Who does this [tip in cash]?............ a $50 tip is nearly as bad from a carrying cash perspective.
You give $50 tips? Must be a very wealthy man.
The reason for tipping in cash is so that the particular waiter gets it. If you tip with a credit card, you don't know that the restaurant owner might get it. Is it really that hard to carry some coins for a tip? (Oh, forgot, the USA does not have any coin worth more than a peanut).
There actually is good advertizing.
[For example]
Reminders for something they wanted to do but forgot, or didn't think about. (People who bought X also bought Y.)
I don't give a shit what other people bought. As if other people never make mistakes.
Bargains (actual ones, not fake sales)
Every salesman will tell you his stuff is a bargain.
There is useful advertising, but on websites specifically for the purpose. The whole of Ebay is advertising, that is its point and I use it a lot. Also I expect every business to have its own website, which again is useful advertising.
If I want to buy a new camera I go to the websites of Pentax, Canon etc to see what they offer - those are advertising websites. As another example, if I need a plumber I Google for "Newport [my nearest town] plumbers" in order to find their adverts - even if unfortunately the results include shoe shops in New York because some admen think it is clever to flood their websites with dictionary keywords.
........ why induction might be better than using a conventional dock, especially for an automated car.
More resistant against vandals.
A plug-in point on a post does not seem particularly vandal prone. Avoid putting them in vandal-prone areas - cars are generally more mobile than vandals.
doesn't take up real estate with a charging station
Except for the credit card reader, unless everything is going to be free in La-La Land. Anyway, people (and entrepreneurs) will still want the adjacent shop to buy their booze and fags when they top up, so a few charging pillars wont make much difference.
No need for a person to hook up the charger.
faster connection
no need to play with adapters
no cables to trip over
A hard connection could be automated with a connector descending from the car to sockets on the ground. Some types of tram used to do that years ago. We are talking about self-parking cars aren't we? Even conventional cars do that now, so positioning is not a problem.
Contactless charging would be a bit more convenient than a hard connection, but seems unlikely to outweigh the penalty of energy losses in this "green" age. Seems to me that the main point is with regard to self-driving cars - that the car could be sent off empty to top up somewhere unattended, although as I said even a hard connection could be automated.
the bus parks over plates buried in the road. The driver then lowers receiver plates on the bottom of the bus to within 4cm of the road surface and the bus is charged
So it is not on the move, and the bus lowers plates. Might as well lower contacts - much cheaper and more efficient.
practically every piece of technology in the tool-chain up to and including the batteries (and their charge times) have gotten orders better in the decades since then
The laws of physics have not gotten better though. Charging across a significant air gap remains an inefficient part of the chain, no matter how much you improve the bits either side.
I think its both. I want an electric car because electricity is a shitload cheaper than petrol or diesel here.
Only because there is massive tax on petrol and diesel (in the UK anyway) and not on electricity. As long as only a few people adopt electric cars the government will be content to posture as the Godfather of Green-ness, and even give subsidies for it, but if/when most cars are electric do we really believe that the government will tolerate the loss of all that tax revenue? Good luck with that.
By that reasoning nobody would buy electric cars when their grid is fossil fuel powered. It reduces the benefit it does not negate it.
You are under-estimating the power of marketing. I once tried in vain to explain to a chatty guy on a train that his idea that running everything on compressed air "would cost nothing, because air was free, and pollution-free", would not in fact solve the World's energy problems.
Hyperloop is, from what I understand, way more flexible than HSR, and just as fast (or faster), with less of the overhead.
How the heck do you make out that the Hyperloop is more flexible than HSR? Just one example of HSR flexibility : it can run off its high speed lines onto slower legacy lines for the purpose of reaching into an existing city central station; the French TGVs do this for example. That sort of flexibility is lacking with any system that needs a non-standard track.
If the Hyperloop is going to run at the speeds claimed, it is going to need some serious civil engineering because the curvature will need to be very gentle and the rate of change of vertical gradient very slight - or the occupants are going to be tossed around like dried peas in a rattle. That won't be a problem in a flat-ish desert, but in hilly areas it will need a lot of tunnels and high viaducts, not just the cheap 20 ft pillars that some people think are all it will need.
You might understand math but you don't understand economics.... This little thing called "scale," and we now have the ability as the average person to purchase said good.
Not everything "scales". Eg gold and land do not "scale". The more people buy gold the dearer it gets.
You realize that your cell phone is based on a subscription model don't you? Unless you pay someone for some kind of connectivity it is pretty useless as a phone.....
False analogy. The clue to that is in the word "connectivity". I pay, and would expect to pay, my ISP for my PC's connectivity, not the maker of the PC or its operating system.
And yet you have no issues with that.
Actually I would. Being a light user of my cell phone I am on a pay per call scheme, not subscription.
... when someone brings home a pre-installed Linux machine..
Who are these people and what country are you in? In the UK it is not possible to buy a PC pre-installed with Linux (or ever has been AFAIR) except from a few very specialised build-to-order companies selling mainly to professionals. Such customers would know exactly what they want.
Grow the fuck up and join the rest of society here in 2016.
Despite having grown up, I also have never liked working with women around, because they have always treated me with unspoken contempt. As for "the rest of society" I'm not special : in my observation 80% of women at work treat 80% of the men with contempt - the 20% of the men not so treated being the charmers and Jocks. Of course women are greatly outnumbered by men anyway if you work in tech, so women can be picky. Or they think they are being picky but actually manage to consort with some of the worse guys. Nothing new there, women's lib has made no difference.
Don't tell me I should "break the ice" and try chatting to them at work; I've tried that and always nearly got a handbag in my face. I don't bother any more; I have found women though different routes, certainly not at work.
Well, the new owner's main slogan is "We help Advertisers reach the right Consumer".
So there will be no adverts here any more? Not that I see any adverts here anyway, so I suppose they have got it right for me already as I am definitely the wrong consumer.
I was still able to sleep in Saturday. And you know what, even sleeping in,.... I usually skip breakfast, and for laundry, being a single guy I just usually have my dirty pile and my clean pile,. I guess I did spend 2 hours on the phone........ and I also cleaned the bathroom........ Maybe you just work really inefficiently?
Wow, you have a hard life! Laundry, phone calls and bathroom cleaning !!
You should follow me around one Saturday. The jobs will include some or all of : cutting up and clearing two fallen trees (~40" girth), keeping about 25 other full sized trees pruned, mowing a half an acre of grass, progressively replacing about 200 yds of fencing, trimming about 500 yds of 10ft high hedging, manually cleaning about 0.1 acres of gravel driveway, digging and planting 0.1 acres of vegtable garden, laying paved paths around the garden, repainting the outside of the house (as part of which project is replacing the facia boards and guttering), redecorating the inside of the house (as part of which project is adding new electrical outlets and building cupboards), replacing the central heating boiler (involving significant replumbing), building a PC, reparing another, maintaining three websites, and servicing two cars.
... pointing out that computer science made daddy the richest man in the world would be sufficient to get them interested in science...
Computer science was not what made Bill Gates rich. There are plenty of people in CS, many far cleverer than Gates, who get no more than a working wage. Gates got rich because of a peculiar set of circumstances that happened at a particular time in computer history, following which he found riches thrust upon him.
What made Gates rich was buying an operating system (QDOS), selling it to IBM, and hiring the guy who wrote it (Tim Paterson) to port it to the IBM PC as PCDOS, and taking the royalties. That made his first "million" (the hardest part of getting rich) and the rest followed. It wasn't computer science, it was a business manoeuver, involving, as successful ones usually do, a combination of luck, skill, and con.
your payment for your data does not pay the remote end's cost. If they want to serve ads as part of their business model and you don't want the ads then don't visit the site.
I don't give a shit whether their business model works or not. The sites that depend on this business model the most are generally the ones I have least wish to visit. The internet is here to stay, but it could do with a lot of the crap being pruned out.
Were we not just saying the other day that APK had been so quite lately that we thought he must have been locked in a padded cell at last? We were wrong.
FWIW, I have used a hosts file for some years, but I don't know how anyone can make an issue out of it
2) Firefox labeled them as "sponsored" instead of being honest and labeling them what they are: advertisements.
What do you think sponsored means?
Sponsored means supporting someone financially or some other way. It does not have to involve advertisement, that is a particular case of sponsorship, but "sponsored" sounds posher.
Sponsor : "One who enters an engagement on behalf of another." - according to the Shorter Oxford Dictionary.
You wanting everything w/o ads tells me that you're ready and willing to offer micropayments to the people creating and publishing all those web sites.
Quite right. No-one would put anything on the internet unless they are paid for it. So if you are reading this pearl of wisdom, send me a micropayment. It took time and effort and paid bandwith to post it.
You are demonstrating incredible short sightedness. Mainly because you sit there asking "Is this something I want?" rather than "Is there a market for this?"
We are not being ridiculous, you are. Mainly because you are not thinking of other people.
No, he is not just thinking of himself; he is thinking of me too - and all the other people I talk to who are increasingly pissed off by some coder (in India probably) of some automated gizmo second guessing what our preferences are.
For example : automatic parking, no doubt "smartly" programmed to head for the nearest available slot to the nominal destination. But how will it know that in my work car park I prefer no-where near the turnstiles but rather in a quiet corner where I can sit and read in peace in the lunch break?
Slashdot Mirror
Who does this [tip in cash]? ............ a $50 tip is nearly as bad from a carrying cash perspective.
You give $50 tips? Must be a very wealthy man.
The reason for tipping in cash is so that the particular waiter gets it. If you tip with a credit card, you don't know that the restaurant owner might get it. Is it really that hard to carry some coins for a tip? (Oh, forgot, the USA does not have any coin worth more than a peanut).
There actually is good advertizing. [For example]
Reminders for something they wanted to do but forgot, or didn't think about. (People who bought X also bought Y.)
I don't give a shit what other people bought. As if other people never make mistakes.
Bargains (actual ones, not fake sales)
Every salesman will tell you his stuff is a bargain.
There is useful advertising, but on websites specifically for the purpose. The whole of Ebay is advertising, that is its point and I use it a lot. Also I expect every business to have its own website, which again is useful advertising.
If I want to buy a new camera I go to the websites of Pentax, Canon etc to see what they offer - those are advertising websites. As another example, if I need a plumber I Google for "Newport [my nearest town] plumbers" in order to find their adverts - even if unfortunately the results include shoe shops in New York because some admen think it is clever to flood their websites with dictionary keywords.
Ads from same domain as site are about as plentiful as unicorns.... apk
Well, for a start, there are about six such unicorns with your initials at the bottom on this very web page. Funny that.
........ why induction might be better than using a conventional dock, especially for an automated car.
More resistant against vandals.
A plug-in point on a post does not seem particularly vandal prone. Avoid putting them in vandal-prone areas - cars are generally more mobile than vandals.
doesn't take up real estate with a charging station
Except for the credit card reader, unless everything is going to be free in La-La Land. Anyway, people (and entrepreneurs) will still want the adjacent shop to buy their booze and fags when they top up, so a few charging pillars wont make much difference.
No need for a person to hook up the charger.
faster connection
no need to play with adapters
no cables to trip over
A hard connection could be automated with a connector descending from the car to sockets on the ground. Some types of tram used to do that years ago. We are talking about self-parking cars aren't we? Even conventional cars do that now, so positioning is not a problem.
Contactless charging would be a bit more convenient than a hard connection, but seems unlikely to outweigh the penalty of energy losses in this "green" age. Seems to me that the main point is with regard to self-driving cars - that the car could be sent off empty to top up somewhere unattended, although as I said even a hard connection could be automated.
the bus parks over plates buried in the road. The driver then lowers receiver plates on the bottom of the bus to within 4cm of the road surface and the bus is charged
So it is not on the move, and the bus lowers plates. Might as well lower contacts - much cheaper and more efficient.
practically every piece of technology in the tool-chain up to and including the batteries (and their charge times) have gotten orders better in the decades since then
The laws of physics have not gotten better though. Charging across a significant air gap remains an inefficient part of the chain, no matter how much you improve the bits either side.
I think its both. I want an electric car because electricity is a shitload cheaper than petrol or diesel here.
Only because there is massive tax on petrol and diesel (in the UK anyway) and not on electricity. As long as only a few people adopt electric cars the government will be content to posture as the Godfather of Green-ness, and even give subsidies for it, but if/when most cars are electric do we really believe that the government will tolerate the loss of all that tax revenue? Good luck with that.
By that reasoning nobody would buy electric cars when their grid is fossil fuel powered. It reduces the benefit it does not negate it.
You are under-estimating the power of marketing. I once tried in vain to explain to a chatty guy on a train that his idea that running everything on compressed air "would cost nothing, because air was free, and pollution-free", would not in fact solve the World's energy problems.
Mod parent up - got it in a nutshell.
Hyperloop is, from what I understand, way more flexible than HSR, and just as fast (or faster), with less of the overhead.
How the heck do you make out that the Hyperloop is more flexible than HSR? Just one example of HSR flexibility : it can run off its high speed lines onto slower legacy lines for the purpose of reaching into an existing city central station; the French TGVs do this for example. That sort of flexibility is lacking with any system that needs a non-standard track.
If the Hyperloop is going to run at the speeds claimed, it is going to need some serious civil engineering because the curvature will need to be very gentle and the rate of change of vertical gradient very slight - or the occupants are going to be tossed around like dried peas in a rattle. That won't be a problem in a flat-ish desert, but in hilly areas it will need a lot of tunnels and high viaducts, not just the cheap 20 ft pillars that some people think are all it will need.
Flexible? - No.
Just as long as his miracle batteries don't need gold, dilithium or unobtainium in their manufacture then.
Who TF is this Tony Stark anyway?
You might understand math but you don't understand economics. ... This little thing called "scale," and we now have the ability as the average person to purchase said good.
Not everything "scales". Eg gold and land do not "scale". The more people buy gold the dearer it gets.
You realize that your cell phone is based on a subscription model don't you? Unless you pay someone for some kind of connectivity it is pretty useless as a phone.....
False analogy. The clue to that is in the word "connectivity". I pay, and would expect to pay, my ISP for my PC's connectivity, not the maker of the PC or its operating system.
And yet you have no issues with that.
Actually I would. Being a light user of my cell phone I am on a pay per call scheme, not subscription.
... when someone brings home a pre-installed Linux machine ..
Who are these people and what country are you in? In the UK it is not possible to buy a PC pre-installed with Linux (or ever has been AFAIR) except from a few very specialised build-to-order companies selling mainly to professionals. Such customers would know exactly what they want.
Grow the fuck up and join the rest of society here in 2016.
Despite having grown up, I also have never liked working with women around, because they have always treated me with unspoken contempt. As for "the rest of society" I'm not special : in my observation 80% of women at work treat 80% of the men with contempt - the 20% of the men not so treated being the charmers and Jocks. Of course women are greatly outnumbered by men anyway if you work in tech, so women can be picky. Or they think they are being picky but actually manage to consort with some of the worse guys. Nothing new there, women's lib has made no difference.
Don't tell me I should "break the ice" and try chatting to them at work; I've tried that and always nearly got a handbag in my face. I don't bother any more; I have found women though different routes, certainly not at work.
Well, the new owner's main slogan is "We help Advertisers reach the right Consumer".
So there will be no adverts here any more? Not that I see any adverts here anyway, so I suppose they have got it right for me already as I am definitely the wrong consumer.
the research highlighted the consumer benefits
This benefits the owner of the router how exactly?
I was still able to sleep in Saturday. And you know what, even sleeping in, .... I usually skip breakfast, and for laundry, being a single guy I just usually have my dirty pile and my clean pile,. I guess I did spend 2 hours on the phone ........ and I also cleaned the bathroom. ....... Maybe you just work really inefficiently?
Wow, you have a hard life! Laundry, phone calls and bathroom cleaning !!
You should follow me around one Saturday. The jobs will include some or all of : cutting up and clearing two fallen trees (~40" girth), keeping about 25 other full sized trees pruned, mowing a half an acre of grass, progressively replacing about 200 yds of fencing, trimming about 500 yds of 10ft high hedging, manually cleaning about 0.1 acres of gravel driveway, digging and planting 0.1 acres of vegtable garden, laying paved paths around the garden, repainting the outside of the house (as part of which project is replacing the facia boards and guttering), redecorating the inside of the house (as part of which project is adding new electrical outlets and building cupboards), replacing the central heating boiler (involving significant replumbing), building a PC, reparing another, maintaining three websites, and servicing two cars.
... pointing out that computer science made daddy the richest man in the world would be sufficient to get them interested in science ...
Computer science was not what made Bill Gates rich. There are plenty of people in CS, many far cleverer than Gates, who get no more than a working wage. Gates got rich because of a peculiar set of circumstances that happened at a particular time in computer history, following which he found riches thrust upon him.
What made Gates rich was buying an operating system (QDOS), selling it to IBM, and hiring the guy who wrote it (Tim Paterson) to port it to the IBM PC as PCDOS, and taking the royalties. That made his first "million" (the hardest part of getting rich) and the rest followed. It wasn't computer science, it was a business manoeuver, involving, as successful ones usually do, a combination of luck, skill, and con.
your payment for your data does not pay the remote end's cost. If they want to serve ads as part of their business model and you don't want the ads then don't visit the site.
I don't give a shit whether their business model works or not. The sites that depend on this business model the most are generally the ones I have least wish to visit. The internet is here to stay, but it could do with a lot of the crap being pruned out.
Were we not just saying the other day that APK had been so quite lately that we thought he must have been locked in a padded cell at last? We were wrong.
FWIW, I have used a hosts file for some years, but I don't know how anyone can make an issue out of it
2) Firefox labeled them as "sponsored" instead of being honest and labeling them what they are: advertisements.
What do you think sponsored means?
Sponsored means supporting someone financially or some other way. It does not have to involve advertisement, that is a particular case of sponsorship, but "sponsored" sounds posher.
Sponsor : "One who enters an engagement on behalf of another." - according to the Shorter Oxford Dictionary.
You wanting everything w/o ads tells me that you're ready and willing to offer micropayments to the people creating and publishing all those web sites.
Quite right. No-one would put anything on the internet unless they are paid for it. So if you are reading this pearl of wisdom, send me a micropayment. It took time and effort and paid bandwith to post it.
You are demonstrating incredible short sightedness. Mainly because you sit there asking "Is this something I want?" rather than "Is there a market for this?"
We are not being ridiculous, you are. Mainly because you are not thinking of other people.
No, he is not just thinking of himself; he is thinking of me too - and all the other people I talk to who are increasingly pissed off by some coder (in India probably) of some automated gizmo second guessing what our preferences are.
For example : automatic parking, no doubt "smartly" programmed to head for the nearest available slot to the nominal destination. But how will it know that in my work car park I prefer no-where near the turnstiles but rather in a quiet corner where I can sit and read in peace in the lunch break?
Who knew that Volvo had the secret to immortality.
I'm going to sit in one all the time from now on.