and what happen when you drive into canada who will pay the $20 a meg roaming fees?
All the issues brought up in this conversation, and this is the one you latch onto? Maybe they'll do what Amazon does with the Kindle - make it free for it's standard uses. Also, I think if it has GPS it might be able to be just a little more intelligent than your typical cell phone, even if they don't have those features.
First, the most likely mass initial deployment, once approved, will be in new cars. The net mechanic hours will be nil, but I expect the cost will still increase, at least initially. Like most people, besides mechanics, I don't care how many hours it takes, I care how much it's going to cost. The two aren't completely related.
Second, if someone decides to upgrade their car with the new battery, I expect the old one will get you some credit. Again, the question is how much will it help?
Third, the mechanic hours isn't the big deal, the big deal in an aftermarket upgrade is, "How long will I be without my toy?" Again, how much the mechanic gets paid, which will certainly be a only fraction of the overall cost, but the inconvenience of waiting for your toy (or your primary means of transportation) will be a factor.
And the difference between a major overhaul and a simple drop-in replacement is similar to the difference between buying a great new home and renovating your home while you live in it. One has a certain amount of pain and an immediate result (for some definitions of immediate). The other can take a loooong time, inconveniences you while it's happening, and invariably has hiccups along the way. Likewise, the new home may as well have been built by magic pixies, too.
Let me be clear, I'm not trivializing their work, and I truly appreciate what they and others like them have done - I wouldn't call myself a typical user. But one of the most amazing things to me is when something new is made so well that either people just change their habits because the new way is that much simpler or the new thing just replaces the old thing without any real thought having to be given to it at all.
Now explain to me why all that work, which the typical user figures has been done by fairies or elves anyway, has any relevance to said user when he goes to get his battery changed? All he is going to care about is how much will it cost, how long will it take, and how much better will it be.
We truly stand on the shoulders of giants. Even a "simple" hammer or wheel isn't simple any more. There is serious research in both of those. And yet, I can still take a cash equivalent of one to three hours of my time and buy this device which literally has thousands of hours of research applied to it. It really is quite simple. Just like the tech switch between two different battery technologies.
Not so simple, except in terms of the mechanic doing the battery replacement. (which of course is one of the beauties of electric vehicles - really easy aftermarket mods to the power system) Battery tech is *the* bottleneck for electric vehicles, and so far it's proved anything but easy to improve on significantly.
So...what you're saying is, once a whole bunch of stuff has been done, and Tesla has approved a new type of battery, someone could take their Model S to the shop and simply have their battery tech switched, right? Sounds pretty simple from the consumer point of view - no more difficult than changing to winter tires.
Really, for the end consumer, this is no different than the switch from NiMH to Li-Ion in laptops. If you can't do it for your current one, you can certainly get it for your next one. If the chargers are made even half-decently, they can probably be upgraded, too. All those huge hurdles that are passed first are invisible to the end user.
Well, for most of us, the game IS bagging as many women as possible, until you hit one that makes you want to hang around with her for more time than the others...often at the exclusion of others.
The larger the sampling pool you have, the better chance you have to meet your mate you want to stay with.
Yes, and some people can't think of anything better to do on the weekend than destroying their livers and brains. Most of the people I've met find that game gets old by their mid-thirties, if not sooner. As for an increased sample size improving the odds of finding a suitable mate, I don't see how casual sex helps with finding someone who is emotionally compatible, and bagging women doesn't usually imply that you're trying to get to know them.
More importantly, you get to focus on interests and personality before you even meet. In bars, you're more likely to focus on looks, on "I'd like to tap that ass", and that's not a great basis for a stable long-term relationship.
Well, that physical attraction has served humanity well for thousands of years. Online dating isn't even 100 years old yet.
I'd bet physical attraction will still be around in a thousand years. The gattaca style online dating, not so much.
Physical attraction is a great tool from an evolutionary perspective, especially when you note what "physically attractive" means from era to era (generally, healthy and able to provide for oneself). It tends to improve the chances of your genes getting passed along, which is what evolution is all about. Long-term relationships aren't as important to the successful passing along of genes (I think about five years has been generally accepted as being enough up until the last few generations of humanity). That said, my main requirement for a long-term partner wasn't primarily the viability of her genes, although I find her attractive enough. I like to think that I can work past my instincts to a certain degree, although for all we know that's just a counter-culture instinct evolution has raised to keep mixing in interesting traits.
Of course, it might just be that you meet so many 'crazy chicks' because sane women know how to spot a misogynistic Neanderthal from miles away.
Well, obviously, I don't talk that way about women I'm wanting to get in bed with,that wouldn't be smart.
Heck, the main thing I find that is successful for bagging women, is to have THEM talk about themselves as much as they want.
I've never known a girl that after a date complained that the guy listened too well, or let her talk too much about herself.
And it's a no brainer that you tell them what they want to hear, you're an idiot if you start telling everything you think or feel right off to bat (if ever).
Hell, my idea of commitment is telling them my real name!!
:)
Marriage isn't about "bagging women" or getting into bed with them, so your whole point and attitude has no overall bearing on the conversation, except the part about potential age-equivalent mates being fewer. I won't even say more "crazies" because I've seen enough people with problems from a variety of age groups over the years. Moreover, marriages where one person just tells the other "what they want to hear" are probably going to be unsatisfying and unsuccessful. Do the world a favor and stick with your series of superficial, commitment-free relationships.
Ladies, not all men think like him. Some of us are willing to tell a woman what we're looking for once we've determined a relationship with her has a chance, as well as being open, honest, and (at least trying to be) considerate. I may not get as many dates as the parent poster, but sometimes quantity doesn't have a quality all its own (and it's still often enough that I remember how everything works).
Of course, if one is seeking to bolster some culturally-determined myth of monogamy (so as to uphold property rights and inheritance, perhaps) then you've got to look pretty far afield for examples of monogamous species.
So, what's the reason in your conspiracy-riddled world that we use rats and mice for so much of the basic research modern scientists do? It certainly can't be all the other commonalities between rats and voles, can it?
Monogamy is a cultural fact, going back thousands of years (same for polygamy). Finding an acceptable model is the first step in seeing if it also has a biological basis. And here's this handy little creature with the trait we want to study and a short lifespan. Even if they're wrong about the connection, this wouldn't be the first time scientists went down a dead end, to the profit of society.
This has nothing to do with fishing stocks. For a start, whales are mammals, not fish.
So? It's about sustainable catching of marine animals. So, semantics don't matter that much. And if you're going to go with excessive pedantry, you'll know that "fish" isn't really a great classification biologically speaking since it does indeed miss out whales (and others).
Moreover, there are plenty of mammals that I find tasty and enjoyable. The sentience level is more of an issue to me (which others can argue about, too).
Not only do you need to be able to deal with abstraction, there are technical limitations, politics, interpersonal issues, vendors, compatibility, bad specs, buggy libraries, etc.
I'm not aware of any courses that teach most of those issues, and the ones that do (psychology and political science) aren't really found in a technical degree. As for the rest, any course would be at least halfway out of date before the syllabus was written up. Sounds like they're all better dealt with in real-world personal development, often called work experience.
Seriously, sounds like you're more appreciative of a trade school program, which certainly has it's strengths. In fact, some of them can be quite good, if that's what you're looking for.
It would be wiser to prepare for a lifetime of abstraction by learning and practicing a form of abstraction that one will actually use in said lifetime.
I would like to believe you're trolling, but I suspect you aren't.
The idea behind abstraction is that it doesn't matter what you learned, it's how you learned to think about the problem. It's the difference between knowing how to use MS Word and knowing how to use a word processor, knowing how to use MS Excel and knowing how to use spreadsheets. The idea is to teach you how to solve problems, not how to solve problems in a certain field.
This can be done in a more 'practical' area, but the beauty of math is that your set of tools are limited, a successful result is limited or unique, and the process used to arrive at your result can be understood by anyone who actually grasps the math concepts. Once you can solve a problem with those restrictions, little things like user requirements and process flow become trivial.
I'm certainly biased - I love math. After all, it's the language that describes the universe.
Same with Open/Libre Office. Never had any stability problems, and in one notable case, was able to open a 'critical' word document for a customer in OO when the various versions of MS could not. Strange.
This is one of my greatest grievances with MS Office. Not only do they fundamentally change the file format just about every version (even when there is no notable difference between version besides UI and two or three features used by a handful of people worldwide), they also seem to have a terrible track record of opening most old versions of their own documents! This never made sense to me, except possibly as a ploy to force user upgrades. It gave me a strong preference to abandon their Office software, especially since Open/Libre Office does a decent job on most MS Office documents anyway.
That said, if you have a heavily formatted MS Word doc, you're better off using the same version of MS Word to open it. I find this is typically an issue with internal office documents. If I get a heavily formatted Word doc from a client, I have to wonder why they want me to be able to change the text of something important that they sent me. PDFs are my preferred word processor format of choice for inter-company documents.
BSE being a disease effectively created by feeding cows on other cows. One that seems to be transferrable to humans. It's unfortunate but it's not really a counter-argument in this context. It's just an argument that you shouldn't eat beef as well as humans.
Wow, I read that, and the argument I came up with is that we shouldn't feed meat to herbivores. Cows aren't bad - cows eating cows are bad.
And yet, the average for being killed by a terrorist in Massachusetts in the last year is about 1 per 100 days. Which is still far lower than traffic fatalities.
Not saying I disagree with the police actions, or the desire to stay home when a loose nut is about, but it's still not a major factor over any span of time.
Let's say you have a patent on a 10-speed bike (2 gears in front, 5 in back). When it's about to expire you file one for an 18-speed bike (3 gears in front, 6 in back). How innovative is this?
I'm not sure how close the changes to the drug are compared to the difference in my example, but the Indian court is leaning towards my example.
Given your signature, I'm not sure which way to respond to your statements. So I'll do both
(Taken at face value) Well, you're a lawyer, so you clearly have more experience in the field than me. That said, I haven't heard of any specific rule where first sale specified a physical copy, and Germany (yes, not the US) has said that first sale applies to downloaded games from the likes of Steam.
(Taken as being misleading) Nice troll! Well done!
So your argument is: Nothing illegal was known to be done, but it was very unusual, and untraceable, therefore it must be illegal. It is because of that exact attitude that some people don't want to use debit/credit - they don't want the government, or anyone else, knowing what their business is, even if it's just stopping at McDonald's.
I'm not saying you're wrong in this case, but this sounds like the same line used when someone doesn't want to talk to the police without their lawyer: What? Do you have something to hide?
Moreover, if prison rape is that prevalent, I sincerely wish for a criminal to sue the government for negligence in their duties and violation of the constitution under cruel and unusual punishment because either they are woefully incapable of stopping crime in prison, or they allow it to happen as an additional punishment. And just maybe recidivism rates would be lower if we taught people how to be useful citizens rather than treating them worse than animals. There is evidence from other countries that it actually works.
then every year 99.9945% of those guns are used for something other than what they're "meant" for since they didn't kill anyone.
You must be remarkably stupid to come to this conclusion. You've heard of practice, right?
So...the other 99.9945% of the guns are used for practice and they still only kill about 11k per year??? If Gretzky had practiced that much, he wouldn't have had time to play a single hockey game!
Another commenter stated the sentence was about half of the maximum of what the offense(s) allowed. They sure threw (half) the book at him!
It's a stupid, negligent act, just as bad if not worse than intentionally driving to the bar to get drunk (which millions have also done without harming anyone). The possibility of it being worse is that if he causes an accident, it's the equivalent of making a bus crash, badly, every time.
Perhaps, by "sending a message", they mean having enough publicity that the entire world takes notice, rather than what we get when someone does a more-than-typically-stupid stunt on the road. Gotta admit, it's pretty tough for anyone who doesn't live under a rock to say they had no clue this could put them in jail now, isn't it?
Imagine someone is driving the wrong way down a freeway. Should he just get a fine for reckless driving? What if he tells his friends, or posts on his social media of choice that he's going to do this? Still a mere reckless driving charge? What if he decides to get drunk first? Is it okay to consider jail time now?
Or how about this - a guy (he's a marksman, even!) decides he's going to shoot the cap off your head - without asking you. Don't worry, he's done it dozens of times before. Are you okay with that?
Face it. This clown willfully and with premeditation engaged in an activity which had the real (if not necessarily high) risk of causing harm or death to a large number of people. You can't accidentally shine a laser pointer on a place for any length of time without trying or not noticing. So, there are three things that happened here. First, this guy engaged in an activity that put other people in some amount of risk, without their consent and without their being able to safely mitigate it. Second, he actively pursued this event. Third, his victims were fortunate enough to pass through this unscathed. I'm not too interested in greatly mitigating the consequences for the first two acts just because no one actually got hurt. And let's face it, if people actually had gotten hurt or died, 2.5 years wouldn't happen even with good behaviour, so his sentence was mitigated by some amount due to the outcome.
Slashdot Mirror
Awesome sig - how appropriate.
and what happen when you drive into canada who will pay the $20 a meg roaming fees?
All the issues brought up in this conversation, and this is the one you latch onto? Maybe they'll do what Amazon does with the Kindle - make it free for it's standard uses. Also, I think if it has GPS it might be able to be just a little more intelligent than your typical cell phone, even if they don't have those features.
That's why I use Calibre + plugin to strip out the DRM from Amazon e-books. Then I can lend them to whomever I like!
Calibre FTW.
First, the most likely mass initial deployment, once approved, will be in new cars. The net mechanic hours will be nil, but I expect the cost will still increase, at least initially. Like most people, besides mechanics, I don't care how many hours it takes, I care how much it's going to cost. The two aren't completely related.
Second, if someone decides to upgrade their car with the new battery, I expect the old one will get you some credit. Again, the question is how much will it help?
Third, the mechanic hours isn't the big deal, the big deal in an aftermarket upgrade is, "How long will I be without my toy?" Again, how much the mechanic gets paid, which will certainly be a only fraction of the overall cost, but the inconvenience of waiting for your toy (or your primary means of transportation) will be a factor.
And the difference between a major overhaul and a simple drop-in replacement is similar to the difference between buying a great new home and renovating your home while you live in it. One has a certain amount of pain and an immediate result (for some definitions of immediate). The other can take a loooong time, inconveniences you while it's happening, and invariably has hiccups along the way. Likewise, the new home may as well have been built by magic pixies, too.
Let me be clear, I'm not trivializing their work, and I truly appreciate what they and others like them have done - I wouldn't call myself a typical user. But one of the most amazing things to me is when something new is made so well that either people just change their habits because the new way is that much simpler or the new thing just replaces the old thing without any real thought having to be given to it at all.
Now explain to me why all that work, which the typical user figures has been done by fairies or elves anyway, has any relevance to said user when he goes to get his battery changed? All he is going to care about is how much will it cost, how long will it take, and how much better will it be.
We truly stand on the shoulders of giants. Even a "simple" hammer or wheel isn't simple any more. There is serious research in both of those. And yet, I can still take a cash equivalent of one to three hours of my time and buy this device which literally has thousands of hours of research applied to it. It really is quite simple. Just like the tech switch between two different battery technologies.
>all for a simple battery tech switch
Not so simple, except in terms of the mechanic doing the battery replacement. (which of course is one of the beauties of electric vehicles - really easy aftermarket mods to the power system) Battery tech is *the* bottleneck for electric vehicles, and so far it's proved anything but easy to improve on significantly.
So...what you're saying is, once a whole bunch of stuff has been done, and Tesla has approved a new type of battery, someone could take their Model S to the shop and simply have their battery tech switched, right? Sounds pretty simple from the consumer point of view - no more difficult than changing to winter tires.
Really, for the end consumer, this is no different than the switch from NiMH to Li-Ion in laptops. If you can't do it for your current one, you can certainly get it for your next one. If the chargers are made even half-decently, they can probably be upgraded, too. All those huge hurdles that are passed first are invisible to the end user.
Well, for most of us, the game IS bagging as many women as possible, until you hit one that makes you want to hang around with her for more time than the others...often at the exclusion of others.
The larger the sampling pool you have, the better chance you have to meet your mate you want to stay with.
Yes, and some people can't think of anything better to do on the weekend than destroying their livers and brains. Most of the people I've met find that game gets old by their mid-thirties, if not sooner. As for an increased sample size improving the odds of finding a suitable mate, I don't see how casual sex helps with finding someone who is emotionally compatible, and bagging women doesn't usually imply that you're trying to get to know them.
Well, that physical attraction has served humanity well for thousands of years. Online dating isn't even 100 years old yet.
I'd bet physical attraction will still be around in a thousand years. The gattaca style online dating, not so much.
Physical attraction is a great tool from an evolutionary perspective, especially when you note what "physically attractive" means from era to era (generally, healthy and able to provide for oneself). It tends to improve the chances of your genes getting passed along, which is what evolution is all about. Long-term relationships aren't as important to the successful passing along of genes (I think about five years has been generally accepted as being enough up until the last few generations of humanity). That said, my main requirement for a long-term partner wasn't primarily the viability of her genes, although I find her attractive enough. I like to think that I can work past my instincts to a certain degree, although for all we know that's just a counter-culture instinct evolution has raised to keep mixing in interesting traits.
Well, obviously, I don't talk that way about women I'm wanting to get in bed with,that wouldn't be smart.
Heck, the main thing I find that is successful for bagging women, is to have THEM talk about themselves as much as they want.
I've never known a girl that after a date complained that the guy listened too well, or let her talk too much about herself.
And it's a no brainer that you tell them what they want to hear, you're an idiot if you start telling everything you think or feel right off to bat (if ever).
Hell, my idea of commitment is telling them my real name!!
Marriage isn't about "bagging women" or getting into bed with them, so your whole point and attitude has no overall bearing on the conversation, except the part about potential age-equivalent mates being fewer. I won't even say more "crazies" because I've seen enough people with problems from a variety of age groups over the years. Moreover, marriages where one person just tells the other "what they want to hear" are probably going to be unsatisfying and unsuccessful. Do the world a favor and stick with your series of superficial, commitment-free relationships.
Ladies, not all men think like him. Some of us are willing to tell a woman what we're looking for once we've determined a relationship with her has a chance, as well as being open, honest, and (at least trying to be) considerate. I may not get as many dates as the parent poster, but sometimes quantity doesn't have a quality all its own (and it's still often enough that I remember how everything works).
Of course, if one is seeking to bolster some culturally-determined myth of monogamy (so as to uphold property rights and inheritance, perhaps) then you've got to look pretty far afield for examples of monogamous species.
So, what's the reason in your conspiracy-riddled world that we use rats and mice for so much of the basic research modern scientists do? It certainly can't be all the other commonalities between rats and voles, can it?
Monogamy is a cultural fact, going back thousands of years (same for polygamy). Finding an acceptable model is the first step in seeing if it also has a biological basis. And here's this handy little creature with the trait we want to study and a short lifespan. Even if they're wrong about the connection, this wouldn't be the first time scientists went down a dead end, to the profit of society.
This has nothing to do with fishing stocks. For a start, whales are mammals, not fish.
So? It's about sustainable catching of marine animals. So, semantics don't matter that much. And if you're going to go with excessive pedantry, you'll know that "fish" isn't really a great classification biologically speaking since it does indeed miss out whales (and others).
Moreover, there are plenty of mammals that I find tasty and enjoyable. The sentience level is more of an issue to me (which others can argue about, too).
Not only do you need to be able to deal with abstraction, there are technical limitations, politics, interpersonal issues, vendors, compatibility, bad specs, buggy libraries, etc.
I'm not aware of any courses that teach most of those issues, and the ones that do (psychology and political science) aren't really found in a technical degree. As for the rest, any course would be at least halfway out of date before the syllabus was written up. Sounds like they're all better dealt with in real-world personal development, often called work experience.
Seriously, sounds like you're more appreciative of a trade school program, which certainly has it's strengths. In fact, some of them can be quite good, if that's what you're looking for.
It would be wiser to prepare for a lifetime of abstraction by learning and practicing a form of abstraction that one will actually use in said lifetime.
I would like to believe you're trolling, but I suspect you aren't.
The idea behind abstraction is that it doesn't matter what you learned, it's how you learned to think about the problem. It's the difference between knowing how to use MS Word and knowing how to use a word processor, knowing how to use MS Excel and knowing how to use spreadsheets. The idea is to teach you how to solve problems, not how to solve problems in a certain field.
This can be done in a more 'practical' area, but the beauty of math is that your set of tools are limited, a successful result is limited or unique, and the process used to arrive at your result can be understood by anyone who actually grasps the math concepts. Once you can solve a problem with those restrictions, little things like user requirements and process flow become trivial.
I'm certainly biased - I love math. After all, it's the language that describes the universe.
Same with Open/Libre Office. Never had any stability problems, and in one notable case, was able to open a 'critical' word document for a customer in OO when the various versions of MS could not. Strange.
This is one of my greatest grievances with MS Office. Not only do they fundamentally change the file format just about every version (even when there is no notable difference between version besides UI and two or three features used by a handful of people worldwide), they also seem to have a terrible track record of opening most old versions of their own documents! This never made sense to me, except possibly as a ploy to force user upgrades. It gave me a strong preference to abandon their Office software, especially since Open/Libre Office does a decent job on most MS Office documents anyway.
That said, if you have a heavily formatted MS Word doc, you're better off using the same version of MS Word to open it. I find this is typically an issue with internal office documents. If I get a heavily formatted Word doc from a client, I have to wonder why they want me to be able to change the text of something important that they sent me. PDFs are my preferred word processor format of choice for inter-company documents.
BSE being a disease effectively created by feeding cows on other cows. One that seems to be transferrable to humans. It's unfortunate but it's not really a counter-argument in this context. It's just an argument that you shouldn't eat beef as well as humans.
Wow, I read that, and the argument I came up with is that we shouldn't feed meat to herbivores. Cows aren't bad - cows eating cows are bad.
And yet, the average for being killed by a terrorist in Massachusetts in the last year is about 1 per 100 days. Which is still far lower than traffic fatalities.
Not saying I disagree with the police actions, or the desire to stay home when a loose nut is about, but it's still not a major factor over any span of time.
Let's say you have a patent on a 10-speed bike (2 gears in front, 5 in back). When it's about to expire you file one for an 18-speed bike (3 gears in front, 6 in back). How innovative is this?
I'm not sure how close the changes to the drug are compared to the difference in my example, but the Indian court is leaning towards my example.
Given your signature, I'm not sure which way to respond to your statements. So I'll do both
(Taken at face value) Well, you're a lawyer, so you clearly have more experience in the field than me. That said, I haven't heard of any specific rule where first sale specified a physical copy, and Germany (yes, not the US) has said that first sale applies to downloaded games from the likes of Steam.
(Taken as being misleading) Nice troll! Well done!
So your argument is: Nothing illegal was known to be done, but it was very unusual, and untraceable, therefore it must be illegal. It is because of that exact attitude that some people don't want to use debit/credit - they don't want the government, or anyone else, knowing what their business is, even if it's just stopping at McDonald's.
I'm not saying you're wrong in this case, but this sounds like the same line used when someone doesn't want to talk to the police without their lawyer: What? Do you have something to hide?
Moreover, if prison rape is that prevalent, I sincerely wish for a criminal to sue the government for negligence in their duties and violation of the constitution under cruel and unusual punishment because either they are woefully incapable of stopping crime in prison, or they allow it to happen as an additional punishment. And just maybe recidivism rates would be lower if we taught people how to be useful citizens rather than treating them worse than animals. There is evidence from other countries that it actually works.
then every year 99.9945% of those guns are used for something other than what they're "meant" for since they didn't kill anyone.
You must be remarkably stupid to come to this conclusion. You've heard of practice, right?
So...the other 99.9945% of the guns are used for practice and they still only kill about 11k per year??? If Gretzky had practiced that much, he wouldn't have had time to play a single hockey game!
Another commenter stated the sentence was about half of the maximum of what the offense(s) allowed. They sure threw (half) the book at him!
It's a stupid, negligent act, just as bad if not worse than intentionally driving to the bar to get drunk (which millions have also done without harming anyone). The possibility of it being worse is that if he causes an accident, it's the equivalent of making a bus crash, badly, every time.
Perhaps, by "sending a message", they mean having enough publicity that the entire world takes notice, rather than what we get when someone does a more-than-typically-stupid stunt on the road. Gotta admit, it's pretty tough for anyone who doesn't live under a rock to say they had no clue this could put them in jail now, isn't it?
Imagine someone is driving the wrong way down a freeway. Should he just get a fine for reckless driving? What if he tells his friends, or posts on his social media of choice that he's going to do this? Still a mere reckless driving charge? What if he decides to get drunk first? Is it okay to consider jail time now?
Or how about this - a guy (he's a marksman, even!) decides he's going to shoot the cap off your head - without asking you. Don't worry, he's done it dozens of times before. Are you okay with that?
Face it. This clown willfully and with premeditation engaged in an activity which had the real (if not necessarily high) risk of causing harm or death to a large number of people. You can't accidentally shine a laser pointer on a place for any length of time without trying or not noticing. So, there are three things that happened here. First, this guy engaged in an activity that put other people in some amount of risk, without their consent and without their being able to safely mitigate it. Second, he actively pursued this event. Third, his victims were fortunate enough to pass through this unscathed. I'm not too interested in greatly mitigating the consequences for the first two acts just because no one actually got hurt. And let's face it, if people actually had gotten hurt or died, 2.5 years wouldn't happen even with good behaviour, so his sentence was mitigated by some amount due to the outcome.