As several other people posted here, one way around this (wish I had thought of it...) is to just ask the user to type in a random phrase on the new keyboard. A USB stick masquerading as a keyboard won't be able to get around that one. Of course, this could be a problem for some other devices which abuse the USB standard (like barcode readers), but I'm sure they could come up with some way to deal with that. Most users don't use barcode readers, so maybe a configuration option could be hidden in Setup somewhere to disable this check for barcode readers, or maybe such devices could be whitelisted based on USB id and then restricted to what they're allowed to do (as in the case of those gaming mini-keyboards).
Hopefully your keyless car fails safe and you actually have a mechanical key. For that one time when your battery dies and you need to unlock the dead car to grab your jumper cables.
Any decent car is indeed designed to handle these scenarios. On my new Mazda, if the keyfob's battery is low, it warns you on the dashboard with a light. If you let it die, you can still get in the car with a mechanical key that's built into the fob, and then you can start the car by holding the fob to the start button as you press it (probably uses something like RFID). If the battery is dead, just open the hood after unlocking the car with that hidden key; the battery is easily accessible.
Sorry, no, not unless you lived in Japan at the time. The NES wasn't really sold in the US until late 1986. It remained popular until 1990, but continued to be sold until 1995.
Two giant factors are 1) convenience and 2) availability of choices.
With your Android example, for instance, both of these are at play. It's really convenient to have a smartphone now, especially since everyone else has one too. They really are convenient: you can take pretty decent photos, read transcribed voice mail, read your email, surf the web, meet dating partners, get turn-by-turn GPS directions, use all kinds of different apps (I have one that's a great RPN calculator, I have another that's a bubble level (!), I have another that's a magnetometer, etc.), I could go on and on. These truly are useful devices. But there aren't many choices: you can either buy a Windows Phone (hahaha), an Apple iPhone (completely locked-down and stuck with Apple's software and their app store), or several dozen different Android phone models from different makers. For many, it's the least-bad choice. None of these three companies (MS, Apple, Google) has a good track record as far as privacy and treating customers well, so if you want to play, you have to pick your poison. And at least with Android, there's at least the possibility that you can replace the software with a custom ROM like CyanogenMod. You can completely forget about that with iOS and WP.
However, some things are really more necessary for functioning in modern society than others. A computer is basically a necessity at this point unless you're elderly and retired. A smartphone is pretty close to a necessity now. However, an internet-connected thermostat is not. A regular thermostat still works just fine, though you can't adjust it when you're away from your home, but do you really really need to do that?
Haha, like that's going to work. Face it, consumers are stupid, and will buy shiny, flashy shit like this without researching it properly. Then they'll get burned, but they won't (as a group) learn their lesson. A few will, but between the idiots who don't, and the new crop of humans constantly coming into being and into adulthood, the lessons will not be learned by the group. Feel free to point to even one example where people smartly rejected something because of concerns like this.
DIVX isn't a good example BTW. DIVX failed because it competed (basically) with DVD, it cost more than DVD, and didn't offer anything better than DVD. The players could play standard DVD discs (IIRC), but they cost more, they were only available at one store (Circuit Shitty), the movies were only available at that one store, and no one cared about pay-per-view discs to want to buy into that scheme. And IIRC the movies weren't even that much cheaper than DVDs. It was a stupid idea all around. If it had been a competition between VHS and DIVX, and there was no DVD, then it probably would have been successful. Or, if the movies had been free (but you had to pay-per-viewing), it probably also would have been successful. People are perfectly happy to buy music from the iTunes Store, after all, and they don't own that.
Face it, in the future everything you own will connect to "the cloud", and your only alternative will be to live as a Luddite because the corps won't offer stuff that you control. And any time a vendor decides to cancel support for something, you'll have to throw those devices away and buy new replacements. People won't learn. They're just too stupid.
Nova Scotia? What kind of work is there in NS besides working on fishing boats? Seriously, I've never heard of NS having any kind of tech work; in Canada, the two main places known for tech work are Vancouver and Toronto. Montreal might have some, but you probably need to speak French.
I don't understand what you are arguing here. Why don't we just skip the paper/wood/yarn chains and just use a proper steel chain right from the start, specifically, one where you are allowed to inspect the links and upgrade them to titanium if you so wish?
1) Because people don't care about security, they just want whatever's cheapest and seems to work.
2) Because titanium would be worse than steel if you just tried use them as a drop-in replacement. Titanium isn't as strong as steel volumetrically, so by replacing a steel link with a titanium one (of the same size, which is necessary for it to be a drop-in replacement), you're putting a weak link there which will break. You could theoretically make a titanium chain that's as strong but lighter than a steel one, but it won't be the same size, it'll be bigger/thicker. However, titanium also doesn't have the hardness that steel does, so it would wear much faster. A quick Google search seems to back this up: hardcore cyclists do have titanium chains available to them, but they're horrifically expensive and don't last very long, so they only make sense on all-out racing bikes where they'll replace the chain after every race.
This seems pretty easy to deal with. First off, a USB stick acting as a keyboard probably isn't going to get too far if it's plugged into a non-Windows computer, because all those hotkeys assume a Windows OS and probably won't work in a different environment.
But aside from that, the easy way to deal with this problem is to simply ask the user if they want to use the new keyboard they plugged in as a keyboard, or something to that effect (and only accept input from previously-known input devices until this one is explicitly authorized by the user).
Are they Android "fan boys" or do they merely prefer it over the alternatives?
If you want a smartphone these days, you only have a few options: Windows Phone, iPhone, and Android. Blackberry is dead. At least with an Android phone, it's possible to flash it with an alternative firmware like CyanogenMod. So to me, Android is the best of the available choices.
My new Mazda3 has a touch screen, and I love it. But it doesn't have these problems. See my reply to the OP. Don't confuse crappy Microsoft-based systems with all systems; they're not the same.
Touchscreens are a necessity for two reasons: 1) back-up cameras 2) navigation systems
It's entirely possible to implement them well, like in my Mazda: there's a big "commander" knob (with detents) that you can use to perform most operations while moving, plus of course a separate volume/mute knob (with detents). There's also buttons on the steering wheel for often-used functions.
Digital speed displays are better. Analog is great for the tach, but digital tells me exactly how fast I'm going, and I don't need to see rate-of-change so much with the speedo. Also, it's pretty hard to do any kind of heads-up-display with an analog speedo.
I got the 2015 Mazda3, and I love it. Sorry if this sounds like an advertisement, but most everything on it is well thought-out and works.
HVAC: on this car, it's an entirely separate unit, not connected to the infotainment system at all. It's a dual-zone automatic climate control system, but the temperatures are set with knobs, and everything else with regular buttons. Mostly I just set it to 70 and forget it.
Rebooting: there is a way to do it, but I've never had to.
Pandora: this system has it. Works fine.
Actual buttons: this system has a big "commander" knob (like the ones in Audis) which lets you interact with the system when the car is in motion. The touchscreen is actually disabled when the car is moving, so you're forced to use the knob, and some functions are locked out (like putting in new addresses for the nav system), presumably for safety (or really, liability). There's also a separate volume/mute knob next to that. The commander knob is easy to reach with your arm on the armrest. Finally, there's a bunch of buttons on the steering wheel: volume, track skip, voice prompt (which I rarely use), phone buttons, etc.
The system is pretty easy to use; the automotive press seems to like it pretty well. No horribly confusing menu tree structure like you're complaining about. Bluetooth pairing with phones is simple and works reliably. Hands-free phone calls work great. It reads me text messages.
The system runs on Linux, so it doesn't have all the reliability problems an MS-based system has. Unfortunately, it's a bit slow at times because they implemented it with a bunch of JavaScript for some odd reason. But it mostly works, and they've issued software updates that fixed some of the issues they had in the earlier versions. Supposedly, they're also working on adding Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, so you'll be able to run Google Maps or Waze or whatever you want through the touchscreen. But the best part is that since it's Linux-based, it's easy to hack on. The root password is "jci" (Johnson Controls, Inc., the supplier). It's easy to log in with an Ethernet cable and make changes. The touchscreen lockout is easily disabled with a built-in debug script, so your passenger can use the touchscreen while you're driving. There's a whole community at mazda3revolution.com working on many other changes, and they've released an alpha version of Android Auto that works on it, plus all kinds of other tweaks for various annoyances people have (like eliminating the warning message at start-up, or the warning message when backing up, or making it play FLAC files).
One of the reasons I got this car was because a little research showed the infotainment ran on Linux, so I knew that people would be hacking on it in short order, and I was right.
There are some downsides, but they're minor. The system isn't the speediest (mainly because of using JS I'm sure), it takes a bit to start up, it has to re-sync contacts every time you start up (instead of just remembering them from last time), and it the nav system is an in-house system that works well enough, but has no traffic updates in the US and is loaded on an SD card. You get a few free updates, but after that you have to pay $$$ (luckily people have now figured out how to hack the system to run copied nav cards and they're passing these around on BitTorrent). Android Auto should be running reliably on it before too long so this may be moot anyway.
Anyway, the bottom line is: stay far, far away from any car that's running an infotainment system that has anything to do with Microsoft.
I don't get it. Toyota is considered the gold standard for reliability in cars. Why would they want to hook up with the maker of notoriously unreliable software?
Did they learn nothing from the Ford Sync debacle?
The problem with phones is that they aren't like most other products.
If you don't buy a Blu-Ray player, no problem: you can just use DVDs, or watch Netflix (using various devices, including your computer), or download stuff off BitTorrent and watch it on your computer, etc. Or you can just read a book, go outside, or anything else that doesn't involve watching a movie.
If you don't buy a game console, no problem: you can play games on your PC (including emulator games which are better anyway), or you can just not play video games at all. Most of the population doesn't play video games, it's a niche market.
If you don't have a phone, it's now rather hard for others to communicate with you, because most of the population does have a mobile phone and there's an expectation that you'll have one too, unless you're elderly. And almost all the phones these days are smartphones. But what's worse is that there's only a handful of cellular carriers, and your phone has to work specifically with that carrier (a Verizon phone doesn't work with T-Mobile or AT&T or even Sprint for instance), and the software is locked down and controlled by both the phone maker and the carrier. There are ways around this, like using CyanogenMod, but it isn't completely trivial to install this because it involves bypassing protection mechanisms on the phone, and can introduce other problems.
It's not FUD, it's absolutely correct, and your post is wishful thinking, which is why the quote is correct.
Your argument for 20 years is worthless, because **software isn't treated like that**. It doesn't matter how long you've been arguing it; software is not treated like other consumer products, no matter how much you think it should be. There's no signs that it'll ever be treated like other consumer products. You're just tilting at windmills.
We FOSS people, unlike you apparently, actually live in the real world, and here in the real world where software *isn't* subject to the quality, safety, reliability, and doctrine of first sale terms that regular consumer products are, FOSS software is the only thing that makes sense if you actually want to have real control over your software instead of just renting it.
Wow, this is a great conversation here. I had all but given up on Slashdot for that...
Anyway, this theory does sound very compelling. As for that one woman I briefly dated, she was 40, never married (but was engaged once), no kids, but on our first date she was already talking about having kids. (For good reason, she wanted to make sure she wasn't wasting time with someone who didn't want any, because apparently (according to her) a lot of men who'd be prospective dates for her either already had kids and didn't want more, or just didn't ever want kids. She even said directly, "I'm really hard to date because I want kids." I was OK with the idea as I don't have any and kinda felt like I've missed out and I told her this.)
There have been other women I've seen (mostly on OKC because the layout there lets people put a LOT more info about themselves there than Tinder) who have said similar stuff: around 40, never married, no kids, but they want them, and due to their age, they want them *soon*. But as you said, with their history of being single, the compromises of a relationship are less compelling.
What really horrifies me though is I think a fair number of these women are considering just becoming (fatherless) single moms. One woman I went on a coffee date with did exactly this; she got artificial insemination so she could be a mother, but of course with no man in the picture. I really hope this isn't a giant trend, but I do think there's a good amount of it now. Normally I'm not very socially conservative, however I was raised by a single working mother and did not enjoy the experience at all; it's a childhood full of extreme loneliness. It's one thing to do this to a kid because there's no alternative (husband gets hit by a bus, husband is abusive so wife leaves him for their safety), but it's entirely another to do it willingly, and I'm completely against it. Growing up with a single parent is not a good experience for a kid IMO, and I think it's particularly bad when the kid is a boy and the parent is female. Even growing up with two lesbians would be a lot better because at least you'd have an adult around much more of the time; with a single working mom, you end up either being raised by babysitters or being at home alone a lot.
I think women with kids would really work best if you had kids of your own and could make that part work, too, and that becomes lots of work and effort.
I have seen several single moms say in their profiles that they were much more interested in dating men who already had kids.
Single women with kid or kids are a train wreck of time management. I've done that and its impossible.
This does not bode well. Since women seem to usually be the ones with custody, and people around 40yo are likely to be parents, that means women who are around this age, are available, have no kids, are reasonably attractive, and are not serious mental cases are going to be in short supply. Then throw in that the ones left are likely to have unrealistic expectations, and not be good at being in a relationship (they've been single this long; relationships take communication and compromise), and as you mention they mot not have much of a sex drive (which would contribute to why they're still single), and I have to say I'm not too hopeful about my prospects....
I also wanted to add, I think these women have an easy time staying single, because women are typically much more social than men, and so they've developed a little "clatch" of other single women they hang out with, and this fills their need for a social outlet. One other guy said to me that he thinks many of these women are very comfortable being single and really only go on dates because it's socially expected of them (by their family or friends), and then they just end up rejecting every man they go on a date with for some insignificant reason.
The other thing I should add is that, demographically, a lot of women in this age range are probably single moms (or at least split-custody parents). I see a bunch of them on the dating sites, though I never meet any on meetup hikes. I tried going out with one such woman on OKC recently and never got anywhere (couldn't even get her to agree to meet for coffee, she was too busy with some work stuff supposedly). I also had one date with such a woman from Tinder, but she got started with kids early so one was 18 and in college and the other 16, so she made some comment about how she now had more time for dating. So my theory there is that there's a bunch of not-married women in this age range that are all or partially off the market because they don't have (or aren't willing to make) the time to date new men.
Thanks for the reply, I do like to hear other peoples' honest perspectives, and verify that I'm not just nuts myself, and also to entertain theories about this.
I hear a lot of horror stories about dating from men my age I know who have been divorced. Most of them are above average in looks and general personality and all of them are above average in income,
Sounds exactly like me (well, I like to think I'm above average in general personality and looks; my ex-wife says I am and says I'm a "great catch". That should be a big asset when your *ex* thinks you're a good catch...).
A large number are just crazy, like something broke. They appear normal up front, but once you get past the veneer, there's a certain craziness and desperation that's not just off-putting, but kind of frightening. I'm mostly convinced that this is just an apt description of most people.
The older I get, the more I think that just about everyone is like this to some extent, and we just have to find people we get along well with and where we can make up for each other's deficiencies. But I do wonder if those of us who are unmarried or divorced at 40+ are frequently more "broken" than others (moreso for those who get to 40 without ever marrying (or being in a long-term marriage-like relationship)).
One guy tells me the secret is to avoid dating sites completely. He does these Meetup.com activities and says there's a lot of dating potential there. His theory is that all the desperate and weird women do dating sites, but the women with functional personalities do activities sites because they're a low-risk way of meeting people and possibly filling the void in your schedule with something worthwhile.
Yeah, I've been trying this too (in addition to dating sites), but it hasn't gone too well. I like hiking and biking, so I end up going on a lot of group hikes with Meetup.com. I've found a lot of these seem to be de-facto singles mixers. I met several nice women when I was in NY/NJ this way, as there's a bunch of single women in NYC; only problem was that I was still married at the time so I didn't pursue any of them. Now I live near DC and am trying the same thing, but I haven't met anyone on hiking events here, though I've been on a bunch of hikes where the female-to-male ratio was 3-1 or even 5-1 like the one I went on this weekend. The women here aren't like the NYC women; the ones on these hikes seem to mostly be much older women (like 55+, sometimes in their 70s; BTW, some of these ladies are in great shape, but not someone I want to date, but it's nice to see people in their 70s and 80s able to keep up with a intermediate-pace hiking group), and a small number of women around my age who are usually very unattractive or seem to be rather "off". So I'm not really finding age-appropriate women with "functional personalities" here, though I can see that they are attending these events as social events (as am I). So I'm not sure where the single ~40yo women in this are, since I do see tons of them on the dating sites, but maybe hiking isn't their thing the way it is for Manhattanites. I haven't really done meetups for other activities; the cycling groups seem way too hard-core for me (I don't do "centuries", nor do I even do hard-core hiking; 10 miles is about my limit, and I sure as hell don't do trail-running like some overly-active people do). But most of my other interests are mainly solitary, or highly unlikely to have any female interest (like the programming groups).
I've had better success on dating sites, namely Tinder (of all places; OKC has been a big bust). But still, "better" only equates to a handful of actual meet-in-person dates which didn't go far. I did have one really promising prospect, with two really nice (and long) dates, and then she suddenly dumped me by text for no good reason. I'm still confounded by that one.
I also tried a speed-dating event. I met 5 (out of 15) women there I was interested in; none returned the interest. :
Maybe, but what are they going to do if the general election comes down to Hillary vs. Trump? Hillary is anti-privacy, pro-NSA, and anti-free-speech (and pro-H1B to boot).
That's why I plan to vote for Trump if the election goes that way and Bernie isn't on the ballot.
Slashdot Mirror
People in the US freaked? As I recall, it was a bunch of Frenchman in a McDonald's in Paris who got physically violent with a Google Glass user.
Don't they already have artificial lenses now which allow accommodation?
As several other people posted here, one way around this (wish I had thought of it...) is to just ask the user to type in a random phrase on the new keyboard. A USB stick masquerading as a keyboard won't be able to get around that one. Of course, this could be a problem for some other devices which abuse the USB standard (like barcode readers), but I'm sure they could come up with some way to deal with that. Most users don't use barcode readers, so maybe a configuration option could be hidden in Setup somewhere to disable this check for barcode readers, or maybe such devices could be whitelisted based on USB id and then restricted to what they're allowed to do (as in the case of those gaming mini-keyboards).
Hopefully your keyless car fails safe and you actually have a mechanical key. For that one time when your battery dies and you need to unlock the dead car to grab your jumper cables.
Any decent car is indeed designed to handle these scenarios. On my new Mazda, if the keyfob's battery is low, it warns you on the dashboard with a light. If you let it die, you can still get in the car with a mechanical key that's built into the fob, and then you can start the car by holding the fob to the start button as you press it (probably uses something like RFID). If the battery is dead, just open the hood after unlocking the car with that hidden key; the battery is easily accessible.
My NES, circa 1983, still works perfectly.
Sorry, no, not unless you lived in Japan at the time. The NES wasn't really sold in the US until late 1986. It remained popular until 1990, but continued to be sold until 1995.
Two giant factors are 1) convenience and 2) availability of choices.
With your Android example, for instance, both of these are at play. It's really convenient to have a smartphone now, especially since everyone else has one too. They really are convenient: you can take pretty decent photos, read transcribed voice mail, read your email, surf the web, meet dating partners, get turn-by-turn GPS directions, use all kinds of different apps (I have one that's a great RPN calculator, I have another that's a bubble level (!), I have another that's a magnetometer, etc.), I could go on and on. These truly are useful devices. But there aren't many choices: you can either buy a Windows Phone (hahaha), an Apple iPhone (completely locked-down and stuck with Apple's software and their app store), or several dozen different Android phone models from different makers. For many, it's the least-bad choice. None of these three companies (MS, Apple, Google) has a good track record as far as privacy and treating customers well, so if you want to play, you have to pick your poison. And at least with Android, there's at least the possibility that you can replace the software with a custom ROM like CyanogenMod. You can completely forget about that with iOS and WP.
However, some things are really more necessary for functioning in modern society than others. A computer is basically a necessity at this point unless you're elderly and retired. A smartphone is pretty close to a necessity now. However, an internet-connected thermostat is not. A regular thermostat still works just fine, though you can't adjust it when you're away from your home, but do you really really need to do that?
Haha, like that's going to work. Face it, consumers are stupid, and will buy shiny, flashy shit like this without researching it properly. Then they'll get burned, but they won't (as a group) learn their lesson. A few will, but between the idiots who don't, and the new crop of humans constantly coming into being and into adulthood, the lessons will not be learned by the group. Feel free to point to even one example where people smartly rejected something because of concerns like this.
DIVX isn't a good example BTW. DIVX failed because it competed (basically) with DVD, it cost more than DVD, and didn't offer anything better than DVD. The players could play standard DVD discs (IIRC), but they cost more, they were only available at one store (Circuit Shitty), the movies were only available at that one store, and no one cared about pay-per-view discs to want to buy into that scheme. And IIRC the movies weren't even that much cheaper than DVDs. It was a stupid idea all around. If it had been a competition between VHS and DIVX, and there was no DVD, then it probably would have been successful. Or, if the movies had been free (but you had to pay-per-viewing), it probably also would have been successful. People are perfectly happy to buy music from the iTunes Store, after all, and they don't own that.
Face it, in the future everything you own will connect to "the cloud", and your only alternative will be to live as a Luddite because the corps won't offer stuff that you control. And any time a vendor decides to cancel support for something, you'll have to throw those devices away and buy new replacements. People won't learn. They're just too stupid.
Nova Scotia? What kind of work is there in NS besides working on fishing boats? Seriously, I've never heard of NS having any kind of tech work; in Canada, the two main places known for tech work are Vancouver and Toronto. Montreal might have some, but you probably need to speak French.
I don't understand what you are arguing here. Why don't we just skip the paper/wood/yarn chains and just use a proper steel chain right from the start, specifically, one where you are allowed to inspect the links and upgrade them to titanium if you so wish?
1) Because people don't care about security, they just want whatever's cheapest and seems to work.
2) Because titanium would be worse than steel if you just tried use them as a drop-in replacement. Titanium isn't as strong as steel volumetrically, so by replacing a steel link with a titanium one (of the same size, which is necessary for it to be a drop-in replacement), you're putting a weak link there which will break. You could theoretically make a titanium chain that's as strong but lighter than a steel one, but it won't be the same size, it'll be bigger/thicker. However, titanium also doesn't have the hardness that steel does, so it would wear much faster. A quick Google search seems to back this up: hardcore cyclists do have titanium chains available to them, but they're horrifically expensive and don't last very long, so they only make sense on all-out racing bikes where they'll replace the chain after every race.
This makes me wonder how many security researchers simply go to work for the black market.\
How exactly do you make a living as a "security researcher" anyway, if companies treat you like this?
This seems pretty easy to deal with. First off, a USB stick acting as a keyboard probably isn't going to get too far if it's plugged into a non-Windows computer, because all those hotkeys assume a Windows OS and probably won't work in a different environment.
But aside from that, the easy way to deal with this problem is to simply ask the user if they want to use the new keyboard they plugged in as a keyboard, or something to that effect (and only accept input from previously-known input devices until this one is explicitly authorized by the user).
Are they Android "fan boys" or do they merely prefer it over the alternatives?
If you want a smartphone these days, you only have a few options: Windows Phone, iPhone, and Android. Blackberry is dead. At least with an Android phone, it's possible to flash it with an alternative firmware like CyanogenMod. So to me, Android is the best of the available choices.
My new Mazda3 has a touch screen, and I love it. But it doesn't have these problems. See my reply to the OP. Don't confuse crappy Microsoft-based systems with all systems; they're not the same.
Touchscreens are a necessity for two reasons:
1) back-up cameras
2) navigation systems
It's entirely possible to implement them well, like in my Mazda: there's a big "commander" knob (with detents) that you can use to perform most operations while moving, plus of course a separate volume/mute knob (with detents). There's also buttons on the steering wheel for often-used functions.
Digital speed displays are better. Analog is great for the tach, but digital tells me exactly how fast I'm going, and I don't need to see rate-of-change so much with the speedo. Also, it's pretty hard to do any kind of heads-up-display with an analog speedo.
Why'd you get that car?
I got the 2015 Mazda3, and I love it. Sorry if this sounds like an advertisement, but most everything on it is well thought-out and works.
HVAC: on this car, it's an entirely separate unit, not connected to the infotainment system at all. It's a dual-zone automatic climate control system, but the temperatures are set with knobs, and everything else with regular buttons. Mostly I just set it to 70 and forget it.
Rebooting: there is a way to do it, but I've never had to.
Pandora: this system has it. Works fine.
Actual buttons: this system has a big "commander" knob (like the ones in Audis) which lets you interact with the system when the car is in motion. The touchscreen is actually disabled when the car is moving, so you're forced to use the knob, and some functions are locked out (like putting in new addresses for the nav system), presumably for safety (or really, liability). There's also a separate volume/mute knob next to that. The commander knob is easy to reach with your arm on the armrest. Finally, there's a bunch of buttons on the steering wheel: volume, track skip, voice prompt (which I rarely use), phone buttons, etc.
The system is pretty easy to use; the automotive press seems to like it pretty well. No horribly confusing menu tree structure like you're complaining about. Bluetooth pairing with phones is simple and works reliably. Hands-free phone calls work great. It reads me text messages.
The system runs on Linux, so it doesn't have all the reliability problems an MS-based system has. Unfortunately, it's a bit slow at times because they implemented it with a bunch of JavaScript for some odd reason. But it mostly works, and they've issued software updates that fixed some of the issues they had in the earlier versions. Supposedly, they're also working on adding Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, so you'll be able to run Google Maps or Waze or whatever you want through the touchscreen. But the best part is that since it's Linux-based, it's easy to hack on. The root password is "jci" (Johnson Controls, Inc., the supplier). It's easy to log in with an Ethernet cable and make changes. The touchscreen lockout is easily disabled with a built-in debug script, so your passenger can use the touchscreen while you're driving. There's a whole community at mazda3revolution.com working on many other changes, and they've released an alpha version of Android Auto that works on it, plus all kinds of other tweaks for various annoyances people have (like eliminating the warning message at start-up, or the warning message when backing up, or making it play FLAC files).
One of the reasons I got this car was because a little research showed the infotainment ran on Linux, so I knew that people would be hacking on it in short order, and I was right.
There are some downsides, but they're minor. The system isn't the speediest (mainly because of using JS I'm sure), it takes a bit to start up, it has to re-sync contacts every time you start up (instead of just remembering them from last time), and it the nav system is an in-house system that works well enough, but has no traffic updates in the US and is loaded on an SD card. You get a few free updates, but after that you have to pay $$$ (luckily people have now figured out how to hack the system to run copied nav cards and they're passing these around on BitTorrent). Android Auto should be running reliably on it before too long so this may be moot anyway.
Anyway, the bottom line is: stay far, far away from any car that's running an infotainment system that has anything to do with Microsoft.
I don't get it. Toyota is considered the gold standard for reliability in cars. Why would they want to hook up with the maker of notoriously unreliable software?
Did they learn nothing from the Ford Sync debacle?
The problem with phones is that they aren't like most other products.
If you don't buy a Blu-Ray player, no problem: you can just use DVDs, or watch Netflix (using various devices, including your computer), or download stuff off BitTorrent and watch it on your computer, etc. Or you can just read a book, go outside, or anything else that doesn't involve watching a movie.
If you don't buy a game console, no problem: you can play games on your PC (including emulator games which are better anyway), or you can just not play video games at all. Most of the population doesn't play video games, it's a niche market.
If you don't have a phone, it's now rather hard for others to communicate with you, because most of the population does have a mobile phone and there's an expectation that you'll have one too, unless you're elderly. And almost all the phones these days are smartphones. But what's worse is that there's only a handful of cellular carriers, and your phone has to work specifically with that carrier (a Verizon phone doesn't work with T-Mobile or AT&T or even Sprint for instance), and the software is locked down and controlled by both the phone maker and the carrier. There are ways around this, like using CyanogenMod, but it isn't completely trivial to install this because it involves bypassing protection mechanisms on the phone, and can introduce other problems.
It's not FUD, it's absolutely correct, and your post is wishful thinking, which is why the quote is correct.
Your argument for 20 years is worthless, because **software isn't treated like that**. It doesn't matter how long you've been arguing it; software is not treated like other consumer products, no matter how much you think it should be. There's no signs that it'll ever be treated like other consumer products. You're just tilting at windmills.
We FOSS people, unlike you apparently, actually live in the real world, and here in the real world where software *isn't* subject to the quality, safety, reliability, and doctrine of first sale terms that regular consumer products are, FOSS software is the only thing that makes sense if you actually want to have real control over your software instead of just renting it.
Wow, this is a great conversation here. I had all but given up on Slashdot for that...
Anyway, this theory does sound very compelling. As for that one woman I briefly dated, she was 40, never married (but was engaged once), no kids, but on our first date she was already talking about having kids. (For good reason, she wanted to make sure she wasn't wasting time with someone who didn't want any, because apparently (according to her) a lot of men who'd be prospective dates for her either already had kids and didn't want more, or just didn't ever want kids. She even said directly, "I'm really hard to date because I want kids." I was OK with the idea as I don't have any and kinda felt like I've missed out and I told her this.)
There have been other women I've seen (mostly on OKC because the layout there lets people put a LOT more info about themselves there than Tinder) who have said similar stuff: around 40, never married, no kids, but they want them, and due to their age, they want them *soon*. But as you said, with their history of being single, the compromises of a relationship are less compelling.
What really horrifies me though is I think a fair number of these women are considering just becoming (fatherless) single moms. One woman I went on a coffee date with did exactly this; she got artificial insemination so she could be a mother, but of course with no man in the picture. I really hope this isn't a giant trend, but I do think there's a good amount of it now. Normally I'm not very socially conservative, however I was raised by a single working mother and did not enjoy the experience at all; it's a childhood full of extreme loneliness. It's one thing to do this to a kid because there's no alternative (husband gets hit by a bus, husband is abusive so wife leaves him for their safety), but it's entirely another to do it willingly, and I'm completely against it. Growing up with a single parent is not a good experience for a kid IMO, and I think it's particularly bad when the kid is a boy and the parent is female. Even growing up with two lesbians would be a lot better because at least you'd have an adult around much more of the time; with a single working mom, you end up either being raised by babysitters or being at home alone a lot.
I think women with kids would really work best if you had kids of your own and could make that part work, too, and that becomes lots of work and effort.
I have seen several single moms say in their profiles that they were much more interested in dating men who already had kids.
Single women with kid or kids are a train wreck of time management. I've done that and its impossible.
This does not bode well. Since women seem to usually be the ones with custody, and people around 40yo are likely to be parents, that means women who are around this age, are available, have no kids, are reasonably attractive, and are not serious mental cases are going to be in short supply. Then throw in that the ones left are likely to have unrealistic expectations, and not be good at being in a relationship (they've been single this long; relationships take communication and compromise), and as you mention they mot not have much of a sex drive (which would contribute to why they're still single), and I have to say I'm not too hopeful about my prospects....
Damn Slashdot and the inability to edit...
I also wanted to add, I think these women have an easy time staying single, because women are typically much more social than men, and so they've developed a little "clatch" of other single women they hang out with, and this fills their need for a social outlet. One other guy said to me that he thinks many of these women are very comfortable being single and really only go on dates because it's socially expected of them (by their family or friends), and then they just end up rejecting every man they go on a date with for some insignificant reason.
The other thing I should add is that, demographically, a lot of women in this age range are probably single moms (or at least split-custody parents). I see a bunch of them on the dating sites, though I never meet any on meetup hikes. I tried going out with one such woman on OKC recently and never got anywhere (couldn't even get her to agree to meet for coffee, she was too busy with some work stuff supposedly). I also had one date with such a woman from Tinder, but she got started with kids early so one was 18 and in college and the other 16, so she made some comment about how she now had more time for dating. So my theory there is that there's a bunch of not-married women in this age range that are all or partially off the market because they don't have (or aren't willing to make) the time to date new men.
Thanks for the reply, I do like to hear other peoples' honest perspectives, and verify that I'm not just nuts myself, and also to entertain theories about this.
I hear a lot of horror stories about dating from men my age I know who have been divorced. Most of them are above average in looks and general personality and all of them are above average in income,
Sounds exactly like me (well, I like to think I'm above average in general personality and looks; my ex-wife says I am and says I'm a "great catch". That should be a big asset when your *ex* thinks you're a good catch...).
A large number are just crazy, like something broke. They appear normal up front, but once you get past the veneer, there's a certain craziness and desperation that's not just off-putting, but kind of frightening. I'm mostly convinced that this is just an apt description of most people.
The older I get, the more I think that just about everyone is like this to some extent, and we just have to find people we get along well with and where we can make up for each other's deficiencies. But I do wonder if those of us who are unmarried or divorced at 40+ are frequently more "broken" than others (moreso for those who get to 40 without ever marrying (or being in a long-term marriage-like relationship)).
One guy tells me the secret is to avoid dating sites completely. He does these Meetup.com activities and says there's a lot of dating potential there. His theory is that all the desperate and weird women do dating sites, but the women with functional personalities do activities sites because they're a low-risk way of meeting people and possibly filling the void in your schedule with something worthwhile.
Yeah, I've been trying this too (in addition to dating sites), but it hasn't gone too well. I like hiking and biking, so I end up going on a lot of group hikes with Meetup.com. I've found a lot of these seem to be de-facto singles mixers. I met several nice women when I was in NY/NJ this way, as there's a bunch of single women in NYC; only problem was that I was still married at the time so I didn't pursue any of them. Now I live near DC and am trying the same thing, but I haven't met anyone on hiking events here, though I've been on a bunch of hikes where the female-to-male ratio was 3-1 or even 5-1 like the one I went on this weekend. The women here aren't like the NYC women; the ones on these hikes seem to mostly be much older women (like 55+, sometimes in their 70s; BTW, some of these ladies are in great shape, but not someone I want to date, but it's nice to see people in their 70s and 80s able to keep up with a intermediate-pace hiking group), and a small number of women around my age who are usually very unattractive or seem to be rather "off". So I'm not really finding age-appropriate women with "functional personalities" here, though I can see that they are attending these events as social events (as am I). So I'm not sure where the single ~40yo women in this are, since I do see tons of them on the dating sites, but maybe hiking isn't their thing the way it is for Manhattanites. I haven't really done meetups for other activities; the cycling groups seem way too hard-core for me (I don't do "centuries", nor do I even do hard-core hiking; 10 miles is about my limit, and I sure as hell don't do trail-running like some overly-active people do). But most of my other interests are mainly solitary, or highly unlikely to have any female interest (like the programming groups).
I've had better success on dating sites, namely Tinder (of all places; OKC has been a big bust). But still, "better" only equates to a handful of actual meet-in-person dates which didn't go far. I did have one really promising prospect, with two really nice (and long) dates, and then she suddenly dumped me by text for no good reason. I'm still confounded by that one.
I also tried a speed-dating event. I met 5 (out of 15) women there I was interested in; none returned the interest. :
I'm just repeating what I remember him saying, I didn't say it was a great idea.
No, he intends to go after remittances by illegal immigrants to their relatives in Mexico.
No, it's not a toy. They're used in a lot of low-volume specialized applications like R&D.
Maybe, but what are they going to do if the general election comes down to Hillary vs. Trump? Hillary is anti-privacy, pro-NSA, and anti-free-speech (and pro-H1B to boot).
That's why I plan to vote for Trump if the election goes that way and Bernie isn't on the ballot.