Steam cleaning a steel can that has humans and electronics in it. Possibly the most retarded idea I will encounter today.
It's actually an Aluminum can, but sadly, they did have to use high strength steel for structural members. Consequently, there is the risk of corrosion, although I'd imagine that the steel members were treated aggressively for corrosion resistance. Even in the mundane world of terrestrial vehicles, that is a fairly well-solved problem when one is willing to throw money at it. Powder coating, epoxy coatings, metallic passivation, sacrificial anodes...
They just need a UV lamp.
The surfaces actually have to be cleaned, and the UV itself will have a deleterious effect on plastic elements. They would have to have been designed for steam cleaning, though. The astronauts aboard the ISS currently use a spray biocide to clean surfaces, but these organisms have other places to live — such as on (and in) the astronauts themselves.
Excel can be replaced with free software, though frequent users will be unhappy with the differences.
I installed Office 97 on my Windows 7 system just so that I would have someplace to paste tables copied from the web that wouldn't make a complete hash of them, as LibreOffice does. On the plus side, LO Calc has functionality that Excel '97 doesn't, like supporting pasting graphic elements. On the down side, I generally only want the text, and LO also isn't as good as putting data in the correct rows or columns. So I paste a table into Excel, massage it slightly, then copy it and paste it again into LibreOffice... To be fair, I'm fairly sure I could run Office 97 under WINE, since it's older than the hills.
That's likely to change soon, but until then it's seen as rude.
It's rude to merge over there from the highway and zoom past people, but it's only sensible to drive up there and merge there if you're entering. Lots of people actually seem to get this.
Where electronics are concerned, the distinction between cord and cable is usually that cords are handled relatively frequently (phone cord, electrical cord, etc), while cables are typically mounted within walls or otherwise out of reach such as high-tension power cables.
That's not true at all. It's a video cable, HDMI cable, coaxial cable, etc. Cord and cable are, alas, both overloaded words. They both have to refer to things which provide tensile strength, and also to bundles of wires (among many other things!) They also can mean exactly the same thing, rope made out of multiple strands. English is dumb, because it's defined by usage, and people are dumb. People with small vocabularies misuse words, and misuse becomes use.
Television means that you watch in realtime some programming that is created at another place (from greek: teleos, far away, and latin: vision, view).
I don't think it does. Examine the phrase/initialism CCTV, for example; closed circuit television. Only it's not from far away. I think a television is an object, and watching stuff on the television is watching television. I don't think it matters if it's time-shifted. We have a name for the thing you describe, and it is "broadcast television".
It's not games. Valve went as far as to create their own flavor of Linux.
That didn't bring games, it only brought a platform where games might run. What's more relevant is Proton, Steam's WINE for games. I haven't tried it yet, though.
3). They think that emissions controls are inherently evil. "CARB = Communism" Yes, I've actually seen that bumper sticker a few times. Not sure what can be said or done about these people; except that there are fortunately few enough of then that they can be considered to be edge cases and mostly ignored.
I believe in emissions controls to a certain degree (although between my lady and I we've got three diesels, with one EGR between them — and only one has to be emissions tested in California) but the CARB is offensively bureaucratic like every other government agency. And really, this whole notion of having equipment restrictions with E.O. numbers is just an organized bribery scheme. The right thing to do is to probe the vehicle in operation, on the road, and determine whether its emissions are in the acceptable range given whatever standard it's supposed to meet. Standing tests only tell you what the vehicle does when it's idled very rapidly, and dyno tests are too easy to detect — and they don't tell you what the vehicle will do in the real world.
With that said, vehicles are generally self-testing now. They should make them tamper-aware, and let you submit emissions self-tests for unmodified vehicles remotely.
The "black boxes" generally record locally and need physical access to the car to retrieve data. Intrusive shit like OnStar isn't (at least presently) mandatory.
If there's some question about whether you are criminally responsible for the accident, then your vehicle will get towed to an impound yard whether you like it or not. Then they can read the PCM at their leisure. I imagine that there's some company they can send it to that specializes in having the right pigtails and scan tools to hook up to PCMs and pull data from them.
Indeed. I knew someone who knew someone who had some thing and that makes me an expert and automatically makes my opinion on this yet unreleased thing completely valid. How dare they release something like this.
It's not unrelated, it's literally the same thing. Hopefully they'd do a better job of it than the current devices, but it would be so much more prevalent that even if it were much more reliable, it could still negatively impact millions of people.
GP promoted making it more difficult to get a license. We should have a graduated licensing system. In order to drive certain cars, or on certain types of roads, you should have to get a higher grade of license that includes a higher standard of testing. Not everyone needs to be permitted to drive a one ton pickup, let alone a class A housecar. Not everyone needs a car that can do a buck fifty. Etc. I'm sure they do it this way somewhere in the world already.
Besides, wasn't the default for removable devices always "Quick Removal"? I could be misremembering, but I believe that's been the default setting when I've inspected a device for as long as a care to remember.
That's how it has been from Windows XP to Windows 7 at least, that I recall.
Lots of distributions. Lots of ways of doing things. Systemd or not. rpm or dpkg or portage or one of the other dozen or so package managers. Lots of old documentation hanging around telling you to do things that don't work any more. Binary drivers or not. X11 or Wayland. GNOME or KDE or neither.
Putting aside the argument of wasted effort, it's just confusing for the average user. Even those of us who are capable of navigating these waters may easily grow tired of the hassle.
The major limitation of aerial delivery systems is not the landing zones, it's the flight path and avoiding other aerial vehicles.
This could be solved with any combination of transponders, with centralized traffic control managed via cellular network, and actual sensing and avoidance hardware. The combination of all three (and maybe something I haven't thought of) would be the most intelligent, but also the most expensive. It takes relatively little logic for GPS-aware devices to avoid one another if transponders are used. Granted, that information can be used to attack drones, so centralized management is probably the best answer — even though it can be used to attack drones. And if I were spending any significant amount of money per device, I'd want them to be capable of making some decisions on their own. For example, is the landing surface really flat?
Or you will buy a sturdy-ish reusable mat with a preprinted QR code. You scan your landing pad when placing order.
I like this, it should be larger than most people can print anyway. Maybe they could make a pizza box that unfolds into the target. That reduces manual deliveries to one. Include an insert with a foil or plastic protective layer to contain grease.
This is a non-starter (pun intended) until we have autonomous vehicles. Then it might be reasonable to make you pass such a test if you want to drive yourself, otherwise the car does everything for you.
Automakers don't give a shit whether such devices are deployed or not. If they are legally mandated, then there's no competitive drawback.
This is surely not the same as diverting people convicted of dealing drugs into pharma sales jobs. But why is it not the same?
Same gig, different risks. Either way you're selling drugs to people who want them but don't know why, and are largely ignorant of the risks involved. Both are generally morally bankrupt. Well, there is one difference. If someone only sells cannabis products, they're not harming anyone. At worst, they're providing false hope. Big pharma drugs actually kill people.
That guy is merging at the point which is both logical, and legally mandated. That is the point at which we zipper (take one vehicle from each lane.) If you don't understand this, please stop driving, as you are certainly doing it wrong.
The target will be a QR code. You will agree on the rough location of the target during the process. The process of downloading and printing the target will also include agreeing that you're responsible for putting it someplace sensible.
If the drone gets there and it doesn't look like a good place to drop a pizza, you will have to go somewhere else to get your pizza.
Nowhere in this process will there be a driver, except to pick up failed drones. That person can be the assistant manager.
Handhelds did kill handheld PCs like the Nokia N800/N900. What's the PC counterpart to, say, a Nintendo 3DS?
Companies are still making handheld PCs. They're not dead, just sharply in the minority. But they never had much market share, so it's hard to say that they were killed. More palmtop PCs are probably being sold than ever, because they are much cheaper than ever before — whether you do the math in real or inflated dollars. An Atari Portfolio was a stunningly expensive thing for its capabilities. You can get a multicore handheld PC with a GPU for less now.
Is there a substantial wheel tax penalty for owning a truck compared to a car?
California charges registration fees based on an arcane formula, but it is known when it is actually computer and not simply bypassed that it involves MSRP, purchase price, age, and GVWR. California refers to any pickup truck over a certain GVWR as a "commercial vehicle" so as to justify charging inflated registration fees. A car weighing 4000 pounds might cost say $130 to register, while a pickup weighing 5500 pounds might cost $230 or more because you might conceivably put more stuff in it. That's not a very large penalty, but it is noticeable.
Eventually, governments are going to force GPS on vehicle owners. All autonomous vehicles will have GPS anyway, but I'll bet money that sooner or later you won't be allowed to operate a vehicle without a V2V transponder. AVs will be speaking V2V so as to know what the other vehicles around them are doing more cheaply than having to compute it all themselves, and so will human-driven vehicles. Even if all the transponder spits out is the position, heading, speed, and the state of the brake light switch, that's going to be very useful to AVs. Vehicles with OBD-II will presumably be plugged in, and those with ESP will be able to report their steering angle and accelerator pedal position as well. This is something that California would have liked to have done already, but the proposal was shot down for privacy reasons. Those reasons will sound silly when the vast majority of vehicles are violating your privacy as a matter of course, and similar legislation will pass.
When your track is logged, it will be possible to assess road taxes fairly based on per-axle weight, and actual roads traveled. We can fairly accurately estimate road wear based on per-tire load. Additional taxes will be levied, primarily against heavy trucks and buses. These taxes will be passed along to consumers when they are levied against commercial users, and their purchasing decisions will affect road use.
With any luck, they won't actually get that kind of legislation in place until I'm old enough to be dependent on others for everything anyway, but unless civilization goes down the toilet, it's coming. And probably within our lifetimes.
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Steam cleaning a steel can that has humans and electronics in it. Possibly the most retarded idea I will encounter today.
It's actually an Aluminum can, but sadly, they did have to use high strength steel for structural members. Consequently, there is the risk of corrosion, although I'd imagine that the steel members were treated aggressively for corrosion resistance. Even in the mundane world of terrestrial vehicles, that is a fairly well-solved problem when one is willing to throw money at it. Powder coating, epoxy coatings, metallic passivation, sacrificial anodes...
They just need a UV lamp.
The surfaces actually have to be cleaned, and the UV itself will have a deleterious effect on plastic elements. They would have to have been designed for steam cleaning, though. The astronauts aboard the ISS currently use a spray biocide to clean surfaces, but these organisms have other places to live — such as on (and in) the astronauts themselves.
Excel can be replaced with free software, though frequent users will be unhappy with the differences.
I installed Office 97 on my Windows 7 system just so that I would have someplace to paste tables copied from the web that wouldn't make a complete hash of them, as LibreOffice does. On the plus side, LO Calc has functionality that Excel '97 doesn't, like supporting pasting graphic elements. On the down side, I generally only want the text, and LO also isn't as good as putting data in the correct rows or columns. So I paste a table into Excel, massage it slightly, then copy it and paste it again into LibreOffice... To be fair, I'm fairly sure I could run Office 97 under WINE, since it's older than the hills.
That's likely to change soon, but until then it's seen as rude.
It's rude to merge over there from the highway and zoom past people, but it's only sensible to drive up there and merge there if you're entering. Lots of people actually seem to get this.
Where electronics are concerned, the distinction between cord and cable is usually that cords are handled relatively frequently (phone cord, electrical cord, etc), while cables are typically mounted within walls or otherwise out of reach such as high-tension power cables.
That's not true at all. It's a video cable, HDMI cable, coaxial cable, etc. Cord and cable are, alas, both overloaded words. They both have to refer to things which provide tensile strength, and also to bundles of wires (among many other things!) They also can mean exactly the same thing, rope made out of multiple strands. English is dumb, because it's defined by usage, and people are dumb. People with small vocabularies misuse words, and misuse becomes use.
Television means that you watch in realtime some programming that is created at another place (from greek: teleos, far away, and latin: vision, view).
I don't think it does. Examine the phrase/initialism CCTV, for example; closed circuit television. Only it's not from far away. I think a television is an object, and watching stuff on the television is watching television. I don't think it matters if it's time-shifted. We have a name for the thing you describe, and it is "broadcast television".
It's not games. Valve went as far as to create their own flavor of Linux.
That didn't bring games, it only brought a platform where games might run. What's more relevant is Proton, Steam's WINE for games. I haven't tried it yet, though.
3). They think that emissions controls are inherently evil. "CARB = Communism" Yes, I've actually seen that bumper sticker a few times. Not sure what can be said or done about these people; except that there are fortunately few enough of then that they can be considered to be edge cases and mostly ignored.
I believe in emissions controls to a certain degree (although between my lady and I we've got three diesels, with one EGR between them — and only one has to be emissions tested in California) but the CARB is offensively bureaucratic like every other government agency. And really, this whole notion of having equipment restrictions with E.O. numbers is just an organized bribery scheme. The right thing to do is to probe the vehicle in operation, on the road, and determine whether its emissions are in the acceptable range given whatever standard it's supposed to meet. Standing tests only tell you what the vehicle does when it's idled very rapidly, and dyno tests are too easy to detect — and they don't tell you what the vehicle will do in the real world.
With that said, vehicles are generally self-testing now. They should make them tamper-aware, and let you submit emissions self-tests for unmodified vehicles remotely.
That's just a hair's breath away from "nazi".
Yes, the Nazis were famous for being opposed to the internal combustion engine. You knob.
I find I have something in common with the Nazis... I love diesels, too. I'm surprised you didn't say anything about the breathing hair.
The "black boxes" generally record locally and need physical access to the car to retrieve data. Intrusive shit like OnStar isn't (at least presently) mandatory.
If there's some question about whether you are criminally responsible for the accident, then your vehicle will get towed to an impound yard whether you like it or not. Then they can read the PCM at their leisure. I imagine that there's some company they can send it to that specializes in having the right pigtails and scan tools to hook up to PCMs and pull data from them.
Indeed. I knew someone who knew someone who had some thing and that makes me an expert and automatically makes my opinion on this yet unreleased thing completely valid. How dare they release something like this.
It's not unrelated, it's literally the same thing. Hopefully they'd do a better job of it than the current devices, but it would be so much more prevalent that even if it were much more reliable, it could still negatively impact millions of people.
GP promoted making it more difficult to get a license. We should have a graduated licensing system. In order to drive certain cars, or on certain types of roads, you should have to get a higher grade of license that includes a higher standard of testing. Not everyone needs to be permitted to drive a one ton pickup, let alone a class A housecar. Not everyone needs a car that can do a buck fifty. Etc. I'm sure they do it this way somewhere in the world already.
Besides, wasn't the default for removable devices always "Quick Removal"? I could be misremembering, but I believe that's been the default setting when I've inspected a device for as long as a care to remember.
That's how it has been from Windows XP to Windows 7 at least, that I recall.
Lots of distributions. Lots of ways of doing things. Systemd or not. rpm or dpkg or portage or one of the other dozen or so package managers. Lots of old documentation hanging around telling you to do things that don't work any more. Binary drivers or not. X11 or Wayland. GNOME or KDE or neither.
Putting aside the argument of wasted effort, it's just confusing for the average user. Even those of us who are capable of navigating these waters may easily grow tired of the hassle.
Amazon is going to have their drones fly in at altitude, balloon down to complete the delivery and back up, out of the annoyingly loud range.
No they aren't. It's a cute idea, but impractical for a variety of reasons. Quads really aren't that loud anyway.
Yeah, that's what I was going to say. They're building new submarine cables? Great. I don't trust anyone to own cables, that's why I use encryption.
The major limitation of aerial delivery systems is not the landing zones, it's the flight path and avoiding other aerial vehicles.
This could be solved with any combination of transponders, with centralized traffic control managed via cellular network, and actual sensing and avoidance hardware. The combination of all three (and maybe something I haven't thought of) would be the most intelligent, but also the most expensive. It takes relatively little logic for GPS-aware devices to avoid one another if transponders are used. Granted, that information can be used to attack drones, so centralized management is probably the best answer — even though it can be used to attack drones. And if I were spending any significant amount of money per device, I'd want them to be capable of making some decisions on their own. For example, is the landing surface really flat?
Or you will buy a sturdy-ish reusable mat with a preprinted QR code. You scan your landing pad when placing order.
I like this, it should be larger than most people can print anyway. Maybe they could make a pizza box that unfolds into the target. That reduces manual deliveries to one. Include an insert with a foil or plastic protective layer to contain grease.
This is a non-starter (pun intended) until we have autonomous vehicles. Then it might be reasonable to make you pass such a test if you want to drive yourself, otherwise the car does everything for you.
Automakers don't give a shit whether such devices are deployed or not. If they are legally mandated, then there's no competitive drawback.
This is surely not the same as diverting people convicted of dealing drugs into pharma sales jobs. But why is it not the same?
Same gig, different risks. Either way you're selling drugs to people who want them but don't know why, and are largely ignorant of the risks involved. Both are generally morally bankrupt. Well, there is one difference. If someone only sells cannabis products, they're not harming anyone. At worst, they're providing false hope. Big pharma drugs actually kill people.
States which have legalized marijuana have seen increases in automobile accidents since legalization. Up to 6% more accidents.
Yes, but cannabis-involved fatalities fell in at least one case. Cannabis may turn out to be like roundabouts, increasing the number of accidents but reducing the number of fatalities.
Maybe we can give this guy a red card.
That guy is merging at the point which is both logical, and legally mandated. That is the point at which we zipper (take one vehicle from each lane.) If you don't understand this, please stop driving, as you are certainly doing it wrong.
The target will be a QR code. You will agree on the rough location of the target during the process. The process of downloading and printing the target will also include agreeing that you're responsible for putting it someplace sensible.
If the drone gets there and it doesn't look like a good place to drop a pizza, you will have to go somewhere else to get your pizza.
Nowhere in this process will there be a driver, except to pick up failed drones. That person can be the assistant manager.
I hate brodozers too, but at least they meet the emission standards.
Even assuming that's true, the light truck standards are a lot more polluting than the standards which apply to smaller vehicles.
Satellite gives you more like 100GB now. It's hard to hit the cap with ordinary use, given that they throttle video.
Handhelds did kill handheld PCs like the Nokia N800/N900. What's the PC counterpart to, say, a Nintendo 3DS?
Companies are still making handheld PCs. They're not dead, just sharply in the minority. But they never had much market share, so it's hard to say that they were killed. More palmtop PCs are probably being sold than ever, because they are much cheaper than ever before — whether you do the math in real or inflated dollars. An Atari Portfolio was a stunningly expensive thing for its capabilities. You can get a multicore handheld PC with a GPU for less now.
Is there a substantial wheel tax penalty for owning a truck compared to a car?
California charges registration fees based on an arcane formula, but it is known when it is actually computer and not simply bypassed that it involves MSRP, purchase price, age, and GVWR. California refers to any pickup truck over a certain GVWR as a "commercial vehicle" so as to justify charging inflated registration fees. A car weighing 4000 pounds might cost say $130 to register, while a pickup weighing 5500 pounds might cost $230 or more because you might conceivably put more stuff in it. That's not a very large penalty, but it is noticeable.
Eventually, governments are going to force GPS on vehicle owners. All autonomous vehicles will have GPS anyway, but I'll bet money that sooner or later you won't be allowed to operate a vehicle without a V2V transponder. AVs will be speaking V2V so as to know what the other vehicles around them are doing more cheaply than having to compute it all themselves, and so will human-driven vehicles. Even if all the transponder spits out is the position, heading, speed, and the state of the brake light switch, that's going to be very useful to AVs. Vehicles with OBD-II will presumably be plugged in, and those with ESP will be able to report their steering angle and accelerator pedal position as well. This is something that California would have liked to have done already, but the proposal was shot down for privacy reasons. Those reasons will sound silly when the vast majority of vehicles are violating your privacy as a matter of course, and similar legislation will pass.
When your track is logged, it will be possible to assess road taxes fairly based on per-axle weight, and actual roads traveled. We can fairly accurately estimate road wear based on per-tire load. Additional taxes will be levied, primarily against heavy trucks and buses. These taxes will be passed along to consumers when they are levied against commercial users, and their purchasing decisions will affect road use.
With any luck, they won't actually get that kind of legislation in place until I'm old enough to be dependent on others for everything anyway, but unless civilization goes down the toilet, it's coming. And probably within our lifetimes.