It's not impervious to bad weather, but pretty resilient. I'd say in the 2 years we've had ours the system has shut off maybe 3-4 times due to one of: a) very low and direct sun angle, b) very heavy rain, c) dense fog. Which, to be fair, are all difficult conditions for a human to drive in as well.
But I agree with the parent, the suite of driver assistance features is very good, but a long way from "self driving".
Do you know if there a legal/tax impediment to getting the pass-through classified as a not-for-profit? Or did you just mean it makes it harder to implement as a traditional startup?
I'm curious as to what your turnaround time from order to delivery is?
We actually tried something pretty similar last year here in Portland (the site is still alive at www.localplate.com although we have ceased operations), we found it pretty challenging just to get people to plan ahead far enough for our offering to be viable. (We came across some consumer research that something like 70% of households don't have a plan for dinner until sometime the same day.)
We eventually tried distribution through existing retail channels which definitely helped with the traction side but made the economics pretty challenging. :)
Best of luck though, it's an interesting space with a lot of people attacking it from different directions right now.
(E-mail is in my profile if you want to know any more about our experience.)
I've gone twice and it is really fascinating. You get to stand about twenty feet from the face of the reactor core, walk around the control room, etc. I have some pictures and video I can share if anyone is interested, although I'm sure some Googling can turn up lots of them as well.
One of my favorite anecdotes is that the valve covers for all the cooling pipes are open and have to remain that way so that the Russian inspectors can verify each year that there is no evidence that the reactor has been in operation. (Not sure if these inspections are actually still happening.)
Also for arms control purposes, there is an open pit elsewhere on the site where decommissioned US Navy reactors are stored. (Russia can monitor the number and position of them via satellite.)
Aha, well apparently I never merged that commit into my deploy branch, so it was still actually on 3.2.1. That combined with the fact that your page had said 3.2.1 was safe caused my brain to short circuit and not realize that 3.2.11 is what it needed to be on. :) I'll redeploy and check it again, thanks guys!
I just tried this on one of my side project sites and it's reporting it as being vulnerable. However I upgraded the site to Rails 3.2.1 last week (and just confirmed that's the version in the bundle). Is there something that would cause a false positive or is my app really still vulnerable?
The reason I went with "vendor everything" several years ago was that I had to make some changes to a legacy codebase and discovered that one of the gems it depended on was no longer available. It wasn't the end of the world to refactor around it, but it motivated me to find a way to ensure I would always have a local copy of all the dependencies for each app.
Someone in the comments of the rubygems.org story yesterday mentioned using a submodule for vendor/cache which seems like an interesting idea to me. That could at least partially address #3.
Steve, could you maybe expand a little bit on your reasons for not wanting to have the gems cached in your repo? Have you run into practical issues (deployment speed, etc.) or is it more of a philosophical thing?
I would say your customers can sue you regardless of what you say in an email or blog post. Using lawyers to hide from your customers seems less than optimal.
Personally, I find the "Pricing" line of the comparison chart to be misleading. For $199 (a year) you get 50GB of space and 250k views with Vimeo Pro. Under the Free Viyard plan you get 1 video and 101GB of bandwidth. Also, the "Unbranded Player" line of the comparison is checked for Vidyard even though the pricing page says the Free plan uses a branded player.
Maybe just get rid of that pricing line in the comparison?
Other than having to mail them a paper check(!), registering js.co.tt with the Trinidad and Tabago NIC was fairly painless. As others have mentioned though, you are pretty much always at the whim of the local government. If you wouldn't trust the local judicial system to fairly adjudicate any disputes, you might want to think twice before basing your business on their TLD.
Different people place importance on different things. The "people who buy airline tickets" market is probably large enough to withstand some segmentation.
I was trying to think of a good analogy before but just came up with this: imagine if the Minerals Management Service (theoretical regulator of the oil industry) was in charge of setting the fuel economy standards for cars and trucks.
But I agree with the parent, the suite of driver assistance features is very good, but a long way from "self driving".