I'm sure that if you were willing to spend a bit more than $2000, Apple can set you up with a computer that doubles all consonants instead of just the Fs. And maybe has those ugly shift keys moved to software that toggles them by watching your face for eye blinks.
So, the repair person flies to the nearest large city, drives a rental car 70km at 25kph through a raging blizzard, hangs out for 45 minutes while the ski area finds someone who can open up the ski rental area, finds skis and boots that don't fit too badly, slogs 500 meters through the ongoing blizzard to get to the control shed... Only to find that someone has changed the standard password.... and that there is no cellphone service available at the control shed.
Sounds like a giant leap forward for mankind to me.
Oh yeah, and the Japanese drive on the left, so there was probably some preference for vehicles with the driver position on the right i.e. vehicles from or produced for England or Australia.
"The Japanese took full advantage, dumping their cars on the American market, making a mint, while prohibiting American companies from selling in Japan."
The Japanese didn't prohibit sale of US cars. But they did have quotas and charged healthy import tariffs which were phased out slowly after 1960. Other important factors in discouraging sales of US cars in Japan were, the large size of the vehicles (didn't fit well on any but main roads), poor fuel economy, and the poor quality of American vehicles.
Not to disparage the Marshall Plan, but it is well documented that the Allies picked over what remained of the German industrial plant after the war and carted off anything that looked shiny and bright. Read up on the Morganthau Plan. The British actually looked at the VW beetle manufacturing machinery (the car was designed in the 1930s) and decided that it wasn't worth carting off. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... and many other sources.
The Japanese story is perhaps even stranger. Honda started off after WWII building motorcycles using war surplus motor generator engines. They went on to become the world's largest manufacturer of motorcycles. IIRC, Honda actually had to fight the Japanese government to go into the automobile business.
Well, sure. But remember that we're largely talking about corporations and their data. AFAICS, corporations are basically sociopathic so a bit of psychopathy in the interest of the shareholders is probably to be expected.
Ahem.... How do we decrypt your post? Is the fact that every other word starts with the letters "crypt" some sort of clue as to how to crack whatever code you are using? Our AI keeps giving us segmentation errors when we attempt to decode it.
PS - My bosses in Tashkent are very curious about this matter.
I think the footprints on the moon will eventually be buried in fine dust arriving ballistically from space. But it'll take a while. Likewise the high altitude satellites (e.g. geosynchronous) are going to take a loooo...ong time to decay. No one seems to know how long.
But there's other stuff like dams, canals, roadcuts, railroad cuts. Even though the roadbeds may be gone in a few hundred years, deep straight or gently curved cuts through hard bedrock are pretty distinctive and in many cases may well be distinguishable tens or even hundreds of millions of years from now. And on the smaller scale, things like reinforced concrete are likely to be recognizable many tens of millions of years from now even though it will likely be difficult or impossible to figure out what the structure they were part of looked like.
"Plastic wouldn't stick around for eons when bacteria are quickly evolving to eat it up."
Plastic is a lot less biodegradable than wood and there is plenty of fossil wood -- some as old as Devonian (380 Million years ago--give or take) if you take the trouble to look for it along ancient-sea margins and in ancient lakebeds. Even if the plastic eating bacteria are efficient and anaerobic, any plastic objects entombed in mud would likely leave distinctive molds in the sediment.
I don't think dinosaurs needed shoes. But they did leave footprints here and there. A great many of them actually. Of course, it's conceivable that they heeded their mother's advice rather better than humans do and took their shoes off when they went wading in the Mesozoic mud.
Moreover, they are reporting what the car tells them is the remaining battery capacity. Unlike Lead Acid batteries, it is apparently difficult/impossible to determine charge state of Lithium ion batteries from the battery voltage except near full charge and near empty. Since EV owners presumably avoid low charge states. there's little or no opportunity for the computer to recalibrate capacity based on actual battery charge level information.
The vehicle computers could be a lot more honest than than those in laptops and cell phones and still be not terribly accurate.
I reckon that fully automated ships ought to be the greatest boon to piracy since the invention of the cutlass. You don't even have to go out in potentially nasty weather to steal a shipload of containers -- just hack into the ship's network via any on board IOT device and run it up a remote beach where you can loot it at leisure while it's navigation gear reports back to the owners that it's en route to Montevideo..
I'm a little unclear as to why one would want to have a ship permanently at sea, but if it doesn't matter all that much where the ship is, where it is going, and when it gets to places, sails ought to work fine for propulsion.
"See, the obsession is that investors have dumped BILLIONS into Tesla and it has been lost - yes, LOST - period."
The money hasn't been lost yet, but Tesla is burning through it's cash at a stunning rate. It looks to be a crapshoot as to whether Tesla will end this year flying high, dead broke, or struggling off into the future having sold off much of whatever it has in the way of marketable assets. See https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/3...
Moody's downgraded Tesla's credit rating to "Negative" a few weeks ago. That's not good.
I'm old enough to recall electric street trolleys. All the trolleys I saw used overhead wires. Sometimes the wires were (are?) used with the buses that replaced the trolleys. Subways, of course, did, and do, use electrified "third rails"
If I understand correctly, many recent cars come with automatic braking (Collision Avoidance) and lane keeping. They just don't call their systems "Autopilot" and don't encourage drivers to count on them working 100% of the time.
It's a deal. I don't have to hassle with running a mail server, they get to collect as much worthless information on me as they desire. If they can find a customer for the data and refrain from doing stupid (and illegal) things like harvesting and selling my credit card informaiton, more power to them.
You left out the use of low contrast colors including, but not limited to, light blue on a white background and the even less readable white on light blue..
In any case, it's a moot point. Despite having DSL fast enough to support 3 TVs streaming different programming simultaneously, gmail and Google docs are so slow and clunky from my location that I long since set up IMAP and POP interfaces for my gmail.
No. Retinopathy is a problem for diabetics of all ages. It's just more common in us old folks because a lot of us develop problems with no or erratic production of insulin, or failure of insulin to work as well when we age. I assume that this will be a device that a doctor can use in a routine physical that'll replace an annual trip to the optometrist for an eye exam for diabetics. Sort of like routine testing for glaucoma or, for men, high BPA (high BPA correlates with prostate cancer).
There's really no cure for retinopathy, but there are treatments that can minimize the effect on vision.
I would guess that the device's utility will depend on cost and the percentages of false positives and false negatives. False positives probably aren't that big a deal because the next step would presumably be examination by an optometrist.
There's also the question of whether the folks at Kellog have ever been on a commercial fishing vessel. I haven't been around boats much for about 50 years, But I think that the jobs in the fishing industry might be a bit more complex than they think.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure that if you were willing to spend a bit more than $2000, Apple can set you up with a computer that doubles all consonants instead of just the Fs. And maybe has those ugly shift keys moved to software that toggles them by watching your face for eye blinks.
So, the repair person flies to the nearest large city, drives a rental car 70km at 25kph through a raging blizzard, hangs out for 45 minutes while the ski area finds someone who can open up the ski rental area, finds skis and boots that don't fit too badly, slogs 500 meters through the ongoing blizzard to get to the control shed ... Only to find that someone has changed the standard password. ... and that there is no cellphone service available at the control shed.
Sounds like a giant leap forward for mankind to me.
Oh yeah, and the Japanese drive on the left, so there was probably some preference for vehicles with the driver position on the right i.e. vehicles from or produced for England or Australia.
"The Japanese took full advantage, dumping their cars on the American market, making a mint, while prohibiting American companies from selling in Japan."
The Japanese didn't prohibit sale of US cars. But they did have quotas and charged healthy import tariffs which were phased out slowly after 1960. Other important factors in discouraging sales of US cars in Japan were, the large size of the vehicles (didn't fit well on any but main roads), poor fuel economy, and the poor quality of American vehicles.
"Please look up the Marshall Plan."
Not to disparage the Marshall Plan, but it is well documented that the Allies picked over what remained of the German industrial plant after the war and carted off anything that looked shiny and bright. Read up on the Morganthau Plan. The British actually looked at the VW beetle manufacturing machinery (the car was designed in the 1930s) and decided that it wasn't worth carting off. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... and many other sources.
The Japanese story is perhaps even stranger. Honda started off after WWII building motorcycles using war surplus motor generator engines. They went on to become the world's largest manufacturer of motorcycles. IIRC, Honda actually had to fight the Japanese government to go into the automobile business.
Hey man. This is Slashdot. Do you seriously expect anyone around here to know how to compute exponential growth?
That said, 25 years is rather a long time to sustain a double digit growth rate.
"That is literally textbook psychopath behavior."
Well, sure. But remember that we're largely talking about corporations and their data. AFAICS, corporations are basically sociopathic so a bit of psychopathy in the interest of the shareholders is probably to be expected.
Ahem.... How do we decrypt your post? Is the fact that every other word starts with the letters "crypt" some sort of clue as to how to crack whatever code you are using? Our AI keeps giving us segmentation errors when we attempt to decode it.
PS - My bosses in Tashkent are very curious about this matter.
And anyway, it's all Hillary's fault.
I think the footprints on the moon will eventually be buried in fine dust arriving ballistically from space. But it'll take a while. Likewise the high altitude satellites (e.g. geosynchronous) are going to take a loooo...ong time to decay. No one seems to know how long.
But there's other stuff like dams, canals, roadcuts, railroad cuts. Even though the roadbeds may be gone in a few hundred years, deep straight or gently curved cuts through hard bedrock are pretty distinctive and in many cases may well be distinguishable tens or even hundreds of millions of years from now. And on the smaller scale, things like reinforced concrete are likely to be recognizable many tens of millions of years from now even though it will likely be difficult or impossible to figure out what the structure they were part of looked like.
"A series of nukes could easily knock it off course by a fraction of a degree, which would be enough to miss the earth a few months later."
And if you manage to steer what was going to be a near miss into a collision?
You're gonna get sued.
"Plastic wouldn't stick around for eons when bacteria are quickly evolving to eat it up."
Plastic is a lot less biodegradable than wood and there is plenty of fossil wood -- some as old as Devonian (380 Million years ago--give or take) if you take the trouble to look for it along ancient-sea margins and in ancient lakebeds. Even if the plastic eating bacteria are efficient and anaerobic, any plastic objects entombed in mud would likely leave distinctive molds in the sediment.
I don't think dinosaurs needed shoes. But they did leave footprints here and there. A great many of them actually. Of course, it's conceivable that they heeded their mother's advice rather better than humans do and took their shoes off when they went wading in the Mesozoic mud.
Yep. If I had a TOP SECRET plan, the first thing I'd do is tell Bloomberg News about it.
Moreover, they are reporting what the car tells them is the remaining battery capacity. Unlike Lead Acid batteries, it is apparently difficult/impossible to determine charge state of Lithium ion batteries from the battery voltage except near full charge and near empty. Since EV owners presumably avoid low charge states. there's little or no opportunity for the computer to recalibrate capacity based on actual battery charge level information.
The vehicle computers could be a lot more honest than than those in laptops and cell phones and still be not terribly accurate.
I reckon that fully automated ships ought to be the greatest boon to piracy since the invention of the cutlass. You don't even have to go out in potentially nasty weather to steal a shipload of containers -- just hack into the ship's network via any on board IOT device and run it up a remote beach where you can loot it at leisure while it's navigation gear reports back to the owners that it's en route to Montevideo..
I'm a little unclear as to why one would want to have a ship permanently at sea, but if it doesn't matter all that much where the ship is, where it is going, and when it gets to places, sails ought to work fine for propulsion.
"See, the obsession is that investors have dumped BILLIONS into Tesla and it has been lost - yes, LOST - period."
The money hasn't been lost yet, but Tesla is burning through it's cash at a stunning rate. It looks to be a crapshoot as to whether Tesla will end this year flying high, dead broke, or struggling off into the future having sold off much of whatever it has in the way of marketable assets. See https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/3...
Moody's downgraded Tesla's credit rating to "Negative" a few weeks ago. That's not good.
I'm old enough to recall electric street trolleys. All the trolleys I saw used overhead wires. Sometimes the wires were (are?) used with the buses that replaced the trolleys. Subways, of course, did, and do, use electrified "third rails"
"... crud doesn't build up"
Quit being pragmatic. We're talking The Guardian here.
Also, unlike overhead wires, this sounds like maintenance nightmare.
If I understand correctly, many recent cars come with automatic braking (Collision Avoidance) and lane keeping. They just don't call their systems "Autopilot" and don't encourage drivers to count on them working 100% of the time.
It's a deal. I don't have to hassle with running a mail server, they get to collect as much worthless information on me as they desire. If they can find a customer for the data and refrain from doing stupid (and illegal) things like harvesting and selling my credit card informaiton, more power to them.
You left out the use of low contrast colors including, but not limited to, light blue on a white background and the even less readable white on light blue..
In any case, it's a moot point. Despite having DSL fast enough to support 3 TVs streaming different programming simultaneously, gmail and Google docs are so slow and clunky from my location that I long since set up IMAP and POP interfaces for my gmail.
"Doesn't everyone over 40 have those?"
No. Retinopathy is a problem for diabetics of all ages. It's just more common in us old folks because a lot of us develop problems with no or erratic production of insulin, or failure of insulin to work as well when we age. I assume that this will be a device that a doctor can use in a routine physical that'll replace an annual trip to the optometrist for an eye exam for diabetics. Sort of like routine testing for glaucoma or, for men, high BPA (high BPA correlates with prostate cancer).
There's really no cure for retinopathy, but there are treatments that can minimize the effect on vision.
I would guess that the device's utility will depend on cost and the percentages of false positives and false negatives. False positives probably aren't that big a deal because the next step would presumably be examination by an optometrist.
There's also the question of whether the folks at Kellog have ever been on a commercial fishing vessel. I haven't been around boats much for about 50 years, But I think that the jobs in the fishing industry might be a bit more complex than they think.