Misleading nonsense. For one thing, not "almost every other state" requires photo ID. In fact, 33 of 50 states do not require photo ID.
Of the 17 states which do require photo ID, 59% of them (10 states; Alabama, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Lousiana, Mississippi, South Dakota, Tennessee,Texas) voted Republican in the last election and 41% of them (seven states; Hawaii, Florida, Michigan, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Virginia, Wisconsin) voted Democrat.
Of the 24 states that voted Republican in the last election, 42% required photo ID. Of the 27 which voted Democrat in the last election (counting DC, which technically isn't a state), just 26% required photo ID.
Seven of the 10 Republican photo ID states (70%) give no provision for casting a provisional vote or signing an affadavit if you lack photo ID. Four of the seven Democrat photo ID states (57%) do the same.
In other words, this is clearly and primarily a Republican thing. If you are in a Republican-leaning state, you are much more likely to need photo ID. And supposedly "free" photo ID (which most photo ID states DON'T provide) isn't much use if you're poor and yet somehow have to take time off work and jump through hoops obtaining documentation to get it.
And there has never been any demonstration that they do anything to counteract voter fraud, because it is has been proven to be miniscule for in-person voting anyway. However, absentee voter fraud is known to be a much broader problem in the real world, and yet these same states which supposedly believe so strongly in the sanctity of the vote that they must protect themselves by requiring photo ID are largely doing nothing at all about the actual, real problem of absentee ballot fraud. (Why is that, you ask? Well, it's because absentee voter fraud -- like absentee votes in general -- typically favors the Republicans.)
This has nothing to do with the sanctity of the vote, and everything to do with disenfranchising poor, minority voters -- who, not coincidentally, are most likely to vote with the Democrats.
Oh, and as for having Carson polling in second place, the chances of his being nominated are nil, just like the moron currently polling in first place. Here's Electoral-Vote.com's summary of him:
"Carson is not a viable candidate because he is running against Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) for the same slice of the electorate. Carson has never run for public office before. Cruz is an extremely smart guy (with degrees from Princeton and Harvard) who defeated the entire Texas Republican establishment in his longshot 2012 Senate primary race against the sitting lieutenant governor of Texas. Cruz has also raised more money than anyone else in the presidential campaign except Jeb Bush. He is also very well organized in the South, which will play a huge role on Super Tuesday (March 1). Sooner or later, Carson's supporters will realize that Cruz stands for the same things Carson does, with the added bonus of being nominatable and possibly even electable (not likely, but a lot more chance than Carson). We are still in the love-fest stage of the campaign but that will be over long before the voting starts."
The same site also pointed out recently that one of Carson's few advantages for Republicans is the fact that his presence in the list allows racists to pretend they're not racist. You know, the very same thing you just did.
Mine, for example. My Sony Xperia Z2 shipped with KitKat, got updated to Lollipop, and will be getting Marshmallow as well. That's not "a couple of point-release upgrades", that's at least two major upgrades (and this on a phone which is now 18 months old.)
And the original Xperia Z started on Jelly Bean and got KitKat *and* Lollipop, so two major releases seems to be par for the course. (In total, the Z got the 4.1.2 it shipped with, then 4.2.2, 4.3, 4.4.2, 4.4.4 and 5.0.2, and I believe it will also be getting 5.1.1. That's six updates, two of them major.) And I've seen similar from my many other Android devices over the years, around half of which weren't even flagship products.
Oh, and you know how many carrier updates I've gotten? None. On my devices which are not Wi-Fi only, I have gotten every update straight from the manufacturer. You know why? Because I had the common-sense to buy unlocked phones, not buy them from the carrier in the false hope of somehow getting free hardware (while actually paying over the odds for it). If you're stupid enough to buy phones from your carrier and pay far more over the life of your contract than just buying unlocked, then frankly you deserve what you get.
Yes, fragmentation is a problem for Android. No, it is not only Google Nexus devices that get major updates, your misleading title to the contrary. Every non-Nexus device I've owned from flagship phones to entry-level kids tablets has gotten at *least* one major update, and several have gotten at least two.
And that's direct from the manufacturer. Unlike Apple fans, I can count on third-parties ensuring that even my oldest devices still get updates. My oldest devices are an Asus Transformer TF101 (early 2011) and Samsung Galaxy Ace (also early 2011). The Transformer has been brought all the way up to fro Honeycomb to Lollipop by third parties, and even the Galaxy Ace has been brought up from Froyo to KitKat.
That's four major releases so far for the tablet, and five in total for the phone. How many iOS devices have gotten five major updates?
Yes, Google needs to get operating system updates in check and take it away from the manufacturers and carriers' responsibility, but the situation is nowhere near as dire as you make it out to be.
And Comcast doesn't even carry it at all. Apparently a bunch of shopping and religious channels that are willing to pay them a pittance are worth more than something even slightly educational.
Which doesn't even remotely change the fact that there is an added cost. Your argument is simply that you can't *remove* the part again to get the cost back -- to which I say that you're looking at the situation back to front. The features add cost; that cost should be borne solely by those who want the features. What you *meant* to say was that it would have been more expensive to add the feature to those cars where customers wanted it, rather than adding it to all of them -- and that's the correct way to say it because it retains the point that the cost should be borne by those who want the feature (ie. the Sirius users, or Sirius itself, in the case of satellite radio. And likewise for OnStar.)
Untrue. Plenty of people want it, but it isn't offered because the manufacturer puts its own interests first. (And its own interests are hooking the gullible into providing an ongoing revenue stream, and having the rest of us pay for that too, so as to avoid having to stock two different options.)
The only reason the Nissan Versa doesn't have those options is because it is being aimed at the entry-level market where price is the overriding criterion for most buyers. Here, it is in the manufacturer's interest not to include those options because they won't be used anyway (so there's no ongoing revenue stream potential) and if they drop the options, they increase their more slender profit margin on a base model.
Your example has nothing to do with what customers *want*, and everything to do with manufacturer self-interest.
Well, sure -- that's the only annoyance if you ignore the fact that you're being forced to pay to subsidize a feature you will never EVER use. I know for a fact I will never pay one cent to Sirius, because I'm not paying for a service which still rams commercials and paid product placements down my throat. However, I think we can both agree that Sirius, not being a charity, is most certainly not covering the entire added cost of the satellite radio-specific components that were added to the bill of materials for my new car and every other one in the natio -- I am, and you are too. We're not Sirius subscribers and never will be, but we're both effectively forced to pay them and their suppliers a lump sum every time we buy a new car.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what really grinds my gears.
One only needs to watch the drek on the National Geographic channel -- an endless parade of shockumentaries and "reality" TV -- to see the lowest common denominator at which Rupert Murdoch is aiming. That, ladies and gentlemen, is what we can also expect as the future of National Geographic Magazine. Loads of articles intended to shock, articles on the latest travels of the celebrities du jour, plenty of paid product placements, and precisely no actual science.
Mourn for National Geographic magazine, ladies and gents, because it just died and the corpse will now be reanimated.
Choosing your own color and options is still perfectly feasible. Choosing a car without the potential of a built-in ongoing revenue stream, sadly, is not. And that goes for both OnStar *and* Sirius, both of which I would personally prefer not to have in my next vehicle -- but short of choosing an awful econobox that I dislike in every way, forgoing those unwanted add-ons simply isn't possible any more.
...which could be used to prevent the same story from appearing on Slashdot FIVE FREAKING TIMES with a few word changes to get it past the moderators.
Seriously, it says it right there in the summary: This is "very similar to the random-sample-voting algorithm that I've advocated as a way to stop vote manipulation on Digg, how to handle abuse reports in a scalable way on Twitter and on Facebook, and how to identify the best ideas submitted to the White House's "We The People" petition site".
And by "very similar", he means "basically the same". Enough, already!
It's a good thing for users who don't need more ports, because it's less to go wrong and less to pay for.
You mean it *could* have been a good thing, but it isn't.
Not because there's less to go wrong, because from the non-power user's perspective there is no win there. Either the extra port fails silently (and they don't care because nothing is plugged into it), the port they're using fails (as it could have done on a single-port design like this) and they have a working port or ports that they can switch to, or the underlying hardware dies and all ports stop working simultaneously (which could also have happened on a single-port design.)
From the end user's perspective, there is no greater likelihood of failure with multiple ports, but there's a greater likelihood of being able to work around that failure. There is no net win for the single-port design, and a small net win for the multi-port design.
And so we come to your only other point here: Price. And yes, this single-port design could have saved the end user money. It's doubtful that the extra port hardware and perhaps a switch to a chipset capable of acting as a hub or switch would have saved more than a few dollars off the bill of materials. Most likely it would have saved less.
But the fact of the matter is that from the consumer's perspective, it has saved them nothing at all. This router, as it is right now, is extremely overpriced for the functionality it provides. It's demonstrably slower and has worse Wi-Fi range than its competitors, you can plug less into it, and you can do next to nothing except standard Wi-Fi with it so far -- and Google has shown no inclination yet to reveal its plans. So for the time being, you're paying far more than a typical entry-level, consumer-grade router, but you're not getting anything more than you would have from one with the debatable exception of a slightly prettier box.
Right now, this is a product with no reason for its existence. It's the Google Glass of SOHO routers, and unless Google announces a very compelling reason for its existence soon, I doubt we'll see it last even as long as Google Glass did.
Chances are, your smartphone uses a Sony sensor unless it's a Samsung phone. They hold the bulk of the image sensor market both in smartphones and standalone cameras, and have done for years.
There are confirmed reports for the latest 4 snooping updates for Win7/8 of this
If this is true, it's class-action time and count me in. I paid full retail for multiple copies of Win7, and did not do so to be spied on. Citation, please?
They quote a 1.25mm sensor pitch on their Kickstarter page, so that's 20.32 sensels per inch, to be more precise. Their 0.1mm figure (if you ignore that they themselves suggest it to be an approximation) translates to 254 dpi.
They list an active area of 9 x 5.1 inches, which is similar to that of the Wacom Intuos Pen and Touch Medium (8.5 x 5.3 inches). Wacom claim an order of magnitude higher resolution (2540 lpi) with a higher read speed (125Hz full-resolution for Sensel vs. 133pps for Wacom).
It seems that the only area where this bests Wacom is in pressure sensitivity (1,024 levels for Wacom vs. 4,096 levels for Sensel), but as you note, nobody is going to come close to their 11lb maximum pressure level in real-world use -- more likely, just a tenth of that. Hence most of their 4,096 levels will go unused, and in the real world likely Wacom will best them for pressure sensitivity as well.
What, precisely, is the reason for spending US$250 to maybe, possibly get one of these in a year when you can pick up the Intuos Pen & Touch Medium today for just US$170? I'm failing to see one, personally.
I said "in any meaningful way". Sure, there are spikes that return to normalcy immediately afterwards, but as you can see in the graph below (corrected to 2005 dollar equivalents) US military spending has been flat or slightly rising ever since the Korean War ended. Save for two brief periods under Carter and Clinton, there has been no noticeable reduction in our military spending in the last 60 years, and our spending for the last ten years isn't far off the peak set (very briefly) during World War II.
Our military spending is absolutely insane. Please don't expect to tug at my heartstrings prattling on about the "considerable pressure" placed on our military when we spend a far far greater fraction of our GDP on the military than anywhere that isn't either a crackpot dictatorship or an oil-rich state that's terrified a neighbor will decide to come in and steal their oil.
Somehow, other first-world nations like the UK, Canada, Australia, Italy, France, Germany, Japan and many others all manage to make do on 1/3 to 1/2 our spending as a fraction of their own GDP. Our spending on the military is absolutely obscene -- economies of scale due to our population and the fact that we're isolated from any countries that might wish to do us harm suggest that all else being equal, we should be spending *less* for the same level of safety not two to three times *more* than any comparable nation. Especially since the US being the world's police force and a defender of good hasn't been true for decades -- we're content to sit by and see others wronged so long as we don't lose any money from it.
More to the point, they're not terribly interesting to look at, don't give a great perception of speed, and there's zero risk since the pilot isn't actually *in* the thing. If you want an idea of the total global audience for this league, look at the global audience for retro video gaming. Sure, there is a tiny subset of people who could spend hours watching someone try to better their top score on Centipede or Pac Man, but by and large the greater public couldn't give a monkey's about it.
America spends over $200B/yr on manned military aviation. Next generation drones could eliminate most of that.
Yeah, not so much. When have you ever known military spending to go down in any meaningful way? Next-gen drones will doubtless be more expensive for the taxpayer than current-gen tech, just because. (Sure, we might need to buy a lot more of them to ensure we keep the bill growing, but you can be assured we'll do it.)
The only monetary advantage will be for the arms companies, lobbyists, and those taking their kickbacks, all of whom will have an even larger profit pool in which to swim. There's no way the average taxpayer won't continue to get shafted, though. The US leads the world in military spending (US$609.9 billion, or US$1,891 per capita) as of 2014, close to triple the nearest country (China, with US$216.4 billion) and there's no sign of that changing.
Sure, in the last decade our spending has decreased a tiny fraction, but only by a paltry 0.4%. Despite not being in any actual wars right now (the arm-waving "war on terror" doesn't count), we're spending more than we were pre-9/11 *or* during the Cold War.
Hong Kong has some of the most affordable, readily-available taxi service anywhere. (I'm not personally aware of better in any major, first-world city.) Your point is invalid...
Now put said cameraphone goof on the sidewalk right outside your house. He can probably see in the windows better from street level than he can from a couple hundred feet up anyway, so why aren't you smacking the phone out of his hand?
Oh, right. Because you take photos on the sidewalk too, so you don't want to lose the right to shoot from that piece of public property, just the area of (potentially) public airspace that the media told you to be scared of, correct?
As for whether or not the property owner has a right to prevent access to airspace above ~83 feet AGL, that has not been confirmed nor tested. We know that he definitely doesn't have rights beyond 500 feet AGL, but the R/C operator is not allowed to fly above 400 feet AGL, so that's neither here nor there. What we do know, though, is that it is illegal to interfere with the operation of any aircraft, and shooting down a quadcopter certainly counts.
You could always have bought less stuff and paid more for it to support homegrown. (In fact, chances are that for many of the non-electronic products you need, you still can do so.)
However, the chances are as high or higher that you choose not to do so, as do most people. Like it or not, you *are* almost certainly a part of this problem.
Slashdot Mirror
Misleading nonsense. For one thing, not "almost every other state" requires photo ID. In fact, 33 of 50 states do not require photo ID.
Of the 17 states which do require photo ID, 59% of them (10 states; Alabama, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Lousiana, Mississippi, South Dakota, Tennessee,Texas) voted Republican in the last election and 41% of them (seven states; Hawaii, Florida, Michigan, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Virginia, Wisconsin) voted Democrat.
Of the 24 states that voted Republican in the last election, 42% required photo ID. Of the 27 which voted Democrat in the last election (counting DC, which technically isn't a state), just 26% required photo ID.
Seven of the 10 Republican photo ID states (70%) give no provision for casting a provisional vote or signing an affadavit if you lack photo ID. Four of the seven Democrat photo ID states (57%) do the same.
In other words, this is clearly and primarily a Republican thing. If you are in a Republican-leaning state, you are much more likely to need photo ID. And supposedly "free" photo ID (which most photo ID states DON'T provide) isn't much use if you're poor and yet somehow have to take time off work and jump through hoops obtaining documentation to get it.
And there has never been any demonstration that they do anything to counteract voter fraud, because it is has been proven to be miniscule for in-person voting anyway. However, absentee voter fraud is known to be a much broader problem in the real world, and yet these same states which supposedly believe so strongly in the sanctity of the vote that they must protect themselves by requiring photo ID are largely doing nothing at all about the actual, real problem of absentee ballot fraud. (Why is that, you ask? Well, it's because absentee voter fraud -- like absentee votes in general -- typically favors the Republicans.)
This has nothing to do with the sanctity of the vote, and everything to do with disenfranchising poor, minority voters -- who, not coincidentally, are most likely to vote with the Democrats.
Oh, and as for having Carson polling in second place, the chances of his being nominated are nil, just like the moron currently polling in first place. Here's Electoral-Vote.com's summary of him:
"Carson is not a viable candidate because he is running against Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) for the same slice of the electorate. Carson has never run for public office before. Cruz is an extremely smart guy (with degrees from Princeton and Harvard) who defeated the entire Texas Republican establishment in his longshot 2012 Senate primary race against the sitting lieutenant governor of Texas. Cruz has also raised more money than anyone else in the presidential campaign except Jeb Bush. He is also very well organized in the South, which will play a huge role on Super Tuesday (March 1). Sooner or later, Carson's supporters will realize that Cruz stands for the same things Carson does, with the added bonus of being nominatable and possibly even electable (not likely, but a lot more chance than Carson). We are still in the love-fest stage of the campaign but that will be over long before the voting starts."
The same site also pointed out recently that one of Carson's few advantages for Republicans is the fact that his presence in the list allows racists to pretend they're not racist. You know, the very same thing you just did.
I know because I've used it underwater multiple times without the slightest ill effect. This is warranty semantics, nothing more or less.
Mine, for example. My Sony Xperia Z2 shipped with KitKat, got updated to Lollipop, and will be getting Marshmallow as well. That's not "a couple of point-release upgrades", that's at least two major upgrades (and this on a phone which is now 18 months old.)
And the original Xperia Z started on Jelly Bean and got KitKat *and* Lollipop, so two major releases seems to be par for the course. (In total, the Z got the 4.1.2 it shipped with, then 4.2.2, 4.3, 4.4.2, 4.4.4 and 5.0.2, and I believe it will also be getting 5.1.1. That's six updates, two of them major.) And I've seen similar from my many other Android devices over the years, around half of which weren't even flagship products.
Oh, and you know how many carrier updates I've gotten? None. On my devices which are not Wi-Fi only, I have gotten every update straight from the manufacturer. You know why? Because I had the common-sense to buy unlocked phones, not buy them from the carrier in the false hope of somehow getting free hardware (while actually paying over the odds for it). If you're stupid enough to buy phones from your carrier and pay far more over the life of your contract than just buying unlocked, then frankly you deserve what you get.
Yes, fragmentation is a problem for Android. No, it is not only Google Nexus devices that get major updates, your misleading title to the contrary. Every non-Nexus device I've owned from flagship phones to entry-level kids tablets has gotten at *least* one major update, and several have gotten at least two.
And that's direct from the manufacturer. Unlike Apple fans, I can count on third-parties ensuring that even my oldest devices still get updates. My oldest devices are an Asus Transformer TF101 (early 2011) and Samsung Galaxy Ace (also early 2011). The Transformer has been brought all the way up to fro Honeycomb to Lollipop by third parties, and even the Galaxy Ace has been brought up from Froyo to KitKat.
That's four major releases so far for the tablet, and five in total for the phone. How many iOS devices have gotten five major updates?
Yes, Google needs to get operating system updates in check and take it away from the manufacturers and carriers' responsibility, but the situation is nowhere near as dire as you make it out to be.
And Comcast doesn't even carry it at all. Apparently a bunch of shopping and religious channels that are willing to pay them a pittance are worth more than something even slightly educational.
Yes, the zombie network is real, and it's name is spelt F. O. X. Murdoch is zombie-in-chief.
Which doesn't even remotely change the fact that there is an added cost. Your argument is simply that you can't *remove* the part again to get the cost back -- to which I say that you're looking at the situation back to front. The features add cost; that cost should be borne solely by those who want the features. What you *meant* to say was that it would have been more expensive to add the feature to those cars where customers wanted it, rather than adding it to all of them -- and that's the correct way to say it because it retains the point that the cost should be borne by those who want the feature (ie. the Sirius users, or Sirius itself, in the case of satellite radio. And likewise for OnStar.)
Untrue. Plenty of people want it, but it isn't offered because the manufacturer puts its own interests first. (And its own interests are hooking the gullible into providing an ongoing revenue stream, and having the rest of us pay for that too, so as to avoid having to stock two different options.)
The only reason the Nissan Versa doesn't have those options is because it is being aimed at the entry-level market where price is the overriding criterion for most buyers. Here, it is in the manufacturer's interest not to include those options because they won't be used anyway (so there's no ongoing revenue stream potential) and if they drop the options, they increase their more slender profit margin on a base model.
Your example has nothing to do with what customers *want*, and everything to do with manufacturer self-interest.
Well, sure -- that's the only annoyance if you ignore the fact that you're being forced to pay to subsidize a feature you will never EVER use. I know for a fact I will never pay one cent to Sirius, because I'm not paying for a service which still rams commercials and paid product placements down my throat. However, I think we can both agree that Sirius, not being a charity, is most certainly not covering the entire added cost of the satellite radio-specific components that were added to the bill of materials for my new car and every other one in the natio -- I am, and you are too. We're not Sirius subscribers and never will be, but we're both effectively forced to pay them and their suppliers a lump sum every time we buy a new car.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what really grinds my gears.
One only needs to watch the drek on the National Geographic channel -- an endless parade of shockumentaries and "reality" TV -- to see the lowest common denominator at which Rupert Murdoch is aiming. That, ladies and gentlemen, is what we can also expect as the future of National Geographic Magazine. Loads of articles intended to shock, articles on the latest travels of the celebrities du jour, plenty of paid product placements, and precisely no actual science.
Mourn for National Geographic magazine, ladies and gents, because it just died and the corpse will now be reanimated.
Choosing your own color and options is still perfectly feasible. Choosing a car without the potential of a built-in ongoing revenue stream, sadly, is not. And that goes for both OnStar *and* Sirius, both of which I would personally prefer not to have in my next vehicle -- but short of choosing an awful econobox that I dislike in every way, forgoing those unwanted add-ons simply isn't possible any more.
...which could be used to prevent the same story from appearing on Slashdot FIVE FREAKING TIMES with a few word changes to get it past the moderators.
Seriously, it says it right there in the summary: This is "very similar to the random-sample-voting algorithm that I've advocated as a way to stop vote manipulation on Digg, how to handle abuse reports in a scalable way on Twitter and on Facebook, and how to identify the best ideas submitted to the White House's "We The People" petition site".
And by "very similar", he means "basically the same". Enough, already!
It's a good thing for users who don't need more ports, because it's less to go wrong and less to pay for.
You mean it *could* have been a good thing, but it isn't.
Not because there's less to go wrong, because from the non-power user's perspective there is no win there. Either the extra port fails silently (and they don't care because nothing is plugged into it), the port they're using fails (as it could have done on a single-port design like this) and they have a working port or ports that they can switch to, or the underlying hardware dies and all ports stop working simultaneously (which could also have happened on a single-port design.)
From the end user's perspective, there is no greater likelihood of failure with multiple ports, but there's a greater likelihood of being able to work around that failure. There is no net win for the single-port design, and a small net win for the multi-port design.
And so we come to your only other point here: Price. And yes, this single-port design could have saved the end user money. It's doubtful that the extra port hardware and perhaps a switch to a chipset capable of acting as a hub or switch would have saved more than a few dollars off the bill of materials. Most likely it would have saved less.
But the fact of the matter is that from the consumer's perspective, it has saved them nothing at all. This router, as it is right now, is extremely overpriced for the functionality it provides. It's demonstrably slower and has worse Wi-Fi range than its competitors, you can plug less into it, and you can do next to nothing except standard Wi-Fi with it so far -- and Google has shown no inclination yet to reveal its plans. So for the time being, you're paying far more than a typical entry-level, consumer-grade router, but you're not getting anything more than you would have from one with the debatable exception of a slightly prettier box.
Right now, this is a product with no reason for its existence. It's the Google Glass of SOHO routers, and unless Google announces a very compelling reason for its existence soon, I doubt we'll see it last even as long as Google Glass did.
HAH! :)
Chances are, your smartphone uses a Sony sensor unless it's a Samsung phone. They hold the bulk of the image sensor market both in smartphones and standalone cameras, and have done for years.
There are confirmed reports for the latest 4 snooping updates for Win7/8 of this
If this is true, it's class-action time and count me in. I paid full retail for multiple copies of Win7, and did not do so to be spied on. Citation, please?
Nope. The only realistic way is not to install it -- and you're a moron if you do.
They quote a 1.25mm sensor pitch on their Kickstarter page, so that's 20.32 sensels per inch, to be more precise. Their 0.1mm figure (if you ignore that they themselves suggest it to be an approximation) translates to 254 dpi.
They list an active area of 9 x 5.1 inches, which is similar to that of the Wacom Intuos Pen and Touch Medium (8.5 x 5.3 inches). Wacom claim an order of magnitude higher resolution (2540 lpi) with a higher read speed (125Hz full-resolution for Sensel vs. 133pps for Wacom).
It seems that the only area where this bests Wacom is in pressure sensitivity (1,024 levels for Wacom vs. 4,096 levels for Sensel), but as you note, nobody is going to come close to their 11lb maximum pressure level in real-world use -- more likely, just a tenth of that. Hence most of their 4,096 levels will go unused, and in the real world likely Wacom will best them for pressure sensitivity as well.
What, precisely, is the reason for spending US$250 to maybe, possibly get one of these in a year when you can pick up the Intuos Pen & Touch Medium today for just US$170? I'm failing to see one, personally.
Only one careful owner, and one gentle click death.
I said "in any meaningful way". Sure, there are spikes that return to normalcy immediately afterwards, but as you can see in the graph below (corrected to 2005 dollar equivalents) US military spending has been flat or slightly rising ever since the Korean War ended. Save for two brief periods under Carter and Clinton, there has been no noticeable reduction in our military spending in the last 60 years, and our spending for the last ten years isn't far off the peak set (very briefly) during World War II.
http://www.heritage.org/~/medi...
Our military spending is absolutely insane. Please don't expect to tug at my heartstrings prattling on about the "considerable pressure" placed on our military when we spend a far far greater fraction of our GDP on the military than anywhere that isn't either a crackpot dictatorship or an oil-rich state that's terrified a neighbor will decide to come in and steal their oil.
Somehow, other first-world nations like the UK, Canada, Australia, Italy, France, Germany, Japan and many others all manage to make do on 1/3 to 1/2 our spending as a fraction of their own GDP. Our spending on the military is absolutely obscene -- economies of scale due to our population and the fact that we're isolated from any countries that might wish to do us harm suggest that all else being equal, we should be spending *less* for the same level of safety not two to three times *more* than any comparable nation. Especially since the US being the world's police force and a defender of good hasn't been true for decades -- we're content to sit by and see others wronged so long as we don't lose any money from it.
More to the point, they're not terribly interesting to look at, don't give a great perception of speed, and there's zero risk since the pilot isn't actually *in* the thing. If you want an idea of the total global audience for this league, look at the global audience for retro video gaming. Sure, there is a tiny subset of people who could spend hours watching someone try to better their top score on Centipede or Pac Man, but by and large the greater public couldn't give a monkey's about it.
America spends over $200B/yr on manned military aviation. Next generation drones could eliminate most of that.
Yeah, not so much. When have you ever known military spending to go down in any meaningful way? Next-gen drones will doubtless be more expensive for the taxpayer than current-gen tech, just because. (Sure, we might need to buy a lot more of them to ensure we keep the bill growing, but you can be assured we'll do it.)
The only monetary advantage will be for the arms companies, lobbyists, and those taking their kickbacks, all of whom will have an even larger profit pool in which to swim. There's no way the average taxpayer won't continue to get shafted, though. The US leads the world in military spending (US$609.9 billion, or US$1,891 per capita) as of 2014, close to triple the nearest country (China, with US$216.4 billion) and there's no sign of that changing.
Sure, in the last decade our spending has decreased a tiny fraction, but only by a paltry 0.4%. Despite not being in any actual wars right now (the arm-waving "war on terror" doesn't count), we're spending more than we were pre-9/11 *or* during the Cold War.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/...
...precisely until the moment that Cisco decides it isn't free any more.
Hong Kong has some of the most affordable, readily-available taxi service anywhere. (I'm not personally aware of better in any major, first-world city.) Your point is invalid...
Now put said cameraphone goof on the sidewalk right outside your house. He can probably see in the windows better from street level than he can from a couple hundred feet up anyway, so why aren't you smacking the phone out of his hand?
Oh, right. Because you take photos on the sidewalk too, so you don't want to lose the right to shoot from that piece of public property, just the area of (potentially) public airspace that the media told you to be scared of, correct?
As for whether or not the property owner has a right to prevent access to airspace above ~83 feet AGL, that has not been confirmed nor tested. We know that he definitely doesn't have rights beyond 500 feet AGL, but the R/C operator is not allowed to fly above 400 feet AGL, so that's neither here nor there. What we do know, though, is that it is illegal to interfere with the operation of any aircraft, and shooting down a quadcopter certainly counts.
You could always have bought less stuff and paid more for it to support homegrown. (In fact, chances are that for many of the non-electronic products you need, you still can do so.)
However, the chances are as high or higher that you choose not to do so, as do most people. Like it or not, you *are* almost certainly a part of this problem.