What if... there's less risk... because it's less-expensive to make a thing... and so you can either expand a luxury good into a broader market, or you can undercut your competitors and capture more of the market for massive profits?
How do you think the prices got set in the first place? Do you think consumer demand sets a maximum price and is fixed regardless of what prices at which a product is available?
It's kind of an argument between "knives don't cause wounds" and "any contact with a knife will leave a permanent, bleeding wound and you die!"
Technical progress reduces labor. It boots people out of jobs. This also reduces the cost and, thus, risk of entering and operating in a market. For higher-cost goods, you expand your market, moving luxuries down to commodities. The same pressures that set the price point before (competition, consumer interest) create a new price point. Consumers will tolerate something costing $50 if the best price they can get is $48; but if the next guy in town has it for $30, they're leaving your store and going to his. They might not leave your state for a 5-hour drive (but hey, Ebay, Amazon...).
Prices don't always come down. For a core basket of goods, the Fed indexes inflation and prints up money to make sure prices go up; wages just go up slightly-faster. For some other goods (notably cars and electronics), people buy at a certain price point relative to their income, and manufacturers keep moving more tech into the bottom end and thus provide that price point with ever-increasing features, thus maintaining the same usage of the labor pool per unit of product (look at the history of standard features in cars). New goods tend to be luxury goods, and comparable goods tend to index against each other, so of course a $5,000 OLED 55-inch TV becomes a $3,500 TV, compared to a $500 LED IPS--and it will eventually be a $500 OLED IPS.
So yes, you're going to see a loss of jobs.
That thing where prices come down--where the proportion of middle-income spent on a product shrinks--leaves people at every income level with left-over spending power after buying the same things. Nothing is zero-labor, and so buying more stuff invokes additional labor. Even self-driving freight trucks and automated warehouses need some form of logistics management, some (minimal) IT behind them, electricity generation, maintenance, all the mining of materials and fuels that goes behind that, and so forth. Load on supporting infrastructure increases, and we suddenly need both high-end engineers and low-end basic labor.
So what really happens here?
Well, if you eliminate 20% of the jobs in 6 months, the economy doesn't even hardly keep up. Welcome to the Great Depression! Even my Universal Social Security probably won't hold up against that very well--it might not even weaken the recession enough to stave off the dire consequences. It'll let Americans shrug off the Great Recession no problem, but anything significantly-larger would be an... interesting academic study, albeit a painful one. America might collapse as a nation despite any effort I can come up with.
If you eliminate 20% of the jobs over 3-4 years, the economy might sweat a little up-front, and it'll make pace with the rate of change before the end of the first year. You'll start on a mild recession, and then start holding it back, and then start recovering while the recession is trying to get worse.
One of these looks just fine from the perspective of national economy, but you'll get hell from the truckers and warehouse workers who lost their jobs. Everything is not fine for them; it will be in a little while, or else unemployment will go up and up and up as your economy dies, but up-front they're going to be carrying the load. Let's also not forget that we face around 5% unemployment constantly, so they're all tossed in a pool with other people who are trying to recover--as individuals, any of them could get left behind.
That' why we need welfare systems: we're all getting richer off the backs of a few unfortunates. When you buy a product, you must pay enough to generate revenue to cover all the wages involved for the time spent per-unit by every human involved in making that product. Get fewer humans to do it and the prices come down, and now you can buy two things; and there's a little gap in there where you're getting
To be fair, it reduces the total scope, as far as I can tell. Arbitration is generally a fair system, as the arbiter is a neutral third-party; the problem is you can't arbitrate en-masse, so a lot of people have to expend time they might have and bring a lack of legal expertise to the table. Unless you're getting the same arbiter again and again and his familiarity weighs in on repeat decisions, your company lawyers are going to be able to improve the outcome over trials--and that's not even considering that most people won't take it to arbitration anyway, so you get off scott-free.
Simple banning of class-action lawsuits would serve the same purpose.
Auto-renew subscriptions are supposed to come with information about whether you can get a refund if you're charged for a renewal ("Oops, cancel that"), an easy method by which to cancel a subscription, and instructions on how to cancel. They didn't, so Apple is in trouble for letting you subscribe to third-party apps without providing all of this.
Business-to-consumer contracts are legal documents, the understanding of which requires a high degree of technical knowledge. Likewise, there are few businesses with whom to do business in many cases--banks are abundant, yet most banks have these clauses, and so consumers are essentially locked into such agreements or locked out of the market. Searching for a bank without such a clause takes time and skill; and if the bank doesn't have the products (online banking with MFA, interest rates, fast wire transfers) of other banks, it's not equivalent in the market.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was chartered by the President to execute legislation by Congress to provide for a certain regulatory need in the interest of the people of the United States. They have made a decision, and Congress seeks to countermand that decision. What great reasoning does Congress have for taking the legal right of due process in civil disagreements away from the Consumer?
Class-action lawsuits allow consumer to sanction a business, to hold a legal threat over its head if it acts in a way legally liable in a civil context. It's the stick that comes behind the carrot in encouraging ethical business. Without a class-action suit, each individual must take their own time, money, and risk to address these behaviors--which means fewer individuals will achieve representation, and so the risk of harm to a business for acting in an unethical manner harmful to its customers is fractional. Even if all customers did come to self-represent, they would sink an enormous amount of time and effort into seeking redress, instead of into any more-useful pursuit.
Arbitration is an ineffective and inefficient method of encouraging or enforcing fair and ethical business behavior.
That's a problem, but not a legal problem. The issue at large isn't Sonos, but the fact that anyone could do this--which is a legal policy problem. A lot of people want to make such things illegal, but that's an engineering problem--building a law that doesn't do terrible things as a side-effect is hard.
Check out Flair. Not because you should buy one, but just look at their pitch. APIs, works with any system, integrate with other vendors's products... for a while,
they had up on the main page that you could replace their firmware with your own custom firmware, but that seems to have not had much marketing impact and been removed as a statement.
I still say we need an OpenIoT standard, and I'm not the only one who's tried to come up with such a thing.
My big focus is security: I want every IoT device and control application to connect to an IoT hub and exchange certificates for identification and encryption (Curve 22519). Your entire attack surface from the outside is the part of the Web server that accepts connections; the part of your SSL library that validates a certificate; and any libraries and system functions used in the process.
It's a short enough path that you could quite possibly make it absolutely, provably secure by creating a specialized listener up front to do the TLS handshake, thus minimizing the active body of code and allowing you to audit the few tens of thousands of lines vigorously. Your back-end (e.g. nginx) would simply need to accept a proxy from this listener and trust the connection details (IP, etc.) it gives; the listener could even hand off the connection fd to the Web server (sendmsg()) and details on the TLS tunnel, thus allowing nginx etc. to take over an already-negotiated connection.
If the connection isn't from a client device which has at some point physically been in the presence of the IoT hub, then it won't have exchanged a trusted client certificate, and the connection is rejected. Your shitty back-end IoT software doesn't matter--no attack surface. Have the IoT device also only accept connections from the hub to seal the deal.
I have, however, also considered describing the packaging of Docker-based services to run on or behind the Hub. Instead of Nest talking to Google, you could have Nest talk to your IoT hub, which talks to a Nest server box or a generalized server box, if the IoT hub isn't beefy enough to self-host services. Thus you can either use Nest's servers or you can have your IoT hub give the Nest app its current public IPv6. Nest Cam could then be made to store its videos locally, without ever talking to the Nest service in the cloud.
Removal of cloud dependence means a compromised Cloud provider can't hack your device, either.
These days, I'd suggest as well allowing authentication by U2F, rather than only by client certificate. That would let you use a PC, or have your phone only capable of connecting to your IoT when you plugged a device into the bottom (or paired a bluetooth device). The certificate or the U2F would be your first factor; once you've connected, there's a log-on page--which you can't attempt to hack unless you have a first factor. As well, the first logic is "do I have any registered U2F keys?", so you're making that decision before processing user-supplied data, and thus a person not using U2F doesn't face a larger attack surface.
I've thought a lot about how to make IoT some kind of harmonious utopia where we have the same shitty or not-shitty products as today, but with network connectivity--rather than network connectivity being a dangerous beast that could destroy our lives.
If a business own the means to production at large, then the megacorporation can utterly-destroy your country. Thus your government must bow to its whims for the sake of national security. This is no different from a government owning the means to production (socialism, not communism).
Incompetence is why I'd never want to be a dictator. I can fix some shit in this country, but I can't fix everything; having to battle with hundreds of other people who may or may not share my vision is a small price to pay for having thousands of congressmen, Congressional staff, independent Government organizations (CBO, etc.), committee staff, and others to back me up if I try to destroy this country with an ill-conceived idea beyond my own capacity. As a dictator, I wouldn't have anyone around to take my hand away from the big red button when I waved it around blindly.
Party politics, however, is bullshit. I want to develop legislation making it easier to run as independent--and defining "independent" so as to prevent the formation of unnamed political parties. Let's give people a better way in, and threaten to dilute the GOP and DNC if they don't shape up.
Each release of firmware is a new software, which means new licensing. They never contracted to keep services up and support old devices in perpetuity, thus you must agree to new software or lose access.
We don't have laws to control this because such laws are... dangerous. Look at what happened with the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, wherein violating the MySpace ToS became a criminal offence for a little while. Everyone wants legislative action, and nobody thinks too hard about the unintended consequences of such action.
If you want laws to control this, they have to start leaky and become water-tight. You want air-tight laws, you're either going to prevent some consumer-desired products from existing, criminalize consumer and researcher actions, or otherwise find yourself unhappy with the result. Look at the DMCA, and then imagine that you asked for it and got exactly what you asked for.
We need to curb privacy concerns; we can't eliminate them completely, but we can get some control and accountability. This isn't as much of a problem as you might think: at some point, you just need to accept you leak information, because you leak a hell of a lot of information even without an external actor trying to pry it out of your hands. Just touching the Internet sends packets moving along which a Government entity could observe, and creates handy debugging logs which can reveal tons of information; not to mention whatever you say online--as much as you might want to believe you're anonymous on Slashdot, there's plenty of information connected to your ID here to link you to other IDs, which ultimately link to you.
A competent PI might be able to track you down and identify all your public faces, as anonymous as you think you are; a Government entity can do so readily. You say things that expose your position, your thinking, your hobbies, your social contacts, your sympathies. The information is frequently non-explicit: the way you move through various topics leaves a void, and that void is shaped like a secret, and now I know something about you that nobody knows. You leak that much.
We might be able to safely deploy legislation to stop corporate sale of identity, exposure of private individual information, and deanonymization. We can't protect you from yourself, and shouldn't try, although if someone uses big-data forensics to go PI and publish your secret life maybe we should have something to say about that--right up until everyone has their hands on that technology and can tell it to look for you and report back to them, and then anonymity is truly dead, and perhaps privacy.
I pull from a hell of a lot of different fields to explain anything, and yet I'm always looking for people who are experts in something I don't understand. I'm a great sysadmin and systems engineer because I understand a lot about how computer systems work from top to bottom, and so see everything as an outcome of known quantities interacting in easily-recognized ways; yet I'm not Andrew Morton, I'm not a programmer, I'm not a computer scientist, and I lack a huge depth of understanding in every part of the field of computers. I can solve problems in a general sense a lot faster than many people who are far beyond my knowledge and skill, and yet I don't have the knowledge and skill to implement solutions without those people.
I want to potentially reorganize the Social Security Subcommittee of the Congressional Ways and Means Committee into a Social Insurances Subcommittee, because Social Security is myopic. The SS Subcommittee focuses on OASDI and a few other small matters; whereas I designed a universal Social Security policy that reorganizes OASDI, TANF, WIC, SNAP, and HUD to provide benefits to more Americans with less net transfer, resulting a permanent guarantee of Social Security's solvency, an end to homelessness and hunger, and a $1 trillion reduction in tax burdens on the American people and American business. It's a finance, accounting, and economics problem—in none of which am I a field expert.
There are spreadsheets with year-by-year models (some cells have notes). I've checked through directly adjusting the finances; I've measured the cost of FICA and adjusted it to 15% of all income to see if that costs the same as my projected transfer (the rough estimate is some $30 billion off---out of $2,183 billion); and I've tinkered a bit with what each income quintile pays in and what each gets out, although I actually need CBO data to accurately make those projections (a very rough look suggests that even 2/3 of what the richest quintile pay into this system goes right back into their pockets, although once you get up to the top 0.1% they're paying a lot more than they get back). The money's definitely not coming out of nowhere.
I've seriously considered trying to get some NASI members to work with me on this, and maybe lobby them for a nomination so I can join NASI. That's a rather high honor, though; membership in NASI is no joke, and I'm presuming a lot suggesting I think I'd fit the ranks. Still, they have an entire membership committee to decide if they think I'm legit, and these people are a hell of a lot smarter than I.
I don't look at problems as a single-field expert; I see them as analogues to hundreds of things, even to partial-body analogies which are glued together as some kind of disjunct chimera. Each piece of the machine independently performs a function similar to many other things I've known, and the pieces each interface with each other rather than with wholly-incompatible and dissimilar things they might be like. It's good to know your limits, but at some point you have to accept that there are some things you can do that many others can't--and in my case, I am damned good at solving problems represented by extremely complex conceptual systems, so long as I can identify each of the concepts as being familiar in analogous terms. Knowing when the analogy stops is critical there.
I don't think you can get that without being a kind of universal expert; and even if you are, you can't apply yourself to 27 different fields at once. You can do one or two things very well using knowledge pulled from everywhere, and you generally can't get very far with it--but you can start down a path nobody else can even see. Bring your smart friends; you'll need them.
My thinking is Google has a weak trademark. The guy who registered "googledonaldtrump.com" appears to have a verb in his domain name, not a claim that he's THE Google. I don't think you should be allowed to represent yourself as Google or use the name to brand your own product in their space; using the term to represent an idea, though, is fine.
It's the kind of thing you know when you see, which is why we have legal reasonable persons.
False equivalence and strawman argument, yeah. "I get Netflix and watch the series I want to watch." "BUT! You don't get the CHANNELS!" "I only care about channels when they carry content I want; I'm just buying content now." "CHANNELS!!!!!!!"
Soon, the TV stations will provide free streaming of their channels with ads built in. Go to http://foxbaltimore.com/ and watch Fox Baltimore live if you're into that. CSPAN and CNN have live streams, too, if you don't want to watch network programming but just network news.
The great power of this model lies in the national advertising chain: if something happens in Baltimore, you can tune into WUTB or WBFF online and watch their news (and ads) to see Baltimore's local news. First-hand reporting right on the ground. You saw it on CNN first and you closed that tab and went straight to the source. Hell, you saw it on Reddit first and there was a friggin' link.
The business is not getting paid later. The business gets paid by your bank; if you default on your loan, they still get paid. If you never show up to pay your tab and the store owner can't find you, they don't get paid.
When you pay with a credit card, you're not an A/R; you, personally, have paid, according to the store you're doing business with. If the bank then can't get the money from you, well, Mom & Pop's Pretzel and Sodas Stand doesn't know anything about that, because they got their money. So did Amazon.
This guy seems to have learned this lesson by displacement. "fuck you fuck you you're all morons fuck how are you so fucking stupid you deleted my files you fucking fucker morons!!!!"
Sometimes, shit is somebody else's fault; you should probably learn to deal with that, too. This is why I don't just blindly stop at a stop sign, wait 3 seconds, then pull through: the next guy might be about to plow through his red light at 90 miles an hour; maybe I should look first to ensure he isn't a moron.
This kid will probably die on a motorcycle. Don't let him get one.
You're talking about leaving without paying. Amazon's 1-click is paying as soon as you decide you want it, without getting out payment methods, without delaying, nothing--the money leaves your possession immediately. No carts, no totaling, no paying for 6 goods at once. "That" *chaching* "and that" *chaching* "and that over there" *chaching* money vanishing out of your bank again and again.
In a physical store, this is akin to grabbing a good and it's immediately charged; and if you grab another on your way out the door, you now have two credit card transactions before you even get outside. For a vending machine, it's as if the vending machine already knows your credit card number, and you push a button for candy and walk out--you've already been charged by the time the Hershey's bar plinks at the bottom.
One-click is not "not paying until later". That's the credit card, and the arrangement is with your bank--the merchant gets paid immediately.
If you didn't come back to pay it later, the owner would never get paid.
With Amazon, when you grab the item, it's immediately charged to your credit card. If you linger in the store and grab another item, it charges that, too. No tabs, no truing up, no coming back to pay your bill, no waiting for you to walk from the cooler to the cash register.
You touched it you bought it--literally, as your bank has just wired us the money directly.
That's not what one-click does. One-click lets you buy something by looking at the page and saying "buy!" It's as if the store had the ability to sense that you lifted an item off the shelf and immediately charge your card, but only when you take it to buy and not when you take it to examine and put back.
He was fired because Trump's conflict-avoiding personality has lead to a psychotic monomania by which he fires anyone with whom he has conflict rather than simply shrinking back into passive-aggressive disquiet.
It's not just 55,000 coal miners. People in blown-out, collapsed cities where industry has become obsolete dream of turning back time at the expense of everyone else. Powerful industrial installations are obsolete because they cost more than what we do today--that is to say: Someone else is better at this, so we pay them and use our labor to make other stuff, and we're better-off.
Americans are better-off thanks to technical progress and global trade, as a whole. America has always had its recessions, and always come down to a near-5% unemployment level (see that 4.7% today? Brace yourself). Somebody has always not been very well off; and this trade and technical progress shifts around who isn't doing very well in our country.
That means the same proportion of Americans as ever enjoy America's prosperity, and by-the-numbers we haven't created an even-larger class of the trampled and downtrodden as we've ever had; but certain people who were well-off before are now the trampled and downtrodden, and they aren't happy about it. Why would they be?
People all over the country live in these cities. Millions of Americans dream of a return of powerful industry--for them. The collapse of other cities isn't their problem; wouldn't you rather somebody else be poor instead of yourself?
I've been trying to run for office because I developed a keystone policy to fix all this. The universal social security does a great many things, one of which is creating a flow of money backed by actual productivity--not debt or money-printing--into these cities. That provides for the general welfare by providing local spending power, meaning someone has to handle the job of vending to these consumers, meaning there will be jobs. Maybe not glamorous jobs, and definitely not 100% employment; but there will be jobs. These cities will get rebuilt.
The trick to that is it pays back to the payees, so the lower-quintile ends up paying in about $45 million but getting $240 million back (stimulus, support), upon which we can build our welfare systems more-effectively and less-expensively. The middle-quintiles end up paying out about what they get back in total, which means this is far-cheaper than today's welfare for them. The upper-quintile still actually pays out quite a bit more than they get back--but less so, so much that the top tax rate in total falls to 35.8% and the business tax rate falls to 33.2%.
It's a hell of a lot of money moving around, and it turns out as lower taxes. That resolves so many problems, from the welfare system to Social Security's insolvency (I lifted OASDI completely out of the system--got rid of the 6.2% payroll tax--then restored the capacity to pay the full of Social Security's benefits in-total with only a 5.3% payroll tax to replace it; and my system grows faster than inflation, so can't become insolvent). Being that it's a constant and continuous economic stimulus, it does... well, exactly what you'd expect; and it's a zero-cost economic stimulus, so it does black magic.
It's actually a hard sell. I solve impossible problems and work miracles as a hobby. Stuff like this, you have to have some skepticism when you see it; if you don't, you're a fool. I can defend it, but it's a lot of numbers, and even an attention span that can handle it might not be able to unblock on the whole "too good to be true" thing.
Nobody ever considers that you can functionally make any system infinitely-worse in every way; they just assume you can't make a system better in every way because there has to be a cost somewhere.
Actually the biggest problem with battery storage is power density. When you make a high-energy-density battery, you have a lot of energy in one place; batteries are high-power-density, and can release all that energy at once if damaged. Big boom.
Think about an encased virtual dielectric. With the right movement of electrons and a (heavy) dielectric shell, a self-sustaining magnetic field would allow the storage of electricity without other materials interposed in the matrix. Supercapacitors get close to this using an air gap as a dielectric, hence the very low voltage. Because the shell is essentially N-doped sapphire, you can build it as an NPN and inject or remove electricity.
The problem is this thing is going to leak photons like crazy. The energy to hold it together has to dissipate, and so thermal energy--magnetic radiation--is going to come through the box. Eventually the whole thing destabilizes and starts physically exerting force outward. If you load it up with a half a gWh of energy and then break it open, you get a massive shockwave like detonating 430 tonnes of TNT.
300kWh--enough to send a Tesla 1,000 miles--is a quarter tonne of TNT. Imagine a 300kWh lithium-sapphire battery under your car, and you hit a 75 pound trailer hitch.
Slashdot Mirror
What if ... there's less risk ... because it's less-expensive to make a thing ... and so you can either expand a luxury good into a broader market, or you can undercut your competitors and capture more of the market for massive profits?
How do you think the prices got set in the first place? Do you think consumer demand sets a maximum price and is fixed regardless of what prices at which a product is available?
Is demand for my product expanding at the same time as the amount of product I can supply?
You found the demand-side argument! Euer Gegener made the trickle-down (supply-side) argument.
So, I would fire half of them at first, and then hire them back again when I have a need to be able to produce more.
This is why we need welfare.
Also ShanghaiBill got the more-complete argument, but you're both on the right page. Slashdot is actually doing pretty well in economics this morning.
It's kind of an argument between "knives don't cause wounds" and "any contact with a knife will leave a permanent, bleeding wound and you die!"
Technical progress reduces labor. It boots people out of jobs. This also reduces the cost and, thus, risk of entering and operating in a market. For higher-cost goods, you expand your market, moving luxuries down to commodities. The same pressures that set the price point before (competition, consumer interest) create a new price point. Consumers will tolerate something costing $50 if the best price they can get is $48; but if the next guy in town has it for $30, they're leaving your store and going to his. They might not leave your state for a 5-hour drive (but hey, Ebay, Amazon...).
Prices don't always come down. For a core basket of goods, the Fed indexes inflation and prints up money to make sure prices go up; wages just go up slightly-faster. For some other goods (notably cars and electronics), people buy at a certain price point relative to their income, and manufacturers keep moving more tech into the bottom end and thus provide that price point with ever-increasing features, thus maintaining the same usage of the labor pool per unit of product (look at the history of standard features in cars). New goods tend to be luxury goods, and comparable goods tend to index against each other, so of course a $5,000 OLED 55-inch TV becomes a $3,500 TV, compared to a $500 LED IPS--and it will eventually be a $500 OLED IPS.
So yes, you're going to see a loss of jobs.
That thing where prices come down--where the proportion of middle-income spent on a product shrinks--leaves people at every income level with left-over spending power after buying the same things. Nothing is zero-labor, and so buying more stuff invokes additional labor. Even self-driving freight trucks and automated warehouses need some form of logistics management, some (minimal) IT behind them, electricity generation, maintenance, all the mining of materials and fuels that goes behind that, and so forth. Load on supporting infrastructure increases, and we suddenly need both high-end engineers and low-end basic labor.
So what really happens here?
Well, if you eliminate 20% of the jobs in 6 months, the economy doesn't even hardly keep up. Welcome to the Great Depression! Even my Universal Social Security probably won't hold up against that very well--it might not even weaken the recession enough to stave off the dire consequences. It'll let Americans shrug off the Great Recession no problem, but anything significantly-larger would be an ... interesting academic study, albeit a painful one. America might collapse as a nation despite any effort I can come up with.
If you eliminate 20% of the jobs over 3-4 years, the economy might sweat a little up-front, and it'll make pace with the rate of change before the end of the first year. You'll start on a mild recession, and then start holding it back, and then start recovering while the recession is trying to get worse.
One of these looks just fine from the perspective of national economy, but you'll get hell from the truckers and warehouse workers who lost their jobs. Everything is not fine for them; it will be in a little while, or else unemployment will go up and up and up as your economy dies, but up-front they're going to be carrying the load. Let's also not forget that we face around 5% unemployment constantly, so they're all tossed in a pool with other people who are trying to recover--as individuals, any of them could get left behind.
That' why we need welfare systems: we're all getting richer off the backs of a few unfortunates. When you buy a product, you must pay enough to generate revenue to cover all the wages involved for the time spent per-unit by every human involved in making that product. Get fewer humans to do it and the prices come down, and now you can buy two things; and there's a little gap in there where you're getting
To be fair, it reduces the total scope, as far as I can tell. Arbitration is generally a fair system, as the arbiter is a neutral third-party; the problem is you can't arbitrate en-masse, so a lot of people have to expend time they might have and bring a lack of legal expertise to the table. Unless you're getting the same arbiter again and again and his familiarity weighs in on repeat decisions, your company lawyers are going to be able to improve the outcome over trials--and that's not even considering that most people won't take it to arbitration anyway, so you get off scott-free.
Simple banning of class-action lawsuits would serve the same purpose.
Auto-renew subscriptions are supposed to come with information about whether you can get a refund if you're charged for a renewal ("Oops, cancel that"), an easy method by which to cancel a subscription, and instructions on how to cancel. They didn't, so Apple is in trouble for letting you subscribe to third-party apps without providing all of this.
That's not the point.
Business-to-consumer contracts are legal documents, the understanding of which requires a high degree of technical knowledge. Likewise, there are few businesses with whom to do business in many cases--banks are abundant, yet most banks have these clauses, and so consumers are essentially locked into such agreements or locked out of the market. Searching for a bank without such a clause takes time and skill; and if the bank doesn't have the products (online banking with MFA, interest rates, fast wire transfers) of other banks, it's not equivalent in the market.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was chartered by the President to execute legislation by Congress to provide for a certain regulatory need in the interest of the people of the United States. They have made a decision, and Congress seeks to countermand that decision. What great reasoning does Congress have for taking the legal right of due process in civil disagreements away from the Consumer?
Class-action lawsuits allow consumer to sanction a business, to hold a legal threat over its head if it acts in a way legally liable in a civil context. It's the stick that comes behind the carrot in encouraging ethical business. Without a class-action suit, each individual must take their own time, money, and risk to address these behaviors--which means fewer individuals will achieve representation, and so the risk of harm to a business for acting in an unethical manner harmful to its customers is fractional. Even if all customers did come to self-represent, they would sink an enormous amount of time and effort into seeking redress, instead of into any more-useful pursuit.
Arbitration is an ineffective and inefficient method of encouraging or enforcing fair and ethical business behavior.
That's a problem, but not a legal problem. The issue at large isn't Sonos, but the fact that anyone could do this--which is a legal policy problem. A lot of people want to make such things illegal, but that's an engineering problem--building a law that doesn't do terrible things as a side-effect is hard.
Check out Flair. Not because you should buy one, but just look at their pitch. APIs, works with any system, integrate with other vendors's products... for a while, they had up on the main page that you could replace their firmware with your own custom firmware, but that seems to have not had much marketing impact and been removed as a statement.
I still say we need an OpenIoT standard, and I'm not the only one who's tried to come up with such a thing.
My big focus is security: I want every IoT device and control application to connect to an IoT hub and exchange certificates for identification and encryption (Curve 22519). Your entire attack surface from the outside is the part of the Web server that accepts connections; the part of your SSL library that validates a certificate; and any libraries and system functions used in the process.
It's a short enough path that you could quite possibly make it absolutely, provably secure by creating a specialized listener up front to do the TLS handshake, thus minimizing the active body of code and allowing you to audit the few tens of thousands of lines vigorously. Your back-end (e.g. nginx) would simply need to accept a proxy from this listener and trust the connection details (IP, etc.) it gives; the listener could even hand off the connection fd to the Web server (sendmsg()) and details on the TLS tunnel, thus allowing nginx etc. to take over an already-negotiated connection.
If the connection isn't from a client device which has at some point physically been in the presence of the IoT hub, then it won't have exchanged a trusted client certificate, and the connection is rejected. Your shitty back-end IoT software doesn't matter--no attack surface. Have the IoT device also only accept connections from the hub to seal the deal.
I have, however, also considered describing the packaging of Docker-based services to run on or behind the Hub. Instead of Nest talking to Google, you could have Nest talk to your IoT hub, which talks to a Nest server box or a generalized server box, if the IoT hub isn't beefy enough to self-host services. Thus you can either use Nest's servers or you can have your IoT hub give the Nest app its current public IPv6. Nest Cam could then be made to store its videos locally, without ever talking to the Nest service in the cloud.
Removal of cloud dependence means a compromised Cloud provider can't hack your device, either.
These days, I'd suggest as well allowing authentication by U2F, rather than only by client certificate. That would let you use a PC, or have your phone only capable of connecting to your IoT when you plugged a device into the bottom (or paired a bluetooth device). The certificate or the U2F would be your first factor; once you've connected, there's a log-on page--which you can't attempt to hack unless you have a first factor. As well, the first logic is "do I have any registered U2F keys?", so you're making that decision before processing user-supplied data, and thus a person not using U2F doesn't face a larger attack surface.
I've thought a lot about how to make IoT some kind of harmonious utopia where we have the same shitty or not-shitty products as today, but with network connectivity--rather than network connectivity being a dangerous beast that could destroy our lives.
If a business own the means to production at large, then the megacorporation can utterly-destroy your country. Thus your government must bow to its whims for the sake of national security. This is no different from a government owning the means to production (socialism, not communism).
Incompetence is why I'd never want to be a dictator. I can fix some shit in this country, but I can't fix everything; having to battle with hundreds of other people who may or may not share my vision is a small price to pay for having thousands of congressmen, Congressional staff, independent Government organizations (CBO, etc.), committee staff, and others to back me up if I try to destroy this country with an ill-conceived idea beyond my own capacity. As a dictator, I wouldn't have anyone around to take my hand away from the big red button when I waved it around blindly.
Party politics, however, is bullshit. I want to develop legislation making it easier to run as independent--and defining "independent" so as to prevent the formation of unnamed political parties. Let's give people a better way in, and threaten to dilute the GOP and DNC if they don't shape up.
Each release of firmware is a new software, which means new licensing. They never contracted to keep services up and support old devices in perpetuity, thus you must agree to new software or lose access.
We don't have laws to control this because such laws are... dangerous. Look at what happened with the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, wherein violating the MySpace ToS became a criminal offence for a little while. Everyone wants legislative action, and nobody thinks too hard about the unintended consequences of such action.
If you want laws to control this, they have to start leaky and become water-tight. You want air-tight laws, you're either going to prevent some consumer-desired products from existing, criminalize consumer and researcher actions, or otherwise find yourself unhappy with the result. Look at the DMCA, and then imagine that you asked for it and got exactly what you asked for.
We need to curb privacy concerns; we can't eliminate them completely, but we can get some control and accountability. This isn't as much of a problem as you might think: at some point, you just need to accept you leak information, because you leak a hell of a lot of information even without an external actor trying to pry it out of your hands. Just touching the Internet sends packets moving along which a Government entity could observe, and creates handy debugging logs which can reveal tons of information; not to mention whatever you say online--as much as you might want to believe you're anonymous on Slashdot, there's plenty of information connected to your ID here to link you to other IDs, which ultimately link to you.
A competent PI might be able to track you down and identify all your public faces, as anonymous as you think you are; a Government entity can do so readily. You say things that expose your position, your thinking, your hobbies, your social contacts, your sympathies. The information is frequently non-explicit: the way you move through various topics leaves a void, and that void is shaped like a secret, and now I know something about you that nobody knows. You leak that much.
We might be able to safely deploy legislation to stop corporate sale of identity, exposure of private individual information, and deanonymization. We can't protect you from yourself, and shouldn't try, although if someone uses big-data forensics to go PI and publish your secret life maybe we should have something to say about that--right up until everyone has their hands on that technology and can tell it to look for you and report back to them, and then anonymity is truly dead, and perhaps privacy.
Another schizoid? No idea how that human emotional attachment thing works?
I feel the same as both perspectives, honestly.
I pull from a hell of a lot of different fields to explain anything, and yet I'm always looking for people who are experts in something I don't understand. I'm a great sysadmin and systems engineer because I understand a lot about how computer systems work from top to bottom, and so see everything as an outcome of known quantities interacting in easily-recognized ways; yet I'm not Andrew Morton, I'm not a programmer, I'm not a computer scientist, and I lack a huge depth of understanding in every part of the field of computers. I can solve problems in a general sense a lot faster than many people who are far beyond my knowledge and skill, and yet I don't have the knowledge and skill to implement solutions without those people.
I want to potentially reorganize the Social Security Subcommittee of the Congressional Ways and Means Committee into a Social Insurances Subcommittee, because Social Security is myopic. The SS Subcommittee focuses on OASDI and a few other small matters; whereas I designed a universal Social Security policy that reorganizes OASDI, TANF, WIC, SNAP, and HUD to provide benefits to more Americans with less net transfer, resulting a permanent guarantee of Social Security's solvency, an end to homelessness and hunger, and a $1 trillion reduction in tax burdens on the American people and American business. It's a finance, accounting, and economics problem—in none of which am I a field expert.
There are spreadsheets with year-by-year models (some cells have notes). I've checked through directly adjusting the finances; I've measured the cost of FICA and adjusted it to 15% of all income to see if that costs the same as my projected transfer (the rough estimate is some $30 billion off---out of $2,183 billion); and I've tinkered a bit with what each income quintile pays in and what each gets out, although I actually need CBO data to accurately make those projections (a very rough look suggests that even 2/3 of what the richest quintile pay into this system goes right back into their pockets, although once you get up to the top 0.1% they're paying a lot more than they get back). The money's definitely not coming out of nowhere.
I've seriously considered trying to get some NASI members to work with me on this, and maybe lobby them for a nomination so I can join NASI. That's a rather high honor, though; membership in NASI is no joke, and I'm presuming a lot suggesting I think I'd fit the ranks. Still, they have an entire membership committee to decide if they think I'm legit, and these people are a hell of a lot smarter than I.
I don't look at problems as a single-field expert; I see them as analogues to hundreds of things, even to partial-body analogies which are glued together as some kind of disjunct chimera. Each piece of the machine independently performs a function similar to many other things I've known, and the pieces each interface with each other rather than with wholly-incompatible and dissimilar things they might be like. It's good to know your limits, but at some point you have to accept that there are some things you can do that many others can't--and in my case, I am damned good at solving problems represented by extremely complex conceptual systems, so long as I can identify each of the concepts as being familiar in analogous terms. Knowing when the analogy stops is critical there.
I don't think you can get that without being a kind of universal expert; and even if you are, you can't apply yourself to 27 different fields at once. You can do one or two things very well using knowledge pulled from everywhere, and you generally can't get very far with it--but you can start down a path nobody else can even see. Bring your smart friends; you'll need them.
My thinking is Google has a weak trademark. The guy who registered "googledonaldtrump.com" appears to have a verb in his domain name, not a claim that he's THE Google. I don't think you should be allowed to represent yourself as Google or use the name to brand your own product in their space; using the term to represent an idea, though, is fine.
It's the kind of thing you know when you see, which is why we have legal reasonable persons.
False equivalence and strawman argument, yeah. "I get Netflix and watch the series I want to watch." "BUT! You don't get the CHANNELS!" "I only care about channels when they carry content I want; I'm just buying content now." "CHANNELS!!!!!!!"
Soon, the TV stations will provide free streaming of their channels with ads built in. Go to http://foxbaltimore.com/ and watch Fox Baltimore live if you're into that. CSPAN and CNN have live streams, too, if you don't want to watch network programming but just network news.
The great power of this model lies in the national advertising chain: if something happens in Baltimore, you can tune into WUTB or WBFF online and watch their news (and ads) to see Baltimore's local news. First-hand reporting right on the ground. You saw it on CNN first and you closed that tab and went straight to the source. Hell, you saw it on Reddit first and there was a friggin' link.
The business is not getting paid later. The business gets paid by your bank; if you default on your loan, they still get paid. If you never show up to pay your tab and the store owner can't find you, they don't get paid.
When you pay with a credit card, you're not an A/R; you, personally, have paid, according to the store you're doing business with. If the bank then can't get the money from you, well, Mom & Pop's Pretzel and Sodas Stand doesn't know anything about that, because they got their money. So did Amazon.
This guy seems to have learned this lesson by displacement. "fuck you fuck you you're all morons fuck how are you so fucking stupid you deleted my files you fucking fucker morons!!!!"
Sometimes, shit is somebody else's fault; you should probably learn to deal with that, too. This is why I don't just blindly stop at a stop sign, wait 3 seconds, then pull through: the next guy might be about to plow through his red light at 90 miles an hour; maybe I should look first to ensure he isn't a moron.
This kid will probably die on a motorcycle. Don't let him get one.
You're talking about leaving without paying. Amazon's 1-click is paying as soon as you decide you want it, without getting out payment methods, without delaying, nothing--the money leaves your possession immediately. No carts, no totaling, no paying for 6 goods at once. "That" *chaching* "and that" *chaching* "and that over there" *chaching* money vanishing out of your bank again and again.
In a physical store, this is akin to grabbing a good and it's immediately charged; and if you grab another on your way out the door, you now have two credit card transactions before you even get outside. For a vending machine, it's as if the vending machine already knows your credit card number, and you push a button for candy and walk out--you've already been charged by the time the Hershey's bar plinks at the bottom.
One-click is not "not paying until later". That's the credit card, and the arrangement is with your bank--the merchant gets paid immediately.
Technology is the science of devising new techniques to produce some result, ultimately to reduce the amount of human labor time invested.
If you didn't come back to pay it later, the owner would never get paid.
With Amazon, when you grab the item, it's immediately charged to your credit card. If you linger in the store and grab another item, it charges that, too. No tabs, no truing up, no coming back to pay your bill, no waiting for you to walk from the cooler to the cash register. You touched it you bought it--literally, as your bank has just wired us the money directly.
That's not what one-click does. One-click lets you buy something by looking at the page and saying "buy!" It's as if the store had the ability to sense that you lifted an item off the shelf and immediately charge your card, but only when you take it to buy and not when you take it to examine and put back.
He was fired because Trump's conflict-avoiding personality has lead to a psychotic monomania by which he fires anyone with whom he has conflict rather than simply shrinking back into passive-aggressive disquiet.
It's not just 55,000 coal miners. People in blown-out, collapsed cities where industry has become obsolete dream of turning back time at the expense of everyone else. Powerful industrial installations are obsolete because they cost more than what we do today--that is to say: Someone else is better at this, so we pay them and use our labor to make other stuff, and we're better-off.
Americans are better-off thanks to technical progress and global trade, as a whole. America has always had its recessions, and always come down to a near-5% unemployment level (see that 4.7% today? Brace yourself). Somebody has always not been very well off; and this trade and technical progress shifts around who isn't doing very well in our country.
That means the same proportion of Americans as ever enjoy America's prosperity, and by-the-numbers we haven't created an even-larger class of the trampled and downtrodden as we've ever had; but certain people who were well-off before are now the trampled and downtrodden, and they aren't happy about it. Why would they be?
People all over the country live in these cities. Millions of Americans dream of a return of powerful industry--for them. The collapse of other cities isn't their problem; wouldn't you rather somebody else be poor instead of yourself?
I've been trying to run for office because I developed a keystone policy to fix all this. The universal social security does a great many things, one of which is creating a flow of money backed by actual productivity--not debt or money-printing--into these cities. That provides for the general welfare by providing local spending power, meaning someone has to handle the job of vending to these consumers, meaning there will be jobs. Maybe not glamorous jobs, and definitely not 100% employment; but there will be jobs. These cities will get rebuilt.
The trick to that is it pays back to the payees, so the lower-quintile ends up paying in about $45 million but getting $240 million back (stimulus, support), upon which we can build our welfare systems more-effectively and less-expensively. The middle-quintiles end up paying out about what they get back in total, which means this is far-cheaper than today's welfare for them. The upper-quintile still actually pays out quite a bit more than they get back--but less so, so much that the top tax rate in total falls to 35.8% and the business tax rate falls to 33.2%.
It's a hell of a lot of money moving around, and it turns out as lower taxes. That resolves so many problems, from the welfare system to Social Security's insolvency (I lifted OASDI completely out of the system--got rid of the 6.2% payroll tax--then restored the capacity to pay the full of Social Security's benefits in-total with only a 5.3% payroll tax to replace it; and my system grows faster than inflation, so can't become insolvent). Being that it's a constant and continuous economic stimulus, it does... well, exactly what you'd expect; and it's a zero-cost economic stimulus, so it does black magic.
It's actually a hard sell. I solve impossible problems and work miracles as a hobby. Stuff like this, you have to have some skepticism when you see it; if you don't, you're a fool. I can defend it, but it's a lot of numbers, and even an attention span that can handle it might not be able to unblock on the whole "too good to be true" thing.
Nobody ever considers that you can functionally make any system infinitely-worse in every way; they just assume you can't make a system better in every way because there has to be a cost somewhere.
Lithium and lead-acid batteries are still 300x as expensive as new advanced CAES stations coming online.
Actually the biggest problem with battery storage is power density. When you make a high-energy-density battery, you have a lot of energy in one place; batteries are high-power-density, and can release all that energy at once if damaged. Big boom.
Think about an encased virtual dielectric. With the right movement of electrons and a (heavy) dielectric shell, a self-sustaining magnetic field would allow the storage of electricity without other materials interposed in the matrix. Supercapacitors get close to this using an air gap as a dielectric, hence the very low voltage. Because the shell is essentially N-doped sapphire, you can build it as an NPN and inject or remove electricity.
The problem is this thing is going to leak photons like crazy. The energy to hold it together has to dissipate, and so thermal energy--magnetic radiation--is going to come through the box. Eventually the whole thing destabilizes and starts physically exerting force outward. If you load it up with a half a gWh of energy and then break it open, you get a massive shockwave like detonating 430 tonnes of TNT.
300kWh--enough to send a Tesla 1,000 miles--is a quarter tonne of TNT. Imagine a 300kWh lithium-sapphire battery under your car, and you hit a 75 pound trailer hitch.