Most of these cloud connected cameras always stream footage through their cloud service, regardless of whether you pay for a subscription. Because people don't know how to configure port forwarding, etc, in their firewall.
They're not architecturally delivering the video a different way if you pay than if you don't. They're just changing the retention period.
This video was probably recovered from cache somewhere.
There was an article the other day called something like "How is Google helping the investigation?"
It said she didn't have a cloud subscription, but that there are data pipelines that make these sort of devices work. (Imagine there's a thumbnail of the video in the product somewhere, so there's a pipeline that takes a video stream and generates thumbnails.)
According to the article, it was a matter of having someone figure out which pipelines her videos might have touched, and then go looking to see if there were any ephemeral artifacts that hadn't been lost yet.
The guy writing a thumbnail pipeline isn't getting petabytes (exabytes?) of storage to cache all videos from the past week in their entirety. If this quantity of data is being stored, it's being stored deliberately and at significant cost.
> Most of these cloud connected cameras always stream footage through their cloud service, regardless of whether you pay for a subscription. Because people don't know how to configure port forwarding, etc, in their firewall.
No consumer product should have users do port-forwarding or punch holes in the firewall. You don't want an IoT device on your network accepting packets from the internet.
The proper way to do this is with a cloud server arbitrating connections, which is what a lot of products do.
The reason most consumers want cloud storage isn't for ease of access, though. It's because they want the footage stored securely somewhere. If the thief can just pick up your camera and walk away with the evidence, it's not very useful to you.
I'm surprised it is that high. Plastic is cheap to produce, and the quality of plastic from US recyclers is poor. It is so infamously dirty that China banned importing recycled plastic from the US. By the time you wash the peanut butter out of each peanut butter jar, you've spent more in water and labor than the plastic is worth.
But ultimately, landfills are a good place to put plastic. It sequesters the carbon and keeps the pollution contained.
> The fact that we tolerate creating waste because it's "economical" is frankly disgusting.
I don't think anyone here is suggesting we "tolerate" it, but describing the economic incentives that exist.
> The disposal fees for e waste should make it uneconomical to dispose of boards.
I can't think of any number that you could pick that wouldn't either be ineffective, or cause unintended effects. At $10, that's a drop in the bucket compared to labor costs of component level repair. At $100, you're going to see the local lake filled with obsolete cell phones, which is even worse than them being in a landfill.
I'm all for repairability, but as labor costs go up and manufacturing costs go down, the window for which there is incentive to repair narrows.
e.g. there's no amount of repairability design that you could apply to a $3 light bulb which would encourage people to pay someone western wages to repair. I think we're better off lobbying for better standards to communicate the quality of a bulb's design. The whole reason we have crappy LED bulbs to begin with is because the $3 overdriven bulb with crap components jammed into a tiny enclosure looks like a better deal on the shelf than a bulky $20 bulb with a large heat sink and lower output.
And the labor required to do component level repair is wildly expensive and limited (YouTubers who do it on principle notwithstanding), even further narrowing that window.
If you could disassemble and diagnose a failing $3 bulb in 60 seconds, you wouldn't need to hire someone at western wages to fix it. But because it is glued together to not be taken apart, and there are no diagrams for how anything in it works or is put together, it isn't worth the time even if you have a station and equipment all ready setup and replacement component on hand. 95% of the time fixing electronics is just figuring out how they were put together in the first place so you can diagnostically trace along the circuit.
Not that I think lightbulbs are probably worth saving, but expand it to any other device which gets exponentially more complex and it is easy to see why they don't get diagnosed, not to mention repaired. With a board diagram I can point at a spot on the board and say "I should see 15 volts here", without a board diagram i gotta draw out and figure out how the power supply even works so I know what it is suppose to be outputting and then trace that all the way to the test point to make sure there isn't other crap inline before then that might change what I see.
Americans' appetite for small cars seems to be linked pretty closely to the inflation-adjusted price of gasoline. Automakers always want to push more premium vehicles, because they make their margins selling to people with more money to buy more features, more space, more performance. The low end of the market is lower margin and you have to make up for it with volume.
When we hit another recession, we'll see smaller cars appear again.
Fuel coast only go up and never down. The market and politicians make it seem like it will go down but in the end it still rises slowly. This is something that most people cannot understand nor want to.
I drive a car and will never buy a truck or SUV because it allows me spend the least amount on fuel. It also allows me to see in front of the vehicle while making it easier to maneuver in tight spots.
American car culture is built on self projection not about functionality.
Great example of this are people who say they bought a truck so the can take home large items from a hardware store. Yet they only will do this less than ten times a year ... making renting a truck and owning a car more economical in the long run.
Evolution of the tuck bed being 60% and cap being 40% in the 1950s to cab being 60% and bed being 60% shows it is not even about functionality of a truck being a truck.
If I have to haul something, I will rent and not waste my time and money maintaining a large vehicle.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/sentences/distill
reply