Well, sure - and Bertha's Kitty Boutique and The Fearmonger's Shop haven't been getting much love from Garrison these last few years either. But here in Northern California I can get away with using 18-pound heater cats instead of 25s. (And I also left out the "enhanced underwriting" for Land's End and whichever bookstore chain it was.)
Lets you sell the product placement after you're done filming!
And I don't think I've ever heard anyone order a "Pepsi" in person. I've seen it on film a couple of times - Marty McFly trying to order a "Pepsi Free", and somebody telling Chase and Ackroyd "Why don't you boys have yourself a Pepsi" in Spies Like Us.
This isn't a new idea from the Netherlands. This is an idea whose proponents have been trying to sell in the US for several years, including trying to sell it to states like California and Oregon, and trying to sell to the Feds, and now they're trying to sell to the Netherlanders.
They can get environmentalists excited about discouraging driving (raising either a fuel tax or annually checking odometers could also do that), and government road building agencies excited about raising taxes on people who use the roads more, and high-tech bloggers excited about arguing the merits of different pricing structures on driver behavior and revenue generation, and police agencies entirely not saying anything out loud about how amazingly cool it would be to have everybody have to buy a system that tracks everywhere they drive, posed as a tax measure, muchcooler than just putting license plates on cars or getting people to buy Fastrack toll transponders or put GPS in their cell phones.
It's a scam now, and it's been a scam since the beginning. It requires expensive equipment in every car and an expensive infrastructure to monitor the equipment, so it's also not revenue-neutral as a tax collection methodology. And at least here in California, we already have a serious mess about how different kinds of taxes get allocated between the state, cities, counties, and state transportation agencies, and they were trying to use that as a way to play the different levels of government off against each other so that at least one of them would be greedy enough to buy this thing.
This isn't a new idea from the Netherlands. This is an idea whose proponents have been trying to sell in the US for several years, including trying to sell it to states like California and Oregon, and trying to sell to the Feds, and now they're trying to sell to the Netherlanders.
Sometimes they compare it to fuel taxes (by saying things about poor people not being able to afford Priuses) or to annual flat or per-car-value fees (by saying that those don't track road usage and construction costs), and they never compare it to having your odometer read when you get your car inspected (because that would be too easy), and sometimes they try to tell the Feds or the states that they aren't getting their fair share of the potential tax money (playing them against each other, except when they're trying to present it as revenue-neutral.)
As far as I can tell, it's primarily about building a big expensive monitoring system and selling lots of equipment that everybody would need to buy for their cars, an, and only secondarily about building a monitoring system that users like police will have ready access to, not that the sellers have any problem with doing that either. Issues like revenue generation for states or national governments or road construction agencies are really tertiary parts of their motivation.
While the best viewing would normally have been tonight or a few days around it, the Perseids hang around for a while, and you may be able to see occasional meteors for a while. I saw one just by chance last night, in spite of the moon, streetlights, the marine-layer haze in the Bay Area. You'll need more patience in a week, but the moon won't be as much of a problem.
What's more frustrating has been not knowing if the auroras from the recent solar flares would be visible down here (which is very rare), and it's been cloudy enough near the horizon at night that I probably couldn't tell anyway. (There was some green glow in the distance the other night, but then it turned in to yellow glow, and red, and green again, so it probably wasn't auroras:-)
Can't drive one of these things downtown, nope, sorry. No nuclear weapons, no nuclear reactors. If they were careless about how they wrote the laws, it'd also be no radioactive smoke detectors or medical equipment either, or at least you have to sneak those past the "Nuclear-Free Zone" signs.
Couple of grams of other stuff? As other people have noted, yes, you can find that easily enough.
0 - Gary Walker's a real person with a non-unique name on Google+. Here's what he did:
1 - Made a Google+ account with his real name, some bogus information, and occasional cat pictures. - Worked
2a - Had three friends report it as a "Fake Profile" - No Response
2b - As the real Gary Walker, reported the new profile as "Impersonation".
2b.1 - Google+ requires a copy of a government ID if you report an account as "Impersonation". He used a really bad fake driver's license. - Worked!
2b.2 - Google+ informed him it was blocking the new profile, and also informed the new profile it was blocked. Took about 2 hours - Worked!
2c - As the new Gary Walker, requested reinstatement, using an even worse fake driver's license - Worked!
3 - Wrote up results - Attracted Blog traffic and comments - Worked!
4 -....
5 - PROFIT!!
Apparently you don't even need Real Photoshop to turn a McLovin' Hawai'i Driver's License into an adequate-quality fake ID for Google+ purposes. But SHHHHHH!! Don't Tell Them!
I'm sure the Chinese research team didn't send their robot car out on the public highway without having tested it a lot in the lab and on closed tracks first, and that Google's robot car team didn't, and that the people who developed power steering etc. didn't either. My guess is that none of the DARPA Autonomous Vehicle Challenge competitors did either (or at worst, not many of them:-).
And you don't send a robot car out to drive itself without a human along to override its decisions, any more than a responsible adult would send a young human out to drive unsupervised in a public road for the first time. (Some of us humans learned to drive in "driver's-ed" cars that had an extra set of brakes in the front passenger seat so the instructor could stop the car if he had to, while others learned in cars that didn't have that, so the instructor was limited to yelling a lot and grabbing the steering wheel if needed. And lots of us learned to drive in mostly-empty parking lots before going out on the street.) Presumably the Chinese car had a human backup driver who could override the autopilot if necessary.
It's more fun if you can have the backup driver in the right-hand seat and a large dog or a Terminator mannequin in the left-hand seat, but that's strictly optional.
Google's driverless car was just in the news for crashing into a Prius - I was assuming that this headline meant that China had a robot car that had done the same, but I guess this is/. and not Fark.
Besides, Google's car can also look up Sarah Connor when it's planning its route...
Telephone systems are electronic. Calling up the customer by phone and telling them you'll be there around 3pm is therefore delivering an electronic message. There's prior art, but getting the messenger service or the pizza or the cable repair guy to actually show up around 3pm is a bit more tricky.
The diagram was "Page 6 of 6" and showed steps 610-616 - perhaps the useful and novel part of the patent was in steps 1-500?
I don't know if they're still doing this, but back in the early 90s when I was working on fiber restoration databases, AT&T used to fly small planes along the main cable routes to look for unregistered construction. If they saw any backhoes they weren't expecting, they'd drop them a package that had call-before-you-dig information, some chewing gum, playing cards, and some leather work gloves (which I gather were basically a bribe.) There were usually about 1000 backhoes within a quarter mile of our cable routes along the east coast, and there were often a couple of them that hadn't called in to check for fiber routes, gas lines, etc.
One of the early competitive fiber providers was Wiltel, who were a gas pipeline company that had started running fiber along their pipelines since they already had right-of-way. They had a real advantage, because Bubba the Backhoe Driver might not worry about a sign saying "Wimpy Fiber that won't slow down your backhoe, please don't dig here", but a sign saying "Gas pipeline" means "don't dig here, it'll blow up and you'll die."
Many years ago, a customer of mine was in the forestry business, and had a railroad to haul trees from their forests to their mill, and they had a few copper T1 lines they ran along the railroad route. Mostly it was buried under the tracks, but where they had bridges it was hanging under the bridge. And every year around hunting season, a few bubbas would shoot out their wires, either because it takes a lot more skill than shotgunning a stop sign, or because there'd be birds sitting on the wire or whatever.
The AT&T version of the story was that the farmer was burying a dead cow. I heard it in the early 90s, when I was working on automatic restoration system databases, though by now I don't remember if that was the fiber cut in Georgia in ~1991 that took out an AT&T line just after we'd installed the FASTAR restoration network, or if that was just a boring backhoe cut and the dead cow had been earlier.
(Not to beat a dead horse, of course.) The fence post story is good - hadn't heard that one.
Slashdot Mirror
Baring Marilyn Monroe was fine, but Charlie Chaplin? Paul Newman impressed a few ladies when he was young, but Charlie just wasn't the looker.
Well, sure - and Bertha's Kitty Boutique and The Fearmonger's Shop haven't been getting much love from Garrison these last few years either. But here in Northern California I can get away with using 18-pound heater cats instead of 25s. (And I also left out the "enhanced underwriting" for Land's End and whichever bookstore chain it was.)
Unofficially, ours increments up to eleven!
Lets you sell the product placement after you're done filming!
And I don't think I've ever heard anyone order a "Pepsi" in person. I've seen it on film a couple of times - Marty McFly trying to order a "Pepsi Free", and somebody telling Chase and Ackroyd "Why don't you boys have yourself a Pepsi" in Spies Like Us.
All restaurants are Taco Bell!
That's Captain North America, to you!
Back To The Future, with product placements for DeLorean and Mr. Fusion?
Prairie Home Companion, sponsored by Powdermilk Biscuits and the American Duct Tape Council?
This isn't a new idea from the Netherlands. This is an idea whose proponents have been trying to sell in the US for several years, including trying to sell it to states like California and Oregon, and trying to sell to the Feds, and now they're trying to sell to the Netherlanders.
They can get environmentalists excited about discouraging driving (raising either a fuel tax or annually checking odometers could also do that), and government road building agencies excited about raising taxes on people who use the roads more, and high-tech bloggers excited about arguing the merits of different pricing structures on driver behavior and revenue generation, and police agencies entirely not saying anything out loud about how amazingly cool it would be to have everybody have to buy a system that tracks everywhere they drive, posed as a tax measure, muchcooler than just putting license plates on cars or getting people to buy Fastrack toll transponders or put GPS in their cell phones.
It's a scam now, and it's been a scam since the beginning. It requires expensive equipment in every car and an expensive infrastructure to monitor the equipment, so it's also not revenue-neutral as a tax collection methodology. And at least here in California, we already have a serious mess about how different kinds of taxes get allocated between the state, cities, counties, and state transportation agencies, and they were trying to use that as a way to play the different levels of government off against each other so that at least one of them would be greedy enough to buy this thing.
This isn't a new idea from the Netherlands. This is an idea whose proponents have been trying to sell in the US for several years, including trying to sell it to states like California and Oregon, and trying to sell to the Feds, and now they're trying to sell to the Netherlanders.
Sometimes they compare it to fuel taxes (by saying things about poor people not being able to afford Priuses) or to annual flat or per-car-value fees (by saying that those don't track road usage and construction costs), and they never compare it to having your odometer read when you get your car inspected (because that would be too easy), and sometimes they try to tell the Feds or the states that they aren't getting their fair share of the potential tax money (playing them against each other, except when they're trying to present it as revenue-neutral.)
As far as I can tell, it's primarily about building a big expensive monitoring system and selling lots of equipment that everybody would need to buy for their cars, an, and only secondarily about building a monitoring system that users like police will have ready access to, not that the sellers have any problem with doing that either. Issues like revenue generation for states or national governments or road construction agencies are really tertiary parts of their motivation.
While the best viewing would normally have been tonight or a few days around it, the Perseids hang around for a while, and you may be able to see occasional meteors for a while. I saw one just by chance last night, in spite of the moon, streetlights, the marine-layer haze in the Bay Area. You'll need more patience in a week, but the moon won't be as much of a problem.
What's more frustrating has been not knowing if the auroras from the recent solar flares would be visible down here (which is very rare), and it's been cloudy enough near the horizon at night that I probably couldn't tell anyway. (There was some green glow in the distance the other night, but then it turned in to yellow glow, and red, and green again, so it probably wasn't auroras :-)
That's what winches are for.
I had oil heat in my house when I lived in New Jersey. I had a 500 gal oil tank, which probably lasted most of the winter.
And just what is the life expectancy of a motorcycle with a nuclear reactor mounted between your legs? And is the driver's name "Raven"?
Can't drive one of these things downtown, nope, sorry. No nuclear weapons, no nuclear reactors. If they were careless about how they wrote the laws, it'd also be no radioactive smoke detectors or medical equipment either, or at least you have to sneak those past the "Nuclear-Free Zone" signs.
Couple of grams of other stuff? As other people have noted, yes, you can find that easily enough.
Apparently you don't even need Real Photoshop to turn a McLovin' Hawai'i Driver's License into an adequate-quality fake ID for Google+ purposes. But SHHHHHH!! Don't Tell Them!
Was tasty!
I'm sure the Chinese research team didn't send their robot car out on the public highway without having tested it a lot in the lab and on closed tracks first, and that Google's robot car team didn't, and that the people who developed power steering etc. didn't either. My guess is that none of the DARPA Autonomous Vehicle Challenge competitors did either (or at worst, not many of them :-).
And you don't send a robot car out to drive itself without a human along to override its decisions, any more than a responsible adult would send a young human out to drive unsupervised in a public road for the first time. (Some of us humans learned to drive in "driver's-ed" cars that had an extra set of brakes in the front passenger seat so the instructor could stop the car if he had to, while others learned in cars that didn't have that, so the instructor was limited to yelling a lot and grabbing the steering wheel if needed. And lots of us learned to drive in mostly-empty parking lots before going out on the street.) Presumably the Chinese car had a human backup driver who could override the autopilot if necessary.
It's more fun if you can have the backup driver in the right-hand seat and a large dog or a Terminator mannequin in the left-hand seat, but that's strictly optional.
Google's driverless car was just in the news for crashing into a Prius - I was assuming that this headline meant that China had a robot car that had done the same, but I guess this is /. and not Fark.
Besides, Google's car can also look up Sarah Connor when it's planning its route...
Ok, fine, "perhaps the useful, novel, and non-obvious part of the patent was in steps 1-500?" Happy now?
Boing-Boing story on using a backhoe as a swimming pool toy, with short youtube video.
Nah - FEMA wouldn't use that much air conditioning.
Telephone systems are electronic. Calling up the customer by phone and telling them you'll be there around 3pm is therefore delivering an electronic message. There's prior art, but getting the messenger service or the pizza or the cable repair guy to actually show up around 3pm is a bit more tricky.
The diagram was "Page 6 of 6" and showed steps 610-616 - perhaps the useful and novel part of the patent was in steps 1-500?
I don't know if they're still doing this, but back in the early 90s when I was working on fiber restoration databases, AT&T used to fly small planes along the main cable routes to look for unregistered construction. If they saw any backhoes they weren't expecting, they'd drop them a package that had call-before-you-dig information, some chewing gum, playing cards, and some leather work gloves (which I gather were basically a bribe.) There were usually about 1000 backhoes within a quarter mile of our cable routes along the east coast, and there were often a couple of them that hadn't called in to check for fiber routes, gas lines, etc.
One of the early competitive fiber providers was Wiltel, who were a gas pipeline company that had started running fiber along their pipelines since they already had right-of-way. They had a real advantage, because Bubba the Backhoe Driver might not worry about a sign saying "Wimpy Fiber that won't slow down your backhoe, please don't dig here", but a sign saying "Gas pipeline" means "don't dig here, it'll blow up and you'll die."
Many years ago, a customer of mine was in the forestry business, and had a railroad to haul trees from their forests to their mill, and they had a few copper T1 lines they ran along the railroad route. Mostly it was buried under the tracks, but where they had bridges it was hanging under the bridge. And every year around hunting season, a few bubbas would shoot out their wires, either because it takes a lot more skill than shotgunning a stop sign, or because there'd be birds sitting on the wire or whatever.
The AT&T version of the story was that the farmer was burying a dead cow. I heard it in the early 90s, when I was working on automatic restoration system databases, though by now I don't remember if that was the fiber cut in Georgia in ~1991 that took out an AT&T line just after we'd installed the FASTAR restoration network, or if that was just a boring backhoe cut and the dead cow had been earlier.
(Not to beat a dead horse, of course.) The fence post story is good - hadn't heard that one.