The government has one purpose, and that's to serve the people it represents. If it allows companies to hire foreign workers at the expense of American citizens, that's a problem.
Right, and the people it represents include business owners, managers, shareholders, and consumers in addition to employees. If Sun can hire an immigrant engineer for half the price of an equally qualified American -- or someone who will do twice as much at the same price -- as a Sun customer I would be happy to benefit from that. (Note that the H1B program is actually supposed to require comparable pay, though from what I can tell that's routinely flouted.)
And actually, if I really wanted to be cynical, I'd repeat something my high-school U.S. history teacher once said: government has a single purpose, and that single purpose is to perpetuate its own existence (on an individual level, to get re-elected).
A stall is where the plane flies too slow, the wings no longer produce enough lift to keep it in the air, and the thing basically just drops out of the sky.
Well, no. A stall occurs when the wing exceeds the critical angle of attack. It can occur in any configuration (nose up, nose down, etc.) and at any speed. The problem is not lack of speed, it's the fact that the excessive angle of attack causes airflow separation across the top of the wing, which results in loss of lift.
As for the thing basically just dropping out of the sky: Also incorrect. In most planes recovering from a stall is a straightforward maneuver, and stall execution and recovery is part of basic flight training. Of course, if you're only a couple of hundred feet above the ground when you stall, you might not have time to recover. The other potential danger with a stall is that if you're flying uncoordinated at the time, you can get into a spin, though in most aircraft spins are also recoverable given sufficient altitude. Flat spins, such as the one depicted in "Top Gun", can indeed be a problem because the aircract lacks rudder authority in that situation, and rudder is important to stall recovery.
(some of the farmers have put their fields under video surveillance, found no evidence of people wandering around and had a crop circle the next morning..).
OK, so the video surveillance didn't see people -- what the hell did it see then? Alien spaceships? The circles just magically appeared *without* any cause?
now they are getting more complicated in shape, some of them would be damn hard to draw on paper, you'd need precise measurements just to draw it on paper so whoever is doing them now is putting a great deal of effort into them.
There probably are lots of people doing them, but they don't really seem that hard. There is a documentary on (I think) the Discovery Channel that has aired a few times over the years where they actually go out with some folks one night and do time-lapse photography as they make a highly complicated crop circle. (They drew the original design using some basic geometric templates, compasses, and things like that, iirc.)
Welcome to Pennsylvania, the Laws are Different here!
Did they ever raise the speed limit? I remember back in the 80s and 90s, driving across the border and being greeted by a big sign that basically said "Welcome to Pennsylvania, where the state speed limit is still 55 mph and fines for speeding are as follows:" Having gotten used to driving in states where the limits were 70-75 outside of urbanized areas, that always made me laugh (and slow down;-)
Don't fool yourself. Every part of the country gets earthquakes. They may not be as frequent as in California -- rare enough that you may even live your life without experiencing one -- but they do happen. Example: "The biggest earthquake on record in New York rolled underneath Massena and Cornwall, Ontario, early on Sept. 5, 1944, toppling chimneys, collapsing roofs and splitting open the ground. It registered 5.9 on the Richter Scale - strong enough to be felt in Detroit - and caused $2 million worth of damage." Or this: "Certainly, seismic activity on the East Coast is much less than the West Coast. But, if you look at the risk, the potential is just as great because of the population along the eastern seaboard."
It's true that 5.9 isn't particularly big by west coast standards, but really really huge earthquakes do sometimes strike in surprising places. Example: "In the winter of 1811-12, the central Mississippi Valley was struck by three of the most powerful earthquakes in U.S. history." What's more, "Because of differences in the geology east and west of the Rocky Mountains, the effects of a magnitude 7 quake in the midcontinental United States could be far worse than those of the 1989 magnitude 7 Loma Prieta, California, earthquake."
So don't get complacent. Earthquakes in east coast states aren't as common, but they can be nearly as large and are often shallower (causing more surface damage); furthermore, the structures, people, and emergency systems are not as well prepared to handle these infrequent events as they are in places like California where they happen all the time.
Re:Escape from Silicon Valley
on
Sili-Hudson Valley?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
the housing isn't so affordable, the traffic isn't that light
Compared with what? This says the median house in Albany sold for $120,000 in January of this year. People living in most of the traditional tech-heavy parts of the country would consider that laughably inexpensive.
This source (Google cache, HTML) calls Albany the second-most affordable city (prices relative to income) in the nation, and says, "Outside New York City, Tri-State rental space deemed suitable for industrial R&D is one-third to one-quarter the cost of similar space in Silicon Valley, Boston, Dallas, or Seattle." And according to this, the overall cost of living in the Bay Area ranges from 75% higher (Berkeley) to 285% higher (Atherton, admittedly an exceptional case).
As for traffic: "Drivers in other urban areas such as Albany or Hartford experience only about one-quarter the delay of a West Coast driver."
I'd actually like to hear what you consider affordable housing or light traffic...
Interesting theory. Moderate doses of caffeine have long been known to have positive effects on learning and memory, at least in rats running mazes -- which seems similar enough to programmers navigating cubicle farms that we can be confident the results should generalize;-)
Your notion of property is rather warped. It's THEIR connection -- they bought/leased and installed the equipment, they provide the service -- and they're allowing you to use it in exchange for compensation. If you don't like the terms of use, you don't have to pay the compensation. (Contrary to what a lot of geeks might wish, there's no inalienable human right to a broadband Internet connection.)
Now, I agree that their terms of use should allow some degree of "fair use" slack. They shouldn't bust you for illegal sharing if your out-of-town friend stays with you for a few days and shares your connection in the meantime. But if you're openly advertising your hot spot as a public access point, the providers have every right to complain.
It's not unlike the difference between taking the morning newspaper and making copies of an interesting article for a couple of friends, and copying the entire newspaper every morning and giving it away to everyone on your block. Whether you're charging them or not isn't the point, you've overstepped the boundaries of fair use. (I know I'm muddying the waters a bit by using a copyright-based analogy and terminology when that's not really the issue at hand, but I think the parallel is quite strong.)
And it actually sounds like this is how the companies are behaving right now: They are going after the people who seem to be willful offenders rather than people sharing casually. And while I may disagree about whether that's a smart way to run the business (and am personally glad to be with Covad, the one company they cite that doesn't care if you share), it's clearly their prerogative to do so.
Or to use a different real-world analogy: leasing a broadband connection is not unlike renting an apartment. You're paying, but it's not YOUR apartment. You don't have the rights to do whatever you want -- tear out the carpet and replace it with linoleum, permanently move in ten of your friends, etc. Of course, you can do things within reason (like have friends stay for a few days, or put up some pictures). But don't think for a minute that it's yours because you're paying.
Not really. In most phases of flight it wouldn't be an issue if ailerons were unavailable momentarily. The plane is instrinsically stable, and in any case you can level wings and induce slow turns with rudder, though it's inefficient. Also, once you are at altitude, you have lots of time to correct if things go wrong. In multi-engine aircraft there's also the option of using differential thrust.
It's instructive to read about the United Flight 232 incident a few years back. The #2 engine of a DC-10 exploded in flight (at around 30,000 feet) and severed ALL the hydraulic systems and their backups. Without rudder, ailerons, elevator, spoilers, flaps, or one of the three engines, the pilots set the plane up for a forced landing. And about 200 of the 300 passengers on board survived.
Of course, certain bugs can be really bad. I was down at Boeing Field once last year when somebody attempted to take off in a light plane that had just been serviced. Unfortunately the mechanic hooked up the ailerons backwards, so that when the pilot attempted to correct for a crosswind on takeoff, he promptly rolled and landed on top of another plane in the parking area. (Sounds like inadequate preflight action by the pilot on that one, since he appears to have missed the "control surfaces free and correct" item on his pre-takeoff checklist, but no injuries to the best of my knowledge.)
Note that I'm hardly going to argue that flight-control software shouldn't be damn good. But... it's overstating your case to assume that downtime or error necessarily means a plane is going to fall out of the sky.
normal weight (180 - 230 lbs typical american weight.)
Hmmm... a 50th percentile adult U.S. male is about 175 pounds, and a 220-pound male is 95th percentile, so while 180 lbs could reasonably be called "typical", 230 is not even close.
My understanding is that ergonomic analyses are usually done at the 5 and 95 percentile limits (including females, who typically are lighter). That said, the Insight's 365-pound passenger weight limit doesn't seem to leave a lot of leeway for two larger-than-average men, say.
Maybe you could drive in the car if he didn't top off the tank?
You clearly intended sarcasm, but the situation is probably a lot worse than you think:
The U.S. House of Representatives has approved and sent to the Senate a six-year farm bill authorizing support payments to farmers, conservation funding and increased incentives for renewable fuels production..... The bill -- which has generated controversy overseas -- in its final form authorizes a $73,500 million limit on new spending on agriculture over the next 10 years and lowers the payment limit of annual subsidies to farmers from the current $460,000 to $360,000.
Now, I would venture that if you can't make money farming with a $360,000 a year subsidy, you should find a different line of business. (I know that's the maximum, not the average, but clearly somebody is getting one heck of a free ride here...)
There was also a story in the NYT (I think) recently about subsidies to cotton farmers in Mississippi. I don't remember the exact $$ and number of farmers, but doing the division worked out to an average of $125,000 in subsidies per individual. Not bad.
is that actually a picture of a bull caught while taking a dump? can you imagine that thing up on a 10-foot projection screen? aaargh, shades of goatse.cx...
actually I am laughing so hard at the fact that he actually had the balls to include a slide like that...
sorry but i dispute the fact that all 6 or 7 billion people in the world are eating well, it's more like half at best.
He didn't say all, and data f rom the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization disputes your claim that it's only "half at best". They estimate that a total of 790 million people in developing countries are undernourished, and that the number is declined by approximately 8 million per year. They state that a further 34 million undernourished people live in developed countries.
That's well under a billion people in all. Still alarmingly high, but nowhere near as bad as you would make it out to be.
One thing to understand is that there is no shortage of food on the planet. (The other night a friend and I were discussing this, and we looked up some numbers and determined that the current agricultural production of the U.S. alone could easily feed every person on the planet, if everyone were vegetarian; meat is pretty inefficient way to deliver calories.) It's just that the food is not always in the hands of people who need it, whether because those people are living on poor land, or they don't have the money to purchase it, or their government is corrupt... but it's not that the earth can't provide enough food to support all these people or for that matter twice as many people...
Essentially, population level fluctuates around a line called the carrying capacity, which is the number of a type of animal an ecosystem can support....Why would people think it wouldn't happen to humans? Sorry, creation scientists, we're animals too, and though we use different resources, we're not immune to laws of nature because of divine providence.
Because humans have a nearly unique ability to modify the environment's carrying capacity through the use of technology. (I say "nearly unique" because there is limited use of tools documented in a handful of other species, e.g. chimps.)
Were it not for agriculture, for example, we would likely have reached the planet's carrying capacity thousands of years ago. (Or more precisely, overshot the carrying capacity and experienced massive death by starvation etc. until the population had fallen to a more sustainable level.)
That's not to say technology will enable us to grow the population and our consumption indefinitely... just that defining carrying capacity in the context of humans, which have repeatedly shown their ability to essentially change the rules of the game, is not easy.
It assumes that people can come to terms with any system if you just find the right methaphro for them to use.
It seems to me you're throwing the baby out with the bath water. Why assume that "ease of use" is a binary affair? There are many, many things that could be done to make computers easier to use. That does not mean that all people would instantly be able to use them (that *is* an unachievable goal).
Think about cars. Cars are a pretty mature technology at this point, and yet they still get more user-friendly. A couple of decades ago you didn't have (in many vehicles at least) power steering or brakes. Most cars were stickshifts. There was no ABS or traction control. As a result of all those advances, most of which are either standard or low-cost options in vehicles sold in the U.S. cars are definitely easier to use today. Particularly so for marginal users (grandma whose arthritic legs can't handle a stiff clutch) or in marginal conditions (snow/ice, stop-and-go traffic).
I know quite a few people who can't program their VCRs, and seem proud of their ignorance.
I think you've hit on an interesting social phenomenon. It's culturally acceptable -- perhaps even desirable in some circles -- to profess ignorance about certain things. I can't count the number of times, for instance, that I've heard people proclaim "Well, I don't really understand math", not with shame but with something approaching pride. (In case math-savant slashdot readers have a hard time relating to this particular example, try replacing it with something more personally salient like "I really don't understand women". In my experience, such a statement is often used as an incentive to bond with other people who feel similarly, not as a shameful admission.)
Then again, there are things that it's not socially acceptable to admit lameness in. Openly admitting lack of knowledge of computers would probably be fatal in a forum like this one. Openly admitting a lack of knowledge about the mechanics of sex (once you're beyond a certain age / experience level) is probably something few people would do. (Though there is a Sex for Dummies book, so who knows -- I figure that's something you buy only as a gag gift, and you make sure that you get it gift-wrapped at the checkout counter!) Or ignorance of how to operate a motor vehicle (unless you're a lifelong Manhattanite, in which case it could be a perverse source of pride)...
one thing kids have in abundance is a willingness to experiment. Adults, by contrast, tend to be much more reserved. Maybe that's a normal byproduct of age and experience -- having made expensive and/or painful mistakes before, and being better at perceiving the potential negative consequences of an action, you're more reluctant to do something wild. Of course, making mistakes is a big part of learning, and if you're too afraid to try anything new, you're unlikely to learn anything new either.
Well, I suspect that happens mostly to people who really have driven just one or two cars their whole lives and are used to the accelerator, brake, and steering behaving *just so*. If you borrow friends' cars and/or travel frequently and rent cars all the time, it's totally trivial to get into a car you've never driven before and operate it safely and effectively. OK, if it's a stick it might require a few shift cycles to get used to the clutch feel and so on, but it's really not that bad.
When I was in high school my dad drove me, along with a girl from one of my classes, to some kind of academic event. He had a radar detector in his car, and she noticed and asked how it worked. More specifically, she presented a hypothesis, something like: "Oh, does it 'see' other cars and identify the police cars by their black and white markings?" (This was L.A., where police cars actually were black-and-whites.) Well, no, he explained, there's a reason it's called a *radar detector*;-)...
Anyway, the point of this is that it can be kind of funny what can happen when people's mental models of a technology device are mistaken. There are some interesting comments about this effect, if I remember correctly, in the book The Logic of Failure (author: Dietrich Dorner). It's amusing (and also hugely informative) to see how people get stumped by relatively simple technology such as a thermostat because they have a fundamentally incorrect mental model for how a thermostat works. It's a similar thing with VCRs, I suspect: Some people probably think that the TV "picture" (having no concept of signal that's coming in over the cable or the airwaves) is only there when the TV itself is on...
"The Design of Everyday Things" is a good place to start.
Admittedly, I think computer-like devices are sometimes held to too high a standard. We forget how much effort it initially took to learn something we now take for granted, like how to use a pencil to write, or how to drive a car.
That said... it is ridiculous to expect users to read a manual. For a device to become accepted by the majority of people, it has to be understandable with minimal effort by a majority of the people. Most people are not engineering types, and they don't give a rat's ass about the reasons things work the way they do, they just want their tools to do exactly what they expect. If they can learn socially (the phone is a good example -- watch somebody dial a number and you realize "I can do this too"), then people will accept it. If they have to be trained to use it, it will never succeed as a mass-market product.
Military pilots wear individual pressure suits so their bodies don't explode at high cruising altitudes, where the air is thinner.
You appear to be confusing pressure suits with cabin pressurization. Pressure suits are used primarily to reduce the effect of g forces introduced in high speed turns. In a plus-G turn, "centrifugal force" caused blood to want to rush toward the lower extremities, depriving the brain of its oxygen supply and potentially leading to G-LOC, or g-force-induced loss of consciousness (aka blackout, or grayout in a less severe form).
Cabin pressurization is used in commercial aircraft to provide oxygen for respiration at relatively normal atmospheric levels. Stictly speaking cabin pressurization is not necessary, and you can get sufficient oxygen from an oxygen mask. Small airplanes may carry actual bottled oxygen, but transport-category aircraft usually generate emergency oxygen through a chemical reaction only if it becomes necessary. However, if cabin pressurization were to be lost at a typical cruising altitude for a commercial airliner, people would not explode, they'd merely need to don their oxygen masks. (I suspect their ears would hurt like hell when they equalized, though;-)
Slashdot Mirror
Thus enabling them to buy more Big Macs, Britney Spears CDs, and other much less onerous American exports. Your point?
Right, and the people it represents include business owners, managers, shareholders, and consumers in addition to employees. If Sun can hire an immigrant engineer for half the price of an equally qualified American -- or someone who will do twice as much at the same price -- as a Sun customer I would be happy to benefit from that. (Note that the H1B program is actually supposed to require comparable pay, though from what I can tell that's routinely flouted.)
And actually, if I really wanted to be cynical, I'd repeat something my high-school U.S. history teacher once said: government has a single purpose, and that single purpose is to perpetuate its own existence (on an individual level, to get re-elected).
I can't believe nobody has suggested a variation on any of these recipes. (The originals, I assume, are copyrighted ;-)
Well, no. A stall occurs when the wing exceeds the critical angle of attack. It can occur in any configuration (nose up, nose down, etc.) and at any speed. The problem is not lack of speed, it's the fact that the excessive angle of attack causes airflow separation across the top of the wing, which results in loss of lift.
As for the thing basically just dropping out of the sky: Also incorrect. In most planes recovering from a stall is a straightforward maneuver, and stall execution and recovery is part of basic flight training. Of course, if you're only a couple of hundred feet above the ground when you stall, you might not have time to recover. The other potential danger with a stall is that if you're flying uncoordinated at the time, you can get into a spin, though in most aircraft spins are also recoverable given sufficient altitude. Flat spins, such as the one depicted in "Top Gun", can indeed be a problem because the aircract lacks rudder authority in that situation, and rudder is important to stall recovery.
OK, so the video surveillance didn't see people -- what the hell did it see then? Alien spaceships? The circles just magically appeared *without* any cause?
There probably are lots of people doing them, but they don't really seem that hard. There is a documentary on (I think) the Discovery Channel that has aired a few times over the years where they actually go out with some folks one night and do time-lapse photography as they make a highly complicated crop circle. (They drew the original design using some basic geometric templates, compasses, and things like that, iirc.)
Did they ever raise the speed limit? I remember back in the 80s and 90s, driving across the border and being greeted by a big sign that basically said "Welcome to Pennsylvania, where the state speed limit is still 55 mph and fines for speeding are as follows:" Having gotten used to driving in states where the limits were 70-75 outside of urbanized areas, that always made me laugh (and slow down ;-)
It's true that 5.9 isn't particularly big by west coast standards, but really really huge earthquakes do sometimes strike in surprising places. Example: "In the winter of 1811-12, the central Mississippi Valley was struck by three of the most powerful earthquakes in U.S. history." What's more, "Because of differences in the geology east and west of the Rocky Mountains, the effects of a magnitude 7 quake in the midcontinental United States could be far worse than those of the 1989 magnitude 7 Loma Prieta, California, earthquake."
So don't get complacent. Earthquakes in east coast states aren't as common, but they can be nearly as large and are often shallower (causing more surface damage); furthermore, the structures, people, and emergency systems are not as well prepared to handle these infrequent events as they are in places like California where they happen all the time.
Compared with what? This says the median house in Albany sold for $120,000 in January of this year. People living in most of the traditional tech-heavy parts of the country would consider that laughably inexpensive.
This source (Google cache, HTML) calls Albany the second-most affordable city (prices relative to income) in the nation, and says, "Outside New York City, Tri-State rental space deemed suitable for industrial R&D is one-third to one-quarter the cost of similar space in Silicon Valley, Boston, Dallas, or Seattle." And according to this, the overall cost of living in the Bay Area ranges from 75% higher (Berkeley) to 285% higher (Atherton, admittedly an exceptional case).
As for traffic: "Drivers in other urban areas such as Albany or Hartford experience only about one-quarter the delay of a West Coast driver."
I'd actually like to hear what you consider affordable housing or light traffic...
Interesting theory. Moderate doses of caffeine have long been known to have positive effects on learning and memory, at least in rats running mazes -- which seems similar enough to programmers navigating cubicle farms that we can be confident the results should generalize ;-)
Your notion of property is rather warped. It's THEIR connection -- they bought/leased and installed the equipment, they provide the service -- and they're allowing you to use it in exchange for compensation. If you don't like the terms of use, you don't have to pay the compensation. (Contrary to what a lot of geeks might wish, there's no inalienable human right to a broadband Internet connection.)
Now, I agree that their terms of use should allow some degree of "fair use" slack. They shouldn't bust you for illegal sharing if your out-of-town friend stays with you for a few days and shares your connection in the meantime. But if you're openly advertising your hot spot as a public access point, the providers have every right to complain.
It's not unlike the difference between taking the morning newspaper and making copies of an interesting article for a couple of friends, and copying the entire newspaper every morning and giving it away to everyone on your block. Whether you're charging them or not isn't the point, you've overstepped the boundaries of fair use. (I know I'm muddying the waters a bit by using a copyright-based analogy and terminology when that's not really the issue at hand, but I think the parallel is quite strong.)
And it actually sounds like this is how the companies are behaving right now: They are going after the people who seem to be willful offenders rather than people sharing casually. And while I may disagree about whether that's a smart way to run the business (and am personally glad to be with Covad, the one company they cite that doesn't care if you share), it's clearly their prerogative to do so.
Or to use a different real-world analogy: leasing a broadband connection is not unlike renting an apartment. You're paying, but it's not YOUR apartment. You don't have the rights to do whatever you want -- tear out the carpet and replace it with linoleum, permanently move in ten of your friends, etc. Of course, you can do things within reason (like have friends stay for a few days, or put up some pictures). But don't think for a minute that it's yours because you're paying.
It's instructive to read about the United Flight 232 incident a few years back. The #2 engine of a DC-10 exploded in flight (at around 30,000 feet) and severed ALL the hydraulic systems and their backups. Without rudder, ailerons, elevator, spoilers, flaps, or one of the three engines, the pilots set the plane up for a forced landing. And about 200 of the 300 passengers on board survived.
Of course, certain bugs can be really bad. I was down at Boeing Field once last year when somebody attempted to take off in a light plane that had just been serviced. Unfortunately the mechanic hooked up the ailerons backwards, so that when the pilot attempted to correct for a crosswind on takeoff, he promptly rolled and landed on top of another plane in the parking area. (Sounds like inadequate preflight action by the pilot on that one, since he appears to have missed the "control surfaces free and correct" item on his pre-takeoff checklist, but no injuries to the best of my knowledge.)
Note that I'm hardly going to argue that flight-control software shouldn't be damn good. But... it's overstating your case to assume that downtime or error necessarily means a plane is going to fall out of the sky.
Hmmm... a 50th percentile adult U.S. male is about 175 pounds, and a 220-pound male is 95th percentile, so while 180 lbs could reasonably be called "typical", 230 is not even close.
My understanding is that ergonomic analyses are usually done at the 5 and 95 percentile limits (including females, who typically are lighter). That said, the Insight's 365-pound passenger weight limit doesn't seem to leave a lot of leeway for two larger-than-average men, say.
Maybe you could drive in the car if he didn't top off the tank?
The U.S. House of Representatives has approved and sent to the Senate a six-year farm bill authorizing support payments to farmers, conservation funding and increased incentives for renewable fuels production. ....
The bill -- which has generated controversy overseas -- in its final form authorizes a $73,500 million limit on new spending on agriculture over the next 10 years and lowers the payment limit of annual subsidies to farmers from the current $460,000 to $360,000.
Now, I would venture that if you can't make money farming with a $360,000 a year subsidy, you should find a different line of business. (I know that's the maximum, not the average, but clearly somebody is getting one heck of a free ride here...)
There was also a story in the NYT (I think) recently about subsidies to cotton farmers in Mississippi. I don't remember the exact $$ and number of farmers, but doing the division worked out to an average of $125,000 in subsidies per individual. Not bad.
actually I am laughing so hard at the fact that he actually had the balls to include a slide like that...
He didn't say all, and data f rom the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization disputes your claim that it's only "half at best". They estimate that a total of 790 million people in developing countries are undernourished, and that the number is declined by approximately 8 million per year. They state that a further 34 million undernourished people live in developed countries.
That's well under a billion people in all. Still alarmingly high, but nowhere near as bad as you would make it out to be.
One thing to understand is that there is no shortage of food on the planet. (The other night a friend and I were discussing this, and we looked up some numbers and determined that the current agricultural production of the U.S. alone could easily feed every person on the planet, if everyone were vegetarian; meat is pretty inefficient way to deliver calories.) It's just that the food is not always in the hands of people who need it, whether because those people are living on poor land, or they don't have the money to purchase it, or their government is corrupt... but it's not that the earth can't provide enough food to support all these people or for that matter twice as many people...
Because humans have a nearly unique ability to modify the environment's carrying capacity through the use of technology. (I say "nearly unique" because there is limited use of tools documented in a handful of other species, e.g. chimps.)
Were it not for agriculture, for example, we would likely have reached the planet's carrying capacity thousands of years ago. (Or more precisely, overshot the carrying capacity and experienced massive death by starvation etc. until the population had fallen to a more sustainable level.)
That's not to say technology will enable us to grow the population and our consumption indefinitely... just that defining carrying capacity in the context of humans, which have repeatedly shown their ability to essentially change the rules of the game, is not easy.
It seems to me you're throwing the baby out with the bath water. Why assume that "ease of use" is a binary affair? There are many, many things that could be done to make computers easier to use. That does not mean that all people would instantly be able to use them (that *is* an unachievable goal).
Think about cars. Cars are a pretty mature technology at this point, and yet they still get more user-friendly. A couple of decades ago you didn't have (in many vehicles at least) power steering or brakes. Most cars were stickshifts. There was no ABS or traction control. As a result of all those advances, most of which are either standard or low-cost options in vehicles sold in the U.S. cars are definitely easier to use today. Particularly so for marginal users (grandma whose arthritic legs can't handle a stiff clutch) or in marginal conditions (snow/ice, stop-and-go traffic).
I think you've hit on an interesting social phenomenon. It's culturally acceptable -- perhaps even desirable in some circles -- to profess ignorance about certain things. I can't count the number of times, for instance, that I've heard people proclaim "Well, I don't really understand math", not with shame but with something approaching pride. (In case math-savant slashdot readers have a hard time relating to this particular example, try replacing it with something more personally salient like "I really don't understand women". In my experience, such a statement is often used as an incentive to bond with other people who feel similarly, not as a shameful admission.)
Then again, there are things that it's not socially acceptable to admit lameness in. Openly admitting lack of knowledge of computers would probably be fatal in a forum like this one. Openly admitting a lack of knowledge about the mechanics of sex (once you're beyond a certain age / experience level) is probably something few people would do. (Though there is a Sex for Dummies book, so who knows -- I figure that's something you buy only as a gag gift, and you make sure that you get it gift-wrapped at the checkout counter!) Or ignorance of how to operate a motor vehicle (unless you're a lifelong Manhattanite, in which case it could be a perverse source of pride)...
one thing kids have in abundance is a willingness to experiment. Adults, by contrast, tend to be much more reserved. Maybe that's a normal byproduct of age and experience -- having made expensive and/or painful mistakes before, and being better at perceiving the potential negative consequences of an action, you're more reluctant to do something wild. Of course, making mistakes is a big part of learning, and if you're too afraid to try anything new, you're unlikely to learn anything new either.
Well, I suspect that happens mostly to people who really have driven just one or two cars their whole lives and are used to the accelerator, brake, and steering behaving *just so*. If you borrow friends' cars and/or travel frequently and rent cars all the time, it's totally trivial to get into a car you've never driven before and operate it safely and effectively. OK, if it's a stick it might require a few shift cycles to get used to the clutch feel and so on, but it's really not that bad.
Anyway, the point of this is that it can be kind of funny what can happen when people's mental models of a technology device are mistaken. There are some interesting comments about this effect, if I remember correctly, in the book The Logic of Failure (author: Dietrich Dorner). It's amusing (and also hugely informative) to see how people get stumped by relatively simple technology such as a thermostat because they have a fundamentally incorrect mental model for how a thermostat works. It's a similar thing with VCRs, I suspect: Some people probably think that the TV "picture" (having no concept of signal that's coming in over the cable or the airwaves) is only there when the TV itself is on...
Admittedly, I think computer-like devices are sometimes held to too high a standard. We forget how much effort it initially took to learn something we now take for granted, like how to use a pencil to write, or how to drive a car.
That said... it is ridiculous to expect users to read a manual. For a device to become accepted by the majority of people, it has to be understandable with minimal effort by a majority of the people. Most people are not engineering types, and they don't give a rat's ass about the reasons things work the way they do, they just want their tools to do exactly what they expect. If they can learn socially (the phone is a good example -- watch somebody dial a number and you realize "I can do this too"), then people will accept it. If they have to be trained to use it, it will never succeed as a mass-market product.
The real issue is likely not ground acceleration but the climb to cruising altitude, which at 2500 fpm could easily take 15 minutes.
You appear to be confusing pressure suits with cabin pressurization. Pressure suits are used primarily to reduce the effect of g forces introduced in high speed turns. In a plus-G turn, "centrifugal force" caused blood to want to rush toward the lower extremities, depriving the brain of its oxygen supply and potentially leading to G-LOC, or g-force-induced loss of consciousness (aka blackout, or grayout in a less severe form).
Cabin pressurization is used in commercial aircraft to provide oxygen for respiration at relatively normal atmospheric levels. Stictly speaking cabin pressurization is not necessary, and you can get sufficient oxygen from an oxygen mask. Small airplanes may carry actual bottled oxygen, but transport-category aircraft usually generate emergency oxygen through a chemical reaction only if it becomes necessary. However, if cabin pressurization were to be lost at a typical cruising altitude for a commercial airliner, people would not explode, they'd merely need to don their oxygen masks. (I suspect their ears would hurt like hell when they equalized, though ;-)