*Even* if something unexpected happens. We're talking about computers here. All you have to do is ensure that the rear vehicle brakes first and hardest and there's no problem. That's the advantage of vehicles that can communicate with one another in a real-time wireless mesh network. They don't need long reaction times the way humans do; the rear vehicle knows about the problem almost instantly, without the need to see the brake lights on the car in front of it.
But with computers controlling cars, the only cause of accidents *should* be "the wheels came off" and other similar classes of failure. All other accidents are caused by human error.
Unlike a human, a computer can simultaneously scan every inch of surface ahead of you, slowing down prior to places where water is pooling on the road, correctly computing the maximum speed for the vehicle going around a given corner knowing its tread depth, the slope of the road, and any turning radius changes it must make mid-turn. It can learn from skid indications on other vehicles and slow down before bad spots. It can make up the time by going significantly faster than the speed limit on straight stretches. It can know that the car ahead of it is about to change into its lane to pass a slow-moving semi and can either slow down or speed up, tell the other car to wait a second, etc. In short, the accident rate should be close to zero (pedestrian/bicycle collisions notwithstanding) unless there's a failure in the hardware or the software.
In fact, if you do it right, you could even save fuel by having computers drive. On straight stretches, if designed correctly, cars could travel quite literally bumper-to-bumper, with the rear car pushing several cars in front of it. Nobody would ever suddenly put on their brakes or change lanes, and everyone would know precisely when to turn for curves, so there's no need for the usual safety margins. Just ease up on the car in front of you until the bumpers touch, then the front car goes into neutral.
The summary is wrong. From the actual article, they compared the total number of collisions. The collision rate is measured in terms of the number of crashes per 100 vehicles.
No matter how high you crank the fines, it won't reduce the rate of crashes. The numbers just aren't there. Accidents caused by distraction are limited almost exclusively to accidents caused by traffic stopping suddenly. Rear-end collisions make up a little over 5% of all wrecks. So even if every single one of them were caused by somebody talking on the phone, you'd still only see single-digit improvement. At any given time, around 1 in every 20 cars has someone talking on the phone, which would make that pretty unlikely. Maybe you'd see a reduction in red-light running and the resulting crashes, but even that is really grasping at straws as far as justification goes.
At least the laws haven't started telling people to pull over to make or take calls. If you convinced people to do that, you'd have a significant increase in accidents. Getting onto and off of a highway from the shoulder is one of the most dangerous things you can do in a car, and far exceeds the risk of driving with a cell phone to your ear. If my stats are correct, more than four out of five highway accidents occur when someone is entering or leaving the highway.
Exactly. Cars are unsafe primarily because of the meat popsicle behind the wheel. I've been saying that for years.
The government should mandate that:
all new vehicles built after 2020 have the ability to drive completely unassisted. Let the car companies scramble to figure out how to make it happen.
all cars contain transceivers that allow them to communicate (anonymously) with other vehicles nearby on the road. Let the car manufacturers collaborate to figure out standards for that communication.
basic transponders be retrofitted into all non-new vehicles by 2025 that identify the exact location of the vehicle, the speed of the vehicle, tire inflation warning status if available, slip indicator status if available, etc. and transmit a warning signal when brakes are activated.
Eventually, this would culminate in banning manual vehicles on major highways in about 2050-2060 and putting mileage limits on their use elsewhere. Insurance rates would no doubt help in making that part happen.
I can play every board game that I've paid for and Apple's approved.
Just to pick nits, for something as simple as a board game, you probably don't really need to use native APIs anyway. Just write it as a web app. At least on iPhone, you can save a web app to the home screen as a standalone app. I'm assuming that the iPad will probably have similar functionality.
With an iPhone offline web app, when you launch it, it takes over the whole screen (minus the menu bar, IIRC). The HTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc. is cached locally on the device, so the app works even when you don't have access to a Wi-Fi or cellular network. It can even store data locally on the device (SQL storage, HTML5 local storage, cookies, etc.) and upload it later if/when a network connection becomes available. And you can use multi-touch events to interact much like you can with a native app.
Of course, it's harder for the developer to make money with web apps, but not impossible. Web programming is certainly not sufficient for some types of apps, but for board games? Sure.
There's definitely a "good enough". If you have locks on the doors with cameras, people can still break in at night because you don't have guard dogs. If you have guard dogs, people can still break in by helicopter and attack the skylights on the roof. If you put the guard dogs inside, people can still wreak havoc by throwing meat to the guard dogs, causing them to run wild and knock down shelves trying to get to it. If you electrify the windows, doors, and skylights, people can still tunnel in with a boring machine. And so on.
So there's definitely a point at which you can rightfully conclude that the cost of securing something exceeds its value. At that point, normally you stop. In this case, we can conclude that the cell companies believe that the value of the encrypted voice data is near zero. What we have here is a disagreement over that assertion.
The problem is, as I said, the chipsets don't exist. There's quad band GSM, but for 3G on both networks in the U.S., you would need a six-band chipset and appropriate antenna hardware. Also, any design you build that covers so many frequencies would likely result in compromising signal strength.
I suspect most people would love to buy a phone, then pick a service. It's just not feasible in the U.S., however, because:
AT&T: uses GSM, uses one set of frequencies for 3G
T-Mobile: uses GSM, uses a *different* set of frequencies for 3G, and AFAIK no phone chipsets currently exist that support both sets of 3G frequencies.
Forget the cable and connector costs. You'll spend about as much on a proper spring-loaded, cutting punchdown tool by itself as you would buying a cheap Wi-Fi router.... The spool of wire, wall plates, keystones, etc. are just the icing on the cake.
It's not a 20-year-old picture. It's a new picture of a character that has existed for 23 years. If a new picture of a person who has been alive for 23 years is legal, so should a new picture of a character that has existed for 23 years. The logic is actually fairly sound; if a cartoon character is going to be treated as a person, it must be fully treated as a person, and therefore if the character has existed for more than 65 years, it should also qualify for social security.... Anything less is just absurd. Anything more is also absurd. Indeed, the entire nature of the question is absurd....
I wired my house when I first moved in. I am not a typical computer user. You are not, either. Most people pay other people to wire their homes.
Compared to spending at least a couple hundred dollars per endpoint, a low-end $40 wireless router is almost invariably a better choice for homes with even two computers. By the time you get to three computers (assuming your router is within normal cable-plugging distance from the first one), you've exceeded the cost of installing even high-end gear with NAS and backup capabilities built in (e.g. Time Capsule).
And unlike gasoline, there's no need to pump lithium around the car, so the risk of fire is much lower assuming adequate tank protection from puncture damage. With electric, instead of needing to protect a significant portion of the car from overheating or puncture damage, you only have a single compartment to protect, and that's typically underneath the vehicle.
Depends on how narrowly you define the immune system. There are microglial cells that operate within the brain and spinal cord that behave like macrophages, except that they are in the brain and spinal cord. Presumably any immunotherapy would be training those cells, not mucking with T cells or B cells. I'm just guessing, though. Or they might be triggering inflammation sufficient to allow other immune cells through. Not sure.
The problem is that even though they are fixed assets, most people aren't really keen on punching holes in all the walls to run ethernet cables to their kids' rooms. It's not about the ugliness of wires. It's about the expense of installation. Most households with kids that have a computer have more than one computer.
The immune system can obliterate things in the brain--meningitis being the obvious example. In fact, there are some experimental tests being done that use the immune system to kill cancer cells in the brain. The immune system just doesn't have a mechanism for dealing with prions, and there's some possibility that it may be complicit in spreading the problem. And there have been some partially successful immunotherapy experiments on prions in mice, too.
I don't think there is a way to get access to the microphone from a web page. On iPhone, Safari doesn't allow any plug-ins to load. From the description, it sounds like this just tells the phone to make a local call over the cell network to a special number that then forwards your call to the desired destination.
Slashdot Mirror
Size matters. No car is going to bother to stop for something that small. Now if they throw a poodle out the window, that's another story.
*Even* if something unexpected happens. We're talking about computers here. All you have to do is ensure that the rear vehicle brakes first and hardest and there's no problem. That's the advantage of vehicles that can communicate with one another in a real-time wireless mesh network. They don't need long reaction times the way humans do; the rear vehicle knows about the problem almost instantly, without the need to see the brake lights on the car in front of it.
But with computers controlling cars, the only cause of accidents *should* be "the wheels came off" and other similar classes of failure. All other accidents are caused by human error.
Unlike a human, a computer can simultaneously scan every inch of surface ahead of you, slowing down prior to places where water is pooling on the road, correctly computing the maximum speed for the vehicle going around a given corner knowing its tread depth, the slope of the road, and any turning radius changes it must make mid-turn. It can learn from skid indications on other vehicles and slow down before bad spots. It can make up the time by going significantly faster than the speed limit on straight stretches. It can know that the car ahead of it is about to change into its lane to pass a slow-moving semi and can either slow down or speed up, tell the other car to wait a second, etc. In short, the accident rate should be close to zero (pedestrian/bicycle collisions notwithstanding) unless there's a failure in the hardware or the software.
In fact, if you do it right, you could even save fuel by having computers drive. On straight stretches, if designed correctly, cars could travel quite literally bumper-to-bumper, with the rear car pushing several cars in front of it. Nobody would ever suddenly put on their brakes or change lanes, and everyone would know precisely when to turn for curves, so there's no need for the usual safety margins. Just ease up on the car in front of you until the bumpers touch, then the front car goes into neutral.
The summary is wrong. From the actual article, they compared the total number of collisions. The collision rate is measured in terms of the number of crashes per 100 vehicles.
No matter how high you crank the fines, it won't reduce the rate of crashes. The numbers just aren't there. Accidents caused by distraction are limited almost exclusively to accidents caused by traffic stopping suddenly. Rear-end collisions make up a little over 5% of all wrecks. So even if every single one of them were caused by somebody talking on the phone, you'd still only see single-digit improvement. At any given time, around 1 in every 20 cars has someone talking on the phone, which would make that pretty unlikely. Maybe you'd see a reduction in red-light running and the resulting crashes, but even that is really grasping at straws as far as justification goes.
At least the laws haven't started telling people to pull over to make or take calls. If you convinced people to do that, you'd have a significant increase in accidents. Getting onto and off of a highway from the shoulder is one of the most dangerous things you can do in a car, and far exceeds the risk of driving with a cell phone to your ear. If my stats are correct, more than four out of five highway accidents occur when someone is entering or leaving the highway.
Won't help. Chauffeurs are still people. What prevents them from wanting to use a phone while driving their socialites around?
Exactly. Cars are unsafe primarily because of the meat popsicle behind the wheel. I've been saying that for years.
The government should mandate that:
Eventually, this would culminate in banning manual vehicles on major highways in about 2050-2060 and putting mileage limits on their use elsewhere. Insurance rates would no doubt help in making that part happen.
Just to pick nits, for something as simple as a board game, you probably don't really need to use native APIs anyway. Just write it as a web app. At least on iPhone, you can save a web app to the home screen as a standalone app. I'm assuming that the iPad will probably have similar functionality.
With an iPhone offline web app, when you launch it, it takes over the whole screen (minus the menu bar, IIRC). The HTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc. is cached locally on the device, so the app works even when you don't have access to a Wi-Fi or cellular network. It can even store data locally on the device (SQL storage, HTML5 local storage, cookies, etc.) and upload it later if/when a network connection becomes available. And you can use multi-touch events to interact much like you can with a native app.
Of course, it's harder for the developer to make money with web apps, but not impossible. Web programming is certainly not sufficient for some types of apps, but for board games? Sure.
There's definitely a "good enough". If you have locks on the doors with cameras, people can still break in at night because you don't have guard dogs. If you have guard dogs, people can still break in by helicopter and attack the skylights on the roof. If you put the guard dogs inside, people can still wreak havoc by throwing meat to the guard dogs, causing them to run wild and knock down shelves trying to get to it. If you electrify the windows, doors, and skylights, people can still tunnel in with a boring machine. And so on.
So there's definitely a point at which you can rightfully conclude that the cost of securing something exceeds its value. At that point, normally you stop. In this case, we can conclude that the cell companies believe that the value of the encrypted voice data is near zero. What we have here is a disagreement over that assertion.
Or http://xkcd.com/566/.
The problem is, as I said, the chipsets don't exist. There's quad band GSM, but for 3G on both networks in the U.S., you would need a six-band chipset and appropriate antenna hardware. Also, any design you build that covers so many frequencies would likely result in compromising signal strength.
I suspect most people would love to buy a phone, then pick a service. It's just not feasible in the U.S., however, because:
Forget the cable and connector costs. You'll spend about as much on a proper spring-loaded, cutting punchdown tool by itself as you would buying a cheap Wi-Fi router.... The spool of wire, wall plates, keystones, etc. are just the icing on the cake.
Then yeah, you're probably fine.
It's not a 20-year-old picture. It's a new picture of a character that has existed for 23 years. If a new picture of a person who has been alive for 23 years is legal, so should a new picture of a character that has existed for 23 years. The logic is actually fairly sound; if a cartoon character is going to be treated as a person, it must be fully treated as a person, and therefore if the character has existed for more than 65 years, it should also qualify for social security.... Anything less is just absurd. Anything more is also absurd. Indeed, the entire nature of the question is absurd....
You did use plenum cabling, right?
I wired my house when I first moved in. I am not a typical computer user. You are not, either. Most people pay other people to wire their homes.
Compared to spending at least a couple hundred dollars per endpoint, a low-end $40 wireless router is almost invariably a better choice for homes with even two computers. By the time you get to three computers (assuming your router is within normal cable-plugging distance from the first one), you've exceeded the cost of installing even high-end gear with NAS and backup capabilities built in (e.g. Time Capsule).
And unlike gasoline, there's no need to pump lithium around the car, so the risk of fire is much lower assuming adequate tank protection from puncture damage. With electric, instead of needing to protect a significant portion of the car from overheating or puncture damage, you only have a single compartment to protect, and that's typically underneath the vehicle.
Depends on how narrowly you define the immune system. There are microglial cells that operate within the brain and spinal cord that behave like macrophages, except that they are in the brain and spinal cord. Presumably any immunotherapy would be training those cells, not mucking with T cells or B cells. I'm just guessing, though. Or they might be triggering inflammation sufficient to allow other immune cells through. Not sure.
The problem is that even though they are fixed assets, most people aren't really keen on punching holes in all the walls to run ethernet cables to their kids' rooms. It's not about the ugliness of wires. It's about the expense of installation. Most households with kids that have a computer have more than one computer.
Nope.
Wi-fi versions are $499, $599, $699 for 16/32/64GB versions, respectively.
3G versions are $629, $729, $829, respectively.
The immune system can obliterate things in the brain--meningitis being the obvious example. In fact, there are some experimental tests being done that use the immune system to kill cancer cells in the brain. The immune system just doesn't have a mechanism for dealing with prions, and there's some possibility that it may be complicit in spreading the problem. And there have been some partially successful immunotherapy experiments on prions in mice, too.
Otherwise, yes, that's pretty close.
Ah. Callback. Yeah, that would work, too. Actually, that's probably more likely. Either way, no microphone access needed.
There is no Flash implementation on iPhone in Safari.
I don't think there is a way to get access to the microphone from a web page. On iPhone, Safari doesn't allow any plug-ins to load. From the description, it sounds like this just tells the phone to make a local call over the cell network to a special number that then forwards your call to the desired destination.