I suspect that degradation of the old equipment is seen by the EPA as a feature rather than a bug, as it means that those old cars will come off the road, their owners either buying newer (and more efficient?) vehicles or being forced to switch to public transportation.
The problem that driverless cars will offer many benefits and reduce costs to society:
reduced chance overall of accidents
increased fuel economy both due to better driving and making slower speeds acceptable to the occupants by taking fatigue due to paying full attention out of the equation
reduced congestion - both because of the net reduction of miles due to driving around looking for a space (you'd just have the car drop you off and sign into the municipal parking database and obtain a reservation for a nearby space and proceed to park in it.), and because cars can take more optimal routes based on other traffic if they communicate with each other
reduced waiting at signals
The efficiency benefits and lives saved will make driverless cars a net benefit to society, so we'd better figure out how to make it possible from a legal and liability standpoint. There will be less overall risk in the driverless car nation, so I don't see how insurance companies would be unwilling to provide service, unless opportunistic lawyers are allowed to create a situation where the money liability is out of sync with the real damages.
Makes sense. The cable companies already do this with television ads. It's only a matter of time if they're not doing it already. Too bad there's no alternative in my area for broadband.....
Instead of having an actual steam box, publish a "steam standard" which pc makers can certify against and game makers can use in their requirements.
Instead of a long list of requirements, the game can just say, "steam 2013 or better" and people can buy machines certified to those standards. The trick would be to publish useful standards frequently enough that they remain useful, but not so often that there are as many standards as possible configurations anyway.
you seem to be under the misapprehension that the action of "too much" will only make the planet nicer and have no other effect.
But I submit that there is a strong possibility that in addition to making the planet nicer, it is pretty likely that the measures taken will also increase human misery and suffering, and may even result in wide-scale death.
Indeed, depopulation is one of the measures that you see proposed here on slashdot a lot. I assume by people who think they will be members of the group that gets to live, rather than the group that makes the grand sacrifice for the greater good.
It is also implicit in your table that the measures taken are actually effective. But there is not a lot of consensus about what genuinely effective measures would look like. It's entirely possible that jumping in and doing "something" could result in achieving the above mentioned human misery without the benefit of a nicer planet.
It's the buses themselves that are uncomfortable. And incredibly inconvenient. My current commute of a hour each way would become *four* hours each way using public transportation, and my personal cost would skyrocket (according to google, it would take me five bus transfers, commuter rail, a subway, and a three mile taxi trip....)
Buses are great for the environment and traffic congestion if they're full, but you gotta run a lot of quarter-or-less full buses if you want enough routes and frequently spaced enough that they're a valid transportation option for many people not living/working in the densest metropolitan areas. How does a quarter-full bus compare to cars in terms of emissions and fuel use?
People who use cars are greedy for the time they save, not for the elitism they can exercise.
When was the last time you checked? We've now got warrantless wiretaps, indefinite detainment, we have to submit to a rapiscan to travel long distances, and the provisions of the TSA are coming soon to a highway near you.
The engineer or mechanic working on nose gear installation: Not so much.
There is still a lot of grey areas, but at least rules like the above would eliminate a lot of patent grabbing. (From both sides).
The spark of an idea might have occurred to the engineer while on the job, and if all they've got is the spark and do nothing with it, then I guess I can see maybe having a vague point (although, if they do nothing with it, it's not really patentable, either...), but unless the engineer uses company time and resources to draw up the plans, do the analysis and modeling, refinement, etc, that idea should belong to him.
The purpose of patents is to encourage inventors to publish the details of their inventions so that we might all benefit from their insights and so that the knowledge to produce useful devices does not pass with the closing of a company or the death of a tradesman. If some other entity is automatically granted the rights to the hypothetical engineer above's work, what incentive does it provide for him to bother?
Well, for one thing, Netflix had a contest a few years back that accidentally showed that you can't anonymize them if you have enough of the history to be useful, or at least that anonymization is more difficult than it would initially appear.
It all comes fairer out in the end if everyone pays for the cost of their own services, as long as it's actually possible to apportion the bill properly.
Maybe, but the measurement process of the original object is unlikely to be non-destructive. This would finally put an end to the copyright vs. theft argument, though...
Drug companies make money off of things like Viagra. It's cheap, easy to make, involves sex, no one dies, has a near unlimited shelf life and doesn't have Jenny McCarthy making her idiotic appearances on morning shows misinforming housewives everywhere about what it does.
Viagra's a good example. Tell us again what they were researching when they discovered it...
Slashdot Mirror
I suspect that degradation of the old equipment is seen by the EPA as a feature rather than a bug, as it means that those old cars will come off the road, their owners either buying newer (and more efficient?) vehicles or being forced to switch to public transportation.
is it twenty or thirty cents more when you normalize for the lower fuel economy due to the lower energy density of ethanol?
The problem that driverless cars will offer many benefits and reduce costs to society:
The efficiency benefits and lives saved will make driverless cars a net benefit to society, so we'd better figure out how to make it possible from a legal and liability standpoint. There will be less overall risk in the driverless car nation, so I don't see how insurance companies would be unwilling to provide service, unless opportunistic lawyers are allowed to create a situation where the money liability is out of sync with the real damages.
Makes sense. The cable companies already do this with television ads. It's only a matter of time if they're not doing it already. Too bad there's no alternative in my area for broadband.....
Is it possible to browse https most places?
What would be the point of building a space station with a planet-destroying superlaser when all live on the same planet as all of our enemies?
I don't think a crooked ventilation shaft would have prevented the chain reaction caused by cauterizing the shaft itself at the outlet.
Those torpedoes didn't go all the way to the core, you know, they just had to get past the opening.
Everything only tastes like chicken because everyone used to smoke, so no one knew what anything tasted like.
That is an interesting idea -
Instead of having an actual steam box, publish a "steam standard" which pc makers can certify against and game makers can use in their requirements.
Instead of a long list of requirements, the game can just say, "steam 2013 or better" and people can buy machines certified to those standards. The trick would be to publish useful standards frequently enough that they remain useful, but not so often that there are as many standards as possible configurations anyway.
you seem to be under the misapprehension that the action of "too much" will only make the planet nicer and have no other effect.
But I submit that there is a strong possibility that in addition to making the planet nicer, it is pretty likely that the measures taken will also increase human misery and suffering, and may even result in wide-scale death.
Indeed, depopulation is one of the measures that you see proposed here on slashdot a lot. I assume by people who think they will be members of the group that gets to live, rather than the group that makes the grand sacrifice for the greater good.
It is also implicit in your table that the measures taken are actually effective. But there is not a lot of consensus about what genuinely effective measures would look like. It's entirely possible that jumping in and doing "something" could result in achieving the above mentioned human misery without the benefit of a nicer planet.
It's the buses themselves that are uncomfortable. And incredibly inconvenient. My current commute of a hour each way would become *four* hours each way using public transportation, and my personal cost would skyrocket (according to google, it would take me five bus transfers, commuter rail, a subway, and a three mile taxi trip....)
Buses are great for the environment and traffic congestion if they're full, but you gotta run a lot of quarter-or-less full buses if you want enough routes and frequently spaced enough that they're a valid transportation option for many people not living/working in the densest metropolitan areas. How does a quarter-full bus compare to cars in terms of emissions and fuel use?
People who use cars are greedy for the time they save, not for the elitism they can exercise.
When was the last time you checked? We've now got warrantless wiretaps, indefinite detainment, we have to submit to a rapiscan to travel long distances, and the provisions of the TSA are coming soon to a highway near you.
And the amusing thing is that many ebook readers are designed so that you can't actually turn them *off*, you can only put them in standby mode.
Why does the new GUI require more hardware resources than many of the games..?
Until you start making sales, the clean-up guy would be getting taxed 100%....
The engineer or mechanic working on nose gear installation: Not so much.
There is still a lot of grey areas, but at least rules like the above would eliminate a lot of patent grabbing. (From both sides).
The spark of an idea might have occurred to the engineer while on the job, and if all they've got is the spark and do nothing with it, then I guess I can see maybe having a vague point (although, if they do nothing with it, it's not really patentable, either...), but unless the engineer uses company time and resources to draw up the plans, do the analysis and modeling, refinement, etc, that idea should belong to him.
The purpose of patents is to encourage inventors to publish the details of their inventions so that we might all benefit from their insights and so that the knowledge to produce useful devices does not pass with the closing of a company or the death of a tradesman. If some other entity is automatically granted the rights to the hypothetical engineer above's work, what incentive does it provide for him to bother?
Well, for one thing, Netflix had a contest a few years back that accidentally showed that you can't anonymize them if you have enough of the history to be useful, or at least that anonymization is more difficult than it would initially appear.
And you couldn't do this zoom+rotate effect with a touchpad or pen tablet?
What are you talking about? Of course it was an infomercial for nintendo games.
It did that by containing interviews, previews, game-related comics, walk-throughs and strategy guides complete with screenshot maps.
Then they charge more for the food they ship.
It all comes fairer out in the end if everyone pays for the cost of their own services, as long as it's actually possible to apportion the bill properly.
-Making dimes out of zinc, to appease the stupid zinc lobby.
No. The zinc people are already screwing everybody with their easily stripped screws.
Wendys has cheeseburgers on the dollar menu. If you live somewhere without sales tax....
No, they're somewhat orthogonal improvements. So, it's really more like a 7x improvement...
Maybe, but the measurement process of the original object is unlikely to be non-destructive. This would finally put an end to the copyright vs. theft argument, though...
For a paper-based 3D printer, it actually does make sense - the square inch size is the sum of the areas of each layer.
Drug companies make money off of things like Viagra. It's cheap, easy to make, involves sex, no one dies, has a near unlimited shelf life and doesn't have Jenny McCarthy making her idiotic appearances on morning shows misinforming housewives everywhere about what it does.
Viagra's a good example. Tell us again what they were researching when they discovered it...