Partially, I would say that there are limits to how much we can expect people, in general, to change.
I think you underestimate how much we can get people to change. In France automated speed traps where introduced in 2003. There are now over 2500 of them (plus about 200 red light cameras). From 1994 to 2002 the number of car-related deaths went down 15%. From 2002 to 2010 it went down 47+% (7655 to 3994). Sure improvements in cars certainly helped a bit, maybe they can explain 15% like for the previous 8 years? There's also a lot of street re-layouts in towns to get people to drive slower but these were already ongoing. But I think a big factor is that now people feel they are too likely to get caught if they are speeding or running a red light and have thus changed their behavior. So I would not give up on trying to change people's behavior just yet.
You are talking about blame and responsibility, which are great AFTER an accident has occurred.
No, I don't care about blame and responsibility. I'm talking about preventing accidents by making people realize that if they can't be bothered to be a bit responsible when they are at the wheel they should not be driving. Yes that means installing red light cameras: how can they learn if they don't even realize they run red lights? (and if they are doing it on deliberately then they are dangerous and should be taken off the roads)
Your approach appears to be throwing your hands up in the air saying people will never change anyway so that we should go out of our way to make sure that the worst drivers cannot cause accidents. That seems like a lost cause to me.
That said I agree that the system should of course have a bit of a safety margin (length of the orange light and delay between red and green for red lights). Maybe the current settings are wrong in places and providing a bit more leeway would be good. But it's not a silver bullet and cannot replace enforcing existing rules.
Of course, you are making an error of assumption in assuming that people who run lights generally do it willfully by thought, and not negligently by distraction, or though misjudgment.
Being negligent or distracted is not a valid excuse for running a red light. A car in motion is pretty dangerous so if you cannot pay enough attention you should not drive. And if you keep making misjudgments maybe it means you don't know how to drive, and thus should not have a driving license. What would you say if any surgeon making a mistake could simply say 'How, I was distracted' and get home free?
I have been an early adopter of many things. But I value my data (which is my bread and butter, after all), and so I will take a conservative approach to this. After more people have had them, for a little while longer, I will revisit the issue then.
If you value your data then no single drive is good enough. The only answer is RAID (1 or 5 typically). If you don't feel like buying two SSDs and you use Linux, then put it in RAID 1 with a regular hard drive using software RAID and write-mostly+write-behind for the HDD. Also remember that you are just as likely to delete a file you care about as the hard drive is to fail. So don't forget about backups, and offsite backups if you can.
It's easier to make LA or SF airports a step in going to distant cities. Trains are more suitable to short and mid-length trips.
Given that going from Los Angeles or San Diego to San Francisco (or even Sacramento) is a mid-length trip, and that these are big population and economic centers, I'm glad you agree that this route is perfect for trains.
Fast trains are lily-gilding.
No. Fast trains make all the difference. Currently going from San Francisco to Los Angeles using regular trains takes a minimum of 9.5 hours which means an average speed of 40mph. Even taking into account just the portion actually traveled by train, from Emeryville to Bakersfield, the average speed is 44mph. Going by car is faster so it's no wonder nobody takes the train! What they propose is to reduce that to just 2.6 hours which becomes much faster than by car and that makes all the difference in the world.
Parking is typically abundant at airports (although in major cities, it's not cheap.) There's not much parking near the train stations in LA and San Diego.
Moving around in San Francisco, or even the Bay Area, is not that much of a problem thanks to the buses, CalTrain and light rail. In Los Angeles you could still take the bus, or a cab if you hate public transportation. Remember that unlike tourists who move around a lot, most business travelers just go to a single destination for their meetings and back, for which a cab is just fine (and if you have shuttles from the train station to Universal Studios or Disneyland, that will be quite enough for a lot of tourists too).
This doesn't make sense. A rider arriving in LA is going to need a car when they get off the train, unless they fancy spending a lot of time waiting for on Metro (formerly known as the RTD - Rough, Tough, and Dangerous.) Total boondoggle.
That also means that all flights between SF and LA don't make any sense because any airplane traveler arriving in LA is going to need a car when they get off the train, unless they fancy spending a lot of time waiting for on Metro (formerly known as the RTD - Rough, Tough, and Dangerous.) Total boondoggle.
That's an oxymoron. Really a medium-range point and shoot will be a huge step up from any cell phone camera and probably sufficient for a newbie and small enough to fit in a pocket or small hand bag so you can take it with you everywhere. Then if the point and shoot turns out to be too limiting (typically due to low light quality, speed or zoom range) then upgrading to a DSLR will be another huge step up.
On the plus side, it is asserted that "The secret to good photography is lots and lots of bad photography" and digital shooting has made lots and lots and lots of bad photography cost virtually nothing...
Well, the cost is the hours you spend going through your photos to trying and pick the best ones to keep. Sometimes it feels like more time is spent on labeling, categorizing and sifting through the photos than in the whole trip:-(
Believe that man is the cause of the current trend, and that man can do something to stop it.
Showing that the amount of CO2 we pump out into the air should have an impact on the climate is pretty easy: Recipe for Climate Change in Two Easy Steps. It's the global warming deniers that need the help of the data models that you say are all wrong to find enough negative feedback loops to compensate.
It's also all those who claim that solving the issue is just a matter of sequestering some CO2 that have to prove that their plans can actually work on a global scale: Putting the Genie Back in the Toothpaste Tube. That said I agree with you that there's no way we will stop global warming: as a species / society we are too lazy to fight the entrenched interests or change our way of life.
As the saying goes: Indifference will certainly be the downfall of mankind, but who cares?
Just block their domain and get on with your life. If you value your time at, say, $20/hr, how much are you willing to spend in order to get nothing in return?
And this is known as the tragedy of the commons. Your 'do nothing' approach would be better called the 'let them continue to mess up the commons until it's unusable for everyone' (where in this case the commons is the email system).
This is the same reason why we don't just let people get away with arson although putting them in jail won't unburn the building, murder (again no benefit to the dead victim), etc. Stopping people who break society's rules is worth it, even at a cost higher than the initial damage, because that's the only thing preventing it from devolving into anarchy. Of course this all needs some leeway and some common sense thrown in, and it does not mean that everyone (or possibly anyone) should turn into a vigilante. But apathy is not the solution either: as Edmond Burke said, "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing".
You need much better than 150-200C to run turbines efficiently. Much, much better preferably.
And generating electricity is not the only useful thing you can do with geothermal energy. With temperatures as low as 70C you can use it for heating (even ~55C is enough if your heating system is modern enough). And this has been used on a large scale for decades already. For instance, in the Paris area, 170,000 housing equivalents are currently heated with geothermal energy (and no, nothing to do with heat pumps).
Good for debugging but running Firefox without any extension is not an option. See if Firefox had a separate process for each tab, these extensions would not have time to cause any significant leak.
Probably too many. The important ones are Tab Mix Plus, Adblock Plus and United States Spellchecker. I also have DownloadHelper though it never seems to work when needed. And then some I could probably do without: Exif Viewer, LinkChecker, User Agent Switcher and Web Developer.
Yes, people are still bitching.
I upgraded to Firefox 6 last Monday and after less than 3 days it's already using 2.3GB of virtual memory and currently has 1.3GB resident. And it's a pain to pull it from the swap after other processes pushed it out, it easily takes minutes (as far as I can tell read-ahead is totally defeated). Unfortunately at 4GB my computer is maxed out (buggy Gigabyte P35 MB) so either Firefox 7 does much better or I'll have to by an SSD for the swap.
Note: When I started writing this message Firefox was only using 1.8GB of VM and 0.8GB resident. No, I did not visit any other page while typing this message!
MS wants to take advantage of UEFI, which has obvious benefits. Chromebooks work the same way, but we don't read any heated/. articles about it because Google is charmed and MS is "evil".
No, it's because ChromeOS does not have ~90% market share on the desktop.
Now that graphics cards are powerful enough to drive 3 or more full HD displays all that's missing is a way to connect them across the home. LightPeak looked like a perfect fit: across one cable you could connect a display, a USB infra-red remote, and even USB drives or an SD reader. And with the fiber optic cable there was no range issue. You could just go through the attic and to the other side of the house, tens of meters away if you so wanted.
But then all we got is Thunderbolt with a measly 3m maximum length. That's just enough to go from one side of an (L-shaped) desk to the other:-(
And no, $2000 connected web TVs are not the solution. Sure they may play some AVIs, maybe some MP4s, but there are also a lot of formats they don't support, Flash, MP4s with the higher end options enabled, etc. And for subtitles it's even worse. And in a couple of years when everyone standardizes on WebM or whatever the new video codec is you'll have to splash another two grands. Not because the display quality is bad, just because it's too old for the manufacturer to bother issuing firmware upgrades to support the new formats. What a waste.
Not exactly. For one, they accept any desktop computer or cellphone regardless of whether or not it was made by Apple.
That's not a difference, that's exactly the same. In France at least, any store selling electronic devices or appliances is required by law to accept old product of the same type, whether of the same brand or not, still in working condition or not.
Secondly, they pay for the shipping which is generally quite expensive around here for heavier items.
That may be a difference. If the new appliance, a fridge for instance, is delivered by the local brick and mortar shop, then they are bound by law to take the old one back for free. However I don't know how it works for online retailers, especially since they often use standard postal services for delivery (at least for stuff like laptops, etc). So they might be exempt from this law. But in that case you still have the fallback option of bringing the old product to a local waste collection center where they will take it for free (yes it is free).
And of course, getting an Apple card if your item is worth anything is just an icing.
That is a difference. Some phone stores do buy back old phones. Also most brick and mortar stores will happily declare that your broken TV set cannot be repaired and apply the diagnosis fee as rebate if you buy a new set from them (works with most appliances, but of course it's mostly a ripoff anyway).
Someone asked how it's financed: Well through a tax you pay on every new product. It's not based on the price of the product but on the type of product ($x for a fridge, $y for a 50" TV, etc.) and is quite low. I think it's a case where a tax makes sense because it's when you buy a new product that you should think about (financing) its recycling. It also makes recycling easy and free which are the two conditions for it to work on a large scale (and we need it to work). And before we get jokes about socialist countries, this tax was put in place by a right-wing government.
So Bing is leveraging Internet Explorer's dominant position to improve its search results. Since they both belong to Microsoft this sounds like an antitrust violation. Even more so since Internet Explorer is bundled with another product which has been ruled to hold a monopoly position on desktop operating systems. That is unless they offer to share the data collected by Internet Explorer with other companies under the same terms as they do for Bing...
The Guardian app is a news reader. The Wikileaks app goes directly to the documents in question.The Guardian app is no different than a browser in that regard. You select the target sites to gather data from. The Wikileaks app only goes to Wikileaks.
Can you really say you don't see the difference?
Yes, absolutely. The Guardian app will only let you see The Guardian content, just like the Wikileaks app only lets you see the Wikileaks content. Neither is a browser since neither can be used to browse Slashdot or other arbitrary websites. So yes, the Guardian app and the Wikileaks app are no different.
<disclaimer>In keeping with the Slashdot tradition I have of course never used either app</disclaimer>
In addition to this, in the US a lot of cars don't have rear turning lights! Instead they blink the tail lights which are also the breaking lights. Without the third breaking light this can be quite confusing sometimes. For instance you're following 2 seconds behind a car when its left turning/tail/break light lights up. Is it because a) he's about to change lanes; b) he just turned on his tail lights but his right tail light is dead; oc c) he is breaking but again his right break light is dead ? You could wait 1 / 1.5 seconds to see if the left light turns off but if he is breaking that's really time you'd rather not waste. Thankfully most have a third breaking light that helps disambiguate such situations.
In the US, unemployment benefits are based on what you used to earn??? What the Hell is the rationale for that?
It works the same way in France. Part of the rationale is that the way it's financed is through a tax on a percentage of your income. So when you lose that income it's normal that you get something proportional to what you paid before. The other part is indeed that it's much harder to get by on 10k$/year if you made 60k$/year before rather than just 15k$/year. Not because you had a lavish lifestyle (expensive restaurants and vacations), but because you typically contracted debt in relation to your salary: house loan, car loan, etc. The car you can get rid of and replace with a cheaper model relatively easily. However getting rid of the house/appartment is much harder, especially now you're jobless nobody is going to rent to you (in France). Even if you 'owned' your house and sell it for a much cheaper one, you'll incur quite a lot of expenses just in that operation (5-10% of your house's price) so that it will only be worth it if you change to a really cheaper one and you'll probably still have a loan to finish paying.
Besides, nobody mentioned it, but you don't get that money forever: it's only there for a few years (a maximum of 4 in France iirc) to give you time to find another job without having to sell everything you own. And I believe it even goes down before that with time. After that period you're totally on your own. Finally you don't get any money if you just quit your job or get fired for cause which makes it a bit harder to just decide to stop working and 'enjoy' the unemployment benefits.
unless you have to power a repeater on the long line... of course "longer line" is different for fiber than cable, but still, it might be necessary.
When on land getting power for a repeater is no issue. The only place where it is tricky is for trans-oceanic cables but that has been solved decades ago. And in any case 'long lines' of any sort certainly don't use Power Over Ethernet!
The issue isn't too many customers on the same COAX, but too many customers on the same node. If a Node has a 1gb fiber link and you have 100 customers, each with a 60mb connection, you're node is going to be overwhelmed. If you think changing the connection between the user and the node is going to make the connection from the node to ISP faster, I'd like to take what you're taking.
That really reminds me of all the discussions saying DSL was useless because already with 0.056Mbps modems the bottleneck was the connection between the local exchange and the ISP. Yet here I am maxing out my 12Mbps (>200x faster) ADSL connection anytime I want. I guess they must have upgraded the connection between the local exchange and the rest of the network. Why you think they will never do that again is beyond me.
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Partially, I would say that there are limits to how much we can expect people, in general, to change.
I think you underestimate how much we can get people to change. In France automated speed traps where introduced in 2003. There are now over 2500 of them (plus about 200 red light cameras). From 1994 to 2002 the number of car-related deaths went down 15%. From 2002 to 2010 it went down 47+% (7655 to 3994). Sure improvements in cars certainly helped a bit, maybe they can explain 15% like for the previous 8 years? There's also a lot of street re-layouts in towns to get people to drive slower but these were already ongoing. But I think a big factor is that now people feel they are too likely to get caught if they are speeding or running a red light and have thus changed their behavior. So I would not give up on trying to change people's behavior just yet.
You are talking about blame and responsibility, which are great AFTER an accident has occurred.
No, I don't care about blame and responsibility. I'm talking about preventing accidents by making people realize that if they can't be bothered to be a bit responsible when they are at the wheel they should not be driving. Yes that means installing red light cameras: how can they learn if they don't even realize they run red lights? (and if they are doing it on deliberately then they are dangerous and should be taken off the roads)
Your approach appears to be throwing your hands up in the air saying people will never change anyway so that we should go out of our way to make sure that the worst drivers cannot cause accidents. That seems like a lost cause to me.
That said I agree that the system should of course have a bit of a safety margin (length of the orange light and delay between red and green for red lights). Maybe the current settings are wrong in places and providing a bit more leeway would be good. But it's not a silver bullet and cannot replace enforcing existing rules.
Of course, you are making an error of assumption in assuming that people who run lights generally do it willfully by thought, and not negligently by distraction, or though misjudgment.
Being negligent or distracted is not a valid excuse for running a red light. A car in motion is pretty dangerous so if you cannot pay enough attention you should not drive. And if you keep making misjudgments maybe it means you don't know how to drive, and thus should not have a driving license. What would you say if any surgeon making a mistake could simply say 'How, I was distracted' and get home free?
I have been an early adopter of many things. But I value my data (which is my bread and butter, after all), and so I will take a conservative approach to this. After more people have had them, for a little while longer, I will revisit the issue then.
If you value your data then no single drive is good enough. The only answer is RAID (1 or 5 typically). If you don't feel like buying two SSDs and you use Linux, then put it in RAID 1 with a regular hard drive using software RAID and write-mostly+write-behind for the HDD. Also remember that you are just as likely to delete a file you care about as the hard drive is to fail. So don't forget about backups, and offsite backups if you can.
It's easier to make LA or SF airports a step in going to distant cities. Trains are more suitable to short and mid-length trips.
Given that going from Los Angeles or San Diego to San Francisco (or even Sacramento) is a mid-length trip, and that these are big population and economic centers, I'm glad you agree that this route is perfect for trains.
Fast trains are lily-gilding.
No. Fast trains make all the difference. Currently going from San Francisco to Los Angeles using regular trains takes a minimum of 9.5 hours which means an average speed of 40mph. Even taking into account just the portion actually traveled by train, from Emeryville to Bakersfield, the average speed is 44mph. Going by car is faster so it's no wonder nobody takes the train! What they propose is to reduce that to just 2.6 hours which becomes much faster than by car and that makes all the difference in the world.
Parking is typically abundant at airports (although in major cities, it's not cheap.) There's not much parking near the train stations in LA and San Diego.
Moving around in San Francisco, or even the Bay Area, is not that much of a problem thanks to the buses, CalTrain and light rail. In Los Angeles you could still take the bus, or a cab if you hate public transportation. Remember that unlike tourists who move around a lot, most business travelers just go to a single destination for their meetings and back, for which a cab is just fine (and if you have shuttles from the train station to Universal Studios or Disneyland, that will be quite enough for a lot of tourists too).
This doesn't make sense. A rider arriving in LA is going to need a car when they get off the train, unless they fancy spending a lot of time waiting for on Metro (formerly known as the RTD - Rough, Tough, and Dangerous.) Total boondoggle.
That also means that all flights between SF and LA don't make any sense because any airplane traveler arriving in LA is going to need a car when they get off the train, unless they fancy spending a lot of time waiting for on Metro (formerly known as the RTD - Rough, Tough, and Dangerous.) Total boondoggle.
A good cell phone camera...
That's an oxymoron. Really a medium-range point and shoot will be a huge step up from any cell phone camera and probably sufficient for a newbie and small enough to fit in a pocket or small hand bag so you can take it with you everywhere. Then if the point and shoot turns out to be too limiting (typically due to low light quality, speed or zoom range) then upgrading to a DSLR will be another huge step up.
On the plus side, it is asserted that "The secret to good photography is lots and lots of bad photography" and digital shooting has made lots and lots and lots of bad photography cost virtually nothing...
Well, the cost is the hours you spend going through your photos to trying and pick the best ones to keep. Sometimes it feels like more time is spent on labeling, categorizing and sifting through the photos than in the whole trip :-(
Believe that man is the cause of the current trend, and that man can do something to stop it.
Showing that the amount of CO2 we pump out into the air should have an impact on the climate is pretty easy: Recipe for Climate Change in Two Easy Steps. It's the global warming deniers that need the help of the data models that you say are all wrong to find enough negative feedback loops to compensate.
It's also all those who claim that solving the issue is just a matter of sequestering some CO2 that have to prove that their plans can actually work on a global scale: Putting the Genie Back in the Toothpaste Tube. That said I agree with you that there's no way we will stop global warming: as a species / society we are too lazy to fight the entrenched interests or change our way of life.
As the saying goes: Indifference will certainly be the downfall of mankind, but who cares?
Just block their domain and get on with your life. If you value your time at, say, $20/hr, how much are you willing to spend in order to get nothing in return?
And this is known as the tragedy of the commons. Your 'do nothing' approach would be better called the 'let them continue to mess up the commons until it's unusable for everyone' (where in this case the commons is the email system).
This is the same reason why we don't just let people get away with arson although putting them in jail won't unburn the building, murder (again no benefit to the dead victim), etc. Stopping people who break society's rules is worth it, even at a cost higher than the initial damage, because that's the only thing preventing it from devolving into anarchy. Of course this all needs some leeway and some common sense thrown in, and it does not mean that everyone (or possibly anyone) should turn into a vigilante. But apathy is not the solution either: as Edmond Burke said, "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing".
You need much better than 150-200C to run turbines efficiently. Much, much better preferably.
And generating electricity is not the only useful thing you can do with geothermal energy. With temperatures as low as 70C you can use it for heating (even ~55C is enough if your heating system is modern enough). And this has been used on a large scale for decades already. For instance, in the Paris area, 170,000 housing equivalents are currently heated with geothermal energy (and no, nothing to do with heat pumps).
This does not make sense. appdb.winehq.org has no pledge system and no program to sell.
Good for debugging but running Firefox without any extension is not an option. See if Firefox had a separate process for each tab, these extensions would not have time to cause any significant leak.
Probably too many. The important ones are Tab Mix Plus, Adblock Plus and United States Spellchecker. I also have DownloadHelper though it never seems to work when needed. And then some I could probably do without: Exif Viewer, LinkChecker, User Agent Switcher and Web Developer.
Yes, people are still bitching.
I upgraded to Firefox 6 last Monday and after less than 3 days it's already using 2.3GB of virtual memory and currently has 1.3GB resident. And it's a pain to pull it from the swap after other processes pushed it out, it easily takes minutes (as far as I can tell read-ahead is totally defeated). Unfortunately at 4GB my computer is maxed out (buggy Gigabyte P35 MB) so either Firefox 7 does much better or I'll have to by an SSD for the swap.
Note: When I started writing this message Firefox was only using 1.8GB of VM and 0.8GB resident. No, I did not visit any other page while typing this message!
MS wants to take advantage of UEFI, which has obvious benefits. Chromebooks work the same way, but we don't read any heated /. articles about it because Google is charmed and MS is "evil".
No, it's because ChromeOS does not have ~90% market share on the desktop.
Now that graphics cards are powerful enough to drive 3 or more full HD displays all that's missing is a way to connect them across the home. LightPeak looked like a perfect fit: across one cable you could connect a display, a USB infra-red remote, and even USB drives or an SD reader. And with the fiber optic cable there was no range issue. You could just go through the attic and to the other side of the house, tens of meters away if you so wanted.
But then all we got is Thunderbolt with a measly 3m maximum length. That's just enough to go from one side of an (L-shaped) desk to the other :-(
And no, $2000 connected web TVs are not the solution. Sure they may play some AVIs, maybe some MP4s, but there are also a lot of formats they don't support, Flash, MP4s with the higher end options enabled, etc. And for subtitles it's even worse. And in a couple of years when everyone standardizes on WebM or whatever the new video codec is you'll have to splash another two grands. Not because the display quality is bad, just because it's too old for the manufacturer to bother issuing firmware upgrades to support the new formats. What a waste.
Not exactly. For one, they accept any desktop computer or cellphone regardless of whether or not it was made by Apple.
That's not a difference, that's exactly the same. In France at least, any store selling electronic devices or appliances is required by law to accept old product of the same type, whether of the same brand or not, still in working condition or not.
Secondly, they pay for the shipping which is generally quite expensive around here for heavier items.
That may be a difference. If the new appliance, a fridge for instance, is delivered by the local brick and mortar shop, then they are bound by law to take the old one back for free. However I don't know how it works for online retailers, especially since they often use standard postal services for delivery (at least for stuff like laptops, etc). So they might be exempt from this law. But in that case you still have the fallback option of bringing the old product to a local waste collection center where they will take it for free (yes it is free).
And of course, getting an Apple card if your item is worth anything is just an icing.
That is a difference. Some phone stores do buy back old phones. Also most brick and mortar stores will happily declare that your broken TV set cannot be repaired and apply the diagnosis fee as rebate if you buy a new set from them (works with most appliances, but of course it's mostly a ripoff anyway).
Someone asked how it's financed: Well through a tax you pay on every new product. It's not based on the price of the product but on the type of product ($x for a fridge, $y for a 50" TV, etc.) and is quite low. I think it's a case where a tax makes sense because it's when you buy a new product that you should think about (financing) its recycling. It also makes recycling easy and free which are the two conditions for it to work on a large scale (and we need it to work). And before we get jokes about socialist countries, this tax was put in place by a right-wing government.
So Bing is leveraging Internet Explorer's dominant position to improve its search results. Since they both belong to Microsoft this sounds like an antitrust violation. Even more so since Internet Explorer is bundled with another product which has been ruled to hold a monopoly position on desktop operating systems. That is unless they offer to share the data collected by Internet Explorer with other companies under the same terms as they do for Bing...
The Guardian app is a news reader. The Wikileaks app goes directly to the documents in question.The Guardian app is no different than a browser in that regard. You select the target sites to gather data from. The Wikileaks app only goes to Wikileaks.
Can you really say you don't see the difference?
Yes, absolutely. The Guardian app will only let you see The Guardian content, just like the Wikileaks app only lets you see the Wikileaks content. Neither is a browser since neither can be used to browse Slashdot or other arbitrary websites. So yes, the Guardian app and the Wikileaks app are no different.
<disclaimer>In keeping with the Slashdot tradition I have of course never used either app</disclaimer>
In addition to this, in the US a lot of cars don't have rear turning lights! Instead they blink the tail lights which are also the breaking lights. Without the third breaking light this can be quite confusing sometimes. For instance you're following 2 seconds behind a car when its left turning/tail/break light lights up. Is it because a) he's about to change lanes; b) he just turned on his tail lights but his right tail light is dead; oc c) he is breaking but again his right break light is dead ? You could wait 1 / 1.5 seconds to see if the left light turns off but if he is breaking that's really time you'd rather not waste. Thankfully most have a third breaking light that helps disambiguate such situations.
In the US, unemployment benefits are based on what you used to earn??? What the Hell is the rationale for that?
It works the same way in France. Part of the rationale is that the way it's financed is through a tax on a percentage of your income. So when you lose that income it's normal that you get something proportional to what you paid before. The other part is indeed that it's much harder to get by on 10k$/year if you made 60k$/year before rather than just 15k$/year. Not because you had a lavish lifestyle (expensive restaurants and vacations), but because you typically contracted debt in relation to your salary: house loan, car loan, etc. The car you can get rid of and replace with a cheaper model relatively easily. However getting rid of the house/appartment is much harder, especially now you're jobless nobody is going to rent to you (in France). Even if you 'owned' your house and sell it for a much cheaper one, you'll incur quite a lot of expenses just in that operation (5-10% of your house's price) so that it will only be worth it if you change to a really cheaper one and you'll probably still have a loan to finish paying.
Besides, nobody mentioned it, but you don't get that money forever: it's only there for a few years (a maximum of 4 in France iirc) to give you time to find another job without having to sell everything you own. And I believe it even goes down before that with time. After that period you're totally on your own. Finally you don't get any money if you just quit your job or get fired for cause which makes it a bit harder to just decide to stop working and 'enjoy' the unemployment benefits.
No, I mentioned 5-6 MB/s out of a 50Mb/s theoretical max.... B=Byte, b=bit....
Geez, and this is a geek site...
Oh sure use inconsistent units and then blame it on others when they miss a case difference.
unless you have to power a repeater on the long line ... of course "longer line" is different for fiber than cable, but still, it might be necessary.
When on land getting power for a repeater is no issue. The only place where it is tricky is for trans-oceanic cables but that has been solved decades ago. And in any case 'long lines' of any sort certainly don't use Power Over Ethernet!
The issue isn't too many customers on the same COAX, but too many customers on the same node. If a Node has a 1gb fiber link and you have 100 customers, each with a 60mb connection, you're node is going to be overwhelmed. If you think changing the connection between the user and the node is going to make the connection from the node to ISP faster, I'd like to take what you're taking.
That really reminds me of all the discussions saying DSL was useless because already with 0.056Mbps modems the bottleneck was the connection between the local exchange and the ISP. Yet here I am maxing out my 12Mbps (>200x faster) ADSL connection anytime I want. I guess they must have upgraded the connection between the local exchange and the rest of the network. Why you think they will never do that again is beyond me.