The trouble with these things is that they want to "phone home" too much. For energy conservation, Nest talks to a Nest, Inc. server and tells it too much. The info it needs (outside temp, power grid load status) is freely available from read-only web sites. (Given a ZIP code, the National Weather Service site will return info in XML.) But no, it has to talk to the "cloud" and give out personal information. That's totally unnecessary.

I have several Teletype machines from the 1926 to 1940 period. All are in good working order. They're completely repairable; it's possible to take one apart down to the individual parts and put it back together. But they're high-maintenance. There are several hundred oiling points on a Model 15 Teletype. There are things that have to be adjusted occasionally, and manuals and tools for doing that. Every few years, the entire machine has to be soaked in solvent to clean off excess oil, then relubricated and adjusted. This is the price of building a complex machine good for a century or more.

(The Model 33 of the minicomputer era is not one of the long-lived machines. This was by design. The Model 35 was the equivalent long-lived, high-maintenance product; the 33 required little mainenance but had a llimited life.)

The problem is C. Programs in all the languages that understand array size, (Pascal, Modula, Ada, Go, Erlang, Eiffel, Haskell, and all the scripting languages) don't have buffer overflow problems.

It's not an overhead problem. That was solved decades ago; compilers can optimize out most subscript checks within inner loops.

I've proposed a way to retrofit array size info to C, but it's a big change to sell. There are many C programmers who think they're so good they don't need subscript checks. Experience demonstrates they are wrong.

Let's say we go after the bastards, then. Make tobacco illegal and drive them underground. We could outsource the production and distribution of tobacco to Los Zetas and it would be a net win, right? At least that terror Philip Morris would be out of the picture.

To some extent, I measure how threatening they are by how dangerous they are to me as a bystander. I'd much rather see a major cigarette outlet near my house than an illegal marijuana distribution center. I can avoid most of the problems with a cigarette outlet by simply not going in. Not so much with the drug import hub.

We seem to have managed to neuter them pretty effectively by taxing cigarettes and making the public aware of just how bad they are for us. It looks like smoking is down about 60% in the US just due to minor regulation and social trends. Our approach with other drugs doesn't seem to be following the same trend.

Finally, measuring "evil" in absolute numbers is fraught with problems. If all we care about is number of dead rather than how they died and why, we'd be pounding on GM's door too. And of course, I don't think we Americans would be so unconcerned about the drug war if it was our country that they were turning into a failed state. Deaths notwithstanding, the total collapse of law and order in a democracy is something that should be talled on the "drug cartels are bad" side of the ledger, even if it's not our country they're doing it to. Duffel bags full of the heads of police officers and elected officials in some foreign country aren't a really big deal for us, so we tend to turn down the knob on "evil" when we assess it.

For all of the badness of Philip Morris, I think I'd still rather they be running the show than the guys who kidnap busloads of people, rape them or make them fight to the death, and then bury them in the desert.

I don't think that's just personal squeamishness talking. It may very well be that the sociopaths who did bad stuff for the cigarette companies are just as evil as the sociopaths who run the cartels. But they do seem to control themselves a little better when they can make tons of money by staying in the law's good graces.

Serious organized crime groups will just make up any lost weed money with other drugs.

If they were able to increase their profits from other drugs at a whim, why would they wait to incur marijuana losses before doing it? Why wouldn't they just do it now?

Rouge waves, typhoons, collisions with tankers, vulnerability to warships, aircraft, submarines.

But hey. It's cool that a tsunami won't screw it up.

You're describing the "nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded" problem, though. Major urban areas are hard to get into becuse they're super crowded, and super crowded means a huge number of potential employees and amenities. Plenty of people can get into San Francisco every day. Evidence: San Francisco is chock full of people every day.

Sure, it would be easy for people who live in the exurbs to commute to a Google office in their particular exurb, but there just aren't enough potential Google employees to run a Google office living in a single exurb.

It's not 100% of the problem, but rent control is a major issue. Given a choice between selling or occupying your property and renting it out, rent control gives the owner a very strong disincentive to rent. So even with the same number of units, the split between "owner occupied" and "rental" shifts strongly in favor of owner occupied dwellings.

The reason was different. Diesels cost about 3x as much as steam locomotives pre-WWII. But by the 1950s, diesel engine manufacturing was a production line process and the price had come down.

The real advantage of diesel over steam was that steam locomotives are incredible maintenance-intensive. Here's daily maintenance. That's what had to be done every day, by a whole crew. That's just daily. Here's 120,000 mile maintenance, done about once a year for a road locomotive. This isn't an oil change; this is a full teardown, boiler replacement, and rebuild.

Electric cars don't have that big an edge over IC engines at this point.

So when you say this:

In summary: Having some profit is acceptable. Horever, to want 900% profit as in the example is simply stupid, blind greed.

We're to understand that you mean that 900% doesn't actually happen, but if it did it would be bad. And while some profit is good, too much profit is bad. But for unspecified values of "some" and "too much." So realistically speaking, are we in a state where "too much" profit is being made? If so, how do we know that? And what amount would be appropriate?

We're talking about a very practical problem here, so some concrete answers would be useful. As far as I can tell, the profit in the home building business is not abnormal, so are we saying that businesses in general are making too much profit? If so, what would be a more appropriate profit margin and how do you decide what that is?

We could send radio signals that far, with the big dish at Arecibo. If they have intelligence, and radio, we can communicate with a 1000-year round trip time. Maybe we should transmit some of the proposed canned messages to other civilizations every month or so.

If there is other intelligent life out there, it looks like they're a very long way away. Too far to talk to round trip, even at light speed. None of the known extra-solar planets within a few light years look promising.

If you're going to complain about "unreasonable" profits and then back off when people actually ask whether the profits are really that unreasonable, you might want to consider the possibility that the profits aren't all that unreasonable and that your basic complaint is nonsense.

And it's not like building houses is a new high-tech endeavor that only a few companies have figured out how to do. There are *a lot* of people and companies in the home buidling business. They know what it costs and they know what the return is. If the return was far higher than the return on other investments, they'd be borrowing shittons of money and then using it to build houses like crazy. The fact that they're not doing so indicates that the return on that invested capital isn't all that much higher than the return on other investments.

You're complaining about a problem that doesn't exist.

Right. Traditional pneumatics is rather dumb - most of the time it's on/off, with air cylinders pushed up against hard limit stops. Positional control of pneumatic cylinders works fine, but it takes proportional valves, feedback sensors, and a fast control system. Until recently, industrial systems tended not to get that fancy.

I was interested in using pneumatics for running robots back in the 1990s, but the available proportional valves back then were big and expensive. One useful model of muscles is two opposed springs, and a double-ended pneumatic cylinder can do just that. You can change both position and stiffness, separately. You can simulate a spring, and recover energy. Someone did that at CWRU a decade ago, but the mechanics were clunky. Festo does that elegantly with their new kangaroo. Very nice mechanical engineering.

Shadow Robotics has a nice pneumatic robot hand. Shadow has been doing pneumatic flexible actuators for many years, but now they have good controllability.

A lot of people consider both Mountain View and San Francisco as valid places to live. Some people would never live in suburbia and some people would never live in the city, but a lot of people are flexible and see costs and benefits to both. They make their decisions in the fuzzy gray areas based on commute time, living environment preferences, and price. Shifing the price of either will cause some percentage of those people to alter their decisions.

And your Honda/Lexus analogy is spot on in many ways, but it doesn't illustrate what you think it does. Many buyers consider both a Honda and a Lexus when they're buying. They may prefer the Lexus but choose the Honda because it's a better deal overall. A $2K bump in the Honda price is very likely to sell more Lexuses. It's not like we're comparing driving Hondas to riding zebras. The two goods are real substitutes, if not perfect ones.