I'm honestly surprised that TWC hasn't sent techs out with hammers to start breaking WAPs.
Thats crude. What they have done is made sure that all of their customers have wifi enabled routers that poison the bandwidth for these mesh networks. Its pretty damn effective too.
It's also wireless, which means that more nodes = more total traffic one the limited bandwidth available. Doccis has the same limitation, but when you add a router to a congested wifi location, the congestion gets worse, not better. When you add routers to Doccis, the individual congestion clears up.
Mesh networks work reasonably well up to about 1000 - 2000 nodes per square mile. Above that, performance drops as a function of n*log(n). By the time you reach 10,000 nodes per square mile, performance on 802.11n drops to less average bandwidth than old school DSL. at 20,000 nodes per square mile, bandwidth has dropped to dialup speeds. New york city (including the boroughs) has over 25,000 residents per square mile. That means that the Mesh network cant handle more than 10% of the population before performance begins to drop under ideal conditions. Under real world conditions, It is likely to be half that, and will get worse over time as more and more bandwidth pollution is brought into service in the form of the IoT. The part that people don't understand about mesh networks, is that even with huge numbers of gateway routers, once more than a dozen nodes are within reach of each other, their traffic starts interfering with each other significantly due to multiple transmission collisions. Directional antennas help a little, but not nearly enough, especially when there are vastly more sources of wifi that are not part of the mesh that inject pockets of congestion and provide no services to the mesh (other peoples wifi routers who are time warner customers for example).
Mesh networks have their uses, but the operating envelope is a relatively narrow band of opportunity, which will not allow them to "take the city by storm".
the 23 watt difference wouldnt even be noticeable on your electric bill
If you leave it on all the time, it will add up to $2.50 per month. If you were to have just a few of them laying around, it could add up pretty quick.
If you aren't using VPN, this doesn't affect you at all.
Absolutely incorrect. What Netflix is talking about, is cross referencing the payment methods bill-to address, and using that to determine what country the customer lives in. The result will be, that when you log in, *your account* determines what content you get access to, not your IP address. Spoofing a bill-to address for payment is a great deal harder to do. Banks do not allow incorrect bill-to address' easily. Most people don't have the wherewithal to get an american billing address, and even if they could, it will cost them more in time and money than it is worth.
And as a consumer, it gets irritating watching a broken legal system strangle capitalism.
So... This is the result of to much government interference?
in any unregulated economic system, The parties will move towards consolidation, and eventually, monopolies and oligopolies. The end result is no more capitalism. In an unrestricted manner, capitalism will actively destroy itself, as a free market economy is not in the interests of the owners of the biggest companies, and they have the means to do something about it.
Pure capitalism cannot exist any more than pure communism can. At the end of the day, the only thing the masses have to protect themselves from the tyranny of the "capitalists" is the point of a gun, and the rule of law backed up by the point of a gun...
??? The best Silicon only options on that graph barely reach the worst of the Gallium based cells, and even then, they are theoretical designs that have monumental manufacturing costs due to the extreme materials handling requirements. What we need to make a solar breakthrough is silicon only cells that can break the 35% efficiency mark while being as cheap to make as the current commercial silicon only products (which run 25% at best).
The other way to improve them would be to increase the durability of the cells. Silicon only cells loose about 15% of their capacity per decade. After 30 years, you're getting a little more than half the power output you were getting when they are brand new. Compare that to coal and oil powered plants where you still get close to 100% power output at the end of the plant lifespan. The only long term advantage that Solar has is that you don't have to keep buying fuel, but as long as you keep having to replace the cells every 20 years, its not terribly better than every other non-renewable energy source.
As I said, the Gallium based cells will provide a meaningful contribution because they improve on the silicon variety in a number of important ways, but due to materials limitations, and lack of raw materials, solar will forever be a minority contributor to our global power grid. In 200 years, our power supply will most likely be around 10% solar, 5% wind, 5% hydroelectric, 20% geothermal, 10% coal / oil and 50% nuclear. In 400 years, it will likely be 90% nuclear because the energy consumption will have increased dramatically, but the supply of all but nuclear is fundamentally limited such that it will not be able to grow beyond a certain absolute maximum.
That is like saying cars are made out of steel. It vastly oversimplifies things.
The first photocells were made from silicon wafers, the same process as used by the semiconductor industry, but modern PV cells use a variety of other materials, to increase efficiency to acceptable levels, such as Gallium, Copper and Indium. These higher efficiency cells are what are referred to by anyone talking about the future of PV cells, because they are the ones that can meet the efficiency targets necessary to make solar cheap enough to be truly competitive. The problem is that these materials are only cheap because the quantities needed for production of todays volumes are easily within the availability of the materials. If you ramp up high efficiency PV cell production, you quickly discover that several of the materials needed will run severely short of supply before even a significant fraction of global power demand is met.
While Solar will make a strong addition to the global power grid, it cannot, by itself, make more than a minority contribution.
His point is that nuclear can't, in and of itself, decarbonize the electric sector. We simply don't have the capacity to build that many nuclear power plants simultaneously, nor do we have the fuel, nor do we have the money.
Like most kinds of systems, there are significant economies of scale to be had when building nuclear power facilities. The first one costs $10B+ to build. The second one only costs $8B because you can reuse much of the equipment and designs. If you are building 100 per year, the cost would probably drop to $5B each. This is easily within the budget of the US military alone, even if we assumed no private investment in nuclear power.
What is missing is neither the capacity, the money, nor the knowledge. What is missing is the political will do actually do something about the problem and stop wasting money dropping $1M bombs on third world countries. Our politicians are guilty of criminal mismanagement of the resources of this planet, and the only excuse they offer is: "It's the will of the people"; which unfortunately it is.
There were so many other ways they could have handled this correctly.
No, no there isn't. As Chrisautrey stated, and you failed to listen: Its not the seasoned hobbyist, or semi pro that is the problem. It's the rank and file immature moron who by design or accident gets too close to commercial airspace and downs an airliner full of people. There have already been far too many close calls. The simple fact is that, although you are right that no self respecting hobbyist will go astray, There is no good way for anyone outside of your hobby to know the difference in advance. Model aircraft were equally dangerous, except for a few basic facts that made them less of a global issue. First, a model aircraft or Heli used to be much harder to fly. Before the advent of microcontroller based flight controls, you had to know what you were doing. This inherently made the hobby expensive and very time consuming. As a result, would-be pilots had a large amount of experience and invested time and money before they were ever able to affect commercial air traffic. That kept incidents to an extremely infrequent pace. Today, any idiot (and a quick hunt around youtube will easily demonstrate that many of these people *are* idiots), can cough up $100 and go fly a drone into someplace they don't belong. This would be akin to allowing any numnuts with $100 to go driving on public roads without a license. You can't make a rational argument for that either.
I'm genuinely sorry that your hobby is being ruined by the massive popularity it wasn't ready for, but doing anything in communal space comes with responsibilities which you and your compatriots have dutifully respected, and now a new breed of kids is ruining it for you. The best you can do is not to fight the regulation that is coming, but work to help ensure that it keeps the riff-raff out, and burdens you the least amount necessary to maintain the safety of the general public.
Can build Machiavellian anti-drone system.... but can't seem to spring for polarized cockpit windows to eliminate the whole laser strike issue.
Complex drone jamming and re-direction has potential military applications, and is likely an offshoot of an existing military project. Tinted windows: not so much.
Deliberate and willful interference with regulated radio services should be, and is, a federal crime.
It is, essentially, a misdemeanor.
Flying a drone in a restricted airspace is, however, a violation of various anti-terror laws, and will end with jail time for the operator. This is one of those cases where the laws actually got it right.
Also, never minding what the laws say, Drones are god-damn dangerous when flown outside of a narrow envelope. The fact that these drone "pilots" are too stupid to know better makes them even more dangerous. It is just a matter of time before one of these idiot toy drones takes down an airliner and kills people. Why do we have to wait for that to happen before we realize that flying a drone is no different than operating a motor vehicle or flying a plane, and treat it as such (Proper licensing only after demonstrated knowledge and skills).
Add back in tariffs (which makes free market zealots cry but we can sell those tears for a profit).
The Australians do that now. The result is not higher paying jobs for Australians, it has done little to improve their overall income.
What it has achieved there is to raise the cost of goods to 60% above what everyone else pays. Everything made in Australia is hideously expensive, but the import tariffs run 50%, or the imports are outright blocked by crooked regulations. At the end of the day, Australia is a case study in why protectionist economics is a disaster.
Whenever the kids ask for a game on their tablets, as soon as it is installed, I log out of the itunes account so that they cant purchase anything more. It takes only seconds, and if this guy can't figure out how / cant be bothered to take that simple step, then he deserves to have to cough up the money. Its like they say, a fool and their money are soon parted.
Amendment 28: The government of these united states shall not borrow money for any reason without a popular vote by referendum requiring no less than 75% of the popular vote and requiring a quorum of no less than 25% of eligible voters.
Bam, no more deficit spending. You'll find that most of these idiotic boondoggles will get the ax when The money dries up. Force these elected officials to have to demonstrate a balanced budget, and give the courts the ammo they need to end any budget that runs a deficit.
You know that Switzerland has a direct democracy and has had it for a long time. We do not describe Switzerland as much of an anarchy you know.
Why do people keep repeating that bullshit? Switzerland has a representative democracy. The swiss electorate only votes on amendments to their constitution, and in the event that someone manages to accumulate enough signature to trigger a referendum. Switzerland is only a Half-Direct Democracy. This effectively means that the Swiss people can directly vote on changes to their constitution, and can vote to repeal a specific law when enough of a legal challenge has been mounted. Mounting that challenge requires 50,000 signatures in 100 days or less, which will require a massive and sustained popular effort. It typically only happens once or twice a year. For all remaining matters, elected representatives perform the law making duties.
I would propose a different system for future "democracies". My suggestion would be Laws are voted on annually by means of a ballot system with all current laws requiring reauthorization. New laws, or amendment variations would appear as well. Any laws that failed at this stage are either removed (if they already existed), or are not put on the books. Additionally, I would allow every citizen to allocate revocation privileges to a representative. This would also be done annually on the ballot. These representatives would be able to cast the votes their representatives have given them. Those elected officials are then able to revoke laws by a vote of the representatives where the collective representative yay vote is greater than 25% of the population. In this fashion, people can select any number of representatives that cover their own interest, and those representatives have the power to remove laws only. In this fashion, there can be a breaking force on the system of laws such that any law that even a 25% minority is opposed to can effectively be stopped if that minority cares strongly enough about it. The idea is quite simply put that most laws should either be blindingly obvious, or they really shouldn't be laws. By allowing people to designate more than one representative at once, they can have a representative for each of the important issue they care about, and they will know that that representative will effective protect their interest in that facet. That way people don't have to cast a vote for an imperfect representative that covers their interests in some areas, but is directly opposed to what they want in others.
"...you can be damn sure that none of those device will run Windows, IOS or Android, much as Microsoft wishes otherwise." So Microsoft wishes otherwise, but Apple and Google do not wish otherwise? I realize you mentioned their products but the absence of the company names is telling.
Apple doesn't care one iota about IOS in the embedded space. For Apple, IOS is a necessary cost of their core business: Selling hardware with exceptionally high margins.
Google cares only marginally about the embedded space because it doesn't give them any opportunity to serve ads. As such, it is largely useless to their core business. The ability to collect and resell information about the users is of some interest to both Microsoft and Google, but not enough to make this a valuable target market for them.
In the end, all three are too short sighted to see the limitations of content consumption devices. They are the current fad, but their popularity has now peaked. Almost everyone who wants a tablet / cell phone has one. The 2 year cell phone cycle will hold apple for a while, but the tablet boom has to bust because these devices have a much longer useful lifespan than cell phones. This is the same pattern we saw early in the PC / Internet craze where people had to upgrade their PC every 2 years just to keep up. Now, a 10 year old PC can handle most kinds of normal usage, and a 5 year old PC can do everything except the hardcore games.
I mentioned Microsoft explicitly in regards to the embedded space because Microsoft has made actual efforts to capture some of that market indicating a desire to pursue it. In addition, Microsoft is the only major player that has no upside potential in the next decade. Unless Microsoft can find a new market to penetrate, their bread and butter is threatened at every turn. Both Apple and Google have significant market share in markets that are not likely to wane quickly or soon (search and mobile). Microsoft's business derives almost exclusively from desktop PCs and laptops, both of which are directly challenged in the private user arena by mobile devices, Which Microsoft has been unable to make significant inroads into without sacrificing margin to the point of loss. This leaves Microsoft relying on their business customers to an extent that is extremely unhealthy, and can evaporate fast and without warning. If some enterprising young startup manages to leverage wine into a works well enough product, they could seriously threaten Microsofts Desktop OS hegemony. Likewise, open office, libre office or Google docs could easily undercut Microsoft office in the business setting, leaving Microsoft with no revenue stream, and nowhere to pivot to.
Microsoft is unlikely to die quickly, as they have enough entrenched userbase in the business products arena to sustain them for quite a while, but it is very likely that Microsoft will follow in IBMs footsteps and just slowly slide away to irrelevance with slowly dwindling revenues and margins.
Finally, you have predicted the future. So now you presume to know the future as well?
In this arena? Yes. I know what is going to happen because it is fairly obvious to most people who are alert and intelligent. The only real question is how long it will take. Most of what I described is possible today. We don't have it today because that kind of thing is expensive to get into homes except as new construction. Retrofit is more expensive, so almost no one does it. Consequently, it will take 30-50 years for it to pervade the houses of the world. I see it now. In all the new construction I see, most of the $M+ homes have voice activated and geolocation activated controls for lights, HVAC, entertainment, houshold appliances, exterior maintence, etc... I even saw one place with an automated lawn mower that keeps his 50 acres cut without needing human intervention. Most of the current incarnations use the customers cell phone or tablet as the control interface, but it will be trivial to
And yet basing something on number of licenses sold is stil far better than counting a person watching The Hobbit as a user because the SFX was rendered on an Ubuntu computer.
Not when it comes to servers or embedded systems. People have no idea what OS runs on the servers that provide them with everything they see every day from the OS running their router and NAS, The OS on their Roku, or DVD player. The OS running on their thermostat. At the end of the day, those are still users, and they are arguably far more important than desktop users. Just like mobile OS rendered the desktop OS' to a backseat role going forward, Embedded OS will render the mobile OS as largely irrelevant as well. In 50 years, you will interact with the majority of your devices by way of voice recognition and audible responses. The OS that underlies these functions will be a Linux variant, likely Ubuntu. Windows can't get traction on anything other than desktop PCs. This is because people don't like windows. Mostly they use it because they have to. Hardware manufacturers don't like windows. It costs too damn much, and Microsoft has a history of screwing their business partners. The market has spoken, and it chose Android and IOS. Microsoft continues to be used on the desktop mostly because business have a huge investment in training their employees how to use windows, and many CIOs have no idea there are alternatives. The only thing keeping business' on windows is that training investment. If that were to become irrelevant, then the obvious business decision is to abandon Windows. This can be seen by the absolutely abysmal uptake of windows 8 and 10. The adoption rate of those two versions is almost exclusively limited to the percentage of PCs that are new hardware sold to consumers with windows pre-installed (Note that PCs destined for business use are almost exclusively windows 7).
And Microsoft doesn't have to count people connecting to a Windows server or people watching a movie that may have been edited on a Windows machine as users to reach their numbers.
Windows 10 has a roughly 10% market share. This is in spite of the fact that A: Microsoft is giving it away for free. B: Microsoft has created an upgrade process for windows 7 & 8 that makes upgrading a default. So, People who are staying with Windows 7, 8 have to *actively* do so. It actually is fairly easy to accidentally "upgrade" to windows 10, and in spite of all that, the majority of people are staying with windows 7. It is also very telling that Windows 10 has only a marginally higher usage rate than windows XP. It should also be noted that business will *not* move to windows 10. Ever. The user interface is so different that it would require massive employee retraining. It is significant enough, that with the introduction of windows 8, switching to an alternative OS like Mac or Linux actually became viable over moving wot windows 10. When LTS for windows 7 ends, if the only options are Windows 8/10 and comparable, then companies will decide that paying to retrain employees will be more cost effective if they go to an OS that does not cost large sums of money... The deal is even better when you consider that Linux based UIs tend to be more like Windows 7 than windows 10 is, meaning that retraining to use Unity, Lubunu, or some other such will be less expensive than retraining to use windows 10. Mark my words; when it comes time for the end of windows 7 LTS, Microsoft will have introduced another windows 7 like UI to move to, or will simply decide to extend windows 7 support.
So earth has like 4.7 billion people on it, are you trying to tell me that one in five of those are full-time ubuntu users? I don't believe you one iota.
What he was really saying is that of the roughly 20 Billion devices on earth capable of running an operating system, Ubuntu is on 5% of them. Comparatively speaking, thats pretty impressive. Microsoft only has about 1.25 Billion of those machines. Apple has a little over 1.5 Billion. Android passed the 1 Billion mark in 2014. By installed base, that puts Canonical in the big leagues. Moreover, Canonical has not even stopped accelerating their adoption rate in the embedded space. All three of the other big OS players have effectively saturated their respective markets, and have nowhere to grow to.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm honestly surprised that TWC hasn't sent techs out with hammers to start breaking WAPs.
Thats crude. What they have done is made sure that all of their customers have wifi enabled routers that poison the bandwidth for these mesh networks. Its pretty damn effective too.
In a mesh, more nodes = more paths.
It's also wireless, which means that more nodes = more total traffic one the limited bandwidth available. Doccis has the same limitation, but when you add a router to a congested wifi location, the congestion gets worse, not better. When you add routers to Doccis, the individual congestion clears up.
Mesh networks work reasonably well up to about 1000 - 2000 nodes per square mile. Above that, performance drops as a function of n*log(n). By the time you reach 10,000 nodes per square mile, performance on 802.11n drops to less average bandwidth than old school DSL. at 20,000 nodes per square mile, bandwidth has dropped to dialup speeds. New york city (including the boroughs) has over 25,000 residents per square mile. That means that the Mesh network cant handle more than 10% of the population before performance begins to drop under ideal conditions. Under real world conditions, It is likely to be half that, and will get worse over time as more and more bandwidth pollution is brought into service in the form of the IoT. The part that people don't understand about mesh networks, is that even with huge numbers of gateway routers, once more than a dozen nodes are within reach of each other, their traffic starts interfering with each other significantly due to multiple transmission collisions. Directional antennas help a little, but not nearly enough, especially when there are vastly more sources of wifi that are not part of the mesh that inject pockets of congestion and provide no services to the mesh (other peoples wifi routers who are time warner customers for example).
Mesh networks have their uses, but the operating envelope is a relatively narrow band of opportunity, which will not allow them to "take the city by storm".
This won't stay "DOJ and four states" very long.
Yes it will. According to the article, the other 46 states already settled.
the 23 watt difference wouldnt even be noticeable on your electric bill
If you leave it on all the time, it will add up to $2.50 per month. If you were to have just a few of them laying around, it could add up pretty quick.
Why put off till tomorrow what can be done the day after?
Never do today, that which can be put off until it no longer has to be done.
If you aren't using VPN, this doesn't affect you at all.
Absolutely incorrect. What Netflix is talking about, is cross referencing the payment methods bill-to address, and using that to determine what country the customer lives in. The result will be, that when you log in, *your account* determines what content you get access to, not your IP address. Spoofing a bill-to address for payment is a great deal harder to do. Banks do not allow incorrect bill-to address' easily. Most people don't have the wherewithal to get an american billing address, and even if they could, it will cost them more in time and money than it is worth.
And as a consumer, it gets irritating watching a broken legal system strangle capitalism.
So... This is the result of to much government interference?
in any unregulated economic system, The parties will move towards consolidation, and eventually, monopolies and oligopolies. The end result is no more capitalism. In an unrestricted manner, capitalism will actively destroy itself, as a free market economy is not in the interests of the owners of the biggest companies, and they have the means to do something about it.
Pure capitalism cannot exist any more than pure communism can. At the end of the day, the only thing the masses have to protect themselves from the tyranny of the "capitalists" is the point of a gun, and the rule of law backed up by the point of a gun...
??? The best Silicon only options on that graph barely reach the worst of the Gallium based cells, and even then, they are theoretical designs that have monumental manufacturing costs due to the extreme materials handling requirements. What we need to make a solar breakthrough is silicon only cells that can break the 35% efficiency mark while being as cheap to make as the current commercial silicon only products (which run 25% at best).
The other way to improve them would be to increase the durability of the cells. Silicon only cells loose about 15% of their capacity per decade. After 30 years, you're getting a little more than half the power output you were getting when they are brand new. Compare that to coal and oil powered plants where you still get close to 100% power output at the end of the plant lifespan. The only long term advantage that Solar has is that you don't have to keep buying fuel, but as long as you keep having to replace the cells every 20 years, its not terribly better than every other non-renewable energy source.
As I said, the Gallium based cells will provide a meaningful contribution because they improve on the silicon variety in a number of important ways, but due to materials limitations, and lack of raw materials, solar will forever be a minority contributor to our global power grid. In 200 years, our power supply will most likely be around 10% solar, 5% wind, 5% hydroelectric, 20% geothermal, 10% coal / oil and 50% nuclear. In 400 years, it will likely be 90% nuclear because the energy consumption will have increased dramatically, but the supply of all but nuclear is fundamentally limited such that it will not be able to grow beyond a certain absolute maximum.
Solar panels are made of sand
That is like saying cars are made out of steel. It vastly oversimplifies things.
The first photocells were made from silicon wafers, the same process as used by the semiconductor industry, but modern PV cells use a variety of other materials, to increase efficiency to acceptable levels, such as Gallium, Copper and Indium. These higher efficiency cells are what are referred to by anyone talking about the future of PV cells, because they are the ones that can meet the efficiency targets necessary to make solar cheap enough to be truly competitive. The problem is that these materials are only cheap because the quantities needed for production of todays volumes are easily within the availability of the materials. If you ramp up high efficiency PV cell production, you quickly discover that several of the materials needed will run severely short of supply before even a significant fraction of global power demand is met.
While Solar will make a strong addition to the global power grid, it cannot, by itself, make more than a minority contribution.
His point is that nuclear can't, in and of itself, decarbonize the electric sector. We simply don't have the capacity to build that many nuclear power plants simultaneously, nor do we have the fuel, nor do we have the money.
Like most kinds of systems, there are significant economies of scale to be had when building nuclear power facilities. The first one costs $10B+ to build. The second one only costs $8B because you can reuse much of the equipment and designs. If you are building 100 per year, the cost would probably drop to $5B each. This is easily within the budget of the US military alone, even if we assumed no private investment in nuclear power.
What is missing is neither the capacity, the money, nor the knowledge. What is missing is the political will do actually do something about the problem and stop wasting money dropping $1M bombs on third world countries. Our politicians are guilty of criminal mismanagement of the resources of this planet, and the only excuse they offer is: "It's the will of the people"; which unfortunately it is.
There were so many other ways they could have handled this correctly.
No, no there isn't. As Chrisautrey stated, and you failed to listen: Its not the seasoned hobbyist, or semi pro that is the problem. It's the rank and file immature moron who by design or accident gets too close to commercial airspace and downs an airliner full of people. There have already been far too many close calls. The simple fact is that, although you are right that no self respecting hobbyist will go astray, There is no good way for anyone outside of your hobby to know the difference in advance. Model aircraft were equally dangerous, except for a few basic facts that made them less of a global issue. First, a model aircraft or Heli used to be much harder to fly. Before the advent of microcontroller based flight controls, you had to know what you were doing. This inherently made the hobby expensive and very time consuming. As a result, would-be pilots had a large amount of experience and invested time and money before they were ever able to affect commercial air traffic. That kept incidents to an extremely infrequent pace. Today, any idiot (and a quick hunt around youtube will easily demonstrate that many of these people *are* idiots), can cough up $100 and go fly a drone into someplace they don't belong. This would be akin to allowing any numnuts with $100 to go driving on public roads without a license. You can't make a rational argument for that either.
I'm genuinely sorry that your hobby is being ruined by the massive popularity it wasn't ready for, but doing anything in communal space comes with responsibilities which you and your compatriots have dutifully respected, and now a new breed of kids is ruining it for you. The best you can do is not to fight the regulation that is coming, but work to help ensure that it keeps the riff-raff out, and burdens you the least amount necessary to maintain the safety of the general public.
Can build Machiavellian anti-drone system.... but can't seem to spring for polarized cockpit windows to eliminate the whole laser strike issue.
Complex drone jamming and re-direction has potential military applications, and is likely an offshoot of an existing military project. Tinted windows: not so much.
Deliberate and willful interference with regulated radio services should be, and is, a federal crime.
It is, essentially, a misdemeanor.
Flying a drone in a restricted airspace is, however, a violation of various anti-terror laws, and will end with jail time for the operator. This is one of those cases where the laws actually got it right.
Also, never minding what the laws say, Drones are god-damn dangerous when flown outside of a narrow envelope. The fact that these drone "pilots" are too stupid to know better makes them even more dangerous. It is just a matter of time before one of these idiot toy drones takes down an airliner and kills people. Why do we have to wait for that to happen before we realize that flying a drone is no different than operating a motor vehicle or flying a plane, and treat it as such (Proper licensing only after demonstrated knowledge and skills).
Add back in tariffs (which makes free market zealots cry but we can sell those tears for a profit).
The Australians do that now. The result is not higher paying jobs for Australians, it has done little to improve their overall income.
What it has achieved there is to raise the cost of goods to 60% above what everyone else pays. Everything made in Australia is hideously expensive, but the import tariffs run 50%, or the imports are outright blocked by crooked regulations. At the end of the day, Australia is a case study in why protectionist economics is a disaster.
Can't wait for the first ransomware. "Please pay X if you wish to drive to work this morning"?
I can't wait to start hearing that excuse from co-workers!
Whenever the kids ask for a game on their tablets, as soon as it is installed, I log out of the itunes account so that they cant purchase anything more. It takes only seconds, and if this guy can't figure out how / cant be bothered to take that simple step, then he deserves to have to cough up the money. Its like they say, a fool and their money are soon parted.
The solution is simple:
Amendment 28: The government of these united states shall not borrow money for any reason without a popular vote by referendum requiring no less than 75% of the popular vote and requiring a quorum of no less than 25% of eligible voters.
Bam, no more deficit spending. You'll find that most of these idiotic boondoggles will get the ax when The money dries up. Force these elected officials to have to demonstrate a balanced budget, and give the courts the ammo they need to end any budget that runs a deficit.
You know that Switzerland has a direct democracy and has had it for a long time. We do not describe Switzerland as much of an anarchy you know.
Why do people keep repeating that bullshit? Switzerland has a representative democracy. The swiss electorate only votes on amendments to their constitution, and in the event that someone manages to accumulate enough signature to trigger a referendum. Switzerland is only a Half-Direct Democracy. This effectively means that the Swiss people can directly vote on changes to their constitution, and can vote to repeal a specific law when enough of a legal challenge has been mounted. Mounting that challenge requires 50,000 signatures in 100 days or less, which will require a massive and sustained popular effort. It typically only happens once or twice a year. For all remaining matters, elected representatives perform the law making duties.
I would propose a different system for future "democracies". My suggestion would be Laws are voted on annually by means of a ballot system with all current laws requiring reauthorization. New laws, or amendment variations would appear as well. Any laws that failed at this stage are either removed (if they already existed), or are not put on the books. Additionally, I would allow every citizen to allocate revocation privileges to a representative. This would also be done annually on the ballot. These representatives would be able to cast the votes their representatives have given them. Those elected officials are then able to revoke laws by a vote of the representatives where the collective representative yay vote is greater than 25% of the population. In this fashion, people can select any number of representatives that cover their own interest, and those representatives have the power to remove laws only. In this fashion, there can be a breaking force on the system of laws such that any law that even a 25% minority is opposed to can effectively be stopped if that minority cares strongly enough about it. The idea is quite simply put that most laws should either be blindingly obvious, or they really shouldn't be laws. By allowing people to designate more than one representative at once, they can have a representative for each of the important issue they care about, and they will know that that representative will effective protect their interest in that facet. That way people don't have to cast a vote for an imperfect representative that covers their interests in some areas, but is directly opposed to what they want in others.
3-the news media become the new politicians, swaying public support for their "clients".
They don't do that already?
"...you can be damn sure that none of those device will run Windows, IOS or Android, much as Microsoft wishes otherwise." So Microsoft wishes otherwise, but Apple and Google do not wish otherwise? I realize you mentioned their products but the absence of the company names is telling.
Apple doesn't care one iota about IOS in the embedded space. For Apple, IOS is a necessary cost of their core business: Selling hardware with exceptionally high margins.
Google cares only marginally about the embedded space because it doesn't give them any opportunity to serve ads. As such, it is largely useless to their core business. The ability to collect and resell information about the users is of some interest to both Microsoft and Google, but not enough to make this a valuable target market for them.
In the end, all three are too short sighted to see the limitations of content consumption devices. They are the current fad, but their popularity has now peaked. Almost everyone who wants a tablet / cell phone has one. The 2 year cell phone cycle will hold apple for a while, but the tablet boom has to bust because these devices have a much longer useful lifespan than cell phones. This is the same pattern we saw early in the PC / Internet craze where people had to upgrade their PC every 2 years just to keep up. Now, a 10 year old PC can handle most kinds of normal usage, and a 5 year old PC can do everything except the hardcore games.
I mentioned Microsoft explicitly in regards to the embedded space because Microsoft has made actual efforts to capture some of that market indicating a desire to pursue it. In addition, Microsoft is the only major player that has no upside potential in the next decade. Unless Microsoft can find a new market to penetrate, their bread and butter is threatened at every turn. Both Apple and Google have significant market share in markets that are not likely to wane quickly or soon (search and mobile). Microsoft's business derives almost exclusively from desktop PCs and laptops, both of which are directly challenged in the private user arena by mobile devices, Which Microsoft has been unable to make significant inroads into without sacrificing margin to the point of loss. This leaves Microsoft relying on their business customers to an extent that is extremely unhealthy, and can evaporate fast and without warning. If some enterprising young startup manages to leverage wine into a works well enough product, they could seriously threaten Microsofts Desktop OS hegemony. Likewise, open office, libre office or Google docs could easily undercut Microsoft office in the business setting, leaving Microsoft with no revenue stream, and nowhere to pivot to.
Microsoft is unlikely to die quickly, as they have enough entrenched userbase in the business products arena to sustain them for quite a while, but it is very likely that Microsoft will follow in IBMs footsteps and just slowly slide away to irrelevance with slowly dwindling revenues and margins.
Finally, you have predicted the future. So now you presume to know the future as well?
In this arena? Yes. I know what is going to happen because it is fairly obvious to most people who are alert and intelligent. The only real question is how long it will take. Most of what I described is possible today. We don't have it today because that kind of thing is expensive to get into homes except as new construction. Retrofit is more expensive, so almost no one does it. Consequently, it will take 30-50 years for it to pervade the houses of the world. I see it now. In all the new construction I see, most of the $M+ homes have voice activated and geolocation activated controls for lights, HVAC, entertainment, houshold appliances, exterior maintence, etc... I even saw one place with an automated lawn mower that keeps his 50 acres cut without needing human intervention. Most of the current incarnations use the customers cell phone or tablet as the control interface, but it will be trivial to
And yet basing something on number of licenses sold is stil far better than counting a person watching The Hobbit as a user because the SFX was rendered on an Ubuntu computer.
Not when it comes to servers or embedded systems. People have no idea what OS runs on the servers that provide them with everything they see every day from the OS running their router and NAS, The OS on their Roku, or DVD player. The OS running on their thermostat. At the end of the day, those are still users, and they are arguably far more important than desktop users. Just like mobile OS rendered the desktop OS' to a backseat role going forward, Embedded OS will render the mobile OS as largely irrelevant as well. In 50 years, you will interact with the majority of your devices by way of voice recognition and audible responses. The OS that underlies these functions will be a Linux variant, likely Ubuntu. Windows can't get traction on anything other than desktop PCs. This is because people don't like windows. Mostly they use it because they have to. Hardware manufacturers don't like windows. It costs too damn much, and Microsoft has a history of screwing their business partners. The market has spoken, and it chose Android and IOS. Microsoft continues to be used on the desktop mostly because business have a huge investment in training their employees how to use windows, and many CIOs have no idea there are alternatives. The only thing keeping business' on windows is that training investment. If that were to become irrelevant, then the obvious business decision is to abandon Windows. This can be seen by the absolutely abysmal uptake of windows 8 and 10. The adoption rate of those two versions is almost exclusively limited to the percentage of PCs that are new hardware sold to consumers with windows pre-installed (Note that PCs destined for business use are almost exclusively windows 7).
And Microsoft doesn't have to count people connecting to a Windows server or people watching a movie that may have been edited on a Windows machine as users to reach their numbers.
No? Microsoft has a History of misleading statistics of their own.
If you want more examples, you're free to Google it yourself
Failure?
Windows 10 has a roughly 10% market share. This is in spite of the fact that A: Microsoft is giving it away for free. B: Microsoft has created an upgrade process for windows 7 & 8 that makes upgrading a default. So, People who are staying with Windows 7, 8 have to *actively* do so. It actually is fairly easy to accidentally "upgrade" to windows 10, and in spite of all that, the majority of people are staying with windows 7. It is also very telling that Windows 10 has only a marginally higher usage rate than windows XP. It should also be noted that business will *not* move to windows 10. Ever. The user interface is so different that it would require massive employee retraining. It is significant enough, that with the introduction of windows 8, switching to an alternative OS like Mac or Linux actually became viable over moving wot windows 10. When LTS for windows 7 ends, if the only options are Windows 8/10 and comparable, then companies will decide that paying to retrain employees will be more cost effective if they go to an OS that does not cost large sums of money... The deal is even better when you consider that Linux based UIs tend to be more like Windows 7 than windows 10 is, meaning that retraining to use Unity, Lubunu, or some other such will be less expensive than retraining to use windows 10. Mark my words; when it comes time for the end of windows 7 LTS, Microsoft will have introduced another windows 7 like UI to move to, or will simply decide to extend windows 7 support.
So earth has like 4.7 billion people on it, are you trying to tell me that one in five of those are full-time ubuntu users? I don't believe you one iota.
What he was really saying is that of the roughly 20 Billion devices on earth capable of running an operating system, Ubuntu is on 5% of them. Comparatively speaking, thats pretty impressive. Microsoft only has about 1.25 Billion of those machines. Apple has a little over 1.5 Billion. Android passed the 1 Billion mark in 2014. By installed base, that puts Canonical in the big leagues. Moreover, Canonical has not even stopped accelerating their adoption rate in the embedded space. All three of the other big OS players have effectively saturated their respective markets, and have nowhere to grow to.
So does this mean that Microsoft should now count anyone who has looked through a window as a Windows user?
With the failure to force Windows 10 on "customers", that tactic can't be long in coming...