Yes, it's sounds like the real problem here is that these areas of the US are suffering from a major tailgating problem above all else.
No, there's two real problems, and that's not it. Problem number one is simply too many cars on the roads. This could be alleviated by better public/mass transportation, but that's expensive. It could also be alleviated by building bigger and better roads but that's also expensive. Problem number two is that most police departments are a lot more concerned about revenue than safety.
Wow, what an irrelevant and aggressively incorrect post.
It's really very, very simple.
Fact 1: When the amount of traffic sufficiently exceeds what the road infrastructure is designed to handle, you're going to have slowdowns and gridlock. Fact 2: You can, to a point, reduce or eliminate the slowdowns by having drivers pack in tighter than the letter of the law dictates.
Then you should have made your context clear in your post rather than making a blanket statement. But that aside, there's plenty of situations in big cities where it's simply not possible to maintain such a following distance that you'd be able to avoid rear-ending someone who suddenly mashed the breaks to the floor. Well, not without causing other worse traffic hazards anyway. Often, the safest course is in fact to use your best judgement and maintain a following distance that's only safe enough with typical driving behavior. With so much traffic on the road, it's simply not possible to account for everything, no matter how good a driver you are.
And that's exactly why roundabouts are so much better at any busy intersection. The only reason they still somewhat suck in the US is because of old or stupid drivers who aren't used to them and/or can't figure them out.
I didn't misread anything. I just demonstrated how your statement is either incomplete or false.
UK law makes it very simple - the guy behind is at fault. If you keep the advised separation (2 seconds), you will have plenty of time to safely react to even the harshest emergency brake.
In my scenario, you were behind the other car. You kept the advised separation. You did not have sufficient time to react to the harshest emergency. Thus, your statement is incorrect.
It's a lot easier to demonstrate than you think. Of course, if you want actual proof you'll have to go find another universe because such a thing doesn't exist in this one.
Let's say there are 10 cars per minute driving through a stretch of highway containing an on-ramp. Now let's say 10 cars are trying to merge into in from that on-ramp every minute. Not a problem. They find spaces in the traffic and merge, and the flow of traffic continues. Now let's double that, and we have 20 cars driving by per minute, and 20 merging per minute. Probably still not too bad. Double it again. And again. Before long, we've hit a point where a merging driver has no choice but to squeeze in where there's not adequate following distance. Now he has to keep speed down so he stays far enough behind the car he merged in behind, and the car he merged in front of has to immediately slow down to maintain safe following distance. But because it's a busy highway, the flow of merging traffic continues, and the only way to keep maintaining safe following distance is for cars already on the highway to keep slowing down, and keep slowing down, and keep slowing down. Now all of a sudden everyone is driving at 5mph because that's the only way to maintain a safe following distance. I could do a quick graphical simulation for you, but I really can't be arsed to spend that much time on something this obvious.
You're on a street with two lanes going in your direction. Traffic light ahead of you is read with cars waiting. You're slowing down as you're closing in on the stopped traffic in your lane. Suddenly a car in the other lane cuts over into your lane because the traffic in his lane is stopped farther back, and he can't see the stopped traffic in your lane. Now he has to slam on the breaks. You slam into his rear end. Obviously you are at fault, because you just rear-ended him. You should have been anticipating him to cut you off at the last second.
Wrong. The reason it doesn't work that way is because there's just simply too much traffic for the size and number of streets. If you could actually force people to drive that way in a big city like NYC or Chicago you'd have traffic at a crawl ALL THE TIME rather than just rush hour.
This needs to be modded up. Even in a fairly non-congested city like Columbus, OH where I live, it still gets congested enough that you just can't simply follow the letter of the law because traffic would go nowhere. Safe following distance is always the first thing to go, and it's not just out of stupidity, it's also out of necessity - and that's when it's not rush hour.
And there's about a dozen of those active at most, at any given time. So the handful that are active encounter a bug, we shoot them down and ground the rest until we figure it out. Maybe a few hundred people die, maybe a few thousand, but probably no one at all. Yep, that's almost as devastating as nuclear war.
Actually, I think you've completely failed to grasp my point of what AI is full stop. You've failed to recognise the underlying point that AI, as we know it, is commonly nothing more than algorithms with emergent properties.
No, I glossed over that because everyone on/. already realizes that, although you in your arrogance assume you're the only one and that eveyone else is just ignorant and wrong. And also because it doesn't matter in this discussion, because this is not a discussion on exactly what all AI could possibly include, but rather a discussion about things that can threaten the very existence of humanity as a species (and potentially all life as we know it on planet earth).
The rest of your tripe is strictly about AI in the financial world, which, while damaging to our wallets and potentially modern civilization, has no way to actually threaten our species. Sure, having the economy tank overnight would be bad, but it's not even remotely comparable to a nuclear holocaust, or a planet turned to desert or ice through climate change, or the drastic global impacts that current rogue biotech could have if released in the wild. And as I said in my previous post, any AI we presently have isn't remotely capable of anything like that.
And yes, the distinction is important here. AI can easily control something like finances that is confined completely to the digital world - but the digital world can't physically harm us or threaten our existence as a species. That requires interfacing with the physical world, and that's where AI as a threat falls apart. Worst-case scenario, we bomb the power source the AI depends on, game over. Maybe a few thousand people die as collateral damage. But even something on that scale is a long ways off yet, if it will ever exist at all.
No, I don't think climate change or rogue biotech are as much of a current threat as nuclear war, but I think they have a lot more potential to be real threats than AI does any time soon, if ever.
So basically, if you already own the hard copy, we'll sell you a digital copy that costs us nothing for just $5! Wow, what a generous offer!
How about this instead: for a $5 yearly fee, you can download any ebooks for free if you already own the hard copy. Now that's an offer I could get on board with.
By your argument, paper books should be less than the indie game as well, since printing and shipping costs are really not that high - or so I've heard.
Perhaps, but that's a different discussion. However the interesting thing here is that in many cases, the paperback is actually cheaper than the e-book.
(FYI, every e-book I bought has cover art, and they still need to do media promotions, etc).
An e-book doesn't need that any more than the variety of games you find in the humble bundles, which is what is being compared here. If they choose to pay extra for that, well, that's on them. That doesn't increase the value of the product.
And the editors? They don't work for free and contribute to "the project". That would be like an indie-game developer having to pay for all his artwork and music from a profession artist.
Uh, yeah, and I mentioned editors as part of the cost/time investment in getting a text ready to be published.
Also, just because it takes 2x-10x more time to do, they should get paid more? Really?
I dunno, when I spend more time working I like to get paid more. Don't you?
So construction for five hours should get paid as much as programming for five hours? I don't think you understand how labor costs work.
So then going by that, the per hour cost for creating a game should be a good deal more than writing a book, because it requires good writing skills in addition to other skills.
Also, the writing isn't the hard part (or so I've heard) - it is thinking about what to write.
And any game that is good enough to turn a profit also requires just as much (if not more) thinking about what to put into it.
It make take 10 hours for someone to code up a good pong game, but I won't buy it because the idea is stale. His effort isn't worth much.
And none of the games we're talking about here are stupid shit like yet another pong rehash. Those games don't even make it to Steam. Some of those games in those bundles are pretty damn good, and provide far more hours of entertainment than any e-book you'll ever buy. And they take more time and creativity to produce. Yet they generally sell for less than the average e-book.
Also, most writers I know or have heard of are full time writers i.e. they don't do a day job on the side. Except for people who are starting out as writers. And guess what? Like the first indie game a guy-in-his-basement releases, very few people buy the first works of any author (I'm sure you can find exceptions, but I'm talking about the average).
Which is completely irrelevant in this discussion, because the same applies equally to game developers.
I don't know what the "proper" price for ebooks is. I don't "believe" it is almost the same as a printed book. But I haven't heard any really good arguments either way, since I am not in the industry and I can't fact check where the majority of costs for printed books are.
You also don't have any good arguments either way.
It's pretty obvious why e-books are priced the way they are. The book industry is dominated by large established corporations, and the nature of the industry makes it a lot harder for newcomers to breakout and become popular than in the video-game industry. Thus, the corporations can set whatever prices they want without fear of competition, because the majority of the competition will never be discovered by the customers anyway.
It's different with video games where you not only have word-of-mouth advertising, but you can also see what games your friends are playing (yes, steam can almost always tell you what game your friends are playing even if it's not a steam game), often see how many hours they play it, and talk to them in real-time while you're playing them. As a
Hard copies have a lot of other additional costs involved that digital copies do not.
Things like:
- Attractive cover design - Shelf space at a store (not applicable to etailers like Amazon of course) - Climate-controlled storage warehouse before they get to the store - Shipping during various stages (don't forget packing material costs)
And then of course there's the other actual costs of printing that you already mentioned, which can be fairly expensive if you go with high-quality materials and a high-quality production process.
Even though those costs may seem trivial, for a book that sells any significant number of copies, the total in extra costs incurred for the hard copies is still almost certainly more than the costs actually involved in producing a production-ready text (writing & editing).
So you can buy their entire catalog for the total sum of $15? Because that's about the only way that could be a good sale. And even that's questionable without knowing what they've got in their catalog.
Sure, let's run with the ebooks vs. steam games comparison. Even small indie games take a lot more man-hours and monetary investment to create than the average ebook. A book typically takes one person less than a year to write, and another one or two people a few months to edit. Since we're focusing solely on the e-book here, you don't need to worry about any of the other costs typically involved in creating a book, such as cover design, etc. So if a small indie game that took probably 2x-10x more time to create sells for $5-10 on average, the average ebook should sell for about $.50-$5. Then they throw those same indie games in the bundles that usually bring about $5-10 for about as many games, so the sales for ebooks should be about $.10-$1 per book.
And this is why the vast majority of geeks realize that ebooks are grossly overpriced.
And I think you're grossly misunderstanding AI as used in this context, and grossly overestimating the amount of control it has even on systems where it is present.
First, the context here is things that are a threat to human civilization as a whole. The other three things are plausible threats in this context. AI is not. For AI to be a threat in this context, it not only has to have significant capability to do damage, it also has to be able to take the crucial step of cutting off human control entirely and still continue to do its damage. Current AI is not even remotely close to this.
Second, anywhere AI is currently used it has so little control over the systems it's laughable.
Frankly, I'm not convinced we even have the capability to design an AI system that's capable of truly being a threat.
Slashdot Mirror
You're more subtle than most trolls, I'll grant you that. But this is where it ends. Sorry, I'm done feeding the troll.
Yes, it's sounds like the real problem here is that these areas of the US are suffering from a major tailgating problem above all else.
No, there's two real problems, and that's not it. Problem number one is simply too many cars on the roads. This could be alleviated by better public/mass transportation, but that's expensive. It could also be alleviated by building bigger and better roads but that's also expensive. Problem number two is that most police departments are a lot more concerned about revenue than safety.
Wow, what an irrelevant and aggressively incorrect post.
It's really very, very simple.
Fact 1: When the amount of traffic sufficiently exceeds what the road infrastructure is designed to handle, you're going to have slowdowns and gridlock.
Fact 2: You can, to a point, reduce or eliminate the slowdowns by having drivers pack in tighter than the letter of the law dictates.
That's really all there is to it.
Then you should have made your context clear in your post rather than making a blanket statement. But that aside, there's plenty of situations in big cities where it's simply not possible to maintain such a following distance that you'd be able to avoid rear-ending someone who suddenly mashed the breaks to the floor. Well, not without causing other worse traffic hazards anyway. Often, the safest course is in fact to use your best judgement and maintain a following distance that's only safe enough with typical driving behavior. With so much traffic on the road, it's simply not possible to account for everything, no matter how good a driver you are.
Prove it or state that it's your opinion. Randomly making up bullshit does not, in fact, make you correct. It does, however, make you a troll.
And that's exactly why roundabouts are so much better at any busy intersection. The only reason they still somewhat suck in the US is because of old or stupid drivers who aren't used to them and/or can't figure them out.
I didn't misread anything. I just demonstrated how your statement is either incomplete or false.
UK law makes it very simple - the guy behind is at fault. If you keep the advised separation (2 seconds), you will have plenty of time to safely react to even the harshest emergency brake.
In my scenario, you were behind the other car. You kept the advised separation. You did not have sufficient time to react to the harshest emergency. Thus, your statement is incorrect.
It's a lot easier to demonstrate than you think. Of course, if you want actual proof you'll have to go find another universe because such a thing doesn't exist in this one.
Let's say there are 10 cars per minute driving through a stretch of highway containing an on-ramp. Now let's say 10 cars are trying to merge into in from that on-ramp every minute. Not a problem. They find spaces in the traffic and merge, and the flow of traffic continues. Now let's double that, and we have 20 cars driving by per minute, and 20 merging per minute. Probably still not too bad. Double it again. And again. Before long, we've hit a point where a merging driver has no choice but to squeeze in where there's not adequate following distance. Now he has to keep speed down so he stays far enough behind the car he merged in behind, and the car he merged in front of has to immediately slow down to maintain safe following distance. But because it's a busy highway, the flow of merging traffic continues, and the only way to keep maintaining safe following distance is for cars already on the highway to keep slowing down, and keep slowing down, and keep slowing down. Now all of a sudden everyone is driving at 5mph because that's the only way to maintain a safe following distance. I could do a quick graphical simulation for you, but I really can't be arsed to spend that much time on something this obvious.
Clearly you've never lived in a big city, or you'd realize that driving at a safe following distance is often simply not possible.
I hate typos.
You're on a street with two lanes going in your direction. Traffic light ahead of you is read with cars waiting. You're slowing down as you're closing in on the stopped traffic in your lane. Suddenly a car in the other lane cuts over into your lane because the traffic in his lane is stopped farther back, and he can't see the stopped traffic in your lane. Now he has to slam on the breaks. You slam into his rear end. Obviously you are at fault, because you just rear-ended him. You should have been anticipating him to cut you off at the last second.
Wrong. The reason it doesn't work that way is because there's just simply too much traffic for the size and number of streets. If you could actually force people to drive that way in a big city like NYC or Chicago you'd have traffic at a crawl ALL THE TIME rather than just rush hour.
This needs to be modded up. Even in a fairly non-congested city like Columbus, OH where I live, it still gets congested enough that you just can't simply follow the letter of the law because traffic would go nowhere. Safe following distance is always the first thing to go, and it's not just out of stupidity, it's also out of necessity - and that's when it's not rush hour.
And there's about a dozen of those active at most, at any given time. So the handful that are active encounter a bug, we shoot them down and ground the rest until we figure it out. Maybe a few hundred people die, maybe a few thousand, but probably no one at all. Yep, that's almost as devastating as nuclear war.
Actually, I think you've completely failed to grasp my point of what AI is full stop. You've failed to recognise the underlying point that AI, as we know it, is commonly nothing more than algorithms with emergent properties.
No, I glossed over that because everyone on /. already realizes that, although you in your arrogance assume you're the only one and that eveyone else is just ignorant and wrong. And also because it doesn't matter in this discussion, because this is not a discussion on exactly what all AI could possibly include, but rather a discussion about things that can threaten the very existence of humanity as a species (and potentially all life as we know it on planet earth).
The rest of your tripe is strictly about AI in the financial world, which, while damaging to our wallets and potentially modern civilization, has no way to actually threaten our species. Sure, having the economy tank overnight would be bad, but it's not even remotely comparable to a nuclear holocaust, or a planet turned to desert or ice through climate change, or the drastic global impacts that current rogue biotech could have if released in the wild. And as I said in my previous post, any AI we presently have isn't remotely capable of anything like that.
And yes, the distinction is important here. AI can easily control something like finances that is confined completely to the digital world - but the digital world can't physically harm us or threaten our existence as a species. That requires interfacing with the physical world, and that's where AI as a threat falls apart. Worst-case scenario, we bomb the power source the AI depends on, game over. Maybe a few thousand people die as collateral damage. But even something on that scale is a long ways off yet, if it will ever exist at all.
No, I don't think climate change or rogue biotech are as much of a current threat as nuclear war, but I think they have a lot more potential to be real threats than AI does any time soon, if ever.
Mod up informative.
So basically, if you already own the hard copy, we'll sell you a digital copy that costs us nothing for just $5! Wow, what a generous offer!
How about this instead: for a $5 yearly fee, you can download any ebooks for free if you already own the hard copy. Now that's an offer I could get on board with.
I think they make a lot more than I do for the time I spend working. But clearly their writing is far more important than anything I'd ever do.
By your argument, paper books should be less than the indie game as well, since printing and shipping costs are really not that high - or so I've heard.
Perhaps, but that's a different discussion. However the interesting thing here is that in many cases, the paperback is actually cheaper than the e-book.
(FYI, every e-book I bought has cover art, and they still need to do media promotions, etc).
An e-book doesn't need that any more than the variety of games you find in the humble bundles, which is what is being compared here. If they choose to pay extra for that, well, that's on them. That doesn't increase the value of the product.
And the editors? They don't work for free and contribute to "the project". That would be like an indie-game developer having to pay for all his artwork and music from a profession artist.
Uh, yeah, and I mentioned editors as part of the cost/time investment in getting a text ready to be published.
Also, just because it takes 2x-10x more time to do, they should get paid more? Really?
I dunno, when I spend more time working I like to get paid more. Don't you?
So construction for five hours should get paid as much as programming for five hours? I don't think you understand how labor costs work.
So then going by that, the per hour cost for creating a game should be a good deal more than writing a book, because it requires good writing skills in addition to other skills.
Also, the writing isn't the hard part (or so I've heard) - it is thinking about what to write.
And any game that is good enough to turn a profit also requires just as much (if not more) thinking about what to put into it.
It make take 10 hours for someone to code up a good pong game, but I won't buy it because the idea is stale. His effort isn't worth much.
And none of the games we're talking about here are stupid shit like yet another pong rehash. Those games don't even make it to Steam. Some of those games in those bundles are pretty damn good, and provide far more hours of entertainment than any e-book you'll ever buy. And they take more time and creativity to produce. Yet they generally sell for less than the average e-book.
Also, most writers I know or have heard of are full time writers i.e. they don't do a day job on the side. Except for people who are starting out as writers. And guess what? Like the first indie game a guy-in-his-basement releases, very few people buy the first works of any author (I'm sure you can find exceptions, but I'm talking about the average).
Which is completely irrelevant in this discussion, because the same applies equally to game developers.
I don't know what the "proper" price for ebooks is. I don't "believe" it is almost the same as a printed book. But I haven't heard any really good arguments either way, since I am not in the industry and I can't fact check where the majority of costs for printed books are.
You also don't have any good arguments either way.
It's pretty obvious why e-books are priced the way they are. The book industry is dominated by large established corporations, and the nature of the industry makes it a lot harder for newcomers to breakout and become popular than in the video-game industry. Thus, the corporations can set whatever prices they want without fear of competition, because the majority of the competition will never be discovered by the customers anyway.
It's different with video games where you not only have word-of-mouth advertising, but you can also see what games your friends are playing (yes, steam can almost always tell you what game your friends are playing even if it's not a steam game), often see how many hours they play it, and talk to them in real-time while you're playing them. As a
Hard copies have a lot of other additional costs involved that digital copies do not.
Things like:
- Attractive cover design
- Shelf space at a store (not applicable to etailers like Amazon of course)
- Climate-controlled storage warehouse before they get to the store
- Shipping during various stages (don't forget packing material costs)
And then of course there's the other actual costs of printing that you already mentioned, which can be fairly expensive if you go with high-quality materials and a high-quality production process.
Even though those costs may seem trivial, for a book that sells any significant number of copies, the total in extra costs incurred for the hard copies is still almost certainly more than the costs actually involved in producing a production-ready text (writing & editing).
So you can buy their entire catalog for the total sum of $15? Because that's about the only way that could be a good sale. And even that's questionable without knowing what they've got in their catalog.
Sure, let's run with the ebooks vs. steam games comparison. Even small indie games take a lot more man-hours and monetary investment to create than the average ebook. A book typically takes one person less than a year to write, and another one or two people a few months to edit. Since we're focusing solely on the e-book here, you don't need to worry about any of the other costs typically involved in creating a book, such as cover design, etc. So if a small indie game that took probably 2x-10x more time to create sells for $5-10 on average, the average ebook should sell for about $.50-$5. Then they throw those same indie games in the bundles that usually bring about $5-10 for about as many games, so the sales for ebooks should be about $.10-$1 per book.
And this is why the vast majority of geeks realize that ebooks are grossly overpriced.
And I think you're grossly misunderstanding AI as used in this context, and grossly overestimating the amount of control it has even on systems where it is present.
First, the context here is things that are a threat to human civilization as a whole. The other three things are plausible threats in this context. AI is not. For AI to be a threat in this context, it not only has to have significant capability to do damage, it also has to be able to take the crucial step of cutting off human control entirely and still continue to do its damage. Current AI is not even remotely close to this.
Second, anywhere AI is currently used it has so little control over the systems it's laughable.
Frankly, I'm not convinced we even have the capability to design an AI system that's capable of truly being a threat.
Likewise. Really makes one wonder just how accidental this really was.
I see that as a good thing. And I have to admit, there have been times I was impaired by non-chemical means and should not have been driving.