Um. What? How? Carry solar panels with you? You might be able to do it like "Route 66", where they took four seasons to get from NYC to LA and back. Otherwise, not sure how this could happen.
Ok, hang on. That's certainly true for household current, but last I checked, all-electric cars needed a high current dedicated charging station. I'd submit that in most countries, there are far more diesel pumps than there are charging stations for electric cars.
Solutions that require ownership of two separately-fueled vehicles, one for daily use and one for edge cases, are going to be a hard sell to the rank and file. Easier for wealthy people, of course.
> I think so, but apparently Merrica needs 300+ mile range day to day.
That's misrepresenting the issue. We don't need 300+ miles for day to day unless we are a courier or a trucker. We do need 300+ mile range often enough to make a 200 mile / multi hour charge vehicle impractical. Just like I don't need a pickup every single day, but when I do, a prius just won't cut it.
It's the charging time that's the problem. I make a 550 mile trip on a regular basis (work). I fly sometimes, and take the motorcycle sometimes, depending on weather and other factors. The bike has perhaps 200 miles capacity, so the Tesla already beats me on range. But the bike's refueling time is perhaps four minutes if I don't take a potty break. The tesla is what, six hours? That's turning a one day trip into two, both ways, unless I want to drive through the night.
Electric cars don't just need to get longer range. They also need to get significantly faster refueling times. For trips beyond the single charge range, there may never be a practical solution. (Yes, I've heard of the battery swap idea. I don't expect that to become widespread for a number of reasons.)
Isn't the tax increase just passed onto customers as higher rates? How does this help? Wouldn't the same thing be achieved more efficiently by raising the income tax?
In any case, why would Gilbert care? It's not his money.
That's one way to look at it. Personally, when the grim reaper comes for me, he'll have a fight on his hands. My family has a plan, and there are emergency supplies including medical, and food and water for three days in each vehicle, we have a direction, (away from city center) and a meeting place already arranged. In the case of an EMP we likely won't have transportation, but you can't plan for everything. I admit the plan works best in the case of a dirty nuclear device detonated in the heaviest populated area, and coincidentally that seems to be the most likely scenario these days.
It may all be for naught, but maybe it'll be the difference between surviving a near miss, or not.
More importantly from the government's point of view, any training that reduces injuries, even non-life-threatening injuries like cuts from broken glass, also reduces load on responders.
When I am at the range, the minute I see a group of police coming to train is the minute I start packing up my gear to leave...they are the most unsafe group of people I tend to run into at the range...even more-so than the newcomers!
...and they're usually the ones getting hostile with the range officer when he tells them to stop fiddling with their weapons while people are downrange...
> Yes, but they're such an *expensive* bad joke that it is too embarressing to too many important people to write off the cost, so usually, the system is kept and forced to work and declared a success.
> If you fuck up a $100k contract, you'll be fired. If you fuck up a $10,000,000, people will work very hard to find a way to make it not look like a fuckup, especially if they've been involved in any way at all.
This. Generally true, I think, of any ridiculously expensive fuckup. What generally happens is that the vendor helps you to save face with management and/or the board of directors, and helps you to sell them on solutions that involve giving the vendor more money.
"Nobody got fired for buying IBM". Partly because when IBM puts in the screws, they also have very experienced sales managers who can help you sell the idea that yes, being kneecapped really is a good idea. Who needs knees? (I used to work for IBM professional services, saw this first hand. Not the knee part, but the bait and switch part.)
Oracle has the same modus. They get you too deep into a project, and then dangle a solution at an increased price. It seems to be their entire business plan.
Same true for companies that provide outsourcing. (a) Having us take over your IT will save you millions a year. (b) It's a disaster because your departing employees didn't document their procedures well enough. (c) We can fix this by bringing in more level 3 and 4 admins, at an additional cost. (4) We can't support your servers because they didn't come from us. All servers are now on 3 year retirement, and you are required to buy our hardware. (5) After six years, you're still paying more for less but we'll help you spin it for upper management.
The idea is to get the decision makers complicit in the crime. After all, to them it's just a job -- it's not like they own the company.
No, it really doesn't. You can build up a tolerance to it in practice. Keep in mind that consumer "pepper spray" is not the same thing as military grade Mace, and isn't significantly more effective than throwing hot sauce at your attacker. It may be effective if the attacker isn't expecting it, you manage in the heat of the moment to deploy it and have the nozzle pointed in the right direction, and you are in a tactical position to inconvenience your attacker and make a run for it. But magical it ain't, and you need to have realistic expectations if you're going to carry it. It's somewhat more effective than a St Christopher medal, true. (Side note, the best pepper spray dispenser I ever saw was shaped somewhat like a handgun, with a handle and a trigger. Much easier to get it pointed the right direction under stress. But those designs are rare.)
> Or a stun gun.
I have researched this, because my 19 year old daughter travels, and the areas of the US with the most draconian gun laws tend to restrict stun guns also. (In some cases, even pepper spray is restricted.) Fortunately she spends most of her time on the west coast, where they can be carried, with some restrictions, and that will have to do until she's old enough to get her CCW. (And even then, she won't be able to carry in California.)
But... you've seen the youtube videos and read news reports about people being tased, right? So you know that effectiveness varies SIGNIFICANTLY from individual to individual, with some people dropping at one jolt, and others continuing the fight after being tased multiple times. So a sure thing, this ain't either. Perhaps better than nothing, but be aware of the limitations.
It seems like the best bet is to not raise the question in the first place. Management doesn't need to know that Apache is free, for instance. And there are commercial and free versions of Nagios, Tripwire, Sendmail, and so forth. We have over half of our prod servers running Red Hat, for which we buy maintenance, but in the lab we run CentOS. The Open Source community realizes that companies have a compulsion to spend money, and there are companies that will sell you free software (think about that phrase for a minute...) to satisfy this requirement.
I think it's possible that the police don't want "smart" guns for the same reason citizens don't -- the perception that the circuitry or sensor may fail at a crucial moment and the gun will fail to fire when it should.
I think the people who believe that smart guns should be required for citizens, justify it in their own minds by the stipulation that citizens shouldn't really be allowed to defend themselves, and "smart gun" laws is a baby step in that direction. And if a citizen needs to fire to defend self or family, and the gun doesn't go off, well, so what?
In my opinion, if you're going to carry, you have an obligation to yourself and others to get some training, not only to operate the weapon safely, but also situational awareness and some rudimentary rules of engagement. There are some well known rules of thumb -- like the "21 foot rule", and easy to train and remember tactics to increase the odds of successfully defending yourself.
What you say is true -- if you wait until the attacker is touching you, it may be too late. There are solutions to this, including defensive techniques, weapon retention techniques, and even carrying your weapon in a fashion where you don't have to draw in order to fire.
Carrying a weapon (or having one at home) is not a magical talisman that keeps you from all harm, nor is it an uncontrolled death device that's an unparalleled danger to yourself and others. The truth, as in many such cases, is somewhere in the middle. As I tried to explain to a newspaper reporter years ago, having a firearm is not a sure thing, but it does give you another choice besides huddling over your children and waiting for the attacker to shoot.
Training and experience increases your chances of survival and reduces chances of collateral damage. Responsible people learn and practice.
To those who say "leave it to the police", keep in mind that the police are usually not there at the time -- they're only there to put up the tape and fill out reports afterwards. And if like me you practice at the same firing ranges where police practice, you might be appalled at how bad many of them are. Both at handling weapons safely, and at basic marksmanship. And those are the ones who *practice*.
> Until I see someone cite an actual statistic of how many people are disarmed and shot with their own weapons, I'm going to continue to see these sorts of claims as hyperbole, and rightfully so.
Yes. The argument often made for women not to carry firearms is that it'll be taken away from them and used against them. (...which is a bit condescending and sexist but let that pass for now.) Although I don't have my copy of the book in front of me, I think it was Paxton Quigley that pointed out the difficulty of finding instances where this has actually happened, as opposed to the quarter million or so of women yearly who successfully use firearms in self defense. In other words, the "smart gun" appears to be a solution in search of a problem.
"We have twelve thousand users accessing our resources daily. Those resources have collectively exhibited a 99.997% uptime.
"We see nine terabytes of data flowing through our networks on a weekly basis."
"We manage nineteen B2B connections representing 22.5 million dollars a month in company business."
"We process an average of 120 helpdesk tickets a day, with a mean time to resolution of eight minutes."
And so forth. I've also seen reports on capital equipment vs overhead, trending over the last X number of years. It's useful to show, for instance, that the majority of your costs are not personnel related, lest upper management get the idea that they could save a buttload of money by outsourcing personnel to a bunch of taxi drivers in Nanjangud.
Customer satisfaction surveys could also be important, especially if they're substantially better than, for instance, the average customer satisfaction for offshore IT...
At one point I had hope for a commercial mission. I think the money is there, private companies don't have the same issues as governments, and they have more freedom to adopt new technologies and push the envelope a bit. My fear, though, is that government institutions (faa, et al) would put so many road blocks in place that a launch could not take place.
Perhaps on a remote island.... hence the "Bond villain". Or, if you will, Tracy Island.:-)
I agree with a lot of what you said. What I'm trying to say is that yes, the moon shots cost a shit-ton in the 1960's, but even adjusted for inflation, the cost of doing it now after the inevitable budget ballooning out of control, due to the process itself becoming fundamentally broken, would be so great that no amount of money could achieve it. The more money you would pour into such a project, the more money it would cost, with the goal being forever out of reach. I'm not saying a moon shot is not practical (that's a sound argument and a good subject for debate) but that it's not even *possible* anymore. Another case in point: A certain modern fighter plane intended to be an affordable replacement for a very expensive older model, has become so much more expensive than the plane it was supposed to replace that it's now in danger of cancellation.
Slashdot Mirror
Um. What? How? Carry solar panels with you? You might be able to do it like "Route 66", where they took four seasons to get from NYC to LA and back. Otherwise, not sure how this could happen.
Ok, hang on. That's certainly true for household current, but last I checked, all-electric cars needed a high current dedicated charging station. I'd submit that in most countries, there are far more diesel pumps than there are charging stations for electric cars.
Solutions that require ownership of two separately-fueled vehicles, one for daily use and one for edge cases, are going to be a hard sell to the rank and file. Easier for wealthy people, of course.
> I think so, but apparently Merrica needs 300+ mile range day to day.
That's misrepresenting the issue. We don't need 300+ miles for day to day unless we are a courier or a trucker. We do need 300+ mile range often enough to make a 200 mile / multi hour charge vehicle impractical. Just like I don't need a pickup every single day, but when I do, a prius just won't cut it.
It's the charging time that's the problem. I make a 550 mile trip on a regular basis (work). I fly sometimes, and take the motorcycle sometimes, depending on weather and other factors. The bike has perhaps 200 miles capacity, so the Tesla already beats me on range. But the bike's refueling time is perhaps four minutes if I don't take a potty break. The tesla is what, six hours? That's turning a one day trip into two, both ways, unless I want to drive through the night.
Electric cars don't just need to get longer range. They also need to get significantly faster refueling times. For trips beyond the single charge range, there may never be a practical solution. (Yes, I've heard of the battery swap idea. I don't expect that to become widespread for a number of reasons.)
And much faster cycle times to refill.
Until someone or some armed gang takes it from you.
The problem won't just be lack of food, water, and transportation; it will be your fellow citizens turning on you to survive at all cost.
I have taken that into account.
That's...... actually, not a bad idea.
Isn't the tax increase just passed onto customers as higher rates? How does this help? Wouldn't the same thing be achieved more efficiently by raising the income tax?
In any case, why would Gilbert care? It's not his money.
That's one way to look at it. Personally, when the grim reaper comes for me, he'll have a fight on his hands. My family has a plan, and there are emergency supplies including medical, and food and water for three days in each vehicle, we have a direction, (away from city center) and a meeting place already arranged. In the case of an EMP we likely won't have transportation, but you can't plan for everything. I admit the plan works best in the case of a dirty nuclear device detonated in the heaviest populated area, and coincidentally that seems to be the most likely scenario these days.
It may all be for naught, but maybe it'll be the difference between surviving a near miss, or not.
More importantly from the government's point of view, any training that reduces injuries, even non-life-threatening injuries like cuts from broken glass, also reduces load on responders.
When I am at the range, the minute I see a group of police coming to train is the minute I start packing up my gear to leave...they are the most unsafe group of people I tend to run into at the range...even more-so than the newcomers!
> Yes, but they're such an *expensive* bad joke that it is too embarressing to too many important people to write off the cost, so usually, the system is kept and forced to work and declared a success.
> If you fuck up a $100k contract, you'll be fired. If you fuck up a $10,000,000, people will work very hard to find a way to make it not look like a fuckup, especially if they've been involved in any way at all.
This. Generally true, I think, of any ridiculously expensive fuckup. What generally happens is that the vendor helps you to save face with management and/or the board of directors, and helps you to sell them on solutions that involve giving the vendor more money.
"Nobody got fired for buying IBM". Partly because when IBM puts in the screws, they also have very experienced sales managers who can help you sell the idea that yes, being kneecapped really is a good idea. Who needs knees? (I used to work for IBM professional services, saw this first hand. Not the knee part, but the bait and switch part.)
Oracle has the same modus. They get you too deep into a project, and then dangle a solution at an increased price. It seems to be their entire business plan.
Same true for companies that provide outsourcing. (a) Having us take over your IT will save you millions a year. (b) It's a disaster because your departing employees didn't document their procedures well enough. (c) We can fix this by bringing in more level 3 and 4 admins, at an additional cost. (4) We can't support your servers because they didn't come from us. All servers are now on 3 year retirement, and you are required to buy our hardware. (5) After six years, you're still paying more for less but we'll help you spin it for upper management.
The idea is to get the decision makers complicit in the crime. After all, to them it's just a job -- it's not like they own the company.
> Pepper spray works wonders, you know.
No, it really doesn't. You can build up a tolerance to it in practice. Keep in mind that consumer "pepper spray" is not the same thing as military grade Mace, and isn't significantly more effective than throwing hot sauce at your attacker. It may be effective if the attacker isn't expecting it, you manage in the heat of the moment to deploy it and have the nozzle pointed in the right direction, and you are in a tactical position to inconvenience your attacker and make a run for it. But magical it ain't, and you need to have realistic expectations if you're going to carry it. It's somewhat more effective than a St Christopher medal, true. (Side note, the best pepper spray dispenser I ever saw was shaped somewhat like a handgun, with a handle and a trigger. Much easier to get it pointed the right direction under stress. But those designs are rare.)
> Or a stun gun.
I have researched this, because my 19 year old daughter travels, and the areas of the US with the most draconian gun laws tend to restrict stun guns also. (In some cases, even pepper spray is restricted.) Fortunately she spends most of her time on the west coast, where they can be carried, with some restrictions, and that will have to do until she's old enough to get her CCW. (And even then, she won't be able to carry in California.)
But ... you've seen the youtube videos and read news reports about people being tased, right? So you know that effectiveness varies SIGNIFICANTLY from individual to individual, with some people dropping at one jolt, and others continuing the fight after being tased multiple times. So a sure thing, this ain't either. Perhaps better than nothing, but be aware of the limitations.
Their enterprise apps are a bad joke.
It seems like the best bet is to not raise the question in the first place. Management doesn't need to know that Apache is free, for instance. And there are commercial and free versions of Nagios, Tripwire, Sendmail, and so forth. We have over half of our prod servers running Red Hat, for which we buy maintenance, but in the lab we run CentOS. The Open Source community realizes that companies have a compulsion to spend money, and there are companies that will sell you free software (think about that phrase for a minute...) to satisfy this requirement.
I think it's possible that the police don't want "smart" guns for the same reason citizens don't -- the perception that the circuitry or sensor may fail at a crucial moment and the gun will fail to fire when it should.
I think the people who believe that smart guns should be required for citizens, justify it in their own minds by the stipulation that citizens shouldn't really be allowed to defend themselves, and "smart gun" laws is a baby step in that direction. And if a citizen needs to fire to defend self or family, and the gun doesn't go off, well, so what?
In my opinion, if you're going to carry, you have an obligation to yourself and others to get some training, not only to operate the weapon safely, but also situational awareness and some rudimentary rules of engagement. There are some well known rules of thumb -- like the "21 foot rule", and easy to train and remember tactics to increase the odds of successfully defending yourself.
What you say is true -- if you wait until the attacker is touching you, it may be too late. There are solutions to this, including defensive techniques, weapon retention techniques, and even carrying your weapon in a fashion where you don't have to draw in order to fire.
Carrying a weapon (or having one at home) is not a magical talisman that keeps you from all harm, nor is it an uncontrolled death device that's an unparalleled danger to yourself and others. The truth, as in many such cases, is somewhere in the middle. As I tried to explain to a newspaper reporter years ago, having a firearm is not a sure thing, but it does give you another choice besides huddling over your children and waiting for the attacker to shoot.
Training and experience increases your chances of survival and reduces chances of collateral damage. Responsible people learn and practice.
To those who say "leave it to the police", keep in mind that the police are usually not there at the time -- they're only there to put up the tape and fill out reports afterwards. And if like me you practice at the same firing ranges where police practice, you might be appalled at how bad many of them are. Both at handling weapons safely, and at basic marksmanship. And those are the ones who *practice*.
> Until I see someone cite an actual statistic of how many people are disarmed and shot with their own weapons, I'm going to continue to see these sorts of claims as hyperbole, and rightfully so.
Yes. The argument often made for women not to carry firearms is that it'll be taken away from them and used against them. (...which is a bit condescending and sexist but let that pass for now.) Although I don't have my copy of the book in front of me, I think it was Paxton Quigley that pointed out the difficulty of finding instances where this has actually happened, as opposed to the quarter million or so of women yearly who successfully use firearms in self defense. In other words, the "smart gun" appears to be a solution in search of a problem.
"We have twelve thousand users accessing our resources daily. Those resources have collectively exhibited a 99.997% uptime.
"We see nine terabytes of data flowing through our networks on a weekly basis."
"We manage nineteen B2B connections representing 22.5 million dollars a month in company business."
"We process an average of 120 helpdesk tickets a day, with a mean time to resolution of eight minutes."
And so forth. I've also seen reports on capital equipment vs overhead, trending over the last X number of years. It's useful to show, for instance, that the majority of your costs are not personnel related, lest upper management get the idea that they could save a buttload of money by outsourcing personnel to a bunch of taxi drivers in Nanjangud.
Customer satisfaction surveys could also be important, especially if they're substantially better than, for instance, the average customer satisfaction for offshore IT...
> The Chinese, however. . .
Yes.
At one point I had hope for a commercial mission. I think the money is there, private companies don't have the same issues as governments, and they have more freedom to adopt new technologies and push the envelope a bit. My fear, though, is that government institutions (faa, et al) would put so many road blocks in place that a launch could not take place.
Perhaps on a remote island.... hence the "Bond villain". Or, if you will, Tracy Island. :-)
It doesn't work that way. The more money you make available, the more it costs. It doesn't end.
I agree with a lot of what you said. What I'm trying to say is that yes, the moon shots cost a shit-ton in the 1960's, but even adjusted for inflation, the cost of doing it now after the inevitable budget ballooning out of control, due to the process itself becoming fundamentally broken, would be so great that no amount of money could achieve it. The more money you would pour into such a project, the more money it would cost, with the goal being forever out of reach. I'm not saying a moon shot is not practical (that's a sound argument and a good subject for debate) but that it's not even *possible* anymore. Another case in point: A certain modern fighter plane intended to be an affordable replacement for a very expensive older model, has become so much more expensive than the plane it was supposed to replace that it's now in danger of cancellation.