Presumably part of the ground tests consist of putting a prototype in a thermal chamber and running it a bit above max temp for a week and a bit below min temp for a week to check functionality+margins...
Wonder why this didn't pick it up? Perhaps the test wasnt long enough?
It was never good when you compare to internet search.
On the internet I can search for "pictures of the eiffel tower". If I try the same on my own computer I expect to find photos from the time I took the family to paris... Yet I don't.
But that's not the point of the Start Menu. The purpose is to quickly start programs with a fixed name, not to do a natural language query. Yet it sucks with that simple task. If programs would add themselves to the PATH, then Win-R would be a worthy replacement. As they don't, it is not.
And yet Gnome and KDE have no troubles doing just that if you activate the corresponding plug-ins for the respective search engines (Tracker and Baloo). How you access them is a matter of taste, but both integrate into your runner dialog or launch menu, if you wish.
You're not allowed to drive cars like that in a functional society. When you go for your compulsory car checkup it wouldn't pass the required safety standards.
What I think is missing today is a way to challenge someone else's car. A few independent reports should force an early checkup, and if passed soon after the accusation, the accused should get their own just to have something at stake.
while I agree, there's many places where the compulsory car checkup is tied to your relationship with the mechanic. I don't think my parents ever had a "valid" car but the certificate always was. It never felt wrong (although I think it is) but more like mutual aid or service.
There’s also the fact that nearly 1/4 US states require no emissions or safety checks whatsoever [1]. So everything is valid by default and realistically the only thing stopping you from driving a literal rust bucket, with tailpipe dragging, poor combustion, or modified emissions filtering (like modifying your truck so you can roll coal down Main Street) is it a cop feels like pulling you over for it
What is allowed and what actually happens are two very different things, my friend.
In the neighbourhood I live, there's a guy who visits someone here several times per week. His headlights are broken, the tires are worn smooth, the exhaust is loud beyond all reason. Given the general state of the vehicle, I don't have high hopes for the brakes.
I reported it to the police. I'm really not the type of person to do that, but this is worse than anything I've seen. Of course nothing happened. I didn't even get a reply. They don't give a shit. Some day that guy is going to rear-end my car and break my neck because his brake lines finally gave out.
Also, the compulsory car inspections only work for honest people. People with illegal mods will put back the stock parts for the inspection, and switch them back after. I'm not gonna say the inspections are worthless, but it does make a lot of money for the state and the private actors who run the inspection centres.
EDIT to add: They made a law recently that the inspector has to take a photo of the car inside the inspection centre, because there was so much fraud happening with vehicles just being "inspected" on paper.
That website will have an IP address and a registered owner. Taking down piracy websites is routine for governments, server providers, and domain registrars now, and they don't care whether the site is actually illegal. You can only get away with this long-term if the site is hosted in Russia, but Russia is sanctioned so how will you pay them?
Eh, somehow The Pirate Bay, Fitgirl Repacks, Anna's Archive, Sci-Hub etc seem to manage it.
The real challenge is delivering good enough performance that your site is better than waiting through 30 seconds of ads; and making it worth your time to run the site: there's hassle, legal risk, and it's not like you can run ads to make some cash.
I think OP is suggesting that the ability to sideload is what is preventing their phones being distributed in China.
If you can present a "locked down" phone to regulators, you might be more likely to get permission to sell large volumes of them - like iPhones in China.
But there still won't be Google Services so what extra money is Google to make there? The markup on hardware. But they have to compete with local manufacturers with the very same OS. At least Apple is the only manufacturer selling phones with iOS.
> voice communication that only your device can hear.
This is fairly straightforward - you have the device spew out noise with similar characteristics to human speech (ie. random overlapping syllables in the speaker's voice). Take a recording then subtract the random syllables.
Only your device can do the subtraction, because only your device knows the waveform it transmitted.
Obviously in a room with lots of reverb this will be a bit harder, since you will also need to subtract the reflection of what was transmitted with a room profile and deal with the phone moving in the room, but it sounds far from impossible.
Countermeasure: set up four microphones some distance apart, use autocorrelation to pinpoint the sound sources, and then isolate them, recovering the "masked" speech. The countercountermeasure would be to fully surround your mouth and vocal tract with an active noise cancelling system and then produce noise (to push whatever little sound gets through far below the noise floor: the signal is unpredictable enough that you can't use averaging techniques to recover it). The countercountercountermeasure would be to use a camera in the radio band to look at the vocal tract directly, using the phone as a light source, and recover the phonemes that way. The countercountercountercountermeasure would be to construct an isolated box… at which point you're no longer having a voice call in public: you have a portable privacy booth.
Why? I'd love to be an alternative whatsapp client with all kinds of new features that the official client doesn't have. Obviously you say you're building a compatible chat network, but the reality is users are just using your client to talk to whatsapp users.
Eg. one feature I'd love is some AI to automatically take any date and time someone mentions to me and put it as a draft event in my calendar. I miss so many events from big group chats I'm not paying proper attention to and suddenly everyone is saying "Whoa, you didn't come to Johns 50th birthday?!? Why not? We invited you months ago[in a group chat with 100 messages a day of mostly memes]"
> Not a reason to violate privacy IMO, especially when at the time this was done these people were only suspected of fraud, not convicted.
Well you can't really wait until the conviction to collect evidence in a criminal trial.
There are several stages that law enforcement must go through to get a warrant like this. The police didn't literally phone up Microsoft and ask for the keys to someone's laptop on a hunch. They had to have already confiscated the laptop, which means they had to have collected enough early evidence to prove suspicion and get a judge to sign off and so on.
They had a warrant. That's enough. Nobody at Microsoft is going to be willing to go to jail for contempt to protect fraudsters grifting off of the public taxpayer. Would you?
For context for international readers, the UK has a lot of speed cameras and other automated ways to give out fines.
These get sent by snailmail to the 'owner'[simplification] of the vehicle using a government database. The owner must then, within a deadline, say who was driving the vehicle at that date and time.
If the owner fails to say who was driving, they have committed a criminal offence, and will be fined.
It looks like Tesla has in a bunch of cases not declared the driver on time. I'm willing to bet that's due to them just being slack with records in some cases - for example loaner cars, offences which occurred on the same day as a sale from person A to person B, etc.
18 offences across the whole fleet of >100k cars isn't much really, when you consider ~30% of motorists receive a fine in any given year.
It's a ludicrous system – I've experienced it first hand.
If for some reason the letter isn't delivered (or indeed sent), the original offence is scrapped and a new offence issued for Failure to provide information.
Frustratingly, there is no obligation on the Police to provide proof of posting, and per the law, it is deemed received once sent.
The primary alternative is to have signed delivery, in which case some people will simply refuse to sign it and thus prevent delivery. Signed delivery is the way the postal service usually differentiate between normal delivery which has some kind of error rate which the postal service do not take responsibility for, and the signed service which usually carry some insurance (up to a maximum) of delivery.
The US has their Service of process which is commonly seen in movies, which is often made into a joke in comedies.
A much older system is the one where by law people had to put a notice in the news paper, sometimes multiple notices, and then that was considered enough proof of delivering the notice.
It would be an interesting conversation to philosophy how a future system should be designed that can't be refused, where delivery to the recipient is guarantied, and where the sender and the delivery service must produce proof of their parts.
Perhaps, though I’m fairly confident that given enough thought we could fairly quickly come up with a much better process; and without the risk of convicting individuals because of unsent or undelivered post.
My father worked on the early 90's contract that implemented the speed camera's on the motorway. The future road map was to make these digitally automated. Dark Fibre was laid but the plans were scrapped as the government saw it as a waste of money. This is why we are stuck with the ludicrous system.
For a long while if you were changing lanes while speeding through the camera it couldn't capture the plate. Again the government didn't care. Of course now resolved with the archaic future technology we have now.
I'm not sure what the technology by which the data from the speed camera is downloaded has to do with identifying the driver?
The reason for this "ludicrous" procedure is that the police can identify the owner of the car (based on the license plate), but not the driver, so the owner has to say who was driving. And all of this has to be done in a way that will hold up in court, therefore snail mail. The same procedure exists in Germany (of course, the bureaucracy here has its ludicrous sides too) and I bet in other countries as well.
In Finland automatic camera fines (they're not exactly fines but I have no idea how to translate "liikennevirhemaksu" so work with me here) are the problem of whoever owns the car. If the owner wasn't the one driving the car, then it's up to them to inform the police who was actually driving
Interesting! If I translate it from Finnish to German, Google says something along the lines of "traffic violation fee". Usually you can't punish someone for something someone else has done, but maybe if you call it a fee (which doesn't imply punishment) instead of a fine, you can (at least in Finland)?
Reminds me of the fines for using public transport without a ticket in Germany: they're not called fines either, but "erhöhtes Beförderungsentgelt" ("increased transportation fee"). I'm sure there's a very good reason for this name too...
"Traffic vioaltion fee" is a great translation. As far as I understand the logic behind them, they're meant for relatively minor violations where a fine would be kind of overkill and specifically have to be "directed" at the right person.
The downside is that unlike fines which scale by income here – the term is "päiväsakko" or "day fine", a fine unit that scales with net income – the fees are fixed sums, so unless a person with high income really does something heinous with their car, they're not as likely to get 200k€ (really) speeding tickets.
So now if you're rich you can speed all you want and pay a relatively small fee for it, as long as you're not doing 200km/h in a school zone or something like that
> And all of this has to be done in a way that will hold up in court, therefore snail mail.
This needs to change. Snail mail is no longer reliable. Letters often get delayed by weeks or go missing altogether, but the law still assumes that justice is being done by it being sufficient to assume that a letter that was posted has been received within a few days. It's no longer true.
Wouldn't it be more reasonable to just issue the fine to the owner of the car? The owner allowed the person to use their car and accepts that responsibility. If it was stolen, then just say so. Even in the case of fleets, someone is responsible for know who is operating the vehicle and when. The gov't shouldn't care about it any further than holding the owner responsible. If the owner doesn't want to rat out the actual driver, then the owner takes the hit on points/fines/whatever
that's difficult when most post is dropped in a metal box on a street. But I'd argue that not the issue people have with the way these laws work in practice.
For those that don't use the UK postal service, Royal Mail has a recorded delivery option that can show that, at least something, mostly likely what was sent, was delivered to the address.
The issue here is that the UK government has given itself a pass that, 'trust us, we sent it' is fair and legal, while at the same time refusing to allow not the government to use the same argument.
People tend to get upset when laws and legal defenses are asymmetric, doubly so when its skewed to protect the bureaucracy at the expense of the citizen.
Just for reference the Royal Mail uses complaints to track losses, in the year 2017-2018, Royal Mail received 250,000 complaints for lost items, out of around 6 billion items processed [0]. Of course that requires that the sender somehow knows that the item was lost, so losses are likely significantly higher.
Without a recorded delivery, 'I never received what you sent' should absolutely be a valid defense. Although, 'Trust me I sent it', should not be a valid argument for either side, unless they can show that the item was send and received.
The Scottish court system uses Royal Mail Signed For to send citations, I believe it makes two attempts to deliver, and won't consider the citation delivered unless the named addressee signs for it.
...on the other hand, if you don't respond to citations e.g. for a criminal case, they might then escalate by issuing a warrant for your arrest.
Looking at the English civil courts, I'm having trouble parsing their rules:
My reading is that either the court sends the summons (claim form) and comes to its own conclusion if it has been served or not, but if you choose to do it or have a process server do it, you have to submit a certificate of service to the court. If you do that, all it says they require is the method and date you sent it, no proof it got delivered!
Furthermore, rule 6.18 says that if the court posts the claim form itself, it will inform you if the form is returned to them undelivered... but will deem it "served" anyway, provided you gave them the correct address?
Tesla finance seems legendary in this regard. A friend here in MA got hauled down to city hall because their auto excise taxes were 3 years overdue - they're the responsibility of the owner of a leased car, in this case Tesla finance. According to the person there, the town (50K people or so) had a bunch of Tesla owners in the same boat.
That’s a horrible system. Britain used to be famous for the professionalism of their police and now they can’t be bothered to make a traffic stop and give people speeding tickets face to face.
I’m a bit biased here, because a close friend’s mother was killed by someone speeding through a red light.
I think automated enforcement of minor driving infractions is a good thing. More efficient use of government resources. Incentivizes drivers to follow the rules of the road.
Automated systems are fine, they would just be a lot better if they were used to dispatch patrol vehicles in real time rather than mailing letters to auto manufacturers.
Now, I'll be the first to agree that you're biased, but surely you see that the rules and norms of the road are generally far more nuanced and not necessarily identical the rules of the road as the government writes them?
There's no reason motorists shouldn't be able to go almost any speed on motorways, conditions permitting. Germany's system is fairly sensible in this regard and many American states have one or two good laws that correlate well with norms and should be adopted elsewhere.
If the rules and laws actually reflected norms of behavior there would be more appetite for enforcement.
Thankfully there is more than one country on earth and we actually have countless examples of this stuff working. Not everything that you’re not personally subject to has to be left to debating hypotheticals.
Except, it does. People worried about getting a fine will not chance a light on yellow. This is patently obvious for anyone that has ever driven in London (where I learned to drive).
Anyone that doesn't care about the fine (perhaps in a stolen car) may still do it, but they'd do it regardless.
Ah yes, the risk of small fines that is why people won't do dangerous things. Have we tried a £50 fine for murder?
Economist brain.
The problem is very simple: driving tests aren't hard enough, too many people have driving licences, and we don't retest people. In addition, enforcement of people driving without a licence is completely pathetic (as anyone who has driven in the UK can attest to, the stuff I have seen over the past few years is insane...obviously there is an underlying cause but if you see a clapped out hatchback, Just Eats bag in the front seat, P plates on the car, you know to steer well clear...as if the multiple dents on the car already didn't give it away).
Automatic enforcement of dumb low level stuff is supposed to free up police time for the more serious things. Whether that happens or not is a political decision. I remember the time before red light cameras in London, and the time afterwards, and the situation was much improved after they showed up.
I agree the driving test is too easy (though several orders of magnitude more difficult than in the US states I've had to do one in), and there is too little enforcement of otherwise dangerous behaviour.
I don't think I mentioned anything wrong with automatic enforcement. I think the claim was that when confronted with a financial incentive, people who drive recklessly will stop driving recklessly. Would this be the case if we paid people £50/month to drive better?
It makes no sense at all. The problem in policy is generally that you have people talking past each other: speed limits are effective for people who are generally going to comply with them anyway, they are not intended to stop serious accidents. The majority of accidents are not caused by "accidents" (as most people on here would think them), they are caused by people who drive recklessly a huge proportion of the time and eventually have an accident.
Again, the solution to this is simple: do not give these people driving licences. In the UK, you can kill someone with your car driving recklessly and be out of jail in 18 months. And I don't think people realise this is true, or that this won't have been the first "near miss" for these people...it will have been months and years of doing stuff that will kill someone, and eventually killing them. How are they supposed to kill people with cars if they can't own a car?
They're sort of damned if they do and damned if they don't, aren't they? If they make traffic stops for speeding people will moan about how they're just trying to meet quotas or ask why they aren't going after "real criminals."
People just want to drive irresponsibly and they will invent any reason to justify why they're the victim, actually.
You've inadvertently completed both parts of a proof by cases. We don't want speeding laws enforced at all right now, because most speed limits are way too low, because they're set for reasons other than actual traffic safety. Let's raise all speed limits to the 85th percentile speed first and only then talk about stepping up enforcement.
Let's not. The Xth percentile speed is not an appropriate measure for a few reasons:
1. Humans are not generally capable of sufficiently accurate long-term low-incidence risk assessment. Meaning, you irrationally value potentially getting to work 10 seconds faster over a 50% increased chance you run over a child crossing the street.
2. Humans are subject to too many irrational psychological factors; stuff like:
• False sense of security due to sitting in a box isolated from the outside world, that's advertised to keep them "safe" in case of a collision.
• Herd mentality, e.g. "everyone's going over the limit, so I will too". Bonus points for rationalizing this behavior "because it's safer to go at the speed of traffic!".
• Delusional rationalizations like "if the limit is 50 then going 10 over must be fine too, due to <reasons>!". Bonus points for applying the "5/10/15/20 over" rule for every possible speed limit — basic maths and physics say hello!
3. The speed humans will travel at on a given road depends primarily on what speed that road seems designed for. People will drive faster on straight, wide roads and slower on winding, narrow ones, regardless of the speed limit. Changing speed limits has little effect compared to changing the physical infrastructure. Show me a picture of a road and I'll tell you how fast people will drive on it.
As such, it makes no sense to first make some sort of a road and only then figure out the limits by observing real traffic. Figure out the appropriate limit first, then design the road with it in mind.
> Bonus points for rationalizing this behavior "because it's safer to go at the speed of traffic!".
But that's true (look up the Solomon curve), and it's exactly why the 85th percentile would be better.
> Delusional rationalizations like "if the limit is 50 then going 10 over must be fine too, due to <reasons>!". Bonus points for applying the "5/10/15/20 over" rule for every possible speed limit — basic maths and physics say hello!
You have cause and effect backwards. People think it's safe to go over the speed limit precisely because most speed limits are too low.
> Changing speed limits has little effect compared to changing the physical infrastructure. Show me a picture of a road and I'll tell you how fast people will drive on it.
Right. So even if going slower is safer, just making the speed limit lower won't accomplish that.
I'll agree with you regarding major arterials but disagree when it comes to suburban neighborhoods. What feels safe from the perspective of someone operating a vehicle can be quite different than what's actually safe when there are pedestrians and cars unexpectedly popping out of driveways.
The UK is not alone in using traffic cameras to enforce speed restrictions. There was a funny example in Germany where their automated cameras blur the face of any passenger... leaving them to be unable to see who was driving a UK left-hand-drive car with Animal from the Muppets in their passenger seat: https://boingboing.net/2008/10/27/german-traffic-cops.html
your source...is a union? really? you can look at ONS numbers yourself (and you will see this isn't the case).
Scotland has seen a drastic reduction in police numbers (unfortunately for you, not a Tory government :( oh well) despite record government funding levels. Labour's plan appears to be attempting the same trick with consolidation of forces, which should allow massive reductions in numbers. In Scotland, there are some days when there is one traffic car covering an area the size of England, and the expected time to respond to car accidents is usually 6-12 hours (this includes situations with serious injuries).
There is a lot more going on here than funding because government has never had more resources. The Tories, to their credit, actually put money in but (even then) the results were no better.
Also, in response to original comment, I am not sure why you think the Police are competent. Much of the policing function of a few decades ago not lies with private companies. Police numbers are generally high but the level of output has never been lower. You are seeing this in multiple areas of the public sector, public-sector output hasn't increased since 1997 whilst govt spending to GDP has basically doubled. The police have massive structural issues with their remit in the UK because of demographic change, and it is generally seen as a career for people of low ability resulting in fairly weak performance. It doesn't feel complex but than you realise that people don't understand that a politician looking to get elected might say it is even simpler. Does anyone actually work at a company where more spending increases results? I have never seen this to be the case. If anything, more spending seems to lead worse results.
> In Scotland, there are some days when there is one traffic car covering an area the size of England
Are you high, or did an AI write this?
Area of Scotland: 80,231 km^2
Area of England: 132,932 km^2
So on some days, in Scotland, there is one traffic car covering an area that is larger than Scotland. OK, where's it patrolling? Or are you saying Police Scotland only sends out 60% of one car to cover the whole country?
2010-2018...when did the Tories time in government end? Based on your comment, I am assuming 2018.
Lol, quite the pedant. To be clear though, yes when they are short-staffed they only have one car actually on patrol for the whole country (iirc, the actual full staffing policy overnights is two cars...which you can see has been covered by the media).
Traffic was consolidated into Police Scotland so there is only one police force, and so there aren't local forces patrolling a local area. I believe the total number of traffic police is something like 400 now (which is mostly not people on patrol) and so, overnight around holidays, the policy is to have two cars which turns into less than that on some occasions.
> In Scotland, there are some days when there is one traffic car covering an area the size of England,
Scotland is smaller than England, so this makes no sense.
Furthermore, anyone who drives regularly in Scotland knows this to be completely false - there are plenty of traffic cops around (sometimes incognito too), and they are sometimes even seen waiting in rural and semi-rural areas.
Again, there are not. The number has fallen significantly...I am not sure what you are arguing with (or why). You can just check because the number of police and the number of traffic police is reported. If you just Google, you will see that the current staffing level for overnight in Scotland is two cars for traffic police.
I live in a rural area, I have done so for two/three decades. When I moved here, you very often saw police doing speed checks because I live in an affluent area and the police would come out if you asked the right people. I don't think I have seen that for fifteen years. Again though, the data is that the number is way down since consolidation...which was the point and stated aim of the policy.
Hilarious to see pearl-clutching when people point out the SNP has been doing this after complaining about the Tories. This is why the UK is so shit, reality doesn't matter, just politics.
> Hilarious to see pearl-clutching when people point out the SNP has been doing this after complaining about the Tories. This is why the UK is so shit, reality doesn't matter, just politics.
I'm not sure where this tirade came from; I wasn't arguing in favour of any political party.
But getting back to the matter of traffic police - I have eyes, and I can see traffic cops with them. I have family in the force elsewhere in Scotland too, so I know that what you're saying simply isn't true. I really don't know why you are making this false claim.
I avoid speeding issues by the one weird trick of not speeding.
Besides, money is a big factor here. If you want to make it cost-effective for someone to physically flag down speeders and ticket them, you'll have to raise the ticket fines significantly. And (sensibly) the revenue goes to HMT and not the individual police forces, avoiding America's perverse incentives, so you'd have to raise the police budget as a separate line item.
(pursuing speeders is right out - police chases are extremely discouraged for obvious safety reasons)
Tesla isn't speeding either (probably; if FSD is speeding that's another issue), they're just manufacturing cars and leasing them to people in the UK.
In most US states, auto registration and auto titles are two separate things, which means our automated traffic camera systems can mail the tickets to the people who are probably actually driving the car. But I guess it's easy for a country like Britain to lay that kind of burden on auto manufacturers when they don't have any of them anymore.
Not manufacturer, leasing agent. Other manufacturers tend to contract out leasing. This probably happens to them occasionally as well, which makes me wonder how newsworthy this really is.
And besides, as other commenters pointed out, even if things get lost in the mail or the government otherwise drops the ball, they'll still consider that your fault.
I disagree. As much as I hate speed cameras, the way they’ve been implemented (meaning, the fact that you get a letter with evidence and it’s clear you committed the offense, and usually no points, like you might get from a cop) seems to strike a balance of fair punishment.
Now, whether they’re that effective at reducing speeding is a bigger question. Because people just slam the brakes for the 100 feet around the camera and then resume speeding.
I actually quite like the system. They tend to only install speed cameras at high hazard areas e.g. where fatal accidents have occurred. Also the camera's are mostly super visible - bright high-vis yellow, and there are often warning signs as you approach them.
It's quite a different story in other countries at least in terms of visibility!
If you break the government's rules, that should be between you and the government. I shouldn't have to front the cost of any fines or otherwise be in the middle of it.
Wonder why this didn't pick it up? Perhaps the test wasnt long enough?
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