That chemical high only lasts about half an hour. For the record I go to work every day on the bike, in the rain and dark, and it's absolutely miserable. Most of the time I hope to be run over. I don't have any stamina, and I'm as fat and non-muscular as I've always been. There's nothing enjoyable about turning up to work soaked to the skin.
Well that sucks, I road six miles a day on my bike 5 days a week and lost about 30 pounds in 3 months or so.
Note the method used by the team in this video was to combine long range video data with more detailed short range data, this was needed just to correctly identify what sort of objects were in front of them. They had to use statistical analysis across two data sets taken at two (rather far) points in time just to tell the difference between the car going bump and a boulder showing up.
If the remaining distance is insufficient, you compare the outcomes of moving left, continuing straight and moving right and choose the best outcome in terms of energy remaining at time of impact (if any).
Wrong, you choose the best outcome based upon how it is going to effect others.
If the choice is either a near guaranteed death collision with the car in front, or running over onto a sidewalk and hitting a child, but with an almost guarantee that the passengers in the vehicle live, which do you choose?
What if the child on the sidewalk is a teenager, and there is a baby in the vehicle?
In a perfectly simulated world in which detailed information about all particles is known with absolute certainty, then yes, mathematics works out perfectly.
You throw stupid humans into the mix though, and things get a bit nuts.
Aside from all of this, humans have instincts; they can react really quickly to insanely complicated scenarios. Heck just think of the CPU power that was needed to keep a car on the road, how many tens of millions, if not tens of billions, of operations needed to be performed per second.
All to accomplish a task that the human mind does with ease.
I have seen computer physics simulations, walking robots are a great example, I believe Honda recently got their's to run. As slow as human babies are to develop, they are apparently easier to program! Admittedly, the major hurdle with walking robots was the development of the appropriate mathematics to solve the problem, and developing a truer understanding of the problem itself, once those were conquered, progress has been made quite steadily.
Also, I might add, physics simulations are really slow. And you would also need a computer that could react to events of such complexity, at incredible speeds. Obviously real time systems are capable of even faster reaction times than this, but the overall complexity of coordinating a real time system of this magnitude, this is not just some real time simulation running inside of Pefect Sphere physics land, the algorithms would have to handle the fact that their data is noisy.
You realize that imaging data collecting when the roads are icy would have problems with glare? Even more so, what about black ice? Where is the black ice at exactly? An experienced driver can feel it beneath their wheels, how about a computer?
When it is foggy out, data is even more sketchy. Heavy rain, humidity, wind, can disrupt the accuracy of sensor data. The fact that your data is being collected from an analog source (the real world), and then put into digital form, means that there is already some loss inherit in it, how much data loss can you tolerate?
Now run your physics simulation on that car skidding on the ice. How well does your simulator handle data of an iffy nature?
The human brain is designed to deal with incomplete, fragmented data, can your simulator handle it as well?
Can it handle it well enough to answer moral dilemas with enough certainty to satify the sue happy public?
If you say yes to all of this, now make such a complex system nearly bug proof. If it crashes, or has even a performance hiccup, even once, lives are going to be lost.
This is not a problem of the physics being done, we all know that the physics can be done, this is a problem of getting the physics done with corrupt tangled data.
I think that you go and teach people what all the alternatives are, give them the tools, then carefully explain, that not a single ONE of those tools has done jack to STOP the increasing prevalence of sexually transmitted diseases amongst the American population.
And if anything is unhealthy, it is this "I'm tired of fucking you now, I'm going to go get someone else" mentality that America has managed to develop.
AIDS is one of the easiest diseases in the world to prevent.
STOP FUCKING EVERYTHING IN SIGHT.
Get married OR in a long term stable relationship and DO NOT CHEAT.
The fact that blood transfusions are not the largest spreader of AIDS shows exactly how little control humans have over their instincts.
Reminds me of Asimov and Piers Anthony
on
Amazon Connect
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Issac Asimov had, and Piers Anthony still has, very detailed author's notes in their books, something that I have always loved. When reading them, I feel like I am joining up with a larger culture, there is no way I could possibly have attended the Hugo awards in the 1950s*, but from reading Asimov's writings about them, I sure felt like I was there.
Likewise with Piers Anthony, reading his books I also got to watch as his family grew up, be there when he moved from one house to another, and experience so many other things that drew me closer to the author.
Really these author's notes were the first sort of "blog", for all intents and purposes the authors are not some sort of famous celebrities (well outside of their circle of fans), and they live pretty typical lives. The only thing different is that they managed to convince their publisher to let stick a journal entry or two in an otherwise fictional book
Having read so much in Asimov's books about Spider Robinson being a young boy, I still have trouble reconciling the fact that he is in reality an old man!
*I think it was the 50s Hugos he wrote about, it has been awhile since I read his Hugo Awards series.
Naturally, the entire problem is compounded by the fact that the computers need to interface with humans, which has never really been their strong point.
Then again, a lot of problems are made almost trivial if the human element is removed. A simple example: network security is a cinch if you can count on there never being dishonest or malicious users!
Indeed, personal rapid transit is mathematically very simple to implement, and the network topology for it, while not exactly simple, is still far easier on a conceptual level than any of these DARPA entries!
Slowing down can at times be the worst response though, and slamming on the breaks even more so (though I would assume they would program computers to not do that!)
Most likely you are right, computers will be programmed as conservatively as possible to avoid lawsuits.
How depressing, legal council resolves a technical dilemma, there likely is a better solution.
What do you do when someone jams their way over into your lane, pushing you out, and you are already up against the edge? Under what conditions do you accelerate, decelerate?
On ice, there is suddenly a collision 50ft ahead, do you try to steer around it, slam on the breaks, coast to a stop? If you have to change lanes, to which lane?
Here comes the key question: How would the appropriate reaction vary based upon the distance of the accident in front of you and upon different road conditions?
Codifying human experience into a computer is a complex task, and at some point a huge switch statement just becomes too unwieldy. If the appropriate reaction is to swerve into the neighboring lane, but there happens to be a child running across a crosswalk there, what then?
You get to a point where a sacrifice must be made, and then how do you program the computer?
1. Running around in the pitch black at 5am in the freezing cold and rain isn't going to make you any happier.
Actually it may just.
Exercise releases a number of positive mood stimulating chemicals in the brain. I rode my bike every morning for years, rain or shine; the weather does not really make all that much of a difference once you really get into it. (That and, contrary to seemingly popular belief, humans do not melt in the rain!)
Also, the results of exercise can definitely make a person feel better!
I am not just talking about the benefits that come from having a positive body image (Nerd who make good money and are in shape are quite attractive to a fairly large portion of society), but also all the other benefits that come from an increase in stamina and overall healthiness. The extra stamina means you can get more done in a day, are less likely to feel that you have "wasted" a day, and all in all feel good about yourself. Having an overall healthy lifestyle leads to a lowered risk of getting sick (in the two years I biked every day, I only once got sick, and then it was only a minor affair that lasted a day or so), which also leads to an increase in productivity, which leads to yet another boost in self esteem.
Basically, after two years of work they have it going at 45MPH over rough uncharted terrain.
That is pretty darn good.
The best thing about it is, the system is capable of second guessing itself, that right there is the fundamental step that lead to success.
The flip side of all of this is, it is based on probability, and while in a desert the opportunities for accidents may be minimized, I wonder how well it will deal with unexpected random events, such as people who don't put on their turn signal when changing lanes.
CPU power and other hardware can always be scaled up to deal with increase speeds (indeed a major topic that the article deals with), the question is can the algorithms deal with truly unexpected input?
Of course one solution to this is to have all cars automated, then you do not have problems with fools not using their turn signal, as the cars would just wirelessly inform each other.
Bleck, then again, I have not yet seen a perfectly working wireless network stack, hopefully who ever they get to program the cars would be of a higher caliber than the idiots who program PCs and wireless routers/switches.
Tabbed browsing, broadband pipes fetching multiple streams of data at any one point in time, RSS collating possibly hundreds of site updates,
and I am supposed to stop all of that and more, so I can watch some person slowly pronounce some words?
Why? I am literate, I can read. If I wanted to watch TV I would go and watch TV, I love the web because it is mostly a textual medium, the density of data on it is much higher.
Occasionally Channel9 has SOME good video blogs, but even then that is only when I am very interested in something that the particular video is talking about, and even some of the Channel9 stuff that I am interested in, I do not watch the video for because I do not want to devote an entire half an hour of my life to watching some video that could be summarized in a few minutes worth of reading text.
True Libertarians also want to do away with all government research projects and educational funding.
All the cool stuff that came out of the MIT AI research lab? Would not have happened.
Many research universities (public and private) would have to make drastic cuts, and in all likely hood some grad student's project on "web searching" would never have gotten approval.
one was a Toshiba app that basically takes over the Microsoft power management suite with a far more complex and convoluted piece of software!
Now I hate craplets as much as anybody else does, but Toshiba's power management thing rocks.
Did you actually try using it? It basically gives a far more fine grained control over power settings, and it allows for easy switching of profiles in a far more powerful manner than the internal Windows stuff.
The Toshiba Power Management utilities will slowly ramp down your machine as the battery drains, in a way that you choose. The basic idea is that it is better to have a slower computer or a dimmer screen than it is to have no computer at all.
Also a monitor that slowly gets dimmer over time is far less irritating then just starting out with a dim monitor, oddly enough.
It works great, if you take your laptop fully charged up and take note of the total time that Windows says you have left, and then using Toshiba Power Saver, you keep using the machine, you will get a good deal more time out of the machine total.
This is because Windows estimates the rate of battery usage as being linear over the entire time you are using the PC, when in fact Toshiba makes your rate of battery usage actually decrease over time.
Also, Toshiba's consumer laptops come loaded with TONS of craplets, I think mine had something like 50 megs of free ram after all the crud was loaded. Even after removal they still left enough cruft around that the machine was slow.
Toshiba's business line of PCs tend to ship with some pretty darn nifty apps though, one of the cooler ones is (admittedly a clone of some nifty app I saw on/. awhile back!) a cute little wireless LAN radar app that includes wireless profiles (something most Linux machines come with and that Windows does not, almost all OEMs shipping laptops with integrated WiFi have to ship a custom wireless profile utility application as well).
They have some other cool ones too, and all together they take up a lot less memory then the crud that shipped with my consumer Toshiba laptop.
It can make for a messy tray bar; you are right about that though.
If it makes you feel any better, Microsoft actually tries to yell at the OEMs to ship less stuff with the machines, Microsoft does care about the customer's out of box experience, because a bad OOBE reflects poorly on Windows in general. Windows XP by itself is relatively lean, Windows 2000 was better and in comparison XP is a bloated piece of crud, but aside from that, on almost any modern machine with 256+ of RAM, XP should run just fine and be "good enough" for any general computing tasks. If due to some manufacturer's actions, this is not the case, the customer often times ends up placing the blame on Microsoft instead.
Re:The real 90s versus outdated 00s software
on
Java Is So 90s
·
· Score: 1
Ada is an outdated language,
Hey, I object!
It may be an overly irritating language, that is in a drastic state of decline, but it isn't outdated by any means. Unpopular, sure, but not outdated.
Excellent teaching language (derived from Pascal), just has the unfortunate site effect of causing programmer's to want to tear their hair out.
Actually I do know of some people who like it. Mostly hyper-organized people who appreciate its innate clarity and clean syntax. (Compared, to, say, C++.:) )
Strange, I live in a major metro city (Seattle WA) and auto-flush toilets are still not the "norm", though I do encounter them from time to time.
I *HATE* the auto-sink things, because I cannot control the flow and usually they are set with such low water pressure that I have to spend a good 10 or so seconds just wetting my hands down to get ready to put soap on them!
You're obviously not much of a Windows user. Driver quality has improved markedly since WHQL came online
Yes that that one time I downloaded the NVIDIA WHQL certified driver from Windows Update and it turned my entire OS interface into French!
That was adorably high quality....
(Admittedly this was 4 or so years ago, and it hasn't happened since. Though I also haven't installed any drivers from Windows Update since then either!)
Sadly, on windows, I discovered how to do this from within the OS. On MacOS X, I'm still searching for an answer.
Of course it would be nice if connecting to a network share from a Windows PC to another Windows PC worked reliably!
Microsoft seems to have this thing against workgroups...
Oh and if the computer doing the sharing is a Windows XP Home box, forget about security!
Setting up passwords for shares is also a pain in the button, the best I have figured out is to, on the machine doing the sharing, create an identical user with an the same password as the user on the machine who wants to access the files.
Without doing this, I get Access Denied messages. Unless I am on a domain of course, then I get a nice login prompt....
Tablet PCs have horrid pressure sensitivity, only 256 levels. Even Wacom's other cheap stuff (Wacom makes most TabletPC digitizers) does 512, and their expensive stuff is even better!
Their midlevel kit does tilt sensitivity as well.
Tablet PCs are not artist quality yet, it is virtually impossible to get them calibrated pixel perfect, and drawing an actual "straight" line on them is also almost impossible.
Slashdot Mirror
Well that sucks, I road six miles a day on my bike 5 days a week and lost about 30 pounds in 3 months or so.
Was rather nice.
By any chance, is your trip all down hill? *G*
Wrong, you choose the best outcome based upon how it is going to effect others.
If the choice is either a near guaranteed death collision with the car in front, or running over onto a sidewalk and hitting a child, but with an almost guarantee that the passengers in the vehicle live, which do you choose?
What if the child on the sidewalk is a teenager, and there is a baby in the vehicle?
In a perfectly simulated world in which detailed information about all particles is known with absolute certainty, then yes, mathematics works out perfectly.
You throw stupid humans into the mix though, and things get a bit nuts.
Aside from all of this, humans have instincts; they can react really quickly to insanely complicated scenarios. Heck just think of the CPU power that was needed to keep a car on the road, how many tens of millions, if not tens of billions, of operations needed to be performed per second.
All to accomplish a task that the human mind does with ease.
I have seen computer physics simulations, walking robots are a great example, I believe Honda recently got their's to run. As slow as human babies are to develop, they are apparently easier to program! Admittedly, the major hurdle with walking robots was the development of the appropriate mathematics to solve the problem, and developing a truer understanding of the problem itself, once those were conquered, progress has been made quite steadily.
Also, I might add, physics simulations are really slow. And you would also need a computer that could react to events of such complexity, at incredible speeds. Obviously real time systems are capable of even faster reaction times than this, but the overall complexity of coordinating a real time system of this magnitude, this is not just some real time simulation running inside of Pefect Sphere physics land, the algorithms would have to handle the fact that their data is noisy.
You realize that imaging data collecting when the roads are icy would have problems with glare? Even more so, what about black ice? Where is the black ice at exactly? An experienced driver can feel it beneath their wheels, how about a computer?
When it is foggy out, data is even more sketchy. Heavy rain, humidity, wind, can disrupt the accuracy of sensor data. The fact that your data is being collected from an analog source (the real world), and then put into digital form, means that there is already some loss inherit in it, how much data loss can you tolerate?
Now run your physics simulation on that car skidding on the ice. How well does your simulator handle data of an iffy nature?
The human brain is designed to deal with incomplete, fragmented data, can your simulator handle it as well?
Can it handle it well enough to answer moral dilemas with enough certainty to satify the sue happy public?
If you say yes to all of this, now make such a complex system nearly bug proof. If it crashes, or has even a performance hiccup, even once, lives are going to be lost.
This is not a problem of the physics being done, we all know that the physics can be done, this is a problem of getting the physics done with corrupt tangled data.
I hate abstinence only education.
I am also a big fan of abstinence.
I think that you go and teach people what all the alternatives are, give them the tools, then carefully explain, that not a single ONE of those tools has done jack to STOP the increasing prevalence of sexually transmitted diseases amongst the American population.
And if anything is unhealthy, it is this "I'm tired of fucking you now, I'm going to go get someone else" mentality that America has managed to develop.
AIDS is one of the easiest diseases in the world to prevent.
STOP FUCKING EVERYTHING IN SIGHT.
Get married OR in a long term stable relationship and DO NOT CHEAT.
The fact that blood transfusions are not the largest spreader of AIDS shows exactly how little control humans have over their instincts.
Issac Asimov had, and Piers Anthony still has, very detailed author's notes in their books, something that I have always loved. When reading them, I feel like I am joining up with a larger culture, there is no way I could possibly have attended the Hugo awards in the 1950s*, but from reading Asimov's writings about them, I sure felt like I was there.
Likewise with Piers Anthony, reading his books I also got to watch as his family grew up, be there when he moved from one house to another, and experience so many other things that drew me closer to the author.
Really these author's notes were the first sort of "blog", for all intents and purposes the authors are not some sort of famous celebrities (well outside of their circle of fans), and they live pretty typical lives. The only thing different is that they managed to convince their publisher to let stick a journal entry or two in an otherwise fictional book
Having read so much in Asimov's books about Spider Robinson being a young boy, I still have trouble reconciling the fact that he is in reality an old man!
*I think it was the 50s Hugos he wrote about, it has been awhile since I read his Hugo Awards series.
Naturally, the entire problem is compounded by the fact that the computers need to interface with humans, which has never really been their strong point.
Then again, a lot of problems are made almost trivial if the human element is removed. A simple example: network security is a cinch if you can count on there never being dishonest or malicious users!
Indeed, personal rapid transit is mathematically very simple to implement, and the network topology for it, while not exactly simple, is still far easier on a conceptual level than any of these DARPA entries!
Slowing down can at times be the worst response though, and slamming on the breaks even more so (though I would assume they would program computers to not do that!)
Most likely you are right, computers will be programmed as conservatively as possible to avoid lawsuits.
How depressing, legal council resolves a technical dilemma, there likely is a better solution.
Not necessarily.
What do you do when someone jams their way over into your lane, pushing you out, and you are already up against the edge? Under what conditions do you accelerate, decelerate?
On ice, there is suddenly a collision 50ft ahead, do you try to steer around it, slam on the breaks, coast to a stop? If you have to change lanes, to which lane?
Here comes the key question: How would the appropriate reaction vary based upon the distance of the accident in front of you and upon different road conditions?
Codifying human experience into a computer is a complex task, and at some point a huge switch statement just becomes too unwieldy. If the appropriate reaction is to swerve into the neighboring lane, but there happens to be a child running across a crosswalk there, what then?
You get to a point where a sacrifice must be made, and then how do you program the computer?
Actually it may just.
Exercise releases a number of positive mood stimulating chemicals in the brain. I rode my bike every morning for years, rain or shine; the weather does not really make all that much of a difference once you really get into it. (That and, contrary to seemingly popular belief, humans do not melt in the rain!)
Also, the results of exercise can definitely make a person feel better!
I am not just talking about the benefits that come from having a positive body image (Nerd who make good money and are in shape are quite attractive to a fairly large portion of society), but also all the other benefits that come from an increase in stamina and overall healthiness. The extra stamina means you can get more done in a day, are less likely to feel that you have "wasted" a day, and all in all feel good about yourself. Having an overall healthy lifestyle leads to a lowered risk of getting sick (in the two years I biked every day, I only once got sick, and then it was only a minor affair that lasted a day or so), which also leads to an increase in productivity, which leads to yet another boost in self esteem.
Basically, after two years of work they have it going at 45MPH over rough uncharted terrain.
That is pretty darn good.
The best thing about it is, the system is capable of second guessing itself, that right there is the fundamental step that lead to success.
The flip side of all of this is, it is based on probability, and while in a desert the opportunities for accidents may be minimized, I wonder how well it will deal with unexpected random events, such as people who don't put on their turn signal when changing lanes.
CPU power and other hardware can always be scaled up to deal with increase speeds (indeed a major topic that the article deals with), the question is can the algorithms deal with truly unexpected input?
Of course one solution to this is to have all cars automated, then you do not have problems with fools not using their turn signal, as the cars would just wirelessly inform each other.
Bleck, then again, I have not yet seen a perfectly working wireless network stack, hopefully who ever they get to program the cars would be of a higher caliber than the idiots who program PCs and wireless routers/switches.
Tabbed browsing, broadband pipes fetching multiple streams of data at any one point in time, RSS collating possibly hundreds of site updates,
and I am supposed to stop all of that and more, so I can watch some person slowly pronounce some words?
Why? I am literate, I can read. If I wanted to watch TV I would go and watch TV, I love the web because it is mostly a textual medium, the density of data on it is much higher.
Occasionally Channel9 has SOME good video blogs, but even then that is only when I am very interested in something that the particular video is talking about, and even some of the Channel9 stuff that I am interested in, I do not watch the video for because I do not want to devote an entire half an hour of my life to watching some video that could be summarized in a few minutes worth of reading text.
Hey what is wrong with addled brained Wiccans from Seattle?*
*Disclaimer: I am from Seattle and the only Wiccans I ever knew were hot two hot (and intelligent) lesbians.
True Libertarians also want to do away with all government research projects and educational funding.
All the cool stuff that came out of the MIT AI research lab? Would not have happened.
Many research universities (public and private) would have to make drastic cuts, and in all likely hood some grad student's project on "web searching" would never have gotten approval.
Google's initial hosting and resources came from Standford, not the free market.
Now I hate craplets as much as anybody else does, but Toshiba's power management thing rocks.
Did you actually try using it? It basically gives a far more fine grained control over power settings, and it allows for easy switching of profiles in a far more powerful manner than the internal Windows stuff.
The Toshiba Power Management utilities will slowly ramp down your machine as the battery drains, in a way that you choose. The basic idea is that it is better to have a slower computer or a dimmer screen than it is to have no computer at all.
Also a monitor that slowly gets dimmer over time is far less irritating then just starting out with a dim monitor, oddly enough.
It works great, if you take your laptop fully charged up and take note of the total time that Windows says you have left, and then using Toshiba Power Saver, you keep using the machine, you will get a good deal more time out of the machine total.
This is because Windows estimates the rate of battery usage as being linear over the entire time you are using the PC, when in fact Toshiba makes your rate of battery usage actually decrease over time.
Also, Toshiba's consumer laptops come loaded with TONS of craplets, I think mine had something like 50 megs of free ram after all the crud was loaded. Even after removal they still left enough cruft around that the machine was slow.
Toshiba's business line of PCs tend to ship with some pretty darn nifty apps though, one of the cooler ones is (admittedly a clone of some nifty app I saw on
They have some other cool ones too, and all together they take up a lot less memory then the crud that shipped with my consumer Toshiba laptop.
It can make for a messy tray bar; you are right about that though.
If it makes you feel any better, Microsoft actually tries to yell at the OEMs to ship less stuff with the machines, Microsoft does care about the customer's out of box experience, because a bad OOBE reflects poorly on Windows in general. Windows XP by itself is relatively lean, Windows 2000 was better and in comparison XP is a bloated piece of crud, but aside from that, on almost any modern machine with 256+ of RAM, XP should run just fine and be "good enough" for any general computing tasks. If due to some manufacturer's actions, this is not the case, the customer often times ends up placing the blame on Microsoft instead.
Hey, I object!
It may be an overly irritating language, that is in a drastic state of decline, but it isn't outdated by any means. Unpopular, sure, but not outdated.
Excellent teaching language (derived from Pascal), just has the unfortunate site effect of causing programmer's to want to tear their hair out.
Actually I do know of some people who like it. Mostly hyper-organized people who appreciate its innate clarity and clean syntax. (Compared, to, say, C++.
THE SUN, IT BUUURNS!
:)
Seriously though, I am more likely to be depressed on days when it is sunny out. Overcast skies / rain brighten me up.
I call it Reverse SAD.
Strange, I live in a major metro city (Seattle WA) and auto-flush toilets are still not the "norm", though I do encounter them from time to time.
I *HATE* the auto-sink things, because I cannot control the flow and usually they are set with such low water pressure that I have to spend a good 10 or so seconds just wetting my hands down to get ready to put soap on them!
Can we just shoot them instead? Then we wouldn't have to listen to them, AND we wouldn't have to deal with them.
It is a win-win situation.
I have 3 first release Nintendo systems, (SNES, N64, Gamecube), never had a problem with any of 'em.
Yah for Nintendo.
Feh, the left news channels are barely to the "left".
Legalized abortion? Bleck, I support mandatory abortions.
Already got 2? No more allowed.
Yes that that one time I downloaded the NVIDIA WHQL certified driver from Windows Update and it turned my entire OS interface into French!
That was adorably high quality.
(Admittedly this was 4 or so years ago, and it hasn't happened since. Though I also haven't installed any drivers from Windows Update since then either!)
Of course it would be nice if connecting to a network share from a Windows PC to another Windows PC worked reliably!
Microsoft seems to have this thing against workgroups...
Oh and if the computer doing the sharing is a Windows XP Home box, forget about security!
Setting up passwords for shares is also a pain in the button, the best I have figured out is to, on the machine doing the sharing, create an identical user with an the same password as the user on the machine who wants to access the files.
Without doing this, I get Access Denied messages. Unless I am on a domain of course, then I get a nice login prompt....
For some reason, scp seems easier.
Tablet PCs have horrid pressure sensitivity, only 256 levels. Even Wacom's other cheap stuff (Wacom makes most TabletPC digitizers) does 512, and their expensive stuff is even better!
Their midlevel kit does tilt sensitivity as well.
Tablet PCs are not artist quality yet, it is virtually impossible to get them calibrated pixel perfect, and drawing an actual "straight" line on them is also almost impossible.
They already don't believe me about the command line!
Heck a lot of people don't even believe me when I tell them that Windows used to crash every 10 minutes, rather regularly.
Arg! It is like people are starting to expect their computers to work or something!