I agree with you in principle. But red light cameras have been shown to increase accident rates. I don't want to punish someone at the expense of injuring someone else and increasing the problem the enforcement action was meant to solve.
There are also some people who are sociopaths and blow through orange and red lights. There are other people who just have a bad day and think they can't stop safely when the light changes yellow, and whether it was misjudging distance and speed or a short yellow, end up entering on red. That is annoying to others, but not truly dangerous.
A possible resolution would add some fraction of a second delay after the red turns but before the red light camera started firing. Or disable the red light camera flashes and deal with the fact that sometimes you wouldn't be able to read the license, or use a UV flash, so people can't see them activate.
In most states, the person in the intersection (e.g. you), has the right away over people entering the intersection. Since in some states it is perfectly legal to enter the intersection on yellow, the people proceeding straight in front of your intended route have the right of way. This is of course ignoring how some people enter on yellow when they were perfectly capable of stopping safely. Once traffic finally stops, no one should be entering the intersection from crossing traffic until you are clear of the intersection. If they do, they are violating traffic law just as much as someone running a red light.
There should never be backing up in an intersection unless you think it is the only way to prevent a wreck, or reduce the severity of one. And even then, you better think twice, quickly.
I'm sure Iran has INS. It is in many commercial aircraft since the 70's. Now you might want to put a previous generation device in an aircraft traversing hostile airspace without weapons.
Basic fact here, T-mobile is going to go away in the next few years, if AT&T gets them or not. This means there will be an automatic reduction in competition, no matter what.
On what basis do you argue this? It seems clear in the forseeable future, DT won't own T-Mobile. But T-Mobile is making a modest profit, and their only real challenge is capital for a next generation network. Their current network will be relevant to the middle and lower part of the cellphone market for many years though. Competition (from a practical perspective) would likely only decrease if T-Mo shut down its network (not likely since it does make money) or AT&T or Verizon bought them (not likely per FCC response). The alternatives (Sprint merger, another company purchases T-Mo, strategic parnership, independent publicly traded company) would be status quo on competition.
You have a point that rural commercial aviation business travel is being both subsidized and deducted. That may not be in the national interest. Though I was more thinking about personal travel.
I'm not entirely against all subsidies. There can be externalites that make subsidizing an activity valuable to society as a whole. For example we wouldn't want everyone to move to the cities because life was better and cheaper here, and have no one living in rural communites to help farm and ranch. But we also don't want to subsidize people to live in rural areas just because they want to have a nice big spread of land, but they aren't using it to productive effect, and drive into the cities for a "better" job.
Obvioulsy the situation we have with subsidies now is out of control and terribly inefficient, while in many cases providing little or negative societal value.
That's why I said it was less useful. The farm subsidies were good for a little while, but poorly implemented to allow the process to be extremely political as our diet preferences and nutrition science advanced. EAS really just transferred wealth from urban to rural residents. It would have been cheaper and more efficient (though I believe equally unnecessary) to allow rural residents to deduct part of their airplane tickets from their taxes, to reimburse them for the longer and more expensive car trip into cities to catch flights.
No, but as a homeowner, or just as a living person, there are many risks you have no option in whether you participate in, or if you try to reduce, you are probably increasing your risk exposure elsewhere. Homeowners insurance protects you for some of those risks. From a realistic perspective, the aviation industry, just like the automobile lifestyle in the USA, isn't optional.
Air carriers carried insurance for damage to people and property on the ground related to accidents at reasonable rate pre 9/11. A large damage event related to terrorism was considered so unlikely, that component was very cheap. Now it is so expensive, based on one large scale event, it is subsidized by the government. Aviation security also is so expensive and overwrought by the government, that it is a similar type of extremely expensive insurance (to the tune of +$6 billion per year). That package flown by airplane for $15, would probably be about $50 if the Fed Gov didn't subsidize any form of aviation expense.
People aren't required to carry insurance to protect others in case their car is carjacked and driven into a restaurant full of people. Gun makers generally don't have to pay claims to victims when a criminal or terrorist uses their product illegally. I don't see any reason aviation should work differently as far as security goes. And I also think the only 2 things that have made us safer since 9-11 are passengers know to fight back, and reinforced cockpit doors. TSA is 90% waste of passengers and taxpayer's money. Though I do greatly miss how pilots would sometimes leave the cockpit door open and you could see up there as they worked.
There is no excuse for the Essential Air Service Program other than to give lawmakers and rural residents a warm and fuzzy about deregulation. It was even less useful than the poorly allocated farm subsidies to society as a whole.
The TSA security fees alone flying from Texas to Orlando (given a connecting flight) could be $5 alone, so I don't get the snark. You'd be hard pressed to find a ticket from TX to FL for less than $140 after taxes. The Federal Government (courtesy of the TSA) enormously overspends on aviation security based on the risk of death to any particular individual versus other common risks we experience every day.
Part of this is due to the fact aviation security threats (and operational risks like crashing) can affect people on the ground who never fly. Part is due to the way an aviation problem can make the entire US populace apoplectic for some strange reason. And part is the general authoritarian streak of our government. So I don't think it is unreasonable aviation security is partly subsidized, when most transportation related infrastructure and fuels in the US are massively subsidized as well.
There are a bunch of internet connected thermostats now. I have one from http://www.bayweb.com/. Not sure if any of them are designed to run schedules out more than 1 week. Most can do a different schedule each of the 7 days of the week.
It is worth mentioning, even old mechanical thermostats had this. It is called the "heat anticipator." I make no suggestions about how well they worked, or how accurately they were set by most HVAC guys.
Desktops? I can't speak for HP, but we buy Dells because you don't really save any money to purchase the same parts and build it yourself, unless you are doing a custom gaming rig. Laptops are pretty impossible to build and have them come out nicer looking and cheaper than what you can purchase prebuilt.
That's why this may be a great acquisition for Google. Any hardware they want to manufacture (and service), hand off to Motorola. Granted Motorola isn't awesome at customer support/service, since a lot of it is handled by the carriers. But they are worlds better than Google. Hopefully their leaders will man up if Google wants to come in and cut back on their service. But it would be great if Google could teach them how to improve their tools and self-service options, while maintaining decent live hardware support.
Cheaper for who? I can assure you it wasn't cheaper for the customers. Perhaps the COGS for the suppliers it was cheaper, but what customer cares about that? Also of those "cheap-ass" phones, though they aren't built well, I've never had one go bad in 20 years, other than the battery in cordless phones.
Just as below Anonymous Coward stated below, no FAA time of duty regulations are tied to radiation exposure. It is all based on fatigue. I could come up with many citations of FAA regs and studies related to this. I defy anyone to find a reputable citation that claims FAA or OSHA considered radiation exposure when setting FAA time of duty regs.
But in general screening pilots is also no defense against some sort of suicidal/terrorist/crazy action taking place. In fact they have ultimate control of the plane. Their hands and minds are the potential dangerous items in a tiny fraction of cases, not any weapons they may have on them. Most importantly properly identify the pilots. I mean we already allow pilots to take weapons onto aircraft under the FFDO program. We might want to be able to properly identify those FFDOs authorized to do this, and if we can properly identify the FFDOs, why not use the same system to allow flight crews to bypass security?
Not in Dallas. We had an incident where a train was disabled in a tunnel on a hot day, and the train operator responded to calls over the train phone only once in over an hour. Finally the passengers got irritated and walked out of the tunnel on their own. The DART response was to claim their employees acted appropriately, blame the passengers, accuse them of doing something dangerous and possibly illegal. If DART had sent any trains into that area at more than a slow walking speed, either to pick up those passengers, or because they didn't know the train was there, then DART is dangerously stupid and incompetent.
My girlfriend grew up in a small town, and was/is really excited when Wal-Mart opened there years ago.
She pointed out that the mom-and-pop stores that got ran out of business generally had limited selection, bad pricing, poor return policies, and only provided employment to their immediate family and good friends. For the rest of the community, Wal-Mart really improved their quality of life, of course at the expense of the local merchants who were doing a less than impressive job.
The array construction costs had already been funded, so SETI must not be too bad at grant writing. All they needed was small amounts of operational funding. It was a novel design that allowed easy and cheap upgrades to the array performance, and had the side benefit of allowing concurrent SETI observations to reduce the marginal costs of those observations. It is specifically in their "charter" that hard science projects take observational priority, and SETI observations are secondary. It was retarded and short-sighted that the array was defunded. It demonstrates our society's complete lack of commitment to basic scientific research today; the same kind of research that allowed all the amazing advances of the space age.
Most uses of power during different times of day is obligatory -- you can't schedule all your air conditioning at night, and you can't schedule your lighting for the day.
This isn't a given. There are devices on the market that allow your A/C to run overnight and freeze an insulated container of ice, and then use that ice to cool the house during the day. Nissan and other companies are working on allowing electric cars plugged in for charging to pass power back to the grid. So theoretically on a smart grid, your Nissan Leaf could charge overnight at the house, you could drive to work and plug it in, during the morning it would continue to trickle charge before the afternoon power spike, then when power is in demand it could be programmed to pass power back to the grid that is credited to your kid's usage of XBox when he got home from school, and leave you just enough power to get home from work.
Looked into this? Says it can do contacts, and documents. Surprised it doesn't say calendar. You can request it as a new app though.
http://www.nabber.org/projects/cloudexport/
Like I said, ActiveSync isn't as good as BES. But it has the most basic necessary functionality for enterprise maintainability, it has 80% of the features the end users want, and it is much cheaper for a Microsoft shop to implement. Best doesn't always win, when cheap and good enough suffices.
I wasn't talking about companies providing 2 machines. I'm talking about the new trend of them providing no work machine for an employee, only a budget for a personal computer for work use and a virtual desktop. I've read several articles in mainstream press about this becoming more common. My company replaces every computer every 3 years on a lease deal with Dell. Supposedly it works financially.
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I agree with you in principle. But red light cameras have been shown to increase accident rates. I don't want to punish someone at the expense of injuring someone else and increasing the problem the enforcement action was meant to solve.
There are also some people who are sociopaths and blow through orange and red lights. There are other people who just have a bad day and think they can't stop safely when the light changes yellow, and whether it was misjudging distance and speed or a short yellow, end up entering on red. That is annoying to others, but not truly dangerous.
A possible resolution would add some fraction of a second delay after the red turns but before the red light camera started firing. Or disable the red light camera flashes and deal with the fact that sometimes you wouldn't be able to read the license, or use a UV flash, so people can't see them activate.
If I hadn't commented already, and I still had moderation points, you'd deserve all 5 for this week.
In most states, the person in the intersection (e.g. you), has the right away over people entering the intersection. Since in some states it is perfectly legal to enter the intersection on yellow, the people proceeding straight in front of your intended route have the right of way. This is of course ignoring how some people enter on yellow when they were perfectly capable of stopping safely. Once traffic finally stops, no one should be entering the intersection from crossing traffic until you are clear of the intersection. If they do, they are violating traffic law just as much as someone running a red light.
There should never be backing up in an intersection unless you think it is the only way to prevent a wreck, or reduce the severity of one. And even then, you better think twice, quickly.
I'm sure Iran has INS. It is in many commercial aircraft since the 70's. Now you might want to put a previous generation device in an aircraft traversing hostile airspace without weapons.
On what basis do you argue this? It seems clear in the forseeable future, DT won't own T-Mobile. But T-Mobile is making a modest profit, and their only real challenge is capital for a next generation network. Their current network will be relevant to the middle and lower part of the cellphone market for many years though. Competition (from a practical perspective) would likely only decrease if T-Mo shut down its network (not likely since it does make money) or AT&T or Verizon bought them (not likely per FCC response). The alternatives (Sprint merger, another company purchases T-Mo, strategic parnership, independent publicly traded company) would be status quo on competition.
You have a point that rural commercial aviation business travel is being both subsidized and deducted. That may not be in the national interest. Though I was more thinking about personal travel.
I'm not entirely against all subsidies. There can be externalites that make subsidizing an activity valuable to society as a whole. For example we wouldn't want everyone to move to the cities because life was better and cheaper here, and have no one living in rural communites to help farm and ranch. But we also don't want to subsidize people to live in rural areas just because they want to have a nice big spread of land, but they aren't using it to productive effect, and drive into the cities for a "better" job.
Obvioulsy the situation we have with subsidies now is out of control and terribly inefficient, while in many cases providing little or negative societal value.
That's why I said it was less useful. The farm subsidies were good for a little while, but poorly implemented to allow the process to be extremely political as our diet preferences and nutrition science advanced. EAS really just transferred wealth from urban to rural residents. It would have been cheaper and more efficient (though I believe equally unnecessary) to allow rural residents to deduct part of their airplane tickets from their taxes, to reimburse them for the longer and more expensive car trip into cities to catch flights.
No, but as a homeowner, or just as a living person, there are many risks you have no option in whether you participate in, or if you try to reduce, you are probably increasing your risk exposure elsewhere. Homeowners insurance protects you for some of those risks. From a realistic perspective, the aviation industry, just like the automobile lifestyle in the USA, isn't optional.
Air carriers carried insurance for damage to people and property on the ground related to accidents at reasonable rate pre 9/11. A large damage event related to terrorism was considered so unlikely, that component was very cheap. Now it is so expensive, based on one large scale event, it is subsidized by the government. Aviation security also is so expensive and overwrought by the government, that it is a similar type of extremely expensive insurance (to the tune of +$6 billion per year). That package flown by airplane for $15, would probably be about $50 if the Fed Gov didn't subsidize any form of aviation expense.
People aren't required to carry insurance to protect others in case their car is carjacked and driven into a restaurant full of people. Gun makers generally don't have to pay claims to victims when a criminal or terrorist uses their product illegally. I don't see any reason aviation should work differently as far as security goes. And I also think the only 2 things that have made us safer since 9-11 are passengers know to fight back, and reinforced cockpit doors. TSA is 90% waste of passengers and taxpayer's money. Though I do greatly miss how pilots would sometimes leave the cockpit door open and you could see up there as they worked.
There is no excuse for the Essential Air Service Program other than to give lawmakers and rural residents a warm and fuzzy about deregulation. It was even less useful than the poorly allocated farm subsidies to society as a whole.
The TSA security fees alone flying from Texas to Orlando (given a connecting flight) could be $5 alone, so I don't get the snark. You'd be hard pressed to find a ticket from TX to FL for less than $140 after taxes. The Federal Government (courtesy of the TSA) enormously overspends on aviation security based on the risk of death to any particular individual versus other common risks we experience every day.
Part of this is due to the fact aviation security threats (and operational risks like crashing) can affect people on the ground who never fly. Part is due to the way an aviation problem can make the entire US populace apoplectic for some strange reason. And part is the general authoritarian streak of our government. So I don't think it is unreasonable aviation security is partly subsidized, when most transportation related infrastructure and fuels in the US are massively subsidized as well.
Could also be done with http://www.bayweb.com/. They just released an API that allows fairly easy automation if you have webz programming skills.
There are a bunch of internet connected thermostats now. I have one from http://www.bayweb.com/. Not sure if any of them are designed to run schedules out more than 1 week. Most can do a different schedule each of the 7 days of the week.
It is worth mentioning, even old mechanical thermostats had this. It is called the "heat anticipator." I make no suggestions about how well they worked, or how accurately they were set by most HVAC guys.
Desktops? I can't speak for HP, but we buy Dells because you don't really save any money to purchase the same parts and build it yourself, unless you are doing a custom gaming rig. Laptops are pretty impossible to build and have them come out nicer looking and cheaper than what you can purchase prebuilt.
That's why this may be a great acquisition for Google. Any hardware they want to manufacture (and service), hand off to Motorola. Granted Motorola isn't awesome at customer support/service, since a lot of it is handled by the carriers. But they are worlds better than Google. Hopefully their leaders will man up if Google wants to come in and cut back on their service. But it would be great if Google could teach them how to improve their tools and self-service options, while maintaining decent live hardware support.
Cable strong enough would be too heavy, and cause too much aerodynamic drag after a couple kilometers.
Cheaper for who? I can assure you it wasn't cheaper for the customers. Perhaps the COGS for the suppliers it was cheaper, but what customer cares about that? Also of those "cheap-ass" phones, though they aren't built well, I've never had one go bad in 20 years, other than the battery in cordless phones.
Just as below Anonymous Coward stated below, no FAA time of duty regulations are tied to radiation exposure. It is all based on fatigue. I could come up with many citations of FAA regs and studies related to this. I defy anyone to find a reputable citation that claims FAA or OSHA considered radiation exposure when setting FAA time of duty regs.
For a related incident see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FedEx_Express_Flight_705
But in general screening pilots is also no defense against some sort of suicidal/terrorist/crazy action taking place. In fact they have ultimate control of the plane. Their hands and minds are the potential dangerous items in a tiny fraction of cases, not any weapons they may have on them. Most importantly properly identify the pilots. I mean we already allow pilots to take weapons onto aircraft under the FFDO program. We might want to be able to properly identify those FFDOs authorized to do this, and if we can properly identify the FFDOs, why not use the same system to allow flight crews to bypass security?
Not in Dallas. We had an incident where a train was disabled in a tunnel on a hot day, and the train operator responded to calls over the train phone only once in over an hour. Finally the passengers got irritated and walked out of the tunnel on their own. The DART response was to claim their employees acted appropriately, blame the passengers, accuse them of doing something dangerous and possibly illegal. If DART had sent any trains into that area at more than a slow walking speed, either to pick up those passengers, or because they didn't know the train was there, then DART is dangerously stupid and incompetent.
My girlfriend grew up in a small town, and was/is really excited when Wal-Mart opened there years ago.
She pointed out that the mom-and-pop stores that got ran out of business generally had limited selection, bad pricing, poor return policies, and only provided employment to their immediate family and good friends. For the rest of the community, Wal-Mart really improved their quality of life, of course at the expense of the local merchants who were doing a less than impressive job.
The array construction costs had already been funded, so SETI must not be too bad at grant writing. All they needed was small amounts of operational funding. It was a novel design that allowed easy and cheap upgrades to the array performance, and had the side benefit of allowing concurrent SETI observations to reduce the marginal costs of those observations. It is specifically in their "charter" that hard science projects take observational priority, and SETI observations are secondary. It was retarded and short-sighted that the array was defunded. It demonstrates our society's complete lack of commitment to basic scientific research today; the same kind of research that allowed all the amazing advances of the space age.
This isn't a given. There are devices on the market that allow your A/C to run overnight and freeze an insulated container of ice, and then use that ice to cool the house during the day. Nissan and other companies are working on allowing electric cars plugged in for charging to pass power back to the grid. So theoretically on a smart grid, your Nissan Leaf could charge overnight at the house, you could drive to work and plug it in, during the morning it would continue to trickle charge before the afternoon power spike, then when power is in demand it could be programmed to pass power back to the grid that is credited to your kid's usage of XBox when he got home from school, and leave you just enough power to get home from work.
Looked into this? Says it can do contacts, and documents. Surprised it doesn't say calendar. You can request it as a new app though. http://www.nabber.org/projects/cloudexport/
Like I said, ActiveSync isn't as good as BES. But it has the most basic necessary functionality for enterprise maintainability, it has 80% of the features the end users want, and it is much cheaper for a Microsoft shop to implement. Best doesn't always win, when cheap and good enough suffices.
I wasn't talking about companies providing 2 machines. I'm talking about the new trend of them providing no work machine for an employee, only a budget for a personal computer for work use and a virtual desktop. I've read several articles in mainstream press about this becoming more common. My company replaces every computer every 3 years on a lease deal with Dell. Supposedly it works financially.