There are a lot of possibilities once you get the output devices small enough to be comfortably worn by an average person for extended amounts of time.
Back before Bluetooth headsets became common and it became (borderline) socially acceptable for people to walk around looking like they fell out of a Star Trek episode, I always thought that there would be serious cyborg possibilities if you could come up with a very small, preferably implantable, earphone that a person could wear continuously. With the source apparatus somewhere else on your body, you'd be able to get a constant stream of information presented to you without an observer being any the wiser.
I always thought that an AM crystal radio, operating on some longwave frequency with the human body as the conductor, would be the way to go. All you'd need would be something in the ear to translate the RF into vibration (piezoelectric?), and by using a crystal transceiver you wouldn't need batteries. (Of course...being around lightning or anything else that sparks could get painful.) You'd probably be talking about something the size of a grain of rice without the antenna.
This was all back before I'd ever seen the actual chip that lies at the center of an RFID tag; now, I suspect, you could have some pretty intelligent active electronics inside something the size of a rice grain, and eliminate many of the problems inherent in having your power and signal on the same frequency (as is the case with AM going into a crystal radio).
I think it's entirely possible that in a generation, perhaps less, people will look back on dangling earbud wires (or even earbuds that you have to continually insert and remove) as comically antiquated.
I don't know about in the online version, but that's one of the things discussed in the print edition of the Wired article. It's in this month's issue. (Look for the 'removable clothing' naked girl on the cover.)
Wouldn't that be just as 'bad' as the real thing?
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Hacking Our Five Senses
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I haven't read the book, but it seems like if you were to play back a "recording" of someone ingesting a psychoactive drug, and the recording was being piped directly into your brain in such a way that it was perceived as real, wouldn't that be just as physiologically addictive as the actual drug?
I mean, heroin works because it causes certain chemicals inside the brain to change. If you don't release those chemicals, it's not going to feel the same. So a completely honest recording of a heroin trip would necessarily have to produce the same physiological response in your synapses as the real thing.
I suspect, that if such a technology were available, that "recordings" of people doing drugs would quickly become just as illicit as the drugs themselves, because they'd be just as addictive. (Although, it's not as though the drug laws in the U.S. have ever had any real correlation to harm, so it might matter more who was making money by selling said recordings and how many Senators they owned.) There are quite a few novels that I've read where the idea of addictive neuro-stimulus was discussed; off the top of my head I think it comes up in Neuromancer, Snow Crash, and the Otherland series by Tad Williams.
You're joking, but I could see some applications of this in cars.
For example, right now there are a lot of cars with sonar sensors to aid in back-in parking. Rather than turning that into audible output that requires a lot of processing to make sense of ("three feet... two feet... " or even "beep...beep..beep..beepbeepbeeeep") you could wire it to an output device that uses some of the driver's unused senses.
Many cars also have inflatable air bladders located in the back of the driver's seat, for lumbar support. Imagine if we connected the parking sensor to the lumbar support, so that as you backed the car in, you'd feel pressure against your back as you got closer and closer to the obstacle. (You'd still want an alarm when you got too close, something that triggered the brain's "abrupt onset" threat response.)
A more complicated system might use multiple bladders, one in the center of the back and smaller ones on either side, to let the driver know approximately how close they are to the car in back, and to the curb, when parallel parking.
Such a system would probably require minimal training and be quick to subliminalize, because it's pretty close to what we experience naturally. (If you're carrying a heavy box and walking backwards, and you feel something contact your back or the back of your legs, even lightly, you're going to immediately stop moving.)
I hope that this research leads to new kinds of output devices that use more of the brain than today's systems, which tend to present everything as predominantly visual, with a smattering of auditory, data.
If you get hit by a semi or a heavy truck of some sort (fire truck, etc.) at high speed, you're going to be dead regardless of what you're driving. So that's a wash.
However, in a collision between two passenger cars, or truck versus car at low speed, the one that's heavier is going to undergo less acceleration and subject the occupants to less force. Also, the one that puts the passengers higher up may be advantageous. That heavy chrome firetruck bumper is at chest level in a Civic, but only at knee level in a Suburban -- that might be the difference between crutches and thorasic surgery. I've been in a subcompact car that nearly got crushed under a garbage truck who backed up without looking; if we hadn't been stopped and just jumped out of the car, people would be calling me Stumpy now. In a taller car, it would have just pushed us backwards. Also, collisions where a driver rear-ends a stopped semitrailer are usually fatal for small cars because of the low positioning (the bumper of the trailer comes in through the windshield -- hello, decapitation), with bigger trucks it's more of a mixed bag. Same with side-impact injuries.
Big SUVs and light trucks certainly have tradeoffs -- there seem to be a lot more one-car accidents involving SUVs (driving off the road, rolling them, etc.) but people tend to quickly trade a risk that they perceive as under their control in order to eliminate on that's not.
Talk to the USG -- they tax the hell out of it.
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X Prize For a 100-MPG Car
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Unfortunately in most of the U.S. diesel is currently more expensive than "regular" unleaded gas. While you may save money with your mileage, most folks don't look that far down the road.
This price difference is artificial. It's a result of the way the Federal (and to a lesser extent, some State) government taxes it.
Here's the issue: trucks (not light trucks, but big semis) do a huge amount of damage to the highways. Aside from frost/salt/washouts and other environmental damage, the biggest thing that kills roads is the high axle loads of semi trucks. Look at a road on which trucks aren't allowed (the G.W. Expressway in VA, or the Merritt in CT, and look at how old the pavement is, and compare it to a nearby freeway -- note the much newer pavement and/or ongoing construction. Cars do almost negligible damage to a well-constructed road.
Since almost all big trucks are powered by diesel fuel, the government at some point decided that making the tax on it higher than gasoline would be a convenient way of making sure that trucks pay for some of the road damage that they do. (Unfortunately they don't pay anything near the damage that they do to the highway system, and the taxpayers foot most of the bill, but I digress.)
But like most shortcuts taken by the government, this had the major unintended consequence of making diesel fuel artificially expensive for passenger vehicles -- or looking at it another way, it made gasoline engines, even though they're comparatively inefficient, much more attractive than they should be.
Just getting rid of the diesel tax, or making it the same as gasoline, isn't an option (at least not without some compensatory measure), because then we'd just be giving an even bigger handout to the OTR trucking industry than we already do.
Until the Federal government figures out some better way of taxing heavy trucks that use the Interstate highways, diesel in the U.S. is always going to be at a massive disadvantage, and our petroleum consumption is going to be far higher than it ought to be as a result. In terms of motor fuels, diesel is just better; it costs less (in terms of energy) to refine, and when used in an internal-combustion engine, you get more energy out of it per volume. With proper emissions equipment it's no more harmful than gasoline, either. The barriers to using it are mostly artificial.
Yeah, you could, but why would you want to? It's not the car manufacturers' job to ensure that people don't violate the laws. That's the driver's job.
Besides which, until fairly recently, there were highways in Montana on which there weren't any speed limits. I think the phrase used was "Reasonable and Prudent" (during the day, it's 70 or something at night). Now, the Federal government cracked down on them and they knuckled under when their funding got threatened, so now it's 75 or 80 during the day, but the point is that the car manufacturers didn't know that.
The electronic limiter should be set at the maximum speed at which a normal person can control the car, and above which (due to its aerodynamic characteristics, tires, etc.) it starts to become un-driveable. That's just common sense, and falls within the realm of not being negligent in manufacturing a product.
You're going down a terrible road when you start making manufacturers of various pieces of equipment responsible for ensuring that users don't do anything illegal with them. The responsibility for compliance with the law rests with the operator, and that's true whether they're driving a car, using a computer, or firing a handgun.
You _could_ change your lifestyle, by simply moving out of the suburbs (or other rural area where you live).
Sure, but why would he want to? He has a car; this allows him (and a vast proportion of the U.S. population) to not have to live packed together in cities in order to get to work.
There's two interrelated concepts here. First, is that people seem to prefer to drive cars when given the choice between driving and taking public transport, unless driving is prohibitively expensive (i.e. parking spaces cost more than equivalent-sized condos) or time-consuming (traffic). If you did research, you could probably quantify exactly how painful a drive needs to be, in order to get an average U.S. resident to use public transportation.
The other issue is that a whole lot of people really abhor living in high-density areas. They see the car as a ticket out of living in a city; without one, they'd be stuck living somewhere (like many people at the very bottom of the socioeconomic ladder) that's served by bus, rail, or subway, but with a car you can live in suburbia. (Which, judging by new home construction, is where a whole lot of people want to live.) People are more than willing to spend the money on a car, and fuel and maintenance, in order to live in a single-family house with a lawn and a garage, etc., rather than in an urban apartment or condo. (Now, much of this preference is driven by the huge tax breaks given to mortgage payments that aren't given to rent, but that's another story.)
Sure, there are people who seem to enjoy living in cities, just like there are people who will take public transportation even if they have the option of driving for the same cost (money and time). But by looking at the general trend, at least in the U.S., we can see that these people aren't the norm.
We'll fix that right after we get cold fusion.
on
X Prize For a 100-MPG Car
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Essentially we're getting 100mph for the transport, but the wanger extension is what is giving us 20mpg. People talk about safety etc, but really these are hedges against speaking the real reason; the perception that Real Men drive Hummers with gunracks, only faggots drive 1100cc Noddy cars.
I'm not quite buying your simplification, though, either: how do you account for the 59% of car purchases made by women? What's their issue, penis envy?
While it may be popular these days to try and pin all the country's (if not the entire world's) ills on a bunch of redneck, white, male, gun-toting, Hummer-driving, "flyover state"-ers, I don't think that reality backs that up. Your typical car buyer is female, and is looking for safety, performance (acceleration and handling, which in many people's minds is intertwined with safety), style, and somewhere significantly further down the list, environmental impact and fuel economy. While the guy driving a Hummer may make a nice target for ridicule, there aren't really enough of them to really matter compared to the legions of people driving mid-market cars which really don't have much in the way of a "penis factor" going for them.
Gas just doesn't cost enough for people to care more about mileage than about style. And to be honest, even if it went up by an order of magnitude, while you'd see cars become more efficient, I doubt that you'd really see people changing their fundamental views very much. We're not really talking about anything that's developed recently here; the same forces are at work today with cars, that led people a century or two ago to buy matched sets of horses to pull their coach. Two thousand years ago, there were probably Romans ogling each others' chariots -- when you have something that represents such a large investment (as personal transportation devices almost always are, regardless of the era), they almost automatically become status symbols.
If we ever get cars that on average get 100MPG, it'll be because the cost of fuel is $10 a gallon; even then, there will still be Hyundais and BMWs, econo-boxes and performance machines, minivans and maybe even a Hummer or two, because that's what people will want and have always wanted.
Given the choice between trying to change a deep-rooted social behavior and solving the technical problem of making a minivan/Hummer/whatever that gets 100MPG, I'd say the technical problem is far more feasible to solve.
Oddly enough, however, one of the reasons that many people use public transportation is because of the traffic. (This is definitely true where I am, outside DC, and I suspect it's true elsewhere.) Other people do it because parking a car in a city is prohibitively expensive...because of the high demand for what spaces are available.
What does this show? It shows that given the choice, people would probably take cars, but because more people want to do that than there is space on the road or parking spaces available, those without large amounts of surplus time and money are pushed onto mass transit.
Sure, there are individual exceptions to this. I'm sure there are a few people riding Metro in the morning who would still ride it, even if I-66 wasn't HOV-only and the Beltway wasn't a veritable parking lot. But they're in the minority; given the option of personal vehicles or mass transit, people overwhelmingly choose personal vehicles -- as evidenced by the utter failure of public transportation to flourish in the U.S. outside zones where driving a car is particularly obnoxious or expensive.
But to get back on point, this is all a bit academic: people who don't own or use cars, for whatever reason, obviously don't participate in the cars-as-expressions-of-something-besides-a-desire- for-transportation game. However, as evidenced by the fact that they aren't wearing identical jumpsuits and eating mush, I don't think there's anything fundamentally different about them, and if they did own cars, they would probably be just as desirous of one that externalized the image that they're trying to present to the world -- in the same way that the clothes/briefcase/watch/cellphone/etc. that they wear on the Metro does.
There's no need for a car that goes more than 70mph.
Regardless of what those pretty signs say on the side of the road, there are lots of places where the prevailing speeds are significantly higher than 70MPH.
And out in those big, flat states (you know, the ones that the pretentious Manhattanites like to call 'flyover states') there are lots of sections of highway where the posted limit is 75 and I suspect most traffic moves upwards of 80.
More generally, you're engaging in what I call the "burlap sack" argument. I could take the same line of thinking that you're going down, and apply it to clothing instead of cars, and come to the conclusion that everyone should stop putting on all these fancy geegaws and just dress in good old burlap sacks, because really, you're just buying a little warmth and weather-resistance. Spray some water repellent on that, and you're good to go.
Cars are as much about 'transportation' as clothes are about staying warm; sure, that's one reason why they exist, but once you've got that function checked off, that's when the real differentiation starts.
You could take my Smart ForTwo and with more efficency get there I am sure, ~60mpg is a good starting place.
Are those street-legal in the U.S.? My understanding was that they're not, at least not yet. It's possible that my fear is irrational, but if I had to pick between being in one of those, or a Chevy Suburban, when slamming the two together, I think I'd probably pick the Suburban. And in our risk-averse culture, safety does sell cars.
The real problem for subminis in the U.S. is interstate/highway driving: there's a much more limited market for vehicles that can't do high-speed interstate driving in the U.S. than in Europe, and I suspect that what there is could be saturated pretty quickly. A vehicle with a top speed of 70mph might be salable, if it can really handle at the upper end of the range comfortably, but something that's not designed to do more than 45-50mph is going to be a tough sell. (I don't know where the Smart cars fall into this, so I'm not singling them out, just speaking generally.)
But case in point: where I live, outside Washington, DC, it's only the 500k or so people who live in the District proper who would really be candidates for non-highway vehicles, the bulk of the car-commuting population live out in areas served by 65MPH arteries. Obviously during rush hour you're lucky to make 20-25 MPH, but only a fool would buy a car that wouldn't let them drive during off-peak hours when the prevailing speeds are up around 70-80. At 45-50 mph or less, you'd better be driving on the shoulder, because you're basically a hazard to navigation. (And I think legally you're required to maintain at least 45mph, and I suspect that if large numbers of slow-moving vehicles started getting driven around, that minimum would increase.)
I've always thought that the Smart cars were neat, conceptually (especially the diesel), but I'm not sure once you saturate the urban market whether the rest of America would be interested.
People really need to see cars as transport. Perhaps then they will start to think in terms of efficiency etc.
People really need to start seeing clothes as something to prevent their reproductive apparatus from freezing. Perhaps then they will start to think in terms of the material and energy required.
In other words: good freaking luck. Cars have been more than transportation for as long as there have been cars. Before there were cars, people had carriages and teams of horses, the perceived quality of which was a sign of wealth, status, and taste. It's been like this probably since the dawn of humanity, with various things.
People will accept some sort of standardized, generic "people transporter" in lieu of a car, right after they all go to wearing standardized jumpsuits with built-in underwear, because hey, its only real function is to keep you warm, right? Who cares what it looks like. Ain't gonna happen.
I'm curious as to possible ways that someone might achieve this. I wonder if it's even possible with something that looks like a car as we know it today, and doesn't stray too far from current internal-combustion engine technology.
I'm particularly interested in things like safety standards: to win the contest, would the vehicle have to be street legal? How about 'not a death trap'? I would think that you could get 100MPG out of a car pretty easily by making it incredibly lightweight, but I wouldn't want to ride in one as it got broadsided by a Suburban.
Do they realize that an entire album, which I can purchase at a brick-and-mortar or an online retailer, will now be cheaper. I can rip that CD using Apple Lossless encoding. Maybe I'm missing the point???
True, but it's worth a significant amount of money to me (and I expect a lot of other people besides) to not have to go anywhere near a shopping mall or other B&M retailer.
Going out to a store, round-trip, is probably an hour of my time, not to mention gas for the car, and is just a giant hassle. It means fighting for a parking space, and then getting into the store, and finding what I want, and waiting in line behind a bunch of teeny-boppers while some stoned clerk plods along through the checkout procedure. I can feel my blood-pressure going up just thinking about it. That's not how I want to spend one of my few free hours after work or on the weekends, thanks much.
If Apple charges a slight premium to allow me to buy DRM-free music from the comfort of my own home, where I can decide to buy something and have it on my computer to listen to, through my stereo, while drinking my beer, in five minutes -- that's value added.
Apple's real competition, at least for me, isn't B&M stores, it's online stores that sell physical CDs, particularly used ones (Half.com). There, it becomes a trade-off between how much I want to pay, and how long I want to wait. Although waiting in a line in a store gives me the urge to stab people, I'm not normally enough of an impulse-buyer to mind waiting a few days for a $4 CD. I could see buying particular tracks that I want to listen to right now from iTunes at $1.30/each, but it's probably not going to be the primary source of my music.
Only if you view DRMed and DRM-free music as the same product. I don't. They're different, in terms of what you can do with them, and the DRMed track has far less value to me.
I would pay $1.30 for an un-DRMed track; I wouldn't pay $0.99 for an DRMed one. The price they're charging for the DRM-free track isn't that far from the mark, IMO the DRMed one is, but I guess I'm in the minority there since they seem to be doing okay.
I don't have a problem with the labels making money, as long as they offer a product to me at a price that I think is worthwhile. With DRMed music, they weren't doing that. It's not a useful product to me, and the prices were extortionate. However, $1.30 a track, or better yet $10 an album, for un-DRMed music might convince me to buy a few albums worth here and there. I'm not going to be running out and dropping a lot of money, but I could think of a few really crummy, low-quality MP3s from back in the Napster days that I'd like to replace.
whereas Microsoft happily licenses their DRM scheme to whoever asks for it in order to encourage interoperability.
Bull -- they license their DRM scheme, but not to foster interoperability, they do it to solidify their monopoly into a new realm. They want to own digital music as thoroughly as they own operating systems, and this means that they need to get all the hardware manufacturers on board.
They have no interest in interoperability, except where it furthers their power over more hardware and software; look at how quickly they abandoned PlaysForSure with Zune. They were all set to pull the rug out from under all their "partners" that they had licensed PFS to. (Of course, Zune was a flop instead of the amazing success that Microsoft apparently hoped it would be, but had it been successful, SanDisk and all the other makers of semi-generic WMA players would have been left out in the cold, quite by design.)
If yours is really maxed out at 128kbps AAC, then yeah, I guess you'll need to go and buy a bigger one. But I think that's fairly rare.
Most people just don't have that much music: 40GB using Apple's math is 10,000 songs (given 7500 for the 30GB model). Few people have that, other than geeks (who can "acquire" it extralegally) or music lovers (who have massive CD collections to begin with).
I know quite a few people who have large parts of their collection stored on their iPods as Apple Lossless, which is significantly bigger than 256kb/s. If you don't store a lot of video on there, particularly the 80GB iPods hold a lot of music, even with lossless compression.
I'd love to see some hard numbers, but I bet that the typical user's iPod is only half to three-quarters full, at the most.
Or alternately, he realizes that since 80% of users (and probably 99.9% of users who are downloading music from iTunes) already have an iPod, which plays AAC, and since AAC offers much better quality-per-bitrate than MP3, and it's an open standard which has fewer licensing and IP problems than MP3 (which is a minefield and will be until at least 2011 or 2017). Plus, it has better support for metadata, and a variety of additional features not provided for in MP3. It's just an all-around better format from a technical standpoint.
Most users don't care about getting music in MP3 versus AAC, and there are a number of reasons why it's advantageous, in the absence of a strong preference for MP3, to go with the latter. If un-DRMed music in the AAC format becomes popular, other portable music device manufacturers are free to implement players for it. But given that music players other than the iPod represent only a negligible fraction of iTunes users, there's simply no reason for Jobs and Apple to bend over backwards in order to support them.
America rather consistently loses wars against third-world countries. Very impressive, and definitely great. Then they criticize the rest of the world for not being stupid enough to get on board for the big defeat. So America is simultaneously weak (for losing), stupid (for going to war in the first place), and petty (for getting mad at nations run by rational, literate people).
I think you're ignoring a rather important point here. America tends to "lose" wars to seemingly inferior opponents, because America (by which I mean the American public, collectively), for better or worse, doesn't really want to do the kind of nastiness that would be required to win decisively.
E.g., it's a lot easier to win wars if you don't care about what you do to the enemy civilian population. In the extreme case, you just kill everyone and take over an empty country. (This is pretty feasible, without anything so uncouth as actual death squads, with biological weapons, some chemical weapons, or certain types of nuclear weapons.)
I'm not sure that I would poke fun at the U.S. for "losing" per se; that's sort of like complaining that a truck full of guys with machine guns get over-run by a mob, because they're unwilling to just start shooting into the crowd. It's less a "loss" in the military sense than it is a quasi-surrender; an admission that victory cannot be attained without doing things that are considered beyond the pale.
So while there's certainly ample room to criticize the U.S.'s military adventures (but before you do -- realize it's not new; the U.S. has a long history of going on bloody little expeditions every once in a while when there isn't a 'real' war going on), the U.S. "losses" in battle are more reflective of the limits on U.S. commitment and conduct than they are on any actual military factors.
If an artifact has existed for 10,000 years, only a fool would suggest that we destroy it and only retain copies that are on an untested medium. However, if some new medium makes the data more convenient and useful, then there's no downside, really, to making it available in both -- keeping the old format and also copying it into a modern electronic one.
Just as a trivial personal example, I have a lot of photographic slides and negatives. Some of them (the ones taken by people in my family who knew, at the time, that they were taking photos of something historically or personally significant) were shot on silver halide black-and-white, or Kodachrome color film. They'll probably last a century or more, properly stored. Short of glass plates, they're the modern photographic equivalent of stone tablets. But I've still scanned them in, not so much for preservation purposes (although there is that -- what if the house they're stored in burned down?) but for convenience. The originals will still hopefully always be around, but it doesn't make any sense to only keep them in a format that's increasingly hard to use and enjoy. A whole lot of people have gotten to see them since I've put them up on Flickr, then ever would have seen them just as 2x2" slides.
I think this approach ought to be the ideal model for things like important records; paper (at least, good cotton paper) has pretty amazing longevity. But it's really inconvenient to work with -- digital records are superior from an accessibility standpoint in almost every way. But it's dangerous to not keep physical copies, because most digital storage formats just don't have a very long track record. We can make guesses that some media will last a hundred years, but really, who knows? Unfortunately, from a budgetary standpoint it's the most expensive solution, but for Things That Matter (whether on an individual, organizational/corporate, or governmental/cultural level), it's almost unquestionably the way to go if at all possible.
Doesn't the ISO9660 format already have a certain amount of redundancy in it?
Not saying that using PAR2 to create some additional redundancy is a bad idea, but I don't think that one-bit errors are totally disastrous automatically, if you've burned your data in a normal format.
Not sure what UDF does, though.
Although it's not as if PAR2 is a particularly exotic format, just in case it drops out of common use in the future, I think I'd still put a plaintext copy of the source code for the reassembler on every backup volume, or at least on the first volume in each set, just to make life potentially easier down the road. (And even if the format doesn't drop out of use, having the backups be self-contained in terms of containing the software necessary to decompress/assemble themselves would let someone use them even if they didn't have network access, which might be handy.)
My major objection to cygwin (and this may be minor compared to others' objections, but I don't do that much serious work with it) is that you, at least to my knowledge, have to install new software through the GUI; you can't do it from the commandline.
So if you have cygwin open and want to install openssl, you can't just type apt-get install openssl, you need to find the installer program (in Windows), and run it, and select the new packages.
It would be nice to be able to do all that stuff, aside from installation of the base system, from within the cygwin shell itself.
Aside from that, the only real problem I've run into is the availability of packages is somewhat less than stellar. But it has the basics, and in terms of things that have made my life at work, where I have to use a Windows machine, more pleasant, it's at the top of the list.
Maybe you missed something, or I was unclear, but I was saying that a normalization procedure that doesn't create a lot of competition is a good thing. Somehow, you seem to have read it as the reverse.
Obviously, a grading schema (such as the "forced curve," which I gave an example of, and I understand used to be pretty common in medical schools) which creates an artificial scarcity of 'A' grades and creates competition between students for them, where they attempt to undermine each other, is bad. It's hugely counterproductive, unless your goal is to turn out sociopaths, and I'd seriously question any educator today who did it. (Unless they were doing it for pedagogical reasons, somehow.)
But normalizing grades is common, because it helps to compensate for factors outside students' and professors' control; my point was that a good normalization procedure also discourage students from allowing people to cheat off of them, but doesn't create the same sort of cutthroat competition that force-curving does.
As other people have pointed out, although collaboration is obviously a critically important skill in today's world (and job market), you're not doing anyone any favors when you help someone who's plainly unqualified to get a grade they don't deserve: you're only creating competition for yourself and other qualified people down the road, and you may bring your field (or your alma mater) into disrepute via their shoddy performance later, which could have negative consequences. And you don't really help them in the long run, because they'll probably just end up over their head someday, when what they don't know catches up to them.
There's a key difference between collaboration and allowing someone who's nothing but dead weight to copy off your answer sheet; in the former case, a team can be greater than the sum of its parts, but in the latter, a solid worker and a cheater are worse than the solid worker by herself.
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There are a lot of possibilities once you get the output devices small enough to be comfortably worn by an average person for extended amounts of time.
Back before Bluetooth headsets became common and it became (borderline) socially acceptable for people to walk around looking like they fell out of a Star Trek episode, I always thought that there would be serious cyborg possibilities if you could come up with a very small, preferably implantable, earphone that a person could wear continuously. With the source apparatus somewhere else on your body, you'd be able to get a constant stream of information presented to you without an observer being any the wiser.
I always thought that an AM crystal radio, operating on some longwave frequency with the human body as the conductor, would be the way to go. All you'd need would be something in the ear to translate the RF into vibration (piezoelectric?), and by using a crystal transceiver you wouldn't need batteries. (Of course...being around lightning or anything else that sparks could get painful.) You'd probably be talking about something the size of a grain of rice without the antenna.
This was all back before I'd ever seen the actual chip that lies at the center of an RFID tag; now, I suspect, you could have some pretty intelligent active electronics inside something the size of a rice grain, and eliminate many of the problems inherent in having your power and signal on the same frequency (as is the case with AM going into a crystal radio).
I think it's entirely possible that in a generation, perhaps less, people will look back on dangling earbud wires (or even earbuds that you have to continually insert and remove) as comically antiquated.
I don't know about in the online version, but that's one of the things discussed in the print edition of the Wired article. It's in this month's issue. (Look for the 'removable clothing' naked girl on the cover.)
I haven't read the book, but it seems like if you were to play back a "recording" of someone ingesting a psychoactive drug, and the recording was being piped directly into your brain in such a way that it was perceived as real, wouldn't that be just as physiologically addictive as the actual drug?
I mean, heroin works because it causes certain chemicals inside the brain to change. If you don't release those chemicals, it's not going to feel the same. So a completely honest recording of a heroin trip would necessarily have to produce the same physiological response in your synapses as the real thing.
I suspect, that if such a technology were available, that "recordings" of people doing drugs would quickly become just as illicit as the drugs themselves, because they'd be just as addictive. (Although, it's not as though the drug laws in the U.S. have ever had any real correlation to harm, so it might matter more who was making money by selling said recordings and how many Senators they owned.) There are quite a few novels that I've read where the idea of addictive neuro-stimulus was discussed; off the top of my head I think it comes up in Neuromancer, Snow Crash, and the Otherland series by Tad Williams.
You're joking, but I could see some applications of this in cars.
... two feet ... " or even "beep...beep..beep..beepbeepbeeeep") you could wire it to an output device that uses some of the driver's unused senses.
For example, right now there are a lot of cars with sonar sensors to aid in back-in parking. Rather than turning that into audible output that requires a lot of processing to make sense of ("three feet
Many cars also have inflatable air bladders located in the back of the driver's seat, for lumbar support. Imagine if we connected the parking sensor to the lumbar support, so that as you backed the car in, you'd feel pressure against your back as you got closer and closer to the obstacle. (You'd still want an alarm when you got too close, something that triggered the brain's "abrupt onset" threat response.)
A more complicated system might use multiple bladders, one in the center of the back and smaller ones on either side, to let the driver know approximately how close they are to the car in back, and to the curb, when parallel parking.
Such a system would probably require minimal training and be quick to subliminalize, because it's pretty close to what we experience naturally. (If you're carrying a heavy box and walking backwards, and you feel something contact your back or the back of your legs, even lightly, you're going to immediately stop moving.)
I hope that this research leads to new kinds of output devices that use more of the brain than today's systems, which tend to present everything as predominantly visual, with a smattering of auditory, data.
You're not making a particularly good argument.
If you get hit by a semi or a heavy truck of some sort (fire truck, etc.) at high speed, you're going to be dead regardless of what you're driving. So that's a wash.
However, in a collision between two passenger cars, or truck versus car at low speed, the one that's heavier is going to undergo less acceleration and subject the occupants to less force. Also, the one that puts the passengers higher up may be advantageous. That heavy chrome firetruck bumper is at chest level in a Civic, but only at knee level in a Suburban -- that might be the difference between crutches and thorasic surgery. I've been in a subcompact car that nearly got crushed under a garbage truck who backed up without looking; if we hadn't been stopped and just jumped out of the car, people would be calling me Stumpy now. In a taller car, it would have just pushed us backwards. Also, collisions where a driver rear-ends a stopped semitrailer are usually fatal for small cars because of the low positioning (the bumper of the trailer comes in through the windshield -- hello, decapitation), with bigger trucks it's more of a mixed bag. Same with side-impact injuries.
Big SUVs and light trucks certainly have tradeoffs -- there seem to be a lot more one-car accidents involving SUVs (driving off the road, rolling them, etc.) but people tend to quickly trade a risk that they perceive as under their control in order to eliminate on that's not.
Unfortunately in most of the U.S. diesel is currently more expensive than "regular" unleaded gas. While you may save money with your mileage, most folks don't look that far down the road.
This price difference is artificial. It's a result of the way the Federal (and to a lesser extent, some State) government taxes it.
Here's the issue: trucks (not light trucks, but big semis) do a huge amount of damage to the highways. Aside from frost/salt/washouts and other environmental damage, the biggest thing that kills roads is the high axle loads of semi trucks. Look at a road on which trucks aren't allowed (the G.W. Expressway in VA, or the Merritt in CT, and look at how old the pavement is, and compare it to a nearby freeway -- note the much newer pavement and/or ongoing construction. Cars do almost negligible damage to a well-constructed road.
Since almost all big trucks are powered by diesel fuel, the government at some point decided that making the tax on it higher than gasoline would be a convenient way of making sure that trucks pay for some of the road damage that they do. (Unfortunately they don't pay anything near the damage that they do to the highway system, and the taxpayers foot most of the bill, but I digress.)
But like most shortcuts taken by the government, this had the major unintended consequence of making diesel fuel artificially expensive for passenger vehicles -- or looking at it another way, it made gasoline engines, even though they're comparatively inefficient, much more attractive than they should be.
Just getting rid of the diesel tax, or making it the same as gasoline, isn't an option (at least not without some compensatory measure), because then we'd just be giving an even bigger handout to the OTR trucking industry than we already do.
Until the Federal government figures out some better way of taxing heavy trucks that use the Interstate highways, diesel in the U.S. is always going to be at a massive disadvantage, and our petroleum consumption is going to be far higher than it ought to be as a result. In terms of motor fuels, diesel is just better; it costs less (in terms of energy) to refine, and when used in an internal-combustion engine, you get more energy out of it per volume. With proper emissions equipment it's no more harmful than gasoline, either. The barriers to using it are mostly artificial.
Yeah, you could, but why would you want to? It's not the car manufacturers' job to ensure that people don't violate the laws. That's the driver's job.
Besides which, until fairly recently, there were highways in Montana on which there weren't any speed limits. I think the phrase used was "Reasonable and Prudent" (during the day, it's 70 or something at night). Now, the Federal government cracked down on them and they knuckled under when their funding got threatened, so now it's 75 or 80 during the day, but the point is that the car manufacturers didn't know that.
The electronic limiter should be set at the maximum speed at which a normal person can control the car, and above which (due to its aerodynamic characteristics, tires, etc.) it starts to become un-driveable. That's just common sense, and falls within the realm of not being negligent in manufacturing a product.
You're going down a terrible road when you start making manufacturers of various pieces of equipment responsible for ensuring that users don't do anything illegal with them. The responsibility for compliance with the law rests with the operator, and that's true whether they're driving a car, using a computer, or firing a handgun.
You _could_ change your lifestyle, by simply moving out of the suburbs (or other rural area where you live).
Sure, but why would he want to? He has a car; this allows him (and a vast proportion of the U.S. population) to not have to live packed together in cities in order to get to work.
There's two interrelated concepts here. First, is that people seem to prefer to drive cars when given the choice between driving and taking public transport, unless driving is prohibitively expensive (i.e. parking spaces cost more than equivalent-sized condos) or time-consuming (traffic). If you did research, you could probably quantify exactly how painful a drive needs to be, in order to get an average U.S. resident to use public transportation.
The other issue is that a whole lot of people really abhor living in high-density areas. They see the car as a ticket out of living in a city; without one, they'd be stuck living somewhere (like many people at the very bottom of the socioeconomic ladder) that's served by bus, rail, or subway, but with a car you can live in suburbia. (Which, judging by new home construction, is where a whole lot of people want to live.) People are more than willing to spend the money on a car, and fuel and maintenance, in order to live in a single-family house with a lawn and a garage, etc., rather than in an urban apartment or condo. (Now, much of this preference is driven by the huge tax breaks given to mortgage payments that aren't given to rent, but that's another story.)
Sure, there are people who seem to enjoy living in cities, just like there are people who will take public transportation even if they have the option of driving for the same cost (money and time). But by looking at the general trend, at least in the U.S., we can see that these people aren't the norm.
Essentially we're getting 100mph for the transport, but the wanger extension is what is giving us 20mpg. People talk about safety etc, but really these are hedges against speaking the real reason; the perception that Real Men drive Hummers with gunracks, only faggots drive 1100cc Noddy cars.
I'm not quite buying your simplification, though, either: how do you account for the 59% of car purchases made by women? What's their issue, penis envy?
While it may be popular these days to try and pin all the country's (if not the entire world's) ills on a bunch of redneck, white, male, gun-toting, Hummer-driving, "flyover state"-ers, I don't think that reality backs that up. Your typical car buyer is female, and is looking for safety, performance (acceleration and handling, which in many people's minds is intertwined with safety), style, and somewhere significantly further down the list, environmental impact and fuel economy. While the guy driving a Hummer may make a nice target for ridicule, there aren't really enough of them to really matter compared to the legions of people driving mid-market cars which really don't have much in the way of a "penis factor" going for them.
Gas just doesn't cost enough for people to care more about mileage than about style. And to be honest, even if it went up by an order of magnitude, while you'd see cars become more efficient, I doubt that you'd really see people changing their fundamental views very much. We're not really talking about anything that's developed recently here; the same forces are at work today with cars, that led people a century or two ago to buy matched sets of horses to pull their coach. Two thousand years ago, there were probably Romans ogling each others' chariots -- when you have something that represents such a large investment (as personal transportation devices almost always are, regardless of the era), they almost automatically become status symbols.
If we ever get cars that on average get 100MPG, it'll be because the cost of fuel is $10 a gallon; even then, there will still be Hyundais and BMWs, econo-boxes and performance machines, minivans and maybe even a Hummer or two, because that's what people will want and have always wanted.
Given the choice between trying to change a deep-rooted social behavior and solving the technical problem of making a minivan/Hummer/whatever that gets 100MPG, I'd say the technical problem is far more feasible to solve.
Oddly enough, however, one of the reasons that many people use public transportation is because of the traffic. (This is definitely true where I am, outside DC, and I suspect it's true elsewhere.) Other people do it because parking a car in a city is prohibitively expensive...because of the high demand for what spaces are available.
- for-transportation game. However, as evidenced by the fact that they aren't wearing identical jumpsuits and eating mush, I don't think there's anything fundamentally different about them, and if they did own cars, they would probably be just as desirous of one that externalized the image that they're trying to present to the world -- in the same way that the clothes/briefcase/watch/cellphone/etc. that they wear on the Metro does.
What does this show? It shows that given the choice, people would probably take cars, but because more people want to do that than there is space on the road or parking spaces available, those without large amounts of surplus time and money are pushed onto mass transit.
Sure, there are individual exceptions to this. I'm sure there are a few people riding Metro in the morning who would still ride it, even if I-66 wasn't HOV-only and the Beltway wasn't a veritable parking lot. But they're in the minority; given the option of personal vehicles or mass transit, people overwhelmingly choose personal vehicles -- as evidenced by the utter failure of public transportation to flourish in the U.S. outside zones where driving a car is particularly obnoxious or expensive.
But to get back on point, this is all a bit academic: people who don't own or use cars, for whatever reason, obviously don't participate in the cars-as-expressions-of-something-besides-a-desire
There's no need for a car that goes more than 70mph.
Regardless of what those pretty signs say on the side of the road, there are lots of places where the prevailing speeds are significantly higher than 70MPH.
And out in those big, flat states (you know, the ones that the pretentious Manhattanites like to call 'flyover states') there are lots of sections of highway where the posted limit is 75 and I suspect most traffic moves upwards of 80.
More generally, you're engaging in what I call the "burlap sack" argument. I could take the same line of thinking that you're going down, and apply it to clothing instead of cars, and come to the conclusion that everyone should stop putting on all these fancy geegaws and just dress in good old burlap sacks, because really, you're just buying a little warmth and weather-resistance. Spray some water repellent on that, and you're good to go.
Cars are as much about 'transportation' as clothes are about staying warm; sure, that's one reason why they exist, but once you've got that function checked off, that's when the real differentiation starts.
You could take my Smart ForTwo and with more efficency get there I am sure, ~60mpg is a good starting place.
Are those street-legal in the U.S.? My understanding was that they're not, at least not yet. It's possible that my fear is irrational, but if I had to pick between being in one of those, or a Chevy Suburban, when slamming the two together, I think I'd probably pick the Suburban. And in our risk-averse culture, safety does sell cars.
The real problem for subminis in the U.S. is interstate/highway driving: there's a much more limited market for vehicles that can't do high-speed interstate driving in the U.S. than in Europe, and I suspect that what there is could be saturated pretty quickly. A vehicle with a top speed of 70mph might be salable, if it can really handle at the upper end of the range comfortably, but something that's not designed to do more than 45-50mph is going to be a tough sell. (I don't know where the Smart cars fall into this, so I'm not singling them out, just speaking generally.)
But case in point: where I live, outside Washington, DC, it's only the 500k or so people who live in the District proper who would really be candidates for non-highway vehicles, the bulk of the car-commuting population live out in areas served by 65MPH arteries. Obviously during rush hour you're lucky to make 20-25 MPH, but only a fool would buy a car that wouldn't let them drive during off-peak hours when the prevailing speeds are up around 70-80. At 45-50 mph or less, you'd better be driving on the shoulder, because you're basically a hazard to navigation. (And I think legally you're required to maintain at least 45mph, and I suspect that if large numbers of slow-moving vehicles started getting driven around, that minimum would increase.)
I've always thought that the Smart cars were neat, conceptually (especially the diesel), but I'm not sure once you saturate the urban market whether the rest of America would be interested.
People really need to see cars as transport. Perhaps then they will start to think in terms of efficiency etc.
People really need to start seeing clothes as something to prevent their reproductive apparatus from freezing. Perhaps then they will start to think in terms of the material and energy required.
In other words: good freaking luck. Cars have been more than transportation for as long as there have been cars. Before there were cars, people had carriages and teams of horses, the perceived quality of which was a sign of wealth, status, and taste. It's been like this probably since the dawn of humanity, with various things.
People will accept some sort of standardized, generic "people transporter" in lieu of a car, right after they all go to wearing standardized jumpsuits with built-in underwear, because hey, its only real function is to keep you warm, right? Who cares what it looks like. Ain't gonna happen.
I'm curious as to possible ways that someone might achieve this. I wonder if it's even possible with something that looks like a car as we know it today, and doesn't stray too far from current internal-combustion engine technology.
I'm particularly interested in things like safety standards: to win the contest, would the vehicle have to be street legal? How about 'not a death trap'? I would think that you could get 100MPG out of a car pretty easily by making it incredibly lightweight, but I wouldn't want to ride in one as it got broadsided by a Suburban.
Do they realize that an entire album, which I can purchase at a brick-and-mortar or an online retailer, will now be cheaper. I can rip that CD using Apple Lossless encoding. Maybe I'm missing the point???
True, but it's worth a significant amount of money to me (and I expect a lot of other people besides) to not have to go anywhere near a shopping mall or other B&M retailer.
Going out to a store, round-trip, is probably an hour of my time, not to mention gas for the car, and is just a giant hassle. It means fighting for a parking space, and then getting into the store, and finding what I want, and waiting in line behind a bunch of teeny-boppers while some stoned clerk plods along through the checkout procedure. I can feel my blood-pressure going up just thinking about it. That's not how I want to spend one of my few free hours after work or on the weekends, thanks much.
If Apple charges a slight premium to allow me to buy DRM-free music from the comfort of my own home, where I can decide to buy something and have it on my computer to listen to, through my stereo, while drinking my beer, in five minutes -- that's value added.
Apple's real competition, at least for me, isn't B&M stores, it's online stores that sell physical CDs, particularly used ones (Half.com). There, it becomes a trade-off between how much I want to pay, and how long I want to wait. Although waiting in a line in a store gives me the urge to stab people, I'm not normally enough of an impulse-buyer to mind waiting a few days for a $4 CD. I could see buying particular tracks that I want to listen to right now from iTunes at $1.30/each, but it's probably not going to be the primary source of my music.
Only if you view DRMed and DRM-free music as the same product. I don't. They're different, in terms of what you can do with them, and the DRMed track has far less value to me.
I would pay $1.30 for an un-DRMed track; I wouldn't pay $0.99 for an DRMed one. The price they're charging for the DRM-free track isn't that far from the mark, IMO the DRMed one is, but I guess I'm in the minority there since they seem to be doing okay.
I don't have a problem with the labels making money, as long as they offer a product to me at a price that I think is worthwhile. With DRMed music, they weren't doing that. It's not a useful product to me, and the prices were extortionate. However, $1.30 a track, or better yet $10 an album, for un-DRMed music might convince me to buy a few albums worth here and there. I'm not going to be running out and dropping a lot of money, but I could think of a few really crummy, low-quality MP3s from back in the Napster days that I'd like to replace.
whereas Microsoft happily licenses their DRM scheme to whoever asks for it in order to encourage interoperability.
Bull -- they license their DRM scheme, but not to foster interoperability, they do it to solidify their monopoly into a new realm. They want to own digital music as thoroughly as they own operating systems, and this means that they need to get all the hardware manufacturers on board.
They have no interest in interoperability, except where it furthers their power over more hardware and software; look at how quickly they abandoned PlaysForSure with Zune. They were all set to pull the rug out from under all their "partners" that they had licensed PFS to. (Of course, Zune was a flop instead of the amazing success that Microsoft apparently hoped it would be, but had it been successful, SanDisk and all the other makers of semi-generic WMA players would have been left out in the cold, quite by design.)
If yours is really maxed out at 128kbps AAC, then yeah, I guess you'll need to go and buy a bigger one. But I think that's fairly rare.
Most people just don't have that much music: 40GB using Apple's math is 10,000 songs (given 7500 for the 30GB model). Few people have that, other than geeks (who can "acquire" it extralegally) or music lovers (who have massive CD collections to begin with).
I know quite a few people who have large parts of their collection stored on their iPods as Apple Lossless, which is significantly bigger than 256kb/s. If you don't store a lot of video on there, particularly the 80GB iPods hold a lot of music, even with lossless compression.
I'd love to see some hard numbers, but I bet that the typical user's iPod is only half to three-quarters full, at the most.
Or alternately, he realizes that since 80% of users (and probably 99.9% of users who are downloading music from iTunes) already have an iPod, which plays AAC, and since AAC offers much better quality-per-bitrate than MP3, and it's an open standard which has fewer licensing and IP problems than MP3 (which is a minefield and will be until at least 2011 or 2017). Plus, it has better support for metadata, and a variety of additional features not provided for in MP3. It's just an all-around better format from a technical standpoint.
Most users don't care about getting music in MP3 versus AAC, and there are a number of reasons why it's advantageous, in the absence of a strong preference for MP3, to go with the latter. If un-DRMed music in the AAC format becomes popular, other portable music device manufacturers are free to implement players for it. But given that music players other than the iPod represent only a negligible fraction of iTunes users, there's simply no reason for Jobs and Apple to bend over backwards in order to support them.
America rather consistently loses wars against third-world countries. Very impressive, and definitely great. Then they criticize the rest of the world for not being stupid enough to get on board for the big defeat. So America is simultaneously weak (for losing), stupid (for going to war in the first place), and petty (for getting mad at nations run by rational, literate people).
I think you're ignoring a rather important point here. America tends to "lose" wars to seemingly inferior opponents, because America (by which I mean the American public, collectively), for better or worse, doesn't really want to do the kind of nastiness that would be required to win decisively.
E.g., it's a lot easier to win wars if you don't care about what you do to the enemy civilian population. In the extreme case, you just kill everyone and take over an empty country. (This is pretty feasible, without anything so uncouth as actual death squads, with biological weapons, some chemical weapons, or certain types of nuclear weapons.)
I'm not sure that I would poke fun at the U.S. for "losing" per se; that's sort of like complaining that a truck full of guys with machine guns get over-run by a mob, because they're unwilling to just start shooting into the crowd. It's less a "loss" in the military sense than it is a quasi-surrender; an admission that victory cannot be attained without doing things that are considered beyond the pale.
So while there's certainly ample room to criticize the U.S.'s military adventures (but before you do -- realize it's not new; the U.S. has a long history of going on bloody little expeditions every once in a while when there isn't a 'real' war going on), the U.S. "losses" in battle are more reflective of the limits on U.S. commitment and conduct than they are on any actual military factors.
Much like alcohol, or drugs.
So, in other words, you mean "awesome"?
I don't think it has to be an either-or decision.
If an artifact has existed for 10,000 years, only a fool would suggest that we destroy it and only retain copies that are on an untested medium. However, if some new medium makes the data more convenient and useful, then there's no downside, really, to making it available in both -- keeping the old format and also copying it into a modern electronic one.
Just as a trivial personal example, I have a lot of photographic slides and negatives. Some of them (the ones taken by people in my family who knew, at the time, that they were taking photos of something historically or personally significant) were shot on silver halide black-and-white, or Kodachrome color film. They'll probably last a century or more, properly stored. Short of glass plates, they're the modern photographic equivalent of stone tablets. But I've still scanned them in, not so much for preservation purposes (although there is that -- what if the house they're stored in burned down?) but for convenience. The originals will still hopefully always be around, but it doesn't make any sense to only keep them in a format that's increasingly hard to use and enjoy. A whole lot of people have gotten to see them since I've put them up on Flickr, then ever would have seen them just as 2x2" slides.
I think this approach ought to be the ideal model for things like important records; paper (at least, good cotton paper) has pretty amazing longevity. But it's really inconvenient to work with -- digital records are superior from an accessibility standpoint in almost every way. But it's dangerous to not keep physical copies, because most digital storage formats just don't have a very long track record. We can make guesses that some media will last a hundred years, but really, who knows? Unfortunately, from a budgetary standpoint it's the most expensive solution, but for Things That Matter (whether on an individual, organizational/corporate, or governmental/cultural level), it's almost unquestionably the way to go if at all possible.
Doesn't the ISO9660 format already have a certain amount of redundancy in it?
Not saying that using PAR2 to create some additional redundancy is a bad idea, but I don't think that one-bit errors are totally disastrous automatically, if you've burned your data in a normal format.
Not sure what UDF does, though.
Although it's not as if PAR2 is a particularly exotic format, just in case it drops out of common use in the future, I think I'd still put a plaintext copy of the source code for the reassembler on every backup volume, or at least on the first volume in each set, just to make life potentially easier down the road. (And even if the format doesn't drop out of use, having the backups be self-contained in terms of containing the software necessary to decompress/assemble themselves would let someone use them even if they didn't have network access, which might be handy.)
My major objection to cygwin (and this may be minor compared to others' objections, but I don't do that much serious work with it) is that you, at least to my knowledge, have to install new software through the GUI; you can't do it from the commandline.
So if you have cygwin open and want to install openssl, you can't just type apt-get install openssl, you need to find the installer program (in Windows), and run it, and select the new packages.
It would be nice to be able to do all that stuff, aside from installation of the base system, from within the cygwin shell itself.
Aside from that, the only real problem I've run into is the availability of packages is somewhat less than stellar. But it has the basics, and in terms of things that have made my life at work, where I have to use a Windows machine, more pleasant, it's at the top of the list.
Maybe you missed something, or I was unclear, but I was saying that a normalization procedure that doesn't create a lot of competition is a good thing. Somehow, you seem to have read it as the reverse.
Obviously, a grading schema (such as the "forced curve," which I gave an example of, and I understand used to be pretty common in medical schools) which creates an artificial scarcity of 'A' grades and creates competition between students for them, where they attempt to undermine each other, is bad. It's hugely counterproductive, unless your goal is to turn out sociopaths, and I'd seriously question any educator today who did it. (Unless they were doing it for pedagogical reasons, somehow.)
But normalizing grades is common, because it helps to compensate for factors outside students' and professors' control; my point was that a good normalization procedure also discourage students from allowing people to cheat off of them, but doesn't create the same sort of cutthroat competition that force-curving does.
As other people have pointed out, although collaboration is obviously a critically important skill in today's world (and job market), you're not doing anyone any favors when you help someone who's plainly unqualified to get a grade they don't deserve: you're only creating competition for yourself and other qualified people down the road, and you may bring your field (or your alma mater) into disrepute via their shoddy performance later, which could have negative consequences. And you don't really help them in the long run, because they'll probably just end up over their head someday, when what they don't know catches up to them.
There's a key difference between collaboration and allowing someone who's nothing but dead weight to copy off your answer sheet; in the former case, a team can be greater than the sum of its parts, but in the latter, a solid worker and a cheater are worse than the solid worker by herself.