I don't very much care how popular something is. Why do you?
The point isn't whether YOU personally care about the sport, the question is whether enough people care to make it economically viable. Assuming you want it to work, you should care how popular it is.
Yeah, because the popular sporting events are MUCH better.
Not all popular sports are good (soccer, for example, is really a pretty damn bad sport from the standpoint of offensive/defense balance; it's far too heavily biased toward the defense), but that doesn't mean all unpopular sports are somehow more noble.
Again, there's a reason airplane racing has never "taken off" (so to speak). It sounds good on paper (machines blazing through the air at hundreds of miles per hour!! Wow!!), but in practice there's not much to watch, and it's too much like a boat race. The first one to get the upper hand will almost always win. There are not enough variables to introduce strategy during the race. A rocket race will be worse -- they're not even as maneuverable as an airplane. It'll be more like a drag race, except they'll be gone so fast you can't see anything.
The fact that there is no popular "airplane racing" sport to speak of should tell these people something. It's hard to watch and boring. I think they're letting their own enthusiasm for rockets cloud their reasoning.
they'd have been better off asking a brighter (or more "driven?") person how the money they worked for might best be spent.
Apparently you missed my point. Rather than repeat myself, go back and read my original comment again.
not every poor person is a lazy, unmotivated bastard.
Where did I say they were? It's so frustrating making a perfectly plain point, and then have people interpret it using their own biases and filters.
The point, mi amigo, is that many poor people are poor because 1) they don't have a job, and/or 2) they are caught in a cycle of poverty where they've gotten frustrated with a lack of opportunity, and it's just easier to take the handout. Couple that with lies from people like you telling them that the fault lies with "the man" keeping them down, and you have a serious problem.
The best use of money is giving someone a job so that they can be self-sufficient.
My final point is that not everything has to have a gray, utilitarian purpose. If people like you ran the world, we'd all live in gray cast-concrete cubes. Can't paint the cube! There are far better things to do with the money!
Who cares if someone spends their money on making the ultimate bathroom? It's funny! Laugh! The guy who did is probably laughing about it, and it put some money back in the economy, giving it to a lot of people who did the work.
You're a half-full kinda guy, aren't you? I look outside and see a beautiful world. You look outside and see pollution and squalor. I think I'd rather be me.
Where do you think the $200K goes? It goes to the installers, the people on the assembly line who built it, etc, etc.
It's actually far preferable for the money to be spent giving people jobs than just handing it out to poor people and keeping them in the poverty cycle.
This attitude reminds me of the luxury tax on yachts in the 80s intended to "punish the rich bastards who can afford a yacht". Of course, what actually happened was the rich had work done elsewhere, and the people who were actually hurt were the people who worked on yachts.
Well I drive a Honda Jazz and it's also one of the safest cars cars on the road. I think it's about number 3 in the stats.
Number 3 in WHAT stats? What the hell does that mean? I guarantee you that some glorified scooter is not number 3 in the death rate.
Hence I've got to take responsibility for my saftey much as I do when I'm on my bike. Or shouldn't I cycle either?
You can do anything you like. But as you say, it's YOUR responsibility to keep yourself safe. It's your own fault if you choose to drive a death machine.
Get this into your head - Car drivers do not own the road! You as a member of society have a responsibility to other citizens too!
Oh, so now it's my responsibility to keep you safe. Sorry, but I'm a safe driver. If you drunkely smash into me in your go-cart while weaving in and out of traffic, I going to do my best to make sure it's YOU who pay the price, not me. Once again -- as you say -- it's my responsibility to keep myself and my family safe.
Right. And that is influenced by many and more significant factors besides "How well will this car protect me in case of an accident.".
Sure, but who cares? What's important is the overall question of safety. And, overall, SUVs (and heavier cars) are safer than light cars, as proven by the death rates. It's somewhat interesting (I guess) to break down all the factors, but the important question is how often I'll die.
Look at any study on nhtsa.gov and you will see that fatality rates are roughly the same for cars, pickups and SUVs despite the larger vehicles' increased weight.
Spoken like someone who never actually looks at the studies. Well, I have, and you are Just Plain Wrong. I'm tired of tracking it down everytime someone makes this post of ignorance. Dig out the statistics, and look at the death rates per 100,000 miles.
Dude, it's simple math. SUV = 15 mpg. Ordinary car = 30 mpg.
No. My Honda Pilot gets about 18 mpg. A "normal" car gets about 25, unless you're driving a tiny death box. Yes, it's a difference, but not enough for me to care about. And if you look at what comes out of a modern tailpipe, it's miniscule. Even if it we're true that it's twice as much as a smaller car (which I doubt, but I don't feel like looking it up and proving you wrong), it's still tiny in the scheme of things.
This obsession about SUVs is just bizarre. Again, it's people picking a useless-but-visible target while ignoring all the invisible-but-real problems.
There is no reason a vehicle has to be 18 feet long and weigh 5000 pounds to be safe or perform adequately. They are that big because people like big vehicles, plain and simple. Why? Who knows. Probably a combination of 1) misguided feelings of safety and 2) dick size.
I drive an SUV for two reasons: 1) Room to haul kids and crap, and 2) safety. It is the biggest myth in history that big cars are somehow less safe than small cars. Read my lips (and read the research): WEIGHT = SAFETY. I don't feel like proving this yet again, as I've proven it time after time after time for people who believe the propaganda. Go do the research yourself, look at the freaking statistics, and then slap your noggin at how freaking obvious it is to any first year physics student that heavy is going to be better than light in a collision.
Rollover safety? 1) Wake up and realize it's not 1985 anymore, and that rollover safety is much improved, 2) Not all SUVs are the same, and 3) Rollover safety is highly a function of the driver. If you're an idiot driver, then you have a much higher risk of rolling it than a driver (such as myself) who understands how to drive.
Environut concerns? Again, it's not 1985 anymore. SUVs are not the devil they're made out to be.
But why do I bother. No one wants to hear this. Everyone wants the simple answer. -sigh-
Why do we still drive cars that use an internal combustion engine and only get 30 miles per gallon? I think that we'll see some amazing achievements in this area.
Yeah, it's not like car manufacturers haven't spent any money on research in that area (*cough*tens of billions*cough*).
Sheesh, it is astoundingly naive to believe that a mere 10 million dollar prize is going to bring about some "magic motor" that is far more fuel efficient than what we have. Some of the smartest engineers in the world have been working on the problem for at least four decades.
Space is different -- there isn't much of a direct economic incentive to get to space, so giving out a prize for a relatively useless stunt made a little bit of sense. But there is already an immense economic incentive to produce a fuel-efficient motor. The patent on something like that would be worth hundreds of millions of dollars (if not billions).
While they're at it, why don't they offer a prize for human-level AI. I hear no one has been working on that, either.::rolls eyes::
what software/hardware company has not made misleading comments based on one benchmark to make it sound like their newer product is so much better?
Please list the companies that have made claims on the order of Apple's benchmarking lies. It's one thing to claim "my product is better" (which is an opinion), it's another thing to make a factual claim that "my product is twice as fast", which is out and out lying. If every company does it, as you claim, you shouldn't have any trouble giving me, say, 10 examples. 5? 1?
And just for the record, I find it very amusing that you accuse me of being an anti-corporate Linux bigot, when I'm the exact opposite. I specifically dislike the business practices of Jobs and Apple. They make decent products, but their business practices make Microsoft look like a piker.
Heck, another example would be them suing Real because they dared to try and let consumers put non-Steve approved music on the iPods that they own. Oh wait, no one owns their own iPod, they all belong to Steve and HE'LL tell you what music you can put on it.
I believe he does it to increase the size of the market he can eventually sell copies of Windows to.
If you actually run the numbers of how many people he's saving as a proportion to the current size of the market, compared to how much money he's spending, the absurdity of that will become clear.
Or to put it another way, if Gates was really interested in making as much money as possible, he'd take the 30 or 50 billion dollars (or whatever he gave away to his charity) and create new products to sell to the existing 6 billion person market, rather than trying to make a mere extra 100 million people live longer to buy copies of his existing product.
He has won every victory, fighting honestly with QUALITY as the preferred weapon.
That's out and out B.S. I will grant you that Jobs likes quality, but there is no doubt that he will use the lawsuit as a weapon in a pinch. Look and feel lawsuits, anyone? Then Jobs has never been afraid to lie in advertising ("twice as fast", which meant they were twice as fast on only one obscure benchmark, but that didn't stop them from misleading people). And no, it's not true that "everone does it" (which doesn't make it right, even if that was true).
Say what you want about Gates and Microsoft, but at least they don't go around suing everyone, and there is a laundry list of people they could sue into oblivion, on merit or not (WINE, Samba, etc, etc).
but The Woz is rich in family and hacking ability, and as far as role models go, I'd much rather be the later.
Hmmm, let's see. Be rich in family and hacking ability, or be rich in family (as Gates is) and hacking ability (which Gates also was, though who knows how he compares to Woz), AND have the ability and desire to innoculate literally millions of children around the world against disease. Note that he doesn't do charity for show, as so many do, he actually gets things done.
You'd have a lot more credibility if you could name someone who has actually done this. As it stands, the second you try it, they'll simply treat you as the crackpot criminal tax evader you are.
This reminds me of the crackpot theory that you don't have to pay income tax because the 16th amendment wasn't properly ratified.
Dude, think about what your saying. The VAST majority of the lower classes vote Democrat, and people who are more successful tend to vote Republican. Do you seriously think all the smart people are poor and blue collar, and all the white collar, rich people are stupid?
Not to say that all Democrats are stupid and vice versa (reasonable, intelligent people can certainly disagree on things), but the surface evidence is exactly the opposite of the point you're trying to make.
Funny how people who are horrible at grammar and spelling amazingly also believe that it doesn't matter.
What I find ironic is that CmdrTaco (legitimately) complains about people wasting his time by not giving him proper information, yet has no problem with people having to waste time re-reading sentences with grammar errors to decode them. As Taco says, it may not be much for a single person, but in aggregate it's wasting a lot of time.
You're not looking at the big picture. The problem isn't the people for whom getting convicted is punishment enough, the problem is the people who don't give a crap how many crimes they're convicted of, as long as all they have to do is pay enough money. The point is that they make more money by breaking the law (and paying the fine along with it) than they do by playing by the rules. Is that the world you want?
What, in your opinion, does society gain from imprisoning this person? Does it deter him from future crimes more than the $25k fine?
Dude, think this through. If all you had to do was pay a fine when you break the law, then breaking the law just becomes a cost-benefit analysis. If you're rich enough, it's not even a consideration (which is somewhat the case now, in certain circumstances).
Jail time is MUCH worse to a white collar person than paying mere money.
Re:It's only natural to inhabit the moon next.
on
Return to the Moon
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Mankind has always and will always explore. That's how people spread across the globe. People braved massive oceans and inhospitable conditions just to see what lies ahead. It's who we are. None of the early explorers new if it would be worthwhile or profitable, but they did it anyways.
That's a nice romantic notion, but unfortunately it's bullshit. Exploration has always been about profit, from the stone ages when people went in search of new food and game supplies, to Columbus looking for new trade routes, to Europeans coming to the United States for the cheap land.
Exploration "because it's there" is a relatively modern concept originally created, frankly, by rich people with too much time on their hands.
Space will be inhabited when, and only when, it's profitable to do so. And it's very likely that it will bases floating in space before we see moon colonies.
The revenue from 14 million iPods last quarter is giving the revenue from Microsoft's gaming division the finger right now. Care to rethink that statement?
We're not talking about Apple consumer electronics, we're talking about Apple computers. Different beasts. That's like saying because Sony Playstations are popular, people will automatically care about Sony MP3 players.
Clearly, the AP's editors determined this news was important enough to warrant such action."
Clearly the news media is dominated by people who use Apple computers. This is a well-known fact, and I actually recall reading an article a while back about the fact that Apple gets a disproportionate amount of computer press when the vast majority of the computer-using population doesn't care about Apple, much less actually owns one.
Just to make another useless-but-interesting experiment, I tried the following:
Google for:
"written in python": 665,000 hits
"written in perl": 1,140,000 hits
"written in c": 1,500,000 hits
"written in c++": 772,000 hits
"written in c#": 342,000 hits
"written in java": 1,750,000 hits
"written in haskell": 33,600 hits
"written in lisp": 61,400 hits
"written in pascal": 51,800 hits
"written in objective c": 26,800 hits
"written in ruby": 120,000 hits
I'm not sure what this measures, but it's interesting.:) Python actually did a lot better than I expected.
Slashdot Mirror
The point isn't whether YOU personally care about the sport, the question is whether enough people care to make it economically viable. Assuming you want it to work, you should care how popular it is.
Yeah, because the popular sporting events are MUCH better.
Not all popular sports are good (soccer, for example, is really a pretty damn bad sport from the standpoint of offensive/defense balance; it's far too heavily biased toward the defense), but that doesn't mean all unpopular sports are somehow more noble.
Again, there's a reason airplane racing has never "taken off" (so to speak). It sounds good on paper (machines blazing through the air at hundreds of miles per hour!! Wow!!), but in practice there's not much to watch, and it's too much like a boat race. The first one to get the upper hand will almost always win. There are not enough variables to introduce strategy during the race. A rocket race will be worse -- they're not even as maneuverable as an airplane. It'll be more like a drag race, except they'll be gone so fast you can't see anything.
But hey, let 'er rip and we'll see what happens.
The Super Bowl is televised worldwide, and gets about a billion viewers.
Apparently you missed my point. Rather than repeat myself, go back and read my original comment again.
not every poor person is a lazy, unmotivated bastard.
Where did I say they were? It's so frustrating making a perfectly plain point, and then have people interpret it using their own biases and filters.
The point, mi amigo, is that many poor people are poor because 1) they don't have a job, and/or 2) they are caught in a cycle of poverty where they've gotten frustrated with a lack of opportunity, and it's just easier to take the handout. Couple that with lies from people like you telling them that the fault lies with "the man" keeping them down, and you have a serious problem.
The best use of money is giving someone a job so that they can be self-sufficient.
My final point is that not everything has to have a gray, utilitarian purpose. If people like you ran the world, we'd all live in gray cast-concrete cubes. Can't paint the cube! There are far better things to do with the money!
Who cares if someone spends their money on making the ultimate bathroom? It's funny! Laugh! The guy who did is probably laughing about it, and it put some money back in the economy, giving it to a lot of people who did the work.
You're a half-full kinda guy, aren't you? I look outside and see a beautiful world. You look outside and see pollution and squalor. I think I'd rather be me.
It's actually far preferable for the money to be spent giving people jobs than just handing it out to poor people and keeping them in the poverty cycle.
This attitude reminds me of the luxury tax on yachts in the 80s intended to "punish the rich bastards who can afford a yacht". Of course, what actually happened was the rich had work done elsewhere, and the people who were actually hurt were the people who worked on yachts.
Number 3 in WHAT stats? What the hell does that mean? I guarantee you that some glorified scooter is not number 3 in the death rate.
Hence I've got to take responsibility for my saftey much as I do when I'm on my bike. Or shouldn't I cycle either?
You can do anything you like. But as you say, it's YOUR responsibility to keep yourself safe. It's your own fault if you choose to drive a death machine.
Get this into your head - Car drivers do not own the road! You as a member of society have a responsibility to other citizens too!
Oh, so now it's my responsibility to keep you safe. Sorry, but I'm a safe driver. If you drunkely smash into me in your go-cart while weaving in and out of traffic, I going to do my best to make sure it's YOU who pay the price, not me. Once again -- as you say -- it's my responsibility to keep myself and my family safe.
Sure, but who cares? What's important is the overall question of safety. And, overall, SUVs (and heavier cars) are safer than light cars, as proven by the death rates. It's somewhat interesting (I guess) to break down all the factors, but the important question is how often I'll die.
"What is the probability of my death by getting in this car."
Spoken like someone who never actually looks at the studies. Well, I have, and you are Just Plain Wrong. I'm tired of tracking it down everytime someone makes this post of ignorance. Dig out the statistics, and look at the death rates per 100,000 miles.
Dude, it's simple math. SUV = 15 mpg. Ordinary car = 30 mpg.
No. My Honda Pilot gets about 18 mpg. A "normal" car gets about 25, unless you're driving a tiny death box. Yes, it's a difference, but not enough for me to care about. And if you look at what comes out of a modern tailpipe, it's miniscule. Even if it we're true that it's twice as much as a smaller car (which I doubt, but I don't feel like looking it up and proving you wrong), it's still tiny in the scheme of things.
This obsession about SUVs is just bizarre. Again, it's people picking a useless-but-visible target while ignoring all the invisible-but-real problems.
I drive an SUV for two reasons: 1) Room to haul kids and crap, and 2) safety. It is the biggest myth in history that big cars are somehow less safe than small cars. Read my lips (and read the research): WEIGHT = SAFETY. I don't feel like proving this yet again, as I've proven it time after time after time for people who believe the propaganda. Go do the research yourself, look at the freaking statistics, and then slap your noggin at how freaking obvious it is to any first year physics student that heavy is going to be better than light in a collision.
Rollover safety? 1) Wake up and realize it's not 1985 anymore, and that rollover safety is much improved, 2) Not all SUVs are the same, and 3) Rollover safety is highly a function of the driver. If you're an idiot driver, then you have a much higher risk of rolling it than a driver (such as myself) who understands how to drive.
Environut concerns? Again, it's not 1985 anymore. SUVs are not the devil they're made out to be.
But why do I bother. No one wants to hear this. Everyone wants the simple answer. -sigh-
Yeah, it's not like car manufacturers haven't spent any money on research in that area (*cough*tens of billions*cough*).
Sheesh, it is astoundingly naive to believe that a mere 10 million dollar prize is going to bring about some "magic motor" that is far more fuel efficient than what we have. Some of the smartest engineers in the world have been working on the problem for at least four decades.
Space is different -- there isn't much of a direct economic incentive to get to space, so giving out a prize for a relatively useless stunt made a little bit of sense. But there is already an immense economic incentive to produce a fuel-efficient motor. The patent on something like that would be worth hundreds of millions of dollars (if not billions).
While they're at it, why don't they offer a prize for human-level AI. I hear no one has been working on that, either. ::rolls eyes::
Please list the companies that have made claims on the order of Apple's benchmarking lies. It's one thing to claim "my product is better" (which is an opinion), it's another thing to make a factual claim that "my product is twice as fast", which is out and out lying. If every company does it, as you claim, you shouldn't have any trouble giving me, say, 10 examples. 5? 1?
And just for the record, I find it very amusing that you accuse me of being an anti-corporate Linux bigot, when I'm the exact opposite. I specifically dislike the business practices of Jobs and Apple. They make decent products, but their business practices make Microsoft look like a piker.
Heck, another example would be them suing Real because they dared to try and let consumers put non-Steve approved music on the iPods that they own. Oh wait, no one owns their own iPod, they all belong to Steve and HE'LL tell you what music you can put on it.
If you actually run the numbers of how many people he's saving as a proportion to the current size of the market, compared to how much money he's spending, the absurdity of that will become clear.
Or to put it another way, if Gates was really interested in making as much money as possible, he'd take the 30 or 50 billion dollars (or whatever he gave away to his charity) and create new products to sell to the existing 6 billion person market, rather than trying to make a mere extra 100 million people live longer to buy copies of his existing product.
That's out and out B.S. I will grant you that Jobs likes quality, but there is no doubt that he will use the lawsuit as a weapon in a pinch. Look and feel lawsuits, anyone? Then Jobs has never been afraid to lie in advertising ("twice as fast", which meant they were twice as fast on only one obscure benchmark, but that didn't stop them from misleading people). And no, it's not true that "everone does it" (which doesn't make it right, even if that was true).
Say what you want about Gates and Microsoft, but at least they don't go around suing everyone, and there is a laundry list of people they could sue into oblivion, on merit or not (WINE, Samba, etc, etc).
Hmmm, let's see. Be rich in family and hacking ability, or be rich in family (as Gates is) and hacking ability (which Gates also was, though who knows how he compares to Woz), AND have the ability and desire to innoculate literally millions of children around the world against disease. Note that he doesn't do charity for show, as so many do, he actually gets things done.
I think I'd rather be Gates.
Russia IS poor, and has never been to the moon.
This reminds me of the crackpot theory that you don't have to pay income tax because the 16th amendment wasn't properly ratified.
Not to say that all Democrats are stupid and vice versa (reasonable, intelligent people can certainly disagree on things), but the surface evidence is exactly the opposite of the point you're trying to make.
What I find ironic is that CmdrTaco (legitimately) complains about people wasting his time by not giving him proper information, yet has no problem with people having to waste time re-reading sentences with grammar errors to decode them. As Taco says, it may not be much for a single person, but in aggregate it's wasting a lot of time.
You're not looking at the big picture. The problem isn't the people for whom getting convicted is punishment enough, the problem is the people who don't give a crap how many crimes they're convicted of, as long as all they have to do is pay enough money. The point is that they make more money by breaking the law (and paying the fine along with it) than they do by playing by the rules. Is that the world you want?
Dude, think this through. If all you had to do was pay a fine when you break the law, then breaking the law just becomes a cost-benefit analysis. If you're rich enough, it's not even a consideration (which is somewhat the case now, in certain circumstances).
Jail time is MUCH worse to a white collar person than paying mere money.
That's a nice romantic notion, but unfortunately it's bullshit. Exploration has always been about profit, from the stone ages when people went in search of new food and game supplies, to Columbus looking for new trade routes, to Europeans coming to the United States for the cheap land.
Exploration "because it's there" is a relatively modern concept originally created, frankly, by rich people with too much time on their hands.
Space will be inhabited when, and only when, it's profitable to do so. And it's very likely that it will bases floating in space before we see moon colonies.
We're not talking about Apple consumer electronics, we're talking about Apple computers. Different beasts. That's like saying because Sony Playstations are popular, people will automatically care about Sony MP3 players.
Clearly the news media is dominated by people who use Apple computers. This is a well-known fact, and I actually recall reading an article a while back about the fact that Apple gets a disproportionate amount of computer press when the vast majority of the computer-using population doesn't care about Apple, much less actually owns one.
"written in python": 665,000 hits
"written in perl": 1,140,000 hits
"written in c": 1,500,000 hits
"written in c++": 772,000 hits
"written in c#": 342,000 hits
"written in java": 1,750,000 hits
"written in haskell": 33,600 hits
"written in lisp": 61,400 hits
"written in pascal": 51,800 hits
"written in objective c": 26,800 hits
"written in ruby": 120,000 hits
I'm not sure what this measures, but it's interesting. :) Python actually did a lot better than I expected.