I wonder if this is a byproduct of the general corporate tendency to look at "innovation" as a way to get a patent which is then used to enforce a monopoly and collect rents. Collecting rents is a disincentive towards more innovation, product improvements and other business efficiencies. Why compete when you can just charge rents?

If there wasn't a patent-and-monopoly mindset, perhaps there would be greater effort put into innovation as a means to more rapidly improve products (as well as a focus on other business efficiencies). If somebody "stole" your IP in this model, it would matter less because your pace of innovation may render the stolen IP retrograde by the time it was turned into useful products, and your sales would be driven by the strength of your products not because you had a legalized monopoly.

I haven't found inter-vendor HDMI control to work well. When I turn on my Sharp TV, my Pioneer receiver turns on and promptly switches the input to a different device than the one that was last on.

It is weird, you know, if this was about specifying some IT gadget, people would be all over the hard numbers and data and adding stuff up.

But as soon as it gets onto energy and climate, it becomes this, oh, we can just consume less, and keep building green energy, and it'll all work out.

It'll be fun when you're getting up in the middle of the night to bathe and shower the family, because that's when the hot water is affordable.

People who talk like this have never, I would guess, lived in a 3rd world country.

"good motivator"

No, that is a bad motivator. It is like, the slave owner motivating the slave with a beating. Yeah, we are all "motivated" to survive.

Making life harder for people is not "good" motivation, that's just called "survival".

Hey, if you make the electricity even more expensive, maybe the women will be "motivated" to going back to spending all day washing the clothes by hand.
You're welcome to try doing that yourself.

Yes, indeed. Unfair.

Also, I could spend all day making a better hunting spear, only for others to come steal it from me by force.
It is because life is unfair, that we are all having to try to find better systems that work better for everyone.
Like the guys who go round killing rhinos to sell the horns, they just say, "life is unfair, I have nothing, why shouldn't I get something for myself?"

Minimum wage may or may not be a good idea (my guess is it isn't), but "life is unfair" is a moot point, because every human is every other human's problem, one way or another.

That kind of thing has always been an option, but the glue from Velcro tape is a mess.

I'd rather see slots of a standard dimension molded into the TV enclosure. STB makers could either mold in matching rails or supply a bracket that would mate with them. Third parties could make accessory rails that would adapt the little keyhole openings so that legacy devices could use the molded in slots.

Most TVs are so big these days that there's a ton of real estate on the back of them for hanging accessories, but other than the VESA mounting bracket standard(s) there isn't a standard for mounting STBs.

Some of the larger STBs (like DVRs with spinning rust) maybe wouldn't be practical rear mounted due to weight, but the smaller boxes like Apple TV or Roku would.

IR transmission for remotes might be an issue, but so many of these boxes can be controlled via wifi that it wouldn't be an issue.

It would also be useful for NUC type PCs where in many use cases IR isn't even a factor.

Since I didn't use the phrase "war on women" in my post, I've got an inclination you know what I'm talking about.

Republicans have a huge problem with human sexuality. They don't appear to like it much, whether it's teaching sex ed or making contraception easy to get. They don't like the HPV vaccine given to teen age girls (because obviously it turns them into insatiable sex maniacs).

With abortion, they've been opposed to even exceptions in the case of rape, including Missouri Senate candidate Todd Akin's quote: âoeIt seems to be, first of all, from what I understand from doctors, itâ(TM)s really rare. If itâ(TM)s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut the whole thing down.â

I think that quote kind of neatly describes the fairly ridiculous attitude toward's women's sexual health.

Look, I get it. If somebody is a religious person and they don't want to have an abortion, that's great, don't have one. You don't want to use contraception for the same reasons -- be my guest, don't use it. But where do you get off trying to restrict access to everyone?

I would recast it as a plane that launches projectiles but becomes a bomb at the end of its mission.

I think the advantage it would have would be in local (company or battalion level) control and targeting. Combat situations are loose and fluid and there's more than a little complexity involved in having ground troops ID a target, relay this to forward air controllers, relay it to a pilot and have the right target get hit and still be the right target.

In some circumstances you can do this with IR designation but it can be complicated by weather, line of sight and other issues that make this difficult.

Having the troops on the front line both identifying the target and controlling the actual delivery of ordinance to the target could make it much more effective in terms of timing and accuracy versus other methods. They could do this now with existing drones, but existing drones are expensive and there aren't enough of them.

And maybe rather than a more complex drone with its own projectile launching capacity, maybe it's a hybrid between a drone and a guided missile. A missile that has the ability to loiter for a period of time over a target.

It seems to be fairly well reported that "conservative party activists" have an influence beyond their numbers in Republican policies which forces a lot of Republican candidates to take more extreme positions on social issues, especially early in the campaign where activists hold a lot of sway in primaries, straw polls, etc.

The Republican party seems to be trying to do something about this -- in a typically Republican-minded fashion -- by altering the nomination rules to minimize the influence that grass-roots activists can have in the primary process.

Mostly this gets described as a strategy designed to limit an "embarrassing" and combative primary process that pits Republicans against Republicans, expending resources that should be directed towards defeating Democrats in the general election.

But I also think that despite the chiding of Republicans as stupid by the left this strategy is also embraced by shrewder Republicans who see a handful of cranky old white people forcing support for their divisive social issues and costing the Republicans votes and ruining their image with younger and more centrist voters.

It remains to be seen if this change will just be exploited for enforcing the power of present party leadership or if it will be used for a more strategic long-term purpose of modernizing the Republican party's positions.

At the end of the day, I don't think the die-hard socially conservatives should be that big of a concern to Republicans. They are something of a PR nightmare for the party image and I would suspect that as many of them would still vote Republican, just like left wing progressives vote for less-than-progressive Democrats.

The die hards don't have enough numbers to mount a compelling challenge on their core ideals and I think that they would be unwilling to see an election become a mass public renunciation of their ideals and deflate the perceived power of their influence.

It's a big leap from NOT trying to outlaw abortion, making contraceptives hard to get and outlaw homosexuals to free birth control and cash entitlements to gays.

I'm surprised there's not more corporate business support for easier access contraception, too, even if the medicine itself costs money. Hormonal birth control for women is dirt cheap. Unplanned pregnancy costs a ton of money in entitlement benefits, school problems and crime in low income women which translates into higher taxes, especially hard-to-escape property taxes that fund schools.

White collar women who get pregnant early in their career path cost corporations money by reducing their labor force participation in addition to throwing out the money spent in their on the job training and experience if they quit or don't come back to their jobs for years. Plus due to pay differentials, they tend to be cheaper in terms of wages up front.

It's far more economical to make birth control cheap and easy to obtain and retain their services until they hit their 30s. These women will be less likely to abandon more established careers and their deeper experience and skill sets will make them more likely to return to work, more quickly, and easier to reintegrate back into the work force if they do take time off.

Plus with more established careers they are more likely to have elevated incomes to pay for child care services which is the primary obstacle to returning to the workforce. For younger women at lower payscales, going back to work and paying for childcare is often a net loss and many of them make the choice to stay out of the labor market until their children hit school age. This makes it harder for them to get back into the labor market due to out of date skills.

If you're pro-money, being against gays is just bad business. Despite discrimination, gays tend to be better educated and have higher incomes. Business should be falling over themselves in support of gays, even if they want to gripe about fags at the country club.

I think this bias comes largely from IT workers who have to deal with rank and file marketing employees who are often clueless when it comes to a lot of technology.

I'm sure I too am biased because of this, but it also seems like your low-level IT employee has more practical intelligence than a lot of low-level marketing employees who seem to trade on good looks and social skills versus any specific practical skill or insight with marketing, at least at the undergrad-only level of education.

The thing is, for the marketing people their social intelligence is far superior to most IT workers and in general it enables a lot of them to advance up the food chain versus the IT worker.

...decide to back legalizing pot and abandon their sex war against abortion, contraception and gays and probably pick up a lot of voters who might otherwise go Democratic.

Backing pot legalization would probably be popular with white collar swing voters who probably like the Republicans on taxes and ultimately take a lot of the harassment heat off blacks by stripping the police of one of their major repression avenues. They might even temper it by announcing that they're going to repurpose those resources being even more law and order on other criminal justice issues to mollify the cops and the law-and-order segment of the electorate.

Ending the anti-sex campaign against women may be even more beneficial. I've read that a lot of middle class women tend towards a certain conservatism and if you stop acting completely anti-woman this could be a major source of support.

Both parties are so close for the most part that it seems like only semi-radical changes on a handful of small issues is necessary to move swing voters. And both of these issues are big from a publicity perspective but probably less meaningful to the corporate guys who fund them.

Republicans could still be the anti-tax/pro-corporate party, pro-military and keep most of their base intact. They may alienate born agains and some law and order cranks with those changes, but who are those people going to vote for anyway? They're not going to vote for tax-hiking, gun-grabbing, affirmative action Democrats (intentional facetious remarks) no matter what.

It's harder to see the issues on which Democrats could being "radical" on. About the only one I can think of is giving up on their general penchant for gun control. They might consider bring more pro-labor when it comes to issues of immigration/H1-Bs but this runs counter to their larger embrace of multiculturalism and also gets them in trouble with Silicon Valley money that wants more tech immigrants.

I've always been curious why there haven't been battlefield "disposable" drones that could be launched from a high altitude bomber, controlled by units in the field, fire a couple of guided missiles and then be delivered as a weapon itself on a target.