I was tempted to agree with you because I am a very attentive driver and have managed to survive by keeping an eye on everything that's happening and anticipating events but... you knew there was going to be a but... In thirty years of driving I have been in two accidents, both times my car was completely stationary. In the first one I was in stopped traffic when someone four or five cars back hit the queue of stopped cars at 60 mph. The front and back of my car were smashed but I was OK inside but things got progressively worse as you worked backwards towards the rear of the line. In the second occasion I stopped at a traffic light and the car behind me didn't, I had been stopped for a while when I was hit so it wasn't as though I braked hard or something. The other driver claimed to have not seen me, despite being in a bright red car stopped at a red traffic light in broad daylight. There were cars crossing the junction in front of me a stopped car to my left and right so nowhere to go.
Then again, you did write "it's very, very rare that an accident 100% absolutely can't be avoided", maybe twice in thirty years of driving almost every day counts as very, very rare.
When I was a little kid I wrote "When I grow up I want to be a scientist and work in a lavatory". I did grow up to be a scientist but, fortunately, I work in a laboratory.
I went through one of these in August. I didn't want to and the TSA staff there gave me no option. I could have kicked up a fun but I'd stood in line for twenty minutes to get to the front and everyone behind me was well and truly pissed enough. Not to mention that my son was with me and having dad lead off in irons wasn't an image I wanted to leave behind. Also, I was on the way home after my own father's funeral.
For thirty years I was a frequent traveller, my family lives in the UK and I live in the USA. I am also a US government contractor so I flew to Europe and Asia yearly on business. Since the mid 2000's I've almost stopped flying at all. Sad really since I missed the last years of dad's life. Stupidly, despite my ticket being paid for by the US government and travelling on government business I was often selected for "extra screening", before anyone thinks "profiling" I am a white and of European descent. The whole thing just pissed me off. So don't say "didn't care enough to opt out" more like blackmailed and shamed into it.
So, at your suggestion I've tried saying "Play Appey Road" three times now. The first time it played Stanley Road and the last two times it said it can't find "Abby Road" in "my music". I almost threw the damned thing out of the window.
That's why I don't talk to machines, they never understand me and they invariably make me angry.
So, the thing that got hit for me was 1Password. So I couldn't log into websites because 1Password wouldn't run. Fortunately I could use the synced copy on my phone and type in the passwords by hand but the whole reason for using a password manager is so that I can use passwords that are long sequences of random characters which are no fun to type by hand! I found that it was an App store problem from the Mac Rumors website. Running the App caused a box to pop up saying the App was corrupted, to delete it and re-install. So I followed the instructions and, guess what? I couldn't re-download from the App store!
This whole idea of having software that quits working based on some random policy is useless. I want software that I buy and is there when I need it. Not checking if some certificate has expired or that I paid a subscription or some other BS.
I've been using Macs since 1985, yes I use Windows and Linux too but Macs were always what I used at home because I could write a file five or ten years ago and still open it. That's fading away. Notice I wrote "what I used at home", I'm shopping around.
"In other words, TV viewing patterns will be used to serve ads to any device user who happens to be connected to the same network as the Vizio Smart TV — an obvious problem for households with a mix of say... adults and children?"
How about a house with a mix of older and younger adults. My kids (23 and 21) watch all sorts of stuff that I don't and watch a lot more TV than me so my TV, laptop or whatever device on the same network would show ads that are dominated by the tastes of my children.
Similarly how about students or other similar groups who share a house, and thereby the same IP address. The advertising would be a mishmash of varying tastes or maybe dominated by the one guy who has the TV on all day to provide "white noise" in the background.
Not a moment too soon. I had two rented set-top boxes that cost $20 each per month so $480 per year. They hadn't been changed in three years so that's $1440 paid. When I finally replaced them they wanted the old ones shipping back. UPS was slow delivering them due to bad weather and I got an email to the effect that if they didn't arrive within 30 day's I'd be charged $300 each of them. So $600 for three year old hardware (full of dust and stuff) that I'd already paid $1440 for! Fortunately they did arrive several days late so I didn't have to wrangle with Verizon over the charge but it's the principle of the thing.
Someone will probably point out that that is why you don't rent stuff, you pay over the odds and in the end don't own anything. I agree, but the cable companies are a monopoly you can't do anything other than rent.
Since the title to this article is a question Betteridge's law states that the answer to the question must be no. So I have to come up with reasons:
1) There's nobody on Mars to ride on a Hyperloop system.
2) There's no manufacturing infrastructure on Mars to make one.
3) The whole point of the Hyperloop is to cut drag by running a train in a tube under a low pressure. Since Mars has a thin atmosphere already there is no need for the tube and hyperloop = train.
I was born and spent my childhood in the UK but have spent the last 25+ years living in the USA.
In the UK I never lived more than a ten minute walk from a bus stop. The busses were every fifteen minutes, they were relatively clean and affordable. They were a mode of transport used by many people not just people who didn't have a car (the very young, very old or poor). We would go grocery shopping and carry the shopping back home on the bus in bags. There were also shops within an easy walk of all the different homes I lived in. That limited our groceries to what we could sensibly carry but gave us quite a bit of exercise.
In the US the nearest bus stop is a mile and a half from my house. It is on the grass at the side of a four lane highway with no bus shelter and you have to stand on the muddy, wet grass. It's six miles from home to work but there is no bus that goes directly there, despite it being just one left turn from getting on the bus to getting off. According to Google Maps it is an hour journey with 25 minutes of that being the walk to the bus stop. There are no grocery stores on the bus route. The closest you get is dropped off on the wrong side of a six lane wide highway then a half mile walk to the store. So cross the highway twice (at peril of death) and walk a mile.
In my car it is a ten minute drive to work. A detour to grocery and other shops is negligible and I can easily get what I want on the way home from work.
My (rambling) point is that the US towns and cities that I have experience of (mid-Atlantic states) are set up for cars, and lots of them. They are impossibly unfriendly for walkers and cyclists and the public transport has very poorly thought out routes. In fact, now that I think of it, the area where I live has changed quite a bit in the last 25 years with new shops, businesses and housing but the bus routes are exactly the same that they always were.
I agree with you. It was actually very useful to me too that they did such a diligent job of restoring everything. My point, and warning, was that, even though I deleted my files myself and then closed the account the files were still "out there" on backup tapes etc. I wasn't too concerned for myself because everything was encrypted twice (encrypted files on encrypted disk images, yes I'm paranoid but it was tax data). What occurred to me after reading this Slashdot article is that someone could store unencrypted files with what, at the time, is a reputable company. That company goes bust and sells their assets including the backup tapes, databases etc. So, don't trust the reputation of the company that exists now unless you know that the files are encrypted on your machine before they are transferred to their servers or you encrypt them yourself (or if you are paranoid both!).
It's already too late for us early adopters. Our information is out there and can't be claimed back now.
For example, up to a year ago I used a cloud storage service to store some files (fortunately encrypted) that I didn't want to lose, tax records and statements in PDF format. I found a better alternative so copied all of the files before deleting them and then asking the company to close the account. Fast forward a year and my "better alternative" announced that they were going out of business so I contacted the first company. I couldn't create a new account because it was keyed to my email address which was already in the system so they offered to reopen the old account. When I closed the account I still had several months left on the subscription and they kindly credited those to the reopened account. When I first logged in I was shocked to find that not only had they restored my physical address in the account info but also my credit card info. They also had helpfully restored all of the files that I had stored in the account. Remember, I deleted them before closing but they pulled them out of the backup from the day before I closed. That now has me thinking about both companies. The one that is still in business but doesn't delete backup copies and personal information of deleted accounts, and the one that went out of business that, presumably, had the same sort of info. Who now owns the databases with my credit card info and the backup tapes with my data?
The only two things to learn from this story are, encrypt whatever and wherever you can, and chose companies that you think (hope) are in there for the long haul.
c) Attach a ring of rockets to the top of the cylinder and allow gravity to balance it for you.
d) Use a teardrop shape instead of a cylinder so that it falls blunt end first, add fold out wings at the other end to produce drag and use the rockets at the top to slow the thing down.
e) Forget the land upright part, stick fold out wings on it and land it horizontally like an aircraft.
My wife has exactly this problem, she clips her FitBit One to the strap on her bra. Works just fine. Yes she could wear a wrist fitness tracker but she hates things around her wrists.
Exactly, I'm in the same situation. The only thing that I can do is at least try to move as much as I can when I am allowed. So, I get up from my desk at least once an hour and walk to someone's office rather than calling them on the phone. Bathroom breaks are taken at the furthest bathroom from my office. When I was in a multi-floor office building I'd go to the bathroom on the floor three down from the office and take the stairs. In the morning I don't park in the spot closest to the building but walk a bit.
I'm still stuck though. The rest of my time is spent typing at my desk or in meetings and I can't exactly stand and pace in the corner of the meeting room.
"TWC's customer service reps are reportedly a bit overwhelmed by call volume at the moment"
So it's just a normal day then? It seems that whenever I call one of these companies all I get is "due to unusually heavy call volume we are experiencing extended hold times".
The DARPA verification method would have to use multiple biometric markers since you could always think of a situation where a medical condition renders one or more of them useless. The person with eye problems who can't use retina scan, the person with damaged fingertips who can't use fingerprint, the person with throat or respiratory disease who can't use voice recognition, etc.
It would be much simpler to have a universal two factor token. Something that you enter a PIN into which generates an encrypted token that is then used for login. It would also solve the social security number identity theft problem since you have a unique way of verifying identity.
Take a string say 100 times the distance from your toe to your heel. Let's call this 100 feet. Tie one end to a peg stuck in the ground and the other end to your belt buckle. Now walk in a circle keeping the string taught putting your feet down toe to heel.Count steps, divide by 200 and you've got pi. Even if you don't count the fraction of a foot left over it has to be accurate to better than 1%. You can keep the cartridges for the zombies.
If it's really a worry, tattoo pi somewhere discrete while you can remember it...
I have yet to see an ad for anything that made me think "Ooh, I need to buy that" or "Ooh, I need to watch that TV show, read that book, watch that play, listen to that music etc etc.". Most of the ads I see are either for things I can't afford, like flashy cars, things I don't want, things of dubious value (loan sharks), or the old standby "Local Mom finds way to make a fortune, cure cancer, grow huge breasts and whiten teeth using this one simple trick". It's a waste of time and offensive. Now you could argue that should allow the advertising just to support the poor impoverished website owner. The problem with that is that it is supporting the whole "advertising funded paradigm that I find wasteful and offensive. Sadly, I'm having a problem thinking of what the answer may be (lets face it if I could I would make my fortune) we don't want a pay-per-view web but we also don't want the advertisers peering into our souls to tailor ads to what interests us.
The other thing to factor in is the reaction time. When the lead car brakes the next car brakes a fraction of a second later and has to brake a little harder because to stop before hitting the lead car. The next car in line has to brake harder still if you have a long enough convoy of traffic you eventually reach a point in the line where it is impossible for the next car to break hard enough to avoid a collision. The ideal situations are either wide enough gaps that any car can stop in time irrespective of how hard the lead car brakes or short enough convoys that the rear most car still has enough stopping time when all the reaction times are subtracted.
This assumes that the data that the navigator has is good. I was recently driving in a 45 zone and the GPS went nuts telling me to slow down all the time. I found out later that the road had been improved over a year ago with extra lanes, a median and an increased limit.Similarly our local interstates had a speed increase to 70 bu there are still stretches at 55 and 65. Relying on the GPS data would be a nightmare.
Slashdot Mirror
I was tempted to agree with you because I am a very attentive driver and have managed to survive by keeping an eye on everything that's happening and anticipating events but... you knew there was going to be a but... In thirty years of driving I have been in two accidents, both times my car was completely stationary. In the first one I was in stopped traffic when someone four or five cars back hit the queue of stopped cars at 60 mph. The front and back of my car were smashed but I was OK inside but things got progressively worse as you worked backwards towards the rear of the line. In the second occasion I stopped at a traffic light and the car behind me didn't, I had been stopped for a while when I was hit so it wasn't as though I braked hard or something. The other driver claimed to have not seen me, despite being in a bright red car stopped at a red traffic light in broad daylight. There were cars crossing the junction in front of me a stopped car to my left and right so nowhere to go.
Then again, you did write "it's very, very rare that an accident 100% absolutely can't be avoided", maybe twice in thirty years of driving almost every day counts as very, very rare.
When I was a little kid I wrote "When I grow up I want to be a scientist and work in a lavatory". I did grow up to be a scientist but, fortunately, I work in a laboratory.
No
damned spell corrector (messer upper) fun should be fuss...
I went through one of these in August. I didn't want to and the TSA staff there gave me no option. I could have kicked up a fun but I'd stood in line for twenty minutes to get to the front and everyone behind me was well and truly pissed enough. Not to mention that my son was with me and having dad lead off in irons wasn't an image I wanted to leave behind. Also, I was on the way home after my own father's funeral.
For thirty years I was a frequent traveller, my family lives in the UK and I live in the USA. I am also a US government contractor so I flew to Europe and Asia yearly on business. Since the mid 2000's I've almost stopped flying at all. Sad really since I missed the last years of dad's life. Stupidly, despite my ticket being paid for by the US government and travelling on government business I was often selected for "extra screening", before anyone thinks "profiling" I am a white and of European descent. The whole thing just pissed me off. So don't say "didn't care enough to opt out" more like blackmailed and shamed into it.
So, at your suggestion I've tried saying "Play Appey Road" three times now. The first time it played Stanley Road and the last two times it said it can't find "Abby Road" in "my music". I almost threw the damned thing out of the window.
That's why I don't talk to machines, they never understand me and they invariably make me angry.
So, the thing that got hit for me was 1Password. So I couldn't log into websites because 1Password wouldn't run. Fortunately I could use the synced copy on my phone and type in the passwords by hand but the whole reason for using a password manager is so that I can use passwords that are long sequences of random characters which are no fun to type by hand! I found that it was an App store problem from the Mac Rumors website. Running the App caused a box to pop up saying the App was corrupted, to delete it and re-install. So I followed the instructions and, guess what? I couldn't re-download from the App store!
This whole idea of having software that quits working based on some random policy is useless. I want software that I buy and is there when I need it. Not checking if some certificate has expired or that I paid a subscription or some other BS.
I've been using Macs since 1985, yes I use Windows and Linux too but Macs were always what I used at home because I could write a file five or ten years ago and still open it. That's fading away. Notice I wrote "what I used at home", I'm shopping around.
"In other words, TV viewing patterns will be used to serve ads to any device user who happens to be connected to the same network as the Vizio Smart TV — an obvious problem for households with a mix of say... adults and children?"
How about a house with a mix of older and younger adults. My kids (23 and 21) watch all sorts of stuff that I don't and watch a lot more TV than me so my TV, laptop or whatever device on the same network would show ads that are dominated by the tastes of my children.
Similarly how about students or other similar groups who share a house, and thereby the same IP address. The advertising would be a mishmash of varying tastes or maybe dominated by the one guy who has the TV on all day to provide "white noise" in the background.
Not a moment too soon. I had two rented set-top boxes that cost $20 each per month so $480 per year. They hadn't been changed in three years so that's $1440 paid. When I finally replaced them they wanted the old ones shipping back. UPS was slow delivering them due to bad weather and I got an email to the effect that if they didn't arrive within 30 day's I'd be charged $300 each of them. So $600 for three year old hardware (full of dust and stuff) that I'd already paid $1440 for! Fortunately they did arrive several days late so I didn't have to wrangle with Verizon over the charge but it's the principle of the thing.
Someone will probably point out that that is why you don't rent stuff, you pay over the odds and in the end don't own anything. I agree, but the cable companies are a monopoly you can't do anything other than rent.
Was it in a fire sale?
They could have developed nutritious bacon that tastes like seaweed!
Since the title to this article is a question Betteridge's law states that the answer to the question must be no. So I have to come up with reasons:
1) There's nobody on Mars to ride on a Hyperloop system.
2) There's no manufacturing infrastructure on Mars to make one.
3) The whole point of the Hyperloop is to cut drag by running a train in a tube under a low pressure. Since Mars has a thin atmosphere already there is no need for the tube and hyperloop = train.
I was born and spent my childhood in the UK but have spent the last 25+ years living in the USA.
In the UK I never lived more than a ten minute walk from a bus stop. The busses were every fifteen minutes, they were relatively clean and affordable. They were a mode of transport used by many people not just people who didn't have a car (the very young, very old or poor). We would go grocery shopping and carry the shopping back home on the bus in bags. There were also shops within an easy walk of all the different homes I lived in. That limited our groceries to what we could sensibly carry but gave us quite a bit of exercise.
In the US the nearest bus stop is a mile and a half from my house. It is on the grass at the side of a four lane highway with no bus shelter and you have to stand on the muddy, wet grass. It's six miles from home to work but there is no bus that goes directly there, despite it being just one left turn from getting on the bus to getting off. According to Google Maps it is an hour journey with 25 minutes of that being the walk to the bus stop. There are no grocery stores on the bus route. The closest you get is dropped off on the wrong side of a six lane wide highway then a half mile walk to the store. So cross the highway twice (at peril of death) and walk a mile.
In my car it is a ten minute drive to work. A detour to grocery and other shops is negligible and I can easily get what I want on the way home from work.
My (rambling) point is that the US towns and cities that I have experience of (mid-Atlantic states) are set up for cars, and lots of them. They are impossibly unfriendly for walkers and cyclists and the public transport has very poorly thought out routes. In fact, now that I think of it, the area where I live has changed quite a bit in the last 25 years with new shops, businesses and housing but the bus routes are exactly the same that they always were.
I agree with you. It was actually very useful to me too that they did such a diligent job of restoring everything. My point, and warning, was that, even though I deleted my files myself and then closed the account the files were still "out there" on backup tapes etc. I wasn't too concerned for myself because everything was encrypted twice (encrypted files on encrypted disk images, yes I'm paranoid but it was tax data). What occurred to me after reading this Slashdot article is that someone could store unencrypted files with what, at the time, is a reputable company. That company goes bust and sells their assets including the backup tapes, databases etc. So, don't trust the reputation of the company that exists now unless you know that the files are encrypted on your machine before they are transferred to their servers or you encrypt them yourself (or if you are paranoid both!).
It's already too late for us early adopters. Our information is out there and can't be claimed back now.
For example, up to a year ago I used a cloud storage service to store some files (fortunately encrypted) that I didn't want to lose, tax records and statements in PDF format. I found a better alternative so copied all of the files before deleting them and then asking the company to close the account. Fast forward a year and my "better alternative" announced that they were going out of business so I contacted the first company. I couldn't create a new account because it was keyed to my email address which was already in the system so they offered to reopen the old account. When I closed the account I still had several months left on the subscription and they kindly credited those to the reopened account. When I first logged in I was shocked to find that not only had they restored my physical address in the account info but also my credit card info. They also had helpfully restored all of the files that I had stored in the account. Remember, I deleted them before closing but they pulled them out of the backup from the day before I closed. That now has me thinking about both companies. The one that is still in business but doesn't delete backup copies and personal information of deleted accounts, and the one that went out of business that, presumably, had the same sort of info. Who now owns the databases with my credit card info and the backup tapes with my data?
The only two things to learn from this story are, encrypt whatever and wherever you can, and chose companies that you think (hope) are in there for the long haul.
You also have :
c) Attach a ring of rockets to the top of the cylinder and allow gravity to balance it for you.
d) Use a teardrop shape instead of a cylinder so that it falls blunt end first, add fold out wings at the other end to produce drag and use the rockets at the top to slow the thing down.
e) Forget the land upright part, stick fold out wings on it and land it horizontally like an aircraft.
"all on one miniature integrated circuit."
That would be as opposed to all of the really big integrated circuits.
My wife has exactly this problem, she clips her FitBit One to the strap on her bra. Works just fine. Yes she could wear a wrist fitness tracker but she hates things around her wrists.
Exactly, I'm in the same situation. The only thing that I can do is at least try to move as much as I can when I am allowed. So, I get up from my desk at least once an hour and walk to someone's office rather than calling them on the phone. Bathroom breaks are taken at the furthest bathroom from my office. When I was in a multi-floor office building I'd go to the bathroom on the floor three down from the office and take the stairs. In the morning I don't park in the spot closest to the building but walk a bit.
I'm still stuck though. The rest of my time is spent typing at my desk or in meetings and I can't exactly stand and pace in the corner of the meeting room.
"TWC's customer service reps are reportedly a bit overwhelmed by call volume at the moment"
So it's just a normal day then? It seems that whenever I call one of these companies all I get is "due to unusually heavy call volume we are experiencing extended hold times".
The DARPA verification method would have to use multiple biometric markers since you could always think of a situation where a medical condition renders one or more of them useless. The person with eye problems who can't use retina scan, the person with damaged fingertips who can't use fingerprint, the person with throat or respiratory disease who can't use voice recognition, etc.
It would be much simpler to have a universal two factor token. Something that you enter a PIN into which generates an encrypted token that is then used for login. It would also solve the social security number identity theft problem since you have a unique way of verifying identity.
Take a string say 100 times the distance from your toe to your heel. Let's call this 100 feet. Tie one end to a peg stuck in the ground and the other end to your belt buckle. Now walk in a circle keeping the string taught putting your feet down toe to heel.Count steps, divide by 200 and you've got pi. Even if you don't count the fraction of a foot left over it has to be accurate to better than 1%. You can keep the cartridges for the zombies.
If it's really a worry, tattoo pi somewhere discrete while you can remember it...
I have yet to see an ad for anything that made me think "Ooh, I need to buy that" or "Ooh, I need to watch that TV show, read that book, watch that play, listen to that music etc etc.". Most of the ads I see are either for things I can't afford, like flashy cars, things I don't want, things of dubious value (loan sharks), or the old standby "Local Mom finds way to make a fortune, cure cancer, grow huge breasts and whiten teeth using this one simple trick". It's a waste of time and offensive. Now you could argue that should allow the advertising just to support the poor impoverished website owner. The problem with that is that it is supporting the whole "advertising funded paradigm that I find wasteful and offensive. Sadly, I'm having a problem thinking of what the answer may be (lets face it if I could I would make my fortune) we don't want a pay-per-view web but we also don't want the advertisers peering into our souls to tailor ads to what interests us.
The other thing to factor in is the reaction time. When the lead car brakes the next car brakes a fraction of a second later and has to brake a little harder because to stop before hitting the lead car. The next car in line has to brake harder still if you have a long enough convoy of traffic you eventually reach a point in the line where it is impossible for the next car to break hard enough to avoid a collision. The ideal situations are either wide enough gaps that any car can stop in time irrespective of how hard the lead car brakes or short enough convoys that the rear most car still has enough stopping time when all the reaction times are subtracted.
This assumes that the data that the navigator has is good. I was recently driving in a 45 zone and the GPS went nuts telling me to slow down all the time. I found out later that the road had been improved over a year ago with extra lanes, a median and an increased limit.Similarly our local interstates had a speed increase to 70 bu there are still stretches at 55 and 65. Relying on the GPS data would be a nightmare.