"I think that rather than air bags, every car should be equipped with a sharpened spike coming out the center of the steering wheel, pointing right at the driver's chest. I bet people would start driving a little more carefully."
My objection to this technology is that drivers are morons. Giving them technology like this will just make them think they are even less required to pay any damn attention to what they're doing than they are now.
Driving a car is a serious responsibility. You're in control of a deadly weapon. No amount of technology absolves the driver of this responsibility, but people simply don't take this seriously.
What I would like to see is for them to have a slightly different, and IMO MORE ACHIEVEABLE goal - that by 2020, no person OUTSIDE a Volvo vehicle will be killed by a Volvo vehicle.
You can't stop someone else from hitting the vehicle and killing people inside, but you can stop the vehicle from hitting OTHER people and killing them.
Thank you for saying that. I don't think most people on the roads know what "driving too fast for conditions" and "safe following distance" even mean.
As you say, the LAW says that you should be able to stop if you come around the corner and there's a stopped car in your lane, or if the vehicle in front of you slams on his brakes for no reason that you can discern. If you can't, you're driving to fast and/or following too close. Not up for discussion, this is by definition.
The percentage has GOT to be higher than 80%. I'd say more like "over 98%" personally.
Some police departments have stopped classifying collisions as "accidents" - because the word has a connotation that it was unavoidable. I'm not sure I've ever seen an unavoidable collision.
I've seen plenty of people do things like lose control on icy patches. I assume they're very much like the idiots that were passing me when I was doing 20 MPH on a 50 MPH limit road the other day; freezing rain, the road already so icy that the barest touch of the brakes kicked on the ABS, and these idiots still wanted to do 50.
If they got in a collision, I'm sure they would say they couldn't avoid it, they slipped on the ice. Well DUH, but the ice didn't sneak up on you. When there are conditions where ice is forming, you slow the heck down.
It's interesting to see who gets in the most accidents - almost every vehicle I see off the road in the ditch anymore is an SUV or pickup. They think somehow that 4WD makes them immune to physics.
I've seen SUV drivers going way too fast on ice, start fishtailing, slow down, and within a mile they're back up to the same speed again.
I'm MORE than happy to let these idiots past me. I'd rather have their shenanigans in front of me and getting farther away all the time than behind me approaching fast.
They just don't pulse them fast enough. I'm sure they'll catch on eventually. If they started pulsing them at 10 KHz, they won't bother you anymore, unless you're from Krypton or something.
If you're using the screen to validate that you pressed a key, you're not typing as fast as you could be. My love of clicky keyboards comes from time spent typing things from print. Prop up some print next to your keyboard and screen, and type a few pages. Every time you have to look at the screen to see what you just typed, it slows you WAY down.
I don't do stuff that archaic much anymore, but it's not unusual for me to be typing code while looking at something else on another window.
I've tried a lot of different keyboards, and there are two that I like. IBM Model M, and the cheapest thing I can get with no L shaped Enter key. I bought a stack of Memorex keyboards at CompUSA a few years back, for $10 each. I still have a couple left.
My criteria are: cheap enough that I don't really care much if I spill something on them, so I can buy 3 or 4 at a time, and NO (that's NO as in NONE) extraneous keys. I'd buy 101 key keyboards (without Windows keys) if I could get them for $20, but no such luck.
The IBM model M is of course the ultimate, but I can't use them if there's anyone else in the building with me; they're loud enough to drive people crazy.
I can type 40 or 50 WPM fairly accurately regardless of keyboard type (maybe an extra 10% on the rare occasions that I can use a model M) so I just buy what's cheap. I've been typing all day long for 30 years now on non-ergonomic, cheap-ass keyboards, and have not had a single strain related ache or pain.
FWIW, my first keyboard was a TRS-80 model I. My favorite was a Burroughs manual typewriter I used in high school. Unbelievably good action to it.
Just set the economy mode as default on your printer. Done. Even $70 laser printers and $30 inkjets I've bought for the last 10 years have economy modes, and they'll work with any font and with graphics.
If you need to print something "nice" just turn it off for that print job.
My requirements for a game is that, when the game is NOT running, that no software that shipped with it are running, either. I don't want drivers, monitors, shell extensions, or anything else lurking around. When the game is running, they can do whatever they like, though I'm not really happy about them making under-the-covers contact with validation servers. From what I can gather about SecuROM, it does install stuff that is running all the time, whether the actual game is running or not. If that's not the case, please respond, cite the reference, and my kids will find Spore under the tree next week.
I would absolutely have bought it. I've bought many games for $50 in the past, and I actually was up at Amazon getting ready to order it when I read the reviews mentioning the DRM. I went out and read more about SecureROM and quickly decided against the purchase. Even now, if they rolled out a no-DRM copy, I'd buy it.
He's demonstrating his fiscal smarts. He probably got the Zune off Woot a few months ago when they were pretty much giving them away.
Personally I wouldn't buy EITHER an iPod or a Zune. I'm very happy with my Sandisk Fuze, and it's half the price of a Nano and has better specs and sounds better. And I don't like itunes either.
People who know anything about that DRM wouldn't let SecureROM on their system, it has no business doing what it does to a system just to play a game.
It's 100% certain they'd have had my money the day the game hit the streets if they didn't have DRM in it. As it is, no. Not ever. Not unless I can run it in a VM where it can't pillage my system, and AFAIK it doesn't run in a VM.
And anyone who wants the game can easily get it in a clean pirated version.
Counting just BitTorrent is undercounting too; usenet is a safer place to get stuff (not as trackable).
OTOH, some of the religious aid agencies are the most efficient ways to send your money to help. The church I go to has an aid branch that you can earmark funds to - the administrative and transportation costs of the agency is 100% paid for out of the church's budget, so 100% (every PENNY) earmarked for that agency goes to buy actual aid in disasters, famine relief, and uplift programs (like installing wells in places where otherwise they have to walk miles for water). The agency does not to evangelism except by example.
I realize that there are missions like what you mention, but I'm just making sure people don't use too wide of a brush here.
I have a cell phone, but there's no coverage at my house. Pagers work though. Since there's no coverage, I have to turn my phone off when I go home, or the batteries are dead in 3 or 4 hours as the thing tries in vain to connect to a network (there's barely enough signal there for it to keep trying). Once I turn it off, I usually forget to turn it back on again. As a result, my phone is off for weeks at a time.
They bought me a nice Blackberry at work, I gave it back the next day. There's no point to having it.
Text messages WILL get through on my phone, in 4 or 5 hours when the conditions are just perfect. Pagers work well there though.
I use Nero DriveSpeed (I think it's called) to give me a read on sample archived discs from my storage area.
I have some CD-Rs that are about 13 years old at this point; I wrote them on a 2X writer that the company I work for paid $3000 for - that was the going price at the time.
Anyway, they're Kodak Gold Datalife discs. I recently pulled 5 samples out of a spindle of 50 discs, and there were only a couple of correctable read errors. This is pretty much what you get on freshly-burned discs too since any little piece of dust or fraction of a fingerprint can cause a recoverable read error.
OTOH, in the past I've seen some truly horrendous quality discs. I once bought a box of 250 CDRs from OfficeMax - they were some generic brand. I tried to use about 30 of them, had 18 bad burns (failed to verify) and the silver layer came off just rubbing it with a thumb. I just threw the whole box away.
I've also seen some cruddy CDRs that died after only a few months to a year.
These days, I use Taiyo Yuiden DVD-Rs exclusively.
For backup, have switched to using 1TB WD Green HDs for $120 (the green ones run cooler, which is never a bad thing when you are talking longevity of hard drives), drop them bare into a docking station, update the backup set, then put them in static bag and foam lined box and transport them offsite.
Hard drives are not much more expensive than good quality DVD blanks (I expect them to get cheaper than, pretty soon), they're way the hell faster, they're reusable (so after the 2nd backup they're way CHEAPER than DVD blanks, and only get even cheaper after that), and I've had better long-term luck with hard drives being readable than DVDs or CDs. As far as failures, IMO you need two backups in physically different locations anyway, regardless of your media of choice.
Belkin did this in their routers a few years ago; hijacked HTTP connections and took you to pages they hosted. That earned them a "never buy Belkin even if the alternative is dialup" rating for me personally.
DLink has been at "these people can't build anything more complicated than a hub without screwing it up" rating for me, but this takes them down to the "never buy" category.
That rating doesn't apply just to routers either. Once a company has done things like this, they've proven that they're willing to use the money they collect from me to actively cause me harm. I won't even buy a USB cable from Belkin, and now not from DLink either.
As was said, this will catch the dumb ones. Good luck finding porn, or anything else, on that "data.tc" file, or the "uninitialized" hard drive on that computer.
Many people use firewire for connecting camcorders and transferring the video data in to the computer. This is a major thing that many people want to do, and without firewire, AFAIK it's simply not possible. This isn't just a matter of removing something that there's an alternate way to do. Taking the firewire port off removes the ability to do this at all, at least without buying an add-in firewire port.
I'm sure they will. I'm 44 and I do. I don't buy media on physical medium unless I don't have a choice or there's a good reason. Al's albums often have bonuses - Right offhand, Straight Outta Lynwood was a flipper, the other side was a DVD with videos from the album. Definitely worth the $13 I spent for it. But if I'm just getting the music, I'll skip the disc TYVM. It just gets ripped to the server and put in a box in the basement for years anyway.
BTW, currently the reason I buy real CDs is that they have no DRM that isn't trivial to overcome. If I could go out and buy FLAC tracks for the same price, I'd rather do that.
What's worked for me so far is to wait 4 years. I'm now playing games that came out 4+ years ago, and they say "this card requires an advanced video card to run" and they run just fine on the embedded graphics card that came on my $60 mainboard.
The problem is, y'all are just too impatient. What's your hurry?
I don't start reading book series until the last book is published, either. Obviously, neither the high end graphics industry or the book publishing industry could survive on a population of "me".
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I once saw an interesting comment online:
"I think that rather than air bags, every car should be equipped with a sharpened spike coming out the center of the steering wheel, pointing right at the driver's chest. I bet people would start driving a little more carefully."
Well no wonder you have so much trouble. You've got the wrong equipment in your car.
Have that break replaced with a brake.
My objection to this technology is that drivers are morons. Giving them technology like this will just make them think they are even less required to pay any damn attention to what they're doing than they are now.
Driving a car is a serious responsibility. You're in control of a deadly weapon. No amount of technology absolves the driver of this responsibility, but people simply don't take this seriously.
What I would like to see is for them to have a slightly different, and IMO MORE ACHIEVEABLE goal - that by 2020, no person OUTSIDE a Volvo vehicle will be killed by a Volvo vehicle.
You can't stop someone else from hitting the vehicle and killing people inside, but you can stop the vehicle from hitting OTHER people and killing them.
It wasn't a collision, it just swung around the star. The people were squished into a red paste one one end or the other by tidal forces.
Thank you for saying that. I don't think most people on the roads know what "driving too fast for conditions" and "safe following distance" even mean.
As you say, the LAW says that you should be able to stop if you come around the corner and there's a stopped car in your lane, or if the vehicle in front of you slams on his brakes for no reason that you can discern. If you can't, you're driving to fast and/or following too close. Not up for discussion, this is by definition.
The percentage has GOT to be higher than 80%. I'd say more like "over 98%" personally.
Some police departments have stopped classifying collisions as "accidents" - because the word has a connotation that it was unavoidable. I'm not sure I've ever seen an unavoidable collision.
I've seen plenty of people do things like lose control on icy patches. I assume they're very much like the idiots that were passing me when I was doing 20 MPH on a 50 MPH limit road the other day; freezing rain, the road already so icy that the barest touch of the brakes kicked on the ABS, and these idiots still wanted to do 50.
If they got in a collision, I'm sure they would say they couldn't avoid it, they slipped on the ice. Well DUH, but the ice didn't sneak up on you. When there are conditions where ice is forming, you slow the heck down.
It's interesting to see who gets in the most accidents - almost every vehicle I see off the road in the ditch anymore is an SUV or pickup. They think somehow that 4WD makes them immune to physics.
I've seen SUV drivers going way too fast on ice, start fishtailing, slow down, and within a mile they're back up to the same speed again.
I'm MORE than happy to let these idiots past me. I'd rather have their shenanigans in front of me and getting farther away all the time than behind me approaching fast.
They just don't pulse them fast enough. I'm sure they'll catch on eventually. If they started pulsing them at 10 KHz, they won't bother you anymore, unless you're from Krypton or something.
If you're using the screen to validate that you pressed a key, you're not typing as fast as you could be.
My love of clicky keyboards comes from time spent typing things from print. Prop up some print next to your keyboard and screen, and type a few pages. Every time you have to look at the screen to see what you just typed, it slows you WAY down.
I don't do stuff that archaic much anymore, but it's not unusual for me to be typing code while looking at something else on another window.
I've tried a lot of different keyboards, and there are two that I like. IBM Model M, and the cheapest thing I can get with no L shaped Enter key. I bought a stack of Memorex keyboards at CompUSA a few years back, for $10 each. I still have a couple left.
My criteria are: cheap enough that I don't really care much if I spill something on them, so I can buy 3 or 4 at a time, and NO (that's NO as in NONE) extraneous keys. I'd buy 101 key keyboards (without Windows keys) if I could get them for $20, but no such luck.
The IBM model M is of course the ultimate, but I can't use them if there's anyone else in the building with me; they're loud enough to drive people crazy.
I can type 40 or 50 WPM fairly accurately regardless of keyboard type (maybe an extra 10% on the rare occasions that I can use a model M) so I just buy what's cheap. I've been typing all day long for 30 years now on non-ergonomic, cheap-ass keyboards, and have not had a single strain related ache or pain.
FWIW, my first keyboard was a TRS-80 model I. My favorite was a Burroughs manual typewriter I used in high school. Unbelievably good action to it.
Just set the economy mode as default on your printer. Done. Even $70 laser printers and $30 inkjets I've bought for the last 10 years have economy modes, and they'll work with any font and with graphics.
If you need to print something "nice" just turn it off for that print job.
My requirements for a game is that, when the game is NOT running, that no software that shipped with it are running, either. I don't want drivers, monitors, shell extensions, or anything else lurking around. When the game is running, they can do whatever they like, though I'm not really happy about them making under-the-covers contact with validation servers.
From what I can gather about SecuROM, it does install stuff that is running all the time, whether the actual game is running or not.
If that's not the case, please respond, cite the reference, and my kids will find Spore under the tree next week.
I would absolutely have bought it. I've bought many games for $50 in the past, and I actually was up at Amazon getting ready to order it when I read the reviews mentioning the DRM. I went out and read more about SecureROM and quickly decided against the purchase.
Even now, if they rolled out a no-DRM copy, I'd buy it.
He's demonstrating his fiscal smarts. He probably got the Zune off Woot a few months ago when they were pretty much giving them away.
Personally I wouldn't buy EITHER an iPod or a Zune. I'm very happy with my Sandisk Fuze, and it's half the price of a Nano and has better specs and sounds better. And I don't like itunes either.
People who know anything about that DRM wouldn't let SecureROM on their system, it has no business doing what it does to a system just to play a game.
It's 100% certain they'd have had my money the day the game hit the streets if they didn't have DRM in it. As it is, no. Not ever. Not unless I can run it in a VM where it can't pillage my system, and AFAIK it doesn't run in a VM.
And anyone who wants the game can easily get it in a clean pirated version.
Counting just BitTorrent is undercounting too; usenet is a safer place to get stuff (not as trackable).
OTOH, some of the religious aid agencies are the most efficient ways to send your money to help. The church I go to has an aid branch that you can earmark funds to - the administrative and transportation costs of the agency is 100% paid for out of the church's budget, so 100% (every PENNY) earmarked for that agency goes to buy actual aid in disasters, famine relief, and uplift programs (like installing wells in places where otherwise they have to walk miles for water). The agency does not to evangelism except by example.
I realize that there are missions like what you mention, but I'm just making sure people don't use too wide of a brush here.
Writing a daemon that sits on the machine and plays one of these at slowly increasing volume for 5 seconds at a time throughout the day.
Heh heh...
I have a cell phone, but there's no coverage at my house. Pagers work though.
Since there's no coverage, I have to turn my phone off when I go home, or the batteries are dead in 3 or 4 hours as the thing tries in vain to connect to a network (there's barely enough signal there for it to keep trying). Once I turn it off, I usually forget to turn it back on again. As a result, my phone is off for weeks at a time.
They bought me a nice Blackberry at work, I gave it back the next day. There's no point to having it.
Text messages WILL get through on my phone, in 4 or 5 hours when the conditions are just perfect. Pagers work well there though.
2130706433 is equivalent to 127.0.0.1 too.
I use Nero DriveSpeed (I think it's called) to give me a read on sample archived discs from my storage area.
I have some CD-Rs that are about 13 years old at this point; I wrote them on a 2X writer that the company I work for paid $3000 for - that was the going price at the time.
Anyway, they're Kodak Gold Datalife discs. I recently pulled 5 samples out of a spindle of 50 discs, and there were only a couple of correctable read errors. This is pretty much what you get on freshly-burned discs too since any little piece of dust or fraction of a fingerprint can cause a recoverable read error.
OTOH, in the past I've seen some truly horrendous quality discs. I once bought a box of 250 CDRs from OfficeMax - they were some generic brand. I tried to use about 30 of them, had 18 bad burns (failed to verify) and the silver layer came off just rubbing it with a thumb. I just threw the whole box away.
I've also seen some cruddy CDRs that died after only a few months to a year.
These days, I use Taiyo Yuiden DVD-Rs exclusively.
For backup, have switched to using 1TB WD Green HDs for $120 (the green ones run cooler, which is never a bad thing when you are talking longevity of hard drives), drop them bare into a docking station, update the backup set, then put them in static bag and foam lined box and transport them offsite.
Hard drives are not much more expensive than good quality DVD blanks (I expect them to get cheaper than, pretty soon), they're way the hell faster, they're reusable (so after the 2nd backup they're way CHEAPER than DVD blanks, and only get even cheaper after that), and I've had better long-term luck with hard drives being readable than DVDs or CDs. As far as failures, IMO you need two backups in physically different locations anyway, regardless of your media of choice.
Belkin did this in their routers a few years ago; hijacked HTTP connections and took you to pages they hosted. That earned them a "never buy Belkin even if the alternative is dialup" rating for me personally.
DLink has been at "these people can't build anything more complicated than a hub without screwing it up" rating for me, but this takes them down to the "never buy" category.
That rating doesn't apply just to routers either. Once a company has done things like this, they've proven that they're willing to use the money they collect from me to actively cause me harm. I won't even buy a USB cable from Belkin, and now not from DLink either.
As was said, this will catch the dumb ones. Good luck finding porn, or anything else, on that "data.tc" file, or the "uninitialized" hard drive on that computer.
Many people use firewire for connecting camcorders and transferring the video data in to the computer. This is a major thing that many people want to do, and without firewire, AFAIK it's simply not possible.
This isn't just a matter of removing something that there's an alternate way to do. Taking the firewire port off removes the ability to do this at all, at least without buying an add-in firewire port.
Could be, I dunno. I tend to buy mainboards with all-nVidia chipsets, and they've worked really well for me. I try to get a DVI output too.
I'm sure they will. I'm 44 and I do. I don't buy media on physical medium unless I don't have a choice or there's a good reason.
Al's albums often have bonuses - Right offhand, Straight Outta Lynwood was a flipper, the other side was a DVD with videos from the album. Definitely worth the $13 I spent for it. But if I'm just getting the music, I'll skip the disc TYVM. It just gets ripped to the server and put in a box in the basement for years anyway.
BTW, currently the reason I buy real CDs is that they have no DRM that isn't trivial to overcome. If I could go out and buy FLAC tracks for the same price, I'd rather do that.
What's worked for me so far is to wait 4 years. I'm now playing games that came out 4+ years ago, and they say "this card requires an advanced video card to run" and they run just fine on the embedded graphics card that came on my $60 mainboard.
The problem is, y'all are just too impatient. What's your hurry?
I don't start reading book series until the last book is published, either. Obviously, neither the high end graphics industry or the book publishing industry could survive on a population of "me".