You should tell that to Google, Firefox, Ubuntu, etc. Although, they don't make enterprise software, just consumer software used in enterprises.
But seriously. This rapid release BS is the worse software lifecycle scheme I've ever seen. Throwing away tried and true for new and shiny only works for kids. Microsoft is finding out the hard way why it doesn't work in the enterprise.
Historically, "he" is the gender-neutral pronoun. Gender itself comes from Latin, and in all romance languages, the masculine is used for gender-neutral or gender-ambigious contexts. It was a hard and fast rule in English until some idiots decided it wasn't PC enough and started railing on people who follow it, but at the same time provide no suitable alternative.
The cause is that the people mandating these actions are unaffected by their consequences. They don't regularly go to places normal people frequent and when they do, it is with armed escort. They are in effect, using the general populace as a shield for their activities.
They are not living above the law (they cannot, as they wrote the laws) so much as they are living above the consequences of their activities. And they don't give a rat's ass about anybody else, so long as they can continue their lifestyle, or even better it. That's the nature of the beast you're staring down.
If many of these Muslim countries didn't have the world's biggest share of the most valuable natural resource currently, radicalization would not be an issue today. This is the modern form of colonization, one that doesn't involve planting a flag and sending people to make war, but instead having the natives make war on themselves while you profit directly and indirectly off it. The important thing to understand is that the best way of exploiting somebody is by destabilizing their life, then recreating stability via a system sympathetic to your intentions. Destabilization can be done directly (Iran in the 70's, Iraq in the 00's) or by proxy (everywhere else, e.g. Egypt, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Yemen, and one can argue Israel serves that purpose as well).
Radicalization is a response to all of this meddling, and it is directed towards the West because it is the Western countries that have (historically and currently) been the most aggressive colonizers. Don't get me wrong; there are terrorists in Russia and China and other Asian countries too (Tamil Tigers, anybody?), but those countries are engaged in territorial takeover, i.e. the first method of colonization (the one that created the United States). Thus there is no need for radicalization.
I think they both matter. One is the basis of addressing the now of things. The other should be used as the basis of addressing the later of things. Addressing the now without addressing the later is irresponsible. Addressing the later without addressing the now is dangerous.
their religion actually does mandate capital punishment... unlike any other modern religion.
Biased much?
The main religious text of every Abrahamic religion promotes violence and killing. The Old Testament is still cited by fundamental Christians (see the U.S.) and Jews (see Israel) to legitimize their violent acts. It may not necessarily be violence to other religions, but it's still violence. (I don't know the other religious texts nearly as well so I can't really speak for them, but I'm certain some non-Abrahamic religions promote some form of religious violence in their text as well.)
But the mainstream Jews and Christians have moved away from the extremes of their ideology and on to more moderate viewpoints. They're still picking and choosing the passages to interpret and follow, but now they're picking the less extreme passages and interpreting them in more moderate ways. The fundamentalists in Christianity and Judiasm are marginalized, and given little to no attention (with the exceptions being the fundamental population of Christians in the U.S. and Jews in Israel, and even then, they're kept in check by equally loud or louder moderate voices).
Muslim extremism is still very much in the limelight of their religion. The extreme viewpoints are constantly in the news, constantly being talked about. Hell, the most wealthy, powerful, and famous Muslims, who often act as role models for many other Muslims, are all extremists. Look at the leaders of Saudi Arabia or Iran, who are clearly extremists. Extremism is given significant attention. There are entire political parties dedicated to extreme interpretations of the Koran. And even if they're discouraged from the extremes, Muslims are exposed to it from youth. Hell, we're all exposed to Muslim extremism from youth.
That is the difference. That is where Islam is currently at, not at the opposite end of "modern religions" but merely a few centuries behind. Islam is currently where Christianity was a few hundred years ago, and is where Judiasm was a thousand years ago. The big question is how to get everybody to reach the points of moderation that Christianity and Judiasm are at. How do you marginalize the extremists?
Denouncing the religion as bad, as you are doing, will not serve those ends. Continuing to bring to attention the violent aspects of the Muslim faith is exactly what people don't do to Christianity and Judiasm (or any other religion for that matter). Implying that it should be gone, as you are doing, is no different than a Muslim person trying to get rid of you for being non-Muslim.
In fact, I'll go a little further and say that the perspective you've taken is exactly the perspective of Muslim extremists. The only difference between you and a terrorist is you haven't quite gotten there. You're still only talking about how bad it is, rather than doing anything about it. Why? I don't know. Maybe you're suppressing that ultimate conclusion to keep your morality. Maybe you're living too comfortable a life and don't want to lose your lifestyle. Maybe you're a coward and trying to incite other people to do what you can't. Maybe it's a combination of multiple factors.
That is, of course, the solution. You can't exactly make people cowards, but you can allow them better lives, and promote less extreme versions of their ideology. You can promote the moderate aspects instead of putting the entire religion of Islam on the defensive. You can denounce government leaders or religious leaders who hold extreme viewpoints, and maybe not prop them up as allies or business partners. You can help make the extremists poor and the moderates wealthy, the extremists weak and the moderates powerful, thereby setting role models who are moderate rather than extreme. These things will help, maybe not right away, but over the course of a generation or two, things will change.
I'm not sure I get your point. How are costs going to go up with net neutrality? Your pipes are laid. If you don't lay new pipes, you're not incurring any new costs.
Net neutrality is about what goes through those pipes. As an analogy, your sewer company wants to charge Pepsi money for your piss that's from Aquafina water, and charge Coca-Cola money for your piss that's from Dasani, or limit the flow rate so that your toilet gets backed up if you drink any of those products. And what's more, your sewer company is doing this because they have their own water bottle company that they want you to use. Net neutrality just says your sewer company must accept whatever liquid waste comes out of your house equally, irrespective of the size of your sewer pipe. If the sewer company doesn't want or can't handle so much of your shit, they shouldn't have put in such large pipes out of your home in the first place (fortunately, there are regulations and building codes that manage this bit for real sewer companies and sewer systems).
And this article reads as alarmist, against net neutrality no less. It's not the most reliable of sources.
Without having been there myself, Wheeler may only have talked about considering the reclassifying, and he may or may not have said anything about exceptions to the regulations after reclassification.
It's far too early to celebrate, especially considering the unreliably biased source. I'd definitely wait and see.
You can't regulate the Internet, only the companies operating on it. The Internet is just a bunch of interconnected networks. If you create a completely separate collection of networks that's sufficiently large enough, you could also call it the Internet, say Internet 2 (oh wait, that's taken already).
I have no problems with regulations on how companies behave, especially when it comes to anti-competitive behavior. But it sounds like you do.
While I don't disagree on the HOA part (which is a completely separate and irrelevant matter to the idea that leaving shit outside your front yard is douchey), leaving props or anything jarring or glaring on your front yard is about as douchey as blasting your music through your earphones on a train or bus. While it's not illegal (in most transit systems), it's certainly inconsiderate when it isn't the accepted social norm.
I wouldn't use the word "douchey" specifically for this situation; I think the proper term is rude.
That's not true. Most national health care covers the day-to-day things, like check ups in public clinics and hospitalizations in public hospitals. They only cover a portion of visits to private institutions and I believe they don't cover things like cosmetic surgeries (like removing a mole).
There's still a place for health insurers with national health care. It's just a much smaller, less lucrative market. With national health care, the insurance companies would have to design and offer an actual product. That's the undesirable element (from the perspective of the people running the place here).
Yes, but they're mostly used by foreigners visiting the place. Which means it's possible they were occasionally proxying through one of those foreign machines. That's far more likely than North Korea actually, though it's also possible North Korean hackers went in (proxy-less) and dug around after the initial breach.
Hackers don't "get sloppy" technologically. They have scripts to prevent that. They get sloppy in the real world.
This is why we need cert pinning. I use CertPatrol on Firefox currently. Even if I can't do anything about MITM proxies, I know about it at least and adjust my surfing behavior accordingly.
Unfortunately, there's currently no way for a site to say, "hey, I just changed my cert from an old one to a new one, don't mind the difference." I have to take it on faith that the new cert is replacing an old, expiring cert (or a few months back, a SHA2 cert replacing a SHA1 cert). That, and Twitter and quite a few other sites use 50 different certs, distributed across five or six domain names. The constant pop-up gets real annoying, especially when their servers are slowly phasing to a new cert from an old one.
Due to insufficient space in Ark B, they got put into Ark B-2. Due to an unfortunate malfunction of the nagivational computer, it ended up flying directly into Golgafrincham's star.
Actually, funny thing: water and power aren't always public. In fact, they're usually private, only heavily regulated.
Roads are mostly public, but some states were so cash-strapped they actually sold sections of road to private entities.
There are a lot of things that should be public, those namely being infrastructure (roads, power, communications) and services (police, fire, medicine). The alluring thing about private is that it moves faster and usually is more efficient when building out the service or infrastructure. But when that service or infrastructure becomes critical, it then becomes incredibly inefficient. So at some point, such services and infrastructure should be taken over by government. But that can't happen or it would disincentivize the buildout entirely, so they're heavily regulated instead.
But the country is trending towards the opposite, where everything's becoming private (sometimes again), from prisons to services to infrastructure. That is a result of cronyism and a rotten political system. It's the late 1800's, early 1900's all over again. "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
That's what this country has turned into: a bunch of cowards. And worse, they're the special bunch of cowards who are jealous of the people who stick their necks out and try to chop it off at first chance.
Look at HBO, Cinemax, Showtime, Starz, etc. That's the unbundling model, and even those channels are "bundling" by offering multiple movie channels. Ad-supported channels may cost less per channel after unbundling, but they'll quickly add up. Meanwhile, the price of basic cable won't budge and you'll end up paying more.
It's like DLC vs expansion pack. You buy the game, and then get nickled and dimed for every little additional item or feature. And the more popular content will be more expensive than the less popular content.
What you want is a smarter cable box that tracks the channels you mostly watch and prioritizes them, not a change in service that gives the cable company more ways to bleed you of money.
Well, yes. You don't expect companies to start creating "products" that make them less money, do you?
Even if there are cost savings for the cable company in the long run, those savings only return to the consumer via inflation by not raising prices. They're certainly not going to lower rates, especially when there's little to no competition.
All of their hardware sucks. Largely because the software in their hardware sucks. They're using Android, fine, but it's a locked-down version of Android customized to exclusively use their own store (I believe you can get Google Play back, but it takes work). Which is them giving both the user and Google a big "fuck you."
And then they're trying to break into a saturated market with big name competitors. What's the killer feature? Where's the value added? What aspect sufficiently differentiates them from their competitors? The Amazon name isn't known for phones and won't carry the product. Their shaft of the customers by tying the phone to their own app store doesn't help. Their help system? Few enough people want to admit they need help, much less have the foresight to improve the experience. And Android is so easy to use, who really needs that much help anyway, especially help they can't get from say, their kids or their friends?
The rest of Amazon's hardware sucks too. They're copies of other products that might visually be nice, but lack usability sense. Google's USB fob can go anywhere. Amazon can only go where Amazon wants you to go. How can that even compete?
And then there's the other stuff that's not even worth mentioning. Like the speaker. What is that even for? Listening to music from Amazon only? Where's the direction? Where's the strategy? It's like they're throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks. Except said wall is the glass back of an elaborate toilet that also is a waterfall.
Actually, I know what it is. They had so much success with the Kindle, they had no idea what made the Kindle successful: they already had the dominant online book store and they were the first to market. Of course it would be successful. But they don't dominate anything else, and they're late to the game everywhere. How can they expect the same success?
It's not going to. At least not likely. Yellowstone is a hotspot caused by the subducting Farallon plate. If anything's going to cause Yellowstone to blow big, it's probably an increase in the rate the remnants of the Farallon plate subduct, namely Juan de Fuca, Explorer, and Gorda plates. Or if the Pacific plate starts subducting under the North America plate.
Fracking (to our knowledge) lubricates old fault lines, weakening or outright breaking the structures that keep them from being active. That won't cause volcanoes to blow even if there were any in the area. It might cause the location of any existing volcano to shift unpredictably, but it's a good thing there aren't any volcanoes in the area.
You forgot one thing though. The stresses could have been otherwise relieved along active fault lines. Tectonic stress isn't a point stress. It's not like a volcano that blows when enough stress builds up under it. There's no local buildup that then eventually causes an earthquake after long enough. It's more like a circuit, a whole system where stress is electricity that takes the path of least resistance. How large the system is depends on the geology of the particular area. Irrespective, the system absorbs the stress as a whole; stress propogates through the entire system, and the point of release is the weakest location in that system. If it's easier to release at an active fault (which it usually is), then it would be released there. Maybe in the active fault, it would be released there after a longer period of buildup, and/or it might be released over a larger area.
But now, all of a sudden, they opened up inactive faults. Inactive faults happen for multiple reasons some of which you've stated. If the inactive fault is inactive despite stresses building up under it, that means it stopped being the weakest point. If fracking is activating it, it means fracking is causing a strong configuration to turn into a weak one. It is weakening what's holding the fault in place. And in addition, the reactivated fault line causes all sorts of other unpredictable behavior in the area. Related fault lines that were once thought to be dormant could suddenly become active. Unrelated fault lines that were just strong enough not to be the weak point could suddenly become just weak enough to become the weak point. Fault lines we didn't know about previously could suddenly appear. Hell, this could trigger (however unlikely), an eventual plate split like what's happening in East Africa.
All this in and of itself isn't bad, at least not on human timescales. Continental earthquakes do happen, and they are usually fairly weak. But it does mean the location of where big earthquakes will happen become less predictable. And that's where the problem lies. Most of Cali is built to withstand upwards of a certain magnitude, say 6.0 (as an example; I'm pulling the number out of my ass). It's expected that Cali will be hit with a 6.0 periodically. People prepare for that sort of thing. Most of the midwest (or Ohio in this case) is not built to withstand a 6.0. It's not expected to experience a 6.0 earthquake. By reactivating an inactive fault line (via weakening), now Ohio or maybe some other part of the midwest can expect a 6.0 earthquake. Why? Because as you say, while that reactivated fault line is moving, it's great. But when it suddenly stops again, and for a long time, then the pressure begins to build. And since the previously inactive fault is now the weakest point in the system, that could very well be where the built-up pressure will be released, this time not so gently..
That's the cost of reactivating inactive fault lines.
At some point, wealthy people stopped flying commercial aircraft and start flying private aircraft. They don't want their trip cut down to even one hour from six if they had to suffer the one hour with a bunch of strangers (and worse, go through TSA).
That and I heard the ride itself was uncomfortable, the cabin and seats being cramped and the ride not being particularly smooth or quiet. It turned the purpose of the supersonic flight from a utility to a novelty, which could be better satisfied with flights on military equipment instead.
The problem with high speed travel is that the higher the speed, the costlier the travel in terms of energy. The curve is exponential, so that at some point, even a small increase in speed requires a significant amount of energy to achieve. Without a source of energy exponentially cheaper than what already exists (like cold fusion), that sweet spot of price to performance is never going to move.
Oh, and the transition from vehicle to plane was only possible because the friction of air is much less than that of a solid like dirt, asphalt, or even steel. So another possible way to significantly speed up travel would be to move to from air to a vacuum. Which is to say, the next leap in transportation, should it happen, would probably look like some form of Musk's vacuum tube.
Actually, there's another counter for Pascal's Wager. If Pascal's god found out that you only believed in him for the purposes of beating the system, then you still might get sent to hell.
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You should tell that to Google, Firefox, Ubuntu, etc. Although, they don't make enterprise software, just consumer software used in enterprises.
But seriously. This rapid release BS is the worse software lifecycle scheme I've ever seen. Throwing away tried and true for new and shiny only works for kids. Microsoft is finding out the hard way why it doesn't work in the enterprise.
That's a lot of post-install work to go from zero to usable. Couldn't they have just bundled all that for us in one package and call it Windows 8.2?
Historically, "he" is the gender-neutral pronoun. Gender itself comes from Latin, and in all romance languages, the masculine is used for gender-neutral or gender-ambigious contexts. It was a hard and fast rule in English until some idiots decided it wasn't PC enough and started railing on people who follow it, but at the same time provide no suitable alternative.
The cause is that the people mandating these actions are unaffected by their consequences. They don't regularly go to places normal people frequent and when they do, it is with armed escort. They are in effect, using the general populace as a shield for their activities.
They are not living above the law (they cannot, as they wrote the laws) so much as they are living above the consequences of their activities. And they don't give a rat's ass about anybody else, so long as they can continue their lifestyle, or even better it. That's the nature of the beast you're staring down.
If many of these Muslim countries didn't have the world's biggest share of the most valuable natural resource currently, radicalization would not be an issue today. This is the modern form of colonization, one that doesn't involve planting a flag and sending people to make war, but instead having the natives make war on themselves while you profit directly and indirectly off it. The important thing to understand is that the best way of exploiting somebody is by destabilizing their life, then recreating stability via a system sympathetic to your intentions. Destabilization can be done directly (Iran in the 70's, Iraq in the 00's) or by proxy (everywhere else, e.g. Egypt, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Yemen, and one can argue Israel serves that purpose as well).
Radicalization is a response to all of this meddling, and it is directed towards the West because it is the Western countries that have (historically and currently) been the most aggressive colonizers. Don't get me wrong; there are terrorists in Russia and China and other Asian countries too (Tamil Tigers, anybody?), but those countries are engaged in territorial takeover, i.e. the first method of colonization (the one that created the United States). Thus there is no need for radicalization.
I think they both matter. One is the basis of addressing the now of things. The other should be used as the basis of addressing the later of things. Addressing the now without addressing the later is irresponsible. Addressing the later without addressing the now is dangerous.
their religion actually does mandate capital punishment ... unlike any other modern religion.
Biased much?
The main religious text of every Abrahamic religion promotes violence and killing. The Old Testament is still cited by fundamental Christians (see the U.S.) and Jews (see Israel) to legitimize their violent acts. It may not necessarily be violence to other religions, but it's still violence. (I don't know the other religious texts nearly as well so I can't really speak for them, but I'm certain some non-Abrahamic religions promote some form of religious violence in their text as well.)
But the mainstream Jews and Christians have moved away from the extremes of their ideology and on to more moderate viewpoints. They're still picking and choosing the passages to interpret and follow, but now they're picking the less extreme passages and interpreting them in more moderate ways. The fundamentalists in Christianity and Judiasm are marginalized, and given little to no attention (with the exceptions being the fundamental population of Christians in the U.S. and Jews in Israel, and even then, they're kept in check by equally loud or louder moderate voices).
Muslim extremism is still very much in the limelight of their religion. The extreme viewpoints are constantly in the news, constantly being talked about. Hell, the most wealthy, powerful, and famous Muslims, who often act as role models for many other Muslims, are all extremists. Look at the leaders of Saudi Arabia or Iran, who are clearly extremists. Extremism is given significant attention. There are entire political parties dedicated to extreme interpretations of the Koran. And even if they're discouraged from the extremes, Muslims are exposed to it from youth. Hell, we're all exposed to Muslim extremism from youth.
That is the difference. That is where Islam is currently at, not at the opposite end of "modern religions" but merely a few centuries behind. Islam is currently where Christianity was a few hundred years ago, and is where Judiasm was a thousand years ago. The big question is how to get everybody to reach the points of moderation that Christianity and Judiasm are at. How do you marginalize the extremists?
Denouncing the religion as bad, as you are doing, will not serve those ends. Continuing to bring to attention the violent aspects of the Muslim faith is exactly what people don't do to Christianity and Judiasm (or any other religion for that matter). Implying that it should be gone, as you are doing, is no different than a Muslim person trying to get rid of you for being non-Muslim.
In fact, I'll go a little further and say that the perspective you've taken is exactly the perspective of Muslim extremists. The only difference between you and a terrorist is you haven't quite gotten there. You're still only talking about how bad it is, rather than doing anything about it. Why? I don't know. Maybe you're suppressing that ultimate conclusion to keep your morality. Maybe you're living too comfortable a life and don't want to lose your lifestyle. Maybe you're a coward and trying to incite other people to do what you can't. Maybe it's a combination of multiple factors.
That is, of course, the solution. You can't exactly make people cowards, but you can allow them better lives, and promote less extreme versions of their ideology. You can promote the moderate aspects instead of putting the entire religion of Islam on the defensive. You can denounce government leaders or religious leaders who hold extreme viewpoints, and maybe not prop them up as allies or business partners. You can help make the extremists poor and the moderates wealthy, the extremists weak and the moderates powerful, thereby setting role models who are moderate rather than extreme. These things will help, maybe not right away, but over the course of a generation or two, things will change.
What you're saying and trying to imply will not.
I'll only accept it as evidence if it shows Neil shot first.
I'm not sure I get your point. How are costs going to go up with net neutrality? Your pipes are laid. If you don't lay new pipes, you're not incurring any new costs.
Net neutrality is about what goes through those pipes. As an analogy, your sewer company wants to charge Pepsi money for your piss that's from Aquafina water, and charge Coca-Cola money for your piss that's from Dasani, or limit the flow rate so that your toilet gets backed up if you drink any of those products. And what's more, your sewer company is doing this because they have their own water bottle company that they want you to use. Net neutrality just says your sewer company must accept whatever liquid waste comes out of your house equally, irrespective of the size of your sewer pipe. If the sewer company doesn't want or can't handle so much of your shit, they shouldn't have put in such large pipes out of your home in the first place (fortunately, there are regulations and building codes that manage this bit for real sewer companies and sewer systems).
And this article reads as alarmist, against net neutrality no less. It's not the most reliable of sources.
Without having been there myself, Wheeler may only have talked about considering the reclassifying, and he may or may not have said anything about exceptions to the regulations after reclassification.
It's far too early to celebrate, especially considering the unreliably biased source. I'd definitely wait and see.
You can't regulate the Internet, only the companies operating on it. The Internet is just a bunch of interconnected networks. If you create a completely separate collection of networks that's sufficiently large enough, you could also call it the Internet, say Internet 2 (oh wait, that's taken already).
I have no problems with regulations on how companies behave, especially when it comes to anti-competitive behavior. But it sounds like you do.
While I don't disagree on the HOA part (which is a completely separate and irrelevant matter to the idea that leaving shit outside your front yard is douchey), leaving props or anything jarring or glaring on your front yard is about as douchey as blasting your music through your earphones on a train or bus. While it's not illegal (in most transit systems), it's certainly inconsiderate when it isn't the accepted social norm.
I wouldn't use the word "douchey" specifically for this situation; I think the proper term is rude.
That's not true. Most national health care covers the day-to-day things, like check ups in public clinics and hospitalizations in public hospitals. They only cover a portion of visits to private institutions and I believe they don't cover things like cosmetic surgeries (like removing a mole).
There's still a place for health insurers with national health care. It's just a much smaller, less lucrative market. With national health care, the insurance companies would have to design and offer an actual product. That's the undesirable element (from the perspective of the people running the place here).
Yes, but they're mostly used by foreigners visiting the place. Which means it's possible they were occasionally proxying through one of those foreign machines. That's far more likely than North Korea actually, though it's also possible North Korean hackers went in (proxy-less) and dug around after the initial breach.
Hackers don't "get sloppy" technologically. They have scripts to prevent that. They get sloppy in the real world.
This is why we need cert pinning. I use CertPatrol on Firefox currently. Even if I can't do anything about MITM proxies, I know about it at least and adjust my surfing behavior accordingly.
Unfortunately, there's currently no way for a site to say, "hey, I just changed my cert from an old one to a new one, don't mind the difference." I have to take it on faith that the new cert is replacing an old, expiring cert (or a few months back, a SHA2 cert replacing a SHA1 cert). That, and Twitter and quite a few other sites use 50 different certs, distributed across five or six domain names. The constant pop-up gets real annoying, especially when their servers are slowly phasing to a new cert from an old one.
It's published in the Journal of Astrobiology. That's the field that thinks they'll find star-devouring organisms.
Due to insufficient space in Ark B, they got put into Ark B-2. Due to an unfortunate malfunction of the nagivational computer, it ended up flying directly into Golgafrincham's star.
Actually, funny thing: water and power aren't always public. In fact, they're usually private, only heavily regulated.
Roads are mostly public, but some states were so cash-strapped they actually sold sections of road to private entities.
There are a lot of things that should be public, those namely being infrastructure (roads, power, communications) and services (police, fire, medicine). The alluring thing about private is that it moves faster and usually is more efficient when building out the service or infrastructure. But when that service or infrastructure becomes critical, it then becomes incredibly inefficient. So at some point, such services and infrastructure should be taken over by government. But that can't happen or it would disincentivize the buildout entirely, so they're heavily regulated instead.
But the country is trending towards the opposite, where everything's becoming private (sometimes again), from prisons to services to infrastructure. That is a result of cronyism and a rotten political system. It's the late 1800's, early 1900's all over again. "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
That's what this country has turned into: a bunch of cowards. And worse, they're the special bunch of cowards who are jealous of the people who stick their necks out and try to chop it off at first chance.
Look at HBO, Cinemax, Showtime, Starz, etc. That's the unbundling model, and even those channels are "bundling" by offering multiple movie channels. Ad-supported channels may cost less per channel after unbundling, but they'll quickly add up. Meanwhile, the price of basic cable won't budge and you'll end up paying more.
It's like DLC vs expansion pack. You buy the game, and then get nickled and dimed for every little additional item or feature. And the more popular content will be more expensive than the less popular content.
What you want is a smarter cable box that tracks the channels you mostly watch and prioritizes them, not a change in service that gives the cable company more ways to bleed you of money.
Well, yes. You don't expect companies to start creating "products" that make them less money, do you?
Even if there are cost savings for the cable company in the long run, those savings only return to the consumer via inflation by not raising prices. They're certainly not going to lower rates, especially when there's little to no competition.
All of their hardware sucks. Largely because the software in their hardware sucks. They're using Android, fine, but it's a locked-down version of Android customized to exclusively use their own store (I believe you can get Google Play back, but it takes work). Which is them giving both the user and Google a big "fuck you."
And then they're trying to break into a saturated market with big name competitors. What's the killer feature? Where's the value added? What aspect sufficiently differentiates them from their competitors? The Amazon name isn't known for phones and won't carry the product. Their shaft of the customers by tying the phone to their own app store doesn't help. Their help system? Few enough people want to admit they need help, much less have the foresight to improve the experience. And Android is so easy to use, who really needs that much help anyway, especially help they can't get from say, their kids or their friends?
The rest of Amazon's hardware sucks too. They're copies of other products that might visually be nice, but lack usability sense. Google's USB fob can go anywhere. Amazon can only go where Amazon wants you to go. How can that even compete?
And then there's the other stuff that's not even worth mentioning. Like the speaker. What is that even for? Listening to music from Amazon only? Where's the direction? Where's the strategy? It's like they're throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks. Except said wall is the glass back of an elaborate toilet that also is a waterfall.
Actually, I know what it is. They had so much success with the Kindle, they had no idea what made the Kindle successful: they already had the dominant online book store and they were the first to market. Of course it would be successful. But they don't dominate anything else, and they're late to the game everywhere. How can they expect the same success?
It's not going to. At least not likely. Yellowstone is a hotspot caused by the subducting Farallon plate. If anything's going to cause Yellowstone to blow big, it's probably an increase in the rate the remnants of the Farallon plate subduct, namely Juan de Fuca, Explorer, and Gorda plates. Or if the Pacific plate starts subducting under the North America plate.
Fracking (to our knowledge) lubricates old fault lines, weakening or outright breaking the structures that keep them from being active. That won't cause volcanoes to blow even if there were any in the area. It might cause the location of any existing volcano to shift unpredictably, but it's a good thing there aren't any volcanoes in the area.
You forgot one thing though. The stresses could have been otherwise relieved along active fault lines. Tectonic stress isn't a point stress. It's not like a volcano that blows when enough stress builds up under it. There's no local buildup that then eventually causes an earthquake after long enough. It's more like a circuit, a whole system where stress is electricity that takes the path of least resistance. How large the system is depends on the geology of the particular area. Irrespective, the system absorbs the stress as a whole; stress propogates through the entire system, and the point of release is the weakest location in that system. If it's easier to release at an active fault (which it usually is), then it would be released there. Maybe in the active fault, it would be released there after a longer period of buildup, and/or it might be released over a larger area.
But now, all of a sudden, they opened up inactive faults. Inactive faults happen for multiple reasons some of which you've stated. If the inactive fault is inactive despite stresses building up under it, that means it stopped being the weakest point. If fracking is activating it, it means fracking is causing a strong configuration to turn into a weak one. It is weakening what's holding the fault in place. And in addition, the reactivated fault line causes all sorts of other unpredictable behavior in the area. Related fault lines that were once thought to be dormant could suddenly become active. Unrelated fault lines that were just strong enough not to be the weak point could suddenly become just weak enough to become the weak point. Fault lines we didn't know about previously could suddenly appear. Hell, this could trigger (however unlikely), an eventual plate split like what's happening in East Africa.
All this in and of itself isn't bad, at least not on human timescales. Continental earthquakes do happen, and they are usually fairly weak. But it does mean the location of where big earthquakes will happen become less predictable. And that's where the problem lies. Most of Cali is built to withstand upwards of a certain magnitude, say 6.0 (as an example; I'm pulling the number out of my ass). It's expected that Cali will be hit with a 6.0 periodically. People prepare for that sort of thing. Most of the midwest (or Ohio in this case) is not built to withstand a 6.0. It's not expected to experience a 6.0 earthquake. By reactivating an inactive fault line (via weakening), now Ohio or maybe some other part of the midwest can expect a 6.0 earthquake. Why? Because as you say, while that reactivated fault line is moving, it's great. But when it suddenly stops again, and for a long time, then the pressure begins to build. And since the previously inactive fault is now the weakest point in the system, that could very well be where the built-up pressure will be released, this time not so gently..
That's the cost of reactivating inactive fault lines.
At some point, wealthy people stopped flying commercial aircraft and start flying private aircraft. They don't want their trip cut down to even one hour from six if they had to suffer the one hour with a bunch of strangers (and worse, go through TSA).
That and I heard the ride itself was uncomfortable, the cabin and seats being cramped and the ride not being particularly smooth or quiet. It turned the purpose of the supersonic flight from a utility to a novelty, which could be better satisfied with flights on military equipment instead.
The problem with high speed travel is that the higher the speed, the costlier the travel in terms of energy. The curve is exponential, so that at some point, even a small increase in speed requires a significant amount of energy to achieve. Without a source of energy exponentially cheaper than what already exists (like cold fusion), that sweet spot of price to performance is never going to move.
Oh, and the transition from vehicle to plane was only possible because the friction of air is much less than that of a solid like dirt, asphalt, or even steel. So another possible way to significantly speed up travel would be to move to from air to a vacuum. Which is to say, the next leap in transportation, should it happen, would probably look like some form of Musk's vacuum tube.
Actually, there's another counter for Pascal's Wager. If Pascal's god found out that you only believed in him for the purposes of beating the system, then you still might get sent to hell.