People managed to make highly functional guns back in the 1500s and 1600s, and they sure didn't have "substantial engineering expertise" back then. Guns aren't that hard to make, the problem is trying to 3D-print them out of plastic. If you abandon that, and switch to metals and machine tools, it's quite doable.
Electric power steering works with sensors on the steering wheel that detect when you turn it, and how much. The car then does some calculations taking into account the force and speed with which you turn the wheel, and the speed at which the vehicle is traveling. It then activates a motor, which actually turns the wheels.
No, it doesn't.
EPS is little different from hydraulic power steering. The motor merely assists the driver in steering the car. There's still a direct mechanical connection between the wheel and the steering arms. The sensors on the steering wheel are detecting how much torque you're applying to the wheel, and use that and the road speed to determine how much assist to give via the motor.
There's no clutch in normal EPS cars. These new variable-ratio ones, however, might just work that way.
I'm pretty sure the S2000 did not have speed-variable-ratio steering; this is entirely new. All cars these days have rack-and-pinion steering, with a direct mechanical connection between the steering wheel and the steering arms and front wheels. What the S2000 had, IIRC, is different gearing on the rack, so as the pinion turned, the ratio would increase towards the limits of the steering range. Basically, the slots cut in the rack were closer together in the middle, and farther apart at the ends. Big f'in deal.
What this system proposes is to vary the steering ratio with vehicle speed. I honestly have no idea how they plan to do this mechanically, unless they're going to eliminate the direct coupling between the steering and the front wheels, which sounds like a terrible idea to me (for one thing, how do you steer the car when the power is off? Batteries and engines do die sometimes.)
This is a stupid idea. For one thing, a big, red, octagonal stop sign is not a good way to steer a car.
But in case you're talking about joysticks, those are terrible ways to control cars, because they don't have the range of motion that a steering wheel does. If they made any sense at all, you'd see Formula 1 cars with them. You don't. F1 cars all use steering wheels, despite being loaded with an incredible amount of technology.
When I was a kid in the 60's we lived on a farm in central Illinois.
There's the key right there. Of course you mail-ordered stuff, because you didn't have any stores nearby. Most of the population does not live on farms, not even back in the 60s.
These days, people in cities order from Amazon all the time. Back in those days, people in cities did not mail-order stuff. Why would they? They could just drive or walk to Montgomery Ward or Sears or JC Penney and buy stuff in person there, rather than ordering from those stores' catalogs. The only reason those stores had catalogs was for all the rural people.
"In 1903 Sears claimed that “one-fourth of the entire population of the United States secures some of their goods from
In 1903, much of the population lived in rural areas. The percentage has been steadily falling ever since then.
I haven't seen the US government help anyone except the 0.01%ers in quite a while. This isn't true of every government in the world; there's lots of countries that seem to do OK with regards to the regular people in their populations, but not the US. (Those countries are in Western Europe BTW, and as a result, they rank at the top of the quality-of-living indices year after year.) The government here only screws over the common people. I don't see how that's one bit cynical; it's just recognizing reality.
Not that many people mail-ordered houses in those days, and even when they did, the USPS did not deliver it. We're talking about the USPS's business here. Look, youngster, I remember the 80s quite well, and mail order was not very common then. People ordered stuff once in a while, but this was a time when not everyone had credit cards, bank-issued Visa/MC debit/ATM cards did not exist, so paying for things usually meant a money order and waiting around hoping it would be delivered within a month. Fedex and UPS were not that large then either, as Fedex (or "Federal Express" as they were called then before they changed their name) actually concentrated on overnight deliveries, hence the "express". Later, in the late 80s/early 90s, mail order became more and more common, especially with people buying computer parts (anyone remember "Computer Shopper"?), and credit cards becoming more common with regular working-class people, but that's more recent; the 70s and 80s weren't like that. But even then, deliveries just weren't that common. Nowadays, people buy all kinds of stuff from Amazon and Ebay and Newegg and zillions of other online vendors. The USPS does a lot of business with small parcels; this simply wasn't the case 30+ years ago, or even 20 years ago.
That 50% assumption is stupid. You can't stream the food items or other things you buy while you're at that store. So you need to go to the store anyway, DVD or not.
Snail mail is serving an important role in small-package delivery, something that wasn't needed very much prior to the commercialization of the internet and the invention of Ebay.
Yes, but if we get rid of other particular people, it'd benefit both the environment and society. Comcast, Verizon, and MPAA executives would be a good start.
Force? As in a restriction of freedom? That will not go well with most people in the developed world.
Why not? We're already perfectly happy to sacrifice our freedom for safety. Just look at all the people standing in TSA lines. Look at all the people who elect Presidential candidates who renew the NDAA and Patriot Act. Look at all the people calling Snowden a traitor. What's so important about being able to reproduce at a young age, especially if you're perfectly OK with being surveilled 24x7?
Anyway, as for your "not finding a mate" thing, if you're the kind of person that doesn't want to be someone's one and only and would prefer a less-committed relationship, that's certainly possible, though our current society does discourage it. You should look into polyamory. There's lots of people who would just prefer to be someone's "secondary" partner (FWB, etc.), and polyamorous relationships allow that. The millenials are getting into poly in a really big way these days, so this isn't something where you need any kind of sci-fi technology to live the way you want.
Look what happened in Star Trek:TNG: they had a smart doctor who was also beautiful (Crusher). Then they replaced her with another really smart doctor who wasn't so hot (Pulaski) and had a somewhat annoying voice and affect, and fans were outraged, so they brought the first one back after 1 season.
At the end of the game, depending on exactly how you finish it, Samus takes off her clothes. I believe the crucial factor is how long it takes you to finish the game. If you're too slow, she never takes off her suit at all, so you don't know she's female. The faster you complete the game, the more clothes she takes off, with the best result being her being in a bikini.
I'd say having a female character strip down to a bikini as a reward for completing the game quickly qualifies as "using women as sex objects".
Now go read some stories about there being very low numbers of women in science and engineering. All the comments are about how they just aren't interested,
That's my theory, and I'm sticking to it. I just haven't heard many stories, or met any examples, of women that tried to go into science or engineering, and changed their mind because of the men in those majors. Women simply aren't interested in even exploring these career options. There's multiple reasons they might not be interested:
1) Science, in particular (separate from engineering) is a shitty career, requiring long hours, an insanely long educational path (need a PhD, which takes forever to get because the profs use you as postdoc slave labor for years), and insanely low pay, if you can even find a job. American companies do not invest in basic research much these days, so there's limited job options.
2) Engineering (esp. computer/software engr) has lots of jobs, but it has many other problems. The expectation of long hours is a big one, plus a very limited career after 10 years or so. Rampant ageism (esp. in the tech sector, not so much in other fields). Nowhere to advance after you have 10-15 years of experience, except into management where you lose all your tech skills. Mass layoffs and outsourcing/offshoring are common. It just isn't that solid a career any more. Some fields are really bad too; electrical engineering for instance is a dead-end unless you get into software, because all the electronic hardware design has moved to Taiwan. The exception is if you work in the defense industry, but then you have to be OK with designing drones to bomb wedding parties, or designing land-mind WiFi control systems so you can help blow the arms and legs off children (this was a job I was offered a few years ago, which I turned down).
3) While I can't say I've heard of many women interested enough in engineering to try it in college and then change majors because of the men there, I have heard of many engineers who told their kids to avoid the profession because they were so disillusioned with it. You never hear of doctors telling their kids to avoid medicine.
4) Girls are told that "math is hard!" and are pushed by their parents or society away from math. I have heard many times of women going into engineering in college, and dropping out because they couldn't handle the math classes, so they switched to an easier major like business.
Women who are smart enough for engineering seem to gravitate towards other fields that are likely better in many ways: medicine, veterinary medicine, finance, law, etc. These fields are more highly-valued by our society and have much more prestige. They generally pay better (though medicine has a longer education time usually), and they have infinitely more stability.
Finally, it's just Western women who avoid engineering. Over in India and China, women happily go into these fields in large numbers. I've worked with many female software engineers who were Indian or Chinese, only a very few Western ones. This means the reasons are entirely cultural, not biological.
I thought "creepiness" was basically when someone you're really not attracted to expresses a sexual interest in you. It works for both women and men, but sexually-aggressive ugly women are very rare, so people generally associate "creepy" only with men, especially men significantly older than the women they hit on (but also men significantly uglier than the women they hit on).
I agree that longer-term relationships are obviously better, but there's also something to be said for having a variety of sex partners over your life. No, just having a bunch of one-night stands is not really a great way to live life, but neither is finding one person and marrying them and never having any other sex partners in your life.
I'm not entirely sure why you put fun in inverted commas there
Because different people have different ideas of what is "fun". Some people think it's "fun" to go to bars, go club-hopping, drink to excess, and talk a lot about inane topics. They think people who don't get drunk are "boring", that people who don't like to ramble about idiotic topics are "boring", etc. Some people, by contrast, think sitting at home and playing video games is "fun", and that going to drunken parties is not fun. Some people think that going to symphony or ballet performances is "fun", and that drunken parties and video games are both uninteresting ways to spend time. Some people think that going sailing is "fun" and that all of the above is "boring". Some people think that fishing is "fun", while others think it's more boring than watching paint dry.
If the person you're attempting to date finds you boring within the first date, then it is not ever going to be a working proposition.
Agreed. So the problem is a giant impedance mismatch between the ideas of "fun" between different groups of people. The male video-game lovers can't find nearly enough opposite-sex partners who also think video games are "fun", and the female bar-hoppers apparently can't find enough decent-looking opposite-sex partners who also think getting drunk is "fun".
The key: be a more iteresting person. Then seek out other, more interesting people.
There's a problem here: there just aren't that many interesting people out there, male or female. And most of them are already in (monogamous) relationships. Most of the single people have something seriously wrong with them, which is why they're still single: they're not interesting, as you note, or worse.
Unfortunately, the problem here is that by the time you and these women have grown old enough for the women to be fed up with abusive guys (or guys that want to just watch sports all the time, or whatever the woman is tired of), many/most of the women now have had kids with the abusive guys. So if you hook up with one, you're now stuck raising the asshole's kids.
So what ends up happening is lots of single mothers bitch about how they can't find quality men any more, and lots of single men lament that they never could find any decent women (but they overlook the single mothers because they don't want to take on that responsibility, which is entirely their right I'll add).
Here's my proposal to fix these societal problems. These weren't problems in the past because people just had arranged marriages, or didn't worry that much about being that emotionally close to their spouses, as marriage was really just for the purpose of having kids and social stability, not finding an emotional partner, so people selected partners based on money, social status, etc., and if the woman didn't like it, too bad because women were second-class citizens. So, my solution is this: we need to work aggressively on extending human lifespans significantly, so that someone at 50yo is as youthful and healthy as a 25yo today, and someone 100yo is like a 40yo today, and people generally live to at least 200. Then, we need to either genetically engineer people, or forcibly use medical means, so that they can't have children until they're at least 50yo. Only after that age will they be allowed to have children, and thanks to extended (healthy, youthful) lifespans they'll have plenty of time and vitality to raise them. This will give people plenty of time to become mature, to figure out what they want out of life, to get an education, to establish and build a career, to build up savings and a nest egg, so that they're in a good position emotionally and financially to have and raise kids with a partner (or partners, if they want to be polyamorous) who will be around long-term.
Slashdot Mirror
People managed to make highly functional guns back in the 1500s and 1600s, and they sure didn't have "substantial engineering expertise" back then. Guns aren't that hard to make, the problem is trying to 3D-print them out of plastic. If you abandon that, and switch to metals and machine tools, it's quite doable.
Electric power steering works with sensors on the steering wheel that detect when you turn it, and how much. The car then does some calculations taking into account the force and speed with which you turn the wheel, and the speed at which the vehicle is traveling. It then activates a motor, which actually turns the wheels.
No, it doesn't.
EPS is little different from hydraulic power steering. The motor merely assists the driver in steering the car. There's still a direct mechanical connection between the wheel and the steering arms. The sensors on the steering wheel are detecting how much torque you're applying to the wheel, and use that and the road speed to determine how much assist to give via the motor.
There's no clutch in normal EPS cars. These new variable-ratio ones, however, might just work that way.
Wow, are you really that stupid? You can't use pushbuttons to steer a car.
I'm pretty sure the S2000 did not have speed-variable-ratio steering; this is entirely new. All cars these days have rack-and-pinion steering, with a direct mechanical connection between the steering wheel and the steering arms and front wheels. What the S2000 had, IIRC, is different gearing on the rack, so as the pinion turned, the ratio would increase towards the limits of the steering range. Basically, the slots cut in the rack were closer together in the middle, and farther apart at the ends. Big f'in deal.
What this system proposes is to vary the steering ratio with vehicle speed. I honestly have no idea how they plan to do this mechanically, unless they're going to eliminate the direct coupling between the steering and the front wheels, which sounds like a terrible idea to me (for one thing, how do you steer the car when the power is off? Batteries and engines do die sometimes.)
This is a stupid idea. For one thing, a big, red, octagonal stop sign is not a good way to steer a car.
But in case you're talking about joysticks, those are terrible ways to control cars, because they don't have the range of motion that a steering wheel does. If they made any sense at all, you'd see Formula 1 cars with them. You don't. F1 cars all use steering wheels, despite being loaded with an incredible amount of technology.
When I was a kid in the 60's we lived on a farm in central Illinois.
There's the key right there. Of course you mail-ordered stuff, because you didn't have any stores nearby. Most of the population does not live on farms, not even back in the 60s.
These days, people in cities order from Amazon all the time. Back in those days, people in cities did not mail-order stuff. Why would they? They could just drive or walk to Montgomery Ward or Sears or JC Penney and buy stuff in person there, rather than ordering from those stores' catalogs. The only reason those stores had catalogs was for all the rural people.
"In 1903 Sears claimed that “one-fourth of the entire population of the United States secures some of their goods from
In 1903, much of the population lived in rural areas. The percentage has been steadily falling ever since then.
I haven't seen the US government help anyone except the 0.01%ers in quite a while. This isn't true of every government in the world; there's lots of countries that seem to do OK with regards to the regular people in their populations, but not the US. (Those countries are in Western Europe BTW, and as a result, they rank at the top of the quality-of-living indices year after year.) The government here only screws over the common people. I don't see how that's one bit cynical; it's just recognizing reality.
Not that many people mail-ordered houses in those days, and even when they did, the USPS did not deliver it. We're talking about the USPS's business here. Look, youngster, I remember the 80s quite well, and mail order was not very common then. People ordered stuff once in a while, but this was a time when not everyone had credit cards, bank-issued Visa/MC debit/ATM cards did not exist, so paying for things usually meant a money order and waiting around hoping it would be delivered within a month. Fedex and UPS were not that large then either, as Fedex (or "Federal Express" as they were called then before they changed their name) actually concentrated on overnight deliveries, hence the "express". Later, in the late 80s/early 90s, mail order became more and more common, especially with people buying computer parts (anyone remember "Computer Shopper"?), and credit cards becoming more common with regular working-class people, but that's more recent; the 70s and 80s weren't like that. But even then, deliveries just weren't that common. Nowadays, people buy all kinds of stuff from Amazon and Ebay and Newegg and zillions of other online vendors. The USPS does a lot of business with small parcels; this simply wasn't the case 30+ years ago, or even 20 years ago.
People didn't mail-order nearly as much as stuff back in those days as they do now.
They've already proven over and over again that they're up to no good at every possible turn.
DVD DRM is so trivial, and already circumvented, that it might as well be ignored.
More advanced DRM forms cannot be ignored, and haven't been circumvented yet.
That 50% assumption is stupid. You can't stream the food items or other things you buy while you're at that store. So you need to go to the store anyway, DVD or not.
Snail mail is serving an important role in small-package delivery, something that wasn't needed very much prior to the commercialization of the internet and the invention of Ebay.
Yes, but if we get rid of other particular people, it'd benefit both the environment and society. Comcast, Verizon, and MPAA executives would be a good start.
Force? As in a restriction of freedom? That will not go well with most people in the developed world.
Why not? We're already perfectly happy to sacrifice our freedom for safety. Just look at all the people standing in TSA lines. Look at all the people who elect Presidential candidates who renew the NDAA and Patriot Act. Look at all the people calling Snowden a traitor. What's so important about being able to reproduce at a young age, especially if you're perfectly OK with being surveilled 24x7?
Anyway, as for your "not finding a mate" thing, if you're the kind of person that doesn't want to be someone's one and only and would prefer a less-committed relationship, that's certainly possible, though our current society does discourage it. You should look into polyamory. There's lots of people who would just prefer to be someone's "secondary" partner (FWB, etc.), and polyamorous relationships allow that. The millenials are getting into poly in a really big way these days, so this isn't something where you need any kind of sci-fi technology to live the way you want.
Go submit it on SoylentNews if you think Slashdot is censoring things.
Look what happened in Star Trek:TNG: they had a smart doctor who was also beautiful (Crusher). Then they replaced her with another really smart doctor who wasn't so hot (Pulaski) and had a somewhat annoying voice and affect, and fans were outraged, so they brought the first one back after 1 season.
You obviously never finished Metroid.
At the end of the game, depending on exactly how you finish it, Samus takes off her clothes. I believe the crucial factor is how long it takes you to finish the game. If you're too slow, she never takes off her suit at all, so you don't know she's female. The faster you complete the game, the more clothes she takes off, with the best result being her being in a bikini.
I'd say having a female character strip down to a bikini as a reward for completing the game quickly qualifies as "using women as sex objects".
How about apologizing for being American, and invading all those countries, you know?
No, the best way to handle this is to sew a Canadian flag on your backpack when you travel in Europe. "Are you American?" "No, I'm from Toronto, eh!"
Now go read some stories about there being very low numbers of women in science and engineering. All the comments are about how they just aren't interested,
That's my theory, and I'm sticking to it. I just haven't heard many stories, or met any examples, of women that tried to go into science or engineering, and changed their mind because of the men in those majors. Women simply aren't interested in even exploring these career options. There's multiple reasons they might not be interested:
1) Science, in particular (separate from engineering) is a shitty career, requiring long hours, an insanely long educational path (need a PhD, which takes forever to get because the profs use you as postdoc slave labor for years), and insanely low pay, if you can even find a job. American companies do not invest in basic research much these days, so there's limited job options.
2) Engineering (esp. computer/software engr) has lots of jobs, but it has many other problems. The expectation of long hours is a big one, plus a very limited career after 10 years or so. Rampant ageism (esp. in the tech sector, not so much in other fields). Nowhere to advance after you have 10-15 years of experience, except into management where you lose all your tech skills. Mass layoffs and outsourcing/offshoring are common. It just isn't that solid a career any more. Some fields are really bad too; electrical engineering for instance is a dead-end unless you get into software, because all the electronic hardware design has moved to Taiwan. The exception is if you work in the defense industry, but then you have to be OK with designing drones to bomb wedding parties, or designing land-mind WiFi control systems so you can help blow the arms and legs off children (this was a job I was offered a few years ago, which I turned down).
3) While I can't say I've heard of many women interested enough in engineering to try it in college and then change majors because of the men there, I have heard of many engineers who told their kids to avoid the profession because they were so disillusioned with it. You never hear of doctors telling their kids to avoid medicine.
4) Girls are told that "math is hard!" and are pushed by their parents or society away from math. I have heard many times of women going into engineering in college, and dropping out because they couldn't handle the math classes, so they switched to an easier major like business.
Women who are smart enough for engineering seem to gravitate towards other fields that are likely better in many ways: medicine, veterinary medicine, finance, law, etc. These fields are more highly-valued by our society and have much more prestige. They generally pay better (though medicine has a longer education time usually), and they have infinitely more stability.
Finally, it's just Western women who avoid engineering. Over in India and China, women happily go into these fields in large numbers. I've worked with many female software engineers who were Indian or Chinese, only a very few Western ones. This means the reasons are entirely cultural, not biological.
I thought "creepiness" was basically when someone you're really not attracted to expresses a sexual interest in you. It works for both women and men, but sexually-aggressive ugly women are very rare, so people generally associate "creepy" only with men, especially men significantly older than the women they hit on (but also men significantly uglier than the women they hit on).
All the rest of us got it. Most of us chose more mundane messages than 'kill all women'. Mine is 'I don't like MS Windows very much'.
Hey, you plagiarized my manifesto!!!
I agree that longer-term relationships are obviously better, but there's also something to be said for having a variety of sex partners over your life. No, just having a bunch of one-night stands is not really a great way to live life, but neither is finding one person and marrying them and never having any other sex partners in your life.
I'm not entirely sure why you put fun in inverted commas there
Because different people have different ideas of what is "fun". Some people think it's "fun" to go to bars, go club-hopping, drink to excess, and talk a lot about inane topics. They think people who don't get drunk are "boring", that people who don't like to ramble about idiotic topics are "boring", etc. Some people, by contrast, think sitting at home and playing video games is "fun", and that going to drunken parties is not fun. Some people think that going to symphony or ballet performances is "fun", and that drunken parties and video games are both uninteresting ways to spend time. Some people think that going sailing is "fun" and that all of the above is "boring". Some people think that fishing is "fun", while others think it's more boring than watching paint dry.
If the person you're attempting to date finds you boring within the first date, then it is not ever going to be a working proposition.
Agreed. So the problem is a giant impedance mismatch between the ideas of "fun" between different groups of people. The male video-game lovers can't find nearly enough opposite-sex partners who also think video games are "fun", and the female bar-hoppers apparently can't find enough decent-looking opposite-sex partners who also think getting drunk is "fun".
The key: be a more iteresting person. Then seek out other, more interesting people.
There's a problem here: there just aren't that many interesting people out there, male or female. And most of them are already in (monogamous) relationships. Most of the single people have something seriously wrong with them, which is why they're still single: they're not interesting, as you note, or worse.
Unfortunately, the problem here is that by the time you and these women have grown old enough for the women to be fed up with abusive guys (or guys that want to just watch sports all the time, or whatever the woman is tired of), many/most of the women now have had kids with the abusive guys. So if you hook up with one, you're now stuck raising the asshole's kids.
So what ends up happening is lots of single mothers bitch about how they can't find quality men any more, and lots of single men lament that they never could find any decent women (but they overlook the single mothers because they don't want to take on that responsibility, which is entirely their right I'll add).
Here's my proposal to fix these societal problems. These weren't problems in the past because people just had arranged marriages, or didn't worry that much about being that emotionally close to their spouses, as marriage was really just for the purpose of having kids and social stability, not finding an emotional partner, so people selected partners based on money, social status, etc., and if the woman didn't like it, too bad because women were second-class citizens. So, my solution is this: we need to work aggressively on extending human lifespans significantly, so that someone at 50yo is as youthful and healthy as a 25yo today, and someone 100yo is like a 40yo today, and people generally live to at least 200. Then, we need to either genetically engineer people, or forcibly use medical means, so that they can't have children until they're at least 50yo. Only after that age will they be allowed to have children, and thanks to extended (healthy, youthful) lifespans they'll have plenty of time and vitality to raise them. This will give people plenty of time to become mature, to figure out what they want out of life, to get an education, to establish and build a career, to build up savings and a nest egg, so that they're in a good position emotionally and financially to have and raise kids with a partner (or partners, if they want to be polyamorous) who will be around long-term.