Yes, people buy them by the millions.... You're not impressed that 6.8 million were sold in 2014 (the first year this stuff really went mainstream, with lots of version 1.0 products that will get more compelling as the years pass)?

I have the Apple Watch myself and sure it's redundant -- but that's sort of the point. I mean, in the era of everyone carrying around cellphones which ALL display the date and time, any wrist worn watch is redundant anyway!

The advantages are ones of convenience, primarily. People tend to keep their phone in a pocket or purse, and it's less convenient to pull it out (probably having to press a button on it to wake it, too) just to check the time, than to glance at a wristwatch. But also, you shouldn't discount the fact that these watches go places the phones don't go. You can take an Apple Watch with you in the shower, for example, or even swimming in a pool. It's relatively waterproof, unlike a phone. And besides, do you have a pocket that would safely secure your phone on your pair of swim-trunks? Around the house, it gives me the freedom to leave my phone on a charger, inside, too, while retaining the usefulness of some of the phone's apps. (I put a wi-fi router out in my garage as a range extender, so my watch stays on my home wi-fi network while I'm mowing the lawn or working on the car.)

The "bragging rights" thing is severely over-rated..... Unless you're talking about something insanely expensive like that Apple Watch "edition" (which is really only being bought as a piece of bling by celebrities, athletes and fashion magazine folks), most people don't really notice or CARE what you're wearing on your wrist. I don't think a single person has commented on my Apple Watch since I've had it, and I ride on the Metro every day where hundreds of people have the opportunity to say something about it if they wanted to. (I went with the black sport band option, so it doesn't really stand out that much.)

But sure, it's also of use to the fitness crowd ... a large segment of the market that I'm not really a part of. And these watches are capable of doing a little more than just telling the time, even when the phone isn't tethered to them. You can load playlists of MP3 or AAC music into mine, for example, to listen to over a bluetooth headset. So it eliminates a need to carry a separate iPod player around.

I have a similar sized PV solar system myself, purchased for about the same price you quote as today's "unsubsidized price". (Well, maybe $32K, but pretty close.) I just got it online in the middle of December of 2014.

In my case, we still qualified for about $9,000 in Federal subsidies, although these are given back as tax credits at tax time, and last year I wasn't able to collect more than about $6,000 of that total. The other $3,000 will get put onto next year's tax refund.

Our house is over 100 years old and a 2 story with a total of 4 bedrooms. With a family of 6, and both my wife and I working in computers and I.T. for a living, our power usage is far more than what the panels generate for us. At the current utility prices out here, I estimate that in sunny months like May, June and July, the panels generate a little over $100/month in electricity for us. But the two heat pumps that run the upstairs and downstairs run quite a bit in the hot summer months too, leaving us with $400+ electric bills.

So in our case, it's pretty hard to really "feel" the savings the panels are supposed to be giving us, tax credits or not.... I still think it was probably a good investment, all in all. But at the end of the day, I still tell everyone PV solar amounts to a bit of a gamble. It's more like picking a few stocks to invest in and hoping you get the return you project than a "sure bet".

I mean, will the fact your house has panels already on it help your resale value enough to make the whole thing a net positive return on investment? It could, even if the electricity savings never really amounted to much for a person. Can anyone say for certain what electric rates will be in 10 years? Most inverters on PV solar systems have warranties far shorter than the panels themselves and they're costly to replace. How often do you think you'll need to do that "out of pocket" over the life of a system and what do you think one will cost down the road? Too many variables for any of this to have solid, certain numbers.....

I already read this story and a bunch of comments on it, when it was shared on a friend's Facebook feed over the weekend. When I saw it here this morning, I have to admit I suspected a lot of people would try to make arguments supporting the guy's decision. (Lots of college age folks on here, after all, presumably suffering with high tuition and challenges finding good paying jobs, fresh out of school. Also a lot of liberal thinkers on here who I imagined would be all for free, govt. funded college educations.)

But no ... I see overwhelming dissatisfaction with his article, which IMO is exactly how it should be!

If nothing else, it strikes me that early on in his article, he encourages others to consider refusing to pay what they owe, just like he did. Yet he goes on to explain his circumstances, which are probably a lot different than many students are in right now. First off, he's talking about his dad going bankrupt after his mom co-signed for his loan. An awful lot of students I know received Federal loan assistance that didn't require a co-signer at all (and actually have pretty low interest rates compared to any other unsecured bank loans you'd take out). If you go in and sign for one of those, you have nobody to blame but yourself if it turns out it's difficult to pay off afterwards! You can't really argue that your parent(s) drug you into the bank and pretty much told you to "get one of these" without you having much of a clue, as they signed along side you on the paperwork.

But second, yeah.... it's kind of tough to feel sympathy for this guy when he's complaining that paying down his loans was going to be so difficult a decision because it would require taking a job other than the one he preferred being in! Hello?! What about the college grads with PhDs in Physics who take a job at Burger King for a while, to pay the bills? You're going to discount their dedication to doing the right thing and paying what they agreed to pay in a written contract because YOU think it's better to ditch your personal responsibility if it means doing a job other than being a writer for a while? Guess what? If I was hiring for one of these career positions and had a candidate with a high level degree with work experience like that, I'd choose him/her over the candidate with nothing! It says things about the person's character and willing to follow through on what they commit to.

One of the problems with Apple's Siri when it launched was slow response times. When you've got to have all the voice traffic transmitted over the net to the server, processed, and results returned - it causes some lag. When you've got millions of users using the thing regularly, you introduce real challenges getting all of that data processed near instantly.

With SoundHound's improvements, I suspect people will be encouraged to speak in longer, run-on sentences, as they think while speaking about all of the conditions they want on a given search. That's going to mean even MORE data to transmit up to a server and parse before a response can be sent back.

Good suggestion about removing that update.... But let's face it. Microsoft doesn't really CARE that you don't like their revised GUI. The whole reason they want people on Windows 10 is to get them under an OS platform that's friendly to a subscription-based model.

No.... I think it's actually pretty accurate to make the basic statement that "copyright is not working". I'm not saying the entire concept needs to vanish. But I think it's pretty clear that the way it works today, copyright only benefits a relative few people at the top of the "pecking order" for a given business pedaling intellectual property.

As we see the increase in popularity of streaming music services/subscriptions, for example? Copyright as a means to ensure an artist gets compensated fairly for his/her work starts looking like an utter joke. What compensation do they really receive? Fractions of a penny each time a song of theirs is streamed! The only people who stand to do well with this model are the services doing the streaming itself, who collect money for the subscriptions no matter what the subscribers listen to (and a rate that's the same whether they listen to a lot or barely anything at all in a given month).

And who is copyright working for when you have people simply trying to build emulators so people can run 20+ year old games again for nostalgia, but it's technically illegal to distribute the software collections due to a (now non-productive) copyright preventing it?

IMO, the only real value of copyright for a creator of a work is in providing some INITIAL protection when the work is still new. The lion's share of income is normally when a work is brand new and nobody has access to it yet. You want to encourage people to keep creating new things by letting them earn that big, initial profit when the new movie, book, video game or music album/single is a "new release" without it being hijacked .... But once the I.P. gets "stale", meaning almost everyone who wants to view/read/listen to it has pretty much done so? It's time for copyright protection on it to wind down.

I'm not a California resident so can't speak directly about the situation out there, but I can speak for solar here in Maryland. The power we generate with solar panels is purchased by the utility company, but technically NOT at "retail prices". (That's generally a fallacy perpetuated by the folks against solar.) They DO probably pay more than they'd prefer to pay (a rate that's a bit higher than their true cost to generate the same amount of electricity themselves), but we have to pay the transmission costs for it to get carried down the wires back to the utility company.

In general, what I've observed around here is that quite a few people who are more "middle class" than "rich" are the ones with PV solar on their roofs. Most of the time, they did a solar lease or "PPA" agreement so their up-front cost to have the panels installed was as little as zero, or as much as maybe a few thousand dollars paid up front in order to secure a better deal on the terms of the lease agreement.

I'm one of the exceptions in our town who decided to buy my panels straight out, but our family couldn't really afford to do that either. I had to get a "solar loan" from a lender offering it, after scraping up about $9,000 to pay upon completion of the work. (That will come back to me as the Federal tax credit for going solar, but they pay it back in stages, at least given my own tax situation. So I have to wait until next tax year to recoup the rest of the credit.) The rest of the cost will get paid off over the next 12 years on this solar loan, at an interest rate of close to 8%. So essentially, I'm gambling here on whether or not the whole project EVER really gives me a positive return on my investment. I *think* it can, but it's really a long term projection..... They estimate the panels will last as long as 25-30 years, and I bought SunPower branded stuff (which has a little less performance drop-off over time than many other cheaper panels). The inverters will almost surely need to be replaced once or twice during that length of time ... but they're under warranty for the first 10 years. By then, you've got to think they'll have better and/or cheaper replacements available to put in their place than what's available today.

Meanwhile, what will power cost in 20 years? The same price as today or close to it? Somehow I doubt that.... and I doubt that enough to take this type of bet as insurance against higher costs on it. But in any case, my system only covers about 60-68% of our total energy usage needs. There's just not enough usable roof space facing the right direction for it to be cost effective to add more capacity. (A problem I see with MANY homes doing solar.)

I guess my point, though, is this: PV solar isn't typically going to make this massive energy savings that some people think when they see the "cool looking solar panels" all over a property. When govt. started with the subsidies on it, it was because the tech. made NO economic sense at all without that padding added to the equation and they were just trying to use our tax money to jump start the whole industry.

Today, I think it *can* make some sense, but the wealthy really won't care about the small savings we're talking about seeing with it! If they do solar, it's merely for show and to give off that "feel good, eco friendly" vibe. The upper class can easily afford to pay their electric bills as a very SMALL part of their total income.

IMO, the "bigger picture" problem is simply that America has jettisoned most of its decent paying jobs in favor of automation and/or outsourcing. What do we really produce here in significant quantities, that we can actually export to the rest of the world? Entertainment and software. (And both of those keep hitting limitations because many parts of the world don't respect the whole concept of intellectual property as something you give heavy legal protection to.)

Furthermore, the music industry is struggling in America today with the shift towards "all I can listen to via streaming for a cheap monthly rate", vs. actually buying the albums or songs individually. Expect the same to happen with movies, post initial theater release, as broadband becomes more commonplace and less expensive.

In a word, we're pretty screwed. As someone pointed out last week on Slashdot, self-driving trucks are on the way. Whenever that becomes acceptable on our roadways, you're going to see all of the middle class "truck driver" jobs vaporize, ALONG with all of the business they used to bring the hotels, truck stops, diners and restaurants along the highways that served them.

There are still some good paying jobs in the medical field, since humans haven't really found a way to stop getting injured, catching various illnesses or diseases, or aging. But even there, the healthcare system (whether you think "Obamacare" was a net positive or negative) is slowly imploding. People don't earn enough money doing OTHER jobs to afford the cost of the healthcare, and insurance can't keep covering it without A) taxing the heck out of you, or B) extracting it on the front end from your employer so you salary diminishes.

IMO, this big push for STEM and software coding is just a way to try to mask the reality as much as possible that we don't produce enough jobs anymore for all the people who want to work. To an extent, automation will increase the need for these folks. (Self driving cars and trucks, for example, will need software and software code updates on a regular basis, as well as engineers and mechanics to keep them going.) Fast food places going to automated touch-screen ordering systems or food processing/vending systems will need them too. So do farms that go to robotics for harvesting crops. But the very *reason* these technologies add value for the people implementing them is the REDUCTION in labor they bring. You're talking 1 person taking care of one of these systems for at least 4 or 5 people they put out of a (lower paying) job.

In the long run, I can't really see a scenario that doesn't result in a whole bunch of unemployed people and a relative few with decent paying jobs taking care of the machines that keep the rest unemployed. I *hope* I'm wrong and has been the case in previous history, new things will emerge that create jobs I'm not even thinking of right now. But it looks to me like it's got to get pretty bad before it gets better.

Exactly.... Personally, I don't see the problem with the concept that some jobs are predominantly of interest to one sex over the other? Isn't this exactly why we had predominantly females in nursing for decades? There simply weren't as many guys interested in doing that particular job (though obviously, *some* do, and that's fine too).

What I do see is some blow-back from the fact that with mostly guys making video games, the games have catered mostly to guys. You do have more females interested in actually playing games now, instead of just watching the guys do it. So yeah, there's some understandable irritation that the games are almost all "guy-centric". But most people who play video games don't have an interest in WRITING them, just like most people who drive cars don't want to become auto mechanics or work in the auto industry.

Ultimately though, markets always follow the money, so even if it takes a bunch of male programmers to do it, they'll build more titles that appeal to females if that's an untapped market. No social manipulation required here.

Well, first of all, I don't really happen to think Rand has the most well thought out stances on some of the issues. Certainly, he's not a cookie-cutter of his father's political beliefs -- and IMO, where he differs from Ron is typically where I least like what he's saying.

Specifically, I think Rand is much more of a believer in the U.S. using its military might to try to shape politics in other parts of the world, where Ron was much more clear that our forces had no business acting as the aggressor in ANY circumstance. (That means no business occupying foreign soil with military bases for "strategic" reasons when we're not actively at war with those nations.)

But that said, I'm not sure those two quotes about Russia are completely incompatible or opposites? It's one thing to believe the Cold War never ended, and another to interpret Russia's latest aggression as a recent happening that really isn't tied to a perceived constant goal of theirs. Russia has been through a lot of changes in leadership over the years.

For example, from the mid 60's through mid 70's, they didn't even have a single leader. Rather, it was a group of 3 individuals; Leonid Brezhnev, Alexei Kosygin and Nikolai Podgorny essentially ruling as a collective.

Many people say Russia's current actions are just a desperate attempt to reclaim some of its former glory .... steps it wasn't really taking in earnest for at least the last couple decades or so.

That's fine. I plan to show up to cancel out your vote.

Yeah.... it's Jason Scott, the guy I had the dubious privilege of having a fairly long, involved conversation/debate with on a Facebook forum a while back. (I belong to a private message group someone created on there where people discuss the "good old days" of the local BBS scene in the area code I lived in back then.)

The BBS Documentary Project was brought up and somehow he was invited to the discussion. I thought that was pretty cool, initially, because I'm one of the people who did an advance purchase of that set of DVDs when I heard it was coming out. I'd never had a conversation with Jason Scott before, but always admired the guy for caring enough about the BBS scene and preserving it as a part of history to make the documentary. (Heck, part of me always wanted to do one myself. I went through a phase where I bought a fair bit of video editing and recording gear and helped make DVDs out of other people's footage from vacations and other events, and wanted to produce something of my own. But life got in the way, as it often does .... a messy divorce, a kid I had to raise on my own, and demands of a new job pretty much squashed that little dream for me.)

But hey, here was a guy in a different place in life who was able to run around the country in his R.V. and actually go get all of these interviews and make the documentary. So, cool... I was happy to give him a little financial support by buying a copy.

After Facebook, my opinion of him changed a bit. For starters, it seems he's really NOT very good at handling constructive criticism. Many of us, for example, simply felt his documentary was oddly biased in a few parts and wanted to ask him why he made some of those choices. For example, after watching the whole thing, I was a little perplexed why he left so much footage in there covering the "ANSI artwork scene"? I fondly remember the days when the WWIV BBS owners would play around in the ANSI art editors for DOS, creating cool welcome screens, and how certain folks achieved near celebrity status as the top ANSI artists out there. But most of the documentary interviewed these younger kids who were part of the later scene that was a very minor footnote. (We're talking the "warez BBS" groups at this point, with people who often as not, just processed GIF or JPG images into ANSI art with utilities and made massive things that had to scroll through 2 full screen displays to see the whole image.) And IMO, their interviews came off pretty arrogant - like the whole BBS community revolved around their work or something. It just felt inaccurate to me.

So anyway, we brought that up to Scott - but to my surprise, he started attacking us, rather than having an honest discussion about why that choice was made. It turned into a big finger-pointing session of "If you think YOU can do so much better, why don't you make your OWN documentary then!?" It wasn't much different when a few of us wanted to know why our requests, back in the day, to get interviewed for the project were ignored. (Basically, he never interviewed a single person living in our area code or any surrounding area codes, yet we had a huge, fairly influential BBS scene in the 80's.) He turned it into a rant on how expensive it was to drive all over the country to collect all of the footage, and how there was no way he could interview everyone who contacted him, etc. etc.

At the end of the day, I'm still very happy he got some of the interviews captured on video that he did. Some of that would surely be lost to history if it wasn't done. And yes, kudos to him for actually going out there any making this documentary when clearly, the rest of us weren't willing or able to do it at that point in time. But man -- drop the negative attitude! Most of us who would even make the effort to discuss this thing with you and question it are among the core group who actually LIVED it. We actually watched all 4 DVDs full of what you put together, which frankly, MOST people would never even do because they'd find it too "dull and dry" of content. (You kind of had to be there, in the middle of it, to care that much about this stuff.) Some of my questions came more from curiosity than anything else.... like what's the story behind why you couldn't visit city X or Y? There could be some interesting anecdotes about "the time the RV broke down outside Toledo, and ....." or whatever. I think we wanted more of that and less of the, "Screw you for questioning my work, since YOU guys didn't ever make one of these!"

Teach kids how to effectively use search engines and tools, for starters. The wealth of knowledge (and garbage) on the Internet requires good search skills to use it effectively. I see far too many adults, much less teenagers, who don't know how to put together searches consisting of more than a word or two. Learn the power of putting exact phrases in quotation marks, and suddenly you'll be able to narrow things down to just one or two very relevant pages when you Google for an error message. Use the * as a placeholder in a search for wildcard terms. Find social tags by putting @ in front of a name. Use minus-signs in front of words to exclude from search results, to help make them more effective. (If you're looking for information about purple rain but not a musical reference, try searching for it with -Prince.)

I'll be honest.... I won't shed a tear if a good 50 or 60% of the existing web sites die off, due to lack of revenue generation.

Maybe then we'll get back to something more sane? Look, I get that a lot of special interest blog sites would die if they didn't receive ad revenue. I used to write for one of them myself. (And guess what? It died, because they couldn't generate enough page hits to impress enough advertisers to spend a lot of money on it.)

But ultimately, it's survival of the fittest like anything else. I think it would be in the best interest of a lot of businesses to host and pay for sites related in some way to products or services they sell, so that would theoretically keep quite a few of them afloat. (A few of the car related forums I'm on work like that.... They're partially funded by contributions by area car dealerships that want to sponsor them, and they charge annual fees for 3rd. parties to host a message base on the forum where they can advertise whatever they like with new message posts.) This model keeps out the spam/malware and ensures target marketing by default. The users LIKE the sponsors and their marketing because it typically includes discount coupon codes on various products of interest, and ensures good
customer service when a forum "regular" also happens to be the owner of the company you bought your items from!

In other cases, people should just learn to accept that hosting a web site is going to cost them something. It really shouldn't cost much, in most cases. If you're not streaming out a bunch of video content or hosting huge downloads, your blog site just isn't likely to generate massive amounts of bandwidth usage (what most hosting services really bill for, because storage space itself is dirt cheap). Every hobby I ever had cost me some money.... Deciding to run a special interest blog or message forum should be no different.

The trucking industry USED to be pretty well regarded for having top notch drivers. I don't think this is the case today. Some of the trucking schools were caught red-handed passing students who had "stand ins" taking the exams for them, for example. And all too often, long-haul drivers are pressed to drive so many hours at a time that they're really not that safe and alert at the wheel some of the time.

The drivers I saw hired at a manufacturing place I used to work for were not exactly pillars of society either. Many had previous criminal records and we had to place GPS tracking systems on the trucks and keep constant watch on where the went, since people tended to use the trucks for non work-related activities otherwise and bill the company for the fuel. That doesn't mean they lacked driving skills ... but it does mean I wouldn't trust them not to misrepresent the truth if they were involved in an accident.

I don't doubt that the majority of accidents involving large truck are still the fault of passenger vehicle drivers -- but I suspect the "big rig" drivers aren't really all that superior of drivers themselves, as often as not. (I've seen some of the guys around here who can barely get the trucks around traffic circles without tearing things up, and who knock down traffic signals going around corners.)