So does that mean that you can only get a Droid telephone with a verizon account?
If so, there's your problem: your markets for mobile telecom are vendor-locked, and thus not very free. Say what you might about the EU, they really whipped the mobile telco's into submission and as such, we don't have a system where your phone is branded by the telco. Incidentally, Apple is trying to push such a model to Europe, but people here are not buying into it.
If not so, what's the big deal? Just buy the droid and don't choose Verizon as your provider.
"In August 2009, 276.9 million people used email across the U.S., several European countries, Australia and Brazil, according to Nielsen Co., up 21% from 229.2 million in August 2008. But the number of users on social-networking and other community sites jumped 31% to 301.5 million people."
Pardon me? 277 million people using mail, 301.5 million using social networking sites?
Am I mistaken in thinking that you actually need an emailaddress to join such a site? How do the 25 something million people manage to get their passwords, notifications etc?
This is just uninspired journalism. Don't know what to write, predict the demise of settled technology X in favour of new technology Y.
Not disagreeing with your point, but noting that Frisians live in the Netherlands and Germany, but not in GB that I know of, apart from the occasional ex-pat of course.
Re:And yet they do nothing to discourage the car
on
The Fresca Rebellion
·
· Score: 1
You talk about cyclists as if they are some different breed of human beings, and I think this illustrates GP's point nicely.
Here in holland almost every cardriver has a bike or two, uses them on a regular basis, if only for recreation, and as such has respect for cyclists (even if they ride like idiots) because he will be one at a later point in time.
Also, the cyclist-driver relationship in the US being so bad is also a direct result of the terrible infrastructure for cycling (and walking -- I was very surprised to find absolutely terrible lighting and sidewalks on a evening walk in Concordia, a very well to do suburb of Boston). Make conditions better for cyclists and you will attract a different and less reckless kind of cyclist.
That research was done with a model featuring.... pedestrians. Rarely seen those doing 120 kph.
Even better, quoting the last few alineas:
"However, there is one rule you shouldn't break, according to a new analysis of how high-volume traffic flows along a highway. Cecile Appert-Rolland, a physicist at the University of Paris-Sud, looked at the tailing distances between cars traveling on a busy two-lane expressway in the suburbs of Paris."
Her research showed that tailgating drivers were more likely than a non-tailgater to have a car in the lane next to them, so they weren't just speeding up in order to change lanes. She also found that these short time headways tended to extend across several vehicles, creating a platoon.
"We can identify at least seven or eight cars where they have time headways of half a second," she said. Considering that a driver's reaction time is about one second, these platoons are disastrous pileups waiting to happen. "If the first one brakes, the second one has to brake harder, the third one even harder, and the last wouldn't be able to brake hard enough."
This came with the machine originally, but didn't much like it. Gameplay was pretty much absent.
Got better games in magazines, that you had to type by hand into the machine, and the debug for hours or days even because you inevitibly made typo's in the hunderds of lines of code.
Later, when we got a floppy drive for the machine, my father used to stop over on at Crazy Eddies in Montreal to get us games, those were the days, great stuff.
Anyway, my point is I think most of the games that took Star Raiders as inspiration used it as a marker pointing to where the improvements were to be made: in gameplay. See e.g. games like Elite which u
Speaking from a country that has had legal euthanasia for quite some years already:
"For like 25 centuries doctors have been swearing the Hippocratic oath, which explicitly states "do no harm.""
Inappropriately lengthening peoples lives and pain in the case of a severe illness can be construed to be doing harm. Doctors are used to keeping people alive and using this as a metric for their effectiveness. Maybe there should be a bigger focus on quality of life and less on plainly being alive. Also, keeping someone alive because of your own personal (religious) beliefs is morally objectionable if the patient does not share these beliefs. I'll leave to the readers imagination what I think of the moral implications of the problems in applying the death penalty as you describe it.
"Also there's the problem of whether the elderly will feel pressured to go to euthanasia (as seen in Soylent Green and Deus Ex) to spare the financial burden on their kids or society."
First, get a decent healthcare system to spread the costs. It seems every discussion on slashdot heads in the direction of the US healthcare system lately, maybe there's change in the air. Secondly, financial considerations are also weighed by medical staff in the decision to use a certain treatment to keep someone alive or not. This is one of the most serious dilemma's we'll face in the decades coming: how much is a life worth or how much is another year of living worth. This stems directly from the invention of new and costly medical treatments and this issue will be important, regardless of legalizing euthanasia or not.
"And there's the catch-22 issue of sound mind: euthanasia candidates must be making a rational decision, but anyone petitioning for euthanasia is acting irrationally..."
I see no paradox here except in your mind: why is petitioning for euthanasia irrational?
"Obviously there should be a better way than taking a gun into a closet, but immediately jumping into legalizing euthanasia would be inappropriate and dangerous."
I don't think anyone is suggesting this. Do you? I think most people in favor of legalizing euthanasia have a very sound idea of what checks and balances should be in place to prevent misuse. I know there are many safeguards in place in the dutch system for legal euthanasia and I think the practice is widely supported and considered far superior to blasting ones brains out in desperation.
Your software-marketing juxtaposition fails IMO: you need to coordinate marketing just like you have to coordinate programming. Your overly simplistic view of marketing is hindering your reasoning.
If all of your 'number of suit-monkeys' decide to go to the same magazine, all carrying their own design for the ad, ideas about the target-audience, numbers of the part of the advertising budget that goes to this magazine, you're going have a very ineffective marketing campaign. Just like when you release a can of programmers uncoordinated and they all decide to work on the game-play logics e.g.
I know marketing folks aren't very popular with techies, but they fullfill a necessary role, like it or not.
So? Don't use an empty CD but one with the actual keys. Flip a bit somewhere in the keys.
If they try to decrypt your drive with the key and fail, blame the recovery process.
I think they'd have a pretty hard time proving that the recovery of the keys from the damaged CD was 100% correct. They might get so far as to make it probable, but I know if no way to prove it 100% accurate without the original data to verify it with.
Hmmm, maybe I shouldn't have posted this... if they find this message and link it to an IP I frequently use.../me engages in paranoid episode.
The human mind is not designed to do heavy mental work 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. In programming working too long diminishes concentration and the small mistakes made cause bugs which can be very hard to trace, ultimately leading to a lower productivity per worked hour. I believe this to be true for other jobs that require continuous abstract thinking.
Had the same thing on the webadmin interface for one of their ILO's. Or more precise, it wouldn't work on anything but IE. Hadn't seen that for quite a while.
"If you are referring to the first column in that table, it's a bogus comparison. Americans drive many more miles per year on average than Europeans, hence more chances to get killed." So maybe that's what you're doing wrong? You have a high degree of urban sprawl and hence you have to drive too much to get your daily routine done? Moreover, I can't find any statistics on average distance travelled so I wouldn't assume that easily that americans drive more or that the difference is significant anyway.
"An even better comparison would take into account the average speeds involved in the accidents as I bet US average speeds are higher (much wider roads on average and more highway driving as trips are generally over greater distances). Yes, I know about autobahns but still in general I think that's true."
I'll take your bet and double it. Most countries in the EU have either an 120 or a 130 km/h speed limit on freeways thats 75 or 80 mph for non-metrics. Judging from this map: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_limits_in_the_United_States, the speed limit is on average lower in the US than in the EU.
Secondly, traffic fatalities differ wildly from country to country in the EU, as they would probably from state to state in the US if we had the figures available.
It won't, it will get crushed and people will die.
Just like when any other compact car gets hit by one of those behemoths.
Hint: I don't think it's funny idiots are allowed to drive contraptions like the hummer on public roads. It makes me want to buy a nice second hand tank to even out the odds.
On the other hand, it seems that, at least, the age of the hummer is finished. Not even the Chinese would buy it off GM, for a measly 86 million.
I have something similar, it's a fashion kind of light fixture made by Philips with 4 leds in it, 2 red a white and a blue I think.
Anyway, it can give any color of light so that's nice, but what isn't is that it uses four leds, like you suggest. This results in four distinct light sources, which gives really spooky shadows.
I think this is the best led-technology has to offer up till now.
We need led lights with a single led that emits an acceptable spectrum of light and does so with enough brightness. AFAIK we aren't that far yet. I think the brightest single led is about equivalent to a 25 watt incandescent.
You'll think I'm kidding, but I'm not: chalk a thick blue line across your dooropening. Ants don't like blue, it's something with their sensory system, and they are very hesitant to cross a blue area.
... the cyclist in the picture doesn't actually have any lighting on his bike apart from the lane-thingy:D
Anyway, as a dutch person who has biked in the states (Knoxville, TN area) I was absolutely appaled by the risks bikers have to take on americans roads. I was trying to make my way from my parents house to knoxville, a minor 10 mile ride, and at one point found myself forced to take an interstate... holding to the shoulder of course but it was rocky and all... worthless and dangerous.
To paint the picture, in the Netherlands you could cycle the whole country without having to share a lane with a car once... we have a pretty good infrastructure with bike lanes and even seperate bike paths with run parallel to the roads.
My point being, this 'solution' sucks, is overengineered and impratical. If you want to really encourage people riding bikes instead of taking the car, build the infrastructure for it.
It can be done, even in formerly very car-centric cities. Take, for example, Paris, where the last years biking has taken off hugely because of a city push for more biking, including cheap rental bikes and massive new bike lane building.
Technically it flies. Ok, not very high, but still.
I've been in the german built (Siemens I think) one to the Shanghai airport. It runs next to a highway... at 430 km/h. Looks like the cars are going backwards, really strange effect.
"(By the way, I thought the European Union forbids deficit spending of its member states?)"
Nope, it theoretically limits it to 3% yearly, but it isn't actually enforced so it's more like wishfull thinking (especially in the current 'let's spend ourselves out of this crisis' climate).
Slashdot Mirror
So does that mean that you can only get a Droid telephone with a verizon account?
If so, there's your problem: your markets for mobile telecom are vendor-locked, and thus not very free. Say what you might about the EU, they really whipped the mobile telco's into submission and as such, we don't have a system where your phone is branded by the telco. Incidentally, Apple is trying to push such a model to Europe, but people here are not buying into it.
If not so, what's the big deal? Just buy the droid and don't choose Verizon as your provider.
Maybe you shouldn't trust CNN then for your world views?
Apart from that, you can't expect one billion people to be elevated to wealth in a few decades.
Please reference India, which is and has been a democracy for multiple decades, and which still has exactly the same kind of wealth spread as China.
Finishing the alinea you started quoting from:
"In August 2009, 276.9 million people used email across the U.S., several European countries, Australia and Brazil, according to Nielsen Co., up 21% from 229.2 million in August 2008. But the number of users on social-networking and other community sites jumped 31% to 301.5 million people."
Pardon me? 277 million people using mail, 301.5 million using social networking sites?
Am I mistaken in thinking that you actually need an emailaddress to join such a site? How do the 25 something million people manage to get their passwords, notifications etc?
This is just uninspired journalism. Don't know what to write, predict the demise of settled technology X in favour of new technology Y.
Not disagreeing with your point, but noting that Frisians live in the Netherlands and Germany, but not in GB that I know of, apart from the occasional ex-pat of course.
Yes, I am frisian, no I won't autograph your cow http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holstein_(cattle), thank you very much.
You talk about cyclists as if they are some different breed of human beings, and I think this illustrates GP's point nicely.
Here in holland almost every cardriver has a bike or two, uses them on a regular basis, if only for recreation, and as such has respect for cyclists (even if they ride like idiots) because he will be one at a later point in time.
Also, the cyclist-driver relationship in the US being so bad is also a direct result of the terrible infrastructure for cycling (and walking -- I was very surprised to find absolutely terrible lighting and sidewalks on a evening walk in Concordia, a very well to do suburb of Boston).
Make conditions better for cyclists and you will attract a different and less reckless kind of cyclist.
Too lazy to read your own article?
That research was done with a model featuring .... pedestrians. Rarely seen those doing 120 kph.
Even better, quoting the last few alineas:
"However, there is one rule you shouldn't break, according to a new analysis of how high-volume traffic flows along a highway. Cecile Appert-Rolland, a physicist at the University of Paris-Sud, looked at the tailing distances between cars traveling on a busy two-lane expressway in the suburbs of Paris."
Her research showed that tailgating drivers were more likely than a non-tailgater to have a car in the lane next to them, so they weren't just speeding up in order to change lanes. She also found that these short time headways tended to extend across several vehicles, creating a platoon.
"We can identify at least seven or eight cars where they have time headways of half a second," she said. Considering that a driver's reaction time is about one second, these platoons are disastrous pileups waiting to happen. "If the first one brakes, the second one has to brake harder, the third one even harder, and the last wouldn't be able to brake hard enough."
This came with the machine originally, but didn't much like it. Gameplay was pretty much absent.
Got better games in magazines, that you had to type by hand into the machine, and the debug for hours or days even because you inevitibly made typo's in the hunderds of lines of code.
Later, when we got a floppy drive for the machine, my father used to stop over on at Crazy Eddies in Montreal to get us games, those were the days, great stuff.
Anyway, my point is I think most of the games that took Star Raiders as inspiration used it as a marker pointing to where the improvements were to be made: in gameplay. See e.g. games like Elite which u
Speaking from a country that has had legal euthanasia for quite some years already:
"For like 25 centuries doctors have been swearing the Hippocratic oath, which explicitly states "do no harm.""
Inappropriately lengthening peoples lives and pain in the case of a severe illness can be construed to be doing harm. Doctors are used to keeping people alive and using this as a metric for their effectiveness. Maybe there should be a bigger focus on quality of life and less on plainly being alive.
Also, keeping someone alive because of your own personal (religious) beliefs is morally objectionable if the patient does not share these beliefs.
I'll leave to the readers imagination what I think of the moral implications of the problems in applying the death penalty as you describe it.
"Also there's the problem of whether the elderly will feel pressured to go to euthanasia (as seen in Soylent Green and Deus Ex) to spare the financial burden on their kids or society."
First, get a decent healthcare system to spread the costs. It seems every discussion on slashdot heads in the direction of the US healthcare system lately, maybe there's change in the air.
Secondly, financial considerations are also weighed by medical staff in the decision to use a certain treatment to keep someone alive or not. This is one of the most serious dilemma's we'll face in the decades coming: how much is a life worth or how much is another year of living worth. This stems directly from the invention of new and costly medical treatments and this issue will be important, regardless of legalizing euthanasia or not.
"And there's the catch-22 issue of sound mind: euthanasia candidates must be making a rational decision, but anyone petitioning for euthanasia is acting irrationally..."
I see no paradox here except in your mind: why is petitioning for euthanasia irrational?
"Obviously there should be a better way than taking a gun into a closet, but immediately jumping into legalizing euthanasia would be inappropriate and dangerous."
I don't think anyone is suggesting this. Do you? I think most people in favor of legalizing euthanasia have a very sound idea of what checks and balances should be in place to prevent misuse. I know there are many safeguards in place in the dutch system for legal euthanasia and I think the practice is widely supported and considered far superior to blasting ones brains out in desperation.
Thanks for sharing, you touched me. I hope life is kind for you from now on.
Your software-marketing juxtaposition fails IMO: you need to coordinate marketing just like you have to coordinate programming. Your overly simplistic view of marketing is hindering your reasoning.
If all of your 'number of suit-monkeys' decide to go to the same magazine, all carrying their own design for the ad, ideas about the target-audience, numbers of the part of the advertising budget that goes to this magazine, you're going have a very ineffective marketing campaign. Just like when you release a can of programmers uncoordinated and they all decide to work on the game-play logics e.g.
I know marketing folks aren't very popular with techies, but they fullfill a necessary role, like it or not.
So? Don't use an empty CD but one with the actual keys. Flip a bit somewhere in the keys.
If they try to decrypt your drive with the key and fail, blame the recovery process.
I think they'd have a pretty hard time proving that the recovery of the keys from the damaged CD was 100% correct. They might get so far as to make it probable, but I know if no way to prove it 100% accurate without the original data to verify it with.
Hmmm, maybe I shouldn't have posted this ... if they find this message and link it to an IP I frequently use ... /me engages in paranoid episode.
Mod parent up.
The human mind is not designed to do heavy mental work 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. In programming working too long diminishes concentration and the small mistakes made cause bugs which can be very hard to trace, ultimately leading to a lower productivity per worked hour. I believe this to be true for other jobs that require continuous abstract thinking.
Had the same thing on the webadmin interface for one of their ILO's. Or more precise, it wouldn't work on anything but IE. Hadn't seen that for quite a while.
"If you are referring to the first column in that table, it's a bogus comparison. Americans drive many more miles per year on average than Europeans, hence more chances to get killed."
So maybe that's what you're doing wrong? You have a high degree of urban sprawl and hence you have to drive too much to get your daily routine done?
Moreover, I can't find any statistics on average distance travelled so I wouldn't assume that easily that americans drive more or that the difference is significant anyway.
"An even better comparison would take into account the average speeds involved in the accidents as I bet US average speeds are higher (much wider roads on average and more highway driving as trips are generally over greater distances). Yes, I know about autobahns but still in general I think that's true."
I'll take your bet and double it. Most countries in the EU have either an 120 or a 130 km/h speed limit on freeways thats 75 or 80 mph for non-metrics. Judging from this map: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_limits_in_the_United_States, the speed limit is on average lower in the US than in the EU.
Secondly, traffic fatalities differ wildly from country to country in the EU, as they would probably from state to state in the US if we had the figures available.
Why would you steal something nobody in their right mind would buy?
And pray tell me what great innovations are to be stolen from the design of the hummer?
"(Sort of like there will always be work for sysadmins, because even here in the future nothing works.)"
Where did you say you were posting from? I mean when?
It won't, it will get crushed and people will die.
Just like when any other compact car gets hit by one of those behemoths.
Hint: I don't think it's funny idiots are allowed to drive contraptions like the hummer on public roads. It makes me want to buy a nice second hand tank to even out the odds.
On the other hand, it seems that, at least, the age of the hummer is finished. Not even the Chinese would buy it off GM, for a measly 86 million.
I have something similar, it's a fashion kind of light fixture made by Philips with 4 leds in it, 2 red a white and a blue I think.
Anyway, it can give any color of light so that's nice, but what isn't is that it uses four leds, like you suggest. This results in four distinct light sources, which gives really spooky shadows.
I think this is the best led-technology has to offer up till now.
We need led lights with a single led that emits an acceptable spectrum of light and does so with enough brightness. AFAIK we aren't that far yet. I think the brightest single led is about equivalent to a 25 watt incandescent.
You'll think I'm kidding, but I'm not: chalk a thick blue line across your dooropening. Ants don't like blue, it's something with their sensory system, and they are very hesitant to cross a blue area.
... the cyclist in the picture doesn't actually have any lighting on his bike apart from the lane-thingy :D
Anyway, as a dutch person who has biked in the states (Knoxville, TN area) I was absolutely appaled by the risks bikers have to take on americans roads. I was trying to make my way from my parents house to knoxville, a minor 10 mile ride, and at one point found myself forced to take an interstate ... holding to the shoulder of course but it was rocky and all ... worthless and dangerous.
To paint the picture, in the Netherlands you could cycle the whole country without having to share a lane with a car once ... we have a pretty good infrastructure with bike lanes and even seperate bike paths with run parallel to the roads.
My point being, this 'solution' sucks, is overengineered and impratical. If you want to really encourage people riding bikes instead of taking the car, build the infrastructure for it.
It can be done, even in formerly very car-centric cities. Take, for example, Paris, where the last years biking has taken off hugely because of a city push for more biking, including cheap rental bikes and massive new bike lane building.
... testing anyone?
It seems Apple has a hard time learning that electronics cause heat and that this heat needs to be led away from the device.
I can remember several cases ( MacBooks, iMacs, what have you) where they've had overheating issues ... pretty sloppy engineering if you ask me.
"If anyone says Emacs or Vi they are insane and have never done 10k lines of code in a modern environment."
Anyone saying that hasn't used vi beyond :wq
Technically it flies. Ok, not very high, but still.
I've been in the german built (Siemens I think) one to the Shanghai airport. It runs next to a highway ... at 430 km/h. Looks like the cars are going backwards, really strange effect.
"(By the way, I thought the European Union forbids deficit spending of its member states?)"
Nope, it theoretically limits it to 3% yearly, but it isn't actually enforced so it's more like wishfull thinking (especially in the current 'let's spend ourselves out of this crisis' climate).
"because of a topless photo in one of the app's subscribed-to papers"
That is indeed a tasteless photo. How could they not be wearing a turtle neck sweater? This reeks of disrespect for The Jobs!