If somebody doesn't like you because you're doing something that isn't actually wrong, that's *THEIR* problem, not yours, and although they might try to make it yours

People are quick to jump to conclusions. It will be, actually, my fault if I am careless with images that they see. Humans are not computers; humans gladly operate on fuzzy data, and they substitute missing information with their own understanding - which may be right or wrong. A neighbor can remain your friend, but you also have to work toward that. You help him, he helps you. Limiting access to information that can hurt him is a good deed. It is customary to put warnings like NSFW or "graphic photo" before the link. As one classic book says, "in much wisdom there is much grief, and increasing knowledge results in increasing pain." We do not give an illustrated catalog of BDSM techniques to children. It will not occur to you to send a video of an Islamic beheading to a random friend. All that is information - and it can hurt.

they might try to make it yours if they decide to get physical with you over it

Going physical is not even necessary. I'd be unhappy if my neighbor starts silently hating me. Good luck talking him out of that. He won't listen to me, and the law does not help. If Shakespeare to be believed, people died from true information that was simply misunderstood. Too much knowledge is a pain indeed. I, personally, do not want to know more than necessary about others.

Razgui says he had made all of the instruments using hard-to-find reeds.

How does one compensate for a dozen of instruments that were hand-made by the player from rare materials? You can't go to the nearest store and rebuy the lost instruments. How long will it even take to make them again? Can the player even do it?

Worse still, will the Customs destroy a Stradivari violin just because old Antonio neglected to attach a US-approved sticker that lists all used woods and where they were finished?

The point I was trying to make is that my wife wouldn't worry

That is highly uncommon. You are lucky. Few families can claim that. In fact, I personally know exactly 0 families with such trust.

You don't need to forget a past mistake to move beyond it... in fact, forgetting mistakes only encourages their repetition.

When you regret a mistake you do not simply remember it as a special case; you form and remember a generic rule. For example, if you got nearly killed on a bike one night it'd be nearly pointless to memorize that specific occasion. It will not reoccur. Instead you tell yourself: do not ride a black bike at night in all black clothes. This is what is memorized.

On top of that, if you remember your mistake it's one thing. If other people remember your mistake it's another. Not everyone is kind; plenty of people will find it funny to recall, years after the fact, how you got nearly killed that night.

If outside circumstances have made it much more difficult because, say, they are being judged for getting drunk at the company christmas party, acting up, and getting fired, reducing the chances of finding new work anytime soon, that's unfortunate, but it's dick-all nothing compared to the shit that people without access to things like facebook have to deal with. In the time that I've typed this, alone, at least a dozen people have died from starvation

You are introducing unrelated events - unless you can show how one's drinking at a party causes hunger in Zair.

But yes, someone drinking at a Christmas party can be denied employment. Wrongly denied, by the way, because he drank a soft drink; but the photo from GG did not come with a handy chemical analysis of the content. Do you want to be wrongly judged by strangers, without a chance for appeal?

You accuse me of living in fear, and yet it seems to be you who does.... fear of what your neighbor might think of you when they see you doing something they don't agree with.

That is true, but it's true because the neighbor (or the boss, or the HR person, etc.) does have certain power over me. I find it unwise to give them reasons to act against me, even if they are incorrectly reading the evidence. This is not the court of law, and if your neighbor sees you on someone's GG with *his* wife he may not think first that you were talking about the Bible. You'd get beaten up. You physically cannot be safe and secure in a society unless you make sure that not only you behave according to the norms of that society, but ALSO that you appear to behave according those norms. For that reason I do not fear my neighbor, but I am trying to ensure that the neighbor has no reason to become my enemy. Yes, it is possible to resolve the enmity were it to occur; but it's easier to prevent it.

Also, your last paragraph...dude, that is too much fantasy to process. A guy filming me with glass in a "less common viewpoint"? Should I be seeing guys appearing from under my crotch now?

Even that happens. I can offer you a personal anecdote. A bunch of girls, in dresses, were sitting on these benches at a school gym, across from us. It took only a moment of distracted attention to transform the "100% best" view into something else. That was quickly signaled across the gym, of course :-) Nobody was wearing GG, obviously, so this is just a verbal story, attached to no one in particular, and entirely harmless. But if GG were to be involved, those images could be quite unwanted. What, in your opinion, would be the chance that all boys who filmed the event would be wise enough to immediately delete the recording? Note: that age is the prime audience for GG.

I can't take your post seriously if the first thing you say about the device is "camera that streams data to the mothership". Get real now.

This is the intent of GG. What is the objection? Battery, storage and bandwidth limitations are mere technicalities that can be solved over time. For example, there is no limit on storage in the cell phone itself - you can get multi-GB SD cards right now. Battery demands are small if the camera is only streaming over BT to the phone. The phone then can upload the video as time and battery and bandwidth allow. Google does not necessarily want your records right away. An hour, or a day later is also OK. It's even possible to come home and upload all those recordings via tether to your PC, over USB or Wi-Fi. As you can see, those solutions exist even right now if you look for them.

And you didn't even challenge my point of the device needing some form of visible activation. If I see some guy touching buttons on his glass or saying "ok glass, record" then I'll have reasons to suspect.

I did not challenge that point because it is trivially defeated. The GG can be activated by a myriad of methods - by a timer, by an app on a cell phone, by a remote phone call, by head movement, by detection of something, by a different keyword, and, finally - in advance. You cannot have "obvious activation" as the only firewall that protects your privacy. Not unless that activation is absolutely, positively, impossible in any other way. Today's GG does not guarantee that - it's all software. Also, the current rev of GG does not even have a recording LED. It only highlights the screen... which means nothing, as there are many reasons to see the screen without recording.

Also, your last paragraph...dude, that is too much fantasy to process.

I simply cannot imagine anyone who looks their best 100% of the time. This is achievable only at fashion shows, where trained models have no other duties but to carefully walk back and forth for 60 seconds. Besides, the very definition of "best" depends on the audience.

What difference should the imperfection of human memory make? People not remembering that Joe did X does not mean that Joe never did X in reality.

I thought it's obvious. It does not matter if Joe did X in reality. All that matters for Joe's social life is what others think of Joe. The only exception is serious crimes. It is essential to forget because this allows people to begin each day anew, hoping to learn from mistakes of the past days, and expecting that eventually mistakes of those past days will be forgotten. No adult wants to be judged for something stupid that he did 40 years ago. A searchable, immortal computer will be incapable of forgetting.

If I were married, why would the fact that another girl who, as you put it, doesn't mind my company, be of any concern whatsoever to my wife?

Only your wife can answer that question. And she will, mark my words :-)

If I am doing something that I don't want others to know about, and I'm not saying that there aren't such things in my life, I do them in private.

It's really nice that some people have private parks, private landmarks, private beaches, private movie theaters, and many more such private things. Poor peons, however, have to share those facilities. There are about two things they can do in private - to study the Bible or to have sex. That'd be a rather abrupt transition from meeting someone in the street and saying "Hello."

This is just a wearable HUD, why is people so obsessed [...]

Because it isn't. It's also a camera that streams the data to the mothership. Nobody knows when that is happening, so people have to presume that it is done all the time.

First, nobody has the mobile bandwidth for a 24/7 stream. Nor the storage space. Nor the battery.

This generation of GG is a foothold for the new generation. It will be capable of all that and more, and it will fall onto prepared legal ground in a conditioned society.

Second, you aren't that interesting when you are outside.

Yes, we are not interesting to other people. We, however, are VERY INTERESTING to Google's (and NSA's) computers. It will be trivial to incentivize Glassholes for capturing more faces, or new faces, or being in new places, just by giving them worthless points or free bandwidth. This will happen.

Of all people the people of slashdot should know the limits of technology better

We do. We also see time when those limits will be lifted. This is why so many geeks are unhappy. GG treads upon certain freedoms that people are used to having, such as the freedom to be largely invisible in public.

And, no, my privacy when I am outside doesn't bother me at all. I look my BEST when I am outside, please record me like that. I am precisely ready to be seen.

No woman would make that statement without week-long, expensive preparations. Pictures taken are forever. Besides, even if you look your best, what stops a Glasshole from filming you from, say, less common viewpoint, that does not exactly strive to show your best looks as you understand them?

Maybe Google Glass isn't what is turning people off of Google Glass wearers. Maybe it is the wearers that are turning people off Google Glass.

It's both the capability for harm of the device itself, AND the low expectation of the judgement of wearers. That low expectation is already amply proven by GG owners who are entirely lost why others are suddenly wary of them. It will be further proven by millions of compromising photos taken by GG wearers, if only GG use becomes common.

Well, to be the devil's advocate, I thought the whole idea of GG was that you could continue being a participant, and then review for anything you actually want to keep later.

I'm afraid that's not how it works. A photographer at an event is not free to mingle with people of his choice and take whatever shots he likes. He has duties, such as to take pictures of everyone, then everyone with everyone, then of those groups, then in this setting, then in that setting... In the end the photographer is just an attachment to the camera, and his own plans have no bearing on what he has to do.

I guess one troubling thing though is that with GG, nobody knows when to pose, and keeping a smile plastered on your face whenever you look at a GG wearer would be rather painful.

That is exactly true. Human life is generally boring and not of any interest to anyone. Only certain events deserve being captured. Often they are staged to form the best impression in the future viewers. Nobody wants their faults to be preserved forever, for random people to look at and laugh. Humans forget rather quickly. Cameras forget nothing.

what I don't get about the Google Glass objections is that they are usually just objecting to stuff being recorded that absolutely anybody in the vicinity could see or hear anyways.

You are conveniently forgetting that human memory is short term, fallible, and cannot be mined by a computer. You can see me in company of others in a park, but you are very unlikely to recognize all of us, or to remember that you saw us at all. A machine has no such problems: everyone will be seen, recognized, geotagged, and all that will be stored for future use. Maybe not today, with primitive GG hardware and pathetic bandwidth. But tomorrow. Objections to GG are striving to prevent smooth, comfortable slide into the society of total surveillance.

If I'm doing something where I'd feel uncomfortable with somebody recording me, I'd be doing it in private

Imagine that you are married. One day you meet a girl who doesn't mind your company, and she asks you to take her to some public place. Do you want to be forced to tell her that you can't do that, in fear that your wife will run a Google search on your whereabouts and views something that was captured by some GG wearers? Do you want to be afraid of that? Oh, that's certainly good for your soul :-) but it's not good for your freedom. Many say that it's not even good for your relations with the wife.

I'm also using a dumb phone. I have no need to be permanently wired into the Internet. If someone has to contact me, they can call. Otherwise it will wait until it is convenient for me to review what the world wants from me.

I could have gotten a smartphone and turned off all those Twitbooks. But AT&T and Verizon (and probably others) charge money for a data plan as soon as you buy a smartphone. I have no desire to give them $500+ per year for a service that I do not plan to ever use. It's not even that I don't have the money. It's a matter of principle. You should be always able to say "no", in every deal, and you will do well if you say "no" often.

And a streamed video of the thief automatically uploaded and sent to the police with GPS coordinates.

One street-smart teenage thief is wiser than 100 geeks on Slashdot. He will run past you, from behind you, will grab the GG, and will be gone before you realize what just happened. That's how they grab purses, cameras, and other stuff. You never see their faces.

The GG, as a mechanism, will not be aware that it had been stolen. The Bluetooth link will be broken nearly instantly. Then the device is inert, open to a hacker who will reset it and sell to another rich $unwise_person. Perhaps the victim can file a complaint form at Google, but who is going to even look into this incident?

30 cents a kwh? Wow! Where are you? I don't even pay that and I have some of the most expensive electricity in the USA...

PG&E sells power in four tiers: (0-100%), (101-130%), (131-200%), (201+%). The lowest tier costs about 11 cents per kWh, and the highest tier costs about 31 cent per kWh. The baseline (100%) is carefully selected such that it is barely enough to run a small home with one occupant who is rarely in need of hot water. Per my bill, the baseline today is 11.70 kWh per day. However my refrigerator (which I cannot upgrade, it's built into the furniture) draws 600 watts, on average - and that is a good number, as it seems. I have one electric water heater (4500W.) A whole house (floor) fan draws about 1 kW. Water well pump is about 3 kW. Booster pump is 1 kW. I'm sitting here, all alone, in one room, with three computers running, and the power meter shows 850W into the house (it's dark outside.) That alone would push me above the baseline even if I don't do anything else. Most people have larger families, and they need more power. Pools are also popular. If you have one, you need to run a filter (pump) for about 5-6 hours per day. Air conditioning in summer is required if you have older people in the house. (I usually don't run A/C.) So it is *very typical* that a house ends up in tier 4 - and that is only twice the baseline! This is why solar setups are used here to drop the power consumption into a lower tier.

Here's a question: Let's say that you somehow come into possession of quite a bit of gasoline. Should the local store be required to buy it from you at their posted price?

The store is not required to buy anything. But you should be able to put a can with gas near the pump and sell it for the price that pleases you. In case of electric power, the utility has no ill effects from households who generate power. Transmission infrastructure is linear, so it does not care in what direction the currents flow. Since PV setups are synchronized to the grid, the injected power is seen at the grid as reduction of load. There is no danger to transformers or wires (and there isn't much else.) Meters are designed for bidirectional measurements.

There was an article yesterday about how Hawaii has hit the point where they're refusing additional grid-tie systems because they're getting 'irregularities' due to having so many of them. It's fixable, but that takes money. Should they raise their rates on me so you can make more profit? That's not very free market, now is it?

Haven't seen that one. No, you shouldn't be paying for someone else's profits. The Federal government does that for us already :-) But the utility should invest into development of the grid so that everyone benefits. For example, the new grid will allow me to sell you the power for half the price that the utility charges you. This would be fair, IMO.

You are aware of the concept of 'oversell', right? Just because every house has a 100/200A connection doesn't mean that EVERY house can pull that max, or even a substantial fraction of that max, simultaneously without popping something further up in the grid.

A well built grid will allow that. However even the existing grid will benefit. Without PV producers the segment will be overloaded by all the AC units in summer (for example) and "something" will disconnect the power. With PV producers - somewhere, but ideally mixed among consumers - there will be no overload. I cannot call that "bad."

The technical constraints of the grid are currently that not all points are fine with bidirectional power transfer.

The grid is highly linear. It does not care. It is governed by Ohm's law, and its extensions onto a graph. This is a well researched area, and I do not foresee much of technical difficulties even if so many PV generators are available that the current flow in the generator itself reverses. But it is true that the network has to be able to smooth the variations in solar output (due to clouds) because the generators cannot react fast enough. So some thought needs to be put into it. Nothing major, though - we know pretty much everything about linear circuits and transmission lines, and we have all the necessary instruments to monitor them.

Interesting battery. Submarines of World War II also used "open jar" type batteries, since they are infinitely serviceable. They were lead-acid, though.

I checked my power bill, and the fees for connection to the grid were $9.17, as of 11/29/2013. In previous month they were $8.50. I have two meters (it's a large property,) so each meter is about $4.50/mo, and most of that cost is minimal charge as set by CPUC. The "Distribution" part of it is $3.96/mo per meter.

In your area the cost of connection is higher, and it is understandable why that is so. However it is not important. These are fixed costs, and you pay those fees as long as you want to have electric power at your home. They do not affect how much power you want to buy, or to sell, or to trade. Up to a point, of course - if you want to produce more than your local transformer can support, the utility will have to spend money on a larger transformer. But we are not going that far. A minimum power panel for a house is 100A. At 120V this amounts to 12 kW per phase. A 200A panel will give you 24 kW per phase. Both of those numbers are high enough for any reasonably priced PV system (in other words, your PV system will not overload the grid - you'd run out of PV installation money first.)

This means that once you are connected, there ought to be no reason why you cannot buy and sell power for the same price. Moneychangers (banks) charge you for services when you exchange currencies; but that's their entire revenue - you do not pay them a monthly fee for the privilege of changing USD to CAD. Utilities do charge that fee; therefore they are not entitled to tell you in what direction to transfer the power, as long as it is within technical constraints of the grid.

Utilities buy power from generators in bulk, and usually with guaranteed delivery, and always from a high capacity plant (2 GW is typical for a coal- or gas-fired powerplant.) Economy of scale makes a huge difference there. Your energy will be more expensive, as you purchased your PV for retail prices, from a small time installer. If your energy is sold for more than the utility charges, nobody would buy, and then the point is moot. But if you can sell for the same cost as utility's own - or some %% less - then the society will benefit. There will be fewer losses, and less fuel will be burned at remote generating stations. The society, however, is not interested in developing locally produced power. Perhaps in AK this is not such a hot item, but CA has plenty of sun. Even today, around Christmas, the sky was perfectly clear. My weather station measures solar radiation and UV, so I checked. Unfortunately the RS485 cable to the PV inverter is not connected, so I can't tell you how many kWh my setup produced today.

Sell electricity at retail? Ever heard of 'net metering'? It's close to what you say, as long as you're only installing as many solar panels as what you use. Allowing them to sell excess at retail dings the power companies too much(in my opinion).

I have a PV setup at my house, and I have a net metering plan, and I have a nice DSP-based power meter that measures power in both directions. So this is not new to me.

But I don't understand why you want me to stop at N PV panels instead of more? I have space. I can install 10x as many. Don't you want power? I will sell you power, and you will receive it for the same price that the utility charges you. It will be just a trade between us, using the utility's power grid for which we pay $8/mo separately.

It's quite curious why would one say that we need more green power, and at the same time put up roadblocks for those who can generate that power? Selling PV energy at generator rates makes no sense: if I buy 1 kWh for 30 cents, why can't I sell it for 30 cents? Or, perhaps, for 29 cents? 3% is a good profit for the utility for doing nothing special. But the utility wants to buy my power for 10% of retail - and /automatically/ resell it for 100% to you. Nice racket they have here. Why would I want to sell my excess power? I'm burning it up on house heating instead.

Also, how would I, producing electric power in my backyard, "ding" the utility that is already suffering from blackouts and brownouts due to overload on hot, sunny days (when my PV panels are pushed to the limit by the blazing Sun.) Are they afraid that nobody will be buying their overpriced power, that they buy from a generator for 3 cents and resell for 30 cents? If so, they are the whip makers, and perhaps they should get what's coming their way. All they block is trading energy between those who live on the sunny side of the hill and those who live on the shadowy side. How would that be antisocial? Should we, the neighbors, create our own power grid for those purposes? The society will suffer from that, as it is suffering now. Today I am not selling excess power to you, and I'm not even investing into more PV panels to keep your house lit and warm, because - by executive fiat - this is a money drain. Make it even reasonably profitable, and I will invest. The choice is yours alone - I have my PV setup already.