Good. Maybe they have time to read this advice before they start designing:
Dear automakers: when we shop around for an EV, we are looking for a conveyance, not for a d*mn lifestyle statement that virtue-signals our greenness. We want a normal looking car, not someone's idea of "the future of urban transportation", and we certainly don't need all those hideous light blue accents on the exterior. Why do you think Tesla has done so well?
For now. The current 2FA method - using a challenge/response that is processed on the actual chip after entering the correct pin on a special card reader - is slowly being replaced by *much* less secure methods like authentication by app, or even by SMS. Apparently many people felt it is too much of an inconvenience to carry the little card reader around (so they can't make that all important purchase on the road or in the workplace); many banks here are moving away from chip-and-pin.
I would like to see you drive from Utrecht to Rotterdam faster than the train can get you there during peak hour.
I drive this 2-3 times a week (Utrecht to Rotterdam in the afternoon). In a lot of cases I can plan my trip outside rush hour, but when I can't, the trip takes at most about 1 hour. The Intercity is 37 minutes, plus 8 minutes by subway, plus a 10 minute walk, and a 20 minute bus ride at the other end. Not allowing any extra time for changing lines. The train is pretty fast... if your journey is station to station (I used to commute like that for a while, the train took me pretty much door to door and it was great)
I would like to see you drive from Amsterdam to Rotterdam faster than the ICD can get you there at midnight when you have perfectly free roads.
Same deal: door to door (assuming I leave from Amsterdam Central Station) that takes just over an hour by car or train.
We do have good public transport and it's well used, but don't think that's how most people travel. Plenty of train lines are already overcrowded and it would take maybe 5-10% of car drivers deciding to commute by train to completely overload the system in rush hour. They are improving the capacity with longer trains, closer-spaced signals and some clever automation, but that only goes so far. Having one car owner in a group of 8 people is exceptional except in a few cities like Amsterdam or Utrecht, but in the Hague or especially Rotterdam, you'll find that most people own one. The "Dutch life" of living close enough to work to go by bike is an unattainable dream for the vast majority.
Even here in the Netherlands, with a very dense and well managed public transport network versus congested roads, commuting by car is still faster than public transport in many cases, and a lot of people prefer to spend less time commuting over taking longer but being able to work or read. Public transport is great when you have an efficient single leg journey with a short-ish distance to walk or cycle at either end. But it starts to suck hard once you have to change lines: the chance of missing your connection adds stress to the journey. Even worse when you're on a crowded train: good luck working, relaxing or even just reading a book in that case.
There's a psychological aspect to it as well. As soon as you get in your car, the workday's done in your mind. With public transport, the day ends only when you're at your front door.
Kurtzmann: "You see? The population census has got him down as dormanted. Uh, the Central Collective Storehouse computer has got him down as deleted. Information Retrieval has got him down as inoperative. And there's another one - security has got him down as excised. Administration has got him down as completed."
Sam Lowry: "He's dead."
So pretty much what that US Senate hearing was. Seriously, while watching those proceedings I sort of expected (and hoped) Mark to reply at some point: "I'm sorry, but I came here to answer your questions, not to be berated like a little schoolboy"
Still no good since it allows you to sell your vote. Someone offers you $50 to vote a certain way, and now they can be sure that you actually did. They will give you the $50 after you give them the verification key.
The point is not that voting by blockchain could be hacked or rigged. The point is that with pretty much any system that relies on computers to tally the votes, the results can not be independently verified end-to-end by laymen. Everyone can understand how voting by paper ballot works, how the ballots are counted, and how the count is verified, and that means everyone can participate in safeguarding or verifying an accurate count. That is where "public faith in elections" comes from.
Besides: rigging a paper based election is possible but the number of people you need to involve scales linearly with the amount of votes you want to falsify, increasing chances of being caught. That's not the same for computer based voting; fraud is much easier to hide, and easier to carry out on a massive scale.
First is how invested you are in the product you're supporting. I'm happy to answer questions (even the occasional dumb ones) about my own pet projects, the ones I wrote as a hobby or side business. My tolerance level is a lot lower for stuff related to my day job. Perhaps that's the difference between taking responsibility for your own dumb mistakes, or for the mistakes of others.
Second is what level of support you are working at. I'm used to working with reasonably tech savvy people and the kind of questions I get are often challenging problems rather than stupid ones. The sort of stuff you usually send to 2nd or 3rd tier support teams. Also, are you doing it full time or is it part of a more diverse role?
I've worked on innovative projects (prototypes, field trials, proofs of concept) for over 20 years; the kind of projects that work in a way similar to what today we call DevOps. That comes with a lot of end user support. And I haven't found it gets harder with age... but that's because I set my own working conditions, and expectations about the product are generally low-ish (them being prototypes): people expect some small issues and are actually interested enough to try and find causes and workarounds themselves before reporting them. It's the difference between working for end users or working with them; the latter is a lot more fun.
Keep all of the internet available, all of the time
Translation: The Pirate Bay is back!
Make the internet affordable and accessible to everyone
Smells like Net Neutrality.
Respect consumers’ privacy and personal data
A good sentiment if a bit vague and high-level
Not so sure about this one:
Build strong communities that respect civil discourse and human dignity
Again this is rather vague. It's fine if people build communities where participants are encouraged to remain civil and respectful... and even ban people who do not comply. We already have that. But what if we want PornHub and 4Chan as well? What happens if a community decides not to play ball and remains a foul-mouthed spreader of undignified fake news conspiracy theories? Can something be done about them, or are they also part of "all of the internet, all of the time"?
I think that, in addition to freedom of speech, the right to offend should be a human right and/or enshrined in our constitutions. Not that it is ever nice to offend, nor good. But it has become so easy to be offended, and that if that becomes the yardstick of free speech, soon we will not be able to say anything. In addition, rules and laws against giving offense are misused to silence opponents, stifle political debates, and enable religious persecution. In many countries, there is freedom of speech with a big fat "except" attached to it, meaning that one should not offend certain sensibilities. And in many, many cases where that rule is actually enforced, it is being misused, not against offense, but against undesirable opinions.
Give us the right to offend. Not because we want to offend. But to ensure that no one can silence us simply by claiming to be offended.
Good news everyone: car emissions are lower than ever and still falling. The reason for air pollution in so many European cities being at illegal levels is not because pollution has increased (it hasn't), but because the legal levels have been set lower and lower. Which is good, sure. Cleaner is always better. But it seems to me that if there is a direct correlation, childhood obesity would have been more prevalent during times when NO2 levels were higher as well, such as during the 80s. It wasn't. And it certainly isn't the "immediate health crisis" that WHO guy calls it.
As far as I'm concerned they can also stop making them larger (those bigger screens require more power as well). Then again it seems to be what the market is asking for,
The idea about these tunnels (IIRC) is that they can have lots of exits. Wasn't this test tunnel also getting a proof-of-concept lift right into a residential garage? Probably too expensive for most people, but feasible for public access points. The main thing with these lifts (especially for cars) is that they usually are slow. Sloooooooooow. For public access points, speeding up the lifts would be an important improvement.
Not daily. But suppose you spill something; you can just call for Roomba to clean up in aisle 5 instead of walking your lazy ass over there and run it manually (or god forbid: getting out the pan and broom yourself).
It's not groundbreaking stuff, but once you integrate more things into these smart speaker systems, you kind of get used to it. I played with it a while ago, removed it since I don't want Google listening in on everything that goes on at home, but I did miss it at first. It's handy to just say "Google, lights" when you walk into the basement with your hands full, unfortunately at the time the system wasn't smart enough to turn on the lights in the room I am in, and I had to specify the room with the command (maybe they've improved that by now). Or "Google, check the doors" to make sure I've locked them for the night. "Google, tea" to turn the kettle on. And so on. Each function is a somewhat pointless tour-de-force, but together these small conveniences add up to something good. Though again, it's hardly a life-changing experience.
I'll add this functionality to my home setup again, once there's a decent off-the-grid voice recognition system available (there already are a few for those who don't mind a homebrew solution).
The purpose of strobe lights and hazard lights is not to increase visibility, in terms of making it easier to judge speed, distance and direction of the vehicle. Their purpose is to draw your attention, which blinking lights are very good for. A continuous light however is much better for “tracking” the vehicle.
By the way, I looked up the laws for bicycle lights around here, and it turns out that blinking front or rear lights are already forbidden.
Slashdot Mirror
Good. Maybe they have time to read this advice before they start designing:
Dear automakers: when we shop around for an EV, we are looking for a conveyance, not for a d*mn lifestyle statement that virtue-signals our greenness. We want a normal looking car, not someone's idea of "the future of urban transportation", and we certainly don't need all those hideous light blue accents on the exterior. Why do you think Tesla has done so well?
For now. The current 2FA method - using a challenge/response that is processed on the actual chip after entering the correct pin on a special card reader - is slowly being replaced by *much* less secure methods like authentication by app, or even by SMS. Apparently many people felt it is too much of an inconvenience to carry the little card reader around (so they can't make that all important purchase on the road or in the workplace); many banks here are moving away from chip-and-pin.
I would like to see you drive from Utrecht to Rotterdam faster than the train can get you there during peak hour.
I drive this 2-3 times a week (Utrecht to Rotterdam in the afternoon). In a lot of cases I can plan my trip outside rush hour, but when I can't, the trip takes at most about 1 hour. The Intercity is 37 minutes, plus 8 minutes by subway, plus a 10 minute walk, and a 20 minute bus ride at the other end. Not allowing any extra time for changing lines. The train is pretty fast... if your journey is station to station (I used to commute like that for a while, the train took me pretty much door to door and it was great)
I would like to see you drive from Amsterdam to Rotterdam faster than the ICD can get you there at midnight when you have perfectly free roads.
Same deal: door to door (assuming I leave from Amsterdam Central Station) that takes just over an hour by car or train.
We do have good public transport and it's well used, but don't think that's how most people travel. Plenty of train lines are already overcrowded and it would take maybe 5-10% of car drivers deciding to commute by train to completely overload the system in rush hour. They are improving the capacity with longer trains, closer-spaced signals and some clever automation, but that only goes so far. Having one car owner in a group of 8 people is exceptional except in a few cities like Amsterdam or Utrecht, but in the Hague or especially Rotterdam, you'll find that most people own one. The "Dutch life" of living close enough to work to go by bike is an unattainable dream for the vast majority.
Why do we live like this?
If you have viable alternatives, I'm sure we'd all love to hear them.
Even here in the Netherlands, with a very dense and well managed public transport network versus congested roads, commuting by car is still faster than public transport in many cases, and a lot of people prefer to spend less time commuting over taking longer but being able to work or read. Public transport is great when you have an efficient single leg journey with a short-ish distance to walk or cycle at either end. But it starts to suck hard once you have to change lines: the chance of missing your connection adds stress to the journey. Even worse when you're on a crowded train: good luck working, relaxing or even just reading a book in that case.
There's a psychological aspect to it as well. As soon as you get in your car, the workday's done in your mind. With public transport, the day ends only when you're at your front door.
no clue what they mean
Nothing good I'm sure...
Kurtzmann: "You see? The population census has got him down as dormanted. Uh, the Central Collective Storehouse computer has got him down as deleted. Information Retrieval has got him down as inoperative. And there's another one - security has got him down as excised. Administration has got him down as completed."
Sam Lowry: "He's dead."
It used to be that half the value of reading a journal was the article after the one you searched for was more important.
You get that in toy, DYI and parts catalogs as well. Browsing in a paper catalog is still that much better.
a dog and pony show, or a kangaroo court
So pretty much what that US Senate hearing was. Seriously, while watching those proceedings I sort of expected (and hoped) Mark to reply at some point: "I'm sorry, but I came here to answer your questions, not to be berated like a little schoolboy"
Still no good since it allows you to sell your vote. Someone offers you $50 to vote a certain way, and now they can be sure that you actually did. They will give you the $50 after you give them the verification key.
It also allows you to sell your vote.
The point is not that voting by blockchain could be hacked or rigged. The point is that with pretty much any system that relies on computers to tally the votes, the results can not be independently verified end-to-end by laymen. Everyone can understand how voting by paper ballot works, how the ballots are counted, and how the count is verified, and that means everyone can participate in safeguarding or verifying an accurate count. That is where "public faith in elections" comes from.
Besides: rigging a paper based election is possible but the number of people you need to involve scales linearly with the amount of votes you want to falsify, increasing chances of being caught. That's not the same for computer based voting; fraud is much easier to hide, and easier to carry out on a massive scale.
Also we don't have "blood bitcoins" yet: coins mined by kids under horrible conditions. Well, give it time...
It really depends on a couple of things.
First is how invested you are in the product you're supporting. I'm happy to answer questions (even the occasional dumb ones) about my own pet projects, the ones I wrote as a hobby or side business. My tolerance level is a lot lower for stuff related to my day job. Perhaps that's the difference between taking responsibility for your own dumb mistakes, or for the mistakes of others.
Second is what level of support you are working at. I'm used to working with reasonably tech savvy people and the kind of questions I get are often challenging problems rather than stupid ones. The sort of stuff you usually send to 2nd or 3rd tier support teams. Also, are you doing it full time or is it part of a more diverse role?
I've worked on innovative projects (prototypes, field trials, proofs of concept) for over 20 years; the kind of projects that work in a way similar to what today we call DevOps. That comes with a lot of end user support. And I haven't found it gets harder with age... but that's because I set my own working conditions, and expectations about the product are generally low-ish (them being prototypes): people expect some small issues and are actually interested enough to try and find causes and workarounds themselves before reporting them. It's the difference between working for end users or working with them; the latter is a lot more fun.
Keep all of the internet available, all of the time
Translation: The Pirate Bay is back!
Make the internet affordable and accessible to everyone
Smells like Net Neutrality.
Respect consumers’ privacy and personal data
A good sentiment if a bit vague and high-level
Not so sure about this one:
Build strong communities that respect civil discourse and human dignity
Again this is rather vague. It's fine if people build communities where participants are encouraged to remain civil and respectful... and even ban people who do not comply. We already have that. But what if we want PornHub and 4Chan as well? What happens if a community decides not to play ball and remains a foul-mouthed spreader of undignified fake news conspiracy theories? Can something be done about them, or are they also part of "all of the internet, all of the time"?
I think that, in addition to freedom of speech, the right to offend should be a human right and/or enshrined in our constitutions. Not that it is ever nice to offend, nor good. But it has become so easy to be offended, and that if that becomes the yardstick of free speech, soon we will not be able to say anything. In addition, rules and laws against giving offense are misused to silence opponents, stifle political debates, and enable religious persecution. In many countries, there is freedom of speech with a big fat "except" attached to it, meaning that one should not offend certain sensibilities. And in many, many cases where that rule is actually enforced, it is being misused, not against offense, but against undesirable opinions.
Give us the right to offend. Not because we want to offend. But to ensure that no one can silence us simply by claiming to be offended.
Good news everyone: car emissions are lower than ever and still falling. The reason for air pollution in so many European cities being at illegal levels is not because pollution has increased (it hasn't), but because the legal levels have been set lower and lower. Which is good, sure. Cleaner is always better. But it seems to me that if there is a direct correlation, childhood obesity would have been more prevalent during times when NO2 levels were higher as well, such as during the 80s. It wasn't. And it certainly isn't the "immediate health crisis" that WHO guy calls it.
As far as I'm concerned they can also stop making them larger (those bigger screens require more power as well). Then again it seems to be what the market is asking for,
If you happen to prefer iOS, there's not much choice. Are there a lot of chunky Android smart phones out there with increased battery capacity?
And what about spice worm attacks or zombie infestations? No, tunnels are a reckless and dangerous concept that we should stay far away from.
The idea about these tunnels (IIRC) is that they can have lots of exits. Wasn't this test tunnel also getting a proof-of-concept lift right into a residential garage? Probably too expensive for most people, but feasible for public access points. The main thing with these lifts (especially for cars) is that they usually are slow. Sloooooooooow. For public access points, speeding up the lifts would be an important improvement.
Not daily. But suppose you spill something; you can just call for Roomba to clean up in aisle 5 instead of walking your lazy ass over there and run it manually (or god forbid: getting out the pan and broom yourself).
It's not groundbreaking stuff, but once you integrate more things into these smart speaker systems, you kind of get used to it. I played with it a while ago, removed it since I don't want Google listening in on everything that goes on at home, but I did miss it at first. It's handy to just say "Google, lights" when you walk into the basement with your hands full, unfortunately at the time the system wasn't smart enough to turn on the lights in the room I am in, and I had to specify the room with the command (maybe they've improved that by now). Or "Google, check the doors" to make sure I've locked them for the night. "Google, tea" to turn the kettle on. And so on. Each function is a somewhat pointless tour-de-force, but together these small conveniences add up to something good. Though again, it's hardly a life-changing experience.
I'll add this functionality to my home setup again, once there's a decent off-the-grid voice recognition system available (there already are a few for those who don't mind a homebrew solution).
sugar lovers don't take pleasure in your pain, but they're also lying shits
Now that would have made an awesome summary...
The purpose of strobe lights and hazard lights is not to increase visibility, in terms of making it easier to judge speed, distance and direction of the vehicle. Their purpose is to draw your attention, which blinking lights are very good for. A continuous light however is much better for “tracking” the vehicle.
By the way, I looked up the laws for bicycle lights around here, and it turns out that blinking front or rear lights are already forbidden.
Translation: we found a tenuous statistical correlation that will make for an awesome headline.
blinks so nobody can judge your speed
I seriously wish they would ban those f-ing things. Hint to cyclists: those blinking lights do NOT increase your visibility, but reduce it.