And building an abacus really isn't THAT hard.

It's not the companies sponsoring the test that somehow try to pick this demographic. It's the people themselves. Most of the tests pay the panelists, but it's not all that much. For someone with a stable job, the small amount usually isn't worth the hassle (have to be at the test location during business hours several times a week sometimes, keeping logs, or whatever). Not to mention not worth the possible health risks. For homeless/unemployed/etc., that's their electric bill for this month. It's enough money to them that they routinely lie about health conditions, drug use, etc. on the consent forms.

Only way to fix it is to offer substantially more money to panelists.

(Source: girlfriend who works as a clinical test manager)

It sounds like they're only doing this when the network is congested in a specific location. Like they're basically prioritizing slowing down the heavy users when things get busy, rather than everyone. I have a much harder time getting worked up about that, especially when they're waiting until people are out of contract and can easily switch carriers.

Not to mention that even if you have "nothing to hide," what about when you piss the wrong person off, and suddenly there's child porn on your encrypted drive that obviously only you could ever have had access to.

It sounds like every single individual like you needs to start filing small-claims cases against MS. Let them deal with several thousand of those, where the money imbalance won't matter so much.

I agree that what you describe makes "consent" useless, but you don't necessarily need to outlaw it.

Just require that:
- any commercial entity that stores information on individuals (with NO exceptions whatsoever) has to provide said individuals a full dump of the data once per some time period upon request, with no conditions or cost attached, along with a list of everyone they've given it to.
- the entity must correct any incorrect information, and can't distribute any information regarding an individual until the errors are corrected.

Not perfect, but it would be a start.

Actually, if you're mailing passwords, send the FUTURE passwords. Then once you've verified that the copies have reached the recipients unmolested, change the passwords to what you sent.

Overcharging for maintenance, and conveniently collecting large numbers of scummy sales droids into one location where they can normally be avoided.

I think the best use might just be to eliminate range anxiety. Take your Tesla example - replace 100kg worth of Li-ion battery with 100kg of this new one. Now you have 4/5 the easily rechargeable range (which is still more than most people need on a daily basis), but, as long as the Al battery is stable long term, if you run down the Li-ion, or need to take a long trip, you can keep going. All without increasing the overall weight.

Apple calls it "retention," the rest of us call it "vendor lock-in."

Yeah... note to self: All the good engineers are going to leave, so all of GM's future cars are probably going to be well-described by all the forbidden words.

It could also be a grid engineer's best friend. You just have to change the way you think about it - the cars would be a *massive* local storage resource. The VAST majority of people are just going to be plugging their cars in overnight at home, and starting with a full "tank" every morning. I could imagine a system where, once electric cars are ubiquitous, most parking lots and cars would be designed so that when you park, your car just automatically gets hooked into the local grid. You set some parameters on the car for min/max charge levels and buy/sell price limits, and suddenly you don't have to worry so much about demand spikes. Demand goes up, the price/kWh goes up, and once it starts passing the "sell" threshold of the local automobile population, they start discharging into the grid. You just tell the car "keep at least X% charge so I can get home." If I show up nearly empty, and there's 1000 other cars in the lot mostly full, they could charge mine without ever making demands on the grid.

Actually, no. The problem is, they race by, stop, and then are in your way as you cruise up to the green light, causing you to have to slow down/stop anyway.

Well, if you're encrypting, it means the keeper of the data isn't supposed to know what it is, which means they can't do any data mining, selling, etc. of it anyway, which would be where the ability to do queries on the data would be useful. If you're encrypting everything, then all you need is to be able to find the records, and you could use hashed account names or something to index those.

So yes, it would be difficult to search/sort on the encrypted data, but then that's sort of the whole point...

I imagine they'd do something similar to how some of the new suspension bridge cables are designed. The main cables are actually cable bundles, and they're made so that individual strands can be replaced if necessary.