And, really, if you're trying to test this... do a bloody honest test.
You do an study in which one group is (placebo|synthetic) and another group which is (placebo|pot).
If you're trying to test a lab-made version of it, you should also be testing the real thing to prove you're doing better.
Nobody will let you run that test, but I'm betting anxiety among your group with the pot goes down, unless someone has too much and has an unpleasant ride. I'm also betting absolutely ZERO of your pot users end up brain dead or otherwise in critical care.
And aspirational goals are fine... but they will never fix human nature.
Hoping to make a better world is fine. Stupidly believing your system will be adhered to despite human nature is delusional.
The only way to do this kind of thing is to find a system which works without hoping human nature suddenly changes to adhere to your idea. Because that won't work.
If any system ever says "and all the humans will act thusly", it's full of shit -- in their extreme forms, Capitalism and Communism both make stupid assumptions about human nature which are utterly unfounded in reality. Which means neither can ever work as promised in all cases.
No, the grandparent is right... when you make an assumption that everybody will behave according to the rules because it's the Right Thing to Do, you are fundamentally denying reality, human nature, and the fact that if even only a tiny amount of people decide they have no interest in Doing The Right Thing then the entire thing can (and will) fall apart.
That's why we have police, prisons, armies, and all sorts of things.
Because the simple reality is, if you are telling yourself that everything will be OK because people will Do the Right Thing... then things are not going to be OK.
Society is a thin veneer trying to keep us all on the same track. But pretending there isn't an underlying element of greedy, vicious, selfish bastards is just self delusion.
Stop pretending like human nature is some truly enlightened thing, and that we're past our baser instincts. We never will be that. And if we ever were that, we'd fall prey to the first person born who still was.
I have great optimism and hope for humanity. But at the level of individual humans, I have no such illusions.
That depends on how long one can continue to believe in the idea that idealism can win over greed.
Well, let me simplify your entire post:
How long does wishful thinking last in the face of reality?
See, anything which ever assumes perfect outcomes by ignoring human nature is utterly doomed to fail.
Religion, political theories, philosophies, magic currencies... if you have to build in an assumption that "well, golly, everyone will play by the rules because my system is so awesome"... then you've already lost, and you are guilty of making up stupid shit which will never account for reality.
Wishful thinking in the form of idealism never has, and never will, magically change human nature. It helps you define your goals, but it cannot be a mechanism to change that someone always wants to come out ahead or game the system for their own benefit.
I contend that any system which relies on "idealism" and "perfect human behavior" to achieve a goal... well, that system is inherently flawed.
Unfortunately, pretty much all of them ultimately do boil down to "and everybody will adhere to what I have decreed as the perfect system". Unfortunately, that's still bullshit and ignores reality.
and as a result thereâ(TM)s no longer much reason to think Bitcoin can actually be better than the existing financial system
In all honesty, there never was much reason. Bitcoin has been paraded around as if is magic. It isn't, and it never has been.
Over time it was fairly inevitable it would develop the exact same problems it claimed to be bypassing. And the notion that it would be free from government taxation or regulation? That was always a bit of a delusion.
So, whatever... the magical unicorns didn't spray us all with the urine of glossy perfection which was promised. Color me completely not surprised.
What's more surprising is now long people kept telling themselves this wishful thinking would hold true.
WTF makes people think we need to defend cities? You've forgotten your nomad roots?
Most cultures moved past being nomads.. they became agrarian, established and then industrialized.
Things like roads and running water and libraries and burial grounds and temples... all of those things which helped us build modern society... they eventually anchored us to cities.
Humans have fundamentally changed the landscape of the world, and there's far too many of us to try to pretend that our nomadic roots have any applicability to our modern lives.
You think the populace of New York or LA could suddenly become nomadic? No way in hell.
So how do you keep animal corpse byproducts out of the food you eat?
You know why we have E-coli outbreaks? Because animal waste and other garbage contaminates food.
You know why we have things like "mad cow disease"? Because some idiot decided grinding up sheep to feed to cows made sense -- despite that cows are herbivores and not evolved to ingest sheep.
No more so than any other flesh based component of compost.
My father made his own garden compost for a lot of years, and quite frankly meat caused more problems than it contributed... because the meat rotted and got nasty and didn't break down into nice clean compost. That's why we historically slop pigs with it, because they do a better job of turning it into something useful -- meat. I won't eat it, but I do know why we've had pigs in agriculture for thousands of years.
You'll notice we don't use the term "manure" to include the shit from carnivores, and people don't generally eat carnivores... because it develops a really nasty flavor due to concentrating everything else in the food chain.
Okay, I thought I had a rather cynical view of humanity, but your hatred of the species is nothing I could ever aspire to.
Look around at your average person you see in Wal Mart. Overweight, loaded up with sodium and other nasty chemicals, fat, grease, oil, medicines -- prepared food and other garbage.
If someone put half of that shit into cows, you wouldn't eat that. Well, increasingly we do put that shit into cows, and people are discovering it's unhealthy and quite the opposite of good for you. In fact, it contributes to makes use overall more sick.
A human from an abstract agrarian culture? Well, there's an "ick" factor, but it isn't quite so loaded with the crap modern humans put in.
If our waterways are full of hormones and antibiotics because we put it into our bodies and excrete it out, you can't claim that a human is fit for eating.
You can go ahead and eat whatever you want. I don't give a shit. But you'll notice nobody is looking to use dog crap as manure, or eating wolves... precisely because, unlike eating cows and other herbivores, they're mostly a concentration of garbage which doesn't add any value to compost.
I don't hate humans. But I look at modern humans as anything but what I'd call a clean food source... because modern life fills us with chemicals and other garbage the FDA wouldn't let you put into cows,
I sure as fuck wouldn't eat something which I knew had humans as compost, and if I had my option, I wouldn't want something which had ground up cows or cats or monkeys as compost either. Precisely because I know damned well there are diseases which can spread from this.
Because the idea of someone tending and revering the rotting meat sack like it's a sacred artifact is kinds of creepy. Embalming it so you can pretend it's not dead is even creepier.
Would vegans refuse to eat veggies grown from human content compost?
I sure would (OK, I'm a vegetarian), for the same reason I don't agree with using human waste as compost... humans are dirty, carry plenty of disease, and a modern human is mostly processed crap.
Which means I assume there's a lot of pathogens and other things which would come into play which we haven't yet established as safe... Hep C and decades of pharmaceuticals, heavy metals, McDonald's, KFC, Viagra, and whatever other crap we dump into our bodies come to mind.
I seriously doubt humans are fit for consumption by anything, let alone humans.
Hell, the animals we grow for the purpose of eating aren't fit to eat in my opinion; the nasty disgusting carcass of a modern human? The mind reels at just how nasty that must be.
Really, would you eat medical waste? Because that's what you're talking about.
Indeed... "I see you've managed to get your shirt off" is one of the best lines imaginable.
And if Sigourney Weaver saying "I mean, this is unreal. They're gonna start eating each other out there." isn't a brilliant send-up of rabid Trekkies, I have no idea what is.
Galaxy Quest is a brilliant movie, and Rickman was about the most perfect for that character you could imagine.
I can't speak for all models, or all forms of heat... but my programmable thermostat does that.
So if it knows it needs to be a certain temperature at a certain time, it has in fact compiled data from before and might start gradually warming (or cooling) earlier in order to get there. It accounts for some lag and inertia in getting to the target, and seems to do it quite well. It doesn't suddenly decide to try to do a big swing with a full-speed heat/cool.
I don't claim to be an HVAC expert, not by a long shot. And I know the more 'unusual' the system is the harder it is to make it work. My brother has baseboard hot-water with an on-demand hot-water tank -- which made for all sorts of nuisance until someone came in and made some changes to the system to address some bad design choices.
My biggest problem for cooling is I have a west facing back yard. So in peak summer I get full daylight from about 11am until around 9pm... so for cooling I need to put up shade sails in the summer so the house doesn't heat up like a clay oven... and in the winter that same sun also warms the main floor of the house and the furnace doesn't run and the rest of the house gets cold. Simple fans actually solve part of that.
(And in case anybody has the same problem, shade sails are quite cheap but make a big difference in terms of cutting down on the heat from the sun in the summer. You don't need to cool the air as much if it isn't being heated as much. And it makes for a nice pleasant place to sit.)
But generally speaking, for my house, for the model of programmable thermostat I have, I've found it has done a really good job of learning, adapting... and it's never been screwed up by a remote update and doesn't send analytics data.
Let me offer a counter point: abstracting, wrapping, deferring, and hiding those black boxes can often lead you to building abstractions and interfaces which promise more than the underlying code can deliver, or which are outright not compatible with it.
If you run screaming from your real code so you can add a layer of code which allows you to pretend like you know what code you have, sooner or later you do something monumentally STUPID.
And the more you add layers of pretty on top of layers of ugly, the sooner it will bite you in the ass.
I've seen (on more than one occasion) someone taking old and ugly code, building a few layers of shiny on top of it, and then start passing around code which explicitly says "WARNING, THIS IS NOT THREAD SAFE" or "DANGER, DON'T EVER DO THIS", and then pass it into stuff which violates those assumptions right up until the code fails spectacularly.
And then of course people look as far as their abstraction and say "looks good here, we won't check down where the dragons are because our abstraction is awesome and perfect".
There are dragons, and if you don't understand it well enough to deal with the dragons, you may not be qualified to build a wrapper around the dragons. Because dragons are sneaky and always looking for a way to bit you on the ass.
I'm not saying don't clean up old code where you can. But if you think piling layers of bad assumptions on top of something you don't understand is a good solution, you're just waiting to get burned.
Or bit in the ass by a dragon you though was no longer a threat.
Oddly, my old Honeywell thermostat had way more problems than the Nest that replaced it. It would frequently turn on heat or AC and leave it on regardless of temperature.
Wow, was it installed properly? Running the systems regardless of temp sounds like it wasn't properly connected, or properly registering the temperature.
My current and my last house have/had programmable thermostats. On both going from heat to cool was a system setting, and it didn't just flip on its own. It's not like in the course of the week that changed
We've always just put the damned thing into "permanent hold" when we go away, and let it be a little cooler in the winter or a little warmer in the summer -- like you, our summer and winter have about a 60C range between them. (+30C in the summer and -30C in the winter aren't unlikely)
I've gotten more improvement in my heating bills by adding foil tape to the ducts, and learning what I need to do to adjust vents and airflow according to the season to get better outcomes, and adding summer shade to keep the house from overheating in the sun -- cheap shade sails go a long way there. I don't have to cool air in my house which isn't being heated by the sun if the sun doesn't hit the house.
There was no reason for the summary to mention a risk of pipes bursting, that's just fear-mongering to try and sensationalize the issue.
You obviously have never lived in a cold weather climate.
Try living in a place where 0F is not that uncommon. A house without heat will cause pipes to freeze and burst.
Honestly, if you have no idea of what you're talking about, shut up. Because in places where cold weather is a real thing in the winter, an unheated house can cause massive amounts of damage.
Fear mongering? Sensationalizing? You clearly have no idea what you're talking about.
It may not happen in Florida, but anywhere with a real winter and it's an actual thing.
For an application like this, if you want a "mature and reliable", you bloody well buy a thermostat which isn't connected, comes from a company which has been making thermostats a long time, and actually know what they're doing.
Because those things are designed to run without ever being updated or connected to anything.
Oh, and they don't upload your information to anybody or provide security holes into your home.
Go buy a Honeywell programmable thermostat or something. You'll find you never have this problem.
I'm afraid I've kind of reached "peak sympathy" for these problems. To a non-tech person they seem really cool, but it's not like this kind of stupidity wasn't entirely foreseeable and predicted.
The company has confirmed that a software update error had caused the thermostat's batteries to drain, therefore making it unable to control the temperature.
Wow, if this isn't an epic example of bullshit stupidity by companies who want to control the infrastructure in your home I have no idea of what it is.
I wouldn't trust a net connected thermostat in the first place. Because it's there to gather information and upload it to the mother ship. And if you can access it via an app, someone else can.
But then they push an update and fuck up the unit to the point people have no heat? Hell no, this is why I have no intention of letting some external party ever be able to access things like my thermostat.
Products used to be engineered knowing their entire life cycle would be in isolation. It had to work, it had to do all of its functions, and it couldn't fuck up because if people had to replace it, they wouldn't replace it with your brand.
Now companies make shitty stuff, ship it out the door, make updates to it, and if you end up with a broken product... well, bummer.
This world of connected crap tied to smart phones? It's garbage, and it's years away from being anything but. It's insecure, and violates your privacy.
Sadly, this kind of crap is what many people have been warning about -- because you're suddenly at the mercy of some damned company who wants to be agile, or find a way to collect even more information about you. And then they push out an untested update, and you're screwed.
As someone who lives in a place where winter means "really damned cold", if I had been stupid enough to buy one of these, I'd be replacing it immediately. Imagine coming home to frozen pipes because some lazy idiot didn't do enough testing?
Until you have an offline digital file which doesn't require a network to give you permission to watch it, you have no such thing.
According to the copyright cartel, you're only allowed to watch where and when they tell you that you're allowed. And you're supposed to say "thank you sir" and be grateful they let you watch it at all.
Legally entitled to watch is defined by the lawyers of a greedy corporation. YOU have no rights except the crumbs they choose to give you.
Slashdot Mirror
You can compensate a volunteer and still have them be considered a volunteer. What the hell are you talking about?
The military in any country which doesn't have mandatory service is a "volunteer army". But they sure as hell get paid for it.
You're making up a definition of volunteer which isn't real in this case.
TFA is short on facts, the claim it was cannabis derived is being rejected.
Short answer, it doesn't look like anybody has said anything meaningful yet about the actual drug in question.
And, really, if you're trying to test this ... do a bloody honest test.
You do an study in which one group is (placebo|synthetic) and another group which is (placebo|pot).
If you're trying to test a lab-made version of it, you should also be testing the real thing to prove you're doing better.
Nobody will let you run that test, but I'm betting anxiety among your group with the pot goes down, unless someone has too much and has an unpleasant ride. I'm also betting absolutely ZERO of your pot users end up brain dead or otherwise in critical care.
I will be curious to hear some real facts come out about this ... brain death isn't a small mishap, it's a pretty serious reaction.
One wonders what they were really given.
If you have 90 random people smoke or ingest cannabis, I bet none of them would end up brain dead.
And aspirational goals are fine ... but they will never fix human nature.
Hoping to make a better world is fine. Stupidly believing your system will be adhered to despite human nature is delusional.
The only way to do this kind of thing is to find a system which works without hoping human nature suddenly changes to adhere to your idea. Because that won't work.
If any system ever says "and all the humans will act thusly", it's full of shit -- in their extreme forms, Capitalism and Communism both make stupid assumptions about human nature which are utterly unfounded in reality. Which means neither can ever work as promised in all cases.
Bah, they've been lobbied to help line the pockets of the multi-billion dollar companies who stand to gain from selling us this technology.
That's pretty much what it always comes down to.
No, the grandparent is right ... when you make an assumption that everybody will behave according to the rules because it's the Right Thing to Do, you are fundamentally denying reality, human nature, and the fact that if even only a tiny amount of people decide they have no interest in Doing The Right Thing then the entire thing can (and will) fall apart.
That's why we have police, prisons, armies, and all sorts of things.
Because the simple reality is, if you are telling yourself that everything will be OK because people will Do the Right Thing ... then things are not going to be OK.
Society is a thin veneer trying to keep us all on the same track. But pretending there isn't an underlying element of greedy, vicious, selfish bastards is just self delusion.
Stop pretending like human nature is some truly enlightened thing, and that we're past our baser instincts. We never will be that. And if we ever were that, we'd fall prey to the first person born who still was.
I have great optimism and hope for humanity. But at the level of individual humans, I have no such illusions.
Well, let me simplify your entire post:
How long does wishful thinking last in the face of reality?
See, anything which ever assumes perfect outcomes by ignoring human nature is utterly doomed to fail.
Religion, political theories, philosophies, magic currencies ... if you have to build in an assumption that "well, golly, everyone will play by the rules because my system is so awesome" ... then you've already lost, and you are guilty of making up stupid shit which will never account for reality.
Wishful thinking in the form of idealism never has, and never will, magically change human nature. It helps you define your goals, but it cannot be a mechanism to change that someone always wants to come out ahead or game the system for their own benefit.
I contend that any system which relies on "idealism" and "perfect human behavior" to achieve a goal ... well, that system is inherently flawed.
Unfortunately, pretty much all of them ultimately do boil down to "and everybody will adhere to what I have decreed as the perfect system". Unfortunately, that's still bullshit and ignores reality.
In all honesty, there never was much reason. Bitcoin has been paraded around as if is magic. It isn't, and it never has been.
Over time it was fairly inevitable it would develop the exact same problems it claimed to be bypassing. And the notion that it would be free from government taxation or regulation? That was always a bit of a delusion.
So, whatever ... the magical unicorns didn't spray us all with the urine of glossy perfection which was promised. Color me completely not surprised.
What's more surprising is now long people kept telling themselves this wishful thinking would hold true.
Most cultures moved past being nomads .. they became agrarian, established and then industrialized.
Things like roads and running water and libraries and burial grounds and temples ... all of those things which helped us build modern society ... they eventually anchored us to cities.
Humans have fundamentally changed the landscape of the world, and there's far too many of us to try to pretend that our nomadic roots have any applicability to our modern lives.
You think the populace of New York or LA could suddenly become nomadic? No way in hell.
You know why we have E-coli outbreaks? Because animal waste and other garbage contaminates food.
You know why we have things like "mad cow disease"? Because some idiot decided grinding up sheep to feed to cows made sense -- despite that cows are herbivores and not evolved to ingest sheep.
My father made his own garden compost for a lot of years, and quite frankly meat caused more problems than it contributed ... because the meat rotted and got nasty and didn't break down into nice clean compost. That's why we historically slop pigs with it, because they do a better job of turning it into something useful -- meat. I won't eat it, but I do know why we've had pigs in agriculture for thousands of years.
You'll notice we don't use the term "manure" to include the shit from carnivores, and people don't generally eat carnivores ... because it develops a really nasty flavor due to concentrating everything else in the food chain.
Look around at your average person you see in Wal Mart. Overweight, loaded up with sodium and other nasty chemicals, fat, grease, oil, medicines -- prepared food and other garbage.
If someone put half of that shit into cows, you wouldn't eat that. Well, increasingly we do put that shit into cows, and people are discovering it's unhealthy and quite the opposite of good for you. In fact, it contributes to makes use overall more sick.
A human from an abstract agrarian culture? Well, there's an "ick" factor, but it isn't quite so loaded with the crap modern humans put in.
If our waterways are full of hormones and antibiotics because we put it into our bodies and excrete it out, you can't claim that a human is fit for eating.
You can go ahead and eat whatever you want. I don't give a shit. But you'll notice nobody is looking to use dog crap as manure, or eating wolves ... precisely because, unlike eating cows and other herbivores, they're mostly a concentration of garbage which doesn't add any value to compost.
I don't hate humans. But I look at modern humans as anything but what I'd call a clean food source ... because modern life fills us with chemicals and other garbage the FDA wouldn't let you put into cows,
I sure as fuck wouldn't eat something which I knew had humans as compost, and if I had my option, I wouldn't want something which had ground up cows or cats or monkeys as compost either. Precisely because I know damned well there are diseases which can spread from this.
Because the idea of someone tending and revering the rotting meat sack like it's a sacred artifact is kinds of creepy. Embalming it so you can pretend it's not dead is even creepier.
I sure would (OK, I'm a vegetarian), for the same reason I don't agree with using human waste as compost ... humans are dirty, carry plenty of disease, and a modern human is mostly processed crap.
Which means I assume there's a lot of pathogens and other things which would come into play which we haven't yet established as safe ... Hep C and decades of pharmaceuticals, heavy metals, McDonald's, KFC, Viagra, and whatever other crap we dump into our bodies come to mind.
I seriously doubt humans are fit for consumption by anything, let alone humans.
Hell, the animals we grow for the purpose of eating aren't fit to eat in my opinion; the nasty disgusting carcass of a modern human? The mind reels at just how nasty that must be.
Really, would you eat medical waste? Because that's what you're talking about.
Indeed ... "I see you've managed to get your shirt off" is one of the best lines imaginable.
And if Sigourney Weaver saying "I mean, this is unreal. They're gonna start eating each other out there." isn't a brilliant send-up of rabid Trekkies, I have no idea what is.
Galaxy Quest is a brilliant movie, and Rickman was about the most perfect for that character you could imagine.
I can't speak for all models, or all forms of heat ... but my programmable thermostat does that.
So if it knows it needs to be a certain temperature at a certain time, it has in fact compiled data from before and might start gradually warming (or cooling) earlier in order to get there. It accounts for some lag and inertia in getting to the target, and seems to do it quite well. It doesn't suddenly decide to try to do a big swing with a full-speed heat/cool.
I don't claim to be an HVAC expert, not by a long shot. And I know the more 'unusual' the system is the harder it is to make it work. My brother has baseboard hot-water with an on-demand hot-water tank -- which made for all sorts of nuisance until someone came in and made some changes to the system to address some bad design choices.
My biggest problem for cooling is I have a west facing back yard. So in peak summer I get full daylight from about 11am until around 9pm ... so for cooling I need to put up shade sails in the summer so the house doesn't heat up like a clay oven ... and in the winter that same sun also warms the main floor of the house and the furnace doesn't run and the rest of the house gets cold. Simple fans actually solve part of that.
(And in case anybody has the same problem, shade sails are quite cheap but make a big difference in terms of cutting down on the heat from the sun in the summer. You don't need to cool the air as much if it isn't being heated as much. And it makes for a nice pleasant place to sit.)
But generally speaking, for my house, for the model of programmable thermostat I have, I've found it has done a really good job of learning, adapting ... and it's never been screwed up by a remote update and doesn't send analytics data.
Arguably, when you request memory from a modern OS, basic security says it shouldn't be filled with random stuff from other programs.
This has been true since at least the 90s.
Multi-processing environments have been solving this for years, like they're supposed to.
Let me offer a counter point: abstracting, wrapping, deferring, and hiding those black boxes can often lead you to building abstractions and interfaces which promise more than the underlying code can deliver, or which are outright not compatible with it.
If you run screaming from your real code so you can add a layer of code which allows you to pretend like you know what code you have, sooner or later you do something monumentally STUPID.
And the more you add layers of pretty on top of layers of ugly, the sooner it will bite you in the ass.
I've seen (on more than one occasion) someone taking old and ugly code, building a few layers of shiny on top of it, and then start passing around code which explicitly says "WARNING, THIS IS NOT THREAD SAFE" or "DANGER, DON'T EVER DO THIS", and then pass it into stuff which violates those assumptions right up until the code fails spectacularly.
And then of course people look as far as their abstraction and say "looks good here, we won't check down where the dragons are because our abstraction is awesome and perfect".
There are dragons, and if you don't understand it well enough to deal with the dragons, you may not be qualified to build a wrapper around the dragons. Because dragons are sneaky and always looking for a way to bit you on the ass.
I'm not saying don't clean up old code where you can. But if you think piling layers of bad assumptions on top of something you don't understand is a good solution, you're just waiting to get burned.
Or bit in the ass by a dragon you though was no longer a threat.
Wow, was it installed properly? Running the systems regardless of temp sounds like it wasn't properly connected, or properly registering the temperature.
My current and my last house have/had programmable thermostats. On both going from heat to cool was a system setting, and it didn't just flip on its own. It's not like in the course of the week that changed
We've always just put the damned thing into "permanent hold" when we go away, and let it be a little cooler in the winter or a little warmer in the summer -- like you, our summer and winter have about a 60C range between them. (+30C in the summer and -30C in the winter aren't unlikely)
I've gotten more improvement in my heating bills by adding foil tape to the ducts, and learning what I need to do to adjust vents and airflow according to the season to get better outcomes, and adding summer shade to keep the house from overheating in the sun -- cheap shade sails go a long way there. I don't have to cool air in my house which isn't being heated by the sun if the sun doesn't hit the house.
If you want private, use your own device. Do it from home. Or use encryption they can't bypass.
But I haven't seen a company in years which didn't say "we can and will monitor what happens on OUR equipment, and if you don't like it TOO BAD".
It has been upheld in a lot of places already that when you use your employer's equipment, you play by their rules.
You obviously have never lived in a cold weather climate.
Try living in a place where 0F is not that uncommon. A house without heat will cause pipes to freeze and burst.
Honestly, if you have no idea of what you're talking about, shut up. Because in places where cold weather is a real thing in the winter, an unheated house can cause massive amounts of damage.
Fear mongering? Sensationalizing? You clearly have no idea what you're talking about.
It may not happen in Florida, but anywhere with a real winter and it's an actual thing.
For an application like this, if you want a "mature and reliable", you bloody well buy a thermostat which isn't connected, comes from a company which has been making thermostats a long time, and actually know what they're doing.
Because those things are designed to run without ever being updated or connected to anything.
Oh, and they don't upload your information to anybody or provide security holes into your home.
Go buy a Honeywell programmable thermostat or something. You'll find you never have this problem.
I'm afraid I've kind of reached "peak sympathy" for these problems. To a non-tech person they seem really cool, but it's not like this kind of stupidity wasn't entirely foreseeable and predicted.
Wow, if this isn't an epic example of bullshit stupidity by companies who want to control the infrastructure in your home I have no idea of what it is.
I wouldn't trust a net connected thermostat in the first place. Because it's there to gather information and upload it to the mother ship. And if you can access it via an app, someone else can.
But then they push an update and fuck up the unit to the point people have no heat? Hell no, this is why I have no intention of letting some external party ever be able to access things like my thermostat.
Products used to be engineered knowing their entire life cycle would be in isolation. It had to work, it had to do all of its functions, and it couldn't fuck up because if people had to replace it, they wouldn't replace it with your brand.
Now companies make shitty stuff, ship it out the door, make updates to it, and if you end up with a broken product ... well, bummer.
This world of connected crap tied to smart phones? It's garbage, and it's years away from being anything but. It's insecure, and violates your privacy.
Sadly, this kind of crap is what many people have been warning about -- because you're suddenly at the mercy of some damned company who wants to be agile, or find a way to collect even more information about you. And then they push out an untested update, and you're screwed.
As someone who lives in a place where winter means "really damned cold", if I had been stupid enough to buy one of these, I'd be replacing it immediately. Imagine coming home to frozen pipes because some lazy idiot didn't do enough testing?
So, same as now except I get to wear the slick white body armor and use the voice thing?
I'm in.
LOL ... that's the nicest (and most untrue) thing anybody has said to me all year.
World-weary has a certain grandeur I don't agree with, but the cynic part has been true for a very long time.
Facebook is in the business of selling Facebook.
That this idiot is saying stupid shit is just a symptom of that.
In general, I find pundits and futurists to be full of shit. In the specific, this man is saying stuff so monumentally stupid as to defy belief.
Sorry, Facebook, you're not going to displace a hundred years of telephone just because you have a fucking app.
I'd throw Zuckerfuck off a bridge before I'd use his crap for my telephone.
Legally entitled to watch.
What a quaint notion.
Until you have an offline digital file which doesn't require a network to give you permission to watch it, you have no such thing.
According to the copyright cartel, you're only allowed to watch where and when they tell you that you're allowed. And you're supposed to say "thank you sir" and be grateful they let you watch it at all.
Legally entitled to watch is defined by the lawyers of a greedy corporation. YOU have no rights except the crumbs they choose to give you.