Depending on the model, they can have RFID keycards or bracelet access to unlock the door. This can help create a secure spot in a region WROL (without rule of law). Tents don't do such a good job with security or rain.

These exo shelters are not meant to satisfy the requirements of the FEMA trailers used after the hurricanes, first of all. Those trailers were issued to people months after people had applied for them. It was a long distribution process with people living in group shelters waiting for the trailers to arrive.

Per this article, they also cost $19,000 in 2005 dollars. Much more than the $4000 you're estimating.

These exo shelters are a more immediate shelter solution. Deployable within hours of an emergency event. Consider the people recovering in Haiti after their big earthquake or the people sleeping on the floor of the Superdome after Katrina. FEMA trailers were not available or provided to those people in the hours and days after the disaster. These exo shelters are a possibility, though.

The exo shelters massively dominate over FEMA trailers on the criteria you have proposed here.

These nest inside each other, so you can lay about ten or so on a flatbed trailer. I think you could get two FEMA trailers on top of a flatbed trailer.

Cost? Well, a FEMA trailer needs to be constructed to highway transportation standards. Do you think that's cheaper than building something to "more durable than a tent" standard (exo shelter)?

Terminator isn't the scenario Elon and Steve are talking about. But it's a model that still fits their concerns.

Automation applies economic coercion to the laboring humans to serve the interests of the automation. For instance, Watson is an AI technology that is being positioned to lay off a lot of people in phone call centers and taking orders for drive-up windows. Actually, Watson is being aimed at a lot of jobs. All those displaced workers cascade to flood the job market. Maybe they get some training to compete for trades such as electricians, plumbers, and taxi cab drivers. With so many available applicants, the wages for those jobs go down. The economy for the middle class tanks. With people desperate to feed their families, do you think they'll really scrutinize that ad looking for workers to build the drone factory? The drones that are intended to fire missiles at the 'terrorists'?

AI is a wealth concentrator. That's what Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak are talking about. It is increasingly developing the capacity to eliminate millions of blue collar jobs in order to enrich people with white collars. The Terminator series is a colorful depiction of this process.

Absolutely correct. Neither godaddy or network solutions are technology innovators. They are merchants of a commodity service. They are running a business model of attracting suckers as customers and providing minimal service (i.e. outsourced to India) while sneaking fees in at any given opportunity.

Both are all about marketing. That's why you see them sponsoring race cars in NASCAR.

I got the "Royal Kludge RC930-87" from Massdrop and love it. Not too loud for a mechanical keyboard and it is extremely responsive. It's also not taking up my whole desk with the numeric keypad, which I love. Very fine-grained control over LED backlighting as well. Since the OP is so detailed on these requirements, I'm sure she'll love the control over the LED backlighting.

Good analysis here, Shanghai.

In terms of the prediction of "$360/TB off a $30/TB investment", does that take into account redundancy to protect their liability for drive failure? I'm thinking they have at least two copies of everything a customer uploads. Maybe three. It's still great money, but I think the numbers are more like $360/TB off a $60/TB investment.

but he's living in a kind of prison right now, anyway. his freedom is highly restricted. plus, well, russia is a shit-hole.

I don't entirely disagree with you here. I do think he has untapped earning potential in Russia, though. If he can get a long-term work visa, there are any number of Russian (Kaspersky as an example) and overseas security consulting firms who would vanity hire him as a security auditor. He was making $200k per year as a contractor for the NSA and I expect he could fetch that or more from a company looking to raise their profile in the security industry. Heck, look at Kevin Mitnick. And that guy was a newb compared to Snowden. I expect $200k per year probably supports a more lavish lifestyle in Russia than it did when Snowden was living in Hawaii.

Since 2000, Mitnick has been a paid security consultant, public speaker and author. He does security consulting for Fortune 500 companies, performs penetration testing services for the worldâ(TM)s largest companies and teaches Social Engineering classes to dozens of companies and government agencies. He is the author of a dozen books that have been translated into many languages, including The Art of Deception, The Art of Intrusion, and Ghost in the Wires.

Interesting article addressing why we're not seeing new chemistries/materials:

http://fortune.com/2014/08/15/...

No, and this is not well understood yet. When I was a kid cars seldom lasted more than 60,000 miles. Now 200,000 is pretty common. So, a good question is what's the average life of a gasoline car, and how many battery swaps might you expect in an EV over the same mileage?

Another thing to consider is that many people believe the cost of replacement batteries will decrease substantially over time, so how long it takes you to put 100,000 or 200,000 miles on the car may substantially change what you end up paying to replace the battery pack.

According to Wikipedia:

So, that could mean up to 400,000 miles if you believe them, but I'm skeptical of hitting numbers like that. But it might suggest that 150,000 to 200,000 miles on a battery pack is a reasonable expectation. Unfortunately, because my Fit is a compliance/lease-only car I'll never get to find out - I'll need to return it long before I can put enough miles on it to see the battery degrade. But I'll get back to you after I put a couple hundred thousand miles on my next EV ;-)

I have an EV (Honda Fit). I think that they're already useful for something like 3/4 of the population. Lots of parts to the equation. Right now they're better as the second car of a two or more car family, but they can be the only car depending on your driving pattern. They're great for someone who has a defined commute, as opposed to someone who drives to work and then drives around as part of their work. They're better when you have a garage or dedicated driveway, probably not so good right now if you have to park curbside. Right now some of them suffer pretty big range loss in cold weather (mine has about 50% range in the dead of winter compared to summer time and that definitely needs to be addressed, but I don't see why it can't be improved substantially).

Charge time is only an issue in rare circumstances; the problem is that people who don't drive an EV tend to think of recharging like going to the gas station; something you do when the tank runs low. That's not how most of us use the EV, though. Typically I use it on trips which I know I can make without recharging. (in warmer months I can drive 100 miles without recharge). The recharge happens at night, or between trips. A typical trip for me is to drive 50-60 miles and get home with 1/2 charge. I plug in to the dryer outlet in my garage and within 90 minutes it's full again. So, I may run some errands, go home and grab lunch, and by the time I'm done with lunch the car is fully charged again, ready for more errands. Or, if I commute to work I get home with 1/2 charge and again, within 90 minutes it's fully charged if I want to go out to dinner etc. Even if I use the full charge (which is very very rare) I typically recharge overnight so by the time I wake up in the morning it's ready to go. My point is that with a few exceptions you don't notice the charge time because it charges while you're doing something else. This means that I almost never have to wait for the car to charge. That said, if I had to do a road trip I could see myself doing it if I had to spend 20 minutes recharging every 200 miles. I'm sure high speed charging will improve, and by the time we hit 10-15 minutes to recharge after 200 miles of driving I think we hit diminishing returns, i.e. it'll be short enough I won't care whether they make it any faster or not.

Similarly, many non-EV people worry about the number of charging stations. Again, my typical use is that I don't have to use a charging station because I plan my trips so that I can make the full trip without recharging, but as an example if I need to drive into Boston (35 miles) I can make it there and back without a recharge, but if I also need to do another stop that's going to require more than another 20 miles of driving, then I'll plan to park in Boston at a charging station. If I've used 35 miles of charge, it only takes 20 minutes to fully recharge, so unless I'm running an especially short errand in Boston the car will be fully charged by the time I get back to it. One way to measure what percentage of my trips are EV friendly is to look at when I use the EV versus the gas car. During the summer, I find I use the gas car about once a month. That's about how often I have a trip to make that the EV doesn't have the range for. My next EV will have at least 200 miles of range and at that point I expect only 1 or 2 trips a YEAR won't fit the profile (and I'll just rent a car for those 2 trips).

All the calculations I've done show that my direct operating costs (i.e. cost to "fill the tank") is about 1/5th of what it costs when I drive a gasoline car. I also save on maintenance - there are no scheduled oil changes or tuneups... just a tire rotation that the dealership did for free. So, it's actually costing me quite a bit less than 1/5th of operating my gasoline car (Subaru Imprezza STi). Right now EVs cost a premium so I wouldn't call them a car for the masses, but as soon as the purchase price is in line with gasoline cars I DO expect them to be a car for the masses. It's hard to argue with the economics for the average person - if you can spend 1/5th the money operating a car, why wouldn't you want to?

Meanwhile I expect battery technology to move forward quickly. As an idea of how much research is being done into battery technology just compare the number of articles in the press today versus 10 years ago. I think that Tesla nailed the perfect range, or even went a little beyond. I predict that the EVs will settle somewhere around 200 miles of range, and beyond that manufacturers will use newer battery technology to reduce weight and increase available storage space.

I realize that I may not exactly fit your model of the "masses", but I'm far from rich, I believe my driving habits are very typical of the population, and the EV works very well for me. I enjoy driving it (even though I'm a sports car kind of guy, and the Fit is definitely not a sports car, but it IS fun to drive). I'm convinced that I will never buy another non-EV in my lifetime.

I'm thinking you set up your browser with the foxyproxy plugin so all normal http requests for HTML are forwarded via socks proxy. The heavy lifting stuff goes straight out and back in through the open fiber connection. I doubt AT&T wants to parse video files. They want to see and modify the clear-text HTTP stuff.

The weird thing is this type of traditional snooping will be defeated as more content providers are switching over to HTTPS. AT&T aren't technical dummies, so they know that. I'm wondering if their scheme doesn't require a special browser plugin that automates an MITM attack on https....

What's weirdest of all is that until now, federal law has protected the ISPs from liability over the content they transmit:

Section 512(a) protects service providers who are passive conduits from liability for copyright infringement, even if infringing traffic passes through their networks. In other words, provided the infringing material is being transmitted at the request of a third party to a designated recipient, is handled by an automated process without human intervention, is not modified in any way, and is only temporarily stored on the system, the service provider is not liable for the transmission.

The rationale behind that statue was that ISPs can't be held accountable for copyright-infringing material going over their wires because filtering it would be too onerous. If AT&T sets up such a monitoring system, it pretty well defeats the claim they don't know what their subscribers are transmitting / receiving.

TFA doesn't do a good job of suggesting the wide-open potential held by photonic communication. It is mostly staring at this topic with the same focus as your comment here-- how to stream data in a living room.

If you consider the requirements of wifi, you'll see some obstacles that limit its applications. For "internet of things" devices, wifi demands a bunch of electricity from a device that you might want to deploy in an electricity-poor environment. Think solar-powered device. Photonic communication might reduce energy consumption.

Wifi has a pretty considerable fixed cost. Similar to RFID. It might be possible to reduce that expense with a non-radio communication channel. Imagine if your toll tag shot an LED flashed unique signal to a road sensor... It might carry a cheaper unit cost than the typical RFID toll tag schemes.

The developers of this aren't thinking it will replace wifi where wifi is good. They're looking to fill the gap where wifi is bad.

This AC speaks the truth. The frys in Austin doesn't even have magazines anymore. When you walk in the front door, there are tables set up with knock-off fragrances like you would find at a flea market. Sad times.

Having worked at IBM Research and wondering if your contribution played a role in them developing Watson... You should check out this book. I'm reading it now and am enjoying reading about how the team(s) developed all the tech beneath Watson in preparation for the televised match.