That works fine if you're a 9 to 5 guy. I work weird hours, and certainly don't come home the same time every day. My GF's schedule is even more irregular. So I switched from a thermostat-with-timer to a system that adapts to us and can be controlled remotely. The result is increased comfort and a lower heating bill.
Look into a Z-Wave based home automation hub like MiCasaverde's Vera. Then get some Z-wave enabled thermostats (or even WiFi ones, for example there's a vera plugin for Heatmiser ones), and Z-Wave TRVs (StellaZ / Danfoss, though the latter ones are somewhat problematic). I have TRVs in several rooms slaved to the thermostats, each of which can drive the boiler (the old fashioned on/off boiler type). Wiring thermostats in parallel can mess up the benefits of their PID-type controller, but in practice they rarely seem to fight each other. You need to write some code or set up a few "scenes" in the hub to tie everything together, but it does work. And it's a hell of a lot cheaper than true multizone central heating.
I have a few thermostats and remote controlled radiator valves around the house plugged into a home automation hub. Took a little while to set up, but now the various rooms around the house only get heated when necessary (instead of heating it based on a timer which rarely matches my schedule), which saves money. When I leave work, I hit the Heating button on the remote control app so the house is warm when I arrive, which adds comfort (next step: use a geofence). I can turn up the heat from the couch, or turn on the AC in the bedroom a bit before we go to bed, which means convenience. So yes, there's lots of reasons to get "smart", connected thermostats. I got to the point where I don't have to think about the heating at all, while my gas bill is noticeably lower.
Any Home Automation product that sends data back to the Mothership will get a big fat "no" from me, but there are plenty of commercial solutions out there that do not phone home. If you're paranoid, run a packet sniffer on your LAN to see what's going on, then kill the device's outbound traffic at the router.
Actually, there are some products that use a gateway service to allow you to connect while away from home, and I am willing to trust these. But I'm not going to hook up a device to my LAN if it comes for a company that is built on data mining.
That would work on a national level, but it would kill the lucrative overseas market for series. Stations here in Europe tend to wait a little and see how a series does in the USA (or wherever it airs first), then pick it up if successful. And they pay a deal less for content that has already been distributed by some other means (streaming / DVD).
Of course, revenue from streaming to overseas customers might make up for lost sales to TV stations there. Plenty of viewers here seem willing to pay to watch episodes when they want, especially if they can do so at the same time or soon after it has aired in the USA.
The situation's worse when watching American shows outside of the USA.
That, and the increasingly pervasive advertisement in the form of pop-overs, commercial breaks that seem to appear more often and last longer, made me turn away from TV and to streaming / downloading. I dunno, with increased competition from other advertising channels, did the stations decide to drop their price and make it up on increased volume? TV stations pretty much crapped the bed they sleep in, I do have subscriptions to HBO and Netflix, but most of the stuff I watch comes from TPB or via Sick Beard.
If you want to avoid a gravity tax when building stuff in space, it makes much more sense to mine the stuff you'll need the most of, weight wise. Stuff like metals. The small amounts of rare earth materials could just be sent up by rocket along with parts manufactured earth-side.
Judging from cop shows (an iffy source at best) I'd say the UK police are pretty good at interacting with the public. They are polite and don't seem to demand respect, though they do expect courtesy. If you give them any lip they'll lay into you a little harder (verbally), and they'll threaten arrest only when you become really abusive. Watch a Dutch cop show sometime, for a laugh. Now there are cops who don't expect respect; our cops are trained to "de-escalate" at all cost. Some kid drives through a couple of red lights at twice the speed limit, and runs his mouth when stopped by the cops, going on and on while they do exactly nothing. In this situation it may even have been the right choice, though it does shine some light on the question of why our cops get no respect whatsoever.
I was involved in a minor prang some years ago, and called in the cops because the other party was verbally abusive and threatening violence (not uncommon: these people learn from early on that a big mouth will get you anything). The cops show up and the guy starts laying into them... no reaction from the cops. Only when at some point I had enough and told the big guy "fuck you", did the cops turn to me and said "now, now, sir, none of that". Because I was de-de-escalating the situation, see?
This happens all the time here. Some kids attack two passengers at a tram stop, cops show up, kids remain abusive, and the passengers are the ones asked to jog on. To "keep the peace". Arresting the youngsters would only aggravate them further.
Personally I think cops do need to be firm at times. The problem is that when they get told that, they'll religiously apply it and do you for the smallest crosswise remark.
I for one hope that robotics will provide Google with a revenue stream other than ads and customer data. That way they might at some point create consumer robots which are designed with our benefit in mind, rather than that of advertisers. Then again, they might be tempted to leverage robotics for even more enhanced, soul-sucking data mining.
Would you trust a Google household robot to not scan your house and every single product in it, and relaying the data back to its corporate overlord?
One thing auto makers can do is bring back old-school dashboards with tactile buttons laid out in a distinct, logical way. My last two cars (a Peugeot and a Toyota) had this. Once you knew the layout of the dashboard, you could operate anything by feeling your way around, without ever taking your eyes off the road. My current car (a Volvo) has tactile buttons, but they are laid out in a grid, so it's harder to figure out what function it's for. The rental car I had the other day had a touch screen with the crappiest menu structure ever, operating anything on that required close attention and taking your eyes off the road. Not good.
If you knew anything about guns, you'd know it only takes a few basic tools and materials to make a functional gun that goes bang without killing its user. You don't need a 3D printer.
The scary/interesting part about 3d printed guns is that you don't have to know anything about guns or metalworking to produce one. Download a good design, print, assemble, charge, and fire.
Of course there's still a few issues, such as: accurate printing in metal still isn't widely available for consumers, operating a 3d printer requires some skill, parts still need finishing, need for ammo, printed guns are prone to failing and/or blowing up when fired, etc. But all of these are problems that can (and probably will) be solved.
I agree that a lot of work remains to be done, much of it legal or regulatory: on what basis will a license to operate be granted, will fixed flight paths or exclusion zones have to be established, what are the safety criteria, etc. But none of this is a showstopper to start a service like this in the near future, which was my point.
The technical part is less scary, there are already drones with some redundancy which are able to fly with 1 or 2 motors out. Some are capable of some extreme autonomous acrobatics; these are certainly able to handle an unexpected gust of wind. Some sites will be harder to land on than others; I imagine you sign up for this premium service, then Amazon checks your house on Google maps (or they simply send a drone to survey your yard) and they let you know if you're eligible. You could even pick the landing site, in a closed off back yard for example (but not in the pool please!).
So what exactly are these reality that would make this a "pipe dream" for the foreseeable future? There certainly are practical issues to be overcome, but the numbers and mechanics themselves tell me that we are already very close to building drones that are relatively cheap to operate, and are capable of autonomously delivering a package safely from A to B (for certain values of A and B).
Not completely true. They didn't try and fail; most alternatives were tried and then abandoned for various reasons. Thorium for example offers a promising, safe alternative. Sure, the science behind it is pretty well understood since the 70s, but there are huge steps to be taken to go from a theoretical fuel cycle to a functioning, commercially viable LFTR. We're only now getting started on that problem, and it's an engineering rather than a scientific problem. Not to mention you first have to overcome the political issues: the public sentiment at the moment is very much anti-nuke, in the short to medium term Thorium reactors offer little to no economic benefit, and there's political resistance as well: in the EU, a proposal to start research into Thorium reactors was shot down by a group led by France (who have invested heavily in conventional nuke plants). Investing in Thorium (or next-gen nuke plants in general) only makes sense if you take the long term view, that's why it hasn't happened yet. Hopefully China and India will make some headway there.
Depends on the reactor and fuel cycle. An LFTR will produce significantly less radioactive waste, but it'll be a good while before we'll have this tech ready for commercial application.
See this report: "NNL’s view is therefore that thorium fuel cycles are likely to offer modest reductions in radiotoxicity. It is considered that the realistic benefits are likely to be too marginal to justify investment in the thorium fuel cycle. However, the substantial reduction in radiotoxicity promised by a full thorium recycle does provide a significant incentive in the long term."
That is pretty much how the EU works. Of course the bothersome part of passing a treaty has already happened; one merely has to get the eminently undemocratic EU bureaucracy to pass a bill. Here in NL several parties have pushed to get something that doesn't sit well with their own constituents passed in the EU. All so they can still claim to be against X, but "the EU is forcing us". Bonus points for those parties claiming to be critical of the EU, of course.
By the way, I am glad Lofgren is still on top of this issue, across the pond..
Illegal in the country where the site is hosted. If you host software in Germany that is illegal in China, nothing happens unless the illegality is covered in some treaty between the two countries. (What do you think the hubbub over ACTA was all about?)
So this will be an improvement: we'll have robots to cart the dead people off the streets, so we won't have to step over them.
The first mistake is assuming that we have "a system", something designed from the ground up or at least tweaked by people with a complete and accurate picture of the situation. Not even communist China or the USSR had that. Secondly, many of our attempts to fix "the system" have failed spectacularly, and not because of ill will or sabotage from those with vested interests.
How much? If 1% of those listeners decides to buy an album or single after hearing it, they'll make a fair bit even under extortionist record label contracts. Radio is a great way to advertise, and unlike Spotify (where I can sample and discover music on my own) they are also market makers: they have a sizeable influence in making songs popular. So it's not all that straightforward to compare radio and Spotify.
In the simplest form: set up a website, stick their music on it, and put out the word. Of course this probably means they'll have to pay parasi^H^H^H^H^H^H professionals to set up and manage the website, market the music, arrange plays on radio stations, do bookkeeping etc. Or try an Indie label. They'll take their cut, but at least you'll not be feeding a large bureaucracy, record label execs, or subsidizing less successful bands, and you'll be able to retain IP rights to your music. You'll most likely keep more of the gross revenue per album sold, but whether you'll sell as many albums as through an established publisher remains to be seen.
My sample might not be representative, but I find that young people (preteens) reared on tablets have similar issues in navigating Windows 8 that older people have: hidden active corners, gestures that make sense on a small touch screen but are awkward to make with a mouse, not enough options to organize a mess of icons on the Metro desktop, etc. When shown the classic desktop and start menu, they seem to prefer that (though they will often add shortcuts to their favorite apps to the desktop as well). The classic desktop deals well with multiple windows and multitasking, something that Metro deals with poorly, and young people have no issues understanding such a windowed environment after the "full screen" environment that tablets offer.
Even for gamers like myself, the cycle is becoming longer. In the past I got a new PC every few years, but these days it's perfectly fine to just upgrade the GPU every so often and alternate with a motherboard / CPU upgrade. My current rig is 3 years old now but still runs modern games just fine, albeit not in the highest graphics settings. But that's where you enter into the land of diminishing returns.
New tech like VR headsets which demand high performance computing might bring about a (brief) resurgence in gaming rig sales.
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That works fine if you're a 9 to 5 guy. I work weird hours, and certainly don't come home the same time every day. My GF's schedule is even more irregular. So I switched from a thermostat-with-timer to a system that adapts to us and can be controlled remotely. The result is increased comfort and a lower heating bill.
Look into a Z-Wave based home automation hub like MiCasaverde's Vera. Then get some Z-wave enabled thermostats (or even WiFi ones, for example there's a vera plugin for Heatmiser ones), and Z-Wave TRVs (StellaZ / Danfoss, though the latter ones are somewhat problematic). I have TRVs in several rooms slaved to the thermostats, each of which can drive the boiler (the old fashioned on/off boiler type). Wiring thermostats in parallel can mess up the benefits of their PID-type controller, but in practice they rarely seem to fight each other. You need to write some code or set up a few "scenes" in the hub to tie everything together, but it does work. And it's a hell of a lot cheaper than true multizone central heating.
I have a few thermostats and remote controlled radiator valves around the house plugged into a home automation hub. Took a little while to set up, but now the various rooms around the house only get heated when necessary (instead of heating it based on a timer which rarely matches my schedule), which saves money. When I leave work, I hit the Heating button on the remote control app so the house is warm when I arrive, which adds comfort (next step: use a geofence). I can turn up the heat from the couch, or turn on the AC in the bedroom a bit before we go to bed, which means convenience. So yes, there's lots of reasons to get "smart", connected thermostats. I got to the point where I don't have to think about the heating at all, while my gas bill is noticeably lower.
Any Home Automation product that sends data back to the Mothership will get a big fat "no" from me, but there are plenty of commercial solutions out there that do not phone home. If you're paranoid, run a packet sniffer on your LAN to see what's going on, then kill the device's outbound traffic at the router.
Actually, there are some products that use a gateway service to allow you to connect while away from home, and I am willing to trust these. But I'm not going to hook up a device to my LAN if it comes for a company that is built on data mining.
That would work on a national level, but it would kill the lucrative overseas market for series. Stations here in Europe tend to wait a little and see how a series does in the USA (or wherever it airs first), then pick it up if successful. And they pay a deal less for content that has already been distributed by some other means (streaming / DVD).
Of course, revenue from streaming to overseas customers might make up for lost sales to TV stations there. Plenty of viewers here seem willing to pay to watch episodes when they want, especially if they can do so at the same time or soon after it has aired in the USA.
The situation's worse when watching American shows outside of the USA.
That, and the increasingly pervasive advertisement in the form of pop-overs, commercial breaks that seem to appear more often and last longer, made me turn away from TV and to streaming / downloading. I dunno, with increased competition from other advertising channels, did the stations decide to drop their price and make it up on increased volume? TV stations pretty much crapped the bed they sleep in, I do have subscriptions to HBO and Netflix, but most of the stuff I watch comes from TPB or via Sick Beard.
If you want to avoid a gravity tax when building stuff in space, it makes much more sense to mine the stuff you'll need the most of, weight wise. Stuff like metals. The small amounts of rare earth materials could just be sent up by rocket along with parts manufactured earth-side.
Doing this manually is prone to errors as well. Quite a bit, actually.
The one thing that I have found IT depts. around the world to be consistently good at, is saying "no", "we can't", or "you shouldn't".
Judging from cop shows (an iffy source at best) I'd say the UK police are pretty good at interacting with the public. They are polite and don't seem to demand respect, though they do expect courtesy. If you give them any lip they'll lay into you a little harder (verbally), and they'll threaten arrest only when you become really abusive. Watch a Dutch cop show sometime, for a laugh. Now there are cops who don't expect respect; our cops are trained to "de-escalate" at all cost. Some kid drives through a couple of red lights at twice the speed limit, and runs his mouth when stopped by the cops, going on and on while they do exactly nothing. In this situation it may even have been the right choice, though it does shine some light on the question of why our cops get no respect whatsoever.
I was involved in a minor prang some years ago, and called in the cops because the other party was verbally abusive and threatening violence (not uncommon: these people learn from early on that a big mouth will get you anything). The cops show up and the guy starts laying into them... no reaction from the cops. Only when at some point I had enough and told the big guy "fuck you", did the cops turn to me and said "now, now, sir, none of that". Because I was de-de-escalating the situation, see?
This happens all the time here. Some kids attack two passengers at a tram stop, cops show up, kids remain abusive, and the passengers are the ones asked to jog on. To "keep the peace". Arresting the youngsters would only aggravate them further.
Personally I think cops do need to be firm at times. The problem is that when they get told that, they'll religiously apply it and do you for the smallest crosswise remark.
I for one hope that robotics will provide Google with a revenue stream other than ads and customer data. That way they might at some point create consumer robots which are designed with our benefit in mind, rather than that of advertisers. Then again, they might be tempted to leverage robotics for even more enhanced, soul-sucking data mining.
Would you trust a Google household robot to not scan your house and every single product in it, and relaying the data back to its corporate overlord?
One thing auto makers can do is bring back old-school dashboards with tactile buttons laid out in a distinct, logical way. My last two cars (a Peugeot and a Toyota) had this. Once you knew the layout of the dashboard, you could operate anything by feeling your way around, without ever taking your eyes off the road. My current car (a Volvo) has tactile buttons, but they are laid out in a grid, so it's harder to figure out what function it's for. The rental car I had the other day had a touch screen with the crappiest menu structure ever, operating anything on that required close attention and taking your eyes off the road. Not good.
If you knew anything about guns, you'd know it only takes a few basic tools and materials to make a functional gun that goes bang without killing its user. You don't need a 3D printer.
The scary/interesting part about 3d printed guns is that you don't have to know anything about guns or metalworking to produce one. Download a good design, print, assemble, charge, and fire.
Of course there's still a few issues, such as: accurate printing in metal still isn't widely available for consumers, operating a 3d printer requires some skill, parts still need finishing, need for ammo, printed guns are prone to failing and/or blowing up when fired, etc. But all of these are problems that can (and probably will) be solved.
They had better PHBs back then. No, seriously.
I agree that a lot of work remains to be done, much of it legal or regulatory: on what basis will a license to operate be granted, will fixed flight paths or exclusion zones have to be established, what are the safety criteria, etc. But none of this is a showstopper to start a service like this in the near future, which was my point.
The technical part is less scary, there are already drones with some redundancy which are able to fly with 1 or 2 motors out. Some are capable of some extreme autonomous acrobatics; these are certainly able to handle an unexpected gust of wind. Some sites will be harder to land on than others; I imagine you sign up for this premium service, then Amazon checks your house on Google maps (or they simply send a drone to survey your yard) and they let you know if you're eligible. You could even pick the landing site, in a closed off back yard for example (but not in the pool please!).
So what exactly are these reality that would make this a "pipe dream" for the foreseeable future? There certainly are practical issues to be overcome, but the numbers and mechanics themselves tell me that we are already very close to building drones that are relatively cheap to operate, and are capable of autonomously delivering a package safely from A to B (for certain values of A and B).
Not completely true. They didn't try and fail; most alternatives were tried and then abandoned for various reasons. Thorium for example offers a promising, safe alternative. Sure, the science behind it is pretty well understood since the 70s, but there are huge steps to be taken to go from a theoretical fuel cycle to a functioning, commercially viable LFTR. We're only now getting started on that problem, and it's an engineering rather than a scientific problem. Not to mention you first have to overcome the political issues: the public sentiment at the moment is very much anti-nuke, in the short to medium term Thorium reactors offer little to no economic benefit, and there's political resistance as well: in the EU, a proposal to start research into Thorium reactors was shot down by a group led by France (who have invested heavily in conventional nuke plants). Investing in Thorium (or next-gen nuke plants in general) only makes sense if you take the long term view, that's why it hasn't happened yet. Hopefully China and India will make some headway there.
Depends on the reactor and fuel cycle. An LFTR will produce significantly less radioactive waste, but it'll be a good while before we'll have this tech ready for commercial application.
See this report: "NNL’s view is therefore that thorium fuel cycles are likely to offer modest reductions in radiotoxicity. It is considered that the realistic benefits are likely to be too marginal to justify investment in the thorium fuel cycle. However, the substantial reduction in radiotoxicity promised by a full thorium recycle does provide a significant incentive in the long term."
That is pretty much how the EU works. Of course the bothersome part of passing a treaty has already happened; one merely has to get the eminently undemocratic EU bureaucracy to pass a bill. Here in NL several parties have pushed to get something that doesn't sit well with their own constituents passed in the EU. All so they can still claim to be against X, but "the EU is forcing us". Bonus points for those parties claiming to be critical of the EU, of course.
By the way, I am glad Lofgren is still on top of this issue, across the pond..
Illegal in the country where the site is hosted. If you host software in Germany that is illegal in China, nothing happens unless the illegality is covered in some treaty between the two countries. (What do you think the hubbub over ACTA was all about?)
Well, the passenger of the autonomous car will have both hands free to hold and point that 12-gauge at your tires. Have fun!
So this will be an improvement: we'll have robots to cart the dead people off the streets, so we won't have to step over them.
The first mistake is assuming that we have "a system", something designed from the ground up or at least tweaked by people with a complete and accurate picture of the situation. Not even communist China or the USSR had that. Secondly, many of our attempts to fix "the system" have failed spectacularly, and not because of ill will or sabotage from those with vested interests.
How much? If 1% of those listeners decides to buy an album or single after hearing it, they'll make a fair bit even under extortionist record label contracts. Radio is a great way to advertise, and unlike Spotify (where I can sample and discover music on my own) they are also market makers: they have a sizeable influence in making songs popular. So it's not all that straightforward to compare radio and Spotify.
In the simplest form: set up a website, stick their music on it, and put out the word. Of course this probably means they'll have to pay parasi^H^H^H^H^H^H professionals to set up and manage the website, market the music, arrange plays on radio stations, do bookkeeping etc. Or try an Indie label. They'll take their cut, but at least you'll not be feeding a large bureaucracy, record label execs, or subsidizing less successful bands, and you'll be able to retain IP rights to your music. You'll most likely keep more of the gross revenue per album sold, but whether you'll sell as many albums as through an established publisher remains to be seen.
My sample might not be representative, but I find that young people (preteens) reared on tablets have similar issues in navigating Windows 8 that older people have: hidden active corners, gestures that make sense on a small touch screen but are awkward to make with a mouse, not enough options to organize a mess of icons on the Metro desktop, etc. When shown the classic desktop and start menu, they seem to prefer that (though they will often add shortcuts to their favorite apps to the desktop as well). The classic desktop deals well with multiple windows and multitasking, something that Metro deals with poorly, and young people have no issues understanding such a windowed environment after the "full screen" environment that tablets offer.
Even for gamers like myself, the cycle is becoming longer. In the past I got a new PC every few years, but these days it's perfectly fine to just upgrade the GPU every so often and alternate with a motherboard / CPU upgrade. My current rig is 3 years old now but still runs modern games just fine, albeit not in the highest graphics settings. But that's where you enter into the land of diminishing returns.
New tech like VR headsets which demand high performance computing might bring about a (brief) resurgence in gaming rig sales.