Yeah, but it's backwards. We've been making individuals (even unskilled ones) much more productive, and total productivity is going up, but interestingly that's not driving higher demand for unskilled labor (since about the 70's). It does seem to be driving some demand for skilled labor. That plus deregulation is what's driving income inequality. I would have thought the Jevons paradox thing should be increasing demand for unskilled labor.

So why is it so hard to find fossilized evidence of previous life then?

I setup a Raspberry Pi as a tor *relay* (not a tor exit node) just as a weekend project this year. Within a couple of days, we couldn't log into our bank (TD Canada Trust). I was able to log in by VPN'ing into my work PC. I took the tor relay offline, and within a couple of days I could log into my bank again from home. Both relays and exit node IPs are public knowledge, but I still think it's wrong to block relays.

Are you saying all those Tesla car batteries only have a lifetime of 2 to 4 years?

This will revolutionize the grid. I was reading that lithium ion batteries are around $500/kWh right now wholesale (and I've seen some you can buy from China that make me believe that's roughly true). Then there's a projected cost as low as $180/kWh in about 5 years after Tesla's factory ramps up (and no doubt others start to come online).

Right now (in Ontario) I can buy peak electricity at about 13 cents per kWh and maybe 7 or 8 cents per kWh at night. Imagine a system of batteries where I buy power at night, store it, and then use that during the day. I worked the rough numbers and at today's battery prices I'd be hard pressed to get a return on my investment in 20 years, and that's only considering battery cost. However, if you use $180/kWh, suddenly you might see the payback period on a system like that drop below 10 years, and if I can do it at that price, what can a utility do with its economy of scale?

The addition of economical grid-level storage will radically change the way the utilities run their business. You won't need so much idle generating capacity such as natural gas or coal sitting around to service peak loads because you can charge up your battery banks at night using nuclear and during the day with solar and consume them during the peak periods.

I'm sure a lot of women think this is great because it's just doing to men what they perceive has been done to them, but I fail to see how this is fair when the victims of the discrimination are young boys, who haven't even had a chance to do anything wrong yet. This is punishing them for alleged wrongs that they could never have had any part in. It's going way too far.

You can't tell anything from a trailer other than how much they're willing to spend on special effects (and how much they're willing to ignore canon). The real test is whether or not the story is any good, and we'll just have to wait and see. Honestly I doubt it, but here's hoping. Also, friggin' shakey cam! Boo!

Yes, now that they've read "The Martian" and played some Kerbal Space Program, they're now experts at interplanetary travel.

The GP means you could solve it with grid-level storage, which is on the order of a billion dollar problem, but solar satellites would be more expensive.

At least in Canada I know what I'm buying then. I get X GB per month, and there is (at least in my area) 3 different ISPs (1 cable, one DSL, and one independent) that I can go to. I go to the one that gives me more bandwidth, higher caps at a lower price (duh). It's $48/month for 300 GB, and there's an unlimited package for about $60, but we just don't seem to ever break that cap. (We came close once but reduced it by lowering the bandwidth settings on my wife's Netflix profile :)

AFAIK, there was no $500 option after VS2010 Pro. That was the last version you could buy without having to buy a mandatory MSDN subscription, so the base price was up around $1200 after that.

Cameras are a problem, but it's not just cameras anymore. Nest thermostats, for instance, have occupancy sensors and they connect to the internet to work. So your thermostat tells a server on the internet if anyone's home (potentially). Smart meters have similar problems. We recently bought a temperature sensor (AVTECH brand) for our small server closet, and it automatically connected to GoToMyDevices.com as soon as I got it on the network, and started uploading sensor data. There was nowhere in the device's built-in web interface to enable or even disable this "feature". Nothing in the documentation. I looked online and found a forum where it explained that you had to telnet to the device, and at the main menu you had to select a hidden menu item, and then type a command to turn off this feature. It's that kind of absurdity that makes the whole "internet of things" just a house of cards waiting to collapse.

I thought this ship was suborbital. Re-entry isn't a big huge deal if you're not going multiple km/s sideways. The red bull space dive thing just had a guy in a spacesuit.

I'm a Canadian who, for a time, worked in the US and had a US health insurance plan (early 2000's), before the ACA. I paid for that health care plan because it had a drug plan and the Ontario health coverage does not. A few times it was convenient to go see a doctor in the US because it was close to the office, and I clearly remember wondering what all those people were doing behind the desk of the doctor's office. In Canada you might see 1 or 2 people in the administrative side of the office, but in a US doctor's office, there seemed to be an army of clerks. I looked into it and it seems like it was all to do with handling all the paperwork due to everyone having a different insurance company. In Ontario there's only one health insurance... the government one, and they just pay for exactly what the doctor bills, there's no "is this covered, is this not", etc. The administrative overhead is much, much lower. The ACA can't possibly have fixed this problem, so you're still paying a lot more overhead for your health care in the US than we are in Canada. Remember, the only "service" an insurance company provides is dividing the costs of a group of people evenly over that entire group. A publicly run insurance scheme doesn't need to pay for advertising, salespeople, lawyers or lawsuits. It's very inexpensive to run, and a lot less hassle for the people who use it.

Yes, we went to a Rogers HD DVR for a while after TiVo and couldn't believe how much the UI sucked. I never really learned how to use it well, and relied on my wife to do the various incantations to get it to record what we wanted. A lot of the menus made no sense, especially trying to get it to not record something, or to wait and not switch the channel when it wanted to record something. Then we got rid of cable and first tried Boxee, then finally broke down and just put a PC there. Best decision ever.