You're assuming, of course, that the SUV is also moving at a velocity so that it meets the small car between head-on and perpendicular--and that situation is instant death no matter what's being driven
Incorrect. People survive side impacts and head on collisions all the time. Your odds are just a lot smaller if you're in one of these toy cars.
It's sad we don't have a better understanding of physics in the general populace.
You misunderstand how the system is working. The real factor I'm talking about is the kinetic energy of the system (which is increased by the mass of the SUV).
(1/2 * (mass toy car) * (velocity toy car)^2) + (1/2 * (mass SUV) * (velocity of SUV))
is a lot more than
(1/2 * (mass toy car) * (velocity toy car)^2) (notice there's no wall mass in this equation)
Normally if the two cars were of nearly equal mass you'd expect about equal destruction to each. With an SUV however the kinetic energy in the system is just going to be greater. In a general sense, the more kinetic energy in a collision, the greater the potential for destruction.
Not everyone has the same value system, or makes a large salary as you apparently do. Just because you're an aerospace engineer doesn't mean what you value is any more important than anyone else values. You seem to put an enormous value on safety. That's fine, that's a good thing to value IMO. Of course, not everyone makes the nice salary that I imagine an aerospace engineer makes, so we can't all afford expensive Volvos or Mercedes.
Get a grip buddy and maybe try to get out into the REAL world where many people can barely afford to buy their Corolla, and many others still dream about just having a car in the first place.
I heard countless predictions on the media that global warming was going to cause the 2006 hurricane season to be catastrophically intense and large. Obviously it wasn't.
I don't know a hell of a lot about hurricane prediction, but I did hear one expert say that el-nino had a moderating influence on the 2006 hurricane season, and el-nino is wearing off for 2007.
As far as the media is concerned, I wouldn't trust them a lick to report anything regarding science. Global warming has an effect on the long term outlook for hurricanes, not one single year. Looking at and single data point like "it's hotter in place X in year Y" is inaccurate and misleading. Global warming means average temperature across the globe over long periods of time. In this case that means that the 2006 hurricane season being an inactive one means very little.
Who needs respect, when you can "merge" into the space between any two cars on the road, even ahead of a tailgater?
Sounds like a dangerous, idiotic thing to do that only pisses people off because you've engangerd their lives. Sorry, but respect IS important on the road, as it's a shared resource and thus cultural.
As far as looking freakish, people WILL judge you on the way your vehicle looks. I don't want to be the freak who drives the freak mobile.
Have you looked at the videos illustrating how safe they are?
I saw a video of it smashing into another car, but not one smashing into an SUV (which is what we're talking about here)
Or how about the one in the UK where they ran the thing against a wall head on.
Didn't see that one, but when you're smashing into a wall you only have to consider the mass of the vehicle you're riding in, not say the mass of an SUV that's 2-3 times heavier. These things are incredibly safe!
Well, I'll believe that when I see comparisons of this thing hitting a typical SUV and a regular sized car hitting an SUV. I suspect the mass of an SUV is going to overwhelm the design of this tiny car. My understanding is that SUVs are far less common in the european countries where this thing is popular, so people might not have much concern about that.
When I saw it in that awful Ashton Kutcher movie. Since then I've found it's a real car, and not a large rollerskate.
I can't imagine buying one of these things. It looks totally freakish, and with it's tiny size you're get about zero respect from other drivers on the highway. And the milage is ONLY 40 mpg? What the hell? My Metro gets at least 34 on the highway, sometimes upwards of 38, and it's got 4 doors, is fairly roomy, and isn't even a hybrid or anything special. Maybe if it got 100 mpg and gas prices were twice what they are now, but no way I'd ever buy one otherwise.
My Dad told me a story this afternoon about a woman who bought an RV, drove it on the highway, set the cruise control, went back to make breafast, and, of course, the RV crashed.
Or at least ones who don't believe every story dad tells them. There's no evidence to suggest any of this story is true, and every reason to believe it's flat out untrue. http://www.snopes.com/autos/techno/cruise.asp
or (d)-(ZZZZZZZZZZ) Do something that hasn't been reported second hand by a bunch of dumb journalists, and summarized in 3 misleading and at least partially innacurate statements (who the hell said anything about fuel?). Would it help if I mentioned that I like Fox News and agree with most of what Sean Hannity says?
It would at exlain a lot of why you have to simplify complex situations down to a few options that miss all the detail.
Conservatives attack social programs because *in too many cases) they encourage people to abdicate their personal responsibility to themselves and their families to the government
See, this is what I'm talking about. You're couching this debate into something it's really not, i.e. "conservatives are for personal responsibility.. unlike those liberals who want everyone to get off scott-free".
What you're talking about is a debate about values, not personal responsibility. But if people are going to be expected by the left to take responsibility for their environmental wellbeing, why can't us on the right expect people to take responsibility for their financial wellbeing?
Actuall you're the one trying to turn global warming about some kind of personal issue. It's not. Global warming is about economics. I.e. there's a bunch of people putting out greenhouse gasses that are screwing it up the environment for other people. Those people (a lot of energy producers, some individuals) aren't going to stop doing that until there's laws on the books that forces them to stop. They aren't going to stop because they have some personal value about not polluting because it's "bad". There's a few on the left that seem to think this too, that all they need to do is "do their part" by driving a Prius or having a compost pile, and it'll all go away.
Congress can try all they like, but there's basically no difference from a first amendment perspective between censoring cable, and censoring any other subscription based press medium.
In other words, if the Supreme Court were to rule in favor of censoring cable, say goodbye to the first amendment. Normally I'd say this was impossible, but with the extreme right leaning of the court these days, anything is possible.
You should really get your pollution facts straight. Smog is from particulate emmisions, not CO2. It also actually DECREASES the effects of global warming (see global dimming), so if you're correct that there's more smog than there was 30 years ago, that's actually decreasing global temperature. I was also under the impression smog was becoming less of a problem in the US as regulations have forced cleaner air standards. (This is at least what a recent Nova special on global dimming said)
I'm not trying to argue against humans causing global warming here, but if you're going to argue about it, at least get the arguments right.
I thought I'd point out that CO2 isn't the ONLY type of pollution
See, it's really the only pollutant that's relevant to a discussion on global warming*. I consider useless facts and lies and distortions by cable and radio personalities to be a pollutant. If we factor that in, I'd say the US is in the lead again.
*I suppose you could consider particle emissions relevant, but they actually DECREASE global warming, not contribute.
Us conservatives have been barking up that particular tree for some time.
Some have, some haven't. I know one "conservative" that's in a high executive position in the federal government right now that seems to think nothing of personal responsibility. It wouldn't take many guesses to find out who.
Why do you think conservatives have some kind of monopoly on personal responsibility? Everyone believes in personal responsibilty in some form or another. It's just the conservatives try to turn that into a debate about eliminating food stamps, or medicare, or whatever program they don't like. Hell, you could turn the anti gay-marriage thing into a "personal responsibility" fight if you twisted hard enough.
It seems to me the whole personal responsibilty debate is just another way to twist something that's not really personal responsility into a topic that most people will say "hey! I support personal responsibility.. that must mean I'm for <thing you want to promote>."
Interestingly, since *everything* is moving, isn't it be possible to demonstrate that any given body is stationary and everything else is moving relative to it?
Being serious for a moment since you have a serious question, you're actually quite correct. Geo-centric theory actually DOES work and can make the correct predictions with all that retro-grade motion stuff.
The problem with it is that for it to work you have to believe in un-observed forces.
The beauty of helio centric theory is that it postulates the same force that keeps us atatched to the earth is the same force that makes the planets orbit around the sun. In other words it doesn't require un-observed forces, and is in agreement with our understanding of gravity. Oh and just one more point, the Earth does not orbit the sun, (well it does, almost) it orbits the solar systems centre of gravity, which is actually a little bit outside the radius of the Sun
Hmm.. Accoring to my sources the earth/sun barycenter is a point inside the sun. So it's quite accurate to say that the earth orbits the sun. Perhaps you're thinking of the sun itself, which if you consider only Jupiter orbits a point just above its surface?
Me.. I like voting on stuff like if the earth revolves around the sun, and not the sun around the earth. I mean.. it's all just who believes what that matters, and not what's real, right?
I've been trying for YEARS to convince people of my geo-centric model of the universe. But these damn "establishment scientists" and their "consensus reality" are always keeping me and my superior theories down. Gravity... pshaw. That's just want they tell people to keep 'ol "Big Space Exploration" in business. They want all the crystal spheres for themselves.
I mean.. it's perfectly obvious that the SUN revolves around the earth! You can prove it yourself. Sit down for a moment. Do you feel like you're moving? I sure don't. Well that's what these damn scientists keep telling you! It's perfectly obvious everything ELSE is moving, not the earth. Everyone has seen the sun move across the sky, and the stars move at night. If we were moving, we're all be constantly dizzy!
Even great scientists like Aristotle and Ptolemy agree with me! One day we'll all wonder why we didn't listen to these great men, and ignore the biased fools like Galileo.
I think this is this most intelligent reply I've heard about multi-core processors. Everything I've heard up to this point is the standard "But multi-threaded programming is both hard, and has diminishing returns". Which is very true. I've often wondered how the hell I'd break my programs into 80 different independent parts.
Ultimately I think you're right. Processors started out general, and have become increasingly specialized. First we had the "floating point co-processor", next stuff like an MMU, then GPUs came along. Multiple cored with differing functions is in many ways just a continuation of that trend.
Wow. That sounds just awful. I'd MUCH rather be in the present day where I can get a LOT more information from a LOT more sources, not to mention a LOT more sources of hardware/software/whatever.
Sorry, but "the good old days" sound like the bad old days to me. Maybe they're only "the good old days" because you don't do any of that kind of stuff anymore? Or maybe back then you were young, and now you're old? There's still plenty of people that do an equivalent of what you're talking about. Probably 100 times more people in fact. It sounds like you're just complaining because the other end of the bell-curve of techno-wannabees has gotten a bit wider.
I'm looking forward to the future, where hopefully more data formats and communications channels are more standardized, there's more protocols so all my different devices can be hooked up and talk to each other. Hopefully I won't look back wistfully at now when Microsoft still ruled the roost for the desktop, people still thought that the internet and websites were the same thing, and anyone wanting to create web-based interfaces was limited to http.
Better code = less bloat = better performance and security.
The thing you've failed to realize is that "bloat" is relative. One mans bloat is another mans "gotta-have-it" feature. Also the point of the poster was that "better performance" is a moving target.
Programmers don't design software for one guy, with one computer, that's run only next week. They design software for a hundred/thousand/million guys that runs on 200 different computers of different speeds, and for the next several years.
The basic takehome message here is that the computing world changes fast, and has a wide diversity of environment. "better" changes.
but what happens when gadgets are the hub of your life? What's the point of starting new hobbies (woodworking?) if my most dear personal projects require gadgets and computers? Have I become a pseudo-slave of gadgets.
It sounds like you've become a slave of NOT having gadgets. Sheesh, the point is to own stuff and not become attached to it, not to just avoid having it in the first place. You can equally become attached to an obsession over not having anything to become attached to.
Should we eliminate foreign aid for poor countries? Welfare? Endowments for the arts? What have we already sacrificed in order to pay for the space program we have?
I'd say an extremely useless War in Iraq for starters. Those costs are something like half a trillion dollars. Oh, and you can throw in subsidies for oil companies as well, and probably 1000 other thing I haven't the faintest clue exist. The point is that the US is a rich country. A couple billion is nothing.
Bringing up things like eliminating foreign aid is really pointless. If you were buying a TV, would you ask yourself "should I give up eating this month for this TV?". No, you'd ask yourself if you can afford it. Comparing things that are more valuable than the ISS really misses the point.
I'd say since we're currently pissing away a couple hundred times the expense of the ISS on a useless war, we can afford the ISS.
Its both a generational thing and cultural thing. Of my relatives only the younger generations have broadband, this would be the below 40 generation. Outside of that only those who have kids still around who push for it. For the most of them "it just really does not matter". Hell, for many the internet does not matter.
Your theory of this being a generational thing falls apart when you realize that other countries with high broadband penetration have older generations as well.
Broadband prices in the US are relatively high ($40-60) from the prices I've heard of in say Japan. I'd say penetration is low because there's a lot of people that think it's too expensive for what they get. My father didn't sign up until I pointed out that DSL was now about the same price as his second phone line + ISP costs. He still only has barely-broadband speed of only 256 kilobits/second, but it's a hell of a lot faster and better than the modem. And it's not like he's a new internet user. He started on the Internet probably in 1996, and only got DSL in 2004.
Stats was a long time ago, but I do remember this point that the stats prof made, because it was so non-intuitive.
Of course we're talking about mathematics here, not the real world. In the real world I'm not sure you'd ever have an infinite number of possible states something could wind up in (of course someone is bound to find an example of this)
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You're assuming, of course, that the SUV is also moving at a velocity so that it meets the small car between head-on and perpendicular--and that situation is instant death no matter what's being driven
Incorrect. People survive side impacts and head on collisions all the time. Your odds are just a lot smaller if you're in one of these toy cars.
It's sad we don't have a better understanding of physics in the general populace.
You misunderstand how the system is working. The real factor I'm talking about is the kinetic energy of the system (which is increased by the mass of the SUV).
(1/2 * (mass toy car) * (velocity toy car)^2) + (1/2 * (mass SUV) * (velocity of SUV))
is a lot more than
(1/2 * (mass toy car) * (velocity toy car)^2)
(notice there's no wall mass in this equation)
Normally if the two cars were of nearly equal mass you'd expect about equal destruction to each. With an SUV however the kinetic energy in the system is just going to be greater. In a general sense, the more kinetic energy in a collision, the greater the potential for destruction.
Sheesh. What an arrogant SOB you sound like.
Not everyone has the same value system, or makes a large salary as you apparently do. Just because you're an aerospace engineer doesn't mean what you value is any more important than anyone else values. You seem to put an enormous value on safety. That's fine, that's a good thing to value IMO. Of course, not everyone makes the nice salary that I imagine an aerospace engineer makes, so we can't all afford expensive Volvos or Mercedes.
Get a grip buddy and maybe try to get out into the REAL world where many people can barely afford to buy their Corolla, and many others still dream about just having a car in the first place.
If you are looking for a small fuel efficient car to fling through corners of a race track at high speeds, I guess the smart is not for you.
I guess I'm looking for a car that's safe. Handling well around corners or in emergency situations is an important part of being safe.
I heard countless predictions on the media that global warming was going to cause the 2006 hurricane season to be catastrophically intense and large. Obviously it wasn't.
I don't know a hell of a lot about hurricane prediction, but I did hear one expert say that el-nino had a moderating influence on the 2006 hurricane season, and el-nino is wearing off for 2007.
As far as the media is concerned, I wouldn't trust them a lick to report anything regarding science. Global warming has an effect on the long term outlook for hurricanes, not one single year. Looking at and single data point like "it's hotter in place X in year Y" is inaccurate and misleading. Global warming means average temperature across the globe over long periods of time. In this case that means that the 2006 hurricane season being an inactive one means very little.
Who needs respect, when you can "merge" into the space between any two cars on the road, even ahead of a tailgater?
Sounds like a dangerous, idiotic thing to do that only pisses people off because you've engangerd their lives. Sorry, but respect IS important on the road, as it's a shared resource and thus cultural.
As far as looking freakish, people WILL judge you on the way your vehicle looks. I don't want to be the freak who drives the freak mobile.
Have you looked at the videos illustrating how safe they are?
I saw a video of it smashing into another car, but not one smashing into an SUV (which is what we're talking about here)
Or how about the one in the UK where they ran the thing against a wall head on.
Didn't see that one, but when you're smashing into a wall you only have to consider the mass of the vehicle you're riding in, not say the mass of an SUV that's 2-3 times heavier.
These things are incredibly safe!
Well, I'll believe that when I see comparisons of this thing hitting a typical SUV and a regular sized car hitting an SUV. I suspect the mass of an SUV is going to overwhelm the design of this tiny car. My understanding is that SUVs are far less common in the european countries where this thing is popular, so people might not have much concern about that.
When I saw it in that awful Ashton Kutcher movie. Since then I've found it's a real car, and not a large rollerskate.
I can't imagine buying one of these things. It looks totally freakish, and with it's tiny size you're get about zero respect from other drivers on the highway. And the milage is ONLY 40 mpg? What the hell? My Metro gets at least 34 on the highway, sometimes upwards of 38, and it's got 4 doors, is fairly roomy, and isn't even a hybrid or anything special. Maybe if it got 100 mpg and gas prices were twice what they are now, but no way I'd ever buy one otherwise.
My Dad told me a story this afternoon about a woman who bought an RV, drove it on the highway, set the cruise control, went back to make breafast, and, of course, the RV crashed.
Or at least ones who don't believe every story dad tells them. There's no evidence to suggest any of this story is true, and every reason to believe it's flat out untrue.
http://www.snopes.com/autos/techno/cruise.asp
or (d)-(ZZZZZZZZZZ) Do something that hasn't been reported second hand by a bunch of dumb journalists, and summarized in 3 misleading and at least partially innacurate statements (who the hell said anything about fuel?).
Would it help if I mentioned that I like Fox News and agree with most of what Sean Hannity says?
It would at exlain a lot of why you have to simplify complex situations down to a few options that miss all the detail.
Conservatives attack social programs because *in too many cases) they encourage people to abdicate their personal responsibility to themselves and their families to the government
See, this is what I'm talking about. You're couching this debate into something it's really not, i.e. "conservatives are for personal responsibility.. unlike those liberals who want everyone to get off scott-free".
What you're talking about is a debate about values, not personal responsibility.
But if people are going to be expected by the left to take responsibility for their environmental wellbeing, why can't us on the right expect people to take responsibility for their financial wellbeing?
Actuall you're the one trying to turn global warming about some kind of personal issue. It's not. Global warming is about economics. I.e. there's a bunch of people putting out greenhouse gasses that are screwing it up the environment for other people. Those people (a lot of energy producers, some individuals) aren't going to stop doing that until there's laws on the books that forces them to stop. They aren't going to stop because they have some personal value about not polluting because it's "bad". There's a few on the left that seem to think this too, that all they need to do is "do their part" by driving a Prius or having a compost pile, and it'll all go away.
Last I checked water vapor wasn't considered a pollutant.
Congress can try all they like, but there's basically no difference from a first amendment perspective between censoring cable, and censoring any other subscription based press medium.
In other words, if the Supreme Court were to rule in favor of censoring cable, say goodbye to the first amendment. Normally I'd say this was impossible, but with the extreme right leaning of the court these days, anything is possible.
You should really get your pollution facts straight. Smog is from particulate emmisions, not CO2. It also actually DECREASES the effects of global warming (see global dimming), so if you're correct that there's more smog than there was 30 years ago, that's actually decreasing global temperature. I was also under the impression smog was becoming less of a problem in the US as regulations have forced cleaner air standards. (This is at least what a recent Nova special on global dimming said)
I'm not trying to argue against humans causing global warming here, but if you're going to argue about it, at least get the arguments right.
I thought I'd point out that CO2 isn't the ONLY type of pollution
See, it's really the only pollutant that's relevant to a discussion on global warming*. I consider useless facts and lies and distortions by cable and radio personalities to be a pollutant. If we factor that in, I'd say the US is in the lead again.
*I suppose you could consider particle emissions relevant, but they actually DECREASE global warming, not contribute.
Us conservatives have been barking up that particular tree for some time.
Some have, some haven't. I know one "conservative" that's in a high executive position in the federal government right now that seems to think nothing of personal responsibility. It wouldn't take many guesses to find out who.
Why do you think conservatives have some kind of monopoly on personal responsibility? Everyone believes in personal responsibilty in some form or another. It's just the conservatives try to turn that into a debate about eliminating food stamps, or medicare, or whatever program they don't like. Hell, you could turn the anti gay-marriage thing into a "personal responsibility" fight if you twisted hard enough.
It seems to me the whole personal responsibilty debate is just another way to twist something that's not really personal responsility into a topic that most people will say "hey! I support personal responsibility.. that must mean I'm for <thing you want to promote>."
Interestingly, since *everything* is moving, isn't it be possible to demonstrate that any given body is stationary and everything else is moving relative to it?
Being serious for a moment since you have a serious question, you're actually quite correct. Geo-centric theory actually DOES work and can make the correct predictions with all that retro-grade motion stuff.
The problem with it is that for it to work you have to believe in un-observed forces.
The beauty of helio centric theory is that it postulates the same force that keeps us atatched to the earth is the same force that makes the planets orbit around the sun. In other words it doesn't require un-observed forces, and is in agreement with our understanding of gravity.
Oh and just one more point, the Earth does not orbit the sun, (well it does, almost) it orbits the solar systems centre of gravity, which is actually a little bit outside the radius of the Sun
Hmm.. Accoring to my sources the earth/sun barycenter is a point inside the sun. So it's quite accurate to say that the earth orbits the sun. Perhaps you're thinking of the sun itself, which if you consider only Jupiter orbits a point just above its surface?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_of_mass
Me.. I like voting on stuff like if the earth revolves around the sun, and not the sun around the earth. I mean.. it's all just who believes what that matters, and not what's real, right?
I've been trying for YEARS to convince people of my geo-centric model of the universe. But these damn "establishment scientists" and their "consensus reality" are always keeping me and my superior theories down. Gravity... pshaw. That's just want they tell people to keep 'ol "Big Space Exploration" in business. They want all the crystal spheres for themselves.
I mean.. it's perfectly obvious that the SUN revolves around the earth! You can prove it yourself. Sit down for a moment. Do you feel like you're moving? I sure don't. Well that's what these damn scientists keep telling you! It's perfectly obvious everything ELSE is moving, not the earth. Everyone has seen the sun move across the sky, and the stars move at night. If we were moving, we're all be constantly dizzy!
Even great scientists like Aristotle and Ptolemy agree with me! One day we'll all wonder why we didn't listen to these great men, and ignore the biased fools like Galileo.
I think this is this most intelligent reply I've heard about multi-core processors. Everything I've heard up to this point is the standard "But multi-threaded programming is both hard, and has diminishing returns". Which is very true. I've often wondered how the hell I'd break my programs into 80 different independent parts.
Ultimately I think you're right. Processors started out general, and have become increasingly specialized. First we had the "floating point co-processor", next stuff like an MMU, then GPUs came along. Multiple cored with differing functions is in many ways just a continuation of that trend.
Wow. That sounds just awful. I'd MUCH rather be in the present day where I can get a LOT more information from a LOT more sources, not to mention a LOT more sources of hardware/software/whatever.
Sorry, but "the good old days" sound like the bad old days to me. Maybe they're only "the good old days" because you don't do any of that kind of stuff anymore? Or maybe back then you were young, and now you're old? There's still plenty of people that do an equivalent of what you're talking about. Probably 100 times more people in fact. It sounds like you're just complaining because the other end of the bell-curve of techno-wannabees has gotten a bit wider.
I'm looking forward to the future, where hopefully more data formats and communications channels are more standardized, there's more protocols so all my different devices can be hooked up and talk to each other. Hopefully I won't look back wistfully at now when Microsoft still ruled the roost for the desktop, people still thought that the internet and websites were the same thing, and anyone wanting to create web-based interfaces was limited to http.
Better code = less bloat = better performance and security.
The thing you've failed to realize is that "bloat" is relative. One mans bloat is another mans "gotta-have-it" feature. Also the point of the poster was that "better performance" is a moving target.
Programmers don't design software for one guy, with one computer, that's run only next week. They design software for a hundred/thousand/million guys that runs on 200 different computers of different speeds, and for the next several years.
The basic takehome message here is that the computing world changes fast, and has a wide diversity of environment. "better" changes.
but what happens when gadgets are the hub of your life? What's the point of starting new hobbies (woodworking?) if my most dear personal projects require gadgets and computers? Have I become a pseudo-slave of gadgets.
It sounds like you've become a slave of NOT having gadgets. Sheesh, the point is to own stuff and not become attached to it, not to just avoid having it in the first place. You can equally become attached to an obsession over not having anything to become attached to.
Should we eliminate foreign aid for poor countries? Welfare? Endowments for the arts? What have we already sacrificed in order to pay for the space program we have?
I'd say an extremely useless War in Iraq for starters. Those costs are something like half a trillion dollars. Oh, and you can throw in subsidies for oil companies as well, and probably 1000 other thing I haven't the faintest clue exist. The point is that the US is a rich country. A couple billion is nothing.
Bringing up things like eliminating foreign aid is really pointless. If you were buying a TV, would you ask yourself "should I give up eating this month for this TV?". No, you'd ask yourself if you can afford it. Comparing things that are more valuable than the ISS really misses the point.
I'd say since we're currently pissing away a couple hundred times the expense of the ISS on a useless war, we can afford the ISS.
Its both a generational thing and cultural thing. Of my relatives only the younger generations have broadband, this would be the below 40 generation. Outside of that only those who have kids still around who push for it. For the most of them "it just really does not matter". Hell, for many the internet does not matter.
Your theory of this being a generational thing falls apart when you realize that other countries with high broadband penetration have older generations as well.
Broadband prices in the US are relatively high ($40-60) from the prices I've heard of in say Japan. I'd say penetration is low because there's a lot of people that think it's too expensive for what they get. My father didn't sign up until I pointed out that DSL was now about the same price as his second phone line + ISP costs. He still only has barely-broadband speed of only 256 kilobits/second, but it's a hell of a lot faster and better than the modem. And it's not like he's a new internet user. He started on the Internet probably in 1996, and only got DSL in 2004.
Stats was a long time ago, but I do remember this point that the stats prof made, because it was so non-intuitive.
Of course we're talking about mathematics here, not the real world. In the real world I'm not sure you'd ever have an infinite number of possible states something could wind up in (of course someone is bound to find an example of this)