Small self-correction: not just at the speed limit, but rather at all speeds that are typical for the road. So if vehicles frequently drive ten over or under the limit, it has to be long enough to pass the above test at ten over or under as well.
Who said anything about adjusting? The yellow light must, by definition, be long enough so that after the driver has had a moment to notice the light, a driver driving the heaviest, hardest-to-brake vehicle that is likely to travel the road in question either has time to stop safely or, if the vehicle is too close to stop safely before entering the intersection, has enough time to safely roll through the intersection at the speed limit before the cross direction turns green. Period. Any intersection with a shorter yellow light is a fundamentally unsafe intersection, and should result in jail time for the traffic engineer who set it up.
Now here I disagree, because to my mind observing a safe following distance is similar to indicating; Contrary to common belief, it's actually very easy. What's more, it's considerate. It's also significantly safer than tailgating and if people tended to follow at a safe distance we'd all feel a great deal more comfortable on the road. I suspect we might even be statistically safer by some degree.
The problem is that I have little choice in the matter when it comes to whether someone is tailgating me. Even if their insurance does pay for the damage, it still causes me an inconvenience (and possibly injures me) if I stop to avoid getting caught by a red light camera and the guy behind me doesn't.
That was mostly sarcasm, but it varies widely by product category.
For books, 20–55% of the cover price typically gets spread among a wholesaler, and a retailer combined, so something like 10–40% of the cost goes to the retailer, depending on the book. Most other authors have to be close to the high end of that range to get into stores at all, but books by well-known authors can, as I understand it, often be on the low side. And if the bookstore ends up with books that aren't allowed to be returned (most can be, but not all), the percentage may be a lot lower, though. Also, most booksellers I've seen charge less than the cover price as a general rule, so the percentage is even lower.
The typical retail markup for software is also 40%, but this falls under the same basic rules as books, IIRC.
For gasoline, IIRC, typically a single-digit percentage goes to the retailer. The rest goes to the distributor, the manufacturer, and taxes.
For certain high-ticket, high-end electronics, such as iPods, from what I've read, only about 15% of the cost goes to the retailer. For high-end cables like Monster cables, 45% of the cost goes to retailers.
For movies at theaters, during the first week, almost everything goes to the studios, but I don't remember the details. This is, of course, why they charge three bucks for a soda that probably costs them fifty cents or so.
For groceries, particularly those where spoilage is a concern, only a little over 10% goes to the retailer.
And then, there are products that are loss leaders, where the store makes little or no money at all. Anything on sale usually falls into this category, under the hopes that people who buy those things will also buy something else with a higher markup.
So yes, 5% was a somewhat hyperbolic exaggeration, even for gasoline. The point was not the number. The point was that statistically most of what you're paying goes to companies upstream that are not local.
Obama probably doesn't care that ebooks are a dollar cheaper than dead-tree books, because unlike the vast majority of his constituents, he's loaded.
Correction: Obama probably doesn't care that electronic versions of the books are cheaper because he is buying them for gift purposes, and you can't realistically give electronic copies of a book as gifts thanks to DRM and our abusive copyright laws.
Out of all of the three times (I think... maybe four) that my credit card number has been stolen in the past few years, thus far it has always been stolen at a local merchant. Your credit card number is much safer on Amazon's servers than on a piece of plastic handled by a minimum-wage employee at a local store or restaurant, statistically speaking.
Also, once you have an account with a store, you never have to create a new one. I usually order stuff from the same three or four stores all the time, because they usually have the best prices on the things that I buy. That's really not a huge inconvenience. And you can opt out of email from those companies.
President Obama loves small businesses so much that he's driving them bankrupt with expensive mandatory health insurance regulations.
Umm... ACA doesn't kick in until you have at least 50 employees. To put that in perspective, assuming your store is open 16 hours per day, multiply the number of employees you want in the store at any given moment by 2.8 to compute the number of full-time-equivalent employees. So even a fairly large restaurant with ten or twelve people in it at any given moment still falls well below the 50-employee threshold where the ACA kicks in. A typical bookstore chain falls below the threshold until it has five or six locations....
No, fifty full-time-equivalent employees is just short of a Wal-Mart-sized store. If you're that big, you are not a small business. Period. You're a medium-sized business. You're bringing in at least three-quarters of a million dollars in profit annually just to cover the employee salaries alone, assuming you pay everyone minimum wage, not counting your contributions to FICA, location rent, business insurance, etc. A bookstore making a million bucks a year would have to sell five or six hundred books per day at typical markups to cover those sorts of costs. That's simply not a small business, and anyone who claims that the ACA is going to cause small businesses to go bankrupt is either ill-informed or deliberately distorting reality to promote an agenda.
First, if you can find significantly better deals online, then the store is overpriced, period. You have a choice when you run a store: sell cheap and make it up in volume, or sell expensive and lose the sale. When I buy DVDs and Blu-Rays at Fry's, they're usually very close to or cheaper than the Amazon price, because the Amazon price builds in a margin to accommodate the free shipping, whereas Fry's doesn't have to absorb that fairly significant cost. And they'll price match Amazon if you're willing to spend the time. If Fry's can do that, so can any store of any reasonable size. It's not like Fry's is a huge chain. (They have 34 stores, by my count, which is way too small to get the sort of bulk buying deals that places like Wal-Mart get.)
Second, when I shop locally, it usually isn't because of in-person browsing except insofar as that browsing lets me walk out with something in my hands immediately. If I can wait a few days, there's no advantage, so this is only important for somewhat urgent or time-critical needs (e.g. I'm bored and want a movie to watch tonight, I'm working on a project and need parts for it immediately, etc.).
It also isn't because of personalized services. Most local stores have customer service that ranks lower than Amazon in my book, frankly. And they can't hope to compete with Amazon's personalization—lists of movies that I would probably like based on large quantities of data mining.
Loyalty to the community doesn't even come into play. If there are no businesses selling a particular product in my community, for the most part, the only real disadvantage to me is that it will take a couple of extra days to get things. That's not a good enough reason to prop up a store that is underperforming. Besides, most of my shopping doesn't actually happen in my immediate community anyway. During the week, I typically make a beeline from home to work and back, and I mostly shop at stores that fall along that line, plus or minus, only half of which is in my community. Half the weekend, I'm in other cities, and I'm at least as likely to shop there as in my own community. As long as I can get food in my community, that's all I really require of it. Everything else is convenient if it is there, but is entirely optional.
No, when I shop locally, it is invariably because I'm going that way anyway. Want to make me a hundred times more likely to shop in your store? Sell good food, and by that, I don't just mean pastries and crap. I have to eat. If I can grab supper at your store on my way home, I'm much more likely to shop there than at other stores where I can't. I would say that availability of sandwiches and hot foods is the #1 consideration in terms of shopping locally.
The second consideration is whether you're selling something that I need with some immediacy and/or can't readily order online (e.g. frozen foods).
The third consideration is whether I'm already at your store for something else that falls into one of the above categories.
The fourth and final consideration is whether I need more information than I can actually get online without being able to physically examine the product. This one is rare, however, and is mostly limited to furniture and products for which I need very precise physical measurements like clothing or, occasionally, capacitors.
In short, if you want me to shop at your store, sell me supper, sell movies at a price that competes with Amazon, sell random household items that are cheap enough that it wouldn't make sense to buy enough of them to get free shipping, or sell groceries. In other words, be Fry's, Wal-Mart, or Target. Those are pretty much the only three stores that I regularly shop in locally. Notice that all of these stores sell me supper, sell movies at competitive prices (except for Target), sell random household items at reasonably cheap prices, and (except for Fry's) sell groceries.
Or sell gasoline and locate yourself on one of my regular driving routes. However, that only goes so far unless you're also selling something else I need at a reasonable price.
Sometimes, yes. However, those signs are A. way too small to read clearly from sufficient distance on roads with 40+ MPH speed limits, and B. not always timed to coincide with the end of the yellow, thus frequently causing people to incorrectly slow down, which causes unnecessary traffic backups.
The only solid lines I've seen at intersections are the ones that begin about ten feet after the start of a turn lane. I suppose they might do what you're describing in some places, though. Same basic idea as my line suggestion, but a bit too subtle for my taste, since most people are looking at the road in front of them, not at the dotted line to the side.
Stripes on the pavement to indicate that at the speed limit, you should not stop if you are past this point. This reduces the guesswork that currently makes it difficult to assess whether to enter a light or not.
Can you expand on this? Are the stripes for a 3000lb car with 4 wheel anti-lock brakes in ideal conditions (dry pavement)?
Neither. The stripes would be set so that the amount of time that it takes for a vehicle (any vehicle) to travel from that line to the intersection at the speed limit is a fraction of a second less than the time it takes for the light to change from yellow to red. If you're significantly before that line, you need to stop.
The yellow length should be set in such a way that takes into account the things you mention. If it isn't, the intersection is not safe.
Show me somewhere in the U.S. where the yellow lights are a reasonable length, and I'll show you an intersection that has almost no red light violations. In study after study, this has been proven. If people are running red lights with any regularity, it is always because the yellow cycle was too short. Therefore, these lights only serve to punish people for failing to work around the city's poor traffic engineering.
Of course, this ignores the occasional driver who runs a red light because he or she isn't paying attention, but those drivers aren't affected by the cameras anyway. (Well, they're punished by them, but the cameras aren't a better deterrent than the "Oh, s**t! I just ran a red light!" realization that such drivers already have.)
The problem you've got in New Jersey is not red light cameras. It's poorly trained, inconsiderate and selfish drivers.
Don't forget pissed off drivers. When you've just hit the last eight lights in a row red, most people find themselves a lot more motivated to try to make it through one, because doing so means that they'll probably make it through the following one or two lights on green. There's only so much that most people can handle, and once people cross that threshold, their driving becomes markedly worse. Unfortunately, our nation's traffic light management sucks harder than a Hoover, so this is a much more common problem than it should rightfully be in any sane universe.
For those folks who don't want to take the time to read the article, briefly put, the number of T-bone crashes decreased, but the average severity of those crashes increased, presumably because of people racing to try to get through the light so that they wouldn't get ticketed, failing to do so, and thus being at an unsafe speed at the time of collision.
Thus, even the costs associated with T-bone crashes increased, and although this study did not break down the cost into medical and non-medical costs, one can reasonably assume that although the injury rate decreased because the total number of accidents decreased, the severity of injuries was probably greater, resulting in increased medical costs. That's just not a very good trade.
Red light cameras do not merely encourage positive behavior. They equally encourage both positive behavior and far more reckless behavior, and on average, make things worse according to nearly every metric. Increasing yellow light times (by starting the yellow cycle a second earlier) make things better by nearly every metric. Why don't we do this? Greed. Write your legislators and demand a ban on red light cameras and a return to more reasonable yellow light times.
No, what is needed are not cameras. What is needed are some combination of:
Stripes on the pavement to indicate that at the speed limit, you should not stop if you are past this point. This reduces the guesswork that currently makes it difficult to assess whether to enter a light or not.
Countdown timers on lights to indicate how long the driver has before the light changes to yellow. Again, this reduces the guesswork.
Longer yellow cycles. Studies consistently show that above a few seconds, drivers do not ever adjust to longer yellow cycles. Thus, lengthening the yellow cycle by only a couple of seconds reliably and reproducibly reduces red light violations to near zero.
Any one of these would result in a far, far greater reduction in traffic light violations and the resulting collisions than any camera system possibly could. The combination of all three would almost (if not completely) eliminate the problem entirely.
The whole rear-end collisions thing is bunk with respect to the cameras. The at-fault is always the driver who is following too closely to the vehicle in front of them so they can't stop in time for the braking vehicle--not the stationary red light camera.
Technically, yes, but the fact of the matter is that increasing the probability of a driver slamming on his or her brakes increases the probability of a rear-end collision, which is a simply inexcusable thing for law enforcement to be doing, given that there are so many better ways of solving the problem in question that do not result in such a negative side effect.
Therefore, given that red light cameras are significantly less effective than alternative techniques, the only real reason to consider them is revenue generation. And if that's the government's only purpose for enforcing traffic laws in a given community, its leaders should resign.
You're assuming the fire doors A. work, and B. are between you and the fire. At least in the case of the WTC collapse, reports suggest that what I described did, in fact, occur, making the upper stairwells impassable.
Whether the fire doors between a basement generator and any stairwells would fail or not (or would get propped open in violation of code because somebody got too hot, or...) is often dependent upon circumstances beyond the designer's control.
If they repost this, does that count as one of the hoaxes?:-)
Also, can we have a similar rule for a**hole bicyclists who flagrantly ignore traffic rules? And maybe an automatic door-open rule for motorcyclists who are splitting lanes because the speed limit isn't fast enough for them? Thanks.
Even this fine article asks the question "If your driverless car is about to crash into a bus, should it veer off a bridge?"... why do they even ask the question of what action to take next - the system ALREADY FAILED.
Moreover, it has an easy answer. If there's enough time for both vehicles to stop, both vehicles put on their brakes. If not, both vehicles brake as hard as they can and count on the passive safety systems to do their job to the maximum extent possible.
It might also be worth considering a J-turn for one or both vehicles, then flooring it. I'm not sure which is greater: the rolling resistance of a wheel under braking or the sliding resistance of a wheel spinning the opposite direction. Either way, your transmission is likely to be shot after doing this, not to mention your tire tread, so such a technique would need to be reserved for only the most extreme dangers, assuming that it proves to be more efficient than braking (and if it doesn't, then you'd never do this).
The problem with that is that not all check engine problems require immediate attention, yet if given the opportunity, many manufacturers might choose to brick their car this for every little problem, urgent or not, so that they can make more money off of unnecessary service work.
For example, a check engine light caused by a lean condition that's just slightly out of spec, for example, will cause no detectable drivability issues, and at worst, increases your NOX emissions slightly. However, a lean condition beyond some much more severe threshold could cause your car to stall. Choosing that threshold is critical.
Likewise, a transmission warning light caused by a bad solenoid can cause you to be missing overdrive and spend more fuel, but you could drive that way for years without a problem. And I'm not entirely sure if the car even knows whether the vehicle failed to shift because of a stuck solenoid (probably harmless), a slipping band (mostly harmless), or a broken band (which could cause a catastrophic transmission failure under the right circumstances).
Similarly, a failure of the brakes (caused by loss of fluid or insufficient pad thickness, is a serious problem, and should cause the car to be limited to slow speeds until the problem is resolved. A failure of the ABS unit, however, is not a serious problem, and should not. A stuck caliper that causes slight disc warping or pad squealing typically is not. However, a stuck caliper that results in significant braking continuously while driving could cause brake failure, particularly if you're dealing with drum brakes.
And so on. So there would need to be a strict set of government standards that defines what is or is not truly a safety issue, and standards that define where various thresholds should be set. That's a nontrivial heap of standards. This is not to say that it shouldn't be done, but rather that it needs to be approached carefully, methodically, and with an eye towards the complete picture.
Also, completely shutting down the vehicle is a very bad idea that could leave someone stranded in the middle of nowhere, and could actually put someone's life at greater risk than driving under certain circumstances. It should instead put the vehicle into a low-speed "limp mode" so that the user won't be willing to drive it much farther than the nearest repair place, but where the user at least has the ability to get it to the repair place without calling a tow truck.:-)
The only major problems I'm aware of with the full version of Slashdot on mobile devices are the ratings slider (which could be trivially fixed by adding support for touch events or by providing an alternative set of up-down arrow controls for the two values that appear only on mobile devices via CSS trickery) and the fact that the minimum column width is too damn wide for viewing on a phone, so you end up scrolling back and forth (which again could be trivially fixed with CSS by adding the various -*-text-size-adjust CSS properties). Incidentally, that second part is a pain in the backside on high-resolution laptops, too, because of the way scaling works in most browsers.
It would, of course, make sense to load fewer items initially on mobile devices, for performance reasons, and there are probably a bunch of other minor behavioral tweaks, but none of those sorts of changes requires a separate site, or even anything approaching a separate site. In fact, if done correctly, those sorts of differences should be entirely transparent to the user up until the user hits the magic point where it can't scroll any further until after it loads more data.
In short, most of the time, the only reason for needing a mobile version of a website is that the CSS and JavaScript designers/coders made poor design decisions in the first place. Thus, in most cases, the enhancements that improve usability on the mobile site would also improve usability on the full site for folks with less-than-perfect vision or too-high-resolution screens, and the enhancements that remove functionality on the mobile site just piss people off. The exceptions are few and far between, and by that, I mean that I can't think of any, but I'm willing to accept that in theory, one or two might exist somewhere in the world.
The problems with fuel taken away from 9/11 wasn't that planes will fly into the roof. It's that fuel is a liquid and it is subject to gravity which means anything puncturing the tanks will cause it to leak down the building whether it is on fire or not. So imagine a lightning strike happens and years the side of the tank out. It caught fire and is now seeping down the stair well and over the sides of the building and through the crack in the roof that got there by the initial explosion caused by the lightning. This can quickly engulf a building and make escape routes impassable.
A lightning strike... on the inside of a building? That's even less likely than a plane flying into one, statistically speaking. A direct strike on the building would almost entirely travel down the superstructure. I mean, it's probably theoretically possible, and it will probably happen at least once before the heat death of the universe—maybe even two or three times if we're lucky. Even an undetected fuel leak should have near-zero probability, assuming you require double-hulled tanks with appropriate sensors.
Flip side, the generator down in the basement catches fire and the fuel hoses rupture. There is now a fire in the basement of a building that is billowing diesel smoke, the entire structure becomes a chimney (including the stairwells and elevator shafts), and none of the exterior windows open for safety reasons. So everyone above a certain floor dies of smoke inhalation before they can be rescued.
Lightning, contractor errors, equipment malfunctions, sabotage, all happen more then floods.
And with the possible theoretical exception of lightning inside a building, all of those are more dangerous with the fire below you than above you, period. Only about 5% of fire deaths are caused by burns alone. The rest are caused by either smoke inhalation or a combination of smoke inhalation and burns. Depending on what stats you believe, 50-80% are caused primarily by smoke inhalation, mostly from carbon monoxide poisoning. You're better off in nearly every situation with the fire up above you than below you up until the point at which it cause the building to pancake (a danger that is also much more likely if you put the generators towards the bottom of the building).
In other words, this is what happens when a bunch of bureaucrats see a disaster and immediately react by saying, "We need to do something to prevent this," rather than stopping to think about whether it can realistically be prevented and/or whether the things that could prevent it have side effects that are worse than the problem they're trying to fix.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, imprecision there. I meant revenue minus cost (of the goods being sold).
Small self-correction: not just at the speed limit, but rather at all speeds that are typical for the road. So if vehicles frequently drive ten over or under the limit, it has to be long enough to pass the above test at ten over or under as well.
Who said anything about adjusting? The yellow light must, by definition, be long enough so that after the driver has had a moment to notice the light, a driver driving the heaviest, hardest-to-brake vehicle that is likely to travel the road in question either has time to stop safely or, if the vehicle is too close to stop safely before entering the intersection, has enough time to safely roll through the intersection at the speed limit before the cross direction turns green. Period. Any intersection with a shorter yellow light is a fundamentally unsafe intersection, and should result in jail time for the traffic engineer who set it up.
The problem is that I have little choice in the matter when it comes to whether someone is tailgating me. Even if their insurance does pay for the damage, it still causes me an inconvenience (and possibly injures me) if I stop to avoid getting caught by a red light camera and the guy behind me doesn't.
That was mostly sarcasm, but it varies widely by product category.
For books, 20–55% of the cover price typically gets spread among a wholesaler, and a retailer combined, so something like 10–40% of the cost goes to the retailer, depending on the book. Most other authors have to be close to the high end of that range to get into stores at all, but books by well-known authors can, as I understand it, often be on the low side. And if the bookstore ends up with books that aren't allowed to be returned (most can be, but not all), the percentage may be a lot lower, though. Also, most booksellers I've seen charge less than the cover price as a general rule, so the percentage is even lower.
The typical retail markup for software is also 40%, but this falls under the same basic rules as books, IIRC.
For gasoline, IIRC, typically a single-digit percentage goes to the retailer. The rest goes to the distributor, the manufacturer, and taxes.
For certain high-ticket, high-end electronics, such as iPods, from what I've read, only about 15% of the cost goes to the retailer. For high-end cables like Monster cables, 45% of the cost goes to retailers.
For movies at theaters, during the first week, almost everything goes to the studios, but I don't remember the details. This is, of course, why they charge three bucks for a soda that probably costs them fifty cents or so.
For groceries, particularly those where spoilage is a concern, only a little over 10% goes to the retailer.
And then, there are products that are loss leaders, where the store makes little or no money at all. Anything on sale usually falls into this category, under the hopes that people who buy those things will also buy something else with a higher markup.
So yes, 5% was a somewhat hyperbolic exaggeration, even for gasoline. The point was not the number. The point was that statistically most of what you're paying goes to companies upstream that are not local.
Correction: Obama probably doesn't care that electronic versions of the books are cheaper because he is buying them for gift purposes, and you can't realistically give electronic copies of a book as gifts thanks to DRM and our abusive copyright laws.
That covers the 5% of the product's cost that goes to the local business. What do you do about the other 95%?
Out of all of the three times (I think... maybe four) that my credit card number has been stolen in the past few years, thus far it has always been stolen at a local merchant. Your credit card number is much safer on Amazon's servers than on a piece of plastic handled by a minimum-wage employee at a local store or restaurant, statistically speaking.
Also, once you have an account with a store, you never have to create a new one. I usually order stuff from the same three or four stores all the time, because they usually have the best prices on the things that I buy. That's really not a huge inconvenience. And you can opt out of email from those companies.
You didn't park that car much, did you? :-D
Umm... ACA doesn't kick in until you have at least 50 employees. To put that in perspective, assuming your store is open 16 hours per day, multiply the number of employees you want in the store at any given moment by 2.8 to compute the number of full-time-equivalent employees. So even a fairly large restaurant with ten or twelve people in it at any given moment still falls well below the 50-employee threshold where the ACA kicks in. A typical bookstore chain falls below the threshold until it has five or six locations....
No, fifty full-time-equivalent employees is just short of a Wal-Mart-sized store. If you're that big, you are not a small business. Period. You're a medium-sized business. You're bringing in at least three-quarters of a million dollars in profit annually just to cover the employee salaries alone, assuming you pay everyone minimum wage, not counting your contributions to FICA, location rent, business insurance, etc. A bookstore making a million bucks a year would have to sell five or six hundred books per day at typical markups to cover those sorts of costs. That's simply not a small business, and anyone who claims that the ACA is going to cause small businesses to go bankrupt is either ill-informed or deliberately distorting reality to promote an agenda.
Actually, IMO, you're off by a mile.
First, if you can find significantly better deals online, then the store is overpriced, period. You have a choice when you run a store: sell cheap and make it up in volume, or sell expensive and lose the sale. When I buy DVDs and Blu-Rays at Fry's, they're usually very close to or cheaper than the Amazon price, because the Amazon price builds in a margin to accommodate the free shipping, whereas Fry's doesn't have to absorb that fairly significant cost. And they'll price match Amazon if you're willing to spend the time. If Fry's can do that, so can any store of any reasonable size. It's not like Fry's is a huge chain. (They have 34 stores, by my count, which is way too small to get the sort of bulk buying deals that places like Wal-Mart get.)
Second, when I shop locally, it usually isn't because of in-person browsing except insofar as that browsing lets me walk out with something in my hands immediately. If I can wait a few days, there's no advantage, so this is only important for somewhat urgent or time-critical needs (e.g. I'm bored and want a movie to watch tonight, I'm working on a project and need parts for it immediately, etc.).
It also isn't because of personalized services. Most local stores have customer service that ranks lower than Amazon in my book, frankly. And they can't hope to compete with Amazon's personalization—lists of movies that I would probably like based on large quantities of data mining.
Loyalty to the community doesn't even come into play. If there are no businesses selling a particular product in my community, for the most part, the only real disadvantage to me is that it will take a couple of extra days to get things. That's not a good enough reason to prop up a store that is underperforming. Besides, most of my shopping doesn't actually happen in my immediate community anyway. During the week, I typically make a beeline from home to work and back, and I mostly shop at stores that fall along that line, plus or minus, only half of which is in my community. Half the weekend, I'm in other cities, and I'm at least as likely to shop there as in my own community. As long as I can get food in my community, that's all I really require of it. Everything else is convenient if it is there, but is entirely optional.
No, when I shop locally, it is invariably because I'm going that way anyway. Want to make me a hundred times more likely to shop in your store? Sell good food, and by that, I don't just mean pastries and crap. I have to eat. If I can grab supper at your store on my way home, I'm much more likely to shop there than at other stores where I can't. I would say that availability of sandwiches and hot foods is the #1 consideration in terms of shopping locally.
The second consideration is whether you're selling something that I need with some immediacy and/or can't readily order online (e.g. frozen foods).
The third consideration is whether I'm already at your store for something else that falls into one of the above categories.
The fourth and final consideration is whether I need more information than I can actually get online without being able to physically examine the product. This one is rare, however, and is mostly limited to furniture and products for which I need very precise physical measurements like clothing or, occasionally, capacitors.
In short, if you want me to shop at your store, sell me supper, sell movies at a price that competes with Amazon, sell random household items that are cheap enough that it wouldn't make sense to buy enough of them to get free shipping, or sell groceries. In other words, be Fry's, Wal-Mart, or Target. Those are pretty much the only three stores that I regularly shop in locally. Notice that all of these stores sell me supper, sell movies at competitive prices (except for Target), sell random household items at reasonably cheap prices, and (except for Fry's) sell groceries.
Or sell gasoline and locate yourself on one of my regular driving routes. However, that only goes so far unless you're also selling something else I need at a reasonable price.
Sometimes, yes. However, those signs are A. way too small to read clearly from sufficient distance on roads with 40+ MPH speed limits, and B. not always timed to coincide with the end of the yellow, thus frequently causing people to incorrectly slow down, which causes unnecessary traffic backups.
The only solid lines I've seen at intersections are the ones that begin about ten feet after the start of a turn lane. I suppose they might do what you're describing in some places, though. Same basic idea as my line suggestion, but a bit too subtle for my taste, since most people are looking at the road in front of them, not at the dotted line to the side.
Neither. The stripes would be set so that the amount of time that it takes for a vehicle (any vehicle) to travel from that line to the intersection at the speed limit is a fraction of a second less than the time it takes for the light to change from yellow to red. If you're significantly before that line, you need to stop.
The yellow length should be set in such a way that takes into account the things you mention. If it isn't, the intersection is not safe.
Show me somewhere in the U.S. where the yellow lights are a reasonable length, and I'll show you an intersection that has almost no red light violations. In study after study, this has been proven. If people are running red lights with any regularity, it is always because the yellow cycle was too short. Therefore, these lights only serve to punish people for failing to work around the city's poor traffic engineering.
Of course, this ignores the occasional driver who runs a red light because he or she isn't paying attention, but those drivers aren't affected by the cameras anyway. (Well, they're punished by them, but the cameras aren't a better deterrent than the "Oh, s**t! I just ran a red light!" realization that such drivers already have.)
Don't forget pissed off drivers. When you've just hit the last eight lights in a row red, most people find themselves a lot more motivated to try to make it through one, because doing so means that they'll probably make it through the following one or two lights on green. There's only so much that most people can handle, and once people cross that threshold, their driving becomes markedly worse. Unfortunately, our nation's traffic light management sucks harder than a Hoover, so this is a much more common problem than it should rightfully be in any sane universe.
For those folks who don't want to take the time to read the article, briefly put, the number of T-bone crashes decreased, but the average severity of those crashes increased, presumably because of people racing to try to get through the light so that they wouldn't get ticketed, failing to do so, and thus being at an unsafe speed at the time of collision.
Thus, even the costs associated with T-bone crashes increased, and although this study did not break down the cost into medical and non-medical costs, one can reasonably assume that although the injury rate decreased because the total number of accidents decreased, the severity of injuries was probably greater, resulting in increased medical costs. That's just not a very good trade.
Red light cameras do not merely encourage positive behavior. They equally encourage both positive behavior and far more reckless behavior, and on average, make things worse according to nearly every metric. Increasing yellow light times (by starting the yellow cycle a second earlier) make things better by nearly every metric. Why don't we do this? Greed. Write your legislators and demand a ban on red light cameras and a return to more reasonable yellow light times.
No, what is needed are not cameras. What is needed are some combination of:
Any one of these would result in a far, far greater reduction in traffic light violations and the resulting collisions than any camera system possibly could. The combination of all three would almost (if not completely) eliminate the problem entirely.
Technically, yes, but the fact of the matter is that increasing the probability of a driver slamming on his or her brakes increases the probability of a rear-end collision, which is a simply inexcusable thing for law enforcement to be doing, given that there are so many better ways of solving the problem in question that do not result in such a negative side effect.
Therefore, given that red light cameras are significantly less effective than alternative techniques, the only real reason to consider them is revenue generation. And if that's the government's only purpose for enforcing traffic laws in a given community, its leaders should resign.
You're assuming the fire doors A. work, and B. are between you and the fire. At least in the case of the WTC collapse, reports suggest that what I described did, in fact, occur, making the upper stairwells impassable.
Whether the fire doors between a basement generator and any stairwells would fail or not (or would get propped open in violation of code because somebody got too hot, or...) is often dependent upon circumstances beyond the designer's control.
If they repost this, does that count as one of the hoaxes? :-)
Also, can we have a similar rule for a**hole bicyclists who flagrantly ignore traffic rules? And maybe an automatic door-open rule for motorcyclists who are splitting lanes because the speed limit isn't fast enough for them? Thanks.
Moreover, it has an easy answer. If there's enough time for both vehicles to stop, both vehicles put on their brakes. If not, both vehicles brake as hard as they can and count on the passive safety systems to do their job to the maximum extent possible.
It might also be worth considering a J-turn for one or both vehicles, then flooring it. I'm not sure which is greater: the rolling resistance of a wheel under braking or the sliding resistance of a wheel spinning the opposite direction. Either way, your transmission is likely to be shot after doing this, not to mention your tire tread, so such a technique would need to be reserved for only the most extreme dangers, assuming that it proves to be more efficient than braking (and if it doesn't, then you'd never do this).
The problem with that is that not all check engine problems require immediate attention, yet if given the opportunity, many manufacturers might choose to brick their car this for every little problem, urgent or not, so that they can make more money off of unnecessary service work.
For example, a check engine light caused by a lean condition that's just slightly out of spec, for example, will cause no detectable drivability issues, and at worst, increases your NOX emissions slightly. However, a lean condition beyond some much more severe threshold could cause your car to stall. Choosing that threshold is critical.
Likewise, a transmission warning light caused by a bad solenoid can cause you to be missing overdrive and spend more fuel, but you could drive that way for years without a problem. And I'm not entirely sure if the car even knows whether the vehicle failed to shift because of a stuck solenoid (probably harmless), a slipping band (mostly harmless), or a broken band (which could cause a catastrophic transmission failure under the right circumstances).
Similarly, a failure of the brakes (caused by loss of fluid or insufficient pad thickness, is a serious problem, and should cause the car to be limited to slow speeds until the problem is resolved. A failure of the ABS unit, however, is not a serious problem, and should not. A stuck caliper that causes slight disc warping or pad squealing typically is not. However, a stuck caliper that results in significant braking continuously while driving could cause brake failure, particularly if you're dealing with drum brakes.
And so on. So there would need to be a strict set of government standards that defines what is or is not truly a safety issue, and standards that define where various thresholds should be set. That's a nontrivial heap of standards. This is not to say that it shouldn't be done, but rather that it needs to be approached carefully, methodically, and with an eye towards the complete picture.
Also, completely shutting down the vehicle is a very bad idea that could leave someone stranded in the middle of nowhere, and could actually put someone's life at greater risk than driving under certain circumstances. It should instead put the vehicle into a low-speed "limp mode" so that the user won't be willing to drive it much farther than the nearest repair place, but where the user at least has the ability to get it to the repair place without calling a tow truck. :-)
The only major problems I'm aware of with the full version of Slashdot on mobile devices are the ratings slider (which could be trivially fixed by adding support for touch events or by providing an alternative set of up-down arrow controls for the two values that appear only on mobile devices via CSS trickery) and the fact that the minimum column width is too damn wide for viewing on a phone, so you end up scrolling back and forth (which again could be trivially fixed with CSS by adding the various -*-text-size-adjust CSS properties). Incidentally, that second part is a pain in the backside on high-resolution laptops, too, because of the way scaling works in most browsers.
It would, of course, make sense to load fewer items initially on mobile devices, for performance reasons, and there are probably a bunch of other minor behavioral tweaks, but none of those sorts of changes requires a separate site, or even anything approaching a separate site. In fact, if done correctly, those sorts of differences should be entirely transparent to the user up until the user hits the magic point where it can't scroll any further until after it loads more data.
In short, most of the time, the only reason for needing a mobile version of a website is that the CSS and JavaScript designers/coders made poor design decisions in the first place. Thus, in most cases, the enhancements that improve usability on the mobile site would also improve usability on the full site for folks with less-than-perfect vision or too-high-resolution screens, and the enhancements that remove functionality on the mobile site just piss people off. The exceptions are few and far between, and by that, I mean that I can't think of any, but I'm willing to accept that in theory, one or two might exist somewhere in the world.
A lightning strike... on the inside of a building? That's even less likely than a plane flying into one, statistically speaking. A direct strike on the building would almost entirely travel down the superstructure. I mean, it's probably theoretically possible, and it will probably happen at least once before the heat death of the universe—maybe even two or three times if we're lucky. Even an undetected fuel leak should have near-zero probability, assuming you require double-hulled tanks with appropriate sensors.
Flip side, the generator down in the basement catches fire and the fuel hoses rupture. There is now a fire in the basement of a building that is billowing diesel smoke, the entire structure becomes a chimney (including the stairwells and elevator shafts), and none of the exterior windows open for safety reasons. So everyone above a certain floor dies of smoke inhalation before they can be rescued.
And with the possible theoretical exception of lightning inside a building, all of those are more dangerous with the fire below you than above you, period. Only about 5% of fire deaths are caused by burns alone. The rest are caused by either smoke inhalation or a combination of smoke inhalation and burns. Depending on what stats you believe, 50-80% are caused primarily by smoke inhalation, mostly from carbon monoxide poisoning. You're better off in nearly every situation with the fire up above you than below you up until the point at which it cause the building to pancake (a danger that is also much more likely if you put the generators towards the bottom of the building).
In other words, this is what happens when a bunch of bureaucrats see a disaster and immediately react by saying, "We need to do something to prevent this," rather than stopping to think about whether it can realistically be prevented and/or whether the things that could prevent it have side effects that are worse than the problem they're trying to fix.
Sure. I'll give you body odor for your Ford Escort.
Step 1: Run around the building a hundred times.
Step 2: There's no step 2!