Last year, I started looking for a way to communicate with my 3 teenagers while they were in their rooms with the doors closed, without yelling at the top of my lungs to be heard over their airpods. Texting would have probably worked but felt wrong. Dedicated wireless intercom systems are clunky, unreliable, and expensive.

Giving the kids each an Echo, either the Dot or the Flex, and putting one in the kitchen as well gave me an easy way to solve this problem. I can use the Echo as an intercom to drop in on one or all of the kids when I need to. This has been a lifesaver for us! I also use the kitchen Echo to play music, which works quite well of course.

I'm not a fan of the privacy implications of having Echo devices in my house. Amazon does provide some controls for that, at least.

The NextGen program has had several high-profile failures. The implementation of new routes in Phoenix resulted in a large number of complaints and lawsuits against the FAA. The more recent changes in the SF Bay Area including routing a much higher number of aircraft over Palo Alto and lower elevations in the Santa Cruz Mountains, both of which have angered a great many residents.

Jet traffic brings noise pollution and air pollution to the corridors they travel, resulting in health impacts (though difficult to measure) and sometimes significant reductions in property value. The previous corridors have been used for decades and the impact is well-understood by residents in those areas; the change was not well-communicated before being implemented and residents were mostly caught unawares.

The benefits of these changes include a higher volume of traffic to airports, increasing airport profits; more efficient routes for airlines, increasing airline profits; and potentially cheaper fares for customers resulting from the first two changes. Speaking personally, I would rather keep my home value and quieter skies.

There's one advantage to using the rsync protocol like this; you can provide file access without creating a user account on the system. Even if you secure that user account (e.g. by using an ssh key and limiting commands init, by setting the shell to /sbin/nologin, using chroots, etc) it's still an account with access on the system. Using rsync in this way is analogous to putting some files on a web server behind Basic Auth. And like using a web server, it should never be used for files that contain sensitive information!

Events like this are what keep sysadmins employed. If you're not paying someone to protect your technology infrastructure, including a layered backup strategy, an effective security policy, and regular audits, this is going to happen to you too.

San Francisco has implemented a school lottery. Siblings get first priority, followed by kids from low-income neighborhoods, followed by actual local residents. Almost everyone I know who had kids while living in S.F. either paid for private school ($25k/year and up) or moved out of town, because they didn't get into a good school.

Yes, housing is expensive and public transit is inferior and the crime rate is undesirable and there aren't enough public parks. Most people I know would tolerate all of that if they could get their kids into a good school. Instead you can get a better house, a better school, a better crime rate, great big parks, possibly even a better public transit system by simply moving 30 minutes drive away. It means giving up the big city life and anyone I know would do that happily to give their kids a better shot at a good education.

One of the first things you learn as a new driver is not to watch the car immediately in front of you, but rather to watch several cars ahead (and behind). This gives you more time to react to traffic changes, and you still see the actions of the nearest vehicle anyway.

Sure, Tesla's Autopilot will have a much faster reaction time. That will help, but it's not good enough - it only allows Autopilot to react to conditions that the nearest vehicle also reacts to. A deer running toward the road, looking to jump in front of you? A kid chasing a ball toward the street? The vehicle in front of you swerving out of the way of an object in the road? Autopilot doesn't handle any of them, and can't as long as it lacks the ability to see more of the environment around it.

Autopilot is dangerous to Tesla drivers and others because it removes the attention of the driver from the road. It's basically like asking a nearly blind friend with fast reflexes to take the wheel while you read a book or play games on your phone. If it's not legal for a nearly blind driver to take the wheel, Autopilot shouldn't be legal either.

Well, I'm sure they really would have taken them, but the customs paperwork is just SO unpleasant, you know? And there is the matter of the 17% import duty on livestock, and there needs to be proof that someone will feed and house the chickens so that they don't become a burden on society. We can't have foreign chickens just coming into the country whenever they want.

Racism is making judgements and assumptions about a person based on their race (or apparent race). It's not racist to be aware of race or use it as an adjective. Ignoring those characteristics is called "color blindness" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_blindness_(race)_in_the_United_States) and is rather controversial. You might not like the adjective ("Black" vs "African American"), and that's valid. Just use a different adjective for the same characteristic.

Per that article, 'Martin Luther King, Jr.'s central hope was that people would someday be judged by "the content of their character" rather than "the color of their skin".' He's not saying people shouldn't recognize the color of their skin; just that they should not be judged by it.

In fact, studies have shown that children raised in a "color blind" environment develop their own judgements about their schoolmates, including juvenile observations about race, gender, height, weight, etc that are shockingly biased because they simply haven't been shown anything different. This is especially true in communities that aren't very diverse, where there might only be one or two minority kids available to base those judgements on.

For example, go ask someone who lives in Japan what they think of black people in America.

Use the appropriate adjectives to describe what you're thinking of, and don't make judgements about people simply because they exhibit some of the characteristics described by those adjectives.

To be fair, most of the water in India is about as likely to get you sick as the unwashed hand that precedes it. Give some credit to a culture of people that recognize this, and try to use just one hand so that the other one is still clean for eating, etc. Saves an enormous amount of water, too.

Not surprising, since the website is badoinkvr.com (with an i). Typo domains suck.

Reed Hastings is trying to say that Netflix can only do business by playing by the rules that the TV networks and content producers write. Those groups want to maximize their profit, and so does Reed. If they refuse to do business with Netflix without geographically-limited licensing, Netflix can either say goodbye to customers or agree to do it.

As the head of a public company, Reed doesn't have a choice. I would at least hope that Netflix itself only licenses on a global basis and doesn't engage in geographic limitations.

Donated once to the EFF and the ACLU at different times. The incredible volume of spam mail, junk mail, and phone calls that I received from these two organizations convinced me to never contribute to them again, as well as likely costing them more than my donation.

My advice: Donate to a local organization, not a national or international one. They are less likely to have hordes of administrative flunkies to bother you later (and consume donation money), and you'll be helping the community you live in. There are good causes in every community in America.

Just look at screen resolution - laptops 4-5 years ago reached the peak resolution of what average machines were coming with. Low-end models were usually 1280x800 with many models offering 1440x900 resolution for a modest increase in price.

Now nearly every single laptop made offers only a 1366x768 screen, which is less vertical pixels than people were getting affordably 5 years ago. Those laptops that do offer higher resolution go straight up to 1920x1080, which many people find too small, and at a significant cost increase. And both of these are 16:9 screens, reducing even further the valuable vertical resolution that is additionally consumed by menu bars, system trays, and application launchers.

The simple fact is that there is only a single hardware manufacturer still making laptops with 16:10 screens, and it's Apple. Everyone else is producing small expensive portable televisions with computers attached.

Nobody I know wants to upgrade because it means sacrificing the graphical experience they want.