Then might I suggest you drive properly? Almost all pedestrian collisions have at least partial fault with the driver. If you're in an area where you can see the sides of the road and the sidewalks clearly then practice defensive driving and keep an eye on any pedestrians as you get near them in case they do something unexpected. If you're in an area where you cannot see the sides of the road and sidewalks clearly because of obstructions, slow the hell down.
I guarantee you, one mass poisoning with strychnine happens and you'll be showing ID every time. But please keep constructing the strawman. Tell me why you NEED to have an anonymous phone. Do you have one? More than one? What do you use them for that you wouldn't want someone knowing the owner of the line that made the call?
> you should be forced to tell us why the right to anonymity should be TAKEN AWAY after so many years of having it?
Because you don't have a right to have an anonymous phone? Because there is literally decades of proof that anonymous phones are abused constantly by everything from low level drug dealers to terrorists? Hell, back in the day dealers used to call payphone to payphone to keep things anonymous. Honestly I've thought it's crazy that you have been able to get a burner phone over the last 15 years.
Sure, but the post is still anonymous, just slower. But it does have the advantage of bandwidth for a whistleblower to present evidence so that's nice...
Same here. Our workstations (dev shop) are a mix of i5s and i7s whose processors were middle of the road decent when they were bought anywhere from 3-5 years ago. We've got budget to do upgrades/replacements on them but they work fine and for the cost of replacing them we'd only see a small bump in speed for day to day work, so the budget is going into bigger and more monitors, swapping out platter drives with SSDs and upping any machine that has less than 16GB of RAM up to 16GB, including the spares. Cheapest. Hardware refresh cycle. Ever.
The PC I use at home right now is 6 years old, though I did add a newer video card and an SSD to it about 2 years ago to keep things humming along. I imagine if I'd bought an iMac and needed to do the same upgrade the process would have involved tossing the existing iMac in a trash can and a visit to the Apple store with a thousand dollar or more purchase ahead of me.
> My internet was a peer-to-peer system, with all peers being equal, two-way flow of content, empowering the little guys, the voiceless, and letting unpopular messages be heard just as loudly as the mainstream ones.
But all of that does happen. Witness the witch hunts, the misinformation, the wingnuts, the anti-vaxxers and more. All of whom have a FAR louder voice in society than would have been possible even 15 years ago. You're falling into the same trap most people do that by thinking only of the welfare of information you want to spread while forgetting that everyone else wants theirs to spread as well. And society as a whole is kind of shit, on average. So that's what we get when we give everyone a platform like the Internet.
You don't even need to get that deep. I used to have a car that was sadly very easy to steal, you could use a screwdriver to start it. So after it got stolen once, when I got it back I got into the habit of pulling the coil wire out and taking it with me for the night when I got home. 2 times I came downstairs to find the ignition in the 'on' position, but the car was not moved. Car thieves aren't generally going to stick around to try and diagnose the car they're trying to steal if it doesn't start in 10 seconds of cranking, so popping a coil wire off in 5 seconds is a quick and easy way to safeguard your car against 99.9999% of the thieves out there.
Curious... how does one "ban" atheism at the same time as banning religions? If you're banning belief in religion and then also banning not having a belief in religion, wouldn't you just save a lot of trouble by crashing an asteroid into the planet and wiping everyone out?
> One would be called "art" and the other "Racist bigotry", morally equivalent... right?
Actually no. One would be called art, some would call it disgusting and then we'd move on. The other would cause outbreaks of violence and some guy might show up on your doorstep and shoot you.
This totally sounds like the NSA's IT people were just being dicks for the sake of being dicks, and like in many companies, when a C level exec gets screwed around by red tape they step around it. I mean FFS, they have "too many Blackberries" to manage but the POTUS gets one and the Secretary of State does not?
> are we going to repeat the history of the Industrial Revolution and let the workers starve to death before reorganizing society?
Well, one big difference there is the job/scarcity revolution will be taking place in first world countries first, because in developing countries the labor is still cheaper than automation. And one first world country in particular has hundreds of millions of guns in the hands of those who will be on the starving end of the equation. I have a feeling if there isn't a good effort put forth like universal basic income or similar that the revolution will look less like the starving masses of the Industrial Revolution and a lot more like the terror purges of the elites during the French Revolution. And UBI or similar is going to be necessary as these businesses shift to automated labor because if half the consumers are out of a job, who is going to buy their shit? Which will cause a downward spiral as even more companies go out of business due to shrinking demand, which means more people out of work, which means even further shrinking of demand.....
> This has been proven countless times since the 1700's to be absolutely false.
Yes because new jobs come along all the time that people gradually shift to that are too complex to be automated. People stopped making cloth by hand when looms and later power looms came in, people stopped farming when tractors became a thing, assembly line workers were somewhat phased out when specialized robots came to the line, etc. The difference this time is we are finally on the cusp of general machine learning.
In the not too distant future robots and computers are going to be in a position to replace not only easily-repeatable low skill labor, but almost ANY job not requiring super specialized knowledge or skills. Those in high paying "intellectual" jobs are also going to be on the receiving end of a pink slip. It's already starting to happen. Lawyer firms used to employ armies of articlers and clerks to do discovery and research on case law, and are already being replaced by automated systems that do the same work in less time. RBS just the other day cut 400+ investment adviser positions to be replaced with their digital robo-adviser system that recently rolled out.
When a machine can learn to do anything you can do, and do it consistently without error, even if it only works at 1//4 your speed you're gone. The machine won't take coffee breaks, surf/. or get sick while it works at its task 24/7/365. And it will get faster over time as the hardware and software inevitably improves.
You joke, but article research is a huge part of the job of lawyers and their clerks and it is swiftly being replaced with automation, and more automation is on the horizon - to the detriment of a lot of the new crop of lawyer grads.
"Watson the lawyer is coming," said Ralph Losey, a legal technology expert at the law firm Jackson Lewis. "He won't come up with the creative solutions, but when it comes to the regular games that lawyers play, he'll kill them."
That means potentially huge cost savings for clients, though it's not so promising for law school graduates looking for work.
The good news for lawyers is that no one thinks the profession can be automated entirely. But lots of legal work is already being computerized by some firms, including the drafting of simple contracts and the search for evidence in reams of documents.
Before we worry about the creature comforts. Personally I wouldn't care if there weren't any, it's supposed to be a car in a vacuum tube that goes supersonic speeds. I'll trade off not looking out a window for a faster trip, personally.
The integrated USB interface and power requirements are the draw here, though you could roll your own. You're paying for convenience. You know, the same way people buy a $2-$3 cup of coffee when it would be far cheaper to make it themselves?
> worst case the engine is 33% efficient, which is 15kWh, not 4
???? Have you ever seen the efficiency reports for full size gasoline powered car engines? Spoiler alert - they are less than 20% efficient power from the gas to the wheels, in many cases under 10% after the drivetrain eats some.
"Most steel engines have a thermodynamic limit of 37%. Even when aided with turbochargers and stock efficiency aids, most engines retain an average efficiency of about 18%-20%"
Think about it. The Tesla P85D has an 85kWh battery and a 200 mile range so by your 33% math that means to go the same distance you should only need 5.7 liters to go 200 miles. Show me a car that size that can go 200 miles (330 km) on 6 liters of gas. Or even 18 liters of gas.
> maybe you're overly focused on the radio shack drone world. there's more to explore than that! once you have a drone the size of what I say above, you can start to do more interesting things like search & rescue, supply drops, hunter/killer, all sorts of stuff.
Dude, I've been playing around with RC and drones on and off for 20 years. Again - to make gas power an efficient alternative as opposed to just having more raw power for shorter endurance you are looking at a large fixed wing drone. You are not going to get an efficient gas powered quad that's any smaller than a large dinner table. All the RC helicopters that run on gas? They run on gas not for fuel efficiency, but so they can have the insane power to pull 10+ Gs with their aerial acrobatic displays.
Here is the smallest VTOL gas powered drone currently commercially available:
Yes there is, but that size is not the size we're talking about. I'm not sure where the disconnect is, but you're not getting the fact that while there might be 45kWh of energy in a liter of gas, you're going to MAYBE extract 4 or 5 kWh of it with that RC engine and the rest will be wasted as heat or not even burned and blown out as part of the engine exhaust. And in order to take advantage of that fuel system you will need to add the weight of a gas RC engine:
23.6 oz in that engine's case, plus the weight of the electrical generator plus the electronics to make sure you're not going to fry the motors with a surge, plus maybe a small battery to provide a short period of power if/when the gas runs out (because you don't have a gas gauge with these) and you are looking at increasing the average quad's weight by a factor of 3 or 4 even before you've added the fuel. Plus you've increased the complexity of the system by an order of magnitude.
For quads, hexacopters and octas that currently use batteries this is not a suitable upgrade. Again, running on gas is more suitable for a fixed wing drone, especially one of larger size. Smaller RC fixed wings are starting to see a growth in switching from gas TO battery because batteries and electric motors have gotten that good compared to running on gas.
Sure that cuts down on the noise problem somewhat (they are still loud sans prop), but you're still left with the inefficiency problem. Some of these motors literally drink 3 oz/minute at full throttle. The more fuel you carry the more weight you have, which means you have to run the motor faster to generate enough electricity to provide lift which means your engine drinks more fuel which means you need more fuel which is more weight....
> The EU will never have the political will to get its act together
For science? Never. It's a good thing CERN built their Superconducting SuperCollider out in Texas because those losers in Switzerland would have never been able to get their thumb out long enough to build that proposed Large Hadron Collider.
I think that's an understatement. I don't think it would be possible at all, the constant adjustments needed to keep a quad flying or actually direct it would be almost impossible to make with direct mechanical input without some super fancy clutches that would probably tear themselves to shreds in a few minutes.
You could build a fixed wing drone but it would have to be considerably larger, like 7+' wingspan larger. A quad you couldn't, the only reason quads are able to fly is because the controllers make minute adjustments to their thrust based on feedback from the gyros and they also drop or add extra power to one or more rotors based on the input commands from the operator. Trying to do that with mechanical input shafts would be impossible without some sort of incredible fast transmission systems.
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Then might I suggest you drive properly? Almost all pedestrian collisions have at least partial fault with the driver. If you're in an area where you can see the sides of the road and the sidewalks clearly then practice defensive driving and keep an eye on any pedestrians as you get near them in case they do something unexpected. If you're in an area where you cannot see the sides of the road and sidewalks clearly because of obstructions, slow the hell down.
I guarantee you, one mass poisoning with strychnine happens and you'll be showing ID every time. But please keep constructing the strawman. Tell me why you NEED to have an anonymous phone. Do you have one? More than one? What do you use them for that you wouldn't want someone knowing the owner of the line that made the call?
> you should be forced to tell us why the right to anonymity should be TAKEN AWAY after so many years of having it?
Because you don't have a right to have an anonymous phone? Because there is literally decades of proof that anonymous phones are abused constantly by everything from low level drug dealers to terrorists? Hell, back in the day dealers used to call payphone to payphone to keep things anonymous. Honestly I've thought it's crazy that you have been able to get a burner phone over the last 15 years.
Sure, but the post is still anonymous, just slower. But it does have the advantage of bandwidth for a whistleblower to present evidence so that's nice...
Same here. Our workstations (dev shop) are a mix of i5s and i7s whose processors were middle of the road decent when they were bought anywhere from 3-5 years ago. We've got budget to do upgrades/replacements on them but they work fine and for the cost of replacing them we'd only see a small bump in speed for day to day work, so the budget is going into bigger and more monitors, swapping out platter drives with SSDs and upping any machine that has less than 16GB of RAM up to 16GB, including the spares. Cheapest. Hardware refresh cycle. Ever.
The PC I use at home right now is 6 years old, though I did add a newer video card and an SSD to it about 2 years ago to keep things humming along. I imagine if I'd bought an iMac and needed to do the same upgrade the process would have involved tossing the existing iMac in a trash can and a visit to the Apple store with a thousand dollar or more purchase ahead of me.
> My internet was a peer-to-peer system, with all peers being equal, two-way flow of content, empowering the little guys, the voiceless, and letting unpopular messages be heard just as loudly as the mainstream ones.
But all of that does happen. Witness the witch hunts, the misinformation, the wingnuts, the anti-vaxxers and more. All of whom have a FAR louder voice in society than would have been possible even 15 years ago. You're falling into the same trap most people do that by thinking only of the welfare of information you want to spread while forgetting that everyone else wants theirs to spread as well. And society as a whole is kind of shit, on average. So that's what we get when we give everyone a platform like the Internet.
You don't even need to get that deep. I used to have a car that was sadly very easy to steal, you could use a screwdriver to start it. So after it got stolen once, when I got it back I got into the habit of pulling the coil wire out and taking it with me for the night when I got home. 2 times I came downstairs to find the ignition in the 'on' position, but the car was not moved. Car thieves aren't generally going to stick around to try and diagnose the car they're trying to steal if it doesn't start in 10 seconds of cranking, so popping a coil wire off in 5 seconds is a quick and easy way to safeguard your car against 99.9999% of the thieves out there.
Curious... how does one "ban" atheism at the same time as banning religions? If you're banning belief in religion and then also banning not having a belief in religion, wouldn't you just save a lot of trouble by crashing an asteroid into the planet and wiping everyone out?
> One would be called "art" and the other "Racist bigotry", morally equivalent ... right?
Actually no. One would be called art, some would call it disgusting and then we'd move on. The other would cause outbreaks of violence and some guy might show up on your doorstep and shoot you.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theo_van_Gogh_(film_director)
This totally sounds like the NSA's IT people were just being dicks for the sake of being dicks, and like in many companies, when a C level exec gets screwed around by red tape they step around it. I mean FFS, they have "too many Blackberries" to manage but the POTUS gets one and the Secretary of State does not?
> are we going to repeat the history of the Industrial Revolution and let the workers starve to death before reorganizing society?
Well, one big difference there is the job/scarcity revolution will be taking place in first world countries first, because in developing countries the labor is still cheaper than automation. And one first world country in particular has hundreds of millions of guns in the hands of those who will be on the starving end of the equation. I have a feeling if there isn't a good effort put forth like universal basic income or similar that the revolution will look less like the starving masses of the Industrial Revolution and a lot more like the terror purges of the elites during the French Revolution. And UBI or similar is going to be necessary as these businesses shift to automated labor because if half the consumers are out of a job, who is going to buy their shit? Which will cause a downward spiral as even more companies go out of business due to shrinking demand, which means more people out of work, which means even further shrinking of demand.....
> This has been proven countless times since the 1700's to be absolutely false.
Yes because new jobs come along all the time that people gradually shift to that are too complex to be automated. People stopped making cloth by hand when looms and later power looms came in, people stopped farming when tractors became a thing, assembly line workers were somewhat phased out when specialized robots came to the line, etc. The difference this time is we are finally on the cusp of general machine learning.
In the not too distant future robots and computers are going to be in a position to replace not only easily-repeatable low skill labor, but almost ANY job not requiring super specialized knowledge or skills. Those in high paying "intellectual" jobs are also going to be on the receiving end of a pink slip. It's already starting to happen. Lawyer firms used to employ armies of articlers and clerks to do discovery and research on case law, and are already being replaced by automated systems that do the same work in less time. RBS just the other day cut 400+ investment adviser positions to be replaced with their digital robo-adviser system that recently rolled out.
When a machine can learn to do anything you can do, and do it consistently without error, even if it only works at 1//4 your speed you're gone. The machine won't take coffee breaks, surf /. or get sick while it works at its task 24/7/365. And it will get faster over time as the hardware and software inevitably improves.
> Next up, perhaps, "robo-lawyers"
You joke, but article research is a huge part of the job of lawyers and their clerks and it is swiftly being replaced with automation, and more automation is on the horizon - to the detriment of a lot of the new crop of lawyer grads.
http://money.cnn.com/2014/03/28/technology/innovation/robot-lawyers/
"Watson the lawyer is coming," said Ralph Losey, a legal technology expert at the law firm Jackson Lewis. "He won't come up with the creative solutions, but when it comes to the regular games that lawyers play, he'll kill them."
That means potentially huge cost savings for clients, though it's not so promising for law school graduates looking for work.
The good news for lawyers is that no one thinks the profession can be automated entirely. But lots of legal work is already being computerized by some firms, including the drafting of simple contracts and the search for evidence in reams of documents.
Before we worry about the creature comforts. Personally I wouldn't care if there weren't any, it's supposed to be a car in a vacuum tube that goes supersonic speeds. I'll trade off not looking out a window for a faster trip, personally.
I got nothin' else. This just seems to be one of these "insane enough it might work once" moves.
The integrated USB interface and power requirements are the draw here, though you could roll your own. You're paying for convenience. You know, the same way people buy a $2-$3 cup of coffee when it would be far cheaper to make it themselves?
YYYYMMDD works for PI day as most rational people only consider MMDD. It is an ANNUAL thing after all, so the year is ignored.
> worst case the engine is 33% efficient, which is 15kWh, not 4
???? Have you ever seen the efficiency reports for full size gasoline powered car engines? Spoiler alert - they are less than 20% efficient power from the gas to the wheels, in many cases under 10% after the drivetrain eats some.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_combustion_engine
"Most steel engines have a thermodynamic limit of 37%. Even when aided with turbochargers and stock efficiency aids, most engines retain an average efficiency of about 18%-20%"
Think about it. The Tesla P85D has an 85kWh battery and a 200 mile range so by your 33% math that means to go the same distance you should only need 5.7 liters to go 200 miles. Show me a car that size that can go 200 miles (330 km) on 6 liters of gas. Or even 18 liters of gas.
> maybe you're overly focused on the radio shack drone world. there's more to explore than that! once you have a drone the size of what I say above, you can start to do more interesting things like search & rescue, supply drops, hunter/killer, all sorts of stuff.
Dude, I've been playing around with RC and drones on and off for 20 years. Again - to make gas power an efficient alternative as opposed to just having more raw power for shorter endurance you are looking at a large fixed wing drone. You are not going to get an efficient gas powered quad that's any smaller than a large dinner table. All the RC helicopters that run on gas? They run on gas not for fuel efficiency, but so they can have the insane power to pull 10+ Gs with their aerial acrobatic displays.
Here is the smallest VTOL gas powered drone currently commercially available:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schiebel_Camcopter_S-100
It weighs 400+ lbs depending on payload.
Yes there is, but that size is not the size we're talking about. I'm not sure where the disconnect is, but you're not getting the fact that while there might be 45kWh of energy in a liter of gas, you're going to MAYBE extract 4 or 5 kWh of it with that RC engine and the rest will be wasted as heat or not even burned and blown out as part of the engine exhaust. And in order to take advantage of that fuel system you will need to add the weight of a gas RC engine:
http://www.horizonhobby.com/airplanes/airplane-engines-15042--1/10gx-10cc-gas-engine-with-pumped-carburetor-evoe10gx2
23.6 oz in that engine's case, plus the weight of the electrical generator plus the electronics to make sure you're not going to fry the motors with a surge, plus maybe a small battery to provide a short period of power if/when the gas runs out (because you don't have a gas gauge with these) and you are looking at increasing the average quad's weight by a factor of 3 or 4 even before you've added the fuel. Plus you've increased the complexity of the system by an order of magnitude.
For quads, hexacopters and octas that currently use batteries this is not a suitable upgrade. Again, running on gas is more suitable for a fixed wing drone, especially one of larger size. Smaller RC fixed wings are starting to see a growth in switching from gas TO battery because batteries and electric motors have gotten that good compared to running on gas.
Fewer NEW ones yes. There's still the inherent one that won't go away ever.
Sure that cuts down on the noise problem somewhat (they are still loud sans prop), but you're still left with the inefficiency problem. Some of these motors literally drink 3 oz/minute at full throttle. The more fuel you carry the more weight you have, which means you have to run the motor faster to generate enough electricity to provide lift which means your engine drinks more fuel which means you need more fuel which is more weight....
> The EU will never have the political will to get its act together
For science? Never. It's a good thing CERN built their Superconducting SuperCollider out in Texas because those losers in Switzerland would have never been able to get their thumb out long enough to build that proposed Large Hadron Collider.
Oh. Wait... I think I got that backwards.
I think that's an understatement. I don't think it would be possible at all, the constant adjustments needed to keep a quad flying or actually direct it would be almost impossible to make with direct mechanical input without some super fancy clutches that would probably tear themselves to shreds in a few minutes.
You could build a fixed wing drone but it would have to be considerably larger, like 7+' wingspan larger. A quad you couldn't, the only reason quads are able to fly is because the controllers make minute adjustments to their thrust based on feedback from the gyros and they also drop or add extra power to one or more rotors based on the input commands from the operator. Trying to do that with mechanical input shafts would be impossible without some sort of incredible fast transmission systems.