FYI : for quite some years now Citroen has a 'fixed hub' on the steering wheel. Probably not on all models (yet) though. My C4 GP 5 years back was the first one I drove personally., the C5 I have now has it too. (quick google gives me this video : skip to around 00:58 on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUpDTBKkrLc )
As to stay on-topic, for 99% of the (highway) time I tend to drive with my left hand on the wheel only, ca 8:30 position; right arm either on the arm-rest, or in my lap. In more urban areas I don't really have a system I think, my hands simply slide along the wheel as needed although when not exercising force on the wheel (e.g. when the wheel is auto-rotating back to it's neutral position and/or when going straight) I have them quite low, probably 7:00 & 5:00 -ish. I think... do people really position their hands that consciously in everyday traffic ?
Having gone through 'the procedure' too (only once admittedly), I tend to agree that objectively all those annoyances are just that : annoying. But subjectively it's a different story. When you're laying there just waiting for the experience to be over it's hard not to get stressed by the combination of LOUD noise, the inability to change position even a little bit (both by the fact your head is restrained and because you know you don't want to ruin the session by causing blurred 'pictures' and having to do it all over again). I'm a (very) laid back type, but I too had to restrain myself from going some thought-paths, the mind indeed tends to wander to strange places when given too much time.
well, kind of. (In theory) I could put one foot right in front of the other and repeat that 130k times, thus walking down the road and getting an approximation of 130k feet. Doing that UPWARDS is just impossible.
So basically they simply announced that they have found a way to work around chrome's security system; won a competition doing so (including fame & prize money) bringing them lots of media coverage (read: free advertising). And now they simply have to wait for some 'clients' to come up with more than 60k for its source, I'm sure their address is on the pown2own website.
Seriously, they might just as well put it on ebay if you think about it, opening bid of 59.999$.
From personal experience I tend to disagree with this. * Whenever I'm behind a car that "sways" or tends to accelerate/decelerate "without good reason" it's always a 50/50 chance that the person is either talking on the phone or talking to a passenger. In fact, to me, those talking to a passenger seem to be 'worse' as they often use gesticulation to convey the message and/or often try to look the other person in the face, both causing small but noticeable steer-movements @ 120 kph. Maybe there indeed is 'another pair of eyes' to catch something unexpectedly, it surely doesn't add to the overall driving skills of said person. * Whenever I'm on the phone (handsfree) for more than a minute while driving I tend to try getting a 'requires less attention'-position on the road (eg. on the right lane (B) behind a lorry or something as those usually drive along at slow, steady speeds) because I have actually had it happen that I missed an exit simply because I obviously wasn't paying enough attention to the road. Although hardly 'dangerous', it did come as an eye-opener and ever since I've been paying more attention to it and indeed have a much harder time recalling things around me while on the phone versus while being able to pay full attention to the road even though the latter often feels like something that happens automatic without the need to actually think about it. Seems it DOES take brainpower. * Whenever I'm talking to a passenger while driving I consciously 'refuse' to look away from the road ahead and will actually try to keep the conversation "light" as I'm sure I'm not invulnerable to the effect I've seen it having on other people.
PS: the most annoying effect seems to be the 'I go slow when you're behind me but will speed up whenever you try to overtake me' maneuver. => I tend to drive 95% on the highway and will use Cruise Control whenever traffic allows it. As I'm not the most 'sporty' driver around (instead I make it a sport of keeping my fuel-consumption low(ish)) I'm not always able to directly overtake them as there might be other cars approaching on the next lane and I prefer not to push the pedal to the metal simply to jump in between the 'faster guys'. So I'll trail behind a bit and learn that the car goes about 5 kph below my set CC-speed. Next lane frees up, I engage CC again and overtake the car and what happens in 25% of the cases : the other car let's me get up there about half way and then speeds up to match my speed or even sometimes above that !?!? Often-times adding another 5 to 10 kph still doesn't get me in front of them and by then I'm usually at the limit of said road. So, rather than risking a ticket I let them get ahead of me and go back to the right lane resuming my drive on my initial speed. And then the car in front seems to realize it's speeding and goes back to it's old speed so I find my self forced again to decelerate (or hit their trunk, tempting at times =) Rinse and repeat.
I've often wondered if this is purely 'human nature' where people simply don't want to get overtaken by another car or whether it is something related to my car somehow 'improving' their cars aerodynamics causing it to pick up speed ??
BTW: this also happens with drivers that are not (visibly) on the phone, nor talking to passengers but whenever I notice they are talking to a passenger I'm already betting it's going to happen... How I wished more people would use cruise-control to drive on the highway. Then again, I guess it will take a while before it's standard on all cars here in EU. From what I've heard it's more common in the US.
NT4 used to show these dots to indicate it was loading stuff... There was no real obvious indication on the amount of dots that it would take to finish the startup, but after a couple of reboots you got the idea. And I think 2000 had some kind of 'DOS'-progress bar going from the left to the rights side of the screen that would indicate how for the (initial) startup was. (after that it would go into graphics-mode and take forever to load but hey, it was a start =)
Man, I'm not sure if you're just being annoying for the sake of it, or really feel that way but in both cases you're an ass-hole. Luckily that +5 reads Interesting and not Insightful.
Insurance isn't there to give you money to fix your car because you parked it against a tree. It's there to help pay for the costs caused on other people. It's not there to find out who was at fault, but rather to have the money available NOW to save a victim's life and find out who's going to pay for it eventually later on.
Not sure how this works on your side of the ocean, but here we have to have insurance for the sake of other party involved. Omnium, the kind of insurance that would also reimburse you to fix _your_ car even though it was your own damned fault, IS optional and actually is there only to reduce the (monetary) risk you talk about. As far as I know most people drive around with just the former and are VERY motivated to not wreck their investment. That's not saying they're great drivers and yes, shit will still happen. Please don't try telling me that the idea behind insurance is a scam. If ever your loved ones need some expensive surgery because some idiot hit them with his car but hardly has enough money to buy gas I sure hope for your sake he didn't feel about insurance the way you seem to do.
I'm pretty sure the thing keeps track of your location too for the simple reason that your driving style is highly related to the context of the location. If you 'smoothly' drive full speed through the inner city, that is rather reckless. The other way around, when you go creepily slow on the high-way, that too is asking for trouble.
(But yes, it might simply say "too slow on highway" without actually writing down the location)
I was waiting for that one to pop up, and I'm sure there are others. But IMHO they don't prove the point that leaving a trail to all your purchases will get you wrongfully convicted. In this case they mismatched the person and the card. Might happen to me too : for most shops we have one card for the entire family and this for the simple reason that every single store has its own card and my wallet is close enough to tearing at the seams already. Wouldn't it be much more convenient if we could simply use our ID-card ? After all there is no data on the card itself, it's just a number they can scan to find the right record in a database. Heck, if it would be painless I'd go all the way to using my DNA ala GATACA, no more mix-ups! But even suggesting such a thing would bring down the angels of the privacy-Apocalypse on me. Yet, it would have been a boon for Philip Scott Lyons as it wouldn't have linked the arson to him but rather directly to whoever did it (or bought that stuff in each case).
PS: there are MUCH more similar stories of people around who get (rightfully) caught for doing some crime because they left a similar trail. We smile at them and call those people idiots for thinking they would get away with it but in the end it's the same 'technology' we're talking about.
What you say probably is partly true although the analogy doesn't work IMHO. Yes, I can see for instance how we're going to a situation where money is becoming something entirely electronic and traceable and in the end the government will have full access to its trail. However, again, I can see more up than downsides (really). What comes after that, I don't know, but I'm confident we (as in 'the people') will be assertive enough to see it coming at that time. I'm sure we all have our secrets / vices, but IMHO things will evolve in such a way that those that actually hurt others will the first to be sanctioned. (**)
If we'd ever get into a society where police can simply storm in and take whatever they need, we both failed at democracy big-time + it won't take long before there is an uprising... I'm not saying I like that scenario, but I'm pretty sure neither do those we put in power. (Sure, it happens in too many countries around the globe, I'm not entirely naive to believe that such a thing would be impossible, but neither do I believe that it would be a stable situation).
(**: although I agree that those priorities are very subjective (think MAFIAA), I really wouldn't downplay the power of the people on it (think 18 Jan))
By all means, feel free to sell it. If it would be worthless, I would not get discounts for it in the first place. I think most people realise this is the way it works, so stop acting like you know "the big secret".
I'm sure there is a lot of info to be mined from our shopping habits, so what ? Marketeers will send me "info" about things they think they have a better chance of selling me because of that info. IMHO that's a win-win situation. (damn, I hate that phrase =)
Look at it from a different perspective : everybody here agrees they hate spam. Most of us hate it enough to consider the people behind it criminals. Yet, if a system comes along that might in theory mean that spam would get completely obsoleted and replaced by adds about stuff for which it is KNOWN that I have an interest in, hell why not ? I'm having a hard time finding the problem with different companies to compete for my money as I get more choice and play them out against each other.
Alternatively it's often implied that 'the man' will use this information to 'get me'. Al-right, I'll admit I might have crossed the speed limit occasionally (and got away with it). If there had been some kind of "policeye-box' in my car I would have been fined. Or not, because if there had been I would not have sped in the first place. I also might have parked illegally (although never on a spot for wheelchairs etc!) and had there been camera's on every single corner of the street, again, I might have not done that. In both cases I would have arrived a bit later to my final destination, oh my. Apart from that kind of non-events, I don't think there is much 'the man' could use against me... Actually, assuming that kind of Big Brother thing would exists, people would stick to the law more often and I'm not sure where you come from, but here most laws are designed to improve my life. In fact, come to think of it, I once got fined for overtaking where it was not allowed while my actual motivation at the time was avoiding the car in front of me (**). Had I had a 'front-camera' or something I would have been able to defend myself out of that one, now I didn't feel like starting a fight over it with the police as I knew that in the end I would probably loose anyway...
Frankly, all these 'giving up privacy for security' doesn't feel that bad to me as long as it stays within limits. I agree that I have no clue where these limits should be. I guess it will be like porn : I'll recognise it when I see it. Similarly, we complain about 'security theatre' in airports but cry foul when they come up with a technology that might actually work... maybe it's not perfect, but it's better than the current metal-detection systems.
Please enlighten me and don't start throwing hollowed out phrases like 'big brother' and 'privacy' around but rather give me some REALISTIC side-effect that I might regret in the NEAR future. Sure we can come up with Sci-Fi blockbuster material but how realistic is all of that ? A lot of stuff in our everyday life brings the potential to cause harm, ranging from kitchen-knives to cars to electricity to cleaning-products to whatever we 'need' to make our lives a bit more enjoyable. Heck, every single technology can be used for good and bad purposes, it's up to us/society to decide which way the balance will tip.
(**: On the highway (2-lane), in between roadworks, the car in front of me decelerated rather fast but either he did so on his engine alone, or he used his handbrake, or his braking lights were simply broken or all of that combined, I dunno, but I had no warning and found myself suddenly MUCH closer to his vehicle than I felt comfortable with (driving 100-ish kph) so I veered to the left to overtake him giving him the 'angry stare'. Seemed there was a bunch of police-cars on the road a bit ahead and the driver in front of me had reacted "panicky" (speed-limit was 100 but people tend to first slam on the brakes and _then_ watch their speedometer) and all the police saw was me driving on the left lane where I wasn't supposed to be)
Here's what I've done on Facebook just today over the last eight hours: [...]
Although I agree that for all of the things you mention Facebook is nice tool (it IS!), However, I don't see how any of those activities will bring money to Facebook. On the contrary, what you did there actually cost Facebook (a little) money (internet traffic, server capacity, hard & software maintenance, etc..).
The question IMHO is NOT about whether Facebook is good at what it does, the question is : can it generate 10 Billion dollar in a reasonable time. To give a bit of an (bad) over-the-top analogy : I'm certain I could start 'wedoweverythingyouwant.com' with well over 10.000 employees waiting to do your every whimsical request for only 2 euro-cents an hour. It would be a HUGE success, have billions of users and generate half the internet traffic of the planet causing it to get valued into the trillions when going IPO. But in reality it would never make a penny and the IPO would just get spent on paying any debt (secretly) created during the 'startup-phase'.. would you buy a share ??
Hmmm.... the more I think about it, the more I think this might actually work =P
Anyway, joking aside, the only way for Facebook to make money from usage like yours is by throwing the right commercial at you and/or get you buy virtual goods. Since you (sensibly) seem to ignore (most) game-offers they'll have to up the ante on the first one, meaning they either need to find out what you REALLY want (data-mining) or they'll simply become more aggressive in the amount of commercial stuff they send at you (Spam). Personally, I don't really mind the first one that much (**) although it probably will never work because even if they somehow can/calculate/ Product X would make my life heaven on earth they'll probably still will try to get me into buying product Y simply because company Y gives then a much higher margin. Generating more spam will simply cause me to find (a 3rd party) tool to ignore it completely.
(**: I prefer to get targeted adds over a fire-hose of things I don't need. As a matter of fact, my penis is big enough thank you and I don't like casino games anyway so leave my inbox alone ! That said, Amazon overdoes this by thinking I now want to buy every single shoe they have in stock simply because the wife sent me link of a pair she wanted to buy for the girls... and I was stupid enough to click it.)
Although you already mentioned it as irrelevant, I doubt it is : CHECK YOUR ADDONS !
I too was feeling FF getting sluggish over time and a colleague finally convinced me to give Chrome a try. WOW, it felt quick, it felt snappy... but it lacked on some parts; eg. somehow the chrome-internet had a lot more ads !?! So I installed Ad-Blocker for Chrome... Oh, and no live-bookmarks ?? No worries, plugin for that too. Hmm, clearly I need Password-maker too because I don't know any single pwd apart from my master pwd... luckily it was ported.... ugly, but workable, more or less. FoxyProxy on chrome ? Check, works albeit seems to mess around with the OS-settings instead of just those of Chrome...oh well, small price to pay I guess. Finding add-ons, err, extensions I mean, isn't fun either, you have to scroll through a gazillion poster-size flashy icons with no obvious explanation of what they do, how is that useful? Anyway, seems there is no chrome-alternative for https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tortoisesvn-menu/ and the author's page seems to have vanished. Too bad, maybe I'll give it a go myself on a dreary day... Luckily my grease-monkey scripts pretty much work right out of the box, so no losses there. Let's have a look what else I have in FF, oohh, 7 more addons that I actually don't really need... time to uninstall them...
After some days of alternatively using both I've managed to tweak Chrome so it does what I want it to do but as a result it feels a lot less snappy now than it did when it was virgin new and after upgrading FF to version 9 and removing those unneeded add-ons that one now feels pretty much the same as Chrome when browsing around the internet with the added benefit that it has the TortoiseSvn plugin that I really miss on Chrome. Yes, Chrome is remarkably faster too start but to be honest I leave my browser(s) open most of the time with tens of tabs open.. and I usually hibernate my laptop so it only gets reboot every few days anyway. Who cares about the browser taking 10 seconds extra to start ?
In the end I've gone back to FF completely except for the occasional situation where I land on some page in a foreign language and I do need to know what's on it (eg. some taiwanese driver page). Chrome really shines when it comes to the 'online' translation thing.
Out of curiosity I now have both open and chrome uses about 170Mb on 12 processes for 3 tabs, firefox takes about 450Mb for 18 tabs, but again, who cares as I've got another 450Mb of memory in standby anyway.
And as for as responsiveness is concerned, I've never experienced FF to hang like what you're describing unless I got in a situation where EVERY program starts behaving unresponsive, in those cases FF is no exception... there is only so much stuff you can cram in 4Gb of ram... If you suffer from 'beach-balling' with 12Gb of memory, you're either having a lot of memory-hungry programs open (not sure how OSX handles swapping out memory of background programs, I guess not that different from Windows) or you're hard disk is going to die some of these days and warning you with IO-bottlenecks right now... (use some tool that can read the SMART info).
Given the amount of studies and remarks about the potentially dangerous effect of 'fake 3D' on the brain/vision development of youngsters, I think I'll keep this technology away from my kids for as long as I can. Sure, the occasional movie or fun-park attraction is OK, but having this in the living-room and/or gaming-computer(console) simply is asking for day-to-day use. Might well be the effects are largely overrated I prefer to play on the safe side with this. It's a fun gimmick and it does have a 3D-ish effect, but until they can do it properly where I can actually see things in real 3D instead of my brain having to interpret clues as 3D, I'm going to put this in the same category as 'Light Energy Drinks'.
PS: Yes I've seen Avatar in 3D and yes I loved how the 3D effect sucks you into the action (eg. the main air-battle). But I also got annoyed and 'headachy' in other scenes where they had these floating 'seeds' that drifted towards the camera and went out of focus while my eyes tried to correct for that. And that's with a 'big-budget, designed for 3D' movie, I can only assume how bad 2D converted into 3D will be; with all respect to the people investing in doing said conversion as good as possible, 3D isn't but a buzzword there. On top of that, I've seen quite a few 2D versions of movies lately that were also available in 3D and although it's impossible to compare, I doubt the extra half-a-dimension would have made much of an improvement to them. For all I care, as long as the story is 3D, I don't care if the medium is only 2D.
I'm pretty sure it doesn't quite work the way you present it. Judiging by how things work @ dropbox (and yes I do have an account unlike you so that makes me the expert and you the scaremonger), they have a database that keeps track of all files they have sitting in some huge database (might not even be a filesystem as we know it but rather some highly compressed blob) holding the contents and some identifying properties for each file (size, hash(es), etc..). In some other table or databases they hold the link between those files and their users. Whenever the client notices a new file arrives on the dropbox folder, it will hash the file, grab it's properties and ask the server whether it knows such file. If not, the file is uploaded, added to the files-database, an entry is put in the user-database and any other client running with the same user-credentials is notified to download said file and put it in said location on each machine. If the file matches some entry already in the files-database, you can skip the upload and all the rest goes exactly the same but this time we're pointing to some entry in the database file that already had been uploaded by someone else. When you delete a file, the dropbox client will upload a command to the server saying that the entry needs to be removed from the user-database; it will NOT be deleted from the files-database because some other user(s) might be pointing to it. For more info refer to : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_deduplication#Deduplication_Methods If you file happens to be unique, it no longer has any user pointing to it, I'm not sure how they cope with that as over time they will get quite a lot of stale info; maybe they have some kind of 'off-peak' cleaning up system going on...
Now, if the feds come in and they start deleting entries from the files-database, pretty much nothing will happen as there is no delete command issued from a client, they simply broke the link. Unless someone connects to his account from an empty computer (or from the web-interface) and tries to download said file that won't work (**), but it's still miles from what you're proposing above. Additionally, I bet they'd need a biggish USB disk as I'm sure DropBox has quite a bit more than a few Terra-byte sitting in there.
(**: in fact, if you have another pc on the LAN running DropBox (under the same account), it will rather fetch the file from there than from DropBox server on the internet )
To be honest, most of what you list only peaks my interest on an 'along the side' kind of way. Sure it's interesting to learn such things when seeing it on Discovery Channel or something, and probably I'll go "Oh, look, they've managed to build a logic gate using valves.. neat!" while only later learning that things evolved the other way around.
But none of that fuels my appetite in 'all things ICT'. Maybe it's just me, but e.g. IMHO cars are just a tool to get from A to B... Some people can go all religious about them, can go on and on on how model X lead to model Y which then turned in to model W etc... Heck, at times I think they know more about their car (or the car of their dreams) than they know of their children ?! Personally I DO enjoy the luxury and/gadgets/ a car comes with these days, but in the end it's just an expensive tool. Similar when it comes down to programming... I don't really care if my code gets compiled into x86 or Cell code and even less on why x86 is what it is and Cell is what it is; as long as it does what I want it to do (or what I tell it to do, which isn't always the same thing sadly =)
Mind: I do care to know the strengths of x86 vs Cell as doing so may steer me into different directions, but why they were built the way they are built... hmm.. interesting to read when I'm on holiday, maybe... although honestly chances are I'd rather pick up the latest Dresden Files instead.
That said, I absolutely don't mind people having an interest in these things, and when well brought I'll gladly listen to them explaining the history of it. But it's on a totally different level as to why I like (and do) IT. Maybe the article is right and maybe it would interest some people into becoming more involved in IT, but for me it wouldn't have worked at all.
I loved and still love to solve problems and improving stuff. I HATED history lessons, even if those related to all things computer. Over time I find myself mildly interested in (some parts of) its history, but the main motivator remains : can we do this with current tools and/or can we do it better than what it is now. I couldn't care less who invented it or wrote a large book about it it's foundation.
Lucky for me, being forced into learning about computer-history didn't interfere with the things I was doing at the time on my Amiga using ARexx & C.
That said, I do agree with the article that understanding what makes a computer tick actually makes better programmers. I still think anyone who writes code should be forced to write a bubble sort on an 8088 in assembler... IMHO most 'young' programmers see the hardware too much as a black box thinking it actually works on the level their nth level language implies it does.
Man, when I started reading your comment I was close to adding ".. but I simply reconfigured the Heisenberg Modulators so the deflector shield now tripled the opticron conversion rate so its alignment is now in conflusion with the beta-cronicles defrigilator.... Glad it started make sense after the third sentence =)
True, but it's unlikely to find a heap of shreds related to 2-3 pages. It's more likely you'll find the equivalent of hundreds of pages thrown together in a heap. This makes scanning a much bigger job (*), as well as the actual piecing stuff together again.
(*: I haven't checked the results yet, but did they consider that each piece has two sides ?)
Ah, I was not aware of that. My bad. I simply assumed it would take a (ridiculous) amount of time but hadn't considered the required escape velocity of the Milky Way, nor the fact that the probe is just coasting...
Damn, you DO learn something on/. now and then, I'll have to adapt my signature some day =)
Slashdot Mirror
.. now Microsoft takes the servers down completely. As if I haven't got enough problems to get C&C:Generals to play on-line as it is.
FYI : for quite some years now Citroen has a 'fixed hub' on the steering wheel. Probably not on all models (yet) though. My C4 GP 5 years back was the first one I drove personally., the C5 I have now has it too. (quick google gives me this video : skip to around 00:58 on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUpDTBKkrLc )
According to what I've read here and there (e.g.. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citro%C3%ABn_C4#Technology ) this should allow for some 'better aimed' air-bag deployment. Luckily I have no personal experience with it.
As to stay on-topic, for 99% of the (highway) time I tend to drive with my left hand on the wheel only, ca 8:30 position; right arm either on the arm-rest, or in my lap. In more urban areas I don't really have a system I think, my hands simply slide along the wheel as needed although when not exercising force on the wheel (e.g. when the wheel is auto-rotating back to it's neutral position and/or when going straight) I have them quite low, probably 7:00 & 5:00 -ish. I think... do people really position their hands that consciously in everyday traffic ?
Having gone through 'the procedure' too (only once admittedly), I tend to agree that objectively all those annoyances are just that : annoying. But subjectively it's a different story. When you're laying there just waiting for the experience to be over it's hard not to get stressed by the combination of LOUD noise, the inability to change position even a little bit (both by the fact your head is restrained and because you know you don't want to ruin the session by causing blurred 'pictures' and having to do it all over again).
I'm a (very) laid back type, but I too had to restrain myself from going some thought-paths, the mind indeed tends to wander to strange places when given too much time.
First rule of Reading Club : nobody talks about Reading Club.
well, kind of.
(In theory) I could put one foot right in front of the other and repeat that 130k times, thus walking down the road and getting an approximation of 130k feet. Doing that UPWARDS is just impossible.
That said, SI rules !
So basically they simply announced that they have found a way to work around chrome's security system; won a competition doing so (including fame & prize money) bringing them lots of media coverage (read: free advertising). And now they simply have to wait for some 'clients' to come up with more than 60k for its source, I'm sure their address is on the pown2own website.
Seriously, they might just as well put it on ebay if you think about it, opening bid of 59.999$.
From personal experience I tend to disagree with this.
* Whenever I'm behind a car that "sways" or tends to accelerate/decelerate "without good reason" it's always a 50/50 chance that the person is either talking on the phone or talking to a passenger. In fact, to me, those talking to a passenger seem to be 'worse' as they often use gesticulation to convey the message and/or often try to look the other person in the face, both causing small but noticeable steer-movements @ 120 kph. Maybe there indeed is 'another pair of eyes' to catch something unexpectedly, it surely doesn't add to the overall driving skills of said person.
* Whenever I'm on the phone (handsfree) for more than a minute while driving I tend to try getting a 'requires less attention'-position on the road (eg. on the right lane (B) behind a lorry or something as those usually drive along at slow, steady speeds) because I have actually had it happen that I missed an exit simply because I obviously wasn't paying enough attention to the road. Although hardly 'dangerous', it did come as an eye-opener and ever since I've been paying more attention to it and indeed have a much harder time recalling things around me while on the phone versus while being able to pay full attention to the road even though the latter often feels like something that happens automatic without the need to actually think about it. Seems it DOES take brainpower.
* Whenever I'm talking to a passenger while driving I consciously 'refuse' to look away from the road ahead and will actually try to keep the conversation "light" as I'm sure I'm not invulnerable to the effect I've seen it having on other people.
PS: the most annoying effect seems to be the 'I go slow when you're behind me but will speed up whenever you try to overtake me' maneuver.
=> I tend to drive 95% on the highway and will use Cruise Control whenever traffic allows it. As I'm not the most 'sporty' driver around (instead I make it a sport of keeping my fuel-consumption low(ish)) I'm not always able to directly overtake them as there might be other cars approaching on the next lane and I prefer not to push the pedal to the metal simply to jump in between the 'faster guys'. So I'll trail behind a bit and learn that the car goes about 5 kph below my set CC-speed. Next lane frees up, I engage CC again and overtake the car and what happens in 25% of the cases : the other car let's me get up there about half way and then speeds up to match my speed or even sometimes above that !?!? Often-times adding another 5 to 10 kph still doesn't get me in front of them and by then I'm usually at the limit of said road. So, rather than risking a ticket I let them get ahead of me and go back to the right lane resuming my drive on my initial speed. And then the car in front seems to realize it's speeding and goes back to it's old speed so I find my self forced again to decelerate (or hit their trunk, tempting at times =) Rinse and repeat.
I've often wondered if this is purely 'human nature' where people simply don't want to get overtaken by another car or whether it is something related to my car somehow 'improving' their cars aerodynamics causing it to pick up speed ??
BTW: this also happens with drivers that are not (visibly) on the phone, nor talking to passengers but whenever I notice they are talking to a passenger I'm already betting it's going to happen... How I wished more people would use cruise-control to drive on the highway. Then again, I guess it will take a while before it's standard on all cars here in EU. From what I've heard it's more common in the US.
NT4 used to show these dots to indicate it was loading stuff... There was no real obvious indication on the amount of dots that it would take to finish the startup, but after a couple of reboots you got the idea. And I think 2000 had some kind of 'DOS'-progress bar going from the left to the rights side of the screen that would indicate how for the (initial) startup was. (after that it would go into graphics-mode and take forever to load but hey, it was a start =)
Man, I'm not sure if you're just being annoying for the sake of it, or really feel that way but in both cases you're an ass-hole. Luckily that +5 reads Interesting and not Insightful.
Insurance isn't there to give you money to fix your car because you parked it against a tree. It's there to help pay for the costs caused on other people. It's not there to find out who was at fault, but rather to have the money available NOW to save a victim's life and find out who's going to pay for it eventually later on.
Not sure how this works on your side of the ocean, but here we have to have insurance for the sake of other party involved. Omnium, the kind of insurance that would also reimburse you to fix _your_ car even though it was your own damned fault, IS optional and actually is there only to reduce the (monetary) risk you talk about. As far as I know most people drive around with just the former and are VERY motivated to not wreck their investment. That's not saying they're great drivers and yes, shit will still happen.
Please don't try telling me that the idea behind insurance is a scam. If ever your loved ones need some expensive surgery because some idiot hit them with his car but hardly has enough money to buy gas I sure hope for your sake he didn't feel about insurance the way you seem to do.
I'm pretty sure the thing keeps track of your location too for the simple reason that your driving style is highly related to the context of the location. If you 'smoothly' drive full speed through the inner city, that is rather reckless. The other way around, when you go creepily slow on the high-way, that too is asking for trouble.
(But yes, it might simply say "too slow on highway" without actually writing down the location)
I was waiting for that one to pop up, and I'm sure there are others. But IMHO they don't prove the point that leaving a trail to all your purchases will get you wrongfully convicted. In this case they mismatched the person and the card. Might happen to me too : for most shops we have one card for the entire family and this for the simple reason that every single store has its own card and my wallet is close enough to tearing at the seams already. Wouldn't it be much more convenient if we could simply use our ID-card ? After all there is no data on the card itself, it's just a number they can scan to find the right record in a database. Heck, if it would be painless I'd go all the way to using my DNA ala GATACA, no more mix-ups! But even suggesting such a thing would bring down the angels of the privacy-Apocalypse on me. Yet, it would have been a boon for Philip Scott Lyons as it wouldn't have linked the arson to him but rather directly to whoever did it (or bought that stuff in each case).
PS: there are MUCH more similar stories of people around who get (rightfully) caught for doing some crime because they left a similar trail. We smile at them and call those people idiots for thinking they would get away with it but in the end it's the same 'technology' we're talking about.
I did ask for a REALISTIC downside =P
What you say probably is partly true although the analogy doesn't work IMHO. Yes, I can see for instance how we're going to a situation where money is becoming something entirely electronic and traceable and in the end the government will have full access to its trail. However, again, I can see more up than downsides (really). What comes after that, I don't know, but I'm confident we (as in 'the people') will be assertive enough to see it coming at that time. I'm sure we all have our secrets / vices, but IMHO things will evolve in such a way that those that actually hurt others will the first to be sanctioned. (**)
If we'd ever get into a society where police can simply storm in and take whatever they need, we both failed at democracy big-time + it won't take long before there is an uprising... I'm not saying I like that scenario, but I'm pretty sure neither do those we put in power. (Sure, it happens in too many countries around the globe, I'm not entirely naive to believe that such a thing would be impossible, but neither do I believe that it would be a stable situation).
(**: although I agree that those priorities are very subjective (think MAFIAA), I really wouldn't downplay the power of the people on it (think 18 Jan))
By all means, feel free to sell it. If it would be worthless, I would not get discounts for it in the first place. I think most people realise this is the way it works, so stop acting like you know "the big secret".
I'm sure there is a lot of info to be mined from our shopping habits, so what ? Marketeers will send me "info" about things they think they have a better chance of selling me because of that info. IMHO that's a win-win situation. (damn, I hate that phrase =)
Look at it from a different perspective : everybody here agrees they hate spam. Most of us hate it enough to consider the people behind it criminals. Yet, if a system comes along that might in theory mean that spam would get completely obsoleted and replaced by adds about stuff for which it is KNOWN that I have an interest in, hell why not ?
I'm having a hard time finding the problem with different companies to compete for my money as I get more choice and play them out against each other.
Alternatively it's often implied that 'the man' will use this information to 'get me'. Al-right, I'll admit I might have crossed the speed limit occasionally (and got away with it). If there had been some kind of "policeye-box' in my car I would have been fined. Or not, because if there had been I would not have sped in the first place. I also might have parked illegally (although never on a spot for wheelchairs etc!) and had there been camera's on every single corner of the street, again, I might have not done that. In both cases I would have arrived a bit later to my final destination, oh my. Apart from that kind of non-events, I don't think there is much 'the man' could use against me... Actually, assuming that kind of Big Brother thing would exists, people would stick to the law more often and I'm not sure where you come from, but here most laws are designed to improve my life.
In fact, come to think of it, I once got fined for overtaking where it was not allowed while my actual motivation at the time was avoiding the car in front of me (**). Had I had a 'front-camera' or something I would have been able to defend myself out of that one, now I didn't feel like starting a fight over it with the police as I knew that in the end I would probably loose anyway...
Frankly, all these 'giving up privacy for security' doesn't feel that bad to me as long as it stays within limits. I agree that I have no clue where these limits should be. I guess it will be like porn : I'll recognise it when I see it. Similarly, we complain about 'security theatre' in airports but cry foul when they come up with a technology that might actually work... maybe it's not perfect, but it's better than the current metal-detection systems.
Please enlighten me and don't start throwing hollowed out phrases like 'big brother' and 'privacy' around but rather give me some REALISTIC side-effect that I might regret in the NEAR future. Sure we can come up with Sci-Fi blockbuster material but how realistic is all of that ? A lot of stuff in our everyday life brings the potential to cause harm, ranging from kitchen-knives to cars to electricity to cleaning-products to whatever we 'need' to make our lives a bit more enjoyable. Heck, every single technology can be used for good and bad purposes, it's up to us/society to decide which way the balance will tip.
(**: On the highway (2-lane), in between roadworks, the car in front of me decelerated rather fast but either he did so on his engine alone, or he used his handbrake, or his braking lights were simply broken or all of that combined, I dunno, but I had no warning and found myself suddenly MUCH closer to his vehicle than I felt comfortable with (driving 100-ish kph) so I veered to the left to overtake him giving him the 'angry stare'. Seemed there was a bunch of police-cars on the road a bit ahead and the driver in front of me had reacted "panicky" (speed-limit was 100 but people tend to first slam on the brakes and _then_ watch their speedometer) and all the police saw was me driving on the left lane where I wasn't supposed to be)
Here's what I've done on Facebook just today over the last eight hours:
[...]
Although I agree that for all of the things you mention Facebook is nice tool (it IS!), However, I don't see how any of those activities will bring money to Facebook. On the contrary, what you did there actually cost Facebook (a little) money (internet traffic, server capacity, hard & software maintenance, etc..).
The question IMHO is NOT about whether Facebook is good at what it does, the question is : can it generate 10 Billion dollar in a reasonable time. To give a bit of an (bad) over-the-top analogy : I'm certain I could start 'wedoweverythingyouwant.com' with well over 10.000 employees waiting to do your every whimsical request for only 2 euro-cents an hour. It would be a HUGE success, have billions of users and generate half the internet traffic of the planet causing it to get valued into the trillions when going IPO. But in reality it would never make a penny and the IPO would just get spent on paying any debt (secretly) created during the 'startup-phase'.. would you buy a share ??
Hmmm .... the more I think about it, the more I think this might actually work =P
Anyway, joking aside, the only way for Facebook to make money from usage like yours is by throwing the right commercial at you and/or get you buy virtual goods. Since you (sensibly) seem to ignore (most) game-offers they'll have to up the ante on the first one, meaning they either need to find out what you REALLY want (data-mining) or they'll simply become more aggressive in the amount of commercial stuff they send at you (Spam). /calculate/ Product X would make my life heaven on earth they'll probably still will try to get me into buying product Y simply because company Y gives then a much higher margin. Generating more spam will simply cause me to find (a 3rd party) tool to ignore it completely.
Personally, I don't really mind the first one that much (**) although it probably will never work because even if they somehow can
(**: I prefer to get targeted adds over a fire-hose of things I don't need. As a matter of fact, my penis is big enough thank you and I don't like casino games anyway so leave my inbox alone ! That said, Amazon overdoes this by thinking I now want to buy every single shoe they have in stock simply because the wife sent me link of a pair she wanted to buy for the girls... and I was stupid enough to click it.)
Although you already mentioned it as irrelevant, I doubt it is : CHECK YOUR ADDONS !
I too was feeling FF getting sluggish over time and a colleague finally convinced me to give Chrome a try. WOW, it felt quick, it felt snappy... but it lacked on some parts; eg. somehow the chrome-internet had a lot more ads !?! So I installed Ad-Blocker for Chrome... Oh, and no live-bookmarks ?? No worries, plugin for that too. Hmm, clearly I need Password-maker too because I don't know any single pwd apart from my master pwd... luckily it was ported.... ugly, but workable, more or less. FoxyProxy on chrome ? Check, works albeit seems to mess around with the OS-settings instead of just those of Chrome.. .oh well, small price to pay I guess. Finding add-ons, err, extensions I mean, isn't fun either, you have to scroll through a gazillion poster-size flashy icons with no obvious explanation of what they do, how is that useful? Anyway, seems there is no chrome-alternative for https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tortoisesvn-menu/ and the author's page seems to have vanished. Too bad, maybe I'll give it a go myself on a dreary day... Luckily my grease-monkey scripts pretty much work right out of the box, so no losses there.
Let's have a look what else I have in FF, oohh, 7 more addons that I actually don't really need... time to uninstall them...
After some days of alternatively using both I've managed to tweak Chrome so it does what I want it to do but as a result it feels a lot less snappy now than it did when it was virgin new and after upgrading FF to version 9 and removing those unneeded add-ons that one now feels pretty much the same as Chrome when browsing around the internet with the added benefit that it has the TortoiseSvn plugin that I really miss on Chrome. Yes, Chrome is remarkably faster too start but to be honest I leave my browser(s) open most of the time with tens of tabs open.. and I usually hibernate my laptop so it only gets reboot every few days anyway. Who cares about the browser taking 10 seconds extra to start ?
In the end I've gone back to FF completely except for the occasional situation where I land on some page in a foreign language and I do need to know what's on it (eg. some taiwanese driver page). Chrome really shines when it comes to the 'online' translation thing.
Out of curiosity I now have both open and chrome uses about 170Mb on 12 processes for 3 tabs, firefox takes about 450Mb for 18 tabs, but again, who cares as I've got another 450Mb of memory in standby anyway.
And as for as responsiveness is concerned, I've never experienced FF to hang like what you're describing unless I got in a situation where EVERY program starts behaving unresponsive, in those cases FF is no exception... there is only so much stuff you can cram in 4Gb of ram ... If you suffer from 'beach-balling' with 12Gb of memory, you're either having a lot of memory-hungry programs open (not sure how OSX handles swapping out memory of background programs, I guess not that different from Windows) or you're hard disk is going to die some of these days and warning you with IO-bottlenecks right now... (use some tool that can read the SMART info).
it might work for urban and even sub-urban locations, but I think we'll need more than ordinary /cantenna/'s to cross the Atlantic =P
Given the amount of studies and remarks about the potentially dangerous effect of 'fake 3D' on the brain/vision development of youngsters, I think I'll keep this technology away from my kids for as long as I can. Sure, the occasional movie or fun-park attraction is OK, but having this in the living-room and/or gaming-computer(console) simply is asking for day-to-day use.
Might well be the effects are largely overrated I prefer to play on the safe side with this. It's a fun gimmick and it does have a 3D-ish effect, but until they can do it properly where I can actually see things in real 3D instead of my brain having to interpret clues as 3D, I'm going to put this in the same category as 'Light Energy Drinks'.
PS: Yes I've seen Avatar in 3D and yes I loved how the 3D effect sucks you into the action (eg. the main air-battle). But I also got annoyed and 'headachy' in other scenes where they had these floating 'seeds' that drifted towards the camera and went out of focus while my eyes tried to correct for that. And that's with a 'big-budget, designed for 3D' movie, I can only assume how bad 2D converted into 3D will be; with all respect to the people investing in doing said conversion as good as possible, 3D isn't but a buzzword there.
On top of that, I've seen quite a few 2D versions of movies lately that were also available in 3D and although it's impossible to compare, I doubt the extra half-a-dimension would have made much of an improvement to them. For all I care, as long as the story is 3D, I don't care if the medium is only 2D.
I'm pretty sure it doesn't quite work the way you present it. Judiging by how things work @ dropbox (and yes I do have an account unlike you so that makes me the expert and you the scaremonger), they have a database that keeps track of all files they have sitting in some huge database (might not even be a filesystem as we know it but rather some highly compressed blob) holding the contents and some identifying properties for each file (size, hash(es), etc..). In some other table or databases they hold the link between those files and their users.
Whenever the client notices a new file arrives on the dropbox folder, it will hash the file, grab it's properties and ask the server whether it knows such file. If not, the file is uploaded, added to the files-database, an entry is put in the user-database and any other client running with the same user-credentials is notified to download said file and put it in said location on each machine. If the file matches some entry already in the files-database, you can skip the upload and all the rest goes exactly the same but this time we're pointing to some entry in the database file that already had been uploaded by someone else.
When you delete a file, the dropbox client will upload a command to the server saying that the entry needs to be removed from the user-database; it will NOT be deleted from the files-database because some other user(s) might be pointing to it. For more info refer to : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_deduplication#Deduplication_Methods
If you file happens to be unique, it no longer has any user pointing to it, I'm not sure how they cope with that as over time they will get quite a lot of stale info; maybe they have some kind of 'off-peak' cleaning up system going on...
Now, if the feds come in and they start deleting entries from the files-database, pretty much nothing will happen as there is no delete command issued from a client, they simply broke the link. Unless someone connects to his account from an empty computer (or from the web-interface) and tries to download said file that won't work (**), but it's still miles from what you're proposing above. Additionally, I bet they'd need a biggish USB disk as I'm sure DropBox has quite a bit more than a few Terra-byte sitting in there.
(**: in fact, if you have another pc on the LAN running DropBox (under the same account), it will rather fetch the file from there than from DropBox server on the internet )
Indeed i was; apologies =)
Reminds me of saying (writing) once I was self-thought ... might be true according to Descartes, but still not quite what I meant ...
English not being my native language I beg you to bare with me =P
To be honest, most of what you list only peaks my interest on an 'along the side' kind of way. Sure it's interesting to learn such things when seeing it on Discovery Channel or something, and probably I'll go "Oh, look, they've managed to build a logic gate using valves.. neat!" while only later learning that things evolved the other way around.
But none of that fuels my appetite in 'all things ICT'. Maybe it's just me, but e.g. IMHO cars are just a tool to get from A to B... Some people can go all religious about them, can go on and on on how model X lead to model Y which then turned in to model W etc... Heck, at times I think they know more about their car (or the car of their dreams) than they know of their children ?! Personally I DO enjoy the luxury and /gadgets/ a car comes with these days, but in the end it's just an expensive tool. Similar when it comes down to programming... I don't really care if my code gets compiled into x86 or Cell code and even less on why x86 is what it is and Cell is what it is; as long as it does what I want it to do (or what I tell it to do, which isn't always the same thing sadly =)
Mind: I do care to know the strengths of x86 vs Cell as doing so may steer me into different directions, but why they were built the way they are built... hmm.. interesting to read when I'm on holiday, maybe... although honestly chances are I'd rather pick up the latest Dresden Files instead.
That said, I absolutely don't mind people having an interest in these things, and when well brought I'll gladly listen to them explaining the history of it. But it's on a totally different level as to why I like (and do) IT. Maybe the article is right and maybe it would interest some people into becoming more involved in IT, but for me it wouldn't have worked at all.
I'm on the other side of the argument.
I loved and still love to solve problems and improving stuff. I HATED history lessons, even if those related to all things computer.
Over time I find myself mildly interested in (some parts of) its history, but the main motivator remains : can we do this with current tools and/or can we do it better than what it is now. I couldn't care less who invented it or wrote a large book about it it's foundation.
Lucky for me, being forced into learning about computer-history didn't interfere with the things I was doing at the time on my Amiga using ARexx & C.
That said, I do agree with the article that understanding what makes a computer tick actually makes better programmers. I still think anyone who writes code should be forced to write a bubble sort on an 8088 in assembler... IMHO most 'young' programmers see the hardware too much as a black box thinking it actually works on the level their nth level language implies it does.
Man, when I started reading your comment I was close to adding ".. but I simply reconfigured the Heisenberg Modulators so the deflector shield now tripled the opticron conversion rate so its alignment is now in conflusion with the beta-cronicles defrigilator....
Glad it started make sense after the third sentence =)
True, but it's unlikely to find a heap of shreds related to 2-3 pages.
It's more likely you'll find the equivalent of hundreds of pages thrown together in a heap.
This makes scanning a much bigger job (*), as well as the actual piecing stuff together again.
(*: I haven't checked the results yet, but did they consider that each piece has two sides ?)
Ah, I was not aware of that. My bad.
I simply assumed it would take a (ridiculous) amount of time but hadn't considered the required escape velocity of the Milky Way, nor the fact that the probe is just coasting...
Damn, you DO learn something on /. now and then, I'll have to adapt my signature some day =)
Patience my friend, one day it might actually leave our Galaxy =)