I've seen that particular episode as I've watched most of Top Gear here and there. I really do love the show; it's like Mythbusters for cars in the sense that it may not always be scientifically rigorous but it's damn entertaining and still mostly informative.
It has poor cornering compared to the car it was based off of, the Lotus Elise. Disclaimer: I'm still learning a lot about how cars work on the level beyond "fill up the gas tank, change the wiper fluid, and rotate the tires". That said, couldn't the poor cornering be compensated for with adjustments in wheel alignment as well as changing out the suspension and tires? I think they run almost all of the cars on the track out of the box, so yeah it does have pretty poor cornering straight from the factory but I don't see why it couldn't be mostly fixed with aftermarket stuff.
It'd be a hell of a drag racer, though, you'd have to admit to that. It has a hell of a lot of torque.
It's only flaw is its inability to refuel quickly, but that could be solved by swapping out to the backup car and changing batteries while one is out on the track.
That is an utterly preposterous "solution" and you should be ashamed of yourself.
Wow, you could run for politics; you're an expert at completely misrepresenting a position and taking quotes out of context.
If it wasn't clear, swapping out batteries was a solution presented for potential circuit use.
A lot of racing organizations have a backup car (also called a spare car or test car; you can read about it a bit here). This makes it very feasible for circuit racing in that respect.
You should be ashamed of yourself.
Yes, Top Gear may be able to arrange to have two Tesla Roadsters on hand on the same day, so they could just "swap out" the dead one, but what about everyone else? Should they buy two?
If it were used in a racing context? Yes. Damn near every racing organization has two cars per team in the event that one were damaged beyond easy repair.
Top Gear quite rightly pointed out that the Roadster, like every other EV ever made to date, has one massive, deal breaking flaw: the massive amount of time it takes to recharge (particularly the ratio of time to charge v's driving time). That's one hell of a flaw, and one which quite rightly puts people off EV's.
As I said above, it's a flaw in the same way a bike can't float over the ocean. It doesn't matter for everyday use. Most of the time people won't even run the battery halfway down.
Perhaps Tesla should withdraw the lawsuit and invest the money they would have wasted on trying to solve that problem, instead?
Fast charging is an engineering problem that will be very difficult to figure out. Tesla is a car company, not a battery company. I suspect the lawsuit is just to get in the headlines anyway.
Alright then, I'll explain it as best as I am able. My point is that the Tesla may be bad for long ranges, but that is irrelevant for the most part as long range driving is not necessary for your everyday, average use. As for being used as a supercar, the great great great etc. grandparent post
shows pretty well that the Tesla has comparable "mileage", as it were, to cars that would go on a track. It's only flaw is its inability to refuel quickly, but that could be solved by swapping out to the backup car and changing batteries while one is out on the track.
I'd argue that people have 2.28 cars because they have 2 adults and one child over 16, all of whom must use their cars in parallel
Valid, and probably true.
(thus diminishing or destroying the theoretical benefit of having one electric and one gas powered car)
Not true. No matter how you cut it, it's still one less gas car on the roads that is fit for daily use. It's still a net gain. And what are the odds that both (or more) family members are going to need each of the individual cars at the same time for a long-distance road trip? I'd imagine that if you're going that far, you're either going by yourself or with your whole family.
but then I'd be playing into your completely tangential argument that doesn't have shit to do with this case specifically pertaining to Top Gear and the usefulness of the Tesla as a "super car".
You're projecting a bit, aren't you? You're right in that my argument has nothing to do with the usefulness of the Tesla as a super car. It is, however, entirely relevant to your post, which I'll quote below and break down from there.
During the review, Clarkson mentions that a trip from the south of England to the north of Scotland (a realistic trip for an Englishman) would take over 72 hours if you had to charge from a wall socket. The trip itself is ~12 hrs at most if you don't have to stop, but because it's over 700 miles, you have to charge it at least 4 times, taking ~16 hrs from a wall socket (as there are no fancy charging stations along the route, and even then you're still talking about many hours per charge). This is using Tesla's value of 200 miles per charge. Even if a gas powered car could only go 60 miles per tank, it'd still finish in ~16 hrs, including time taken to find a gas station off the main road and fill up eleven times.
You're the one who brought up how it was impractical for long-distance trips, but long distance trips are not what most electric cars on the market are suited for. Saying that an electric car is bad for long distance trips is like saying a bicycle is bad for crossing the ocean or an airplane is useless for space travel.
And that is the main thrust of their problem with the car. One which Tesla simply has no defense for.
You're quite right. Tesla has no adequate defense for their car's inability to go long ranges, just as a bicycle company has no defense for their inability to cross large bodies of water and an airplane company has no defense for not being able to break orbit without stalling.
I do not liken shooting, injuring, or - if it cannot be prevented - killing someone who breaks into my home as vigilantism; I consider it the basic principle of self-defense.
Legally, they'd be liable for SMS fees at the worst I imagine.
I'm pretty sure in a lot of jurisdictions you can't sue someone for what happened to you when you did something illegal (but I may be wrong). It falls to common sense. If you get shot breaking into someone's home, can you have them arrested for shooting you? Sadly, in more than a few states in the U.S. this can actually happen, as ridiculous as it is. I'd imagine, though, that if you asked anyone if they thought this was right they'd say no.
Yeah, okay. The Tesla would be horrible if you're going to do a road trip in excess of its range. You're right, Tesla has no defense for that.
The thing is, you just don't need that sort of range for everyday use. According to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, the average American travels only 29 miles a day. Even at the 55 mile range, that's almost twice as much as is needed.
One of my good friends (and a lot of his friends) are really, really into cars. He's barely 30 and he's been through almost 20 cars - buying, building, rebuilding, tuning, trading, etc. At any one point, he has always owned two cars. No racer or car enthusiast worth their salt would take a drift car, rally car, or racing car out on the street for every day use. Hell, on a drift car alone, you have (expensive) custom suspension work, high quality tires, and perhaps even a custom ECU. Right now, my buddy owns a Skyline R32 and a '86 Corolla. The R32 is on the road maybe an hour a week at most. The '86 is his Daily (the term they use for their everyday use cars).
Would it be a good idea to take a Viper or a Ferrari grocery shopping? Come on now.
Electric cars will not be the be-all, end-all for at least 10 years. However, they will make fantastic daily cars. If you want to take a long-term trip, then you could rent or borrow a regular gasoline-powered vehicle. Actually, that might not even be necessary, considering a study shows that the average American household owns 2.28 cars. You could very easily have one electric and one gasoline car and you'd still be doing a lot to help the environment.
How many road trips or long car drives have involved both cars the average family owns? Typically they'd take the minivan or van or what have you for maximum passenger capacity and cargo storage. Ditto on grocery shopping.
If Tesla had the money to advertise, I think perhaps they should go with an appeal to the facts. After all I've said here, can anyone give me a good reason why owning an electric car with at least a 50 mile range on a day's charge would be a bad idea?
It's not really incompetent engineering IMO. Most of the stuff at the plant was built 30-40 years ago. For its time I imagine the engineering to be very sound.
If you cleared all the regulatory hurdles to building a nuclear power plant and started construction today, you'd be done in 5 years at the fastest. By that time, all of the engineering involved in the plant will, unsurprisingly, be outdated by five years.
I wonder if there's a way to crowdsource conceptual ideas. You start with a basic question like "How do we do this"? and then go from there. If someone asked me what I'd put in such a plant, I'd probably have the radiation-hardened robots placed in strategic locations with Roomba-style chargers.
If sanctions were applied against Israel to the point where military intervention were necessary, America wouldn't get involved. The Middle East would launch, at best, some half-assed coalition mission. Russia, China, India, etc. - all the big, economically powerful Eurasian countries with competent militaries - wouldn't get involved unless it was somehow in their long-term interest. That leaves Europe, who would debate things for five years at the very least. By that time, the situation will either have gotten much worse or blown over altogether.
Might absolutely makes right. You can't argue your point of view if you're dead.
Wow, what a supremely asinine attitude. "It's happened before, so why not let it happen again?"
Have you ever heard the phrase "two wrongs don't make a right"? How about "The pot calling the kettle black?"
I didn't say "let it happen again". Land changes hands many, many times every year. It might not be written up on an "official" map, but the guys with the guns and the tanks are the ones in charge on whatever particular parcel they happen to be sitting on.
It is really not such a inconceivable moral demand of humanity that it recognize the ethical invalidity of imperialism and upholding the right of the strong to prey upon the weak. And like all ethical maxims according to which society is carried out, it indeed may not be possible that all nations and peoples act at all times according to these maxims. We can, however, avoid actively sponsoring such violations, and bathing its cause in misappropriated guilt money.
That's an extremely idealistic view of the world.
I'd really, really like things to be this way, truly. I'd love it if the U.N. actually did one of its jobs and prevented disputes of this nature.
However, just like real life it's all about who you know. Israel will have to do something majorly stupid and/or horrible for the U.N. (or anyone else halfway militarily competent) to take action against them. Why? Because of the U.S. Israel does something stupid, someone invades Israel, and the U.S. airstrikes the living piss out of whatever poor, dumb bastard went into the holy land.
The maintenance of some kind of "moral consistency" is a pretty piss poor reason to abandon the right treatment of people, and the same goes for any fatalist "law-of-the-jungle" rhetorics which uphold such despicable conduct by those who claim to be the more right behaving members of the species.
I think we could both agree that the treatment of a lot of people in this world has been getting better. The civil rights front alone has made leaps and bounds in the last 50 years in America and the rest of the industrialized world. 50 years from now, our kids and grandkids will crack jokes about how backwards our (and our parents) generations were about LGBT people.
I do believe in equality and fairness. I think we should have five or six hundred fewer military bases than we (The United States) have. (We have over 700 bases around the world.) I think we should be out of Iraq and Afghanistan by Janurary 2012, that it's entirely doable, and that we shouldn't be messing in those countries at all. We shouldn't be messing in any other countries but our own, period.
However, I am also a practical person. All your ideals in the world don't count for shit if you can't defend yourself. Law of the Jungle absolutely applies today and will probably apply for hundreds of years. It's detestable to a degree, but that's the way things work. It's very Darwinian.
The U.S. couldn't give two shits about spreading democracy. We're not it in for spreading democracy. We're spreading "democracy" (READ: explosives dropped from huge planes several miles in the air) in countries that have things we want. I believe we're building four military bases in Iraq right now. Why are we building military bases in Iraq if the current stated mission is to be pulling soldiers out of there? Because we're going to be staying in that country for a very, very long time. We need oil, the country has oil, and its neighbors have oil. It will keep it flowing from Iraq and any other counties within airstrike range of Iraq.
Until corruption in government is severely beaten down and we get actual idealists who believe in the mission - pretty much, people like you - in charge, the gubmint will always kowtow to corporate interests. We'll always have unjust laws that favor the profits of a business over the rights of an i
On the one hand, I agree. I do think pretty much all recreational drugs should be legalized. It would put an end to a lot of crime, for one thing. That's how you win the war on drugs - by legalizing them.
On the other hand, knowing our luck, Monsanto will come up with High THC Weed Syrup, put out an inferior product that is ten times more harmful than the natural thing, and sue the pants off of anyone who's infringing on their patented genes. =/
I don't particularly like a lot of things Israel does, nor do I particularly like a lot of things anyone in their general neighborhood does. Even so, the Palestinians got their land taken.
So?
This is "How the World Works 101". Damn near every country in the world has both taken land and had land taken from it. Every. Country. Why is Palestine so special? Because it happened in the last 100 years?
How come nobody's crying over Hawaii (psst, we straight up stole an entire country, albeit a small one.) The Russians pretty much stole a chunk of Georgia (South Ossetia). I don't see anyone crying over the fact that the Kingdom of Prussia isn't around anymore. And on and on and on it goes.
Pfft, amateur. You think that's old school? You should check out the Depression Games museum in Montgomery, Alabama. They have ORIGINAL hoop and stick, kick the can (including both the original can AND the original sense of shame!), and a stickball stick that was once used by Joe Dimaggio (as a broom)!
I'd be with you on the whole "change economic forces" thing, except it would be really hard to convince a business to move from a place where they have 10,000 potential customers within a quarter mile to somewhere where they have a thousand potential customers within 10 miles.
Also of note, I didn't say that the gubmint would plan the cities, just that they'd fund the planning. There's probably a lot of people in the architecture and city planning fields that are getting sick of making the same decisions over and over again, designing the same cookie-cutter houses. This would give small firms and people who want to be a little more creative the chance to flex their muscles. (Honestly, you only have so much room to work with within a city.)
Out of curiosity, why is my heart in the wrong place? Ultimately, I'd want to get people out of the huge cities and into smaller, tighter-knit communites. I've just presented an (admittedly shallow and brief) idea of how it could be accomplished.
Without getting into all the intricacies of it, isn't proofreading basically just reading something and pointing out mistakes and potential improvements?
We did the same thing back in primary school. Write a short paragraph, then pass it to the person to your left and have them read it over. Even if you think you made no mistakes, all it usually takes is a different point of view or three to actually catch them. Ditto on providing creative advice on changes/additions that can be made.
I would go as far to say that anyone who is competent enough to write a book is also competent enough to proofread effectively - they just can't do it for themselves as well due to the bias from reading their own work.
10 years is far, far too long. Don't movies usually make 90% of their money in theaters like in the first 4-6 weeks after release and the same time period for DVD release?
20 or even 10 years ago, I'd agree that 5 or 10 years makes sense. But now, the best tradeoff would probably be 1 or 2 years IMO.
Aside from the underlying theories, most of that stuff boils down to learning a handful of formulas and knowing when to apply them. It would be challenging to say the least for an average person, but, ya know, genius...
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I've seen that particular episode as I've watched most of Top Gear here and there. I really do love the show; it's like Mythbusters for cars in the sense that it may not always be scientifically rigorous but it's damn entertaining and still mostly informative.
It has poor cornering compared to the car it was based off of, the Lotus Elise. Disclaimer: I'm still learning a lot about how cars work on the level beyond "fill up the gas tank, change the wiper fluid, and rotate the tires". That said, couldn't the poor cornering be compensated for with adjustments in wheel alignment as well as changing out the suspension and tires? I think they run almost all of the cars on the track out of the box, so yeah it does have pretty poor cornering straight from the factory but I don't see why it couldn't be mostly fixed with aftermarket stuff.
It'd be a hell of a drag racer, though, you'd have to admit to that. It has a hell of a lot of torque.
That is an utterly preposterous "solution" and you should be ashamed of yourself.
Wow, you could run for politics; you're an expert at completely misrepresenting a position and taking quotes out of context.
If it wasn't clear, swapping out batteries was a solution presented for potential circuit use.
A lot of racing organizations have a backup car (also called a spare car or test car; you can read about it a bit here). This makes it very feasible for circuit racing in that respect.
You should be ashamed of yourself.
Yes, Top Gear may be able to arrange to have two Tesla Roadsters on hand on the same day, so they could just "swap out" the dead one, but what about everyone else? Should they buy two?
If it were used in a racing context? Yes. Damn near every racing organization has two cars per team in the event that one were damaged beyond easy repair.
Top Gear quite rightly pointed out that the Roadster, like every other EV ever made to date, has one massive, deal breaking flaw: the massive amount of time it takes to recharge (particularly the ratio of time to charge v's driving time). That's one hell of a flaw, and one which quite rightly puts people off EV's.
As I said above, it's a flaw in the same way a bike can't float over the ocean. It doesn't matter for everyday use. Most of the time people won't even run the battery halfway down.
Perhaps Tesla should withdraw the lawsuit and invest the money they would have wasted on trying to solve that problem, instead?
Fast charging is an engineering problem that will be very difficult to figure out. Tesla is a car company, not a battery company. I suspect the lawsuit is just to get in the headlines anyway.
So what is your point, exactly?
Alright then, I'll explain it as best as I am able. My point is that the Tesla may be bad for long ranges, but that is irrelevant for the most part as long range driving is not necessary for your everyday, average use. As for being used as a supercar, the great great great etc. grandparent post
shows pretty well that the Tesla has comparable "mileage", as it were, to cars that would go on a track. It's only flaw is its inability to refuel quickly, but that could be solved by swapping out to the backup car and changing batteries while one is out on the track.
I'd argue that people have 2.28 cars because they have 2 adults and one child over 16, all of whom must use their cars in parallel
Valid, and probably true.
(thus diminishing or destroying the theoretical benefit of having one electric and one gas powered car)
Not true. No matter how you cut it, it's still one less gas car on the roads that is fit for daily use. It's still a net gain. And what are the odds that both (or more) family members are going to need each of the individual cars at the same time for a long-distance road trip? I'd imagine that if you're going that far, you're either going by yourself or with your whole family.
but then I'd be playing into your completely tangential argument that doesn't have shit to do with this case specifically pertaining to Top Gear and the usefulness of the Tesla as a "super car".
You're projecting a bit, aren't you? You're right in that my argument has nothing to do with the usefulness of the Tesla as a super car. It is, however, entirely relevant to your post, which I'll quote below and break down from there.
During the review, Clarkson mentions that a trip from the south of England to the north of Scotland (a realistic trip for an Englishman) would take over 72 hours if you had to charge from a wall socket. The trip itself is ~12 hrs at most if you don't have to stop, but because it's over 700 miles, you have to charge it at least 4 times, taking ~16 hrs from a wall socket (as there are no fancy charging stations along the route, and even then you're still talking about many hours per charge). This is using Tesla's value of 200 miles per charge. Even if a gas powered car could only go 60 miles per tank, it'd still finish in ~16 hrs, including time taken to find a gas station off the main road and fill up eleven times.
You're the one who brought up how it was impractical for long-distance trips, but long distance trips are not what most electric cars on the market are suited for. Saying that an electric car is bad for long distance trips is like saying a bicycle is bad for crossing the ocean or an airplane is useless for space travel.
And that is the main thrust of their problem with the car. One which Tesla simply has no defense for.
You're quite right. Tesla has no adequate defense for their car's inability to go long ranges, just as a bicycle company has no defense for their inability to cross large bodies of water and an airplane company has no defense for not being able to break orbit without stalling.
I do not liken shooting, injuring, or - if it cannot be prevented - killing someone who breaks into my home as vigilantism; I consider it the basic principle of self-defense.
Legally, they'd be liable for SMS fees at the worst I imagine.
I'm pretty sure in a lot of jurisdictions you can't sue someone for what happened to you when you did something illegal (but I may be wrong). It falls to common sense. If you get shot breaking into someone's home, can you have them arrested for shooting you? Sadly, in more than a few states in the U.S. this can actually happen, as ridiculous as it is. I'd imagine, though, that if you asked anyone if they thought this was right they'd say no.
Yeah, okay. The Tesla would be horrible if you're going to do a road trip in excess of its range. You're right, Tesla has no defense for that.
The thing is, you just don't need that sort of range for everyday use. According to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, the average American travels only 29 miles a day. Even at the 55 mile range, that's almost twice as much as is needed.
One of my good friends (and a lot of his friends) are really, really into cars. He's barely 30 and he's been through almost 20 cars - buying, building, rebuilding, tuning, trading, etc. At any one point, he has always owned two cars. No racer or car enthusiast worth their salt would take a drift car, rally car, or racing car out on the street for every day use. Hell, on a drift car alone, you have (expensive) custom suspension work, high quality tires, and perhaps even a custom ECU. Right now, my buddy owns a Skyline R32 and a '86 Corolla. The R32 is on the road maybe an hour a week at most. The '86 is his Daily (the term they use for their everyday use cars).
Would it be a good idea to take a Viper or a Ferrari grocery shopping? Come on now.
Electric cars will not be the be-all, end-all for at least 10 years. However, they will make fantastic daily cars. If you want to take a long-term trip, then you could rent or borrow a regular gasoline-powered vehicle. Actually, that might not even be necessary, considering a study shows that the average American household owns 2.28 cars. You could very easily have one electric and one gasoline car and you'd still be doing a lot to help the environment.
How many road trips or long car drives have involved both cars the average family owns? Typically they'd take the minivan or van or what have you for maximum passenger capacity and cargo storage. Ditto on grocery shopping.
If Tesla had the money to advertise, I think perhaps they should go with an appeal to the facts. After all I've said here, can anyone give me a good reason why owning an electric car with at least a 50 mile range on a day's charge would be a bad idea?
It's not really incompetent engineering IMO. Most of the stuff at the plant was built 30-40 years ago. For its time I imagine the engineering to be very sound.
If you cleared all the regulatory hurdles to building a nuclear power plant and started construction today, you'd be done in 5 years at the fastest. By that time, all of the engineering involved in the plant will, unsurprisingly, be outdated by five years.
I wonder if there's a way to crowdsource conceptual ideas. You start with a basic question like "How do we do this"? and then go from there. If someone asked me what I'd put in such a plant, I'd probably have the radiation-hardened robots placed in strategic locations with Roomba-style chargers.
If sanctions were applied against Israel to the point where military intervention were necessary, America wouldn't get involved. The Middle East would launch, at best, some half-assed coalition mission. Russia, China, India, etc. - all the big, economically powerful Eurasian countries with competent militaries - wouldn't get involved unless it was somehow in their long-term interest. That leaves Europe, who would debate things for five years at the very least. By that time, the situation will either have gotten much worse or blown over altogether.
Might absolutely makes right. You can't argue your point of view if you're dead.
Wow, what a supremely asinine attitude. "It's happened before, so why not let it happen again?"
Have you ever heard the phrase "two wrongs don't make a right"? How about "The pot calling the kettle black?"
I didn't say "let it happen again". Land changes hands many, many times every year. It might not be written up on an "official" map, but the guys with the guns and the tanks are the ones in charge on whatever particular parcel they happen to be sitting on.
It is really not such a inconceivable moral demand of humanity that it recognize the ethical invalidity of imperialism and upholding the right of the strong to prey upon the weak. And like all ethical maxims according to which society is carried out, it indeed may not be possible that all nations and peoples act at all times according to these maxims. We can, however, avoid actively sponsoring such violations, and bathing its cause in misappropriated guilt money.
That's an extremely idealistic view of the world.
I'd really, really like things to be this way, truly. I'd love it if the U.N. actually did one of its jobs and prevented disputes of this nature.
However, just like real life it's all about who you know. Israel will have to do something majorly stupid and/or horrible for the U.N. (or anyone else halfway militarily competent) to take action against them. Why? Because of the U.S. Israel does something stupid, someone invades Israel, and the U.S. airstrikes the living piss out of whatever poor, dumb bastard went into the holy land.
The maintenance of some kind of "moral consistency" is a pretty piss poor reason to abandon the right treatment of people, and the same goes for any fatalist "law-of-the-jungle" rhetorics which uphold such despicable conduct by those who claim to be the more right behaving members of the species.
I think we could both agree that the treatment of a lot of people in this world has been getting better. The civil rights front alone has made leaps and bounds in the last 50 years in America and the rest of the industrialized world. 50 years from now, our kids and grandkids will crack jokes about how backwards our (and our parents) generations were about LGBT people.
I do believe in equality and fairness. I think we should have five or six hundred fewer military bases than we (The United States) have. (We have over 700 bases around the world.) I think we should be out of Iraq and Afghanistan by Janurary 2012, that it's entirely doable, and that we shouldn't be messing in those countries at all. We shouldn't be messing in any other countries but our own, period.
However, I am also a practical person. All your ideals in the world don't count for shit if you can't defend yourself. Law of the Jungle absolutely applies today and will probably apply for hundreds of years. It's detestable to a degree, but that's the way things work. It's very Darwinian.
The U.S. couldn't give two shits about spreading democracy. We're not it in for spreading democracy. We're spreading "democracy" (READ: explosives dropped from huge planes several miles in the air) in countries that have things we want. I believe we're building four military bases in Iraq right now. Why are we building military bases in Iraq if the current stated mission is to be pulling soldiers out of there? Because we're going to be staying in that country for a very, very long time. We need oil, the country has oil, and its neighbors have oil. It will keep it flowing from Iraq and any other counties within airstrike range of Iraq.
Until corruption in government is severely beaten down and we get actual idealists who believe in the mission - pretty much, people like you - in charge, the gubmint will always kowtow to corporate interests. We'll always have unjust laws that favor the profits of a business over the rights of an i
Why? Really, why does being born somewhere somehow make you more righteous in your cause?
On the one hand, I agree. I do think pretty much all recreational drugs should be legalized. It would put an end to a lot of crime, for one thing. That's how you win the war on drugs - by legalizing them.
On the other hand, knowing our luck, Monsanto will come up with High THC Weed Syrup, put out an inferior product that is ten times more harmful than the natural thing, and sue the pants off of anyone who's infringing on their patented genes. =/
Damn, Sony puts parts in Apple products? Now that's one more to add to my list of reasons not to buy from Apple:
1) I play a lot of games that aren't on OSX.
2) I don't have the kind of money to spend on Macs.
3) Sony supplies parts to Apple.
4) I look good in black, but I don't look good in turtlenecks. And I hate jeans.
It's great, isn't it? It's speech recognition software for people who use sign language.
I don't particularly like a lot of things Israel does, nor do I particularly like a lot of things anyone in their general neighborhood does. Even so, the Palestinians got their land taken.
So?
This is "How the World Works 101". Damn near every country in the world has both taken land and had land taken from it. Every. Country. Why is Palestine so special? Because it happened in the last 100 years?
How come nobody's crying over Hawaii (psst, we straight up stole an entire country, albeit a small one.) The Russians pretty much stole a chunk of Georgia (South Ossetia). I don't see anyone crying over the fact that the Kingdom of Prussia isn't around anymore. And on and on and on it goes.
Please mod this comment [cardinal direction]
Will do, as soon as I figure out how to mod you "East".
Pfft, amateur. You think that's old school? You should check out the Depression Games museum in Montgomery, Alabama. They have ORIGINAL hoop and stick, kick the can (including both the original can AND the original sense of shame!), and a stickball stick that was once used by Joe Dimaggio (as a broom)!
Unfortunately for the scientists at Sao Paolo State University, there's thousands of years of research in the opposing field of study.
Hurm, I heard about that guy from my Archaeology teacher across campus. Mr. Jones thought he was a dick.
I'd be with you on the whole "change economic forces" thing, except it would be really hard to convince a business to move from a place where they have 10,000 potential customers within a quarter mile to somewhere where they have a thousand potential customers within 10 miles.
Also of note, I didn't say that the gubmint would plan the cities, just that they'd fund the planning. There's probably a lot of people in the architecture and city planning fields that are getting sick of making the same decisions over and over again, designing the same cookie-cutter houses. This would give small firms and people who want to be a little more creative the chance to flex their muscles. (Honestly, you only have so much room to work with within a city.)
Out of curiosity, why is my heart in the wrong place? Ultimately, I'd want to get people out of the huge cities and into smaller, tighter-knit communites. I've just presented an (admittedly shallow and brief) idea of how it could be accomplished.
Without getting into all the intricacies of it, isn't proofreading basically just reading something and pointing out mistakes and potential improvements?
We did the same thing back in primary school. Write a short paragraph, then pass it to the person to your left and have them read it over. Even if you think you made no mistakes, all it usually takes is a different point of view or three to actually catch them. Ditto on providing creative advice on changes/additions that can be made.
I would go as far to say that anyone who is competent enough to write a book is also competent enough to proofread effectively - they just can't do it for themselves as well due to the bias from reading their own work.
10 years is far, far too long. Don't movies usually make 90% of their money in theaters like in the first 4-6 weeks after release and the same time period for DVD release?
20 or even 10 years ago, I'd agree that 5 or 10 years makes sense. But now, the best tradeoff would probably be 1 or 2 years IMO.
Few people know this, but "Georgia on my Mind" is actually a song about heat exhaustion.
Aside from the underlying theories, most of that stuff boils down to learning a handful of formulas and knowing when to apply them. It would be challenging to say the least for an average person, but, ya know, genius...
Let us have more rule of law and less rule of men, yes?
Laws are written by men. Rule of law is just rule of men by proxy.
Can't be, they said "cultured life". Unless they're talking about one of the cast's STD tests...