Streaming services are not radio. They are going to replace physical media or even digital media files for the new generation. These services are not cheap advertising, so there is no way that payments to copyright holders are going to be minimized. We are going to need compulsory licensing and reasonable payments to right holders. The lack of such is what is causing the friction and inefficiency, and what is causing loses. I think the argument of whether streaming services are the future is over. This is what kids are used to, and what they will lobby for when they are older.

That said, small payments don't work. The administrative costs of any payments are huge, and customers rightly demand a expensive level of service once payments are made, even if those payments are very small. Probably a $15-$20 a year would cover some costs, but would still require ads. What might be more workable is a sponsored product. A branded credit card would do it.

Yearly payments could work. People pay for sub-basic cable that only supplies local channels. People pay for Hulu. But Hulu plus is almost $100 a year.

This is what seemed to happen to a few other startups, you know the ones that had lists of bars and restaurants and the like, and then tracked attendance and such. The big problem with them was that many of the smaller venues were widely inaccurate, like to the point of putting a bar in someones house. This happened quite a bit in my old neighborhood and I would send in corrections. I think at one point I sent in about 10. Nothing ever happened to fix the problem. I guess they had to staff to make information accurate. The apps were for entertainment purposes, and now at least on these entertainment apps more. There was a time when I wished I treated google maps as entertainment only, and usually I take anything on it with a large grain of salt.

MS is known to break MS Windows every few years, then taking a few years to fix it. We See this with MS Windows 8, MS Vista, Windows ME, Windows 98. This is OK Because most commercial users stick with a version that works. Historical stochastics predict that MS Windows 10 will be a workable version, around 2017, but I expect to be on MS Windows 7 until then. My understanding is that MS Windows X is going to be a rolling upgrade. I interpret this to mean that when one uses the update service, new features will be included with bug fixes and the like. The will be no way to avoid a product like Vista and work will come to a halt. This is different from Mac OS X, where each version is a separate, if now free and almost forcible pushed on users. However, it is not hard to stay with the old version for the lifetime of a machine.

There long term job is a myth that was true for some semi skilled workers many years ago, but right now most of us are going to have many careers in our lifetime. Age discrimination in IT starts at 40. Automation is probably more of a threat to many jobs than offshoring. And if you think you are going to be a teacher for a lifetime, think again. Teachers unions have become so weak that administration is increasing free to make a teachers life so miserable the teacher will choose to quite. That and wages for a college educated, felony free, drug free, social media faux pas free, person is so low that most who expect a good lifestyle can't make it. So the defense to this is to be very good at what you do, but more important very flexible.

It seems to me the attraction of a chromebook is a solid state, light, durable machine for around $200,with wifi, and immediate start up, and all day battery life. The weight is around a MacBook Air, but at 1/5 the price. So I do not see how repurposing a laptop will result in any advantage other then integration with the Google stack. Using a chrome browser and logging in would accomplish much of this. Ubuntu seems to have variations that have recommended usage at or below 2GB.

First, to criticize the computer marking of exams one has understand the human process. In the human process readers are trained to use a rubric to award points for the presence of certain attributes. On objective subjects like maths and science, the readers will generally train until everyone gets the same score for the same work. On less objective tests, some variation is tolerated. For instance on my GRE essay, I receive two different scores that were averaged. It was the same essay, and from an assessment point of view the variation in grade is purely attributed to the personal preference of the reader.

Therefore the only task of those who write software to grade essays is that the variation of the machine is no worse that the variations of the humans. There is some success in this. Edx has a module that will grade essays. As far as I know the value in this is quicker and more uniform feedback for practice essays. Of course humanities majors, who have generally have minimal understanding of advanced technology, hate it. This, of course, includes journalists.

This is not to say that computer graded essays are going to be as good of an assessment as human graded essays. However, it may be good enough, and better than other objective measures, such as fill in the bubble tests. In fact anything that minimizes the cost of open ended free response assessment is going to benefit anyone. Securing multiple guess test is very expensive, and the value of them are highly questionable. They tend to overestimate the value of student how have vague passive knowledge, and underestimate the value of those who have an ability to actively apply knowledge.

There is a lot of counterfeiting as well. While insurance, if Uber has it, will protect the consumer and vendor, the consumer will not be protected from counterfeit bags.

I even doubt there will be suitable insurance or bonding, as one reason Uber can be so cheap is because they externalize most costs to the driver, which means consumer do not have the protection they normally expect. I mean if something happens on the trip, or to a product, who are you going to sue? The driver who doesn't even hold the title to the car? The driver's insurance company that specifically is not going to cover commercial activities?

Even with proper insurance and bonding, it still leaves the consumer open to receiving counterfeit property. The driver substitutes the counterfeit for the original, gives the authenticity card to the customer, and end up with an authentic $2500 bag for the costs of counterfeit.

While TAM Galveston is above the level of a community college, it is not up to the level of the more legitimate universities in the State even though it shares a name with some. Also, it has a reason to exist apart from the greater system, namely a maritime emphasis. That said, the flagship universities do have a tendency to shift less desirable students to these outlying branches. Students want to go to these education not for the education, but so they can say they went. The universities encourage this by have 'former student associations' instead of 'alumni organizations'

In any case I am sure these problems exist a the colleges that occupy the space between community colleges and legitimate universities, where such problems are much less dominate. That is why it still makes a difference where one goes to school, and why some schools can charge a premium.

My suspicion with these so-called African landfills, or anywhere, is where is the economics of transporting heavy waste ten thousand miles just to dump it. yes, the US and European laws make dumping it a home expensive, but just to dump it elsewhere for the kid to play in? Does not seem to add up. Transporting it to be used for a few years and them dumping it, that makes sense. That still has the problem of concentrating toxic waste in places where there are not good regulations to protect the populous, but that is a different issue.

This is why I do not buy DRM videos from anyone. At some point something will happen where you can't play them. The music is OK because it was never particularly hard to remove the DRM.

That said, the same thing can happen to pirated content. You hard disk can crash, the file can corrupt, the content can be taken down. If you have good backups you are ok, but in my experience backing up terabytes worth of content is non trivial.

It is convenient have your licensed content on the cloud. It off course is a trade off.

Most guilty people will immediately try to become the victim. Ignore the fact that I convince gullible people to buy junk that at best is useless and at worst will harm them. Ignore the fact that I use my medical degree to trick people. Look at the big bad corporation over here that wants to attack me. Ignore the fact that I am in the arms of a big bad corporation that airs my tv show and wants rating no matter what.

My problem with Dr. Oz is not that he appears to be a unethical charletan that will prostitute himself to any snake oil salesman who asks. My problem is, n the few shows I have seen, is that he actively is teaching his audience bad science. This is not surprising as doctors are not scientists. For instance, there was one show on fat where his depiction of fat was completely inaccurate. The demonstration was there to be visually exciting, but at the expense of any real science. I can imagine the people who saw it going to their doctor and arguing a point, thinking Dr. Oz is right, and their doctor is wrong.

It is entertainment. I agree that persons who are fundamentally entertainers and not seriously committed to medicine should probably not be the medical staff.

My concern is that we might see a rise in muggings again. Like those white cords coming out of your ears that marked the wearer as a victim, we might see that a wearer or a the distinctive watch is a victim.

Of course it will be a while before many people have a watch. Those who ordered in the first couple minutes will get it before May. Those who ordered in the first hour may get it by mid may. ten hours after the watch was on sale the shipment date was almost the end of June.

So will we see retail sales for the watch before the end of summer? I think for the Watch Edition and other Watch that are far north of $100.

It is interesting that most Watch sold are Sports model. Buying an expensive Watch now seems really silly. Spending $500 is smug and borderline senseless. This is not a device one is going to use for a generation. In the next two years the Watch that one might keep for a couple years will be on the market. One has to admit the electronics for this Watch is going to seem obsolete in 6 months. And you won't even be able to go the pawn shop and sell the gold for gold.

I don't see why legitimate companies would want to own this TLD. Let is go to people who want to attack the company online. If you have a good product your customers are not going to be overwhelmed by the negative reviews on a site that that has the sole purpose to be negative. New customers are going to see negative reviews, on a site that is intended to be negative, but again if the product is good they will also see other reviews elsewhere

The only thing a .sucks is going to do is provide a platform for negative opinions. It will not necessarily be a popular or dominant platform. The exception might be organizations that are not really flexible enough to handle criticism. So Scientology and many other religions, most politicians, and Coca Cola will probably have to buy the domains, but $2500 is not a huge expense for them.

This is speculation and some will profit but I suspect it will not be a long term thing. It is like when the domains names cost huge amounts of money and people spent huge amounts of money buying them up hoping to resell. Some people made a lot of money, but I suspect most did not.

The science on this is good. The lawyers will eventually get payments and may make the cost of current water disposal prohibitively expensive. That is not going to stop the earthquakes in Oklahoma because Oklahoma does not have a diverse vibrant economy, so voters, in general, are not going to ask officials to stop water disposal or fracking.

Compare this to Texas where local bans are in place and it is only oil industry bribes at the state level that keeps fracking.

I have not been in New Mexico when the Trinity site has been open. I need to just fly out for the weekend and see it one day...

However, I have been to The National Museum of Nuclear Science & History in Albuquerque(where bugs bunny always goes). It is a nice museum, apparently on a tight budget, with many interesting planes. They usually have a good traveling exhibit.

109 East Place is a good book on the secret site in Los Alamos. It was so secret that all communication and travel when through 109 East Place in Santa Fe.