Clancy did a lot of research for all of his books, you have to give him props for that.
He was given unfettered access to the military and often his stories were really just fictionalizations with mild embellishments of actual events. This follows on a long tradition of artists (painters, writers, photographers) being given special access to war theaters. So nothing wrong with that, I just don't know if I would call this "research".
I would.
Ian Fleming wrote the James Bond novels based on a lot of what happened with Naval intelligence in the war where Fleming was assigned but stylised to a point where they were no longer recognisable. They were also adjusted to the time frame that the novels were written in (I.E. the earlier novels showed Britain as still being an imperialistic power whilst later novels depicted Britain as a waning power).
A lot of novels are just fictionalisations of actual events, this is often what makes them believable. There's a lot more to making a fictionalisation of an actual event than changing the names, you need to create dialogue, drama, back stories and enough action/story progression to make it interesting. This is the hard part of writing.
Your rebuttal seems to have demonstrated how surveillance technologies, mostly in the hands of private entities have aided after the event
The GGP implied that government surveillance did not stop events like these. In particular, the NSA surveillance.
Boston Marathon bombing
Caught with the assistance of a multitude of surveillance cameras in the area.
Who owned the cameras, Boston PD, businesses and private entities in Boston or the NSA?
Sarin Gas attack by Syria
Thanks to real-time satellite intelligence over the middle east, we were able to not only spot the attack, but able to warn local health care of the impending crisis.
This is a tenuous link at best. A very long bow to draw. In reality it probably did SFA to help the victims given the limited humanitarian resources in the area and the fact they were in a war zone.
But again it did not do anything to stop the attack. Further more, this is the CIA's regular duties of foreign surveillance that proves no value in the NSA's domestic surveillance.
School shooting rampages
Cameras in schools have allowed us to quickly identify attackers and separate facts from fiction.
Again, how were the attacks stopped by government surveillance?
And again, who owned the cameras?
9/11 1000 killed by car bombs in Iraq in September alone One Drug Killing every half hour in Mexico
Here you've cited a lack of surveillance.
When the NSA surveillance fails to foil the most poorly planned mass shooting how will more cameras and wiretaps help here?
The simple answer is that it wont. In fact, all you've managed to show is that surveillance is only good after the fact and wont help in stopping an attack.
The car bombs in Iraq are a direct result of the US removing a oppressive yet stable government which was, whilst brutal managed to keep the various ethnic and religious groups from fighting. School and mass shootings are a cultural problem and can only be stopped by fixing the culture around guns. Domestic killings can only be solved by better police work. Tapping the phones of every American and putting cameras on every street corner wont fix a damn thing. There is practically a camera on every corner as it is when we count private security cameras but footage is only useful after the fact, before the fact you rely on tip offs and good old fashioned investigative police work to follow up those tips.
Finally, attacks like 9/11 are stopped in two ways, stop acting like giant dicks. It is a well known and oft proven fact that people who like you are less likely to attack you. This also reduces the workload on number 2, identify your potential enemies and keep tabs on them. There's no point in surveilling everyone, you get so much useless information about who had what for lunch that useful clues are overlooked and lost. Re read that last sentence, it's the biggest reason the NSA hasn't and wont do any good.
Add a navy operation on Jersey, Guernesey and Sark to hunt down rogue bankers in neighouring tax havens for good measure, and voilà !
Well Jersey, Guernesey and Sark are all protected by the British crown, that means the first thing they'll do is send angriest Scots in the Royal Army to invade France and historically, this has not worked out well for the French.
you don't understand. on an american airline, the stewardess sells $2 bags of peanuts, $2 soda, $5 beer and $6 wine (was july a vintage month?)
Are things really that bad?
Most stewards and stewardesses will have advanced levels of first aid training. I know a few on Asian and Australian airlines and basic first aid is mandatory before setting foot on a commercial flight as cabin staff. If you have any problems mid-flight, you'll be relying on them to save your life.
This is likely a good time to talk up Insite, a "safe injection" site in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside.
The premise of Insite is simple: provide a clean, safe place for addicts to shoot up, under medical supervision. Insite doesn't provide drugs, but at least it offers some kind of controlled environment for injection.
The upshot is ten years of servicing addicts, and not one death. It Just Works.
Of course our law 'n' order neo-con Harper government is determined to shut it down, crying "Think of The Children" while pocketing donations from the big US private prison companies...
This, Australia has a couple of safe injection rooms. The theory goes that people who do heroin will do heroin anyway. Before the safe injection rooms, they would inject in parks at night, leave the needles in the park and during the day kids would play in the same park where there are used needles. Safe injection rooms get them out of the parks and give them a way to dispose of the used needles.
Methadone clinics are another thing we've done, an attempt to wean addicts off of Heroin.
Actually, Krokodil is for those who cant afford Heroin.
One of the reasons it's big in Russia is that Heroin is very expensive in Russia. There are plenty of alternative "cheap highs" but it's people looking for extreme pain killers like Heroin.
I had to give up on that requirement. The CVT is still 100 times better than any slushbox. Finding a hatchback that also has a stick is like finding the holy grail it seems.
Seriously?
It's dead easy in Oz. Almost all hot hatches are available as manuals and most of the cheap ones. Is it that hard to get a Ford Fiesta or Focus that has a manual transmission? Out of the 17 models offered in Australia, there are five with an MT. http://www.redbook.com.au/cars/research/Ford/Focus/2013.
With SUV's I can understand as they'll never go off road and are bought by people who cant drive (ergo, could never handle a manual), but hatches are a prime candidate for MT's.
And it's Apple's fault that this route is open to drivers?
Apple's data comes from third parties - a lot of it is aggregated by the likes of TomTom etc, from local authorities.
Yes, but it is 100% Apples responsibility to QA this data and make sure it's use is accurate.
Secondly, it appears that you no SFA about GIS (Geographic Information Systems). Whilst the mapping data is provided by third party sources, the use, the navigation algorithms are provided by Apple (or whomever Apple bought and slapped their logo on). The whole point of a GIS application like Apple or Google maps is to take layers of disparate data and overlay them accurately. If you fail at this, you fail at GIS in it's entirety.
And it's Apple's fault that this route is open to drivers?
The airport said it had first complained to the phone-maker three weeks ago via the local attorney general's office.
Apple had known about the issue for weeks.
The driver has to shoulder some of the blame for not taking notice of what they are doing (this really says a lot about Apple users) but Apple has to shoulder a lot of the blame for ignoring a known error until it becomes international news.
Remember the bullshit about people getting lost in Victoria (australia) looking for a town called Mildura?
It wasn't Bullshit. You're obviously not an Australian. In Australia its easy to get lost, you can be hundreds of kilometers from the nearest town and there is no mobile coverage. People fucking die out there from exposure, snake bites, minor injuries, every year.
Once again it's Apple's responsibility to QA the data. They didn't know the difference between a town called Mildura and a region called Mildura. The application either didn't know about the town called Mildura or didn't care, in either case it's a serious fuck up.
The driver has a reasonable expectation that the device will not lead them 100's of KM's in the wrong direction, doubly so in a nation that hosts 10 out of the 10 most dangerous animals on the planet (11 if we count humans).
I've had Google Navigate fuck up more than a few times too. I was on a military base one time and it took me out on what I can only guess was some sort of tank trail (not having a 4-wheel drive, I almost got stuck a few times). All this to get to a main road that it turned out actually *intersected* with the main road that I was on when Navigate decided to take me out on a long country drive through the swamp.
Erm... Why would you take a dirt track?
Seriously?
What was going through your head when you thought leaving the sealed road was a good idea.
I drive a Japanese sports car, which by definition is very low to the ground even in stock form. There's no way in hell I'd be leaving sealed roads unless I knew the path was perfectly smooth despite what the GPS said. Holes in my exhaust sound awesome but are a pain in the arse to fix.
Google maps does not always provide the fastest or best route (in the city of Perth, Western Australia it will regularly lead you into areas where traffic jams are a daily occurrence) but what you wrote doesn't say anything about Google's mapping skills, it says a lot about your lack of common sense.
Airport's fault. No one should be able to drive their car right onto the runway, no matter what GPS or voice in their heads is telling them. Fire whoever runs this airport because they're a moron for not putting a fence up
How?
Runways need to be accessible to vehicles. As in unhindered access to emergency vehicles.
Its primarily the users fault for trusting the GPS implicitly and ignoring the signs and the fact they were driving onto a bloody runway. This says a lot about Apple users.
Secondarily it's Apple's fault for building such a crappy mapping system that it directs people across runways. Now if this was a once off you might get away with the "everyone has a few minor glitches" but this is just the latest in a long running series of failures in Apple's mapping products indicating a serious QA failure. This is doubly so seeing as it was a known flaw and Fairbanks airport has complained to Apple about it three weeks ago, FTA:
The airport said it had first complained to the phone-maker three weeks ago via the local attorney general's office.
So Apple has to shoulder a lot of the blame here because they knew about the error.
another story that will give an excuse to the ignorant crotchspawn bearers a big head and pretend that they're better.
FTFY.
Sorry about this, but there are two sides to this. Having a kid does not automatically imbue one with magical knowledge (Evidence: Honey Boo Boo's parents) nor does not having a child mean that one doesn't understand child rearing issues.
I can show you plenty of examples of bad parents, from people who actually have kids. They are also arrogant enough to assume because they have kids they're better despite being borderline abusive parents.
Manual transmission here in Ireland. The law is that when you are stopped at a red light (or for extended periods of time) that you must engage the handbrake and disengage the gears (neutral).
You can keep an eye on the lights as to when it's about to go green for you but in the half a second that it takes to put the car into first, is it really that bad compared to clumsy feet drivers?
Before you go calculating how many half seconds you could save per traffic light, consider that in the UK the amber light is illuminated whilst the red is in order to indicate to the driver that the lights will soon change to green.
This.
If you pay attention to the traffic (like you're meant to) you can spot when the lights will change and be ready in time for the change.
In Australia there is normally a 1-2 second gap between a red light on one street and a green light on the other (safety gap implemented by the govt. thanks to arsehole red light runners) so when traffic slows or stops you've got enough time to slip it into gear and release the handbrake.
Actually, in the US where almost everyone is driving an automatic, this is dangerous. If the foot slips off the brake for any reason, the car will propel itself forward while the driver likely has no hands on the steering wheel, and is distracted by their phone. You might think that scenario unlikely, but if someone even bumps the back of your car gently, your foot is going to come off the brake and you are now going into the car in front of you - one that might be driving through the intersection at speed.
In some other countries where most have manual transmissions, drivers are trained to place the car into neutral and engage the handbrake at a red light. That at least makes this a somewhat safer practice.
OK, do people not put it into N at the lights?
Disclosure: I drive a manual so I always put it into Neutral so I dont have to keep the clutch down (saves wear on the clutch) at the lights. I would assume a lot of Auto drivers would do the same thing. Then again, I also assume everyone else on the road is a complete idiot and drive defensively.
But how many are killed because people are texting while their vehicle is stationary?
You have no idea how close they came.
Every time I get stuck behind someone who doesn't notice that the light has gone green because they were too busy texting they become very, very close to getting murdered. The horn just does not convey my displeasure well enough. After getting the beeping of their life time they need to take 5 minutes to take the handbrake off and put it into gear.
Seriously, good on this guy. I do 80-100 KM's a day and there rarely is a day where I dont get stuck at a GREEN light thanks to someone too engrossed in their phone to care about their driving.
What if I get a scrap of wood, paint it to look like a cellphone, and get pulled over for texting because a policeman saw me glancing at it and poking at it while driving. Have I broken a law? What precisely or generally would I be charged with?
In Australia,
Dangerous driving, wasting a police officers time and wasting the courts time.
Courts in Oz take a very, very dim view of dumb smartarses.
Indeed, and especially assuming the officer that pulls you over is a plain clothes officer. Given some attempts at police impersonators, I've seen recommendations FROM POLICE that if there's a question of an unmarked / un-uniformed officer pulling you over, to call dispatch and verify. Maybe that doesn't work in 'merica where you'll be thrown in Guantanamo before your call can be completed.
Not sure about 'Murica, but here in Australia plain clothes cops are instantly recognisable from their haircut and the sheer amount of radio/computer equipment in their car.
However plain clothes cops in Oz will only pull you over if you're doing something stupid... Like texting and driving.
Nothing but a bunch of idiotic, xenophobic racists over there, man, I swear.
A significant portion of America are idiotic, xenophobic racists. For example:
- In 2013, approximately 15% of Americans believe Barack Obama was born in Kenya, despite lots of evidence to the contrary.
- The newly crowned Miss America has brown skin and dark hair, because her parents were from India. There was a lot of online activity complaining about how horrible it was that we were giving the Miss America award to an Arab who was a member of Al Qaida.
- Based on recent elections for governor in my home state of Ohio, approximately one third of the electorate who typically vote Republican will not do so if their party's chosen candidate is black, regardless of other factors.
- "English-only" laws in many states in the US that prohibit state employees from conducting government business in any language other than English. The stated goal of these laws is to prevent other languages, particularly Spanish, from becoming the majority language in the US.
The bolded one I agree with, well mostly agree with.
95% of govt services should not be expected to provide translators, the only big exceptions I can think of are:
1. Immigration.
2. Customs.
3. Health care (I live in Oz, where health care is cheap and universal).
Other services should only be required to be conducted in English (or the official language of the nation in question). I also believe in not being a hypocrite, if I were to move to Panama I should expect to deal with government departments in Spanish or Thailand where I'll hire a Thai translator (because learning Spanish was hard enough).
In the case of Australia, this wouldn't be a law though. Rather the government would just set a policy which would act as a giudeline for departments to act under.
However I disagree with the racist sentiments behind it. For me it's more about cost reduction (forcing the fisheries department to keep translators on staff for 15 dialects of Swahili is expensive and unnecessary). For a nation to keep its primary language, it should be promoted through education but for the poor, the US fails pretty horribly here and a lot of the poor are from Spanish speaking families.
it could quiet some of the naysayers who have spent the past several months suggesting that Apple's best years are behind it.
If you know anything about Apple, it should be that nothing will really stop the fans and nothing will quiet the naysayers.
Yep, but everyone knows this pattern.
on release there are a lot of sales as all the fanboys upgrade and they claim x million sales and they're number 1. Then sales taper off and they continue to lose marketshare when the fanboys become very, very quiet.
Release sales are never indicative of a market. Everyone expect the Iphone to sell big on the release day, however it's the long term that matters.
Probably the same kind of people who buy Macs, even though Dell computers do the same thing for a fraction of the cost
Good analogy, people are buying a product that is internally identical, but costs many times as much simply because of the brand.
Or the people who buy a Mercedes Benz, even though a Hyundai does the same thing for a fraction of the cost.
Bad analogy, Mercedes offers a lot of cars that Hyundai simply dont offer.
A better car analogy is refusing to buy a Nissan Skyline 370GT which retails at $40,000 because it's a Nissan but then buying an Infiniti G37 for $80,000 because it's an Infiniti.
Because it's fairly obvious you dont know much about cars, they're both the same. The Infinity G37 and Skyline 370GT are both V36 Skylines with different badges and slightly different trims. In fact Nissan invented the Infiniti brand to sell Nissan cars at higher prices in the US (Same with Honda/Acura and Toyota/Lexus).
Seeing as Android now offers more features at a lower price point, the only reason people buy Apple is because of the brand. So it's not even comparing Skylines, Choosing an Iphone is more like choosing a car with its bonnet (hood) welded shut, a steering wheel that only responds when the company that made the car allows it and to change a tyre, you need to remove the chassis and the drive train over say a Toyota Yaris, BWM 5 series or Lamborghini. But hey, people will do that.
Their very recent attempts to enter the cheaper market will probably be mildly successful, but I think it's a "too little, too late" attempt.
The 5C isn't an attempt to enter the cheap market. Pundits and analysts were all predicting it would; it's not. It's the same price as Apple prices on the older generation of phones.
It was an attempt to enter the cheap market, it just wasn't a good one.
It is, a lower speced version of the flagship phone, that is the dictionary definition of trying to enter the cheap market. Don't be fooled because they didn't actually make it cheap to buy.
To use a car analogy, Mazda sells the 2L Mazda 3 as it's mainstream car and the 1.5L Mazda 2 as it's cheap car. Mazda is trying to sell the Mazda 2 at people who think the Mazda 3 is too expensive and are happy to live with a smaller engine. Apple is doing the exact same thing, except they aren't bothering with the lower prices that Mazda put on the 2.
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Clancy did a lot of research for all of his books, you have to give him props for that.
He was given unfettered access to the military and often his stories were really just fictionalizations with mild embellishments of actual events. This follows on a long tradition of artists (painters, writers, photographers) being given special access to war theaters. So nothing wrong with that, I just don't know if I would call this "research".
I would.
Ian Fleming wrote the James Bond novels based on a lot of what happened with Naval intelligence in the war where Fleming was assigned but stylised to a point where they were no longer recognisable. They were also adjusted to the time frame that the novels were written in (I.E. the earlier novels showed Britain as still being an imperialistic power whilst later novels depicted Britain as a waning power).
A lot of novels are just fictionalisations of actual events, this is often what makes them believable. There's a lot more to making a fictionalisation of an actual event than changing the names, you need to create dialogue, drama, back stories and enough action/story progression to make it interesting. This is the hard part of writing.
Your rebuttal seems to have demonstrated how surveillance technologies, mostly in the hands of private entities have aided after the event
The GGP implied that government surveillance did not stop events like these. In particular, the NSA surveillance.
Boston Marathon bombing
Caught with the assistance of a multitude of surveillance cameras in the area.
Who owned the cameras, Boston PD, businesses and private entities in Boston or the NSA?
Sarin Gas attack by Syria
Thanks to real-time satellite intelligence over the middle east, we were able to not only spot the attack, but able to warn local health care of the impending crisis.
This is a tenuous link at best. A very long bow to draw. In reality it probably did SFA to help the victims given the limited humanitarian resources in the area and the fact they were in a war zone.
But again it did not do anything to stop the attack. Further more, this is the CIA's regular duties of foreign surveillance that proves no value in the NSA's domestic surveillance.
School shooting rampages
Cameras in schools have allowed us to quickly identify attackers and separate facts from fiction.
Again, how were the attacks stopped by government surveillance?
And again, who owned the cameras?
9/11
1000 killed by car bombs in Iraq in September alone
One Drug Killing every half hour in Mexico
Here you've cited a lack of surveillance. When the NSA surveillance fails to foil the most poorly planned mass shooting how will more cameras and wiretaps help here? The simple answer is that it wont. In fact, all you've managed to show is that surveillance is only good after the fact and wont help in stopping an attack. The car bombs in Iraq are a direct result of the US removing a oppressive yet stable government which was, whilst brutal managed to keep the various ethnic and religious groups from fighting. School and mass shootings are a cultural problem and can only be stopped by fixing the culture around guns. Domestic killings can only be solved by better police work. Tapping the phones of every American and putting cameras on every street corner wont fix a damn thing. There is practically a camera on every corner as it is when we count private security cameras but footage is only useful after the fact, before the fact you rely on tip offs and good old fashioned investigative police work to follow up those tips.
Finally, attacks like 9/11 are stopped in two ways, stop acting like giant dicks. It is a well known and oft proven fact that people who like you are less likely to attack you. This also reduces the workload on number 2, identify your potential enemies and keep tabs on them. There's no point in surveilling everyone, you get so much useless information about who had what for lunch that useful clues are overlooked and lost. Re read that last sentence, it's the biggest reason the NSA hasn't and wont do any good.
Italy has a government.
Yes, but bunga bunga parties aren't "ha ha" funny.
Add a navy operation on Jersey, Guernesey and Sark to hunt down rogue bankers in neighouring tax havens for good measure, and voilà !
Well Jersey, Guernesey and Sark are all protected by the British crown, that means the first thing they'll do is send angriest Scots in the Royal Army to invade France and historically, this has not worked out well for the French.
you don't understand. on an american airline, the stewardess sells $2 bags of peanuts, $2 soda, $5 beer and $6 wine (was july a vintage month?)
Are things really that bad?
Most stewards and stewardesses will have advanced levels of first aid training. I know a few on Asian and Australian airlines and basic first aid is mandatory before setting foot on a commercial flight as cabin staff. If you have any problems mid-flight, you'll be relying on them to save your life.
This is likely a good time to talk up Insite, a "safe injection" site in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside.
The premise of Insite is simple: provide a clean, safe place for addicts to shoot up, under medical supervision. Insite doesn't provide drugs, but at least it offers some kind of controlled environment for injection.
The upshot is ten years of servicing addicts, and not one death. It Just Works.
Of course our law 'n' order neo-con Harper government is determined to shut it down, crying "Think of The Children" while pocketing donations from the big US private prison companies...
This, Australia has a couple of safe injection rooms. The theory goes that people who do heroin will do heroin anyway. Before the safe injection rooms, they would inject in parks at night, leave the needles in the park and during the day kids would play in the same park where there are used needles. Safe injection rooms get them out of the parks and give them a way to dispose of the used needles.
Methadone clinics are another thing we've done, an attempt to wean addicts off of Heroin.
i guess a few cold beers and the occasional bit of pot just isnt enough for some people,
More along the lines of cant afford a few beers and the occasional bit of pot.
People on these kinds of drugs are hardly living a normal suburban life and all of a sudden say, I'm going to try something that'll make my flesh rot.
Actually, Krokodil is for those who cant afford Heroin.
One of the reasons it's big in Russia is that Heroin is very expensive in Russia. There are plenty of alternative "cheap highs" but it's people looking for extreme pain killers like Heroin.
They dont.
Much like revolutionary movements in South America, the drug trade is used to finance their military operations.
I had to give up on that requirement. The CVT is still 100 times better than any slushbox. Finding a hatchback that also has a stick is like finding the holy grail it seems.
Seriously?
It's dead easy in Oz. Almost all hot hatches are available as manuals and most of the cheap ones. Is it that hard to get a Ford Fiesta or Focus that has a manual transmission? Out of the 17 models offered in Australia, there are five with an MT. http://www.redbook.com.au/cars/research/Ford/Focus/2013.
With SUV's I can understand as they'll never go off road and are bought by people who cant drive (ergo, could never handle a manual), but hatches are a prime candidate for MT's.
And it's Apple's fault that this route is open to drivers? Apple's data comes from third parties - a lot of it is aggregated by the likes of TomTom etc, from local authorities.
Yes, but it is 100% Apples responsibility to QA this data and make sure it's use is accurate.
Secondly, it appears that you no SFA about GIS (Geographic Information Systems). Whilst the mapping data is provided by third party sources, the use, the navigation algorithms are provided by Apple (or whomever Apple bought and slapped their logo on). The whole point of a GIS application like Apple or Google maps is to take layers of disparate data and overlay them accurately. If you fail at this, you fail at GIS in it's entirety.
And it's Apple's fault that this route is open to drivers?
No, but its Apple's fault drivers were being directed down there. FTA http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-24246646
Apple had known about the issue for weeks.
The driver has to shoulder some of the blame for not taking notice of what they are doing (this really says a lot about Apple users) but Apple has to shoulder a lot of the blame for ignoring a known error until it becomes international news.
Remember the bullshit about people getting lost in Victoria (australia) looking for a town called Mildura?
It wasn't Bullshit. You're obviously not an Australian. In Australia its easy to get lost, you can be hundreds of kilometers from the nearest town and there is no mobile coverage. People fucking die out there from exposure, snake bites, minor injuries, every year.
Once again it's Apple's responsibility to QA the data. They didn't know the difference between a town called Mildura and a region called Mildura. The application either didn't know about the town called Mildura or didn't care, in either case it's a serious fuck up.
The driver has a reasonable expectation that the device will not lead them 100's of KM's in the wrong direction, doubly so in a nation that hosts 10 out of the 10 most dangerous animals on the planet (11 if we count humans).
I've had Google Navigate fuck up more than a few times too. I was on a military base one time and it took me out on what I can only guess was some sort of tank trail (not having a 4-wheel drive, I almost got stuck a few times). All this to get to a main road that it turned out actually *intersected* with the main road that I was on when Navigate decided to take me out on a long country drive through the swamp.
Erm... Why would you take a dirt track?
Seriously?
What was going through your head when you thought leaving the sealed road was a good idea.
I drive a Japanese sports car, which by definition is very low to the ground even in stock form. There's no way in hell I'd be leaving sealed roads unless I knew the path was perfectly smooth despite what the GPS said. Holes in my exhaust sound awesome but are a pain in the arse to fix.
Google maps does not always provide the fastest or best route (in the city of Perth, Western Australia it will regularly lead you into areas where traffic jams are a daily occurrence) but what you wrote doesn't say anything about Google's mapping skills, it says a lot about your lack of common sense.
Airport's fault. No one should be able to drive their car right onto the runway, no matter what GPS or voice in their heads is telling them. Fire whoever runs this airport because they're a moron for not putting a fence up
How?
Runways need to be accessible to vehicles. As in unhindered access to emergency vehicles.
Its primarily the users fault for trusting the GPS implicitly and ignoring the signs and the fact they were driving onto a bloody runway. This says a lot about Apple users.
Secondarily it's Apple's fault for building such a crappy mapping system that it directs people across runways. Now if this was a once off you might get away with the "everyone has a few minor glitches" but this is just the latest in a long running series of failures in Apple's mapping products indicating a serious QA failure. This is doubly so seeing as it was a known flaw and Fairbanks airport has complained to Apple about it three weeks ago, FTA:
The airport said it had first complained to the phone-maker three weeks ago via the local attorney general's office.
So Apple has to shoulder a lot of the blame here because they knew about the error.
another story that will give an excuse to the ignorant crotchspawn bearers a big head and pretend that they're better.
FTFY.
Sorry about this, but there are two sides to this. Having a kid does not automatically imbue one with magical knowledge (Evidence: Honey Boo Boo's parents) nor does not having a child mean that one doesn't understand child rearing issues.
I can show you plenty of examples of bad parents, from people who actually have kids. They are also arrogant enough to assume because they have kids they're better despite being borderline abusive parents.
I'd call it even, personally.
But the complaint was made by car dealers, not car manufacturers.
The best dealer makes the worst manufacturer look like the paragon of truth and honesty.
Manual transmission here in Ireland. The law is that when you are stopped at a red light (or for extended periods of time) that you must engage the handbrake and disengage the gears (neutral).
You can keep an eye on the lights as to when it's about to go green for you but in the half a second that it takes to put the car into first, is it really that bad compared to clumsy feet drivers?
Before you go calculating how many half seconds you could save per traffic light, consider that in the UK the amber light is illuminated whilst the red is in order to indicate to the driver that the lights will soon change to green.
This.
If you pay attention to the traffic (like you're meant to) you can spot when the lights will change and be ready in time for the change.
In Australia there is normally a 1-2 second gap between a red light on one street and a green light on the other (safety gap implemented by the govt. thanks to arsehole red light runners) so when traffic slows or stops you've got enough time to slip it into gear and release the handbrake.
Actually, in the US where almost everyone is driving an automatic, this is dangerous. If the foot slips off the brake for any reason, the car will propel itself forward while the driver likely has no hands on the steering wheel, and is distracted by their phone. You might think that scenario unlikely, but if someone even bumps the back of your car gently, your foot is going to come off the brake and you are now going into the car in front of you - one that might be driving through the intersection at speed.
In some other countries where most have manual transmissions, drivers are trained to place the car into neutral and engage the handbrake at a red light. That at least makes this a somewhat safer practice.
OK, do people not put it into N at the lights?
Disclosure: I drive a manual so I always put it into Neutral so I dont have to keep the clutch down (saves wear on the clutch) at the lights. I would assume a lot of Auto drivers would do the same thing. Then again, I also assume everyone else on the road is a complete idiot and drive defensively.
But how many are killed because people are texting while their vehicle is stationary?
You have no idea how close they came.
Every time I get stuck behind someone who doesn't notice that the light has gone green because they were too busy texting they become very, very close to getting murdered. The horn just does not convey my displeasure well enough. After getting the beeping of their life time they need to take 5 minutes to take the handbrake off and put it into gear.
Seriously, good on this guy. I do 80-100 KM's a day and there rarely is a day where I dont get stuck at a GREEN light thanks to someone too engrossed in their phone to care about their driving.
What if I get a scrap of wood, paint it to look like a cellphone, and get pulled over for texting because a policeman saw me glancing at it and poking at it while driving. Have I broken a law? What precisely or generally would I be charged with?
In Australia,
Dangerous driving, wasting a police officers time and wasting the courts time.
Courts in Oz take a very, very dim view of dumb smartarses.
Indeed, and especially assuming the officer that pulls you over is a plain clothes officer. Given some attempts at police impersonators, I've seen recommendations FROM POLICE that if there's a question of an unmarked / un-uniformed officer pulling you over, to call dispatch and verify. Maybe that doesn't work in 'merica where you'll be thrown in Guantanamo before your call can be completed.
Not sure about 'Murica, but here in Australia plain clothes cops are instantly recognisable from their haircut and the sheer amount of radio/computer equipment in their car.
However plain clothes cops in Oz will only pull you over if you're doing something stupid... Like texting and driving.
Nothing but a bunch of idiotic, xenophobic racists over there, man, I swear.
A significant portion of America are idiotic, xenophobic racists. For example:
- In 2013, approximately 15% of Americans believe Barack Obama was born in Kenya, despite lots of evidence to the contrary.
- The newly crowned Miss America has brown skin and dark hair, because her parents were from India. There was a lot of online activity complaining about how horrible it was that we were giving the Miss America award to an Arab who was a member of Al Qaida.
- Based on recent elections for governor in my home state of Ohio, approximately one third of the electorate who typically vote Republican will not do so if their party's chosen candidate is black, regardless of other factors.
- "English-only" laws in many states in the US that prohibit state employees from conducting government business in any language other than English. The stated goal of these laws is to prevent other languages, particularly Spanish, from becoming the majority language in the US.
The bolded one I agree with, well mostly agree with.
95% of govt services should not be expected to provide translators, the only big exceptions I can think of are:
1. Immigration.
2. Customs.
3. Health care (I live in Oz, where health care is cheap and universal).
Other services should only be required to be conducted in English (or the official language of the nation in question). I also believe in not being a hypocrite, if I were to move to Panama I should expect to deal with government departments in Spanish or Thailand where I'll hire a Thai translator (because learning Spanish was hard enough).
In the case of Australia, this wouldn't be a law though. Rather the government would just set a policy which would act as a giudeline for departments to act under.
However I disagree with the racist sentiments behind it. For me it's more about cost reduction (forcing the fisheries department to keep translators on staff for 15 dialects of Swahili is expensive and unnecessary). For a nation to keep its primary language, it should be promoted through education but for the poor, the US fails pretty horribly here and a lot of the poor are from Spanish speaking families.
but I haven't gotten anymore mods points for a very long time.
The same with anyone slightly critical of Apple.
it could quiet some of the naysayers who have spent the past several months suggesting that Apple's best years are behind it.
If you know anything about Apple, it should be that nothing will really stop the fans and nothing will quiet the naysayers.
Yep, but everyone knows this pattern.
on release there are a lot of sales as all the fanboys upgrade and they claim x million sales and they're number 1. Then sales taper off and they continue to lose marketshare when the fanboys become very, very quiet.
Release sales are never indicative of a market. Everyone expect the Iphone to sell big on the release day, however it's the long term that matters.
Probably the same kind of people who buy Macs, even though Dell computers do the same thing for a fraction of the cost
Good analogy, people are buying a product that is internally identical, but costs many times as much simply because of the brand.
Or the people who buy a Mercedes Benz, even though a Hyundai does the same thing for a fraction of the cost.
Bad analogy, Mercedes offers a lot of cars that Hyundai simply dont offer. A better car analogy is refusing to buy a Nissan Skyline 370GT which retails at $40,000 because it's a Nissan but then buying an Infiniti G37 for $80,000 because it's an Infiniti.
Because it's fairly obvious you dont know much about cars, they're both the same. The Infinity G37 and Skyline 370GT are both V36 Skylines with different badges and slightly different trims. In fact Nissan invented the Infiniti brand to sell Nissan cars at higher prices in the US (Same with Honda/Acura and Toyota/Lexus).
Seeing as Android now offers more features at a lower price point, the only reason people buy Apple is because of the brand. So it's not even comparing Skylines, Choosing an Iphone is more like choosing a car with its bonnet (hood) welded shut, a steering wheel that only responds when the company that made the car allows it and to change a tyre, you need to remove the chassis and the drive train over say a Toyota Yaris, BWM 5 series or Lamborghini. But hey, people will do that.
Their very recent attempts to enter the cheaper market will probably be mildly successful, but I think it's a "too little, too late" attempt.
The 5C isn't an attempt to enter the cheap market. Pundits and analysts were all predicting it would; it's not. It's the same price as Apple prices on the older generation of phones.
It was an attempt to enter the cheap market, it just wasn't a good one.
It is, a lower speced version of the flagship phone, that is the dictionary definition of trying to enter the cheap market. Don't be fooled because they didn't actually make it cheap to buy.
To use a car analogy, Mazda sells the 2L Mazda 3 as it's mainstream car and the 1.5L Mazda 2 as it's cheap car. Mazda is trying to sell the Mazda 2 at people who think the Mazda 3 is too expensive and are happy to live with a smaller engine. Apple is doing the exact same thing, except they aren't bothering with the lower prices that Mazda put on the 2.