Texas has an advantage of lots of space. The times I was there the freeways were wide with enough space at the shoulders and median to add more lanes if they had wanted to. Parts of California though at highly impacted. Ie, in Silicon Valley you can't grow outwards, you can't take the land to widen some freeways, and there aren't viable alternative routes. Mountains and water are inflexible borders. So you can take freeway A which is congested, or switch to freeway B which is also congested but longer and the connectors between the two are also congested. It's time to say that the area is full.
Uber & Lyft certainly do not cater to taking groups of people around, they're usually one driver and one passenger, and the driver doesn't count as a commuter. These are alternative taxis, and not ride "sharing".
I don't expect autonomous vehicles to remedy this. Consumers want these on-demand and don't want them taking a detour because a different passenger has a different destination.
But if an app tells everyone to take that back road, it's making the situation worse. The app is attempting to optimize a single user's route but as a side effect it is making everyone's route worse. If the apps distributed the load it would help out more, even making the single user's commute easier. Ie, if there are three backroad routes, why not send different users to different backroads?
Although in Silicon Valley there often is only one route to take with no viable alternatives that don't add an hour or more. So I will see coworkers look at their apps, bitch that the commute is terrible, then leave anyway so that they can sit in the peak traffic they were warned about. They could have waited a bit longer to go home though...
Meanwhile on the freeways, the high occupancy lanes aren't really high occupancy when they only have 2 people, all the non-HOV lanes are almost exclusively full of single occupant vehicles. All the effort to encourage people to use a carpool, or mass transit, etc, aren't actually changing behavior. Autonomous cars won't improve this as passengers are still going to want to be the only passenger in them.
Sometimes wikipedia fails. But then so do all the competing pages. I wanted to know what VSTS was. Wikipedia was amazingly obscure. Then I went to the Microsoft page and it was even more obscure and cagey about what it was. Usually a technical question is clear on Wikipedia, so I suspect that Microsoft marketing was allowed to write their own page for it.
True. If for example I want to know what xyzzy is, I get the answer from wikipedia. Whereas a general search would turn up a hundred 10 minute long videos on the subject, a hundred pages to claim to get me the best value in my area, 33 threads where the same question was asked but no one ever answered, and a stackoverflow page with the wrong answer.
I don't need to research further most of the time.
My guess is that there was a ton of smoke from burning chemicals after the blast, and it spread through most of the other units. So there's your nice dress, only you can't touch it. Maybe it causes blisters. I knew someone who did professional fireworks and they always use gloves because of the minor irritation some of the chemicals have. Now if it were a major irritant, a carcinogen, etc, it's just not safe.
Note that some AAA games that you could optionally get from the apps store worked worse than the same game purchased a different way. They only sell "Universal Application Platform" apps in their store, and most games aren't built that way and are more traditional apps. There aren't enough AAA games in the Windows app store to know how this is going to play out though, but if history is any indication, Microsoft will screw this up the same way they screwed the pooch with GFWL.
I'm not certain about their gaming, they've been doing stupid stuff there too if you buy games from their app store. Don't forget the stupidity of Windows for Games Live, whenever they see some other companies monetizing users MS will always jump in and try to grab a piece of the pie too.
Their mail app when 8.0 was released was awful. No reason anyone would want to use that. It was spyware too, you couldn't even run it without a microsoft account in addition to the mail account.
We did have out battery supplier lose their entire factory to a fire, forcing us to delay our own products until while we searched for and adapted to a different battery vendor. So the stuff does happen. Those guys weren't raising prices though, they had no product to sell.
Similarly, there was a shortgage of one processor we were using, and the explanation was that the fabs were all overbooked. As in all the big name suppliers of small embedded MCUs were in the same boat. It could have been lying, but some digging showed that there were indeed extremely long lead times for the competitors as well.
Because there may not be that much electricity. Also such a high use puts greater demands on the infrastructure, and so it is more expensive to supply the service. I meant a tiered rate, which is how overage charges are sometimes done, though sometimes tiered rates are by time of day. Especially in the case of this city when the low cost electricity shared with residential users is a fixed amount, you do not want one customer taking most of it.
Consider if this was the water service. If an industry moves in, digs a well, then sucks the water table dry, it has a severe effect on the neighbors. Or if they just turned on the tap and forgot about it. These cryptominers did have a noticeable effect on the electricity rates of all users, not just themselves. Granted, a lot of that was naivete on the part of the city.
Sure, it should apply to internet. The big snag that caused all the early complaints was with early high use users of cable internet who shared their wires with their neighbors. They started whining loudly about how service was declining over time as more of their neighbors started using the internet. It's not an infinite service, there isn't infinite bandwidth. Extra demand can increase supply, but not instantly. Again, naivete on the part of ISPs for offering "unlimited" plans.
In this case, it wasn't a straight up tax break, but a steep discount on electricity (2c per KWh I think, compared to national average of 10c). And it was an industry and the city knew it existed, this wasn't a case of people secretly mining from their bedrooms.
They should charge overage charges to the currency miners and charge them at a higher rate. And they have every right to do so. They should even have a case of doing this retroactively if the mining companies lied about their expected rate of electricty use. They would be in their rights also to give only a certain allotment to the mining companies and pulling the plug when that is exceeded.
The super cheap price for industrial user (cheaper than residential rates!) was intended to bring in jobs. That's a naive plan that too many cities fall for, sweetheart deals to attract a larger tax base, which rarely works out. That's because there's more automation now, fewer jobs arrive to offset the industry discounts. City councils are often thinking about the good old days when a new factory would need lots of workers all eager to go out and buy houses and pay sales tax; and local citizens are all thinking that a new industry will need lots of local unskilled workers and thus save their economy. Now these cryptominers show and and show the flaws in this thinking as this industry ends up being a net drain on the city.
Their electricity originates from a hydroelectric plant (ie, a dam), and that is parceled out to various municipalities. Ie, the region's power generation infrastructure that was paid for by tax dollars is being used by regional tax payers. Excess power can be sold on the open market, but the local cities get first dibs.
But then other mathematicians and physicists come by and review the math for errors. If the math is wrong it's usually discovered in a relatively short time. Changing theories usually happens after the base assumptions are shown to have changed.
But that's ok. These are all models of the universe, as we learn more about the universe then the models will change. That's not a bad thing. We still use Newton's model of gravity even though we know it's wrong, because it still a very good model for making predictions when the scope is large enough to discount quantum effects and small enough to discount relativistic effects. So someday Hawking's theories will likely be in the same boat; not precisely accurate but very close.
The money for coming up with the theories is not a big deal. An office, a white board, a computer, etc. Experimental physics is where most of the money goes.
And in the last century we have used indeed used quantum theory and relativity to improve technology, these are not just mind puzzles with no practical purpose. You need general relativity to build a good GPS system, and you need quantum theory to build better communications and electronic systems. The theory and applications of these do fall within the last century (the theory of general relativity being only slightly more than a century old).
When they did Fallout 4, which took place in Boston, they explicitly decided not to use real world topographical maps for gameplay purposes and not to be strictly constrained.
No different than cryogenics. Whereas today we realize that cryogenics is stupid and does massive damage to the body that's not fixable, but the new idea has yet to be debunked.
On the other hand, maybe someday in the distant fugure, technology will be good enough to resurrect someone that's decomposed into dust, so why worry about it?
Look at mummies today. Most go into the trash, quite a lot go into second rate museums, and a few go into quality museums. An extremely small number are examined in details.
Which means that three thousand years ago, some guy was preserved after his death with the fervent belief that he was extremely import and and worthy of the most advanced preservations techniques. Then he ends up in the trash eventually. Go forward even one hundred years and most people will not care one bit about that mummy, their guys are ever so much important than last century's guys.
Or if you wait until the year three thousand, some decrepit old professor will use you as jerky.
It's 2018. Can't we just stop the earth from rotating and then time will be very simple? This would also solve global warming for half the globe, and increase tourism to the other half.
Well, 12:00am and 12:00pm would be variable concepts, but noon and midnight are based upon where the sun is and that would vary, just like morning and dusk vary.
Or do I need to bring out the time cube to try and explain this to everyone?
Solar time then. We've had a 12 hour clock since ancient times.
Florida wants to keep DST all year long, they're not getting rid of it. What they're getting rid of is the twice a year time changes. Daylight Saving Time is explicitly not Standard Time. They could instead join Atlantic time zone while getting rid of DST and achieve the same result.
It's moot though, I don't expect congress to approve the change.
Slashdot Mirror
Texas has an advantage of lots of space. The times I was there the freeways were wide with enough space at the shoulders and median to add more lanes if they had wanted to. Parts of California though at highly impacted. Ie, in Silicon Valley you can't grow outwards, you can't take the land to widen some freeways, and there aren't viable alternative routes. Mountains and water are inflexible borders. So you can take freeway A which is congested, or switch to freeway B which is also congested but longer and the connectors between the two are also congested. It's time to say that the area is full.
Uber & Lyft certainly do not cater to taking groups of people around, they're usually one driver and one passenger, and the driver doesn't count as a commuter. These are alternative taxis, and not ride "sharing".
I don't expect autonomous vehicles to remedy this. Consumers want these on-demand and don't want them taking a detour because a different passenger has a different destination.
But if an app tells everyone to take that back road, it's making the situation worse. The app is attempting to optimize a single user's route but as a side effect it is making everyone's route worse. If the apps distributed the load it would help out more, even making the single user's commute easier. Ie, if there are three backroad routes, why not send different users to different backroads?
Although in Silicon Valley there often is only one route to take with no viable alternatives that don't add an hour or more. So I will see coworkers look at their apps, bitch that the commute is terrible, then leave anyway so that they can sit in the peak traffic they were warned about. They could have waited a bit longer to go home though...
Meanwhile on the freeways, the high occupancy lanes aren't really high occupancy when they only have 2 people, all the non-HOV lanes are almost exclusively full of single occupant vehicles. All the effort to encourage people to use a carpool, or mass transit, etc, aren't actually changing behavior. Autonomous cars won't improve this as passengers are still going to want to be the only passenger in them.
Sometimes wikipedia fails. But then so do all the competing pages. I wanted to know what VSTS was. Wikipedia was amazingly obscure. Then I went to the Microsoft page and it was even more obscure and cagey about what it was. Usually a technical question is clear on Wikipedia, so I suspect that Microsoft marketing was allowed to write their own page for it.
True. If for example I want to know what xyzzy is, I get the answer from wikipedia. Whereas a general search would turn up a hundred 10 minute long videos on the subject, a hundred pages to claim to get me the best value in my area, 33 threads where the same question was asked but no one ever answered, and a stackoverflow page with the wrong answer.
I don't need to research further most of the time.
My guess is that there was a ton of smoke from burning chemicals after the blast, and it spread through most of the other units. So there's your nice dress, only you can't touch it. Maybe it causes blisters. I knew someone who did professional fireworks and they always use gloves because of the minor irritation some of the chemicals have. Now if it were a major irritant, a carcinogen, etc, it's just not safe.
Note that some AAA games that you could optionally get from the apps store worked worse than the same game purchased a different way. They only sell "Universal Application Platform" apps in their store, and most games aren't built that way and are more traditional apps. There aren't enough AAA games in the Windows app store to know how this is going to play out though, but if history is any indication, Microsoft will screw this up the same way they screwed the pooch with GFWL.
You mean a Windows branded VR headset, or all VR headsets in the entire world that can work with Windows?
I'm not certain about their gaming, they've been doing stupid stuff there too if you buy games from their app store. Don't forget the stupidity of Windows for Games Live, whenever they see some other companies monetizing users MS will always jump in and try to grab a piece of the pie too.
There will be one left though. Always one last person clinging to the belief that Microsoft can do no wrong.
Their mail app when 8.0 was released was awful. No reason anyone would want to use that. It was spyware too, you couldn't even run it without a microsoft account in addition to the mail account.
We did have out battery supplier lose their entire factory to a fire, forcing us to delay our own products until while we searched for and adapted to a different battery vendor. So the stuff does happen. Those guys weren't raising prices though, they had no product to sell.
Similarly, there was a shortgage of one processor we were using, and the explanation was that the fabs were all overbooked. As in all the big name suppliers of small embedded MCUs were in the same boat. It could have been lying, but some digging showed that there were indeed extremely long lead times for the competitors as well.
Because there may not be that much electricity. Also such a high use puts greater demands on the infrastructure, and so it is more expensive to supply the service. I meant a tiered rate, which is how overage charges are sometimes done, though sometimes tiered rates are by time of day. Especially in the case of this city when the low cost electricity shared with residential users is a fixed amount, you do not want one customer taking most of it.
Consider if this was the water service. If an industry moves in, digs a well, then sucks the water table dry, it has a severe effect on the neighbors. Or if they just turned on the tap and forgot about it. These cryptominers did have a noticeable effect on the electricity rates of all users, not just themselves. Granted, a lot of that was naivete on the part of the city.
Sure, it should apply to internet. The big snag that caused all the early complaints was with early high use users of cable internet who shared their wires with their neighbors. They started whining loudly about how service was declining over time as more of their neighbors started using the internet. It's not an infinite service, there isn't infinite bandwidth. Extra demand can increase supply, but not instantly. Again, naivete on the part of ISPs for offering "unlimited" plans.
In this case, it wasn't a straight up tax break, but a steep discount on electricity (2c per KWh I think, compared to national average of 10c). And it was an industry and the city knew it existed, this wasn't a case of people secretly mining from their bedrooms.
They should charge overage charges to the currency miners and charge them at a higher rate. And they have every right to do so. They should even have a case of doing this retroactively if the mining companies lied about their expected rate of electricty use. They would be in their rights also to give only a certain allotment to the mining companies and pulling the plug when that is exceeded.
The super cheap price for industrial user (cheaper than residential rates!) was intended to bring in jobs. That's a naive plan that too many cities fall for, sweetheart deals to attract a larger tax base, which rarely works out. That's because there's more automation now, fewer jobs arrive to offset the industry discounts. City councils are often thinking about the good old days when a new factory would need lots of workers all eager to go out and buy houses and pay sales tax; and local citizens are all thinking that a new industry will need lots of local unskilled workers and thus save their economy. Now these cryptominers show and and show the flaws in this thinking as this industry ends up being a net drain on the city.
Their electricity originates from a hydroelectric plant (ie, a dam), and that is parceled out to various municipalities. Ie, the region's power generation infrastructure that was paid for by tax dollars is being used by regional tax payers. Excess power can be sold on the open market, but the local cities get first dibs.
Well, I wanted to go but I had prior commitments.
But then other mathematicians and physicists come by and review the math for errors. If the math is wrong it's usually discovered in a relatively short time. Changing theories usually happens after the base assumptions are shown to have changed.
But that's ok. These are all models of the universe, as we learn more about the universe then the models will change. That's not a bad thing. We still use Newton's model of gravity even though we know it's wrong, because it still a very good model for making predictions when the scope is large enough to discount quantum effects and small enough to discount relativistic effects. So someday Hawking's theories will likely be in the same boat; not precisely accurate but very close.
The money for coming up with the theories is not a big deal. An office, a white board, a computer, etc. Experimental physics is where most of the money goes.
And in the last century we have used indeed used quantum theory and relativity to improve technology, these are not just mind puzzles with no practical purpose. You need general relativity to build a good GPS system, and you need quantum theory to build better communications and electronic systems. The theory and applications of these do fall within the last century (the theory of general relativity being only slightly more than a century old).
When they did Fallout 4, which took place in Boston, they explicitly decided not to use real world topographical maps for gameplay purposes and not to be strictly constrained.
It will work perfectly and in 30 years time the brains will be revived for sale as childrens' toys.
Somewhat reminiscent of Black Mirror's "Black Museum" episode.
I keep thinking of the preserved head stuck in the basement for two hundred years staring at a blank wall (Fallout 4's Nuka World).
No different than cryogenics. Whereas today we realize that cryogenics is stupid and does massive damage to the body that's not fixable, but the new idea has yet to be debunked.
On the other hand, maybe someday in the distant fugure, technology will be good enough to resurrect someone that's decomposed into dust, so why worry about it?
Look at mummies today. Most go into the trash, quite a lot go into second rate museums, and a few go into quality museums. An extremely small number are examined in details.
Which means that three thousand years ago, some guy was preserved after his death with the fervent belief that he was extremely import and and worthy of the most advanced preservations techniques. Then he ends up in the trash eventually. Go forward even one hundred years and most people will not care one bit about that mummy, their guys are ever so much important than last century's guys.
Or if you wait until the year three thousand, some decrepit old professor will use you as jerky.
It's 2018. Can't we just stop the earth from rotating and then time will be very simple? This would also solve global warming for half the globe, and increase tourism to the other half.
Well, 12:00am and 12:00pm would be variable concepts, but noon and midnight are based upon where the sun is and that would vary, just like morning and dusk vary.
Or do I need to bring out the time cube to try and explain this to everyone?
Solar time then. We've had a 12 hour clock since ancient times.
Florida wants to keep DST all year long, they're not getting rid of it. What they're getting rid of is the twice a year time changes. Daylight Saving Time is explicitly not Standard Time. They could instead join Atlantic time zone while getting rid of DST and achieve the same result.
It's moot though, I don't expect congress to approve the change.