'Cloud based' means you can access the data and interact with your energy from any location. Many energy monitoring solutions available today are accessible from the local premises only. With a cloud-based system you can access it on your phone, TV, computer, etc. at any location.
The most useful time for me to turn off my power is when I'm away from home and forgot to turn something off, which is a good case for the mobile phone.
A few extra sensors to detect movement or body heat and the system would automatically know when you are home or not. You could then define a profile for the system to automatically turn devices off that's supposed to be off when you're gone. This way, the system works automatically without any interaction. Instead, the app-centric approach to this tells me that the platform is going to nag me to death when I'm not home and the lights are on.
The author even goes so far as to describe how to get a legal drivers license in the name of a corporation
Where, Latvia? In the US, a license to drive is an individual document, tied to a single human being.
This was in the US. There are a handful of western states that are really loose with their incorporation laws (at least they were a few years ago) and thus make it really easy to make the corporation appear as though they were a human being. I'm sure if the authorities found out about someone doing this, they would eventually find the person responsible and accuse them of all manner of crimes.
The point is that even as an individual with relatively *limited* means, it's incredibly easy to hide your actions behind a corporation.
People hide behind corporate identities to hide from accountability for their actions
Really? Which big corporation are you thinking of - especially a publicly-traded one - that manages to operate without people readily knowing who their shareholders, board, and executives are? Please be specific.
It's not just large publicly traded corporations that can be used to hide accountability. There is a book, "How to be Invisible," which describes exactly how you can set up a network of LLCs and trusts to hide your own identity and actions, effectively erasing your name from ever being used again. The author even goes so far as to describe how to get a legal drivers license in the name of a corporation.
I read the NYT version of the article. I seems like we need more vocabulary to define "attack" vs. "tresspass" vs. "spying" vs. "wikileaking". The UN should by all rights be FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) accessible, providing this information to everyone. For five years, someone peeked through agency files. I wouldn't expect anything I sent to the UN to remain a secret.
From what I read in both articles, I wasn't able to gain an understanding as to what actually happened. The word "attack" in the online context is meaningless. Too many people try to apply physical world characteristics and descriptors to the internet when many of these carry over terms aren't appropriate. The vocabulary issue also demonstrates that many of those in power really don't understand the problem.
Most of Anon/Lulzsec are whiney kids and would rather be jerking off to pron on the internet than playing bitch in a prison block. Those who aren't deterred are just plain stupid.
This is the same demographic that continued to download torrents as their friends got RIAA extortion letters in the mail.
The police don't need to catch all the hackers. They just need to catch enough that the script kiddies in Anonymous look around nervously, see their buddies disappearing, and decide to stick to legal ways to pass the time. Deterrence works great, except for crimes of passion. Hacking isn't something many people do in the heat of the moment, so deterrence should work against it too.
Are you sure about this? It's been widely publicized that harsh punishments, such as capital punishment in the US, aren't an effective crime deterrent. They deter some people, but not everyone (citation needed). Clearly, they're enough hackers around to do damage who aren't deterred from hearing about past hacking punishments.
I think it incorrectly states "fake" where it should really say "automated".
I would say that it's more of a conflict of interest than fake or automated. The reviewer may be a real person and he or she may have actually owned/consumed/used the product being reviewed. The issue is that the reviewer is in the employ of the product manufacturer or marketing agency hired by the manufacturer.
But I honestly think that we need more of this, not less. I'm constantly annoyed by blatantly illegal driving. It annoys me that chronic speeders and such aren't flagged by stationary plate readers along the highway, etc.
The implications of this go far beyond promoting safe driving.
The next person who compares ANYTHING to the price of a latte needs to be torn into pieces and set on fire. My rate went up 60%. I don't care what your rate did. I have NEVER bought a latte. Not even really certain what a latte is. The fact that you obviously have to much leisure time on your hands and enough money to not care does NOT change the fact that this impact, like most things, rapes the lower income folks.
Ditto. I never buy coffee from a coffeeshop. It's much cheaper to buy a bag of beans at the grocery store and to boot, I can also control how strong I make each pot. The latte analogy demonstrates that there are a lot of people who have money to burn and that's the market segment Netflix intends to rip off.
By the way, paying for cable is paying for the service of having channels piped to your home, NOT for the shows
If this were true, then why are channels are grouped into packages instead of priced a la carte? Furthermore, once the infrastructure is paid for, the marginal cost of providing an extra channel to a customer is essentially zero.
In the past the kitchen seemed to be hidden away out the back.
Where I live in the US, the few colonial era houses that are still standing have the kitchens in a separate building behind the main house. Since most meals were cooked over an open flame, a separate building mitigated the risk of a kitchen fire spreading to the main house.
The 99.99% figure is the only one that is reliable. The 9% figure depends on things that vary over time outside the control of the company selling the software, i.e. the proportion of true terrorists (or other true targets) in the passenger stream.
You're a typical scientist. You have 1 figure which is always reliable and true, but it is misleading. The other one depends on too many variables but is a lot more insightful. The scientist will choose the first misleading figure, all other people would go for the second. Adapt to your audience: present a simple case in which you can calculate the useful figure.
In this case, I would replace scientist with salesman.
Well, then that means that you'll have to get a scholarship for being, you know, a scholar. Maybe they should concentrate on studying, instead of playing catch with their friends.
You're overgeneralizing -- not all athletes are lacking in the scholarship department. Where I went as an undergrad, a highly selective public school on the US east coast, the student athletes had a higher average GPA than the student body as a whole. I was on an NCAA D1 team that qualified for the NCAA national championships for all four years of my eligibility and even finished in the top 10 during one year. I still managed to make the Dean's List several times. Furthermore, a large majority of my teammates have gone on to graduate school to earn MDs, JDs, and PhDs.
It takes a lot of effort and discipline to perform at such a high level, including some serious time management skills to handle school work while practicing 30 hours a week and frequent travel to competitions. When I got to graduate school, I was surprised at how lazy most of the students were because they had so much extra time than I did when I was an undergrad.
The NCAA is free to set rules and regulations for their scholarships based on their values, and the students are free to not seek NCAA scholarships if they disagree or can't accept those rules.
The problem is that the NCAA has a defacto monopoly over college sports. There's also the NAIA, but they're mostly limited to a handful of small schools and attract little athletic talent. If you want to be an NCAA athlete, you have to sign all the compliance stuff and abide by their rules, whether you are on scholarship or not (most NCAA athletes do not receive any athletic scholarship money). This situation is no different than being a subservient customer of an ISP who engages in traffic shaping, DNS hijacking, and bandwidth caps because there is no alternative competitor to run to.
I'm of the opposite reaction here, and I plan on sticking with Netflix despite this. Over a year ago I cut off my DirecTV service as I was paying $85 a month, this being 2 years after the $30 a month introductory cost. So now all I get is the free over the air stuff and Netflix and a $5 a month increase isn't going to change that. People need some perspective here because at least Netflix is announcing it rather than sneakily increasing your bill over the months like DirectTV and Time Warner.
I've never had cable at all in the five years I've lived on my own, instead sticking to OTA TV and Netflix. To me, paying $85 per month for TV and/or movies is insane, especially considering the amount of commercials and fixed programming schedule. While the marginal cost increase for entertainment might be low for you, considering you were paying so much for cable, the price increase effectively doubled the cost for me. I dropped the DVD portion of the plan as I've found myself to be using streaming much more.
Why are so many things justified with the already unjustifiable cost of a Latte? Just as two wrongs don't make a right, two prices that are too high, don't make the second any cheaper.
The electric company says the same "oh, it's just a latte," excuse when they increase the rates. As does the cable company. As does the wireless provider. As does the landlord. All of these "latte-sized" cost increases add up to several thousand dollars per year of new expenses. Naturally, these increases aren't just a one time deal, either, so if income is limited, something's gotta go.
As a CS PhD student, I can say from experience there are quite a few of my peers that _really_ dislike programming, surprisingly more than I would have expected. Most of these students are heavily invested in theory rather than any practical work, sticking to MATLAB for any kind of implementation and kludging together a bunch of existing libraries.
While I was an undergrad, I found that as a percentage, more of my peers were enthusiastic about programming and were also quite good at it. I suppose most of them saw no reason to stay in school given that they could do quite well with a B.S., given their skillsets.
As far as intro to programming goes, when I took High School Computer Science, our textbook was the Dietel & Dietel C++ How to Program.
While my high school CS instructor provided her own take home lecture notes and assignments, I also picked up this book to help with the more difficult topics for first time programmers, such as pointers. I definitely found it helpful as I was completely new to programming at the time.
Slashdot Mirror
'Cloud based' means you can access the data and interact with your energy from any location. Many energy monitoring solutions available today are accessible from the local premises only. With a cloud-based system you can access it on your phone, TV, computer, etc. at any location. The most useful time for me to turn off my power is when I'm away from home and forgot to turn something off, which is a good case for the mobile phone.
A few extra sensors to detect movement or body heat and the system would automatically know when you are home or not. You could then define a profile for the system to automatically turn devices off that's supposed to be off when you're gone. This way, the system works automatically without any interaction. Instead, the app-centric approach to this tells me that the platform is going to nag me to death when I'm not home and the lights are on.
The author even goes so far as to describe how to get a legal drivers license in the name of a corporation
Where, Latvia? In the US, a license to drive is an individual document, tied to a single human being.
This was in the US. There are a handful of western states that are really loose with their incorporation laws (at least they were a few years ago) and thus make it really easy to make the corporation appear as though they were a human being. I'm sure if the authorities found out about someone doing this, they would eventually find the person responsible and accuse them of all manner of crimes.
The point is that even as an individual with relatively *limited* means, it's incredibly easy to hide your actions behind a corporation.
People hide behind corporate identities to hide from accountability for their actions
Really? Which big corporation are you thinking of - especially a publicly-traded one - that manages to operate without people readily knowing who their shareholders, board, and executives are? Please be specific.
It's not just large publicly traded corporations that can be used to hide accountability. There is a book, "How to be Invisible," which describes exactly how you can set up a network of LLCs and trusts to hide your own identity and actions, effectively erasing your name from ever being used again. The author even goes so far as to describe how to get a legal drivers license in the name of a corporation.
I read the NYT version of the article. I seems like we need more vocabulary to define "attack" vs. "tresspass" vs. "spying" vs. "wikileaking". The UN should by all rights be FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) accessible, providing this information to everyone. For five years, someone peeked through agency files. I wouldn't expect anything I sent to the UN to remain a secret.
From what I read in both articles, I wasn't able to gain an understanding as to what actually happened. The word "attack" in the online context is meaningless. Too many people try to apply physical world characteristics and descriptors to the internet when many of these carry over terms aren't appropriate. The vocabulary issue also demonstrates that many of those in power really don't understand the problem.
Instead of calling it "Google execution," how about simply "excommunication"?
It would only be called "excommunication" if it were Apple disabling iPhones.
Most of Anon/Lulzsec are whiney kids and would rather be jerking off to pron on the internet than playing bitch in a prison block. Those who aren't deterred are just plain stupid.
This is the same demographic that continued to download torrents as their friends got RIAA extortion letters in the mail.
The police don't need to catch all the hackers. They just need to catch enough that the script kiddies in Anonymous look around nervously, see their buddies disappearing, and decide to stick to legal ways to pass the time. Deterrence works great, except for crimes of passion. Hacking isn't something many people do in the heat of the moment, so deterrence should work against it too.
Are you sure about this? It's been widely publicized that harsh punishments, such as capital punishment in the US, aren't an effective crime deterrent. They deter some people, but not everyone (citation needed). Clearly, they're enough hackers around to do damage who aren't deterred from hearing about past hacking punishments.
I think it incorrectly states "fake" where it should really say "automated".
I would say that it's more of a conflict of interest than fake or automated. The reviewer may be a real person and he or she may have actually owned/consumed/used the product being reviewed. The issue is that the reviewer is in the employ of the product manufacturer or marketing agency hired by the manufacturer.
But I honestly think that we need more of this, not less. I'm constantly annoyed by blatantly illegal driving. It annoys me that chronic speeders and such aren't flagged by stationary plate readers along the highway, etc.
The implications of this go far beyond promoting safe driving.
The next person who compares ANYTHING to the price of a latte needs to be torn into pieces and set on fire. My rate went up 60%. I don't care what your rate did. I have NEVER bought a latte. Not even really certain what a latte is. The fact that you obviously have to much leisure time on your hands and enough money to not care does NOT change the fact that this impact, like most things, rapes the lower income folks.
Ditto. I never buy coffee from a coffeeshop. It's much cheaper to buy a bag of beans at the grocery store and to boot, I can also control how strong I make each pot. The latte analogy demonstrates that there are a lot of people who have money to burn and that's the market segment Netflix intends to rip off.
By the way, paying for cable is paying for the service of having channels piped to your home, NOT for the shows
If this were true, then why are channels are grouped into packages instead of priced a la carte? Furthermore, once the infrastructure is paid for, the marginal cost of providing an extra channel to a customer is essentially zero.
In the past the kitchen seemed to be hidden away out the back.
Where I live in the US, the few colonial era houses that are still standing have the kitchens in a separate building behind the main house. Since most meals were cooked over an open flame, a separate building mitigated the risk of a kitchen fire spreading to the main house.
Agreed. This guy sounds like he bought Ruby Ridge from the Weavers.
The 99.99% figure is the only one that is reliable. The 9% figure depends on things that vary over time outside the control of the company selling the software, i.e. the proportion of true terrorists (or other true targets) in the passenger stream.
You're a typical scientist. You have 1 figure which is always reliable and true, but it is misleading. The other one depends on too many variables but is a lot more insightful. The scientist will choose the first misleading figure, all other people would go for the second. Adapt to your audience: present a simple case in which you can calculate the useful figure.
In this case, I would replace scientist with salesman.
Well, then that means that you'll have to get a scholarship for being, you know, a scholar. Maybe they should concentrate on studying, instead of playing catch with their friends.
You're overgeneralizing -- not all athletes are lacking in the scholarship department. Where I went as an undergrad, a highly selective public school on the US east coast, the student athletes had a higher average GPA than the student body as a whole. I was on an NCAA D1 team that qualified for the NCAA national championships for all four years of my eligibility and even finished in the top 10 during one year. I still managed to make the Dean's List several times. Furthermore, a large majority of my teammates have gone on to graduate school to earn MDs, JDs, and PhDs.
It takes a lot of effort and discipline to perform at such a high level, including some serious time management skills to handle school work while practicing 30 hours a week and frequent travel to competitions. When I got to graduate school, I was surprised at how lazy most of the students were because they had so much extra time than I did when I was an undergrad.
The problem is that the NCAA has a defacto monopoly over college sports. There's also the NAIA, but they're mostly limited to a handful of small schools and attract little athletic talent. If you want to be an NCAA athlete, you have to sign all the compliance stuff and abide by their rules, whether you are on scholarship or not (most NCAA athletes do not receive any athletic scholarship money). This situation is no different than being a subservient customer of an ISP who engages in traffic shaping, DNS hijacking, and bandwidth caps because there is no alternative competitor to run to.
I'm of the opposite reaction here, and I plan on sticking with Netflix despite this. Over a year ago I cut off my DirecTV service as I was paying $85 a month, this being 2 years after the $30 a month introductory cost. So now all I get is the free over the air stuff and Netflix and a $5 a month increase isn't going to change that. People need some perspective here because at least Netflix is announcing it rather than sneakily increasing your bill over the months like DirectTV and Time Warner.
I've never had cable at all in the five years I've lived on my own, instead sticking to OTA TV and Netflix. To me, paying $85 per month for TV and/or movies is insane, especially considering the amount of commercials and fixed programming schedule. While the marginal cost increase for entertainment might be low for you, considering you were paying so much for cable, the price increase effectively doubled the cost for me. I dropped the DVD portion of the plan as I've found myself to be using streaming much more.
Why are so many things justified with the already unjustifiable cost of a Latte? Just as two wrongs don't make a right, two prices that are too high, don't make the second any cheaper.
The electric company says the same "oh, it's just a latte," excuse when they increase the rates. As does the cable company. As does the wireless provider. As does the landlord. All of these "latte-sized" cost increases add up to several thousand dollars per year of new expenses. Naturally, these increases aren't just a one time deal, either, so if income is limited, something's gotta go.
Credit Union.
>PhD students in what fields?
As a CS PhD student, I can say from experience there are quite a few of my peers that _really_ dislike programming, surprisingly more than I would have expected. Most of these students are heavily invested in theory rather than any practical work, sticking to MATLAB for any kind of implementation and kludging together a bunch of existing libraries.
While I was an undergrad, I found that as a percentage, more of my peers were enthusiastic about programming and were also quite good at it. I suppose most of them saw no reason to stay in school given that they could do quite well with a B.S., given their skillsets.
Keeping accurate time is HARD. Distributing it by the power grid is EASY.
The better system for distributing TIME is GPS.
Good luck getting a signal indoors. Receivers are also very expensive.
Automakers didn't shut down profitable bus and rail lines where I live.
Are they really profitable? Just today, I read that the bus system in my town has 90% of its operating costs subsidized by the government. I've heard similar figures for other systems.
Do states really have the power to tax transactions happening in their airspace?
States don't, but the feds do: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_rights
As far as intro to programming goes, when I took High School Computer Science, our textbook was the Dietel & Dietel C++ How to Program.
While my high school CS instructor provided her own take home lecture notes and assignments, I also picked up this book to help with the more difficult topics for first time programmers, such as pointers. I definitely found it helpful as I was completely new to programming at the time.
Or, perhaps a discount source for radioactive materials? http://www.thedump.com/
Their TV advertisements are one of the reasons I gave up cable TV and never looked back.