Because this one system is just soooo cool, and there are no others out there like it.

Well, you could say that about the Middle East vs. the Gobi Desert -- because that ONE patch of sand has something and no others out there are like it.

As it turns out, some patches of sand in the Middle East turn out to actually have something no others out there like it have and that something (oil) turns out to be hugely important for managing and maintaining your inter(steller)national empire.

Who's to say the same wouldn't apply to outer space? Maybe there's some unobtainium material out there that just turns out to be very rare AND very useful either to interstellar space travel or use on some home planet. It's not like it's not a recurring theme in tons of scifi books, from the "spice" in Dune to dilithium in Star Trek.

It might be a fair argument to make that interstellar travel presupposes the ability to produce useful energy in unlimited quantities and mastery of such energy production also presupposes the ability to create materials and refine raw materials on a virtually limitless basis.

OK, but we really don't yet know what kind of materials make this energy harnessing possible and maybe those materials don't exist with some uniform distribution or in the quantities necessary for interstellar travel, making acquiring such materials or elements critical for maintaining an interstellar civilization and hence making it necessary to use military force to maintain supplies.

I'm not sure anything's a fair comparison with an HBO series, mini or otherwise. HBO programming has a staggering production quality whose peers really are only big-budget Hollywood movies.

Most TV series (other than HBO) have simpler production values all around, from costumes to sets to location shooting and generally even to cast sizes and extras. This makes them cheaper but I would also guess makes them faster to shoot, since as the AD is fond of yelling, "Time is money people!"

I suppose Amazon and Netflix are consciously trying to conflate their unique programs with HBO's, but other than what seems like extensive location shooting in House of Cards, most seem fairly conventional in terms of production standards.

Maybe the earnings call will go something like this:

ANALYST: How much loss do you attribute to the totally failing Fire Phone?

AMAZON: WOW! We're going to produce a dozen movies! It'll be awesome!

I keep hearing this said, but that wasn't my impression nor does it seem especially fair after ONE episode.

The genre it seems to belong to has a pretty low bar for entry -- Fringe was like 5 seasons, and having begun watching it recently I'm already kind of tired of it. It follows such a set formula I feel like *I* could write episodes for it -- new fringey event, nutty professor solves puzzle with application of physics, medicine and biology with a little help from moody Fed Boss and ActionGirl, last 3 minutes of show, ambiguously advance "conspiracy".

Lather, rinse, repeat.

Really, The After couldn't have been so much worse than this, Revolution, Falling Skies, etc etc.

Transparent won a couple of Golden Globes, but "Bosch" hasn't started streaming yet and Chris Carter's "The After" mysteriously got cancelled almost a year after it was a winner in the same pilot voting "election" as Bosch.

I think someone trying to reinvent the "system" of creating filmed content is laudable and worthwhile, I'm just curious if Amazon really has put more thought into this than "vertical integration" and assuming that whatever insight they have into package delivery logistics and cloud computing is somehow universally applicable to something like film/tv production. They wouldn't be the first "geniuses" to take hubris to a new level only to discover that doing A well means nothing when it comes to doing B well. We see plenty of that when A and B aren't all that different.

I think faster (and more complete) turnaround of announced content would definitely help, I also wonder if it would make sense to rethink some of the streaming assumptions -- like, why straightjacket yourself into the one hour episode format? Why not two hour episodes, but fewer of them? Does the entire series have to available all at once, or could faster release cycles from pilots to episodes be accomplished by releasing a group of episodes every 60-90 days to allow for simultaneous shooting and releases?

  Should they dilute their resources producing a bunch of one-hour pilots, or should they be a little more discriminating and look at a pilot instead as a more complete story arc and make 3 episodes? That way even failures that didn't become series could at least be watchable, self-contained miniseries adding value to the catalog instead of just becoming trivial ephemera? Maybe the desire to make more typical "movies" is part of this.

A state spying on it's own citizens... shameful. I'd be outraged, unless of course they said it was part of the war on terror, or whatever China's current favorite boogeyman is.

It's a gamble between two opposing forces of insurance:

1) On one hand, insurance companies are bureaucracies and handling claims is a bureaucratic process with a certain amount of inertia, where obvious fraud needs to be caught but time/people/resources don't exist to fine-grain protect against all possible marginal fraud, otherwise the system would grind to a halt. A tracking device with a minor deviation from observed damaged may just get written off as the strangeness of physicals or the brittleness of plastic cars -- I mean, we have the data, right?

2) On the other hand, IMHO, the insurance company is almost in the primary business not of supplying insurance or processing claims, but in DENYING claims. Insurance fraud is a huge risk, the more claims they can deny the more money they make and they have deep and long-term investments in actuarial data and statistics. They may already have enough tracking device data in their databases to *know* that your physical damage doesn't align with the tracking data.

What do we know about the security of systems such as onStar?

But will a wearing a dongle help?

Regardless of the reason (Amazon's missteps or typical TV timelines), it's kind of problematic. A year turnaround kind of kills momentum and interest, although given the thin creme at the top of the shitpile that is a streaming content catalog, maybe it won't matter because streamers will watch almost anything even if its not that good.

It could also be a limitation of the "instant binge" model where the entire series is available at once versus a weekly release that allows them to actuallly shoot the series as it runs.

Maybe they could do some kind of combination, shooting 3 episodes of every series they ballot and then actually starting production on the rest of the series immediately after the voting window ends. In theory, a 60 day delay between the end of balloting and the "start" of the series should allow them time to shoot an additional two episodes, and the whole thing could be setup to be released in 4 episode batches every 90 days.

They'd end up shooting episdes they don't need, but pehaps they could structure the 3 episode narratives in a way that made them more or less complete even if they didn't get voted for a season. A three-episode triptych could become some kind of new streaming-only format and maybe it would serve as some kind of an incubator for new talent or genre fiction.

And the Chris Carter sort of post-apoc sci fi thing, too, Which will probably suck and be like everything else, with predictable, formulaic episode structures where *tiny* amounts of the bigger conspiracy are revealed, stringing viewers along forever and then never really having a point, like "Lost".

Anyway, the pilot at least held my interest and binging without commercials makes it somehow less annoying. And the Bosch series looks good, too. The books are above everage mysteries and Welliver is pretty perfect for Bosch.

I don't understand Amazon's long window between pilot and series, though. It seems that traditionally when a pilot was aired if new episodes were to be aired, they aired fairly closely. Maybe traditional pilots and series' had long windows, too, you just didn't know about them because only TV suits saw the pilots and Amazon had that voting scheme.

Or maybe this is tech industry hubris, where they think beause they have a handle on cloud computing and fulfillment logistics that they can just step into making TV shows, too, and then find out that everything they think they know is worthless.

I kind of hope it's the latter; not for the comeuppance, but maybe there's some slim chance that an application of money and disconnection from traditional media can kind of reinvent the process for making filmed entertainment.

And while I'm ranting on the topic, I wonder why they stick with the traditional 60 minute episode. If people can binge watch it anyway, why not 7 two hour episodes instead of 13 hour episodes?

If you can think of as many distinct sexual activities as there are symbols in your wrinting system, make a table and encode your secret messages as porn movies. (Spies will probably watch them, but probably also forget that they're supposed to be looking for messages.)

"...serious newspapers and comedy TV shows..."

It may be cheaper to drop the setpoint down when power is comparatively cheaper (and how much cheaper are we talking -- a couple of cents per kWh?) but it is it more energy efficient to drop the setpoint down so that it can cycle less and gain temperature above optimal when the power is more expensive? Eg, if optimal is 36F and I drop it to 34 when power is cheap but let it rise to 38 when its expensive only to need to drop it back to 34 when its cheap.

In my experience, doing something similar with my central air conditioner in the summer usually seems like a mistake. If I raise the setpoint from 72F to 75F during the day it seems to take constant running for hours to get back those 3 degrees, more running than it would seem to take just to keep it at 72F.

It seems like it takes more energy to drop a box a few degrees than it does to keep it at a constant temperature. Of course all I know about refrigeration and thermodynamics is that it means we can't have nice things.

Something's wrong if your pipes will freeze with the furnace off for a couple of hours.

I also live where it can hit -35C (although -30C is more common) and I have my thermostat automatically setback to 60F at night and unless it really is -30C, the inside temperature never hits the setpoint, usually sinking to the low 60s from a normal setpoint of 69.

In my experience in order to freeze pipes, your furnace would have to be completely off for many hours, in extremely cold temperatures (-30 or colder), your house would have to be extremely poorly insulated (lots of heat loss) and you'd have to have uninsulated pipes in an exterior wall which was itself nearly uninsulated. For internal pipe runs your entire house would have to fall below freezing for hours before you burst pipes.

I think there is some risk in the latter in many kitchens, as sinks tend to be on outside walls in many houses and often the supply plumbing is run up in the exterior wall void which some idiot builder/installer/plumber/remodeler doesn't re-pack with insulation. I've known a couple people who have had this happen when on vacation -- set back thermostat really low (like 55F for the duration of their trip) and 5 days of serious subzero weather. Always shut off the water main when leaving like this -- that way at least a burst pipe is a minor mess versus a total disaster.

Putting foam insulation on the exterior wall pipe runs helps a lot. I found that insulating the entire hot water line from the hot water heater to the kitchen sink was beneficial just for faster hot water to the sink. It seems I get max hot water much faster when my pipes aren't basement cold and nearly instantly if I've used the hot water within the last few hours.