It's capped to the speed of the pricing system. The power company decides the rates; if it's based solely upon instant demand of the "market" then it becomes a game of milliseconds like the financial casinos.

If the rate is too slow, then the power company creates more troubles for themselves as everybody adapts to the rates causing low rate times to become high usage spikes. In a more distributed solution, the rates are set by location ... and locations raise or lower their loads to match the grid. Oh! Doesn't that sound like a smart grid?

So this is the next step in the smart grid, with the minor money savings used as an incentive; but one should just think about regulating such things in because that isn't much of a money incentive to buy the electronics to allow such use (regulating it LATER after electric cars take over is quite likely in some countries.)

If they keep testing ideas and don't falsify results it is still science, even if everything proves false or the ideas are crazy. There are an infinite number of things to test and while it saves a lot of resources to make educated guesses on what to test, sometimes the crazy stuff yields results... which is likely the main excuse to waste time in fringe areas that don't get attention because 'it's crazy.'

Of course, if the topic being explored is idiotic they are only going to have negative test results and that doesn't provide much in the way of guidance for future tests.

Science is done by humans, so you have the same issues as anywhere else-- systems where somebody's job is connected to signs of progress...

Canada's Fascist Prime Minister, Harper has been trying to sabotage their mail service as well. The same playbook in the USA is being played out in other western nations... makes one wonder who is orchestrating all this. It can't be they simply offer horrible ideas to each other at these G8 summits.

Before you think I'm exaggerating, go look up what a Fascist really is and how Harper would have been booted from office if it wasn't for a horrible loophole involving the Queen. He wants to privatize part of the healthcare system because the USA's is just so great...

Does any normal person need a device to tell them they are stressed and emotional?
I have a solution:
In your wallet or purse where you store your money... place a card saying "Are you eating out of stress? again?" maybe with a little photo of something motivational on it. Just in case you are not aware of your feelings at the time you are hungry.

Or instead of all that tech cost. pay somebody to explain how your anxiety makes you feel hungry.

The line between corporate and government has been severely blurred. It shouldn't be hard for you find retired operatives making statements on how they were doing the bidding of corporations far too often when that was not supposed to be their job. If you mess with the wrong private people or corps, you'll start feeling that force. There are so many things to choose from that you have to be really severe to have them pull out the big guns. Most threats can be squashed with proportional measures... there is probably a whole handbook of guidelines on measured responses.

People wonder why the USA ignores any law and gets foreign governments to ignore their own laws... You don't need force, you can use the CIA and NSA to wield the extremely powerful weapon of information. Just look at how Wikileaks and Snowden illustrate that "soft" power to upturn any EU legal system; the ones who do the bidding would go to jail if their actions were not sanctioned; thus, providing the illusion that the system works.

The good side of democracy is the public is not so easily suckered by legal technical trickery (but instead by many other kinds) and if the people don't buy an idiotic technical argument it won't work. Do not let them talk you out of your own ability to reason. There are technicalities (the letter) and then there are distortions of intent (the meaning.)

We all know aliens have a problem with abducting and then "probing" farm animals and humans - we probably inherited some of that behavior from them... (some of us more than others.)

Stop living in Flat Land / The Matrix, go to politicalcompass.org and wake up.

Socialism is so broad in definition and so loaded with propaganda the word is dead except to an educated minority.

Nearly everything can be described in Socialistic ideology; even the economic anarchists claim their beliefs result in the best situation for mankind (it is what they consider best that is in dispute. Fair is letting the weak and unfortunate starve to death for "the greater good".)

politicalcompass.org

There is no left or right - it's a false dichotomy which is why people get confused trying to characterize things in the real world using something that fails miserably to describe it. You can't describe a sphere if you live in flatland.

Nearly every undergrad degree remains largely static over time; having old timers repeating the same thing is just fine as long as they don't get too bad at it. Bringing in adjunct is often covered by some false premise that they are up to date and out in the "real world" but that is not all that useful for most material-- some courses and probably more at higher levels like the graduate level. The real reason is they don't want to pay for a full timer. A big cost for full time employment is health benefits-- if you can decouple that from employment then you'll see a big shift in the actual motivation behind many of these policies.

There is always a small % who give simpletons some example to cite. Entrenched management, employees (relatives,) politicians does encourage abuse of their power - but this is education- there is not much money or power involved compared to those others. Sometimes solving a problem is more trouble than it is worse-- Perfect can be the enemy of good. Take the UK postal service-- 2% failure rate on delivery times or something like that-- and they spent billions trying to be perfect and made everything worse; now they've sold off and gutted the royal mail (the inventors of mail) and it will not get better than it was before they tried to perfect it. Often, the best attack is to use the enemy and their supporter's own nature against themselves... This is often done when destroying democratic/public organizations -- the terrorists sure beat the USA with the tactic.. the Americans win battles but they've lost the war (or if you are optimistic, they are still losing the war.)

I hope so! Maybe it exposes people to something informative and thought provoking; maybe they will wake up before the next multinational caused disaster smacks more people to wake. the. fuck. up!

We the people, in order to have an actually safer nation, ask the FCC to do it's job by requiring and allow certain avenues to remotely disable cell phone use. Terrorism was never a big threat; cell phone drivers are - and if you think that is exaggeration I'm wasting my time on you.

Jailbreak your phone and hack off the feature if you don't plan to crash while texting... and risk the heavy penalty when the (metadata) phone records betray you afterwards.

Parent makes total sense.

Why not pass a regulation on phones -- they have bluetooth, it's not like they couldn't make them disable when a certain device is present... that goes into the car. Failure to use the device would be easier to detect.

Nobody has any legitimate reason to receive texts while in traffic outside of EMT people. Or at least, there is ZERO reason for anybody to be able to send anything. Pagers are old-- they never caused troubles.

Not being able to use the phone everywhere is not a communist plot-- it's totally reasonable. You don't have to be that old to remember when you could live your life just fine (if not better) without carrying a cell phone everywhere. With the power of the MPAA you'd think we'd have something like this in place as soon as phones had reasonable video recording ability.

1) They are spending money locally instead of banking it off shore. (expect the new CEO to ruin Apple in the same vein of other corps; "investing" money in casino games instead of the real economy.)

2) You can't just put money into things and expect faster results or new inventions - like it was a linear correlation.

3) Free advertizing to promote themselves; the whole innovator image thing helps them. That isn't cheap; and it lasts longer than an ad campaign. Plus it may help attract and retain the kind of employees they need; it adds to the subculture / tribalism that some like to promote in a business (see Pixar.) You can't put simplistic metrics on this sort of thing other than to look at successful creative companies.

4) Cupertino is in CA. They have no weather in CA except fire. If there is anywhere on earth all-glass can be done...

5) Urban sprawl and waste of land is sooo American. Since they are doing it anyway and the city wouldn't allow them to go against the culture they may as well aim for the 1950's utopia futurism where everybody is in the center of their own park-like land... but still lack the flying cars that make up for the wasted space.

The data source seems flawed from the start. Changes to it may be documented but the initial proposals before the leak; that is, the ones who drafted it initially, have a huge influence. Knowing that information would likely end up in huge changes. The USA likely would have the most proposals and that would be a good reason for them having fewer of them at this phase of the process.

The approach and tool use is interesting. It highlights another way to analyze or summarize such things; although, I'm not sure it should be used in this realm. Negotiations are so subtle and complicated no metrics and charts can do it justice. That said, it's probably harmless because few people will use it in this way... unless somebody takes the newer US house/senate rules that puts names with amendments and starts drawing graphs on the politicians... (The dyads for them could be quite use useful.)

Could one use apply this in a more practical way so we can bring in game theory computation? I can't think of one; which is why i ask.

I suggest you do some homework. There are many people in Gitmo still to this day who are innocent; a few reporters I can think of, one is still in there, I heard about him months ago. As for high profile, in the USA the media is inept at best - we barely get coverage on Assange and only probably because of the attention he gets from the internet. In other countries they made other victims get a higher profile (especially if it's one of their innocent victims-- Canada even payed for damages to one of their own for their complacency, it got coverage there.) Another issue is the other innocents are not extremely political and controversial; they are much more innocent and were/are not actively political, like most normal people are.

Due process in the USA is broken, if you have not noticed. It's much more hit or miss. Assange is clearly a flight risk, he'd be in jail from day 1 until his trial YEARS later and be prevented from doing his day job-- which is keeping his tiny organization going and funding the lawyers. The case will be bogus if they can't invent something to stick because they want to make an example out of him; they have the power to mess you up good without breaking any laws. Today they can bend the laws or break them without much trouble; it's unlikely you end up vindicated let alone having them punished for their actual legal infractions after a decade of court time.

You must have noticed the politicians and government lawyers mentioning severe terms and references to ancient laws that don't reasonably apply... but technically could apply if you have the warped reasoning of a lawyer or politician. They've been doing it on many other fronts in the name of security... You did hear them justifying the NSA stuff, no?

GOVERNMENT DOES WORK! most the time! Any form of government can work well -- all that matters is how it is administered. (Ben Franklin said as much.) If you let corporations and the powerful run the government, it will work just fine; FOR THEM! A healthy democracy is going to have inefficiency by the nature of that system but it is worth the price of having the most people served fairly - in that they get what they want; now they may want stupid things-- but then it is serving the most people the best way we know of, right? I find it almost laughable when I read of "tyranny by the majority" because that is not so horrible; one can do better, but it's still not that bad. How does the majority have their will determined and implemented? Well, that is not a simple or clean process in itself so it's not going to "work" like every individual would like.

Just believing in a democratic government is like believing in your driving skills while you are texting on your phone. If we don't have enough people paying attention at the wheel bad things happen. It doesn't help when idiots elect incompetent officials who wreck everything then campaign against the mess they created (and likely profited from in the process.)

Again, as Franklin also said all democracies fall into despotism and it's the probably majority's fault. Unless we can wake up the majority it's hopeless and will need a total reboot. The whole principle they based it upon was to civilize revolutions that naturally occur throughout human history. It's still the goal today; but the difference is that it's about prolonging the illusion for as long as possible while positioning the elite to survive the inevitable collapse (if well managed, it'll be less of a collapse and more of a morph into something else. which is what we've been having so far.)