Yes, and it's extremely annoying if you want to do anything to your own car. It's bad on the same level as proprietary connectors for phones and all that, but unfortunately the amount of people improving their own cars is too low to cause any consumer feedback to manufacturers.
And I don't mean adding stupid spoilers and boost chips and sillyness, I mean stuff like adding an extra pair of high beams that can be operated with the same button as the regular high beams. That will take some serious hacking on a modern car. If car manufacturers were good at making things, this wouldn't be a huge problem, but modern cars do so many things wrong that it's infuriating. Like putting lambertian leds in places where they should have put batwing ones, forcing me to put a diffuser in front of it so that my daughter is able to sleep in her car seat. Or making it a fifteen-minute job to remove the battery for charging it during the winter, when it should take two minutes. Or putting the light that activates when you open the trunk in the far left corner of the trunk, so that it doesn't light up anything if you actually have something in the trunk. I could go on about this for a while...
An extra pair of high beams/driving lights can usually be done by just wiring a relay up to one of the lights that come on when you trigger the event you want to do; they still have to get a boatload of power to those lights somehow. It's not as elegant as pulling it from somewhere closer to the control itself, but it's very doable without too much work. The only exception I can think of for this is the HID systems that use servos to reposition the lens for high beams. Those are still fairly rare in my experience, and usually on offered on higher end vehicles that will seldom see a knife anyway. That said, I have a passion for cars and think about this kind of stuff quite a bit, so I may not be the audience you're speaking to about your complaint.
CAN has the potential to help modders actually: More and more is getting monitored by the system. If the system can be accessed by a third party device (like say via a standardized port) and the communication spec is public, the ability to do stuff with your car could be really neat. Your extra driving lights could be done elegantly, after you worked out how to get the raspberry PI to interface with the system.
Bad design lurks everywhere, it's not strictly the bailiwick of the automobile. It just happens to be one of the most common things that make it obvious.
That said, I completely agree: Some designers don't appear to actually have to use what they're designing.
"Ingenious"...You keep saying that. I think that word does not mean what you think it means.
Seriously, if anything that our banker overloards do is ever ingenious, the results will prove it, and the world will probably be a better place. However, sometimes my idea of genius is set to a longer time-line than what others would care to explore.
Any selfish act, no matter how well planned, cannot be called ingenious. Any act that promotes health throughout the world, no matter how simple, is always ingenious.
just my.02
Either you read Rand and didn't like it, or you REALLY need to read Rand and perhaps adjust the idea of what selfishness can accomplish. If the former, I respectfully disagree. If the latter, I would recommend reading and delving deep into some of the ideas that Rand presents.
At least now we know around which star is Alderaan.
25 LY isn't far. We can send all the niggers, spics, baby boomers, political elite, lardasses, and other undesirables to this planet. Imagine how much better off the rest of us will be. Good riddance!
Why not use a gun to fire fuel to a rocket then?
If you fired the gun every few seconds you wouldn't have the expense of lifting all of the fuel right from the start.
You'd just need the rocket to have some way of catching the fuel. Bit tricky admittedly.
Some would say this is already being done with laser launch systems.
In which case you would be taxed for miles driven outside the state.
The easy way to attempt to balance this is to charge for only a percentage of the miles turned. Still not completely fair, but would square it up at least somewhat.
OK, but I'm 6'2". How is it in my best interests for someone who's 4'11" to be able to attack me with equal force? Hmmm?
Didn't think of that did you.
The same applies the other direction: With current law (in most US states anyway), both the 4'11 and you have equal opportunity to legally acquire and train on the proper handling of firearms. I'm not seeing the problem here.
Here is a crazy idea, GET RID OF THEM.
If people want to go hunting let them use bows and there is no reason to have automatic weapons and handguns.
I genuinely don't understand this idea.
The firearm is a force multiplier when it comes to self defense. It allows a properly trained 90#, 4'11" person to be able to defend themselves from a 6'5" 250# person.
It is the responsibility of the owner of said firearm to learn how to properly and safely use it, and that's where I believe everyone agrees the breakdown is. The firearm is a tool. Improperly used, it's lethal, much like many other tools.
The MFR simply makes the product.
The owner still carries full weight and responsibility for proper use and misuse.
Shouldnt have to have a law to state that.
With respect to guns, the proper, intended use of the product is to put holes into stuff.
Why should they be shielded from liability any more than tobacco companies?
Come on, it's not that bad if you split everything up appropriately into well named subroutines and such like.
This is one of the most important things anyone approaching perl needs to grok. Perl gives you enough rope to hang yourself, that's why I use it. Lack of awareness of that has bitten me in the backside enough that I've learned this lesson.
Show it to the average consumer and ask them what it is. They won't tell you its an "ultrabook" ( and they wouldn't even if they knew what that was) they'll say "tablet" and compare it to... other tablets.
Its like porshe comming out with a new model that looks idetnical to a toyota yaris. They need an easy way for consumers to tell where the extra money and reduced fue effiencincy is going. The nameplate of porshe helps, but you could also show them different performance specs and have them test drive it a bit. Microsoft needs to do something to make it easy to explain to people why its differnt than other tablets. Oh wait, they already have an identical looking device that does behavie like a tablet in surface with windows RT. That would be like porshe developing two cars identical to the yaris, one with great performance you'd expect of porshe and antother that has performance on par with the yaris. Basically, MS is screwed. That's too dificult to explain to enough people.
Republicans have stalled the Cybersecurity Act of 2012 with a Senate vote of 51-47 against the legislation
So, I am not an expert on politics, but in the current congress, there 51 democratic senators, 47 republican senators, and 2 independents (both of whom caucus with the democrats). By my count, if every single senate republican voted against this, that still only comes to 47 votes. That means that the other 4 would have had to break ranks with the democratic party. So, just who is at fault here?
Just saying.
This. It's not just "one party". It's The Hill in general.
Not that I've read the legislation that they're voting on to ensure it's at least moderately sane. Most of it isn't.
> I'm tired of half my extra contract work money going to the federal government and being called a bigot for saying anything about it
No, you're called a bigot because you had a bumper sticker on the back of your truck, right above your trailer-hitch testicles, that said "Don't Re-Nig in November" like a lot of retards had.
I'd be more worried that 60% of voters think that taxes should go up for the richest people and only 35% thought that taxes shouldn't go up for anyone
Why? We're insolvent, and any fiscal conservative ought to know that when you're deep in debt, the only responsible thing to do is to pay it off, even if it means taking a second job (increasing income) as well as cutting expenses.
Which holy cows are you willing to turn into hamburger with regard to spending? The problem is that no one wants to donate their cow, just everyone elses.
Drive it off the cliff. Let every branch take a 10% hit and maybe, MAYBE Congress learn some priorities. At least then everyone donates a side of beef to the grinder.
Don;t you all understand!? People _died_ during this storm.
Yup, a damn shame, especially the avoidable deaths (not sure that there were any, but you know how people can be when they panic).
Lots of Newyorkers are still without power and water and here your all woried about data centers!? Get a grip nerds!
We are not paramedics; we are not firemen, or police, or any other sort of emergency personnel. What would you have us do, other than get in the way of the professionals?
We let the emergency personnel do their jobs by doing our jobs and getting the systems back up and running. Believe me, you wouldn't want a bunch of sysadmins doing triage anymore than you would want a bunch of cops and medics rebuilding a data center.
I would assume that the reason why the DC is there is for latency reasons. Probably peered to or on the same network as whatever major market their institution deals with.
Now, Microsoft is focussing on providing a strongly-preferred application distribution system for Windows and extracting a share of the revenues that go to application distributors
Hmm, so similar to Apple's strategy. And nobody is developing apps for iOS huh?
Apple extracts a minimal fee used just to cover costs because they can make up their money in hardware sales. Apple on the desktop does not prefer App store apps by limiting access to APIs based upon whether or not the developer paid a fee to Apple. Apple on mobile devices is not dominant in the industry such that ignoring that market means not having a viable market, so Apple can't jerk developers around as much or they just go to Android.
You'd like to think that Apples dominance is in question, but at least in the states, you can pretty safely bet that if it's a smart phone, it's an iDevice. The developers are listening to the market, and many things are iDevice only. Here's one example that's relevant to me: Irig: http://www.ikmultimedia.com/products/irig/
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, and it's extremely annoying if you want to do anything to your own car. It's bad on the same level as proprietary connectors for phones and all that, but unfortunately the amount of people improving their own cars is too low to cause any consumer feedback to manufacturers. And I don't mean adding stupid spoilers and boost chips and sillyness, I mean stuff like adding an extra pair of high beams that can be operated with the same button as the regular high beams. That will take some serious hacking on a modern car. If car manufacturers were good at making things, this wouldn't be a huge problem, but modern cars do so many things wrong that it's infuriating. Like putting lambertian leds in places where they should have put batwing ones, forcing me to put a diffuser in front of it so that my daughter is able to sleep in her car seat. Or making it a fifteen-minute job to remove the battery for charging it during the winter, when it should take two minutes. Or putting the light that activates when you open the trunk in the far left corner of the trunk, so that it doesn't light up anything if you actually have something in the trunk. I could go on about this for a while...
An extra pair of high beams/driving lights can usually be done by just wiring a relay up to one of the lights that come on when you trigger the event you want to do; they still have to get a boatload of power to those lights somehow. It's not as elegant as pulling it from somewhere closer to the control itself, but it's very doable without too much work. The only exception I can think of for this is the HID systems that use servos to reposition the lens for high beams. Those are still fairly rare in my experience, and usually on offered on higher end vehicles that will seldom see a knife anyway. That said, I have a passion for cars and think about this kind of stuff quite a bit, so I may not be the audience you're speaking to about your complaint.
CAN has the potential to help modders actually: More and more is getting monitored by the system. If the system can be accessed by a third party device (like say via a standardized port) and the communication spec is public, the ability to do stuff with your car could be really neat. Your extra driving lights could be done elegantly, after you worked out how to get the raspberry PI to interface with the system.
Bad design lurks everywhere, it's not strictly the bailiwick of the automobile. It just happens to be one of the most common things that make it obvious.
That said, I completely agree: Some designers don't appear to actually have to use what they're designing.
"Ingenious"...You keep saying that. I think that word does not mean what you think it means.
Seriously, if anything that our banker overloards do is ever ingenious, the results will prove it, and the world will probably be a better place. However, sometimes my idea of genius is set to a longer time-line than what others would care to explore.
Any selfish act, no matter how well planned, cannot be called ingenious. Any act that promotes health throughout the world, no matter how simple, is always ingenious.
just my .02
Either you read Rand and didn't like it, or you REALLY need to read Rand and perhaps adjust the idea of what selfishness can accomplish. If the former, I respectfully disagree. If the latter, I would recommend reading and delving deep into some of the ideas that Rand presents.
Thats no planet.
At least now we know around which star is Alderaan.
25 LY isn't far. We can send all the niggers, spics, baby boomers, political elite, lardasses, and other undesirables to this planet. Imagine how much better off the rest of us will be. Good riddance!
The hitchhikers guide has something to say about that very statement: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minor_The_Hitchhiker's_Guide_to_the_Galaxy_characters#Telephone_Sanitizer
Sublime wit. Oh for mod points.
Why not use a gun to fire fuel to a rocket then? If you fired the gun every few seconds you wouldn't have the expense of lifting all of the fuel right from the start. You'd just need the rocket to have some way of catching the fuel. Bit tricky admittedly.
Some would say this is already being done with laser launch systems.
In which case you would be taxed for miles driven outside the state.
The easy way to attempt to balance this is to charge for only a percentage of the miles turned. Still not completely fair, but would square it up at least somewhat.
So he can design and print his own cases for his builds.
OK, but I'm 6'2". How is it in my best interests for someone who's 4'11" to be able to attack me with equal force? Hmmm?
Didn't think of that did you.
The same applies the other direction: With current law (in most US states anyway), both the 4'11 and you have equal opportunity to legally acquire and train on the proper handling of firearms. I'm not seeing the problem here.
Here is a crazy idea, GET RID OF THEM. If people want to go hunting let them use bows and there is no reason to have automatic weapons and handguns.
I genuinely don't understand this idea.
The firearm is a force multiplier when it comes to self defense. It allows a properly trained 90#, 4'11" person to be able to defend themselves from a 6'5" 250# person.
It is the responsibility of the owner of said firearm to learn how to properly and safely use it, and that's where I believe everyone agrees the breakdown is. The firearm is a tool. Improperly used, it's lethal, much like many other tools.
The MFR simply makes the product. The owner still carries full weight and responsibility for proper use and misuse. Shouldnt have to have a law to state that.
With respect to guns, the proper, intended use of the product is to put holes into stuff.
Why should they be shielded from liability any more than tobacco companies?
FTFY.
Larry Wall won the IOCCC - twice.
That just makes him incomprehensible in two languages.
Three, if you include English. If only I could be that incomprehensible...
And, in python: list = [1, 1, 2, 2, 3, 3, 4, 4, ] unique = set(list)
Which is more readable?
use List::MoreUtils qw(uniq);
my @words = qw(foo bar baz foo zorg baz);
my @unique_words = uniq @words;
What was that about readability?
practically unmodifiable once written
Come on, it's not that bad if you split everything up appropriately into well named subroutines and such like.
This is one of the most important things anyone approaching perl needs to grok. Perl gives you enough rope to hang yourself, that's why I use it. Lack of awareness of that has bitten me in the backside enough that I've learned this lesson.
It's also the government that has to clean up the land fills and ground water when they get sued for letting people dump so much mercury into them.
Do you have proof for this claim?
http://www.epa.gov/superfund/ would be a good indication of this.
Show it to the average consumer and ask them what it is. They won't tell you its an "ultrabook" ( and they wouldn't even if they knew what that was) they'll say "tablet" and compare it to ... other tablets.
Its like porshe comming out with a new model that looks idetnical to a toyota yaris. They need an easy way for consumers to tell where the extra money and reduced fue effiencincy is going. The nameplate of porshe helps, but you could also show them different performance specs and have them test drive it a bit. Microsoft needs to do something to make it easy to explain to people why its differnt than other tablets. Oh wait, they already have an identical looking device that does behavie like a tablet in surface with windows RT. That would be like porshe developing two cars identical to the yaris, one with great performance you'd expect of porshe and antother that has performance on par with the yaris. Basically, MS is screwed. That's too dificult to explain to enough people.
It wasn't a Yaris, and it wasn't Porsche, but you're close on both counts:
http://www.astonmartin.com/cars/cygnet
Hello Scion/Toyota iQ!
Republicans have stalled the Cybersecurity Act of 2012 with a Senate vote of 51-47 against the legislation
So, I am not an expert on politics, but in the current congress, there 51 democratic senators, 47 republican senators, and 2 independents (both of whom caucus with the democrats). By my count, if every single senate republican voted against this, that still only comes to 47 votes. That means that the other 4 would have had to break ranks with the democratic party. So, just who is at fault here?
Just saying.
This. It's not just "one party". It's The Hill in general.
Not that I've read the legislation that they're voting on to ensure it's at least moderately sane. Most of it isn't.
APPL could conceivably give Samsung the middle finger by purchasing AMD. At least in part.
You're offended by "tea-tard"?
How about retard? How's that?
> I'm tired of half my extra contract work money going to the federal government and being called a bigot for saying anything about it
No, you're called a bigot because you had a bumper sticker on the back of your truck, right above your trailer-hitch testicles, that said "Don't Re-Nig in November" like a lot of retards had.
-- BMO
Completely relevant: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19
Why? We're insolvent, and any fiscal conservative ought to know that when you're deep in debt, the only responsible thing to do is to pay it off, even if it means taking a second job (increasing income) as well as cutting expenses.
Which holy cows are you willing to turn into hamburger with regard to spending? The problem is that no one wants to donate their cow, just everyone elses.
Drive it off the cliff. Let every branch take a 10% hit and maybe, MAYBE Congress learn some priorities. At least then everyone donates a side of beef to the grinder.
So there's someone using bitcoins after all.
Comment of the day. Oh for mod points.
This is less 'haha that's funny' than 'haha that's so true' than many would like to believe.
I think it is funny that the Republicans demonized an activity that over 30 million Americans take part in.
http://www.vg247.com/2011/12/06/report-39-million-mmo-gamers-in-the-us-play-scifi-68-prefer-f2p/
Then again around 80 million Americans have smoked pot and they demonize that also.
I think demonizing pot is a bipartisan thing.
Don;t you all understand!? People _died_ during this storm.
Yup, a damn shame, especially the avoidable deaths (not sure that there were any, but you know how people can be when they panic).
Lots of Newyorkers are still without power and water and here your all woried about data centers!? Get a grip nerds!
We are not paramedics; we are not firemen, or police, or any other sort of emergency personnel. What would you have us do, other than get in the way of the professionals? We let the emergency personnel do their jobs by doing our jobs and getting the systems back up and running. Believe me, you wouldn't want a bunch of sysadmins doing triage anymore than you would want a bunch of cops and medics rebuilding a data center.
Relevant: http://xkcd.com/898/
I would assume that the reason why the DC is there is for latency reasons. Probably peered to or on the same network as whatever major market their institution deals with.
And just in case you think I'm blowing smoke, let me remind you of a previous article: http://tech.slashdot.org/story/11/09/13/0258217/300m-to-save-6-milliseconds
Now, Microsoft is focussing on providing a strongly-preferred application distribution system for Windows and extracting a share of the revenues that go to application distributors
Hmm, so similar to Apple's strategy. And nobody is developing apps for iOS huh?
Apple extracts a minimal fee used just to cover costs because they can make up their money in hardware sales. Apple on the desktop does not prefer App store apps by limiting access to APIs based upon whether or not the developer paid a fee to Apple. Apple on mobile devices is not dominant in the industry such that ignoring that market means not having a viable market, so Apple can't jerk developers around as much or they just go to Android.
You'd like to think that Apples dominance is in question, but at least in the states, you can pretty safely bet that if it's a smart phone, it's an iDevice. The developers are listening to the market, and many things are iDevice only. Here's one example that's relevant to me: Irig: http://www.ikmultimedia.com/products/irig/