Actually, yes I have... sit down, for a tale I have to tell... this was back in the late 1980s, when I was doing bits and extras. I was on my way home, at midnight in the pouring rain, from working on the new Twilight Zone (always a wretched set to work). Came to the last stoplight before my place, and what do I see in the next lane, the only other traffic in sight??
A guy on a unicycle. With a backpack.
So I rolled down the window and said hello there, and what on earth are you doing on that thing?
So we talked for a bit, and turns out he was riding it cross-country to raise money for some charity, the object of which I forget. AND... back home, he was Rod Serling's next-door neighbour.
I couldn't remember where in the thread I'd seen the link:) But exactly so... vocal minorities have disporportionate control. -- I'm reminded that last year's ballot proposition for N-S light rail in California (which I can't recall if passed or not) worked out to a break-even ticket price of over a thousand bucks per 400 mile one-way trip, assuming no cost overruns (ha... never seen a gov't project here that didn't cost at least 2x, and often more like 5x, the initial budget) and that's before daily operating costs. Since this is clearly untenable even in the most absurdly skewed market, it follows that the actual ticket price would be comparable to driving, and taxpayers would get to pick up the $900 or so balance.
And that points up another problem -- what happens when a generation is raised to depend on BigBrothermobile, and CANNOT fend for themselves when it breaks?? Big Brother could cripple any contrarian or otherwise disapproved movement simply by disabling the appropriate vehicles.
Or... the road out of the city is clogged. No more traffic is allowed. Your vacation will take place in another direction; too bad about your hard-to-get reservations in the now generally off-limits national park. Or the emergency evacuation will simply not happen. Make up your own scenario, anyone can play!!
Take note that the article only uses raw numbers -- so fatalities are roughly proportional to the gross percentage of that type of vehicle on the road. Who would have guessed??!
Per the last stats I saw that were (more reasonably) weighted by *fatalities per thousand passenger vehicles of a given type*, pickup trucks came in best, SUVs next, while sports cars came in dead last.
The article also fails to note that sports cars cause more accidents, by diving in and out of traffic while expecting heavier (less maneuverable) vehicles to get out of their way, or stop short to avoid them. I see this all the time in Los Angeles. Only reason there aren't more accidents is because the bigger vehicles usually travel in a more predictable pattern than the little lane-divers (and because frankly, big-city drivers become very skilled of sheer necessity, regardless of what they drive).
As to "combined risk", this is a bizarre metric. Essentially it wants us to believe that you should choose your vehicle based on its relative risk to others. Excuse me, I'm responsible for MY driving and MY safety, not theirs. And if a higher vehicle riding over a smaller one is a problem, what's wrong with building a proper roll cage into the small vehicle, to prevent that? Oh wait, that would interfere with the weight-to-mileage ratio dictated by the EPA, which has done more to damage auto safety than any other factor, by turning 'em all into fragile plastic boxes.
All in all, I'd say that in this particular dick-measuring contest, the smaller the car, the less likely the owner is to have any sense, and the more likely they are to think they ought to come in first no matter what, and to blame others for their own shortcomings.
So it's no wonder liberals drive compacts, and conservatives drive pickups.;)
This thread points up that there's a difference between "doing the right or best thing because it's the reasonable thing to do" and "doing what your religion says is best because it makes you better than the heretics doing something else, all of whom are out to get you" (because every right-thinking green-bike knows that SUVs exist only to flatten bikes).
Or as you succincted it (new verb:) arrogance. An awful lot of which is not actually doing the right thing, but sour grapes: "*I* can't own or drive an SUV, so anyone who does is a wasteful bitch for the oil companies."
At any rate, to the nominal topic -- as Jane Q. Public says in http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1684280&cid=32553894, there's going to be no good way to keep Big Brother out of an "Automotive Internet". And what is Big Brother, really?? A whopping huge arrogance that believes it is right and everyone else is up to no good, therefore needs regulation and restriction. What if the "automotive internet" decides that, for our own good, only certain types of vehicle are allowed? Religious arrogance can't admit to contrary data, such as the interesting article someone cited at http://www.templetons.com/brad/transit-myth.html
And here you thought this subthread was off topic. What was the question??:)
And what would an F-16 be like if mass-produced for the $35,000 market? and of course, if each didn't come with its own team of crack mechanics. Call it what, about 1% of the quality control an average F-16 is accustomed to??
Since I totally agree with Jane Q. Public, I'll take that as a serious comment. The question is whether TOR-equipped cars will be ALLOWED on the roads. I'd guess not, because "it would compromise safety" but in reality because it would compromise Big Brother's ability to hand out speeding tickets. Bonus points for surveillance whenever they feel the "need".
No, you were right the first time -- a medium-sized plane has what, between 6 and a dozen wheels, depending on the model? And a small plane usually 3 to 6. And a train has LOTS of wheels. See? Your postulated ratio was right the first time. Gods help us if unicycles ever become popular.:)
I'd hazard that there have been fatal accidents caused by an auto trying to avoid a cyclist; I've nearly had to run off the road to avoid one myself. If it comes to hitting a wayward cyclist, or a head-on collision, which would you pick?? (hint: hitting the cyclist will probably kill fewer people.)
BTW as a driver who *needs* a fullsized pickup (and only has to make a fraction as many trips as I would carrying the same loads in a car), I've rather enjoyed this particular chain of comments:D
Per'zactly. I shorthanded it down to 3 lines (my, what a controversy that caused), but that's really what it boiled down to.
You cannot mandate and enforce desirable behaviour without doing at least as much harm (either to the object, or to someone else). This is a great example of that.
And I agree, it was the beginning of a much more insidious servitude. But hey, now all Americans get to participate equally, instead of it being applied only to a select few!
"Democracy imposed from without is the severest form of tyranny." -- Lloyd Biggle Jr.
Dvorkin says, The US Constitution itself is a politically correct document. Look how it dances around the issue of slavery: "Person held to Service or Labour"
Like most people who focus on the issue of slavery, you're forgetting the practices of indentured servitude, which was probably more widespread at time than was slavery.
And the South didn't fight over slavery; that issue didn't enter the war til later, and Lincoln was only bent on hurting the south, not helping the slaves -- read his own words about it. The war was about states' rights, and against crushing economic pressure brought by northern industrialists.
A few years back someone charted crime vs various major FPS releases. There were obvious drop-offs shortly after the release of DOOM, DOOM2, and Quake.
One can make similar observations about sex-related crime and availability of porn -- there are two obvious drop-offs: a smaller one corresponding to when dialup BBSs first made porn readily available, and a much larger drop-off once the internet got into full swing.
The conclusion I draw is that if something passively satisfies any set of human urges (good, bad, or ugly), it reduces the need to actively satisfy those urges. To me this is obvious of itself simply from broad observation of the world, but some people can't see anything that doesn't have a study and a slew of PhDs attached to it. And if the study excludes all the real world and focuses only on special cases, well, so much the easier for the PhD to prove his point, however bogus it may be.
The way I'm thinking, the passwords would be easy for the printer's owner to change, so if a password was compromised, it would be obvious after the first bogus print job. I'm looking at this as something average non-IT people could do -- put a teeny little webserver in the printer, where all it does is cough up a form that the owner used to input usernames (sender's email addy) and a password for each address. NOT asterisked, since no one else will see it and you want Average Joe to be sure what he typed.
It could also have a function to email an "invitation to print" to Yonder Sender, with a hash that has to be present in the reply before the print job is accepted. Random Spammer's junk printjobs won't have that information, so they'd be rejected from the print queue.
Essentially what I'm going for is closed two-way communication (so printer is not available to random strangers) with simple-to-manage authentication. I gather some network printers already do something similar but I've never heard anything but swearing from the IT guys who manage 'em.
Yeah, it would mean you'd have to exchange a pair of request/invite emails first. But why would anyone want random images arriving unannounced anyway? (Well, unless your idea is to collect printed porn without having to look it up yourself:)
How about something like using the SUBJECT field for a password? Easy to give to someone who wants to send you something, and No password, No print. And no reason you can't have more than one, maybe with restrictions attached to some of them, like size of document, or only good for a particular sender. Essentially Q&D network admin stuff.
Not only that, but increasingly you get crap results on the order of "FIND FIVE STAR HOTELS IN PODUNKVILLE" (population 12) -- the latest form of linkfarm, it seems.
I'd seen so much of this crap that I actually did not believe it when a motel listing came up for a town with a current population of (count them) 7 people... turns out for once it's real.
As to the "store locators" on chains' sites, about half the time they won't even speak to you if you ask for listings outside your immediate zipcode. Just gimme a damn sorted list and I'll find it myself; stop trying to be "helpful" by restricting what I'm show to what YOU think I'll want.
As to UVB-76 (where do they get these names??), I asked a fella I figured would be in the know on this, and he said more than likely it's simply that the money to operate the station ran out.
Montana Power was VERY well managed until the owners decided on an exit strategy that raped the company of all its assets and left its stockholders and customers high and dry -- it had formerly been THE stock to own for your retirement investment, and THE cheapest most reliable power in the entire northwest. They called their exit strategy "deregulation", tho, and it's been a disaster ever since, much as you describe for Utah Power. As I vaguely recall, what's left of MT Power is indeed foreign-owned (as is the case with California's mess too -- our rates are now TEN TIMES what they were ten years ago, thanks to morons who followed MT Power's model of "deregulation"!!)
I think it's reached the point where we ought to nationalize the damned things and start over. The appalling blackmail scenario you describe is exactly why no part of critical infrastructure should EVER be foreign-owned, nor controlled by anyone from outside its service area.
Amazon's crack team of shopping specialists cruise the streets, taking orders from every gesture or grimace performed in every front yard and every living room in America. For added convenience, a shopping drone will penetrate those pesky closed-up rooms, ensuring that no shopper's fantasy goes unfilled!
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Haha, good point. Now where did I park my well-armed black helicopter?? ;D
I dunno. Certainly very confused. I think you're going to have to run over yourself in your own driveway. ;)
Actually, yes I have... sit down, for a tale I have to tell... this was back in the late 1980s, when I was doing bits and extras. I was on my way home, at midnight in the pouring rain, from working on the new Twilight Zone (always a wretched set to work). Came to the last stoplight before my place, and what do I see in the next lane, the only other traffic in sight??
A guy on a unicycle. With a backpack.
So I rolled down the window and said hello there, and what on earth are you doing on that thing?
So we talked for a bit, and turns out he was riding it cross-country to raise money for some charity, the object of which I forget. AND... back home, he was Rod Serling's next-door neighbour.
Whoa... TZ comes to life...!!
I couldn't remember where in the thread I'd seen the link :) But exactly so... vocal minorities have disporportionate control. -- I'm reminded that last year's ballot proposition for N-S light rail in California (which I can't recall if passed or not) worked out to a break-even ticket price of over a thousand bucks per 400 mile one-way trip, assuming no cost overruns (ha... never seen a gov't project here that didn't cost at least 2x, and often more like 5x, the initial budget) and that's before daily operating costs. Since this is clearly untenable even in the most absurdly skewed market, it follows that the actual ticket price would be comparable to driving, and taxpayers would get to pick up the $900 or so balance.
And that points up another problem -- what happens when a generation is raised to depend on BigBrothermobile, and CANNOT fend for themselves when it breaks?? Big Brother could cripple any contrarian or otherwise disapproved movement simply by disabling the appropriate vehicles.
Or... the road out of the city is clogged. No more traffic is allowed. Your vacation will take place in another direction; too bad about your hard-to-get reservations in the now generally off-limits national park. Or the emergency evacuation will simply not happen. Make up your own scenario, anyone can play!!
Take note that the article only uses raw numbers -- so fatalities are roughly proportional to the gross percentage of that type of vehicle on the road. Who would have guessed??!
Per the last stats I saw that were (more reasonably) weighted by *fatalities per thousand passenger vehicles of a given type*, pickup trucks came in best, SUVs next, while sports cars came in dead last.
The article also fails to note that sports cars cause more accidents, by diving in and out of traffic while expecting heavier (less maneuverable) vehicles to get out of their way, or stop short to avoid them. I see this all the time in Los Angeles. Only reason there aren't more accidents is because the bigger vehicles usually travel in a more predictable pattern than the little lane-divers (and because frankly, big-city drivers become very skilled of sheer necessity, regardless of what they drive).
As to "combined risk", this is a bizarre metric. Essentially it wants us to believe that you should choose your vehicle based on its relative risk to others. Excuse me, I'm responsible for MY driving and MY safety, not theirs. And if a higher vehicle riding over a smaller one is a problem, what's wrong with building a proper roll cage into the small vehicle, to prevent that? Oh wait, that would interfere with the weight-to-mileage ratio dictated by the EPA, which has done more to damage auto safety than any other factor, by turning 'em all into fragile plastic boxes.
All in all, I'd say that in this particular dick-measuring contest, the smaller the car, the less likely the owner is to have any sense, and the more likely they are to think they ought to come in first no matter what, and to blame others for their own shortcomings.
So it's no wonder liberals drive compacts, and conservatives drive pickups. ;)
Welcome to Slashdot. Now get off my lawn! :)
This thread points up that there's a difference between "doing the right or best thing because it's the reasonable thing to do" and "doing what your religion says is best because it makes you better than the heretics doing something else, all of whom are out to get you" (because every right-thinking green-bike knows that SUVs exist only to flatten bikes).
Or as you succincted it (new verb :) arrogance. An awful lot of which is not actually doing the right thing, but sour grapes: "*I* can't own or drive an SUV, so anyone who does is a wasteful bitch for the oil companies."
At any rate, to the nominal topic -- as Jane Q. Public says in http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1684280&cid=32553894, there's going to be no good way to keep Big Brother out of an "Automotive Internet". And what is Big Brother, really?? A whopping huge arrogance that believes it is right and everyone else is up to no good, therefore needs regulation and restriction. What if the "automotive internet" decides that, for our own good, only certain types of vehicle are allowed? Religious arrogance can't admit to contrary data, such as the interesting article someone cited at http://www.templetons.com/brad/transit-myth.html
And here you thought this subthread was off topic. What was the question?? :)
Until a deer runs across the road, or someone blows a tire, or skids on that little patch of black ice.
And what would an F-16 be like if mass-produced for the $35,000 market? and of course, if each didn't come with its own team of crack mechanics. Call it what, about 1% of the quality control an average F-16 is accustomed to??
Since I totally agree with Jane Q. Public, I'll take that as a serious comment. The question is whether TOR-equipped cars will be ALLOWED on the roads. I'd guess not, because "it would compromise safety" but in reality because it would compromise Big Brother's ability to hand out speeding tickets. Bonus points for surveillance whenever they feel the "need".
No, you were right the first time -- a medium-sized plane has what, between 6 and a dozen wheels, depending on the model? And a small plane usually 3 to 6. And a train has LOTS of wheels. See? Your postulated ratio was right the first time. Gods help us if unicycles ever become popular. :)
I'd hazard that there have been fatal accidents caused by an auto trying to avoid a cyclist; I've nearly had to run off the road to avoid one myself. If it comes to hitting a wayward cyclist, or a head-on collision, which would you pick?? (hint: hitting the cyclist will probably kill fewer people.)
BTW as a driver who *needs* a fullsized pickup (and only has to make a fraction as many trips as I would carrying the same loads in a car), I've rather enjoyed this particular chain of comments :D
Per'zactly. I shorthanded it down to 3 lines (my, what a controversy that caused), but that's really what it boiled down to.
You cannot mandate and enforce desirable behaviour without doing at least as much harm (either to the object, or to someone else). This is a great example of that.
And I agree, it was the beginning of a much more insidious servitude. But hey, now all Americans get to participate equally, instead of it being applied only to a select few!
"Democracy imposed from without is the severest form of tyranny." -- Lloyd Biggle Jr.
Dvorkin says, The US Constitution itself is a politically correct document. Look how it dances around the issue of slavery: "Person held to Service or Labour"
Like most people who focus on the issue of slavery, you're forgetting the practices of indentured servitude, which was probably more widespread at time than was slavery.
And the South didn't fight over slavery; that issue didn't enter the war til later, and Lincoln was only bent on hurting the south, not helping the slaves -- read his own words about it. The war was about states' rights, and against crushing economic pressure brought by northern industrialists.
I've had Google try to prevent me from going to perfectly legit sites free of taint, too.
A few years back someone charted crime vs various major FPS releases. There were obvious drop-offs shortly after the release of DOOM, DOOM2, and Quake.
One can make similar observations about sex-related crime and availability of porn -- there are two obvious drop-offs: a smaller one corresponding to when dialup BBSs first made porn readily available, and a much larger drop-off once the internet got into full swing.
The conclusion I draw is that if something passively satisfies any set of human urges (good, bad, or ugly), it reduces the need to actively satisfy those urges. To me this is obvious of itself simply from broad observation of the world, but some people can't see anything that doesn't have a study and a slew of PhDs attached to it. And if the study excludes all the real world and focuses only on special cases, well, so much the easier for the PhD to prove his point, however bogus it may be.
I think you just stated everything that can be learned from such a study... all the learning we do is about those *doing* the study. :/
Maybe they already got back at him... by submitting the story to slashdot ;) Wait til he sees his bandwidth bill!!
(And they shoulda been whatever.gov in the first place.)
The way I'm thinking, the passwords would be easy for the printer's owner to change, so if a password was compromised, it would be obvious after the first bogus print job. I'm looking at this as something average non-IT people could do -- put a teeny little webserver in the printer, where all it does is cough up a form that the owner used to input usernames (sender's email addy) and a password for each address. NOT asterisked, since no one else will see it and you want Average Joe to be sure what he typed.
It could also have a function to email an "invitation to print" to Yonder Sender, with a hash that has to be present in the reply before the print job is accepted. Random Spammer's junk printjobs won't have that information, so they'd be rejected from the print queue.
Essentially what I'm going for is closed two-way communication (so printer is not available to random strangers) with simple-to-manage authentication. I gather some network printers already do something similar but I've never heard anything but swearing from the IT guys who manage 'em.
Yeah, it would mean you'd have to exchange a pair of request/invite emails first. But why would anyone want random images arriving unannounced anyway? (Well, unless your idea is to collect printed porn without having to look it up yourself :)
How about something like using the SUBJECT field for a password? Easy to give to someone who wants to send you something, and No password, No print. And no reason you can't have more than one, maybe with restrictions attached to some of them, like size of document, or only good for a particular sender. Essentially Q&D network admin stuff.
So, is the real objective population control ("No population, no popular unrest!") or assassination of Dear Leader??
Not only that, but increasingly you get crap results on the order of "FIND FIVE STAR HOTELS IN PODUNKVILLE" (population 12) -- the latest form of linkfarm, it seems.
I'd seen so much of this crap that I actually did not believe it when a motel listing came up for a town with a current population of (count them) 7 people... turns out for once it's real.
As to the "store locators" on chains' sites, about half the time they won't even speak to you if you ask for listings outside your immediate zipcode. Just gimme a damn sorted list and I'll find it myself; stop trying to be "helpful" by restricting what I'm show to what YOU think I'll want.
I wonder how many of these mystery stations remain running for no better reason than that no order was ever received to shut them down??
Kinda like the Netware 3.0 server still grinding away in a closet no one has opened for decades.
As to UVB-76 (where do they get these names??), I asked a fella I figured would be in the know on this, and he said more than likely it's simply that the money to operate the station ran out.
Montana Power was VERY well managed until the owners decided on an exit strategy that raped the company of all its assets and left its stockholders and customers high and dry -- it had formerly been THE stock to own for your retirement investment, and THE cheapest most reliable power in the entire northwest. They called their exit strategy "deregulation", tho, and it's been a disaster ever since, much as you describe for Utah Power. As I vaguely recall, what's left of MT Power is indeed foreign-owned (as is the case with California's mess too -- our rates are now TEN TIMES what they were ten years ago, thanks to morons who followed MT Power's model of "deregulation"!!)
I think it's reached the point where we ought to nationalize the damned things and start over. The appalling blackmail scenario you describe is exactly why no part of critical infrastructure should EVER be foreign-owned, nor controlled by anyone from outside its service area.
Drive-by (or should that be drive-buy) shopping:
Amazon's crack team of shopping specialists cruise the streets, taking orders from every gesture or grimace performed in every front yard and every living room in America. For added convenience, a shopping drone will penetrate those pesky closed-up rooms, ensuring that no shopper's fantasy goes unfilled!