During one of my last Waymo rides the car stopped on Powell between Bush and Sutter (facing South stopping on the regular lane a bit before the Powell/Sutter crossing). This caused other drivers to drive on the cable car tracks to go around the Waymo (which are separated from the driving lane with a double yellow line) and it caused a truck to do a right turn directly from the cable car tracks (as there wasn't enough space to merge back into the lane).
Not sure if was legal or not for the Waymo to stop there, but given that Waymo stops take quite a bit longer than stops with Uber/Lyft (as it takes a while for the car to continue driving) this was one of the worst places possible to stop. Especially as there would have been space available right after the crossing next to Walgreens.
Honestly, it’s almost always legal to stop in a lane. Regardless of the fact that other drivers had bad behavior, that was the right thing to do. Some of the future of all this is that we will need to install curbs in places we don’t have them now to prevent bad human behavior.
This is absolutely false in California, please don't spread dangerous misinformation.
See CVC 22400(a):
No person shall drive upon a highway at such a slow speed as to impede or block the normal and reasonable movement of traffic unless the reduced speed is necessary for safe operation, becauseof a grade, or in compliance with law.
No person shall bring a vehicle to a complete stop upon a highway so as to impede or block the normal and reasonable movement of traffic unless the stop is necessary for safe operation or in compliance with law.
The above was referencing stopping on a city street ("Powell between Bush and Sutter"). You're talking about stopping on a highway. These things are not particularly comparable.
In the California Vehicle Code section 360, a "highway" is defined for the purposes of the vehicle code as "a way or place of whatever nature, publicly maintained and open to the use of the public for purposes of vehicular travel. Highway includes street." [0]
Yes. Most of the plans of the provider that I use in the US (T-Mobile) include free SMS and MMS to any country (also free data roaming in almost any country). I think it's similar for other providers (Verizon and AT&T), but I'm not sure as I'm not familiar with their plans.
> The best thing to do is for the city to own both fiber and electricity, and let providers compete for both.
Something similar is the case in the European Union, as the electricity network is usually a different company than the electricity providers. The network is often owned by some municipal company and charges customers only for the transport of energy over the network. For the energy itself customers can choose from dozens of different providers, some of them generate their own electricity, others just buy and resell electricity on the market.
With Google Voice I have a phone number not tied to a particular SIM card or to a particular phone. When I travel internationally I can use a cheap local SIM and I'm still reachable on my US number for calls and texts.
With Fi you run into issues if you use it for too long outside the US. And also I read that people had troubles re-activating a Fi eSIM from outside the US in cases where they (for example) lost their phone.
Did you have the number configured as forwarding number? At some point I got asked to verify an old forwarding number, but I just deleted it and Google Voice continued to work fine (I mostly use it in VoIP mode instead of forwarding calls).
For day to day use I use Apple Maps, but when hiking Organic Maps is my absolute favorite. A lot more useful than Apple Maps or Google Maps (as it includes routes that are missing in the other two) and it allows to add custom tracks which is super useful for navigation.
Organic Maps is great, especially for planning hikes, but I'd be careful about relying on the OSM topos for wilderness travel. I got burned pretty hard in the Alps by OSM when a trail didn't actually exist. Since then, I like to use Organic Maps for a digital "reconnaissance" of OSM points of interest and then a country-specific topo map like USGS or IGN for backcountry navigation or route finding.
Note: AlpineQuest is a great app for this and is one of the few apps that doesn't charge a subscription to access our taxpayer-funded maps.
I had a similar experience using Organic Maps for hiking. I was hiking on a forested hill near an urban center. Both Google and Apple Maps only had a couple of the biggest trails while organic maps showed an extensive network. This was really helpful for exploring but I ended up having to take a pretty long detour to get back since the trail I had planned to take didn’t exist. I also encountered a trail marked on the map that had obviously been closed for years and was extremely overgrown. I really like the app but I wouldn’t trust the data for backcountry navigation at all.
Slightly offtopic but related: One of my mobile providers supports configuring public (non firewalled) IP addresses for mobile devices and when choosing that option my phone battery drains very significantly faster than otherwise. I suspect it's because all the random packets that arrive every second or so on the public interface (when NAT and firewall are disabled) either cause the radio to use a lot more battery or prevent the CPU from going into sleep mode (or both of that).
That reminds me of when I had a computer with spinning rust hard drives on my desk in grad school. At some point I was trying to focus but there was a periodic, roughly once a second hard drive noise that was driving me nuts. Went through the usual suspects at the time like the background locatedb updater, and eventually ended up finding that some bot was trying to ssh login once per second going down a list of passwords, and the errors were being logged to disk. Need I mention the computer had a public IP address?
I've been wondering about that! A long time ago, I had a phone plan like that as well (in fact, a public IPv4 was the only option), and I was wondering if random port scanning would eventually use up all of my data allowance.
Turns out stateful firewalls aren't just a security factor on mobile internet connections.
I've luckily mostly been on unlimited data plans, so I don't know about it using up your data, but I guess it would? Your device is sending and receiving data. I don't think there's a distinction for externally made connections, otherwise vpn tunnels would have been really popular.
I did have an experience with my phone being suddenly used by random internet users. I had ampache running on my n900 (maemo/debian-based) and somebody found it on the internet and started streaming my music. :D I had a higher-than-normal amount of battery usage for a few days so I decided to see what's using it and discovered that my music was being played and downloaded.
For some reason lots of Android phones (even the Pixel models from Google) seem to use a whitelist approach that is quite restrictive regarding where VoLTE is supported. For example at least up until recently (and probably still the case?) Pixel phones only supported VoLTE in countries that were in the list of countries in which the Google store official sold Pixel phones.
Meanwhile newer iOS versions seem to nowadays have generic VoLTE (and even VoWiFi) support that even works for smaller MVNOs without an iPhone carrier profile (as long as their VoLTE implementation somewhat conforms to standards).
There are a lot of interoperability bugs in VoLTE. The best part of standards is that each vendor implements it slightly differently.
Apple tends to hold back a feature until all carriers have blessed it. Apple withholds Carrier Bundles from MVNOs who don’t promote iPhones, so iPhones are more likely to be used on fully compatible carriers. They also have significant market weight so a MNO is less likely to decide they can’t bother to fix interoperability bugs with iPhones.
There’s a correlation between buyers of expensive smartphones and higher ARPU customers which further increases incentive to put in the engineering resources to squash bugs but only for flagship phones. MNOs also have an incentive against improving interoperability as it makes it easier to switch to another carrier (“churn”).
And worse, it differs when roaming. I am aware there are networks where if you are their customer VoLTE works but if you are roaming onto their network it does not work at all. With the exact same device.
I’d have to think that a network that shuts down their 2G network probably allows roaming devices to make calls over VoLTE. All those carriers that don’t allow roaming devices to make VoLTE calls probably have an active 2G network.
Not sure if was legal or not for the Waymo to stop there, but given that Waymo stops take quite a bit longer than stops with Uber/Lyft (as it takes a while for the car to continue driving) this was one of the worst places possible to stop. Especially as there would have been space available right after the crossing next to Walgreens.