"and the passenger has their own eyes to compensate or add attention to the road" This is generally only the case if the passenger happens to also regularly drive. or otherwise do not place any implicit trust on the driver.
Children are an obvious example of this. I see mums driving along while remonstrating with thier children because they are fighting each other or something. I would not rate the concentration on the road very high for either driver or passengers in those scenarios.
If you are about to hit something a passenger will shut up, or better yet, warn you.
Depends on the passenger. You don't know my sister-in-law, who is totally oblivious of anything except what she is talking about - usually her shopping experiences from the previous day. I reckon she would still be talking about it after the crash.
Buddy, child prn existed way way before the internet and even if somehow you manage to eradicate it entirely from the internet, child prn will continue to exist in the world.
No doubt it did exist, but I never saw any CP, even though I browsed porn mag shops on a few occasions, and I would not have known where to begin to find it if I'd wanted it. OTOH, I am sure I could soon find it on the Web today if I wanted, and in fact I have seen side-adverts on other sites that look suspiciously like links to CP.
As for "continuing to exist", most crimes continue to exist despite laws against them, but laws reduce their occurence. Eg theft levels would be >1000 times higher if it were not for it being illegal. You think all laws should be abandoned because crimes continue to exist? You would have loved living in the Dark Ages.
On the eve of the 9/11 attacks, the US Army's top priority was the Crusader Artillery, a 99 ton monstrosity what would have proved nearly useless in the the ensuing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The link says it weighs less than half your 99 ton. Just looks like a modern 155mm Self Propelled Gun to me.
like the UK during WW2--a huge aircraft and troop carrier parked off the coast of Germany. No disrespect to the British, who just happened to be living on "the carrier" when the extra troops arrived
You obviously got your "history" from the movies. Apart from the numbers of American and British invading Europe in 1944 being of the same order, it was the British who stopped a collapse of the US forces in the Battle of the Ardennes in the following winter. Basically the US army, like the French Army, had (still has?) a similar (and fatal) trust in "elan", so the troops had little training in fighting defensively or in retreat; they considered to train for such situations was defeatism. The British OTOH were used to colonial wars in which remote outposts might need to defend themselves for weeks against revolting natives until re-inforcements arrived. The US attitude was fine until they found themselves needing to fight defensively, as in the Ardennes; then they panicked and ran - an episode that US historians tend to gloss over.
The exception in the Ardennes was the US Airborne divisions. Those paratroops were trained in defensive fighting because of their role in capturing bridges etc behind enemy lines and waiting for ground troops to catch up. Hence the brilliant and tenacious defence of Bastogne by the US 101st Airborne.
I would opine that Windows 95 was actually the last innovative product that Microsoft brought out.
WTF ?! - a kludgy OS that was outdated at its launch - it had been preceded by better OS's in Windows NT and OS/2. MS should have been producing a Lite version of NT in 1995, but someone in MS was still in love with DOS and wanted to keep building OSs on its ricketty foundation - as they did with Win95/98/ME for 5 wasted years.
AND it ran on just about every configuration of PC hardware imaginable.
That is not thanks to MS, it is thanks to the hardware makers who knew that without W95 drivers for their kit they would never sell it. MS was in the fortunate position that they could lean back and let the hardware makers do the grunt work of writing drivers for everything except the generic stuff like keyboard and mouse.
Have you actually used WinME? It's the same Win98, but with DOS hidden and locked downWindows 2000 is a much more modern NT-based OS
I read Devman as that is what he meant - that WinME was the last OS to be based on DOS.
Windows 2000 was originally planned to replace the DOS-based 98, but application/driver compatibility was not perfect, so Microsoft instead produced the WinME abomination before finally moving everyone to XP.
I understand that it was not because "app/driver compatibility was not perfect" (it still isn't) but because of MS internal politics. The DOS/W9x team and the NT team were run in rivalry and the former lasted for years after they should have been taken out and shot. By about 1998, even entry level PCs could easily have run a lite version of NT (I ran NT4 then on a far-from-cutting-edge PC). The excuse was that games needed the direct hardware access that W9x allowed, and that the games writers could not adjust to NT. Eventually, with XP, the games writers had to adjust - or get lost.
From the link : " Most of NT's core designers had worked on and with VMS at Digital; some had worked directly with Cutler.... Many users believe that NT's developers carried concepts from VMS to NT, but most don't know just how similar NT and VMS are at the kernel level (despite the Usenet joke that if you increment each letter in VMS you end up with WNTWindows NT). "
And : " [the] similarities could fill a book. In fact, you can read sections of VAX/VMS Internals and Data Structures (Digital Press) as an accurate description of NT internals simply by translating VMS terms to NT terms. "
How's the kernel you wrote doing these days?
Easy to criticise others i guess.
Who TF modded this as "Insightful" ?
Here is a quote (AFAIR) from the great Dr Johnson:- "I can criticise a carpenter for a badly made table, even though I could not make a table myself. It is not my job to make a table."
Back in Ancient Greece I think, after an arch was finished being built, the master builder would stand underneath the arch while the supports were taken down. Kind of gives you a pretty good incentive to not fuck up when the quality of your work determines if you live or die.
Perhaps we could reintroduce something similar to that, require that the owners of the construction company building the plant live within 1 mile of the plant for X years.
Funnily enough, the Ancient Greeks never discovered the arch. That is why their temple interiors were a forest of columns holding up beams.
As for the "owners of the construction company" living within one mile, you should think more of the designers and those who run the plant. In fact the people who run these plants do tend to live close by and think nothing of it, and as an engineer myself who has been involved in heavy engineering projects, no doubts about the integrity of my work, of the sort that would make me hesitate to "stand under it", ever cross my mind. It is not any threat of "danger" that motivates me to do work well (or money as some here seem to think), but pride in my job.
I have a senior position in a UK nuclear power station company and have both designed and assessed critical engineering features.
No-one has any idea [of] the exact number of deaths and disabilities from the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan
Of course no-one knows the exact number, but the data is amenable to statistical analysis and the rules concerning dosages (such as here : www.hse.gov.uk/radiation/ionising/doses/) are based on extremely pessimistic interpretations of those statistics. The levels allowable even to regular nuclear workers are far below any that have been detected to have any effect whatever on a person, and the 1mSv/y for a member of the public is significantly below that and even below natural radiation levels.
All I know is that I will NEVER trust people to run fission power stations as people cut corners and lie.
I find that a pretty offensive accusation, and just shows how little you are aware of the culture within at least the UK nuclear power industry. I have been an engineer in several areas where public safety is involved, and the nuclear industry is the most conscientious of the lot - almost painfully so. I have never seen corners cut - more like people holding their trousers up using belts, braces and rawlbolts too. In fact I tend to argue against some of the excessive precautions, not because I am after profit (makes no difference to my salary) but because they are simply wasteful and unnecessary - sounds to me like some of the Fukushima measures are just that.
......... would you trust that statement with your life?
As someone else said, you had better find a cave. Let's assume you do not trust me despite (or because of) this post. FWIW, I was previously in the railway industry and one of my responsibilities was to derive a method to calculate margins against train derailment, which fed into the design of certain trains in use now. I also did the stress calculations for certain railway vehicles on which you could be riding - so avoid trains entirely if I were you. Also I did the stress calcs for a certain railway over-bridge in North London - so don't drive under any railway bridges in that area. I also did the stress calcs for certain road vehicle designs - so don't get into any road vehicles in case they are one of mine. And if you don't trust me, how about trusting someone else you don't know instead?
BTW, I sleep perfectly well at night, in case you were wondering.
Spatial ability is testable. I took such a test to get into high school.It is explicitly listed on tests such as the ASVAB.
I also took such a test (called the "Eleven-Plus", in the UK years ago to get placed in a selective Grammar School), and I am suprised that someone says it is "untestable".
The Eleven-Plus consisted of three papers, Maths, English and Intelligence. The intelligence test included a lot of diagramatic puzzles such as being able to pair patterns that were both mirror-imaged and inverted. I hated the English test but loved those spatial puzzles - could do them at a glance. I am now an engineer and need to use those spatial abilities all the time.
Creativity can and is taught. I teach it all the time.
You can stand up and "teach" it, but is it learned?
I work with kids in after school programs..... If you pair a dull kid up with a brighter kid, he will learn by example.
You are part of the problem - trying to normalise everyone. In the UK there has been a theory of socialist origin that everyone has exactly the same ability, but opportunities differ. So they abolished Grammar schools (which were selective) and put all kids in the same "comprehensive" schools with, like your theory, the idea that the [apparently] bright kids would pull the [apparently] slow kids up to the same high level. What has happened is that everyone has ended up mediocre. Goes a lot to explain why the UK has fallen from being world technical leader to just saying "wow" when they see a new gadget from Taiwan.
My son was exceptionally bright, so in a class of mixed abilities he got postioned into tutoring his slower fellow pupils (like in your classes), so for two years he learned nothing (except from me at home) and began to get dissillusioned with learning. That is not even to mention the distraction of the disruptive pupils, who tend to be the duller ones because it is the duller ones who are not interested in learning (cause/effect or effect/cause ?) so out of boredom they create havoc instead.
Not really. Lead acid is about as good now as it was 50 years ago.
No, it is worse. Older car batteries used to spend a few months getting noticably worse, but still usable, like you needed to put them on charge on cold nights. So you got advance warning that you needed a new one, and you could avoid getting to the point of being stranded somewhere. Nowadays, they fail suddenly and completely with no warning - my last failure was a totally dead battery after I had only stopped for 15 minutes to buy something on the way home from work, even though it had been perfectly good until then. First time in my life I ever had to call a breakdown service.
Perhaps modern car batteries are "better" in have a higher power/weight or are "greener" in some way. I don't care.
Retargeting is 5x more effective than context based ad targeting.
Citation?
Here's why. Imagine that you've just been shopping around for a new pair of shoes....Then you get distracted The next day you... go to a tech blog.... but look right there, an ad for Nike. Your memory kicks in and you recall shopping for shoes.
How the hell do you forget that you are looking for new shoes? You get reminded every time you put your old ones on.
The Nike ad is right they [sic] so you click and then buy. Was the retargeted ad helpful to you? Some would say yes. Was it invasive? Maybe. Did you buy a pair of shoes from the company that used retargeted ads, absolutely.
No I wouldn't buy the Nikes, because an advert popping up in the middle of a tech blog will piss me off, and if it were not intrusive I would not even notice it on an unrelated site.
What you people ignore is the piss-off factor. There may be some people who will buy something because it took over their screen, but others (like me) will be so annoyed that it is the last thing they will buy. As you suggest, I make buying decisions based on research; eg if I want a camera I will base my choice on as many independent camera reviews as possible. Then I will search for camera sellers' websites to compare prices; then I buy. Adverts popping up on irrelevant websites, billboards or TV will merely annoy me and might put me off entirely.
[Nukenerd] Also, Musk's idea is to run inside a vacuum tube. A leak caused by an earthquake would let in air, which, if you hit it at 4000 mph, would be like hitting a brick wall.
[Teancum] I'm really curious about what details you happen to know about this hyperloop system. Are you a SpaceX or Tesla employee that has had a couple of cool ones with the boss to get him to spill his guts about the idea?
No. But some of the links I followed (eg www.businessinsider.com/what-is-elon-musks-hyperloop-2013-5) referred to an evacuated tunnel.
[Teancum] Otherwise, I don't think anybody but Musk has a bloody clue about how his system works. When asked explicitly if it was an underground vacuum tube system, Elon Musk even said "No".
I am a former London Undergound railway engineer and I can tell you that the air resistance in a tunnel is higher than in the open, and that there is no way that 4000 mph is going to be possible in a tunnel unless it is evacuated. The train would melt otherwise, even if you could give it the power.
[Teancum] In other words, this whole article is just a bunch of BS.
Several railways have used an external tube (ie the whole train was not inside it) with a piston to pull them along. Brunel did it with the South Devon Railway. In his obsession with this propulsion, he proved himself to be a lousy mechanical engineer - even if he was a superb civil engineer (although not even that on this particular line). There are all sorts of problems, not least sectioning and pointwork (US "switches"?)
Terrorists go for planes as most people seem to view them as more "cool" than trains, and assume they carry richer passengers. Goodness knows why, and that could change.
Most of the time you can just walk right on 10 minutes before the train leaves.
I don't know about the US (except that most people there seem scarcely to have heard of trains), but in the UK you can board most trains seconds before they leave. At a main terminus such as London Paddington it may be a minute because there is such a high throughput that they want the train to be ready to go immediately it gets the green light.
Because the high speed train can stop much quicker. At 4000 mph even an emergency stop is going to cover a far greater distance than a 200 mph high speed train will (400 times as much in fact), so the chance of running into a dislocation is much higher. On Japan's high speed lines there are earthquake signals that turn red on tremors.
Also, Musk's idea is to run inside a vacuum tube. A leak caused by an earthquake would let in air, which, if you hit it at 4000 mph, would be like hitting a brick wall.
Fining the NHS is pointless.... Those responsible don't care because its not their money.
They should fine the contractor instead, as it was his laziness/incompetence that caused this.
Wrong, I think you would find those responsible DO care and are feeling very embarrased about this. Nevertheless, the episode shows that they were incompetent and should simply be sacked. There are too many incapable people holding jobs they are not up to, and too many capable people unemployed.
Apart from that, there is no way that the NHS should have been letting PC's off the premises with data on the drives, contract or no contract. If they had to employ a contractor, the work should have been done on NHS premises, and a responsible and cabable NHS IT guy check each one before releasing it.
If the NHS have no responsible and capable IT guys, then it's time to employ some. FFS, I know how to wipe a HD and I do not even work in IT.
Difference is when a private company pulls a stunt like taking down its entire IT system, customers start to abandon it and head to a competitor. If they screw up badly enough, they go bankrupt and everyone who worked there is out of a job. That creates a huge incentive to do things in a manner least disruptive to their customers.
As capitalists always do, you assume that customers are well informed, and react to that information. However, customers are often (shall I even say usually) uninformed because they do not have the time or experience to research the field. Example : where I worked (private company). ordering stationery stuff was left to a woman who was paying 5x as much to Company A as she could have paid for the same stuff from Company B, so even though Company B was more "efficient" it did not get our custom, and our woman was not fired either . Another example:- Ryobi garden equipment (strimmers etc) is utter crap, but it still the best selling garden stuff in the UK because the people buying it are ignorant of the fact.
Slashdot Mirror
When are we going to get out of the dead tree age with money and replace it with smart cars
Your future vision then :- bartering for everything with a car ! What will we use for loose change? Bikes? Toy cars?
"and the passenger has their own eyes to compensate or add attention to the road" This is generally only the case if the passenger happens to also regularly drive. or otherwise do not place any implicit trust on the driver.
Children are an obvious example of this. I see mums driving along while remonstrating with thier children because they are fighting each other or something. I would not rate the concentration on the road very high for either driver or passengers in those scenarios.
If you are about to hit something a passenger will shut up, or better yet, warn you.
Depends on the passenger. You don't know my sister-in-law, who is totally oblivious of anything except what she is talking about - usually her shopping experiences from the previous day. I reckon she would still be talking about it after the crash.
Buddy, child prn existed way way before the internet and even if somehow you manage to eradicate it entirely from the internet, child prn will continue to exist in the world.
No doubt it did exist, but I never saw any CP, even though I browsed porn mag shops on a few occasions, and I would not have known where to begin to find it if I'd wanted it. OTOH, I am sure I could soon find it on the Web today if I wanted, and in fact I have seen side-adverts on other sites that look suspiciously like links to CP.
As for "continuing to exist", most crimes continue to exist despite laws against them, but laws reduce their occurence. Eg theft levels would be >1000 times higher if it were not for it being illegal. You think all laws should be abandoned because crimes continue to exist? You would have loved living in the Dark Ages.
You don't trust other people to think for themselves
Irrespective of the rights and wrongs of this subject, that phrase caught my eye. No, I don't trust other people to think for themselves.
On the eve of the 9/11 attacks, the US Army's top priority was the Crusader Artillery, a 99 ton monstrosity what would have proved nearly useless in the the ensuing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The link says it weighs less than half your 99 ton. Just looks like a modern 155mm Self Propelled Gun to me.
like the UK during WW2--a huge aircraft and troop carrier parked off the coast of Germany. No disrespect to the British, who just happened to be living on "the carrier" when the extra troops arrived
You obviously got your "history" from the movies. Apart from the numbers of American and British invading Europe in 1944 being of the same order, it was the British who stopped a collapse of the US forces in the Battle of the Ardennes in the following winter. Basically the US army, like the French Army, had (still has?) a similar (and fatal) trust in "elan", so the troops had little training in fighting defensively or in retreat; they considered to train for such situations was defeatism. The British OTOH were used to colonial wars in which remote outposts might need to defend themselves for weeks against revolting natives until re-inforcements arrived. The US attitude was fine until they found themselves needing to fight defensively, as in the Ardennes; then they panicked and ran - an episode that US historians tend to gloss over.
The exception in the Ardennes was the US Airborne divisions. Those paratroops were trained in defensive fighting because of their role in capturing bridges etc behind enemy lines and waiting for ground troops to catch up. Hence the brilliant and tenacious defence of Bastogne by the US 101st Airborne.
I would opine that Windows 95 was actually the last innovative product that Microsoft brought out.
WTF ?! - a kludgy OS that was outdated at its launch - it had been preceded by better OS's in Windows NT and OS/2. MS should have been producing a Lite version of NT in 1995, but someone in MS was still in love with DOS and wanted to keep building OSs on its ricketty foundation - as they did with Win95/98/ME for 5 wasted years.
AND it ran on just about every configuration of PC hardware imaginable.
That is not thanks to MS, it is thanks to the hardware makers who knew that without W95 drivers for their kit they would never sell it. MS was in the fortunate position that they could lean back and let the hardware makers do the grunt work of writing drivers for everything except the generic stuff like keyboard and mouse.
Have you actually used WinME? It's the same Win98, but with DOS hidden and locked downWindows 2000 is a much more modern NT-based OS
I read Devman as that is what he meant - that WinME was the last OS to be based on DOS.
Windows 2000 was originally planned to replace the DOS-based 98, but application/driver compatibility was not perfect, so Microsoft instead produced the WinME abomination before finally moving everyone to XP.
I understand that it was not because "app/driver compatibility was not perfect" (it still isn't) but because of MS internal politics. The DOS/W9x team and the NT team were run in rivalry and the former lasted for years after they should have been taken out and shot. By about 1998, even entry level PCs could easily have run a lite version of NT (I ran NT4 then on a far-from-cutting-edge PC). The excuse was that games needed the direct hardware access that W9x allowed, and that the games writers could not adjust to NT. Eventually, with XP, the games writers had to adjust - or get lost.
I still don't understand how VMS can be compared to NT. They don't even seem remotely similar.
Then follow this link.
... Many users believe that NT's developers carried concepts from VMS to NT, but most don't know just how similar NT and VMS are at the kernel level (despite the Usenet joke that if you increment each letter in VMS you end up with WNTWindows NT). "
From the link : " Most of NT's core designers had worked on and with VMS at Digital; some had worked directly with Cutler.
And : " [the] similarities could fill a book. In fact, you can read sections of VAX/VMS Internals and Data Structures (Digital Press) as an accurate description of NT internals simply by translating VMS terms to NT terms. "
How's the kernel you wrote doing these days? Easy to criticise others i guess.
Who TF modded this as "Insightful" ?
:- "I can criticise a carpenter for a badly made table, even though I could not make a table myself. It is not my job to make a table."
Here is a quote (AFAIR) from the great Dr Johnson
Back in Ancient Greece I think, after an arch was finished being built, the master builder would stand underneath the arch while the supports were taken down. Kind of gives you a pretty good incentive to not fuck up when the quality of your work determines if you live or die. Perhaps we could reintroduce something similar to that, require that the owners of the construction company building the plant live within 1 mile of the plant for X years.
Funnily enough, the Ancient Greeks never discovered the arch. That is why their temple interiors were a forest of columns holding up beams.
As for the "owners of the construction company" living within one mile, you should think more of the designers and those who run the plant. In fact the people who run these plants do tend to live close by and think nothing of it, and as an engineer myself who has been involved in heavy engineering projects, no doubts about the integrity of my work, of the sort that would make me hesitate to "stand under it", ever cross my mind. It is not any threat of "danger" that motivates me to do work well (or money as some here seem to think), but pride in my job.
No-one has any idea [of] the exact number of deaths and disabilities from the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan
Of course no-one knows the exact number, but the data is amenable to statistical analysis and the rules concerning dosages (such as here : www.hse.gov.uk/radiation/ionising/doses/) are based on extremely pessimistic interpretations of those statistics. The levels allowable even to regular nuclear workers are far below any that have been detected to have any effect whatever on a person, and the 1mSv/y for a member of the public is significantly below that and even below natural radiation levels.
All I know is that I will NEVER trust people to run fission power stations as people cut corners and lie.
I find that a pretty offensive accusation, and just shows how little you are aware of the culture within at least the UK nuclear power industry. I have been an engineer in several areas where public safety is involved, and the nuclear industry is the most conscientious of the lot - almost painfully so. I have never seen corners cut - more like people holding their trousers up using belts, braces and rawlbolts too. In fact I tend to argue against some of the excessive precautions, not because I am after profit (makes no difference to my salary) but because they are simply wasteful and unnecessary - sounds to me like some of the Fukushima measures are just that.
......... would you trust that statement with your life?
As someone else said, you had better find a cave. Let's assume you do not trust me despite (or because of) this post. FWIW, I was previously in the railway industry and one of my responsibilities was to derive a method to calculate margins against train derailment, which fed into the design of certain trains in use now. I also did the stress calculations for certain railway vehicles on which you could be riding - so avoid trains entirely if I were you. Also I did the stress calcs for a certain railway over-bridge in North London - so don't drive under any railway bridges in that area. I also did the stress calcs for certain road vehicle designs - so don't get into any road vehicles in case they are one of mine. And if you don't trust me, how about trusting someone else you don't know instead?
BTW, I sleep perfectly well at night, in case you were wondering.
Spatial ability is testable. I took such a test to get into high school.It is explicitly listed on tests such as the ASVAB.
I also took such a test (called the "Eleven-Plus", in the UK years ago to get placed in a selective Grammar School), and I am suprised that someone says it is "untestable".
The Eleven-Plus consisted of three papers, Maths, English and Intelligence. The intelligence test included a lot of diagramatic puzzles such as being able to pair patterns that were both mirror-imaged and inverted. I hated the English test but loved those spatial puzzles - could do them at a glance. I am now an engineer and need to use those spatial abilities all the time.
Creativity can and is taught. I teach it all the time.
You can stand up and "teach" it, but is it learned?
I work with kids in after school programs ..... If you pair a dull kid up with a brighter kid, he will learn by example.
You are part of the problem - trying to normalise everyone. In the UK there has been a theory of socialist origin that everyone has exactly the same ability, but opportunities differ. So they abolished Grammar schools (which were selective) and put all kids in the same "comprehensive" schools with, like your theory, the idea that the [apparently] bright kids would pull the [apparently] slow kids up to the same high level. What has happened is that everyone has ended up mediocre. Goes a lot to explain why the UK has fallen from being world technical leader to just saying "wow" when they see a new gadget from Taiwan.
My son was exceptionally bright, so in a class of mixed abilities he got postioned into tutoring his slower fellow pupils (like in your classes), so for two years he learned nothing (except from me at home) and began to get dissillusioned with learning. That is not even to mention the distraction of the disruptive pupils, who tend to be the duller ones because it is the duller ones who are not interested in learning (cause/effect or effect/cause ?) so out of boredom they create havoc instead.
Not really. Lead acid is about as good now as it was 50 years ago.
No, it is worse. Older car batteries used to spend a few months getting noticably worse, but still usable, like you needed to put them on charge on cold nights. So you got advance warning that you needed a new one, and you could avoid getting to the point of being stranded somewhere. Nowadays, they fail suddenly and completely with no warning - my last failure was a totally dead battery after I had only stopped for 15 minutes to buy something on the way home from work, even though it had been perfectly good until then. First time in my life I ever had to call a breakdown service.
Perhaps modern car batteries are "better" in have a higher power/weight or are "greener" in some way. I don't care.
Retargeting is 5x more effective than context based ad targeting.
Citation?
Here's why. Imagine that you've just been shopping around for a new pair of shoes. ...Then you get distracted The next day you ... go to a tech blog. ... but look right there, an ad for Nike. Your memory kicks in and you recall shopping for shoes.
How the hell do you forget that you are looking for new shoes? You get reminded every time you put your old ones on.
The Nike ad is right they [sic] so you click and then buy. Was the retargeted ad helpful to you? Some would say yes. Was it invasive? Maybe. Did you buy a pair of shoes from the company that used retargeted ads, absolutely.
No I wouldn't buy the Nikes, because an advert popping up in the middle of a tech blog will piss me off, and if it were not intrusive I would not even notice it on an unrelated site.
What you people ignore is the piss-off factor. There may be some people who will buy something because it took over their screen, but others (like me) will be so annoyed that it is the last thing they will buy. As you suggest, I make buying decisions based on research; eg if I want a camera I will base my choice on as many independent camera reviews as possible. Then I will search for camera sellers' websites to compare prices; then I buy. Adverts popping up on irrelevant websites, billboards or TV will merely annoy me and might put me off entirely.
On a projector? Luxury! I had to make do with a flickbook.
[Nukenerd] Also, Musk's idea is to run inside a vacuum tube. A leak caused by an earthquake would let in air, which, if you hit it at 4000 mph, would be like hitting a brick wall.
[Teancum] I'm really curious about what details you happen to know about this hyperloop system. Are you a SpaceX or Tesla employee that has had a couple of cool ones with the boss to get him to spill his guts about the idea?
No. But some of the links I followed (eg www.businessinsider.com/what-is-elon-musks-hyperloop-2013-5) referred to an evacuated tunnel.
[Teancum] Otherwise, I don't think anybody but Musk has a bloody clue about how his system works. When asked explicitly if it was an underground vacuum tube system, Elon Musk even said "No".
I am a former London Undergound railway engineer and I can tell you that the air resistance in a tunnel is higher than in the open, and that there is no way that 4000 mph is going to be possible in a tunnel unless it is evacuated. The train would melt otherwise, even if you could give it the power.
[Teancum] In other words, this whole article is just a bunch of BS.
Agreed.
Several railways have used an external tube (ie the whole train was not inside it) with a piston to pull them along. Brunel did it with the South Devon Railway. In his obsession with this propulsion, he proved himself to be a lousy mechanical engineer - even if he was a superb civil engineer (although not even that on this particular line). There are all sorts of problems, not least sectioning and pointwork (US "switches"?)
Terrorists go for planes as most people seem to view them as more "cool" than trains, and assume they carry richer passengers. Goodness knows why, and that could change.
Most of the time you can just walk right on 10 minutes before the train leaves.
I don't know about the US (except that most people there seem scarcely to have heard of trains), but in the UK you can board most trains seconds before they leave. At a main terminus such as London Paddington it may be a minute because there is such a high throughput that they want the train to be ready to go immediately it gets the green light.
What is the ten minutes for?
Because the high speed train can stop much quicker. At 4000 mph even an emergency stop is going to cover a far greater distance than a 200 mph high speed train will (400 times as much in fact), so the chance of running into a dislocation is much higher. On Japan's high speed lines there are earthquake signals that turn red on tremors.
Also, Musk's idea is to run inside a vacuum tube. A leak caused by an earthquake would let in air, which, if you hit it at 4000 mph, would be like hitting a brick wall.
Fining the NHS is pointless .... Those responsible don't care because its not their money.
They should fine the contractor instead, as it was his laziness/incompetence that caused this.
Wrong, I think you would find those responsible DO care and are feeling very embarrased about this. Nevertheless, the episode shows that they were incompetent and should simply be sacked. There are too many incapable people holding jobs they are not up to, and too many capable people unemployed.
Apart from that, there is no way that the NHS should have been letting PC's off the premises with data on the drives, contract or no contract. If they had to employ a contractor, the work should have been done on NHS premises, and a responsible and cabable NHS IT guy check each one before releasing it.
If the NHS have no responsible and capable IT guys, then it's time to employ some. FFS, I know how to wipe a HD and I do not even work in IT.
Difference is when a private company pulls a stunt like taking down its entire IT system, customers start to abandon it and head to a competitor. If they screw up badly enough, they go bankrupt and everyone who worked there is out of a job. That creates a huge incentive to do things in a manner least disruptive to their customers.
As capitalists always do, you assume that customers are well informed, and react to that information. However, customers are often (shall I even say usually) uninformed because they do not have the time or experience to research the field. Example : where I worked (private company). ordering stationery stuff was left to a woman who was paying 5x as much to Company A as she could have paid for the same stuff from Company B, so even though Company B was more "efficient" it did not get our custom, and our woman was not fired either . Another example :- Ryobi garden equipment (strimmers etc) is utter crap, but it still the best selling garden stuff in the UK because the people buying it are ignorant of the fact.
This is the Grantham Grocer Fallacy