I also could not stop laughing when I read the article. Craigslist go public? WTF? Is this guy going to the same Craigslist I've been using forever?
It's apparent after reading this guy's article that he has no clue what Craigslist is. Hey, buddy, here's a clue: you haven't noticed the fact that the icon file you get when you bookmark it (or browse there on browsers like Safari) is a hippie peace sign?
Why craigslist works would be destroyed by any attempt to mass-market and package it, which would be seemingly required for an IPO. Besides, as I understand it, Craigslist is a labor of love for the founder and the staff, so an IPO would only destroy what they've built.
In short, this guy really needs to get a life... not everybody is out there to make a killing in the stock market. Some people are *gasp* just happy to make a modest living for themselves doing something they love.
the only problem that I see is that some brazilians create communities with an english title and use only portuguese to comunicate, it upset some english speaking people. if you create a community and someone posts with an undesirable language, ignore or delete the posts...
The even bigger issue is when they take a formerly low-traffic topic that WAS primarily in English and start posting only in Portuguese. This has essentially happened to the Orkut "Bloggers" community. Almost 80% of the traffic there is in Portuguese.
Let me echo the statements of others that said "This has been possible forever" by saying that I was doing this with a Pacific Bell ISDN line six years ago. I discovered that they weren't authenticating any of the data I sent out on the D-channel, they were just passing it along.
Also, the reason why many VoIP providers are passing along Caller ID data without verification is legitimate. VoIP has no concept of "numbers" tied to hard physical "lines". Many VoIP providers sell outgoing service that is not tied to any physical telephone number. This is nothing new: conventional telcos have been doing that for years (it used to be called OutWATS) over T1s. If my VoIP gateway provider has no physical phone number to set my calls to, what are they supposed to do? This is the #1 reason all those telemarketer calls are labelled "OUT OF AREA", BTW.
In my case, I set the Caller ID to the POTS line that terminates into the same phone system. However, it would be trivial for me to set it to something like 714-853-1212, and it would get passed.
The problem is not that I can set Caller ID to any arbitrary number, but that idiots are actually depending upon an in-band signalling system which depends upon third parties (private PABXs) for the data as a secure authentication method.
I don't personally see any easy fix to this, nor should there be. The telecom business is increasingly having small players in it, and it will be difficult to fix this alleged "problem" without locking out these same small players.
My friend in Southern California works for a company that builds concrete structures (bridges, parking garages, etc.). On several occasions he has worked up bids for extensions and modifications of the Disneyland monorail. Those projects were all cancelled because of price. There was a phenomenally high per-foot price for the beam, but I won't try to pull an actual number out of my fuzzy memory. Disney did make some small changes to accomodate California Adventure. My friend's company bid, but lost on that project.
Probably because your friend's bid was too expensive.
In Japan, where monorail systems are more common, they are considered "cheap" technology because all the components can be manufactured offsite, dragged to the installation site, and literally dropped in place. In Las Vegas, they chose a more expensive construction method (while the beams were made offsite, the support structures were cast in place).
One of the reasons why Las Vegas chose monorail was because of the "hidden costs" that light-rail advocates hide. Business disruption caused by construction is one of the biggest costs to any infrastructure construction project. When the LV Monorail was under construction, the business impact was minimal.
Monorail construction works a little like this: dig a hole, drop in a tower, bolt a rail to it. Lather, rinse, repeat. On one of the recently-constructed Hitachi systems, they even used a special monorail car with a crane on it to lift the beams into place.
No light-rail system I've ever seen built can claim "minimal impact." The biggest impact the LV Monorail has had on the existing businesses was caused by street-level improvements that Clark County decided to do to streamline traffic.
I wasn't comparing it to elevated light rail. Monorail, by it's nature, must be elevated. Light rail does not, and thus can be significantly cheaper.
Non-grade seperate light rail is dangerous for both pedestrians and automobiles. The fact of the matter is, trains and cars do not mix. Accidents on streetcar systems involving the death of either an automobile occupant or a pedestrian happen on a regular basis.
The only safe way to add rail-based transit of any kind is to make it grade-seperate.
To compare at-grade streetcar systems (which are unsafe) to a safe, elevated system is comparing apples to oranges. Why would you want to put streetcars on the same streets that are too clogged to handle automotive traffic effectively? Why not just run buses at that point? They're cheaper than streetcars, and don't require any infrastructure.
Disneyland does have some fire fighting and rescue equipment on the property, but I don't believe the have ladder trucks or cherry pickers tall enough for a monorail evacuation.
As of the recent addition of Downtown Disney and Disney's California Adventure, there is now a City of Anaheim Fire Dept. station and a Anaheim Police Department station on the property. The police station (and the office for the Fire Dept.) are visible from the monorail as you exit the Downtown Disney station. The Anaheim Fire Dept. station has a long-reach ladder truck specifically for rescues involving high-points on rides and neighboring mid-rise hotels.
Previosly, the City had a fire station two blocks away on Clementine and Freedman Streets (Freedman Street is now called "Disney Way").
That's BART. MUNI is the bus system. The failure was less than two years ago, and there was no immediate danger, such as a fire in the tunnel. As I've already pointed out, the evacuation procedures for the monorail were for extreme circumstances.
No, it was MUNI. MUNI stands for the "Municipal Railway." MUNI runs six streetcar lines, five of which use the upper tracks in the Market Street subway. The automation system failure affected MUNI, not BART. It was in 1998, and is colorfully referred to by locals as the "Muni Metro Meltdown".
Except, a few years ago, this was actually happening in Kern County, California. A gas station owner paid a local computer programmer to hack the code of his electronic pumps so that it would "cheat", but catch up at the right time for the state's established "test container" volume. Supposedly, it was a trivial hack that anybody who knows 68xx series assembler could do in their sleep.
First off, Disneyland's choice regarding the Disneyland Monorail had nothing to do with cost, or efficiency. It has more to do with Disney's internal pricing policies regarding the two Anaheim parks than anything else. We are actually now hearing that there WILL be extensions to the Disneyland Monorail at some point in the future, but not to the parking structure.. likely to a theoretical "third" park that is still in development.
Secondly, please provide some proof to the claim that Monorail is more expensive than an elevated, grade seperate light rail.
Thirdly, evacuating a monorail is no different than any other elevated train. If you have no catwalk (like the Disneyland monorails, or even the Chicago "El"), you just don't. However, only TWICE (that I was able to find) in the entire 40 year operating history of the Disneyland Monorail has an evacuation been required. In both cases, City of Anaheim ladder trucks were used, one of which is stationed ON DISNEYLAND PROPERTY anyway. The simple fact of the matter is it is much easier for ANY transit vehicle to proceed to the nearest station than to stop dead on the tracks and evacuate mid-span. I don't care who you are, monorail, light rail, or even busway.. a mid-span evacuation is dangerous and not routinely done by any of these transit modes.
A couple of years ago, SF-MUNI (the light rail system in San Francisco) experienced a complete failure of the automation system that runs the subway. Trains were stopped, dead, inside underground tunnels. No effort was made by SF-MUNI to evacuate passengers, even though the SF-MUNI subways are equipped with catwalks and emergency exits. Some passengers were stuck in trains for 2 or more hours.
The fact of the matter is, very few rail systems routinely evacuate passengers to the catwalks, even when they have them, unless their life is in immediate danger. There are more dangers present outside the train: high voltage, potential passing trains, etc.
Dunno. Considering that BART was the first fully automated passenger rail system in the world, I guess Europe is stll learning from the US.
"Driverless" is an important test concept on the Las Vegas Monorail not because it couldn't "theoretically" be done in the US (many systems, like SF-MUNI, BART, the Chicago "El", and the LA Metro Red Line are fully or partially automated). Questions of liability prevent many systems from operating "driverless." Concerns of organized labor (this was BART's problem) prevented other systems from running "driverless."
The technology has existed for 30 years (see BART). Because LV Monorail was largely privately funded, they got to dictate terms a lot more than a lot of transit agencies get to.
On BART, the "driver" does nothing more than push a "close door" button. They are not in control of the train, except when the automation system fails (which when I worked there in the 80's was "often"). However, part of BART's design was to have a 100% automated system. The "driver" is there solely because of a concession to the transit operator's unions. 99% of the time, the BART operator is just passively sitting in his chair.. bored out of his tiny little mind.
SFO Airport SkyTrain is not, technically, a "mass transit" system, it is an airport peoplemover. Many airport peoplemovers are "driverless", including Denver's. I was speaking strictly of mass transit systems.
Docklands Light Rail isn't in the US. At least, last time I checked England was still part of the United Kingdom. Has something changed?
Wasn't supposed to be a solution for everybody. It was, however, supposed to be a solution for the Strip and Convention Center.
Being as the vast majority of the Las Vegas economy seems to revolve around liberating cash from tourists, looks like a good thing to me.
Besides, that $654 million dollars came entirely from the private sector, through direct financial contributions and bonds. The taxpayers of Clark County aren't paying for it, so why the hell are you bitching?
Much like BART had all kinds of computer problems when it first went online. These things were not totally unanticipated. This is "new" tech, in the sense that Las Vegas Monorail will be the first mass-transit application of "driverless" rail systems anywhere in the United States (BART comes close, but somebody still pushes the "close door" button).
Yes, it's "old" 70's (well, really, 50's, as it differs very little from the original Alweg designs that run on Seattle and Anaheim trackage) technology. However, buses are, what, 30's technology? Light rail vehicles, also, are nothing more than the modern version of the 1910's streetcars.
In transit systems, very little changes.. because it dosen't have to. The fundamental job of getting people from one place to another across town is a simple one: it dosen't need maglev. The physics of rubber tires on a concrete "roadway" are well understood. Construction techniques required to build the Las Vegas Monorail are essentially no different than what was needed to build I-215: once you know how to pour concrete, it doesn't matter if you're building a highway for cars or a guideway for a monorail.
Personally, I can't wait. Monorail technology is a good transit solution: clean and quiet, with the potential to be cheap and easily maintained. Hopefully, Las Vegas Monorail will prove out as good as the monorail enthusiasts (like myself) have been saying it will.
The top dog is perpetually being challenged. Saying that they are attacked often is handing them the opportunity to say that they are top dog.
To which, you rebute, "No, it's more like car thieves and car alarms. More cars without alarms are stolen than ones with car alamrs, because cars lacking alarms make easier targets. Similarly, insecure operating systems like Windows make easier targets, therefore, they recieve the majority of the attacks."
Plus, you missed the point of the previous statement, which was, "IIS is NOT top dog, yet it recieves the majority of the attacks. Why?"
I vaguely recall an incident involving their claim that IE was "inseperable" from the OS that involved faked video. Perhaps somebody else has more info, but that's probably a good start.
had to price a system (was in the wrong place when VOIP was mentioned in front of PHB). 60 Grandstreams is still damned expensive, plus a 60 line FXO/PBX
I don't know what phone system prices are like where you are, but here in the US any decent mid-scale PBX will cost you around $300-500 per extension, more with advanced features like ACD/Automated Attendant. You can build one hell of a VoIP system for around the same amount of money, if you have somebody who knows what they are doing put it together.
There are some pretty big advantages to a VoIP system as well.. things that no PBX can do, since (in the case of Asterisk) you have the Fine Source and a really neato API for extending the system. My home phone system, as an example, even has tie-ins to pgpGroupware, doing things like notifying you of important appointments via your phone, allowing you to record voice memos (which show up in the Groupware)... and allowing you to map speed-dial numbers from your contacts in the groupware. I'm a shitty programmer and it took me about an afternoon to get this kind of stuff up and running.
Then I found out that simple things like call forwarding didn't work..
Funny. On my Asterisk system here at home, call forwarding works just fine with Grandstream phones. Call forwarding is usually a function of the PBX.
Now, if what you're referring to is "attended transfer", yes, that's a known limitation of the BudgeTone 100. We keep being told on various mailing lists that Grandstream is working on a firmware that will allow for that functionality soon.
Yes, SCO was caught violating copyright. Is there any company in the world that doesn't do this, on occasion, by accident, or because some employee pretends he wrote something he didn't? I doubt it.
No other company besides SCO has had the audacity to claim that "millions" of lines of their code has been copied into an Open Source work, sued major players, and then backpedelled once the courts started requiring that they prove their claims.
That kinda puts them in a special category: one deserving of scrutiny, methinks.
It's a fine line between "helpful" and "annoying". For example, I would love an intelligent house robot that automatically found my keys in an odd place, moved them to where they belonged, and remembered that they moved them. If I asked "Hey, have you seen my keys?" the robot would be able to remember.
Likewise, if I tell the robot, "Please don't move my keys again" it should be able to honor that request.
Ultimately, however, (and this was pointed out in the article) gender in robots WILL be a major factor in how we interact with them. People do (for whatever reason) respond differently to males than females, and that gender role will play an important part in a robot's function. I, for one, would be much more comfortable if my house robot had female characteristics.. however, I'd probably be more comfortable with a factory automaton being male. On the third hand, more pedestrian robots (like Roomba) would likely not have any intentional gender identification.. but it would probably develop it anyway (as the article points out, most people who have Roombas view them as "female").
It is going to be inevitable that machines that share our personal space will likely take on some gender-specific traits, especially as the machines become mass-market. It's just what most human beings are: sexual animals with a highly developed forebrain.. and gender identification plays an important role. Why not use that to an advantage? It would seem to make for great UI design.
Yeah, and you apparently missed the part of the article that said the whole reason why he was picked up by the County Mounty was because he was behaving erratically.
Personally, this frightens me. As someone who is diabetic, I sure as hell would WANT my loved ones to be contacted if I was sitting in jail without insulin or my other meds. If I'm in diabetic ketoacidosis, I may be unable to think clearly and not communicate properly, and I certainly would look and act fall-down "drunk". I certainly would be in need of medical attention, and the sooner the better.
Two lessons need to be learned here. First, the Sheriff probably needs to send some of their officers to school and teach them that not everybody who acts drunk belongs in a detox cell -- there are serious, life-threatening medical conditions that can cause a person to act oddly. This having taken place at an Indian casino in "hick" Riverside County dosen't shock me at all.
Secondly, and this is a lesson everybody who has a medical condition that can result in this sort of thing needs to know: THERE IS NO SUBSTITUTE FOR A MEDICALERT BRACELET OR NECKLACE. Carrying a card in your wallet with your information on it IS NO HELP, because law enforcement and/or paramedics will often not look in a wallet.. hell, in some places, they are specifically instructed NOT TO because if money is missing the agency may be held liable. But, even a back-country sheriff is going to know enough about that little silver bracelet to at least call the number on it. I highly suspect that if this kid had a MedicAlert necklace or bracelet, he would have been transported to the hospital in the back of an ambulance, not to jail in the back of a squad car.
For me, just having the necklace that said "Diabetic" on the back has already resulted in my life being saved once. And the paramedics who found me didn't even have to call a phone number: they knew the second they found me and my MedicAlert necklace exactly what needed to be done. That's not "rooting around in your medical file".. that's telling emergency personell what they need to know to save your life.
Actually, this has not proven to be a major issue. There ARE people doing card-swaps, and there are loyalty card programs that provide savings based on purchases (Petco comes to mind here). Most loyalty-card rebate programs, however, have very short shelf-lifes (Ralphs does this here in SoCal, and typically it's a "buy $x in six weeks and get a coupon for $y").. so you just time the loyalty card swap on the boundaries of the programs.
Or, do what I do. Give them bogus information, and "lose" the card every six months or so and get another, with bogus information.
That said, I'm STILL using "Fuk Lucky"'s Vons Club card, along with about 20 other SoCal'ers...
Slashdot Mirror
Except, at least in the United States, such a snippet falls well within the guidelines of "fair use."
I also could not stop laughing when I read the article. Craigslist go public? WTF? Is this guy going to the same Craigslist I've been using forever?
It's apparent after reading this guy's article that he has no clue what Craigslist is. Hey, buddy, here's a clue: you haven't noticed the fact that the icon file you get when you bookmark it (or browse there on browsers like Safari) is a hippie peace sign?
Why craigslist works would be destroyed by any attempt to mass-market and package it, which would be seemingly required for an IPO. Besides, as I understand it, Craigslist is a labor of love for the founder and the staff, so an IPO would only destroy what they've built.
In short, this guy really needs to get a life... not everybody is out there to make a killing in the stock market. Some people are *gasp* just happy to make a modest living for themselves doing something they love.
Yes. Do a google search on "lasik dangers" and you'll find that when it goes wrong, it can go horribly wrong, up to and including blindness.
I, personally, wouldn't do it unless my vision was so bad I needed coke-bottle bottoms to see.
the only problem that I see is that some brazilians create communities with an english title and use only portuguese to comunicate, it upset some english speaking people. if you create a community and someone posts with an undesirable language, ignore or delete the posts...
The even bigger issue is when they take a formerly low-traffic topic that WAS primarily in English and start posting only in Portuguese. This has essentially happened to the Orkut "Bloggers" community. Almost 80% of the traffic there is in Portuguese.
Let me echo the statements of others that said "This has been possible forever" by saying that I was doing this with a Pacific Bell ISDN line six years ago. I discovered that they weren't authenticating any of the data I sent out on the D-channel, they were just passing it along.
Also, the reason why many VoIP providers are passing along Caller ID data without verification is legitimate. VoIP has no concept of "numbers" tied to hard physical "lines". Many VoIP providers sell outgoing service that is not tied to any physical telephone number. This is nothing new: conventional telcos have been doing that for years (it used to be called OutWATS) over T1s. If my VoIP gateway provider has no physical phone number to set my calls to, what are they supposed to do? This is the #1 reason all those telemarketer calls are labelled "OUT OF AREA", BTW.
In my case, I set the Caller ID to the POTS line that terminates into the same phone system. However, it would be trivial for me to set it to something like 714-853-1212, and it would get passed.
The problem is not that I can set Caller ID to any arbitrary number, but that idiots are actually depending upon an in-band signalling system which depends upon third parties (private PABXs) for the data as a secure authentication method.
I don't personally see any easy fix to this, nor should there be. The telecom business is increasingly having small players in it, and it will be difficult to fix this alleged "problem" without locking out these same small players.
My friend in Southern California works for a company that builds concrete structures (bridges, parking garages, etc.). On several occasions he has worked up bids for extensions and modifications of the Disneyland monorail. Those projects were all cancelled because of price. There was a phenomenally high per-foot price for the beam, but I won't try to pull an actual number out of my fuzzy memory. Disney did make some small changes to accomodate California Adventure. My friend's company bid, but lost on that project.
Probably because your friend's bid was too expensive.
In Japan, where monorail systems are more common, they are considered "cheap" technology because all the components can be manufactured offsite, dragged to the installation site, and literally dropped in place. In Las Vegas, they chose a more expensive construction method (while the beams were made offsite, the support structures were cast in place).
One of the reasons why Las Vegas chose monorail was because of the "hidden costs" that light-rail advocates hide. Business disruption caused by construction is one of the biggest costs to any infrastructure construction project. When the LV Monorail was under construction, the business impact was minimal.
Monorail construction works a little like this: dig a hole, drop in a tower, bolt a rail to it. Lather, rinse, repeat. On one of the recently-constructed Hitachi systems, they even used a special monorail car with a crane on it to lift the beams into place.
No light-rail system I've ever seen built can claim "minimal impact." The biggest impact the LV Monorail has had on the existing businesses was caused by street-level improvements that Clark County decided to do to streamline traffic.
I wasn't comparing it to elevated light rail. Monorail, by it's nature, must be elevated. Light rail does not, and thus can be significantly cheaper.
Non-grade seperate light rail is dangerous for both pedestrians and automobiles. The fact of the matter is, trains and cars do not mix. Accidents on streetcar systems involving the death of either an automobile occupant or a pedestrian happen on a regular basis.
The only safe way to add rail-based transit of any kind is to make it grade-seperate.
To compare at-grade streetcar systems (which are unsafe) to a safe, elevated system is comparing apples to oranges. Why would you want to put streetcars on the same streets that are too clogged to handle automotive traffic effectively? Why not just run buses at that point? They're cheaper than streetcars, and don't require any infrastructure.
Disneyland does have some fire fighting and rescue equipment on the property, but I don't believe the have ladder trucks or cherry pickers tall enough for a monorail evacuation.
As of the recent addition of Downtown Disney and Disney's California Adventure, there is now a City of Anaheim Fire Dept. station and a Anaheim Police Department station on the property. The police station (and the office for the Fire Dept.) are visible from the monorail as you exit the Downtown Disney station. The Anaheim Fire Dept. station has a long-reach ladder truck specifically for rescues involving high-points on rides and neighboring mid-rise hotels.
Previosly, the City had a fire station two blocks away on Clementine and Freedman Streets (Freedman Street is now called "Disney Way").
That's BART. MUNI is the bus system. The failure was less than two years ago, and there was no immediate danger, such as a fire in the tunnel. As I've already pointed out, the evacuation procedures for the monorail were for extreme circumstances.
No, it was MUNI. MUNI stands for the "Municipal Railway." MUNI runs six streetcar lines, five of which use the upper tracks in the Market Street subway. The automation system failure affected MUNI, not BART. It was in 1998, and is colorfully referred to by locals as the "Muni Metro Meltdown".
It was quite routine for the D
Except, a few years ago, this was actually happening in Kern County, California. A gas station owner paid a local computer programmer to hack the code of his electronic pumps so that it would "cheat", but catch up at the right time for the state's established "test container" volume. Supposedly, it was a trivial hack that anybody who knows 68xx series assembler could do in their sleep.
Woah, buddy.
First off, Disneyland's choice regarding the Disneyland Monorail had nothing to do with cost, or efficiency. It has more to do with Disney's internal pricing policies regarding the two Anaheim parks than anything else. We are actually now hearing that there WILL be extensions to the Disneyland Monorail at some point in the future, but not to the parking structure.. likely to a theoretical "third" park that is still in development.
Secondly, please provide some proof to the claim that Monorail is more expensive than an elevated, grade seperate light rail.
Thirdly, evacuating a monorail is no different than any other elevated train. If you have no catwalk (like the Disneyland monorails, or even the Chicago "El"), you just don't. However, only TWICE (that I was able to find) in the entire 40 year operating history of the Disneyland Monorail has an evacuation been required. In both cases, City of Anaheim ladder trucks were used, one of which is stationed ON DISNEYLAND PROPERTY anyway. The simple fact of the matter is it is much easier for ANY transit vehicle to proceed to the nearest station than to stop dead on the tracks and evacuate mid-span. I don't care who you are, monorail, light rail, or even busway.. a mid-span evacuation is dangerous and not routinely done by any of these transit modes.
A couple of years ago, SF-MUNI (the light rail system in San Francisco) experienced a complete failure of the automation system that runs the subway. Trains were stopped, dead, inside underground tunnels. No effort was made by SF-MUNI to evacuate passengers, even though the SF-MUNI subways are equipped with catwalks and emergency exits. Some passengers were stuck in trains for 2 or more hours.
The fact of the matter is, very few rail systems routinely evacuate passengers to the catwalks, even when they have them, unless their life is in immediate danger. There are more dangers present outside the train: high voltage, potential passing trains, etc.
Dunno. Considering that BART was the first fully automated passenger rail system in the world, I guess Europe is stll learning from the US.
"Driverless" is an important test concept on the Las Vegas Monorail not because it couldn't "theoretically" be done in the US (many systems, like SF-MUNI, BART, the Chicago "El", and the LA Metro Red Line are fully or partially automated). Questions of liability prevent many systems from operating "driverless." Concerns of organized labor (this was BART's problem) prevented other systems from running "driverless."
The technology has existed for 30 years (see BART). Because LV Monorail was largely privately funded, they got to dictate terms a lot more than a lot of transit agencies get to.
On BART, the "driver" does nothing more than push a "close door" button. They are not in control of the train, except when the automation system fails (which when I worked there in the 80's was "often"). However, part of BART's design was to have a 100% automated system. The "driver" is there solely because of a concession to the transit operator's unions. 99% of the time, the BART operator is just passively sitting in his chair.. bored out of his tiny little mind.
SFO Airport SkyTrain is not, technically, a "mass transit" system, it is an airport peoplemover. Many airport peoplemovers are "driverless", including Denver's. I was speaking strictly of mass transit systems.
Docklands Light Rail isn't in the US. At least, last time I checked England was still part of the United Kingdom. Has something changed?
The Sands Hotel and Convention Center refused to pay into the Monorail Corporation fund. Therefore, they were bypassed by the system.
Actually, Kim started the Monorail Society some years ago. The home-built monorail came well after.
Yeah. God forbid somebody is actually interested in technology that happens to be older, but underdeveloped.
Ya know, for a 70's-era invention, this TCP/IP thing is sure getting a lot of attention on slashdot.
Wasn't supposed to be a solution for everybody. It was, however, supposed to be a solution for the Strip and Convention Center.
Being as the vast majority of the Las Vegas economy seems to revolve around liberating cash from tourists, looks like a good thing to me.
Besides, that $654 million dollars came entirely from the private sector, through direct financial contributions and bonds. The taxpayers of Clark County aren't paying for it, so why the hell are you bitching?
Much like BART had all kinds of computer problems when it first went online. These things were not totally unanticipated. This is "new" tech, in the sense that Las Vegas Monorail will be the first mass-transit application of "driverless" rail systems anywhere in the United States (BART comes close, but somebody still pushes the "close door" button).
Yes, it's "old" 70's (well, really, 50's, as it differs very little from the original Alweg designs that run on Seattle and Anaheim trackage) technology. However, buses are, what, 30's technology? Light rail vehicles, also, are nothing more than the modern version of the 1910's streetcars.
In transit systems, very little changes.. because it dosen't have to. The fundamental job of getting people from one place to another across town is a simple one: it dosen't need maglev. The physics of rubber tires on a concrete "roadway" are well understood. Construction techniques required to build the Las Vegas Monorail are essentially no different than what was needed to build I-215: once you know how to pour concrete, it doesn't matter if you're building a highway for cars or a guideway for a monorail.
Personally, I can't wait. Monorail technology is a good transit solution: clean and quiet, with the potential to be cheap and easily maintained. Hopefully, Las Vegas Monorail will prove out as good as the monorail enthusiasts (like myself) have been saying it will.
No operators. System is 100% computer controlled.
The top dog is perpetually being challenged. Saying that they are attacked often is handing them the opportunity to say that they are top dog.
To which, you rebute, "No, it's more like car thieves and car alarms. More cars without alarms are stolen than ones with car alamrs, because cars lacking alarms make easier targets. Similarly, insecure operating systems like Windows make easier targets, therefore, they recieve the majority of the attacks."
Plus, you missed the point of the previous statement, which was, "IIS is NOT top dog, yet it recieves the majority of the attacks. Why?"
I vaguely recall an incident involving their claim that IE was "inseperable" from the OS that involved faked video. Perhaps somebody else has more info, but that's probably a good start.
had to price a system (was in the wrong place when VOIP was mentioned in front of PHB). 60 Grandstreams is still damned expensive, plus a 60 line FXO/PBX
I don't know what phone system prices are like where you are, but here in the US any decent mid-scale PBX will cost you around $300-500 per extension, more with advanced features like ACD/Automated Attendant. You can build one hell of a VoIP system for around the same amount of money, if you have somebody who knows what they are doing put it together.
There are some pretty big advantages to a VoIP system as well.. things that no PBX can do, since (in the case of Asterisk) you have the Fine Source and a really neato API for extending the system. My home phone system, as an example, even has tie-ins to pgpGroupware, doing things like notifying you of important appointments via your phone, allowing you to record voice memos (which show up in the Groupware)... and allowing you to map speed-dial numbers from your contacts in the groupware. I'm a shitty programmer and it took me about an afternoon to get this kind of stuff up and running.
Then I found out that simple things like call forwarding didn't work..
Funny. On my Asterisk system here at home, call forwarding works just fine with Grandstream phones. Call forwarding is usually a function of the PBX.
Now, if what you're referring to is "attended transfer", yes, that's a known limitation of the BudgeTone 100. We keep being told on various mailing lists that Grandstream is working on a firmware that will allow for that functionality soon.
terminal emulators.
It's real #(%*# annoying. There are also a couple of games (including one frotz implementation) that breaks as well.
Yes, SCO was caught violating copyright. Is there any company in the world that doesn't do this, on occasion, by accident, or because some employee pretends he wrote something he didn't? I doubt it.
No other company besides SCO has had the audacity to claim that "millions" of lines of their code has been copied into an Open Source work, sued major players, and then backpedelled once the courts started requiring that they prove their claims.
That kinda puts them in a special category: one deserving of scrutiny, methinks.
It's a fine line between "helpful" and "annoying". For example, I would love an intelligent house robot that automatically found my keys in an odd place, moved them to where they belonged, and remembered that they moved them. If I asked "Hey, have you seen my keys?" the robot would be able to remember.
Likewise, if I tell the robot, "Please don't move my keys again" it should be able to honor that request.
Ultimately, however, (and this was pointed out in the article) gender in robots WILL be a major factor in how we interact with them. People do (for whatever reason) respond differently to males than females, and that gender role will play an important part in a robot's function. I, for one, would be much more comfortable if my house robot had female characteristics.. however, I'd probably be more comfortable with a factory automaton being male. On the third hand, more pedestrian robots (like Roomba) would likely not have any intentional gender identification.. but it would probably develop it anyway (as the article points out, most people who have Roombas view them as "female").
It is going to be inevitable that machines that share our personal space will likely take on some gender-specific traits, especially as the machines become mass-market. It's just what most human beings are: sexual animals with a highly developed forebrain.. and gender identification plays an important role. Why not use that to an advantage? It would seem to make for great UI design.
It's people like you that are the reason Arizona is an open-carry state.
*BLAM* *BLAM*
Yeah, and you apparently missed the part of the article that said the whole reason why he was picked up by the County Mounty was because he was behaving erratically.
Personally, this frightens me. As someone who is diabetic, I sure as hell would WANT my loved ones to be contacted if I was sitting in jail without insulin or my other meds. If I'm in diabetic ketoacidosis, I may be unable to think clearly and not communicate properly, and I certainly would look and act fall-down "drunk". I certainly would be in need of medical attention, and the sooner the better.
Two lessons need to be learned here. First, the Sheriff probably needs to send some of their officers to school and teach them that not everybody who acts drunk belongs in a detox cell -- there are serious, life-threatening medical conditions that can cause a person to act oddly. This having taken place at an Indian casino in "hick" Riverside County dosen't shock me at all.
Secondly, and this is a lesson everybody who has a medical condition that can result in this sort of thing needs to know: THERE IS NO SUBSTITUTE FOR A MEDICALERT BRACELET OR NECKLACE. Carrying a card in your wallet with your information on it IS NO HELP, because law enforcement and/or paramedics will often not look in a wallet.. hell, in some places, they are specifically instructed NOT TO because if money is missing the agency may be held liable. But, even a back-country sheriff is going to know enough about that little silver bracelet to at least call the number on it. I highly suspect that if this kid had a MedicAlert necklace or bracelet, he would have been transported to the hospital in the back of an ambulance, not to jail in the back of a squad car.
For me, just having the necklace that said "Diabetic" on the back has already resulted in my life being saved once. And the paramedics who found me didn't even have to call a phone number: they knew the second they found me and my MedicAlert necklace exactly what needed to be done. That's not "rooting around in your medical file".. that's telling emergency personell what they need to know to save your life.
Actually, this has not proven to be a major issue. There ARE people doing card-swaps, and there are loyalty card programs that provide savings based on purchases (Petco comes to mind here). Most loyalty-card rebate programs, however, have very short shelf-lifes (Ralphs does this here in SoCal, and typically it's a "buy $x in six weeks and get a coupon for $y").. so you just time the loyalty card swap on the boundaries of the programs.
Or, do what I do. Give them bogus information, and "lose" the card every six months or so and get another, with bogus information.
That said, I'm STILL using "Fuk Lucky"'s Vons Club card, along with about 20 other SoCal'ers...