A state spying on it's own citizens... shameful. I'd be outraged, unless of course they said it was part of the war on terror, or whatever China's current favorite boogeyman is.

It's a gamble between two opposing forces of insurance:

1) On one hand, insurance companies are bureaucracies and handling claims is a bureaucratic process with a certain amount of inertia, where obvious fraud needs to be caught but time/people/resources don't exist to fine-grain protect against all possible marginal fraud, otherwise the system would grind to a halt. A tracking device with a minor deviation from observed damaged may just get written off as the strangeness of physicals or the brittleness of plastic cars -- I mean, we have the data, right?

2) On the other hand, IMHO, the insurance company is almost in the primary business not of supplying insurance or processing claims, but in DENYING claims. Insurance fraud is a huge risk, the more claims they can deny the more money they make and they have deep and long-term investments in actuarial data and statistics. They may already have enough tracking device data in their databases to *know* that your physical damage doesn't align with the tracking data.

What do we know about the security of systems such as onStar?

But will a wearing a dongle help?

Regardless of the reason (Amazon's missteps or typical TV timelines), it's kind of problematic. A year turnaround kind of kills momentum and interest, although given the thin creme at the top of the shitpile that is a streaming content catalog, maybe it won't matter because streamers will watch almost anything even if its not that good.

It could also be a limitation of the "instant binge" model where the entire series is available at once versus a weekly release that allows them to actuallly shoot the series as it runs.

Maybe they could do some kind of combination, shooting 3 episodes of every series they ballot and then actually starting production on the rest of the series immediately after the voting window ends. In theory, a 60 day delay between the end of balloting and the "start" of the series should allow them time to shoot an additional two episodes, and the whole thing could be setup to be released in 4 episode batches every 90 days.

They'd end up shooting episdes they don't need, but pehaps they could structure the 3 episode narratives in a way that made them more or less complete even if they didn't get voted for a season. A three-episode triptych could become some kind of new streaming-only format and maybe it would serve as some kind of an incubator for new talent or genre fiction.

And the Chris Carter sort of post-apoc sci fi thing, too, Which will probably suck and be like everything else, with predictable, formulaic episode structures where *tiny* amounts of the bigger conspiracy are revealed, stringing viewers along forever and then never really having a point, like "Lost".

Anyway, the pilot at least held my interest and binging without commercials makes it somehow less annoying. And the Bosch series looks good, too. The books are above everage mysteries and Welliver is pretty perfect for Bosch.

I don't understand Amazon's long window between pilot and series, though. It seems that traditionally when a pilot was aired if new episodes were to be aired, they aired fairly closely. Maybe traditional pilots and series' had long windows, too, you just didn't know about them because only TV suits saw the pilots and Amazon had that voting scheme.

Or maybe this is tech industry hubris, where they think beause they have a handle on cloud computing and fulfillment logistics that they can just step into making TV shows, too, and then find out that everything they think they know is worthless.

I kind of hope it's the latter; not for the comeuppance, but maybe there's some slim chance that an application of money and disconnection from traditional media can kind of reinvent the process for making filmed entertainment.

And while I'm ranting on the topic, I wonder why they stick with the traditional 60 minute episode. If people can binge watch it anyway, why not 7 two hour episodes instead of 13 hour episodes?

If you can think of as many distinct sexual activities as there are symbols in your wrinting system, make a table and encode your secret messages as porn movies. (Spies will probably watch them, but probably also forget that they're supposed to be looking for messages.)

"...serious newspapers and comedy TV shows..."

Also it completely breaks formatting if you zoom in to 150% like I do

It may be cheaper to drop the setpoint down when power is comparatively cheaper (and how much cheaper are we talking -- a couple of cents per kWh?) but it is it more energy efficient to drop the setpoint down so that it can cycle less and gain temperature above optimal when the power is more expensive? Eg, if optimal is 36F and I drop it to 34 when power is cheap but let it rise to 38 when its expensive only to need to drop it back to 34 when its cheap.

In my experience, doing something similar with my central air conditioner in the summer usually seems like a mistake. If I raise the setpoint from 72F to 75F during the day it seems to take constant running for hours to get back those 3 degrees, more running than it would seem to take just to keep it at 72F.

It seems like it takes more energy to drop a box a few degrees than it does to keep it at a constant temperature. Of course all I know about refrigeration and thermodynamics is that it means we can't have nice things.

Something's wrong if your pipes will freeze with the furnace off for a couple of hours.

I also live where it can hit -35C (although -30C is more common) and I have my thermostat automatically setback to 60F at night and unless it really is -30C, the inside temperature never hits the setpoint, usually sinking to the low 60s from a normal setpoint of 69.

In my experience in order to freeze pipes, your furnace would have to be completely off for many hours, in extremely cold temperatures (-30 or colder), your house would have to be extremely poorly insulated (lots of heat loss) and you'd have to have uninsulated pipes in an exterior wall which was itself nearly uninsulated. For internal pipe runs your entire house would have to fall below freezing for hours before you burst pipes.

I think there is some risk in the latter in many kitchens, as sinks tend to be on outside walls in many houses and often the supply plumbing is run up in the exterior wall void which some idiot builder/installer/plumber/remodeler doesn't re-pack with insulation. I've known a couple people who have had this happen when on vacation -- set back thermostat really low (like 55F for the duration of their trip) and 5 days of serious subzero weather. Always shut off the water main when leaving like this -- that way at least a burst pipe is a minor mess versus a total disaster.

Putting foam insulation on the exterior wall pipe runs helps a lot. I found that insulating the entire hot water line from the hot water heater to the kitchen sink was beneficial just for faster hot water to the sink. It seems I get max hot water much faster when my pipes aren't basement cold and nearly instantly if I've used the hot water within the last few hours.

There are roughly 1.6 billion Muslims in the world but only 320 million Americans. There are five Muslims in the world for every one American. It's not clear that there would be any point to an all out war between the all the Muslims of the world and the USA (i.e. both sides would lose far more than they could hope to gain). But it's also far from clear that the USA could win such a war with brutality alone. Most likely other countries would get involved and the outcome would be determined by which side could build the strongest alliances.

Total warfare is an overarching military philosophy, it is not a specific campaign strategy.

We speak of Islamic extremism, but most generally we experience a particular flavor of Arab-dominated Islamic extremism made possible right now by a handful of weak and failed Arab states, bounded by Lebanon on the North and West, Syria and Northern Iraq in the Center and Yemen in the South. Arab states with functioning governments and effective central control have little problems with jihadis, they are treated as an internal problem.

Imposing order on these areas would vastly minimize the breeding ground for this kind of terrorism.

but the real war won't be won on the battlefield any more than the war against the Soviets was won on the battlefield.

It all depends on what kind of battlefield warfare you're willing to fight.

The TV news friendly, politically popular war where we're real careful about the destruction we cause and the collateral damage and winning hearts and minds is a sure loser.

Scorched earth total warfare where you ring a population center and utterly bomb it to rubble without any consideration for civilians is winnable. You win a war by utterly destroying your enemies ability AND their will to fight. And you do by inflicting massive death and destruction.

The of the firebombing of Tokyo and the A-bomb strikes. The Japanese were infamous for fighting to the last man and never surrendering. Once we demonstrated the ability and willingness to just level cities until they capitulated, they capitulated. The alternative was not capitulating and risking the reduction of the Japanese nation to the same footnote status of Carthage.

How do you think Julius Ceasar won the Gallic campaign? By building roads and schools and promising H1-B visas? You were given an offer to disarm and pledge allegiance to Rome. Your alternative was to have your people killed, your treasure seized and anyone left standing sold into slavery or crucified.

No, it is not nice in any sense of the word. It is utter brutality and bloodshed. Which is why we should never, ever get into these conflicts unless we're willing to do what successful armies for centuries have done to actually conquer a people.

Somehow it seems like an even worse version of the Gilded Age's above the law mentality. You might argue that era really was a "wild west" in which there wasn't much in terms of law and regulation and people really kind of did what they wanted. The Federal Government was much weaker than it is now and the concept of regulation was pretty weak at any level.

These days there's more government and regulation (for good or for ill) and it should come as no surprise to anyone that many things are subject to rules and regulation. But what seems to happen is that corporations know things are illegal but assume that political payola or huge legal retainers will protect them.

My favorite gimmick is knowing something is prima facie illegal, but paying some lawyer a pile of money to offer a "legal opinion" of pretzel logic that says its illegal, but the intent of congress was that's only illegal for other people to do for reasons other than what we're doing it for, and since we're operating within the "spirit" of the law its OK.

Then when they get caught there's a whole bunch of "Who, me? But I got a legal opinion from my lawyer, and he said it was OK. You can't hold it against me because I intended to follow the law as I understood it."

When my younger son was about a year old, I asked his (2 year) older brother what he was saying. I figured that maybe being close in age he could remember or something. Older son looked at me like I was from Mars and said "I don't know!" and went back to his blocks.