Subscription airbags.

(Already exists in the motorcycling world)

Once you add up the cost of fuel, insurance, actually buying the poxy car in the first place, And that fact that autonomous driving still requires some level of monitoring from the driver.

It seems rather worthless compared to a taxi. You can be blind drunk getting into a taxi - but you cant do that on an autonomous car.

But more than that, the one thing I absolutely adore about my car in this day and age is that it just works. It's a machine to eats fuel and maintenance and once fed keeps going. I own it. It doesn't look for any subscriptions, it doesn't car about any connectivity issues and it won't get into a war with my phone when I try and bluetooth into it.

It is controlled by buttons that beep when I push them and I can work them by feel while driving.

The engine shit the bed and I put the engine from a similar car in it. Plug it in, wire it up and away it ran. It adjusted its own controllers to match the specific characteristics of the new engine in about five minutes of idling. I've shocks from Tein, and I've reprogrammed the ECU to work with ignition coils from a completely different manufactuer and to ignore the complete lack of a catalyst.

The Iphonisation of cars will be a disaster.

Really Facebook - you think you're so great because you banned him after he lost the legal capability of retaliation?

It's closing the door after the horse has bolted and all that. All that sweet advertising cash decided to go away if he stayed, probably - rather than risk being associated with Trumpist rhetoric.

I think, you want to position yourself like a toll-road operator. If that truck's carrying bread, beer, sex dolls or trafficked children - it's not your gig. After watching the last four years or more of effluent on your platform, when you're knowingly let your toll road be used by harmful elements and you know there's kids in the back of those trucks and you know where they're going and all that and what the consequences are or have been, but you're still merrily collecting the tolls along the way because, hey, it's not your problem otherwise, you're just a neutral party.

The HSE have apparently already initiated ransom negotiations. The Hackers have been informed that there is only a 3 year waiting list before a specialist consulting negotiatologist can see them.

They can, of course, try get the ransom immediately if they go private.

---

In non-humerous posts, I've heard the system was a bit like the Battlestar Galactica and might've been saved from worse damage because of it.

My Laptop is six years old. It killed two harddisks in the first year.

It's third harddisk has 33,128 power on hours as of now, according to SMART. (And 229,840 Load/unload cycles).

Amusingly, the original disks hit that figure after six months due to a firmware bug

'Just' 4GB of RAM

It wasn't that long ago that I had Xubuntu humming away on on a Pentium M withg 256 Megabytes.

Was it that long ago? When was 7.10 released?

Where does it all go?

It got my hopes up for a minute. Then I saw the #fictionalevent tag.

Oh sweet meteor of death.
Fall upon us and deliver us in fire
To peace everlasting

But you know what.

After ten hours at a desk all day I just stopped caring because all the other happy robot people were so insulting by smiling at me and saying why don't you just run?

I sleep. I work. I wait to go to work.

Ain't that hateful.

This is not just an excel thing.

By sheer virtue of knowing the difference between 'The Computer' and Windows I've found myself wearing the IT hat in a small business. I multiple small businesses.

When the mission critical server falls over. It's me that fixes it.
When someone can't get on the network, it's me that fixes it.
When the wordpress site needs to be kicked to do something unusual - I get to do that.
When all company data gets nuked because someone set up the RAID array on the server as RAID 0 rather than 1 - and the controller let the smoke out - I fixed that too. And saved the company.
I'm the one who knows the difference between what a public and private IP is - what subscriber NAT is - and why that piece of hardware wont work with that network operator.

I built an excel tool to automate what I actually do - turning a manual job that can take hours into one of fifteen minutes. It's really just a conglomeration of multiple rules of thumb formed more by accretion than by any actual factored design process. It used to break regularly in ways only I understood - often silently giving a wrong answer only obviously wrong to someone who knew what the right answer should've looked like. It's gotten more reliable and defined as it got used.

It's now become the company's first "app". Eventually an actual software developer will get to see it to turn it into a fancy jolly rancher icon and personal data snaffler. I expect them to run screaming in horror at the undocumented melange.

All it does, is the job I normally did from Monday to Friday. Nobody bothered me about my job on Saturday because it was obvious that, yeah, I wouldn't be in work on a Saturday.

The first time it popped out from beneath the company veil and met an actual user, I got a call on a Saturday. Because they wanted to use it NOW and couldn't log in, (A user error, not a program error - it worked as I intended). It got fixed anyway.

Eventually, when it filters out into the wider world, I'll get more calls. Asking me to fix the automation on Saturday - when the same people would've happily waited until monday morning for me to do the job.

I really didn't want to get into IT for a reason.

This is basically the market segment we pitch at in work.

Tough. Reliable. Functional. Efficient.

We're about 10-20% more expensive than the market bottom - which is basically none of these. And we're well below the market top. We get more work from the market top than bottom.

We refuse to go to the bottom because it's an utter hellhole down there. The only way anything actually succeeds down there is by having basically zero technical support, and selling things that have no chance of working in reality, but that sound really good on paper. They'll have FEATURES!! that sound good, but on the other hand when you utterly dig into the spec you realise how utterly shit the result is.

It's basically like the oak table from China.

We're in the position of having more people regret not buying from us, than who actually do buy from us because going with the cheaper competitor led to the whole thing breaking and failing to work - in the exact way we told them it would. But people are just caught up in the cufflinks of the salesman and the idea that they're getting a 'bargain'

You know what a Chinese Oak Table is, right?

It looks like Oak. It has texture. It has grain. It even feels like Oak to someone who doesn't really know what Oak is. It's fucking heavy too and resonates when you knock on it. And for a few weeks after you sit it in a kitchen it's happy and people love your new oak table until, one day, a few weeks in, you spill your tea on it.

And wiping the tea off, some of the painted on wood-grain comes off on the cloth too.

As time gooes by, the texture plastic surface that pretended to be oak grain starts to bubble and delaminate, revealing the mixture of wood-shavings and PVA glue beneath. And the lead blocks buried inside that gave it the sense of weight.

That's Chinese Oak. And the moment you realise you've bought Chinese Oak, you realise you've bought utter crap.

Linkedin is full of people like that. They look great on the surface. They make themselves look great on the surface. And Linkedin is the condensation of these people. It's where they all congregate to get noticed. That's their sole skill, because that's the only real skill that's required in the modern day environment. That's what actually gets you hired by HR.

Maybe I'm being bitter. But the only time I've ever had any sort of success with job interviews is where I spoke to the people who actually did the work, rather than the HR department.

Tired of driving?

Stressed out from all the traffic?

Take a Kalashnikov to the office today!

At least in spirit. Because this probably isn't the first time it's happened.

The hardest thing in work to do is put down the phone and let customers lie until the office is open. It might take two days. It takes a certain level of entitlement to expect an immediate response, RIGHT NOW when these operations might not have been able to do it. Being the person trying to answer now nearly led to burnout in work for me.

Because, you know, people do deserve to have lives. They might have sold you something, but giving them a hundred quid doesn't mean you own them.

And I've taken those calls. From people who're really pissed that slavery was outlawed so they just sort of treat anyone that's had the gall to charge them for a service as their own personal rental slave.

There've been plenty of times, and plenty of people, to whom I would love to have done something similar.

An yes. I'm sure I'll get modded troll for this. I don't care. I specifically recovered my account to say it. This sort of absolute customer entitlement in the modern era really pisses me off. Business is much easier for everyone when there's a level of mutual respect.

Did that in work to pay for a bit of software for the company website, since the vendor used paypal and the company credit account already had a paypal account associated with it - which was innaccessible for *reason that doesn't matter*.

Didn't realise the plugin would be tied to my personal email until after buying the bloody thing.

The problem with public transport is that it's full of the Public.