Nice apples and oranges comparison you made there. That's completely irrelevant. You are comparing two COMPLETELY DIFFERENT capture devices, and the data storage format has next to no impact compared to the differences between the capture devices. In my post, I was talking about an image captured by the exact same camera being stored in 16-bit vs 8-bit. Spitzak suggested that the 16-bit version could actually be worse quality than the 8-bit version, which didn't make any sense due to the fact that all of the data that was used to generate the 8-bit version is contained completely in the 16-bit version. Certainly the 8-bit might look better than the 16-bit if the 8-bit has some processing applied to it in the conversion, but you could do the same thing at a later time using the 16-bit version as the source.
If you try to make 12 bits linear then your shadows are going to be TERRIBLE, actually worse that 8-bit sRGB.
OK...how exactly do you propose that the 8-bit image generated from the 12-bit data could actually be better and more detailed than the original 12-bit data?
You need a floating point format, such as 16-bit float.
Nice idea. Now answer one of the following questions for me (your choice which one) 1) How is the floating point image going to have any more detail than what the sensor already captured (which can be contained fully in the 16-bit format)? 2) Which cameras capture floating point data natively?
If you can sufficiently answer one of those question, then you may be on to something.
Yes, 12 bits will definitely give you a larger number of usable stops. Your sensor is already capturing 12 bits of data, so recording all 12 bits to the file (padding it to fit the 16 bit format) will give you more detail to work with later.
Each stop of light gets recorded with more precision than the next darker stop. The result of this is that dark areas have less data to work with and thus end up having more posterization. When you have really bright areas, if you overexpose them you end up with no precision at all (just a solid patch of color). To make sure that doesn't happen you have to back off on the exposure, which causes the darker areas to have less detail (more posterized). By recording all 12 bits, you end up with more detail in those shadows, so that when you later do editing to brighten up those shadows, the image doesn't look like crap.
You can act like 12 bits won't give you more room to work with getting a usable image, but myself and thousands of other photographers will tell you from firsthand experience that you are absolutely wrong.
Digital cameras didn't just evolve from simple 8 bit capture to 10, 12, and now 14 bit capture just for the heck of it, and it wasn't just for marketing literature either. There is a real world benefit, and it comes in the form of having more detail over a wider exposure range.
USPS even accused GameFly of stealing their own games: "Please describe any measures GameFly undertakes to manage or limit theft. In your answer please include the anti-theft procedures utilized in GameFly’s own plants and during transit of GameFly mail to and from postal facilities."
W...T....F.... USPS are you serious? So, if I call you and say "hey my mail keeps disappearing" are you going to tell me "what are YOU doing to stop it?"
No, I think this is a valid question from the USPS. The original inquiry was not just about broken discs but also lost discs. If the USPS doesn't believe discs are actually getting lost at the rate GameFly thinks they are, then it's a valid question to determine whether it's the USPS losing them or gamefly employees stealing them before the are checked in.
USPS even wants GameFly to analyze the material DVDs are made of:
"USPS/GFL-30. Has GameFly conducted any testing related to materials used in the DVDs it distributes or that it is aware respective manufacturers have undertaken? In your answer please describe the tests and any results from the tests, including breakage rates for the materials tested."
Again, there's some validity to this question. If you complain to me that X is breaking more than Y, then I'd like to make sure there isn't a reason why X is breaking more which is out of my control.
These both come down to the same sort of thing a lot of us deal with in IT all the time...I don't want to waste my time having to chase down ghosts when I'm not convinced that the problem isn't user error (as it turns out to be in MANY of the cases).
Some of the other questions do seem to be a bit pointless to me, but maybe they make more sense to someone else.
OK. I need to capture a scene that has some really bright highlights and some really shadowed areas. I need to retain as much detail as possible in both areas. Fill flash is not an option, nor is doing a multiple exposure HDR shot. I suppose 12 bit is NOT superior to 8 bit, and I just need to learn to be a better photographer, right?
Wait....so the "protecting your source" provisions only come into place if the warrant is served AFTER the journalist was asked to reveal his/her source? Either you are mistaken, or I think I see a gigantic loophole in that law.
If you are going to claim that Google said it would be on the iPhone, then you might want to actually include a quote and link for an article that says that. The one included says they are WORKING on bringing it to the iPhone. Come on, lots of people have been working on bringing lots of things to lots of platforms, but they don't always work out. I don't call that backpedaling.
I swear, this is why some companies feel they have to remain so secretive about everything...because you announce the POSSIBILITY of something and then they act like you promised and crucify you when it doesn't happen or doesn't have all the features they thought it should.
The idea is that the banks gradually remove them from circulation by sending them in to be destroyed and replaced with modern currency. It takes a while, but eventually the old bills become uncommon enough that their use becomes more suspect. For example, this is still valid us currency: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:One_US_dollar_1917.jpg
but if someone tried to pay me with one, I think I'd be a bit suspicious. Especially if they tried using a whole bunch of them at once. Counterfeiters don't just spend a $20 here and a $20 there...they are in it big time and have loads of bills they need to unload.
Wait...so looking at a book makes you sick but looking at a screen doesn't? Very odd. That doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. I was always under the impression that the illness was cause by not seeing the scenery outside moving by, and thus your brain freaks out because it feels the movement but doesn't see it.
Kids would have gone nuts without being able to watch some stuff now and again.
When I was a kid, we used to do tons of driving. 8 hour drives to new york. 20 hour drives to florida and colorado. 3 day drives to washington. Somehow, I managed to never go nuts. When I was a teen, we made some of these trips with various nieces/nephews between the ages of 2 and 7 and they all managed to survive just fine.
Well, he *did* call random numbers... just not the obvious ones (how about work# of the guy who just left without the phone?) So let's throw out that argument.
No, I'm saying....it's the middle of the night. You want him to call some random number, where most likely he'll either get no answer, or he'll rudely wake somebody up from their sleep. Before you say he should call the work number and he'll get voice mail, you don't know that the work number isn't somebody's cell phone, and thus he'll be waking up someone from the guy's work in the middle of the night. No, the reasonable thing to do is to not make a call in the middle of the night, and instead do it in the morning.
Look, he remembered the guy's name and facebook page, that's why he's in this mess in the first place, right?
So you are saying that if he remembered a name, surely he should be able to remember the phone number too? I'm sorry, but one's a hell of a lot easier to remember than the other. As for facebook, it's great that facebook lets anybody post message to people on facebook, right? Oh no, that right...you need to have an account. Sorry, but there are some of us who don't have an account on facebook and would need to be paid money to be convinced to create one.
So, the guy doesn't have a phone number to call, and (unless I missed something in the article) we don't know that he has a facebook account to make a post. So he does what he can and tries contacting apple.
You're trying to paint this guy as some polite, moral character.
No. I'm arguing your point where you said he should try contacting the owner. You are apparently expecting him to call some number he doesn't know and wake up some random person in the middle of the night. Either that, or you are expecting him to have a photographic memory or to be psychic and know that he won't be able to retrieve the number from the phone in the morning.
And for the record, I never called it blatent theft
Well, you pretty much implied that you thought he had zero intention of returning the phone. That's pretty much the same as saying he intended to steal the phone (if you know something belongs to somebody and you intend not to return it to them, that's theft in my view).
Way to go all out, buddy. How about actually contacting the owner?? After all, he had access to the owner's facebook account as well as his home/work phone number before the 4g was remotely disabled. It seems like an obviously half-hearted attempt because the finder did not want return the phone but wanted to appear like he did.
Yeah, he was definitely intending to steal it. I mean, that article you linked to really made it sound like this happened in the middle of the night, but who cares. If the guy who found the phone wasn't willing to call some random phone number in the middle of the night, and instead intended to wait until morning to make that call, well certainly that's not being polite...it's blatent theft. And if he didn't anticipate that the phone would be locked down by morning and thus didn't write down the number on a piece of paper while it was still working in the middle of the night, then that's not a lack of psychic ability...it's blatent theft.
You don't think the diagnostic puts any sort of stress test on anything other than the memory?
Prime95 isn't a diagnostic test for anything
Really? You don't think a test that is notorious for pushing the CPU to high load and high temperatures is a diagnostic for anything?
Well, in case you disagree with both of those assessments, I'd like you to reread my original post, and this time please pay extra careful attention and note the "etc" included in there. Unless you are suggesting that there are absolutely no diagnostic tests that are available to consumers to test stuff like this, I'm not sure what your point was other than to pointlessly smack me around for knowing the basics of what you'd have to do but not knowing (and not listing) every last diagnostic test available.
True, but there's also a good possibility that the your part wasn't binned to fulfill an order. Chips go through a severe set of stress tests that often exceed what will be encountered in practical use. During these tests, it may be revealed that a core doesn't function properly or well enough (it gives bad results) to qualify. All chips go through that, and that's why there's many redundant structures on a chip (to improve yields). (Sony PS3 has 7 SPUs when they build 8 on a chip, Xbox360's got 3 PowerPC cores even though it has 4, Intel disables cache lines and/or functional units, etc. etc. etc.)
So the question is, are those cores disabled because AMD had extra parts and an outstanding order they could fulfill? Or are there actually potential issues that may only be revealed under certain loads? FOr the most part, it just means a game crashes a bit more often than usual (since mission critical servers never do wierd things like this - the money saved isn't worth the potential for extra downtime), or maybe a file gets corrupted. Or worse, your disk gets corrupted.
That's what diagnostic tests are for. memtest86, prime95, etc. If you system can crank through 24+ hours of those tests, you can be reasonably certain it will perform just fine for everyday usage.
Sony adds some good money to each console, hoping to recuperate in games and movies. Now imagine the Army buys 2000 PS3s for making a supercomputing cluster, because they are priced competetively. Because Sony is subsidizing them. Of course they will use the "Other OS" feature to run their supercomputer stuff and they won't buy a single game for the cluster. Same about nerds who have 5-10 games and spend time running Linux on PS3.
I think the best course of action would be "You can have the feature... for $150 extra" from moment zero - consoles with "Other OS" enabled not subsidized and sold at a good profit margin.
Sony didn't seem to mind using all these non-user in their numbers when they were trying to defeat HD-DVD. They were more than happy to brag about how many bluray players were out in the market. They were happy with it when they had a heated battle to fight, but now that they've won they'd like to undo all those sales they made that were instrumental to their victory.
Mod parent up. This is partially true. However, there are exceptions. ATM transactions aren't covered by the 5 day policy (presumably because the bank is on the hook directly, not the merchant....funny how they're so helpful until it's their money on the line), along with a few other exceptions
Also, here is a pretty lengthy discussion of debit cards, including the risks involved in their use, and a lot of other useful details (including some of these visa rules and the exceptions) http://www.fatwallet.com/forums/finance/989139
I've seen those a number of times and have always thought every intersection should have them. However, not too long ago, I found a place that actually screwed up that concept, as the countdown timer reached zero about 5 seconds before the light changed.
it only makes sense to dismiss something as a "sunk cost" if its future availability is unaffected by current use.
Wrong. In terms of deciding what the best action for the future is, you ALWAYS consider ANY cost that has already been made and can't be undone to be a sunk cost. It may make your previous decision making appear to be less financially sound, but you don't roll with it just to save face. That's how businesses fail. You always ask "how much MORE will it cost me (than I've already spent) to go with my current plan of action, and how much to go with a completely different plan instead" and go with whatever is cheaper.
Yes, the shuttle was to be retired with no immediate replacement, but with one on the horizon.
Yes...the constellation project was on the horizon, but from what I had read, it seemed a lot of the NASA engineers were in disagreement with administration over just how viable the project was. Costs were rising, the timeline was being extended, and engineers weren't fully behind the project.
I have no comment on how accurate the wiki figures are compared to NASA's figure (it's not a topic I'm familiar with), but just looking at the 2 wiki figures ($60 million vs $1.3 billion), the $60 million would be the more correct value for what we are concerned with. All the initial investment (shuttles, buildings, etc) are what is known as a sunk cost. We can try to amortize them over more flights to make it APPEAR more attractive, but the reality is that we've already spent it and there's nothing we can do about it now. So all we can do is look at what our cost is going forward. How much additional would we spend to add another launch? That number would be the $60 million figure, so essentially that's what a shuttle launch costs (if that number is accurate).
Actually, the Woz case is a possible misunderstanding on his part about exactly how the cruise control functions. Lots of people explained almost immediately how he was misunderstanding what was going on. I seem to recall he later even admitted to such when it was explained to him, but I can't seem to find a link to back that up right now, so I'm not sure if I'm mistaken on that or if his retraction just never made headlines the way his initial statement did.
What I find far more concerning than people who can't tell their floor mat is pressing on their gas pedal
Apparently you don't know how the floor mat problem worked. I was baffled at how a floor mat could even cause that to happen (I figured, if anything, it would jam under the pedal and STOP it from being pressed), so I looked for photos of it. What I found were photos where the edge of the pedal essentially snapped into a groove in the floor mat. I'm sure that, driving these vehicles, it would not be very obvious on the spot as to exactly why the pedal is stuck down.
I don't think that's much of a valid argument. Driving a truck is very much a special case, and I suspect few people would argue that a manual transmission would not be highly preferable there.
By the way...was your automatic truck experience in 1956? It would explain your username:-)
I feel like I'm going to die every time I pull into busy traffic in an automatic
Then it sounds like you are doing it wrong (maybe you might want to avoid pulling out in front of people going 50). I've been driving for almost 20 years, and never once used a manual transmission. Yet I can't recall a single time where I felt like I was going to die pulling into traffic. In fact, the only time in my life that I've ever been the least bit annoyed with an automatic was pulling a trailer, and my problem there was that it would shift back and forth between 3rd/4th gear too easily. I can lock it into 3rd gear, though that does reduce gas mileage, so I'd prefer to make the choice for when to shift. Yet, I only tow a trailer about a half dozen times a year, and most of those trips aren't very long at all, so it really comes down to about 1 trip each year that's about 2.5 hours each way. So, for the little bit of usage I do, I see no reason to deal with a manual transmission year round.
For people that do towing a lot more often (especially truckers), I can easily see how manual would be quite preferable. For a typically driver, though, if you like manual than that is fine, but I cannot see how an automatic would be in any way inadequate, especially to the point of "I feel like I'm going to die".
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Nice apples and oranges comparison you made there. That's completely irrelevant. You are comparing two COMPLETELY DIFFERENT capture devices, and the data storage format has next to no impact compared to the differences between the capture devices. In my post, I was talking about an image captured by the exact same camera being stored in 16-bit vs 8-bit. Spitzak suggested that the 16-bit version could actually be worse quality than the 8-bit version, which didn't make any sense due to the fact that all of the data that was used to generate the 8-bit version is contained completely in the 16-bit version. Certainly the 8-bit might look better than the 16-bit if the 8-bit has some processing applied to it in the conversion, but you could do the same thing at a later time using the 16-bit version as the source.
No, I'm very well aware of how things work.
OK...how exactly do you propose that the 8-bit image generated from the 12-bit data could actually be better and more detailed than the original 12-bit data?
Nice idea. Now answer one of the following questions for me (your choice which one)
1) How is the floating point image going to have any more detail than what the sensor already captured (which can be contained fully in the 16-bit format)?
2) Which cameras capture floating point data natively?
If you can sufficiently answer one of those question, then you may be on to something.
Yes, 12 bits will definitely give you a larger number of usable stops. Your sensor is already capturing 12 bits of data, so recording all 12 bits to the file (padding it to fit the 16 bit format) will give you more detail to work with later.
Each stop of light gets recorded with more precision than the next darker stop. The result of this is that dark areas have less data to work with and thus end up having more posterization. When you have really bright areas, if you overexpose them you end up with no precision at all (just a solid patch of color). To make sure that doesn't happen you have to back off on the exposure, which causes the darker areas to have less detail (more posterized). By recording all 12 bits, you end up with more detail in those shadows, so that when you later do editing to brighten up those shadows, the image doesn't look like crap.
You can act like 12 bits won't give you more room to work with getting a usable image, but myself and thousands of other photographers will tell you from firsthand experience that you are absolutely wrong.
Digital cameras didn't just evolve from simple 8 bit capture to 10, 12, and now 14 bit capture just for the heck of it, and it wasn't just for marketing literature either. There is a real world benefit, and it comes in the form of having more detail over a wider exposure range.
USPS even accused GameFly of stealing their own games:
"Please describe any measures GameFly undertakes to manage
or limit theft. In your answer please include the anti-theft procedures utilized in
GameFly’s own plants and during transit of GameFly mail to and from postal
facilities."
W...T....F.... USPS are you serious? So, if I call you and say "hey my mail keeps disappearing" are you going to tell me "what are YOU doing to stop it?"
No, I think this is a valid question from the USPS. The original inquiry was not just about broken discs but also lost discs. If the USPS doesn't believe discs are actually getting lost at the rate GameFly thinks they are, then it's a valid question to determine whether it's the USPS losing them or gamefly employees stealing them before the are checked in.
USPS even wants GameFly to analyze the material DVDs are made of:
"USPS/GFL-30. Has GameFly conducted any testing related to materials used in
the DVDs it distributes or that it is aware respective manufacturers have
undertaken? In your answer please describe the tests and any results from the
tests, including breakage rates for the materials tested."
Again, there's some validity to this question. If you complain to me that X is breaking more than Y, then I'd like to make sure there isn't a reason why X is breaking more which is out of my control.
These both come down to the same sort of thing a lot of us deal with in IT all the time...I don't want to waste my time having to chase down ghosts when I'm not convinced that the problem isn't user error (as it turns out to be in MANY of the cases).
Some of the other questions do seem to be a bit pointless to me, but maybe they make more sense to someone else.
OK. I need to capture a scene that has some really bright highlights and some really shadowed areas. I need to retain as much detail as possible in both areas. Fill flash is not an option, nor is doing a multiple exposure HDR shot. I suppose 12 bit is NOT superior to 8 bit, and I just need to learn to be a better photographer, right?
Wait....so the "protecting your source" provisions only come into place if the warrant is served AFTER the journalist was asked to reveal his/her source? Either you are mistaken, or I think I see a gigantic loophole in that law.
If you are going to claim that Google said it would be on the iPhone, then you might want to actually include a quote and link for an article that says that. The one included says they are WORKING on bringing it to the iPhone. Come on, lots of people have been working on bringing lots of things to lots of platforms, but they don't always work out. I don't call that backpedaling.
I swear, this is why some companies feel they have to remain so secretive about everything...because you announce the POSSIBILITY of something and then they act like you promised and crucify you when it doesn't happen or doesn't have all the features they thought it should.
The idea is that the banks gradually remove them from circulation by sending them in to be destroyed and replaced with modern currency. It takes a while, but eventually the old bills become uncommon enough that their use becomes more suspect. For example, this is still valid us currency:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:One_US_dollar_1917.jpg
but if someone tried to pay me with one, I think I'd be a bit suspicious. Especially if they tried using a whole bunch of them at once. Counterfeiters don't just spend a $20 here and a $20 there...they are in it big time and have loads of bills they need to unload.
Wait...so looking at a book makes you sick but looking at a screen doesn't? Very odd. That doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. I was always under the impression that the illness was cause by not seeing the scenery outside moving by, and thus your brain freaks out because it feels the movement but doesn't see it.
Kids would have gone nuts without being able to watch some stuff now and again.
When I was a kid, we used to do tons of driving. 8 hour drives to new york. 20 hour drives to florida and colorado. 3 day drives to washington. Somehow, I managed to never go nuts. When I was a teen, we made some of these trips with various nieces/nephews between the ages of 2 and 7 and they all managed to survive just fine.
No, I'm saying....it's the middle of the night. You want him to call some random number, where most likely he'll either get no answer, or he'll rudely wake somebody up from their sleep. Before you say he should call the work number and he'll get voice mail, you don't know that the work number isn't somebody's cell phone, and thus he'll be waking up someone from the guy's work in the middle of the night. No, the reasonable thing to do is to not make a call in the middle of the night, and instead do it in the morning.
So you are saying that if he remembered a name, surely he should be able to remember the phone number too? I'm sorry, but one's a hell of a lot easier to remember than the other. As for facebook, it's great that facebook lets anybody post message to people on facebook, right? Oh no, that right...you need to have an account. Sorry, but there are some of us who don't have an account on facebook and would need to be paid money to be convinced to create one.
So, the guy doesn't have a phone number to call, and (unless I missed something in the article) we don't know that he has a facebook account to make a post. So he does what he can and tries contacting apple.
No. I'm arguing your point where you said he should try contacting the owner. You are apparently expecting him to call some number he doesn't know and wake up some random person in the middle of the night. Either that, or you are expecting him to have a photographic memory or to be psychic and know that he won't be able to retrieve the number from the phone in the morning.
Well, you pretty much implied that you thought he had zero intention of returning the phone. That's pretty much the same as saying he intended to steal the phone (if you know something belongs to somebody and you intend not to return it to them, that's theft in my view).
Way to go all out, buddy. How about actually contacting the owner ?? After all, he had access to the owner's facebook account as well as his home/work phone number before the 4g was remotely disabled. It seems like an obviously half-hearted attempt because the finder did not want return the phone but wanted to appear like he did.
Yeah, he was definitely intending to steal it. I mean, that article you linked to really made it sound like this happened in the middle of the night, but who cares. If the guy who found the phone wasn't willing to call some random phone number in the middle of the night, and instead intended to wait until morning to make that call, well certainly that's not being polite...it's blatent theft. And if he didn't anticipate that the phone would be locked down by morning and thus didn't write down the number on a piece of paper while it was still working in the middle of the night, then that's not a lack of psychic ability...it's blatent theft.
You don't think the diagnostic puts any sort of stress test on anything other than the memory?
Really? You don't think a test that is notorious for pushing the CPU to high load and high temperatures is a diagnostic for anything?
Well, in case you disagree with both of those assessments, I'd like you to reread my original post, and this time please pay extra careful attention and note the "etc" included in there. Unless you are suggesting that there are absolutely no diagnostic tests that are available to consumers to test stuff like this, I'm not sure what your point was other than to pointlessly smack me around for knowing the basics of what you'd have to do but not knowing (and not listing) every last diagnostic test available.
True, but there's also a good possibility that the your part wasn't binned to fulfill an order. Chips go through a severe set of stress tests that often exceed what will be encountered in practical use. During these tests, it may be revealed that a core doesn't function properly or well enough (it gives bad results) to qualify. All chips go through that, and that's why there's many redundant structures on a chip (to improve yields). (Sony PS3 has 7 SPUs when they build 8 on a chip, Xbox360's got 3 PowerPC cores even though it has 4, Intel disables cache lines and/or functional units, etc. etc. etc.)
So the question is, are those cores disabled because AMD had extra parts and an outstanding order they could fulfill? Or are there actually potential issues that may only be revealed under certain loads? FOr the most part, it just means a game crashes a bit more often than usual (since mission critical servers never do wierd things like this - the money saved isn't worth the potential for extra downtime), or maybe a file gets corrupted. Or worse, your disk gets corrupted.
That's what diagnostic tests are for. memtest86, prime95, etc. If you system can crank through 24+ hours of those tests, you can be reasonably certain it will perform just fine for everyday usage.
Sony adds some good money to each console, hoping to recuperate in games and movies.
Now imagine the Army buys 2000 PS3s for making a supercomputing cluster, because they are priced competetively. Because Sony is subsidizing them. Of course they will use the "Other OS" feature to run their supercomputer stuff and they won't buy a single game for the cluster.
Same about nerds who have 5-10 games and spend time running Linux on PS3.
I think the best course of action would be "You can have the feature... for $150 extra" from moment zero - consoles with "Other OS" enabled not subsidized and sold at a good profit margin.
Sony didn't seem to mind using all these non-user in their numbers when they were trying to defeat HD-DVD. They were more than happy to brag about how many bluray players were out in the market. They were happy with it when they had a heated battle to fight, but now that they've won they'd like to undo all those sales they made that were instrumental to their victory.
Mod parent up. This is partially true. However, there are exceptions. ATM transactions aren't covered by the 5 day policy (presumably because the bank is on the hook directly, not the merchant....funny how they're so helpful until it's their money on the line), along with a few other exceptions
Also, here is a pretty lengthy discussion of debit cards, including the risks involved in their use, and a lot of other useful details (including some of these visa rules and the exceptions)
http://www.fatwallet.com/forums/finance/989139
I've seen those a number of times and have always thought every intersection should have them. However, not too long ago, I found a place that actually screwed up that concept, as the countdown timer reached zero about 5 seconds before the light changed.
most current titles use VC-1 and old ones used MPEG-2, not H.264.
Here's a pretty thorough list of Bluray movies and what codecs they use.
http://media.cinemasquid.com/blu-ray/blu-specs.txt
The link came from here:
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=1155731
By this list, the most popular codec appears to be AVC (H.264), by a ratio of about 2:1 over VC-1.
it only makes sense to dismiss something as a "sunk cost" if its future availability is unaffected by current use.
Wrong. In terms of deciding what the best action for the future is, you ALWAYS consider ANY cost that has already been made and can't be undone to be a sunk cost. It may make your previous decision making appear to be less financially sound, but you don't roll with it just to save face. That's how businesses fail. You always ask "how much MORE will it cost me (than I've already spent) to go with my current plan of action, and how much to go with a completely different plan instead" and go with whatever is cheaper.
Yes, the shuttle was to be retired with no immediate replacement, but with one on the horizon.
Yes...the constellation project was on the horizon, but from what I had read, it seemed a lot of the NASA engineers were in disagreement with administration over just how viable the project was. Costs were rising, the timeline was being extended, and engineers weren't fully behind the project.
I have no comment on how accurate the wiki figures are compared to NASA's figure (it's not a topic I'm familiar with), but just looking at the 2 wiki figures ($60 million vs $1.3 billion), the $60 million would be the more correct value for what we are concerned with. All the initial investment (shuttles, buildings, etc) are what is known as a sunk cost. We can try to amortize them over more flights to make it APPEAR more attractive, but the reality is that we've already spent it and there's nothing we can do about it now. So all we can do is look at what our cost is going forward. How much additional would we spend to add another launch? That number would be the $60 million figure, so essentially that's what a shuttle launch costs (if that number is accurate).
Actually, the Woz case is a possible misunderstanding on his part about exactly how the cruise control functions. Lots of people explained almost immediately how he was misunderstanding what was going on. I seem to recall he later even admitted to such when it was explained to him, but I can't seem to find a link to back that up right now, so I'm not sure if I'm mistaken on that or if his retraction just never made headlines the way his initial statement did.
What I find far more concerning than people who can't tell their floor mat is pressing on their gas pedal
Apparently you don't know how the floor mat problem worked. I was baffled at how a floor mat could even cause that to happen (I figured, if anything, it would jam under the pedal and STOP it from being pressed), so I looked for photos of it. What I found were photos where the edge of the pedal essentially snapped into a groove in the floor mat. I'm sure that, driving these vehicles, it would not be very obvious on the spot as to exactly why the pedal is stuck down.
I don't think that's much of a valid argument. Driving a truck is very much a special case, and I suspect few people would argue that a manual transmission would not be highly preferable there.
By the way...was your automatic truck experience in 1956? It would explain your username :-)
I feel like I'm going to die every time I pull into busy traffic in an automatic
Then it sounds like you are doing it wrong (maybe you might want to avoid pulling out in front of people going 50). I've been driving for almost 20 years, and never once used a manual transmission. Yet I can't recall a single time where I felt like I was going to die pulling into traffic. In fact, the only time in my life that I've ever been the least bit annoyed with an automatic was pulling a trailer, and my problem there was that it would shift back and forth between 3rd/4th gear too easily. I can lock it into 3rd gear, though that does reduce gas mileage, so I'd prefer to make the choice for when to shift. Yet, I only tow a trailer about a half dozen times a year, and most of those trips aren't very long at all, so it really comes down to about 1 trip each year that's about 2.5 hours each way. So, for the little bit of usage I do, I see no reason to deal with a manual transmission year round.
For people that do towing a lot more often (especially truckers), I can easily see how manual would be quite preferable. For a typically driver, though, if you like manual than that is fine, but I cannot see how an automatic would be in any way inadequate, especially to the point of "I feel like I'm going to die".