People bring those bags aboard because airlines seem to love to lose or break stuff. If Fedex can manage 99%+ delivery to the right place at the right time surely the airlines could too.
The big difference between FedEx and Airlines is that if FedEx tells a package to shut up, sit down and stop fiddling with it's bloody phone it does it.
Airlines are herding 2-500 cats into a cramped cigar tube. People are terrible at following directions.
Yes, but some airlines/airports lose luggage more often than others. And some airlines are more helpful than others when they do lose the luggage.
And some customers are real douchebags who take affront at everything and are unreasonable no matter how hard the agent is trying to help.
Bottom line is - we don't know where the line is in this case. This guy may have a completely legitimate grievance, or he could be raising hell because BA wouldn't compensate him $500 a bag or give him 10,000 free travel miles. We just don't know.
I RTFA'd.
The tweet said "dont fly @BritishAirways their customer service is horrendous" which is a valid opinion and very neutrally worded (and given my personal experiences with BA, entirely true, I swear they're run by angry Scottish grandmothers). Hard to tell what his grievance is here. This is a pretty big non-event. Guy buys tweet, guy posts generic message, goes viral. I guess it's a slow news day.
But I completely agree with your point, some people are utter tosspots when dealing with airlines (or anyone really). I've had two significant problems with airlines, both were sorted out within 20 mintues by me simply explaining my predicament to the airline rep in a calm and polite manner. When you're nice, people are more likely to help you.
Having read the article, it's a bit too generic to be a case for libel or deformation.
All it said was "dont fly @BritishAirways their customer service is horrendous" which is an opinion rather than slander. If he had of said "Dont fly @BritishAirways, their CEO sleeps with boys" then it would be deformation and they could sue the pants off him (well, assuming it's not true).
When they privatised the power corporation in several eastern Australian states the price of electricity began to rise more than it did in states with state owned power companies. Yay, the all powerful free market has won again.
I'm not sure what the vegans and homosexuals have to do with this, but if i remember, a lot of this started under bush and has been embraced wholeheartedly by the present administration. If you think this is about left vs. right, you don't understand american politics.
I dont think anyone understands 'Murican politics and if anyone did understand 'Murican politics it would be instantaneously replaced with something even more unexplainable and convoluted.
Maps? Google wasn't permitted to improve or do squat with the iOS map app until Apple kicked them off as a standard app. When Apple's maps came out, bad as they were, all of a sudden Google's map app came back improved and updated, with features that were only released on Android because they were now free of Apple's restrictions on what features they were permitted to implement on the IOS version of the app.
There, fixed that for you.
Google wanted to put turn by turn navigation in. Apple stopped them because they didn't want Google branding on it.
I am not going to cry for Apple over software patents.
Neither am I, nor will I cry for their users.
Sure it may seem like Apple is the victim here (and the fanboys love to play the victim card) but really, this is just someone doing to Apple what Apple has been doing to the rest of the industry for years now. They lived by the software patent, now they shall die by the software patent.
Its effectively karma, in patent form.
BTW, for the record I think software patents are a stupendously idiotic idea that should never have been granted in the first place.
I also really can't blame them in this matter as I have been saying for years and time and time again I've seen with my own two eyes that CPUs passed "good enough" several releases ago and even the Phenom II based chips and first gen Bulldozers really are overkill for all but a handful of users.
This.
I have a Phenom II 955 and the only problem I have is the motherboard doesn't support SSD's properly. The CPU handles new games fine, I've upgraded my graphics card and RAM, bought 2 SSD's (thinking about buying a third so I can use my 512 GB SSD exclusively for game installs and the old 256 GB went into the laptop) but not the CPU. The only thing at the moment that would force me to upgrade my CPU is the motherboard (I think I can still get an AM3 compatible board though).
If I had to buy a new CPU, it'd be looking at the mid range rather than i7's. Would prefer another AMD.
With the quality of software in modern cars, I wouldn't want to trust my life on a vehicle that can override my actions.
Most cars made today are drive by wire. There is already software that overrides your actions, in fact without the software you cannot perform any action in your car.
Actually a lot of the autobahn now has speed limits. And yes it has cut the amount of deaths there by a lot.
I in fact like this idea.
My life should not be put at risk because some rich jack ass in a merc wants to go 90 while everyone else is going 65-70.
Would it make any difference if it's a poor prick in a Hyundai Excel?
I agree with your principle but this is a bad idea because there are a few situations where it's safer to break the speed limit, these are once in a blue moon situations but when they happen it's normally life and death.
Also, this wont work as pricks who want to speed will just have the chip disabled/modified making this ineffective.
Beyond this, EU car manufacturers wont have a bar of it, I imagine BMW, Mercades et al. will simply put a system into their cars that disables this at the touch of a button (they'll call it "race mode" or something and claim it's only for use on the track).
As a I said, I agree with your principle, but this wont affect people who speed because they're pricks. The only way to affect these idiots is to take away their licenses (and then their cars if they're dumb and arrogant enough to drive unlicensed). Fines for speeding are pretty ineffective.
Marijuana impairs attention. That seems to be the linkage that most people cite. But I find no hard statistics on this either.
Well, there's plenty of evidence that Marijuana has effects on response time (like most depressants).
For most of us who've smoked pot, we know it definitely affects your faculties to the point where you cant drive safely, more over this is more noticeable to the user than it is with alcohol. Unlike alcohol, pot users tend to avoid taking extreme risks like excessive speed (people driving high tend to be slower than the median, which is still bad) but still have the problems with fine motor control (keeping the wheel straight) as well as reduced response speed and impaired perception.
I'm pro-decriminalisation of marijuana, but really it needs to be treated like other legal mind altering drugs (I.E. Alcohol). In Australia we treat driving under the influence of drugs to be the same as driving under the influence of Alcohol but you also get a drug conviction, not just a DUI conviction.
There was also a study of New Zealanders. They found that people who began using pot earlier in life and used it most frequently over the years experienced an average decline of eight IQ points by the time they turned 38. By comparison, those who never smoked pot had an average increase of one IQ point by the same age.
A reanalysis of the New Zealand data by Ole Røgeberg of the Ragnar Frisch Center for Economic Research in Oslo, however, suggested that the IQ difference could be explained by socioeconomic factors. People who start smoking marijuana at an earlier age are often less intelligent to begin with.
You will find most of the research is similarly tainted.
How such research is conducted.
Researcher: Have you used marijuana? Dumb pot user: Yes Smart pot user: No
The only real way to confirm this is to check for a history of drug related charges, which will only be present for the dumbest of the dumb.
Yeah, they can surely make them small. But with smallness comes small capacity. It should go without saying but a battery 1/10th the size of today's typical cell phone battery would only get 1/10th the talk time. So, what, 30 minutes tops?
This should be obvious, but maybe not.
on a typical watch that is connected by links (you know, the metal studs) there is significant area in the links themselves. If you were to put a cell in each one and link them together, you can reduce the size of the face.
And another thing: How would you use it to talk? Like Dick Tracy does? That's fine if you don't care about others near you hearing both sides of the conversation (and being intensely annoying to some bystanders). What do you do for a private conversation, hold it to your ear? Imagine that for a minute. It would look about as ridiculous as someone talking with a phablet.
This may be obvious, but maybe not.
We already have a solution to this, I use it to skype on my 10" tablet.
You have any idea how much talk time you would get from a battery that can fit inside a watch? We need a few of those revolutionary battery breakthroughs that we've read about for years to happen first.
How small can you make battery cells? Small enough to fit inside the links of the watch band?
A 2000+ year old book (older, in some cases) fraudulently constructed by ignorant, illiterate peasant halfwits from a time before justice and democracy
Youre knowledge of history is truly astounding. Do tell, when do you suppose the Roman Republic existed? Or the democratic Greek city-states?
Or that it was written by illiterate peasants when the Christian Bible was in fact penned by the nobility at the council of Nicaea which was assembled by the Roman Emperor Constantine.
Constantine was not the first ruler to write religious texts and many kings and tyrants since Constantine have re-written the bible in part or in whole to suit their own needs.
Nissan will be ready with revolutionary commercially-viable Autonomous Drive in multiple vehicles by the year 2020
Why would anyone buy a new Nissan, now that Nissan has told us that if we wait for six years (at the longest!) we could get one with Autonomous Drive?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_Effect
Precisely because we _dont_ want a self driving car.
Sales will be unaffected as demand for new cars is fairly inelastic. What will be effected is the share price. This is Nissan saying "we're really advanced, buy NSSNY now".
The amazing autonomous James Bond "Q" car will catch it, skin it, and roast it over the car engine while you drive.
When you get home, dinner will be ready to be served.
Yum, yum.
Ahh, you must be thinking of the new Ford F160 Roaster utility.
The Aston Martin DB12 will not only hit a deer, it will butcher it, sautee it and serve venison with lightly buttered garden vegetables and a nice Chianti.
Getting rear-ended because you are going the speed limit while the person behind you is exceeding it is rarely anything more serious than a fender-bender... and the person who rear-ended you is going to be held to be at fault.
Erm. Getting rear ended at the lights is usually enough to put your car out of commission for a while.
At the very best, at the speed limit of 60KPH you're looking at a serious bumper repair. Possibly worse (my car has fins under the bumper to produce more downforce, those are damn expensive to replace as my cars been out of production for 6 years). Even just hitting your average hatch, that is a few grand to replace.
At worst, you'll bend the chassis and that's a complete write off in my country.
Yep, it's all the responsibility of the tool who hits me (and I have a dash cam in case the tool does a hit and run) but the inconvenience of having my car taken off the road and possibly even having to go buy another car.
If the car in front has a braking distance of 50 feet and the car behinds brakes are not as good with a braking distance of 100 feet then the car behind needs to be 50 feet from the car in front, autonomous or otherwise.
This, your total stopping distance is not the distance you need to keep from another vehicle, nor your braking distance.
You need to be far enough back to stop in an emergency without hitting the car in front. Because this distance varies with car type, weight, tyre condition and speed, we measure it in time as opposed to distance. 3 seconds is generally considered safe, anything less than 2 seconds is dangerous. A 2-3 second gap is good on a dry road as long as your car's in good condition (decent brakes and tyres). I typically double that for large vehicles (trucks).
There is no rule that says the left lane is for speeding.
The left lane is NOT a speeding lane. It is not you personal driving lane. It is not their responsibility that you can't drive legally.
Suck it up and stop causing accident, you jerk.
Reading this is funny considering that for me, the left lane is the outside lane.
But your point stands. There is no designated speeding lane. Some laws dictate that you cant be in the inside lane if you're not overtaking but this varies.
Generally speaking though, on any dual carriageway (multi lane road) its just common god damn courtesy to not drive in the inside lane without a good reason (overtaking, turning, etc...). Courtesy isn't codified in law, but it's still a good bloody idea. The inside lane is not anyone's personal lane, be it for speeding or going slow.
Traffic jams are almost a sole function of human deficiencies through overreaction and slow reaction.
No they are not. That is a myth. Traffic jams are almost a sole function of not enough road for the number of cars. Once a road is at capacity, no amount of 'perfect' driving is going to prevent the addition of more cars from causing traffic slowdowns and eventually traffic jams.
Not traffic jams as such but traffic waves definitely are caused by over and under reaction by bad drivers.
A scenario I see often, Car #2 brakes because he's going faster than Car #1, Car #3 panics and hits the brakes harder. This chain continues until we reach someone who was actually watching more than the car right in front of you and left enough room to ride out the wave without braking.
Traffic waves are often confused for jams as waves often bring traffic to a halt for short periods of time.
One of the oldest rules of survival - STUPID ANIMALS DIE!!!!
Only up to a point. Natural selection works both ways. Stupid animals may die because they make stupid mistakes. But smart animals may also be under a disadvantage because their more active brain consumes more energy, and the curiosity that comes with intelligence may get them in trouble. If wild animals, such as rats, are captured, selectively bred to improve their intelligence, and then released, they will regress to their original level. So you want to be smart, but not too smart.
Not really, smarter animals are more often in trouble when stupid animals die because they used the stupid animal as a staple food source.
Not that I propose eating anti-vaxxers... Who knows what diseases they might have.
Slashdot Mirror
People bring those bags aboard because airlines seem to love to lose or break stuff. If Fedex can manage 99%+ delivery to the right place at the right time surely the airlines could too.
The big difference between FedEx and Airlines is that if FedEx tells a package to shut up, sit down and stop fiddling with it's bloody phone it does it.
Airlines are herding 2-500 cats into a cramped cigar tube. People are terrible at following directions.
Yes, but some airlines/airports lose luggage more often than others. And some airlines are more helpful than others when they do lose the luggage.
And some customers are real douchebags who take affront at everything and are unreasonable no matter how hard the agent is trying to help.
Bottom line is - we don't know where the line is in this case. This guy may have a completely legitimate grievance, or he could be raising hell because BA wouldn't compensate him $500 a bag or give him 10,000 free travel miles. We just don't know.
I RTFA'd.
The tweet said "dont fly @BritishAirways their customer service is horrendous" which is a valid opinion and very neutrally worded (and given my personal experiences with BA, entirely true, I swear they're run by angry Scottish grandmothers). Hard to tell what his grievance is here. This is a pretty big non-event. Guy buys tweet, guy posts generic message, goes viral. I guess it's a slow news day.
But I completely agree with your point, some people are utter tosspots when dealing with airlines (or anyone really). I've had two significant problems with airlines, both were sorted out within 20 mintues by me simply explaining my predicament to the airline rep in a calm and polite manner. When you're nice, people are more likely to help you.
Libel lawsuit in 3... 2... 1...
Having read the article, it's a bit too generic to be a case for libel or deformation.
All it said was "dont fly @BritishAirways their customer service is horrendous" which is an opinion rather than slander. If he had of said "Dont fly @BritishAirways, their CEO sleeps with boys" then it would be deformation and they could sue the pants off him (well, assuming it's not true).
When they privatised the power corporation in several eastern Australian states the price of electricity began to rise more than it did in states with state owned power companies. Yay, the all powerful free market has won again.
Look, those could be anyone's cock shots that were posted, anyone's.
I'm not sure what the vegans and homosexuals have to do with this, but if i remember, a lot of this started under bush and has been embraced wholeheartedly by the present administration. If you think this is about left vs. right, you don't understand american politics.
I dont think anyone understands 'Murican politics and if anyone did understand 'Murican politics it would be instantaneously replaced with something even more unexplainable and convoluted.
Maps? Google wasn't permitted to improve or do squat with the iOS map app until Apple kicked them off as a standard app. When Apple's maps came out, bad as they were, all of a sudden Google's map app came back improved and updated, with features that were only released on Android because they were now free of Apple's restrictions on what features they were permitted to implement on the IOS version of the app.
There, fixed that for you.
Google wanted to put turn by turn navigation in. Apple stopped them because they didn't want Google branding on it.
I am not going to cry for Apple over software patents.
Neither am I, nor will I cry for their users.
Sure it may seem like Apple is the victim here (and the fanboys love to play the victim card) but really, this is just someone doing to Apple what Apple has been doing to the rest of the industry for years now. They lived by the software patent, now they shall die by the software patent.
Its effectively karma, in patent form.
BTW, for the record I think software patents are a stupendously idiotic idea that should never have been granted in the first place.
I also really can't blame them in this matter as I have been saying for years and time and time again I've seen with my own two eyes that CPUs passed "good enough" several releases ago and even the Phenom II based chips and first gen Bulldozers really are overkill for all but a handful of users.
This.
I have a Phenom II 955 and the only problem I have is the motherboard doesn't support SSD's properly. The CPU handles new games fine, I've upgraded my graphics card and RAM, bought 2 SSD's (thinking about buying a third so I can use my 512 GB SSD exclusively for game installs and the old 256 GB went into the laptop) but not the CPU. The only thing at the moment that would force me to upgrade my CPU is the motherboard (I think I can still get an AM3 compatible board though). If I had to buy a new CPU, it'd be looking at the mid range rather than i7's. Would prefer another AMD.
With the quality of software in modern cars, I wouldn't want to trust my life on a vehicle that can override my actions.
Most cars made today are drive by wire. There is already software that overrides your actions, in fact without the software you cannot perform any action in your car.
Actually a lot of the autobahn now has speed limits. And yes it has cut the amount of deaths there by a lot.
I in fact like this idea.
My life should not be put at risk because some rich jack ass in a merc wants to go 90 while everyone else is going 65-70.
Would it make any difference if it's a poor prick in a Hyundai Excel?
I agree with your principle but this is a bad idea because there are a few situations where it's safer to break the speed limit, these are once in a blue moon situations but when they happen it's normally life and death.
Also, this wont work as pricks who want to speed will just have the chip disabled/modified making this ineffective.
Beyond this, EU car manufacturers wont have a bar of it, I imagine BMW, Mercades et al. will simply put a system into their cars that disables this at the touch of a button (they'll call it "race mode" or something and claim it's only for use on the track).
As a I said, I agree with your principle, but this wont affect people who speed because they're pricks. The only way to affect these idiots is to take away their licenses (and then their cars if they're dumb and arrogant enough to drive unlicensed). Fines for speeding are pretty ineffective.
The only real way to confirm this is to check for a history of drug related charges, which will only be present for the dumbest of the dumb.
Wrong.
(Try actually testing them for the presence of cannabinoids in their systems, maybe?)
Erm, wrong.
the question was "Have you used marijuana" not "are you currently high".
Finding THC in their system is only evidence of recent use, not historical use and you cant base a study on long term effects based on recent use.
Marijuana impairs attention. That seems to be the linkage that most people cite. But I find no hard statistics on this either.
Well, there's plenty of evidence that Marijuana has effects on response time (like most depressants).
For most of us who've smoked pot, we know it definitely affects your faculties to the point where you cant drive safely, more over this is more noticeable to the user than it is with alcohol. Unlike alcohol, pot users tend to avoid taking extreme risks like excessive speed (people driving high tend to be slower than the median, which is still bad) but still have the problems with fine motor control (keeping the wheel straight) as well as reduced response speed and impaired perception.
I'm pro-decriminalisation of marijuana, but really it needs to be treated like other legal mind altering drugs (I.E. Alcohol). In Australia we treat driving under the influence of drugs to be the same as driving under the influence of Alcohol but you also get a drug conviction, not just a DUI conviction.
There was also a study of New Zealanders. They found that people who began using pot earlier in life and used it most frequently over the years experienced an average decline of eight IQ points by the time they turned 38. By comparison, those who never smoked pot had an average increase of one IQ point by the same age.
A reanalysis of the New Zealand data by Ole Røgeberg of the Ragnar Frisch Center for Economic Research in Oslo, however, suggested that the IQ difference could be explained by socioeconomic factors. People who start smoking marijuana at an earlier age are often less intelligent to begin with.
You will find most of the research is similarly tainted.
How such research is conducted.
Researcher: Have you used marijuana?
Dumb pot user: Yes
Smart pot user: No
The only real way to confirm this is to check for a history of drug related charges, which will only be present for the dumbest of the dumb.
This should be obvious, but maybe not...
Yeah, they can surely make them small. But with smallness comes small capacity. It should go without saying but a battery 1/10th the size of today's typical cell phone battery would only get 1/10th the talk time. So, what, 30 minutes tops?
This should be obvious, but maybe not.
on a typical watch that is connected by links (you know, the metal studs) there is significant area in the links themselves. If you were to put a cell in each one and link them together, you can reduce the size of the face.
And another thing: How would you use it to talk? Like Dick Tracy does? That's fine if you don't care about others near you hearing both sides of the conversation (and being intensely annoying to some bystanders). What do you do for a private conversation, hold it to your ear? Imagine that for a minute. It would look about as ridiculous as someone talking with a phablet.
This may be obvious, but maybe not.
We already have a solution to this, I use it to skype on my 10" tablet.
It's called a headset. I connects via bluetooth.
You have any idea how much talk time you would get from a battery that can fit inside a watch? We need a few of those revolutionary battery breakthroughs that we've read about for years to happen first.
How small can you make battery cells? Small enough to fit inside the links of the watch band?
Erm... Patent pending.
People who dont understand this are forced to rely on what other people tell them.
So to them, there is no difference between science and religion (even if they are told there is).
The sad part is, these people end up in a position where they can spread their anti-science nonsense.
A 2000+ year old book (older, in some cases) fraudulently constructed by ignorant, illiterate peasant halfwits from a time before justice and democracy
Youre knowledge of history is truly astounding. Do tell, when do you suppose the Roman Republic existed? Or the democratic Greek city-states?
Or that it was written by illiterate peasants when the Christian Bible was in fact penned by the nobility at the council of Nicaea which was assembled by the Roman Emperor Constantine.
Constantine was not the first ruler to write religious texts and many kings and tyrants since Constantine have re-written the bible in part or in whole to suit their own needs.
Nissan will be ready with revolutionary commercially-viable Autonomous Drive in multiple vehicles by the year 2020
Why would anyone buy a new Nissan, now that Nissan has told us that if we wait for six years (at the longest!) we could get one with Autonomous Drive?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_Effect
Precisely because we _dont_ want a self driving car.
Sales will be unaffected as demand for new cars is fairly inelastic. What will be effected is the share price. This is Nissan saying "we're really advanced, buy NSSNY now".
Road Kill for dinner.
The amazing autonomous James Bond "Q" car will catch it, skin it, and roast it over the car engine while you drive.
When you get home, dinner will be ready to be served.
Yum, yum.
Ahh, you must be thinking of the new Ford F160 Roaster utility.
The Aston Martin DB12 will not only hit a deer, it will butcher it, sautee it and serve venison with lightly buttered garden vegetables and a nice Chianti.
Getting rear-ended because you are going the speed limit while the person behind you is exceeding it is rarely anything more serious than a fender-bender... and the person who rear-ended you is going to be held to be at fault.
Erm. Getting rear ended at the lights is usually enough to put your car out of commission for a while.
At the very best, at the speed limit of 60KPH you're looking at a serious bumper repair. Possibly worse (my car has fins under the bumper to produce more downforce, those are damn expensive to replace as my cars been out of production for 6 years). Even just hitting your average hatch, that is a few grand to replace.
At worst, you'll bend the chassis and that's a complete write off in my country.
Yep, it's all the responsibility of the tool who hits me (and I have a dash cam in case the tool does a hit and run) but the inconvenience of having my car taken off the road and possibly even having to go buy another car.
If the car in front has a braking distance of 50 feet and the car behinds brakes are not as good with a braking distance of 100 feet then the car behind needs to be 50 feet from the car in front, autonomous or otherwise.
This, your total stopping distance is not the distance you need to keep from another vehicle, nor your braking distance.
You need to be far enough back to stop in an emergency without hitting the car in front. Because this distance varies with car type, weight, tyre condition and speed, we measure it in time as opposed to distance. 3 seconds is generally considered safe, anything less than 2 seconds is dangerous. A 2-3 second gap is good on a dry road as long as your car's in good condition (decent brakes and tyres). I typically double that for large vehicles (trucks).
There is no rule that says the left lane is for speeding.
The left lane is NOT a speeding lane. It is not you personal driving lane. It is not their responsibility that you can't drive legally.
Suck it up and stop causing accident, you jerk.
Reading this is funny considering that for me, the left lane is the outside lane.
But your point stands. There is no designated speeding lane. Some laws dictate that you cant be in the inside lane if you're not overtaking but this varies.
Generally speaking though, on any dual carriageway (multi lane road) its just common god damn courtesy to not drive in the inside lane without a good reason (overtaking, turning, etc...). Courtesy isn't codified in law, but it's still a good bloody idea. The inside lane is not anyone's personal lane, be it for speeding or going slow.
Then again, courtesy is not that common
Traffic jams are almost a sole function of human deficiencies through overreaction and slow reaction.
No they are not. That is a myth. Traffic jams are almost a sole function of not enough road for the number of cars. Once a road is at capacity, no amount of 'perfect' driving is going to prevent the addition of more cars from causing traffic slowdowns and eventually traffic jams.
Not traffic jams as such but traffic waves definitely are caused by over and under reaction by bad drivers.
A scenario I see often, Car #2 brakes because he's going faster than Car #1, Car #3 panics and hits the brakes harder. This chain continues until we reach someone who was actually watching more than the car right in front of you and left enough room to ride out the wave without braking.
Traffic waves are often confused for jams as waves often bring traffic to a halt for short periods of time.
One of the oldest rules of survival - STUPID ANIMALS DIE!!!!
Only up to a point. Natural selection works both ways. Stupid animals may die because they make stupid mistakes. But smart animals may also be under a disadvantage because their more active brain consumes more energy, and the curiosity that comes with intelligence may get them in trouble. If wild animals, such as rats, are captured, selectively bred to improve their intelligence, and then released, they will regress to their original level. So you want to be smart, but not too smart.
Not really, smarter animals are more often in trouble when stupid animals die because they used the stupid animal as a staple food source.
Not that I propose eating anti-vaxxers... Who knows what diseases they might have.