Any speed limiter probably won't control the brake, it'll probably only control the gas.
Well the TFA says "... read road speed limit signs and automatically apply the brakes when this is exceeded", but it wouldn't be the first time TFA was wrong. Maybe the speed limiter will cut off your foot and stab you in the face instead?
1. Cars will fail to read the road signs correctly
2. Someone will hack the road signs, leading to mayhem
3. Only a certain percentage of road fatalities are caused by people exceeding the listed speed limit
4. Retrofitting a feature to cars to control their braking sounds like a poorly thought out idea. That would be my major concern, if any of TFS was actually correct.
Why not fit cars with a voluntary limiter that users can enable themselves?
I've got one. It's called a "cruise control". I set it to the speed limit and ignore the pricks trying to climb in my rear window.
Not the same. Not even close. Speed limiter means you can follow the car in front that varies his speed between well above and well below the speed limit without you exceeding it and without having to constantly check your speedometer. With cruise control you are constantly setting it then tapping the breaks to clear it. Same with winding roads when backing off a bit around a sharp corner.
Why not fit cars with a voluntary limiter that users can enable themselves?
My car has one of those and it's awesome. I started using it along winding back roads at dusk where I would be looking out for kangaroos and was finding that I was subconciously increasing my speed to well over the speed limit. Setting the limiter to something reasonable meant I wouldn't exceed a safe speed and didn't have to keep tapping the cruise control when a bend came up etc. It's also great for following cars along winding roads that sit 10kph over the speed limit but slow down to 60kph every time a gentle bend comes up - previously I found I would subconciously follow them up to whatever speed they were doing and knowing my luck i'd be the one to get the speeding ticket
Now i just set it everywhere and never touch the cruise control unless i'm on a really long trip on the open road. With the speed limiter set I don't need to look at the speedometer nearly as often around town so my eyes are on the road more.
I really hate people that tell me I'm a bad person because I do what I think is best for my kids. They still get my taxes to pay for public education so why the hell should I be a bad person for sending my kids to a better school?
She's just another damned collectivist who thinks that they should have the right to control another aspect of my life.
(disclaimer - my kids go to a catholic school)
It depends on how the funding is set up. In Australia, the states fund the public schools, and the federal government provides a small amount (compared to state government) funding to all schools, but does provide more funding to private than public schools. This leads to the situation where the anti-private school claim "the government is giving more money to private schools!", which is a complete misrepresentation of the truth but comes up over and over again.
So having kids in private schools leaves more money for state schools, in Australia at least (same amount of tax payers, but less with kids using state funds). The only real downside to this is that the rich get some choice in the manner in which their kids are educated, while the poor are stuck with the state school system. Our state school system is pretty good though, for the average kid with no learning problems.
There was a situation a while back where a catholic (eg private) school required a completely new toilet block and asked the government to help. The government said no, so the catholic school started to move towards closing down. The government, having realised that having to add a heap of kids to the public school system was going to cost them a fortune, changed their mind and provided assistance.
If the funding of public vs private schools is set up differently in the US then obviously your results may vary
-Tepco reported that the radiation level was 100-millisieverts. It now transpires that 100-millisieverts was the highest reading that the measuring equipment in use was capable of displaying.
What the actual fuck. How could such a stupid mistake be made?
Wouldn't be the first time testing was stopped as soon as a nice answer was found...
With the recent "revelations" (they're not), it would be obvious that xkcd was pretty far off the mark here. The NSA is engaging in a far-reaching fishing expedition that is not practical to conduct with wrenches.
But on the other hand if their "far-reaching fishing expedition" doesn't give them the information they want, and they want it badly enough, a wrench always works.
Some people simply won't give in, even if you use that wrench on their loved ones.
Yes but that's the sort of person the NSA really is interested in. My secrets, i'd give up in a hearbeat in that situation.
So everybody is complaining about bad software patents, but are there any good software patents which are actually doing something tricky/interesting worth patenting?
I think this is a bad patent, whether it's software or not. If this guy can come up with a solution that does the same thing as the patented technology (without referencing the patent itself of course) in a short amount of time then it should be obvious that the only thing the patent has going for it is that the holder patented it first. It doesn't represent a substantial investment that the holder needs to recoup.
This is a patent on "technologies for tracking vehicles and providing users with electronic updates", which isn't necessarily a "software" patent, even if the particular implementation they are going after is all software. Or at least I think it isn't clear cut enough that they couldn't still tie it up in courts for enough time arguing about "what is software anyway?" to send a small software shop into the red.
With the recent "revelations" (they're not), it would be obvious that xkcd was pretty far off the mark here. The NSA is engaging in a far-reaching fishing expedition that is not practical to conduct with wrenches.
But on the other hand if their "far-reaching fishing expedition" doesn't give them the information they want, and they want it badly enough, a wrench always works.
At the very least, someone on the No-Fly list should be allowed to fly if they pay for a second seat and an armed government agent to sit behind them the whole flight.
No need to bring a weapon on the plane if you know someone else already brought one for you. Sitting behind you means it's out of your reach, but not out of your accomplices reach. A bunch of terrorists who are planning on flying a plane into a building aren't going to be afraid of government agent with a weapon... i mean what's he going to do? Call for backup?
It's not that hard in this case. If Mr Castillo demands to wear his colander only when it suits him to do so (eg having his photo taken), but elects to not wear it at other times, then we probably have a non-believer on our hands.
My point is that if you had a medical condition that required you to wear some form of headgear (a helmet for epilepsy, a head scarf for agoraphobia/social anxiety, etc) then I have no objection to that. And I believe that anyone who is brainwashed into believing that their personal "sky fairy" tells them that they also need to wear some form of headgear is similarly disabled and should also be allowed some concessions. I think you and I disagree on that point, and that's fine because it's only opinion anyway, but it makes the rest of our arguments pretty irrelevant to each other. But i'll continue anyway!
If you found someone who actually believes in the flying spaghetti monster, and wasn't just doing it to poke fun at other religions, then I'd be willing to grant them a similar exemption (although i'd question the process that lead to them believing this...) - this was my comment about "find me someone who actually believes..."
But if you take someone who is gaming the system to push boundaries that don't need pushing then I have a problem. If you think getting away with wearing a stupid metal hat in a drivers license photo somehow makes the world a better place then I think you are thinking about the problem all backwards. Any religion that oppresses it's followers is fucked up. I don't believe in a god (although I'm prepared to believe in the possibility of one, maybe), but the existence of god or not is inconsequential to the problem with most religions anyway, it's all about brainwashing people to believe the same things you do and then using those beliefs to control and oppress them, and getting away with wearing a metal hat in your drivers license photo doesn't solve any of these problems in the same way that blindness isn't going to be cured by a sighted person winning the right to take a dog into a shop because a blind person is allowed to take one in. You seem to be focusing on the dog, but i'd rather a cure for blindness.
I find the whole thing a bit distasteful. I see being allowed to wear a colander on your head in an official photo as more a "milestone for fail.
It's a milestone for not getting special priviledges because you believe in the *correct* magical sky fairy.
You find me a pastafarian who actually believes in the flying spaghetti monster and isn't just "holding a mirror up to the other religions" or whatever other things are cool at the moment and then we'll talk.
the forms don't have a space for the prices. They don't care about the price.
Then it would be against the code of practice to put your premium number on such a form.
Still... if it wasn't _your_ number, then I guess you couldn't get into trouble. You wouldn't receive a cut, but the idea of them trying to sell something to the girl on the end of the "naughty nun spank hotline" might give you a smug sense of satisfaction.
What exactly is the difference between 'religion' and 'preference'? Why should we treat them differently?
Why should the religious get special privilege when all they are doing, essentially, is making a series of choices they prefer to make over other choices? How is that different to how everybody else makes decisions?
Special consideration for disability. If you've been brought up to believe that you are required to hide your face, whether you want to or not, because an invisible unprovable deity says so (do any religious texts actually say such things?), then your brain has been well and truly washed. You've been brainwashed probably since birth by people who want to control you. It's not your fault, and your disability should be given some respect like any other disability.
As far as I can see the guy in TFA believes no such thing and is just making fun of these people, and I find the whole thing a bit distasteful. I see being allowed to wear a colander on your head in an official photo as more a "milestone for fail" than a "milestone for atheism"
Seriously, though, frogs has to be the oddest possible plague. They are about the least threatening creatures ever (perhaps along with sheep) and eat bugs. Also, they look nice.
Plague of frogs == awesomest thing ever.
Depends on the type. Some are so deadly that simply touching where they have been is enough to kill you. Thats the sort of plague i'd be looking at if i was god.
Exactly. I can concede every single point to an anti-vaxxer and still show the outcome is better with vaccines.
The other angle to take is that with most people immunising, their position is relatively safe. They can protect their little darlings from the "horrors of immunisation", while the fact that the rest of us continue to immunise protects their little darlings from the disease itself. Seems like a fairly selfish position to take, and certainly doesn't scale.
Definitely agree. My daughter caught measles at around 10 months old (MMR is given at 12 months). Because she still had some of her mothers immunity (so i'm told) it didn't amount to anything more than an extremely high temp, a bit of a rash, and extreme grumpiness for a few days. If anything "caused" her autism it was that. Thanks a lot non-immunisers.
Some of the diseases we immunise against can never be completely eradicated because of non-accessible reservoirs (birds, bats, etc), but if there was a worldwide campaign to immunise everyone then measles, polio, and a few others could be gone in a generation, and a whole load of arguments about immunisation would just evaporate
What scares me is that the current measles vaccine works very well right now, but is there any chance that continued background exposure of immunised people to measles via non-immunised infected people could allow a mutation to evolve that makes the current vaccine ineffective?
I did a bit of digging too but came up empty, or at least everything I found relating to carbonate (my guess as to the material the bricks might be made of) didn't seem to link back to the stakeholders mentioned in TFA so I couldn't be sure. Do you have a link?
I don't think an unencrypted virtual network satisfies the P in VPN.
The P refers to the differentiation between the public internet and your internal network. Encryption is normally implied for security reasons, but if you can justify encryption on your VPN then I would highly recommend running IPSEC between all endpoints to avoid a malicious device on your internal network sniffing packets.
Slashdot Mirror
Any speed limiter probably won't control the brake, it'll probably only control the gas.
Well the TFA says "... read road speed limit signs and automatically apply the brakes when this is exceeded", but it wouldn't be the first time TFA was wrong. Maybe the speed limiter will cut off your foot and stab you in the face instead?
1. Cars will fail to read the road signs correctly
2. Someone will hack the road signs, leading to mayhem
3. Only a certain percentage of road fatalities are caused by people exceeding the listed speed limit
4. Retrofitting a feature to cars to control their braking sounds like a poorly thought out idea. That would be my major concern, if any of TFS was actually correct.
Why not fit cars with a voluntary limiter that users can enable themselves?
I've got one. It's called a "cruise control". I set it to the speed limit and ignore the pricks trying to climb in my rear window.
Not the same. Not even close. Speed limiter means you can follow the car in front that varies his speed between well above and well below the speed limit without you exceeding it and without having to constantly check your speedometer. With cruise control you are constantly setting it then tapping the breaks to clear it. Same with winding roads when backing off a bit around a sharp corner.
Why not fit cars with a voluntary limiter that users can enable themselves?
My car has one of those and it's awesome. I started using it along winding back roads at dusk where I would be looking out for kangaroos and was finding that I was subconciously increasing my speed to well over the speed limit. Setting the limiter to something reasonable meant I wouldn't exceed a safe speed and didn't have to keep tapping the cruise control when a bend came up etc. It's also great for following cars along winding roads that sit 10kph over the speed limit but slow down to 60kph every time a gentle bend comes up - previously I found I would subconciously follow them up to whatever speed they were doing and knowing my luck i'd be the one to get the speeding ticket
Now i just set it everywhere and never touch the cruise control unless i'm on a really long trip on the open road. With the speed limiter set I don't need to look at the speedometer nearly as often around town so my eyes are on the road more.
I really hate people that tell me I'm a bad person because I do what I think is best for my kids. They still get my taxes to pay for public education so why the hell should I be a bad person for sending my kids to a better school?
She's just another damned collectivist who thinks that they should have the right to control another aspect of my life.
(disclaimer - my kids go to a catholic school)
It depends on how the funding is set up. In Australia, the states fund the public schools, and the federal government provides a small amount (compared to state government) funding to all schools, but does provide more funding to private than public schools. This leads to the situation where the anti-private school claim "the government is giving more money to private schools!", which is a complete misrepresentation of the truth but comes up over and over again.
So having kids in private schools leaves more money for state schools, in Australia at least (same amount of tax payers, but less with kids using state funds). The only real downside to this is that the rich get some choice in the manner in which their kids are educated, while the poor are stuck with the state school system. Our state school system is pretty good though, for the average kid with no learning problems.
There was a situation a while back where a catholic (eg private) school required a completely new toilet block and asked the government to help. The government said no, so the catholic school started to move towards closing down. The government, having realised that having to add a heap of kids to the public school system was going to cost them a fortune, changed their mind and provided assistance.
If the funding of public vs private schools is set up differently in the US then obviously your results may vary
-Tepco reported that the radiation level was 100-millisieverts. It now transpires that 100-millisieverts was the highest reading that the measuring equipment in use was capable of displaying.
What the actual fuck. How could such a stupid mistake be made?
Wouldn't be the first time testing was stopped as soon as a nice answer was found...
With the recent "revelations" (they're not), it would be obvious that xkcd was pretty far off the mark here. The NSA is engaging in a far-reaching fishing expedition that is not practical to conduct with wrenches.
But on the other hand if their "far-reaching fishing expedition" doesn't give them the information they want, and they want it badly enough, a wrench always works.
Some people simply won't give in, even if you use that wrench on their loved ones.
Yes but that's the sort of person the NSA really is interested in. My secrets, i'd give up in a hearbeat in that situation.
So everybody is complaining about bad software patents, but are there any good software patents which are actually doing something tricky/interesting worth patenting?
I think this is a bad patent, whether it's software or not. If this guy can come up with a solution that does the same thing as the patented technology (without referencing the patent itself of course) in a short amount of time then it should be obvious that the only thing the patent has going for it is that the holder patented it first. It doesn't represent a substantial investment that the holder needs to recoup.
This is a patent on "technologies for tracking vehicles and providing users with electronic updates", which isn't necessarily a "software" patent, even if the particular implementation they are going after is all software. Or at least I think it isn't clear cut enough that they couldn't still tie it up in courts for enough time arguing about "what is software anyway?" to send a small software shop into the red.
With the recent "revelations" (they're not), it would be obvious that xkcd was pretty far off the mark here. The NSA is engaging in a far-reaching fishing expedition that is not practical to conduct with wrenches.
But on the other hand if their "far-reaching fishing expedition" doesn't give them the information they want, and they want it badly enough, a wrench always works.
At the very least, someone on the No-Fly list should be allowed to fly if they pay for a second seat and an armed government agent to sit behind them the whole flight.
No need to bring a weapon on the plane if you know someone else already brought one for you. Sitting behind you means it's out of your reach, but not out of your accomplices reach. A bunch of terrorists who are planning on flying a plane into a building aren't going to be afraid of government agent with a weapon... i mean what's he going to do? Call for backup?
So you can prove what others believe?
It's not that hard in this case. If Mr Castillo demands to wear his colander only when it suits him to do so (eg having his photo taken), but elects to not wear it at other times, then we probably have a non-believer on our hands.
My point is that if you had a medical condition that required you to wear some form of headgear (a helmet for epilepsy, a head scarf for agoraphobia/social anxiety, etc) then I have no objection to that. And I believe that anyone who is brainwashed into believing that their personal "sky fairy" tells them that they also need to wear some form of headgear is similarly disabled and should also be allowed some concessions. I think you and I disagree on that point, and that's fine because it's only opinion anyway, but it makes the rest of our arguments pretty irrelevant to each other. But i'll continue anyway!
If you found someone who actually believes in the flying spaghetti monster, and wasn't just doing it to poke fun at other religions, then I'd be willing to grant them a similar exemption (although i'd question the process that lead to them believing this...) - this was my comment about "find me someone who actually believes..."
But if you take someone who is gaming the system to push boundaries that don't need pushing then I have a problem. If you think getting away with wearing a stupid metal hat in a drivers license photo somehow makes the world a better place then I think you are thinking about the problem all backwards. Any religion that oppresses it's followers is fucked up. I don't believe in a god (although I'm prepared to believe in the possibility of one, maybe), but the existence of god or not is inconsequential to the problem with most religions anyway, it's all about brainwashing people to believe the same things you do and then using those beliefs to control and oppress them, and getting away with wearing a metal hat in your drivers license photo doesn't solve any of these problems in the same way that blindness isn't going to be cured by a sighted person winning the right to take a dog into a shop because a blind person is allowed to take one in. You seem to be focusing on the dog, but i'd rather a cure for blindness.
I find the whole thing a bit distasteful. I see being allowed to wear a colander on your head in an official photo as more a "milestone for fail.
It's a milestone for not getting special priviledges because you believe in the *correct* magical sky fairy.
You find me a pastafarian who actually believes in the flying spaghetti monster and isn't just "holding a mirror up to the other religions" or whatever other things are cool at the moment and then we'll talk.
the forms don't have a space for the prices. They don't care about the price.
Then it would be against the code of practice to put your premium number on such a form.
Still... if it wasn't _your_ number, then I guess you couldn't get into trouble. You wouldn't receive a cut, but the idea of them trying to sell something to the girl on the end of the "naughty nun spank hotline" might give you a smug sense of satisfaction.
"Hang on I'll just get my credit card" is likely to keep them waiting for longer
What exactly is the difference between 'religion' and 'preference'? Why should we treat them differently?
Why should the religious get special privilege when all they are doing, essentially, is making a series of choices they prefer to make over other choices? How is that different to how everybody else makes decisions?
Special consideration for disability. If you've been brought up to believe that you are required to hide your face, whether you want to or not, because an invisible unprovable deity says so (do any religious texts actually say such things?), then your brain has been well and truly washed. You've been brainwashed probably since birth by people who want to control you. It's not your fault, and your disability should be given some respect like any other disability.
As far as I can see the guy in TFA believes no such thing and is just making fun of these people, and I find the whole thing a bit distasteful. I see being allowed to wear a colander on your head in an official photo as more a "milestone for fail" than a "milestone for atheism"
Unless they were actually Toads.
Even better. I'm sure the toads will simply eat the locusts then die off. What could possibly go wrong?
(whoosh filter - i'm actually from Australia)
A river of blood, locusts and frogs.
Seriously, though, frogs has to be the oddest possible plague. They are about the least threatening creatures ever (perhaps along with sheep) and eat bugs. Also, they look nice.
Plague of frogs == awesomest thing ever.
Depends on the type. Some are so deadly that simply touching where they have been is enough to kill you. Thats the sort of plague i'd be looking at if i was god.
Exactly. I can concede every single point to an anti-vaxxer and still show the outcome is better with vaccines.
The other angle to take is that with most people immunising, their position is relatively safe. They can protect their little darlings from the "horrors of immunisation", while the fact that the rest of us continue to immunise protects their little darlings from the disease itself. Seems like a fairly selfish position to take, and certainly doesn't scale.
Definitely agree. My daughter caught measles at around 10 months old (MMR is given at 12 months). Because she still had some of her mothers immunity (so i'm told) it didn't amount to anything more than an extremely high temp, a bit of a rash, and extreme grumpiness for a few days. If anything "caused" her autism it was that. Thanks a lot non-immunisers.
Some of the diseases we immunise against can never be completely eradicated because of non-accessible reservoirs (birds, bats, etc), but if there was a worldwide campaign to immunise everyone then measles, polio, and a few others could be gone in a generation, and a whole load of arguments about immunisation would just evaporate
What scares me is that the current measles vaccine works very well right now, but is there any chance that continued background exposure of immunised people to measles via non-immunised infected people could allow a mutation to evolve that makes the current vaccine ineffective?
They're only putting those who are not vaccinated at risk.
Like babies too young to have been immunised yet.
Seems like we have a failure of English, Geography, and Whoosh going on here.
(I was going to say geometry instead, just for laughs, but the whoosh would probably be deafening)
I did a bit of digging too but came up empty, or at least everything I found relating to carbonate (my guess as to the material the bricks might be made of) didn't seem to link back to the stakeholders mentioned in TFA so I couldn't be sure. Do you have a link?
I don't think an unencrypted virtual network satisfies the P in VPN.
The P refers to the differentiation between the public internet and your internal network. Encryption is normally implied for security reasons, but if you can justify encryption on your VPN then I would highly recommend running IPSEC between all endpoints to avoid a malicious device on your internal network sniffing packets.