Hahahaha.

This might be pleasant. With so many cars in the body shop the following days, the highways might be fun!

> I shudder to think what would happen if US drivers were let loose on roads such as the Autobahn in their cars, with their proficiency, and their respect for the rules of the road - it'd make some great TV :)

Really, I guess it depends on *how many* Americans (and which Americans) are released. If it's the same as the non-German percentage on the Autobahns, maybe the effect is negligible. A typical American isn't much different than the typical French (i.e., some of them won't get the hell out of the left lane).

Overall, though, I cede you the point. I used to be proud of my fellow Michiganders for example, but in the last 15 years, they're as stupid as Ohioans. Granted we have some stupid left-side exits and entrances, but gee, you don't need eight miles to prepare for them.

> Yeah, but on the autobahn there is no speed limit.

Except in the urbanized areas, which is a hell of a lot of the very densely populated country. Yup, there are free-for-all zones, but it’s not at all like most people think.

Let me tell you. When I was stationed in Germany from 1991 to 1993, you were correct. Then the EU and open borders and the Eurozone and all that stuff happened. I've been back to Germany several times (no longer as poor soldier) in the 2000's, and I can say that there are a lot of foreigners on them there Autobahns (nouns are cap'd in German), and the rules ain't that strictly followed. (Not sure why I'm writing in that tone of voice.)

There's still pretty good discipline in the leftmost lane. But out of five or six lanes, it's not quite good enough. And of course in cities and urban areas there have always been speed limits. In fact the speed limits in these areas are programmed based on traffic flow and peak times.

Intercity is where the safe and prudent really works in Germany, especially because the left-most lane (not all lanes!) discipline works fairly well. Note that as early as 1991, though, there is certain liability for causing an accident in the left lane, even if there's a slow driver.

I guess my point is, Germany isn't the speed-limitless-wonderland that so many people think it is.

This isn't uncommon in industry (it's also not the normal way of things). If we want to to be certain that a supplier builds something the right way, we might specify every detail of the tooling, and sometimes buy it and install it ourselves.

>Whereas net neutrality is about not charging companies extra for delivering data to users who already paid.

But so many net neutrality bigmouths are against paid prioritization, too.

(I work for an auto manufacturer, but my opinions are my own. And my lifestyle is my own, and doesn't reflect 100% of slashdot).

1. Peak demand. In car-culture areas there's a peak demand. *Someone* has to own the rush hour fleet. But no business is going to want to invest in a fleet that has 21 hours of downtime during non-peak loads.
2. Consumers want reliability and 100% availability. Consider Uber and Lyft that promise this, except during surge pricing periods. People hate this. It's economically correct in the case of Uber and Lyft, and an obvious idea, but surge pricing during rush hour isn't going to work. People will still own their own cars.
3. Personalization and customization. Hey, I like my cars stock, but I still have my stuff in the center console, my presets on the stereo (yes, 760 am in the morning, I'm a dying breed), and my iPhone paired to Sync. A different car every day isn't going to cut it. And think about comfort, especially on a commute. If it's hit or miss as far as comfort, people are willing to pay for 100% access to a Fusion versus an Elantra (or choose an Elantra versus a smaller B-sized car).
4. Toy haulers. You're not going to call Uber or Lyft to tow your trailer to a state park or tow your boat to a launch. And this isn't 99%'er speaking, this is blue collar worker in my part of the country.

Will annual sales go down? Yeah, probably. Maybe undoubtably (how's that for hedging?). But families in most areas are still going to continue to own their own cars. Maybe not two or three cars -- supplemented by autonomous vehicles or ride sharing -- but the private market most definitely won't dry up, even amongst the 99%.

I'm limiting my projections here to about 50 years. Beyond that, who knows. Most of us will be dead then, so it's good enough.

Surely Google needs custodians, too. Or security. Or gardeners.

Granted, most of this can be contracted out. But if I were cleaning toilets I could still say, "I work at Google" and not "I work for Generic Contracting Services LLC."

"Tax evasion" is a crime. "Tax avoidance" is what is being done here.

And it's been established that Italians were in China (living here) before Marco Polo:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K...

As much as they try to shrug off foreigners in China, the statue and museum in Yangzhou dedicated to him are touching. I didn't know of them before I visited, and I certainly had no knowledge that there were already Italian communities!

>but it output is configured in current mode

It's not even that difficult. You probably know exactly how they work, and are only struggling for words.

"Constant current" is the same as "constant voltage" if the load is static. If an LED needs 100mA and the voltage (as you accurately described) is constant, there's no "current mode" regulation needed. Just a known resistance.

For others, LEDs are definitely current devices. Remember: current isn't *put*; it's *drawn*. If the conductor is big enough (e.g., no resistor), then regardless of the voltage, LEDs will suck up all the juice they can, glow brightly for a short amount of time, and then die. So with a known voltage, put a resistance in series, and you have a stable LED semiconductor.

A good switching power supply will produce a stable output voltage regardless of the input voltage (within specs, that is). Ergo failure of LEDs due to overcurrent situations is most likely the result of crappy switching power supplies.

I was watching a WWDC Xcode session video on an airplane Saturday, and a surprised passenger walking past asked if I was running Mac OS X (ecks, he said) on my first gen iPad mini. That got me thinking... yeah, I'd buy a surface pro if I could run a Mac OS X on it. My iPad is mostly useless to me other than plane trips and Omnifocus.

I'm off to Google VMWare Player on the Surface 3... that would make a surface a no-brainer. OneNote on Windows is sooo much better than OneNote on Mac. Put them together, and a Surface actually makes some sense to me.

This implies *much* more than the simple scanning of email and image recognition. After all, is Google also reporting innocent pictures people take of their babies in, e.g., the bathtub to send to daddy while he's in China on a business trip? Or is it more likely that Google knew the guy was a sex offender and targeted the scanning of his email specifically?

NewsFox was my absolute favorite! Then I moved away from FireFox to Chrome, and there was nothing nearly as good as NewFox.

The nice thing about moving to Chrome was forcing myself to use Google Reader. At first I rather hated Google Reader, but with a Chrome extension and some themes, I got it to finally work more or less like NewsFox.

These days I'm using Tiny Tiny RSS.

Yup, Tiny Tiny RSS on my shared BlueHost account, with some mobile reader plugin I can't remember the name of (it looks mostly like mobile Google Reader looked).