People that talk on their cell phones while driving, are obviously distracted and drive like they're retarded.
All the ones you notice, anyway.
You ever just sat at a busy corner and took inventory for an hour? There are a lot of "retarded" drivers NOT talking on the phone, and a lot of people talking on the phone and driving perfectly normally. It's a confirmation bias that leads you to think there's a correlation.
I hate you all, you fucking phone drivers. Get off your fucking phones and out of my damn lane. YOU are the reason that it is such hell to drive now. YOU are the reason there are so many wrecks and red light running. YOU are the reason that so many lives are lost and everyone's insurance is so high. Hang the fuck up.
Yes, because as you can see, the annual number of accidents per vehicle miles traveled has gone up in direct proportion to saturation of the cell phone market.
Except... not. No, accident statistics have stayed pretty darned flat with respect to VMT (which continually goes up, year after year). The severity of injuries and incidence of fatalities goes down as new innovations in passenger safety come out and are implemented in the fleet.
BTW, one thing that has stayed VERY constant, for the last 30+ years: half of road fatalities are caused by a drunk driver. Even though road fatalities have gone down (even as the total population and per capita VMT have risen), 50% are from accidents caused by drunk drivers. You'd think we would have learned better by now, but nooooo.
So it'd be dead easy to determine, once and for all, what effect cell phone use has on driving: run a multiple-regression analysis on accident rates, taking into account VMT per capita, total population, and other such stats that we know influence accident rates, plus add cell phone market penetration over time. Look at data for the last, say, 20 years. That will show you how much cell phones (remember when they were all "car phones"?) impact accident rates. Until someone does this (law enforcement has all the accident data, and I'm sure the cell companies would cough up the subscriber numbers if it meant the possibility of getting all these laws against using their product repealed), everyone needs to calm the f*** down and realize that there are good drivers, and bad drivers, and mediocre drivers, and if it wasn't the phone, it'd be something else distracting the a**hole in front of you.
BTW, I say this as someone who is not a habitual multitasker... except in the sense that I'm forced to be, because I have two children and have to occasionally do SOMETHING besides pay attention to them.;-) But I don't consider myself good at it and prefer to concentrate on a single thing at a time.
Exactly. What they demonstrated was that people who habitually multitask perform more poorly than people who don't habitually multitask when asked NOT to. What they *should have* done, though, to really be thorough, was to quiz all groups about the blue rectangles afterward. It's likely that the "concentrators" wouldn't have been able to tell you a darned thing about them, but the multitaskers would have actually noticed quite a bit.
All they showed is, some people concentrate well on a single thing and can block out other influences; other people can't. People who can't are habitual multitaskers.
Actually, I learned all this from transportation ENGINEERS in a transportation ENGINEERING class. It wasn't required for my planning degree, it was totally optional, but I thought it would be a good idea.
First of all... 85 is not the OPTIMUM speed. It's the design speed, true. Roads are engineered with the assumption that they *will* have to accommodate drivers who are 70 years old, drunk, driving at night in the rain. That's how they determine curvature, lane width, shoulder width, sign placement, etc. So, once you've made the road navigable by a senior alcoholic in the wet & dark, it turns out that a sober driver with average reflexes, good visibility and dry traction can safely drive it at 85. Is it safe to assume that all, or even most, drivers, all, or even most of the time, meet all those criteria? Hell no.
The fact that maximum throughput occurs at 65 MPH was discovered in a CalTrans data analysis project in San Diego County. They looked at the actual traffic during peak times, based on the sensor network on the freeways. They were expecting to see max throughput around 45 MPH, but they found instead that it occurred at 65 MPH. Further analysis showed that this happened because people were following much closer than recommended, given human reaction times. It makes pileups more likely, but increases throughput in the meantime.
As for why, then, do some states have higher speed limits... what's their traffic like? Does Bozeman have hour-long traffic jams on a daily basis? Is Cheyenne suffering for lack of lane miles? In California, the speed limit is 65 in the urbanized areas, but 70 on the open highway... where the extra throughput isn't needed.
Better implementations of this type of fraud protection detect unusual use specific to the account. i.e. if you do the majority of your transactions in a particular county, and suddenly do one from halfway around the world, they'll flag it... but if you travel frequently, they won't. And *really* good ones will notice that you usually use your card to pay for hotels, rental cars, plane tickets, etc., and you're suddenly trying to buy several thousand dollars worth of consumer electronics from a site you've never used before WHILE your other activity shows you seem to be far from your home address, and will flag that transaction.
"Hackers follow a culture of anti-authoritarianism"
In other words they commit acts that the authorities consider crimes, like breaking-into secure computers, making free phonecalls, copying software without permission, et cetera. Just like I said previously.
But that's not *all* they do.
Hacking is not by definition illegal. You can "hack" a piece of hardware or software such that you change its behavior from that intended by the original designer without breaking any laws. You're still a hacker.
Here, I'll translate it into car-analogy for you.... The other day, my husband watched someone use a couple of special shims and inflatable bladders to open the door of a BMW without the keys and without setting off the alarm. Now, certainly, such activities *could* be done in the pursuit of lawbreaking, but as it happens, my father-in-law had locked his keys in his car, and the guy was a Triple-A dispatched mechanic.
Re:Thwarted by properly designed online banking
on
Real-Time Keyloggers
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· Score: 1
The system you describe would be feasible for online banking from a computer terminal, but not from a merchant pay terminal. SMS is often near-instantaneous, but the increase in cycle time from having to wait for the message and key in an additional code would cause massive complaint in busy retail environments. (Yes, people are stupid... but hey, it's a reality, we need to deal with it.)
Re:Thwarted by properly designed online banking
on
Real-Time Keyloggers
·
· Score: 1
So people who don't own their own computers shouldn't have access to online banking?
Which is stupid, really. It makes more sense to ticket people for averaging over the speed limit over a distance than to ticket them for popping up over the speed limit for a moment. But, sigh.
How else can you explain an engineering report that lists 120mph as the designed maximum limit for an interstate, and an 85mph recommended limit for travel, but somehow gets signed at 65? The only reason I can conclude why politicians ignore engineers' recommendations is because the politicians view the twenty mph gap as an opportunity - to increase tax revenue.
Actually, there are a lot of reasons. Some of them have been listed below, such as fuel economy. However, another reason is a combination of safety and efficient use of the road. Given human reflexes, maximum safe throughput occurs at about 45 MPH. At higher speeds, the following distance required for the trailing car to be able to stop in time causes sufficient overhead that the positive effect on throughput gained by increasing the speed is nullified.
In practice, however, people don't generally leave adequate following distance. Still, maximum throughput in real-life scenarios occurs at about... 65 MPH. Coincidence? I think not.
Now, they *could* make the speed laws change with the time of day or heaviness of traffic, but that's excessively complicated.
Seems to me like quite a good thing that people value fairness highly.
It's not as simple as people valuing fairness. People actually place a negative value on unfair behavior, such that they are willing to pay an out-of-pocket cost to punish it. Even when the punishment doesn't change the behavior.
If it was just people valuing fairness, they'd be willing to put money into systems that keep people honest. Instead, people are more willing to put money into punitive systems to deal with people who were unfair.
10 seems redundant with 7 (thermite burns at up to 2500C, according to Wikipedia), and I'm not sure why 5 and 10 get science points while 7 doesn't.
If you RTFA, 7 is actually a recommendation to melt the aluminum down and recycle it. After the Thermite, I doubt your local recycling center will have much use for what's left.
And I guess environmental science doesn't count...
What's the point of 3700 fps? The human eye can't possibly see the difference after about 50 fps. Any more than that, and your video card is just an expensive heater. But maybe it'd be useful to keep the chug at bay for big raid fights.
Great, now I need to microwave my magazine before reading it. Or not, since the ad-to-content ratio was what stopped my buying print publications in the first place...
That's why I read Cook's Illustrated. No ads! Seems like such a skinny magazine for $7 (newsstand, much cheaper subscription) but I'm probably getting more content than your typical ad-laden publication.
But, a stream of times that public transit arrives at stops? Yeah, no, not copyrightable.
How come? Any piece of text or numbers that is human-generated, requires intelligence and creativity, is protected by copyright.
Human-created, that's the key. At some point, some human or humans *did* create the time system we currently use, but if it was ever subject to copyright, it has long expired. And most transit scheduling in large urban areas is done by computer systems, not by people.
The actual printed schedules can be subject to copyright, such that it's illegal to photocopy them for redistribution, or to borrow the design for another purpose. They probably also have a trademark on their logos and route names. But the time data? It's DATA, not art.
More accurate, say a development company builds a subdivision, and then claims that you need a license from them to publish a map of the streets that they built (which have become public streets, not private property).
Where do I apply to patent the street map of the city ?
Ok, one, this is about copyright, not patent.
Two, it's about schedules, not maps.
Three, mechanically reproducing a map *is* a violation of copyright. Re-drawing it yourself isn't, but careful... a lot of map printers deliberately include small errors in their maps to catch people who just use their work as a source. You better be prepared to drive the whole terrain and verify it yourself.
There's lots of precedent for maps being copyrighted works. Thomas Bros. (now owned by Rand McNally) include deliberate small errors in their maps (such as adding short cul-de-sacs that don't actually exist) to catch unlicensed reproduction.
But, a stream of times that public transit arrives at stops? Yeah, no, not copyrightable.
However, once you add a fancy new buzzword like "cloud" to what remains essentially IT outsourcing, executives' brains fall out of their skulls and they forget about risk management.
I don't actually think that there's a whole lot of executives who have been around this block before and suddenly have forgotten what the issues are because it's "in the cloud."
Rather, "the cloud" has put a lot of electronic services within reach of companies who have NEVER had them available before. They haven't outsourced; they haven't even insourced. They just haven't done it at all. And they have no concept of what the risks are.
With Google Docs, any two-bit non-profit can shove all their data online for free. What's not to like? There are going to be companies that can't even afford to give their employees laptops signing up, because now their employees can work from home or the field in a way they couldn't before. It's like if someone suddenly started selling disposable cars for $49.95. People who have been driving for years wouldn't suddenly forget how, but a lot of people who couldn't afford to drive before would suddenly be careening around like maniacs.
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People that talk on their cell phones while driving, are obviously distracted and drive like they're retarded.
All the ones you notice, anyway.
You ever just sat at a busy corner and took inventory for an hour? There are a lot of "retarded" drivers NOT talking on the phone, and a lot of people talking on the phone and driving perfectly normally. It's a confirmation bias that leads you to think there's a correlation.
I hate you all, you fucking phone drivers. Get off your fucking phones and out of my damn lane. YOU are the reason that it is such hell to drive now. YOU are the reason there are so many wrecks and red light running. YOU are the reason that so many lives are lost and everyone's insurance is so high. Hang the fuck up.
Yes, because as you can see, the annual number of accidents per vehicle miles traveled has gone up in direct proportion to saturation of the cell phone market.
Except... not. No, accident statistics have stayed pretty darned flat with respect to VMT (which continually goes up, year after year). The severity of injuries and incidence of fatalities goes down as new innovations in passenger safety come out and are implemented in the fleet.
BTW, one thing that has stayed VERY constant, for the last 30+ years: half of road fatalities are caused by a drunk driver. Even though road fatalities have gone down (even as the total population and per capita VMT have risen), 50% are from accidents caused by drunk drivers. You'd think we would have learned better by now, but nooooo.
So it'd be dead easy to determine, once and for all, what effect cell phone use has on driving: run a multiple-regression analysis on accident rates, taking into account VMT per capita, total population, and other such stats that we know influence accident rates, plus add cell phone market penetration over time. Look at data for the last, say, 20 years. That will show you how much cell phones (remember when they were all "car phones"?) impact accident rates. Until someone does this (law enforcement has all the accident data, and I'm sure the cell companies would cough up the subscriber numbers if it meant the possibility of getting all these laws against using their product repealed), everyone needs to calm the f*** down and realize that there are good drivers, and bad drivers, and mediocre drivers, and if it wasn't the phone, it'd be something else distracting the a**hole in front of you.
BTW, I say this as someone who is not a habitual multitasker... except in the sense that I'm forced to be, because I have two children and have to occasionally do SOMETHING besides pay attention to them. ;-) But I don't consider myself good at it and prefer to concentrate on a single thing at a time.
The tests in TFA aren't multitasking either.
Exactly. What they demonstrated was that people who habitually multitask perform more poorly than people who don't habitually multitask when asked NOT to. What they *should have* done, though, to really be thorough, was to quiz all groups about the blue rectangles afterward. It's likely that the "concentrators" wouldn't have been able to tell you a darned thing about them, but the multitaskers would have actually noticed quite a bit.
All they showed is, some people concentrate well on a single thing and can block out other influences; other people can't. People who can't are habitual multitaskers.
Actually, I learned all this from transportation ENGINEERS in a transportation ENGINEERING class. It wasn't required for my planning degree, it was totally optional, but I thought it would be a good idea.
First of all... 85 is not the OPTIMUM speed. It's the design speed, true. Roads are engineered with the assumption that they *will* have to accommodate drivers who are 70 years old, drunk, driving at night in the rain. That's how they determine curvature, lane width, shoulder width, sign placement, etc. So, once you've made the road navigable by a senior alcoholic in the wet & dark, it turns out that a sober driver with average reflexes, good visibility and dry traction can safely drive it at 85. Is it safe to assume that all, or even most, drivers, all, or even most of the time, meet all those criteria? Hell no.
The fact that maximum throughput occurs at 65 MPH was discovered in a CalTrans data analysis project in San Diego County. They looked at the actual traffic during peak times, based on the sensor network on the freeways. They were expecting to see max throughput around 45 MPH, but they found instead that it occurred at 65 MPH. Further analysis showed that this happened because people were following much closer than recommended, given human reaction times. It makes pileups more likely, but increases throughput in the meantime.
As for why, then, do some states have higher speed limits... what's their traffic like? Does Bozeman have hour-long traffic jams on a daily basis? Is Cheyenne suffering for lack of lane miles? In California, the speed limit is 65 in the urbanized areas, but 70 on the open highway... where the extra throughput isn't needed.
Better implementations of this type of fraud protection detect unusual use specific to the account. i.e. if you do the majority of your transactions in a particular county, and suddenly do one from halfway around the world, they'll flag it... but if you travel frequently, they won't. And *really* good ones will notice that you usually use your card to pay for hotels, rental cars, plane tickets, etc., and you're suddenly trying to buy several thousand dollars worth of consumer electronics from a site you've never used before WHILE your other activity shows you seem to be far from your home address, and will flag that transaction.
"Hackers follow a culture of anti-authoritarianism"
In other words they commit acts that the authorities consider crimes, like breaking-into secure computers, making free phonecalls, copying software without permission, et cetera. Just like I said previously.
But that's not *all* they do.
Hacking is not by definition illegal. You can "hack" a piece of hardware or software such that you change its behavior from that intended by the original designer without breaking any laws. You're still a hacker.
Here, I'll translate it into car-analogy for you.... The other day, my husband watched someone use a couple of special shims and inflatable bladders to open the door of a BMW without the keys and without setting off the alarm. Now, certainly, such activities *could* be done in the pursuit of lawbreaking, but as it happens, my father-in-law had locked his keys in his car, and the guy was a Triple-A dispatched mechanic.
The system you describe would be feasible for online banking from a computer terminal, but not from a merchant pay terminal. SMS is often near-instantaneous, but the increase in cycle time from having to wait for the message and key in an additional code would cause massive complaint in busy retail environments. (Yes, people are stupid... but hey, it's a reality, we need to deal with it.)
So people who don't own their own computers shouldn't have access to online banking?
Speed traps are explicitly illegal in California.
Which is stupid, really. It makes more sense to ticket people for averaging over the speed limit over a distance than to ticket them for popping up over the speed limit for a moment. But, sigh.
How else can you explain an engineering report that lists 120mph as the designed maximum limit for an interstate, and an 85mph recommended limit for travel, but somehow gets signed at 65? The only reason I can conclude why politicians ignore engineers' recommendations is because the politicians view the twenty mph gap as an opportunity - to increase tax revenue.
Actually, there are a lot of reasons. Some of them have been listed below, such as fuel economy. However, another reason is a combination of safety and efficient use of the road. Given human reflexes, maximum safe throughput occurs at about 45 MPH. At higher speeds, the following distance required for the trailing car to be able to stop in time causes sufficient overhead that the positive effect on throughput gained by increasing the speed is nullified.
In practice, however, people don't generally leave adequate following distance. Still, maximum throughput in real-life scenarios occurs at about... 65 MPH. Coincidence? I think not.
Now, they *could* make the speed laws change with the time of day or heaviness of traffic, but that's excessively complicated.
Seems to me like quite a good thing that people value fairness highly.
It's not as simple as people valuing fairness. People actually place a negative value on unfair behavior, such that they are willing to pay an out-of-pocket cost to punish it. Even when the punishment doesn't change the behavior.
If it was just people valuing fairness, they'd be willing to put money into systems that keep people honest. Instead, people are more willing to put money into punitive systems to deal with people who were unfair.
10 seems redundant with 7 (thermite burns at up to 2500C, according to Wikipedia), and I'm not sure why 5 and 10 get science points while 7 doesn't.
If you RTFA, 7 is actually a recommendation to melt the aluminum down and recycle it. After the Thermite, I doubt your local recycling center will have much use for what's left.
And I guess environmental science doesn't count...
What's the point of 3700 fps? The human eye can't possibly see the difference after about 50 fps. Any more than that, and your video card is just an expensive heater. But maybe it'd be useful to keep the chug at bay for big raid fights.
And stenchwarrior is sorta right, given that the Iraq war and the London bombings made the list, but most of it is political and religious.
Bah. That's not bacon; that's prosciutto.
As posted above by Ben Jackson, there is.
Google was massive WAY before they started introducing inline ads.
But were they profitable?
Great, now I need to microwave my magazine before reading it. Or not, since the ad-to-content ratio was what stopped my buying print publications in the first place...
That's why I read Cook's Illustrated. No ads! Seems like such a skinny magazine for $7 (newsstand, much cheaper subscription) but I'm probably getting more content than your typical ad-laden publication.
How come? Any piece of text or numbers that is human-generated, requires intelligence and creativity, is protected by copyright.
Human-created, that's the key. At some point, some human or humans *did* create the time system we currently use, but if it was ever subject to copyright, it has long expired. And most transit scheduling in large urban areas is done by computer systems, not by people.
The actual printed schedules can be subject to copyright, such that it's illegal to photocopy them for redistribution, or to borrow the design for another purpose. They probably also have a trademark on their logos and route names. But the time data? It's DATA, not art.
More accurate, say a development company builds a subdivision, and then claims that you need a license from them to publish a map of the streets that they built (which have become public streets, not private property).
london train schedules were copyrighted in the holmes days, too.
Under US copyright law though?
Where do I apply to patent the street map of the city ?
Ok, one, this is about copyright, not patent.
Two, it's about schedules, not maps.
Three, mechanically reproducing a map *is* a violation of copyright. Re-drawing it yourself isn't, but careful... a lot of map printers deliberately include small errors in their maps to catch people who just use their work as a source. You better be prepared to drive the whole terrain and verify it yourself.
There's lots of precedent for maps being copyrighted works. Thomas Bros. (now owned by Rand McNally) include deliberate small errors in their maps (such as adding short cul-de-sacs that don't actually exist) to catch unlicensed reproduction.
But, a stream of times that public transit arrives at stops? Yeah, no, not copyrightable.
However, once you add a fancy new buzzword like "cloud" to what remains essentially IT outsourcing, executives' brains fall out of their skulls and they forget about risk management.
I don't actually think that there's a whole lot of executives who have been around this block before and suddenly have forgotten what the issues are because it's "in the cloud."
Rather, "the cloud" has put a lot of electronic services within reach of companies who have NEVER had them available before. They haven't outsourced; they haven't even insourced. They just haven't done it at all. And they have no concept of what the risks are.
With Google Docs, any two-bit non-profit can shove all their data online for free. What's not to like? There are going to be companies that can't even afford to give their employees laptops signing up, because now their employees can work from home or the field in a way they couldn't before. It's like if someone suddenly started selling disposable cars for $49.95. People who have been driving for years wouldn't suddenly forget how, but a lot of people who couldn't afford to drive before would suddenly be careening around like maniacs.