In most high high schools one has free speech ad infinitum. A student can yell out in the classroom, curse the principle, and generally make sure the he or she is the center of attention. Short of a felony, the state still has to educate.
George Bush's supreme court has made sure that this is no longer true to any degree of the imagination.
However, the rest of your post strikes me as paranoid and delusional. Shouting during a calculus exam has nothing to do with free speech, and prohibiting such an activity doesn't violate free speech according to the supreme court. On the other hand, the manner in which the student in question expressed himself wasn't disruptive in the slightest.
If I had a professor who was spewing bullshit about intelligent design during a biology lecture, I would sure as hell raise my hand, and call him out on it, or at least provide evidence to the contrary. The ability to speak freely in an academic setting is paramount to the integrity of any educational institution. The professor might fail me as a result, but a public university sure as hell couldn't expel me for speaking up in such a manner. Apart from having to deal with the legal backlash that is sure to occur, the professor in question would likely lose his credibility (and possibly his tenure), and the university's accreditation would be put in jeopardy.
The university on the other hand is not so comprehensive, and have the responsibility to genuinely educate, not just babysit.
I want a caring administration to keep track of the students and redirect them from behaviors that are destructive.
These two statements are in complete direct contradiction with each other.
Given that college is a choice, so it success in college. A student can choose to get an education or waste the opportunity.
The iconic Supreme Court ruling, "Brown vs. Board of Education" in 1954, which desegregated school systems, stated in the first page of the ruling: "Where a State has undertaken to provide an opportunity for an education in its public schools, such an opportunity is a right which must be made available to all on equal terms" In other words, all students must be held to the same standards. So, although a student can be kicked out for failing his classes, any other students with similar grades must be subject to the same actions. On the other hand, it is not the right of the university to arbitrarily decide which students can stay, and which must leave. All in all, this is legal recognition that the right to choose to get an education is a fundamental right is protected under US law.
I also know that universities cannot release student data, so the ability of the university to defend itself in the press is limited, as well as the ability to get rid of such a student. I recall one such student when I was in school, that really seemed crazy and scary, and we would have all been better off without him.
It has been mentioned time, and time again that the Columbine shooters went on their rampage, not because they were "crazy and scary", but because of the xenophobic reaction people tend to have against anybody who's even slightly different from the norm. Arbitrary discrimination is NOT the answer to any of our problems, and will only make things worse. I could draw historical parallels, but I'd rather not invoke Godwin's law for this discussion....
It's a state university. That means they're bound by the Constitution and cannot expel students without affording them due process.
Had this been a private school, he would have had utterly no recourse: expulsion at will for any reason, even none at all, is one of the perks (if you're an administrator) of being at a private school.
Despite what George Bush thinks, the constitution applies to everybody in the US.
Had a private university printed "we reserve the right to murder our students" in their handbook, they would be allowed to do so under their own rules. However, you bet your ass that they'd be found guilty of murder should they ever choose to use that policy. The terms in the handbook are bound by the same laws and regulations that the rest of us are.
Public/private boundaries of free speech are somewhat blurry, although the university was public in this case. Assuming the kid gets a good lawyer (and I'd bet that the ACLU would take up his case for free), there's no way that the decision would stand up in court.
Hate to point this out, but I don't think we're talking about another university here,... the fact that he referred to "Principal" and "locker" should indicate that he's talking about a high school. The rules do tend to be different between high school and college; for one, high school students are generally minors, having not reached the age of 18; most college students are adults, with full legal rights.
Not quite. There's a bit of a language gap here, so bear with me: 1) The sort of higher-education institution one attends between the ages of ~18 and ~21 is referred to as a "University" everywhere on the planet apart from the US, where a "College" is where one studies toward an undergraduate degree. Most US "Colleges" are also referred to as "Universities" because they also grant Post-Graduate degrees (also referred to as "graduate degrees" in the US, although you can easily see why this phrase is redundant and ambiguous).
2) "College" in the UK most typically refers to a school attended between the ages of 16 and 18 to prepare/qualify students for study at a university, typically by taking A-Levels (similar to AP in the US, but a bit more sane). The UK's structure of what Americans refer to "High School" can be complicated, varies by geographic locale, although this term generally holds true. "Honors" programs at American High Schools that take place in the Junior/Senior years are somewhat comparable. Much of this terminology has crossed over into Australia, and many private 4-year "High Schools" call themselves colleges. Professional/vocational schools are also typically referred to as a "college," which is somewhat consistent with US usage.
3) To add to the confusion, some smaller tertiary schools in Australia do call themselves colleges. This most likely arises from the original definition of the word "college" as "a group of colleagues". The US's beloved Electoral College is an example of this. Likewise, old large Universities in the UK such as Oxford, St Andrews, and Cambridge are subdivided into smaller "colleges". Much of the Ivy League has adopted a similar system in the hopes of appearing authentic.
4) Generally speaking, the head of any educational institution in the UK is referred to as the "Principal", including both Universities, and primary and secondary schools. This term applies in virtually all of the Commonwealth countries (ie. all of the former British colonies apart from the US)
5) Virtually all universities in the UK and Australia are publicly funded (as they should be!). They are not necessarily under direct governmental oversight, but would almost certainly be subject to large monetary penalties for such an egregious violation of the law.
6) "Legal Adulthood" is not granted at the age of 18 around the world, as you would imply it is. It's not even defined at the age of 18 in the US, and falls under state jurisdiction. Although the age *is* 18 in Australia, England, and Wales, it's 16 in Scotland. In the US, various states have passed legislation to restrict the legal rights of its citizens by either raising the age to 19, 21, or making legal adulthood contingent upon graduating High School. This article on the subject should be enlightening.
Hope that clears up any confusion floating around..... silly Americans for tweaking their language and measurement systems to make them incompatible with the rest of the English-speaking world.....
Although I don't see any evidence stating that laptops can't be valuable instructional tools in the classroom, I have also seen very little evidence that they *can*, based upon 1:1 laptop initiatives that have been attempted in the past (in both affluent, and poor areas)
For starters, the absolute biggest hurdle to jump over is the teachers. Many are reluctant to teach with laptops, many are unable to, and many have enough experience to (correctly) make the call that handing a laptop to every child isn't the sort of educational reform needed in the US at the moment.
If teachers aren't able to use the laptops, they sure as hell won't be effectively used in a classroom setting. Even if the teachers are willing participants, the cost of training them to use the laptops is almost as great as the cost of the machines themselves.
Educational software (especially FREE educational software) isn't at a stage where it can be easily and reliably integrated into a lesson without the considerable overhead of getting students to learn how to use the software, and overcoming any technical glitches that might occur. This added overhead typically counteracts whatever benefit the laptops might have provided in the first place.
I do hope that more good software gets developed (and not just proprietary apps for the OLPC, which, for an "open" project, seems to encourage lock-in rather than cooperation), although I don't see 1:1 initiatives as being particularly viable at the present.
On the other hand, we have seen quite a bit of success in our own district with giving laptops and projectors to individual teachers, providing a bit of training, and then encouraging teachers to go out and think of ways to creatively integrate the technology into their curriculum as a teaching/demonstration aid. We also make an active effort to provide teachers with a good list of online resources to consult for information and material.
Not all of them catch on to it, but the ones who do report fantastic results, and students describe the lessons as being particularly memorable and instructive (which can also be confirmed by test scores). From this point, teachers now have a much better grasp of how technology can be used in the classroom, as well as its strengths and weaknesses. I'd feel much more comfortable giving this sort of teacher a classroom full of computers (should they see the need for it) than one who has virtually no experience with technology-assisted instruction.
The "let them eat cake" ethos of the OLPC founders drives me nuts, as the benefits are unclear, and there are other educational reforms that are far more urgent at the present. Adding more technology to schools *IS* a good thing, but it has to be done gradually and responsibly. Giving every kid a laptop is not only a bad idea economically, but will also have a *negative* educational impact if the educators are not prepared for it.
Although I'll agree with you that a 192kbps+ MP3 sounds virtually identical to its CD counterpart, the iPod is not a professional-grade piece of audio equipment, and its analogue output really shouldn't be connected to anything other than a set of headphones due to the relatively low quality of the preamp, which, coincidentally *CAN* be scientifically tested and measured unlike most other audiophile "claims". Although the test was done on a 3rd-generation iPod a few years ago, the same output stage was used on the 4th-gen models. The newer generations use a different output stage that I haven't seen much information on, so I'm afraid I can't make comments on their performance....
Ironically, the iPod Shuffle demonstrates the best quantifiable audio characteristics when performing under a load, thanks to its push-pull amplifier design, which isn't commonly seen in portable consumer devices.
This shouldn't come as too much of a surprise, considering the weight/space/power requirements of an iPod. And for all intents and purposes, the iPod's circuits are perfectly adequate for their indented purpose as a portable audio player.
I love my iPod, because I can bring my entire music library with me in my car, or on the train on the way to work.
However, when I perform a DJ set, I use a nice set of CD-based "turntables" (which are increasingly popular these days, as they can do all sorts of neat tricks that are impossible on vinyl), because the noisy preamp, and weak bass response of an iPod becomes very readily apparent when amplified through a big PA. Recently, there are also a few "pro" level DJ products that take their input from the PCM digital output from the iPod's dock connector, thus entirely bypassing the "faulty" amplification stage, and performing the analogue conversion and amplification externally.
Entire houses wouldn't have to be rewired, and "Smart sockets" would in all likelihood be unreliable, prone to hacks/abuse, expensive, and impossible to enforce.
Instead, a more reasonable solution would be to supply three-phase power to homes, and to split the three phases off at the main breaker/distribution box. A hypothetical arrangement of phases would be
1) Permanent lighting, and other "essential" devices (eg. life-critical medical equipment, and other things that should already have a battery backup). 2) Socketed outlets, low-current appliances, refrigerators. 3) Air-conditioning, other high-current/nonessential appliances, electric car chargers (we can dream, can't we?)...in order of decreasing importance. For any home that's reasonably up-to-spec, and was wired by an electrician with half a brain, this could easily be implemented with the addition of a transformer box, and re-patching the main distribution box accordingly.
Multi-phase power is already in extensive use at commercial and industrial sites, and is a proven technology that never really found its way into household use (mainly for lack of need). If you'll also notice, only Phase II devices above would really require "clean" power. A/C compressors should respond gracefully to drops in voltage, and lighting can always be dimmed without worrying about damaging equipment.
On the other hand, in NYC, Con Edison has a semi-automated system for alerting customers of possible shortages, and advising them to shut down non-critical cooling and lighting operations. Supposedly, compliance has been high, and the program a success (although such a program would probably only work in a large city). Back when I worked in NYC, losing A/C in the afternoon, wasn't even all that bad as long as we turned off extra lighting, and powered down other unnecessary equipment. By the time the residual "coolness" from the morning wore off, and things started to get uncomfortable, it was time to call it quits. Dress-code restrictions were also relaxed, and we had the option to "shift" our hours earlier.
I've personally been eying Pixel [kanzelsberger.com]. I haven't giving it extensive testing yet since the programmer hasn't released the OS X version with a proper Mac GUI (which is promised in the next compile). He's also bothered to compile his code on quite a few operating systems, including some that only have like a dozen desktop users.
I was mainly impressed with Pixelmator, because it provides a very substantial subset of Photoshop's features, took a year to develop, and costs something like 50 bucks... As a 1.0 product, I'm still pretty impressed by it. Adobe's really been slacking, and it's only a matter of time before the world realizes that they can get by without them. Sadly, though, it's destined to remain a Mac-only app for quite some time, as it relies heavily upon MacOS's core libraries to do most of its heavy-duty image processing (but benefits from the heavy optimizations and hardware-acceleration that apple took the time to include). Perhaps we can get a similar cross-platform set of libraries released, although I'm not too optimistic at the moment......
As for Pixel..... wow. Even using non-native widgets, it looks absolutely stunning (and non-native apps have a tendency to be absolute shit on MacOS). One of my biggest criticisms of large, overmanaged projects is that they love to create their own crossplatform windowing toolkits, which inevitably leads to memory hoggage, slowness, ugliness, and a whole host of other issues that have to be individually resolved on each platform, eliminating whatever flexibility the toolkit was originally designed to provide.
The GIMP's toolkit eventually morphed into GTK, which also caused the GTK and GNOME folks quite a bit of grief early on, although the two teams are now thankfully independent, and GTK+ is pretty decent -- Xfce is particularly nice. Most of Mozilla/Firefox's headaches lie with its toolkit, XUL and XPCOM, and not with the actual browser itself -- it's a cool platform, but I'm still not convinced that the overhead is worth it, and that individual native ports might have been a better route to take. I'm not sure if Blender has its own toolkit, but I'm pretty convinced that its UI wasn't designed by humans. OO.o is a hideous Java monstrosity, and very few Java apps are able to get past the clunkiness of the various toolkits available to Java. And so on, and so forth......
However, Pixel paradoxically seems to have done a pretty damn good job of providing its own widgets. It's also quite snappy, and doesn't use that much memory. (Snappiness is a bit of a pet peeve of mine, and I'm continually frustrated by the fact that Operating Systems have gotten *less* responsive over the past few years). I'm frankly not even sure *how* the guy has managed get it to run (and run well) on so many operating systems without spending a gargantuan effort, given that SDL is the only graphic-related library that it links to, and isn't even available on some of the platforms he supports. I've do have to give him major props for using OpenGL -- it's clearly the way forward.
On the other hand, he seems to have issues with compiling it on other architectures, which raises even more questions about what sort of magic mushrooms are powering this application. Given that he's got both PowerPC and x86 ports, I can't think of any technical reason for a port to x86-64 or Intel Mac would be even remotely difficult.
If only we could see his code.......
That all said and done, it crashes a lot for me. A very cool and intriguing app that should serve as a model to other enormous projects that have less to show for their efforts than this one guy.
I wholeheartedly agree. We need to stop touting OO as a good substitute for Office.
Office isn't very good, and for OOo to do *worse* than it is a pretty miserable achievement. We need to get some fresh faces involved with the project to either clean things up (a la Firefox), or start from scratch to build an application that's got an overall "friendlier" appearance.
"Lack of features" isn't even the biggest issue here. Despite being much "simpler", I find AbiWord to be vastly superior to OOo, even though its featureset is comparatively limited.
The GIMP has been stumbling along for years upon years, and has never really managed to reach a state of usefulness to designers. However, in a very short period of time, two guys wrote an f---ing amazing shareware "Photoshop substitute" for Mac OS. Granted, it's not photoshop, but unlike The GIMP, or OOo, it's fast, has a good UI, and even though it lacks some of Photoshop's more advanced features, it's more than adequate for my needs.
It's not open-source or cross-platform, but seriously..... two guys wrote it in their spare time!
I'll also ignore that comment about teaching primary schoolers LaTeX. I'm a reasonably savvy university student, and I find LaTeX absolutely unusable. It's got to be one of the most difficult and convoluted pieces of software in widespread use. It's great in concept, but make one tiny syntax error, and the compiler blows up with a 2-page long indecipherable error message. Most C compliers have better error handling.
My bank sends me an email and a text message any time a direct debit, direct deposit, or credit card transaction is made against my account without the presence of a physical card or cheque, or if a transaction occurs in a foreign country.
In this case, I could hypothetically phone the bank to block any fradulent charges before they even clear the bank, and block any further transactions.
I'm not sure which banks offer this, but it's a fantastic feature to have. Of course, most banks also offer fraud protection.
Wouldn't the driver's BAC be the "smoking gun" in most DUI cases?
The evidence of an alcohol purchase isn't going to be remotely sufficient to convict without a BAC test, and the presence of a BAC test alone should be more than sufficient to produce a conviction. I honestly don't see where the purhcahse record could hypothetically fit into the equation.
If there's an argument for or against ID scanning, this isn't it. Even from the cops' perspective, this isn't even going to help them 'nab the bad guys' any more than they're already equipped to do.
Perpetual motion machines are flat-out impossible. Conservation of energy is a *VERY* well established scientific fact.
Chemical reactions don't necessarily release heat. Endothermic reactions tend to absorb it. The reaction mechanism here just happens to end up with a large amount of its original reactants at the end, and most likely catalyzes itself somewhere along the way.
The reaction in question isn't exactly perpetual either. The system eventually reaches equilibrium, and the cycle stops. (Entropy -- another well-established scientific principle makes perpetual motion rather unlikely)
If you wanted to harvest energy from the reaction, you'd have to directly absorb it from the system as the reaction is taking place. This alters the system, and will most likely result in the reaction stopping, assuming that the temperature differential is great enough to allow you to harvest any useful amount of energy (I don't recall this particular reaction getting very hot, so that seems unlikely). You'd also be limited by the second law of thermodynamics and the carnot efficency probably wouldn't be all that favorable.
So, all in all, the reaction's rather novel, although there's nothing in our current understanding of scientific fact that dictates that it should be impossible, even though we haven't been able to piece together the exact mechanism by which the reaction actually takes place.
The reaction's notable for its cyclical nature and the fact that we don't really understand the underlying mechanisms. According to the news article, we still haven't figured it out.
Yes, but the mentality of a motorcycle driver is somewhat different from the the mentality of a car driver.
A motorcycle driver *knows* that he will very likely die if he crashes at high speed. Car drivers typically don't tend to exercise the same amount of caution.
Likewise, the handling and braking on a $2500 car can't be all that good. Pedestrian injuries seem extremely likely.
Why the hell would you need several in reserve? It's not like the first is going to break -- the old IBM keyboards will probably outlast the apocalypse. The Model M is easily one of the most overengineered computer peripherals ever constructed.
1) It's an AP article. Not written by the Fox News staff
2) What comments? Safety concerns about the car do appear to be legitimate, and congestion is a *big* issue for India. Adding millions of cars to the roads will wreck havoc upon the national infrastructure, and produce tons of pollution.
It's important for everybody to have access to reliable transportation. However, adding more cars to the roads might not be the best solution to that problem. Personal vehicles are a piss poor solution for large, densely populated cities. Essential services and jobs can be easily placed within walking distances, and public transport should be able to take care of the rest.
If you want to criticize the "let them eat cake" mentality, start speaking out about the absurdity of the OLPC project. Those guys are far more guilty of it than the people concerned about the sustainability of placing millions of unsafe cars into an already overcrowded road network.
The new apples are closer in feel to a laptop keyboard, and actually seem to provide a tad more tactile response than a typical laptop, and is also quite a bit better than a typical $5 keyboard.
Granted laptops aren't the best things to type on, but people seem to have adapted....
1) Squash a regular voice coil speaker cone, and shove it into a tiny cabinet. This is obviously not optimal.
2) Make a flat object to vibrate to produce your sound. This can cause all sorts of unwanted resonances, the elimination of which is one of NXT's primary innovations.
Bass, however, still is a problem no matter what design you choose. Because lower frequencies have longer wavelengths, the object producing said waves needs to have a great enough range of vibration to produce those wavelengths. (mountains and weather systems can produce massive kilometers-long sound waves that are able to literally circle the globe, but I digress...) Because flat panel speakers are by their very nature, flat, the range of motion for the panel is limited to the depth of the cabinet, which typically isn't that much.
The Logitech design does pretty well at lower volume levels, although it's obvious that a better rubber gasket around the panel would allow the panel travel further, and offer an increased bass response.
The other option is to get the bass response of the flat panels "good enough", add a crossover, and funnel whatever bass the panels can't produce into a subwoofer that gets hidden out of sight. Once again, due to the long wavelengths, a low frequency sound has poor directionality, and is transmitted through solid surfaces more easily.
It's not perfect, but you can't fight the laws of physics. If you want big wavelengths, you need a big speaker.
I misread the headline as "Material Turns All Surfaces into Sterno"
which, although a boon to the catering industry, would be somewhat troubling.
Fortunately, they're just talking about NXT's cool speaker transducers that have been around for quite some time now (yawn...). Given that the laws of acoustics do still apply, even if the speaker is flat, the "cabinet" needs to be properly designed to produce good sound.
I've got a portable speaker that incorporates the technology. Logitech mm28 -- I think I paid $15 for it, although it's discontinued now. Although it does sound fantastic for a tiny $15 speaker, the bass is a bit lacking, and the thing distorts all to hell when the volume is turned up. To be fair, it can be driven *quite* loud, which seems to indicate that the transducers are quite powerful, and that Logitech forgot to include some sort of volume-limiting circuit. It's more or less the most simplistic NXT design you could imagine, as it's a rounded rectangle panel with an NXT transducer a third of the way from either edge.
All in all, with a bit of refinement, it could be turned into a great product, and it's easy to see how there could be many applications for this. Even though it might not produce audiophile sound (at least, not as lotitech had it configured), I imagine that it could be quite handy for "hiding" speakers in various locations, and could definitely be used to improve the sound quality of mobile phones. It also avoids many of the pitfalls of other "flat panel" designs.
Poking around their website reveals that they've got a pretty nifty portfolio of technologies backed up by some hard science -- they've even applied the same technology (in reverse) to produce touch screens.
While Firewire was invented by Apple, Microsoft also actually delivered support for IP over Firewire first (several years first), although I doubt many people used it on Windows because most PCs that have Firewire only have the 4-pin, non-powered version like Sony's iLink. Mini-to-mini Firewire cables are not too common.
Although I love Firewire, and will agree you on all of the points you made, I have one small objection:
The 4-pin socket seems to have only made it onto PC-based laptops and Sony PCs. Every PC desktop I've used had a 'normal' 6-pin socket, although I've admittedly been building my own over the past few years, and many mainstream desktops tend to omit the ports altogether, so my experience isn't all that vast.
That all said, I don't think the failure of IP via 1394 was due to the connectors. It's just not that useful. Ethernet is generally 'good enough' for transfers between machines. On the other hand, Apple's target disk mode is a fantastic combination of speed and simplicity, and is an absolute godsend for IT folks (especially if you've ever had to pry a hard drive from the iron grip of a powerbook)
What happened to firewire? All signs point to it going extinct in the very near future....
Wasn't it vastly superior to USB? It had a higher maximum throughput that could almost be realistically achieved, delivered useful amounts of power over the bus, and allowed devices to talk to each other. The audio/video features are pretty nice as well....
Both firewire and usb were well-supported on all platforms, so *that*'s not the issue. It's also robust, to the point of being found in many modern aircraft designs and the space shuttle.
IEEE1394c is even cooler, and uses CAT5e/RJ45 for wiring, allowing for automatic negotiation between other 1394 devices, and normal ethernet devices. Max speed is 800mbps, and it very nicely bridges the gap between "traditional" peripherals, and network-attached devices.
So what happened? Did I miss something? Who killed Firewire?
Plastic is a byproduct of petroleum refinement. The components of crude oil used to make plastic are *NOT* the same as the ones used to produce gasoline.
Also, we've got quite a bit of recyclable plastic sitting in landfills. More than we could ever possibly need. Likewise, there are a few new "plastic" materials on the horizon that can economically be produced from plants.
When I passed through Gatwick this week, there was a separate scanner for shoes that you go through after you've scanned your carry-on baggage. It does seem to speed things up a bit, although the shoe threat is completely absurd.
The security at Gatwick, on the other hand did make a good deal more sense than what I've seen in the US. Before passing the X-ray machines, an agent scans your boarding pass to make sure it's valid, checks ID, and then takes your picture. Upon arriving at the gate, your pass is scanned again, and the pictures are compared. This helps in two respects, by making sure that fraudulent boarding passes don't pass security, and making sure passengers don't swap places beyond the gate.
Of course, once again, as long as bombs and guns don't pass security, there's not a lot more you can do, and I'm not really even convinced that the ID checks are necessary. As long as the pilot maintains control of the plane, the amount of damage that can be inflicted is rather small.
Microsoft's not going after Google. If anything, they're pre-empting them (but even that would be hypothetical, unless Microsoft's been participating in some sort of industrial espionage...)
FAST is an enterprise search platform, which enables corporations to quickly search their entire repository of documents (assuming that they already have one). Given that SharePoint is increasingly being marketed as a large-scale document repository, this is a perfectly logical direction for Microsoft to take. FAST can be easily integrated into Microsoft's existing product portfolio, can easily be marketed (document storage and search is a hot area at the moment), and will greatly increase the value of their existing products. Even though the $1.2bn pricetag seems absurdly high, the purchase makes perfect sense from a business perspective.
The only way in which Microsoft is "going after Google" is that Google could hypothetically choose to develop a similar product. The Google Search Appliance is somewhat similar, although it's not in widespread use, and fills a rather different niche than SharePoint. Unless Google wants to seriously focus on delivering an enterprise-grade version of Google Docs, and providing a heavy-grade search feature to match, the relevance of this story to Google is tenuous at best.
Also, FAST isn't a recursive acronym. It's not even an acronym at all in English (or it'd be FSAT). Given that FAST is based in Norway, I'd guess that the phrase properly spells the acronym in Norwegian (although "fast" probably doesn't exist in the Norwegian lexicon, so I'm not even sure that's explanation either....)
You're right. In my opinion, the one thing that the American autos do somewhat well is pickup trucks. In this market segment, it's probably an advantage for the vehicles to be mechanically simple, built like a tank, and heavy, even if it is at the consequence of gas mileage. Of course, a lot of pickup drivers could also get by just fine with something smaller and more efficient.
American cars, however, tend to be kind of crappy. Although I don't really mind if the interior of a pickup is rough around the edges, I'm a bit amazed that the American automakers *still* haven't figured out how to make all of the bits fit together without massive gaps between the panels. They're also not particularly reliable, efficient, attractive, fast, or affordable compared to their foreign counterparts. Although I'm still not a huge fan of the Japanese imports (had two Toyotas, both were lemons), European cars have always been good to me. It's no surprise that the euro-inspired Focus is Ford's most popular car, and that both Ford and GM are relying heavily on their Volvo and Saab divisions to design new platforms. (Although they're not quite what they used to be, take a look at just how many old Volvos and Saabs are on the road today)
On the other hand, old Toyota pickups are quite literally indestructible.
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George Bush's supreme court has made sure that this is no longer true to any degree of the imagination.
However, the rest of your post strikes me as paranoid and delusional. Shouting during a calculus exam has nothing to do with free speech, and prohibiting such an activity doesn't violate free speech according to the supreme court. On the other hand, the manner in which the student in question expressed himself wasn't disruptive in the slightest.
If I had a professor who was spewing bullshit about intelligent design during a biology lecture, I would sure as hell raise my hand, and call him out on it, or at least provide evidence to the contrary. The ability to speak freely in an academic setting is paramount to the integrity of any educational institution. The professor might fail me as a result, but a public university sure as hell couldn't expel me for speaking up in such a manner. Apart from having to deal with the legal backlash that is sure to occur, the professor in question would likely lose his credibility (and possibly his tenure), and the university's accreditation would be put in jeopardy.
These two statements are in complete direct contradiction with each other.
The iconic Supreme Court ruling, "Brown vs. Board of Education" in 1954, which desegregated school systems, stated in the first page of the ruling:
"Where a State has undertaken to provide an opportunity for an education in its public schools, such an opportunity is a right which must be made available to all on equal terms"
In other words, all students must be held to the same standards. So, although a student can be kicked out for failing his classes, any other students with similar grades must be subject to the same actions. On the other hand, it is not the right of the university to arbitrarily decide which students can stay, and which must leave. All in all, this is legal recognition that the right to choose to get an education is a fundamental right is protected under US law.
It has been mentioned time, and time again that the Columbine shooters went on their rampage, not because they were "crazy and scary", but because of the xenophobic reaction people tend to have against anybody who's even slightly different from the norm. Arbitrary discrimination is NOT the answer to any of our problems, and will only make things worse. I could draw historical parallels, but I'd rather not invoke Godwin's law for this discussion....
Despite what George Bush thinks, the constitution applies to everybody in the US.
Had a private university printed "we reserve the right to murder our students" in their handbook, they would be allowed to do so under their own rules. However, you bet your ass that they'd be found guilty of murder should they ever choose to use that policy. The terms in the handbook are bound by the same laws and regulations that the rest of us are.
Public/private boundaries of free speech are somewhat blurry, although the university was public in this case. Assuming the kid gets a good lawyer (and I'd bet that the ACLU would take up his case for free), there's no way that the decision would stand up in court.
Not quite. There's a bit of a language gap here, so bear with me:
1) The sort of higher-education institution one attends between the ages of ~18 and ~21 is referred to as a "University" everywhere on the planet apart from the US, where a "College" is where one studies toward an undergraduate degree. Most US "Colleges" are also referred to as "Universities" because they also grant Post-Graduate degrees (also referred to as "graduate degrees" in the US, although you can easily see why this phrase is redundant and ambiguous).
2) "College" in the UK most typically refers to a school attended between the ages of 16 and 18 to prepare/qualify students for study at a university, typically by taking A-Levels (similar to AP in the US, but a bit more sane). The UK's structure of what Americans refer to "High School" can be complicated, varies by geographic locale, although this term generally holds true. "Honors" programs at American High Schools that take place in the Junior/Senior years are somewhat comparable. Much of this terminology has crossed over into Australia, and many private 4-year "High Schools" call themselves colleges. Professional/vocational schools are also typically referred to as a "college," which is somewhat consistent with US usage.
3) To add to the confusion, some smaller tertiary schools in Australia do call themselves colleges. This most likely arises from the original definition of the word "college" as "a group of colleagues". The US's beloved Electoral College is an example of this. Likewise, old large Universities in the UK such as Oxford, St Andrews, and Cambridge are subdivided into smaller "colleges". Much of the Ivy League has adopted a similar system in the hopes of appearing authentic.
4) Generally speaking, the head of any educational institution in the UK is referred to as the "Principal", including both Universities, and primary and secondary schools. This term applies in virtually all of the Commonwealth countries (ie. all of the former British colonies apart from the US)
5) Virtually all universities in the UK and Australia are publicly funded (as they should be!). They are not necessarily under direct governmental oversight, but would almost certainly be subject to large monetary penalties for such an egregious violation of the law.
6) "Legal Adulthood" is not granted at the age of 18 around the world, as you would imply it is. It's not even defined at the age of 18 in the US, and falls under state jurisdiction. Although the age *is* 18 in Australia, England, and Wales, it's 16 in Scotland. In the US, various states have passed legislation to restrict the legal rights of its citizens by either raising the age to 19, 21, or making legal adulthood contingent upon graduating High School. This article on the subject should be enlightening.
Hope that clears up any confusion floating around..... silly Americans for tweaking their language and measurement systems to make them incompatible with the rest of the English-speaking world.....
Would you like chips with that?
I call premature bullshit.
Although I don't see any evidence stating that laptops can't be valuable instructional tools in the classroom, I have also seen very little evidence that they *can*, based upon 1:1 laptop initiatives that have been attempted in the past (in both affluent, and poor areas)
For starters, the absolute biggest hurdle to jump over is the teachers. Many are reluctant to teach with laptops, many are unable to, and many have enough experience to (correctly) make the call that handing a laptop to every child isn't the sort of educational reform needed in the US at the moment.
If teachers aren't able to use the laptops, they sure as hell won't be effectively used in a classroom setting. Even if the teachers are willing participants, the cost of training them to use the laptops is almost as great as the cost of the machines themselves.
Educational software (especially FREE educational software) isn't at a stage where it can be easily and reliably integrated into a lesson without the considerable overhead of getting students to learn how to use the software, and overcoming any technical glitches that might occur. This added overhead typically counteracts whatever benefit the laptops might have provided in the first place.
I do hope that more good software gets developed (and not just proprietary apps for the OLPC, which, for an "open" project, seems to encourage lock-in rather than cooperation), although I don't see 1:1 initiatives as being particularly viable at the present.
On the other hand, we have seen quite a bit of success in our own district with giving laptops and projectors to individual teachers, providing a bit of training, and then encouraging teachers to go out and think of ways to creatively integrate the technology into their curriculum as a teaching/demonstration aid. We also make an active effort to provide teachers with a good list of online resources to consult for information and material.
Not all of them catch on to it, but the ones who do report fantastic results, and students describe the lessons as being particularly memorable and instructive (which can also be confirmed by test scores). From this point, teachers now have a much better grasp of how technology can be used in the classroom, as well as its strengths and weaknesses. I'd feel much more comfortable giving this sort of teacher a classroom full of computers (should they see the need for it) than one who has virtually no experience with technology-assisted instruction.
The "let them eat cake" ethos of the OLPC founders drives me nuts, as the benefits are unclear, and there are other educational reforms that are far more urgent at the present. Adding more technology to schools *IS* a good thing, but it has to be done gradually and responsibly. Giving every kid a laptop is not only a bad idea economically, but will also have a *negative* educational impact if the educators are not prepared for it.
Although I'll agree with you that a 192kbps+ MP3 sounds virtually identical to its CD counterpart, the iPod is not a professional-grade piece of audio equipment, and its analogue output really shouldn't be connected to anything other than a set of headphones due to the relatively low quality of the preamp, which, coincidentally *CAN* be scientifically tested and measured unlike most other audiophile "claims". Although the test was done on a 3rd-generation iPod a few years ago, the same output stage was used on the 4th-gen models. The newer generations use a different output stage that I haven't seen much information on, so I'm afraid I can't make comments on their performance....
Ironically, the iPod Shuffle demonstrates the best quantifiable audio characteristics when performing under a load, thanks to its push-pull amplifier design, which isn't commonly seen in portable consumer devices.
This shouldn't come as too much of a surprise, considering the weight/space/power requirements of an iPod. And for all intents and purposes, the iPod's circuits are perfectly adequate for their indented purpose as a portable audio player.
I love my iPod, because I can bring my entire music library with me in my car, or on the train on the way to work.
However, when I perform a DJ set, I use a nice set of CD-based "turntables" (which are increasingly popular these days, as they can do all sorts of neat tricks that are impossible on vinyl), because the noisy preamp, and weak bass response of an iPod becomes very readily apparent when amplified through a big PA. Recently, there are also a few "pro" level DJ products that take their input from the PCM digital output from the iPod's dock connector, thus entirely bypassing the "faulty" amplification stage, and performing the analogue conversion and amplification externally.
Entire houses wouldn't have to be rewired, and "Smart sockets" would in all likelihood be unreliable, prone to hacks/abuse, expensive, and impossible to enforce.
...in order of decreasing importance. For any home that's reasonably up-to-spec, and was wired by an electrician with half a brain, this could easily be implemented with the addition of a transformer box, and re-patching the main distribution box accordingly.
Instead, a more reasonable solution would be to supply three-phase power to homes, and to split the three phases off at the main breaker/distribution box. A hypothetical arrangement of phases would be
1) Permanent lighting, and other "essential" devices (eg. life-critical medical equipment, and other things that should already have a battery backup).
2) Socketed outlets, low-current appliances, refrigerators.
3) Air-conditioning, other high-current/nonessential appliances, electric car chargers (we can dream, can't we?)
Multi-phase power is already in extensive use at commercial and industrial sites, and is a proven technology that never really found its way into household use (mainly for lack of need). If you'll also notice, only Phase II devices above would really require "clean" power. A/C compressors should respond gracefully to drops in voltage, and lighting can always be dimmed without worrying about damaging equipment.
On the other hand, in NYC, Con Edison has a semi-automated system for alerting customers of possible shortages, and advising them to shut down non-critical cooling and lighting operations. Supposedly, compliance has been high, and the program a success (although such a program would probably only work in a large city). Back when I worked in NYC, losing A/C in the afternoon, wasn't even all that bad as long as we turned off extra lighting, and powered down other unnecessary equipment. By the time the residual "coolness" from the morning wore off, and things started to get uncomfortable, it was time to call it quits. Dress-code restrictions were also relaxed, and we had the option to "shift" our hours earlier.
I was mainly impressed with Pixelmator, because it provides a very substantial subset of Photoshop's features, took a year to develop, and costs something like 50 bucks... As a 1.0 product, I'm still pretty impressed by it. Adobe's really been slacking, and it's only a matter of time before the world realizes that they can get by without them. Sadly, though, it's destined to remain a Mac-only app for quite some time, as it relies heavily upon MacOS's core libraries to do most of its heavy-duty image processing (but benefits from the heavy optimizations and hardware-acceleration that apple took the time to include). Perhaps we can get a similar cross-platform set of libraries released, although I'm not too optimistic at the moment......
As for Pixel..... wow. Even using non-native widgets, it looks absolutely stunning (and non-native apps have a tendency to be absolute shit on MacOS). One of my biggest criticisms of large, overmanaged projects is that they love to create their own crossplatform windowing toolkits, which inevitably leads to memory hoggage, slowness, ugliness, and a whole host of other issues that have to be individually resolved on each platform, eliminating whatever flexibility the toolkit was originally designed to provide.
The GIMP's toolkit eventually morphed into GTK, which also caused the GTK and GNOME folks quite a bit of grief early on, although the two teams are now thankfully independent, and GTK+ is pretty decent -- Xfce is particularly nice. Most of Mozilla/Firefox's headaches lie with its toolkit, XUL and XPCOM, and not with the actual browser itself -- it's a cool platform, but I'm still not convinced that the overhead is worth it, and that individual native ports might have been a better route to take. I'm not sure if Blender has its own toolkit, but I'm pretty convinced that its UI wasn't designed by humans. OO.o is a hideous Java monstrosity, and very few Java apps are able to get past the clunkiness of the various toolkits available to Java. And so on, and so forth......
However, Pixel paradoxically seems to have done a pretty damn good job of providing its own widgets. It's also quite snappy, and doesn't use that much memory. (Snappiness is a bit of a pet peeve of mine, and I'm continually frustrated by the fact that Operating Systems have gotten *less* responsive over the past few years). I'm frankly not even sure *how* the guy has managed get it to run (and run well) on so many operating systems without spending a gargantuan effort, given that SDL is the only graphic-related library that it links to, and isn't even available on some of the platforms he supports. I've do have to give him major props for using OpenGL -- it's clearly the way forward.
On the other hand, he seems to have issues with compiling it on other architectures, which raises even more questions about what sort of magic mushrooms are powering this application. Given that he's got both PowerPC and x86 ports, I can't think of any technical reason for a port to x86-64 or Intel Mac would be even remotely difficult.
If only we could see his code.......
That all said and done, it crashes a lot for me. A very cool and intriguing app that should serve as a model to other enormous projects that have less to show for their efforts than this one guy.
I wholeheartedly agree. We need to stop touting OO as a good substitute for Office.
Office isn't very good, and for OOo to do *worse* than it is a pretty miserable achievement. We need to get some fresh faces involved with the project to either clean things up (a la Firefox), or start from scratch to build an application that's got an overall "friendlier" appearance.
"Lack of features" isn't even the biggest issue here. Despite being much "simpler", I find AbiWord to be vastly superior to OOo, even though its featureset is comparatively limited.
The GIMP has been stumbling along for years upon years, and has never really managed to reach a state of usefulness to designers. However, in a very short period of time, two guys wrote an f---ing amazing shareware "Photoshop substitute" for Mac OS. Granted, it's not photoshop, but unlike The GIMP, or OOo, it's fast, has a good UI, and even though it lacks some of Photoshop's more advanced features, it's more than adequate for my needs.
It's not open-source or cross-platform, but seriously..... two guys wrote it in their spare time!
I'll also ignore that comment about teaching primary schoolers LaTeX. I'm a reasonably savvy university student, and I find LaTeX absolutely unusable. It's got to be one of the most difficult and convoluted pieces of software in widespread use. It's great in concept, but make one tiny syntax error, and the compiler blows up with a 2-page long indecipherable error message. Most C compliers have better error handling.
My bank sends me an email and a text message any time a direct debit, direct deposit, or credit card transaction is made against my account without the presence of a physical card or cheque, or if a transaction occurs in a foreign country.
In this case, I could hypothetically phone the bank to block any fradulent charges before they even clear the bank, and block any further transactions.
I'm not sure which banks offer this, but it's a fantastic feature to have. Of course, most banks also offer fraud protection.
Wouldn't the driver's BAC be the "smoking gun" in most DUI cases?
The evidence of an alcohol purchase isn't going to be remotely sufficient to convict without a BAC test, and the presence of a BAC test alone should be more than sufficient to produce a conviction. I honestly don't see where the purhcahse record could hypothetically fit into the equation.
If there's an argument for or against ID scanning, this isn't it. Even from the cops' perspective, this isn't even going to help them 'nab the bad guys' any more than they're already equipped to do.
Papers, please?
Uhm. No.
Perpetual motion machines are flat-out impossible. Conservation of energy is a *VERY* well established scientific fact.
Chemical reactions don't necessarily release heat. Endothermic reactions tend to absorb it. The reaction mechanism here just happens to end up with a large amount of its original reactants at the end, and most likely catalyzes itself somewhere along the way.
The reaction in question isn't exactly perpetual either. The system eventually reaches equilibrium, and the cycle stops. (Entropy -- another well-established scientific principle makes perpetual motion rather unlikely)
If you wanted to harvest energy from the reaction, you'd have to directly absorb it from the system as the reaction is taking place. This alters the system, and will most likely result in the reaction stopping, assuming that the temperature differential is great enough to allow you to harvest any useful amount of energy (I don't recall this particular reaction getting very hot, so that seems unlikely). You'd also be limited by the second law of thermodynamics and the carnot efficency probably wouldn't be all that favorable.
So, all in all, the reaction's rather novel, although there's nothing in our current understanding of scientific fact that dictates that it should be impossible, even though we haven't been able to piece together the exact mechanism by which the reaction actually takes place.
I'm confused..... where's the news here?
The reaction's notable for its cyclical nature and the fact that we don't really understand the underlying mechanisms. According to the news article, we still haven't figured it out.
Thanks for that status update!
Yes, but the mentality of a motorcycle driver is somewhat different from the the mentality of a car driver.
A motorcycle driver *knows* that he will very likely die if he crashes at high speed. Car drivers typically don't tend to exercise the same amount of caution.
Likewise, the handling and braking on a $2500 car can't be all that good. Pedestrian injuries seem extremely likely.
Why the hell would you need several in reserve? It's not like the first is going to break -- the old IBM keyboards will probably outlast the apocalypse. The Model M is easily one of the most overengineered computer peripherals ever constructed.
1) It's an AP article. Not written by the Fox News staff
2) What comments? Safety concerns about the car do appear to be legitimate, and congestion is a *big* issue for India. Adding millions of cars to the roads will wreck havoc upon the national infrastructure, and produce tons of pollution.
It's important for everybody to have access to reliable transportation. However, adding more cars to the roads might not be the best solution to that problem. Personal vehicles are a piss poor solution for large, densely populated cities. Essential services and jobs can be easily placed within walking distances, and public transport should be able to take care of the rest.
If you want to criticize the "let them eat cake" mentality, start speaking out about the absurdity of the OLPC project. Those guys are far more guilty of it than the people concerned about the sustainability of placing millions of unsafe cars into an already overcrowded road network.
The new apples are closer in feel to a laptop keyboard, and actually seem to provide a tad more tactile response than a typical laptop, and is also quite a bit better than a typical $5 keyboard.
Granted laptops aren't the best things to type on, but people seem to have adapted....
"Flat panel" speakers can be made in two ways:
1) Squash a regular voice coil speaker cone, and shove it into a tiny cabinet. This is obviously not optimal.
2) Make a flat object to vibrate to produce your sound. This can cause all sorts of unwanted resonances, the elimination of which is one of NXT's primary innovations.
Bass, however, still is a problem no matter what design you choose. Because lower frequencies have longer wavelengths, the object producing said waves needs to have a great enough range of vibration to produce those wavelengths. (mountains and weather systems can produce massive kilometers-long sound waves that are able to literally circle the globe, but I digress...) Because flat panel speakers are by their very nature, flat, the range of motion for the panel is limited to the depth of the cabinet, which typically isn't that much.
The Logitech design does pretty well at lower volume levels, although it's obvious that a better rubber gasket around the panel would allow the panel travel further, and offer an increased bass response.
The other option is to get the bass response of the flat panels "good enough", add a crossover, and funnel whatever bass the panels can't produce into a subwoofer that gets hidden out of sight. Once again, due to the long wavelengths, a low frequency sound has poor directionality, and is transmitted through solid surfaces more easily.
It's not perfect, but you can't fight the laws of physics. If you want big wavelengths, you need a big speaker.
I misread the headline as "Material Turns All Surfaces into Sterno"
which, although a boon to the catering industry, would be somewhat troubling.
Fortunately, they're just talking about NXT's cool speaker transducers that have been around for quite some time now (yawn...). Given that the laws of acoustics do still apply, even if the speaker is flat, the "cabinet" needs to be properly designed to produce good sound.
I've got a portable speaker that incorporates the technology. Logitech mm28 -- I think I paid $15 for it, although it's discontinued now. Although it does sound fantastic for a tiny $15 speaker, the bass is a bit lacking, and the thing distorts all to hell when the volume is turned up. To be fair, it can be driven *quite* loud, which seems to indicate that the transducers are quite powerful, and that Logitech forgot to include some sort of volume-limiting circuit. It's more or less the most simplistic NXT design you could imagine, as it's a rounded rectangle panel with an NXT transducer a third of the way from either edge.
All in all, with a bit of refinement, it could be turned into a great product, and it's easy to see how there could be many applications for this. Even though it might not produce audiophile sound (at least, not as lotitech had it configured), I imagine that it could be quite handy for "hiding" speakers in various locations, and could definitely be used to improve the sound quality of mobile phones. It also avoids many of the pitfalls of other "flat panel" designs.
Poking around their website reveals that they've got a pretty nifty portfolio of technologies backed up by some hard science -- they've even applied the same technology (in reverse) to produce touch screens.
Although I love Firewire, and will agree you on all of the points you made, I have one small objection:
The 4-pin socket seems to have only made it onto PC-based laptops and Sony PCs. Every PC desktop I've used had a 'normal' 6-pin socket, although I've admittedly been building my own over the past few years, and many mainstream desktops tend to omit the ports altogether, so my experience isn't all that vast.
That all said, I don't think the failure of IP via 1394 was due to the connectors. It's just not that useful. Ethernet is generally 'good enough' for transfers between machines. On the other hand, Apple's target disk mode is a fantastic combination of speed and simplicity, and is an absolute godsend for IT folks (especially if you've ever had to pry a hard drive from the iron grip of a powerbook)
What happened to firewire? All signs point to it going extinct in the very near future....
Wasn't it vastly superior to USB? It had a higher maximum throughput that could almost be realistically achieved, delivered useful amounts of power over the bus, and allowed devices to talk to each other. The audio/video features are pretty nice as well....
Both firewire and usb were well-supported on all platforms, so *that*'s not the issue. It's also robust, to the point of being found in many modern aircraft designs and the space shuttle.
IEEE1394c is even cooler, and uses CAT5e/RJ45 for wiring, allowing for automatic negotiation between other 1394 devices, and normal ethernet devices. Max speed is 800mbps, and it very nicely bridges the gap between "traditional" peripherals, and network-attached devices.
So what happened? Did I miss something? Who killed Firewire?
Plastic is a byproduct of petroleum refinement. The components of crude oil used to make plastic are *NOT* the same as the ones used to produce gasoline.
Also, we've got quite a bit of recyclable plastic sitting in landfills. More than we could ever possibly need. Likewise, there are a few new "plastic" materials on the horizon that can economically be produced from plants.
NOT an issue.
When I passed through Gatwick this week, there was a separate scanner for shoes that you go through after you've scanned your carry-on baggage. It does seem to speed things up a bit, although the shoe threat is completely absurd.
The security at Gatwick, on the other hand did make a good deal more sense than what I've seen in the US. Before passing the X-ray machines, an agent scans your boarding pass to make sure it's valid, checks ID, and then takes your picture. Upon arriving at the gate, your pass is scanned again, and the pictures are compared. This helps in two respects, by making sure that fraudulent boarding passes don't pass security, and making sure passengers don't swap places beyond the gate.
Of course, once again, as long as bombs and guns don't pass security, there's not a lot more you can do, and I'm not really even convinced that the ID checks are necessary. As long as the pilot maintains control of the plane, the amount of damage that can be inflicted is rather small.
Microsoft's not going after Google. If anything, they're pre-empting them (but even that would be hypothetical, unless Microsoft's been participating in some sort of industrial espionage...)
FAST is an enterprise search platform, which enables corporations to quickly search their entire repository of documents (assuming that they already have one). Given that SharePoint is increasingly being marketed as a large-scale document repository, this is a perfectly logical direction for Microsoft to take. FAST can be easily integrated into Microsoft's existing product portfolio, can easily be marketed (document storage and search is a hot area at the moment), and will greatly increase the value of their existing products. Even though the $1.2bn pricetag seems absurdly high, the purchase makes perfect sense from a business perspective.
The only way in which Microsoft is "going after Google" is that Google could hypothetically choose to develop a similar product. The Google Search Appliance is somewhat similar, although it's not in widespread use, and fills a rather different niche than SharePoint. Unless Google wants to seriously focus on delivering an enterprise-grade version of Google Docs, and providing a heavy-grade search feature to match, the relevance of this story to Google is tenuous at best.
Also, FAST isn't a recursive acronym. It's not even an acronym at all in English (or it'd be FSAT). Given that FAST is based in Norway, I'd guess that the phrase properly spells the acronym in Norwegian (although "fast" probably doesn't exist in the Norwegian lexicon, so I'm not even sure that's explanation either....)
Sorry mate. America only has one Math.
Fortunately for them, the hubble proved it to be correct.
You're right. In my opinion, the one thing that the American autos do somewhat well is pickup trucks. In this market segment, it's probably an advantage for the vehicles to be mechanically simple, built like a tank, and heavy, even if it is at the consequence of gas mileage. Of course, a lot of pickup drivers could also get by just fine with something smaller and more efficient.
American cars, however, tend to be kind of crappy. Although I don't really mind if the interior of a pickup is rough around the edges, I'm a bit amazed that the American automakers *still* haven't figured out how to make all of the bits fit together without massive gaps between the panels. They're also not particularly reliable, efficient, attractive, fast, or affordable compared to their foreign counterparts. Although I'm still not a huge fan of the Japanese imports (had two Toyotas, both were lemons), European cars have always been good to me. It's no surprise that the euro-inspired Focus is Ford's most popular car, and that both Ford and GM are relying heavily on their Volvo and Saab divisions to design new platforms. (Although they're not quite what they used to be, take a look at just how many old Volvos and Saabs are on the road today)
On the other hand, old Toyota pickups are quite literally indestructible.