If you think they are at all reflective of anything other than "stupid instances that get laughed out of court" then you're sadly mistaken.
Every country has stories of such things and there's ALWAYS more behind it than the headline would have you belief. And even when there isn't, it gets laughed out on appeal and people sanctioned.
Sorry, but you honestly AREN'T British if you haven't constantly taken the piss out of every establishment in the country at every opportunity, and you'll not suffer in any way, shape or form for doing so. Honestly, watch one of OUR cop-shows. They are incredibly boring and frustrating as some guy yells into a police officers face and calls him every name under the sun and the police just go "Yes, right, okay" in a display of utter, accustomed, British tolerance.
If you think there are police (with batons, not even guns) on every corner beating the populace into line, you just haven't been to the UK.
P.S. I've lived in some of the scummiest areas of London and Essex. I've worked in schools under "special measures" because the teenagers are kicking off so much that they have assigned police officers. And I have ZERO cause to be scared of the police or any similar organisation. If anything, I pity them immensely and I'm not sure I could apply their same coolness to that job, especially not for the wages we pay them.
Far from being an oppressed population under a police state, we tend to live out our lives without interacting with the police at all, and then only positively.
My father-in-law was in America once and was removed from his car at gunpoint for "failing to come to a complete stop at a stop sign". I guarantee you this is true. I also don't believe it's reflective of the entire US.
By contrast, after dropping an unnecessary second (foreign) mobile phone into a bin on Liverpool Street Station (back in the days before we imported US terror-phobia when we had bins on them), short after the July London bus bombings, without thinking, the same guy was surrounded and questioned by unarmed anti-terrorism police officers in seconds. Who were then laughing with him about the whole thing and barely even bothered to take his name.
These things are not indicative of real life. But real-life between the US and the UK in terms of policing is RADICALLY different. Honestly, come over. Spend some time here. Find out. Police here are professional people. Highly trained. Highly regulated. Held responsible for every action, word, gesture and implication they provide.
What you're referring to are media-blown instances missing 99% of the facts. P.S. the judiciary are NOTHING to do with the police force at all. They aren't allowed to be, they are entirely separate, and blurring the two shows your ignorance.
Agreed... as someone who's lived all their life in the UK, and travelled quite a bit, I can safely say that the UK is no worse than any other civilised place I've been to.
Plus, I don't get regarded like an idiot that can't cross the road unsupervised.
Plus, literally, I do not feel in fear of government one iota (except from a "what stupid thing are they doing now" viewpoint, but that's universal).
Strange that people complaining they live freer lives than other countries that they've never been to also think they have to sustain a household armoury in order to do so.
(P.S. The last time I was questioned in any official capacity, or had any interaction with official law enforcement bodies, was while entering the United States for a brief holiday... honestly, I've never been asked so many obtuse, unrelated, obscure questions and I hear they're going to start asking for social media details? Oh... unless you count the policeman who came to my daughter's school fair and let the kids press the siren button)
I mean... if you're stupid enough to believe in flat-earth, I understand that "don't throw yourself off precipices into the void" might also be tricky for you, but...
The prison service in the US is run as a profit-centre.
Literally no civilised country in the world sees incarceration rates, or such profit from the prison services, as the US has.
Basically, the US keeps modern-day slaves of the prison population, in for-profit prisons, thus giving it the incentive to incarcerate as many people as possible (contrary to almost every other country which is trying to CUT their prison population and spending money to do so).
Ironically, the US forbids buying items produced in foreign prisons but makes more of them than any other country in the world.
Could we please stop celebrating and tolerating ignorance?
Thanks.
P.S. Just... literally... get a boat. Pick a direction - any direction. And keep going. Whether or not the Earth is flat will be proven within less than 80 days (and that was a long time ago, you can do it much quicker now).
If something's flat, it either has an edge, or it's infinite. You'll find out, to within a certain margin or error, in a couple of months of travelling, and have some great experiences along the way.
Either you'll never see the same place twice, or you'll fall off an end. Note: If you come back where you started, you're crap at navigation or the Earth is round. Both of which give you a pretty big hint that you shouldn't be formulating flat-Earth theories.
Or are we honestly claiming an infinitely long and wide self-repeating tiled plane?
- Vehicle usage ("vehicle" includes long-distance trucks, motorbikes and all sorts, Tesla only really make cars) - Journey distance (cars can do three times the distance of a Tesla, so are used for different things) - Vehicle age (adjust for 15-year-old falling-apart things with rusted mounts for fuel lines, etc.) - Other causes (e.g. deliberate arson)
Hell, most Tesla in the UK wouldn't have even had their first MOT test yet. They'll still be inside the service warranty. They are literally not old enough for the law to consider them capable of being unroadworthy yet, unless there's been some absolutely disastrous documented and reported cock-up in their engineering.
There are lies, damn lies and statistics. I don't think Tesla's are any more likely to catch fire than other electric vehicles, or that electric vehicles in general are any more likely to catch fire than ICE vehicles. (Note that this does not even imply that Tesla's are less likely to catch fire than ICE vehicles on its own - statistics are weird!).
But it does raise a question of whether they've designed it correctly and issued the correct advice to the relevant authorities. That car wouldn't have been released to a towing company if the fire service thought it could reignite. And yet it did.
P.S. Courting the media for every piece of hype ends in tears if they turn against you and report every counter-piece too. That's what happens with Tesla. If you weren't claiming your cars were so superior and intelligent and infallible etc. then they wouldn't be able to go "Yeah, right, what about this..."
To accelerate a certain mass, you need a certain amount of force, which requires a certain amount of energy to create.
NO MATTER whether you're powering from AA batteries, nuclear fuel, people pedalling on bikes, or petroleum, that same amount of energy - to make a practical car - has to be contained within the car.
That energy, if released outside of expected parameters, is huge. Literally a bomb. There's no difference between the energy in an exploding petrol tank, and the energy in a lithium battery powering a car (in fact, the lithium battery is technically much less energy, I believe... petroleum is incredibly energy-dense which is why we use it, and why a tank of it can go longer than any Tesla charge).
It's as simple as that. What matters is... how easy is it to release unexpectedly? Shorting a petrol car's electrics might start a fire but it's unlikely to explode immediately. Petrol tanks are designed to withstand fires, obstruct people putting lighted matches into them, fuel pumps are designed to cut off if they take a jolt, etc.
The problem is not the technology, or the energy density. They are all equally as dangerous over a certain margin of error. The problem is the design. Hitting an object with the front of the car somehow damages the battery in a way that it CANNOT be safely isolated without draining the whole battery (which may take hours)? That's assuming the battery is actually intact enough for you to be able to do that by any conventional means. If that battery was "in half", say, how would you safely drain it?
The petrol tank, however, you can cover in sand / foam. You can drain it into the grass, move the car away from it and then just wait for it to evaporate.
For some reason, dealing with a petrol tank is much less scary to me than a block of hundreds of modular batteries each of which is capable of independently catching fire just because they are contacting anything metal, forming a run-away reaction at temperatures that will affect all the nearby cells. Batteries which you can't put water on (you can't do that with petrol either really, but you can at least use it as the carrier for extinguishing foam), which short on contact with metal, which don't have an "off-switch" if they are damaged. Which you can't cover in sand / foam. Which you can't drain without putting metal objects onto them (where?) and pulling current from an already-damaged battery.
Yeah, they sound more dangerous to me than a tank of flammable fluid that fire crews can just spray foam on from a distance, or drain safely into a container.
This is not a technology issue. This is a design / procedure issue. Fire crews will already have had training on how to deal with such fires. They wouldn't let some random guy tow it without thinking it was safe. And they got it wrong. Twice.
And the reason is that the design used has inherent safety problems in such an accident. Sure. It could be a really unfortunate, rare, one-off that's not countered by a simple design change. But it could also just be that the batteries need reinforcing in an isolated fireproof box with an isolator and some material that - on fire - expands and suppresses the battery's ability to keep reigniting.
But "discharging" all that energy means it has to go somewhere. You can't just short the battery to try to make it safe. Is there not a safe dummy load it could short through clearly labelled and fire crews made aware? It doesn't appear to be the case.
What we need is a material that actually stops a lithium battery from working. Something that could be released by a heat-trigger, or by fire crews. We have that for petrol and most flammables. It's fire extinguishing foam. Do we have that for batteries? No. And it seems silly to keep designing batteries on the expectation that someone will worry about that when the emergency happens.
My workplace is 28 acres of grassland in the middle of picturesque fields.
My house in a flat in a city centre.
One is covered by "green belt" restrictions. The other literally has tower blocks.
You can still destroy the character of a place with a building that just doesn't belong in a small town. Especially if it brings dozens of random people driving up to it every day, the upheaval of groundworks and power infrastructure, and so on.
And there were three objections. And the objections were made on perfectly legitimate grounds (they didn't do the legal paperwork, and he called them on it). And if there's any company in the world that can actually afford a lawyer who knows what he's doing, and swallow the cost when he fucks up, I think it's Apple.
The guy would have stood to lose a VASTLY more large percentage of his assets if the court ruled against him on legal grounds for a groundless case, than Apple ever could.
Well, a rural town with only 3,950 people in it? Yeah a datacentre is going to destroy that overnight.
Sure, someone may decide that's necessary, but it's by no means a "Oh, my god, why are they saying no!?" reaction, surely? I'd object if I lived in a town of only 4000 people and Apple wanted to install a huge feck-off datacenter with presumably hundreds or thousands of people there on my doorstep.
Converting plans for a single-data-centre to a multi-data-centre without considering the environmental impact.
"A Junior Counsel for the pair said they argue that An Bord PleanÃla was required by law to carry out an EIA of the entire plan, but did not and no reason was given as to why not."
"A legal representative for An Bord PleanÃla argues that her client had not done a full EIA of the entire masterplan as it was not proposed, nor was Apple seeking planning permission for it."
"was required under law to consider the impact of an expansion of the project to include up to eight data halls, rather than the one hall for which permission was granted."
So... in actuality Apple had already given up on the datacentre long ago (because of a double-one in Denmark) and wasn't even applying for permission (supposedly) which they thought meant they didn't have to an impact assessment (which is legally required and just been upheld by a court as being so).
Maybe Apple should hire better lawyers and not just hope that throwing political weight around will get them everything they want without even jumping through the right hoops. Oh, and not change their plans eight-fold mid-way through all this stuff.
Basically, Apple, you tried to bully your way in and just split this in a tiny town while Ireland were friendly to you and giving you backhanders, and when the EU took those away and you couldn't just buy you way through the process any more, you got the hump and stormed off.
The problem is not that it's all around so we're "used to it".
The problem is that it's pretty unreactive. As such, there's nothing in our body that's able to detect it. It's one of the reasons it's used in fire suppression, in lightbulb gas (normally something incredibly inert but nitrogen is also used for the same reasons), aircraft fuel systems, sports car tyres, etc.
Nitrogen is only dangerous when it's the only thing left, because it doesn't really do anything useful. You use it in crisp (potato chip) packets to stop things going stale, because nothing biological really uses it.
The problem with nitrogen is that it's dangerously easy to have an accident. No, you cannot ride in a lift with a nitrogen tank. One knock and you'll die and never know. There are protocols for just such things anywhere that uses it (e.g. hospitals, labs, etc.).
The same reason that helium et al also don't provoke a response. Nothing biological really requires them, or nothing reacts with them, so they end up passing unnoticed. That's why you don't feel distress - there is no cell or membrane set up to react with it and provoke any kind of response, because it doesn't perform any useful function.
However, it's silly to think that nitrogen is any different to other gases in this regard. Carbon monoxide is also incredibly unreactive in human biology, biologically indetectable, and actually replaces the oxygen atoms (meaning your blood binds to the carbon monoxide and doesn't release it to pick up oxygen). That's why so many people die from stupid accidents when doing things like putting their barbecue inside their tent-porch, not servicing their gas heater, etc.
Of all the things to use, nitrogen isn't particularly brilliant. At least CO leaks you can detect with a cheap sensor from a hardware store. Nitrogen leaks? You will be hard pushed to spot that in a nitrogen-rich atmosphere without expensive sensors that are slow to react.
The question is not one of "how to kill people humanely". There are millions of ways to do that. It's how to do so safely. The guys setting up the equipment to do this are your concern here, and transporting and maintaining the equipment to do so.
Nitrogen is a fairly stupid idea because, as you point out, it's indiscriminate, hard to detect, and fast-acting. None of those are really necessary for execution.
Just because you inform doesn't mean anyone cares.
Most people I speak to have absolutely zero idea what the recommended intake is, even to the nearest 1000 kcal. It's not because they couldn't find out. They just don't care.
Pretty much, because it's highly subjective and variable between people anyway, but nobody has a clue what "100 calories" means. They don't even correlate "100 calories" of food with the work required on an exercise machine to burn 100 calories of energy (mainly because it's so vastly unbelievable how much energy is in one single treat, for example, but your body also burns an astounding amount of energy just sitting there doing nothing).
Additionally - I *KNOW* that my greasy hamburger and fries isn't low-calorie. That's kind of why I ordered it. I wasn't IGNORANT. I was APATHETIC. As a certified Skinny Git(TM), I have to eat food with some actual substance to it or I waste away. I live on sugars and fats because my body processes them so [well/poorly depending on your outlook] that they just pass through me and if I don't, I can start to look like death within a few days. Either my gut bacteria is damn amazing at processing such food such that I don't get much left out of it, or they are so bad that they can only grab the easy pickings out of whatever I eat (either way, I don't really care!)
To be honest, even the people who calorie-count have NO IDEA what they're doing either. It's usually those same people who are sitting there telling me how their muesli is so good for them (hint: Read the nutritional information, compare and contrast to sugar-frosted honey nut cornflakes, and then get back to me).
I tend to find that those people with any modicum of interest in their diet then quickly descend into utter nonsense and are sitting there buying into everything from whole-grain to "good bacteria" to anti-oxidants. These things all exist, they all have some basis to them. But not to the extent that swallowing some bottle of green shite a day will make you super-human and never get ill, which is what they then start to believe (often contrary to their own evidence). Oh, and "carbs", don't get me started on "carbs".
At some point you have to accept that people DON'T CARE that something is full of fat.
I have to say that, despite being underweight my entire life, I honestly do not feel full unless I've had a sizeable amount of fat/sugar in a day. It's as simple as that. Putting on the calorie amounts won't change what I order, precisely because I have a good idea of what's the most fatty anyway and often order that, and that comes purely from what it tastes like and how filling it is.
I can't imagine that there aren't people in the opposite position - who are fat and know exactly what the healthiest thing is anyway - but they're opposite in attitude, and will deliberately go for the fattiest thing anyway.
You're not fighting ignorance here. We can find out the information about any food whenever we like with a quick command to our phones. You're fighting apathy. We can't even be bothered to look. Nobody cares, and often they choose something PRECISELY because it's unhealthy.
The only reason to care about weight are:
- Personal longevity. (They're really not going to "hurt" anyone else here, so it's a hard-sell) - Personal financial cost. (Unfortunately fast/fatty food is often cheaper than the healthier food, and certainly easier to come by). - Penalties (e.g. life insurance premiums, being charged for or refused surgery, etc. - again, the only person they're hurting is themselves).
Thus, you can't solve people being overweight or eating unhealthily until pretty much after you have also solved the problems like people smoking, doing drugs, etc. too (which have the above AND the possible effect on others).
I think we should have higher priorities. I also think that it's nice to be informed, yes, but in the UK/EU, nutritional information has been available for a long time and places like restaura
Oh, look at that.... Slashdot replaces double-space after period with single space. This is definitely two spaces to the left. And now three spaces to the left of that.
When even Slash has it in code they haven't updated properly in decades and can't have UK pound signs (you get this junk:
£), you know you're onto a loser!
"But we had one certain thing about a human language, - that the words are separated with a space, with one space."
I hate to break it to you.... people (like myself) were taught to use two spaces after a full-stop for DECADES. The predecessors of ubiquitous computing were all taught like that as the only reference was typewriters and which were often taught to double-space.
This is not a "now we'll have a problem". This is a "You've already had this problem for a very long time and it's never been standardised, so don't make bad assumptions".
You are much more likely to find existing users using double-space-after-period than you are younger users.
Fact is, there is no such standard. What standards they were stayed the same from typewriters to PCs, but then changed to this "one-space" system, and now people are arguing over "one-space vs two-space" again. So you have to code to account for all situations anyway.
Sort is more problematic, sure, but again ignoring whitespace in sort is incredibly easily (and actually beneficial... did you enter the book title as "whitehouse" or "white house"? Surely you want those listed close to each other).
This was never a given. I was EXPLICITLY taught, less than 30 years ago, to double-space after periods. It's a habit you'll find throughout this post (which I'm writing at 100+ WPM). Maybe the new generations weren't but you can't just assume that.
Don't even get me started on spaces (and punctuation) when they are near / inside the end of quotes, semi-colons, etc.
Stop making bad coding assumptions where they relate to human-entered or human-visible data (which INCLUDES search criteria, and the original entered data).
A warning on the screen that says "GPS Tracker Enabled to Jane's Phone" would be quite sufficient to provide enough information to any driver of the car (Jane, her friend who borrows it, a thief, the driver she sold it to) that it's active.
My car tells me when I turn it on that it's "Connected to Ledow's Phone". It also tells me that the emergency contact feature is enabled when it does so (so if the airbag goes off, it uses my phone to call emergency services).
This kind of stuff is fixed by the user interface, not hoping-and-wishing. Even if that was, under "Settings... Connected Devices...", it told you that Jane's Phone was connected for GPS tracking.
Still doesn't stop stupid users leaving it on / buying it like that, but it makes it far more obvious what's happening rather than some silent-but-still-operational scenario.
(P.S. No reason you can't remove the tracking from the car, but it texts Jane's Phone to do so... if she doesn't get the hint, the new owner could pull Jane's Phone number from the car and ring her and explain. Or the dealership could override and reset - which begs the question, if every dealership can clear your GPS tracking, how many thieves have a way to do so too?)
Which is why you "ignore whitespace" and code it as an option wherever it's needed. If anything, it actually makes searching FASTER, because an exact-whitespace match takes longer to find.
When you then put in Unicode, other languages, non-breaking spaces, paragraph marks, and you're working on human-entered data, you're really onto a loser from the start if you have coded anything on a byte-for-byte matching process.
Also, your system works against you in more ways than one. Someone creates an entry with one space. Someone else doesn't see it so they create it with two. Now you have two entirely different entries with different data referring to different database rows, but both "look" identical.
To be honest, if you're buying a used car, you have no idea what the previous owner did or didn't do. They could have just bolted on a tracker and then sold you the car, no? I doubt that a dealership would ALWAYS be able to pick that up. Do they trace every wiring loom?
If you're buying a car, reset it before you start using it. You don't want their details on the car, and if the model has trackers etc. then surely you'll want to check that's off before you start. Don't rely on the previous owner having done it for you (you may have no idea who they are if you've gone through a dealership, etc.)
Maybe it comes under "things you might not have considered", it's certainly not "things that are entirely unexpected". There's not much you can do about it, and not really the previous owner's fault (they shouldn't be advertising their data any more than anyone else).
What will end up happening is that cars will end up getting "accounts" which you have to sign-into, just like PC's. Not signed into the account, then you can't track it. Signed in as someone else, then it'll be obvious and you'll need to sign them out and sign in as yourself, wiping their settings in the process.
I can't wait for the first "find my ipad" style activation lock on a car, in that instance.
I have a 2016 model car, I've had it from new, it has a full connected infotainment touchscreen thing, with emergency dialling, Internet connection,etc. But there's nothing stored on it that's that important at all - even the phone messages are just picked up from the phone itself and not stored locally, and anything it does can be reset from the menu and would clear it in seconds.
About the only thing you'd be able to get would be sat-nav favourites (cleared on reset), my phone's Bluetooth MAC address (cleared on reset) and a background image (cleared on reset). It certainly wouldn't let you into anything.
The problem is far too much "independence" of the owner's devices, rather than actually being integrated.
The bigger question I really have is why would either buyer want a car with a factory-installed tracking system if neither of them care enough to check it works / remove it once they sell the car?
(P.S. There's a reason I installed my own GPS tracker, because I guarantee that there'll be compromises against any factory trackers that are well-known in the industry and thus can be turned off by any garage with the right software - precisely because of this kind of problem. A pittance on Amazon, half-hour's work, and you'll be hard pushed to even know that there's even a tracker installed, let alone what brand or potential compromises there are of it.
I estimate it would take you a determined hour to find my tracker, even if you were looking for it knowing specifically that it had one, and that would be by tracing the power - the cutting of which would make it send out a specific "power lost at this location" signal and it'd keep tracking for several days after from its internal battery.)
If you have a search function that doesn't ignore whitespace, you're probably onto a loser before you even start.
Plus, why would you search for an entire sentence + follow on sentence in one search? That's just going to end in disaster whether it's a double-space, a new-line, a new paragraph or anything else.
"Ignore whitespace" is an option in your searches for a reason.
These people don't understand, or care, about the technicalities of how your product works. They care about money. You went to them to ask for money. They promised you some. That you then don't answer even the most ridiculous of questions from them will make them walk away.
If anyone thought that a financial analyst on a finance call would somehow be interested in what battery chemistry you're using, they really must be an idiot.
It's like sitting in the office of your bank manager, who asks you questions about where his loan money has gone to and when you expect to pay it back. Do you really think he cares about the minutiae of how you operate? Or do you think he wants to see a balance sheet of assets, payments and forecasts?
Despite comments on here, NOBODY invests in any significant business because they "believe" in it (that might be the kind of thing you do for a friend in trouble, but that's not business and doesn't translate to large companies). If they did, they wouldn't invest. They'd donate. They'd be involved. They'd champion it. They wouldn't give you a terms-attached loan backed by huge legal agreements and assurances and things like legally-required earnings calls.
By that standard, you could say that maybe Musk believes in it. But his portion of the funds are pretty insignificant in the grand scheme of things.
Tesla has, by his own admission, skirted bankruptcy. As has SpaceX. He had to go to those people to get money to get out of that, and I bet the pitch wasn't about how "cool" the technology was but how they could see a return on their investment. That people of that ilk are then more interested in how they are going to get their investment back shouldn't be surprising. They honestly couldn't care if you sold spoons, or cancer cures, fast food or spaceships. They are interested in how much money they can get back. The reason you go to them is because they have money, not because they believe in your cause. A billionaire believing in the cause make the company skirt bankruptcy and require investment, that's how good it was for them.
Of course, a lot of the game is not anything to do with the business whatsoever anyway. Literally that company - and its sister companies - are operating at huge losses at the moment. No different to quite a lot of other big-name businesses, current and historic.
The game there is still the same, though. To make money. To buy the stock before it's famous, make it famous and expensive, and then SELL OFF before it downturns below the point you paid for it (plus a healthy profit). It has almost zero correlation to profit, performance, sales or anything else. It's about hype and bullshit. They are there to sell the hot potato to someone else before it burns them. To convince someone else that it's a magic bean before they notice it's worthless.
These people generate that bullshit, not listen to it. That's how they make their money. And cutting such people off means that they know exactly why you're not discussing certain things, and tells them what their next action is going to be.
Such people honestly don't care about what Musk might promise or not. They want to see the numbers, and for those numbers to continue to rise until they decide to sell. Past that point, they don't care a jot about the performance of the company, billionaires or bankrupts, they don't care about causes or advancement or anything it - it makes no difference if they've already made what they see as a profit.
As such, pissing them off is not wise. Because they'll see the comments, cause the downturn in price, sell off, and by doing so leave with a healthy profit even if the company never sees another penny of investment or advice. The next guy who thinks "Oh, wow, look I could own a bit of Tesla now than some have become available" is the one who'll take the fall, not these guys.
Musk wouldn't have got the investment with such attitude. He won't keep it with such attitude. And the investo
Slashdot Mirror
If you think they are at all reflective of anything other than "stupid instances that get laughed out of court" then you're sadly mistaken.
Every country has stories of such things and there's ALWAYS more behind it than the headline would have you belief. And even when there isn't, it gets laughed out on appeal and people sanctioned.
Sorry, but you honestly AREN'T British if you haven't constantly taken the piss out of every establishment in the country at every opportunity, and you'll not suffer in any way, shape or form for doing so. Honestly, watch one of OUR cop-shows. They are incredibly boring and frustrating as some guy yells into a police officers face and calls him every name under the sun and the police just go "Yes, right, okay" in a display of utter, accustomed, British tolerance.
If you think there are police (with batons, not even guns) on every corner beating the populace into line, you just haven't been to the UK.
P.S. I've lived in some of the scummiest areas of London and Essex. I've worked in schools under "special measures" because the teenagers are kicking off so much that they have assigned police officers. And I have ZERO cause to be scared of the police or any similar organisation. If anything, I pity them immensely and I'm not sure I could apply their same coolness to that job, especially not for the wages we pay them.
Far from being an oppressed population under a police state, we tend to live out our lives without interacting with the police at all, and then only positively.
My father-in-law was in America once and was removed from his car at gunpoint for "failing to come to a complete stop at a stop sign". I guarantee you this is true. I also don't believe it's reflective of the entire US.
By contrast, after dropping an unnecessary second (foreign) mobile phone into a bin on Liverpool Street Station (back in the days before we imported US terror-phobia when we had bins on them), short after the July London bus bombings, without thinking, the same guy was surrounded and questioned by unarmed anti-terrorism police officers in seconds. Who were then laughing with him about the whole thing and barely even bothered to take his name.
These things are not indicative of real life. But real-life between the US and the UK in terms of policing is RADICALLY different. Honestly, come over. Spend some time here. Find out. Police here are professional people. Highly trained. Highly regulated. Held responsible for every action, word, gesture and implication they provide.
What you're referring to are media-blown instances missing 99% of the facts. P.S. the judiciary are NOTHING to do with the police force at all. They aren't allowed to be, they are entirely separate, and blurring the two shows your ignorance.
"The weather is perfect, the ocean is a stone's throw away and each block has something interesting to see."
Yes... generally the ocean.
It also stinks to high heaven in the summer and is full of rats.
I never got the appeal of Venice past, say, a single postcard photo.
Cameras are cheap.
People to watch them, however, aren't. Nor are security-cleared installers to install stuff in international embassies.
That $5m also did a lot more than just put a camera in.
Agreed... as someone who's lived all their life in the UK, and travelled quite a bit, I can safely say that the UK is no worse than any other civilised place I've been to.
Plus, I don't get regarded like an idiot that can't cross the road unsupervised.
Plus, literally, I do not feel in fear of government one iota (except from a "what stupid thing are they doing now" viewpoint, but that's universal).
Strange that people complaining they live freer lives than other countries that they've never been to also think they have to sustain a household armoury in order to do so.
(P.S. The last time I was questioned in any official capacity, or had any interaction with official law enforcement bodies, was while entering the United States for a brief holiday... honestly, I've never been asked so many obtuse, unrelated, obscure questions and I hear they're going to start asking for social media details? Oh... unless you count the policeman who came to my daughter's school fair and let the kids press the siren button)
Seriously, check your facts first. The very upper estimate for NK is literally a tiny fraction behind the CONFIRMED numbers for the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"The United States has the largest prison population in the world, and the second-highest per-capita incarceration rate, behind Seychelles"
Yep. Something like 5% of the US population has spent a night in jail.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
You really want to find out what happened in 1975-1980 and undo it (hint: prison privatisation).
I wouldn't even mind but your crime and re-offending rates are actually much WORSE than a lot of other countries.
Why on earth you'd ever want some non-government-funded / regulated police or prison service, I can't begin to fathom.
Nobody said you have to jump off the edge.
I mean... if you're stupid enough to believe in flat-earth, I understand that "don't throw yourself off precipices into the void" might also be tricky for you, but...
The prison service in the US is run as a profit-centre.
Literally no civilised country in the world sees incarceration rates, or such profit from the prison services, as the US has.
Basically, the US keeps modern-day slaves of the prison population, in for-profit prisons, thus giving it the incentive to incarcerate as many people as possible (contrary to almost every other country which is trying to CUT their prison population and spending money to do so).
Ironically, the US forbids buying items produced in foreign prisons but makes more of them than any other country in the world.
Could we please stop celebrating and tolerating ignorance?
Thanks.
P.S. Just... literally... get a boat. Pick a direction - any direction. And keep going. Whether or not the Earth is flat will be proven within less than 80 days (and that was a long time ago, you can do it much quicker now).
If something's flat, it either has an edge, or it's infinite. You'll find out, to within a certain margin or error, in a couple of months of travelling, and have some great experiences along the way.
Either you'll never see the same place twice, or you'll fall off an end. Note: If you come back where you started, you're crap at navigation or the Earth is round. Both of which give you a pretty big hint that you shouldn't be formulating flat-Earth theories.
Or are we honestly claiming an infinitely long and wide self-repeating tiled plane?
Skewed by:
- Vehicle usage ("vehicle" includes long-distance trucks, motorbikes and all sorts, Tesla only really make cars)
- Journey distance (cars can do three times the distance of a Tesla, so are used for different things)
- Vehicle age (adjust for 15-year-old falling-apart things with rusted mounts for fuel lines, etc.)
- Other causes (e.g. deliberate arson)
Hell, most Tesla in the UK wouldn't have even had their first MOT test yet. They'll still be inside the service warranty. They are literally not old enough for the law to consider them capable of being unroadworthy yet, unless there's been some absolutely disastrous documented and reported cock-up in their engineering.
There are lies, damn lies and statistics. I don't think Tesla's are any more likely to catch fire than other electric vehicles, or that electric vehicles in general are any more likely to catch fire than ICE vehicles. (Note that this does not even imply that Tesla's are less likely to catch fire than ICE vehicles on its own - statistics are weird!).
But it does raise a question of whether they've designed it correctly and issued the correct advice to the relevant authorities. That car wouldn't have been released to a towing company if the fire service thought it could reignite. And yet it did.
P.S. Courting the media for every piece of hype ends in tears if they turn against you and report every counter-piece too. That's what happens with Tesla. If you weren't claiming your cars were so superior and intelligent and infallible etc. then they wouldn't be able to go "Yeah, right, what about this..."
It's not. Nobody could ever claim that.
To accelerate a certain mass, you need a certain amount of force, which requires a certain amount of energy to create.
NO MATTER whether you're powering from AA batteries, nuclear fuel, people pedalling on bikes, or petroleum, that same amount of energy - to make a practical car - has to be contained within the car.
That energy, if released outside of expected parameters, is huge. Literally a bomb. There's no difference between the energy in an exploding petrol tank, and the energy in a lithium battery powering a car (in fact, the lithium battery is technically much less energy, I believe... petroleum is incredibly energy-dense which is why we use it, and why a tank of it can go longer than any Tesla charge).
It's as simple as that. What matters is... how easy is it to release unexpectedly? Shorting a petrol car's electrics might start a fire but it's unlikely to explode immediately. Petrol tanks are designed to withstand fires, obstruct people putting lighted matches into them, fuel pumps are designed to cut off if they take a jolt, etc.
The problem is not the technology, or the energy density. They are all equally as dangerous over a certain margin of error. The problem is the design. Hitting an object with the front of the car somehow damages the battery in a way that it CANNOT be safely isolated without draining the whole battery (which may take hours)? That's assuming the battery is actually intact enough for you to be able to do that by any conventional means. If that battery was "in half", say, how would you safely drain it?
The petrol tank, however, you can cover in sand / foam. You can drain it into the grass, move the car away from it and then just wait for it to evaporate.
For some reason, dealing with a petrol tank is much less scary to me than a block of hundreds of modular batteries each of which is capable of independently catching fire just because they are contacting anything metal, forming a run-away reaction at temperatures that will affect all the nearby cells. Batteries which you can't put water on (you can't do that with petrol either really, but you can at least use it as the carrier for extinguishing foam), which short on contact with metal, which don't have an "off-switch" if they are damaged. Which you can't cover in sand / foam. Which you can't drain without putting metal objects onto them (where?) and pulling current from an already-damaged battery.
Yeah, they sound more dangerous to me than a tank of flammable fluid that fire crews can just spray foam on from a distance, or drain safely into a container.
This is not a technology issue. This is a design / procedure issue. Fire crews will already have had training on how to deal with such fires. They wouldn't let some random guy tow it without thinking it was safe. And they got it wrong. Twice.
And the reason is that the design used has inherent safety problems in such an accident. Sure. It could be a really unfortunate, rare, one-off that's not countered by a simple design change. But it could also just be that the batteries need reinforcing in an isolated fireproof box with an isolator and some material that - on fire - expands and suppresses the battery's ability to keep reigniting.
But "discharging" all that energy means it has to go somewhere. You can't just short the battery to try to make it safe. Is there not a safe dummy load it could short through clearly labelled and fire crews made aware? It doesn't appear to be the case.
What we need is a material that actually stops a lithium battery from working. Something that could be released by a heat-trigger, or by fire crews. We have that for petrol and most flammables. It's fire extinguishing foam. Do we have that for batteries? No. And it seems silly to keep designing batteries on the expectation that someone will worry about that when the emergency happens.
I live minutes away from my workplace.
My workplace is 28 acres of grassland in the middle of picturesque fields.
My house in a flat in a city centre.
One is covered by "green belt" restrictions. The other literally has tower blocks.
You can still destroy the character of a place with a building that just doesn't belong in a small town. Especially if it brings dozens of random people driving up to it every day, the upheaval of groundworks and power infrastructure, and so on.
And there were three objections. And the objections were made on perfectly legitimate grounds (they didn't do the legal paperwork, and he called them on it). And if there's any company in the world that can actually afford a lawyer who knows what he's doing, and swallow the cost when he fucks up, I think it's Apple.
The guy would have stood to lose a VASTLY more large percentage of his assets if the court ruled against him on legal grounds for a groundless case, than Apple ever could.
Erm..
Well, a rural town with only 3,950 people in it? Yeah a datacentre is going to destroy that overnight.
Sure, someone may decide that's necessary, but it's by no means a "Oh, my god, why are they saying no!?" reaction, surely? I'd object if I lived in a town of only 4000 people and Apple wanted to install a huge feck-off datacenter with presumably hundreds or thousands of people there on my doorstep.
What was the appeal on the grounds of?
https://www.rte.ie/news/2018/0...
Converting plans for a single-data-centre to a multi-data-centre without considering the environmental impact.
"A Junior Counsel for the pair said they argue that An Bord PleanÃla was required by law to carry out an EIA of the entire plan, but did not and no reason was given as to why not."
"A legal representative for An Bord PleanÃla argues that her client had not done a full EIA of the entire masterplan as it was not proposed, nor was Apple seeking planning permission for it."
"was required under law to consider the impact of an expansion of the project to include up to eight data halls, rather than the one hall for which permission was granted."
So... in actuality Apple had already given up on the datacentre long ago (because of a double-one in Denmark) and wasn't even applying for permission (supposedly) which they thought meant they didn't have to an impact assessment (which is legally required and just been upheld by a court as being so).
Maybe Apple should hire better lawyers and not just hope that throwing political weight around will get them everything they want without even jumping through the right hoops. Oh, and not change their plans eight-fold mid-way through all this stuff.
Basically, Apple, you tried to bully your way in and just split this in a tiny town while Ireland were friendly to you and giving you backhanders, and when the EU took those away and you couldn't just buy you way through the process any more, you got the hump and stormed off.
The problem is not that it's all around so we're "used to it".
The problem is that it's pretty unreactive. As such, there's nothing in our body that's able to detect it. It's one of the reasons it's used in fire suppression, in lightbulb gas (normally something incredibly inert but nitrogen is also used for the same reasons), aircraft fuel systems, sports car tyres, etc.
Nitrogen is only dangerous when it's the only thing left, because it doesn't really do anything useful. You use it in crisp (potato chip) packets to stop things going stale, because nothing biological really uses it.
The problem with nitrogen is that it's dangerously easy to have an accident. No, you cannot ride in a lift with a nitrogen tank. One knock and you'll die and never know. There are protocols for just such things anywhere that uses it (e.g. hospitals, labs, etc.).
The same reason that helium et al also don't provoke a response. Nothing biological really requires them, or nothing reacts with them, so they end up passing unnoticed. That's why you don't feel distress - there is no cell or membrane set up to react with it and provoke any kind of response, because it doesn't perform any useful function.
However, it's silly to think that nitrogen is any different to other gases in this regard. Carbon monoxide is also incredibly unreactive in human biology, biologically indetectable, and actually replaces the oxygen atoms (meaning your blood binds to the carbon monoxide and doesn't release it to pick up oxygen). That's why so many people die from stupid accidents when doing things like putting their barbecue inside their tent-porch, not servicing their gas heater, etc.
Of all the things to use, nitrogen isn't particularly brilliant. At least CO leaks you can detect with a cheap sensor from a hardware store. Nitrogen leaks? You will be hard pushed to spot that in a nitrogen-rich atmosphere without expensive sensors that are slow to react.
The question is not one of "how to kill people humanely". There are millions of ways to do that. It's how to do so safely. The guys setting up the equipment to do this are your concern here, and transporting and maintaining the equipment to do so.
Nitrogen is a fairly stupid idea because, as you point out, it's indiscriminate, hard to detect, and fast-acting. None of those are really necessary for execution.
Just because you inform doesn't mean anyone cares.
Most people I speak to have absolutely zero idea what the recommended intake is, even to the nearest 1000 kcal. It's not because they couldn't find out. They just don't care.
Pretty much, because it's highly subjective and variable between people anyway, but nobody has a clue what "100 calories" means. They don't even correlate "100 calories" of food with the work required on an exercise machine to burn 100 calories of energy (mainly because it's so vastly unbelievable how much energy is in one single treat, for example, but your body also burns an astounding amount of energy just sitting there doing nothing).
Additionally - I *KNOW* that my greasy hamburger and fries isn't low-calorie. That's kind of why I ordered it. I wasn't IGNORANT. I was APATHETIC. As a certified Skinny Git(TM), I have to eat food with some actual substance to it or I waste away. I live on sugars and fats because my body processes them so [well/poorly depending on your outlook] that they just pass through me and if I don't, I can start to look like death within a few days. Either my gut bacteria is damn amazing at processing such food such that I don't get much left out of it, or they are so bad that they can only grab the easy pickings out of whatever I eat (either way, I don't really care!)
To be honest, even the people who calorie-count have NO IDEA what they're doing either. It's usually those same people who are sitting there telling me how their muesli is so good for them (hint: Read the nutritional information, compare and contrast to sugar-frosted honey nut cornflakes, and then get back to me).
I tend to find that those people with any modicum of interest in their diet then quickly descend into utter nonsense and are sitting there buying into everything from whole-grain to "good bacteria" to anti-oxidants. These things all exist, they all have some basis to them. But not to the extent that swallowing some bottle of green shite a day will make you super-human and never get ill, which is what they then start to believe (often contrary to their own evidence). Oh, and "carbs", don't get me started on "carbs".
At some point you have to accept that people DON'T CARE that something is full of fat.
I have to say that, despite being underweight my entire life, I honestly do not feel full unless I've had a sizeable amount of fat/sugar in a day. It's as simple as that. Putting on the calorie amounts won't change what I order, precisely because I have a good idea of what's the most fatty anyway and often order that, and that comes purely from what it tastes like and how filling it is.
I can't imagine that there aren't people in the opposite position - who are fat and know exactly what the healthiest thing is anyway - but they're opposite in attitude, and will deliberately go for the fattiest thing anyway.
You're not fighting ignorance here. We can find out the information about any food whenever we like with a quick command to our phones. You're fighting apathy. We can't even be bothered to look. Nobody cares, and often they choose something PRECISELY because it's unhealthy.
The only reason to care about weight are:
- Personal longevity. (They're really not going to "hurt" anyone else here, so it's a hard-sell)
- Personal financial cost. (Unfortunately fast/fatty food is often cheaper than the healthier food, and certainly easier to come by).
- Penalties (e.g. life insurance premiums, being charged for or refused surgery, etc. - again, the only person they're hurting is themselves).
Thus, you can't solve people being overweight or eating unhealthily until pretty much after you have also solved the problems like people smoking, doing drugs, etc. too (which have the above AND the possible effect on others).
I think we should have higher priorities. I also think that it's nice to be informed, yes, but in the UK/EU, nutritional information has been available for a long time and places like restaura
Chrome browser.
UK keyboard.
UK language.
UK computer.
Literally NO OTHER languages etc. installed, nothing playing with keyboards or regions or localisation, no plugins or extensions.
Slashdot, for some reason ALWAYS messes up pound-signs. No other site (even ones based on Slash like SoylentNews) does that to me.
Been the same for 10+ years, on as many computers as I've ever used to access this site.
£
£
£
£
£
I'm literally just typing Shift-3 and that's the crap I get.
It's in the summary:
"including through opaque financing offers that can keep people in debt for months or years"
I'm British.
You're just as wrong to make that assumption as the OP.
Oh, look at that.... Slashdot replaces double-space after period with single space. This is definitely two spaces to the left. And now three spaces to the left of that.
When even Slash has it in code they haven't updated properly in decades and can't have UK pound signs (you get this junk:
£), you know you're onto a loser!
"But we had one certain thing about a human language, - that the words are separated with a space, with one space."
I hate to break it to you.... people (like myself) were taught to use two spaces after a full-stop for DECADES. The predecessors of ubiquitous computing were all taught like that as the only reference was typewriters and which were often taught to double-space.
This is not a "now we'll have a problem". This is a "You've already had this problem for a very long time and it's never been standardised, so don't make bad assumptions".
You are much more likely to find existing users using double-space-after-period than you are younger users.
Fact is, there is no such standard. What standards they were stayed the same from typewriters to PCs, but then changed to this "one-space" system, and now people are arguing over "one-space vs two-space" again. So you have to code to account for all situations anyway.
Sort is more problematic, sure, but again ignoring whitespace in sort is incredibly easily (and actually beneficial... did you enter the book title as "whitehouse" or "white house"? Surely you want those listed close to each other).
This was never a given. I was EXPLICITLY taught, less than 30 years ago, to double-space after periods. It's a habit you'll find throughout this post (which I'm writing at 100+ WPM). Maybe the new generations weren't but you can't just assume that.
Don't even get me started on spaces (and punctuation) when they are near / inside the end of quotes, semi-colons, etc.
Stop making bad coding assumptions where they relate to human-entered or human-visible data (which INCLUDES search criteria, and the original entered data).
Quite.
A warning on the screen that says "GPS Tracker Enabled to Jane's Phone" would be quite sufficient to provide enough information to any driver of the car (Jane, her friend who borrows it, a thief, the driver she sold it to) that it's active.
My car tells me when I turn it on that it's "Connected to Ledow's Phone". It also tells me that the emergency contact feature is enabled when it does so (so if the airbag goes off, it uses my phone to call emergency services).
This kind of stuff is fixed by the user interface, not hoping-and-wishing. Even if that was, under "Settings... Connected Devices...", it told you that Jane's Phone was connected for GPS tracking.
Still doesn't stop stupid users leaving it on / buying it like that, but it makes it far more obvious what's happening rather than some silent-but-still-operational scenario.
(P.S. No reason you can't remove the tracking from the car, but it texts Jane's Phone to do so... if she doesn't get the hint, the new owner could pull Jane's Phone number from the car and ring her and explain. Or the dealership could override and reset - which begs the question, if every dealership can clear your GPS tracking, how many thieves have a way to do so too?)
Because you have humans using the system.
Which is why you "ignore whitespace" and code it as an option wherever it's needed. If anything, it actually makes searching FASTER, because an exact-whitespace match takes longer to find.
When you then put in Unicode, other languages, non-breaking spaces, paragraph marks, and you're working on human-entered data, you're really onto a loser from the start if you have coded anything on a byte-for-byte matching process.
Also, your system works against you in more ways than one. Someone creates an entry with one space. Someone else doesn't see it so they create it with two. Now you have two entirely different entries with different data referring to different database rows, but both "look" identical.
Ignore whitespace, and the problem solves itself.
To be honest, if you're buying a used car, you have no idea what the previous owner did or didn't do. They could have just bolted on a tracker and then sold you the car, no? I doubt that a dealership would ALWAYS be able to pick that up. Do they trace every wiring loom?
If you're buying a car, reset it before you start using it. You don't want their details on the car, and if the model has trackers etc. then surely you'll want to check that's off before you start. Don't rely on the previous owner having done it for you (you may have no idea who they are if you've gone through a dealership, etc.)
Maybe it comes under "things you might not have considered", it's certainly not "things that are entirely unexpected". There's not much you can do about it, and not really the previous owner's fault (they shouldn't be advertising their data any more than anyone else).
What will end up happening is that cars will end up getting "accounts" which you have to sign-into, just like PC's. Not signed into the account, then you can't track it. Signed in as someone else, then it'll be obvious and you'll need to sign them out and sign in as yourself, wiping their settings in the process.
I can't wait for the first "find my ipad" style activation lock on a car, in that instance.
I have a 2016 model car, I've had it from new, it has a full connected infotainment touchscreen thing, with emergency dialling, Internet connection,etc. But there's nothing stored on it that's that important at all - even the phone messages are just picked up from the phone itself and not stored locally, and anything it does can be reset from the menu and would clear it in seconds.
About the only thing you'd be able to get would be sat-nav favourites (cleared on reset), my phone's Bluetooth MAC address (cleared on reset) and a background image (cleared on reset). It certainly wouldn't let you into anything.
The problem is far too much "independence" of the owner's devices, rather than actually being integrated.
The bigger question I really have is why would either buyer want a car with a factory-installed tracking system if neither of them care enough to check it works / remove it once they sell the car?
(P.S. There's a reason I installed my own GPS tracker, because I guarantee that there'll be compromises against any factory trackers that are well-known in the industry and thus can be turned off by any garage with the right software - precisely because of this kind of problem. A pittance on Amazon, half-hour's work, and you'll be hard pushed to even know that there's even a tracker installed, let alone what brand or potential compromises there are of it.
I estimate it would take you a determined hour to find my tracker, even if you were looking for it knowing specifically that it had one, and that would be by tracing the power - the cutting of which would make it send out a specific "power lost at this location" signal and it'd keep tracking for several days after from its internal battery.)
If you have a search function that doesn't ignore whitespace, you're probably onto a loser before you even start.
Plus, why would you search for an entire sentence + follow on sentence in one search? That's just going to end in disaster whether it's a double-space, a new-line, a new paragraph or anything else.
"Ignore whitespace" is an option in your searches for a reason.
Shocking.
These people don't understand, or care, about the technicalities of how your product works. They care about money. You went to them to ask for money. They promised you some. That you then don't answer even the most ridiculous of questions from them will make them walk away.
If anyone thought that a financial analyst on a finance call would somehow be interested in what battery chemistry you're using, they really must be an idiot.
It's like sitting in the office of your bank manager, who asks you questions about where his loan money has gone to and when you expect to pay it back. Do you really think he cares about the minutiae of how you operate? Or do you think he wants to see a balance sheet of assets, payments and forecasts?
Despite comments on here, NOBODY invests in any significant business because they "believe" in it (that might be the kind of thing you do for a friend in trouble, but that's not business and doesn't translate to large companies). If they did, they wouldn't invest. They'd donate. They'd be involved. They'd champion it. They wouldn't give you a terms-attached loan backed by huge legal agreements and assurances and things like legally-required earnings calls.
By that standard, you could say that maybe Musk believes in it. But his portion of the funds are pretty insignificant in the grand scheme of things.
Tesla has, by his own admission, skirted bankruptcy. As has SpaceX. He had to go to those people to get money to get out of that, and I bet the pitch wasn't about how "cool" the technology was but how they could see a return on their investment. That people of that ilk are then more interested in how they are going to get their investment back shouldn't be surprising. They honestly couldn't care if you sold spoons, or cancer cures, fast food or spaceships. They are interested in how much money they can get back. The reason you go to them is because they have money, not because they believe in your cause. A billionaire believing in the cause make the company skirt bankruptcy and require investment, that's how good it was for them.
Of course, a lot of the game is not anything to do with the business whatsoever anyway. Literally that company - and its sister companies - are operating at huge losses at the moment. No different to quite a lot of other big-name businesses, current and historic.
The game there is still the same, though. To make money. To buy the stock before it's famous, make it famous and expensive, and then SELL OFF before it downturns below the point you paid for it (plus a healthy profit). It has almost zero correlation to profit, performance, sales or anything else. It's about hype and bullshit. They are there to sell the hot potato to someone else before it burns them. To convince someone else that it's a magic bean before they notice it's worthless.
These people generate that bullshit, not listen to it. That's how they make their money. And cutting such people off means that they know exactly why you're not discussing certain things, and tells them what their next action is going to be.
Such people honestly don't care about what Musk might promise or not. They want to see the numbers, and for those numbers to continue to rise until they decide to sell. Past that point, they don't care a jot about the performance of the company, billionaires or bankrupts, they don't care about causes or advancement or anything it - it makes no difference if they've already made what they see as a profit.
As such, pissing them off is not wise. Because they'll see the comments, cause the downturn in price, sell off, and by doing so leave with a healthy profit even if the company never sees another penny of investment or advice. The next guy who thinks "Oh, wow, look I could own a bit of Tesla now than some have become available" is the one who'll take the fall, not these guys.
Musk wouldn't have got the investment with such attitude. He won't keep it with such attitude. And the investo