I have to say, I was honestly shocked when I first saw this ad campaign. Perhaps my naivete is showing, but that's the only time I can recall seeing something I know to be a complete, bald-faced lie in an ad. Normally it's spin, shading, vague terminology, inapt comparisons, rigged tests, the works. But my jaw literally dropped when I heard that claim.
And of course, the problem is best illustrated by my fiancee, who had no idea why I'd be so amazed at such a statement until I explained to her what they were actually talking about.
We seriously need a contravening campaign - of course, good luck getting the cable company to show it.
I, on the other hand, have had a strikingly different experience with Charter.
I've had them for about a year and a half now, since moving to Madison. Up until last month, their digital cable UI was, in a word, awful. One time slot on screen at a time, the left third of the screen taken up with banner ads, and no way to see what was going on in the show that you were watching at the time. Thankfully, this has been updated to a better system.
It still doesn't default the channel menu to the channel you're currently on, so you have to either curse down to it, or enter the digits. And, since the response time of the box to the remote is so slow, either is an unnecessarily painful process.
Their pricing is asinine. For a 3Mbps/768Kbps connection, they want $52.99/mo. If you bundle it with mid-tier (no premium content) digital cable and Charter's VOIP, you can get the whole package for $99.99. Plus fees and taxes. Plus rental on a second box, plus additional rental on the HD box for the main TV. Plus an additional fee (~$10, I think) for HD content (all eight channels of it, including the ones I can get in higher quality OTA). So it comes in at ~$130.
The VOIP service is crap, compared to POTS service - I haven't used other VOIP solutions, so I can't speak to them. Dialing the voice mail is a 14-keypress operation (10-digit phone number, wait for the prompt, 4-digit passcode. There is no way, according to the tech, to shortcut this process, even from the home handset). When answering calls, there's ~2 seconds of line noise before thing sync up. Luckily, we only got VOIP because, as part of the package, it doesn't cost anything extra - my fiancee and I use our cells as our primary phones.
Their service has been far less than stellar. Last time I called (to troubleshoot an issue with our box; they, apparently, hadn't listened to the tech when he told them to set us up with an HD box), I was on hold for 90 minutes. Their setup process for email addresse on their web site failed every time I tried it. Emails to their support staff resulted in no response for three days. After three days, I got an automated email apologizing for them not getting back to me. When I tried calling in, I gave up after 60 minutes of hold time. A second email to support turned out the same as the first. I admit to a degree of laziness on this one, I've since given up trying; I don't want a charter.net email address that badly.
Unfortunately, we're only planning in staying in our apartment until next summer, and all their "competition" requires 12-month contracts. So they are, currently, the lesser of two evils. But that doesn't make them any less evil.
Via Joystiq, an article at GamePro asking is Live Arcade worth it?
Worth what? The nothing extra you have to pay if you hve a 360 and a broadband connection? Acquiring a broadband connection if you don't already have one? Acquiring a 360 if you don't already have one? (The answers are yes, maybe, and no, incidentally).
I don't really know what question the article is trying to answer.
That's still a tough sell, though. Most places I've worked had a strict policy of leaving PCs on, if only so that patches can be pushed down outside office hours. The cost of power is trivial compared to the cost in labor of having someone either manually patch each machine, run around after hours powering each machine on, or causing down time during the day (along with the problem of people who are on vacation or out sick).
So if you dead short a Li-po battery, you get some spectacular fireworks. If you dead short a Li-ion battery, you get somewhat more spectacular fireworks. By your rationale -
Whether or not it happens to you is irrelevant. It only needs to happen once to do damage, and in the case of a plane it needn't be your laptop.
- I fail to see how Li-po is better. For that matter, I don't know how you can justify using house current - if you dead short across your circuit breaker, you'll get some spectacular fireworks. Much less the high tension lines running through the branches of the tree in your front yard.
There have been plenty of house fires started by faulty wiring in the home. While I don't have numbers to back it up, I would bet my salary for the next decade that more people have been killed, more people have been injured, and more property damage has occurred due to electrical fires in buildings than has happened due to Li-ion or Li-po battery fires. This does not mean a rational response is to only allow houses to draw 10 volts and 5 milliamps. This means a rational response is implementing better ways of mitigating the risk.
But you're right, it comes down to how much you value your life. Me, I take a lot of risks every day. I get out of bed (sudden change in blood flow could trigger a stroke), I shower every morning (do you have any idea how many lethal accidents happen in home bathrooms?), I drive to work (40,000 people a year are killed in car accidents in the US alone), I eat fried foods (heart disease is a leading killer among American males), I've even been known to have the occasional beer or mixed drink (direct ingestion of poison!!). Hell, I've been known to have sex with my fiancee - that's a blood pressure spike-induced coronary just waiting to happen.
Given the insanely high risk way I live my life - I might as well be base jumping into razor wire, for all the care I take - it really shouldn't surprise you that I could be so gruesomely cavalier as to use my cell phone, laptop, and iPod on a regular basis.
Thank God Sony is helping me by not letting me buy a PS3, that would be yet another ticking time bomb in my life.
I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that ignoring online sales would have an effect fairly proportional to the number of units sold "on the ground." I'm open to the idea that it might have a skewing effect, but I'd need to see a decent rationale for why.
No, that's not "a plus." That's a cost-benefit tradeoff on the manufacturing side, and a risk-reward proposal on the end-user side. Lower energy density means either shorter battery life or heavier laptops. I don't think anyone would call either of those results a "plus." They're tradeoffs.
Moreover, there are plenty of Li-ion batteries out there that haven't overheated, burned, detonated, or imploded into naked singularities causing the annihilation of life as we know it. Which means, for those batteries, you get to have longer battery life or lighter laptops sans the death and destruction result, so the move from that state to the proposed solution isn't even a tradeoff, it's a pure loss.
Covering for the inadequacy of your manufacturing/QC processes by making a worse product that's easier to make doesn't translate into a "plus." It sounds to me that the real plus would be if they moved to a power source they've obviously got in plenty - though I think the name "spintronics" has already been taken.
You're right; the city I live in (Madison, WI) has just over half a million people in its metro area. We do get congestion at rush hour (the streets are designed for roughly two thirds of the capacity they actually see), but it's not long-lasting and not, generally, catastrophic (barring, of course, major accidents, blizzards, fog that turns you inside out, etc).
Most of our "meetings" are very informal two-to-five person get togethers in someone's office, and that works well for us. But we do have that one weekly meeting, and, to me at least, there's a real value in finding out what the other team members are doing. In a consulting environment, of course, I can see that not being as useful, since there isn't much direct impact between what one person is doing for company A on what another is doing for company B.
Yep, that's a job I wouldn't have for long. I don't even like ordering pizza over the phone - my fiancee and I have a deal where she calls, and I pay. I accept the phone as part of my job in a necessary evil sort of way, but I do try to minimize it as much as possible. I operate primarily by email, IM, and face to face.
All told, I agree with you completely - my reasons are just that, my reasons, and I don't expect them to be universally applicable. I doubt I'm the only person with a similar reaction to the idea, but for those people and environments this works for, I'm all in favor of it. If your employees are happy and the work is getting done, it's got to be called a win.
Good for them; it sounds like it's working out so far, and if the employees like it, then roll with it.
But, at the risk of sounding like one of the old fogeys the article talks about, it's not for me, and for the reasons those old fogeys mention.
a) I work better when at work. I don't like to work at home; one of the nice things about my 5 mile commute is that, if I have to get any significant work done "after hours," I can drive to the office and do it. My focus is better when I don't have my fiancee, my cats, my 360, my Wii, my stereo, my television, etc. around all tempting me to spend time with them, instead. Moreover, I don't want to be available for routine work 24/7 - I'm already "on call" for crises all the time, but it's with the understanding that I'm only to be bothered if it really is a crisis.
b) There is a value to meetings - at least, some of them. We'd all love to completely ditch the useless all staff meetings that are pretty much just a productivity black hole, but some meetings are valuable. In my office, we have one weekly meeting just of the technology team - it's a tight group and a focused meeting. It's on the schedule from 1:00 - 2:00, but we've only actually been in the meeting until 2:00 once since I've been here. We all have pretty specialized jobs, but they all inter-relate. I'm the DBA, for example, and Dave is the storage architect. It's good to touch base on a regular basis to keep up with what's going on outside our fairly narrow areas.
c) I'm not good on the phone. My hearing isn't what it could be, and I spend too much mental power on making sure I'm hearing what the other person is saying to really be processing well. Face to face, I can use rudimentary lip reading and body language to "fill in the gaps" without the mental effort.
This, of course, is just the way I work - for people who don't have my hangups, this is a great system. But I'd end up working somewhere else, most likely.
"Some people are getting a lot more excited than we'd expected," Iwata said. "We need to better communicate to people how to deal with Wii as a new form of entertainment."
At the risk of being obvious: because the way you use the Wiimote would make having it tethered to the console unwieldy? We're talking about an item you're supposed to swing, twist, wave in circles over your head, punch with, putt with, and bowl with.
Having a cord from the controller to the console would make that a real pain.
If all you're interested in is game demos (and they are the cat's pajamas, there's no doubt about it), you don't have to pay MS a dime beyond the purchase of the 360. Silver accounts are free, and have the same access to game demos as Gold (paid) accounts.
To date, the only things a Gold account gets you that a Silver account doesn't are a) online multiplayer, and b) earlier access to the Gears Of War trailer.
Playing against people online - with all the benefits and convenience of Live's consistent interface and single login - is worth $50/yr to me, and it might be to you. But it's essentially the only thing you're paying $50 for.
Re:The rest of the launch lineup can go to hell...
on
Two Weeks with the Wii
·
· Score: 4, Funny
SMB and Trauma Center
No. Just no.
SMB == Super Mario Bros
Especially in a discussion involving Nintendo. You'll just have to come up with another abbreviation for Super Monkey Ball.
In this instance, consider "cannibal" a term of art: it has a specific meaning within marketing, and this is it. A product "cannibalizes" another product if both products are sold by the same company, and product A removes sales from product B. It would be entirely correct, for example, to say that Country Time Lemonade cannibalizes Sprite if, in fact, an increase in sales of Country Time leads to a decrease in sales of Sprite (I believe both are owned by Pepsico, if not, pretend they are for the purposes of this example).
So in fact, this use of the term "cannibal" is appropriate.
you're MUCH more likely to do the proper thing, and talk the situation down or handle it in such a way that it stays in control
This is true. However, it isn't comprehensive. You're denying the existence of mob situations that cannot be defused by negotiation, yet do not warrant gunning people down in the street.
Really, it's the same problem an individual cop faces when dealing with an individual citizen. The cop's got a wide array of force options available: starting with the uniform, and moving up through the simple presence, the radio, the physical training, the night stick, and the gun. Denying the police, for example, Tazers, denies the existence of situations with a person who won't be subdued by the night stick, but don't deserve to be killed.
The answer is, as it has always been, accountability. If we stipulate that a police force is necessary for society to function reasonably smoothly, then there's no getting past the fact that the citizenry is required to trust the police to act properly in the moment. Without that, the police have no immediate authority, and then they might as well not exist.
The check on that power, of course, is accountability after the fact. If police aren't held accountable for their actions by the rest of the legal system, you have a police state. So, if police aren't held accountable for "less-than-lethally" (it's never "non-lethal," it's always "less than lethal") subduing a suspect or a crowd, then there's a problem.
But the problem doesn't lie with the "less than lethal" technology, it lies with the degree of accountability to which the police are held. Denying the technology to make up for the inadequacy of other parts of the system is, at best, throwing a band-aid on the problem, and at worst, masking a real problem in such a way that it never gets addressed. Either way, it will also have the effect of causing the use of lethal force in situations that might have been handled without it.
Don't you supposed the students shot at Kent State would rather have been raygunned by the nervous teenagers than killed?
Counting in twelves would be just as easy if the number system was base twelve. The only reason counting in tens is easy is because it's counting in ones, with a zero on the end. This would also be the case in a base twelve system.
Frankly, moving to a base twelve system is only a bad idea because everyone already knows and thinks in base ten.
Try cutting a pizza into ten slices. Now try cutting it into twelve. Which is easier?
Historically, we've used base twelve numbering quite a lot - which is, of course, why the foot is twelve inches. The only reason base ten took over is because zero is more important than a convenient number base, and the zero was introduced in a base ten system.
But my point was that it's easier to make cold decisions when you're not faced with the immediacy of people being threatened. Human nature means it's harder to say "those are acceptable losses" when you can see the people you're writing off; it's much easier to say "those are acceptable losses" when you're talking about people you can't see, don't know, and will never meet.
Regardless, as another poster replied to me, while it might be harder from a personal interaction standpoint to hijack a remote-control plane, it's easier from a technical standpoint, so it really doesn't matter.
That's an excellent point...and I hadn't thought of it.
I imagine you could design the control protocol such that it would be arbitrarily difficult for an unauthorized person to fly the plane, but I can't think of an obvious way to prevent someone from preventing you from flying it.
Slashdot Mirror
Net Neutrality means the consumer pays more
I have to say, I was honestly shocked when I first saw this ad campaign. Perhaps my naivete is showing, but that's the only time I can recall seeing something I know to be a complete, bald-faced lie in an ad. Normally it's spin, shading, vague terminology, inapt comparisons, rigged tests, the works. But my jaw literally dropped when I heard that claim.
And of course, the problem is best illustrated by my fiancee, who had no idea why I'd be so amazed at such a statement until I explained to her what they were actually talking about.
We seriously need a contravening campaign - of course, good luck getting the cable company to show it.
I, on the other hand, have had a strikingly different experience with Charter.
I've had them for about a year and a half now, since moving to Madison. Up until last month, their digital cable UI was, in a word, awful. One time slot on screen at a time, the left third of the screen taken up with banner ads, and no way to see what was going on in the show that you were watching at the time. Thankfully, this has been updated to a better system.
It still doesn't default the channel menu to the channel you're currently on, so you have to either curse down to it, or enter the digits. And, since the response time of the box to the remote is so slow, either is an unnecessarily painful process.
Their pricing is asinine. For a 3Mbps/768Kbps connection, they want $52.99/mo. If you bundle it with mid-tier (no premium content) digital cable and Charter's VOIP, you can get the whole package for $99.99. Plus fees and taxes. Plus rental on a second box, plus additional rental on the HD box for the main TV. Plus an additional fee (~$10, I think) for HD content (all eight channels of it, including the ones I can get in higher quality OTA). So it comes in at ~$130.
The VOIP service is crap, compared to POTS service - I haven't used other VOIP solutions, so I can't speak to them. Dialing the voice mail is a 14-keypress operation (10-digit phone number, wait for the prompt, 4-digit passcode. There is no way, according to the tech, to shortcut this process, even from the home handset). When answering calls, there's ~2 seconds of line noise before thing sync up. Luckily, we only got VOIP because, as part of the package, it doesn't cost anything extra - my fiancee and I use our cells as our primary phones.
Their service has been far less than stellar. Last time I called (to troubleshoot an issue with our box; they, apparently, hadn't listened to the tech when he told them to set us up with an HD box), I was on hold for 90 minutes. Their setup process for email addresse on their web site failed every time I tried it. Emails to their support staff resulted in no response for three days. After three days, I got an automated email apologizing for them not getting back to me. When I tried calling in, I gave up after 60 minutes of hold time. A second email to support turned out the same as the first. I admit to a degree of laziness on this one, I've since given up trying; I don't want a charter.net email address that badly.
Unfortunately, we're only planning in staying in our apartment until next summer, and all their "competition" requires 12-month contracts. So they are, currently, the lesser of two evils. But that doesn't make them any less evil.
Via Joystiq, an article at GamePro asking is Live Arcade worth it?
Worth what? The nothing extra you have to pay if you hve a 360 and a broadband connection? Acquiring a broadband connection if you don't already have one? Acquiring a 360 if you don't already have one? (The answers are yes, maybe, and no, incidentally).
I don't really know what question the article is trying to answer.
That's still a tough sell, though. Most places I've worked had a strict policy of leaving PCs on, if only so that patches can be pushed down outside office hours. The cost of power is trivial compared to the cost in labor of having someone either manually patch each machine, run around after hours powering each machine on, or causing down time during the day (along with the problem of people who are on vacation or out sick).
So if you dead short a Li-po battery, you get some spectacular fireworks. If you dead short a Li-ion battery, you get somewhat more spectacular fireworks. By your rationale -
Whether or not it happens to you is irrelevant. It only needs to happen once to do damage, and in the case of a plane it needn't be your laptop.
- I fail to see how Li-po is better. For that matter, I don't know how you can justify using house current - if you dead short across your circuit breaker, you'll get some spectacular fireworks. Much less the high tension lines running through the branches of the tree in your front yard.
There have been plenty of house fires started by faulty wiring in the home. While I don't have numbers to back it up, I would bet my salary for the next decade that more people have been killed, more people have been injured, and more property damage has occurred due to electrical fires in buildings than has happened due to Li-ion or Li-po battery fires. This does not mean a rational response is to only allow houses to draw 10 volts and 5 milliamps. This means a rational response is implementing better ways of mitigating the risk.
But you're right, it comes down to how much you value your life. Me, I take a lot of risks every day. I get out of bed (sudden change in blood flow could trigger a stroke), I shower every morning (do you have any idea how many lethal accidents happen in home bathrooms?), I drive to work (40,000 people a year are killed in car accidents in the US alone), I eat fried foods (heart disease is a leading killer among American males), I've even been known to have the occasional beer or mixed drink (direct ingestion of poison!!). Hell, I've been known to have sex with my fiancee - that's a blood pressure spike-induced coronary just waiting to happen.
Given the insanely high risk way I live my life - I might as well be base jumping into razor wire, for all the care I take - it really shouldn't surprise you that I could be so gruesomely cavalier as to use my cell phone, laptop, and iPod on a regular basis.
Thank God Sony is helping me by not letting me buy a PS3, that would be yet another ticking time bomb in my life.
This is neat and all, but I'm still holding out for FMD-ROM.
I've been waiting for seven years, so it's got to be out Real Soon Now.
I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that ignoring online sales would have an effect fairly proportional to the number of units sold "on the ground." I'm open to the idea that it might have a skewing effect, but I'd need to see a decent rationale for why.
An extraction isn't even in the same ballpark as a root canal in terms of discomfort at the time.
Of course, there's a perceived benefit in keeping the tooth.
No, that's not "a plus." That's a cost-benefit tradeoff on the manufacturing side, and a risk-reward proposal on the end-user side. Lower energy density means either shorter battery life or heavier laptops. I don't think anyone would call either of those results a "plus." They're tradeoffs.
Moreover, there are plenty of Li-ion batteries out there that haven't overheated, burned, detonated, or imploded into naked singularities causing the annihilation of life as we know it. Which means, for those batteries, you get to have longer battery life or lighter laptops sans the death and destruction result, so the move from that state to the proposed solution isn't even a tradeoff, it's a pure loss.
Covering for the inadequacy of your manufacturing/QC processes by making a worse product that's easier to make doesn't translate into a "plus." It sounds to me that the real plus would be if they moved to a power source they've obviously got in plenty - though I think the name "spintronics" has already been taken.
2) Good tasting food can have a stimulating effect on people with eating disorders, so will you ban good tasting food?
Yeah - luckily, that couldn't possibly happen, since that would be ridiculous.
You're right; the city I live in (Madison, WI) has just over half a million people in its metro area. We do get congestion at rush hour (the streets are designed for roughly two thirds of the capacity they actually see), but it's not long-lasting and not, generally, catastrophic (barring, of course, major accidents, blizzards, fog that turns you inside out, etc).
Most of our "meetings" are very informal two-to-five person get togethers in someone's office, and that works well for us. But we do have that one weekly meeting, and, to me at least, there's a real value in finding out what the other team members are doing. In a consulting environment, of course, I can see that not being as useful, since there isn't much direct impact between what one person is doing for company A on what another is doing for company B.
Yep, that's a job I wouldn't have for long. I don't even like ordering pizza over the phone - my fiancee and I have a deal where she calls, and I pay. I accept the phone as part of my job in a necessary evil sort of way, but I do try to minimize it as much as possible. I operate primarily by email, IM, and face to face.
All told, I agree with you completely - my reasons are just that, my reasons, and I don't expect them to be universally applicable. I doubt I'm the only person with a similar reaction to the idea, but for those people and environments this works for, I'm all in favor of it. If your employees are happy and the work is getting done, it's got to be called a win.
Good for them; it sounds like it's working out so far, and if the employees like it, then roll with it.
But, at the risk of sounding like one of the old fogeys the article talks about, it's not for me, and for the reasons those old fogeys mention.
a) I work better when at work. I don't like to work at home; one of the nice things about my 5 mile commute is that, if I have to get any significant work done "after hours," I can drive to the office and do it. My focus is better when I don't have my fiancee, my cats, my 360, my Wii, my stereo, my television, etc. around all tempting me to spend time with them, instead. Moreover, I don't want to be available for routine work 24/7 - I'm already "on call" for crises all the time, but it's with the understanding that I'm only to be bothered if it really is a crisis.
b) There is a value to meetings - at least, some of them. We'd all love to completely ditch the useless all staff meetings that are pretty much just a productivity black hole, but some meetings are valuable. In my office, we have one weekly meeting just of the technology team - it's a tight group and a focused meeting. It's on the schedule from 1:00 - 2:00, but we've only actually been in the meeting until 2:00 once since I've been here. We all have pretty specialized jobs, but they all inter-relate. I'm the DBA, for example, and Dave is the storage architect. It's good to touch base on a regular basis to keep up with what's going on outside our fairly narrow areas.
c) I'm not good on the phone. My hearing isn't what it could be, and I spend too much mental power on making sure I'm hearing what the other person is saying to really be processing well. Face to face, I can use rudimentary lip reading and body language to "fill in the gaps" without the mental effort.
This, of course, is just the way I work - for people who don't have my hangups, this is a great system. But I'd end up working somewhere else, most likely.
See any serious problems with this story? Email our on-duty editor.
Yeah, I sure do - it's about good news for the PS3.
That can't be right.
Gears Of War required a patch on release day.
HTH
HAND
Or, it could be a quote from Iwata himself:
"Some people are getting a lot more excited than we'd expected," Iwata said. "We need to better communicate to people how to deal with Wii as a new form of entertainment."
As reported by Reuters and passed on by Fox News.
Ignore the C# part; that's not the interesting bit.
The interesting bit is that, for no cost beyond having a Windows machine and the bandwidth to download XNA, you can write video games for a console.
That's not something that's been done before by any other console company that I'm aware of.
At the risk of being obvious: because the way you use the Wiimote would make having it tethered to the console unwieldy? We're talking about an item you're supposed to swing, twist, wave in circles over your head, punch with, putt with, and bowl with.
Having a cord from the controller to the console would make that a real pain.
If all you're interested in is game demos (and they are the cat's pajamas, there's no doubt about it), you don't have to pay MS a dime beyond the purchase of the 360. Silver accounts are free, and have the same access to game demos as Gold (paid) accounts.
To date, the only things a Gold account gets you that a Silver account doesn't are a) online multiplayer, and b) earlier access to the Gears Of War trailer.
Playing against people online - with all the benefits and convenience of Live's consistent interface and single login - is worth $50/yr to me, and it might be to you. But it's essentially the only thing you're paying $50 for.
SMB and Trauma Center
No. Just no.
SMB == Super Mario Bros
Especially in a discussion involving Nintendo. You'll just have to come up with another abbreviation for Super Monkey Ball.
SuMo Ball, anyone?
In this instance, consider "cannibal" a term of art: it has a specific meaning within marketing, and this is it. A product "cannibalizes" another product if both products are sold by the same company, and product A removes sales from product B. It would be entirely correct, for example, to say that Country Time Lemonade cannibalizes Sprite if, in fact, an increase in sales of Country Time leads to a decrease in sales of Sprite (I believe both are owned by Pepsico, if not, pretend they are for the purposes of this example).
So in fact, this use of the term "cannibal" is appropriate.
you're MUCH more likely to do the proper thing, and talk the situation down or handle it in such a way that it stays in control
This is true. However, it isn't comprehensive. You're denying the existence of mob situations that cannot be defused by negotiation, yet do not warrant gunning people down in the street.
Really, it's the same problem an individual cop faces when dealing with an individual citizen. The cop's got a wide array of force options available: starting with the uniform, and moving up through the simple presence, the radio, the physical training, the night stick, and the gun. Denying the police, for example, Tazers, denies the existence of situations with a person who won't be subdued by the night stick, but don't deserve to be killed.
The answer is, as it has always been, accountability. If we stipulate that a police force is necessary for society to function reasonably smoothly, then there's no getting past the fact that the citizenry is required to trust the police to act properly in the moment. Without that, the police have no immediate authority, and then they might as well not exist.
The check on that power, of course, is accountability after the fact. If police aren't held accountable for their actions by the rest of the legal system, you have a police state. So, if police aren't held accountable for "less-than-lethally" (it's never "non-lethal," it's always "less than lethal") subduing a suspect or a crowd, then there's a problem.
But the problem doesn't lie with the "less than lethal" technology, it lies with the degree of accountability to which the police are held. Denying the technology to make up for the inadequacy of other parts of the system is, at best, throwing a band-aid on the problem, and at worst, masking a real problem in such a way that it never gets addressed. Either way, it will also have the effect of causing the use of lethal force in situations that might have been handled without it.
Don't you supposed the students shot at Kent State would rather have been raygunned by the nervous teenagers than killed?
Strictly speaking, 1 is not a prime number.
I'm just saying.
Counting in twelves would be just as easy if the number system was base twelve. The only reason counting in tens is easy is because it's counting in ones, with a zero on the end. This would also be the case in a base twelve system.
Frankly, moving to a base twelve system is only a bad idea because everyone already knows and thinks in base ten.
Try cutting a pizza into ten slices. Now try cutting it into twelve. Which is easier?
Historically, we've used base twelve numbering quite a lot - which is, of course, why the foot is twelve inches. The only reason base ten took over is because zero is more important than a convenient number base, and the zero was introduced in a base ten system.
But my point was that it's easier to make cold decisions when you're not faced with the immediacy of people being threatened. Human nature means it's harder to say "those are acceptable losses" when you can see the people you're writing off; it's much easier to say "those are acceptable losses" when you're talking about people you can't see, don't know, and will never meet.
Regardless, as another poster replied to me, while it might be harder from a personal interaction standpoint to hijack a remote-control plane, it's easier from a technical standpoint, so it really doesn't matter.
That's an excellent point...and I hadn't thought of it.
I imagine you could design the control protocol such that it would be arbitrarily difficult for an unauthorized person to fly the plane, but I can't think of an obvious way to prevent someone from preventing you from flying it.
Here's hoping somone mods you up for this.