Truth. We have public repair stations on our local bike paths, even including a pump for your tires. Which lasted a couple months before someone cut the hose off it, then someone else later on stole the whole pump. I'm waiting to see how long the cable-attached tools last before some skeeze steals those, too. In some of the same places there is a rediculous solar-powered recycle bin that supposedly compacts the cans and stuff you put in it. Waiting to see how long it is before some homeless guy breaks into it and steals the solar panel and batteries and anything else they can sell. Also, more shit to monitor people? Benches? Really? What the actual fuck? Like someone else said, nice to see that Boston, apparently, has no infrastructure maintenance that needs to be done or other public problems that need any money to fix that they can spend money on stupid crap like this. Seriously, is anyone really going to trust something like this to plug their phone into it? Sounds like a great vector for having your phone hijacked to me. Nice move, Boston.

I was rolling; when you're rolling you don't use paragraphs. =).

What they don't seem to understand is that their whole 'Think of the children!' approach will end with everyone being treated like children, themselves included -- except of course the Watchers themselves, who will be the only people left on the planet who are anything even close to being adults anymore.

Being an AC the only form of intelligence you'd have would have to be the artificial kind, that's for sure.

I'll be over here, waiting patiently for the tipping-point to occur, when all you 'I have nothing to hide!' and 'I don't care who knows what I buy/where I go/what I do so long as I get a discount' people who have deprecated the whole concept of privacy have finally had enough of companies (and in this case, doctors and maybe insurance companies) poking their noses into your business. Those 'loyalty club' cards you've been using for years? Because you never cared about your own privacy, you never thought to ask for the contract you agreed to by accepting the card and the discount, which gave them the right to collect all sorts of personally-identifiable data on your purchasing habits, did you? Did you really think they were giving you a discount on everything you bought there out of the goodness of their hearts? Because they're such nice people? Because 'insuring your continued business' was enough of a reason for them? HA! Enjoy having your doctor up your ass constantly, after all you got a whole $0.10 off that box of cereal you bought so it's worth it, right?

You don't need a 'smart home', you need a 'common sense homeowner'. Besides which there are already 'smart home' systems out there that don't need to be connected to the goddamn Internet, just use those.

Isn't that what got Clinton in so much trouble?

Are you kidding me? I've been riding motorcycles for 35 years and I'd stand in line for a chance to own something like this, and I've owned some fast bikes. Zero to 60 in 4 seconds? And it does it quietly? Hell, yes! Fewer moving parts to wear out? Hell, yes! No massive amounts of heat generated? Hell, yes! For 100,000 miles the only thing that would likely need replacing are brake pads and tires? Oh HELL YES!

You, on the other hand? As others have pointed out, sounds like you want compensation for something you're lacking, buddy, not necessarily a motorcycle. Midlife crisis much?

'Cryptocoin mining'.

Google may or may not accomplish this goal, but the real question is, how long after that will it be before Comcast does a hostile takeover of Google and fuck it all up for everybody?

Simple solution to that little problem, my friend: don't buy a so-called 'smart' TV.

THANK YOU! For once I'm not the one who has to make a post filled with common sense! Hear, hear!

Sounds to me like something the NSA would come up with, a universal database tracking everyone's access to every little thing on the internet, and the so-called 'restrictions' are as meaningless as the 'do not track' flag in a web browser, it only works when everyone is playing by the same rules.

This.
All over the place I see kids and even young engineers that may be geniuses when it comes to anything digital, but you ask them to design a crystal radio without cheating a looking online and most of them are completely lost, let alone being able to design the RF portion of, say, a wifi adapter, or really understand how an op-amp works or what to use it for. Online I see kids playing around with Arduinos and the like, thinking they're 'working with electronics', when in fact what they're doing is putting lego blocks together and writing some code. I've run into more than one person who thinks you can't do anything at all without using some sort of microcontroller, including something as simple as flashing an LED; you try to show them something as basic as a transistor oscillator and they think you're just kidding with them and that that couldn't possibly do anything at all. What's worse is what I see as a growing sentiment that anyone who uses a discrete or analog approach to a problem, even a small, simple problem, is somehow backwards or unintelligent, or that anything less complicated than a microcontroller is somehow trivial and therefore should be disregarded. Little do they understand that all their microcontrollers wouldn't operate at all without a humble crystal oscillator, which at it's roots is analog in nature.

If you're going to advocate civil disobedience on the level of outright violence you could at least put your name to it you goddamn pussy. Nobody is going to put their necks on the line when you're clearly not willing to yourself.