Because there have been large waves of immigration many times in our country's history, and each time produces the same backlash with the same rhetoric. It doesn't matter whether the immigration is legal, what matters is that different kinds of people are moving into "your" neighborhood and changing it. You can see this right now in Europe with the backlash against legal immigrants from the Middle East. People don't get that emotional over abstract legal principles without an excuse.

It's always the same -- they're too poor, they're criminals, they're not learning English, they don't share our values, they don't understand democracy (i.e. they vote for the "wrong" party), they're out-breeding us, they'll destroy America unless we turn them back. Two generations later the immigrants' grandchildren have assimilated and are indistinguishable from the general population. Then the next wave comes along and the whole cycle repeats again. So far it's happened to the Irish, Italians, Germans, Eastern Europeans of all sorts, Chinese, and probably others -- pretty well everyone except the original British colonists, and you know how *they* got all that land...

One of the problems with IPv4 address exhaustion is that routing tables become very complex. Having everyone try to glom a dozen random /24s together to make their local networks will not help.

Also, this is an exponential growth situation, so stopgap measures won't buy much time anyway.

Sorry, I suppose I wasn't clear. Internet-controllable major appliances are a very new thing. Business travel is not. How were you dealing with these problems five or ten years ago?

I specifically said in my reply to you that this isn't a problem with you personally, but rather with large numbers of appliances being sold to large numbers of people, many/most of whom will not maintain and protect the networked parts properly.

Then you either have a minor increase in your electricity bill or you're a bit warm for an hour or so while your house cools down.

Because many of these new unpatched network devices will be wreaking havoc on the rest of the internet. (Perhaps not yours personally, but you're not the only person in the world.)

How are you dealing with all of these problems now? Clearly you're able to function today. Although this:

is a pretty big problem and seems like way more of a danger than bad weather or network attacks.

Just because the equipment is present doesn't mean it's connected. At the very least, the user has to pick a wireless network and enter the password. I see your point, though.

I think you misunderstand. I'm not saying you should leave a key right outside the door all the time. I'm suggesting hiding a key somewhere non-obvious, *temporarily*, as a backup method in case you can't have an actual human being present. The alternative is an always-on, globally-accessible network attack surface for your front door lock. If that's compromised, getting in is as easy as "send me X bitcoins and I'll open the door at Y o'clock".

A lot of those examples are solved problems, and at worst are minor inconveniences. Many IoT proposals can easily be replaced with three existing categories of solution: "other people", "paying attention", and "non-networked computing". To address your specific examples:

Thermostat: Schedule the turn-on in advance. Alternate, come home, move your luggage inside, turn on the AC, and go out to dinner.
Laundry machines: Check a clock every so often.
Broken fridge: Show failure status on an LCD. Or have a USB port that you can plug a laptop or a smart phone into.
Freezing weather: Ask a neighbor or a friend to check on your house once every day or two. You may already be doing this if you have pets.
Door opening: See above re: neighbor or friend, or hide a key somewhere.
Out-of-reach window shades: Close them before you leave for work.
Dishwasher: Assuming that scheduling is really that much of a money-save, start it manually before you go to bed. Or use a time delay. Or load the data into the washer via USB.

The more serious problems are much more rare, and that must be weighed against the constant vulnerability from having internet-connected appliances and the upkeep required to secure them.

Perhaps a better option would be to get away from the idea that networking should imply both internet access and full remote control. Is there any reason an embedded device can't limit communications to its own subnet? Stick an upgradable, patchable PC on the network to act as a master, and have it talk to the outside world. Meanwhile, the appliance should be designed at the hardware level so that remote access only gets you status information and the ability to trigger a few well-defined fail-safe modes. Using a stove as an example, you would be able to tell if the burners are on, or force them off, but you wouldn't be able to turn them on or change the heat setting.

So I go to a web site to download a nifty-looking piece of software, and right there in the middle of the download page there's a big "Download" button. Except it's really an ad for a totally different piece of software. Whose bright idea was it to hide the product they've already sold me on?

Thank you for the correction. There's still something I don't understand, though:

My understanding was that modern HDTVs are computer monitors are essentially interchangeable (the panels are the same, at least), and that HDMI video and DVI-D are very similar. Digital video is of course encoded for a fixed resolution. So what's the difference between, say, a PC decoding Blu-ray video into a monitor vs. a set-top player decoding the same video into an HDTV?

It's also a more accurate name in that horizontal resolution doesn't vary with a movie's aspect ratio. A "1080p" movie could be 1920x1080 (16:9) or ~1920x800 (21:9) or any other vertical resolution. The 1920 ("2k") is the real constant. I think the usage of lines was a holdover from the days of analog TV when vertical resolution was discrete but horizontal was continuous.

Thank you for posting. I'm sorry that so many of my brethren willfully ignore the direct personal experience of many, many, many women in favor of a comforting fantasy. Hopefully at least a few of them will be persuaded by your words.

Yeah, this part is pretty ridiculous:

[emphasis mine]

He didn't think to try Steam? Or Origin? Or Amazon.com? Or, heck, picking up a DVD from GameStop or Best Buy? This is a big release. It's not exactly hard to find.

I'm not sure about NAND flash, which is a block device, but in NOR flash sequential reads are faster due to prefetching, where the next memory word is read before the CPU has finished processing the first one. For NAND, I'd imagine you could start caching the next page. Not sure if that's actually done, though.

That was well-written and enjoyable (and utterly horrifying) story. Thanks for posting the link!

It takes a bit of effort and a lot of downloading, but it is possible to get HD-quality fan reconstructions of the original theatrical cuts of the Star Wars trilogy. This obviously doesn't help the mass market, but if you want to show your friends and family the original movies, it's as close as one can currently get.

Harmy's STAR WARS Despecialized Edition
Harmy's THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK Despecialized Edition
Harmy's RETURN OF THE JEDI Despecialized Edition