Do you actually carry multiple batteries?

Serious question. I hear people gripe about this all the time, but I don't know ANYONE who actually carries extra batteries. I only hear of people either carrying a charging cable or asking to borrow one.

So, you *actually* want a phone that gets better battery life.

I think the heart of it stems from the fact that even non-users are affected by this kind of thing - at least unless they go massively out of their way to avoid it. Look at the opposition and non-adoption of the DNT header, to actively* express that you do not want to be tracked by these companies. They just don't care about the human side of things if there's money to be made.

But at the same time, it's like the banking crisis. In theory, a single business going under should only hurt its direct customers. There's going to be some ripple effect in there, but what we see today is far beyond what anyone would have expected. There's now so much interdependency between these companies that one doing something stupid affects half the world.

However I don't blame SV for this. It's just a lot more prominent because there's so much (largely stupid and pointless) tech coming out of here. Give it a couple years now that we're no longer throwing $2m at a random college kid with no business model and aspirations of ten million users and you'll see it die off quite a bit (VCs are, it seems, finally looking at the business side of things again before investing). It was happening in NY and Boston too, just not nearly to the same degree since those investors weren't all high on recent tech IPOs.

* Yes, fuck you IE10 for not understanding the concept of "actively". Even when you're using new tech, you somehow manage to still screw it up for everyone.

Plows scrape the asphalt pretty aggressively precisely to remove layers of ice - a significant factor as to why roads in colder climates need to be repaired quite frequently.

Sure, but that doesn't mean someone legally allowed to fill the market must do so. There's a huge market for $1000 Ferraris, but you don't see them rushing to fill it.

Yes, that's technically true.

However, that's only illegal because we invented "better" laws to make something that was already illegal (unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material) "more" illegal (breaking the encryption used to prevent the former).

Politicians need to stop rejecting these "we need better tools" lobbyist-created laws and tell them to use the perfectly valid tools they already have in place. I know this will never happen, but wishful thinking. Being illegal - in terms of the letter of the law - is a pretty binary thing. I think content producers should have every right to sue people for distributing their material, but we don't need to give them stuff to make gumming up the legal system with their stuff any easier.

It's like the arguments claiming that it would be legal to drive high if we legalized marijuana: of course it's not - that's both a DUI* and reckless driving. You don't need to add a new law for driving high because it's already illegal under other laws. Distributing copyrighted content that you're not the rights-holder of has been illegal since we introduced copyright, so adding the DMCA** was completely unnecessary.

* There are slight differences between DWI and DUI, and the meaning varies slightly from state to state. Many places are intentionally vague on the meaning of "under the influence" to (rightly) catch non-alcoholic substances that impair one's ability to safely operate a vehicle.

** The law is fundamentally flawed anyway, as it's outlawing a specific implementation of an undesired behavior. It would be like making murder by bludgeoning someone with a lead pipe illegal. Great - I'll just use a knife instead. You're trying to stop the murder, not the misuse of lead pipes. As such, it'll be obsoleted by the next major round of technical advances.

True, but I'm pretty sure they don't have any sort of HMAC-type mechanism ensuring they're untampered-with. i.e., unless you put something in there that causes their machines to get cranky, your chances of being caught is nearly zero.

Hacking into banks is also illegal, but that doesn't stop determined individuals from trying.

That's kinda the point. Crappy signal results in high packet loss. If you can recover lost packets through some recipient-side magic (clever math, apparently) rather than retransmission, you avoid the overhead of another roundtrip, and get higher bandwidth as a result. This cuts down massively on latency (huge win) and should also decrease network congestion significantly.

I'm trying to think of a way to put this in the requisite car analogy, but don't honestly know enough about the lower-level parts of the network stack to do so without sounding like an idiot to someone sufficiently informed. But I'm sure there's something about a car exploding and all traffic backs up for tens of miles along the way ;)

$266 is a very plausible round trip airfare price. So if you mean one-way... well not 3-4x but 2x for sure.

I've definitely seen trips by train that cost quite a bit more than equivalent airfare; I'd cite one but the prices are always in flux (I think it was LA-SF though)

It most definitely _is_ excessive force by any rational person's standards - it just may not be judged as such by the courts.

Courts get stuff wrong all the time.

Also, they tend to believe more in the idea that our security theater is effective. Hypothetically it makes both sides happier.

An extension cord? Something tells me that's been done before.

They still (autonomously) scan your email and use the data for targeted advertising. Nobody clicks the ads in gmail, but they certainly use the mail to target the ads you see on google searches. I'm sure that's why they don't charge for Exchange/IMAP/POP access.

So... probably not an issue.

Microseconds? Are you kidding? We accelerate at rates higher than 1G all the time, and certainly do it for longer than microseconds. A (very) fast car can pull over 1G (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fastest_production_cars_by_acceleration), and drag racers have set records of just over 3Gs. Go look at fighter jets if you're so inclined, never mind spacecraft.

Sustaining it for enough time to do serious long-term exploration will certainly be a problem, but what you're saying is just incorrect. And it's probably unnecessary to maintain anywhere near a full 1G of acceleration in order to avoid serious medical complications. 0.5G should (if my understanding is correct) take about 0.25x of the fuel (read: 4x the duration, all else being equal). Maybe lunar gravity is plenty - who knows? That would get you a massively increased burn range, though of course you're travelling over a much longer period of time. I'd be interested to see this graphed out.

So charge me $0.10/GB (plus even a small connection fee, as you do with some utilities) and call it a day. It's important to be able to get a sense of my usage throughout the month, but that price seems more than fair. I'd need to burn through nearly a terabyte of data to pay what I do now... and even I'd have difficulty doing that - and that's living with several other people that use just as much if not more bandwidth than I do, and I'm not a light user. Our house does 300-400GB/month based on some old router logs.

Even charge more for higher bandwidth as they do now, or for higher bandwidth priority. Or penalize with above-average usage, as also happens with many utilities. But a random data cap is just stupid. It penalizes the people who want your service the most and does nothing to help the 95% of your users that just care about things working. Just squeeze down bandwidth a bit during heavy use times.

Also Yahoo and Wikipedia, both of which are in the top five.