Google's probably not going to add this to their default search engine. They've already got a good audience using this where it's appropriate - to keep spambots from joining or posting to forums or in other contexts where you want to determine if your web client is human or bot.
Google SEARCH exists and is popular because it's fast and convenient. I can't see them adding a 2-word CAPTCHA to do a simple search only because that would drive search traffic (which is already very profitable) to their competition.
Google is very, very clever at designing mutually beneficial arrangements. They craft all of their products so the user is receiving some significant benefit in return for the information or work they provide to Google. reCAPTCHA only provides a benefit when users see a forum is pretty clean from spam and crap because CAPTCHA is there, so they'll go to the effort of joining those forums. Forum master and user both see a tangible benefit - reduced spam - and will happily compensate google with 5 seconds' work.
Most CAPTCHA solutions have at least two ways you can solve them. Some offer an audio version of the words that is only slightly garbled (enough to defeat voice recognition) that you can listen to in addition to or instead of the CAPTCHA word, and some allow you to solve some simple word problem instead of CAPTCHA if your hearing AND eyesight are both bad.
As far as the Clinton example, funny, but in reality people are going to be looking at one word at a time. The Clinton bio example would be frequently made (humorously or maliciously) due to context. But if the word "election" was put on a CAPTCHA, most people would interpret it correctly. A few might get funny and try "erection" just to see if it's the "non significant" word, but I doubt that would be EVERYONE. If you checked the word against a dozen people, you'd have to have at least (at a guess) 10 of them with the exact same sense of humor to get the word automatically accepted as "erection" and not "election".
I don't know Google's algorithm for re-checking words, but the article clearly says they'll be doing some rechecking for reliability by having a number of different randomly-chosen people interpret the same word. I imagine that words where the answers are all identical might get 4-5 checks, while words that prove less consistent will get checked at least a dozen times or so, and those that continue being unreliable would probably get an authoritative check.
If, say, 4 people chose "erection" and the remaining 8 chose "election", the word would probably be flagged as "unreliable" by the automated CAPTCHA system and reviewed by a Google employee in proper context for final verification. Then the word would be corrected. Exactly which of the two words is chosen would probably depend on the political affiliation of the Google employee.:)
Or more radioactive materials in the crust, which would be undetectable from distance. Or a different basis for life than DNA, which mutates under different circumstances.
But, yeah, point taken that a moon might be a differentiating factor when forced to choose which of a bunch of nearly-identical-looking planetary systems to commit to exploring, if we manage to develop that technology before we wipe ourselves out entirely. We'd stand a slightly better chance of understanding what we're looking at, and if there's no life there at all it might be more amenable to our own species at least, and that's a nifty consolation prize...
It'd be pretty low on my personal checklist if I had a superlight ship at my disposal.:)
Google is doing this in order to prevent spam and to improve OCR. But once OCR is improved to the point where it can read poorer scans, won't spammers be able to use that new technology to eventually defeat CAPTCHA?
Don't get me wrong, I think this is a marvelous idea, potentially using volunteer labor of humans as OCR to interpret a book one poorly-scanned word at a time. But it does seem to have the side effect of eventually destroying the original purpose of what they bought. Maybe CAPTCHA is worth more as a "crowdsourced OCR solution" than it ever was as spam prevention anyway...
We honestly don't know the conditions under which life could form. About the only thing that is certainly required is some source of energy, and even that doesn't necessarily need to come from sources we'd recognize. Of course, finding "life as we know it" is the most efficient because we'd be the best equipped to recognize it and possibly communicate with it. Finding "life as we understand it" would be somewhat less easy and less likely to communicate with, and "life as we can't possibly imagine it today" would probably just remain undetected. Do you KNOW if that shade of blue in your drapes is intelligent? How would you be equipped to recognize its motivations? You'd just think of it as a shade of blue and move on. Meanwhile, it's laughing at me. Maybe I'm the only one who can tell it's intelligent, or maybe I'm overdue for the yellow pill today.
So a detail like a moon, while important to some of the habitability concerns of our own oxygen-breathing selves, and especially important to species that have come to depend on the tides, is probably very unimportant in terms of the development of a life form. It may, however, be somewhat important if we find a dozen Earth-like planets, because picking the one with a moon might increase the chances of finding life ever so slightly similar to our own. Or it may turn out to be too insignificant a detail to even consider.
The moon is vital to the survival of many species on this planet, but certainly not all. And if the moon had never existed, there's a very good chance something alive would have evolved on this planet. It might or might not be exactly what we ended up with today, but there'd probably be something posting on slashdot right now (though it might be called tentaclesquib).:)
I don't know if I'd want to narrow it down that precisely. Could be squared, could be cubed, could be more accurate (guesses canceling each other out). The blithe assumption of it being merely "squared" on your part is mere, well, guesswork.
Might be fun for one person to write the code, but it would destroy the ongoing joy of dozens of slashdotters who have indexed xkcd in their heads and can instantly recall the appropriate xkcd reference.
Some things are best left to trained artisans and handcrafters, and this is one of them. Xkcd references should be lovingly chosen from the available stock, and carefully hand-posted using only the best hand-cut-and-pasted letters in the URL. You just won't get that kind of artistry from an emotionless metadata comparison engine.
In general, yes, but if you drove your RV down a logging road for 20 miles where there's a real risk of getting permanently stuck and/or rolling it over, I'd call that "intrepid".:)
But, yes, the original story is someone I would not describe as "intrepid". LOL
Possibly, but I'm not sure Hugin or another free equivalent could manage something quite on this scale. Microsoft appears to have customized matching algorithms and provided some pretty staggering amounts of computing power. Short of using something similar to folding@home, I can't imagine the school doing this.
Microsoft gets publicity and some new algorithms for image stitching, the school gets funding for a research project.
It's tough to compare a US Cable subscription with the BBC system because they are different types of service.
The Cable system includes wired delivery to your home, which the British system (as I understand it) does not. BBC is broadcast TV, correct? The BBC doesn't run a coaxial cable from their offices to your house and guarantee you reception, do they?
I currently have a 14-channel lineup which I pay $12US for. But most of those channels would be available to me free over the air if I chose to hook up my antenna and watch them that way, so comparing my 14 channels at $12 with advertising to your 15 channels for $20 without advertising is a somewhat meaningless comparison.
I'm paying for guaranteed delivery of a service into my house. If my Cable TV goes out for more than 4 hours in a given day, the Cable company is contractually obligated to refund me the equivalent of one days' delivery charge. I also have perfect reception all the time, and a support desk that will send out someone to fix it if I don't.
I'm mostly paying for the delivery of the TV stations (though some of my subscription fee certainly goes into content). The ads, by and large, pay for the content.
Of course, as you add the additional 80-1000 channels you COULD get on my cable system and get into the $50-200 a month range, certainly a significant amount of that money is paying for content, and you still have ads. But since you used a limited-lineup BBC-style system, I only felt it fair to compare that to the closest analogue here in the States.
I can't include radio, because that's a completely separate thing here. Radio stations are all (as far as I've ever heard) free, and are all paid for with advertising.
The only exception would be the National Public Radio system, which is paid for by a blend of sources including listener donations, corporate underwriting, and US Government taxpayer dollars. They acknowledge their underwriters, but do not engage in actual advertising per se.
Having said all that, I'd MUCH rather pay AN ADDITIONAL $20 a month and get advert-free programming where a one hour show is actually one hour long. The US standard seems to have devolved to about 38 minutes for a one-hour show, and 19 or so for a 1/2-hour show, and some of that is credits, the opening theme, etc.
An RV would probably more accurately be called a "Camper Van". My mistake. Though I don't know if you have a separate term for one the size of a bus, errrr, lorry.
A "Caravan" would be (depending on size) probably called a "Pop-up" (very small one that collapses), "Camper" (about the size of an automobile, the ones that Top Gear are always destroying), or a "Fifth Wheel" (if it requires a very large truck and sleeps more than 4) in the US, if I have my English to USEnglish translator working correctly. Unless you have other terms for the pop-up type and/or the really big "sleeps eight" behemoths.
It's just the term that's developed in the US for a large van or bus that has beds in it.
If you call it a "Recreational Vehicle", most "RV" drivers would look at you oddly anyway, so the acronym has largely lost its original roots.
Some call them "Campers", but that's usually a term reserved for the type you tow behind another vehicle. Somehow, the term "RV" came into usage for the ones that are built onto a chassis that has an engine and drivetrain.
It won't give you 100% completely continuous coverage, but in areas where there is even weak 3G coverage outdoors but just not inside the RV, you could use a repeater. That allows you to put a really big antenna outside (it can even be directional) and the unit acts as a small local cell tower giving you full bars inside the RV.
Of course, if you go outside of 3G coverage, your phone will fall back to an older technology which is slower, and if you get out of data areas altogether you're screwed. However, you can supplement this in a lot of areas - many parks now offer WiFi.
I use a repeater at my house because, while I have half-decent signal outside, I have an aluminum-sided house and inside there's no signal whatsoever. I just use the included el cheapo antenna, but you can add some really powerful receiving antennas for some extra dough. My repeater cost about $300, and is a ZyXel unit, but Wilson and several other companies make various iterations of them with various antenna designs.
You'll still have to stick to at least fringe areas where signal is actually available, but it would significantly increase your range at least. Short of satellite, which you've already said you don't want, that's about it at the moment.
THIS is the important sentence: "has filed legislation to spend $154.5M"
Say it with me, Swedish Chef style, "PORK! PORK! PORK!"
This has nothing to do with gasoline taxes or reclaiming lost revenues. This is purely a way to increase State Of Oregon revenue by having the federal government pour $150 million into its coffers.
The result is predictable. They'll cut-and-paste some of the arguments from this thread as to why it's unenforceable, too expensive, or not a significant technical improvement over the odometer. Then they'll announce that they've saved billions by coming up with a simple solution - use the odometer. Unless, of course, Oregon has a major GPS manufacturer who just happens to be able to handle the Government contract for millions and millions of GPS units.
Garmin AT 2345 Turner Road SE Salem, OR 97302
Huh, whoda thunk it? Garmin's got a major presence in... Oregon. Wow, incredible coincidence, that.
Sorry, took me a minute to see your point - you mean that you'd simply deny the GPS unit any electricity.
Very true.
Trouble is, GPS is a expensive enough system to enforce in corporate and rental fleets, and currently there is little in the way of cost to the end-user for allowing the GPS to work properly. If you use a company car to get where you are going, you don't care whether the GPS works because it's not costing you anything.
There are going to be a lot of ways to bypass a system like this. It's going to need to be tamperproof, and have a tamperproof connection to your car's electrical system. That means it's going to be expensive, as in costing a lot of money that will have to be reclaimed somehow. And nothing is tamperproof.
Yes, people who abuse it will probably be fringe cases. But a lot more people will have the opportunity and the means for abuse than the current gas tax system does today.
We'd be dropping a load of money to change the way 95% of the auto fleet for the foreseeable future works in order to capture the other 5%.
It'd be cheaper to simply add a penny to the gasoline and Diesel taxes and pocket the difference, or look at vehicles that run on alternatives and figure out ways to recapture the cost of wear-and-tear they put on the roads based on some other criteria.
And possibly some of those exceptions would include the use of a GPS to measure mileage. Though I think the good old Odometer would work just fine. It's not tamperproof, but neither is GPS, and the Odomoeter's already there.
I'll go with "paranoid", too, and maybe a little bit of lawsuit prevention to boot.
After all, if the monitor system alerts the kid when his/her heartrate exceeds optimum for his/her age, there's less of a chance of some silent heart issue killing Little Johnny or Jane at school. Which is not to say that a system like this eliminates such risks, but it will certainly tend to reduce them, and give the school the lawyer-friendly "we did everything we feasibly could to detect and prevent any problems".
After all, if you are managing a gym class of 40 kids, it's hard to notice that the kid who isn't keeping up is around the last bend, gasping and wheezing and turning really pretty shades of blue and purple. An alert system like this would at least tell the gym teacher that it's time to stop pushing the kid so hard and manage his exercise to his abilities, and not to a class average.
I doubt the monitors they have would be sophisticated enough to store the data, they are probably a "beep fast if the kid is well below aerobic/cardio target, silence if kid is in range, beep really loud if kid exceeds range" unit. If they are being mass-produced for kids, the age won't vary enough to have to worry about individualized target ranges, so you just issue each kid one and tell them to make the unit not beep during gym class, and you know they are getting some good exercise.
If they were, I can also see (maybe!) summary data, over time, being used to measure the average fitness of school kids, or even possibly identifying kids that are having trouble reaching target heart ranges or reaching and blowing past them too soon. But that's somewhat unlikely.
But storing/using it at an individual level for any other use than to advise the parent, or optimize the kids workout and help ensure the workout is safe?
No, that school would rapidly be embroiled in a complete fecalstorm if they were to try to sell that information, with the people responsible probably getting uninvited conjugal visits with Bubba while in prison. Assuming the parents would let them live long enough. Think "burning torches and pitchforks".
Big brotherly, invasive, and also pretty expensive to implement and administer, and easy to abuse. Not to mention that a heavier car puts more wear on the road so if you're going to recoup by wear and tear, by and large the gasoline tax is already a relatively accurate gauge of road usage. A car that weighs three times as much will put more wear on the road per mile driven, but will also use more fuel and therefore pay more fuel tax. Problem solved. Already.
Plus, the current system is very hard to cheat. If you drive your Gas/Diesel car, you will burn fuel. You can't put tinfoil around the gas tank and make a cross-country trip "not count". With a GPS-based system, you're going to run into all sorts of issues with GPS satellite acquisition that makes the system unreliable even ignoring the inevitable cheating. And you'll have to have a whole new enforcement system and bureaucracy to handle cheating, inaccurate readings, etc.
As people get into lighter and more efficient gasoline/diesel cars, engage in carpooling, ride their bikes, etc, the decreases in fuel revenues will be matched (in large part) by a reduced need for road maintenance and building new roads. Not entirely, but then again we didn't stop driving when gas hit $5 a gallon, now did we?
As new untaxed or untaxable fuels start coming into vogue, we have to accept that those users will be paying a lower share of road maintenance. Where the alternative puts basically zero wear on the roads and basically zero pollution (like bicycles) we just accept that that's one less car on the road and therefore the roads will wear out more slowly.
Where the alternative fuel doesn't reduce actual road wear while avoiding road tax (electric, vegetable oil conversions, natural gas, etc) we have to make a decision as to whether to try and recover the cost of wear and tear from that user by implementing a special tax for that specific class of vehicle, or to consider the reduction in pollution and other factors as a societal benefit.
No system is going to be 100% fair. But the gas tax system is simple, effective, hard to cheat, and about as fair as we can implement cheaply. Vehicles that put wear and tear on the roads but don't pay for that wear are *exceptions*, and should be handled as such. There's no need to retrofit millions of cars already on the road with an expensive new piece of equipment to recoup losses that they aren't causing.
I took driver's ed and it allowed me to pass my test and taught me the basic laws. I have to agree, it was "here's the steering wheel, here's the turn signals, let's drive around the block so I can yell at you when you break a law until I stop yelling, then you pass".
Then I waited for winter, found a large empty parking lot, and learned what a "skid" was and how scary it could be - where I couldn't do any damage to anyone other cars. I repeated that process until I felt I had some slight clue about controlling a car when things went pear-shaped, and the cops finally told me if they caught me again I'd get a ticket.;)
Classes like this weren't readily available when I was learning to drive. I'm sure with an instructor I'd have learned far better techniques than I did, but I understand how quickly things can go wrong and have some clue how to avoid it, and some idea of what to do when you are surprised by circumstances. I learned to plan ahead, and to feel for and react to a sudden loss of control.
Those skills have come in occasionally handy here in the Frozen Hinterlands.
Though once I got a car with ABS, I did have to UN-learn the whole "pump the brakes" thing. The car does that much better, I can assure you. Even adults need to go find an empty snowy parking lot and test out new toys once in a while (grin).
I'll disagree for another reason, though it may be a difference in the nature of the restrictions you've heard about.
The restrictions on most licenses I've heard about are "driving alone or exclusively with others of the same age". In other words, when you are 17 you can drive the family car at night, as long as Mom or Dad (or another adult driver) is in the passenger's seat. A set of experienced eyes to assist (in theory) during that learning curve, as opposed to another 17-year-old who still thinks being able to drive is SOOO COOL that they aren't paying attention to the actual driving, only how cool it is.
Of course, the 22-year-old in the passenger's seat could be a drunk idiot playing punch-buggy with the driver while burping the "Star Spangled Banner" with his ass, but that's probably somewhat more likely the younger the person in the shotgun seat is...:)
Except that insurance companies use actuarial tables, where they tabulate the correlation between red cars and accidents (for example) and discover that red cars are involved in (I am making this up as an example) 2.6% more accidents than all other colors on average.
Actuarial tables don't give a rat's ass about WHY, they just know what has happened.
As time goes by, if "dangerous drivers choose something else", the significance of red on the actuarial tables dwindles off, and red no longer has an association with increased accident rates, and there's no reason to charge more for red cars.
Actuarial tables are used to assess risk based on past events. As such, they do not concern themselves with cause and effect, only historical trends associated with specific factors the table creators have decided may be significant.
The system is by no means perfect, but it's probably a pretty accurate judge of risk factors, especially compared to trying to figure out causes for every effect and guessing wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
Google's probably not going to add this to their default search engine. They've already got a good audience using this where it's appropriate - to keep spambots from joining or posting to forums or in other contexts where you want to determine if your web client is human or bot.
Google SEARCH exists and is popular because it's fast and convenient. I can't see them adding a 2-word CAPTCHA to do a simple search only because that would drive search traffic (which is already very profitable) to their competition.
Google is very, very clever at designing mutually beneficial arrangements. They craft all of their products so the user is receiving some significant benefit in return for the information or work they provide to Google. reCAPTCHA only provides a benefit when users see a forum is pretty clean from spam and crap because CAPTCHA is there, so they'll go to the effort of joining those forums. Forum master and user both see a tangible benefit - reduced spam - and will happily compensate google with 5 seconds' work.
Most CAPTCHA solutions have at least two ways you can solve them. Some offer an audio version of the words that is only slightly garbled (enough to defeat voice recognition) that you can listen to in addition to or instead of the CAPTCHA word, and some allow you to solve some simple word problem instead of CAPTCHA if your hearing AND eyesight are both bad.
As far as the Clinton example, funny, but in reality people are going to be looking at one word at a time. The Clinton bio example would be frequently made (humorously or maliciously) due to context. But if the word "election" was put on a CAPTCHA, most people would interpret it correctly. A few might get funny and try "erection" just to see if it's the "non significant" word, but I doubt that would be EVERYONE. If you checked the word against a dozen people, you'd have to have at least (at a guess) 10 of them with the exact same sense of humor to get the word automatically accepted as "erection" and not "election".
I don't know Google's algorithm for re-checking words, but the article clearly says they'll be doing some rechecking for reliability by having a number of different randomly-chosen people interpret the same word. I imagine that words where the answers are all identical might get 4-5 checks, while words that prove less consistent will get checked at least a dozen times or so, and those that continue being unreliable would probably get an authoritative check.
If, say, 4 people chose "erection" and the remaining 8 chose "election", the word would probably be flagged as "unreliable" by the automated CAPTCHA system and reviewed by a Google employee in proper context for final verification. Then the word would be corrected. Exactly which of the two words is chosen would probably depend on the political affiliation of the Google employee. :)
Or more radioactive materials in the crust, which would be undetectable from distance. Or a different basis for life than DNA, which mutates under different circumstances.
But, yeah, point taken that a moon might be a differentiating factor when forced to choose which of a bunch of nearly-identical-looking planetary systems to commit to exploring, if we manage to develop that technology before we wipe ourselves out entirely. We'd stand a slightly better chance of understanding what we're looking at, and if there's no life there at all it might be more amenable to our own species at least, and that's a nifty consolation prize...
It'd be pretty low on my personal checklist if I had a superlight ship at my disposal. :)
Google is doing this in order to prevent spam and to improve OCR. But once OCR is improved to the point where it can read poorer scans, won't spammers be able to use that new technology to eventually defeat CAPTCHA?
Don't get me wrong, I think this is a marvelous idea, potentially using volunteer labor of humans as OCR to interpret a book one poorly-scanned word at a time. But it does seem to have the side effect of eventually destroying the original purpose of what they bought. Maybe CAPTCHA is worth more as a "crowdsourced OCR solution" than it ever was as spam prevention anyway...
Maybe.
How about an uninformed one?
We honestly don't know the conditions under which life could form. About the only thing that is certainly required is some source of energy, and even that doesn't necessarily need to come from sources we'd recognize. Of course, finding "life as we know it" is the most efficient because we'd be the best equipped to recognize it and possibly communicate with it. Finding "life as we understand it" would be somewhat less easy and less likely to communicate with, and "life as we can't possibly imagine it today" would probably just remain undetected. Do you KNOW if that shade of blue in your drapes is intelligent? How would you be equipped to recognize its motivations? You'd just think of it as a shade of blue and move on. Meanwhile, it's laughing at me. Maybe I'm the only one who can tell it's intelligent, or maybe I'm overdue for the yellow pill today.
So a detail like a moon, while important to some of the habitability concerns of our own oxygen-breathing selves, and especially important to species that have come to depend on the tides, is probably very unimportant in terms of the development of a life form. It may, however, be somewhat important if we find a dozen Earth-like planets, because picking the one with a moon might increase the chances of finding life ever so slightly similar to our own. Or it may turn out to be too insignificant a detail to even consider.
The moon is vital to the survival of many species on this planet, but certainly not all. And if the moon had never existed, there's a very good chance something alive would have evolved on this planet. It might or might not be exactly what we ended up with today, but there'd probably be something posting on slashdot right now (though it might be called tentaclesquib). :)
I don't know if I'd want to narrow it down that precisely. Could be squared, could be cubed, could be more accurate (guesses canceling each other out). The blithe assumption of it being merely "squared" on your part is mere, well, guesswork.
But I'm only guessing.
Might be fun for one person to write the code, but it would destroy the ongoing joy of dozens of slashdotters who have indexed xkcd in their heads and can instantly recall the appropriate xkcd reference.
Some things are best left to trained artisans and handcrafters, and this is one of them. Xkcd references should be lovingly chosen from the available stock, and carefully hand-posted using only the best hand-cut-and-pasted letters in the URL. You just won't get that kind of artistry from an emotionless metadata comparison engine.
In general, yes, but if you drove your RV down a logging road for 20 miles where there's a real risk of getting permanently stuck and/or rolling it over, I'd call that "intrepid". :)
But, yes, the original story is someone I would not describe as "intrepid". LOL
Possibly, but I'm not sure Hugin or another free equivalent could manage something quite on this scale. Microsoft appears to have customized matching algorithms and provided some pretty staggering amounts of computing power. Short of using something similar to folding@home, I can't imagine the school doing this.
Microsoft gets publicity and some new algorithms for image stitching, the school gets funding for a research project.
It's tough to compare a US Cable subscription with the BBC system because they are different types of service.
The Cable system includes wired delivery to your home, which the British system (as I understand it) does not. BBC is broadcast TV, correct? The BBC doesn't run a coaxial cable from their offices to your house and guarantee you reception, do they?
I currently have a 14-channel lineup which I pay $12US for. But most of those channels would be available to me free over the air if I chose to hook up my antenna and watch them that way, so comparing my 14 channels at $12 with advertising to your 15 channels for $20 without advertising is a somewhat meaningless comparison.
I'm paying for guaranteed delivery of a service into my house. If my Cable TV goes out for more than 4 hours in a given day, the Cable company is contractually obligated to refund me the equivalent of one days' delivery charge. I also have perfect reception all the time, and a support desk that will send out someone to fix it if I don't.
I'm mostly paying for the delivery of the TV stations (though some of my subscription fee certainly goes into content). The ads, by and large, pay for the content.
Of course, as you add the additional 80-1000 channels you COULD get on my cable system and get into the $50-200 a month range, certainly a significant amount of that money is paying for content, and you still have ads. But since you used a limited-lineup BBC-style system, I only felt it fair to compare that to the closest analogue here in the States.
I can't include radio, because that's a completely separate thing here. Radio stations are all (as far as I've ever heard) free, and are all paid for with advertising.
The only exception would be the National Public Radio system, which is paid for by a blend of sources including listener donations, corporate underwriting, and US Government taxpayer dollars. They acknowledge their underwriters, but do not engage in actual advertising per se.
Having said all that, I'd MUCH rather pay AN ADDITIONAL $20 a month and get advert-free programming where a one hour show is actually one hour long. The US standard seems to have devolved to about 38 minutes for a one-hour show, and 19 or so for a 1/2-hour show, and some of that is credits, the opening theme, etc.
one-piece jump suit? I don't think I've ever seen that. Depending on the geographic area, it's usually jeans and a t-shirt or loud golf shorts.
Good point.
An RV would probably more accurately be called a "Camper Van". My mistake. Though I don't know if you have a separate term for one the size of a bus, errrr, lorry.
A "Caravan" would be (depending on size) probably called a "Pop-up" (very small one that collapses), "Camper" (about the size of an automobile, the ones that Top Gear are always destroying), or a "Fifth Wheel" (if it requires a very large truck and sleeps more than 4) in the US, if I have my English to USEnglish translator working correctly. Unless you have other terms for the pop-up type and/or the really big "sleeps eight" behemoths.
Sorry for the confusion.
It's just the term that's developed in the US for a large van or bus that has beds in it.
If you call it a "Recreational Vehicle", most "RV" drivers would look at you oddly anyway, so the acronym has largely lost its original roots.
Some call them "Campers", but that's usually a term reserved for the type you tow behind another vehicle. Somehow, the term "RV" came into usage for the ones that are built onto a chassis that has an engine and drivetrain.
It won't give you 100% completely continuous coverage, but in areas where there is even weak 3G coverage outdoors but just not inside the RV, you could use a repeater. That allows you to put a really big antenna outside (it can even be directional) and the unit acts as a small local cell tower giving you full bars inside the RV.
Of course, if you go outside of 3G coverage, your phone will fall back to an older technology which is slower, and if you get out of data areas altogether you're screwed. However, you can supplement this in a lot of areas - many parks now offer WiFi.
I use a repeater at my house because, while I have half-decent signal outside, I have an aluminum-sided house and inside there's no signal whatsoever. I just use the included el cheapo antenna, but you can add some really powerful receiving antennas for some extra dough. My repeater cost about $300, and is a ZyXel unit, but Wilson and several other companies make various iterations of them with various antenna designs.
You'll still have to stick to at least fringe areas where signal is actually available, but it would significantly increase your range at least. Short of satellite, which you've already said you don't want, that's about it at the moment.
RV = Recreational Vehicle. It's a small (or sometimes large) home on wheels.
I think the Brits call them "Caravans", in case you're from that side of the pond. ;)
Yes, we had O. To do a "Q", you did an O, then backspaced and typed a comma over it.
THIS is the important sentence: "has filed legislation to spend $154.5M"
Say it with me, Swedish Chef style, "PORK! PORK! PORK!"
This has nothing to do with gasoline taxes or reclaiming lost revenues. This is purely a way to increase State Of Oregon revenue by having the federal government pour $150 million into its coffers.
The result is predictable. They'll cut-and-paste some of the arguments from this thread as to why it's unenforceable, too expensive, or not a significant technical improvement over the odometer. Then they'll announce that they've saved billions by coming up with a simple solution - use the odometer. Unless, of course, Oregon has a major GPS manufacturer who just happens to be able to handle the Government contract for millions and millions of GPS units.
Garmin AT
2345 Turner Road SE
Salem, OR 97302
Huh, whoda thunk it? Garmin's got a major presence in... Oregon. Wow, incredible coincidence, that.
Sorry, took me a minute to see your point - you mean that you'd simply deny the GPS unit any electricity.
Very true.
Trouble is, GPS is a expensive enough system to enforce in corporate and rental fleets, and currently there is little in the way of cost to the end-user for allowing the GPS to work properly. If you use a company car to get where you are going, you don't care whether the GPS works because it's not costing you anything.
There are going to be a lot of ways to bypass a system like this. It's going to need to be tamperproof, and have a tamperproof connection to your car's electrical system. That means it's going to be expensive, as in costing a lot of money that will have to be reclaimed somehow. And nothing is tamperproof.
Yes, people who abuse it will probably be fringe cases. But a lot more people will have the opportunity and the means for abuse than the current gas tax system does today.
We'd be dropping a load of money to change the way 95% of the auto fleet for the foreseeable future works in order to capture the other 5%.
It'd be cheaper to simply add a penny to the gasoline and Diesel taxes and pocket the difference, or look at vehicles that run on alternatives and figure out ways to recapture the cost of wear-and-tear they put on the roads based on some other criteria.
And possibly some of those exceptions would include the use of a GPS to measure mileage. Though I think the good old Odometer would work just fine. It's not tamperproof, but neither is GPS, and the Odomoeter's already there.
I'll go with "paranoid", too, and maybe a little bit of lawsuit prevention to boot.
After all, if the monitor system alerts the kid when his/her heartrate exceeds optimum for his/her age, there's less of a chance of some silent heart issue killing Little Johnny or Jane at school. Which is not to say that a system like this eliminates such risks, but it will certainly tend to reduce them, and give the school the lawyer-friendly "we did everything we feasibly could to detect and prevent any problems".
After all, if you are managing a gym class of 40 kids, it's hard to notice that the kid who isn't keeping up is around the last bend, gasping and wheezing and turning really pretty shades of blue and purple. An alert system like this would at least tell the gym teacher that it's time to stop pushing the kid so hard and manage his exercise to his abilities, and not to a class average.
I doubt the monitors they have would be sophisticated enough to store the data, they are probably a "beep fast if the kid is well below aerobic/cardio target, silence if kid is in range, beep really loud if kid exceeds range" unit. If they are being mass-produced for kids, the age won't vary enough to have to worry about individualized target ranges, so you just issue each kid one and tell them to make the unit not beep during gym class, and you know they are getting some good exercise.
If they were, I can also see (maybe!) summary data, over time, being used to measure the average fitness of school kids, or even possibly identifying kids that are having trouble reaching target heart ranges or reaching and blowing past them too soon. But that's somewhat unlikely.
But storing/using it at an individual level for any other use than to advise the parent, or optimize the kids workout and help ensure the workout is safe?
No, that school would rapidly be embroiled in a complete fecalstorm if they were to try to sell that information, with the people responsible probably getting uninvited conjugal visits with Bubba while in prison. Assuming the parents would let them live long enough. Think "burning torches and pitchforks".
Big brotherly, invasive, and also pretty expensive to implement and administer, and easy to abuse. Not to mention that a heavier car puts more wear on the road so if you're going to recoup by wear and tear, by and large the gasoline tax is already a relatively accurate gauge of road usage. A car that weighs three times as much will put more wear on the road per mile driven, but will also use more fuel and therefore pay more fuel tax. Problem solved. Already.
Plus, the current system is very hard to cheat. If you drive your Gas/Diesel car, you will burn fuel. You can't put tinfoil around the gas tank and make a cross-country trip "not count". With a GPS-based system, you're going to run into all sorts of issues with GPS satellite acquisition that makes the system unreliable even ignoring the inevitable cheating. And you'll have to have a whole new enforcement system and bureaucracy to handle cheating, inaccurate readings, etc.
As people get into lighter and more efficient gasoline/diesel cars, engage in carpooling, ride their bikes, etc, the decreases in fuel revenues will be matched (in large part) by a reduced need for road maintenance and building new roads. Not entirely, but then again we didn't stop driving when gas hit $5 a gallon, now did we?
As new untaxed or untaxable fuels start coming into vogue, we have to accept that those users will be paying a lower share of road maintenance. Where the alternative puts basically zero wear on the roads and basically zero pollution (like bicycles) we just accept that that's one less car on the road and therefore the roads will wear out more slowly.
Where the alternative fuel doesn't reduce actual road wear while avoiding road tax (electric, vegetable oil conversions, natural gas, etc) we have to make a decision as to whether to try and recover the cost of wear and tear from that user by implementing a special tax for that specific class of vehicle, or to consider the reduction in pollution and other factors as a societal benefit.
No system is going to be 100% fair. But the gas tax system is simple, effective, hard to cheat, and about as fair as we can implement cheaply. Vehicles that put wear and tear on the roads but don't pay for that wear are *exceptions*, and should be handled as such. There's no need to retrofit millions of cars already on the road with an expensive new piece of equipment to recoup losses that they aren't causing.
Answer: One. With a LOT of cotton balls and q-tips. And you'll need DNA evidence to determine which bits belong to which kid.
I took driver's ed and it allowed me to pass my test and taught me the basic laws. I have to agree, it was "here's the steering wheel, here's the turn signals, let's drive around the block so I can yell at you when you break a law until I stop yelling, then you pass".
Then I waited for winter, found a large empty parking lot, and learned what a "skid" was and how scary it could be - where I couldn't do any damage to anyone other cars. I repeated that process until I felt I had some slight clue about controlling a car when things went pear-shaped, and the cops finally told me if they caught me again I'd get a ticket. ;)
Classes like this weren't readily available when I was learning to drive. I'm sure with an instructor I'd have learned far better techniques than I did, but I understand how quickly things can go wrong and have some clue how to avoid it, and some idea of what to do when you are surprised by circumstances. I learned to plan ahead, and to feel for and react to a sudden loss of control.
Those skills have come in occasionally handy here in the Frozen Hinterlands.
Though once I got a car with ABS, I did have to UN-learn the whole "pump the brakes" thing. The car does that much better, I can assure you. Even adults need to go find an empty snowy parking lot and test out new toys once in a while (grin).
I'll disagree for another reason, though it may be a difference in the nature of the restrictions you've heard about.
The restrictions on most licenses I've heard about are "driving alone or exclusively with others of the same age". In other words, when you are 17 you can drive the family car at night, as long as Mom or Dad (or another adult driver) is in the passenger's seat. A set of experienced eyes to assist (in theory) during that learning curve, as opposed to another 17-year-old who still thinks being able to drive is SOOO COOL that they aren't paying attention to the actual driving, only how cool it is.
Of course, the 22-year-old in the passenger's seat could be a drunk idiot playing punch-buggy with the driver while burping the "Star Spangled Banner" with his ass, but that's probably somewhat more likely the younger the person in the shotgun seat is... :)
Except that insurance companies use actuarial tables, where they tabulate the correlation between red cars and accidents (for example) and discover that red cars are involved in (I am making this up as an example) 2.6% more accidents than all other colors on average.
Actuarial tables don't give a rat's ass about WHY, they just know what has happened.
As time goes by, if "dangerous drivers choose something else", the significance of red on the actuarial tables dwindles off, and red no longer has an association with increased accident rates, and there's no reason to charge more for red cars.
Actuarial tables are used to assess risk based on past events. As such, they do not concern themselves with cause and effect, only historical trends associated with specific factors the table creators have decided may be significant.
The system is by no means perfect, but it's probably a pretty accurate judge of risk factors, especially compared to trying to figure out causes for every effect and guessing wrong.