Taxis don't patrol residential streets..... It's not efficient. It's not profitable.
That is because 98% of the people are driving their own car. But once on-demand rides are used by many people, residential streets will be high demand areas. For an SDC, the cost of waiting is near zero.
No, taxis prefer not to pick up from residential areas because they know that people are unreliable. Even if the taxi has been booked, they can take a long drive out to the suburbs and find the passenger needs another 10 minutes to get ready or even does not show up. Taxis would rather pick up fares from the steady demand at a railway station, city centre or airport. They definitely do not patrol residential areas.
I've never understood why anyone worries about their credit card information.... I'm not liable for any fraudulent charges made with my card, and reporting mis-use is the work of a few moments..... A replacement card will be in my mailbox in a few days.
You need to convince the bank that any transactions between its being compromised or stolen and your notifying them were not in fact yours. Good luck with that. I would not notice a fraudulent charge until the next monthly statement
But you sound as if your cards are often compromised, lost or stolen, so it's all the more suprising if your bank cancels the fraudulant charges at the drop of a hat. You must have such a reputation with them that I wonder why they don't cancel your contract instead.
Web browsers have come the modern equivalent of the telescreens in Orwell's 1984- but Orwell never realized how popular telescreens would be.
He did actually. When the hero gets a new flat the landlord apologises that it does not have a telescreen, which implies that most tenants would have expected one as standard. [Spoiler alert ------------------ it turns out that there is a hidden one]
[KGIII] I thought you weren't retarded? To those who read my above post. See? I told you there'd be one. *sighs*
It has become a job to find your above post, but perhaps it's this:-
[KGIII] There are those who say we should have staved them out but that's probably the most retarded thing I've ever heard
I said no such thing about "starving them out", which I would strongly have opposed. I specifically said denying them the import of strategic materials. I had in mind oil, chemicals and metals above certain levels - enough to live on but insufficient to allow resumption of hostilities. With the huge USAAF able to patrol and observe, any warship building and other arms manufacture could soon have been spotted and destroyed. As for Japan building a nuclear bomb, that scenario is no different from any of the other myriad of USA-hating nations we see today.
[KGIII]- on the subject. It discounts the continued atrocities and soldiers elsewhere and the blind devotion to war that they had going on.... Yes, you're RIGHT because there were no atrocity committing Japanese anywhere else on the globe but on that island!
You've lost me there. I (or are you referring to someone else?) did not suggest ceasing hostilities against the Japs elsewhere, if that is what you are trying to say; obviously that needed clearing up. The Russians were already doing that in Manchuria (and being atrocious themselves) and ditto the British in Burma, and the US in the general Pacific area.
Sure thing, you brave warrior cum historian you! Sure thing.
... what could easily be considered the two most devastating war actions resulting in the highest number of civilian deaths during any war
No chance. Even in Japan in WW2, a particular conventional bombing raid on Tokyo caused more deaths. When you start to look at other wars, even in ancient times, there have been far more civilian deaths. The horrific thing about the A-bomb raids however is the sheer efficiency of the killing.
Cue the millennials' halfwitted observation that the bombs were "unjust" and my grandparents should've gone into another brutal, horrifying ground war in Japan.
Why would a ground war have been necessary? By the time the bombs were dropped Japan was no longer a serious threat. Any ship that ventured out of harbour was being sunk, and Jap ground troops around the Pacific had run out of food and ammo (most of those never surrendered anyway). The British had defeated them in Burma (partly because the Jap supply system had collapsed), and it could have been left to Russia to drive them out of China.
Japan has few natural resources, in particular no reliable source of oil. Any attempt to re-supply themselves with strategic materials or to resume building aircraft or warships over the following decades could have been nipped in the bud with some pin-point conventional bombing (seriousy, the USAF was good at that).
A "surrender", conditional or otherwise, was unnecessary - Japan could have been simply cut off and left to get on with fishing and to stew in its own fish juice. But Western politicians wanted something dramatic.
But which Linux and which desktop? Linux is like all of those third-party political parties.....there are too many of them without a fully concerted effort to win against the incumbents.
False analogy. Choose a third-party candidate, he gets beaten by a mainstream candidate, and (unless it is a proportional representation system maybe) you don't end up with a representative in government. OTOH, choose a Linux distro to use (or anything else, Beos, whatever) and you do end up using it.
Most people using Linux are not trying to make Linux "win", whatever that means. I am quite happy to let the majority Eternal September crowd carry on using Windows, and for the hipsters use OSX.
The wide choice of distros has nothing to do with most people not using Linux. The people I know using Windows may have heard of Linux but are not aware of the choice of distros. It is not a factor in why they do not use it.
Woman is already nervous about flying, and 15 years of Fox News conditioning takes over
Someone said she was from Wales. (I cannot check TFA as it's page is so broken that I cannot read the left half of it). I live in Wales myself and can vouch for the fact that we don't get Fox News here.
Because renting you stuff and getting a steady revenue stream is a WAY better business model than trying to get you to buy a new version every few years.
Then again, renting customers switch much more readily to the competition
Firstly, Microsoft think they have no significant competition in the areas they are now focussing on (corporates and home), apart from in the entrenched Apple zone.
Secondly, the obstacles confronting a renting customer switching are just as high as they are now - FUD, file formats, familiarity, and the MS name (which means a lot to many users, believe it or not)
Actually, the GP forgot to mention the biggest advantage of all of renting for MS : they do not need to develop much any more. When selling their OS's over the last 30 years they had to produce something different every couple of years (and get people to buy it) or their revenue dried up. XP and Win7 being fairly good, combined with the fact that PCs themselves are now powerful enough to do almost anything the user needs (so fewer Windows pre-loaded ones sold) has hurt Microsoft and they don't want that scenario ever again.
But with rental they can sack most of their developers, lean back, and collect steady predictable rents for ever more (company accountants love a steady income). Well almost : obviously they will do cosmetic make-overs now and then, and do security patches, and will eventually need to stir at some time in the future when other developments threaten to overtake them (like has happened with tablets).
Rental had been Microsoft's wet dream for a long time now.
That's exactly what people said when Windows XP came out and Microsoft introduced the "activation" process that's required.
And many did switch, and they did with Win Vista, and many are switching today because of Win10. However, this is not the YOLOD which will never happen, thank goodness. The YOLOD would be like the Eternal September on the Internet.
* YOLOD : Year of Linux on Desktops - can't we make this acronym official?
Windows 7 recognizes my USB mouse, but randomly fails to register clicks.
Windows does not recognise some of your mouse clicks? Luxury !!
On my laptop, set up for dual booting Windows and Debian, Windows recognises my mouse but not the keyboard. I have re-installed Windows several times but no-go. The Debian is fine, using it now.
No, they just assume somebody in a big, old, heavy car is going to be limited to slower reactions. That big old heavy steel car has lower crash survivability than most of the new little light things.
I don't think the drivers of the new light things were worried about the GP's survivability. They were more concerned with their own.
I remember when people said that about XP. Yet, here we all are.
Yes, here I am with XP still in a VM. I boot it up when those Indian guys phone me to tell me I have a virus and let them play with it for half an hour.
I do have an Android tablet and it tells me I am in Uxbridge (a London suburb). In fact I am about 150 miles from there, in Wales (promise to tell no-one). So I'm not too worried about their telemetry unless they are bluffing.
People voting the iPhone in this reminds me of a similar poll for the worst film of all time. They came up with ones like "The War of the Worlds" (Tom Cruise version), "Terminator", "Forest Gump" etc. In other words they voted for films they had seen recently and did not happen to like themselves. They showed their complete ignorance of just how bad films can really be, such as "Plan 9 from Outer Space", "Manos, the Hands of Fate", and "The attack of the 50 foot Woman". These iFans have got their noses too close to their little screens.
if it looked like a VW camper bus with a Z-bed in back with a Grateful Dead sticker in the back window.... Definitely better.
No thanks, not my style and those VW vans were F*#i%ng awful. A hooker around my way was advertising rides in a stretch limo while being chauffered aroung town.
If I have to sit in a self-driving car fully alert of the surrounding traffic and always poised to take over from the computer then exactly how is this any better than normal car?
It isn't better, it is worse, because for example the scenario in the headline of TFA, and less spectacular lapses of concentration. It is also worse because if you must maintain as much alertness as if you were driving yourself, but are not, it is going to be very mentally stressful and even harrowing (as I find when I am passenger to any driver with a different style from mine). It seems to me that the only thing it would save is some lightweight arm movements and slight foot movements - but what is so hard about them?
You won't be saving money when the self-driving feature becomes standard (or even compulsory). It will be like PCs without pre-loaded software costing more than bare PCs because they are subsidised by the crapware. Like self driving software will be sponsored by McDonalds, and will drive you there when it's lunchtime.
Self-driving needs to be 100% self-sufficient or not at all.
Most desktop users still call the desktop the 'hard disk'.
Do they?
I believe desktop users fall into four categories:-
Office workers
Power users/developers
Power Gamers [my term fro them, to exclude the Flappy Bird crowd]
Old timers who will use their XP desktop PC until it fails
Slashdot Mirror
Taxis don't patrol residential streets ..... It's not efficient. It's not profitable.
That is because 98% of the people are driving their own car. But once on-demand rides are used by many people, residential streets will be high demand areas. For an SDC, the cost of waiting is near zero.
No, taxis prefer not to pick up from residential areas because they know that people are unreliable. Even if the taxi has been booked, they can take a long drive out to the suburbs and find the passenger needs another 10 minutes to get ready or even does not show up. Taxis would rather pick up fares from the steady demand at a railway station, city centre or airport. They definitely do not patrol residential areas.
I'll tell you a secret : they don't stop even if you buy one.
I've never understood why anyone worries about their credit card information .... I'm not liable for any fraudulent charges made with my card, and reporting mis-use is the work of a few moments ..... A replacement card will be in my mailbox in a few days.
You need to convince the bank that any transactions between its being compromised or stolen and your notifying them were not in fact yours. Good luck with that. I would not notice a fraudulent charge until the next monthly statement
But you sound as if your cards are often compromised, lost or stolen, so it's all the more suprising if your bank cancels the fraudulant charges at the drop of a hat. You must have such a reputation with them that I wonder why they don't cancel your contract instead.
Web browsers have come the modern equivalent of the telescreens in Orwell's 1984- but Orwell never realized how popular telescreens would be.
He did actually. When the hero gets a new flat the landlord apologises that it does not have a telescreen, which implies that most tenants would have expected one as standard. [Spoiler alert ------------------ it turns out that there is a hidden one]
[KGIII] I thought you weren't retarded? To those who read my above post. See? I told you there'd be one. *sighs*
It has become a job to find your above post, but perhaps it's this :-
[KGIII] There are those who say we should have staved them out but that's probably the most retarded thing I've ever heard
I said no such thing about "starving them out", which I would strongly have opposed. I specifically said denying them the import of strategic materials. I had in mind oil, chemicals and metals above certain levels - enough to live on but insufficient to allow resumption of hostilities. With the huge USAAF able to patrol and observe, any warship building and other arms manufacture could soon have been spotted and destroyed. As for Japan building a nuclear bomb, that scenario is no different from any of the other myriad of USA-hating nations we see today.
[KGIII]- on the subject. It discounts the continued atrocities and soldiers elsewhere and the blind devotion to war that they had going on .... Yes, you're RIGHT because there were no atrocity committing Japanese anywhere else on the globe but on that island!
You've lost me there. I (or are you referring to someone else?) did not suggest ceasing hostilities against the Japs elsewhere, if that is what you are trying to say; obviously that needed clearing up. The Russians were already doing that in Manchuria (and being atrocious themselves) and ditto the British in Burma, and the US in the general Pacific area.
Sure thing, you brave warrior cum historian you! Sure thing.
Ad hominen attack.
... what could easily be considered the two most devastating war actions resulting in the highest number of civilian deaths during any war
No chance. Even in Japan in WW2, a particular conventional bombing raid on Tokyo caused more deaths. When you start to look at other wars, even in ancient times, there have been far more civilian deaths. The horrific thing about the A-bomb raids however is the sheer efficiency of the killing.
- Why is this on /.?
Because Obama uses a computer, or so I've heard.
Cue the millennials' halfwitted observation that the bombs were "unjust" and my grandparents should've gone into another brutal, horrifying ground war in Japan.
Why would a ground war have been necessary? By the time the bombs were dropped Japan was no longer a serious threat. Any ship that ventured out of harbour was being sunk, and Jap ground troops around the Pacific had run out of food and ammo (most of those never surrendered anyway). The British had defeated them in Burma (partly because the Jap supply system had collapsed), and it could have been left to Russia to drive them out of China.
Japan has few natural resources, in particular no reliable source of oil. Any attempt to re-supply themselves with strategic materials or to resume building aircraft or warships over the following decades could have been nipped in the bud with some pin-point conventional bombing (seriousy, the USAF was good at that).
A "surrender", conditional or otherwise, was unnecessary - Japan could have been simply cut off and left to get on with fishing and to stew in its own fish juice. But Western politicians wanted something dramatic.
But which Linux and which desktop? Linux is like all of those third-party political parties.....there are too many of them without a fully concerted effort to win against the incumbents.
False analogy. Choose a third-party candidate, he gets beaten by a mainstream candidate, and (unless it is a proportional representation system maybe) you don't end up with a representative in government. OTOH, choose a Linux distro to use (or anything else, Beos, whatever) and you do end up using it.
Most people using Linux are not trying to make Linux "win", whatever that means. I am quite happy to let the majority Eternal September crowd carry on using Windows, and for the hipsters use OSX.
The wide choice of distros has nothing to do with most people not using Linux. The people I know using Windows may have heard of Linux but are not aware of the choice of distros. It is not a factor in why they do not use it.
Woman is already nervous about flying, and 15 years of Fox News conditioning takes over
Someone said she was from Wales. (I cannot check TFA as it's page is so broken that I cannot read the left half of it). I live in Wales myself and can vouch for the fact that we don't get Fox News here.
Because renting you stuff and getting a steady revenue stream is a WAY better business model than trying to get you to buy a new version every few years.
Then again, renting customers switch much more readily to the competition
Firstly, Microsoft think they have no significant competition in the areas they are now focussing on (corporates and home), apart from in the entrenched Apple zone.
Secondly, the obstacles confronting a renting customer switching are just as high as they are now - FUD, file formats, familiarity, and the MS name (which means a lot to many users, believe it or not)
Actually, the GP forgot to mention the biggest advantage of all of renting for MS : they do not need to develop much any more. When selling their OS's over the last 30 years they had to produce something different every couple of years (and get people to buy it) or their revenue dried up. XP and Win7 being fairly good, combined with the fact that PCs themselves are now powerful enough to do almost anything the user needs (so fewer Windows pre-loaded ones sold) has hurt Microsoft and they don't want that scenario ever again.
But with rental they can sack most of their developers, lean back, and collect steady predictable rents for ever more (company accountants love a steady income). Well almost : obviously they will do cosmetic make-overs now and then, and do security patches, and will eventually need to stir at some time in the future when other developments threaten to overtake them (like has happened with tablets).
Rental had been Microsoft's wet dream for a long time now.
There is a reason now to switch.
That's exactly what people said when Windows XP came out and Microsoft introduced the "activation" process that's required.
And many did switch, and they did with Win Vista, and many are switching today because of Win10. However, this is not the YOLOD which will never happen, thank goodness. The YOLOD would be like the Eternal September on the Internet.
* YOLOD : Year of Linux on Desktops - can't we make this acronym official?
Windows 7 recognizes my USB mouse, but randomly fails to register clicks.
Windows does not recognise some of your mouse clicks? Luxury !!
On my laptop, set up for dual booting Windows and Debian, Windows recognises my mouse but not the keyboard. I have re-installed Windows several times but no-go. The Debian is fine, using it now.
No, they just assume somebody in a big, old, heavy car is going to be limited to slower reactions. That big old heavy steel car has lower crash survivability than most of the new little light things.
I don't think the drivers of the new light things were worried about the GP's survivability. They were more concerned with their own.
I remember when people said that about XP. Yet, here we all are.
Yes, here I am with XP still in a VM. I boot it up when those Indian guys phone me to tell me I have a virus and let them play with it for half an hour.
Agreed. Ryobi stuff is crap. It fails after the year's guarantee, and it's impossible to get spares for it.
I do have an Android tablet and it tells me I am in Uxbridge (a London suburb). In fact I am about 150 miles from there, in Wales (promise to tell no-one). So I'm not too worried about their telemetry unless they are bluffing.
Obviously this means trusting some guy on the internet more than Microsoft
No problem then.
The same (or equivalent) people paying thousands of dollars to watch people run around with a real ball.
OK, so where do I pay my grandstand entry fee to watch a game stream?
People voting the iPhone in this reminds me of a similar poll for the worst film of all time. They came up with ones like "The War of the Worlds" (Tom Cruise version), "Terminator", "Forest Gump" etc. In other words they voted for films they had seen recently and did not happen to like themselves. They showed their complete ignorance of just how bad films can really be, such as "Plan 9 from Outer Space", "Manos, the Hands of Fate", and "The attack of the 50 foot Woman". These iFans have got their noses too close to their little screens.
But what's the reasoning?
if it looked like a VW camper bus with a Z-bed in back with a Grateful Dead sticker in the back window.... Definitely better.
No thanks, not my style and those VW vans were F*#i%ng awful. A hooker around my way was advertising rides in a stretch limo while being chauffered aroung town.
If I have to sit in a self-driving car fully alert of the surrounding traffic and always poised to take over from the computer then exactly how is this any better than normal car?
It isn't better, it is worse, because for example the scenario in the headline of TFA, and less spectacular lapses of concentration. It is also worse because if you must maintain as much alertness as if you were driving yourself, but are not, it is going to be very mentally stressful and even harrowing (as I find when I am passenger to any driver with a different style from mine). It seems to me that the only thing it would save is some lightweight arm movements and slight foot movements - but what is so hard about them?
You won't be saving money when the self-driving feature becomes standard (or even compulsory). It will be like PCs without pre-loaded software costing more than bare PCs because they are subsidised by the crapware. Like self driving software will be sponsored by McDonalds, and will drive you there when it's lunchtime.
Self-driving needs to be 100% self-sufficient or not at all.
Most desktop users still call the desktop the 'hard disk'.
Do they?
:-
I believe desktop users fall into four categories
Office workers
Power users/developers
Power Gamers [my term fro them, to exclude the Flappy Bird crowd]
Old timers who will use their XP desktop PC until it fails
A punishment.
Next question?