Except that to get an apartment, you have to pay a ridiculously large bribe called "key money" to secure the apartment, equivalent to a bunch of month's worth of rent. It's probably this that is keeping people at the capsule hotel that has a similar monthly expense to a tiny studio walk up.
Remember how much 'key money' is to get an apartment? Like a bunch of month's rent up front as a bribe? I'm guessing that's a contributing factor.
If the figures from the people who run the hotel are correct, that seems like an actual trend to me. the # of long term residents vs. one-nighter drunkards.
Actually the number of smokers has dropped precipitously in the last 10 years. When did you go? When I first went in 2001 it was everywhere, unavoidable. Every restaurant was billowing clouds. On the last of four trips, it was practically nonexistent in comparison. No smoking on the JR trains, hardly any smoke in the restaurants. There has been a large campaign against smoking in public.
The fact that Japan's homelessness is large enough to now be visible is pretty shocking. Although as far back as 2001, I saw a few homeless in Ueno park. It's a problem they very much liked to sweep under the rug, but they can no longer. Most Japanese are taught to save as much as we spend, even if you're dirt poor, and that usually mitigates the chances of one becoming homeless, if it is only for lack of a job. But as the person at the end of the article shows, that will only go so far, if you are out of a job for a long time. An increasing disconnectedness in family structure may also contribute to a decreasing natural social safety net in urban areas. The latter is only a guess. There are varying qualities of capsule hotels, and it sounds like the lower end ones are becoming long term residencies.
I have a website with tasteful art-nude images on it, among many other types of photography and artwork, and I have had the entire site blocked by filtering companies quite frequently. A friend who works at a government office found my website blocked, most recently. I don't hold high chances that it will be accessible in China any time soon.
Invariably there is no distinction drawn between artistic nudity and images that would generally be classed as obscene or pornographic. This is a big problem here in the US with private filtering companies. For legal purposes it's very clear, and obscene material must meet three criteria.
Filtering companies tend to err on the side of fanaticism with regard to any kind of nudity whatsoever.
Of course, one person's obscene is another person's fetish, and even the obscenity law here is nothing more than a value judgment being made by the tyranny of the majority ("contemporary community standards").
Also, paying people per site to find 'pornographic' sites will result in mass overkill and false reporting, much like when innocent people were rounded up when we offered a bounty to Afghani locals for bringing suspected Taliban.
Also, you might want to have a look at the latest Futron Study...Check out this article if you don't want to give out your info to download the study itself.
There is elasticity in the market. The price has a lot of room to come down. As mentioned in another post, there is enough demand at the $200,000 price point to last quite a while; not everybody cares about being first.
If there are several people per year willing to pay $30mil to go to the ISS for a week, there are a whole hell of a lot more willing and able to pay $200k for a quick jaunt with the view of a lifetime.
From what I understand, the White Knight II cockpits act as a simulator for the space ship, with the cockpits being identical between mothership and spaceship. One cockpit flies the plane, the other acts as a simulator. I am guessing both can fly the plane in case of emergency.
About $200k per seat. Much like aviation's early days, when air travel was reserved for the wealthy. Give it a few decades and some healthy competition, and the price will come down by an order of magnitude or more. Right now, there's enough customers at that price point to serve the market for years given three or four operating vehicles.
The fuel cel is only green if you are separating the hydrogen and oxygen using power from a nuke plant. Otherwise it costs a tremendous amount of fossil fuel energy to separate the hydrogen.
The only truly green fuels at this point are hydrogen and electricity from nuke plants, perhaps supplemented by solar and wind, although the later two are extremely expensive per watt in comparison, as well as extremely inefficient land-usage wise.
If apple has any Apple Stores in your state, that is probably why they charge you tax. But they should be charging you your state tax, no CA state tax.
"The U.S. Supreme Court's ruling 16 years ago in Quill Corp. v. North Dakota reaffirmed that a corporation must have a "substantial nexus" with a state in order to be subject to its sales and use taxes. When corporations lack physical presence in a state and rely only on common-carrier contacts or the mail to reach its customers, those corporations do not fall under the requisite "substantial nexus." Nor does a corporation's mere licensing of software to customers in another state fall under this requirement. "
Also, is your occupancy detection based on motion sensors? What happens if you sit still on the computer or are reading a book for a long time? Or is the timeout sufficiently high....
Agreed on most points. But it's only energy saving if you're controlling enough lights to offset the cost of the controller PC running 24/7, unless you have baked everything into the little Insteon or other plug-in PLC unit. The fancy dimmers with the LEDs and what not also take up a not-insignificant amount of power compared to the old light switch.
Insteon was designed to address the major problems with X-10...unreliable mostly one-way communication, not enough addressable devices and interference caused by switching power supplies in the power line carrier device signals, plus the inability for X-10 signals to jump across difference phases in your house without a phase coupler.
Insteon uses a combination of wired and wireless, and each device acts as a signal repeater / booster, so the theory is the more devices you have the more robust the network, sort of like a mesh.
I embraced Insteon when it first came out and unfortunately it's been plagued by problems - many switches just stopped working completely and others only work one out of 10 times that you press it. I think that they are very sensitive to voltage fluctuations, and where I live we have a lot. I simply cannot afford a whole-house power conditioner to go along with all that stuff. I hope they've improved upon that since then.
Other than that it's an enormous improvement over X10. Also, to comment on a previous poster's X10 information - X10 has been doing home automation since the late 70s / early 80s. They were one of the earliest companies in the market. The X10 cam thing came after, not before that phase.
Most of the friends I know playing with home automation stuff are using Insteon + Homeseer on Windows. Homeseer is very powerful but the UI, at least last time I played with it could use a lot of polish. That being said, you can do almost anything with it via the use of plugins and scripts.
I think that in the end home automation for most people is a fun toy to play with, but only if you won't miss the money you're spending on it. These days I mostly want to use it to turn on a room full of lights all at once when the lights aren't all plugged into a single switched outlet. I've given up taking it to the level of Homeseer, I have other hobbies and I don't want to leave a PC on 24/7 when that's all it's doing. I agree with the sentiment that it is still a hobbyists endeavour and not a 'standard item' you can just drop into a house. It has too many reliability problems to be a true replacement for the old fashioned light switch.
One last note, a lot of people seem to be thinking that home automation is about remotely managing your cookery and your fridge - from my perspective home automation focuses around managing lights and security.
4K is roughly 4,000 pixels across, not 4X "HD", which is probably assuming HD to be defined as 1920X1080. 4x HD, if you multiply each dimension, would be 7680x4320, a lot higher. I did see a demo of an 8k system earlier this year at NAB, quite nice on a large screen. Downsampled to 4k on a smaller screen and it was jawdropping. now if overall you mean four times the data, then yes, because it's roughly x2 in each dimension in two dimensions.
We've always used the horizontal pixel resolution to define filmout resolutions for cinema. (2k, 4k, etc.) Consumer product manufacturers use the retarded "megapixels" number so it sounds larger and more impressive. (multiply width x height for total pixel count).
I'm impressed that the camera optics they rigged into the laproscopy procedure had enough fidelity to make a 4k image worthwhile from such a small imaging source.
The RED system is the current darling of high end 'indie' filmmakers, TV shows and commercial producers everywhere where 4k is desirable, while the Canon 5D Mk. II is being used extensively for 2k owing to its full frame, exceptionally sharp sensor combined with Canon's unbeatable lenses, despite the fact that it is primarily a still camera. Both were all over the place at NAB this year, and I have the 5D Mk. II myself. The tools are getting cheaper and better every year and a lot of the old names in broadcasting are fading away...
The spinning mirror technology has been around for quite some time, I remember seeing demos at Siggraph 10 years ago and it definitely goes farther back than that. Same idea behind the spinning LED clocks you can buy now, except adding a third dimension with a larger LED array and different axis of rotation for the mirror. What is changing now is packaging and integration, and advances in various sub-technologies that make it more viable. As it matures it begins to look like something more useful / fun, and the cost comes down. Obviously the mechanical rotation limits the practicality of the size of the thing, but this could be useful in a few applications, it might compliment the use of stereoscopic vision for medical procedures, and be a fun toy as the poster suggests.
In the same genre though more fluffy was Amazing Stories TV series in the 80s and Amazing Stories: The Movie. I like the old man who gets on the ghost train that crashes through the house. "Thank you, Mr. Coffee!"
Arguably one of the best pinball games ever made, amongst pinball aficionados. TZ always represented the best 80s era pinball, and Mars Attacks! the best 1990s era pinball. A friend of mine owns both.
It could be seen as an intermediate point in that process, yes. Only time will tell if the neurological structure can build itself to accommodate that or not, or if there are some fundamental limitations in the structure that would require a few thousand years of evolutionary development to fix.
I am reminded of Stranger in a Strange Land, who's protagonist was raised by aliens to learn quite a different set of abilities, and to think very differently from humans, with the same brain. Could be possible.
Yes, we are fortunate in that way. I do know what you are referring to and have seen it...that and people who reply ADHD machine gun style, a couple of words or a sentence at a time, covering one topic in each email, when they could have composed one longer email detailing everything.
After watching the demo, a lot of people were commenting that the major problem is that it runs counter to how the brain operates...we aren't designed to heavily multitask. Email provides a linear conversation at least. Still, it's interesting and I think that it does have uses. Perhaps the user feedback will cause it to evolve into something more manageable for a regular brain. I think the potential to assist with remote project collaboration is great.
A lot will depending on how people use it, not what it is. There will need to be settings to help people set limits on the barrage of information.
Slashdot Mirror
Except that to get an apartment, you have to pay a ridiculously large bribe called "key money" to secure the apartment, equivalent to a bunch of month's worth of rent. It's probably this that is keeping people at the capsule hotel that has a similar monthly expense to a tiny studio walk up.
Remember how much 'key money' is to get an apartment? Like a bunch of month's rent up front as a bribe? I'm guessing that's a contributing factor.
If the figures from the people who run the hotel are correct, that seems like an actual trend to me. the # of long term residents vs. one-nighter drunkards.
Actually the number of smokers has dropped precipitously in the last 10 years. When did you go? When I first went in 2001 it was everywhere, unavoidable. Every restaurant was billowing clouds. On the last of four trips, it was practically nonexistent in comparison. No smoking on the JR trains, hardly any smoke in the restaurants. There has been a large campaign against smoking in public.
The fact that Japan's homelessness is large enough to now be visible is pretty shocking. Although as far back as 2001, I saw a few homeless in Ueno park. It's a problem they very much liked to sweep under the rug, but they can no longer. Most Japanese are taught to save as much as we spend, even if you're dirt poor, and that usually mitigates the chances of one becoming homeless, if it is only for lack of a job. But as the person at the end of the article shows, that will only go so far, if you are out of a job for a long time. An increasing disconnectedness in family structure may also contribute to a decreasing natural social safety net in urban areas. The latter is only a guess. There are varying qualities of capsule hotels, and it sounds like the lower end ones are becoming long term residencies.
I have a website with tasteful art-nude images on it, among many other types of photography and artwork, and I have had the entire site blocked by filtering companies quite frequently. A friend who works at a government office found my website blocked, most recently. I don't hold high chances that it will be accessible in China any time soon.
Invariably there is no distinction drawn between artistic nudity and images that would generally be classed as obscene or pornographic. This is a big problem here in the US with private filtering companies. For legal purposes it's very clear, and obscene material must meet three criteria.
Filtering companies tend to err on the side of fanaticism with regard to any kind of nudity whatsoever.
Of course, one person's obscene is another person's fetish, and even the obscenity law here is nothing more than a value judgment being made by the tyranny of the majority ("contemporary community standards").
Also, paying people per site to find 'pornographic' sites will result in mass overkill and false reporting, much like when innocent people were rounded up when we offered a bounty to Afghani locals for bringing suspected Taliban.
Eh, Tesla did it 100 years ago, if the stories and his autobiography are to be believed :)
Hipster fight!
Also, you might want to have a look at the latest Futron Study...Check out this article if you don't want to give out your info to download the study itself.
There is elasticity in the market. The price has a lot of room to come down. As mentioned in another post, there is enough demand at the $200,000 price point to last quite a while; not everybody cares about being first.
If there are several people per year willing to pay $30mil to go to the ISS for a week, there are a whole hell of a lot more willing and able to pay $200k for a quick jaunt with the view of a lifetime.
There's enough stuff in a single nickel iron asteroid to keep the earth supplies for centuries.
From what I understand, the White Knight II cockpits act as a simulator for the space ship, with the cockpits being identical between mothership and spaceship. One cockpit flies the plane, the other acts as a simulator. I am guessing both can fly the plane in case of emergency.
About $200k per seat. Much like aviation's early days, when air travel was reserved for the wealthy. Give it a few decades and some healthy competition, and the price will come down by an order of magnitude or more. Right now, there's enough customers at that price point to serve the market for years given three or four operating vehicles.
The fuel cel is only green if you are separating the hydrogen and oxygen using power from a nuke plant. Otherwise it costs a tremendous amount of fossil fuel energy to separate the hydrogen.
The only truly green fuels at this point are hydrogen and electricity from nuke plants, perhaps supplemented by solar and wind, although the later two are extremely expensive per watt in comparison, as well as extremely inefficient land-usage wise.
--M
If apple has any Apple Stores in your state, that is probably why they charge you tax. But they should be charging you your state tax, no CA state tax.
What ever happened to that bit about States not being able to tax interstate commerce? The 'use' tax is simple a loophole for that isn't it?
There was that brouhaha with New York a year ago
"The U.S. Supreme Court's ruling 16 years ago in Quill Corp. v. North Dakota reaffirmed that a corporation must have a "substantial nexus" with a state in order to be subject to its sales and use taxes. When corporations lack physical presence in a state and rely only on common-carrier contacts or the mail to reach its customers, those corporations do not fall under the requisite "substantial nexus." Nor does a corporation's mere licensing of software to customers in another state fall under this requirement. "
So why is this even being debated?
Do you find Z-wave more reliable than insteon?
Also, is your occupancy detection based on motion sensors? What happens if you sit still on the computer or are reading a book for a long time? Or is the timeout sufficiently high....
Agreed on most points. But it's only energy saving if you're controlling enough lights to offset the cost of the controller PC running 24/7, unless you have baked everything into the little Insteon or other plug-in PLC unit. The fancy dimmers with the LEDs and what not also take up a not-insignificant amount of power compared to the old light switch.
Insteon was designed to address the major problems with X-10...unreliable mostly one-way communication, not enough addressable devices and interference caused by switching power supplies in the power line carrier device signals, plus the inability for X-10 signals to jump across difference phases in your house without a phase coupler.
Insteon uses a combination of wired and wireless, and each device acts as a signal repeater / booster, so the theory is the more devices you have the more robust the network, sort of like a mesh.
I embraced Insteon when it first came out and unfortunately it's been plagued by problems - many switches just stopped working completely and others only work one out of 10 times that you press it. I think that they are very sensitive to voltage fluctuations, and where I live we have a lot. I simply cannot afford a whole-house power conditioner to go along with all that stuff. I hope they've improved upon that since then.
Other than that it's an enormous improvement over X10. Also, to comment on a previous poster's X10 information - X10 has been doing home automation since the late 70s / early 80s. They were one of the earliest companies in the market. The X10 cam thing came after, not before that phase.
Most of the friends I know playing with home automation stuff are using Insteon + Homeseer on Windows. Homeseer is very powerful but the UI, at least last time I played with it could use a lot of polish. That being said, you can do almost anything with it via the use of plugins and scripts.
I think that in the end home automation for most people is a fun toy to play with, but only if you won't miss the money you're spending on it. These days I mostly want to use it to turn on a room full of lights all at once when the lights aren't all plugged into a single switched outlet. I've given up taking it to the level of Homeseer, I have other hobbies and I don't want to leave a PC on 24/7 when that's all it's doing. I agree with the sentiment that it is still a hobbyists endeavour and not a 'standard item' you can just drop into a house. It has too many reliability problems to be a true replacement for the old fashioned light switch.
One last note, a lot of people seem to be thinking that home automation is about remotely managing your cookery and your fridge - from my perspective home automation focuses around managing lights and security.
4K is roughly 4,000 pixels across, not 4X "HD", which is probably assuming HD to be defined as 1920X1080. 4x HD, if you multiply each dimension, would be 7680x4320, a lot higher. I did see a demo of an 8k system earlier this year at NAB, quite nice on a large screen. Downsampled to 4k on a smaller screen and it was jawdropping. now if overall you mean four times the data, then yes, because it's roughly x2 in each dimension in two dimensions.
We've always used the horizontal pixel resolution to define filmout resolutions for cinema. (2k, 4k, etc.) Consumer product manufacturers use the retarded "megapixels" number so it sounds larger and more impressive. (multiply width x height for total pixel count).
I'm impressed that the camera optics they rigged into the laproscopy procedure had enough fidelity to make a 4k image worthwhile from such a small imaging source.
The RED system is the current darling of high end 'indie' filmmakers, TV shows and commercial producers everywhere where 4k is desirable, while the Canon 5D Mk. II is being used extensively for 2k owing to its full frame, exceptionally sharp sensor combined with Canon's unbeatable lenses, despite the fact that it is primarily a still camera. Both were all over the place at NAB this year, and I have the 5D Mk. II myself. The tools are getting cheaper and better every year and a lot of the old names in broadcasting are fading away...
--M
The spinning mirror technology has been around for quite some time, I remember seeing demos at Siggraph 10 years ago and it definitely goes farther back than that. Same idea behind the spinning LED clocks you can buy now, except adding a third dimension with a larger LED array and different axis of rotation for the mirror. What is changing now is packaging and integration, and advances in various sub-technologies that make it more viable. As it matures it begins to look like something more useful / fun, and the cost comes down. Obviously the mechanical rotation limits the practicality of the size of the thing, but this could be useful in a few applications, it might compliment the use of stereoscopic vision for medical procedures, and be a fun toy as the poster suggests.
In the same genre though more fluffy was Amazing Stories TV series in the 80s and Amazing Stories: The Movie. I like the old man who gets on the ghost train that crashes through the house. "Thank you, Mr. Coffee!"
Lots of guest stars on that one.
Arguably one of the best pinball games ever made, amongst pinball aficionados. TZ always represented the best 80s era pinball, and Mars Attacks! the best 1990s era pinball. A friend of mine owns both.
It could be seen as an intermediate point in that process, yes. Only time will tell if the neurological structure can build itself to accommodate that or not, or if there are some fundamental limitations in the structure that would require a few thousand years of evolutionary development to fix.
I am reminded of Stranger in a Strange Land, who's protagonist was raised by aliens to learn quite a different set of abilities, and to think very differently from humans, with the same brain. Could be possible.
Yes, we are fortunate in that way. I do know what you are referring to and have seen it...that and people who reply ADHD machine gun style, a couple of words or a sentence at a time, covering one topic in each email, when they could have composed one longer email detailing everything.
After watching the demo, a lot of people were commenting that the major problem is that it runs counter to how the brain operates...we aren't designed to heavily multitask. Email provides a linear conversation at least. Still, it's interesting and I think that it does have uses. Perhaps the user feedback will cause it to evolve into something more manageable for a regular brain. I think the potential to assist with remote project collaboration is great.
A lot will depending on how people use it, not what it is. There will need to be settings to help people set limits on the barrage of information.