(1) Begging the question is entirely different than stating an opinion. An opinion is never a logical fallacy, by definition. (2) Cooperation is not sharing. Again, by definition. (3) Cooperation is not optimization. Optimization may include cooperation, but does not require it. Sometimes cooperation is less efficient. Optimization can be achieved through automation reducing the resources and people required thereby eliminating cooperation entirely. (4) Two problems with the Amish as an example of a sharing economy. First, it is bad logic to take a tiny community (The Amish are 0.02783% of the global population) and apply it to the whole of humanity. There is certainly evidence that some systems of governance and economics will not work based upon geography. Humans have encountered many different geographical problems on this planet and have made many different systems to facilitate living in those regions. One size will not fit all. Second, the Amish help each other, but they can exclude those who do not follow their strict rules with out resorting to murder, and they are fairly capitalistic in their economic activities. You are mistaking a religious sect that limits access to technology for sharing. The Amish communities work because they account honestly for human nature and only include those willing to live by their rules. Not a good example and NOT what the Sharing Economy is as described by the article. A microcosm is not an economy - an example of sharing system that works would be the ancient monasteries of medieval Europe. However, that is a monastery not an economy. The whole of the European economy did not function that way. Small groups may share in a commune system, but this is the exception and not the rule. (5) > Just because most men are to stupid to value the spiritual truth of "You receive what you give", and "Treat others how you want to be treated" in spite of man's obsessive path of destruction, this in no way negates man's potential to live a harmonious and in unity with all things. Both of these quotes are not basic human nature. They are ideals that humans strive to achieve. The facts, the demonstrable facts, are different: You do not receive what you give - you receive based upon your ability to convince others - what you labor is worth, what your service is worth, etc. You may treat others how you want to be treated but they are under no obligation to do the same to you and very often don't care enough to notice. Ideals are wonderful, but they are not something upon which a real working economy is based. Whining about that cruel fact has been the foiled battle cry of every Utopian with an IDEA that the whole world would be BETTER if everyone just GOT ALONG! But humans are humans and aren't changing very fast -- certainly not as fast as our technology. Complaining about the selfishness of humans is not, has not, will not change human nature. Again, in order to build a stable economic system that works for everyone, human nature in all of its variety must be honestly accounted. Crying about how the majority of the human race doesn't live up to the ideal values promoted by any decent philosophy is wasting time and effort. None of us can change the human race. Let me state that again: NONE of US can change the HUMAN race. We have neither the tools to do so nor the ethical trust required to make such modifications to our progeny. (6) I have no illusions that the human race as it is now will ever see an end to war and commerce - both are fundamental to who we are as a species. WE have been trading and fighting since before we had fire. War and commerce have driven every endeavor, every advancement, and continue to do so. Like gravity, this is a truth that simply is and it cares not for our opinions of its fairness, rightness, or purity. Where humans blunder most often is when we mistake our fictional ideas of who we are for our actual selves.
Forget for a moment that the sharing economy is based upon some very wrong assumptions about human nature - things that any parent can tell you are not a normal part of human nature, and focus upon the inspiration for this new economic model - Feudal Europe, the village commons, the Great Depression. Nothing in the article is hopeful or progressive - it's all been done before by desperate people trying very hard not to starve to death. How many jobs did people have during the Great Depression? Lots. They just lumped them all together and said "We did what we had to do to survive." This is just another rich asshole's version of "you are poor because you are lazy - now get another low paying job." This goes completely away if wages are required to be livable.
The concept of the Sharing economy is stupid at its core. This "panacea" is ignoring the basic human territoriality regarding property. Children have to be FORCED to share. They will throw a temper tantrum when required to share. Adults are little different. Smoother, less prone to emotional outbursts and more prone to murder than toddlers. The idea of a "sharing" economy is as dumb as any other Utopian vision that makes assumptions contrary to human nature. Every sharing economy is based upon an outside requirement - men with weapons making unarmed peasants work the land in the Feudal "Sharing Economy." Starvation in the Great Depression. Otherwise, people revert to their nature of territoriality over property.
Micro doses of potent drugs explains the whole concept of windows 8 and a lot of the invisible features of iphone operating systems. Yep - I've been wondering if they were on drugs as the current designs kinda look like it.
It will be like LASIK or really good dental work - not deemed medically necessary and thus available only to those with the money to buy it. A few countries, with small, aging populations might toy with providing it to their citizens, but the majority won't have it available to them. Having lots of youthful adults would diminish the profits of the medical/insurance complex. It will be hard on some types of plastic surgery, but overall, you won't ever see it except on movie stars and billionaires.
So the FBI is going after a guy for doing bad things to planes because the flight control system is on the same wireless net work as the email and pay per view movies. WHY THE F**K ARE THESE UNSECURED REMOTE CONTROLLABLE TERRORIST BOMBS ALLOWED TO FLY? They should be grounded immediately and not allowed to enter US airspace until they can be proven to have secured their flight controls from anyone outside of the cock pit. Perhaps we should loudly petition the FAA to ground these dangerously unsecured hostage filled terrorist missiles before the stereotypical ISIS computer genius bad guy figures out how to use social media to hack into the inner workings of these potentially lethal death drones and crash them into a high profile targets while posting the play by play to twitter and Facebook.
Of course what will really happen here is that one security expert will be "prosecuted" until he "suicides," while a "Protect Americans While Flying Freedom Act" rushes through congress requiring the TSA to arrest anyone caught with an "Airplane Electronic Control Device" and that those villains shall to be sentenced to 500 years in a super max isolation cell, ban all electronic devices from airports and aircraft unless stored without the battery in the stowed luggage where the ever vigilant TSA security mavens can recoup any additional expenses by "securing" those "potentially lethal" iPhones sorry -"Airplane Electronic Control Devices" in the "to be sold on eBay box", but if you agree to a brief background check and a generous donation to the TSA's Frequently Searched Club, you can by pass the whole process and you get a spiffy medallion to wear on your I "Heart" TSA sweat shirt (comes in five colors and in Men's M, L XL, XXL, XXXL, XXXXL, and women's XXS).
The Bush II administration took advantage of a crisis, inflated it's danger, and got a panicked congress to vote for the patriot act. All of the renewals are on the congress critters so look up what your representative has done. A lot of Dems have voted to keep that act.
Let us point out that one of the more difficult of the sciences, chemistry, does not have a diversity problem. There are as many women as men in chemistry at all levels of education and employment. So for the rest of the technology and science groups, what is YOUR problem with gender? It's not that girls can't do math, or science, or get steered in kindergarten, it is something else. Figure that out and solve the problem.
But how well would it work for people with prescription eye glasses? Nobody in the demo is wearing eye-glasses - 60% of Americans have to wear glasses and only about 13% of Americans wear contacts. So that leaves over a hundred million Americans having to cram this thing over their glasses just to use it or not buy it at all. It seems that this suffers from the same issue that Google Glass had - prescription eye care. 3D movies are ruined for folks with glasses - try stuffing two sets of glasses on your head for a couple of hours - it flat out sucks. The selection of headphones is limited by how comfortable they are with glasses on for an hour or more. So why would this technology be any better?
The article focuses on how cool it is without addressing the actual practicality of having one - how heavy is it? How likely is it to survive five hundred or more impacts with the floor? What happens when the cat sit in it while it is lying on the desk? Besides a couple of gimmicky things, who cares? How is holography on the inside of my helmet better than a computer screen? I keep hearing about how much cooler it is, but not how much better it is than what I have now. Why is it better? A holographic display is not going to be any more enlightening than a regular display. Besides we already see the world in 3D. I really just don't get why this is anything but "cool" like 3D movies were in the 1970's, 1980's, 1990's, 2000's, etc. It's a gimmick.
"That's an illogical reaction. Gas stations won't charge you less for using the same amount of gas. "
My gas usage is roughly unchanged from week to week. The price of gas goes up - max was about $3.97/gallon.. The price of gas goes down- currently $2.17/gallon. So you are VERY wrong about energy price fluctuations. The amount of gas required to move me and my vehicle to work and back is very much the same. So it is not an illogical reaction. Demand for oil dropped, but not in proportion to the drop in price. The oil producing countries are mostly in OPEC which is a cartel that tries to control the supply of oil to meet their price goals. The price of energy has long been somewhat divorced from demand.
Cable used to be a la carte. The cable company created bundles because they could charge for things you're not going to use - you could only watch one channel at a time. HBO or SHO used to be 15/month alone. Then HBO got bundled with SHO for $25/month, so you saved $5 if you got the bundle. The cable company is paying based upon number of subscribers with a volume discount - so the more subscribers to a channel the better the rate is for the cable company. So they get a better deal on their end whether you use the SHO or not and you are paying more for HBO than you would if you got it alone - but it's a great deal, amiright? IT just got worse and worse as time went on. Basic cable was priced at about 20/month which was CBS, NBC,ABC, PBS, the local college station if you had one, and TBS when it got started. The premium channels were HBO, SHO, Cinnemax, and The movie Channel each priced at about $15/month. So cable was a pretty good deal. You could get a movie channel and basic cable for $35/month. Now, there are hundreds of channels and mostly they are not any better than the stuff that was on forty years ago and the cost is WAY higher - but not when you figure price per channel. LAst time I had cable TV the price was $120/month for 140 channels of TV which included all the premium channels. That works out to $0.85/channel per month. Basic+ HBO was $35/month and that works out to about $6/channel per month. So the cost per channel per month is much less, and the price is much higher due to the volume of channels provided. But as the man said: "100 channels and nothing on." Mostly we look at TV and see two or three things we want embedded in a large pile of stuff we don't want for a large price and don't buy the value of each channel. Sadly, the option to just by the channel we want is not an option the cable company is willing to provide anymore, I think, because of all the deals they made with all of the channels. So wanting to buy only the thing I want and not pay for things I am NEVER going to use, is not the moral equivalent of "use less electricity." It is a value based reaction to the product being offered. It is the same reaction that music lovers had to the one good song but you have to buy the whole album issue. Really, bundling is good only when all of the items in the bundle are desired or useful.
They have this thing called a switch. You can plug your appliances into the switch and when you leave for work you can turn all the switches off - except of course for the refrigerator and the freezer. I don't know about San Jose, but everywhere I've lived the AC/Heater unit has a switch that turns it off. So you can drastically remove your electric usage without giving control and access to some company. If they are paying you on top of that for participating in a program, then they are using that information to make money.
So really, electric bill maintenance is something your parent's figured out long ago without the need for corporate micromanagement and an "internet of things."
The 3D technology doesn't work very well with eye glasses either. Lots and lots of people can't see very well or well enough to enjoy a movie without their current glasses. Add those clunky glasses on top of current set and the whole experience sucks, not to mention it gives a lot of people a headache.
The whole point that we process visuals in 3D. No need for extra 3D.
Unfortunately, the visual processing software to recognize objects is not a good as a toddler so it's pretty darn useless, and why do I need my phone to recognize something? I've already seen it, processed it, and recognized it. Oh! Yeah! It might be good for that "what kind of bug is that?" that happens every decade or so - but you can already do that in 2D photos. Not much of a feature, really.
The practical effect would be to turn the power off. Do that around the time most people are busy at home and watch the fun as evenings are ruined! People do this now which is why there are locks on the breakers outside of most apartment complexes.
The meter will reside on the utility company's side of the connection and won't be owned by you. The smart meter probably won't even let you look at what it collects. The utility may or may not allow you to view your moment by moment usage, but they don't have to.
The meters are designed to allow the utility company to remotely manage your electrical usage. Don't pay your bill on time? - no need to send someone out to your house to shut off the power, the meter will do that automatically. The utility company didn't apply the payment on time? Power shut off until Monday afternoon when the sole remaining human in customer service can fix the issue. The other effect is to remove the actual person reading the meter. With remote management, the meter is read by software, thus eliminating two jobs with a software/hardware installation. This is certainly not about renewable energy. The coal and natural gas based utilities have zero interest in renewable energy - it reduces consumption of the electricity they generate.
The ancillary data is that they will know rather precisely when everyone is home and when everyone is out. Since the data may or may not be very well secured (and how is the homeowner or occupant going to know?) -this data can be used by criminals to facilitate burglary. Not to mention the fun that other people can have by hacking into the system and turning power off at random.
I was steered towards progressive lenses and found the same irritating issues. I switched to regular bi-focals and have little to no problems. I did move my monitors to allow me to have the correct distance from me, but other than that the bifocals serve me well.
I've always had the lowest memory size in my iphone - never noticed a problem with upgrades. Computer and device upgrades have ALWAYS taken up more space and been slower in performance since the first computer I owned back in the 1980's. Suing apple over this is just stupid. They should sue EVERY device maker because every upgrade consumes more memory and works slower on the old hardware. This is a case of lawyers wanting to get rich off of a profitable company for doing something everyone in the industry has been doing for decades.
"Throughout most of history, wandering beyond the horizon would have been suicidally insane and very few to attempted it were ever heard from again."
Not from the tracks our ancestors laid down. We left tools. We traded with other humans far from our homes as far back as we can find records. Humans have wandered over the horizon for as long as we have been on this planet. The archeological record demonstrates our many migrations from place to place as does our complicated genetic heritage. We are wanders by nature and our settling down into cities is recent, though with as much as we move around, we've not really stopped wandering. (I have lived in twelve cities and five states in less than 50 years.) Wandering over the horizon is suicide? Hardly. There is no land on this planet that we have not figured out how to live upon from the Inuit of the North, to the bases in Antarctica and every island and continent in between.
I really have a hard time understanding where you get the idea that US is so weak and irrelevant. We spend 1.7 trilliion dollars on defense on this planet and 36.6% (640 billion) of that is done in the US. China is the next most prolific spender on defense and they spend around a third of what the US spends (188 billion).
The comment about legacy yet relevant weapons really doesn't make sense to me.
The value of NASA has never been commercial. It is a pure research area. WE are learning how to live and work in space, which is an environment so alien to us that our bodies don't even function properly. That knowledge flows into the private commerce section of our economy and slowly brings benefits that we have yet to imagine.
I don't know where you get your 1/6th figure. US military spending for fiscal 2014 according to the wikipedia page is 43% of the total amount budgeted. Only 1.4% goes to NASA and 0.6% for the National Science Foundation.
(1) Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) is not a security issue for the victim. It is a security issue for the thousands of computers illegally used in the attack - think thousands of illegally accessed computers, theft of the electricity and network access required to run a bot net sufficient to impact a large network like Microsoft or Sony's. (2) Nothing the Victims security team could do would prevent a DDOS from occurring. That Microsoft or Sony's security was bad, is irrelevant to any DDOS. DDOS is like having a group of people drive bumper to bumper around your block. You can't get out, and that fancy home security system isn't going to stop the cars in the street. (3) They were apparently in it for something other than principle as it has been pointed out that they tweeted that they received compensation to stop the DDOS. So extortion? That's not a protest at all. That's like someone getting out of one of those cars and asking you for money to make the artificially created traffic jam go away. Which is very similar to an arsonist selling protection from him burning your house down. (4) Anyone who wanted to access the affected networks was denied access because of the DDOS. They paid for access to that network and their time on the network was essentially stolen from them. The customers who are adversely affected here are not mentioned - they are just as much victims as the corporate network. Consider for a moment that many of these people may not have much time to access the DDOS's networks due to other constraints upon their time (work, school, etc.) and were looking forward to enjoying some play time. Those plans were cancelled without recourse by the Lousy Lizard Squad and their army of stolen computers. I say stolen computers because I am pretty sure that any DDOS was not done using thousands of willing participants who signed upon on someone's website to allow the Lousy Lizard Squad to DDOS Microsoft. They are accessing other peoples property and spending other peoples resources in electricity and network access to run the DDOS attacks and that is theft of services plain and simple.
So there are four decent reasons to call these people thieves and that makes them assholes.
Who cares about how popular code is now? How popular was it? How much stuff is coded in C that is vital to people willing to pay people to fix it and maintain it and perhaps even improve it. Fer craps sake, Cobol is still alive and kicking. Just because some computer science wiz farts out some new language every three years doesn't mean that all the previously built code goes up in flames. The old code has more lives than a zombie apocalypse and some poor sap gets to make a living off of it. This is supposed to be a serious profession not a gaggle of high school sophomores giggling over who got asked to the senior prom.
Lizard B was distinguishable from Lizards A and C only by the name on the Ballot and the face used in the advertising literature. Beyond that, the campaigns were so identical, the policy statements so generically similar that nobody really knew which lizard was which. In most cases the voters simply picked the first Lizards on the list and shuffled out of the voting booth. Other, more creative voters, flipped a coin, or in one case rolled six sided dice.
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(1) Begging the question is entirely different than stating an opinion. An opinion is never a logical fallacy, by definition.
(2) Cooperation is not sharing. Again, by definition.
(3) Cooperation is not optimization. Optimization may include cooperation, but does not require it. Sometimes cooperation is less efficient. Optimization can be achieved through automation reducing the resources and people required thereby eliminating cooperation entirely.
(4) Two problems with the Amish as an example of a sharing economy. First, it is bad logic to take a tiny community (The Amish are 0.02783% of the global population) and apply it to the whole of humanity. There is certainly evidence that some systems of governance and economics will not work based upon geography. Humans have encountered many different geographical problems on this planet and have made many different systems to facilitate living in those regions. One size will not fit all. Second, the Amish help each other, but they can exclude those who do not follow their strict rules with out resorting to murder, and they are fairly capitalistic in their economic activities. You are mistaking a religious sect that limits access to technology for sharing. The Amish communities work because they account honestly for human nature and only include those willing to live by their rules. Not a good example and NOT what the Sharing Economy is as described by the article. A microcosm is not an economy - an example of sharing system that works would be the ancient monasteries of medieval Europe. However, that is a monastery not an economy. The whole of the European economy did not function that way. Small groups may share in a commune system, but this is the exception and not the rule.
(5) > Just because most men are to stupid to value the spiritual truth of "You receive what you give", and "Treat others how you want to be treated" in spite of man's obsessive path of destruction, this in no way negates man's potential to live a harmonious and in unity with all things. Both of these quotes are not basic human nature. They are ideals that humans strive to achieve. The facts, the demonstrable facts, are different: You do not receive what you give - you receive based upon your ability to convince others - what you labor is worth, what your service is worth, etc. You may treat others how you want to be treated but they are under no obligation to do the same to you and very often don't care enough to notice. Ideals are wonderful, but they are not something upon which a real working economy is based. Whining about that cruel fact has been the foiled battle cry of every Utopian with an IDEA that the whole world would be BETTER if everyone just GOT ALONG! But humans are humans and aren't changing very fast -- certainly not as fast as our technology. Complaining about the selfishness of humans is not, has not, will not change human nature. Again, in order to build a stable economic system that works for everyone, human nature in all of its variety must be honestly accounted. Crying about how the majority of the human race doesn't live up to the ideal values promoted by any decent philosophy is wasting time and effort. None of us can change the human race. Let me state that again: NONE of US can change the HUMAN race. We have neither the tools to do so nor the ethical trust required to make such modifications to our progeny.
(6) I have no illusions that the human race as it is now will ever see an end to war and commerce - both are fundamental to who we are as a species. WE have been trading and fighting since before we had fire. War and commerce have driven every endeavor, every advancement, and continue to do so. Like gravity, this is a truth that simply is and it cares not for our opinions of its fairness, rightness, or purity. Where humans blunder most often is when we mistake our fictional ideas of who we are for our actual selves.
Forget for a moment that the sharing economy is based upon some very wrong assumptions about human nature - things that any parent can tell you are not a normal part of human nature, and focus upon the inspiration for this new economic model - Feudal Europe, the village commons, the Great Depression. Nothing in the article is hopeful or progressive - it's all been done before by desperate people trying very hard not to starve to death. How many jobs did people have during the Great Depression? Lots. They just lumped them all together and said "We did what we had to do to survive." This is just another rich asshole's version of "you are poor because you are lazy - now get another low paying job." This goes completely away if wages are required to be livable.
The concept of the Sharing economy is stupid at its core. This "panacea" is ignoring the basic human territoriality regarding property. Children have to be FORCED to share. They will throw a temper tantrum when required to share. Adults are little different. Smoother, less prone to emotional outbursts and more prone to murder than toddlers. The idea of a "sharing" economy is as dumb as any other Utopian vision that makes assumptions contrary to human nature. Every sharing economy is based upon an outside requirement - men with weapons making unarmed peasants work the land in the Feudal "Sharing Economy." Starvation in the Great Depression. Otherwise, people revert to their nature of territoriality over property.
Micro doses of potent drugs explains the whole concept of windows 8 and a lot of the invisible features of iphone operating systems. Yep - I've been wondering if they were on drugs as the current designs kinda look like it.
It will be like LASIK or really good dental work - not deemed medically necessary and thus available only to those with the money to buy it. A few countries, with small, aging populations might toy with providing it to their citizens, but the majority won't have it available to them. Having lots of youthful adults would diminish the profits of the medical/insurance complex. It will be hard on some types of plastic surgery, but overall, you won't ever see it except on movie stars and billionaires.
So the FBI is going after a guy for doing bad things to planes because the flight control system is on the same wireless net work as the email and pay per view movies. WHY THE F**K ARE THESE UNSECURED REMOTE CONTROLLABLE TERRORIST BOMBS ALLOWED TO FLY? They should be grounded immediately and not allowed to enter US airspace until they can be proven to have secured their flight controls from anyone outside of the cock pit. Perhaps we should loudly petition the FAA to ground these dangerously unsecured hostage filled terrorist missiles before the stereotypical ISIS computer genius bad guy figures out how to use social media to hack into the inner workings of these potentially lethal death drones and crash them into a high profile targets while posting the play by play to twitter and Facebook.
Of course what will really happen here is that one security expert will be "prosecuted" until he "suicides," while a "Protect Americans While Flying Freedom Act" rushes through congress requiring the TSA to arrest anyone caught with an "Airplane Electronic Control Device" and that those villains shall to be sentenced to 500 years in a super max isolation cell, ban all electronic devices from airports and aircraft unless stored without the battery in the stowed luggage where the ever vigilant TSA security mavens can recoup any additional expenses by "securing" those "potentially lethal" iPhones sorry -"Airplane Electronic Control Devices" in the "to be sold on eBay box", but if you agree to a brief background check and a generous donation to the TSA's Frequently Searched Club, you can by pass the whole process and you get a spiffy medallion to wear on your I "Heart" TSA sweat shirt (comes in five colors and in Men's M, L XL, XXL, XXXL, XXXXL, and women's XXS).
The Bush II administration took advantage of a crisis, inflated it's danger, and got a panicked congress to vote for the patriot act. All of the renewals are on the congress critters so look up what your representative has done. A lot of Dems have voted to keep that act.
Let us point out that one of the more difficult of the sciences, chemistry, does not have a diversity problem. There are as many women as men in chemistry at all levels of education and employment. So for the rest of the technology and science groups, what is YOUR problem with gender? It's not that girls can't do math, or science, or get steered in kindergarten, it is something else. Figure that out and solve the problem.
But how well would it work for people with prescription eye glasses? Nobody in the demo is wearing eye-glasses - 60% of Americans have to wear glasses and only about 13% of Americans wear contacts. So that leaves over a hundred million Americans having to cram this thing over their glasses just to use it or not buy it at all. It seems that this suffers from the same issue that Google Glass had - prescription eye care. 3D movies are ruined for folks with glasses - try stuffing two sets of glasses on your head for a couple of hours - it flat out sucks. The selection of headphones is limited by how comfortable they are with glasses on for an hour or more. So why would this technology be any better?
The article focuses on how cool it is without addressing the actual practicality of having one - how heavy is it? How likely is it to survive five hundred or more impacts with the floor? What happens when the cat sit in it while it is lying on the desk? Besides a couple of gimmicky things, who cares? How is holography on the inside of my helmet better than a computer screen? I keep hearing about how much cooler it is, but not how much better it is than what I have now. Why is it better? A holographic display is not going to be any more enlightening than a regular display. Besides we already see the world in 3D. I really just don't get why this is anything but "cool" like 3D movies were in the 1970's, 1980's, 1990's, 2000's, etc. It's a gimmick.
"That's an illogical reaction. Gas stations won't charge you less for using the same amount of gas. "
My gas usage is roughly unchanged from week to week. The price of gas goes up - max was about $3.97/gallon.. The price of gas goes down- currently $2.17/gallon. So you are VERY wrong about energy price fluctuations. The amount of gas required to move me and my vehicle to work and back is very much the same. So it is not an illogical reaction. Demand for oil dropped, but not in proportion to the drop in price. The oil producing countries are mostly in OPEC which is a cartel that tries to control the supply of oil to meet their price goals. The price of energy has long been somewhat divorced from demand.
Cable used to be a la carte. The cable company created bundles because they could charge for things you're not going to use - you could only watch one channel at a time. HBO or SHO used to be 15/month alone. Then HBO got bundled with SHO for $25/month, so you saved $5 if you got the bundle. The cable company is paying based upon number of subscribers with a volume discount - so the more subscribers to a channel the better the rate is for the cable company. So they get a better deal on their end whether you use the SHO or not and you are paying more for HBO than you would if you got it alone - but it's a great deal, amiright? IT just got worse and worse as time went on. Basic cable was priced at about 20/month which was CBS, NBC,ABC, PBS, the local college station if you had one, and TBS when it got started. The premium channels were HBO, SHO, Cinnemax, and The movie Channel each priced at about $15/month. So cable was a pretty good deal. You could get a movie channel and basic cable for $35/month. Now, there are hundreds of channels and mostly they are not any better than the stuff that was on forty years ago and the cost is WAY higher - but not when you figure price per channel. LAst time I had cable TV the price was $120/month for 140 channels of TV which included all the premium channels. That works out to $0.85/channel per month. Basic+ HBO was $35/month and that works out to about $6/channel per month. So the cost per channel per month is much less, and the price is much higher due to the volume of channels provided. But as the man said: "100 channels and nothing on." Mostly we look at TV and see two or three things we want embedded in a large pile of stuff we don't want for a large price and don't buy the value of each channel. Sadly, the option to just by the channel we want is not an option the cable company is willing to provide anymore, I think, because of all the deals they made with all of the channels. So wanting to buy only the thing I want and not pay for things I am NEVER going to use, is not the moral equivalent of "use less electricity." It is a value based reaction to the product being offered. It is the same reaction that music lovers had to the one good song but you have to buy the whole album issue. Really, bundling is good only when all of the items in the bundle are desired or useful.
They have this thing called a switch. You can plug your appliances into the switch and when you leave for work you can turn all the switches off - except of course for the refrigerator and the freezer. I don't know about San Jose, but everywhere I've lived the AC/Heater unit has a switch that turns it off. So you can drastically remove your electric usage without giving control and access to some company. If they are paying you on top of that for participating in a program, then they are using that information to make money.
So really, electric bill maintenance is something your parent's figured out long ago without the need for corporate micromanagement and an "internet of things."
The limited viewing angle, which, like progressive bifocal lenses, makes the whole thing rather useless.
The 3D technology doesn't work very well with eye glasses either. Lots and lots of people can't see very well or well enough to enjoy a movie without their current glasses. Add those clunky glasses on top of current set and the whole experience sucks, not to mention it gives a lot of people a headache.
The whole point that we process visuals in 3D. No need for extra 3D.
Unfortunately, the visual processing software to recognize objects is not a good as a toddler so it's pretty darn useless, and why do I need my phone to recognize something? I've already seen it, processed it, and recognized it. Oh! Yeah! It might be good for that "what kind of bug is that?" that happens every decade or so - but you can already do that in 2D photos. Not much of a feature, really.
Better batteries would be useful.
The practical effect would be to turn the power off. Do that around the time most people are busy at home and watch the fun as evenings are ruined! People do this now which is why there are locks on the breakers outside of most apartment complexes.
The meter will reside on the utility company's side of the connection and won't be owned by you. The smart meter probably won't even let you look at what it collects. The utility may or may not allow you to view your moment by moment usage, but they don't have to.
The meters are designed to allow the utility company to remotely manage your electrical usage. Don't pay your bill on time? - no need to send someone out to your house to shut off the power, the meter will do that automatically. The utility company didn't apply the payment on time? Power shut off until Monday afternoon when the sole remaining human in customer service can fix the issue. The other effect is to remove the actual person reading the meter. With remote management, the meter is read by software, thus eliminating two jobs with a software/hardware installation. This is certainly not about renewable energy. The coal and natural gas based utilities have zero interest in renewable energy - it reduces consumption of the electricity they generate.
The ancillary data is that they will know rather precisely when everyone is home and when everyone is out. Since the data may or may not be very well secured (and how is the homeowner or occupant going to know?) -this data can be used by criminals to facilitate burglary. Not to mention the fun that other people can have by hacking into the system and turning power off at random.
I was steered towards progressive lenses and found the same irritating issues. I switched to regular bi-focals and have little to no problems. I did move my monitors to allow me to have the correct distance from me, but other than that the bifocals serve me well.
I've always had the lowest memory size in my iphone - never noticed a problem with upgrades. Computer and device upgrades have ALWAYS taken up more space and been slower in performance since the first computer I owned back in the 1980's. Suing apple over this is just stupid. They should sue EVERY device maker because every upgrade consumes more memory and works slower on the old hardware. This is a case of lawyers wanting to get rich off of a profitable company for doing something everyone in the industry has been doing for decades.
"Throughout most of history, wandering beyond the horizon would have been suicidally insane and very few to attempted it were ever heard from again."
Not from the tracks our ancestors laid down. We left tools. We traded with other humans far from our homes as far back as we can find records. Humans have wandered over the horizon for as long as we have been on this planet. The archeological record demonstrates our many migrations from place to place as does our complicated genetic heritage. We are wanders by nature and our settling down into cities is recent, though with as much as we move around, we've not really stopped wandering. (I have lived in twelve cities and five states in less than 50 years.) Wandering over the horizon is suicide? Hardly. There is no land on this planet that we have not figured out how to live upon from the Inuit of the North, to the bases in Antarctica and every island and continent in between.
I really have a hard time understanding where you get the idea that US is so weak and irrelevant. We spend 1.7 trilliion dollars on defense on this planet and 36.6% (640 billion) of that is done in the US. China is the next most prolific spender on defense and they spend around a third of what the US spends (188 billion).
The comment about legacy yet relevant weapons really doesn't make sense to me.
The value of NASA has never been commercial. It is a pure research area. WE are learning how to live and work in space, which is an environment so alien to us that our bodies don't even function properly. That knowledge flows into the private commerce section of our economy and slowly brings benefits that we have yet to imagine.
I don't know where you get your 1/6th figure. US military spending for fiscal 2014 according to the wikipedia page is 43% of the total amount budgeted. Only 1.4% goes to NASA and 0.6% for the National Science Foundation.
Pranks have to be funny. What is funny about DDOS?
Ok, here are a few points:
(1) Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) is not a security issue for the victim. It is a security issue for the thousands of computers illegally used in the attack - think thousands of illegally accessed computers, theft of the electricity and network access required to run a bot net sufficient to impact a large network like Microsoft or Sony's.
(2) Nothing the Victims security team could do would prevent a DDOS from occurring. That Microsoft or Sony's security was bad, is irrelevant to any DDOS. DDOS is like having a group of people drive bumper to bumper around your block. You can't get out, and that fancy home security system isn't going to stop the cars in the street.
(3) They were apparently in it for something other than principle as it has been pointed out that they tweeted that they received compensation to stop the DDOS. So extortion? That's not a protest at all. That's like someone getting out of one of those cars and asking you for money to make the artificially created traffic jam go away. Which is very similar to an arsonist selling protection from him burning your house down.
(4) Anyone who wanted to access the affected networks was denied access because of the DDOS. They paid for access to that network and their time on the network was essentially stolen from them. The customers who are adversely affected here are not mentioned - they are just as much victims as the corporate network. Consider for a moment that many of these people may not have much time to access the DDOS's networks due to other constraints upon their time (work, school, etc.) and were looking forward to enjoying some play time. Those plans were cancelled without recourse by the Lousy Lizard Squad and their army of stolen computers. I say stolen computers because I am pretty sure that any DDOS was not done using thousands of willing participants who signed upon on someone's website to allow the Lousy Lizard Squad to DDOS Microsoft. They are accessing other peoples property and spending other peoples resources in electricity and network access to run the DDOS attacks and that is theft of services plain and simple.
So there are four decent reasons to call these people thieves and that makes them assholes.
The mentality and intelligence level of the officers is screened to fit a certain profile. Perhaps that profile is the issue.
Link: http://thefreethoughtproject.c...
Who cares about how popular code is now? How popular was it? How much stuff is coded in C that is vital to people willing to pay people to fix it and maintain it and perhaps even improve it. Fer craps sake, Cobol is still alive and kicking. Just because some computer science wiz farts out some new language every three years doesn't mean that all the previously built code goes up in flames. The old code has more lives than a zombie apocalypse and some poor sap gets to make a living off of it. This is supposed to be a serious profession not a gaggle of high school sophomores giggling over who got asked to the senior prom.
Lizard B was distinguishable from Lizards A and C only by the name on the Ballot and the face used in the advertising literature. Beyond that, the campaigns were so identical, the policy statements so generically similar that nobody really knew which lizard was which. In most cases the voters simply picked the first Lizards on the list and shuffled out of the voting booth. Other, more creative voters, flipped a coin, or in one case rolled six sided dice.