Ummm.... no.... Two completely different issues.

The H1-B issue with the I.T. field is all about people skilled or trained to perform a job that's in high demand in the U.S. right now, yet getting short-changed in their ability to find employment doing it, because companies are receiving legal passes to hire outsiders at big salary discounts.

In the industries you're referring to, you're talking about businesses who were traditionally free to place big markups on offering their intellectual property to the public while simultaneously slapping numerous restrictions on its use or redistribution. TECHNOLOGICAL ADVANCES causes their business models to increasingly become obsolete, so rather than adapt, they spent too much time trying to strong-arm people into continuing to ignore the changes, and keep on doing things the way they were always done. When this (predictably) became a losing battle, they acted like the injured parties.

Seriously, I *work* for a communications marketing company, and still, I think the whining and gnashing of teeth over plug-ins like ABP is misplaced!

You can't realistically expect to stop people from blocking your ads with software any more than you can stop people from pressing "mute", channel change buttons, or just the "on/off" switch on the television when commercials come on!

The truth is, ad banners, pop-ups, pop-unders, animated page overlays and the rest of it are just distractions. If you create one that's minimal enough so most people can't be bothered to actively use a tool like ABP to filter it? Then you've probably just made an ineffective advertisement that people aren't even paying attention to in the first place. Advertisers who "get" this and have worked hard to build more effective ads are prompting people to "fight back" with these blocking tools. The takeaway we probably all SHOULD be getting from this is that this form of marketing isn't a very good one.

The fact that many site operators out there can barely make enough revenue to cover their costs of hosting means there's a strong interest in keeping the current business model in place and pretending it works. But truthfully, I think things would work out far better if marketers would agree to sponsor web sites likely to have an audience interested in one of their products. Just flat out pay their hosting for them, in exchange for the site making it clear your company is doing that for them. THEN you'd win the respect of the userbase and generate good P.R. and sales.

Yep. The obvious "fix" that nobody seems to be taking very seriously yet is making it much more difficult to get permission to hire an H1-B worker.

Corporations are ALWAYS going to push for a plentiful supply of these as a cost savings measure, but it's ultimately the government who issues them. It's about time they start putting pressure on companies to PROVE they're unable to hire from the talent pool of American citizens before qualifying to go the H1-B route.

I think it's great that someone is trying to advance battery storage technology. Tesla finds itself in a position to have a real vested interest in doing so, for the sake of improving sales of its vehicles AND because it opens up a whole new area they can market products to (PV solar owners who want to charge batteries for power storage to use when the sun isn't shining).

The hype come in with all of these statements about power companies being scared by it, and it putting existing business models in peril.

Frankly, that's a load of B.S. for the foreseeable future.

For starters, this stuff has very high up-front costs. There's no way around the fact that storing enough electricity to power an entire home for a whole night (or longer if it's rainy and cloudy all day, so solar isn't generating a whole lot of power) requires some big batteries. Right now, most people could honestly see a lot more savings/return on investment by reducing their power consumption before even thinking about any of this stuff. (How many homes are still full of older appliances that use as much as 2-3x the amount of power as new, high-efficiency alternatives? What about buying the most efficient furnace or heat-pump or A/C unit available? People say they can't justify or "afford" it because you know... it might cost several thousand dollars to upgrade it. But even $7-8K for a new central A/C and furnace isn't even coming close to what one of these battery storage systems will cost you. And what about replacing all those incandescent or halogen bulbs in the house with low wattage LED versions?)

The people buying this stuff anywhere in the near future are just the "early adopters" who have other motivations besides proof of pure financial savings. Heck, even if you could eek out a small net savings with this stuff -- you could *probably* just invest that money wisely and see more return that way.

Yeah, technically that's a good point ... except I think what you'd see happening instead is the power generated by your PV solar going on out to the grid and getting used *somewhere*. But that somewhere might be far enough away that transmission line losses, and need for the power company to supplement it via a "step up transformer" along the way means it wasn't saving them any money over just generating the power centrally themselves and delivering it.

So from the power company's standpoint, they're not too happy about all of that happening on their grid....

I just purchased a solar panel system for our home, and I've been learning a lot about all of this stuff during the process.

The problem with the author's suggestion is that he's concerned about a problem that, by and large, we haven't quite come to yet. Solar adoption is still such a small percentage of the total number of electric consumers that the "saturation point" hasn't usually been reached yet. The entire "net metering" model for solar isn't really sustainable if you get more than a single digit percentage of homeowners in a given area going solar. I think that will hold true EVEN if you could convince all the new solar installations to use west-facing panels to time shift their power production hours.

Right now, practically everything about PV solar adoption centers around government regulations creating an "artificial" incentive for it. For example, in my home state of Maryland and a number of others, they have an SREC program in place (solar reclamation credits). How does it work? Basically, they made a rule that the state's utility companies have to obtain a certain percentage of their electricity generation via "Green" sources like wind or solar. If they fail to hit that target, they must purchase these SREC certificates in a sufficient quantity to offset it. (In reality, they're always going to pay for the SRECs rather than adopt more alternative energy generation themselves -- because for them, it's still the more cost-effective and sensible option. They don't want to spend a bunch on new infrastructure and land to place it on, just to meet those percentage targets.) For every megawatt of solar power your home solar panel setup produces, you earn an SREC which you can turn around and resell to the power company (directly, or via one of several auction web sites designed for the purpose). There's even one offering to buy 10 or 20 years' worth of your SRECs in advance, at some discounted price, giving you more "up front" cash to pay off your system's initial installation cost - should you find that the best option.

Don't forget the Federal tax credit of 30% of whatever you spent to buy the solar panel system, and states like mine who kick in another $1,000 or so. This stuff just doesn't make the same financial sense with all of these constructs removed from the equation.

The real elephant in the room that everyone's ignoring is the fact that power DISTRIBUTION is the limiting factor for the power companies. As soon as too many people start putting power from solar back onto the grid at one time, in one area? They can't really do anything with it, so it gets wasted. Yet the "net metering" rules require that pay you back for it anyway, at full retail prices. For a SHORT time, you might be able to postpone this by switching more panels to face west instead of south, but soon enough - it will become a problem again.

Honestly, I predict that what we'll see playing out is government withdrawing all of the tax breaks, followed by the value of your SRECs dropping to very little as they ease up on the requirements the utilities must meet. This will put the brakes on solar adoption, making it one of those things that only paid off for the people who got in on it early - or who have a situation where it STILL pays off (due to especially high power costs). In Hawaii or parts of California, for example, I believe the utilities sometimes bill as high as 90-some cents per kilowatt-hour used. In Maryland, by contrast? I pay closer to 11 cents.

I've seen this trailer shared around Facebook all morning and many of my friends who are long time Star Wars fans are optimistic, based on the little bit shown.

Personally, I feel like part of the reason the original 3 movies were viewed as so superior to episodes 1-3 had a lot to do with the limitations of the technology of the time preventing everything from being "overdone".

Starr Wars featured enough visually amazing things (from the Imperial Star Destroyer coming on the screen and viewers slowly realizing just how massive it was, to each one of the interesting robots) that appreciating them fully required not cluttering the scenes up with too much other eye candy or content. Back in 1977, that wasn't an issue because it was difficult and time-consuming enough to create these things that nobody would make the mistake of putting too many of them in one scene.

The computer CGI capabilities of today made it too easy to make scenes too "busy" and cheapen the value of individual creatures, backdrops, weapons, spaceships or robots. The prequel movies felt like they were trying to see how many thousands of objects they could render at the same time in some of the battle scenes. (EG. Jedi knights chopping and hacking away at robots in wave after wave.) Believability suffered.

If they go back to simple sets like the desert of Tatooine and stop going "CGI crazy" with every single background, I think there's a good chance they'll achieve the original Star Wars feel we all know and love. (And yeah, no insipid characters like Jar Jar either.)

I think you're neglecting the fact that with larger storage capacities come new options.

Sure, right now you see a lot of people with a 1TB drive that's not nearly full. But I also see quite a few people who fill up really large amounts of drive space with photo, music and video libraries. With enough cheap storage, more people can store music in an uncompressed, lossless format (like FLAC) instead of compromising sound quality with MP3 or AAC just to save space. Digital cameras have gone from 1 or 2 megapixel to 14-18 megapixel in many cases, generating much larger image files for still photos, too. And even your commercial video games are taking up exponentially more drive space than they used to, as developers decide to tell stories with full-screen hi-res video, vs. scrolling a few lines of text up a screen to summarize things, and as they build large 3D worlds you can run around in and fully explore.

Another culprit for sucking up disk space in a corporate setting is DropBox. Companies using the paid "Teams" version wind up with everyone's copy of the software downloading and syncing ALL of the content stored in the shared folders. So instead of just keeping YOUR data, you now have a copy of the whole team/division/company's data you're all storing there. (Yes, you can use "selective sync" to trim this back down. But except for folders you know you have no use for at all, it's preferable to sync it all so you have immediate access to anything your co-workers intended to make available, even if you're not by an Internet connection.)

Mag tape is definitely on the way out, because it's slow and the drives require regular maintenance to keep them working reliably. Sure, it meets your "requirements" - but I'd argue that MOST businesses really don't need to do things the way you've proposed in order to have a more than reasonable amount of data security.

I've never been a big fan of flash storage as archival backup. Even for consumers only needing a backup of a small photo collection or what-not? Putting it on thumb drives winds up being a false sense of security when the cheap Asian flash chip fails suddenly, with no advance warning, as soon as the drive is plugged into a USB port to access it.

But I can still pull archived ZIP files off of CDRs we burned in 1996-97 -- in response to your "But go pull the post-close EOY General Journal from 1996 off of one, I dare you." comment.

And most of what you're really talking about isn't backup/archiving, but rather, disaster recovery (having multiple copies of the data in different cities and states). There's no reason TAPE makes that any easier than other forms of media. In fact, today's easiest way to accomplish that is using cloud storage with reliable services who already have redundant data centers and backups done at all sites.

That's what some of the service techs were getting paid to do on-site service for Dell, last time I checked. And that's in the DC metro area, where cost of living is way high!

Gee... I wonder why people aren't lining up to take those job offers?!

Is this really a big factor? I'm just asking because the trend I've witnessed in recent years has been towards ensuring the cops live where they work. The last couple places I've lived, they had special tax credits or break for police officers so they could purchase homes at a discount in the community they worked in.

I can see how police might need a little more time to learn a neighborhood, if they're getting transferred around from department to department -- or if their department is asked to cover a large area. But small communities with their own little police departments seem to be among the more corrupt and trouble-prone. (Ferguson is a very small community in St. Louis, MO, for example.)

It seems to me like this problem will eventually cause people to look into ways to automate the bean picking process, and remove much of the labor-intensiveness?

It's not like this hasn't been an issue before with other crops.... I get the idea that the only reason this has been done with all the manual labor for so long is geography. The beans are grown primarily in places where labor is dirt cheap.

Paying the farmers more will happen naturally if chocolate gets too scarce. (Companies intent on making cheap candy will use very little cacao in whatever they sell, and those interested in really good chocolate candy will up the price.) But those with a vested interest in getting large supplies of cacao beans at as low a price as possible will probably invest in technology to harvest them more efficiently. Get directly involved in the process, opening up farming operations using the machinery -- and you've got your own supplier that you own and control. Not a bad solution, really -- and will bring costs back down again.

I've been primarily a Mac user since 1999 or 2000, and I've watched the serviceability of Apple's machines go back and forth over the years. Before they moved to the Intel processor, you often had very limited options to do anything with the configuration you purchased, even when the machine in question was a tower type desktop computer. RAM was generally not an issue, although Apple sometimes required very specific timing for the DIMM modules - limiting what you could put in. But certainly, upgraded video was a problem (very limited in which cards could be used as upgrades - including cases like the G4 Cube where some cards were physically too long to fit, even if they'd work otherwise). Laptops like the iBook G4 were notoriously difficult to take apart for service. I remember replacing a bad hard drive in one for a guy I used to work for, and it was at least a 2 hour long job for me with screws all over the place. After that, I understood why repair shops would quote such high labor rates when you asked about an iBook repair.

Then I watched things go the opposite direction. The newer Macbooks and Pros became increasingly easy to work on, so you could unscrew the bottom plate and have instant access to everything -- or just remove a small plate to get to the RAM slots. Batteries became removable from the bottom by just sliding an unlock switch. Even the iMac was easy to upgrade at one point (hard drive right there once you took the back cover off, and no need to do more than unscrew a couple screws on the bottom to get to the SO-DIMM memory).

But it's now swinging back to the "non serviceable" mode again, with the pentalobe screws trying to keep people out, soldered RAM on the motherboards, and having to take the whole glass and LCD screens out of iMacs to work on them.

Truthfully, I don't think the TRIM support for non-Apple branded SSDs is that big of a deal. It's been known for quite a while now that Apple wasn't including TRIM support for 3rd. party drives -- and there's even one 3rd. party SSD coming out now with TRIM functionality built into its firmware, so OS X doesn't need to have support to do it. You can turn off the feature in OS X that verifies you're only using signed KEXTs and get the custom ones to work for TRIM support too.

But sure, it's annoying .... and I'm not going to make apologies for Apple about any of this. We still use their products where I work and none of this will make us stop. (As long as you have a warranty, you just hand it back to Apple when it breaks and it's their problem. If you still need it and the warranty is up? Fine... you pay up and let Apple service it and hand it back to you again. Their repair prices have actually gone down in recent years, as they've made more products reliant on them to service them.) Home users are the ones who get the short end of the deal though, as money is more of a problem for us and we tend to buy lesser configurations of machines to save money up front -- intending to add to it later. With Apple, that's becoming a poor decision.

Traditional land lines have the caller ID information generated at the phone company's central office, based on who is paying the bill for the circuit.
Unless you're planning on hacking into their computers - it's not really changeable.

The problem lies with all the VoIP based phone systems out there. These days, there are probably more phone lines using VoIP than traditional copper lines.

The VoIP systems don't even have a way to tell emergency 911 operators what your correct address is. You're expected to provide the right one to go with the number you receive (often with the ability to do that yourself with a self-service web based control panel). So yes, the caller ID information is also controlled by the VoIP server -- and anyone running their own can do as they please with it.

Not necessarily though ... because most of the big, commercial trucks are providing products or services that everyone utilizes. If you place a higher tax on commercial trucks, it winds up redistributed anyway, as it's covered with higher shipping/transportation costs passed along to those buying the products and services carried on the trucks.

So yes, why not tax the larger vehicle that do the lion's share of wear and tear on the roads, and let that help fund any needs for increased road infrastructure for the other vehicles too?