The industrial revolution allowed us to make things less expensively. What took 100 man-hours could be produced in 10, or 1. With it came the rise of unions and a power struggle between the robber barons and the working classes. The standard of living of most people in the industrialized world skyrocketed, with a good deal of the wealth trickling into the new "middle class". Industrialization made things, but required manpower to run them.

The rise of technology has made manpower obsolete. We're not making things with software but rather learning how to eliminate service people (technology in general, this is really all one wave and Y-C thinking software is somehow divorced from the IT revoultion that's been in progress for 40 years is bullshit). The end game isn't really "more stuff" but "automated services". We don't need more people to ramp up production - once the software is running it merely needs maintenance and a very small incremental staff to serve 100, 1000, 10000x it's original purpose.

That's where people are getting crunched. Now that the industrial revolution has spread to more of the world, there's international competition for those "factory" jobs, and so the Man can simple take operations to a cheaper location. But there's nowhere for the factory workers to go because all the service jobs are drying up too, thanks for software. The wages on the inside are good, but the inside is getting smaller and smaller as tech takes over more positions. That leaves a large, unemployable population.

There are some over 5000 years old and still work perfectly. Reproduction doesn't even require electricity. They are very low maintenance, but not very space efficient.

See what I did there? You've suggested a medium which may be somewhat practical for a very limited purpose, but wholly unworkable for the type or quantity of storage needed today. Unless you were going for humor, in which case I proffer a wry smile.

In reality, what is needed is not a static storage format but a dynamic one which regularly reads, verifies, updates, re-stores, and then re-verifies the files on a regular basis.

If someone patents in interface, it's gone from every other vendor. And since it's the "best" it's worth more, so a $5 item is now a $100 item (gotta pay back that engineering time). It's not expensive because it's mechanically robust or physically challenging to build the parts, it's because of the monopolistic lock in that each standard brings.

Plus, there are no (useful, universal) standards for home automation. Partly because it's just too wide open, partly because shit is changing all the time. How often has the primary power distribution in a home changed in your lifetime (0)? How many times has TV transmission (once, maybe twice)? How many times has network requirements changed (I've run out of fingers)? A simple, end-user programmable, extensible system available on a commodity basis from multiple vendors simply doesn't exist.

FWIW, 20 years is a blink of an eye for a house. I regularly run across basically the same dumb electrical components in 1950s buildings that are being installed in today's brand new homes. And multiple manufacturers offer interchangeable parts for houses built today and 60+ years ago. Until Smart stops meaning outrageously overpriced for the hardware provided, it's never going to be mainstream.

Even ignoring those in the house who don't always have a smartphone with them (young children, grandparents) and any visitor who isn't on your network, needing a smartphone to control most things is simply awkward in inefficient when compared to a dedicated remote control.

Which is why, if you're going to spend $10 on lottery tickets in a year, you may as well play when the payout is the highest.

I do agree that looking at the odds and the payout for anything where you can't get enough play to take advantage of the house odds is a fools game when it comes to making money on a regular basis. (And lotteries, with only 50% proceeds to the winners, is never in the players favor even if enough plays were possible to make the odds relevant)

The sibling post nailed it. It's not an investment and shouldn't be considered such. Here's why: at the beginning of the two years, if you put the money into the bank your chances of becoming independently wealthy are exactly zero. In fact, the chances of having enough money for a weekend getaway in something nicer than a Motel 8 in your home town are still zero. Compare that to the chance of your retiring in those two years on lottery winnings. Maybe 1 in 10,000 - about the same as you next long distance call you receive having the same last four digits. That's not much, but it's still undeniably higher than retiring on what's in that bank account.

You may as well put the same amount of money into a music streaming service and decide, at the end of two years, which version had produced the most money - because after two years the entertainment will be just a thing of the past.

Insurance is a losing bet. It's a $1 ticket with an 80-90% payback. The funniest part is that it's a bet you *do* hope to lose. Rather it's a business decision, a hedge, which does not always need to show a positive ROI.

In the case of a lottery ticket, it's not a business decision. It's a lark, an entertainment. It's also one of the only ways to become independently wealthy with almost zero work (12 minutes at minimum wage, less than 5 minutes of labor at average wage). For 99% of the people out there, it's the *only* chance they will have of becoming independently wealthy. And someone *will* win eventually.

While I can't argue that people are, as a whole, bad at math. In fact, they're even worse at probability than general math. But it's not necessarily a tax on people who are bad at math, it's a peek at a life they would never, ever encounter for themselves in the normal course of their lives.

The magic 8 ball could have told them that.

Welcome to 2006: http://www.amazon.com/gp/produ...

Welcome to 2012: http://www.amazon.com/Actionte...

A new life awaits you in the off-world colonies. The chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure...

why would you even want to stay here, right?

FAA can do anything they fucking want; nobody else in the world will give a shit. Do you really think if the Russian, Indian, or Chinese equivalent of the FAA pulled this that the US would take it in stride? Of course not. We'd claim they still don't have any right to reserve property on the moon.

And it would come down to who had the guns and is willing to use them. Which, to be honest, is all property rights really is anyway.

$20k a day, or $20k, once, on sales for a particularly timely topic?

$20k a day sounds great, $20k, once every 2-4 months, less costs and overhead, sounds pretty pedestrian.

They did NOT show that, from 3-4 transactions, they could provide your name, address and phone number, or even that if you have 3-4 transactions in a million transaction anonymized data set they can find out anything about you personally *unless they know you first*.

What they did is show that if they know that you, personally, had 3 to 4 types of transactions on specific dates (you went to a grocery store and a gas station today, and a restaurant yesterday), they could identify which anonymized data set you belong to. Their discovery requires specific outside knowledge not contained in the data.

This only matters if, say, a third party could identify specific purchases and dates - they could then comb the records and find the rest of your transactions on that specific card. IOW, someone has to be looking for you, and know at least something about you, to even start the search.

That's kind of the issue. There are people on the roof with significant firepower to take something like that down. Most of the incursions onto the lawn have been at night, when nobody of value is in the vicinity.

You'd be better off with a mortar mounted to the truck bed and lobbing a shell onto the lawn. It will be moving a lot faster and be harder to hit when incoming, and could deliver a larger payload. 50mph really isn't that fast.

Are you sure that includes all of DC and some of the surrounding Maryland and Virginia suburbs*?

*25km is 15+ miles. DC proper is 10mi x 10mi, minus the part across the river that VA took back.