I don't disagree with your conclusion but for a moment we should remember that 2007 was eight years ago. If somebody changes their mind over the course of eight years I'll give them the benefit of the doubt. They're not swaying with the political winds. Maybe the situation changed or they were exposed to new information. Especially now that (it feels like) the general public knows more about basic vaccines, due to the information campaigns needed to counter the lunatic anti-vaccine crowd.
If it's free, then it's just a different way of living that works for them. I couldn't find any information within the first couple minutes to figure out whether it was free or not.
If it hits USD parity then the market cap and the most goods that it could possibly be traded for daily would be severely limited. BTC needs to rebound in value for it to be worthwhile to build an economy around it.
Also as it declines and more miners shut off due to nonprofitability there has been a proposed (not yet observed) death spiral process: price drops, miners shut off, verifications start getting backlogged, BTC loses its utility as an actual currency, price drops more. IIRC miners that actually pay their own rent and electric bills have break-even points in the $100-$200 range.
I've never held a position in it but it is a fascinating experiment, least to say. All the stuff about mining rig scams, Ponzi schemes, Silk Road, Mt Gox, etc. is a sideshow.
$400 ticket + $0 to stuff your unneeded extras in max-size carry on bags and manhandle them into the overheads like everyone else + $0 - I fly in and out of flyover country all the time and have never sat next to somebody I considered large enough to devalue my seat + $30-$75 is what I usually see quoted for the extra legroom seats, OR you can pick a seat near the back that is more likely to have an empty neighbor + $0 read a book + $0 some of the entertainment is pay-per-view but i've even been on flights with free satellite television before + $0 for a coke and a bag of peanuts, which is a light snack + $0 who cares, smartphone while you're waiting
Really? They don't have to do 18,000 simultaneous attacks. One or two would suffice to put a crippling chill on ticket sales for the rest of the season.
To be fair, the only reason flying is so expensive in two weeks is because you've chosen to travel during peak time. I find ORD - MIA round trip for $193 in late January. You'll get there within six hours and can sleep for most of that. Right now, with gas prices at their lowest in years, it's $170 (source: gasbuddy.com, assuming 35 mpg highway just to be nice) to drive, but you'll need to operate a motor vehicle for 20 hours. Not to mention that flying is orders of magnitude safer than driving...
I found that a wireless mouse made my Surface Pro 2 significantly easier to use. I know that's adding yet another part and taking away from the all-in-one-rectangle transformable tablet philosophy that Microsoft is going after, but it doesn't bother me to carry an additional little mouse when I travel. After an hour I actually caught myself switching fluidly between touching the screen and using the mouse depending on how fine-grained of control I needed. You can actually two-hand it for the most part, if you use your non-dominant hand for the touchscreen.
It's important to consider the economics of the second tier. How much should catastrophic-only insurance cost? And do we let people drop dead when they get catastrophic illness and didn't buy insurance?
Also keep in mind that a lot of the cost difference between the US and Cuba is the Americans are getting paid living wages (to live in America). When you say "a condition that could be treated for a few dollars at any decent 3rd-world clinic," let's get real, that probably translates to about $30 (or $300 even) in the US, even with the same penny pinching attitude.
>we really started to lose it around 1910 when the Federal Government began to assert itself as a central law enforcement and control authority.
First, absolutely not. Regarding the income tax, money does not equal freedom.
Second, the individual states have repeatedly proven themselves unable to protect minority rights or even outright hostile to the concept. Without a strong federal government anywhere from 15 to 30% of the population would be third-class citizens.
FWIW as another proud owner of a G2 I have not found it particularly fragile. Sure, it feels much more fragile than other phones because they threw a plastic shell on it, but it has stood up to time just as well as my other phone. I got a wallet-case for it, and damn Verizon for getting their own SKU that is apparently ~1mm wider, the phone popped out of the case onto a concrete floor from about six feet up. Nary a scratch.
All that said, part of the reason I got the G2 was its then-best flagship battery life, so I was bummed that the G3 didn't build upon that (not that I ever go less than two years between upgrades anyway). I appreciate LG's obsessive drive towards a nanometer-bezel 4K screen but I would much prefer days and days of battery life instead.
I have been waiting for a device like the Band ever since reading Total Recall, a book by Gordon Bell, a few years ago. The book described his experience with a total life logging system called MyLifeBits inside Microsoft Research. About once every six months since 2012 I've investigated what options are available in the smartphone personal assistant and wearables markets, and tested lots of half-baked apps like ReQall Rover, that just weren't there in terms of features or integration. Wearables on the market previously have always been lacking in something that was a deal breaker for me - no apps, no HR monitor, poor battery life, etc. So when I read a few months ago the rumor that MSFT was going to release a fitness tracker band, knowing the long-running work they've had there in this field, I was cautiously excited.
The release yesterday seems to have caught most everybody by surprise. I'm happy that they went with a low-key launch because it ensured I was able to run to the mall and grab one after work. I did look at the sparse first-day reviews before going out, because I'm not a fan boy and $200 while lower than many other wearables isn't anything to sneeze at.
I unboxed and paired it to my Android phone at their mall kiosk to be sure it worked. The manual claims that it ships with only a partial charge, but I've had it on for most of a day now, and am still at half battery, even with the screen-always-on watch mode activated. The feature set is a pretty short list, which is understandable given the form factor: I can see myself primarily using it as a watch, workout tracker, and to check phone notifications. The Starbucks app, which I have not yet used, gives hope that more specialized apps will become available in the future.
As far as the actual wearing of it there are two things I'd warn about. The band is not terribly flexible, since they've jammed hardware into it, so if you have a wrist of unusual physical shape, you will definitely want to be careful with getting a good fit in-person before you buy one. It's heavier and bulkier than a watch, but not irritatingly so - it doesn't get in the way when I'm at a keyboard, sink, or steering wheel. It is probably tied for the heaviest watch I've ever worn. It is a discreet black band, especially when you wear it in the recommended placement underneath your wrist, and from a casual glance at my wrist looks almost like the $10 Casio watch it replaced.
It's pretty much set it and forget it. After you choose which notifications you want to be pushed to it, you ignore the thing sitting on your wrist until it vibrates, then you can turn your wrist over and see the notification. Maybe it's because I had been waiting for a worthy wearable for a long time, but I actually was already fluidly using it before even making it to the other side of the mall. Today it's been a notable boost to my productivity because I can glance at 98% of notifications in less than a second and either choose a canned reply from the Band (editable - so I've set "Sounds good," "I'll call you ASAP," etc.) or ignore them until I actually want to see my phone again. Because Google Now pushes new cards to notifications, it's worked very well with that, giving football game score updates, ETA to my house or work, etc.
I haven't yet gotten to use it to track a workout or run, which I hope to do later today. But for what I have used it for, the interface is great (it's nice to see Metro tiles finally find their place), and the few non-workout things it does, it does very well. For a first generation of a product, easy provisional A+, based on how well the fitness tracker features go.
The Dropbox client actually works and reliably syncs documents across devices. As somebody who has been struggling to get OneDrive to work properly for the year that I've had a ton of free storage (from the Surface Pro 2 promotion last winter), that is much more than Microsoft can offer.
What's more, due to the glamour of the skies, there is always a fresh bumper crop of new applicants for flight attendant positions, keeping pay terribly depressed. I had a friend who applied and got accepted at a major airline but turned it down when she found out it paid less than her call center job.
Funny this was on Slashdot - my dinner companions and I actually discussed Musk v Thiel last night. Musk needs to do the man a favor and give him the number of his damn publicist. Thiel is mostly known for whining (RTFA), investing (see other posts in this thread), and taking applications for Libertarian Fantasy Island.
Not to mention almost nobody ever will actually have one of these for less than $100 new and not closeout/clearance. Taxes, shipping, or both. As a question of language I would be happy with $100. I agree that $99 is a distasteful marketing gimmick although I probably wouldn't have bothered to raise the standard for non-psychologically-misleading pricing like you have.
I'm not quite so sure 16-17 year olds can be written off as a horde of yesbots. I recall NPR reporting yesterday that the teenage demographic surprised most with how 'No' they were, and they interviewed a couple who made clear they were decently informed of the issues. Expanding the voter pool to include more rightful citizens, who are going to spend the rest of their lives affected by this decision, is not 'rigging the game'.
Existing apps don't. I haven't figured out a way to tell AT&T DriveMode "no, I'm a passenger, please don't bug me for the next {1,2,3,...} hours." Fortunately it can still be bypassed. The irritating thing about DriveMode is that it lets you use maps and a couple other things even while you are putatively the driver. Bad AT&T. If somebody is driving they should know where they're going and just not be distracted until they're stopped again. Lost? Pull over and stop to look at the map like we did back in the dark ages.
Seriously, smartphones have turned being a roadtrip passenger from an awful chore into a breeze. They don't seem to make passengers roadsick like a book does, they're legible at night, the passenger can still hold a conversation with the driver just like before, and they can be a much better navigator if in unfamiliar ground. I really hope the cell companies don't screw the pooch on this.
If $2B is to be believed, Microsoft is offering Notch hundreds of times that. I'd easily sell the permanent rights to everything I've ever done so far professionally for that much cash. You should be leery around anyone who wouldn't.
One thing that's usually neglected in these discussions is the toughness of the calculator. My TI-84+ rode in my backpack and got tossed around for the better part of a decade and still functions just as perfectly as it did the day I opened it, with nothing more than a couple surface scratches.
It's true that the electronics could be replicated for a few bucks these days, but it seems that competitors that try to shave that cost inevitably also try to shave the cost of the plastic shell. Casios that I have worked with feel much, much flimsier. Remember that most of these are going into the 6th-12th grade education market. Abuse is a normal operating condition.
The first "toughbook"-style TI 84 clone, maybe add a hi-res screen, maybe cost 30% less, will obliterate the monopoly. However, by the time the beancounters at Calculator Corp Z figure out that's what it will take, we'll already have every student provisioned with Surface Pro-style devices that can be locked down to appropriate features during tests. This market may have another ten years left of life in it.
Do you have a vendetta against Amazon? I was about to call you out for mixing semiannual and annual, and profits and revenues, but then I recognized your name from your front page submission "Why the Public Library Beats Amazon."
Agree, and expand the scope to try to get a taxi anywhere in the US outside of NYC/Chicago/LA. There is a reason these companies have been able to spring up nationally almost overnight when their business model is "convince people to get into the passenger seat of a stranger with inadequate licensing and insurance."
Who cares? They're very easily identifiable, especially from in front of the car, which is the perspective from which you will first see the car as it pulls in to pick you up, but where you can't generally see stickers or vinyl wraps.
>hopelessly hipster/metrosexual...ashamed to be seen in said cars.
It's 2014 and you are "ashamed" to ride in a car with something pink on it?
Slashdot Mirror
I don't disagree with your conclusion but for a moment we should remember that 2007 was eight years ago. If somebody changes their mind over the course of eight years I'll give them the benefit of the doubt. They're not swaying with the political winds. Maybe the situation changed or they were exposed to new information. Especially now that (it feels like) the general public knows more about basic vaccines, due to the information campaigns needed to counter the lunatic anti-vaccine crowd.
Byrd turned around so completely on civil rights that he was getting 100% ratings from the NAACP by the 1990s. What's your guy's excuse?
If it's free, then it's just a different way of living that works for them. I couldn't find any information within the first couple minutes to figure out whether it was free or not.
Interestingly...
If it hits USD parity then the market cap and the most goods that it could possibly be traded for daily would be severely limited. BTC needs to rebound in value for it to be worthwhile to build an economy around it.
Also as it declines and more miners shut off due to nonprofitability there has been a proposed (not yet observed) death spiral process: price drops, miners shut off, verifications start getting backlogged, BTC loses its utility as an actual currency, price drops more. IIRC miners that actually pay their own rent and electric bills have break-even points in the $100-$200 range.
I've never held a position in it but it is a fascinating experiment, least to say. All the stuff about mining rig scams, Ponzi schemes, Silk Road, Mt Gox, etc. is a sideshow.
What kind of hell-liner are you flying on?
$400 ticket
+ $0 to stuff your unneeded extras in max-size carry on bags and manhandle them into the overheads like everyone else
+ $0 - I fly in and out of flyover country all the time and have never sat next to somebody I considered large enough to devalue my seat
+ $30-$75 is what I usually see quoted for the extra legroom seats, OR you can pick a seat near the back that is more likely to have an empty neighbor
+ $0 read a book
+ $0 some of the entertainment is pay-per-view but i've even been on flights with free satellite television before
+ $0 for a coke and a bag of peanuts, which is a light snack
+ $0 who cares, smartphone while you're waiting
The hell bar are you going to? My locals are $2. $9 is more than all but the most esoteric limited release craft brews.
Really? They don't have to do 18,000 simultaneous attacks. One or two would suffice to put a crippling chill on ticket sales for the rest of the season.
How on Earth can you just imagine numbers and so confidently make assertions based on them?
To be fair, the only reason flying is so expensive in two weeks is because you've chosen to travel during peak time. I find ORD - MIA round trip for $193 in late January. You'll get there within six hours and can sleep for most of that. Right now, with gas prices at their lowest in years, it's $170 (source: gasbuddy.com, assuming 35 mpg highway just to be nice) to drive, but you'll need to operate a motor vehicle for 20 hours. Not to mention that flying is orders of magnitude safer than driving...
I found that a wireless mouse made my Surface Pro 2 significantly easier to use. I know that's adding yet another part and taking away from the all-in-one-rectangle transformable tablet philosophy that Microsoft is going after, but it doesn't bother me to carry an additional little mouse when I travel. After an hour I actually caught myself switching fluidly between touching the screen and using the mouse depending on how fine-grained of control I needed. You can actually two-hand it for the most part, if you use your non-dominant hand for the touchscreen.
It's important to consider the economics of the second tier. How much should catastrophic-only insurance cost? And do we let people drop dead when they get catastrophic illness and didn't buy insurance?
Also keep in mind that a lot of the cost difference between the US and Cuba is the Americans are getting paid living wages (to live in America). When you say "a condition that could be treated for a few dollars at any decent 3rd-world clinic," let's get real, that probably translates to about $30 (or $300 even) in the US, even with the same penny pinching attitude.
>we really started to lose it around 1910 when the Federal Government began to assert itself as a central law enforcement and control authority.
First, absolutely not. Regarding the income tax, money does not equal freedom.
Second, the individual states have repeatedly proven themselves unable to protect minority rights or even outright hostile to the concept. Without a strong federal government anywhere from 15 to 30% of the population would be third-class citizens.
FWIW as another proud owner of a G2 I have not found it particularly fragile. Sure, it feels much more fragile than other phones because they threw a plastic shell on it, but it has stood up to time just as well as my other phone. I got a wallet-case for it, and damn Verizon for getting their own SKU that is apparently ~1mm wider, the phone popped out of the case onto a concrete floor from about six feet up. Nary a scratch.
All that said, part of the reason I got the G2 was its then-best flagship battery life, so I was bummed that the G3 didn't build upon that (not that I ever go less than two years between upgrades anyway). I appreciate LG's obsessive drive towards a nanometer-bezel 4K screen but I would much prefer days and days of battery life instead.
I have been waiting for a device like the Band ever since reading Total Recall, a book by Gordon Bell, a few years ago. The book described his experience with a total life logging system called MyLifeBits inside Microsoft Research. About once every six months since 2012 I've investigated what options are available in the smartphone personal assistant and wearables markets, and tested lots of half-baked apps like ReQall Rover, that just weren't there in terms of features or integration. Wearables on the market previously have always been lacking in something that was a deal breaker for me - no apps, no HR monitor, poor battery life, etc. So when I read a few months ago the rumor that MSFT was going to release a fitness tracker band, knowing the long-running work they've had there in this field, I was cautiously excited.
The release yesterday seems to have caught most everybody by surprise. I'm happy that they went with a low-key launch because it ensured I was able to run to the mall and grab one after work. I did look at the sparse first-day reviews before going out, because I'm not a fan boy and $200 while lower than many other wearables isn't anything to sneeze at.
I unboxed and paired it to my Android phone at their mall kiosk to be sure it worked. The manual claims that it ships with only a partial charge, but I've had it on for most of a day now, and am still at half battery, even with the screen-always-on watch mode activated. The feature set is a pretty short list, which is understandable given the form factor: I can see myself primarily using it as a watch, workout tracker, and to check phone notifications. The Starbucks app, which I have not yet used, gives hope that more specialized apps will become available in the future.
As far as the actual wearing of it there are two things I'd warn about. The band is not terribly flexible, since they've jammed hardware into it, so if you have a wrist of unusual physical shape, you will definitely want to be careful with getting a good fit in-person before you buy one. It's heavier and bulkier than a watch, but not irritatingly so - it doesn't get in the way when I'm at a keyboard, sink, or steering wheel. It is probably tied for the heaviest watch I've ever worn. It is a discreet black band, especially when you wear it in the recommended placement underneath your wrist, and from a casual glance at my wrist looks almost like the $10 Casio watch it replaced.
It's pretty much set it and forget it. After you choose which notifications you want to be pushed to it, you ignore the thing sitting on your wrist until it vibrates, then you can turn your wrist over and see the notification. Maybe it's because I had been waiting for a worthy wearable for a long time, but I actually was already fluidly using it before even making it to the other side of the mall. Today it's been a notable boost to my productivity because I can glance at 98% of notifications in less than a second and either choose a canned reply from the Band (editable - so I've set "Sounds good," "I'll call you ASAP," etc.) or ignore them until I actually want to see my phone again. Because Google Now pushes new cards to notifications, it's worked very well with that, giving football game score updates, ETA to my house or work, etc.
I haven't yet gotten to use it to track a workout or run, which I hope to do later today. But for what I have used it for, the interface is great (it's nice to see Metro tiles finally find their place), and the few non-workout things it does, it does very well. For a first generation of a product, easy provisional A+, based on how well the fitness tracker features go.
The Dropbox client actually works and reliably syncs documents across devices. As somebody who has been struggling to get OneDrive to work properly for the year that I've had a ton of free storage (from the Surface Pro 2 promotion last winter), that is much more than Microsoft can offer.
What's more, due to the glamour of the skies, there is always a fresh bumper crop of new applicants for flight attendant positions, keeping pay terribly depressed. I had a friend who applied and got accepted at a major airline but turned it down when she found out it paid less than her call center job.
Funny this was on Slashdot - my dinner companions and I actually discussed Musk v Thiel last night. Musk needs to do the man a favor and give him the number of his damn publicist. Thiel is mostly known for whining (RTFA), investing (see other posts in this thread), and taking applications for Libertarian Fantasy Island.
Not to mention almost nobody ever will actually have one of these for less than $100 new and not closeout/clearance. Taxes, shipping, or both. As a question of language I would be happy with $100. I agree that $99 is a distasteful marketing gimmick although I probably wouldn't have bothered to raise the standard for non-psychologically-misleading pricing like you have.
I'm not quite so sure 16-17 year olds can be written off as a horde of yesbots. I recall NPR reporting yesterday that the teenage demographic surprised most with how 'No' they were, and they interviewed a couple who made clear they were decently informed of the issues. Expanding the voter pool to include more rightful citizens, who are going to spend the rest of their lives affected by this decision, is not 'rigging the game'.
Existing apps don't. I haven't figured out a way to tell AT&T DriveMode "no, I'm a passenger, please don't bug me for the next {1,2,3,...} hours." Fortunately it can still be bypassed. The irritating thing about DriveMode is that it lets you use maps and a couple other things even while you are putatively the driver. Bad AT&T. If somebody is driving they should know where they're going and just not be distracted until they're stopped again. Lost? Pull over and stop to look at the map like we did back in the dark ages.
Seriously, smartphones have turned being a roadtrip passenger from an awful chore into a breeze. They don't seem to make passengers roadsick like a book does, they're legible at night, the passenger can still hold a conversation with the driver just like before, and they can be a much better navigator if in unfamiliar ground. I really hope the cell companies don't screw the pooch on this.
>enough cash to retire
If $2B is to be believed, Microsoft is offering Notch hundreds of times that. I'd easily sell the permanent rights to everything I've ever done so far professionally for that much cash. You should be leery around anyone who wouldn't.
One thing that's usually neglected in these discussions is the toughness of the calculator. My TI-84+ rode in my backpack and got tossed around for the better part of a decade and still functions just as perfectly as it did the day I opened it, with nothing more than a couple surface scratches.
It's true that the electronics could be replicated for a few bucks these days, but it seems that competitors that try to shave that cost inevitably also try to shave the cost of the plastic shell. Casios that I have worked with feel much, much flimsier. Remember that most of these are going into the 6th-12th grade education market. Abuse is a normal operating condition.
The first "toughbook"-style TI 84 clone, maybe add a hi-res screen, maybe cost 30% less, will obliterate the monopoly. However, by the time the beancounters at Calculator Corp Z figure out that's what it will take, we'll already have every student provisioned with Surface Pro-style devices that can be locked down to appropriate features during tests. This market may have another ten years left of life in it.
Do you have a vendetta against Amazon? I was about to call you out for mixing semiannual and annual, and profits and revenues, but then I recognized your name from your front page submission "Why the Public Library Beats Amazon."
Agree, and expand the scope to try to get a taxi anywhere in the US outside of NYC/Chicago/LA. There is a reason these companies have been able to spring up nationally almost overnight when their business model is "convince people to get into the passenger seat of a stranger with inadequate licensing and insurance."
>stupid pink mustaches
Who cares? They're very easily identifiable, especially from in front of the car, which is the perspective from which you will first see the car as it pulls in to pick you up, but where you can't generally see stickers or vinyl wraps.
>hopelessly hipster/metrosexual...ashamed to be seen in said cars.
It's 2014 and you are "ashamed" to ride in a car with something pink on it?