Sure, but you can't possibly get to see something like the Pillars of Creation without equipment, no matter where you go.
First of all the structure is too large to see up close. That'd be like trying to figure out the shape of an ocean by standing on one shore. And it's probably close to impossible for our eyes to see space dust. We'd need to have it blocking some light source, and then we're back to trying to deduce the shape of something that is so massive.
And even then - how in the world does a space ship not count as equipment? If we can use space ships to aid in our observations, why not telescopes? Telescopes are a hell of a lot easier to build, so if anything they're lower tech.
but it's not what you would see if you were positioned to look without equipment.
What's your point? If we didn't have equipment, we couldn't see the rings around Saturn. We couldn't see Uranus let alone Neptune.
Once you accept that we can use equipment to see things that are beyond the ability of our naked eye, you'd be an idiot to limit said equipment to our eyes' limited range of the electromagnetic spectrum.
This, of course, leaves us with a dilemma - how do we visualize something that we cannot see with our naked eye? If we just display pictures using the actual wavelengths, we can't see anything. So we use false colours.
With a high cost of PII, there is now an economic incentive for companies to actually give a rats ass. It's the same kind of incentive that is used to make sure companies don't just dump toxic chemicals in kindergarten sandboxes.
If there were other intelligent races, far advance of us, but with our innate bloodthirstiness and violent tendencies, we would dead
Not necessarily.
If C turns out to be a hard limit, a race that reached that ability 50,000 years ago could still have a 25,000 year journey ahead of them, before they stumble upon Earth. The universe is fucking huge. If they reached that ability a million years ago, they could have waltzed past Earth before we were barely even Homo anything, decided that Earth doesn't fit their needs (maybe too much water or oxygen or they didn't like the microbiology) and moved on.
Hell, they could have reached that ability a billion years ago, and we'd have no possible way of knowing it.
Offtopic: Congratulations with your son, and I hope the climate, in a decad, will indeed allow skating on the canals...
The way things are going, I think you should be more worried about you having any canals left and won't instead be saddled with some huge lakes.
Unless you guys decide to forego the dykes and instead work towards making the country rise on hydraulic legs, so you can roam the world and settle somewhere nice;)
Better losing billions with no flights and than one crashing flight.
Sure, but look at it from the perspective of the airlines.
If an Airline like Virgin handles say 10% of the flights in Europe, then there's only a 10% chance that they'll be the ones suffering the crash and lost revenue, but with the flight ban, there's a 100% chance they'll lose revenue.
And as an added bonus, in all cases they get to drum up public support for their position: 1) They crash: "This is because the government said it was safe for us to fly in these levels! We are of course terribly upset about this terrible terrible tragedy; a tragedy that wouldn't have happened, if the government had pulled its head out of its arse and conducted proper testing years ago!" 2) Other airline crash: "This is because the government said it was safe to fly in these levels. We warned them about it! We are of course terribly upset about this terrible terrible tragedy; a tragedy that wouldn't have happened, if the government had pulled its head out of its arse and conducted proper testing years ago!" 3) Ban: "This is because the government is over reacting, it's perfectly safe to fly, and we can just move our planes around the clouds.
Neither do phones really. When's the last time you saw a cell phone that ONLY did phone calls and text messages?
Even the ones I have that don't have a camera have a contact book (semi-phone related), calendar (not phone related), a couple of games, and an alarm clock.
The Earth has 361,132,000 km^2 of water. The Sahara is over 9,000,000 km^2
So, if we want to drop the sea level by a foot, we need to siphon off 110,073.034 km^3. To do that, we need to lower the entire Sahara to 12.2 meters below sea level. Probably 12.5 meters to get the sea to fall that extra foot.
Good idea, but where exactly are we going to put those 110,000 km^3 of material? We can't dump it into the ocean for obvious reasons. Also, those 110,000 km^3 are just the stuff you need do dig away, once we've made the entire Sahara flat and given it a height of 0 meters.
Every meter of average height of the desert, adds another 9,000 km^3 of material to haul away.
To put that into perspective - if we build an equilateral square pyramid with a volume of 110,000 km^3, its surface area would be 77 km on each side (6,016 km^2) and would be 54,848 meters tall.
Sure, it might lower the sea level by a foot, and it would certainly keep a lot people employed for the foreseeable future, and I suppose a 54,848 meter tall pyramid on the equator would make for a great launch pad into space... but at the same time I don't see that any government or company would ever want to sponsor this kind of project.
Oh, and just for kicks. Suppose we only wanted to move this mountain of material one meter. How much energy would be required? Assuming that instead of a mix of sand and bed rock it's actually water, we now have to move 1.1 × 10^17 kg 1 meter. This works out as 1.08 exa-joules. In 2008 the entire world used 474 exa joules. Even if we used all the the energy avaialble to us in 2008, we could only move this mass less than half a kilometer.
So... in theory it might be possible to do this, but it's also theoretically possible to dig a tunnel all the way through the Earth. But the practicalities of both of these ideas are quite bitchy.
France was a Major Power in May 1940, and before the end of June it had surrendered.
To be fair, that would have happened to any of the world powers at the time, provided that the areas attacked weren't too large.
First of all, Germany had built up a huge war machine. Secondly they rewrote the rulebook on how you manage an offensive war. They didn't stop for anything, including supplies. It wasn't called Blitzkrieg (lightning war) for nothing. Thirdly, the German army at the time was at a pretty significant technological advantage. Their armoured units were top notch, as were their air force and I'm guessing their infantry were similarly equipped.
Could they have taken the US with a similar tactic in 1940? Unlikely, because the US is a massive area. But I'd be surprised if they couldn't have taken the states from New York to Virginia or North Carolina. That would cripple the US leadership. Establish a foothold, take control of local industries to aid in building more military hardware and supplies and settle in for a long war. Then you move over to Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Michigan to gain even more industry as well as food supplies.
Could they have taken USSR, if they had started there, instead of taking on everyone? Again, a little doubtful for the same reasons, but notice just how far they DID get. That was done while they had to fend off the Allies on the western front as well. And if they had consolidated their takings instead of constantly pressing forward, they wouldn't have had such vulnerable supply lines, they wouldn't have had to try to advance in winter time on open plains etc.
Pointing fingers at France because they were conquered in less than a month is a bit like laughing at a random fat guy because he got the snot beaten out of him when he stepped into the ring against Mike Tyson.
Can you tell the difference between a 300dpi printed sheet of paper, and a 1200dpi glossy magazine page?
First of all, it's a fucking pain in the ass, when you start part of your sentence in the title and don't copy it into the actual text.
Secondly - that's a faulty comparison. You might as well ask if people can tell the difference between a box and a circle. The two aren't equal.
The interesting thing is if you can tell the difference between text that is printed at 72, 96, 150, 300, 600 and 1200 DPI on the same printer. Yes, most people can in fact tell them apart, even if you use a font and document type, that allows for perfect scaling.
But comparing different mediums and then claiming that the stuff printed on one of them is better is a rubbish comparison. There's a reason magazines tend to be printed on glossy paper.
Since about Windows 2000, I've had the taskbar on the left side of the screen. And with your comment, I just checked, and now I have my row of tabs on the right hand side of my monitor (Opera). It's a bit strange to get used to, but it's cool. And now I get previews of the pages as well. Since I don't use the address or search bar, I've already hidden that, so now I only have the application title bar (with the close etc. buttons) taking up vertical estate. And Opera allows you to hide the menu bar as well, which is a bit odd to get used to, but they've made it easy to show it when needed (like changing certain view functions).
Maybe not everyone, but I wouldn't mind having a 640k p monitor. I probably wouldn't want to PAY for one. Or lug it around. But really, 1,137,780x640,000 would be somewhat cool.
People with less than perfect vision find modern screens with high DPI tough to read - and frustratingly, the only fix that works with everything is running at non-native resolution.
Factually incorrect. SOME people with less than perfect vision, certainly. But I have -3.75 on both eyes, and I have no issue even when using my old -3.25 glasses.
That it's an issue with the DPI is also a myth. All that does is allow you to put in more detail. If the UI or windowing system doesn't allow adding more detail, that's not a problem with the monitor - it's a problem with the windowing system.
Hell, in Opera on Windows I can take off my glasses and still read the text without having to move my head - I "just" need to change the zoom level to 1,000% (!) and fit the page to the width of the page. I can't make out the dot of an i perfectly, but I can read everything just fine, and I can tell the difference between a comma (,) and a period (.) as well as a colon (:) and semi-colon (;), even though the : and . have a sort of optical bleed illusion that makes it look a bit elongated.
Granted, I can only just sort of make out the hint of icons in the notification area (they're just blobs of colour), but the text on the page is readable. Slightly blurry (again, my eyes are quite bad), but readable without eye strain or anything like that. And in case you're wondering, I can see this many characters in the text area: 12345678901234 iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii
So allow me to dispel your misconception about people with bad eye sight. High DPI isn't an issue. Bad windowing systems and UIs are.
20 years and 364 days old, you're too young to drink, it's illegal, and there are sanctions. 20 years and 365 days -- 21 years old, and it's perfectly legal.
UNLESS it's a leapyear AND it's later than February 28th.
If you were born on June 17th 1987, you would be 20 year and 365 days old on the 16th of June 2008 - but you wouldn't be 21 until June 17th.
Even if the SCUS comes down in favour if the prosecutor being immune, doesn't mean it will continue to be so. It is entirely possible for the states and federal governments to enact laws that makes this illegal and sets up jail time for the knowing parties involved (would be a nice sense of justice, if it was the same amount of jail time as their dealings created - to be served consecutively for multiple offences of course).
Even if the SCUS says that it would be unconstitutional, it can still be done - it "just" requires changing that bit of the constitution.
And drumming up political support isn't that hard. Just use attack ads, explaining how the politicians who plan to vote against it are in favour of a police state with no accountability for the crooked lawyers.
And while a lot of people tend to think that you must placate the middle class, the lower class and poor people not only outnumber them, but they are also more likely to be the ones facing this kind of miscarriage of justice.
You might be right about both of these things, but considering that the people I'm mocking think that Teletubbies are part of a gay agenda and that commercials for fruit juicecan make you gay, I think I'm allowed to read between the lines in their "holy book" when mocking them.
And to be honest, those people should really lighten up and not take the Bible seriously. It's just the Bible. It's not... Gospel! (Apologies to Dara Ó Briain)
Not only do they have to listen to people bitch (rightfully), but since they're likely running Windows XP + McAfee, they can't use their logging tools (meaning they have to do it by hand and then log later), can't get online updates when solutions are available etc.
But getting fined for getting injured? Never heard that one.
You can in Denmark.
For example: You work at a construction site. Your employer supplies you with plenty of hard hats (i.e. not 300 hard hats, 350 workers). You get a head injury while not wearing the helmet. You will face a 1,000 DKK (180 US$) fine, your employer will face a 10,000 DKK (1,800 US$) fine.
It makes sense as well, as some people will probably just shrug their shoulders at a rule saying you must wear a hard hat to go from the portapotty to the break room, but if they're facing a day wage (after taxes) fine for not doing it, they're more likely to do so.
You don't even have to be injured to get the fine. There are unannounced inspections of work places, and if you're caught violating the law, you will be fined as will your employer.
And Jesus went 33 years without having a wife, probably without having sex with a woman (extramarital sex) despite hanging out with a prostitute (Mary Magdalene). Instead he opted to hang out with 12 sailors, even though he knew he'd be thrown in jail the next day and killed a few days later. Obviously he was gay.
I'm not pointing fingers, but isn't it strange that you have people idolizing Jesus, when at the same time they run around screaming bloody murder at gay people?
Re:Conclusions from googling..
on
Volcano Futures
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· Score: 1
- Possibility that propellor planes and helicopters are safer
As someone else said, once you go above a few seats, propeller aeroplanes tend to be turbo-prop, and would likely suffer the same problems as the regular jet engines.
And I think most helicopters use gas turbine engines, and would likely suffer from the same engine issues.
Re:Why can't we do better? Are you fucking kidding
on
Volcano Futures
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· Score: 1
It may seem cool to be stuck in Europe, but in actuality it's not.
The stuff you mention has nothing to do with Europe - it's a consequence of being stuck anywhere in the world.
Europe might be more expensive than being stuck in some 3rd world country, but I suspect it's just as expensive being stuck in the US or Japan.
The "Simple Way" is usually the wrong way when dealing with complex systems.
As it happens a car is a fairly complex system. Once you take turbo chargers, super chargers, fuel injectors, gearing, ESP, ABS, traction control etc into account, it's extremely complex and does stuff you cannot possibly achieve on your own. But they still have a very simple interface. Gear lever (unless it's an automatic), steering wheel, gas pedal, brake pedal, clutch (unless it's an automatic), and each of them serve a very simple purpose.
Yet, we don't have to punch in a number every time we want to change gear, enter the exact angle for the steering wheel, set the gas or brake at certain percentages etc.
Mostly the reason the 'simple way' fails to work properly with complex systems is not because they're simple interfaces, but because the designer of the interface didn't do a good job.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, but you can't possibly get to see something like the Pillars of Creation without equipment, no matter where you go.
First of all the structure is too large to see up close. That'd be like trying to figure out the shape of an ocean by standing on one shore. And it's probably close to impossible for our eyes to see space dust. We'd need to have it blocking some light source, and then we're back to trying to deduce the shape of something that is so massive.
And even then - how in the world does a space ship not count as equipment? If we can use space ships to aid in our observations, why not telescopes? Telescopes are a hell of a lot easier to build, so if anything they're lower tech.
What's your point? If we didn't have equipment, we couldn't see the rings around Saturn. We couldn't see Uranus let alone Neptune.
Once you accept that we can use equipment to see things that are beyond the ability of our naked eye, you'd be an idiot to limit said equipment to our eyes' limited range of the electromagnetic spectrum.
This, of course, leaves us with a dilemma - how do we visualize something that we cannot see with our naked eye? If we just display pictures using the actual wavelengths, we can't see anything. So we use false colours.
Epic fail. Medium format isn't 35 mm. 35 mm is full frame, and smaller than medium format.
Even the cropped medium formats digitals are much larger than 35 mm (typically 36x24 mm) and starts at around 33x44 mm making it at least 68% larger.
What is so scary about this?
With a high cost of PII, there is now an economic incentive for companies to actually give a rats ass. It's the same kind of incentive that is used to make sure companies don't just dump toxic chemicals in kindergarten sandboxes.
Not necessarily.
If C turns out to be a hard limit, a race that reached that ability 50,000 years ago could still have a 25,000 year journey ahead of them, before they stumble upon Earth. The universe is fucking huge. If they reached that ability a million years ago, they could have waltzed past Earth before we were barely even Homo anything, decided that Earth doesn't fit their needs (maybe too much water or oxygen or they didn't like the microbiology) and moved on.
Hell, they could have reached that ability a billion years ago, and we'd have no possible way of knowing it.
The way things are going, I think you should be more worried about you having any canals left and won't instead be saddled with some huge lakes.
Unless you guys decide to forego the dykes and instead work towards making the country rise on hydraulic legs, so you can roam the world and settle somewhere nice ;)
Sure, but look at it from the perspective of the airlines.
If an Airline like Virgin handles say 10% of the flights in Europe, then there's only a 10% chance that they'll be the ones suffering the crash and lost revenue, but with the flight ban, there's a 100% chance they'll lose revenue.
And as an added bonus, in all cases they get to drum up public support for their position:
1) They crash: "This is because the government said it was safe for us to fly in these levels! We are of course terribly upset about this terrible terrible tragedy; a tragedy that wouldn't have happened, if the government had pulled its head out of its arse and conducted proper testing years ago!"
2) Other airline crash: "This is because the government said it was safe to fly in these levels. We warned them about it! We are of course terribly upset about this terrible terrible tragedy; a tragedy that wouldn't have happened, if the government had pulled its head out of its arse and conducted proper testing years ago!"
3) Ban: "This is because the government is over reacting, it's perfectly safe to fly, and we can just move our planes around the clouds.
See how easy it is?
3) The designer and/or programmer are of average skill or lower
Neither do phones really. When's the last time you saw a cell phone that ONLY did phone calls and text messages?
Even the ones I have that don't have a camera have a contact book (semi-phone related), calendar (not phone related), a couple of games, and an alarm clock.
The Earth has 361,132,000 km^2 of water.
The Sahara is over 9,000,000 km^2
So, if we want to drop the sea level by a foot, we need to siphon off 110,073.034 km^3. To do that, we need to lower the entire Sahara to 12.2 meters below sea level. Probably 12.5 meters to get the sea to fall that extra foot.
Good idea, but where exactly are we going to put those 110,000 km^3 of material? We can't dump it into the ocean for obvious reasons. Also, those 110,000 km^3 are just the stuff you need do dig away, once we've made the entire Sahara flat and given it a height of 0 meters.
Every meter of average height of the desert, adds another 9,000 km^3 of material to haul away.
To put that into perspective - if we build an equilateral square pyramid with a volume of 110,000 km^3, its surface area would be 77 km on each side (6,016 km^2) and would be 54,848 meters tall.
Sure, it might lower the sea level by a foot, and it would certainly keep a lot people employed for the foreseeable future, and I suppose a 54,848 meter tall pyramid on the equator would make for a great launch pad into space ... but at the same time I don't see that any government or company would ever want to sponsor this kind of project.
Oh, and just for kicks. Suppose we only wanted to move this mountain of material one meter. How much energy would be required? Assuming that instead of a mix of sand and bed rock it's actually water, we now have to move 1.1 × 10^17 kg 1 meter. This works out as 1.08 exa-joules. In 2008 the entire world used 474 exa joules. Even if we used all the the energy avaialble to us in 2008, we could only move this mass less than half a kilometer.
So ... in theory it might be possible to do this, but it's also theoretically possible to dig a tunnel all the way through the Earth. But the practicalities of both of these ideas are quite bitchy.
To be fair, that would have happened to any of the world powers at the time, provided that the areas attacked weren't too large.
First of all, Germany had built up a huge war machine.
Secondly they rewrote the rulebook on how you manage an offensive war. They didn't stop for anything, including supplies. It wasn't called Blitzkrieg (lightning war) for nothing.
Thirdly, the German army at the time was at a pretty significant technological advantage. Their armoured units were top notch, as were their air force and I'm guessing their infantry were similarly equipped.
Could they have taken the US with a similar tactic in 1940? Unlikely, because the US is a massive area. But I'd be surprised if they couldn't have taken the states from New York to Virginia or North Carolina. That would cripple the US leadership. Establish a foothold, take control of local industries to aid in building more military hardware and supplies and settle in for a long war. Then you move over to Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Michigan to gain even more industry as well as food supplies.
Could they have taken USSR, if they had started there, instead of taking on everyone? Again, a little doubtful for the same reasons, but notice just how far they DID get. That was done while they had to fend off the Allies on the western front as well. And if they had consolidated their takings instead of constantly pressing forward, they wouldn't have had such vulnerable supply lines, they wouldn't have had to try to advance in winter time on open plains etc.
Pointing fingers at France because they were conquered in less than a month is a bit like laughing at a random fat guy because he got the snot beaten out of him when he stepped into the ring against Mike Tyson.
First of all, it's a fucking pain in the ass, when you start part of your sentence in the title and don't copy it into the actual text.
Secondly - that's a faulty comparison. You might as well ask if people can tell the difference between a box and a circle. The two aren't equal.
The interesting thing is if you can tell the difference between text that is printed at 72, 96, 150, 300, 600 and 1200 DPI on the same printer. Yes, most people can in fact tell them apart, even if you use a font and document type, that allows for perfect scaling.
But comparing different mediums and then claiming that the stuff printed on one of them is better is a rubbish comparison. There's a reason magazines tend to be printed on glossy paper.
Sometimes I love suggestions like this.
Since about Windows 2000, I've had the taskbar on the left side of the screen. And with your comment, I just checked, and now I have my row of tabs on the right hand side of my monitor (Opera). It's a bit strange to get used to, but it's cool. And now I get previews of the pages as well. Since I don't use the address or search bar, I've already hidden that, so now I only have the application title bar (with the close etc. buttons) taking up vertical estate. And Opera allows you to hide the menu bar as well, which is a bit odd to get used to, but they've made it easy to show it when needed (like changing certain view functions).
Thanks! :D
Maybe not everyone, but I wouldn't mind having a 640k p monitor. I probably wouldn't want to PAY for one. Or lug it around. But really, 1,137,780x640,000 would be somewhat cool.
Factually incorrect. SOME people with less than perfect vision, certainly. But I have -3.75 on both eyes, and I have no issue even when using my old -3.25 glasses.
That it's an issue with the DPI is also a myth. All that does is allow you to put in more detail. If the UI or windowing system doesn't allow adding more detail, that's not a problem with the monitor - it's a problem with the windowing system.
Hell, in Opera on Windows I can take off my glasses and still read the text without having to move my head - I "just" need to change the zoom level to 1,000% (!) and fit the page to the width of the page. I can't make out the dot of an i perfectly, but I can read everything just fine, and I can tell the difference between a comma (,) and a period (.) as well as a colon (:) and semi-colon (;), even though the : and . have a sort of optical bleed illusion that makes it look a bit elongated.
Granted, I can only just sort of make out the hint of icons in the notification area (they're just blobs of colour), but the text on the page is readable. Slightly blurry (again, my eyes are quite bad), but readable without eye strain or anything like that.
And in case you're wondering, I can see this many characters in the text area:
12345678901234
iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii
So allow me to dispel your misconception about people with bad eye sight. High DPI isn't an issue. Bad windowing systems and UIs are.
UNLESS it's a leapyear AND it's later than February 28th.
If you were born on June 17th 1987, you would be 20 year and 365 days old on the 16th of June 2008 - but you wouldn't be 21 until June 17th.
Even if the SCUS comes down in favour if the prosecutor being immune, doesn't mean it will continue to be so. It is entirely possible for the states and federal governments to enact laws that makes this illegal and sets up jail time for the knowing parties involved (would be a nice sense of justice, if it was the same amount of jail time as their dealings created - to be served consecutively for multiple offences of course).
Even if the SCUS says that it would be unconstitutional, it can still be done - it "just" requires changing that bit of the constitution.
And drumming up political support isn't that hard. Just use attack ads, explaining how the politicians who plan to vote against it are in favour of a police state with no accountability for the crooked lawyers.
And while a lot of people tend to think that you must placate the middle class, the lower class and poor people not only outnumber them, but they are also more likely to be the ones facing this kind of miscarriage of justice.
You might be right about both of these things, but considering that the people I'm mocking think that Teletubbies are part of a gay agenda and that commercials for fruit juice can make you gay, I think I'm allowed to read between the lines in their "holy book" when mocking them.
And to be honest, those people should really lighten up and not take the Bible seriously. It's just the Bible. It's not ... Gospel! (Apologies to Dara Ó Briain)
Not only do they have to listen to people bitch (rightfully), but since they're likely running Windows XP + McAfee, they can't use their logging tools (meaning they have to do it by hand and then log later), can't get online updates when solutions are available etc.
You can in Denmark.
For example:
You work at a construction site. Your employer supplies you with plenty of hard hats (i.e. not 300 hard hats, 350 workers). You get a head injury while not wearing the helmet. You will face a 1,000 DKK (180 US$) fine, your employer will face a 10,000 DKK (1,800 US$) fine.
Citation from the Danish parliament's website (Google translation). There are other examples as well of course.
It makes sense as well, as some people will probably just shrug their shoulders at a rule saying you must wear a hard hat to go from the portapotty to the break room, but if they're facing a day wage (after taxes) fine for not doing it, they're more likely to do so.
You don't even have to be injured to get the fine. There are unannounced inspections of work places, and if you're caught violating the law, you will be fined as will your employer.
And Jesus went 33 years without having a wife, probably without having sex with a woman (extramarital sex) despite hanging out with a prostitute (Mary Magdalene). Instead he opted to hang out with 12 sailors, even though he knew he'd be thrown in jail the next day and killed a few days later. Obviously he was gay.
I'm not pointing fingers, but isn't it strange that you have people idolizing Jesus, when at the same time they run around screaming bloody murder at gay people?
Google also told me that the Earth is flat.
That's why sources are important.
As someone else said, once you go above a few seats, propeller aeroplanes tend to be turbo-prop, and would likely suffer the same problems as the regular jet engines.
And I think most helicopters use gas turbine engines, and would likely suffer from the same engine issues.
The stuff you mention has nothing to do with Europe - it's a consequence of being stuck anywhere in the world.
Europe might be more expensive than being stuck in some 3rd world country, but I suspect it's just as expensive being stuck in the US or Japan.
As it happens a car is a fairly complex system. Once you take turbo chargers, super chargers, fuel injectors, gearing, ESP, ABS, traction control etc into account, it's extremely complex and does stuff you cannot possibly achieve on your own. But they still have a very simple interface. Gear lever (unless it's an automatic), steering wheel, gas pedal, brake pedal, clutch (unless it's an automatic), and each of them serve a very simple purpose.
Yet, we don't have to punch in a number every time we want to change gear, enter the exact angle for the steering wheel, set the gas or brake at certain percentages etc.
Mostly the reason the 'simple way' fails to work properly with complex systems is not because they're simple interfaces, but because the designer of the interface didn't do a good job.