"he reached into the glove box to get a cloth and was cleaning the dashboard seconds before the collision"
The Tesla has a clear warning that "autopilot" is not "self-driving", so the driver should have been paying attention to the road, not digging through the glovebox and cleaning the dashboard.
You wrote 5 paragraphs to explain that building a cellular network is hard, but those details don't matter. The bigger picture is that the moment you let a company get away with below-advertized speeds without penalties, you start a race to the bottom between providers where actual speeds slip farther and farther from the advertized speeds. This is simply not acceptable and you don't seem to understand it.
What advertised speed? I didn't see anything in their "unlimited data" ad that includes any expected speeds.
If a road gets congested, then travelling on it gets slower, it doesn't ban new cars from entering the roadway. However the road might open up carpool lanes, which effectively prioritize those people who are taking actions to reduce road congestion...
The other way road congestion is reduced is by using metering lights to "de-prioritize" traffic entering the freeway.
Do you really get to use unlimited data? Or do you get to use 5GB of data and then they start throttling you?
I'm currently on T-Mobile's pay as you go. $30 a month for 100 minutes talk, unlimited text, 5GB unthrotled data + unlimited throtled data. The only thing that _might_ tempt me to switch for more than double the price is if the data is _really_ unlimited and entirely unthrotled.
It's unlimited until you hit the limit in the fine print:
Customers who use more than 26GB of data in a bill cycle will have their data usage de-prioritized compared to other customers for that bill cycle at locations and times when competing network demands occur, resulting in relatively slower speeds
"Google is taking a strategy timeout on its high-speed-internet business. According to WSJ, the Google Fiber unit is -- including Los Angeles, Chicago, and Dallas -- after its initial rollouts proved time-consuming and expensive than anticipated rethinking how to deliver internet connections in about a dozen metro areas"
I don't think it is the allegations that are tainting them.
Then what is it? Indiegogo projects frequently. With this one there are allegations that funds were spent improperly, but no proof... So isn't it the allegations that are tainting them?
WTF kind of hipsterism is this?? I have no fucking idea what this means. It's completely incomprehensible.
Slashdot is located in the USA, so you have to expect articles to use English. If you have trouble reading English, check your local community college for remedial english classes and I'm sure you can get yourself up to a high school reading comprehension level.
If Musk wants to redefine a word to serve his own purposes then that is some serious 1984-level shit right there.
No one bitched when Apple hijacked "device" to mean phone instead of it's established, ancient definition of 'thingy/doohickey'.
(Every time someone says "mobile device" (4 syllables) instead of "phone" (1 syllable) I want to slap them.)
"Device" is a much more accurate name as the "phone" part of mobile devices is becoming less used. I changed carriers and porting my number over was unsuccessful so my phone can make outbound calls but can't accept inbound calls. This was nearly a month ago and I haven't bothered asking the carrier to fix it because it turns out that I just don't care. If someone calls me they can leave me a message and I'll get a notification, which is all i really need.
The only time I watch American live sports is when I'm literally in the stadium. I do watch some international sports, but can usually find a live stream online.
If you spent the same resources to fool a human driver, how hard would that be?
Exactly, for far less than $90,000 you can set up a water curtain projection system that would fool any unsuspecting driver. Put one on a highway and show a film of an approaching wrong-way driving semi and let the hilarity commence.
What is this "Cable TV"? I vaguely remember it being some old fashioned improvement over "rabbit ears", but I didn't realize people still used it today.
The cable companies may win a Pyrrhic victory on this one. I finally got rid of my cable box and went completely to Netflix + over the air TV (which looks fantastic thanks to digital broadcasting -- the over-the-air channels look a *lot* better than they did on cable (even when I was paying extra for "HD") because the cable company uses some aggressive compression that leaves very visible compression artifacts).
The laggy UI is what made me decide to get rid of the box -- taking nearly a second for each page of the program guide, plus at least a second to change channels. I can't help thinking that a third party could make a much better cable box that's both faster and more usable.
And all it took was a $20 antenna for my TV hanging on the wall behind the TV, saved me around $480/year in cable fees. Granted I don't have nearly as many channels as I used to, but 100 channels of crap TV wasn't worth the money.
Nothing about the F-35 precludes development of drones though, and the West already seems to be leading the way on that front too.
Except the cost -- you don't spend over a trillion dollars (projected cost for deployment + operations) on a platform, then let it sit idle while you send in the drones.
There's no reason the F-35 couldn't in itself be the basis of a drone.
Again, cost. Why turn a $150M+ airframe into a drone when you can use a purpose built drone for a fraction of the cost? Removing the pilot from the plane removes a lot of design constraints, so it makes little sense to turn a human piloted aircraft into a drone.
Where I live in Seattle, they provide service to the other side of the street, but not to mine. The city has blocked them from digging and adding new pedestals, so they can't. Since there's no fine for not offering service, it's cheaper for them to just lose the profit from the ~20 houses than it is to fight the city. Comcast needs to start being fined so they have an incentive to fight to provide service. CenturyLink has the same problem so they haven't been able to upgrade to higher than 1.5 Mbps DSL on my street.
You want the city to force Comcast to fight the city to provide service that the city won't allow them to provide?
Is this some sort of job creation program for lawyers?
Router failures shouldn't cause loss of data in any appreciatable amount. Enterprise level organizations should have automatic failover routers in place. This was far more than a simple router failure...so the real question should be: should companies be allowed to lie to their customers about major technical issues?
Why is that so hard to believe? I can see how a core router failure could lead to data loss. Router failed, backup router didn't work (if you don't do failover testing, you don't know that your backup is really ready to take over the load: "oh oops, the firmware on the fiber interface card on the secondary crashes under heavy load"), split-brain leads some systems to fail over to secondary, now you've got transactions hitting primary and secondary databases concurrently, possibly with no way to reconcile them, hence data loss. It may have failed over and back several times, making data recovery even harder.
My company made a conscious decision to delay failover until an engineer decides to flip the switch to prevent this kind of split-brain situation, we'll take the 30 - 60 minute hit on downtime, but that costs us a lot less than it would cost Southwest.
Of course, even letting an engineer decide when to failover doesn't prevent problems, just ask salesforce
Does it bother anyone else that a single moderator can decide that a post is without merit and greatly decrease its visibility?
Newsgroups are dead. I've been using the internet since the early 1990s and I've never used and newsgroup once. I don't know anyone who does. Maybe they once had value a long time ago, but they're obsolete. As for email, I rarely use email to contact anyone outside of work. Even businesses don't like providing email support any longer, instead moving to chat-based support. I don't email friends much. I text them or send them messages on social media. I've always thought email forwards were obnoxious, but now people just share stuff on social media and don't forward stuff. I still get a lot of spam, but I don't use email much. And I don't know a lot of people who use email much for stuff that's not formal. Email is dying, though it's not obsolete yet.
If you disagree, fine. But reply instead of using moderation as a -1 disagree. That's an abuse.
Try logging in instead of posting as an AC if you want more respect. The Slashdot moderation scheme explicitly discourages moderators from explaining their mods since their mod go away if they post anywhere else the thread. So if someone disagrees with you, they'll either downmod you (if they have modpoints) or tell you why they disagree, but they can't do both.
Well, Canada and the USA aren't part of that, that's for sure. Every restaurant, Walmart, mini mart, gas station, hell, even furniture stores will take the opposite countries currency happily. Typically at a loss for the buyer. I've ended up doing this a few times when I've been short on cash and not a single time have they asked for any information at all, ever. In fact, all the currency conversions I've done at professional institutions, such as large currency conversion chains... never once been asked for info.
Perhaps in border towns, but in most parts of the USA, stores will only accept American currency and will look at you suspiciously if you try to use foreign currency - even Canadian.
I used my Canadian credit card there successfully more than once, effectively making the retailer accept Canadian dollars.
That's not how foreign credit card transactions typically work - the merchant gets paid in his local currency, and your bank exchanges that currency for your local currency (usually charging you a foreign transaction fee or a more expensive exchange rate).
I've seen some merchants in heavy tourist areas let the customer decide which of a few currencies the transaction is charged in when you make the transaction, but that's not the norm.
They aren't stupid, they bit copy (dd) the device when it's seized. Now a local police agency might not do this but anything involving the fed's is going to be copied the second they get their hands on the data, even if it's encrypted. This is directly to prevent challenges on data integrity and to prevent dead man switches.
Ideally, whenever the phone wipes itself and destroys its copy of the master encryption key to the phone's storage, then the only way to get the data is to use brute force the 128 bit random key. Even if you have a perfect copy of the data, without the key that's locked up in the phone's security processor, your copy is useless.
The TSA should be replaced with a much much smaller group of enforcement inspectors and all they do is set security guidelines and test airport security. The actual security staff should be hired by the airports themselves, and all TSA does is test that they are meeting standards. (the standards that TSA themselves fail 95% of the time).
* People were fed up with carrier-crap on their phones
I'm definitely in that camp, I'm sticking with the Nexus, not only do I not have all of the carrier crap, but I also get regular OS updates - my 3 year old Nexus 7 tablet still receives near monthly updates.
* People were fed up with Google-crap on their phones
Apparently not that many, or Cyanogen would have a market for their OS. Even cyanogen provides a wiki page to tell you how to load Google Apps on your Cyanogenmod device, because "many users find them beneficial to take full advantage of the Android ecosystem."
And they still profit. Why? Because robocalls like this help push people into deciding they need unlimited calling in the first place, thereby spurring them to spend more. And because not everybody has unlimited calling, and a large portion of their userbase has their minutes eaten up by this. Whether you personally spend more because of it changes that not one lick.
Really? It's hard to find a plan from a major carrier that does't have unlimited (or near unlimited) calling, some MVNO's offer them, but the carriers make so little money off of minutes, I'd be surprised if robocalls would earn any significant revenue for the carriers.
if legit companies were required to prove that their contractors followed ALL laws (with epic fines for violations) then these boiler room companies would go "POOF".
None of the robocalls I receive (at least the ones I've listened to) are legit companies, they are all "You won a trip to the Caribbean", "Listen for special offer to lower your interest rate", etc. They are fly-by-night companies that are hard to track down, and will just pop up again under another name if they face any punishment for the robocalls.
Robocalls have gotten so bad that I stopped answering the phone for cals from numbers I don't recognize, I just let them go to voicemail and wait for the Google Voice transcript to see if I want to call them back.
They will offer free robocall blocking and the sudden and completely unrelated rate hike will be completely unrelated.
It doesn't matter, the rate hike is coming whether they implement this or not -- they charge based on what the market will bear, not on their cost of delivering service.
Or more likely, they'll do nothing at all because they profit every time a robocall hits one of our phones.
Not really, I have unlimited (or nearly unlimited, 1000 minutes) calling, I only use a fraction of that allowance, sending more calls to me doesn't earn AT&T any money, and causes additional load on their network.
Yes-- according to Verizon, "unlimited" has its limits.
"Unlimited" comes with a caveat: common sense.
Personally I'd rather have that caveat than pay extra to support the 0.01% of the people that consume 1000x more resources than everyone else.
I really do hope somebody hits them hard for false advertising [cornell.edu]
Nope. If you are a subscriber, you do have unlimited data. These people are no longer subscribers. Verizon isn't offering them a service any longer, and they aren't paying for it. Business transaction complete.
The problem with relying on common sense is that it's not that common and what seems perfectly reasonable to one person "The only reason I signed up for Verizon was because they offered an unlimited plan that I could use to stream videos to my mountain retreat", may be unreasonable to someone else.
That's why we have truth in advertising laws -- if you lease someone a car with "unlimited mileage" included, you can't charge them extra (or take back their car) when they put 300,000 miles on it in a year. Unlimited has a very clear meaning.
Slashdot Mirror
"he reached into the glove box to get a cloth and was cleaning the dashboard seconds before the collision"
The Tesla has a clear warning that "autopilot" is not "self-driving", so the driver should have been paying attention to the road, not digging through the glovebox and cleaning the dashboard.
You wrote 5 paragraphs to explain that building a cellular network is hard, but those details don't matter. The bigger picture is that the moment you let a company get away with below-advertized speeds without penalties, you start a race to the bottom between providers where actual speeds slip farther and farther from the advertized speeds. This is simply not acceptable and you don't seem to understand it.
What advertised speed? I didn't see anything in their "unlimited data" ad that includes any expected speeds.
If a road gets congested, then travelling on it gets slower, it doesn't ban new cars from entering the roadway. However the road might open up carpool lanes, which effectively prioritize those people who are taking actions to reduce road congestion...
The other way road congestion is reduced is by using metering lights to "de-prioritize" traffic entering the freeway.
Do you really get to use unlimited data? Or do you get to use 5GB of data and then they start throttling you?
I'm currently on T-Mobile's pay as you go. $30 a month for 100 minutes talk, unlimited text, 5GB unthrotled data + unlimited throtled data. The only thing that _might_ tempt me to switch for more than double the price is if the data is _really_ unlimited and entirely unthrotled.
It's unlimited until you hit the limit in the fine print:
Customers who use more than 26GB of data in a bill cycle will have their data usage de-prioritized compared to other customers for that bill cycle at locations and times when competing network demands occur, resulting in relatively slower speeds
"Google is taking a strategy timeout on its high-speed-internet business. According to WSJ, the Google Fiber unit is -- including Los Angeles, Chicago, and Dallas -- after its initial rollouts proved time-consuming and expensive than anticipated rethinking how to deliver internet connections in about a dozen metro areas"
What the fuck, seriously
Just RTFA?
I don't think it is the allegations that are tainting them.
Then what is it? Indiegogo projects frequently. With this one there are allegations that funds were spent improperly, but no proof... So isn't it the allegations that are tainting them?
Wild Abuse Allegations Taint Indiegogo Helmet Maker Skully
WTF kind of hipsterism is this?? I have no fucking idea what this means. It's completely incomprehensible.
Slashdot is located in the USA, so you have to expect articles to use English. If you have trouble reading English, check your local community college for remedial english classes and I'm sure you can get yourself up to a high school reading comprehension level.
What the f is a "wobble"?
Won't all that wobbling destroy the internet? It's all just a system of tubes, you know. Wobbling the tubes billions of times a second can't be good.
If Musk wants to redefine a word to serve his own purposes then that is some serious 1984-level shit right there.
No one bitched when Apple hijacked "device" to mean phone instead of it's established, ancient definition of 'thingy/doohickey'.
(Every time someone says "mobile device" (4 syllables) instead of "phone" (1 syllable) I want to slap them.)
"Device" is a much more accurate name as the "phone" part of mobile devices is becoming less used. I changed carriers and porting my number over was unsuccessful so my phone can make outbound calls but can't accept inbound calls. This was nearly a month ago and I haven't bothered asking the carrier to fix it because it turns out that I just don't care. If someone calls me they can leave me a message and I'll get a notification, which is all i really need.
What about live sports? :P
The only time I watch American live sports is when I'm literally in the stadium. I do watch some international sports, but can usually find a live stream online.
If you spent the same resources to fool a human driver, how hard would that be?
Exactly, for far less than $90,000 you can set up a water curtain projection system that would fool any unsuspecting driver. Put one on a highway and show a film of an approaching wrong-way driving semi and let the hilarity commence.
They are already used as hard-to-miss warning signs on some roads: https://youtu.be/Dk9DjO-_rT8
What is this "Cable TV"? I vaguely remember it being some old fashioned improvement over "rabbit ears", but I didn't realize people still used it today.
The cable companies may win a Pyrrhic victory on this one. I finally got rid of my cable box and went completely to Netflix + over the air TV (which looks fantastic thanks to digital broadcasting -- the over-the-air channels look a *lot* better than they did on cable (even when I was paying extra for "HD") because the cable company uses some aggressive compression that leaves very visible compression artifacts).
The laggy UI is what made me decide to get rid of the box -- taking nearly a second for each page of the program guide, plus at least a second to change channels. I can't help thinking that a third party could make a much better cable box that's both faster and more usable.
And all it took was a $20 antenna for my TV hanging on the wall behind the TV, saved me around $480/year in cable fees. Granted I don't have nearly as many channels as I used to, but 100 channels of crap TV wasn't worth the money.
Nothing about the F-35 precludes development of drones though, and the West already seems to be leading the way on that front too.
Except the cost -- you don't spend over a trillion dollars (projected cost for deployment + operations) on a platform, then let it sit idle while you send in the drones.
There's no reason the F-35 couldn't in itself be the basis of a drone.
Again, cost. Why turn a $150M+ airframe into a drone when you can use a purpose built drone for a fraction of the cost? Removing the pilot from the plane removes a lot of design constraints, so it makes little sense to turn a human piloted aircraft into a drone.
Where I live in Seattle, they provide service to the other side of the street, but not to mine. The city has blocked them from digging and adding new pedestals, so they can't. Since there's no fine for not offering service, it's cheaper for them to just lose the profit from the ~20 houses than it is to fight the city. Comcast needs to start being fined so they have an incentive to fight to provide service. CenturyLink has the same problem so they haven't been able to upgrade to higher than 1.5 Mbps DSL on my street.
You want the city to force Comcast to fight the city to provide service that the city won't allow them to provide?
Is this some sort of job creation program for lawyers?
Router failures shouldn't cause loss of data in any appreciatable amount. Enterprise level organizations should have automatic failover routers in place. This was far more than a simple router failure...so the real question should be: should companies be allowed to lie to their customers about major technical issues?
Why is that so hard to believe? I can see how a core router failure could lead to data loss. Router failed, backup router didn't work (if you don't do failover testing, you don't know that your backup is really ready to take over the load: "oh oops, the firmware on the fiber interface card on the secondary crashes under heavy load"), split-brain leads some systems to fail over to secondary, now you've got transactions hitting primary and secondary databases concurrently, possibly with no way to reconcile them, hence data loss. It may have failed over and back several times, making data recovery even harder.
My company made a conscious decision to delay failover until an engineer decides to flip the switch to prevent this kind of split-brain situation, we'll take the 30 - 60 minute hit on downtime, but that costs us a lot less than it would cost Southwest.
Of course, even letting an engineer decide when to failover doesn't prevent problems, just ask salesforce
Does it bother anyone else that a single moderator can decide that a post is without merit and greatly decrease its visibility?
Newsgroups are dead. I've been using the internet since the early 1990s and I've never used and newsgroup once. I don't know anyone who does. Maybe they once had value a long time ago, but they're obsolete. As for email, I rarely use email to contact anyone outside of work. Even businesses don't like providing email support any longer, instead moving to chat-based support. I don't email friends much. I text them or send them messages on social media. I've always thought email forwards were obnoxious, but now people just share stuff on social media and don't forward stuff. I still get a lot of spam, but I don't use email much. And I don't know a lot of people who use email much for stuff that's not formal. Email is dying, though it's not obsolete yet.
If you disagree, fine. But reply instead of using moderation as a -1 disagree. That's an abuse.
Try logging in instead of posting as an AC if you want more respect. The Slashdot moderation scheme explicitly discourages moderators from explaining their mods since their mod go away if they post anywhere else the thread. So if someone disagrees with you, they'll either downmod you (if they have modpoints) or tell you why they disagree, but they can't do both.
Well, Canada and the USA aren't part of that, that's for sure. Every restaurant, Walmart, mini mart, gas station, hell, even furniture stores will take the opposite countries currency happily. Typically at a loss for the buyer. I've ended up doing this a few times when I've been short on cash and not a single time have they asked for any information at all, ever. In fact, all the currency conversions I've done at professional institutions, such as large currency conversion chains... never once been asked for info.
Perhaps in border towns, but in most parts of the USA, stores will only accept American currency and will look at you suspiciously if you try to use foreign currency - even Canadian.
I used my Canadian credit card there successfully more than once, effectively making the retailer accept Canadian dollars.
That's not how foreign credit card transactions typically work - the merchant gets paid in his local currency, and your bank exchanges that currency for your local currency (usually charging you a foreign transaction fee or a more expensive exchange rate).
I've seen some merchants in heavy tourist areas let the customer decide which of a few currencies the transaction is charged in when you make the transaction, but that's not the norm.
They aren't stupid, they bit copy (dd) the device when it's seized. Now a local police agency might not do this but anything involving the fed's is going to be copied the second they get their hands on the data, even if it's encrypted. This is directly to prevent challenges on data integrity and to prevent dead man switches.
Ideally, whenever the phone wipes itself and destroys its copy of the master encryption key to the phone's storage, then the only way to get the data is to use brute force the 128 bit random key. Even if you have a perfect copy of the data, without the key that's locked up in the phone's security processor, your copy is useless.
The TSA should be replaced with a much much smaller group of enforcement inspectors and all they do is set security guidelines and test airport security. The actual security staff should be hired by the airports themselves, and all TSA does is test that they are meeting standards. (the standards that TSA themselves fail 95% of the time).
* People were fed up with carrier-crap on their phones
I'm definitely in that camp, I'm sticking with the Nexus, not only do I not have all of the carrier crap, but I also get regular OS updates - my 3 year old Nexus 7 tablet still receives near monthly updates.
* People were fed up with Google-crap on their phones
Apparently not that many, or Cyanogen would have a market for their OS. Even cyanogen provides a wiki page to tell you how to load Google Apps on your Cyanogenmod device, because "many users find them beneficial to take full advantage of the Android ecosystem."
https://wiki.cyanogenmod.org/w...
And they still profit. Why? Because robocalls like this help push people into deciding they need unlimited calling in the first place, thereby spurring them to spend more. And because not everybody has unlimited calling, and a large portion of their userbase has their minutes eaten up by this. Whether you personally spend more because of it changes that not one lick.
Really? It's hard to find a plan from a major carrier that does't have unlimited (or near unlimited) calling, some MVNO's offer them, but the carriers make so little money off of minutes, I'd be surprised if robocalls would earn any significant revenue for the carriers.
if legit companies were required to prove that their contractors followed ALL laws (with epic fines for violations) then these boiler room companies would go "POOF".
None of the robocalls I receive (at least the ones I've listened to) are legit companies, they are all "You won a trip to the Caribbean", "Listen for special offer to lower your interest rate", etc. They are fly-by-night companies that are hard to track down, and will just pop up again under another name if they face any punishment for the robocalls.
Robocalls have gotten so bad that I stopped answering the phone for cals from numbers I don't recognize, I just let them go to voicemail and wait for the Google Voice transcript to see if I want to call them back.
They will offer free robocall blocking and the sudden and completely unrelated rate hike will be completely unrelated.
It doesn't matter, the rate hike is coming whether they implement this or not -- they charge based on what the market will bear, not on their cost of delivering service.
Or more likely, they'll do nothing at all because they profit every time a robocall hits one of our phones.
Not really, I have unlimited (or nearly unlimited, 1000 minutes) calling, I only use a fraction of that allowance, sending more calls to me doesn't earn AT&T any money, and causes additional load on their network.
Yes-- according to Verizon, "unlimited" has its limits.
"Unlimited" comes with a caveat: common sense.
Personally I'd rather have that caveat than pay extra to support the 0.01% of the people that consume 1000x more resources than everyone else.
I really do hope somebody hits them hard for false advertising [cornell.edu]
Nope. If you are a subscriber, you do have unlimited data. These people are no longer subscribers. Verizon isn't offering them a service any longer, and they aren't paying for it. Business transaction complete.
The problem with relying on common sense is that it's not that common and what seems perfectly reasonable to one person "The only reason I signed up for Verizon was because they offered an unlimited plan that I could use to stream videos to my mountain retreat", may be unreasonable to someone else.
That's why we have truth in advertising laws -- if you lease someone a car with "unlimited mileage" included, you can't charge them extra (or take back their car) when they put 300,000 miles on it in a year. Unlimited has a very clear meaning.