That is mainly a problem if you sign up to get something for free. I don't expect that a company that makes 50 bucks net profit off of a fridge is going to risk their reputation in order to make a tiny bit more money by selling my data.

I'm more worried that the NSA would hack into an accelerometer intended to detect vibrations of the compressor and use it as a microphone to spy on my kitchen.

It's that too, but that's not what the (more serious) suits are excited about. The suits are typically excited about increasing profits for stuff that already exists, or about new business to business inventions.

Imagine for instance connecting everything in a factory in such a way that you can sit at a screen in a control room and detect or predict problems ahead of time. You could also have a risk function that quantifies risk. Sensors might for instance detect weak but unusual vibrations in a machine. Other sensors might detect that you only have spares in stock for one repair of that machine. The risk function has a model of how the factory works and the model shows that the machine is vital and that production will be significantly reduced if it breaks down, which means that you're looking at a fairly high economic risk. The system could then suggest potential fixes, like stocking up on more spares, or running the machine more slowly until the next scheduled maintenance.

I think this sort of setup is already in place in many factories, but it will get more common and more advanced in the future.

Yeah and there were virtual machines talking to other virtual machines and abstracting away resources long before anyone thought of the word "cloud".

Simple shorthands like "cloud" or "internet of things" are needed because the suit-wearing people who decide where money gets allocated often prefer fuzzy thinking.

You don't get it. IoT is a shorthand for the idea of having lots of networked sensors and actuators. In layman's terms: setups such as self-driving cars that warn each other about road hazards.

If this is the shape of things to come then there will obviously will be plenty of work for security experts.

We have to distinguish between the onset of mental illness and the prevalence. The onset is often between age 0-35. Look here for stats on schizophrenia http://bjp.rcpsych.org/content/202/s54/s5.full Also note the comments about depression and anxiety. If you haven't had these before age 35 you're not likely to get them before retirement age.

I'm surprised to see the suicide figures, that the onset is basically constant with age. I guess I've been getting information about the <i>relative</i> risk compared to other causes of death.

The average age of onset of alcohol dependence is 22.5 http://www.nih.gov/news/pr/jul2007/niaaa-02.htm Look at page 11 of this paper for age of first use for "other drugs" (as in not alcohol, cannabis) http://www.qucosa.de/fileadmin/data/qucosa/documents/11009/646_PP.pdf There does look to be a small peak in the 45+ bracket too. Medicine / opiate abuse, I'm guessing.

On the other hand, younger people are more likely to have a baby, develop a debilitating mental illness, develop a debilitating substance addiction, commit suicide, or die in a violent accident. All of which will drastically impact their ability to contribute professionally.

Employers take that into account too.

Perhaps if the bus driver makes minimum wage. But then, would you want to be driven by someone who makes minimum wage?

Subways are easy to automate, it's been done in countless cities, but there you have an average of 100-200 passengers per driver which really does make it pretty pointless to eliminate the driver.

Most of Joe Six Pack's data is going straight to his various cloud accounts, which he expects to be cheap (if not free). This means that Google and Amazon need the price per unit of storage to go down, if they want to keep their customers.

The limiting latency here is the > 50 ms latency to the servers and the limiting transfer speed is the 100 Mb/s or so offered by the ISP that Joe uses. Regular old HDD:s will do fine for the storage in that situation. The database that catalogs Joe's collection of "home movies" will probably be stored in RAM most of the time, but SSD:s do have their place here as well, of course.

This is not exactly a niche case btw.

Nah, real programmers just wire analog components together until they get the behavior that they need.

It's a bit worse than that. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle states that you are not allowed by the laws of physics to simultaneously know all the initial conditions with arbitrarily high precision.

They're doing this because they don't want to delay their landing trials until they get cleared to fly the stage back to the launchpad.

Basically they don't know how long it'll take for the government to issue a permit (and the government probably doesn't know either).

It's actually pretty common for the founder to be someone who doesn't have any technical knowledge or any knowledge of managing the finances of a business. The founder could be a person who brings money and ambition to the table. (I'm not sure if this applies in this particular case, but it would not be unusual).

The most important decisions then are usually the first 2-5 employees that they hire. The first person must be an experienced, ambitious, loyal and tireless person with the right technical knowledge who for some reason prefers to work for a tiny startup instead of a larger, more established company.

Best of luck!

The first picture on that page shows an ominous-looking and unprecedented (in the 2000-year period covered by the graph) temperature spike over the last 150 years. This coincides with a rapid rise in atmospheric CO2 concentration. Even if that is just a coincidence we still have to face the fact that we are probably headed for CO2 concentrations in the 1000+ ppm range, a range where the atmosphere has not been since the Jurassic.

We can hope that the warming will be significantly less severe than the models predict, but it would be good to have a plan B and a plan C when the stakes include all coastal cities around the world.

There was a 30-year period in the mid-1900's when there was significant cooling. That does not negate the fact that the trend over the last 150 years is, by human historical standards, rapid heating.

Now, do you think that 20 years of little to no warming disproves the connection between CO2 and average temperature?

I think it might be the creative aspect of it. The social climate of these conspiracy scenes seems to revolve around the idea that everyone will refrain from debunking each other's theories, even if they clash logically. So you get to invent your own take on the course of events and underlying motives of the different actors in the conspiracy and nobody gets to call you out on it.

When I was maybe 10 or 11 I used to enjoy fantasizing about secret tunnels and stuff run by ancient secret organizations, so I can kind of relate.

It helps to meddle with creative hobbies like visual art or music, or indeed creative writing if that's what you like.