It's not a matter of ability, it's a matter of population density. If you have access to enough food and water to live for several months and are reasonably assured there is no meaningful competition for those resources, you'll be fine.
In more rural areas, this is a non-issue. I live on 3 acres of land that include a dug well I can dip from, and I'm used to power outages and have 550 gallons of Kerosene for my furnace that can also be used to keep my KeroSun going for the better part of a year. My house water pipes are designed to be drained to keep them from freezing in an extended outage. I have a deep freeze full of food (I'd have to cook it as it thaws and preserve it that way), and lots of canned vegetables and fruit in the basement. I could probably get through an entire winter in reasonable comfort.
In a microapartment in the middle of the city, dependent on electricity for heat and city lines for water, something like this could turn into a big problem, really fast. They are currently being sustained by water that is treated and pumped to them. If power goes out, so do the treatment plants and the pumps. So you have to find untreated but safe water, and get it to them or them to it.
And keep in mind, power outages caused by geomagnetic storms can be continental in scale, and the damage can take weeks or months to repair. It's not likely, but it is possible, and this article is about a not-unrealistic worst case scenario. So you aren't going to be able to depend on much of anything.
How do you get fresh water every day to a city of 5 million people when there isn't electricity available for 500 miles in any direction? An 18-wheeler can haul about 8000 gallons of water. Assuming each person is limited to 2 quarts a day of water, you need over 300 trips per day. How do you distribute it? Can you sustain that for months? If you can't, where do you evacuate them all to? Is there enough water to sustain them? Is it safe, or does it need to be treated or boiled? Do they know how to get it without fouling it?
Now, say this happens in January. How do you keep them warm?
This article is about preparedness. Your house is fine, no need to grab the tent. Just be prepared for no electricity and no water for a month or so, and food may be hard to come by. Encourage your neighbors to do the same, or arm yourself. No big deal.
Your house will be intact if a geomagnetic storm hits. You just need to make sure you are able to survive the zombie apocalypse that will surely follow.
Umm, sorry, did I say that? Ignore it. I have no knowledge of an impending zombie apocalypse. Nor am I planning on being a zombie. Trust me.
You'll just need to make sure you have enough food, water, and heat to get by for a few weeks in case of a temporary collapse of services.
Oh, and canned brains. Keep lots of those handy. Don't ask why, just do it.
Since when did solar flares change tides and throw debries around to cause massive flooding, and random destruction.
They don't. They only take out services. Over VERY large areas, for long periods of time. Your house is safe, but it'll be cold and dark and no one will answer the phone at Dominos.
With Katrina, there was some warning, and there were safe areas 50 miles away that still had power, water, food, and communications. People could be evacuated to those areas. Katrina was a big problem over a small area, and people survived by moving short distances to areas that had services.
A solar geomagnetic storm could be a smaller problem over a much larger area. Imagine the power going out at every house north of the Mason Dixon line in the US and up into Canada. Where do you send people? Nowhere. You tell them to stay the hell home. But what are they going to eat and drink, and how will they stay warm?
The important thing is that power, water, heat, telephone, Internet, and even radio communications (including aviation navigation and shortwave) could all go away at once, and some or all of them might be out for an extended period of time. It could literally take months to restore services to some areas. And this could potentially be on a continental scale. Additionally, an X-Class geomagnetic storm can damage unshielded electronics. Your PC, cell phone, modem, etc may or may not work even if power and Internet come back. Your car may not function even if fuel is readily available. Your backup generator may not start. They may all need expensive repairs, and you'll have to wait a while because everyone else will be in the same situation.
There's no need for panic, of course, but TFA doesn't mention panic. It mentions preparedness. I think it's perfectly prudent to prepare in much the same way as you would for a hurricane or major snowstorm, because you may suffer from the same lack of readily available food, water, and heat. Except something like this cannot be predicted, so you have to be prepared all the time. Oh, and you don't need plywood, unless you plan on burning it for heat.:)
This is more of a city problem, because city services might go away in a hurry, and a dense population means more immediate dependence on common resources that will go away. The water will run out in the first week, if not sooner. Food before that, probably, but people can get by without food for a few days.
More rural folks have wells we can dip for safe drinking water, campstoves with lots of fuel we can use for cooking, and heaters that don't depend on electricity but are designed to be used safely indoors. This will be an annoyance, little more. We get power outages and major snowstorms all the time, and we don't really need to go anywhere for a while if things get bad - we'll just hunker down and start rationing out the food we canned away or put in the deep freezer.
It's simple. Take your dwelling (apartment, house, condo, whatever). Play a mental game where you have to depend ONLY on whatever you have on your property for one month. If that doesn't concern you, you're probably good, as long as your neighbors have gone through the same mental exercise OR you are better armed than they are.:)
I debated whether to mod this flamebait due to the obvious flamebait parts of your post, but mixed into the unfounded insults you actually make a salient point, so I'll respond to the valid point instead.
The reason distros are out there is to make installs easy. Each distro manager takes applications they want to support and builds an installer that suits their distro for each application. This means that someone who understands and maintains the distro has compiled the application and confirmed that it uses dependent objects that are compatible with other dependencies required by the other applications they support. The problem is that software uses common libraries (Windows calls them DLLs) and changing the underlying library to accommodate one bit of software can break another. Windows and Linux approach that problem in markedly different ways.
Linux users used to install a lot of their own software manually. Anyone can still do it, and many do, but if you have a dependency on a specific bit of supporting software, you can break existing software by upgrading that dependency for your new software. But the same is true of a bit of Windows software that overwrites a DLL that other software is dependent on.
Repositories solve this problem in Linux by marking software with metadata indicating what it depends on, and what specific versions of each dependency are required. If you upgrade a dependency and it will break compatibility with other software you have installed, the repository will warn you of this.
Windows is only available as one set of underlying system services, and they are by and large compatible. But updates to those system services can and do break existing software packages, and since Windows lacks a repository it's a harder problem to solve, so it's largely just ignored, and sometimes it causes problems.
Since Microsoft does not do software repositories, but has a pretty standard install base, the authors of FlightGear can build a Microsoft version that can be installed today. There is no guarantee that the version will be free of DLL conflicts since there is no central software repository to manage dependencies, but it'll probably work for the vast majority of Windows installs. No one at Microsoft has vetted the install, so good luck. It'll probably work. And it probably won't break anything else. But there's no one looking out for you on that.
Since Linux does have software and dependency repositories, and volunteers checking compatibility for your specific distro, it may take a little while for the repository manager of your favorite repo to download the source from the FlightGear team, check dependencies, and make sure it will compile on your distro. He/she may need to upgrade a few dependencies and update some other software to be compatible with that new dependency. But once it's done, you can be assured that the install will work, all the tools you need to run it will be available, and it won't break any software you have installed today.
If you're eager and willing, you can download the source yourself, put it in a folder, and type MAKE, then find any dependencies it needs and resolve them yourself.
You can also add FlightGear's repository which will allow you to install 2.0 right now, and will warn you about compatibility problems with any existing dependencies you may have today. That's very much like a Windows install, except you get a warning if you are about to break compatibility with some software you have installed today.
To demonstrate the problem of relying on power-assisted brakes in the case of sudden and uncontrollable acceleration, the attorney for Guadalupe Gomez explained the details of his client’s case, “He [Gomez] was held hostage for 20 miles on a Bay Area freeway by a 2007 Camry traveling more than 100 mph. Gomez was unable to turn off the engine or shift into neutral and then burned out his brakes before slamming into another car and killing that driver.”
The root cause, of course, is too much control of the car has been given to a computer. I should be able to DECIDE to take the damned car out of gear if I choose to. But at least this software fix appears to disable the gas pedal if the brakes are mashed down on, which sounds like a good idea if you want to give that level of control to a computer.
Personally, I'm sticking with manual transmissions.:)
That leads to some interesting legal questions. REALLY interesting ones.
Did he have a reasonable expectation to privacy if his garden wall was shorter than the Google Street View van plus the mast they put the camera on? The sample image on the article shows the street view camera perspective looking to be at least 3 meters high, at a guess. If I took a camera and put a 2-meter stepladder on the sidewalk and took a picture of him from 4 meters off the ground, is that a violation of a reasonable expectation of privacy? I'm in a public place. I haven't climbed his wall.
I mean, he's not visible from street level, but he is visible from a public place, and Google was following the height restriction for vehicles in that area.
On the other hand, Google's image collection is rather outside the normal realm of "visible from the street". It's not that often that 4-meter-high people walk by the front of the house. So the guy who got photographed in the nude may have a valid point.
I'm just glad I don't have to decide something like this, though my decision would probably be for a case-by-case fix. Have Google either remove the single image that contains the guy in question, or retake the photo after telling the guy what day they will be by so he knows not to air out the sausage-and-meatballs on the porch that day.
But even that would have a pretty chilling effect on photographs that are made public, not just by Google but everywhere else. If you caught me picking my nose when you took a vacation snap, and I saw the image online, would I have a valid beef in telling you to take it down? At what point do my rights to privacy overcome your rights to post pictures of your vacation?
That's not going to do anything but make sure you have company in the afterlife.
You're at 100 because your brakes are now buttery soft and silky smooth and are utterly useless. You have a multi-hundred-horsepower engine that has clearly demonstrated the ability to overcome the power of four brake pads. Four more brake pads aren't going to help.
So you rear end someone else. Chances are their rear end will be dragged sideways and they'll spin or flip, and at 80MPH (plus whatever additional speed you've added) the prognosis for them is not good.
Even if they are prepared for it and know what to do to handle the violent rear-loaded acceleration, and manage to keep the whole thing under control, what's next?
Easy, your car engine will now easily burn out another four brake pads, and you'll have two cars running at 100MPH with no brakes and very heavily rear-loaded acceleration with a flexible middle, and a very real risk of the two of you not steering perfectly together and both going off on tangental courses, almost ensuring violent maneuvers and probably a roll, high chance of fatality for both of you.
Now, if you could find a very large truck moving at about 80 who has enough of a rear bumper to absorb the impact, THEN you might be on to something. Truck brakes could EASILY absorb whatever your car engine could dish out, and the tire-iron beating you're going to take from the surprised and angry truck driver is far less likely to be fatal.
No matter what, PR, bullshit fix, whatever you want to call it, this firmware fix is a good idea. Brakes should be an absolute-priority command to the car that the user is requesting it slow down, regardless of any other input into the vehicle control system. Idling the engine is just a logical idea. It doesn't matter if the fix is not necessary to stop the current problem, or what the root cause of the problem might be.
Even if we accept that the various incidents were all user error, and absolve Toyota of any design flaws, the fact remains that this fix is a good idea. It might even have prevented some of the incidents, because several people who experienced them reported that the brakes and the engine were fighting each other. Average car brakes cannot possibly fight an engine at full throttle, they'll rapidly overheat and burn out trying. This fix would ensure that the brakes would win.
And,of course, regardless of the root cause, the solution to ANY "out of control acceleration problem" is to stop the acceleration, which is precisely what this fix is designed to do. If you hit the brakes, the car engine returns to idle and stops putting acceleration into the system.
Sometimes, you release a patch that fixes the symptom until you can isolate the root cause.
Or change in ambient temperature, and suddenly your idle setting is too low?
Yeah, but that was back in my car built in 1974 that had a carburetor and a crappy choke system. None of the cars I've owned since have had a problem with temperature changes, and if they did the proper response is to get the idle/mix system fixed up, not play two-foot.
If this was floormats as Toyota is claiming, then this patch does no harm. Plus, if you get something other than a floor mat stuck under your go-fast pedal and hit the brakes, the car would immediately ignore the go-fast pedal and you could stop the car without any fuss or bother. So no matter what else happens, when you hit the brakes the accelerator is returned to IDLE state, and the brakes work normally. You may suffer wild acceleration if you let up on the brakes again, but pushing back on the brakes will stop that immediately, you'll figure it out, and pull over.
If this was NOT floormats, but some other software issue, this patch will still allow the engine to be idled when you push the brakes.
So, no matter what, this seems like a rational and reasonable safety feature. The braking system should win any contest with any other vehicle subsystem. If I push on the brakes, that means I want the car to stop. If my foot is on the brake, the most important thing the car can be doing at that moment is to be slowing down. All other systems except maybe steering have now become optional.
Honestly, the only reason NOT to want this patch is if you are one of the few who still drives "two foot" (one foot on the accelerator, one foot on the brakes) and you have a habit of "riding the brake" by resting your "brake" foot on the pedal. And the only real risk is that when you put any weight on the brake pedal the accelerator will stop working.
Lovin' my manual-shift Jetta TDI even more, for the same reason. It would take a truly odd and scary set of circumstances that would prevent me from disengaging the engine from the wheels in the extremely unlikely event of the go pedal getting stuck on 11.
Having said that, my reaction to this letter would be to stop whatever it is that I am doing and head straight to my Toyota dealership, and politely request that the software patch be installed immediately if not sooner. Whatever else this bug fix could introduce, it seems to have been written clearly with a "disengage the engine if the brake is engaged" instruction that, in my mind, overrides all concerns I might have about the short testing interval of the patch. Even if it causes the engine to disengage randomly and for no reason, I can always coast to the side of the road. I'd rather be at a full stop complaining that the car won't move, than moving along complaining that I can't get the car to a full stop.
It's like the old aviation joke: "I'd rather be DOWN HERE wishing I was UP THERE, than UP THERE wishing I was DOWN HERE."
That was one of the major reasons I chose ReplayTV over TiVo when I took the DVR plunge about 6 years or so ago. Replay had both a phone and Ethernet port, and I didn't have a landline.
As a side effect, someone wrote an open source Java applet that pretends to be a ReplayTV and can copy shows from my Replay to my computer, schedule shows from the computer, etc. So the Replay is sitting in the basement as the only thing hooked up to my Cable TV, and I haven't touched its remote in over a year. It just records shows, and I copy them up to my Linux desktop to actually watch them. Kinda like a MythTV server but without all the setup.:)
I think TiVo added Ethernet and even wireless access later on. I have to imagine they have by now.
I bought a ReplayTV (competitor to TiVo, same basic idea) about 6 years ago, and paid $200 for the "lifetime service". Like TiVO, with a ReplayTV, once the listings stop being fed to the machine it cannot record anything - you can't just do time/day based recording. The monthly service was something like $15, so I figured I might as well "prepay" for 14 months of service and get lifetime service that way.
The overall machine cost $400 with the lifetime service, and 6 years and counting and the machine is working just fine. And I could easily resell it and include the lifetime service with it if I ever decide I don't need it any more.
Somehow, ReplayTV is continuing to offer channel updates, even though I'm not sure you could buy a new one today if you wanted to. They have been absorbed by DirectTV, so I'm sure that's the technology inside DirectTV's DVR units.
I don't know if TiVo has a lifetime prepay option, but it might be worth it.
1. Even though it's within limits, there are people who intentionally look for units that emit the least RF possible, so that if it does turn out there was a risk they are minimizing their risk. It's at least more rational than sleeping in a Faraday cage and suing neighbors for WiFi radiation or wearing tinfoil underwear. If you need a cell phone but have some concerns about RF exposure, picking the cell phone that emits the lowest levels of RF just seems like a rational middle ground.
2. Some will intentionally seek out phones with high RF because more RF means the radio has more juice or the antenna is more efficient, which means it'll get "more bars in more places". I know my Blackberry Curve 8310 gets awesome signal in a lot of places that iPhones don't, so I'm sure that also means it's putting out more RF and/or has a more efficient antenna.
3. If it's GSM, one of the side effects is the annoying clicky-buzzing sound every nonshielded electronic device within ten yards emits. Less RF means less of that interference.
I see your point, but I disagree. I think I'd still use an iPad for the "just a moment while I look that up" surfing at home. I think the form factor would scale quite well.
Now, if I wanted something I could take with me, then it would be a different discussion entirely and I'd probably choose netbook or laptop, for the simple fact that I'm not going to pull out an iPad in a restaurant and use it to look up something while chatting with a friend. I see your point there.
Back when we had a Windows machine in the house, we used to use the remote control to play music on iTunes. The computer had a standard audio cable that ran the length of the house, and plugged into the AUX input on a cheap living room stereo.
I found it particularly geeky to be using a wireless iPod Touch to control the music player on a computer on the other side of the house, so it could pipe music to the stereo RIGHT IN FRONT OF ME.;)
Now that I have Linux throughout, I VNC into the box from the iPod Touch. Geeky+.:)
I'm increasingly beginning to believe it's a solution in search of a problem.
Meaning no offense, but maybe it's a solution to a "problem" you don't have? I've tried the tablet form factor, and love it. I'm not necessarily sold on Apple's solution to it, but their iPod is actually a fantastic little handheld computer, despite its shortcomings (most of which are Apple design decisions).
I don't think it completely overcomes them, but it's a great device all the same. I like mine, but I did get it for free. I'm sure I would never have bought one, but now that I've owned and used one I understand the appeal.
The iPad is far from perfect, and without a camera and compatible keyboard at least seems, well, missing something important. But it's precisely an iPod Touch that's been enlarged. Nothing more, nothing less.
Despite the vendor lockdown, the lack of features, the nonreplaceable battery, the nonexpandable memory, the inability to multitask, the Apple restrictions, and all the other shortcomings of the iPod Touch.... they are going to sell like, well, magic.
Because there's nothing out there that fits the niche quite as well.
There isn't anything wrong with the netbook experience. But it's not the tablet experience. They are different form factors for different usage patterns. Similar, but different.
If I want to read a book in bed in the evening, a netbook's attached keyboard just gets in the way, and I want a portrait-format screen for that. And I want it to be light. A netbook requires that I interact with a keyboard to turn pages, and sit differently than I would if I had a physical book. A tablet or bookreader is a closer-to-paper experience. A bookreader would work, of course, but that's a purpose-built device, and for the cost of that and a netbook, I could have a tablet that does both and not have to worry about syncing data between them.
If I want to sit in bed or on an easychair and surf the Internet (provided I'm not trying to type War and Peace) a tablet or a netbook would have approximately the same utility depending on what I'm doing a lot of. More watching video = tablet, more typing = netbook. If I need to carry it around, the iThing format is thinner and lighter, but the netbook can be closed to protect the screen. If I want to hand it to someone else to show them something, the iThing is more convenient to handle.
Personally, I'd lean toward a netbook, but having used an iPod Touch and constantly thought "this thing would be perfect if the screen was larger!" I can understand where the "magic" of an iPad comes in, for those who desire that form factor.
Does it honestly need to be anything more beyond a giant iPod Touch?
I would never have spent the money on an iPod Touch, but I won one in a contest. I'm a full card-carrying geek, but at the risk of losing my geek card, the iPod Touch was a magical little device. It's absolute crap for listening to music (limited storage space, crappy tinny speaker, etc) but as a little miniature computer it is truly amazing. I played with it for about 1 day before my wife latched on to it and wouldn't let go (what the hell? saved me buying her an iPhone).
During the time I've used it, I found myself occasionally thinking, "gee, you know, the interface is top notch, the tablet form factor is perfect for casual surfing, but I just wish the screen was bigger".
The geek in me hates the closed nature, the fixed memory, the non-replaceable battery, the Reality Distortion Field telling me what apps are OK for me to run and what are not.
The "screw it just want to surf the web in the evenings and maybe read a book occasionally" is fighting with the "but you can't spend $600 for THAT!" accountant in me over whether I want one.
A netbook is cheaper, probably has better battery life, is less "closed", and by all accounts is a better solution to any problem you care to name. But, sitting in bed or lounging in the easychair wanting to look up some obscure bit of trivia or watch a video from the Olympics (can't do it on the desktop - Linux Users Need Not Apply at nbcolympics dot com), I find myself snagging the iPod more often than I dig out the laptop. The tablet-style form factor is just too convenient.
Right, so copyright was specifically designed to prevent competition. It did so for darned good reason, by recognizing that people who put lots of work into specific works deserved a reasonable time to profit off that work exclusively. This encourages people to create works, because they know that once they've put the work into it they will be free of competition and be able to recoup their costs.
And it was (and continues to be) a good idea, as long as that exclusive period requires that the rights-holder continues to demonstrate an interest in the work, and the time limit is measured in years and not decades or centuries.
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It's not a matter of ability, it's a matter of population density. If you have access to enough food and water to live for several months and are reasonably assured there is no meaningful competition for those resources, you'll be fine.
In more rural areas, this is a non-issue. I live on 3 acres of land that include a dug well I can dip from, and I'm used to power outages and have 550 gallons of Kerosene for my furnace that can also be used to keep my KeroSun going for the better part of a year. My house water pipes are designed to be drained to keep them from freezing in an extended outage. I have a deep freeze full of food (I'd have to cook it as it thaws and preserve it that way), and lots of canned vegetables and fruit in the basement. I could probably get through an entire winter in reasonable comfort.
In a microapartment in the middle of the city, dependent on electricity for heat and city lines for water, something like this could turn into a big problem, really fast. They are currently being sustained by water that is treated and pumped to them. If power goes out, so do the treatment plants and the pumps. So you have to find untreated but safe water, and get it to them or them to it.
And keep in mind, power outages caused by geomagnetic storms can be continental in scale, and the damage can take weeks or months to repair. It's not likely, but it is possible, and this article is about a not-unrealistic worst case scenario. So you aren't going to be able to depend on much of anything.
How do you get fresh water every day to a city of 5 million people when there isn't electricity available for 500 miles in any direction? An 18-wheeler can haul about 8000 gallons of water. Assuming each person is limited to 2 quarts a day of water, you need over 300 trips per day. How do you distribute it? Can you sustain that for months? If you can't, where do you evacuate them all to? Is there enough water to sustain them? Is it safe, or does it need to be treated or boiled? Do they know how to get it without fouling it?
Now, say this happens in January. How do you keep them warm?
This article is about preparedness. Your house is fine, no need to grab the tent. Just be prepared for no electricity and no water for a month or so, and food may be hard to come by. Encourage your neighbors to do the same, or arm yourself. No big deal.
So don't depend on your government.
Your house will be intact if a geomagnetic storm hits. You just need to make sure you are able to survive the zombie apocalypse that will surely follow.
Umm, sorry, did I say that? Ignore it. I have no knowledge of an impending zombie apocalypse. Nor am I planning on being a zombie. Trust me.
You'll just need to make sure you have enough food, water, and heat to get by for a few weeks in case of a temporary collapse of services.
Oh, and canned brains. Keep lots of those handy. Don't ask why, just do it.
Since when did solar flares change tides and throw debries around to cause massive flooding, and random destruction.
They don't. They only take out services. Over VERY large areas, for long periods of time. Your house is safe, but it'll be cold and dark and no one will answer the phone at Dominos.
With Katrina, there was some warning, and there were safe areas 50 miles away that still had power, water, food, and communications. People could be evacuated to those areas. Katrina was a big problem over a small area, and people survived by moving short distances to areas that had services.
A solar geomagnetic storm could be a smaller problem over a much larger area. Imagine the power going out at every house north of the Mason Dixon line in the US and up into Canada. Where do you send people? Nowhere. You tell them to stay the hell home. But what are they going to eat and drink, and how will they stay warm?
The important thing is that power, water, heat, telephone, Internet, and even radio communications (including aviation navigation and shortwave) could all go away at once, and some or all of them might be out for an extended period of time. It could literally take months to restore services to some areas. And this could potentially be on a continental scale. Additionally, an X-Class geomagnetic storm can damage unshielded electronics. Your PC, cell phone, modem, etc may or may not work even if power and Internet come back. Your car may not function even if fuel is readily available. Your backup generator may not start. They may all need expensive repairs, and you'll have to wait a while because everyone else will be in the same situation.
There's no need for panic, of course, but TFA doesn't mention panic. It mentions preparedness. I think it's perfectly prudent to prepare in much the same way as you would for a hurricane or major snowstorm, because you may suffer from the same lack of readily available food, water, and heat. Except something like this cannot be predicted, so you have to be prepared all the time. Oh, and you don't need plywood, unless you plan on burning it for heat. :)
This is more of a city problem, because city services might go away in a hurry, and a dense population means more immediate dependence on common resources that will go away. The water will run out in the first week, if not sooner. Food before that, probably, but people can get by without food for a few days.
More rural folks have wells we can dip for safe drinking water, campstoves with lots of fuel we can use for cooking, and heaters that don't depend on electricity but are designed to be used safely indoors. This will be an annoyance, little more. We get power outages and major snowstorms all the time, and we don't really need to go anywhere for a while if things get bad - we'll just hunker down and start rationing out the food we canned away or put in the deep freezer.
It's simple. Take your dwelling (apartment, house, condo, whatever). Play a mental game where you have to depend ONLY on whatever you have on your property for one month. If that doesn't concern you, you're probably good, as long as your neighbors have gone through the same mental exercise OR you are better armed than they are. :)
I debated whether to mod this flamebait due to the obvious flamebait parts of your post, but mixed into the unfounded insults you actually make a salient point, so I'll respond to the valid point instead.
The reason distros are out there is to make installs easy. Each distro manager takes applications they want to support and builds an installer that suits their distro for each application. This means that someone who understands and maintains the distro has compiled the application and confirmed that it uses dependent objects that are compatible with other dependencies required by the other applications they support. The problem is that software uses common libraries (Windows calls them DLLs) and changing the underlying library to accommodate one bit of software can break another. Windows and Linux approach that problem in markedly different ways.
Linux users used to install a lot of their own software manually. Anyone can still do it, and many do, but if you have a dependency on a specific bit of supporting software, you can break existing software by upgrading that dependency for your new software. But the same is true of a bit of Windows software that overwrites a DLL that other software is dependent on.
Repositories solve this problem in Linux by marking software with metadata indicating what it depends on, and what specific versions of each dependency are required. If you upgrade a dependency and it will break compatibility with other software you have installed, the repository will warn you of this.
Windows is only available as one set of underlying system services, and they are by and large compatible. But updates to those system services can and do break existing software packages, and since Windows lacks a repository it's a harder problem to solve, so it's largely just ignored, and sometimes it causes problems.
Since Microsoft does not do software repositories, but has a pretty standard install base, the authors of FlightGear can build a Microsoft version that can be installed today. There is no guarantee that the version will be free of DLL conflicts since there is no central software repository to manage dependencies, but it'll probably work for the vast majority of Windows installs. No one at Microsoft has vetted the install, so good luck. It'll probably work. And it probably won't break anything else. But there's no one looking out for you on that.
Since Linux does have software and dependency repositories, and volunteers checking compatibility for your specific distro, it may take a little while for the repository manager of your favorite repo to download the source from the FlightGear team, check dependencies, and make sure it will compile on your distro. He/she may need to upgrade a few dependencies and update some other software to be compatible with that new dependency. But once it's done, you can be assured that the install will work, all the tools you need to run it will be available, and it won't break any software you have installed today.
If you're eager and willing, you can download the source yourself, put it in a folder, and type MAKE, then find any dependencies it needs and resolve them yourself.
You can also add FlightGear's repository which will allow you to install 2.0 right now, and will warn you about compatibility problems with any existing dependencies you may have today. That's very much like a Windows install, except you get a warning if you are about to break compatibility with some software you have installed today.
the brakes are not engaging because the signal is not transmitted from the pedal to the pads.
That doesn't jive with any of the articles I've read on the problem.
Example:
http://www.leftlanenews.com/a-closer-look-at-toyotas-sudden-acceleration-problem.html
To demonstrate the problem of relying on power-assisted brakes in the case of sudden and uncontrollable acceleration, the attorney for Guadalupe Gomez explained the details of his client’s case, “He [Gomez] was held hostage for 20 miles on a Bay Area freeway by a 2007 Camry traveling more than 100 mph. Gomez was unable to turn off the engine or shift into neutral and then burned out his brakes before slamming into another car and killing that driver.”
The root cause, of course, is too much control of the car has been given to a computer. I should be able to DECIDE to take the damned car out of gear if I choose to. But at least this software fix appears to disable the gas pedal if the brakes are mashed down on, which sounds like a good idea if you want to give that level of control to a computer.
Personally, I'm sticking with manual transmissions. :)
That leads to some interesting legal questions. REALLY interesting ones.
Did he have a reasonable expectation to privacy if his garden wall was shorter than the Google Street View van plus the mast they put the camera on? The sample image on the article shows the street view camera perspective looking to be at least 3 meters high, at a guess. If I took a camera and put a 2-meter stepladder on the sidewalk and took a picture of him from 4 meters off the ground, is that a violation of a reasonable expectation of privacy? I'm in a public place. I haven't climbed his wall.
I mean, he's not visible from street level, but he is visible from a public place, and Google was following the height restriction for vehicles in that area.
On the other hand, Google's image collection is rather outside the normal realm of "visible from the street". It's not that often that 4-meter-high people walk by the front of the house. So the guy who got photographed in the nude may have a valid point.
I'm just glad I don't have to decide something like this, though my decision would probably be for a case-by-case fix. Have Google either remove the single image that contains the guy in question, or retake the photo after telling the guy what day they will be by so he knows not to air out the sausage-and-meatballs on the porch that day.
But even that would have a pretty chilling effect on photographs that are made public, not just by Google but everywhere else. If you caught me picking my nose when you took a vacation snap, and I saw the image online, would I have a valid beef in telling you to take it down? At what point do my rights to privacy overcome your rights to post pictures of your vacation?
That's not going to do anything but make sure you have company in the afterlife.
You're at 100 because your brakes are now buttery soft and silky smooth and are utterly useless. You have a multi-hundred-horsepower engine that has clearly demonstrated the ability to overcome the power of four brake pads. Four more brake pads aren't going to help.
So you rear end someone else. Chances are their rear end will be dragged sideways and they'll spin or flip, and at 80MPH (plus whatever additional speed you've added) the prognosis for them is not good.
Even if they are prepared for it and know what to do to handle the violent rear-loaded acceleration, and manage to keep the whole thing under control, what's next?
Easy, your car engine will now easily burn out another four brake pads, and you'll have two cars running at 100MPH with no brakes and very heavily rear-loaded acceleration with a flexible middle, and a very real risk of the two of you not steering perfectly together and both going off on tangental courses, almost ensuring violent maneuvers and probably a roll, high chance of fatality for both of you.
Now, if you could find a very large truck moving at about 80 who has enough of a rear bumper to absorb the impact, THEN you might be on to something. Truck brakes could EASILY absorb whatever your car engine could dish out, and the tire-iron beating you're going to take from the surprised and angry truck driver is far less likely to be fatal.
No matter what, PR, bullshit fix, whatever you want to call it, this firmware fix is a good idea. Brakes should be an absolute-priority command to the car that the user is requesting it slow down, regardless of any other input into the vehicle control system. Idling the engine is just a logical idea. It doesn't matter if the fix is not necessary to stop the current problem, or what the root cause of the problem might be.
Even if we accept that the various incidents were all user error, and absolve Toyota of any design flaws, the fact remains that this fix is a good idea. It might even have prevented some of the incidents, because several people who experienced them reported that the brakes and the engine were fighting each other. Average car brakes cannot possibly fight an engine at full throttle, they'll rapidly overheat and burn out trying. This fix would ensure that the brakes would win.
And,of course, regardless of the root cause, the solution to ANY "out of control acceleration problem" is to stop the acceleration, which is precisely what this fix is designed to do. If you hit the brakes, the car engine returns to idle and stops putting acceleration into the system.
Sometimes, you release a patch that fixes the symptom until you can isolate the root cause.
Or change in ambient temperature, and suddenly your idle setting is too low?
Yeah, but that was back in my car built in 1974 that had a carburetor and a crappy choke system. None of the cars I've owned since have had a problem with temperature changes, and if they did the proper response is to get the idle/mix system fixed up, not play two-foot.
I think this is a case of "belt and suspenders".
If this was floormats as Toyota is claiming, then this patch does no harm. Plus, if you get something other than a floor mat stuck under your go-fast pedal and hit the brakes, the car would immediately ignore the go-fast pedal and you could stop the car without any fuss or bother. So no matter what else happens, when you hit the brakes the accelerator is returned to IDLE state, and the brakes work normally. You may suffer wild acceleration if you let up on the brakes again, but pushing back on the brakes will stop that immediately, you'll figure it out, and pull over.
If this was NOT floormats, but some other software issue, this patch will still allow the engine to be idled when you push the brakes.
So, no matter what, this seems like a rational and reasonable safety feature. The braking system should win any contest with any other vehicle subsystem. If I push on the brakes, that means I want the car to stop. If my foot is on the brake, the most important thing the car can be doing at that moment is to be slowing down. All other systems except maybe steering have now become optional.
Honestly, the only reason NOT to want this patch is if you are one of the few who still drives "two foot" (one foot on the accelerator, one foot on the brakes) and you have a habit of "riding the brake" by resting your "brake" foot on the pedal. And the only real risk is that when you put any weight on the brake pedal the accelerator will stop working.
Lovin' my manual-shift Jetta TDI even more, for the same reason. It would take a truly odd and scary set of circumstances that would prevent me from disengaging the engine from the wheels in the extremely unlikely event of the go pedal getting stuck on 11.
Having said that, my reaction to this letter would be to stop whatever it is that I am doing and head straight to my Toyota dealership, and politely request that the software patch be installed immediately if not sooner. Whatever else this bug fix could introduce, it seems to have been written clearly with a "disengage the engine if the brake is engaged" instruction that, in my mind, overrides all concerns I might have about the short testing interval of the patch. Even if it causes the engine to disengage randomly and for no reason, I can always coast to the side of the road. I'd rather be at a full stop complaining that the car won't move, than moving along complaining that I can't get the car to a full stop.
It's like the old aviation joke: "I'd rather be DOWN HERE wishing I was UP THERE, than UP THERE wishing I was DOWN HERE."
DirectTV just bought out ReplayTV, who makes a decent DVR (or used to). I doubt they'll be snuggling back up with TiVo anytime soon.
That was one of the major reasons I chose ReplayTV over TiVo when I took the DVR plunge about 6 years or so ago. Replay had both a phone and Ethernet port, and I didn't have a landline.
As a side effect, someone wrote an open source Java applet that pretends to be a ReplayTV and can copy shows from my Replay to my computer, schedule shows from the computer, etc. So the Replay is sitting in the basement as the only thing hooked up to my Cable TV, and I haven't touched its remote in over a year. It just records shows, and I copy them up to my Linux desktop to actually watch them. Kinda like a MythTV server but without all the setup. :)
I think TiVo added Ethernet and even wireless access later on. I have to imagine they have by now.
I bought a ReplayTV (competitor to TiVo, same basic idea) about 6 years ago, and paid $200 for the "lifetime service". Like TiVO, with a ReplayTV, once the listings stop being fed to the machine it cannot record anything - you can't just do time/day based recording. The monthly service was something like $15, so I figured I might as well "prepay" for 14 months of service and get lifetime service that way.
The overall machine cost $400 with the lifetime service, and 6 years and counting and the machine is working just fine. And I could easily resell it and include the lifetime service with it if I ever decide I don't need it any more.
Somehow, ReplayTV is continuing to offer channel updates, even though I'm not sure you could buy a new one today if you wanted to. They have been absorbed by DirectTV, so I'm sure that's the technology inside DirectTV's DVR units.
I don't know if TiVo has a lifetime prepay option, but it might be worth it.
Three reasons come to mind:
1. Even though it's within limits, there are people who intentionally look for units that emit the least RF possible, so that if it does turn out there was a risk they are minimizing their risk. It's at least more rational than sleeping in a Faraday cage and suing neighbors for WiFi radiation or wearing tinfoil underwear. If you need a cell phone but have some concerns about RF exposure, picking the cell phone that emits the lowest levels of RF just seems like a rational middle ground.
2. Some will intentionally seek out phones with high RF because more RF means the radio has more juice or the antenna is more efficient, which means it'll get "more bars in more places". I know my Blackberry Curve 8310 gets awesome signal in a lot of places that iPhones don't, so I'm sure that also means it's putting out more RF and/or has a more efficient antenna.
3. If it's GSM, one of the side effects is the annoying clicky-buzzing sound every nonshielded electronic device within ten yards emits. Less RF means less of that interference.
They'll come out with one that is just exactly at the Government limit on radiation, and call it the "Zesty".
Then they'll come out with one well above the limit and call it the "Extra Crispy"
I see your point, but I disagree. I think I'd still use an iPad for the "just a moment while I look that up" surfing at home. I think the form factor would scale quite well.
Now, if I wanted something I could take with me, then it would be a different discussion entirely and I'd probably choose netbook or laptop, for the simple fact that I'm not going to pull out an iPad in a restaurant and use it to look up something while chatting with a friend. I see your point there.
Back when we had a Windows machine in the house, we used to use the remote control to play music on iTunes. The computer had a standard audio cable that ran the length of the house, and plugged into the AUX input on a cheap living room stereo.
I found it particularly geeky to be using a wireless iPod Touch to control the music player on a computer on the other side of the house, so it could pipe music to the stereo RIGHT IN FRONT OF ME. ;)
Now that I have Linux throughout, I VNC into the box from the iPod Touch. Geeky+. :)
I'm increasingly beginning to believe it's a solution in search of a problem.
Meaning no offense, but maybe it's a solution to a "problem" you don't have? I've tried the tablet form factor, and love it. I'm not necessarily sold on Apple's solution to it, but their iPod is actually a fantastic little handheld computer, despite its shortcomings (most of which are Apple design decisions).
I don't think it completely overcomes them, but it's a great device all the same. I like mine, but I did get it for free. I'm sure I would never have bought one, but now that I've owned and used one I understand the appeal.
The iPad is far from perfect, and without a camera and compatible keyboard at least seems, well, missing something important. But it's precisely an iPod Touch that's been enlarged. Nothing more, nothing less.
Despite the vendor lockdown, the lack of features, the nonreplaceable battery, the nonexpandable memory, the inability to multitask, the Apple restrictions, and all the other shortcomings of the iPod Touch.. .. they are going to sell like, well, magic.
Because there's nothing out there that fits the niche quite as well.
... or use my Blackberry, which has a perfectly acceptable speaker and a lot more space to store music.
My point is that, as a music player, and especially as a standalone music player, the iPod Touch is nowhere NEAR the best.
But it's an awesome little handheld computer.
The "Giant iPod Touch" version (no 3G) is $499. Half a grand != "close to a grand", at least not using any math I've ever heard of.
Granted, it's more costly than your average netbook and has less memory, but it's not meant to be a netbook. It's meant to be a tablet.
And in the tablet market, $499 is relatively competitive.
Umm, because I can watch them just fine on my iPod Touch?
I was watching highlights of Olympic Hockey last night on it, from NBC's Olympic site. I've watched YouTube videos on it. No problem.
Or are you suggesting that Apple is going to remove all that functionality when the iPad comes out?
There isn't anything wrong with the netbook experience. But it's not the tablet experience. They are different form factors for different usage patterns. Similar, but different.
If I want to read a book in bed in the evening, a netbook's attached keyboard just gets in the way, and I want a portrait-format screen for that. And I want it to be light. A netbook requires that I interact with a keyboard to turn pages, and sit differently than I would if I had a physical book. A tablet or bookreader is a closer-to-paper experience. A bookreader would work, of course, but that's a purpose-built device, and for the cost of that and a netbook, I could have a tablet that does both and not have to worry about syncing data between them.
If I want to sit in bed or on an easychair and surf the Internet (provided I'm not trying to type War and Peace) a tablet or a netbook would have approximately the same utility depending on what I'm doing a lot of. More watching video = tablet, more typing = netbook. If I need to carry it around, the iThing format is thinner and lighter, but the netbook can be closed to protect the screen. If I want to hand it to someone else to show them something, the iThing is more convenient to handle.
Personally, I'd lean toward a netbook, but having used an iPod Touch and constantly thought "this thing would be perfect if the screen was larger!" I can understand where the "magic" of an iPad comes in, for those who desire that form factor.
Does it honestly need to be anything more beyond a giant iPod Touch?
I would never have spent the money on an iPod Touch, but I won one in a contest. I'm a full card-carrying geek, but at the risk of losing my geek card, the iPod Touch was a magical little device. It's absolute crap for listening to music (limited storage space, crappy tinny speaker, etc) but as a little miniature computer it is truly amazing. I played with it for about 1 day before my wife latched on to it and wouldn't let go (what the hell? saved me buying her an iPhone).
During the time I've used it, I found myself occasionally thinking, "gee, you know, the interface is top notch, the tablet form factor is perfect for casual surfing, but I just wish the screen was bigger".
The geek in me hates the closed nature, the fixed memory, the non-replaceable battery, the Reality Distortion Field telling me what apps are OK for me to run and what are not.
The "screw it just want to surf the web in the evenings and maybe read a book occasionally" is fighting with the "but you can't spend $600 for THAT!" accountant in me over whether I want one.
A netbook is cheaper, probably has better battery life, is less "closed", and by all accounts is a better solution to any problem you care to name. But, sitting in bed or lounging in the easychair wanting to look up some obscure bit of trivia or watch a video from the Olympics (can't do it on the desktop - Linux Users Need Not Apply at nbcolympics dot com), I find myself snagging the iPod more often than I dig out the laptop. The tablet-style form factor is just too convenient.
Right, so copyright was specifically designed to prevent competition. It did so for darned good reason, by recognizing that people who put lots of work into specific works deserved a reasonable time to profit off that work exclusively. This encourages people to create works, because they know that once they've put the work into it they will be free of competition and be able to recoup their costs.
And it was (and continues to be) a good idea, as long as that exclusive period requires that the rights-holder continues to demonstrate an interest in the work, and the time limit is measured in years and not decades or centuries.