Talking of cars, Mrs Al received a letter this morning from the Met with a speeding fine for doing 24mph on a 20mph road in Croydon, at 8.00 on a Sunday morning. Is it normal practice to be so tough? Seemed very harsh to us, as on local 20mph roads the average speed seems to be around 25-30 mph. Guess we just have to suck it up, though.
It's supposed to be 26 before a fine here in the Socialist Republic of Wales.
Suggestions of “dozens” injured on that Singapore flight which got caught in turbulence. 30 ambulances met the plane as it landed in Bangkok. Sounds utterly horrific for passengers and crew. Plane was a 777-300ER, 219 pax and 18 crew on board. (2/3 full).
Jesus Christ
To make it worse that must have been totally unexpected, otherwise everyone woukd have been strapped in, anticipating turbulence. That many injuries - even deaths - suggests there was no warning at all. Kinell
And that's why you wear your seatbelt unless you're actively moving around the cabin.
Seriously, though, to have such severe turbulence someone dies. Wow. That must have been horrific.
One way it can happen is if the plane suddenly plunges you can be hurled UPWARDS from your seat, breaking your neck on the overhead cabins. Jeez!
Or - as I said - people have been killed by runaway trolleys, smashing into them
Yep, always wear your seatbelt, even when sleeping. Maybe especially when sleeping
Which of course doesn't protect you from the flying bodies of non-belters.
On the upside, we express alarm at this news report because it is so vanishingly rare
I remember as a kid in the 70s plane crashes were weekly events, or so it seemed. God knows what it was like in the 1930s. I also remember our family car regularly breaking down - it was expected. The AA man was a constant necessity
We forget how much things have improved. How many planes fly every day? Tens of thousands? How many crash? Almost none? As for cars, I can't remember when I last drove a car which broke down, unless it was my own fault and I was doing something RIDIC
Obviously you don't drive a Land Rover.
I had a succession of crap cars, all of them German - BMW, Merc, etc, that would just break constantly. Rarely engine failure but more often something else - windscreen wiper motors giving out, starter motors packing in etc. Plus huge mark ups on parts.
I then bought a second hand Toyota that I flogged to death without a single incident in five years. Sailed through every MOT first time. When it finally gives up on me I'll buy another.
But I do worry about today's generation of over-engineered cars that are pretty much just computers on wheels. My crappy Corolla will still be driveable (and user serviceable) in 25 years time, doubt the same could be said for any car that's being made today.
And touchscreens. Who actually wants endless touchscreens and menus when driving? When the, uh, tactile feel of a knob is far superior...
It's bonkers that you can get 6 points for phone use but all new cars (except Mazdas, I think) have a giant iPad in them.
So...
As a man with a telematics auto insurance company, I can tell you that the smaller your phone, the more dangerous using it is.
That said: having the center console so far from the centerline of your vehicle isn't very good for safety either.
Buttons. Actual buttons is what you want. I think I almost killed myself last year in a newish hire car, looking for the touch-point to change the radio station.
My knackered Toyota has two buttons, pressing up raises temp 0.5c, pressing down lowers it 0.5c. Simples. And there's no danger of it also being the go-to place to push to change radio station, etc. I sometimes rent a modern, touchscreeny car, and am always happy when I get back into my 13 year old shitbox with actual buttons.
I also wonder how these new cars are going to age. I suspect they have a 3-5 year lifespan then will just get stripped for parts, as mentioned below. Planned obsolescence.
Oh don't get me started on unnecessarily complicated climate control. Our 2009 Ford Focus has one button for air conditioning which turns it on or off, and three dials - one which coldens or hottens the air, one which blows harder or softer or not at all, and one which points the air at the windscreen or the driver or the drivers feet or some mixture of these. It is perfect. Our 2019 volkswagen, on the other hand - well, I still don't understand it. It has an array of controls and buttons some of which appear to override or contradict each other. And they're necessarily so small that I can't see what they do without my reading glasses, which obviously I can't use to drive. And they don't appear to heat or cool the car any more efficiently - much less so, in fact. And as you say - buttons. Anything you can't do with a button isn't worth doing.
The 2024 version will be worse still. It will have no buttons at all, with all the HVAC controls on a massive ipad-looking screen in the middle, that you can’t possibly adjust while keeping your eyes on the road ahead.
What amazes me is that car designs must be focus grouped to death, here we have a small but probably representative sample of "people old enough and rich enough to be buying new cars every 3-5 years" and the universal consensus is a hatred of touch screens.
Unfortunately for the consumer, the screens save a fortune in manufacturing costs, not just by removing the switches, but also miles of cabling and usually a serious consolidation in the number of control modules around the car.
And the dashboard can be upgraded via software.
Indeed. And as mentioned elsewhere, they are permanently online, and collecting massive amounts of valuable (to the manufacturer) data. We can safely blame the Americans for that trend, started by GM with OnStar, and turned up to 11 by Tesla.
Suggestions of “dozens” injured on that Singapore flight which got caught in turbulence. 30 ambulances met the plane as it landed in Bangkok. Sounds utterly horrific for passengers and crew. Plane was a 777-300ER, 219 pax and 18 crew on board. (2/3 full).
Jesus Christ
To make it worse that must have been totally unexpected, otherwise everyone woukd have been strapped in, anticipating turbulence. That many injuries - even deaths - suggests there was no warning at all. Kinell
And that's why you wear your seatbelt unless you're actively moving around the cabin.
Seriously, though, to have such severe turbulence someone dies. Wow. That must have been horrific.
One way it can happen is if the plane suddenly plunges you can be hurled UPWARDS from your seat, breaking your neck on the overhead cabins. Jeez!
Or - as I said - people have been killed by runaway trolleys, smashing into them
Yep, always wear your seatbelt, even when sleeping. Maybe especially when sleeping
Which of course doesn't protect you from the flying bodies of non-belters.
On the upside, we express alarm at this news report because it is so vanishingly rare
I remember as a kid in the 70s plane crashes were weekly events, or so it seemed. God knows what it was like in the 1930s. I also remember our family car regularly breaking down - it was expected. The AA man was a constant necessity
We forget how much things have improved. How many planes fly every day? Tens of thousands? How many crash? Almost none? As for cars, I can't remember when I last drove a car which broke down, unless it was my own fault and I was doing something RIDIC
Obviously you don't drive a Land Rover.
I had a succession of crap cars, all of them German - BMW, Merc, etc, that would just break constantly. Rarely engine failure but more often something else - windscreen wiper motors giving out, starter motors packing in etc. Plus huge mark ups on parts.
I then bought a second hand Toyota that I flogged to death without a single incident in five years. Sailed through every MOT first time. When it finally gives up on me I'll buy another.
But I do worry about today's generation of over-engineered cars that are pretty much just computers on wheels. My crappy Corolla will still be driveable (and user serviceable) in 25 years time, doubt the same could be said for any car that's being made today.
And touchscreens. Who actually wants endless touchscreens and menus when driving? When the, uh, tactile feel of a knob is far superior...
It's bonkers that you can get 6 points for phone use but all new cars (except Mazdas, I think) have a giant iPad in them.
So...
As a man with a telematics auto insurance company, I can tell you that the smaller your phone, the more dangerous using it is.
That said: having the center console so far from the centerline of your vehicle isn't very good for safety either.
Buttons. Actual buttons is what you want. I think I almost killed myself last year in a newish hire car, looking for the touch-point to change the radio station.
My knackered Toyota has two buttons, pressing up raises temp 0.5c, pressing down lowers it 0.5c. Simples. And there's no danger of it also being the go-to place to push to change radio station, etc. I sometimes rent a modern, touchscreeny car, and am always happy when I get back into my 13 year old shitbox with actual buttons.
I also wonder how these new cars are going to age. I suspect they have a 3-5 year lifespan then will just get stripped for parts, as mentioned below. Planned obsolescence.
Oh don't get me started on unnecessarily complicated climate control. Our 2009 Ford Focus has one button for air conditioning which turns it on or off, and three dials - one which coldens or hottens the air, one which blows harder or softer or not at all, and one which points the air at the windscreen or the driver or the drivers feet or some mixture of these. It is perfect. Our 2019 volkswagen, on the other hand - well, I still don't understand it. It has an array of controls and buttons some of which appear to override or contradict each other. And they're necessarily so small that I can't see what they do without my reading glasses, which obviously I can't use to drive. And they don't appear to heat or cool the car any more efficiently - much less so, in fact. And as you say - buttons. Anything you can't do with a button isn't worth doing.
The 2024 version will be worse still. It will have no buttons at all, with all the HVAC controls on a massive ipad-looking screen in the middle, that you can’t possibly adjust while keeping your eyes on the road ahead.
What amazes me is that car designs must be focus grouped to death, here we have a small but probably representative sample of "people old enough and rich enough to be buying new cars every 3-5 years" and the universal consensus is a hatred of touch screens.
Unfortunately for the consumer, the screens save a fortune in manufacturing costs, not just by removing the switches, but also miles of cabling and usually a serious consolidation in the number of control modules around the car.
And the dashboard can be upgraded via software.
And functionality disabled unless you pay a subscription
Suggestions of “dozens” injured on that Singapore flight which got caught in turbulence. 30 ambulances met the plane as it landed in Bangkok. Sounds utterly horrific for passengers and crew. Plane was a 777-300ER, 219 pax and 18 crew on board. (2/3 full).
Jesus Christ
To make it worse that must have been totally unexpected, otherwise everyone woukd have been strapped in, anticipating turbulence. That many injuries - even deaths - suggests there was no warning at all. Kinell
And that's why you wear your seatbelt unless you're actively moving around the cabin.
Seriously, though, to have such severe turbulence someone dies. Wow. That must have been horrific.
One way it can happen is if the plane suddenly plunges you can be hurled UPWARDS from your seat, breaking your neck on the overhead cabins. Jeez!
Or - as I said - people have been killed by runaway trolleys, smashing into them
Yep, always wear your seatbelt, even when sleeping. Maybe especially when sleeping
Which of course doesn't protect you from the flying bodies of non-belters.
On the upside, we express alarm at this news report because it is so vanishingly rare
I remember as a kid in the 70s plane crashes were weekly events, or so it seemed. God knows what it was like in the 1930s. I also remember our family car regularly breaking down - it was expected. The AA man was a constant necessity
We forget how much things have improved. How many planes fly every day? Tens of thousands? How many crash? Almost none? As for cars, I can't remember when I last drove a car which broke down, unless it was my own fault and I was doing something RIDIC
Obviously you don't drive a Land Rover.
I had a succession of crap cars, all of them German - BMW, Merc, etc, that would just break constantly. Rarely engine failure but more often something else - windscreen wiper motors giving out, starter motors packing in etc. Plus huge mark ups on parts.
I then bought a second hand Toyota that I flogged to death without a single incident in five years. Sailed through every MOT first time. When it finally gives up on me I'll buy another.
But I do worry about today's generation of over-engineered cars that are pretty much just computers on wheels. My crappy Corolla will still be driveable (and user serviceable) in 25 years time, doubt the same could be said for any car that's being made today.
And touchscreens. Who actually wants endless touchscreens and menus when driving? When the, uh, tactile feel of a knob is far superior...
It's bonkers that you can get 6 points for phone use but all new cars (except Mazdas, I think) have a giant iPad in them.
So...
As a man with a telematics auto insurance company, I can tell you that the smaller your phone, the more dangerous using it is.
That said: having the center console so far from the centerline of your vehicle isn't very good for safety either.
Buttons. Actual buttons is what you want. I think I almost killed myself last year in a newish hire car, looking for the touch-point to change the radio station.
My knackered Toyota has two buttons, pressing up raises temp 0.5c, pressing down lowers it 0.5c. Simples. And there's no danger of it also being the go-to place to push to change radio station, etc. I sometimes rent a modern, touchscreeny car, and am always happy when I get back into my 13 year old shitbox with actual buttons.
I also wonder how these new cars are going to age. I suspect they have a 3-5 year lifespan then will just get stripped for parts, as mentioned below. Planned obsolescence.
Oh don't get me started on unnecessarily complicated climate control. Our 2009 Ford Focus has one button for air conditioning which turns it on or off, and three dials - one which coldens or hottens the air, one which blows harder or softer or not at all, and one which points the air at the windscreen or the driver or the drivers feet or some mixture of these. It is perfect. Our 2019 volkswagen, on the other hand - well, I still don't understand it. It has an array of controls and buttons some of which appear to override or contradict each other. And they're necessarily so small that I can't see what they do without my reading glasses, which obviously I can't use to drive. And they don't appear to heat or cool the car any more efficiently - much less so, in fact. And as you say - buttons. Anything you can't do with a button isn't worth doing.
The 2024 version will be worse still. It will have no buttons at all, with all the HVAC controls on a massive ipad-looking screen in the middle, that you can’t possibly adjust while keeping your eyes on the road ahead.
What amazes me is that car designs must be focus grouped to death, here we have a small but probably representative sample of "people old enough and rich enough to be buying new cars every 3-5 years" and the universal consensus is a hatred of touch screens.
Unfortunately for the consumer, the screens save a fortune in manufacturing costs, not just by removing the switches, but also miles of cabling and usually a serious consolidation in the number of control modules around the car.
And the dashboard can be upgraded via software.
Also....things can be software locked unless you pay the subscription. BMWs tried it with heated seats etc.
Suggestions of “dozens” injured on that Singapore flight which got caught in turbulence. 30 ambulances met the plane as it landed in Bangkok. Sounds utterly horrific for passengers and crew. Plane was a 777-300ER, 219 pax and 18 crew on board. (2/3 full).
Jesus Christ
To make it worse that must have been totally unexpected, otherwise everyone woukd have been strapped in, anticipating turbulence. That many injuries - even deaths - suggests there was no warning at all. Kinell
And that's why you wear your seatbelt unless you're actively moving around the cabin.
Seriously, though, to have such severe turbulence someone dies. Wow. That must have been horrific.
One way it can happen is if the plane suddenly plunges you can be hurled UPWARDS from your seat, breaking your neck on the overhead cabins. Jeez!
Or - as I said - people have been killed by runaway trolleys, smashing into them
Yep, always wear your seatbelt, even when sleeping. Maybe especially when sleeping
Which of course doesn't protect you from the flying bodies of non-belters.
On the upside, we express alarm at this news report because it is so vanishingly rare
I remember as a kid in the 70s plane crashes were weekly events, or so it seemed. God knows what it was like in the 1930s. I also remember our family car regularly breaking down - it was expected. The AA man was a constant necessity
We forget how much things have improved. How many planes fly every day? Tens of thousands? How many crash? Almost none? As for cars, I can't remember when I last drove a car which broke down, unless it was my own fault and I was doing something RIDIC
Obviously you don't drive a Land Rover.
I had a succession of crap cars, all of them German - BMW, Merc, etc, that would just break constantly. Rarely engine failure but more often something else - windscreen wiper motors giving out, starter motors packing in etc. Plus huge mark ups on parts.
I then bought a second hand Toyota that I flogged to death without a single incident in five years. Sailed through every MOT first time. When it finally gives up on me I'll buy another.
But I do worry about today's generation of over-engineered cars that are pretty much just computers on wheels. My crappy Corolla will still be driveable (and user serviceable) in 25 years time, doubt the same could be said for any car that's being made today.
And touchscreens. Who actually wants endless touchscreens and menus when driving? When the, uh, tactile feel of a knob is far superior...
It's bonkers that you can get 6 points for phone use but all new cars (except Mazdas, I think) have a giant iPad in them.
So...
As a man with a telematics auto insurance company, I can tell you that the smaller your phone, the more dangerous using it is.
That said: having the center console so far from the centerline of your vehicle isn't very good for safety either.
Buttons. Actual buttons is what you want. I think I almost killed myself last year in a newish hire car, looking for the touch-point to change the radio station.
My knackered Toyota has two buttons, pressing up raises temp 0.5c, pressing down lowers it 0.5c. Simples. And there's no danger of it also being the go-to place to push to change radio station, etc. I sometimes rent a modern, touchscreeny car, and am always happy when I get back into my 13 year old shitbox with actual buttons.
I also wonder how these new cars are going to age. I suspect they have a 3-5 year lifespan then will just get stripped for parts, as mentioned below. Planned obsolescence.
Oh don't get me started on unnecessarily complicated climate control. Our 2009 Ford Focus has one button for air conditioning which turns it on or off, and three dials - one which coldens or hottens the air, one which blows harder or softer or not at all, and one which points the air at the windscreen or the driver or the drivers feet or some mixture of these. It is perfect. Our 2019 volkswagen, on the other hand - well, I still don't understand it. It has an array of controls and buttons some of which appear to override or contradict each other. And they're necessarily so small that I can't see what they do without my reading glasses, which obviously I can't use to drive. And they don't appear to heat or cool the car any more efficiently - much less so, in fact. And as you say - buttons. Anything you can't do with a button isn't worth doing.
The 2024 version will be worse still. It will have no buttons at all, with all the HVAC controls on a massive ipad-looking screen in the middle, that you can’t possibly adjust while keeping your eyes on the road ahead.
What amazes me is that car designs must be focus grouped to death, here we have a small but probably representative sample of "people old enough and rich enough to be buying new cars every 3-5 years" and the universal consensus is a hatred of touch screens.
Unfortunately for the consumer, the screens save a fortune in manufacturing costs, not just by removing the switches, but also miles of cabling and usually a serious consolidation in the number of control modules around the car.
And the dashboard can be upgraded via software.
And functionality disabled unless you pay a subscription
The John Deere practices are quite incredible. What the f##k are you supposed to do if your massive tractor / combine break down in middle of a field in rural America, 100s of miles from nearest town with a service centre. You can't even easily put those things on a trailer, you need special ones with a massive truck to pull it.
Suggestions of “dozens” injured on that Singapore flight which got caught in turbulence. 30 ambulances met the plane as it landed in Bangkok. Sounds utterly horrific for passengers and crew. Plane was a 777-300ER, 219 pax and 18 crew on board. (2/3 full).
Jesus Christ
To make it worse that must have been totally unexpected, otherwise everyone woukd have been strapped in, anticipating turbulence. That many injuries - even deaths - suggests there was no warning at all. Kinell
And that's why you wear your seatbelt unless you're actively moving around the cabin.
Seriously, though, to have such severe turbulence someone dies. Wow. That must have been horrific.
One way it can happen is if the plane suddenly plunges you can be hurled UPWARDS from your seat, breaking your neck on the overhead cabins. Jeez!
Or - as I said - people have been killed by runaway trolleys, smashing into them
Yep, always wear your seatbelt, even when sleeping. Maybe especially when sleeping
Which of course doesn't protect you from the flying bodies of non-belters.
On the upside, we express alarm at this news report because it is so vanishingly rare
I remember as a kid in the 70s plane crashes were weekly events, or so it seemed. God knows what it was like in the 1930s. I also remember our family car regularly breaking down - it was expected. The AA man was a constant necessity
We forget how much things have improved. How many planes fly every day? Tens of thousands? How many crash? Almost none? As for cars, I can't remember when I last drove a car which broke down, unless it was my own fault and I was doing something RIDIC
Obviously you don't drive a Land Rover.
I had a succession of crap cars, all of them German - BMW, Merc, etc, that would just break constantly. Rarely engine failure but more often something else - windscreen wiper motors giving out, starter motors packing in etc. Plus huge mark ups on parts.
I then bought a second hand Toyota that I flogged to death without a single incident in five years. Sailed through every MOT first time. When it finally gives up on me I'll buy another.
But I do worry about today's generation of over-engineered cars that are pretty much just computers on wheels. My crappy Corolla will still be driveable (and user serviceable) in 25 years time, doubt the same could be said for any car that's being made today.
And touchscreens. Who actually wants endless touchscreens and menus when driving? When the, uh, tactile feel of a knob is far superior...
It's bonkers that you can get 6 points for phone use but all new cars (except Mazdas, I think) have a giant iPad in them.
So...
As a man with a telematics auto insurance company, I can tell you that the smaller your phone, the more dangerous using it is.
That said: having the center console so far from the centerline of your vehicle isn't very good for safety either.
Buttons. Actual buttons is what you want. I think I almost killed myself last year in a newish hire car, looking for the touch-point to change the radio station.
My knackered Toyota has two buttons, pressing up raises temp 0.5c, pressing down lowers it 0.5c. Simples. And there's no danger of it also being the go-to place to push to change radio station, etc. I sometimes rent a modern, touchscreeny car, and am always happy when I get back into my 13 year old shitbox with actual buttons.
I also wonder how these new cars are going to age. I suspect they have a 3-5 year lifespan then will just get stripped for parts, as mentioned below. Planned obsolescence.
Oh don't get me started on unnecessarily complicated climate control. Our 2009 Ford Focus has one button for air conditioning which turns it on or off, and three dials - one which coldens or hottens the air, one which blows harder or softer or not at all, and one which points the air at the windscreen or the driver or the drivers feet or some mixture of these. It is perfect. Our 2019 volkswagen, on the other hand - well, I still don't understand it. It has an array of controls and buttons some of which appear to override or contradict each other. And they're necessarily so small that I can't see what they do without my reading glasses, which obviously I can't use to drive. And they don't appear to heat or cool the car any more efficiently - much less so, in fact. And as you say - buttons. Anything you can't do with a button isn't worth doing.
The 2024 version will be worse still. It will have no buttons at all, with all the HVAC controls on a massive ipad-looking screen in the middle, that you can’t possibly adjust while keeping your eyes on the road ahead.
What amazes me is that car designs must be focus grouped to death, here we have a small but probably representative sample of "people old enough and rich enough to be buying new cars every 3-5 years" and the universal consensus is a hatred of touch screens.
Unfortunately for the consumer, the screens save a fortune in manufacturing costs, not just by removing the switches, but also miles of cabling and usually a serious consolidation in the number of control modules around the car.
It's good for the consumer because they make cars cheaper and simpler.
The old luddites on here who apparently can't operate any car made after 2015 are fighting a losing battle. Except for the latest Hyundai Kona which has physical HVAC controls reminiscent of a 90s stereo for some reason.
Almost all modern cars (cars that you'd actually want to own) have voice activated everything anyway so if you plough into a bus queue while fiddling with the touch screen you've only got yourself to blame.
Talking of cars, Mrs Al received a letter this morning from the Met with a speeding fine for doing 24mph on a 20mph road in Croydon, at 8.00 on a Sunday morning. Is it normal practice to be so tough? Seemed very harsh to us, as on local 20mph roads the average speed seems to be around 25-30 mph. Guess we just have to suck it up, though.
Does trying to get out of Croydon as quickly as possible not count as a mitigating factor?
Suggestions of “dozens” injured on that Singapore flight which got caught in turbulence. 30 ambulances met the plane as it landed in Bangkok. Sounds utterly horrific for passengers and crew. Plane was a 777-300ER, 219 pax and 18 crew on board. (2/3 full).
Jesus Christ
To make it worse that must have been totally unexpected, otherwise everyone woukd have been strapped in, anticipating turbulence. That many injuries - even deaths - suggests there was no warning at all. Kinell
And that's why you wear your seatbelt unless you're actively moving around the cabin.
Seriously, though, to have such severe turbulence someone dies. Wow. That must have been horrific.
One way it can happen is if the plane suddenly plunges you can be hurled UPWARDS from your seat, breaking your neck on the overhead cabins. Jeez!
Or - as I said - people have been killed by runaway trolleys, smashing into them
Yep, always wear your seatbelt, even when sleeping. Maybe especially when sleeping
Footage here showing the captain’s diversion announcement and a dented ceiling panel. Also claims now two dead but uncorroborated:
OMG that looks harrowing. The guy in the last photo covered with blood
Imagine the intensity of the fear. There is something about planes which still induces existential dread. Something about being stuck in a metal tube 30,000 feet up in the air. And then suddenly just 24,000 feet....
If I was one of the surviving passengers I would now be getting drunker than I have ever been in my life and then some on top.
The pilot managed a clam voice. That is quite something.
When I was a frequent flyer, I always thought the older the pilot, the better.
Talking of cars, Mrs Al received a letter this morning from the Met with a speeding fine for doing 24mph on a 20mph road in Croydon, at 8.00 on a Sunday morning. Is it normal practice to be so tough? Seemed very harsh to us, as on local 20mph roads the average speed seems to be around 25-30 mph. Guess we just have to suck it up, though.
It's supposed to be 26 before a fine here in the Socialist Republic of Wales.
Speed awareness course I attended a couple of years back (27 in a 20) the guy suggested that the idea of a maximum above the limit that you get away with is not necessarily in operation - so one mph above could get you a ticket. I think in practice with police intervention they would no go after you for it, but fixed cameras is a different matter.
There is no doubt that lowering the limit pulls the speed down, but not necessarily down to the limit or below. Near my folks there is the A303 passing through Winterbourne Stoke. It used to be a 50 mph, and cars routinely did 60. It changed to 40 and they were still exceeding it, just at 50 now.
Something else government should be asking themselves how can we change this...
"undergraduates at top US universities start companies at more than 5x the rate of their British-educated peers."
"But there’s a pessimism in the UK that often makes people believe they’re destined to fail before they start. That it’s wrong to even think about being different. Our smartest, most technical young people aspire to work for big companies with prestigious brands, rather than take a risk and start something of their own."
Suggestions of “dozens” injured on that Singapore flight which got caught in turbulence. 30 ambulances met the plane as it landed in Bangkok. Sounds utterly horrific for passengers and crew. Plane was a 777-300ER, 219 pax and 18 crew on board. (2/3 full).
Jesus Christ
To make it worse that must have been totally unexpected, otherwise everyone woukd have been strapped in, anticipating turbulence. That many injuries - even deaths - suggests there was no warning at all. Kinell
And that's why you wear your seatbelt unless you're actively moving around the cabin.
Seriously, though, to have such severe turbulence someone dies. Wow. That must have been horrific.
One way it can happen is if the plane suddenly plunges you can be hurled UPWARDS from your seat, breaking your neck on the overhead cabins. Jeez!
Or - as I said - people have been killed by runaway trolleys, smashing into them
Yep, always wear your seatbelt, even when sleeping. Maybe especially when sleeping
Footage here showing the captain’s diversion announcement and a dented ceiling panel. Also claims now two dead but uncorroborated:
OMG that looks harrowing. The guy in the last photo covered with blood
Imagine the intensity of the fear. There is something about planes which still induces existential dread. Something about being stuck in a metal tube 30,000 feet up in the air. And then suddenly just 24,000 feet....
If I was one of the surviving passengers I would now be getting drunker than I have ever been in my life and then some on top.
The pilot managed a clam voice. That is quite something.
When I was a frequent flyer, I always thought the older the pilot, the better.
Indeed. Experience is everything when flying, cf a certain Captain Sullenberger.
On a different subject, there’s a sleek and swish and unusually designed super yacht moored just off Trieste, unusual enough to be worth looking up. Turns out it was designed by Phillipe Stark for some Russian criminal billionaire, and has been sitting there for eighteen months having been confiscated by the Italian authorities due Ukraine. Which is nice.
Suggestions of “dozens” injured on that Singapore flight which got caught in turbulence. 30 ambulances met the plane as it landed in Bangkok. Sounds utterly horrific for passengers and crew. Plane was a 777-300ER, 219 pax and 18 crew on board. (2/3 full).
Jesus Christ
To make it worse that must have been totally unexpected, otherwise everyone woukd have been strapped in, anticipating turbulence. That many injuries - even deaths - suggests there was no warning at all. Kinell
And that's why you wear your seatbelt unless you're actively moving around the cabin.
Seriously, though, to have such severe turbulence someone dies. Wow. That must have been horrific.
One way it can happen is if the plane suddenly plunges you can be hurled UPWARDS from your seat, breaking your neck on the overhead cabins. Jeez!
Or - as I said - people have been killed by runaway trolleys, smashing into them
Yep, always wear your seatbelt, even when sleeping. Maybe especially when sleeping
Footage here showing the captain’s diversion announcement and a dented ceiling panel. Also claims now two dead but uncorroborated:
OMG that looks harrowing. The guy in the last photo covered with blood
Imagine the intensity of the fear. There is something about planes which still induces existential dread. Something about being stuck in a metal tube 30,000 feet up in the air. And then suddenly just 24,000 feet....
If I was one of the surviving passengers I would now be getting drunker than I have ever been in my life and then some on top.
The pilot managed a clam voice. That is quite something.
Would you ever fly again? I like to think I am quite resilient, indeed I AM quite resilient, but wow, after that, I'd be wary
There'd be no choice here as you'd still need to get back home. Straight back on is probably the best way. The longer you leave it the more chance you have to get spooked.
It's going to be a bit of a b*gger for Leon if he goes all Denis Bergkamp on us, bearing in mind his job.
Suggestions of “dozens” injured on that Singapore flight which got caught in turbulence. 30 ambulances met the plane as it landed in Bangkok. Sounds utterly horrific for passengers and crew. Plane was a 777-300ER, 219 pax and 18 crew on board. (2/3 full).
Jesus Christ
To make it worse that must have been totally unexpected, otherwise everyone woukd have been strapped in, anticipating turbulence. That many injuries - even deaths - suggests there was no warning at all. Kinell
And that's why you wear your seatbelt unless you're actively moving around the cabin.
Seriously, though, to have such severe turbulence someone dies. Wow. That must have been horrific.
One way it can happen is if the plane suddenly plunges you can be hurled UPWARDS from your seat, breaking your neck on the overhead cabins. Jeez!
Or - as I said - people have been killed by runaway trolleys, smashing into them
Yep, always wear your seatbelt, even when sleeping. Maybe especially when sleeping
Footage here showing the captain’s diversion announcement and a dented ceiling panel. Also claims now two dead but uncorroborated:
OMG that looks harrowing. The guy in the last photo covered with blood
Imagine the intensity of the fear. There is something about planes which still induces existential dread. Something about being stuck in a metal tube 30,000 feet up in the air. And then suddenly just 24,000 feet....
If I was one of the surviving passengers I would now be getting drunker than I have ever been in my life and then some on top.
The pilot managed a clam voice. That is quite something.
People don’t pay the slightest attention during a flight, so I doubt it makes much difference whether there was a warning or not.
Remember during Sully’s masterful landing on the Hudson, the passengers had literally all just had the safety briefing, seconds before, and were then told they were about to land on water. Yet only about 15% of them managed to find their life jacket and successfully put it on.
Suggestions of “dozens” injured on that Singapore flight which got caught in turbulence. 30 ambulances met the plane as it landed in Bangkok. Sounds utterly horrific for passengers and crew. Plane was a 777-300ER, 219 pax and 18 crew on board. (2/3 full).
Jesus Christ
To make it worse that must have been totally unexpected, otherwise everyone woukd have been strapped in, anticipating turbulence. That many injuries - even deaths - suggests there was no warning at all. Kinell
And that's why you wear your seatbelt unless you're actively moving around the cabin.
Seriously, though, to have such severe turbulence someone dies. Wow. That must have been horrific.
One way it can happen is if the plane suddenly plunges you can be hurled UPWARDS from your seat, breaking your neck on the overhead cabins. Jeez!
Or - as I said - people have been killed by runaway trolleys, smashing into them
Yep, always wear your seatbelt, even when sleeping. Maybe especially when sleeping
Which of course doesn't protect you from the flying bodies of non-belters.
On the upside, we express alarm at this news report because it is so vanishingly rare
I remember as a kid in the 70s plane crashes were weekly events, or so it seemed. God knows what it was like in the 1930s. I also remember our family car regularly breaking down - it was expected. The AA man was a constant necessity
We forget how much things have improved. How many planes fly every day? Tens of thousands? How many crash? Almost none? As for cars, I can't remember when I last drove a car which broke down, unless it was my own fault and I was doing something RIDIC
Obviously you don't drive a Land Rover.
I had a succession of crap cars, all of them German - BMW, Merc, etc, that would just break constantly. Rarely engine failure but more often something else - windscreen wiper motors giving out, starter motors packing in etc. Plus huge mark ups on parts.
I then bought a second hand Toyota that I flogged to death without a single incident in five years. Sailed through every MOT first time. When it finally gives up on me I'll buy another.
But I do worry about today's generation of over-engineered cars that are pretty much just computers on wheels. My crappy Corolla will still be driveable (and user serviceable) in 25 years time, doubt the same could be said for any car that's being made today.
And touchscreens. Who actually wants endless touchscreens and menus when driving? When the, uh, tactile feel of a knob is far superior...
It's bonkers that you can get 6 points for phone use but all new cars (except Mazdas, I think) have a giant iPad in them.
So...
As a man with a telematics auto insurance company, I can tell you that the smaller your phone, the more dangerous using it is.
That said: having the center console so far from the centerline of your vehicle isn't very good for safety either.
Buttons. Actual buttons is what you want. I think I almost killed myself last year in a newish hire car, looking for the touch-point to change the radio station.
My knackered Toyota has two buttons, pressing up raises temp 0.5c, pressing down lowers it 0.5c. Simples. And there's no danger of it also being the go-to place to push to change radio station, etc. I sometimes rent a modern, touchscreeny car, and am always happy when I get back into my 13 year old shitbox with actual buttons.
I also wonder how these new cars are going to age. I suspect they have a 3-5 year lifespan then will just get stripped for parts, as mentioned below. Planned obsolescence.
Oh don't get me started on unnecessarily complicated climate control. Our 2009 Ford Focus has one button for air conditioning which turns it on or off, and three dials - one which coldens or hottens the air, one which blows harder or softer or not at all, and one which points the air at the windscreen or the driver or the drivers feet or some mixture of these. It is perfect. Our 2019 volkswagen, on the other hand - well, I still don't understand it. It has an array of controls and buttons some of which appear to override or contradict each other. And they're necessarily so small that I can't see what they do without my reading glasses, which obviously I can't use to drive. And they don't appear to heat or cool the car any more efficiently - much less so, in fact. And as you say - buttons. Anything you can't do with a button isn't worth doing.
The 2024 version will be worse still. It will have no buttons at all, with all the HVAC controls on a massive ipad-looking screen in the middle, that you can’t possibly adjust while keeping your eyes on the road ahead.
What amazes me is that car designs must be focus grouped to death, here we have a small but probably representative sample of "people old enough and rich enough to be buying new cars every 3-5 years" and the universal consensus is a hatred of touch screens.
Unfortunately for the consumer, the screens save a fortune in manufacturing costs, not just by removing the switches, but also miles of cabling and usually a serious consolidation in the number of control modules around the car.
And the dashboard can be upgraded via software.
Also....things can be software locked unless you pay the subscription. BMWs tried it with heated seats etc.
What, they refused to turn them off midsummer, unless you paid ?
Also, see my prior comment. We don't even NEED touchscreens. It is yesterday's tech. We now have machines that respond to voice commands, with great skill. Vastly safer
We have all seen that movie.
"Open the doors"
"Dave, I can't do that..."
If, on the other hand, you're doing 80 down the M6 and Dave happens to be your idiot mate in the passenger seat, that would be a more helpful response.
Labour is probably sitting very pretty in Scotland given the ongoing deflation of the SNP. If the SNP falls below the tipping point they could be back on just a handful of seats.
The SNP have gone from being Useless to Swinney-dling the voters.
Their problem is pretty simple - no ideas left in the tank. Heading towards 2 decades in office and all of the zeal has gone, replaced with lunatic policies which mostly turn off voters whilst daily politics issues like health and education get worse.
Swinney offers the same kind of relief as Sunak did after Truss - stability vs immediate risk of capsizing, but like Sunak's Tories the boat is still sinking.
And no ships in the water.
Speaking today which did they ever sort out the major structural flaws in the ferries? Or will they sink as they start sailing Scottish waters?
One on trials , the other they need to spend millions ripping out pipes as they used the wrong steel to be able to handle LNG and so it is delayed even further. They could have launched an armada with eth money spent on those two. Also as they did not bother to do the LNG infrastructure they will need to refuel at sea at great cost and inconvenience. Next thing will be to convert them back to oil no doubt and at great expense
Suggestions of “dozens” injured on that Singapore flight which got caught in turbulence. 30 ambulances met the plane as it landed in Bangkok. Sounds utterly horrific for passengers and crew. Plane was a 777-300ER, 219 pax and 18 crew on board. (2/3 full).
Jesus Christ
To make it worse that must have been totally unexpected, otherwise everyone woukd have been strapped in, anticipating turbulence. That many injuries - even deaths - suggests there was no warning at all. Kinell
And that's why you wear your seatbelt unless you're actively moving around the cabin.
Seriously, though, to have such severe turbulence someone dies. Wow. That must have been horrific.
One way it can happen is if the plane suddenly plunges you can be hurled UPWARDS from your seat, breaking your neck on the overhead cabins. Jeez!
Or - as I said - people have been killed by runaway trolleys, smashing into them
Yep, always wear your seatbelt, even when sleeping. Maybe especially when sleeping
Which of course doesn't protect you from the flying bodies of non-belters.
On the upside, we express alarm at this news report because it is so vanishingly rare
I remember as a kid in the 70s plane crashes were weekly events, or so it seemed. God knows what it was like in the 1930s. I also remember our family car regularly breaking down - it was expected. The AA man was a constant necessity
We forget how much things have improved. How many planes fly every day? Tens of thousands? How many crash? Almost none? As for cars, I can't remember when I last drove a car which broke down, unless it was my own fault and I was doing something RIDIC
Obviously you don't drive a Land Rover.
I had a succession of crap cars, all of them German - BMW, Merc, etc, that would just break constantly. Rarely engine failure but more often something else - windscreen wiper motors giving out, starter motors packing in etc. Plus huge mark ups on parts.
I then bought a second hand Toyota that I flogged to death without a single incident in five years. Sailed through every MOT first time. When it finally gives up on me I'll buy another.
But I do worry about today's generation of over-engineered cars that are pretty much just computers on wheels. My crappy Corolla will still be driveable (and user serviceable) in 25 years time, doubt the same could be said for any car that's being made today.
And touchscreens. Who actually wants endless touchscreens and menus when driving? When the, uh, tactile feel of a knob is far superior...
It's bonkers that you can get 6 points for phone use but all new cars (except Mazdas, I think) have a giant iPad in them.
So...
As a man with a telematics auto insurance company, I can tell you that the smaller your phone, the more dangerous using it is.
That said: having the center console so far from the centerline of your vehicle isn't very good for safety either.
Buttons. Actual buttons is what you want. I think I almost killed myself last year in a newish hire car, looking for the touch-point to change the radio station.
My knackered Toyota has two buttons, pressing up raises temp 0.5c, pressing down lowers it 0.5c. Simples. And there's no danger of it also being the go-to place to push to change radio station, etc. I sometimes rent a modern, touchscreeny car, and am always happy when I get back into my 13 year old shitbox with actual buttons.
I also wonder how these new cars are going to age. I suspect they have a 3-5 year lifespan then will just get stripped for parts, as mentioned below. Planned obsolescence.
Oh don't get me started on unnecessarily complicated climate control. Our 2009 Ford Focus has one button for air conditioning which turns it on or off, and three dials - one which coldens or hottens the air, one which blows harder or softer or not at all, and one which points the air at the windscreen or the driver or the drivers feet or some mixture of these. It is perfect. Our 2019 volkswagen, on the other hand - well, I still don't understand it. It has an array of controls and buttons some of which appear to override or contradict each other. And they're necessarily so small that I can't see what they do without my reading glasses, which obviously I can't use to drive. And they don't appear to heat or cool the car any more efficiently - much less so, in fact. And as you say - buttons. Anything you can't do with a button isn't worth doing.
The 2024 version will be worse still. It will have no buttons at all, with all the HVAC controls on a massive ipad-looking screen in the middle, that you can’t possibly adjust while keeping your eyes on the road ahead.
What amazes me is that car designs must be focus grouped to death, here we have a small but probably representative sample of "people old enough and rich enough to be buying new cars every 3-5 years" and the universal consensus is a hatred of touch screens.
Unfortunately for the consumer, the screens save a fortune in manufacturing costs, not just by removing the switches, but also miles of cabling and usually a serious consolidation in the number of control modules around the car.
It's good for the consumer because they make cars cheaper and simpler.
The old luddites on here who apparently can't operate any car made after 2015 are fighting a losing battle. Except for the latest Hyundai Kona which has physical HVAC controls reminiscent of a 90s stereo for some reason.
Almost all modern cars (cars that you'd actually want to own) have voice activated everything anyway so if you plough into a bus queue while fiddling with the touch screen you've only got yourself to blame.
Peasant. The Ineos Grenadier specifically removed a lot of the screen functionality and replaced them with exciting switches with bars next to them, like a Big Plane
"...There’s nothing superfluous inside the Grenadier. Any unnecessary electronics were stripped out, in favour of analogue controls. All the buttons, switches and dials are clearly labelled and purposely spaced, so they can be used with wet hands. Or gloves..."
Suggestions of “dozens” injured on that Singapore flight which got caught in turbulence. 30 ambulances met the plane as it landed in Bangkok. Sounds utterly horrific for passengers and crew. Plane was a 777-300ER, 219 pax and 18 crew on board. (2/3 full).
Jesus Christ
To make it worse that must have been totally unexpected, otherwise everyone woukd have been strapped in, anticipating turbulence. That many injuries - even deaths - suggests there was no warning at all. Kinell
And that's why you wear your seatbelt unless you're actively moving around the cabin.
Seriously, though, to have such severe turbulence someone dies. Wow. That must have been horrific.
One way it can happen is if the plane suddenly plunges you can be hurled UPWARDS from your seat, breaking your neck on the overhead cabins. Jeez!
Or - as I said - people have been killed by runaway trolleys, smashing into them
Yep, always wear your seatbelt, even when sleeping. Maybe especially when sleeping
Which of course doesn't protect you from the flying bodies of non-belters.
On the upside, we express alarm at this news report because it is so vanishingly rare
I remember as a kid in the 70s plane crashes were weekly events, or so it seemed. God knows what it was like in the 1930s. I also remember our family car regularly breaking down - it was expected. The AA man was a constant necessity
We forget how much things have improved. How many planes fly every day? Tens of thousands? How many crash? Almost none? As for cars, I can't remember when I last drove a car which broke down, unless it was my own fault and I was doing something RIDIC
Obviously you don't drive a Land Rover.
I had a succession of crap cars, all of them German - BMW, Merc, etc, that would just break constantly. Rarely engine failure but more often something else - windscreen wiper motors giving out, starter motors packing in etc. Plus huge mark ups on parts.
I then bought a second hand Toyota that I flogged to death without a single incident in five years. Sailed through every MOT first time. When it finally gives up on me I'll buy another.
But I do worry about today's generation of over-engineered cars that are pretty much just computers on wheels. My crappy Corolla will still be driveable (and user serviceable) in 25 years time, doubt the same could be said for any car that's being made today.
And touchscreens. Who actually wants endless touchscreens and menus when driving? When the, uh, tactile feel of a knob is far superior...
It's bonkers that you can get 6 points for phone use but all new cars (except Mazdas, I think) have a giant iPad in them.
So...
As a man with a telematics auto insurance company, I can tell you that the smaller your phone, the more dangerous using it is.
That said: having the center console so far from the centerline of your vehicle isn't very good for safety either.
Buttons. Actual buttons is what you want. I think I almost killed myself last year in a newish hire car, looking for the touch-point to change the radio station.
My knackered Toyota has two buttons, pressing up raises temp 0.5c, pressing down lowers it 0.5c. Simples. And there's no danger of it also being the go-to place to push to change radio station, etc. I sometimes rent a modern, touchscreeny car, and am always happy when I get back into my 13 year old shitbox with actual buttons.
I also wonder how these new cars are going to age. I suspect they have a 3-5 year lifespan then will just get stripped for parts, as mentioned below. Planned obsolescence.
Oh don't get me started on unnecessarily complicated climate control. Our 2009 Ford Focus has one button for air conditioning which turns it on or off, and three dials - one which coldens or hottens the air, one which blows harder or softer or not at all, and one which points the air at the windscreen or the driver or the drivers feet or some mixture of these. It is perfect. Our 2019 volkswagen, on the other hand - well, I still don't understand it. It has an array of controls and buttons some of which appear to override or contradict each other. And they're necessarily so small that I can't see what they do without my reading glasses, which obviously I can't use to drive. And they don't appear to heat or cool the car any more efficiently - much less so, in fact. And as you say - buttons. Anything you can't do with a button isn't worth doing.
The 2024 version will be worse still. It will have no buttons at all, with all the HVAC controls on a massive ipad-looking screen in the middle, that you can’t possibly adjust while keeping your eyes on the road ahead.
What amazes me is that car designs must be focus grouped to death, here we have a small but probably representative sample of "people old enough and rich enough to be buying new cars every 3-5 years" and the universal consensus is a hatred of touch screens.
Unfortunately for the consumer, the screens save a fortune in manufacturing costs, not just by removing the switches, but also miles of cabling and usually a serious consolidation in the number of control modules around the car.
And the dashboard can be upgraded via software.
And functionality disabled unless you pay a subscription
The John Deere practices are quite incredible. What the f##k are you supposed to do if your massive tractor / combine break down in middle of a field in rural America, 100s of miles from nearest town with a service centre. You can't even easily put those things on a trailer, you need special ones with a massive truck to pull it.
If I was a farmer... I'd be jailbreaking the F out of it. Even then, of course, that comes with problems - voided warranty etc.
But it's all part of the wider SaaS ripoff.
I'm stuck paying Microsoft seventy quid a year now for copies of Word, Powerpoint and Excel that fundamentally haven't changed since the 90s (but the old versions no longer work on my M1 Mac).
Same with Adobe. How many quid a month for Creative Suite? The subscription model is just designed to leech money off you a little bit at a time and deliver very little in terms of new functionality in return. I could still do 90% of what I need to do with CS6. Or a one off payment to Pixelmator for thirty quid.
We've sorta accepted it for software, but when it turns into "pay £15 a month for heated seats" to unlock a hardware functionality that already exists, it is full on pisstake territory.
Scotland, like other parts of the UK, is suffering the consequences of a very long period of inept government with politicians who are peculiarly uninterested in actually governing. They are much more interested in gestures, trivialities and positions which they think will help them win the next election.
So, inevitably, our health service is in crisis, education is not performing well, our infrastructure is inadequate, criminal justice is on its knees, social care is becoming unaffordable resulting in never ending paring to stretch what is available to cover unmet needs and our housing stock is not meeting demand, at least where people actually want to live. The cumulative consequence of these failures is an economy that is feeble and does not provide the tax base to fix the problems.
Swinney is not innocent of these failures as he has been an incompetent minister in various departments over the years, just as his predecessor was, but even I can feel a bit sorry for him given the size and complexity of the intray.
We desperately, urgently need to find ways to improve public services without throwing money we don’t have at them. There are no easy solutions to this. Simply blaming the current crop of politicians is simplistic and irrelevant. But they do need to at least start to address real issues rather than hand waving.
We're spending the right money on the wrong things. Cut costs in school and hospital budgets, create a staffing and resources crisis which you have to throw even more money at in short-term emergency fixes.
The solution in the short term is to spend more money - fix the crumbling infrastructure, hire the staff, create an environment where things actually work. Then you don't need temp staff and emergency measures which cost so much more.
Plan the work, work the plan. Problem is that we have a revolving door of ministers in both governments with a need for very short term political fixes. So we spend £lots on stupid, make the problem worse, and then as always blame the users.
When the solution is to spend more money, further analysis is needed. We already are borrowing £150 billion pa, and our current debt, deficit and interest payments are heading towards crippling levels. Taxes are highish, and, according to PB/media generally, nothing works and everything is broken.
Only three ways apply to spending more until the promised growth arrives: borrowing more, taxing more or cutting (massively) elsewhere.
Do let us know the plan.
Tax more. The grants to businesses and the furlough pay were over-generous during COVID lockdown, then when Russia/Ukraine hit we paid the electricity bills of people who can afford to go to Disneyland for their holidays. The money needs to be paid back to the government to cut the debt.
The money just went to their chums, other countries managed to control the prices, Tories used as a scam to get shedloads of public cash to their pals in the utility companies. Bonanza for those and such as those.
Suggestions of “dozens” injured on that Singapore flight which got caught in turbulence. 30 ambulances met the plane as it landed in Bangkok. Sounds utterly horrific for passengers and crew. Plane was a 777-300ER, 219 pax and 18 crew on board. (2/3 full).
Jesus Christ
To make it worse that must have been totally unexpected, otherwise everyone woukd have been strapped in, anticipating turbulence. That many injuries - even deaths - suggests there was no warning at all. Kinell
And that's why you wear your seatbelt unless you're actively moving around the cabin.
Seriously, though, to have such severe turbulence someone dies. Wow. That must have been horrific.
One way it can happen is if the plane suddenly plunges you can be hurled UPWARDS from your seat, breaking your neck on the overhead cabins. Jeez!
Or - as I said - people have been killed by runaway trolleys, smashing into them
Yep, always wear your seatbelt, even when sleeping. Maybe especially when sleeping
Which of course doesn't protect you from the flying bodies of non-belters.
On the upside, we express alarm at this news report because it is so vanishingly rare
I remember as a kid in the 70s plane crashes were weekly events, or so it seemed. God knows what it was like in the 1930s. I also remember our family car regularly breaking down - it was expected. The AA man was a constant necessity
We forget how much things have improved. How many planes fly every day? Tens of thousands? How many crash? Almost none? As for cars, I can't remember when I last drove a car which broke down, unless it was my own fault and I was doing something RIDIC
Obviously you don't drive a Land Rover.
I had a succession of crap cars, all of them German - BMW, Merc, etc, that would just break constantly. Rarely engine failure but more often something else - windscreen wiper motors giving out, starter motors packing in etc. Plus huge mark ups on parts.
I then bought a second hand Toyota that I flogged to death without a single incident in five years. Sailed through every MOT first time. When it finally gives up on me I'll buy another.
But I do worry about today's generation of over-engineered cars that are pretty much just computers on wheels. My crappy Corolla will still be driveable (and user serviceable) in 25 years time, doubt the same could be said for any car that's being made today.
And touchscreens. Who actually wants endless touchscreens and menus when driving? When the, uh, tactile feel of a knob is far superior...
It's bonkers that you can get 6 points for phone use but all new cars (except Mazdas, I think) have a giant iPad in them.
So...
As a man with a telematics auto insurance company, I can tell you that the smaller your phone, the more dangerous using it is.
That said: having the center console so far from the centerline of your vehicle isn't very good for safety either.
Buttons. Actual buttons is what you want. I think I almost killed myself last year in a newish hire car, looking for the touch-point to change the radio station.
My knackered Toyota has two buttons, pressing up raises temp 0.5c, pressing down lowers it 0.5c. Simples. And there's no danger of it also being the go-to place to push to change radio station, etc. I sometimes rent a modern, touchscreeny car, and am always happy when I get back into my 13 year old shitbox with actual buttons.
I also wonder how these new cars are going to age. I suspect they have a 3-5 year lifespan then will just get stripped for parts, as mentioned below. Planned obsolescence.
Oh don't get me started on unnecessarily complicated climate control. Our 2009 Ford Focus has one button for air conditioning which turns it on or off, and three dials - one which coldens or hottens the air, one which blows harder or softer or not at all, and one which points the air at the windscreen or the driver or the drivers feet or some mixture of these. It is perfect. Our 2019 volkswagen, on the other hand - well, I still don't understand it. It has an array of controls and buttons some of which appear to override or contradict each other. And they're necessarily so small that I can't see what they do without my reading glasses, which obviously I can't use to drive. And they don't appear to heat or cool the car any more efficiently - much less so, in fact. And as you say - buttons. Anything you can't do with a button isn't worth doing.
The 2024 version will be worse still. It will have no buttons at all, with all the HVAC controls on a massive ipad-looking screen in the middle, that you can’t possibly adjust while keeping your eyes on the road ahead.
What amazes me is that car designs must be focus grouped to death, here we have a small but probably representative sample of "people old enough and rich enough to be buying new cars every 3-5 years" and the universal consensus is a hatred of touch screens.
Unfortunately for the consumer, the screens save a fortune in manufacturing costs, not just by removing the switches, but also miles of cabling and usually a serious consolidation in the number of control modules around the car.
And the dashboard can be upgraded via software.
And functionality disabled unless you pay a subscription
The John Deere practices are quite incredible. What the f##k are you supposed to do if your massive tractor / combine break down in middle of a field in rural America, 100s of miles from nearest town with a service centre. You can't even easily put those things on a trailer, you need special ones with a massive truck to pull it.
If I was a farmer... I'd be jailbreaking the F out of it. Even then, of course, that comes with problems - voided warranty etc.
But it's all part of the wider SaaS ripoff.
I'm stuck paying Microsoft seventy quid a year now for copies of Word, Powerpoint and Excel that fundamentally haven't changed since the 90s (but the old versions no longer work on my M1 Mac).
Same with Adobe. How many quid a month for Creative Suite? The subscription model is just designed to leech money off you a little bit at a time and deliver very little in terms of new functionality in return. I could still do 90% of what I need to do with CS6. Or a one off payment to Pixelmator for thirty quid.
We've sorta accepted it for software, but when it turns into "pay £15 a month for heated seats" to unlock a hardware functionality that already exists, it is full on pisstake territory.
Suggestions of “dozens” injured on that Singapore flight which got caught in turbulence. 30 ambulances met the plane as it landed in Bangkok. Sounds utterly horrific for passengers and crew. Plane was a 777-300ER, 219 pax and 18 crew on board. (2/3 full).
Jesus Christ
To make it worse that must have been totally unexpected, otherwise everyone woukd have been strapped in, anticipating turbulence. That many injuries - even deaths - suggests there was no warning at all. Kinell
And that's why you wear your seatbelt unless you're actively moving around the cabin.
Seriously, though, to have such severe turbulence someone dies. Wow. That must have been horrific.
One way it can happen is if the plane suddenly plunges you can be hurled UPWARDS from your seat, breaking your neck on the overhead cabins. Jeez!
Or - as I said - people have been killed by runaway trolleys, smashing into them
Yep, always wear your seatbelt, even when sleeping. Maybe especially when sleeping
Which of course doesn't protect you from the flying bodies of non-belters.
On the upside, we express alarm at this news report because it is so vanishingly rare
I remember as a kid in the 70s plane crashes were weekly events, or so it seemed. God knows what it was like in the 1930s. I also remember our family car regularly breaking down - it was expected. The AA man was a constant necessity
We forget how much things have improved. How many planes fly every day? Tens of thousands? How many crash? Almost none? As for cars, I can't remember when I last drove a car which broke down, unless it was my own fault and I was doing something RIDIC
Obviously you don't drive a Land Rover.
I had a succession of crap cars, all of them German - BMW, Merc, etc, that would just break constantly. Rarely engine failure but more often something else - windscreen wiper motors giving out, starter motors packing in etc. Plus huge mark ups on parts.
I then bought a second hand Toyota that I flogged to death without a single incident in five years. Sailed through every MOT first time. When it finally gives up on me I'll buy another.
But I do worry about today's generation of over-engineered cars that are pretty much just computers on wheels. My crappy Corolla will still be driveable (and user serviceable) in 25 years time, doubt the same could be said for any car that's being made today.
And touchscreens. Who actually wants endless touchscreens and menus when driving? When the, uh, tactile feel of a knob is far superior...
It's bonkers that you can get 6 points for phone use but all new cars (except Mazdas, I think) have a giant iPad in them.
So...
As a man with a telematics auto insurance company, I can tell you that the smaller your phone, the more dangerous using it is.
That said: having the center console so far from the centerline of your vehicle isn't very good for safety either.
Buttons. Actual buttons is what you want. I think I almost killed myself last year in a newish hire car, looking for the touch-point to change the radio station.
My knackered Toyota has two buttons, pressing up raises temp 0.5c, pressing down lowers it 0.5c. Simples. And there's no danger of it also being the go-to place to push to change radio station, etc. I sometimes rent a modern, touchscreeny car, and am always happy when I get back into my 13 year old shitbox with actual buttons.
I also wonder how these new cars are going to age. I suspect they have a 3-5 year lifespan then will just get stripped for parts, as mentioned below. Planned obsolescence.
Oh don't get me started on unnecessarily complicated climate control. Our 2009 Ford Focus has one button for air conditioning which turns it on or off, and three dials - one which coldens or hottens the air, one which blows harder or softer or not at all, and one which points the air at the windscreen or the driver or the drivers feet or some mixture of these. It is perfect. Our 2019 volkswagen, on the other hand - well, I still don't understand it. It has an array of controls and buttons some of which appear to override or contradict each other. And they're necessarily so small that I can't see what they do without my reading glasses, which obviously I can't use to drive. And they don't appear to heat or cool the car any more efficiently - much less so, in fact. And as you say - buttons. Anything you can't do with a button isn't worth doing.
The 2024 version will be worse still. It will have no buttons at all, with all the HVAC controls on a massive ipad-looking screen in the middle, that you can’t possibly adjust while keeping your eyes on the road ahead.
What amazes me is that car designs must be focus grouped to death, here we have a small but probably representative sample of "people old enough and rich enough to be buying new cars every 3-5 years" and the universal consensus is a hatred of touch screens.
Unfortunately for the consumer, the screens save a fortune in manufacturing costs, not just by removing the switches, but also miles of cabling and usually a serious consolidation in the number of control modules around the car.
And the dashboard can be upgraded via software.
Also....things can be software locked unless you pay the subscription. BMWs tried it with heated seats etc.
What, they refused to turn them off midsummer, unless you paid ?
They considered making indicators part of the subscription model, but realised they'd go bankrupt as no BMW driver would pay.
Suggestions of “dozens” injured on that Singapore flight which got caught in turbulence. 30 ambulances met the plane as it landed in Bangkok. Sounds utterly horrific for passengers and crew. Plane was a 777-300ER, 219 pax and 18 crew on board. (2/3 full).
Jesus Christ
To make it worse that must have been totally unexpected, otherwise everyone woukd have been strapped in, anticipating turbulence. That many injuries - even deaths - suggests there was no warning at all. Kinell
And that's why you wear your seatbelt unless you're actively moving around the cabin.
Seriously, though, to have such severe turbulence someone dies. Wow. That must have been horrific.
One way it can happen is if the plane suddenly plunges you can be hurled UPWARDS from your seat, breaking your neck on the overhead cabins. Jeez!
Or - as I said - people have been killed by runaway trolleys, smashing into them
Yep, always wear your seatbelt, even when sleeping. Maybe especially when sleeping
Footage here showing the captain’s diversion announcement and a dented ceiling panel. Also claims now two dead but uncorroborated:
OMG that looks harrowing. The guy in the last photo covered with blood
Imagine the intensity of the fear. There is something about planes which still induces existential dread. Something about being stuck in a metal tube 30,000 feet up in the air. And then suddenly just 24,000 feet....
If I was one of the surviving passengers I would now be getting drunker than I have ever been in my life and then some on top.
The pilot managed a clam voice. That is quite something.
When I was a frequent flyer, I always thought the older the pilot, the better.
Indeed. Experience is everything when flying, cf a certain Captain Sullenberger.
On a different subject, there’s a sleek and swish and unusually designed super yacht moored just off Trieste, unusual enough to be worth looking up. Turns out it was designed by Phillipe Stark for some Russian criminal billionaire, and has been sitting there for eighteen months having been confiscated by the Italian authorities due Ukraine. Which is nice.
A number of seized Russian yachts (among €2bn of other physical assets), is causing problems for the Italian government, who are having to pay a skeleton staff, mooring, and maintainance costs on them, to ensure they remain seaworthy.
Suggestions of “dozens” injured on that Singapore flight which got caught in turbulence. 30 ambulances met the plane as it landed in Bangkok. Sounds utterly horrific for passengers and crew. Plane was a 777-300ER, 219 pax and 18 crew on board. (2/3 full).
Jesus Christ
To make it worse that must have been totally unexpected, otherwise everyone woukd have been strapped in, anticipating turbulence. That many injuries - even deaths - suggests there was no warning at all. Kinell
And that's why you wear your seatbelt unless you're actively moving around the cabin.
Seriously, though, to have such severe turbulence someone dies. Wow. That must have been horrific.
One way it can happen is if the plane suddenly plunges you can be hurled UPWARDS from your seat, breaking your neck on the overhead cabins. Jeez!
Or - as I said - people have been killed by runaway trolleys, smashing into them
Yep, always wear your seatbelt, even when sleeping. Maybe especially when sleeping
Which of course doesn't protect you from the flying bodies of non-belters.
On the upside, we express alarm at this news report because it is so vanishingly rare
I remember as a kid in the 70s plane crashes were weekly events, or so it seemed. God knows what it was like in the 1930s. I also remember our family car regularly breaking down - it was expected. The AA man was a constant necessity
We forget how much things have improved. How many planes fly every day? Tens of thousands? How many crash? Almost none? As for cars, I can't remember when I last drove a car which broke down, unless it was my own fault and I was doing something RIDIC
Obviously you don't drive a Land Rover.
I had a succession of crap cars, all of them German - BMW, Merc, etc, that would just break constantly. Rarely engine failure but more often something else - windscreen wiper motors giving out, starter motors packing in etc. Plus huge mark ups on parts.
I then bought a second hand Toyota that I flogged to death without a single incident in five years. Sailed through every MOT first time. When it finally gives up on me I'll buy another.
But I do worry about today's generation of over-engineered cars that are pretty much just computers on wheels. My crappy Corolla will still be driveable (and user serviceable) in 25 years time, doubt the same could be said for any car that's being made today.
And touchscreens. Who actually wants endless touchscreens and menus when driving? When the, uh, tactile feel of a knob is far superior...
It's bonkers that you can get 6 points for phone use but all new cars (except Mazdas, I think) have a giant iPad in them.
So...
As a man with a telematics auto insurance company, I can tell you that the smaller your phone, the more dangerous using it is.
That said: having the center console so far from the centerline of your vehicle isn't very good for safety either.
Buttons. Actual buttons is what you want. I think I almost killed myself last year in a newish hire car, looking for the touch-point to change the radio station.
My knackered Toyota has two buttons, pressing up raises temp 0.5c, pressing down lowers it 0.5c. Simples. And there's no danger of it also being the go-to place to push to change radio station, etc. I sometimes rent a modern, touchscreeny car, and am always happy when I get back into my 13 year old shitbox with actual buttons.
I also wonder how these new cars are going to age. I suspect they have a 3-5 year lifespan then will just get stripped for parts, as mentioned below. Planned obsolescence.
Oh don't get me started on unnecessarily complicated climate control. Our 2009 Ford Focus has one button for air conditioning which turns it on or off, and three dials - one which coldens or hottens the air, one which blows harder or softer or not at all, and one which points the air at the windscreen or the driver or the drivers feet or some mixture of these. It is perfect. Our 2019 volkswagen, on the other hand - well, I still don't understand it. It has an array of controls and buttons some of which appear to override or contradict each other. And they're necessarily so small that I can't see what they do without my reading glasses, which obviously I can't use to drive. And they don't appear to heat or cool the car any more efficiently - much less so, in fact. And as you say - buttons. Anything you can't do with a button isn't worth doing.
The 2024 version will be worse still. It will have no buttons at all, with all the HVAC controls on a massive ipad-looking screen in the middle, that you can’t possibly adjust while keeping your eyes on the road ahead.
It's also stupid AND technically passe
We now have machines that will respond superbly to voice commands, they can hear and understand everything with astonishing fidelity and cleverness. You could grunt "Ugh, gggngng, bbbpppff, too bloody cold uggghh change it" and they can understand that completely, and they can change the temperature, make it hotter here or colder there
Why aren't car manufacturers installing this life-saving tech in their cars? Talking to your car, with your eyes on the road, is infinitely safer than lurching around trying to touch part of an iPad three feet to your left, so you must look away from the traffic
I wouldn't trust a car that runs on "Open" AI.
You ask it to start, and it will probably say "sorry, as a large language motor vehicle designed in Silicon Valley, cars are bad for the environment and your journey would be better taken on a cycle. It's important to note that cycling is good for your health, as well as the environment. Is there anything else I can "help" you with today?"
Definitely if it was Google AI.....it told me off when I asked it to produce a picture of an alien on the moon taking a selfie of a crashed space craft....apparently aliens (it was thinking about illegal immigrants in US) are a minority that shouldn't be mocked and so refused to create such a picture.
That is why (or because) Americans talk about space aliens, which to us sounds tautologous.
There's also Alienism, which has nothing to do with either sort of Alien
Suggestions of “dozens” injured on that Singapore flight which got caught in turbulence. 30 ambulances met the plane as it landed in Bangkok. Sounds utterly horrific for passengers and crew. Plane was a 777-300ER, 219 pax and 18 crew on board. (2/3 full).
Jesus Christ
To make it worse that must have been totally unexpected, otherwise everyone woukd have been strapped in, anticipating turbulence. That many injuries - even deaths - suggests there was no warning at all. Kinell
And that's why you wear your seatbelt unless you're actively moving around the cabin.
Seriously, though, to have such severe turbulence someone dies. Wow. That must have been horrific.
One way it can happen is if the plane suddenly plunges you can be hurled UPWARDS from your seat, breaking your neck on the overhead cabins. Jeez!
Or - as I said - people have been killed by runaway trolleys, smashing into them
Yep, always wear your seatbelt, even when sleeping. Maybe especially when sleeping
Which of course doesn't protect you from the flying bodies of non-belters.
On the upside, we express alarm at this news report because it is so vanishingly rare
I remember as a kid in the 70s plane crashes were weekly events, or so it seemed. God knows what it was like in the 1930s. I also remember our family car regularly breaking down - it was expected. The AA man was a constant necessity
We forget how much things have improved. How many planes fly every day? Tens of thousands? How many crash? Almost none? As for cars, I can't remember when I last drove a car which broke down, unless it was my own fault and I was doing something RIDIC
Obviously you don't drive a Land Rover.
I had a succession of crap cars, all of them German - BMW, Merc, etc, that would just break constantly. Rarely engine failure but more often something else - windscreen wiper motors giving out, starter motors packing in etc. Plus huge mark ups on parts.
I then bought a second hand Toyota that I flogged to death without a single incident in five years. Sailed through every MOT first time. When it finally gives up on me I'll buy another.
But I do worry about today's generation of over-engineered cars that are pretty much just computers on wheels. My crappy Corolla will still be driveable (and user serviceable) in 25 years time, doubt the same could be said for any car that's being made today.
And touchscreens. Who actually wants endless touchscreens and menus when driving? When the, uh, tactile feel of a knob is far superior...
It's bonkers that you can get 6 points for phone use but all new cars (except Mazdas, I think) have a giant iPad in them.
So...
As a man with a telematics auto insurance company, I can tell you that the smaller your phone, the more dangerous using it is.
That said: having the center console so far from the centerline of your vehicle isn't very good for safety either.
Buttons. Actual buttons is what you want. I think I almost killed myself last year in a newish hire car, looking for the touch-point to change the radio station.
My knackered Toyota has two buttons, pressing up raises temp 0.5c, pressing down lowers it 0.5c. Simples. And there's no danger of it also being the go-to place to push to change radio station, etc. I sometimes rent a modern, touchscreeny car, and am always happy when I get back into my 13 year old shitbox with actual buttons.
I also wonder how these new cars are going to age. I suspect they have a 3-5 year lifespan then will just get stripped for parts, as mentioned below. Planned obsolescence.
Oh don't get me started on unnecessarily complicated climate control. Our 2009 Ford Focus has one button for air conditioning which turns it on or off, and three dials - one which coldens or hottens the air, one which blows harder or softer or not at all, and one which points the air at the windscreen or the driver or the drivers feet or some mixture of these. It is perfect. Our 2019 volkswagen, on the other hand - well, I still don't understand it. It has an array of controls and buttons some of which appear to override or contradict each other. And they're necessarily so small that I can't see what they do without my reading glasses, which obviously I can't use to drive. And they don't appear to heat or cool the car any more efficiently - much less so, in fact. And as you say - buttons. Anything you can't do with a button isn't worth doing.
The 2024 version will be worse still. It will have no buttons at all, with all the HVAC controls on a massive ipad-looking screen in the middle, that you can’t possibly adjust while keeping your eyes on the road ahead.
What amazes me is that car designs must be focus grouped to death, here we have a small but probably representative sample of "people old enough and rich enough to be buying new cars every 3-5 years" and the universal consensus is a hatred of touch screens.
Unfortunately for the consumer, the screens save a fortune in manufacturing costs, not just by removing the switches, but also miles of cabling and usually a serious consolidation in the number of control modules around the car.
It's good for the consumer because they make cars cheaper and simpler.
The old luddites on here who apparently can't operate any car made after 2015 are fighting a losing battle. Except for the latest Hyundai Kona which has physical HVAC controls reminiscent of a 90s stereo for some reason.
Almost all modern cars (cars that you'd actually want to own) have voice activated everything anyway so if you plough into a bus queue while fiddling with the touch screen you've only got yourself to blame.
Peasant. The Ineos Grenadier specifically removed a lot of the screen functionality and replaced them with exciting switches with bars next to them, like a Big Plane
"...There’s nothing superfluous inside the Grenadier. Any unnecessary electronics were stripped out, in favour of analogue controls. All the buttons, switches and dials are clearly labelled and purposely spaced, so they can be used with wet hands. Or gloves..."
Suggestions of “dozens” injured on that Singapore flight which got caught in turbulence. 30 ambulances met the plane as it landed in Bangkok. Sounds utterly horrific for passengers and crew. Plane was a 777-300ER, 219 pax and 18 crew on board. (2/3 full).
Jesus Christ
To make it worse that must have been totally unexpected, otherwise everyone woukd have been strapped in, anticipating turbulence. That many injuries - even deaths - suggests there was no warning at all. Kinell
And that's why you wear your seatbelt unless you're actively moving around the cabin.
Seriously, though, to have such severe turbulence someone dies. Wow. That must have been horrific.
One way it can happen is if the plane suddenly plunges you can be hurled UPWARDS from your seat, breaking your neck on the overhead cabins. Jeez!
Or - as I said - people have been killed by runaway trolleys, smashing into them
Yep, always wear your seatbelt, even when sleeping. Maybe especially when sleeping
Which of course doesn't protect you from the flying bodies of non-belters.
On the upside, we express alarm at this news report because it is so vanishingly rare
I remember as a kid in the 70s plane crashes were weekly events, or so it seemed. God knows what it was like in the 1930s. I also remember our family car regularly breaking down - it was expected. The AA man was a constant necessity
We forget how much things have improved. How many planes fly every day? Tens of thousands? How many crash? Almost none? As for cars, I can't remember when I last drove a car which broke down, unless it was my own fault and I was doing something RIDIC
Obviously you don't drive a Land Rover.
I had a succession of crap cars, all of them German - BMW, Merc, etc, that would just break constantly. Rarely engine failure but more often something else - windscreen wiper motors giving out, starter motors packing in etc. Plus huge mark ups on parts.
I then bought a second hand Toyota that I flogged to death without a single incident in five years. Sailed through every MOT first time. When it finally gives up on me I'll buy another.
But I do worry about today's generation of over-engineered cars that are pretty much just computers on wheels. My crappy Corolla will still be driveable (and user serviceable) in 25 years time, doubt the same could be said for any car that's being made today.
And touchscreens. Who actually wants endless touchscreens and menus when driving? When the, uh, tactile feel of a knob is far superior...
It's bonkers that you can get 6 points for phone use but all new cars (except Mazdas, I think) have a giant iPad in them.
So...
As a man with a telematics auto insurance company, I can tell you that the smaller your phone, the more dangerous using it is.
That said: having the center console so far from the centerline of your vehicle isn't very good for safety either.
Buttons. Actual buttons is what you want. I think I almost killed myself last year in a newish hire car, looking for the touch-point to change the radio station.
My knackered Toyota has two buttons, pressing up raises temp 0.5c, pressing down lowers it 0.5c. Simples. And there's no danger of it also being the go-to place to push to change radio station, etc. I sometimes rent a modern, touchscreeny car, and am always happy when I get back into my 13 year old shitbox with actual buttons.
I also wonder how these new cars are going to age. I suspect they have a 3-5 year lifespan then will just get stripped for parts, as mentioned below. Planned obsolescence.
Oh don't get me started on unnecessarily complicated climate control. Our 2009 Ford Focus has one button for air conditioning which turns it on or off, and three dials - one which coldens or hottens the air, one which blows harder or softer or not at all, and one which points the air at the windscreen or the driver or the drivers feet or some mixture of these. It is perfect. Our 2019 volkswagen, on the other hand - well, I still don't understand it. It has an array of controls and buttons some of which appear to override or contradict each other. And they're necessarily so small that I can't see what they do without my reading glasses, which obviously I can't use to drive. And they don't appear to heat or cool the car any more efficiently - much less so, in fact. And as you say - buttons. Anything you can't do with a button isn't worth doing.
The 2024 version will be worse still. It will have no buttons at all, with all the HVAC controls on a massive ipad-looking screen in the middle, that you can’t possibly adjust while keeping your eyes on the road ahead.
What amazes me is that car designs must be focus grouped to death, here we have a small but probably representative sample of "people old enough and rich enough to be buying new cars every 3-5 years" and the universal consensus is a hatred of touch screens.
Unfortunately for the consumer, the screens save a fortune in manufacturing costs, not just by removing the switches, but also miles of cabling and usually a serious consolidation in the number of control modules around the car.
And the dashboard can be upgraded via software.
And functionality disabled unless you pay a subscription
The John Deere practices are quite incredible. What the f##k are you supposed to do if your massive tractor / combine break down in middle of a field in rural America, 100s of miles from nearest town with a service centre. You can't even easily put those things on a trailer, you need special ones with a massive truck to pull it.
If I was a farmer... I'd be jailbreaking the F out of it. Even then, of course, that comes with problems - voided warranty etc.
But it's all part of the wider SaaS ripoff.
I'm stuck paying Microsoft seventy quid a year now for copies of Word, Powerpoint and Excel that fundamentally haven't changed since the 90s (but the old versions no longer work on my M1 Mac).
Same with Adobe. How many quid a month for Creative Suite? The subscription model is just designed to leech money off you a little bit at a time and deliver very little in terms of new functionality in return. I could still do 90% of what I need to do with CS6. Or a one off payment to Pixelmator for thirty quid.
We've sorta accepted it for software, but when it turns into "pay £15 a month for heated seats" to unlock a hardware functionality that already exists, it is full on pisstake territory.
When my laptop hard drive went bad earlier this year, I had to talk the young chap repairing it thru the procedure to download non-subscription Microsoft Office 202X instead of subscription Microsoft Office 365. It did degenerate to terse words and INTERRUPTING HIM, because he simply couldn't get his head round software as a deliverable, not as a service. Still, I larned him in the end.
Suggestions of “dozens” injured on that Singapore flight which got caught in turbulence. 30 ambulances met the plane as it landed in Bangkok. Sounds utterly horrific for passengers and crew. Plane was a 777-300ER, 219 pax and 18 crew on board. (2/3 full).
Jesus Christ
To make it worse that must have been totally unexpected, otherwise everyone woukd have been strapped in, anticipating turbulence. That many injuries - even deaths - suggests there was no warning at all. Kinell
And that's why you wear your seatbelt unless you're actively moving around the cabin.
Seriously, though, to have such severe turbulence someone dies. Wow. That must have been horrific.
One way it can happen is if the plane suddenly plunges you can be hurled UPWARDS from your seat, breaking your neck on the overhead cabins. Jeez!
Or - as I said - people have been killed by runaway trolleys, smashing into them
Yep, always wear your seatbelt, even when sleeping. Maybe especially when sleeping
Which of course doesn't protect you from the flying bodies of non-belters.
On the upside, we express alarm at this news report because it is so vanishingly rare
I remember as a kid in the 70s plane crashes were weekly events, or so it seemed. God knows what it was like in the 1930s. I also remember our family car regularly breaking down - it was expected. The AA man was a constant necessity
We forget how much things have improved. How many planes fly every day? Tens of thousands? How many crash? Almost none? As for cars, I can't remember when I last drove a car which broke down, unless it was my own fault and I was doing something RIDIC
Obviously you don't drive a Land Rover.
I had a succession of crap cars, all of them German - BMW, Merc, etc, that would just break constantly. Rarely engine failure but more often something else - windscreen wiper motors giving out, starter motors packing in etc. Plus huge mark ups on parts.
I then bought a second hand Toyota that I flogged to death without a single incident in five years. Sailed through every MOT first time. When it finally gives up on me I'll buy another.
But I do worry about today's generation of over-engineered cars that are pretty much just computers on wheels. My crappy Corolla will still be driveable (and user serviceable) in 25 years time, doubt the same could be said for any car that's being made today.
And touchscreens. Who actually wants endless touchscreens and menus when driving? When the, uh, tactile feel of a knob is far superior...
It's bonkers that you can get 6 points for phone use but all new cars (except Mazdas, I think) have a giant iPad in them.
So...
As a man with a telematics auto insurance company, I can tell you that the smaller your phone, the more dangerous using it is.
That said: having the center console so far from the centerline of your vehicle isn't very good for safety either.
Buttons. Actual buttons is what you want. I think I almost killed myself last year in a newish hire car, looking for the touch-point to change the radio station.
My knackered Toyota has two buttons, pressing up raises temp 0.5c, pressing down lowers it 0.5c. Simples. And there's no danger of it also being the go-to place to push to change radio station, etc. I sometimes rent a modern, touchscreeny car, and am always happy when I get back into my 13 year old shitbox with actual buttons.
I also wonder how these new cars are going to age. I suspect they have a 3-5 year lifespan then will just get stripped for parts, as mentioned below. Planned obsolescence.
Oh don't get me started on unnecessarily complicated climate control. Our 2009 Ford Focus has one button for air conditioning which turns it on or off, and three dials - one which coldens or hottens the air, one which blows harder or softer or not at all, and one which points the air at the windscreen or the driver or the drivers feet or some mixture of these. It is perfect. Our 2019 volkswagen, on the other hand - well, I still don't understand it. It has an array of controls and buttons some of which appear to override or contradict each other. And they're necessarily so small that I can't see what they do without my reading glasses, which obviously I can't use to drive. And they don't appear to heat or cool the car any more efficiently - much less so, in fact. And as you say - buttons. Anything you can't do with a button isn't worth doing.
The 2024 version will be worse still. It will have no buttons at all, with all the HVAC controls on a massive ipad-looking screen in the middle, that you can’t possibly adjust while keeping your eyes on the road ahead.
What amazes me is that car designs must be focus grouped to death, here we have a small but probably representative sample of "people old enough and rich enough to be buying new cars every 3-5 years" and the universal consensus is a hatred of touch screens.
Unfortunately for the consumer, the screens save a fortune in manufacturing costs, not just by removing the switches, but also miles of cabling and usually a serious consolidation in the number of control modules around the car.
And the dashboard can be upgraded via software.
And functionality disabled unless you pay a subscription
The John Deere practices are quite incredible. What the f##k are you supposed to do if your massive tractor / combine break down in middle of a field in rural America, 100s of miles from nearest town with a service centre. You can't even easily put those things on a trailer, you need special ones with a massive truck to pull it.
There’s a bunch of Ukranian hackers who cracked into Deere’s software, and are now selling it to Americans.
On the other side, there were also some funny stories from the start of the war, that Ukranian tracters reported stolen by Russians were able to be bricked remotely by the company.
Suggestions of “dozens” injured on that Singapore flight which got caught in turbulence. 30 ambulances met the plane as it landed in Bangkok. Sounds utterly horrific for passengers and crew. Plane was a 777-300ER, 219 pax and 18 crew on board. (2/3 full).
Jesus Christ
To make it worse that must have been totally unexpected, otherwise everyone woukd have been strapped in, anticipating turbulence. That many injuries - even deaths - suggests there was no warning at all. Kinell
And that's why you wear your seatbelt unless you're actively moving around the cabin.
Seriously, though, to have such severe turbulence someone dies. Wow. That must have been horrific.
One way it can happen is if the plane suddenly plunges you can be hurled UPWARDS from your seat, breaking your neck on the overhead cabins. Jeez!
Or - as I said - people have been killed by runaway trolleys, smashing into them
Yep, always wear your seatbelt, even when sleeping. Maybe especially when sleeping
Which of course doesn't protect you from the flying bodies of non-belters.
On the upside, we express alarm at this news report because it is so vanishingly rare
I remember as a kid in the 70s plane crashes were weekly events, or so it seemed. God knows what it was like in the 1930s. I also remember our family car regularly breaking down - it was expected. The AA man was a constant necessity
We forget how much things have improved. How many planes fly every day? Tens of thousands? How many crash? Almost none? As for cars, I can't remember when I last drove a car which broke down, unless it was my own fault and I was doing something RIDIC
Obviously you don't drive a Land Rover.
I had a succession of crap cars, all of them German - BMW, Merc, etc, that would just break constantly. Rarely engine failure but more often something else - windscreen wiper motors giving out, starter motors packing in etc. Plus huge mark ups on parts.
I then bought a second hand Toyota that I flogged to death without a single incident in five years. Sailed through every MOT first time. When it finally gives up on me I'll buy another.
But I do worry about today's generation of over-engineered cars that are pretty much just computers on wheels. My crappy Corolla will still be driveable (and user serviceable) in 25 years time, doubt the same could be said for any car that's being made today.
And touchscreens. Who actually wants endless touchscreens and menus when driving? When the, uh, tactile feel of a knob is far superior...
It's bonkers that you can get 6 points for phone use but all new cars (except Mazdas, I think) have a giant iPad in them.
So...
As a man with a telematics auto insurance company, I can tell you that the smaller your phone, the more dangerous using it is.
That said: having the center console so far from the centerline of your vehicle isn't very good for safety either.
Buttons. Actual buttons is what you want. I think I almost killed myself last year in a newish hire car, looking for the touch-point to change the radio station.
My knackered Toyota has two buttons, pressing up raises temp 0.5c, pressing down lowers it 0.5c. Simples. And there's no danger of it also being the go-to place to push to change radio station, etc. I sometimes rent a modern, touchscreeny car, and am always happy when I get back into my 13 year old shitbox with actual buttons.
I also wonder how these new cars are going to age. I suspect they have a 3-5 year lifespan then will just get stripped for parts, as mentioned below. Planned obsolescence.
Oh don't get me started on unnecessarily complicated climate control. Our 2009 Ford Focus has one button for air conditioning which turns it on or off, and three dials - one which coldens or hottens the air, one which blows harder or softer or not at all, and one which points the air at the windscreen or the driver or the drivers feet or some mixture of these. It is perfect. Our 2019 volkswagen, on the other hand - well, I still don't understand it. It has an array of controls and buttons some of which appear to override or contradict each other. And they're necessarily so small that I can't see what they do without my reading glasses, which obviously I can't use to drive. And they don't appear to heat or cool the car any more efficiently - much less so, in fact. And as you say - buttons. Anything you can't do with a button isn't worth doing.
The 2024 version will be worse still. It will have no buttons at all, with all the HVAC controls on a massive ipad-looking screen in the middle, that you can’t possibly adjust while keeping your eyes on the road ahead.
What amazes me is that car designs must be focus grouped to death, here we have a small but probably representative sample of "people old enough and rich enough to be buying new cars every 3-5 years" and the universal consensus is a hatred of touch screens.
Unfortunately for the consumer, the screens save a fortune in manufacturing costs, not just by removing the switches, but also miles of cabling and usually a serious consolidation in the number of control modules around the car.
And the dashboard can be upgraded via software.
And functionality disabled unless you pay a subscription
Suggestions of “dozens” injured on that Singapore flight which got caught in turbulence. 30 ambulances met the plane as it landed in Bangkok. Sounds utterly horrific for passengers and crew. Plane was a 777-300ER, 219 pax and 18 crew on board. (2/3 full).
Jesus Christ
To make it worse that must have been totally unexpected, otherwise everyone woukd have been strapped in, anticipating turbulence. That many injuries - even deaths - suggests there was no warning at all. Kinell
And that's why you wear your seatbelt unless you're actively moving around the cabin.
Seriously, though, to have such severe turbulence someone dies. Wow. That must have been horrific.
One way it can happen is if the plane suddenly plunges you can be hurled UPWARDS from your seat, breaking your neck on the overhead cabins. Jeez!
Or - as I said - people have been killed by runaway trolleys, smashing into them
Yep, always wear your seatbelt, even when sleeping. Maybe especially when sleeping
Which of course doesn't protect you from the flying bodies of non-belters.
On the upside, we express alarm at this news report because it is so vanishingly rare
I remember as a kid in the 70s plane crashes were weekly events, or so it seemed. God knows what it was like in the 1930s. I also remember our family car regularly breaking down - it was expected. The AA man was a constant necessity
We forget how much things have improved. How many planes fly every day? Tens of thousands? How many crash? Almost none? As for cars, I can't remember when I last drove a car which broke down, unless it was my own fault and I was doing something RIDIC
Obviously you don't drive a Land Rover.
I had a succession of crap cars, all of them German - BMW, Merc, etc, that would just break constantly. Rarely engine failure but more often something else - windscreen wiper motors giving out, starter motors packing in etc. Plus huge mark ups on parts.
I then bought a second hand Toyota that I flogged to death without a single incident in five years. Sailed through every MOT first time. When it finally gives up on me I'll buy another.
But I do worry about today's generation of over-engineered cars that are pretty much just computers on wheels. My crappy Corolla will still be driveable (and user serviceable) in 25 years time, doubt the same could be said for any car that's being made today.
And touchscreens. Who actually wants endless touchscreens and menus when driving? When the, uh, tactile feel of a knob is far superior...
It's bonkers that you can get 6 points for phone use but all new cars (except Mazdas, I think) have a giant iPad in them.
So...
As a man with a telematics auto insurance company, I can tell you that the smaller your phone, the more dangerous using it is.
That said: having the center console so far from the centerline of your vehicle isn't very good for safety either.
Buttons. Actual buttons is what you want. I think I almost killed myself last year in a newish hire car, looking for the touch-point to change the radio station.
My knackered Toyota has two buttons, pressing up raises temp 0.5c, pressing down lowers it 0.5c. Simples. And there's no danger of it also being the go-to place to push to change radio station, etc. I sometimes rent a modern, touchscreeny car, and am always happy when I get back into my 13 year old shitbox with actual buttons.
I also wonder how these new cars are going to age. I suspect they have a 3-5 year lifespan then will just get stripped for parts, as mentioned below. Planned obsolescence.
Oh don't get me started on unnecessarily complicated climate control. Our 2009 Ford Focus has one button for air conditioning which turns it on or off, and three dials - one which coldens or hottens the air, one which blows harder or softer or not at all, and one which points the air at the windscreen or the driver or the drivers feet or some mixture of these. It is perfect. Our 2019 volkswagen, on the other hand - well, I still don't understand it. It has an array of controls and buttons some of which appear to override or contradict each other. And they're necessarily so small that I can't see what they do without my reading glasses, which obviously I can't use to drive. And they don't appear to heat or cool the car any more efficiently - much less so, in fact. And as you say - buttons. Anything you can't do with a button isn't worth doing.
The 2024 version will be worse still. It will have no buttons at all, with all the HVAC controls on a massive ipad-looking screen in the middle, that you can’t possibly adjust while keeping your eyes on the road ahead.
What amazes me is that car designs must be focus grouped to death, here we have a small but probably representative sample of "people old enough and rich enough to be buying new cars every 3-5 years" and the universal consensus is a hatred of touch screens.
Unfortunately for the consumer, the screens save a fortune in manufacturing costs, not just by removing the switches, but also miles of cabling and usually a serious consolidation in the number of control modules around the car.
And the dashboard can be upgraded via software.
And functionality disabled unless you pay a subscription
The John Deere practices are quite incredible. What the f##k are you supposed to do if your massive tractor / combine break down in middle of a field in rural America, 100s of miles from nearest town with a service centre. You can't even easily put those things on a trailer, you need special ones with a massive truck to pull it.
A relative of mine is f**ked off with them over it - I might be seeing him tomorrow, so I;ll see if there's been any change.
The 6,000’ descent does now appear to be a red herring, coming from amateur reading of online ADSB flight data.
This is a more plausible reading, from a PPRuNe member: If you look at their flightpath in FR24, there are some altitude fluctuations at around 7.50UTC when the flight is at FL370 and still flying towards Singapore, just over Myanmar when they are about to go over the bay of Bengal. Flight is stable at 37000, then there is one datapoint at 37275, a few datapoints later they are at 36975. 10 minutes later, the flight changes it's heading towards Bangkok and descends to FL310 (which is the reported 6k feet "drop" which doesn't seem any more than a regular descent, after they decided to divert to BKK. After a couple of minutes at FL310, they continue their descent on approach into BKK. Squawk is changed to 7700 halfway into their descent. https://www.pprune.org/accidents-close-calls/659356-severe-turbulence-lhr-sin-one-dead.html#post11659807
300’ up and then 400’ back down again quickly, is more in the expected range of CAT disturbances. The 6,000’ descent was under control over the next few minutes, as the pilot declared an emergency and looked for the nearest suitable place to land.
Suggestions of “dozens” injured on that Singapore flight which got caught in turbulence. 30 ambulances met the plane as it landed in Bangkok. Sounds utterly horrific for passengers and crew. Plane was a 777-300ER, 219 pax and 18 crew on board. (2/3 full).
Jesus Christ
To make it worse that must have been totally unexpected, otherwise everyone woukd have been strapped in, anticipating turbulence. That many injuries - even deaths - suggests there was no warning at all. Kinell
And that's why you wear your seatbelt unless you're actively moving around the cabin.
Seriously, though, to have such severe turbulence someone dies. Wow. That must have been horrific.
One way it can happen is if the plane suddenly plunges you can be hurled UPWARDS from your seat, breaking your neck on the overhead cabins. Jeez!
Or - as I said - people have been killed by runaway trolleys, smashing into them
Yep, always wear your seatbelt, even when sleeping. Maybe especially when sleeping
Which of course doesn't protect you from the flying bodies of non-belters.
On the upside, we express alarm at this news report because it is so vanishingly rare
I remember as a kid in the 70s plane crashes were weekly events, or so it seemed. God knows what it was like in the 1930s. I also remember our family car regularly breaking down - it was expected. The AA man was a constant necessity
We forget how much things have improved. How many planes fly every day? Tens of thousands? How many crash? Almost none? As for cars, I can't remember when I last drove a car which broke down, unless it was my own fault and I was doing something RIDIC
Obviously you don't drive a Land Rover.
I had a succession of crap cars, all of them German - BMW, Merc, etc, that would just break constantly. Rarely engine failure but more often something else - windscreen wiper motors giving out, starter motors packing in etc. Plus huge mark ups on parts.
I then bought a second hand Toyota that I flogged to death without a single incident in five years. Sailed through every MOT first time. When it finally gives up on me I'll buy another.
But I do worry about today's generation of over-engineered cars that are pretty much just computers on wheels. My crappy Corolla will still be driveable (and user serviceable) in 25 years time, doubt the same could be said for any car that's being made today.
And touchscreens. Who actually wants endless touchscreens and menus when driving? When the, uh, tactile feel of a knob is far superior...
It's bonkers that you can get 6 points for phone use but all new cars (except Mazdas, I think) have a giant iPad in them.
So...
As a man with a telematics auto insurance company, I can tell you that the smaller your phone, the more dangerous using it is.
That said: having the center console so far from the centerline of your vehicle isn't very good for safety either.
Buttons. Actual buttons is what you want. I think I almost killed myself last year in a newish hire car, looking for the touch-point to change the radio station.
My knackered Toyota has two buttons, pressing up raises temp 0.5c, pressing down lowers it 0.5c. Simples. And there's no danger of it also being the go-to place to push to change radio station, etc. I sometimes rent a modern, touchscreeny car, and am always happy when I get back into my 13 year old shitbox with actual buttons.
I also wonder how these new cars are going to age. I suspect they have a 3-5 year lifespan then will just get stripped for parts, as mentioned below. Planned obsolescence.
Oh don't get me started on unnecessarily complicated climate control. Our 2009 Ford Focus has one button for air conditioning which turns it on or off, and three dials - one which coldens or hottens the air, one which blows harder or softer or not at all, and one which points the air at the windscreen or the driver or the drivers feet or some mixture of these. It is perfect. Our 2019 volkswagen, on the other hand - well, I still don't understand it. It has an array of controls and buttons some of which appear to override or contradict each other. And they're necessarily so small that I can't see what they do without my reading glasses, which obviously I can't use to drive. And they don't appear to heat or cool the car any more efficiently - much less so, in fact. And as you say - buttons. Anything you can't do with a button isn't worth doing.
The 2024 version will be worse still. It will have no buttons at all, with all the HVAC controls on a massive ipad-looking screen in the middle, that you can’t possibly adjust while keeping your eyes on the road ahead.
What amazes me is that car designs must be focus grouped to death, here we have a small but probably representative sample of "people old enough and rich enough to be buying new cars every 3-5 years" and the universal consensus is a hatred of touch screens.
Unfortunately for the consumer, the screens save a fortune in manufacturing costs, not just by removing the switches, but also miles of cabling and usually a serious consolidation in the number of control modules around the car.
And the dashboard can be upgraded via software.
And functionality disabled unless you pay a subscription
The John Deere practices are quite incredible. What the f##k are you supposed to do if your massive tractor / combine break down in middle of a field in rural America, 100s of miles from nearest town with a service centre. You can't even easily put those things on a trailer, you need special ones with a massive truck to pull it.
If I was a farmer... I'd be jailbreaking the F out of it. Even then, of course, that comes with problems - voided warranty etc.
But it's all part of the wider SaaS ripoff.
I'm stuck paying Microsoft seventy quid a year now for copies of Word, Powerpoint and Excel that fundamentally haven't changed since the 90s (but the old versions no longer work on my M1 Mac).
Same with Adobe. How many quid a month for Creative Suite? The subscription model is just designed to leech money off you a little bit at a time and deliver very little in terms of new functionality in return. I could still do 90% of what I need to do with CS6. Or a one off payment to Pixelmator for thirty quid.
We've sorta accepted it for software, but when it turns into "pay £15 a month for heated seats" to unlock a hardware functionality that already exists, it is full on pisstake territory.
When my laptop hard drive went bad earlier this year, I had to talk the young chap repairing it thru the procedure to download non-subscription Microsoft Office 202X instead of subscription Microsoft Office 365. It did degenerate to terse words and INTERRUPTING HIM, because he simply couldn't get his head round software as a deliverable, not as a service. Still, I larned him in the end.
Yes but buying MS Office costs £400 so it is cheaper to have the annual subscription unless you trust Microsoft software stability over five or six years.
Water companies in England and Wales want bills to increase by between 24% and 91% over the next five years, according to figures compiled by the consumer watchdog.
Southern Water is asking for the biggest jump of 91%, according to the Consumer Council for Water (CCW), with South Staffordshire and Cambridge Water asking for the lowest rise of 24%.
The regulator is unlikely to approve the bill rises in full, but the BBC understands it is expected to agree to bill rises of at least half the amount the companies are requesting, and in some cases considerably more than half.
Suggestions of “dozens” injured on that Singapore flight which got caught in turbulence. 30 ambulances met the plane as it landed in Bangkok. Sounds utterly horrific for passengers and crew. Plane was a 777-300ER, 219 pax and 18 crew on board. (2/3 full).
Jesus Christ
To make it worse that must have been totally unexpected, otherwise everyone woukd have been strapped in, anticipating turbulence. That many injuries - even deaths - suggests there was no warning at all. Kinell
And that's why you wear your seatbelt unless you're actively moving around the cabin.
Seriously, though, to have such severe turbulence someone dies. Wow. That must have been horrific.
One way it can happen is if the plane suddenly plunges you can be hurled UPWARDS from your seat, breaking your neck on the overhead cabins. Jeez!
Or - as I said - people have been killed by runaway trolleys, smashing into them
Yep, always wear your seatbelt, even when sleeping. Maybe especially when sleeping
Which of course doesn't protect you from the flying bodies of non-belters.
On the upside, we express alarm at this news report because it is so vanishingly rare
I remember as a kid in the 70s plane crashes were weekly events, or so it seemed. God knows what it was like in the 1930s. I also remember our family car regularly breaking down - it was expected. The AA man was a constant necessity
We forget how much things have improved. How many planes fly every day? Tens of thousands? How many crash? Almost none? As for cars, I can't remember when I last drove a car which broke down, unless it was my own fault and I was doing something RIDIC
Obviously you don't drive a Land Rover.
I had a succession of crap cars, all of them German - BMW, Merc, etc, that would just break constantly. Rarely engine failure but more often something else - windscreen wiper motors giving out, starter motors packing in etc. Plus huge mark ups on parts.
I then bought a second hand Toyota that I flogged to death without a single incident in five years. Sailed through every MOT first time. When it finally gives up on me I'll buy another.
But I do worry about today's generation of over-engineered cars that are pretty much just computers on wheels. My crappy Corolla will still be driveable (and user serviceable) in 25 years time, doubt the same could be said for any car that's being made today.
And touchscreens. Who actually wants endless touchscreens and menus when driving? When the, uh, tactile feel of a knob is far superior...
Suggestions of “dozens” injured on that Singapore flight which got caught in turbulence. 30 ambulances met the plane as it landed in Bangkok. Sounds utterly horrific for passengers and crew. Plane was a 777-300ER, 219 pax and 18 crew on board. (2/3 full).
Jesus Christ
To make it worse that must have been totally unexpected, otherwise everyone woukd have been strapped in, anticipating turbulence. That many injuries - even deaths - suggests there was no warning at all. Kinell
And that's why you wear your seatbelt unless you're actively moving around the cabin.
Seriously, though, to have such severe turbulence someone dies. Wow. That must have been horrific.
One way it can happen is if the plane suddenly plunges you can be hurled UPWARDS from your seat, breaking your neck on the overhead cabins. Jeez!
Or - as I said - people have been killed by runaway trolleys, smashing into them
Yep, always wear your seatbelt, even when sleeping. Maybe especially when sleeping
Which of course doesn't protect you from the flying bodies of non-belters.
On the upside, we express alarm at this news report because it is so vanishingly rare
I remember as a kid in the 70s plane crashes were weekly events, or so it seemed. God knows what it was like in the 1930s. I also remember our family car regularly breaking down - it was expected. The AA man was a constant necessity
We forget how much things have improved. How many planes fly every day? Tens of thousands? How many crash? Almost none? As for cars, I can't remember when I last drove a car which broke down, unless it was my own fault and I was doing something RIDIC
Obviously you don't drive a Land Rover.
I had a succession of crap cars, all of them German - BMW, Merc, etc, that would just break constantly. Rarely engine failure but more often something else - windscreen wiper motors giving out, starter motors packing in etc. Plus huge mark ups on parts.
I then bought a second hand Toyota that I flogged to death without a single incident in five years. Sailed through every MOT first time. When it finally gives up on me I'll buy another.
But I do worry about today's generation of over-engineered cars that are pretty much just computers on wheels. My crappy Corolla will still be driveable (and user serviceable) in 25 years time, doubt the same could be said for any car that's being made today.
And touchscreens. Who actually wants endless touchscreens and menus when driving? When the, uh, tactile feel of a knob is far superior...
It's bonkers that you can get 6 points for phone use but all new cars (except Mazdas, I think) have a giant iPad in them.
So...
As a man with a telematics auto insurance company, I can tell you that the smaller your phone, the more dangerous using it is.
That said: having the center console so far from the centerline of your vehicle isn't very good for safety either.
Buttons. Actual buttons is what you want. I think I almost killed myself last year in a newish hire car, looking for the touch-point to change the radio station.
My knackered Toyota has two buttons, pressing up raises temp 0.5c, pressing down lowers it 0.5c. Simples. And there's no danger of it also being the go-to place to push to change radio station, etc. I sometimes rent a modern, touchscreeny car, and am always happy when I get back into my 13 year old shitbox with actual buttons.
I also wonder how these new cars are going to age. I suspect they have a 3-5 year lifespan then will just get stripped for parts, as mentioned below. Planned obsolescence.
Oh don't get me started on unnecessarily complicated climate control. Our 2009 Ford Focus has one button for air conditioning which turns it on or off, and three dials - one which coldens or hottens the air, one which blows harder or softer or not at all, and one which points the air at the windscreen or the driver or the drivers feet or some mixture of these. It is perfect. Our 2019 volkswagen, on the other hand - well, I still don't understand it. It has an array of controls and buttons some of which appear to override or contradict each other. And they're necessarily so small that I can't see what they do without my reading glasses, which obviously I can't use to drive. And they don't appear to heat or cool the car any more efficiently - much less so, in fact. And as you say - buttons. Anything you can't do with a button isn't worth doing.
The 2024 version will be worse still. It will have no buttons at all, with all the HVAC controls on a massive ipad-looking screen in the middle, that you can’t possibly adjust while keeping your eyes on the road ahead.
What amazes me is that car designs must be focus grouped to death, here we have a small but probably representative sample of "people old enough and rich enough to be buying new cars every 3-5 years" and the universal consensus is a hatred of touch screens.
Unfortunately for the consumer, the screens save a fortune in manufacturing costs, not just by removing the switches, but also miles of cabling and usually a serious consolidation in the number of control modules around the car.
It's good for the consumer because they make cars cheaper and simpler.
The old luddites on here who apparently can't operate any car made after 2015 are fighting a losing battle. Except for the latest Hyundai Kona which has physical HVAC controls reminiscent of a 90s stereo for some reason.
Almost all modern cars (cars that you'd actually want to own) have voice activated everything anyway so if you plough into a bus queue while fiddling with the touch screen you've only got yourself to blame.
Peasant. The Ineos Grenadier specifically removed a lot of the screen functionality and replaced them with exciting switches with bars next to them, like a Big Plane
"...There’s nothing superfluous inside the Grenadier. Any unnecessary electronics were stripped out, in favour of analogue controls. All the buttons, switches and dials are clearly labelled and purposely spaced, so they can be used with wet hands. Or gloves..."
Suggestions of “dozens” injured on that Singapore flight which got caught in turbulence. 30 ambulances met the plane as it landed in Bangkok. Sounds utterly horrific for passengers and crew. Plane was a 777-300ER, 219 pax and 18 crew on board. (2/3 full).
Jesus Christ
To make it worse that must have been totally unexpected, otherwise everyone woukd have been strapped in, anticipating turbulence. That many injuries - even deaths - suggests there was no warning at all. Kinell
And that's why you wear your seatbelt unless you're actively moving around the cabin.
Seriously, though, to have such severe turbulence someone dies. Wow. That must have been horrific.
One way it can happen is if the plane suddenly plunges you can be hurled UPWARDS from your seat, breaking your neck on the overhead cabins. Jeez!
Or - as I said - people have been killed by runaway trolleys, smashing into them
Yep, always wear your seatbelt, even when sleeping. Maybe especially when sleeping
Which of course doesn't protect you from the flying bodies of non-belters.
On the upside, we express alarm at this news report because it is so vanishingly rare
I remember as a kid in the 70s plane crashes were weekly events, or so it seemed. God knows what it was like in the 1930s. I also remember our family car regularly breaking down - it was expected. The AA man was a constant necessity
We forget how much things have improved. How many planes fly every day? Tens of thousands? How many crash? Almost none? As for cars, I can't remember when I last drove a car which broke down, unless it was my own fault and I was doing something RIDIC
Obviously you don't drive a Land Rover.
I had a succession of crap cars, all of them German - BMW, Merc, etc, that would just break constantly. Rarely engine failure but more often something else - windscreen wiper motors giving out, starter motors packing in etc. Plus huge mark ups on parts.
I then bought a second hand Toyota that I flogged to death without a single incident in five years. Sailed through every MOT first time. When it finally gives up on me I'll buy another.
But I do worry about today's generation of over-engineered cars that are pretty much just computers on wheels. My crappy Corolla will still be driveable (and user serviceable) in 25 years time, doubt the same could be said for any car that's being made today.
And touchscreens. Who actually wants endless touchscreens and menus when driving? When the, uh, tactile feel of a knob is far superior...
It's bonkers that you can get 6 points for phone use but all new cars (except Mazdas, I think) have a giant iPad in them.
So...
As a man with a telematics auto insurance company, I can tell you that the smaller your phone, the more dangerous using it is.
That said: having the center console so far from the centerline of your vehicle isn't very good for safety either.
Buttons. Actual buttons is what you want. I think I almost killed myself last year in a newish hire car, looking for the touch-point to change the radio station.
My knackered Toyota has two buttons, pressing up raises temp 0.5c, pressing down lowers it 0.5c. Simples. And there's no danger of it also being the go-to place to push to change radio station, etc. I sometimes rent a modern, touchscreeny car, and am always happy when I get back into my 13 year old shitbox with actual buttons.
I also wonder how these new cars are going to age. I suspect they have a 3-5 year lifespan then will just get stripped for parts, as mentioned below. Planned obsolescence.
Oh don't get me started on unnecessarily complicated climate control. Our 2009 Ford Focus has one button for air conditioning which turns it on or off, and three dials - one which coldens or hottens the air, one which blows harder or softer or not at all, and one which points the air at the windscreen or the driver or the drivers feet or some mixture of these. It is perfect. Our 2019 volkswagen, on the other hand - well, I still don't understand it. It has an array of controls and buttons some of which appear to override or contradict each other. And they're necessarily so small that I can't see what they do without my reading glasses, which obviously I can't use to drive. And they don't appear to heat or cool the car any more efficiently - much less so, in fact. And as you say - buttons. Anything you can't do with a button isn't worth doing.
The 2024 version will be worse still. It will have no buttons at all, with all the HVAC controls on a massive ipad-looking screen in the middle, that you can’t possibly adjust while keeping your eyes on the road ahead.
What amazes me is that car designs must be focus grouped to death, here we have a small but probably representative sample of "people old enough and rich enough to be buying new cars every 3-5 years" and the universal consensus is a hatred of touch screens.
Unfortunately for the consumer, the screens save a fortune in manufacturing costs, not just by removing the switches, but also miles of cabling and usually a serious consolidation in the number of control modules around the car.
And the dashboard can be upgraded via software.
And functionality disabled unless you pay a subscription
The John Deere practices are quite incredible. What the f##k are you supposed to do if your massive tractor / combine break down in middle of a field in rural America, 100s of miles from nearest town with a service centre. You can't even easily put those things on a trailer, you need special ones with a massive truck to pull it.
If I was a farmer... I'd be jailbreaking the F out of it. Even then, of course, that comes with problems - voided warranty etc.
But it's all part of the wider SaaS ripoff.
I'm stuck paying Microsoft seventy quid a year now for copies of Word, Powerpoint and Excel that fundamentally haven't changed since the 90s (but the old versions no longer work on my M1 Mac).
Same with Adobe. How many quid a month for Creative Suite? The subscription model is just designed to leech money off you a little bit at a time and deliver very little in terms of new functionality in return. I could still do 90% of what I need to do with CS6. Or a one off payment to Pixelmator for thirty quid.
We've sorta accepted it for software, but when it turns into "pay £15 a month for heated seats" to unlock a hardware functionality that already exists, it is full on pisstake territory.
When my laptop hard drive went bad earlier this year, I had to talk the young chap repairing it thru the procedure to download non-subscription Microsoft Office 202X instead of subscription Microsoft Office 365. It did degenerate to terse words and INTERRUPTING HIM, because he simply couldn't get his head round software as a deliverable, not as a service. Still, I larned him in the end.
Yes but buying MS Office costs £400 so it is cheaper to have the annual subscription unless you trust Microsoft software stability over five or six years.
This whole discussion is making Warhammer look a lot cheaper.
Something else government should be asking themselves how can we change this...
"undergraduates at top US universities start companies at more than 5x the rate of their British-educated peers."
"But there’s a pessimism in the UK that often makes people believe they’re destined to fail before they start. That it’s wrong to even think about being different. Our smartest, most technical young people aspire to work for big companies with prestigious brands, rather than take a risk and start something of their own."
The 6,000’ descent does now appear to be a red herring, coming from amateur reading of online ADSB flight data.
This is a more plausible reading, from a PPRuNe member: If you look at their flightpath in FR24, there are some altitude fluctuations at around 7.50UTC when the flight is at FL370 and still flying towards Singapore, just over Myanmar when they are about to go over the bay of Bengal. Flight is stable at 37000, then there is one datapoint at 37275, a few datapoints later they are at 36975. 10 minutes later, the flight changes it's heading towards Bangkok and descends to FL310 (which is the reported 6k feet "drop" which doesn't seem any more than a regular descent, after they decided to divert to BKK. After a couple of minutes at FL310, they continue their descent on approach into BKK. Squawk is changed to 7700 halfway into their descent. https://www.pprune.org/accidents-close-calls/659356-severe-turbulence-lhr-sin-one-dead.html#post11659807
300’ up and then 400’ back down again quickly, is more in the expected range of CAT disturbances. The 6,000’ descent was under control over the next few minutes, as the pilot declared an emergency and looked for the nearest suitable place to land.
6000ft in 5s would be over 800mph. I don’t think it would be possible to accelerate that fast in such a short period of time.
Suggestions of “dozens” injured on that Singapore flight which got caught in turbulence. 30 ambulances met the plane as it landed in Bangkok. Sounds utterly horrific for passengers and crew. Plane was a 777-300ER, 219 pax and 18 crew on board. (2/3 full).
Jesus Christ
To make it worse that must have been totally unexpected, otherwise everyone woukd have been strapped in, anticipating turbulence. That many injuries - even deaths - suggests there was no warning at all. Kinell
And that's why you wear your seatbelt unless you're actively moving around the cabin.
Seriously, though, to have such severe turbulence someone dies. Wow. That must have been horrific.
One way it can happen is if the plane suddenly plunges you can be hurled UPWARDS from your seat, breaking your neck on the overhead cabins. Jeez!
Or - as I said - people have been killed by runaway trolleys, smashing into them
Yep, always wear your seatbelt, even when sleeping. Maybe especially when sleeping
Footage here showing the captain’s diversion announcement and a dented ceiling panel. Also claims now two dead but uncorroborated:
OMG that looks harrowing. The guy in the last photo covered with blood
Imagine the intensity of the fear. There is something about planes which still induces existential dread. Something about being stuck in a metal tube 30,000 feet up in the air. And then suddenly just 24,000 feet....
If I was one of the surviving passengers I would now be getting drunker than I have ever been in my life and then some on top.
The pilot managed a clam voice. That is quite something.
When I was a frequent flyer, I always thought the older the pilot, the better.
Indeed. Experience is everything when flying, cf a certain Captain Sullenberger.
On a different subject, there’s a sleek and swish and unusually designed super yacht moored just off Trieste, unusual enough to be worth looking up. Turns out it was designed by Phillipe Stark for some Russian criminal billionaire, and has been sitting there for eighteen months having been confiscated by the Italian authorities due Ukraine. Which is nice.
A number of seized Russian yachts (among €2bn of other physical assets), is causing problems for the Italian government, who are having to pay a skeleton staff, mooring, and maintainance costs on them, to ensure they remain seaworthy.
Suggestions of “dozens” injured on that Singapore flight which got caught in turbulence. 30 ambulances met the plane as it landed in Bangkok. Sounds utterly horrific for passengers and crew. Plane was a 777-300ER, 219 pax and 18 crew on board. (2/3 full).
Jesus Christ
To make it worse that must have been totally unexpected, otherwise everyone woukd have been strapped in, anticipating turbulence. That many injuries - even deaths - suggests there was no warning at all. Kinell
And that's why you wear your seatbelt unless you're actively moving around the cabin.
Seriously, though, to have such severe turbulence someone dies. Wow. That must have been horrific.
One way it can happen is if the plane suddenly plunges you can be hurled UPWARDS from your seat, breaking your neck on the overhead cabins. Jeez!
Or - as I said - people have been killed by runaway trolleys, smashing into them
Yep, always wear your seatbelt, even when sleeping. Maybe especially when sleeping
Which of course doesn't protect you from the flying bodies of non-belters.
On the upside, we express alarm at this news report because it is so vanishingly rare
I remember as a kid in the 70s plane crashes were weekly events, or so it seemed. God knows what it was like in the 1930s. I also remember our family car regularly breaking down - it was expected. The AA man was a constant necessity
We forget how much things have improved. How many planes fly every day? Tens of thousands? How many crash? Almost none? As for cars, I can't remember when I last drove a car which broke down, unless it was my own fault and I was doing something RIDIC
Obviously you don't drive a Land Rover.
I had a succession of crap cars, all of them German - BMW, Merc, etc, that would just break constantly. Rarely engine failure but more often something else - windscreen wiper motors giving out, starter motors packing in etc. Plus huge mark ups on parts.
I then bought a second hand Toyota that I flogged to death without a single incident in five years. Sailed through every MOT first time. When it finally gives up on me I'll buy another.
But I do worry about today's generation of over-engineered cars that are pretty much just computers on wheels. My crappy Corolla will still be driveable (and user serviceable) in 25 years time, doubt the same could be said for any car that's being made today.
And touchscreens. Who actually wants endless touchscreens and menus when driving? When the, uh, tactile feel of a knob is far superior...
It's bonkers that you can get 6 points for phone use but all new cars (except Mazdas, I think) have a giant iPad in them.
So...
As a man with a telematics auto insurance company, I can tell you that the smaller your phone, the more dangerous using it is.
That said: having the center console so far from the centerline of your vehicle isn't very good for safety either.
Buttons. Actual buttons is what you want. I think I almost killed myself last year in a newish hire car, looking for the touch-point to change the radio station.
My knackered Toyota has two buttons, pressing up raises temp 0.5c, pressing down lowers it 0.5c. Simples. And there's no danger of it also being the go-to place to push to change radio station, etc. I sometimes rent a modern, touchscreeny car, and am always happy when I get back into my 13 year old shitbox with actual buttons.
I also wonder how these new cars are going to age. I suspect they have a 3-5 year lifespan then will just get stripped for parts, as mentioned below. Planned obsolescence.
Oh don't get me started on unnecessarily complicated climate control. Our 2009 Ford Focus has one button for air conditioning which turns it on or off, and three dials - one which coldens or hottens the air, one which blows harder or softer or not at all, and one which points the air at the windscreen or the driver or the drivers feet or some mixture of these. It is perfect. Our 2019 volkswagen, on the other hand - well, I still don't understand it. It has an array of controls and buttons some of which appear to override or contradict each other. And they're necessarily so small that I can't see what they do without my reading glasses, which obviously I can't use to drive. And they don't appear to heat or cool the car any more efficiently - much less so, in fact. And as you say - buttons. Anything you can't do with a button isn't worth doing.
The 2024 version will be worse still. It will have no buttons at all, with all the HVAC controls on a massive ipad-looking screen in the middle, that you can’t possibly adjust while keeping your eyes on the road ahead.
What amazes me is that car designs must be focus grouped to death, here we have a small but probably representative sample of "people old enough and rich enough to be buying new cars every 3-5 years" and the universal consensus is a hatred of touch screens.
Unfortunately for the consumer, the screens save a fortune in manufacturing costs, not just by removing the switches, but also miles of cabling and usually a serious consolidation in the number of control modules around the car.
And the dashboard can be upgraded via software.
And functionality disabled unless you pay a subscription
The John Deere practices are quite incredible. What the f##k are you supposed to do if your massive tractor / combine break down in middle of a field in rural America, 100s of miles from nearest town with a service centre. You can't even easily put those things on a trailer, you need special ones with a massive truck to pull it.
If I was a farmer... I'd be jailbreaking the F out of it. Even then, of course, that comes with problems - voided warranty etc.
But it's all part of the wider SaaS ripoff.
I'm stuck paying Microsoft seventy quid a year now for copies of Word, Powerpoint and Excel that fundamentally haven't changed since the 90s (but the old versions no longer work on my M1 Mac).
Same with Adobe. How many quid a month for Creative Suite? The subscription model is just designed to leech money off you a little bit at a time and deliver very little in terms of new functionality in return. I could still do 90% of what I need to do with CS6. Or a one off payment to Pixelmator for thirty quid.
We've sorta accepted it for software, but when it turns into "pay £15 a month for heated seats" to unlock a hardware functionality that already exists, it is full on pisstake territory.
When my laptop hard drive went bad earlier this year, I had to talk the young chap repairing it thru the procedure to download non-subscription Microsoft Office 202X instead of subscription Microsoft Office 365. It did degenerate to terse words and INTERRUPTING HIM, because he simply couldn't get his head round software as a deliverable, not as a service. Still, I larned him in the end.
Yes but buying MS Office costs £400 so it is cheaper to have the annual subscription unless you trust Microsoft software stability over five or six years.
Just use Google suite for free? Having switched due to work I think it's better.
Comments
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-62142208
Utter madness. Shades of John Deere. https://www.theregister.com/2022/09/12/deere_software_revenues/
The old luddites on here who apparently can't operate any car made after 2015 are fighting a losing battle. Except for the latest Hyundai Kona which has physical HVAC controls reminiscent of a 90s stereo for some reason.
Almost all modern cars (cars that you'd actually want to own) have voice activated everything anyway so if you plough into a bus queue while fiddling with the touch screen you've only got yourself to blame.
There is no doubt that lowering the limit pulls the speed down, but not necessarily down to the limit or below. Near my folks there is the A303 passing through Winterbourne Stoke. It used to be a 50 mph, and cars routinely did 60. It changed to 40 and they were still exceeding it, just at 50 now.
"undergraduates at top US universities start companies at more than 5x the rate of their British-educated peers."
"But there’s a pessimism in the UK that often makes people believe they’re destined to fail before they start. That it’s wrong to even think about being different. Our smartest, most technical young people aspire to work for big companies with prestigious brands, rather than take a risk and start something of their own."
https://tomblomfield.com/post/750852175114174464/taking-risk
On a different subject, there’s a sleek and swish and unusually designed super yacht moored just off Trieste, unusual enough to be worth looking up. Turns out it was designed by Phillipe Stark for some Russian criminal billionaire, and has been sitting there for eighteen months having been confiscated by the Italian authorities due Ukraine. Which is nice.
People don’t pay the slightest attention during a flight, so I doubt it makes much difference whether there was a warning or not.
Remember during Sully’s masterful landing on the Hudson, the passengers had literally all just had the safety briefing, seconds before, and were then told they were about to land on water. Yet only about 15% of them managed to find their life jacket and successfully put it on.
1. 993
2. E36
3. W124
4. FD
Next thing will be to convert them back to oil no doubt and at great expense
"...There’s nothing superfluous inside the Grenadier. Any unnecessary electronics were stripped out, in favour of analogue controls. All the buttons, switches and dials are clearly labelled and purposely spaced, so they can be used with wet hands. Or gloves..."
https://ineosgrenadier.com/en/gb/explore/the-grenadier-videos-and-stories/building-the-grenadier/the-grenadier-interior
But it's all part of the wider SaaS ripoff.
I'm stuck paying Microsoft seventy quid a year now for copies of Word, Powerpoint and Excel that fundamentally haven't changed since the 90s (but the old versions no longer work on my M1 Mac).
Same with Adobe. How many quid a month for Creative Suite? The subscription model is just designed to leech money off you a little bit at a time and deliver very little in terms of new functionality in return. I could still do 90% of what I need to do with CS6. Or a one off payment to Pixelmator for thirty quid.
We've sorta accepted it for software, but when it turns into "pay £15 a month for heated seats" to unlock a hardware functionality that already exists, it is full on pisstake territory.
The "drink verification can" meme is slowly becoming true... https://imgur.com/please-drink-verification-can-dgGvgKF
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/how-did-the-eu-get-raisis-death-so-wrong/
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/italys-multimillion-dollar-upkeep-of-russian-oligarchs-yachts-ignites-debate/ar-BB1mfpDM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alienism
I have no idea why that fucking thing exists or who would want one.
If you want a badly built Defender copy, get a Defender.
If you want the admittedly very good BMW powertrain, get an X5.
If you want a boringly reliable utilitarian 4x4, get a LandCruiser.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/xykkkd/why-american-farmers-are-hacking-their-tractors-with-ukrainian-firmware
On the other side, there were also some funny stories from the start of the war, that Ukranian tracters reported stolen by Russians were able to be bricked remotely by the company.
https://www.csoonline.com/article/572811/remote-bricking-of-ukrainian-tractors-raises-agriculture-security-concerns.html
This is a more plausible reading, from a PPRuNe member:
If you look at their flightpath in FR24, there are some altitude fluctuations at around 7.50UTC when the flight is at FL370 and still flying towards Singapore, just over Myanmar when they are about to go over the bay of Bengal. Flight is stable at 37000, then there is one datapoint at 37275, a few datapoints later they are at 36975. 10 minutes later, the flight changes it's heading towards Bangkok and descends to FL310 (which is the reported 6k feet "drop" which doesn't seem any more than a regular descent, after they decided to divert to BKK. After a couple of minutes at FL310, they continue their descent on approach into BKK. Squawk is changed to 7700 halfway into their descent.
https://www.pprune.org/accidents-close-calls/659356-severe-turbulence-lhr-sin-one-dead.html#post11659807
300’ up and then 400’ back down again quickly, is more in the expected range of CAT disturbances. The 6,000’ descent was under control over the next few minutes, as the pilot declared an emergency and looked for the nearest suitable place to land.
Rocket company ULA may use airships to transport rockets cross-country.
https://x.com/TheEtherLog/status/1792727858881691964
(I can scarcely believe it, but Ariane might be doing similar:
https://www.ariane.group/en/news/itw-flying-whales-what-if-a-giant-airship-were-used-to-transport-the-themis-reusable-launcher-stage-demonstrator/ )
Southern Water is asking for the biggest jump of 91%, according to the Consumer Council for Water (CCW), with South Staffordshire and Cambridge Water asking for the lowest rise of 24%.
The regulator is unlikely to approve the bill rises in full, but the BBC understands it is expected to agree to bill rises of at least half the amount the companies are requesting, and in some cases considerably more than half.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ce55vp78n40o
My Isuzu is mechanically sound 101k miles every single panel dented (late onset dyspraxia). Think I will donate it to the Ukraine war effort.
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