The driver in that case (who should be in jail) ran over the girl not because he was an Uber driver, BUT just because he was a negligent driver on the road at the time.
Or maybe an inattentive driver, as even if he's not picking up a passenger, by being an Uber driver, he by necessity has to have his phone with him and will need to actively check it while driving.
In college, one of the EE professors recounted a story about a frantic call he got the day before a test. The student said he had been in a bad car accident, was calling from the hospital, and asked if he could take the test next week. The professor assured him that, of course, this would be no problem, but noted the test was not in fact tomorrow, but the same day next week. The student cursed and hung up the phone.
I always thought that the student should have been smarter and played it cool, "Oh thank God! I was so worried." etc and then the professor would have been none the wiser. But I guess if he was smarter, he wouldn't need to avoid taking the test...
Poor form to reply to myself, etc, but the person who wrote the paper is David Lowery, frontman for the band Cracker ("Low"), a trained mathematician, and now a lecturer at Univ of Georgia.
I remember using lyrics.ch, and was disappointed to see it go, but the "Undesirable list" pdf makes some reasonable points (even if it wasn't attributed at the top, you can tell it was written by a person, and not some committee). It notes that the fully-licensed azlyrics is in the top 500 of websites, and presumably takes in a proportionate amount of ad revenue, and that "unlike the sound recording business, the lyric business may be more valuable in the Internet age." The interesting thing is VC darling rapgenius (investors including Marc Andreesen) is at the top of the list. I guess $15,000,000 Series A financing didn't leave any money for paying the people it will be profiting from.
Is XBMC any good for streaming, e.g. from Hulu, Netflix, etc and live TV/DVR? I looked into XBMC once, and it seemed to be primarily for stored media, and not TV or internet streaming. For example, there wasn't an official browser plugin to go to the various sites I use. Has this changed, or are there other options for this?
Did you actually try clicking the link? If you identify yourself as a Home/HomeOffice user, it says "The product you have selected is not currently available for online purchase in the segment you have selected." IIRC it turns out to be easy to "pretend" to be a small business on Dell's site, so you can still get it from Dell Business, but this is far from a mainstream solution.
Additionally, the price is $329, probably $150 over a typical TFT 1920x1080 monitor, a premium you're paying mostly for the monitor being IPS, even if all you wanted was the higher resolution. As 1920x1200 resolution is increasingly "relegated" to the premium market, it becomes increasingly hard to find it on inexpensive mainstream monitors.
this. I have twin 1920x1200 screens, which I bought a few years ago when they were abundant. They're a *lot* harder to find now, and typically are more expensive higher end models, e.g. IPS. On the chart labelled "Windows 7 screen Resolutions" it shows 1920x1200 is ~1-2% of Win7 installs, reflective of this. Relative to 1920x1080, I feel 120 pixels is a lot to give up. Surprisingly 1920x1080 is only 8%, which speaks to the broader trend of how more than 50% of installs are on cripplingly low resolutions. I think this is a combination of factors: fewer desktops/more laptops, and work environments that won't ever spring for more than bottom of the barrel monitors. I checked my work monitor, and even though I use medical apps to view radiology/echos etc, the resolution is a meager 1280x1024.
daytum.com (acquired by facebook) is personal tracking gone mainstream. they have iphone/android apps so you can easily track things throughout the day, and then can generate pretty reports of your activity. one of the co-founders has been putting out his "annual reports" for a number of years, see http://feltron.com/ar11_02.html for an example. his report includes things like number of days spent in NYC, servings of coffee during the year, etc...
dexpot is free (though not open source) and very customizable. It has a few idiosyncracies (e.g. can't drag a window by a title bar to a different desktop), but even with them, it's better than the many other solutions I've tried.
It's not another link to the original site, but in the NYT recently Errol Morris was researching an unrelated Civil War story, and one of the sources was David H. Kelly, who did major work deciphering the Mayan script. In passing Errol asked about the 2012 thing: http://morris.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/01/whose-father-was-he-part-four/
area. the mass is minimal. from a bbc article "Indeed, so feeble is the ring that scientists have calculated that if all the material were gathered up, it would fill a crater on Phoebe no more than a kilometre across." http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8291905.stm
To help with the window management required to do this (and if you run windows), look into the freeware app Gridmove. You can divide up your screen real estate into many different chunks, and have all sorts of handy ways of resizing your windows.
Valve's Steam, for one. It's a nice service, but, as near as I can tell, it's impossible to transfer games from one account to another.
It's too bad, as I think allowing resale would create a thriving market and bring life back into games that people don't want to shell the retail price for. Of course, that's the goal: to eliminate the natural market price for the game.
some credit cards offer "virtual credit card numbers" which are linked to (but different from) your credit card number, but are only valid for a single vendor, and have both a spending limit and an expiration that you set. additionally, it can be withdrawn at anytime.
it's more time-consuming to do this, but it circumvents some security issues esp when dealing with smaller online vendors who may or may not be diligent about safeguarding data on their end.
there's more to it than the cumulative cap. they also have an elaborate throttling scheme based on how much you're currently downloading:
The issue will be their strange throttling scheme, which puts users in a "penalty box" for using more than 70% of available bandwidth in any 15 minute window and releases them from the box when their activity drops below 50%.
It has the net effect of decreasing the effective sustained bandwidth. I don't have Comcast, and I think the cumulative limits are fair, but this strikes me as unfair. What if I don't come close to the monthly limits, but I'm streaming/DLing something that will take longer than 15min? If congestion isn't an issue, why not let someone DL at the capabilities of their connection?
Similar to other countries where Street View has been rolled out, some Japanese have created a site with a collection of interesting images from their country's Street View: http://google-streetview.seesaa.net/
I think the original Japanese author has some odd notions about American perceptions of privacy (your front yard as a public space?), and overemphasizes what real cultural differences exist; many Americans have much the same concerns.
FTA:
Japanese people intuitively recognize that a flesh-and-blood human being peeking into people's living space from the alleyway results in trouble, so ordinary people don't do this kind of thing.
...and if they do, Americans would reply "Hey, whadda you lookin at??" See? Not so different after all.
That article reads like a young adult suddenly realizing how the world really works, but still stuck in the idea that everything they learned before must still be true.
[disclaimer: i'm the submitter]
definitely true, and to be expected from The Economist; like the WSJ and FT, it's just always going to have a rah-rah business attitude.
still, i think this is good insight into the big businesses' mindsets, and these are encouraging first signs of cracks in the old thinking, and maybe even a sneak preview of how things may change.
this isn't true. many doctors work for hospitals or for practices which they don't own, enough so that saying they "usually" do work for themself is an exaggeration. and yes, there is no hourly pay, per se, for full-time jobs, but in moonlighting shifts, it's easy enough to calculate (though if finishing your work runs you overtime, you'd be responsible for that without pay).
New tab button...who needs that? The tabs also belong at the bottom and there shouldn't be an X on each one. Ya, I've been using Opera for far too long. But I still love it. I tried Firefox 3 but they STILL won't let you put the tab bar on the bottom (must be hidden somewhere if the option exists.)
unless you're absolutely on principle opposed to extensions, the add-on tab mix plus (TMP) includes all your feature requests. it lets you put the tab-bar on the bottom (and has allowed doing so for ages), allows removal of the "X" on individual tabs (though i can't remember if that's a TMP feature or just an FF one), and the "new tab" button is made superfluous since double-clicking in any empty space in the tab-bar opens a new tab.
the above is exactly how i run FF: i use middle-click to close a tab, and scroll-wheel or ctrl-tab to traverse between tabs. for new tabs, you can use ctrl-t, but if you're only using the mouse, this requires switching contexts (or adding one, by keeping one hand on the kbd and one on the mouse), so i typically use the double-click method above.
one complication: TMP isn't listed as compatible with the release version of ff3 on mozilla's main addon site, though it works with the betas. This can easily be gotten around with the dev build found here: http://tmp.garyr.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=7031
Nice link. I'd been hoping for this for a while. I'd have been happy to open up my WiFi if I could retain my own private, secure channel. The secondary link would be open and with a bandwidth cap, suitable for someone in a pinch needing to check email, google maps, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
The driver in that case (who should be in jail) ran over the girl not because he was an Uber driver, BUT just because he was a negligent driver on the road at the time.
Or maybe an inattentive driver, as even if he's not picking up a passenger, by being an Uber driver, he by necessity has to have his phone with him and will need to actively check it while driving.
In college, one of the EE professors recounted a story about a frantic call he got the day before a test. The student said he had been in a bad car accident, was calling from the hospital, and asked if he could take the test next week. The professor assured him that, of course, this would be no problem, but noted the test was not in fact tomorrow, but the same day next week. The student cursed and hung up the phone.
I always thought that the student should have been smarter and played it cool, "Oh thank God! I was so worried." etc and then the professor would have been none the wiser. But I guess if he was smarter, he wouldn't need to avoid taking the test...
Poor form to reply to myself, etc, but the person who wrote the paper is David Lowery, frontman for the band Cracker ("Low"), a trained mathematician, and now a lecturer at Univ of Georgia.
I remember using lyrics.ch, and was disappointed to see it go, but the "Undesirable list" pdf makes some reasonable points (even if it wasn't attributed at the top, you can tell it was written by a person, and not some committee). It notes that the fully-licensed azlyrics is in the top 500 of websites, and presumably takes in a proportionate amount of ad revenue, and that "unlike the sound recording business, the lyric business may be more valuable in the Internet age." The interesting thing is VC darling rapgenius (investors including Marc Andreesen) is at the top of the list. I guess $15,000,000 Series A financing didn't leave any money for paying the people it will be profiting from.
Is XBMC any good for streaming, e.g. from Hulu, Netflix, etc and live TV/DVR? I looked into XBMC once, and it seemed to be primarily for stored media, and not TV or internet streaming. For example, there wasn't an official browser plugin to go to the various sites I use. Has this changed, or are there other options for this?
Did you actually try clicking the link? If you identify yourself as a Home/HomeOffice user, it says "The product you have selected is not currently available for online purchase in the segment you have selected." IIRC it turns out to be easy to "pretend" to be a small business on Dell's site, so you can still get it from Dell Business, but this is far from a mainstream solution.
Additionally, the price is $329, probably $150 over a typical TFT 1920x1080 monitor, a premium you're paying mostly for the monitor being IPS, even if all you wanted was the higher resolution. As 1920x1200 resolution is increasingly "relegated" to the premium market, it becomes increasingly hard to find it on inexpensive mainstream monitors.
this. I have twin 1920x1200 screens, which I bought a few years ago when they were abundant. They're a *lot* harder to find now, and typically are more expensive higher end models, e.g. IPS. On the chart labelled "Windows 7 screen Resolutions" it shows 1920x1200 is ~1-2% of Win7 installs, reflective of this. Relative to 1920x1080, I feel 120 pixels is a lot to give up. Surprisingly 1920x1080 is only 8%, which speaks to the broader trend of how more than 50% of installs are on cripplingly low resolutions. I think this is a combination of factors: fewer desktops/more laptops, and work environments that won't ever spring for more than bottom of the barrel monitors. I checked my work monitor, and even though I use medical apps to view radiology/echos etc, the resolution is a meager 1280x1024.
daytum.com (acquired by facebook) is personal tracking gone mainstream. they have iphone/android apps so you can easily track things throughout the day, and then can generate pretty reports of your activity. one of the co-founders has been putting out his "annual reports" for a number of years, see http://feltron.com/ar11_02.html for an example. his report includes things like number of days spent in NYC, servings of coffee during the year, etc...
wow. mike nelson posted to the that thread. http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3450845&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=4#post398052361
dexpot is free (though not open source) and very customizable. It has a few idiosyncracies (e.g. can't drag a window by a title bar to a different desktop), but even with them, it's better than the many other solutions I've tried.
The addon Mr. Tech Toolkit has this option. Under its options Misc -> XPI install options -> Enable Addons Compatibility checking
It's not another link to the original site, but in the NYT recently Errol Morris was researching an unrelated Civil War story, and one of the sources was David H. Kelly, who did major work deciphering the Mayan script. In passing Errol asked about the 2012 thing: http://morris.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/01/whose-father-was-he-part-four/
area. the mass is minimal. from a bbc article "Indeed, so feeble is the ring that scientists have calculated that if all the material were gathered up, it would fill a crater on Phoebe no more than a kilometre across."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8291905.stm
To help with the window management required to do this (and if you run windows), look into the freeware app Gridmove. You can divide up your screen real estate into many different chunks, and have all sorts of handy ways of resizing your windows.
But the upgraded/final release came out just now and Penny Arcade covered that as well (just 6 days ago).
http://www.penny-arcade.com/2009/1/9/
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2009/1/9/
also you find what a rhombus is.
Valve's Steam, for one. It's a nice service, but, as near as I can tell, it's impossible to transfer games from one account to another.
It's too bad, as I think allowing resale would create a thriving market and bring life back into games that people don't want to shell the retail price for. Of course, that's the goal: to eliminate the natural market price for the game.
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2008/4/23/
some credit cards offer "virtual credit card numbers" which are linked to (but different from) your credit card number, but are only valid for a single vendor, and have both a spending limit and an expiration that you set. additionally, it can be withdrawn at anytime.
it's more time-consuming to do this, but it circumvents some security issues esp when dealing with smaller online vendors who may or may not be diligent about safeguarding data on their end.
there's more to it than the cumulative cap. they also have an elaborate throttling scheme based on how much you're currently downloading:
The issue will be their strange throttling scheme, which puts users in a "penalty box" for using more than 70% of available bandwidth in any 15 minute window and releases them from the box when their activity drops below 50%.
It has the net effect of decreasing the effective sustained bandwidth. I don't have Comcast, and I think the cumulative limits are fair, but this strikes me as unfair. What if I don't come close to the monthly limits, but I'm streaming/DLing something that will take longer than 15min? If congestion isn't an issue, why not let someone DL at the capabilities of their connection?
Similar to other countries where Street View has been rolled out, some Japanese have created a site with a collection of interesting images from their country's Street View: http://google-streetview.seesaa.net/
I think the original Japanese author has some odd notions about American perceptions of privacy (your front yard as a public space?), and overemphasizes what real cultural differences exist; many Americans have much the same concerns.
FTA:
Japanese people intuitively recognize that a flesh-and-blood human being peeking into people's living space from the alleyway results in trouble, so ordinary people don't do this kind of thing.
...and if they do, Americans would reply "Hey, whadda you lookin at??" See? Not so different after all.
That article reads like a young adult suddenly realizing how the world really works, but still stuck in the idea that everything they learned before must still be true.
[disclaimer: i'm the submitter]
definitely true, and to be expected from The Economist; like the WSJ and FT, it's just always going to have a rah-rah business attitude.
still, i think this is good insight into the big businesses' mindsets, and these are encouraging first signs of cracks in the old thinking, and maybe even a sneak preview of how things may change.
this isn't true. many doctors work for hospitals or for practices which they don't own, enough so that saying they "usually" do work for themself is an exaggeration. and yes, there is no hourly pay, per se, for full-time jobs, but in moonlighting shifts, it's easy enough to calculate (though if finishing your work runs you overtime, you'd be responsible for that without pay).
New tab button...who needs that? The tabs also belong at the bottom and there shouldn't be an X on each one. Ya, I've been using Opera for far too long. But I still love it. I tried Firefox 3 but they STILL won't let you put the tab bar on the bottom (must be hidden somewhere if the option exists.)
unless you're absolutely on principle opposed to extensions, the add-on tab mix plus (TMP) includes all your feature requests. it lets you put the tab-bar on the bottom (and has allowed doing so for ages), allows removal of the "X" on individual tabs (though i can't remember if that's a TMP feature or just an FF one), and the "new tab" button is made superfluous since double-clicking in any empty space in the tab-bar opens a new tab.
the above is exactly how i run FF: i use middle-click to close a tab, and scroll-wheel or ctrl-tab to traverse between tabs. for new tabs, you can use ctrl-t, but if you're only using the mouse, this requires switching contexts (or adding one, by keeping one hand on the kbd and one on the mouse), so i typically use the double-click method above.
one complication: TMP isn't listed as compatible with the release version of ff3 on mozilla's main addon site, though it works with the betas. This can easily be gotten around with the dev build found here: http://tmp.garyr.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=7031
that depends. would you consider contractors on the death star evil?
Nice link. I'd been hoping for this for a while. I'd have been happy to open up my WiFi if I could retain my own private, secure channel. The secondary link would be open and with a bandwidth cap, suitable for someone in a pinch needing to check email, google maps, etc.