Fund R&D projects? Yes. But there will not BE cheap electric or hybrids until enough of them are sold every year to bring the manufacturing costs down enough to bring the price down enough that they are competitive, price-wise, with internal combustion vehicles. Also, face the reality: We don't have that much oil left, and we NEED to start weaning off it NOW, rather than later when it's a crisis situation. I'm not saying we should have permanent government incentives to consumers to buy electric vehicles, just long enough to kick-start the process of getting more people to buy them. Enough people buy them and have them, the more people will start thinking they need to buy them too, and so on, until it's the norm instead of just the exception. The more electric vehicles on the road, the more incentive there will be to build infrastructure to charge them, the easier it'll be to own one, the more incentive people will have to BUY one, and so on.
You want people to adopt electric cars and hybrids in greater numbers sooner? You want to wean the general populace off of fossil fuels? This is how you do it! Of all the complete wastes of money the U.S. government commits, this comparatively speaking would be a drop in the bucket and of great long-term benefit to the entire country. While we're at it how about they sink some money into electric vehicle support infrastructure like rapid charging stations, too?
THIS is one of the MANY reasons I do not EVER want there to be 100% autonomous cars on the road. Any such law-enforcement-oriented technology can and WILL be hijacked by criminals to suit their own purposes. If you are in a car by yourself, YOU should be the ultimate intellgence in control of the vehicles' speed and direction, NOT a computer, NOT a cop, and sure as fuck NOT some criminal or some script kiddie who thinks it's funny or something to hack your car.
It's the dirty little secret of cable TV: Pixel resolution and compression are two different things. You may be getting a channel in 1080, but by the time a cable company delivers it to your TV, it's be recompressed so much that it being 1080 doesn't matter anymore. You see it most when things in the picture are moving, they get blocky, and in aliasing around things like text on the screen. They do this to fit more channels into the available bandwidth of their network. Over-the-air from local stations isn't recompressed within an inch of it's life; you're getting the highest quality you can get that way short of having an actual digital copy of a program physically sent to you on some sort of storage medium. I suspect that satellite TV compresses the hell out of things, too, for the same reason: fit more channels into the available bandwidth, so they can make more money. Try paying attention to all this the next time you're watching cable or satellite, you'll notice the compression artifacts. Sorry in advance for ruining it for you, BTW. Then go watch TV where it's using an antenna for OTA broadcasts, you'll see the difference.
You don't have to 'explain' a goddamn thing to them or anyone else, and you damn well TELL them that. You are paying them, not the other way around, and if you want to cancel your service with them or anyone else for that matter, it's not their place to badger you or bully you. Being asked, once, politely, why you're unhappy enough to cancel is one thing, but if you don't wish to explain why then they MUST accept that. Arguing, bullying, badgering, or any other hard-sell tactics, is just plain bullshit. Anyone gives you that kind of guff? You tell them you want to speak to their supervisor, RIGHT NOW, and YOU don't take 'no' for an answer, either. Their supervisor is being a hardass about it, too? Go over their head. And so on. The only way you get shithead companies like Comcast to knock it off is to not sit back and take shit from them.
Do you have Aspergers? Or some heretofore undiscovered textual version of Turret's Syndrome? Reading just the first screenful or two of your recent comments leads me to believe that you do. Either that or you're just some shitty troll refugee from 4chan who couldn't cut it in that particular jungle. I'm honestly surprised that you're not posting as an Anonymous Coward. Oh, and before you protest my attacking you personally? You're the one that insulted me, so go fuck yourself, OK?
You can't compare any disaster like Katrina in this country (a 1st world country) to the everyday conditions in a 3rd world country where people are starving; there is no food to distribute so what does it matter if there is commication to help distribute what doesn't exist?
You're ignoring my point about the local warlords. They already have money to spend because they take it from whoever they want. The warlords will be the one with the internet, not the civilians who, again, have nothing and will continue to have nothing so long as there is a para-military around to keep taking everything from them and killing them, so all you're really doing is creating a wide-area communications system for the warlords and their troops.
People are living in (comparatively speaking, anyway) shithole ghetto countries with an extremely low standard of living, and you want them to get the Internet? Expensive Internet, at that? What the actual fuck? Only the 1% richest people in these 'equatorial regions' will end up with access, the poor will still be fucking poor and in many places starving. How about you invest that money in getting rid of local warlords, drug cartels, corrupt governments, and other assholes that profit from keeping people down and out so they can live high on the hog? How about you invest that money in helping people to improve their lives? This makes no sense whatsoever, unless you factor in the 'publicity' factor; I'm sure these assholes think it makes them look real humanitarian and all that crap to the rest of the world. I call bullshit on the whole thing.
"Hey, let's blatantly spin the news by using out-and-out censorship!". Fuck you Google, what the hell do you think you're doing? The news is the news, good, bad, or indifferent. It is the duty of a news agency to report the news, not filter it. What you're doing is no different than some government propaganda engine.
Oh, come on. Unbelievable as it is, there are reasonable, intelligent people on the Internet.
This is what I've been saying: You're not going to convince people to give up their personal transportation and take buses and trains everywhere, and it's not practical for every single person to ride a bike, either, and if I have to explain that one to you then you need to sit back and think a while longer before saying anything because the reasons are obvious (I'm a cyclist by the way so it's not like I'm anti-bicycle). Electric vehicles are going to have to be the way. We charge them with nuclear power generation plants. We make those safe by some serious and hard-line reforms in the way they're designed, constructed, and especially in how they're managed, to make them as safe as possible, instead of letting the bean counters cut corners because it's 'good enough' when they don't know what the hell they're even doing. We continue developing higher and higher efficiency photovoltaics. We continue working to unlock the secrets of fusion power. Maybe we even unlock higher-order mysteries of the Universe and find other, more exotic sources of energy to tap into. Meanwhile we're running out of fossil fuels anyway so everyone had better get on board with all this now and beat the rush later.
Oh, no, not at all. If anything I feel sorry for actual religious people because by large and far they're being used, manipulated. I'll put aside my personal belief that they'd be better off putting aside their superstitions and learning instead to stand on their own, but the fact of the matter is that their own spirituality is used as a lever to manipulate them into doing the will of a few religious leaders who only have money, power, and control on their minds. This is not to say that on the local level there aren't low-level leaders who actually *believe* in what they're preaching, but that unfortunately just makes them, to borrow from the Russians, 'useful idiots' for the cause of the higher-ups. It's the exploitation of what I perceive as a fundamental flaw in the human psyche, something that I dearly hope we grow out of sooner rather than later, before it wrecks the entire human race.
The 'be fruitful and multiply' thing may ostensibly be the reason, but having as many people part of a partiucular religion is what's attractive to the leaders of said religion. More people under their sway means more power overall in the world; if the population of your country becomes, say, theoretically, 80% Catholic, then what do you think that's going to do to public policy in that country? Similarly, what if the vast majority is some flavor of Muslim? Overrunning a country with sheer numbers because you're encouraged, one way or another, to have as many children as possible may be a long game, but it's an effective one. You're a particular religion, you have 10 kids, you raise them all to be that religion. Over the course of a few generations you have a large effect on the total population, and that starts to affect politics. Don't confuse religion with spirituality, either. Organized religion, at it's highest leadership levels, is about power, control, and money, and has been for a long, long time now.
Organized religion believes that the Earth will soon come to an end so there's no point in population control, in fact they want as many babies born under their control as possible, so naturally they're against birth control entirely.
I'm not even a pilot, but I think I understand the mindset of pilots well enough, having known a few: In the event of mechanical (or system) failure(s), any pilot is at least going to want to be able to peer out a window with his own two eyes to see what's going on. It's a backup system that is hard to cause failure in: If the windshield is shattered to the point where you can't see out of it, then you've got worse problems than not being able to see! This sounds like something some non-pilot (or worse, marketing monkey or bean-counter) came up with. Or maybe, just maybe, they're patenting it for the sole purpose of preventing anyone from doing anything this dangerous and stupid with airplane design?
Could we have some actual licensed experienced pilots please join this conversation? I'd like to know what you think about this, please.
It doesn't matter if anyone 'figures out how to do it' or not, I just don't see the average person doing it or even having a reason to do it. I think it's way more likely that this guy is just trying to draw some attention to himself so he can sell more books.
If this becomes a reality in the U.S. during my lifetime, I sure as fuck hope they're sitting there in the cab, supervising the onboard systems, ready to take over when (not if, but when) it fucks up. Autonomous cars are a scary enough idea to me, but 40 tons of truck travelling at highway speeds, with no one in the cab? Oh, hell no..
It might have been 4-bit equivalents of sinewaves, I never actually looked at the data, I was doing well just being able to get blank PROMs and having a programmer at the time to burn new ones with for repair purposes. I'm pretty sure one of the two PROMs was part of a simple state-machine that governed how the sound generator worked, though. Haven't actually looked at the schematics for years and years..
For those of you who aren't aware, this is true. Older games, especially from the 80's, used graphics systems that used very little RAM, instead the graphics all being stored in EPROMs. The background images were one layer, with hardware that usually supported scrolling, and the foreground (or 'motion graphics') images in another set of EPROMs, with specific hardware to place said objects at specific locations on the screen, and yet another layer of graphics just for text images like player scores. Completely different from the bitmap graphics that everything uses now. The reason was the price of RAM. The exception to the rule was Williams games like Defender, Stargate, Joust, Robotron 2084, Bubbles, and other similar era titles, that used 3 banks of 4116's for a total of 48kB of bitmap graphics memory, with DMA used to move graphics data from EPROMs to the screen buffer. Since there was no 'standard' for any of this hardware you'd have to write an emulator for each and every different game. Then there's sound. Pacman/Ms. Pacman used a very simple discrete sound generator using a couple bipolar ROMs; you'd have to code specifically for that, or cheat and use PCM samples. Galaxian actually had a hardware PRNG connected to a simple resistor-ladder DAC and some low-pass filtering to generate white noise for things like explosion noises. Really, I learned a hell of a lot about electronics back in the day from having to learn how these boards all worked, so I could repair them effectively (not like there was tech support for repairing any of this stuff or troubleshooting manuals!)
Truth. We have public repair stations on our local bike paths, even including a pump for your tires. Which lasted a couple months before someone cut the hose off it, then someone else later on stole the whole pump. I'm waiting to see how long the cable-attached tools last before some skeeze steals those, too. In some of the same places there is a rediculous solar-powered recycle bin that supposedly compacts the cans and stuff you put in it. Waiting to see how long it is before some homeless guy breaks into it and steals the solar panel and batteries and anything else they can sell. Also, more shit to monitor people? Benches? Really? What the actual fuck? Like someone else said, nice to see that Boston, apparently, has no infrastructure maintenance that needs to be done or other public problems that need any money to fix that they can spend money on stupid crap like this. Seriously, is anyone really going to trust something like this to plug their phone into it? Sounds like a great vector for having your phone hijacked to me. Nice move, Boston.
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Fund R&D projects? Yes. But there will not BE cheap electric or hybrids until enough of them are sold every year to bring the manufacturing costs down enough to bring the price down enough that they are competitive, price-wise, with internal combustion vehicles. Also, face the reality: We don't have that much oil left, and we NEED to start weaning off it NOW, rather than later when it's a crisis situation. I'm not saying we should have permanent government incentives to consumers to buy electric vehicles, just long enough to kick-start the process of getting more people to buy them. Enough people buy them and have them, the more people will start thinking they need to buy them too, and so on, until it's the norm instead of just the exception. The more electric vehicles on the road, the more incentive there will be to build infrastructure to charge them, the easier it'll be to own one, the more incentive people will have to BUY one, and so on.
You want people to adopt electric cars and hybrids in greater numbers sooner? You want to wean the general populace off of fossil fuels? This is how you do it! Of all the complete wastes of money the U.S. government commits, this comparatively speaking would be a drop in the bucket and of great long-term benefit to the entire country. While we're at it how about they sink some money into electric vehicle support infrastructure like rapid charging stations, too?
THIS is one of the MANY reasons I do not EVER want there to be 100% autonomous cars on the road. Any such law-enforcement-oriented technology can and WILL be hijacked by criminals to suit their own purposes. If you are in a car by yourself, YOU should be the ultimate intellgence in control of the vehicles' speed and direction, NOT a computer, NOT a cop, and sure as fuck NOT some criminal or some script kiddie who thinks it's funny or something to hack your car.
Explain this one, I don't get it.
It's the dirty little secret of cable TV: Pixel resolution and compression are two different things. You may be getting a channel in 1080, but by the time a cable company delivers it to your TV, it's be recompressed so much that it being 1080 doesn't matter anymore. You see it most when things in the picture are moving, they get blocky, and in aliasing around things like text on the screen. They do this to fit more channels into the available bandwidth of their network. Over-the-air from local stations isn't recompressed within an inch of it's life; you're getting the highest quality you can get that way short of having an actual digital copy of a program physically sent to you on some sort of storage medium. I suspect that satellite TV compresses the hell out of things, too, for the same reason: fit more channels into the available bandwidth, so they can make more money. Try paying attention to all this the next time you're watching cable or satellite, you'll notice the compression artifacts. Sorry in advance for ruining it for you, BTW. Then go watch TV where it's using an antenna for OTA broadcasts, you'll see the difference.
You don't have to 'explain' a goddamn thing to them or anyone else, and you damn well TELL them that. You are paying them, not the other way around, and if you want to cancel your service with them or anyone else for that matter, it's not their place to badger you or bully you. Being asked, once, politely, why you're unhappy enough to cancel is one thing, but if you don't wish to explain why then they MUST accept that. Arguing, bullying, badgering, or any other hard-sell tactics, is just plain bullshit. Anyone gives you that kind of guff? You tell them you want to speak to their supervisor, RIGHT NOW, and YOU don't take 'no' for an answer, either. Their supervisor is being a hardass about it, too? Go over their head. And so on. The only way you get shithead companies like Comcast to knock it off is to not sit back and take shit from them.
'Not agreeing/liking with what I'm saying' and 'being wrong' are two different things. Now please fuck off.
How long until I can get a racing bicycle frame made of this stuff?
Do you have Aspergers? Or some heretofore undiscovered textual version of Turret's Syndrome? Reading just the first screenful or two of your recent comments leads me to believe that you do. Either that or you're just some shitty troll refugee from 4chan who couldn't cut it in that particular jungle. I'm honestly surprised that you're not posting as an Anonymous Coward. Oh, and before you protest my attacking you personally? You're the one that insulted me, so go fuck yourself, OK?
You can't compare any disaster like Katrina in this country (a 1st world country) to the everyday conditions in a 3rd world country where people are starving; there is no food to distribute so what does it matter if there is commication to help distribute what doesn't exist?
You're ignoring my point about the local warlords. They already have money to spend because they take it from whoever they want. The warlords will be the one with the internet, not the civilians who, again, have nothing and will continue to have nothing so long as there is a para-military around to keep taking everything from them and killing them, so all you're really doing is creating a wide-area communications system for the warlords and their troops.
People are living in (comparatively speaking, anyway) shithole ghetto countries with an extremely low standard of living, and you want them to get the Internet? Expensive Internet, at that? What the actual fuck? Only the 1% richest people in these 'equatorial regions' will end up with access, the poor will still be fucking poor and in many places starving. How about you invest that money in getting rid of local warlords, drug cartels, corrupt governments, and other assholes that profit from keeping people down and out so they can live high on the hog? How about you invest that money in helping people to improve their lives? This makes no sense whatsoever, unless you factor in the 'publicity' factor; I'm sure these assholes think it makes them look real humanitarian and all that crap to the rest of the world. I call bullshit on the whole thing.
Okay. We'll just turn a blind eye when Russia invades your poutine-eating, hockey-obsessing, lager-swilling asses.
Hey now that's not very polite of you, are you sure you're Canadian? Isn't it against some national law or something for you to be publicly rude?
"Hey, let's blatantly spin the news by using out-and-out censorship!". Fuck you Google, what the hell do you think you're doing? The news is the news, good, bad, or indifferent. It is the duty of a news agency to report the news, not filter it. What you're doing is no different than some government propaganda engine.
Oh, come on. Unbelievable as it is, there are reasonable, intelligent people on the Internet.
This is what I've been saying: You're not going to convince people to give up their personal transportation and take buses and trains everywhere, and it's not practical for every single person to ride a bike, either, and if I have to explain that one to you then you need to sit back and think a while longer before saying anything because the reasons are obvious (I'm a cyclist by the way so it's not like I'm anti-bicycle). Electric vehicles are going to have to be the way. We charge them with nuclear power generation plants. We make those safe by some serious and hard-line reforms in the way they're designed, constructed, and especially in how they're managed, to make them as safe as possible, instead of letting the bean counters cut corners because it's 'good enough' when they don't know what the hell they're even doing. We continue developing higher and higher efficiency photovoltaics. We continue working to unlock the secrets of fusion power. Maybe we even unlock higher-order mysteries of the Universe and find other, more exotic sources of energy to tap into. Meanwhile we're running out of fossil fuels anyway so everyone had better get on board with all this now and beat the rush later.
Oh, no, not at all. If anything I feel sorry for actual religious people because by large and far they're being used, manipulated. I'll put aside my personal belief that they'd be better off putting aside their superstitions and learning instead to stand on their own, but the fact of the matter is that their own spirituality is used as a lever to manipulate them into doing the will of a few religious leaders who only have money, power, and control on their minds. This is not to say that on the local level there aren't low-level leaders who actually *believe* in what they're preaching, but that unfortunately just makes them, to borrow from the Russians, 'useful idiots' for the cause of the higher-ups. It's the exploitation of what I perceive as a fundamental flaw in the human psyche, something that I dearly hope we grow out of sooner rather than later, before it wrecks the entire human race.
The 'be fruitful and multiply' thing may ostensibly be the reason, but having as many people part of a partiucular religion is what's attractive to the leaders of said religion. More people under their sway means more power overall in the world; if the population of your country becomes, say, theoretically, 80% Catholic, then what do you think that's going to do to public policy in that country? Similarly, what if the vast majority is some flavor of Muslim? Overrunning a country with sheer numbers because you're encouraged, one way or another, to have as many children as possible may be a long game, but it's an effective one. You're a particular religion, you have 10 kids, you raise them all to be that religion. Over the course of a few generations you have a large effect on the total population, and that starts to affect politics. Don't confuse religion with spirituality, either. Organized religion, at it's highest leadership levels, is about power, control, and money, and has been for a long, long time now.
Organized religion believes that the Earth will soon come to an end so there's no point in population control, in fact they want as many babies born under their control as possible, so naturally they're against birth control entirely.
I'm not even a pilot, but I think I understand the mindset of pilots well enough, having known a few: In the event of mechanical (or system) failure(s), any pilot is at least going to want to be able to peer out a window with his own two eyes to see what's going on. It's a backup system that is hard to cause failure in: If the windshield is shattered to the point where you can't see out of it, then you've got worse problems than not being able to see! This sounds like something some non-pilot (or worse, marketing monkey or bean-counter) came up with. Or maybe, just maybe, they're patenting it for the sole purpose of preventing anyone from doing anything this dangerous and stupid with airplane design?
Could we have some actual licensed experienced pilots please join this conversation? I'd like to know what you think about this, please.
It doesn't matter if anyone 'figures out how to do it' or not, I just don't see the average person doing it or even having a reason to do it. I think it's way more likely that this guy is just trying to draw some attention to himself so he can sell more books.
Sure, it's incentive to stay alive the next 30 years.. so I can laugh at this idiot for saying something so damned rediculous.
If this becomes a reality in the U.S. during my lifetime, I sure as fuck hope they're sitting there in the cab, supervising the onboard systems, ready to take over when (not if, but when) it fucks up. Autonomous cars are a scary enough idea to me, but 40 tons of truck travelling at highway speeds, with no one in the cab? Oh, hell no..
It might have been 4-bit equivalents of sinewaves, I never actually looked at the data, I was doing well just being able to get blank PROMs and having a programmer at the time to burn new ones with for repair purposes. I'm pretty sure one of the two PROMs was part of a simple state-machine that governed how the sound generator worked, though. Haven't actually looked at the schematics for years and years..
For those of you who aren't aware, this is true. Older games, especially from the 80's, used graphics systems that used very little RAM, instead the graphics all being stored in EPROMs. The background images were one layer, with hardware that usually supported scrolling, and the foreground (or 'motion graphics') images in another set of EPROMs, with specific hardware to place said objects at specific locations on the screen, and yet another layer of graphics just for text images like player scores. Completely different from the bitmap graphics that everything uses now. The reason was the price of RAM. The exception to the rule was Williams games like Defender, Stargate, Joust, Robotron 2084, Bubbles, and other similar era titles, that used 3 banks of 4116's for a total of 48kB of bitmap graphics memory, with DMA used to move graphics data from EPROMs to the screen buffer. Since there was no 'standard' for any of this hardware you'd have to write an emulator for each and every different game. Then there's sound. Pacman/Ms. Pacman used a very simple discrete sound generator using a couple bipolar ROMs; you'd have to code specifically for that, or cheat and use PCM samples. Galaxian actually had a hardware PRNG connected to a simple resistor-ladder DAC and some low-pass filtering to generate white noise for things like explosion noises. Really, I learned a hell of a lot about electronics back in the day from having to learn how these boards all worked, so I could repair them effectively (not like there was tech support for repairing any of this stuff or troubleshooting manuals!)
Back in a previous life I repaired arcade games. A fair number of the PCBs pictured are knock-offs (illegal copies). Not surprising, really.
Truth. We have public repair stations on our local bike paths, even including a pump for your tires. Which lasted a couple months before someone cut the hose off it, then someone else later on stole the whole pump. I'm waiting to see how long the cable-attached tools last before some skeeze steals those, too. In some of the same places there is a rediculous solar-powered recycle bin that supposedly compacts the cans and stuff you put in it. Waiting to see how long it is before some homeless guy breaks into it and steals the solar panel and batteries and anything else they can sell. Also, more shit to monitor people? Benches? Really? What the actual fuck? Like someone else said, nice to see that Boston, apparently, has no infrastructure maintenance that needs to be done or other public problems that need any money to fix that they can spend money on stupid crap like this. Seriously, is anyone really going to trust something like this to plug their phone into it? Sounds like a great vector for having your phone hijacked to me. Nice move, Boston.