if you want to be able to converse with others about various subjects you need to know what you are talking about......... You will be required to remember names, locations, relationships, experiences, events, etc... quickly and accurately.
The extroverts I have come across make up their "general knowledge" as they go along, and mostly get away with it because they sound plausible to those who know nothing. Politicians are a good example : when one of them starts spouting about a subject I happen to know about it is obvious BS, yet their many admirers lap it up like it is coming down from Mount Sinai. The second part of your statement however, remembering names etc of those in their circle, is more accurate however, and extroverts are good at it.
You're operating under the mistaken notion that the primary purpose of traffic lights is to increase safety and maximize throughput....It's called "traffic calming",
I'm not under that notion at all, well aware that it is for "calming", as you can see from other posts of mine here, now and in the past:-). As you say, it's infuriating, not calming, and I have even complained to my local council about it.
Traffic lights on a roundabout? Sort of defeats the purpose
Yep, in the UK. Try the Google Street View of Avonmouth, coming off the M5, the short spur North West to a traffic-light roundabout. There are eight signal heads for that intersection alone.
I often pass here late at night when there is no other traffic, yet the lights turn red in my face all the way round. I believe it is deliberate, it is supposed to "calm" you; actually it is infuriating and when I see them changing to red I floor it and jump them sometimes, the visibility is very clear anyway. I didn't say that.
Before doing that it would be very advantageous and far simpler to review the algorithms controlling existing traffic lights, which seem to have been devised by idiots.
There are junctions near me where the lights hold everything stopped for anything up to 30 seconds (and there no pedestrians crossing, in case you were wondering). Another junction has a pedestrian crossing 25 yards before it, and the two sets of lights are not synchronised; usually they are out of phase so when the junction lights go green only four cars are released with the rest of the queue held back at the pedestrian lights, and apart from those four cars nothing moves for about a minute.
There are some very easy wins to be had without waiting for pipe dream technology to appear.
Space requirements. A high-traffic roundabout requires more land area than a cross intersection.
I thought that the US had loads of space. Roundabouts have been back-fitted all over the place in the UK, including "mini-roundabouts" (which I don't believe achieve much), Having done that though, the trend in the UK is to install traffic lights at every intersection of the roundabout as well. There is a large roundabout near me (just off the M5 at Avonmouth) that has I reckon about fifty traffic light heads; I must count them one day.
As in only the standard safety tests that all cars currently go through, and nothing else?
Google's claim is disingenuous BS.
Current car construction regulations were written with the unspoken assumption that there would be a competent driver who can react to failures, for example can apply the handbrake if the footbrake fails. Of course a Google car can be programmed to apply a secondary brake if the primary one fails, but for that to occur automatically is not a requirement in the present construction regulations (in the UK anyway).
What a self-driving car needs to meet is the sum of the existing vehicle constructional safety requirements, and the driver competence requirements, and more as well. More because the driver competence test does not cover everything and every situation, because there is in it an assumption that a human who shows competence in the random situations arising in the test will probably be competent in other situations too (this is the nature of most human exams), because humans (even less intelligent ones) are very adaptable and resourceful compared with a computer.
For example how exactly are you supposed to direct the car to a specific parking spot..?
Ok, google, park next to the elevator/blue sedan/in spot 14A/etc...
I like to park away from other cars (less likely to get dinged) and away from the elevator. I expect the Google car would be programmed to park as close as possible to the elevator anyway, which is what most people want and exactly what I don't.
At work I park in the remotest area of the car park because I like quiet and privacy when I often go and sit in it at lunch break. I even wash it there sometimes. There are a few other like-minded people who do the same, spaced about. And the slots are not numbered - not even marked out where I park.
Every 2-3 months I make a certain journey and pull off-road for a coffee break (from a Thermos) by about a quarter mile. It is actually a quiet part of an army training area. Don't suppose the Google car would allow that, even assuming it were capable of off-roading. So no thanks.
Trouble is, programmers always consider what the average person finds convenient, not the edge cases. That is why I'd rather someone else does not program my movements for me.
Why do people talk as if Ubuntu/Lubuntu/Kubuntu/Whatevertu is a synonym for Linux? You talk about using the Lubuntu software center to get an alternative desktop environment (LXDE), saying you do not like Ubuntu, but Lubuntu is still basically Ubuntu - just a different desktop environment.
Ubuntu and its variants have gone out on a limb, become a total fork from Linux. Just ditch all of them and their Canonical crap and install an entirely different Linux distro.
Or you could use a PRINTER to make a hardcopy only when you need it, which 99.9% of the time, is NEVER.
Or you could get the BANK to use a printer to make a hardcopy and post it to you at their expense, so all you need is to pop it into the filing cabinet.
I often refer to past bank statements - only yesterday I needed to check what I paid by debit card for something I bought 11 months ago, for which I was claiming my money back under guarantee. Depending on your bank, but mine does not make it easy to see back past the current month and it is much faster to flick through paper copies anyway.
My bank has 5 years of online statements available, so I download all of them for the past year when I do my taxes, since I need them anyway then.
So you spent half an hour downloading them. I just pulled my paper copies from my filing cabinet.
In the last 3 years I have been twice to a bank... and the only people who were there were oldsters with a plastic bag full of invoices that they wanted the clerk to transfer money to,
WTF has this got to do with paperless statements? I have paper statements and have not been inside my bank for about 15 years (since I moved to a new area). I do not even know offhand where it is now, as I did receive a notice that it had moved too.
The judge did not accept my printed copy, he thought it was too easily faked. He did accept my hard-copy mailed statement from the bank
In the UK, bank statements printed off the Internet are not generally acceptable legally. However, that does not stop the banks and building societies from nagging us to "Go paperless".
Here is an example from the Coventry Building Society. Under Identification Requirements to open an account, it says among the documentation required:
Bank/building society statement less than 3 months old (not from Coventry Building Society) and not printed off the internet - original document [My emphasis]
.
Yet elsewhere on the website (and on statements) it says:
If you are registered for Online Services.... why not switch to paperless statements?
The BBC licencing fee is worth it if it saves having to sit through the commercial breaks that the non-BBC (ITV) channels have - typically 15 minites in a 1 hour programme.
This is less relevant however with the ability to record ITV programmes and watch later, fast-forwarding through the ads. That is the only way I watch ITV these days. Oh wait, I'm stealing.
In the past every time I moved they would continually harass me and send legal threats in disbelief that I don't own a TV, they've become more tolerable in recent years and usually one phone call will do the trick...
I had the same trouble. But I tried their website and it told me to phone. I then tried the phone and after about 20 minutes of being re-directed between different robots and being told to ring differnt numbers, a robot eventually told me to go and use the website.
At that point I decided I would not spend any more time or money humouring their paranoia. That if they wished to take me to court, let them. Their weekly letters became increasingly hysterical but would then cease for a month or two, then start up from the bottom of the scale again.
It seemed to me that their position was analagous to a shopkeeper who has wares spread out on the pavement in front of his shop. I walk past and the shopkeeper runs out accusing me of stealing something on no firmer basis than that it would be easy. Seems to me that if that is what the shopkeeper believes it is for him to make the effort of finding any evidence and taking me to court.
A license to own a TV?! So do people actually do this?
I am in the UK and it works like this:-
If you live in a "law-abiding" middle class part of town they will check their records to see if any houses do not have a licence. There will only be a few, and they will hound those houses mercilessly, assuming that every house in the area must have a TV. I moved out of such a house leaving it empty for a year, returning once a fornight to pick up any post. There was a constant stream of legally threatening letters from the licencing authority who assumed I was watching TV woithout a licence, and I have no doubt there would have been attempted visits from their inspectors too. I ignored them all, only wishing that they would get on and carry out their threat to take me to court.
In the rougher no-go parts of town however, I understand that they consider it too dangerous to intervene, and too complex where for example six illegal immigrants are sharing part of the house and maybe TVs, disowned by all of them who pretend they cannot speak English anyway.
They also used to operate "detector vans" which could pin-point TVs from their high frequency emissions, but I don't know if that works with LCD TVs.
When you open an app or look at a browser page, there's a very fast auction... where different advertisers bid to.. show you an ad
Very fast? Not in my experience - it's fucking slow, so much so that it turns me off many websites. Now, if a website spends more than about ten seconds doing these shinanegins (as can be seen in the staus bar) I go elsewhere.
It suprises me that most people (even a website developer I was talking to recently) are unaware that this bidding goes on. They just think that their connection is slow.
Many students are forced.... into advanced grammer courses when they would be better served by more emphasis on the lower levels that they are still weak at.
Already furniture (for example) is crappier than it was in my father's or grandfather's time, now mostly made of chipboard rather than solid wood because the world is running out of hardwood forests.
No, it's not, this is completely false. Furniture now is better than it was in your grandfather's time, or earlier. The problem is that you're buying cheap-ass furniture, instead of hiring a woodworker to make custom pieces for you.
Of course you can still get well made hardwood furniture for a price. Even in Soylent Green you could still buy steak. But I am comparing like with like - my grandfather was not rich and his cupboards were basic (did you miss that word?), sold to the equivalent market that the crap chipboard stuff is today. But his cupboards could last for ever (I use them daily) whereas some new stuff I buy today is falling to pieces even as I install it - I often need to add strengthening.
For example, I have bought three beds over the last 20 years. The first had storage drawers with plywood bottoms. The second had storage drawers with hardboard bottoms. The third had storage drawers with cardboard bottoms. In the latter two cases the bottoms promptly burst out when blankets were put in them, and I made steel plates to fit under them to give adequate strength. The beds were all the same brand, same price bracket. I don't consider my life as having improved with regard to beds.
If you aren't paying thousands of dollars for a single piece of furniture, then you can't compare: back in the old days, people spent a fortune on furniture...... All those nice museum pieces you see from a couple centuries ago are the furniture pieces that ultra-wealthy people had commissioned
My grandfather certainly could not have spent a fortune. In fact he probably bought them second-hand, which was possible as this stuff was solidly made, though not stylish. I'm not talking about museum pieces, but about the basic, functional, tool cupboards in my shed.
These days, woodworkers get a lot of their hardwood from Africa, which wasn't available to your grandfather...... And there's still plenty of hardwood coming from North America. Go to a lumber store and see for yourself. It isn't even that expensive.
Funny, because grandfather's cupboards are made from hardwood; I wonder if you know what hardwood means.The USA is one area that has a relatively large amount of forest, for now, but I am in the UK and you won't see hardwood in publicly accessible "lumber stores" except in tiny amounts like beading and veneers. Any significant amounts of hardwood are kept within the professional trade.
As for Africa, did you hear that it is being colonised by China? I cannot see much hardwood being left over for the West in the future.
The more people you have participating in an economy, the larger the economy is, the more wealth is created, and the more jobs there are.
What matters is not the total wealth or number of jobs, but the total per person. Once you have achieved the economies of scale (which the present developed nations have exceeded by a long way already) you hit the limits of resources that cannot be increased - such as land, energy and minerals. There are also things directly degraded by larger populations, such as living space and road congestion.
Already furniture (for example) is crappier than it was in my father's or grandfather's time, now mostly made of chipboard rather than solid wood because the world is running out of hardwood forests. I still have some of their cupboards in my shed for tools, basic but strong - I have thrown away newer cupboards as too weak. I am "wealthier" than my ancestors in terms of microchip gizmos, but not in terms of furniture. They did not need to spend two hours a day commuting in traffic jams either.
That is silly. People use PINs all the time with debit cards.... My PIN is my wife's birthday, so I have plenty of incentive to not forget it.
It certainly is silly; so silly that I wonder if you are not allowed in the US to change the PIN to something easier to remember. The date idea, being four digits, is a good one. I might use dates of battles; a pickpocket, or even someone who knows me, is hardly likely to derive it because (1) He won't know that I use dates of battles and (2) Even if he did he won't know which battle.
So my HSBC card might be the Battle of Blenheim, and my Lloyds card the Battle of Borodino. Actually, they are not.
Slashdot Mirror
The study was done by Satoshi Kanazawa, so take it with a grain of salt:
That is an ad hominem attack. Attack his arguments if you think they are wrong, or just say nothing..
if you want to be able to converse with others about various subjects you need to know what you are talking about ......... You will be required to remember names, locations, relationships, experiences, events, etc... quickly and accurately.
The extroverts I have come across make up their "general knowledge" as they go along, and mostly get away with it because they sound plausible to those who know nothing. Politicians are a good example : when one of them starts spouting about a subject I happen to know about it is obvious BS, yet their many admirers lap it up like it is coming down from Mount Sinai. The second part of your statement however, remembering names etc of those in their circle, is more accurate however, and extroverts are good at it.
You're operating under the mistaken notion that the primary purpose of traffic lights is to increase safety and maximize throughput. ...It's called "traffic calming",
I'm not under that notion at all, well aware that it is for "calming", as you can see from other posts of mine here, now and in the past :-). As you say, it's infuriating, not calming, and I have even complained to my local council about it.
Traffic lights on a roundabout? Sort of defeats the purpose
Yep, in the UK. Try the Google Street View of Avonmouth, coming off the M5, the short spur North West to a traffic-light roundabout. There are eight signal heads for that intersection alone.
I often pass here late at night when there is no other traffic, yet the lights turn red in my face all the way round. I believe it is deliberate, it is supposed to "calm" you; actually it is infuriating and when I see them changing to red I floor it and jump them sometimes, the visibility is very clear anyway. I didn't say that.
Hides out of sight and then pops out - sounds perfect.
Before doing that it would be very advantageous and far simpler to review the algorithms controlling existing traffic lights, which seem to have been devised by idiots.
There are junctions near me where the lights hold everything stopped for anything up to 30 seconds (and there no pedestrians crossing, in case you were wondering). Another junction has a pedestrian crossing 25 yards before it, and the two sets of lights are not synchronised; usually they are out of phase so when the junction lights go green only four cars are released with the rest of the queue held back at the pedestrian lights, and apart from those four cars nothing moves for about a minute.
There are some very easy wins to be had without waiting for pipe dream technology to appear.
Space requirements. A high-traffic roundabout requires more land area than a cross intersection.
I thought that the US had loads of space. Roundabouts have been back-fitted all over the place in the UK, including "mini-roundabouts" (which I don't believe achieve much), Having done that though, the trend in the UK is to install traffic lights at every intersection of the roundabout as well. There is a large roundabout near me (just off the M5 at Avonmouth) that has I reckon about fifty traffic light heads; I must count them one day.
As in only the standard safety tests that all cars currently go through, and nothing else?
Google's claim is disingenuous BS.
Current car construction regulations were written with the unspoken assumption that there would be a competent driver who can react to failures, for example can apply the handbrake if the footbrake fails. Of course a Google car can be programmed to apply a secondary brake if the primary one fails, but for that to occur automatically is not a requirement in the present construction regulations (in the UK anyway).
What a self-driving car needs to meet is the sum of the existing vehicle constructional safety requirements, and the driver competence requirements, and more as well. More because the driver competence test does not cover everything and every situation, because there is in it an assumption that a human who shows competence in the random situations arising in the test will probably be competent in other situations too (this is the nature of most human exams), because humans (even less intelligent ones) are very adaptable and resourceful compared with a computer.
For example how exactly are you supposed to direct the car to a specific parking spot..?
Ok, google, park next to the elevator/blue sedan/in spot 14A/etc...
I like to park away from other cars (less likely to get dinged) and away from the elevator. I expect the Google car would be programmed to park as close as possible to the elevator anyway, which is what most people want and exactly what I don't.
At work I park in the remotest area of the car park because I like quiet and privacy when I often go and sit in it at lunch break. I even wash it there sometimes. There are a few other like-minded people who do the same, spaced about. And the slots are not numbered - not even marked out where I park. Every 2-3 months I make a certain journey and pull off-road for a coffee break (from a Thermos) by about a quarter mile. It is actually a quiet part of an army training area. Don't suppose the Google car would allow that, even assuming it were capable of off-roading. So no thanks.
Trouble is, programmers always consider what the average person finds convenient, not the edge cases. That is why I'd rather someone else does not program my movements for me.
Here is a good click-bait title...... "Republicans may like getting their salad tossed after Jeb Bush buys ranch dressing manufacturer."
Cool, but where's the link?
No.. #bringgatesback, sadly he has no interest in Windows anymore, so will likely never happen.
So he uses Linux these days? What a turnout. Or has he gone senile and returned to DOS?
Why do people talk as if Ubuntu/Lubuntu/Kubuntu/Whatevertu is a synonym for Linux? You talk about using the Lubuntu software center to get an alternative desktop environment (LXDE), saying you do not like Ubuntu, but Lubuntu is still basically Ubuntu - just a different desktop environment.
Ubuntu and its variants have gone out on a limb, become a total fork from Linux. Just ditch all of them and their Canonical crap and install an entirely different Linux distro.
Or you could use a PRINTER to make a hardcopy only when you need it, which 99.9% of the time, is NEVER.
Or you could get the BANK to use a printer to make a hardcopy and post it to you at their expense, so all you need is to pop it into the filing cabinet.
I often refer to past bank statements - only yesterday I needed to check what I paid by debit card for something I bought 11 months ago, for which I was claiming my money back under guarantee. Depending on your bank, but mine does not make it easy to see back past the current month and it is much faster to flick through paper copies anyway.
My bank has 5 years of online statements available, so I download all of them for the past year when I do my taxes, since I need them anyway then.
So you spent half an hour downloading them. I just pulled my paper copies from my filing cabinet.
In the last 3 years I have been twice to a bank ... and the only people who were there were oldsters with a plastic bag full of invoices that they wanted the clerk to transfer money to,
WTF has this got to do with paperless statements? I have paper statements and have not been inside my bank for about 15 years (since I moved to a new area). I do not even know offhand where it is now, as I did receive a notice that it had moved too.
The judge did not accept my printed copy, he thought it was too easily faked. He did accept my hard-copy mailed statement from the bank
In the UK, bank statements printed off the Internet are not generally acceptable legally. However, that does not stop the banks and building societies from nagging us to "Go paperless". Here is an example from the Coventry Building Society. Under Identification Requirements to open an account, it says among the documentation required :
Bank/building society statement less than 3 months old (not from Coventry Building Society) and not printed off the internet - original document [My emphasis]
. Yet elsewhere on the website (and on statements) it says :
If you are registered for Online Services .... why not switch to paperless statements?
Hypocrites.
The BBC licencing fee is worth it if it saves having to sit through the commercial breaks that the non-BBC (ITV) channels have - typically 15 minites in a 1 hour programme.
This is less relevant however with the ability to record ITV programmes and watch later, fast-forwarding through the ads. That is the only way I watch ITV these days. Oh wait, I'm stealing.
In the past every time I moved they would continually harass me and send legal threats in disbelief that I don't own a TV, they've become more tolerable in recent years and usually one phone call will do the trick...
I had the same trouble. But I tried their website and it told me to phone. I then tried the phone and after about 20 minutes of being re-directed between different robots and being told to ring differnt numbers, a robot eventually told me to go and use the website.
At that point I decided I would not spend any more time or money humouring their paranoia. That if they wished to take me to court, let them. Their weekly letters became increasingly hysterical but would then cease for a month or two, then start up from the bottom of the scale again.
It seemed to me that their position was analagous to a shopkeeper who has wares spread out on the pavement in front of his shop. I walk past and the shopkeeper runs out accusing me of stealing something on no firmer basis than that it would be easy. Seems to me that if that is what the shopkeeper believes it is for him to make the effort of finding any evidence and taking me to court.
A license to own a TV?! So do people actually do this?
I am in the UK and it works like this :-
If you live in a "law-abiding" middle class part of town they will check their records to see if any houses do not have a licence. There will only be a few, and they will hound those houses mercilessly, assuming that every house in the area must have a TV. I moved out of such a house leaving it empty for a year, returning once a fornight to pick up any post. There was a constant stream of legally threatening letters from the licencing authority who assumed I was watching TV woithout a licence, and I have no doubt there would have been attempted visits from their inspectors too. I ignored them all, only wishing that they would get on and carry out their threat to take me to court.
In the rougher no-go parts of town however, I understand that they consider it too dangerous to intervene, and too complex where for example six illegal immigrants are sharing part of the house and maybe TVs, disowned by all of them who pretend they cannot speak English anyway.
They also used to operate "detector vans" which could pin-point TVs from their high frequency emissions, but I don't know if that works with LCD TVs.
When you open an app or look at a browser page, there's a very fast auction ... where different advertisers bid to .. show you an ad
Very fast? Not in my experience - it's fucking slow, so much so that it turns me off many websites. Now, if a website spends more than about ten seconds doing these shinanegins (as can be seen in the staus bar) I go elsewhere.
It suprises me that most people (even a website developer I was talking to recently) are unaware that this bidding goes on. They just think that their connection is slow.
Many students are forced .... into advanced grammer courses when they would be better served by more emphasis on the lower levels that they are still weak at.
Like spelling?
Already furniture (for example) is crappier than it was in my father's or grandfather's time, now mostly made of chipboard rather than solid wood because the world is running out of hardwood forests.
No, it's not, this is completely false. Furniture now is better than it was in your grandfather's time, or earlier. The problem is that you're buying cheap-ass furniture, instead of hiring a woodworker to make custom pieces for you.
Of course you can still get well made hardwood furniture for a price. Even in Soylent Green you could still buy steak. But I am comparing like with like - my grandfather was not rich and his cupboards were basic (did you miss that word?), sold to the equivalent market that the crap chipboard stuff is today. But his cupboards could last for ever (I use them daily) whereas some new stuff I buy today is falling to pieces even as I install it - I often need to add strengthening.
For example, I have bought three beds over the last 20 years. The first had storage drawers with plywood bottoms. The second had storage drawers with hardboard bottoms. The third had storage drawers with cardboard bottoms. In the latter two cases the bottoms promptly burst out when blankets were put in them, and I made steel plates to fit under them to give adequate strength. The beds were all the same brand, same price bracket. I don't consider my life as having improved with regard to beds.
If you aren't paying thousands of dollars for a single piece of furniture, then you can't compare: back in the old days, people spent a fortune on furniture. ..... All those nice museum pieces you see from a couple centuries ago are the furniture pieces that ultra-wealthy people had commissioned
My grandfather certainly could not have spent a fortune. In fact he probably bought them second-hand, which was possible as this stuff was solidly made, though not stylish. I'm not talking about museum pieces, but about the basic, functional, tool cupboards in my shed.
These days, woodworkers get a lot of their hardwood from Africa, which wasn't available to your grandfather...... And there's still plenty of hardwood coming from North America. Go to a lumber store and see for yourself. It isn't even that expensive.
Funny, because grandfather's cupboards are made from hardwood; I wonder if you know what hardwood means.The USA is one area that has a relatively large amount of forest, for now, but I am in the UK and you won't see hardwood in publicly accessible "lumber stores" except in tiny amounts like beading and veneers. Any significant amounts of hardwood are kept within the professional trade.
As for Africa, did you hear that it is being colonised by China? I cannot see much hardwood being left over for the West in the future.
it makes me wonder how many crashes we would have had in autonomous mode, if there weren't an attentive driver
What's your point?
The point is that the safety driver's presence and power to intervene means that we cannot rely on the accident rate statistics racked up so far.
The safety driver thought the bus would yield, they did not say anything about what the Google AI expected the bus to do.
Looks like that is what the AI thought too.
The more people you have participating in an economy, the larger the economy is, the more wealth is created, and the more jobs there are.
What matters is not the total wealth or number of jobs, but the total per person. Once you have achieved the economies of scale (which the present developed nations have exceeded by a long way already) you hit the limits of resources that cannot be increased - such as land, energy and minerals. There are also things directly degraded by larger populations, such as living space and road congestion.
Already furniture (for example) is crappier than it was in my father's or grandfather's time, now mostly made of chipboard rather than solid wood because the world is running out of hardwood forests. I still have some of their cupboards in my shed for tools, basic but strong - I have thrown away newer cupboards as too weak. I am "wealthier" than my ancestors in terms of microchip gizmos, but not in terms of furniture. They did not need to spend two hours a day commuting in traffic jams either.
That is silly. People use PINs all the time with debit cards.... My PIN is my wife's birthday, so I have plenty of incentive to not forget it.
It certainly is silly; so silly that I wonder if you are not allowed in the US to change the PIN to something easier to remember. The date idea, being four digits, is a good one. I might use dates of battles; a pickpocket, or even someone who knows me, is hardly likely to derive it because (1) He won't know that I use dates of battles and (2) Even if he did he won't know which battle.
So my HSBC card might be the Battle of Blenheim, and my Lloyds card the Battle of Borodino. Actually, they are not.