Mudslides, bridges out, unknown construction closures, fallen rock, trees down, escaped farm cows, and flooding are all major obstacles that I, myself, have encountered on lesser-travelled roads but never on a major highway.
Take all of that into consideration, and you might have my vote for your concept. (Unless I happen to live on one of these secondary roads, in which case I might take offense at any proposition to dramatically increase traffic, automated or not.)
If they notify authorities that aggressive passing is happening, then those authorities should also use this information (demographically) in order to determine which section(s) of roadway need improved/widened/better-patrolled/whatever sooner instead of later.
Seems like the natural upgrade is to just have a tablet that can be on a charger AND support a credit/debit card reader at the same time. Bingo, cheap touch screen POS system. Is there one out there that already does this?
Card readers from Square and PayPal already work like you suggest, at least sort of: They connect to the headset jack in a very device-agnostic way. Any other ports are left unused.
These effects feed into each other, enforcing the effects and if kept unchecked will lead to a situation where a few players own the vast majority of the bitcoin supply. The pool of bitcoins not in their hands will dwindle as more and more of it is paid as interest to the large lenders, given continuous deflation and ultimately concludes in a credit crunch of epic proportions.
Eh? This implies that there is something to be gained by hoarding all of the bitcoin, instead of trading it for something else, whether that something else be goods, services, other currency, stocks, or whatever.
What good would it do someone (or a small group) to have ALL of the bitcoin? It'd cease to be a meaningful currency, which means that any hypothetical group that holds all of it won't let that happen...lest all of the interest they've earned turn into a pile of bits worth exactly nothing.
And, it can't happen overnight. Supposing that someone with a hoarding complex decides he wants all of the bitcoin, by the becomes a real issue folks with an interest in it will have long before started moving toward some other form of more liquid currency.
In Ohio (at least), most city streets (as in, everything not otherwise-marked or a designated State Route) are restricted to 25 MPH.
Navigating a turn at an intersection in any vehicle at 30MPH is likely to get one all-sorts of fucked up if the road is not abundantly clear, because nobody around expects that.
In social aspects, it's also likely to alert your passengers to the fact that you're a madman, because you're going fast enough to scare them.
In traffic aspects, it's likely to catch the one vehicle that you didn't see off-guard -- even if the operator of that vehicle was generally succeeding at paying attention.
But on a bike? FFS: Everyone else is already trying to kill you. Don't press your luck. Assume that they're all of texting and drunk, while they also have to piss and are -very- high, while also stoned, fucked-up, and also need to dump a load. Meanwhile, they're concurrently groping for a lost (lit!) cigarette and somehow also managing to finger their girlfriend while they're also aiming directly at you because they both see you and have determined that you need exterminating. (Take all of this into consideration and you'll probably do fine for years, perhaps even decades...as long as you're not too bold about it.)
(Disclaimer: I drive an E36 BMW with sticky tires, and slowing down for a turn inside of a US city is always completely optional -- in fact, acceleration is also always an applicable option. But I still slow waaaay down when there is any visible movement, at all, when navigating a turn, and I give bikers and other vehicles all the breathing room necessary (even if it pisses off my fellow car-dwellers) for them to do what they're doing. Furthermore, I'd far rather be rear-ended by a few tonnes of someone with airbags and seatbelts than to run over a pedestrian or on any manner of lightly-armored vehicle like a motorcycle, scooter, Segway, bicycle, or similar because then, at least everyone probably lives.)
it's not about being a hyperactive boy scout, it's not about the law, it's about living with myself. because if i am on the phone with someone while they are driving and i am AWARE of it, then i am responsible
It used to be -lots- better, at least on the PS3 and on a real web browser.
They gimped it, apparently in a successful attempt to unify the interface with that of the shittiest of Netflix clients: Discount BluRay players that just happen to have some sort of Ethernet connectivity.
It is, IMHO, just another failure of lowest-common-denominator.
That said: Thanks for the link. Here is an RSS feed which lets you see the latest in Netflix. With Firefox's Live Bookmarks functionality turns into a handy dropdown of new shit.
SSDs have the huge advantage that everyone wants them. Every device needs fast access and transfer rates with low power usage in as small a space as possible.
Everyone?
I want a device with reasonable transfer rates, low cost, and high capacity, and that's what I put my own wallet behind.
Why? Well, for instance, I don't care how fast a 2-hour movie takes to start playing in my home theater -- whether it is 900 nanoseconds or 900 milliseconds, it's all the same to me. And the few Watts consumed by a cheap modern high-capacity drive don't make a meaningful dent in my electric bill.
Meanwhile, cheaper storage lets me buy more movies instead of fewer movies, and that's important to me.
Maybe in your bizzaro future world where everything is either portable and battery operated or magically In Teh Cloud, then everyone will care about the things you say they care about.
But as long as my BFT takes up most of a wall, and my amplifiers need multiple 20A circuits to avoid localized brownouts, I could give a fuck less about SSD. It offers no advantage to me in the applications where my storage needs are at all significant.
I think you missed the class in Marketing wherein everyone else learned the following about pricing an item: Widgets are best sold at a price consistent with whatever the market will bear.
OTOH, when you're in the business of selling widgets, you can price them however you want. Maybe folks will buy them, maybe they won't. Maybe competitors will crush you in all possible ways, maybe they'll stay at bay.
Maybe you're altruistic enough to sell things at razor-thin margins for the good of the people, but somehow I think you'll put your own wants and needs (along with, hopefully, the wants and needs of the folks who help you produce and sell widgets) ahead of the desires of the consumer, as long as the market continues to bear your pricing (ie: buy your widgets).
We consumers all want to think we'd be happiest if hard drives were all sold at a loss (so that we could get more for less), but the simple truth is that removing profit from the equation is precisely why we're down to just the two-or-three manufacturers we've got to choose from instead of the dozens we've had previously.
I'd rather pay a few percent more and get to pick from Samsung, JVC, IBM, Quantum, Maxtor, Fujitsu, Seagate, Hitachi, Western Digital, Micropolis, DEC, Apple, Epson, MiniScribe, Mitsubishi, Tandon, and Wang, than have my available palette reduced to several manufacturers (at best).
If they ever attend a rock concert or watch a video of one (or if they ever take up electric guitar or bass) they'd see walls of them. Usually with big script logos that say "Marshall" or sometimes logos that say "Fender", "Soldano", or "Mesa-Boogie", with a few other brands that are less well-known and typically considered more "exclusive" like Matchless, Framus, Dr. Z, Top Hat, Divided by 13, Bad Cat, Victoria, etc etc.
Last time I was at a concert and saw a wall of Marshall full stacks with big heads on top, there was a microphone pointed at one of them. The rest of the cabinets were empty -- just props. As they loaded in and out, you could see daylight through the holes which were cut for the speakers.
(Modern PA plus a desire to reduce stage volume (and setup complexity, and weight, etc), etc. (and so on, and so forth))
At least TV's were partly repairable. Now the repair costs are often more than a new TV.
Hmm. A few months back my big LCD TV stopped working. I pulled the back off of it, did a casual visual inspection and found two bulging capacitors. I removed the capacitors, put them in my shirt pocket, and walked over to a nearby electronics shop to get new ones.
A little while (and $2.00) later, the TV is still working fine.
So, that's one repair in five years, and something like fourteen thousand hours of actual use. How many dozen times did your mom fix a TV, again?
AndroidLost is some clever software which does a few glorious things with lost devices, including bright lights, loud noises, taking (and delivering) pictures, making maps, and displaying messages. Also (remotely) supports wipe, basic file management, setting a passcode, and hiding itself from the app list. And it does this stuff in response to either SMS messages or from data originating in Teh Cloud.
And, it's clever enough to be completely not-running-at-all unless activated, so the performance hit when the phone is not lost is exactly zero.
Whatever the conditions in a Mexican factory might be, the workers are there by choice. Communism is dead in that country, and folks there aren't generally told what jobs they must do. It might have been different a long time ago (when I lived there as a kid, the mountain overlooking our house featured a giant hammer-and-sickle formed from boulders, which I'm told has since been destroyed).
Life is full of choices. If I have the choice to buy products made in a country who has a history of treating their workers respectfully, I do so. Even little things: I like fasteners made by company called Spax, for instance. Their manufacturing happens either in Germany or not so far from me in Bryan, Ohio (also home of the Etch-a-Sketch), and either one is perfectly fine with me and -vastly- preferable over anything which might be Chinese in origin because I can be reasonably certain that their workers are well-paid.
But given a choice between China and Mexico, I prefer Mexico, just because anything I can do to support my neighbors to the south is far preferable to supporting a country on the other side of the world. Put simply: I'd rather see Mexico's economy do well, than see China's do the same, since the former will have a greater positive influence on the economy of my own country.
Prior to the advent of pulse audio on my distros of choice, I had audio issues from time to time. Usually small stuff like audio randomly stopping working or not being able to play certain applications simultaneously.
[Old Man mode]: I remember a time before PulseAudio, and before JACK, and before ALSA: The Linux kernel had some built-in drivers ("OSS-Free"?) which supported adequate functionality for every sound card/chip on the list, and if you wanted more features or support you could just pay 4front for a better driver (and they were always worth the minimal price).
And: Everything. Just. Worked. Always. Hardware settings (back when sound cards still had configurable analog sections(!)) were deterministic and reliable, and getting excellent sound from *random_app* was a foregone conclusion.
Much fun was had, for instance, with "cat/dev/audio >/dev/st0" to dump a radio show (reliably! without problems! in the plain-and-simple way that Unix is supposed to be!) to DDS tape.
Now, this was 17 (or so) years ago. Anything involving further difficulty, at any stage of the game on a user level, on the Linux sound front is a step backward.
But that costs space, weight, money, and perhaps time, plus almost certainly complexity when it comes to charge the thing(s) at the end of the day.
If I'm out and about ("traveling,") and my laptop is open, I prefer to play music from it because it has the best interface. Both my phone and my laptop can access the same music (thanks to Subsonic), but I like having a real keyboard and pointer for selecting things and it's fewer physical boxes to fuck with. (And, no, I'm not -also- going to carry a dedicated music player -- even with cargo pants, I'll always prefer to have a pocket knife and a backup pocket knife over any other redundant gear on my person, and that's already getting silly: I don't also need three music players. FFS, I'm traveling, and my gear is already heavy enough.)
YMMV, but if I've already got a particular bit of kit out and in front of me and it can do the thing that I myself want to be doing, I generally prefer to use it for that rather than an additional box. (And playing music should not be a stressful operation for a normal laptop, as long as the screen is already on because I'm actively using it -- stuffing a few milliWatts out through the headphone jack is not a big deal.)
Back to the topic: The discussion sounds a whole lot like Windows, to me. There's the usual way of doing audio (which might be efficient and is never low-latency), and then there's ASIO (which might not be power-efficient but is low-latency as a design parameter). It's damn near exactly like this discussion between PulseAudio and JACK, respectively: Both have different design goals.
And more to the point: Use them both, as needed. *shrug* Use them at the same time, for all I care. (Last I looked, all of the *nix audio kits could be integrated together on a single machine in any fashion the heart desires.)
I have always just erased the magstripe on my license using a strong permanent magnet.
It has always worked fine, as in it both fails on their scanner, and still allows me into the venue. It does take an extra few seconds for the door gunther to actually look at my ID, and sometimes he questions why it doesn't work ("I climb radio towers for a living" makes their eyes glaze over just enough, even though that's an apples-and-oranges thing).
Never did understand the point of scanning the magstripe, anyway. There's less far less security in the magstripe than there is in the holographic film over the printing, and it's trivial to undetectably modify the former but not the latter.
When I own a nightclub (which is one of my minor goals), there will be no scanners/cameras/whatever of any type capable of producing uniquely-identifiable information about my patrons in an automated way. Ever. Even if that means that I must operate in a different locality.
I might have a blurry webcam feed and some self-cleansing CCTV watching a few important spots, and it'll be just that: A blurry webcam feed, and a DVR that nukes old video after a day or two. (Blurry enough to see the crowd but not recognize the faces, with any improved video being kept locally and saved just long enough for me to notice that something is physically missing and begin tracking it down or provide evidence after a fight, but for a short enough period to avoid a subpoena).
There are other freely-available VMs out there and not all of them require special hardware features.
I've run various versions of VMWare just fine, for instance, on my Pentium-M laptop (which just barely predates your Core Duo machine). But it's not exactly speedy about it (and never was) without hardware support.
If you're really, really interested: See if someone has a pre-made VM with Windows 8 that works with VMWare Player and then just run the thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Mudslides, bridges out, unknown construction closures, fallen rock, trees down, escaped farm cows, and flooding are all major obstacles that I, myself, have encountered on lesser-travelled roads but never on a major highway.
Take all of that into consideration, and you might have my vote for your concept. (Unless I happen to live on one of these secondary roads, in which case I might take offense at any proposition to dramatically increase traffic, automated or not.)
If they notify authorities that aggressive passing is happening, then those authorities should also use this information (demographically) in order to determine which section(s) of roadway need improved/widened/better-patrolled/whatever sooner instead of later.
Card readers from Square and PayPal already work like you suggest, at least sort of: They connect to the headset jack in a very device-agnostic way. Any other ports are left unused.
Eh? This implies that there is something to be gained by hoarding all of the bitcoin, instead of trading it for something else, whether that something else be goods, services, other currency, stocks, or whatever.
What good would it do someone (or a small group) to have ALL of the bitcoin? It'd cease to be a meaningful currency, which means that any hypothetical group that holds all of it won't let that happen...lest all of the interest they've earned turn into a pile of bits worth exactly nothing.
And, it can't happen overnight. Supposing that someone with a hoarding complex decides he wants all of the bitcoin, by the becomes a real issue folks with an interest in it will have long before started moving toward some other form of more liquid currency.
#1, because I couldn't bear to read any further:
In Ohio (at least), most city streets (as in, everything not otherwise-marked or a designated State Route) are restricted to 25 MPH.
Navigating a turn at an intersection in any vehicle at 30MPH is likely to get one all-sorts of fucked up if the road is not abundantly clear, because nobody around expects that.
In social aspects, it's also likely to alert your passengers to the fact that you're a madman, because you're going fast enough to scare them.
In traffic aspects, it's likely to catch the one vehicle that you didn't see off-guard -- even if the operator of that vehicle was generally succeeding at paying attention.
But on a bike? FFS: Everyone else is already trying to kill you. Don't press your luck. Assume that they're all of texting and drunk, while they also have to piss and are -very- high, while also stoned, fucked-up, and also need to dump a load. Meanwhile, they're concurrently groping for a lost (lit!) cigarette and somehow also managing to finger their girlfriend while they're also aiming directly at you because they both see you and have determined that you need exterminating. (Take all of this into consideration and you'll probably do fine for years, perhaps even decades...as long as you're not too bold about it.)
(Disclaimer: I drive an E36 BMW with sticky tires, and slowing down for a turn inside of a US city is always completely optional -- in fact, acceleration is also always an applicable option. But I still slow waaaay down when there is any visible movement, at all, when navigating a turn, and I give bikers and other vehicles all the breathing room necessary (even if it pisses off my fellow car-dwellers) for them to do what they're doing. Furthermore, I'd far rather be rear-ended by a few tonnes of someone with airbags and seatbelts than to run over a pedestrian or on any manner of lightly-armored vehicle like a motorcycle, scooter, Segway, bicycle, or similar because then, at least everyone probably lives .)
Oh. And I almost forgot:
And if you ARE Catholic, then you simply go to confession sometime afterward, and it's all cool.
Morally, at least. As so-defined.
YMMV (my own mileage certainly does vary).
Only if you are Catholic.
It used to be -lots- better, at least on the PS3 and on a real web browser.
They gimped it, apparently in a successful attempt to unify the interface with that of the shittiest of Netflix clients: Discount BluRay players that just happen to have some sort of Ethernet connectivity.
It is, IMHO, just another failure of lowest-common-denominator.
That said: Thanks for the link. Here is an RSS feed which lets you see the latest in Netflix. With Firefox's Live Bookmarks functionality turns into a handy dropdown of new shit.
Everyone?
I want a device with reasonable transfer rates, low cost, and high capacity, and that's what I put my own wallet behind.
Why? Well, for instance, I don't care how fast a 2-hour movie takes to start playing in my home theater -- whether it is 900 nanoseconds or 900 milliseconds, it's all the same to me. And the few Watts consumed by a cheap modern high-capacity drive don't make a meaningful dent in my electric bill.
Meanwhile, cheaper storage lets me buy more movies instead of fewer movies, and that's important to me.
Maybe in your bizzaro future world where everything is either portable and battery operated or magically In Teh Cloud, then everyone will care about the things you say they care about.
But as long as my BFT takes up most of a wall, and my amplifiers need multiple 20A circuits to avoid localized brownouts, I could give a fuck less about SSD. It offers no advantage to me in the applications where my storage needs are at all significant.
IMHO, of course.
I think you missed the class in Marketing wherein everyone else learned the following about pricing an item: Widgets are best sold at a price consistent with whatever the market will bear.
OTOH, when you're in the business of selling widgets, you can price them however you want. Maybe folks will buy them, maybe they won't. Maybe competitors will crush you in all possible ways, maybe they'll stay at bay.
Maybe you're altruistic enough to sell things at razor-thin margins for the good of the people, but somehow I think you'll put your own wants and needs (along with, hopefully, the wants and needs of the folks who help you produce and sell widgets) ahead of the desires of the consumer, as long as the market continues to bear your pricing (ie: buy your widgets).
We consumers all want to think we'd be happiest if hard drives were all sold at a loss (so that we could get more for less), but the simple truth is that removing profit from the equation is precisely why we're down to just the two-or-three manufacturers we've got to choose from instead of the dozens we've had previously.
I'd rather pay a few percent more and get to pick from Samsung, JVC, IBM, Quantum, Maxtor, Fujitsu, Seagate, Hitachi, Western Digital, Micropolis, DEC, Apple, Epson, MiniScribe, Mitsubishi, Tandon, and Wang, than have my available palette reduced to several manufacturers (at best).
YMMV.
Last time I was at a concert and saw a wall of Marshall full stacks with big heads on top, there was a microphone pointed at one of them. The rest of the cabinets were empty -- just props. As they loaded in and out, you could see daylight through the holes which were cut for the speakers.
(Modern PA plus a desire to reduce stage volume (and setup complexity, and weight, etc), etc. (and so on, and so forth))
Hmm. A few months back my big LCD TV stopped working. I pulled the back off of it, did a casual visual inspection and found two bulging capacitors. I removed the capacitors, put them in my shirt pocket, and walked over to a nearby electronics shop to get new ones.
A little while (and $2.00) later, the TV is still working fine.
So, that's one repair in five years, and something like fourteen thousand hours of actual use. How many dozen times did your mom fix a TV, again?
The best part about any sort of GPS tracking is that the error is a known, measured, and reported value.
AndroidLost is some clever software which does a few glorious things with lost devices, including bright lights, loud noises, taking (and delivering) pictures, making maps, and displaying messages. Also (remotely) supports wipe, basic file management, setting a passcode, and hiding itself from the app list. And it does this stuff in response to either SMS messages or from data originating in Teh Cloud.
And, it's clever enough to be completely not-running-at-all unless activated, so the performance hit when the phone is not lost is exactly zero.
That implies organization, which is something that a lot of "hate crimes" seem to lack.
Oh, I know! The best solution to the woes in our neighboring country Mexico is to never buy anything from them again, ever!
Better to support the Chinese, way over there.
Thanks for your insight. We're done here.
Meh. That was a failure of sarcasm-insertion. :)
Whatever the conditions in a Mexican factory might be, the workers are there by choice. Communism is dead in that country, and folks there aren't generally told what jobs they must do. It might have been different a long time ago (when I lived there as a kid, the mountain overlooking our house featured a giant hammer-and-sickle formed from boulders, which I'm told has since been destroyed).
Life is full of choices. If I have the choice to buy products made in a country who has a history of treating their workers respectfully, I do so. Even little things: I like fasteners made by company called Spax, for instance. Their manufacturing happens either in Germany or not so far from me in Bryan, Ohio (also home of the Etch-a-Sketch), and either one is perfectly fine with me and -vastly- preferable over anything which might be Chinese in origin because I can be reasonably certain that their workers are well-paid.
But given a choice between China and Mexico, I prefer Mexico, just because anything I can do to support my neighbors to the south is far preferable to supporting a country on the other side of the world. Put simply: I'd rather see Mexico's economy do well, than see China's do the same, since the former will have a greater positive influence on the economy of my own country.
And it's just the neighborly thing to do.
That's a bummer.
As a counterpoint: Can you tell me how to turn off that same feature under Windows? I *don't* want it to auto-switch, but it insists upon it.
[Old Man mode]: I remember a time before PulseAudio, and before JACK, and before ALSA: The Linux kernel had some built-in drivers ("OSS-Free"?) which supported adequate functionality for every sound card/chip on the list, and if you wanted more features or support you could just pay 4front for a better driver (and they were always worth the minimal price).
And: Everything. Just. Worked. Always. Hardware settings (back when sound cards still had configurable analog sections(!)) were deterministic and reliable, and getting excellent sound from *random_app* was a foregone conclusion.
Much fun was had, for instance, with "cat /dev/audio > /dev/st0" to dump a radio show (reliably! without problems! in the plain-and-simple way that Unix is supposed to be!) to DDS tape.
Now, this was 17 (or so) years ago. Anything involving further difficulty, at any stage of the game on a user level, on the Linux sound front is a step backward.
Now, get the fuck off my lawn.
[/Old Man mode]
But that costs space, weight, money, and perhaps time, plus almost certainly complexity when it comes to charge the thing(s) at the end of the day.
If I'm out and about ("traveling,") and my laptop is open, I prefer to play music from it because it has the best interface. Both my phone and my laptop can access the same music (thanks to Subsonic), but I like having a real keyboard and pointer for selecting things and it's fewer physical boxes to fuck with. (And, no, I'm not -also- going to carry a dedicated music player -- even with cargo pants, I'll always prefer to have a pocket knife and a backup pocket knife over any other redundant gear on my person, and that's already getting silly: I don't also need three music players. FFS, I'm traveling, and my gear is already heavy enough.)
YMMV, but if I've already got a particular bit of kit out and in front of me and it can do the thing that I myself want to be doing, I generally prefer to use it for that rather than an additional box. (And playing music should not be a stressful operation for a normal laptop, as long as the screen is already on because I'm actively using it -- stuffing a few milliWatts out through the headphone jack is not a big deal.)
Back to the topic: The discussion sounds a whole lot like Windows, to me. There's the usual way of doing audio (which might be efficient and is never low-latency), and then there's ASIO (which might not be power-efficient but is low-latency as a design parameter). It's damn near exactly like this discussion between PulseAudio and JACK, respectively: Both have different design goals.
And more to the point: Use them both, as needed. *shrug* Use them at the same time, for all I care. (Last I looked, all of the *nix audio kits could be integrated together on a single machine in any fashion the heart desires.)
I have always just erased the magstripe on my license using a strong permanent magnet.
It has always worked fine, as in it both fails on their scanner, and still allows me into the venue. It does take an extra few seconds for the door gunther to actually look at my ID, and sometimes he questions why it doesn't work ("I climb radio towers for a living" makes their eyes glaze over just enough, even though that's an apples-and-oranges thing).
Never did understand the point of scanning the magstripe, anyway. There's less far less security in the magstripe than there is in the holographic film over the printing, and it's trivial to undetectably modify the former but not the latter.
When I own a nightclub (which is one of my minor goals), there will be no scanners/cameras/whatever of any type capable of producing uniquely-identifiable information about my patrons in an automated way. Ever. Even if that means that I must operate in a different locality.
I might have a blurry webcam feed and some self-cleansing CCTV watching a few important spots, and it'll be just that: A blurry webcam feed, and a DVR that nukes old video after a day or two. (Blurry enough to see the crowd but not recognize the faces, with any improved video being kept locally and saved just long enough for me to notice that something is physically missing and begin tracking it down or provide evidence after a fight, but for a short enough period to avoid a subpoena).
There are other freely-available VMs out there and not all of them require special hardware features.
I've run various versions of VMWare just fine, for instance, on my Pentium-M laptop (which just barely predates your Core Duo machine). But it's not exactly speedy about it (and never was) without hardware support.
If you're really, really interested: See if someone has a pre-made VM with Windows 8 that works with VMWare Player and then just run the thing.
Does Lotus still make real cars? Some of them (used to) fit that description.
Yes. Bows also become discounted.