I'm looking at my Comcast bill. Not only have the rates gone steadily up, but there are all kinds of add-ons: Franchise fee, PEG access fee, FCC regulatory fee. They don't have to hide the costs of reglatory compliance in the rates, they simply add a fee to recover the cost. That way the customer knows why they're paying more.

And what is the customer going to do, call Time Warner to get service?

Churn is already a market fact of life. Passing the costs of compliance with new laws onto the customer will have little effect on that. Given that anyone else that the customer can call will ALSO have those fees, there is little incentive to change. (My other ISP I use regularly has its own "Regulatory Cost Recovery Fee", too.)

I had no particular problem with estimates.

At a minimum, you could break out easy "construction/recognized pattern" work from risky new stuff.

As far as managing programmers... it was humorous.

Few liked giving estimates. So they would say it couldn't be estimated.

So I would ask, will this project take 2 years... and they would say, "oh no- of course not" and after a bit, we'd get down to 6 months or 6 weeks or 6 hours...

So then we'd time box it to what could be done in a month and move any risky items up to the front so we could establish if a new technology wasn't going to work before we put a lot of work into the project.

Then, I recorded over/under for every project and found (over about 24 programmer data set) that programmers consistently overshot or undershot their estimates. So after a few projects, I had a pretty good idea of their deliverables.

Finally status reports and status meetings with function points and overall percentage delivered kept things on schedule or let us know well ahead of time there was a problem with the estimate/schedule.

Programmers were not my problem- executives were.

They...
a) pushed us to violate standards.
b) ordered overtime without ordering it. As in assign 80 hours work and then insist it be completed when everyone knew it couldn't be completed. Made worse by the fact the indian contractors said "I'll do my best" for "no- you are batshit crazy" and then things fell apart when the indians were unable to deliver. Of course, the indians were very good at delivering to the (crazy/incomplete) specifications on time. At least enough to be testable. I'm not sure if it is because they were contractor types or that they were indian- perhaps a bit of both. I learned in a contracting shop, you always say you can meet the estimate (to get assigned the work) instead of giving a realistic estimate. Then renegotiated it later when it wasn't going to make the schedule. If you didn't, then the three other people bidding on the work would get the work. Executives seemed to have zero memory for the fact that you delivered on time on estimate while the other people were usually late.
c) made everything priority 1a. they had no ability to prioritize as far as I could see. Which really just pushed prioritization down to me or the programmers.
d) cancelled projects without warning.

Find a compromise between predicting too much of the future and just managing a project by the seat of your pants; get into a rhythm where you check how good your estimations and learn to get better at them.

Of course you can't develop every project this way; I've used Agile and it's worked for me. I've used waterfall and it's worked for me too. You have to try to be sensible; you can't completely wall of other people's need to know when you'll accomplish certain things, nor can you build a solid plan based on pure speculation. You have to have an intelligent responsible way of dealing with future uncertainty, a plan to cut it down to size.

I've even had the good fortune at one point of winning a $750,000 grant to build a system for which no firm requirements had been established. It was kind of an uphill-flowing waterfall: we knew how long it would take us and how much it would cost but we had no firm idea of what we were supposed to build. If that sounds like a recipe for disaster, it was; but my team was *successful* and built a product which was still be used and supported over a decade after the grant finished.

What's missing from many programming estimates is honesty. It's a matter of ethics; you can't take people's money and say maybe someday you'll deliver something useful to them. People don't have unlimited time and money to accomplish all the things that need to be done in the world. It's an honor being entrusted with people's aspirations, and a serious responsibility. It's hard, even nerve-wracking, but you've got to care enough about the impact of your planning on other people to make the effort to do the very best job you can.

And what I've found is that if you do make the effort you can do a surprisingly good job of estimating a project if it's in an area and with technologies you're reasonably familiar with. If you look closely your specific predictions will often be way off, but if you care enough to be brutally honest the pleasant surprises tend to balance out the unpleasant ones.

Telcos got their status under other rules and long ago. Cable franchises are not government granted monopolies. The only reason there is a defacto monopoly for most cable companies is economic, not legal.

I've served on two local cable commissions and dealt with franchises. Non-exclusive means another competitor is free to enter the market, as long as they go through the same franchise process.

That may be, but when the monopoly is defacto and not dejure there is a difference in the solution.

If your fiance could not afford to pay the cost of insurance before, then she was in a high-risk group where the insurance company could not afford to pay her potential claims unless she paid a higher rate. If she has insurance now that she can afford, then you know that she's being subsidized somehow.

Here's the definition of "subsidy" as used by the exchange:

Subsidies are "subsidized" by the federal government and are paid for through taxes.

So, while you think you are "paying your way", and while you aren't getting a tax credit or other federal subsidy, your fiance truly is being subsidized by all the lower risk participants in her plan. Just because the taxpayers as a whole aren't subsidizing her healthcare, a lot of other people are. That includes the guy whose rates went up because of ACA who thinks you owe him a "thank you".

I'm responding to your claim that her insurance coverage isn't subsidized. You brought it up, not me. Truth is a reasonable straw to cling to.

This sounds very much like Icom's way dealing with their "open" D-Star protocol. The protocol definition is open but the chip to actually implement is it closed and single-sourced.

And I hate to say, if it's open for hams, then the Chinese will have it before most hams do. Do you ever wonder why the early Chinese amateur knock-offs worked very much like existing amateur radios? And why FTDI felt compelled to release a windows driver update that bricked a lot of USB/serial adapters? (I.e., whatever part of your hardware is closed they'll just reverse engineer.) It would be a shame if you have to dedicate a large part of your income from this to paying lawyers to deal with Chinese IP infringement.

It seems to me that the constant "overhaul" of a GUI to change icons, menu structures, etc is bad design. Not because the final product is necessarily bad, but because whatever improvements the new design brings are dwarfed by the cost of throwing away of user knowledge about the old interface and the cost of re-learning a new interface and its symbols and structure.

There's probably even unconsidered effects. A lot of clients I've worked with have resisted upgrades (they own and have paid for) to Office because of the radical changes in look and feel. By running older versions with weaker security, they're now exposed to greater risk of compromise by malware. There may even be meaningful losses in productivity from missing new features or improved implementations of existing functionality. This can even be made even worse by resisting operating system updates.

I've always been puzzled that some of the best minds in user interface design get together and say "obviously, the best solution is to throw out everything the users have learned and give them something totally different."

Automation can't replace all jobs, but from what I've read there are a couple of concerns.

A lot of the jobs that seem to be most easily automatable are "good" white collar jobs that previously had required some skill. There's a lot less manufacturing left (partly due to automation, but partly due to offshoring of manufacturing), so there's a lot less fallback jobs outside of very low wage service jobs.

Even if the job loss ends up being only 20%, 20% unemployment is a big deal. It can have higher-order economic impacts on significant markets, like real estate, it can have potentially destabilizing political effects which can feed back into the economic system through bad policy,

There is also an amplification of inequality from automation, as technology allows greater amounts of capital to be controlled by fewer people, usually with a feedback loop that allows them access to superior technology, enabling advantages in capital control.

Oh sure, it says it is in love but it's a computer. I know it's just a simulation of love, not the real thing.

I agree.

The thing is-- with robotics doing parallel work on human level physical reactions (like tossing things in the air and catching them- without the use of a brain), true AI may be more human like with one part being the conscious mind that says "start walking towards the door" while other parts control the actual movement, balancing, etc.

if you start reading about the brain (Brain Bugs is a good book for it), the first thing you see is that the brain is multiple independent systems. If you break them, the conscious mind does really weird things like, for example, saying "That's not my limb" (alien limb syndrome), losing the ability to form memories, crossing sensory systems (so sounds smell and odors have colors), and what's really crazy is that often- even when informed of the problem- the conscious mind of the people can't process that anything is wrong.

It looks like we have a vision system-- then an object system- and then an importance system- and then a fear system (the amygdala).

The weird thing is- for people with broken amygdala's- they know the rattle snake is important- but not that it is dangerous. In other cases, people have said "I know this is bad" logically- and then done it anyway without being able to stop themselves.
Very interesting stuff.

As of now, they have human level agility and balance with plugged in humanoid robots, vision and dexterity to pick random mixed items out of bins faster than humans. The robot population is rising at a low exponent but the exponent is increasing.

That depends on the incentives the AI has.

In this case, it appears it has incentives to gain the highest possible score as quickly as possible.

In this case, tunneling and bouncing off the top wall better matches those goals.

I read about his before and the computer starts out not knowing where the score is-- it has to learn which area is score and then do random things with the game until something succeeds at causing the score area to go up... and then optimize for high score and high speed.

That sure sounds like learning to me.

Don't worry, if this becomes in any way successful, the Chinese will happily take care of all the "Asian manufacturing" without you having to do anything at all. They'll drop the price to $100 or less. That fact of life is why I wondered why you commented on preventing Chinese knock-off production, especially for an open-source/open-hardware system.

Nobody will be able to use this in the ham bands without a ham license, or in the LMR without the appropriate licenses. At least not as a transmitter. It is a really bad idea to suggest to people that they can use a transceiver without the appropriate license. That's why we have license-free CB -- so many people got the idea they didn't need a license for a radio they bought from K-Mart that the FCC had to give up on requiring licenses.

It should be LMR, since amateur typing won't make use on commercial frequencies legal. Since it's open source software, you will have a hard time claiming that the radio is limited to any specific bands or uses.

You talk in your slides about how the "big 3" will sell you something and they don't interoperate in digital mode. Yes, that's a problem. (And I, too, wonder what Yaesu was thinking with their C4FM radios.) Your solution is this system. So, you'll need apps that do all the existing digital modes. As soon as someone modifies one of them and starts passing their nifty new app around, you'll have the same interop problem. Even worse -- instead of three main manufacturers to keep track of, there will be potentially hundreds of amateur tinkerers creating new "not-modes" digital ops. Saying the amateur community should come up with the digital standards is like saying a herd of cats should guard the catnip. Herding cats, herding amateurs ...

You're going to need a master contacts-app that keeps track of who you talk to and what app you need and even then you'll need to know which app they're using at the moment.

Don't get me wrong. It's an interesting piece of hardware. It's just the idea of saying "without a license" that needs to be controlled. Handing a transceiver to someone that can cover 50-1000 MHz (even at just 2W) and suggesting that they don't need a license to use it, well, I dunno. I think that's dangerous for the future of ham radio, not beneficial.

By the way, you say that "the AMBE 1000 IP will be unenforceable after Hamvention" (or something like that. ) What does Hamvention have to do with it?

My only axe to grind is with someone who treats me like an idiot because I don't think I should have to write an add-on to do something that used to be a simple checkbox menu item. Someone who thinks THEIR solution to a problem they've never come across is so much better.

Do'h. I know that. So what? Once you get rid of the malicious page that you can't get away from while js is active, TURN JAVASCRIPT BACK ON. It really is that simple. Three simple steps: 1. Turn js off. 2. Escape the malicious page. 3. Turn js on.

If some other webpage cannot survive with javascript off for ten seconds and you may lose so much precious data because of it, just imagine how much precious data you'll lose when you have to kill the browser and reload the page from scratch.

You make it sound like I'm saying I go visit my bank and then decide to go look at malicious websites just for fun. That demonstrates a complete lack of comprehension of the problem and is patently insulting to boot. You're the one who brought up loading banking pages after a malicious web page gets control. I told you how you solve the incredibly difficult problem of having a banking page that needs js -- by simply not disabling js when you go there.

Now I know you're trolling. Why the fuck would I reload a malicious page once I've managed to get away from it? The goal is NOT to be there at all, not to see what it looks like without javascript enabled. But then, you've said you've never been on one, so you don't know.

I understand. You got yours. A feature THAT YOU WOULDN'T USE ANYWAY cannot be tolerated because ... I don't know, because you might lose control of your own mouse and wind up using it and not know why all your favorite websites no longer work like you want them to? You think that it should be impossible to have a simple option to do something simple and you want to force others to create an add-on. Your machine and network connection is fast enough to reload twenty or thirty tabs so killing the browser and hoping you uncheck the right miscreant if/when you get offered the chance is the only option anyone needs.

And I get that you think other people are too stupid to be able to manage a simple checkbox to turn javascript off. You make that clear when you talk about deliberately going to malicious websites while I'm doing my banking ("But then on the other side, loading a banking page in the same browser as a potentially untrusted page at the same time isn't really a good idea in the first place.") or how I want to reload the malicious web page I've just managed to get away from. Stop treating other people like idiots because they want an option PUT BACK (not created, just put back) that you don't intend on using.

Every reason you have for not allowing a simple option to disable javascript boils down to two: it might break some web page if javascript isn't on, and nobody could be smart enough to turn javascript back on when going to such a page. To the first, boo friken hoo, and to the second, <expletive deleted>.

So this will be low enough powered to be certificated as a Part 15 device? And it won't have trivially modifiable software to violate the Part 15 standards so that everyone and their brother can have a cheap, unlicensed high-power (>Part 15 limits) source of interference to all the other licensed users?