and they want their stereotypes of cities back. Dirty, filled with crime, derelict neighborhoods, etc. etc. Thanks to the meth epidemic I'd say that suburbs and rural America have inherited that rap.
I live in Brooklyn. Yesterday I took a break from programming and went for a casual walk through the neighborhood, swung past the cafe on the corner where there was a full-fledged ceilidh going on, then went up the street through a block party where the kids were drawing with chalk on the street and playing in the fire hydrant they had opened a bit as a sprinkler. Through Prospect Park where people were playing cricket and eating tandoori BBQ. Then around through the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens where they were having a bonsai exhibition. Out the north entrance and sat and watched the mathematically patterned dancing fountain in front of the Brooklyn Museum of Art for a bit. Then swung back through the green market at the top of Grand Army Plaza where I picked up some of the finest organic veggies on the Eastern seaboard for dinner. There was a bluegrass/folk trio jamming just inside the GAP entrance to Prospect Park, so sat and listened to them for a while. Then walked back home past artists selling works that would be hanging in a museum in the rest of America.
That wasn't a special festival day, just an average summer day in New York. Didn't have to plan to see any of those things. Just did, because they're just there and they're just happening like that all the time, everywhere here. Had I walked in a different direction I'd have seen plenty of similar things that way.
None of any of that sounds anything like the weird, dystopian picture you painted of the big, bad city.
For me, being around that degree of refined creativity and passion is incredibly inspiring as a human being and as a technologist. So, yeah, because the suburbs are the opposite of that sort of density and complexity, they are soul-crushing.
The cops and firefighters have their own dedicated coms. So why do they need another? Citizens, however, do need an emergency system if the government decides it wants to begin censoring communications, monitoring them, or shutting them down. Having a mesh network that could spontaneously form would be especially useful in that case. Rather makes the prospect of cops being able to confiscate cameras and other devices recording their misconduct rather futile, doesn't it? As in, sure, take the guy in the front's phone or camera, but all the thousand people in back already have the footage and are uploading it to the broader internet, plus they have footage of the exact officers who are confiscating the guy in front's camera.
Loved the Stainless Steel Rat. It influenced my life in 3 key ways. Jim di Griz's mastery of judo inspired me to earn a green belt and stand up successfully to the bullies in my junior high school. And if it weren't for you I wouldn't have known Esperanto existed. Never learned much of that, but it kicked off a life-long love for languages that has led to mastery of five others. Lastly, it began a life-long quest for a real-life glass of Syrian Panther Sweat.
I have grown heartsick, just down- and dog-tired, of the cottage industry in the public discourse of setting everyone at each other's throats. Pundits spend so much time and energy inciting riots while real problems go unaddressed.
So when this fellow comes along and tries to stir up the same nonsense among programmers it gets my goat. Didn't we learn anything from lasting damage of the vi vs. emacs Holy Wars of the past? TIMTOWTDI, people. Don't buy into this guy's screed.
Do we need a public awareness advertisement of a field of nerds at each other's throats while Stephen Hawking looks on, a tear running down his cheek?
My natural geek bias is coming out, but this defines team sport and puts the Olympics to shame. Phenomenal achievement--congratulations to NASA and JPL!
To see anyone working themselves into a lather over an irrelevant OS. Everyone who develops for real does so on some *nix variant. The tools available on Windows are neither free nor meaningful.
I have been off MS for 15 years. I stopped having regular contact with its variants around Win2K.
No, no, I understand that many users still live in Windows-land. I understand that many Baby-Boomer CIO/CTOs still accept everything that MS says as gospel. But those people are not long for this world. And everyone from Gen-X to younger who is building for the future, does not use Windows in any way, shape, or form.
So I look on this whole Windows 8 discourse as I do on Kabuki, that is, as something that might be quite meaningful and relevant to the culture in question, but still quite alien and quite irrelevant.
Please, the really creative thinkers will find much better things to do with additive manufacturing. Yes, you *could* employ your 3D printer creating objects that the established powers-that-be know how to defend against. But that's a futile exercise. The brighter lights will understand that asymmetrical warfare (if they're so inclined) is the way to go, and they will design accordingly.
The time is not far off when someone bright within the 99% will figure out that they can enable a quantum leap in human progress by designing something that disintermediates the entirety of the 1%.
Those times are terrifying. They're also terrifically exciting. And they're waiting for you in 6 months.
I can't spare a moment to watch the advertising debacle that is the Olympics; I won't waste a second of my time to endorse or support the corruption of the IOC by watching; I can't be bothered to weather 25 minutes of backstory, 30 minutes of commercials, to see 5 minutes of competition quick-cut between 15 different events, none of which NBC will ever let me witness the beginning or conclusion of; and furthermore as much as I can appreciate supreme human effort in pursuit of a goal, these athletes are the very class of people we geeks were neglected and abused for in school, while we tried to solve the problems that plagued civilization and tried to improve mankind's lot, so I don't have a whole heck of a lot of sympathy. Sorry.
But for all that, the Olympics are about *games*. That is, they don't matter. They produce no outcomes that advance the human species, beyond tertiary considerations.
The Mars landing, now, that represents a new frontier. Everything we do within our solar system or the universe to understand our place within it matters. Our grandchildren will wonder that we found the time to explore other worlds while most of the world's governments' attention was absorbed with worthless things like the Olympics. They'll shake their heads at the unfathomable naivete of beggaring the future to satisfy the momentary, ephemeral impulses of manufactured demand.
It's like pooh-poohing Columbus's discovery in favor of the local bull-fighting results.
I, for one, will be awaiting this landing with the ardor that others watch football. Football doesn't matter. This does (tm). Hope all you other/.-ers are there with me.
If you live in a place with low insolation (that's avg. hours of peak PV efficiency) and low average windspeed, then you have to have some water--a creek, brook, whatever--running through your property to have good chances of generating your own power needs.
But if you do have decent insolation and greater than 2mph average windspeed, you have options. If you can only do a roof-mounted wind turbine, then there is this:
If you have an average windspeed of greater than 8.5 mph then you could also do one of these units, which can be mast-mounted for greater than rooftop-level windspeeds:
Whatever works for you, it's worth considering that traditional, fossil fuel-generated grid power has and will continue to rise a lot for the forseeable future. For example the cost per kwh in the Pittsburgh increased 10% in the last year alone. In NYC, it's currently greater than $0.30/kwh for the end user. It doesn't take much of that to get your personal break-even under 5 years (not that long when you consider most people own their homes for 30+ years).
The 1% need to know that the Total Information Awareness they wish to impose on the 99% can be turned around on them. They think they maintain a monopoly on violence and technological know-how, but they really don't anymore, and it's getting worse. When someone with a 3D printer can print out a gun, the monopoly on violence is over. When an average citizen can track the exact whereabouts of a 1%-er, then the 1%'s ability to exercise their heretofore unlimited power is curtailed. It won't be long before a bright light in the 99% figures out that if they can track every single member of the 1% (which is entirely possible with modern information technology), then they can simultaneously bring down every member of the 1%. Please, 1%, continue to rip-off everyone else in the country. Please, continue to think you can get away with murder forever. Your chickens will soon come home to roost.
I hope I live to see that day, but I know at least my children will. DIAF, 1%
Women can sexually harass men, too. It happened to me. I was running the tech team at a large advertising agency on Madison Avenue. One of the three biggest in the world. We hired a woman who proceeded to openly talk about the erotica she like to write, how she liked to dance naked, and regularly threw sexual innuendo into everything and make off-color remarks.
I didn't know what to do, it was such a bizarre situation. I complained to my boss, without result. I complained to his boss, without result. I went to HR and filed a formal complaint. The next day, I was fired.
From the tenor of most of the posts about this article it sounds like most men get what they're not supposed to do when it comes to sexual harassment. I'd like to figure out what to do when the shoe is on the other foot.
Guns are irrelevant in the case of the Aurora shooter. He possessed enough intelligence to booby-trap his apartment. If guns were illegal, he could have done the same or greater damage with IEDs. If the materials to form IEDs were illegal, he could have done a lot of damage with acid the way the crazies in Afghanistan do.
In other words, you cannot totally prevent this sort of thing by any measure tolerable by a free society. This will always be the case until you tie every citizen's hands behind his back and only allow him to move them under closely monitored cases. Even then, the intelligent ones will find a way.
Let me suggest something controversial--let's correct the gross and systemic inequality, in material terms, of our society. That eliminates an entire swath of economic-based grievances. Let's also address the endemic prejudice of society against intelligent kids in favor of physical kids; this has been salient since Columbine, but no one in America has done anything meaningful against it except to further stigmatize intelligent kids.
I know, this is crazy talk. Let's all double-down on the status quo instead. Let's criminalize everything we possibly can, flying in the face of the constant march of technology. Nevermind that soon everyone will have the ability to manufacture their own guns and worse in defiance of all prohibitions. Nevermind that it will soon be possible for an enterprising, but disgruntled, teen-ager to manufacture his own variant of Ebola. Nevermind that it will soon be possible to enterprising nerds to mastermind the mass-execution of the 1% via swarm-controlled bots.
No, let's continue to plug our fingers in our ears and pretend that the status quo is fine. Remember, I said it here first.
My family watches Netflix streaming every day, every night. What we want, when we want, with no commercials. There are no Disney offerings, no Hollywood blockbusters, but I view that as a net positive. My kids don't know who Mickey Mouse is and so don't pester me to buy them Disney crap or take them to Disneyworld. They don't pester me for any merchandized crap. That saves me a ton of $. As a beleaguered parent, I'm grateful for that.
In the meantime I get to discover very fine films and TV shows from indys and overseas that I would otherwise never have been exposed to. I get to watch entire seasons of US TV shows without the incredibly annoying extended commercial breaks or airing delays.
We still have DVDs in our plan, but they've become an afterthought. Why wait for a DVD with the latest from Hollywood's hype machine when streaming scratches the itch without wait, post office BS, or anything else?
Disney, the Hollywood studios, and all the rest of the gang of usual suspects are missing us, and relegating themselves to cultural irrelevance because they refuse to adapt to technology. Good f*ing riddance, guys!
You can dramatically reduce your energy costs & carbon footprint using proven technologies. You don't have to wait for Buck Rogers improvements in battery technology and the like.
At $1500/yr you are doing pretty well relative to the American average. It sounds like you have already done the easy stuff like changing out your lights, computers, etc. But if temperature control is still the lion's share of your costs, then you can win by switching your HVAC to a ground source heat pump (GSHP) + radiant floor setup.
GSHP's take advantage of the earth's constant temp. of 50F to heat or cool depending upon the season. In the summer, bring out solution at 50F and blow air across that into your existing ductwork to cool the house. In the winter, bring out that 50F solution and boost it a little and deliver it via hydronic radiant floor heating. If you've ever encountered heated floors, you know how incredibly awesome that is; plus, it's absolutely the most efficient way to heat a room.
Sealing the envelope of the house via improved insulation and airtightness measures (basically, eliminating drafts) is the first step to take. It's not sexy, but it's the most important and cost-effective measure to take.
Replacing your windows can help, but double- and triple-paned windows are unfortunately still quite expensive per unit. It is not unusual to have the job of replacing every window in your house to price out at $10K for the dubious savings of a $100/yr.
Implementing solar and micro-wind can help you a lot, if you're using an EV or plug-in hybrid especially. Keep in mind that the highest spot prices for grid electricity are during the afternoon, the height of the day. That's also when solar panels perform their best. So if you have a decent solar array producing electricity then you're chopping the top of your personal electricity price curve. If you live in a place with at least 2mph average wind speed then there are solutions for you that reach break-even in less that 10 years, esp. when incentives are factored in.
When you consider that most Americans commute less than 30 miles/day, which puts them well within range for most existing EVs and plug-in hybrids to run on pure electricity, you save that money, too. If you live in a state with net-metering laws, when you generate more electricity than you use (a safe bet if you work outside the house during the day, when your house's solar array is going like gangbusters) the power company has to send you a check at the end of the month.
Those are the direct savings. There are other, indirect, savings. Consider that when you spend $15K remodeling your kitchen that your home price appreciates whether or not the prospective buyers like what you did or not; IOW it's a matter of taste. But when you upgrade the house's energy efficiency, those are direct, quantifiable savings that are reflected in the value of that house. The national association of realtors and contractors agree that the present value of 30 years of energy bill savings are justifiably reflected in a home's market value. That can mean 20% or more added to the value of your home. That is, it's a much better way to boost the value of your home that remodeling anything or putting in a swimming pool. Then there are the discounts you get on your homeowner's insurance, your mortgage, your property taxes, and even carbon credits you can take and sell.
In short, upgrading your home's energy efficiency saves the earth, yada yada, but more than that it means real dollars in your pocket, right now.
Those traditional teachers say that as though they take an actual interest in their students and take the time to fully answer their questions in a thorough, instructive manner. Lemme save the younglings here the costly journey through higher education now and say, they don't! Traditional teachers have canned lectures they give over and over for 30 years. What do they care if they make no sense? They have non-English speaking TA's for that. Or if they don't, who cares? At the end of the day they're the ones issuing the grades so if you don't like it you can take a hike. Seriously.
Then you take somebody like Khan who wants to explain the concepts in an accessible way, and take no money for it. It seems the only ones who have a problem with that are the ones who have been doing it wrong for generations and charging a premium for it, as gatekeepers to ineffable knowledge.
Well, friends, this is the sound of chickens coming home to roost. Rip enough people off for long enough, and they will route around your damage. Watch, and beware, ye (teachers|bankers|politicians|oilmen|1%)
Damn! You got $8/hr?! Sign me up! My job was to re-position irrigation pipe manually at 5am in 18in. of mud in chest-high wheat so laden with morning dew that by noon I was sodden and muddy down to my underwear. I got paid by the pipe *section*, which worked out to less than $3/hr if I worked fast.
Other'n that, my reaction to this article is yours: people who lament our loss of connection with the land or machinery or whatever have never *done* it. Automation and increasing productivity are good things. They mean we can do more in less time.
except when it becomes as easy for people to toss broken objects into a hopper and see them reconstituted as a complete object. We are conditioned by traditional manufacturing techniques to regard objects as *finished,* ie. they cannot be changed after purchase. But if you fast-forward to a 3-D printing universe, then all those assumptions are undone.
We are talking about a future in which you can toss a "finished" product into a 3-D printer hopper and have it outputted to a customized form thanks to a downloaded mod. The mass & volume of determinant materials is the only limiting factor. But if you can provide those feedstocks yourself, then all bets are off.
We are entering an interesting time of transition. Trained industrial designers and engineers who work for centralised conglomerates find themselves suddenly thrust into a world where anything is possible.
It is a paradigm shift. Humanity can take a quantum leap into the future, or fall back into the dark ages to protect status quo interests. I await the outcome.
I have been an ardent/. fan since early days. When CmdrTaco left I was emotionally affected, as if my brother was moving to the Moon and I'd never see him again. And all these years the naysayers and haters have railed against Jon Katz and goatse and dupes and spelling errors and such when I've considered them idiosyncracies that make the place more genuine than your typical corporate clone news site (tm).
I still read Slashdot for the comments, same as always, because I still learn about areas I don't know much about; but, several recent misadventures like that goofy business portal make me think there's some jackass MBA PHB at the parent company who knows absolutely zip about science, technology, intelligence, or, heck, even the Slashdot community and who's spending every waking hour scheming how to pump-and-dump this bitch. That makes me very, very sad.
People in the US government have clearly failed to realise it's futile to recruit hackers to fight the enemy because THEY, the US govt., are the enemy.
I've been following wearable computing since the days of Xybernaut, during the Dot-Com era. Google Glass looks like it has the display issue nearly solved--it's functional without being overly intrusive. If they can wear it all day long then the battery issue would be solved enough for most people conditioned to the iPhone's evanescent battery life.
An input mechanism remains a quandry. Voice recognition has improved a lot beyond the days of Dragon Naturally Speaking, but it's still aggravating when you're trying to do something technical or even unusual. Are projected keyboards the answer, or those two handed-deals that ride under velcro patches on your knees? An arm mounted keyboard? Has anyone from MIT's media lab or similar place tried those options? How do they compare?
I was a kid when Iran held US embassy personnel hostage. I didn't care then, and I don't care now. Between that incident and now Iran has never entered my personal radar screen. Iranians I have met seem pleasant enough. Incidental encounters with their history seem like they're pretty accomplished and cultured. Kudos and all that. But I really could not care less if they got nuclear weapons. They'd probably sit on them and do nothing. Why would they attack Israel with them? Israel stole American nuclear know-how and fissile material a long time ago. (Nobody here threw a hissy fit about that.) So they'd instantly crater Iran.
Israel, on the other hand, is constantly siphoning billions of my tax dollars away that they use to dehumanize Palestinians and other non-Hebrew speaking persons in the Middle East. They warp the foreign policy of my country toward an ENTIRE REGION. They insult the president and vice-president of my country with impugnity. And all the while they're busy as beavers implementing the Jewish equivalent of shariah law, using my tax dollars.
Well, I know who I'd rather be friends with. Or at least on speaking terms with. Answer: none of them. Really. None of them. Don't care. Don't want my tax dollars going to any of them. Fuck you/have a nice life/fuck off.
Meantime, many major car companies have come out with either EVs or plug-in hybrids. In the United States, automotive use accounts for the vast majority of our oil consumption, so how long before those two juggernauts collide?
When the tipping point is reached and people switch to EVs because OMG the sky is falling "range anxiety" issues disappear and because it's quicker, easier, cheaper, and feel-good-er to drive an EV, then the oil industry could well find itself in Kodak's shoes in the face of the digital camera revolution.
I for one am stocking up on hot dogs and marshmallows to roast over the bonfire of their vanities...
Day late, dollar short, Congress. I asked DirecTV for this years ago. They blew me off. The next thing I did was to cut the cord. Haven't watched a lick of TV since. My wife and kids complained at first, but after 3 years of pure on-demand shows via Netflix, they can't bear "real" TV anymore. On a recent vacation there was a TV with cable in the room. My wife clapped her hands and switched it on. In the middle of a blaring commercial break. You should have seen her scramble after the toddler, who had walked off with the remote, in the rush to switch the set off again.
I have read that millions of others have cut the cord, too. If that trend continues, it won't be long before cable is forced to change or face total implosion.
We do know that corporations are a major source of unchecked power. We can limit them by undoing the doctrine of corporate personhood, ie. natural persons have the rights to free speech, etc., but corporations do not. We know that unlimited money in the process warps it beyond the bounds of democracy. We can reverse the Citizens United decision. We know that professional politicians are a pox on the body politic. We can implement strict & comprehensive term limits. When government is transparent, people can monitor and guide it. We need to absolutely rip away government pretense to secrecy. IOW we can do a lot to dismantle the sociopathic culture that is destroying us all. It is easier to fall back on glib pronouncements like "democracy is the worst of all political systems. Except for every other kind." But we've been doing that for 50 years and it has nearly destroyed us.
Slashdot Mirror
and they want their stereotypes of cities back. Dirty, filled with crime, derelict neighborhoods, etc. etc. Thanks to the meth epidemic I'd say that suburbs and rural America have inherited that rap.
I live in Brooklyn. Yesterday I took a break from programming and went for a casual walk through the neighborhood, swung past the cafe on the corner where there was a full-fledged ceilidh going on, then went up the street through a block party where the kids were drawing with chalk on the street and playing in the fire hydrant they had opened a bit as a sprinkler. Through Prospect Park where people were playing cricket and eating tandoori BBQ. Then around through the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens where they were having a bonsai exhibition. Out the north entrance and sat and watched the mathematically patterned dancing fountain in front of the Brooklyn Museum of Art for a bit. Then swung back through the green market at the top of Grand Army Plaza where I picked up some of the finest organic veggies on the Eastern seaboard for dinner. There was a bluegrass/folk trio jamming just inside the GAP entrance to Prospect Park, so sat and listened to them for a while. Then walked back home past artists selling works that would be hanging in a museum in the rest of America.
That wasn't a special festival day, just an average summer day in New York. Didn't have to plan to see any of those things. Just did, because they're just there and they're just happening like that all the time, everywhere here. Had I walked in a different direction I'd have seen plenty of similar things that way.
None of any of that sounds anything like the weird, dystopian picture you painted of the big, bad city.
For me, being around that degree of refined creativity and passion is incredibly inspiring as a human being and as a technologist. So, yeah, because the suburbs are the opposite of that sort of density and complexity, they are soul-crushing.
But I'm glad you like it there. Please stay.
The cops and firefighters have their own dedicated coms. So why do they need another? Citizens, however, do need an emergency system if the government decides it wants to begin censoring communications, monitoring them, or shutting them down. Having a mesh network that could spontaneously form would be especially useful in that case. Rather makes the prospect of cops being able to confiscate cameras and other devices recording their misconduct rather futile, doesn't it? As in, sure, take the guy in the front's phone or camera, but all the thousand people in back already have the footage and are uploading it to the broader internet, plus they have footage of the exact officers who are confiscating the guy in front's camera.
Loved the Stainless Steel Rat. It influenced my life in 3 key ways. Jim di Griz's mastery of judo inspired me to earn a green belt and stand up successfully to the bullies in my junior high school. And if it weren't for you I wouldn't have known Esperanto existed. Never learned much of that, but it kicked off a life-long love for languages that has led to mastery of five others. Lastly, it began a life-long quest for a real-life glass of Syrian Panther Sweat.
I have grown heartsick, just down- and dog-tired, of the cottage industry in the public discourse of setting everyone at each other's throats. Pundits spend so much time and energy inciting riots while real problems go unaddressed.
So when this fellow comes along and tries to stir up the same nonsense among programmers it gets my goat. Didn't we learn anything from lasting damage of the vi vs. emacs Holy Wars of the past? TIMTOWTDI, people. Don't buy into this guy's screed.
Do we need a public awareness advertisement of a field of nerds at each other's throats while Stephen Hawking looks on, a tear running down his cheek?
My natural geek bias is coming out, but this defines team sport and puts the Olympics to shame. Phenomenal achievement--congratulations to NASA and JPL!
To see anyone working themselves into a lather over an irrelevant OS. Everyone who develops for real does so on some *nix variant. The tools available on Windows are neither free nor meaningful.
I have been off MS for 15 years. I stopped having regular contact with its variants around Win2K.
No, no, I understand that many users still live in Windows-land. I understand that many Baby-Boomer CIO/CTOs still accept everything that MS says as gospel. But those people are not long for this world. And everyone from Gen-X to younger who is building for the future, does not use Windows in any way, shape, or form.
So I look on this whole Windows 8 discourse as I do on Kabuki, that is, as something that might be quite meaningful and relevant to the culture in question, but still quite alien and quite irrelevant.
Shine on, you crazy diamonds...
Please, the really creative thinkers will find much better things to do with additive manufacturing. Yes, you *could* employ your 3D printer creating objects that the established powers-that-be know how to defend against. But that's a futile exercise. The brighter lights will understand that asymmetrical warfare (if they're so inclined) is the way to go, and they will design accordingly.
The time is not far off when someone bright within the 99% will figure out that they can enable a quantum leap in human progress by designing something that disintermediates the entirety of the 1%.
Those times are terrifying. They're also terrifically exciting. And they're waiting for you in 6 months.
I can't spare a moment to watch the advertising debacle that is the Olympics; I won't waste a second of my time to endorse or support the corruption of the IOC by watching; I can't be bothered to weather 25 minutes of backstory, 30 minutes of commercials, to see 5 minutes of competition quick-cut between 15 different events, none of which NBC will ever let me witness the beginning or conclusion of; and furthermore as much as I can appreciate supreme human effort in pursuit of a goal, these athletes are the very class of people we geeks were neglected and abused for in school, while we tried to solve the problems that plagued civilization and tried to improve mankind's lot, so I don't have a whole heck of a lot of sympathy. Sorry.
But for all that, the Olympics are about *games*. That is, they don't matter. They produce no outcomes that advance the human species, beyond tertiary considerations.
The Mars landing, now, that represents a new frontier. Everything we do within our solar system or the universe to understand our place within it matters. Our grandchildren will wonder that we found the time to explore other worlds while most of the world's governments' attention was absorbed with worthless things like the Olympics. They'll shake their heads at the unfathomable naivete of beggaring the future to satisfy the momentary, ephemeral impulses of manufactured demand.
It's like pooh-poohing Columbus's discovery in favor of the local bull-fighting results.
I, for one, will be awaiting this landing with the ardor that others watch football. Football doesn't matter. This does (tm). Hope all you other /.-ers are there with me.
But if you do have decent insolation and greater than 2mph average windspeed, you have options. If you can only do a roof-mounted wind turbine, then there is this:
Honeywell Wind Turbine
If you have an average windspeed of greater than 8.5 mph then you could also do one of these units, which can be mast-mounted for greater than rooftop-level windspeeds:
Windtronic Wind Turbine
Whatever works for you, it's worth considering that traditional, fossil fuel-generated grid power has and will continue to rise a lot for the forseeable future. For example the cost per kwh in the Pittsburgh increased 10% in the last year alone. In NYC, it's currently greater than $0.30/kwh for the end user. It doesn't take much of that to get your personal break-even under 5 years (not that long when you consider most people own their homes for 30+ years).
The 1% need to know that the Total Information Awareness they wish to impose on the 99% can be turned around on them. They think they maintain a monopoly on violence and technological know-how, but they really don't anymore, and it's getting worse. When someone with a 3D printer can print out a gun, the monopoly on violence is over. When an average citizen can track the exact whereabouts of a 1%-er, then the 1%'s ability to exercise their heretofore unlimited power is curtailed. It won't be long before a bright light in the 99% figures out that if they can track every single member of the 1% (which is entirely possible with modern information technology), then they can simultaneously bring down every member of the 1%. Please, 1%, continue to rip-off everyone else in the country. Please, continue to think you can get away with murder forever. Your chickens will soon come home to roost.
I hope I live to see that day, but I know at least my children will. DIAF, 1%
Women can sexually harass men, too. It happened to me. I was running the tech team at a large advertising agency on Madison Avenue. One of the three biggest in the world. We hired a woman who proceeded to openly talk about the erotica she like to write, how she liked to dance naked, and regularly threw sexual innuendo into everything and make off-color remarks.
I didn't know what to do, it was such a bizarre situation. I complained to my boss, without result. I complained to his boss, without result. I went to HR and filed a formal complaint. The next day, I was fired.
From the tenor of most of the posts about this article it sounds like most men get what they're not supposed to do when it comes to sexual harassment. I'd like to figure out what to do when the shoe is on the other foot.
Guns are irrelevant in the case of the Aurora shooter. He possessed enough intelligence to booby-trap his apartment. If guns were illegal, he could have done the same or greater damage with IEDs. If the materials to form IEDs were illegal, he could have done a lot of damage with acid the way the crazies in Afghanistan do.
In other words, you cannot totally prevent this sort of thing by any measure tolerable by a free society. This will always be the case until you tie every citizen's hands behind his back and only allow him to move them under closely monitored cases. Even then, the intelligent ones will find a way.
Let me suggest something controversial--let's correct the gross and systemic inequality, in material terms, of our society. That eliminates an entire swath of economic-based grievances. Let's also address the endemic prejudice of society against intelligent kids in favor of physical kids; this has been salient since Columbine, but no one in America has done anything meaningful against it except to further stigmatize intelligent kids.
I know, this is crazy talk. Let's all double-down on the status quo instead. Let's criminalize everything we possibly can, flying in the face of the constant march of technology. Nevermind that soon everyone will have the ability to manufacture their own guns and worse in defiance of all prohibitions. Nevermind that it will soon be possible for an enterprising, but disgruntled, teen-ager to manufacture his own variant of Ebola. Nevermind that it will soon be possible to enterprising nerds to mastermind the mass-execution of the 1% via swarm-controlled bots.
No, let's continue to plug our fingers in our ears and pretend that the status quo is fine. Remember, I said it here first.
My family watches Netflix streaming every day, every night. What we want, when we want, with no commercials. There are no Disney offerings, no Hollywood blockbusters, but I view that as a net positive. My kids don't know who Mickey Mouse is and so don't pester me to buy them Disney crap or take them to Disneyworld. They don't pester me for any merchandized crap. That saves me a ton of $. As a beleaguered parent, I'm grateful for that.
In the meantime I get to discover very fine films and TV shows from indys and overseas that I would otherwise never have been exposed to. I get to watch entire seasons of US TV shows without the incredibly annoying extended commercial breaks or airing delays.
We still have DVDs in our plan, but they've become an afterthought. Why wait for a DVD with the latest from Hollywood's hype machine when streaming scratches the itch without wait, post office BS, or anything else?
Disney, the Hollywood studios, and all the rest of the gang of usual suspects are missing us, and relegating themselves to cultural irrelevance because they refuse to adapt to technology. Good f*ing riddance, guys!
You can dramatically reduce your energy costs & carbon footprint using proven technologies. You don't have to wait for Buck Rogers improvements in battery technology and the like.
At $1500/yr you are doing pretty well relative to the American average. It sounds like you have already done the easy stuff like changing out your lights, computers, etc. But if temperature control is still the lion's share of your costs, then you can win by switching your HVAC to a ground source heat pump (GSHP) + radiant floor setup.
GSHP's take advantage of the earth's constant temp. of 50F to heat or cool depending upon the season. In the summer, bring out solution at 50F and blow air across that into your existing ductwork to cool the house. In the winter, bring out that 50F solution and boost it a little and deliver it via hydronic radiant floor heating. If you've ever encountered heated floors, you know how incredibly awesome that is; plus, it's absolutely the most efficient way to heat a room.
Sealing the envelope of the house via improved insulation and airtightness measures (basically, eliminating drafts) is the first step to take. It's not sexy, but it's the most important and cost-effective measure to take.
Replacing your windows can help, but double- and triple-paned windows are unfortunately still quite expensive per unit. It is not unusual to have the job of replacing every window in your house to price out at $10K for the dubious savings of a $100/yr.
Implementing solar and micro-wind can help you a lot, if you're using an EV or plug-in hybrid especially. Keep in mind that the highest spot prices for grid electricity are during the afternoon, the height of the day. That's also when solar panels perform their best. So if you have a decent solar array producing electricity then you're chopping the top of your personal electricity price curve. If you live in a place with at least 2mph average wind speed then there are solutions for you that reach break-even in less that 10 years, esp. when incentives are factored in.
When you consider that most Americans commute less than 30 miles/day, which puts them well within range for most existing EVs and plug-in hybrids to run on pure electricity, you save that money, too. If you live in a state with net-metering laws, when you generate more electricity than you use (a safe bet if you work outside the house during the day, when your house's solar array is going like gangbusters) the power company has to send you a check at the end of the month.
Those are the direct savings. There are other, indirect, savings. Consider that when you spend $15K remodeling your kitchen that your home price appreciates whether or not the prospective buyers like what you did or not; IOW it's a matter of taste. But when you upgrade the house's energy efficiency, those are direct, quantifiable savings that are reflected in the value of that house. The national association of realtors and contractors agree that the present value of 30 years of energy bill savings are justifiably reflected in a home's market value. That can mean 20% or more added to the value of your home. That is, it's a much better way to boost the value of your home that remodeling anything or putting in a swimming pool. Then there are the discounts you get on your homeowner's insurance, your mortgage, your property taxes, and even carbon credits you can take and sell.
In short, upgrading your home's energy efficiency saves the earth, yada yada, but more than that it means real dollars in your pocket, right now.
Those traditional teachers say that as though they take an actual interest in their students and take the time to fully answer their questions in a thorough, instructive manner. Lemme save the younglings here the costly journey through higher education now and say, they don't! Traditional teachers have canned lectures they give over and over for 30 years. What do they care if they make no sense? They have non-English speaking TA's for that. Or if they don't, who cares? At the end of the day they're the ones issuing the grades so if you don't like it you can take a hike. Seriously.
Then you take somebody like Khan who wants to explain the concepts in an accessible way, and take no money for it. It seems the only ones who have a problem with that are the ones who have been doing it wrong for generations and charging a premium for it, as gatekeepers to ineffable knowledge.
Well, friends, this is the sound of chickens coming home to roost. Rip enough people off for long enough, and they will route around your damage. Watch, and beware, ye (teachers|bankers|politicians|oilmen|1%)
Damn! You got $8/hr?! Sign me up! My job was to re-position irrigation pipe manually at 5am in 18in. of mud in chest-high wheat so laden with morning dew that by noon I was sodden and muddy down to my underwear. I got paid by the pipe *section*, which worked out to less than $3/hr if I worked fast.
Other'n that, my reaction to this article is yours: people who lament our loss of connection with the land or machinery or whatever have never *done* it. Automation and increasing productivity are good things. They mean we can do more in less time.
As a happy Apple investor, pray the instant pro-Apple mantra continue :-)
except when it becomes as easy for people to toss broken objects into a hopper and see them reconstituted as a complete object. We are conditioned by traditional manufacturing techniques to regard objects as *finished,* ie. they cannot be changed after purchase. But if you fast-forward to a 3-D printing universe, then all those assumptions are undone.
We are talking about a future in which you can toss a "finished" product into a 3-D printer hopper and have it outputted to a customized form thanks to a downloaded mod. The mass & volume of determinant materials is the only limiting factor. But if you can provide those feedstocks yourself, then all bets are off.
We are entering an interesting time of transition. Trained industrial designers and engineers who work for centralised conglomerates find themselves suddenly thrust into a world where anything is possible.
It is a paradigm shift. Humanity can take a quantum leap into the future, or fall back into the dark ages to protect status quo interests. I await the outcome.
I have been an ardent /. fan since early days. When CmdrTaco left I was emotionally affected, as if my brother was moving to the Moon and I'd never see him again. And all these years the naysayers and haters have railed against Jon Katz and goatse and dupes and spelling errors and such when I've considered them idiosyncracies that make the place more genuine than your typical corporate clone news site (tm).
I still read Slashdot for the comments, same as always, because I still learn about areas I don't know much about; but, several recent misadventures like that goofy business portal make me think there's some jackass MBA PHB at the parent company who knows absolutely zip about science, technology, intelligence, or, heck, even the Slashdot community and who's spending every waking hour scheming how to pump-and-dump this bitch. That makes me very, very sad.
People in the US government have clearly failed to realise it's futile to recruit hackers to fight the enemy because THEY, the US govt., are the enemy.
I've been following wearable computing since the days of Xybernaut, during the Dot-Com era. Google Glass looks like it has the display issue nearly solved--it's functional without being overly intrusive. If they can wear it all day long then the battery issue would be solved enough for most people conditioned to the iPhone's evanescent battery life.
An input mechanism remains a quandry. Voice recognition has improved a lot beyond the days of Dragon Naturally Speaking, but it's still aggravating when you're trying to do something technical or even unusual. Are projected keyboards the answer, or those two handed-deals that ride under velcro patches on your knees? An arm mounted keyboard? Has anyone from MIT's media lab or similar place tried those options? How do they compare?
I was a kid when Iran held US embassy personnel hostage. I didn't care then, and I don't care now. Between that incident and now Iran has never entered my personal radar screen. Iranians I have met seem pleasant enough. Incidental encounters with their history seem like they're pretty accomplished and cultured. Kudos and all that. But I really could not care less if they got nuclear weapons. They'd probably sit on them and do nothing. Why would they attack Israel with them? Israel stole American nuclear know-how and fissile material a long time ago. (Nobody here threw a hissy fit about that.) So they'd instantly crater Iran.
Israel, on the other hand, is constantly siphoning billions of my tax dollars away that they use to dehumanize Palestinians and other non-Hebrew speaking persons in the Middle East. They warp the foreign policy of my country toward an ENTIRE REGION. They insult the president and vice-president of my country with impugnity. And all the while they're busy as beavers implementing the Jewish equivalent of shariah law, using my tax dollars.
Well, I know who I'd rather be friends with. Or at least on speaking terms with. Answer: none of them. Really. None of them. Don't care. Don't want my tax dollars going to any of them. Fuck you/have a nice life/fuck off.
Meantime, many major car companies have come out with either EVs or plug-in hybrids. In the United States, automotive use accounts for the vast majority of our oil consumption, so how long before those two juggernauts collide?
When the tipping point is reached and people switch to EVs because OMG the sky is falling "range anxiety" issues disappear and because it's quicker, easier, cheaper, and feel-good-er to drive an EV, then the oil industry could well find itself in Kodak's shoes in the face of the digital camera revolution.
I for one am stocking up on hot dogs and marshmallows to roast over the bonfire of their vanities...
Day late, dollar short, Congress. I asked DirecTV for this years ago. They blew me off. The next thing I did was to cut the cord. Haven't watched a lick of TV since. My wife and kids complained at first, but after 3 years of pure on-demand shows via Netflix, they can't bear "real" TV anymore. On a recent vacation there was a TV with cable in the room. My wife clapped her hands and switched it on. In the middle of a blaring commercial break. You should have seen her scramble after the toddler, who had walked off with the remote, in the rush to switch the set off again.
I have read that millions of others have cut the cord, too. If that trend continues, it won't be long before cable is forced to change or face total implosion.
We do know that corporations are a major source of unchecked power. We can limit them by undoing the doctrine of corporate personhood, ie. natural persons have the rights to free speech, etc., but corporations do not. We know that unlimited money in the process warps it beyond the bounds of democracy. We can reverse the Citizens United decision. We know that professional politicians are a pox on the body politic. We can implement strict & comprehensive term limits. When government is transparent, people can monitor and guide it. We need to absolutely rip away government pretense to secrecy. IOW we can do a lot to dismantle the sociopathic culture that is destroying us all. It is easier to fall back on glib pronouncements like "democracy is the worst of all political systems. Except for every other kind." But we've been doing that for 50 years and it has nearly destroyed us.
Time to bite the bullet and fix things.