In other words, the world we're living in, except for that bit about "amplified intelligence".

No, no, things are certainly amplified, so that part is correct. It's the "intelligence" part that's a bit off the mark here. Networking can help leverage the abilities of each of the networked nodes (people, in this case). When many of those nodes excel at being dumb animals, well, you get a heavy preponderance of lolcats and porn. Many (perhaps most?) of us humans are just living day to day and trying to get by. Not a lot of room there for higher-order thinking.

Lest we lose sight of all hope, it's important to recognize that it's not all gloom and doom, though -- despite all the porn and lolcats, there's also a good bit of smart thinking that is also amplified. That's easy to miss amidst all the noise, but it's definitely there.

Cheers,

And Hamburg is known as the birthplace of the hamburger, which is made from beef, which is raised in large quantities in Texas, and the most prosecution-friendly venue for patent lawsuits in the US is East Texas...

Aha! We've found the causal link!

...

But now I wonder what the basic legal trends are for the Frankfurt regional court. :-P

Cheers,

The target range of the Skyjack drones is limited by the range of the WiFi card, but Kamkar said he uses a very powerful WiFi adapter called the Alfa AWUS036H, which produces 1000mW of power.

So this "very powerful" Wi Fi outputs 1000 milliwatts ... which equals one watt.

Am I missing something, or is this just bad reporting?

Nope; as noted, "I haven't run across anyone in my personal life...", so this would fall under the "anecdote" category. :)

Similar to the anecdote/data duality is the fact that not everyone is affected by things the same way. You may be one of the lucky few or lucky many who aren't negatively impacted by looking at an LCD all day. I know that my nearsightedness is markedly worse at the end of any workweek where I've been staring at the monitor all the time, and that my eyesight is noticeably improved after spending several days not staring at something only a couple feet away. YMMV, and all that.

The impact of backlit screens on circadian rhythms has been studied, if memory serves. Some quick googling pulls up a goodly number of hits, including a couple actual studies just in the first page of hits. Changing from regular web-wide Google to Google Scholar produces more hits for studies.

And more specific to eye strain are these hits. I haven't waded through, but the number of hits (524) and the titles of the first page of hits suggests that this is an area of study. This one in particular sounds like what you might be looking for: Comparison of eye fatigue among readings on conventional book and two typical electronic books equipped with electrophoretic display and LC display . This link to the paper is paywalled, unfortunately, but you might be able to ferret out an open copy of it somewhere.

Cheers,

A real study would be good. At the same time, I haven't run across anyone in my personal life who doesn't prefer reading a dead-tree book over an ebook. Ebooks are certainly more convenient in many ways, especially once you factor in portability. But many (most?) ebook readers these days that I see around me are backlit (as they tend to be tablets), which does lead to a certain amount of eyestrain and can cause circadian imbalance.

You've just admitted that [a power utility] has a "low rate of return." If there's one thing the government should never put up money for, it's projects with a low rate of return.

What are you talking about? Really, you're not making any sense. You sound like you're talking about stock investment instead of public-sector infrastructure.

Seriously, by your line of argument, the freeways wouldn't exist. You need to look beyond the near-term immediately quantifiable numbers. A power utility has a low rate of return when properly operated and managed. The only power utilities that get high margins are the ones on the verge of breaking things -- like Enron. That said, the greater return -- beyond just the financials of the utility company itself -- includes things like, you know, people having relatively inexpensive access to electric power. Which is kind of a requirement for anything resembling a modern life and economy.

Enterprises with low rates of financial return, but high rates of overall return in terms of what they enable, are precisely the kinds of things that government should do, precisely because the private sector either won't get involved, or will engineer market conditions that benefit the company while screwing over everyone else. Imagine if every road were a toll road, or if every power company were like Enron. I certainly don't want to live in that world.

If you're telling any person that some of the political speech they want to engage in is illegal, then that is censorship. I suggest you embrace the term and not try to call it by another name. My business belongs to me.

...But one thing the law needs to stay very clear on, and that is never censoring people from engaging in political speech however the heck they want to engage in it.

From my reading of this thread, Duhavid is not advocating "telling any person that some of the political speech they want to engage in is illegal". Nor is he making any argument regarding business ownership. He is instead arguing that a business (corporation) is not a person, and therefore has no legitimate right to free speech, political or otherwise. By extension, he takes the position that any political speech must come from individuals, not from collectives, be they businesses or unions.

I think you both have good points to make. I also think you're both talking past each other to some extent.

Cheers,

Could the US use improvements in this area? Absolutely, and I want to be clear on that point. But what I consistently notice is that people, particularly those who have either never left the US to experience other parts of the world, or else those from smaller countries who have never traveled across a single country as large as the US, have no appreciation for just how difficult of a problem the US faces as compared to many other developed nations, simply due to its massive size.

It would be one thing if the argument were solely that people living in Story, Indiana or Nothing, Arizona couldn't get broadband speeds.

While that is an issue, it's not what causes much of the complaint about the state of internet services in the US.

I live in Seattle, within the city limits. I can't get better than 4.5mbps down on a good day, and certainly not in the evening when everyone's watching Netflix, short of ponying up for a business line to the tune of substantially more expense. Five years ago, I lived within spitting distance of the Google campus, and couldn't get better than 1.5mbps down. These are major cities, densely populated, with all the infrastructure right there.

By comparison, when I left Japan in 2005, my bare-bones residential service -- the cheapest, slowest, least-of-everything-and-still-be-online package gave me 18 mbps for around $30 a month. And it was scheduled for an upgrade, at no cost to the subscriber, to 24 mbps two months later.

The key difference? Competition. For all the malarkey about free markets and rainbows, the US market sucks for internet services. A handful of companies have effective geographic monopolies (or at least very small cartels), giving them leverage to jack prices and keep services at the bare minimum. In Japan, the kind of lockdowns that are the status quo in the US aren't possible due to an effective regulatory regime, necessitating that companies actually compete for consumers' business on the basis of service and price. The differences are amazing. Or depressing, depending on where you live.

Interesting, thank you. As I just replied to icebike above, my perspective is as an owner of a 2005 Prius. Have you run across anything similar for that particular car?

Cheers,

Points taken. To clarify, I'm not arguing that Toyota is problem-free. And I'm not arguing that unintended acceleration doesn't happen. That said, I *am* doubtful of the (older) cases of runaway vehicles, especially when "NHTSA ... determined that [the vehicles'] braking systems were capable of overcoming all levels of acceleration, including wide open throttle.". That's really what I was reacting to in your post -- the mention of runaway vehicles and brake problems.

My perspective was somewhat narrower than yours, and it occurs to me that this where we may have been missing each other. My car is a 2005 Prius, and I hadn't been aware of the more-recent problems with 2010 models. I'm happy to admit that I may have missed something, but everything I've read so far about the older cars describes possible problems with the Prius accelerator pedal and the steering rack, but not with the brakes. If you're aware of any reported brake problems with the 2005 Prius in particular, I'm very interested to hear it.

Cheers,

Clearly, then, the only possible choice is Lady Gaga.

I thought the NHTSA data ultimately showed that the incidence of "run-away vehicles" was pretty much entirely mappable to the incidence of "old or confused person stomping on the wrong pedal", and that this incidence rate was in line with the average for all passenger cars?

Okay, this prompted me to poke around again on the NHTSA page for Additional Information on Toyota Recalls and Investigations. Of particular note on the NHTSA-NASA Study of Unintended Acceleration in Toyota Vehicles page and the executive summary of the report linked from there:

...NASA did not find an electronic cause of large throttle openings that can result in UA [unintended acceleration] incidents. NHTSA did not find a vehicle-based cause of those incidents in addition to those causes already addressed by Toyota recalls.

...NHTSA's vehicle characterization analysis and testing supported NASA's review. NHTSA found no previously unknown defects in the test vehicles and determined that their braking systems were capable of overcoming all levels of acceleration, including wide open throttle.

Those "other causes" appear to be primarily related to floor mats blocking free motion of the accelerator pedal. There was a recall related to this, to replace the driver's floor mat with a new mat cut differently to avoid the possibility of getting stuck under or behind the pedal. It sounds like Toyota were asshats about that, and they paid sizable fines for failing to tell the authorities about the problems. But a lot of the bad press about runaway cars turned out to be BS, such as these two incidents covered by CBS News.

This is mostly a divergence from icebike's point about PR, which I think is mostly valid. I simply wanted to address what sounded a bit like misinformation about runaway cars. I happen to own a Prius, so I followed up on the stories and investigations in an effort to better understand my own risk.

Cheers,

I thought that's what these rags were *for* -- something to look at while on the shitter.

Cheers,

In a digression from the discussion about the current administration's gun policy:

It's arguable that the historical reason for the Second Amendment had more to do with avoiding the need for a standing army, with all the expense and centralized power that entails, especially at a time when 1) the federal government, such as it was, had a shoestring budget, and 2) the states were still very leery of granting any more power (read: ceding any more sovereignty) than absolutely necessary to this new centralized entity.

Cheers,

The end result is probably something like Singapore. Ostensibly free, but scratch the surface and you quickly hit authoritarianism and an oligarchy of connected families and companies. The problem is, most of the US governing class would see little wrong with such an outcome.

From the things I've read, Singapore has better social services.