Yes, I believe I will see the day when I can go in, and print myself a new car, with tires and the fuel cell.
And I believe you must be posting from the far distant future (and, apparently humans have evolved to handle very high temperatures or our current projections on the lifecycle of the Sun are very wrong).
Cars have many different materials in them and even the same materials get processed differently (with heat treating, chemical baths, etching etc). Stocking all these materials efficiently and being able to handle the different processes in on demand 3D printing seems to be a very distant dream - esp. if the result is not 30,000 parts produced on different machines that then need assembly. Imagine the complexity and cost of 3D printing the following in one facility where you "can go in and print yourself a new car":
"Bag" part of an airbag
"Explosive" charge to deploy the airbag
The circuitry for the ECU, airbag control, et al
Tires
Cabin Air Filters
Specialized glass for windshield/side windows/rear windows
LCD panel for driver control
Bearings (motor, wheel, etc)
Brake pads
Lubricants and fluids (brake etc).
Tires
Etc...
There would have to be an amazing advances in material science and engineering way beyond 3D printing technology to make this work.
You might be able to "design" your car's body panels and have them 3D printed along with various decorative elements, but not the core of the car from the ground up for a very long time (and, by that time it's possible/feasible, the notion of a "car" will likely be a long forgotten quaint historical reference).
And, that's a problem with our laws that should be fixed. If a competent PCP would not have referred the person to an ER, the ER doctor/PA/NP should be able to tell the person that their condition is not a medical emergency and advise them to see their primary care provider and the ER should suffer no more risk than the PCP would have. It should also be a crime to misrepresent your medical condition at an ER in order to get preferred or priority treatment (yes, this would rarely be prosecuted, but the occasional prosecution would deter people from doing it).
There is a good social reason for NOT completing treatment and diagnosis after evaluation determines the problem not to be an emergency -- the next time that person (and their friends and family) probably will not clog up the ER with what is obviously a cold or minor sprain that can be dealt with during normal business hours by their primary care provider.
The system, expectations, and culture is broken -- requiring ERs to act as PCPs is not the answer and the liability laws should reflect that.
This is rare. However, if that's a concern for enough women in the market for insurance, insurance companies could offer, if it were not for PPACA rules, pregnancy coverage for women who have had a (potentially unsuccessful) tubal litigation at a vastly reduced rate (a few dollars a year would cover it given how rare such pregnancies are).
This is not unlike, for some strange reason, PPACA rules allow charging a additional premium for smokers - or put another way, a discount for not smoking. Why can't insurance companies offer similar discounts for those who take steps to avoid other conditions such as pregnancy by having a tubal litigation? Note that non-smokers still get lung cancer (much more likely I suspect than women who have undergone a tubal litigation getting pregnant).
Why not allow insurance companies to charge more for people who engage in "extreme" sports - their odds of getting expensive injuries at a young age are much higher than someone who doesn't engage in them.
So, they'd be using the very expensive ER visits rather than the much less expensive office visits.
And that is simply a problem with the law or hospitals not being willing to say "no". When someone presents with the types of problems that result in "very expensive ER visits rather than the much less expensive office visits", the ER should simply tell them to leave (and have them arrested for trespassing if they refuse) because they are not emergencies - if I call 911 because I want a pizza, they won't deliver it and I may well get in trouble if I keep calling with that request.
I don't know what the AC's situation is, but some plans that were once available are not. Some people can afford to have what Obama considered "junk plans" but can no longer get them and must pay higher rates for plans they don't want or including coverage for events that can't happen to them. What does a woman who has had her tubes tied (and would happily have an abortion if somehow the operation wasn't really successful) or a post-menopausal woman want with coverage for pregnancy?
It is almost always better to self insure portions of risk if you can reasonable do do -- why pay middlemen? Do you buy the "extended warranty" on every USB cable you buy from BestBuy or NewEgg? No, because you can easily absorb the cost of replacing it OR, perhaps, you only expect to be using it a few weeks by which time you are pretty sure you will accidentally leave it in a rental car or at a Starbucks by accident so you just don need long term protection.
Americans who purchased coverage are paying for it
vs.
Americans who could not previously afford any health insurance and therefore were essentially locked out from most health care are now being subsidized
In standard usage, "paying for X" means "paying in full" (try telling your mortgage company that you are "paying your monthly payment" when you are only paying 50% of the required payment and see if the agree with your assessment that you are "paying your monthly payment").
People do love free stuff of course and most don't care if some other person is forced to pay for what they get for free. We could, for example, increase homeownership (something that some think is good) simply by buying a house for everyone and only making them pay 20% (or whatever) of their income on mortgage, insurance and taxes while the American taxpayers pick up the remainder.
Since he personally owns over $45B of Oracle stock (and billions in other assets), a 0.01% increase in Oracle's stock price results in his net worth increasing by (in current dollars) about what a "typical" software engineer will make during their entire career.
Fabulous. But note that the FCC didn't need to tax someone in the Bronx for the needs of a business in Minnesota since Minnesota residents seem to have decided it's in their best interests, due to their demographics, to pay taxes (I assume taxes are involved here given how you worded it) for infrastructure to give their businesses a competitive advantage over businesses in other states. A family in the Bronx might feel that the money is better spent on local schools (and, they would probably be right) and can choose to tax themselves for that.
(Of course, if Minnesota's premise is correct, these lines should probably be paid for via a revenue bond that the farmers pay -- if it increases sales enough to be worthwhile, the cost of paying of the bonds would be more than offset by increased profits).
I'm curious how much of a premium individuals are willing to pay for 1gbs vs. 100mbs. I have slightly greater than 100mbs down and I don't think I would pay $5 a month more for 1gbs down although I only have about 20 mbs up and would pay $5 a month to increase that to 100mbs (it would make my online backups faster).
I suspect few households would pay much extra for 1gbs which suggests it's not that important. The primary use for 1gbs seems to be entertainment in large households who want multiple concurrent high quality video streams -- that doesn't strike me as a national priority (and, if it is, shouldn't we be subsidizing 55" 4K TVs and Hulu and Netflix for everyone as well?).
Yes, but the small businesses get other breaks -- such as SBA loans and exemptions from the requirement to offer medical insurance to their employees or pay a fine.
If these rural areas need broadband to prosper and they pay for it themselves, then the cost of minerals or timber from that area may go up infinitesimally. If that pushes mineral or timber costs higher than somewhere else (including transport costs), then harvesting minerals or timber wasn't really a viable business there anyway. Mining and timber companies don't need more government subsidies and I don't see why a telephone user in an inner city two thousand miles away should subsidize building mansions for Larry Ellison or Bill Gates via keeping timber or concrete artificially cheap.
Comparing federal level taxes/subsidies to regional is comparing apples to BMWs. If voters in a regional area decide they want to subsidize the outlying areas for some reason, that's much more acceptable as residents in those areas are best able to judge what their needs are. They may decide a new hospital is more important than broadband for every cabin in the woods and if they decide the broadband is more important, they can set rules for the subsidies that make sense for their geography and demographics.
there's no good reason not to have broadband everywhere as well.
Hmm... there must be, because it's not everywhere.
There are areas in the US that have still have little more than dirt and gravel roads. The residents of those areas don't seem to think it's worth their money to upgrade to "Interstate Highway" grade pavement while in other areas, they have. The same is true of residential broadband, if there is sufficient demand, it will become available.
There's always satellite for those who want modest internet access beyond dialup but don't want to pay to upgrade the infrastructure to reach their low (internet user) density environment. In many areas of the country, people rely on personal wells to provide their water -- it's far from as ideal a solution as municipal water, but it's often more cost effective in those areas than building and maintaining a municipal water system. Why should broadband be treated any differently than something critical to life itself - water. There are plots of land that are considered, basically, inhabitable and have virtually no market value due to lack of water service or the ability to tap ground water - should we also insure those plots of land have inexpensive broadband access if someone decides to buy one and truck water in?
People move all the time as the area they live in no longer matches their needs - such as when unemployment rises due to coal mining or logging being reduced due to environmental laws. If you need high speed internet and you've chosen to live in an area where the number of users who are willing to pay for it per square mile is insufficient, move -- or convince your neighbors that they too want to watch (and are willing to pay to do so) every cat video in stunning uncompressed 4K the moment it's released.
If businesses want to woo customers who have low speed (dialup for example) internet access, they will offer low bandwidth versions of their web sites but one doesn't see much of this so it seems unlikely that there is a lot of unmet demand there.
True food security is being able to grow and raise your own food. If food security became a problem in the US (which it is not -- there's more than enough food to go around, income security is another issue), people would flock to these rural areas where they could afford some land to farm -- independent of if 1Gb internet access was available. To my knowledge, migrant farmworkers are not demanding high speed internet access yet and when/if they do, there will then be a market for it in these rural areas.
But that's nothing compared to what it would cost someone who chose to live in downtown Manhatten to get a home there that had enough land around it to support organic sustainable agriculture that produced enough food to provide all the food needs of their family of six. Surely eating fresh healthy food that you know has not been sprayed with chemicals or been genetically modified is a basic right and more important than internet access.
People choose to live in different places for different reasons. It's pretty stupid to move to/continue to live somewhere that doesn't meet one's needs. Certainly when I move, a "must have" consideration is "Does this residence have high speed internet from a reliable ISP?" -- some people instead might ask "Is there a world class opera company within 20 minutes drive?" or "Does it get below 20 degrees F?" or "Is one of the top ten hospitals in the country within a 30 minute drive from this residence?".
Even Democratic Congressmenuse (and defend the use rather than apologize for it) the "Uncle Tom" racial slur to refer to Justice Thomas because he, apparently, doesn't "think Black enough".
This same Congressman asserts that another Congressman stating he would not support Obama's polices was because of racism -- ignoring the fact that President Obama is the least experienced President and ran on the most progressive platform (albeit, he hasn't followed through on his stated principles) of any President in decades (to say nothing of probably being the most publicly arrogant) and that their viewpoints on political issues were radically different. (Both viewpoints, IMHO, wrong - but that's another issue.)
If logic isn't on your side, scream racism and that will surely win the argument -- or so some liberals seem to believe.
However, if people using the cabs had instead had a friend or partner drive them to the airport (for example), the driver is often deadheading back to where they came from while a cab is more likely to pick up another fare without traveling the full distance of the original fare so there's less deadheading per trip. Thus, getting the same number of people to the airport by cab generally results in less total miles being driven than having someone else drive you so the cab is safer to society and creates less congestion.
One cab, ten 30 mile trips, 300 miles per day vs. Ten private cars, ten 30(+) mile trips, 300 miles per day - all pretty much the same (ignoring deadheading differences).
An inspection 3K miles would be once every ten days for the cab, once every 100 days for the private cars - again, mileage based on cars getting this sort of usage (if a car is only driven 2K miles per year, of course the time based inspections kick in for detecting time dependent decline in rubber components etc).
Anyone who wants the security of a government certification for drivers "for hire", is free to choose a service offering that. Uber isn't trying to ban conventional taxi services.
Obviously if an Uber driver is claiming they are a licensed taxi service, they should be prosecuted for fraud -- but I've never heard of such claims being made.
Seriously, how many people audit a friend's insurance and financial records before accepting a ride from them?
Go ahead and risk your life but don't risk the lives of paying passengers.
When dealing with vehicles on public roads many, perhaps most, life threatening mechanical failures also put those in other vehicles at risk. If I get hit by a car that loses control at 65MPH on the freeway because its front tire blew out, my heirs really don't care if the car that hit me was a "commercial" or "private" car -- they are just happy they were named in my trust.
If daily inspections are required for commercial vehicles, it seems they should be required for similar private vehicles.
In reality, only a few checks make sense every day. Glancing at tires daily to see if any appear to be flat is a sensible precaution as an embedded nail can cause a tire to leak down slowly and, overnight, make the car much less safe to drive than it was twelve hours earlier (although with the adoption of TPMS, this check is no longer as useful). However daily checks make little sense for most items (including tire wear) as "time degradation" is swamped by "mileage degradation"- drive belts would be an example of this (they should be checked a minimum of every M miles or W weeks but even most private cars will exceed M miles before W weeks between checks with modern drive belts).
Very few accidents involving modern cars are caused primarily by mechanical failure rather than driver error. It's not clear to me that an Uber driver is any less safe when driving paying passengers than when driving to meet a friend. In fact, driving to meet a friend may involve consumption of alcohol at the destination and a return trip in a slightly demeaned, but legal, state while the Uber driver is likely to be seeking another fare rather than hanging out at a bar after completing a paying mission.
He didn't mention -- he fell off the ladder while removing the bulb and fell 12 feet (cathedral ceilings!) and hit his head on the edge of his Steelcase desk from the 50's (the ones that a lot of Cop shows have on the set). But, I'm pretty sure it was the mercury that had that remarkable effect, not the anxiety of if mercury was harmful or the concussion and blood loss.
You can buy thermometers with a bulb of mercury at any Chinese drugstore.
Awesome - thanks for the information.
I hate digital fever thermometers - when I need one every five or ten years, the battery is dead (and the very reason I want to take my temperature is the same reason I don't want, nor to people in the outside world want me, to go out at 3AM to find and buy a new one or a new battery). Fortunately, I still have a "backup" mercury thermometer that's close to 40 years old - but I've wondered where to buy a backup for the backup should it meet an untimely demise.
With the timer disabling notion, presumably the expiration would be fairly long (days or weeks - perhaps varying based on operational conditions) and would be renewed regularly in normal conditions (such as hourly if normally done via satellite) and the equipment would begin to warn of failure of expected renewal quickly (such as after a couple missed renewals). Although this would not prevent the enemy from using a freshly captured device, it could keep them from using it for very long and there would be no "surprises" to the troops using the equipment due to sudden disabling due to timer expiration as they would have been receiving warnings for days or weeks of the impending disable event.
Doing so would increase the cost of the US arming its own troops of course. Selling to foreign governments allows defense contractors to amortize the fixed R&D cost over more units and allows them to scale production more efficiently thereby reducing the unit cost.
Qualified senior developers I know do some amount of all three and all have done a substantial amount of all three during various points in their career.
If you're considering just a "coder" (working, presumably, from some detailed design spec), that's probably a different matter (I've never worked anywhere that a "coder" job role existed), but a "dev" (a.k.a. "developer") is a much broader role than "coder" (and pays much better - so, yes, I probably pay them three times what I would pay a "coder" if I could find an efficient use for the latter). Anyone on my staff who only has potential to be a "coder", is sent on their way as it's faster to write the damned code than to write a detailed design spec that a one dimensional "coder" can code from -- and the result is generally much better (unless, of course, the detailed design spec is so detailed that the coder has to make no decisions -- in which case, just write the spec in Java or C++ and compile it).
Slashdot Mirror
And I believe you must be posting from the far distant future (and, apparently humans have evolved to handle very high temperatures or our current projections on the lifecycle of the Sun are very wrong).
Cars have many different materials in them and even the same materials get processed differently (with heat treating, chemical baths, etching etc). Stocking all these materials efficiently and being able to handle the different processes in on demand 3D printing seems to be a very distant dream - esp. if the result is not 30,000 parts produced on different machines that then need assembly. Imagine the complexity and cost of 3D printing the following in one facility where you "can go in and print yourself a new car":
There would have to be an amazing advances in material science and engineering way beyond 3D printing technology to make this work.
You might be able to "design" your car's body panels and have them 3D printed along with various decorative elements, but not the core of the car from the ground up for a very long time (and, by that time it's possible/feasible, the notion of a "car" will likely be a long forgotten quaint historical reference).
And, that's a problem with our laws that should be fixed. If a competent PCP would not have referred the person to an ER, the ER doctor/PA/NP should be able to tell the person that their condition is not a medical emergency and advise them to see their primary care provider and the ER should suffer no more risk than the PCP would have. It should also be a crime to misrepresent your medical condition at an ER in order to get preferred or priority treatment (yes, this would rarely be prosecuted, but the occasional prosecution would deter people from doing it).
There is a good social reason for NOT completing treatment and diagnosis after evaluation determines the problem not to be an emergency -- the next time that person (and their friends and family) probably will not clog up the ER with what is obviously a cold or minor sprain that can be dealt with during normal business hours by their primary care provider.
The system, expectations, and culture is broken -- requiring ERs to act as PCPs is not the answer and the liability laws should reflect that.
This is rare. However, if that's a concern for enough women in the market for insurance, insurance companies could offer, if it were not for PPACA rules, pregnancy coverage for women who have had a (potentially unsuccessful) tubal litigation at a vastly reduced rate (a few dollars a year would cover it given how rare such pregnancies are).
This is not unlike, for some strange reason, PPACA rules allow charging a additional premium for smokers - or put another way, a discount for not smoking. Why can't insurance companies offer similar discounts for those who take steps to avoid other conditions such as pregnancy by having a tubal litigation? Note that non-smokers still get lung cancer (much more likely I suspect than women who have undergone a tubal litigation getting pregnant).
Why not allow insurance companies to charge more for people who engage in "extreme" sports - their odds of getting expensive injuries at a young age are much higher than someone who doesn't engage in them.
And that is simply a problem with the law or hospitals not being willing to say "no". When someone presents with the types of problems that result in "very expensive ER visits rather than the much less expensive office visits", the ER should simply tell them to leave (and have them arrested for trespassing if they refuse) because they are not emergencies - if I call 911 because I want a pizza, they won't deliver it and I may well get in trouble if I keep calling with that request.
I don't know what the AC's situation is, but some plans that were once available are not. Some people can afford to have what Obama considered "junk plans" but can no longer get them and must pay higher rates for plans they don't want or including coverage for events that can't happen to them. What does a woman who has had her tubes tied (and would happily have an abortion if somehow the operation wasn't really successful) or a post-menopausal woman want with coverage for pregnancy?
It is almost always better to self insure portions of risk if you can reasonable do do -- why pay middlemen? Do you buy the "extended warranty" on every USB cable you buy from BestBuy or NewEgg? No, because you can easily absorb the cost of replacing it OR, perhaps, you only expect to be using it a few weeks by which time you are pretty sure you will accidentally leave it in a rental car or at a Starbucks by accident so you just don need long term protection.
vs.
In standard usage, "paying for X" means "paying in full" (try telling your mortgage company that you are "paying your monthly payment" when you are only paying 50% of the required payment and see if the agree with your assessment that you are "paying your monthly payment").
People do love free stuff of course and most don't care if some other person is forced to pay for what they get for free. We could, for example, increase homeownership (something that some think is good) simply by buying a house for everyone and only making them pay 20% (or whatever) of their income on mortgage, insurance and taxes while the American taxpayers pick up the remainder.
Since he personally owns over $45B of Oracle stock (and billions in other assets), a 0.01% increase in Oracle's stock price results in his net worth increasing by (in current dollars) about what a "typical" software engineer will make during their entire career.
Fabulous. But note that the FCC didn't need to tax someone in the Bronx for the needs of a business in Minnesota since Minnesota residents seem to have decided it's in their best interests, due to their demographics, to pay taxes (I assume taxes are involved here given how you worded it) for infrastructure to give their businesses a competitive advantage over businesses in other states. A family in the Bronx might feel that the money is better spent on local schools (and, they would probably be right) and can choose to tax themselves for that.
(Of course, if Minnesota's premise is correct, these lines should probably be paid for via a revenue bond that the farmers pay -- if it increases sales enough to be worthwhile, the cost of paying of the bonds would be more than offset by increased profits).
I'm curious how much of a premium individuals are willing to pay for 1gbs vs. 100mbs. I have slightly greater than 100mbs down and I don't think I would pay $5 a month more for 1gbs down although I only have about 20 mbs up and would pay $5 a month to increase that to 100mbs (it would make my online backups faster).
I suspect few households would pay much extra for 1gbs which suggests it's not that important. The primary use for 1gbs seems to be entertainment in large households who want multiple concurrent high quality video streams -- that doesn't strike me as a national priority (and, if it is, shouldn't we be subsidizing 55" 4K TVs and Hulu and Netflix for everyone as well?).
Yes, but the small businesses get other breaks -- such as SBA loans and exemptions from the requirement to offer medical insurance to their employees or pay a fine.
If these rural areas need broadband to prosper and they pay for it themselves, then the cost of minerals or timber from that area may go up infinitesimally. If that pushes mineral or timber costs higher than somewhere else (including transport costs), then harvesting minerals or timber wasn't really a viable business there anyway. Mining and timber companies don't need more government subsidies and I don't see why a telephone user in an inner city two thousand miles away should subsidize building mansions for Larry Ellison or Bill Gates via keeping timber or concrete artificially cheap.
Comparing federal level taxes/subsidies to regional is comparing apples to BMWs. If voters in a regional area decide they want to subsidize the outlying areas for some reason, that's much more acceptable as residents in those areas are best able to judge what their needs are. They may decide a new hospital is more important than broadband for every cabin in the woods and if they decide the broadband is more important, they can set rules for the subsidies that make sense for their geography and demographics.
Hmm... there must be, because it's not everywhere.
There are areas in the US that have still have little more than dirt and gravel roads. The residents of those areas don't seem to think it's worth their money to upgrade to "Interstate Highway" grade pavement while in other areas, they have. The same is true of residential broadband, if there is sufficient demand, it will become available.
There's always satellite for those who want modest internet access beyond dialup but don't want to pay to upgrade the infrastructure to reach their low (internet user) density environment. In many areas of the country, people rely on personal wells to provide their water -- it's far from as ideal a solution as municipal water, but it's often more cost effective in those areas than building and maintaining a municipal water system. Why should broadband be treated any differently than something critical to life itself - water. There are plots of land that are considered, basically, inhabitable and have virtually no market value due to lack of water service or the ability to tap ground water - should we also insure those plots of land have inexpensive broadband access if someone decides to buy one and truck water in?
People move all the time as the area they live in no longer matches their needs - such as when unemployment rises due to coal mining or logging being reduced due to environmental laws. If you need high speed internet and you've chosen to live in an area where the number of users who are willing to pay for it per square mile is insufficient, move -- or convince your neighbors that they too want to watch (and are willing to pay to do so) every cat video in stunning uncompressed 4K the moment it's released.
If businesses want to woo customers who have low speed (dialup for example) internet access, they will offer low bandwidth versions of their web sites but one doesn't see much of this so it seems unlikely that there is a lot of unmet demand there.
True food security is being able to grow and raise your own food. If food security became a problem in the US (which it is not -- there's more than enough food to go around, income security is another issue), people would flock to these rural areas where they could afford some land to farm -- independent of if 1Gb internet access was available. To my knowledge, migrant farmworkers are not demanding high speed internet access yet and when/if they do, there will then be a market for it in these rural areas.
But that's nothing compared to what it would cost someone who chose to live in downtown Manhatten to get a home there that had enough land around it to support organic sustainable agriculture that produced enough food to provide all the food needs of their family of six. Surely eating fresh healthy food that you know has not been sprayed with chemicals or been genetically modified is a basic right and more important than internet access.
People choose to live in different places for different reasons. It's pretty stupid to move to/continue to live somewhere that doesn't meet one's needs. Certainly when I move, a "must have" consideration is "Does this residence have high speed internet from a reliable ISP?" -- some people instead might ask "Is there a world class opera company within 20 minutes drive?" or "Does it get below 20 degrees F?" or "Is one of the top ten hospitals in the country within a 30 minute drive from this residence?".
Even Democratic Congressmen use (and defend the use rather than apologize for it) the "Uncle Tom" racial slur to refer to Justice Thomas because he, apparently, doesn't "think Black enough".
This same Congressman asserts that another Congressman stating he would not support Obama's polices was because of racism -- ignoring the fact that President Obama is the least experienced President and ran on the most progressive platform (albeit, he hasn't followed through on his stated principles) of any President in decades (to say nothing of probably being the most publicly arrogant) and that their viewpoints on political issues were radically different. (Both viewpoints, IMHO, wrong - but that's another issue.)
If logic isn't on your side, scream racism and that will surely win the argument -- or so some liberals seem to believe.
However, if people using the cabs had instead had a friend or partner drive them to the airport (for example), the driver is often deadheading back to where they came from while a cab is more likely to pick up another fare without traveling the full distance of the original fare so there's less deadheading per trip. Thus, getting the same number of people to the airport by cab generally results in less total miles being driven than having someone else drive you so the cab is safer to society and creates less congestion.
One cab, ten 30 mile trips, 300 miles per day vs. Ten private cars, ten 30(+) mile trips, 300 miles per day - all pretty much the same (ignoring deadheading differences).
An inspection 3K miles would be once every ten days for the cab, once every 100 days for the private cars - again, mileage based on cars getting this sort of usage (if a car is only driven 2K miles per year, of course the time based inspections kick in for detecting time dependent decline in rubber components etc).
Anyone who wants the security of a government certification for drivers "for hire", is free to choose a service offering that. Uber isn't trying to ban conventional taxi services.
Obviously if an Uber driver is claiming they are a licensed taxi service, they should be prosecuted for fraud -- but I've never heard of such claims being made.
Seriously, how many people audit a friend's insurance and financial records before accepting a ride from them?
When dealing with vehicles on public roads many, perhaps most, life threatening mechanical failures also put those in other vehicles at risk. If I get hit by a car that loses control at 65MPH on the freeway because its front tire blew out, my heirs really don't care if the car that hit me was a "commercial" or "private" car -- they are just happy they were named in my trust.
If daily inspections are required for commercial vehicles, it seems they should be required for similar private vehicles.
In reality, only a few checks make sense every day. Glancing at tires daily to see if any appear to be flat is a sensible precaution as an embedded nail can cause a tire to leak down slowly and, overnight, make the car much less safe to drive than it was twelve hours earlier (although with the adoption of TPMS, this check is no longer as useful). However daily checks make little sense for most items (including tire wear) as "time degradation" is swamped by "mileage degradation"- drive belts would be an example of this (they should be checked a minimum of every M miles or W weeks but even most private cars will exceed M miles before W weeks between checks with modern drive belts).
Very few accidents involving modern cars are caused primarily by mechanical failure rather than driver error. It's not clear to me that an Uber driver is any less safe when driving paying passengers than when driving to meet a friend. In fact, driving to meet a friend may involve consumption of alcohol at the destination and a return trip in a slightly demeaned, but legal, state while the Uber driver is likely to be seeking another fare rather than hanging out at a bar after completing a paying mission.
Most consumer oral fever thermometers use a button cell battery of a size I don't keep around.
I keep lots of charged AA and AAA rechargeable batteries (Eneloop et al) around but that doesn't help me with the fever thermometers.
He didn't mention -- he fell off the ladder while removing the bulb and fell 12 feet (cathedral ceilings!) and hit his head on the edge of his Steelcase desk from the 50's (the ones that a lot of Cop shows have on the set). But, I'm pretty sure it was the mercury that had that remarkable effect, not the anxiety of if mercury was harmful or the concussion and blood loss.
Awesome - thanks for the information.
I hate digital fever thermometers - when I need one every five or ten years, the battery is dead (and the very reason I want to take my temperature is the same reason I don't want, nor to people in the outside world want me, to go out at 3AM to find and buy a new one or a new battery). Fortunately, I still have a "backup" mercury thermometer that's close to 40 years old - but I've wondered where to buy a backup for the backup should it meet an untimely demise.
With the timer disabling notion, presumably the expiration would be fairly long (days or weeks - perhaps varying based on operational conditions) and would be renewed regularly in normal conditions (such as hourly if normally done via satellite) and the equipment would begin to warn of failure of expected renewal quickly (such as after a couple missed renewals). Although this would not prevent the enemy from using a freshly captured device, it could keep them from using it for very long and there would be no "surprises" to the troops using the equipment due to sudden disabling due to timer expiration as they would have been receiving warnings for days or weeks of the impending disable event.
Doing so would increase the cost of the US arming its own troops of course. Selling to foreign governments allows defense contractors to amortize the fixed R&D cost over more units and allows them to scale production more efficiently thereby reducing the unit cost.
Qualified senior developers I know do some amount of all three and all have done a substantial amount of all three during various points in their career.
If you're considering just a "coder" (working, presumably, from some detailed design spec), that's probably a different matter (I've never worked anywhere that a "coder" job role existed), but a "dev" (a.k.a. "developer") is a much broader role than "coder" (and pays much better - so, yes, I probably pay them three times what I would pay a "coder" if I could find an efficient use for the latter). Anyone on my staff who only has potential to be a "coder", is sent on their way as it's faster to write the damned code than to write a detailed design spec that a one dimensional "coder" can code from -- and the result is generally much better (unless, of course, the detailed design spec is so detailed that the coder has to make no decisions -- in which case, just write the spec in Java or C++ and compile it).
Wait... I thought Healthcare.gov was coded long ago. Are you working on version 2?