Since the energy expenditure squares each time the speed is doubled, you soon hit a wall where the energy efficiency drops well below an aircraft.
I think you meant to say, the energy expenditure is proportional to the square of the speed, which is not at all the same thing. But regardless, airplanes are subject to the same rule, they just have a lower constant because of the lower air density. And considering that airplanes have to use inefficient reaction engines whereas trains can use the entire mass of the Earth as reaction mass, it's a big win.
Since we're talking about the early 80s here, I meant any Personal Computer, not just International Business Machines (and compatible) Personal Computers.
Although, thinking about it more, I'm not sure if they were late, per se, but they certainly weren't there before anybody else.
Yeah, they're getting on the search bandwagon late the same way they got on the PC bandwagon late, the office suite bandwagon, the browser bandwagon, the input devices bandwagon, the server OS bandwagon, and the gaming system bandwagon. Obviously they have to hope.
Many of them are. The problem I see is twofold. First, a child may end up seeing all schooling as being a special sort of jail and all authority as being idiots, which will probably hurt them a great deal once they get to university and this often isn't true. Second, a child will associate "learning" with school, and be turned off from enormous swaths of interesting, useful, and enjoyable material simply because it's mandatory in school. I agree that the lessons I cite are often correct, but they can be learned "too much".
You are aware that every single generation since the beginning of time has said the exact same thing about the next generation, right? And yet, somehow, life goes on.
In France there is also (nearly, it's possible but extremely rare to select a different language) mandatory to begin learning English at a young age. And yet, a good number of my students, who are around 14-16 and have been learning English for at least five years can barely hold a basic conversation about food or the weather. Starting early is good, but it's possible to screw up anything, even something that should be easy like teaching a foreign language to eager young children.
All of the best math professors I had at university no longer knew how to multiply numbers and had even forgotten basic algebra. They were still incredibly intelligent people with amazing math ability. Arithmetic has about as much to do with mathematics as carpentry has to do with physics. You will find people who don't know their multiplication tables in the lower, middle, and upper sections of every class.
The problem is that the smart kid who can do basic algebra while the rest of the class is still learning long division is still forced to sit in this utterly useless class and do this utterly useless homework, bored stiff, for hours every week. This teaches kids that school is is a strange sort of jail for children and that people in authority are total idiots, and this attitude takes a very long time to unlearn. If they are supposed to teach themselves, then you have to give them time to do it.
Why would you use BT for this? It's a small file, so you don't really get the benefit of bandwidth sharing. And it broadcasts the IP address of every downloader to anybody who cares to look, as opposed to something like HTTP which will keep it all secret unless you sniff traffic or hack the box and steal the logs.
Stop being an ignorant jackhole and read the links I provided, would you? The caffeine in your coffee is extremely dilute. Plutonium at the same level of concentration would as harmless as the caffeine is. One of them involves basically the same contest you proposed, in fact, although it sadly never took place. Being afraid of something with no evidence to back the fear up and much evidence to dispel it is superstition.
If you truly think no one cares about traffic accidents
Please quote where I said that. Go ahead. It's not a very long post, it should be easy to find. I'll wait.
.
.
Anyway, let's forget about that spectacular display of uselessness and discuss your points. They're pretty much irrelevant, but we can make some comparisons anyway.
penalties for drunk driving have been steadily rising
Doesn't matter. Drunk people don't worry about jail when they decide whether they should call a taxi, and the punishment happens after the potential for death has passed. (That's how it should be, of course; putting people in jail for potential crimes is abhorrent, but that's exactly the way airline security works.)
age limits on drivers liscenses have increased by a good margin
And meanwhile age limits on who gets to be pulled aside for full-body searches in airports have been steadily widening. Yes, this is a very small improvement. No, it doesn't compare with being forced to submit to a guy with a metal detector wand just to get on a friggin' airplane.
and the driving tests have gotten enormously harder
I can't comment on this, I have no idea whether it's true or not. When I took the driving test in Wisconsin 1996, it was difficult not to pass. Worse, they exclusively tested your knowledge of basic things like parallel parking and city driving, and didn't test people's abilities at all in areas where fatalities can actually happen, like speeds above 25 miles per hour.
Also, safety standards in cars have been steadily increasing
Well, whoop de do. I never said otherwise.
Yes, cars have gotten safer. Yes, people care. It's obvious; traffic fatalities have remained level for something like forty years, whereas the population has doubled in that time. But that's not the point, which you apparently missed in your rabid zealotry to disprove a post that appears to disagree with your precious opinions. Let's compare cars and airplanes:
Driving: basic regulations to keep those who are totally incompetent off the road. Punishment for endangering others. Improving standards for vehicle safety. 0.88 fatalities per 100 million passenger miles, and 43,000 fatalities per year.
Flying: draconian security checks. People pawing through your personal items. Metal detectors. Wands. Pat-downs. Watch lists. Explosives sniffers. X-ray machines. Things like nail clippers prohibited. ID required just to be a passenger. Roughly 0.02 fatalities per 100 million passenger miles, and a number of fatalities per year that's so low that you can't even give a reasonable average yearly figure because it gets lost in the noise.
Are we really spending the 100 or 1000 times more effort to prevent automobile fatalities that the number of deaths would warrant?
In 2002, there were 42,815 traffic fatalities in the US. There was presumably a similar number of traffic fatalities in 2003, although I couldn't find the exact number. That's one death every twelve minutes. A September 11 every month. Why do we care so much about airplanes? What makes them so damned important that we can't stomach a single crash, while tens of thousands of people die on the roads every year?
It's not at all surprising, it's just bad. And there's no reason to be fatalistic about it. Yes, the government is trying to restrict anonymous travel in the name of safety, but it's not succeeding and we should fight it!
especially when using risky modes of transit, such as trains or airplanes.
Come on, traveling by train or airplane is an order of magnitude safer than driving a car. If safety were a concern, rather than just trying to "Do something, anything at all, to stop terrorists!" then there would be a crackdown on cars; any jackass over 16 with a pulse who can sign his name can get a driver's license, and there's absolutely nothing in place to stop somebody who got totally smashed at a bar from trying to drive sixty miles home.
That is completely meaningless. With the right compression algorithm and the right data set, you can get any level of compression you like, but I don't see anybody actually advertising million-to one compression ratios. It is bogus, precisely because it depends on the data set.
I doubt if this is clueless marketing. I'm sure Iomega's marketing department knows exactly how this technology works and just how far they can exaggerate their device's capacity by referring to bogus compression numbers before they gets smacked by truth-in-advertising laws.
This is going to be heavily oversubscribed. Most people won't use anywhere close to 1GB of storage, so they don't need to provide a theoretical maximum. I really doubt if Hotmail actually has enough storage to store the maximum amount of data for every account they have either.
No. I prefer a sequence like; click on System Preferences, then Sharing, then click the box next to "Web Server" or "Windows File Sharing" or whatever it is you want to enable or disable.
I would hope that a company's debt to me would be expressed entirely in the salary and benefits that they give me. If it's not, that means I'm being underpaid!
The trend throughout history is to replace human labor. First it was animals, then water power, then steam, electricity, robotics, etc. etc. The entire history of the industrial revolution is that of replacing jobs with automation. And yet, people are better off and wealthier than ever before, and unemployment is no worse than at any other point in history (better than most, really).
I don't see anything qualitatively different about now compared with 1950, 1900, 1800, 1700, etc. so I don't see why the trend would change. Yes, people will lose their jobs, they'll have to find something else to do, etc. Live sucks, then you die.
Currently there isn't enough awareness of viruses because they don't do that much harm to the people who get infected. The network admins know about it, of course, and they go around lecturing and threatening people, but it's all way too abstract.
In order to show people the problem, I propose a vaccine virus:
It would spread using many different methods, but in the quietest way possible. Use e-mail attachments, buffer overflow exploits, everything that's being done, but keep it quiet. Don't scan a thousand machines a minute, or send out millions of e-mails. Make the e-mails look like other virus e-mails, scan slowly, etc. The idea is to get onto as many machines as possible before triggering. Once it triggers, wreak as much havoc as possible on the infected machines. Delete files, overwrite them to be sure. Target document files before OS files. Hit network shares. Wipe out partition maps. Trash the BIOS if you can.
It would be a pretty terrible virus, but I bet people would get serious about prevention after the dust settled. But is the cure worse than the disease?
(Disclaimer: I'm not actually advocating this! Please don't take me to jail. It's just some food for thought.)
I had an Airport base station die on me last summer because of a design flaw in the power supply. The thing was almost three years out of warranty. Called Apple, and they Airborne Expressed me a refurb'd replacement the next day, and told me to use the box it came in to ship the old one back to them, at no cost to me. Way cool.
First, they still sell black and white portable computers today, they've just shrunk; before they were 5-pound portables, now they're quarter-pound Palms.
Second, battery life, both for portable phones and portable computers, has been on the increase, not the decrease. My portable computer from the mid-90s (black and white, even) was lucky to get two hours. My giant, power-sucking G4 with a full-color 3D-accelerated screen is unlucky to get three hours; I can get five hours on light use. My girlfriend's full-color-screen, MIDI-playing, Java-gamed cell phone lasts for four days between charges. I see no reason for this trend to reverse; indeed, people tend to value battery life extremely highly, and so manufacturers value it accordingly highly.
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Since the energy expenditure squares each time the speed is doubled, you soon hit a wall where the energy efficiency drops well below an aircraft.
I think you meant to say, the energy expenditure is proportional to the square of the speed, which is not at all the same thing. But regardless, airplanes are subject to the same rule, they just have a lower constant because of the lower air density. And considering that airplanes have to use inefficient reaction engines whereas trains can use the entire mass of the Earth as reaction mass, it's a big win.
Since we're talking about the early 80s here, I meant any Personal Computer, not just International Business Machines (and compatible) Personal Computers.
Although, thinking about it more, I'm not sure if they were late, per se, but they certainly weren't there before anybody else.
Yeah, they're getting on the search bandwagon late the same way they got on the PC bandwagon late, the office suite bandwagon, the browser bandwagon, the input devices bandwagon, the server OS bandwagon, and the gaming system bandwagon. Obviously they have to hope.
Many of them are. The problem I see is twofold. First, a child may end up seeing all schooling as being a special sort of jail and all authority as being idiots, which will probably hurt them a great deal once they get to university and this often isn't true. Second, a child will associate "learning" with school, and be turned off from enormous swaths of interesting, useful, and enjoyable material simply because it's mandatory in school. I agree that the lessons I cite are often correct, but they can be learned "too much".
You are aware that every single generation since the beginning of time has said the exact same thing about the next generation, right? And yet, somehow, life goes on.
In France there is also (nearly, it's possible but extremely rare to select a different language) mandatory to begin learning English at a young age. And yet, a good number of my students, who are around 14-16 and have been learning English for at least five years can barely hold a basic conversation about food or the weather. Starting early is good, but it's possible to screw up anything, even something that should be easy like teaching a foreign language to eager young children.
All of the best math professors I had at university no longer knew how to multiply numbers and had even forgotten basic algebra. They were still incredibly intelligent people with amazing math ability. Arithmetic has about as much to do with mathematics as carpentry has to do with physics. You will find people who don't know their multiplication tables in the lower, middle, and upper sections of every class.
The problem is that the smart kid who can do basic algebra while the rest of the class is still learning long division is still forced to sit in this utterly useless class and do this utterly useless homework, bored stiff, for hours every week. This teaches kids that school is is a strange sort of jail for children and that people in authority are total idiots, and this attitude takes a very long time to unlearn. If they are supposed to teach themselves, then you have to give them time to do it.
Why would you use BT for this? It's a small file, so you don't really get the benefit of bandwidth sharing. And it broadcasts the IP address of every downloader to anybody who cares to look, as opposed to something like HTTP which will keep it all secret unless you sniff traffic or hack the box and steal the logs.
Internet for news.
Books for entertainment.
Brain for opinions.
Stop being an ignorant jackhole and read the links I provided, would you? The caffeine in your coffee is extremely dilute. Plutonium at the same level of concentration would as harmless as the caffeine is. One of them involves basically the same contest you proposed, in fact, although it sadly never took place. Being afraid of something with no evidence to back the fear up and much evidence to dispel it is superstition.
Asinine is defined as "Utterly stupid or silly." Doesn't that disqualify true statements? Caffeine is more toxic than plutonium.
That doesn't really relate. Caffeine is more toxic than plutonium, but I don't see anyone claiming that caffeine is environmentally unsafe.
If you truly think no one cares about traffic accidents
Please quote where I said that. Go ahead. It's not a very long post, it should be easy to find. I'll wait.
.
.
Anyway, let's forget about that spectacular display of uselessness and discuss your points. They're pretty much irrelevant, but we can make some comparisons anyway.
penalties for drunk driving have been steadily rising
Doesn't matter. Drunk people don't worry about jail when they decide whether they should call a taxi, and the punishment happens after the potential for death has passed. (That's how it should be, of course; putting people in jail for potential crimes is abhorrent, but that's exactly the way airline security works.)
age limits on drivers liscenses have increased by a good margin
And meanwhile age limits on who gets to be pulled aside for full-body searches in airports have been steadily widening. Yes, this is a very small improvement. No, it doesn't compare with being forced to submit to a guy with a metal detector wand just to get on a friggin' airplane.
and the driving tests have gotten enormously harder
I can't comment on this, I have no idea whether it's true or not. When I took the driving test in Wisconsin 1996, it was difficult not to pass. Worse, they exclusively tested your knowledge of basic things like parallel parking and city driving, and didn't test people's abilities at all in areas where fatalities can actually happen, like speeds above 25 miles per hour.
Also, safety standards in cars have been steadily increasing
Well, whoop de do. I never said otherwise.
Yes, cars have gotten safer. Yes, people care. It's obvious; traffic fatalities have remained level for something like forty years, whereas the population has doubled in that time. But that's not the point, which you apparently missed in your rabid zealotry to disprove a post that appears to disagree with your precious opinions. Let's compare cars and airplanes:
Driving: basic regulations to keep those who are totally incompetent off the road. Punishment for endangering others. Improving standards for vehicle safety. 0.88 fatalities per 100 million passenger miles, and 43,000 fatalities per year.
Flying: draconian security checks. People pawing through your personal items. Metal detectors. Wands. Pat-downs. Watch lists. Explosives sniffers. X-ray machines. Things like nail clippers prohibited. ID required just to be a passenger. Roughly 0.02 fatalities per 100 million passenger miles, and a number of fatalities per year that's so low that you can't even give a reasonable average yearly figure because it gets lost in the noise.
Are we really spending the 100 or 1000 times more effort to prevent automobile fatalities that the number of deaths would warrant?
In 2002, there were 42,815 traffic fatalities in the US. There was presumably a similar number of traffic fatalities in 2003, although I couldn't find the exact number. That's one death every twelve minutes. A September 11 every month. Why do we care so much about airplanes? What makes them so damned important that we can't stomach a single crash, while tens of thousands of people die on the roads every year?
It's not at all surprising, it's just bad. And there's no reason to be fatalistic about it. Yes, the government is trying to restrict anonymous travel in the name of safety, but it's not succeeding and we should fight it!
especially when using risky modes of transit, such as trains or airplanes.
Come on, traveling by train or airplane is an order of magnitude safer than driving a car. If safety were a concern, rather than just trying to "Do something, anything at all, to stop terrorists!" then there would be a crackdown on cars; any jackass over 16 with a pulse who can sign his name can get a driver's license, and there's absolutely nothing in place to stop somebody who got totally smashed at a bar from trying to drive sixty miles home.
That is completely meaningless. With the right compression algorithm and the right data set, you can get any level of compression you like, but I don't see anybody actually advertising million-to one compression ratios. It is bogus, precisely because it depends on the data set.
I doubt if this is clueless marketing. I'm sure Iomega's marketing department knows exactly how this technology works and just how far they can exaggerate their device's capacity by referring to bogus compression numbers before they gets smacked by truth-in-advertising laws.
This is going to be heavily oversubscribed. Most people won't use anywhere close to 1GB of storage, so they don't need to provide a theoretical maximum. I really doubt if Hotmail actually has enough storage to store the maximum amount of data for every account they have either.
Easy enough?
No. I prefer a sequence like; click on System Preferences, then Sharing, then click the box next to "Web Server" or "Windows File Sharing" or whatever it is you want to enable or disable.
I would hope that a company's debt to me would be expressed entirely in the salary and benefits that they give me. If it's not, that means I'm being underpaid!
The trend throughout history is to replace human labor. First it was animals, then water power, then steam, electricity, robotics, etc. etc. The entire history of the industrial revolution is that of replacing jobs with automation. And yet, people are better off and wealthier than ever before, and unemployment is no worse than at any other point in history (better than most, really).
I don't see anything qualitatively different about now compared with 1950, 1900, 1800, 1700, etc. so I don't see why the trend would change. Yes, people will lose their jobs, they'll have to find something else to do, etc. Live sucks, then you die.
Currently there isn't enough awareness of viruses because they don't do that much harm to the people who get infected. The network admins know about it, of course, and they go around lecturing and threatening people, but it's all way too abstract.
In order to show people the problem, I propose a vaccine virus:
It would spread using many different methods, but in the quietest way possible. Use e-mail attachments, buffer overflow exploits, everything that's being done, but keep it quiet. Don't scan a thousand machines a minute, or send out millions of e-mails. Make the e-mails look like other virus e-mails, scan slowly, etc. The idea is to get onto as many machines as possible before triggering. Once it triggers, wreak as much havoc as possible on the infected machines. Delete files, overwrite them to be sure. Target document files before OS files. Hit network shares. Wipe out partition maps. Trash the BIOS if you can.
It would be a pretty terrible virus, but I bet people would get serious about prevention after the dust settled. But is the cure worse than the disease?
(Disclaimer: I'm not actually advocating this! Please don't take me to jail. It's just some food for thought.)
Apple can be good about that sort of thing.
I had an Airport base station die on me last summer because of a design flaw in the power supply. The thing was almost three years out of warranty. Called Apple, and they Airborne Expressed me a refurb'd replacement the next day, and told me to use the box it came in to ship the old one back to them, at no cost to me. Way cool.
Two points:
First, they still sell black and white portable computers today, they've just shrunk; before they were 5-pound portables, now they're quarter-pound Palms.
Second, battery life, both for portable phones and portable computers, has been on the increase, not the decrease. My portable computer from the mid-90s (black and white, even) was lucky to get two hours. My giant, power-sucking G4 with a full-color 3D-accelerated screen is unlucky to get three hours; I can get five hours on light use. My girlfriend's full-color-screen, MIDI-playing, Java-gamed cell phone lasts for four days between charges. I see no reason for this trend to reverse; indeed, people tend to value battery life extremely highly, and so manufacturers value it accordingly highly.