A couple of years ago I get an interesting e-mail from an "author agent" from Wrox. They were looking to publish a book about Perl and asked if I was interested.
No, not in writing the book -- in writing a chapter. Apparently they go out and find programmers off the Internet to each write a chapter of the book. Well, I thought that was a strange way to run a railroad, but what the hell. I asked her about the compensation package.
$1000. Plus $1000 as an "on-time" bonus. No royalties.
Well, that totally sucked. And on top of that, the deadline was like two weeks away! So I was supposed to write a quality chapter (presumably with lots of tested examples) in two weeks. For $2,000. Yeah right. That's going to produce a quality product.
Ever since then, I've never gone near Wrox books. This one might be different, but screw them. I don't trust them at all.
By far the best programmer's calculator ever made (that I've seen, anyway) was the HP 16C. Not made anymore, but EBay usually has a few you can pick up.
Z80 assembly language was the second language I learned (after BASIC, of course). I'm convinced that learning assembly language was key to making me the (humbly) great programmer I am today.
I've ranted about this before, but I have to say it again: Programming is taught ass-backwards in college. Assembly language should be the FIRST thing taught, and then gradually building up to higher and higher levels of abstraction. All algorithm theory should be taught in assembly. When you've implemented algorithms in assembly, then there's no question that you know them far better than when they're surrounded by 7 layers of syntactical fluff.
Look at the way EE's are taught: You start with the basics of transisters, resisters, capicitors, etc and work your way up. If EEs were taught the same way as programmers, they would start with plugging cards into PCs with component theory being taught as an afterthought!
In my experience, I've often found that EEs converted into programmers are better programmers than people with CS degrees, and I think this is the reason. EEs are taught how to think early on at the component level.
I should also say that it's a total myth that assembly language is "hard". It's not. It's simply "more". More detail, more instructions, more attention to what you're doing. Assembly itself is extremely simple. Get an instruction; execute it; move to next.
Bottom line: TWO years of assembly before a student even sniffs high-level languages.
I keep ranting about this, but I doubt that CS programs are going to change. I can always dream, though.
The distinction I made is valid: the encoders and decoders you use are free only by virtue of the fact that you downloaded them for free.
Exactly. It's free for ME, which is the free I care about. If you want to use it in commercial software, you have to pay a licensing fee. Sounds completely reasonable to me. But hey, YMMV. If you want to do something commercial, then Vorbis might be a good alternative for you. But since I don't want to do anything commercial (nor the vast majority of the population), MP3 is entirely free.
Red Hat didn't pull MP3 stuff from its distribution because of GPL-fuzzy reasoning, they did so to avoid getting charged for making money on patents they hadn't licensed.
Big deal. Then you download it from somewhere else. Once again, it's freely available out there. It's not going to decay and rot.
What, it wouldn't be legal for Microsoft to inadvertently break something while attempting to fix something else?
The key word there is "inadvertently".
And, last I heard about it, Microsoft has never been held accountable for their software hosing a system and causing data loss.
That's because it's all "inadvertent" and unintentional. The day that Microsoft starts intentionally causing data loss or destruction of private property is the day they are in deep shit. No EULA, no matter what it says, will give them the right to do that.
The Sun/Microsoft agreements let them upgrade various installed software on the computer. How is that illegal?
It's not, because you are authorizing them to update the Windows operating system, including applications associated with the distribution. You are not authorizing them to modify your data files, nor changes your third-party applications.
I fail to see where any of my comments have even remotely indicated paranoia.
Worrying about Microsoft modifying and/or destroying your personal data files and/or modifying third party applications is well into downtown Paranoia.
Great, your encoders and decoders were free. MP3 itself is not. This can't be such a leap of understanding, can it?
Apparently it is. What part of "free" don't YOU understand? What, are "they" going to come to my door and confiscate my encoding software? Confiscate my players? Yes, there is some (small) risk that in the future, I may have to buy software. Big deal. My existing software works just fine.
And if they did start charging for it, I'm not sure I would care. I don't have a problem with paying people for a product of value.
Normally, I wouldn't worry about this sort of thing coming true, but with Sun and Microsoft changing EULA's willy-nilly to let them legally muck with the software on our computers
Except that Microsoft has not done that. And it wouldn't be legal for them to, anyway. There is no requirement for downloading ANYTHING from Microsoft. And if they tried, rest assured that it would be illegal for them to damage anything on your computer.
Well, Microsoft say that 64kbps is CD-quality, so why use anything more?:)
Heh, I was all set to rip you a new one for spouting anti-Microsoft rhetoric, but it turns out they do claim that.
But you know what? I only listened to the Brandenburg Concerto, but A/Bing between the two sources, it sounds pretty damn good at 64kpbs. Of course, Microsoft is picking the samples, so it may be that it happened to work really well, but still it sounds pretty impressive.
Based on that one sample I listened to, calling it CD quality was warranted.
If not Xiph, then who else has the financial motive if the result is, in practice, good enough?
How about any of the major audio magazines? They do equipment testing all the time.
Look, I don't mean to be critical of Ogg per se. But there is way too much "rah rah" around here that the only the thing that matters is that Ogg happens to have the source code available, and no one seems to care whether it sounds comparable to MP3 or not. You're probably right that there is far too little analysis of MP3 as well, but it has enough mass distribution that the general public has decided that MP3 is good enough.
The problem is that music as a whole is subjective.
That's why you don't do it subjectively. You use a large number of people, both professional audio people and "normal" people, and you average the results.
About the only way I could think of the really test the two formats is to overlay a graph of the outputs of the.wav,.mp3, and.ogg and see which of the formats differ most from the.wav.
There are known, mathematical ways to test audio quality.
This method would also have inherent problems because you are only looking at raw output and not what you may possibly hear.
That's why you do both measurement tests and listening tests.
Have there been any REAL double-blind tests as well as equipment tests of quality comparisons between MP3 and Ogg Vorbis yet? They never seem to get done. All the tests so far are of the form "Hey! My music sounds really l33t !!!!!"
Anybody know of some honest testing across a wide variety of music (particularly instrumental / classical / baroque) that is not just one person's subjective opinion?
Everyone seems to think that doing a lossy music compressor is just a "matter of cranking it out", but it's an extremely difficult problem. I'm not going to trust a bunch of amateurs until I see some real evidence that they know what they're doing. And no, "test it out yourself" is not an option. I have better things to do with my time, particularly since MP3 is free.
I've got some news for you, Mr. Literalist Geek: Words mean more than their literal definitions. If I say "this movie is infinitely better than the one I saw yesterday", obviously that is mathematically impossible. If I say, "Here, have some of my paper clips. I have an infinite supply", then I probably mean that my stock of paper clips is never going to run out because they get replinished periodically. Even though, technically, there is not enough mass in the universe to truly create an "infinite supply".
When I say something like "The supply of oil is infinite", what that means is that FOR ALL PRACTICAL PURPOSES, the supply is infinite, just like paper clips. In other words, what is the difference between having an infinite supply of oil and a supply that never runs out? Absolutely no practical difference.
Language: it's a beautiful, flexible thing. You might want to learn about it someday.
Take a look at the rating breakdown of Titanic at IMDB. Now, it may not be your favorite movie, but if someone is scoring it lower than, say, a 3 (much less the 10.7% that scored it a ONE), then we know that it's just popularity backlash.
Personally, I thought it was a great movie. Not the best movie of all time (the dialogue WAS a little clunky in places), but it is certainly among the greatest disaster sequences ever filmed.
Yeah, but you didn't mean it. Proof: the Earth's mass is not infinite, and only a tiny fraction of it is petroleum. Therefor, there is a finite amount of petroleum on or in earth. QED. Next time, learn what those long words mean before you use them so forcefully.
Boy I'll bet you're a million laughs at parties.
Partier A: Boy the sun hit me like a hammer this morning!
StrawberryFrog: You do know that photons can't actually apply the force of a hammer, right?
A much better choice than last year [Harry Potter].
Yes, because we know that anything that is popular is automatically bad. And of course we know that anything obscure and unread by the masses is automatically better.
I will never, ever, understand why certain people must hate anything that a lot of other people happen to like (see also: movies, Titanic).
If it is that good that pirate copies are in circulation, do they really need a marketing campaign?
Sheesh, dude, the LOTR geeks make up a VERY small proportion of moviegoers. If just the geeks saw the movie, it would be dismal failure. Marketing it to promote it to normal, once-to-couple-times-a-month movie people as well as the I-go-to-movies-when-there's-something-good people (I wouldn't be surprised if the latter is a majority of people).
The difference is that it's a lot easier to add a widget to a commodity x86 board than it is to completely reengineer a G4 board.
This is the same argument as "Microsoft will just change the APIs". Apple can't just willy-nilly change things, because they break backward compatibility with all the existing widgets. Apple is obnoxious about making everybody upgrade their hardware, but they can't do it every operating system release.
Hehehee...yeah. Herd mentality...right. I would hardly classify those supporting alternative energies as "the herd." But maybe herd has been re-defined.
Nope, same definition as always. One who doesn't do any of his own thinking, but just follows the herd. Your herd just happens to be smaller than a lot of other herds. Of course, people like you think that the farther out of the fringe you go, you must be getting closer to the truth.
What you want is magic technology. And if the magic doesn't exist, then it must be a conspiracy of someone to keep the magic away from the masses.
WHY? Because Stalinism is obviously the only alternative to Multi-National Corporate Run capitalist government.
OK, if the failure of electric cars is just a big capitalist conspiracy, then why aren't your non-capitalistic paradises producing them? Only stupid people live there and have no engineers? Come on, if it's just a big conspiracy, then I'm sure one of your oh-so-moral countries will start producing them tomorrow and gloriously fill the world with non-polluting, electric vehicles that recharge in 5 minutes and run for 1000 miles. And of course, all produced by a non-profit entity.
So please, tell us all. What country is it, and when will the utopia begin? We're all anxious to hear about it./p
who worked for the big manufacturers say they were never serious about the projects and wanted them to fail,
Yeah, I guess billions of dollars "isn't really serious".
the manufacturers spent more effort trying to kill legislation towards developing this technology than they spent trying to get the technology to market,
They spent lots of money trying to kill legislation that tried to legislate technology. Guess what? If technology is good, then it doesn't need to be legislated. The car manufacturers knew that electric cars weren't going to happen soon.
now that they've killed most of the legislation they're killing development of the technology and blaming it on "lack of government support",
They're killing development because it's a waste of money. Do you seriously think all the engineers that billions of dollars bought were all part of a conspiracy to make it fail? All of them?
American car manufacturers have a very long history of straight-up lying about these issues
Yeah, it's a great conspiracy. If they would just stop suppressing the 1000 MPG carbeurator, all are problems would be solved, right?
If we continue to burn up oil as quickly as we can, people like Bush will continue to press for drilling into areas like the beautiful Alaskan countryside.
This is something else I don't understand. Why is it such a big deal that thousands of square miles be completely untouched? I'm sorry, but a couple acre processing plant is not going to turn the countryside into black, sludge filled hell-hole.
It's not like we shouldn't stop using it now because it is terribly dirty.
And getting cleaner all the time due to better technology. Taken a look at car emissions lately?
It just makes sense that we should definately destroy any pristine nature environments where oil is just to get down to last drops in pursuit of keeping prices down
Name the last "pristin nature environment" that was destroyed through normal excavation of oil, other than accidents (and even the accidents aren't that bad).
While are at it, lets have a few more wars over it....
I'm always amused by this line of thinking. There is nothing intrinsically immoral about buying oil. That wars are caused by this is the fault of the countries that make war, not the countries that buy oil. It's always amazing when people shift the blame away from the people who actually make the wars.
We've definately seen that capitalism does great things for the planet
Well, yes, we have. Considering that Capitalism has been the greatest force for raising people's standard of living than any other force. It's kind of funny how the more capitalism a country has, the better the people live. Or haven't you noticed that direct relation? Ah, you're probably right. We should all live in the paradises like the old Soviet Union.
The almighty dollar will save us!
Actually, it would save the middle east countries if their politics weren't so screwed up. If they had freedom and capitalism, the money that poured in from their natural resources would transform them into modern countries. But again, it's not our fault that they continue to screw themselves and their people.
THANK YOU SIR! I feel blessed to have my whole mind on the issue changed by Slashdot!
We can only hope that people like you overcome your herd mentality.
Go do a little research, heck, take a PHYSICS class before you make those statements. Try to understand the constraints involved, they ain't trivial.
No one, including him, has claimed that it's trivial. All he's stating are the minimum requirements before he would consider an electric car. And I agree wholehardedly.
Sorry, but you are not going to guilt me into buying a car that sucks. If it's not practical to build electric cars, then they aren't practical.
Slashdot Mirror
A couple of years ago I get an interesting e-mail from an "author agent" from Wrox. They were looking to publish a book about Perl and asked if I was interested.
No, not in writing the book -- in writing a chapter. Apparently they go out and find programmers off the Internet to each write a chapter of the book. Well, I thought that was a strange way to run a railroad, but what the hell. I asked her about the compensation package.
$1000. Plus $1000 as an "on-time" bonus. No royalties.
Well, that totally sucked. And on top of that, the deadline was like two weeks away! So I was supposed to write a quality chapter (presumably with lots of tested examples) in two weeks. For $2,000. Yeah right. That's going to produce a quality product.
Ever since then, I've never gone near Wrox books. This one might be different, but screw them. I don't trust them at all.
By far the best programmer's calculator ever made (that I've seen, anyway) was the HP 16C. Not made anymore, but EBay usually has a few you can pick up.
Downloading an unlicensed encoder does not make MP3 a free and open standard.
Where did this come from? I never said I downloaded an unlicensed encoder. There are tons of free, licensed ones out there.
Now, now, just because I know everything doesn't mean you have to get snippy. Be assured that I use my powers for good, and not evil.
Z80 assembly language was the second language I learned (after BASIC, of course). I'm convinced that learning assembly language was key to making me the (humbly) great programmer I am today.
I've ranted about this before, but I have to say it again: Programming is taught ass-backwards in college. Assembly language should be the FIRST thing taught, and then gradually building up to higher and higher levels of abstraction. All algorithm theory should be taught in assembly. When you've implemented algorithms in assembly, then there's no question that you know them far better than when they're surrounded by 7 layers of syntactical fluff.
Look at the way EE's are taught: You start with the basics of transisters, resisters, capicitors, etc and work your way up. If EEs were taught the same way as programmers, they would start with plugging cards into PCs with component theory being taught as an afterthought!
In my experience, I've often found that EEs converted into programmers are better programmers than people with CS degrees, and I think this is the reason. EEs are taught how to think early on at the component level.
I should also say that it's a total myth that assembly language is "hard". It's not. It's simply "more". More detail, more instructions, more attention to what you're doing. Assembly itself is extremely simple. Get an instruction; execute it; move to next.
Bottom line: TWO years of assembly before a student even sniffs high-level languages.
I keep ranting about this, but I doubt that CS programs are going to change. I can always dream, though.
The distinction I made is valid: the encoders and decoders you use are free only by virtue of the fact that you downloaded them for free.
Exactly. It's free for ME, which is the free I care about. If you want to use it in commercial software, you have to pay a licensing fee. Sounds completely reasonable to me. But hey, YMMV. If you want to do something commercial, then Vorbis might be a good alternative for you. But since I don't want to do anything commercial (nor the vast majority of the population), MP3 is entirely free.
Red Hat didn't pull MP3 stuff from its distribution because of GPL-fuzzy reasoning, they did so to avoid getting charged for making money on patents they hadn't licensed.
Big deal. Then you download it from somewhere else. Once again, it's freely available out there. It's not going to decay and rot.
What, it wouldn't be legal for Microsoft to inadvertently break something while attempting to fix something else?
The key word there is "inadvertently".
And, last I heard about it, Microsoft has never been held accountable for their software hosing a system and causing data loss.
That's because it's all "inadvertent" and unintentional. The day that Microsoft starts intentionally causing data loss or destruction of private property is the day they are in deep shit. No EULA, no matter what it says, will give them the right to do that.
The Sun/Microsoft agreements let them upgrade various installed software on the computer. How is that illegal?
It's not, because you are authorizing them to update the Windows operating system, including applications associated with the distribution. You are not authorizing them to modify your data files, nor changes your third-party applications.
I fail to see where any of my comments have even remotely indicated paranoia.
Worrying about Microsoft modifying and/or destroying your personal data files and/or modifying third party applications is well into downtown Paranoia.
Great, your encoders and decoders were free. MP3 itself is not. This can't be such a leap of understanding, can it?
Apparently it is. What part of "free" don't YOU understand? What, are "they" going to come to my door and confiscate my encoding software? Confiscate my players? Yes, there is some (small) risk that in the future, I may have to buy software. Big deal. My existing software works just fine.
And if they did start charging for it, I'm not sure I would care. I don't have a problem with paying people for a product of value.
Normally, I wouldn't worry about this sort of thing coming true, but with Sun and Microsoft changing EULA's willy-nilly to let them legally muck with the software on our computers
Except that Microsoft has not done that. And it wouldn't be legal for them to, anyway. There is no requirement for downloading ANYTHING from Microsoft. And if they tried, rest assured that it would be illegal for them to damage anything on your computer.
Sorry, but paranoia is not reason.
Ogg Vorbis is free, MP3 is certainly not, whether we're talking beer or speech.
Funny, I've downloaded both MP3 encoders and decoders free*. Unless you're talking about commercial use, which I'm not really concerned with.
*I don't recognize the usage of "free as in freedom" when referring to software. RMS can kiss my ass.
Well, Microsoft say that 64kbps is CD-quality, so why use anything more? :)
Heh, I was all set to rip you a new one for spouting anti-Microsoft rhetoric, but it turns out they do claim that.
But you know what? I only listened to the Brandenburg Concerto, but A/Bing between the two sources, it sounds pretty damn good at 64kpbs. Of course, Microsoft is picking the samples, so it may be that it happened to work really well, but still it sounds pretty impressive.
Based on that one sample I listened to, calling it CD quality was warranted.
If not Xiph, then who else has the financial motive if the result is, in practice, good enough?
How about any of the major audio magazines? They do equipment testing all the time.
Look, I don't mean to be critical of Ogg per se. But there is way too much "rah rah" around here that the only the thing that matters is that Ogg happens to have the source code available, and no one seems to care whether it sounds comparable to MP3 or not. You're probably right that there is far too little analysis of MP3 as well, but it has enough mass distribution that the general public has decided that MP3 is good enough.
The problem is that music as a whole is subjective.
That's why you don't do it subjectively. You use a large number of people, both professional audio people and "normal" people, and you average the results.
About the only way I could think of the really test the two formats is to overlay a graph of the outputs of the .wav, .mp3, and .ogg and see which of the formats differ most from the .wav.
There are known, mathematical ways to test audio quality.
This method would also have inherent problems because you are only looking at raw output and not what you may possibly hear.
That's why you do both measurement tests and listening tests.
Have there been any REAL double-blind tests as well as equipment tests of quality comparisons between MP3 and Ogg Vorbis yet? They never seem to get done. All the tests so far are of the form "Hey! My music sounds really l33t !!!!!"
Anybody know of some honest testing across a wide variety of music (particularly instrumental / classical / baroque) that is not just one person's subjective opinion?
Everyone seems to think that doing a lossy music compressor is just a "matter of cranking it out", but it's an extremely difficult problem. I'm not going to trust a bunch of amateurs until I see some real evidence that they know what they're doing. And no, "test it out yourself" is not an option. I have better things to do with my time, particularly since MP3 is free.
ditto to you
I've got some news for you, Mr. Literalist Geek: Words mean more than their literal definitions. If I say "this movie is infinitely better than the one I saw yesterday", obviously that is mathematically impossible. If I say, "Here, have some of my paper clips. I have an infinite supply", then I probably mean that my stock of paper clips is never going to run out because they get replinished periodically. Even though, technically, there is not enough mass in the universe to truly create an "infinite supply".
When I say something like "The supply of oil is infinite", what that means is that FOR ALL PRACTICAL PURPOSES, the supply is infinite, just like paper clips. In other words, what is the difference between having an infinite supply of oil and a supply that never runs out? Absolutely no practical difference.
Language: it's a beautiful, flexible thing. You might want to learn about it someday.
Take a look at the rating breakdown of Titanic at IMDB. Now, it may not be your favorite movie, but if someone is scoring it lower than, say, a 3 (much less the 10.7% that scored it a ONE), then we know that it's just popularity backlash.
Personally, I thought it was a great movie. Not the best movie of all time (the dialogue WAS a little clunky in places), but it is certainly among the greatest disaster sequences ever filmed.
Yeah, but you didn't mean it. Proof: the Earth's mass is not infinite, and only a tiny fraction of it is petroleum. Therefor, there is a finite amount of petroleum on or in earth. QED. Next time, learn what those long words mean before you use them so forcefully.
Boy I'll bet you're a million laughs at parties.
Partier A: Boy the sun hit me like a hammer this morning!
StrawberryFrog: You do know that photons can't actually apply the force of a hammer, right?
A much better choice than last year [Harry Potter].
Yes, because we know that anything that is popular is automatically bad. And of course we know that anything obscure and unread by the masses is automatically better.
I will never, ever, understand why certain people must hate anything that a lot of other people happen to like (see also: movies, Titanic).
If it is that good that pirate copies are in circulation, do they really need a marketing campaign?
Sheesh, dude, the LOTR geeks make up a VERY small proportion of moviegoers. If just the geeks saw the movie, it would be dismal failure. Marketing it to promote it to normal, once-to-couple-times-a-month movie people as well as the I-go-to-movies-when-there's-something-good people (I wouldn't be surprised if the latter is a majority of people).
The difference is that it's a lot easier to add a widget to a commodity x86 board than it is to completely reengineer a G4 board.
This is the same argument as "Microsoft will just change the APIs". Apple can't just willy-nilly change things, because they break backward compatibility with all the existing widgets. Apple is obnoxious about making everybody upgrade their hardware, but they can't do it every operating system release.
Hehehee...yeah. Herd mentality...right. I would hardly classify those supporting alternative energies as "the herd." But maybe herd has been re-defined.
Nope, same definition as always. One who doesn't do any of his own thinking, but just follows the herd. Your herd just happens to be smaller than a lot of other herds. Of course, people like you think that the farther out of the fringe you go, you must be getting closer to the truth.
What you want is magic technology. And if the magic doesn't exist, then it must be a conspiracy of someone to keep the magic away from the masses.
WHY? Because Stalinism is obviously the only alternative to Multi-National Corporate Run capitalist government.
OK, if the failure of electric cars is just a big capitalist conspiracy, then why aren't your non-capitalistic paradises producing them? Only stupid people live there and have no engineers? Come on, if it's just a big conspiracy, then I'm sure one of your oh-so-moral countries will start producing them tomorrow and gloriously fill the world with non-polluting, electric vehicles that recharge in 5 minutes and run for 1000 miles. And of course, all produced by a non-profit entity.
So please, tell us all. What country is it, and when will the utopia begin? We're all anxious to hear about it./p
Why argue with these hard right neo-conservative bone-heads?
It IS much easier to just shoot off labels than it is to think rationally, isn't it? Sorry, I didn't mean to challenge your fragile world view.
who worked for the big manufacturers say they were never serious about the projects and wanted them to fail,
Yeah, I guess billions of dollars "isn't really serious".
the manufacturers spent more effort trying to kill legislation towards developing this technology than they spent trying to get the technology to market,
They spent lots of money trying to kill legislation that tried to legislate technology. Guess what? If technology is good, then it doesn't need to be legislated. The car manufacturers knew that electric cars weren't going to happen soon.
now that they've killed most of the legislation they're killing development of the technology and blaming it on "lack of government support",
They're killing development because it's a waste of money. Do you seriously think all the engineers that billions of dollars bought were all part of a conspiracy to make it fail? All of them?
American car manufacturers have a very long history of straight-up lying about these issues
Yeah, it's a great conspiracy. If they would just stop suppressing the 1000 MPG carbeurator, all are problems would be solved, right?
If we continue to burn up oil as quickly as we can, people like Bush will continue to press for drilling into areas like the beautiful Alaskan countryside.
This is something else I don't understand. Why is it such a big deal that thousands of square miles be completely untouched? I'm sorry, but a couple acre processing plant is not going to turn the countryside into black, sludge filled hell-hole.
It's not like we shouldn't stop using it now because it is terribly dirty.
And getting cleaner all the time due to better technology. Taken a look at car emissions lately?
It just makes sense that we should definately destroy any pristine nature environments where oil is just to get down to last drops in pursuit of keeping prices down
Name the last "pristin nature environment" that was destroyed through normal excavation of oil, other than accidents (and even the accidents aren't that bad).
While are at it, lets have a few more wars over it....
I'm always amused by this line of thinking. There is nothing intrinsically immoral about buying oil. That wars are caused by this is the fault of the countries that make war, not the countries that buy oil. It's always amazing when people shift the blame away from the people who actually make the wars.
We've definately seen that capitalism does great things for the planet
Well, yes, we have. Considering that Capitalism has been the greatest force for raising people's standard of living than any other force. It's kind of funny how the more capitalism a country has, the better the people live. Or haven't you noticed that direct relation? Ah, you're probably right. We should all live in the paradises like the old Soviet Union.
The almighty dollar will save us!
Actually, it would save the middle east countries if their politics weren't so screwed up. If they had freedom and capitalism, the money that poured in from their natural resources would transform them into modern countries. But again, it's not our fault that they continue to screw themselves and their people.
THANK YOU SIR! I feel blessed to have my whole mind on the issue changed by Slashdot!
We can only hope that people like you overcome your herd mentality.
Go do a little research, heck, take a PHYSICS class before you make those statements. Try to understand the constraints involved, they ain't trivial.
No one, including him, has claimed that it's trivial. All he's stating are the minimum requirements before he would consider an electric car. And I agree wholehardedly.
Sorry, but you are not going to guilt me into buying a car that sucks. If it's not practical to build electric cars, then they aren't practical.