All of this should make the UK a very dangerous place for pedestrians if speed limits alone were a primary driver of road fatalities, but they aren't. The UK averages 3.6 fatalities per billion kilometres driven. The US average (where limits are on average lower) is 7.1, which is effectively double. It seems much more likely that issues like car quality, driver certification, road design, car design etc are far more influential.
I would say that the UK is much more pedestrian friendly than the US in general. Just one example is the use of zebra crossings. Also the level of driver education is higher in the UK, in my experience.
My youngest has been using a Lumia 630 for a year or so. It's really not a bad device; I like the the interface, and she hasn't had any issues with it crashing that I'm aware of. For a cheap phone the camera is ok - I got it for $50, unlocked. The only thing against it really is the paucity of apps.
She's getting an iPhone next, despite me trying to steer her towards an Android.
Yeah, but 80% of the US population lives in urban areas. The other 20% will just have to choose if they want a depreciating electric car or a (possibly less quickly depreciating) normal car.
I dunno about you but I'd gladly take the tradeoff of a gun that fires 99.999% of the time when I want it to if it also fires 0% of the time if someone wrestles it out of my grasp or some less responsible member of the household somehow manages to get a hold of it and starts messing around with it.
Sure, but that's not the likely scenario. There's either going to be some biometric stuff, which won't be that reliable, or some sort of token which, unless you're super diligent and wear it all the time, will be available to a less responsible member of your household.
It's widely known that having a gun in the house significantly increases your chances of being shot. The scenario of having the gun wrestled out of your hand is statistically unlikely; you're most likely to shoot yourself (suicide accounts for 2/3 or so of gun deaths in the US). Smart guns wouldn't help there.
Guns are basically very simple machines, and I'm willing to wager that agencies will review the smart gun tech every so often, and conclude that it does not meet their needs. I won't be buying shares in any smart gun companies anytime soon.
I just wish this type of solution can hit the consumer market.
It absolutely could. But how many people would buy it? A 6TB external drive is more than the vast majority of people need to hold all their personal files, simpler, smaller, and costs less than $200. And still most people don't bother backing stuff up.
$600 + 20% (which I think is a pretty common VAT in Europe) is $720. So that might well explain most of the difference right there.
In the US, there's no VAT, and states all set their own sales tax rates from 0% on up (not sure if any are over 8 or 9%). But a lot of stuff you order online will come with no tax charged even if your state does charge it, so $600 is probably what most in the US will actually pay.
I'm in the camp of "demanding", in that if I were in a focus group I would tell them that the first sub-$50k self driving car which hits the market, I'll probably buy. The blind and elderly may still be better served by taxis with "drivers" who could assist them, but the driving should be done by the car. And the goal of self driving cars is to have them able to drive with no one in them, ie. no need for a blind person to be in charge any more than you or I would be.
Au contraire, I found that using the Mailvelope plugin in Chrome is really easy, and I mess it up less than I did with PGP via Thunderbird. I use Thunderbird mostly, but if I want to send encrypted mail I use Chrome & Mailvelope.
The point is that human drivers are idiots and drive in all sorts of unpredictable ways.
All of this is true, yet accident rate of these idiotic humans is half of what rigidly-abiding robots are.
Did you miss the part where this accident rate is for accidents *involving* the robots, but not *caused* by the robots? The idiot humans are hitting them at double the average rate; the same rate would likely apply to any slower, rule following human drivers. But the point is, the robot was driving in a legal (though arguably excessively conservative) manner, and other drivers ran into them.
30,000 people are killed in auto accidents each year in the US. There is no way that widespread adoption of autonomous cars is going to increase that number, and I imagine that in 30 years that number will be decreased by an order of magnitude.
the original trilogy was re-released to theaters multiple times, the last being in 1997. I saw it again on the big screen then, and it held up as well as ever.
Ok, I saw the original in the theater at least 5 times as a kid, read the comics, etc. Saw the trilogy on VHS maybe a couple of times. So not a major fan, but interested enough. Then I didn't watch them again until the re-release in 1997. I have to say, even aside from the lame extra CGI, it wasn't what I remembered. It's still fun and all, but as a kid it was the best thing ever and as an adult, just ok.
I don't know about ever, but I have a brown Zune too, and up until this year (when I switched to Sonos) it was the main audio source for my kitchen/dining room speakers. I used the radio a lot, and being able to sync wirelessly was great for the time. When my kids were smaller I would load videos on it for traveling. I even prefer the Zune software to iTunes. I got it cheap from Woot, and it has been one of the best electronic purchases I've ever made.
I never trusted MS for music purchases, but the hardware and software were really pretty good.
I use ConnectBot with Hacker's Keyboard and that combination does everything I need to do on a phone. I seem to recall checking out JuiceSSH too, but I can't remember why I chose ConnectBot.
I have a spider on my front door which drops down when it hears a noise. Can't remember where I got it, but it is great for the little kids - they love to be able to knock and have it fall and scare them. Some even remember it from year to year. It's just a cheapo toy, but it's been the best bang for the buck of any of my stuff.
The other hit I have is a cauldron with fake flames made with silk triangles blown by a fan underneath and a couple of orange lights - like what they do here: http://www.themebuilders.com/e.... Again the younger kids are fascinated with it; it really does look pretty realistic.
Martha Stewart's Creepy Halloween sounds through a bluetooth speaker in a bush adds a bit of atmosphere.
I wind up paying 20% to 50% more for a vehicle than my counterparts in the UK or Germany, and wind up with a shittier vehicle to boot.
I have relatives in the UK, and lived there for years. My rule of thumb is that most things there cost in pounds what they do in dollars in the US. Cars aren't quite that bad, but a quick search shows a Toyota Yaris starts at ~$16k in the UK, ~$14k in the US. So I'm not seeing your 20% markup in the US.
If people would spend 50% more on TCO, the cars would already be able to last longer.
The problem with making cars last longer (and they already are pretty good) is that most of the ways you could do it would add weight so they would be less efficient over their longer lifetime.
And if they put their new housing development near the transit, so much the better. It seems to me, as an East Coast observer, that San Francisco's high prices are due to physical limitations (like Manhattan lite) and rules against new development. If there are 100,000 homes, and 150,000 households wanting to live in them, you are going to have high prices. It should be possible for Seattle to avoid that.
I think the parent might have meant inefficient in the sense that they are way more expensive per kwh generated than large windmills. If you spend $1000 on a small setup which only produces 100 watts for an average of 8 hours a day, it's much more efficient (economically) to buy from a wind farm. And possibly environmentally too, since that $1000 represents a real amount of raw materials extracted and energy invested in production.
Now, if you can't connect to the grid, fine. But if you can, you should take this into account.
Yeah, it seems to me that the ChannelMaster DVR+ is the only DVR I'd consider over a media PC. It seems crazy to have to pay that much for relatively simple data. Of course I'd just be using it for OTA, not cable.
I have a older nook (I think it's the first touch screen one). Do you like your Kobo? I think something with a built in light would be very nice, but I am not keen on buying into the whole Amazon ecosystem. Where did you buy your Kobo? I would think that since Rakuten owns Kobo, you could get them at rakuten.com, but it pretty much seems like the kobobooks.com site is the only place they have them.
Around me, it's certainly not a myth. I switched from T-Mo to Cricket (AT&T towers) last year, and I noticed a decided improvement in my coverage. I was happy enough with T-Mobile since i don't really make many calls anyway, but there were certain routes where Pandora would drop on T-Mo & the Cricket data is uninterrupted.
You can buy a nice car for half the price, but it won't be just as nice. And it won't have the acceleration of the Tesla. My car is over 10 years old, and I won't be buying a new one anytime soon, but if I had the cash for a luxury car I would certainly get the Tesla.
Sounds like you need a Chevy Volt, unless you really don't do any local driving. First 40 miles electric, gas after that as long as you want. And under $60k.
In addition to the fraud etc, there is the fact that for someone like me who pays their balance each month, the credit card company is loaning me the money at no interest. That's not free. Plus they actually give me 1-2% of my purchases as cashback. I'm all in favor of reducing the transaction costs, but I don't see it happening so meanwhile, I'll try to get the most out of the system we have.
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All of this should make the UK a very dangerous place for pedestrians if speed limits alone were a primary driver of road fatalities, but they aren't. The UK averages 3.6 fatalities per billion kilometres driven. The US average (where limits are on average lower) is 7.1, which is effectively double. It seems much more likely that issues like car quality, driver certification, road design, car design etc are far more influential.
I would say that the UK is much more pedestrian friendly than the US in general. Just one example is the use of zebra crossings. Also the level of driver education is higher in the UK, in my experience.
My youngest has been using a Lumia 630 for a year or so. It's really not a bad device; I like the the interface, and she hasn't had any issues with it crashing that I'm aware of. For a cheap phone the camera is ok - I got it for $50, unlocked. The only thing against it really is the paucity of apps.
She's getting an iPhone next, despite me trying to steer her towards an Android.
Yeah, but 80% of the US population lives in urban areas. The other 20% will just have to choose if they want a depreciating electric car or a (possibly less quickly depreciating) normal car.
I dunno about you but I'd gladly take the tradeoff of a gun that fires 99.999% of the time when I want it to if it also fires 0% of the time if someone wrestles it out of my grasp or some less responsible member of the household somehow manages to get a hold of it and starts messing around with it.
Sure, but that's not the likely scenario. There's either going to be some biometric stuff, which won't be that reliable, or some sort of token which, unless you're super diligent and wear it all the time, will be available to a less responsible member of your household.
It's widely known that having a gun in the house significantly increases your chances of being shot. The scenario of having the gun wrestled out of your hand is statistically unlikely; you're most likely to shoot yourself (suicide accounts for 2/3 or so of gun deaths in the US). Smart guns wouldn't help there.
Guns are basically very simple machines, and I'm willing to wager that agencies will review the smart gun tech every so often, and conclude that it does not meet their needs. I won't be buying shares in any smart gun companies anytime soon.
I just wish this type of solution can hit the consumer market.
It absolutely could. But how many people would buy it? A 6TB external drive is more than the vast majority of people need to hold all their personal files, simpler, smaller, and costs less than $200. And still most people don't bother backing stuff up.
$600 + 20% (which I think is a pretty common VAT in Europe) is $720. So that might well explain most of the difference right there.
In the US, there's no VAT, and states all set their own sales tax rates from 0% on up (not sure if any are over 8 or 9%). But a lot of stuff you order online will come with no tax charged even if your state does charge it, so $600 is probably what most in the US will actually pay.
I'm in the camp of "demanding", in that if I were in a focus group I would tell them that the first sub-$50k self driving car which hits the market, I'll probably buy.
The blind and elderly may still be better served by taxis with "drivers" who could assist them, but the driving should be done by the car. And the goal of self driving cars is to have them able to drive with no one in them, ie. no need for a blind person to be in charge any more than you or I would be.
Au contraire, I found that using the Mailvelope plugin in Chrome is really easy, and I mess it up less than I did with PGP via Thunderbird. I use Thunderbird mostly, but if I want to send encrypted mail I use Chrome & Mailvelope.
The point is that human drivers are idiots and drive in all sorts of unpredictable ways.
All of this is true, yet accident rate of these idiotic humans is half of what rigidly-abiding robots are.
Did you miss the part where this accident rate is for accidents *involving* the robots, but not *caused* by the robots? The idiot humans are hitting them at double the average rate; the same rate would likely apply to any slower, rule following human drivers. But the point is, the robot was driving in a legal (though arguably excessively conservative) manner, and other drivers ran into them.
30,000 people are killed in auto accidents each year in the US. There is no way that widespread adoption of autonomous cars is going to increase that number, and I imagine that in 30 years that number will be decreased by an order of magnitude.
Most people aren't that bad. I'm sure Uber will have a way for you to report a filthy car, and they could just send another.
the original trilogy was re-released to theaters multiple times, the last being in 1997. I saw it again on the big screen then, and it held up as well as ever.
Ok, I saw the original in the theater at least 5 times as a kid, read the comics, etc. Saw the trilogy on VHS maybe a couple of times. So not a major fan, but interested enough. Then I didn't watch them again until the re-release in 1997. I have to say, even aside from the lame extra CGI, it wasn't what I remembered. It's still fun and all, but as a kid it was the best thing ever and as an adult, just ok.
I don't know about ever, but I have a brown Zune too, and up until this year (when I switched to Sonos) it was the main audio source for my kitchen/dining room speakers. I used the radio a lot, and being able to sync wirelessly was great for the time. When my kids were smaller I would load videos on it for traveling. I even prefer the Zune software to iTunes. I got it cheap from Woot, and it has been one of the best electronic purchases I've ever made.
I never trusted MS for music purchases, but the hardware and software were really pretty good.
I use ConnectBot with Hacker's Keyboard and that combination does everything I need to do on a phone. I seem to recall checking out JuiceSSH too, but I can't remember why I chose ConnectBot.
I have a spider on my front door which drops down when it hears a noise. Can't remember where I got it, but it is great for the little kids - they love to be able to knock and have it fall and scare them. Some even remember it from year to year. It's just a cheapo toy, but it's been the best bang for the buck of any of my stuff.
The other hit I have is a cauldron with fake flames made with silk triangles blown by a fan underneath and a couple of orange lights - like what they do here: http://www.themebuilders.com/e.... Again the younger kids are fascinated with it; it really does look pretty realistic.
Martha Stewart's Creepy Halloween sounds through a bluetooth speaker in a bush adds a bit of atmosphere.
I wind up paying 20% to 50% more for a vehicle than my counterparts in the UK or Germany, and wind up with a shittier vehicle to boot.
I have relatives in the UK, and lived there for years. My rule of thumb is that most things there cost in pounds what they do in dollars in the US. Cars aren't quite that bad, but a quick search shows a Toyota Yaris starts at ~$16k in the UK, ~$14k in the US. So I'm not seeing your 20% markup in the US.
If people would spend 50% more on TCO, the cars would already be able to last longer.
The problem with making cars last longer (and they already are pretty good) is that most of the ways you could do it would add weight so they would be less efficient over their longer lifetime.
And if they put their new housing development near the transit, so much the better. It seems to me, as an East Coast observer, that San Francisco's high prices are due to physical limitations (like Manhattan lite) and rules against new development. If there are 100,000 homes, and 150,000 households wanting to live in them, you are going to have high prices. It should be possible for Seattle to avoid that.
I think the parent might have meant inefficient in the sense that they are way more expensive per kwh generated than large windmills. If you spend $1000 on a small setup which only produces 100 watts for an average of 8 hours a day, it's much more efficient (economically) to buy from a wind farm. And possibly environmentally too, since that $1000 represents a real amount of raw materials extracted and energy invested in production.
Now, if you can't connect to the grid, fine. But if you can, you should take this into account.
Yeah, it seems to me that the ChannelMaster DVR+ is the only DVR I'd consider over a media PC. It seems crazy to have to pay that much for relatively simple data. Of course I'd just be using it for OTA, not cable.
I have a older nook (I think it's the first touch screen one). Do you like your Kobo? I think something with a built in light would be very nice, but I am not keen on buying into the whole Amazon ecosystem. Where did you buy your Kobo? I would think that since Rakuten owns Kobo, you could get them at rakuten.com, but it pretty much seems like the kobobooks.com site is the only place they have them.
Motorola seems ok to me - I have an unlocked 2013 Moto X and got a Stagefright update a couple of weeks ago.
I try to avoid Verizon if I can anyway.
Around me, it's certainly not a myth. I switched from T-Mo to Cricket (AT&T towers) last year, and I noticed a decided improvement in my coverage. I was happy enough with T-Mobile since i don't really make many calls anyway, but there were certain routes where Pandora would drop on T-Mo & the Cricket data is uninterrupted.
You can buy a nice car for half the price, but it won't be just as nice. And it won't have the acceleration of the Tesla.
My car is over 10 years old, and I won't be buying a new one anytime soon, but if I had the cash for a luxury car I would certainly get the Tesla.
Sounds like you need a Chevy Volt, unless you really don't do any local driving. First 40 miles electric, gas after that as long as you want. And under $60k.
In addition to the fraud etc, there is the fact that for someone like me who pays their balance each month, the credit card company is loaning me the money at no interest. That's not free. Plus they actually give me 1-2% of my purchases as cashback. I'm all in favor of reducing the transaction costs, but I don't see it happening so meanwhile, I'll try to get the most out of the system we have.