That's the really silly part... we don't need to ban it. Just about any sane jurisdiction that allows driving already has laws against various forms of reckless or distracted driving.
I'm so sick of people making this argument every time this topic comes up. To penalize texting while driving under the current law, you would have to haul each offender into court, and each and every time try to prove to a jury that texting is indeed distracted driving. Huge amounts of resources would be wasted doing this over and over again. Each time it would be fought tooth-and-nail by slick and clever defense lawyers who would bring in all sorts of pseudo statistics to try raise doubts that texting while driving has been 100% air-tight proven to be dangerous. Remember how they convinced a jury that OJ wasn't guilty?
A specific law would point out that texting while driving == distracted driving, no ifs, ands or buts. This fact would not have to be re-proven in every case. Pay the ticket, move on, and don't do it again.
They should also ban passengers in cars then, if its the conversation.
A real person in the car shares your entire context of the traffic situation, communicates using full audio bandwidth and a large dynamic range in a full 3-d sound field.
You talk to someone on a cellphone using about 3kHz of bandwidth, very poor dynamic range, piped through a tiny point source speaker, all made worse by the noisy environment of the car. The random infuriating glitches and dropouts in many wireless connections don't help either.
Phone etiquette also makes it rude to ignore the talker or leave long gaps in the conversation, and the person on the other end has no way to know that such gaffes might be due to traffic. All of this means that when you're on a cellphone, much of your brain horsepower must be dedicated without interruption to audio signal processing, to the detriment of dealing with the traffic around you. (Even more of your brain has to be used up trying to reconstruct in your mind a model of what the other party on the phone is meaning and feeling, but without the benefits of subtle queues, gestures, and facial expressions that you get in person.)
It never ceases to amaze me how many people can't seem to understand the difference in the two situations.
Technically, it had two closely-spaced wheels in the back. But I think that the huge airplane-like stabilizer fins had more to do with keeping it pointed forward than any of its wheels did.
wrong. 1933 it got 36mpg WITH A V8 ENGINE and a 20 FOOT LONG BODY. geniuses like fuller arent around anymore. dont you love progress ?
I've long been a fan of this vehicle, but it's basically a light airplane fuselage stripped of wings and control surfaces. Of course it will have great economy and straight-line performance. That doesn't make it a practical, comfortable or safe ground vehicle.
Modern computerized control systems could probably address its stability issues, but a competitive modern version would probably have to be much heavier to provide crashworthiness, sound deadening, climate control, etc. Highway mileage would always be great because of the aerodynamic shape (and that's probably what gets quoted for the original vehicle). City mileage probably wouldn't be much better than any midsized SUV (and I suspect the original city mileage wasn't so great with its flathead engine).
If you tell me I can do what ever the hell I want to with your code when I work on it I'm more apt to work on code than if you tell me I have to follow your rules when I use it.
Maybe *you* would be more likely to work on the code, but that's not very relevant. Most of the heavy lifting in Linux kernel development is done by corporations.
If you analyze the situation with some basic game theory, it's clear that corporations are unlikely to publicly license the source to any of their significant development efforts unless GPL-style restrictions go along with it. They don't want their competitors taking their hard work and going proprietary with it. (I'm talking about writing new code as open source here. This doesn't count the common case of companies dumping unprofitable proprietary products into unrestrictive open source licenses, often in a last-ditch attempt to devalue their competitors' proprietary products. (See Sun Microsystems.))
This may be why the Linux kernel is less likely to fork. All of the big players are in the same boat, and they enjoy a network effect by sticking together and adding all the improvements to the same codebase. Having to sync improvements between multiple forks (even if they were all GPLd) would add significant overhead to the process. Thus the big contributors would tend to shun any fork.
That sounds good, but isn't 100% efficient either. Many kinds of plastic have no recycling market because it's hard to reconstitute it into high-quality material. So what you often get is the recycling center wasting resources on sorting out certain plastic types then dumping them in a landfill.
Moreover, a lot of other plastics are only turned into low-grade products. Take plastic decking boards. How many gallons of oil are tied up into just one of those huge solid chunks of junk plastic? Will that in turn get recycled again? Doubtful, because they usually mix in non-plastic fibers to give it what little strength it has. All that petroleum will probably get pitched in a landfill after the single recycling pass.
As long as anybody in the world is burning oil as fuel, it makes just as much sense to get the oil from junk plastic as from direct crude oil. If you want to complain about using petroleum, you need to *first* get all fuel use eliminated, *then* you can worry about plastic recycling. You're putting the cart before the horse.
Call me a skeptic, but when someone starts talking about $10/barrel oil made from trash, well let's just say we have a saying here in Missouri: "Show me".
The plastic was made by joining petroleum molecules together. What makes you think that pulling them back apart would be very costly?
I could be dead wrong about the reasoning, but CFLs unquestionably die faster than incandescent bulbs around here. Hopefully this isn't an issue with LED bulbs.
I'm not sure I believe the claims on the super-long life of LEDs. I routinely see LED truck taillights and traffic lights with various patterns of dead elements in them. LEDs are so new and they're supposed to last so long, there shouldn't yet be any dead elements in the wild, but it seems to happen a lot. My theory is that the reliability of high-powered LEDs is overblown.
viruses are not living as they do not exhibit many traits that living creatures do (eg. homeostasis, metabolism, growth, asexual or sexual reproduction, etc).
If you consider a virus to only be the infectious particles outside of a cell, that's true. However, that's not even the interesting portion of a virus's existence. It's just a kind of dormant spore.
When a cell gets infected with a virus, one could argue that the original identity of the cell is lost, and the newly reprogrammed cell now *is* the virus, and it is in its active phase. The cell is born again. It is no longer concerned with replicating its original self (or the organism it belongs to), but instead it becomes mainly dedicated to replicating the virus.
There is no doubt that the virus is alive at that point, as it consumes energy and cranks out more spore particles. When the cell bursts and releases the particles, it goes back into the dormant phase until it comes alive again in new cells.
So I'd argue that a virus is alive, but only intermediately. It has the ability to suspend itself into pure information between active states, then reconstitute itself.
The shuttle is quite reasonable, and I hate when people insist otherwise. In terms of deaths per mile traveled, it is probably the safest form of travel for which we have enough empirical data to accurately assess its danger.
The shuttle caused 14 deaths in over 200 million miles (well over 100 flights, and using a deliberate underestimate of 2 million miles per flight. Most flights are travel 6 million miles.) compared to 13 deaths per 100 million miles by car in the US.
If you count miles traveled as being from departure to destination, the Shuttle only goes a couple of miles per trip (Unless weather makes them land in California.) That probably makes the Shuttle the *most* dangerous per mile form of transport ever devised.
Maybe that's not a fair assessment, but neither is counting all the miles logged coasting in pointless low-orbit circles as some kind of accomplishment.
The Challenger accident was 22 years ago, but people still bring it up to show how unsafe the shuttle is.
That's probably to remind you that it is in fact a deathtrap. It has no escape system and is subject to multiple unnecessary failure modes due to its launch configuration and trying to make it look like an airplane.
NASA is not risk-adverse at all. They've been making people fly in that dangerous Rube Goldberg contraption for decades. It was obvious in the first few years that the Shuttle was never going to be cost-effective, reliable or safe. If they had canned it back then and replaced it with a reasonable launch system, *then* NASA would have been avoiding risks. Maybe they've kept flying it just for the thrill factor.
That doesn't mean it isn't crappy. It especially isn't "in no way crappy", as the GP post asserted.
There are plenty of abysmal widely used "standards" we are stuck with for no other reason than the fact that everybody uses them. FAT32 is one of them.
One thing you can always remain impressed by Microsoft is how they manage to spin something that everyone has been doing for 20 years and talk about it as a trend.
well.... if the copyright didn't extend to well-after the holder's death..... tony and guido would be doing a killer business clearing the way for the big bad media companies.... and much cheaper than options and movie rights.
There's a simple way to avoid that problem. Copyrights should go back to unconditionally expiring after 28 years, dead or alive.
If the author don't save enough of their proceeds into their 401k during the first three decades after publication, then they can get off their asses and earn some money doing new work, just like the rest of us would have to.
It's simply ridiculous that this stale old story is still under the monopolistic control of Tolkein's hysterical heirs.
Such slightly-overweight patients may simply have deeper bodily reserves to draw on in times of medical crisis like surgery or Swine's Flu, not necessarily more healthy.
If you live longer, you live longer. It doesn't matter whether you choose to call it "healthy".
One thing I know for sure is that dead is not healthy.
what's wrong with letting the authors profit off the thing that you're using to make profit?
Nothing. But there's nothing wrong with pointing out that in the current market, development tools and libraries often cost nothing, even to use in proprietary products.
If I say "Store A can't expect to milk at a 50% markup when all the other stores in town sell it at below cost. I want cheap milk. I won't pay that price.", it's a demand I'm entitled to make.
Store A doesn't have to listen to my demand, but they might very well find out that they don't sell much milk. Righteous indignation about Store A's right to make a profit won't change the facts. People are going to expect cheap milk, and they're going to complain about and avoid stores that don't offer it.
It's leeching because apparently you want to make money off someone else's work without ever having to pay him.
What's wrong with that? Nokia is releasing Python bindings under the LGPL in an effort to build market share for other products. It's a loss leader, like milk sold below cost at a supermarket.
Do you think that people who go to the store and buy cheap milk are leeches, too?
So what? fdisk tells me that my drive is 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30401 cylinders. Powers of two have ZERO advantage over base 10 for working with those numbers. A factor of 512 thrown in buys you nothing.
kB and mB have accepted defintions
That's right: KB = 1000 bytes, MB = 1000000 bytes. KiB = 1024 bytes, MiB = (I can't figure it out in my head) bytes. (Which illustrates exactly why MiB sucks rocks.)
Hard drives are just an extension of computer memory
No they're not, and it wouldn't matter if they were. They have NOTHING TO DO with powers of 2.
The ALU in a computer uses base 2, but that's IRRELEVANT.
Do all your spreadsheets show their answers in hexadecimal? No, because that would be moronic. I/O operations convert data into *human readable* format.
There is nothing about hard drive capacity that has anything to do with powers of 2. The number of cylinders, sectors and heads have never been constrained to a power of two. As soon as a single factor of the size is not a power of 2, it blows away any inkling of utility in using powers of two for hard drive capacities. 512-byte sectors don't help one bit. The sizes of files, partitions and other structures on a hard disk have nothing to do with powers of 2 either. Whoever started this trend of showing users invalid SI prefixes was an idiot.
The only thing that makes any sense to report in MiB and GiB is computer memory, which is about the only quantity in a computer that is typically constrained to a power of 2. Even there, the prefixes should always include the 'i' to remove the ambiguity.
Slashdot Mirror
That's the really silly part... we don't need to ban it. Just about any sane jurisdiction that allows driving already has laws against various forms of reckless or distracted driving.
I'm so sick of people making this argument every time this topic comes up. To penalize texting while driving under the current law, you would have to haul each offender into court, and each and every time try to prove to a jury that texting is indeed distracted driving. Huge amounts of resources would be wasted doing this over and over again. Each time it would be fought tooth-and-nail by slick and clever defense lawyers who would bring in all sorts of pseudo statistics to try raise doubts that texting while driving has been 100% air-tight proven to be dangerous. Remember how they convinced a jury that OJ wasn't guilty?
A specific law would point out that texting while driving == distracted driving, no ifs, ands or buts. This fact would not have to be re-proven in every case. Pay the ticket, move on, and don't do it again.
They should also ban passengers in cars then, if its the conversation.
A real person in the car shares your entire context of the traffic situation, communicates using full audio bandwidth and a large dynamic range in a full 3-d sound field.
You talk to someone on a cellphone using about 3kHz of bandwidth, very poor dynamic range, piped through a tiny point source speaker, all made worse by the noisy environment of the car. The random infuriating glitches and dropouts in many wireless connections don't help either.
Phone etiquette also makes it rude to ignore the talker or leave long gaps in the conversation, and the person on the other end has no way to know that such gaffes might be due to traffic. All of this means that when you're on a cellphone, much of your brain horsepower must be dedicated without interruption to audio signal processing, to the detriment of dealing with the traffic around you. (Even more of your brain has to be used up trying to reconstruct in your mind a model of what the other party on the phone is meaning and feeling, but without the benefits of subtle queues, gestures, and facial expressions that you get in person.)
It never ceases to amaze me how many people can't seem to understand the difference in the two situations.
Technically, it had two closely-spaced wheels in the back. But I think that the huge airplane-like stabilizer fins had more to do with keeping it pointed forward than any of its wheels did.
This had a V8 and more room than a tiny subcompact.
An *anemic* V8. A typical modern 4-cylinder (and even a few 3-cylinder) economy car engines are more powerful than that one.
The OP also said the car had minimal metal. He didn't say that the small amount of metal wasn't stretched out over a large interior volume.
wrong. 1933 it got 36mpg WITH A V8 ENGINE and a 20 FOOT LONG BODY.
geniuses like fuller arent around anymore. dont you love progress ?
I've long been a fan of this vehicle, but it's basically a light airplane fuselage stripped of wings and control surfaces. Of course it will have great economy and straight-line performance. That doesn't make it a practical, comfortable or safe ground vehicle.
Modern computerized control systems could probably address its stability issues, but a competitive modern version would probably have to be much heavier to provide crashworthiness, sound deadening, climate control, etc. Highway mileage would always be great because of the aerodynamic shape (and that's probably what gets quoted for the original vehicle). City mileage probably wouldn't be much better than any midsized SUV (and I suspect the original city mileage wasn't so great with its flathead engine).
If you tell me I can do what ever the hell I want to with your code when I work on it I'm more apt to work on code than if you tell me I have to follow your rules when I use it.
Maybe *you* would be more likely to work on the code, but that's not very relevant. Most of the heavy lifting in Linux kernel development is done by corporations.
If you analyze the situation with some basic game theory, it's clear that corporations are unlikely to publicly license the source to any of their significant development efforts unless GPL-style restrictions go along with it. They don't want their competitors taking their hard work and going proprietary with it. (I'm talking about writing new code as open source here. This doesn't count the common case of companies dumping unprofitable proprietary products into unrestrictive open source licenses, often in a last-ditch attempt to devalue their competitors' proprietary products. (See Sun Microsystems.))
This may be why the Linux kernel is less likely to fork. All of the big players are in the same boat, and they enjoy a network effect by sticking together and adding all the improvements to the same codebase. Having to sync improvements between multiple forks (even if they were all GPLd) would add significant overhead to the process. Thus the big contributors would tend to shun any fork.
Make plastic into other plastics (recycle!)
That sounds good, but isn't 100% efficient either. Many kinds of plastic have no recycling market because it's hard to reconstitute it into high-quality material. So what you often get is the recycling center wasting resources on sorting out certain plastic types then dumping them in a landfill.
Moreover, a lot of other plastics are only turned into low-grade products. Take plastic decking boards. How many gallons of oil are tied up into just one of those huge solid chunks of junk plastic? Will that in turn get recycled again? Doubtful, because they usually mix in non-plastic fibers to give it what little strength it has. All that petroleum will probably get pitched in a landfill after the single recycling pass.
As long as anybody in the world is burning oil as fuel, it makes just as much sense to get the oil from junk plastic as from direct crude oil. If you want to complain about using petroleum, you need to *first* get all fuel use eliminated, *then* you can worry about plastic recycling. You're putting the cart before the horse.
Call me a skeptic, but when someone starts talking about $10/barrel oil made from trash, well let's just say we have a saying here in Missouri: "Show me".
The plastic was made by joining petroleum molecules together. What makes you think that pulling them back apart would be very costly?
I could be dead wrong about the reasoning, but CFLs unquestionably die faster than incandescent bulbs around here. Hopefully this isn't an issue with LED bulbs.
I'm not sure I believe the claims on the super-long life of LEDs. I routinely see LED truck taillights and traffic lights with various patterns of dead elements in them. LEDs are so new and they're supposed to last so long, there shouldn't yet be any dead elements in the wild, but it seems to happen a lot. My theory is that the reliability of high-powered LEDs is overblown.
And why did the Challenger rotate out of normal flight profile?
Because the frigging rocket that it was attached to EXPLODED, Einstein.
Thanks for the polite and insightful comments.
Have fun with your toy filesystem.
viruses are not living as they do not exhibit many traits that living creatures do (eg. homeostasis, metabolism, growth, asexual or sexual reproduction, etc).
If you consider a virus to only be the infectious particles outside of a cell, that's true. However, that's not even the interesting portion of a virus's existence. It's just a kind of dormant spore.
When a cell gets infected with a virus, one could argue that the original identity of the cell is lost, and the newly reprogrammed cell now *is* the virus, and it is in its active phase. The cell is born again. It is no longer concerned with replicating its original self (or the organism it belongs to), but instead it becomes mainly dedicated to replicating the virus.
There is no doubt that the virus is alive at that point, as it consumes energy and cranks out more spore particles. When the cell bursts and releases the particles, it goes back into the dormant phase until it comes alive again in new cells.
So I'd argue that a virus is alive, but only intermediately. It has the ability to suspend itself into pure information between active states, then reconstitute itself.
It's life, but not as we know it.
The shuttle is quite reasonable, and I hate when people insist otherwise. In terms of deaths per mile traveled, it is probably the safest form of travel for which we have enough empirical data to accurately assess its danger.
The shuttle caused 14 deaths in over 200 million miles (well over 100 flights, and using a deliberate underestimate of 2 million miles per flight. Most flights are travel 6 million miles.) compared to 13 deaths per 100 million miles by car in the US.
If you count miles traveled as being from departure to destination, the Shuttle only goes a couple of miles per trip (Unless weather makes them land in California.) That probably makes the Shuttle the *most* dangerous per mile form of transport ever devised.
Maybe that's not a fair assessment, but neither is counting all the miles logged coasting in pointless low-orbit circles as some kind of accomplishment.
Airliners are probably about 10**8 times less likely to spontaneously explode in flight than rockets.
Maybe the Shuttle designers thought that they had somehow circumvented that fact, but events proved otherwise.
The Challenger accident was 22 years ago, but people still bring it up to show how unsafe the shuttle is.
That's probably to remind you that it is in fact a deathtrap. It has no escape system and is subject to multiple unnecessary failure modes due to its launch configuration and trying to make it look like an airplane.
NASA is not risk-adverse at all. They've been making people fly in that dangerous Rube Goldberg contraption for decades. It was obvious in the first few years that the Shuttle was never going to be cost-effective, reliable or safe. If they had canned it back then and replaced it with a reasonable launch system, *then* NASA would have been avoiding risks. Maybe they've kept flying it just for the thrill factor.
That doesn't mean it isn't crappy. It especially isn't "in no way crappy", as the GP post asserted.
There are plenty of abysmal widely used "standards" we are stuck with for no other reason than the fact that everybody uses them. FAT32 is one of them.
The only complaints I have with FAT32 are:
4 GB limit - an actual issue now.
IOW: crappy. It can't even hold a single ISO for a 35-cent DVD+RW.
Possible corruption when power is cut - don't cut power in the middle of a write, design a hardware solution for when it does happen.
IOW: crappy, but you can avoid stepping in the crap if you're extra careful
MS owns it - deal with it.
IOW: Every time you buy a gadget that can write FAT32, you get to pay a crappy little tax to Microsoft.
Face it, FAT32 *is* just plain crappy, especially compared to the dozen or so available alternatives.
One thing you can always remain impressed by Microsoft is how they manage to spin something that everyone has been doing for 20 years and talk about it as a trend.
20 years? In this case, more like 50.
well.... if the copyright didn't extend to well-after the holder's death..... tony and guido would be doing a killer business clearing the way for the big bad media companies.... and much cheaper than options and movie rights.
There's a simple way to avoid that problem. Copyrights should go back to unconditionally expiring after 28 years, dead or alive.
If the author don't save enough of their proceeds into their 401k during the first three decades after publication, then they can get off their asses and earn some money doing new work, just like the rest of us would have to.
It's simply ridiculous that this stale old story is still under the monopolistic control of Tolkein's hysterical heirs.
Please provide an example of ANY use in history of this UUID that I created.
If not, STFU, I can get a valid patent on it.
Because after all, if it's never been done, it must be patentable.
Such slightly-overweight patients may simply have deeper bodily reserves to draw on in times of medical crisis like surgery or Swine's Flu, not necessarily more healthy.
If you live longer, you live longer. It doesn't matter whether you choose to call it "healthy".
One thing I know for sure is that dead is not healthy.
what's wrong with letting the authors profit off the thing that you're using to make profit?
Nothing. But there's nothing wrong with pointing out that in the current market, development tools and libraries often cost nothing, even to use in proprietary products.
If I say "Store A can't expect to milk at a 50% markup when all the other stores in town sell it at below cost. I want cheap milk. I won't pay that price.", it's a demand I'm entitled to make.
Store A doesn't have to listen to my demand, but they might very well find out that they don't sell much milk. Righteous indignation about Store A's right to make a profit won't change the facts. People are going to expect cheap milk, and they're going to complain about and avoid stores that don't offer it.
It's leeching because apparently you want to make money off someone else's work without ever having to pay him.
What's wrong with that? Nokia is releasing Python bindings under the LGPL in an effort to build market share for other products. It's a loss leader, like milk sold below cost at a supermarket.
Do you think that people who go to the store and buy cheap milk are leeches, too?
Hard drives are addressed in 512 byte sectors
So what? fdisk tells me that my drive is 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30401 cylinders. Powers of two have ZERO advantage over base 10 for working with those numbers. A factor of 512 thrown in buys you nothing.
kB and mB have accepted defintions
That's right: KB = 1000 bytes, MB = 1000000 bytes.
KiB = 1024 bytes, MiB = (I can't figure it out in my head) bytes. (Which illustrates exactly why MiB sucks rocks.)
Hard drives are just an extension of computer memory
No they're not, and it wouldn't matter if they were. They have NOTHING TO DO with powers of 2.
The ALU in a computer uses base 2, but that's IRRELEVANT.
Do all your spreadsheets show their answers in hexadecimal? No, because that would be moronic. I/O operations convert data into *human readable* format.
There is nothing about hard drive capacity that has anything to do with powers of 2. The number of cylinders, sectors and heads have never been constrained to a power of two. As soon as a single factor of the size is not a power of 2, it blows away any inkling of utility in using powers of two for hard drive capacities. 512-byte sectors don't help one bit. The sizes of files, partitions and other structures on a hard disk have nothing to do with powers of 2 either. Whoever started this trend of showing users invalid SI prefixes was an idiot.
The only thing that makes any sense to report in MiB and GiB is computer memory, which is about the only quantity in a computer that is typically constrained to a power of 2. Even there, the prefixes should always include the 'i' to remove the ambiguity.