Toyota has a news conference coming up shortly. Apparently they are going to address the issue of San Diego driver Jim Sikes and his runaway Prius.
Reports are that engineers have been unable to duplicate the problem as Sikes described it, in either Sikes’s car or another car of the same model.
Frankly, I still see no reason not to believe Sikes. Where both mechanics and computer electronics are involved, the actual cause of an intermittent problem can be really, really hard to pinpoint. (Ask any computer owner!) Just because engineers can’t replicate the problem doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. And so far there’s has been no reason to think Sikes lied about it.
Seems to me that the very fact that some of the recalled and repaired Toyotas reportedly have continued to have problems indicates that Toyota engineers themselves may not have accurately pinpointed the source of the problems they “fixed.”
It would be pretty easy for a corporation like Toyota to discredit a single private citizen. Their doing so doesn’t prove anything.
Just sayin’ …
What was your first job? The first one you got paid for doing, by someone other than your parents.
If you count summer jobs, my first was as a lab assistant at the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation. I mostly took care of the research animals, feeding, watering, and cleaning cages for rats, mice, guinea pigs, and chicks. Sometimes I helped the lab techs weigh the animals, or measure and weigh stuff for projects they were working on.
My first full-time (not summer) job after I graduated was as a bank teller where I’d worked the previous summer. But that only lasted until I got married and the huz and I moved from Oklahoma City back to Norman so he could attend law school. The J-school director hooked me up with the publisher of the Norman newspaper and my mommy-track career was born in the Norman Transcript’s advertising department.
For years, stories about Comcast restricting its customers’ Internet use by slowing, limiting, or cutting off access have circulated. Obviously not quite kosher when, at the same time, they hype the speed of their connections vs. the other guys.
I’m not enough of a tech head to understand the details even if I’d been following that closely — which I haven’t. The only thing I’ve noticed, personally, is that between about 5 and 6 pm, when people start getting home from work, my Internet connection seems to lag a bit. Or, as my son explains it, my bandwidth gets reduced because more people in the area are logging on. I’ve never thought that was quite fair. I contracted for a specific service from Comcast and I should get it, regardless of what my neighbors do.
Anyway, I was reminded of all this when my statement this week included a notice of a class action suit against Comcast [oh happy day!]. It seems somebody in Pennsylvania filed suit against Comcast because the company “promised and advertised specific speeds and unlimited Internet access but impaired the use of some ‘Peer-toPeer’ file sharing traffic” — specifically, the use of Ares, BitTorrent, eDonkey, FastTrack or Gnutella protocols.
Comcast “denies these claims, but has revised its management of P2P and is settling to avoid the burden and cost of further litigation.” Sounds like an admission of guilt to me. If you’re innocent, and you have the resources to defend your good name, you do it.
Now that someone has called their hand on limiting P2P, they’re taking a new approach. Apparently their “revised” management approach is a handy dandy new feature, the Usage Meter, announced in today’s e-mail:
“This new feature is available to Comcast High-Speed Internet customers and provides an easy way to check total monthly household high-speed Internet data usage at any time [how thoughtful!]. Monthly data usage is the amount of data, such as images, movies, photos, videos, and other files that customers send, receive, download or upload each month. Comcast measures total data usage and does not monitor specific customer activities to determine data usage [cuz we got sued for doing that].
The current data usage allowance for the Comcast High-Speed Internet service is 250GB per month.”
Oh? My “unlimited” access is limited, after all?
It remains to be seen if Comcast will get sued over the 250GB limit, but since their first method of controlling customers’ Internet use got them sued, they’ve moved on to Plan B. No doubt they’re already working on Plan C, just in case.
You don’t have to be a geek to see where this is going. Comcast and the other telecorps are determined to get every nickel they can from the explosion of Internet technology. They will charge for use. They will limit use. They will tier their charges. When charging for phone minutes isn’t enough, they’ll start charging for data transfer [can you say "texting"?]. They will, to whatever extent they can, control Internet access and use, and get filthy rich doing it.
They’ll do all this unless and until the law stops them. Stopping them, by the way, is what Net Neutrality is all about. Support Net Neutrality. It’s good for all of us.
I’ve written before about Phoebe the hummingbird and her awesome live webcam in Southern California. You’ll recall she had the chick, Sassy, who did not develop normally and died despite last-minute human intervention. Since then, she has been incubating two new eggs in another nest in the same lovely rosebush. They are due to hatch this weekend, probably in the early morning, according to the knowledgeable folks who visit the site.
Phoebe's eggs are the size of Tic-Tacs, in a nest the size of a golfball.
Just a few miles from Phoebe is another hummer webcam. This one features Buzzie Bea and her two chicks, Velcro and Zipper. These adorable little guys will steal your heart. You can see their fuzzy colors, something poor Sassy never developed. Viewers are now betting on when these two hummers will fledge, or leave the nest. Many are guessing it will happen this weekend.
Things are getting snug for Velcro and Zipper, even with Mom away.
Both webcams are well worth visiting, if only to soak up the luscious spring color and the sounds of light breezes, windchimes, and birds calling in the background. Great balm for the winter-weary soul.
Oops!
Next time you see one of those Falling Rock signs along the highway, pay attention. Sometimes the rocks look like this:
Monday along I-70 in Glenwood Canyon west of Denver, there was a rock slide, to put it mildly. Some of the errant boulders were bus-sized. They punched holes through two lanes of bridge decking and shattered across all four lanes. Luckily the slide occurred during the night, when traffic is lighter, and no one was injured.
A 17-mile stretch of the Interstate is closed now, and no one knows when it will be re-opened. Because the area is in a narrow canyon, no nearby detour is possible, so a daily average of 25,000 vehicles will be forced to drive some 200 miles out of their way.
Yep, those signs are in ALL CAPS for a reason.
_____________
Update, March 10: Nature has a cruel sense of humor. Today a woman riding in a car along one of the I-70 alternate routes was killed when a basketball-sized boulder smashed through the roof of the car.
