At least around here, I've never seen a cop drive faster than the REALLY fast drivers on the road. Considering cop cars have really safe tires and the drivers have extensive training, I'm willing to let it go -- even if it is obnoxious.
Hey, some people don't want to spend a penny more than they have to. $25 less on car insurance is $25 less -- if you don't speed anyway. Spend it on a nice steak dinner.
Uh, there are lots of other ways to get this information. A standard G-Tech unit tells you how fast you're going, your rate of acceleration, etc, based on data interpolated from the pressure of a weight on a censor.
That's much harder to dupe without opening the box.
You don't ever have to worry about your state using your EZ-Pass records to prosecute speeding.
If they did that, they would instantly and substantially decrease the number of EZ-Pass users, which would increase the lines at toll booths, increase the need for toll takers, increase road rage. and send drivers to non-toll highways (increasing the need for maintenance).
The cost would be far greater than the money brough in from the batch of speeding tickets.
Well, duh. Traffic speeds are extremely generalized. They have to be. I mean, what's the alternative? Speed signs that detect traffic levels, road conditions and the weather report to indicate the exact safe speed at that moment?
Three problems with this idea:
1) The speed could fluctuate wildly, creating more acceleration and deceleration and thus decreasing the efficient flow of traffic.
2) The system would be expensive and require frequent maintenance and calibration.
3) Nobody will drive the speed on the sign anyway.
My state police go after real criminals. They also go after unsafe drivers. Actually, the state police catch a lot of drug smugglers and other criminals in routine traffic stops. Occasionally, they do stop obvious speeders like yourself, thus giving the majority an incentive to not drive as fast as they like. Traffic regulations are only as useful as they are enforcable.
It's great that you've driven 100+ with nobody around. I've done it too (hard not to, driving late at night in a German auto). But I don't for a second believe that it's safe. And I don't feel for a second that it's the police' fault if I get caught. After all, I've never lobbied for higher limits or anything.
Probably, it doesn't matter what your speed is in relation to the limit. Probably, they take the data from all of these units and graph them together. The lowest XX% get a discount, the rest do not.
That's how the rest of insurance discounts work. Why should this be any different?
Speeding may or may not cause accidents. But speed kills -- every mile an hour over the limit drastically decreases the possibility of surviving a crash (some say Dale Earnhardt would have survived if he was going 10 mph slower when he hit the wall). Since if your crash results in death the insurance company has to pay out more, it makes you more of a risk. They don't want anybody to hit that jackpot.
I mean, come on. Have you seen the difference between getting rear ended on the thruway and getting rear ended in town? I was smacked from behind at a half dozen stoplights with no effect other than some scratches...but one hit on the Penn Pike and the effing bumper cover looked like swiss cheese. Blew my alignment out of wack, too.
And go easy on the bluehairs, man. Yes, they cause a ton of accidents, and their insurance premiums reflect this. My grandma's insurance is so high it takes her entire pension to pay for it...all that's left is that little social security check.
Uh, speaking as somebody who has REALLY good insurance (I pay $145 per month for $500 deductable on three cars), insurance companies court their good driver customers like you would not believe. They're all shooting to cover the good drivers (who are almost ALWAYS profitable) so they're constantly twisting the actuarial tables to offer as low rates as they dare to keep the customers they have from switching. My rates have gone down an average of $20 per month every six months for the past three years.
And they even treat you better when you make a claim if you're a good driver. Last year I replaced two windshields and had a minor fender-bender that was my wife's fault. My insurance has not gone up a cent -- still have the "premium plus" rate and in fact my house insurance went down a bit (due to a multi-policy discount).
The insurance company, BTW, would lower my rate another 5% if I installed an engine-cut security alarm or if my wife OR I took a defensive driving class. They do not increase our rate to reflect NOT having this discount. Why should this box provide a different effect -- because suddenly the addition of technology is going to turn the actuarial sciences on their ear and result in companies only covering those without privacy concerns?
Sounds like paranoid bullshit to me. Probably sounds that way to anybody who thinks about it in a historical context. Shit, you can still get insurance in a car with no seatbelts -- like my Beetle, which I pay $30 a month for (compact car discount, heh, they didn't ask about the engine). Which do you think would save more lives -- a device that checks speed and offers a discount if you want one, or a fucking seat belt?
This is foolish. Insurance companies offer discounts for airbags, daytime running lights, security systems, defensive driving courses and getting married. None of these things is required for insurance, and they're all far more indicative of crash survivability than driving 5 mph slower.
See, sometimes analyzing reality is more useful than making paranoid science fiction guesses. It seems to me this system is no different from a defensive driving class...and so long as I can turn it off when I start speeding, I'd get one in a heartbeat.
No, a government mandated payment that goes to the GOVERNMENT is a tax. Your license and registration fees are taxes. Insurance is not a tax, it's quite different -- for one thing, you can't shop around for better rates on a tax or reduce your taxation by taking a ten hour "defensive citizenship class" Insurance is important -- it's a guarantee that if you drive your car like a weapon you'll be able to compensate your victims. In fact some states -- California comes to mind -- allow you to bypass insurance if you're willing to dedicate a certain amount of money to indemnify yourself. You can post a bond and even collect interest on it. Some other states allow super cut rate insurance on tiny cars and/or motorcycles where the chance of injuring others is low. Other states allow you to skip insurance on vehicles that are rarely used ("show" cars) and most will let you skip it if the vehicle is only driven on private roads.
You can also drive without insurance in some areas if you're renting the car -- at least, the rental company is not required to check proof of insurance before issuing the car/truck/hovercraft. But I wouldn't suggest it.
but how many units can you realistically expect to sell at that price?
My guess is they'll sell out of the initial run of a few thousand units very quickly. Then they'll lower the price for the next run.
It's called "economics." There's a side called supply, and a side called demand. If the demand at a certain price level -- say, $1499 -- is high enough to sell a significant amount of the supply, you'd be a fool to price it any cheaper. If the demand is insufficient, well you can always lower the price later.
I'm fairly sure you can't sue companies for selling things for what people are willing to pay.
Read the fuckin' summary. The CD/DVD burning division -- which makes DirectCD and the AWESOME toast application -- is profitable. Meaning, it makes profit.
Roxio is SELLING the profitable part of their business to concentrate on the stuff that's not working.
What's the jurisdiction of the Digital Alien Copyright Act -- should we worry about the Green Lanterns coming here to kick our ass if we decrypt episodes of "Upsilon Centauri Survivor?"
You're not excited by the prospect of decoding random alien broadcast?
God, I am. Somehow, watching a 3d tank image of an alien reality series seems so much more voyeuristic and interesting than just watching a human one. Because even though the contestants will be just as vapid and vanilla culturally as our human contestants, they'll be vapid and vanilla about a completely different culture.
Kinda like the first time you see Anime, before you realize it's all giant angular robots, blushing big eyed sailor girls and effeminate men with swords.
1. Would you rather have a system where the uninsured go without care? I wouldn't.
2. Would you rather have a system where doctors don't feel pressure from malpractice insurers to keep up-to-date on modern practices? I'd sure hate to have a doctor sipping whiskey while he performs an apendectomy on me, knowing there's nothing we can do about it if he screws something up.
3. Yeah, and this is exactly why we have group health insurance in the first damned place. When you get old or you get sick, the healthy will help pay for you, too. You might say it was some kind of economic "Insurance" that if you get sick, you won't go broke getting better.
4. To be honest, paper work is officious and mindlessly bureaucratic up until the point you get the wrong dosage...and your family wants to fond out who screwed it up.
Actually, what you're describing -- running enough code to do the job -- can be just as dangerous. It requires intimate knowledge of every facet of the system from configuration to drivers and adaptation of each variable to the task at hand. What if a critical component is only used in emergency situations, and you removed it, thinking it extraneous? I've seen this happen on Windows systems, believe it or not...people who have turned off one or more services thinking them useless, only to find they turned off the reporting engine for their RAID...and brought the raid down with it.
It is actually much more beneficial from a cost-benefit standpoint to use a stable platform in its entirety, even if it contains unused items. Bloat you never call on a system that's never full has no effect whatsoever on the computing experience. Performance and space come cheap these days and you rarely see any actual benefit from pruning. Don't mess with it and you'll be happier overall.
Notice I said "stable." Stability is the key. If you have a system that's completely stable and allows access to all of your hardware, you can use it. If you have a system such as the Windows NT kernel that's mostly stable except when connected to a wild networking environment, you can use it for anything but networking. Using Windows to control even delicate equipment CAN be a good idea, providing that the developer understands the OS. My buddy writes CE based kiosks and POS devices; he boasts that they've never had one of their devices fail in the line of duty and some investors are shocked they aren't running QNX. But his company's stuff is expensive -- mostly because they use the extra time saved developing on CE to heavily over-engineer everything, building failsafes upon failsafes and putting their devices through hell. This is something most Windows developers don't do, because outside of the embedded market there's no point. People would rather deal with crashes if they get software that's a little better or a little cheaper - it's an economic fact.
Er, I meant to say "TCL or Perl" code, but I thought of a much better example. PHP. PHP is another powerful tool for fast development, and there are some really HORRIBLE PHP packages out there. To the point that when we bought an ASP and discovered it ran PHP, we decided to EOL the product and write a new one. It would take less time than trying to untangle the conditional blocks...
Okay. Really quick: the reason niche software is expensive and yet poorly written is not because it is considered "elite." It is because there is not a lot of money in the niche. See, if you need to bring in $100k with a program, and you have an audience of 2000 people, you can easily charge $50 for it. But if your audience is only 100 people...you have to charge $1000. In a niche, you really have no way to increase the size of the market, and your market often has little choice but to pay the high cost for what's essentially one step down from custom software.
And if you're one of the 100 people, that software might save you hours and hours of work, tens of thousands of dollars on custom software, and maybe even save you having to hire somebody. All that for $1000 is a pretty sweet deal, and doesn't seem ridiculous at all. Granted, if you could get the same thing for $50, you'd take it. But on a business scale, $1000 is fucking chump change.
Furthermore, many niche software companies use the cheapest programmers and cheapest practices to get the job done. This means VB, which is a powerful tool when you want to make a program in less than an hour. Sloppy code is sometimes the fault of bad programmers (what do you expect, offering 35% or less than the going rate) but just as often is the fault of high pressure development. Customers paying $1000 for software are VERY insistant and many times their complaints will almost completely drive development. If Customer A asks for some feature unique to their business flow, you have to put it in, even if it doesn't make any damn sense. Our old software (which I had nothing to do with or it'd be all objects) is 20% functionality and 80% stupid business logic (if company = "company a" then...).
Incidentally, with Linux gaining ground in a lot of these market niches, expect to see a lot of really shitty TCL or VB code showing up in closed source Linux packages. It's lack of money that creates stupid software...
Let's not forget that Lewis Caroll, author of the youth fantasy Alice in Wonderland, was a mathematician who liked to photograph nude children. One might say his obsessions with logic puzzles and the innocence of youth helped create one of the most influential works of modern western literature.
In fact, a lot of great author were perverts or deviants...with the notable exception of Lolita author Vladimir Nabokov, who despite his writing the most famous modern tale about a sexual relationship between a man and a young girl was not himself sexually interested in children -- in fact, he's claimed the story disturbed him as he was writing it.
Actually, I don't think they're programmers at all...just old hat CS folks that have moved into an IT capacity. Writing cunning, efficient little programs to manage files on a webserver does not make you a programmer any more than writing this post makes me a published author. That sort of tunnel vision won't get you very far in the software industry -- real programmers understand the difference between high performance and high functionality.
(I'm a little bitter...I've dealt with lots of ex-CS folks who think they can judge my code based on what they learned in some 300 level algorithms class they can barely remember. "Yes, this code WOULD be faster if I rewrote it a recurse functional language...but doing that and testing it would take a full day for no perceptible benefit, so fuck off.")
First: I am embarassed that you think the secret to tight, efficient code is the elimination of bloat. The whole point of bloat is that it isn't used. If something isn't used, it's not necessarily inefficient. In fact, if space is not an issue, it would be an inefficient use of time to eliminate unused components.
Besides, the point of a project like this is not to TEACH anything...it's so the students themselves can learn how to engineer a solution given a set of constraints. If the constraints are "build an autonomous UAV linking off the shelf parts in three months," and they have at their disposal a system which NATIVELY integrates all of the available parts without the need to write drivers or compile special libraries, it would be a disservice to force them to use something else. It's be like telling a carpenter to build a shed in three days and that he has to mill his own lumber. It's unfair to say "you can't use this program because it has a few functions you won't use, making it bloated and worthless."
Tell me: when you're hanging a picture, do you refuse to use a claw hammer just because you don't intend on pulling any nails out? I mean, the claw is just added bloat right? Makes the hammer heavier for functionality you probably won't need.
Fucking retard. There's more to life than systems that fit on a floppy diskette. This is why we INVENTED the computer as an abstraction to calculation, C as an abstraction to machine language, etc.
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At least around here, I've never seen a cop drive faster than the REALLY fast drivers on the road. Considering cop cars have really safe tires and the drivers have extensive training, I'm willing to let it go -- even if it is obnoxious.
Hey, some people don't want to spend a penny more than they have to. $25 less on car insurance is $25 less -- if you don't speed anyway. Spend it on a nice steak dinner.
Uh, there are lots of other ways to get this information. A standard G-Tech unit tells you how fast you're going, your rate of acceleration, etc, based on data interpolated from the pressure of a weight on a censor.
That's much harder to dupe without opening the box.
You don't ever have to worry about your state using your EZ-Pass records to prosecute speeding.
If they did that, they would instantly and substantially decrease the number of EZ-Pass users, which would increase the lines at toll booths, increase the need for toll takers, increase road rage. and send drivers to non-toll highways (increasing the need for maintenance).
The cost would be far greater than the money brough in from the batch of speeding tickets.
Well, duh. Traffic speeds are extremely generalized. They have to be. I mean, what's the alternative? Speed signs that detect traffic levels, road conditions and the weather report to indicate the exact safe speed at that moment?
Three problems with this idea:
1) The speed could fluctuate wildly, creating more acceleration and deceleration and thus decreasing the efficient flow of traffic.
2) The system would be expensive and require frequent maintenance and calibration.
3) Nobody will drive the speed on the sign anyway.
There's also a big difference between common 5-10 mph fender benders and the rare 75 mph collision.
You don't need an ambulance for the former.
My state police go after real criminals. They also go after unsafe drivers. Actually, the state police catch a lot of drug smugglers and other criminals in routine traffic stops. Occasionally, they do stop obvious speeders like yourself, thus giving the majority an incentive to not drive as fast as they like. Traffic regulations are only as useful as they are enforcable.
It's great that you've driven 100+ with nobody around. I've done it too (hard not to, driving late at night in a German auto). But I don't for a second believe that it's safe. And I don't feel for a second that it's the police' fault if I get caught. After all, I've never lobbied for higher limits or anything.
Probably, it doesn't matter what your speed is in relation to the limit. Probably, they take the data from all of these units and graph them together. The lowest XX% get a discount, the rest do not.
That's how the rest of insurance discounts work. Why should this be any different?
Speeding may or may not cause accidents. But speed kills -- every mile an hour over the limit drastically decreases the possibility of surviving a crash (some say Dale Earnhardt would have survived if he was going 10 mph slower when he hit the wall). Since if your crash results in death the insurance company has to pay out more, it makes you more of a risk. They don't want anybody to hit that jackpot.
I mean, come on. Have you seen the difference between getting rear ended on the thruway and getting rear ended in town? I was smacked from behind at a half dozen stoplights with no effect other than some scratches...but one hit on the Penn Pike and the effing bumper cover looked like swiss cheese. Blew my alignment out of wack, too.
And go easy on the bluehairs, man. Yes, they cause a ton of accidents, and their insurance premiums reflect this. My grandma's insurance is so high it takes her entire pension to pay for it...all that's left is that little social security check.
Uh, speaking as somebody who has REALLY good insurance (I pay $145 per month for $500 deductable on three cars), insurance companies court their good driver customers like you would not believe. They're all shooting to cover the good drivers (who are almost ALWAYS profitable) so they're constantly twisting the actuarial tables to offer as low rates as they dare to keep the customers they have from switching. My rates have gone down an average of $20 per month every six months for the past three years.
And they even treat you better when you make a claim if you're a good driver. Last year I replaced two windshields and had a minor fender-bender that was my wife's fault. My insurance has not gone up a cent -- still have the "premium plus" rate and in fact my house insurance went down a bit (due to a multi-policy discount).
The insurance company, BTW, would lower my rate another 5% if I installed an engine-cut security alarm or if my wife OR I took a defensive driving class. They do not increase our rate to reflect NOT having this discount. Why should this box provide a different effect -- because suddenly the addition of technology is going to turn the actuarial sciences on their ear and result in companies only covering those without privacy concerns?
Sounds like paranoid bullshit to me. Probably sounds that way to anybody who thinks about it in a historical context. Shit, you can still get insurance in a car with no seatbelts -- like my Beetle, which I pay $30 a month for (compact car discount, heh, they didn't ask about the engine). Which do you think would save more lives -- a device that checks speed and offers a discount if you want one, or a fucking seat belt?
This is foolish. Insurance companies offer discounts for airbags, daytime running lights, security systems, defensive driving courses and getting married. None of these things is required for insurance, and they're all far more indicative of crash survivability than driving 5 mph slower.
See, sometimes analyzing reality is more useful than making paranoid science fiction guesses. It seems to me this system is no different from a defensive driving class...and so long as I can turn it off when I start speeding, I'd get one in a heartbeat.
Government mandated payment = tax.
No, a government mandated payment that goes to the GOVERNMENT is a tax. Your license and registration fees are taxes. Insurance is not a tax, it's quite different -- for one thing, you can't shop around for better rates on a tax or reduce your taxation by taking a ten hour "defensive citizenship class" Insurance is important -- it's a guarantee that if you drive your car like a weapon you'll be able to compensate your victims. In fact some states -- California comes to mind -- allow you to bypass insurance if you're willing to dedicate a certain amount of money to indemnify yourself. You can post a bond and even collect interest on it. Some other states allow super cut rate insurance on tiny cars and/or motorcycles where the chance of injuring others is low. Other states allow you to skip insurance on vehicles that are rarely used ("show" cars) and most will let you skip it if the vehicle is only driven on private roads.
You can also drive without insurance in some areas if you're renting the car -- at least, the rental company is not required to check proof of insurance before issuing the car/truck/hovercraft. But I wouldn't suggest it.
but how many units can you realistically expect to sell at that price?
My guess is they'll sell out of the initial run of a few thousand units very quickly. Then they'll lower the price for the next run.
It's called "economics." There's a side called supply, and a side called demand. If the demand at a certain price level -- say, $1499 -- is high enough to sell a significant amount of the supply, you'd be a fool to price it any cheaper. If the demand is insufficient, well you can always lower the price later.
I'm fairly sure you can't sue companies for selling things for what people are willing to pay.
Read the fuckin' summary. The CD/DVD burning division -- which makes DirectCD and the AWESOME toast application -- is profitable. Meaning, it makes profit.
Roxio is SELLING the profitable part of their business to concentrate on the stuff that's not working.
Why? Because they're dumb.
What's the jurisdiction of the Digital Alien Copyright Act -- should we worry about the Green Lanterns coming here to kick our ass if we decrypt episodes of "Upsilon Centauri Survivor?"
You're not excited by the prospect of decoding random alien broadcast?
God, I am. Somehow, watching a 3d tank image of an alien reality series seems so much more voyeuristic and interesting than just watching a human one. Because even though the contestants will be just as vapid and vanilla culturally as our human contestants, they'll be vapid and vanilla about a completely different culture.
Kinda like the first time you see Anime, before you realize it's all giant angular robots, blushing big eyed sailor girls and effeminate men with swords.
I'm not familiar with your units. What's that in split beavers per inch?
1. Would you rather have a system where the uninsured go without care? I wouldn't.
2. Would you rather have a system where doctors don't feel pressure from malpractice insurers to keep up-to-date on modern practices? I'd sure hate to have a doctor sipping whiskey while he performs an apendectomy on me, knowing there's nothing we can do about it if he screws something up.
3. Yeah, and this is exactly why we have group health insurance in the first damned place. When you get old or you get sick, the healthy will help pay for you, too. You might say it was some kind of economic "Insurance" that if you get sick, you won't go broke getting better.
4. To be honest, paper work is officious and mindlessly bureaucratic up until the point you get the wrong dosage...and your family wants to fond out who screwed it up.
Actually, what you're describing -- running enough code to do the job -- can be just as dangerous. It requires intimate knowledge of every facet of the system from configuration to drivers and adaptation of each variable to the task at hand. What if a critical component is only used in emergency situations, and you removed it, thinking it extraneous? I've seen this happen on Windows systems, believe it or not...people who have turned off one or more services thinking them useless, only to find they turned off the reporting engine for their RAID...and brought the raid down with it.
It is actually much more beneficial from a cost-benefit standpoint to use a stable platform in its entirety, even if it contains unused items. Bloat you never call on a system that's never full has no effect whatsoever on the computing experience. Performance and space come cheap these days and you rarely see any actual benefit from pruning. Don't mess with it and you'll be happier overall.
Notice I said "stable." Stability is the key. If you have a system that's completely stable and allows access to all of your hardware, you can use it. If you have a system such as the Windows NT kernel that's mostly stable except when connected to a wild networking environment, you can use it for anything but networking. Using Windows to control even delicate equipment CAN be a good idea, providing that the developer understands the OS. My buddy writes CE based kiosks and POS devices; he boasts that they've never had one of their devices fail in the line of duty and some investors are shocked they aren't running QNX. But his company's stuff is expensive -- mostly because they use the extra time saved developing on CE to heavily over-engineer everything, building failsafes upon failsafes and putting their devices through hell. This is something most Windows developers don't do, because outside of the embedded market there's no point. People would rather deal with crashes if they get software that's a little better or a little cheaper - it's an economic fact.
Er, I meant to say "TCL or Perl" code, but I thought of a much better example. PHP. PHP is another powerful tool for fast development, and there are some really HORRIBLE PHP packages out there. To the point that when we bought an ASP and discovered it ran PHP, we decided to EOL the product and write a new one. It would take less time than trying to untangle the conditional blocks...
Okay. Really quick: the reason niche software is expensive and yet poorly written is not because it is considered "elite." It is because there is not a lot of money in the niche. See, if you need to bring in $100k with a program, and you have an audience of 2000 people, you can easily charge $50 for it. But if your audience is only 100 people...you have to charge $1000. In a niche, you really have no way to increase the size of the market, and your market often has little choice but to pay the high cost for what's essentially one step down from custom software.
...).
And if you're one of the 100 people, that software might save you hours and hours of work, tens of thousands of dollars on custom software, and maybe even save you having to hire somebody. All that for $1000 is a pretty sweet deal, and doesn't seem ridiculous at all. Granted, if you could get the same thing for $50, you'd take it. But on a business scale, $1000 is fucking chump change.
Furthermore, many niche software companies use the cheapest programmers and cheapest practices to get the job done. This means VB, which is a powerful tool when you want to make a program in less than an hour. Sloppy code is sometimes the fault of bad programmers (what do you expect, offering 35% or less than the going rate) but just as often is the fault of high pressure development. Customers paying $1000 for software are VERY insistant and many times their complaints will almost completely drive development. If Customer A asks for some feature unique to their business flow, you have to put it in, even if it doesn't make any damn sense. Our old software (which I had nothing to do with or it'd be all objects) is 20% functionality and 80% stupid business logic (if company = "company a" then
Incidentally, with Linux gaining ground in a lot of these market niches, expect to see a lot of really shitty TCL or VB code showing up in closed source Linux packages. It's lack of money that creates stupid software...
Let's not forget that Lewis Caroll, author of the youth fantasy Alice in Wonderland, was a mathematician who liked to photograph nude children. One might say his obsessions with logic puzzles and the innocence of youth helped create one of the most influential works of modern western literature.
In fact, a lot of great author were perverts or deviants...with the notable exception of Lolita author Vladimir Nabokov, who despite his writing the most famous modern tale about a sexual relationship between a man and a young girl was not himself sexually interested in children -- in fact, he's claimed the story disturbed him as he was writing it.
This is the most insightful post using the word "fuckhole" in months.
Actually, I don't think they're programmers at all...just old hat CS folks that have moved into an IT capacity. Writing cunning, efficient little programs to manage files on a webserver does not make you a programmer any more than writing this post makes me a published author. That sort of tunnel vision won't get you very far in the software industry -- real programmers understand the difference between high performance and high functionality.
(I'm a little bitter...I've dealt with lots of ex-CS folks who think they can judge my code based on what they learned in some 300 level algorithms class they can barely remember. "Yes, this code WOULD be faster if I rewrote it a recurse functional language...but doing that and testing it would take a full day for no perceptible benefit, so fuck off.")
First: I am embarassed that you think the secret to tight, efficient code is the elimination of bloat. The whole point of bloat is that it isn't used. If something isn't used, it's not necessarily inefficient. In fact, if space is not an issue, it would be an inefficient use of time to eliminate unused components.
Besides, the point of a project like this is not to TEACH anything...it's so the students themselves can learn how to engineer a solution given a set of constraints. If the constraints are "build an autonomous UAV linking off the shelf parts in three months," and they have at their disposal a system which NATIVELY integrates all of the available parts without the need to write drivers or compile special libraries, it would be a disservice to force them to use something else. It's be like telling a carpenter to build a shed in three days and that he has to mill his own lumber. It's unfair to say "you can't use this program because it has a few functions you won't use, making it bloated and worthless."
Tell me: when you're hanging a picture, do you refuse to use a claw hammer just because you don't intend on pulling any nails out? I mean, the claw is just added bloat right? Makes the hammer heavier for functionality you probably won't need.
Fucking retard. There's more to life than systems that fit on a floppy diskette. This is why we INVENTED the computer as an abstraction to calculation, C as an abstraction to machine language, etc.