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Comment Re:Why is suicide bad? (Score 1) 44

If it's the will of the person?

Because people aren't solitary islands whose deaths harm only themselves. Anyone who has lived on Earth for more than a few days has formed relationships with other people, and suicide is the murder of a person those people have a relationship with. Suicide harms everyone who interacts with or depends on that suicider for anything, in much the same way that the murder of that person would.

Being dead, after all, is just like being stupid, only people around you are bothered by it.

Yes, that is precisely the problem.

Comment Re:If I had to bet (Score 1) 14

I would bet they are lying They will never install fiber in my area

Even if it even exists, I would expect the $20 rate will be deemed non-viable within a few months of implementation. Everyone knows government contracts have zero teeth for enforcement against corporate entities.

Eventually, yes, but you forgot a bunch of steps:

  • Hide the information in a tiny little link at the very bottom of the terms and conditions that nobody reads.
  • Cap the speed and/or amount of data in a way that makes the service completely unusable for 99% of real-world customers.
  • Impose income limits that make the service unavailable for nearly everyone who wants to apply.
  • Require such a complex application process that nobody who needs the program can figure out how to use it.

Then, after about three years, they show the government that nobody wanted $20 Internet service, and ask permission to stop providing it. And the CPUC, being an industry lapdog, quickly agrees to whatever Verizon asks for. And *then* they stop providing it.

Comment Re:Waymo pickup from tricky location? (Score 1) 10

I always have trouble with rideshare pickups from my apartment. I can plant an X where I want to be picked up but then this gets translated to an address on a neighbouring street that is not in my complex. I always have to send a clarifying message to the driver. This is challenging because I can't send it until the driver is assigned, which is when I'm rushing around trying to be ready in time. It would seem that Waymo might skip the step of converting to a human readable address. That might help. But if, it doesn't, texting the robot driving the car doesn't seem to be an option. Has anyone here tried to get a Waymo pickup from a similar tricky location?

It probably helps to use a ridesharing platform that doesn't use multiple map providers. If all your map data is from one source, you don't have these problems. It's when you start to mix multiple map providers that things go horribly and irreparably wrong, because the workarounds for one platform don't work on a different platform. Given that we're talking about Waymo, I assume Google Maps is used for everything, so I wouldn't expect those issues to occur. But no way to know without trying it at your specific location.

Comment Re:It isn't that simple (Score 1) 52

"Just invest in rail."

No, it's not that easy. Trains are slow to get started, they need a significant amount of time to stop. Most trains weigh way more than a truck with full load. But trains need to be managed carefully. Enough distance between the trains, a quality management system for switches and signals, good trains, good personnel.

Before that, you need to design your network such that it's attractive enough for people to use it. With public transit this generally means: put stations at places where people want to get on or get off or want to transfer to other modes of public transport (such as buses, subways, trams) which can bring people closer to their final destination.

And note that this will change over time, but your rails can't change over time. This is the peril of rail for intracity transit.

Rails make a lot of sense in ultra-dense areas (think Manhattan, *maybe* downtown SF, but not any of the rest of the Bay Area, etc.), because the roads can't handle even a fraction of the passenger volume.

Rails also make sense for long-distance travel. If you're traveling for several hours, you probably don't want to drive that, so it is worth the inconvenience of not having a car at the other end. Also, if the trains are fast enough for their average speed to exceed the average speed of a car, then after two or three hours, you've probably broken even with the extra travel time required to get to and from those fixed endpoints.

But for the most part, rail *doesn't* make a lot of sense, because they're too much slower than air travel for long distances, and they're too much slower than cars for short distances. If you really want rail to work, we need 250 MPH (minimum) bullet trains from city to city so that they are competitive with airplanes. And provide ample parking at the termini.

All of these modes of public transport need to be efficient, arrive at least twice (preferably more) per hour throughout the day, be safe and clean.

Twice per hour makes a transit system borderline useless unless you are traveling for multiple hours. Your average latency is half of that, so that means on average you will waste 15 minutes waiting for every train. That means to break even, even before factoring in the extra time to get to/from the station, you need to save a whopping 15 minutes by using the train. And if you have even one connection, that makes your median latency thirty minutes. When you're wasting half an hour just waiting for the train to arrive, you're not only uncompetitive with driving; you're starting to be uncompetitive with bicycling.

Successful transit systems run avery 3 to 5 minutes during rush hour, and no more than about once every ten minutes late at night or on weekends. If you can't keep trains running at that frequency, you aren't dense enough to need a transit system, and you probably will regret putting one in. You'll end up repeatedly reducing the frequency to keep the trains at high enough occupancy to be worth doing, and then you'll be confused when ridership drops because nobody wants to wait that long for a train, and eventually you'll end up with a massively subsidized waste of taxpayer dollars like VTA.

Comment Re:No more mergers, at all. (Score 0) 14

I've really come around to this idea that we should simply stop any mergers or acquisitions by businesses, full stop. I don't think any major merger in my lifetime has ended actually postitively to where we can all say "wow, sure glad that happened!". Have we ever seen the lower prices promised?

Want to make a business then you make your business to be a self sustaining entity and not just have the end goal of being purchased.

License your tech if you want to join forces. Gone bankrupt and another company wants your assets? They can buy it then but that's it.

Yup. We're well past the point where the resulting economies of scale benefit the consumer. In late-stage capitalism, economies of scale benefit the corporation and only the corporation.

Comment Re:Train kept a-rollin' / till six PM (Score 2) 52

"Rail produces one-fifth the emissions of cars per passenger kilometer..."

Sure, for all cars. But how does it compare to just buses?

I think the inefficiency may lie not the mode of transport but in our unwillingness to all pile into the same conveyance.

Full or at typical capacity? Lots of bus routes around here average a low single-digit number of passengers for much of the route. Even single-passenger cars compare favorably to that. Assuming a diesel bus at an average of 3 MPG, you need a minimum of 15 passengers on average to break even with driving single-passenger hybrids. And that's not factoring in how much dirtier a gallon of diesel fuel is compared with a gallon of gasoline.

Comment Re:Time to rename the company (Score 1) 41

Thanks, I see, so it is a company without a product that is truly representative of nothing at all.

I guess the conclusion about the impending job market doom is justified then.

I kind of automatically assume that any company that can successfully replace a third of their workforce with AI is not doing anything meaningful. I mean, a company that does nothing but write crappy rehashed product reviews could pull it off, or a company that has no plans to innovate or grow could maybe do it by laying off all the sales/advertising people, but otherwise, it seems like a stretch.

So the question, then, is whether this company is genuinely circling the drain with nothing to lose or just has leadership who have no idea what any of their employees actually do.

Comment Re:Just installed Sequoia (Score 1) 33

Could you hook the hardware up to a Linux system and then get that data to your applications some other way? Looks like Linux still has firewire support, and you can connect to pipewire with ffado.

Ostensibly, yes, I could. I could even use an ancient Mac Mini with a built-in FireWire port to do that. But at some point, the level of hackiness becomes high enough that you're spending all your time dealing with things not working, and that's almost worse than it not working at all. :-)

Comment Re:Just installed Sequoia (Score 1) 33

What model of mac do you have ? I doubt any mac models with firewire ports are supported by tahoe.

M1 Max MacBook Pro. The setup involves a Thunderbolt 3 to Thunderbolt 2 adapter chained to a Thunderbolt 2 to FireWire 800 adapter, which in turn is chained to a FireWire 800 to 400 adapter, which is then connected by a cable to the device. It's dongles all the way down.

Comment Re:Just installed Sequoia (Score 1) 33

OWC makes a Thunderbolt 3 dock that has a FW800 port, that might do the job for you. Although avoiding Liquid Gas is probably a sound decision anyway.

Getting Thunderbolt ports isn't the problem; Apple's Thunderbolt-to-FireWire hardware does that, too. Without FireWire device family support in the kernel, FireWire hardware can't be used, period.

Comment Re:Poor Boeing. (Score 4, Interesting) 35

You're missing that both a bleed air system AND poor maintenance are required for this problem to manifest.

Presumably the other planes with a bleed air system are getting better maintenance, so haven't been a problem. No idea how the 787's maintenance is, but since it doesn't have a bleed air system, the problem of dangerously contaminated cabin air hasn't manifested.

More specifically, this happens when engine oil or hydraulic fluid leak into the engine while bleed air is being drawn.

Comment Just installed Sequoia (Score 2) 33

I depend on FireWire audio interfaces, so everything from Tahoe on is dead to me for the foreseeable future.

My problem is that I don't do audio recording often enough to justify spending the thousands of dollars it would cost to buy all new hardware, but I do it often enough that I can't upgrade my operating system and lose the capability. It's that really annoying middle ground that Apple really doesn't support well, though to be fair, I've gotten thirteen years out of it after Apple stopped shipping built-in FireWire ports, so I guess that's not too horrible. :-)

I tried getting off of FireWire a long time ago, precisely because I suspected that this would eventually happen. But to keep costs down, my plan was to buy a MOTU LP32 ADAT-to-AVB bridge so that I could keep using 16 inputs from my existing interfaces and supplement that with a MOTU Stage-B16. The problem is, the LP32 has been on permanent back-order for about two years now, with no sign of things improving.

I'm also a late adopter after lots of bad experiences, so I just downloaded Sequoia so that at least I won't be stuck on Sonoma forever. I'm hoping that by the time they stop shipping security updates for Sequoia, either MOTU will have the LP32 available again, someone will have figured out a way to get IOFireWireFamily to build and run on later OSes, or I will have found some other low-cost solution for a large number of inputs. Not holding my breath, though, on any of the above.

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