It's fascinating to me that we went from "embedding important information in QR codes is silly because they look ridiculous and no one will ever use them" ( https://picturesofpeoplescanningqrcodes.tumblr.com/ ) all the way to "sweet, I can read the whole menu online and order and pay when I'm ready, this is great" in like 3 months.
Yeah. It's baffling to me that Private Eye covered this in explicit, specific detail a decade ago and there were essentially no consequences for many years after.
Heinlein's "The Roads Must Roll" posits a network of very fast, very long moving walkways which could be used for mass transit (you'd ramp up speed on slower ones then hop over to a fast one). Wikipedia says that moving walkways had been in sf for decades by that point, but Heinlein also almost incidentally invents the Segway in the story -- just a little treat.
I love peoplemovers (like the Hong Kong Central-Mid Level escalators and the delightfully bouncy SFO walkways) and always wondered what would have to be different for us to get super-fast ones for transit.
In Boston, IMO they would be at least as good as the Green Line :)
I used to regularly use these at the Uni of Leeds in the Roger Stevens lecture theatre building. Never saw an accident. Freshers were told that they turned upside down when going over the top but in fact they just slid sideways to the next shaft (we used to ride over the top sometimes to beat a queue going down) but they could apparently jam if too many people tried it so it was frowned upon by the porters.
Got to ride one of those in the Bat'a building in Zlin, Czech Republic. Supposedly that version had some sort of safety mechanism to keep you from crushing your arm off if you didn't have it tucked inside, but I didn't dare test it. We called it a "Mario elevator" due to the obvious similarities with the elevators in the original Super Mario Bros.
"Their overall rate of accidents is estimated as 30 times higher than conventional elevators. A representative of the Union of Technical Inspection Associations stated that Germany saw an average of one death per year due to paternosters..."
Wow - those were definitely different times in terms of acceptable risks in various aspects of life.
Modern times obviously improved a lot of it, but if you're at least a bit cynical, you also have to wonder how much, due to those measures, people are "prevented" from having to build out their awareness of surroundings, dexterity and overall "aptitude for life".
Sure, but that doesn’t really change the comparison of risks. Escalator rides, for example, are just plain old more dangerous than car rides regardless of why, just as car rides are just plain old more dangerous than train rides.
Moving walkways have a big power efficiency problem over a distance. While you can make a train track longer without decreasing the efficiency of the train, a moving walkway has to move that whole walkway. Can you imagine the friction on a 10 mile long moving walkway? You would need massive motors just to budge it.
If, like in the design seen here, the slide movement and propulsion is decoupled, and motors add impulse to the platforms at constant intervals, doesn't sound like that would be a problem. These wood platforms must have weighed tons by the way.
Mid level escalators have a very definite purpose as people wouldn't walk up that steep slope before.
Moving walkways along flat surfaces though? Its very hard to make them attractive. Most people like to walk a little, certainly we are built for it genetically and most people don't walk as much as they should in any case. In terms of mass transit nobody has ever got the safety and space issues to work. They only really have tended to work in airports where there are sometimes very large distances to traverse, and you need an (actually pretty slow moving for safety) solution for the elderly etc. who aren't as mobile. Even at an airport unless distances are massive and people have giant luggage most will prefer to walk, or only take the moving walkway for novelty value.
People would walk more if they could get to where they were going fast. If you could walk to the store as quickly as you could drive, why would you get in the car? No traffic jams on a sidewalk.
It’s certainly true in NYC. Even if it takes a touch longer than taking the subway, lots of folks walk. If the infrastructure supports it, people will use it.
In dense cities? Yes. You don’t need a car to transport a load of groceries if there’s a grocery store on the 20 minute walk home from work. For larger trips, backpacks, rolling folding grocery carts, or even wagons do nearly everything a car can do. I used a car sharing service, as needed, for most of my adult life. Having moved to a city with shit for public transit, I miss the hell out of that.
I think the concept of not doing a months worth of grocery shopping for a family of four at a time is w what's foreign. going to the store for pasta and eggs and toast and nothing more is a waste of a grocery trip in some people's eyes. Those people love to shop at Costco and Sam's, and have a SUV's worth of groceries each time they do a trip. It's not a wrong way to live, but if that's how you live, not driving a vehicle with enough cargo space to hold a large body around means it doesn't make sense how you'd get any groceries. Doing that large a run is exhausting, so you don't do it very often, which means when you do go, you have to do a huge run which makes it suck. Smaller more frequent trips is shorter and mute frequent, which has its own, different problems.
Agreed. Even then, I used to take the subway to a regional big box wholesale club to grab stuff that made sense. If I lived nearer to a Costco, I’d take advantage of their fantastic sustainable fish program. Lot’s of good quality stuff has a totally worthwhile price point at those places. There’s a lot of room for different approaches, even in dense cities. Most people in cities don’t even have room to store that much stuff. I never did, and I didn’t miss it.
I'd never heard of the mid-level escalators before. Apparently they're on a slope with an elevation gain of 135m over 800m, which is pretty serious for someone who's out to do some shopping: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central%E2%80%93Mid-Levels_e...
Just from my rusty memory, the roads were after the Crazy Years and before the Prophet. So yes, before the theocracy.
EDIT: I found a link to the chart.
I seem to recall this is also a thing in "the city and the stars" by Clarke (1956), including the fact that it's faster towards the middle. I imagined a river of asphalt and it was kinda cool.
Since the article is about patents I, too, limited the scope of my comments--quite deliberately--to patents so these are really out-of-scope. I mentioned Apple v. Samsung because of the confusing language ie "design patent".
The first case you mention is against third-party repair and parts. This isn't a simple issue. At one end of spectrum people have died from fake accessories (eg [1]). So while I trust (and use) Anker devices that are sold in the US, would I buy and use a charger in Cambodia? Probably not. So I support the idea of third-party repair but you have to deal with the question of quality and the parts being suitable.
The second relates to, again, design (and trademark). This is less defensible. I mean they do look like Airpods but really how many ways can you make an earpod?
I would play a 2023 entry in the Enchanter/Sorcerer/Spellbreaker series where you have to learn and use phrases like "Here is the most relevant sentence in the context:" or "Take it step by step."
Gosh I think I'll be a little sad about that future? I'm reminded of how we used to know really fun tricks for squeezing another bit of performance out of our assembly code -- "The Story of Mel" -- and then compilers started doing all the work for us.
The past year or so of published literature on LLMs has been kind of hilarious because there is a substantial chunk of stuff whose contribution is "putting this extra English sentence into the input produces measurably better output".
It's like watching alchemists puzzle out chemistry, or like watching wizards fill their spellbooks. What a cool time.
Some of the best ambassadors for Brutalist architecture I've experienced are the Barbican in London and the Bonaventure in Los Angeles. They make good spaces for people.
I had a pair of white Denon Wireless Earbuds that I tried to sell on Facebook Marketplace, still in shrink and with my own photos. They were kicked off as counterfeit items, presumably because I described them as knockoff Air Pods and that triggered some filter. I wonder if Apple is also coaching classified ad sides with the same trademark messaging they're giving CBP?
If Facebook didn't immediately block sales of items self-described as knockoff <whatever brand>, they'd be (rightly) criticised for allowing the sale of counterfeit goods
Is it a counterfeit if it's advertised as such? The harm of counterfeits is only when they're being passed off as the real thing. If the buyer is aware that it's counterfeit what's the issue?
That you’re cutting into the sales of the legitimate item and the buyer could easily sell on the counterfeit to an unwitting buyer. The protection does not solely exist for the benefit of consumers.
Why's that? For example, wouldn't you describe any rotomolded cooler as a knockoff Yeti? To me, that doesn't seem to comment on the legit vs. counterfeit nature of the cooler, it just anchors the viewer's expectation.
Is there some special protection (in the USA) given to describing something as a "knockoff" versus "similar to"?
Gosh. I just emailed myself a .png of the barcode containing my library card number and open it in, like, the Photos or Gmail app when I'm at the kiosk.
Wallet passes allow you to define locations and timespans where the pass is "relevant". I've used the app MakePass to create a pass with my StarBucks membership code and when I'm nearing my usual shops, my phone will automatically suggest the StarBucks pass on the lock screen.
Same with event tickets. I define a location and timespan and when I arrive at that location, my phone will suggest the pass automatically without me having to look for it. Also, after the event, it won't suggest it anymore and move the pass to the "Expired Passes" section to not clutter the main view.
