Why on earth would a cheap mass production car in India cost $2500? Does a steel frame, motorcycle engine, plastic body panels, windows, and wheels really cost that much? I'd think they could put together something for less than $1000.
Smog? Forget California smog laws, this thing wouldn't pass federal safety regulations.
This thing was designed for use by people in India, which means that the only way someone in one of these would survive an impact with a Honda Civic is if the Tata were light enough to just be bounced out of the way. An SUV could probably tear through it without even slowing down.
See the recent story of the game reviewer that was fired for giving a low score to a game that his magazine was advertising, for a refutation of this idea. There are a few magazines (like Consumer Reports) that have their entire business centered around the idea of unbiased reviews. If they were shown to have bias in their reviews, they would be ruined. Pretty much everyone else you can expect to have at least a little bit of bias. At the very least, they either won't review a better competing product, or a poorly performing advertised product.
Wait, does that "should I fetch the driver online" thing ever work ? It's in XP too and I've never once seen it report anything but "sorry, no driver for you". LOL, never in the history of mankind has that feature worked:) I meant firing up Firefox and downloading the driver that way...
Incredibly I saw this work last night for the first time in my life. It actually confused me for a few seconds because I couldn't figure out what had happened. I was helping my roommate set up his brand new Dell 27" LCD monitor, and even though it detected and worked just fine as a "Plug and play monitor", he wanted to use the driver CD. I went into the device manager and told it to search for a driver. It found the same driver on the CD and online.
I installed the driver off of the CD, although in retrospect I should have done the online option just to see what would happen. In the driver list it listed the installed "Plug and play monitor", the Dell driver with the path on the CD, and the Dell driver with the path as "Windows Update". So yeah, the only time I've ever managed to find a driver for a device was when the device was already working and I already had the updated driver. Go figure.
A Tungsten/Platinum ring? I hope you're never in an emergency where the the ring needs to be removed and you have have one that you can neither crush nor cut. Sounds dangerous.
I get the distinct feeling that it was an idea that didn't get all the way thought through. For instance, laptop initiatives in the US and the rest of the developed world have had a very spotty record of success, and although you can't compare apples to oranges, I'm a bit concerned.
Yeah, that is something to consider. In the US, students already have ready access to all sorts of information sources. Most schools have a library with encyclopedias, and most also have at least some computers with internet access. Laptops were thrown into classrooms without any plan, and so it was difficult for teachers to find reasons to change their teaching methods to integrate them.
Of course, all this means is that nobody really knows what will happen if you give a million poor kids a simple laptop as their first and only source of internet access. It's possible that most of the potential will be wasted. It's also possible that the sudden ready access to information will cause the educational state of these countries to skyrocket from their present mediocrity. Who knows?
I am cautiously optimistic that free textbooks will be written to be included on these devices, that lesson plans with ways to integrate the laptops will be developed and distributed to teachers, and that the ready access to information will help kids to improve their situations far beyond anything they could have imagined a year ago. One can hope.
But these kids aren't starving or dying off due to some easily treatable disease. Really, giving them $188 in food and medicine wouldn't help them that much, and would be pretty limited in the length of time it did help.
Providing the OLPC is something like providing a basic infrastructure like roads or water, except in this case it is information. Money for these things could always be spent in other ways to meet short term needs, but they are far better off investing in infrastructure that will have long term positive impacts for many years to come.
Without going back and reading those articles (read them a while back), I seem to recall him saying that they did fix a lot of leaks, but those leaks ended up not being as big an issue as people thought. If you fix 300 leaks and your memory usage only drops by 1%, then leaks aren't your biggest problem. He's apparently discovered that memory fragmentation is the issue. In some circumstances you might only be using half of your allocated memory due to not being able to release it, due to memory fragmentation.
The first post says no such thing. It simply says that IOS has a very antiquated command system, which it does. If IOS were to break backwards compatibility they would have the opportunity to create a much easier to use and much more flexible ways of doing things. It would be really good in the long run, but is not likely to happen because the short term consequences would probably be so painful.
I call BS on you. Even if MS didn't strictly enforce good coding practice by starting users off as "users" instead of "administrators", any IT department worth their salt should have. And applications developers were certainly aware of what were proper coding practices. Coding to the proper practices in 90% of cases wasn't any more difficult than the wrong way.
As an examples I take Firefox. In the 1.0 release they incorrectly stored the internet cache in the user's "Application Data" directory instead of "Local Settings\Application Data". It was a simple mistake, but an annoying one for anyone using roaming profiles. The next semi major release they fixed it.
The registry (as it exists in 2000 and above) is far from the dumbest idea in computer history. It is essentially a database of user (and machine) settings. It allows multiple applications to update and read settings simultaneously. It also enforces strict syntax so you can't store settings wrong or break other settings through bad coding. Any coder that doesn't feel like using the registry is always welcome to use.ini files in the user's profile with no extra effort. Given how many applications make use of the registry, I'd say it's not too bad.
Of course, it is not without it's pitfalls. Storing everything in a big binary blob means you are forced to use Windows mechanisms to read and write to it. And having all your settings in one file means that all of your settings get corrupted if the one file goes. There is also not a good way to diff the information in registries.
Personally, I'm surprised MS hasn't taken the registry is a database paradigm to the next level and offered centralized synchronization of the registry. Have a sort of "registry server" that holds the settings in a database. For roaming profiles this would let users be logged it at multiple locations and synchronize just those keys that have changed. Meh, oh well.
Our experience with Vista includes the issues with the (thankfully) basic correcting of security design, but also goes way beyond that. Forcing the writers of programs to realize that all users are not running as local administrators is a good thing, and I understand there are going to be growing pains with that, but there is so much more wrong with Vista that I was hoping SP1 would fix.
Network issues are the biggest. For instance, they completely broke the way that a user selects what wireless network to use. It used to be fairly intuitive, and now nobody understands, AND there aren't any added benefits (although a few options seem to be missing).
I was trying to change a particular network setting in Vista once, and I could not find it anywhere. After enough time, I decided to google it, and saw the solution (which many others had apparently searched for). You had to open this one particular window and press the ALT key, opened up an extra menu with the option I needed. There was absolutely nothing in the window to indicate some random keypress would show more options.
On a network share there is a folder with 10 pictures, all with the same owner and NTFS permissions and all taken by the same camera. The user on the Vista machine cannot open 4 of them, but other users can just fine.
Accessing the Vista machine through explorer using \\computer\c$\, some folders return an access denied. There doesn't seem to be any reasoning behind which folders can and can't be accessed, and permissions don't seem to make a difference.
There are others, but you get the idea. Yes, the security changes broke stuff, but there are a lot of other things that have been broken for no apparent reason.
That your friend said that is a big part of the problem. For some reason Russians don't believe Russia could be any different, that it couldn't change. It is a sort of self fulfilling prophecy.
Public folders still exist in E2k7, they've just been "de-emphasized". I don't have a book handy, but I want to say that it is optional during installation as to if it is installed, dependent on some other option being selected. You can do an install of E2k7 with or without public folders just fine. They do state clearly that the next version of Exchange will not have public folders at all, but I don't have to even think about that for at least another 4 years.
Your assertion that Americans are cheap is a bit of a low blow, it's more that transportation is different. I know lots of people in Europe, and many of them have traveled around Europe quite a bit. Heck, you can get rail passes and travel Europe for relatively small amounts. You don't have that option in the US, and just getting to Europe will cost you more than a few weeks of traveling around Europe. Plane tickets overseas cost a lot of money and time. Because less people can or are inclined to afford it, it produces some isolationist attitudes where people are less likely to travel outside the US anyway.
Heck, I could easily travel around the US for a few weeks for less than one day in Europe.
I'm not entirely sure how exactly this is related to Voyager 2 and the termination shock, but your comment is too interesting to pass up.
Your comments seem to focus on the fact that there was extremely limited permanent structure building in the area occupied by the United States 500 years ago. 500 years ago towns in Europe and other places were building structures using ideas and materials there were essentially isolated from each other. This resulted in cities that look significantly different from each other. The US on the other hand already had decent communication and transport systems in place by the time structures of significance were being built. This resulted in a lot of shared ideas and materials being used to build cities, and so less general diversity. There are still a lot of specific differences due to differences in climate, immediate materials, and cultural differences. Still, it's not like the difference between pyramids and castles.
Of course, if I want to see castles and pyramids, I have to spend a small fortune (by my standards) and travel half way around the world. In the US I can go on a road trip and see quite a bit for significantly less money (but still not that many pyramids). There are places in the US where I can barely understand the spoken language because it is so different. The foods (mostly derivatives from all over Europe) vary quite a bit too. This summer I went to see several sets of American Indian ruins there were thousands of years old. I've seen many different buildings of American cultural significance, and enjoyed the differing city planning and building styles. They are certainly not all ghettos and suburbs (but then suburbs are an American culture that I see other countries try to imitate).
You may laugh, but I had to Tallin to find out what/where it was. My geography skills have always been pretty poor, but this isn't surprising. Americans have a hard time learning about the rest of the world because it is so far removed from them. Estonia? Usually you learn about other countries' histories by how they relate to your own. I honestly can't think of how Estonia relates to the US. I've never met anyone from there. I've never knowingly had any economic trading or seen products made in Estonia. It doesn't crop up on movies (except Encino Man from 1992), the news, or TV shows. Relevance of knowing where Estonia is to the American people at large is somewhere close to zero. You have to spend time and effort learning things to live your life, and I'd have to say that most people are better off learning something else.
Yes, I realize that makes me sound like an ego-centric American, but it just makes sense. I don't spend any time learning sewing techniques, and they have a lot more relevance to me in my daily life as a sysadmin then Estonia. My brother speaks Dutch, but has lived in the US for the past decade where he has had exactly zero opportunity to speak to anyone in Dutch (though he has managed to try and sound smart by providing some basic etymology for the random Dutch word we come across). Guess how much time he spends practicing it now? Can you guess how much time I've spent learning words from him?
If Estonia, or whatever other random country, comes up, I'll do exactly what I did tonight. Look it up and learn exactly what I need or what to know about it. Just like I do for everything else.
Genocide? You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. Thanksgiving traditionally has it's basis in the original European settlers to the Americas being thankful for the local American Indians saving them all from starvation one winter. And while a lot of the European immigrants purposefully killed a lot of them and drove them off their land, they weren't interested so much in genocide as much and just taking all of their land. The Nazis were trying to round up all of the Jews and kill them. That's genocide. Early American immigrants were trying to round them all up on their land and send them someplace else.
I think your impression of cuffing someone is pretty optimistic. If someone really doesn't want to be cuffed, a second isn't enough time to do much of anything. If someone is really violent, you aren't going to cuff them until they are out of energy or can't think strait. (beware the biter)
I think office workers should be video-tapeable, though that doesn't mean that anyone could just walk into their office. I think that if you have a meeting with a public official where they are acting as a public official, you should always be allowed to record your meeting. In cases where video would be a security concern, audio should be allowable.
Tasers offer a special set of circumstances. If you shoot someone running at you, usually it causes them to stop/fall due to a combination of psychology and pain. In most circumstances, if a person didn't think they were supposed to fall, and they are able to ignore the pain, getting shot once or twice will do little until they slowly bleed out. Head shots are a different matter, but the vast majority of people shoot at the body because it is an easier shot. This makes shooting someone an iffy proposition, especially if they have a weapon like a knife. You can shoot a person three times running at you, and they could still reach you and slice your throat open. Tasers on the other hand cause instant freezing of the muscles, so a running person does a face plant. That, is a good thing.
On the other hand, tasers aren't as scary, and if you miss you're screwed. Chances are organizations have run the numbers to figure out which is safer. I suspect you're right that a gun is better, but I'd like to see some numbers to back it up.
What is your opinion on confiscating a recording, so that it can be used as evidence? If someone films a crime, or evidence to a crime, should the police have a right to demand the video immediately (so as to prevent tampering)?
Most of the taser videos I've seen (if my memory isn't failing me) have been around two seconds of actual shock (officers being shocked). Recovery time for movement and cognition seemed to be around a second or two, though nobody just jumped up from it. This may be different in less controlled environments with longer shocks. I don't really know.
I'm afraid I don't know when it is appropriate to draw a firearm instead of a taser, though I suspect it is a matter of department policy. I've seen them pull a taser with two officers on the scene on some clips from the TV show Cops. (I don't watch Cops, just random clips. I'm not an officer, and other than taking a concealed handgun class, I have no training. I don't own a handgun, I just took the class out of curiosity.)
Personally, I think that any government official should be recordable while in the act of any public duties. And I think it should be a federal law that should be passed. That said, there was an interesting experience last weekend here at a political rally. There were some protesters across the street from the entrance carrying signs and yelling at the people going into the entrance, with at least one person swearing. One of the officers went over to quiet down the most vocal fellow swearing. The officer came back with disturbing the peace and impeding traffic. A rather amusing dialog. He also chewed out one of the protesters with a video camera. He wasn't trying to get the guy to stop video taping, he was trying get out of his face while talking to the other guy, and to get out of way so people wouldn't have to walk in the street to get around them.
Talking to this officer afterwards, it was obvious that he didn't care for the political rally (Obama, incidentally), but that wasn't his concern. His job (as he saw it) was safety and atmosphere. For safety, he wanted people out of the way so everyone wasn't walking in the road that had vehicle traffic. For atmosphere, (I'm a bit fuzzy on the specifics of this) he didn't want people creating a scene with all of the swearing. I'm curious about the legality of that.
Anyway, it got me thinking about the camera guy. I wonder how many claims of first amendment suppression are really just officers trying to get people out of the way for safety or so they can deal with some other more pressing issue. Obviously there are all sorts of wrongful situations, but I wonder how often it's a "don't tase me bro" guy calling wolf.
I watched all of the videos on YouTube I could find, including after he was escorted out into the hall. A lot of people took videos and uploaded them, so you got a lot of different perspectives. I can see from some of the videos how people get certain ideas about what went down, but I think after viewing them all, you get a reasonably clear idea of what happened.
After viewing them all, I have to agree with QuantumG on points 2 and 3. For officers, the appropriate steps were taken once they were removing him*. I have no idea about point 1 because the videos aren't clear enough to clearly make out all badges and labels. At some universities, the "security" are essentially police officers with a jurisdiction the size of the university.
*I still have questions as to if the security should have touched the questioner in the first place. Once they touched him, the protocol was followed pretty clearly. If the questioner sued, it would be for trying to escort him in the first place, not for steps taken to subdue him.
In at least one of the cases it WAS used as a torture device - how else can you explain 30 shocks over a 5 minute period?
You would be surprised how persistent some people can be. While it can be painful to be tasered, and you aren't able to move while it's happening, the shock doesn't last for long. Once the shock is over (usually just a second or two) the person is able to move again just fine. If a person is sufficiently persistent (and hopped up on whatever drugs) they can go for quite a bit of time. If a person is violent enough, and an officer is alone enough, 30 shocks over 5 minutes from an officer (or two) trying to keep someone on the ground until more backup arrives is not outside of possibility.
Personally, I think the biggest step towards preventing abuse was the prevalence of audio/video recording systems in patrol cars. Officers are more cautious about doing the wrong thing while being recorded, and people have difficulty wrongfully claiming abuse in a fully recorded situation. Everybody wins. It's certainly not 100%. Really dirty cops just moved further into the shadows, but it does mean the mediocre ones are less likely to fall into the wrong things.
Okay, I'll bite. Let's see what it would cost for me. I drive around 13,000 miles per year, and my car gets around 30 mpg. Let's say that a new hybrid would get me 100 mpg, and that gas prices average $5/gallon over the next 5 years.
My current car: (13,000 miles) / (30 miles per gallon) * ($5 per gallon) * (5 years) = $10,833
Theoretical super hybrid: (13,000 miles) / (100 miles per gallon) * ($5 per gallon) * (5 years) = $3,250
So the difference in gas savings over 5 years would be $7,583, which is just about the difference in cost between gas and hybrid versions of some cars. But that doesn't include the added interest for a larger car loan, higher insurance for more expensive car, or replacing the batteries at the (3 or 5) year mark. And this is better numbers than you will actually get.
It looks to me like hybrids aren't quite cost effective, and aren't likely to be without some pretty serious engineering or economic changes. I'm still hopeful, but we just aren't close to being there yet.
Frankly, I'd rather they take a couple more years and improve the battery technology and put safeguards.
Since the whole point of a battery is to store energy in a form it can be released from on demand, I'm not sure it is even in theory possible to build batteries which can't release all that energy at once - in other words, explode - when suitably damaged.
I'm pretty sure PortHaven was suggesting to wait for two things to happen.
1. "improve the battery technology" would be to improve the energy density. Current batteries are big, heavy, environmentally unsound, and have a rather limited life span. Lots of things to "improve".
2. "put safeguards" would be to find ways to make them safer in the event of an accident. Lithium batteries can be extremely flammable if damaged properly. Perhaps placing a chemical in an impact sensitive packet in the battery that causes the battery to react more slowly? Or better ways of shielding the outside from puncture? You're never going to have it perfect, but I'm sure they can do a lot better than they are now.
This is just a guess here, but a human's metabolism can become dramatically more efficient at slower rates. Also, certain hereditary traits focus on being extremely efficient metabolically. (Take an indian tribe that has spent thousands of years living off of a few berries a day and then give them a 1000 calorie/day diet and see what happens.) With the wrong body conditions and wrong genetic traits, this guy could cut his calorie intake in half and he still might not lose much weight (even with the exercise).
Those charts for how much you burn doing certain activities are great for most of the population. But they fail miserable on small groups on either end of the spectrum.
"...substituting honey or molasses or even natural cane sugar (depending on allergies)..."
All are terrible for you. None are better than the others.
To be fair, the sugar in honey is the same as the sugar in other things, and will be just as bad. But, there are a ton of things in honey that make it extremely good for you to eat small amounts of on occasion. Trace minerals all over the spectrum, antibiotics, etc. It's like a freakin wonder drug. But yeah, sparingly is pretty key here.
(Honey should never be fed to infants. Also, the vast majority of honey is heated to high temperatures for filtering, which destroys many of the molecules in it that can be beneficial. If you want it for health benefits, get the cold pressed stuff.)
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Why on earth would a cheap mass production car in India cost $2500? Does a steel frame, motorcycle engine, plastic body panels, windows, and wheels really cost that much? I'd think they could put together something for less than $1000.
Smog? Forget California smog laws, this thing wouldn't pass federal safety regulations.
This thing was designed for use by people in India, which means that the only way someone in one of these would survive an impact with a Honda Civic is if the Tata were light enough to just be bounced out of the way. An SUV could probably tear through it without even slowing down.
See the recent story of the game reviewer that was fired for giving a low score to a game that his magazine was advertising, for a refutation of this idea. There are a few magazines (like Consumer Reports) that have their entire business centered around the idea of unbiased reviews. If they were shown to have bias in their reviews, they would be ruined. Pretty much everyone else you can expect to have at least a little bit of bias. At the very least, they either won't review a better competing product, or a poorly performing advertised product.
Incredibly I saw this work last night for the first time in my life. It actually confused me for a few seconds because I couldn't figure out what had happened. I was helping my roommate set up his brand new Dell 27" LCD monitor, and even though it detected and worked just fine as a "Plug and play monitor", he wanted to use the driver CD. I went into the device manager and told it to search for a driver. It found the same driver on the CD and online.
I installed the driver off of the CD, although in retrospect I should have done the online option just to see what would happen. In the driver list it listed the installed "Plug and play monitor", the Dell driver with the path on the CD, and the Dell driver with the path as "Windows Update". So yeah, the only time I've ever managed to find a driver for a device was when the device was already working and I already had the updated driver. Go figure.
A Tungsten/Platinum ring? I hope you're never in an emergency where the the ring needs to be removed and you have have one that you can neither crush nor cut. Sounds dangerous.
Yeah, that is something to consider. In the US, students already have ready access to all sorts of information sources. Most schools have a library with encyclopedias, and most also have at least some computers with internet access. Laptops were thrown into classrooms without any plan, and so it was difficult for teachers to find reasons to change their teaching methods to integrate them.
Of course, all this means is that nobody really knows what will happen if you give a million poor kids a simple laptop as their first and only source of internet access. It's possible that most of the potential will be wasted. It's also possible that the sudden ready access to information will cause the educational state of these countries to skyrocket from their present mediocrity. Who knows?
I am cautiously optimistic that free textbooks will be written to be included on these devices, that lesson plans with ways to integrate the laptops will be developed and distributed to teachers, and that the ready access to information will help kids to improve their situations far beyond anything they could have imagined a year ago. One can hope.
But these kids aren't starving or dying off due to some easily treatable disease. Really, giving them $188 in food and medicine wouldn't help them that much, and would be pretty limited in the length of time it did help.
Providing the OLPC is something like providing a basic infrastructure like roads or water, except in this case it is information. Money for these things could always be spent in other ways to meet short term needs, but they are far better off investing in infrastructure that will have long term positive impacts for many years to come.
Without going back and reading those articles (read them a while back), I seem to recall him saying that they did fix a lot of leaks, but those leaks ended up not being as big an issue as people thought. If you fix 300 leaks and your memory usage only drops by 1%, then leaks aren't your biggest problem. He's apparently discovered that memory fragmentation is the issue. In some circumstances you might only be using half of your allocated memory due to not being able to release it, due to memory fragmentation.
Link to Orion Watch:
http://www.orion-watch.com/
The first post says no such thing. It simply says that IOS has a very antiquated command system, which it does. If IOS were to break backwards compatibility they would have the opportunity to create a much easier to use and much more flexible ways of doing things. It would be really good in the long run, but is not likely to happen because the short term consequences would probably be so painful.
I call BS on you. Even if MS didn't strictly enforce good coding practice by starting users off as "users" instead of "administrators", any IT department worth their salt should have. And applications developers were certainly aware of what were proper coding practices. Coding to the proper practices in 90% of cases wasn't any more difficult than the wrong way.
.ini files in the user's profile with no extra effort. Given how many applications make use of the registry, I'd say it's not too bad.
As an examples I take Firefox. In the 1.0 release they incorrectly stored the internet cache in the user's "Application Data" directory instead of "Local Settings\Application Data". It was a simple mistake, but an annoying one for anyone using roaming profiles. The next semi major release they fixed it.
The registry (as it exists in 2000 and above) is far from the dumbest idea in computer history. It is essentially a database of user (and machine) settings. It allows multiple applications to update and read settings simultaneously. It also enforces strict syntax so you can't store settings wrong or break other settings through bad coding. Any coder that doesn't feel like using the registry is always welcome to use
Of course, it is not without it's pitfalls. Storing everything in a big binary blob means you are forced to use Windows mechanisms to read and write to it. And having all your settings in one file means that all of your settings get corrupted if the one file goes. There is also not a good way to diff the information in registries.
Personally, I'm surprised MS hasn't taken the registry is a database paradigm to the next level and offered centralized synchronization of the registry. Have a sort of "registry server" that holds the settings in a database. For roaming profiles this would let users be logged it at multiple locations and synchronize just those keys that have changed. Meh, oh well.
Our experience with Vista includes the issues with the (thankfully) basic correcting of security design, but also goes way beyond that. Forcing the writers of programs to realize that all users are not running as local administrators is a good thing, and I understand there are going to be growing pains with that, but there is so much more wrong with Vista that I was hoping SP1 would fix.
Network issues are the biggest. For instance, they completely broke the way that a user selects what wireless network to use. It used to be fairly intuitive, and now nobody understands, AND there aren't any added benefits (although a few options seem to be missing).
I was trying to change a particular network setting in Vista once, and I could not find it anywhere. After enough time, I decided to google it, and saw the solution (which many others had apparently searched for). You had to open this one particular window and press the ALT key, opened up an extra menu with the option I needed. There was absolutely nothing in the window to indicate some random keypress would show more options.
On a network share there is a folder with 10 pictures, all with the same owner and NTFS permissions and all taken by the same camera. The user on the Vista machine cannot open 4 of them, but other users can just fine.
Accessing the Vista machine through explorer using \\computer\c$\, some folders return an access denied. There doesn't seem to be any reasoning behind which folders can and can't be accessed, and permissions don't seem to make a difference.
There are others, but you get the idea. Yes, the security changes broke stuff, but there are a lot of other things that have been broken for no apparent reason.
That your friend said that is a big part of the problem. For some reason Russians don't believe Russia could be any different, that it couldn't change. It is a sort of self fulfilling prophecy.
Public folders still exist in E2k7, they've just been "de-emphasized". I don't have a book handy, but I want to say that it is optional during installation as to if it is installed, dependent on some other option being selected. You can do an install of E2k7 with or without public folders just fine. They do state clearly that the next version of Exchange will not have public folders at all, but I don't have to even think about that for at least another 4 years.
Your assertion that Americans are cheap is a bit of a low blow, it's more that transportation is different. I know lots of people in Europe, and many of them have traveled around Europe quite a bit. Heck, you can get rail passes and travel Europe for relatively small amounts. You don't have that option in the US, and just getting to Europe will cost you more than a few weeks of traveling around Europe. Plane tickets overseas cost a lot of money and time. Because less people can or are inclined to afford it, it produces some isolationist attitudes where people are less likely to travel outside the US anyway.
Heck, I could easily travel around the US for a few weeks for less than one day in Europe.
I'm not entirely sure how exactly this is related to Voyager 2 and the termination shock, but your comment is too interesting to pass up.
Your comments seem to focus on the fact that there was extremely limited permanent structure building in the area occupied by the United States 500 years ago. 500 years ago towns in Europe and other places were building structures using ideas and materials there were essentially isolated from each other. This resulted in cities that look significantly different from each other. The US on the other hand already had decent communication and transport systems in place by the time structures of significance were being built. This resulted in a lot of shared ideas and materials being used to build cities, and so less general diversity. There are still a lot of specific differences due to differences in climate, immediate materials, and cultural differences. Still, it's not like the difference between pyramids and castles.
Of course, if I want to see castles and pyramids, I have to spend a small fortune (by my standards) and travel half way around the world. In the US I can go on a road trip and see quite a bit for significantly less money (but still not that many pyramids). There are places in the US where I can barely understand the spoken language because it is so different. The foods (mostly derivatives from all over Europe) vary quite a bit too. This summer I went to see several sets of American Indian ruins there were thousands of years old. I've seen many different buildings of American cultural significance, and enjoyed the differing city planning and building styles. They are certainly not all ghettos and suburbs (but then suburbs are an American culture that I see other countries try to imitate).
You may laugh, but I had to Tallin to find out what/where it was. My geography skills have always been pretty poor, but this isn't surprising. Americans have a hard time learning about the rest of the world because it is so far removed from them. Estonia? Usually you learn about other countries' histories by how they relate to your own. I honestly can't think of how Estonia relates to the US. I've never met anyone from there. I've never knowingly had any economic trading or seen products made in Estonia. It doesn't crop up on movies (except Encino Man from 1992), the news, or TV shows. Relevance of knowing where Estonia is to the American people at large is somewhere close to zero. You have to spend time and effort learning things to live your life, and I'd have to say that most people are better off learning something else.
Yes, I realize that makes me sound like an ego-centric American, but it just makes sense. I don't spend any time learning sewing techniques, and they have a lot more relevance to me in my daily life as a sysadmin then Estonia. My brother speaks Dutch, but has lived in the US for the past decade where he has had exactly zero opportunity to speak to anyone in Dutch (though he has managed to try and sound smart by providing some basic etymology for the random Dutch word we come across). Guess how much time he spends practicing it now? Can you guess how much time I've spent learning words from him?
If Estonia, or whatever other random country, comes up, I'll do exactly what I did tonight. Look it up and learn exactly what I need or what to know about it. Just like I do for everything else.
Genocide? You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. Thanksgiving traditionally has it's basis in the original European settlers to the Americas being thankful for the local American Indians saving them all from starvation one winter. And while a lot of the European immigrants purposefully killed a lot of them and drove them off their land, they weren't interested so much in genocide as much and just taking all of their land. The Nazis were trying to round up all of the Jews and kill them. That's genocide. Early American immigrants were trying to round them all up on their land and send them someplace else.
I think your impression of cuffing someone is pretty optimistic. If someone really doesn't want to be cuffed, a second isn't enough time to do much of anything. If someone is really violent, you aren't going to cuff them until they are out of energy or can't think strait. (beware the biter)
I think office workers should be video-tapeable, though that doesn't mean that anyone could just walk into their office. I think that if you have a meeting with a public official where they are acting as a public official, you should always be allowed to record your meeting. In cases where video would be a security concern, audio should be allowable.
Tasers offer a special set of circumstances. If you shoot someone running at you, usually it causes them to stop/fall due to a combination of psychology and pain. In most circumstances, if a person didn't think they were supposed to fall, and they are able to ignore the pain, getting shot once or twice will do little until they slowly bleed out. Head shots are a different matter, but the vast majority of people shoot at the body because it is an easier shot. This makes shooting someone an iffy proposition, especially if they have a weapon like a knife. You can shoot a person three times running at you, and they could still reach you and slice your throat open. Tasers on the other hand cause instant freezing of the muscles, so a running person does a face plant. That, is a good thing.
On the other hand, tasers aren't as scary, and if you miss you're screwed. Chances are organizations have run the numbers to figure out which is safer. I suspect you're right that a gun is better, but I'd like to see some numbers to back it up.
What is your opinion on confiscating a recording, so that it can be used as evidence? If someone films a crime, or evidence to a crime, should the police have a right to demand the video immediately (so as to prevent tampering)?
Most of the taser videos I've seen (if my memory isn't failing me) have been around two seconds of actual shock (officers being shocked). Recovery time for movement and cognition seemed to be around a second or two, though nobody just jumped up from it. This may be different in less controlled environments with longer shocks. I don't really know.
I'm afraid I don't know when it is appropriate to draw a firearm instead of a taser, though I suspect it is a matter of department policy. I've seen them pull a taser with two officers on the scene on some clips from the TV show Cops. (I don't watch Cops, just random clips. I'm not an officer, and other than taking a concealed handgun class, I have no training. I don't own a handgun, I just took the class out of curiosity.)
Personally, I think that any government official should be recordable while in the act of any public duties. And I think it should be a federal law that should be passed. That said, there was an interesting experience last weekend here at a political rally. There were some protesters across the street from the entrance carrying signs and yelling at the people going into the entrance, with at least one person swearing. One of the officers went over to quiet down the most vocal fellow swearing. The officer came back with disturbing the peace and impeding traffic. A rather amusing dialog. He also chewed out one of the protesters with a video camera. He wasn't trying to get the guy to stop video taping, he was trying get out of his face while talking to the other guy, and to get out of way so people wouldn't have to walk in the street to get around them.
Talking to this officer afterwards, it was obvious that he didn't care for the political rally (Obama, incidentally), but that wasn't his concern. His job (as he saw it) was safety and atmosphere. For safety, he wanted people out of the way so everyone wasn't walking in the road that had vehicle traffic. For atmosphere, (I'm a bit fuzzy on the specifics of this) he didn't want people creating a scene with all of the swearing. I'm curious about the legality of that.
Anyway, it got me thinking about the camera guy. I wonder how many claims of first amendment suppression are really just officers trying to get people out of the way for safety or so they can deal with some other more pressing issue. Obviously there are all sorts of wrongful situations, but I wonder how often it's a "don't tase me bro" guy calling wolf.
People get tasered while trying to flee? I've never heard of that, but is it better or worse than being tackled and thrown the the ground?
I watched all of the videos on YouTube I could find, including after he was escorted out into the hall. A lot of people took videos and uploaded them, so you got a lot of different perspectives. I can see from some of the videos how people get certain ideas about what went down, but I think after viewing them all, you get a reasonably clear idea of what happened.
After viewing them all, I have to agree with QuantumG on points 2 and 3. For officers, the appropriate steps were taken once they were removing him*. I have no idea about point 1 because the videos aren't clear enough to clearly make out all badges and labels. At some universities, the "security" are essentially police officers with a jurisdiction the size of the university.
*I still have questions as to if the security should have touched the questioner in the first place. Once they touched him, the protocol was followed pretty clearly. If the questioner sued, it would be for trying to escort him in the first place, not for steps taken to subdue him.
You would be surprised how persistent some people can be. While it can be painful to be tasered, and you aren't able to move while it's happening, the shock doesn't last for long. Once the shock is over (usually just a second or two) the person is able to move again just fine. If a person is sufficiently persistent (and hopped up on whatever drugs) they can go for quite a bit of time. If a person is violent enough, and an officer is alone enough, 30 shocks over 5 minutes from an officer (or two) trying to keep someone on the ground until more backup arrives is not outside of possibility.
Personally, I think the biggest step towards preventing abuse was the prevalence of audio/video recording systems in patrol cars. Officers are more cautious about doing the wrong thing while being recorded, and people have difficulty wrongfully claiming abuse in a fully recorded situation. Everybody wins. It's certainly not 100%. Really dirty cops just moved further into the shadows, but it does mean the mediocre ones are less likely to fall into the wrong things.
"Tell me that next summer at $4.50 a gallon."
Okay, I'll bite. Let's see what it would cost for me. I drive around 13,000 miles per year, and my car gets around 30 mpg. Let's say that a new hybrid would get me 100 mpg, and that gas prices average $5/gallon over the next 5 years.
My current car:
(13,000 miles) / (30 miles per gallon) * ($5 per gallon) * (5 years) = $10,833
Theoretical super hybrid:
(13,000 miles) / (100 miles per gallon) * ($5 per gallon) * (5 years) = $3,250
So the difference in gas savings over 5 years would be $7,583, which is just about the difference in cost between gas and hybrid versions of some cars. But that doesn't include the added interest for a larger car loan, higher insurance for more expensive car, or replacing the batteries at the (3 or 5) year mark. And this is better numbers than you will actually get.
It looks to me like hybrids aren't quite cost effective, and aren't likely to be without some pretty serious engineering or economic changes. I'm still hopeful, but we just aren't close to being there yet.
Since the whole point of a battery is to store energy in a form it can be released from on demand, I'm not sure it is even in theory possible to build batteries which can't release all that energy at once - in other words, explode - when suitably damaged.
I'm pretty sure PortHaven was suggesting to wait for two things to happen.
1. "improve the battery technology" would be to improve the energy density. Current batteries are big, heavy, environmentally unsound, and have a rather limited life span. Lots of things to "improve".
2. "put safeguards" would be to find ways to make them safer in the event of an accident. Lithium batteries can be extremely flammable if damaged properly. Perhaps placing a chemical in an impact sensitive packet in the battery that causes the battery to react more slowly? Or better ways of shielding the outside from puncture? You're never going to have it perfect, but I'm sure they can do a lot better than they are now.
This is just a guess here, but a human's metabolism can become dramatically more efficient at slower rates. Also, certain hereditary traits focus on being extremely efficient metabolically. (Take an indian tribe that has spent thousands of years living off of a few berries a day and then give them a 1000 calorie/day diet and see what happens.) With the wrong body conditions and wrong genetic traits, this guy could cut his calorie intake in half and he still might not lose much weight (even with the exercise).
Those charts for how much you burn doing certain activities are great for most of the population. But they fail miserable on small groups on either end of the spectrum.
To be fair, the sugar in honey is the same as the sugar in other things, and will be just as bad. But, there are a ton of things in honey that make it extremely good for you to eat small amounts of on occasion. Trace minerals all over the spectrum, antibiotics, etc. It's like a freakin wonder drug. But yeah, sparingly is pretty key here.
(Honey should never be fed to infants. Also, the vast majority of honey is heated to high temperatures for filtering, which destroys many of the molecules in it that can be beneficial. If you want it for health benefits, get the cold pressed stuff.)