Not only will it be couples and singles wailing away, there will be an increase in mobile prostitution. I say increase in that the last time I was in Vegas I was given "promotional" literature advertising that I could get a happy ending limo back to the airport.
While this is sort of a funny thing it is not inconsequential in that most of the time prostitution takes place in an alley or some dark spot near the stroll. I once worked in an office in the shadier part of town and we joked that we had a rubber tree out back as the discards were often thrown into its branches.
Now they won't have to pull into some dark corner but just circle the block for a short while.
Just a few of the zillion cultural and economic changes that self driving cars will impart.
I have worked with organizations that used similarly old stuff and would buy stacks of replacements. The problem was that nearly all the replacements were failing in the same way before any use. Some glue that was fine for 10 years would suddenly start to run and dissolve other important bits. Certain bits would just corrode even thought they had been kept in a pretty damn good environment. LCD screens looked like something like bacteria were growing inside as some strange chemical process crept along.
One other magical thing is that it seems that if you don't use a hard drive for years that it will spin up, work fine for a very short while and then fail very rapidly. Probably some lubricant just dried up or mutated.
I can see Steve Jobs launching the prototype watch mockups into the wall yelling, "Why the poop would I want to wear a brick on my arm? This isn't elegant, this isn't design, this is a committee who put everything that popped into their heads into a single thing." "Boil this thing down until it is slim and does what people want. Not all these stupid menus."
I can see him then making a rule. "Only use the watch for features where people glance at their phones; time, weather, notifications, minimal navigation. If it more than a glance then we don't put it on the watch."
But instead they allowed the "creatives" to do whatever they wanted without any reigning in their stupider ideas. Many of the ideas such as incorporating the heartbeat or the apple pay should have waited until the technology was a few generations in and those features could be added to the super slim long battery lived watch.
Apple is clearly a company that has had one home run every few years with a new product that soon eclipses the former products as they go into the sunset. Macbooks are a big market, just not a terribly big one for apple, yet in their day they were king. The iPhone was certain to meet the same fate. So while the watch could have been great, it certainly wasn't going to eclipse the iPhone. Thus Apple seems to have forgotten this little factoid. Build something that can eclipse the iPhone. Maybe that is what they were trying with whatever car project they have going. Maybe it will come out and blow everyone away. The critical bit being that I hope they have more than one high risk project in the works.
If Steve Jobs had any one superpower it was that he didn't accept other people as having genuine expertise no matter how much they were at the top of their field. He knew that it was too easy for them to get caught up in group think, or to think that their shit smelled better than others just because of their qualifications. Thus he was perfectly happy to call the top experts in any domain an idiot if what they were proposing didn't make sense. He was also happy to demand that they do things that went against every industry norm that they understood, and could justify all day long. I don't see anyone at Apple willing to call Ivy an idiot for his ugly flat designs, or his stupid fat crappy battery watch. He is the expert you know.
Not that I don't care about this statistic, it is interesting. But most people don't care about which desktop. For a huge number of people they need a browser, and well that's it, a browser. Then they occasionally need to print what they browse. The other big feature they need is the ability to back up photos from their phone until their hard drive fails and they lose all their photos.
Occasionally some people need to run Microsoft Office specifically. Or they need to run some software that only runs on windows. This is becoming rarer and rarer. One large group that I have found are hard core windows users are accountants. Most of them have mastered Excel, not are good at it and could use something else, but have pretty much mystical abilities with it. Beyond that there the PC gamers. But for the vast majority, the OS isn't even the big question but budget.
Most people are happy with a 10 year old laptop with a 4 minute battery that they keep in a drawer only to be pulled out on the occasion that their phone or tablet can't fill out some form, or they need to so a sudden excess of typing.
There isn't much difference at work. Most people don't need any machine better than an average machine circa 2008.
This means that for many people they will keep using any given machine until it utterly fails. Then they will replace it with the cheapest machine that allows them to continue with little regard as to what OS it uses as long as it functions as the old one did.
Few people that I know outside of programmers will ask any questions about hard drives, memory, etc, because they know that pretty much any machine in 2016 will be far beyond their needs.
So for most people, if you were to ask them what OS they would like they would say, "Don't care"
I would suspect that this tradeoff would apply to every single project, but not all the projects overall. The above screwup cost over $200 million. Thus the savings from preventing a single screwup out of even 20 projects would more than cover the extra costs.
This is similar to an argument I often have about unit testing. Many programmers are still opposed to the idea. I actually believe that a large project without unit testing can't actually be competed. The extra effort of unit testing actually allows for ever faster progress the deeper you get into the project as compared to the same project without unit testing that often becomes stalled at a certain point.
So I would somewhat think that even though launches and space vehicles aren't quite a commodity product, that by not standardizing that it is decreasing product quality while limiting what can be developed.
I would think that if the bulk of a space probe could be borderline off the shelf and if they weren't quite reinventing the wheel or at least rebuilding someone else's wheel from scratch, that more effort could be put into the final mission.
Also this would presumably decrease risk which by itself reduces cost, and would just reduce cost which either means more money for the actual mission, or more missions because of lowered costs.
I have heard either indirectly or from the horse's mouth about all kinds of close calls. Birds appearing like a hailstorm of missiles, errors, flights off course, etc.
Then there are the scarier stories about Stalin in his last days 100% sure that the US was going to order a first strike, and thus he should beat them to the punch. I would also not be surprised if some US military advisors over the years thought that a US first strike would somehow have been a good idea. Assuming this to be true, how few people did they have to convince to make it so?
Then we have the classics like the Cuban missile crisis.
Importantly many military analysts have pointed out that if the NATO and the Soviets had ever started to go toe to toe in some actual conflict, such as NATO stepping in for Hungary that it would have resulted in one side or the other beginning to lose, this might have escalated to local tactical battlefield nukes, which might have escalated to strategic nukes.
I would have thought that most of this would be plug and play by now. Not so much that every component is the same, but that how the components interface would be the same. Much like when I hook a new more sensitive mouse, or a better printer to my computer, I don't need to reconfigure my browser. There can't be that many unique systems on any given platform. Gyros, rockets, sensors, etc. Maybe today's gyro package is way better than yesterday's but I would think that you just make the interface capable of handling an insanely great gyro and then don't worry about it for many many generations of gyros.
I would also have thought that there would be simulators for most of this crap. Things that would give a nice broadspectrum test of a system with various temperatures, magnetic flux, radiation, etc. Something where they could test just about every strange scenario that space throws at a system over its lifetime. But in spades.
Also by standardizing some of this crap, they could also effectively opensource their solutions. It seems fairly common to hear heroic stories where a system will have 5 gyros with a minimum of 3 required to operate. But then 4 of them fail and the geniuses figure out how to keep the system limping along on that single gyro. That is a perfect but of software to then just incorporate into all future systems.
Lastly why isn't there a "your commands are stupid, let's wait for manual control" edge case analyser. Things like spinning too fast, very long burns on the rockets, etc. If the computer decides to do one of these unusual things, that instead it yells to ground control, "Hey, could you double check to make sure that I don't have a case of the stupids."
Every judge and lawyer is run through a gauntlet of security background checks. Does anyone honestly think that a former ALCU lawyer or human rights advocate is going to past muster? They are only going to approve the most authority respecting hanging judges they can find.
Even for those defendants who want to hire a lawyer has to get that lawyer and their firm approved. Again an actual lawyer who believes in things such as the constitution or knows who side they are on are going to survive the testing. If your lawyer is rejected from the process you can still have them but they don't get to see your case.
Also a critical factor in winning cases that are already stacked against you is to hire a lawyer who then puts 10 interns onto the case along with a handful of investigators, none of whom are either going to be allowed to see anything or do an investigation. Thus these are nearly unwinnable cases.
Then the entire US justice system is adversarial. So any group of prosecutors and judges who don't have an opposing side are going to easily run circles around defendants who don't even know they are on trial (being investigated).
The key to all this is that there are already plenty of laws that deal with nearly every form of crime that a terrorist might do or plan. If you plan on murdering people then oddly enough that is a crime and can be investigated including wire taps. Murdering people is probably against the law. Hiring murders is, funding criminals is, hiding criminals, all existing crimes. There are all kinds of interesting things such as probable cause, RICO, etc that give police everything they need. Not everything they want, just everything they need.
The crazy thing is that this continues at pretty much full speed. It is almost like the constitution is some kind of measuring stick where they get to measure the size of their dicks by how many part of the constitution are ignored or suspended on their behalf. Like the stupid war on drugs, their efforts are going to only have overall negative returns. Maybe once in a blue moon they catch an actual bad guy as opposed to a straw bad guy they pretty much had to build from scratch. But for every bad guy they catch they will spread untold misery, economic problems, and potentially an increased death toll by slightly increasing the overall stress and unhappiness of the entire population. I will be discussing this sort of thing over the phone and sometimes the other person will say that they aren't comfortable talking about this on a phone. Crazy.
I would say that the only way that this madness ends is if crystal clear laws are put into place that wholesale ban this sort of behaviour. Potentially all the way to a constitutional amendment. Otherwise it will simply be a ratchet type approach. Every time there is a scare they will get a few more regulations or laws that favour the ending of this right or that privacy. These laws are typically one way. Very rarely are they repealed. Also there don't seem to be any willing investigators actively prosecuting those who have already violated existing laws.
I wonder what any of the space of likely presidential winners will do? Will they curtail these abuses and the entire abusive direction. Or will they realize that it just makes them more powerful?
Separating causation in a case like this will be fantastically hard. My gut feeling (see what I did there) is that something like a gut bacteria is the route cause of much of the expanding waistlines. Even identifying a gut bacteria can be hard for if the cause were just crappy fast food, there could be bacteria that simply thrive in the presence of crappy fast food.
People of course use data like this to support their favourite issues such as processed food, fast food, sugar, western diets, etc. Not that all these issues are bad, but if my supposition is correct and it were to be gut bacteria, the gut bacteria might be increasing the desire for crappy fast food or whatever. Thus there would be a near perfect correlation of crappy fast food to fatties as the fatties would be demanding the crappy fast food.
The three ways to figure this out would be some fantastic biochemical insights as to how one or more bacteria are spreading and causing this. To do double blind studies where they add bacteria to skinny populations, or to figure out how to eliminate a suspect bacteria and then double blind some people there.
A double blind introduction of suspect bacteria into random skinny populations would probably produce the quickest results, despite the huge ethical issue this does have the advantage that the scientists can outrun the angry mob who weren't in the control group.
What many people don't realize is that the party machine is much bigger than a single election or politician. Politicians come and go for the most part, but the machine is there today, tomorrow, and for a long time to come.
This has huge implications for those preparing to fight the machine. For instance if some small town guy puts up a Feel the Bern sign, the local democratic HOA or alderman will come knocking and put a bit of pressure on that person even if they agree with them and like the person in question. The reason they will do this is because the machine remembers who supports and who hurts them. So while they might be able to directly get to the guy who puts up the sign they can get to the people who can shut him down. They will deny the alderman support in the next election. Even the HOA president would be in trouble if the local state legislator showed up at a HOA election BBQ for the opponent this year instead of them.
This doesn't only apply to elections and election support. The airport might have been funded by a party senator, jobs at that airport, contracts at that airport, etc are very much handed out to party loyalists. So maybe the company that has the fuel contract is the employer of the guy with the sign. A little reminder as to who is in charge of their future will have them talk to the guy with the sign.
But this isn't a huge well organized conspiracy. Each level knows what is expected of it and just acts. Thus there are no wiretaps that will expose this, no paper trails to follow.
The crazy part is that both machines are active regardless of who is in power, or even who is the default party in that neck of the woods. If you take a state like Connecticut which will never go all republican, you still have a republican party machine that demands loyalty.
Where it gets even weirder is that they are like a cult hunting apostates. When the machine sees someone supporting the other party, that is from their view a healthy part of democracy. He won't get any contracts while they are in power, but they aren't overly vindictive. It is when their own don't support the candidate picked in a smokey back room. Those disloyal Mofos need to be taught some respect.
This is one of the reasons Millennials are the ones supporting Sanders, they aren't typically part of the machine and getting their livelihood from the machine. But if you are 60 and own a solid pillar-of-the-community business, then you don't dare turn your back on your superiors.
Many times I have had an uber driver who simply can't find me. They will text me and ask where I am and I will say exactly where I am referring to some giant landmark that I am standing under. I then watch them drive around a bit hundreds of feet away, and they text/call again.
Where I live now had all the uber drivers looking for my house about 300 feet away. The cab companies make the same mistake. So I just call and wander down to where I know they think I will be.
Obviously their mapping software isn't very good, but why can't the uber drivers just look to see where my "dot" is? I could see some of these drivers pulling this sort of crap hoping to charge me a "late" fee. Or they might just make this mistake for whatever reason they are making it now and charge me a late fee.
So unless it is me just not ready for when the uber car come then Uber could rapidly turn people off.
Also in order for this to be reasonable they need to get their "1 minute" to last less than 5 minutes. Because I would say that on average I wait 1 minute that lasts well in excess of 3 minutes and often pushing into 5 or more minutes.
How about we get to charge Uber a late fee when they say that the cab will be there in a certain amount of time and they are wrong by a sizeable amount?
Assuming the cab icons on the app aren't made up crap, then I watch my uber driver often take some of the crappiest routes to get to me. It can't just be the routing as they will go a block beyond me and then sometimes circle that block. Or get stopped at stop signs for a minute or more when there is no traffic in the neighbourhood.
The traditional news business somewhat became a rentier business. One of the biggest revenue sources for newspapers was classified advertising. They would charge 20-30 dollars for something that cost them pennies. They also became the de-facto source of news. If they liked a politician or a party then they would not cover it negatively. If a friend of the owners got in trouble there would be no reporting. If one of their major advertisers got in trouble then little or nothing with lots of room for the companies to spin the negative news.
The business model was abusive and ripe for someone to do an end run.
The first sign I saw of this would be a local newspaper that carried just classifieds that were free for most purposes. They combined the online submission with print for the masses. I suspect that the news papers weren't happy with this.
The internet started to pick away at this. I would say the gut shot was craigslist and similar sites. Quite simply that was an instant lights out for an entire revenue stream.
The other was google adsense. Not that it is a great way to fund a site these days, but in the early days it was so damn easy to get started and your tiny site could instantly produce revenue. This allowed for some of the earliest web publications to make money and grow.
Google adsense wasn't just a slight revolution but it was a revolution in thinking. It had been proceeded by doubleclick. They were a huge pain in the ass if you were a nobody. They wanted to screen their prospective publishers to make sure they had the volumes and respectability. This translated to their preferring to land old media companies who were doing an online presence.
But what shocks me is that the old media companies have largely doubled down on what made them suck. They are still wildly biased. They don't seem to care about actual journalism such as taking down bad politicians or exposing evil companies. Then to add insult to all this they have adopted some of the worst practices of the internet such as clickbaiting or the various dark practises.
For instance, in my city there have been a spate of murders. Serious ones such as shootings on the core downtown streets. Reading the local newspapers they are talking about it in the general sense of a spate of murders. But no stories that paint a picture of who did what and why they might have had it coming, or not. Then I go on reddit and find eye-witness accounts, pictures, and stories about long running feuds between families. How is it that reddit has become the paper of record in a city of 1 million?
Then there are the autoplay videos. Wow what asshole came up with that gem. Not only do they autoplay, but they will follow you down the page, and even when paused will just start playing after a while. Then there are the videos that just keep streaming one video after another. These companies are wondering why we are all getting adblockers? Do they not understand that their cunning ways are effectively creating the drive and desire to dump them? That once dumped that we won't be coming back?
The reason is that I could probably find 1000 white papers that would fear monger about either open source being a security risk "The source code has been leaked to hackers." or something along the lines of "Good luck without enterprise support." as if this means that a bug found in Oracle tonight will be fixed just for you by tomorrow.
The few times I ever called Oracle were disappointments, and pretty much all my support was from google searches. With MariaDB, Postgres, etc my support is from google searches.
The other is when people dismiss open source data stores as toys and not meant for corporate data. They usually just start making up arguments when I point out that the companies with some of the largest databases in the world use opensource. Things like, "Well they have heavily modified them." to which I will point out, yes, and the commonly useful modifications or fixes were pushed into the open source project.
I think it all boils down to, "My database is better than your database because I paid so much for it."
In my distant past I was the guy who would made Oracle things happen for clients. But as I got more and more into dealing with clients I realized that Oracle is just a mean thing to do to people. One interesting part of the Oracle sales process seems to be to delay giving a final price. This way the project is well underway or even done before you present the client with some sticker-shock.
Then there were the prices themselves. I deployed quite a number of systems and could never predict the price. Would it be $30,000 or $300,000.
Then there were the end runs. Once Oracle got ahold of your client they were perfectly happy to see you swapped out and replaced with another consultancy who would slather the entire client with Oracle products. It was bordering on Oracle Doorbell for all your ding-dong needs.
There is no way I would ever use a solution that results in a company like that able to mess with my clients. No Microsoft, no Oracle, no IBM, or SAP.
My favourite is when I have a client who is in the process of throwing them out and they ask, "What will it cost to licence MariaDB." Then when they ask, "Can it handle our Enterprise database?" I will say, "Your $400,000 system has 40,000 rows of data in it. A $25 raspberry Pi could handle your needs." Then they ask about per seat licensing costs. "None." At this point I can see them fishing around in their heads for how they are going to be screwed; suddenly it dawns on them that the screwing is now over. They then go through a list of features that they have built up over time but couldn't afford. When they get the quote for those they pretty much throw up in disgust at how badly they had been treated over the years.
When they put it all together they realise that their previous consultant hadn't been working for them but effectively for a company like Oracle.
It has been over a decade since I dumped everything Oracle and will never go back.
MariaDB is the anti-Oracle. Oracle bought out MySQL which caused the main creator to flee and fork MySQL into MariaDB. There are three keys to MariaDB that would repulse an Oracle DBA. One is that for most use cases any halfway sane developer can conjure up a good enough schema. This scares the shit out of them. Maybe they could even double the performance if they used their skills, except that doubling 20ms queries isn't really worth much.
Second there is no company behind MariaDB to give grand certifications and otherwise reward people who promote the use of their product.
Lastly, due to the above two situations a MariaDB DBA is usually some guy who has a hundred other responsibilities in maintaining the servers. This is in direct opposition to someone who is solely responsible for just the Oracle database and used to be extremely well paid to do so.
At this point the only use case that I am seeing anymore for Oracle is that some fool is trapped in their ecosystem. There are plenty of MariaDB installs with massive clusters of computers happily handling absurd amounts of data. These are installs in the top 0.1% of storage and data bandwidth. I am hard pressed to even understand why anyone would pay for an Oracle DB at this point with all the fantastic options available. Plus MariaDB doesn't compile on Sun anymore.
One thing about the above Sun guy is that he also chose Sun because he would be one of the few masters of that universe vs all the little rats running around popping up Linux machines like weeds.
I have been working in technology for over 20 years. I see the same thing over and over. There is the oracle dba who fought for years to keep the primary servers all Sun. Then one day not only is the switch made to linux, but much to his shock one or more data stores were deployed with new projects. Radical things like MariaDB. Then the same guy is screaming mad that he isn't being consulted on database schemas saying that some junior programmer will just expose their clients to all kinds of pain without him.
But what happens is that all his attempts to stay with the old result in his not being invited onto the big billing projects. So as the ever shortening list of Oracle customers dries up, so do his billable hours.
Then another guy down the hall, the exact same age has just made a crazy contribution to redis because of his hard core C skills. Thus he has blended his old school C skills with his passion for a more recent and awesome technology. Oddly enough this second guy is fought over by the various projects as his contributions are relevant, and also don't come with any smell of arrogance.
Weeks after the Oracle guy is let go when the last project finally went away, the GM privately passes some of Oracle guy's emails on to the redis guy not only arguing that redis is a pile of shit, but that by contributing to a project he is revealing proprietary customer code and that the customer should be warned as to the risks of this and open source in general.
Sound hypothetical? Nope, real life example. I could find other guys who have done the same but you can cross out Oracle with Novell, MSDN, IBM, etc. I can remember in the early 2000s waving my arms in more than one meeting saying, "We can buy 20 whitebox linux machines for the price of one Sun machine, plus when the customer finds out what their database licensing costs are going to be for a database with a few thousand rows they are going to freak. Let's go open source on that as well." In the above there would be Sun certified guys arguing that Linux and whitebox machines working in a cluster were so fantastically unreliable that we were crossing the line into fraud to deploy them on clients. This would be when our own statistics showed a long term failure rate that was pretty much identical between the two. Then these same guys would eventually give up this battle but then move onto an argument about switching from perl to PHP because perl was a "proven" language.
I don't think that is is caused by age so much as by aging skills. I suspect a 50 year old who got into programming today would use modern tools in modern ways, but in 10 years would have a roughly equal chance of then being 10 years out of date as some 30 year old would have after 10 years of programming.
My personal example is that I work with C++ (which is pretty old school for many) but I know quite a few C++ programmers my age who don't even like vectors yelling that they are a performance hazard and cover up to much of what happens under the hood. I am not 100% modern C++ and haven't even generally stuck to the latest and greatest. But my code does require C++11 compilers to function in the slightest.
The successful people in tech are willing to learn the newest and coolest. I have found that those older types who have the above complaint are often resting on laurels that younger people don't even know exist. Who cares if you are certified in Sun or Novell? It doesn't matter if you have worked with Window NT, your PhD in digital signal processing from the early 90s is worthless. It doesn't matter if you worked for Nortel, Intel, Bell labs, or IBM.
If you are looking at an older skill that is relevant it might be OpenGL. What project did you recently do on your own that didn't involve a white paper? If you want to impress you need to show that you are surfing the most recent wave, not talking about the big one in Y2K.
I find the main difference between younger and older developers is simply the younger ones are pretty much by default using today's technology. So an older worker who knows node.js and redis is far more valuable than one who knows Oracle and Perl. Of course the one who knows Oracle, perl, redis, and node.js is more valuable again.
The unhealthy balances the healthy by providing an outlet. Maybe there is some spill-over, but I find that in a discussion on Python Programming there is very little politics, racism, etc. There are excellent forums where people can crap on Trump supporters, or others where they can kiss the Trump ring. For the most part I would say that the "healthy" parts of reddit stay more pure than similar discussions in Slashdot. I don't know how many slashdot threads I have seen that started out with a metallurgical breakthrough where someone's comment mentioned Ayn Rand, and then proceeded into a huge libertarian knife fight.
So maybe 4chan levels aren't needed but if someone wants to set up an area where they hate some group, then great, now it will be less likely to spill over into my discussion of new features in C++.
What I would love is a $50 smartphone where I can at least partially upgrade it. A few things such as a better battery would be nice if. The simple reality is that while I have an unlimited everything package, I don't use my phone for that much. I use the maps, occasionally surf the web, run a few apps of no particular hardship on the CPU, listen to lectures and audiobooks, listen to podcasts, listen to music, and check simple things such as the time or weather. Oh, and I take non critical pictures and videos.
My present phone is an iPhone 5C which was an upgrade from a 4S only because the provider I switched to won't support the 4S.
I might switch to the 6 because of the larger screen. But if I could switch to the larger screen and only have the capacity I have now, it wouldn't bother me. In fact a 4S with a larger screen would be fine.
Even then the only reason I had a 4S is because I develop apps and my 3G couldn't go past iOS v5.1.1. So maybe I would still be using the 3G if I had not been "forced" to switch.
I think boiled down, I really don't need a $500 plus smartphone. If it weren't for the app development issue my phone would probably be something like the OnePlus 2. Simple, cheap, basic, and by far, good enough.
A switch that I have been planning on making is to a very dumb phone from the chocolate bar slab family. Except the one I am looking at can tether. Then I will just use other devices as I please for years to come.
The benefits are pretty good. The basic phone not only has a very good battery, but also has a swapable battery. The devices that I can tether will then vary with my mood, and over the years with what devices I still have. A small tablet one day, a larger tablet the next, or a laptop. This way when I buy another device I don't have to ask, "Is it unlocked?"
This is from someone who only recently replaced my iPad 1 for the simple reason that a few critical apps would no longer run.
I can see these policemen trading these keys around like some kids with $2 baseball cards. The RCMP would hand these over to every spy agency and police force in the world if they got two candies and a pat on the head.
The question isn't why would they? That is obvious. The question is what possibly could have stopped them? How about nothing. They literally would have nothing to lose handing over this access and everything to gain.
I want to sit in a park, at work, at home, or wherever. I want to order something like a burger, a donair (look it up) or a coffee. I then want to step outside and have it arrive a very short while later. Once I can do this, then I can't see not having this service all the time.
I could see this operating at many levels. I am biking, it is a hot day, get fluids delivered. All the way to, I am camping, in pretty much the middle of nowhere and get a missing item delivered, or just some icecream.
This would ideally also extend to some sort of courier service. My kid forgets their homework; for a very reasonable fee, it gets delivered.
If the delivery can be something larger like an entire order of groceries, then all the better. But packages under 1kg would still make my life a whole lot better.
Slashdot Mirror
Not only will it be couples and singles wailing away, there will be an increase in mobile prostitution. I say increase in that the last time I was in Vegas I was given "promotional" literature advertising that I could get a happy ending limo back to the airport.
While this is sort of a funny thing it is not inconsequential in that most of the time prostitution takes place in an alley or some dark spot near the stroll. I once worked in an office in the shadier part of town and we joked that we had a rubber tree out back as the discards were often thrown into its branches.
Now they won't have to pull into some dark corner but just circle the block for a short while.
Just a few of the zillion cultural and economic changes that self driving cars will impart.
I run one pretty typical website (i.e. not named chromeuserslove.com). Where I don't see a whole lot of IE.
Personally I see IE as the new AOL. It kind of tells you that you are dealing with a rank amateur.
I have worked with organizations that used similarly old stuff and would buy stacks of replacements. The problem was that nearly all the replacements were failing in the same way before any use. Some glue that was fine for 10 years would suddenly start to run and dissolve other important bits. Certain bits would just corrode even thought they had been kept in a pretty damn good environment. LCD screens looked like something like bacteria were growing inside as some strange chemical process crept along.
One other magical thing is that it seems that if you don't use a hard drive for years that it will spin up, work fine for a very short while and then fail very rapidly. Probably some lubricant just dried up or mutated.
I feel their pain.
I can see Steve Jobs launching the prototype watch mockups into the wall yelling, "Why the poop would I want to wear a brick on my arm? This isn't elegant, this isn't design, this is a committee who put everything that popped into their heads into a single thing." "Boil this thing down until it is slim and does what people want. Not all these stupid menus."
I can see him then making a rule. "Only use the watch for features where people glance at their phones; time, weather, notifications, minimal navigation. If it more than a glance then we don't put it on the watch."
But instead they allowed the "creatives" to do whatever they wanted without any reigning in their stupider ideas. Many of the ideas such as incorporating the heartbeat or the apple pay should have waited until the technology was a few generations in and those features could be added to the super slim long battery lived watch.
Apple is clearly a company that has had one home run every few years with a new product that soon eclipses the former products as they go into the sunset. Macbooks are a big market, just not a terribly big one for apple, yet in their day they were king. The iPhone was certain to meet the same fate. So while the watch could have been great, it certainly wasn't going to eclipse the iPhone. Thus Apple seems to have forgotten this little factoid. Build something that can eclipse the iPhone. Maybe that is what they were trying with whatever car project they have going. Maybe it will come out and blow everyone away. The critical bit being that I hope they have more than one high risk project in the works.
If Steve Jobs had any one superpower it was that he didn't accept other people as having genuine expertise no matter how much they were at the top of their field. He knew that it was too easy for them to get caught up in group think, or to think that their shit smelled better than others just because of their qualifications. Thus he was perfectly happy to call the top experts in any domain an idiot if what they were proposing didn't make sense. He was also happy to demand that they do things that went against every industry norm that they understood, and could justify all day long. I don't see anyone at Apple willing to call Ivy an idiot for his ugly flat designs, or his stupid fat crappy battery watch. He is the expert you know.
Not that I don't care about this statistic, it is interesting. But most people don't care about which desktop. For a huge number of people they need a browser, and well that's it, a browser. Then they occasionally need to print what they browse. The other big feature they need is the ability to back up photos from their phone until their hard drive fails and they lose all their photos.
Occasionally some people need to run Microsoft Office specifically. Or they need to run some software that only runs on windows. This is becoming rarer and rarer. One large group that I have found are hard core windows users are accountants. Most of them have mastered Excel, not are good at it and could use something else, but have pretty much mystical abilities with it. Beyond that there the PC gamers. But for the vast majority, the OS isn't even the big question but budget.
Most people are happy with a 10 year old laptop with a 4 minute battery that they keep in a drawer only to be pulled out on the occasion that their phone or tablet can't fill out some form, or they need to so a sudden excess of typing.
There isn't much difference at work. Most people don't need any machine better than an average machine circa 2008.
This means that for many people they will keep using any given machine until it utterly fails. Then they will replace it with the cheapest machine that allows them to continue with little regard as to what OS it uses as long as it functions as the old one did.
Few people that I know outside of programmers will ask any questions about hard drives, memory, etc, because they know that pretty much any machine in 2016 will be far beyond their needs.
So for most people, if you were to ask them what OS they would like they would say, "Don't care"
I would suspect that this tradeoff would apply to every single project, but not all the projects overall. The above screwup cost over $200 million. Thus the savings from preventing a single screwup out of even 20 projects would more than cover the extra costs.
This is similar to an argument I often have about unit testing. Many programmers are still opposed to the idea. I actually believe that a large project without unit testing can't actually be competed. The extra effort of unit testing actually allows for ever faster progress the deeper you get into the project as compared to the same project without unit testing that often becomes stalled at a certain point.
So I would somewhat think that even though launches and space vehicles aren't quite a commodity product, that by not standardizing that it is decreasing product quality while limiting what can be developed.
I would think that if the bulk of a space probe could be borderline off the shelf and if they weren't quite reinventing the wheel or at least rebuilding someone else's wheel from scratch, that more effort could be put into the final mission.
Also this would presumably decrease risk which by itself reduces cost, and would just reduce cost which either means more money for the actual mission, or more missions because of lowered costs.
I have heard either indirectly or from the horse's mouth about all kinds of close calls. Birds appearing like a hailstorm of missiles, errors, flights off course, etc.
Then there are the scarier stories about Stalin in his last days 100% sure that the US was going to order a first strike, and thus he should beat them to the punch. I would also not be surprised if some US military advisors over the years thought that a US first strike would somehow have been a good idea. Assuming this to be true, how few people did they have to convince to make it so?
Then we have the classics like the Cuban missile crisis.
Importantly many military analysts have pointed out that if the NATO and the Soviets had ever started to go toe to toe in some actual conflict, such as NATO stepping in for Hungary that it would have resulted in one side or the other beginning to lose, this might have escalated to local tactical battlefield nukes, which might have escalated to strategic nukes.
I would have thought that most of this would be plug and play by now. Not so much that every component is the same, but that how the components interface would be the same. Much like when I hook a new more sensitive mouse, or a better printer to my computer, I don't need to reconfigure my browser. There can't be that many unique systems on any given platform. Gyros, rockets, sensors, etc. Maybe today's gyro package is way better than yesterday's but I would think that you just make the interface capable of handling an insanely great gyro and then don't worry about it for many many generations of gyros.
I would also have thought that there would be simulators for most of this crap. Things that would give a nice broadspectrum test of a system with various temperatures, magnetic flux, radiation, etc. Something where they could test just about every strange scenario that space throws at a system over its lifetime. But in spades.
Also by standardizing some of this crap, they could also effectively opensource their solutions. It seems fairly common to hear heroic stories where a system will have 5 gyros with a minimum of 3 required to operate. But then 4 of them fail and the geniuses figure out how to keep the system limping along on that single gyro. That is a perfect but of software to then just incorporate into all future systems.
Lastly why isn't there a "your commands are stupid, let's wait for manual control" edge case analyser. Things like spinning too fast, very long burns on the rockets, etc. If the computer decides to do one of these unusual things, that instead it yells to ground control, "Hey, could you double check to make sure that I don't have a case of the stupids."
Every judge and lawyer is run through a gauntlet of security background checks. Does anyone honestly think that a former ALCU lawyer or human rights advocate is going to past muster? They are only going to approve the most authority respecting hanging judges they can find.
Even for those defendants who want to hire a lawyer has to get that lawyer and their firm approved. Again an actual lawyer who believes in things such as the constitution or knows who side they are on are going to survive the testing. If your lawyer is rejected from the process you can still have them but they don't get to see your case.
Also a critical factor in winning cases that are already stacked against you is to hire a lawyer who then puts 10 interns onto the case along with a handful of investigators, none of whom are either going to be allowed to see anything or do an investigation. Thus these are nearly unwinnable cases.
Then the entire US justice system is adversarial. So any group of prosecutors and judges who don't have an opposing side are going to easily run circles around defendants who don't even know they are on trial (being investigated).
The key to all this is that there are already plenty of laws that deal with nearly every form of crime that a terrorist might do or plan. If you plan on murdering people then oddly enough that is a crime and can be investigated including wire taps. Murdering people is probably against the law. Hiring murders is, funding criminals is, hiding criminals, all existing crimes. There are all kinds of interesting things such as probable cause, RICO, etc that give police everything they need. Not everything they want, just everything they need.
The crazy thing is that this continues at pretty much full speed. It is almost like the constitution is some kind of measuring stick where they get to measure the size of their dicks by how many part of the constitution are ignored or suspended on their behalf. Like the stupid war on drugs, their efforts are going to only have overall negative returns. Maybe once in a blue moon they catch an actual bad guy as opposed to a straw bad guy they pretty much had to build from scratch. But for every bad guy they catch they will spread untold misery, economic problems, and potentially an increased death toll by slightly increasing the overall stress and unhappiness of the entire population. I will be discussing this sort of thing over the phone and sometimes the other person will say that they aren't comfortable talking about this on a phone. Crazy.
I would say that the only way that this madness ends is if crystal clear laws are put into place that wholesale ban this sort of behaviour. Potentially all the way to a constitutional amendment. Otherwise it will simply be a ratchet type approach. Every time there is a scare they will get a few more regulations or laws that favour the ending of this right or that privacy. These laws are typically one way. Very rarely are they repealed. Also there don't seem to be any willing investigators actively prosecuting those who have already violated existing laws.
I wonder what any of the space of likely presidential winners will do? Will they curtail these abuses and the entire abusive direction. Or will they realize that it just makes them more powerful?
Separating causation in a case like this will be fantastically hard. My gut feeling (see what I did there) is that something like a gut bacteria is the route cause of much of the expanding waistlines. Even identifying a gut bacteria can be hard for if the cause were just crappy fast food, there could be bacteria that simply thrive in the presence of crappy fast food.
People of course use data like this to support their favourite issues such as processed food, fast food, sugar, western diets, etc. Not that all these issues are bad, but if my supposition is correct and it were to be gut bacteria, the gut bacteria might be increasing the desire for crappy fast food or whatever. Thus there would be a near perfect correlation of crappy fast food to fatties as the fatties would be demanding the crappy fast food.
The three ways to figure this out would be some fantastic biochemical insights as to how one or more bacteria are spreading and causing this. To do double blind studies where they add bacteria to skinny populations, or to figure out how to eliminate a suspect bacteria and then double blind some people there.
A double blind introduction of suspect bacteria into random skinny populations would probably produce the quickest results, despite the huge ethical issue this does have the advantage that the scientists can outrun the angry mob who weren't in the control group.
What many people don't realize is that the party machine is much bigger than a single election or politician. Politicians come and go for the most part, but the machine is there today, tomorrow, and for a long time to come.
This has huge implications for those preparing to fight the machine. For instance if some small town guy puts up a Feel the Bern sign, the local democratic HOA or alderman will come knocking and put a bit of pressure on that person even if they agree with them and like the person in question. The reason they will do this is because the machine remembers who supports and who hurts them. So while they might be able to directly get to the guy who puts up the sign they can get to the people who can shut him down. They will deny the alderman support in the next election. Even the HOA president would be in trouble if the local state legislator showed up at a HOA election BBQ for the opponent this year instead of them.
This doesn't only apply to elections and election support. The airport might have been funded by a party senator, jobs at that airport, contracts at that airport, etc are very much handed out to party loyalists. So maybe the company that has the fuel contract is the employer of the guy with the sign. A little reminder as to who is in charge of their future will have them talk to the guy with the sign.
But this isn't a huge well organized conspiracy. Each level knows what is expected of it and just acts. Thus there are no wiretaps that will expose this, no paper trails to follow.
The crazy part is that both machines are active regardless of who is in power, or even who is the default party in that neck of the woods. If you take a state like Connecticut which will never go all republican, you still have a republican party machine that demands loyalty.
Where it gets even weirder is that they are like a cult hunting apostates. When the machine sees someone supporting the other party, that is from their view a healthy part of democracy. He won't get any contracts while they are in power, but they aren't overly vindictive. It is when their own don't support the candidate picked in a smokey back room. Those disloyal Mofos need to be taught some respect.
This is one of the reasons Millennials are the ones supporting Sanders, they aren't typically part of the machine and getting their livelihood from the machine. But if you are 60 and own a solid pillar-of-the-community business, then you don't dare turn your back on your superiors.
Many times I have had an uber driver who simply can't find me. They will text me and ask where I am and I will say exactly where I am referring to some giant landmark that I am standing under. I then watch them drive around a bit hundreds of feet away, and they text/call again.
Where I live now had all the uber drivers looking for my house about 300 feet away. The cab companies make the same mistake. So I just call and wander down to where I know they think I will be.
Obviously their mapping software isn't very good, but why can't the uber drivers just look to see where my "dot" is? I could see some of these drivers pulling this sort of crap hoping to charge me a "late" fee. Or they might just make this mistake for whatever reason they are making it now and charge me a late fee.
So unless it is me just not ready for when the uber car come then Uber could rapidly turn people off.
Also in order for this to be reasonable they need to get their "1 minute" to last less than 5 minutes. Because I would say that on average I wait 1 minute that lasts well in excess of 3 minutes and often pushing into 5 or more minutes.
How about we get to charge Uber a late fee when they say that the cab will be there in a certain amount of time and they are wrong by a sizeable amount?
Assuming the cab icons on the app aren't made up crap, then I watch my uber driver often take some of the crappiest routes to get to me. It can't just be the routing as they will go a block beyond me and then sometimes circle that block. Or get stopped at stop signs for a minute or more when there is no traffic in the neighbourhood.
Adding to this mess they bought each of the newspapers with huge amounts of debt.
The traditional news business somewhat became a rentier business. One of the biggest revenue sources for newspapers was classified advertising. They would charge 20-30 dollars for something that cost them pennies. They also became the de-facto source of news. If they liked a politician or a party then they would not cover it negatively. If a friend of the owners got in trouble there would be no reporting. If one of their major advertisers got in trouble then little or nothing with lots of room for the companies to spin the negative news.
The business model was abusive and ripe for someone to do an end run.
The first sign I saw of this would be a local newspaper that carried just classifieds that were free for most purposes. They combined the online submission with print for the masses. I suspect that the news papers weren't happy with this.
The internet started to pick away at this. I would say the gut shot was craigslist and similar sites. Quite simply that was an instant lights out for an entire revenue stream.
The other was google adsense. Not that it is a great way to fund a site these days, but in the early days it was so damn easy to get started and your tiny site could instantly produce revenue. This allowed for some of the earliest web publications to make money and grow.
Google adsense wasn't just a slight revolution but it was a revolution in thinking. It had been proceeded by doubleclick. They were a huge pain in the ass if you were a nobody. They wanted to screen their prospective publishers to make sure they had the volumes and respectability. This translated to their preferring to land old media companies who were doing an online presence.
But what shocks me is that the old media companies have largely doubled down on what made them suck. They are still wildly biased. They don't seem to care about actual journalism such as taking down bad politicians or exposing evil companies. Then to add insult to all this they have adopted some of the worst practices of the internet such as clickbaiting or the various dark practises.
For instance, in my city there have been a spate of murders. Serious ones such as shootings on the core downtown streets. Reading the local newspapers they are talking about it in the general sense of a spate of murders. But no stories that paint a picture of who did what and why they might have had it coming, or not. Then I go on reddit and find eye-witness accounts, pictures, and stories about long running feuds between families. How is it that reddit has become the paper of record in a city of 1 million?
Then there are the autoplay videos. Wow what asshole came up with that gem. Not only do they autoplay, but they will follow you down the page, and even when paused will just start playing after a while. Then there are the videos that just keep streaming one video after another. These companies are wondering why we are all getting adblockers? Do they not understand that their cunning ways are effectively creating the drive and desire to dump them? That once dumped that we won't be coming back?
The reason is that I could probably find 1000 white papers that would fear monger about either open source being a security risk "The source code has been leaked to hackers." or something along the lines of "Good luck without enterprise support." as if this means that a bug found in Oracle tonight will be fixed just for you by tomorrow.
The few times I ever called Oracle were disappointments, and pretty much all my support was from google searches. With MariaDB, Postgres, etc my support is from google searches.
The other is when people dismiss open source data stores as toys and not meant for corporate data. They usually just start making up arguments when I point out that the companies with some of the largest databases in the world use opensource. Things like, "Well they have heavily modified them." to which I will point out, yes, and the commonly useful modifications or fixes were pushed into the open source project.
I think it all boils down to, "My database is better than your database because I paid so much for it."
In my distant past I was the guy who would made Oracle things happen for clients. But as I got more and more into dealing with clients I realized that Oracle is just a mean thing to do to people. One interesting part of the Oracle sales process seems to be to delay giving a final price. This way the project is well underway or even done before you present the client with some sticker-shock.
Then there were the prices themselves. I deployed quite a number of systems and could never predict the price. Would it be $30,000 or $300,000.
Then there were the end runs. Once Oracle got ahold of your client they were perfectly happy to see you swapped out and replaced with another consultancy who would slather the entire client with Oracle products. It was bordering on Oracle Doorbell for all your ding-dong needs.
There is no way I would ever use a solution that results in a company like that able to mess with my clients. No Microsoft, no Oracle, no IBM, or SAP.
My favourite is when I have a client who is in the process of throwing them out and they ask, "What will it cost to licence MariaDB." Then when they ask, "Can it handle our Enterprise database?" I will say, "Your $400,000 system has 40,000 rows of data in it. A $25 raspberry Pi could handle your needs." Then they ask about per seat licensing costs. "None." At this point I can see them fishing around in their heads for how they are going to be screwed; suddenly it dawns on them that the screwing is now over. They then go through a list of features that they have built up over time but couldn't afford. When they get the quote for those they pretty much throw up in disgust at how badly they had been treated over the years.
When they put it all together they realise that their previous consultant hadn't been working for them but effectively for a company like Oracle.
It has been over a decade since I dumped everything Oracle and will never go back.
MariaDB is the anti-Oracle. Oracle bought out MySQL which caused the main creator to flee and fork MySQL into MariaDB. There are three keys to MariaDB that would repulse an Oracle DBA. One is that for most use cases any halfway sane developer can conjure up a good enough schema. This scares the shit out of them. Maybe they could even double the performance if they used their skills, except that doubling 20ms queries isn't really worth much.
Second there is no company behind MariaDB to give grand certifications and otherwise reward people who promote the use of their product.
Lastly, due to the above two situations a MariaDB DBA is usually some guy who has a hundred other responsibilities in maintaining the servers. This is in direct opposition to someone who is solely responsible for just the Oracle database and used to be extremely well paid to do so.
At this point the only use case that I am seeing anymore for Oracle is that some fool is trapped in their ecosystem. There are plenty of MariaDB installs with massive clusters of computers happily handling absurd amounts of data. These are installs in the top 0.1% of storage and data bandwidth. I am hard pressed to even understand why anyone would pay for an Oracle DB at this point with all the fantastic options available. Plus MariaDB doesn't compile on Sun anymore.
One thing about the above Sun guy is that he also chose Sun because he would be one of the few masters of that universe vs all the little rats running around popping up Linux machines like weeds.
I have been working in technology for over 20 years. I see the same thing over and over. There is the oracle dba who fought for years to keep the primary servers all Sun. Then one day not only is the switch made to linux, but much to his shock one or more data stores were deployed with new projects. Radical things like MariaDB. Then the same guy is screaming mad that he isn't being consulted on database schemas saying that some junior programmer will just expose their clients to all kinds of pain without him.
But what happens is that all his attempts to stay with the old result in his not being invited onto the big billing projects. So as the ever shortening list of Oracle customers dries up, so do his billable hours.
Then another guy down the hall, the exact same age has just made a crazy contribution to redis because of his hard core C skills. Thus he has blended his old school C skills with his passion for a more recent and awesome technology. Oddly enough this second guy is fought over by the various projects as his contributions are relevant, and also don't come with any smell of arrogance.
Weeks after the Oracle guy is let go when the last project finally went away, the GM privately passes some of Oracle guy's emails on to the redis guy not only arguing that redis is a pile of shit, but that by contributing to a project he is revealing proprietary customer code and that the customer should be warned as to the risks of this and open source in general.
Sound hypothetical? Nope, real life example. I could find other guys who have done the same but you can cross out Oracle with Novell, MSDN, IBM, etc. I can remember in the early 2000s waving my arms in more than one meeting saying, "We can buy 20 whitebox linux machines for the price of one Sun machine, plus when the customer finds out what their database licensing costs are going to be for a database with a few thousand rows they are going to freak. Let's go open source on that as well." In the above there would be Sun certified guys arguing that Linux and whitebox machines working in a cluster were so fantastically unreliable that we were crossing the line into fraud to deploy them on clients. This would be when our own statistics showed a long term failure rate that was pretty much identical between the two. Then these same guys would eventually give up this battle but then move onto an argument about switching from perl to PHP because perl was a "proven" language.
I don't think that is is caused by age so much as by aging skills. I suspect a 50 year old who got into programming today would use modern tools in modern ways, but in 10 years would have a roughly equal chance of then being 10 years out of date as some 30 year old would have after 10 years of programming.
My personal example is that I work with C++ (which is pretty old school for many) but I know quite a few C++ programmers my age who don't even like vectors yelling that they are a performance hazard and cover up to much of what happens under the hood. I am not 100% modern C++ and haven't even generally stuck to the latest and greatest. But my code does require C++11 compilers to function in the slightest.
The successful people in tech are willing to learn the newest and coolest. I have found that those older types who have the above complaint are often resting on laurels that younger people don't even know exist. Who cares if you are certified in Sun or Novell? It doesn't matter if you have worked with Window NT, your PhD in digital signal processing from the early 90s is worthless. It doesn't matter if you worked for Nortel, Intel, Bell labs, or IBM.
If you are looking at an older skill that is relevant it might be OpenGL. What project did you recently do on your own that didn't involve a white paper? If you want to impress you need to show that you are surfing the most recent wave, not talking about the big one in Y2K.
I find the main difference between younger and older developers is simply the younger ones are pretty much by default using today's technology. So an older worker who knows node.js and redis is far more valuable than one who knows Oracle and Perl. Of course the one who knows Oracle, perl, redis, and node.js is more valuable again.
The unhealthy balances the healthy by providing an outlet. Maybe there is some spill-over, but I find that in a discussion on Python Programming there is very little politics, racism, etc. There are excellent forums where people can crap on Trump supporters, or others where they can kiss the Trump ring. For the most part I would say that the "healthy" parts of reddit stay more pure than similar discussions in Slashdot. I don't know how many slashdot threads I have seen that started out with a metallurgical breakthrough where someone's comment mentioned Ayn Rand, and then proceeded into a huge libertarian knife fight.
So maybe 4chan levels aren't needed but if someone wants to set up an area where they hate some group, then great, now it will be less likely to spill over into my discussion of new features in C++.
What I would love is a $50 smartphone where I can at least partially upgrade it. A few things such as a better battery would be nice if. The simple reality is that while I have an unlimited everything package, I don't use my phone for that much. I use the maps, occasionally surf the web, run a few apps of no particular hardship on the CPU, listen to lectures and audiobooks, listen to podcasts, listen to music, and check simple things such as the time or weather. Oh, and I take non critical pictures and videos.
My present phone is an iPhone 5C which was an upgrade from a 4S only because the provider I switched to won't support the 4S.
I might switch to the 6 because of the larger screen. But if I could switch to the larger screen and only have the capacity I have now, it wouldn't bother me. In fact a 4S with a larger screen would be fine.
Even then the only reason I had a 4S is because I develop apps and my 3G couldn't go past iOS v5.1.1. So maybe I would still be using the 3G if I had not been "forced" to switch.
I think boiled down, I really don't need a $500 plus smartphone. If it weren't for the app development issue my phone would probably be something like the OnePlus 2. Simple, cheap, basic, and by far, good enough.
A switch that I have been planning on making is to a very dumb phone from the chocolate bar slab family. Except the one I am looking at can tether. Then I will just use other devices as I please for years to come.
The benefits are pretty good. The basic phone not only has a very good battery, but also has a swapable battery. The devices that I can tether will then vary with my mood, and over the years with what devices I still have. A small tablet one day, a larger tablet the next, or a laptop. This way when I buy another device I don't have to ask, "Is it unlocked?"
This is from someone who only recently replaced my iPad 1 for the simple reason that a few critical apps would no longer run.
I wish you were correct.
I can see these policemen trading these keys around like some kids with $2 baseball cards. The RCMP would hand these over to every spy agency and police force in the world if they got two candies and a pat on the head.
The question isn't why would they? That is obvious. The question is what possibly could have stopped them? How about nothing. They literally would have nothing to lose handing over this access and everything to gain.
I want to sit in a park, at work, at home, or wherever. I want to order something like a burger, a donair (look it up) or a coffee. I then want to step outside and have it arrive a very short while later. Once I can do this, then I can't see not having this service all the time.
I could see this operating at many levels. I am biking, it is a hot day, get fluids delivered. All the way to, I am camping, in pretty much the middle of nowhere and get a missing item delivered, or just some icecream.
This would ideally also extend to some sort of courier service. My kid forgets their homework; for a very reasonable fee, it gets delivered.
If the delivery can be something larger like an entire order of groceries, then all the better. But packages under 1kg would still make my life a whole lot better.