I'm sure it is. I support a customer every few years at a 4 day convention there. Last time they bought a brand new dyson vaccuum for less than the price of the cleaning crew vaccuuming the booth at night. Another vendor bought a full set of very nice folding chairs for their booth for the price of chair rental. The service prices are just absurd.

From what I can gather, the features of most peoples' phones are good enough that they don't want to talk to the people around them much less people who aren't around them.

And that is solved by airgapping my thermostat either by removing its wifi settings or setting up a local wifi network. I've got a spare router sitting in a box and I don't even have any connected devices to need a dedicated network. I'm just not seeing any reason that any effort at malice here wouldn't be exponentially more time consuming that what it would take to thwart it.

I've got a question, what possible motivation could anyone have for hacking my thermostat?

I got an ad from Walmart/Sam's Club yesterday saying they could scan my kids' faces in store and make a custom action figure with their faces on it at select stores as part of a pilot program.

So if I just sever all legal means of communication then I should be free to skirt the law? I'll have to remember that.

The climate change folks set the public expectation with the original wording of this discussion. There is a significant amount of the population who don't understand the issue any deeper than the two words "global warming." You can rant and rave about the idiodicy of people, but until you actually tackle the grammer nazi issue then you won't make it anywhere with policy changes.

Well then there is a difference between the colloquial and the academic uses. That in itself is probably a big reason for the divide between positions on the issue.

Yep. It is an availability bias. We only hear about states rights when in completely screws something up. You can't seriously say that a uniform code of law works best across the country, can you? What is best for California is best for New York? Or what is best for Arkansaw is best for New Jersey? Or what is best for Hawaii is best for Montana? Different attitudes, different resources, different population densitities. We are strong because we are different but united, granted when we screw it up the we screw it up monumentally.

There is a good chance the test is flawed, but IQ is not the only indicator of high intelligence that points to a subset of people as intelligent but who don't perform well in school. It is pretty terrible when intelligent people can't do well in intelligence training.

My oldest is 6 and naturally curious about how it works. You could go through all the mechanics and he would be captivated with the description but never touch it. My youngest is 4 and you've got to be careful merely doing things in his presence.

I've done some work with human factors evaluation of HUDs for aircraft. Some information just needs to be text. It takes a bit longer to process but it is better to have critical text available near the field of view and refocus than to have to hunt for it at my knees and lose my reaction time. BTW, a well designed HUD isn't in focus at the optic. It looks like this one is focused a bit in front of the vehicle. A really nice one will be focused at pseudoinfinity and is mostly in focus anywhere you look.

Despite all the (partially true) snark. Isn't this a good thing? Shouldn't the highest court of the land be producing rulings that are predictably consistent with previous rulings? Unless a case is truly novel, past performance should be a good predictor of future performance here, since case law is cumulative.

"The real problem is the tendency of mankind to accept things as given without checking up on it." That isn't a problem that is one of the fundamental pieces to how our minds process a complex world.

Well I buy their argument that figuring out which teachers are truly bad teachers is exceptionally hard. Stakes are high, evaluation is tough, results play out over a long time, and there are really important corner cases for any evaluating. Parents should have a say but not too much. Peers should have a say but not too much. I guess it falls on administrators but that is our current scheme.