I do agree that all that electronics is a bit excessive, but it is a nifty idea. It might be a good idea to know the battery state, and certainly speed and distance indicators are helpful.
I am right now shopping for an electric bike for commuting, and the idea of an electronic interface sounds pretty interesting. I wonder what can be done that is not too distracting for safe riding. The largest road hazard by far are the clueless idiots in four-wheel metal boxes who are too busy reading the paper to pay attention to the road, I certainly don't want to encourage cyclists to behave in the same poor fashion.
Btw, if anyone has an opinion on specific electric bikes, I would appreciate any comments. Here in drive-or-die Atlanta, there are few places that even have any, much less what I'm looking for, and I will either have to buy it sight unseen or plan a trip somewhere. I have decided to go with a trike because it's bigger and more stable -- and with the electric assist the mass isn't a problem.
And before you get on me about the blue hair trailer park thing, the last thing I am interested in is sport riding -- I just want to be able to go to the train station or the store without driving. The short trips are killing my car and the bus sucks for reasons too numerous to start in on here.
I called their customer service number because there is no link I could find on the web site for cancelling one's account.
Toll-free in the U.S. and Canada: (800) 201-7575
Outside the U.S. and Canada: (206) 266-2992
I was on hold for quite a long time (about 15 minutes) so they appear busy. Their computer system was running slowly, too; it took several minutes to locate my account record.
The customer service person was completely unfazed by my request to delete my account information and my complaint about the revised privacy policy. I suspect mine was not the first call for that purpose today.
We have been having a big laugh over this, my company had the contract to do their billing system. Although the bean counters are upset they lost a customer, many on the tech staff are amused at the absurdity of the whole situation. It is always interesting to read about one of your customers in Dilbert.
I found an article a while back about some explorers who were out in the wilds when the network went down. They had mixed feelings about losing their telephone connection to the civilized world, but they were very happy they could dump the large clunky handset.
I saw a sign on a telephone pole the other day that said "We Buy Satellites!" I thought about calling them up and suggesting they contact Motorola...
Oh, didn't you know? Hackers are responsible for all the bad stuff on the Internet. Pr0n, hate speech, abortion information, broken links, political web sites...
Libraries select materials based on patron interest and budget. There are guidelines for appropriate materials, and the limited budget ensures that many things that might be useful will not get selected.
This is far different than filtering web sites. Books and other print publications do not arrive by the truckload, for the library staff to sort through and determine what to shelve and what to toss.
Even in a situation where the library has chosen to include particular material, no librarian sits down and reads every single item to determine if there might be a dirty word in it somewhere. If this were the case, no public library would subscribe to any periodical because of the time it would take to determine if the latest issue of Newsweek had a review of some R-rated movie, an article about abortion or favorable comment on homosexuality.
There are many challenges every year from people who want to censor this or that because it is "inappropriate" based on their personal opinion. If libraries only had books that were acceptable to every single one of their potential patrons, they would be very small buildings, indeed.
The vast majority of libraries, and the American Library Association, have long been clear on their position of censorship, or monitoring. Some years ago there was an attempt by the government to use public libraries as a spy network -- tracking who checked out what book. ALA turned them down flat, and refused to even discuss it.
More recently, some libraries have removed Internet access altogether rather than submit to filtering. If the pressure to filter continues, I predict that more public libraries will remove the Internet connections rather than filter, particularly with the wildly inaccurate tools available and the heavy-handed pressure on many subjects that are well-represented in traditional print collections.
Old hardware or not, I still use old browsers. Small, fast, no annoying Javascript, that sort of thing. I couldn't care less about the latest Flash do-dad, I'm looking for content. And even when I have to use more recent browsers (like at the office, where I can't run my beloved Cyberdog on NT) I turn all that junk off.
Even here, I enabled cookies against my usual policy (with notification, please!) not so much so I could customize slashdot content, but to turn on lite mode and skip all that non-content windowdressing.
I do find it rather annoying that I have to keep a stable of browsers around for various purposes, just because of non-standard extensions and various mostly excessive junk. The office requires IE because whoever does our internal web pages has this sick ActiveX fetish, and I want to hurt whoever decided that Javascript was required to implement a button!
Yes, there is still a major imbalance, but at least I have seen more women in computer science than in many other engineering fields. I work with many more women in software development than my sister, who is an industrial engineer. When I was in school, the vast majority of female engineering students were in the Civil department, and that is mostly because we had a strong Environmental program.
Sometimes it is still that girls and young women are discouraged from technical fields generally. I certainly was, from my mother and from certain teachers and university professors. (But my father the mechanical engineer was always supportive.)
I put up with both obvious and subtle "Girls Not Welcome" and managed to get through by sheer force of will. But not everyone has the desire to do that. Even with the "dotcom" explosion, it is still very not cool to be a female geek out in the non-geek world.
Women everywhere are subject to harrassment, as evidenced by the rude replies to a female author in another thread. As long as some men still act like pigs, there will be limited opportunities for women in traditionally male fields.
Slashdot Mirror
I do agree that all that electronics is a bit excessive, but it is a nifty idea. It might be a good idea to know the battery state, and certainly speed and distance indicators are helpful.
I am right now shopping for an electric bike for commuting, and the idea of an electronic interface sounds pretty interesting. I wonder what can be done that is not too distracting for safe riding. The largest road hazard by far are the clueless idiots in four-wheel metal boxes who are too busy reading the paper to pay attention to the road, I certainly don't want to encourage cyclists to behave in the same poor fashion.
Btw, if anyone has an opinion on specific electric bikes, I would appreciate any comments. Here in drive-or-die Atlanta, there are few places that even have any, much less what I'm looking for, and I will either have to buy it sight unseen or plan a trip somewhere. I have decided to go with a trike because it's bigger and more stable -- and with the electric assist the mass isn't a problem.
And before you get on me about the blue hair trailer park thing, the last thing I am interested in is sport riding -- I just want to be able to go to the train station or the store without driving. The short trips are killing my car and the bus sucks for reasons too numerous to start in on here.
I called their customer service number because there is no link I could find on the web site for cancelling one's account.
Toll-free in the U.S. and Canada: (800) 201-7575
Outside the U.S. and Canada: (206) 266-2992
I was on hold for quite a long time (about 15 minutes) so they appear busy. Their computer system was running slowly, too; it took several minutes to locate my account record.
The customer service person was completely unfazed by my request to delete my account information and my complaint about the revised privacy policy. I suspect mine was not the first call for that purpose today.
... for real this time!
We have been having a big laugh over this, my company had the contract to do their billing system. Although the bean counters are upset they lost a customer, many on the tech staff are amused at the absurdity of the whole situation. It is always interesting to read about one of your customers in Dilbert.
I found an article a while back about some explorers who were out in the wilds when the network went down. They had mixed feelings about losing their telephone connection to the civilized world, but they were very happy they could dump the large clunky handset.
I saw a sign on a telephone pole the other day that said "We Buy Satellites!" I thought about calling them up and suggesting they contact Motorola...
Oh, didn't you know? Hackers are responsible for all the bad stuff on the Internet. Pr0n, hate speech, abortion information, broken links, political web sites...
Libraries select materials based on patron interest and budget. There are guidelines for appropriate materials, and the limited budget ensures that many things that might be useful will not get selected.
This is far different than filtering web sites. Books and other print publications do not arrive by the truckload, for the library staff to sort through and determine what to shelve and what to toss.
Even in a situation where the library has chosen to include particular material, no librarian sits down and reads every single item to determine if there might be a dirty word in it somewhere. If this were the case, no public library would subscribe to any periodical because of the time it would take to determine if the latest issue of Newsweek had a review of some R-rated movie, an article about abortion or favorable comment on homosexuality.
There are many challenges every year from people who want to censor this or that because it is "inappropriate" based on their personal opinion. If libraries only had books that were acceptable to every single one of their potential patrons, they would be very small buildings, indeed.
The vast majority of libraries, and the American Library Association, have long been clear on their position of censorship, or monitoring. Some years ago there was an attempt by the government to use public libraries as a spy network -- tracking who checked out what book. ALA turned them down flat, and refused to even discuss it.
More recently, some libraries have removed Internet access altogether rather than submit to filtering. If the pressure to filter continues, I predict that more public libraries will remove the Internet connections rather than filter, particularly with the wildly inaccurate tools available and the heavy-handed pressure on many subjects that are well-represented in traditional print collections.
Old hardware or not, I still use old browsers. Small, fast, no annoying Javascript, that sort of thing. I couldn't care less about the latest Flash do-dad, I'm looking for content. And even when I have to use more recent browsers (like at the office, where I can't run my beloved Cyberdog on NT) I turn all that junk off.
Even here, I enabled cookies against my usual policy (with notification, please!) not so much so I could customize slashdot content, but to turn on lite mode and skip all that non-content windowdressing.
I do find it rather annoying that I have to keep a stable of browsers around for various purposes, just because of non-standard extensions and various mostly excessive junk. The office requires IE because whoever does our internal web pages has this sick ActiveX fetish, and I want to hurt whoever decided that Javascript was required to implement a button!
Yes, there is still a major imbalance, but at least I have seen more women in computer science than in many other engineering fields. I work with many more women in software development than my sister, who is an industrial engineer. When I was in school, the vast majority of female engineering students were in the Civil department, and that is mostly because we had a strong Environmental program.
Sometimes it is still that girls and young women are discouraged from technical fields generally. I certainly was, from my mother and from certain teachers and university professors. (But my father the mechanical engineer was always supportive.)
I put up with both obvious and subtle "Girls Not Welcome" and managed to get through by sheer force of will. But not everyone has the desire to do that. Even with the "dotcom" explosion, it is still very not cool to be a female geek out in the non-geek world.
Women everywhere are subject to harrassment, as evidenced by the rude replies to a female author in another thread. As long as some men still act like pigs, there will be limited opportunities for women in traditionally male fields.