Don't demean yourself by reaffirming his assertion that we are animals. You can't both be an animal and not be an animal at the same time, and there are clearly traits which seperate [sic] us from them.
You fail at biology. An animal is defined as a multicellular eucaryotic organism - and you are one. There might be traits which separate you from a baboon, but there are a lot more traits which separate the baboon from an earthworm...
what you say is reasonable but there are a lot of assumptions and i really would like to see some numbers.
So what about solar panel ? Are they made with this concepts in mind or are they made just as cheap as possible without taking in account pollution made to make them or not?
How long does it takes to make them "greener" or , using math, when this is true ?
Also, even though the panels are made to last "forever" (many manufacturers give 25-year warranties), some players in the industry are already giving the option to recycle (since it only costs 1/3 in energy terms to recycle them than to manufacture them from scratch).
As for high-speed trains, they are able to travel 200mph due to extremely smooth and straight railways. If we put that sort of accuracy and stability into our freeway systems, along with long on/off ramps and appropriate barriers to prevent oncoming collisions, we could vastly increase the speeds on our interstates and cut down travel times in all directions. It just takes the will to act to benefit all of us.
Smooth and straight track - and more importantly, advanced signalling and very few drivers on the track at once. Germany already has that sort of "accuracy and stability" in many of its freeways. (and no speed limit on them). Nevertheless you can only drive above 150 mph on a Sunday morning at 5am when the freeway is empty, since all the other relatively slow and unskilled drivers would kill you within half an hour. (Not to speak of the capital investment that you need to make to get a car that drives 200 mph+.)
Land in China does not cost the same price as in CA. Likewise, most places have stable land. This will require special construction to keep the train from jumping the track when one of their earthquake comes. And it costs money to build new stations. I suspect that if you look in EU, you will find that trains there who build on new lines costs more than 25B euro/mile.
I hope you meant 25 million euro/mile... Which is still a bit high. The most recent and most modern track I know of is the French LGV Est which cost EUR 4bn -- about 16.7 million euro/mile, plus 800mn for the trains.
The population of London is expected to drop below 50% English by 2012. Would you want to let that happen with your own capital?
Gosh, like just imagine if Washington DC had less than 50% Native Americans!
The population of London may or may not have more than 50% born abroad (though given the 2001 census figure of 24% that sounds unlikely), but that is not the same as them not being English, many are getting UK citizenship.
Yup, but the grandparent was referring to ethnic self-identification rather than birth place. The Focus on London report shows 58% "White British" and falling. And anything else - to many simple minds - is the equivalent of "dirty foreigner" even if they are 3rd generation Brits...
And GP: Of course you would want that to happen to your capital. Or do you think London would be the financial and cultural capital of the world but for its ethnic/cultural diversity?
I'm from a small org, fully embracing the leading edge.
But I can See the following scenario:
1) Org has large internal App written for IE6 only. Can't upgrade so users are forced to have IE6 on their workstations
2) Org's IT admins are well aware of the security problems IE6 forces them to work around.
3) Roll out the Chrome plugin, and set things up so everything *but* the internal site uses Chrome.
Installing IE upgrades makes it difficult to leave an ie6 & ie_latest deployment side-by-side in a 'supported' fashion (Unless ms has a 'supported' way of doing this?)
Using the Chrome plugin lets the Org upgrade the browser to something maintained & more secure on their deployment, while allowing the archaic app to work as expected.
That's what Firefox with the IE Tab add-in is for. If you have control of your IT infrastructure, why settle for the intrusive kludge of Chrome Frame?
[...] if they bother to go through it and find something encrypted, they'll likely subpoena you for the key. Don't want to turn it over? Can't remember the old password? Contempt of court.
Wonder what they'd do if you told it's company policy that you only get the key by calling home office and assure them the machine has never left your hands?
As a side note, I've crossed Finland-Norway border overland several times and I've never been asked anything - indeed usually I haven't even seen border guards (once I didn't even notice the border). Sometimes the customs building has had a note on its door saying "we're closed, please drive on".:-)
And this is EU's external border (Finland's in EU, Norway isn't).
That's hardly surprising - Norway is in a customs union with Finland and the rest of the EU (the Schengen zone), so there are not supposed to be any controls at all anyway...
And even if it were not - if you managed to illegally immigrate to Norway from outside (rowing across the Arctic sea? walking through the Murmansk polar forests?), no number of Finnish border guards could stop you anyway...
I've never checked but does slashdot come in any other language than the one read by the 5%?
Yes, there are versions of Slashcode that can deal with unicode perfectly fine, but slashdot.org has chosen to filter out anything not in ASCII.
I heard that this was apparently a "fix" for people playing around impersonating other users by using similar characters in their usernames and suchlike. One might think that it wouldn't be much effort to put in a whitelist for some frequently-used glyphs and alphabets, but then, I'm the guy with the 7-digit-uid...
And you didn't need to be omniscient to see that government policy (keeping interest rates extremely low) was leading to a misallocation of investment funds into real estate.
To fight this recession the Fed needs more than a snapback; it needs soaring household spending to offset moribund business investment. And to do that, as Paul McCulley of Pimco put it, Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble.
You are quoting Krugman seriously out of context. One, he did not "call for" a bubble, he mentioned another guy calling for it. Two, even the guy he quoted was most likely not in favor of replacing one bubble with another, but criticizing it. Three, the same Krugman article makes his criticism of Fed&Treasury policy, if only one bothers to read the conclusion of his op-ed.
Radiohead and NIN are poor examples, and you know it.
They both were established through the system before their little experiments with downloads-for-donations.
Your own argument is broken, because it applies just as well the other way around: If you are a small unknown artist, you have nothing to lose from free downloads (since you don't have any sales to speak of, the free publicity and word-of-mouth will easily outstrip the loss-of-sales); and for big established bands there are other huge advantages (they earn more from one donation than from the ten lost album sales, because their recording label doesn't take away most of the revenue).
Cory Doctorow had a recent article about this: When he was an unknown artist and released his books for free, critics said it only works because he has nothing to lose; today the same critics say that it only works because he is already famous -- you can't have it both ways!
When a cop is called to a dispute or fight, not always but often, s/he will ask each participant a few pointed, even brusque questions. [...] If you're stupid enough to react to a cop aggressively rather than addressing any wrongs later through the courts or a police complaints board then you're likely gonna get charges laid against you that otherwise might be let go.
Yes, but this is the point - you will always be less credible than a cop before a court, if word stands against word. So if they prohibit your recording of all the insults the cop hurled at you (just because he can), you have no realistic chance of redress later through the courts (whether you became aggressive or not).
Well such a service would be violating the copyrights of all the authors of the software that is contained in their database. As such the service would be open to many copyright lawsuits not to mention the "hey our software's not malware, it's special feature ware" slander lawsuits. The Virus Makers would have a new source of income!
Breaking the law to stop those that break the law. Typical double standards set by those who thing they are doing good in the world.
It would take an extremely brazen (not to say suicidal) kind of virus/trojan writer to acknowledge authorship of the malware they created. While they might be successful suing this particular repository for damages, they would open themselves up to 1000s of lawsuits - both civil and criminal - from people/companies that their creation infected...
There is a straightforward transcription of Hindi devanagari into latin script, so "Gandhi" is obviously right, while "Ghandi" is obviously wrong. (G and Gh represent distinct sounds and different devanagari letters, as do D and Dh.)
So except for the US, who has a huge cruise missile fleet that needs to be guarded against?
Every other nuclear power of course; then there is Germany, Taiwan, Norway (NSM), Spain (Taurus), Korea (Hyunmoo) and Pakistan (Babur).
None of them are current threats, but a scenario where Pakistan/China/Russia sells missiles or missile technology to a US adversary is not all that outlandish...
That one I see mainly as a good thing--- smallish levels of inflation are felt mainly on the long term, so mainly serve to erode attempts to maintain long-lived, large fortunes, while helps keep the United States from sprouting a hereditary nobility.
I can guarantee you that no long-lived, large fortunes are held in cash. They are held largely in land, real estate and stocks -- all of which keep step with inflation. The institutions that keep long-lived fortunes in fixed income instruments (and thus lose out to inflation) are pension funds, insurers and central banks, i.e. either stewards of the small peoples' money or public sector institutions.
Since anyone with a large fortune can pay people who know how to invest their money in any environment, the only way to avoid a hereditary oligarchy is to tax the heirs of large fortunes for the income that the inheritance represents (and to close offshore avoidance loopholes, which is the hard part).
I've had no problems using VGA on several different HD TVs - you just need to set the resolution to the native resolution of the screen.
Yes, that would be a neat idea, except for the fact that the driver for the VGA chip running on probably half the PCs and laptops out there (the Intel GMA 9xx) does not support 1366x768 (except if you do some really crude and invasive hacking).
Yes, I got it to run in the end, but it's such a pain to set up that I decided to just mirror my 1280x768 on the TV screen...
Hell, last time I went to a private store, those idiots weren't even charging for their parking lot. I'm not surprised they're fucking this up.
The largest shopping centre in the European Uniondoesn't charge for parking. It has a total of 10,000 spaces, including three multi-story carparks. It also has it's own bus station, and train station.
That should tell people something about how to do parking right.
Yes, but it is not in an inner city, but a greenfield development. Any mall I've seen in a city center (whether in Europe or the US) will charge to deter freeloaders from blocking too many spaces -- though they might reimburse your ticket if you buy something at one of the stores.
Projectors need a good surface, need controlled light around them, and need to be free of dust in the air, etc.
You are thinking about 20th projectors. Try thinking about 22nd century technology...
Projectors that are hidden in your glasses (or even implanted into your cornea) which project onto your retina. Same with supersmall hidden in-ear headphones. Both receiving data wirelessly from the device in your pocket or on your wrist (or even interfacing seamlessly with the "cloud"). The only problem that is moderately hard and keeps this sort of technology from happening at the moment is that we don't have a really small and hassle-free energy source for them.
I would point out that when Charlie Rangel and some other politicians started denigrating the volunteer soldiers as a bunch of lower class, uneducated people with no prospects, as study found that they were generally middle class and better educated than the citizenry as a whole. http://www.heritage.org/research/nationalsecurity/cda05-08.cfm
Yes, but if you actually look at the study, you see how Heritage distorts the results. 98% of military recruits have High School diplomas -- because the military enlists very few people without. So the study is disingenuous in that it doesn't compare populations _with the actual opportunity_ to enlist.... And even then, they find that the top quintile (the smart kids) are underrepresented, and they find that Asian kids are underrepresented, while there is a higher fraction of black and latino kids.
SSNs are not secrets. They are not authentication credentials.
Storing (or even leaking) SSNs is not the problem. The problem is when certain negligent organizations use knowledge of SSNs as some sort of proof of identity. If you're worried about your SSN being misused, talk to those companies.
You can't conceivably talk to all of the 10,000s of stupid businesses/hospitals/agencies who accept SSNs as ID and thus facilitate fraudulent use of your SSN... It would only work if the govt would mandate it.
Therefore right now the only pragmatic workaround is to minimize the exposure of your SSN to potential crooks, alas.
Uuum... From what I read, our nukes have no problem splitting the earth in two. I'd call that pretty much uninhabitable.;)
Where did you read that? Reality is not quite Star Wars... The earth is a 12000km ball of molten iron held together by gravity; setting off a few firecrackers on the crust won't do a lot!
If I'm not mistaken, you'd need to accelerate about 3*10^21 tonnes (half the earth's mass) to 10+ km/sec (escape velocity) to overcome the gravity well and split the earth permanently... You'd need trillions of tons of antimatter to do it. Today's weapons are not quite there yet.
The Japanese economy is even more fucked than the US economy. I don't think holding them up as an example is going to win you many converts.
He was talking about Japanese health insurance, however, which outperforms the US in just about every respect (cost, insurance coverage, life expectancy, child mortality, take your pick).
Interestingly enough that's part of the reason why they lost the war. The typical German design for equipment was overly-engineered, overly-complicated and overly-expensive. Compare their armored vehicle designs to those of the Americans and Soviets. They were arguably more advanced but they pushed the engineering technology of the day to the point that they were more prone to breakdown, harder to maintain and harder to mass produce.
The Sherman wasn't a match for most German tanks one-on-one but that didn't matter -- it was easier to maintain in the field, easier to mass produce and was coupled with tactics (air power and tank destroyers) that more than offset it's disadvantages. It was good enough for the job it had to perform and when all factors are taken into account was arguably better than the German designs.
Do you have some authoritative sources for that? I thought the orthodox opinion was that the German production lagged because after 1942 the Allies had about ~5-10 times the manpower, ~4 times the GDP and access to material like oil and rubber that the boxed-in Axis didn't have...
Slashdot Mirror
Don't demean yourself by reaffirming his assertion that we are animals. You can't both be an animal and not be an animal at the same time, and there are clearly traits which seperate [sic] us from them.
You fail at biology. An animal is defined as a multicellular eucaryotic organism - and you are one. There might be traits which separate you from a baboon, but there are a lot more traits which separate the baboon from an earthworm...
what you say is reasonable but there are a lot of assumptions and i really would like to see some numbers. So what about solar panel ? Are they made with this concepts in mind or are they made just as cheap as possible without taking in account pollution made to make them or not? How long does it takes to make them "greener" or , using math, when this is true ?
Google is your friend. This IEEE Spectrum article has some numbers.
Also, even though the panels are made to last "forever" (many manufacturers give 25-year warranties), some players in the industry are already giving the option to recycle (since it only costs 1/3 in energy terms to recycle them than to manufacture them from scratch).
As for high-speed trains, they are able to travel 200mph due to extremely smooth and straight railways. If we put that sort of accuracy and stability into our freeway systems, along with long on/off ramps and appropriate barriers to prevent oncoming collisions, we could vastly increase the speeds on our interstates and cut down travel times in all directions. It just takes the will to act to benefit all of us.
Smooth and straight track - and more importantly, advanced signalling and very few drivers on the track at once. Germany already has that sort of "accuracy and stability" in many of its freeways. (and no speed limit on them). Nevertheless you can only drive above 150 mph on a Sunday morning at 5am when the freeway is empty, since all the other relatively slow and unskilled drivers would kill you within half an hour. (Not to speak of the capital investment that you need to make to get a car that drives 200 mph+.)
Land in China does not cost the same price as in CA. Likewise, most places have stable land. This will require special construction to keep the train from jumping the track when one of their earthquake comes. And it costs money to build new stations. I suspect that if you look in EU, you will find that trains there who build on new lines costs more than 25B euro/mile.
I hope you meant 25 million euro/mile... Which is still a bit high. The most recent and most modern track I know of is the French LGV Est which cost EUR 4bn -- about 16.7 million euro/mile, plus 800mn for the trains.
The population of London is expected to drop below 50% English by 2012. Would you want to let that happen with your own capital?
Gosh, like just imagine if Washington DC had less than 50% Native Americans! The population of London may or may not have more than 50% born abroad (though given the 2001 census figure of 24% that sounds unlikely), but that is not the same as them not being English, many are getting UK citizenship.
Yup, but the grandparent was referring to ethnic self-identification rather than birth place. The Focus on London report shows 58% "White British" and falling. And anything else - to many simple minds - is the equivalent of "dirty foreigner" even if they are 3rd generation Brits... And GP: Of course you would want that to happen to your capital. Or do you think London would be the financial and cultural capital of the world but for its ethnic/cultural diversity?
I'm from a small org, fully embracing the leading edge.
But I can See the following scenario:
1) Org has large internal App written for IE6 only. Can't upgrade so users are forced to have IE6 on their workstations 2) Org's IT admins are well aware of the security problems IE6 forces them to work around. 3) Roll out the Chrome plugin, and set things up so everything *but* the internal site uses Chrome.
Installing IE upgrades makes it difficult to leave an ie6 & ie_latest deployment side-by-side in a 'supported' fashion (Unless ms has a 'supported' way of doing this?)
Using the Chrome plugin lets the Org upgrade the browser to something maintained & more secure on their deployment, while allowing the archaic app to work as expected.
That's what Firefox with the IE Tab add-in is for. If you have control of your IT infrastructure, why settle for the intrusive kludge of Chrome Frame?
[...] if they bother to go through it and find something encrypted, they'll likely subpoena you for the key. Don't want to turn it over? Can't remember the old password? Contempt of court.
Wonder what they'd do if you told it's company policy that you only get the key by calling home office and assure them the machine has never left your hands?
As a side note, I've crossed Finland-Norway border overland several times and I've never been asked anything - indeed usually I haven't even seen border guards (once I didn't even notice the border). Sometimes the customs building has had a note on its door saying "we're closed, please drive on". :-)
And this is EU's external border (Finland's in EU, Norway isn't).
That's hardly surprising - Norway is in a customs union with Finland and the rest of the EU (the Schengen zone), so there are not supposed to be any controls at all anyway...
And even if it were not - if you managed to illegally immigrate to Norway from outside (rowing across the Arctic sea? walking through the Murmansk polar forests?), no number of Finnish border guards could stop you anyway...
I've never checked but does slashdot come in any other language than the one read by the 5%?
Yes, there are versions of Slashcode that can deal with unicode perfectly fine, but slashdot.org has chosen to filter out anything not in ASCII.
I heard that this was apparently a "fix" for people playing around impersonating other users by using similar characters in their usernames and suchlike. One might think that it wouldn't be much effort to put in a whitelist for some frequently-used glyphs and alphabets, but then, I'm the guy with the 7-digit-uid...
When have you heard about a political speech and reality having any connection?
Oooh, I have one! It even has its own article in Wikipedia.
Fixed that for you... (And yes, someone ought to tell the Slashcode monkeys that 7-bit ASCII is only sufficient for 5% of the world's population...)
But it was the Keynesians who wanted the rates pushed so low to begin with. Paul Krugman, for example, explicitly called for a housing bubble in 2002:
You are quoting Krugman seriously out of context. One, he did not "call for" a bubble, he mentioned another guy calling for it. Two, even the guy he quoted was most likely not in favor of replacing one bubble with another, but criticizing it. Three, the same Krugman article makes his criticism of Fed&Treasury policy, if only one bothers to read the conclusion of his op-ed.
Radiohead and NIN are poor examples, and you know it. They both were established through the system before their little experiments with downloads-for-donations.
Your own argument is broken, because it applies just as well the other way around: If you are a small unknown artist, you have nothing to lose from free downloads (since you don't have any sales to speak of, the free publicity and word-of-mouth will easily outstrip the loss-of-sales); and for big established bands there are other huge advantages (they earn more from one donation than from the ten lost album sales, because their recording label doesn't take away most of the revenue).
Cory Doctorow had a recent article about this: When he was an unknown artist and released his books for free, critics said it only works because he has nothing to lose; today the same critics say that it only works because he is already famous -- you can't have it both ways!
When a cop is called to a dispute or fight, not always but often, s/he will ask each participant a few pointed, even brusque questions. [...] If you're stupid enough to react to a cop aggressively rather than addressing any wrongs later through the courts or a police complaints board then you're likely gonna get charges laid against you that otherwise might be let go.
Yes, but this is the point - you will always be less credible than a cop before a court, if word stands against word. So if they prohibit your recording of all the insults the cop hurled at you (just because he can), you have no realistic chance of redress later through the courts (whether you became aggressive or not).
Well such a service would be violating the copyrights of all the authors of the software that is contained in their database. As such the service would be open to many copyright lawsuits not to mention the "hey our software's not malware, it's special feature ware" slander lawsuits. The Virus Makers would have a new source of income!
Breaking the law to stop those that break the law. Typical double standards set by those who thing they are doing good in the world.
It would take an extremely brazen (not to say suicidal) kind of virus/trojan writer to acknowledge authorship of the malware they created. While they might be successful suing this particular repository for damages, they would open themselves up to 1000s of lawsuits - both civil and criminal - from people/companies that their creation infected...
There is a straightforward transcription of Hindi devanagari into latin script, so "Gandhi" is obviously right, while "Ghandi" is obviously wrong. (G and Gh represent distinct sounds and different devanagari letters, as do D and Dh.)
Taiwan has neither nuclear weapon
Nor have I asserted that anywhere...
nor cruise missle[sic].
Oh really? Go google "taiwan cruise missile". Just in case you are too lazy, I'll even give you a link...
Please check your facts before posting.
I do that. Do you?
So except for the US, who has a huge cruise missile fleet that needs to be guarded against?
Every other nuclear power of course; then there is Germany, Taiwan, Norway (NSM), Spain (Taurus), Korea (Hyunmoo) and Pakistan (Babur).
None of them are current threats, but a scenario where Pakistan/China/Russia sells missiles or missile technology to a US adversary is not all that outlandish...
That one I see mainly as a good thing--- smallish levels of inflation are felt mainly on the long term, so mainly serve to erode attempts to maintain long-lived, large fortunes, while helps keep the United States from sprouting a hereditary nobility.
I can guarantee you that no long-lived, large fortunes are held in cash. They are held largely in land, real estate and stocks -- all of which keep step with inflation. The institutions that keep long-lived fortunes in fixed income instruments (and thus lose out to inflation) are pension funds, insurers and central banks, i.e. either stewards of the small peoples' money or public sector institutions.
Since anyone with a large fortune can pay people who know how to invest their money in any environment, the only way to avoid a hereditary oligarchy is to tax the heirs of large fortunes for the income that the inheritance represents (and to close offshore avoidance loopholes, which is the hard part).
I've had no problems using VGA on several different HD TVs - you just need to set the resolution to the native resolution of the screen.
Yes, that would be a neat idea, except for the fact that the driver for the VGA chip running on probably half the PCs and laptops out there (the Intel GMA 9xx) does not support 1366x768 (except if you do some really crude and invasive hacking). Yes, I got it to run in the end, but it's such a pain to set up that I decided to just mirror my 1280x768 on the TV screen...
Hell, last time I went to a private store, those idiots weren't even charging for their parking lot. I'm not surprised they're fucking this up.
The largest shopping centre in the European Union doesn't charge for parking. It has a total of 10,000 spaces, including three multi-story carparks. It also has it's own bus station, and train station.
That should tell people something about how to do parking right.
Yes, but it is not in an inner city, but a greenfield development. Any mall I've seen in a city center (whether in Europe or the US) will charge to deter freeloaders from blocking too many spaces -- though they might reimburse your ticket if you buy something at one of the stores.
Projectors need a good surface, need controlled light around them, and need to be free of dust in the air, etc.
You are thinking about 20th projectors. Try thinking about 22nd century technology...
Projectors that are hidden in your glasses (or even implanted into your cornea) which project onto your retina. Same with supersmall hidden in-ear headphones. Both receiving data wirelessly from the device in your pocket or on your wrist (or even interfacing seamlessly with the "cloud"). The only problem that is moderately hard and keeps this sort of technology from happening at the moment is that we don't have a really small and hassle-free energy source for them.
I would point out that when Charlie Rangel and some other politicians started denigrating the volunteer soldiers as a bunch of lower class, uneducated people with no prospects, as study found that they were generally middle class and better educated than the citizenry as a whole. http://www.heritage.org/research/nationalsecurity/cda05-08.cfm
Yes, but if you actually look at the study, you see how Heritage distorts the results. 98% of military recruits have High School diplomas -- because the military enlists very few people without. So the study is disingenuous in that it doesn't compare populations _with the actual opportunity_ to enlist.... And even then, they find that the top quintile (the smart kids) are underrepresented, and they find that Asian kids are underrepresented, while there is a higher fraction of black and latino kids.
SSNs are not secrets. They are not authentication credentials.
Storing (or even leaking) SSNs is not the problem. The problem is when certain negligent organizations use knowledge of SSNs as some sort of proof of identity. If you're worried about your SSN being misused, talk to those companies.
You can't conceivably talk to all of the 10,000s of stupid businesses/hospitals/agencies who accept SSNs as ID and thus facilitate fraudulent use of your SSN... It would only work if the govt would mandate it.
Therefore right now the only pragmatic workaround is to minimize the exposure of your SSN to potential crooks, alas.
Uuum... From what I read, our nukes have no problem splitting the earth in two. I'd call that pretty much uninhabitable. ;)
Where did you read that? Reality is not quite Star Wars... The earth is a 12000km ball of molten iron held together by gravity; setting off a few firecrackers on the crust won't do a lot!
If I'm not mistaken, you'd need to accelerate about 3*10^21 tonnes (half the earth's mass) to 10+ km/sec (escape velocity) to overcome the gravity well and split the earth permanently... You'd need trillions of tons of antimatter to do it. Today's weapons are not quite there yet.
The Japanese economy is even more fucked than the US economy. I don't think holding them up as an example is going to win you many converts.
He was talking about Japanese health insurance, however, which outperforms the US in just about every respect (cost, insurance coverage, life expectancy, child mortality, take your pick).
Interestingly enough that's part of the reason why they lost the war. The typical German design for equipment was overly-engineered, overly-complicated and overly-expensive. Compare their armored vehicle designs to those of the Americans and Soviets. They were arguably more advanced but they pushed the engineering technology of the day to the point that they were more prone to breakdown, harder to maintain and harder to mass produce.
The Sherman wasn't a match for most German tanks one-on-one but that didn't matter -- it was easier to maintain in the field, easier to mass produce and was coupled with tactics (air power and tank destroyers) that more than offset it's disadvantages. It was good enough for the job it had to perform and when all factors are taken into account was arguably better than the German designs.
Do you have some authoritative sources for that? I thought the orthodox opinion was that the German production lagged because after 1942 the Allies had about ~5-10 times the manpower, ~4 times the GDP and access to material like oil and rubber that the boxed-in Axis didn't have...