I do not believe they actually exist on Illinois toll roads. I certainly have never seen one and I've been on most of the major toll roads in the area.
Just to put some context around this, the "new" transponders were out 10 years ago. I've had an IPass hanging off my windshield since at least 2001 and it's always been the newer ones, no replaceable battery, no beep. They were fairly new at the time, because some of the instructions talked about stuff the new ones didn't have but the old ones did.
There's probably no evil conspiracy. He's just the IPass equivalent of an Windows 98 user and they don't want to support him any more. The old transponders may have a different protocol, or the failure rate among them may have hit a point where they just want them all out of the field.
You can tell if the toll has been paid if you go through the lanes that are like the coin collection lanes (where you're supposed to stop.) There's a light.
It's only the "open road tolling" where you can't tell, and if your transponder isn't working you don't get a ticket - because they know your license plate. So if you have a broken transponder, they look up the plate in their database and apply the normal IPass charge to your account. I went literally months before I realized my transponder had failed, and they didn't even mention it to me, much less send a ticket. I just finally realized that the light never lit up on the side of the road when I drove by.
Now, there have been rumors of tickets being issued based on the transponders - if I make it from toll point A to toll point B in an amount of time that indicates an average speed over the speed limit, I was clearly speeding. But so far I've never gotten a ticket, and I surely have deserved one many times. But a camera would make sense in that case - you want to be able to prove who was driving.
I only have three phone numbers I'm 100% confident of.
1. My mom's, which is the same number she drilled into my head as a small child. 2. My home number. 3. My desk # at work, because people constantly ask me what my extension is.
Wife's cell phone? I think maybe I know it.
Son's cell? No idea.
Mom's business? probably, but once again, same number as 30 years ago when I actually dialed it a lot.
Seems like nobody read the articles. Don't know why I should be shocked. Here are some facts from the various articles and some additional searching around:
1. It collapses, side to side, somewhat like an accordion. There's a hinge in the middle of the roof and the floor, and (my guess) some cables linking the two. Here's video http://youtu.be/QTdgZ2YuAM8 of (an animation of) it being folded and stacked. 2. 5 folded ones fit in the space of one full one. 3. It costs roughly as much to ship an empty as a full. (This suggests to me that the thing that costs is volume rather than weight.) 4. The weight of 5 folded ones is roughly the same as one laden one, so it costs 1/5 as much to ship a folded one as an empty standard one. 5. Aside from folding, it's designed to be backward-compatible with standard containers - so all the same ships, lifts, cranes, trucks, rail cars, etc. work. 6. The design intention, based on the video above, is to use a forklift to fold it up. My guess is that a forklift is used at some point to move around the empty ones, too, so if you can take another 5 minutes and fold it to get the advantages it may be a win.
So far as I can tell, based on Amazon.com, this is not true. You may be able to pay someone else in Bitcoins to buy you something from Amazon, but that is not the same as shopping at Amazon.
Virtually all of them take credit and debit cards and have 3 - 5 card readers.
Virtually all of those card readers can take Visa PayWave, as well as the similar technology from AmEx, MasterCard and Discover.
So all "hundreds of thousands" means is they got maybe a half-dozen large chains to put the silly things in around the world. Statistically speaking, nobody accepts them.
Air travel is unique in that you're in a very confined place with a lot of people for an extended period of time, with a great deal of difficulty and expense to shorten that period. (And sometimes impossible, for example, a trans-oceanic flight.)
A city block stops every block or two, a greyhound can pull over whenever the driver wants, and also stops comparatively often. The subway has a lot of stops, the cruise ship is not confined, and the car is really just you and people you know.
So some security is reasonable. Only reasonable-sized pocket knives, no guns. Some security folks trained to recognize nuts walking the lines chatting with people.
But if you want to carry a gallon of water and a family size shampoo, go for it.
It doesn't even take any real work to get a knife on a plane.
Well after 9/11 happened a co-worker and I flew from Chicago's O'Hare airport to Fargo, ND. As is standard, our bags and jackets went through the x-ray as we walked through the metal detector.
While eating dinner that night in Fargo, he found a whole package of utility knife blades (the super-sized razor blades that are angle-cut on both ends) in his jacket pocket.
I'm not sure where you got the idea that COD doesn't exist. I haven't seen it used since I was a kid - everyone has credit cards now, but it does appear to at least theoretically still exist.
Don't discount the cost of figuring out the correct postage.
If a letter from HI to ME cost more than a cross-town letter then the post offices would be filled up with old ladies asking the rate for every single thing they sent.
Meanwhile the rest of us would make a high guess, slap too many stamps on, and get on with our lives.
I would guess that they aren't allowed to deliver mail if you don't have a (USPS approved) mailbox, no doubt due to some regulation intended to force people to have mailboxes so postal carriers have somewhere to put their mail instead of strewing envelopes around their property.
Unfortunately, that regulation probably applies whether the item in question would actually fit in said mailbox or not.
Maybe you just don't know about the things you've lost, ever considered that?
About a block away from my house is another house with a very similar address.
My address is 16W535 Reindeer Place. Theirs is 6S535 Reindeer Avenue.
My mailman regular delivers my address-twin's mail to me, and my mail to them.
One letter (from a mortgage company) I had to put back into the mailbox twice before I stopped getting it.
In fairness, UPS and FedEx have both done it also. I called UPS up and explained how they'd abandoned $2,000 in prescription medication on the wrong porch and they haven't done it since.
First, there are a lot of schools - real universities, not trade schools - that have an automotive engineering major. If you want to design cars, that might be something to at least investigate.
The computerized components of cars tend to be pretty low level. CS tends to be pretty theoretical. If you want the computer knowledge for application to the automotive work, you should probably think more computer engineering or electrical engineering.
Personally, I'm not sure it's possible to double major like that and live to tell the tale. The school may not even let you. But maybe you're smarter, or harder working, than I am.
But there are a lot of APIs that the documentation appears to indicate are being provided by Explorer. Some of them are things you would expect, some of them aren't. (It's really an odd list if you ask me.)
Do those still work if explorer.exe isn't running? I have no idea to be honest.
Maybe I'm missing sarcasm, but that's exactly what most of my CS classes looked like.
We all sat around in a basement room under the English Building with green-screen terminals and used a single Unix system to code and test.
Of course, this was a few years ago... 22 I think.
You could almost hear the single 386 panting as it struggled under the load of 50 CS students editing and compiling. (The Sequent had once had two CPU cards, but one of them died. And who would spend money on an undergrad 100-level lab? That's just crazy.)
The printer was amazingly fast, though. You can really push paper through a dot matrix line printer.
Later I got the ability to telnet to the system from the dorm sorted out and my life got better.
Subsequent classes had single Unix-based computers of various sorts in the labs, but you could always telnet to them and use them along with someone else. AT&T 3B2, IBM RT, all sorts of marvelous even-then junk that had presumably been donated.
So that you can schedule it during their work day. Since you often don't know people's exact work day (even in the same office) you just assume that 9 to 4 is fine with almost everyone.
You need to know the approximate position of the sun for all of these meeting participants when you're scheduling the meeting, unless you're a complete self-centered asshole, of course.
But the rest of us, who care about other people, would still need to know what time the work day starts and ends in other places. It's easier to do time zones, and assume that it starts at roughly 9 and ends at roughly 5.
Time zones aren't that hard, and most people don't ever deal with them. I would bet my mom never thinks about time zone except when she calls her aunt, who lives in Pennsylvania, to decide if it's too early or too late to call from Illinois. A lot of people don't even have that need for them - basically everyone they know is within 50 miles of their home.
Personally, it would take me quite a long time to learn that I have to be at work at 13:00 and can leave at 22:00.
There's no reason to bother most of the world's population just to make international business slightly easier for assholes.
That has historically been a mess, but it seems like they've pretty well resolved it in a sensible fashion.
The counties that are arguably part of the greater Chicago metro area are in Central time, same as Chicago.
The rest are in Eastern time.
I'm really not sure what you think the problem is. The line between time zones has to fall somewhere, and lots of people commute across state lines, so putting it at state boundaries doesn't help.
There are official work hours defined, sure. But If I get sticky about those hours then so does the company. And I start getting in trouble for showing up late or leaving early because I've got stuff going on in my personal life I need to attend to.
Instead, I get my work done by the deadlines, come in a little late some days, leave a little early some days, and check my email at home before I leave for work and after I get home. It all averages out.
And in fact, if I recall correctly, they are moving away from the old method with newly issued numbers.
It's not the birthdate that matters as much as the date of SSN issue though. For those of us the age of college students parents, we weren't issued numbers at birth.
My sister, three years younger, and I both got ours at the same time. They differ by the last two digits.
Slashdot Mirror
I do not believe they actually exist on Illinois toll roads. I certainly have never seen one and I've been on most of the major toll roads in the area.
Agreed. I hated the ribbon at first because I was lost, but now that I'm used to it I like it a lot.
It is harder to do keyboard shortcuts, though. (I know, it tells you, etc etc but I can't get the hang of it.)
No it isn't.
It's the Tri-State.
Never, ever use the numbers - someone new to the area might accidentally understand what you're talking about.
Just to put some context around this, the "new" transponders were out 10 years ago. I've had an IPass hanging off my windshield since at least 2001 and it's always been the newer ones, no replaceable battery, no beep. They were fairly new at the time, because some of the instructions talked about stuff the new ones didn't have but the old ones did.
There's probably no evil conspiracy. He's just the IPass equivalent of an Windows 98 user and they don't want to support him any more. The old transponders may have a different protocol, or the failure rate among them may have hit a point where they just want them all out of the field.
You can tell if the toll has been paid if you go through the lanes that are like the coin collection lanes (where you're supposed to stop.) There's a light.
It's only the "open road tolling" where you can't tell, and if your transponder isn't working you don't get a ticket - because they know your license plate. So if you have a broken transponder, they look up the plate in their database and apply the normal IPass charge to your account. I went literally months before I realized my transponder had failed, and they didn't even mention it to me, much less send a ticket. I just finally realized that the light never lit up on the side of the road when I drove by.
Now, there have been rumors of tickets being issued based on the transponders - if I make it from toll point A to toll point B in an amount of time that indicates an average speed over the speed limit, I was clearly speeding. But so far I've never gotten a ticket, and I surely have deserved one many times. But a camera would make sense in that case - you want to be able to prove who was driving.
Not in Illinois, though.
I only have three phone numbers I'm 100% confident of.
1. My mom's, which is the same number she drilled into my head as a small child.
2. My home number.
3. My desk # at work, because people constantly ask me what my extension is.
Wife's cell phone? I think maybe I know it.
Son's cell? No idea.
Mom's business? probably, but once again, same number as 30 years ago when I actually dialed it a lot.
Seems like nobody read the articles. Don't know why I should be shocked. Here are some facts from the various articles and some additional searching around:
1. It collapses, side to side, somewhat like an accordion. There's a hinge in the middle of the roof and the floor, and (my guess) some cables linking the two. Here's video http://youtu.be/QTdgZ2YuAM8 of (an animation of) it being folded and stacked.
2. 5 folded ones fit in the space of one full one.
3. It costs roughly as much to ship an empty as a full. (This suggests to me that the thing that costs is volume rather than weight.)
4. The weight of 5 folded ones is roughly the same as one laden one, so it costs 1/5 as much to ship a folded one as an empty standard one.
5. Aside from folding, it's designed to be backward-compatible with standard containers - so all the same ships, lifts, cranes, trucks, rail cars, etc. work.
6. The design intention, based on the video above, is to use a forklift to fold it up. My guess is that a forklift is used at some point to move around the empty ones, too, so if you can take another 5 minutes and fold it to get the advantages it may be a win.
So far as I can tell, based on Amazon.com, this is not true. You may be able to pay someone else in Bitcoins to buy you something from Amazon, but that is not the same as shopping at Amazon.
Tell me about Bitcoin when I can use it buy groceries, shop at Amazon & Home Depot, and pay for my dry cleaning.
Until then, it's just crypto-currency geek games.
I'd just like to point out:
There are roughly 14,000 McDonald's in the USA.
Virtually all of them take credit and debit cards and have 3 - 5 card readers.
Virtually all of those card readers can take Visa PayWave, as well as the similar technology from AmEx, MasterCard and Discover.
So all "hundreds of thousands" means is they got maybe a half-dozen large chains to put the silly things in around the world. Statistically speaking, nobody accepts them.
Air travel is unique in that you're in a very confined place with a lot of people for an extended period of time, with a great deal of difficulty and expense to shorten that period. (And sometimes impossible, for example, a trans-oceanic flight.)
A city block stops every block or two, a greyhound can pull over whenever the driver wants, and also stops comparatively often. The subway has a lot of stops, the cruise ship is not confined, and the car is really just you and people you know.
So some security is reasonable. Only reasonable-sized pocket knives, no guns. Some security folks trained to recognize nuts walking the lines chatting with people.
But if you want to carry a gallon of water and a family size shampoo, go for it.
It doesn't even take any real work to get a knife on a plane.
Well after 9/11 happened a co-worker and I flew from Chicago's O'Hare airport to Fargo, ND. As is standard, our bags and jackets went through the x-ray as we walked through the metal detector.
While eating dinner that night in Fargo, he found a whole package of utility knife blades (the super-sized razor blades that are angle-cut on both ends) in his jacket pocket.
I'm not sure where you got the idea that COD doesn't exist. I haven't seen it used since I was a kid - everyone has credit cards now, but it does appear to at least theoretically still exist.
Maybe your local PO doesn't want to deal with it?
http://faq.usps.com/eCustomer/iq/usps/request.do?create=kb:USPSFAQ&view()=c%5Bc_usps6519%5D&varset(source)=sourceType:embedded
Don't discount the cost of figuring out the correct postage.
If a letter from HI to ME cost more than a cross-town letter then the post offices would be filled up with old ladies asking the rate for every single thing they sent.
Meanwhile the rest of us would make a high guess, slap too many stamps on, and get on with our lives.
I would guess that they aren't allowed to deliver mail if you don't have a (USPS approved) mailbox, no doubt due to some regulation intended to force people to have mailboxes so postal carriers have somewhere to put their mail instead of strewing envelopes around their property.
Unfortunately, that regulation probably applies whether the item in question would actually fit in said mailbox or not.
There is actually a UPS service that is exactly what you describe. UPS gets it to the local post office, the USPS takes it the last couple miles.
Or maybe it's FedEx? Or DHL? I really don't remember but they do it with one of them.
Maybe you just don't know about the things you've lost, ever considered that?
About a block away from my house is another house with a very similar address.
My address is 16W535 Reindeer Place. Theirs is 6S535 Reindeer Avenue.
My mailman regular delivers my address-twin's mail to me, and my mail to them.
One letter (from a mortgage company) I had to put back into the mailbox twice before I stopped getting it.
In fairness, UPS and FedEx have both done it also. I called UPS up and explained how they'd abandoned $2,000 in prescription medication on the wrong porch and they haven't done it since.
First, there are a lot of schools - real universities, not trade schools - that have an automotive engineering major. If you want to design cars, that might be something to at least investigate.
The computerized components of cars tend to be pretty low level. CS tends to be pretty theoretical. If you want the computer knowledge for application to the automotive work, you should probably think more computer engineering or electrical engineering.
Personally, I'm not sure it's possible to double major like that and live to tell the tale. The school may not even let you. But maybe you're smarter, or harder working, than I am.
You can absolutely do this.
But there are a lot of APIs that the documentation appears to indicate are being provided by Explorer. Some of them are things you would expect, some of them aren't. (It's really an odd list if you ask me.)
Do those still work if explorer.exe isn't running? I have no idea to be honest.
Maybe I'm missing sarcasm, but that's exactly what most of my CS classes looked like.
We all sat around in a basement room under the English Building with green-screen terminals and used a single Unix system to code and test.
Of course, this was a few years ago... 22 I think.
You could almost hear the single 386 panting as it struggled under the load of 50 CS students editing and compiling. (The Sequent had once had two CPU cards, but one of them died. And who would spend money on an undergrad 100-level lab? That's just crazy.)
The printer was amazingly fast, though. You can really push paper through a dot matrix line printer.
Later I got the ability to telnet to the system from the dorm sorted out and my life got better.
Subsequent classes had single Unix-based computers of various sorts in the labs, but you could always telnet to them and use them along with someone else. AT&T 3B2, IBM RT, all sorts of marvelous even-then junk that had presumably been donated.
Ah, the good old days.
OK, back to my rocking chair. Get off my lawn!
So that you can schedule it during their work day. Since you often don't know people's exact work day (even in the same office) you just assume that 9 to 4 is fine with almost everyone.
You need to know the approximate position of the sun for all of these meeting participants when you're scheduling the meeting, unless you're a complete self-centered asshole, of course.
But the rest of us, who care about other people, would still need to know what time the work day starts and ends in other places. It's easier to do time zones, and assume that it starts at roughly 9 and ends at roughly 5.
Time zones aren't that hard, and most people don't ever deal with them. I would bet my mom never thinks about time zone except when she calls her aunt, who lives in Pennsylvania, to decide if it's too early or too late to call from Illinois. A lot of people don't even have that need for them - basically everyone they know is within 50 miles of their home.
Personally, it would take me quite a long time to learn that I have to be at work at 13:00 and can leave at 22:00.
There's no reason to bother most of the world's population just to make international business slightly easier for assholes.
That has historically been a mess, but it seems like they've pretty well resolved it in a sensible fashion.
The counties that are arguably part of the greater Chicago metro area are in Central time, same as Chicago.
The rest are in Eastern time.
I'm really not sure what you think the problem is. The line between time zones has to fall somewhere, and lots of people commute across state lines, so putting it at state boundaries doesn't help.
There are official work hours defined, sure. But If I get sticky about those hours then so does the company. And I start getting in trouble for showing up late or leaving early because I've got stuff going on in my personal life I need to attend to.
Instead, I get my work done by the deadlines, come in a little late some days, leave a little early some days, and check my email at home before I leave for work and after I get home. It all averages out.
And in fact, if I recall correctly, they are moving away from the old method with newly issued numbers.
It's not the birthdate that matters as much as the date of SSN issue though. For those of us the age of college students parents, we weren't issued numbers at birth.
My sister, three years younger, and I both got ours at the same time. They differ by the last two digits.