I don't know how Heinlen gets so much credit for this book...it's was a rambling, shambolic pulp thing with sex and politics wedged into it at every opportunity in a vain attempt to perk it up a bit. It's not a book that has "stood the test of time" at all. If there's money for classic SciFi, we need someone to get off their butts and make "RingWorld". It's time.
Um "Wikileaks" - not "Wikipedia leaks". WIkileaks has *nothing* to do with Wikipedia other than that they both happen to use a "Wiki". It's rather important not to make that mistake!
So if someone shows up, checks in, then doesn't actually vote...it throws you into chaos? I think that's something you might not want to advertise too widely!
The "dye a finger" thing has some concerns. In some elections, you really want a certain class of person to just not vote. The dyed finger is proof that you voted - and it's hard to wash off (intentionally, obviously). So the bad guy can threaten to beat the crap out of people who voted and still gain an edge. This isn't a theoretical problem.
Of course, you can achieve a similar effect by simply hanging out outside the voting location and noting which people went inside.
But the easier you make it, the more chance of abuse.
So to pull this off you need (a) a voting machine to play with to learn the techniques and (b) physical access to every voting machine you need to influence.
My approach is to make a completely fake voting machine, with the same interfaces as the real thing - and just swap the whole machine out when I have physical access to it.
This thought-experiment shows that with those two things (a machine to play with and physical access) there is no conceivable security measure that'll be 100% effective. So control access to the physical machines and your problem is solved.
So, this is easy. We just have to turn this over to the public sector. We pay Disney a small fee to put a picture of Mickey Mouse on every ballot paper. If people photograph it and post the pictures then Disney can sue the pants off them for copyright violation.
Problem solved - and as a plus we can subtly reinforce the idea that voting for Mickey Mouse as a write-in candidate might be a better idea than any of the other choices!
You have it backwards. You can't ban the posting of the photo without infringing the constitutional right to free speech. You CAN ban the talking of the photo in the first place by the simple expedient of banning the use of cameras in the polling station. We already ban photography in courts and on military bases and in some other government facilities. The polling station is no different in principle to those other places. It's ridiculously easy (and constitutional) to ban the use of cameras in polling stations - it would be wildly unconstitutional to ban the sharing of those photos.
Plus (in principle) your boss could station someone inside the polling booth and fire any employees who requested a replacement ballot after taking their obligatory corporate selfie.
The ability to request a replacement is no guarantee of secrecy at all.
The law should prevent TAKING the photograph - not SHARING a photograph that you already took. A law preventing people from sharing the photo would (arguably) be a violation of free speech...and would be blown away as unconstitutional. A law preventing people from taking photographs inside the polling station would be no different than the laws preventing you from taking photos during a trial or on a military base - no different than the copyright laws - no different than the child pornography laws. All of those limit your right to take a photograph - and the constitution says nothing about any special rights in that regard.
If someone were to take a photo of their ballot (illegally) and share it on Facebook - the crime would be of having taken the photo - not of sharing it. Sharing it would be evidence that you broke the law by taking the selfie in the first place...so making it illegal to take the photo would be a strong disincentive to share it if you did.
We don't have to make this any harder than it already is. "No Photography within the bounds of a polling station" is a perfectly good law with ZERO downsides.
You're getting confused over the "right to free speech" here. Nobody is trying to prevent people from displaying a legally taken photograph - posting it on facebook or whatever...banning *THAT* would be a violation of the freedom of speech. What they seek here is to make it illegal to take the photo in the first place. There is no constitutional right to take a photograph or to copy a document - and preventing people from doing that happens all the time (eg with copyright law, child pornography laws, state secrecy laws, DMCA, etc).
So - we can certainly make it illegal to take a photograph or otherwise scan your ballot paper or the screen of any voting machine - we can ban the taking of photographs inside the polling station - period. Nobody's constitutional rights are impinged in any way whatever by the passage of such a law.
Hence, there is no flip-flop here. This is NOT a constitutional matter. The secrecy of the ballot is a far, far bigger concern.
Yeah - mail-in ballots are a tremendous concern. This is concern is reflected in the crazy-quilt set of laws across the USA. Some US states allow postal voting to anyone who requests it without even asking for a reason. Oregon, Washington and Colorado *only* have postal voting (although you can drop your vote off at the post office on the day of the election...so it's not exactly "posted"). Some states only allow it for specific cases such as disability. Others say that those are the criteria but don't actually enforce them (for example, in Texas, there is no requirement to *prove* that you'd be unable to stand in line for an hour to vote - and no mechanism to check whether you lied or not). Some states also allow "drive-thru" voting, where you fill out the ballot paper in advance and just drop it off at the polling station on the day.
I agree - the concept of a secret ballot is critical to fair and independent elections.
The right to free speech gives you the right to say "I voted for candidate A" without impediment. Banning cameras inside the voting booth doesn't impede that right in any way. The "right to free speech" isn't "the right to take photographs" - although it arguably is "the right to display photographs that you've taken". We could however, make the voting form, or the display on the voting machine be a copyrighted work - making it illegal to photograph it. The "right to free speech" isn't the "right to disseminate copies of copyrighted works"...so this could be fixed quite easily by paying Disney to put a copy of Mickey Mouse next to each check box (and given the number of "Mickey Mouse" candidates, we get...that's not an entirely stupid idea!):-)
If you can't prove the way you voted, then nobody can bribe you to vote against your preference or threaten you if you don't do what they want. Sure, they can give you money to vote a particular way - but if there is no way to prove that you did. With a true secret ballot you can always vote your true preference and then tell people whatever they want to hear afterwards.
It is *much* easier to prevent someone from using a camera in the controlled space of a voting booth than it is to try to catch people who are bribing, or otherwise coercing voters.
Voting by mail is a similarly risky proposition, and when that's widely available, you again risk coercion. For the relatively small numbers of people who literally cannot vote in person, we should consider having mobile "polling booths" that can be taken to the person's home such that they can still vote in secrecy.
Early voting is also problematic for me. While it's very convenient and helps to reduce the long lines on the day - there is the risk that people will make up their minds before they have all of the facts at their fingertips.
The problem we have in our modern world is that people believe what they want to believe. For the first time in history, nearly every person has the whole of human knowledge at their fingertips - you can find the answer to any question with 30 seconds of googling/wikipedia-ing.
This video tells "believers" what they already know - and will be completely ignored by those who don't.
"An Inconvenient Truth" set the stage - it may have swayed a few minds - but essentially, everyone who already knew and understood had their deepest fears confirmed - and the people who didn't want to believe simply dismissed it out of hand...possibly never even watched it.
This is everywhere these days. Donald Trump can say any lies he wants - people who support him will believe absolutely anything he says, no matter the evidence to the contrary. The people who were convinced to vote for "Brexit" in the UK were similarly immune to fact when the facts didn't fit their world view.
So what we need as a civilization is NOT more videos like this. What we need is to somehow awaken people's minds to the idea of seeking TRUTH. To think for themselves. To look up the fact - and if they doubt the fact, to follow the little blue numbers on the Wikipedia pages. To think for themselves. To believe what is actually true, and not what they want to be true.
For me - global climate change is very real. What's wrong is that we're trying to fix it by switching to LED lamps, recycling coke cans and driving hybrid SUV's. We need to look for changes that'll work...stop farming cows, for example. We can all, quite easily, give up beef and cow-milk. That alone would have more impact than replacing every incandescent bulb, replacing every car with a Nissan Leaf, and recycling every scrap of recyclable material to perfection. The second thing we need to do is to cut our population to maybe a quarter of what it currently is. This is REALLY hard to do. But that's the thing that'll ultimately do.
So even the promoters of fixing things need to step back from their current recommendations and check the facts. It's actually not that hard to figure out what's required.
Where I live - a semi-rural area outside of Austin TX (sadly *just* outside of Google Fiber's coverage area), there are only four ways to get Internet:
1) AT&T (their service is basically cellular-to-the-home - they don't own wires). 2) Time Warner Cable (they have cable TV wires to my home) 3) Dish Network (they have satellite for downloads and use AT&T cellular for uploads). 4) Carrier pigeons.
Since Dish is AT&T - if TWC gets merged into AT&T - then there is literally no other way to get online than to buy from them...or else, maybe, the pigeon thing.
That's intolerable.
The problem is that when AT&T own the area, it would cost an absolute fortune for someone like Google Fiber to come along and dig up all the streets to get some competition going. It's really not going to happen.
In my opinion, what's required is what it done with electricity supply in my area. We can buy electricity from half a dozen suppliers. Some are "green", some have better customer service, some are much cheaper. They all use the same copper wires that lead to my house though - so what's happening is that one company owns the wires and the others handle supply and customer support, etc. We never have to deal with the company that owns the wires. If there is a problem, we go to our "supplier" and they are responsible for fixing it. They take a portion of our electricity bill and pay the guys who own the wires for the capacity their customers consume.
That's what the Internet (and CableTV - which is really "the internet" these days) should be.
There should be companies who own the wires and the routers and such - and companies who handle pricing, bandwidth allocation, customer support and billing. Those guys can compete for my business.
Roadside sensors are a natural for a mesh network. Each sensor can use something akin to WiFi to talk to the next one in each direction along the road. Data can pass from each sensor to it's neighbor in two directions, providing a measure of fault tolerance and detection.
However, cars are gradually becoming connected - it might be easier for them just to talk to each other and back to the net using the sensors and radio gear that they already have. That way you don't have to monitor sections of road where nobody's driving.
The thing is that incident sunlight is ALREADY melting the snow - don't need no fancy solar panels for that. The only thing these gizmo's could do would be to "time-shift" the sunlight from the period before it started snowing...so the concern isn't so much the power they generate as the power they can store. Once the panel has snow on it, it's not getting much sunlight anyway.
This whole concept is broken in so many ways - it's laughable.
Except: View everything on-demand. Have as many TV's as you like, no need for DVR's for time-shifting. No adverts.
In a home with 4 TV's we'd have needed to rent 4 cable boxes - we saved $120/month on cable fees (still paid for Internet)...added $10 for Netflix, $4 for Acorn, $10 for Amazon Prime. We probably spend another $20 on Amazon for movies and non-free TV shows. We have an antenna on each TV for local news and stuff like that.
We're saving a little money - but that's not the point. Watch what we want, when we want, no adverts. That's a game changer.
Better still, the quality of shows that you pay for directly is WAY higher than those that are paid for by some collection of advertisers. Netflix make shows that their customers want to watch - not shows that advertisers will pay to stuff adverts into. Binge watching is a great way to see long-running shows. Weird niche stuff is always available as well as the obvious content.
We cut the cord about 4 years ago - we tried going back to cable briefly - but cut the cord again after just a few months. Every year, the online streaming stuff gets better and better.
So, thanks to an over-enthusiastic use of headphones in my youth, I now have to boost high frequencies with a pair of hearing aids if I want a hope of understanding conversation and enjoying music. These are not your grandmother's contraptions. They are all-but invisible, they communicate with each other using ultrasound pulses sent through my skull to help to spatialize sound more effectively and to dynamically adjust to ambient sound levels and such. They are pretty nifty devices - and produce really good audio quality, even for my sub-par ears. A pair of good ones will cost you (or, ideally, your HMO) around $6,000 - but even with decent health insurance, it still cost me $1,300 to get a pair fully tweaked to my specific needs.
Now, when I want to listen to music...well, I can't wear earbuds because my ears are already full of hearing aids and over-ear headphones tend to cause audio feedback in my hearing aids...so that's out. But no problem, the hearing aid designers thought of that - and my hearing aids have bluetooth! So I can pair them with my phone/laptop/TV and listen to high quality audio through my hearing aids! Magic! This is actually better than normal hearing because they can automatically turn off real-world sound while I'm listening to music - and turn down the music when they hear someone talking to me - and at $6,000 a pair, as you might expect, the audio quality is on a par with the best earbuds money can buy!
Now, Apple claim to have a "bluetooth-like" interface...um...so not *actual* standards-compliant bluetooth then? Great - thanks guys. Smart move. Replace a perfectly good, established standard with a piece of proprietary crap. Sure, that might persuade enough of your customers to dump their perfectly good earbuds/headphones to buy your contraptions instead - but there is no way for me to do that.
Oh - but wait! I have a fallback position! My hearing aids come with a small device that can be used as a remote control - it has a jack socket and a built-in bluetooth transmitter so all I have to do is...WTF!?!...no jack plug either? Oh for chrissakes.
The point here being that you can't just come along and define a new standard in order to force people to buy your stupid earbuds - because a good slice of the population can't use them. You can't even come up with iHearingAids because I can't afford to pay $6,000 for a new pair every time some company decides it would be fun to corner the earbud market by deliberately flouting standards...and even if they DID make iHearingAids - they probably wouldn't work with my non-Apple computer and my non-Apple TV.
Title IV of the Americans With Disabilities Act requires that all telecommunications companies in the U.S. take steps to ensure "functionally equivalent services" for consumers who are deaf or hard of hearing. I'm not sure this applies here - but it damned well should!
Even for people with good hearing - do you really want one set of earbuds for your phone - and different ones for your computer?
OK then - Android phones it is. Way to go Apple - you just wiped out your market with all of us hearing-aid wearers.
Step 1: Devise clever experiments to detect the presence of life. Step 2: Ship experiments to Mars at cost of $1bn (1970's dollars - that's between $5bn and $15bn 2016 dollars). Step 3: Experiment says "WOW! We have detected life on Mars!" Step 4: Decide that the experiment was not sufficiently good to produce a meaningful result. Step 5: Ignore (or at least, endlessly debate) the results.
Argh! They really *REALLY* should have thought through the experiment a bit more carefully before they did that!
The Pi is really nice for "soft" realtime projects - but running a full OS like Linux means that you can't ever get really solid realtime performance.
The hardware is now down cheap enough to replace Arduino's in the role of "bare to the metal" devices - and it sure would be nice not to have to have two families of boards in my hardware supplies box.
So how about a bare-to-the-metal OS - with nothing beyond the ability to download an executable and boot/run it and all of the hardware exposed...or perhaps some means to lock away one CPU core to run a hard-realtime task while Linux runs on the other(s)?
Oh - well if that's the case then it makes no sense. The RealSense camera dev kit interfaces via USB...why wouldn't you just use a RaspPi Zero for $9 rather than the $300+ Intel board? Plus, RealSense is only available for developers - they make you sign an agreement not to use it in any actual product!
At first sight, it looks like this is a horribly overpriced tiny-Linux gizmo - but what I think people here are missing is the important fact that it includes an integrated RealSense 3D camera...over 300 bucks for a $10 computer is a lot - but the RealSense 3D camera was selling for over $100 a few months ago - and that was a gigantic thing compared to this.
So, while I think they should be selling this for $50 to get more people interested in using it - I don't think it's surprising that they're asking so much as a "dev kit". The original RealSense dev kit (just the camera) was (IIRC) $200 - but included support from Intel engineers for serious developers.
Slashdot Mirror
DHCP killed that one.
If I could have my own permanent IP address, that would be a great idea.
I don't know how Heinlen gets so much credit for this book...it's was a rambling, shambolic pulp thing with sex and politics wedged into it at every opportunity in a vain attempt to perk it up a bit. It's not a book that has "stood the test of time" at all. If there's money for classic SciFi, we need someone to get off their butts and make "RingWorld". It's time.
Um "Wikileaks" - not "Wikipedia leaks". WIkileaks has *nothing* to do with Wikipedia other than that they both happen to use a "Wiki". It's rather important not to make that mistake!
Yeah - I remembered correctly for once:
http://www.slate.com/articles/...
Isn't Alfabank the one that was engaging in all of that highly suspicious/mystery network traffic from an "unused" Trump server a couple of weeks ago?
Seems like a bit of a coincidence.
Any juicy conspiracy theories here?
So if someone shows up, checks in, then doesn't actually vote...it throws you into chaos? I think that's something you might not want to advertise too widely!
The "dye a finger" thing has some concerns. In some elections, you really want a certain class of person to just not vote. The dyed finger is proof that you voted - and it's hard to wash off (intentionally, obviously). So the bad guy can threaten to beat the crap out of people who voted and still gain an edge. This isn't a theoretical problem.
Of course, you can achieve a similar effect by simply hanging out outside the voting location and noting which people went inside.
But the easier you make it, the more chance of abuse.
So to pull this off you need (a) a voting machine to play with to learn the techniques and (b) physical access to every voting machine you need to influence.
My approach is to make a completely fake voting machine, with the same interfaces as the real thing - and just swap the whole machine out when I have physical access to it.
This thought-experiment shows that with those two things (a machine to play with and physical access) there is no conceivable security measure that'll be 100% effective. So control access to the physical machines and your problem is solved.
So, this is easy. We just have to turn this over to the public sector. We pay Disney a small fee to put a picture of Mickey Mouse on every ballot paper. If people photograph it and post the pictures then Disney can sue the pants off them for copyright violation.
Problem solved - and as a plus we can subtly reinforce the idea that voting for Mickey Mouse as a write-in candidate might be a better idea than any of the other choices!
You have it backwards. You can't ban the posting of the photo without infringing the constitutional right to free speech. You CAN ban the talking of the photo in the first place by the simple expedient of banning the use of cameras in the polling station. We already ban photography in courts and on military bases and in some other government facilities. The polling station is no different in principle to those other places. It's ridiculously easy (and constitutional) to ban the use of cameras in polling stations - it would be wildly unconstitutional to ban the sharing of those photos.
Plus (in principle) your boss could station someone inside the polling booth and fire any employees who requested a replacement ballot after taking their obligatory corporate selfie.
The ability to request a replacement is no guarantee of secrecy at all.
The law should prevent TAKING the photograph - not SHARING a photograph that you already took. A law preventing people from sharing the photo would (arguably) be a violation of free speech...and would be blown away as unconstitutional. A law preventing people from taking photographs inside the polling station would be no different than the laws preventing you from taking photos during a trial or on a military base - no different than the copyright laws - no different than the child pornography laws. All of those limit your right to take a photograph - and the constitution says nothing about any special rights in that regard.
If someone were to take a photo of their ballot (illegally) and share it on Facebook - the crime would be of having taken the photo - not of sharing it. Sharing it would be evidence that you broke the law by taking the selfie in the first place...so making it illegal to take the photo would be a strong disincentive to share it if you did.
We don't have to make this any harder than it already is. "No Photography within the bounds of a polling station" is a perfectly good law with ZERO downsides.
You're getting confused over the "right to free speech" here. Nobody is trying to prevent people from displaying a legally taken photograph - posting it on facebook or whatever...banning *THAT* would be a violation of the freedom of speech. What they seek here is to make it illegal to take the photo in the first place. There is no constitutional right to take a photograph or to copy a document - and preventing people from doing that happens all the time (eg with copyright law, child pornography laws, state secrecy laws, DMCA, etc).
So - we can certainly make it illegal to take a photograph or otherwise scan your ballot paper or the screen of any voting machine - we can ban the taking of photographs inside the polling station - period. Nobody's constitutional rights are impinged in any way whatever by the passage of such a law.
Hence, there is no flip-flop here. This is NOT a constitutional matter. The secrecy of the ballot is a far, far bigger concern.
Yeah - mail-in ballots are a tremendous concern. This is concern is reflected in the crazy-quilt set of laws across the USA. Some US states allow postal voting to anyone who requests it without even asking for a reason. Oregon, Washington and Colorado *only* have postal voting (although you can drop your vote off at the post office on the day of the election...so it's not exactly "posted"). Some states only allow it for specific cases such as disability. Others say that those are the criteria but don't actually enforce them (for example, in Texas, there is no requirement to *prove* that you'd be unable to stand in line for an hour to vote - and no mechanism to check whether you lied or not). Some states also allow "drive-thru" voting, where you fill out the ballot paper in advance and just drop it off at the polling station on the day.
I agree - the concept of a secret ballot is critical to fair and independent elections.
The right to free speech gives you the right to say "I voted for candidate A" without impediment. Banning cameras inside the voting booth doesn't impede that right in any way. The "right to free speech" isn't "the right to take photographs" - although it arguably is "the right to display photographs that you've taken". We could however, make the voting form, or the display on the voting machine be a copyrighted work - making it illegal to photograph it. The "right to free speech" isn't the "right to disseminate copies of copyrighted works"...so this could be fixed quite easily by paying Disney to put a copy of Mickey Mouse next to each check box (and given the number of "Mickey Mouse" candidates, we get...that's not an entirely stupid idea!) :-)
If you can't prove the way you voted, then nobody can bribe you to vote against your preference or threaten you if you don't do what they want. Sure, they can give you money to vote a particular way - but if there is no way to prove that you did. With a true secret ballot you can always vote your true preference and then tell people whatever they want to hear afterwards.
It is *much* easier to prevent someone from using a camera in the controlled space of a voting booth than it is to try to catch people who are bribing, or otherwise coercing voters.
Voting by mail is a similarly risky proposition, and when that's widely available, you again risk coercion. For the relatively small numbers of people who literally cannot vote in person, we should consider having mobile "polling booths" that can be taken to the person's home such that they can still vote in secrecy.
Early voting is also problematic for me. While it's very convenient and helps to reduce the long lines on the day - there is the risk that people will make up their minds before they have all of the facts at their fingertips.
The problem we have in our modern world is that people believe what they want to believe. For the first time in history, nearly every person has the whole of human knowledge at their fingertips - you can find the answer to any question with 30 seconds of googling/wikipedia-ing.
This video tells "believers" what they already know - and will be completely ignored by those who don't.
"An Inconvenient Truth" set the stage - it may have swayed a few minds - but essentially, everyone who already knew and understood had their deepest fears confirmed - and the people who didn't want to believe simply dismissed it out of hand...possibly never even watched it.
This is everywhere these days. Donald Trump can say any lies he wants - people who support him will believe absolutely anything he says, no matter the evidence to the contrary. The people who were convinced to vote for "Brexit" in the UK were similarly immune to fact when the facts didn't fit their world view.
So what we need as a civilization is NOT more videos like this. What we need is to somehow awaken people's minds to the idea of seeking TRUTH. To think for themselves. To look up the fact - and if they doubt the fact, to follow the little blue numbers on the Wikipedia pages. To think for themselves. To believe what is actually true, and not what they want to be true.
For me - global climate change is very real. What's wrong is that we're trying to fix it by switching to LED lamps, recycling coke cans and driving hybrid SUV's. We need to look for changes that'll work...stop farming cows, for example. We can all, quite easily, give up beef and cow-milk. That alone would have more impact than replacing every incandescent bulb, replacing every car with a Nissan Leaf, and recycling every scrap of recyclable material to perfection. The second thing we need to do is to cut our population to maybe a quarter of what it currently is. This is REALLY hard to do. But that's the thing that'll ultimately do.
So even the promoters of fixing things need to step back from their current recommendations and check the facts. It's actually not that hard to figure out what's required.
Where I live - a semi-rural area outside of Austin TX (sadly *just* outside of Google Fiber's coverage area), there are only four ways to get Internet:
1) AT&T (their service is basically cellular-to-the-home - they don't own wires).
2) Time Warner Cable (they have cable TV wires to my home)
3) Dish Network (they have satellite for downloads and use AT&T cellular for uploads).
4) Carrier pigeons.
Since Dish is AT&T - if TWC gets merged into AT&T - then there is literally no other way to get online than to buy from them...or else, maybe, the pigeon thing.
That's intolerable.
The problem is that when AT&T own the area, it would cost an absolute fortune for someone like Google Fiber to come along and dig up all the streets to get some competition going. It's really not going to happen.
In my opinion, what's required is what it done with electricity supply in my area. We can buy electricity from half a dozen suppliers. Some are "green", some have better customer service, some are much cheaper. They all use the same copper wires that lead to my house though - so what's happening is that one company owns the wires and the others handle supply and customer support, etc. We never have to deal with the company that owns the wires. If there is a problem, we go to our "supplier" and they are responsible for fixing it. They take a portion of our electricity bill and pay the guys who own the wires for the capacity their customers consume.
That's what the Internet (and CableTV - which is really "the internet" these days) should be.
There should be companies who own the wires and the routers and such - and companies who handle pricing, bandwidth allocation, customer support and billing. Those guys can compete for my business.
Roadside sensors are a natural for a mesh network. Each sensor can use something akin to WiFi to talk to the next one in each direction along the road. Data can pass from each sensor to it's neighbor in two directions, providing a measure of fault tolerance and detection.
However, cars are gradually becoming connected - it might be easier for them just to talk to each other and back to the net using the sensors and radio gear that they already have. That way you don't have to monitor sections of road where nobody's driving.
The thing is that incident sunlight is ALREADY melting the snow - don't need no fancy solar panels for that. The only thing these gizmo's could do would be to "time-shift" the sunlight from the period before it started snowing...so the concern isn't so much the power they generate as the power they can store. Once the panel has snow on it, it's not getting much sunlight anyway.
This whole concept is broken in so many ways - it's laughable.
Except: View everything on-demand. Have as many TV's as you like, no need for DVR's for time-shifting. No adverts.
In a home with 4 TV's we'd have needed to rent 4 cable boxes - we saved $120/month on cable fees (still paid for Internet)...added $10 for Netflix, $4 for Acorn, $10 for Amazon Prime. We probably spend another $20 on Amazon for movies and non-free TV shows. We have an antenna on each TV for local news and stuff like that.
We're saving a little money - but that's not the point. Watch what we want, when we want, no adverts. That's a game changer.
Better still, the quality of shows that you pay for directly is WAY higher than those that are paid for by some collection of advertisers. Netflix make shows that their customers want to watch - not shows that advertisers will pay to stuff adverts into. Binge watching is a great way to see long-running shows. Weird niche stuff is always available as well as the obvious content.
We cut the cord about 4 years ago - we tried going back to cable briefly - but cut the cord again after just a few months. Every year, the online streaming stuff gets better and better.
So, thanks to an over-enthusiastic use of headphones in my youth, I now have to boost high frequencies with a pair of hearing aids if I want a hope of understanding conversation and enjoying music. These are not your grandmother's contraptions. They are all-but invisible, they communicate with each other using ultrasound pulses sent through my skull to help to spatialize sound more effectively and to dynamically adjust to ambient sound levels and such. They are pretty nifty devices - and produce really good audio quality, even for my sub-par ears. A pair of good ones will cost you (or, ideally, your HMO) around $6,000 - but even with decent health insurance, it still cost me $1,300 to get a pair fully tweaked to my specific needs.
Now, when I want to listen to music...well, I can't wear earbuds because my ears are already full of hearing aids and over-ear headphones tend to cause audio feedback in my hearing aids...so that's out. But no problem, the hearing aid designers thought of that - and my hearing aids have bluetooth! So I can pair them with my phone/laptop/TV and listen to high quality audio through my hearing aids! Magic! This is actually better than normal hearing because they can automatically turn off real-world sound while I'm listening to music - and turn down the music when they hear someone talking to me - and at $6,000 a pair, as you might expect, the audio quality is on a par with the best earbuds money can buy!
Now, Apple claim to have a "bluetooth-like" interface...um...so not *actual* standards-compliant bluetooth then? Great - thanks guys. Smart move. Replace a perfectly good, established standard with a piece of proprietary crap. Sure, that might persuade enough of your customers to dump their perfectly good earbuds/headphones to buy your contraptions instead - but there is no way for me to do that.
Oh - but wait! I have a fallback position! My hearing aids come with a small device that can be used as a remote control - it has a jack socket and a built-in bluetooth transmitter so all I have to do is...WTF!?!...no jack plug either? Oh for chrissakes.
The point here being that you can't just come along and define a new standard in order to force people to buy your stupid earbuds - because a good slice of the population can't use them. You can't even come up with iHearingAids because I can't afford to pay $6,000 for a new pair every time some company decides it would be fun to corner the earbud market by deliberately flouting standards...and even if they DID make iHearingAids - they probably wouldn't work with my non-Apple computer and my non-Apple TV.
Title IV of the Americans With Disabilities Act requires that all telecommunications companies in the U.S. take steps to ensure "functionally equivalent services" for consumers who are deaf or hard of hearing. I'm not sure this applies here - but it damned well should!
Even for people with good hearing - do you really want one set of earbuds for your phone - and different ones for your computer?
OK then - Android phones it is. Way to go Apple - you just wiped out your market with all of us hearing-aid wearers.
The Viking missions were really annoying:
Step 1: Devise clever experiments to detect the presence of life.
Step 2: Ship experiments to Mars at cost of $1bn (1970's dollars - that's between $5bn and $15bn 2016 dollars).
Step 3: Experiment says "WOW! We have detected life on Mars!"
Step 4: Decide that the experiment was not sufficiently good to produce a meaningful result.
Step 5: Ignore (or at least, endlessly debate) the results.
Argh! They really *REALLY* should have thought through the experiment a bit more carefully before they did that!
The Pi is really nice for "soft" realtime projects - but running a full OS like Linux means that you can't ever get really solid realtime performance.
The hardware is now down cheap enough to replace Arduino's in the role of "bare to the metal" devices - and it sure would be nice not to have to have two families of boards in my hardware supplies box.
So how about a bare-to-the-metal OS - with nothing beyond the ability to download an executable and boot/run it and all of the hardware exposed...or perhaps some means to lock away one CPU core to run a hard-realtime task while Linux runs on the other(s)?
Oh - well if that's the case then it makes no sense. The RealSense camera dev kit interfaces via USB...why wouldn't you just use a RaspPi Zero for $9 rather than the $300+ Intel board? Plus, RealSense is only available for developers - they make you sign an agreement not to use it in any actual product!
At first sight, it looks like this is a horribly overpriced tiny-Linux gizmo - but what I think people here are missing is the important fact that it includes an integrated RealSense 3D camera...over 300 bucks for a $10 computer is a lot - but the RealSense 3D camera was selling for over $100 a few months ago - and that was a gigantic thing compared to this.
So, while I think they should be selling this for $50 to get more people interested in using it - I don't think it's surprising that they're asking so much as a "dev kit". The original RealSense dev kit (just the camera) was (IIRC) $200 - but included support from Intel engineers for serious developers.