But you don't need 3 MW of power to move a car. Half the reason it uses so much energy is that A. two-thirds to three-quarters of the energy input is wasted (mostly in the form of heat), and B. another huge chunk of it is wasted lugging around that insanely heavy engine block and all the crap that it requires. You can easily get equivalent amounts of torque from an electric car that uses much, much, much less energy than a gasoline-powered car.
Gasoline contains 121 MJ per gallon, but by the time you factor in the efficiency, you're getting closer to 25-35 MJ per gallon, which is only about 8.3 kWh. With a 15 amp circuit at full capacity, every 5 hours charging is equivalent to a gallon of gas (approximately). As long as you don't *average* more than 60 miles per day, charging overnight is likely to be sufficient. And that's assuming a 110VAC charger. Most electric car chargers, AFAIK, are at 220VAC with a 30 amp circuit or larger, so it would only take two nights (or all day one day and night) to charge up a battery with a 500 mile range, give or take.
Sadly, it's not necessarily cheaper. At my current PG&E rate, even after accounting for the engine efficiency, gasoline is at a dead tie with what I paid at the pump on Monday---literally within tenths of a cent per gallon. If I could buy an engine that was 100% efficient, it would cost a fourth as much money to run a gasoline-powered generator as it does to buy power from PG&E, and that's at full retail gas prices. There's a fun stat for you, as though I needed any more proof that PG&E is screwing me.
Understood. That vendor lock-in inherent in such software is the reason they so desperately need to be smacked down in court---if not for first sale violations, then for monopoly abuse.
For this reason, AutoDesk is a very evil company, and should be boycotted without mercy.
If this case goes the way I would expect it to go and first sale is upheld, their little schemes are only going to get them slapped with huge fines and possible contempt charges if they continue to violate the order of the court by deliberately obstructing that right. At that point, they can no longer claim ignorance and it becomes willful violation of an order of the court. It will get uglier and uglier until some judge holds up a multimillion dollar class action lawsuit by their customers, at which point maybe they will come to understand that what they are doing is illegal, unethical, and in every other way wrong. And if they don't, they will be gone. Either way, they lose. One way, their customers lose, too.
The problem is that the people at those extremes then cause problems for the people in the middle, and it doesn't effectively serve people who are even one standard deviation away. Besides, you're assuming a normal distribution for intelligence. In many schools, that's probably not a safe assumption.
I'm not talking about working with partners where one person can goof off. I'm talking about regular exercises in class where it's obvious (assuming the teacher is competent) whether everybody is doing their fair share. For example, one part of this might be tutoring during in-class exercises. If you're one of the first people to get finished with the classwork, you can go help other students (not give them the answers) when they raise their hands.
I'm not sure what the best way to evaluate elementary kids is, but I am absolutely positive that my education was adversely impacted by my school system not doing so substantially until middle school. I have a hard time believing that this isn't true for most students. When you have classes with a wide discrepancy in abilities, you end up with a couple of idiots being troublemakers because they can't keep up, a few really intelligent people doing really badly (to the point of failing) and sometimes acting up because they don't think what they're doing is worth their time, and everybody else suffering from the problems caused by those folks. The result is an environment that isn't conducive to learning even for the people in the middle, forget the people on either end....
I'm sure it depends on the school, but in my class, I'd guess it was probably 10% for whom it was too fast, but at least one entire class (out of five, IIRC) for whom it was too slow overall, plus significant portions of the next class (but often unevenly), and adequately serving probably half the students.
And that's just looking at the curriculum as a whole, which is really a rather bad idea. I knew plenty of folks who struggled with math skills or English skills, but not both. Unfortunately, by the time they were ability grouped, they were already behind in that area, and because the grouping was not per-subject, they ended up in a slower class in other areas, resulting in boredom, lack of interest in school, and eventually bad grades....
Actually, I was in Tennessee, and it was similar, though we did have Calculus in our senior year. The thing is, by the time kids are in high school, they're almost adults, and most of their habits and behaviors are pretty much set. That's way too late to start getting kids excited about learning---almost a decade too late. By second or third grade, students should be learning at an accelerated pace if they show aptitude in a particular area.
Clearly. For some people, 98% of the time spent in school is wasted already. Increasing it to 99.5% isn't a good use of anyone's time. In general, I'm referring to anyone more than about two standard deviations on either side of the intellectual norm. School is tailored heavily to the people in the middle. The people at the bottom don't get the extra attention they need, and the people at the top are bored out of their minds. Here are a couple of things that would help, IMHO:
Part 1: Take advantage of existing human resources. The brightest students are often scorned by their classmates out of jealousy. This leads to all sorts of social problems that can hurt the grades of everyone. The brighter students start to not do so well so people won't think of them as nerds. The less bright students get discouraged because they see that it comes so easily for the bright students and it isn't coming as easily for them, so they don't do as well, either. How do you solve this? Encourage students to help other students during class. More discussion, more group work, less individual work. In the real world, no man is an island, but in school, we're too focused on individual learning. That's just not an effective way to educate.
Part 2: Eliminate grade levels. To some degree, you don't want people five years apart in the same class, but if people are learning at a faster rate, you also don't want to waste half of the year by teaching too slowly just to spread it out over a year. Instead, have groups that learn a particular subject at a particular rate. A student good in math but bad in English might be in English 1 and Math 5. Allow these to progress at a rate independent of the annual schedule. Some students finish junior high with Calculus under their belts, others with basic math, and that's okay. When students get far enough ahead, they join some of the medium groups from the next grade and at that point, the schedules sync up and they help those struggling students to improve.
Sorry if this comment is rough. No time to proofread. Battery almost out.
And the result is that the specific product you're asking about might well be in either one aisle, the other, or neither. Yes.
And then, there's the component section, where 75% of the electronic component hooks have no products on them at all, products are mostly on the wrong hooks (more often than they are on the right ones), the hook order isn't in any sort of order (well, it will be in order for a while, then it suddenly jumps from 100 uF to 100 pF for no obvious reason. The hooks for the larger components (10 uF and up) are almost always empty, no vertical mount components (99% of the capacitors used in electronics have to be mounted vertically for space reasons, but almost all Fry's seems to stock is horizontal mount most of the time), and even the NTE parts aren't always in numerical order, IIRC. They'll have a range in part number order followed by a huge jump, with the part you're looking for on the opposite side of the aisle. Aaaargh.
And people wonder why every single freaking electronics project I do, I end up ordering at least a handful of parts from Jameco. If they weren't so darn far North, I'd just go to their store instead of wasting time with Fry's at all....
You handle peak times the same way as any other store. You bring in temp people. You may not get the best people during those times, but I guarantee you can find contractors willing to work on a 1 1/2 month contract from mid November through early January. That problem isn't in any way specific to this model. It's the same problem if your experts are at the store.
That said, with the model I proposed, it's a much easier problem to solve because you can hire these people without any need for them to actually be located anywhere near the people you're serving. Hire a handful of college CS students at universities to take shifts of as little as an hour or two between classes. Once you eliminate the physical constraints of the experts being on site, lots of problems just cease to be problems.
Also, because it's a queue system, your wait times can increase on average and the worst case times still diminish. It's not the difference between a 1 minute and a 65 second average wait that drives away customers. It's the "I couldn't find an employee to help me for twelve minutes" peak waits that drive people away.
Yeah, apparently that site deletes the generated images after an hour or so. It showed a cat on a keyboard and said "I'm on ur Twitter" at the top, and at the bottom, "Sendin monee to Switzerland."
The only things jaw-dropping about this case are the price and either the noise level or the hard drive failure rate. In that small an enclosure, hard drives are going to heat up rather severely unless you move a lot of air past them, and if you do that, it's going to be loud. The laws of physics are at work here.... It's the same reason external hard drive cases are not generally recommended for continuous use.
You've obviously never tried to stop a car that has power brakes with the engine turned off. It's a lot harder than it sounds. Try it sometime on a completely empty road. Get up to about 15 MPH, throw it into neutral, and turn off the car. Try to stop. The first tap of the brakes works well. After that, it gets harder and harder to do anything with them. If you've never experienced it, it's worth experiencing, if only because power assist braking could fail at any time, and you should know how to handle that situation as a driver. Your emergency brake is your friend in this case.:-)
The minimum reasonable passing speed is the speed limit or 5 MPH faster than the vehicle in the right lane, whichever is FASTER. At a five MPH differential, from the time your front bumper lines up with the other car's rear bumper to the point at which your rear bumper lines up with its front bumper, it takes about 4 seconds on average. If you aren't going at least 5 MPH faster, you're doing something wrong. Driving slightly over the speed limit while passing (in a straight stretch of road) is safer than maintaining less than a 5 MPH speed difference. Being beside another car puts you at a significantly elevated risk of collision because you cannot steer to avoid a sudden problem in the road without impacting another car.
Under no circumstances should you drive in the left lane at a speed significantly below the posted speed limit unless cars in front of you are limiting your speed or severe weather conditions make it unsafe to drive at the limit. Doing so backs up traffic and causes dangerous driving conditions for cars behind you as drivers become more and more desperate to reach their destinations on schedule.
The maximum reasonable passing speed is 10 MPH faster than the vehicle in the right lane, or 5 MPH over the limit, whichever is SLOWER. Having too great a speed difference between lanes can pose a significant risk to other drivers attempting to change lanes. Similarly speeds more than a few MPH over the posted limit should be dangerous. If they are not, the limit is set too low. On the vast majority of highways I've driven, the speed limits are at least 10 MPH below what they should be.
Combine these two rules and a rather interesting pattern emerges: the need for an automatic minimum speed limit of 10 MPH slower than the posted maximum limit except in extreme weather. This also means that having separate truck speed limits is inherently dangerous. If a truck cannot maintain the same speed as other vehicles, they should be required to use a different road. Period. That speed difference is a major cause of accidents on many roads.
Yes. In fact, some stores have done this. For example, the Pharmacy sections of some stores (I forget whether it was Target or Wal-Mart where I saw this) have a screen for searching for a particular product. This is far preferable to stores like Fry's where the products move to different aisles every three or four weeks and nobody knows whether they carry any particular product, and each salesperson directs you to a different section, none of which actually have the product....
I have a solution. Start a retail chain and set up video chat screens to chat with a bunch of highly paid geek advisers. They do nothing but handle continuous questions from people interested in buying products of whatever type, and they try to give the best answers. By consolidating the entire nationwide chain to a few dozen advisers spread across the entire chain, the per-store training costs drop to a fraction of their current costs. Also, because your sales droids are only there to physically assist customers in carrying heavy products, fetching things from shelves, pushing the button that says "customer needs help", etc., your sales costs go down because you can hire Wal-Mart stock boys instead of people with a computer background.
The net win in the cost of doing business that way means that you can continue to make good profits without the need to resort to underhanded sales tactics to get more profit. This, in turn, leads to greater customer trust, which leads to brand loyalty, which leads to a long-term revenue stream.
Treat your customers with respect and they will respect you in return. Treat your customers with disdain, and you become nothing more than a purveyor of commodities, easily replaced by the next big thing to come along.
Except that for those of us who have to drive at night, cell phones are an invaluable way to help keep the driver alert. You talk on the phone with a parent, husband, wife, whatever, and because you are being forced to multitask and periodically get aural stimulus, it is nearly impossible to fall asleep behind the wheel. No other activity is as good for keeping a sleepy driver awake except having a second passenger in the car. So for every person who gets into a wreck because they were talking on the phone and forgot that they were driving, there are almost certainly several who didn't get into a wreck because they were talking on the phone.
In short, banning cell phones while driving is a stupid idea because a police officer staring through the window can't possibly know whether a cell phone is making the driver safer or less safe. Not to mention that there's no good way for them to detect whether someone is using a hands-free device or is just talking to himself/herself. We don't need any more brain-damaged laws on the book. We already have tens of thousands too many of them.
Yes, that's one way to accomplish the same thing, if your language supports it. It also means that you end up using exceptions, which IMHO are evil. The entire notion of program execution jumping out of a context is just plain wrong. It is goto times a thousand because it isn't constrained to dropping you elsewhere in the same function. In fact, exceptions remind me of the old setjmp and longjmp instructions in procedural C, and earn no less disdain from me. They make debugging harder and make it harder to return precise error messages to the user, all to save a mere handful of lines of code per function for proper error checking. Exceptions are the ultimate example of duct tape programming, and are the primary reason that I refuse to program in Java. Ever.
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But you don't need 3 MW of power to move a car. Half the reason it uses so much energy is that A. two-thirds to three-quarters of the energy input is wasted (mostly in the form of heat), and B. another huge chunk of it is wasted lugging around that insanely heavy engine block and all the crap that it requires. You can easily get equivalent amounts of torque from an electric car that uses much, much, much less energy than a gasoline-powered car.
Gasoline contains 121 MJ per gallon, but by the time you factor in the efficiency, you're getting closer to 25-35 MJ per gallon, which is only about 8.3 kWh. With a 15 amp circuit at full capacity, every 5 hours charging is equivalent to a gallon of gas (approximately). As long as you don't *average* more than 60 miles per day, charging overnight is likely to be sufficient. And that's assuming a 110VAC charger. Most electric car chargers, AFAIK, are at 220VAC with a 30 amp circuit or larger, so it would only take two nights (or all day one day and night) to charge up a battery with a 500 mile range, give or take.
Sadly, it's not necessarily cheaper. At my current PG&E rate, even after accounting for the engine efficiency, gasoline is at a dead tie with what I paid at the pump on Monday---literally within tenths of a cent per gallon. If I could buy an engine that was 100% efficient, it would cost a fourth as much money to run a gasoline-powered generator as it does to buy power from PG&E, and that's at full retail gas prices. There's a fun stat for you, as though I needed any more proof that PG&E is screwing me.
This is only modded up to +4 Funny. Clearly the folks moderating don't know me or it would somehow miraculously get modded up to +10.
but Google maps keeps directing me to the middle of the city.
Eh, sonny?
Understood. That vendor lock-in inherent in such software is the reason they so desperately need to be smacked down in court---if not for first sale violations, then for monopoly abuse.
For this reason, AutoDesk is a very evil company, and should be boycotted without mercy.
If this case goes the way I would expect it to go and first sale is upheld, their little schemes are only going to get them slapped with huge fines and possible contempt charges if they continue to violate the order of the court by deliberately obstructing that right. At that point, they can no longer claim ignorance and it becomes willful violation of an order of the court. It will get uglier and uglier until some judge holds up a multimillion dollar class action lawsuit by their customers, at which point maybe they will come to understand that what they are doing is illegal, unethical, and in every other way wrong. And if they don't, they will be gone. Either way, they lose. One way, their customers lose, too.
The problem is that the people at those extremes then cause problems for the people in the middle, and it doesn't effectively serve people who are even one standard deviation away. Besides, you're assuming a normal distribution for intelligence. In many schools, that's probably not a safe assumption.
I'm not talking about working with partners where one person can goof off. I'm talking about regular exercises in class where it's obvious (assuming the teacher is competent) whether everybody is doing their fair share. For example, one part of this might be tutoring during in-class exercises. If you're one of the first people to get finished with the classwork, you can go help other students (not give them the answers) when they raise their hands.
I'm not sure what the best way to evaluate elementary kids is, but I am absolutely positive that my education was adversely impacted by my school system not doing so substantially until middle school. I have a hard time believing that this isn't true for most students. When you have classes with a wide discrepancy in abilities, you end up with a couple of idiots being troublemakers because they can't keep up, a few really intelligent people doing really badly (to the point of failing) and sometimes acting up because they don't think what they're doing is worth their time, and everybody else suffering from the problems caused by those folks. The result is an environment that isn't conducive to learning even for the people in the middle, forget the people on either end....
I'm sure it depends on the school, but in my class, I'd guess it was probably 10% for whom it was too fast, but at least one entire class (out of five, IIRC) for whom it was too slow overall, plus significant portions of the next class (but often unevenly), and adequately serving probably half the students.
And that's just looking at the curriculum as a whole, which is really a rather bad idea. I knew plenty of folks who struggled with math skills or English skills, but not both. Unfortunately, by the time they were ability grouped, they were already behind in that area, and because the grouping was not per-subject, they ended up in a slower class in other areas, resulting in boredom, lack of interest in school, and eventually bad grades....
Actually, I was in Tennessee, and it was similar, though we did have Calculus in our senior year. The thing is, by the time kids are in high school, they're almost adults, and most of their habits and behaviors are pretty much set. That's way too late to start getting kids excited about learning---almost a decade too late. By second or third grade, students should be learning at an accelerated pace if they show aptitude in a particular area.
Clearly. For some people, 98% of the time spent in school is wasted already. Increasing it to 99.5% isn't a good use of anyone's time. In general, I'm referring to anyone more than about two standard deviations on either side of the intellectual norm. School is tailored heavily to the people in the middle. The people at the bottom don't get the extra attention they need, and the people at the top are bored out of their minds. Here are a couple of things that would help, IMHO:
Part 1: Take advantage of existing human resources. The brightest students are often scorned by their classmates out of jealousy. This leads to all sorts of social problems that can hurt the grades of everyone. The brighter students start to not do so well so people won't think of them as nerds. The less bright students get discouraged because they see that it comes so easily for the bright students and it isn't coming as easily for them, so they don't do as well, either. How do you solve this? Encourage students to help other students during class. More discussion, more group work, less individual work. In the real world, no man is an island, but in school, we're too focused on individual learning. That's just not an effective way to educate.
Part 2: Eliminate grade levels. To some degree, you don't want people five years apart in the same class, but if people are learning at a faster rate, you also don't want to waste half of the year by teaching too slowly just to spread it out over a year. Instead, have groups that learn a particular subject at a particular rate. A student good in math but bad in English might be in English 1 and Math 5. Allow these to progress at a rate independent of the annual schedule. Some students finish junior high with Calculus under their belts, others with basic math, and that's okay. When students get far enough ahead, they join some of the medium groups from the next grade and at that point, the schedules sync up and they help those struggling students to improve.
Sorry if this comment is rough. No time to proofread. Battery almost out.
And the result is that the specific product you're asking about might well be in either one aisle, the other, or neither. Yes.
And then, there's the component section, where 75% of the electronic component hooks have no products on them at all, products are mostly on the wrong hooks (more often than they are on the right ones), the hook order isn't in any sort of order (well, it will be in order for a while, then it suddenly jumps from 100 uF to 100 pF for no obvious reason. The hooks for the larger components (10 uF and up) are almost always empty, no vertical mount components (99% of the capacitors used in electronics have to be mounted vertically for space reasons, but almost all Fry's seems to stock is horizontal mount most of the time), and even the NTE parts aren't always in numerical order, IIRC. They'll have a range in part number order followed by a huge jump, with the part you're looking for on the opposite side of the aisle. Aaaargh.
And people wonder why every single freaking electronics project I do, I end up ordering at least a handful of parts from Jameco. If they weren't so darn far North, I'd just go to their store instead of wasting time with Fry's at all....
I have decided to buy... puts pinkie finger to mouth... One meeeelion rubber chickens! Mwahahahahaa.
Okay, that's just disturbing.
You handle peak times the same way as any other store. You bring in temp people. You may not get the best people during those times, but I guarantee you can find contractors willing to work on a 1 1/2 month contract from mid November through early January. That problem isn't in any way specific to this model. It's the same problem if your experts are at the store.
That said, with the model I proposed, it's a much easier problem to solve because you can hire these people without any need for them to actually be located anywhere near the people you're serving. Hire a handful of college CS students at universities to take shifts of as little as an hour or two between classes. Once you eliminate the physical constraints of the experts being on site, lots of problems just cease to be problems.
Also, because it's a queue system, your wait times can increase on average and the worst case times still diminish. It's not the difference between a 1 minute and a 65 second average wait that drives away customers. It's the "I couldn't find an employee to help me for twelve minutes" peak waits that drive people away.
Yeah, apparently that site deletes the generated images after an hour or so. It showed a cat on a keyboard and said "I'm on ur Twitter" at the top, and at the bottom, "Sendin monee to Switzerland."
The only things jaw-dropping about this case are the price and either the noise level or the hard drive failure rate. In that small an enclosure, hard drives are going to heat up rather severely unless you move a lot of air past them, and if you do that, it's going to be loud. The laws of physics are at work here.... It's the same reason external hard drive cases are not generally recommended for continuous use.
You've obviously never tried to stop a car that has power brakes with the engine turned off. It's a lot harder than it sounds. Try it sometime on a completely empty road. Get up to about 15 MPH, throw it into neutral, and turn off the car. Try to stop. The first tap of the brakes works well. After that, it gets harder and harder to do anything with them. If you've never experienced it, it's worth experiencing, if only because power assist braking could fail at any time, and you should know how to handle that situation as a driver. Your emergency brake is your friend in this case. :-)
The minimum reasonable passing speed is the speed limit or 5 MPH faster than the vehicle in the right lane, whichever is FASTER. At a five MPH differential, from the time your front bumper lines up with the other car's rear bumper to the point at which your rear bumper lines up with its front bumper, it takes about 4 seconds on average. If you aren't going at least 5 MPH faster, you're doing something wrong. Driving slightly over the speed limit while passing (in a straight stretch of road) is safer than maintaining less than a 5 MPH speed difference. Being beside another car puts you at a significantly elevated risk of collision because you cannot steer to avoid a sudden problem in the road without impacting another car.
Under no circumstances should you drive in the left lane at a speed significantly below the posted speed limit unless cars in front of you are limiting your speed or severe weather conditions make it unsafe to drive at the limit. Doing so backs up traffic and causes dangerous driving conditions for cars behind you as drivers become more and more desperate to reach their destinations on schedule.
The maximum reasonable passing speed is 10 MPH faster than the vehicle in the right lane, or 5 MPH over the limit, whichever is SLOWER. Having too great a speed difference between lanes can pose a significant risk to other drivers attempting to change lanes. Similarly speeds more than a few MPH over the posted limit should be dangerous. If they are not, the limit is set too low. On the vast majority of highways I've driven, the speed limits are at least 10 MPH below what they should be.
Combine these two rules and a rather interesting pattern emerges: the need for an automatic minimum speed limit of 10 MPH slower than the posted maximum limit except in extreme weather. This also means that having separate truck speed limits is inherently dangerous. If a truck cannot maintain the same speed as other vehicles, they should be required to use a different road. Period. That speed difference is a major cause of accidents on many roads.
Or the LOLCats version
http://bighugelabs.com/output/lolcat6528288a5fbaabe890a88dbfecccb45635d9ef59.jpg
Epic FAIL!
Safe to say that if it took all his money to buy a pair of platform shoes and a handful of rubber chickens, he wasn't rich to begin with....
Yes. In fact, some stores have done this. For example, the Pharmacy sections of some stores (I forget whether it was Target or Wal-Mart where I saw this) have a screen for searching for a particular product. This is far preferable to stores like Fry's where the products move to different aisles every three or four weeks and nobody knows whether they carry any particular product, and each salesperson directs you to a different section, none of which actually have the product....
I have a solution. Start a retail chain and set up video chat screens to chat with a bunch of highly paid geek advisers. They do nothing but handle continuous questions from people interested in buying products of whatever type, and they try to give the best answers. By consolidating the entire nationwide chain to a few dozen advisers spread across the entire chain, the per-store training costs drop to a fraction of their current costs. Also, because your sales droids are only there to physically assist customers in carrying heavy products, fetching things from shelves, pushing the button that says "customer needs help", etc., your sales costs go down because you can hire Wal-Mart stock boys instead of people with a computer background.
The net win in the cost of doing business that way means that you can continue to make good profits without the need to resort to underhanded sales tactics to get more profit. This, in turn, leads to greater customer trust, which leads to brand loyalty, which leads to a long-term revenue stream.
Treat your customers with respect and they will respect you in return. Treat your customers with disdain, and you become nothing more than a purveyor of commodities, easily replaced by the next big thing to come along.
Except that for those of us who have to drive at night, cell phones are an invaluable way to help keep the driver alert. You talk on the phone with a parent, husband, wife, whatever, and because you are being forced to multitask and periodically get aural stimulus, it is nearly impossible to fall asleep behind the wheel. No other activity is as good for keeping a sleepy driver awake except having a second passenger in the car. So for every person who gets into a wreck because they were talking on the phone and forgot that they were driving, there are almost certainly several who didn't get into a wreck because they were talking on the phone.
In short, banning cell phones while driving is a stupid idea because a police officer staring through the window can't possibly know whether a cell phone is making the driver safer or less safe. Not to mention that there's no good way for them to detect whether someone is using a hands-free device or is just talking to himself/herself. We don't need any more brain-damaged laws on the book. We already have tens of thousands too many of them.
Yes, that's one way to accomplish the same thing, if your language supports it. It also means that you end up using exceptions, which IMHO are evil. The entire notion of program execution jumping out of a context is just plain wrong. It is goto times a thousand because it isn't constrained to dropping you elsewhere in the same function. In fact, exceptions remind me of the old setjmp and longjmp instructions in procedural C, and earn no less disdain from me. They make debugging harder and make it harder to return precise error messages to the user, all to save a mere handful of lines of code per function for proper error checking. Exceptions are the ultimate example of duct tape programming, and are the primary reason that I refuse to program in Java. Ever.