Wasn't there a brief modular TV trend in the early 90s where the idea was that the TV was a monitor and you bought components like a stereo, or probably more correctly, they were thought of as stereo-type components to be added to the component stereo system?
I think it was at about the peak of VHS as a technology, when TV broadcasts were in stereo and VHS had hi-fi stereo audio and better TVs had at least composite if not SVHS video.
Now most people use them that way despite the TV industry never giving up its thick feature set, tuners (which later became cable-ready, then digital capable and then worthless with digital cable boxes), and now smart features.
Really, somebody needs to go after Visa/MC/Amex and start taking the money from them, too, because they're the ones that enable the purchasing aspect of this.
It would be kind of nice if these "app store" type purchases required not just that app store approval, but some kind of credit card pin to approve the actual financial transaction, too.
There's just so much functionality tied to the app store/vendor cloud account that you end up needing the password to add free apps, which ends up opening the door to using the password for making in-app purchases as well.
It'd be nice to see "a minor made this purchase" be an affirmative and non-deniable method of obtaining a refund. Yes, it would be abused, but the abuse of it would be the key to forcing the app store and/or Visa into creating a system of affirmative cardholder approval of the purchases.
They could be running a converged network infrastructure with storage and networking fabrics meshed and a run-amok router starts blasting out broken routes and it cascades into storage access problems and crashes compute nodes that lose their storage, resulting some borked databases and crashed apps.
I'd guess it was designed to not do that and we don't know if it was a config error, some HA feature that didn't work, some other bug or what.
This was my thought. Exploration in remote places has always been dangerous.
Sailors risked tropical disease, sanitation-related disease, malnutrition diseases, starvation, death from dehydration.
I'm curious what the risk rate for skin cancers is for mountaineers given that they spend increased time at high elevations with enhanced solar radiation exposure.
Nobody is being forced to strap into a rocket and go to Mars, just like nobody is forced to skydive, climb mountains or explore any wilderness. There are people who look at the risks and decide that the exploration is worth it for them personally.
The hard part about deep space won't be finding people willing to face these risks, it will be filtering out the few people you will actually end up sending from the vast sea of volunteers.
And yes, to a certain extent they will be guinea pigs, but they will also help us understand the risks and develop drugs or materials or therapies to overcome them.
I too think e-cigarettes are an annoying and asinine way for people to keep doing something they know they shouldn't.
This is where the magic is.
You probably "shouldn't" do something if it is extremely harmful to you, although even then there are some cases where it doesn't matter (ie, a patient with late-stage terminal brain cancer can do most everything, including smoking, since smoking isn't what's going to end their life).
If smoking tobacco cigarettes has a harm score of 95 on a scale of 1-100 and vaping has a harm score of 10 on the same scale, does vaping still count as "something I know I shouldn't do"? What's the socially acceptable harm threshold where something can be harmful but somehow morally acceptable?
I feel like the whole e-cig debate is kind of dominated by a standard of safety that is unobtainable for what vaping physically represents, simply because it is a pleasure-providing drug experience.
I still remember the driver's ed teacher describing what he called our state's "basic speed limit" which said that you had to drive at a speed appropriate for conditions, which meant that if the conditions warranted it you could be tagged for driving at or under the speed limit.
If Putin instead decided to target the RNC they might uncover discussions of voter suppression efforts or other dirty tricks.
You don't need the Russians to reveal that the Republicans want to suppress voting, the Republicans make voter ID and reforming the Voting Rights Act an open part of their political program.
What's truly bothersome about the DNC emails is that the Democrats are so completely sanctimonious about being the guardians of the voting franchise, yet they're completely willing to undermine the primary election process by hindering or sabotaging a candidate who posed a significant threat to their preferred candidate.
So what do they REALLY value, free and fair elections where the outcome might not be what their power brokers want, or a fraudulent process that they control through manipulation? To me, they are cynical to the core and their only belief is self promotion.
At this point, it's becoming less and less a question of policy (since really, no meaningful change in the status quo will actually happen no matter who wins) but a question of voting for the candidate who seems the least cynical and dishonest. At this point, I'd rather vote for a candidate who's up front about being an asshole than I would one who's going to lie continually.
You would think they could have cameras with overlapping fields of view and the software to mask the overlap correctly to provide a stereoscopic effect. Even cardboard videos seem to do this OK.
I guess that's part of my question. A lot of car parts do come from the existing global parts supply chains, so building a "new" internal combustion vehicle wouldn't be that hard because almost nothing about it would be unique or proprietary and would be available from suppliers, right down to complete power trains.
With electric cars, though, there's a lot of engineering synthesis between the batteries, the drive train, even the braking (for regenerative braking) and in some ways, even the chassis considering the weight/safety issues relative to batteries.
While it's "just electric motors" and "just batteries", you're not building a golf cart, you're building a car where capacity/distance are major selling points and where innovation is ongoing, meaning that these systems aren't parts bin parts, many of them are highly proprietary engineered systems that can't easily just be bought off the shelf if they can be bought at all, especially when the buyer is Apple and the vendors of these products might not want to cede the market for electric cars to them.
With ICU cars, the incremental improvements in powertrains are miniscule, so nobody has a problem selling you their engines or transmissions and the rest of the car literally is parts bin parts from Delco or Bosch or the like.
I've noticed there are quite a few cameras trained at cars in the Arizona checkpoints I've been through. I wonder if they have some kind of collation system that's able to identify cars via license plate readers who have been through an actual border crossing and then compare the occupants from high resolution cameras trained at the passenger compartments.
In theory, foreign cars that have already cleared the actual border and seem to contain the same occupants would be ones you would possibly want to reduce scrutiny on since you've already checked their IDs and vehicle at the actual border, possibly adding some kind of reasonable time window for the car to have been driven from the border to the inland checkpoint.
That way, if you crossed into the US, did the entry-to-the-US thing at the border you would be of less interest at an inland checkpoint and can be waved through faster, cutting crossing delays at the inland checkpoints.
Sea planes are mostly planes that can use water as a takeoff and landing surface, but don't generally operate on the water as seagoing vessels.
Has anyone ever built sort of the opposite, a vessel that can fly but has some designed in ability to stay on the water more in the manner of a boat?
Maybe with gas turbines for electric generation, electric motor props and a electric pod drives retractable into the fuselage for marine propulsion?
Perhaps the engineering is too complex or it would do neither job well enough to be worthwhile, but it seems like there may be some interesting niches where rapid access to a remote ocean location is desirable but where there's some task needed where loitering and maneuvering on the surface of the water is desirable in ways or for time periods that an airplane isn't useful.
While it's not like they don't have the cash (in Ireland..), but vehicle assembly is a huge job and I'm guessing that many of the parts for an electric car aren't something you can necessarily just get out of the Bosch parts bin or get from jobbers.
My guess is they're building one to try to understand them from the ground up to be suppliers of technology or to lure a major carmaker without an electric car into building it for them.
3D cinema only has 2 points of view. There are other 3D display technologies that offer 8 points of view, creating a wider sweet spot and allowing more compelling depth.
And if they compel me to provide fingerprints, not only should I not have to tell them which fingerprint may unlock the device, it should be up to them to convert my fingerprint into a useful tool to actually unlock the phone.
Hopefully device manufacturers will include a configurable time window for the time to PIN/password fallback. It would be useful to adjust it based on usage from anywhere 0 to days, depending on what you think your exposure is.
I'm generally happy with Win10 on both my laptops.
But Cortana? Why isn't there an option to disable it completely who don't want it? And why does putting it on the lock screen (hey, if its locked, maybe that's to keep anyone from doing anything, including random voice tasks..) feel like they're just jamming it somewhere *else* it's not wanted because people are ignoring it on the task bar?
I really would like to hear actual meetings where highly paid people at Microsoft think running around like a third-rate Apple knockoff is a good idea.
In addition to seeing some kind of supporting data driving these decisions. Either they'd confirm that research shows shoving Cortana everywhere actually adds to its usage, or they'd confirm there is no data, this is all mental masturbation to further fantasies that badly imitating Apple is actually a strategy.
We won an Xbox 360 in a school raffle two years ago. The Xbox One had just been released. But because it had and the 360 had been on the market for a while, we were able to walk out of a pawn shop with a half-dozen games for less than $50.
I think our total game investment is maybe $100 up to now, and the count is probably 15 or more.
If you can play 360 games on the One, it might make a decent Christmas present if we don't lose the games we own or have to maintain two systems.
"A century ago, there would be a battle that wiped out the next village, you'd never even hear about it."
Huh? Maybe in the remote parts of Africa or some other place that was still stuck in the stone age. Maybe. In the parts of the worlds actually living in the (early) 20th century not so much.
I think there's some truth to this, in that not even that long ago when something awful happened far away it may have gotten printed in a larger newspaper but even then the details were spartan, often delayed by days or weeks (depending on how far back we're talking).
But now? We get to watch high definition video of the something awful happening in almost real time and within hours we have a mountain of data on it, from facts to photos to additional video, from the other side of the world.
The benefit of not knowing or knowing very poorly was that the something awfuls were less inflammatory. You were, somewhat rightly, more aggrieved about the local awful things, which based on nothing more than probability, were far less awful. And because the focus was more local, the awful things usually involved people like you, so there was less likelihood that the awful things immediately raised tribal instincts.
Now? A member of $group1 is a victim of $group2, and within hours $group1 is rioting in the streets or whipping their members into a froth (if they didn't already whip themselves into one after watching constant HD video replays). Even people without a dog in the fight reframe their conception of their local lives based on what they see, despite these things being remote.
That they were terrified of the loudmouth Donald Trump and grew increasingly terrified as he completely sabotaged their own attempt at coronating their own hand-picked stooge to run against Hillary in 2016.
The only difference between them and the Democrats? The RNC failed to derail Trump and the DNC and Hillary Clinton vociferously denied colluding to railroad Bernie Sanders.
The difference is also in expectations. Everyone *expects* the RNC and its major donors to guide a hand-picked favorite son into November. It's who they are. They don't operate under ideological banner that promotes free, open and fair elections -- they want to gut the Voting Rights Act, for example.
The Democrats, including Hillary Clinton, promote themselves as the guarantors of democracy, extending and protecting the franchise and voice of all people. Which is now being exposed for what it was all along -- a sanctimonious fiction and a bill of goods. Instead they spent their time promoting their own handpicked favorite and undermined a worthy and successful challenger.
I try not to buy into the Hillary is corrupt meme. But at this point, there's just too much evidence she's conniving and fundamentally not honest. And I'm not a Trump supporter, but I do have a certain admiration for the way he eviscerated the Republican party.
I love those armed checkpoints many miles from the border in Arizona.
Ironically, the last time I had to go through one I was the passenger in a car with Arizona plates. I'm 50, the driver was 65, both of us are Caucasian men. We had to answer a bunch of questions and were there for 2-3 minutes. The driver lives in Bisbee and has to pass through either the checkpoint in Tombstone or Sierra Vista to go anywhere north (Benson, Tuscon, etc), and so is through the checkpoints all the time.
The car in front of us had *Mexican* plates and 2 passengers. I don't think they were stopped for more than 10 seconds.
That's just fucking great. Two American Citizens NOT crossing a border in a vehicle with in-state plates spend more time answering Border Patrol questions than three likely foreign nationals in a vehicle with foreign license plates. Tell me what this system is about again?
I think you're sort of on the right track, but I think it has even LESS to do with potential technological or engineering innovation.
My sense is that the finance people have basically taken over, and that technology/engineering is being completely driven by financial modeling. Basic technology and innovation is being dictated by what the elaborate revenue models tell them, and the models are built in a way to min/max production cost and consumer spending.
I see this in all kinds of technology situations, where what appear to be the dumbest engineering decisions are made because it requires you to spend more.
I expect the same with the elimination of the heapdhone jack. They will eliminate the 3.5mm jack and replace it with a lightning based audio connector. The specs won't be released until after the phone is available to purchase and they will be the exclusive provider of native Lightning headphones *and* Lightning-3.5mm stereo adapters at huge premiums, raking in nearly exclusive revenue on them for months. They will eventually acquiesce and approve third party 3.5mm adapters, but their licensing process will also also guarantee they get a percentage of ALL of them.
Now, if you look at it from a technology perspective, maybe the 3.5mm jack does need to go. But you don't need much of an imagination to think that maybe there could have been some other jack design implemented that would have still have accomplished the other putative design reasons (thinner, more internal space) and not tied up in a bunch of exclusive-to-Apple IP.
What I think is especially maddening is that Amazon allows sellers to brand what look like identical goods with their own names, yet use the EXACT same picture of the items in the listings.
I bought a digital volt/current meter from a company on Amazon and there is another seller selling the EXACT same product using the EXACT same image as the one I bought. Both companies appear fairly engaged in their product (answering questions) and the second seller has suggested usage wiring diagrams as secondary photos.
My guess is that both sellers are selling some kind of Chinese product whose "brand" is whatever factory turns them out, but why does Amazon allow them to use the same photo? Why would they WANT to use the same photo?
I prefer driving as well, and even though we have a lot of direct flights from MSP, I find that security, delays, car rental, and so on worth nearly 3 hours or nearly 200 miles of road time on the Interstate. My limit, though, is about 500 miles because distances beyond that are just too time consuming for driving. I did have a trip to Springfield, IL, though which ended up being longer flying than driving would have been due to a cancelled flight and getting re-routed via Chicago.
The upside even if driving is long is you can take stuff with you -- food, full-size monitor, a decent electric kettle, cooler, etc. All that makes a week at a budget hotel much more bearable, especially when you're working 12 hour days. I've worked a couple of projects where I literally didn't need to leave the hotel for 2 days (on one of those trips the manager called me on day 2 asking if everything was OK -- she explained they get edgy when guests at this location don't leave the room for a couple of days as it makes them think of crime/drugs).
From a rights perspective, though, I think it's a mixed bag. The whole TSA experience is like visiting a prison, but I've kind of gotten to the point where I think they don't give a shit about anything but potentially violent people and no longer have the cop's what-can-I-bust-you-for-today mindset.
And in your car, with out of state license plates? You're basically an engraved invitation for a moving violation and an intensive search, and god forbid the cop that pulls you over is anything other than a major city squad or a state trooper. The former don't generally bother with anything but egregious traffic violations and the latter the same, provided your car is late model and in decent shape.
But small-town cops and county sheriff deputies can be real assholes to out of state cars. They are hot shit in their jurisdiction, shitkicker ex-football bullies making $20k/year and just convinced that someone from out of state is carrying mary-wanna and they just love to offer you a deal -- let me search your trunk, or you can have a stay in the county lockup, eat a moving violation, impound fees and lose 48 hours of your life.
I remember rumors a few years ago that VMware was going to make a smartphone hypervisor that would allow for smartphone VM partitioning.
The downsides would be battery consumption, paltry RAM on smartphones and the fact that you would basically need a major OEM to bake it into the design.
Of course the unachievable dream would have been iOS and Android VMs on one piece of hardware.
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Wasn't there a brief modular TV trend in the early 90s where the idea was that the TV was a monitor and you bought components like a stereo, or probably more correctly, they were thought of as stereo-type components to be added to the component stereo system?
I think it was at about the peak of VHS as a technology, when TV broadcasts were in stereo and VHS had hi-fi stereo audio and better TVs had at least composite if not SVHS video.
Now most people use them that way despite the TV industry never giving up its thick feature set, tuners (which later became cable-ready, then digital capable and then worthless with digital cable boxes), and now smart features.
Vlad rode a horse without a shirt. Fucking Chuck Norris won't say shit about him.
Really, somebody needs to go after Visa/MC/Amex and start taking the money from them, too, because they're the ones that enable the purchasing aspect of this.
It would be kind of nice if these "app store" type purchases required not just that app store approval, but some kind of credit card pin to approve the actual financial transaction, too.
There's just so much functionality tied to the app store/vendor cloud account that you end up needing the password to add free apps, which ends up opening the door to using the password for making in-app purchases as well.
It'd be nice to see "a minor made this purchase" be an affirmative and non-deniable method of obtaining a refund. Yes, it would be abused, but the abuse of it would be the key to forcing the app store and/or Visa into creating a system of affirmative cardholder approval of the purchases.
Shouldn't, but could.
They could be running a converged network infrastructure with storage and networking fabrics meshed and a run-amok router starts blasting out broken routes and it cascades into storage access problems and crashes compute nodes that lose their storage, resulting some borked databases and crashed apps.
I'd guess it was designed to not do that and we don't know if it was a config error, some HA feature that didn't work, some other bug or what.
This was my thought. Exploration in remote places has always been dangerous.
Sailors risked tropical disease, sanitation-related disease, malnutrition diseases, starvation, death from dehydration.
I'm curious what the risk rate for skin cancers is for mountaineers given that they spend increased time at high elevations with enhanced solar radiation exposure.
Nobody is being forced to strap into a rocket and go to Mars, just like nobody is forced to skydive, climb mountains or explore any wilderness. There are people who look at the risks and decide that the exploration is worth it for them personally.
The hard part about deep space won't be finding people willing to face these risks, it will be filtering out the few people you will actually end up sending from the vast sea of volunteers.
And yes, to a certain extent they will be guinea pigs, but they will also help us understand the risks and develop drugs or materials or therapies to overcome them.
I too think e-cigarettes are an annoying and asinine way for people to keep doing something they know they shouldn't.
This is where the magic is.
You probably "shouldn't" do something if it is extremely harmful to you, although even then there are some cases where it doesn't matter (ie, a patient with late-stage terminal brain cancer can do most everything, including smoking, since smoking isn't what's going to end their life).
If smoking tobacco cigarettes has a harm score of 95 on a scale of 1-100 and vaping has a harm score of 10 on the same scale, does vaping still count as "something I know I shouldn't do"? What's the socially acceptable harm threshold where something can be harmful but somehow morally acceptable?
I feel like the whole e-cig debate is kind of dominated by a standard of safety that is unobtainable for what vaping physically represents, simply because it is a pleasure-providing drug experience.
I still remember the driver's ed teacher describing what he called our state's "basic speed limit" which said that you had to drive at a speed appropriate for conditions, which meant that if the conditions warranted it you could be tagged for driving at or under the speed limit.
If Putin instead decided to target the RNC they might uncover discussions of voter suppression efforts or other dirty tricks.
You don't need the Russians to reveal that the Republicans want to suppress voting, the Republicans make voter ID and reforming the Voting Rights Act an open part of their political program.
What's truly bothersome about the DNC emails is that the Democrats are so completely sanctimonious about being the guardians of the voting franchise, yet they're completely willing to undermine the primary election process by hindering or sabotaging a candidate who posed a significant threat to their preferred candidate.
So what do they REALLY value, free and fair elections where the outcome might not be what their power brokers want, or a fraudulent process that they control through manipulation? To me, they are cynical to the core and their only belief is self promotion.
At this point, it's becoming less and less a question of policy (since really, no meaningful change in the status quo will actually happen no matter who wins) but a question of voting for the candidate who seems the least cynical and dishonest. At this point, I'd rather vote for a candidate who's up front about being an asshole than I would one who's going to lie continually.
You would think they could have cameras with overlapping fields of view and the software to mask the overlap correctly to provide a stereoscopic effect. Even cardboard videos seem to do this OK.
I guess that's part of my question. A lot of car parts do come from the existing global parts supply chains, so building a "new" internal combustion vehicle wouldn't be that hard because almost nothing about it would be unique or proprietary and would be available from suppliers, right down to complete power trains.
With electric cars, though, there's a lot of engineering synthesis between the batteries, the drive train, even the braking (for regenerative braking) and in some ways, even the chassis considering the weight/safety issues relative to batteries.
While it's "just electric motors" and "just batteries", you're not building a golf cart, you're building a car where capacity/distance are major selling points and where innovation is ongoing, meaning that these systems aren't parts bin parts, many of them are highly proprietary engineered systems that can't easily just be bought off the shelf if they can be bought at all, especially when the buyer is Apple and the vendors of these products might not want to cede the market for electric cars to them.
With ICU cars, the incremental improvements in powertrains are miniscule, so nobody has a problem selling you their engines or transmissions and the rest of the car literally is parts bin parts from Delco or Bosch or the like.
I've noticed there are quite a few cameras trained at cars in the Arizona checkpoints I've been through. I wonder if they have some kind of collation system that's able to identify cars via license plate readers who have been through an actual border crossing and then compare the occupants from high resolution cameras trained at the passenger compartments.
In theory, foreign cars that have already cleared the actual border and seem to contain the same occupants would be ones you would possibly want to reduce scrutiny on since you've already checked their IDs and vehicle at the actual border, possibly adding some kind of reasonable time window for the car to have been driven from the border to the inland checkpoint.
That way, if you crossed into the US, did the entry-to-the-US thing at the border you would be of less interest at an inland checkpoint and can be waved through faster, cutting crossing delays at the inland checkpoints.
Sea planes are mostly planes that can use water as a takeoff and landing surface, but don't generally operate on the water as seagoing vessels.
Has anyone ever built sort of the opposite, a vessel that can fly but has some designed in ability to stay on the water more in the manner of a boat?
Maybe with gas turbines for electric generation, electric motor props and a electric pod drives retractable into the fuselage for marine propulsion?
Perhaps the engineering is too complex or it would do neither job well enough to be worthwhile, but it seems like there may be some interesting niches where rapid access to a remote ocean location is desirable but where there's some task needed where loitering and maneuvering on the surface of the water is desirable in ways or for time periods that an airplane isn't useful.
I mean whole cars meant for consumer sale.
While it's not like they don't have the cash (in Ireland..), but vehicle assembly is a huge job and I'm guessing that many of the parts for an electric car aren't something you can necessarily just get out of the Bosch parts bin or get from jobbers.
My guess is they're building one to try to understand them from the ground up to be suppliers of technology or to lure a major carmaker without an electric car into building it for them.
3D cinema only has 2 points of view. There are other 3D display technologies that offer 8 points of view, creating a wider sweet spot and allowing more compelling depth.
And if they compel me to provide fingerprints, not only should I not have to tell them which fingerprint may unlock the device, it should be up to them to convert my fingerprint into a useful tool to actually unlock the phone.
Hopefully device manufacturers will include a configurable time window for the time to PIN/password fallback. It would be useful to adjust it based on usage from anywhere 0 to days, depending on what you think your exposure is.
I'm generally happy with Win10 on both my laptops.
But Cortana? Why isn't there an option to disable it completely who don't want it? And why does putting it on the lock screen (hey, if its locked, maybe that's to keep anyone from doing anything, including random voice tasks..) feel like they're just jamming it somewhere *else* it's not wanted because people are ignoring it on the task bar?
I really would like to hear actual meetings where highly paid people at Microsoft think running around like a third-rate Apple knockoff is a good idea.
In addition to seeing some kind of supporting data driving these decisions. Either they'd confirm that research shows shoving Cortana everywhere actually adds to its usage, or they'd confirm there is no data, this is all mental masturbation to further fantasies that badly imitating Apple is actually a strategy.
We won an Xbox 360 in a school raffle two years ago. The Xbox One had just been released. But because it had and the 360 had been on the market for a while, we were able to walk out of a pawn shop with a half-dozen games for less than $50.
I think our total game investment is maybe $100 up to now, and the count is probably 15 or more.
If you can play 360 games on the One, it might make a decent Christmas present if we don't lose the games we own or have to maintain two systems.
"A century ago, there would be a battle that wiped out the next village, you'd never even hear about it."
Huh? Maybe in the remote parts of Africa or some other place that was still stuck in the stone age. Maybe. In the parts of the worlds actually living in the (early) 20th century not so much.
I think there's some truth to this, in that not even that long ago when something awful happened far away it may have gotten printed in a larger newspaper but even then the details were spartan, often delayed by days or weeks (depending on how far back we're talking).
But now? We get to watch high definition video of the something awful happening in almost real time and within hours we have a mountain of data on it, from facts to photos to additional video, from the other side of the world.
The benefit of not knowing or knowing very poorly was that the something awfuls were less inflammatory. You were, somewhat rightly, more aggrieved about the local awful things, which based on nothing more than probability, were far less awful. And because the focus was more local, the awful things usually involved people like you, so there was less likelihood that the awful things immediately raised tribal instincts.
Now? A member of $group1 is a victim of $group2, and within hours $group1 is rioting in the streets or whipping their members into a froth (if they didn't already whip themselves into one after watching constant HD video replays). Even people without a dog in the fight reframe their conception of their local lives based on what they see, despite these things being remote.
That they were terrified of the loudmouth Donald Trump and grew increasingly terrified as he completely sabotaged their own attempt at coronating their own hand-picked stooge to run against Hillary in 2016.
The only difference between them and the Democrats? The RNC failed to derail Trump and the DNC and Hillary Clinton vociferously denied colluding to railroad Bernie Sanders.
The difference is also in expectations. Everyone *expects* the RNC and its major donors to guide a hand-picked favorite son into November. It's who they are. They don't operate under ideological banner that promotes free, open and fair elections -- they want to gut the Voting Rights Act, for example.
The Democrats, including Hillary Clinton, promote themselves as the guarantors of democracy, extending and protecting the franchise and voice of all people. Which is now being exposed for what it was all along -- a sanctimonious fiction and a bill of goods. Instead they spent their time promoting their own handpicked favorite and undermined a worthy and successful challenger.
I try not to buy into the Hillary is corrupt meme. But at this point, there's just too much evidence she's conniving and fundamentally not honest. And I'm not a Trump supporter, but I do have a certain admiration for the way he eviscerated the Republican party.
No, but I guess I had this idea that there would be more BORDER PATROL scrutiny of a vehicle WITH FOREIGN LICENSE PLATES.
It's not racist when the license plate says "Package may contain non-US content."
I love those armed checkpoints many miles from the border in Arizona.
Ironically, the last time I had to go through one I was the passenger in a car with Arizona plates. I'm 50, the driver was 65, both of us are Caucasian men. We had to answer a bunch of questions and were there for 2-3 minutes. The driver lives in Bisbee and has to pass through either the checkpoint in Tombstone or Sierra Vista to go anywhere north (Benson, Tuscon, etc), and so is through the checkpoints all the time.
The car in front of us had *Mexican* plates and 2 passengers. I don't think they were stopped for more than 10 seconds.
That's just fucking great. Two American Citizens NOT crossing a border in a vehicle with in-state plates spend more time answering Border Patrol questions than three likely foreign nationals in a vehicle with foreign license plates. Tell me what this system is about again?
I think you're sort of on the right track, but I think it has even LESS to do with potential technological or engineering innovation.
My sense is that the finance people have basically taken over, and that technology/engineering is being completely driven by financial modeling. Basic technology and innovation is being dictated by what the elaborate revenue models tell them, and the models are built in a way to min/max production cost and consumer spending.
I see this in all kinds of technology situations, where what appear to be the dumbest engineering decisions are made because it requires you to spend more.
I expect the same with the elimination of the heapdhone jack. They will eliminate the 3.5mm jack and replace it with a lightning based audio connector. The specs won't be released until after the phone is available to purchase and they will be the exclusive provider of native Lightning headphones *and* Lightning-3.5mm stereo adapters at huge premiums, raking in nearly exclusive revenue on them for months. They will eventually acquiesce and approve third party 3.5mm adapters, but their licensing process will also also guarantee they get a percentage of ALL of them.
Now, if you look at it from a technology perspective, maybe the 3.5mm jack does need to go. But you don't need much of an imagination to think that maybe there could have been some other jack design implemented that would have still have accomplished the other putative design reasons (thinner, more internal space) and not tied up in a bunch of exclusive-to-Apple IP.
What I think is especially maddening is that Amazon allows sellers to brand what look like identical goods with their own names, yet use the EXACT same picture of the items in the listings.
I bought a digital volt/current meter from a company on Amazon and there is another seller selling the EXACT same product using the EXACT same image as the one I bought. Both companies appear fairly engaged in their product (answering questions) and the second seller has suggested usage wiring diagrams as secondary photos.
My guess is that both sellers are selling some kind of Chinese product whose "brand" is whatever factory turns them out, but why does Amazon allow them to use the same photo? Why would they WANT to use the same photo?
I prefer driving as well, and even though we have a lot of direct flights from MSP, I find that security, delays, car rental, and so on worth nearly 3 hours or nearly 200 miles of road time on the Interstate. My limit, though, is about 500 miles because distances beyond that are just too time consuming for driving. I did have a trip to Springfield, IL, though which ended up being longer flying than driving would have been due to a cancelled flight and getting re-routed via Chicago.
The upside even if driving is long is you can take stuff with you -- food, full-size monitor, a decent electric kettle, cooler, etc. All that makes a week at a budget hotel much more bearable, especially when you're working 12 hour days. I've worked a couple of projects where I literally didn't need to leave the hotel for 2 days (on one of those trips the manager called me on day 2 asking if everything was OK -- she explained they get edgy when guests at this location don't leave the room for a couple of days as it makes them think of crime/drugs).
From a rights perspective, though, I think it's a mixed bag. The whole TSA experience is like visiting a prison, but I've kind of gotten to the point where I think they don't give a shit about anything but potentially violent people and no longer have the cop's what-can-I-bust-you-for-today mindset.
And in your car, with out of state license plates? You're basically an engraved invitation for a moving violation and an intensive search, and god forbid the cop that pulls you over is anything other than a major city squad or a state trooper. The former don't generally bother with anything but egregious traffic violations and the latter the same, provided your car is late model and in decent shape.
But small-town cops and county sheriff deputies can be real assholes to out of state cars. They are hot shit in their jurisdiction, shitkicker ex-football bullies making $20k/year and just convinced that someone from out of state is carrying mary-wanna and they just love to offer you a deal -- let me search your trunk, or you can have a stay in the county lockup, eat a moving violation, impound fees and lose 48 hours of your life.
I remember rumors a few years ago that VMware was going to make a smartphone hypervisor that would allow for smartphone VM partitioning.
The downsides would be battery consumption, paltry RAM on smartphones and the fact that you would basically need a major OEM to bake it into the design.
Of course the unachievable dream would have been iOS and Android VMs on one piece of hardware.