It'd be awesome not to need a DD (or risk a DUI) to go to the bar in the many US cities with no or inadequate public transit...
If only it were somehow possible to hire another human being to drive a car for you.
Better yet, perhaps these "drivers for rent" could maintain the vehicles themselves, thereby saving you the cost and inconvenience of owning, repairing, and insuring your own car. In order to keep their rates reasonable, you wouldn't have to hire one of these individuals full-time -- there would be some sort of central dispatching organization that would send you a car in response to a telephone call; each driver would service dozens or hundreds of people. (Perhaps these vehicles could also be painted distinctive colors, so that you could flag an unoccupied one down when you were out on the street.) This service-on-demand model would also obviate the need to find or pay for parking. Some sort of fee could be paid based on time or distance driven.
I think that my scheme could be a useful stopgap measure until autonomous driving technology matures, and hope that it will someday be adopted.
So, to anyone who says that classrooms haven't changed in 100 years, I say to them this: has the human brain changed in the last 100 years? What's different about the way the brain learns now as opposed to 100 years ago?
"So, to anyone who says that hospitals haven't changed in 100 years, I say to them this: has the human body changed in the last 100 years? What's different about the way your organs work now as opposed to 100 years ago?"
While I agree with you that we shouldn't be engaging in change for the sake of change, nor should we be trying to make our schools look like Apple stores to suit some film producer's notion of what the 'future of education' should be, I have to say that your questions gave me pause. Your rhetorical questions presume that the knowledge about how to educate had reached its pinnacle at some point at least a century ago, and that there was nothing else we needed or could learn about how to teach. They presume that changes in the world outside the classroom don't affect what or how we should teach. In the context of your other comments, they presume that where new technologies have been added to the classroom, those technologies have failed despite being used in the best possible ways.
If we had really settled on the best way to educate our children a hundred years ago, we would be giving the same answers to the following questions now that we did then:
Should primary education be compulsory?
How many years of schooling should be required for a diploma? At what age is it permissible to drop out and join the workforce, in lieu of further classroom education?
Should schools and classrooms be segregated according to age, gender, and/or race?
Should we teach students to read using a phonics-based or whole-language approach? What 'counts' as a functional level of literacy? Is it important to learn a fine Spencerian hand?
Should students interact with one another in the classroom, or sit silently and learn material by rote?
Should we make provisions for specially educating students who are significantly above or below the average level of intelligence? If so, should those students be integrated into regular classrooms, or segregated from other students?
Should we be providing 'charter' or 'magnet' schools that cater to particular interests of students or their parents?
At what age and in what areas should we begin to allow students to 'customize' their learning? How many courses in math, in science, in English, in music should be compulsory? When should teachers be required to have special skills and training for a subject area, and how many different teachers do students need to see in a day?
What is the optimal size for a school? The minimum acceptable? The maximum?
Kids have the same brains that they did a century past, but our understanding of what goes on inside those heads has changed markedly in that time -- and, to be honest, still remains incomplete.
If you're not going to read or respond to the points I have to made, do you really think that it's a constructive use of anyone's time for you to just rant about how much you hate government?
Instaed of considering some of the reasons I gave for why it wouldn't be appropriate for a well-managed business to do on-the-spot, on-demand work, you've decided that - in the absence of evidence - you prefer incompetence as your explanation. That's fine for you, but it's not rational.
They clearly weren't running it like a business. If they were, they would have accepted a higher fee to put out the fire, which still would have made them a profit. As usual, people are straining to blame libertarianism when the opposite is true. This is clearly a failure of government.
They were operating like a business that preferred to sell service contracts and deliver their services on that basis. They did not, at that time, wish to offer a fee-for-service model, and their front-line servicepeople weren't empowered to change company policy and invent new products on a whim.
Given the peculiarities of their particular line of business, I can even see why. Is the sales team ready to negotiate a contract in a couple of minutes, so that a timely response to a fire can still occur? Can the accounts department, in the middle of the night, actualy run a credit check or confirm that the home's resident has clear title to the property, so that the fire department would be able to place a lien in the event of nonpayment? Will courts be comfortable with enforcing the terms of a contract which was signed while one of the parties was watching his house burn, and which he wouldn't have time to read?
Businesses are free to choose the manner in which they offer their services. Moreover, there is nothing that prevents another entity from establishing a competing fire service aimed at people who can't be bothered to pay in advance for a service contract. (The fact that no service has appeared to fill this particular niche suggests that a) the market isn't very big and may not be worth servicing, and/or b) the people who lack the common sense or financial ability to buy fire insurance, and who may have just lost a substantial fraction of their physical assets in a serious fire, may not be a good group to whom to sell big-ticket services.)
Dow Corning won't sell me two ounces of silly putty; they only do hundred pound lots. If I want a smaller quantity, then I have to go through a different supplier. Since Dow isn't willing to sell me their product in the manner I choose, does that mean that Dow isn't being run like a business?
No, the real problem is with having a voluntary fee for a collective, necessary service. Don't blame the firefighters. Blame the government that set up a no-win situation.
Missed it by one.
Blame the people who kept electing county officials who promised lower taxes. Blame the people who couldn't see that putting an annual $75 charge on everyone's property tax bill would have provided coverage for all the rural properties. Blame the people who didn't clue in that they could probably negotiate a significant group discount if they paid for universal coverage (both because more people would be buying the service, and because the fire department wouldn't have to manage a parallel bill collection scheme). This sort of failure of private firefighting isn't exactly rare; why does the media portray it as surprising and shocking every time it happens again?
It's not some nebulous 'government' bogeyman who screwed up here; governments don't appear out of a vacuum. Entirely to blame are the selfish and shortsighted people who live in the county in question.
Actually, the obvious (and cheaper) solution is simply to make sure the front of the train is fairly sturdy and won't get dented by morons walking along the track looking for their Darwin award.
While this is a real design consideration, and modern high-speed trainsets incorporate deformable sections ('crumple zones', in automotive parlance) to absorb the shocks of a high-speed collision, it's still preferable to avoid impacts altogether. Even if the train isn't damaged by a collision, it's still delayed -- the line gets closed for hours while there's a police investigation, nobody can use the tracks, the passengers get grumpy....
And hitting a live person is hell for the train drivers. Post-traumatic stress disorder is not uncommon among the drivers of trains that hit people, even if they were not at fault in the collision.
You seem to have completely failed to understand the argument that I presented, since you seem to think I'm opposed to making both DUI and texting while driving illegal.
The grandparent post suggested that texting while driving should be fully legal, but associated with greater punishments after the accident occurs. In that way, some hypothetical group of 'good' drivers would be able to still play with their toys, while the 'bad' drivers would know not to take the extra risk.
This would work well if people actually were capable of neutrally and accurately assessing their own competence behind the wheel (and the effect of texting on that competence). Most would recognize that they are neither particularly superb drivers, nor magically protected from accidents while they were temporarily distracted. Sadly, this is not the case, and it usually takes a collision (or a close call) for a driver to become aware that texting impairs their abilities -- if they realize it even then.
I'm pretty sure that you meant to aim your vitriol at the poster above me, who was making the argument. I'm pretty sure he's the same guy who figures it's okay for him to get loaded at the bar and then drive himself home; he's a 'good' driver, and it must be 'safe' because he hasn't hit anyone yet.
Yeah, let's mock them for that until they start omitting the "according to so-and-so" qualifications, and then we can mock them for pretending to be in a position to make definitive claims about topics they don't understand.
My major concern would be with the reporters who are so clearly scientifically illiterate or utterly innumerate that they rely solely on quote-mining to support even the most inane statements of fact. There are writers who are so fearful of basic science and mathematics that they publish statements like this:
"Thirty-five per cent means for every 20 people, seven are successful," said Paul McNicholas, an associate professor at the University of Guelph’s department of mathematics and statistics. "That's an awful lot . . . better than one-in-three."
This is from one of Canada's major daily newspapers. The reporter is so afraid of mathematics - or so afraid to go out on a limb and do his own minor arithmetic - that he needs to get a professor of mathematics to back him up. (What's worse, the article is about the legal system, and the prof's statement that "That's an awful lot" inadvertently makes an implicit judgement that should have been left to a legal scholar, not a mathematician.)
Reporters have abdicated any responsibility for ensuring that what they print is true and accurate in any higher sense than "I printed exactly what some people said."
I've also seen a territorial admin who kept deleting things even after an academic familiar with the field did a survey of dozens of the standard textbooks in an area and posted the results on the Talk Page, proving that the admin's view on the subject was absolutely wrong.
The right question is, "What can I do to remember to download it every month?"
Indeed. Do you do online banking at least once per month? I'm assuming that you're paying some of your recurring bills or transferring funds to your credit cards at least that often; make the download of transaction data a part of that monthly process.
Or set a recurring alarm on your cell phone's calendar, your email client, or what-have-you. If you can't set a three-month recurrence for new reminders, then set them as four annual events at quarterly intervals.
Go old school and make a note in your day planner, or create a tickler file.
Go round the side of your house...And check how fast the dial in the electric meter is spinning.
Which works brilliantly, as long as he's only interested in knowing his electrical consumption while he's outside the house -- and not when he's busy cooking, watching television, ironing, using power tools, or having a hot electrically-heated shower. And as long as he doesn't care about electrical usage while he's asleep at night or when he's at work during the day. And as long as he doesn't mind getting funny numbers because the baseboard heaters in the front hall cycle on for a few minutes every time he opens the front door to go out to read the meter...
Back in 1930, some Senators came close to banning the dial telephone...
Seriously? An eighty-year-old resolution -- that didn't even pass -- is the best and most current example of laughable Senate conduct you can come up with? Are any of the Senators who voted for this measure even still alive, let alone still sitting in the Senate? This is sort of like judging the quality of the U.S. Army based on the leadership qualities of General Pershing, or the calibre of New York newspapers on the conduct of Randolph Hearst.
In 1987, Bill Gates declared that "I believe OS/2 is destined to be the most important operating system, and possibly program, of all time."
In 1996, Steve Jobs announced that "If I were running Apple, I would milk the Macintosh for all it's worth — and get busy on the next great thing. The PC wars are over. Done. Microsoft won a long time ago."
Warren Buffett bought US Air and Dexter Shoe in the early 1990s.
Even people widely-recognized as brilliant screw up from time to time. If you want to argue against a policy proposal, do it on the merits, not on the basis of a cheap shot at an eighty-year-old boner.
The reason why we have a balance of power between the Judaical, Executive and Legislative branch. Is that Judaical branch will stop laws which are unconstitutional.
Actually, the Judaical branch is there to strike down (or, in technical terms, to "smite") any laws which are inconsistent with the Old Testament.
...designed over 30 years ago (and tested) by a Professor at the University of Colorado. Yale didn't do anything new here.
Well, not quite true. While laser cooling isn't new as either a concept or an application, there is a novel twist here. This is (apparently) the first time laser cooling has been successfully applied to molecules, rather than just monatomic gases.
So yes, the "gee whiz!" Slashdot summary is a tad misleading, but there really is new technology being reported. Of course, you knew that already, since you read the linked article before posting...right?
Safety standards are one of the main reasons a 2010 Honda Civic gets nearly the same mileage in practice as a 1990 Civic. Although the more modern car has made strides in improving drive train efficiency, it weighs over 600 lbs more resulting in nearly the same fuel efficiency. Things like side-impact beams, air bags, and ABS make cars safer, but they also make them a lot heavier.
Well, no. Yes, airbags and side-impact beams do add weight -- but putting an extra 600 pounds of curbside heft at the feet of safety equipment stretches the limits of credibility.
Compare the 1990 Civic with the 2010 Civic. The new Civic has a wheelbase roughly eight inches longer. The overall vehicle is roughly a foot longer. The 2010 model is about three inches wider, and about three inches taller. The smallest-displacement (non-hybrid) gasoline engine offered for the 2010 model (a 1.6 L straight-four) is the same displacement as the largest engine offered in 1990.
The trim has gotten fancier, the soundproofing has gotten better, the seats have gotten cushier, the engines have gotten more powerful, and Honda has been targeting more affluent buyers. The 2010 Civic isn't heavier because of safety standards; it's heavier because it's quite a bit bigger. The 2010 Civic isn't just an otherwise-identical super-safe variant of the 1990 Civic -- it's a different car.
I'm advising a friend who is running for office (city council in a smallish town) and she's been hit with a lot of questions about what her platform is, whereas she's really a pragamatic problem solver with a great record of listening to people and using the best factual information available to fix stuff.
Well, it sounds like that is her platform.
Unfortunately - accurately or not - the vast bulk of politicians will tell you that they're "pragmatic problem solvers who will listen to people and use available information to fix stuff". When you catch them off guard and ask about something that they don't want to put in their platform (too controversial, potentially unpopular, etc.) or something that they just haven't bothered to think about, they'll tell you that they intend to "listen to the voices of their constituents and do their best to find practical, affordable, sustainable solutions to their problems."
"No platform" is too close to "I'll wing it when you elect me". Why hasn't your candidate researched the issues and spoken with constituents before the election, rather than asking us to just trust that she'll get around to it after she's won? She can put wiggle room in the platform -- be clear about her reasoning, and open in her justifications for each platform plank. If it turns out that through new information, new evidence, or just plain honest error she can't (or realizes that she shouldn't) follow through on (some of the) stuff said during the campaign, people will know where she was coming from and why she changed her mind.
Moreover, people deserve a window on the way that she would approach the problems that are important to them. People and politics are complex; there may be many solutions to any given problem. (A budget shortfall can be met through tax hikes, user fees, road tolls, cuts to the transit system, etc. Which is best is matter not just of logic or research but also a particular philosophy or vision. How will the candidate evaluate the information that she is given? Which constituents and advice will be taken most seriously?)
I don't know about that. Presumably if the pilot has a heart attack before takeoff, the flight is going to get cancelled.:D
2) such systems are awesomely expensive; in fact, they are only installed on heavy-traffic locations with visibility problems
You're right, eliminating the co-pilot would mean that more airports would need to have Cat III ILS systems, in order to provide alternate landing sites. But eliminating the jobs of, say, four or five thousand pilots frees up more than a hundred million dollars a year. And I can certain see the FAA imposing additional restrictions on single-pilot flights regarding destination weather conditions and so forth.
Co-pilots are there to handle things in case the pilot gets sick or something. If modern technology has made co-pilots unncesessary, it has made pilots unnecessary, period. If it hasn't made pilots redundant, then it has not made co-pilots redundant, either.
That leaves us with the question - how many airline crashes have been prevented by co-pilots? The snap response is to say, "Well, every time the pilot is ill or incapacitated." -- but that's not really true any more. A modern airliner is fully capable of landing itself entirely under computer and instrument control at most major airports. (And, incidentally, the aircraft that have the best-paid flight crew are also the aircraft most likely to have autoland capability, and be travelling to the best-equipped international airports.) Are there situations where a copilot has caught a pilot's error? Sure. How many of those errors wouldn't have been rescued by built-in warnings from the flight computer, or caught by a greater reliance on checklists? How many would be fatal? In an emergency, is it useful to have a copilot watching gauges and flipping switches while the pilot flies? In a few cases -- but I suspect that cases are rare where a plane crashes without a copilot's help, but is saved by a full flight crew.
You are saving the $10,000-$100,000/year pilot salary and risking the $50-$150 million plane. Even from a corporate sociopath perspective, this is a really dumb idea.
I don't know about that. If the cost of a pilot (including accommodations while out of town, medical benefits, payroll and human resources overhead, etc.) is $100 thousand per year, and the airframe is worth $100 million, then you can argue the economic case if the elimination of 1000 co-pilots results in no more than one major crash per year. (You can scale that number by a factor of three or four if you want to include the million-dollar-per-seat liability settlement with the passengers' next of kin.)
Right now, there is about a one in fifteen million chance of a passenger jet aircraft flight going down. Meanwhile, the FAA limits pilots of large aircraft to 1000 flying hours per year; figure they're doing no more than 500 flights each. That means that each pilot has about a 1 in 30 thousand chance of crashing each year. So, will the elimination of the co-pilot make it thirty times more likely that they will crash? If not, then there's an economic case.
Thirty years ago, there were usually three crew on the flight deck of an airliner: pilot, co-pilot, and flight engineer. Increasing automation and reliability of components eliminated the third seat. Is it inconceivable that the same forces won't eventually push out the co-pilot?
Actually, it is possible to work in fundamental units in which hbar = c = 1, so the latter two can be considered constant by definition.
Oh, so close -- you just needed to look up one more Wikipedia article to get a hint about why your reasoning is faulty. There are indeed systems of so-called natural units which assign a constant value of 1 to certain physical units. Yes, there are systems which define c and h-bar as 1, but there are also systems which define e to be exactly 1.
Inconveniently, merely asserting a definition doesn't actually compel obedience on the part of the Universe. If I work in Stoney units, then I define e and c to be constant, so h-bar must be changing if the fine structure constant changes. In Schrodinger units, e and h-bar are constants, and c must be changing. The natural-unit systems only work properly if the assumption of constancy of their chosen fundamental constants is correct.
You sir are a worthless human being with no redeeming quality. Comparing prostitution with a normal job no matter how much you might look down on is the hallmark of a very narrow mind. The kind who says it is okay his iPod was made with slave labor because else these people would have just starved.
Disgusting.
So, the computer (or is it a smart phone?) that you posted your self-righteous message from -- please tell us, where were all of its components manufactured? Presumably in a unionized factory in Canada or western Europe, by workers earning a living wage and working reasonable hours, protected by a social safety net that won't leave them to starve in the street if they don't like their working conditions, or leave them to die in their beds if they fall ill, is that right?
Otherwise you can shove off, you hypocritical, sanctimonious ass.
Slashdot Mirror
It'd be awesome not to need a DD (or risk a DUI) to go to the bar in the many US cities with no or inadequate public transit...
If only it were somehow possible to hire another human being to drive a car for you.
Better yet, perhaps these "drivers for rent" could maintain the vehicles themselves, thereby saving you the cost and inconvenience of owning, repairing, and insuring your own car. In order to keep their rates reasonable, you wouldn't have to hire one of these individuals full-time -- there would be some sort of central dispatching organization that would send you a car in response to a telephone call; each driver would service dozens or hundreds of people. (Perhaps these vehicles could also be painted distinctive colors, so that you could flag an unoccupied one down when you were out on the street.) This service-on-demand model would also obviate the need to find or pay for parking. Some sort of fee could be paid based on time or distance driven.
I think that my scheme could be a useful stopgap measure until autonomous driving technology matures, and hope that it will someday be adopted.
"So, to anyone who says that hospitals haven't changed in 100 years, I say to them this: has the human body changed in the last 100 years? What's different about the way your organs work now as opposed to 100 years ago?"
While I agree with you that we shouldn't be engaging in change for the sake of change, nor should we be trying to make our schools look like Apple stores to suit some film producer's notion of what the 'future of education' should be, I have to say that your questions gave me pause. Your rhetorical questions presume that the knowledge about how to educate had reached its pinnacle at some point at least a century ago, and that there was nothing else we needed or could learn about how to teach. They presume that changes in the world outside the classroom don't affect what or how we should teach. In the context of your other comments, they presume that where new technologies have been added to the classroom, those technologies have failed despite being used in the best possible ways.
If we had really settled on the best way to educate our children a hundred years ago, we would be giving the same answers to the following questions now that we did then:
Should primary education be compulsory?
How many years of schooling should be required for a diploma? At what age is it permissible to drop out and join the workforce, in lieu of further classroom education?
Should schools and classrooms be segregated according to age, gender, and/or race?
Should we teach students to read using a phonics-based or whole-language approach? What 'counts' as a functional level of literacy? Is it important to learn a fine Spencerian hand?
Should students interact with one another in the classroom, or sit silently and learn material by rote?
Should we make provisions for specially educating students who are significantly above or below the average level of intelligence? If so, should those students be integrated into regular classrooms, or segregated from other students?
Should we be providing 'charter' or 'magnet' schools that cater to particular interests of students or their parents?
At what age and in what areas should we begin to allow students to 'customize' their learning? How many courses in math, in science, in English, in music should be compulsory? When should teachers be required to have special skills and training for a subject area, and how many different teachers do students need to see in a day?
What is the optimal size for a school? The minimum acceptable? The maximum?
Kids have the same brains that they did a century past, but our understanding of what goes on inside those heads has changed markedly in that time -- and, to be honest, still remains incomplete.
Instaed of considering some of the reasons I gave for why it wouldn't be appropriate for a well-managed business to do on-the-spot, on-demand work, you've decided that - in the absence of evidence - you prefer incompetence as your explanation. That's fine for you, but it's not rational.
They clearly weren't running it like a business. If they were, they would have accepted a higher fee to put out the fire, which still would have made them a profit. As usual, people are straining to blame libertarianism when the opposite is true. This is clearly a failure of government.
They were operating like a business that preferred to sell service contracts and deliver their services on that basis. They did not, at that time, wish to offer a fee-for-service model, and their front-line servicepeople weren't empowered to change company policy and invent new products on a whim.
Given the peculiarities of their particular line of business, I can even see why. Is the sales team ready to negotiate a contract in a couple of minutes, so that a timely response to a fire can still occur? Can the accounts department, in the middle of the night, actualy run a credit check or confirm that the home's resident has clear title to the property, so that the fire department would be able to place a lien in the event of nonpayment? Will courts be comfortable with enforcing the terms of a contract which was signed while one of the parties was watching his house burn, and which he wouldn't have time to read?
Businesses are free to choose the manner in which they offer their services. Moreover, there is nothing that prevents another entity from establishing a competing fire service aimed at people who can't be bothered to pay in advance for a service contract. (The fact that no service has appeared to fill this particular niche suggests that a) the market isn't very big and may not be worth servicing, and/or b) the people who lack the common sense or financial ability to buy fire insurance, and who may have just lost a substantial fraction of their physical assets in a serious fire, may not be a good group to whom to sell big-ticket services.)
Dow Corning won't sell me two ounces of silly putty; they only do hundred pound lots. If I want a smaller quantity, then I have to go through a different supplier. Since Dow isn't willing to sell me their product in the manner I choose, does that mean that Dow isn't being run like a business?
And ... everyone will see this as an obvious flaw in libertarianism.
Except these guys worked for the government.
Yeah, and in this case they were running their government service like a business -- just like the libertarians want them to.
No, the real problem is with having a voluntary fee for a collective, necessary service. Don't blame the firefighters. Blame the government that set up a no-win situation.
Missed it by one.
Blame the people who kept electing county officials who promised lower taxes. Blame the people who couldn't see that putting an annual $75 charge on everyone's property tax bill would have provided coverage for all the rural properties. Blame the people who didn't clue in that they could probably negotiate a significant group discount if they paid for universal coverage (both because more people would be buying the service, and because the fire department wouldn't have to manage a parallel bill collection scheme). This sort of failure of private firefighting isn't exactly rare; why does the media portray it as surprising and shocking every time it happens again?
It's not some nebulous 'government' bogeyman who screwed up here; governments don't appear out of a vacuum. Entirely to blame are the selfish and shortsighted people who live in the county in question.
Actually, the obvious (and cheaper) solution is simply to make sure the front of the train is fairly sturdy and won't get dented by morons walking along the track looking for their Darwin award.
While this is a real design consideration, and modern high-speed trainsets incorporate deformable sections ('crumple zones', in automotive parlance) to absorb the shocks of a high-speed collision, it's still preferable to avoid impacts altogether. Even if the train isn't damaged by a collision, it's still delayed -- the line gets closed for hours while there's a police investigation, nobody can use the tracks, the passengers get grumpy....
And hitting a live person is hell for the train drivers. Post-traumatic stress disorder is not uncommon among the drivers of trains that hit people, even if they were not at fault in the collision.
The grandparent post suggested that texting while driving should be fully legal, but associated with greater punishments after the accident occurs. In that way, some hypothetical group of 'good' drivers would be able to still play with their toys, while the 'bad' drivers would know not to take the extra risk.
This would work well if people actually were capable of neutrally and accurately assessing their own competence behind the wheel (and the effect of texting on that competence). Most would recognize that they are neither particularly superb drivers, nor magically protected from accidents while they were temporarily distracted. Sadly, this is not the case, and it usually takes a collision (or a close call) for a driver to become aware that texting impairs their abilities -- if they realize it even then.
I'm pretty sure that you meant to aim your vitriol at the poster above me, who was making the argument. I'm pretty sure he's the same guy who figures it's okay for him to get loaded at the bar and then drive himself home; he's a 'good' driver, and it must be 'safe' because he hasn't hit anyone yet.
Don't outlaw texting (though I think it's dumb), but make it an extra fine if you get in an accident, are speeding, etc. due to texting.
Still sound like a good idea?
Write people an extremely hefty fine if they are involved in an accident while texting.
If I'm the guy that got run over by the texting jackass, I don't want to know he's going to pay a ruinous fine; I want to not be dead.
If people can safely text, great. If not, punish them when they cause problems.
And they only find out that they can't safely text while driving at the cost of one dead pedestrian per driver. 'Great' indeed.
My major concern would be with the reporters who are so clearly scientifically illiterate or utterly innumerate that they rely solely on quote-mining to support even the most inane statements of fact. There are writers who are so fearful of basic science and mathematics that they publish statements like this:
This is from one of Canada's major daily newspapers. The reporter is so afraid of mathematics - or so afraid to go out on a limb and do his own minor arithmetic - that he needs to get a professor of mathematics to back him up. (What's worse, the article is about the legal system, and the prof's statement that "That's an awful lot" inadvertently makes an implicit judgement that should have been left to a legal scholar, not a mathematician.)
Reporters have abdicated any responsibility for ensuring that what they print is true and accurate in any higher sense than "I printed exactly what some people said."
[Citation needed]?
Which article? Which admin? When?
The right question is, "What can I do to remember to download it every month?"
Indeed. Do you do online banking at least once per month? I'm assuming that you're paying some of your recurring bills or transferring funds to your credit cards at least that often; make the download of transaction data a part of that monthly process.
Or set a recurring alarm on your cell phone's calendar, your email client, or what-have-you. If you can't set a three-month recurrence for new reminders, then set them as four annual events at quarterly intervals.
Go old school and make a note in your day planner, or create a tickler file.
This isn't rocket science.
Go round the side of your house...And check how fast the dial in the electric meter is spinning.
Which works brilliantly, as long as he's only interested in knowing his electrical consumption while he's outside the house -- and not when he's busy cooking, watching television, ironing, using power tools, or having a hot electrically-heated shower. And as long as he doesn't care about electrical usage while he's asleep at night or when he's at work during the day. And as long as he doesn't mind getting funny numbers because the baseboard heaters in the front hall cycle on for a few minutes every time he opens the front door to go out to read the meter...
Back in 1930, some Senators came close to banning the dial telephone...
Seriously? An eighty-year-old resolution -- that didn't even pass -- is the best and most current example of laughable Senate conduct you can come up with? Are any of the Senators who voted for this measure even still alive, let alone still sitting in the Senate? This is sort of like judging the quality of the U.S. Army based on the leadership qualities of General Pershing, or the calibre of New York newspapers on the conduct of Randolph Hearst.
In 1987, Bill Gates declared that "I believe OS/2 is destined to be the most important operating system, and possibly program, of all time."
In 1996, Steve Jobs announced that "If I were running Apple, I would milk the Macintosh for all it's worth — and get busy on the next great thing. The PC wars are over. Done. Microsoft won a long time ago."
Warren Buffett bought US Air and Dexter Shoe in the early 1990s.
Even people widely-recognized as brilliant screw up from time to time. If you want to argue against a policy proposal, do it on the merits, not on the basis of a cheap shot at an eighty-year-old boner.
The reason why we have a balance of power between the Judaical, Executive and Legislative branch. Is that Judaical branch will stop laws which are unconstitutional.
Actually, the Judaical branch is there to strike down (or, in technical terms, to "smite") any laws which are inconsistent with the Old Testament.
...designed over 30 years ago (and tested) by a Professor at the University of Colorado. Yale didn't do anything new here.
Well, not quite true. While laser cooling isn't new as either a concept or an application, there is a novel twist here. This is (apparently) the first time laser cooling has been successfully applied to molecules, rather than just monatomic gases.
So yes, the "gee whiz!" Slashdot summary is a tad misleading, but there really is new technology being reported. Of course, you knew that already, since you read the linked article before posting...right?
Maybe a place where Monsoons are spelled with accent marks?
Sweden?
A monsøøn once bit my sister....
Safety standards are one of the main reasons a 2010 Honda Civic gets nearly the same mileage in practice as a 1990 Civic. Although the more modern car has made strides in improving drive train efficiency, it weighs over 600 lbs more resulting in nearly the same fuel efficiency. Things like side-impact beams, air bags, and ABS make cars safer, but they also make them a lot heavier.
Well, no. Yes, airbags and side-impact beams do add weight -- but putting an extra 600 pounds of curbside heft at the feet of safety equipment stretches the limits of credibility.
Compare the 1990 Civic with the 2010 Civic. The new Civic has a wheelbase roughly eight inches longer. The overall vehicle is roughly a foot longer. The 2010 model is about three inches wider, and about three inches taller. The smallest-displacement (non-hybrid) gasoline engine offered for the 2010 model (a 1.6 L straight-four) is the same displacement as the largest engine offered in 1990.
The trim has gotten fancier, the soundproofing has gotten better, the seats have gotten cushier, the engines have gotten more powerful, and Honda has been targeting more affluent buyers. The 2010 Civic isn't heavier because of safety standards; it's heavier because it's quite a bit bigger. The 2010 Civic isn't just an otherwise-identical super-safe variant of the 1990 Civic -- it's a different car.
Well, it sounds like that is her platform.
Unfortunately - accurately or not - the vast bulk of politicians will tell you that they're "pragmatic problem solvers who will listen to people and use available information to fix stuff". When you catch them off guard and ask about something that they don't want to put in their platform (too controversial, potentially unpopular, etc.) or something that they just haven't bothered to think about, they'll tell you that they intend to "listen to the voices of their constituents and do their best to find practical, affordable, sustainable solutions to their problems."
"No platform" is too close to "I'll wing it when you elect me". Why hasn't your candidate researched the issues and spoken with constituents before the election, rather than asking us to just trust that she'll get around to it after she's won? She can put wiggle room in the platform -- be clear about her reasoning, and open in her justifications for each platform plank. If it turns out that through new information, new evidence, or just plain honest error she can't (or realizes that she shouldn't) follow through on (some of the) stuff said during the campaign, people will know where she was coming from and why she changed her mind.
Moreover, people deserve a window on the way that she would approach the problems that are important to them. People and politics are complex; there may be many solutions to any given problem. (A budget shortfall can be met through tax hikes, user fees, road tolls, cuts to the transit system, etc. Which is best is matter not just of logic or research but also a particular philosophy or vision. How will the candidate evaluate the information that she is given? Which constituents and advice will be taken most seriously?)
trains... cars... boats...
Q. What do these things have in common?
A. They don't go 500+ mph or fly.
A: They kill a lot more people, per passenger-mile, than planes do?
3) even if both airports have cat 3...
I don't know about that. Presumably if the pilot has a heart attack before takeoff, the flight is going to get cancelled. :D
2) such systems are awesomely expensive; in fact, they are only installed on heavy-traffic locations with visibility problems
You're right, eliminating the co-pilot would mean that more airports would need to have Cat III ILS systems, in order to provide alternate landing sites. But eliminating the jobs of, say, four or five thousand pilots frees up more than a hundred million dollars a year. And I can certain see the FAA imposing additional restrictions on single-pilot flights regarding destination weather conditions and so forth.
Co-pilots are there to handle things in case the pilot gets sick or something. If modern technology has made co-pilots unncesessary, it has made pilots unnecessary, period. If it hasn't made pilots redundant, then it has not made co-pilots redundant, either.
That leaves us with the question - how many airline crashes have been prevented by co-pilots? The snap response is to say, "Well, every time the pilot is ill or incapacitated." -- but that's not really true any more. A modern airliner is fully capable of landing itself entirely under computer and instrument control at most major airports. (And, incidentally, the aircraft that have the best-paid flight crew are also the aircraft most likely to have autoland capability, and be travelling to the best-equipped international airports.) Are there situations where a copilot has caught a pilot's error? Sure. How many of those errors wouldn't have been rescued by built-in warnings from the flight computer, or caught by a greater reliance on checklists? How many would be fatal? In an emergency, is it useful to have a copilot watching gauges and flipping switches while the pilot flies? In a few cases -- but I suspect that cases are rare where a plane crashes without a copilot's help, but is saved by a full flight crew.
You are saving the $10,000-$100,000/year pilot salary and risking the $50-$150 million plane. Even from a corporate sociopath perspective, this is a really dumb idea.
I don't know about that. If the cost of a pilot (including accommodations while out of town, medical benefits, payroll and human resources overhead, etc.) is $100 thousand per year, and the airframe is worth $100 million, then you can argue the economic case if the elimination of 1000 co-pilots results in no more than one major crash per year. (You can scale that number by a factor of three or four if you want to include the million-dollar-per-seat liability settlement with the passengers' next of kin.)
Right now, there is about a one in fifteen million chance of a passenger jet aircraft flight going down. Meanwhile, the FAA limits pilots of large aircraft to 1000 flying hours per year; figure they're doing no more than 500 flights each. That means that each pilot has about a 1 in 30 thousand chance of crashing each year. So, will the elimination of the co-pilot make it thirty times more likely that they will crash? If not, then there's an economic case.
Thirty years ago, there were usually three crew on the flight deck of an airliner: pilot, co-pilot, and flight engineer. Increasing automation and reliability of components eliminated the third seat. Is it inconceivable that the same forces won't eventually push out the co-pilot?
Actually, it is possible to work in fundamental units in which hbar = c = 1, so the latter two can be considered constant by definition.
Oh, so close -- you just needed to look up one more Wikipedia article to get a hint about why your reasoning is faulty. There are indeed systems of so-called natural units which assign a constant value of 1 to certain physical units. Yes, there are systems which define c and h-bar as 1, but there are also systems which define e to be exactly 1.
Inconveniently, merely asserting a definition doesn't actually compel obedience on the part of the Universe. If I work in Stoney units, then I define e and c to be constant, so h-bar must be changing if the fine structure constant changes. In Schrodinger units, e and h-bar are constants, and c must be changing. The natural-unit systems only work properly if the assumption of constancy of their chosen fundamental constants is correct.
You sir are a worthless human being with no redeeming quality. Comparing prostitution with a normal job no matter how much you might look down on is the hallmark of a very narrow mind. The kind who says it is okay his iPod was made with slave labor because else these people would have just starved.
Disgusting.
So, the computer (or is it a smart phone?) that you posted your self-righteous message from -- please tell us, where were all of its components manufactured? Presumably in a unionized factory in Canada or western Europe, by workers earning a living wage and working reasonable hours, protected by a social safety net that won't leave them to starve in the street if they don't like their working conditions, or leave them to die in their beds if they fall ill, is that right?
Otherwise you can shove off, you hypocritical, sanctimonious ass.