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Comment Re:Cue the whiners (Score 1) 329

It is not a necessity. Not any more than a computer, an internet connection or a dishwasher. It's a matter of convenience and enjoyment. People want to watch their shows. And to watch them, they need to be able to do just that. They don't care that they get channels they don't want to get. What difference does it make for them?

Comment Re:With the best will in the world... (Score 1) 486

The EV might be ok for the american suburbs where everyone has a big house with a garage, but for for european ones where almost everyone live in apartments where you park your car either in the stress or on some parking lots.

Geez, I couldn't live like that. Just not having a place for my outdoor grill and smoker....or a place to set up my burners and pots for a crawfish boil (or do some home brewing) out back would drive me crazy.

I'd miss cooking out and having a bunch of friends over on the weekends.

Comment Re:danger vs taste (Score 1) 630

It has RDA of calories, and if you're drinking soda, then 100% of the calories are from sugar (or corn syrup, for most soda in the US). There is no RDA for sugar specifically because there are no scientific guidelines, not because the FDA is part of some grand conspiracy to keep it a secret.

Well, the WHO tried to set very specific and LOW limits on what human daily sugar consumption should have been a few years ago. The US sugar consortium had our govt basically tell the WHO to remove such bad and low recommendations or we'd withhold our funds and a lot of that language was stricken from the WHO recommendations.

There was apparently an attempt to lower sugar recommendations from The McGovern committee to study food and the US.

Here

And interesting video on the report too HERE.

Here's a little of what WHO was proposing

. Give this movie a watch, it is free to stream on Netflix, called Fed Up . It has some very interesting insights into sugar and its impact on society from since about the 70's...

Comment Re:danger vs taste (Score 1) 630

Given a choice between something that I'm scared might kill me (diet soda) and something that I know is likely to kill me (regular soda), I'll choose the former over the latter every time. But you know what? I don't have to make that choice.

We have alternatives, people! Tap water is good for us, good for the environment, stunningly cheap and tastes pretty good. Tea and coffee are actually good for us and taste great. I just don't get why anyone would pour chemical effluent down their throat when the alternatives are so much more attractive.

Comment Re:Why would a non-sports person have cable? (Score 2) 329

I thought that was the only reason anyone had cable anymore, for the sportsing. Especially since HBONow is finally a thing.

The sports thing is only really important to me during college football season, other than that, I don't watch it.

But I would miss all the different cable news networks, I tend to default to them when nothing else is on, etc...

If I could stream and get all those, I'd likely cut the cable too. Right now I'm experimenting with an indoor HDTV OTA antenna and NF/Amazon streaming to see how much I can deal with that and not miss UVerse......right now it is mostly the missing the cable news shows, and the fact I don't have a mythtv box set up to act as DVR and distribution to all the TVs in my house.

That is one of my next projects, but until then...uverse stays.

Comment Re:Least common denominator (Score 1) 161

Connectivity is huge, but it's only one of the ingredients in making this decision.

If you want the app to work for them outside of the corporate WiFi, you have to host it on the public internet, where all attackers are equally welcome without regard to skillz or skripts. Are you sure that server is secure? What about tomorrow? Are you patching it? Are your users securing their devices properly? Uh oh, it's the new version of Heartbleed, go back three spaces.

You also have to consider performance. Is this something that your users will use constantly for their jobs, or occasionally for some rare piece of info? If it's going to add one second to every screen, and you're asking people to tap their way through 600 screens a day, the inefficiency is going to cost you 10 minutes worth of payroll per user per day. Maybe you make that up in hardware costs if you force your users to bring their own smartphone to work. Maybe the sluggishness just makes your users miserable throughout the day. Or maybe it simply costs you a lot of money.

On the other side, if it's used perhaps once or twice a day by 2000 people, poor performance and connectivity issues won't be nearly as important as savings on developer costs and time to market, Or if you have only a half dozen heavy users, perhaps you're willing to eat the payroll cost of an hour per day instead of spending them on development.

It's a question best answered by the money.

Comment Re:You're not willing to pay (Score 1) 285

Yep...I buy most of my fruits and veggies while in SEASON these days and from local farmers around me...I do this whenever possible.

I buy for taste and nutrition, and I'll pay that little extra more to have it.

It isn't like strawberries grown locally (I live in LA and love Pontachula strawberries) are going to break the bank on my budget. I buy them in season, enjoy the hell out of them, and then move onto the next seasonal fruit for my diet.

Comment Re:Cue the whiners (Score 4, Insightful) 329

The problem is that the only real option you have is abstaining. You don't want this behaviour? No cable TV for you. Because there's no such thing as a "channel mix" that you want. Have you ever taken a look at the average "basic mix" of channels? Nobody, absolutely nobody, on this planet would choose these channels. No matter what his interests.

If you're not happy with this, your choice is to do without. Not only without the channels you don't want, but also the ones that you would want. Don't want Sports and Bible TV? Ok, no SciFi for you either.

And most people would rather grin and bear it than abstain. Essentially what it means to them is that they don't get the 100+ channels promised but actually just about 10, with 90+ more that could as well not exist.

Comment Re:But it doesn't work (Score 1) 64

Manning would almost certainly have been caught regardless. All those State Department cables could only have come from someone with access to the entire database. That's a reasonably short list of people, and everyone on it would have been grilled and inspected from head to toe.

His (her) talking about it just made the inevitable happen faster.

Comment Re:With the best will in the world... (Score 1) 486

Except that:
"...One has to charge, but one never has to go to a gas station, and most people would find plugging in in their garage much more convenient than a special trip to a gas station and standing outside in whatever weather. This leaves open the question of charge times, of course. But if you can drive hundreds of miles on a single charge and charge up on a fast charger during lunch and then take off again, it's pretty irrelevant...."

Aside from the fact that it simply doesn't exist, sure.

Nobody minds plugging in, but when you have to plug in for 2-4x the time you can drive at highway speeds, that's ridiculous.. The tesla model S is the best in class with a range of 265 mi/charge. That's 10-12h at 220V, so a 'drive:charge' time ratio of 1:3. Gas engined cars are ~400 mi tank, what, maybe 5 mins to fill? That's a ratio of 80:1, or what, about 2 orders of magnitude better? That's more than you can hand-wave away.

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