Have you ever actually used an uber? Try doing it on a crowded street or by a hotel. It can take more than 2 minutes to find the damn car, its not like they're easily marked taxis. I've had ubers go more than 5 minutes late because they decided to park in the lot across the street, how the fuck was I supposed to know that?
Minicabbers in London will either call you or beep/signal in another way.
But no doubt Uber will start offering that as a paid service shortly.
Even if you say the driver should be getting paid for those minutes, taking the current US median taxi driver wage of around $16 per hour (source http://www1.salary.com/Taxi-Dr... [salary.com] ) (which is likely more than an uber drivers average hourly wage) that extra 5 minutes at most should be $1.33. Charging $5-$10 is excessive.
So, yeah, $1.33 for the driver; $8.67 for Uber. Fair is fair.
Expect more of this from Uber in the future as they're haemorrhaging more and more money each quarter.
This is what happens when you support a race to the bottom. Its reminiscent of the US airline industry which has pretty much completed nickel and diming everyone for absolutely everything, expect the low cost taxi industry to do the same... well if they dont go bankrupt in the process which at over US$100 million a quarter is a distinct possibility.
Expensive does NOT always mean better. Though yes, very often you get what you pay for.
But the OP did not say "Expensive == better".
He said he's willing to pay a little bit more for a product that lasts.
Buying the cheap $40 business shoes might seem like a bargain, but they only last six months. Buying a $120 pair is more sensible when they last 2 years. I'm a bit of a tight arse, but I do the same because paying a little bit more for a job done right is cheaper than paying to have the job done again.
Also I tend to put a bit of research into the things I buy, I'm well aware that expensive does not equal quality (erm... Apple) but cheap more often than not equals crap. I'll happily pay a small premium for say Sennheiser headphones because they break less often than the headphones you get for $5 off or Amazon, however I wont pay for the top end $300 headphones (for me, $50-100 is the sweet spot). The extra comfort is worth it, same with the noise isolation as my housemate has recently developed RPD (Random Pavarotti Disorder).
OTOH if I dont care how long a product lasts, I'll generally buy the cheapest. I have been pleasantly surprised in the past but most of the time, quality has been adequate at best.
Also, most MP3s are now sold without copy protection anyway so there is no analog hole.
Now... As in currently.
Make no mistake, the content industry would like nothing less than to kill DRM free products, most likely with a new format that not only has DRM baked in, but is entirely based around DRM.
The consumer doesn't even enter the equation here. This is about control. Again.
Sort of, except ultimately the consumers have to actually buy this stuff. And there's a problem there. People who like sound and have expensive headphones aren't going to rush out and plunk down another few hundred bucks willy nilly.
You're placing too much faith in people knowing what the hell they are doing.
I guess you're a software developer, if you were a Sysadmin you'd understand that people are just that stupid. Facebook is case in point. The masses piled onto the platform not caring what would happen to their data... now they're all like "Waaaaaaahhhhhh, Big Data leave me alone". People dont think about the consequences until it's too late... Need more examples, go visit a drunk driver in prison.
Expensive USB headphones will be sold to them because they will buy the latest iPotato which doesn't have a 3.5mm headphone port. They'll buy it willingly because of the reason above and it's OMG iPotato!!!!1!!!11!!ONE!!!.
However my money is on it not working... like every other USB headset I've ever used.
1: Car audio. Even the crackheads won't bust out a car stereo these days. Apple making an actual 1-2 DIN audio head would score big, as car makers would buy it. Car makers would actually be faced with a choice, just like existing CarPlay. Buy Apple's product, or go bankrupt and be replaced by companies that have.
Hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha.
The car industry is far more powerful than Apple, who's power is waning. It's the car industry that will dictate terms to the head unit makers, not Apple to the car industry. Also car audio is the very definition of an over saturated market. You've got dozens of choices with large established manufacturers willing to run on razor thin margins. This is why car makers can dictate to them.
Besides, all the car industry will have to do to counter Apple's threats is go to Microsoft or Google and say "Apple are promising this, but want us to do this thing we dont like" and they'll jump at doing the same thing as Apple without the thing they dont like.
3: Security in general. Make a new type of mechanical, or electro-mechanical key lock
Hey look, its a solution without a problem.
It will never gain traction because it's nothing but a gimmick. A traditional lock and key is good enough and will still work when the powers out.
Go into the enterprise. Apple has name recognition,
Again, oversaturated and Apple's support policy of "blame the user" combined with their design philosophy of "our way or the highway" means that business wont touch them.
Make a security IoT infrastructure.
Another gimmick. Besides, giving people lots of options on what to do with their product is contrary to apple's philosophy of taking away options from the user.
Sell iOS technologies as an embedded platform, as well as their custom ARM SoC.
You mean like a phone... or a tablet... or a media centre... oh wait.
Get with Intel and VMWare, make an XServe model which has ESXi (upgradable of course) in firmware
You mean like HP, IBM, Dell and every other server vendor has been doing for years? Shipping essentially disk-less servers with nothing but a bit of memory for ESXi and a heap of network IO ports. I assure you Apple are at least 8 years late to this party and again, the margins are razor thin.
Also you dont seem to understand how Apple or VMWare work. Apple beleives in locking you into their infrastructure, VMWare believes in not locking you into anyone's infrastructure, not even their own. With VSphere it doesn't matter if it's IBM, Dell or HP running underneath ESXi as long as the CPU's are compatible. Its going to get worse for Apple with NSX, now it doesn't matter what network and storage you're running as your guests are only dealing with the hypervisor.
Do you work for Tech Crunch? I have to ask because you've presented us with a list of ideas to save Apple that range from the useless to the utterly stupid.
My prediction is that Apple will try to enter the car market and that will bury them. Tesla already offers a better product, by the time Apple has made a car Hyundai will offer a better product and the Apple i-car will cost three times as much, have the indicator stalk sticking out of the back seat, the satnav will only work with Apple authorised locations and it will only turn right.
All year round, in many areas the roads are not safe for cyclists anyway.
From what I've seen here in London, cyclists are not safe for the roads the year round. I dont know what it is about Lycra that makes people feel invincible around 2 ton hulking death machines.
The UK has the harshest Drink Driving penalties in the western world.
Being caught with a breath test reading of 35 micrograms of alcohol per 100 micrograms of breath (about 0.08 BAC) carries:
1) Mandatory 12 month driving suspension (minimum, could be up to 36 months).
2) Up to a 2500 pound fine (calculated according to your income).
3) 3 to 11 demerit points.
Repeat offenders can expect up to 5 years suspension, 5000 pounds in fines and up to 6 months in prison. More over, you can be charged with drink driving even if you blow just under the limit.
These penalties are far harsher than any others I've seen, especially compared to Australia or the US.
In the UK these penalties work because they're enforced and we have decent public transport options (erm... not to mention there's a pub on every street corner, so you dont have to go far to get rat faced if you dont want to). It's just not worth the risk to drink and drive... nor do you really need to.
A friend moved from the US to the UK and joined the company I worked at (he wasnt a friend before that point) and he was astounded by how different the drink-drive culture is in the UK - over here, its universally accepted that its a very very very bad thing to do, to the point where very few people pressure you to "have a quick one" if you are driving, and drinking soft drinks on a night out is completely acceptable.
He was very approving of it, and said that it was unheard of from where he came from (California).
Just for people who've never been to the UK, that's because the DUI penalties are an instant loss of license. The penalty for DUI is 1-3 years of license suspension and up to 2500 pounds in fines for your first offence, second offences within 10 years can get up to 5 years suspension and 5000 pounds in fines. Jail is also a real possibility for repeat offenders.
They really do take a hard line on drink driving over here, in Australia or the US, if you're caught just under the permitted BAC (Blood Alcohol Content, for the uninitiated) then you're fine, here courts are likely to treat that as DUI. If you get pinged for drink driving, you've got no chance of keeping your license.
The UK has the harshest drink driving rules I've seen outside of countries where alcohol is illegal.
The cars only have to pass a laboratory test. If that test bears no resemblance to the real world (which the EU one doesn't) then thats the fault of the people who devised it.
That would be the auto industry itself.
The problem they have in Europe is due to historic dicounts/tax concessions on diesel, they became popular with tight-fisted motorists. Even though most of these concessions have been removed, the mindset of "diesel == cheap" remains.
There is a backlash in Europe against diesels because they've been directly linked to worsening air quality in major cities.
The main problem with emissions is if you want good fuel economy and hence lower CO2 per km then you need a high burn temp. The trouble with that is a high burn temp gives high NOx. Take your pick.
The only serious solution to NOx is a urea system such as adblue as used in trucks but that's more equipment, more complexity and more expense.
You cant make diesel cleaner. It's impossible. Everyone I know who worked with diesel engines from the fitter and mechanic level to the design and engineering level predicted this kind of revelation happening years ago. Being engineers, you can imagine the level of smug they generated after Dieselgate.
To make diesel as clean as petrol, you have to refine it into petrol in the first place.
Small diesel passenger cars are really an abbreviation, which is why they aren't common in the US or Australia where we never subsidised diesel fuels for passenger cars. Diesel engines are heavier and more complex than petrols, they require turbochargers regardless (if you want to know what a truly gutless car feels like, drive a naturally aspirated diesel). The returns are less than non-turbo petrol engines of the same size, if you turbo a petrol engine, you could easily knock 25% of the capacity off and still have a faster car with the same fuel efficiency and is kinder to the baby foxes.
The only time a diesel engine is better than a petrol is when you need pulling power. This is why almost all big rigs and tractors are turbo diesels. Even decent 4x4's like a Hilux or Triton tend to use diesels, not for fuel efficiency but to pull 3 tons of bricks about using a 2.4L 4 banger.
There were two articles that appeared in my feed yesterday morning. Both had headlines about "free things to do in London this week". One served up an ad, the other told me about things that were going on in London in the coming week. Things like free exhibitions, entry to venues, fee tours, so on and so forth. There may have been a small ad or two in the content but I didn't notice or care.
Hey, dont get me wrong. I wish it were as simple as ignoring every headline that looks buzzfeedy but sadly most news agencies have fallen into the habit of using clickbait, whether they be small agencies who want to print decent stories and just need to use it to get the eyeballs or mega (news) corps who are just trying to get ads seen.
Gotta fix this for you: Facebook kills clickbait with one simple tweak! Number 6 will blow your mind!
Really though, the clickbait industry is going into a death phase and has been since last year, and with any luck it'll kill the sites. Advertising revenue is drying up, people aren't going to the sites.
This.
And it is entirely because the advertisements have become too insidious, too annoying and too intrusive.
Advertisers have learned that if you load the advertisement, especially the interstitial too quickly, before giving the sucker... erm, I mean viewer a split second view of the content than they'll instantly turn off. So they let the page load first and then load the ad over the content.
Sadly the only defences against this are adblockers or learning which sites are not taking the piss with advertising. Whilst I prefer the later, more and more sites are making me dependent on the former. Also, having recently moved countries, I'm having to learn which local sites are abusing my internet connection... Londonist... I'm looking right at you.
Ignore laws, write off settlements as cost of doing business compared to revenue.
Sounds about business as usual.
How much longer can Uber keep doing it? Last year it was revealed they were losing $100 million a quarter. That was before the notion of giving out $100 million settlements to make people go away.
The same thing was said when the Colecovision and Atari 2600 faded.
When was the Atari trying to compete with PC's of the day?
The Atari was a toy, nowhere near PC's of the day. When Atari died we got Sega and Ninendo (note: this name is familar to children today). The NES was still very toy like.
That is completely different to today where we have the last two Playstations and Xboxes trying to take on PC gaming and utterly failing at it. Nintendo did it right when they decided the Wii would be an accessible console, enjoyable even if you weren't a gamer. It was a toy and that isn't demeaning in the slightest. As a 35 yr old... Yes I still buy toys... they just got more expensive (owner of 2 sports cars... very expensive). Fortunately not the Wii which is something I can enjoy with my non gamer friends.
The country where something is developed first is saddled with a large installed base of the older tech. Countries which hop on the bandwagon later benefit from the experience of that trailblazer, and get the better tech right off the bat. Other examples include:
African countries lead the world in ratio of cellular vs landline phones - they just skipped landlines almost entirely.
Erm... this is mainly because when they tried to lay copper, it was being dug up to be sold as scrap metal.
Fibre optic cable between mobile towers isn't valuable enough to be worth digging up.
"because you can't tip Chip & Pin unless they bring the mobile POS to the table and you enter the tip directly in it."
Bringing the POS to you is the point. It works perfectly fine for damned dirty communists in Europe.
Patently false sir.
You're right due to our 1000 year history of anti-slavery rules here in 5 weeks of paid holiday Britain that we dont tip because it's unnecessary and frankly barbaric to keep people on unliveable wages that they are dependent on the charity of customers but that doesn't stop you from being able to tip with a Chip and Pin card.
You simply do it the same way you currently do it. The service serf brings you a cheque with a pen, you write the tip amount or percentage onto the cheque, the indentured thrall then takes that to the till, enters the tip in as a line item, finalises the sale and the till passes the full amount, tip and all to the Chip and Pin device.
Also mobile Chip and Pin terminals are commonplace over here. Mainly because they're the cheapest device offered to small businesses.
I don't really care that much about the theoretical security. I avoid this technology because it shifts liability onto me, that with swiping the card the old way rests with the bank.
I don't want to take on a smaller liability to save the bank from the larger old one. It isn't like the savings pass through to me.
Then fix your shitty government.
In Australia and Europe, the liability still rests with the bank. In fact merchants have gotten rid of swiping only terminals because it's the other way around (and should be) that the merchant can be liable for not having the updated terminals where as with Chip and Pin, the bank is liable.
Then Netflix shouldn't put it on my list. Or rather they should dish out for the rights, they've continued to increase prices while dropping more than half their content.
You should just stop paying them.
Do you know the only reason I haven't stopped paying Netflix A$12 per month... Because I can still access US content.
If that stopped, yeah I'd go back to Channel BT. Your move content "owners".
What a moron. We have wait until an airliner crashes, then we do something, right? You'll notice that the thing was not sucked into an engine, and that the 747 was landing, not taking off. If both those criteria had been met then your post might read a little differently. You appear not to notice the research that has been conducted on bird strikes on large jets for many years. You also seem to be unaware of the unlucky passengers of light aircraft who have had large birds land in their laps, along with chunks of perspex and aluminium. The pilots are asking for more research, but you'd rather not find out because, hey, your rights trump everything and everyone.
On the whole, I agree with the gist of your post but it wasn't a Boeing 747, it was an Airbus A320.
Which makes the risk of an engine strike even worse as they only have two of them and a fair bit less wingspan.
It should also be noted that the drone, fortunately, struck the front of the aircraft rather than an engine or control surface (the article in the summary did not mention this, I read it on the BBC this morning).
Erm, but carry on. Apart from those minor quibbles I agree with your point.
Totally wrong. Pilots regularly train for engine failures at all stages of takeoff, and unless spectacularly mishandled, does NOT lead to the plane crashing.
Also, losing an engine in cruise does NOT cause the a/c to start losing altitude quickly. Sure, you'll have to drift down to a single engine cruise altitude but it's not nearly as harsh as the poster seems to think.
Well it's good to know that the Air Conditioning will keep working whilst the airframe plummets it's occupants to an almost certain death.
For the humour impaired, this is a sarcastic post about using industry specific jargon and acronyms. If you take a BA flight over here to London Tesco have a basic sense of humour package for £20. Watch out for drones on your way in.
Uber: order an illegal taxi.. but online. Facebook: Gossip circle... but online. Amazon: going to a warehouse... but online.
None of these are innovations, apart from Amazon, none of them are even successful. This is why American innovation is failing, you cant just add "but online" to something that already exists and call it new. Uber and Facebook are feats of marketing over technology and hard work and if you ask me, that is exactly the problem.
First off, dont get me wrong, the US still produces a lot of innovative products, just not from people you normally think (Apple, Uber, Facebook, none of them innovative, yes fanbois, its true and you know it so bite me). Think of things like VMWare NSX, the thing is, things like that are built with global talent. That has really been the only thing keeping the US ahead of the game, the fact that you used to be able to attract the best scientific and engineering talent... So what happened.
Well I said commonly cited "innovations" are nothing but marketing circuses and there in lies the problem. Being seen as an innovation is more important to a modern American company than actually being innovative. Science and engineering jobs are not respected, they're seen as cost centres, necessary evils and punished when engineering cannot produce what marketing has promised. As such, STEM jobs are now low paying and have appalling conditions. Long hours and low pay in lay terms, why would anyone want to go to the US for that, you can have shit wages in your own country and often better conditions than the US (20-28 paid holidays a year sound nice)?
Add to this, the patent and copyright minefield that has been created. The US became big by deliberately ignoring the patents of other nations, now seeks to viciously defend its own. Property that has no tangible value is defended more vigorously than people who can actually develop and build new technologies.
Whilst engineers have always been happy to work long hours for their craft, they've traditionally been rewarded for it, this is the kind of thing that made NASA, Boeing and IBM giants. Now the marketers are more important and get the big wages, the lawyers, instead of being told to solve problems for the engineers are now forcing engineers to solve problems for them. Laws have become anti-innovation and anti-technology. Appearance is now more important than reality. Am I the only one who sees the problem with this?
Slashdot Mirror
Considering that the only thing ironic in that song is that it had nothing to do with irony.
Have you ever actually used an uber? Try doing it on a crowded street or by a hotel. It can take more than 2 minutes to find the damn car, its not like they're easily marked taxis. I've had ubers go more than 5 minutes late because they decided to park in the lot across the street, how the fuck was I supposed to know that?
Minicabbers in London will either call you or beep/signal in another way.
But no doubt Uber will start offering that as a paid service shortly.
So, yeah, $1.33 for the driver; $8.67 for Uber. Fair is fair.
Expect more of this from Uber in the future as they're haemorrhaging more and more money each quarter.
This is what happens when you support a race to the bottom. Its reminiscent of the US airline industry which has pretty much completed nickel and diming everyone for absolutely everything, expect the low cost taxi industry to do the same... well if they dont go bankrupt in the process which at over US$100 million a quarter is a distinct possibility.
Expensive does NOT always mean better. Though yes, very often you get what you pay for.
But the OP did not say "Expensive == better".
He said he's willing to pay a little bit more for a product that lasts.
Buying the cheap $40 business shoes might seem like a bargain, but they only last six months. Buying a $120 pair is more sensible when they last 2 years. I'm a bit of a tight arse, but I do the same because paying a little bit more for a job done right is cheaper than paying to have the job done again.
Also I tend to put a bit of research into the things I buy, I'm well aware that expensive does not equal quality (erm... Apple) but cheap more often than not equals crap. I'll happily pay a small premium for say Sennheiser headphones because they break less often than the headphones you get for $5 off or Amazon, however I wont pay for the top end $300 headphones (for me, $50-100 is the sweet spot). The extra comfort is worth it, same with the noise isolation as my housemate has recently developed RPD (Random Pavarotti Disorder).
OTOH if I dont care how long a product lasts, I'll generally buy the cheapest. I have been pleasantly surprised in the past but most of the time, quality has been adequate at best.
The the last number is "fucktons" or the metric equivalent (fucktonnes?),
Just for everyone playing along at home, a metric fuckton is approximately 2.3 imperial shitloads (British) or 3.1 fucktonnes (US Customary).
Also, what is this "sun" you speak of? I live in Seattle, you insensitive clod.
Seattle, you mean a tropical paradise.
Signed,
A Londoner.
Also, most MP3s are now sold without copy protection anyway so there is no analog hole.
Now... As in currently.
Make no mistake, the content industry would like nothing less than to kill DRM free products, most likely with a new format that not only has DRM baked in, but is entirely based around DRM.
The consumer doesn't even enter the equation here. This is about control. Again.
Sort of, except ultimately the consumers have to actually buy this stuff. And there's a problem there. People who like sound and have expensive headphones aren't going to rush out and plunk down another few hundred bucks willy nilly.
You're placing too much faith in people knowing what the hell they are doing.
I guess you're a software developer, if you were a Sysadmin you'd understand that people are just that stupid. Facebook is case in point. The masses piled onto the platform not caring what would happen to their data... now they're all like "Waaaaaaahhhhhh, Big Data leave me alone". People dont think about the consequences until it's too late... Need more examples, go visit a drunk driver in prison.
Expensive USB headphones will be sold to them because they will buy the latest iPotato which doesn't have a 3.5mm headphone port. They'll buy it willingly because of the reason above and it's OMG iPotato!!!!1!!!11!!ONE!!!.
However my money is on it not working... like every other USB headset I've ever used.
Hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha.
The car industry is far more powerful than Apple, who's power is waning. It's the car industry that will dictate terms to the head unit makers, not Apple to the car industry. Also car audio is the very definition of an over saturated market. You've got dozens of choices with large established manufacturers willing to run on razor thin margins. This is why car makers can dictate to them.
Besides, all the car industry will have to do to counter Apple's threats is go to Microsoft or Google and say "Apple are promising this, but want us to do this thing we dont like" and they'll jump at doing the same thing as Apple without the thing they dont like.
3: Security in general. Make a new type of mechanical, or electro-mechanical key lock
Hey look, its a solution without a problem.
It will never gain traction because it's nothing but a gimmick. A traditional lock and key is good enough and will still work when the powers out.
Go into the enterprise. Apple has name recognition,
Again, oversaturated and Apple's support policy of "blame the user" combined with their design philosophy of "our way or the highway" means that business wont touch them.
Make a security IoT infrastructure.
Another gimmick. Besides, giving people lots of options on what to do with their product is contrary to apple's philosophy of taking away options from the user.
Sell iOS technologies as an embedded platform, as well as their custom ARM SoC.
You mean like a phone... or a tablet... or a media centre... oh wait.
Get with Intel and VMWare, make an XServe model which has ESXi (upgradable of course) in firmware
You mean like HP, IBM, Dell and every other server vendor has been doing for years? Shipping essentially disk-less servers with nothing but a bit of memory for ESXi and a heap of network IO ports. I assure you Apple are at least 8 years late to this party and again, the margins are razor thin.
Also you dont seem to understand how Apple or VMWare work. Apple beleives in locking you into their infrastructure, VMWare believes in not locking you into anyone's infrastructure, not even their own. With VSphere it doesn't matter if it's IBM, Dell or HP running underneath ESXi as long as the CPU's are compatible. Its going to get worse for Apple with NSX, now it doesn't matter what network and storage you're running as your guests are only dealing with the hypervisor.
Do you work for Tech Crunch? I have to ask because you've presented us with a list of ideas to save Apple that range from the useless to the utterly stupid.
My prediction is that Apple will try to enter the car market and that will bury them. Tesla already offers a better product, by the time Apple has made a car Hyundai will offer a better product and the Apple i-car will cost three times as much, have the indicator stalk sticking out of the back seat, the satnav will only work with Apple authorised locations and it will only turn right.
All year round, in many areas the roads are not safe for cyclists anyway.
From what I've seen here in London, cyclists are not safe for the roads the year round. I dont know what it is about Lycra that makes people feel invincible around 2 ton hulking death machines.
I take it you've never actually looked them up.
The UK has the harshest Drink Driving penalties in the western world.
Being caught with a breath test reading of 35 micrograms of alcohol per 100 micrograms of breath (about 0.08 BAC) carries:
1) Mandatory 12 month driving suspension (minimum, could be up to 36 months).
2) Up to a 2500 pound fine (calculated according to your income).
3) 3 to 11 demerit points.
Repeat offenders can expect up to 5 years suspension, 5000 pounds in fines and up to 6 months in prison. More over, you can be charged with drink driving even if you blow just under the limit.
These penalties are far harsher than any others I've seen, especially compared to Australia or the US.
In the UK these penalties work because they're enforced and we have decent public transport options (erm... not to mention there's a pub on every street corner, so you dont have to go far to get rat faced if you dont want to). It's just not worth the risk to drink and drive... nor do you really need to.
A friend moved from the US to the UK and joined the company I worked at (he wasnt a friend before that point) and he was astounded by how different the drink-drive culture is in the UK - over here, its universally accepted that its a very very very bad thing to do, to the point where very few people pressure you to "have a quick one" if you are driving, and drinking soft drinks on a night out is completely acceptable.
He was very approving of it, and said that it was unheard of from where he came from (California).
Just for people who've never been to the UK, that's because the DUI penalties are an instant loss of license. The penalty for DUI is 1-3 years of license suspension and up to 2500 pounds in fines for your first offence, second offences within 10 years can get up to 5 years suspension and 5000 pounds in fines. Jail is also a real possibility for repeat offenders.
They really do take a hard line on drink driving over here, in Australia or the US, if you're caught just under the permitted BAC (Blood Alcohol Content, for the uninitiated) then you're fine, here courts are likely to treat that as DUI. If you get pinged for drink driving, you've got no chance of keeping your license.
The UK has the harshest drink driving rules I've seen outside of countries where alcohol is illegal.
The cars only have to pass a laboratory test. If that test bears no resemblance to the real world (which the EU one doesn't) then thats the fault of the people who devised it.
That would be the auto industry itself.
The problem they have in Europe is due to historic dicounts/tax concessions on diesel, they became popular with tight-fisted motorists. Even though most of these concessions have been removed, the mindset of "diesel == cheap" remains.
There is a backlash in Europe against diesels because they've been directly linked to worsening air quality in major cities.
The main problem with emissions is if you want good fuel economy and hence lower CO2 per km then you need a high burn temp. The trouble with that is a high burn temp gives high NOx. Take your pick.
The only serious solution to NOx is a urea system such as adblue as used in trucks but that's more equipment, more complexity and more expense.
You cant make diesel cleaner. It's impossible. Everyone I know who worked with diesel engines from the fitter and mechanic level to the design and engineering level predicted this kind of revelation happening years ago. Being engineers, you can imagine the level of smug they generated after Dieselgate.
To make diesel as clean as petrol, you have to refine it into petrol in the first place.
Small diesel passenger cars are really an abbreviation, which is why they aren't common in the US or Australia where we never subsidised diesel fuels for passenger cars. Diesel engines are heavier and more complex than petrols, they require turbochargers regardless (if you want to know what a truly gutless car feels like, drive a naturally aspirated diesel). The returns are less than non-turbo petrol engines of the same size, if you turbo a petrol engine, you could easily knock 25% of the capacity off and still have a faster car with the same fuel efficiency and is kinder to the baby foxes.
The only time a diesel engine is better than a petrol is when you need pulling power. This is why almost all big rigs and tractors are turbo diesels. Even decent 4x4's like a Hilux or Triton tend to use diesels, not for fuel efficiency but to pull 3 tons of bricks about using a 2.4L 4 banger.
Sadly its not always that simple.
There were two articles that appeared in my feed yesterday morning. Both had headlines about "free things to do in London this week". One served up an ad, the other told me about things that were going on in London in the coming week. Things like free exhibitions, entry to venues, fee tours, so on and so forth. There may have been a small ad or two in the content but I didn't notice or care.
Hey, dont get me wrong. I wish it were as simple as ignoring every headline that looks buzzfeedy but sadly most news agencies have fallen into the habit of using clickbait, whether they be small agencies who want to print decent stories and just need to use it to get the eyeballs or mega (news) corps who are just trying to get ads seen.
Gotta fix this for you:
Facebook kills clickbait with one simple tweak! Number 6 will blow your mind!
Really though, the clickbait industry is going into a death phase and has been since last year, and with any luck it'll kill the sites. Advertising revenue is drying up, people aren't going to the sites.
This.
And it is entirely because the advertisements have become too insidious, too annoying and too intrusive.
Advertisers have learned that if you load the advertisement, especially the interstitial too quickly, before giving the sucker... erm, I mean viewer a split second view of the content than they'll instantly turn off. So they let the page load first and then load the ad over the content.
Sadly the only defences against this are adblockers or learning which sites are not taking the piss with advertising. Whilst I prefer the later, more and more sites are making me dependent on the former. Also, having recently moved countries, I'm having to learn which local sites are abusing my internet connection... Londonist... I'm looking right at you.
Ignore laws, write off settlements as cost of doing business compared to revenue.
Sounds about business as usual.
How much longer can Uber keep doing it? Last year it was revealed they were losing $100 million a quarter. That was before the notion of giving out $100 million settlements to make people go away.
The same thing was said when the Colecovision and Atari 2600 faded.
When was the Atari trying to compete with PC's of the day?
The Atari was a toy, nowhere near PC's of the day. When Atari died we got Sega and Ninendo (note: this name is familar to children today). The NES was still very toy like.
That is completely different to today where we have the last two Playstations and Xboxes trying to take on PC gaming and utterly failing at it. Nintendo did it right when they decided the Wii would be an accessible console, enjoyable even if you weren't a gamer. It was a toy and that isn't demeaning in the slightest. As a 35 yr old... Yes I still buy toys... they just got more expensive (owner of 2 sports cars... very expensive). Fortunately not the Wii which is something I can enjoy with my non gamer friends.
The country where something is developed first is saddled with a large installed base of the older tech. Countries which hop on the bandwagon later benefit from the experience of that trailblazer, and get the better tech right off the bat. Other examples include:
Erm... this is mainly because when they tried to lay copper, it was being dug up to be sold as scrap metal.
Fibre optic cable between mobile towers isn't valuable enough to be worth digging up.
"because you can't tip Chip & Pin unless they bring the mobile POS to the table and you enter the tip directly in it."
Bringing the POS to you is the point. It works perfectly fine for damned dirty communists in Europe.
Patently false sir.
You're right due to our 1000 year history of anti-slavery rules here in 5 weeks of paid holiday Britain that we dont tip because it's unnecessary and frankly barbaric to keep people on unliveable wages that they are dependent on the charity of customers but that doesn't stop you from being able to tip with a Chip and Pin card.
You simply do it the same way you currently do it. The service serf brings you a cheque with a pen, you write the tip amount or percentage onto the cheque, the indentured thrall then takes that to the till, enters the tip in as a line item, finalises the sale and the till passes the full amount, tip and all to the Chip and Pin device.
Also mobile Chip and Pin terminals are commonplace over here. Mainly because they're the cheapest device offered to small businesses.
I don't really care that much about the theoretical security. I avoid this technology because it shifts liability onto me, that with swiping the card the old way rests with the bank.
I don't want to take on a smaller liability to save the bank from the larger old one. It isn't like the savings pass through to me.
Then fix your shitty government.
In Australia and Europe, the liability still rests with the bank. In fact merchants have gotten rid of swiping only terminals because it's the other way around (and should be) that the merchant can be liable for not having the updated terminals where as with Chip and Pin, the bank is liable.
Hi, this is Steve. I read all this emails.
Given the standard of your grammar, I can only assume your position has already gone.
How's the weather in Mumbai this time of year.
Then Netflix shouldn't put it on my list. Or rather they should dish out for the rights, they've continued to increase prices while dropping more than half their content.
You should just stop paying them.
Do you know the only reason I haven't stopped paying Netflix A$12 per month... Because I can still access US content.
If that stopped, yeah I'd go back to Channel BT. Your move content "owners".
This Steve, is what happens when you piss off a sysadmin.
What a moron. We have wait until an airliner crashes, then we do something, right? You'll notice that the thing was not sucked into an engine, and that the 747 was landing, not taking off. If both those criteria had been met then your post might read a little differently. You appear not to notice the research that has been conducted on bird strikes on large jets for many years. You also seem to be unaware of the unlucky passengers of light aircraft who have had large birds land in their laps, along with chunks of perspex and aluminium. The pilots are asking for more research, but you'd rather not find out because, hey, your rights trump everything and everyone.
On the whole, I agree with the gist of your post but it wasn't a Boeing 747, it was an Airbus A320.
Which makes the risk of an engine strike even worse as they only have two of them and a fair bit less wingspan.
It should also be noted that the drone, fortunately, struck the front of the aircraft rather than an engine or control surface (the article in the summary did not mention this, I read it on the BBC this morning).
Erm, but carry on. Apart from those minor quibbles I agree with your point.
Totally wrong. Pilots regularly train for engine failures at all stages of takeoff, and unless spectacularly mishandled, does NOT lead to the plane crashing.
Also, losing an engine in cruise does NOT cause the a/c to start losing altitude quickly. Sure, you'll have to drift down to a single engine cruise altitude but it's not nearly as harsh as the poster seems to think.
Well it's good to know that the Air Conditioning will keep working whilst the airframe plummets it's occupants to an almost certain death.
For the humour impaired, this is a sarcastic post about using industry specific jargon and acronyms. If you take a BA flight over here to London Tesco have a basic sense of humour package for £20. Watch out for drones on your way in.
Uber: order an illegal taxi.. but online.
Facebook: Gossip circle... but online.
Amazon: going to a warehouse... but online.
None of these are innovations, apart from Amazon, none of them are even successful. This is why American innovation is failing, you cant just add "but online" to something that already exists and call it new. Uber and Facebook are feats of marketing over technology and hard work and if you ask me, that is exactly the problem.
First off, dont get me wrong, the US still produces a lot of innovative products, just not from people you normally think (Apple, Uber, Facebook, none of them innovative, yes fanbois, its true and you know it so bite me). Think of things like VMWare NSX, the thing is, things like that are built with global talent. That has really been the only thing keeping the US ahead of the game, the fact that you used to be able to attract the best scientific and engineering talent... So what happened.
Well I said commonly cited "innovations" are nothing but marketing circuses and there in lies the problem. Being seen as an innovation is more important to a modern American company than actually being innovative. Science and engineering jobs are not respected, they're seen as cost centres, necessary evils and punished when engineering cannot produce what marketing has promised. As such, STEM jobs are now low paying and have appalling conditions. Long hours and low pay in lay terms, why would anyone want to go to the US for that, you can have shit wages in your own country and often better conditions than the US (20-28 paid holidays a year sound nice)?
Add to this, the patent and copyright minefield that has been created. The US became big by deliberately ignoring the patents of other nations, now seeks to viciously defend its own. Property that has no tangible value is defended more vigorously than people who can actually develop and build new technologies.
Whilst engineers have always been happy to work long hours for their craft, they've traditionally been rewarded for it, this is the kind of thing that made NASA, Boeing and IBM giants. Now the marketers are more important and get the big wages, the lawyers, instead of being told to solve problems for the engineers are now forcing engineers to solve problems for them. Laws have become anti-innovation and anti-technology. Appearance is now more important than reality. Am I the only one who sees the problem with this?