This isn't about internet access.

Disclaimer: I work for a state DOT as a software development manager and I consult on systems that are impacted by these systems.

This is about V2V and V2I communications platforms. In the 2017 model year, all new vehicles will require V2V communication systems. And another ~5 years after that we'll likely see V2I requirements.

Currently, when you see those signs that say "X minutes to exit Y", they pull that data in one of a few ways:
1) Buy it from Google or other cell phone tracking companies
2) Use radar speed cameras to calculate the average speed and travel time
3) Use roadside Bluetooth detectors to identify specific vehicle travel times between two detectors
4) Magnetic loop vehicle counters and an algorithm to compare rate to volume and travel time.

V2V communication systems don't directly communicate with the infrastructure system. But similar to the Bluetooth detection system, we can identify that a specific car with a V2V system has passed a point, and then measure the travel time for it to reach the next meter point. Currently we capture ~2% of traffic using Bluetooth, with the new V2V system being mandated for 2017 and a ~5% annual fleet replacement rate, by 2018 we should over double our data collection.

There's nothing fancy there though. The detail data is only retained for the segment measurements, and since all we know is effectively a GUID, we can't identify specific people. But if you were to learn of a GUID associated with someone's vehicle or phone's Bluetooth, and you were to capture and store the meter data, you could, in theory, determine their travel habits across the specific place those meters are installed (pro-tip: there aren't many of them)

Where V2I starts getting really cool is when we can actually communicate with vehicles about the environment. For example, If you have a densely populated area with significant street parking (say like pretty much any down town metro in the country) as the street parking fills, you get more surface traffic of people looking for parking. At ~50% parking capacity roughly 80% of the traffic is searching for parking. V2I communication can cut that rate tremendously by informing vehicles of the closest available parking spots.

Another cool use that's already being done in Vegas is that the infrastructure can inform the car as to the optimum speed to travel at to hit all of the green lights.

Then you get into the really cool stuff, next gen and all that. Where a vehicle that has it's route information can report travel times for each road segment, and share this data between V2V and V2I, allowing the other vehicles and infrastructure perform vastly more efficient route planning, alleviating traffic jams, minimizing road surface damage, etc...

That data can also feed our construction plans giving us hard analytical data to determine where construction projects are needed. Where safety needs to be improved, where volume is changing rapidly. It can help plan lane closures and route plans for over sized-over weight vehicles. It can replace a ton of what is currently labor intensive and best-guess analysis with cold hard facts.

But it needs to be shepparded by people who are aware of the security impacts and unwilling to overstep bounds.

At one stakeholder meeting, a senior member of a policing branch of the state government asked if the system could be used to disable the vehicles of people who were driving recklessly. Or if they would be able to query the system to identify suspects in relation to a crime.

Some of the ops folks were really excited about the idea of identifying common traffic routes, to be able to see how individual drivers get from point A to point B.

But there were those of us in the group who were willing to say, no, killing someone's ignition at 90 mph is a bad idea. No, having a searchable database with PII is bad. No, showing full route information is a horrible intrusion in the drivers' privacy.

These are the battles that are being had, across the country, in your own Department of Transportation.

If you are concerned about it, contact your local DOT, that's where the magic is happening right now.

-Rick

Back in the mid '90s playing Doom and Quake using mouse look, I had a problem that my left hand would cramp up horribly from trying to handle all of the keyboard buttons.

So I took a few old mice, a copping saw, hot glue gun, and soldering iron, and made my own left hand controller.

It resembled two mice going at it. The upper mouse my hand rested on and the first segment of my pointer and middle fingers controlled the top mouse buttons, and my finger tips controlled the bottom mouse buttons. Thumb and pink controlled side buttons.

I ran the mice wires into an AT keyboard (this was either pre-USB or really early in the rollout) and solder them in as a secondary path for assorted keys.

It was the greatest thing since sliced bread IMO. These days you can get quality made left handed controllers like the Nostromo 52 and other ergonomically designed devices, so I haven't been hacking up mice any more ;)

-Rick

The 2007 and newer standards (phased in from 2007-2010)

The preceding 2004-2006 standards:

From a Vox article with actual details ( http://www.vox.com/2015/9/21/9... ):

Assuming they mean the 2010 limit, that puts it at 3.0-7.0 g/bhp*hr

Or roughly 1.0-4.0 g/bhp*hr

So the NEW Passat is capable of meeting the OLD Passat's emissions rate, some of the time.

The NEW Jetta never comes close to meeting the OLD Jetta's emissions rate.

Somehow, not only did they not improve on power or mileage over the last 8 years, they also are doing worse on emissions?!?

I love my '06 Golf, but I've got to wonder what the hell they've been doing for the last decade...

-Rick

My '06 VW Golf TDi gets 42mpg when I do primarily highway driving.

I met an actual hypermiler a few years ago. Chipped the car and swaped the 5 gear for a 6th gear out of a GLS. He pulled 56 mpg in an 05 Jetta TDI.

-Rick

I agree with you, you can disguise a bomb to look like damn near anything.

Which leads to the next question; if you can disguise a bomb to look like anything, why aren't kids getting arrested/suspended left and right for taking hoax bombs into school?

If a Campbell's soup can is such a great way to disguise a bomb, why is it that kids bring them to school, in their lunches or repurposed for pencil holders, or for food drives? Why are these kids not being arrested for carrying hoax bombs?

-Rick

Why should I have to pay for your health care when you inevitably rack up a higher bill than you can pay?

Ahh, but the difference is that ~90% of all Americans have health insurance.

Roughly Just because one did not have health insurance does not mean they couldn't have received medical care. In fact, paying for health insurance, on the whole, costs more than paying for basic medical treatment out of one's own pocket.

Keyword BASIC. I've know people to do it before. Hell, I did it before. One of my good friends went for 14 years without health insurance, then got a job with a company that provided it at such a cheap rate it would be silly to not take it. 3 weeks later he had a heart attack. Over the next two weeks he racked up almost $200,000 in medical expenses. Had he not had insurance, he wouldn't have paid even a quarter of that, and everyone else in the system would be paying more for services to cover his costs.

And imagine what a relief it will be when you get diagnosed with cancer, that you will not lose 100 times that much in trying to cover your treatment options.

The problem is that when you choose to live your life betting against the odds that you will never have a major medical issue, when you do have that major medical issue, your choices are forcibly taking MY money. You get to decide how to live your life, and I have to pay for it.

So here's the deal. If you don't want to have insurance, great. If you want to make your own choices, great. But that means you have to deal with the consequences of your choices. So if you get hit by a bus, you cannot use any medical services you can't pay for out of pocket. If you have a heart attack and it's two weeks to pay day, you will die. If it's cancer, don't bother with treatment, just spend your money on a world tour then die.

If you are willing to ensure that you are not a burden to anyone else, if you are willing to kill yourself rather than infringe upon the rights of others to keep their money, then by all means, opt out! Keep your money, life your life as you see fit, and die as soon as the bill for that lifestyle exceeds your bank account.

If you aren't willing to go to that extreme, if you expect that in such a situation you should be able to declare bankruptcy, if believe that you should be able to get insurance after a major incident has occurred without paying into the system, then yeah, I'm all for forcibly parting you and your money. And that money will go to fund other's health care needs so that WHEN you have a need, their money will go to fund YOUR needs.

-Rick

And I, as someone who pays for health insurance, who is forced to subsidize those who don't, now have a choice. Since you are now required to pay for health insurance, I have more money that isn't paying for subsidizing others, so I have more choice.

It's funny how easily people can focus in on only their own personal view and ignore everyone else's.

"Freedom" is a zero sum game. The more you have, the less someone else has. And while you may have been one of those few individuals who is financially stable enough to cover a quarter million dollar hospital stay out of pocket without the need for insurance, you sir are in a tiny minority.

Your right, as a tiny minority who is already of significant financial worth, does not trump the vast majority of the population who has to offset the costs of the larger minority of people who don't have insurance due to a lack of material wealth.

Sorry, you are just not that important.

-Rick

Yeah, like a USB cable...

-Rick

Tests are great, but in real world usage Edge has been absolutely a shit fest for Facebook usage on my PC and tablet.

Scrolling locks up, typing often hits .5 to 3 second lag spikes. Occasionally, if I type too fast while it's lagging, I get a audible beep and any characters that were lagging are dropped and I have to re-type what I was writing.

Outside of Facebook, it seems fine. But I've reverted to Chrome for social media.

On my media PC it works fine. I don't get the disappearing cursor issue when binge watching Netflix. My only gripe is that even in tablet mode the navigation buttons are too small for my fat fingers.

-Rick

This office was:

1) Staffed primarily by millennials
2) Developed a product written using node.js and/or ruby and/or scala or was not a software development business

1) In part, average age was probably split evenly across gen X/Y and Millennials.

2) Nope, .Net through and through (and some Obj-C for the iPad client). Shrink wrapped software and SaaS for the building materials industry. If you buy a window or door you are almost guaranteed to have it go through this company's software.

-Rick

Hah, yeah, there was some of that too.

Like moving from offices to an open floor plan. But the CEO didn't like the part about parting with /his/ office for a cubical in the middle of the floor.

But the corporate culture and fun loving atmosphere were a huge boon to working there. Nerf gun wars, Segway races, RC vehicle battles, M:tG lunches, board game nights, LAN parties, etc... were regular occurrences. Things like the City Scour (a company wide off-site team based scavenger hunt) which took months of planning and research, and gave the whole company a chance to get out of the office and have some fun, the holiday party in the winter and the family picnic in the summer weren't some little shindig. The holiday party was held at some of the premiere conference facilities in the area, typically included a full casino, video arcade, and a short movie competition. The movies that would compete were written, directed, and starred by employees, the company funded the cost of bringing in the videographers and their editing.

Quarterly release parties included free beer (assorted microbrews, not a cheap MGD keg), h'ordeuvres, and a wall of fame picture for the release heroes.

The summer picnic was similarly a big deal. Bouncy houses, temp tattoos, spin painting, corn holing, a huge banquet spread... all at one of the nicest golf courses in the area.

Basically, the CEO was a dick, but he was a dick that knew the importance of employee moral, and he put people in positions to ensure that even when things were hard, employees had opportunities to unwind, relax, and do something fun.

-Rick

... just not the execution of it.

Having a dedicated staff to driving the culture of your company can have a huge impact and pay massive dividends in retention, employee satisfaction, and willingness to go the extra mile.

One of my previous employers had an employee that started out as a receptionist. She always decorated for the holidays, and she was super social, so she organized extra circular activities. Bowling leagues, wine tastings, etc... She was also tasked with organizing our holiday party, summer picnic, office Olympics, city scour scavenger hunt, and tons of other ideas she helped build in the company.

Eventually, it became clear that these tasks took too much time for her to also be the receptionist, so the CEO created a new position for her to focus on the corporate culture, events, and social media.

Best decision he made. She wasn't a cheer leader running around in a short skirt, but her efforts to make the company a fun place to work were way more impactful than any executive direction.

-Rick

I'm curious though, is it at all similar to an individual who monetized their YouTube account?

They sign up for the YouTube service, they produce a transformative product/service, and they get paid for it.

Are successful YouTube users effectively Google employees as well?

-Rick

My example was a hyperbole to demonstrate how international headquarters are used to avoid local regulations. Microsoft has been guilty of this many times over. They expatriate US revenues to avoid paying taxes on it, they expatriate R&D and patents to avoid US export controls, etc...

Also, do you realize that that staff represents less than 1% of Microsoft's personnel, right?

If the US is going after EU citizen data that is held on servers in the EU, that is communicated over networks that exist in the EU, then yeah, I'm fully on board, the US can get bent.

But if Microsoft is saying "We're not going to comply with the US because we're an Irish company" they're full of shit.

-Rick

So if I make a business, and I HQ it out of Ireland, but I don't have anything but a PO Box and tax filings in Ireland. My servers are in the US. My staff is in the US. I am in the US. My revenue is generated in the US. My customers are in the US. My packaging and distribution is in the US, etc...

Then I should be exempt from US laws?

It would take some more digging, but giving the clearly biased summary, I'd wager there is more to this than just the Federal government trying to run roughshod over Irish law.

-Rick