When was Firefox or Mozilla or Netscape ever stable?
I use Firefox daily to this day and haven't experienced a meaningful stability problem on Windows or a Mac in probably 10 years. Not to say it doesn't have any issues but stability does not appear to be one of them. Maybe some versions on linux had problems but I haven't run into any myself. I honestly can't remember the last time I managed to crash Firefox. Certainly hasn't been within the last 5 years.
"Does it sync?" A: Well, kind of - if you use iCloud.
Actually I just used the built in Sync for firefox and it did sync my bookmarks. Otherwise I'm not really sure what the point of it is and I use Firefox as my primary browser. (Chrome is buggy, IE is Windows Only and Safari is Mac only) I'm pretty much exactly who would think about using it and I don't see much point.
The model of relying on a business to provide benefits to its employees in lieu of the government or the employees themselves turns the employee into a serf, unable to leave in fear of losing their benefits.
Which is I think a part of why Republicans seem to hate "Obamacare" so much. They've lost their leverage to keep people subservient.
COBRA [dol.gov] was the last grand experiment in government meddling in "portable" healthcare benefits and it was by all accounts a miserable failure.
It wasn't a failure. COBRA did more or less what it was designed to do. It was designed to be a bridge, not ongoing portable insurance. The system around it was the failure. Used to be that if you lost your job you lost your health insurance too so you were doubly screwed. COBRA gave an (expensive) safety net option but it couldn't possibly solve the actual problem that was eventually solved with the Affordable Care Act. I've used COBRA insurance twice and it was fine for what it was.
Your fingerprints are likely on there somewhere, and if someone really wants your print and device and you are careful they'll likely follow you and wait for you to leave something behind that'll give a great print.
Are you REALLY worried about that? Seriously? Anyone that serious about getting the contents of your phone is probably going to just grab you and put your finger on the reader.
Fingerprints are a shit security measure.
Maybe if you are worried about the Impossible Missions Force. In my case they work just fine. It's kind of like the lock on my house. No, it won't keep a determined intruder out but it will keep out casual snoopers.
"It is clear that DraftKings and FanDuel are the leaders of a massive, multibillion-dollar scheme intended to evade the law and fleece sports fans across the country," says NY attorney general, Eric T. Schneiderman, "Today we have sent a clear message: not in New York, and not on my watch."
Why don't we have a plug-in digital replacement for VHS/Beta tapes?
To what purpose? So we can display low rez old TV signals? It's an obsolete technology. Time to let it die. Transfer the contents to digital media and throw the old unit out. Keeping old VCR units around is a waste of resources.
why can't I get a digital-imaging back for my old 35mm Nikon cameras?
Because it doesn't work well. It's been tried. There is more to it than putting a digital sensor into the body. The interface isn't the same and retrofitting is rarely a good idea. Buy a new camera body and use the lenses on it. Keep your old camera body in case you ever decide to use film again. I don't like to throw out old stuff either if it works well but sometimes you have to move on.
Modern VHS tapes are complete crap, like modern floppy disks.
They always were complete crap. We just didn't have anything better back when they were ubiquitous. Even the best VHS tapes were really not terribly good products. Usable but never good.
Built to extremely low standards because hardly anyone uses them and they sell for ridiculously low prices.
Things that hardly anyone uses get sold for higher prices. The only reason they can sell them relatively cheaply is because the equipment to make the tapes has been fully depreciated for a very long time now.
Why wouldn't you just switch to recording on DVD/flash drive?
Because that requires learning something new. Lots of people absolutely HATE learning anything new. Several of my relatives have DVRs and have no idea how to use them despite them actually being quite easy to use.
I understand something like 60% of the US population is obese, and an almost equal number is diabetic.
No. The are overweight or obese. Overweight is not the same thing as obese. The number for obese is around 1/3 which is still alarmingly high.
By 2025, 75% of the US population will be obese.
Beware of naive extrapolation. It will lead you down all sorts of false paths. You are presuming that historic trends will continue indefinitely without change and that is actually quite unlikely.
And tasting the food as it is being prepared. Smelling the ingredients to be certain they are fresh.
Actually that might be easier than you think. Sensors can detect chemical and physical properties pretty effectively. It's not inconceivable that they could have sensors that could detect freshness and maybe even make a pretty good analysis of expected taste. This would be a ways off obviously for practical applications but I could see it happening someday. You'd probably see it in an industrial kitchen first if such things work since they would benefit the most from automation.
And this is why we can't have nice things: everyone's a lawyer, looking for the legalistic loophole they can take advantage of to get theirs
There is no loophole here. If a seller offers something and a buyer accepts, it is reasonable for the buyer to expect to get exactly what was offered. No more, no less. Insisting that an ISP actually provide "unlimited" service when they offered "unlimited" service is not unreasonable. If they were unable to provide such service at the time they offered it then they are committing fraud. I have no objection to them making a reasonable profit but whether they actually do or not is not my concern. If they lose money on the deal that is their problem. Similarly if I buy more than I can actually afford that is not the concern of the ISP.
It's the consequence of living in an adversarial society, I guess, but it's rather unpleasant.
Welcome to the Real World my friend. These companies are not your friend. The ONLY thing they want from you is your money and the exist for no other purpose. If you want to pretend otherwise then you are being naive. This is exactly why we have contracts, even between friends. Arguments occur when agreements are ambiguous or when one party tries to change the deal after the fact.
Why the hell are you defending these weasels? Your arguments are nonsense and not based in any contract law or any reasonable interpretation of reality. There are NO communal resources here. Not applicable. If they didn't have the resources to offer what they were offering then the company is committing fraud.
Unless you have a contract that extends into the future, neither of you have any significant obligation to each other going forwards.
People DO have contracts that extend into the future. If you have unlimited service (which some do) and they cap that service (which has happened) contrary to the original agreement (which also has happened) then the company has violated their obligations. Period. End of Discussion.
The definition in question is not 'unlimited' we agree on what that means. The definition in question is that of 'abuse'.
There is no debate about abuse because it cannot occur by definition. If they offer "unlimited" service then you cannot abuse that by using it as much as possible. If they slow the connection intentionally then they are violating their agreement after the fact. The fact that they later feel it is a bad deal for them is irrelevant. The fact that it might impact others (but probably doesn't) is irrelevant. They offered and you accepted. That is the deal and there is no abuse.
Not when they understand its limited and communal resource that they are being given unmetered access to.
A) They don't understand that and B) even if true it doesn't matter. If a company offers something in unlimited amounts in means UNLIMITED. Without limit. They didn't qualify it. There is no other meaning for unlimited than "without limit". If they made a bad deal then that is their fault and not the customer's problem. If they didn't really mean unlimited then they should have offered some other deal. There is no social contract here between me and you. It's solely between me and the company. If you don't like the effects of that, too bad.
You are trying to weasel word this and I am not buying what you are arguing. It's very simple. Don't offer "unlimited" anything unless you really mean it.
Its only bait and switch if they change the terms or product on you.
They DID change the terms. QED it is a bait and switch. They lured you in with one offer and then changed the offer. This is not complicated. They offered unlimited downloads and later realized that was a bad deal for them and are trying to weasel out of the deal.
They gave you unlimited access. You 'abused' it.
By definition it is impossible to abuse UNLIMITED access by utilizing said access. If you offer me unlimited bandwidth at a particular speed, you should not be surprised if I utilize it to the fullest extent possible. That is what they offered and what was accepted.
Normal people understand that an 'unlimited' offer of a resource that is actually both limited and communal should not be unreasonably monopolized.
Normal people understand "unlimited" to actually mean "unlimited" when used to promote the service. If it isn't unlimited it should not be advertised as such. But these companies very clearly said that you would have "unlimited" bandwidth so any changes after the fact means that they lied. That is called bait and switch among other things.
If you are the guy that goes downstairs and takes the entire 'continental breakfast' plate of danish up to your hotel room your abusing the fact that the hotel didn't place a 'limit' on the number of danish you could have.
Did the hotel advertise the number of danishes as "unlimited"? My guess is that they did nothing of the sort. They merely said a free breakfast was available, not that you could take the entire buffet back to your room.
If you walk into a chinese buffet for brunch at 11am, plunk down your $8 for all you can eat, and then promptly take the entire tray of sweet and sour chicken balls depriving everyone else of any.
It's all you can EAT. Not all you can take. You seem to be fuzzy on the difference. Stomachs have a finite capacity and restaurants know this. (Well, unless you are the late John Pinette)
The big question now is: were these companies cynical, or just naive?
Probably a bit of both.
We have no way of evaluating their claims that a small number of users who abused the system caused it to be unprofitable for them.
I happen to be a certified accountant (among other things) and my guess is that any claims that just a few users are able to make the service unprofitable are probably bogus. You could make a pretty good analysis with just a little bit of information. Comcast for example provides a breakout of their revenues from their internet services. We also know what their profit margins are overall. While crude we can get at least a rough idea of what the profits on their internet service might be. Then we can figure out how much service a "small number of users" would have to utilize to make the service unprofitable. You could apply the Pareto principle here (80/20 rule) probably to good effect. It's a very back-of-the-envelope analysis but probably not far off the mark.
Comcast for example has roughly 21 million high speed internet customers. Their operating income in 2014 was about $18 Billion and internet service accounts for about 8.3% of their revenues. So let's naively say that their profits from internet service are in line with their other offerings and so Comcast would have made a profit of about $1.5 billion on internet services. Could be less but we're probably within an order of magnitude.
So to believe that Comcast loses money on a "small number" of customers we would have to believe that those customers used over a billion dollars of bandwidth? That would mean that if we apply the Pareto rule, 4.2 million customers would be responsible for an extra $357 in cost EACH per year. (That's about $30/user/month) They charge more for faster service but the cost of providing faster service is a fixed cost so all they have to do is price it such that the marginal cost from a heavy user is less than the marginal revenue from the faster service. If they haven't done this then their CFO is an idiot and I'm pretty sure that isn't the case.
Engineers don't make economic decisions in a large company.
Engineers make economic decisions on a daily basis. Costing is a fundamental part of engineering. Anyone who thinks otherwise has never been an engineer in the real world. Engineers determine what is possible and specify the parts. Those parts have a cost attached so the engineers very much make economic decisions in companies of any size.
Any system that relies on the super-morality of people is bound to fail. History can attest to that.
And any system that doesn't have separation of duties and other internal controls is also bound to fail. As a group it doesn't shock me that some of them behaved badly but then they should expect no sympathy after the fact. If there weren't adequate internal controls then that is the fault of management but it doesn't excuse the engineers from what they did.
If these engineers were complicit in committing this fraud then they deserve whatever punishment awaits them. I have little sympathy for people who could easily have chosen to do the right thing and chose to do the easy thing instead.
You can relatively easily prosecute the engineers because well... they were the ones to implement it and would know what impact things would have.
They cannot easily prosecute the engineers if they never commit the crime in the first place. All the engineers had to do was refuse to commit fraud and both the company and the engineers would be better off for it. If the engineers knew what they were doing was a crime (and they almost certainly did) then they could easily have refused to do it. These are not people without options. The worst the company could do to them is fire them and then they find a job elsewhere. Much better than being hauled into court.
Look at it this way. Is it better to A) lose your job refusing to do something illegal or B) face prosecution for facilitating a fraud? Speaking for myself I'll take A every day of the week.
How about a touchscreen interface showing the area around you (based on sensor data), which allows you to drag a representation of the car to the place you want it to go?
That's basically the same thing as handing someone the controls to the car. Plus it really would be hard to do well, presuming it's even possible at all. Might as well drive at that point. It would be a LOT quicker and less annoying. The car's sensors can keep you from hitting things.
Cars and gasoline are not a big part of an American household's budget; you can increase the cost of driving substantially and people will still drive just as much and instead cut down on something else.
In the short run people will still have to drive. In the long run they would find alternative transportation options. You can reduce car usage by slowly ramping up the cost of fuel. Eventually people will either drive more efficient cars or alternative transportation means become economically viable like passenger rail.
To substantially change automobile usage in the US, you'd have to tax people so much that everybody becomes a lot poorer. That would work, but it probably wouldn't be popular. And what would be the point?
FALSE. You are correct that to reduce auto use you would have to tax fuel more and that it wouldn't be popular. But you are wrong that everybody becomes poorer. Europe taxes gasoline much much more than the US does and yet their standard of living is pretty similar. In response they utilize rail more and tend to drive smaller more fuel efficient cars. The point would be that the single best thing you could possibly do for the environment in the short to medium term would be to tax gasoline. Higher fuel costs force people to be more frugal with their use of it. That is a Good Thing. Now I don't think it is going to happen in the US in my lifetime but there is a point to it and the point is a good one.
Long term we have to find a way to hugely reduce our use of fossil fuels. We are literally and figuratively playing with fire by burning them for power.
In addition, "multi-billion dollar subsidies to the oil industry" are a drop in the bucket compared to the enormous subsidies "green" energy and public transportation already receive in the US.
I call bullshit on that one. 20 Seconds on Google would provide you the evidence that your statement is wrong. Fossil fuel subsidies roughly equal or even exceed renewables subsidies despite there being little economic justification for subsidizing fossil fuels.
The governments set CO2 emissions requirements for vehicles that, it seems, were impossible to meet given the current technology.
The emissions targets are demonstrably possible. There are cars driving on the road today which substantially exceed the CO2 emissions requirements under CAFE and similar legislation. Car companies might have to stop selling the ones that don't but that is a Good Thing.
After expending a large effort and resources on improving the technology, it was still impossible.
WRONG. The technology required for VW to meet emissions standards already exists and was available to them. They made a purely economic decision to not implement that technology in order to save money while fraudulently claiming that they had solved the problem. This was fraud in pursuit of money. Nothing more.
It stinks that commercial vehicles don't have to have pollution controls.
I would very much agree with that and we should work to fix that problem. What I think stinks more is that companies will fight fixing the problem every step of the way.
I hope I'm alive to see the end of burning in order to create energy and power.
Nice sentiment but it almost certainly won't happen in the lifetime of anyone reading this. Only way I can see a big dent being made is if there is are huge breakthroughs in fusion and battery technologies. Right now that is sort of wishful thinking...
The Chief Executive set unrealistic goals and planned punishments for anyone who failed. So, the engineers did what was rational, and now they're going to get the blame for the whole thing.
If the engineers did something that they knew was wrong then they deserve to be blamed and punished for what they did. If someone asks you to commit a crime the answer should be an unequivocal "NO". This was not a complicated ethical situation. This is kindergarten stuff. Just because someone told you to commit a crime doesn't make it acceptable for you to go ahead and actually do it.
Nobody at VW involved in this fiasco was under any illusions that what they were doing was legal or even in a gray area. Any engineers who were involved in this fraud should be taken to court and punished in a manner commensurate with their crime. Same with any management that was in charge. They knew or should have known what was going on and deserve to be punished for this crime.
And let's not pretend that the executives didn't know what was happening. This is a company that is renowned for their centralized control and micro-managing. Any pretense that the management was not aware of this fraud is almost certainly untrue. It might not go all the way to the top but I can't imaging how some folks pretty high up the food chain didn't authorize this.
I own a 2015 Passat tdi. Frankly I am not worried about the nox or co2 output I make in my vehicle.
So you are saying you don't give a crap about the environment. Fair enough. I appreciate your honesty.
Diesel trucks dump far more crap and haul less people.
So the reason you don't care is because other sources of pollution are worse? That's like saying it's ok for me to dump toxins in the stream because the factory down the street pollutes more. If we accept that logic then there would be no point in any rules prohibiting pollution. Just because we haven't solved some other problem doesn't mean we shouldn't deal with the pollution coming out of your car if we can.
My carbon footprint per person is far lower than other diesel vehicles
The biggest problems aren't actually going to be point to point navigation or even obstacle avoidance, though those aren't trivial. Navigation when you know the destinations is a solved problem and we've got a pretty good idea how to handle obstacle avoidance and terrain following though there is progress to be made
Possibly the hardest problem to solve it you want completely autonomous cars will be navigation in the last quarter mile and for destinations where you aren't actually sure exactly where you are going. This is a human interface problem and those are always challenging. In those circumstances it is REALLY hard to instruct a computer efficiently without actually taking the controls yourself. For example how do you explain to the computer that you want the parking space 3 places over but you want to back in? Or that you don't want to block in the car so park next to it on the lawn? Sounds easy but it really isn't - not yet anyway. Humans can do it mostly competently but we don't have any computer that is anywhere close to human level processing of verbal commands. Stuff like parking lots will be surprisingly hard to automate in a way that will be pleasing to most people. There are solutions but they are going to take a long time and require a lot of infrastructure. Probably several decades away at minimum. Sort of how we had autopilot for planes many year before we had the ability to do autonomous takeoffs and landings. (and the aviation problem is arguably easier as it has fewer variables)
I think we will see semi-autonomous systems relatively soon particularly for stuff like highway driving. But I think there is going to remain driver controls for quite some time because steering into that parking space or instructing the car to back up to the front door is actually pretty hard to do well. What will happen is that you'll program in your destination, the car will take you close to where you want to go and then you'll probably drive the last little bit yourself in a lot of cases. I think this piece of navigation will be solved last if at all.
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When was Firefox or Mozilla or Netscape ever stable?
I use Firefox daily to this day and haven't experienced a meaningful stability problem on Windows or a Mac in probably 10 years. Not to say it doesn't have any issues but stability does not appear to be one of them. Maybe some versions on linux had problems but I haven't run into any myself. I honestly can't remember the last time I managed to crash Firefox. Certainly hasn't been within the last 5 years.
"Does it sync?" A: Well, kind of - if you use iCloud.
Actually I just used the built in Sync for firefox and it did sync my bookmarks. Otherwise I'm not really sure what the point of it is and I use Firefox as my primary browser. (Chrome is buggy, IE is Windows Only and Safari is Mac only) I'm pretty much exactly who would think about using it and I don't see much point.
The model of relying on a business to provide benefits to its employees in lieu of the government or the employees themselves turns the employee into a serf, unable to leave in fear of losing their benefits.
Which is I think a part of why Republicans seem to hate "Obamacare" so much. They've lost their leverage to keep people subservient.
COBRA [dol.gov] was the last grand experiment in government meddling in "portable" healthcare benefits and it was by all accounts a miserable failure.
It wasn't a failure. COBRA did more or less what it was designed to do. It was designed to be a bridge, not ongoing portable insurance. The system around it was the failure. Used to be that if you lost your job you lost your health insurance too so you were doubly screwed. COBRA gave an (expensive) safety net option but it couldn't possibly solve the actual problem that was eventually solved with the Affordable Care Act. I've used COBRA insurance twice and it was fine for what it was.
Your fingerprints are likely on there somewhere, and if someone really wants your print and device and you are careful they'll likely follow you and wait for you to leave something behind that'll give a great print.
Are you REALLY worried about that? Seriously? Anyone that serious about getting the contents of your phone is probably going to just grab you and put your finger on the reader.
Fingerprints are a shit security measure.
Maybe if you are worried about the Impossible Missions Force. In my case they work just fine. It's kind of like the lock on my house. No, it won't keep a determined intruder out but it will keep out casual snoopers.
Wouldn't there be a more even distribution of winners?
Not necessarily. See the NY State Lottery if you need examples.
"It is clear that DraftKings and FanDuel are the leaders of a massive, multibillion-dollar scheme intended to evade the law and fleece sports fans across the country," says NY attorney general, Eric T. Schneiderman, "Today we have sent a clear message: not in New York, and not on my watch."
That statement might have some credibility if the State of New York didn't run their own gambling operation.
F'ing hypocrites...
Why don't we have a plug-in digital replacement for VHS/Beta tapes?
To what purpose? So we can display low rez old TV signals? It's an obsolete technology. Time to let it die. Transfer the contents to digital media and throw the old unit out. Keeping old VCR units around is a waste of resources.
why can't I get a digital-imaging back for my old 35mm Nikon cameras?
Because it doesn't work well. It's been tried. There is more to it than putting a digital sensor into the body. The interface isn't the same and retrofitting is rarely a good idea. Buy a new camera body and use the lenses on it. Keep your old camera body in case you ever decide to use film again. I don't like to throw out old stuff either if it works well but sometimes you have to move on.
Modern VHS tapes are complete crap, like modern floppy disks.
They always were complete crap. We just didn't have anything better back when they were ubiquitous. Even the best VHS tapes were really not terribly good products. Usable but never good.
Built to extremely low standards because hardly anyone uses them and they sell for ridiculously low prices.
Things that hardly anyone uses get sold for higher prices. The only reason they can sell them relatively cheaply is because the equipment to make the tapes has been fully depreciated for a very long time now.
Why wouldn't you just switch to recording on DVD/flash drive?
Because that requires learning something new. Lots of people absolutely HATE learning anything new. Several of my relatives have DVRs and have no idea how to use them despite them actually being quite easy to use.
I understand something like 60% of the US population is obese, and an almost equal number is diabetic.
No. The are overweight or obese. Overweight is not the same thing as obese. The number for obese is around 1/3 which is still alarmingly high.
By 2025, 75% of the US population will be obese.
Beware of naive extrapolation. It will lead you down all sorts of false paths. You are presuming that historic trends will continue indefinitely without change and that is actually quite unlikely.
And tasting the food as it is being prepared. Smelling the ingredients to be certain they are fresh.
Actually that might be easier than you think. Sensors can detect chemical and physical properties pretty effectively. It's not inconceivable that they could have sensors that could detect freshness and maybe even make a pretty good analysis of expected taste. This would be a ways off obviously for practical applications but I could see it happening someday. You'd probably see it in an industrial kitchen first if such things work since they would benefit the most from automation.
And this is why we can't have nice things: everyone's a lawyer, looking for the legalistic loophole they can take advantage of to get theirs
There is no loophole here. If a seller offers something and a buyer accepts, it is reasonable for the buyer to expect to get exactly what was offered. No more, no less. Insisting that an ISP actually provide "unlimited" service when they offered "unlimited" service is not unreasonable. If they were unable to provide such service at the time they offered it then they are committing fraud. I have no objection to them making a reasonable profit but whether they actually do or not is not my concern. If they lose money on the deal that is their problem. Similarly if I buy more than I can actually afford that is not the concern of the ISP.
It's the consequence of living in an adversarial society, I guess, but it's rather unpleasant.
Welcome to the Real World my friend. These companies are not your friend. The ONLY thing they want from you is your money and the exist for no other purpose. If you want to pretend otherwise then you are being naive. This is exactly why we have contracts, even between friends. Arguments occur when agreements are ambiguous or when one party tries to change the deal after the fact.
Why the hell are you defending these weasels? Your arguments are nonsense and not based in any contract law or any reasonable interpretation of reality. There are NO communal resources here. Not applicable. If they didn't have the resources to offer what they were offering then the company is committing fraud.
Unless you have a contract that extends into the future, neither of you have any significant obligation to each other going forwards.
People DO have contracts that extend into the future. If you have unlimited service (which some do) and they cap that service (which has happened) contrary to the original agreement (which also has happened) then the company has violated their obligations. Period. End of Discussion.
The definition in question is not 'unlimited' we agree on what that means. The definition in question is that of 'abuse'.
There is no debate about abuse because it cannot occur by definition. If they offer "unlimited" service then you cannot abuse that by using it as much as possible. If they slow the connection intentionally then they are violating their agreement after the fact. The fact that they later feel it is a bad deal for them is irrelevant. The fact that it might impact others (but probably doesn't) is irrelevant. They offered and you accepted. That is the deal and there is no abuse.
Not when they understand its limited and communal resource that they are being given unmetered access to.
A) They don't understand that and B) even if true it doesn't matter. If a company offers something in unlimited amounts in means UNLIMITED. Without limit. They didn't qualify it. There is no other meaning for unlimited than "without limit". If they made a bad deal then that is their fault and not the customer's problem. If they didn't really mean unlimited then they should have offered some other deal. There is no social contract here between me and you. It's solely between me and the company. If you don't like the effects of that, too bad.
You are trying to weasel word this and I am not buying what you are arguing. It's very simple. Don't offer "unlimited" anything unless you really mean it.
Its only bait and switch if they change the terms or product on you.
They DID change the terms. QED it is a bait and switch. They lured you in with one offer and then changed the offer. This is not complicated. They offered unlimited downloads and later realized that was a bad deal for them and are trying to weasel out of the deal.
They gave you unlimited access. You 'abused' it.
By definition it is impossible to abuse UNLIMITED access by utilizing said access. If you offer me unlimited bandwidth at a particular speed, you should not be surprised if I utilize it to the fullest extent possible. That is what they offered and what was accepted.
Normal people understand that an 'unlimited' offer of a resource that is actually both limited and communal should not be unreasonably monopolized.
Normal people understand "unlimited" to actually mean "unlimited" when used to promote the service. If it isn't unlimited it should not be advertised as such. But these companies very clearly said that you would have "unlimited" bandwidth so any changes after the fact means that they lied. That is called bait and switch among other things.
If you are the guy that goes downstairs and takes the entire 'continental breakfast' plate of danish up to your hotel room your abusing the fact that the hotel didn't place a 'limit' on the number of danish you could have.
Did the hotel advertise the number of danishes as "unlimited"? My guess is that they did nothing of the sort. They merely said a free breakfast was available, not that you could take the entire buffet back to your room.
If you walk into a chinese buffet for brunch at 11am, plunk down your $8 for all you can eat, and then promptly take the entire tray of sweet and sour chicken balls depriving everyone else of any.
It's all you can EAT. Not all you can take. You seem to be fuzzy on the difference. Stomachs have a finite capacity and restaurants know this. (Well, unless you are the late John Pinette)
The big question now is: were these companies cynical, or just naive?
Probably a bit of both.
We have no way of evaluating their claims that a small number of users who abused the system caused it to be unprofitable for them.
I happen to be a certified accountant (among other things) and my guess is that any claims that just a few users are able to make the service unprofitable are probably bogus. You could make a pretty good analysis with just a little bit of information. Comcast for example provides a breakout of their revenues from their internet services. We also know what their profit margins are overall. While crude we can get at least a rough idea of what the profits on their internet service might be. Then we can figure out how much service a "small number of users" would have to utilize to make the service unprofitable. You could apply the Pareto principle here (80/20 rule) probably to good effect. It's a very back-of-the-envelope analysis but probably not far off the mark.
Comcast for example has roughly 21 million high speed internet customers. Their operating income in 2014 was about $18 Billion and internet service accounts for about 8.3% of their revenues. So let's naively say that their profits from internet service are in line with their other offerings and so Comcast would have made a profit of about $1.5 billion on internet services. Could be less but we're probably within an order of magnitude.
So to believe that Comcast loses money on a "small number" of customers we would have to believe that those customers used over a billion dollars of bandwidth? That would mean that if we apply the Pareto rule, 4.2 million customers would be responsible for an extra $357 in cost EACH per year. (That's about $30/user/month) They charge more for faster service but the cost of providing faster service is a fixed cost so all they have to do is price it such that the marginal cost from a heavy user is less than the marginal revenue from the faster service. If they haven't done this then their CFO is an idiot and I'm pretty sure that isn't the case.
Engineers don't make economic decisions in a large company.
Engineers make economic decisions on a daily basis. Costing is a fundamental part of engineering. Anyone who thinks otherwise has never been an engineer in the real world. Engineers determine what is possible and specify the parts. Those parts have a cost attached so the engineers very much make economic decisions in companies of any size.
Any system that relies on the super-morality of people is bound to fail. History can attest to that.
And any system that doesn't have separation of duties and other internal controls is also bound to fail. As a group it doesn't shock me that some of them behaved badly but then they should expect no sympathy after the fact. If there weren't adequate internal controls then that is the fault of management but it doesn't excuse the engineers from what they did.
If these engineers were complicit in committing this fraud then they deserve whatever punishment awaits them. I have little sympathy for people who could easily have chosen to do the right thing and chose to do the easy thing instead.
You can relatively easily prosecute the engineers because well... they were the ones to implement it and would know what impact things would have.
They cannot easily prosecute the engineers if they never commit the crime in the first place. All the engineers had to do was refuse to commit fraud and both the company and the engineers would be better off for it. If the engineers knew what they were doing was a crime (and they almost certainly did) then they could easily have refused to do it. These are not people without options. The worst the company could do to them is fire them and then they find a job elsewhere. Much better than being hauled into court.
Look at it this way. Is it better to A) lose your job refusing to do something illegal or B) face prosecution for facilitating a fraud? Speaking for myself I'll take A every day of the week.
How about a touchscreen interface showing the area around you (based on sensor data), which allows you to drag a representation of the car to the place you want it to go?
That's basically the same thing as handing someone the controls to the car. Plus it really would be hard to do well, presuming it's even possible at all. Might as well drive at that point. It would be a LOT quicker and less annoying. The car's sensors can keep you from hitting things.
Cars and gasoline are not a big part of an American household's budget; you can increase the cost of driving substantially and people will still drive just as much and instead cut down on something else.
In the short run people will still have to drive. In the long run they would find alternative transportation options. You can reduce car usage by slowly ramping up the cost of fuel. Eventually people will either drive more efficient cars or alternative transportation means become economically viable like passenger rail.
To substantially change automobile usage in the US, you'd have to tax people so much that everybody becomes a lot poorer. That would work, but it probably wouldn't be popular. And what would be the point?
FALSE. You are correct that to reduce auto use you would have to tax fuel more and that it wouldn't be popular. But you are wrong that everybody becomes poorer. Europe taxes gasoline much much more than the US does and yet their standard of living is pretty similar. In response they utilize rail more and tend to drive smaller more fuel efficient cars. The point would be that the single best thing you could possibly do for the environment in the short to medium term would be to tax gasoline. Higher fuel costs force people to be more frugal with their use of it. That is a Good Thing. Now I don't think it is going to happen in the US in my lifetime but there is a point to it and the point is a good one.
Long term we have to find a way to hugely reduce our use of fossil fuels. We are literally and figuratively playing with fire by burning them for power.
In addition, "multi-billion dollar subsidies to the oil industry" are a drop in the bucket compared to the enormous subsidies "green" energy and public transportation already receive in the US.
I call bullshit on that one. 20 Seconds on Google would provide you the evidence that your statement is wrong. Fossil fuel subsidies roughly equal or even exceed renewables subsidies despite there being little economic justification for subsidizing fossil fuels.
The governments set CO2 emissions requirements for vehicles that, it seems, were impossible to meet given the current technology.
The emissions targets are demonstrably possible. There are cars driving on the road today which substantially exceed the CO2 emissions requirements under CAFE and similar legislation. Car companies might have to stop selling the ones that don't but that is a Good Thing.
After expending a large effort and resources on improving the technology, it was still impossible.
WRONG. The technology required for VW to meet emissions standards already exists and was available to them. They made a purely economic decision to not implement that technology in order to save money while fraudulently claiming that they had solved the problem. This was fraud in pursuit of money. Nothing more.
It stinks that commercial vehicles don't have to have pollution controls.
I would very much agree with that and we should work to fix that problem. What I think stinks more is that companies will fight fixing the problem every step of the way.
I hope I'm alive to see the end of burning in order to create energy and power.
Nice sentiment but it almost certainly won't happen in the lifetime of anyone reading this. Only way I can see a big dent being made is if there is are huge breakthroughs in fusion and battery technologies. Right now that is sort of wishful thinking...
The Chief Executive set unrealistic goals and planned punishments for anyone who failed. So, the engineers did what was rational, and now they're going to get the blame for the whole thing.
If the engineers did something that they knew was wrong then they deserve to be blamed and punished for what they did. If someone asks you to commit a crime the answer should be an unequivocal "NO". This was not a complicated ethical situation. This is kindergarten stuff. Just because someone told you to commit a crime doesn't make it acceptable for you to go ahead and actually do it.
Nobody at VW involved in this fiasco was under any illusions that what they were doing was legal or even in a gray area. Any engineers who were involved in this fraud should be taken to court and punished in a manner commensurate with their crime. Same with any management that was in charge. They knew or should have known what was going on and deserve to be punished for this crime.
And let's not pretend that the executives didn't know what was happening. This is a company that is renowned for their centralized control and micro-managing. Any pretense that the management was not aware of this fraud is almost certainly untrue. It might not go all the way to the top but I can't imaging how some folks pretty high up the food chain didn't authorize this.
I own a 2015 Passat tdi. Frankly I am not worried about the nox or co2 output I make in my vehicle.
So you are saying you don't give a crap about the environment. Fair enough. I appreciate your honesty.
Diesel trucks dump far more crap and haul less people.
So the reason you don't care is because other sources of pollution are worse? That's like saying it's ok for me to dump toxins in the stream because the factory down the street pollutes more. If we accept that logic then there would be no point in any rules prohibiting pollution. Just because we haven't solved some other problem doesn't mean we shouldn't deal with the pollution coming out of your car if we can.
My carbon footprint per person is far lower than other diesel vehicles
And yet it isn't as low as it could or should be.
The biggest problems aren't actually going to be point to point navigation or even obstacle avoidance, though those aren't trivial. Navigation when you know the destinations is a solved problem and we've got a pretty good idea how to handle obstacle avoidance and terrain following though there is progress to be made
Possibly the hardest problem to solve it you want completely autonomous cars will be navigation in the last quarter mile and for destinations where you aren't actually sure exactly where you are going. This is a human interface problem and those are always challenging. In those circumstances it is REALLY hard to instruct a computer efficiently without actually taking the controls yourself. For example how do you explain to the computer that you want the parking space 3 places over but you want to back in? Or that you don't want to block in the car so park next to it on the lawn? Sounds easy but it really isn't - not yet anyway. Humans can do it mostly competently but we don't have any computer that is anywhere close to human level processing of verbal commands. Stuff like parking lots will be surprisingly hard to automate in a way that will be pleasing to most people. There are solutions but they are going to take a long time and require a lot of infrastructure. Probably several decades away at minimum. Sort of how we had autopilot for planes many year before we had the ability to do autonomous takeoffs and landings. (and the aviation problem is arguably easier as it has fewer variables)
I think we will see semi-autonomous systems relatively soon particularly for stuff like highway driving. But I think there is going to remain driver controls for quite some time because steering into that parking space or instructing the car to back up to the front door is actually pretty hard to do well. What will happen is that you'll program in your destination, the car will take you close to where you want to go and then you'll probably drive the last little bit yourself in a lot of cases. I think this piece of navigation will be solved last if at all.