If you were a real geek, you'd put a small shed by the road.
In that shed, you'd put a laptop. It doesn't need power: A small, hidden UPS will do fine.
You would call this your "home," and have them install cable to it, which they will do for a nominal low cost.
Afterward, you'd string your own coax (whether RG-6 or RG-11 or 1/2" hardline or whatever) to your house, down your driveway along your "bump poles" (whatever those are).
Terminate both ends of the wire, optionally keep the shed for future reference, and call it a day.
...as opposed to $35 Chromecasts, or the functionality built into every smart TV and damn near every modern Blu-Ray player (whether "smart" or not), as if people are lining up to rent movies on yet-another-device.
It's akin to when Sony started offering movie rentals on the PS3 almost a decade ago. Except back then, it was expensive and novel.
Now, it's just expensive. The novelty wore off eons ago.
Meanwhile, I make enough Play Store credit with Google Opinion Rewards, mostly just telling them about my regular shopping experiences, that whenever I feel like "renting" something I've already got more than enough credit to do so (for only a couple of minutes of my previous time).
(Oh, and the $35 Chromecast is often available for $25 after retailer promotions, and mine (at least) came with $20 in Play Store credit, and some free rentals, making the eventual cost less than $0. Just saying.)
The part of California that he moved away from before it became unbearably hot. (which, thereby, means that he had no idea if it was unbearable or not, because he chose to vacate before it came to bear.)
How about they work on writing an AI that can play a competent game of Civ V without cheating.
RTS is much less interesting since a big component of RTS is actions per minute/reflex based. Of course a computer is going to be better at that.
I'd like to point out a few things:
1. Google and their competitors are working on this same problem. 2. Operating Skynet is going to be closer to a Starcraft-esque RTS than Civ V. 3. There can only be one.
I can only imagine needing 1 HDMI and 1 component input, because I cannot imagine ever listening to the sound that flat-panel TVs produce and the best solution for that is an AV receiver.
The HDMI input is obvious. The component input is to handle everything analog, in particular video game systems that predate HDMI, because the conversion from analog component to digital HDMI (which most AVRs can do) can add noticeable latency, while most analog-analog conversions can be handled by an AVR in the analog domain with zero latency.
But they did do all three, especially since #3 is only tested on an EPA-sanctioned dynamometer.
That said, while I feel that emissions standards should call for real on-the-road testing across the board, this wasn't (and AFAICT, still isn't) the case.
I'm sure every single concert promoter or other live event promoter is now going to ban phones at their events so people aren't live-streaming-pirating it on YouTube.
...because having a crappy, shaky stream of a concert with wickedly distorted audio has always been a roadblock that kept people from buying tickets.
Meanwhile, somewhere around 2000-2004, concert tickets stopped saying "No cameras or recorders," as dumb cell phones turned into camera phones.
So now, it might now make more sense to get a month of Prime for $10.99 instead of pay for 2-day shipping on a single order.
Which might be perfect for me. I've had Prime before but I don't order from Amazon enough to care about paying for it by the year. When I do order from them it tends to be many small orders all lumped within a week or two as I gather the parts for some project or other.
And if it comes with some streaming stuff, I guess I'm OK with that, although I've been paying for Netflix for so many years I don't even think about it anymore.
But I have been blocking ads since long before Youtube had them -- ffs, I've been blocking ads for at least 20 years. I was shocked when one day I fired up a new PC that wasn't fully configured and found an ad on Youtube, and that was (apparently) years after they started.
Nowadays I don't think about it much, except when I get a new portable device. Youtube ads are already blocked at my router, including on Chromecast (which involves sandboxing 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4, but I don't miss Google's DNS).
Wait. Arsenic is in apples? No wonder I never liked them! [/kidding]
I love balsamic vinegar, even though the real thing is positively loaded with mercury from the grapes themselves.
But if the question is to GMO or not to GMO, the answer is: Gosh, it depends. Just because we can create it and grow it doesn't mean it's automatically food. I'm not inherently against GMO, I'm simply in favor of transparency. It's hard to believe a company when they say, in the same paragraph or breath, that "GMO is better/safer/whatever (because we say so)" as they do "We won't tell you if it's GMO because it doesn't matter (because we say so)". It sets off my bullshit detector, same as any other sales tactic should to any free-thinking person.
And since it is the job of every for-profit corporation to maximize shareholder value, I believe that this sort of doublespeak ought to set off bullshit detectors.
And maybe cloned beef is the best beef. I AM OK WITH THIS, as long as I'm aware. (Actually I'd be particularly OK with eating cloned, flightless, GMO animals, because animals don't generally pollinate with the wind...)
Then again, I also want more transparency in the rest of my food, too, though: Don't just tell me that my tortilla chips contain "corn," tell me what cultivar so maybe I can better and more-informedly select for my individual taste instead of merely by the color of the plastic packaging and the salt content.
If the question is whether to eat the canned sauerkraut, the canned organic sauerkraut, the fresh (alive) sauerkraut, the fresh (alive) organic sauerkraut, the home-made (alive) sauerkraut, or the GMO version of any such variation: I think the correct answer might well be "all of the above."
And while I do believe that variety is good, I also think that simpler is also good.
In all of the above cases, I'll still only buy sauerkraut if it contains no more than these four general ingredients: Cabbage, salt, water, enzymes. Ascorbic acid? Citric acid? Vinegar? If it needs preserved/acidified additionally, it should have just been left to ferment longer.....
Because, srsly, sauerkraut is pretty hard to fuck up. (And yeah, I did cherry-pick that example.)
It also greatly reduces the number of configurations you have to support, both mechanically and software side of things. If everything is ala carte, you quickly run in to tens of thousands of configurations, which you have to test for. Multiply that by recalled and unrecalled cars, different model years, etc and testing to avoid serious failures quickly reach nightmare levels.
To use an antagonist antonym computer analogy (since we're talking about cars, this is probably befitting): Dell will never be able to be competitive if they keep letting people pick-and-choose the components of their computers. Can you imagine the nightmare of having tens of thousands of configurations which you have to test for, multiplied by the number of recalled and unrecalled cars, different accessory revisions, etc and testing to avoid serious failures?
I've independently invented lots of things that I later found out were commonplace.
I've also independently invented two things which were not common, and which were later patented by someone else.
In the second case, had I published my work, I might have (at least) had a chance at limiting the other party's patent on my creation.
But since I did not publish it, and never pursued a patent myself, I don't have a verifiable leg to stand on.
If TFA describes a place where ideas can be published, then they are providing a good place for prior art to be a thing. This doesn't mean that the idea can never be included in a patent, necessarily, but it shows that at least a portion of the patent was invented previously (and should be referenced in the patent's own statements of prior art).
As it is, though: I'm technically not allowed to use two of my own inventions, which is at least an emotional burden.
They never figured out the accounting. I suspect this has as much to do with U-Verse also being an IPTV service as anything else. Counting U-Verse Internet traffic is certainly a lot simpler without all of the television traffic (including free VOD traffic from lots of sources). I expect that this current shift (whereby TV subscribers automatically are not-capped) simply reflects the inherent difficulties of the problem.
According to my own logs, I've routinely done over 900GB a month with U-Verse, and a slow month is generally at least 400GB.
Netflix, perhaps unsurprisingly, was most of this. Back when I still had U-Verse TV, years and years ago I wasn't keeping bandwidth stats. I didn't start doing so until they announced the caps several years ago, so I'm not sure how much their TV service chewed up the bandwidth.
That all said, I'm completely flabbergasted that The Phone Company, of all things, has taken this long to figure out how to do cumulative billing.
I recently dropped U-Verse because they raised my rates and refused to be competitive without talking to their customer retention department and I figured as long as I am talking to those folks I might as well jump ship. It turns out that I did so at the right time, and I'm currently with Time Warner's 30/5Mbps package for $35/mo (plus $10 for a fucking modem, but I'll fix that soon enough).
The sad part is I actually liked U-Verse, and their local techs were generally stellar. They spent at least 50 man hours tirelessly troubleshooting the first loop I had, some of which was still in ancient lead-sheathed cable, and that's an effort that I find to be fairly endearing. They had some hard problems to solve, and not only did they fix them, but they'd credit me for entire months of service at a time until they did.
U-Verse was supposed to be capped anyway, right? Or am I the only person who remembers this?
A couple of years ago I moved, and for [reasons] I started new service at the new place. They insisted on selling me a modem for $200, instead of renting one to me at $5/mo as I was accustomed to.
Now, this would be fine, except they no longer allow U-Verse installs using customer-owned modems, so the device itself is useless to both me and anyone else.
So, now that I've switched to cable, I have a $200 doorstop.
Yep. Just zeroed and set up a Citizen watch for my boss-like-creature that does the auto-DST, auto-leap-year (with millennium fix). It's solar powered, "analog," and only wants a few hours every few months of sunlight (or reasonable ambient light) to keep it going accurately.
It was $200, which seems cheap for a good-looking watch like that.
After I got done, he asked for the rundown on adjusting the time. I said: "Here's what you do: Just wear the watch every now and then, and never hide it in a dresser drawer. It'll be fine."
Race to the bottom? That socket for a CR2035 coin cell doesn't happen for free, you know!
Besides, why do you need a backup battery, when The time is set Automatically, Sir? [/sarcasm]
OTOH, Aldi (US, some states only) has Medion tablets right now for $59 with a 7" IPS touch screen, an Intel Atom CPU, 1GB of RAM. Such a thing is not only a battery-backed alarm clock, but also a potentially awesome late-night Netflix/Youtube snoozumentary device.
Add a Bluetooth speaker with its own battery ($10-$400), and now you've got an accurate, internet-connected battery-powered alarm clock with enough volume to get you up (and probably better sound than most clock radios not made by Bose [ugh] or Proton [antique, now]), maybe for less than an "atomic" clock that receives the signal from Colorado (if it's lucky).
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If you were a real geek, you'd put a small shed by the road.
In that shed, you'd put a laptop. It doesn't need power: A small, hidden UPS will do fine.
You would call this your "home," and have them install cable to it, which they will do for a nominal low cost.
Afterward, you'd string your own coax (whether RG-6 or RG-11 or 1/2" hardline or whatever) to your house, down your driveway along your "bump poles" (whatever those are).
Terminate both ends of the wire, optionally keep the shed for future reference, and call it a day.
What is wrong with you?
...as opposed to $35 Chromecasts, or the functionality built into every smart TV and damn near every modern Blu-Ray player (whether "smart" or not), as if people are lining up to rent movies on yet-another-device.
It's akin to when Sony started offering movie rentals on the PS3 almost a decade ago. Except back then, it was expensive and novel.
Now, it's just expensive. The novelty wore off eons ago.
Meanwhile, I make enough Play Store credit with Google Opinion Rewards, mostly just telling them about my regular shopping experiences, that whenever I feel like "renting" something I've already got more than enough credit to do so (for only a couple of minutes of my previous time).
(Oh, and the $35 Chromecast is often available for $25 after retailer promotions, and mine (at least) came with $20 in Play Store credit, and some free rentals, making the eventual cost less than $0. Just saying.)
The part of California that he moved away from before it became unbearably hot. (which, thereby, means that he had no idea if it was unbearable or not, because he chose to vacate before it came to bear.)
I'd like to point out a few things:
1. Google and their competitors are working on this same problem.
2. Operating Skynet is going to be closer to a Starcraft-esque RTS than Civ V.
3. There can only be one.
We don't incorporate "those" into our summaries.
I can only imagine needing 1 HDMI and 1 component input, because I cannot imagine ever listening to the sound that flat-panel TVs produce and the best solution for that is an AV receiver.
The HDMI input is obvious. The component input is to handle everything analog, in particular video game systems that predate HDMI, because the conversion from analog component to digital HDMI (which most AVRs can do) can add noticeable latency, while most analog-analog conversions can be handled by an AVR in the analog domain with zero latency.
But they did do all three, especially since #3 is only tested on an EPA-sanctioned dynamometer.
That said, while I feel that emissions standards should call for real on-the-road testing across the board, this wasn't (and AFAICT, still isn't) the case.
Meanwhile, somewhere around 2000-2004, concert tickets stopped saying "No cameras or recorders," as dumb cell phones turned into camera phones.
So now, it might now make more sense to get a month of Prime for $10.99 instead of pay for 2-day shipping on a single order.
Which might be perfect for me. I've had Prime before but I don't order from Amazon enough to care about paying for it by the year. When I do order from them it tends to be many small orders all lumped within a week or two as I gather the parts for some project or other.
And if it comes with some streaming stuff, I guess I'm OK with that, although I've been paying for Netflix for so many years I don't even think about it anymore.
Naah. I jest.
But I have been blocking ads since long before Youtube had them -- ffs, I've been blocking ads for at least 20 years. I was shocked when one day I fired up a new PC that wasn't fully configured and found an ad on Youtube, and that was (apparently) years after they started.
Nowadays I don't think about it much, except when I get a new portable device. Youtube ads are already blocked at my router, including on Chromecast (which involves sandboxing 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4, but I don't miss Google's DNS).
Youtube has ads?
Since when?
It was the first thing I searched. It was more than a zero result.
Still don't care. Never did.
https://www.google.com/search?q=ipad+won%27t+go+home
Coal began being replaced by natural gas as it got cheap because of fracking.
Natural gas fracking expansions got ruined because of OPEC dumping crude.
Now the coal suppliers have begun to fail, as the natural gas suppliers have begun to stop expanding.
If OPEC (or Saudi Arabia -- whoever) doesn't stop dumping crude oil onto the market, natural gas suppliers will fail next.
It's a vicious cycle, this, at it eats its young.
But gas is still hovering around $2.00 per gallon stateside and home heating bills are down, so nobody cares...yet.
Wait. Arsenic is in apples? No wonder I never liked them! [/kidding]
I love balsamic vinegar, even though the real thing is positively loaded with mercury from the grapes themselves.
But if the question is to GMO or not to GMO, the answer is: Gosh, it depends. Just because we can create it and grow it doesn't mean it's automatically food. I'm not inherently against GMO, I'm simply in favor of transparency. It's hard to believe a company when they say, in the same paragraph or breath, that "GMO is better/safer/whatever (because we say so)" as they do "We won't tell you if it's GMO because it doesn't matter (because we say so)". It sets off my bullshit detector, same as any other sales tactic should to any free-thinking person.
And since it is the job of every for-profit corporation to maximize shareholder value, I believe that this sort of doublespeak ought to set off bullshit detectors.
And maybe cloned beef is the best beef. I AM OK WITH THIS, as long as I'm aware. (Actually I'd be particularly OK with eating cloned, flightless, GMO animals, because animals don't generally pollinate with the wind...)
Then again, I also want more transparency in the rest of my food, too, though: Don't just tell me that my tortilla chips contain "corn," tell me what cultivar so maybe I can better and more-informedly select for my individual taste instead of merely by the color of the plastic packaging and the salt content.
If the question is whether to eat the canned sauerkraut, the canned organic sauerkraut, the fresh (alive) sauerkraut, the fresh (alive) organic sauerkraut, the home-made (alive) sauerkraut, or the GMO version of any such variation: I think the correct answer might well be "all of the above."
And while I do believe that variety is good, I also think that simpler is also good.
In all of the above cases, I'll still only buy sauerkraut if it contains no more than these four general ingredients: Cabbage, salt, water, enzymes. Ascorbic acid? Citric acid? Vinegar? If it needs preserved/acidified additionally, it should have just been left to ferment longer.....
Because, srsly, sauerkraut is pretty hard to fuck up. (And yeah, I did cherry-pick that example.)
They offer CPU and memory and storage and connectivity and display and multimedia and battery and [...] choices.
We're already up to thousands of combinations, in a given model.
To use an antagonist antonym computer analogy (since we're talking about cars, this is probably befitting): Dell will never be able to be competitive if they keep letting people pick-and-choose the components of their computers. Can you imagine the nightmare of having tens of thousands of configurations which you have to test for, multiplied by the number of recalled and unrecalled cars, different accessory revisions, etc and testing to avoid serious failures?
Oh, wait.
I've independently invented lots of things that I later found out were commonplace.
I've also independently invented two things which were not common, and which were later patented by someone else.
In the second case, had I published my work, I might have (at least) had a chance at limiting the other party's patent on my creation.
But since I did not publish it, and never pursued a patent myself, I don't have a verifiable leg to stand on.
If TFA describes a place where ideas can be published, then they are providing a good place for prior art to be a thing. This doesn't mean that the idea can never be included in a patent, necessarily, but it shows that at least a portion of the patent was invented previously (and should be referenced in the patent's own statements of prior art).
As it is, though: I'm technically not allowed to use two of my own inventions, which is at least an emotional burden.
They never figured out the accounting. I suspect this has as much to do with U-Verse also being an IPTV service as anything else. Counting U-Verse Internet traffic is certainly a lot simpler without all of the television traffic (including free VOD traffic from lots of sources). I expect that this current shift (whereby TV subscribers automatically are not-capped) simply reflects the inherent difficulties of the problem.
According to my own logs, I've routinely done over 900GB a month with U-Verse, and a slow month is generally at least 400GB.
Netflix, perhaps unsurprisingly, was most of this. Back when I still had U-Verse TV, years and years ago I wasn't keeping bandwidth stats. I didn't start doing so until they announced the caps several years ago, so I'm not sure how much their TV service chewed up the bandwidth.
That all said, I'm completely flabbergasted that The Phone Company, of all things, has taken this long to figure out how to do cumulative billing.
I recently dropped U-Verse because they raised my rates and refused to be competitive without talking to their customer retention department and I figured as long as I am talking to those folks I might as well jump ship. It turns out that I did so at the right time, and I'm currently with Time Warner's 30/5Mbps package for $35/mo (plus $10 for a fucking modem, but I'll fix that soon enough).
The sad part is I actually liked U-Verse, and their local techs were generally stellar. They spent at least 50 man hours tirelessly troubleshooting the first loop I had, some of which was still in ancient lead-sheathed cable, and that's an effort that I find to be fairly endearing. They had some hard problems to solve, and not only did they fix them, but they'd credit me for entire months of service at a time until they did.
Oh, well.
Yeah, fuck 'em.
U-Verse was supposed to be capped anyway, right? Or am I the only person who remembers this?
A couple of years ago I moved, and for [reasons] I started new service at the new place. They insisted on selling me a modem for $200, instead of renting one to me at $5/mo as I was accustomed to.
Now, this would be fine, except they no longer allow U-Verse installs using customer-owned modems, so the device itself is useless to both me and anyone else.
So, now that I've switched to cable, I have a $200 doorstop.
Thanks, fuckers.
Copper is good for voice service, especially with a simple corded phone, but nobody you might want to call has POTS anymore.
Meanwhile, the problem with cell phones is that the networks go over capacity the instant that a disaster happens.
Except 911 calls, which are prioritized and handled very differently by the system, cell phones don't work after any emergency.
Short answer: No.
Long answer: Even Panasonic is building their CCTV products in China these days.
Different answer: These days, buying anything and hanging it on a network is inviting problems. Everything is sloppier than it used to be.
Yes.
Why wouldn't everyone want that?
Yep. Just zeroed and set up a Citizen watch for my boss-like-creature that does the auto-DST, auto-leap-year (with millennium fix). It's solar powered, "analog," and only wants a few hours every few months of sunlight (or reasonable ambient light) to keep it going accurately.
It was $200, which seems cheap for a good-looking watch like that.
After I got done, he asked for the rundown on adjusting the time. I said: "Here's what you do: Just wear the watch every now and then, and never hide it in a dresser drawer. It'll be fine."
Race to the bottom? That socket for a CR2035 coin cell doesn't happen for free, you know!
Besides, why do you need a backup battery, when The time is set Automatically, Sir? [/sarcasm]
OTOH, Aldi (US, some states only) has Medion tablets right now for $59 with a 7" IPS touch screen, an Intel Atom CPU, 1GB of RAM. Such a thing is not only a battery-backed alarm clock, but also a potentially awesome late-night Netflix/Youtube snoozumentary device.
Add a Bluetooth speaker with its own battery ($10-$400), and now you've got an accurate, internet-connected battery-powered alarm clock with enough volume to get you up (and probably better sound than most clock radios not made by Bose [ugh] or Proton [antique, now]), maybe for less than an "atomic" clock that receives the signal from Colorado (if it's lucky).