Yeah, I know. But that's not the thing with the Canon 350D.
First, I'm not sure if it's really "cheap", I guess for a digital SLR $1000 is not expensive, but it's also not really cheap (seeing as you get others for half that)
Secondly, the camera does infact have enough memory-buffer, if I put it in serial-pictures mode I can simply hold the shutter down and the camera will do 3 pictures a second or so until the buffer is full which takes around 7 pictures in raw-mode (and naturally significantly more in jpeg-mode)
Yes, but for some oddball reason that "aeb" still requires you to press the shutter three times. So you're still not going to be able to say use the self-timer and avoid camera-shake.
OK, so the remote-control plus this feature will do it.
The idea is both obvious and good. What gets me is: why can't even the newer digital cameras do this by themselves ?
Yes, it needs a tripod, but even with one you risk sligthly nudging the camera while changing the exposure. When I take tripod-pictures with long exposures I always use a remote-control or the delayed-exposure setting to avoid camera-shake.
Why can't the camera do say 5 exposures centered on the "correct" shutter-time, so that if "correct" is 1/50s it'll take 1/250 1/100 1/50 1/25 and 1/15 ?
My eos-350D could do it all in a second, and the storage is trivially cheap these days, besides it'd only do it when you asked for it anyway.
Oh well, I guess what I'd really dig would be the ability to upload say python-scripts to the camera and have them do it.
Yes, I *can* already do this, sort of: it requires bringing a pda along and have the pda control the camera over usb. This works, I've done it. It's a bit of a kludge though.
No, you're wrong. Infact unix happily mmaps executables and libraries.
The difference is that unix file-model is a lot more flexible than the model in dos (now largely inherited by Windows)
In Windows, a "file" is a collection of bytes with one name.
In Unix, a "file" is a collection of bytes with zero or more names.
Simply put, unix uses reference-counting, the actual blocks on disk are only freed when the last reference is gone. Thus it's unproblematic to allow deletion of an open file -- the deletion only affects the directory formerly holding a reference to the file, the file still exists because the process has a handle on it and the reference-count is thus not null.
You can try it out for yourself trivially:
Create a large file somehow.
start i.e. python with "python"
open the file and get a filehandle by doing: "fp = open("filename.whatever")
Open a different shell.
Check how much space is free on the device.
Delete the file. Notice it's gone from the directory.
Check how much space is free, notice that it's not changed (i.e. the file is still taking up room)
in python, do fp.close()
Repeat test, notice that *now* the file is no longer taking up room.
The disadvantages of the unix-aproach you talk about don't exist, they are purely imagined and purely the result of you failing to grasp the unix file-semantics.
Sure. Some goods are more volatile than others, even a lot so. The price of oil fluctuates a lot more than the price of say gold.
And sure, products that are in reality non-scarce and where scarcity is only "simulated" by the producing company (trough limited production) are the potentially most unstable of all, depending on the policies of the producer.
This is why the comparisons against derivatives are misguided. True derivatives are not physical things, but still, an option to buy pork bellies at a certian price in the future will not become worthless without pork bellies themselves becoming worthless.
Completely and utterly wrong.
The option of buying say 100 pork-bellies for 50 each in december 2005 is *utterly* worthless if the market-price of pork-bellies in december 2005 is lower than 50. It does *not* require the market-price to be zero. A market-price of 49 is sufficient to make the option worthless.
I quite liked Startide Rising. (assuming that's the correct english name:-)) It's not terribly realistic, but then neither is his other books. It is, however, a good fun romp.
It's got lots of underwater-sledge, some dolphin-with-harness (the dolphins have a "neural interface" (how original) that lets them control machinery, the "harness" is basically neurably-controlled arms and some human fighting. There's also a hunking large space-battle going on above the planet they're hiding on. Hunking large as in thousands of ships from a dozen races, going on over weeks.
Sounds like hollywood to me.
I agree that in most cases the book are superior to the film, or even when not it brings other aspects over well than the film.
Yeah, the kids also needs to learn that marketing today consists of 30% pretty pictures with no relation to the product, 50% lies, 5% half-truths, and at most 5% actual information.
Bull. Sure, we use better more efficient tools now than earlier, a calculator can do more than a slide-rule, (even though the slide-rule is cool too)
That doesn't free us from having to understand what we're doing though. Even if the calculator can do the math for you, you still need to understand that with 12 guests, each eating around 150g of cheese you're going to need 12*150g cheese.
You need to understand that 10% a year for 5 years is *not* in any way the same as 50%. The calculator won't help you with this. If you want to avoid being fooled you need to understand that "+25% free" does *not* mean you save 25%. (it means you save 20%)
95% of the stuff you learn (or atleast of the stuff you should learn) in math are completely unaffected by what tool (pen and paper, slide-rule, calculator, computer) the students use to do the final calculations.
The calculator can quickly and effortlessly calculate 11500*(1+4.2/100)^5 to tell you what your 11500 dollars will be worth after 5 years at 4.2% interest. However, you need to know that that is indeed the formula to enter. That's not obvious if you've never learned maths.
Yes, but there's a difference between a picture of a person and a picture where a person can be seen. Legally that makes a lot of difference.
You *do* need the permission of the person depicted if you take a portrait of a person and want to use that picture say in a magazine.
You do *not* need the permission of the person depicted if you take a picture of the Eiffel Tower to use in a magazine, and some random person is in the picture.
Yeah, the dividing line is somewhat fuzzy, but that's nothing new in law.
That is a risk you can't fix anyway, I mean even if you where using a film-based camera the authorities could still take your pictures and negatives away by force.
If anything digital makes it easier to guard against that, because it makes it trivial to ensure mutliple, backups. If you're *really* paranoid you make you've got atleast 5 backups in 5 different jurisdictions.
You are wrong. The issue is not "digital vs analog", or "film vs harddisk", the issue is yourself knowing how to use the image, or have some arbitrary company control access to your images.
With a film negative you're able to develop your own images as long as the required chemicals aren't a secret, and as long as it's allowed to sell them to you, and as long as you've got the required skills.
With a image-file you're able to do the same thing as long as it's not a secret how to decode the image, as long as it's allowed to sell you photo-quality printers and as long as you've got the required skills.
No difference between analog and digital here really.
The difference only appears when you agree to store your digital images in a proprietary, secret file-format. You'd get the same problem with film if you agreed to take your pictures with a proprietary secret film-format from say Kodak that uses patented chemicals to develop and which thus can only be developed by a Kodak-lab.
The solution is simple: insist on storing *your* information in formats where it's publicly known how to decode it. Store a copy of the instructions for decoding it in plain ascii next to the images themselves if you're feeling particularily paranoid. But it's not very likely the world will suddenly forget how to decode jpegs in the next 1000 years. (I'm/not/ saying jpegs will stay the dominant format for a thousand years!)
Except quite a few of us have already gotten the cord-chaos behind the computer under control by the simple use of a usb-hub.
This doesn't have any of the drawbacks you mention (batteries, cost, leds) and can reduce clutter enormously.
My computer is connected to 3 wires: usb, vga, power.
Ok, so if you could get *everything* cordless you could reduce that to 2, but that's not a huge win. Besides:
My digital camera charges off usb-power. Without that it'd need an external power-adapter.
My scanner uses no power other than that over usb, without it it'd need batteries (yeah right!) or an external power-adapter.
The selection of scanners, digital cameras, web-cameras etc that are available wireless is severly limited.
Most of the things that *do* exist use their own proprietary rf-dongles that need to be connected to the computer with a -- you guessed it -- cable. (in the case of the reviewed product the "win" for the keyboard is that the cable need only go the first 8 inches, not the whole way to the keyboard, what an advantage!
Having 8 different rf-dongles connected to the computer would do anything but eliminate mess. In addition, you'd run out of usb-slots and need an usb-hub anyway.
wireless makes sense for devices where the cable is in the way, for example mice. It *may* make sense for a few more things the day the producers start to use one, standard, rf-protocol so that you don't need a separate rf-dongle for every device. (I realize bluetooth was supposed to do this, maybe it will some day)
I also don't think many people have large dvd-collections stored as 5-10GB ripped dual-layer films. But I question your calculations.
As you say, HDD space is ridicolously cheap. Raw disk-space is available as cheaply as around $0.50/GB. This means a 5-10GB movie will cost $2.50 - $5 to store. The typical bougth DVD-movie costs more than 25% over that. It's more like 4 times that cost.
Secondly, with movies stored on HDD, you can delete old ones that no longer interests you and reuse the place, giving further savings.
Third, this all only shows that presently it's marginally useful to store raw dvds on HDD. But HDD-prices keep falling like a rock. The storage that costs $0.50 today will cost *how* much in 2 years ? How about in 10 years ?
Then there's also the little fact that a 8GB raw DVD can generally be compressed to 1/4th - 1/8th of that by a good video-codec without losing very much quality. No it's not "perfect", but neither are 128kbps mp3s, and see how that's stopped people from accepting them.
In a world where any medicine can be cheaply copied, and there are no laws preventing that, the logical way to finance research is by introducing a bounty-system.
This give incentives not unlike those today. Today companies spend money doing research, clinical tests etc on the hope that they'll find something useful and get a reward. Today this reward is paid by giving the ma a time-limited monopoly on the invented drug (trough patents etc) and letting them sell it at what the market will bear for this time-period.
There's no reason why the reward *has* to be precisely this though. (I agree there should be some reward)
An alternative would be to place bounties on remedies for certain problems. Governments, health-insurance, individuals and anyone else that wants the problem to be solved could pledge freely selectable sums to the bounty. The bounty would be paid in full to the first person or organisation that develops a method for solving the problem that meets the stated criteria.
This way it's even less risk for the developers, they don't need to be afraid of their invention being "pirated", or that the market fails to materialise or anything like that. If they're first to solve the problem, they get the bounty, end of story.
Ofcourse the risk of not being first remains, but that's a risk that's also there today.
Also notice that this would bring an order of magnitude improvement in cost compared to today, because typical pharmaceuticals spend 4-10 times as much money doing non-research as they do on research. With this system there'd be no reason for them to do anything but research.
If you read the article you would've noticed that offcourse with such a system they'd only allow you to borrow stuff with a total value smaller than your deposit.
In other words, if you want to check out 5 hardcovers at a time, you're going to have to deposit more than $20.
It's been rehashed a million times because it's true: The main problem of electric cars is that batteries absolutely positively suck as a method of storing energy.
The power/weight, energy/weight, energy/size, energy/price, lifetime, environmental impact and efficiency all stink to high heaven. (yes, it's improved, but it's still lacking orders of magnitude)
The electric motor, in contrast, is already very very efficient, silent, high-torque, compact, good power/weight, acceptable price and low maintenance.
Really. There's a *reason* that electrical engines totally outcomepete internal-combustion ones in scenarios where we have a good way of supplying them with energy (which is basically anything that ain't mobile) whereas internal combustion engines generally are in the lead for stuff that can't be hooked up to mains.
The new electric motor won't extend the range of batteryvehicles by much. Existing motors are already very very efficient. The main extension will probably be to -- wait for it -- use the saved weigth of the motor for installing *even*more* batteries.
fuel celss may be part of the solution, sure. Listen, I'm not saying electric cars are impossible. (for some applications they're even practicable today)
I'm just saying, for them to become popular what is needed is first and foremost some better way of supplying the electricity, not some better electric engine. Yes, both is nice, but even a 1kg 500HP 99% efficient over the range of 1-10000rpm electric engine wouldn't make electric cars dominant tomorrow.
A 50kg battery with the size of a petroltank and the same energy-content as a petroltank, refillable in 10 minutes and for an acceptable price would however make internal combustion engine cars obsolete more or less overnight.
Except "take out" ain't quite that trivial when the battery to "take out" weighs 400kgs and is (for weigth-distribution-reasons) distributed around the lower part of your vehicle.
I agree by the way, that standard replacable battery-packs *may* turn out to be atleast part of the solution. But this doesn't change my main point: what is needed for electric cars to really take off is primarily a better way of supplying the elctric motor with electricity, not primarily a better electric motor (allthough that is offcourse also nice)
Sure, a higher power/weight electric engine capable of operation over a wide spectre of speeds is useful. It is not, however, the thing an electric car needs the most to be competitive.
It's *already* the case that an electric motor is equally strong, or stronger, than a equally heavy internal combustion engine.
The problem for electric motors is *energy*storage*, typically batteries. With todays tech 400kgs of batteries can store *maybe* a tenth of the energy in a tank of petrol weighing a tent of that, meaning it's 100 times less effective for storing energy.
To add insult to injusry the 40kg petrol-tank can trivially be refilled in a minute or two, while the battery-pack weighing ten times as much and storing a tenth of the energy, needs hours at best to approach full.
Actually, even if we ignore that you got it backwards, it's still not as you claim "a good guess" at the time you've got left.
First, 68 is a very low life-expectancy for a developed nation (most people reading slashdot are from developed nations) even USA (which have bad life-expectancies) are a decade better than this.
Second, that's life-expectancy *at birth*. Saying that a new-born has an expected life of 78 years is not at all the same as claiming that a 75 year old living person will on the average only live another 3 years, or the even more absurd that a 80 year old living person will on the average be 2 years dead.
Besides, it's a straw-man anyway, if the parents really want to allow their 9--year old to play some 18+ game, there's nothing stopping them from buying it for him/her. All such laws do is stopping kids from buying it themselves.
I've known kids like you. Lots of them. You see, I used to be the leader for a group of scouts. And in *every* freaking group ther'd be parents that absolutely *refused* to trust their children with even simple, basic stuff of no consequence.
Example: we would go camping for a weekend. We would give out papers with information for the parents beforehand. On those you could read, among other things, that we (the leaders) have spares of *everything* that is important, so forgetting something will have *no* important consequences whatsoever, and *please* let the kids pack for themselves, that's part of the learning-experience.
A third of the parents where unable to, after being asked nicely several times, to let their own 12-14 year-olds pack their own backpack. They just *had* to check, and often add in the additional half-dozen woolen pullover. What horrible thing would happen if they -- just this once -- trusted their kids, we where never told.
Yes, the kids who *where* allowed to pack by themselves sometimes forgot stuff. So what ? That is a good lesson, when you're trusted to do something, and do it poorly, it has consequences. Kids aren't dumb. In general they're a lot smarter , more reliable than the untrusting parents think.
It's just that, if noone ever gives you the chanse to show that you can do it, you just simply won't bother. Why think about what to pack if mother is going to triple-check it and nag at regardless ?
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First, I'm not sure if it's really "cheap", I guess for a digital SLR $1000 is not expensive, but it's also not really cheap (seeing as you get others for half that)
Secondly, the camera does infact have enough memory-buffer, if I put it in serial-pictures mode I can simply hold the shutter down and the camera will do 3 pictures a second or so until the buffer is full which takes around 7 pictures in raw-mode (and naturally significantly more in jpeg-mode)
OK, so the remote-control plus this feature will do it.
Yes, it needs a tripod, but even with one you risk sligthly nudging the camera while changing the exposure. When I take tripod-pictures with long exposures I always use a remote-control or the delayed-exposure setting to avoid camera-shake.
Why can't the camera do say 5 exposures centered on the "correct" shutter-time, so that if "correct" is 1/50s it'll take 1/250 1/100 1/50 1/25 and 1/15 ?
My eos-350D could do it all in a second, and the storage is trivially cheap these days, besides it'd only do it when you asked for it anyway.
Oh well, I guess what I'd really dig would be the ability to upload say python-scripts to the camera and have them do it.
Yes, I *can* already do this, sort of: it requires bringing a pda along and have the pda control the camera over usb. This works, I've done it. It's a bit of a kludge though.
The difference is that unix file-model is a lot more flexible than the model in dos (now largely inherited by Windows)
In Windows, a "file" is a collection of bytes with one name.
In Unix, a "file" is a collection of bytes with zero or more names.
Simply put, unix uses reference-counting, the actual blocks on disk are only freed when the last reference is gone. Thus it's unproblematic to allow deletion of an open file -- the deletion only affects the directory formerly holding a reference to the file, the file still exists because the process has a handle on it and the reference-count is thus not null.
You can try it out for yourself trivially:
The disadvantages of the unix-aproach you talk about don't exist, they are purely imagined and purely the result of you failing to grasp the unix file-semantics.
And sure, products that are in reality non-scarce and where scarcity is only "simulated" by the producing company (trough limited production) are the potentially most unstable of all, depending on the policies of the producer.
Completely and utterly wrong.
The option of buying say 100 pork-bellies for 50 each in december 2005 is *utterly* worthless if the market-price of pork-bellies in december 2005 is lower than 50. It does *not* require the market-price to be zero. A market-price of 49 is sufficient to make the option worthless.
It's got lots of underwater-sledge, some dolphin-with-harness (the dolphins have a "neural interface" (how original) that lets them control machinery, the "harness" is basically neurably-controlled arms and some human fighting. There's also a hunking large space-battle going on above the planet they're hiding on. Hunking large as in thousands of ships from a dozen races, going on over weeks.
Sounds like hollywood to me.
I agree that in most cases the book are superior to the film, or even when not it brings other aspects over well than the film.
If anything it has an overabundance of BAM BAM KABOOM, in space aswell as in the sea.
It'd need huge amounts of CGI though, for fins, X alien races, Y different alien ships, etc.
But all in all, it's very adaptable to film.
Microsoft really cannot "force" the government of a sovereign country to do anything, unless they're prepared to hire an army and invade or something.
That's not really a math-problem though.
That doesn't free us from having to understand what we're doing though. Even if the calculator can do the math for you, you still need to understand that with 12 guests, each eating around 150g of cheese you're going to need 12*150g cheese.
You need to understand that 10% a year for 5 years is *not* in any way the same as 50%. The calculator won't help you with this. If you want to avoid being fooled you need to understand that "+25% free" does *not* mean you save 25%. (it means you save 20%)
95% of the stuff you learn (or atleast of the stuff you should learn) in math are completely unaffected by what tool (pen and paper, slide-rule, calculator, computer) the students use to do the final calculations.
The calculator can quickly and effortlessly calculate 11500*(1+4.2/100)^5 to tell you what your 11500 dollars will be worth after 5 years at 4.2% interest. However, you need to know that that is indeed the formula to enter. That's not obvious if you've never learned maths.
You *do* need the permission of the person depicted if you take a portrait of a person and want to use that picture say in a magazine.
You do *not* need the permission of the person depicted if you take a picture of the Eiffel Tower to use in a magazine, and some random person is in the picture.
Yeah, the dividing line is somewhat fuzzy, but that's nothing new in law.
If anything digital makes it easier to guard against that, because it makes it trivial to ensure mutliple, backups. If you're *really* paranoid you make you've got atleast 5 backups in 5 different jurisdictions.
With a film negative you're able to develop your own images as long as the required chemicals aren't a secret, and as long as it's allowed to sell them to you, and as long as you've got the required skills.
With a image-file you're able to do the same thing as long as it's not a secret how to decode the image, as long as it's allowed to sell you photo-quality printers and as long as you've got the required skills.
No difference between analog and digital here really.
The difference only appears when you agree to store your digital images in a proprietary, secret file-format. You'd get the same problem with film if you agreed to take your pictures with a proprietary secret film-format from say Kodak that uses patented chemicals to develop and which thus can only be developed by a Kodak-lab.
The solution is simple: insist on storing *your* information in formats where it's publicly known how to decode it. Store a copy of the instructions for decoding it in plain ascii next to the images themselves if you're feeling particularily paranoid. But it's not very likely the world will suddenly forget how to decode jpegs in the next 1000 years. (I'm /not/ saying jpegs will stay the dominant format for a thousand years!)
This doesn't have any of the drawbacks you mention (batteries, cost, leds) and can reduce clutter enormously.
My computer is connected to 3 wires: usb, vga, power. Ok, so if you could get *everything* cordless you could reduce that to 2, but that's not a huge win. Besides:
wireless makes sense for devices where the cable is in the way, for example mice. It *may* make sense for a few more things the day the producers start to use one, standard, rf-protocol so that you don't need a separate rf-dongle for every device. (I realize bluetooth was supposed to do this, maybe it will some day)
As you say, HDD space is ridicolously cheap. Raw disk-space is available as cheaply as around $0.50/GB. This means a 5-10GB movie will cost $2.50 - $5 to store. The typical bougth DVD-movie costs more than 25% over that. It's more like 4 times that cost.
Secondly, with movies stored on HDD, you can delete old ones that no longer interests you and reuse the place, giving further savings.
Third, this all only shows that presently it's marginally useful to store raw dvds on HDD. But HDD-prices keep falling like a rock. The storage that costs $0.50 today will cost *how* much in 2 years ? How about in 10 years ?
Then there's also the little fact that a 8GB raw DVD can generally be compressed to 1/4th - 1/8th of that by a good video-codec without losing very much quality. No it's not "perfect", but neither are 128kbps mp3s, and see how that's stopped people from accepting them.
This give incentives not unlike those today. Today companies spend money doing research, clinical tests etc on the hope that they'll find something useful and get a reward. Today this reward is paid by giving the ma a time-limited monopoly on the invented drug (trough patents etc) and letting them sell it at what the market will bear for this time-period.
There's no reason why the reward *has* to be precisely this though. (I agree there should be some reward)
An alternative would be to place bounties on remedies for certain problems. Governments, health-insurance, individuals and anyone else that wants the problem to be solved could pledge freely selectable sums to the bounty. The bounty would be paid in full to the first person or organisation that develops a method for solving the problem that meets the stated criteria.
This way it's even less risk for the developers, they don't need to be afraid of their invention being "pirated", or that the market fails to materialise or anything like that. If they're first to solve the problem, they get the bounty, end of story.
Ofcourse the risk of not being first remains, but that's a risk that's also there today.
Also notice that this would bring an order of magnitude improvement in cost compared to today, because typical pharmaceuticals spend 4-10 times as much money doing non-research as they do on research. With this system there'd be no reason for them to do anything but research.
In other words, if you want to check out 5 hardcovers at a time, you're going to have to deposit more than $20.
The power/weight, energy/weight, energy/size, energy/price, lifetime, environmental impact and efficiency all stink to high heaven. (yes, it's improved, but it's still lacking orders of magnitude)
The electric motor, in contrast, is already very very efficient, silent, high-torque, compact, good power/weight, acceptable price and low maintenance. Really. There's a *reason* that electrical engines totally outcomepete internal-combustion ones in scenarios where we have a good way of supplying them with energy (which is basically anything that ain't mobile) whereas internal combustion engines generally are in the lead for stuff that can't be hooked up to mains.
The new electric motor won't extend the range of batteryvehicles by much. Existing motors are already very very efficient. The main extension will probably be to -- wait for it -- use the saved weigth of the motor for installing *even*more* batteries.
I'm just saying, for them to become popular what is needed is first and foremost some better way of supplying the electricity, not some better electric engine. Yes, both is nice, but even a 1kg 500HP 99% efficient over the range of 1-10000rpm electric engine wouldn't make electric cars dominant tomorrow.
A 50kg battery with the size of a petroltank and the same energy-content as a petroltank, refillable in 10 minutes and for an acceptable price would however make internal combustion engine cars obsolete more or less overnight.
I agree by the way, that standard replacable battery-packs *may* turn out to be atleast part of the solution. But this doesn't change my main point: what is needed for electric cars to really take off is primarily a better way of supplying the elctric motor with electricity, not primarily a better electric motor (allthough that is offcourse also nice)
Sure, a higher power/weight electric engine capable of operation over a wide spectre of speeds is useful. It is not, however, the thing an electric car needs the most to be competitive.
It's *already* the case that an electric motor is equally strong, or stronger, than a equally heavy internal combustion engine.
The problem for electric motors is *energy*storage*, typically batteries. With todays tech 400kgs of batteries can store *maybe* a tenth of the energy in a tank of petrol weighing a tent of that, meaning it's 100 times less effective for storing energy.
To add insult to injusry the 40kg petrol-tank can trivially be refilled in a minute or two, while the battery-pack weighing ten times as much and storing a tenth of the energy, needs hours at best to approach full.
First, 68 is a very low life-expectancy for a developed nation (most people reading slashdot are from developed nations) even USA (which have bad life-expectancies) are a decade better than this.
Second, that's life-expectancy *at birth*. Saying that a new-born has an expected life of 78 years is not at all the same as claiming that a 75 year old living person will on the average only live another 3 years, or the even more absurd that a 80 year old living person will on the average be 2 years dead.
Besides, it's a straw-man anyway, if the parents really want to allow their 9--year old to play some 18+ game, there's nothing stopping them from buying it for him/her. All such laws do is stopping kids from buying it themselves.
Example: we would go camping for a weekend. We would give out papers with information for the parents beforehand. On those you could read, among other things, that we (the leaders) have spares of *everything* that is important, so forgetting something will have *no* important consequences whatsoever, and *please* let the kids pack for themselves, that's part of the learning-experience.
A third of the parents where unable to, after being asked nicely several times, to let their own 12-14 year-olds pack their own backpack. They just *had* to check, and often add in the additional half-dozen woolen pullover. What horrible thing would happen if they -- just this once -- trusted their kids, we where never told.
Yes, the kids who *where* allowed to pack by themselves sometimes forgot stuff. So what ? That is a good lesson, when you're trusted to do something, and do it poorly, it has consequences. Kids aren't dumb. In general they're a lot smarter , more reliable than the untrusting parents think.
It's just that, if noone ever gives you the chanse to show that you can do it, you just simply won't bother. Why think about what to pack if mother is going to triple-check it and nag at regardless ?