It wasn't just what Clarkson said, it's also what was shown: a Tesla being pushed into a garage, ostensibly running out of power mid-test. I was very disappointed with Aunty when I learned this was staged*. Between that, the overly farcical "accidents" and a dearth of tests on normal cars I could ever buy I just stopped watching.
*I'm not a complete idiot; I know batteries run out, but was an accurate portrayal of the car's range really too much to ask?
I seem to recall that they were pushing it because something had broken (or that might have been staged, I can't remember), not because it ran out of batteries. When they mentioned running out of batteries it was saying how long Tesla had calculated it would take to do on their track, not that it had actually happened.
Google+ has a superior "wall" concept but none of the things that cause/allow users to spend all day "hanging out" there.
Others have already mentioned the various games on Google+, I have heard of people using the "Hangout" feature of Google+ (although it might have changed its name since launch). I've heard it allows screen sharing so can let a group of people to watch someone they know while playing a strategy based game online (Magic: The Gathering was the game I heard people watching).
How will this affect the automotive insurance industry? If I have a car that does all of my driving then I should never have an at-fault collision. So it only makes sense to me that my rates should be a fraction of what they are now.
If the insurance industry sees this as a potential threat to their profits then I think they will lobby hard to keep it from advancing.
Another time I saw this topic appear on slashdot, someone suggested that there would be a discount on insurance for driveless cars, because they would cost less due to less crashes.
Hypothetically, if there was, and everyone switched to driveless cars, insurance companies would be getting less money coming in from people, becuase they are paying less due to having driverless cars. But if there are next to no accidents because all driving is done by computers, they will be paying out a lot less in claims, and get to keep more of what they have coming in.
My wife plays and draws and bakes cookies with my kids too
Your wife plays cookies? I mean drawing them and baking them I can understand (although I can think of more interesting things to draw). But playing them?
SCNR:-)
Sorry, don't get the joke?
It is a play on the ambiguity of how the English language constructs sentences:
My wife [plays and draws and bakes] cookies
Parsed this way, the extracted meaning is that the list of activities (plays, draws and bakes) is what is happening to the cookies (the object/noun)
(Also, I like the song better than the original too and so does my 1.8 yr old toddler.)
You express your toddler's age as a decimal number, despite there being 12 months in the year? Not sure if that's amazing or really sad...
At least they were using years. I saw a stand-up show recently where one of the stand-ups was talking about how a lot of parents express their childs age in weeks or months, as though they had forgotten that we (as people) had created the construct of years to make expressing time simpler (and some people can't be bothered to do the maths of months -> years)
Relaxing? First the link takes me to a page that doesn't actually have the music, but has a link to another page with the music.. but it's flash.
The first link is to the Daily Mail website, which is often filled with rage-fuelled articles (and sometimes nonsense that can make rational people angry).
The flash setup is a bit weird, I use flashblock, which usually replaces its usage with a big rectangle where it should be, and a "play" button, to enable that flash, but didn't see it so had to enable flash for the whole page to work. The song isn't even overly relaxing; its alright I guess, but I didn't think it was anything special.
When I was at Uni I did have a "Coding" playlist which did heavily feature Dragonforce. I also had a "Study" (or was it "Research") playlist that was mainly classical music (or calm music without words) to focus (without worrying about focusing on song lyrics) on reading while not sitting in silence.
If it's tied to one computer, it's not what I want to do. I just want, no matter where I am, for my posts to one social network to be there for friends on all of them. But also no matter which device I use.
I have seen someone else set up some sort of RSS feed for one of their social networks, which is set to automatically post to another one. I think they post on Google+ and it automatically posts the same thing to Facebook; they don't use twitter as far as I know, so I don't know if it will work there. If I see it pop up again I will see if there is a link to what is being used and post it here.
Now, I guess I need to find a way to have my Twitter posts automatically post to Google+ instead of Buzz.
I think I read somewhere there is a Chrome plug-in that does this, I've not used it, however, so don't know how well it works or whether it will do exactly what you want it to do.
I recently heard that the bishop of St Paul's Cathedral (where the protesters camped for the night) have allowed the protesters to stay and asked the police to move on.
I swear that thing is like crack to large sections of the pop, so if G+ doesn't also have those games AND a way to transfer the hours they've already put in PLUS an easy way like FB has to get people to help you get items? No chance in hell friend, no chance in hell.
Google+ does have some of the games (I don't think it has Farmville, but it does have some other Zynga games), and you can send game items to other people using Google+. I don't know if you can transfer game state from one network to another, however.
Well whenever there is something new people try it out and realize it isn't like what they are use to and go back to the old way. Confident that they are not a close minded individual.
It's an expected reaction. I'm certain the migration from MySpace to Facebook took time, too. Give Google+ time. Facebook is so idiotic I'm looking forward to not going there if I can help it, which is about the way I felt about MySpace.
Somewhat related, I remember one of the first posts someone put on my Facebook wall back when you had to be part of a University to join was "this site sucks, myspace for the win". I agree that change is unlikely to be instant.
Correction: the article states "It must be made absolutely clear that the copyright monopoly does not extend to what an ordinary person can do with ordinary equipment in their home and spare time; it regulates commercial, intent-to-profit activity only. Specifically, file sharing is always legal."
So, file sharing would be legal and the 20-year copyright doesn't apply to it? That's some bullshit crazy talk. Why even have a copyright at all? If we ditched copyright entirely and allowed people to sell copyrighted work, they'd quickly get undermined by people giving it away for free. So, the 20-year copyright is worthless.
In your initial quote it states regulation is for "commercial, intent to profit" activity. My understanding of what you quoted is that you could get a file through sharing, but would only be able to use it for non-commercial purposes (which is likely to be mainly personal use). You wouldn't be able to sell a hard copy of it (so the author can still make money there), and you wouldn't be able to sell it or use it in a commercial activity (for example, a background song in an advert on TV, or a photo in a poster) - again the rights for that would have to be brought from the author.
It NEVER has anything to do with saving electricity.
Seriously? That's practically the only reason I ever shut my computers off and the only answer I've ever gotten from people when I've bothered to ask. You must either have some really paranoid friends or not know that many IT people. If I left all the hardware in my house powered up all the time it would cost me a fortune in bills, not to mention it's decidedly bad for the electrical grid and the ecosystem.
I always turn my computer off at night, mainly because of bills - because I've had to start paying them recently (no longer at parents/student houses where the cost is shared).
It helps that the computer goes from off (no power) to usable (system loaded and no start up processes still running) in 20 seconds, and I don't really have the need to try and make it quicker.
On the other hand, if someone has posted many articles in the past, from that we can deduce that they're probably not an astroturfer, but instead a real actual slashdot regular.
They could also be a shill, if all the stories they submit are about one company, and all comments they make are about that company. But at least those suspicions can be chceked by looking at their posting history.
In theory it would be nice to just have stories without who submitted them attached, so the story can stand and fall on its own merit, without its authenticability being linked to or influenced by the submitter
In case you're wondering, I'm not truly atheist. I'd say I'm agnostic as I don't believe the god described by religious cults actually exists, but I can't completely rule out the possibility of a higher power or level of existence.
I am similar, I doubt the existance in general without wanting to rule anything out without proof, but don't care enough either way. Apathy really, I guess.
The cat thing is getting annoying. Don't believe everything you hear/read. That stupid woman ranting about how a cat allows an illegal immigrant to stay in the UK is just trying to scare the public about how bad the Human Rights Act is. There is a lot more to the story than a cat.
i though that if your friends enable apps, then your data is already accessible to the developers
I think, if you disable all apps (not just remove them all, but disable the platform alltogether), then your friends can't accidentally be leaking your information to other developers. This may or may not have been the case a year or so ago, so I don't know the situation now.
Sure, it might be used for blocking malicious links now.. but what about when competing social networks, like Diaspora, emerge? Looking at Facebook's history I'm sure they will use it to block users moving to Diaspora and reading about Diaspora. It will be used as an opinion suppression tool.
I remember a while ago when the lamebook website (posted screencaps from Facebook that were amusing) was in legal arguments with Facebook over trademarks, links to lamebook on Facebook did not auto link properly.
I think they also don't auto link (or hinder posting) any link that has the word "torrent" in it.
Both of these might be out of date now, so I don't know if they still do it.
The same applies for basically every music player around, on the desktop and on devices. Crap.
I found a music player on Android called tinyPlayer that seems to follow directory structure as opposed to meta data. Not used it in a little while though, so I might be misremembering.
I also still don't get why we can't pay to support an archive of downloads.
A number of shows shown on the BBC were made by other companies; the BBC gets to show them (and usually have them avaliable online on their iPlayer for a month or so). Quite often the broadcast rights to the show are sold to another channel at a later date (usually a few years later) - if everything was avaliable online the value of re-selling the show would be a lot less.
(Note that this is a probable reason, not a good excuse for doing it; I would also like old Doctor Who episodes easily viewable online - I guess with Doctor Who at least the BBC are releasing new versions of the old episodes that have been restored/remastered etc. and having them online too would cut into the DVD sales)
As I understand it, diaspora had two selling points: one it was not under the control of a large corporation who could abuse you, and two you were able to choose who you shared what with. Google+ scooped that second feature already, and it probably won't be long before facebook does too if they haven't already
Facebook has had that for a while - at least a year, anyway, using Lists. You can choose to post updates/photos/whatever to people who are members of a list, and only those people will see it. It's worked well for quite a while - until this week, as they have changed it so that people on those lists can now see who else is on the list, which is quite a step backwards. Unfortunately, it mirrors Google+ behaviour in this regard.
I didn't think you could see what Google+ list you were on (so wouldn't see who else was on that list). I think if something was posted to that list, you would be able to see who else it was shared with, but it could have been a custom list of names, or a selection of different lists (you could, of course, probably work it out by tracking common posting recipients).
I did see that Facebook created lists, however it was a bit too late as I would have to go through my entire list of friends to sort them if I wanted to use them (which I don't really have the time to do), where the set up for that has been done from the start with Google+
F***ing Google it. Seriously - is this what Ask Slashdot's become?
Do you think there are many questions that can't be searched on Google (and so would be a valid "Ask Slashdot" Question), or do you think that "Ask Slashdot" is now mostly redundant?
Then when I get to the phone I find that my muscle-memory is not only useless, it is actually a hindrance.
I only have three phone number committed to memory: my own mobile, my Mums house and my Dads house (mainly because I used to live at the last two so the memory is just historical). The only time I can remember typing any of them in in the last few years is my own mobile, and that is only when I am using a computer (validation with a bank or phone company usually).
Again in the last few years, I think I have read aloud either of the numbers more often than I have had to type them in, either for someone else to call themselves, or for someone else to enter somewhere (or to check against their current details), not looking at a keypad in either case.
I guess I just have different use cases to you. What do you do if you need to tell someone a memorized phone number either in a face to face conversation, or written down on a paper form?
As an aside, I did a course on Human Computer Interaction and they did mention the difference between the different keypads. There was one suggestion that the reason for the difference is because Japan was producing calculators with a keypad around the same time another country (probabaly America) was producing a phone keypad (it might have been the other way arond), and the difference in numbers was because Japanese wasn't written left-to-right in the same way that English is, so they chose a layout that was more natural to their language. I think we discovered that it was just an urban myth, but I can't remember the actual reason for the difference (or even if there is one). If I find it, I'll add it here.
Slashdot Mirror
It wasn't just what Clarkson said, it's also what was shown: a Tesla being pushed into a garage, ostensibly running out of power mid-test. I was very disappointed with Aunty when I learned this was staged*. Between that, the overly farcical "accidents" and a dearth of tests on normal cars I could ever buy I just stopped watching.
*I'm not a complete idiot; I know batteries run out, but was an accurate portrayal of the car's range really too much to ask?
I seem to recall that they were pushing it because something had broken (or that might have been staged, I can't remember), not because it ran out of batteries. When they mentioned running out of batteries it was saying how long Tesla had calculated it would take to do on their track, not that it had actually happened.
Google+ has a superior "wall" concept but none of the things that cause/allow users to spend all day "hanging out" there.
Others have already mentioned the various games on Google+, I have heard of people using the "Hangout" feature of Google+ (although it might have changed its name since launch). I've heard it allows screen sharing so can let a group of people to watch someone they know while playing a strategy based game online (Magic: The Gathering was the game I heard people watching).
How will this affect the automotive insurance industry? If I have a car that does all of my driving then I should never have an at-fault collision. So it only makes sense to me that my rates should be a fraction of what they are now. If the insurance industry sees this as a potential threat to their profits then I think they will lobby hard to keep it from advancing.
Another time I saw this topic appear on slashdot, someone suggested that there would be a discount on insurance for driveless cars, because they would cost less due to less crashes.
Hypothetically, if there was, and everyone switched to driveless cars, insurance companies would be getting less money coming in from people, becuase they are paying less due to having driverless cars. But if there are next to no accidents because all driving is done by computers, they will be paying out a lot less in claims, and get to keep more of what they have coming in.
Your wife plays cookies? I mean drawing them and baking them I can understand (although I can think of more interesting things to draw). But playing them? SCNR :-)
Sorry, don't get the joke?
It is a play on the ambiguity of how the English language constructs sentences:
My wife [plays and draws and bakes] cookies
Parsed this way, the extracted meaning is that the list of activities (plays, draws and bakes) is what is happening to the cookies (the object/noun)
(Also, I like the song better than the original too and so does my 1.8 yr old toddler.)
You express your toddler's age as a decimal number, despite there being 12 months in the year? Not sure if that's amazing or really sad ...
At least they were using years. I saw a stand-up show recently where one of the stand-ups was talking about how a lot of parents express their childs age in weeks or months, as though they had forgotten that we (as people) had created the construct of years to make expressing time simpler (and some people can't be bothered to do the maths of months -> years)
Relaxing? First the link takes me to a page that doesn't actually have the music, but has a link to another page with the music.. but it's flash.
The first link is to the Daily Mail website, which is often filled with rage-fuelled articles (and sometimes nonsense that can make rational people angry).
The flash setup is a bit weird, I use flashblock, which usually replaces its usage with a big rectangle where it should be, and a "play" button, to enable that flash, but didn't see it so had to enable flash for the whole page to work. The song isn't even overly relaxing; its alright I guess, but I didn't think it was anything special.
When I was at Uni I did have a "Coding" playlist which did heavily feature Dragonforce. I also had a "Study" (or was it "Research") playlist that was mainly classical music (or calm music without words) to focus (without worrying about focusing on song lyrics) on reading while not sitting in silence.
If it's tied to one computer, it's not what I want to do. I just want, no matter where I am, for my posts to one social network to be there for friends on all of them. But also no matter which device I use.
I have seen someone else set up some sort of RSS feed for one of their social networks, which is set to automatically post to another one. I think they post on Google+ and it automatically posts the same thing to Facebook; they don't use twitter as far as I know, so I don't know if it will work there. If I see it pop up again I will see if there is a link to what is being used and post it here.
Now, I guess I need to find a way to have my Twitter posts automatically post to Google+ instead of Buzz.
I think I read somewhere there is a Chrome plug-in that does this, I've not used it, however, so don't know how well it works or whether it will do exactly what you want it to do.
I recently heard that the bishop of St Paul's Cathedral (where the protesters camped for the night) have allowed the protesters to stay and asked the police to move on.
I swear that thing is like crack to large sections of the pop, so if G+ doesn't also have those games AND a way to transfer the hours they've already put in PLUS an easy way like FB has to get people to help you get items? No chance in hell friend, no chance in hell.
Google+ does have some of the games (I don't think it has Farmville, but it does have some other Zynga games), and you can send game items to other people using Google+. I don't know if you can transfer game state from one network to another, however.
Well whenever there is something new people try it out and realize it isn't like what they are use to and go back to the old way. Confident that they are not a close minded individual.
It's an expected reaction. I'm certain the migration from MySpace to Facebook took time, too. Give Google+ time. Facebook is so idiotic I'm looking forward to not going there if I can help it, which is about the way I felt about MySpace.
Somewhat related, I remember one of the first posts someone put on my Facebook wall back when you had to be part of a University to join was "this site sucks, myspace for the win". I agree that change is unlikely to be instant.
Correction: the article states "It must be made absolutely clear that the copyright monopoly does not extend to what an ordinary person can do with ordinary equipment in their home and spare time; it regulates commercial, intent-to-profit activity only. Specifically, file sharing is always legal."
So, file sharing would be legal and the 20-year copyright doesn't apply to it? That's some bullshit crazy talk. Why even have a copyright at all? If we ditched copyright entirely and allowed people to sell copyrighted work, they'd quickly get undermined by people giving it away for free. So, the 20-year copyright is worthless .
In your initial quote it states regulation is for "commercial, intent to profit" activity. My understanding of what you quoted is that you could get a file through sharing, but would only be able to use it for non-commercial purposes (which is likely to be mainly personal use). You wouldn't be able to sell a hard copy of it (so the author can still make money there), and you wouldn't be able to sell it or use it in a commercial activity (for example, a background song in an advert on TV, or a photo in a poster) - again the rights for that would have to be brought from the author.
Seriously? That's practically the only reason I ever shut my computers off and the only answer I've ever gotten from people when I've bothered to ask. You must either have some really paranoid friends or not know that many IT people. If I left all the hardware in my house powered up all the time it would cost me a fortune in bills, not to mention it's decidedly bad for the electrical grid and the ecosystem.
I always turn my computer off at night, mainly because of bills - because I've had to start paying them recently (no longer at parents/student houses where the cost is shared).
It helps that the computer goes from off (no power) to usable (system loaded and no start up processes still running) in 20 seconds, and I don't really have the need to try and make it quicker.
On the other hand, if someone has posted many articles in the past, from that we can deduce that they're probably not an astroturfer, but instead a real actual slashdot regular.
They could also be a shill, if all the stories they submit are about one company, and all comments they make are about that company. But at least those suspicions can be chceked by looking at their posting history.
In theory it would be nice to just have stories without who submitted them attached, so the story can stand and fall on its own merit, without its authenticability being linked to or influenced by the submitter
In case you're wondering, I'm not truly atheist. I'd say I'm agnostic as I don't believe the god described by religious cults actually exists, but I can't completely rule out the possibility of a higher power or level of existence.
I am similar, I doubt the existance in general without wanting to rule anything out without proof, but don't care enough either way. Apathy really, I guess.
The cat thing is getting annoying. Don't believe everything you hear/read. That stupid woman ranting about how a cat allows an illegal immigrant to stay in the UK is just trying to scare the public about how bad the Human Rights Act is. There is a lot more to the story than a cat.
Indeed, this has been disproved already by people who know what they are talking about: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-15171980
I even read the other day an article by one of the lawyers involved saying it was not the reason, but don't have the link at the moment.
i though that if your friends enable apps, then your data is already accessible to the developers
I think, if you disable all apps (not just remove them all, but disable the platform alltogether), then your friends can't accidentally be leaking your information to other developers. This may or may not have been the case a year or so ago, so I don't know the situation now.
Sure, it might be used for blocking malicious links now.. but what about when competing social networks, like Diaspora, emerge? Looking at Facebook's history I'm sure they will use it to block users moving to Diaspora and reading about Diaspora. It will be used as an opinion suppression tool.
I remember a while ago when the lamebook website (posted screencaps from Facebook that were amusing) was in legal arguments with Facebook over trademarks, links to lamebook on Facebook did not auto link properly.
I think they also don't auto link (or hinder posting) any link that has the word "torrent" in it.
Both of these might be out of date now, so I don't know if they still do it.
The speed/memory is nice. Sure would like to has a "last tab closed" option. It may be there, didn't see it and didn't search for answers yet.
Do you mean a way to open the last tab that was closed? In Firefox it is Ctrl + Shift + 'T' and I believe it is the same for Chrome
The same applies for basically every music player around, on the desktop and on devices. Crap.
I found a music player on Android called tinyPlayer that seems to follow directory structure as opposed to meta data. Not used it in a little while though, so I might be misremembering.
I also still don't get why we can't pay to support an archive of downloads.
A number of shows shown on the BBC were made by other companies; the BBC gets to show them (and usually have them avaliable online on their iPlayer for a month or so). Quite often the broadcast rights to the show are sold to another channel at a later date (usually a few years later) - if everything was avaliable online the value of re-selling the show would be a lot less.
(Note that this is a probable reason, not a good excuse for doing it; I would also like old Doctor Who episodes easily viewable online - I guess with Doctor Who at least the BBC are releasing new versions of the old episodes that have been restored/remastered etc. and having them online too would cut into the DVD sales)
As I understand it, diaspora had two selling points: one it was not under the control of a large corporation who could abuse you, and two you were able to choose who you shared what with. Google+ scooped that second feature already, and it probably won't be long before facebook does too if they haven't already
Facebook has had that for a while - at least a year, anyway, using Lists. You can choose to post updates/photos/whatever to people who are members of a list, and only those people will see it. It's worked well for quite a while - until this week, as they have changed it so that people on those lists can now see who else is on the list, which is quite a step backwards. Unfortunately, it mirrors Google+ behaviour in this regard.
I didn't think you could see what Google+ list you were on (so wouldn't see who else was on that list). I think if something was posted to that list, you would be able to see who else it was shared with, but it could have been a custom list of names, or a selection of different lists (you could, of course, probably work it out by tracking common posting recipients).
I did see that Facebook created lists, however it was a bit too late as I would have to go through my entire list of friends to sort them if I wanted to use them (which I don't really have the time to do), where the set up for that has been done from the start with Google+
F***ing Google it. Seriously - is this what Ask Slashdot's become?
Do you think there are many questions that can't be searched on Google (and so would be a valid "Ask Slashdot" Question), or do you think that "Ask Slashdot" is now mostly redundant?
Then when I get to the phone I find that my muscle-memory is not only useless, it is actually a hindrance.
I only have three phone number committed to memory: my own mobile, my Mums house and my Dads house (mainly because I used to live at the last two so the memory is just historical). The only time I can remember typing any of them in in the last few years is my own mobile, and that is only when I am using a computer (validation with a bank or phone company usually).
Again in the last few years, I think I have read aloud either of the numbers more often than I have had to type them in, either for someone else to call themselves, or for someone else to enter somewhere (or to check against their current details), not looking at a keypad in either case.
I guess I just have different use cases to you. What do you do if you need to tell someone a memorized phone number either in a face to face conversation, or written down on a paper form?
As an aside, I did a course on Human Computer Interaction and they did mention the difference between the different keypads. There was one suggestion that the reason for the difference is because Japan was producing calculators with a keypad around the same time another country (probabaly America) was producing a phone keypad (it might have been the other way arond), and the difference in numbers was because Japanese wasn't written left-to-right in the same way that English is, so they chose a layout that was more natural to their language. I think we discovered that it was just an urban myth, but I can't remember the actual reason for the difference (or even if there is one). If I find it, I'll add it here.