Having just driven Toronto-San Francisco and back, almost the entire time at speed limit or speed limit +5, I must say that, having encountered limits from 45-75 mph on the highway, people were exceeding all of them by the same margins. The biggest danger I regularly faced on those roads were people who thought it was somehow either okay or safe to tailgate someone going highway speeds, just because they did not want to go 100 (kph) in a 70 (kph) zone. Luckily, I never had an animal walk in front of me while tailgated, but that was amazing, given the number of animals that I had to dodge on that trip (and the racoon and the ssquirrel that I was too slow on).
Speed limits are hardly uiversally too slow--they are a speed which everyone should be able to drive safely, not just young, cocky, caffeinated jerks in late model-year cars. While some of the speed limits I encountered (the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and mmuch of Ontario come to mind), there were some that were also set much too high (any rural highway in Manitoba comes to mind--an the speed limits are not even particularly high, the roads are just dangerously laid out).
Having had a fundamental realization that 1. traffic tickets are expensive and 2. I really didn't want to get in another accident (not related to speeding, but going slower would have helped), I keep to the speed limit, and I will say that neither my schedule nor my sanity suffer from it. I mean, how often is it deadly important that one gets home 2-3 minutes earlier on a 40-minute commute? Even cross-country, I might have saved a day in eleven, which I could easily have mad up by choosing a more direct route. The savings most people make are chump-change compared to the additional risk, and a device like this (if it can actaully change based upon the local speed limit) is a good start in reigning in notoriously dangerous teen drivers (I know I used to regularly do 80-85 in a 65 zone travelling to and from my undergraduate university, and it had nothing to do with whether my parents trusted me, as I was in all other ways a model youth.
I have never really understood why it is news that a company that has had a profitable year wasn't as profitable as a previous blockbuster year. Last year, with greater profits, was news; this year just seems normal. Would anyone have a headline saying "Square-Enix has nice, but unexceptional, year"?
I think what all these complaints about institutional confusion ignore is that 'NASA scientist' is not taken to mean, policymaker speaking for NASA--rather, it is a coe word for 'man who knows his shit,' much in the same vein as 'MIT professor.'
While I agree with the concept of reducing EULA and contracts to simple, understandable language, the parent post's call to "return to the days when the law was simple to read, and simple to enforce" is as wishy-washily romantic as actually believing his anarcho-capitalistic legal system would work. There has never been a period when civil law was simple to enforce, and, as a result, codes of law and lawyers have been a part of our societies for well over two millenia now.
Roman law was professionalized and often arcane, as were the civil codes that were based upon it and the foundation of law in Europe (except in England, where an equally complex system of common law developed). The Church followed Canon law, and this interacted with civil law in strage ways that required complex legal thinking in some cases. Jews followed Rabbinic law, and Moslems had Sharia and other law systems. And complex systems of law and the use of legal representatives in its interpretation were hardly limited to Europe, but were the norm in India, China, Africa, and elsewhere. Even historical Iceland, which is apparently (according to the very pro- stilted Wikipedia article on anarcho-capitalism) held up by some as some sort of anarcho-capitalist paradise, the Allthing had complex shades of law that required intervention by lawyers and judges (even if, as in the saga evidence, judgements were often circumvented through violence).
The move to a simple code of laws that may be easily read and enforced is a futurist move, not a historical one, and should not be represented otherwise.
If you are going to do a useability study, might I suggest sitting down a bunch of fairly bright volunteers with the documentation, and seeing how long it is before they get it up and running? As a Mac/PC user, I recall the hardest part of learning Unix (of which I still have no great command, but enough to extend the useability of my OS X laptop and write programs to batch simple functions for me) was the general spottiness of documentation--some of it is excellent and some of it looks like ot was written by an alien civilization (engineers!).
Find the provided docs and also find some of what you consider the best docs, and see if they can work it out for themselves without help. Once they get it running and customized, see how long it takes them to learn a new feature. Once they have learned a feature, see how long it takes them to use it on a repeat visit. Usability to me implies everything from the learning curve to the advanced user features.
You have no idea how much time I spent bored out of my mind in elementary and high school because my age-peers could not learn simple concepts at a commensurate pace, or retain much from reading. Putting children in classes below their level leads to boredom, malcontent, and destroys work ethics--if everything that your peers are struggling to do comes to you easily, why bother applying yourself? The current system on a whole has little to reward the gifted child with; while I believe that such programs as the one highlighted are the other extreme, and reward domineering, hot-housing parents who push their children too hard (and I saw this both growing up and as a teacher of the SAT), the idea that there should not be special programs for smart children is to say that students who are smarter do not deserve the same resources as those who are slower, and that they will be penalized for being better than their peers at what is being taught in school. This leads towards acting out and away from applying oneself--it took until university, where I could challenge myself by taking double-courseloads of subjects that interested me, until I finally recovered the focus lost when my 5th-grade math accelleration program ended and I got pushed back in with the rest of the third-graders the next year instead of moving through seventh and eight grade math. Without a single challenging subject for years--how would *you* maintain interest in your schoolwork, or come to view your attendace and the overly-easy assignments as little more than a joke?
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Having just driven Toronto-San Francisco and back, almost the entire time at speed limit or speed limit +5, I must say that, having encountered limits from 45-75 mph on the highway, people were exceeding all of them by the same margins. The biggest danger I regularly faced on those roads were people who thought it was somehow either okay or safe to tailgate someone going highway speeds, just because they did not want to go 100 (kph) in a 70 (kph) zone. Luckily, I never had an animal walk in front of me while tailgated, but that was amazing, given the number of animals that I had to dodge on that trip (and the racoon and the ssquirrel that I was too slow on).
Speed limits are hardly uiversally too slow--they are a speed which everyone should be able to drive safely, not just young, cocky, caffeinated jerks in late model-year cars. While some of the speed limits I encountered (the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and mmuch of Ontario come to mind), there were some that were also set much too high (any rural highway in Manitoba comes to mind--an the speed limits are not even particularly high, the roads are just dangerously laid out).
Having had a fundamental realization that 1. traffic tickets are expensive and 2. I really didn't want to get in another accident (not related to speeding, but going slower would have helped), I keep to the speed limit, and I will say that neither my schedule nor my sanity suffer from it. I mean, how often is it deadly important that one gets home 2-3 minutes earlier on a 40-minute commute? Even cross-country, I might have saved a day in eleven, which I could easily have mad up by choosing a more direct route. The savings most people make are chump-change compared to the additional risk, and a device like this (if it can actaully change based upon the local speed limit) is a good start in reigning in notoriously dangerous teen drivers (I know I used to regularly do 80-85 in a 65 zone travelling to and from my undergraduate university, and it had nothing to do with whether my parents trusted me, as I was in all other ways a model youth.
Trolls are hardly uncommon on /.--you must be using quite a filter if this is the first you have seen.
I have never really understood why it is news that a company that has had a profitable year wasn't as profitable as a previous blockbuster year. Last year, with greater profits, was news; this year just seems normal. Would anyone have a headline saying "Square-Enix has nice, but unexceptional, year"?
I think what all these complaints about institutional confusion ignore is that 'NASA scientist' is not taken to mean, policymaker speaking for NASA--rather, it is a coe word for 'man who knows his shit,' much in the same vein as 'MIT professor.'
While I agree with the concept of reducing EULA and contracts to simple, understandable language, the parent post's call to "return to the days when the law was simple to read, and simple to enforce" is as wishy-washily romantic as actually believing his anarcho-capitalistic legal system would work. There has never been a period when civil law was simple to enforce, and, as a result, codes of law and lawyers have been a part of our societies for well over two millenia now.
Roman law was professionalized and often arcane, as were the civil codes that were based upon it and the foundation of law in Europe (except in England, where an equally complex system of common law developed). The Church followed Canon law, and this interacted with civil law in strage ways that required complex legal thinking in some cases. Jews followed Rabbinic law, and Moslems had Sharia and other law systems. And complex systems of law and the use of legal representatives in its interpretation were hardly limited to Europe, but were the norm in India, China, Africa, and elsewhere. Even historical Iceland, which is apparently (according to the very pro- stilted Wikipedia article on anarcho-capitalism) held up by some as some sort of anarcho-capitalist paradise, the Allthing had complex shades of law that required intervention by lawyers and judges (even if, as in the saga evidence, judgements were often circumvented through violence).
The move to a simple code of laws that may be easily read and enforced is a futurist move, not a historical one, and should not be represented otherwise.
If you are going to do a useability study, might I suggest sitting down a bunch of fairly bright volunteers with the documentation, and seeing how long it is before they get it up and running? As a Mac/PC user, I recall the hardest part of learning Unix (of which I still have no great command, but enough to extend the useability of my OS X laptop and write programs to batch simple functions for me) was the general spottiness of documentation--some of it is excellent and some of it looks like ot was written by an alien civilization (engineers!).
Find the provided docs and also find some of what you consider the best docs, and see if they can work it out for themselves without help. Once they get it running and customized, see how long it takes them to learn a new feature. Once they have learned a feature, see how long it takes them to use it on a repeat visit. Usability to me implies everything from the learning curve to the advanced user features.
You have no idea how much time I spent bored out of my mind in elementary and high school because my age-peers could not learn simple concepts at a commensurate pace, or retain much from reading. Putting children in classes below their level leads to boredom, malcontent, and destroys work ethics--if everything that your peers are struggling to do comes to you easily, why bother applying yourself? The current system on a whole has little to reward the gifted child with; while I believe that such programs as the one highlighted are the other extreme, and reward domineering, hot-housing parents who push their children too hard (and I saw this both growing up and as a teacher of the SAT), the idea that there should not be special programs for smart children is to say that students who are smarter do not deserve the same resources as those who are slower, and that they will be penalized for being better than their peers at what is being taught in school. This leads towards acting out and away from applying oneself--it took until university, where I could challenge myself by taking double-courseloads of subjects that interested me, until I finally recovered the focus lost when my 5th-grade math accelleration program ended and I got pushed back in with the rest of the third-graders the next year instead of moving through seventh and eight grade math. Without a single challenging subject for years--how would *you* maintain interest in your schoolwork, or come to view your attendace and the overly-easy assignments as little more than a joke?