At a new year's party - I endured a long conversation of a bunch of self-proclaimed "nerds and geeks" talking about how our new nerdy sci-fi culture was breeding a new generation of brilliant science-and-math oriented geniuses. Because we all grew up loving sci fi tv shows like star trek and star wars, and because we all play video games and read comic books.
I played the bad guy. The stick in the mud. As I always do. I expect not to be invited back next year. I asked the room: how many of them had completed Calculus, or Linear Algebra, or were working in Science or Engineering fields. Not a one. Well, one. But he was a Marketing Manager at a software company, and couldn't write a singe line of code to save his life. I am such a shit - I made them feel bad.
And that's what this is all about. Ego. Math and Science classes are hard work, and when you fail you get bad grades, and feel bad. And there isn't a big audience clapping, or a row of cheerleaders chanting "go team go!" when you win. No. Our culture celebrates ignorance, and punishes brilliance.
I honestly don't think that this nation deserves to be competitive anymore. We had our brief flash of glory. 40 years of selfish, bad policy. It will take a change of heart, and then at least 20 years to build it back. And I don't think that we have the gumption, and the capitalists who run our nation don't want to build anything back. They don't even want to pay to repair bridges. They will leave this country a smoking ruin, and move on to where the money is. Switzerland. Luxembourg. Dubai. KSA.
The true big expense of companies now, is on lobbyists and bribery via telegraphed stock buybacks and insider-trading for politicians. This is why companies are not hiring workers or investing in R&D. The biggest bang for the buck now, is bribing politicians, to print money, to pay wealthy plutocrats, to bribe politicians.
Oh - it takes probably another 20 hp, and two more gears in the transmission. For some reason, you limeys get 5, 6, 7-speed gearboxes, when we get 3 and 4-speed gearboxes, and crippled engines.
I don't think it takes an "italian sports car". Most American sedans are simply designed with crappy leaf-spring or dependent suspensions, or with rear-drum brakes. Many poor trade-offs. On the other hand, not very Americans actually DRIVE American cars anymore! Mostly, we're driving the same European or Japanese-made cars that you guys are driving. With this exception: When American auto makers export our cars to the European or Australian markets, they seem to get better suspensions, upgraded engines, better brakes, and, oddly, crippled emissions-control systems? Then they market them under a different name. And we go over there, and drive them, find out they're better, and can't re-import them to the US.:( So we buy BMW's and Porsches.
Thinking about this: The old rovers were not designed to operate as long as they have. The mission was intended to go for only a few months, if I recall correctly. I think that the operators were surprised that they survived the first martian winter, and knew that dust build-up was going to be a problem for solar power generation.
Nuclear power, however, has a known and predictable lifespan. Curiosity's going to definitely run out of RTG power at some known point in time: X. And that's it. Mission's over. Period.
It is possible that Opportunity will still be rolling, and will roll over Curiosity's faintly radioactive grave. I hope so.
I learned photography back in the days of film. And you kids (get off my lawn) - with your digital photography don't know how good you have it. It is such a luxury to be able to take hundreds or thousands of experimental throwaway shots!!!
Set your fucking camera on S or A. Period. Bracket, and take three shots, under, on, and over. Look at the viewfinder - holy crap, you can even see a fucking preview of what your contrast range is going to look like! Get the fuck off my lawn you punks!
Do yourself a favor, and just put a little piece of tape over the P spot on the wheel. You won't learn a damn thing until you learn to use S or A, and leave it there.
True: also. . . if you get the alpha-series Sony, it is more of a DSLR. It is less compact, and the lens does not actually move. The viewfinder is not a live TTL viewfinder, which a lot of DSLR users see as a non-negotiable trade-off, because of the lag. But with my alpha-55, there is no lag. Sony has conquered the lag problem.
How does the light get through the mirror to the sensor if the mirror is fixed? It's an LCD, so the mirror becomes partially transparent during shutter-open.
The cons are: a tad less light gets through to the sensor, so obviously, they have to use a more sensitive sensor, noise-reduction. But again, the image quality is on-par with Canon and Nikon, so really, it's not a problem.
The pros to the fixed mirror are: lighter weight than a full reflex mirror system, less mechanical complexity, faster and quieter action, you can zoom and focus DURING video shooting, you can live-preview your aperture. This camera is very fast.
This camera is also quite a bit less expensive than the Canons and Nikons with equivalent feature sets. It's also got a built-in GPS.
The only problems have to do with not being able to do much with the White Balance other than selecting Sony's pre-sets, and the operation of the controls and menus is pretty much the same as all Sony consumer-level cameras: which is very different than what a pro would expect on this level of DSLR camera. Also, it uses Sony "smart" batteries, which are pretty pricey, like $40. And it goes through them pretty quick, so I'd recommend buying about 3-4 of those as well. You can use any Pentax or Konica glass, as well as the Sony alpha mount lens system.
Also: the onboard HDR function kind of sucks. You can auto-bracket to RAW, and process in photoshop or however you do your HDR, you get better fine control over contrasts and ranges that way anyway.
I have to say that the Leaf is about the ugliest car I've ever seen. The only thing close, is the Prius. Civic is pretty butt-ugly too. Damn. Poor dude.
well - I used to think that about diesel too - and, in fact, I do have a diesel, and it does suck.
I think that the "next big thing", actually, is unemployment keeps going up, so that only really wealthy people can drive, and most of us walk, and pretty much fucking eat eachother or starve to death.
bottom line is: some people can just be dumbasses, and abuse their batteries.
If they know they can swap it out, and make it someone else's problem, they WILL do it.
I do not want to pull into a service station, and trade in my GOOD battery, that I've babied, and treated nice, and not drained down to dead, for a piece of crap that is damaged by some moron who has no impulse control or foresight or capability to plan and discipline themselves, and runs their battery until empty thus burning out a $30,000 battery pack.
This is a huge problem, and battery-swaps will NOT solve it.
I can verify via anaecdotes from other prius owners (I do not own one myself) - that the regenerative braking that most electric/hybrid cars have, does, indeed, extend brake life far beyond what we expect in normal gas cars.
Then again, so does a manual transmission, and intelligent downshifting technique - lol!
Plenty of people, and I mean PLENTY, drive their personal car, over 500 miles, several times a year.
The airline industry, the train and bus industry, simply do NOT cut it. And the rental-car industry sucks-ass.
I'm about as big an "electric-car" fan as you'll find anywhere.
I have a 10-mile commute to work. But until the electric car can satisfy my occasional use-case of the "over 500 mile car trip" - I ain't buying one. (and I would happily have a second, electric car for daily commute, with a gasser for long trips: but again. . . I'm not THAT wealthy)
The sordid history of the seditious acts of the US Chamber of Commerce date well back to the Nixon Administration's appointment of former chair Lewis Powell to the Supreme Court. He wrote a now-infamous memo, (at the time, secret) to other business leaders, in reaction to Ralph Nader's efforts with Consumers Union, about the horrible threat posed to the American Way of Life, by a politically empowered Middle Class. In this memo, he outlined a strategy, including de-funding the political opposition (basically, anything left of Nixon).
Part of the strategy was to move manufacturing overseas, on a large scale, to limit the incomes of middle-america, so that they could no longer donate money to politicians who opposed the policies friendly to big-business.
This has obviously been tremendously successful.
Note that Karl Rove, Richard Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld, were all members (not senior members, but associates) of the Nixon Administration.
Maybe the US will apologize when Pakistan formally apologizes for sheltering Osama bin Laden for 10 years, running the Taliban as a proxy organization from the ISI, and staging the Mumbai terrorist attack.
I think that the only reason the US considers them an "ally" is because it is vaguely convenient. The only reason Pakistan considers the US an "ally" is because the US pays them a shitload of money. Liars on both sides. Which is probably why karma is fucking both sides up the ass.
Yeah; but the "convenience" issue for electric cars is: typical non-workday use-case: I would like to drive up to Yakima to visit my Sister's family this weekend @ 500 miles. EV car has 250 mile range on freeway + 8hr recharge between 250 mile sprint. . . therefore, 500 miles will take (50mph freeway avg. . . 5hr + 8hr charge + 5hr =) 18 hrs, each way. . . Gas car has - we'll say 250 mile range on freeway + 10 minute refuel stop: (my diesel car has a 450 mile range on freeway, so suck-it). ETA 10 hr each way.
You can do that 10 hr drive on the Friday evening, Sunday evening. But with an EV your mobility of this use-case is severely impaired. 90% of use cases, as the hollywood intelligencia are fond of pointing out, are not impacted by this limitation. IF ONLY the insurance companies and governments and automakers will allow me to own a second vehicle, FREE OF CHARGE, for the other 10% of the time I need this kind of capability.
(by the way, renting a gas vehicle for this kind of trip, as I am doing this holiday, is costing me $400. I'm stuck this time, because we have to take the dogs, and they just won't fit in the diesel car. My thinking is that it would cost $60 to euthanize them. - - but that's just MY life. )
EV problem to be solved is RECHARGE-TIME. and/or capacity/range. (and. . . get the idea through the stupid thick skulls of auto manufacturers that they don't have to make them look ugly as fuck. They can make them look the same as regular cars - duh! You seen the Leaf? bleh!).
The saudis tried this techniqe in the 90's and fucked a huge oilfield to the point where they collapsed hundreds of square miles of rock formation, such that they can not extract the oil. Gas is a different story.
They PARTIALLY de-regulated, to favor donors, and left regulations in place which prevented fair competition. This created a system of perverse incentives, which encouraged companies to take on enormous risk, that they knew the government would cover in a bailout.
This is why the first act of any reform or revolution movement must be to set up an iron wall between money and politics. I don't fucking care if politicians have to dress in garbage bags and work in chains, and live in prison cells. They've fucked us over for the last time. They are paid generous public salaries, there is no reason they should be allowed private profit on the side so that they can sell regulation to the highest commercial bidder.
Americans have shown that they are very willing and happy to pay $2 for 16oz of water in a clear-plastic disposable bottle for at least the past decade.
Water as a public utility is WAY under-priced. (OR - American consumers are overpaid, and motherfucking stupid).
In 2001 - a gallon of diesel fuel used to be on-par with a gallon of regular unleaded gasoline. Now, in 2011, a gallon of diesel is easily more expensive, in some regions, as much as a dollar more per gallon than premium unleaded gasoline. The increased fuel efficiency of diesel no longer makes good sense.
I know that there are a lot of good reasons why this should NOT be the case, but unfortunately, the fuel distribution industry has decided to price car-driving consumers out of the equation.
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At a new year's party - I endured a long conversation of a bunch of self-proclaimed "nerds and geeks" talking about how our new nerdy sci-fi culture was breeding a new generation of brilliant science-and-math oriented geniuses. Because we all grew up loving sci fi tv shows like star trek and star wars, and because we all play video games and read comic books.
I played the bad guy. The stick in the mud. As I always do. I expect not to be invited back next year. I asked the room: how many of them had completed Calculus, or Linear Algebra, or were working in Science or Engineering fields. Not a one. Well, one. But he was a Marketing Manager at a software company, and couldn't write a singe line of code to save his life. I am such a shit - I made them feel bad.
And that's what this is all about. Ego. Math and Science classes are hard work, and when you fail you get bad grades, and feel bad. And there isn't a big audience clapping, or a row of cheerleaders chanting "go team go!" when you win. No. Our culture celebrates ignorance, and punishes brilliance.
I honestly don't think that this nation deserves to be competitive anymore. We had our brief flash of glory. 40 years of selfish, bad policy. It will take a change of heart, and then at least 20 years to build it back. And I don't think that we have the gumption, and the capitalists who run our nation don't want to build anything back. They don't even want to pay to repair bridges. They will leave this country a smoking ruin, and move on to where the money is. Switzerland. Luxembourg. Dubai. KSA.
or caps-lock!
The true big expense of companies now, is on lobbyists and bribery via telegraphed stock buybacks and insider-trading for politicians. This is why companies are not hiring workers or investing in R&D. The biggest bang for the buck now, is bribing politicians, to print money, to pay wealthy plutocrats, to bribe politicians.
Oh - it takes probably another 20 hp, and two more gears in the transmission. For some reason, you limeys get 5, 6, 7-speed gearboxes, when we get 3 and 4-speed gearboxes, and crippled engines.
I don't think it takes an "italian sports car". Most American sedans are simply designed with crappy leaf-spring or dependent suspensions, or with rear-drum brakes. Many poor trade-offs. On the other hand, not very Americans actually DRIVE American cars anymore! Mostly, we're driving the same European or Japanese-made cars that you guys are driving. With this exception: When American auto makers export our cars to the European or Australian markets, they seem to get better suspensions, upgraded engines, better brakes, and, oddly, crippled emissions-control systems? Then they market them under a different name. And we go over there, and drive them, find out they're better, and can't re-import them to the US. :( So we buy BMW's and Porsches.
Thinking about this: The old rovers were not designed to operate as long as they have. The mission was intended to go for only a few months, if I recall correctly. I think that the operators were surprised that they survived the first martian winter, and knew that dust build-up was going to be a problem for solar power generation.
Nuclear power, however, has a known and predictable lifespan. Curiosity's going to definitely run out of RTG power at some known point in time: X. And that's it. Mission's over. Period.
It is possible that Opportunity will still be rolling, and will roll over Curiosity's faintly radioactive grave. I hope so.
If one is really serious; one would carry TWO cameras, so that you wouldn't be swapping telephoto and wide-angle lenses constantly. :P
I disagree about using full-auto.
I learned photography back in the days of film. And you kids (get off my lawn) - with your digital photography don't know how good you have it. It is such a luxury to be able to take hundreds or thousands of experimental throwaway shots!!!
Set your fucking camera on S or A. Period. Bracket, and take three shots, under, on, and over. Look at the viewfinder - holy crap, you can even see a fucking preview of what your contrast range is going to look like! Get the fuck off my lawn you punks!
Do yourself a favor, and just put a little piece of tape over the P spot on the wheel. You won't learn a damn thing until you learn to use S or A, and leave it there.
True: also. . . if you get the alpha-series Sony, it is more of a DSLR. It is less compact, and the lens does not actually move. The viewfinder is not a live TTL viewfinder, which a lot of DSLR users see as a non-negotiable trade-off, because of the lag. But with my alpha-55, there is no lag. Sony has conquered the lag problem.
How does the light get through the mirror to the sensor if the mirror is fixed? It's an LCD, so the mirror becomes partially transparent during shutter-open.
The cons are: a tad less light gets through to the sensor, so obviously, they have to use a more sensitive sensor, noise-reduction. But again, the image quality is on-par with Canon and Nikon, so really, it's not a problem.
The pros to the fixed mirror are: lighter weight than a full reflex mirror system, less mechanical complexity, faster and quieter action, you can zoom and focus DURING video shooting, you can live-preview your aperture. This camera is very fast.
This camera is also quite a bit less expensive than the Canons and Nikons with equivalent feature sets. It's also got a built-in GPS.
The only problems have to do with not being able to do much with the White Balance other than selecting Sony's pre-sets, and the operation of the controls and menus is pretty much the same as all Sony consumer-level cameras: which is very different than what a pro would expect on this level of DSLR camera. Also, it uses Sony "smart" batteries, which are pretty pricey, like $40. And it goes through them pretty quick, so I'd recommend buying about 3-4 of those as well. You can use any Pentax or Konica glass, as well as the Sony alpha mount lens system.
Also: the onboard HDR function kind of sucks. You can auto-bracket to RAW, and process in photoshop or however you do your HDR, you get better fine control over contrasts and ranges that way anyway.
I have to say that the Leaf is about the ugliest car I've ever seen. The only thing close, is the Prius. Civic is pretty butt-ugly too. Damn. Poor dude.
well - I used to think that about diesel too - and, in fact, I do have a diesel, and it does suck.
I think that the "next big thing", actually, is unemployment keeps going up, so that only really wealthy people can drive, and most of us walk, and pretty much fucking eat eachother or starve to death.
bottom line is: some people can just be dumbasses, and abuse their batteries.
If they know they can swap it out, and make it someone else's problem, they WILL do it.
I do not want to pull into a service station, and trade in my GOOD battery, that I've babied, and treated nice, and not drained down to dead, for a piece of crap that is damaged by some moron who has no impulse control or foresight or capability to plan and discipline themselves, and runs their battery until empty thus burning out a $30,000 battery pack.
This is a huge problem, and battery-swaps will NOT solve it.
I can verify via anaecdotes from other prius owners (I do not own one myself) - that the regenerative braking that most electric/hybrid cars have, does, indeed, extend brake life far beyond what we expect in normal gas cars.
Then again, so does a manual transmission, and intelligent downshifting technique - lol!
Plenty of people, and I mean PLENTY, drive their personal car, over 500 miles, several times a year.
The airline industry, the train and bus industry, simply do NOT cut it.
And the rental-car industry sucks-ass.
I'm about as big an "electric-car" fan as you'll find anywhere.
I have a 10-mile commute to work.
But until the electric car can satisfy my occasional use-case of the "over 500 mile car trip" - I ain't buying one. (and I would happily have a second, electric car for daily commute, with a gasser for long trips: but again. . . I'm not THAT wealthy)
The sordid history of the seditious acts of the US Chamber of Commerce date well back to the Nixon Administration's appointment of former chair Lewis Powell to the Supreme Court. He wrote a now-infamous memo, (at the time, secret) to other business leaders, in reaction to Ralph Nader's efforts with Consumers Union, about the horrible threat posed to the American Way of Life, by a politically empowered Middle Class. In this memo, he outlined a strategy, including de-funding the political opposition (basically, anything left of Nixon).
Part of the strategy was to move manufacturing overseas, on a large scale, to limit the incomes of middle-america, so that they could no longer donate money to politicians who opposed the policies friendly to big-business.
This has obviously been tremendously successful.
Note that Karl Rove, Richard Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld, were all members (not senior members, but associates) of the Nixon Administration.
Maybe the US will apologize when Pakistan formally apologizes for sheltering Osama bin Laden for 10 years, running the Taliban as a proxy organization from the ISI, and staging the Mumbai terrorist attack.
I think that the only reason the US considers them an "ally" is because it is vaguely convenient. The only reason Pakistan considers the US an "ally" is because the US pays them a shitload of money. Liars on both sides. Which is probably why karma is fucking both sides up the ass.
Yeah; but the "convenience" issue for electric cars is:
typical non-workday use-case: I would like to drive up to Yakima to visit my Sister's family this weekend @ 500 miles.
EV car has 250 mile range on freeway + 8hr recharge between 250 mile sprint. . . therefore, 500 miles will take (50mph freeway avg. . . 5hr + 8hr charge + 5hr =) 18 hrs, each way. . .
Gas car has - we'll say 250 mile range on freeway + 10 minute refuel stop: (my diesel car has a 450 mile range on freeway, so suck-it). ETA 10 hr each way.
You can do that 10 hr drive on the Friday evening, Sunday evening.
But with an EV your mobility of this use-case is severely impaired.
90% of use cases, as the hollywood intelligencia are fond of pointing out, are not impacted by this limitation.
IF ONLY the insurance companies and governments and automakers will allow me to own a second vehicle, FREE OF CHARGE, for the other 10% of the time I need this kind of capability.
(by the way, renting a gas vehicle for this kind of trip, as I am doing this holiday, is costing me $400. I'm stuck this time, because we have to take the dogs, and they just won't fit in the diesel car. My thinking is that it would cost $60 to euthanize them. - - but that's just MY life. )
EV problem to be solved is RECHARGE-TIME. and/or capacity/range.
(and. . . get the idea through the stupid thick skulls of auto manufacturers that they don't have to make them look ugly as fuck. They can make them look the same as regular cars - duh! You seen the Leaf? bleh!).
The saudis tried this techniqe in the 90's and fucked a huge oilfield to the point where they collapsed hundreds of square miles of rock formation, such that they can not extract the oil. Gas is a different story.
The judiciary is almost universally corrupt in this country. From top to bottom. Libertarians are living in a fantasy world that they don't see this.
The government did not de-regulate wall street.
They PARTIALLY de-regulated, to favor donors, and left regulations in place which prevented fair competition. This created a system of perverse incentives, which encouraged companies to take on enormous risk, that they knew the government would cover in a bailout.
This is why the first act of any reform or revolution movement must be to set up an iron wall between money and politics. I don't fucking care if politicians have to dress in garbage bags and work in chains, and live in prison cells. They've fucked us over for the last time. They are paid generous public salaries, there is no reason they should be allowed private profit on the side so that they can sell regulation to the highest commercial bidder.
Naw. Not ugly at all.
Americans have shown that they are very willing and happy to pay $2 for 16oz of water in a clear-plastic disposable bottle for at least the past decade.
Water as a public utility is WAY under-priced. (OR - American consumers are overpaid, and motherfucking stupid).
We can trust Shell to screw up diesels though.
In 2001 - a gallon of diesel fuel used to be on-par with a gallon of regular unleaded gasoline. Now, in 2011, a gallon of diesel is easily more expensive, in some regions, as much as a dollar more per gallon than premium unleaded gasoline. The increased fuel efficiency of diesel no longer makes good sense.
I know that there are a lot of good reasons why this should NOT be the case, but unfortunately, the fuel distribution industry has decided to price car-driving consumers out of the equation.
A flying-wing does not "glide". It's an inherently unstable design. I can almost guarantee it was a controlled landing.
I would NOT want to be the guy who does routine refuelling and maintenance checks on a C-4-packed drone.
What Japan has much less of now: uncontaminated land. See ya in about 200 years.