Not everyone lives in the same awful sounding place as you do.
I'm glad for them, whoever they are.
Airlifting? do you really think that a helicopter is going to just land right there in the busy road to pick up my broken remains?
Happened about two months ago to a guy I know. That's why I mentioned that. I was there as Fire and EMR were "collecting his broken remains" (he broke his neck, pretty much) and EMR had no doubt that he wouldn't survive a trip in the ambulance. They should know, I guess, they see this every day.
A road is busy typically because of all the cars not the bicycles
That's true; however video from China tells us that it's the people that make the road busy, not their vehicles.
It's about 30 mins cycling for me (~10km) versus 40+ for public transport (this includes travel to and from the bus/ tram stops), I don't own a car but with parking etc I figure it would be at least 30 mins for that too.
I will set aside the public transit time; I never use it myself. With all the waiting time and endless stops at every corner it is indeed a waste of life.
Your 10 km trip is done at 20 km/h, which is nicely matching the statistics at Wikipedia. In a car that distance in a typical US city, in a typical rush hour traffic can be covered in 1/3 of the time - in 10 minutes. Parking in US cities on a home to work trip is usually not a problem (provided by the company, provided by your rental place, included with your house, etc.) This means that you will save 2*20 minutes (total 40 minutes) per day. If you work as most people, that amounts to 220 work days per year and 8800 minutes (146 hours, about a week) of your life spent in traffic, among exhausts of cars, breathing all these carcinogens. Are you a suicider, or what? That can't be good for you.
To compare, the air that goes into the car (if it goes in at all, it is adjustable) is filtered before it enters the cabin. That alone is a big deal. But also higher speeds and shorter travel time help to keep you out of the poisoned air.
Also, don't you have something better to do with a week of your life every year - better than pedaling among cars? Drivers of some cars don't even see you, especially in the evening, when everyone is dog tired and it's getting dark. If you want an exercise, get an exercise bike (I have one) - they aren't expensive, and you can combine pedaling with reading, listening to music, watching TV, and it's very safe too:-)
Another item which most people without homes or family are easily overlooking is that cars are necessary to transport essential cargo, such as food, materials, and everything else that a household may require. You need a car to transport things and people when your relatives need that help. Car is not simply a people's mover - it is a cargo mover. Rare is a day when I don't carry some cargo in my car that won't fit on a bicycle. Long gone are the careless days when all I needed to deliver was myself. Today I carry metal pieces, electronic equipment, wood, tools, and all kinds of stuff that I need every day. I will go and collect a UPS package in an hour or so; it is so large that it can't be conveniently transported on a bicycle. I will throw it into the car and that's all.
Besides, I live at elevation of about 400 meters above the city (in the hills) and rare a bicycle rider can get that high. They do, sometimes, but they are not carrying bags of food, and they rest often, and they are well trained, and they take their time. One couldn't do that as a matter of routine.
As the Pacific Institute has shown, you'd have to be eating an all-beef diet to offset the environmental benefits of walking or bicycling.
You need to consider other factors too. Showers, for example, which bicycle riders use more often (after each trip.) You also need to count how one bicycle on a busy road affects efficiency of a 1,000 cars that have to slow down or otherwise navigate around the bicycle. And if you get into an accident (regardless of why) you need to count the carbon footprint of airlifting you to the hospital and treating you there for as long as it takes. But even if you don't get into an accident, what is the "carbon footprint" of you wasting your life on a bike instead of getting home earlier and doing something productive instead? You can't possibly suggest that riding at rush hour, among cars, is in any way healthy.
Just try it sometime - enable Instant and type "sex" into the bar. It will not display results.
OK, I did that. Typed 'sex', did NOT press Enter or click anything, and within 0.5 second got an ad for 'naughty local girls' along with a full page of sex-related stuff. Proceeded to type 'tant' and got what I needed in the first place.
Typed 'kill' and got suggestions and search done on that. Proceeded to type 'een' and got the stuff about the city in Texas.
This experiment failed to reveal a filter. I was not logged in and I was using standard, default settings. The browser was IE9. Besides, I doubt very much that Google would know all NSFW fragments of all languages on Earth, in all encodings.
One of concerns is that the cache of your browser will be searched and used against you if something happens.
We aren't yet at the stage when your searches can trigger the police response, but it's getting there. There is no need to make "the man's" job easier. As had been said by a competent specialist: "If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged." That part hasn't changed.
At work your searches go through the corporate filter; we had one at the last place (a big company) that I worked at. The whole 'sex' page would be blocked by that filter, with logs and all. How would you prove to your boss that your search was innocent? The filter has no reason to log traffic that it doesn't block, so your search of 'sextant' a second later won't be logged.
As I see it, instant search doesn't help (at least me) to get results faster. It only helps Google to claim 10x more searches done. In reality, most of the intermediate searches are a waste of resources. For example, all intermediate searches in "internal combustion engine in prius" are useless until the last word is entered. It doesn't help that one of suggestions after "internal" is "internal hemorroids."
This has a direct analogy IRL. A few people like to reply to someone's speech before the speaker finishes. It is rarely welcome or productive. Humanity worked out a simple protocol: listen to the complete statement, think about it, voice your answer. Google here tries to answer before you are done asking. When it's not pointless it is simply distracting; sometimes it is also disturbing, disgusting or otherwise unwelcome (and unrelated to your query.)
I have all forms of instant searches and auto-suggestions disabled. But that's not because I type so fast. It's because when I search for a sextant I don't want to be given a ton of links about sex. There could be other NSFW fragments too, and I don't want any of them hitting the cache. I search only when I'm done typing.
I was thinking that he wants to make a bigger bang. But whatever.
And nobody will wonder why some caterers are loading luggage onto the tram?
Correct. Nobody at the field is paid (or is in position) to watch for security issues like that. There are several points where the "extra" luggage may show up, all are after the final scan of barcodes. Nearly anyone can walk up to the baggage cars, load one up, hitch it to the train and drive it all the way to the airplane and throw your bags onto the conveyor. I watched the loading in many airports, and (to an external observer) there are no checks of any kind. There are hundreds of drivers of baggage trains, thousands of baggage cars, and anyone can be sent at any time to any gate to service any flight. Those are low-paid jobs, with low retention, so a baggage handler is nearly invisible.
Then the unsuspecting stewardess microwaves the dinners, and voila, boom flambe'e?
The thought was that the terrorist only needs to shrink-wrap a pallet that looks like food containers, but in reality could be something else. It is unthinkable to even consider that TSA would unwrap the whole pallet (which immediately falls apart) and open every lunch box. I mentioned that already.
Or you can keep one real pallet at the truck's door and replace other pallets (that are deep inside and not visible) with whatever you are smuggling in. They can't be unloaded without a forklift anyway, and I very much doubt that the unloading of trucks is in any way checked by the TSA. Again we are talking here about half a ton of stuff; a mere bag with ten pounds of an explosive can be just thrown into the cab of the truck and nobody will blink an eye.
Pilots are a well educated bunch, and they will call the police in the very next moment. The police should be smart enough to figure out what to do. The family of the pilot will NOT survive if the pilot does what the terrorists tell him to do. The only (small) chance of their survival is that the police finds them and frees them.
The costs grow exponentially with size if not faster
The costs grow linearly, just as the GP correctly pointed out. You can easily verify that if you consider that security at airport A is not dependent on security at airport B.
In the US there is a lot more opportunity for smart people
What color is the sky on your planet? The USA is seeing record-high numbers of people without jobs.
and airport screening isn't a very sexy job
I guess flipping hamburgers is sexy then? Fact: most jobs are not sexy. Most jobs are just jobs; you do them and go home. A job at an airport is a blessing compared to most construction jobs, for example.
You can't just pay the same and expect to get the same level of abilities.
First, you'd be amazed of what people can do if they are challenged to do it. We don't know what the current TSA crowd can do because they are told to not talk to passengers, just grope them. Would you recognize Albert Einstein if he is told to stand here all day and check boarding passes?
Second, if the pay depends on skills it gives the TSA people a good incentive to learn.
Third, if some of TSA employees are incapable of higher mental processes, there are always menial jobs. If you still have an excess of idiots, let them go.
israel's system relies on intelligence gathering about each passenger, setting aside the social costs of such a surveillance society, simply tracking 2nd and 3rd order associations between people gets exponentially harder as the number of people grow.
Yes, that thing grows fast. However nobody needs to do it by hand, and computers are pretty good at it. How hard would that be to run one SQL query?
The problem is that we have two options, both bad. Different sets of people argue for and against them, creating an illusion that everyone is against everything.
The first option is to search everyone. This is getting flak because it is stupid. The second option is to search nobody, but profile instead. This offends people who insist on their right to stay anonymous.
IMO, profiling is a lesser evil because you are (or should be) in charge of your profile. If properly implemented, it would be transparent to you. The fact that you are flying is known to the government anyway. If you have enough points on your history you are a lesser risk and endure less scrutiny. If you have few points you need to fly more, or you can apply for a background check that boosts your points instantly. You still can fly "anonymously" (or with zero points) but then you need to be searched. Few people would need to be searched.
Such a system is not foolproof. A terrorist can develop a good profile and then one day carry a bag full of grenades onto a flight. IMO, life has risks, and grenades can end up on the plane even today. They aren't only because nobody needs them there. A dedicated terrorist group can infiltrate the airport and do whatever they want. The strength of the chain is defined by the weakest link; so as long as we can't strengthen that link we don't need to bother with X-raying passengers.
then they see some strange catering truck pull up and start to transfer a half ton of bricks to the cargo hold?
Why would they need to load a half ton of bricks (or explosives)? The airplane is full of fuel, so if they intend to crash it the resulting fireball will be large enough as it is.
But if they want to load half a ton of something, they can easily do it by putting those bricks into regular travel bags, throwing them onto a baggage train and... done. They don't even need to load them - the baggage handlers at the airplane will do that for them. There is no law against carrying travel bags into an airport; but the easiest would be to just load stuff in bags into the catering truck. It can be a real catering truck, just its usual driver is in a ditch somewhere, seeing stars (or meeting his maker.) TSA isn't going to open every sandwich package, are they?
You don't have to get on the plane; you can just carry weapons/drugs/whatever to a stash on the other side
If that's what you want then you don't need to bother with a fairly exclusive club of pilots. Instead one of your people gets a lowly tech job as a baggage handler, for example, or fuel truck driver, or just as a sales clerk at the Pizza joint inside the secure area of the terminal. Those jobs are dime a dozen, and nobody will notice the new guy.
Once you have your man on the inside many possibilities open up. Does the TSA inspect all packages of frozen pizza? Can they tell that a certain frozen pizza is made out of C4 instead of dough? Can they tell that a pressurized, sealed container of Pepsi concentrate doesn't hold something that is even more dangerous? Do they strain all 10 tons of fuel in every fuel truck as it rolls through the airport gates? Can they detect that someone attached a small box to the underside of the truck and once on the inside someone removed the same box? Far more serious checks are done at prisons, and still whole *humans* manage to escape.
I'd be satisfied if they let me know when the package has reached the final distribution center.
They do that already, for a very long time. I'm in habit of tracking my packages, and they make it trivial as long as you have an Internet connection and a browser. They offer an expected date of arrival, which is almost always correct and matches what I paid for. I ran into only a couple "exceptions" (don't recall if it was UPS or Fedex) where they misrouted stuff and it was sent sightseeing.
On the delivery day they post the record saying that the package is "on the vehicle for delivery." That is done around 6am. After that I don't need any further guidance; I know already when the truck is likely to show up.
Sorry, it's you who are wrong. I can't speak for Oregon or Washington, but there is no such law in California.
Such a law does exist, but it's not what the GP remembers. The law applies only to immigrants and it requires them to carry their Green Card with them at all times. Citizens don't have to carry any ID (unless driving) and it is common to hear 10-27 on the police scanner where the officer mentions "verbal" -- meaning that the subject simply told the officer who he is but produced no proof of that.
If the "contract" says my package can arrive anywhere between Wednesday and Saturday, it'd be nice to have a heads-up on the day it actually gets here.
Slashdot, in its infinite wisdom, doesn't allow to reply to several comments at once; so this will have to do.
The trick here is the complications, legal and psychological, that arise from this promise. UPS can probably deal with the former, using notices in small font that these are just estimates and they have no legal meaning etc. etc.
However the customer will be still very much displeased if he, using these estimates, takes a day off, stays at home on Thursday, and nothing happens. Then he goes to work on Friday, and upon coming home finds a door tag that says "we will deliver on Saturday" - so he has to sit at home on Saturday as well.
In other words, UPS would need to pretty much guarantee the delivery date to the day (or to the hour) or else they take flak. But more difficult deliveries, like international, are given a range exactly because there is no way to know how long will it take to go through customs or how good the weather will be over Elbonia.
All the cited patents simply notified of a shipment being sent, some included an estimate of delivery, but none cited measured delivery time based on similar shipments to nearby addresses.
When I ship via UPS I don't want an estimate of how long does it typically take to deliver. I'm signing a contract with UPS, and if I ask for next day afternoon delivery then it better be next day afternoon. In other words, there should be no correlation between deliveries yesterday and deliveries today. If UPS has a driver that spends most of the day home and slaps stickers "Business closed" on all packages then they should deal with that instead of calculating averages and adjusting the delivery date.
Broadcasting police information in the clear also has privacy implications (did you here that Fred Smith was busted for speeding last night?)
This is not directly transmitted over the air. The LEO may ask for 10-28 on a plate and the dispatcher says "Vehicle registered to Fred Smith, digits in Anytown, US" and that's basically all. Very little is reported over the air about the nature of the stop; it goes into the report, if there is any.
A typical 10-36, if transmitted, contains name and address of the subject, his DL number, DOB, warrants, and everything else that may be useful for ID. With just one such piece of information you can go and steal his identity. This is sent in the clear, at least where I live.
Lucid updates stop in 2013, but then you upgrade for free to 13.04. So that's no problem, except maybe for Unity.
You don't want to upgrade a box that is perfectly working and providing tons of services to a small business. Who knows what can of worms this upgrade will open?
The only way to safely "upgrade" is to build a new box, with the new OS and the software that you need, test that box for a while, and if you like it then you swap the old box with the new one.
Needless to say, this is not an upgrade - this is a complete rebuild and replacement, a major effort.
After the dust settles I'm sure only the people caught in the process of rioting will be prosecuted. Even if a camera records a man running into the store, grabbing something and running out, and even if that man is uniquely identified, he can always claim that someone forced him to do that, threatening him with a knife. In a quiet situation this lie can be untangled, evidence found, witnesses questioned, etc. etc. However in *this* mess it is impossible to prove or disprove the story, even though it is obviously a lie through and through. But you can't convict based on "obvious" things; you convict based on proven facts. Besides, the police already has about a thousand of rioters caught red-handed. They don't need more; they can't even find enough jail cells.
If we were to put those people unemployed to work we would be able to produce and consume much more than we do now, so how is it that we can't afford to consume again?
Well, of course the situation is not unrecoverable. But there are obstacles.
Currently (before I apply your "if") working for anything less than the social security and unemployment assistance pays you is a bad business decision. People still do that if they intend to maintain continuous employment on their resumes. OTOH an engineer can't say that he was working for 3 months flipping burgers. He'd better say that he was a self-employed contractor, try to disprove that. But most people are actively prevented from working.
Another obstacle is the minimum salary. It's currently something like $6 or $8 per hour. This makes sure that jobs that are less productive than that can't exist (or are paid for under the table.)
Another obstacle is payroll taxes. Some of them count toward your income tax; other are paid by the employer. This increases the cost of labor even further, guaranteeing that cheap jobs are illegal in the USA.
Now if we apply your "if" and all these problems are corrected, we still need to outcompete China and India and other developing nations if we want to sell. This can be done by lowering prices on common goods (TV, phones, etc.) or by maintaining high prices on goods that the USA has near-monopoly on (high-tech R&D, CPU, etc.) The latter can't occupy many people, and those are already employed anyway. The former is an option, assuming that tens of millions of unemployed people can overcome their habit of not working and go to work every day (instead of going to work on some nights, when the Moon is not shining.)
However you do it, the whole structure of prices in the USA will have to go down, about to 1% of what it is now - to match Chinese quality of life. Cars will be a luxury; bicycles will be the common way to move around; horses may become a good option for rural dwellers. The USA will survive, but it will not be the USA that we know today. Perhaps that is unavoidable, and perhaps it is better than the Mad Max scenario that is the other possibility.
With regard to "consume again" thing, the USA is living on borrowed money and borrowed time. We aren't supposed to be consuming what we are consuming. This level of consumption is unsustainable. You should be able to consume only as much as you are producing. If you are mowing lawns five days a week, expect to pay 20% of your salary to have your own lawn mowed by someone else one day of the week. But right now you are sitting in the office 5 days a week, playing games on the computer, and you expect to pay 0.5% of your salary to have your lawn mowed.
how is an economy which has never repaid and only ever printed money a safe investment?
The USA repays the borrowed money, with interest, all the time. But the volume of the offering grows. It's not a concern until the point where you start suspecting that the country won't be able to service its debt. In other words, your one-year T-bills mature but the government says "fsck you, come later."
That point was reached in several ways. First, the very discussion of default undermines the reliability of country's debt. But then the amount of outstanding debt also makes it possible that the country will either physically run out of money to pay interest and buy matured bonds back, or it prints so much paper money that the profit of those bonds becomes negative, or does something else equally displeasing. The US debt stops being a safe store of value. It wasn't for about a decade already, but events like that serve as excuses for policy makers of countries to reevaluate the allocation of their currency reserves without being crucified.
Also why is it that for the past 2 years people have been steadily divesting from the American economy (which can be seen in the fall of the USD vs all other currencies)
The USD loses to other currencies not because "people are divesting" but because its value drops, and that happens because the printing press works day and night. For most of 2011 the US government borrows money from Federal Reserve which makes it out of thin air. When dollars are created at the rate of a few billion per day, why anyone is surprised that they get diluted?
Besides, most of investments in the US economy are done not by rich foreigners but by mutual funds and the like. This money remains in the system. If you take the money out of the market there will be excess of stock without buyers, and that will result in a serious crash of the stock market. That hasn't been observed. The US economy flounders because the business climate is bad, taxes are high, future is uncertain, labor is very expensive, and whatever you do or don't do you get sued. Can you open a small business and sell goods to China? Chinese can do that and sell their goods to the USA.
Just because you can't see Java (because you have your eyes closed) doesn't mean you don't use it whenever you use the Web (same thing with Linux, which handles almost all the external-going mail you'll ever send, but this is also invisible to you because it works so damn well).
I certainly know that Postfix handles my email because that was me who installed it:-)
With regard to "hidden" software, I know about that too because some of my code is firmware for microcontrollers. There is plenty of cases when neither Java nor C# nor even C++ cut it - nothing but Ada, for example.
However in the context of this thread (started with a rather trollish submission, I must say) it is reasonable to discuss desktop software. As I said [elsewhere] my experience with Java is not recent, and if it works well for someone then I'm glad for it. My own encounters with Java-based, Web-driven corporate trashware were not that exciting, though, and I'd very much prefer a native application..NET solved the deployment problem with ClickOnce, so what other reasons remain to use IE 6.0 to run some old JVM? Certainly not portability; it is neither desired for such use nor even offered; the thing barely runs on Windows...
On top of all that, a letter has much better chances of being open of it is personally addressed to Miguel Rodriguez than to "Postal Customer."
I understand that some of that information is in phone books. But some people pay to opt out of those books. Also only the account holder is listed there - not his family members. The account holder is likely to be the most financially responsible person there, head of the household, and it's tough to sell to him. His teenage children, OTOH, would be a great target for all kinds of ads... but if their names are not known, the head of the household opens the mail and throws it away. Letters addressed personally to Anita Rodriguez will be delivered unopened, even if that's an obvious mail spam.
If I'm going to learn a language to write programs in, I'm not likely to put a lot of effort into learning a language that is not likely to work well on multiple platforms.
And that is certainly your choice, if you think that the only framework that you will ever learn in your entire life must support multiple platforms.
But IMO you won't find a perfect solution to your problem. If you are a professional programmer you must know multiple languages and frameworks. For example, I know:
Languages: FORTRAN, PL/1, Pascal, Modula-II, C, C++, C#, some Java, Perl, TCL, BASH/KSH scripting, DBASE, various BASICs, assembly languages for a handful of processors, and probably a few more, totally insignificant in my practice - like LISP, which I had to code in for AutoCAD scripting, or PHP that I rarely need.
Frameworks: OWL, MFC, Vermont Views, FoxPro, CURSES, MOTIF, Win16 and Win32, WDM (for drivers,) Qt, WPF (in.NET), some Java, and I'm sure more that are even more exotic.
My point is that you have to learn all the time as you go. If you look at my list, OWL is really ancient today... but it was mighty good in days of Turbo C, you had to know it.
The choice of the environment is driven by many factors. One of more popular ones is "the old software is written in $foo already, so you are stuck fixing it." But there are good reasons too. For example, coding for an ATTiny MCU should be done in assembly or in C. Coding of a Linux application today should be done in C or C++. Coding of a Windows application today would benefit from C# and.NET - perhaps C++, but still in the managed form, that helps in most cases.
So there is no "silver bullet" and you have to know them all. You don't have to have working knowledge of everything; it's sufficient to know enough to get started quickly and without too much flailing. Most importantly, you need to know what language and what framework are best for a given application. On top of that you should be able to see bottlenecks and build systems out of components, that makes you even more valuable.
Myself, I can't claim good knowledge of Java today; I wrote a few applications in it some years ago, but it wasn't very fast, so I switched to Qt/C++ and never looked back. Today I won't pick Java unless there are good reasons for that.
But when I started a new database application for Windows users I had a different set of possibilities. My users are 100% on Windows (they don't even know that other OSes exist.) They are using MS SQL Server. They are running anything from XP SP3 to Win7. So I picked.NET - specifically, WPF and OleDb - and went from there. It's all written now, and works fine, as far as I can tell. The speed of development was at least 3x of what I could have accomplished with C++ - just the lack of destructors simplified the code a lot. Where necessary you can always use the using() { } block, then the runtime will help you with disposal; but only few objects deserve this treatment.
If you're talking about something with a high transaction rate, say handling buy/sell bookings for 8 primary securities markets simultaneously, Java or.Net will leave you broken upon the wheel as they can't cope.
That also depends on how you structure your system, where the bottlenecks are. If you have 100 GUI terminals that request one transaction per second, that's plenty fast for a human operator to issue. But as these requests are concentrated at the back office box they become 100 per second, and that's where you need to be careful.
Besides, in all my Windows experience I had more problems with non-deterministic behavior of Windows itself, rather than the application. You do something, click somewhere, and Windows starts thrashing the disk for interminable seconds, while the desktop is unresponsive.
If GC is a concern, an extra GB or two can be always thrown at the problem, it's a cheap solution and it offers instant gratification. Today a common box has 8 GB - if your application can allocate that much you are probably running Firefox:-) and FF is not a managed code anyway.
You can't write an application that doesn't suck without using a platform specific API on a platform with users.
Here is an example. Some years ago I was developing in Qt on Windows and Linux. And one thing nearly drove me to madness. On Linux you can't save positions of your windows! This is because they are determined by the WM, which in turn uses a theme to find out the size of decorations. This creates an offset, and your windows drift when they are restored. I knew that this can be done, since XMMS does that just fine; but Qt, at all its awesome cross-platformeness, fell flat on its face there with a bug. The documentation on Qt actually talked about this issue and "suggested" solutions that Qt itself hasn't implemented. In the end I wrote some *extremely* platform-specific (even WM-specific) code to fix something that "just worked" on Windows. It cost me quite a number of hours digging into WM details that I had no interest in.
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Not everyone lives in the same awful sounding place as you do.
I'm glad for them, whoever they are.
Airlifting? do you really think that a helicopter is going to just land right there in the busy road to pick up my broken remains?
Happened about two months ago to a guy I know. That's why I mentioned that. I was there as Fire and EMR were "collecting his broken remains" (he broke his neck, pretty much) and EMR had no doubt that he wouldn't survive a trip in the ambulance. They should know, I guess, they see this every day.
A road is busy typically because of all the cars not the bicycles
That's true; however video from China tells us that it's the people that make the road busy, not their vehicles.
It's about 30 mins cycling for me (~10km) versus 40+ for public transport (this includes travel to and from the bus/ tram stops), I don't own a car but with parking etc I figure it would be at least 30 mins for that too.
I will set aside the public transit time; I never use it myself. With all the waiting time and endless stops at every corner it is indeed a waste of life.
Your 10 km trip is done at 20 km/h, which is nicely matching the statistics at Wikipedia. In a car that distance in a typical US city, in a typical rush hour traffic can be covered in 1/3 of the time - in 10 minutes. Parking in US cities on a home to work trip is usually not a problem (provided by the company, provided by your rental place, included with your house, etc.) This means that you will save 2*20 minutes (total 40 minutes) per day. If you work as most people, that amounts to 220 work days per year and 8800 minutes (146 hours, about a week) of your life spent in traffic, among exhausts of cars, breathing all these carcinogens. Are you a suicider, or what? That can't be good for you.
To compare, the air that goes into the car (if it goes in at all, it is adjustable) is filtered before it enters the cabin. That alone is a big deal. But also higher speeds and shorter travel time help to keep you out of the poisoned air.
Also, don't you have something better to do with a week of your life every year - better than pedaling among cars? Drivers of some cars don't even see you, especially in the evening, when everyone is dog tired and it's getting dark. If you want an exercise, get an exercise bike (I have one) - they aren't expensive, and you can combine pedaling with reading, listening to music, watching TV, and it's very safe too :-)
Another item which most people without homes or family are easily overlooking is that cars are necessary to transport essential cargo, such as food, materials, and everything else that a household may require. You need a car to transport things and people when your relatives need that help. Car is not simply a people's mover - it is a cargo mover. Rare is a day when I don't carry some cargo in my car that won't fit on a bicycle. Long gone are the careless days when all I needed to deliver was myself. Today I carry metal pieces, electronic equipment, wood, tools, and all kinds of stuff that I need every day. I will go and collect a UPS package in an hour or so; it is so large that it can't be conveniently transported on a bicycle. I will throw it into the car and that's all.
Besides, I live at elevation of about 400 meters above the city (in the hills) and rare a bicycle rider can get that high. They do, sometimes, but they are not carrying bags of food, and they rest often, and they are well trained, and they take their time. One couldn't do that as a matter of routine.
As the Pacific Institute has shown, you'd have to be eating an all-beef diet to offset the environmental benefits of walking or bicycling.
You need to consider other factors too. Showers, for example, which bicycle riders use more often (after each trip.) You also need to count how one bicycle on a busy road affects efficiency of a 1,000 cars that have to slow down or otherwise navigate around the bicycle. And if you get into an accident (regardless of why) you need to count the carbon footprint of airlifting you to the hospital and treating you there for as long as it takes. But even if you don't get into an accident, what is the "carbon footprint" of you wasting your life on a bike instead of getting home earlier and doing something productive instead? You can't possibly suggest that riding at rush hour, among cars, is in any way healthy.
Just try it sometime - enable Instant and type "sex" into the bar. It will not display results.
OK, I did that. Typed 'sex', did NOT press Enter or click anything, and within 0.5 second got an ad for 'naughty local girls' along with a full page of sex-related stuff. Proceeded to type 'tant' and got what I needed in the first place.
Typed 'kill' and got suggestions and search done on that. Proceeded to type 'een' and got the stuff about the city in Texas.
This experiment failed to reveal a filter. I was not logged in and I was using standard, default settings. The browser was IE9. Besides, I doubt very much that Google would know all NSFW fragments of all languages on Earth, in all encodings.
One of concerns is that the cache of your browser will be searched and used against you if something happens.
We aren't yet at the stage when your searches can trigger the police response, but it's getting there. There is no need to make "the man's" job easier. As had been said by a competent specialist: "If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged." That part hasn't changed.
At work your searches go through the corporate filter; we had one at the last place (a big company) that I worked at. The whole 'sex' page would be blocked by that filter, with logs and all. How would you prove to your boss that your search was innocent? The filter has no reason to log traffic that it doesn't block, so your search of 'sextant' a second later won't be logged.
As I see it, instant search doesn't help (at least me) to get results faster. It only helps Google to claim 10x more searches done. In reality, most of the intermediate searches are a waste of resources. For example, all intermediate searches in "internal combustion engine in prius" are useless until the last word is entered. It doesn't help that one of suggestions after "internal" is "internal hemorroids."
This has a direct analogy IRL. A few people like to reply to someone's speech before the speaker finishes. It is rarely welcome or productive. Humanity worked out a simple protocol: listen to the complete statement, think about it, voice your answer. Google here tries to answer before you are done asking. When it's not pointless it is simply distracting; sometimes it is also disturbing, disgusting or otherwise unwelcome (and unrelated to your query.)
I have all forms of instant searches and auto-suggestions disabled. But that's not because I type so fast. It's because when I search for a sextant I don't want to be given a ton of links about sex. There could be other NSFW fragments too, and I don't want any of them hitting the cache. I search only when I'm done typing.
But I think the gist is to blow up the plane.
I was thinking that he wants to make a bigger bang. But whatever.
And nobody will wonder why some caterers are loading luggage onto the tram?
Correct. Nobody at the field is paid (or is in position) to watch for security issues like that. There are several points where the "extra" luggage may show up, all are after the final scan of barcodes. Nearly anyone can walk up to the baggage cars, load one up, hitch it to the train and drive it all the way to the airplane and throw your bags onto the conveyor. I watched the loading in many airports, and (to an external observer) there are no checks of any kind. There are hundreds of drivers of baggage trains, thousands of baggage cars, and anyone can be sent at any time to any gate to service any flight. Those are low-paid jobs, with low retention, so a baggage handler is nearly invisible.
Then the unsuspecting stewardess microwaves the dinners, and voila, boom flambe'e?
The thought was that the terrorist only needs to shrink-wrap a pallet that looks like food containers, but in reality could be something else. It is unthinkable to even consider that TSA would unwrap the whole pallet (which immediately falls apart) and open every lunch box. I mentioned that already.
Or you can keep one real pallet at the truck's door and replace other pallets (that are deep inside and not visible) with whatever you are smuggling in. They can't be unloaded without a forklift anyway, and I very much doubt that the unloading of trucks is in any way checked by the TSA. Again we are talking here about half a ton of stuff; a mere bag with ten pounds of an explosive can be just thrown into the cab of the truck and nobody will blink an eye.
Pilots are a well educated bunch, and they will call the police in the very next moment. The police should be smart enough to figure out what to do. The family of the pilot will NOT survive if the pilot does what the terrorists tell him to do. The only (small) chance of their survival is that the police finds them and frees them.
The costs grow exponentially with size if not faster
The costs grow linearly, just as the GP correctly pointed out. You can easily verify that if you consider that security at airport A is not dependent on security at airport B.
In the US there is a lot more opportunity for smart people
What color is the sky on your planet? The USA is seeing record-high numbers of people without jobs.
and airport screening isn't a very sexy job
I guess flipping hamburgers is sexy then? Fact: most jobs are not sexy. Most jobs are just jobs; you do them and go home. A job at an airport is a blessing compared to most construction jobs, for example.
You can't just pay the same and expect to get the same level of abilities.
First, you'd be amazed of what people can do if they are challenged to do it. We don't know what the current TSA crowd can do because they are told to not talk to passengers, just grope them. Would you recognize Albert Einstein if he is told to stand here all day and check boarding passes?
Second, if the pay depends on skills it gives the TSA people a good incentive to learn.
Third, if some of TSA employees are incapable of higher mental processes, there are always menial jobs. If you still have an excess of idiots, let them go.
israel's system relies on intelligence gathering about each passenger, setting aside the social costs of such a surveillance society, simply tracking 2nd and 3rd order associations between people gets exponentially harder as the number of people grow.
Yes, that thing grows fast. However nobody needs to do it by hand, and computers are pretty good at it. How hard would that be to run one SQL query?
The problem is that we have two options, both bad. Different sets of people argue for and against them, creating an illusion that everyone is against everything.
The first option is to search everyone. This is getting flak because it is stupid. The second option is to search nobody, but profile instead. This offends people who insist on their right to stay anonymous.
IMO, profiling is a lesser evil because you are (or should be) in charge of your profile. If properly implemented, it would be transparent to you. The fact that you are flying is known to the government anyway. If you have enough points on your history you are a lesser risk and endure less scrutiny. If you have few points you need to fly more, or you can apply for a background check that boosts your points instantly. You still can fly "anonymously" (or with zero points) but then you need to be searched. Few people would need to be searched.
Such a system is not foolproof. A terrorist can develop a good profile and then one day carry a bag full of grenades onto a flight. IMO, life has risks, and grenades can end up on the plane even today. They aren't only because nobody needs them there. A dedicated terrorist group can infiltrate the airport and do whatever they want. The strength of the chain is defined by the weakest link; so as long as we can't strengthen that link we don't need to bother with X-raying passengers.
then they see some strange catering truck pull up and start to transfer a half ton of bricks to the cargo hold?
Why would they need to load a half ton of bricks (or explosives)? The airplane is full of fuel, so if they intend to crash it the resulting fireball will be large enough as it is.
But if they want to load half a ton of something, they can easily do it by putting those bricks into regular travel bags, throwing them onto a baggage train and ... done. They don't even need to load them - the baggage handlers at the airplane will do that for them. There is no law against carrying travel bags into an airport; but the easiest would be to just load stuff in bags into the catering truck. It can be a real catering truck, just its usual driver is in a ditch somewhere, seeing stars (or meeting his maker.) TSA isn't going to open every sandwich package, are they?
You don't have to get on the plane; you can just carry weapons/drugs/whatever to a stash on the other side
If that's what you want then you don't need to bother with a fairly exclusive club of pilots. Instead one of your people gets a lowly tech job as a baggage handler, for example, or fuel truck driver, or just as a sales clerk at the Pizza joint inside the secure area of the terminal. Those jobs are dime a dozen, and nobody will notice the new guy.
Once you have your man on the inside many possibilities open up. Does the TSA inspect all packages of frozen pizza? Can they tell that a certain frozen pizza is made out of C4 instead of dough? Can they tell that a pressurized, sealed container of Pepsi concentrate doesn't hold something that is even more dangerous? Do they strain all 10 tons of fuel in every fuel truck as it rolls through the airport gates? Can they detect that someone attached a small box to the underside of the truck and once on the inside someone removed the same box? Far more serious checks are done at prisons, and still whole *humans* manage to escape.
Profit
Not Profit - Prophet.
I'd be satisfied if they let me know when the package has reached the final distribution center.
They do that already, for a very long time. I'm in habit of tracking my packages, and they make it trivial as long as you have an Internet connection and a browser. They offer an expected date of arrival, which is almost always correct and matches what I paid for. I ran into only a couple "exceptions" (don't recall if it was UPS or Fedex) where they misrouted stuff and it was sent sightseeing.
On the delivery day they post the record saying that the package is "on the vehicle for delivery." That is done around 6am. After that I don't need any further guidance; I know already when the truck is likely to show up.
Sorry, it's you who are wrong. I can't speak for Oregon or Washington, but there is no such law in California.
Such a law does exist, but it's not what the GP remembers. The law applies only to immigrants and it requires them to carry their Green Card with them at all times. Citizens don't have to carry any ID (unless driving) and it is common to hear 10-27 on the police scanner where the officer mentions "verbal" -- meaning that the subject simply told the officer who he is but produced no proof of that.
If the "contract" says my package can arrive anywhere between Wednesday and Saturday, it'd be nice to have a heads-up on the day it actually gets here.
Slashdot, in its infinite wisdom, doesn't allow to reply to several comments at once; so this will have to do.
The trick here is the complications, legal and psychological, that arise from this promise. UPS can probably deal with the former, using notices in small font that these are just estimates and they have no legal meaning etc. etc.
However the customer will be still very much displeased if he, using these estimates, takes a day off, stays at home on Thursday, and nothing happens. Then he goes to work on Friday, and upon coming home finds a door tag that says "we will deliver on Saturday" - so he has to sit at home on Saturday as well.
In other words, UPS would need to pretty much guarantee the delivery date to the day (or to the hour) or else they take flak. But more difficult deliveries, like international, are given a range exactly because there is no way to know how long will it take to go through customs or how good the weather will be over Elbonia.
All the cited patents simply notified of a shipment being sent, some included an estimate of delivery, but none cited measured delivery time based on similar shipments to nearby addresses.
When I ship via UPS I don't want an estimate of how long does it typically take to deliver. I'm signing a contract with UPS, and if I ask for next day afternoon delivery then it better be next day afternoon. In other words, there should be no correlation between deliveries yesterday and deliveries today. If UPS has a driver that spends most of the day home and slaps stickers "Business closed" on all packages then they should deal with that instead of calculating averages and adjusting the delivery date.
Broadcasting police information in the clear also has privacy implications (did you here that Fred Smith was busted for speeding last night?)
This is not directly transmitted over the air. The LEO may ask for 10-28 on a plate and the dispatcher says "Vehicle registered to Fred Smith, digits in Anytown, US" and that's basically all. Very little is reported over the air about the nature of the stop; it goes into the report, if there is any.
A typical 10-36, if transmitted, contains name and address of the subject, his DL number, DOB, warrants, and everything else that may be useful for ID. With just one such piece of information you can go and steal his identity. This is sent in the clear, at least where I live.
Lucid updates stop in 2013, but then you upgrade for free to 13.04. So that's no problem, except maybe for Unity.
You don't want to upgrade a box that is perfectly working and providing tons of services to a small business. Who knows what can of worms this upgrade will open?
The only way to safely "upgrade" is to build a new box, with the new OS and the software that you need, test that box for a while, and if you like it then you swap the old box with the new one.
Needless to say, this is not an upgrade - this is a complete rebuild and replacement, a major effort.
After the dust settles I'm sure only the people caught in the process of rioting will be prosecuted. Even if a camera records a man running into the store, grabbing something and running out, and even if that man is uniquely identified, he can always claim that someone forced him to do that, threatening him with a knife. In a quiet situation this lie can be untangled, evidence found, witnesses questioned, etc. etc. However in *this* mess it is impossible to prove or disprove the story, even though it is obviously a lie through and through. But you can't convict based on "obvious" things; you convict based on proven facts. Besides, the police already has about a thousand of rioters caught red-handed. They don't need more; they can't even find enough jail cells.
If we were to put those people unemployed to work we would be able to produce and consume much more than we do now, so how is it that we can't afford to consume again?
Well, of course the situation is not unrecoverable. But there are obstacles.
Currently (before I apply your "if") working for anything less than the social security and unemployment assistance pays you is a bad business decision. People still do that if they intend to maintain continuous employment on their resumes. OTOH an engineer can't say that he was working for 3 months flipping burgers. He'd better say that he was a self-employed contractor, try to disprove that. But most people are actively prevented from working.
Another obstacle is the minimum salary. It's currently something like $6 or $8 per hour. This makes sure that jobs that are less productive than that can't exist (or are paid for under the table.)
Another obstacle is payroll taxes. Some of them count toward your income tax; other are paid by the employer. This increases the cost of labor even further, guaranteeing that cheap jobs are illegal in the USA.
Now if we apply your "if" and all these problems are corrected, we still need to outcompete China and India and other developing nations if we want to sell. This can be done by lowering prices on common goods (TV, phones, etc.) or by maintaining high prices on goods that the USA has near-monopoly on (high-tech R&D, CPU, etc.) The latter can't occupy many people, and those are already employed anyway. The former is an option, assuming that tens of millions of unemployed people can overcome their habit of not working and go to work every day (instead of going to work on some nights, when the Moon is not shining.)
However you do it, the whole structure of prices in the USA will have to go down, about to 1% of what it is now - to match Chinese quality of life. Cars will be a luxury; bicycles will be the common way to move around; horses may become a good option for rural dwellers. The USA will survive, but it will not be the USA that we know today. Perhaps that is unavoidable, and perhaps it is better than the Mad Max scenario that is the other possibility.
With regard to "consume again" thing, the USA is living on borrowed money and borrowed time. We aren't supposed to be consuming what we are consuming. This level of consumption is unsustainable. You should be able to consume only as much as you are producing. If you are mowing lawns five days a week, expect to pay 20% of your salary to have your own lawn mowed by someone else one day of the week. But right now you are sitting in the office 5 days a week, playing games on the computer, and you expect to pay 0.5% of your salary to have your lawn mowed.
how is an economy which has never repaid and only ever printed money a safe investment?
The USA repays the borrowed money, with interest, all the time. But the volume of the offering grows. It's not a concern until the point where you start suspecting that the country won't be able to service its debt. In other words, your one-year T-bills mature but the government says "fsck you, come later."
That point was reached in several ways. First, the very discussion of default undermines the reliability of country's debt. But then the amount of outstanding debt also makes it possible that the country will either physically run out of money to pay interest and buy matured bonds back, or it prints so much paper money that the profit of those bonds becomes negative, or does something else equally displeasing. The US debt stops being a safe store of value. It wasn't for about a decade already, but events like that serve as excuses for policy makers of countries to reevaluate the allocation of their currency reserves without being crucified.
Also why is it that for the past 2 years people have been steadily divesting from the American economy (which can be seen in the fall of the USD vs all other currencies)
The USD loses to other currencies not because "people are divesting" but because its value drops, and that happens because the printing press works day and night. For most of 2011 the US government borrows money from Federal Reserve which makes it out of thin air. When dollars are created at the rate of a few billion per day, why anyone is surprised that they get diluted?
Besides, most of investments in the US economy are done not by rich foreigners but by mutual funds and the like. This money remains in the system. If you take the money out of the market there will be excess of stock without buyers, and that will result in a serious crash of the stock market. That hasn't been observed. The US economy flounders because the business climate is bad, taxes are high, future is uncertain, labor is very expensive, and whatever you do or don't do you get sued. Can you open a small business and sell goods to China? Chinese can do that and sell their goods to the USA.
Just because you can't see Java (because you have your eyes closed) doesn't mean you don't use it whenever you use the Web (same thing with Linux, which handles almost all the external-going mail you'll ever send, but this is also invisible to you because it works so damn well).
I certainly know that Postfix handles my email because that was me who installed it :-)
With regard to "hidden" software, I know about that too because some of my code is firmware for microcontrollers. There is plenty of cases when neither Java nor C# nor even C++ cut it - nothing but Ada, for example.
However in the context of this thread (started with a rather trollish submission, I must say) it is reasonable to discuss desktop software. As I said [elsewhere] my experience with Java is not recent, and if it works well for someone then I'm glad for it. My own encounters with Java-based, Web-driven corporate trashware were not that exciting, though, and I'd very much prefer a native application. .NET solved the deployment problem with ClickOnce, so what other reasons remain to use IE 6.0 to run some old JVM? Certainly not portability; it is neither desired for such use nor even offered; the thing barely runs on Windows...
On top of all that, a letter has much better chances of being open of it is personally addressed to Miguel Rodriguez than to "Postal Customer."
I understand that some of that information is in phone books. But some people pay to opt out of those books. Also only the account holder is listed there - not his family members. The account holder is likely to be the most financially responsible person there, head of the household, and it's tough to sell to him. His teenage children, OTOH, would be a great target for all kinds of ads ... but if their names are not known, the head of the household opens the mail and throws it away. Letters addressed personally to Anita Rodriguez will be delivered unopened, even if that's an obvious mail spam.
If I'm going to learn a language to write programs in, I'm not likely to put a lot of effort into learning a language that is not likely to work well on multiple platforms.
And that is certainly your choice, if you think that the only framework that you will ever learn in your entire life must support multiple platforms.
But IMO you won't find a perfect solution to your problem. If you are a professional programmer you must know multiple languages and frameworks. For example, I know:
Languages: FORTRAN, PL/1, Pascal, Modula-II, C, C++, C#, some Java, Perl, TCL, BASH/KSH scripting, DBASE, various BASICs, assembly languages for a handful of processors, and probably a few more, totally insignificant in my practice - like LISP, which I had to code in for AutoCAD scripting, or PHP that I rarely need.
Frameworks: OWL, MFC, Vermont Views, FoxPro, CURSES, MOTIF, Win16 and Win32, WDM (for drivers,) Qt, WPF (in .NET), some Java, and I'm sure more that are even more exotic.
My point is that you have to learn all the time as you go. If you look at my list, OWL is really ancient today... but it was mighty good in days of Turbo C, you had to know it.
The choice of the environment is driven by many factors. One of more popular ones is "the old software is written in $foo already, so you are stuck fixing it." But there are good reasons too. For example, coding for an ATTiny MCU should be done in assembly or in C. Coding of a Linux application today should be done in C or C++. Coding of a Windows application today would benefit from C# and .NET - perhaps C++, but still in the managed form, that helps in most cases.
So there is no "silver bullet" and you have to know them all. You don't have to have working knowledge of everything; it's sufficient to know enough to get started quickly and without too much flailing. Most importantly, you need to know what language and what framework are best for a given application. On top of that you should be able to see bottlenecks and build systems out of components, that makes you even more valuable.
Myself, I can't claim good knowledge of Java today; I wrote a few applications in it some years ago, but it wasn't very fast, so I switched to Qt/C++ and never looked back. Today I won't pick Java unless there are good reasons for that.
But when I started a new database application for Windows users I had a different set of possibilities. My users are 100% on Windows (they don't even know that other OSes exist.) They are using MS SQL Server. They are running anything from XP SP3 to Win7. So I picked .NET - specifically, WPF and OleDb - and went from there. It's all written now, and works fine, as far as I can tell. The speed of development was at least 3x of what I could have accomplished with C++ - just the lack of destructors simplified the code a lot. Where necessary you can always use the using() { } block, then the runtime will help you with disposal; but only few objects deserve this treatment.
If you're talking about something with a high transaction rate, say handling buy/sell bookings for 8 primary securities markets simultaneously, Java or .Net will leave you broken upon the wheel as they can't cope.
That also depends on how you structure your system, where the bottlenecks are. If you have 100 GUI terminals that request one transaction per second, that's plenty fast for a human operator to issue. But as these requests are concentrated at the back office box they become 100 per second, and that's where you need to be careful.
Besides, in all my Windows experience I had more problems with non-deterministic behavior of Windows itself, rather than the application. You do something, click somewhere, and Windows starts thrashing the disk for interminable seconds, while the desktop is unresponsive.
If GC is a concern, an extra GB or two can be always thrown at the problem, it's a cheap solution and it offers instant gratification. Today a common box has 8 GB - if your application can allocate that much you are probably running Firefox :-) and FF is not a managed code anyway.
I personally use very nice styled buttons and all it takes is to say Style="{StaticResource OrangeButton}" in XAML.
You can't write an application that doesn't suck without using a platform specific API on a platform with users.
Here is an example. Some years ago I was developing in Qt on Windows and Linux. And one thing nearly drove me to madness. On Linux you can't save positions of your windows! This is because they are determined by the WM, which in turn uses a theme to find out the size of decorations. This creates an offset, and your windows drift when they are restored. I knew that this can be done, since XMMS does that just fine; but Qt, at all its awesome cross-platformeness, fell flat on its face there with a bug. The documentation on Qt actually talked about this issue and "suggested" solutions that Qt itself hasn't implemented. In the end I wrote some *extremely* platform-specific (even WM-specific) code to fix something that "just worked" on Windows. It cost me quite a number of hours digging into WM details that I had no interest in.