Let's do the math:

If you rent a cheap room for $400 a month + $100 a month in utilities (remember, winters in NY get COLD) it's $6k a year.
If you spend another $200 in groceries a month? $2.4k a year
Car insurance? $100 / month. Gas? $80 / month? Total: $2.1k a year

So just adding in just a little bit of extra stuff to live off of, we add almost $9k to the total.

The truth is you'll probably want to spend more than that, because you'll want to see a movie every now and then, have to pay for books, or maybe software or a computer for your studies.

It all easily adds up, which is how even people from a state school come out with $100k+ in student loans after 4 years.

(Disclaimer: IAANY -- I Am A New Yorker, you'll be hard pressed to meet some of those numbers even in someplace in the sticks like SUNY Oneonta)

You forgot money to eat. Gas for the car. Things like that.

Even at a state school you'll be looking at $30k a year, assuming you share an apartment, drive a POS, and eat a lot of ramen.

While the Airport might indeed be essentially an overpriced router, the Time Machine is pure genius.

Essentially it's a hard drive attached to a router, but it will seamlessly set up backups for your macbook.

If your disk gets hosed, you can restore almost everything, with diffs taken something like every hour.

While some /.'ers might point out the ability to do this with cheaper hardware and rolling your own using rsync, I defy you to find a similarly simple solution.

Literally I just told my parents to buy a time machine, and their mac is backed up. Nothing else I need to do, brain dead simple!

A) Philosophically some people will agree with you. And some will disagree. As some people will throw the whole concept of afterlife in the mix
B) Some people want big statues in their honor upon their death and will search for any sort of immortality.
C) How do you know you aren't already a simulation? Maybe your "program" is getting turned on and off all the time. What is death? Your stack gets put into disk to be queried up later?

Yes, but which is preferable? A complete death where you don't come back or a mini-death where your backed up consciousness comes back?

It sounds like this is not going to be done by people who say, "I want to go skip into the future" but by people who are dying of a terminal illness, and find the idea of coming back as a simulation preferable to ultimate death.

Death is a big black box where people have all sorts of ideas, but no one can prove one way or the other. I imagine it's comforting to stack your odds in a particular outcome.

I'd add to that list a course on dating / the opposite sex.

Sure we have sex ed, but it's mostly about scaring kids that they'll get STDs.

In other countries, students actually learn about relationships, how to attract a partner, etiquette for dates, etc.

I used to live in the Netherlands, and I can tell you the high tax rate is a bit of a myth, but the devil is in the details.

As a foreigner, I was allowed a 30% tax rate instead of the usual 50% tax rate, so long as I signed a paper stating I would not retire in the Netherlands.

After 10 years in the country, they assume you lied about the not retiring thing, and your tax rate jumps up to 50%.

The difference in tax relates directly to the cost of dutch social security and pension, which is very good.

So someone who contributes 0% to their 401k in the US is technically taking home more money, but they should be saving.

Therefore, I like to think the Netherlands is a better value for your money, as you're forced to save for retirement in a way that Americans are not. (Which ultimately, results in a lot of heart ache when people end up retiring and having to eat cat food).

Another thing to point out is some countries like Switzerland have a lower tax rate, and their citizens have a better quality of life.

Definitely a lot Americans could learn!

But the process is also reversible. So if you can extract the CO2 then you can store it, or use it. Possible uses include creating polymers or fuels, which are mostly long carbon chains. In TFA, they take the CO2, put it into water, and inject it in the ground for storage (the CO2 turning into carbonates). The heat comes from waste heat from geothermal, so the whole idea is very efficient.

User reviews are suspect to begin with.

I can't tell you the number of great shops I've been to that have had really terrible reviews posted.

* A guitar shop I frequent had a 1 star review posted (because 0 stars are not possible) because the owner asked him to get control of his kids. Ernie is a nice guy, but not the most socially graceful, and I could see him cursing. So the guy went off in his review about how bad a person the shopkeep was, never once thinking "Hey maybe having unsupervised children in a guitar shop isn't the best idea"

* A mechanic I use because he's incredibly honest (he's the only guy who will tell you "nah you've got another 5k miles in those tires," won't upsell you, or otherwise prevent you from wasting money had a review posted about how he was a thief. I found this kinda crazy especially because of the honesty of the guy. Turns out they left their car unlocked and something disappeared from it. Because the mechanic was the last place they went it must've been the mechanic who stole it.

* A lady bought some guitar strings from me on ebay. Total cost? $10. My ebay auctions specifically state handling can take up to 5 days because I'm busy, and she didn't have a clear address. By the time it was fixed and I got to the post office it was day 5. Still in terms, she left a ranting review full of curses because I "wasn't worth a damn" because shipping took so long and also that "it should never take more than two to three days to receive a package." Really incredible seeing as she's on the other side of the country.

Then, on the other end of the spectrum, there are people who equate "I liked it" with 5 stars.

Statistically reviews should be a bell curve, but really you have to look into them to find out if in fact they're correct.

The slashdot headline makes it sounds like Sonos is screwing their users over and making changes to a privacy policy that's well known.

Actually, the changes aren't that drastic, and you had to accept a privacy policy to use Sonos anyways.

Not so much screwing with the users as making a reasonable change.

This is FUD. Sonos has been working on allowing voice assistant (Siri / Alexa) integration with their speakers, and it's a well known fact they're going to start releasing speakers with microphones. The fact that this is now covered in their privacy policy is not surprising. Other changes include sending error information to Sonos, and sharing data about your usage with tie in services (as in, use your spotify account with your sonos, and sonos will need to talk to spotify).

While it would be great if Sonos could invent a way to stream subscription services without actually talking to them, or a voice assistant with an AI living in the speaker instead of sending your voice to a server farm for processing, that's not really possible.

You can read about the changes yourself at: http://blog.sonos.com/en/sonos...

From a personal level, I've been a Sonos user for five years now, and couldn't be happier. Their speakers would stand up to much higher end systems, and I can't tell you how many times I hear a song on them for the first time surprised me about some little details in the background you just don't hear on your car radio.

And the fact that you can set up wireless zones that are all magically in sync is amazing.

Seriously, once you try it you'll be hooked...

The odds are much higher it'll be captured in orbit around some celestial body.

Think about it: to become space dust it has to have almost a direct hit on something. To be captured into orbit it only has to pass through a very very large area out the the edge of the (extra) solar system.

I mentioned I was overestimating. The point is if, given very aggressive projections, there's still not a large move to the ticket price, getting rid of pilots doesn't help consumers at all

If you got rid of the pilot and co pilot, you would barely see a blip in your ticket price.

Let's do the math.

2 pilots @ $200k each == $400k
Training etc for those pilots @ $200k each == $400k
1 trip per day assuming 3 weeks vacation a year: 5 * (52 - 3) == 245
Cost of pilot per trip: $800k / 245 == $3.27k

There are approximately 200 seats on a 737, so that's $3.27k / 200 == $16 per ticket potential savings

Now for an airline, that might make sense on a large scale because they'll reap millions a year in savings, but for consumers it's barely a blip on the radar.

These are with conservative estimates. The salary I took was the highest in the range on glassdoor, I'm assuming all their fancy simulator time doubles their salaries, and most pilots fly short haul flights so they rack up multiple flights a day. Wikipedia confirms the number of seats for a 737, but of course if you have a cabin of first class passengers there are less seats, but still it wouldn't matter.

Additionally, insurance companies will likely charge increased premiums for a pilotless craft, so at the end of day the savings will be considerably less.

The only time you would conceivably see a savings big enough to care would be with a transcontinental flight where you might have four or more pilots (because they sleep in shifts and rotate out). But, compared to the ticket price, I suspect the savings will be marginal.

I suspect there would also be additional overhead as pilots have other functions than flying. For instance, determining if a reroute is necessary or if a passenger is fit to fly.

Additional training and delegation of these duties would most likely raise the cost of other crew.

So, in the end, this is a non issue. Until AI auto pilot comes in a cheap as in uber quad copter that will taxi you where you want on demand, we won't see AI in the sky

References:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://www.glassdoor.com/Sala...

We also THINK we know how gravity works.