The point is this: fully automated taxis are much more believable if manually operated cars are kept out of the roads. I think this was your original point, and it makes sense since it'd be much harder to build automatic cars which would have to adapt to the unpredictability of human drivers.
I understand completely what you're saying about the pleasures of driving, I just don't think that as a society it's worth to give up on the idea of a totally automated flexible transportation system just because a few people like to drive their cars themselves.
The costs of driving to society are immense. It's not just the number of deaths on the road, it's all the people who don't die but are injured for life, the material costs of destroyed property, the safety systems built into cars and roads. This is not to mention energy and time efficiency which could greatly improved by having computers driving our cars, or the fact that a lot less cars would have to be produced if they were being shared.
If there are a lot of people sharing your opinion, I can imagine that it might be possible to have stretches of road designated for human drivers. I just don't think that the benefits of the self-driving car should be held back just because some of us would like to keep our toys.
It may sound hokey, but even if personal control of my car is taken away from me, no one will ever take motorcycling away from me. I'd rather die than lose that.
Same as every other activity which people do for pleasure but for one reason or another can't be allowed unrestricted in public: do it in specially designated areas for that effect.
Things like target practising, hunting, racing, etc.
There are already car sharing systems which don't require that the car is checked by an employee after each use.
I'm not sure of the details since I've never used that system myself, but as I understand it, in order to have access to the car, you have to give the company your details and credit card number. I suppose that if you try renting a car which someone used as a toilet, you can report the car as damaged and the previous owner will have some explaining to do.
The point is that this is already a solved problem. The hurdle is really the development of a reliable self-driving car.
Biggest problem is that Android actually sucks as a UI in the car. it is very distracting to change modes.
I've noticed this myself. I've fashioned a car dock for my Nexus S by glueing the phone's horizontal dock to a bean bag mount and connecting it to a FM transmitter (I wanted something easy to set up, and also hide when parked). It's nice to have the Android apps in the car, but it's a pain switching between, say, navigation and music, especially since the official music app hides the status bar when horizontal.
I've tried using the "car home" software (or whatever it's called) but it's next to useless for that I need. I'd be interested in starting a discussion on what the perfect software for a head unit could be, and how to go about doing it. I have some experience with Android development, so I'm willing to get my hands dirty.
BTW thanks for sharing your setup. It seems a bit too complex for my knowledge and time, but it does sound interesting.
Say I discovered a great indie band and I wanted to share with a technically challenged friend: with Indietorrent I'd have to explain to him how torrents work, have him install a torrent client, get him to download the music and add it to wherever he stores it. With services like Google Music and iTunes, the user can stream a sample directly and if he likes it, simply press the buy button and everything's taken care of for him. This is not to mention the fact that your music is in the same place as recognized bands. People create their accounts for $popular_artist, but they may just leave with a few new bands in their shopping cart.
Hell, I just listened to a shared song on the Google+ Android app and it worked flawlessly, despite the fact that I'm not in the US and don't have access to their music website. The ability to share a song instantly with anyone on your social network is, to me, the killer feature, and it seems to be much more beneficial for indie artists than established bands.
As for what you said about the band making their own promotion, I don't see why they couldn't do the same with Google music or any other site. Though to be fair, if you're doing your own promotion, you might as well promote the one with the best return (or all of them, if you think users would rather keep the service they're already used to).
I think the point is that with the Google offering you get a huge installed base, and great integration with the software and devices people are already using. It's the same benefit that integrated app stores had for indie developers.
I'd never heard of Indietorrent or Bandcamp before. Granted, I don't look for much new music these days, but I guess that makes me a good representative of your average music listener.
I generally agree with the sentiment of your post, I just wanted to add something here. When I was in the same situation as the parent (single, employed, money in the bank) and decided to invest, I read The Motley Fool as a beginner's guide. There's a sentence in that book which stuck with me (paraphrased from memory): "You'll almost always get much better return doing actual work than investing in the stock market. However, if you adopt a long-term investment strategy, only checking from time to time if your companies are doing fine, you'll be hard-pressed to find any other activity which gives you as much return for such a low time investment."
I think this also applies to the difference between the GP's strategy of keeping MSFT and reaping the dividends vs your suggestion that better returns could've been had. While that's true, it'd also have required that the parent invest a lot more time keeping up with the market, and probably also assume more risk.
Seamless mode is I think a feature specific to VirtualBox where the Windows desktop is hidden, and you see only the running program on top of your Linux desktop, and side by side with your other Linux apps. Visually it's almost identical to running a normal Linux application, but with crappier integration. You also get the Windows taskbar on the bottom of the screen, which actually fits quite well, at least on my Gnome 3 desktop.
You might also be interested in using the VirtualBox shared folders. It's essentially the same as using Samba for sharing the files, but has better performance. Basically, it allows you to "mount" folders from your Linux filesystem in your Windows system, so you can keep your data out of the virtual machine.
Well, technically yes. However, the way I use it, just to run Office windows in seamless mode, it's more like using Windows as a virtual machine, not unlike running Java programs.
I guess you can say that I "run Windows", but don't "use Windows", which is the whole point. I'm very happy with Linux.
Not knowing your setup or having any experience with MacOS, I don't know if my experience correlates, but here booting the VirtualBox virtual machine with a saved session takes less than 10 seconds.
Office then runs at full speed (or at least fast enough not to notice), and if I remember to press the VirtualBox escape key (right CTRL) before trying to interact with my Linux system, it's seamless. Sometimes I even forget I left the virtual machine running for hours.
Of course this isn't ideal, but I'd rather suffer through the pain of not having a native Office than move to Windows.
I found out that if you really need to use MS Office, you can just run in on a virtual machine. If you use seamless mode it works perfectly, and you get the advantages of running a Linux desktop (virtual desktops, for one). Copying text works between systems, and you can configure it so that Windows has read-write access to whatever folders you need on your host computer.
The only issue I have is that I use Alt-F# to move between my virtual desktops, and the virtual machine steals those. For that reason, I always keep Windows on the 4th desktop, so that I don't press Alt-F4 and close the currently running program.
And this is why I don't comment in places where they are using the Facebook commenting system. For example, 9Gag. I'd be damned before I put my real name to a 9Gag comment.
I'm always amazed that some people there are willingly attaching their real names to comments on the NSFW posts.
Don't get me wrong. I lived in Asia for 1/3rd of my life, so I developed two things: a strong resistance to germs, and a strong sense of not wanting to know what's in my food.
If I can't see it, it won't hurt me. Doesn't mean I want to see it (or want to know about it) though:-)
Not to mention Skype: Commits to keeping the Linux client up-to-date but never does. Then commits to making a connector library available so others can implement a decent client UI (or integrate it into Pidgin/Empathy/etc.) but never does.
Now that MS bought Skype, it's essentially dead on Linux. Oh well, at least it'll force me to do what I've been wanting to do for a while: migrate to another platform.
Re:Just seems like a well thought out list
on
The RMS Tour Rider
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· Score: 1
Not to mention that in order to separate the M&Ms someone would have to put his hands all over said M&Ms.
I'm not paranoid about cleanliness, but I sure wouldn't like some guy touching my food before I eat it (unless he's a cook, which I force myself to blindly assume they're careful with hygiene).
From what I understood, when you wake up and turn it on at 7:00 it's not learning "I should turn the heating on everyday at 7:00" but rather "the temperature should be X at 7:00".
The system seems to also learn how long it takes to reach the desired temperature, so it can actually have your apartment warmed up just as you're waking up.
This is, of course, my understanding. Reality may (and many times does) differ.
Yes, same as my car. Setting a higher temperature delta increases the fan power which throws more cold/hot air around, but what I've noticed is that I usually forget to set it back once the interior reaches a comfortable temperature, and after a while I'm opening the windows because it's too cold/hot inside.
I've now learned to simply let the car do its thing, except for very rare situations when I'm really uncomfortable. I like the idea of setting and forgetting. This thing seems to fit the bill, I'll have to check if it's compatible with my home heating.
I understand some people's hangups with using their real names, but what I don't understand is why they're complaining so loudly. It's Google's site, and it's their prerogative to implement whatever rules fit their fancy. It's not like people are being forced to join, so if you don't like the rules, join a social network which allows you to use nicknames.
JBQ is the guy who almost resigned in protest over the Cyanogenmod debacle (when Google demanded that they don't bundle the Google apps with their rom), and he's the guy in charge of releasing the code to the Android open source project. So when he says the source is coming, I'm inclined to believe him.
Slashdot Mirror
The point is this: fully automated taxis are much more believable if manually operated cars are kept out of the roads. I think this was your original point, and it makes sense since it'd be much harder to build automatic cars which would have to adapt to the unpredictability of human drivers.
I understand completely what you're saying about the pleasures of driving, I just don't think that as a society it's worth to give up on the idea of a totally automated flexible transportation system just because a few people like to drive their cars themselves.
The costs of driving to society are immense. It's not just the number of deaths on the road, it's all the people who don't die but are injured for life, the material costs of destroyed property, the safety systems built into cars and roads.
This is not to mention energy and time efficiency which could greatly improved by having computers driving our cars, or the fact that a lot less cars would have to be produced if they were being shared.
If there are a lot of people sharing your opinion, I can imagine that it might be possible to have stretches of road designated for human drivers.
I just don't think that the benefits of the self-driving car should be held back just because some of us would like to keep our toys.
It may sound hokey, but even if personal control of my car is taken away from me, no one will ever take motorcycling away from me. I'd rather die than lose that.
That's either hyperbole, or just sad.
Same as every other activity which people do for pleasure but for one reason or another can't be allowed unrestricted in public: do it in specially designated areas for that effect.
Things like target practising, hunting, racing, etc.
There are already car sharing systems which don't require that the car is checked by an employee after each use.
I'm not sure of the details since I've never used that system myself, but as I understand it, in order to have access to the car, you have to give the company your details and credit card number.
I suppose that if you try renting a car which someone used as a toilet, you can report the car as damaged and the previous owner will have some explaining to do.
The point is that this is already a solved problem. The hurdle is really the development of a reliable self-driving car.
You should've requested the captain to disable all of *his* electronic equipment.
What's good for the goose is good for the gander.
Biggest problem is that Android actually sucks as a UI in the car. it is very distracting to change modes.
I've noticed this myself.
I've fashioned a car dock for my Nexus S by glueing the phone's horizontal dock to a bean bag mount and connecting it to a FM transmitter (I wanted something easy to set up, and also hide when parked).
It's nice to have the Android apps in the car, but it's a pain switching between, say, navigation and music, especially since the official music app hides the status bar when horizontal.
I've tried using the "car home" software (or whatever it's called) but it's next to useless for that I need.
I'd be interested in starting a discussion on what the perfect software for a head unit could be, and how to go about doing it.
I have some experience with Android development, so I'm willing to get my hands dirty.
BTW thanks for sharing your setup. It seems a bit too complex for my knowledge and time, but it does sound interesting.
What's your hardware?
I've seen a few all-in-one double-DIN PCs, but I wasn't sure how hard it would be to simply drop Android on it.
Did you use the software from Android-x86?
No. You obviously haven't looked at how it works.
I hadn't. Thanks for the correction.
Say I discovered a great indie band and I wanted to share with a technically challenged friend: with Indietorrent I'd have to explain to him how torrents work, have him install a torrent client, get him to download the music and add it to wherever he stores it.
With services like Google Music and iTunes, the user can stream a sample directly and if he likes it, simply press the buy button and everything's taken care of for him.
This is not to mention the fact that your music is in the same place as recognized bands. People create their accounts for $popular_artist, but they may just leave with a few new bands in their shopping cart.
Hell, I just listened to a shared song on the Google+ Android app and it worked flawlessly, despite the fact that I'm not in the US and don't have access to their music website.
The ability to share a song instantly with anyone on your social network is, to me, the killer feature, and it seems to be much more beneficial for indie artists than established bands.
As for what you said about the band making their own promotion, I don't see why they couldn't do the same with Google music or any other site.
Though to be fair, if you're doing your own promotion, you might as well promote the one with the best return (or all of them, if you think users would rather keep the service they're already used to).
I think the point is that with the Google offering you get a huge installed base, and great integration with the software and devices people are already using.
It's the same benefit that integrated app stores had for indie developers.
I'd never heard of Indietorrent or Bandcamp before. Granted, I don't look for much new music these days, but I guess that makes me a good representative of your average music listener.
I generally agree with the sentiment of your post, I just wanted to add something here.
When I was in the same situation as the parent (single, employed, money in the bank) and decided to invest, I read The Motley Fool as a beginner's guide.
There's a sentence in that book which stuck with me (paraphrased from memory): "You'll almost always get much better return doing actual work than investing in the stock market.
However, if you adopt a long-term investment strategy, only checking from time to time if your companies are doing fine, you'll be hard-pressed to find any other activity which gives you as much return for such a low time investment."
I think this also applies to the difference between the GP's strategy of keeping MSFT and reaping the dividends vs your suggestion that better returns could've been had.
While that's true, it'd also have required that the parent invest a lot more time keeping up with the market, and probably also assume more risk.
Me too!
I've been thinking of doing this for a long time now, but have been holding off because I have no idea where to start.
Would you (GP) mind sharing your setup?
Seamless mode is I think a feature specific to VirtualBox where the Windows desktop is hidden, and you see only the running program on top of your Linux desktop, and side by side with your other Linux apps.
Visually it's almost identical to running a normal Linux application, but with crappier integration.
You also get the Windows taskbar on the bottom of the screen, which actually fits quite well, at least on my Gnome 3 desktop.
You might also be interested in using the VirtualBox shared folders. It's essentially the same as using Samba for sharing the files, but has better performance.
Basically, it allows you to "mount" folders from your Linux filesystem in your Windows system, so you can keep your data out of the virtual machine.
Well, technically yes.
However, the way I use it, just to run Office windows in seamless mode, it's more like using Windows as a virtual machine, not unlike running Java programs.
I guess you can say that I "run Windows", but don't "use Windows", which is the whole point. I'm very happy with Linux.
Trying to win a pedant award?
Not knowing your setup or having any experience with MacOS, I don't know if my experience correlates, but here booting the VirtualBox virtual machine with a saved session takes less than 10 seconds.
Office then runs at full speed (or at least fast enough not to notice), and if I remember to press the VirtualBox escape key (right CTRL) before trying to interact with my Linux system, it's seamless.
Sometimes I even forget I left the virtual machine running for hours.
Of course this isn't ideal, but I'd rather suffer through the pain of not having a native Office than move to Windows.
I found out that if you really need to use MS Office, you can just run in on a virtual machine.
If you use seamless mode it works perfectly, and you get the advantages of running a Linux desktop (virtual desktops, for one). Copying text works between systems, and you can configure it so that Windows has read-write access to whatever folders you need on your host computer.
The only issue I have is that I use Alt-F# to move between my virtual desktops, and the virtual machine steals those.
For that reason, I always keep Windows on the 4th desktop, so that I don't press Alt-F4 and close the currently running program.
And this is why I don't comment in places where they are using the Facebook commenting system.
For example, 9Gag. I'd be damned before I put my real name to a 9Gag comment.
I'm always amazed that some people there are willingly attaching their real names to comments on the NSFW posts.
Don't get me wrong. I lived in Asia for 1/3rd of my life, so I developed two things: a strong resistance to germs, and a strong sense of not wanting to know what's in my food.
If I can't see it, it won't hurt me. Doesn't mean I want to see it (or want to know about it) though :-)
Not to mention Skype:
Commits to keeping the Linux client up-to-date but never does.
Then commits to making a connector library available so others can implement a decent client UI (or integrate it into Pidgin/Empathy/etc.) but never does.
Now that MS bought Skype, it's essentially dead on Linux. Oh well, at least it'll force me to do what I've been wanting to do for a while: migrate to another platform.
RMS
Not to mention that in order to separate the M&Ms someone would have to put his hands all over said M&Ms.
I'm not paranoid about cleanliness, but I sure wouldn't like some guy touching my food before I eat it (unless he's a cook, which I force myself to blindly assume they're careful with hygiene).
From what I understood, when you wake up and turn it on at 7:00 it's not learning "I should turn the heating on everyday at 7:00" but rather "the temperature should be X at 7:00".
The system seems to also learn how long it takes to reach the desired temperature, so it can actually have your apartment warmed up just as you're waking up.
This is, of course, my understanding. Reality may (and many times does) differ.
Yes, same as my car. Setting a higher temperature delta increases the fan power which throws more cold/hot air around, but what I've noticed is that I usually forget to set it back once the interior reaches a comfortable temperature, and after a while I'm opening the windows because it's too cold/hot inside.
I've now learned to simply let the car do its thing, except for very rare situations when I'm really uncomfortable.
I like the idea of setting and forgetting. This thing seems to fit the bill, I'll have to check if it's compatible with my home heating.
I understand some people's hangups with using their real names, but what I don't understand is why they're complaining so loudly.
It's Google's site, and it's their prerogative to implement whatever rules fit their fancy. It's not like people are being forced to join, so if you don't like the rules, join a social network which allows you to use nicknames.
In fact, there's one which does just that: MySpace.
Here's the founder's comments on the whole real name thing: https://plus.google.com/112063946124358686266/posts/EcJ77v4KRSA
Or you could just create your own social network, with blackjack, and hookers.
In fact, forget the social network.
I don't know where the Slashdot summary pulled the (strangely unlinked) quote from JBQ, but in his most recent post in Google+. he confirmed the source is coming: https://plus.google.com/112218872649456413744/posts/HB5qQHeNKBQ
JBQ is the guy who almost resigned in protest over the Cyanogenmod debacle (when Google demanded that they don't bundle the Google apps with their rom), and he's the guy in charge of releasing the code to the Android open source project.
So when he says the source is coming, I'm inclined to believe him.