In my what I consider to be typical high school, we had 40 minutes per class period. Teachers were required to take attendance. If this takes only a minute and a half, that still means you are losing 3.75% of class time to attendance taking, which this system would give back. I am sure it will also reduce the age-old game of sneaking in "just after" the bell just to get away with it and hassle the teacher. I mean honestly how can this system be abused?
I think there is a lot of confusion between people disliking enforcement of laws and disliking the laws themselves. I feel that many people just kind of put up with many laws they dislike because they are rarely enforced and they can get away with it-jay walking and speeding being obvious examples- and you come to a complete stop at every stop sign every time right?. I think most people would be quite shocked to learn how often they are in violation of some law.
Personally I hope that this seemingly impending age of 100% enforcement forces us to really look at our laws and repeal them or put proper punishments on them. Imagine getting a $75 ticket every time you went one mph over the speed limit? my bank account would be cleaned out in a week...
The biggest missing feature of all the mapping services I have seen is the lack of integrating mass transit.
I live in NYC, and whenever I am going somewhere, I usually pull out mapquest to find the address (cross streets) and then sit there with a subway/bus map to try and figure out how to get there. Aside from the time problem (the time intervals that flights trains and busses leave is not as flexible as a car), this should be relatively easy to implement as the search space is so much smaller, and should be easy to acquire information about (as opposed to every backroad across the US). Just overlaying subway and bus stops onto the street maps would be a huge improvement.
There are many profitable ways to utilize this:
I type in to WA. I get all the options- from trains, busses, airplanes. This is targeted marketing nirvana, as unlike people who are searching for TV's just to see the latest stuff, very few people ask for driving directions "just to see how they would get there."
Just targetting airlines and railroads, etc. might be too small of a market... So how about showing ads from places along the route? Driving from NY to DC? See the diners along the way. Taking the train? Stop at the pizza hut in Penn. There is alot of revenue to be made there.
It could be argued that this is a small market. However, considering that there are 10M people in NYC alone, most of which whom rely on mass transit, I would have to disagree.
How often do you check to see if someone put a dongle there?
If there was a PS2/USB adapter on it, would you think twice (aka would you even notice if a well made dongle was there)?
Id say most dorks would answer yes to the second question, but very few typical users would. but the first? Id say I have a reason to fiddle around back there every few months at most. I would say that during that time I am just reaching back there to tighten a loose wire, and I would be very susceptible to someone putting this there. This goes even more so for cramped cubicle dwellers.
If you do daily checks to see if someone has installed a dongle on your machine, I have to wonder if the tinfoil hat ever burns your head if you spent too much time outside in the summer?
If not, I highly recommend TeamTrack. Its completely customizable, and will save you a bundle. Even if you must develop the system, you should study the featureset of the system. You might even be able to get a good start on how the schema should look as its database is in access. You can also learn from the strengths of its GUI. There are such good products already out there... I get the feeling that you are reinventing the wheel.
Indeed. it was a funny and humorous joke. MS is an 800 pound gorilla and for every MS post I see just as many OSS posts (I mean jesus look at how many "FF is gaining marketshare" stories there are, and no one bitches about them).
I don't understand why people keep making demands of slashdot like they are owed something. I see slashdot as kind of like hanging out at my friend's house. Sometimes they act like asses, and people get in fights, but most of the time its a great time. The fact that people keep showing up and hanging out is evidence enough that nothing is wrong. If a story is 3 years old, but its still "stuff that matters" thats good enough for me.
To continue the house analogy: Id much rather be able to walk right in without knocking and put my feet up on the table and deal with some dupes and spelling mistakes than deal with how corporatized most sites have gotten in the past few years. I actually enjoy the dupes and various offenses against the english language, it lets me know you guys are still just human (and dorks):).
The editors seem to be getting an increasing amount of sh*t lately over these things. I just wanted to let you know that I think you guys are doing a great job and I hope there is a special place in hell for all the whiners, especially the grammar nazi's (though then again I kind of suspect that most of these people are posting from Storage Room B and spend most of their day aside from posting on/. bitching about their stapler or how their boss misused the word 'except' in an email to them).
That is all. May those that think im kissing arse (and before you do accuse me of this- think real hard about what I am gaining by giving them thanks, which is absolutely nothing) mod me to -1 hell.:) -K
Its really not. Because humans are well... human. Most drivers are good drivers 99% of the time. Its just when that 1% of the time that youre not at full attention happens to coincide with someone else's 1% or some other string of events happens that leads to an accident. Not paying attention to the road happens, and EVERYONE does it sometimes. Computers however, can be fully functional 100% of the time, have a quicker reaction time, and can respond to data that human's don't have (IE when they are losing traction in a wheel or wheels, or knowing the safe stopping distance based on road conditions).
And sure we can say computers are not infallible, they have bugs, make windows BSOD jokes, etc, until we are blue in the face. But in reality there are many control systems in your car controlled by computer chips and they run just fine.
I welcome this new technology. It would sure make driving on the Belt Pkwy into the city alot less stressfull if I knew that I was going to be able to safely stop automatically if the guy in front of me slams on his brakes while im focused on the guy next to me who tried to swerve into my lane. I also recall an article in the economist talking about how stability control technology put into high-end mercedes in Germany reduced accident rates by 30%. Due to the fact that the technology did take control of your car to a large extent, they did not introduce it into the US- both due to attitudes like yours and the litigous environment.
This could also pave the way for higher speed limits. I personally do not see any downside to this at all. Between tech like this and hybrid's, I feel like automotive technology is finally exciting again!
Southwest and other regional airlines are more profitable today, but its a more complex picture than you paint.
One factor is labor- Working in the airline industry, whether as a mechanic or flight attendant was a great living and is still a good living. Typical unionized type benefits- nice, fat pension on retirement, benefits (both while working and in retirement), and a salary to support a family comfortably with (regardless of whether or not your job really required enough skills that you deserved such a comfortable living). These pensions, medical benefits and salaries are killing the old airlines, and we are going to see more of this in other industries soon, particularly the auto industry.
Another factor is that regional airlines, by the nature of them being regional (and only regional) require fewer types of planes, and thus less parts, mechanics, etc. I forget where I read these stats, but the regionals usually only maintain 4 or 5 different planes where as a major carrier will maintain somewhere around 16 types of planes, and thus a small army of trained mechanics is needed to maintain all of them. The majors run a much more diverse business, and it is less efficient.
And yes, the regionals just have better operations. I am not an expert, but from what I understand the turnaround time required by most of the regionals is 1/3 of that required by majors. Southwest or JetBlue (I forget which) has a turnaround of only 15 minutes- pretty amazing when you consider all the refueling and loading going on. There is definitely an air of big lumbering beauracracy about the majors.
Personally, I think we are going to see the majors specializing in more long distance routes between hubs while the regionals continue to operate more efficiently for well... regional travel. It is not going to be easy. The airline industry has very strong unions and the needed job and pay cuts necessary to get the majors into good shape may be impossible to get without a bloody bloody battle.
They got me just last weekend by price. I was in the store, and they had the ultra sexy ipod sitting there, the 40GB model was $499. But then right next to it was the 40GB Nomad (by Creative) for $250. I was like umm... yeah the ipod is hot, but 1/2 the price?! And we are not talking about a $20 difference here, thats $250! That would pay my rent for a month in college. Yeah its not as cool, no I won't impress people on the subway (not that I would have anyway, I have a seperate set of headphones so people wouldn't recognize that I was using an ipod anyway). It works for me. It supports playlists and all that and the software is easy to use, if not quite at iTunes level. The only things I found lacking on it was the lack of an FM tuner, the headphones supplied are pretty crappy, and transferring via usb1.0 is sloooow (it supports usb 2.0 but I unfortunately only have machines w/ usb 1.0). It is also a bit big, but I can deal.
Other highlights: Removable/Replacable battery (to me a HUGE drawback to the ipod). Comes with a leather/pleather case.
Unless you are trying to win a geek fashion show or "be like the cool kids", I see no reason to choose an ipod over a Nomad.
I think it is important for you to realize that granting options DOES dilute the existing stock.
Also, if the company gives you actual shares, that does not mean that you have to sell them immediately. You could hold on to the stock, wait for it to go up or down, and since you are given something of actual value, you will always profit, unless the company goes under. This could also be advantageous as it eliminates the conflict of interest that managers have when giving out dividends (Since management usually holds lots of stock options, and not actual stock, it is therefore in their best interests to reinvest any additional profits back into the company, not to dole out dividends to actual stock holders).
Other than Quake, which completely blew everyone away by going from 2 dimensions to 3, Every game they have produced has been "more of the same" with only graphics, monster, and gun updates. Wolfenstein -> Doom had the difference of what... larger rooms and diagonal walls? Doom II was also just more of the same. Quake - Quake3 were only marginal improvemens also. Doom 3 IMHO was a huge step forward, but again not revolutionary, though I certainly would not call it bland crap- I have found most of their games to be exceptionally good.
This is what id does. They make FPS games. Asking them to do something completely different is like asking Britney Spears to start making hardcore rock music.
Game genres are similar to music in that certain styles go in and out of favor. A few, like RPG's and FPS's are always around. Others like puzzle/adventure games go in and out of style like disco/dance music does every few years. The main difference between the two is that regardless of how fun a certain genre is (aka side scroller) if it is deemed outdated it gets buried and is never really seen again.
I completely agree. My 50" is only 16 inches deep, light, consumes little power (less than my previous 20") and looks great. The only thing that I find inferior is that the blacks are not as black as CRT's and the big arse rear projections.
And not for nothing, but 70% of the time I am still watching non-HD broadcasts, where the quality of the signal is the limiting factor on the picture quality, not the TV itself.
To be honest, I can not really say that I have ever gone to someone else's house and really noticed someone's tv picture being significantly better or worse than anyone else's. Its always been the input signal that has made the difference (IE DVD over VHS, component video cables as opposed to composite, HD over standard broadcasts, etc.)
Also, its nice to see the wall hangers in commercial installations, but its unlikely youre going to get such a clean look in your home, unless you have an electrician come in and wire an outlet and cable jack directly behind the TV. Even then you may still have a problem asthetically if it requires a cable box.
Im really surprised that Home Theater Master has not been mentioned... I bought the MX-500 for my father for christmas last year and its just awesome, and can be found for under $100 also. It mixes both programmable "soft" keys with hard keys and if the codes dont provide all the functions of your device, as long as you have the original remote you can teach it new functions. It can control every function of every device I have (including my complex yamaha reciever and digital cable remotes). It also has "punch through" keys that allow you to control the volume on your reciever while still flipping channels on your tv or cable box (sounds intuititive, but most cheaper remotes require you to change mode from tv to reciever for this). The light up function also makes it easy to see at night, though the softkeys are not backlit. Unlike what I hear about alot of other high end remotes, the battery life is long and on par with a typical remote.
I sound like a fanboy, but I really cant say enough about it. Its easy enough for my family to use, and very versatile. http://www.remotecentral.com is an excellent site for remote reviews, and you can see that it is rated very highly.
links: MX-500: http://www.remotecentral.com/mx500/index.html Mx- 700 (updated 500?) http://www.remotecentral.com/mx700/index.ht ml
Ill see your flame and raise you another word twisting...
So you are saying that conservatives prefer to see their children get sucked into the renting cycle rather than let them get some savings together so they can actually buy a home of their own?
Maybe it needs some clearing up, but the quoted statement meant that the views on social and political issues may be less divergent in liberal households, hence the parent-child relationships are better. This was based on the axiom that children are generally considerably more liberal than their parents, and this is a cause of friction.
I work with some people who are from various parts of the country, and what I have learned is that living at home is viewed very differently in different parts of the US.
I am from the Northeast, and almost all of my friends lived at home for at least two years after finishing school, with the exceptions being those that found jobs far from their homes, and those that were living in cramped apartments in the city. It also took me two years to move out, and again that was only because I found a job far from home (though I did feel it was time to get out). My parents also tried to convince me to stay.
My friends from the midwest and south, however tell a different story, and are pretty much pushed out the door once they finish school. The feeling seems to be mutual, as they too see living at home as a fate worse than death and just could not understand why in the world I would actually choose to live at home when I had a good job after graduation.
The main factor in these views IMHO is the cost of living. Buying a house/coop/condo for someone just getting out of school is out of the question except for maybe the top 3% of earners. Even renting a decent place in NYC or its suburbs is likely to cost you 50% of your take home income. The only other factor I can really attribute to these differences are just regional cultural differences. It may just be that since these areas tend to be very liberal, there is less of a divide between parents and children and hence they can coexist better together.
If you are going to nail me as responsible for all of my government's policies, then you are essentially saying that every citizen votes in exactly the same way. Last I remember 49% of America voted against Bush and thus his policies. An exercised right to vote does not mean that policies that I favor or support get enacted.
A little off the track, but- couldn't it also be said that citizens in dictatorships have the ability to revolt? And their lack of revolting is essentially an acceptance of the dictatorship and its policies?
In 1998 someone might have said the same thing, putting a search engine in place of photoshop and saying "imagine completely stripping out all boolean operators from search engines to simplify the interface"- it would make no sense simply because searching through millions- billions of documents is a far more complex process than.
However, here we are today, and I just type a few terms into google, and 95% of the time, I get exactly what I want... almost magically.
I can imagine an interface to photoshop where there there is just a command box that you could do things like type "fix blotches" or "make water blue."
I am not saying I disagree with your argument or saying that photoshop could or should be reduced to a one button interface. However, I think it is a bit shortsighted to say that complexity is a necessity.
Also remember that once you are in 1099 land, the world can become your tax deduction. Have a home office? It can be used as a deduction. Your computer, cellphone, blackberry, portable hard drive (aka ipod), gas money, car depreciation (and even the whole car purchase price), etc. can all be deducted from your taxes. Obviously talk to an accountant, there are very specific rules about all these things, but even if you are conservative, you will be laughing your ass off as you pay that extra 14%. And as the parent stated, using an S or C corp can also be used as a vehicle to defer or reduce your tax bill (but most importantly reduce your personal liability!).
About an accountant- It is highly recommended but not entirely necessary to go through an accountant for these things. Accountants are people just like you, and you can read the same books and tax codes that they do. Accountants make mistakes and get too aggressive too and YOU are the one signing the tax return- having an accountant doesn't reduce your liablity one iota. If you have the techie spirt figuring out what you can and cannot deduct should not be too difficult, and won't leave you a whimpering uneducated mess if the IRS comes a knocking for an audit.
My policy is that I upgrade when there is a 7x improvement in hardware speeds than my current machine at an affordable price. Right now my 700mhz machine is holding up just fine, and I have no problem doing development on it, or playing modest games, or its normal use- websurfing and mp3 jukebox. I am fairly sure that by the time we get to 5ghz, which right now feels like will take an eternity, I will become dissatisfied with the performance enough that I will want to upgrade. CPU speed isnt really what is making me drool, but things like PCI-X, hypertransport, the new fast front side busses, usb2.0, SATA, dual core processors, 64 bit processors, etc. do make me want to upgrade.
How did I come up w/ the 7x figure? My first real machine was a 100mhz pentium. Around 2000, it started falling behind the software advances, and I could not play free cell without mp3's skipping. This was during the race to 1ghz, and once the processors hit 1ghz the 700mhz chips were a relatively cheap $200 or so, so I went for it. Thats been the standard since.
The interest generated by cash in the bank is reported on earnings statements. As you can read here: http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1288776/000 119312504175503/dex991.htm , the interest generated was 3.8 million for the quarter. Not even a drop in the bucket.
I discussed this with a politically active (Republican) friend of mine in college, because of all things that seemingly require a National holiday, election day seems to me to be by far the most deserving. Essentially, she told me it boils down to the fact that numerically there are more Democrats in the US than Republicans. However, Democrats are more aloof and have much lower turnouts at the polls than Republicans tend to. Hence this is why you often see Democratic groups holding voter registration drives while Republicans tend to focus their efforts on promoting their actual candidates. As a side effect to this, Republicans would never support a national election day as it would benefit Democrats more than Republicans, since presumably turnouts would be far greater.
I am a Kerry supporter and Bush hater, and I have to say that Bush's responses were far better. They were more detailed and contained specific ideas of what he has done, and what he plans to do.
Of course, I do not believe that Bush (or Kerry) actually wrote any of this. But at the same time, his team apparently understands the issues alot better than Kerry's team, and that is important. Do I really think Bush or Kerry have a friggen clue as to what VOIP is? Noooo way. In fact, I am not even sure that if either Bush or Kerry even read the responses, they would fully understand what was being discussed. However, when something like the Can-Spam act comes across their desk, it appears Bush has a much better team working for him to put it in little words he can understand and thus should be able to make better decisions on these types of issues.
Ive been hearing this more and more... Being a large and growing company does not make you a monopoly! Google does not have a monopoly on anything, the closest they come is a large market share on searching.
But, lets say for a minute that Google is a monopoly. There is still no comparison to MS. MS gained a virtual monopoly in Operating Systems. Operating Systems are large, complicated things. It is not all that easy for a target MS user to switch his OS. There is the learning curve issue, the fact that any other OS out there will not have the same and possibly inferior software, etc. -There are many, many reasons why you can't just change your OS and I do not think they really need to be explained to this crowd. By comparison, a search engine is complete cake to switch over. There is no complex set of commands needed to use one, fear of not being able to use certain sites unless you use certain search engines, etc. Type 20 characters, and im at yahoo. or lycos. or hotbot. or askJeeves, or msn, etc. There is no lock-in. They are not making me sign up for gmail or even pushing it down my throat if I just want to search. They are not "helpfully" bundling a web browser with their google toolbar, or making me convert to the google filesystem. I could go on and on. The central point being that though they have a "monopoly" on searching, there is nothing stopping me from switching to yahoo tommorrow and thus they have no ability to force anything down anyone's throat or force competitors out. Google is merely taking what they do best-searching and applying it to things other than just general web searches.
And who says a monopoly is a bad thing if it is not abused and created because the people have chosen the entity to be their sole provider? I would also not think that MS is just going to look the other way as this happens either. They have proven time and again that they can copy and then outdo groups who seem to have a near stranglehold on their market. Particularly, the deskbar is just begging to be copied and bundled into the next Windows.
Your comment reminds me of the minority report where the one false positive is considered by the public to completely outweigh all the good the system has done.
I cannot speak for the incident you are speaking of, or even of flight controls at all, but I do know that mercedes was able to reduce its accident rate by 1/3 in Germany by introducing a "drive-by-wire" stability management system on some of its models. Maybe this system will in some cases make mistakes. But a 33% reduction is a pretty drastic reduction- one that will make me sleep better at night, and is an acceptable risk for me.
I personally am looking forward to the day when my car will take control and brake for me when I have momentarily taken my attention off of the road and the guy in front of me has slammed on his brakes, or alert me that I am going off the road if I am falling asleep at the wheel. And even just vanilla traction control is an absolute godsend when driving my Mustang through the snow.
Some of these systems seem so easy to implement too- I mean how hard can it be to put a sensor in front of the car and sense if you are approaching an object at a speed that you will soon not be able to avoid a collision? I understand it is not quite *that* simplistic, but surely it can not be much harder than implementing an airbag system. I am guessing it is mostly the fear of litigation that keeps such systems out of cars today.
I don't know how out of shape you guys are, but a 10 mile ride should not make you a sweaty mess unless you are really chugging to get there. In summer it may be an issue, but it should be no worse than sitting in a hot car before the AC kicks on or waiting for the subway in a sweltering station.
I agree. My "Big Idea" for a racing game would be a game where you could do races along routes. Not race tracks, but routes like DC to Boston, or a typical commute from the Nassau/Suffolk border on Long Island to manhattan, etc (throw in traffic for an alternate "ultra realistic" office-space type mode). Then I realized that to do it right, it had to be real, and maps that size are just infeasible. mebbe on the PS10:)
Slashdot Mirror
In my what I consider to be typical high school, we had 40 minutes per class period. Teachers were required to take attendance. If this takes only a minute and a half, that still means you are losing 3.75% of class time to attendance taking, which this system would give back. I am sure it will also reduce the age-old game of sneaking in "just after" the bell just to get away with it and hassle the teacher. I mean honestly how can this system be abused?
I think there is a lot of confusion between people disliking enforcement of laws and disliking the laws themselves. I feel that many people just kind of put up with many laws they dislike because they are rarely enforced and they can get away with it-jay walking and speeding being obvious examples- and you come to a complete stop at every stop sign every time right?. I think most people would be quite shocked to learn how often they are in violation of some law.
Personally I hope that this seemingly impending age of 100% enforcement forces us to really look at our laws and repeal them or put proper punishments on them. Imagine getting a $75 ticket every time you went one mph over the speed limit? my bank account would be cleaned out in a week...
The biggest missing feature of all the mapping services I have seen is the lack of integrating mass transit.
I live in NYC, and whenever I am going somewhere, I usually pull out mapquest to find the address (cross streets) and then sit there with a subway/bus map to try and figure out how to get there. Aside from the time problem (the time intervals that flights trains and busses leave is not as flexible as a car), this should be relatively easy to implement as the search space is so much smaller, and should be easy to acquire information about (as opposed to every backroad across the US). Just overlaying subway and bus stops onto the street maps would be a huge improvement.
There are many profitable ways to utilize this:
I type in to WA. I get all the options- from trains, busses, airplanes. This is targeted marketing nirvana, as unlike people who are searching for TV's just to see the latest stuff, very few people ask for driving directions "just to see how they would get there."
Just targetting airlines and railroads, etc. might be too small of a market... So how about showing ads from places along the route? Driving from NY to DC? See the diners along the way. Taking the train? Stop at the pizza hut in Penn. There is alot of revenue to be made there.
It could be argued that this is a small market. However, considering that there are 10M people in NYC alone, most of which whom rely on mass transit, I would have to disagree.
assuming your work computer is under your desk...
How often do you check to see if someone put a dongle there?
If there was a PS2/USB adapter on it, would you think twice (aka would you even notice if a well made dongle was there)?
Id say most dorks would answer yes to the second question, but very few typical users would. but the first? Id say I have a reason to fiddle around back there every few months at most. I would say that during that time I am just reaching back there to tighten a loose wire, and I would be very susceptible to someone putting this there. This goes even more so for cramped cubicle dwellers.
If you do daily checks to see if someone has installed a dongle on your machine, I have to wonder if the tinfoil hat ever burns your head if you spent too much time outside in the summer?
If not, I highly recommend TeamTrack. Its completely customizable, and will save you a bundle. Even if you must develop the system, you should study the featureset of the system. You might even be able to get a good start on how the schema should look as its database is in access. You can also learn from the strengths of its GUI. There are such good products already out there... I get the feeling that you are reinventing the wheel.
Indeed. it was a funny and humorous joke. MS is an 800 pound gorilla and for every MS post I see just as many OSS posts (I mean jesus look at how many "FF is gaining marketshare" stories there are, and no one bitches about them).
:).
/. bitching about their stapler or how their boss misused the word 'except' in an email to them).
:)
I don't understand why people keep making demands of slashdot like they are owed something. I see slashdot as kind of like hanging out at my friend's house. Sometimes they act like asses, and people get in fights, but most of the time its a great time. The fact that people keep showing up and hanging out is evidence enough that nothing is wrong. If a story is 3 years old, but its still "stuff that matters" thats good enough for me.
To continue the house analogy:
Id much rather be able to walk right in without knocking and put my feet up on the table and deal with some dupes and spelling mistakes than deal with how corporatized most sites have gotten in the past few years. I actually enjoy the dupes and various offenses against the english language, it lets me know you guys are still just human (and dorks)
The editors seem to be getting an increasing amount of sh*t lately over these things. I just wanted to let you know that I think you guys are doing a great job and I hope there is a special place in hell for all the whiners, especially the grammar nazi's (though then again I kind of suspect that most of these people are posting from Storage Room B and spend most of their day aside from posting on
That is all. May those that think im kissing arse (and before you do accuse me of this- think real hard about what I am gaining by giving them thanks, which is absolutely nothing) mod me to -1 hell.
-K
Its really not. Because humans are well... human. Most drivers are good drivers 99% of the time. Its just when that 1% of the time that youre not at full attention happens to coincide with someone else's 1% or some other string of events happens that leads to an accident. Not paying attention to the road happens, and EVERYONE does it sometimes. Computers however, can be fully functional 100% of the time, have a quicker reaction time, and can respond to data that human's don't have (IE when they are losing traction in a wheel or wheels, or knowing the safe stopping distance based on road conditions).
And sure we can say computers are not infallible, they have bugs, make windows BSOD jokes, etc, until we are blue in the face. But in reality there are many control systems in your car controlled by computer chips and they run just fine.
I welcome this new technology. It would sure make driving on the Belt Pkwy into the city alot less stressfull if I knew that I was going to be able to safely stop automatically if the guy in front of me slams on his brakes while im focused on the guy next to me who tried to swerve into my lane. I also recall an article in the economist talking about how stability control technology put into high-end mercedes in Germany reduced accident rates by 30%. Due to the fact that the technology did take control of your car to a large extent, they did not introduce it into the US- both due to attitudes like yours and the litigous environment.
This could also pave the way for higher speed limits. I personally do not see any downside to this at all. Between tech like this and hybrid's, I feel like automotive technology is finally exciting again!
Southwest and other regional airlines are more profitable today, but its a more complex picture than you paint.
One factor is labor- Working in the airline industry, whether as a mechanic or flight attendant was a great living and is still a good living. Typical unionized type benefits- nice, fat pension on retirement, benefits (both while working and in retirement), and a salary to support a family comfortably with (regardless of whether or not your job really required enough skills that you deserved such a comfortable living). These pensions, medical benefits and salaries are killing the old airlines, and we are going to see more of this in other industries soon, particularly the auto industry.
Another factor is that regional airlines, by the nature of them being regional (and only regional) require fewer types of planes, and thus less parts, mechanics, etc. I forget where I read these stats, but the regionals usually only maintain 4 or 5 different planes where as a major carrier will maintain somewhere around 16 types of planes, and thus a small army of trained mechanics is needed to maintain all of them. The majors run a much more diverse business, and it is less efficient.
And yes, the regionals just have better operations. I am not an expert, but from what I understand the turnaround time required by most of the regionals is 1/3 of that required by majors. Southwest or JetBlue (I forget which) has a turnaround of only 15 minutes- pretty amazing when you consider all the refueling and loading going on. There is definitely an air of big lumbering beauracracy about the majors.
Personally, I think we are going to see the majors specializing in more long distance routes between hubs while the regionals continue to operate more efficiently for well... regional travel. It is not going to be easy. The airline industry has very strong unions and the needed job and pay cuts necessary to get the majors into good shape may be impossible to get without a bloody bloody battle.
They got me just last weekend by price. I was in the store, and they had the ultra sexy ipod sitting there, the 40GB model was $499. But then right next to it was the 40GB Nomad (by Creative) for $250. I was like umm... yeah the ipod is hot, but 1/2 the price?! And we are not talking about a $20 difference here, thats $250! That would pay my rent for a month in college. Yeah its not as cool, no I won't impress people on the subway (not that I would have anyway, I have a seperate set of headphones so people wouldn't recognize that I was using an ipod anyway). It works for me. It supports playlists and all that and the software is easy to use, if not quite at iTunes level. The only things I found lacking on it was the lack of an FM tuner, the headphones supplied are pretty crappy, and transferring via usb1.0 is sloooow (it supports usb 2.0 but I unfortunately only have machines w/ usb 1.0). It is also a bit big, but I can deal.
Other highlights:
Removable/Replacable battery (to me a HUGE drawback to the ipod).
Comes with a leather/pleather case.
Unless you are trying to win a geek fashion show or "be like the cool kids", I see no reason to choose an ipod over a Nomad.
I think it is important for you to realize that granting options DOES dilute the existing stock.
Also, if the company gives you actual shares, that does not mean that you have to sell them immediately. You could hold on to the stock, wait for it to go up or down, and since you are given something of actual value, you will always profit, unless the company goes under. This could also be advantageous as it eliminates the conflict of interest that managers have when giving out dividends (Since management usually holds lots of stock options, and not actual stock, it is therefore in their best interests to reinvest any additional profits back into the company, not to dole out dividends to actual stock holders).
Other than Quake, which completely blew everyone away by going from 2 dimensions to 3, Every game they have produced has been "more of the same" with only graphics, monster, and gun updates. Wolfenstein -> Doom had the difference of what... larger rooms and diagonal walls? Doom II was also just more of the same. Quake - Quake3 were only marginal improvemens also. Doom 3 IMHO was a huge step forward, but again not revolutionary, though I certainly would not call it bland crap- I have found most of their games to be exceptionally good.
This is what id does. They make FPS games. Asking them to do something completely different is like asking Britney Spears to start making hardcore rock music.
Game genres are similar to music in that certain styles go in and out of favor. A few, like RPG's and FPS's are always around. Others like puzzle/adventure games go in and out of style like disco/dance music does every few years. The main difference between the two is that regardless of how fun a certain genre is (aka side scroller) if it is deemed outdated it gets buried and is never really seen again.
I completely agree. My 50" is only 16 inches deep, light, consumes little power (less than my previous 20") and looks great. The only thing that I find inferior is that the blacks are not as black as CRT's and the big arse rear projections.
And not for nothing, but 70% of the time I am still watching non-HD broadcasts, where the quality of the signal is the limiting factor on the picture quality, not the TV itself.
To be honest, I can not really say that I have ever gone to someone else's house and really noticed someone's tv picture being significantly better or worse than anyone else's. Its always been the input signal that has made the difference (IE DVD over VHS, component video cables as opposed to composite, HD over standard broadcasts, etc.)
Also, its nice to see the wall hangers in commercial installations, but its unlikely youre going to get such a clean look in your home, unless you have an electrician come in and wire an outlet and cable jack directly behind the TV. Even then you may still have a problem asthetically if it requires a cable box.
Im really surprised that Home Theater Master has not been mentioned... I bought the MX-500 for my father for christmas last year and its just awesome, and can be found for under $100 also. It mixes both programmable "soft" keys with hard keys and if the codes dont provide all the functions of your device, as long as you have the original remote you can teach it new functions. It can control every function of every device I have (including my complex yamaha reciever and digital cable remotes). It also has "punch through" keys that allow you to control the volume on your reciever while still flipping channels on your tv or cable box (sounds intuititive, but most cheaper remotes require you to change mode from tv to reciever for this). The light up function also makes it easy to see at night, though the softkeys are not backlit. Unlike what I hear about alot of other high end remotes, the battery life is long and on par with a typical remote.
- 700 (updated 500?)t ml
I sound like a fanboy, but I really cant say enough about it. Its easy enough for my family to use, and very versatile. http://www.remotecentral.com is an excellent site for remote reviews, and you can see that it is rated very highly.
links:
MX-500: http://www.remotecentral.com/mx500/index.html
Mx
http://www.remotecentral.com/mx700/index.h
Ill see your flame and raise you another word twisting...
So you are saying that conservatives prefer to see their children get sucked into the renting cycle rather than let them get some savings together so they can actually buy a home of their own?
Maybe it needs some clearing up, but the quoted statement meant that the views on social and political issues may be less divergent in liberal households, hence the parent-child relationships are better. This was based on the axiom that children are generally considerably more liberal than their parents, and this is a cause of friction.
I work with some people who are from various parts of the country, and what I have learned is that living at home is viewed very differently in different parts of the US.
I am from the Northeast, and almost all of my friends lived at home for at least two years after finishing school, with the exceptions being those that found jobs far from their homes, and those that were living in cramped apartments in the city. It also took me two years to move out, and again that was only because I found a job far from home (though I did feel it was time to get out). My parents also tried to convince me to stay.
My friends from the midwest and south, however tell a different story, and are pretty much pushed out the door once they finish school. The feeling seems to be mutual, as they too see living at home as a fate worse than death and just could not understand why in the world I would actually choose to live at home when I had a good job after graduation.
The main factor in these views IMHO is the cost of living. Buying a house/coop/condo for someone just getting out of school is out of the question except for maybe the top 3% of earners. Even renting a decent place in NYC or its suburbs is likely to cost you 50% of your take home income. The only other factor I can really attribute to these differences are just regional cultural differences. It may just be that since these areas tend to be very liberal, there is less of a divide between parents and children and hence they can coexist better together.
If you are going to nail me as responsible for all of my government's policies, then you are essentially saying that every citizen votes in exactly the same way. Last I remember 49% of America voted against Bush and thus his policies. An exercised right to vote does not mean that policies that I favor or support get enacted.
A little off the track, but- couldn't it also be said that citizens in dictatorships have the ability to revolt? And their lack of revolting is essentially an acceptance of the dictatorship and its policies?
In 1998 someone might have said the same thing, putting a search engine in place of photoshop and saying "imagine completely stripping out all boolean operators from search engines to simplify the interface"- it would make no sense simply because searching through millions- billions of documents is a far more complex process than .
However, here we are today, and I just type a few terms into google, and 95% of the time, I get exactly what I want... almost magically.
I can imagine an interface to photoshop where there there is just a command box that you could do things like type "fix blotches" or "make water blue."
I am not saying I disagree with your argument or saying that photoshop could or should be reduced to a one button interface. However, I think it is a bit shortsighted to say that complexity is a necessity.
Also remember that once you are in 1099 land, the world can become your tax deduction. Have a home office? It can be used as a deduction. Your computer, cellphone, blackberry, portable hard drive (aka ipod), gas money, car depreciation (and even the whole car purchase price), etc. can all be deducted from your taxes. Obviously talk to an accountant, there are very specific rules about all these things, but even if you are conservative, you will be laughing your ass off as you pay that extra 14%. And as the parent stated, using an S or C corp can also be used as a vehicle to defer or reduce your tax bill (but most importantly reduce your personal liability!).
About an accountant- It is highly recommended but not entirely necessary to go through an accountant for these things. Accountants are people just like you, and you can read the same books and tax codes that they do. Accountants make mistakes and get too aggressive too and YOU are the one signing the tax return- having an accountant doesn't reduce your liablity one iota. If you have the techie spirt figuring out what you can and cannot deduct should not be too difficult, and won't leave you a whimpering uneducated mess if the IRS comes a knocking for an audit.
My policy is that I upgrade when there is a 7x improvement in hardware speeds than my current machine at an affordable price. Right now my 700mhz machine is holding up just fine, and I have no problem doing development on it, or playing modest games, or its normal use- websurfing and mp3 jukebox. I am fairly sure that by the time we get to 5ghz, which right now feels like will take an eternity, I will become dissatisfied with the performance enough that I will want to upgrade. CPU speed isnt really what is making me drool, but things like PCI-X, hypertransport, the new fast front side busses, usb2.0, SATA, dual core processors, 64 bit processors, etc. do make me want to upgrade.
How did I come up w/ the 7x figure? My first real machine was a 100mhz pentium. Around 2000, it started falling behind the software advances, and I could not play free cell without mp3's skipping. This was during the race to 1ghz, and once the processors hit 1ghz the 700mhz chips were a relatively cheap $200 or so, so I went for it. Thats been the standard since.
The interest generated by cash in the bank is reported on earnings statements. As you can read here: http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1288776/000 119312504175503/dex991.htm , the interest generated was 3.8 million for the quarter. Not even a drop in the bucket.
I discussed this with a politically active (Republican) friend of mine in college, because of all things that seemingly require a National holiday, election day seems to me to be by far the most deserving. Essentially, she told me it boils down to the fact that numerically there are more Democrats in the US than Republicans. However, Democrats are more aloof and have much lower turnouts at the polls than Republicans tend to. Hence this is why you often see Democratic groups holding voter registration drives while Republicans tend to focus their efforts on promoting their actual candidates. As a side effect to this, Republicans would never support a national election day as it would benefit Democrats more than Republicans, since presumably turnouts would be far greater.
I am a Kerry supporter and Bush hater, and I have to say that Bush's responses were far better. They were more detailed and contained specific ideas of what he has done, and what he plans to do.
Of course, I do not believe that Bush (or Kerry) actually wrote any of this. But at the same time, his team apparently understands the issues alot better than Kerry's team, and that is important. Do I really think Bush or Kerry have a friggen clue as to what VOIP is? Noooo way. In fact, I am not even sure that if either Bush or Kerry even read the responses, they would fully understand what was being discussed. However, when something like the Can-Spam act comes across their desk, it appears Bush has a much better team working for him to put it in little words he can understand and thus should be able to make better decisions on these types of issues.
Ive been hearing this more and more... Being a large and growing company does not make you a monopoly! Google does not have a monopoly on anything, the closest they come is a large market share on searching.
But, lets say for a minute that Google is a monopoly. There is still no comparison to MS. MS gained a virtual monopoly in Operating Systems. Operating Systems are large, complicated things. It is not all that easy for a target MS user to switch his OS. There is the learning curve issue, the fact that any other OS out there will not have the same and possibly inferior software, etc. -There are many, many reasons why you can't just change your OS and I do not think they really need to be explained to this crowd. By comparison, a search engine is complete cake to switch over. There is no complex set of commands needed to use one, fear of not being able to use certain sites unless you use certain search engines, etc. Type 20 characters, and im at yahoo. or lycos. or hotbot. or askJeeves, or msn, etc. There is no lock-in. They are not making me sign up for gmail or even pushing it down my throat if I just want to search. They are not "helpfully" bundling a web browser with their google toolbar, or making me convert to the google filesystem. I could go on and on. The central point being that though they have a "monopoly" on searching, there is nothing stopping me from switching to yahoo tommorrow and thus they have no ability to force anything down anyone's throat or force competitors out. Google is merely taking what they do best-searching and applying it to things other than just general web searches.
And who says a monopoly is a bad thing if it is not abused and created because the people have chosen the entity to be their sole provider? I would also not think that MS is just going to look the other way as this happens either. They have proven time and again that they can copy and then outdo groups who seem to have a near stranglehold on their market. Particularly, the deskbar is just begging to be copied and bundled into the next Windows.
Your comment reminds me of the minority report where the one false positive is considered by the public to completely outweigh all the good the system has done.
I cannot speak for the incident you are speaking of, or even of flight controls at all, but I do know that mercedes was able to reduce its accident rate by 1/3 in Germany by introducing a "drive-by-wire" stability management system on some of its models. Maybe this system will in some cases make mistakes. But a 33% reduction is a pretty drastic reduction- one that will make me sleep better at night, and is an acceptable risk for me.
I personally am looking forward to the day when my car will take control and brake for me when I have momentarily taken my attention off of the road and the guy in front of me has slammed on his brakes, or alert me that I am going off the road if I am falling asleep at the wheel. And even just vanilla traction control is an absolute godsend when driving my Mustang through the snow.
Some of these systems seem so easy to implement too- I mean how hard can it be to put a sensor in front of the car and sense if you are approaching an object at a speed that you will soon not be able to avoid a collision? I understand it is not quite *that* simplistic, but surely it can not be much harder than implementing an airbag system. I am guessing it is mostly the fear of litigation that keeps such systems out of cars today.
I don't know how out of shape you guys are, but a 10 mile ride should not make you a sweaty mess unless you are really chugging to get there. In summer it may be an issue, but it should be no worse than sitting in a hot car before the AC kicks on or waiting for the subway in a sweltering station.
I agree. My "Big Idea" for a racing game would be a game where you could do races along routes. Not race tracks, but routes like DC to Boston, or a typical commute from the Nassau/Suffolk border on Long Island to manhattan, etc (throw in traffic for an alternate "ultra realistic" office-space type mode). Then I realized that to do it right, it had to be real, and maps that size are just infeasible. mebbe on the PS10 :)