It seems you have nothing to say about the content of the comment so you opt for an ad hominem attack on form? I guess anyone can be an asshole nowadays.
> they're nowhere near solid enough to control a car
So how is it that I had two total-loss crashes with cheap-ass old cars, completely mechanical at that, back in the 90s (The cars were from the 80s) while all of the company cars I've driven in the last ten years were nice, expensive, electronically controlled vehicles that never so much as hiccupped?
I hate to say it, but my Saab 9-3 Sport Sedan had electronic systems for steering, breaking, traction control, fly-by-wire acceleration and lord knows what other systems, and it's the finest damn car I have driven to date.
So apart from your general musings on the state of technology, what actual facts can you present to me that will convince me a 1920 Ford is a safer drive than a 2010 Prius?
Everyone keeps on calling it "The Problem". So one dude in California played a hoax, and another man ended up upside down in a small lake with three passengers somewhere.
So, how many cars get acceleration issues? Out of how many sold? In what time frame? And how many of those cause harm, injury or death? How does all of that data compares to other manufacturers' data?
What is the actual, factual statistical likelihood of you getting killed in a Prius due to the car failing? I wonder if anyone knows in this forum. I sincerely doubt the journalists that feed us this irrelevant crap even know what they're on about except selling the odd paper.
Quite a few neuro-scientists link religious experiences with mis-firing of parts of the brain or local attacks of epilepsy. One of those is Dr. Dick Swaab, former director of the Dutch Institute for Brain Research as it's called, and he has given a crystal clear opinion on religion in a Dutch TV series entitled "God does not exist". A transcript of what he has to say on religion and brain function can be found here (Dutch).
Now I didn't know the man, but when you're defending the notion that someone is in possession of all of his or her faculties it is not an encouraging argument to say you attended church with them for that long.
Because it's easy to say that "this system is more reliable than that system", but I have the following questions:
- How do you measure "more reliable"? - What actual data do you have to support that claim? - How do you look at historical data?
I'm quite sure that the current electronically driven telecommunication networks are more feature-rich and stable than their mechanical switchboard counterparts from back in the day, but there must have been a transition period where certain childhood-illnesses had to be fixed.
In the same vein I guess mechanical controls are quite stable because they've been around for a long time, so it's proven technology. It stands to reason that software driven electronic systems may be more reliable as soon as they hit a certain level of maturity. So are we there yet, and what do the numbers say?
Obviously the Toyota story is big in the news, so it serves as food for your confirmation bias. Also it tells your reptile brain electronic acceleration is an issue because you have ample "examples" your reptile brain recalls of this being an issue. However, I wonder at the statistics over time and "real" data surrounding this topic, because I generally do feel safer in new cars than old ones, and most of them are electronically run.
All that aside, I think various people have their advantages and disadvantages behind the wheel. The Dutch are quite good at driving in the rain, Swedes and Finns are good at ice, snow and sleet, the Germans are good in situations where the rules of engagement are clear, the Italians and Israelis are good at ad-hoc driving in chaotic situations and the Americans are nice defensive drivers.
On the other hand, if something is not in the rule-book, the Germans and Swedes tend to freeze. The Dutch are generally quite annoying in the mountains. The Israelis and Italians drive irresponsibly in certain situations that don't lend themselves to their style and the French bang up your car while they park. So your mileage may vary. As always, with everything.
> billions would be save each quarter by avoiding the malware that is part and parcel of the Windows experience.
A somewhat ludicrous prediction. Firstly you have no idea if the malware would not become commonplace on the New Default Platform, whatever it may be. Second of all, I don't think anyone has an accurate idea of the actual costs of Malware right now, let alone in a highly hypothetical future. You can have opinions based on facts and figures, but this type of "koffiedik kijken" isn't exactly science, is it?
Quite frankly I don't see the issue. I got sick of the Windows experience, and bought two macs for the house. A lot of people still buy Windows because they don't want to shell out the cash for a mac and they don't know diddley about Linux/Unix. Let them. It keeps people like ourselves off the streets, and if it ever will change, it'll change. Nuffsaid.
I see comments like this all the time... "There are a lot of people who". I also see mention of "popular" sites I've never heard of in my life. Can any of these claims be backed up by numbers? Anything that measures what "lot of people" are, concretely?
Well, after three years of using a Sinclair ZX-81, one year with an Acorn Electron, side dabbling with Commodore +4 and finally 22 years of using DOS/Win3/WinNT/2000/XP/95/98/Vista PC's, working on HP-UX, Sun Solaris, Linux and whatnot, I have recently switched to Mac. Likewise I have gone through Walkmans, Discmans, iRiver and iAudio MP3 players, the iPod Classic to finally end up with the iPhone 32GB 3GS.
All I can say at the end of the day is this: It *IS* better this way.;)
Hang on, hang on... The people on my mailing list don't have a clue where their e-mail with links/spam/jokes/photos will be read. It could be the iPhone, but the majority don't know (or care) I have one. It could be my mac, my windows laptop, it could be an anonymous machine in some airport somewhere. The "why would anyone" argument is pure and utter rubbish. "People" don't tend to know jack shit, really, and hence they send me all kinds of garbage I don't care about on a daily basis.
Quite frankly, until you guys mentioned it I had never heard of Vimeo. Period. And the fact that I've been an iPhone owner since October last year doesn't have anything to do with that.
On top of that I would assume two things. I must say IANAL and I've only read the Dutch and US constitutions (The Dutch ones from the 1567-republican one forward to the post 1851 amendments), but it strikes me as plausible that the practice of actual Fascism is unconstitutional in and of itself since you can't let the "right to free speech" for one group negate that same right *and* the right to the pursuit of happiness, freedom of practicing any (or no) religion and the right to a degree of safety for a whole bunch of other people.
The second assumption then would be that the German constitution is good. I know an Israeli that claimed he read it, and that it has passages that said that the rights mentioned in said constitution is only applicable to Germans, born Germans. Now I'm not sure about that. But if that were true the Constitution wouldn't amount to a whole hill of beans for anyone that came to Germany.
You can ignore America's shameful history of racism. Yours is a circle argument. We can't act normally because in the past people didn't act normally? Come on.
The original poster was right. And even if these people are doing what they are doing because they are racists, I don't get what the Big Fucking Deal (TM) is. Let them be racist, it doesn't mean censorship is the answer. Censoring racism will force it underground and thus strengthen it.
To answer Jon Stewart's question "Is blackface ever acceptable?": Hell yes. Just as whiteface, or any "face". It's only racist if we let it affect ourselves in that way. Otherwise it's just something to shrug your shoulders at, or potentially laugh.
There, now we got that out of the way (and I do feel oddly better about life) I have to say that I'm still skeptical about these algorithms for music recommendation.
A friend of mine and I listen to a lot of the same music. He got me on the soul train in a way, so we talk a lot about Soul, R&B (The old fashioned kind), Funk, Rare Groove, Jazz and Gospel. Now he and I can dig the same song for wildly different reasons. We can sit and discuss the same tune, which we both like, and discover we look at the thing so differently it's as though we're from different planets.
Now I've tried all possible music sites and playlist generators, but at the end of the day I simply never really agree with the correlation they see between song one and song two. I really wonder if the/. audience believes something as complex as music appreciation can be captured in a program....
OK... Typical American hyperbolic bullshit, this. A woman opts into something, but she doesn't know what... Then a prank ensues, and person in question is too bone-headed to figure out it's a prank.
*OBVIOUSLY* that entitles said person to 10.000.000 USD. This also means you don't buy Toyota cars because *OBVIOUSLY* they're all psychopaths. America is now *outraged* at this life-endangering misconduct.
Get a grip. This reminds me so much about the "Cat in microwave" and "Hot coffee at McDonald's" lawsuits it makes my eyeballs bleed. It would be very poetic if she was a project manager or hairdresser, because then she and her lawyer would be prime candidates for off-world settlement according to the Douglas Adams Principle.
From what I can see, the Israeli motto of "Don't be a sucker!" applies here. No more, no less.
All of you people are delusional. I have weird friends in tech, definitely, but then I have to admit most of my friends are in tech, and this is a tech forum. All of this "I am a bigger geek than you" is a pissing contest without any merit.
To illustrate this, I had a girlfriend once. Lived together with her for three years. She was a delightful woman whom I met in her dad's little Classical Music and Jazz CD store. She was completely non-technical and functioned relatively normally in most settings, but by god was she a geek. A classical music geek with a penchant for literature and some other culturally tinged stuff. Spoke Czech, Swedish and English, was highly intelligent and had a shitty job for a while. Now she works at a law firm that deals with patents and patent law (Patentbyrå), as an assistant to patent lawyers. She was so goddamn geeky at heart she would put most of us on/. to shame. It's just a kind of weirdness and geekiness most of "us" here on/. won't recognize if it kicked us in the arse, that is.
Maybe your average software developer can do magic under the hood, but he's not motivated to. Maybe (s)he can do magic under the hood in bed, in a kitchen, on a squash court, with a chemistry lab or with a bass, but you'll never know it. On the other hand, one of the most common beliefs amongst humans is that one is different or not normal. Superior, even.
This planet is filled with weird fuckers. The trick is figuring out what's weird about whom.
"the Big Essay"? A 500 word essay can hardly be labeled "Big", "Long" or anything implying a large size. 2000-5000 word essays are big, but a 500 word text blurb is just not worthy of the name essay in my book. Cutting that down to 250 words just make for a headline with some fuzz underneath.
The student who wrote the piece in the Times did have a point there, although she was using quite a bit of melodramatic wind-baggery when she wrote:
Now, please don't get me wrong, I'm not attempting to fault the short essay in any way, but its position is not in danger here. I have heard little convincing criticism against the long essay, and while high praise has been heaped upon its shorter counterpart, there was a short essay in there before! In classic MIT fashion, we are wiping out the quality and diversity of information in exchange for a consistent data set and higher word count. I feel it is my duty as a lover of the written word to defend the merit of lengthy writing before the long essay goes the way of mailing letters and classical literature.
Old cars making us smile tells me we're stupid in many ways. I'm not a complete stranger to nostalgia, but the technology the old cars stand for is repulsive in my eyes. The 59 Bel Air should be in a museum for those that are interested in the vehicle, but all other units should be scrapped and recycled. You don't want them on the roads, at any rate.
Quite frankly I could have been without the Harry Potter series, thankyouverymuch. They're a load of hogwarts, and I don't understand the fixation on this universe by anyone between 5 and 85.
Having said that, J.K. Rowling is also the Metallica of the publishing world. Got a bunch of money from her fans, then insults them.
Slashdot Mirror
Last time I checked one major reason for you being able to leave that comment on this website is Software.
Or are you telling me you're blowing bits and bytes out of your ass to submit on /.?
It seems you have nothing to say about the content of the comment so you opt for an ad hominem attack on form? I guess anyone can be an asshole nowadays.
Learn to fuckin' use decent rhetoric.
Protip: Nobody with half a brain gives a shit.
> they're nowhere near solid enough to control a car
So how is it that I had two total-loss crashes with cheap-ass old cars, completely mechanical at that, back in the 90s (The cars were from the 80s) while all of the company cars I've driven in the last ten years were nice, expensive, electronically controlled vehicles that never so much as hiccupped?
I hate to say it, but my Saab 9-3 Sport Sedan had electronic systems for steering, breaking, traction control, fly-by-wire acceleration and lord knows what other systems, and it's the finest damn car I have driven to date.
So apart from your general musings on the state of technology, what actual facts can you present to me that will convince me a 1920 Ford is a safer drive than a 2010 Prius?
Everyone keeps on calling it "The Problem". So one dude in California played a hoax, and another man ended up upside down in a small lake with three passengers somewhere.
So, how many cars get acceleration issues?
Out of how many sold?
In what time frame?
And how many of those cause harm, injury or death?
How does all of that data compares to other manufacturers' data?
What is the actual, factual statistical likelihood of you getting killed in a Prius due to the car failing? I wonder if anyone knows in this forum. I sincerely doubt the journalists that feed us this irrelevant crap even know what they're on about except selling the odd paper.
> We attended the same church for nearly 15 years
Quite a few neuro-scientists link religious experiences with mis-firing of parts of the brain or local attacks of epilepsy. One of those is Dr. Dick Swaab, former director of the Dutch Institute for Brain Research as it's called, and he has given a crystal clear opinion on religion in a Dutch TV series entitled "God does not exist". A transcript of what he has to say on religion and brain function can be found here (Dutch).
Now I didn't know the man, but when you're defending the notion that someone is in possession of all of his or her faculties it is not an encouraging argument to say you attended church with them for that long.
Is that true?
Because it's easy to say that "this system is more reliable than that system", but I have the following questions:
- How do you measure "more reliable"?
- What actual data do you have to support that claim?
- How do you look at historical data?
I'm quite sure that the current electronically driven telecommunication networks are more feature-rich and stable than their mechanical switchboard counterparts from back in the day, but there must have been a transition period where certain childhood-illnesses had to be fixed.
In the same vein I guess mechanical controls are quite stable because they've been around for a long time, so it's proven technology. It stands to reason that software driven electronic systems may be more reliable as soon as they hit a certain level of maturity. So are we there yet, and what do the numbers say?
Obviously the Toyota story is big in the news, so it serves as food for your confirmation bias. Also it tells your reptile brain electronic acceleration is an issue because you have ample "examples" your reptile brain recalls of this being an issue. However, I wonder at the statistics over time and "real" data surrounding this topic, because I generally do feel safer in new cars than old ones, and most of them are electronically run.
Does the name Michael Schumacher ring a bell? :)
All that aside, I think various people have their advantages and disadvantages behind the wheel. The Dutch are quite good at driving in the rain, Swedes and Finns are good at ice, snow and sleet, the Germans are good in situations where the rules of engagement are clear, the Italians and Israelis are good at ad-hoc driving in chaotic situations and the Americans are nice defensive drivers.
On the other hand, if something is not in the rule-book, the Germans and Swedes tend to freeze. The Dutch are generally quite annoying in the mountains. The Israelis and Italians drive irresponsibly in certain situations that don't lend themselves to their style and the French bang up your car while they park. So your mileage may vary. As always, with everything.
> billions would be save each quarter by avoiding the malware that is part and parcel of the Windows experience.
A somewhat ludicrous prediction. Firstly you have no idea if the malware would not become commonplace on the New Default Platform, whatever it may be. Second of all, I don't think anyone has an accurate idea of the actual costs of Malware right now, let alone in a highly hypothetical future. You can have opinions based on facts and figures, but this type of "koffiedik kijken" isn't exactly science, is it?
Quite frankly I don't see the issue. I got sick of the Windows experience, and bought two macs for the house. A lot of people still buy Windows because they don't want to shell out the cash for a mac and they don't know diddley about Linux/Unix. Let them. It keeps people like ourselves off the streets, and if it ever will change, it'll change. Nuffsaid.
Space Rock is a genre of music? Here I was, thinking it's, you know, a Rock. In Space.
Having said that, any music labeled space rock probably requires the listener drop acid to enjoy it.
I see comments like this all the time... "There are a lot of people who". I also see mention of "popular" sites I've never heard of in my life. Can any of these claims be backed up by numbers? Anything that measures what "lot of people" are, concretely?
Well, after three years of using a Sinclair ZX-81, one year with an Acorn Electron, side dabbling with Commodore +4 and finally 22 years of using DOS/Win3/WinNT/2000/XP/95/98/Vista PC's, working on HP-UX, Sun Solaris, Linux and whatnot, I have recently switched to Mac. Likewise I have gone through Walkmans, Discmans, iRiver and iAudio MP3 players, the iPod Classic to finally end up with the iPhone 32GB 3GS.
All I can say at the end of the day is this: It *IS* better this way. ;)
Hang on, hang on... The people on my mailing list don't have a clue where their e-mail with links/spam/jokes/photos will be read. It could be the iPhone, but the majority don't know (or care) I have one. It could be my mac, my windows laptop, it could be an anonymous machine in some airport somewhere. The "why would anyone" argument is pure and utter rubbish. "People" don't tend to know jack shit, really, and hence they send me all kinds of garbage I don't care about on a daily basis.
Quite frankly, until you guys mentioned it I had never heard of Vimeo. Period. And the fact that I've been an iPhone owner since October last year doesn't have anything to do with that.
As a Dutchman I have to make a case for weed. It's far easier to handle in low gravity.
And here I was thinking they closed Rasbiologiska Institutet around 1958... Oh. Wait. ;-)
On top of that I would assume two things. I must say IANAL and I've only read the Dutch and US constitutions (The Dutch ones from the 1567-republican one forward to the post 1851 amendments), but it strikes me as plausible that the practice of actual Fascism is unconstitutional in and of itself since you can't let the "right to free speech" for one group negate that same right *and* the right to the pursuit of happiness, freedom of practicing any (or no) religion and the right to a degree of safety for a whole bunch of other people.
The second assumption then would be that the German constitution is good. I know an Israeli that claimed he read it, and that it has passages that said that the rights mentioned in said constitution is only applicable to Germans, born Germans. Now I'm not sure about that. But if that were true the Constitution wouldn't amount to a whole hill of beans for anyone that came to Germany.
I wish I had mod points. :-D Even if you're an AC. :-D
You can ignore America's shameful history of racism. Yours is a circle argument. We can't act normally because in the past people didn't act normally? Come on.
The original poster was right. And even if these people are doing what they are doing because they are racists, I don't get what the Big Fucking Deal (TM) is. Let them be racist, it doesn't mean censorship is the answer. Censoring racism will force it underground and thus strengthen it.
To answer Jon Stewart's question "Is blackface ever acceptable?": Hell yes. Just as whiteface, or any "face". It's only racist if we let it affect ourselves in that way. Otherwise it's just something to shrug your shoulders at, or potentially laugh.
There, now we got that out of the way (and I do feel oddly better about life) I have to say that I'm still skeptical about these algorithms for music recommendation.
A friend of mine and I listen to a lot of the same music. He got me on the soul train in a way, so we talk a lot about Soul, R&B (The old fashioned kind), Funk, Rare Groove, Jazz and Gospel. Now he and I can dig the same song for wildly different reasons. We can sit and discuss the same tune, which we both like, and discover we look at the thing so differently it's as though we're from different planets.
Now I've tried all possible music sites and playlist generators, but at the end of the day I simply never really agree with the correlation they see between song one and song two. I really wonder if the /. audience believes something as complex as music appreciation can be captured in a program....
Hey! I never had first post!
OK... Typical American hyperbolic bullshit, this. A woman opts into something, but she doesn't know what... Then a prank ensues, and person in question is too bone-headed to figure out it's a prank.
*OBVIOUSLY* that entitles said person to 10.000.000 USD. This also means you don't buy Toyota cars because *OBVIOUSLY* they're all psychopaths. America is now *outraged* at this life-endangering misconduct.
Get a grip. This reminds me so much about the "Cat in microwave" and "Hot coffee at McDonald's" lawsuits it makes my eyeballs bleed. It would be very poetic if she was a project manager or hairdresser, because then she and her lawyer would be prime candidates for off-world settlement according to the Douglas Adams Principle.
From what I can see, the Israeli motto of "Don't be a sucker!" applies here. No more, no less.
All of you people are delusional. I have weird friends in tech, definitely, but then I have to admit most of my friends are in tech, and this is a tech forum. All of this "I am a bigger geek than you" is a pissing contest without any merit.
To illustrate this, I had a girlfriend once. Lived together with her for three years. She was a delightful woman whom I met in her dad's little Classical Music and Jazz CD store. She was completely non-technical and functioned relatively normally in most settings, but by god was she a geek. A classical music geek with a penchant for literature and some other culturally tinged stuff. Spoke Czech, Swedish and English, was highly intelligent and had a shitty job for a while. Now she works at a law firm that deals with patents and patent law (Patentbyrå), as an assistant to patent lawyers. She was so goddamn geeky at heart she would put most of us on /. to shame. It's just a kind of weirdness and geekiness most of "us" here on /. won't recognize if it kicked us in the arse, that is.
Maybe your average software developer can do magic under the hood, but he's not motivated to. Maybe (s)he can do magic under the hood in bed, in a kitchen, on a squash court, with a chemistry lab or with a bass, but you'll never know it. On the other hand, one of the most common beliefs amongst humans is that one is different or not normal. Superior, even.
This planet is filled with weird fuckers. The trick is figuring out what's weird about whom.
"the Big Essay"? A 500 word essay can hardly be labeled "Big", "Long" or anything implying a large size. 2000-5000 word essays are big, but a 500 word text blurb is just not worthy of the name essay in my book. Cutting that down to 250 words just make for a headline with some fuzz underneath.
The student who wrote the piece in the Times did have a point there, although she was using quite a bit of melodramatic wind-baggery when she wrote:
Now, please don't get me wrong, I'm not attempting to fault the short essay in any way, but its position is not in danger here. I have heard little convincing criticism against the long essay, and while high praise has been heaped upon its shorter counterpart, there was a short essay in there before! In classic MIT fashion, we are wiping out the quality and diversity of information in exchange for a consistent data set and higher word count. I feel it is my duty as a lover of the written word to defend the merit of lengthy writing before the long essay goes the way of mailing letters and classical literature.
Old cars making us smile tells me we're stupid in many ways. I'm not a complete stranger to nostalgia, but the technology the old cars stand for is repulsive in my eyes. The 59 Bel Air should be in a museum for those that are interested in the vehicle, but all other units should be scrapped and recycled. You don't want them on the roads, at any rate.
I like your thinking to the point where the mere thought of having mod points sends little rivers of anticipation running down my inseam.
Quite frankly I could have been without the Harry Potter series, thankyouverymuch. They're a load of hogwarts, and I don't understand the fixation on this universe by anyone between 5 and 85.
Having said that, J.K. Rowling is also the Metallica of the publishing world. Got a bunch of money from her fans, then insults them.