superpie

[ Speaking Spanish ]

A manual transmission does have one upside. It creates engagement around the experience of driving, which I believe is something many vehicles lack. I sound like [old man yells at cloud], but people just do not seem to be paying attention to what they're doing in their giant metal death machines these days.

There are the fun aspects obviously. I know that when I want to pass another car, go around a corner at speed, and navigate snowy roads I'll be in exactly the right gear without the computer having to guess what I want. But those are secondary to the demand of attention created by it.

It seems this is more likely for devices that are stationary but limited to battery power. Off the top of my head, I could imagine replacing the battery in my electronic front door lock with a tidy hardwire to avoid the need for occasional replacement.

It's fantastic that he provided a place to host code for game modders / developers as well, I definitely spent years of my life playing http://svn.icculus.org/tremulous/

While I'm for blocking malicious ads, I'm not huge on the idea of one of the biggest advertising companies deciding what ads get blocked in the world's most popular browser.

This seems horrendously expensive at $36 per user per year to incentivize basic community tasks. Maybe it just doesn't fit into my world, where we do things like put dishes in the dishwasher as we use them and put them away when they're clean.

Almost everything they design seems to require a case as well, which contradicts the spirit of the wonderful looking products they sell. Camera bumps that scrape against tables on all of the iDevices, and laptop feet so shallow that the bottom of my MacBook is scuffed up in the center from normal use have cosmetically destroyed my uncased devices.

Facebook sort-of-recently introduced measures to defeat ad blockers, which I think has greatly increased the number of clicks.

A while back I'd explored trying to own my data, especially with email, and found that the efforts involved in hosting your own email server were tantamount to a full-time job.

The amount of fighting you have to do to stay on everyone's whitelists is absurd.

Not a fan of the predatory "Sign up for a 7 day free trial, and if you forget to cancel we'll bill you $60 for the year membership" system. It's also a week trial, but the AI takes 8 workouts to learn -- not great for a comprehensive demo at all.

Michael Crichton did this in State of Fear. It was page after page of graphs, graphs, more graphs, with long detailed explanations. It really put me off of reading his books.

Randall's book "What If?," which is a collection of these absurd hypotheticals, is for sale on Amazon for $3 right now. I've got it, it's a fun read.

Edit: I should add that it's the eBook.

I've heard that carbonation in some drinks acts as a more efficient alcohol delivery system, so mixing heavily carbonated drinks (beer) with higher proof ones (liquor) will maximize absorption and potentially lead to a stronger intoxication / hangover.

This is pure speculation, but I wonder if this has anything to do with the AirPower wireless charging mat's development?

They did post a writeup here: https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/09/security-update/

Although, I expected to see a notice after my own tokens had been reset by Facebook before or after logging back into my account.

Has anyone found the full text of this tax funded study published anywhere that's not charging $35 to read it?

Some car manufacturers sell ash trays as "add-on" items at the dealer since that space can be used more practically for the non-smoking majority.

That mobile revolution still relies largely on cloud compute platforms, I feel that this is more like building better destinations for automobiles to go to.

It really does bother me that few people these days are concerned about actual sound quality. At my local Best Buy, there is an entire isle dedicated to headphones with about a dozen on display and connected to a central music box. This music box makes even the best headphones sound absolutely terrible--and all of the headphones are 'trendy' styles such as Beats or Sol which have over-exaggerated highs and lows that make the listener think they're awesome.

If you ever wander in to a BB store with these boxes, go ahead and plug a set of headphones into your cell phone and play a song--you'll be amazed at the difference. They literally do not care how the headphones sound to the buyer, just how they look and how much they cost.

In the back of the store, by the musical instruments and "DJ" stuff there is another headphones display. This display has gear from companies that actually make a good product for music. Sennheiser, Pioneer, the good stuff. This section is completely abandoned and nobody cares about this stuff, which is why the section has been shrinking to make more room for Monster HDMI cables and the like.

Best Buy also has a car stereo section, which is unsurprisingly less than fantastic as well. They carry speakers that are designed with loudness in mind far before sound quality--but they'll tell you they sound great, and most consumers will listen to the expert on stereos in the blue shirt and khakis. Head units are toted as having apps and dvd players and all the gadgets, but no mention of sound quality is ever made with the units. Sure they can read the box and tell you it has a 24-bit burr-brown DAC, but they couldn't tell you what it means.

Disclaimer: I am considering Best Buy to be sort of an 'average' for consumer electronics due to its dominance on the market and with that I am only using my local store as an example. YMMV

I feel that with low enough risk rates, prevalence in new battery products will still increase to the point that Lithium Ion and similar high end batteries are currently at. When cell phones and laptops were making frequent news stories by exploding, it scared a lot of people, but advances in battery technology were made to make them safer and now they are ubiquitous.

"But all the other kids are doing it, mom!"

What I want to know is, why are these systems accessible from the public internet in the first place?