I want my bank to give me a smart card, and to use that smart card to securely transfer payments to vendors without paying any other intermediaries whatsoever.
So you want them to design a secure payment system, and issue you a high tech piece of plastic, and keep it secure against attacks, and operate servers to process payments until the end of time... for zero dollars, ever. I mean sure, that would be nice, but unless you want to build it yourself, how do you ever expect that to happen? Why would any company build something like that with no prospect of getting paid, according to your own logic that corporations never do anything except to get money?
I'm happy to pay my bank to secure my money. That's their job, they offered to hold my money, I chose them to do it, and we've mutually agreed that they will do it for a cut of the interest made on storing my money for me. But I'm not happy to pay PayPay, or Google, or Visa, to carry the transaction information from my bank to the store I'm shopping at. The Internet is perfectly capable of carrying that information without them, and it doesn't take a cut.
Visa is like the creepy old guy in the bathroom at a pretentious restaurant, the one who gets in your way to take a towel from the dispenser and hands it to you, then expects a tip. Except replace my feelings of "pity for the poor guy who can only get this job" with "disgust with corporation who strong-arms 1% from the till of the guy running the local pizza parlor."
And regarding Google's reasoning, well, I actually have fairly deep knowledge of what they're doing. And it's not for the kittens, and despite what I said above it's not even 100% for the dollars. They're doing it for the information they can skim, which is even more profitable. They are doing it to close the Google Analytics loop on every shopping transaction made through their system. Consider that right now see what you search for, they get millions of sites to stick google-analytics.js on their pages, and they follow your queries from the time you search for "LCD TV" through your surfing through doubleclick.com, epinions.com, bestbuy.com, amazon.com, wordpress.com, newegg.com, slashdot.org, etc. But what they don't know is at the end of your search: "did you buy a TV? What brand? What model? Who did you buy it from? How much did you pay? Did you use a coupon?" If they handle your money, they can close that loop. They can establish not only what advertisements worked, but what price points people are willing to pay. They can sell that info to sleazy marketers who then go out and astroturf the reviews on epinions, bestbuy, amazon, wordpress, and newegg. They can sell information about deep discounters to their competitors. They can sell that information to the discounters themselves, who then can figure out "hey, I don't have to sell a TV for $400, because the next cheapest competitor is $600. I'll sell mine for $550 and still be the lowest price." That not-so-discounted TV just cost every customer $150 extra.
What I'm saying is that Google is only doing (2) . They don't give a crap about (1). If you think it's about (1), they may be happy because you like them better, but it's not true and has nothing to do with (1). They don't care if they're refining kittens into sawdust paste, or saving cute baby chipmunks from a big scary leaf. They're only skimming vigorish off of transactions and sticking it in their banks, and nothing else.
I certainly didn't say Google was being evil, or that they were or were not doing charity work by destroying PayPal, or even that "profit is bad". I also don't think someone has to "unseat the abusive PayPal", nor do I particularly "loathe" them, as I'm not personally impacted one way or the other by their behavior. I only said Google's decision was completely amoral. So I don't ascribe goodwill towards them for this act, and I certainly don't have to support them in it.
What I'm most opposed to is that everyone and their brother wants to stick an e-wallet in my browser and my phone and charge plenty for the privilege. I don't care if it's PayPal, Google, Visa, or whoever -- it's all theft, because they're taking money for doing nothing of value. I don't mind paying profits to those who add value, but they don't. I want my bank to give me a smart card, and to use that smart card to securely transfer payments to vendors without paying any other intermediaries whatsoever. Visa, Google, PayPal, and whatever other payment networks are out there, they're all irrelevant to me, they reduce my security, they all try to market to me, and they all piss me off with their skim. Your support of Google is like thanking the bear for saving you from the wolf -- it still won't end well for you.
The only way to unseat them is for a big player (like Google) to say enough is enough and discontinue doing business with a company with such abusive practices. And of course, then they need an alternative to replace it with, so they created one.
Umm... Google is doing this for profit. Not to unseat PayPal because they somehow deserve a comeuppance, but because truckloads of money flow through this system. There's no underlying noble effort to unseat the bad guys, there's no punishment being meted out for abusing the developers in Google Marketplace.
I'm sure Google likes it when people rationalize their behavior into somehow "not doing evil," because that makes them seem like they have the high ground, but this is a completely amoral decision. It's driven by profit, profit, and more profit.
I remember seeing the OD light being on unexpectedly recently, (probably in conjunction with this incident,) but I don't recall if it was blinking or not. It's only happened a few times, once about two months ago, and once about two weeks ago. (I refuse to believe that two points makes a trend.) And mine's a Ranger, which is built on the same frame as the Explorer.
Your post just made me think of it, and that if the update software was of the same quality that it could just as easily have been so stupid as to update itself mid-traffic.
And now you're making me think that I should keep my ODB-II reader in the truck, just in case it happens again. Maybe it can discover something useful. But there would have been no way to safely plug it in during the little reboot incident I mentioned -- I was very concerned that I would be able to shut it down and turn it on before the light changed. Maybe I can just keep it plugged in and recording all the time, I'll have to read the book again.
Hey, I have a 10 year old ordinary Ford pickup, and I recently had to reboot it. The transmission wasn't leaving 2nd gear (a.k.a. the "safety" gear), so when I stopped at the next intersection, I shut the engine off, waited five seconds, then turned it back on. It was fine after that.
I have no idea what went wrong, only that a reboot fixed it. I'm just glad I was able to choose the circumstances, rather than have the truck decide to update itself in the middle of the road because it forgot it wasn't in the garage.
Just to be a little more precise, the wifi/cellular tower locations in Apple's location data appear to be the averages of the GPS coordinates of the phones that received ID from that transmitter. They're not the exact coordinates of the antennas.
Plotting all the locations in my database after a day trip in a car, (I queried the data from the tables in KML format and displayed them in Google Earth), I did get a very good picture of where I went, and saw "larger blobs" around the places on the trip where I spent more time.
I could see that the "points" were often centered around highly trafficked areas. Studying points near my home, where I'm familiar with the antenna towers, I could see there obviously was no cell tower in the middle of the freeway cloverleaf, but thousands of drivers with iPhones reported their location as they passed nearby, so that's where the point was placed. Other cell towers in the middle of residential areas yield a position very close to the actual antenna.
Is that as in "Holy Shit, that solar flare, it's headed right for us!" Because if I'm gonna fry, I don't think I want to spend my last few minutes on Earth surrounded by grammar Nazis.
Not all E-books are written by writers.
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The eBook Backlash
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There are a lot of crappy e-books out there, mostly because the authors are any old Joe Schmoe with a keyboard and a 5th grade English education.
If they can't be arsed to spring for a proofreader and editor, what makes you think they'll even recognize typography as an issue?
Nonsense. Privacy used to be an absolute. You could quite easily prove you were alone. Go in the middle of a field with a companion and simply look around. Have your conversation. It would go unnoticed and unrecorded. It was private because it couldn't have been anything else.
Now, I can't walk down the street without various buildings' cameras watching my every coming and going. Middle of a field? Assuming I can get to one without scrutiny, my companion could be recording the conversation. My own clothing could have been bugged. A satellite or plane could be recording video of the event. Even my own cell phone is continually broadcasting my location.
Actually, one of the supposed "benefits" of the electronic system that I don't care about is the immediate feedback. It's not needed. The offices are seated months after the election. That delay was important in the days of horseback transmission of results to Washington, but it's still there now.
Let the system do its task, the way it was designed, and report only after the outcome is official. So what if results don't come in until 7AM Wednesday morning? Or even the next week? It doesn't materially change anything except the timing of when the celebrating and crying starts.
Perhaps it would teach patience to people to learn to wait for important things. Or teach people that important things are worth waiting for. As we've become a society of immediate gratification junkies, we could certainly stand to learn a few more of those lessons.
True, casinos are substantially more honest than insurance companies. The house cut is right there printed on the table for anyone to see. The insurance company, on the other hand, doesn't have to tell you the odds they calculated. They can compute them at 1% and charge you 10%, and you will never know.
And there are lots of methods for assessing risk that yield probabilities. FAIR is one such practice that's gaining acceptance in the info security world. ISO 31000 is an attempt to standardize risk management across the board. It's a lot more disciplined than "guessing".
Umm, I'm not sure you get the whole "replaceable" thing. A replacement is not the same thing as the original. It's compensation for your loss.
But in the case of Bitcoins, that's completely irrelevant. Unlike an insurance company writing you a check for a stolen car (which does not magically put your old car back in the garage for you), Bitcoins are absolutely perfectly replaceable. Someone stole your Bitcoin #12345? Here, have one numbered #23456. If the old Bitcoin was worth $6.00, the new Bitcoin is also worth $6.00. To the client, there was a transient inconvenience, but they still have exactly the same value.
And as far as the transactions go, once you've received recompense, whatever the thief did with your old bitcoins is now the problem of the entity who replaced them, not you. It's not irreplaceable data, not by a long shot. It's easily replaced with money.
It may appear thorny, but insurance is simply legitimized gambling, which ultimately is dirt simple. The company will lay odds against your losses. Now, they're going to study what's happening, and they're going to change the premiums on a scheduled basis, and they're going to present a quote that represents their estimate of your chances of loss, and they're going to have a lawyer write as many weaselly exclusions in the policy that they think they can get away with. If you ask them to insure $10,000 worth of bitcoins against loss, and they're only 50% confident in your security, they may take those odds and set your premium at $6,000.
That's the other thing about insurance companies. They're exactly the same as the casino owner: the house always gets its cut.
Consider a parking stall where a large opaque vehicle has parked right next to your passenger door, blocking your line of sight to the side. (That's a monthly occurrence where I live and shop.) The height of an average modern car's rear deck would prevent you from seeing a child shorter than 36" that close to your vehicle. I've observed poorly-attended children running in parking lots; a child can sprint at 10MPH and can cross the one foot gap between two parked cars in 70 milliseconds. Are you looking over your shoulder to back out, or are you checking the side mirror at exactly those 70 milliseconds? There are plenty of ways the child could remain completely invisible in this worst case scenario.
If you can't possibly believe that the conditions ever exist in the real world for such a thing to be possible, consider instead a garage in a residential neighborhood. To fit my small 4x4 truck in my small garage, I back it in so the passenger mirror is within 3" of the door. I'm facing outward when I leave. The hood of my truck stands 48" tall. A child could simply walk from the west side of my garage in front of my truck and I would never be able to see it. Ever. And that's through the front window, with maximum visibility. A high rear window, wide rear pillars, small mirrors, and equally narrow conditions while backing out of a garage are far worse conditions. If other factors weren't at play, I might have had to park so as to always back my truck out, with a tailgate even higher than the front of the hood.
Fortunately, with the geography of my house and the demographics of my neighbors, the chances of a child walking that path are almost zero. But a pet or animal certainly is still at risk.
Regardless of the scenario, as the driver you are 100% at fault for striking the child.
The people running over these 200 children per year don't all do so out of carelessness. They do so because there are certain geometries of cars and external conditions that create truly blind spots, and because children are not predictably fixed in time and space.
I have a backup camera in my other car, along with ultrasonic sensors that warn of the approach of any object from the rear sides. I have a great deal of comfort in tough parking situations, knowing that I can see or at least detect unsafe conditions. I have never had so much as a "near miss" with the camera and beepers, whereas I've had several in the truck.
When you consider the billion trips made daily in cars in this country, 200 is a pretty low number. But it's certainly not zero. I know the camera and sensors really do make these situations much more preventable and avoidable. And they certainly don't make me a worse driver because I'm using them. If anything, they've made me even more paranoid when backing my truck, because I truly feel blind.
Still want to tell me how that GGP poster has a point? He has no evidence that cameras make the situation worse, and you only can offer weak speculations that don't coincide with actual experience. Really, he's a selfish cheapskate, and just wants to whine some "nanny statism" political bullshit slogan just to make some kind of stupid illogical point; and I loathe that particular attitude of "my brand of stupidity is somehow better than actual logic". Don't defend him, he's not worth it.
The smiley face was to indicate it was a joke. Perhaps I needed a separate line to say "THIS IS A JOKE! DO NOT TAKE THIS FOR FACT." Apparently it requires a whole post.
THE LINE ABOUT VOLVOS IN THE POST ABOVE THIS WAS A JOKE.
But seriously, they're fscking ugly cars.
IF YOU ARE A VOLVO OWNER, THE ABOVE LINE WAS ALSO A JOKE.
I'm not sure, but I imagine their anthem will go something like this:
[chant and response] "What are we going to do today, Sergey?" "Same thing we do every day, Eric. Try to take over the world!"
[music] They're Pinky and the Brain. Yes, Pinky and the Brain! One is a genius, The other is insane! They're laboratory mice. Their genes have been spliced! They're dinky, they're Pinky and the Brain, Brain, Brain, Brain, Brain, Brain, Brain, Brain, Brain.
Before each night is done Their plan will be unfurled. By the dawning of the sun They'll take over the world.
They're Pinky and The Brain. Yes, Pinky and The Brain Their twilight campaign Is easy to explain.
To prove their mousy worth, They'll overthrow the Earth. They're dinky, they're Pinky and The Brain, Brain, Brain, Brain Brain, Brain, Brain, Brain
So, you cannot imagine a scenario where the child enters the blind spot, therefore there is zero risk of it happening? Have you ever heard of these buildings called "garages"? They consist of opaque walls that shield the view of the driver from objects and persons entering the driveway from their sides. Have you never been in a parking stall next to a large vehicle that similarly blocks your line of sight to the side, and can you not imagine small children darting from behind them to behind your vehicle?
I've observed poorly-attended children running in parking lots; a child can sprint at 10MPH and can cross the one foot gap between parked cars in 70 milliseconds. The average human reaction time is somewhere around 200 milliseconds. There is literally no chance of avoiding striking the child in this worst case scenario, yet it's still 100% the fault of the driver.
It would horrify me to cause harm to someone in an accident that is easily preventable through technology. And to live with the guilt knowing that I could have spent the cost of a few nice meals out to prevent it? I should hope you have enough humanity that it would similarly disturb you.
I'd strike "driver's side air bags", "driver's side shoulder belts", and "collapsible steering wheels" off your list. If someone is so stupid and cheap that they don't want to pay for some safety feature that could only reduce their own risk, I'm perfectly willing to let them go. That's just evolution doing its thing.
But the rest of the features you listed reduce the risk to other people, and I'm not willing to let someone walk away from having them. Brake lights keep us from crashing into them. Antilock brakes might keep them from crashing into me. Child restraint seats keep kids safe, and even if the children have the misfortune to be the spawn of stupidity, and are probably likely to be just as stupid as their parents when they grow up, they're still innocent today and shouldn't pay for the stupidity or cheapness of the parent with their lives. Even a drivers' side lap belt keeps a driver in place so they avoid loss of control when unexpected G forces would shift them from their seat at a time of need, which might keep them from crashing into someone else.
Even so, a friend or spouse may want to drive their car, or have to drive them home when they're drunk, and I'm not too keen on increasing their risk in a driver's side death trap. If the lack of safety could follow the cheap-ass owner around, that would be great, but it doesn't work that way. I guess that's just the price they pay for associating with such a stupid, cheap friend.
Cars are not a "right". They have to integrate with the rest of the transportation system on a giant grid of shared roads. If they aren't integrating properly, they should not be permitted to be in the system at all. Safety is just one attribute they need to have.
If it were just your car in just your driveway, fine. Back up around your property all you want, drive around it blindfolded, I don't care. And if this was something that affected only your personal safety, and not that of other people, I wouldn't care either. If you don't want to pay for a car with a driver's side airbag, and would rather die in a head-on collision, I'm all for it. Sayonara, cheapskate. But when you are on the public roads, you damn sure better play well with the other drivers. That means a vehicle that minimizes the risks to the rest of us.
If the cost of these keep the price of cars unaffordably high to 0.001% of people, and makes them take buses instead, I'm good with that. I'd rather have you on a bus than driving a piece of shit that's not safe, and endangering me and my friends with it.
The idea of "you should learn to be a better driver" doesn't work in practice. A disturbingly large number of drivers are mentally the equivalent of children who are baffled by a parent playing peek-a-boo, yet most of them are issued drivers licenses anyway. Unless you're going to revamp the driver's license system to be biannually test-based, like pilot's licenses, hoping for them to improve is a fool's hope. So any tool you put in their stupid hands that makes the world a tiny bit safer for the rest of us is a good thing.
It'd be different if they only risked their own lives, but in this case they're only risking the lives of others. Darwin's theory doesn't help us out with this problem.
And not only is that base assumption wrong, but his statement fails utterly to take history into account: 100 years of driving has created a new category of fatality rate bested only by our improvements in weapons and war. "Solved problem for the last 100 years of driving" is simply false. It's really a new problem created by the last 100 years of driving.
Put some more numbers to it: in the 80s it was calculated that those high rear taillights (in the middle of a car) would prevent 50% of accidents. Later they recalculated it's a lot closer to 5%.
Rearview cameras will get dirty & will prevent some people from using their own eyes in some cases. Who benefits?
Probably somebody has a ton of shitty old TFT resistive panels left to unload, or some other ulterior motive that will come out years from now.
Another example of legislation without a factual basis was the "headlights on all the time" mandated in the 1990s. Someone did a study and found that drivers who turned their headlights on in the daytime were far less likely to get into accidents. They confused correlation with causation and arrived at the wrong conclusion, that it was the headlights preventing accidents. In reality, headlights didn't change the accident statistics at all, but cost us millions of barrels of oil powering them all. What they really learned was that a person who voluntarily takes actions for their own safety are far less likely to get in accidents. "Headlights on for safety" was only a side effect of a careful driver.
It's also why Volvos are such "safe" cars. Someone has to be pretty desperately concerned for their safety before buying something that ugly.:-)
However, in this case, I have to agree with the backup cameras directly adding to safety. Every new car I've sat in for the last few years has had high side and rear windows, and poor lines of sight to close-up obstacles. Our new car has a backup camera, and there is simply no comparison in terms of visibility. The lens doesn't show too much peripheral vision, however, so it also has ultrasonic detectors that pick up motion and warn of external objects approaching from the rear sides. These also add to safely backing out of perpendicular parking spots, which are especially problematic when stuck beside a giant blind spot created by an SUV, truck, or van. I can't tell how many actual accidents they've prevented in the past year, because they probably would have been avoided by traditional means (sight, brakes, honking, flipping of fingers, etc.) but I know I've had no accidents when using them.
I've also been involved in a dual rear-end collision in a parking lot. My little pickup met a Mercedes Benz at about 4-5 MPH. I had checked over my shoulder before moving, and was backing out using the mirror, and the car in the slot opposite mine was simultaneously backing out and was hidden from my line of sight below the level of the tailgate. We both were backing our tails out to the west, so each of us entered the other's mirror blind spot almost immediately. Turns out the final score was steel bumper: 0, engineered crumple zones: -$$$$. While no lives were threatened, a backup camera would have saved both of us from having to deal with a collision that cost far more than any camera system on the market.
Then you'll love this one. Watch as he helps rob an entire country's treasury.
The sum of all the theft obtained by all the "stupid criminal shows" and "youtube videos" of car thieves, ATM snatchers, bank robbers, and other lowlifes that I've ever seen in my life comes nowhere close to the amount stolen by AIG and Goldman Sachs. It probably doesn't add up to one decimal point of a percent of the $150,000,000,000.00 they stole. It probably doesn't add up to one decimal point of a percent of the $450,000,000.00 in bonuses they stole.
Put another way, all shoplifting in America adds up to less than $19 billion a year. They stole more in one fraud than every thief in America will shoplift in the next 9 years.
And none of the thieves in this giant swindle weren't already millionaires. They just wanted to steal more money. Money that comes from the retirement plans and investments of millions of ordinary people.
Are there more dishonest people per capita at certain income levels? Is it just that the magnitude of their crimes is so much higher because of their station in life? Or is it the size of the immorality of stealing all the net worth of millions of people, and not just their lunch money or their car, and not one personalized theft at a time?
Sure, fine, the system can auto-mute/pause, or whatever, but that's not the point. The point is that the iPhone/iPad doesn't have tactile operational buttons, which is really useful when watching. I have a Harmony 1100, with a combination of touch screen and hard buttons, and as a result it's a pretty useful operational remote. But it's still just a remote, and not coordinated with my media in any way. It's not like surfing on the iPad.
Good phones with good interfaces already exist. A good operational remote will have tactile buttons for the most common operational features: volume up/down, play/pause, skip 30 seconds, rewind 10 seconds. No iPhone has these, of course, and I'm not aware of any Android phones that have these kinds of buttons. Some older Motorola devices had hard buttons for music playback, those would work well for this application.
Usability, usability, usability. Jobs understood this (although he liked to stuff "clean design" somewhere in this set, occasionally to the detriment of the usability of the device.)
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I want my bank to give me a smart card, and to use that smart card to securely transfer payments to vendors without paying any other intermediaries whatsoever.
So you want them to design a secure payment system, and issue you a high tech piece of plastic, and keep it secure against attacks, and operate servers to process payments until the end of time... for zero dollars, ever. I mean sure, that would be nice, but unless you want to build it yourself, how do you ever expect that to happen? Why would any company build something like that with no prospect of getting paid, according to your own logic that corporations never do anything except to get money?
I'm happy to pay my bank to secure my money. That's their job, they offered to hold my money, I chose them to do it, and we've mutually agreed that they will do it for a cut of the interest made on storing my money for me. But I'm not happy to pay PayPay, or Google, or Visa, to carry the transaction information from my bank to the store I'm shopping at. The Internet is perfectly capable of carrying that information without them, and it doesn't take a cut.
Visa is like the creepy old guy in the bathroom at a pretentious restaurant, the one who gets in your way to take a towel from the dispenser and hands it to you, then expects a tip. Except replace my feelings of "pity for the poor guy who can only get this job" with "disgust with corporation who strong-arms 1% from the till of the guy running the local pizza parlor."
And regarding Google's reasoning, well, I actually have fairly deep knowledge of what they're doing. And it's not for the kittens, and despite what I said above it's not even 100% for the dollars. They're doing it for the information they can skim, which is even more profitable. They are doing it to close the Google Analytics loop on every shopping transaction made through their system. Consider that right now see what you search for, they get millions of sites to stick google-analytics.js on their pages, and they follow your queries from the time you search for "LCD TV" through your surfing through doubleclick.com, epinions.com, bestbuy.com, amazon.com, wordpress.com, newegg.com, slashdot.org, etc. But what they don't know is at the end of your search: "did you buy a TV? What brand? What model? Who did you buy it from? How much did you pay? Did you use a coupon?" If they handle your money, they can close that loop. They can establish not only what advertisements worked, but what price points people are willing to pay. They can sell that info to sleazy marketers who then go out and astroturf the reviews on epinions, bestbuy, amazon, wordpress, and newegg. They can sell information about deep discounters to their competitors. They can sell that information to the discounters themselves, who then can figure out "hey, I don't have to sell a TV for $400, because the next cheapest competitor is $600. I'll sell mine for $550 and still be the lowest price." That not-so-discounted TV just cost every customer $150 extra.
What I'm saying is that Google is only doing (2) . They don't give a crap about (1). If you think it's about (1), they may be happy because you like them better, but it's not true and has nothing to do with (1). They don't care if they're refining kittens into sawdust paste, or saving cute baby chipmunks from a big scary leaf. They're only skimming vigorish off of transactions and sticking it in their banks, and nothing else.
I certainly didn't say Google was being evil, or that they were or were not doing charity work by destroying PayPal, or even that "profit is bad". I also don't think someone has to "unseat the abusive PayPal", nor do I particularly "loathe" them, as I'm not personally impacted one way or the other by their behavior. I only said Google's decision was completely amoral. So I don't ascribe goodwill towards them for this act, and I certainly don't have to support them in it.
What I'm most opposed to is that everyone and their brother wants to stick an e-wallet in my browser and my phone and charge plenty for the privilege. I don't care if it's PayPal, Google, Visa, or whoever -- it's all theft, because they're taking money for doing nothing of value. I don't mind paying profits to those who add value, but they don't. I want my bank to give me a smart card, and to use that smart card to securely transfer payments to vendors without paying any other intermediaries whatsoever. Visa, Google, PayPal, and whatever other payment networks are out there, they're all irrelevant to me, they reduce my security, they all try to market to me, and they all piss me off with their skim. Your support of Google is like thanking the bear for saving you from the wolf -- it still won't end well for you.
The only way to unseat them is for a big player (like Google) to say enough is enough and discontinue doing business with a company with such abusive practices. And of course, then they need an alternative to replace it with, so they created one.
Umm ... Google is doing this for profit. Not to unseat PayPal because they somehow deserve a comeuppance, but because truckloads of money flow through this system. There's no underlying noble effort to unseat the bad guys, there's no punishment being meted out for abusing the developers in Google Marketplace.
I'm sure Google likes it when people rationalize their behavior into somehow "not doing evil," because that makes them seem like they have the high ground, but this is a completely amoral decision. It's driven by profit, profit, and more profit.
I would argue that if gave an unreasonable deadly for a hello world program, many of them would have a bug of some sort.
"You have 1 minute to write a hello world program...45 seconds of which will be in a meeting to be sure every one knows what is taking place.
Oh, shit, my manager's posting on Slashdot!
I remember seeing the OD light being on unexpectedly recently, (probably in conjunction with this incident,) but I don't recall if it was blinking or not. It's only happened a few times, once about two months ago, and once about two weeks ago. (I refuse to believe that two points makes a trend.) And mine's a Ranger, which is built on the same frame as the Explorer.
Your post just made me think of it, and that if the update software was of the same quality that it could just as easily have been so stupid as to update itself mid-traffic.
And now you're making me think that I should keep my ODB-II reader in the truck, just in case it happens again. Maybe it can discover something useful. But there would have been no way to safely plug it in during the little reboot incident I mentioned -- I was very concerned that I would be able to shut it down and turn it on before the light changed. Maybe I can just keep it plugged in and recording all the time, I'll have to read the book again.
Hey, I have a 10 year old ordinary Ford pickup, and I recently had to reboot it. The transmission wasn't leaving 2nd gear (a.k.a. the "safety" gear), so when I stopped at the next intersection, I shut the engine off, waited five seconds, then turned it back on. It was fine after that.
I have no idea what went wrong, only that a reboot fixed it. I'm just glad I was able to choose the circumstances, rather than have the truck decide to update itself in the middle of the road because it forgot it wasn't in the garage.
Just to be a little more precise, the wifi/cellular tower locations in Apple's location data appear to be the averages of the GPS coordinates of the phones that received ID from that transmitter. They're not the exact coordinates of the antennas.
Plotting all the locations in my database after a day trip in a car, (I queried the data from the tables in KML format and displayed them in Google Earth), I did get a very good picture of where I went, and saw "larger blobs" around the places on the trip where I spent more time.
I could see that the "points" were often centered around highly trafficked areas. Studying points near my home, where I'm familiar with the antenna towers, I could see there obviously was no cell tower in the middle of the freeway cloverleaf, but thousands of drivers with iPhones reported their location as they passed nearby, so that's where the point was placed. Other cell towers in the middle of residential areas yield a position very close to the actual antenna.
Is that as in "Holy Shit, that solar flare, it's headed right for us!" Because if I'm gonna fry, I don't think I want to spend my last few minutes on Earth surrounded by grammar Nazis.
There are a lot of crappy e-books out there, mostly because the authors are any old Joe Schmoe with a keyboard and a 5th grade English education.
If they can't be arsed to spring for a proofreader and editor, what makes you think they'll even recognize typography as an issue?
Nonsense. Privacy used to be an absolute. You could quite easily prove you were alone. Go in the middle of a field with a companion and simply look around. Have your conversation. It would go unnoticed and unrecorded. It was private because it couldn't have been anything else.
Now, I can't walk down the street without various buildings' cameras watching my every coming and going. Middle of a field? Assuming I can get to one without scrutiny, my companion could be recording the conversation. My own clothing could have been bugged. A satellite or plane could be recording video of the event. Even my own cell phone is continually broadcasting my location.
The very ability to assume privacy has been lost.
Actually, one of the supposed "benefits" of the electronic system that I don't care about is the immediate feedback. It's not needed. The offices are seated months after the election. That delay was important in the days of horseback transmission of results to Washington, but it's still there now.
Let the system do its task, the way it was designed, and report only after the outcome is official. So what if results don't come in until 7AM Wednesday morning? Or even the next week? It doesn't materially change anything except the timing of when the celebrating and crying starts.
Perhaps it would teach patience to people to learn to wait for important things. Or teach people that important things are worth waiting for. As we've become a society of immediate gratification junkies, we could certainly stand to learn a few more of those lessons.
True, casinos are substantially more honest than insurance companies. The house cut is right there printed on the table for anyone to see. The insurance company, on the other hand, doesn't have to tell you the odds they calculated. They can compute them at 1% and charge you 10%, and you will never know.
And there are lots of methods for assessing risk that yield probabilities. FAIR is one such practice that's gaining acceptance in the info security world. ISO 31000 is an attempt to standardize risk management across the board. It's a lot more disciplined than "guessing".
Umm, I'm not sure you get the whole "replaceable" thing. A replacement is not the same thing as the original. It's compensation for your loss.
But in the case of Bitcoins, that's completely irrelevant. Unlike an insurance company writing you a check for a stolen car (which does not magically put your old car back in the garage for you), Bitcoins are absolutely perfectly replaceable. Someone stole your Bitcoin #12345? Here, have one numbered #23456. If the old Bitcoin was worth $6.00, the new Bitcoin is also worth $6.00. To the client, there was a transient inconvenience, but they still have exactly the same value.
And as far as the transactions go, once you've received recompense, whatever the thief did with your old bitcoins is now the problem of the entity who replaced them, not you. It's not irreplaceable data, not by a long shot. It's easily replaced with money.
It may appear thorny, but insurance is simply legitimized gambling, which ultimately is dirt simple. The company will lay odds against your losses. Now, they're going to study what's happening, and they're going to change the premiums on a scheduled basis, and they're going to present a quote that represents their estimate of your chances of loss, and they're going to have a lawyer write as many weaselly exclusions in the policy that they think they can get away with. If you ask them to insure $10,000 worth of bitcoins against loss, and they're only 50% confident in your security, they may take those odds and set your premium at $6,000.
That's the other thing about insurance companies. They're exactly the same as the casino owner: the house always gets its cut.
Consider a parking stall where a large opaque vehicle has parked right next to your passenger door, blocking your line of sight to the side. (That's a monthly occurrence where I live and shop.) The height of an average modern car's rear deck would prevent you from seeing a child shorter than 36" that close to your vehicle. I've observed poorly-attended children running in parking lots; a child can sprint at 10MPH and can cross the one foot gap between two parked cars in 70 milliseconds. Are you looking over your shoulder to back out, or are you checking the side mirror at exactly those 70 milliseconds? There are plenty of ways the child could remain completely invisible in this worst case scenario.
If you can't possibly believe that the conditions ever exist in the real world for such a thing to be possible, consider instead a garage in a residential neighborhood. To fit my small 4x4 truck in my small garage, I back it in so the passenger mirror is within 3" of the door. I'm facing outward when I leave. The hood of my truck stands 48" tall. A child could simply walk from the west side of my garage in front of my truck and I would never be able to see it. Ever. And that's through the front window, with maximum visibility. A high rear window, wide rear pillars, small mirrors, and equally narrow conditions while backing out of a garage are far worse conditions. If other factors weren't at play, I might have had to park so as to always back my truck out, with a tailgate even higher than the front of the hood.
Fortunately, with the geography of my house and the demographics of my neighbors, the chances of a child walking that path are almost zero. But a pet or animal certainly is still at risk.
Regardless of the scenario, as the driver you are 100% at fault for striking the child.
The people running over these 200 children per year don't all do so out of carelessness. They do so because there are certain geometries of cars and external conditions that create truly blind spots, and because children are not predictably fixed in time and space.
I have a backup camera in my other car, along with ultrasonic sensors that warn of the approach of any object from the rear sides. I have a great deal of comfort in tough parking situations, knowing that I can see or at least detect unsafe conditions. I have never had so much as a "near miss" with the camera and beepers, whereas I've had several in the truck.
When you consider the billion trips made daily in cars in this country, 200 is a pretty low number. But it's certainly not zero. I know the camera and sensors really do make these situations much more preventable and avoidable. And they certainly don't make me a worse driver because I'm using them. If anything, they've made me even more paranoid when backing my truck, because I truly feel blind.
Still want to tell me how that GGP poster has a point? He has no evidence that cameras make the situation worse, and you only can offer weak speculations that don't coincide with actual experience. Really, he's a selfish cheapskate, and just wants to whine some "nanny statism" political bullshit slogan just to make some kind of stupid illogical point; and I loathe that particular attitude of "my brand of stupidity is somehow better than actual logic". Don't defend him, he's not worth it.
That's true. And if its display is a Denon in-dash stereo, well, that'll break the piggy bank for sure.
The smiley face was to indicate it was a joke. Perhaps I needed a separate line to say "THIS IS A JOKE! DO NOT TAKE THIS FOR FACT." Apparently it requires a whole post.
THE LINE ABOUT VOLVOS IN THE POST ABOVE THIS WAS A JOKE.
But seriously, they're fscking ugly cars.
IF YOU ARE A VOLVO OWNER, THE ABOVE LINE WAS ALSO A JOKE.
The rest of us still think they're fugly.
I'm not sure, but I imagine their anthem will go something like this:
[chant and response]
"What are we going to do today, Sergey?"
"Same thing we do every day, Eric. Try to take over the world!"
[music]
They're Pinky and the Brain.
Yes, Pinky and the Brain!
One is a genius,
The other is insane!
They're laboratory mice.
Their genes have been spliced!
They're dinky, they're Pinky and the Brain, Brain, Brain, Brain,
Brain, Brain, Brain, Brain,
Brain.
Before each night is done
Their plan will be unfurled.
By the dawning of the sun
They'll take over the world.
They're Pinky and The Brain.
Yes, Pinky and The Brain
Their twilight campaign
Is easy to explain.
To prove their mousy worth,
They'll overthrow the Earth.
They're dinky, they're Pinky and The Brain, Brain, Brain, Brain
Brain, Brain, Brain, Brain
Narf!
So, you cannot imagine a scenario where the child enters the blind spot, therefore there is zero risk of it happening? Have you ever heard of these buildings called "garages"? They consist of opaque walls that shield the view of the driver from objects and persons entering the driveway from their sides. Have you never been in a parking stall next to a large vehicle that similarly blocks your line of sight to the side, and can you not imagine small children darting from behind them to behind your vehicle?
I've observed poorly-attended children running in parking lots; a child can sprint at 10MPH and can cross the one foot gap between parked cars in 70 milliseconds. The average human reaction time is somewhere around 200 milliseconds. There is literally no chance of avoiding striking the child in this worst case scenario, yet it's still 100% the fault of the driver.
It would horrify me to cause harm to someone in an accident that is easily preventable through technology. And to live with the guilt knowing that I could have spent the cost of a few nice meals out to prevent it? I should hope you have enough humanity that it would similarly disturb you.
I'd strike "driver's side air bags", "driver's side shoulder belts", and "collapsible steering wheels" off your list. If someone is so stupid and cheap that they don't want to pay for some safety feature that could only reduce their own risk, I'm perfectly willing to let them go. That's just evolution doing its thing.
But the rest of the features you listed reduce the risk to other people, and I'm not willing to let someone walk away from having them. Brake lights keep us from crashing into them. Antilock brakes might keep them from crashing into me. Child restraint seats keep kids safe, and even if the children have the misfortune to be the spawn of stupidity, and are probably likely to be just as stupid as their parents when they grow up, they're still innocent today and shouldn't pay for the stupidity or cheapness of the parent with their lives. Even a drivers' side lap belt keeps a driver in place so they avoid loss of control when unexpected G forces would shift them from their seat at a time of need, which might keep them from crashing into someone else.
Even so, a friend or spouse may want to drive their car, or have to drive them home when they're drunk, and I'm not too keen on increasing their risk in a driver's side death trap. If the lack of safety could follow the cheap-ass owner around, that would be great, but it doesn't work that way. I guess that's just the price they pay for associating with such a stupid, cheap friend.
Cars are not a "right". They have to integrate with the rest of the transportation system on a giant grid of shared roads. If they aren't integrating properly, they should not be permitted to be in the system at all. Safety is just one attribute they need to have.
If it were just your car in just your driveway, fine. Back up around your property all you want, drive around it blindfolded, I don't care. And if this was something that affected only your personal safety, and not that of other people, I wouldn't care either. If you don't want to pay for a car with a driver's side airbag, and would rather die in a head-on collision, I'm all for it. Sayonara, cheapskate. But when you are on the public roads, you damn sure better play well with the other drivers. That means a vehicle that minimizes the risks to the rest of us.
If the cost of these keep the price of cars unaffordably high to 0.001% of people, and makes them take buses instead, I'm good with that. I'd rather have you on a bus than driving a piece of shit that's not safe, and endangering me and my friends with it.
The idea of "you should learn to be a better driver" doesn't work in practice. A disturbingly large number of drivers are mentally the equivalent of children who are baffled by a parent playing peek-a-boo, yet most of them are issued drivers licenses anyway. Unless you're going to revamp the driver's license system to be biannually test-based, like pilot's licenses, hoping for them to improve is a fool's hope. So any tool you put in their stupid hands that makes the world a tiny bit safer for the rest of us is a good thing.
It'd be different if they only risked their own lives, but in this case they're only risking the lives of others. Darwin's theory doesn't help us out with this problem.
And not only is that base assumption wrong, but his statement fails utterly to take history into account: 100 years of driving has created a new category of fatality rate bested only by our improvements in weapons and war. "Solved problem for the last 100 years of driving" is simply false. It's really a new problem created by the last 100 years of driving.
Put some more numbers to it:
in the 80s it was calculated that those high rear taillights (in the middle of a car) would prevent 50% of accidents. Later they recalculated it's a lot closer to 5%.
Rearview cameras will get dirty & will prevent some people from using their own eyes in some cases. Who benefits?
Probably somebody has a ton of shitty old TFT resistive panels left to unload, or some other ulterior motive that will come out years from now.
Another example of legislation without a factual basis was the "headlights on all the time" mandated in the 1990s. Someone did a study and found that drivers who turned their headlights on in the daytime were far less likely to get into accidents. They confused correlation with causation and arrived at the wrong conclusion, that it was the headlights preventing accidents. In reality, headlights didn't change the accident statistics at all, but cost us millions of barrels of oil powering them all. What they really learned was that a person who voluntarily takes actions for their own safety are far less likely to get in accidents. "Headlights on for safety" was only a side effect of a careful driver.
It's also why Volvos are such "safe" cars. Someone has to be pretty desperately concerned for their safety before buying something that ugly. :-)
However, in this case, I have to agree with the backup cameras directly adding to safety. Every new car I've sat in for the last few years has had high side and rear windows, and poor lines of sight to close-up obstacles. Our new car has a backup camera, and there is simply no comparison in terms of visibility. The lens doesn't show too much peripheral vision, however, so it also has ultrasonic detectors that pick up motion and warn of external objects approaching from the rear sides. These also add to safely backing out of perpendicular parking spots, which are especially problematic when stuck beside a giant blind spot created by an SUV, truck, or van. I can't tell how many actual accidents they've prevented in the past year, because they probably would have been avoided by traditional means (sight, brakes, honking, flipping of fingers, etc.) but I know I've had no accidents when using them.
I've also been involved in a dual rear-end collision in a parking lot. My little pickup met a Mercedes Benz at about 4-5 MPH. I had checked over my shoulder before moving, and was backing out using the mirror, and the car in the slot opposite mine was simultaneously backing out and was hidden from my line of sight below the level of the tailgate. We both were backing our tails out to the west, so each of us entered the other's mirror blind spot almost immediately. Turns out the final score was steel bumper: 0, engineered crumple zones: -$$$$. While no lives were threatened, a backup camera would have saved both of us from having to deal with a collision that cost far more than any camera system on the market.
Then you'll love this one. Watch as he helps rob an entire country's treasury.
The sum of all the theft obtained by all the "stupid criminal shows" and "youtube videos" of car thieves, ATM snatchers, bank robbers, and other lowlifes that I've ever seen in my life comes nowhere close to the amount stolen by AIG and Goldman Sachs. It probably doesn't add up to one decimal point of a percent of the $150,000,000,000.00 they stole. It probably doesn't add up to one decimal point of a percent of the $450,000,000.00 in bonuses they stole.
Put another way, all shoplifting in America adds up to less than $19 billion a year. They stole more in one fraud than every thief in America will shoplift in the next 9 years.
And none of the thieves in this giant swindle weren't already millionaires. They just wanted to steal more money. Money that comes from the retirement plans and investments of millions of ordinary people.
Are there more dishonest people per capita at certain income levels? Is it just that the magnitude of their crimes is so much higher because of their station in life? Or is it the size of the immorality of stealing all the net worth of millions of people, and not just their lunch money or their car, and not one personalized theft at a time?
Sure, fine, the system can auto-mute/pause, or whatever, but that's not the point. The point is that the iPhone/iPad doesn't have tactile operational buttons, which is really useful when watching. I have a Harmony 1100, with a combination of touch screen and hard buttons, and as a result it's a pretty useful operational remote. But it's still just a remote, and not coordinated with my media in any way. It's not like surfing on the iPad.
Good phones with good interfaces already exist. A good operational remote will have tactile buttons for the most common operational features: volume up/down, play/pause, skip 30 seconds, rewind 10 seconds. No iPhone has these, of course, and I'm not aware of any Android phones that have these kinds of buttons. Some older Motorola devices had hard buttons for music playback, those would work well for this application.
Usability, usability, usability. Jobs understood this (although he liked to stuff "clean design" somewhere in this set, occasionally to the detriment of the usability of the device.)