Many moons ago, people used to stuff all kinds of ridiculous claptrap in their Usenet.sig lines to "clog the NSA monitors." Keywords like nuclear, communist, peace, soviet, blah blah blah blah. It was a fairly useless exercise whether the underlying suspicions were true or not.
The execution was amteurish, but today's news proves that the principle is worth exlporing further. Software developers need to stop talking the talk and make a more concerted effort to transparently encrypt all the network communication conducted by their applications, their mail systems, their social media platforms, whatever. The cypherpunk community has long pooh-poohed allowing "weak" encryption to become entrenched and create a false sense of security. But this "secutrity through purity" approach has resulted in the abject failure of the widespread adoption of encryption at all levels. Can we not find some sort of barely acceptable common standard and just start routinely implementing it and make the marketing people figure out how to describe it as a sexy feature?
I don't have the privilege of living in Sen. Wyden's district any longer, but I always voted for him when I did, and that was well before his name became associated with civil liberties in the digital age. He played a critical role in getting the NTSB to conduct a much-needed-and-unheard-of civilian investigation of a C-130 crash that killed 10 Oregon National Guardsmen. From then until now he has repeatedly demonstrated tenacity, intellectual curiosity, and a willingness to say unpopular things for as long as I've cared to watch his performance as a Senator.
Yes, I realize Slashdot is probably the absolute last place on earth to say anything positive about an elected official. I should be trying to hype some unelectable wacko instead. Sorry to dissappoint.
I'm really amused by all the ideological civil libertarians who are shocked (SHOCKED I tell you!) at finding common cause with Scalia on this issue. The general assumption seems to be that Scalia "is finally right for once." Here's an alternative explanation: Scalia hasn't changed at all. It's the ideologically motivated civil libertarians who are off their rockers here.
If you'll tie your jerking knee down for a minute and whip up a Top 20 list of the most pernicious and chilling abuses of government authority, I suspect you'll have a hard time finding a spot for this line item. The risk/benefit equation on this is different. Managing this data in an appropriate and accountable fashion is officially Not Rocket Science. You may not trust the government to behave in a reasonable and appropriate manner, but there's all kinds of stuff you accept silently right now which is already egregious. Letting that stuff slide (Guantanomo, CIA-run drone strikes against civilian targets, National Security Letters, good old fashioned "driving while black", take your pick) while getting your panties in a bunch over soemthing with tangible benefits to a civil society is not much more than masturbatory paranoia.
Or maybe I should put it this way: When extremists of different factions agree, it doesn't make them less extreme.
Congratulatons, you have managed to parlay your irrational fear of GMO into an irrational fear of entirely unrelated technologies. There's no gene splicing going on here. The RNA material they are embedding into the bandage are not genes, are not being spliced into living cells, and will not replicate. They are basically custom marching orders being sent to the existing genes, temporarily telling certain ones to shut the hell up for the duration of time that the RNA persists in the immediate area. The bandage approach is specifically because the RNA is so fragile as to not deliver effectively via traditional methods. So... you're wrong on so many levels, it boggles the mind.
Since you felt it would be tedious to explain specifics, you create a huge hole in our ability to give you a serious answer that is relevant to your situation. So to speak on a purely generic level, there's no such thing as too good a user experience.. The notion that you might make the user of your product TOO happy, or make their lives TOO easy, is the sort of sadistic logic that I would normally attribute to someone whose just shitty at developing user interfaces and wants some kind of perverse rationalization to justify their shortcomings.
However... this whole "flying car" analogy leads me to believe that you're not really talking about "user experience" in terms of user interfaces, ergonomics, and the like. It seems to me that you're talking about feature sets and what you are empowering the user to accomplish with your software. For example, some advanced text editors may enable global search and replace. That same text editor may support using regular expressions in a variety of ways. With this hypothetical text editor, it might be possible to combine the application of these features and modify dozens of critical files in unexpected ways, really wrecking the local PC.I'm wondering if this is the scenario that's really behind this question? If so, referring to this as "user experience" is misleading.
I'm fully in agreement that you want to be careful about what sort of capacities you grant the users of your application. If that particular feature has a crappy risk/benefit ratio, then drop it altogether. On the other hand, if you have powerful but risky features that you believe the software needs, then you should be working hard to improve the user experience in such a way that inexperienced users don't stumble across those features accidentally. Although I have personally railed against Microsoft's history of nesting options under multiple layers of dialog boxes, part of the intent there is to segregate "power user" options where they will not distract casual users from the features they actually care about.
sitting on my ass in his kangaroo traffic court for 16 fucking hours that cost me then equivalent to $800 USD in lost wages for a $50 USD bicycle citation
1. Send the best minds in Japan to the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. Study the tools and methodologies used. Interview all the engineers participating in the cleanup effort. Learn absolutely everything you can about waste recovery techniques, environmental stewardship, and safety protocols.
Allow modern statistical techniques to be applied to the Census.
Enlarge the House of Representatives by shrinking and fixing the population size attributed to each House rep. Then modernize the participatory infrastructure to allow the MUCH larger house to perform meaningful work while spending more time in their home districts. The effect would be that reps would need less money for their re-election campaigns, would have much more exposure to their local consituents, would have less comittee assignments to track, and would make national-level lobbying interests spend a lot more.
Targeted spending of federal capital on decaying infrastrcuture. Roads, bridges, and the like.
A combination jobs/environment program, as a public/private partnership with wilderness firefighting companies, to actively reduce fuel load in national forests
I'm sure there's lots more but since our electoral system was designed in a way that reinforces a two-party model (intentionally or not), I don't see any need to giveadditional futile suggestions to a group that will never have any meaningful power at the national level.
I really don't intend that as a dig. It is what it is. It's certainly possible that the GOP will continue it's self-marginalization until a third party finds an opportunity to supercede it. The GOP themselves did that in the 19th century.... but for any 3rd party to realize the possibility of becoming the new 2nd party, it will have to capture the attention of "boring" middle-of-the-road voters who feel disenfrancized by the polarization. Nibbling around the edges of public policy with highly technical optimizations are not going to cut it. If the GOP leaves that door unlocked, you'll need big, heavy, sexy planks to beat it down with.
I'm surprised that the doubting Thomases are getting so many mod points around here today. There is no better facial recognition system in the world than the human brain. The pictures are worthlessly low-res and indiscriminate? Someone who knows these individuals will correlate the physical details of the face, the expression, the height, haircut, posture, and clothing instantly and unconsciously. They will be recognized. Those acquaintances can see the forest. All we are getting is trees.
And to cover the other criticism of why these two were chosen... Both were seen walking together with black backpacks. Then each one was seen individually right at one of the two bomb sites. In the case of suspect #2, there is video of him putting his backpack down and then walking away from it. Personally I agree that this is sufficient to refer to both individuals as "suspects."
If I'm a small entrepeneur, these three give me platforms for advertising, promotion, and e-commerce with optional "social interaction" channels built in. I'm probably already an experienced user with all of these systems, and I can safely assume that the overwhelming majority of my current and future customers know these systems as well. How much time and money do I need to invest up front in order to exploit these tools? Zero. Zip. Nada.
Anybody who wants to deliberately insert a $$ product or service into this space is going to have to identify a gap in the current ecosystem that is painful enough that the entrepeneur will happilly throw the money at them. I don't see Foursquare doing anything right now that meets those crieria. They might have something interesting in mind but we'll just have to see.
One of the things about Bab5 that was always fun for the hardcore SF fans was bringing back actors from classic SF television. Casting Billy Mumy (Lost in Space) as Lennier and Walter Koenig as Alfred Bester (a personal fav) were entertaining beyond the performances they delivered. Are there any cool casting choices about Sense8 that you have planned or can dish on?
As a former Amiga owner, I remember how excited the community was to learn that this new TV series called Babylon 5 was going to have it's visual effects developed on the NewTek Video Toaster. Many considered it a vindication of the Amiga platform as well as a milestone in the evolution of digital video. My understanding is that you moved away from this platform in later seasons because it wasn't scaling up to meet your needs.
Today desktop video is commonplace, and there are a million billion Youtube videos whose quality is only limited by the talent and time invested by the creators rather than any technological barriers. How do you feel about the progression from then till now and the role you played as an early adopter?
Subtle. In the rythym of the overall broadcast. A few years ago they did a piece on Weekend Edition about how Bloomberg was pushing for a limited set of "authorized" ringtones in NYC to combat noise polution. I was having a not-sure-if-serious moment until the article ended and the promotional bumper indicated that the show received support from "Soylent" corporation. Hearing that ubiquitous NPR voice cheerily exclaim that "Soylent Green is People" had me out of my chair.
If we're going to dredge up old, irritating Usenet crap because it's 4/1, you could at least pretend that B1FF had been made into a Slashdot moderator. Then we could have two pages of ASCII art at the end of each slashpost, and make all the mobile RSS users cry.
1. The ATF is a bunch of ignorant buffoons. A 3D printed gun doesn't have to last long if you are planning a suicidal shooting spree! Stupid calcified bureacracies are simply incapable of formulating an intelligent and agile response to modern technolgy.
2. The ATF is a bunch of ignorant buffoons. Getting up in arms over some obscure thing like 3D printing isn't going to make anyone safer. Stupid meddling, overreaching bureacracies are simply incapable of forming a thoughtful and nuanced response to modern technology.
So do I, and I actually think your argument is irrelevant. What you are describing in a nutshell is the 80/20 rule. In essence, a majority of the customer interaction problems any business faces come from a minority of customers. Your organization's inability to manage the nutjob 20% effectively is not a justification to deny access to the other 80%. Your leadership needs to do the following:
1. Drink the kool-aid on that fact that patient access to their EMR is an overall net benefit to the quality of care they receive. (aka, the "carrot")
2. Accept that even if you can't get your head wrapped around #1, HIPAA doesn't care and mandates it anyway. (aka, the "stick")
3. Establish reasonable and consistent processes to deliver that access in a manner that is cost effective to your organization.
But that is completely irrelevant. Any private entitty that maintains detailed information about an individual US citizen should be required to disclose those records to the individual in question under any circumstances. That goes for my doctor, Facebook, whatever. There may be any number of reasonable exceptions to this, but disclosure should be the default expectation. In the case of healthcare I believe that any cases of disclosure that are actually harmful to patient care are rare exceptions that prove the rule.
So to the 69% of physicians who prefer restricting patient access: Fuck off.
Officially, Card has expressed himself. DC's customers have expressed themselves. The illustrator expressed himself as well as making a personal business decision. DC is now faced with a business decision, but their specific choice will almost guaranteeably be a safe and legal one. This is how free speech and free enterprise work.
Personally, Card is just the one name in a long string of SF authors whose political and philosophical views generate interest above and beyond their novels. Larry Niven thinks the notion of privacy is obsolete. Issac Asimov was a proudly outspoken secular humanist. Heinlein got seriously pervy as he aged. I find it fascinating to see how these authors personal views bled (or didn't bleed) into their work at different phases of their career. It does seem like Card is going the Heinlein route in that his personal views are becoming more strident and more visible in his fiction as he ages. (I read Empire... it was fun even though I did feel like there was some Fox News inspired, masturbatory logic in it). Bottom line though, this whole thing is a tempest in a teapot.
So just visit their website and lie about everything. Make the information offensive, even, or obviously false (all except the address, I guess, which they have to have).
I, for one, welcome our new competitively philanthropic overlords.
The new found social, political, and economic clout that modern day intellectuals are receiving as an outcome of the digital revolution is welcome and long overdue. The prize-ification of discovery and invention is a reflection of a shift in the priorities of our culture as a whole. The PBS Idea Channel has argued that in the modern area, societies pursuit of greatness has largely focused on athletics. That the money for, attention to, and veneration of athletes is what is largely driving the steady crushing of one record of physical acheivement after another.
Prizes like this, the X Prize, bug bounties, crowdsourced funding of science and technology research... all of this is a reflection of gradually shifting priorities. We are slowly redefining what it means to be a winner or a hero. Even if this sort of activity is a relatively minor contribution to the overall progress of civilization, it is a welcome sign of the times.
(P.S. Not watching the Idea Channel yet? Put away your re-tread oblig. XKCD links and get thee to Youtube.)
After reading the Musk analysis and the Broder rebuttal, I have to come to the conclusion that Mr. Broder's assessment is honest an accurate. I think there are two critical points that he brings up. These points do not paint Musk as a conniver, but simply as a proud engineer. He is trying to defend the engineering of the vehicle, but the problem was not with the engineering. The problems were purely operational in nature. First:
"I was given battery-conservation advice at that time (turn off the cruise control; alternately slow down and speed up to take advantage of regenerative braking) that was later contradicted by other Tesla personnel."
There are multiple references like this in the article, but I will address them all with this statement. Mr. Broder's account shows an all too common problem: a support organization that does not provide consistent or specifically correct answers to customer's questions. Guess what? Good support is hard. For a company of Tesla's age, with a product that has very little "gamma testing" to it's name right now, it is not the least bit surprising that Mr. Broder received conflicting and ultimately counterproductive support advice. Second:
"it may be the result of the car being delivered with 19-inch wheels and all-season tires, not the specified 21-inch wheels and summer tires. That just might have affected the recorded speed, range, rate of battery depletion or any number of other parameters."
A change in the overall tire/wheel diameter generally requires having your speedometer re-calibrated if you want it to give you an accurate reading. It is entirely reasonable to expect that there is a lot of calculation going on inside the vehicle that is dependent on being able to correctly correlate RPMs to distance traveled. It's also reasonable to expect that differences in the rolling resistance between the stock tires and the AW tires would also have some impact.
These are not engineering problems. These are operational problems with process, knowledge, and execution. Musk should be rightly proud of the car his company is built, and should be rightly terrified that his post-purchase support could potentially burn a lot of goodwill once he runs out of early-adopting fanboys and geeks who will cut him slack and are motivated to fix their own problems. The I Just Want It To Work crowd will be a tougher audience.
Slashdot Mirror
Many moons ago, people used to stuff all kinds of ridiculous claptrap in their Usenet .sig lines to "clog the NSA monitors." Keywords like nuclear, communist, peace, soviet, blah blah blah blah. It was a fairly useless exercise whether the underlying suspicions were true or not.
The execution was amteurish, but today's news proves that the principle is worth exlporing further. Software developers need to stop talking the talk and make a more concerted effort to transparently encrypt all the network communication conducted by their applications, their mail systems, their social media platforms, whatever. The cypherpunk community has long pooh-poohed allowing "weak" encryption to become entrenched and create a false sense of security. But this "secutrity through purity" approach has resulted in the abject failure of the widespread adoption of encryption at all levels. Can we not find some sort of barely acceptable common standard and just start routinely implementing it and make the marketing people figure out how to describe it as a sexy feature?
I don't have the privilege of living in Sen. Wyden's district any longer, but I always voted for him when I did, and that was well before his name became associated with civil liberties in the digital age. He played a critical role in getting the NTSB to conduct a much-needed-and-unheard-of civilian investigation of a C-130 crash that killed 10 Oregon National Guardsmen. From then until now he has repeatedly demonstrated tenacity, intellectual curiosity, and a willingness to say unpopular things for as long as I've cared to watch his performance as a Senator.
Yes, I realize Slashdot is probably the absolute last place on earth to say anything positive about an elected official. I should be trying to hype some unelectable wacko instead. Sorry to dissappoint.
I'm really amused by all the ideological civil libertarians who are shocked (SHOCKED I tell you!) at finding common cause with Scalia on this issue. The general assumption seems to be that Scalia "is finally right for once." Here's an alternative explanation: Scalia hasn't changed at all. It's the ideologically motivated civil libertarians who are off their rockers here.
If you'll tie your jerking knee down for a minute and whip up a Top 20 list of the most pernicious and chilling abuses of government authority, I suspect you'll have a hard time finding a spot for this line item. The risk/benefit equation on this is different. Managing this data in an appropriate and accountable fashion is officially Not Rocket Science. You may not trust the government to behave in a reasonable and appropriate manner, but there's all kinds of stuff you accept silently right now which is already egregious. Letting that stuff slide (Guantanomo, CIA-run drone strikes against civilian targets, National Security Letters, good old fashioned "driving while black", take your pick) while getting your panties in a bunch over soemthing with tangible benefits to a civil society is not much more than masturbatory paranoia.
Or maybe I should put it this way: When extremists of different factions agree, it doesn't make them less extreme.
All it means is that a Bitcoin angle to this story will be revealed later.
Yay, it's an IQ thread.
Cue bragging about IQ followed by arguments about whether IQ measures intelligence.
making popcorn. brb.
I'm so smart, I know better than to reply to sarcastic trolls. Oh, wait...
Congratulatons, you have managed to parlay your irrational fear of GMO into an irrational fear of entirely unrelated technologies. There's no gene splicing going on here. The RNA material they are embedding into the bandage are not genes, are not being spliced into living cells, and will not replicate. They are basically custom marching orders being sent to the existing genes, temporarily telling certain ones to shut the hell up for the duration of time that the RNA persists in the immediate area. The bandage approach is specifically because the RNA is so fragile as to not deliver effectively via traditional methods. So... you're wrong on so many levels, it boggles the mind.
Welcome to Slashdot, BTW. You fit in just fine.
Since you felt it would be tedious to explain specifics, you create a huge hole in our ability to give you a serious answer that is relevant to your situation. So to speak on a purely generic level, there's no such thing as too good a user experience.. The notion that you might make the user of your product TOO happy, or make their lives TOO easy, is the sort of sadistic logic that I would normally attribute to someone whose just shitty at developing user interfaces and wants some kind of perverse rationalization to justify their shortcomings.
However... this whole "flying car" analogy leads me to believe that you're not really talking about "user experience" in terms of user interfaces, ergonomics, and the like. It seems to me that you're talking about feature sets and what you are empowering the user to accomplish with your software. For example, some advanced text editors may enable global search and replace. That same text editor may support using regular expressions in a variety of ways. With this hypothetical text editor, it might be possible to combine the application of these features and modify dozens of critical files in unexpected ways, really wrecking the local PC.I'm wondering if this is the scenario that's really behind this question? If so, referring to this as "user experience" is misleading.
I'm fully in agreement that you want to be careful about what sort of capacities you grant the users of your application. If that particular feature has a crappy risk/benefit ratio, then drop it altogether. On the other hand, if you have powerful but risky features that you believe the software needs, then you should be working hard to improve the user experience in such a way that inexperienced users don't stumble across those features accidentally. Although I have personally railed against Microsoft's history of nesting options under multiple layers of dialog boxes, part of the intent there is to segregate "power user" options where they will not distract casual users from the features they actually care about.
So is cognitivedissonance.com. Both seem so much more... appropriate now.
Does mike449 work for the Idaho National Laboratory?
sitting on my ass in his kangaroo traffic court for 16 fucking hours that cost me then equivalent to $800 USD in lost wages for a $50 USD bicycle citation
1. Send the best minds in Japan to the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. Study the tools and methodologies used. Interview all the engineers participating in the cleanup effort. Learn absolutely everything you can about waste recovery techniques, environmental stewardship, and safety protocols.
2. Do exactly the opposite.
I'm sure there's lots more but since our electoral system was designed in a way that reinforces a two-party model (intentionally or not), I don't see any need to giveadditional futile suggestions to a group that will never have any meaningful power at the national level.
I really don't intend that as a dig. It is what it is. It's certainly possible that the GOP will continue it's self-marginalization until a third party finds an opportunity to supercede it. The GOP themselves did that in the 19th century.... but for any 3rd party to realize the possibility of becoming the new 2nd party, it will have to capture the attention of "boring" middle-of-the-road voters who feel disenfrancized by the polarization. Nibbling around the edges of public policy with highly technical optimizations are not going to cut it. If the GOP leaves that door unlocked, you'll need big, heavy, sexy planks to beat it down with.
I'm surprised that the doubting Thomases are getting so many mod points around here today. There is no better facial recognition system in the world than the human brain. The pictures are worthlessly low-res and indiscriminate? Someone who knows these individuals will correlate the physical details of the face, the expression, the height, haircut, posture, and clothing instantly and unconsciously. They will be recognized. Those acquaintances can see the forest. All we are getting is trees.
And to cover the other criticism of why these two were chosen... Both were seen walking together with black backpacks. Then each one was seen individually right at one of the two bomb sites. In the case of suspect #2, there is video of him putting his backpack down and then walking away from it. Personally I agree that this is sufficient to refer to both individuals as "suspects."
If I'm a small entrepeneur, these three give me platforms for advertising, promotion, and e-commerce with optional "social interaction" channels built in. I'm probably already an experienced user with all of these systems, and I can safely assume that the overwhelming majority of my current and future customers know these systems as well. How much time and money do I need to invest up front in order to exploit these tools? Zero. Zip. Nada.
Anybody who wants to deliberately insert a $$ product or service into this space is going to have to identify a gap in the current ecosystem that is painful enough that the entrepeneur will happilly throw the money at them. I don't see Foursquare doing anything right now that meets those crieria. They might have something interesting in mind but we'll just have to see.
Don't they know that zero-day warez are supposed to be leaked by employees?
One of the things about Bab5 that was always fun for the hardcore SF fans was bringing back actors from classic SF television. Casting Billy Mumy (Lost in Space) as Lennier and Walter Koenig as Alfred Bester (a personal fav) were entertaining beyond the performances they delivered. Are there any cool casting choices about Sense8 that you have planned or can dish on?
As a former Amiga owner, I remember how excited the community was to learn that this new TV series called Babylon 5 was going to have it's visual effects developed on the NewTek Video Toaster. Many considered it a vindication of the Amiga platform as well as a milestone in the evolution of digital video. My understanding is that you moved away from this platform in later seasons because it wasn't scaling up to meet your needs.
Today desktop video is commonplace, and there are a million billion Youtube videos whose quality is only limited by the talent and time invested by the creators rather than any technological barriers. How do you feel about the progression from then till now and the role you played as an early adopter?
Subtle. In the rythym of the overall broadcast. A few years ago they did a piece on Weekend Edition about how Bloomberg was pushing for a limited set of "authorized" ringtones in NYC to combat noise polution. I was having a not-sure-if-serious moment until the article ended and the promotional bumper indicated that the show received support from "Soylent" corporation. Hearing that ubiquitous NPR voice cheerily exclaim that "Soylent Green is People" had me out of my chair.
If we're going to dredge up old, irritating Usenet crap because it's 4/1, you could at least pretend that B1FF had been made into a Slashdot moderator. Then we could have two pages of ASCII art at the end of each slashpost, and make all the mobile RSS users cry.
Choose one:
1. The ATF is a bunch of ignorant buffoons. A 3D printed gun doesn't have to last long if you are planning a suicidal shooting spree! Stupid calcified bureacracies are simply incapable of formulating an intelligent and agile response to modern technolgy.
2. The ATF is a bunch of ignorant buffoons. Getting up in arms over some obscure thing like 3D printing isn't going to make anyone safer. Stupid meddling, overreaching bureacracies are simply incapable of forming a thoughtful and nuanced response to modern technology.
I work in the US healthcare industry
So do I, and I actually think your argument is irrelevant. What you are describing in a nutshell is the 80/20 rule. In essence, a majority of the customer interaction problems any business faces come from a minority of customers. Your organization's inability to manage the nutjob 20% effectively is not a justification to deny access to the other 80%. Your leadership needs to do the following:
1. Drink the kool-aid on that fact that patient access to their EMR is an overall net benefit to the quality of care they receive. (aka, the "carrot")
2. Accept that even if you can't get your head wrapped around #1, HIPAA doesn't care and mandates it anyway. (aka, the "stick")
3. Establish reasonable and consistent processes to deliver that access in a manner that is cost effective to your organization.
But that is completely irrelevant. Any private entitty that maintains detailed information about an individual US citizen should be required to disclose those records to the individual in question under any circumstances. That goes for my doctor, Facebook, whatever. There may be any number of reasonable exceptions to this, but disclosure should be the default expectation. In the case of healthcare I believe that any cases of disclosure that are actually harmful to patient care are rare exceptions that prove the rule.
So to the 69% of physicians who prefer restricting patient access: Fuck off.
Officially, Card has expressed himself. DC's customers have expressed themselves. The illustrator expressed himself as well as making a personal business decision. DC is now faced with a business decision, but their specific choice will almost guaranteeably be a safe and legal one. This is how free speech and free enterprise work.
Personally, Card is just the one name in a long string of SF authors whose political and philosophical views generate interest above and beyond their novels. Larry Niven thinks the notion of privacy is obsolete. Issac Asimov was a proudly outspoken secular humanist. Heinlein got seriously pervy as he aged. I find it fascinating to see how these authors personal views bled (or didn't bleed) into their work at different phases of their career. It does seem like Card is going the Heinlein route in that his personal views are becoming more strident and more visible in his fiction as he ages. (I read Empire... it was fun even though I did feel like there was some Fox News inspired, masturbatory logic in it). Bottom line though, this whole thing is a tempest in a teapot.
So just visit their website and lie about everything. Make the information offensive, even, or obviously false (all except the address, I guess, which they have to have).
Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie agree.
I, for one, welcome our new competitively philanthropic overlords.
The new found social, political, and economic clout that modern day intellectuals are receiving as an outcome of the digital revolution is welcome and long overdue. The prize-ification of discovery and invention is a reflection of a shift in the priorities of our culture as a whole. The PBS Idea Channel has argued that in the modern area, societies pursuit of greatness has largely focused on athletics. That the money for, attention to, and veneration of athletes is what is largely driving the steady crushing of one record of physical acheivement after another.
Prizes like this, the X Prize, bug bounties, crowdsourced funding of science and technology research... all of this is a reflection of gradually shifting priorities. We are slowly redefining what it means to be a winner or a hero. Even if this sort of activity is a relatively minor contribution to the overall progress of civilization, it is a welcome sign of the times.
(P.S. Not watching the Idea Channel yet? Put away your re-tread oblig. XKCD links and get thee to Youtube.)
After reading the Musk analysis and the Broder rebuttal, I have to come to the conclusion that Mr. Broder's assessment is honest an accurate. I think there are two critical points that he brings up. These points do not paint Musk as a conniver, but simply as a proud engineer. He is trying to defend the engineering of the vehicle, but the problem was not with the engineering. The problems were purely operational in nature. First:
"I was given battery-conservation advice at that time (turn off the cruise control; alternately slow down and speed up to take advantage of regenerative braking) that was later contradicted by other Tesla personnel."
There are multiple references like this in the article, but I will address them all with this statement. Mr. Broder's account shows an all too common problem: a support organization that does not provide consistent or specifically correct answers to customer's questions. Guess what? Good support is hard. For a company of Tesla's age, with a product that has very little "gamma testing" to it's name right now, it is not the least bit surprising that Mr. Broder received conflicting and ultimately counterproductive support advice. Second:
"it may be the result of the car being delivered with 19-inch wheels and all-season tires, not the specified 21-inch wheels and summer tires. That just might have affected the recorded speed, range, rate of battery depletion or any number of other parameters."
A change in the overall tire/wheel diameter generally requires having your speedometer re-calibrated if you want it to give you an accurate reading. It is entirely reasonable to expect that there is a lot of calculation going on inside the vehicle that is dependent on being able to correctly correlate RPMs to distance traveled. It's also reasonable to expect that differences in the rolling resistance between the stock tires and the AW tires would also have some impact.
These are not engineering problems. These are operational problems with process, knowledge, and execution. Musk should be rightly proud of the car his company is built, and should be rightly terrified that his post-purchase support could potentially burn a lot of goodwill once he runs out of early-adopting fanboys and geeks who will cut him slack and are motivated to fix their own problems. The I Just Want It To Work crowd will be a tougher audience.