http://gethuman.com/ will often give you a decent number to get to an actual human in a lot of organizations. Biased to the US at the moment. The person on the AT&T number has actually asked in puzzlement 'how did you get this number?'. I have no connection with the site, but have had the occasional success with it.
And we've been doing it since at least the 1940s with everything from pharmaceuticals to fertilizer and hence it's extremely well developed and cheap technology.
That's how most of the '-contin' formulations work (eg oxycontin). You make tiny pellets of the analgesic, add a thin layer of wax to some, a thicker layer to some, a thicker yet layer to some, then make up a pill containing some pellets with no coating, and some with each of the increasingly thicker layers of wax. When you swallow the pill, the stuff with no layer goes into immediate effect (so you get fast acting relief). The acid in your stomach starts dissolving the wax around the rest, with the different thicknesses of wax acting to give a continuous release of the remaining analgesic. Different formulations have differing amounts of the initial uncoated analgesic.
All roadworkers carry a device which signals to self driving vehicles that they can't pass through this area? The truck either re-routes, pulls over, or wakes the human substitute driver up.
Note the poster said " Driving along the pacific highway south from Brisbane". The Pacific Highway is a large national multi-lane highway, not inner-city driving..
Thanks. Although I see (as others commented) that the right-click-to-measure version in new maps doesn't let you chose units (I'm a scientist. I need metric, even if what I'm measuring is in the US or Liberia).
Development of libreoffice on android *is* on the top of the priority list. Betas are available now: https://wiki.documentfoundatio... and the open document foundation awarded a contract to two firms to speed up development in January (http://www.zdnet.com/article/libreoffice-for-android-coming-soon/). The android stable is supposed to be released at the same time as the next major libreoffice release.
Well that narrows it down to 205 million people. To catch the, what, 15 or so people from the middle east who have actually attempted or succeeded in committing terrorism in the US?
I've been using a keyboard from wasd keyboards with cherry MX switches for the past couple of years and have been extremely happy with it. Sole downside is no usb input (so if you use a wired mouse it takes up another usb slot on your computer). http://www.wasdkeyboards.com/
Glympse (https://www.glympse.com/) does basically the same thing as latitude as far as I can tell (I never used latitude when it was around but use glympse all the time).
It might only be 12%, but 3,480 is still a *lot* of guns. Just saying. And yeah, the ATF has made a murderous nightmare even worse and some people should be doing prison time for that one.
Keeping an eye on the Mexican cartel's major source of weapons seems like a half-sensible suggestion. And since it's at least half sensible, it's completely unsurprising the DEA decided not to actually do it.
In my experience "genius" and "brilliance" tend to necessarily involve the ability to monomanically focus on things in a way which, socially speaking, is 'self centered'. We socialize that tendency out of most people, and particularly out of women.
"Working remotely is now widespread, and will only become moreso once telepresence robots become ubiquitous."
Telecommuting (much discussed on slashdot over the past decade) is fairly common, but still hardly 'widepread' - only 2.6% of the U.S. employee workforce 'considers the home their primary workplace', and the single largest group of telecommuters are federal employees (3.3%), ahead of private for-profit sector workers (2.6%) (http://globalworkplaceanalytics.com/telecommuting-statistics). And even among those (like myself) who would say my home is my primary workplace (I live about 3 hours drive from my employer) still need to go in to the office once a month or so. Which might work in some parts of Europe, but for most fo the world is unreasonably complicated and expensive. And I suspect the vast vast majority of those of us who telecommute or work remotely are still doing so within national boundaries.
"Translation services, both for written and spoken language are approaching sci-fi-level capabilities."
Bullshit. Well, so far anyway. The linked slashdot story contained a bunch of comments from people saying the skype translation was just about good enough for scheduling another meeting time, but you couldn't use it to do actual work.
"The rise of cryptocurrencies is providing a method for people worldwide to move away from national currencies."
Right up until you need to buy groceries or pay rent.
Of course, all these things will change. Machine translation will definitely get better. Telepresence might get beyond novelty and/or uncanny valley and genuinely make 'going for a beer with the boss' on another continent work. And my landlord might even start accepting bitcoin. But with the possible exception of machine translation, the rest of it will remain the province of fairly well off people for a long time. Well off people like Peter Diamandis.
"I see no hope for the future of our people if they are dependent on frivolous youth of today, for certainly all youth are reckless beyond words... When I was young, we were taught to be discreet and respectful of elders, but the present youth are exceedingly wise [disrespectful] and impatient of restraint". (Hesiod, 8th century BC)
Oh, I'm not a libertarian:) In a 'libertarian paradise' pesky 'regulations' which establish things like renter's rights (probably the single largest use of small claims court is by renters trying to recover their deposit when leaving a rental and the landlord claims the money is now theirs because [insert minor wear and tear here]) don't exist. Because 'the market' will somehow stop all that from happening..
I think the precise details of how easy small claims is to use varies from state to state. I've only had experience with it in California (and only once at that), and in CA the court doesn't give multiple opportunities to appear unless the defendant files paperwork each time giving a documented (and reasonable) reason they can't appear. And neither party is allowed to bring a lawyer with them. But yes, working out how to collect is up to you, and how easy that is varies wildly depending on the situation. Landlords tend to be easy to collect from because, by definition, they have fixed assets. Uber drivers, maybe not so much.
We need a Megan's Law equivalent for people who refuse to be vaccinated. Sure, you can refuse to vaccinate yourself or your child because your skyfairy says so, or for any other reason you like, but you have to be registered like a sex offender and banned from living or going within a thousand feet of any school.
Yes, but it happens less often when 'government regulations' prevent people with known histories of raping and assaulting people from driving taxis.
Whereas you seem to be arguing that the inconvenience of running a background check on someone before letting them drive a taxi is so onerous that it's worth letting known rapists drive taxis just to avoid the burden on the taxi industry of 'all that government red tape'.
"if I take it to small claims court... you probably won't show up"
In which case you automatically win.
"and even if I got the judgment you'd just stiff me anyway"
In which case the court will help you garnish their wages, order their bank to pay you from any funds they have in the bank, suspend their professional license and/or drivers license until they pay you, and a range of other things that will make their life a complete misery (http://www.courts.ca.gov/1179.htm).
But yeah, it does take time. But laying all this out to them in a demand-for-payment letter so they see that you know how the system works and are willing to grind through those steps is usually sufficient to get people to stop bluffing and pay you if you're clearly in the right.
"It's unlikely that a high school student would come away with any other conclusion than the police are a fearful group to be avoided at all costs," says Eugene O'Donnell, a former police officer and professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice
That's probably because the police *are* a fearful group to be avoided at all costs..
Scan a barcode on the dash with your phone as soon as you get in; your phone syncs with the car & the car changes all the radio station presets change according to the preference file your phone sent it. Ditto climate control preferences, seat position, throttle responsiveness, basically anything that can be controlled electronically.
The other three points I more or less agree with you on though.
Dealing with non-metric units isn't that daunting for people raised on metric either - I grew up in Australia and moved to the US in my 30s. I'm a scientist, so in my day-to-day worklife nothing changed at all. The conversions needed for daily shopping are rudimentary (a pound of fish is half a kilo of fish) and you quickly stop needing to even make the conversion. Inches for woodworking are sometimes actually an improvement (12 inches is divisible by 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, and 12, which makes for a lot of easy mental arithmetic when dividing a length of wood into halves, third, quarters etc; 10 cm is only divisible by 1, 2, 5, and 10). Miles per hour is just a number on a sign which needs to be related to the same number on your speedometer - there's no need to convert at all. Temperature took longer to adjust to - it's really a matter of recalibrating your sense of which number matches to which relative feeling, and that took 4 or 5 years. The only thing I still struggle with is wrench sizes - quick, which is bigger, a 5/8 wrench or a 3/4 wrench? Quick, which is bigger, a 10mm wrench or a 12mm wrench? I just tried a 5/8 wrench on a bolt and it was slightly too small - quick, what's the next size up to try? etc.
Slashdot Mirror
http://gethuman.com/ will often give you a decent number to get to an actual human in a lot of organizations. Biased to the US at the moment. The person on the AT&T number has actually asked in puzzlement 'how did you get this number?'. I have no connection with the site, but have had the occasional success with it.
And we've been doing it since at least the 1940s with everything from pharmaceuticals to fertilizer and hence it's extremely well developed and cheap technology.
That's how most of the '-contin' formulations work (eg oxycontin). You make tiny pellets of the analgesic, add a thin layer of wax to some, a thicker layer to some, a thicker yet layer to some, then make up a pill containing some pellets with no coating, and some with each of the increasingly thicker layers of wax. When you swallow the pill, the stuff with no layer goes into immediate effect (so you get fast acting relief). The acid in your stomach starts dissolving the wax around the rest, with the different thicknesses of wax acting to give a continuous release of the remaining analgesic. Different formulations have differing amounts of the initial uncoated analgesic.
All roadworkers carry a device which signals to self driving vehicles that they can't pass through this area? The truck either re-routes, pulls over, or wakes the human substitute driver up.
Note the poster said " Driving along the pacific highway south from Brisbane". The Pacific Highway is a large national multi-lane highway, not inner-city driving..
Thanks. Although I see (as others commented) that the right-click-to-measure version in new maps doesn't let you chose units (I'm a scientist. I need metric, even if what I'm measuring is in the US or Liberia).
Development of libreoffice on android *is* on the top of the priority list. Betas are available now: https://wiki.documentfoundatio... and the open document foundation awarded a contract to two firms to speed up development in January (http://www.zdnet.com/article/libreoffice-for-android-coming-soon/). The android stable is supposed to be released at the same time as the next major libreoffice release.
Dammit, I use the 'measure' tool in classic all the time.
"Most terrorists are middle eastern."
Well that narrows it down to 205 million people. To catch the, what, 15 or so people from the middle east who have actually attempted or succeeded in committing terrorism in the US?
I've been using a keyboard from wasd keyboards with cherry MX switches for the past couple of years and have been extremely happy with it. Sole downside is no usb input (so if you use a wired mouse it takes up another usb slot on your computer). http://www.wasdkeyboards.com/
Glympse (https://www.glympse.com/) does basically the same thing as latitude as far as I can tell (I never used latitude when it was around but use glympse all the time).
Not at all. The halfwits who ordered and implemented that one should be in prison too.
It might only be 12%, but 3,480 is still a *lot* of guns. Just saying. And yeah, the ATF has made a murderous nightmare even worse and some people should be doing prison time for that one.
Keeping an eye on the Mexican cartel's major source of weapons seems like a half-sensible suggestion. And since it's at least half sensible, it's completely unsurprising the DEA decided not to actually do it.
In my experience "genius" and "brilliance" tend to necessarily involve the ability to monomanically focus on things in a way which, socially speaking, is 'self centered'. We socialize that tendency out of most people, and particularly out of women.
"Working remotely is now widespread, and will only become moreso once telepresence robots become ubiquitous."
Telecommuting (much discussed on slashdot over the past decade) is fairly common, but still hardly 'widepread' - only 2.6% of the U.S. employee workforce 'considers the home their primary workplace', and the single largest group of telecommuters are federal employees (3.3%), ahead of private for-profit sector workers (2.6%) (http://globalworkplaceanalytics.com/telecommuting-statistics). And even among those (like myself) who would say my home is my primary workplace (I live about 3 hours drive from my employer) still need to go in to the office once a month or so. Which might work in some parts of Europe, but for most fo the world is unreasonably complicated and expensive. And I suspect the vast vast majority of those of us who telecommute or work remotely are still doing so within national boundaries.
"Translation services, both for written and spoken language are approaching sci-fi-level capabilities."
Bullshit. Well, so far anyway. The linked slashdot story contained a bunch of comments from people saying the skype translation was just about good enough for scheduling another meeting time, but you couldn't use it to do actual work.
"The rise of cryptocurrencies is providing a method for people worldwide to move away from national currencies."
Right up until you need to buy groceries or pay rent.
Of course, all these things will change. Machine translation will definitely get better. Telepresence might get beyond novelty and/or uncanny valley and genuinely make 'going for a beer with the boss' on another continent work. And my landlord might even start accepting bitcoin. But with the possible exception of machine translation, the rest of it will remain the province of fairly well off people for a long time. Well off people like Peter Diamandis.
"I see no hope for the future of our people if they are dependent on frivolous youth of today, for certainly all youth are reckless beyond words... When I was young, we were taught to be discreet and respectful of elders, but the present youth are exceedingly wise [disrespectful] and impatient of restraint".
(Hesiod, 8th century BC)
Oh, I'm not a libertarian :) In a 'libertarian paradise' pesky 'regulations' which establish things like renter's rights (probably the single largest use of small claims court is by renters trying to recover their deposit when leaving a rental and the landlord claims the money is now theirs because [insert minor wear and tear here]) don't exist. Because 'the market' will somehow stop all that from happening..
I think the precise details of how easy small claims is to use varies from state to state. I've only had experience with it in California (and only once at that), and in CA the court doesn't give multiple opportunities to appear unless the defendant files paperwork each time giving a documented (and reasonable) reason they can't appear. And neither party is allowed to bring a lawyer with them. But yes, working out how to collect is up to you, and how easy that is varies wildly depending on the situation. Landlords tend to be easy to collect from because, by definition, they have fixed assets. Uber drivers, maybe not so much.
We need a Megan's Law equivalent for people who refuse to be vaccinated. Sure, you can refuse to vaccinate yourself or your child because your skyfairy says so, or for any other reason you like, but you have to be registered like a sex offender and banned from living or going within a thousand feet of any school.
Yes, but it happens less often when 'government regulations' prevent people with known histories of raping and assaulting people from driving taxis.
Whereas you seem to be arguing that the inconvenience of running a background check on someone before letting them drive a taxi is so onerous that it's worth letting known rapists drive taxis just to avoid the burden on the taxi industry of 'all that government red tape'.
"if I take it to small claims court ... you probably won't show up"
In which case you automatically win.
"and even if I got the judgment you'd just stiff me anyway"
In which case the court will help you garnish their wages, order their bank to pay you from any funds they have in the bank, suspend their professional license and/or drivers license until they pay you, and a range of other things that will make their life a complete misery (http://www.courts.ca.gov/1179.htm).
But yeah, it does take time. But laying all this out to them in a demand-for-payment letter so they see that you know how the system works and are willing to grind through those steps is usually sufficient to get people to stop bluffing and pay you if you're clearly in the right.
"It's unlikely that a high school student would come away with any other conclusion than the police are a fearful group to be avoided at all costs," says Eugene O'Donnell, a former police officer and professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice
That's probably because the police *are* a fearful group to be avoided at all costs..
"3. Personalization and customization."
Scan a barcode on the dash with your phone as soon as you get in; your phone syncs with the car & the car changes all the radio station presets change according to the preference file your phone sent it. Ditto climate control preferences, seat position, throttle responsiveness, basically anything that can be controlled electronically.
The other three points I more or less agree with you on though.
Dealing with non-metric units isn't that daunting for people raised on metric either - I grew up in Australia and moved to the US in my 30s. I'm a scientist, so in my day-to-day worklife nothing changed at all. The conversions needed for daily shopping are rudimentary (a pound of fish is half a kilo of fish) and you quickly stop needing to even make the conversion. Inches for woodworking are sometimes actually an improvement (12 inches is divisible by 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, and 12, which makes for a lot of easy mental arithmetic when dividing a length of wood into halves, third, quarters etc; 10 cm is only divisible by 1, 2, 5, and 10). Miles per hour is just a number on a sign which needs to be related to the same number on your speedometer - there's no need to convert at all. Temperature took longer to adjust to - it's really a matter of recalibrating your sense of which number matches to which relative feeling, and that took 4 or 5 years. The only thing I still struggle with is wrench sizes - quick, which is bigger, a 5/8 wrench or a 3/4 wrench? Quick, which is bigger, a 10mm wrench or a 12mm wrench? I just tried a 5/8 wrench on a bolt and it was slightly too small - quick, what's the next size up to try? etc.
Finally, an easy way to cancel a comcast subscription!
http://boingboing.net/2014/07/...