I own a LEAF, and I've heard no such recommendation. They recommend against multiple quick charges per day, but I haven't seen anything about twice a month. You don't want to put the battery through a quick charge when the batteries are real hot, but a battery pack is not going to hold heat for multiple days. Sorry, the thermal mass isn't that high.
Now, they do tell you that the less you quick charge, the longer your battery will last. They say that regular quick charging will leave you with 70% capacity after 8 or 10 years (I can't remember the quoted "lifetime"), and 80% capacity at "end of life" if you don't quick charge, but just use 110V trickle charging and 220V normal charging.
That's not exactly frying your batteries early.
Don't hold your breath on your non-RTFM scenario, dude. First of all, EV owners know the dominant strategy for charging is always going to be charging at home. Very few people are going to be doing a lot of quick charging (maybe cab drivers?). Quick charging is likely to be significantly more expensive per kWh than charging at home, and people just don't buy LEAFs if they do a lot of long-distance (100 miles+) driving. If they did, they'd but a Volt.
Oh, stop it. Sorry, but this debate isn't over. Don't try to bully this forum by simply resorting to name-calling.
A standard set of battery sizes (A, AA, AAA, C, D, camera batteries, 9-volts, watch batteries, etc.) and capacities has prevented electronic device makers from building different devices? No, it hasn't.
The electric car battery issue is also a bigger deal, so there's even more motivation to come up with a standard solution. People aren't terribly worried about charge times for their flashlight, but they are for their EVs.
Your point number 2... do you worry about gas stations being "out of fuel"? (you actually did in the 70s, but that didn't stop people from wanting cars). You're exploiting the fact that any new technology has certain chicken-and-egg issues. As soon as EVs are prevalent, charge stations will exist to meet demand, like what you see for any other product.
3? Don't confuse "simple" with "not able to be done by hand". No, a person can't lift an EV battery pack. That doesn't mean they can't be made modularly to be swapped out by a machine with some mechanical advantage. A gas pump can pump hundreds of pounds of fuel in a few minutes. A battery lift isn't fundamentally more complex.
4 can be addressed. First of all, you're not stuck with the battery you swap in at a charge station, any more than you're stuck with the one that comes with your car. Like an odometer in a car, you attach a lifecycle monitor to each battery pack, so it's known how many cycles it's gone through. For a multi-thousand dollar pack, that's easily a justifiable expense.
You'd also probably have to sign up for some kind of network to be allowed to use the swapping system. That way, if you try to leave them with some kind of battery that's had its cycle counter tampered with, the charge station knows who you are. Lack of anonymity is a minor inconvenience for getting a full battery in a few minutes. Besides, nobody today (except tinfoil hats) buys gas with anything but a credit/debit card, which certainly isn't anonymous.
You do realize that there are digital design tools, right? I don't use paper or whiteboards much, but I do design things before I code. The difference is that I have a digital record of my class diagrams, or sequence diagrams, and you're looking for them under a stack of papers on your desk, or bitching about the guy who backed into your whiteboard, and smudged your pretty picture.
I don't have to worry about deciphering my crummy handwriting, I can easily send my design documents to people who missed the meeting (and associated whiteboard sketches), and if the design session actually involves prototyping code, I get Intellisense, autoformatting, syntax-checking, and a whole host of other automated features that my whiteboard doesn't seem to do for me.
Neal Stephenson actually worked at Blue Origin in Seattle for a while (Jeff Bezos' commercial space company). According to an engineer I knew who worked there, his presence in meetings was an utter distraction, as the real engineers would toss around reasonable technical suggestions, and Stephenson would chime in with idiotic comments from the peanut gallery. Apparently, nobody felt comfortable calling him out as an ass-clown because he was one of Bezos' favorites.
... and that's the hum of an internal combustion engine.
The attempt to make electric cars sound like ICEs is silly. First, it's motivated by people attempting to use their guts to determine what constitutes a safety feature. It's all very intuitive to think that a noisy car is safer. Except that it really isn't. Pedestrians don't rely heavily on their sense of sound to avoid getting hit. They just don't. Spend time watching pedestrians at an intersection, and you'll realize that they're either (a) not paying attention at all, or (b) using their sight to avoid cars.
Trying to use sound to avoid collisions is problematic for two reasons. First, because all the other cars in the vicinity that don't pose an immediate threat are also making noise, the noise of cars closer to you gets drowned out. Second, because it's very hard to tell where a sound is coming from, especially in urban environments, where sounds reflect off buildings. Do the experiment yourself. Close your eyes, and listen for cars, and see if you can tell where they are. It's extremely difficult.
Electric cars also are not silent to start off with. They still produce wind noise, and tire noise, like other cars.
But, perhaps the biggest logical farce is that these noisemakers are being justified based on a multi-year study done by NHTSA, whereby hybrids got into a higher number of accidents with pedestrians than conventional cars, and at low speeds, hybrids work similarly to electric cars (can be quieter). The factor by which hybrids got into more ped accidents was about 1.4 (40% more). That's not a huge amount more, but it certainly is noticeable.
The problem is that the study did not account for the environment hybrids tend to operate in. With half of this country living in urban vs. rural settings, you don't see hybrids represented equally in both. By a two to one ratio, you see more hybrids among city dwellers. And if you look at overall pedestrian accident data, you'll see that pedestrian accidents are twice as likely in urban environments. So, the increased rate of ped accidents with hybrids can probably be explained completely by simply understanding that they operate in riskier environments.
The study also only attempts to address accidents caused by the car making the noise (or not). The study makes no attempt to understand that aside from the car that actually hits the pedestrian, every other car in the vicinity was making noise that made it harder for that particular car to be heard. Electric cars make the environment quieter for everybody, which could have a small beneficial effect that makes it less likely for all the cars around them to go unnoticed, because of ambient noise. In game theory terms, this is a true Prisoner's Dilemma, where the automakers are concluding that every car should be noisy, in an attempt to out-noisy the rest, paying no attention to the net effect of all the noise pollution.
When you consider these factors, you realize that the overall affect on pedestrian safety from quiet cars is very small. Certainly nowhere near the 40% figure that's spawned this hysteria.
This is really just an attempt by the auto industry, that is really looking for excuses to say, "we just can't build cars competitively any other way... and thus were right all along to populate the planet with pollution machines". It's pretty pathetic, really.
The predictability of human emotion overriding reason is frustrating in the masses, but it's tragic among people (Slashdotters) that should know better. I totally get why dogs are man's best friend. But, it's utterly ridiculous how that status has translated into people thinking that dogs are even vaguely intelligent creatures, or useful for things like home security.
Dogs are stupid. Really, they're stupid. If you rely on a dog as any significant part of your security system, you're not much better. The principal by which dogs are supposed to be good for security is largely the same as that which is supposed to make car alarms work (making noise). Because car alarms are not companions, and therefore people don't have emotional reasons to be irrational about them, people have now largely accepted the reality that car alarms don't do much to stop car thefts.
Dogs also shouldn't even be part of a discussion about cheap security systems. Dogs cost thousands of dollars over their lifetimes, and the bigger they are, the more they cost. And for those people who respond to my previous paragraph by asserting that dogs' purpose is also to attack the thieves, now you're talking about something (training attack dogs), that's not cheap, not easy, and not DIY for average Joes.
Guns aren't that much better. Criminals generally aren't going to know about your gun until they've already broken in (and found you home). Maybe guns would be a deterrent against the same criminals, or one of their friends, robbing you a second time, after robbing you once and finding you at home to show them your gun. But, mostly, the idea that guns prevent burglaries is more fantasy, just like the dog mythology.
What? Lockheed is financed almost entirely with taxpayer funds, they lose what Solyndra lost, every year in between the couch cushions, and you don't know anything about what really happened at Solyndra, other than they had a business that didn't succeed.
Perhaps no company in the US gets more of their business from "black" projects, so don't even try to pretend like the lack of transparency in the Solyndra deal is even on the same order of magnitude as Lockheed's business.
God, conservatives are adept at pulling crap out of their rear ends!
How does a one-sentence answer with only two thoughts in it, both of which are demonstrably wrong, get modded up to 5?
You're asserting that airport security is now (a) expensive, and (b) not secure. Both aren't even close to correct.
Since 9/11, which is when the modern airport security apparatus was spawned, we've had no major incidents on airplanes. That's 10 years with no major incidents. Seriously. What would it take for you to say that airplanes are fairly secure? And please, no crap about how we didn't really stop the underwear bomber. I don't care if that bomb did go off. Statistically, one incident would still constitute fantastic safety over the course of a ten-year period. Jesus, do slashdotters not understand statistics, or what? What mobile location is more secure than an airplane?
And the cost? What are you basing this supposedly high cost on? I can't recall the stats off the top of my head, but it's something like $10 a ticket. That's not even three airport coffees at today's prices. Do you think bag and body scanners can be bought at newegg.com for $100 each?
Seeing irrational crap like this on a supposedly rational internet forum makes me want to f'ing scream.
John Mica is the same guy who shut down the FAA for a couple weeks because he decided now is the right time to bust airport unions. He also specifically introduced measures into the FAA funding bill that called for closures in Democrats' districts. Those were the hard-line positions he took that caused the impasse over extension of FAA funding, which is normally a completely routine process.
I'm actually not much of a fan of either unions, or the TSA, but I can recognize partisan hackery when I see it. It's also ludicrous to think that public sector unions are a major cause of our recent woes, as union membership has already been declining for years.
So, sorry, but I'm a little bit inclined to be skeptical of his motives. The GOP are making a living off of objecting to stuff (e.g. TSA) that they were all for, when Republicans controlled the government. People who continue to give these craven conservative monsters the benefit of the doubt are merely fueling their outrageous behavior.
There's really no sense in worrying about anything in a car that's not responsible for the actual driving of the car. If the computers that control engine timing, or braking, or airbag deployment get hacked, that's a problem. If the entertainment system gets hacked, and somebody maliciously transfers some Michael Bolton mp3s to your sound system, it's much less of a problem. You simply need to isolate the systems. Cars already have multiple internal computers, so it's not like this requires splitting one on-board computer into two.
Military aircraft have had this concept for a long time. The computing systems that actually fly the plane, like the fly-by-wire controls, are completely separate from the stuff that a pilot uses to do other tasks, like mission planning. Depending on whether your software is "mission critical" or "flight critical" or neither, there are different systems that run it, and different quality standards that apply.
I'd just hate to see a massive freak-out about "hackers" disabling your brakes remotely, when there's no reason for that to ever be even technically feasible.
I worked on defense systems in Ada for a number of years. While I love working in C# and Java, and sometimes Objective-C, I have to say that Ada had some really great features (some of which clearly influenced later languages).
It might seem like Ada would be a great language for financial services, as it was designed with security and reliability in mind. But, alas, the financial sector is really less interested in those features, and vastly more interested in skimming their clients' money while telling them how lucky they are to have the liquidity. I don't remember Ada including a library for that (system.scheming.ponzi, maybe?).
I have a question. How can a guy make $500k and obviously think the world of himself while being under the impression that 12 hours x 7 days equals 100 hrs/wk?
Sorry in advance for the sarcasm, but slashdotters do know what you do. If you paid attention, there have been lots of HFT threads since 2008. The question is, "do you understand what you do"? Namely, destabilize markets, manipulate prices for your clients, participate in systemic frontrunning, and divert talent away from solving engineering problems that actually matter to humanity, for the sake of enriching yourself off one of the biggest examples of what game theorists call a "Prisoner's Dilemma" that I can imagine. Your use of the word "useful" to describe your work leads me to think not.
What does your Direct TV story have to do with my iPhone? I mean, thanks for the explanation, but the only thing it has in common with the topic is that the telecom industry is involved. Different network technology, different company. Different. Everything isn't a slippery slope to everything else.
I'm pissed, because for about the last three or so years, I haven't seen one iota of increased performance in my home internet or mobile phone speeds, my rates haven't dropped a bit, the economy is in the tank (which normally drops prices, especially for technology that isn't improving), and AT&T is one of the most profitable companies on earth, even before this move!
That's incredibly myopic. Any system that yields an "ounce of prevention being worth a pound of cure" is one that should be even more important to someone like you who's under tight time constraints. During any given day, you're not just spending time on the particular task at hand, you're spending time as a result of past decisions. If you're adding a new feature to the Widget class, the amount of time that'll take today is directly proportional to how well that class was originally written. If it was originally tossed together, to be just "good enough", but not readable or maintainable, then every feature you add will be more costly to implement.
Similarly, your work today may involve fixing a bug, that would never have surfaced had the code been properly reviewed 6 months ago.
You have to try to envision an alternate universe, where you were taking the time to implement those quality processes that pay future dividends (commensurate with their cost, of course). The question you should be asking is, "would I be further ahead in that alternate universe than I am today?".
It's just bogus to claim "schedule" is the reason you have to implement processes that forgo earlier, cheaper fixes, for later, more expensive ones. I know lazy coders use that excuse all the time, and managers frequently go along with that short-sighted rationale, but it doesn't make it right.
Why are continuous code reviews great? Is a flood great because water is good?
People who don't like pair programming aren't merely antisocial, as you contend. There are very legitimate reasons why pair programming may be a bad idea. For one, logistics. Having pairs requires people to work the same hours, sit in very close proximity to one another, get interrupted when someone else needs to use the bathroom, it works poorly with telecommuting, etc, etc. There's something uniquely human about needing some space to work and think, that pair programming does not allow.
It's also pretty established fact that knowledge work (for many people) requires concentration, and the absence of interruption. Pair programming is horrible from this standpoint. You are constantly having thoughts, and then getting interrupted when your pair has a thought they want to share. You'll basically be coding, and trying to hold a conversation at the same time. Concurrency like that isn't helpful for many computer programs, and it's even less helpful for most human brains. It's like context switching on the order of seconds, rather than having an hour or so to work in peace and quiet, and then conversing with a coworker only on demand.
Personality also has an impact. If you have a dominant personality (driver), you'll often have them doing most of the actual coding, with the other person just serving as their typist (which is slower than if the person thinking just typed it themselves). The passive personality may be having trouble coming up with good ideas on their own, because their mind is being constantly re-routed by the aggressive personality.
You can argue all you want that impracticalities like the ones I've mentioned are just indications that the pair programmers need to get better at pair programming. But, that's crap. A good system is one that capitalizes on the way people actually are, not one that forces people to work in unnatural ways.
While it's nice of you to recognize the need for more engineers, it's hugely disingenuous of you to suggest that someone else needs to do something about it. Your policies have a huge impact on such things, and you've missed opportunity after opportunity to make changes that would help this issue. Instead of promoting technical innovation, you have participated in the largest giveaways in history to the financial and insurance sectors. Why would bright minds go into engineering, when you've continued to dump heaps of welfare into the laps of bankers, traders, and insurance salesman who simply leech wealth from those of us who actually invent and innovate?
Engineers don't magically appear out of thin air because you passed the largest and most irresponsible tax breaks in history. You need to actually enact major programs to foster things like IT development and green technology, instead of just paying lip service to them during primary campaign stops.
I know many of us just associate with other geeks, but this phenomenon isn't at all confined to the geek world. Don't overthink this one.
Conservatism has had a nice little rebound in the last year or so, not to mention a trend in the US that really started in 2001 with the election of the quintessential anti-intellectual, George W. Bush.
Modern conservatism is, at its core, anti-intellectual. It doesn't care about facts, degrees, experts, or reason. It's all about giving in to your fear, and what your gut tells you. The masses are most easily lured by this kind of philosophy, but geeks aren't immune to it, either. Geeks are humans, too.
Why is it that atheists on the internet spend so much more time talking about god on the internet than people of faith...
We atheists spend time "talking" about it on the internet, because direct communication is how intellectuals share and evaluate ideas. Basically, we take all the time we save praying to entities that don't exist, and channel that into time spent talking, and writing to entities that do. Got it?
I would have completely agreed with the premise of the topic when iOS 4.0 was released. It brought my 3G to a crawl. But, the majority of the sluggishness problems were fixed in iOS 4.1. Don't lump the current version in with the original release of iOS 4.
It obviously would have been better if Apple actually tested 4.0 on 3G devices, which would have immediately revealed a problem. They apparently didn't, or didn't care.. which is bad. But, the fix did come.
Also, a lot of the observed problems may actually have less to do with the OS version, and more to do with the fact that most users don't use the optimal method of upgrading their OS. If you just accept iTunes' prompt to upgrade when you connect your iPhone, you'll likely eventually wind up with a phone that's bogged down and sluggish. I've had much better results instead backing up my phone (apps, data, music, etc.), then using the "Restore" process to go to the new OS as a clean slate. You then, of course, have to restore from backup, after going to the new OS. It's an extra step, and probably shouldn't be necessary, but it gets better results than the basic "upgrade".
Make sure you're not confusing these two issues (OS suitability for older hardware, and the problems with direct upgrades).
Teaching the right about what Net Neutrality means is pointless. Conservatives don't make decisions based on facts. They make decisions based on their guts. And there's considerable behavioral research that indicates that when confronted with the fact that their existing views are contradicted by actual facts, those holding the views will actually become more convinced of their erroneous viewpoints (see climate change, Obama's birth, health care death panels, WMDs in Iraq, etc.) . So, in reality, the best thing you could do is just ignore them, and hope that their opposition remains at a relatively low energy intensity.
This is a sad statement about human nature, but if liberals and intellectuals don't come to terms with this simple reality, they will continue to be frustrated by the knuckle draggers among us.
Why is it that conservatives and libertarians can never seem to draw from actual empirical evidence, and insist on clinging to unproven philosophy?
The hell with Adam Smith. Look at this issue in practice.
I live in Seattle proper, where we have a publicly-run utility company. We have the lowest electricity rates in the nation, and solid reliability. Sure, some of that has to do with natural resources in the area, but Seattle's suburbs have those same advantages. You literally go outside Seattle's city limits, and you have to buy electricity from Puget Sound Energy, whose rates are significantly higher, and whose service is worse. The public utility beats the private one hands-down.
For the other side of the coin, look at California's recent experiment with electricity deregulation. Enron jumped right in and screwed everyone over. The little detail of the market makers is always conveniently ignored by conservative theory. The entire west coast suffered because of California's naivete.
Electricity in this country is not expensive. It's cheap. Period. Americans just feel that God has given them the right to boundless consumption, so as long as energy isn't free, they whine like little babies.
I'm not a fool, but I do still do business with BofA. Since you're apparently hip on using insults to get your point across, I don't feel bad calling you naive. Your little vote-with-your-dollars speech is quaint, but it completely ignores the fact that there is no "vote" to be counted.
There is no alternative here. All the banks are engaged in this bullshit. The state banks, too. Credit unions. Want to keep your money in some alternate investment? Great, you can be fucked over by companies like Vanguard or TDAmeritrade.
You also don't have a vote in the sense that these financial services companies don't need customers to be profitable. In fact, they're learning that it's sort of easier without the customers. Banks can stop managing other people's money, and get low-interest loans from the Federal Reserve, which they invest in commodities, stocks, or some other investment that is being propped up by the international finance cartel. So, taking your $100k out of the bank will make no difference to them.
What about just not investing in anything? Great... do that, and your money will disappear before your eyes. Have you ever asked yourself why inflation doesn't average 0%, over long periods of time? Why does it always seem to be above zero? It's because that's the finance cartel's way of ensuring that you use their services, in one form or another. Over time, you'll still usually lose money, in real dollar terms. But, less than you would if you just kept your cash under the mattress.
(Please, no idiotic replies about how some stock index has outpaced inflation over time... if you believe the validity of either of those published numbers, then you're a lost cause).
So, until you realize that our societal tolerance of these finance leeches has led us to a position where we're essentially powerless to do anything, your market-based democracy is going to be utterly pointless.
Brilliant. Let's all rely on nuclear energy, which, if it were the primary replacement for fossil fuels, would run out even faster than oil.
It's nice that France uses nuclear, and it is nominally carbon-neutral, but you cannot solve the climate change problem with nuclear power. Nuclear fuel is hard to make, and the raw materials needed to make it won't even last one human lifetime if we use it at the rate we use fossil fuels. At best, nuclear power is a transition technology that can help us get from where we are now, to an ultimately sustainable future energy mix. That's it.
Regarding the fact that there have been doomsayers before, and we haven't all perished yet: are you kidding me? That's like saying that you heard a couple guys in blue shirts make a prediction once, and they were wrong, so you're not listening to any more predictions from guys in blue shirts. Not to mention the fact that world resource consumption has only continued to go up with time. Unless you're arguing that the earth's resources are not actually finite, then that means that on average, today's resource "doomsayers" are speaking from an even stronger position that those from the 90s, 80s, 70s, etc. What about that is difficult to comprehend?
Are we living in the movie Idiocracy, where morons can make patently irrational suggestions like this, and get modded up to 5?
Jesus, get over yourself already. Everything can't be represented as a 1 or 0. There are degress of everything. Just because you give a rip about the environment doesn't mean you have to kill yourself, and everyone else, who has ever consumed anything. Do you really have such a poor grasp of complexity that you can only see things as black and white?
The attempt at mangling logic in your last paragraph is pathetic. I happen to have made the decision not to have kids, and world overpopulation is definitely one factor that lead me to that decision. This isn't illogical, and is undeserving of your childish "WTF?". I do care about "our descendents". The apparent difference between me and you is that I don't refuse to include other people's offspring in the category of "our descendents". If I only gave a damn about people who were direct descendents of myself, then I agree that it would be illogical to refuse to procreate in order to make life better for my future (non-existant) descendents. But, here's the kicker... despite the fact that you are clearly a selfish clown, I actually care about the well-being of the spawn you produce.
Hence, I care what we do to our planet today, even when it happens to conflict with my own immediate self-interests. You can decline to think this way if you like, but don't bash those of us who are responsible enough to think more than a generation into the future.
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I own a LEAF, and I've heard no such recommendation. They recommend against multiple quick charges per day, but I haven't seen anything about twice a month. You don't want to put the battery through a quick charge when the batteries are real hot, but a battery pack is not going to hold heat for multiple days. Sorry, the thermal mass isn't that high.
Now, they do tell you that the less you quick charge, the longer your battery will last. They say that regular quick charging will leave you with 70% capacity after 8 or 10 years (I can't remember the quoted "lifetime"), and 80% capacity at "end of life" if you don't quick charge, but just use 110V trickle charging and 220V normal charging.
That's not exactly frying your batteries early.
Don't hold your breath on your non-RTFM scenario, dude. First of all, EV owners know the dominant strategy for charging is always going to be charging at home. Very few people are going to be doing a lot of quick charging (maybe cab drivers?). Quick charging is likely to be significantly more expensive per kWh than charging at home, and people just don't buy LEAFs if they do a lot of long-distance (100 miles+) driving. If they did, they'd but a Volt.
Oh, stop it. Sorry, but this debate isn't over. Don't try to bully this forum by simply resorting to name-calling.
A standard set of battery sizes (A, AA, AAA, C, D, camera batteries, 9-volts, watch batteries, etc.) and capacities has prevented electronic device makers from building different devices? No, it hasn't.
The electric car battery issue is also a bigger deal, so there's even more motivation to come up with a standard solution. People aren't terribly worried about charge times for their flashlight, but they are for their EVs.
Your point number 2 ... do you worry about gas stations being "out of fuel"? (you actually did in the 70s, but that didn't stop people from wanting cars). You're exploiting the fact that any new technology has certain chicken-and-egg issues. As soon as EVs are prevalent, charge stations will exist to meet demand, like what you see for any other product.
3? Don't confuse "simple" with "not able to be done by hand". No, a person can't lift an EV battery pack. That doesn't mean they can't be made modularly to be swapped out by a machine with some mechanical advantage. A gas pump can pump hundreds of pounds of fuel in a few minutes. A battery lift isn't fundamentally more complex.
4 can be addressed. First of all, you're not stuck with the battery you swap in at a charge station, any more than you're stuck with the one that comes with your car. Like an odometer in a car, you attach a lifecycle monitor to each battery pack, so it's known how many cycles it's gone through. For a multi-thousand dollar pack, that's easily a justifiable expense.
You'd also probably have to sign up for some kind of network to be allowed to use the swapping system. That way, if you try to leave them with some kind of battery that's had its cycle counter tampered with, the charge station knows who you are. Lack of anonymity is a minor inconvenience for getting a full battery in a few minutes. Besides, nobody today (except tinfoil hats) buys gas with anything but a credit/debit card, which certainly isn't anonymous.
You're out of excuses.
You do realize that there are digital design tools, right? I don't use paper or whiteboards much, but I do design things before I code. The difference is that I have a digital record of my class diagrams, or sequence diagrams, and you're looking for them under a stack of papers on your desk, or bitching about the guy who backed into your whiteboard, and smudged your pretty picture.
I don't have to worry about deciphering my crummy handwriting, I can easily send my design documents to people who missed the meeting (and associated whiteboard sketches), and if the design session actually involves prototyping code, I get Intellisense, autoformatting, syntax-checking, and a whole host of other automated features that my whiteboard doesn't seem to do for me.
Neal Stephenson actually worked at Blue Origin in Seattle for a while (Jeff Bezos' commercial space company). According to an engineer I knew who worked there, his presence in meetings was an utter distraction, as the real engineers would toss around reasonable technical suggestions, and Stephenson would chime in with idiotic comments from the peanut gallery. Apparently, nobody felt comfortable calling him out as an ass-clown because he was one of Bezos' favorites.
... and that's the hum of an internal combustion engine.
The attempt to make electric cars sound like ICEs is silly. First, it's motivated by people attempting to use their guts to determine what constitutes a safety feature. It's all very intuitive to think that a noisy car is safer. Except that it really isn't. Pedestrians don't rely heavily on their sense of sound to avoid getting hit. They just don't. Spend time watching pedestrians at an intersection, and you'll realize that they're either (a) not paying attention at all, or (b) using their sight to avoid cars.
Trying to use sound to avoid collisions is problematic for two reasons. First, because all the other cars in the vicinity that don't pose an immediate threat are also making noise, the noise of cars closer to you gets drowned out. Second, because it's very hard to tell where a sound is coming from, especially in urban environments, where sounds reflect off buildings. Do the experiment yourself. Close your eyes, and listen for cars, and see if you can tell where they are. It's extremely difficult.
Electric cars also are not silent to start off with. They still produce wind noise, and tire noise, like other cars.
But, perhaps the biggest logical farce is that these noisemakers are being justified based on a multi-year study done by NHTSA, whereby hybrids got into a higher number of accidents with pedestrians than conventional cars, and at low speeds, hybrids work similarly to electric cars (can be quieter). The factor by which hybrids got into more ped accidents was about 1.4 (40% more). That's not a huge amount more, but it certainly is noticeable.
The problem is that the study did not account for the environment hybrids tend to operate in. With half of this country living in urban vs. rural settings, you don't see hybrids represented equally in both. By a two to one ratio, you see more hybrids among city dwellers. And if you look at overall pedestrian accident data, you'll see that pedestrian accidents are twice as likely in urban environments. So, the increased rate of ped accidents with hybrids can probably be explained completely by simply understanding that they operate in riskier environments.
The study also only attempts to address accidents caused by the car making the noise (or not). The study makes no attempt to understand that aside from the car that actually hits the pedestrian, every other car in the vicinity was making noise that made it harder for that particular car to be heard. Electric cars make the environment quieter for everybody, which could have a small beneficial effect that makes it less likely for all the cars around them to go unnoticed, because of ambient noise. In game theory terms, this is a true Prisoner's Dilemma, where the automakers are concluding that every car should be noisy, in an attempt to out-noisy the rest, paying no attention to the net effect of all the noise pollution.
When you consider these factors, you realize that the overall affect on pedestrian safety from quiet cars is very small. Certainly nowhere near the 40% figure that's spawned this hysteria.
This is really just an attempt by the auto industry, that is really looking for excuses to say, "we just can't build cars competitively any other way ... and thus were right all along to populate the planet with pollution machines". It's pretty pathetic, really.
The predictability of human emotion overriding reason is frustrating in the masses, but it's tragic among people (Slashdotters) that should know better. I totally get why dogs are man's best friend. But, it's utterly ridiculous how that status has translated into people thinking that dogs are even vaguely intelligent creatures, or useful for things like home security.
Dogs are stupid. Really, they're stupid. If you rely on a dog as any significant part of your security system, you're not much better. The principal by which dogs are supposed to be good for security is largely the same as that which is supposed to make car alarms work (making noise). Because car alarms are not companions, and therefore people don't have emotional reasons to be irrational about them, people have now largely accepted the reality that car alarms don't do much to stop car thefts.
Dogs also shouldn't even be part of a discussion about cheap security systems. Dogs cost thousands of dollars over their lifetimes, and the bigger they are, the more they cost. And for those people who respond to my previous paragraph by asserting that dogs' purpose is also to attack the thieves, now you're talking about something (training attack dogs), that's not cheap, not easy, and not DIY for average Joes.
Guns aren't that much better. Criminals generally aren't going to know about your gun until they've already broken in (and found you home). Maybe guns would be a deterrent against the same criminals, or one of their friends, robbing you a second time, after robbing you once and finding you at home to show them your gun. But, mostly, the idea that guns prevent burglaries is more fantasy, just like the dog mythology.
What? Lockheed is financed almost entirely with taxpayer funds, they lose what Solyndra lost, every year in between the couch cushions, and you don't know anything about what really happened at Solyndra, other than they had a business that didn't succeed.
Perhaps no company in the US gets more of their business from "black" projects, so don't even try to pretend like the lack of transparency in the Solyndra deal is even on the same order of magnitude as Lockheed's business.
God, conservatives are adept at pulling crap out of their rear ends!
Uh, the F-35/JSF was like the biggest procurement in the history of military aviation. Phantom Ray is a tiny program. So, yeah, Boeing lost out.
As Scott Evil once said, "A billion is more than a million, numbnuts."
How does a one-sentence answer with only two thoughts in it, both of which are demonstrably wrong, get modded up to 5?
You're asserting that airport security is now (a) expensive, and (b) not secure. Both aren't even close to correct.
Since 9/11, which is when the modern airport security apparatus was spawned, we've had no major incidents on airplanes. That's 10 years with no major incidents. Seriously. What would it take for you to say that airplanes are fairly secure? And please, no crap about how we didn't really stop the underwear bomber. I don't care if that bomb did go off. Statistically, one incident would still constitute fantastic safety over the course of a ten-year period. Jesus, do slashdotters not understand statistics, or what? What mobile location is more secure than an airplane?
And the cost? What are you basing this supposedly high cost on? I can't recall the stats off the top of my head, but it's something like $10 a ticket. That's not even three airport coffees at today's prices. Do you think bag and body scanners can be bought at newegg.com for $100 each?
Seeing irrational crap like this on a supposedly rational internet forum makes me want to f'ing scream.
John Mica is the same guy who shut down the FAA for a couple weeks because he decided now is the right time to bust airport unions. He also specifically introduced measures into the FAA funding bill that called for closures in Democrats' districts. Those were the hard-line positions he took that caused the impasse over extension of FAA funding, which is normally a completely routine process.
I'm actually not much of a fan of either unions, or the TSA, but I can recognize partisan hackery when I see it. It's also ludicrous to think that public sector unions are a major cause of our recent woes, as union membership has already been declining for years.
So, sorry, but I'm a little bit inclined to be skeptical of his motives. The GOP are making a living off of objecting to stuff (e.g. TSA) that they were all for, when Republicans controlled the government. People who continue to give these craven conservative monsters the benefit of the doubt are merely fueling their outrageous behavior.
There's really no sense in worrying about anything in a car that's not responsible for the actual driving of the car. If the computers that control engine timing, or braking, or airbag deployment get hacked, that's a problem. If the entertainment system gets hacked, and somebody maliciously transfers some Michael Bolton mp3s to your sound system, it's much less of a problem. You simply need to isolate the systems. Cars already have multiple internal computers, so it's not like this requires splitting one on-board computer into two.
Military aircraft have had this concept for a long time. The computing systems that actually fly the plane, like the fly-by-wire controls, are completely separate from the stuff that a pilot uses to do other tasks, like mission planning. Depending on whether your software is "mission critical" or "flight critical" or neither, there are different systems that run it, and different quality standards that apply.
I'd just hate to see a massive freak-out about "hackers" disabling your brakes remotely, when there's no reason for that to ever be even technically feasible.
I worked on defense systems in Ada for a number of years. While I love working in C# and Java, and sometimes Objective-C, I have to say that Ada had some really great features (some of which clearly influenced later languages).
It might seem like Ada would be a great language for financial services, as it was designed with security and reliability in mind. But, alas, the financial sector is really less interested in those features, and vastly more interested in skimming their clients' money while telling them how lucky they are to have the liquidity. I don't remember Ada including a library for that (system.scheming.ponzi, maybe?).
I have a question. How can a guy make $500k and obviously think the world of himself while being under the impression that 12 hours x 7 days equals 100 hrs/wk?
Sorry in advance for the sarcasm, but slashdotters do know what you do. If you paid attention, there have been lots of HFT threads since 2008. The question is, "do you understand what you do"? Namely, destabilize markets, manipulate prices for your clients, participate in systemic frontrunning, and divert talent away from solving engineering problems that actually matter to humanity, for the sake of enriching yourself off one of the biggest examples of what game theorists call a "Prisoner's Dilemma" that I can imagine. Your use of the word "useful" to describe your work leads me to think not.
What does your Direct TV story have to do with my iPhone? I mean, thanks for the explanation, but the only thing it has in common with the topic is that the telecom industry is involved. Different network technology, different company. Different. Everything isn't a slippery slope to everything else.
I'm pissed, because for about the last three or so years, I haven't seen one iota of increased performance in my home internet or mobile phone speeds, my rates haven't dropped a bit, the economy is in the tank (which normally drops prices, especially for technology that isn't improving), and AT&T is one of the most profitable companies on earth, even before this move!
That's incredibly myopic. Any system that yields an "ounce of prevention being worth a pound of cure" is one that should be even more important to someone like you who's under tight time constraints. During any given day, you're not just spending time on the particular task at hand, you're spending time as a result of past decisions. If you're adding a new feature to the Widget class, the amount of time that'll take today is directly proportional to how well that class was originally written. If it was originally tossed together, to be just "good enough", but not readable or maintainable, then every feature you add will be more costly to implement.
Similarly, your work today may involve fixing a bug, that would never have surfaced had the code been properly reviewed 6 months ago.
You have to try to envision an alternate universe, where you were taking the time to implement those quality processes that pay future dividends (commensurate with their cost, of course). The question you should be asking is, "would I be further ahead in that alternate universe than I am today?".
It's just bogus to claim "schedule" is the reason you have to implement processes that forgo earlier, cheaper fixes, for later, more expensive ones. I know lazy coders use that excuse all the time, and managers frequently go along with that short-sighted rationale, but it doesn't make it right.
Why are continuous code reviews great? Is a flood great because water is good?
People who don't like pair programming aren't merely antisocial, as you contend. There are very legitimate reasons why pair programming may be a bad idea. For one, logistics. Having pairs requires people to work the same hours, sit in very close proximity to one another, get interrupted when someone else needs to use the bathroom, it works poorly with telecommuting, etc, etc. There's something uniquely human about needing some space to work and think, that pair programming does not allow.
It's also pretty established fact that knowledge work (for many people) requires concentration, and the absence of interruption. Pair programming is horrible from this standpoint. You are constantly having thoughts, and then getting interrupted when your pair has a thought they want to share. You'll basically be coding, and trying to hold a conversation at the same time. Concurrency like that isn't helpful for many computer programs, and it's even less helpful for most human brains. It's like context switching on the order of seconds, rather than having an hour or so to work in peace and quiet, and then conversing with a coworker only on demand.
Personality also has an impact. If you have a dominant personality (driver), you'll often have them doing most of the actual coding, with the other person just serving as their typist (which is slower than if the person thinking just typed it themselves). The passive personality may be having trouble coming up with good ideas on their own, because their mind is being constantly re-routed by the aggressive personality.
You can argue all you want that impracticalities like the ones I've mentioned are just indications that the pair programmers need to get better at pair programming. But, that's crap. A good system is one that capitalizes on the way people actually are, not one that forces people to work in unnatural ways.
Mr. Obama,
While it's nice of you to recognize the need for more engineers, it's hugely disingenuous of you to suggest that someone else needs to do something about it. Your policies have a huge impact on such things, and you've missed opportunity after opportunity to make changes that would help this issue. Instead of promoting technical innovation, you have participated in the largest giveaways in history to the financial and insurance sectors. Why would bright minds go into engineering, when you've continued to dump heaps of welfare into the laps of bankers, traders, and insurance salesman who simply leech wealth from those of us who actually invent and innovate?
Engineers don't magically appear out of thin air because you passed the largest and most irresponsible tax breaks in history. You need to actually enact major programs to foster things like IT development and green technology, instead of just paying lip service to them during primary campaign stops.
I know many of us just associate with other geeks, but this phenomenon isn't at all confined to the geek world. Don't overthink this one. Conservatism has had a nice little rebound in the last year or so, not to mention a trend in the US that really started in 2001 with the election of the quintessential anti-intellectual, George W. Bush. Modern conservatism is, at its core, anti-intellectual. It doesn't care about facts, degrees, experts, or reason. It's all about giving in to your fear, and what your gut tells you. The masses are most easily lured by this kind of philosophy, but geeks aren't immune to it, either. Geeks are humans, too.
Why is it that atheists on the internet spend so much more time talking about god on the internet than people of faith...
We atheists spend time "talking" about it on the internet, because direct communication is how intellectuals share and evaluate ideas. Basically, we take all the time we save praying to entities that don't exist, and channel that into time spent talking, and writing to entities that do. Got it?
I would have completely agreed with the premise of the topic when iOS 4.0 was released. It brought my 3G to a crawl. But, the majority of the sluggishness problems were fixed in iOS 4.1. Don't lump the current version in with the original release of iOS 4.
It obviously would have been better if Apple actually tested 4.0 on 3G devices, which would have immediately revealed a problem. They apparently didn't, or didn't care .. which is bad. But, the fix did come.
Also, a lot of the observed problems may actually have less to do with the OS version, and more to do with the fact that most users don't use the optimal method of upgrading their OS. If you just accept iTunes' prompt to upgrade when you connect your iPhone, you'll likely eventually wind up with a phone that's bogged down and sluggish. I've had much better results instead backing up my phone (apps, data, music, etc.), then using the "Restore" process to go to the new OS as a clean slate. You then, of course, have to restore from backup, after going to the new OS. It's an extra step, and probably shouldn't be necessary, but it gets better results than the basic "upgrade".
Make sure you're not confusing these two issues (OS suitability for older hardware, and the problems with direct upgrades).
http://www.enscand.com/roller/enscand/entry/upgrading_iphone_3g_to_ios4
Teaching the right about what Net Neutrality means is pointless. Conservatives don't make decisions based on facts. They make decisions based on their guts. And there's considerable behavioral research that indicates that when confronted with the fact that their existing views are contradicted by actual facts, those holding the views will actually become more convinced of their erroneous viewpoints (see climate change, Obama's birth, health care death panels, WMDs in Iraq, etc.) . So, in reality, the best thing you could do is just ignore them, and hope that their opposition remains at a relatively low energy intensity.
This is a sad statement about human nature, but if liberals and intellectuals don't come to terms with this simple reality, they will continue to be frustrated by the knuckle draggers among us.
Why is it that conservatives and libertarians can never seem to draw from actual empirical evidence, and insist on clinging to unproven philosophy?
The hell with Adam Smith. Look at this issue in practice.
I live in Seattle proper, where we have a publicly-run utility company. We have the lowest electricity rates in the nation, and solid reliability. Sure, some of that has to do with natural resources in the area, but Seattle's suburbs have those same advantages. You literally go outside Seattle's city limits, and you have to buy electricity from Puget Sound Energy, whose rates are significantly higher, and whose service is worse. The public utility beats the private one hands-down.
For the other side of the coin, look at California's recent experiment with electricity deregulation. Enron jumped right in and screwed everyone over. The little detail of the market makers is always conveniently ignored by conservative theory. The entire west coast suffered because of California's naivete.
Electricity in this country is not expensive. It's cheap. Period. Americans just feel that God has given them the right to boundless consumption, so as long as energy isn't free, they whine like little babies.
I'm not a fool, but I do still do business with BofA. Since you're apparently hip on using insults to get your point across, I don't feel bad calling you naive. Your little vote-with-your-dollars speech is quaint, but it completely ignores the fact that there is no "vote" to be counted.
There is no alternative here. All the banks are engaged in this bullshit. The state banks, too. Credit unions. Want to keep your money in some alternate investment? Great, you can be fucked over by companies like Vanguard or TDAmeritrade.
You also don't have a vote in the sense that these financial services companies don't need customers to be profitable. In fact, they're learning that it's sort of easier without the customers. Banks can stop managing other people's money, and get low-interest loans from the Federal Reserve, which they invest in commodities, stocks, or some other investment that is being propped up by the international finance cartel. So, taking your $100k out of the bank will make no difference to them.
What about just not investing in anything? Great ... do that, and your money will disappear before your eyes. Have you ever asked yourself why inflation doesn't average 0%, over long periods of time? Why does it always seem to be above zero? It's because that's the finance cartel's way of ensuring that you use their services, in one form or another. Over time, you'll still usually lose money, in real dollar terms. But, less than you would if you just kept your cash under the mattress.
(Please, no idiotic replies about how some stock index has outpaced inflation over time ... if you believe the validity of either of those published numbers, then you're a lost cause).
So, until you realize that our societal tolerance of these finance leeches has led us to a position where we're essentially powerless to do anything, your market-based democracy is going to be utterly pointless.
Brilliant. Let's all rely on nuclear energy, which, if it were the primary replacement for fossil fuels, would run out even faster than oil.
It's nice that France uses nuclear, and it is nominally carbon-neutral, but you cannot solve the climate change problem with nuclear power. Nuclear fuel is hard to make, and the raw materials needed to make it won't even last one human lifetime if we use it at the rate we use fossil fuels. At best, nuclear power is a transition technology that can help us get from where we are now, to an ultimately sustainable future energy mix. That's it.
Regarding the fact that there have been doomsayers before, and we haven't all perished yet: are you kidding me? That's like saying that you heard a couple guys in blue shirts make a prediction once, and they were wrong, so you're not listening to any more predictions from guys in blue shirts. Not to mention the fact that world resource consumption has only continued to go up with time. Unless you're arguing that the earth's resources are not actually finite, then that means that on average, today's resource "doomsayers" are speaking from an even stronger position that those from the 90s, 80s, 70s, etc. What about that is difficult to comprehend?
Are we living in the movie Idiocracy, where morons can make patently irrational suggestions like this, and get modded up to 5?
Jesus, get over yourself already. Everything can't be represented as a 1 or 0. There are degress of everything. Just because you give a rip about the environment doesn't mean you have to kill yourself, and everyone else, who has ever consumed anything. Do you really have such a poor grasp of complexity that you can only see things as black and white?
The attempt at mangling logic in your last paragraph is pathetic. I happen to have made the decision not to have kids, and world overpopulation is definitely one factor that lead me to that decision. This isn't illogical, and is undeserving of your childish "WTF?". I do care about "our descendents". The apparent difference between me and you is that I don't refuse to include other people's offspring in the category of "our descendents". If I only gave a damn about people who were direct descendents of myself, then I agree that it would be illogical to refuse to procreate in order to make life better for my future (non-existant) descendents. But, here's the kicker ... despite the fact that you are clearly a selfish clown, I actually care about the well-being of the spawn you produce.
Hence, I care what we do to our planet today, even when it happens to conflict with my own immediate self-interests. You can decline to think this way if you like, but don't bash those of us who are responsible enough to think more than a generation into the future.