Source control has it's advantages, but source control isn't nearly as good as the commenting tools you get in office. My Girlfriend/Office Mate is writing her PhD in LaTeX as we speak, with version control. Learning the LaTeX is easy, writing well is hard, and for that comments, spelling and grammar checkers, accepting and rejecting revisions etc. are so much better in some sort of office type product (or google docs).
Several actually. In LaTeX. It depends what your biggest hurdles when writing are. If you have problems with the content of the writing then LaTeX is the enemy, if you have problems with the layout and formatting, LaTeX is your friend (assuming you can manage to use it).
We convert everything to Adobe PDF, and the documents are guaranteed to look exactly the same on all systems, unlike MS docs, which are always a line or two off when opened on another computer.
That's not a feature. Try doing business with people who use metric paper sizes when you work in US sizes or the reverse. You can work around it, but all of a sudden your document isn't the same both places.
Also, I don't know what decade you're living in, but if you have the same paper size selected word documents don't seem to have that problem across computers. If you do have different paper sizes it's very much intentional. Whether you like it or not is certainly subjective, but MS could have long ago fixed paper size and margins etc. to the document, they've deliberately chosen to not do that because it's a pain in the arse when you work internationally.
Also, if you want to collaboratively edit a PDF you're pretty much on the hook for cash the same way you are with MS, so you're not really getting yourself much there.
LaTeX is one of those things that has clung to life long past its expiry date. We still see it in academia a lot, and at this point the advice I give people is write your document in some sort of 'office' suite with a half assed effort at formatting, and then put it into LaTeX at the end (or paragraph by paragraph if you need things like equations for the content to make sense). It's much easier to check spelling/grammar, have revisions made by other people (with comments and suggested corrections and so on), in one of the office suits than it is with LaTeX.
There are some good LaTeX editors out there, but in terms of creating a document office suites are so much better. Because, you know, this isn't the 1980's. I can write HTML and CSS by hand entirely too, but for most people that's really not a good plan.
A home user running xp doesn't care about office 2013, and a business user on XP would reasonably move to 7 before getting office 2013 anyway.
XP is approaching the end of life where you can say it 'works'. It has compatibility and security issues that will no longer get fixed, and as time goes on new software will rely on libraries and so on that just don't exist on XP (see the hardware acceleration on DX10 class hardware mentioned).
With linux these sorts of problems are simply solved by a free upgrade (which, like windows, comes with features you may not want and so on), but with MS they charge you money for it, but the core problem would still be there, you just don't get an excuse of 'oh but I can't afford Ubuntu 12 when I still have 10' the way you do with XP and 7.
That something 'works' is a moving target in the IT sector. Does it support flash? How about the latest version? Will it support HTML5 and whatever video encoding scheme your browser wants? Will anyone even want a browser without hardware acceleration in a year or two? Is there a new UI API that just doesn't exist on an old version? Etc. The world plods along, and eventually it's not practical to make your software for an old operating system, as relatively important companies start making that transition your computer will 'work' less and less, in the same way IE6 works but doesn't.
I'm not sure it's there yet, but XP clinging to life could start to cause issues as security and compatibility move past what is reasonably possible on XP.
There's a jagged alliance remake available, it's pretty decent. It's not quite Xcom (though you can buy that from GoG.com if you want it, or gamersgate, or steam).
Except that doing that they'd have been looking at an MMO in 2020. Depends on how much money you can borrow and from where. Clearly they thought they were going to sell a lot more than 1.5 million units of Kingdoms of Amalaur.
I think that's where a mix of real time and turn based works well. Turn based combat, but real time running around out of combat. It was tedious to move around 20 squad members looking for something while turn based.
E.G. See jagged alliance. (Which has a remake out at the moment).
Unfair is probably the wrong word. I can like a lot of different games, but I know what to expect if I buy a call of duty, fifa, the sims, wow expansions, Battlefield etc. I'm willing to shell out money for those, in many cases more money than I otherwise would, because even without playing them I have a fairly good sense of what I'm going to get. Some of those big titles make a lot of money because they have huge production quality. If you want 200 hours of voice acting (think Star Wars the Old Republic) that's going to cost an astronomical amount of money, or full motion capture, licensed images (vehicles items etc.). Going with that is huge advertising budgets, if you want to sell your game that you spent 60 -100 million dollars to make it's likely to pay off to spend 200 million on advertising because people need to know when your game is going to be out, you want them to buy it day 1 before they can pirate it etc. etc. etc.
Kingdoms of Amalaur, which I just finally, got around to finishing, was a new IP, with a relatively overall standard fantasy setting (partly because they hired people who have defined the fantasy genre lately). But it still only sold about 1.5 million copies. That would be a good title for some people, but not for the production quality and tools they had, and the business risk Shilling was taking, and so they're out of business and on the hook for significant debts. The game was well reviewed, it plays reasonably well, it has good production quality, in all respects it is objectively a decent game, but it still didn't make enough money.
If you want to innovate the place to do that is mobile. The barrier to entry is very very low, since apple and google don't have onerous rules like sony and nintendo, but even in the mobile space odds are good (really good, like 90% or more good) that you'll not make any money on a particular title. Indie PC titles are the next step up from that, but you have to be big enough to get listed on steam to have a chance, and then the next step up from that would be the PSN/XBLA type stores (where your sales may not be better than Steam, but you have to go through the Sony/MS certification process which is much more stringent than Steam).
Either way, as with the movie business, there's always some innovation in the games business, but a lot of those plans fail to make money unless you engage in the well oiled machine of hollywood accounting (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting). Tera online seems to managing to hold it together for the moment, but no one really wants to end up like 38 studios and Curt Schilling, so the only serious risks taken are in small titles where if you loose 90% of your investment you're out 20K and you aren't out everything for the rest of your life. It's a down economy, no one wants to risk large amounts of money when you can't make any good predictions on sales. SWTOR which is probably the biggest trainwreck financially in the games business lately still sold something like 2 million copies - they just can't seem to maintain big subscriber numbers, but they got good opening sales, which I'm sure they were reasonably able to predict based on the KOTOR franchise and so on.
If big publishers had more risky games on the side, where the big projects funded more risky ones it might appear more 'fair', but that would cost them a lot of money.
Right, the whole WP7 thing is to lure developers and to get enough of a base they can get statistically significant metrics on what they need to make it do.
Presumably the plan has been to incorporate this into WP8, whether they succeed or not is another matter entirely.
In this case the yahoo's official stance was that these were all username/pwd pairs from 2010 when yahoo acquired/merged/whatever with the service in question. So the users in question could even have changed their passwords in the intervening 2 years and still been relatively safe. That could be complete bullshit or completely wrong, I have no idea. I would think yahoo by 2010 would have known enough about security to not have a plaintext password, but you never know.
But yes, the problem with 'change your password' advice is that you need to know the problem has been fixed before thinking a new password actually accomplishes anything other than handing hackers another password.
There are a LOT of artificially created obstacles up in the air. Not colliding with another airplane isn't so bad, it's not getting 'too close' to the aviation authority approved box around all other aircraft, in 3 dimensions, when they're all moving at high speeds is a very difficult problem, in addition to air corridors.
Where automated car systems tend to fall apart is when their sensor systems can't get the data they want (which is explicitly opposite of how aircraft are designed, automated aircraft systems are very much about working when the pilot can't get the information s/he needs), or when there is something like construction, which the car cannot interpret. Aircraft of course fail badly (see the air france crash from brazil to paris) when the sensors start getting bad data.
Automated cars would actually be much easier if we could do things like radio tag the road or something similar, so that cars followed along electronic line markers. If you could then radio tag other cars as well that would make the whole problem significantly easier. That's essentially what aircraft do, but thus far no one seems inclined to do that on regular cars.
I would think though, that the first and biggest market for self driving cars will be for the elderly, where putting constraints on (vehicle moves slowly, don't go near construction etc. ) will be acceptable tradeoffs in usability, because those sorts of constraints are still a lot better than not being able to get around on your own at all. It also means that the government or an insurance company or the like may 'own' the vehicle, and assume liability for it, and maintenance costs etc. and the operator is renting it.
A car can't drive now with a LOT of different electrical or mechanical failures. Adding one more into the mix isn't really changing much.
The legal compliance issue (what if the car knows one of its sensors isn't working) is actually a serious and legitimate problem. In that case who is considered responsible for 'operating' the vehicle? If a device has a tendency to catch fire or otherwise fail unsafely it tends to get recalled and the manufacturer blamed, so a car may not automatically do anything other than drive to a repair shop if part of its own diagnostic system fails. Right now you can just ignore those warnings and keep driving (at your own peril naturally).
I was referring, as divebus said, more to when adding fonts became a trivial activity (desktop publishing for example). Once something becomes cheap (relative to the regular costs of the industry) it has a tendency to get used to death until people realize it's not getting them anything, or they start thinking about when exactly it does add something and when it doesn't.
You could say the same thing about fonts in books. I'm sure the first time fonts were available at a printing press authors and publishers massively overused the feature, and did more harm than good to their books by overdosing people on fonts.
And then people started thinking about how fonts could convey meaning, or style, and how fonts effect readability, and suddenly the choice of font(s) can help better convey the story and characters, and sometimes to a wider audience.
3D, colour, surround sound, CGI, all of it are just tools for the storytellers to use to tell their story. We don't even think about colour in film, but it was a huge technical milestone for a lot more than just 'improving a character or story'. But then the use of colour, once its available can very much impact story telling, see schindlers list if you want an example.
There are clearly lots of artists who think 3D will help better convey the world their story takes place, make their characters more believable or real and so on. Most of them are probably wrong, but it takes time for people to appreciate just how it could be used to their benefit, and importantly, how to use it well.
That is, quite literally, someone else's problem. It sounds calloused to say, but seriously,/. isn't a site for first responders, it's for IT and CS types. It's not like we're looking at one thing at the expense of another here, your data (and 911 access) should work, people shouldn't die in a fire and your data shouldn't be hosed if it was housed there.
As to your point about universities. As tragic as it might be if someone died in a fire tomorrow at the university I graduated from 10 years ago, I still want them to be able to provide me transcripts and a copy of my degree if needed 10 years from now.
People around here are supposed to worry about preserving data, usually not at the expense of peoples lives (although there is a market for that in government secrets). Worrying about how to put out a fire and treat burn victims is someone else's job.
I think the implication is that in the USA drivers are responsible for not hitting a pedestrian, whereas in Europe a pedestrian is responsible for not getting hit.
In practice I don't think there's actually much difference, in either case the pedestrian doesn't want to get hit, being at fault, having healthcare or not.
no, but in smaller cities (including where I am) it's only a small set of pedestrians that you see trying to either run lights or charge forward before the walk indicator is on. At the university entrance that seems like everyone, but everywhere else the vast majority of people wait.
"Speed conventions" (by which I assume you mean the speed people actually choose to drive) are not set relative to speed limits. People drive at the maximum speed they feel to be safe/comfortable
people drive at the maximum speed they figure they won't get ticketed at, which, depending on local factors, is either a fixed value or a percent over the speed limit (or even right on the speed limit some places). Photoradar did wonders for getting people to obey speed limits, it was a disaster for traffic flow, and pissed everyone off for all sorts of liability issues, but it did get people obeying speed limits.
If you aren't familiar with photoradar, basically it was cameras along the road that ticketed *everyone* who was driving over the limit that passed by. No stopping, no appeals. Just a ticket in the mail a couple of weeks later.
The presence of traffic lights makes the situation more predictable, which makes drivers feel safer. When they feel safer, they speed up and/or pay less attention.
I'll agree with not paying attention to the right things. Traffic lights are only reasonably predictable if you're familiar with that particular light, otherwise it's a guessing game as to how long the green/yellow is. In the former case you get lazy and don't pay attention, in the latter to spend too much time guessing and not enough time paying attention to the road.
It's probably a fair point that Apple gets a lot of unfair criticism because they disclose quite a lot, and they are individually one of the bigger and more profitable outfits. But that doesn't make them saints.
Making devices harder to repair is/was a step backwards. Even if everything they had done to that point was a good idea (which by no means is it), it was still a bad idea to make devices into a metal box of glue and solder.
Besides that, the reason you do business in china is that it's cheap, and it's cheap because they have lax labour and environmental laws, and are happy to pay people shitty wages. In the long run that's the only way china will develop into having decent wages, so fair enough, it's going to happen, and Apple is there to take advantage of that, just like everyone else. No one with any sort of soul is particularly pleased with this arrangement, including I'm sure a huge portion of apple or their competitions staff, but they're still doing it.
In my previous job I had to repair a lot of electronic devices, (mostly laptops that got dropped or similar). Having to toss an entire ipad because the glass screen is cracked would be very wasteful. It doesn't matter if you have to replace it, or you send it to apple and they replace it, or it gets sent to india/china and is 'recycled' there, hard to tear down is hard to tear down.
No one, absolutely no one wants to spend 100 dollars in man hours to recycle a laptop or an iPad. By making devices hard to repair you make them landfill fodder, or dumping on poor people fodder. Now if all you need is a single 'special' tool or two (that are really just odd variants of generic tools) that's not a huge problem, but the direction apple went, with unibody construction, gluing parts to other parts etc. soldering them all together was making their devices very hard to repair, even for their own people, to the point that it would be better to just junk any broken device and completely replace it. That's bad (generally).
If you could get what you wanted by just crushing down the electronics and re-refining out the metals then it wouldn't be so bad to have everything soldered together from an environmental standpoint, but because of all of the relatively toxic parts that's not usually a great option.
That would have the benefit of forcing city planners to incorporate more parking, and automating parking spot locators.
In that case your car could find a parking spot quite a ways away from where you want to be, and start driving over to pick you up before you're ready to actually get in the car.
I'm in southern ontario and you don't see a lot of roundabouts here, which makes them hazardous partly because people aren't used to dealing with them.
I regularly go near one just outside hamilton, which is fortunately in the middle of nowhere, but there are regularly tyre tracks through the centre of it.
the 'etc' on safety equipment is where you get into trouble.
Does a car *require* winter tyres? (In Quebec they do in the winter) as part of approved safety equipment? That would make operating a vehicle without properly treaded tyres illegal. How about noise? Too loud, too quiet, seriously, both.
And so on. You can make a car capable of doing 300 km/h and still have it be street legal. But you can also do that and *not* have it be legal. I suspect for example, mounting a rocket engine on the back of your car would fail some safety standard.
if autonomous vehicles take off, expect laws to be written expressly for the purposes of defining what they have to do, and what happens if you modify them (presumably there's also liability there, modification itself may not be illegal, but the person who did the modifications would be liable for any damage the vehicle does).
Slashdot Mirror
Source control has it's advantages, but source control isn't nearly as good as the commenting tools you get in office. My Girlfriend/Office Mate is writing her PhD in LaTeX as we speak, with version control. Learning the LaTeX is easy, writing well is hard, and for that comments, spelling and grammar checkers, accepting and rejecting revisions etc. are so much better in some sort of office type product (or google docs).
Several actually. In LaTeX. It depends what your biggest hurdles when writing are. If you have problems with the content of the writing then LaTeX is the enemy, if you have problems with the layout and formatting, LaTeX is your friend (assuming you can manage to use it).
We convert everything to Adobe PDF, and the documents are guaranteed to look exactly the same on all systems, unlike MS docs, which are always a line or two off when opened on another computer.
That's not a feature. Try doing business with people who use metric paper sizes when you work in US sizes or the reverse. You can work around it, but all of a sudden your document isn't the same both places.
Also, I don't know what decade you're living in, but if you have the same paper size selected word documents don't seem to have that problem across computers. If you do have different paper sizes it's very much intentional. Whether you like it or not is certainly subjective, but MS could have long ago fixed paper size and margins etc. to the document, they've deliberately chosen to not do that because it's a pain in the arse when you work internationally.
Also, if you want to collaboratively edit a PDF you're pretty much on the hook for cash the same way you are with MS, so you're not really getting yourself much there.
LaTeX is one of those things that has clung to life long past its expiry date. We still see it in academia a lot, and at this point the advice I give people is write your document in some sort of 'office' suite with a half assed effort at formatting, and then put it into LaTeX at the end (or paragraph by paragraph if you need things like equations for the content to make sense). It's much easier to check spelling/grammar, have revisions made by other people (with comments and suggested corrections and so on), in one of the office suits than it is with LaTeX.
There are some good LaTeX editors out there, but in terms of creating a document office suites are so much better. Because, you know, this isn't the 1980's. I can write HTML and CSS by hand entirely too, but for most people that's really not a good plan.
A home user running xp doesn't care about office 2013, and a business user on XP would reasonably move to 7 before getting office 2013 anyway.
XP is approaching the end of life where you can say it 'works'. It has compatibility and security issues that will no longer get fixed, and as time goes on new software will rely on libraries and so on that just don't exist on XP (see the hardware acceleration on DX10 class hardware mentioned).
With linux these sorts of problems are simply solved by a free upgrade (which, like windows, comes with features you may not want and so on), but with MS they charge you money for it, but the core problem would still be there, you just don't get an excuse of 'oh but I can't afford Ubuntu 12 when I still have 10' the way you do with XP and 7.
That something 'works' is a moving target in the IT sector. Does it support flash? How about the latest version? Will it support HTML5 and whatever video encoding scheme your browser wants? Will anyone even want a browser without hardware acceleration in a year or two? Is there a new UI API that just doesn't exist on an old version? Etc. The world plods along, and eventually it's not practical to make your software for an old operating system, as relatively important companies start making that transition your computer will 'work' less and less, in the same way IE6 works but doesn't.
I'm not sure it's there yet, but XP clinging to life could start to cause issues as security and compatibility move past what is reasonably possible on XP.
There's a jagged alliance remake available, it's pretty decent. It's not quite Xcom (though you can buy that from GoG.com if you want it, or gamersgate, or steam).
Except that doing that they'd have been looking at an MMO in 2020. Depends on how much money you can borrow and from where. Clearly they thought they were going to sell a lot more than 1.5 million units of Kingdoms of Amalaur.
I think that's where a mix of real time and turn based works well. Turn based combat, but real time running around out of combat. It was tedious to move around 20 squad members looking for something while turn based.
E.G. See jagged alliance. (Which has a remake out at the moment).
unfair share of the dollars spent.
Unfair is probably the wrong word. I can like a lot of different games, but I know what to expect if I buy a call of duty, fifa, the sims, wow expansions, Battlefield etc. I'm willing to shell out money for those, in many cases more money than I otherwise would, because even without playing them I have a fairly good sense of what I'm going to get. Some of those big titles make a lot of money because they have huge production quality. If you want 200 hours of voice acting (think Star Wars the Old Republic) that's going to cost an astronomical amount of money, or full motion capture, licensed images (vehicles items etc.). Going with that is huge advertising budgets, if you want to sell your game that you spent 60 -100 million dollars to make it's likely to pay off to spend 200 million on advertising because people need to know when your game is going to be out, you want them to buy it day 1 before they can pirate it etc. etc. etc.
Kingdoms of Amalaur, which I just finally, got around to finishing, was a new IP, with a relatively overall standard fantasy setting (partly because they hired people who have defined the fantasy genre lately). But it still only sold about 1.5 million copies. That would be a good title for some people, but not for the production quality and tools they had, and the business risk Shilling was taking, and so they're out of business and on the hook for significant debts. The game was well reviewed, it plays reasonably well, it has good production quality, in all respects it is objectively a decent game, but it still didn't make enough money.
If you want to innovate the place to do that is mobile. The barrier to entry is very very low, since apple and google don't have onerous rules like sony and nintendo, but even in the mobile space odds are good (really good, like 90% or more good) that you'll not make any money on a particular title. Indie PC titles are the next step up from that, but you have to be big enough to get listed on steam to have a chance, and then the next step up from that would be the PSN/XBLA type stores (where your sales may not be better than Steam, but you have to go through the Sony/MS certification process which is much more stringent than Steam).
Either way, as with the movie business, there's always some innovation in the games business, but a lot of those plans fail to make money unless you engage in the well oiled machine of hollywood accounting (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting). Tera online seems to managing to hold it together for the moment, but no one really wants to end up like 38 studios and Curt Schilling, so the only serious risks taken are in small titles where if you loose 90% of your investment you're out 20K and you aren't out everything for the rest of your life. It's a down economy, no one wants to risk large amounts of money when you can't make any good predictions on sales. SWTOR which is probably the biggest trainwreck financially in the games business lately still sold something like 2 million copies - they just can't seem to maintain big subscriber numbers, but they got good opening sales, which I'm sure they were reasonably able to predict based on the KOTOR franchise and so on.
If big publishers had more risky games on the side, where the big projects funded more risky ones it might appear more 'fair', but that would cost them a lot of money.
Right, the whole WP7 thing is to lure developers and to get enough of a base they can get statistically significant metrics on what they need to make it do.
Presumably the plan has been to incorporate this into WP8, whether they succeed or not is another matter entirely.
ya, it looks like the yahoo android app has some problem with it.
http://www.zdnet.com/new-yahoo-app-vulnerability-explains-android-spam-7000000964/
At the same time, there has been an nvidia forum breach, so anyone who used a shared username/pwd pair on those services might be vulnerable.
In this case the yahoo's official stance was that these were all username/pwd pairs from 2010 when yahoo acquired/merged/whatever with the service in question. So the users in question could even have changed their passwords in the intervening 2 years and still been relatively safe. That could be complete bullshit or completely wrong, I have no idea. I would think yahoo by 2010 would have known enough about security to not have a plaintext password, but you never know.
But yes, the problem with 'change your password' advice is that you need to know the problem has been fixed before thinking a new password actually accomplishes anything other than handing hackers another password.
There are a LOT of artificially created obstacles up in the air. Not colliding with another airplane isn't so bad, it's not getting 'too close' to the aviation authority approved box around all other aircraft, in 3 dimensions, when they're all moving at high speeds is a very difficult problem, in addition to air corridors.
Where automated car systems tend to fall apart is when their sensor systems can't get the data they want (which is explicitly opposite of how aircraft are designed, automated aircraft systems are very much about working when the pilot can't get the information s/he needs), or when there is something like construction, which the car cannot interpret. Aircraft of course fail badly (see the air france crash from brazil to paris) when the sensors start getting bad data.
Automated cars would actually be much easier if we could do things like radio tag the road or something similar, so that cars followed along electronic line markers. If you could then radio tag other cars as well that would make the whole problem significantly easier. That's essentially what aircraft do, but thus far no one seems inclined to do that on regular cars.
I would think though, that the first and biggest market for self driving cars will be for the elderly, where putting constraints on (vehicle moves slowly, don't go near construction etc. ) will be acceptable tradeoffs in usability, because those sorts of constraints are still a lot better than not being able to get around on your own at all. It also means that the government or an insurance company or the like may 'own' the vehicle, and assume liability for it, and maintenance costs etc. and the operator is renting it.
That's silly.
A car can't drive now with a LOT of different electrical or mechanical failures. Adding one more into the mix isn't really changing much.
The legal compliance issue (what if the car knows one of its sensors isn't working) is actually a serious and legitimate problem. In that case who is considered responsible for 'operating' the vehicle? If a device has a tendency to catch fire or otherwise fail unsafely it tends to get recalled and the manufacturer blamed, so a car may not automatically do anything other than drive to a repair shop if part of its own diagnostic system fails. Right now you can just ignore those warnings and keep driving (at your own peril naturally).
I was referring, as divebus said, more to when adding fonts became a trivial activity (desktop publishing for example). Once something becomes cheap (relative to the regular costs of the industry) it has a tendency to get used to death until people realize it's not getting them anything, or they start thinking about when exactly it does add something and when it doesn't.
You could say the same thing about fonts in books. I'm sure the first time fonts were available at a printing press authors and publishers massively overused the feature, and did more harm than good to their books by overdosing people on fonts.
And then people started thinking about how fonts could convey meaning, or style, and how fonts effect readability, and suddenly the choice of font(s) can help better convey the story and characters, and sometimes to a wider audience.
3D, colour, surround sound, CGI, all of it are just tools for the storytellers to use to tell their story. We don't even think about colour in film, but it was a huge technical milestone for a lot more than just 'improving a character or story'. But then the use of colour, once its available can very much impact story telling, see schindlers list if you want an example.
There are clearly lots of artists who think 3D will help better convey the world their story takes place, make their characters more believable or real and so on. Most of them are probably wrong, but it takes time for people to appreciate just how it could be used to their benefit, and importantly, how to use it well.
Is everybody safe
That is, quite literally, someone else's problem. It sounds calloused to say, but seriously, /. isn't a site for first responders, it's for IT and CS types. It's not like we're looking at one thing at the expense of another here, your data (and 911 access) should work, people shouldn't die in a fire and your data shouldn't be hosed if it was housed there.
As to your point about universities. As tragic as it might be if someone died in a fire tomorrow at the university I graduated from 10 years ago, I still want them to be able to provide me transcripts and a copy of my degree if needed 10 years from now.
People around here are supposed to worry about preserving data, usually not at the expense of peoples lives (although there is a market for that in government secrets). Worrying about how to put out a fire and treat burn victims is someone else's job.
I think the implication is that in the USA drivers are responsible for not hitting a pedestrian, whereas in Europe a pedestrian is responsible for not getting hit.
In practice I don't think there's actually much difference, in either case the pedestrian doesn't want to get hit, being at fault, having healthcare or not.
What, do Soviet pedestrians obey the signal?
no, but in smaller cities (including where I am) it's only a small set of pedestrians that you see trying to either run lights or charge forward before the walk indicator is on. At the university entrance that seems like everyone, but everywhere else the vast majority of people wait.
"Speed conventions" (by which I assume you mean the speed people actually choose to drive) are not set relative to speed limits. People drive at the maximum speed they feel to be safe/comfortable
people drive at the maximum speed they figure they won't get ticketed at, which, depending on local factors, is either a fixed value or a percent over the speed limit (or even right on the speed limit some places). Photoradar did wonders for getting people to obey speed limits, it was a disaster for traffic flow, and pissed everyone off for all sorts of liability issues, but it did get people obeying speed limits.
If you aren't familiar with photoradar, basically it was cameras along the road that ticketed *everyone* who was driving over the limit that passed by. No stopping, no appeals. Just a ticket in the mail a couple of weeks later.
The presence of traffic lights makes the situation more predictable, which makes drivers feel safer. When they feel safer, they speed up and/or pay less attention.
I'll agree with not paying attention to the right things. Traffic lights are only reasonably predictable if you're familiar with that particular light, otherwise it's a guessing game as to how long the green/yellow is. In the former case you get lazy and don't pay attention, in the latter to spend too much time guessing and not enough time paying attention to the road.
It's probably a fair point that Apple gets a lot of unfair criticism because they disclose quite a lot, and they are individually one of the bigger and more profitable outfits. But that doesn't make them saints.
Making devices harder to repair is/was a step backwards. Even if everything they had done to that point was a good idea (which by no means is it), it was still a bad idea to make devices into a metal box of glue and solder.
Besides that, the reason you do business in china is that it's cheap, and it's cheap because they have lax labour and environmental laws, and are happy to pay people shitty wages. In the long run that's the only way china will develop into having decent wages, so fair enough, it's going to happen, and Apple is there to take advantage of that, just like everyone else. No one with any sort of soul is particularly pleased with this arrangement, including I'm sure a huge portion of apple or their competitions staff, but they're still doing it.
No, but I'd repair it.
Seriously.
In my previous job I had to repair a lot of electronic devices, (mostly laptops that got dropped or similar). Having to toss an entire ipad because the glass screen is cracked would be very wasteful. It doesn't matter if you have to replace it, or you send it to apple and they replace it, or it gets sent to india/china and is 'recycled' there, hard to tear down is hard to tear down.
No one, absolutely no one wants to spend 100 dollars in man hours to recycle a laptop or an iPad. By making devices hard to repair you make them landfill fodder, or dumping on poor people fodder. Now if all you need is a single 'special' tool or two (that are really just odd variants of generic tools) that's not a huge problem, but the direction apple went, with unibody construction, gluing parts to other parts etc. soldering them all together was making their devices very hard to repair, even for their own people, to the point that it would be better to just junk any broken device and completely replace it. That's bad (generally).
If you could get what you wanted by just crushing down the electronics and re-refining out the metals then it wouldn't be so bad to have everything soldered together from an environmental standpoint, but because of all of the relatively toxic parts that's not usually a great option.
That would have the benefit of forcing city planners to incorporate more parking, and automating parking spot locators.
In that case your car could find a parking spot quite a ways away from where you want to be, and start driving over to pick you up before you're ready to actually get in the car.
I'm in southern ontario and you don't see a lot of roundabouts here, which makes them hazardous partly because people aren't used to dealing with them.
I regularly go near one just outside hamilton, which is fortunately in the middle of nowhere, but there are regularly tyre tracks through the centre of it.
the 'etc' on safety equipment is where you get into trouble.
Does a car *require* winter tyres? (In Quebec they do in the winter) as part of approved safety equipment? That would make operating a vehicle without properly treaded tyres illegal. How about noise? Too loud, too quiet, seriously, both.
And so on. You can make a car capable of doing 300 km/h and still have it be street legal. But you can also do that and *not* have it be legal. I suspect for example, mounting a rocket engine on the back of your car would fail some safety standard.
Further there is no felony modification laws
Yet.
if autonomous vehicles take off, expect laws to be written expressly for the purposes of defining what they have to do, and what happens if you modify them (presumably there's also liability there, modification itself may not be illegal, but the person who did the modifications would be liable for any damage the vehicle does).