Re: Build a List?
Oh, THOSE lampposts. No, these kinds of people know how to turn the hangmen to their side. Everyone has their price.
16605 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
"Whataboutism can be a useful rhetorical device to further a discussion. It can also reveal a passive, defeatist approach to life's problems. Just because greedy, corporatists are seizing control of an engineering toy, doesn't mean we have to give up and go home."
The thing about edge cases is that they don't STAY edge cases. And there are people out there who encounter Murphy more often than most. Not to mention people who have to live with people with terrible memories (as in sometimes they can't recall their name yet are too proud to ask for help).
As for solutions, I always recall my favorite whine: "I want it all, and I want it yesterday! Now JFDIE!" Thus ICU to me isn't Intensive Care Unit but Instructed to Chase Unicorns.
"Of course, you have to then type in your address and credit card details every single time, but that's the price you have to pay for wearing a tinfoil hat."
So what do you tell people with bad memories who can't recall stuff like that to save their lives, to say nothing of stuff like passwords (Now was it correcthorsebatterystaple or donkeyenginepaperclipwrong)?
Then use an active protocol like VNC instead of shoehorning state into what was mostly a passive protocol.
Frankly, what's needed is to reduce web functionality drastically so that we go back to a mostly-passive environment. Anyone who complains get their Internet access cut off by their ISP (on pain of fines and possible criminal culpability) until they re-earn their Internet License.
I'm waiting for the day the ad and the content are part and parcel, either due to Product Placement like in TV shows, or by ad companies BECOMING the content providers. Either way, ads become articlrs, articles become ads, and your only recourse is to go, "Stop the Internet! I wanna get off!"...and go back to your junk mails, billboards, product placements, etc.
An ISP may simply use a certificate certified from up the chain: to the point if you don't have it, you can't surf, period. Plus, if they're MiTM from point zero, their certificate is the first (and probably ONLY) one you ever see. Isn't that how corporate secure proxies work?
"The rest of us use encryption to do our online banking, buy goods and services and hold perfectly innocent private conversations, because we don't want law enforcement spying on us "just in case"."
Then what did people do before the Internet, then? It's not like it's that much easier to buy groceries online versus going to the store: physical stuff still needed to be transferred.
"And on Android you can always flash a new ROM over the vendor installed one to remove any bloat"
A lot of manufacturers don't provide bloat-free ROMs, and most Android phones will balk on an unisgned ROM, which requires the manufacturer to sign.
It could simply be a matter of a unique version being available exclusively for Russia. Which means its own signature keys and so on, meaning it wouldn't be possible to install anything BUT Russian ROMs (with their concomitant spyware).
"But one slide compared a chunk of typical US beef with grass-fed Argentinian."
Nice loaded comparison. Would make more sense to compare say American-grown Wagyu-class beef to Japan-grown Wagyu-class beef to equivalent high-quality beef grown in other parts of the world.
In the US, they use cotton seeds the same way. They extract the oil, and the leftover meal becomes animal feed. And it's not just waste from farming, either. The cod industry up in Alaska is said to be able to extract every last bit of use from the fish: including the bones and leftover meat from the human-food process which I recall are dried, ground, and turned into animal feed.
Something tells me Moses was out to make sure people only ate strict herbivores (ruminating is a peculiar evolutionary specialty that would only emerge in species desperate to have the double-digestion needed to break down cellulose without resorting to cacophagy like the lagomorphs do). Now was there a reason for this? Maybe, for reasons of experience, can't say for sure. But I'm willing to assume there was an at-least-partially-logical reason for it.
Tree nuts are just fruits without the fruits (as fruits are seed-bearing bodies; nuts are essentially the bare seed by itself), making them kind of a subset, whereas I can't recall anything growing in a tree canopy that could really be considered a vegetable by the botanical definition (botanically speaking, almonds and pistachios are fruits--drupes--rather than nuts).
"They can be self-fuelling"
Not in a stable. Plus, by not wandering off, it's easier to find the car again in the morning (while a horse may find a gap in the fence or may become spooked enough to jump and bolt).
"Leave a car with a full tank parked up for a while in warm enough weather and you'll tend to get the fuel either evaporating or 'going off' ie breaking down and fouling carbs/injection systems and the like."
That's why they offer fuel stabilizers. Plus, like you said, a car can be left alone for a few months completely unattended and little will happen. Horses will tend to need attending much sooner to avoid unintended consequences.
"and it can find its way home without swerving off the road/under trucks etc."
OR it could get lost...or spooked by say lightning and run off to who knows where.
"Oh, and their emissions are actually quite good for the environment, especially gardens!"
Only to a point. Again, recall the Labor of the Aegean Stables. And what if you don't have a garden? Plus there's the matter of the smell, which unlike that of a car tends to linger, both on and off the animal.
Let's put it like this. If horses really were much easier to maintain than a car, why did horses get niched so quickly after the rise of the automobile?
4 minutes? Most places I know you're expected to pull in place inside of 15 seconds and have the fuel cap off within 30 seconds of stopping (that includes the time it takes to turn off the car, get out, and get to the fuel cap). Any slower and you're liable to get honked. I know I routinely beat those times...and that's WITH a locking fuel cap.
"don't let it get so low that it runs out - generally the sensible option"
EXCEPT electrical measurement of charge is a rather inexact thing. Plus battery quirks can misreport charge. I personally saw my cell phone plunge from 95% to 5% in a blink. That was my first cue I needed to switch out the battery on my phone (AND why I insist on a user-replaceable battery on any phone--because of quirks like this).
TLDR: Your car can read 50% when you get home at night and STILL end up flat the next day, due to misreporting.
Think more than pedestrians? Think other drivers who give the rules the finger because they've been gridlocked for over an hour and they're late (with paying passengers inside, no less).
You want a REAL AI driving test? Turn them loose in some overpopulated Asian metropolis in the middle of their rush hour (my personal experience is Metro Manila's Epifanio de los Santos Avenue during evening rush as the sun is setting). Guaranteed every square centimeter of the road will be packed to the gills: if not with cars then with motorcycles, bicycles, even street peddlers on foot taking advantage of the captive audience. And no, mass transit won't save you here. Buses and taxis take up a fair chunk of the traffic while the line to take the train often spills out into the street to further add to the chaos.
If an AI car can successfully run the length of the road under those constant condition without a ding, THEN I'll think it's ready.
You also won't go very far, period. This is because the mere act of driving is an inherent risk no matter what you do. All you can do at that point is to live with the risk, understand there WILL be people unintentionally out to kill you, but you have to drive around them anyway and live with your Sword of Damocles if you want to make a living.
Does the study take into consideration people who "slip" at the last instant, resulting in the failed attempt.
I'm looking at people who attempted suicide, went completely through with it, and still survived. Something like shooting oneself through the brain or falling tens of stories and landing flat or head-first...and living.