Blade was more antihero than super hero; along with Hancock, and do we count DeadShot in Suicide Squad?
Plus I recently watched, Luke Cage on Netflix, but that wasn't a feature film.
I agree perhaps Black Panther isn't the first, but there aren't really a lot. And there HAVE been a pile of marvel and DC super hero movies made in the last decade - ive lost count -- between Thor, Captain America, Spiderman, Superman and Batman and their sequels its already at least a dozen or more, and that's before even looking at Green Lantern or Antman or other lesser known names, what percentage of them were black vs white? so I don't see why anyone would take issue with a bit of fanfare around this one being about a black hero. It doesn't happen all that often.
"Pretty much no one was using USB-anything before the first iMac made USB popular with accessory manufacturers".
for fucks sake, usb 1.0 had just landed in 1996; and it was pretty flakey for the first few years. Existing versions of Windows 95 "Windows 95 "A") didn't even support it, and nobody was going to buy a whole new computer just for a USB port; so you need to expect that its going to take an upgrade cycle of 2-3 years before it really takes off.
Apple committing to it 1999 was pretty much right when it was going to take off anyway.
USB 1.0 was flakey, and it wasn't much good until USB until 1.1 was released midway through 1998, by which time Windows 95 "B" had arrived with USB support, and Windows 98 has USB support built in.
To give Apple credit for the success of USB by releasing a PC in 1999 that exclusively supported it is just stupid.
USB1.1 was just arriving, but really it wasn't much use for anything but printers, scanners, and modems at that point. And modems were mostly built in or on PCI cards. So the first wave of USB devices was mostly printers and multi-function all-in-ones. USB2.0 arrived in 2000 and opened the speed up enough for other applications.
Digital cameras, mp3 players, external hard drives, chargers... those markets themselves were all in their infancy; and they all went with USB, of course they did, and they would have done so whether the imac had ever existed or not.
USB would have been popular with or without Apple. And I don't even think Apple really sped it along much; perhaps we can credit apple for getting us into USB keyboards and mice a bit faster; and for creating a sudden unnessary market for USB floppy drives and USB to ADB adapters. But that's about it.
"Except some of the children will be more than clever enough to re-flash the phones with their own preferred ROMs."
A yes, if some gifted young prodigy can defeat it then its totally worthless even f it works really in practice against the overwhelming majority of toddlers to pre-teens.
"Teaching children expectations and consequences is a basic parental responsibility..."
So is keeping the power tools and razer blades out of reach of toddlers.
Parenting is this whole range of things, where you combine teaching, while controlling the environment, while letting them explore, while monitoring the situation, while letting them get hurt, while protecting them from getting hurt too badly. And yes, those goals can directly conflict with each other. That's the point.
"The only argument you pro-NN people ever have is the netflix deal."
I didn't mention netflix.
There are plenty of good examples. Many ISPs are also landline providers, cellular phone providers, and/or in the cableTV business. Many also offer internetTV and/or voip services; or they form partnerships with various providers of those services. And then they have all kinds of incentives to ensure their own (or their partners) telephony and video services work best, including prioritizing them on the network, or even throttling their competitors.
We aren't going to see a lot of big tiffs like Netflix a few years ago, or Amazon and Google fighting over youtube (not an NN issue, but the same type of competing interests are creating that mess.)
What we are going to see is that the ISPs will pick the winners and losers of internet services. And by 'pick' I mean get 'paid for', resulting in the entrenchment of existing large players, which already had the advantage.
Meanwhile the only argument you anti-NN people ever has is... well... nothing. There is no good anti-NN argument, is there? I've yet to hear one that was:
a) any good. b) anything to do with NN*
* I have heard lots of great arguments that medical monitoring and voip traffic shouldn't have to be treated like windows updates and bit torrents from anti-NN quacks, and I even agree with that, but that's really got nothing to do with NN.
"Apple has a history of dropping old well established standards about 2 to 3 years before people can see they were right."
No. Apple has a history of dropping standards people are actively using, often before the new stuff has matured enough to even be usable.
everyone thought these moves were crazy at the time"
Almost everyone still had devices that that used those ports and had to buy adapters or all new devices. I had $500 serial US Robotics modems, and $300 ADB barcode scanners, for example. That all had to be replaced or adapted. (And adapting them was a PITA because Apple has always been extremely stingy with USB ports too.)
The PC carried these legacy ports for years before getting dropped, the result was that a lot of us had computers with a floppy drive that never got used. This was a much better situation to be in, than not having a floppy drive and needing one - a situation a lot of people found themselves in.
Apple wasn't right. They were irritating. Everyone could have told you USB was better than ADB and parallel ports, or that USB flash drives and networking would kill floppies, and on the PC side everyone was switching to USB as fast as they could. You didn't have have much foresight to see the writing on the wall for the legacy ports.
But it was greatly fucking appreciated by PC users that you didn't have to throw out all your peripherals and buy new ones, because old ones were generally supported until most people were finished using them.
I have a $100,000 lathe at a site, still using ISA controller boards with Windows 98. The computer died last year, and I had no trouble buying a replacement.
Meanwhile Apple frequently won't support interfaces from peripherals from 2 years ago. I recall having the original imac from 1999 and Power Mac 7600 from 1998 in the same office and having no way to get files from one to the other. No floppy on the imac, no writeable CD support on either, and no usb on the powermac. I could network them, but since that office didn't otherwise have or need a LAN and the computers weren't sitting next to eachother... Fuck you very much apple.
by requiring that any device plugged in met some higher level of service expectation they could write software that took advantage of that requirement sooner than their competition who had to have legacy support. I give you the WYSIWYG revolution as exhibit A.
That argument really doesn't have a comparable example for any of the other ports you mentioned.
Yeah. I pay my ISP for my connection to "the Internet" and my traffic. They pay their ISP for their connection to "the Internet" and their traffic. That's how its 'supposed to work'.
Then some ISPs got the bright idea that even though I'm a their customer and am paying them to deliver packets to me from the servers of my choice; thay they could start a protection racket and charge the operator of the server extortion money not to 'disrupt' or 'slowdown' the packets.
ie... my ISP says to various service providers i use:
"Gee, a lot of our customers are requesting packets from you; you must have a really nice useful service there. Be a shame if anything stopped your packets reaching our customers; maybe if you pay us some protection money we'll make sure they get there safe and sound!"
Its interesting to note that although they didn't include Vancouver, they did include Toronto, and the average in Toronto is 73K USD (92K CAD). Cost of living in Vancouver is only slightly higher than Toronto.
It's also worth noting that we shouldn't put too much faith in this this data... it seems pretty low quality.
I did some poking around and it suggests that the average salary for a network admin in Boston is 120K, in SF is 128K, and in New York City... 30K. Tell me that's anywhere close to right.
Meanwhile the average salary for desktop support in SF is 132K. Really? 132K for desktop support? More than a network admin (120K in SF, and more than a sys admin 129K in SF, and more than a Data Analyst 131K in SF).
Where did this data come from and how reliable is it?
"Evaluating a country's military spending in absolute dollars makes as little sense as..."
Let me stop you there. absolute dollars is a pretty important metric. Suppose two countries were in a cold war, and one was twice as large as the other economically and by population, etc. Suppose the smaller country is dedicating 20% of its GDP towards military supremacy. The larger by a factor of 2 country doesn't need to dedicate 20% of its GDP to maintain parity, it only needs 10% to maintain parity. (By parity, I mean an equivalent force, same size army, same number of same value planes, tanks and ships etc...) in other words: parity is the same absolute spend. This is how the US won its cold war, it was able, thanks to its higher GDP to afford a higher absolute spend than the USSR, which was forced to allocate a higher portion of its GDP to compete and the strain on its economy that caused is what led to the collapse of the USSR.
Relative Absolute military capability (absolute spend, absolute capacity, etc, total headcount, total ordnance counts, etc...) is extremely important. And there is tremendous benefit to the US by having the largest absolute spend, largest gross total capability.
It should not be discounted as irrelevant.
But let's carry on with your argument...
"... Evaluating the food budget of a household while ignoring their income and how many people live there."
That's also a valid point. The US is a big wealthy country with a lot of people, so the absolute spend can be quite high relative to smaller or poorer countries, without it being a strain on the economy; I have no argument with that.
" If you want to compare expenditures properly, it has to be as a percentage of GDP. "
I think its important to ALSO compare it as a percentage of the GDP.
However, also like food, you benefit from economies of scale. It's more expensive to feed a family of six than it costs to feed a single person, but its not six times as expensive.
The US as a big wealthy populous country should also be benefiting from those economies of scale. So that while it should spend a lot more than a country 1/10th its population, it shouldn't need to spend 10x more.
Especially since in absolute terms, it doesn't need 10x the army to win a conflict against the smaller country. Surely it will handily win any conflict with 8x the army (everything else being equal). Therefor the US can spend less as percentage of the GDP vs other countries and still come out very much on top in any match up.
The upshot is that, as a percentage of GDP, the US would remain uncontested and dominant with something in the 1.8 to 2.2% range.
"The U.S. isn't even in the top 20 in military spending as a percent of GDP. "
"If you want to compare expenditures properly, it has to be as a percentage of GDP. "
That's a fair comment but look at the top 20. The top bunch skews towards a bunch of lousy countries.
I'm also not sure what that chart is including; the US currently line items military spending separate from some of the various war and homeland security efforts. So depending on what you are counting its 600 billion... or its 900 billion.
In any case, I agree with you, we shouldn't cut it in half, I think cutting it by about a 1/3rd, plus scaling down DHS etc.
As a large populous wealthy country with a very high GDP, and a very high per capita GDP we should be benefiting from that scale, and really should be very well served in the 1.8% to 2.2% range. (For example, does South Sudan have a magnificent military? Or just a small population and even smaller GDP?)
That would be oversimplifying my position considerably, but sure yes, I think a combination of spending cuts across several areas combined with tax changes would be the solution.
On the social security / medicare front in particular I think getting more value per dollar is a very acheivable goal. We don't need to cut services, we can do more than we are now AND spend less.
I'd also cut DHS funding; $40+ billion plus for mostly worthless security theatre; yeah... its smaller thing but these little things add up too.
Oh, and I'd cancel the fucking parade Trump is planning too.:p
Even if we cut it in half the US still has vastly more invested than anywhere else in the world. (And if you look at that chart, of the next 14 after the US, most of them are pretty close allies too; so in terms of spending the US + allies still would drastically outclass all plausible opponents combined.)
Returning the mortgage analogy; my first home cost me $1200/mo in mortgage payments for a single bedroom+den apartment; and was probably among the least expensive places in the area; the loan payment of $600/month for a Porsche 911; on the other hand was an extravagance. Yeah the mortgage was the bigger expense, but it was still the car that was the extravagance.
If cash had been an issue at the time, I'd have traded down to a more sensible vehicle without a second thought... I'd have bought a $5000 used honda or VW, had no payment at all, and freed up 10s of thousands in cash in the process too depending exactly where along the loan it happened.
Likewise, the US military is a collection of exotic hyper-cars; it may not be the biggest piece of the total US budget but it is still a ludicrous extravagance. It's perfectly legitimate to argue that you improve the efficiency and reduce costs in social security and medicare, because you absolutely should do that. But refusing to even consider selling even one of your 918 Spyders or Rolls-Royces or Pagani's when cash is tight is a bit absurd.
"Nest Thermostat works on existing wires. There will be no compatibility issues."
The compatibilty issues I was referring to was the software and apps and so forth between different evolving home automation solutions.
"Turning on the AC by shouting "OK Google, turn on the AC" still feels like magic, although not that useful."
OTOH telling google when nobody is home seems like a bad idea.
"Starting the AC 30 minutes before I get home is nice when it's 90+ degree outside."
I just have it set for when I'm usually home. Beyond that I spend maybe 3 minutes over the course of a year thinking about the temperature in my house. The idea of thinking about it 30 minutes before i get home on a daily basis and doing something about it each time just seems dreadful.
Plus I have a bunch of people in my household and 4 people fiddling with the thermostat is 4 people too many.
Every room in the upper level of my home has its own electric radiator that is independently controlled by its own thermostat. Most years I don't even turn them on. We like our rooms a little cooler, and enough heat rises from downstairs. So buying a nest wouldn't help them.
The lower levels of the house are heated by a gas furnace; and a pretty basic thermostat operates it just fine. When i go on business trips I imagine the rest of my family and pets wish to remain their usual temperature. When we go on vacation together... either I'll lower it before I go, or i won't worry about it; the last thing I'm going to want to do on vacation is to micromanage my thermostat at home to save less money than I'll spend on a glass of wine for lunch. If I get home and its chilly... i turn on the fireplace or grab a space heater out of the garage or put on a sweater for a couple hours. I just personally can't fathom the value of an internet connected thermostat.
Although im sure it has its niche use cases, and you seem to like yours, it just doesnt seem like the 'next big thing' to me and home automation in general just seems like a waste of cash.
Nearly everyone i know who tries it regrets it... 10 years later they're replacing bits here and chasing gremlins there, and dealing with compatibility issues. Meanwhile the boring old manually operated windows and doors and blinds and lights in my house all work flawlessly; and are inexpensive and trivial to maintain.
I'm pretty sure it's something along the line of 'progressively delivered'; because your delivering a 'shell' to the app store which the user downloads, and then the rest of the app is delivered at runtime via the web.
Possibly modules / features / whatever are even delivered in chunks as you need them. (so if you never open feature X dialog box, its never downloaded.)
"You'd have to be delusional to think this is an advantage"
You'd have to be delusional not to think this is an advantage.
Driving by GPS is fine for areas you don't know. But you drive a LOT more intelligently and safer in areas you DO KNOW.
You know complicated left/right/left maneuvers and which lane to be in at each step, often in cases faster than the GPS has time to update the display after your last manueover and recite the instructions for the next one.
"Take the 3rd exit from the round about which is itself another round about that you take the 2nd exit from"... stuff like that.
GPS will get you there, but KNOWING a city makes a huge difference.
"A human navigator can't see ahead for optimizing against current traffic patterns as can GPS"
This is true, human + GPS can be even better than human alone. I don't think anyone disputes that GPS is useful. I often run routes through a GPS, to see what it thinks and where it sees traffic issues etc. Sometimes it proposes better routes than I would have taken.. sometimes it proposes making a left turn across 4 lanes of rush hour traffic at an uncontrolled intersection to save 0.2 km a situation I could spend 20 minutes waiting for a break to get through assuming the guy making a right behind me didn't rage-kill me for attempting a left there. (Although that same route would be fine at 9pm.)
I've also had GPS take me down a residential street past an elementary school with roundabouts and speedbumps to avoid making a right turn at an efficient controlled intersection on the main street at a traffic light that takes about the same amount of time but is slightly longer and is heavier traffic (due to being the main street)... in that case its suggested route would 'work' but its still a stupid route.
A human navigator also tends to be able to deal with detours and closed roads and lane closures etc much better than GPS can. I don't think its arguable that having the knowledge plus GPS is the best option.
"Not even Musk was proposing one big site. He was just saying, for the sake of argument, the total amount of land required would be negligible compared to the land we have available."
For sure. But its an astronomical amount of work to cover even that much in solar panels. Its not a 'small project' its just a 'really big country'.
You might as well say that digging a 1/4 mi wide canal along the 35th parallel to connect the atlantic and pacific is "nothing" too; because it would only a fraction the size of the solar panel project. At 2800 mi long x 1/4 mi wide = 700 sq mi.:P
Or... take the entire population of the earth just get them all standing next to eachother. How much area would that be? Should comfortably fit within 1000 sq miles (that gives every man, woman, and child on the planet more than 4 sq feet to stand in. The entire population can hang out in a space that's only 10% the size of the solar project! Why are we worried about population growth again?
Give them 10x that much space each so its the same size as the solar project, now they have a small room to themselves, and the entire population of earth could be housed in a 'tiny corner of Nevada'. Now, make it a modest 10 story building, and they'd each have quite bit more living space to themselves than most people in the world do now.... now put solar panels on the roof...:p
"If the locksmith physically helped a stranger gain access to your car, then they would be liable for the theft of the car and anything inside it."
Really? By that logic the bank teller cooperating with the guy with the gun is now an accomplice because 'they physically helped' with the crime. Obviously, the bar is a little higher than that.
If the locksmith assisted the theives that's quite different from the thieves taking advantage of a mistake the locksmith made.
" But when they promised the lock but fail to delier, any and everything they did to help the criminal makes them an accessory."
Yes, to an extent I DO see that.
But if you gaurd something really valuable, would you hire a few illegal day laborers off the street as your security?
Likewise, trusting minimum wage outsourced randos in customer service at a telco to be the lynchpin in your personal security chain is pretty stupid.
I don't trust those guys not to screw up my voicemail when I change rate plans. I wouldn't put them on the critical path of security for my investment accounts.
You want to hold someone accountable? Might as well hold the idiot company that suggested using your phone SMS as 2FA; THEY also should have known that the sanctity of your cellular account is in the hands of minimum wage outsourced randos.
Your phone company though, never promised you much of anything; except that if they do fuck up, they'll give you a few bucks credit on your bill and fix it. That's my issue here, much as I hate the telcos... they didn't promise they were competent to be THE lynch-pin in your personal security system protecting all your most valuable assets.
I'm just point out that it is a mega project. I even agree, if you managed to make it to the 2nd sentence of my post, that dividing it up into a million small projects is not only doable, but inevitable.
But even doing it that way it is a massive undertaking when considered as a collective accomplishment by a country.
Sure if you read the first sentence of a post, and then hit reply I guess I sound unreasonable.
"you've been backing the wrong horse all along?"
Read the next sentence, where I describes a distributed system as being inevitable. (10,000 square miles funded as a 1,000,000 separate little projects...)
"Solar not only can be distributed with zero drawbacks, but in fact it actually works better when it is distributed"
There are two drawbacks to highly distributed systems: repair and maintenance costs increase dramatically. And two lots of places don't get a lot of sun, I'm not sure it makes sense to distribute solar where the usual forecast is clouds and rain. (Yes, solar works on cloudy days... just not nearly as well.)
The issue with that is that you don't get any economy of scale. And the maintenance cost will be through the roof.
A 100x100 sq mile array would have a supply warehouse adjacent and a full time team handling maintenance.
"spread it accross every single roof that can take a panel and attach a battery to each panel" and it you've created a whole service industry just to maintain, troubleshoot and repair it. And another whole service industry for distribution. Great for jobs,but it'll up the maintenance cost about 1000 times what a big site needs.
Its the same reason we have data centers, instead of putting a server in every corner and closet that will take one. Consider the cost of replacing a failed drive in a data center - one guy can deal with dozens if not even hundreds of drive replacements in a day. compared to dell's next day onsite service calls -- he manages what... 4 to 8, plus shipping and travel time, having to coordinate access to each computer he works on, etc, etc. A distributed solution is vastly more expensive to maintain.
Sure, lets just build a single structure the size of New York City, LA, Chicago, Miami, and Washington DC... combined. no sweat.
10,000 sq mi of panels funded over a period years spread over 1,000,000 separate projects sure... its absolutely doable. Perhaps it is even inevitable. But as a single project its a mega project the likes of which the world has never seen.
Slashdot Mirror
Blade was more antihero than super hero; along with Hancock, and do we count DeadShot in Suicide Squad?
Plus I recently watched, Luke Cage on Netflix, but that wasn't a feature film.
I agree perhaps Black Panther isn't the first, but there aren't really a lot. And there HAVE been a pile of marvel and DC super hero movies made in the last decade - ive lost count -- between Thor, Captain America, Spiderman, Superman and Batman and their sequels its already at least a dozen or more, and that's before even looking at Green Lantern or Antman or other lesser known names, what percentage of them were black vs white? so I don't see why anyone would take issue with a bit of fanfare around this one being about a black hero. It doesn't happen all that often.
"Pretty much no one was using USB-anything before the first iMac made USB popular with accessory manufacturers".
for fucks sake, usb 1.0 had just landed in 1996; and it was pretty flakey for the first few years. Existing versions of Windows 95 "Windows 95 "A") didn't even support it, and nobody was going to buy a whole new computer just for a USB port; so you need to expect that its going to take an upgrade cycle of 2-3 years before it really takes off.
Apple committing to it 1999 was pretty much right when it was going to take off anyway.
USB 1.0 was flakey, and it wasn't much good until USB until 1.1 was released midway through 1998, by which time Windows 95 "B" had arrived with USB support, and Windows 98 has USB support built in.
To give Apple credit for the success of USB by releasing a PC in 1999 that exclusively supported it is just stupid.
USB1.1 was just arriving, but really it wasn't much use for anything but printers, scanners, and modems at that point. And modems were mostly built in or on PCI cards. So the first wave of USB devices was mostly printers and multi-function all-in-ones. USB2.0 arrived in 2000 and opened the speed up enough for other applications.
Digital cameras, mp3 players, external hard drives, chargers... those markets themselves were all in their infancy; and they all went with USB, of course they did, and they would have done so whether the imac had ever existed or not.
USB would have been popular with or without Apple. And I don't even think Apple really sped it along much; perhaps we can credit apple for getting us into USB keyboards and mice a bit faster; and for creating a sudden unnessary market for USB floppy drives and USB to ADB adapters. But that's about it.
"Except some of the children will be more than clever enough to re-flash the phones with their own preferred ROMs."
A yes, if some gifted young prodigy can defeat it then its totally worthless even f it works really in practice against the overwhelming majority of toddlers to pre-teens.
"Teaching children expectations and consequences is a basic parental responsibility..."
So is keeping the power tools and razer blades out of reach of toddlers.
Parenting is this whole range of things, where you combine teaching, while controlling the environment, while letting them explore, while monitoring the situation, while letting them get hurt, while protecting them from getting hurt too badly. And yes, those goals can directly conflict with each other. That's the point.
"The only argument you pro-NN people ever have is the netflix deal."
I didn't mention netflix.
There are plenty of good examples. Many ISPs are also landline providers, cellular phone providers, and/or in the cableTV business. Many also offer internetTV and/or voip services; or they form partnerships with various providers of those services. And then they have all kinds of incentives to ensure their own (or their partners) telephony and video services work best, including prioritizing them on the network, or even throttling their competitors.
We aren't going to see a lot of big tiffs like Netflix a few years ago, or Amazon and Google fighting over youtube (not an NN issue, but the same type of competing interests are creating that mess.)
What we are going to see is that the ISPs will pick the winners and losers of internet services. And by 'pick' I mean get 'paid for', resulting in the entrenchment of existing large players, which already had the advantage.
Meanwhile the only argument you anti-NN people ever has is ... well... nothing. There is no good anti-NN argument, is there? I've yet to hear one that was:
a) any good.
b) anything to do with NN*
* I have heard lots of great arguments that medical monitoring and voip traffic shouldn't have to be treated like windows updates and bit torrents from anti-NN quacks, and I even agree with that, but that's really got nothing to do with NN.
"Apple has a history of dropping old well established standards about 2 to 3 years before people can see they were right."
No. Apple has a history of dropping standards people are actively using, often before the new stuff has matured enough to even be usable.
everyone thought these moves were crazy at the time"
Almost everyone still had devices that that used those ports and had to buy adapters or all new devices. I had $500 serial US Robotics modems, and $300 ADB barcode scanners, for example. That all had to be replaced or adapted. (And adapting them was a PITA because Apple has always been extremely stingy with USB ports too.)
The PC carried these legacy ports for years before getting dropped, the result was that a lot of us had computers with a floppy drive that never got used. This was a much better situation to be in, than not having a floppy drive and needing one - a situation a lot of people found themselves in.
Apple wasn't right. They were irritating. Everyone could have told you USB was better than ADB and parallel ports, or that USB flash drives and networking would kill floppies, and on the PC side everyone was switching to USB as fast as they could. You didn't have have much foresight to see the writing on the wall for the legacy ports.
But it was greatly fucking appreciated by PC users that you didn't have to throw out all your peripherals and buy new ones, because old ones were generally supported until most people were finished using them.
I have a $100,000 lathe at a site, still using ISA controller boards with Windows 98. The computer died last year, and I had no trouble buying a replacement.
Meanwhile Apple frequently won't support interfaces from peripherals from 2 years ago. I recall having the original imac from 1999 and Power Mac 7600 from 1998 in the same office and having no way to get files from one to the other. No floppy on the imac, no writeable CD support on either, and no usb on the powermac. I could network them, but since that office didn't otherwise have or need a LAN and the computers weren't sitting next to eachother... Fuck you very much apple.
by requiring that any device plugged in met some higher level of service expectation they could write software that took advantage of that requirement sooner than their competition who had to have legacy support. I give you the WYSIWYG revolution as exhibit A.
That argument really doesn't have a comparable example for any of the other ports you mentioned.
Yeah. I pay my ISP for my connection to "the Internet" and my traffic. They pay their ISP for their connection to "the Internet" and their traffic. That's how its 'supposed to work'.
Then some ISPs got the bright idea that even though I'm a their customer and am paying them to deliver packets to me from the servers of my choice; thay they could start a protection racket and charge the operator of the server extortion money not to 'disrupt' or 'slowdown' the packets.
ie... my ISP says to various service providers i use:
"Gee, a lot of our customers are requesting packets from you; you must have a really nice useful service there. Be a shame if anything stopped your packets reaching our customers; maybe if you pay us some protection money we'll make sure they get there safe and sound!"
Its interesting to note that although they didn't include Vancouver, they did include Toronto, and the average in Toronto is 73K USD (92K CAD). Cost of living in Vancouver is only slightly higher than Toronto.
It's also worth noting that we shouldn't put too much faith in this this data... it seems pretty low quality.
I did some poking around and it suggests that the average salary for a network admin in Boston is 120K, in SF is 128K, and in New York City... 30K. Tell me that's anywhere close to right.
Meanwhile the average salary for desktop support in SF is 132K. Really? 132K for desktop support? More than a network admin (120K in SF, and more than a sys admin 129K in SF, and more than a Data Analyst 131K in SF).
Where did this data come from and how reliable is it?
"Evaluating a country's military spending in absolute dollars makes as little sense as..."
Let me stop you there. absolute dollars is a pretty important metric. Suppose two countries were in a cold war, and one was twice as large as the other economically and by population, etc. Suppose the smaller country is dedicating 20% of its GDP towards military supremacy. The larger by a factor of 2 country doesn't need to dedicate 20% of its GDP to maintain parity, it only needs 10% to maintain parity. (By parity, I mean an equivalent force, same size army, same number of same value planes, tanks and ships etc...) in other words: parity is the same absolute spend. This is how the US won its cold war, it was able, thanks to its higher GDP to afford a higher absolute spend than the USSR, which was forced to allocate a higher portion of its GDP to compete and the strain on its economy that caused is what led to the collapse of the USSR.
Relative Absolute military capability (absolute spend, absolute capacity, etc, total headcount, total ordnance counts, etc...) is extremely important. And there is tremendous benefit to the US by having the largest absolute spend, largest gross total capability.
It should not be discounted as irrelevant.
But let's carry on with your argument...
"... Evaluating the food budget of a household while ignoring their income and how many people live there."
That's also a valid point. The US is a big wealthy country with a lot of people, so the absolute spend can be quite high relative to smaller or poorer countries, without it being a strain on the economy; I have no argument with that.
" If you want to compare expenditures properly, it has to be as a percentage of GDP. "
I think its important to ALSO compare it as a percentage of the GDP.
However, also like food, you benefit from economies of scale. It's more expensive to feed a family of six than it costs to feed a single person, but its not six times as expensive.
The US as a big wealthy populous country should also be benefiting from those economies of scale. So that while it should spend a lot more than a country 1/10th its population, it shouldn't need to spend 10x more.
Especially since in absolute terms, it doesn't need 10x the army to win a conflict against the smaller country. Surely it will handily win any conflict with 8x the army (everything else being equal). Therefor the US can spend less as percentage of the GDP vs other countries and still come out very much on top in any match up.
The upshot is that, as a percentage of GDP, the US would remain uncontested and dominant with something in the 1.8 to 2.2% range.
"The U.S. isn't even in the top 20 in military spending as a percent of GDP. "
"If you want to compare expenditures properly, it has to be as a percentage of GDP. "
That's a fair comment but look at the top 20. The top bunch skews towards a bunch of lousy countries.
I'm also not sure what that chart is including; the US currently line items military spending separate from some of the various war and homeland security efforts. So depending on what you are counting its 600 billion ... or its 900 billion.
In any case, I agree with you, we shouldn't cut it in half, I think cutting it by about a 1/3rd, plus scaling down DHS etc.
As a large populous wealthy country with a very high GDP, and a very high per capita GDP we should be benefiting from that scale, and really should be very well served in the 1.8% to 2.2% range. (For example, does South Sudan have a magnificent military? Or just a small population and even smaller GDP?)
That would be oversimplifying my position considerably, but sure yes, I think a combination of spending cuts across several areas combined with tax changes would be the solution.
On the social security / medicare front in particular I think getting more value per dollar is a very acheivable goal. We don't need to cut services, we can do more than we are now AND spend less.
I'd also cut DHS funding; $40+ billion plus for mostly worthless security theatre; yeah... its smaller thing but these little things add up too.
Oh, and I'd cancel the fucking parade Trump is planning too. :p
"Cutting the military budget would be like cutting the cable bill when you can't afford the mortgage."
Sort of. If social security and medicare are your $2300 mortage, the military is your $600 car payment. Education is your $100 cable bill.
https://www.nationalpriorities...
Take a look at the 3rd chart.
The military budget is not as large as you might think, relatively.
I guess it depends "what you think", but no matter how you slice it it is still a massive amount of money; especially when put into perspective:
https://www.washingtonpost.com...
Even if we cut it in half the US still has vastly more invested than anywhere else in the world. (And if you look at that chart, of the next 14 after the US, most of them are pretty close allies too; so in terms of spending the US + allies still would drastically outclass all plausible opponents combined.)
Returning the mortgage analogy; my first home cost me $1200/mo in mortgage payments for a single bedroom+den apartment; and was probably among the least expensive places in the area; the loan payment of $600/month for a Porsche 911; on the other hand was an extravagance. Yeah the mortgage was the bigger expense, but it was still the car that was the extravagance.
If cash had been an issue at the time, I'd have traded down to a more sensible vehicle without a second thought... I'd have bought a $5000 used honda or VW, had no payment at all, and freed up 10s of thousands in cash in the process too depending exactly where along the loan it happened.
Likewise, the US military is a collection of exotic hyper-cars; it may not be the biggest piece of the total US budget but it is still a ludicrous extravagance. It's perfectly legitimate to argue that you improve the efficiency and reduce costs in social security and medicare, because you absolutely should do that. But refusing to even consider selling even one of your 918 Spyders or Rolls-Royces or Pagani's when cash is tight is a bit absurd.
QQ
Product on Alibaba... description includes CODEC
https://www.alibaba.com/produc...
Even the Datasheet says it's a CODEC
http://www.vlsi.fi/fileadmin/d...
A codec is a device or computer program for encoding or decoding a digital data stream or signal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
for example:
http://www.ti.com/product/PCM3...
A codec is an (en)coder/decoder; this can be done in hardware or software. There are plenty of 'codec chips' out there.
"Nest Thermostat works on existing wires. There will be no compatibility issues."
The compatibilty issues I was referring to was the software and apps and so forth between different evolving home automation solutions.
"Turning on the AC by shouting "OK Google, turn on the AC" still feels like magic, although not that useful."
OTOH telling google when nobody is home seems like a bad idea.
"Starting the AC 30 minutes before I get home is nice when it's 90+ degree outside."
I just have it set for when I'm usually home. Beyond that I spend maybe 3 minutes over the course of a year thinking about the temperature in my house. The idea of thinking about it 30 minutes before i get home on a daily basis and doing something about it each time just seems dreadful.
Plus I have a bunch of people in my household and 4 people fiddling with the thermostat is 4 people too many.
Every room in the upper level of my home has its own electric radiator that is independently controlled by its own thermostat. Most years I don't even turn them on. We like our rooms a little cooler, and enough heat rises from downstairs. So buying a nest wouldn't help them.
The lower levels of the house are heated by a gas furnace; and a pretty basic thermostat operates it just fine. When i go on business trips I imagine the rest of my family and pets wish to remain their usual temperature. When we go on vacation together... either I'll lower it before I go, or i won't worry about it; the last thing I'm going to want to do on vacation is to micromanage my thermostat at home to save less money than I'll spend on a glass of wine for lunch. If I get home and its chilly... i turn on the fireplace or grab a space heater out of the garage or put on a sweater for a couple hours. I just personally can't fathom the value of an internet connected thermostat.
Although im sure it has its niche use cases, and you seem to like yours, it just doesnt seem like the 'next big thing' to me and home automation in general just seems like a waste of cash.
Nearly everyone i know who tries it regrets it... 10 years later they're replacing bits here and chasing gremlins there, and dealing with compatibility issues. Meanwhile the boring old manually operated windows and doors and blinds and lights in my house all work flawlessly; and are inexpensive and trivial to maintain.
I'm pretty sure it's something along the line of 'progressively delivered'; because your delivering a 'shell' to the app store which the user downloads, and then the rest of the app is delivered at runtime via the web.
Possibly modules / features / whatever are even delivered in chunks as you need them. (so if you never open feature X dialog box, its never downloaded.)
Or I'm wrong. That happens often.
"You'd have to be delusional to think this is an advantage"
You'd have to be delusional not to think this is an advantage.
Driving by GPS is fine for areas you don't know. But you drive a LOT more intelligently and safer in areas you DO KNOW.
You know complicated left/right/left maneuvers and which lane to be in at each step, often in cases faster than the GPS has time to update the display after your last manueover and recite the instructions for the next one.
"Take the 3rd exit from the round about which is itself another round about that you take the 2nd exit from"... stuff like that.
GPS will get you there, but KNOWING a city makes a huge difference.
"A human navigator can't see ahead for optimizing against current traffic patterns as can GPS"
This is true, human + GPS can be even better than human alone. I don't think anyone disputes that GPS is useful. I often run routes through a GPS, to see what it thinks and where it sees traffic issues etc. Sometimes it proposes better routes than I would have taken.. sometimes it proposes making a left turn across 4 lanes of rush hour traffic at an uncontrolled intersection to save 0.2 km a situation I could spend 20 minutes waiting for a break to get through assuming the guy making a right behind me didn't rage-kill me for attempting a left there. (Although that same route would be fine at 9pm.)
I've also had GPS take me down a residential street past an elementary school with roundabouts and speedbumps to avoid making a right turn at an efficient controlled intersection on the main street at a traffic light that takes about the same amount of time but is slightly longer and is heavier traffic (due to being the main street)... in that case its suggested route would 'work' but its still a stupid route.
A human navigator also tends to be able to deal with detours and closed roads and lane closures etc much better than GPS can. I don't think its arguable that having the knowledge plus GPS is the best option.
"Not even Musk was proposing one big site. He was just saying, for the sake of argument, the total amount of land required would be negligible compared to the land we have available."
For sure. But its an astronomical amount of work to cover even that much in solar panels. Its not a 'small project' its just a 'really big country'.
You might as well say that digging a 1/4 mi wide canal along the 35th parallel to connect the atlantic and pacific is "nothing" too; because it would only a fraction the size of the solar panel project. At 2800 mi long x 1/4 mi wide = 700 sq mi. :P
Or ... take the entire population of the earth just get them all standing next to eachother. How much area would that be? Should comfortably fit within 1000 sq miles (that gives every man, woman, and child on the planet more than 4 sq feet to stand in. The entire population can hang out in a space that's only 10% the size of the solar project! Why are we worried about population growth again?
Give them 10x that much space each so its the same size as the solar project, now they have a small room to themselves, and the entire population of earth could be housed in a 'tiny corner of Nevada'. Now, make it a modest 10 story building, and they'd each have quite bit more living space to themselves than most people in the world do now. ... now put solar panels on the roof... :p
"If the locksmith physically helped a stranger gain access to your car, then they would be liable for the theft of the car and anything inside it."
Really? By that logic the bank teller cooperating with the guy with the gun is now an accomplice because 'they physically helped' with the crime. Obviously, the bar is a little higher than that.
If the locksmith assisted the theives that's quite different from the thieves taking advantage of a mistake the locksmith made.
" But when they promised the lock but fail to delier, any and everything they did to help the criminal makes them an accessory."
Yes, to an extent I DO see that.
But if you gaurd something really valuable, would you hire a few illegal day laborers off the street as your security?
Likewise, trusting minimum wage outsourced randos in customer service at a telco to be the lynchpin in your personal security chain is pretty stupid.
I don't trust those guys not to screw up my voicemail when I change rate plans. I wouldn't put them on the critical path of security for my investment accounts.
You want to hold someone accountable? Might as well hold the idiot company that suggested using your phone SMS as 2FA; THEY also should have known that the sanctity of your cellular account is in the hands of minimum wage outsourced randos.
Your phone company though, never promised you much of anything; except that if they do fuck up, they'll give you a few bucks credit on your bill and fix it. That's my issue here, much as I hate the telcos... they didn't promise they were competent to be THE lynch-pin in your personal security system protecting all your most valuable assets.
I'm just point out that it is a mega project. I even agree, if you managed to make it to the 2nd sentence of my post, that dividing it up into a million small projects is not only doable, but inevitable.
But even doing it that way it is a massive undertaking when considered as a collective accomplishment by a country.
Sure if you read the first sentence of a post, and then hit reply I guess I sound unreasonable.
"you've been backing the wrong horse all along?"
Read the next sentence, where I describes a distributed system as being inevitable. (10,000 square miles funded as a 1,000,000 separate little projects...)
"Solar not only can be distributed with zero drawbacks, but in fact it actually works better when it is distributed"
There are two drawbacks to highly distributed systems: repair and maintenance costs increase dramatically. And two lots of places don't get a lot of sun, I'm not sure it makes sense to distribute solar where the usual forecast is clouds and rain. (Yes, solar works on cloudy days... just not nearly as well.)
The issue with that is that you don't get any economy of scale. And the maintenance cost will be through the roof.
A 100x100 sq mile array would have a supply warehouse adjacent and a full time team handling maintenance.
"spread it accross every single roof that can take a panel and attach a battery to each panel" and it you've created a whole service industry just to maintain, troubleshoot and repair it. And another whole service industry for distribution. Great for jobs,but it'll up the maintenance cost about 1000 times what a big site needs.
Its the same reason we have data centers, instead of putting a server in every corner and closet that will take one. Consider the cost of replacing a failed drive in a data center - one guy can deal with dozens if not even hundreds of drive replacements in a day. compared to dell's next day onsite service calls -- he manages what... 4 to 8, plus shipping and travel time, having to coordinate access to each computer he works on, etc, etc. A distributed solution is vastly more expensive to maintain.
"10000 square miles is still nothing."
Sure, lets just build a single structure the size of New York City, LA, Chicago, Miami, and Washington DC... combined. no sweat.
10,000 sq mi of panels funded over a period years spread over 1,000,000 separate projects sure... its absolutely doable. Perhaps it is even inevitable. But as a single project its a mega project the likes of which the world has never seen.
I wouldn't call it 'nothing'.