because the odds against someone noticing something as subtle as a defective ABS module during a post-crash investigation are astronomical.
Compare the effort that goes into investigating a rail accident (example -- a derailment with no injuries, a 41-page report concluding with learning points and recommendations) to the not-much that happens after a road accident.
I'd like to see more effort spent investigating road accidents -- perhaps choosing a small sample to thoroughly investigate.
You've got hundreds of posts here bitching about Google. I'm going to guess you knew their privacy policies sometime before they started putting messages from people on G+ in your (low priority) inbox.
I think that would be the privacy policies that Google have recently been fined in France for.
"I dislike Microsoft and Windows with a passion, but at least they don't arbitrarily decide that your PC is too old to run their latest operating system."
You mean like Linux dropping support for Pentium class CPUs?
Linux dropped support for 80386 CPUs, 486s and later are still supported.
KDE already (by default, I think) tries to snap and resize dragged windows to the left or right (full height), or a corner (half height), or another window. It would take just a few seconds to drag four windows to snap + resize each to its own corner.
The maximise button already maximises only vertically if pressed with the middle button, and only horizontally if pressed with the right button. With a really huge monitor, perhaps it needs another window button which opens a small menu, a 3x4 grid of positions to resize+move the window to.
People spend so much money eating out or on coffee and snacks... yet think twice before spending $1.99 or some app.
People replace clothes all the time just because they're bored of it.
Some people are really awful at budgeting. When I returned from a three week backpacking trip to SE Asia, a couple of friends asked me how I could afford it -- they really wanted to do a similar trip. The flights cost about £600, and by staying in hostels and eating cheaply I spent roughly £800 on everything else. If I'd been on a stricter budget I could probably have limited that to £500 or less.
They considered this too much to save up, yet it turned out each was spending over £1000/year on a coffee and a snack (cake etc) on the way to work every day.
Different people have different values. It doesn't make sense to me that someone values a daily shop-made coffee over... well, anything really. But they seem to.
The British talk about the weather (more than Americans, in my experience, as it's the standard conversation starter). Extreme weather of any kind is rare -- the current flooding that had round-the-clock media coverage Christmas week only affected a very small number of people.
But, due to being at the end of the Atlantic and under the jet stream, the weather is very changeable. It's not uncommon at work for us to compare the weather on our journeys to work that day.
Also, while those -30, -40 etc numbers sound terrible, if you dress properly its not that bad and further, they usually happen betwen 4am and 7am and quickly moderate.
To someone from the [southern] British Isles, like me, they sound horrendous. The high in London today was 12C, the overnight minimum is 9C. The record minimum is -10C.
The coldest place I've ever visited is a city in the Czech Republic, where it was about -9C one night in late November.
That is a problem that is pretty unique for Germany and it is completely unreasonable to have a map of where all bombs were dropped over Germany while it is (or at least should be) completely reasonable to have a map of where cables and pipes are under a city.
It's a worldwide problem, there are unexploded bombs wherever there have been conflicts using them, and in training areas. Southeast Asia is particularly badly affected from American bombing.
The three banks I've used all incorporated part of the receiving bank's account number into the token that must be input into the reader, which wouldn't help for online shopping. Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chip_Authentication_Program suggests what you suggest is implemented. (And also that it's Sweden and the UK that have this, so my generalisation to all of Europe from my personal experience might be wrong -- those are the two countries I have/had accounts in.)
At the moment when I buy something online by credit or debit card I'm usually prompted for characters from a password used only for this purpose. I don't like this method either -- it means putting banking secrets into a website that's not my bank! The form is shown as a form within the shopping website. The Visa system is called Verified by Visa: http://www.visaeurope.com/en/cardholders/verified_by_visa.aspx (I wasn't aware of the "personal message" that shows). And I've found the Wiki page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3-D_Secure -- it would be much better to rely on a code generated from the chip card (without compromising the security of online banking), or failing that a code sent by SMS.
(Sorry if that doesn't make sense or rambles, I'm tired.)
I'm not sure it's a good idea to use the same device to verify purchases. If they did, then how would you prevent a fraudulent website from collecting the one-time-code generated and using it to authenticate a banking transaction? (Remembering that users aren't very good at following instructions.)
My EMV cards allow 3-5 (I don't remember) incorrect offline PINs before I must take it to an ATM, where I can reset it without needing to phone the bank. I think it's the same if I get the PIN wrong in a terminal in a shop etc -- I can reset it at an ATM.
The UK was one of the first countries to change to EMV (Chip+PIN), almost everyone had chip cards by mid 2005.
Most shops still have terminals that accept swipe cards, although unless it's a place popular with (American) tourists the staff might not be willing to swipe a card. (It depends on the risk, since the shop takes the loss on fraudulent swipe transactions, but the bank covers fraudulent PIN ones.)
My mum claimed the same, but also had too many restrictions. She didn't give me any money, I had to ask for exactly what I wanted. But she spent her money so carefully, how could I ask for such frivolous things as my friends bought? I wanted black clothes, Magic cards and Warhammer, but she didn't want to buy them. My grandma took me shopping, so I got some clothes I wanted then; I think they'd had an argument.
My best friend's parents were really cool. They took my friend to a music festival when he was about 13, and staying at their house meant sharing a bottle of wine at dinner, playing the music we liked to his dad (and listening to what he liked), and not being disturbed if we'd shut the door. Another friend's parents just kept out of the way, and said (once we were about 14) they they'd buy beer/cider/alcopops, so long as we drank it in their house, and cleaned up afterwards.
My parents would stick a head round the door every 15 minutes after creeping up the stairs, would ask intrusive questions ("Does 'xaxa' have a girlfriend?") and pretty much failed to get the trust of anyone. I didn't invite friends round, but they didn't want to come anyway.
I "joined" a couple of after-school clubs, which gave me about an hour after school to do what I wanted, until my mum picked me up. I like the irony that she had far less idea where I was, because not allowing me to do things meant I hid it from her. Most friends would just phone/text/nothing "I'll be an hour late, going to Games Workshop", my mum thought I was at Book Club.
I signed up for Livejournal when I started at university (and moved out), and found the URL bookmarked on my mum's computer a while later. When he was about 16, my younger brother walked to a friend's house, about 200m up the road, and my mum followed (without him knowing) to check he got there OK...
There are other countries where the 'old way' is the normal way -- I've seen it in Germany, the Netherlands and Scandinavia. (I'm British, and I think we're in-between, and perhaps closer to the US.) I don't think they have so many scare stories in their media.
I'm annoyed when I see a class of children wearing high-visibility jackets when I go past the nearby botanical garden (what could possibly be the danger?!), but at least many/most travel (including to school) by normal public transport, and can be seen wandering around after school has finished.
And then in a big cat and mouse game, all the teenagers move to a different social media site.
They already have (at least in the UK). I can't remember the name of the site, but Facebook was where you put things to show mum, and the other site where you did what you wanted.
Mercedes is still a luxury brand for cars in Europe -- they're more expensive -- but Mercedes also make vans, lorries and buses (e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citaro ).
They have a reputation for lasting forever, and the designs seem to take longer to go out of fashion. In the UK the number plate of a vehicle identifies it's age, and it's not uncommon to see someone who looks like they could afford a much newer car driving a well-polished old Mercedes.
Land Rover have an even better reputation for reliability (or, after a couple of decades, straightforward repairability). In the UK, Range Rovers are the pointless brand (for mums to drive children to school, while pretending they work on a farm). We call them "Chelsea Tractors" (although that applies to any luxury 4x4 i.e. SUV).
They couldn't build an Earth tunneling machine that cant deal with a giant boulder ?
They could, but tunnelling machines are designed to cope with the expected geology.
Crossrail (near me) requires boring 43km of new tunnels, and there are two different types of TBM required: one type for chalk, the other for clay/sand/gravel. Presumably that means they couldn't cope with hard rock. Seattle is also built on gravelly clay/sand.
I didn't say the synthesizer isn't an instrument. I said it can't fully duplicate the real thing.
Why does it need to duplicate the real thing? It's its own instrument.
The first post in this thread was about a sampler, which is different to a synthesiser. The first plays back recorded noises, the second generates new noises, or perhaps distorts a recorded noise beyond recognition.
Preferred colour temperature varies by region and culture.
I think Subway (the sandwich place) looks strangely yellow, compared to most other shops and restaurants. I think Americans would consider the whiter lights here "clinical", but I just think "clean". The yellower light is more typical of a rustic restaurant or a pub.
Slashdot Mirror
The page on the ESA website says there are two panels, each 32 m^2.
I'm not familiar with basketball courts, but I assume they're quite a lot bigger than that.
Those quote symbols are in Unicode. It's just a reflection of Slashdot's poor Unicode support.
“Test”, ‘Test’, Test”, Test.
(If the preview is correct, ,, << and >> are stripped out, but the English quotes remain.)
because the odds against someone noticing something as subtle as a defective ABS module during a post-crash investigation are astronomical.
Compare the effort that goes into investigating a rail accident (example -- a derailment with no injuries, a 41-page report concluding with learning points and recommendations) to the not-much that happens after a road accident.
I'd like to see more effort spent investigating road accidents -- perhaps choosing a small sample to thoroughly investigate.
Further examples:
Eye-fi cards are SD cards containing a WiFi module, which can be a quick way to get photos off a camera.
Intel Edison is an SD-sized computer with WiFi and Bluetooth: http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/do-it-yourself/edison.html
USB storage drives can be tiny too: http://www.gizmodo.co.uk/2013/10/worlds-smallest-usb-stick-squeezes-64gb-into-a-tiny-silvery-peanut/
You've got hundreds of posts here bitching about Google. I'm going to guess you knew their privacy policies sometime before they started putting messages from people on G+ in your (low priority) inbox.
I think that would be the privacy policies that Google have recently been fined in France for.
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/14/01/09/2011219/google-fined-by-french-privacy-regulator
"I dislike Microsoft and Windows with a passion, but at least they don't arbitrarily decide that your PC is too old to run their latest operating system."
You mean like Linux dropping support for Pentium class CPUs?
Linux dropped support for 80386 CPUs, 486s and later are still supported.
KDE already (by default, I think) tries to snap and resize dragged windows to the left or right (full height), or a corner (half height), or another window. It would take just a few seconds to drag four windows to snap + resize each to its own corner.
The maximise button already maximises only vertically if pressed with the middle button, and only horizontally if pressed with the right button. With a really huge monitor, perhaps it needs another window button which opens a small menu, a 3x4 grid of positions to resize+move the window to.
People spend so much money eating out or on coffee and snacks... yet think twice before spending $1.99 or some app.
People replace clothes all the time just because they're bored of it.
Some people are really awful at budgeting. When I returned from a three week backpacking trip to SE Asia, a couple of friends asked me how I could afford it -- they really wanted to do a similar trip. The flights cost about £600, and by staying in hostels and eating cheaply I spent roughly £800 on everything else. If I'd been on a stricter budget I could probably have limited that to £500 or less.
They considered this too much to save up, yet it turned out each was spending over £1000/year on a coffee and a snack (cake etc) on the way to work every day.
Different people have different values. It doesn't make sense to me that someone values a daily shop-made coffee over ... well, anything really. But they seem to.
Here's a link for anyone else interested in further information on this: http://www.humanityinaction.org/knowledgebase/323-solitary-confinement-a-threat-to-denmark-s-credibility
In some countries (Australia, NZ and maybe more) bell peppers are called capsicum.
You do know some plant genera: Cannabis, Nicotiana, Thymus, Narcissus, Olea, Rosa, Tulipa, Prunus, Pinus, Crocus, Iris, Brassica, Coffea, Eucalyptus.
And there's always Amorphophallus titanum.
Oh, you guys have "Free Speech Zones" as well?
I think the restriction is on a procession/march near Westminster Palace. You can still make a static protest.
http://content.met.police.uk/Article/Organising-a-protest-march-or-static-demonstration/1400002380711/1400002380711 suggests that's correct.
The British talk about the weather (more than Americans, in my experience, as it's the standard conversation starter). Extreme weather of any kind is rare -- the current flooding that had round-the-clock media coverage Christmas week only affected a very small number of people.
But, due to being at the end of the Atlantic and under the jet stream, the weather is very changeable. It's not uncommon at work for us to compare the weather on our journeys to work that day.
Also, while those -30, -40 etc numbers sound terrible, if you dress properly its not that bad and further, they usually happen betwen 4am and 7am and quickly moderate.
To someone from the [southern] British Isles, like me, they sound horrendous. The high in London today was 12C, the overnight minimum is 9C. The record minimum is -10C.
The coldest place I've ever visited is a city in the Czech Republic, where it was about -9C one night in late November.
That is a problem that is pretty unique for Germany and it is completely unreasonable to have a map of where all bombs were dropped over Germany while it is (or at least should be) completely reasonable to have a map of where cables and pipes are under a city.
It's a worldwide problem, there are unexploded bombs wherever there have been conflicts using them, and in training areas. Southeast Asia is particularly badly affected from American bombing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unexploded_ordnance
That's a good idea.
The three banks I've used all incorporated part of the receiving bank's account number into the token that must be input into the reader, which wouldn't help for online shopping. Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chip_Authentication_Program suggests what you suggest is implemented. (And also that it's Sweden and the UK that have this, so my generalisation to all of Europe from my personal experience might be wrong -- those are the two countries I have/had accounts in.)
At the moment when I buy something online by credit or debit card I'm usually prompted for characters from a password used only for this purpose. I don't like this method either -- it means putting banking secrets into a website that's not my bank! The form is shown as a form within the shopping website. The Visa system is called Verified by Visa: http://www.visaeurope.com/en/cardholders/verified_by_visa.aspx (I wasn't aware of the "personal message" that shows). And I've found the Wiki page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3-D_Secure -- it would be much better to rely on a code generated from the chip card (without compromising the security of online banking), or failing that a code sent by SMS.
(Sorry if that doesn't make sense or rambles, I'm tired.)
In much of Europe online banking transactions can be authenticated with a battery powered reader like this: http://fstop57.com/freshstock/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/stock-photo-online-banking-6526.jpg . Most banks, as far as I know, only use them for online banking.
I'm not sure it's a good idea to use the same device to verify purchases. If they did, then how would you prevent a fraudulent website from collecting the one-time-code generated and using it to authenticate a banking transaction? (Remembering that users aren't very good at following instructions.)
My EMV cards allow 3-5 (I don't remember) incorrect offline PINs before I must take it to an ATM, where I can reset it without needing to phone the bank. I think it's the same if I get the PIN wrong in a terminal in a shop etc -- I can reset it at an ATM.
(I can use offline authentication to authenticate online banking transactions, the bank sent a battery-powered card reader: http://fstop57.com/freshstock/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/stock-photo-online-banking-6526.jpg . It's also common for low-value things like buying something on a train, where data connectivity isn't guaranteed.)
The UK was one of the first countries to change to EMV (Chip+PIN), almost everyone had chip cards by mid 2005.
Most shops still have terminals that accept swipe cards, although unless it's a place popular with (American) tourists the staff might not be willing to swipe a card. (It depends on the risk, since the shop takes the loss on fraudulent swipe transactions, but the bank covers fraudulent PIN ones.)
(Most machines etc only accept chip cards.)
My mum claimed the same, but also had too many restrictions. She didn't give me any money, I had to ask for exactly what I wanted. But she spent her money so carefully, how could I ask for such frivolous things as my friends bought? I wanted black clothes, Magic cards and Warhammer, but she didn't want to buy them. My grandma took me shopping, so I got some clothes I wanted then; I think they'd had an argument.
My best friend's parents were really cool. They took my friend to a music festival when he was about 13, and staying at their house meant sharing a bottle of wine at dinner, playing the music we liked to his dad (and listening to what he liked), and not being disturbed if we'd shut the door. Another friend's parents just kept out of the way, and said (once we were about 14) they they'd buy beer/cider/alcopops, so long as we drank it in their house, and cleaned up afterwards.
My parents would stick a head round the door every 15 minutes after creeping up the stairs, would ask intrusive questions ("Does 'xaxa' have a girlfriend?") and pretty much failed to get the trust of anyone. I didn't invite friends round, but they didn't want to come anyway.
I "joined" a couple of after-school clubs, which gave me about an hour after school to do what I wanted, until my mum picked me up. I like the irony that she had far less idea where I was, because not allowing me to do things meant I hid it from her. Most friends would just phone/text/nothing "I'll be an hour late, going to Games Workshop", my mum thought I was at Book Club.
I signed up for Livejournal when I started at university (and moved out), and found the URL bookmarked on my mum's computer a while later. When he was about 16, my younger brother walked to a friend's house, about 200m up the road, and my mum followed (without him knowing) to check he got there OK...
There are other countries where the 'old way' is the normal way -- I've seen it in Germany, the Netherlands and Scandinavia. (I'm British, and I think we're in-between, and perhaps closer to the US.) I don't think they have so many scare stories in their media.
I'm annoyed when I see a class of children wearing high-visibility jackets when I go past the nearby botanical garden (what could possibly be the danger?!), but at least many/most travel (including to school) by normal public transport, and can be seen wandering around after school has finished.
And then in a big cat and mouse game, all the teenagers move to a different social media site.
They already have (at least in the UK). I can't remember the name of the site, but Facebook was where you put things to show mum, and the other site where you did what you wanted.
Ah -- found it -- the app is WhatsApp.
Mercedes is still a luxury brand for cars in Europe -- they're more expensive -- but Mercedes also make vans, lorries and buses (e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citaro ).
They have a reputation for lasting forever, and the designs seem to take longer to go out of fashion. In the UK the number plate of a vehicle identifies it's age, and it's not uncommon to see someone who looks like they could afford a much newer car driving a well-polished old Mercedes.
Land Rover have an even better reputation for reliability (or, after a couple of decades, straightforward repairability). In the UK, Range Rovers are the pointless brand (for mums to drive children to school, while pretending they work on a farm). We call them "Chelsea Tractors" (although that applies to any luxury 4x4 i.e. SUV).
They couldn't build an Earth tunneling machine that cant deal with a giant boulder ?
They could, but tunnelling machines are designed to cope with the expected geology.
Crossrail (near me) requires boring 43km of new tunnels, and there are two different types of TBM required: one type for chalk, the other for clay/sand/gravel. Presumably that means they couldn't cope with hard rock. Seattle is also built on gravelly clay/sand.
I didn't say the synthesizer isn't an instrument. I said it can't fully duplicate the real thing.
Why does it need to duplicate the real thing? It's its own instrument.
The first post in this thread was about a sampler, which is different to a synthesiser. The first plays back recorded noises, the second generates new noises, or perhaps distorts a recorded noise beyond recognition.
(An instrumental track with [almost?] entirely synthesisers which I happen to like. I'm sure there are much more intellectual artists.)
Preferred colour temperature varies by region and culture.
I think Subway (the sandwich place) looks strangely yellow, compared to most other shops and restaurants. I think Americans would consider the whiter lights here "clinical", but I just think "clean". The yellower light is more typical of a rustic restaurant or a pub.
(example)