OK, show of hands, how many of us want our cars to behave like smartphones?
I asked this question outside of/. and sadly, all I saw were hands.
Most people treat driving as a chore and couldn't care less about being safe or courteous drivers. They do want Facebook integration and twitter clients in their cars so they dont have to think about what they're doing on the road. Hell, half of Slashdot dont give a crap about their driving and will complain as viciously as it is ineffectual when these things get banned because people are too busy updating their Facebook status with "FBing whilst taking a corner #LOL #Driving" or the subsequent "crashed LOL, #BleedingOut #JawsOfLife".
I do agree with you.
There are only two real "optional" requirements I have for a car.
1. Good leather seats (once you've driven a car with these, you cant go back to cloth)
2. A good, easy to use sound system.
What about receiving engine info, warnings regarding brake pads, fuel consumption, etc, etc? An established protocol that could link this to a mobile device would make sense. Not sure why this wasn't done with bluetooth ages ago...
Again, the ICRC is not interested in all video games – only in those simulating real-life armed conflict. Some of these games are being designed and produced by the same companies developing simulated battlefields for the training of armed forces where the law of armed conflict are a necessary ingredient."
And to add an addendum to this, they're only interested in these kinds of games _WHEN_ the player is committing some kind of war crime (I.E. killing or torturing of prisoners, ill-treatment of POW's, wanton and unjustified destruction of civilian towns, ethnic cleansing) in simple terms, ICRC dont want to ban games from having the player line up civilians against the wall, they want the player to be punished for doing so.
GTA is so far removed from this scenario that it's not funny.
Well, in CoD games, if you're playing multiplayer (as most players are), then there isn't a way to kill frendlies unless you play "hardcore" mode. In hardcore mode, you get kicked from a match if you kill teammates 3 times.
I'm pretty sure that they're talking about single player stories... And when they mean war crimes they mean things like torture, genocide, killing unarmed civilians, ethnic cleansing and so forth.
Killing your own squadmates in real life is more of a problem for the army involved rather than the Red Cross. The Red Cross is more involved with refugee camps after armies have ejected all the people who believe in the wrong invisible sky man from their homes and frogmarched them out of town.
They should stop experiment on cockroaches, and start experimenting on lower life forms instead....
Members of Congress come to mind as a possibility...
They tried.
They opened up the politician and found they lacked both a spine and a brain. Unable to find anywhere to attach the electrodes they gave up and moved onto roaches.
Arguably, the photos most people take with a smartphone are actually better than they would take with a "real" camera. As sensor size increases, sensitivity to focus also increases.
Just a proper lens which can change focus will improve shots.
But the reason a lot of people produce worse shots with a DSLR than a smart phone is that they are just crap photographers. Watch them fumble with focusing, let alone understanding the effects of changing aperture and film speed (erm, not sure what the digital equivalent is called). They dont even know what a light meter is, so if you give them a camera that does more and requires more work from the user it's inevitable that quality is lost. Good equipment doesn't make a bad photographer good.
I first used SLR's when they all used film (the digital camera was still so expensive only militiaries used it) but now I travel with a Point & Shoot only for convenience reasons (the P&S fits in my pocket, battery life is fantastic, instant startup). The difference between a smartphone and a decent P&S in the hands of a semi-decent photographer is the chalk and cheese (and chalk sandwiches suck).
Every Nexus device going back the very first has been an existing phone with a few minor upgrades at most and a different set of software installed.
And this is the brilliant part of it.
Google has zero experience with HW, however they're excellent with simple, functional yet extremely powerful software.
Samsung, LG, HTC and others make great hardware but shit software with crapily reskinned version of Android and social media up the wazoo. If you wanted something more spartan or something that was easily modifiable on great hardware you wanted a Nexus device.
However I'm a bit disappointed that we haven't seen anything decent from Moto. Moto makes better HW than Samsung IMHO but again, crap software and even worse locked bootloaders.
Mastercard surely employs security experts who should know better. I would think most of them would come up with the same counter-arguments we'll be reading on Slashdot in the next few hours.
So the question is, who came up with this idea and why authorize to release it to the media?
MasterCard and Visa dont give two shits about security.
Because they've passed that buck onto the individual banks. The Banks are responsible for losses through stolen cards, not MasterCard. Now the banks only care about security as long as it doesn't interfere with profit.
Visa and MasterCard have been pushing an extremely insecure system which transmits your card number, name and card expiry to any NFC device that asks for it. This is many Android phones. The authentication on PayPass/Wave cards has already been cracked and cards issued today will be in service to 2018 and beyond.
Was bluffing all this time, how ironic would it be if just the rumor of Apple coming out with this caused multiple vendors to blow all that R&D and production on a product no one really wants.
Except that smart watches have been in development for years before Apple made their rumour. The Pebble Smartwatch has been out for months.
Cranky stewardesses are the rulers: "take that headphone off!", me: "it's not connected", she, with stern voice: "take it off now!".
Sure nullyfies any FAA relaxation.
This,
Even if the FAA relaxes it, my bet is on airlines keeping.
And yes, I have been asked to put my 100% non electronic, tree based book away for take off on multiple flights. The only difference were that I was asked by polite and friendly Singaporean, Malay and Filipino hostesses rather than western battle axes.
I've made comments before comparing science and religion, and too often people think that I'm a religious person trying to belittle a genuine quest for knowledge. On the contrary, I think the genuine quest for knowledge is an amazingly worthwhile thing. However, science has become a method for the "practitioners" and "priests" to exert social, economic, and institutional influence by swaying the beliefs of those who are not educated enough or informed enough to differentiate between genuine knowledge and blind dogma.
A lot of people who dont understand how the scientific method works and only get their science information from tabloid news papers think this way.
It doesn't make it true.
The difference between science and religion is that science actually questions itself, it is designed to be questioned and if proven wrong, science has to change. Religion has no such requirement and even when proven wrong beyond all doubt, has no impetus to change.
You seem to think what you read from tabloids is real science, it isn't. This is why you think it's a grand conspiracy to "exert social, economic and institutional influence". Science does no such thing, the scientific method is the search for truth from experimentation and itself is not above question. However it appears that you dont understand the basics of it, you think a scientist starts with a result and works backwards where in reality, they start with a hypothesis and experiment, then gets a result. If the result does not match the hypothesis, the hypothesis was wrong and needs to be changed.
Any "social, economic or institutional" change that occurs from science is due to the result changing a hypothesis held by that "society, economy or institution" that has been proven incorrect. The problem is, people who dont understand the science tend to think of this as a conspiracy to undermine them.
...for enshrining the "right" to bear arms in your constitution. "Gun control? Fuck no, we have the right to wear guns and shoot things, goddammit! Zomglol bless Murrica!"
It's looking more and more like all the shots fired were by the Police...
But still a sad indictment of how US gun culture is horribly wrong.
The Police are expected to uphold the law, armed as they are the use of firearms should be a last resort so I have to ask what justified this shootout? Should the police not have attempted to intercept and apprehend the suspect so that they could be bought before a court of law and have their actions judged by a jury of their peers (OK, with some of the comments I see from Americans, I'm losing faith in this idea too).
What if this had of been a horrible mistake, the woman was mentally unstable, on drugs, lost and confused (it's mentioned here the car had out of state plates) or simply disgruntled and driven over the edge by recent events. It was stupid to do what she did, no arguments about that but does it carry an instant death sentence?
If there were no shots fired at police, why were they even shooting? The problem is cultural, people are in love with their guns and see them as the first point of call in resolving problems instead of an absolute last resort in a life threatening situation. Cops are expected to take risks but this seems to be indicative of a culture of "shoot first and ask questions later" up to "trespassers will be shot, survivors will be shot again" in some cases. Many UK police dont even carry guns because they dont need to with plenty of non/less lethal technologies at their disposal. In this case, would it not have been smarter to intercept the car (spike strips, road blocks) rather than shoot the woman?
In my country (Australia) police are held responsible for every single shot they fire. If this incident had of happened here or in the UK, the officers involved would be placed on leave whilst it was investigated. This isn't a situation where a clear danger was presented to the officers or bystanders (unlike the incident in London a few months back where a knife wielding maniac was a clear danger). In fact the shoot out caused a more dangerous situation. Please note, I'm not blaming the officers here, I'm blaming the gun culture that says shooting people is OK and a preferred solution over more sensible ideas.
The color code that signifies that all Americans are to be on the lookout for aggrieved ladies trying to ram their cars onto public property. Shoot to kill.
Just opt out of getting sick or injured, I hear your fucked if you do in your country. When I get sick or injured i just go to the doctor or hospital and then go home until I'm better. Healthcare in the USA is something I hear everyone say "I hope our country is never that screwed". I can't opt out of my healthcare but I don't see my investments as so fragile that they need the extra $7.50 per month that it costs me to make sure I can go to hospital if I need to.
I'm also someone who is also from one of those "screwed up" countries where I can go to a doctor, be diagnosed and treated without being out of pocket and have access to affordable medication.
I dont understand what is so screwed up about it.
BTW, Americans, I'll be a tourist in your nation shortly, please patch your government to a functional level and re-open your national parks. Also please be a dear and drop your dollar a bit. Thanks.
Bad example: Fleming acquired that knowledge with no intent whatsoever of writing a book. Even if were to agree that Clancy did research, Fleming clearly did not.
To be sure I went and looked up a random sample of ten pages on Ian Fleming pages that discuss James Bond and research and none of them describe his experience in the secret service as research. This is in contrast to his knowledge of arms and Japan, which was acquired later for the purpose of writing his novels and is described as research.
Fleming wasn't in the secret service, he was in Naval Intelligence during the second world war.
Although his writing was pretty mechanical, his stories were real page turners.
That's certainly true of the earlier books that he actually wrote. I think I read and enjoyed all of them. One thing I've always disliked is when authors needlessly inject their own politics, left or right, into fiction, but Clancy was no worse with that than many authors.
It's another story when you start talking about the later books (after 2003) that said "by Tom Clancy" in gigantic type, and "with so-and-so" in little type. In other words, books not really written by Clancy. Why a successful author would do that is beyond me. Even if he didn't feel like ever writing another book, he didn't need to, as I'm sure he'd already made a fortune from his books and the movie rights.
Some authors do this to help up and coming authors or write the core story whilst the other author fleshes it out. It's not always to make money. Not having read the novel in question I cant say.
A lot like some authors doing forewords on stories they like. Last week I bought a book from an author I've never heard of simply because the foreword was written by Alistair Reynolds, one of my favourite sci-fi authors. Its only a short book (180 odd pages) so if it's pants it'll be quick if it's good, I'll look at other books by this author.
I shout this every time I see someone fake right then flip around for a u-turn at a 4-way stop in San Francisco, which is like every day.
Look, if I lived in a nation retarded enough to use four way stops instead of:
1. designating one road as having priority.
2. Traffic lights and sliplanes.
3. Rounabouts.
I'd be fucking crazy too.
Slashdot Mirror
But personally I think a curved phone is a bit of a gimmick and Apple will not follow it.
If this is a gimmick, then Apple is likely to follow it (then claim they came up with the idea) because gimmicks is all Apple does.
OK, show of hands, how many of us want our cars to behave like smartphones?
I asked this question outside of /. and sadly, all I saw were hands.
Most people treat driving as a chore and couldn't care less about being safe or courteous drivers. They do want Facebook integration and twitter clients in their cars so they dont have to think about what they're doing on the road. Hell, half of Slashdot dont give a crap about their driving and will complain as viciously as it is ineffectual when these things get banned because people are too busy updating their Facebook status with "FBing whilst taking a corner #LOL #Driving" or the subsequent "crashed LOL, #BleedingOut #JawsOfLife".
I do agree with you.
There are only two real "optional" requirements I have for a car.
1. Good leather seats (once you've driven a car with these, you cant go back to cloth)
2. A good, easy to use sound system.
Everything else is trivial.
Erm, that should be OBDII (lexdyslia strikes again).
What about receiving engine info, warnings regarding brake pads, fuel consumption, etc, etc? An established protocol that could link this to a mobile device would make sense. Not sure why this wasn't done with bluetooth ages ago...
You mean like CANBUS and ODBII?
Read my lips. There are 30 rounds in this magazine. Problem solved.
You must be American, there are 29 rounds in the magazine, 1 in the chamber.
Again, the ICRC is not interested in all video games – only in those simulating real-life armed conflict. Some of these games are being designed and produced by the same companies developing simulated battlefields for the training of armed forces where the law of armed conflict are a necessary ingredient."
And to add an addendum to this, they're only interested in these kinds of games _WHEN_ the player is committing some kind of war crime (I.E. killing or torturing of prisoners, ill-treatment of POW's, wanton and unjustified destruction of civilian towns, ethnic cleansing) in simple terms, ICRC dont want to ban games from having the player line up civilians against the wall, they want the player to be punished for doing so.
GTA is so far removed from this scenario that it's not funny.
Well, in CoD games, if you're playing multiplayer (as most players are), then there isn't a way to kill frendlies unless you play "hardcore" mode. In hardcore mode, you get kicked from a match if you kill teammates 3 times.
I'm pretty sure that they're talking about single player stories... And when they mean war crimes they mean things like torture, genocide, killing unarmed civilians, ethnic cleansing and so forth.
Killing your own squadmates in real life is more of a problem for the army involved rather than the Red Cross. The Red Cross is more involved with refugee camps after armies have ejected all the people who believe in the wrong invisible sky man from their homes and frogmarched them out of town.
Their last example - payroll cards with fees ought to be outright illegal. IMO.
In most civilised countries, they are.
Internet costs in Australia. Its not uncommon to pay around $70/month for ADSL 1 speeds (1.5Mbps).
I see you're on Telstra.
They should stop experiment on cockroaches, and start experimenting on lower life forms instead....
Members of Congress come to mind as a possibility...
They tried.
They opened up the politician and found they lacked both a spine and a brain. Unable to find anywhere to attach the electrodes they gave up and moved onto roaches.
If you live anywhere cockroaches run rampant, you know the score. Kill them, or be infested.
Maybe you'd consider your actions more carefully in the future now Cyber-Roach is back with a vengeance.
Arguably, the photos most people take with a smartphone are actually better than they would take with a "real" camera. As sensor size increases, sensitivity to focus also increases.
Just a proper lens which can change focus will improve shots.
But the reason a lot of people produce worse shots with a DSLR than a smart phone is that they are just crap photographers. Watch them fumble with focusing, let alone understanding the effects of changing aperture and film speed (erm, not sure what the digital equivalent is called). They dont even know what a light meter is, so if you give them a camera that does more and requires more work from the user it's inevitable that quality is lost. Good equipment doesn't make a bad photographer good.
I first used SLR's when they all used film (the digital camera was still so expensive only militiaries used it) but now I travel with a Point & Shoot only for convenience reasons (the P&S fits in my pocket, battery life is fantastic, instant startup). The difference between a smartphone and a decent P&S in the hands of a semi-decent photographer is the chalk and cheese (and chalk sandwiches suck).
Every Nexus device going back the very first has been an existing phone with a few minor upgrades at most and a different set of software installed.
And this is the brilliant part of it.
Google has zero experience with HW, however they're excellent with simple, functional yet extremely powerful software.
Samsung, LG, HTC and others make great hardware but shit software with crapily reskinned version of Android and social media up the wazoo. If you wanted something more spartan or something that was easily modifiable on great hardware you wanted a Nexus device.
However I'm a bit disappointed that we haven't seen anything decent from Moto. Moto makes better HW than Samsung IMHO but again, crap software and even worse locked bootloaders.
To be able to have the choice of OS on your device is a good thing.
This, whilst I wouldn't touch WP with a 10 foot barge pole, you should be able to stick any OS on your device.
Mastercard surely employs security experts who should know better. I would think most of them would come up with the same counter-arguments we'll be reading on Slashdot in the next few hours.
So the question is, who came up with this idea and why authorize to release it to the media?
MasterCard and Visa dont give two shits about security.
Because they've passed that buck onto the individual banks. The Banks are responsible for losses through stolen cards, not MasterCard. Now the banks only care about security as long as it doesn't interfere with profit.
Visa and MasterCard have been pushing an extremely insecure system which transmits your card number, name and card expiry to any NFC device that asks for it. This is many Android phones. The authentication on PayPass/Wave cards has already been cracked and cards issued today will be in service to 2018 and beyond.
Was bluffing all this time, how ironic would it be if just the rumor of Apple coming out with this caused multiple vendors to blow all that R&D and production on a product no one really wants.
Except that smart watches have been in development for years before Apple made their rumour. The Pebble Smartwatch has been out for months.
But nice revisionist history.
Cranky stewardesses are the rulers: "take that headphone off!", me: "it's not connected", she, with stern voice: "take it off now!".
Sure nullyfies any FAA relaxation.
This,
Even if the FAA relaxes it, my bet is on airlines keeping.
And yes, I have been asked to put my 100% non electronic, tree based book away for take off on multiple flights. The only difference were that I was asked by polite and friendly Singaporean, Malay and Filipino hostesses rather than western battle axes.
I've made comments before comparing science and religion, and too often people think that I'm a religious person trying to belittle a genuine quest for knowledge. On the contrary, I think the genuine quest for knowledge is an amazingly worthwhile thing. However, science has become a method for the "practitioners" and "priests" to exert social, economic, and institutional influence by swaying the beliefs of those who are not educated enough or informed enough to differentiate between genuine knowledge and blind dogma.
A lot of people who dont understand how the scientific method works and only get their science information from tabloid news papers think this way.
It doesn't make it true.
The difference between science and religion is that science actually questions itself, it is designed to be questioned and if proven wrong, science has to change. Religion has no such requirement and even when proven wrong beyond all doubt, has no impetus to change.
You seem to think what you read from tabloids is real science, it isn't. This is why you think it's a grand conspiracy to "exert social, economic and institutional influence". Science does no such thing, the scientific method is the search for truth from experimentation and itself is not above question. However it appears that you dont understand the basics of it, you think a scientist starts with a result and works backwards where in reality, they start with a hypothesis and experiment, then gets a result. If the result does not match the hypothesis, the hypothesis was wrong and needs to be changed.
Any "social, economic or institutional" change that occurs from science is due to the result changing a hypothesis held by that "society, economy or institution" that has been proven incorrect. The problem is, people who dont understand the science tend to think of this as a conspiracy to undermine them.
It's looking more and more like all the shots fired were by the Police...
But still a sad indictment of how US gun culture is horribly wrong.
The Police are expected to uphold the law, armed as they are the use of firearms should be a last resort so I have to ask what justified this shootout? Should the police not have attempted to intercept and apprehend the suspect so that they could be bought before a court of law and have their actions judged by a jury of their peers (OK, with some of the comments I see from Americans, I'm losing faith in this idea too).
What if this had of been a horrible mistake, the woman was mentally unstable, on drugs, lost and confused (it's mentioned here the car had out of state plates) or simply disgruntled and driven over the edge by recent events. It was stupid to do what she did, no arguments about that but does it carry an instant death sentence?
If there were no shots fired at police, why were they even shooting? The problem is cultural, people are in love with their guns and see them as the first point of call in resolving problems instead of an absolute last resort in a life threatening situation. Cops are expected to take risks but this seems to be indicative of a culture of "shoot first and ask questions later" up to "trespassers will be shot, survivors will be shot again" in some cases. Many UK police dont even carry guns because they dont need to with plenty of non/less lethal technologies at their disposal. In this case, would it not have been smarter to intercept the car (spike strips, road blocks) rather than shoot the woman?
In my country (Australia) police are held responsible for every single shot they fire. If this incident had of happened here or in the UK, the officers involved would be placed on leave whilst it was investigated. This isn't a situation where a clear danger was presented to the officers or bystanders (unlike the incident in London a few months back where a knife wielding maniac was a clear danger). In fact the shoot out caused a more dangerous situation. Please note, I'm not blaming the officers here, I'm blaming the gun culture that says shooting people is OK and a preferred solution over more sensible ideas.
The color code that signifies that all Americans are to be on the lookout for aggrieved ladies trying to ram their cars onto public property. Shoot to kill.
Fuchsia?
Fuck that, I'm going straight to brown alert.
I'm also someone who is also from one of those "screwed up" countries where I can go to a doctor, be diagnosed and treated without being out of pocket and have access to affordable medication.
I dont understand what is so screwed up about it.
BTW, Americans, I'll be a tourist in your nation shortly, please patch your government to a functional level and re-open your national parks. Also please be a dear and drop your dollar a bit. Thanks.
Bad example: Fleming acquired that knowledge with no intent whatsoever of writing a book. Even if were to agree that Clancy did research, Fleming clearly did not.
To be sure I went and looked up a random sample of ten pages on Ian Fleming pages that discuss James Bond and research and none of them describe his experience in the secret service as research. This is in contrast to his knowledge of arms and Japan, which was acquired later for the purpose of writing his novels and is described as research.
Fleming wasn't in the secret service, he was in Naval Intelligence during the second world war.
Also, 5 minutes on Wikipedia would have shown that Ian Fleming took inspiration for James Bond from his time in Naval Intelligence.
Although his writing was pretty mechanical, his stories were real page turners.
That's certainly true of the earlier books that he actually wrote. I think I read and enjoyed all of them. One thing I've always disliked is when authors needlessly inject their own politics, left or right, into fiction, but Clancy was no worse with that than many authors.
It's another story when you start talking about the later books (after 2003) that said "by Tom Clancy" in gigantic type, and "with so-and-so" in little type. In other words, books not really written by Clancy. Why a successful author would do that is beyond me. Even if he didn't feel like ever writing another book, he didn't need to, as I'm sure he'd already made a fortune from his books and the movie rights.
Some authors do this to help up and coming authors or write the core story whilst the other author fleshes it out. It's not always to make money. Not having read the novel in question I cant say.
A lot like some authors doing forewords on stories they like. Last week I bought a book from an author I've never heard of simply because the foreword was written by Alistair Reynolds, one of my favourite sci-fi authors. Its only a short book (180 odd pages) so if it's pants it'll be quick if it's good, I'll look at other books by this author.
I shout this every time I see someone fake right then flip around for a u-turn at a 4-way stop in San Francisco, which is like every day.
Look, if I lived in a nation retarded enough to use four way stops instead of:
1. designating one road as having priority.
2. Traffic lights and sliplanes.
3. Rounabouts.
I'd be fucking crazy too.
Also, at the risk of Godwinning the thread, a certain vegetarian German politician died at 56.
Vegetarians and vegans aren't necessarily any healthier than anyone else: It all depends on a lot more than what somebody eats or doesn't eat.
I disagree,
There aren't any vegan rock stars because they all collapsed mid show due to a lack of iron and protein.
Plus it's near impossible to find organic, fair-trade cocaine.