"The submitter notes that this V2V communication would include transmission of a vehicle's location, which comes with privacy concerns. "
For the purposes of reducing accidents and facilitating things like lane changes, there's no reason for the location to be transmitted more broadly than a few hundred metres around the transmitting vehicle, nor for either the transmitting vehicle or receiving vehicles to store that location for more than 10 minutes or so. I'm not too worried about the impact on privacy if that were the case. And I'm expecting car manufacturers to go with the cheapest possible solution which meets regulation, so they certainly have no interest in installing the kind of equipment needed to broadcast location beyond 100m or so, and lost of interest in resisting regulation which goes beyond that.
Well, I just wasted about an hour rummaging through California's law relating to waste water from industrial processes, as well as law relating to drinking water, and in that time could not find anything which either supports or refutes the parent poster's assertion that waste water from semiconductor plants must be cleaner than tap water (links to the law and regulations below). Nor could I find any support for the parent poster's claim just randomly googling around (I figured if it were true there'd be multiple references to it).
I agree with you that if wastewater from industrial processes is held to higher standards than tap water, then that's ridiculous. However given it's such an extrodinary claim, I'd also suggest that the burden of proof lies with those making it - here's the law; knock yourselves out.
"Why would the rest of the world care? If Californians eliminate themselves as a competitor through insane regulation, other countries benefit."
Well, another way to look at it is Californians have calculated the real cost. Sure, you get a couple of hundred FAB plant jobs, and a dribble of corporate and payroll tax out of it, but FABs are notoriously hard on worker health and on the surrounding environment. So the state ends up paying big dollars down the track to clean up the toxic mess left behind (and remember the only thing prop 65 bans is businesses dumping known carcinogens *into the drinking water supply* - under this law you can still dump carcinogenic waste wherever else you want), and pays again for healthcare costs for workers and their families (or we all pay it through increased insurance premiums if the state doesn't end up paying for it with our taxes).
About the only reason you'd want a FAB plant in your state that wasn't willing or able to comply with California's environmental laws is if you want to be able to boast about how you 'created more jobs' in the leadup to the next election, and didn't give a shit what the real cost to the state would be over the next 30 years.
The law just says "Businesses are prohibited from knowingly releasing listed chemicals into drinking water sources."
The law *doesn't* say industry is held to higher standards than water treatment facilites - just that industry can't deliberately dump known carcinogens into the water supply. Per this particular law, industry could still dump known carcinogens into any other random body of water they like.
You forget that allowing companies to expose workers to toxic crap and to dump waste everywhere comes with economic costs to the state as well as economic benefits. Sure, you get a handful more jobs and the tax revenue which comes with that, but usually it's the state who ends up paying for the cleanup afterwards, and it's everyone in the state who pays for the downstream healthcare costs for workers and others affected by it, both through higher insurance premiums and through taxes to pay for medi-cal and medicare. Sometimes the economic benefits to the state of allowing a semiconductor fab plant to skip environmental regulations so they don't leave to Texas or Mexico don't actually add up. Unless the *only* thing you care about is being able to boast about how you 'created more jobs' between now and the next election.
That particular regulation (prop 65) was voter initiated, not legislature initiated. All it requires is: the state must publish a list of chemicals known to cause cancer or reproductive harm (defined as having a 1 in 100,000 chance of causing cancer or birth defects or other reproductive harm); businesses must label products and areas, like workplaces or apartments, that contain or release *significant amounts* of those poisons; and businesses are prohibited from knowingly releasing listed chemicals into drinking water sources. Many businesses have taken the position that they're better off posting warnings when any amount of a carcinogenic substance is present.
Given that semiconductor manufacturing is one of the more hazardous and polluting industries out there, I'm not surprised fab plants have a difficult time meeting environmental regulations in CA and have been willing to deal with the costs associated with moving to states or coutries who don't care as much about the health of workers or the cost of environmental cleanup. The solution to lost jobs isn't to drop regulation so employers can go back to putting employee health at risk, it's to improve the standards of the rest of the world so there isn't an unregulated bolt-hole for fab plant owners to run off to.
Link zotero to this and you'll have a solution academic collaborators have been looking for since the beginning of word processing.. Seriously, we need a collaborative writing platform which allows multiple authors to add citations.
Like many slashdotters, I have an old box under my desk which grabs mail from several external accounts via pop and serves it up via imap. No smtp though. And having home DSL with no static IP, I use No-IP to provide a stable domain for that machine. So this morning I wake up and discover that the domain has disappeared and my mail client can't connect. And I'm out of town, so have no physical access to the box, which is still happily grabbing my mail from external accounts.. Fortunately the no-ip website is still displaying the dynamic ip address the domain was last pointing at, and my ISP hasn't changed it (and probably won't until I next reboot) so I've been able to log in just using the ip address, but now I need to waste a morning switching it to another domain. Seriously, wtf microsoft!
A watch is easier to look at when you're driving than a smartphone. Work out something that's useful to have when you only have a split second to look at it, and you have a market. Otherwise you're just talking about a fashion accessory which happens to tell the time.
We need a Megan's law for the unvaccinated. So you can look up which of your neighbors you need to avoid and keep your kids aways from, just as you would keep them away from sex offenders. Or at the very least childcares, kindergartens, and schools should be required to publicly document how many unvaccinated kids are attending so people can make informed decisions about whether to send their own kids there.
It would be competition if taxi drivers were allowed to ignore the regulations that govern their activities too. All regulation has compliance costs; uber is 'competetive' largely because it dodges the compliance costs borne by existing services.
Now what would be really interesting is to see what happens when some city decides 'sure, uber can operate here, but we're dropping all the regulations we've built up over the years which currently apply to cabs too'.
Or living in a light-polluted environment is correlated with poverty, and poverty is a predictor of obesity due to the kids of food you access when poor.
Let's just take it a step further. We need a Megan's law style 'refused to vaccinate' registry, which shows where unvaccinated children and adults go to kingergarten/school/work. Or at very least require schools and kindergartens to make public what percentage of their students have not been vaccinated, so I can make intelligent decisions about where to send or not send my kid.
When the US govt starts dictating who is allowed to come to your conferences you need to move the conference. Same as the AIDS research conferences have been held anywhere except the US since the 80s because from 1987 to 2009 the US govt banned people with AIDS from traveling to the US.
"Our third gen iPad is about two years old, and already we have problems with app upgrades breaking things"
This. Same with iphones. Perfectly good hardware, continuing to do a decent job doing the stuff you bought it for, being slowly forced into obselecense by iOS and app upgrades. Which makes short term sense for a company whose core business is selling hardware - forcing people to buy a new device every couple of years regardless of whether the last device has died or not does in fact make you money. In the short term. But sooner or later your customers get tired of periodically having to replace working hardware just so they can continue to have essentially the same functionality they had with the previous device, and will switch to one of the many other manufacturers who have (by now) duplicated your functionality. The *only* reason to buy Apple hardware is when Apple does something genuinely new and their latest gadget does something genuinely useful that no-one else does yet (first gen iPhones, for example). After that it's all incremental upgrades and forced obselecense and you may as well switch to the competition until the next time Apple does something genuinely new. Assuming they continue to do so - not a guarantee for any company.
"Another person that doesn't understand Libertarian ideals."
I don't need to understand Libertarian ideals. Everyone I've ever met or read professing 'libertarian ideals' has been a whiny self-centered asshole who appeared to want to live in a society which has been restructured around their desires and fuck everyone else. 'Libertarian ideals' don't need "understanding", they need to be mocked and ridiculed.
I did it for years with a wide range of random supermarket flyers and coupon books and other mailbox-clogging guff, but like you had a more recent attempt rebuffed. But the thing is, the law (or rather, both the law and the Code of Federal Regulations enacting the law) haven't changed. 39 CFR 3008 hasn't changed. My suspicion is some lower-level apparatchik has instructed the people who actually implement it to not do so except for obvious porn, in violation of the law. The last time I tried, I didn't follow up because I found a (well hidden) 'unsubscribe' option on that coupon company's website which actually had the desired effect, so problem solved.
But now that I know other people are being bounced by the classification office, next time I move or just get a persistent junk mailer I'll try again, and this time persist and see how far I get..
Australia Post made a post-tax profit of AUD$311.9 million (USD$289.6 million) in 2013 (http://auspost.com.au/annualreport2013/financial-report.html) in a country with a population of 20 million people scattered across an area close to the size of the continental US. This despite making more than 90% of income from activities where it competes on the open market (ie without government monopoly) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia_Post).
By contrast, USPS made a loss of USD$5 billion in 2013, in a country with 300 million people. Admittedly, the USPS has been spectacularly hamstrung by congress, which has actively prevented it from acting like a business (in contrast to Australia Post, which was corporatized in 1989 - it acts like an independent business entity but pays all revenue back to the state, reducing the need for taxation) - even conservative thinktanks like the Heritige Foundation think the USPS is unreasonably crippled: http://www.heritage.org/resear....
But the USPS (or the situation its been placed in by congress) is anything but "the envy of the world".
You don't have to pay for it. Per 39 CFR 3008 'Prohibition of pandering advertisements' (http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/39/3008), you can tell the USPS that you find mailers from any sender to be offensive and the USPS is required to issue an order that no more mailings be sent to you by that mailer. The form you need is PS1500, available at http://about.usps.com/forms/ps...
Good to know. The ultimate solution in this case was to abandon their software and switch to something web-based so we could use any device with an internet connection. So really they just lost a customer out of it.
This isn't OT. It's a major problem with apple, period. The other half of the same problem is the use of the app store as the sole way to get software means you can't roll back to previous versions of things. Which is a major problem when you're working with software whose purpose is to be multi-device. eg I use a software package used for designing iphone/ipod based surveys - the design software runs on your mac and the end result gets loaded onto idevices for use, which then sync the data collected back to the mac. A recent 'upgrade' of the design software turned out to be incompatible with the client software I had installed on 30 or so idevices. No problem, just update the client software.. Except the newer version of the device software required a newer version of ios, and the devices in question were old enough that they weren't compatable with a newer version of ios, so no upgrade was possible. ok, no problem, roll the mac software back to the previous version. Except you can't do that through the app store. The software supplier seriously suggested the solution was ditching 30 or so perfectly functional idevices and replacing all of them because (they claim - I don't know if this is true) their contract with Apple to allow distribution of their software through the app store prevents them from distributing installables any other way so they couldn't provide me with an installer for the earlier version.
I've been writing ethnographic field notes for about 15 years. I had a couple of phases of trying to do this electronically, but the notes from each of those 3 month experiments are for the most part now lost or at least difficult to access - proprietary formats, failed backups, accidental deletions, you name it. Whereas the paper notebooks are sitting on my bookshelf beside my desk. For one project I chopped the spine off the notebook and dropped the pages into a bulk scanner before perfect-binding the notebook back together again, but the resulting physical notebook is a bit more delicate than I'd like. But I do like having an electronic version, both for backup and so I have a copy available when I'm away from my bookshelf. So these days I photocopy each notebook and drop the photocopies through the scanner (and more recently I've been able to have a student or an intern do it, but for a task I only needed to do every three-six months it was never that onerous to begin with), storing both the photocopy and a copy of the pdf offsite. I've played with various indexing schemes over the years, from leaving the last dozen pages blank and writing a single-line description of the contents of each page as I filled it (2002-03-21: key informant interview, ER doctor, hospital xxx), through to embedding metadata on relevant pages of the pdf to make it searchable (my handwriting is way way too bad for ocr to have any utility). But the 'write the index on the last few pages of the notebook as you go' method has been the simplest and most robust, and it rarely takes long to find anything, even with 30 or so notebooks on my bookshelf. And picking up an old notebook every few months and just reading or skimming through it is often a worthwhile exercise, reminding you of ideas and streams of thought and research context in ways that simply searching for something you already know is in there never can.
As an additional benefit, I've always found making notes in a notebook to be less intrusive in meetings or interviews than typing or using a stylus on a tablet (although changing social norms may make the latter less intrusive eventually), and the act of writing to be less intrusive to my own thought processes than typing (maybe just because no red squiggly lines appear under my notes as I type, or text reflowing, drawing the eye as it does so), but that might just be me, or I might just be showing my age.
Slashdot Mirror
"The submitter notes that this V2V communication would include transmission of a vehicle's location, which comes with privacy concerns. "
For the purposes of reducing accidents and facilitating things like lane changes, there's no reason for the location to be transmitted more broadly than a few hundred metres around the transmitting vehicle, nor for either the transmitting vehicle or receiving vehicles to store that location for more than 10 minutes or so. I'm not too worried about the impact on privacy if that were the case. And I'm expecting car manufacturers to go with the cheapest possible solution which meets regulation, so they certainly have no interest in installing the kind of equipment needed to broadcast location beyond 100m or so, and lost of interest in resisting regulation which goes beyond that.
Well, I just wasted about an hour rummaging through California's law relating to waste water from industrial processes, as well as law relating to drinking water, and in that time could not find anything which either supports or refutes the parent poster's assertion that waste water from semiconductor plants must be cleaner than tap water (links to the law and regulations below). Nor could I find any support for the parent poster's claim just randomly googling around (I figured if it were true there'd be multiple references to it).
I agree with you that if wastewater from industrial processes is held to higher standards than tap water, then that's ridiculous. However given it's such an extrodinary claim, I'd also suggest that the burden of proof lies with those making it - here's the law; knock yourselves out.
CA law and regulation relating to drinking water: http://www.cdph.ca.gov/certlic...
CA law and regulation relating to waste water: http://www.waterboards.ca.gov/...
All code relating to water in CA: http://www.waterboards.ca.gov/...
"Why would the rest of the world care? If Californians eliminate themselves as a competitor through insane regulation, other countries benefit."
Well, another way to look at it is Californians have calculated the real cost. Sure, you get a couple of hundred FAB plant jobs, and a dribble of corporate and payroll tax out of it, but FABs are notoriously hard on worker health and on the surrounding environment. So the state ends up paying big dollars down the track to clean up the toxic mess left behind (and remember the only thing prop 65 bans is businesses dumping known carcinogens *into the drinking water supply* - under this law you can still dump carcinogenic waste wherever else you want), and pays again for healthcare costs for workers and their families (or we all pay it through increased insurance premiums if the state doesn't end up paying for it with our taxes).
About the only reason you'd want a FAB plant in your state that wasn't willing or able to comply with California's environmental laws is if you want to be able to boast about how you 'created more jobs' in the leadup to the next election, and didn't give a shit what the real cost to the state would be over the next 30 years.
You could at least quote the actual list published under this law in California: http://oehha.ca.gov/prop65/pro...
The law just says "Businesses are prohibited from knowingly releasing listed chemicals into drinking water sources."
The law *doesn't* say industry is held to higher standards than water treatment facilites - just that industry can't deliberately dump known carcinogens into the water supply. Per this particular law, industry could still dump known carcinogens into any other random body of water they like.
You forget that allowing companies to expose workers to toxic crap and to dump waste everywhere comes with economic costs to the state as well as economic benefits. Sure, you get a handful more jobs and the tax revenue which comes with that, but usually it's the state who ends up paying for the cleanup afterwards, and it's everyone in the state who pays for the downstream healthcare costs for workers and others affected by it, both through higher insurance premiums and through taxes to pay for medi-cal and medicare. Sometimes the economic benefits to the state of allowing a semiconductor fab plant to skip environmental regulations so they don't leave to Texas or Mexico don't actually add up. Unless the *only* thing you care about is being able to boast about how you 'created more jobs' between now and the next election.
That particular regulation (prop 65) was voter initiated, not legislature initiated. All it requires is: the state must publish a list of chemicals known to cause cancer or reproductive harm (defined as having a 1 in 100,000 chance of causing cancer or birth defects or other reproductive harm); businesses must label products and areas, like workplaces or apartments, that contain or release *significant amounts* of those poisons; and businesses are prohibited from knowingly releasing listed chemicals into drinking water sources. Many businesses have taken the position that they're better off posting warnings when any amount of a carcinogenic substance is present.
Given that semiconductor manufacturing is one of the more hazardous and polluting industries out there, I'm not surprised fab plants have a difficult time meeting environmental regulations in CA and have been willing to deal with the costs associated with moving to states or coutries who don't care as much about the health of workers or the cost of environmental cleanup. The solution to lost jobs isn't to drop regulation so employers can go back to putting employee health at risk, it's to improve the standards of the rest of the world so there isn't an unregulated bolt-hole for fab plant owners to run off to.
Link zotero to this and you'll have a solution academic collaborators have been looking for since the beginning of word processing.. Seriously, we need a collaborative writing platform which allows multiple authors to add citations.
Like many slashdotters, I have an old box under my desk which grabs mail from several external accounts via pop and serves it up via imap. No smtp though. And having home DSL with no static IP, I use No-IP to provide a stable domain for that machine. So this morning I wake up and discover that the domain has disappeared and my mail client can't connect. And I'm out of town, so have no physical access to the box, which is still happily grabbing my mail from external accounts.. Fortunately the no-ip website is still displaying the dynamic ip address the domain was last pointing at, and my ISP hasn't changed it (and probably won't until I next reboot) so I've been able to log in just using the ip address, but now I need to waste a morning switching it to another domain. Seriously, wtf microsoft!
A watch is easier to look at when you're driving than a smartphone. Work out something that's useful to have when you only have a split second to look at it, and you have a market. Otherwise you're just talking about a fashion accessory which happens to tell the time.
We need a Megan's law for the unvaccinated. So you can look up which of your neighbors you need to avoid and keep your kids aways from, just as you would keep them away from sex offenders. Or at the very least childcares, kindergartens, and schools should be required to publicly document how many unvaccinated kids are attending so people can make informed decisions about whether to send their own kids there.
Facebook has ads? Or rather, there are people out there who still don't have adblock installed?
It would be competition if taxi drivers were allowed to ignore the regulations that govern their activities too. All regulation has compliance costs; uber is 'competetive' largely because it dodges the compliance costs borne by existing services.
Now what would be really interesting is to see what happens when some city decides 'sure, uber can operate here, but we're dropping all the regulations we've built up over the years which currently apply to cabs too'.
Or living in a light-polluted environment is correlated with poverty, and poverty is a predictor of obesity due to the kids of food you access when poor.
Let's just take it a step further. We need a Megan's law style 'refused to vaccinate' registry, which shows where unvaccinated children and adults go to kingergarten/school/work. Or at very least require schools and kindergartens to make public what percentage of their students have not been vaccinated, so I can make intelligent decisions about where to send or not send my kid.
When the US govt starts dictating who is allowed to come to your conferences you need to move the conference. Same as the AIDS research conferences have been held anywhere except the US since the 80s because from 1987 to 2009 the US govt banned people with AIDS from traveling to the US.
"Our third gen iPad is about two years old, and already we have problems with app upgrades breaking things"
This. Same with iphones. Perfectly good hardware, continuing to do a decent job doing the stuff you bought it for, being slowly forced into obselecense by iOS and app upgrades. Which makes short term sense for a company whose core business is selling hardware - forcing people to buy a new device every couple of years regardless of whether the last device has died or not does in fact make you money. In the short term. But sooner or later your customers get tired of periodically having to replace working hardware just so they can continue to have essentially the same functionality they had with the previous device, and will switch to one of the many other manufacturers who have (by now) duplicated your functionality. The *only* reason to buy Apple hardware is when Apple does something genuinely new and their latest gadget does something genuinely useful that no-one else does yet (first gen iPhones, for example). After that it's all incremental upgrades and forced obselecense and you may as well switch to the competition until the next time Apple does something genuinely new. Assuming they continue to do so - not a guarantee for any company.
"Another person that doesn't understand Libertarian ideals."
I don't need to understand Libertarian ideals. Everyone I've ever met or read professing 'libertarian ideals' has been a whiny self-centered asshole who appeared to want to live in a society which has been restructured around their desires and fuck everyone else. 'Libertarian ideals' don't need "understanding", they need to be mocked and ridiculed.
I did it for years with a wide range of random supermarket flyers and coupon books and other mailbox-clogging guff, but like you had a more recent attempt rebuffed. But the thing is, the law (or rather, both the law and the Code of Federal Regulations enacting the law) haven't changed. 39 CFR 3008 hasn't changed. My suspicion is some lower-level apparatchik has instructed the people who actually implement it to not do so except for obvious porn, in violation of the law. The last time I tried, I didn't follow up because I found a (well hidden) 'unsubscribe' option on that coupon company's website which actually had the desired effect, so problem solved.
But now that I know other people are being bounced by the classification office, next time I move or just get a persistent junk mailer I'll try again, and this time persist and see how far I get..
" But there must be more to do!"
Take your meds and calm down?
"the USPS is the envy of the world"..
Australia Post made a post-tax profit of AUD$311.9 million (USD$289.6 million) in 2013 (http://auspost.com.au/annualreport2013/financial-report.html) in a country with a population of 20 million people scattered across an area close to the size of the continental US. This despite making more than 90% of income from activities where it competes on the open market (ie without government monopoly) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia_Post).
By contrast, USPS made a loss of USD$5 billion in 2013, in a country with 300 million people. Admittedly, the USPS has been spectacularly hamstrung by congress, which has actively prevented it from acting like a business (in contrast to Australia Post, which was corporatized in 1989 - it acts like an independent business entity but pays all revenue back to the state, reducing the need for taxation) - even conservative thinktanks like the Heritige Foundation think the USPS is unreasonably crippled: http://www.heritage.org/resear....
But the USPS (or the situation its been placed in by congress) is anything but "the envy of the world".
You don't have to pay for it. Per 39 CFR 3008 'Prohibition of pandering advertisements' (http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/39/3008), you can tell the USPS that you find mailers from any sender to be offensive and the USPS is required to issue an order that no more mailings be sent to you by that mailer. The form you need is PS1500, available at http://about.usps.com/forms/ps...
Good to know. The ultimate solution in this case was to abandon their software and switch to something web-based so we could use any device with an internet connection. So really they just lost a customer out of it.
This isn't OT. It's a major problem with apple, period. The other half of the same problem is the use of the app store as the sole way to get software means you can't roll back to previous versions of things. Which is a major problem when you're working with software whose purpose is to be multi-device. eg I use a software package used for designing iphone/ipod based surveys - the design software runs on your mac and the end result gets loaded onto idevices for use, which then sync the data collected back to the mac. A recent 'upgrade' of the design software turned out to be incompatible with the client software I had installed on 30 or so idevices. No problem, just update the client software.. Except the newer version of the device software required a newer version of ios, and the devices in question were old enough that they weren't compatable with a newer version of ios, so no upgrade was possible. ok, no problem, roll the mac software back to the previous version. Except you can't do that through the app store. The software supplier seriously suggested the solution was ditching 30 or so perfectly functional idevices and replacing all of them because (they claim - I don't know if this is true) their contract with Apple to allow distribution of their software through the app store prevents them from distributing installables any other way so they couldn't provide me with an installer for the earlier version.
I've been writing ethnographic field notes for about 15 years. I had a couple of phases of trying to do this electronically, but the notes from each of those 3 month experiments are for the most part now lost or at least difficult to access - proprietary formats, failed backups, accidental deletions, you name it. Whereas the paper notebooks are sitting on my bookshelf beside my desk. For one project I chopped the spine off the notebook and dropped the pages into a bulk scanner before perfect-binding the notebook back together again, but the resulting physical notebook is a bit more delicate than I'd like. But I do like having an electronic version, both for backup and so I have a copy available when I'm away from my bookshelf. So these days I photocopy each notebook and drop the photocopies through the scanner (and more recently I've been able to have a student or an intern do it, but for a task I only needed to do every three-six months it was never that onerous to begin with), storing both the photocopy and a copy of the pdf offsite. I've played with various indexing schemes over the years, from leaving the last dozen pages blank and writing a single-line description of the contents of each page as I filled it (2002-03-21: key informant interview, ER doctor, hospital xxx), through to embedding metadata on relevant pages of the pdf to make it searchable (my handwriting is way way too bad for ocr to have any utility). But the 'write the index on the last few pages of the notebook as you go' method has been the simplest and most robust, and it rarely takes long to find anything, even with 30 or so notebooks on my bookshelf. And picking up an old notebook every few months and just reading or skimming through it is often a worthwhile exercise, reminding you of ideas and streams of thought and research context in ways that simply searching for something you already know is in there never can.
As an additional benefit, I've always found making notes in a notebook to be less intrusive in meetings or interviews than typing or using a stylus on a tablet (although changing social norms may make the latter less intrusive eventually), and the act of writing to be less intrusive to my own thought processes than typing (maybe just because no red squiggly lines appear under my notes as I type, or text reflowing, drawing the eye as it does so), but that might just be me, or I might just be showing my age.