Those people who distract themselves with gadgets and get into accidents are probably the bad drivers who would have managed to get into accidents anyway.
I've found that a pretty good way to identify the "bad drivers" is by looking to see which ones are fiddling with their cell phones, Blackberries, or GPS receivers.
The drivers who use these devices but think they are driving well are generally just sufficiently distracted not to notice all the errors that they're making. I don't think anyone gets into their car in the morning and says "I'm going to do something dangerous today that might kill myself or others", and yet we still have thousands of people dying in car accidents.
This Slashdot discussion is an excellent study in seeing how people resolve cognitive dissonance. Everyone likes to see themselves as a good driver. Using a cell phone is a serious distraction. The logical conclusion is that people who use cell phones while driving are not good drivers. The dissonance is resolved by carving out personal exceptions ("Sure, some people can't handle the phone, but I'm a really good driver") or dismissing the evidence ("I'm sure the study is flawed, because the people who got into the accidents were bad drivers anyway").
Although a loss for science, this would seem to be more accurately blamed on poor management and budgeting. Perhaps a smaller, better managed project will rise from the ashes.
This isn't exactly a surprise. The only way NASA can get funding is to promise the moon (usually figuratively, though occasionally literally) on an implausible shoestring budget, and then hope that the real costs later on don't cause management to scupper an already-in-progress high-profile project. This is a pretty common strategy in government funded technology and research projects, and it's something that's as old as NASA.
The Mercury program came in at roughly double its original estimated price.
The Air Force anticipated in 1958 that a lunar program would cost $1.5 billion and be complete by the end of 1965. In 1961, NASA's experts said they could do the job by 1967, at a cost of $7 billion. By the time Neil Armstrong took his one small step, it was 1969, and the program had rung up a price tag of about $25 billion (in 1960s dollars).
Looking at the last space telescope project, the Hubble was originally budgeted at $400 million. It cost $2.5 billion by launch time, and total program costs to date run to between $4.5 and $6 billion.
This problem isn't unique to NASA. Technology development programs in the military offer some particularly good examples. Lockheed completed their contract for the F-22 Raptor more than two years and ten billion dollars behind schedule--but they still received more than $800 million in performance awards for their work.
Looks like approximately 5% hair, 95% "plant based bioresin". The artists statement neglects to compare its energy cost to manufacture versus metal or plastic frames.
Quite. How much fuel was used by the farmers who harvested the 'plant-based bioresin', and how many liters of industrial solvents were used in its manufacture?
Let's be honest here--an entire pair of glasses, even with evil petroleum-product-based plastic lenses, is going to tip the scales at maybe a 100 grams (less than a quarter of a pound). That's how much oil is actually in the glasses themselves. Saving a few ounces of petroleum every couple of years is an utterly negligible savings.
While these frames may make a novel fashion statement, there are smarter ways to try to cut consumption of oil.
According to Google, UK£ 4 = $6.42800 which is still at least double what an HDMI cable goes for on Monoprice (depending on length that they are selling)
Not when you add in shipping cost. It may exceed the price of the cable for shipping to North American addresses, and runs close to $30 for delivery to the UK. It's not a major issue for multiple items shipped to the U.S. or Canada, but still--you should be comparing the actual prices paid to get a cable. (There's probably a comparable UK online retailer with lower shipping costs, though....)
Besides, it should be a no-brainer by now that maintaining a bricks and mortar retail presence does add at least a small premium to prices. On the retailer's side, they need to pay for space somewhere that customers can actually get to, they need to have full-time sales staff, and they need to deal with shoplifters. On the customer's side, they get to actually see and handle the products before they buy them, and (during store hours) they can have the product right now. (They may also be able to talk to the sales staff, which can be a mixed blessing depending on the ethics and competence of a given retailer's crew.) There's no shipping charges, and returns or exchanges can be done face to face with a live person.
That said - and as other posters have noted - the purchasing power of GBP in the UK is not what would be expected from the nominal GBP-USD exchange rate. With few exceptions (pints of beer, thank god, among them) prices for goods in the UK are roughly the same numbers as for the corresponding items in the US. (A two-dollar coffee in New York is going to sell for two pounds in London.) On the bright side, a similar phenomenon happens with wages as well. It can be quite lucrative to work in the UK and vacation/retire somewhere else.
Installation costs will be significantly higher than for a simple four-way stop or lighted intersection; they require more land and a larger paved area. In principle, the larger paved area will also have higher ongoing maintenance costs.
On the other hand, this is offset somewhat by the potential for reduced maintenance costs. The larger area may require more streetlighting for night safety and greater costs due to maintenance of more pavement, however there will be no ongoing cost of traffic light maintenance. At properly-designed roundabouts, heavy vehicles will spend less time stopped, sharply reducing the costly-to-repair 'wheel trough' indentations observed in front of many traffic lights.
On a personal level, drivers will spend less time getting to and passing through the roundabout than they would at a conventional intersection. They will enjoy measurable fuel savings from reduced driving time and (more important) a reduction in fuel-costly stops and starts.
While I fear this may be an (emotionally) unpopular assertion here on Slashdot, could it be that pool of U.S. drivers is inherently less-skilled than drivers in many other developed countries? Yes, yes--I know that you (whomever you might be, dear American who is reading this comment right now) are a superb, attentive, alert, efficient, far-above-average driver, but for a moment consider just how stupid and inconsiderate all those other yahoos you have to deal with on the road are.
The fact is, it's harder to get a driver's license in a lot of other countries. The standards and expectations are higher. In the U.S., I exaggerate only very slightly to suggest that a driver's license (and even automobile ownership) are seen as a fundamental human right, rather than a privilege. Most places, public transit is something that poor people use until they work hard enough to live the American dream (with accompanying house in the 'burbs and two-car garage).
Many other driving nations impose stricter conditions on new drivers, graduated licensing schemes (which require the passages of time and/or tests before new drivers are allowed greater driving privileges--the use of high-speed highways, driving late at night, driving without another experienced driver, etc. may all be prohibited to new drivers), older minimum driving ages, and more complex driving tests than the United States.
Despite its abundant roundabouts, the UK enjoys a non-motorway death rate about 15% below that of the U.S. (Their motorway death rate is more than 60% less, but that's pretty much irrelevant to the roundabout issue.) Better public transit also means that people who can't or shouldn't be driving are less tempted to do so.
If that's what you got from reading my comment, you're not reading my comment.
Reflexive tendencies towards self-defence notwithstanding (and I do wonder what sort of soft spot I've touched), I'm sure that most Vine reviewers don't feel that they're being manipulated or biased by the gifts they receive. The vast majority, I'm sure, certainly aren't deliberately slanting their reviews in hopes of acquiring more free stuff.
On the other hand, when asked, the doctors receiving the free pens, and stuffed toys, and dinners, and other pharmaceutical company perks will also emphatically tell you that the company gifts have no effect on their prescribing habits. They would be aghast at the very suggestion that their judgement might be ever-so-slightly twisted by tiny trinkets. And yet...pharmaceutical companies don't spend their marketing budget frivolously. They invest where they expect to get a return.
The doctors receiving these freebies fall into two camps. The naive think that virtually all doctors are above such influences; there might be one or two bad apples, but the profession's integrity is too great to be compromised. The self-deceived acknowledge that other doctors may be influenced to one degree or another, but know that their own judgement is superior to the average, and that they are not swayed.
In the same way that every driver thinks they're above average - safer and smoother than those other idiots on the road - most every doctor thinks they are above influence by trinkets, and every Vine reviewer carves out a personal assumption of superior judgement. They're not bad people, they're just ignorant (wilfully or otherwise) of basic human psychology, and trying to reduce the cognitive dissonance. ("Good people don't take bribes" but "I like to get free stuff". Therefore, "It's okay to take the free stuff and I'm not a bad person as long as I persuade myself that I'm not being influenced.")
And for the record, I'm quite happy to give a scathing review to a product that I didn't pay for...
And the doctors don't prescribe the new acid reflux drug when their patient comes in with a wrist fracture. A free pen with a logo doesn't mean that every patient gets the shiny new drug, it's just to bias the physician's selection. In the case of Vine reviews, it also means that - no matter what you tell yourself - your assessment of 'value for money' is going to be off, because deep down inside, you know you didn't put your own money down.
Really? Do you think they're biased because they got a free $2 pack of erasers to review?
Yes.
If free stuff didn't result in better reviews, businesses wouldn't be giving away free stuff to reviewers.
Medical doctors are highly paid, non-anonymous, well-educated, and government-licensed, but their prescribing habits are still influenced by pharmaceutical company reps giving out logo-covered pens. If an elite group of highly-trained, thoroughly-tested individuals making life-or-death decisions can be influenced by crappy gifts, do you really think some anonymous, unpaid, unregulated, and unsupervised reviewer is going to be more resistant to that sort of influence?
And getting rid of the penny will have some negative global effects on the value of the dollar. They market may very well see it as a devaluation. If it does, you're boned, and there is no way to know ahead of time.
Fortunately, the market is usually smarter than a Slashdot poster. The rest of us have already realized that pennies are worthless wastes of time. A penny is what someone earning minimum wage collects for about four seconds work.
The smallest Australian dollar (worth about the same as a Canadian or U.S. dollar) denomination is 5 cents; their 1 and 2 cent pieces were discontinued in 1991--without destroying their currency.
While the euro includes 1 and 2 cent coins, Finland and the Netherlands officially discourage their use; retailers in many other Eurozone countries informally discourage the use of these least-useful denominations.
The Swiss franc (again, comparable in value) is divided into 100 rappen. The 1 rappen piece was legal tender until 2007, but avoided as much as possible for decades before. In general, when one considers countries which don't understand banking, Switzerland tends not to appear high on the list.
If I drive, I'm at work in in 17-20 minutes depending on traffic, but if I use public transport, it's one hour if everything is perfectly on time.
I can't dispute that even under the best of circumstances, there will be trips that are inefficient or circuitous by mass transit. In densely urbanized centers these 'difficult' trips can be minimized (or nearly eliminated) by grid-layout bus systems coupled to light rail and subway backbones, but not every urban area has the population density to support that level of infrastructure, nor the geography (and absence of geographic and architectural obstacles) to permit it. There will also be populations (particularly in rural areas) which are difficult or prohibitively costly to serve. The car (or some other means of individual, independent transport) will almost certainly always be a practical necessity for some fraction of people.
That said, when you chose to live where you do, did you make access to transit a high personal priority? Or did you choose a place that had ample parking and easy access to the highway? On the flip side, it's almost certain that your employer didn't consider access to public transit an important issue when siting their offices. (In the United States, there is almost universally an assumption of car ownership, and access to transit is an afterthought. In all but the largest cities, public transit is for poor people; a sop for the lowest classes who can't (yet) afford a car.)
Regarding your other comment about the disruption caused by a transit strike, it is possible to declare transit workers an essential service and eliminate their right to strike. Contract disputes are settled through a binding arbitration process, rather than through strikes (or lockouts). Yes, this generally results in slightly higher personnel costs, but it eliminates the massive economic dislocations that can be caused by the temporary loss of mass transit. Other classes of public workers (particularly police officers, firefighters, and ambulance crews) are often declared essential and subject to similar provisions. A number of jurisdictions (including the city of New York) already bar transit workers from striking.
Suppose you lived in a community where everyone contributed to public transit an amount equal to what they spend on their cars now. The amount spent by Americans on their cars is frankly astonishing. In 2004, cars were the second-largest expense for U.S. households, representing 17% of total expenditures. (That falls behind shelter - mortgage or rent - at 32%, and ahead of food, at 13%.) Car ownership runs to roughly $7000 per household per year. About half of that is the purchase cost, the remainder is fuel, insurance, maintenance, and assorted other goodies. Multiply that by (more than) a hundred million U.S. households and you're rapidly approaching a trillion dollars per year.
Right now, the United States (including governments at all levels) spends a total of between 50 and 60 billion dollars per year on mass transit infrastructure and operations. Funding for Amtrak has averaged around $2 billion per year the last decade or so.
If a quarter of spending on automobiles were diverted into public transit infrastructure and operations, it would quadruple the mass transit subsidy. (Note that that would still leave the United States ahead of European countries - many by a significant margin - in terms of fraction of household expenditures on car ownership.) Your bus stop probably wouldn't be a mile away any more. Your bus wouldn't take 45 minutes to get to the train station; it would run in a dedicated lane or on its own right-of-way, if it weren't replaced outright with light rail. It wouldn't have to stop for traffic lights, because signals would automatically clear the road ahead. The train station would probably be closer, anyway--and you'd probably be connected to an express or even high-speed line. There would be a unified fare system, so you could ride the entire system with one smart card. You can rent a car by the hour for those trips to IKEA.
Your forty-minute commute by car might, under ideal circumstances, be the same length, or even shorter. Or it might stretch out to forty-five or fifty minutes, during which time you can have a nap, read a book, catch up on the news, or connect to the onboard wifi. And the four or five grand per year you're saving turns into an annual two-week vacation in Switzerland, where you can see just how good public transit can get if it's funded properly.
The problem, of course, is that there's always a delay between when you start putting money into infrastructure and when it starts making a difference to a large number of people on the ground. And that interval between the investment and the return frightens the living daylights out of politicians. Even projects that will save their constituents money in the long term are a tough sell, because they're up against candidates who will promise to cut taxes now.
To be fair, if I had a child, I'd be more worried about them learning swear words. I don't see exposing them to obviously fictional death in the thousands as having much influence on their daily lives. Learning a few bad words, though, would be a great way to get a reaction from their parents.
You might want to look at those ratings again. Can you find any thirteen-year-old in America who hasn't already been exposed to the word "fuck"? Really? I can see why you wouldn't hand a G rating to The King's Speech, but insisting that teenagers need to be protected from profanity (in the context of a two-minute scene during a speech therapy session) until they're seventeen on the grounds that they might "[learn] a few bad words" isn't a credible position.
In real life the rating agencies are pretty damn helpful. You aren't thinking like a parent...
I suppose I'm not, if I'm a parent that believes naughty words are less obscene (and less harmful) than the graphic fetishization of violence and torture. Or perhaps I'm a parent that believes it's important to teach children than homosexuality (or even the idea that gay people are normal people like everyone else) is scary and obscene. You think that kids don't clue in to what is forbidden nearly as quickly as they see what is allowed?
The ratings systems are fine for me as a parent if I respond to exactly the same (far right-wing, hyper-Christian) morality cues as the MPAA. Otherwise, I'm teaching my children to be numb to violence, to feel dirty about healthy sexuality, to be titillated by the forbidden four-letter words, and to be fearful of homosexuals.
Bear in mind that relying on the "real ratings agenc[ies]" simply means substituting (and abdicating) one's parental responsibilities for one particular and frankly peculiar brand of moral hygeine.
In the United States, The King's Speech drew an R rating from the MPAA. (Apparently, they objected to the use of profanity - including the dreaded 'fuck' - even in the context of speech therapy.) No youth under the age of 17 is allowed to see the film in theaters without an accompanying adult parent or guardian. The same goes for Billy Elliot and Erin Brockovich.
The Lord of the Rings films, meanwhile, get a PG-13, despite impalements, beheadings, and the deaths of thousands. Casino Royale gets a PG-13, even with all its James Bond violence, and the sadistic clubbing of the protagonist's testicles while he's tied to a chair.
All moral issues must be absolutely black and white--any adult who lets a teenager have a glass of wine must be a drug-addled older sibling living a life of failure, a corrupt businessman (Mafia or inside trader about to be brought down), or a pedophile. Any reference to sexuality will be harshly punished, and the children absolutely must be protected from anything but stereotypical portrayals of asexual homosexuality. (Homosexual males are child-safe only if they are portrayed shopping, prancing, lisping, and looking fabulous--surrounded only by women.)
and also due the dynamics of capitalism, someone else fills in the void, in this case it's Mr. Yankelevitz.
Didn't bother to read the article, did you?
Mr. Yankelevitz didn't recognize a profitable niche market and use his small-business agility to step in where the big guys couldn't. He's selling these controllers for the cost of materials and giving away his time, skills, and experience for free. He's not making money and has no expectation of a return on the time and effort he's expended, ever. It would be impossible for him to make a living wage manufacturing these devices at his current price point.
If he were to factory-build the devices and pay employees to assemble them, he'd be charging at least five times as much. (That's from Yankelevitz, not my own hyperbole.) The market knows a price signal when it sees one, and demand would fall accordingly. In other words, fewer people could afford these devices. The invisible hand (ouch) has no sympathy for the handicapped. That would be "the dynamics of capitalism".
Capitalism is perfectly willing to leave voids unfilled; this is basic ECON 101 stuff. Since I'm assuming that you haven't still got your course notes, here's the Wikipedia article on price elasticity of demand.
Here is what is playig at the theater. Brides mainds, kung fu panda. x-men, etc. Not a high end theater like landmark or Dundance where the films require a little more attention.
That's right. Only people who are watching appropriately high-class, cultured, artistic works of cinema should expect to be able to watch a film without unnecessary distractions. Folks who are going to watch mass-market movies just to have a pleasant night out aren't interested in paying attention; of course they shouldn't expect to be able to see or hear what they're watching. Their low-brow entertainment preferences don't deserve any better.
Seriously? For someone who's bemoaning Austin (Austin? Texas? Really?) as a city of pseudo-chic poseurs, you're awfully stuck up. Sure, this could just be a publicity stunt--but I hold out some faint hope that there might actually exist theaters which care about the audience's experience, and expect a better level of conduct than we seem to settle for in most venues.
Successful dropouts are noteworthy because they are the exception.
No one reacts with surprise and astonishment when they hear about how someone with an advanced degree achieves financial, technical, or creative success. Why do you suppose that is?
...there is a world of difference between deliberately causing death, and allowing death by not treating...
Oh, legally, sure. Practically, however, it's a matter of dumb chance. Someone who wishes to die (and makes that as a clear, deliberated, rational, cool-headed choice) has to wait to 'luck in' to an incidental ailment that can be neglected to the point of lethality. The terminal cancer patient with pneumonia gets to choose whether or not to commit suicide by refusal of IV antibiotic treatment. An otherwise identical patient with terminal cancer but no pneumonia doesn't get that choice.
If you accept that there is the potential for abuse by coercing individuals into legal assisted suicide (were such an option available), you also have to accept that there is the potential for abuse involving coercion of individuals into accepting (potentially) therapeutic interventions that they don't actually want. For physicians, there is much more incentive to enroll terminally-ill patients in advanced clinical trials than there is to coerce them into suicide.
Are cell phones going to be the new tobacco, then?
No.
Duh.
If cell phones were anywhere near as bad as tobacco - or even anywhere near as bad as the doomsayers insist - then the extensive, large-scale, costly, long-term studies already conducted would have picked up a clear effect already.
Detecting the negative health effects of tobacco was some pretty low-hanging epidemiological fruit. Smokers die between ten and fifteen years younger than their non-smoking peers. Between one half and two thirds will die from a smoking-related illness. Their risk of lung cancer is elevated more than tenfold; about one in six smokers will be killed by it.
For cellular phones, the absolute worst-case scenario is a statistically-significant increase in the risk of certain rare cancers, affecting a minuscule portion of the population. The WHO's caution is based principally on a single study that found a 40% increase in glioma incidence among heavy cell phone users; the WHO report noted that while there is reason for suspicion, chance or coincidence couldn't be ruled out as a cause of the apparent effect.
The incidence of central nervous system tumors is something like 7 per 100,000 population per year; gliomas are about half of that total. If we assume that the full 40% increase in risk is real and accurate, then we're looking at something like 1 or 2 cases per 100,000 population per year. This isn't the next tobacco. This isn't tobacco's kid brother. This isn't even tobacco's fifth cousin's hamster. Heavy cell phone use is something like a thousand-fold less risky than lighting up.
You're more likely to be killed by a car (either as a pedestrian or as an occupant), or drowning, or accidental poisoning. You're appreciably more likely to be shot and killed (though slightly less likely to be stabbed to death). Statistically speaking, the average American is quite a bit more likely to deliberately kill himself rather than wait for his cell phone to do it for him.
The most likely way for cell phone use to kill or maim anyone isn't through radiation, but through distracted driving.
The USA doesn't grow most of the world's food. Farms in other countries will still use antibiotics irrespective of what the FDA does. The superbugs being developed elsewhere will eventually migrate to every other country. If we are to retain the ability to use the antibiotics we have today, action needs to be taken globally. Not sure how to enforce that, but that's what would have to happen.
On the other hand, saying "We won't do anything unless everyone else does it first" is pretty much a recipe for failure. Moreover, it isn't necessarily required for this to work.
Heavily restrict the import of livestock and meat products from countries which don't restrict the use of antibiotics appropriately. Insist on lengthy quarantine periods and thorough testing for imported livestock. These first two points will probably be popular because they appeal to the American instinct for protectionism anyway. Aggressively screen and quarantine any domestic animals/herds which are suspected of harboring antibiotic resistant bacterial strains.
You don't need to get rid of every single resistant bacterium to see public health benefits. In the absence of regular exposure to antibiotics, the 'superbugs' have no competitive advantage over other bacteria (indeed, maintaining their antibiotic resistance when they don't need it probably costs them just a little bit) and there will just naturally be fewer of them in the domestic food supply. It's not perfect, but it's better than doing nothing. And sometimes it's good to set a constructive example.
You know, if a country thought it would be worthwhile to have some new antibiotics, it could just form its own socialized pharmaceutical company and support it. Yet they don't.
Yes, as I'm sure that there wouldn't be any lobbying or brutal lawsuits if the government of an industrialized nation so much as hinted at creating companies which might somehow compete with a massively-profitable private industry.
I mean, as Slashdot readers we've obviously never seen any similar problems. It's not like U.S. cable companies have fought tooth and nail to prevent rural municipalities providing broadband service where those private companies have failed to do so.... Oh.
Airbus is run by software. Boeing by pilots. I don't trust either, but I trust the software less
Not only is your statement a grotesque and erroneous oversimplification that betrays your appalling ignorance of these matters on any number of levels, your post isn't even relevant to this discussion, because this particular Airbus was under the pilot's direct control when it crashed.
If, as seems likely, the aircraft's airspeed sensors began to fail due to pitot tube icing, the autopilot and autothrust would disengage, and the confusing sensor outputs would have kicked the aircraft over into one of the alternate control law modes. (Based on the cockpit chatter and sensor logs described in the report, this is exactly what did occur.) Among other things, the alternate control laws would give the pilot significant latitude to take actions - even actions that seemed 'wrong' - because the onboard computer was aware that its sensor inputs were compromised.
Perhaps they should have tried an actual normal bag?
They did. The jar was wrapped in bubble wrap, which was then zipped inside a small backpack/tote bag. While I'm sure that the producers were hoping for a bag of broken jar and loose M&Ms about which they could snark at the end of the segment, there wasn't anything freakishly bizarre about the bag that they tried to check.
The one thing that was a bit unusual was the size of the bag--it was quite a bit smaller than most checked bags or backpacks would be; certainly much smaller than the carry-on limits for any airline. I can see a parcel that size being checked only if the passenger had multiple carry-on-sized items and the airline was being particularly sticky about their carry-on bag count. Since the automated checking system incorporates sensors for bag weight and laser scanners to detect bag size, it may be that this particular item fell below the check-in system's minimum size thresholds. It couldn't tell the difference between this small bag and an empty bin, so sent the passenger to the regular, manual check-in rather than risking checking in an RFID tag without its attached luggage.
A generation of developers maybe, but not all information is lost I'm sure. With accumulated knowledge, now there exist proper UI design guidelines for most platforms. 17 years ago not, as it really all had to be invented.
17 years ago, the original Macintosh was still ten years old. Xerox and others had been experimenting with GUIs and hyperlink-driven interfaces for years before that. And yet, somehow, the computing world of 1994 still turned out enormous amounts of utter crap when faced with a slightly different environment.
The problem wasn't that there was a new environment. It was that the programmers and designers of 1994 decided to forget everything that they'd learned about interface design over the preceding decades, because the old rules didn't have to apply to new technology, and it was more fun to be wild and crazy and different. Except that the old rules often existed for a reason, and they (or at least their underlying rationales, which is sometimes a more difficult intellectual leap) often could and should have been adapted to the new environment.
Gestural interfaces today are often broken not because Gestures are a New Technology and we must accept that it naturally takes decades for software companies to figure these things out. Gestures are broken because by and large software companies are too cheap and lazy to sensibly and rigorously test for what works and what doesn't, and to adapt their approach to what does work; and they're too fractious to ever get together to agree on anything; and sometimes they deliberately try to be mutually incompatible for murky short-term competitive gains. Programmers, meanwhile, often prefer what's cool-looking to what's actually quick and useful, and by and large they don't want to do 'boring stuff' like intelligent interface design.
Lol, I have to get used to the concept of staying in a single location on a trip;) When we travel, we always move every night.
There are definitely arguments for both methods of travel. Oftentimes I'll split the difference and stay two or three nights in each location just so I don't have to worry about packing and unpacking, and checking in and out on time, and finding a hostel, and carrying my bag, every day. Short stays are particularly useful when I'm visiting a country or region for the first time and I want to get my bearings and catch the highlights. We've been to Iceland before, so we're now doing some 'in-depth' exploration.
Come back in August? So are you going before then? Because we'll be there in mid-late July.
Ah, I should have been more clear -- our next visit is late September this year; I was just anticipating a summer visit in some future year. We've actually never been during the summer 'high' season. (Visiting during the late spring and early fall 'shoulder' seasons has saved us a small fortune in car rental and accommodation fees, and we've been remarkably lucky with the weather so far.)
Slashdot Mirror
Those people who distract themselves with gadgets and get into accidents are probably the bad drivers who would have managed to get into accidents anyway.
I've found that a pretty good way to identify the "bad drivers" is by looking to see which ones are fiddling with their cell phones, Blackberries, or GPS receivers.
The drivers who use these devices but think they are driving well are generally just sufficiently distracted not to notice all the errors that they're making. I don't think anyone gets into their car in the morning and says "I'm going to do something dangerous today that might kill myself or others", and yet we still have thousands of people dying in car accidents.
This Slashdot discussion is an excellent study in seeing how people resolve cognitive dissonance. Everyone likes to see themselves as a good driver. Using a cell phone is a serious distraction. The logical conclusion is that people who use cell phones while driving are not good drivers. The dissonance is resolved by carving out personal exceptions ("Sure, some people can't handle the phone, but I'm a really good driver") or dismissing the evidence ("I'm sure the study is flawed, because the people who got into the accidents were bad drivers anyway").
Although a loss for science, this would seem to be more accurately blamed on poor management and budgeting. Perhaps a smaller, better managed project will rise from the ashes.
This isn't exactly a surprise. The only way NASA can get funding is to promise the moon (usually figuratively, though occasionally literally) on an implausible shoestring budget, and then hope that the real costs later on don't cause management to scupper an already-in-progress high-profile project. This is a pretty common strategy in government funded technology and research projects, and it's something that's as old as NASA.
The Mercury program came in at roughly double its original estimated price.
The Air Force anticipated in 1958 that a lunar program would cost $1.5 billion and be complete by the end of 1965. In 1961, NASA's experts said they could do the job by 1967, at a cost of $7 billion. By the time Neil Armstrong took his one small step, it was 1969, and the program had rung up a price tag of about $25 billion (in 1960s dollars).
Looking at the last space telescope project, the Hubble was originally budgeted at $400 million. It cost $2.5 billion by launch time, and total program costs to date run to between $4.5 and $6 billion.
This problem isn't unique to NASA. Technology development programs in the military offer some particularly good examples. Lockheed completed their contract for the F-22 Raptor more than two years and ten billion dollars behind schedule--but they still received more than $800 million in performance awards for their work.
Looks like approximately 5% hair, 95% "plant based bioresin". The artists statement neglects to compare its energy cost to manufacture versus metal or plastic frames.
Quite. How much fuel was used by the farmers who harvested the 'plant-based bioresin', and how many liters of industrial solvents were used in its manufacture?
Let's be honest here--an entire pair of glasses, even with evil petroleum-product-based plastic lenses, is going to tip the scales at maybe a 100 grams (less than a quarter of a pound). That's how much oil is actually in the glasses themselves. Saving a few ounces of petroleum every couple of years is an utterly negligible savings.
While these frames may make a novel fashion statement, there are smarter ways to try to cut consumption of oil.
According to Google, UK£ 4 = $6.42800 which is still at least double what an HDMI cable goes for on Monoprice (depending on length that they are selling)
Not when you add in shipping cost. It may exceed the price of the cable for shipping to North American addresses, and runs close to $30 for delivery to the UK. It's not a major issue for multiple items shipped to the U.S. or Canada, but still--you should be comparing the actual prices paid to get a cable. (There's probably a comparable UK online retailer with lower shipping costs, though....)
Besides, it should be a no-brainer by now that maintaining a bricks and mortar retail presence does add at least a small premium to prices. On the retailer's side, they need to pay for space somewhere that customers can actually get to, they need to have full-time sales staff, and they need to deal with shoplifters. On the customer's side, they get to actually see and handle the products before they buy them, and (during store hours) they can have the product right now. (They may also be able to talk to the sales staff, which can be a mixed blessing depending on the ethics and competence of a given retailer's crew.) There's no shipping charges, and returns or exchanges can be done face to face with a live person.
That said - and as other posters have noted - the purchasing power of GBP in the UK is not what would be expected from the nominal GBP-USD exchange rate. With few exceptions (pints of beer, thank god, among them) prices for goods in the UK are roughly the same numbers as for the corresponding items in the US. (A two-dollar coffee in New York is going to sell for two pounds in London.) On the bright side, a similar phenomenon happens with wages as well. It can be quite lucrative to work in the UK and vacation/retire somewhere else.
Higher taxes?
Installation costs will be significantly higher than for a simple four-way stop or lighted intersection; they require more land and a larger paved area. In principle, the larger paved area will also have higher ongoing maintenance costs.
On the other hand, this is offset somewhat by the potential for reduced maintenance costs. The larger area may require more streetlighting for night safety and greater costs due to maintenance of more pavement, however there will be no ongoing cost of traffic light maintenance. At properly-designed roundabouts, heavy vehicles will spend less time stopped, sharply reducing the costly-to-repair 'wheel trough' indentations observed in front of many traffic lights.
On a personal level, drivers will spend less time getting to and passing through the roundabout than they would at a conventional intersection. They will enjoy measurable fuel savings from reduced driving time and (more important) a reduction in fuel-costly stops and starts.
The fact is, it's harder to get a driver's license in a lot of other countries. The standards and expectations are higher. In the U.S., I exaggerate only very slightly to suggest that a driver's license (and even automobile ownership) are seen as a fundamental human right, rather than a privilege. Most places, public transit is something that poor people use until they work hard enough to live the American dream (with accompanying house in the 'burbs and two-car garage).
Many other driving nations impose stricter conditions on new drivers, graduated licensing schemes (which require the passages of time and/or tests before new drivers are allowed greater driving privileges--the use of high-speed highways, driving late at night, driving without another experienced driver, etc. may all be prohibited to new drivers), older minimum driving ages, and more complex driving tests than the United States.
Despite its abundant roundabouts, the UK enjoys a non-motorway death rate about 15% below that of the U.S. (Their motorway death rate is more than 60% less, but that's pretty much irrelevant to the roundabout issue.) Better public transit also means that people who can't or shouldn't be driving are less tempted to do so.
I'm one of those evil Vine reviewers.
If that's what you got from reading my comment, you're not reading my comment.
Reflexive tendencies towards self-defence notwithstanding (and I do wonder what sort of soft spot I've touched), I'm sure that most Vine reviewers don't feel that they're being manipulated or biased by the gifts they receive. The vast majority, I'm sure, certainly aren't deliberately slanting their reviews in hopes of acquiring more free stuff.
On the other hand, when asked, the doctors receiving the free pens, and stuffed toys, and dinners, and other pharmaceutical company perks will also emphatically tell you that the company gifts have no effect on their prescribing habits. They would be aghast at the very suggestion that their judgement might be ever-so-slightly twisted by tiny trinkets. And yet...pharmaceutical companies don't spend their marketing budget frivolously. They invest where they expect to get a return.
The doctors receiving these freebies fall into two camps. The naive think that virtually all doctors are above such influences; there might be one or two bad apples, but the profession's integrity is too great to be compromised. The self-deceived acknowledge that other doctors may be influenced to one degree or another, but know that their own judgement is superior to the average, and that they are not swayed.
In the same way that every driver thinks they're above average - safer and smoother than those other idiots on the road - most every doctor thinks they are above influence by trinkets, and every Vine reviewer carves out a personal assumption of superior judgement. They're not bad people, they're just ignorant (wilfully or otherwise) of basic human psychology, and trying to reduce the cognitive dissonance. ("Good people don't take bribes" but "I like to get free stuff". Therefore, "It's okay to take the free stuff and I'm not a bad person as long as I persuade myself that I'm not being influenced.")
And for the record, I'm quite happy to give a scathing review to a product that I didn't pay for...
And the doctors don't prescribe the new acid reflux drug when their patient comes in with a wrist fracture. A free pen with a logo doesn't mean that every patient gets the shiny new drug, it's just to bias the physician's selection. In the case of Vine reviews, it also means that - no matter what you tell yourself - your assessment of 'value for money' is going to be off, because deep down inside, you know you didn't put your own money down.
Really? Do you think they're biased because they got a free $2 pack of erasers to review?
Yes.
If free stuff didn't result in better reviews, businesses wouldn't be giving away free stuff to reviewers.
Medical doctors are highly paid, non-anonymous, well-educated, and government-licensed, but their prescribing habits are still influenced by pharmaceutical company reps giving out logo-covered pens. If an elite group of highly-trained, thoroughly-tested individuals making life-or-death decisions can be influenced by crappy gifts, do you really think some anonymous, unpaid, unregulated, and unsupervised reviewer is going to be more resistant to that sort of influence?
And getting rid of the penny will have some negative global effects on the value of the dollar. They market may very well see it as a devaluation. If it does, you're boned, and there is no way to know ahead of time.
Fortunately, the market is usually smarter than a Slashdot poster. The rest of us have already realized that pennies are worthless wastes of time. A penny is what someone earning minimum wage collects for about four seconds work.
The smallest Australian dollar (worth about the same as a Canadian or U.S. dollar) denomination is 5 cents; their 1 and 2 cent pieces were discontinued in 1991--without destroying their currency.
While the euro includes 1 and 2 cent coins, Finland and the Netherlands officially discourage their use; retailers in many other Eurozone countries informally discourage the use of these least-useful denominations.
The Swiss franc (again, comparable in value) is divided into 100 rappen. The 1 rappen piece was legal tender until 2007, but avoided as much as possible for decades before. In general, when one considers countries which don't understand banking, Switzerland tends not to appear high on the list.
If I drive, I'm at work in in 17-20 minutes depending on traffic, but if I use public transport, it's one hour if everything is perfectly on time.
I can't dispute that even under the best of circumstances, there will be trips that are inefficient or circuitous by mass transit. In densely urbanized centers these 'difficult' trips can be minimized (or nearly eliminated) by grid-layout bus systems coupled to light rail and subway backbones, but not every urban area has the population density to support that level of infrastructure, nor the geography (and absence of geographic and architectural obstacles) to permit it. There will also be populations (particularly in rural areas) which are difficult or prohibitively costly to serve. The car (or some other means of individual, independent transport) will almost certainly always be a practical necessity for some fraction of people.
That said, when you chose to live where you do, did you make access to transit a high personal priority? Or did you choose a place that had ample parking and easy access to the highway? On the flip side, it's almost certain that your employer didn't consider access to public transit an important issue when siting their offices. (In the United States, there is almost universally an assumption of car ownership, and access to transit is an afterthought. In all but the largest cities, public transit is for poor people; a sop for the lowest classes who can't (yet) afford a car.)
Regarding your other comment about the disruption caused by a transit strike, it is possible to declare transit workers an essential service and eliminate their right to strike. Contract disputes are settled through a binding arbitration process, rather than through strikes (or lockouts). Yes, this generally results in slightly higher personnel costs, but it eliminates the massive economic dislocations that can be caused by the temporary loss of mass transit. Other classes of public workers (particularly police officers, firefighters, and ambulance crews) are often declared essential and subject to similar provisions. A number of jurisdictions (including the city of New York) already bar transit workers from striking.
Right now, the United States (including governments at all levels) spends a total of between 50 and 60 billion dollars per year on mass transit infrastructure and operations. Funding for Amtrak has averaged around $2 billion per year the last decade or so.
If a quarter of spending on automobiles were diverted into public transit infrastructure and operations, it would quadruple the mass transit subsidy. (Note that that would still leave the United States ahead of European countries - many by a significant margin - in terms of fraction of household expenditures on car ownership.) Your bus stop probably wouldn't be a mile away any more. Your bus wouldn't take 45 minutes to get to the train station; it would run in a dedicated lane or on its own right-of-way, if it weren't replaced outright with light rail. It wouldn't have to stop for traffic lights, because signals would automatically clear the road ahead. The train station would probably be closer, anyway--and you'd probably be connected to an express or even high-speed line. There would be a unified fare system, so you could ride the entire system with one smart card. You can rent a car by the hour for those trips to IKEA.
Your forty-minute commute by car might, under ideal circumstances, be the same length, or even shorter. Or it might stretch out to forty-five or fifty minutes, during which time you can have a nap, read a book, catch up on the news, or connect to the onboard wifi. And the four or five grand per year you're saving turns into an annual two-week vacation in Switzerland, where you can see just how good public transit can get if it's funded properly.
The problem, of course, is that there's always a delay between when you start putting money into infrastructure and when it starts making a difference to a large number of people on the ground. And that interval between the investment and the return frightens the living daylights out of politicians. Even projects that will save their constituents money in the long term are a tough sell, because they're up against candidates who will promise to cut taxes now.
To be fair, if I had a child, I'd be more worried about them learning swear words. I don't see exposing them to obviously fictional death in the thousands as having much influence on their daily lives. Learning a few bad words, though, would be a great way to get a reaction from their parents.
You might want to look at those ratings again. Can you find any thirteen-year-old in America who hasn't already been exposed to the word "fuck"? Really? I can see why you wouldn't hand a G rating to The King's Speech, but insisting that teenagers need to be protected from profanity (in the context of a two-minute scene during a speech therapy session) until they're seventeen on the grounds that they might "[learn] a few bad words" isn't a credible position.
In real life the rating agencies are pretty damn helpful. You aren't thinking like a parent...
I suppose I'm not, if I'm a parent that believes naughty words are less obscene (and less harmful) than the graphic fetishization of violence and torture. Or perhaps I'm a parent that believes it's important to teach children than homosexuality (or even the idea that gay people are normal people like everyone else) is scary and obscene. You think that kids don't clue in to what is forbidden nearly as quickly as they see what is allowed?
The ratings systems are fine for me as a parent if I respond to exactly the same (far right-wing, hyper-Christian) morality cues as the MPAA. Otherwise, I'm teaching my children to be numb to violence, to feel dirty about healthy sexuality, to be titillated by the forbidden four-letter words, and to be fearful of homosexuals.
In the United States, The King's Speech drew an R rating from the MPAA. (Apparently, they objected to the use of profanity - including the dreaded 'fuck' - even in the context of speech therapy.) No youth under the age of 17 is allowed to see the film in theaters without an accompanying adult parent or guardian. The same goes for Billy Elliot and Erin Brockovich.
The Lord of the Rings films, meanwhile, get a PG-13, despite impalements, beheadings, and the deaths of thousands. Casino Royale gets a PG-13, even with all its James Bond violence, and the sadistic clubbing of the protagonist's testicles while he's tied to a chair.
All moral issues must be absolutely black and white--any adult who lets a teenager have a glass of wine must be a drug-addled older sibling living a life of failure, a corrupt businessman (Mafia or inside trader about to be brought down), or a pedophile. Any reference to sexuality will be harshly punished, and the children absolutely must be protected from anything but stereotypical portrayals of asexual homosexuality. (Homosexual males are child-safe only if they are portrayed shopping, prancing, lisping, and looking fabulous--surrounded only by women.)
That's no world in which to raise a child.
and also due the dynamics of capitalism, someone else fills in the void, in this case it's Mr. Yankelevitz.
Didn't bother to read the article, did you?
Mr. Yankelevitz didn't recognize a profitable niche market and use his small-business agility to step in where the big guys couldn't. He's selling these controllers for the cost of materials and giving away his time, skills, and experience for free. He's not making money and has no expectation of a return on the time and effort he's expended, ever. It would be impossible for him to make a living wage manufacturing these devices at his current price point.
If he were to factory-build the devices and pay employees to assemble them, he'd be charging at least five times as much. (That's from Yankelevitz, not my own hyperbole.) The market knows a price signal when it sees one, and demand would fall accordingly. In other words, fewer people could afford these devices. The invisible hand (ouch) has no sympathy for the handicapped. That would be "the dynamics of capitalism".
Capitalism is perfectly willing to leave voids unfilled; this is basic ECON 101 stuff. Since I'm assuming that you haven't still got your course notes, here's the Wikipedia article on price elasticity of demand.
Here is what is playig at the theater. Brides mainds, kung fu panda. x-men, etc. Not a high end theater like landmark or Dundance where the films require a little more attention.
That's right. Only people who are watching appropriately high-class, cultured, artistic works of cinema should expect to be able to watch a film without unnecessary distractions. Folks who are going to watch mass-market movies just to have a pleasant night out aren't interested in paying attention; of course they shouldn't expect to be able to see or hear what they're watching. Their low-brow entertainment preferences don't deserve any better.
Seriously? For someone who's bemoaning Austin (Austin? Texas? Really?) as a city of pseudo-chic poseurs, you're awfully stuck up. Sure, this could just be a publicity stunt--but I hold out some faint hope that there might actually exist theaters which care about the audience's experience, and expect a better level of conduct than we seem to settle for in most venues.
Successful dropouts are noteworthy because they are the exception.
No one reacts with surprise and astonishment when they hear about how someone with an advanced degree achieves financial, technical, or creative success. Why do you suppose that is?
...there is a world of difference between deliberately causing death, and allowing death by not treating...
Oh, legally, sure. Practically, however, it's a matter of dumb chance. Someone who wishes to die (and makes that as a clear, deliberated, rational, cool-headed choice) has to wait to 'luck in' to an incidental ailment that can be neglected to the point of lethality. The terminal cancer patient with pneumonia gets to choose whether or not to commit suicide by refusal of IV antibiotic treatment. An otherwise identical patient with terminal cancer but no pneumonia doesn't get that choice.
If you accept that there is the potential for abuse by coercing individuals into legal assisted suicide (were such an option available), you also have to accept that there is the potential for abuse involving coercion of individuals into accepting (potentially) therapeutic interventions that they don't actually want. For physicians, there is much more incentive to enroll terminally-ill patients in advanced clinical trials than there is to coerce them into suicide.
Are cell phones going to be the new tobacco, then?
No.
Duh.
If cell phones were anywhere near as bad as tobacco - or even anywhere near as bad as the doomsayers insist - then the extensive, large-scale, costly, long-term studies already conducted would have picked up a clear effect already.
Detecting the negative health effects of tobacco was some pretty low-hanging epidemiological fruit. Smokers die between ten and fifteen years younger than their non-smoking peers. Between one half and two thirds will die from a smoking-related illness. Their risk of lung cancer is elevated more than tenfold; about one in six smokers will be killed by it.
For cellular phones, the absolute worst-case scenario is a statistically-significant increase in the risk of certain rare cancers, affecting a minuscule portion of the population. The WHO's caution is based principally on a single study that found a 40% increase in glioma incidence among heavy cell phone users; the WHO report noted that while there is reason for suspicion, chance or coincidence couldn't be ruled out as a cause of the apparent effect.
The incidence of central nervous system tumors is something like 7 per 100,000 population per year; gliomas are about half of that total. If we assume that the full 40% increase in risk is real and accurate, then we're looking at something like 1 or 2 cases per 100,000 population per year. This isn't the next tobacco. This isn't tobacco's kid brother. This isn't even tobacco's fifth cousin's hamster. Heavy cell phone use is something like a thousand-fold less risky than lighting up.
You're more likely to be killed by a car (either as a pedestrian or as an occupant), or drowning, or accidental poisoning. You're appreciably more likely to be shot and killed (though slightly less likely to be stabbed to death). Statistically speaking, the average American is quite a bit more likely to deliberately kill himself rather than wait for his cell phone to do it for him.
The most likely way for cell phone use to kill or maim anyone isn't through radiation, but through distracted driving.
The USA doesn't grow most of the world's food. Farms in other countries will still use antibiotics irrespective of what the FDA does. The superbugs being developed elsewhere will eventually migrate to every other country. If we are to retain the ability to use the antibiotics we have today, action needs to be taken globally. Not sure how to enforce that, but that's what would have to happen.
On the other hand, saying "We won't do anything unless everyone else does it first" is pretty much a recipe for failure. Moreover, it isn't necessarily required for this to work.
Heavily restrict the import of livestock and meat products from countries which don't restrict the use of antibiotics appropriately. Insist on lengthy quarantine periods and thorough testing for imported livestock. These first two points will probably be popular because they appeal to the American instinct for protectionism anyway. Aggressively screen and quarantine any domestic animals/herds which are suspected of harboring antibiotic resistant bacterial strains.
You don't need to get rid of every single resistant bacterium to see public health benefits. In the absence of regular exposure to antibiotics, the 'superbugs' have no competitive advantage over other bacteria (indeed, maintaining their antibiotic resistance when they don't need it probably costs them just a little bit) and there will just naturally be fewer of them in the domestic food supply. It's not perfect, but it's better than doing nothing. And sometimes it's good to set a constructive example.
You know, if a country thought it would be worthwhile to have some new antibiotics, it could just form its own socialized pharmaceutical company and support it. Yet they don't.
Yes, as I'm sure that there wouldn't be any lobbying or brutal lawsuits if the government of an industrialized nation so much as hinted at creating companies which might somehow compete with a massively-profitable private industry.
I mean, as Slashdot readers we've obviously never seen any similar problems. It's not like U.S. cable companies have fought tooth and nail to prevent rural municipalities providing broadband service where those private companies have failed to do so.... Oh.
Airbus is run by software. Boeing by pilots. I don't trust either, but I trust the software less
Not only is your statement a grotesque and erroneous oversimplification that betrays your appalling ignorance of these matters on any number of levels, your post isn't even relevant to this discussion, because this particular Airbus was under the pilot's direct control when it crashed.
If, as seems likely, the aircraft's airspeed sensors began to fail due to pitot tube icing, the autopilot and autothrust would disengage, and the confusing sensor outputs would have kicked the aircraft over into one of the alternate control law modes. (Based on the cockpit chatter and sensor logs described in the report, this is exactly what did occur.) Among other things, the alternate control laws would give the pilot significant latitude to take actions - even actions that seemed 'wrong' - because the onboard computer was aware that its sensor inputs were compromised.
Perhaps they should have tried an actual normal bag?
They did. The jar was wrapped in bubble wrap, which was then zipped inside a small backpack/tote bag. While I'm sure that the producers were hoping for a bag of broken jar and loose M&Ms about which they could snark at the end of the segment, there wasn't anything freakishly bizarre about the bag that they tried to check.
The one thing that was a bit unusual was the size of the bag--it was quite a bit smaller than most checked bags or backpacks would be; certainly much smaller than the carry-on limits for any airline. I can see a parcel that size being checked only if the passenger had multiple carry-on-sized items and the airline was being particularly sticky about their carry-on bag count. Since the automated checking system incorporates sensors for bag weight and laser scanners to detect bag size, it may be that this particular item fell below the check-in system's minimum size thresholds. It couldn't tell the difference between this small bag and an empty bin, so sent the passenger to the regular, manual check-in rather than risking checking in an RFID tag without its attached luggage.
A generation of developers maybe, but not all information is lost I'm sure. With accumulated knowledge, now there exist proper UI design guidelines for most platforms. 17 years ago not, as it really all had to be invented.
17 years ago, the original Macintosh was still ten years old. Xerox and others had been experimenting with GUIs and hyperlink-driven interfaces for years before that. And yet, somehow, the computing world of 1994 still turned out enormous amounts of utter crap when faced with a slightly different environment.
The problem wasn't that there was a new environment. It was that the programmers and designers of 1994 decided to forget everything that they'd learned about interface design over the preceding decades, because the old rules didn't have to apply to new technology, and it was more fun to be wild and crazy and different. Except that the old rules often existed for a reason, and they (or at least their underlying rationales, which is sometimes a more difficult intellectual leap) often could and should have been adapted to the new environment.
Gestural interfaces today are often broken not because Gestures are a New Technology and we must accept that it naturally takes decades for software companies to figure these things out. Gestures are broken because by and large software companies are too cheap and lazy to sensibly and rigorously test for what works and what doesn't, and to adapt their approach to what does work; and they're too fractious to ever get together to agree on anything; and sometimes they deliberately try to be mutually incompatible for murky short-term competitive gains. Programmers, meanwhile, often prefer what's cool-looking to what's actually quick and useful, and by and large they don't want to do 'boring stuff' like intelligent interface design.
Lol, I have to get used to the concept of staying in a single location on a trip ;) When we travel, we always move every night.
There are definitely arguments for both methods of travel. Oftentimes I'll split the difference and stay two or three nights in each location just so I don't have to worry about packing and unpacking, and checking in and out on time, and finding a hostel, and carrying my bag, every day. Short stays are particularly useful when I'm visiting a country or region for the first time and I want to get my bearings and catch the highlights. We've been to Iceland before, so we're now doing some 'in-depth' exploration.
Come back in August? So are you going before then? Because we'll be there in mid-late July.
Ah, I should have been more clear -- our next visit is late September this year; I was just anticipating a summer visit in some future year. We've actually never been during the summer 'high' season. (Visiting during the late spring and early fall 'shoulder' seasons has saved us a small fortune in car rental and accommodation fees, and we've been remarkably lucky with the weather so far.)