I hate to say it, but the general population doesn't really care. If they did, they wouldn't buy/use this stuff and the companies would go out of business. It's not a situation where people aren't informed, they just don't care.
Not quite, most people actually aren't informed, and if they were then more of them would care (certainly not all, but more.) It's why stories like this are important, to raise awareness and hopefully push product development in more consumer friendly directions. Not just "we know what consumers want, they want us to control everything so they don't have to care" directions, also in the direction of "our products still have value even after the next internet bubble pops."
How about we allow the damn things to at least work in our home network without having to use the cloud - that's what pisses me off about the IoT things I have, everything on my end is up and running, but if "the cloud is down" it still doesn't work.
Dear Canucks, under your provincial consumer protection laws(varies by province) you are likely entitled to a full refund of the product price regardless of when you bought it. Revocation of a lifetime agreement, even when the company is bought out is considered a breach of said warranty and support agreement under the law, and you are permitted to a full refund. Remember, if refused it only costs $20-40 to file in small claims court over this, and you do not have to settle for arbitration in Canada, jumping through that hoop is not required.
So, tell us what we've won? A $300 judgment in a Canadian court against an international entity. Let's hope that 100 or more people win similar judgements so that it might attract the attention of an attorney who might start a class action injunction against said company and potentially motivate them to either: pay up, or quit doing business in the country. I don't know about Canadian laws in this area for collection of legal fees, but if the class action attorney can't collect his fees separately, I'm sure he'll eat up at least $30K getting the class action suit filed and won.
2kW continuous loss is much less than the energy that would be wasted on healthcare and funerals for people who accidentally fry themselves on plug-in charging systems. Of course, the current system has problems too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
The real unsurprising story: DOE is developing a method to efficiently transmit 50KW wirelessly - meaning they can boil a 100kg person, wirelessly, in just under 9 minutes:
Florida, in a building built in the 1960s when the theory of AC was: put in a huge, oversized chiller and adjust the temperature with heat strips - so the most efficient way to run the units is at "full cold" (or not at all, which leads to problems due to lack of ventilation.)
When I read "cheap enough to deploy" my brain replaced with "destroy" instinctively. These things will be (or should be) mass produced and used up like socks.
As for "skill to fly" on a massive program like this, they should be installing a $3 IMU+processor that mostly takes the skill out of flying it.
Do you have the possibility of going to India for awhile?
In no way am I comparing the US to other countries and their current state of opportunity or fairness... mature places like Europe have incredibly entrenched wealth/ownership much moreso than the US, emerging markets like India/China still have crushing poverty for the majority of the population like the US hasn't seen for 100+ years. This is more a statement of where we are vs where we could (should) be going.
Still, emerging markets like India also offer incredible opportunity for building wealth - if you have enough to invest/risk, you can be making 4x the gains there that you might for equivalent investments in the US today.
I'm not talking about building wealth. I'm talking about gaining perspective and adjusting one's attitude to fit the realities of life as opposed to the sense of entitlement that we westerners are born with.
That person of the family of four who wants to go to night school but 'cannot' should go live in India for a year and then we'll see if they still think that they 'cannot' do night school back wherever they come from even given the inconveniences that they face.
I consider a sense of entitlement part of the human condition, and not an altogether good one. I think that humanity as a whole needs to get stronger perspective on what they are doing to their planet and adjust their expectations of what the Earth should be giving us - this guy stood up and published a book along those lines: http://eowilsonfoundation.org/... basically what I ranted in a blog about a few years back: https://5050by2150.wordpress.c...
Still, even if we do scale back our expectations of what the Earth should be giving us, I don't think for a minute that those of us who are not "untouchable" should be grateful for our standing, or that the untouchables should be grateful to be alive as humans at all... Those who are more fortunate should share, better than they do today, with those who are less fortunate. From the perspective of an already highly fortunate westerner, the sad perspective of the last 30 years is that we have been sharing less and less, not more and more. It's an extremely complex picture, nothing one person can realistically communicate to another in its entirety, but the high level trends seem clear enough from where I stand.
We ultimately returned our 3D printer because the building air was rarely above 18C and the printer couldn't get decent adhesion between layers because the material cooled too quickly.
While we're on the topic of "fleshed out" - what about the "porn drives technology" factor behind internet (DVD, VHS, printed, etc.) transmission of photos, video, video chat, and all manner of other remote applications? If it's "a tech toy" that has porn applications, that seems to drive adoption and growth in most cases - later leading to more mainstream applications.
Who worked very hard to get there. You think being the fattest cats in america came for free?
Thousands (perhaps millions) of Americans have worked as hard, harder, and much harder than the Wal family over the last 50 years, and have much less to show for it today. Luck in timing, luck in connections, luck in starting from a good place - these are stronger determining factors for Wal level success than "worked very hard" - some hard work is usually also required, but it's not the component most highly correlated with unusual levels of success.
Do you have the possibility of going to India for awhile?
In no way am I comparing the US to other countries and their current state of opportunity or fairness... mature places like Europe have incredibly entrenched wealth/ownership much moreso than the US, emerging markets like India/China still have crushing poverty for the majority of the population like the US hasn't seen for 100+ years. This is more a statement of where we are vs where we could (should) be going.
Still, emerging markets like India also offer incredible opportunity for building wealth - if you have enough to invest/risk, you can be making 4x the gains there that you might for equivalent investments in the US today.
The problem with tax on profit is Hollywood accounting. When businesses start playing that game, some tax on revenue needs to be levied. States do this with sales tax, but the Feds mostly leave it alone.
So, think of the suffering hookers, pimps and blow dealers who aren't getting that additional business because the government is getting end-run and can't tax the hidden money.
To me, the real problem is that the money is hidden - squirreled away in private control, ready to splash out as a personal power-play whenever the urge strikes. Unlike government programs, these guys already have all the money they need to satisfy their hookers and blow appetites. What these guys do is arbitrarily splash out a big pile of cash when the urge strikes them to own some waterfront property, or a yacht, or jet - they employ a ton of people on a more or less temporary basis and then close their wallet and let everybody go looking for work again. As their numbers decline (per capita), there aren't enough of them to form a stable working economy.
If you could rely on the rich to spend their money, they wouldn't be a problem. Hell, even if they only spend 1/2 of it before they die, that's enough to keep the wheels spinning for the rest of the world. But, when they go all Steve Jobs and sit on their billions until they die, and worse yet squirrel it away out of sight, that starves the economy, depression style.
David Cameron and George Osbourne are removing welfare that WORKING people need in order to work and be independent
What is wrong with this is not that they are removing it but that working people need welfare in order to work and be independent in the first place. Paying welfare to people who are in work just allows companies to pay lower wages increasing the profits for the fat cats at the top.
Wal-Mart - family of the fattest cats from Arkansas.
Of course you can "hindsight" every choice every person ever made and point out places where their life _might_ have gone easier or better had they done the other thing.
What I dislike most about life in the USA is the extreme element of risk-reward that goes into so many life choices. Starting from an impoverished background and pursuing a medical doctor degree is a very high risk undertaking in the US, even if you have all the aptitudes for it. PreMed programs are arbitrarily difficult, they flunk out huge percentages of capable candidates just because the numbers allowed to progress up the ladder are strictly limited. Many "respected" schools are very expensive, so now they offer you loans: take out a huge debt on the chance that you get a good paying job later to pay it off. Most business has always been a matter of luck + connections - without the connections you need to be very lucky to succeed, with them you have a better chance but still can fail even if you make all the best choices (given the information available when you start.) The safer businesses (franchises, etc.) require you to be quite wealthy, and put that wealth at risk, just to start.
There is plenty of chaos in the US economy, enough that some poor people become rich and some rich people become poor, often with little connection to the "wiseness" of the choices that they have made.
You could select the stars you are spoofing by distance (if they have FTL travel, we're hosed anyway), or if you see some un-natural looking activity (stars going nova in the middle of their sequence, sudden brief flare ups like planets being converted to temporary stars) that general neighborhood might be a good one to try to hide from.
Of course, if you screw it up, you're actually signalling to them that you are there instead of hiding.
How hard was it to cross the ocean with ships suitable to carry permanent colonists? Pretty damn hard from the caveman perspective, those guys needed serious cooperation back home to build the ships, finance the voyage, etc. never mind the tech involved. Still, when they arrived, how long was it before people were pouring molten gold down their throats, dropping like flies from smallpox, etc.?
In the age of exploration, those being discovered by the explorers usually got the short end of the cultural exchange.
Slashdot Mirror
I hate to say it, but the general population doesn't really care. If they did, they wouldn't buy/use this stuff and the companies would go out of business. It's not a situation where people aren't informed, they just don't care.
Not quite, most people actually aren't informed, and if they were then more of them would care (certainly not all, but more.) It's why stories like this are important, to raise awareness and hopefully push product development in more consumer friendly directions. Not just "we know what consumers want, they want us to control everything so they don't have to care" directions, also in the direction of "our products still have value even after the next internet bubble pops."
How about we allow the damn things to at least work in our home network without having to use the cloud - that's what pisses me off about the IoT things I have, everything on my end is up and running, but if "the cloud is down" it still doesn't work.
Dear Canucks, under your provincial consumer protection laws(varies by province) you are likely entitled to a full refund of the product price regardless of when you bought it. Revocation of a lifetime agreement, even when the company is bought out is considered a breach of said warranty and support agreement under the law, and you are permitted to a full refund. Remember, if refused it only costs $20-40 to file in small claims court over this, and you do not have to settle for arbitration in Canada, jumping through that hoop is not required.
So, tell us what we've won? A $300 judgment in a Canadian court against an international entity. Let's hope that 100 or more people win similar judgements so that it might attract the attention of an attorney who might start a class action injunction against said company and potentially motivate them to either: pay up, or quit doing business in the country. I don't know about Canadian laws in this area for collection of legal fees, but if the class action attorney can't collect his fees separately, I'm sure he'll eat up at least $30K getting the class action suit filed and won.
2kW continuous loss is much less than the energy that would be wasted on healthcare and funerals for people who accidentally fry themselves on plug-in charging systems. Of course, the current system has problems too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
The real unsurprising story: DOE is developing a method to efficiently transmit 50KW wirelessly - meaning they can boil a 100kg person, wirelessly, in just under 9 minutes:
(100 x 4 x 63 / 3412 = 7.4kW to do it in an hour) https://elementsofheating.word...
Florida, in a building built in the 1960s when the theory of AC was: put in a huge, oversized chiller and adjust the temperature with heat strips - so the most efficient way to run the units is at "full cold" (or not at all, which leads to problems due to lack of ventilation.)
Yep- through the wire.
When I read "cheap enough to deploy" my brain replaced with "destroy" instinctively. These things will be (or should be) mass produced and used up like socks.
As for "skill to fly" on a massive program like this, they should be installing a $3 IMU+processor that mostly takes the skill out of flying it.
Do you have the possibility of going to India for awhile?
In no way am I comparing the US to other countries and their current state of opportunity or fairness... mature places like Europe have incredibly entrenched wealth/ownership much moreso than the US, emerging markets like India/China still have crushing poverty for the majority of the population like the US hasn't seen for 100+ years. This is more a statement of where we are vs where we could (should) be going.
Still, emerging markets like India also offer incredible opportunity for building wealth - if you have enough to invest/risk, you can be making 4x the gains there that you might for equivalent investments in the US today.
I'm not talking about building wealth. I'm talking about gaining perspective and adjusting one's attitude to fit the realities of life as opposed to the sense of entitlement that we westerners are born with.
That person of the family of four who wants to go to night school but 'cannot' should go live in India for a year and then we'll see if they still think that they 'cannot' do night school back wherever they come from even given the inconveniences that they face.
I consider a sense of entitlement part of the human condition, and not an altogether good one. I think that humanity as a whole needs to get stronger perspective on what they are doing to their planet and adjust their expectations of what the Earth should be giving us - this guy stood up and published a book along those lines: http://eowilsonfoundation.org/... basically what I ranted in a blog about a few years back: https://5050by2150.wordpress.c...
Still, even if we do scale back our expectations of what the Earth should be giving us, I don't think for a minute that those of us who are not "untouchable" should be grateful for our standing, or that the untouchables should be grateful to be alive as humans at all... Those who are more fortunate should share, better than they do today, with those who are less fortunate. From the perspective of an already highly fortunate westerner, the sad perspective of the last 30 years is that we have been sharing less and less, not more and more. It's an extremely complex picture, nothing one person can realistically communicate to another in its entirety, but the high level trends seem clear enough from where I stand.
We ultimately returned our 3D printer because the building air was rarely above 18C and the printer couldn't get decent adhesion between layers because the material cooled too quickly.
Sounds like they need an offshore shell corporation to do the hacking for them.
While we're on the topic of "fleshed out" - what about the "porn drives technology" factor behind internet (DVD, VHS, printed, etc.) transmission of photos, video, video chat, and all manner of other remote applications? If it's "a tech toy" that has porn applications, that seems to drive adoption and growth in most cases - later leading to more mainstream applications.
3D printer advocates have as much trouble getting their replies to flow as they do their printing material.
Who worked very hard to get there. You think being the fattest cats in america came for free?
Thousands (perhaps millions) of Americans have worked as hard, harder, and much harder than the Wal family over the last 50 years, and have much less to show for it today. Luck in timing, luck in connections, luck in starting from a good place - these are stronger determining factors for Wal level success than "worked very hard" - some hard work is usually also required, but it's not the component most highly correlated with unusual levels of success.
Do you have the possibility of going to India for awhile?
In no way am I comparing the US to other countries and their current state of opportunity or fairness... mature places like Europe have incredibly entrenched wealth/ownership much moreso than the US, emerging markets like India/China still have crushing poverty for the majority of the population like the US hasn't seen for 100+ years. This is more a statement of where we are vs where we could (should) be going.
Still, emerging markets like India also offer incredible opportunity for building wealth - if you have enough to invest/risk, you can be making 4x the gains there that you might for equivalent investments in the US today.
The problem with tax on profit is Hollywood accounting. When businesses start playing that game, some tax on revenue needs to be levied. States do this with sales tax, but the Feds mostly leave it alone.
So, think of the suffering hookers, pimps and blow dealers who aren't getting that additional business because the government is getting end-run and can't tax the hidden money.
To me, the real problem is that the money is hidden - squirreled away in private control, ready to splash out as a personal power-play whenever the urge strikes. Unlike government programs, these guys already have all the money they need to satisfy their hookers and blow appetites. What these guys do is arbitrarily splash out a big pile of cash when the urge strikes them to own some waterfront property, or a yacht, or jet - they employ a ton of people on a more or less temporary basis and then close their wallet and let everybody go looking for work again. As their numbers decline (per capita), there aren't enough of them to form a stable working economy.
If you could rely on the rich to spend their money, they wouldn't be a problem. Hell, even if they only spend 1/2 of it before they die, that's enough to keep the wheels spinning for the rest of the world. But, when they go all Steve Jobs and sit on their billions until they die, and worse yet squirrel it away out of sight, that starves the economy, depression style.
David Cameron and George Osbourne are removing welfare that WORKING people need in order to work and be independent
What is wrong with this is not that they are removing it but that working people need welfare in order to work and be independent in the first place. Paying welfare to people who are in work just allows companies to pay lower wages increasing the profits for the fat cats at the top.
Wal-Mart - family of the fattest cats from Arkansas.
If you think the market is anything approaching an idealistic "free," you've been drinking the kool-aid without reading the label.
Of course you can "hindsight" every choice every person ever made and point out places where their life _might_ have gone easier or better had they done the other thing.
What I dislike most about life in the USA is the extreme element of risk-reward that goes into so many life choices. Starting from an impoverished background and pursuing a medical doctor degree is a very high risk undertaking in the US, even if you have all the aptitudes for it. PreMed programs are arbitrarily difficult, they flunk out huge percentages of capable candidates just because the numbers allowed to progress up the ladder are strictly limited. Many "respected" schools are very expensive, so now they offer you loans: take out a huge debt on the chance that you get a good paying job later to pay it off. Most business has always been a matter of luck + connections - without the connections you need to be very lucky to succeed, with them you have a better chance but still can fail even if you make all the best choices (given the information available when you start.) The safer businesses (franchises, etc.) require you to be quite wealthy, and put that wealth at risk, just to start.
There is plenty of chaos in the US economy, enough that some poor people become rich and some rich people become poor, often with little connection to the "wiseness" of the choices that they have made.
Your box needs more exorcise...
You could select the stars you are spoofing by distance (if they have FTL travel, we're hosed anyway), or if you see some un-natural looking activity (stars going nova in the middle of their sequence, sudden brief flare ups like planets being converted to temporary stars) that general neighborhood might be a good one to try to hide from.
Of course, if you screw it up, you're actually signalling to them that you are there instead of hiding.
We have the technology, we have the economic/industrial capability, what we lack is the sociopolitical will to do it.
Yeah, that's a hopeful outlook.
How hard was it to cross the ocean with ships suitable to carry permanent colonists? Pretty damn hard from the caveman perspective, those guys needed serious cooperation back home to build the ships, finance the voyage, etc. never mind the tech involved. Still, when they arrived, how long was it before people were pouring molten gold down their throats, dropping like flies from smallpox, etc.?
In the age of exploration, those being discovered by the explorers usually got the short end of the cultural exchange.
We could just cloak the planet, let all the sunlight pass around us and continue on... would be kinda hard on the photosynthesis thing, tho....