You can just shift to neutral and brake. No need to turn the car off, just let it revving up until you can brake. Or in a manual car, you can just hold the clutch until you regain control and stop the car, then turn it off. They should just add this to the DMV exam, instead of making cars more expensive, complex, and keep bulking the legislation.
In the long term, and if not corrected, the unequal distribution of wealth in the US will be a major factor for our country decline. In a sense, the people with power to decide is playing against our own country, because their personal interests conflict with the common interests. 50 years from now we will look back and wonder how could we have been so blind.
Both of these (static image where one has to find the car and audio-only GPS) will only help to stress the driver and make him/her waste time trying to figure things out. I was thinking that maybe overlapping actual video of the surroundings (like street view on google maps) and limiting the display to mark/tag what is within the visible range of the driver is a better idea, so if the driver is watching the GPS screen, there is information about the actual road in the screen as well.
Still, I do not think GPS is as bad as people texting, and I see people texting while driving pretty much every day in my very short commute to work.
Why has the parent been downvoted? He is right. Using the cell phone to pay has been something commonplace in many Asian countries for the last 10-15 years... I do not know what Apple patent is about, but they certainly did not come up with the original idea.
The issue is not lack of qualified people, but lack of good jobs and opportunities for the qualified people. More people will get advanced degrees if that would guarantee a solid financial outcome with a balanced lifestyle. Today, in America, no training can guarantee both of these. If you are lucky, you can make some money, but chances are your life will be your job. Forget about been able to live without stress, or having a balanced family life.
Microsoft is seeing the advantages that Apple has with its tight control on its software ecosystem, and it is trying to emulate it. But it is too late, and it is too detached from their current model of software distribution for it to work. It is the same they tried to do with the Zune. This will work if they spawn a new company for it, and disassociate the project from Windows in the minds of the customers. Then, they may have a chance to do this and to get a better grip at controlling the hardware (both of which are troubling for us power users, tinkerers, and software developers).
Sometimes I think Microsoft somehow is stuck 20 years in the past, no matter how much they try. They sure do have the brains and the money, but they do not have anybody with a vision.
It is not only money. There is something else that is remarkable. Our elected officials listen more to their 'friends' that to the people who vote them in power. And we seem to be complacent with this. Somehow we have to find a way in the US to held individuals working for the government accountable for their actions, if we want the land of the free to be so for our children.
I think if we want to fix this, culturally, we need to get out of the "I want to be rich" idea, because it cannot possibly happening to a sizeable percentage of people without extreme social unbalances. Also, the idea that growth can be sustained indefinitely is a dangerous fallacy. You can keep printing money and raising you salary all you want, but the truth is that we have a limited amount of resources on Earth, and once they are gone there is no more. And we cannot eat money. We are not using these resources wisely, nor we are partitioning them in an equitable way among our society. At some point we need to find a system that is sustainable, or we will either deplete everything, or the control of these resources would be so concentrated that for practical purposes it will be as if they are depleted for 99.99% of the population. The idea that something can grow indefinitely on limited resources is not sound, and can only possibly benefit the individuals that are in control of these scarce resources by means of appeasing the rest of the potential consumers. There is a lack of alignment between what we need to do and what we are told is the solution, and the people who is explaining it to us have not necessarily our best interests in mind. So it is up to each of us to listen to it or not. At some point people has to grow up and start thinking on their own.
I think that the larger issue with America these days is connected to our cultural tendency about measuring success in terms of money and power. In the newer generations, this is displacing the very values that made the nation great, and resulting in short term and immediate results kind of thinking. We are teaching our youth to think like a 5-year old with a tantrum, with an insane sense of entitlement and no responsibility. And the older generations are not much better. Add to this the fact that there are no visionaries among the people with power to make changes in the nation, be it the heads of large corporations, the congress, or elected officers. Long term is thought as "5 years down the road". That does not scale for the size and complexity of America today. We need a 100-year plan, not a "will do whatever necessary to get re-elected next year" plan. And this long term plan should not be based on controlling the rest of the world or waging wars when other countries do not submit to our might; we should use our resources wisely to take care of our own people instead, and shift to a sustainable economic model so we do not need resources from other countries. The only reason we have not collapsed onto ourselves is that the rest of the world is messed up too. But we can do so much better than that. My impression is that unless we start thinking long term and incorporate healthier values into education, to slowly revert this tendency, the decline of America will not only continue but accelerate in all areas, including technology, quality of life for the average citizen, and the position of our country in the world. At this rate, we will be a part of the 3rd world in 50 years. We can do better for our children.
You are not the only one. But that goes against companies selling everybody a new OS (and new hardware) every couple of years... there is no reason why a 10 year old machine is not perfectly fine to run pretty much everything that 95% of the people needs for their daily work (with the probable exception of gaming).
You do not need a network to air anything these days. Put it on YouTube, and allow for linking. Post it on Slashdot, Reddit, and 10 or 20 more popular websites. Post it on Facebook, tweet about. Link it from the comments on articles about SOPA in news websites.
Because Linux is still a pain to use on the desktop. I know, because I use it every day (Ubuntu on a Thinkpad T420). I love what I can do with it, but casual use is just too painful. Tons of little annoying things. Linux on the desktop is like death by 1000 paper cuts. Wifi does not always reconnects on resume (most of the time it does), screen dims erratically sometimes (most of the times it behaves well), office applications hung (OpenOffice/Libre Office are 10 times more stable is Windows or OS X), and then the other things, like not having good support for some hardware (optimus video cards come to mind, I have to reboot and change BIOS settings to switch between integrated and discrete graphics), or like the Ubuntu kernel upgrades that break everything (had 8 kernels automatically installed by the update program, and visible from the bootloader menu, but only 2 booted up as intended). And do not get me wrong, Ubuntu is a pretty good distro.
So the available choices for desktop OS really suck right now.
On Windows 7 one ends up spending more time closing pop-up messages, reading OS alerts, updating, and virus checking than actually doing any work. XP is better than Win7 any day of the week in that department. On OS X the experience is exceptionally smooth and polished, but you have to do things the Apple(tm) way, and if your workflow does not jive with that, or if you want to do any serious programming on anything native with a GUI and do not feel like using Objective-C, well... too bad (I've used and still use OS X). Linux is yet not ready, and looking back at its evolution, starts to seem that it will never be completely polished as far as the desktop user experience goes. BSD seems like well put together and very secure and consistent, but good luck with hardware support on notebooks (it will not even boot on my machine).
There is such an opportunity for somebody to come up with a reasonable OS alternative right now.
Google has been pulling the plug on a lot of their projects lately. This will make me think twice about alternatives when starting new projects on the cloud, especially if they are based on "free" services. There is hidden price there, which can hit you in the less expected moment...
I second that. DreamHost is excellent for hosting. Fast servers, good service, and they allow you to do pretty much whatever you want with your account without hassles or unreasonable extra charges. Their prices seem competitive too, but to be honest, I am so happy with them that I have not checked out for pricing elsewhere. I've been using them for about 3 years and will not go back to other providers.
The thing is, when talking about what is right and what is wrong, "illegal" should not be the boundary, but a far extreme towards "bad", which most companies should avoid by far. As I see it, the fact that a company does anything that is "legal" and in its power to generate profit, in real life means that the company is driven by greedy individuals and often ethically questionable practices. And if a company does something illegal, somebody somewhere has to go to jail. Period. I know, I know, there is the free market idea, too, and all that argument - if that worked so well, our economy would be in a different place. But you choose whatever you want to believe in, and live the consequences; I think that companies that have some sort of ethical self-regulation are healthier to society as a whole than the ones that just "follow the law". Think about the banking industry for a bad example of legal theft.
While I agree people in the US should in general exercise more, I do not think you can regulate people's lives with a tax increase. People getting to exercise requires a change of attitude, values, and likely education, not more taxes. Ask yourself how many smokers stopped smoking because of the tobacco tax, or how many heavy drinkers stopped drinking because of alcohol tax - it just does not work like that.
Netflix is positive in which it gives you the choice of what to watch, and you do not have to endure commercials, which arguably have a worse effect on people than the movies themselves.
If we had self-sustained habitats in which people would live for 500 years comfortably, you will likely have a hard time making the descendants of the first space travellers to get out of there comfortable spaceships and settle from scratch on a planet. Maybe instead of finding a planet like the one we have now it will be easier (and faster) to develop self-sustained space colonies in which people live in large ships, but are free and have the means to get resources from any planet.
Right, because spitting on a book they consider sacred will fix things. Instead of having alternative ideas to outrage others, you should be outraged ourselves with our politicians. I wish WE do the obvious thing, which is refuse to go through a scanner every single time. The safety argument is bogus (if you do not get it, read Schneier website, or his newsletter on security), and even knowing that, we give up on our dignity, and submit ourselves and our children to be groped and radiated. I just cannot believed how a bunch of people with special interests cajole a whole country into this. Oh, I forgot, we Americans like convenience, and 'safety'; or are just spineless. Maybe we deserve what is coming to us, then.
Yes, but they appeal to a different demographics. Not everybody knows about Ritchie, or can understand how fundamental his contributions were; on the other hand, Jobs was a bit of a star for consumers in general, an iconic figure. Both of them made incredible things, thou. Setting up a day to recognise a single person is silly in a world with 7 billion people.
I do not know why this is in the front page, and I do not know why the educated crowd of Slashdot listens to BS from the CIO/CEO/CXO of the day and his new genius theory to quantify things he should not, mainly because he does not understand what technology is about. These guys should be in marketing. There are new technologies and old technologies, and jobs for all of them if you are good and know the right people. If you are very good at Fortran or Cobol you can get a job. If you excel at Java or C you can get a job. None of these are new technologies by far, and the skills are highly portable from one to the other. The basic knowledge you need is always sort of the same, a mix or common sense, knowledge of the basics (algorithms, data structures, and a brief background on the problem domain you are working on), and some minimum social skills.
One thing is to try to justify searches at the country borders. Another is to expand that to all flights, be them national or international (and I do not agree with this policy). But now, random checks in a highway? This does nothing to improve safety of citizenships, but helps to educate new generations of Americans into getting used to these outrageous privacy invasions. You can expect to see this kind of government behavior from a dictatorship, not from a democracy. What are we transforming America into?
I agree with you.. well.. almost. It is not supposed to be an investment tool, but most people who get into it does it because it believes it will be valuable in the future, not because they can pay rent or buy groceries, or a plane ticket with it.
Right. And my guess would be that one will think twice before investing in Zimbabwe's currency. Which seems to be the same point that one could make with Bitcoin. It is sort of sad, because I like the idea of a digital currency, but since it is volatile and not widely accepted, its only value right know is in terms of an instrument to speculate with future gains. So as far as I can tell, bitcoin is as good as 'investing' money in a Las Vegas casino.. or maybe worse, since casinos are somewhat regulated by the government.
Slashdot Mirror
You can just shift to neutral and brake. No need to turn the car off, just let it revving up until you can brake. Or in a manual car, you can just hold the clutch until you regain control and stop the car, then turn it off. They should just add this to the DMV exam, instead of making cars more expensive, complex, and keep bulking the legislation.
In the long term, and if not corrected, the unequal distribution of wealth in the US will be a major factor for our country decline. In a sense, the people with power to decide is playing against our own country, because their personal interests conflict with the common interests. 50 years from now we will look back and wonder how could we have been so blind.
Both of these (static image where one has to find the car and audio-only GPS) will only help to stress the driver and make him/her waste time trying to figure things out. I was thinking that maybe overlapping actual video of the surroundings (like street view on google maps) and limiting the display to mark/tag what is within the visible range of the driver is a better idea, so if the driver is watching the GPS screen, there is information about the actual road in the screen as well. Still, I do not think GPS is as bad as people texting, and I see people texting while driving pretty much every day in my very short commute to work.
Why has the parent been downvoted? He is right. Using the cell phone to pay has been something commonplace in many Asian countries for the last 10-15 years... I do not know what Apple patent is about, but they certainly did not come up with the original idea.
The issue is not lack of qualified people, but lack of good jobs and opportunities for the qualified people. More people will get advanced degrees if that would guarantee a solid financial outcome with a balanced lifestyle. Today, in America, no training can guarantee both of these. If you are lucky, you can make some money, but chances are your life will be your job. Forget about been able to live without stress, or having a balanced family life.
Microsoft is seeing the advantages that Apple has with its tight control on its software ecosystem, and it is trying to emulate it. But it is too late, and it is too detached from their current model of software distribution for it to work. It is the same they tried to do with the Zune. This will work if they spawn a new company for it, and disassociate the project from Windows in the minds of the customers. Then, they may have a chance to do this and to get a better grip at controlling the hardware (both of which are troubling for us power users, tinkerers, and software developers). Sometimes I think Microsoft somehow is stuck 20 years in the past, no matter how much they try. They sure do have the brains and the money, but they do not have anybody with a vision.
It is not only money. There is something else that is remarkable. Our elected officials listen more to their 'friends' that to the people who vote them in power. And we seem to be complacent with this. Somehow we have to find a way in the US to held individuals working for the government accountable for their actions, if we want the land of the free to be so for our children.
I think if we want to fix this, culturally, we need to get out of the "I want to be rich" idea, because it cannot possibly happening to a sizeable percentage of people without extreme social unbalances. Also, the idea that growth can be sustained indefinitely is a dangerous fallacy. You can keep printing money and raising you salary all you want, but the truth is that we have a limited amount of resources on Earth, and once they are gone there is no more. And we cannot eat money. We are not using these resources wisely, nor we are partitioning them in an equitable way among our society. At some point we need to find a system that is sustainable, or we will either deplete everything, or the control of these resources would be so concentrated that for practical purposes it will be as if they are depleted for 99.99% of the population. The idea that something can grow indefinitely on limited resources is not sound, and can only possibly benefit the individuals that are in control of these scarce resources by means of appeasing the rest of the potential consumers. There is a lack of alignment between what we need to do and what we are told is the solution, and the people who is explaining it to us have not necessarily our best interests in mind. So it is up to each of us to listen to it or not. At some point people has to grow up and start thinking on their own.
I think that the larger issue with America these days is connected to our cultural tendency about measuring success in terms of money and power. In the newer generations, this is displacing the very values that made the nation great, and resulting in short term and immediate results kind of thinking. We are teaching our youth to think like a 5-year old with a tantrum, with an insane sense of entitlement and no responsibility. And the older generations are not much better. Add to this the fact that there are no visionaries among the people with power to make changes in the nation, be it the heads of large corporations, the congress, or elected officers. Long term is thought as "5 years down the road". That does not scale for the size and complexity of America today. We need a 100-year plan, not a "will do whatever necessary to get re-elected next year" plan. And this long term plan should not be based on controlling the rest of the world or waging wars when other countries do not submit to our might; we should use our resources wisely to take care of our own people instead, and shift to a sustainable economic model so we do not need resources from other countries. The only reason we have not collapsed onto ourselves is that the rest of the world is messed up too. But we can do so much better than that. My impression is that unless we start thinking long term and incorporate healthier values into education, to slowly revert this tendency, the decline of America will not only continue but accelerate in all areas, including technology, quality of life for the average citizen, and the position of our country in the world. At this rate, we will be a part of the 3rd world in 50 years. We can do better for our children.
You are not the only one. But that goes against companies selling everybody a new OS (and new hardware) every couple of years... there is no reason why a 10 year old machine is not perfectly fine to run pretty much everything that 95% of the people needs for their daily work (with the probable exception of gaming).
You do not need a network to air anything these days. Put it on YouTube, and allow for linking. Post it on Slashdot, Reddit, and 10 or 20 more popular websites. Post it on Facebook, tweet about. Link it from the comments on articles about SOPA in news websites.
Because Linux is still a pain to use on the desktop. I know, because I use it every day (Ubuntu on a Thinkpad T420). I love what I can do with it, but casual use is just too painful. Tons of little annoying things. Linux on the desktop is like death by 1000 paper cuts. Wifi does not always reconnects on resume (most of the time it does), screen dims erratically sometimes (most of the times it behaves well), office applications hung (OpenOffice/Libre Office are 10 times more stable is Windows or OS X), and then the other things, like not having good support for some hardware (optimus video cards come to mind, I have to reboot and change BIOS settings to switch between integrated and discrete graphics), or like the Ubuntu kernel upgrades that break everything (had 8 kernels automatically installed by the update program, and visible from the bootloader menu, but only 2 booted up as intended). And do not get me wrong, Ubuntu is a pretty good distro.
So the available choices for desktop OS really suck right now.
On Windows 7 one ends up spending more time closing pop-up messages, reading OS alerts, updating, and virus checking than actually doing any work. XP is better than Win7 any day of the week in that department. On OS X the experience is exceptionally smooth and polished, but you have to do things the Apple(tm) way, and if your workflow does not jive with that, or if you want to do any serious programming on anything native with a GUI and do not feel like using Objective-C, well... too bad (I've used and still use OS X). Linux is yet not ready, and looking back at its evolution, starts to seem that it will never be completely polished as far as the desktop user experience goes. BSD seems like well put together and very secure and consistent, but good luck with hardware support on notebooks (it will not even boot on my machine).
There is such an opportunity for somebody to come up with a reasonable OS alternative right now.
Google has been pulling the plug on a lot of their projects lately. This will make me think twice about alternatives when starting new projects on the cloud, especially if they are based on "free" services. There is hidden price there, which can hit you in the less expected moment...
I second that. DreamHost is excellent for hosting. Fast servers, good service, and they allow you to do pretty much whatever you want with your account without hassles or unreasonable extra charges. Their prices seem competitive too, but to be honest, I am so happy with them that I have not checked out for pricing elsewhere. I've been using them for about 3 years and will not go back to other providers.
The thing is, when talking about what is right and what is wrong, "illegal" should not be the boundary, but a far extreme towards "bad", which most companies should avoid by far. As I see it, the fact that a company does anything that is "legal" and in its power to generate profit, in real life means that the company is driven by greedy individuals and often ethically questionable practices. And if a company does something illegal, somebody somewhere has to go to jail. Period. I know, I know, there is the free market idea, too, and all that argument - if that worked so well, our economy would be in a different place. But you choose whatever you want to believe in, and live the consequences; I think that companies that have some sort of ethical self-regulation are healthier to society as a whole than the ones that just "follow the law". Think about the banking industry for a bad example of legal theft.
While I agree people in the US should in general exercise more, I do not think you can regulate people's lives with a tax increase. People getting to exercise requires a change of attitude, values, and likely education, not more taxes. Ask yourself how many smokers stopped smoking because of the tobacco tax, or how many heavy drinkers stopped drinking because of alcohol tax - it just does not work like that. Netflix is positive in which it gives you the choice of what to watch, and you do not have to endure commercials, which arguably have a worse effect on people than the movies themselves.
If we had self-sustained habitats in which people would live for 500 years comfortably, you will likely have a hard time making the descendants of the first space travellers to get out of there comfortable spaceships and settle from scratch on a planet. Maybe instead of finding a planet like the one we have now it will be easier (and faster) to develop self-sustained space colonies in which people live in large ships, but are free and have the means to get resources from any planet.
Right, because spitting on a book they consider sacred will fix things. Instead of having alternative ideas to outrage others, you should be outraged ourselves with our politicians. I wish WE do the obvious thing, which is refuse to go through a scanner every single time. The safety argument is bogus (if you do not get it, read Schneier website, or his newsletter on security), and even knowing that, we give up on our dignity, and submit ourselves and our children to be groped and radiated. I just cannot believed how a bunch of people with special interests cajole a whole country into this. Oh, I forgot, we Americans like convenience, and 'safety'; or are just spineless. Maybe we deserve what is coming to us, then.
I would mod you up if I had any points left today.
Yes, but they appeal to a different demographics. Not everybody knows about Ritchie, or can understand how fundamental his contributions were; on the other hand, Jobs was a bit of a star for consumers in general, an iconic figure. Both of them made incredible things, thou. Setting up a day to recognise a single person is silly in a world with 7 billion people.
I do not know why this is in the front page, and I do not know why the educated crowd of Slashdot listens to BS from the CIO/CEO/CXO of the day and his new genius theory to quantify things he should not, mainly because he does not understand what technology is about. These guys should be in marketing. There are new technologies and old technologies, and jobs for all of them if you are good and know the right people. If you are very good at Fortran or Cobol you can get a job. If you excel at Java or C you can get a job. None of these are new technologies by far, and the skills are highly portable from one to the other. The basic knowledge you need is always sort of the same, a mix or common sense, knowledge of the basics (algorithms, data structures, and a brief background on the problem domain you are working on), and some minimum social skills.
One thing is to try to justify searches at the country borders. Another is to expand that to all flights, be them national or international (and I do not agree with this policy). But now, random checks in a highway? This does nothing to improve safety of citizenships, but helps to educate new generations of Americans into getting used to these outrageous privacy invasions. You can expect to see this kind of government behavior from a dictatorship, not from a democracy. What are we transforming America into?
I agree with you.. well.. almost. It is not supposed to be an investment tool, but most people who get into it does it because it believes it will be valuable in the future, not because they can pay rent or buy groceries, or a plane ticket with it.
Right. And my guess would be that one will think twice before investing in Zimbabwe's currency. Which seems to be the same point that one could make with Bitcoin. It is sort of sad, because I like the idea of a digital currency, but since it is volatile and not widely accepted, its only value right know is in terms of an instrument to speculate with future gains. So as far as I can tell, bitcoin is as good as 'investing' money in a Las Vegas casino.. or maybe worse, since casinos are somewhat regulated by the government.
That is correct. And that is also the reason bitcoin does not work for everybody.