Should every job that involves interaction with other people require a background check like that? Should I have to get a background check as an office worker because there's some women in my office?
Yeah, I think cab drivers should have tougher licensing requirements, and lose their licenses more easily.
I disagree. Why should private drivers be able to run red lights and make dangerous turns with impunity? Driving is the same, whether you're driving yourself, a guest, your whole family, or a paying customer. The standards should not be different for anyone. If running red lights is dangerous, then all drivers should be punished for it, not just cab drivers.
My whole point is that, as a nation, we do an absolutely terrible job of making sure our drivers are trained properly and actually follow the rules. Driver training is usually either non-existent or a total joke, as is driver testing. There are enforcement efforts, but they're almost solely geared towards revenue generation, usually with speeding tickets, and in some places automated red light tickets, but with the yellow-light duration shortened dangerously to increase the number of tickets (and also accidents). So why have increased standards for cab drivers? Why not have increased standards for everyone? This isn't like tractor-trailer driving, or 777 piloting versus Cesna piloting, where the commercial pilot/driver is operating a far larger and far more complex vehicle; cab drivers drive the same cars the rest of us do. They don't even have manual transmissions like some car drivers (and all tractor-trailer drivers) do, which require a lot more skill to operate.
Personal homes don't cook food to be served to large numbers of people in the public. If you infect the food in your apartment with e. coli, you and your family and maybe some guests will be the only ones to get sick. Restaurants serve very large numbers of people on a constant basis.
Personal cars drive on public roads, and can cause deadly accidents and pile-ups just like cabs. If there's a standard for cabs, then private cars and drivers should be held to the same standard.
No, they aren't. It entirely depends on each state. Many states have no inspections whatsoever, and I've never heard of any state where they make sure you maintain your car. The most stringent is probably California, and some other states, where they check emissions (in CA, I think they even check them at checkpoints as people drive by); that doesn't check maintenance at all, but a poorly-maintained car engine will eventually fail emissions tests. Of course, this doesn't mean the suspension or brakes have been maintained correctly; someone could change their oil regularly and pass smog tests with flying colors, but still have unsafe brakes or something wrong with their suspension.
My whole point is that if these things are worthy things to hold cabs to, then regular drivers should be held to the same standard. There shouldn't be a double-standard, because cabs and private cars share the same roads. If poorly-maintained cars are such a problem that we need to regulate this in cabs, then we should be regulating it in everyone else's car too, because there's far more private cars on the road than there are cabs.
Same goes for driving tests, only it's worse, because most places in the US don't have any serious driving test at all. My driving test consisted of three right turns.
Re-enactments and recordings of those events in the form of TV, plays, and movies.
So how does that work? The actor playing Darmok can't just stand up and say "Darmok and Jalad, on the ocean!", they actually have to have some sort of experience which they re-enact, and this has to involve communication between the Darmok and Jalad actors. Is that going to be nothing more than references to even older mythological characters? I just don't see how it's possible to have a comprehensive language that doesn't have terms to refer to abstract ideas, rather than simply references to past events. It's like circular reasoning. You can't teach anyone about the past event without simply referring to it, since you have no way of communicating what happened in that past event using abstract terminology.
How about an episode where Geordi pipes and and says, "Why the hell do we have so much power routed through the bridge consoles that they actually explode and injure users when the ship is damaged? Relays and data buses were invented centuries ago!"
Only in the US. Over in China, the executives are personally liable for the company's actions, and there've been many cases of corporate executives being executed by gunshot to the head for fraud, which doesn't actually physically harm anyone unlike safety flaws in cars.
So basically, the US is far more corrupt than China. Let that sink in.
Driver training should not be a requirement. If it isn't a requirement for normal drivers, who use the same roads as the cabs, then why are cab drivers required to get some kind of special training?
Car maintenance should not be a requirement. Normal drivers aren't required to follow any special maintenance schedule or get any inspections, so why should cabs? They operate on the same roads. (note: some states do require all cars to have regular inspections; in those states, cabs should be subject to the exact same requirement.)
C++ doesn't have any garbage collection. There is an offshoot of C++ used by MS that has managed-code features, but that's not standard C++ (and they're probably not bothering with it much these days in their push to C#).
You mean fire roads? That's nominally true, I guess. I'd take a Subaru. And in fact I have driven my good old 300SD way on up into the BLM land roads out of Upper Lake.
Yes, I was thinking of BLM forest roads; they're usually full of huge rocks and holes, not something a high-priced road-going car is designed for (whether it's a Tesla, or a Porsche, or a BMW, or even a Cadillac). Subaru perhaps, but even there you have to worry about bottoming out. The Forester is really more of a small SUV though; it has a lot of ground clearance compared to other cars. The whole key here is ground clearance: if you're driving over big rocks and holes, the more ground clearance, the better. The thing that gets people into trouble with SUVs is snow and ice; idiots think their SUV can "go anywhere" and try to drive in snow and ice like it's summer, and end up in the ditch.
Exactly. It's much cheaper and easier to just use aluminum. If you need better strength and/or lower weight, you can forge it instead of casting it like most alloy wheels are. Going to some highly-complex multi-piece aluminum-rim+CF-spoke wheel isn't going to make any kind of measurable difference in performance or fuel economy for a regular commuter car. There's still room for improvement in aluminum wheels, or you can go to magnesium like some European cars used to use. Heck, you could probably switch to titanium and still be a lot cheaper than the CF-spoke wheel.
CF spokes won't work either: as we've already discussed here, CF isn't very suitable for applications where it's going to be gouged and impacted. Regular car drivers are notorious for "curbing" their wheels. It would only take one incident of scratching the wheel on a curb and a CF-spoke rim would be trashed. Even if you're a good enough driver to not curb your rims, it's still quite possible for stray rocks to hit the wheel spokes and damage them over the course of 100,000 miles or so, which could lead to catastrophic failure and a giant lawsuit. So you're not likely to see any CF-spoke wheels for roadgoing cars, except maybe from some aftermarket companies that include giant warnings and disclaimers. I wouldn't use one. This is yet another example of something that would be OK for a race car where it only needs to work for 500 miles on a nice racetrack before being replaced, but is entirely unsuitable for regular cars which encounter all kinds of weather conditions and poor treatment and maintenance over 100-300,000 miles.
So uh, it's a touring car that can only be driven on boring roads? Whoopdeeshit.
No, it's a normal road-going car, not a Land Rover safari vehicle. No normal road-going car is meant for forest roads. You need an SUV or truck for that.
If you're going to get into a discussion about the properties of materials, you can't use colloquial terms because you're no longer talking colloquially. "Toughness", "hardness", and "strength" are very basic materials science terms with very specific meanings.
How many of those are in older vehicles that don't meet modern crash standards? (Or foreign vehicles which don't meet any real crash standards? Indian and Chinese cars are not known for crashworthiness.) How many are with people who are unbelted?
No, it's not. Go take a Materials Science class. From Wikipedia (for the 3rd time in this thread): "In materials science and metallurgy, toughness is the ability of a material to absorb energy and plastically deform without fracturing. One definition of material toughness is the amount of energy per volume that a material can absorb before rupturing. It is also defined as the resistance to fracture of a material when stressed."
Why? What happened? Isn't carbon fiber the magical Space Elevator material of the glorious 3D printed future? Oops, turns out that carbon fiber has very low toughness, it doesn't deal very well with cracks under stress.
You really should read your own links, or better yet take a Materials Science class. From Wikipedia: "In materials science and metallurgy, toughness is the ability of a material to absorb energy and plastically deform without fracturing. One definition of material toughness is the amount of energy per volume that a material can absorb before rupturing. It is also defined as the resistance to fracture of a material when stressed."
Something that can be flexed back and forth a lot without ever fracturing is by definition "tough". This doesn't mean it has the surface hardness necessary to be used as an impact shield (or a road wheel), or is appropriate for use as an ablative shield.
Also, carbon fiber technology has changed a lot since the 1960s.
BTW, aluminum is notorious for not being very tough at all. Its attractive quality is an extremely high strength-to-weight ratio. It works in bike wheels because it's light, strong, and has decent (though not great) hardness, so minor scratches and gouges aren't a problem. CF is lighter and stronger, but doesn't work so well when it's damaged.
Yes, you should use technical terms, and "toughness" is indeed a technical term. From Wikipedia: "In materials science and metallurgy, toughness is the ability of a material to absorb energy and plastically deform without fracturing. One definition of material toughness is the amount of energy per volume that a material can absorb before rupturing. It is also defined as the resistance to fracture of a material when stressed. Toughness requires a balance of strength and ductility."
It happened for Intel, but it didn't go over well for them. People bought AMD64 processors in huge numbers, despite Intel's claims that "consumers don't need 64-bit CPUs, anyone who really needs that should get an Itanic!!", which is precisely why Intel jumped on the bandwagon shortly after.
Battery swaps aren't a dumb idea. If you want to recharge your electric car as fast as it takes a gas-powered car to refuel, that's the only way to do it with current tech. This doesn't mean it'll actually happen though; economic and regulatory problems could prevent battery swaps from ever becoming an available option. Technically, they make perfect sense.
When the Empire State Building was designed, it was planned that dirigibles would dock there and people would be able to get on and off from the deck on top of the building. That of course never happened, but the building was designed with that capability in mind, and it wasn't a dumb idea; dirigible travel would really be nice in a lot of ways, but various problems prevented them from becoming a common mode of travel.
Transporting energy isn't that big an issue; that's what radiators are for. We already use them a lot on spacecraft, satellites, etc. Over a long trip, once the heat is radiated away, you don't have to worry much about it; it's not like all those frozen bodies are going to keep generating lots of heat. Only the monitoring equipment will, and with modern electronics that's extremely low-power.
The ship doesn't need to be warm to be fixed. We invented spacesuits for a reason.
200W per person for communications and controls is ridiculous. A modern laptop PC consumes a small fraction of that power even when running at 100% CPU, and you don't need anywhere near that much compute power to do a little environmental monitoring. A small microcontroller could handle it, while consuming a few milliamps of current at most (or microamps, if you take advantage of sleep states and only wake the thing up periodically to check on things and report back to the main computer). You seem to be assuming that they'd use 1970s electronics technology.
You need a lot of energy to support lets say 100 000 stasis pods and you want to support those for 30 000 years. Lets assume that on pod requires 200 W per hour.
Why would you need that much power to keep people cold? Have you forgotten that space is close to absolute zero? Just keep the entire stasis pod portion of the ship unheated.
What about fist control? You can beat someone to death with your fists. Maybe they should require everyone to have their hands removed, or to be surgically altered so they can't curl their fingers into a fist.
Slashdot Mirror
Should every job that involves interaction with other people require a background check like that? Should I have to get a background check as an office worker because there's some women in my office?
Yeah, I think cab drivers should have tougher licensing requirements, and lose their licenses more easily.
I disagree. Why should private drivers be able to run red lights and make dangerous turns with impunity? Driving is the same, whether you're driving yourself, a guest, your whole family, or a paying customer. The standards should not be different for anyone. If running red lights is dangerous, then all drivers should be punished for it, not just cab drivers.
My whole point is that, as a nation, we do an absolutely terrible job of making sure our drivers are trained properly and actually follow the rules. Driver training is usually either non-existent or a total joke, as is driver testing. There are enforcement efforts, but they're almost solely geared towards revenue generation, usually with speeding tickets, and in some places automated red light tickets, but with the yellow-light duration shortened dangerously to increase the number of tickets (and also accidents). So why have increased standards for cab drivers? Why not have increased standards for everyone? This isn't like tractor-trailer driving, or 777 piloting versus Cesna piloting, where the commercial pilot/driver is operating a far larger and far more complex vehicle; cab drivers drive the same cars the rest of us do. They don't even have manual transmissions like some car drivers (and all tractor-trailer drivers) do, which require a lot more skill to operate.
Personal homes don't cook food to be served to large numbers of people in the public. If you infect the food in your apartment with e. coli, you and your family and maybe some guests will be the only ones to get sick. Restaurants serve very large numbers of people on a constant basis.
Personal cars drive on public roads, and can cause deadly accidents and pile-ups just like cabs. If there's a standard for cabs, then private cars and drivers should be held to the same standard.
No, they aren't. It entirely depends on each state. Many states have no inspections whatsoever, and I've never heard of any state where they make sure you maintain your car. The most stringent is probably California, and some other states, where they check emissions (in CA, I think they even check them at checkpoints as people drive by); that doesn't check maintenance at all, but a poorly-maintained car engine will eventually fail emissions tests. Of course, this doesn't mean the suspension or brakes have been maintained correctly; someone could change their oil regularly and pass smog tests with flying colors, but still have unsafe brakes or something wrong with their suspension.
My whole point is that if these things are worthy things to hold cabs to, then regular drivers should be held to the same standard. There shouldn't be a double-standard, because cabs and private cars share the same roads. If poorly-maintained cars are such a problem that we need to regulate this in cabs, then we should be regulating it in everyone else's car too, because there's far more private cars on the road than there are cabs.
Same goes for driving tests, only it's worse, because most places in the US don't have any serious driving test at all. My driving test consisted of three right turns.
Re-enactments and recordings of those events in the form of TV, plays, and movies.
So how does that work? The actor playing Darmok can't just stand up and say "Darmok and Jalad, on the ocean!", they actually have to have some sort of experience which they re-enact, and this has to involve communication between the Darmok and Jalad actors. Is that going to be nothing more than references to even older mythological characters? I just don't see how it's possible to have a comprehensive language that doesn't have terms to refer to abstract ideas, rather than simply references to past events. It's like circular reasoning. You can't teach anyone about the past event without simply referring to it, since you have no way of communicating what happened in that past event using abstract terminology.
How about an episode where Geordi pipes and and says, "Why the hell do we have so much power routed through the bridge consoles that they actually explode and injure users when the ship is damaged? Relays and data buses were invented centuries ago!"
Only in the US. Over in China, the executives are personally liable for the company's actions, and there've been many cases of corporate executives being executed by gunshot to the head for fraud, which doesn't actually physically harm anyone unlike safety flaws in cars.
So basically, the US is far more corrupt than China. Let that sink in.
If regular cars aren't subjected to safety inspections, then there's no reason cabs should be subject to them.
I disagree about some of this stuff.
Driver training should not be a requirement. If it isn't a requirement for normal drivers, who use the same roads as the cabs, then why are cab drivers required to get some kind of special training?
Car maintenance should not be a requirement. Normal drivers aren't required to follow any special maintenance schedule or get any inspections, so why should cabs? They operate on the same roads. (note: some states do require all cars to have regular inspections; in those states, cabs should be subject to the exact same requirement.)
C++ doesn't have any garbage collection. There is an offshoot of C++ used by MS that has managed-code features, but that's not standard C++ (and they're probably not bothering with it much these days in their push to C#).
You mean fire roads? That's nominally true, I guess. I'd take a Subaru. And in fact I have driven my good old 300SD way on up into the BLM land roads out of Upper Lake.
Yes, I was thinking of BLM forest roads; they're usually full of huge rocks and holes, not something a high-priced road-going car is designed for (whether it's a Tesla, or a Porsche, or a BMW, or even a Cadillac). Subaru perhaps, but even there you have to worry about bottoming out. The Forester is really more of a small SUV though; it has a lot of ground clearance compared to other cars. The whole key here is ground clearance: if you're driving over big rocks and holes, the more ground clearance, the better. The thing that gets people into trouble with SUVs is snow and ice; idiots think their SUV can "go anywhere" and try to drive in snow and ice like it's summer, and end up in the ditch.
Probably an astronomically expensive part.
Exactly. It's much cheaper and easier to just use aluminum. If you need better strength and/or lower weight, you can forge it instead of casting it like most alloy wheels are. Going to some highly-complex multi-piece aluminum-rim+CF-spoke wheel isn't going to make any kind of measurable difference in performance or fuel economy for a regular commuter car. There's still room for improvement in aluminum wheels, or you can go to magnesium like some European cars used to use. Heck, you could probably switch to titanium and still be a lot cheaper than the CF-spoke wheel.
CF spokes won't work either: as we've already discussed here, CF isn't very suitable for applications where it's going to be gouged and impacted. Regular car drivers are notorious for "curbing" their wheels. It would only take one incident of scratching the wheel on a curb and a CF-spoke rim would be trashed. Even if you're a good enough driver to not curb your rims, it's still quite possible for stray rocks to hit the wheel spokes and damage them over the course of 100,000 miles or so, which could lead to catastrophic failure and a giant lawsuit. So you're not likely to see any CF-spoke wheels for roadgoing cars, except maybe from some aftermarket companies that include giant warnings and disclaimers. I wouldn't use one. This is yet another example of something that would be OK for a race car where it only needs to work for 500 miles on a nice racetrack before being replaced, but is entirely unsuitable for regular cars which encounter all kinds of weather conditions and poor treatment and maintenance over 100-300,000 miles.
So uh, it's a touring car that can only be driven on boring roads? Whoopdeeshit.
No, it's a normal road-going car, not a Land Rover safari vehicle. No normal road-going car is meant for forest roads. You need an SUV or truck for that.
If you're going to get into a discussion about the properties of materials, you can't use colloquial terms because you're no longer talking colloquially. "Toughness", "hardness", and "strength" are very basic materials science terms with very specific meanings.
How many of those are in older vehicles that don't meet modern crash standards? (Or foreign vehicles which don't meet any real crash standards? Indian and Chinese cars are not known for crashworthiness.) How many are with people who are unbelted?
No, it's not. Go take a Materials Science class. From Wikipedia (for the 3rd time in this thread): "In materials science and metallurgy, toughness is the ability of a material to absorb energy and plastically deform without fracturing. One definition of material toughness is the amount of energy per volume that a material can absorb before rupturing. It is also defined as the resistance to fracture of a material when stressed."
Why? What happened? Isn't carbon fiber the magical Space Elevator material of the glorious 3D printed future? Oops, turns out that carbon fiber has very low toughness, it doesn't deal very well with cracks under stress.
That doesn't seem to stop Boeing from using it for aircraft wings.
You really should read your own links, or better yet take a Materials Science class. From Wikipedia: "In materials science and metallurgy, toughness is the ability of a material to absorb energy and plastically deform without fracturing. One definition of material toughness is the amount of energy per volume that a material can absorb before rupturing. It is also defined as the resistance to fracture of a material when stressed."
Something that can be flexed back and forth a lot without ever fracturing is by definition "tough". This doesn't mean it has the surface hardness necessary to be used as an impact shield (or a road wheel), or is appropriate for use as an ablative shield.
Also, carbon fiber technology has changed a lot since the 1960s.
BTW, aluminum is notorious for not being very tough at all. Its attractive quality is an extremely high strength-to-weight ratio. It works in bike wheels because it's light, strong, and has decent (though not great) hardness, so minor scratches and gouges aren't a problem. CF is lighter and stronger, but doesn't work so well when it's damaged.
Yes, you should use technical terms, and "toughness" is indeed a technical term. From Wikipedia:
"In materials science and metallurgy, toughness is the ability of a material to absorb energy and plastically deform without fracturing. One definition of material toughness is the amount of energy per volume that a material can absorb before rupturing. It is also defined as the resistance to fracture of a material when stressed. Toughness requires a balance of strength and ductility."
Diamonds aren't very tough. They are extremely hard however. Hardness != toughness != strength.
You people need to take a Materials Science class.
It happened for Intel, but it didn't go over well for them. People bought AMD64 processors in huge numbers, despite Intel's claims that "consumers don't need 64-bit CPUs, anyone who really needs that should get an Itanic!!", which is precisely why Intel jumped on the bandwagon shortly after.
Battery swaps aren't a dumb idea. If you want to recharge your electric car as fast as it takes a gas-powered car to refuel, that's the only way to do it with current tech. This doesn't mean it'll actually happen though; economic and regulatory problems could prevent battery swaps from ever becoming an available option. Technically, they make perfect sense.
When the Empire State Building was designed, it was planned that dirigibles would dock there and people would be able to get on and off from the deck on top of the building. That of course never happened, but the building was designed with that capability in mind, and it wasn't a dumb idea; dirigible travel would really be nice in a lot of ways, but various problems prevented them from becoming a common mode of travel.
What's your friend doing driving on roads with fist-size rocks on them? The Tesla isn't meant for forest roads.
Transporting energy isn't that big an issue; that's what radiators are for. We already use them a lot on spacecraft, satellites, etc. Over a long trip, once the heat is radiated away, you don't have to worry much about it; it's not like all those frozen bodies are going to keep generating lots of heat. Only the monitoring equipment will, and with modern electronics that's extremely low-power.
The ship doesn't need to be warm to be fixed. We invented spacesuits for a reason.
200W per person for communications and controls is ridiculous. A modern laptop PC consumes a small fraction of that power even when running at 100% CPU, and you don't need anywhere near that much compute power to do a little environmental monitoring. A small microcontroller could handle it, while consuming a few milliamps of current at most (or microamps, if you take advantage of sleep states and only wake the thing up periodically to check on things and report back to the main computer). You seem to be assuming that they'd use 1970s electronics technology.
You need a lot of energy to support lets say 100 000 stasis pods and you want to support those for 30 000 years. Lets assume that on pod requires 200 W per hour.
Why would you need that much power to keep people cold? Have you forgotten that space is close to absolute zero? Just keep the entire stasis pod portion of the ship unheated.
What about fist control? You can beat someone to death with your fists. Maybe they should require everyone to have their hands removed, or to be surgically altered so they can't curl their fingers into a fist.