Can you provide a citation? I've been pretty deep into cars as a hobby for about fifteen years now and your comment is the first I've heard about it. Besides, cars 1996 and above are not dyno-tested anymore, they use an OBD-II reader that interfaces to the car's electronics and basically asks the car if it's passing its tests or not. They wouldn't have to fake a dyno comparing ABS properties on each axle when that test was no longer being performed.
I personally kind of like the idea that law would be uniform from state to state. In 1791 travel was difficult and it was very unlikely that people would move around so much as they do today or that they could literally spend a few days half a nation away. Besides, less than seventy years later this country fought its bloodiest war ever in part on account of states having more internal power than they probably should have, and the legacy of that war a hundred years later was still being contested in the very places most affected by it.
Sorry, the enrollment period is closed. You'll have to wait for your employer's next go-around or have a life-changing event, like getting married, getting divorced, having children, adopting children, or having any of the people in the aforementioned groups die. Then contact your Human Resources Employee Benefits and Risk Management Department, find the clerk that handles your particular ID range, then once you reach her, explain the life change, get the necessary form to fill out and mail back, wait a week, and receive confirmation.
In reality, it's a lot easier to make a Jeep perform a lot more like Corvette than it is to make a Corvette perform like a Jeep, especially when both vehicles are limited to the same road-going laws.
Here, the claw is two clamshell halves with rubber pulled from two points. As the clamshell closes the rubber, not the metal, grabs the barrel. The arm lifts it and as it pivots over the truck right behind the cab the lid falls open from gravity and the contents spill into the truck. The truck then presses the contents back from the cab to the back of the hopper, so that the same hydraulics can also dump the truck when they get to the landfill.
It's very efficient. There's enough play in the claw that it doesn't have to stop perfectly positioned next to the can, and often the claw is on a horizontal track, so one stop could collect two cans without moving the truck if they're close enough together. The cans are fairly durable so the beating they take doesn't destroy them very quickly, and the truck can dump a load in a second.
It's not all that different in high-density cities like New York. In some buildings garbage men still climb stairs up to upper floors to grab plastic bags of garbage left out in the hall by the tenants of the floor, haul them down to the truck, and go back up for more again.
That's part why I don't know how good robotics would be for this unless they're willing to also modify how the trash gets accumulated in the buildings to start with, and the more consolidation done in each building, the easier it is to pick-up without using advanced robots.
The article submitter made it clear that he's new. He very well may not understand the workflow and who actually knows how to take care of what. He needs to learn that before he can start making changes, or he, not the existing staff, will be the one blamed when everything goes wrong.
IT attracts a fair amount of introverts. It's likely that a lot of his staff are playing their cards close to their chest because that's what they're simply used to doing. It's also possible that they themselves wanted to make changes but were not given the budget needed to do so, so legacy systems continue to be used. It could also be that a few incompetent people in key positions have gummed-up the whole works.
Do you think that anyone wants to be stuck with ancient garbage if there's something newer that actually demonstrably works better? Most of the time the decisions that hold back the IT department are made either by IT management or by those outside of the IT department.
Yep. If you're not in-charge and able to make the tough calls (ie, figuring out who's actually supporting important stuff, who's not, and making the decisions about who gets a chance to migrate to something new and who needs to take their skillset elsewhere) then you're probably not going to make the difference that you want to make or that your superiors somehow expect.
What I can say, from experience, is that you need to actually learn how things are working now before you start making changes. I've had bosses brought in from the outside that thought they were gods' gift to the IT world that decided to try to remake the organization in their own image, only be be fired less than a year later because they pissed off all of the existing IT staff such that the boss got no results, and pissed off the users by failing to maintain existing workflow such that the users' jobs became much harder or required lots of direct assistance.
Learn what's there, why it's there, and understand that most decisions were made as a reaction to something prompting it to be necessary. Change what can be changed in a sane way, but don't take personal offense to anything as it is now as there are probably good reasons why it is the way it is. If you come in with the attitude that you can rip out everything without a care, you'll find suddenly that no staff will bother to warn you of the pitfalls in front of you that they're all well aware of, and you, not them, will be the one with egg on your face when it breaks because it was your decision to change it.
That seems weird. Our standardized cans for recycling are too large and heavy to be manhandled when they're full. The trash here is picked up from the alley, in cans that are very, very big and definitely not man-movable.
You can't possibly be a real person! It's like a caricature of someone so destroyed by that which they hate, that they become an even greater evil. Your hatred of hipsters has caused you to become a vile, filth-spewing menace to polite society.
Penny Arcade had something to say on this kind of thing. Sad thing is that they're right.
All the world seems in tune on a spring afternoon
When we're poisoning pigeons^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hcanines in the park
Every Sunday you'll see my sweetheart and me
As we poison the pigeons^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hcanines in the park...
Back when IRC was pretty hot, a couple of friends of mine each created bots that attempted to interact with an unsuspecting channel. One of the bot was a massive thing that attempted to learn and form responses based on keywords, while the other one just randomly pulled lines from a cybersex chat log. Both masqueraded as women. The advanced bot that was somewhat capable of making reasoned responses was kicked in a few minutes, the other one was there for the better part of half an hour before it inadvertently triggered a channel guard bot; it complained that no one was talking so it should go to #lesbian and it got kicked for 'advertising'.
The guy that had spent some time writing the more advanced bot gave up on that sort of thing altogether, he was so bummed out.
If the union leadership is smart they'll see that the automation is coming regardless, and will work toward a solution that slowly replaces workers as they retire with mechanization instead of one day the parent organization lays-off the entire union when the brand new fleet of autonomous machines appears. The Union can also migrate toward organization of the maintenance staff that take care of the machines, which will require their own specific kinds of maintenance, and are also probably somewhat better paying jobs that simply operating the trucks are.
Some unions over time have had the foresight to do this while others have not. It's bad for a society to have a lot of unemployed, probably worse than having inefficiency in the system due to outmoded practices.
...but in suburban and rural areas this really wouldn't be that necessary. As long as there's room for a standardized bin to be wheeled to the street by the tenant or resident of the property then the trash truck is capable of automatically picking up the can and dumping its contents so long as the driver stops the truck at the right spot.
There are still some places where two or three men work each truck, where one drives and one or two manually dump the tenants' or residents' own cans instead of a standardized can supplied by the municipality, but I suspect those are more due to negotiated rules between the unions and the waste management services; the unions want to keep their people employed and the service doesn't want to spend $300,000 per truck to replace their old manual truck that still run with new automated trucks, so they keep the existing system in place.
Makes me wonder how easy it would be to automate trash collection from high density areas though, where each building and possibly each floor would have its own unique method for placing trash for collection. It might require standardization, to a degree, on the part of the residents.
A 3D printed drone that connects to the IoT and has iPhone connectivity with an app that hacks cars!
Well, the IoT thing and the iPhone thing are redundant, but if the only way to hack a car was to keep up with it on the road and to establish a direct point to point connection to it, this would probably be the solution to make that happen.
DRM is Digital Rights Management. Preventing a special cartridge from being rewound without inerting a pin into a special hole on the rental tape is not digital. It's a literal mechanical lock. Probably easily defeated too, but most people wouldn't bother unless someone else made a machine to do it for them.
I admit I only skimmed the article. As a kid we watched rental tapes over and over while we had the tapes. One-watch per rental simply wouldn't fly. We also had separate VCRs from our TVs, we had probably three or four TVs but only two VCRs, and they got moved around to different TVs occasionally as needed. So between the one-watch model, the higher startup-costs associated with having to buy the TV/VCR combo, and the reduced portability I can see why the system didn't really take off.
That's not a good solution at all. Kids often take their favorite toys with them wherever they go. Daycare, school, road trips, grandma's house, their friends' houses, out on the back lawn, etc. Requiring the toy to link to a home computer through the home WIFI is not the right solution.
I suspect a lot of "customers" will refuse the reflash after they figure out it'll cause a loss of power (which in a diesel is bad enough as it is). As far as I know, nowhere in the US has yearly emissions testing like the UK.
They probably won't have a choice. VW will be forced to provide records of which vehicles were flashed, and those records will be pushed to the motor vehicle departments of all states, and they will simply not be eligible for plate renewal if the owners haven't had the cars fixed.
There are jurisdictions that specifically require emissions testing and plenty of places where it's not mandatory that an end-owner could get away with tampering and no one would be the wiser, but as far as the federal government is concerned every car sold new has to meet the legal requirements, even in places where the states, counties, or cities don't actually themselves require cars to be tested.
I would not be surprised if the federal government was within its power to confiscate each and every vehicle. They've done that for grey-market imports like a whole bunch of Landrover Defenders that were VINned as pre-import-rule-change but the federal government felt were actually modern trucks with old VIN plates attached that did not meet the laws. They probably would not go to the extent to seize every violating VW, but they probably could and it would be legal.
Some may find my opinion on this harsh, but I think that they need to buy-back the cars at the original purchase price. Not current fair-market-value with depreciation factored-in, but original price including all sales taxes. I suspect that most of these cars are new enough that they'll be with their original owners.
My reasoning is that Volkswagen committed fraud. This was not some case of there being a means to accidentally trigger the car to go into a mode that violated the emissions rules that customers or service staff discovered and exploited, this was a car company that chose of its own accord to violate the law on an unprecedented scale. They defrauded the government and they defrauded their individual customers that bought cars expecting street-legal vehicles that met both the performance and the fuel economy criteria that Volkswagen advertised. Simply reprogramming the PCM may make the cars legal, but they now no longer meet the performance that the customers were sold on the cars as having. I've seen the commercials, a recent one featured a bunch of old-ladies getting into a kid's diesel car and not wanting to wear their seatbelts because it was an underpowered diesel, and the kid threw them around showing the performance. That performance as advertised is now gone.
Throw the book at them. Make it cost them $30,000,000,000 to correct this. Make this the single costliest consumer fraud case in the history of the concept and maybe, just maybe they and others like them will think before doing this again.
How about putting the speech processing and response circuit right into the toy, so it works locally irrespective of the Internet?
The first time I used speech recognition was on a Macintosh LC, a 68020 machine at 16MHz with 4MB RAM. I also used it on a 486DX. There's no excuse to offload speech recognition over the Internet when the device that is doing the initial listening doesn't use the Internet for anything.
I'm not exactly a fan of it being used this way for smartphones either, but at least there's usually an intent to use the input for Internet-connected purposes in that particular case.
Per-passenger might be a different market, but there's still program costs that have to be paid. Normally those costs are paid for by amortizing over the sale of aircraft. The purchase of the aircraft have to be paid, by amortizing over the sale of airfare.
I do not see enough passengers to justify enough planes to justify development costs. I don't doubt that there is a market for same-day passenger service to anywhere on the planet, but that market is too small to drive development of the equipment to make it possible. Even among the rich, there are only so many people that would want or need service like this, and most of them probably can't justify the $5000/trip cost to work weekdays at the office in Singapore and to see their families on the weekend in New York.
For just about anyone else going vast distances, there's usually time available to account for the travel.
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Can you provide a citation? I've been pretty deep into cars as a hobby for about fifteen years now and your comment is the first I've heard about it. Besides, cars 1996 and above are not dyno-tested anymore, they use an OBD-II reader that interfaces to the car's electronics and basically asks the car if it's passing its tests or not. They wouldn't have to fake a dyno comparing ABS properties on each axle when that test was no longer being performed.
I personally kind of like the idea that law would be uniform from state to state. In 1791 travel was difficult and it was very unlikely that people would move around so much as they do today or that they could literally spend a few days half a nation away. Besides, less than seventy years later this country fought its bloodiest war ever in part on account of states having more internal power than they probably should have, and the legacy of that war a hundred years later was still being contested in the very places most affected by it.
Sorry, the enrollment period is closed. You'll have to wait for your employer's next go-around or have a life-changing event, like getting married, getting divorced, having children, adopting children, or having any of the people in the aforementioned groups die. Then contact your Human Resources Employee Benefits and Risk Management Department, find the clerk that handles your particular ID range, then once you reach her, explain the life change, get the necessary form to fill out and mail back, wait a week, and receive confirmation.
When a plan or process exists it can be revised. No plan, no process, it's tough to even get the ball rolling.
ACA is a start. It's far from perfect. Its shortcomings hopefully will lead to further revision, now that we have something to actually revise.
In reality, it's a lot easier to make a Jeep perform a lot more like Corvette than it is to make a Corvette perform like a Jeep, especially when both vehicles are limited to the same road-going laws.
Here, the claw is two clamshell halves with rubber pulled from two points. As the clamshell closes the rubber, not the metal, grabs the barrel. The arm lifts it and as it pivots over the truck right behind the cab the lid falls open from gravity and the contents spill into the truck. The truck then presses the contents back from the cab to the back of the hopper, so that the same hydraulics can also dump the truck when they get to the landfill.
It's very efficient. There's enough play in the claw that it doesn't have to stop perfectly positioned next to the can, and often the claw is on a horizontal track, so one stop could collect two cans without moving the truck if they're close enough together. The cans are fairly durable so the beating they take doesn't destroy them very quickly, and the truck can dump a load in a second.
It's not all that different in high-density cities like New York. In some buildings garbage men still climb stairs up to upper floors to grab plastic bags of garbage left out in the hall by the tenants of the floor, haul them down to the truck, and go back up for more again.
That's part why I don't know how good robotics would be for this unless they're willing to also modify how the trash gets accumulated in the buildings to start with, and the more consolidation done in each building, the easier it is to pick-up without using advanced robots.
The article submitter made it clear that he's new. He very well may not understand the workflow and who actually knows how to take care of what. He needs to learn that before he can start making changes, or he, not the existing staff, will be the one blamed when everything goes wrong.
IT attracts a fair amount of introverts. It's likely that a lot of his staff are playing their cards close to their chest because that's what they're simply used to doing. It's also possible that they themselves wanted to make changes but were not given the budget needed to do so, so legacy systems continue to be used. It could also be that a few incompetent people in key positions have gummed-up the whole works.
Do you think that anyone wants to be stuck with ancient garbage if there's something newer that actually demonstrably works better? Most of the time the decisions that hold back the IT department are made either by IT management or by those outside of the IT department.
Yep. If you're not in-charge and able to make the tough calls (ie, figuring out who's actually supporting important stuff, who's not, and making the decisions about who gets a chance to migrate to something new and who needs to take their skillset elsewhere) then you're probably not going to make the difference that you want to make or that your superiors somehow expect.
What I can say, from experience, is that you need to actually learn how things are working now before you start making changes. I've had bosses brought in from the outside that thought they were gods' gift to the IT world that decided to try to remake the organization in their own image, only be be fired less than a year later because they pissed off all of the existing IT staff such that the boss got no results, and pissed off the users by failing to maintain existing workflow such that the users' jobs became much harder or required lots of direct assistance.
Learn what's there, why it's there, and understand that most decisions were made as a reaction to something prompting it to be necessary. Change what can be changed in a sane way, but don't take personal offense to anything as it is now as there are probably good reasons why it is the way it is. If you come in with the attitude that you can rip out everything without a care, you'll find suddenly that no staff will bother to warn you of the pitfalls in front of you that they're all well aware of, and you, not them, will be the one with egg on your face when it breaks because it was your decision to change it.
I think that bot from a few articles down is trying to weigh-in...
That seems weird. Our standardized cans for recycling are too large and heavy to be manhandled when they're full. The trash here is picked up from the alley, in cans that are very, very big and definitely not man-movable.
You can't possibly be a real person! It's like a caricature of someone so destroyed by that which they hate, that they become an even greater evil. Your hatred of hipsters has caused you to become a vile, filth-spewing menace to polite society.
Penny Arcade had something to say on this kind of thing. Sad thing is that they're right.
All the world seems in tune on a spring afternoon
When we're poisoning pigeons^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hcanines in the park
Every Sunday you'll see my sweetheart and me
As we poison the pigeons^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hcanines in the park...
Back when IRC was pretty hot, a couple of friends of mine each created bots that attempted to interact with an unsuspecting channel. One of the bot was a massive thing that attempted to learn and form responses based on keywords, while the other one just randomly pulled lines from a cybersex chat log. Both masqueraded as women. The advanced bot that was somewhat capable of making reasoned responses was kicked in a few minutes, the other one was there for the better part of half an hour before it inadvertently triggered a channel guard bot; it complained that no one was talking so it should go to #lesbian and it got kicked for 'advertising'.
The guy that had spent some time writing the more advanced bot gave up on that sort of thing altogether, he was so bummed out.
If the union leadership is smart they'll see that the automation is coming regardless, and will work toward a solution that slowly replaces workers as they retire with mechanization instead of one day the parent organization lays-off the entire union when the brand new fleet of autonomous machines appears. The Union can also migrate toward organization of the maintenance staff that take care of the machines, which will require their own specific kinds of maintenance, and are also probably somewhat better paying jobs that simply operating the trucks are.
Some unions over time have had the foresight to do this while others have not. It's bad for a society to have a lot of unemployed, probably worse than having inefficiency in the system due to outmoded practices.
...but in suburban and rural areas this really wouldn't be that necessary. As long as there's room for a standardized bin to be wheeled to the street by the tenant or resident of the property then the trash truck is capable of automatically picking up the can and dumping its contents so long as the driver stops the truck at the right spot.
There are still some places where two or three men work each truck, where one drives and one or two manually dump the tenants' or residents' own cans instead of a standardized can supplied by the municipality, but I suspect those are more due to negotiated rules between the unions and the waste management services; the unions want to keep their people employed and the service doesn't want to spend $300,000 per truck to replace their old manual truck that still run with new automated trucks, so they keep the existing system in place.
Makes me wonder how easy it would be to automate trash collection from high density areas though, where each building and possibly each floor would have its own unique method for placing trash for collection. It might require standardization, to a degree, on the part of the residents.
A 3D printed drone that connects to the IoT and has iPhone connectivity with an app that hacks cars!
Well, the IoT thing and the iPhone thing are redundant, but if the only way to hack a car was to keep up with it on the road and to establish a direct point to point connection to it, this would probably be the solution to make that happen.
DRM is Digital Rights Management. Preventing a special cartridge from being rewound without inerting a pin into a special hole on the rental tape is not digital. It's a literal mechanical lock. Probably easily defeated too, but most people wouldn't bother unless someone else made a machine to do it for them.
I admit I only skimmed the article. As a kid we watched rental tapes over and over while we had the tapes. One-watch per rental simply wouldn't fly. We also had separate VCRs from our TVs, we had probably three or four TVs but only two VCRs, and they got moved around to different TVs occasionally as needed. So between the one-watch model, the higher startup-costs associated with having to buy the TV/VCR combo, and the reduced portability I can see why the system didn't really take off.
That's not a good solution at all. Kids often take their favorite toys with them wherever they go. Daycare, school, road trips, grandma's house, their friends' houses, out on the back lawn, etc. Requiring the toy to link to a home computer through the home WIFI is not the right solution.
I suspect a lot of "customers" will refuse the reflash after they figure out it'll cause a loss of power (which in a diesel is bad enough as it is). As far as I know, nowhere in the US has yearly emissions testing like the UK.
They probably won't have a choice. VW will be forced to provide records of which vehicles were flashed, and those records will be pushed to the motor vehicle departments of all states, and they will simply not be eligible for plate renewal if the owners haven't had the cars fixed.
There are jurisdictions that specifically require emissions testing and plenty of places where it's not mandatory that an end-owner could get away with tampering and no one would be the wiser, but as far as the federal government is concerned every car sold new has to meet the legal requirements, even in places where the states, counties, or cities don't actually themselves require cars to be tested.
I would not be surprised if the federal government was within its power to confiscate each and every vehicle. They've done that for grey-market imports like a whole bunch of Landrover Defenders that were VINned as pre-import-rule-change but the federal government felt were actually modern trucks with old VIN plates attached that did not meet the laws. They probably would not go to the extent to seize every violating VW, but they probably could and it would be legal.
Some may find my opinion on this harsh, but I think that they need to buy-back the cars at the original purchase price. Not current fair-market-value with depreciation factored-in, but original price including all sales taxes. I suspect that most of these cars are new enough that they'll be with their original owners.
My reasoning is that Volkswagen committed fraud. This was not some case of there being a means to accidentally trigger the car to go into a mode that violated the emissions rules that customers or service staff discovered and exploited, this was a car company that chose of its own accord to violate the law on an unprecedented scale. They defrauded the government and they defrauded their individual customers that bought cars expecting street-legal vehicles that met both the performance and the fuel economy criteria that Volkswagen advertised. Simply reprogramming the PCM may make the cars legal, but they now no longer meet the performance that the customers were sold on the cars as having. I've seen the commercials, a recent one featured a bunch of old-ladies getting into a kid's diesel car and not wanting to wear their seatbelts because it was an underpowered diesel, and the kid threw them around showing the performance. That performance as advertised is now gone.
Throw the book at them. Make it cost them $30,000,000,000 to correct this. Make this the single costliest consumer fraud case in the history of the concept and maybe, just maybe they and others like them will think before doing this again.
How about putting the speech processing and response circuit right into the toy, so it works locally irrespective of the Internet?
The first time I used speech recognition was on a Macintosh LC, a 68020 machine at 16MHz with 4MB RAM. I also used it on a 486DX. There's no excuse to offload speech recognition over the Internet when the device that is doing the initial listening doesn't use the Internet for anything.
I'm not exactly a fan of it being used this way for smartphones either, but at least there's usually an intent to use the input for Internet-connected purposes in that particular case.
Per-passenger might be a different market, but there's still program costs that have to be paid. Normally those costs are paid for by amortizing over the sale of aircraft. The purchase of the aircraft have to be paid, by amortizing over the sale of airfare.
I do not see enough passengers to justify enough planes to justify development costs. I don't doubt that there is a market for same-day passenger service to anywhere on the planet, but that market is too small to drive development of the equipment to make it possible. Even among the rich, there are only so many people that would want or need service like this, and most of them probably can't justify the $5000/trip cost to work weekdays at the office in Singapore and to see their families on the weekend in New York.
For just about anyone else going vast distances, there's usually time available to account for the travel.
Until we can keep reliable low-supersonic passenger service flying, I'm really not going to worry about the hype of hypersonic.
Give me LA to London in six hours for a price I'm willing to pay as an already frequent flyer, then we'll start talking.