I'm really surprised that, "It's just a prank bro!" hasn't been documented on-video as famous last words.
I guess I look at pranks on strangers as something that has to be limited enough that the person pranked will themselves laugh about it. It's one thing to prank your friends that you have an understanding with, but it's an entirely different matter to do something that affects otherwise-uninvolved third parties.
This is a case of, "play stupid games, win stupid prizes."
I expect that things like divorce happen in progressive societies because we allow the individual to leave a marriage, and we allow either individual to make the choice.
Societies that either do not let marriages end, or else restrict who can initiate such a divorce, or even societies where such a divorce is possible but where one party may end up without any of the resources gained during the marriage. All of these conditions either prevent divorce, formally restrict divorce, or otherwise make ending a marriage impossible or impractical.
If you look at the nature of product recalls, they're generally recalled for one of three reasons:
Product is inherently flawed or otherwise unsafe and cannot be corrected. This covers things like manufacturing the chassis of a product with flawed materials, or using the wrong material, or a design whose intended use is inherently unsafe. Two examples I can think of off of the top of my head are Lawn Darts, whose very concept makes them unsafe, and the Perfect Flame grille, whose housing was magnesium and prone to igniting in a metal-fire.
Product has minor flaws or only a risk of safety-issue, but correcting those flaws will cost too much to achieve. Inexpensive home goods may fall into this category, and sometimes when food products are recalled en-masse it's like this- only a few actual package of a food item may be dangerous, but it would cost far more to test all of the food for the danger than it is to just throw it away.
Users misuse a product and it's not possible to correct user-error. At first this doesn't sound like a product problem, but casual-use products are not supposed to require advanced training to use. There's a threshold for the number of incidents relative to the userbase to be considered, and if too many users are all having similar problems then that's indicative that something in the product itself needs to be changed, as changing human behavior on a large scale is not easy.
Unfortunately software has been allowed to violate #3 and arguably the others for a very long time, as the push for newer/faster/prettier has trumped all other considerations. It's about time that we acknowledge that we haven't really made much improvement in UI in the last decade and that at-best we're reimplementing the wheel, and that we need to forcus on the underpinnings.
Yep. I'm typing this on an Alienware M17x, which came out in 2009 and still does everything I need it to do beautifully as effectively a desktop computer.
One can actually thank the advent of tablets for making the use of older computers with newer software possible, a lot of scaled-down mobile devices use variants of what had been desktop or higher-end laptop components years earlier. As software companies are forced to write for less horsepower to have good applications on the mobile devices the side-effect is supporting slower, older computers.
They're trying to counteract that with rules as to what chipsets and processors new OSes will run on, but if they're not careful they'll end up with a fractured market like cell phones.
Gotta start somewhere. Sorry petroleum industry, but it looks like the focus of your products will have to change. Trying to forestall it with claims so transparent even auto enthusiasts are embarrassed by them won't help.
Whatever remaining aspects of pollution from electric cars can be addressed in-time.
Is this first-hand knowledge or is this your repeating what you've heard elsewhere?
I ask because I don't have first-hand knowledge of how regen-braking works. I would love to think that traction motors do all of the braking and that pads are only put into use for either emergency stops or for parking brakes when the vehicle is off, but I do not know and I do not claim to know.
If you have first-hand knowledge, as a designer, or as a manufacturer, or as a mechanic, or even as an owner I would like to hear how the systems have performed, but if all that you're doing is repeating what others, who themselves lack first-hand experience, have said, then perhaps you need to stop repeating what you don't know.
Yeah, it's common, but it's not common to have no electrical system whatsoever. I'm talking a vehicle with no alternator, no generator, no battery, no wiring, no lights.
Given that lights are required and DOT-rated lights are all electrical there will always be an electrical system on a truck, for what it's worth. Hence why we use electric-powered pulley clutches and fans and stuff.
I admit, I was an early-adopter and had a T-Mobile G1 (aka HTC Dream), which was the first production Android phone. Now, I got it because I saw Android as the natural evolution for use of a personal digital assistant kind of device, and I'd carried Palm devices for years. Unlike Palm, the over-the-air synching and other centralized services actually worked right, so the phone acted as a natural extension of my existing e-mail and contacts and calendar and the like, and the actual handset didn't matter since the content that was important was housed centrally.
I don't text all that much, I don't get on the phone all that much. I check the device when I have notifications, but given the nature of my current job and dealing with outages, it makes it convenient to know that something's gone awry quickly so I can address it while handling my other duties.
I would much rather people call me on my landline, and my business cards don't even have my cell phone number printed on them. If someone needs my cell phone number I'll provide it, but that's not usually the case.
I survived being grounded, without long-lasting repercussions. They'll survive.
Kids need to learn that there are consequences for their actions, while those consequences are relatively minor.
As a parallel, I ended up getting a better job at work because the guy that was the lead tested several of us out, "borrowing" us for some larger jobs. One of the guys that lost-out did so because he couldn't stop texting to focus on the damn job.
The conclusion is bullshit. Free will isn't an illusion and life isn't a game that plays us. (Anyone catch the reference there?)
On short time scales, reaction time is probably faster if the brain does some processing in advance. The decision is already made so the mental processing need not be done instantly and, instead, can just be acted upon almost right away.
The thing I took, at least from the article summary, is that they were given a particular test, and depending on how their mechanistic senses worked, they did better when answering closer to the event because the brain is able to act on sensory input before consciousness necessarily kicks-in.
I don't really see how that's any different than anticipating a pothole while walking, or attempting to block a suckerpunch, or other forms of recognition of pending events based on low-level processing of how the body moves through its envionment.
I don't see how responding to things based on sensory input that one was tasked to respond-to, or are self-preservation tactics, means that there's no free will.
Minivans are probably the vehicle most likely to have more than a single occupant, and for those additional occupants to be attention-grabbing children. It's also a very good platform for long-distance driving, such that the combination of the two means that the adult, freed from the necessity of driving, could spend more time engaging with the kids, sightseeing, and otherwise doing things that the form-factor of the platform allows while the vehicle drives itself.
Minivans are essentially the most utility-driven vehicle that normal consumers buy, in the sense that they're the most versatile for the largest set of tasks. Hauling people. Hauling cargo. Hauling a combination. Driving long distances. Sports cars and four wheel drive trucks and SUVs are about the worst candidates if the owners use them to their design-intentions, sports cars are supposed to be fun to drive, and 4x4s probably won't have any kind of autonomous mode that would work off-pavement.
I could see a road-trip in a self-driving minivan being a comfortable thing, especially if they get the design of the interior such that it allows the "driver" to turn around and participate with the passengers.
The electric motor is not strictly necessary. Automotive air conditioners rely on power taken from the crankshaft to turn the compressor.
It probably has never been built, but it should be possible to build pneumatic-start into a mechanical-injected diesel truck, with a full-time, clutchless, belt-driven AC compressor, and with a belt and shaft-driven cabin fan, with a belt-driven compressor to recharge the compressed-air tank to drive the starter.
Obviously there isn't a benefit in doing this, electrical technology is ubiquitous enough to where we generally can get away without having to go nuts to avoid it, but we could if we really, really wanted to.
Refrigeration technology also allows us to produce heat from electricity more efficiently and more safely than simply heating-up wires by passing current through them. Such allows us to further reduce dependence on chemical-reaction combustion, if we take the initiative to build power plants that don't chemically-burn fuel to make electricity.
Only rule here is that if you have an alarm, you have to register it with the municipality. Alarm doesn't even have to be monitored. The fee is low enough that it doesn't seem like a cash-grab either, like $10/year if I remember right. I think the main purpose is so that they know who to contact if an alarm goes-off and no one is home.
Done via the federal level. Require states to find the average weighted sales tax rate for all things. This includes local. Then take that new rate, and only allow out-of-state businesses to pay it using a special tax code. This way, it's very simple.
Weighted since cities/counties/etc. have different rates.
"all things" since different items might be taxed differently. Although, when the out-of-state business calculates the tax, it first needs to determine if it's a taxable good (some places exempt food for example). Although, it could just charge the tax and leave it to the consumer to get a refund on the taxed item, for simplicity purposes.
And it'd only be for out-of-state businesses.
The revenue would then be divided up in a fair and appropriate manner within the state to its own taxing locales.
It's likely that it'll be held to the state-level.
When Dad bought a car from an out-of-state dealer he basically did it as a catalog purchase with will-call pickup. The selling dealership did not collect any taxes, including anything for registration other than the fee for a temporary-use permit so we could drive it home.
He did still have to pay taxes, but those taxes assessed were state-taxes, no county or municipal taxes. Also, normally our state bases the sales-taxes on the MSRP of the vehicle regardless of the deal negotiated (probably in-part to prevent fudging the paperwork by offloading some vehicle costs as untaxed labor for the installation of accessories) but because this was an out-of-state purchase, the sales tax was based on the contract price, not on the MSRP. Even with three people flying in and with a hotel bill, fuel, and food, it was still a lot cheaper to purchase the vehicle this way.
I expect that taxes will be similarly applied to catalog purchases if retailers are forced to collect them on behalf of the resident's state. Counties and municipalities will either not factor-in (as they don't when you buy something in an adjacent city anyway) and the seller will only have to collect on behalf of the state. I furthermore expect some states to attempt to add more taxes to out-of-state catalog purchases (like New Hampshire, no local sales tax, so they could encourage local retail through out-of-state catalog purchase taxes) but that this may be a problem and could be ruled-against.
That's because Amazon has a business-presence in Illinois. When the selling agent has a presence in the state it's really not possible to justify the purchase as an out-of- state purchase.
The issue now is that with these vulnerable systems, depending on what a burglar is after, there may be no sign that the house was entered until long after the crime.
The best crime is the one where no one realizes that a crime was committed. The second best crime is when, on discovery, no one knows when the crime was committed. Before, a burglar usually had to actually break something to get in, such that the evidence of the crime was discovered within hours or days. Now, if the burglar can open their phone and use and application to unlock the door, if they're after something specific and not obvious (like stored jewelery that isn't daily-wear for example) they can come and go without someone realizing until they discover said items missing.
In theory if you have a monitorable camera system, a competent security company will check the camera feeds soon after the alarm notification. Obviously this requires that their access to the cameras works properly, and that they respond to alarms quickly, but it's still doable.
For a security system to work best you need all points of entrance except for one to be instant-trip, as in, if someone attempts to enter through any door other than a particular one, the alarm immediately goes off and trips the notification. If door has a grace-period to deactivate the system then a quick smash-and-grab may be over before security company even gets the notice that there's an alarm.
Lastly, even though some may argue against it from a fire safety perspective, use double-cylinder locks, so that a key is necessary to open the door from either side. if a thief breaks-in through a window on the backside of the house to avoid attracting too much attention they won't be able to just open the front door from the inside to run off with your stuff.
Just revert the reversion, unless they made a valid point. Due to the 3RR rule, you can revert 3 times, unless another author agrees with them, Also, your edit will wind up remaining in place, because the other user is also not allowed to revert more than 3 times, and if they do, you can request intervention.
I'm sorry, I have this thing called a life. I'm not going to play games like trying to bump-up against an edit/revert counter with a bunch of people that don't have lives, I have better things to do.
The person that spends the most time making edits is the Editor. And there are a lot of self-important busy-bodies that will revert casual edits because they can. Some will attempt to justify it with official-sounding reasons for reversing, others will simply revert without much comment.
This is why I don't contribute to Wikipedia anymore, and why I do not browse it as much as I used to. The idea was interesting, but due to the way it was set up, the trolls run the place.
...that they could get away with it for longer. Japan is a lot more urban so there's a lot more city driving. It's much harder to determine if you're getting worse fuel economy than you were supposed to get when driving conditions already put that fuel economy measurement all over the place.
The '93 would have either had a K-engine (2.2/2.5) or a Mitsubishi 3.0L V6.
The '97 would have had either a Powertech (2.4) or a a 3.3 or 3.8 V6.
the 2.4 had a real problem with head gaskets, the bean-counters wouldn't allow them to use the multi-layer steel gasket, and the cheaper gaskets failed, many were replaced under-recall. Unfortunately if the shop did a crap-job under recall (like in my Stratus) then the cooling system could act as a vent for exhaust gases under pressure.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm really surprised that, "It's just a prank bro!" hasn't been documented on-video as famous last words.
I guess I look at pranks on strangers as something that has to be limited enough that the person pranked will themselves laugh about it. It's one thing to prank your friends that you have an understanding with, but it's an entirely different matter to do something that affects otherwise-uninvolved third parties.
This is a case of, "play stupid games, win stupid prizes."
I expect that things like divorce happen in progressive societies because we allow the individual to leave a marriage, and we allow either individual to make the choice.
Societies that either do not let marriages end, or else restrict who can initiate such a divorce, or even societies where such a divorce is possible but where one party may end up without any of the resources gained during the marriage. All of these conditions either prevent divorce, formally restrict divorce, or otherwise make ending a marriage impossible or impractical.
If you look at the nature of product recalls, they're generally recalled for one of three reasons:
Product is inherently flawed or otherwise unsafe and cannot be corrected. This covers things like manufacturing the chassis of a product with flawed materials, or using the wrong material, or a design whose intended use is inherently unsafe. Two examples I can think of off of the top of my head are Lawn Darts, whose very concept makes them unsafe, and the Perfect Flame grille, whose housing was magnesium and prone to igniting in a metal-fire.
Product has minor flaws or only a risk of safety-issue, but correcting those flaws will cost too much to achieve. Inexpensive home goods may fall into this category, and sometimes when food products are recalled en-masse it's like this- only a few actual package of a food item may be dangerous, but it would cost far more to test all of the food for the danger than it is to just throw it away.
Users misuse a product and it's not possible to correct user-error. At first this doesn't sound like a product problem, but casual-use products are not supposed to require advanced training to use. There's a threshold for the number of incidents relative to the userbase to be considered, and if too many users are all having similar problems then that's indicative that something in the product itself needs to be changed, as changing human behavior on a large scale is not easy.
Unfortunately software has been allowed to violate #3 and arguably the others for a very long time, as the push for newer/faster/prettier has trumped all other considerations. It's about time that we acknowledge that we haven't really made much improvement in UI in the last decade and that at-best we're reimplementing the wheel, and that we need to forcus on the underpinnings.
Yep. I'm typing this on an Alienware M17x, which came out in 2009 and still does everything I need it to do beautifully as effectively a desktop computer.
One can actually thank the advent of tablets for making the use of older computers with newer software possible, a lot of scaled-down mobile devices use variants of what had been desktop or higher-end laptop components years earlier. As software companies are forced to write for less horsepower to have good applications on the mobile devices the side-effect is supporting slower, older computers.
They're trying to counteract that with rules as to what chipsets and processors new OSes will run on, but if they're not careful they'll end up with a fractured market like cell phones.
Answer is one bite at a time.
Gotta start somewhere. Sorry petroleum industry, but it looks like the focus of your products will have to change. Trying to forestall it with claims so transparent even auto enthusiasts are embarrassed by them won't help.
Whatever remaining aspects of pollution from electric cars can be addressed in-time.
Is this first-hand knowledge or is this your repeating what you've heard elsewhere?
I ask because I don't have first-hand knowledge of how regen-braking works. I would love to think that traction motors do all of the braking and that pads are only put into use for either emergency stops or for parking brakes when the vehicle is off, but I do not know and I do not claim to know.
If you have first-hand knowledge, as a designer, or as a manufacturer, or as a mechanic, or even as an owner I would like to hear how the systems have performed, but if all that you're doing is repeating what others, who themselves lack first-hand experience, have said, then perhaps you need to stop repeating what you don't know.
Yeah, it's common, but it's not common to have no electrical system whatsoever. I'm talking a vehicle with no alternator, no generator, no battery, no wiring, no lights.
Given that lights are required and DOT-rated lights are all electrical there will always be an electrical system on a truck, for what it's worth. Hence why we use electric-powered pulley clutches and fans and stuff.
I admit, I was an early-adopter and had a T-Mobile G1 (aka HTC Dream), which was the first production Android phone. Now, I got it because I saw Android as the natural evolution for use of a personal digital assistant kind of device, and I'd carried Palm devices for years. Unlike Palm, the over-the-air synching and other centralized services actually worked right, so the phone acted as a natural extension of my existing e-mail and contacts and calendar and the like, and the actual handset didn't matter since the content that was important was housed centrally.
I don't text all that much, I don't get on the phone all that much. I check the device when I have notifications, but given the nature of my current job and dealing with outages, it makes it convenient to know that something's gone awry quickly so I can address it while handling my other duties.
I would much rather people call me on my landline, and my business cards don't even have my cell phone number printed on them. If someone needs my cell phone number I'll provide it, but that's not usually the case.
I survived being grounded, without long-lasting repercussions. They'll survive.
Kids need to learn that there are consequences for their actions, while those consequences are relatively minor.
As a parallel, I ended up getting a better job at work because the guy that was the lead tested several of us out, "borrowing" us for some larger jobs. One of the guys that lost-out did so because he couldn't stop texting to focus on the damn job.
The conclusion is bullshit. Free will isn't an illusion and life isn't a game that plays us. (Anyone catch the reference there?)
On short time scales, reaction time is probably faster if the brain does some processing in advance. The decision is already made so the mental processing need not be done instantly and, instead, can just be acted upon almost right away.
The thing I took, at least from the article summary, is that they were given a particular test, and depending on how their mechanistic senses worked, they did better when answering closer to the event because the brain is able to act on sensory input before consciousness necessarily kicks-in.
I don't really see how that's any different than anticipating a pothole while walking, or attempting to block a suckerpunch, or other forms of recognition of pending events based on low-level processing of how the body moves through its envionment.
I don't see how responding to things based on sensory input that one was tasked to respond-to, or are self-preservation tactics, means that there's no free will.
Minivans are probably the vehicle most likely to have more than a single occupant, and for those additional occupants to be attention-grabbing children. It's also a very good platform for long-distance driving, such that the combination of the two means that the adult, freed from the necessity of driving, could spend more time engaging with the kids, sightseeing, and otherwise doing things that the form-factor of the platform allows while the vehicle drives itself.
Minivans are essentially the most utility-driven vehicle that normal consumers buy, in the sense that they're the most versatile for the largest set of tasks. Hauling people. Hauling cargo. Hauling a combination. Driving long distances. Sports cars and four wheel drive trucks and SUVs are about the worst candidates if the owners use them to their design-intentions, sports cars are supposed to be fun to drive, and 4x4s probably won't have any kind of autonomous mode that would work off-pavement.
I could see a road-trip in a self-driving minivan being a comfortable thing, especially if they get the design of the interior such that it allows the "driver" to turn around and participate with the passengers.
The electric motor is not strictly necessary. Automotive air conditioners rely on power taken from the crankshaft to turn the compressor.
It probably has never been built, but it should be possible to build pneumatic-start into a mechanical-injected diesel truck, with a full-time, clutchless, belt-driven AC compressor, and with a belt and shaft-driven cabin fan, with a belt-driven compressor to recharge the compressed-air tank to drive the starter.
Obviously there isn't a benefit in doing this, electrical technology is ubiquitous enough to where we generally can get away without having to go nuts to avoid it, but we could if we really, really wanted to.
Refrigeration technology also allows us to produce heat from electricity more efficiently and more safely than simply heating-up wires by passing current through them. Such allows us to further reduce dependence on chemical-reaction combustion, if we take the initiative to build power plants that don't chemically-burn fuel to make electricity.
That's pretty bad, about the alarm response.
Only rule here is that if you have an alarm, you have to register it with the municipality. Alarm doesn't even have to be monitored. The fee is low enough that it doesn't seem like a cash-grab either, like $10/year if I remember right. I think the main purpose is so that they know who to contact if an alarm goes-off and no one is home.
Done via the federal level. Require states to find the average weighted sales tax rate for all things. This includes local. Then take that new rate, and only allow out-of-state businesses to pay it using a special tax code. This way, it's very simple.
Weighted since cities/counties/etc. have different rates. "all things" since different items might be taxed differently. Although, when the out-of-state business calculates the tax, it first needs to determine if it's a taxable good (some places exempt food for example). Although, it could just charge the tax and leave it to the consumer to get a refund on the taxed item, for simplicity purposes. And it'd only be for out-of-state businesses. The revenue would then be divided up in a fair and appropriate manner within the state to its own taxing locales.
Any thoughts on this idea?
You had me right up until the bold line.
It's likely that it'll be held to the state-level.
When Dad bought a car from an out-of-state dealer he basically did it as a catalog purchase with will-call pickup. The selling dealership did not collect any taxes, including anything for registration other than the fee for a temporary-use permit so we could drive it home.
He did still have to pay taxes, but those taxes assessed were state-taxes, no county or municipal taxes. Also, normally our state bases the sales-taxes on the MSRP of the vehicle regardless of the deal negotiated (probably in-part to prevent fudging the paperwork by offloading some vehicle costs as untaxed labor for the installation of accessories) but because this was an out-of-state purchase, the sales tax was based on the contract price, not on the MSRP. Even with three people flying in and with a hotel bill, fuel, and food, it was still a lot cheaper to purchase the vehicle this way.
I expect that taxes will be similarly applied to catalog purchases if retailers are forced to collect them on behalf of the resident's state. Counties and municipalities will either not factor-in (as they don't when you buy something in an adjacent city anyway) and the seller will only have to collect on behalf of the state. I furthermore expect some states to attempt to add more taxes to out-of-state catalog purchases (like New Hampshire, no local sales tax, so they could encourage local retail through out-of-state catalog purchase taxes) but that this may be a problem and could be ruled-against.
That's because Amazon has a business-presence in Illinois. When the selling agent has a presence in the state it's really not possible to justify the purchase as an out-of- state purchase.
The issue now is that with these vulnerable systems, depending on what a burglar is after, there may be no sign that the house was entered until long after the crime.
The best crime is the one where no one realizes that a crime was committed. The second best crime is when, on discovery, no one knows when the crime was committed. Before, a burglar usually had to actually break something to get in, such that the evidence of the crime was discovered within hours or days. Now, if the burglar can open their phone and use and application to unlock the door, if they're after something specific and not obvious (like stored jewelery that isn't daily-wear for example) they can come and go without someone realizing until they discover said items missing.
In theory if you have a monitorable camera system, a competent security company will check the camera feeds soon after the alarm notification. Obviously this requires that their access to the cameras works properly, and that they respond to alarms quickly, but it's still doable.
For a security system to work best you need all points of entrance except for one to be instant-trip, as in, if someone attempts to enter through any door other than a particular one, the alarm immediately goes off and trips the notification. If door has a grace-period to deactivate the system then a quick smash-and-grab may be over before security company even gets the notice that there's an alarm.
Lastly, even though some may argue against it from a fire safety perspective, use double-cylinder locks, so that a key is necessary to open the door from either side. if a thief breaks-in through a window on the backside of the house to avoid attracting too much attention they won't be able to just open the front door from the inside to run off with your stuff.
Can confrm. Got wife a t-shirt that says, "I put ketchup on my ketchup" because it's true.
Just revert the reversion, unless they made a valid point. Due to the 3RR rule, you can revert 3 times, unless another author agrees with them, Also, your edit will wind up remaining in place, because the other user is also not allowed to revert more than 3 times, and if they do, you can request intervention.
I'm sorry, I have this thing called a life. I'm not going to play games like trying to bump-up against an edit/revert counter with a bunch of people that don't have lives, I have better things to do.
Wikipedia is playing King of the Hill.
The person that spends the most time making edits is the Editor. And there are a lot of self-important busy-bodies that will revert casual edits because they can. Some will attempt to justify it with official-sounding reasons for reversing, others will simply revert without much comment.
This is why I don't contribute to Wikipedia anymore, and why I do not browse it as much as I used to. The idea was interesting, but due to the way it was set up, the trolls run the place.
And now you know why Slashdot never added Unicode support.
...that they could get away with it for longer. Japan is a lot more urban so there's a lot more city driving. It's much harder to determine if you're getting worse fuel economy than you were supposed to get when driving conditions already put that fuel economy measurement all over the place.
The '93 would have either had a K-engine (2.2/2.5) or a Mitsubishi 3.0L V6.
The '97 would have had either a Powertech (2.4) or a a 3.3 or 3.8 V6.
the 2.4 had a real problem with head gaskets, the bean-counters wouldn't allow them to use the multi-layer steel gasket, and the cheaper gaskets failed, many were replaced under-recall. Unfortunately if the shop did a crap-job under recall (like in my Stratus) then the cooling system could act as a vent for exhaust gases under pressure.