Comment All natural? (Score 1) 128
Maybe this will finally shut up the people who complain that eBooks just aren't like the real thing.
Maybe this will finally shut up the people who complain that eBooks just aren't like the real thing.
and you wonder why California has no money for the basics.
Actually, California is doing pretty well at the moment.
(Come to think of it, a good 10% the readership of this site probably REALLY does want a pony.)
Dibs on Twilight Sparkle!
So, how do the "poorest residents" own a home?
Most likely they bought back when housing prices were cheaper and/or they had more income.
Prop 13 at work, eh?
A) Insurance NEVER pays to replace a car, even if it is totaled. They give you 80% of the current value.
B) I have 40K to replace MY car which the other guy totaled but which HIS insurance won't pay anything near what it costs me. I could sue him in court for damages to recover the rest of the money but insurance companies have seen to it that you really can't sue in court any more because they would have to do what people are paying them to do.
C) Your donation of a kidney is your choice. That is completely different than someone plowing into me which has happened with every car I have every owned. Mainly as I'm the last guy in line.
Insurance is the biggest scam ever perpetrated in the history of mankind. You pay and pay and pay some more, then, when you need to use it you're given every excuse possible why the coverage you've been paying for doesn't apply.
When one takes into consideration the thousands of dollars each year the average person pours down the drain for insurance, it's no wonder people are going broke. That money could be used for more productive endeavors such as food, housing, education or transportation.
Instead, the money is lost in the ether, used only to enrich a few while the many bleed from a thousand cuts.
So yeah, it's not as easy as just throwing a GPS on your locomotive and calling it good.
Still, even a partial solution (e.g. one that matches the train's GPS location, if known, against a table of specified maximum-safe-under-any-circumstances speed limits for that location) would prevent a train wreck in certain cases (such as the recent one that prompted this article). I'm all for full PTC, but I don't think the perfect needs to be made the enemy of the good here.
If the engineers' concentration is so fragile that they are going to be distracted by a camera, they are obviously not the right people to be operating complex machinery.
They suffer from a condition called "being human". It causes occasional failures in an otherwise operational controller-human, some very small percentage of the time. Even the highest-quality controller-humans have a non-zero failure rate.
Maybe we should just replace them with automation and run the trains remotely. They could keep one engineer per train to engage the manual override in the event that someone hacks the control infrastructure and tries to do Bad Things(tm) to the trains.
That is actually a pretty good idea, and it's more or less what PTC is intended to do, at least as far as the "avoid accidents" part of the job is concerned. Automating things further than that is also possible, although probably not really necessary.
A gasoline odor coming from a car? That NEVER happens, despite an 8 - 30 gallon tank of gasoline being in the car. It sure is grounds for probable cause. >_>
(in case you missed it: NOT)
and I suppose the M3800 is glued together like the newer Macbooks, making it near impossible even for seasoned techs to replace without warping or breaking parts during disassembly or at least baking the crap out of it with a heat gun?
Where there's a will, there's a relative.