I'm going to go with "too little, too late." I imagine the PS3 will hit its stride in about 18-24 months... it is a powerful system with loads of possibility. The question is whether any developers will remain interested by then.
You might get a N64/GC situation. Sony itself is a pretty good set of development studios and it's first tier developement (Gods of war, Gran Turismo, ICO, Shadow of the colossus, SOCOM, Wipeout etc..) might be able to keep it alive for the next generation and we might all remember the PS3 fondly like the Dreamcast. Both Technically well put together but killed by Sony's marketing.
The GPU is roughly mid-range PC hardware now: It's basically a GeForce 7900GT with 256MB VRAM. Quite respectable, and it doesn't seem to get nearly as hot as the 7600GS I have in my PC. On a purely technical level, it's superior to the GPU in the XBox 360.
I think the difference in GPU's is frame rate. It's easier to keep the universal shaders on the Xenos busy because they are flexible while the more specialized shaders on the RSX suffer from needing more attention by the programmer to get the same frame rates. The slight bit of extra juice in the RSX doesn't quite make up the gap so far. Probably int he 3rd or 4th generations of games the RSX might start making the Xenos look poorer. But right now the 5th generation 360 games look on par or slightly better then the first generation PS3 games. The comparison is slightly unfair because the tricks needed to squeeze performance out of the 360 is fairly common now while the tricks required for the PS3 have yet to come. But in business it's rare you have a level playing field. I already backed Nintendo and Sony because despite the root kit(Sony), DRM(Sony), and previous tyranny (Nintendo; MS still the greater evil.
I'm a bit of a hypocrite myself. On one hand, I balk at the price of a PS3, yet on the other hand, I spent $2500+ building and upgrading my gaming computer.
It's because option A (PS3) says you like bakake, jRPG's and tentacle porn and option B (2500+ PC) means you will go to great lengths to make up for your genital inadequacies./friendly jab
the ps3 has been "worth it" to any videophile since its release simply because of its bluray capability
Just like the PS2 was "worth it" because of its DVD capability. Never mind that the PS2 was just about the world's worst DVD player. I know quite a few people who won't be testing those particular waters again any time soon.
Let me just paraphrase what you said.
"Product X is worthless in role A because it's predecessor was very bad at role B."
Do you see the logical fallacy? I have a ps3 and a HD tv. The upscaler in the Ps3 is much better then the upscaler in the TV. The Play back is excellent and it's the best HD player I've used (granted the rest were store demo's or at friends). Compared to any DVD machine I've used it's does as good or better then any I have used. You may fault their price, may fault their game line up, but you can't really fault their BD/DVD playback.
I don't think that's what we're talking about. A more interesting question, I think, is whether "true AI," should it come to pass, will be derived from basic principles (i.e. math) or based on heuristics (i.e. not math). After laying the groundwork in the first few years of digital computers, the theory of computing has not progressed very much! There is no proof that encryption is secure. Quicksort, which is O(n^2), generally outperforms the O(nLog(n)) algorithms. There is still not even a proof that P != NP, even though it seems obvious. I think what has been proven is that most problem classes of interest are non-decidable and intractible. But so what? You can still get along quite well in the world without a provably optimal solution most choices. So now theory is concerned with deriving probabilistic bounds on accuracy and runtime for heuristic methods. I would call that nice to have, but is it necessary?
Newsflash : thats still math. You've moved from linear algebra and trig to statics and sloppy programming.
umm, this is true of ANY country. Still I don't see Canadians murdering each other over the uranium, nickel and wheat. And your point is?
Didn't you take any basic economics. The life of a middle class European is worth 4 or 5 ordinary Caucasians like arabs and at least a dozen of anyone else. it's just basic economics. uranium is about 140$ per pound while a average white Canadian is 10,680$/pound ((GDP per capita / avg body weight) * avg yrs in work force). So if uranium ever becomes 10,681$ You see them murdering each other for control too!
The great logical fallacy of the 1990s was that stereotypes are always incorrect by sheer virtue of them being stereotypes. It's so heartwarming to see that fallacy continued even today.
By the way, at least the article managed to put forth some conjectures, even if they don't cite any studies. Your "nuh-uh" rebuttal leaves something to be desired./i>
I'm asian. I drive a civic. I play copious amounts of starcraft/warcraft. I am good with computers and can make a man 1.5-2 times my size say mercy if I need to. yeah, sometimes those stereo types have some basis.
Actually, sex _does_ drive everything. Without the diversity sex offers, how would anything evolve at it's current rate? At best we'd have mutations from UV rays and the like. We'd probably all still be single celled organisms, or not much better than them.
Our bodies are just vessels our dna is using to perpetuate themselves.
The selective pressure is there. It's just selecting for greasy promiscuous men who don't want to use condoms and foolish girls who don't believe in the pill. In 20-30 generations everyone will resemble Brittany and Kevin... shudder.
Unfortunately, the more powerful enemies are even dumber that the terrorists. You'd think we would be smart enough to realize that attempting to bomb people who aren't afraid to die is not going to work to do ANYTHING but provoke the suicide bombers even more... but we don't think. Same thing with Mexico -- don't build a wall, build up Mexico so no one wants to leave.
I disagree. The people you bomb are plenty afraid to die. I also agree that the people doing the suicide bombings tend not to care so much. The solution to this contradiction is you aren't bombing the right people. The people who fund this is rich Saudis with a Saladin complex and poor jobless Saudis looking for a scape goat to explain their lives.
No. A "data anomaly" would be "left handed suicide bombers". Or "lesbian suicide bombers".
A female suicide bomber DIRECTLY CONTRADICTS their cherry-picked "evidence" for their theory.
A woman does not become a suicide bomber because she cannot find a mate. In most of those countries, there are more men than women.
A woman does not become a suicide bomber because she wants the 72 virgins.
And so forth.
Check the stats on it. it's be a low enough percentage as to be a data anomaly. Although I've done a quick look and have not found any numbers. perhaps you should do a study?
Holy cow! Over twice as many males as females in the UAE? Where the hell are all their women going?
-jcr
The women aren't going anywhere. More precisely the women aren't coming . UAE requires a lot of skilled labor but still wishes to maintain a certain cultural purity. So it imports workers but does not provide a means to import a workers family. The workers required are skilled trades and dumb labor which is not often a womens thing and the risk of uprooting and moving tends also not to be a womens thing. Thus you have a 2:1 ration and little to no casual sex to relive that immense social pressure abstinence creates.
I know the price difference is true. Mostly because of the drastically lower population density and higher required coverage area. And also the big ones like the taste of money and haven't gone into a price war yet.
TELUS has rescinded it's offer to buy out bell. That isn't happening. And where did you get your info about cell penetration. I haven't read anythign notable about Canada's Cell distribution.
For heaven's sake, my VCS 2600 still works as well as the day it came out the box. I have a Pong, and it still works as well as the day it came out. And I still hook them up from time to time! There's no reason why all these 360s should die so easily, and if I want to play a little Crackdown 10 years from now, I should be able to.
Don't worry, there will be a 20%-30% chance the Xbox 720 will be Backwards compatible with it and Microsoft will replace it as often as you like for a certain period. And then it's a brick.
I think it's somewhat unrealistic to expect hardware to last forever but 30% fail rate is ridiculous.
Swarms are like a proof-of-concept that when people are able to stop being myopically selfish and participate in a collective "organ" that's larger than them, rewards return to them which couldn't have been anticipated with a free market perspective. In one way, this is a kind of creepy realization, since it suggests that the most efficient mode of socio-economic organization would be some kind of Borg-like hive-mind. Obviously, I don't think that'd be a good thing, but I do think there's room for individuals participating in collective swarms when it comes to important matters (like food,clothes,shelter), and going their own ways when it's not.
I thought that was what the US political system was? pick a 1 of two virtually identical sides. Turn the brain off and follow the hive mind till you die.
Again you have an evolutionary scenario data point of one. It happened that a quadruped became the common ancestor of most things within our size class but your still working with 1 data point and we aren't aware that you need to be our size, perhaps a communal intelligence. Soem sort of hive mind with small individual bits. Hard to say. We won't know till we meet someone else.
This brings up a funny question in my mind. Basically, there are very few fundamental sources of energy for us to use: solar (photovoltaics, oil, gas, ethanol, etc) and nuclear (fission, fusion). But the rotational energy of the solar system and our planet in particular seem more difficult to tap. Some of it might be partially represented by geothermal power, but you can't exactly tie gears to the planets and attach them to a generator. But your comment makes me wonder if the magnetic field of the natural magnets in Earth's crust may or may not form a kind of energy storage device for past rotational kinetic energy that formed the Earth's dynamo and created the magnets in the first place.
Lets say it works, and thats exactly what it does. Energy always comes from somewhere and if you get energy out of the momentum of the planets.. tapping that is a very very bad idea for obvious reasons.
Prices for the very first CDs I bought were in the range of 10-20 UKP. Twenty years later they are in the range 7-15 UKP. In real terms that's a significant drop. It hasn't been a continual smooth fall, and there's been a few blips along the way, but it looks to me that cost have declined and a free market is in action.
What were the prices in Canada 20 years ago?
At the advent they were 30-40$. They dropped in price early on and have stayed exactly the same since. The last 10 years have had the same prices. The only savings is in inflation.
Except that those "middle men" really DO provide service of immense value... they filter out the crap. And let me assure you, there's lots and LOTS of that crap out there. And much of what they do is help train marginal artists into much better (or even great) artists.
Even though it's not a shining example of talent, note sometime the difference between American Idol contestants early in the season, and compare that to how the very same artist performs at the end. The differences can be stark.
I'm not saying that *IAA doesn't have their collective heads up their behinds on the issue of how to deal with the Internet, but it's really disingenuous to imply that they provide no value at all. Whether it's truly $1 per song (to you) is a matter that the marketplace will ultimately decide.
I disagree. They engineer crap and make it feel all sparkly and fake. Not the RIAA itself since they represent the interests of those that do. The major labels find exactly what they want to market, distort them to fit, and sell sell sell.
As for the market, since all the major players are colluding (RIAA) it isn't a free market thus it decides nothing.
True points, but are they relevant? You have to prove that a monopoly or cartel is in operation. The fact that CD prices (in real terms) have consistently fallen kind of suggests there isn't, and a free-market (or as close as you get in any actual economy) is in operation.
Really. I haven't noticed this. Anything thats popular is 19.99 here in Canada. Anything that was popular or appeals to collectors (eg. NIN CD's) are 20+. I say Halo 10 for 34.95 at a HMV here. I haven't seen the price drop recently.
Let me introduce you to all of history, power and corruption go hand-in-hand. The last 7 years have been the same as the last 7000
Your friendly neighbors up north disagree. The last 7 have been a fair bit worse then the 30 or so before. You have to look back to Nixon to see a similarly evil man in office. or vice-office. The other guy is just a sock puppet.
Your arguing that a quadratic form is superior to other forms making it preferred. I'm pointing out that by numbers, weight, coverage, and diversity insects and round worms have us quadratics beat. It's hubris to assume this form is any more likely then any of the other util forms. They may be a warm blooded sexped with 4 legs and 2 arms. Maybe a two headed triped with a dexterous tongue. Perhaps a cthulu like multiped. Who knows we have a data point of 1 so far so any statement is speculation.
{RANT ON} Personally I hate collectors. My gf dad is a big one. It is a pretty big indication of how selfish and greedy we are in the west, that we prize this stupid old crap, and artificially inflate the value of trash like this. As you say, the beer would have gone of. I see collecting more as a psychological disease. A sickness that comes about from having too much money and space. A disease of the wealth.
That's why when it becomes cheap enough to design with redundancy you do so. Hence 4 legged tables that have an essentially zero failure rate operating within their expected tolerances. (Note that it is entirely plausible the alien craft could have been shot down, that's parallel to putting elephants on the tables).
It will not be hard to design a system in which the worst case failure of our cars will be that one wheel computer goes crazy, and a similar failure of one of the 3 redundant governing systems results in a 2 out of 3 vote to disable the wheel entirely, and bring the vehicle to a safe stop.
It's all a matter of cost, and putting such computers in cars is already almost cheap enough (more and more high end cars are already getting accident avoidance systems of various kinds). I would personally bet that widespread adoption of such systems is less than 20 years away, and adoption of redundant systems is less than 40 years away. Just like airbags became mandatory, I would place a bet on such systems being mandatory in new cars in the 2057 model year. At that point, accidents should essentially be impossible, as the car will not allow you to drive it in a way that it cannot recover safely from (not allowing you to endanger others).
Adding complexity generally reduces the reliability of a system. A table is not the same as say a mainframe. The more complex the systems becomes the more back up you have the more prone to bugs you get. Since the occurance of bugs. Take airplanes. The number of crashes were greatly reduced within the first 10 years then stabilized and has not diminishes. It's a complex system with multiple points of failure. There is redundancy and yet things can still go wrong. The idea progress will make thing perfect is silly. Progress will simply make thing different.
If a genetic biologist gives that answer, then they are wrong. It's clear that humans have changed vastly from fish. Fish don't have the advanced characteristics that make us unusual. Eg, high intelligence, grasping hands, linguistic ability, etc. So some characteristics that came from fish have been retained, but much has been discarded or radically changed. The quadratic configuration has stayed probably because it still is superior to alternatives. There's been hundreds of millions of years in which to try out different forms. And given that non-quadratic configurations (both in humans and animals) still are born on occasion, it seems to me that the quadratic form survives because it is superior to other possible morphological forms.
You mean more successful then say ants? It's a useful morphology but there are others. Insects and nematodes have pretty different stuctures but they are pretty successful too. probably mores successful by volume.
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I'm going to go with "too little, too late." I imagine the PS3 will hit its stride in about 18-24 months... it is a powerful system with loads of possibility. The question is whether any developers will remain interested by then.
You might get a N64/GC situation. Sony itself is a pretty good set of development studios and it's first tier developement (Gods of war, Gran Turismo, ICO, Shadow of the colossus, SOCOM, Wipeout etc..) might be able to keep it alive for the next generation and we might all remember the PS3 fondly like the Dreamcast. Both Technically well put together but killed by Sony's marketing.
The GPU is roughly mid-range PC hardware now: It's basically a GeForce 7900GT with 256MB VRAM. Quite respectable, and it doesn't seem to get nearly as hot as the 7600GS I have in my PC. On a purely technical level, it's superior to the GPU in the XBox 360.
I think the difference in GPU's is frame rate. It's easier to keep the universal shaders on the Xenos busy because they are flexible while the more specialized shaders on the RSX suffer from needing more attention by the programmer to get the same frame rates. The slight bit of extra juice in the RSX doesn't quite make up the gap so far. Probably int he 3rd or 4th generations of games the RSX might start making the Xenos look poorer. But right now the 5th generation 360 games look on par or slightly better then the first generation PS3 games. The comparison is slightly unfair because the tricks needed to squeeze performance out of the 360 is fairly common now while the tricks required for the PS3 have yet to come. But in business it's rare you have a level playing field. I already backed Nintendo and Sony because despite the root kit(Sony), DRM(Sony), and previous tyranny (Nintendo; MS still the greater evil.
You obviously haven't met many PC gamers...
I'm a bit of a hypocrite myself. On one hand, I balk at the price of a PS3, yet on the other hand, I spent $2500+ building and upgrading my gaming computer.
It's because option A (PS3) says you like bakake, jRPG's and tentacle porn and option B (2500+ PC) means you will go to great lengths to make up for your genital inadequacies.
the ps3 has been "worth it" to any videophile since its release simply because of its bluray capability
Just like the PS2 was "worth it" because of its DVD capability. Never mind that the PS2 was just about the world's worst DVD player. I know quite a few people who won't be testing those particular waters again any time soon.
Let me just paraphrase what you said.
"Product X is worthless in role A because it's predecessor was very bad at role B."
Do you see the logical fallacy? I have a ps3 and a HD tv. The upscaler in the Ps3 is much better then the upscaler in the TV. The Play back is excellent and it's the best HD player I've used (granted the rest were store demo's or at friends). Compared to any DVD machine I've used it's does as good or better then any I have used. You may fault their price, may fault their game line up, but you can't really fault their BD/DVD playback.
I don't think that's what we're talking about. A more interesting question, I think, is whether "true AI," should it come to pass, will be derived from basic principles (i.e. math) or based on heuristics (i.e. not math). After laying the groundwork in the first few years of digital computers, the theory of computing has not progressed very much! There is no proof that encryption is secure. Quicksort, which is O(n^2), generally outperforms the O(nLog(n)) algorithms. There is still not even a proof that P != NP, even though it seems obvious. I think what has been proven is that most problem classes of interest are non-decidable and intractible. But so what? You can still get along quite well in the world without a provably optimal solution most choices. So now theory is concerned with deriving probabilistic bounds on accuracy and runtime for heuristic methods. I would call that nice to have, but is it necessary?
Newsflash : thats still math. You've moved from linear algebra and trig to statics and sloppy programming.
umm, this is true of ANY country. Still I don't see Canadians murdering each other over the uranium, nickel and wheat. And your point is?
Didn't you take any basic economics. The life of a middle class European is worth 4 or 5 ordinary Caucasians like arabs and at least a dozen of anyone else. it's just basic economics. uranium is about 140$ per pound while a average white Canadian is 10,680$/pound ((GDP per capita / avg body weight) * avg yrs in work force). So if uranium ever becomes 10,681$ You see them murdering each other for control too!
The great logical fallacy of the 1990s was that stereotypes are always incorrect by sheer virtue of them being stereotypes. It's so heartwarming to see that fallacy continued even today.
By the way, at least the article managed to put forth some conjectures, even if they don't cite any studies. Your "nuh-uh" rebuttal leaves something to be desired./i>
I'm asian. I drive a civic. I play copious amounts of starcraft/warcraft. I am good with computers and can make a man 1.5-2 times my size say mercy if I need to. yeah, sometimes those stereo types have some basis.
Actually, sex _does_ drive everything. Without the diversity sex offers, how would anything evolve at it's current rate? At best we'd have mutations from UV rays and the like. We'd probably all still be single celled organisms, or not much better than them.
Our bodies are just vessels our dna is using to perpetuate themselves.
The selective pressure is there. It's just selecting for greasy promiscuous men who don't want to use condoms and foolish girls who don't believe in the pill. In 20-30 generations everyone will resemble Brittany and Kevin... shudder.
Unfortunately, the more powerful enemies are even dumber that the terrorists. You'd think we would be smart enough to realize that attempting to bomb people who aren't afraid to die is not going to work to do ANYTHING but provoke the suicide bombers even more... but we don't think. Same thing with Mexico -- don't build a wall, build up Mexico so no one wants to leave.
I disagree. The people you bomb are plenty afraid to die. I also agree that the people doing the suicide bombings tend not to care so much. The solution to this contradiction is you aren't bombing the right people. The people who fund this is rich Saudis with a Saladin complex and poor jobless Saudis looking for a scape goat to explain their lives.
No. A "data anomaly" would be "left handed suicide bombers". Or "lesbian suicide bombers".
A female suicide bomber DIRECTLY CONTRADICTS their cherry-picked "evidence" for their theory.
A woman does not become a suicide bomber because she cannot find a mate. In most of those countries, there are more men than women.
A woman does not become a suicide bomber because she wants the 72 virgins.
And so forth.
Check the stats on it. it's be a low enough percentage as to be a data anomaly. Although I've done a quick look and have not found any numbers. perhaps you should do a study?
Holy cow! Over twice as many males as females in the UAE? Where the hell are all their women going?
-jcr
The women aren't going anywhere. More precisely the women aren't coming . UAE requires a lot of skilled labor but still wishes to maintain a certain cultural purity. So it imports workers but does not provide a means to import a workers family. The workers required are skilled trades and dumb labor which is not often a womens thing and the risk of uprooting and moving tends also not to be a womens thing. Thus you have a 2:1 ration and little to no casual sex to relive that immense social pressure abstinence creates.
I know the price difference is true. Mostly because of the drastically lower population density and higher required coverage area. And also the big ones like the taste of money and haven't gone into a price war yet.
TELUS has rescinded it's offer to buy out bell. That isn't happening. And where did you get your info about cell penetration. I haven't read anythign notable about Canada's Cell distribution.
For heaven's sake, my VCS 2600 still works as well as the day it came out the box. I have a Pong, and it still works as well as the day it came out. And I still hook them up from time to time! There's no reason why all these 360s should die so easily, and if I want to play a little Crackdown 10 years from now, I should be able to.
Don't worry, there will be a 20%-30% chance the Xbox 720 will be Backwards compatible with it and Microsoft will replace it as often as you like for a certain period. And then it's a brick.
I think it's somewhat unrealistic to expect hardware to last forever but 30% fail rate is ridiculous.
Swarms are like a proof-of-concept that when people are able to stop being myopically selfish and participate in a collective "organ" that's larger than them, rewards return to them which couldn't have been anticipated with a free market perspective. In one way, this is a kind of creepy realization, since it suggests that the most efficient mode of socio-economic organization would be some kind of Borg-like hive-mind. Obviously, I don't think that'd be a good thing, but I do think there's room for individuals participating in collective swarms when it comes to important matters (like food,clothes,shelter), and going their own ways when it's not.
I thought that was what the US political system was? pick a 1 of two virtually identical sides. Turn the brain off and follow the hive mind till you die.
Again you have an evolutionary scenario data point of one. It happened that a quadruped became the common ancestor of most things within our size class but your still working with 1 data point and we aren't aware that you need to be our size, perhaps a communal intelligence. Soem sort of hive mind with small individual bits. Hard to say. We won't know till we meet someone else.
This brings up a funny question in my mind. Basically, there are very few fundamental sources of energy for us to use: solar (photovoltaics, oil, gas, ethanol, etc) and nuclear (fission, fusion). But the rotational energy of the solar system and our planet in particular seem more difficult to tap. Some of it might be partially represented by geothermal power, but you can't exactly tie gears to the planets and attach them to a generator. But your comment makes me wonder if the magnetic field of the natural magnets in Earth's crust may or may not form a kind of energy storage device for past rotational kinetic energy that formed the Earth's dynamo and created the magnets in the first place.
Lets say it works, and thats exactly what it does. Energy always comes from somewhere and if you get energy out of the momentum of the planets.. tapping that is a very very bad idea for obvious reasons.
Prices for the very first CDs I bought were in the range of 10-20 UKP. Twenty years later they are in the range 7-15 UKP. In real terms that's a significant drop. It hasn't been a continual smooth fall, and there's been a few blips along the way, but it looks to me that cost have declined and a free market is in action.
What were the prices in Canada 20 years ago?
At the advent they were 30-40$. They dropped in price early on and have stayed exactly the same since. The last 10 years have had the same prices. The only savings is in inflation.
Except that those "middle men" really DO provide service of immense value... they filter out the crap. And let me assure you, there's lots and LOTS of that crap out there. And much of what they do is help train marginal artists into much better (or even great) artists.
Even though it's not a shining example of talent, note sometime the difference between American Idol contestants early in the season, and compare that to how the very same artist performs at the end. The differences can be stark.
I'm not saying that *IAA doesn't have their collective heads up their behinds on the issue of how to deal with the Internet, but it's really disingenuous to imply that they provide no value at all. Whether it's truly $1 per song (to you) is a matter that the marketplace will ultimately decide.
I disagree. They engineer crap and make it feel all sparkly and fake. Not the RIAA itself since they represent the interests of those that do. The major labels find exactly what they want to market, distort them to fit, and sell sell sell.
As for the market, since all the major players are colluding (RIAA) it isn't a free market thus it decides nothing.
True points, but are they relevant? You have to prove that a monopoly or cartel is in operation. The fact that CD prices (in real terms) have consistently fallen kind of suggests there isn't, and a free-market (or as close as you get in any actual economy) is in operation.
Really. I haven't noticed this. Anything thats popular is 19.99 here in Canada. Anything that was popular or appeals to collectors (eg. NIN CD's) are 20+. I say Halo 10 for 34.95 at a HMV here. I haven't seen the price drop recently.
Let me introduce you to all of history, power and corruption go hand-in-hand. The last 7 years have been the same as the last 7000
Your friendly neighbors up north disagree. The last 7 have been a fair bit worse then the 30 or so before. You have to look back to Nixon to see a similarly evil man in office. or vice-office. The other guy is just a sock puppet.
Your arguing that a quadratic form is superior to other forms making it preferred. I'm pointing out that by numbers, weight, coverage, and diversity insects and round worms have us quadratics beat. It's hubris to assume this form is any more likely then any of the other util forms. They may be a warm blooded sexped with 4 legs and 2 arms. Maybe a two headed triped with a dexterous tongue. Perhaps a cthulu like multiped. Who knows we have a data point of 1 so far so any statement is speculation.
{RANT ON}
Personally I hate collectors. My gf dad is a big one. It is a pretty big indication of how selfish and greedy we are in the west, that we prize this stupid old crap, and artificially inflate the value of trash like this. As you say, the beer would have gone of. I see collecting more as a psychological disease. A sickness that comes about from having too much money and space. A disease of the wealth.
{/RANT ON}
It's called Obsessive-compulsive disorder(ocd).
That's why when it becomes cheap enough to design with redundancy you do so. Hence 4 legged tables that have an essentially zero failure rate operating within their expected tolerances. (Note that it is entirely plausible the alien craft could have been shot down, that's parallel to putting elephants on the tables).
It will not be hard to design a system in which the worst case failure of our cars will be that one wheel computer goes crazy, and a similar failure of one of the 3 redundant governing systems results in a 2 out of 3 vote to disable the wheel entirely, and bring the vehicle to a safe stop.
It's all a matter of cost, and putting such computers in cars is already almost cheap enough (more and more high end cars are already getting accident avoidance systems of various kinds). I would personally bet that widespread adoption of such systems is less than 20 years away, and adoption of redundant systems is less than 40 years away. Just like airbags became mandatory, I would place a bet on such systems being mandatory in new cars in the 2057 model year. At that point, accidents should essentially be impossible, as the car will not allow you to drive it in a way that it cannot recover safely from (not allowing you to endanger others).
Adding complexity generally reduces the reliability of a system. A table is not the same as say a mainframe. The more complex the systems becomes the more back up you have the more prone to bugs you get. Since the occurance of bugs. Take airplanes. The number of crashes were greatly reduced within the first 10 years then stabilized and has not diminishes. It's a complex system with multiple points of failure. There is redundancy and yet things can still go wrong. The idea progress will make thing perfect is silly. Progress will simply make thing different.
If a genetic biologist gives that answer, then they are wrong. It's clear that humans have changed vastly from fish. Fish don't have the advanced characteristics that make us unusual. Eg, high intelligence, grasping hands, linguistic ability, etc. So some characteristics that came from fish have been retained, but much has been discarded or radically changed. The quadratic configuration has stayed probably because it still is superior to alternatives. There's been hundreds of millions of years in which to try out different forms. And given that non-quadratic configurations (both in humans and animals) still are born on occasion, it seems to me that the quadratic form survives because it is superior to other possible morphological forms.
You mean more successful then say ants? It's a useful morphology but there are others. Insects and nematodes have pretty different stuctures but they are pretty successful too. probably mores successful by volume.