If someone patents in interface, it's gone from every other vendor. And since it's the "best" it's worth more, so a $5 item is now a $100 item (gotta pay back that engineering time). It's not expensive because it's mechanically robust or physically challenging to build the parts, it's because of the monopolistic lock in that each standard brings.

Plus, there are no (useful, universal) standards for home automation. Partly because it's just too wide open, partly because shit is changing all the time. How often has the primary power distribution in a home changed in your lifetime (0)? How many times has TV transmission (once, maybe twice)? How many times has network requirements changed (I've run out of fingers)? A simple, end-user programmable, extensible system available on a commodity basis from multiple vendors simply doesn't exist.

FWIW, 20 years is a blink of an eye for a house. I regularly run across basically the same dumb electrical components in 1950s buildings that are being installed in today's brand new homes. And multiple manufacturers offer interchangeable parts for houses built today and 60+ years ago. Until Smart stops meaning outrageously overpriced for the hardware provided, it's never going to be mainstream.

Even ignoring those in the house who don't always have a smartphone with them (young children, grandparents) and any visitor who isn't on your network, needing a smartphone to control most things is simply awkward in inefficient when compared to a dedicated remote control.

Which is why, if you're going to spend $10 on lottery tickets in a year, you may as well play when the payout is the highest.

I do agree that looking at the odds and the payout for anything where you can't get enough play to take advantage of the house odds is a fools game when it comes to making money on a regular basis. (And lotteries, with only 50% proceeds to the winners, is never in the players favor even if enough plays were possible to make the odds relevant)

The sibling post nailed it. It's not an investment and shouldn't be considered such. Here's why: at the beginning of the two years, if you put the money into the bank your chances of becoming independently wealthy are exactly zero. In fact, the chances of having enough money for a weekend getaway in something nicer than a Motel 8 in your home town are still zero. Compare that to the chance of your retiring in those two years on lottery winnings. Maybe 1 in 10,000 - about the same as you next long distance call you receive having the same last four digits. That's not much, but it's still undeniably higher than retiring on what's in that bank account.

You may as well put the same amount of money into a music streaming service and decide, at the end of two years, which version had produced the most money - because after two years the entertainment will be just a thing of the past.

Insurance is a losing bet. It's a $1 ticket with an 80-90% payback. The funniest part is that it's a bet you *do* hope to lose. Rather it's a business decision, a hedge, which does not always need to show a positive ROI.

In the case of a lottery ticket, it's not a business decision. It's a lark, an entertainment. It's also one of the only ways to become independently wealthy with almost zero work (12 minutes at minimum wage, less than 5 minutes of labor at average wage). For 99% of the people out there, it's the *only* chance they will have of becoming independently wealthy. And someone *will* win eventually.

While I can't argue that people are, as a whole, bad at math. In fact, they're even worse at probability than general math. But it's not necessarily a tax on people who are bad at math, it's a peek at a life they would never, ever encounter for themselves in the normal course of their lives.

The magic 8 ball could have told them that.

Welcome to 2006: http://www.amazon.com/gp/produ...

Welcome to 2012: http://www.amazon.com/Actionte...

The memo doesn't mention Gamergate so I had to check who did.

Turns out the source of this summary is The Verge and it is one of the corrupt medias Gamergate is fighting. TheVerge regularly post anti-gamergate articles. So it's only fair they carried on by linking the leaked memo to GamerGate. It is in the interest of the corrupt media to silence their critics. How else will they sell their bullshit lies if there are loud critics on Twitter and Youtube?

P.s. You do not have to be in Gamergate to hate TheVerge, they are the people who brought you and fuelled #ShirtStorm.

A new life awaits you in the off-world colonies. The chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure...

why would you even want to stay here, right?

FAA can do anything they fucking want; nobody else in the world will give a shit. Do you really think if the Russian, Indian, or Chinese equivalent of the FAA pulled this that the US would take it in stride? Of course not. We'd claim they still don't have any right to reserve property on the moon.

And it would come down to who had the guns and is willing to use them. Which, to be honest, is all property rights really is anyway.

$20k a day, or $20k, once, on sales for a particularly timely topic?

$20k a day sounds great, $20k, once every 2-4 months, less costs and overhead, sounds pretty pedestrian.

They did NOT show that, from 3-4 transactions, they could provide your name, address and phone number, or even that if you have 3-4 transactions in a million transaction anonymized data set they can find out anything about you personally *unless they know you first*.

What they did is show that if they know that you, personally, had 3 to 4 types of transactions on specific dates (you went to a grocery store and a gas station today, and a restaurant yesterday), they could identify which anonymized data set you belong to. Their discovery requires specific outside knowledge not contained in the data.

This only matters if, say, a third party could identify specific purchases and dates - they could then comb the records and find the rest of your transactions on that specific card. IOW, someone has to be looking for you, and know at least something about you, to even start the search.

That's kind of the issue. There are people on the roof with significant firepower to take something like that down. Most of the incursions onto the lawn have been at night, when nobody of value is in the vicinity.

You'd be better off with a mortar mounted to the truck bed and lobbing a shell onto the lawn. It will be moving a lot faster and be harder to hit when incoming, and could deliver a larger payload. 50mph really isn't that fast.

Are you sure that includes all of DC and some of the surrounding Maryland and Virginia suburbs*?

*25km is 15+ miles. DC proper is 10mi x 10mi, minus the part across the river that VA took back.

I would agree, but only if we can let all the people who get stuck in a predictable storm die of hypothermia on the roads. Except, of course, nobody will let that happen. We'll spend millions of dollars and possibly endanger rescuer's lives to save them.

"Charge them the cost," I hear you cry? Yeah, that's not really going to go over well, and the lawyer's fees will dwarf anything we might recoup - not to mention pretty much guaranteeing whomever is in charge will never be elected to office again.

No - you (and I mean both you, personally, AC, as well as most of humanity) is too fucking stupid to stay safe, so the government is doing it for you. If you weren't so stupid in every. single. disaster. it might not be necessary. But utterly braindead humans show up every time. So stop blaming the evil gubmint - blame yourself and the dumb bitch next door. You're the reason these bans are put into place.