Neither have I. I don't trust my cell phone service provider to handle consumer purchases. Not until they are regulated just like a credit card company would be and are the consumer's side instead of on the vendor's side. Right now, the worse you get scammed, the more money your phone company makes. This is not how you ensure proper customer service.
What is the most worthless app purchase you made? Did you ask for a refund?
1. several were worthless.
2. no. only cost $0.99.
bottom line: gave up on the smartphone in 2013.
have a dumb phone now. ignorance is bliss.
And that is what they are counting on. If you cheat a billion people out of $1, then hopefully those billion people won't care enough about it to tell the net person not to buy it. P.T. Barnum rides again.
Trains have solved the problem that driverless cars are trying to solve. Instead of cameras, GPS, and detailed maps, they simply use tracks to guide them. Guess what? After a few hundred years of using trains, we've found it helps to have a human on board. Same will be true of "driverless" cars and trucks.
-Chris
This. And Pilots. So the truck ( or train or plane) can drive itself 99% of the time, but when an emergency happens or something routine which we don't trust the computer to do, the human is there to handle it. The same thing will happen with trucks if anything happens at all. Driving a truck will just become a job where you sit around in the cab watching instruments 99% of the time. You can't and shouldn't eliminate the human.
In the Smart Fortwo EV, you do not have to buy the battery. You can rent it for $80/month.
Ah!. Then they have already figured out the cost of replacing a battery pack and amortized it. That also has the side effect of being able to figure out the monthly operating cost of the vehicle. $80 a month plus electricity. I have seen claims that it costs about $30 in electricity. So $110 compared to, say $100 worth of gas per month. I could see how some people will pay the extra $10 a month (plus the extra cost of the vehicle). It is only a TCO of maybe $5,000 more over a five year ownership.
You forget that there are 3 quarters in a year. I also assumed that that one class was the TAs only responsibility, while you assumed that they taught five classes. Certainly if they are teaching 5 classes, that changes the equation considerably. However, I have never known a TA to teach more than one or two classes.
You can't replace the drivetrain on a brand new BMW 3 series for $20k.
Well, maybe you could, but replacing the drive train is not normal maintenance, as would be replacing the battery in an EV. I have never replaced the drivetrain on any vehicle I have owned nor do I expect to have to.
How many times have you been in a meeting and someone's smartphone went off? Even if on vibrate? That person reacts to the phone. How much of a distraction is it to the members of the meeting?
So while you are taking care of the distraction, what have you missed of the meeting? Regardless of how many, or boring, the meetings that you attend. What if you had an opinion of what you missed that would have save hundreds of hours of work by not going down the wrong path, the harder path or just another view point on the problem that everyone missed? No they, and you, have missed the opportunity for "good".
Well, then don't allow distractions such as phones, tablets, laptops, and smartwatches to the meeting.
So they charge $41k per student, they have 15 students in a class, that is $615,000. Each of those students is probably taking about 5 classes each for three quarters, so that comes down to $41,000 per class. According to Standford itself, the most they pay is about $28,000 per year for Teaching Assistants, and some of that is funny money spent allowing them to take courses. Let's not forget that the University is constantly harassing alumni for money.
It certainly looks to me from a cursory look at the numbers that they can't afford to have two TAs in the class. However, in a school which boasts a low student to faculty ratio, they ought to have it easier than most schools for one faculty member to handle grading the work.
As far as I can tell the cost of a Toyota Corolla is basically the same number of dollars as it was 10 years ago. Which means that after factoring in inflation the car is significantly cheaper than it used to be.
Simple research on cars.com shows that the MSRP of a new 2015 Corolla is between 16,950 and 22,955. The original MSRP on a 2005 Corolla was 13,780 to 17,555. The price has increased between 23% and 31%. In that timeframe, inflation has supposedly gone up 20.2%, so the price of the Corolla has output paced inflation by a factor of 1.15 to 1.5.
In 2005, the Median household income was $55,238. A Corolla cost 25-32% of that.
In 2013, the last year for which numbers have been released, the median household income was $51,939. A Corolla costs 33-44% of that.
In 1968, the Corolla was first introduced in the United States. It cost under $1,700. Median household income was $7,700. The Corolla cost 22% of that.
Clearly cars are costing more as a fraction of income then ever before.
This does not even take into consideration that many households in 1968 were single earner households. Now, most households are dual income, but with nearly twice the earners in the household, the cost of a new car is still a higher percentage of income than ever before.
Well, yes, but if they STOP offering those things, they don't raise your salary. Where I worked most recently they used to pay for lunch almost every day. Then they said they were not longer providing that, and sure enough , they no longer provided it. However, the salaries remained the same.
If they have written the software such that you, they or anyone else can modify the mileage then they are violating a lot of laws. I believe this to be a strawman argument.
I don't think people who want to work on their car are becoming more rare. People who are ABLE to work on their car are becoming more rare because cars are becoming less mechanical and more software. Meanwhile the hourly rates for repair are going through the roof, so clearly more people would like to avoid that expense if they can. But they can't because the car companies won't let them. Used to be you could buy a brand new car for 1/4 of your annual income, and then work on it yourself for only the price of parts. Now, a brand new car costs more than half your annual income, and getting it fixed costs about another 10% of your annual income.
Natural forest fires are one thing, but forest fires have increased, mainly due to discarded lit cigarettes, but occasionally due to campfires which have not been put out properly.
Then you can brag to your friends about how your internet is so fast that you can use your entire month's allotment in only 20 minutes. I have Cox, and with my speeds, it takes me two hours (at their theoretical speeds) to use my allotment.
How many KWs of energy does it take to climb Pike's Peak? If my figures are right, if they take 10 minutes, then it would be about 25 KW just to lift the car straight up the 1.5 kilometers, not taking into consideration the twists and turns, wind resistance, etc.
"Rush hour" will become an anachronistic misnomer, as driverless cars could move at open freeway speeds, even with (increasingly rare) high traffic density. This will make its first appearance in formerly-HOV lanes. I imagine watching cars travelling 65mph -- even when they're nearly bumper-to-bumper
Most likely the autonomous cars will be built with the intelligence to maintain a safe distance, unlike human drivers/ This being the case, you won't see cars driving bumper to bumper at 65 MPH. At any moment, a car's tire could fall off, a large animal could run out in the road, or some other incident could disable a vehicle and the cars behind all need to be able to stop faster than the car in front. If the car veered into a pylon and stopped nearly instantly, but with part of the car still in the roadway, the car behind is screwed, unless they were following at a safe distance.
The only reason roads are able to handle the traffic they do right now is because people ignore the minimum safe distance. Once we have autonomous cars operating safely, the roads will have to be upgraded to handle the traffic flow with minimum distances.
What autonomous cars could do is get rid of the "inchworm" syndrome, where cars start, move a short distance, and stop, and then the cars behind them do the same thing, ad infinitum. Cars that know what is going on would allow for cars to drive at an average, slow speed rather than starting and stopping constantly.
Autonomous cars could also stop the problems of people starting into intersections that they have no hope of getting across before the light changes, and also of people running through lights that have already turned red, inconveniencing, or possibly killing the people whose light has turned green.
It's not hard to imagine use cases. Take, for instance, an 88-year-old senior who is trying to age in place but for whom a trip to the store isn't a trivial undertaking, and who has no interest in a smartphone (and sure isn't going to see a 4" HD screen).
Unfortunately, he will not be able to use this product because it requires a smartphone.
I can't blame him for not wanting to buy things via smartphone. I sure as heck would never buy anything using my smartphone, or even configure it so that I (or anyone who steals it from me or finds it laying around) could.
The main problem (well, perhaps not the MAIN problem) I see is that no-one signed up to have drone flights right over their houses.
That is true, and in the United States, the FAA already protects you from this invasion of your airspace. Since we are talking about rural areas (although I doubt a drone could be cost effective due to distance limitations in a rural area), the applicable FAR is Sec. 91.119 - Minimum safe altitudes: General....
(c) Over other than congested areas. An altitude of 500 feet above the surface, except over open water or sparsely populated areas. In those cases, the aircraft may not be operated closer than 500 feet to any person, vessel, vehicle, or structure.
Obviously a rural area is the only place where the craft could legally (well, quasi-legally, assuming that by ordering you are giving permission to land on your property) land and still be more than 500 feet from a person, vessel, vehicle or structure.
In a big city where a delivery is a 1-5 minute flight as the crow flies, as they say, or a 40 minute traffic fest. In major cities there is also the problem of where do you park even just to walk into the building for 2-5 minutes.
If you are UPS or FedEx, you just park in the middle of the street and block traffic.
Slashdot Mirror
Neither have I. I don't trust my cell phone service provider to handle consumer purchases. Not until they are regulated just like a credit card company would be and are the consumer's side instead of on the vendor's side. Right now, the worse you get scammed, the more money your phone company makes. This is not how you ensure proper customer service.
What is the most worthless app purchase you made? Did you ask for a refund? 1. several were worthless. 2. no. only cost $0.99. bottom line: gave up on the smartphone in 2013. have a dumb phone now. ignorance is bliss.
And that is what they are counting on. If you cheat a billion people out of $1, then hopefully those billion people won't care enough about it to tell the net person not to buy it. P.T. Barnum rides again.
The same thing train engineers are thinking.
Trains have solved the problem that driverless cars are trying to solve. Instead of cameras, GPS, and detailed maps, they simply use tracks to guide them. Guess what? After a few hundred years of using trains, we've found it helps to have a human on board. Same will be true of "driverless" cars and trucks.
-Chris
This. And Pilots. So the truck ( or train or plane) can drive itself 99% of the time, but when an emergency happens or something routine which we don't trust the computer to do, the human is there to handle it. The same thing will happen with trucks if anything happens at all. Driving a truck will just become a job where you sit around in the cab watching instruments 99% of the time. You can't and shouldn't eliminate the human.
In the Smart Fortwo EV, you do not have to buy the battery. You can rent it for $80/month.
Ah!. Then they have already figured out the cost of replacing a battery pack and amortized it. That also has the side effect of being able to figure out the monthly operating cost of the vehicle. $80 a month plus electricity. I have seen claims that it costs about $30 in electricity. So $110 compared to, say $100 worth of gas per month. I could see how some people will pay the extra $10 a month (plus the extra cost of the vehicle). It is only a TCO of maybe $5,000 more over a five year ownership.
You forget that there are 3 quarters in a year. I also assumed that that one class was the TAs only responsibility, while you assumed that they taught five classes. Certainly if they are teaching 5 classes, that changes the equation considerably. However, I have never known a TA to teach more than one or two classes.
You can't replace the drivetrain on a brand new BMW 3 series for $20k.
Well, maybe you could, but replacing the drive train is not normal maintenance, as would be replacing the battery in an EV. I have never replaced the drivetrain on any vehicle I have owned nor do I expect to have to.
How many times have you been in a meeting and someone's smartphone went off? Even if on vibrate? That person reacts to the phone. How much of a distraction is it to the members of the meeting?
So while you are taking care of the distraction, what have you missed of the meeting? Regardless of how many, or boring, the meetings that you attend. What if you had an opinion of what you missed that would have save hundreds of hours of work by not going down the wrong path, the harder path or just another view point on the problem that everyone missed? No they, and you, have missed the opportunity for "good".
Well, then don't allow distractions such as phones, tablets, laptops, and smartwatches to the meeting.
It can track and tell time!
Yes, but not for very long. If you really need to know the time accurately, it is recommended that you also wear a regular watch.
So they charge $41k per student, they have 15 students in a class, that is $615,000. Each of those students is probably taking about 5 classes each for three quarters, so that comes down to $41,000 per class. According to Standford itself, the most they pay is about $28,000 per year for Teaching Assistants, and some of that is funny money spent allowing them to take courses. Let's not forget that the University is constantly harassing alumni for money.
It certainly looks to me from a cursory look at the numbers that they can't afford to have two TAs in the class. However, in a school which boasts a low student to faculty ratio, they ought to have it easier than most schools for one faculty member to handle grading the work.
As far as I can tell the cost of a Toyota Corolla is basically the same number of dollars as it was 10 years ago. Which means that after factoring in inflation the car is significantly cheaper than it used to be.
Simple research on cars.com shows that the MSRP of a new 2015 Corolla is between 16,950 and 22,955. The original MSRP on a 2005 Corolla was 13,780 to 17,555. The price has increased between 23% and 31%. In that timeframe, inflation has supposedly gone up 20.2%, so the price of the Corolla has output paced inflation by a factor of 1.15 to 1.5.
In 2005, the Median household income was $55,238. A Corolla cost 25-32% of that.
In 2013, the last year for which numbers have been released, the median household income was $51,939. A Corolla costs 33-44% of that.
In 1968, the Corolla was first introduced in the United States. It cost under $1,700. Median household income was $7,700. The Corolla cost 22% of that.
Clearly cars are costing more as a fraction of income then ever before.
This does not even take into consideration that many households in 1968 were single earner households. Now, most households are dual income, but with nearly twice the earners in the household, the cost of a new car is still a higher percentage of income than ever before.
Well, yes, but if they STOP offering those things, they don't raise your salary. Where I worked most recently they used to pay for lunch almost every day. Then they said they were not longer providing that, and sure enough , they no longer provided it. However, the salaries remained the same.
Hey no problem. They want dealer only service for the life of the car, then go ahead and supply it under warranty.
If they have written the software such that you, they or anyone else can modify the mileage then they are violating a lot of laws. I believe this to be a strawman argument.
I don't think people who want to work on their car are becoming more rare. People who are ABLE to work on their car are becoming more rare because cars are becoming less mechanical and more software. Meanwhile the hourly rates for repair are going through the roof, so clearly more people would like to avoid that expense if they can. But they can't because the car companies won't let them. Used to be you could buy a brand new car for 1/4 of your annual income, and then work on it yourself for only the price of parts. Now, a brand new car costs more than half your annual income, and getting it fixed costs about another 10% of your annual income.
I've seen the prints of wales, but never an actual wale.
Well, by all means, set the example and the rest of us will follow it.
Natural forest fires are one thing, but forest fires have increased, mainly due to discarded lit cigarettes, but occasionally due to campfires which have not been put out properly.
Then you can brag to your friends about how your internet is so fast that you can use your entire month's allotment in only 20 minutes. I have Cox, and with my speeds, it takes me two hours (at their theoretical speeds) to use my allotment.
How many KWs of energy does it take to climb Pike's Peak? If my figures are right, if they take 10 minutes, then it would be about 25 KW just to lift the car straight up the 1.5 kilometers, not taking into consideration the twists and turns, wind resistance, etc.
"Rush hour" will become an anachronistic misnomer, as driverless cars could move at open freeway speeds, even with (increasingly rare) high traffic density. This will make its first appearance in formerly-HOV lanes. I imagine watching cars travelling 65mph -- even when they're nearly bumper-to-bumper
Most likely the autonomous cars will be built with the intelligence to maintain a safe distance, unlike human drivers/ This being the case, you won't see cars driving bumper to bumper at 65 MPH. At any moment, a car's tire could fall off, a large animal could run out in the road, or some other incident could disable a vehicle and the cars behind all need to be able to stop faster than the car in front. If the car veered into a pylon and stopped nearly instantly, but with part of the car still in the roadway, the car behind is screwed, unless they were following at a safe distance.
The only reason roads are able to handle the traffic they do right now is because people ignore the minimum safe distance. Once we have autonomous cars operating safely, the roads will have to be upgraded to handle the traffic flow with minimum distances.
What autonomous cars could do is get rid of the "inchworm" syndrome, where cars start, move a short distance, and stop, and then the cars behind them do the same thing, ad infinitum. Cars that know what is going on would allow for cars to drive at an average, slow speed rather than starting and stopping constantly.
Autonomous cars could also stop the problems of people starting into intersections that they have no hope of getting across before the light changes, and also of people running through lights that have already turned red, inconveniencing, or possibly killing the people whose light has turned green.
It's not hard to imagine use cases. Take, for instance, an 88-year-old senior who is trying to age in place but for whom a trip to the store isn't a trivial undertaking, and who has no interest in a smartphone (and sure isn't going to see a 4" HD screen).
Unfortunately, he will not be able to use this product because it requires a smartphone.
I can't blame him for not wanting to buy things via smartphone. I sure as heck would never buy anything using my smartphone, or even configure it so that I (or anyone who steals it from me or finds it laying around) could.
Or if not noon, at least by the time you are 12.
Is it "Don't read slashdot" day already? This year is going by fast.
The main problem (well, perhaps not the MAIN problem) I see is that no-one signed up to have drone flights right over their houses.
That is true, and in the United States, the FAA already protects you from this invasion of your airspace. Since we are talking about rural areas (although I doubt a drone could be cost effective due to distance limitations in a rural area), the applicable FAR is Sec. 91.119 - Minimum safe altitudes: General.... (c) Over other than congested areas. An altitude of 500 feet above the surface, except over open water or sparsely populated areas. In those cases, the aircraft may not be operated closer than 500 feet to any person, vessel, vehicle, or structure.
Obviously a rural area is the only place where the craft could legally (well, quasi-legally, assuming that by ordering you are giving permission to land on your property) land and still be more than 500 feet from a person, vessel, vehicle or structure.
In a big city where a delivery is a 1-5 minute flight as the crow flies, as they say, or a 40 minute traffic fest. In major cities there is also the problem of where do you park even just to walk into the building for 2-5 minutes.
If you are UPS or FedEx, you just park in the middle of the street and block traffic.