> However, you were spot-on about this: Calc 1 is 90% algebra
All math is 90% algebra. That's why they hammer algebra so hard in high school math: so when you get to college, you can take math classes. Starting with calculus.
And yeah, if you had trouble with algebra in high school, you either need to knuckle down and make yourself learn it, or else think about a college major that doesn't involve much math. Counseling, for instance. Because if you think you're going to find a college math or science program that doesn't require any algebra, I've got some nice beach-front property in Oklahoma that I can let you have cheap, since the previous owners defaulted on their last loan payment.
> You'll never use statistics but you will need to use calculus every day.
I don't know about that, but you sure can't expect to pass your other college math classes if you don't have a couple semesters of calc first. It's foundational.
> I haven't done ANY calculus since I was an undergrad.
I have, and I'm just a network administrator.
But the main point of taking calculus isn't its immediate practical application.
Calculus is the gateway math. It stretches your thinking in ways that allow you to take college-level math courses, and it's a prerequisite for almost everything. Linear algebra, modern algebra, number theory, prob and stat (_real_ prob and stat, not the half-baked version they teach to business majors so they can make mathematically invalid charts for their PowerPoint presentations), analysis, non-planar geometry, topology,... Once you've got a couple of semesters of calc under your belt, the world of math opens up to you. Heck, after calc 3 you can even jump straight into engineering math courses like diff eq, if you are so inclined.
That's why you have to take calculus. It's not the destination. It's the front door.
> No, the US is a two-party system because the voting system is that way.
The US would have two significant parties no matter how the voting was set up (and did have two significant political parties *before* the current voting system was set up), because our demographics are that way.
We're roughly evenly split between rural and urban, with a STRONG correlation between that and political views, and we have been that way since before the revolution -- indeed, since before the French & Indian War.
Even in the swing states, the split between conservative and liberal is strongly geographic. Separate Detroit out of Michigan, or Pittsburgh and the less affluent parts of Philadelphia out of Pennsylvania, or Chicago out of Illinois, and you don't have a swing state anymore: the big cities go Dem, and the rest of the state goes GOP. (Some states, like Ohio for instance, are more complicated and more mixed, but even in those states there are still definite geographic lines.)
What the current voting system does, is it forces the two parties closer together, because instead of mostly fighting for higher voter turnout in their strong party-line states, they're usually fighting mostly for control of swing-state votes, which are often decided by the moderates that make up perhaps 10% of the population. Take away the electoral college, and both parties will campaign differently, pushing stronger, more hardline views (more _different_ from each other), and then you'd see just exactly how politically polarized this country really is. But there still wouldn't be a viable third party.
> That is precisely what a "trade deficit" is - the money is NOT coming back.
Sort of.
But describing it that way implies that you're thinking of trade as a zero-sum exercise. It's not.
> With a trade deficit, we send 100 out, and less than 100 comes back. > If it's 95 that come back, the deficit isn't to bad. If it's less than > 80 that come back, then we're hurting.
It's not that straightforward. A trade deficit does *not* mean that our wealth is all disappearing overseas never to return. It does mean that somebody else is getting more benefit out of the trading arrangement than we are. But we do still benefit. Indeed, a positive trade balance of 10 million dollars that results in exporting at 20 million and importing at 10 million is a great deal worse than a trade balance of -10 million dollars that results from exporting 90 million and importing 100 million.
We had a pretty big deficit in the nineties, when the economy was way too good to be true. A negative trade balance does not automatically equal doom and destruction, and as I said above it also does not mean that our wealth is vanishing overseas never to return.
When we import more than we export, the exchange rates automatically shift, devaluing our currency internationally, relative to other world currencies (well, the ones that float; pegged currencies, which until recently included the renminbi, don't entirely follow the rules, which complicates things somewhat). Devaluation of our currency sounds bad, but it is necessary and has an upside: overseas, the more favorable exchange rate makes our exports, priced in dollars, come out cheaper in the local currency, so they can compete better, which allows us to export more, which tends to push the balance of trade back toward zero. Domestically, the rising exchange values of foreign currencies make imports more expensive in dollars, which allows locally-produced products (where applicable) to compete better.
Yes, a trade deficit can be maintained over the course of several years, or even several decades. But it can only go so far, as long as exchange rates float, because the higher the trade deficit is the more it drives exchange rates in a direction that will push the trade deficit back toward zero. A run-away effect where the balance of trade gets more and more unbalanced indefinitely is not possible, unless exchange rates are artificially fixed (e.g., by use of gold standards or pegging).
You mention China particularly, but our exchange rate with China has been floating since 2005. If they sell us too much junk, the exchange rate will shift and make their junk more expensive here, and our junk more expensive there, pushing things back the other direction.
An increase in personal debt (say, by taking out a loan, or using a credit card) allows individuals to buy more than they make; if they buy mostly imports, this creates a temporary imbalance that's small if it's just one guy but can be large in aggregate. In the case of the US trade deficit in the last thirty years, this is one of the major causes. But it's inherently limited and nominally temporary, because the loans have to be repaid, and the credit card bills are going to come due. (Yes, bankruptcy can disrupt this, and the lending agency can get caught holding the bag on that. But lending agencies are supposed to know what risks they're taking when they lend out the money and account for that, and usually they mostly do.)
There are other complicating factors, besides spending more than we make, that cause the dollar values of imports and exports to not match up quite exactly over the short and medium term. Inflation and exchange-rate shifts both occur continuously; whereas, imports and exports can happen in chunks at any time, so the real-value calculations can get complicated. Foreign investors (including foreign governments) can and often do deliberately hold US currency as an investment, as well as assets that are pegged to the US dollar, such as U
Meh. If everyone can get away with it once, people will figure they can do it until they get caught, and by then they'll already be in the habit. I say, nip it in the bud: you get caught driving drunk, you never drive on the public roads again. Put a private track in your back yard and drive around that, where you won't put other people at risk.
The problem is, in order for such penalties to actually have any value, they have to be enforced, and that means the penalties for driving illegally after your license is revoked have to be *really* severe -- significantly more severe than the penalty of never driving again. Otherwise they'll all just drive illegally (and probably drunk to boot). With as much value as most Americans place on driving, to be significantly more severe than permanent loss of license we're talking along the lines of, if you keep driving after your license is revoked, we start cutting off popular and/or interesting parts of your anatomy with each offense, or something like that. Which would be in danger of running afoul of some court's interpretation of the eighth amendment.
> I get 40mpg on the highway, and 35-36 or so around town.
Yeah. We used to get that kind of mileage with our 1987 Plymouth Horizon.
Here's why: in the 70s, there was an "energy crisis", a series of events that lead to shortages of gas, higher prices, and, importantly, concern that this situation would escalate in the future. (For further details, see the Wikipedia article, 1970s Energy Crisis.) This got a lot of media attention, and people started to think of it as important. It got to be such a big deal, that it started to impact people's buying behavior, so that cars that were more fuel-efficient started to sell better.
The automobile industry caught onto this, and so they started to make fuel efficiency a design priority. By the late eighties, it was relatively common for smaller vehicles to get 40mpg on the freeway. The whole thing culminated finally during the Clinton administration, when Geo introduced a vehicle that they advertised as "the loophole" to the (proposed) gasoline tax increase. Only, by then, most car buyers had started to think in other directions. OPEC had, due to infighting, largely lost its ability to stay within quota, and other sources of oil had opened up, including Russian oil (remember, the wall came down in the fall of '89, and the curtain followed not long after that). BP had also increased production in the North Sea, and the United States had increased production as well.
In the late eighties and early nineties, vehicle safety ratings started to get a lot of press, and also people started to care more about the amount of space in (and behind) the back seat. It didn't take the automobile industry long to adjust: within a few years, they changed their design priorities. The subcompact car gave way to the midsize sedan. The minivan was introduced, and before long the term "SUV" was coined.
Things could (and probably eventually will) swing back the other direction. But no, the last two decades of automobile development have not focused much on fuel efficiency. (Well, there are the hybrids, but those are sort of a side-line of development that the car companies kept going to hedge their bets. They don't sell hardly any of them compared to regular cars. They're really a niche product.)
> Indy cars, for example, are vastly lighter than any standard American > cars, and they crash at extremely high speeds with very few fatalities
Indy cars don't drive on regular roads and and participate in collisions involving regular vehicles.
> The problem is that vastly overweight cars are dangerous to other cars on the road.
Yes, exactly.
It's true that weight is definitely not the only or even the most important factor in determining the safety for the occupants of a particular vehicle. But it is *a* factor, and cars don't just drive in a vacuum, on empty roads with no other vehicles.
In the real world, if your car can't take being hit at 65mph by an SUV and still provide some measure of protection for the occupants, it's not safe to drive on the freeway.
Cup holders, interior space, and separate temperature controls for each seat also sell more cars than MPG.
The main reason for this is basic arithmetic. The gas mileage a car gets has surprisingly little impact on how much it costs to maintain the car. Even if you could save twenty dollars a week on gas, that only adds up to a little over a thousand dollars a year. That sounds like a lot of money, but only until you compare it to what car repairs and insurance cost per year, not to mention the cost of the car itself.
If it were really a priority to make fuel efficiency matter in people's car-buying decisions, the obvious way to do that would be to increase the excise tax on gas, repeatedly, until it permanently drives the prices at the pump up by two or three orders of magnitude. If gas were twelve bucks a gallon, then a 40% savings would start to be worth *real* money, the kind of money people take into consideration when spending thousands of dollars on a vehicle. (Also, if gas were twelve bucks a gallon, it would be economically feasible to make and sell alcohol-based fuels that compete with gas.)
However, promising to do that isn't necessarily a good way to get elected to a federal office. Promising to make the car companies sell cars that use less gas sounds better to most voters.
Personally, I'm not too worried. If the environmentalists have been right about our use of non-renewable resources all along, then it follows that we'll be running out of economical sources of petroleum in a few years anyway, and then supply and demand forces will naturally raise gas prices and the problem will solve itself.
> No, we're in the shitter because our constitution grants a minority party veto power
That's actually a very important protection here.
In some countries, it wouldn't be so important, but those countries all have multiple viable parties. The US is naturally a de facto two-party system, because our demographics just work out that way. (The list of political parties has changed several times in our history, most often because one of the parties split in half, but it never takes more than a couple of elections before we're back to having exactly two relevant parties. The others fade into obscurity very quickly. This is not a coincidence.)
When you only have two parties, you generally have one party that's a majority all by itself. That would be very dangerous if the minority party didn't have any ability to hold them back.
> I'm driving an 11 year old car. It's in great condition, comfortable, > reliable, safe, gets good gas mileage...why should I replace it?
Because, your neighbors across the street might get a new car, and where would you be then? Playing catch-up, that's where. If you want to stay ahead of them, you have to get your new car first! Also, you want to make sure you get one just a little more expensive than what your neighbors can really afford. That way, *they'll* be trying to catch up with you, and not quite succeeding. That's what it's all about, right?
> Not only have I purchased better quality, but someone in America was paid for making those T's
That doesn't actually make any difference to the economy. Money doesn't just vanish when it's spent overseas. It always makes its way back, usually sooner rather than later. If that weren't happening, the exchange rates would shift and then it would happen. That's the main advantage of having a fiat currency with floating exchange rates. Every dime you spend overseas is a dime some foreigner is going to spend on your exports. (The downside is, inflation is harder to control than when you're on a specie exchange standard.)
I agree about quality though. If the shirts you're buying last longer, then they're worth more, obviously. That by itself is absolutely a good enough reason to buy them, even if they cost a little more (assuming you're buying for an adult whose shirt size doesn't change often).
There can be other quality issues besides how long something lasts, too. I paid $160 for my last pair of shoes. I've been buying shoes made by a company called SAS (motto, which I swear on Dave Barry's last column that I'm not making up: "Our shoemaking is fifty years behind the times"), and they're darned expensive, but I buy them anyway because they fit better. I have unusually-shaped feet. Most shoes are too narrow across the toes for me, which is painful. I could get shoes for probably around $100 that would last just about as long, by buying four sizes too long in width EEEEEE, but I don't want them. Having shoes that fit reasonably well is worth an extra $60/pair to me, and then some.
Are the shoes made in the US? I don't know, and I don't care.
Microsoft was constantly doing that too. Every time a nice and really useful piece of freeware came along, they started figuring out how they could reproduce it in the next major version of DOS. DOSKEY became DOSEDIT. The third-party "move" freeware became a standard command in DOS 5. NU became undelete in DOS 6. Even Stacker, which was way more trouble than it was worth, became DoubleSpace, which was also way more trouble than it was worth.
It isn't just names, either. Apostrophes and other special characters show up all kinds of places in data where naive programmers tend to imagine they won't appear. Did you know a less-than symbol can show up in a book title? Oh, yes, and if you aren't doing entity-encoding when you build HTML from the data you will get a surprise. With experience, you eventually learn to write the code so that it will either accept those characters as part of the data and handle them as such, or in cases where that's not desirable (like, say, non-numeric characters in a year field) catch them preemptively and issue a clear error message to the user. SQL injection is a particularly easy thing to fix, because you can just use prepared statements with bound variables, but nearly every program of any size or complexity is going to run into situations where it has to do more complex data checking. User-entered data is going to have stuff in it that you didn't anticipate. Every programmer has to learn this lesson, and most have to learn it repeatedly until they eventually become near-paranoid and borderline obsessive about it.
I was gratified when users came to me complaining that they got an error message about time travel not being permitted. Ha! I *knew* it was a good idea to write a test for the end of an appointment being before the beginning of the same appointment. I don't even want to *think* about the bugs that would have ensued if that data had got into the database. The routine that checks whether a room is free at a certain time wouldn't have handled it correctly, that's for certain.
You're not just paranoid. The data really are out to get you. You have to be ready for them, ready for *anything* they may throw at your code. If you're not careful, they'll get you.
Except that, in most cases, random letters in the ranges a-z and A-Z are not where you're going to find most of your problems. The major sources of bugs that can be uncovered by random data are assumptions that programmers (sometimes subconsciously) make about what the data are going to be like.
The most obvious of these are assumptions like "a newline can't occur in a single-line field" (a mistake web developers often make, because they assume the data are coming from an HTML input element that only allows single-line data; but an attacker can in fact send anything they want in an http request), or "nobody's going to have a single-quote character in their name" (hello, SQL injection attack). This sort of thing is probably not a major factor in Office, because it's common for documents to have those kinds of characters in them. There might be a couple of weird old control characters (like the ASCII NUL, 000), but those bugs were probably found aeons ago.
A second major category of problematic assumptions assumptions has to do with languages and code pages and character sets. When software that was written to assume a particular character set (like ASCII, or Latin-1) or even just one code page at a time (like, whichever one is the system default) has to be extended to support more (like, especially, Unicode), you run into all kinds of nasties. Again, though, Office probably had to deal with these issues a couple of versions ago. They may have found a few more, but at this point it's probably not the most fertile ground any more.
When you're dealing with file formats, however, there are also things like "the value at offset 0x003C from the beginning of the object header contains the size of the object, which can never be more than 0xFFFF" and "an object can embed another object by referencing it, but there are never any circular references, because the software doesn't allow the user to put an object inside itself". These sorts of assumptions pop up every time you write or change code that reads a file format, so they never go away really. This sort of thing is probably *most* of what the Office team found, I suspect.
> take census forms and check them for finger prints?
How would you determine whose prints are on any given form?
In the first place, there's not a one-to-one relationship between people and forms, since most people live in a household with other people. If there were one form per person, that would lead to a much less accurate census, because more people would decide not to bother.
Even if somehow magically there were a form for every person, you still don't have any way to know whose fingerprints are on it. About a third of the population does not fill out ANY of their own paperwork, ever. They don't file their own taxes, fill out their own applications for government "assistance" (i.e., handouts), don't fill out their own census,... don't do ANY of their own paperwork.
Young people get their mothers to do all that stuff for them (yes, even if their mothers live in a different town). Old people get their kids to do it, or their neighbors, or that nice lady at the library, or anyone else they think they can talk into it. Disabled people get their aides to do it all for them. Some people feel they're too busy for such menial things and just pay somebody to do all their paperwork. Others are afraid to try because they don't know how because they've never done it before, so they whine and plead and beg until someone takes pity on them and just does it. Some people just take it for granted that you always get somebody to do that stuff for you, because that's what their parents always did. Some people can't read (about ten times as many people as will admit it). And of course some people are just lazy. There are a lot of reasons, but they all add up.
The long and short of it is, you can't assume that the fingerprints on the form belong to any of the people whose names are on the form. They very well might not.
> How can anything be worse than emacs? Why bother trying to get worse?
Apparently you haven't seen the news today. Microsoft announced a beta release of the new Visual Studio.NET, which has, among other things, pervasive Visual Basic scripting. The VB scripting engine is now so fundamental to VS.NET that the editing features are all implemented in VB (sort of like how the editing features in Emacs are implemented in lisp). It's also now more completely integrated with Exchange, SQL Server, IIS, and Active Directory. For example, source code indentation styles can now be centrally managed in Group Policy. You can even put custom VB.NET code in a GPO, so that everyone's Visual Studio.NET behaves in the same customized manner throughout your entire domain forest.
In other news, Glenn Beck has announced that he has secured a major source of funding for his 2012 election campaign, and if he doesn't get the GOP nomination, he'll run for President anyway on an independent ticket. He says he's got some great ideas for how to get people excited about the election, and he wants to start campaigning in earnest as soon as the summer of 2011.
> He's probably thinking of the aardvark, numbat, echidna, > or pangolin, which are all colloquially known as "anteaters" > but don't eat ants and aren't in the same family.
Wait, the word "anteater" has another meaning besides being a synonym for "aardvark"?
I did not know that. I've always been under the impression that the two words were different names for the same animal. That thing in the "anteater" article looks more like a sloth. Every drawing of an "anteater" that I've ever seen looks a lot more like an aardvark.
Echidnas DO eat ants, but I've never heard them called "anteaters" until this moment. I don't know much about pangolins, and I've never heard of a numbat until now.
Apparently vigor wasn't vile enough. vi need a text-editing abomination with more vim. Got to keep up with Microsoft. What shall we call this one? The names viper and elvis are already taken. How about vinegar? vice? violate? vitiate?
Currently I am in the unfortunate position of living in a community that puts NO fluorine in the water, because of the irrational "It's a poison!" argument. Since I've moved here, I've gone from having no dental problems to now having CONSTANT dental problems. (I've started buying fluoride mouth rinse in an attempt to ameliorate the situation, but you can't really use the stuff often enough to make up for not having fluoride in the water.)
But do you know what happens if there's a bit "too much" fluoride in your water supply? Your teeth turn dark yellow, and you get no dental cavities at ALL. The amount needed to pose any significant health risk is much greater than the amount needed to turn your teeth yellow. Consequently, an independent lab test is not required. If your teeth are closer to white than brown, the levels of fluorine in your water are safe.
Slashdot Mirror
> However, you were spot-on about this: Calc 1 is 90% algebra
All math is 90% algebra. That's why they hammer algebra so hard in high school math: so when you get to college, you can take math classes. Starting with calculus.
And yeah, if you had trouble with algebra in high school, you either need to knuckle down and make yourself learn it, or else think about a college major that doesn't involve much math. Counseling, for instance. Because if you think you're going to find a college math or science program that doesn't require any algebra, I've got some nice beach-front property in Oklahoma that I can let you have cheap, since the previous owners defaulted on their last loan payment.
> You'll never use statistics but you will need to use calculus every day.
I don't know about that, but you sure can't expect to pass your other college math classes if you don't have a couple semesters of calc first. It's foundational.
> I haven't done ANY calculus since I was an undergrad.
... Once you've got a couple of semesters of calc under your belt, the world of math opens up to you. Heck, after calc 3 you can even jump straight into engineering math courses like diff eq, if you are so inclined.
I have, and I'm just a network administrator.
But the main point of taking calculus isn't its immediate practical application.
Calculus is the gateway math. It stretches your thinking in ways that allow you to take college-level math courses, and it's a prerequisite for almost everything. Linear algebra, modern algebra, number theory, prob and stat (_real_ prob and stat, not the half-baked version they teach to business majors so they can make mathematically invalid charts for their PowerPoint presentations), analysis, non-planar geometry, topology,
That's why you have to take calculus. It's not the destination. It's the front door.
> No, the US is a two-party system because the voting system is that way.
The US would have two significant parties no matter how the voting was set up (and did have two significant political parties *before* the current voting system was set up), because our demographics are that way.
We're roughly evenly split between rural and urban, with a STRONG correlation between that and political views, and we have been that way since before the revolution -- indeed, since before the French & Indian War.
Even in the swing states, the split between conservative and liberal is strongly geographic. Separate Detroit out of Michigan, or Pittsburgh and the less affluent parts of Philadelphia out of Pennsylvania, or Chicago out of Illinois, and you don't have a swing state anymore: the big cities go Dem, and the rest of the state goes GOP. (Some states, like Ohio for instance, are more complicated and more mixed, but even in those states there are still definite geographic lines.)
What the current voting system does, is it forces the two parties closer together, because instead of mostly fighting for higher voter turnout in their strong party-line states, they're usually fighting mostly for control of swing-state votes, which are often decided by the moderates that make up perhaps 10% of the population. Take away the electoral college, and both parties will campaign differently, pushing stronger, more hardline views (more _different_ from each other), and then you'd see just exactly how politically polarized this country really is. But there still wouldn't be a viable third party.
> If they sell us too much junk, the exchange rate will shift and make
> their junk more expensive here, and our junk more expensive there
Sorry, I meant to say "and our junk cheaper there".
> That is precisely what a "trade deficit" is - the money is NOT coming back.
Sort of.
But describing it that way implies that you're thinking of trade as a zero-sum exercise. It's not.
> With a trade deficit, we send 100 out, and less than 100 comes back.
> If it's 95 that come back, the deficit isn't to bad. If it's less than
> 80 that come back, then we're hurting.
It's not that straightforward. A trade deficit does *not* mean that our wealth is all disappearing overseas never to return. It does mean that somebody else is getting more benefit out of the trading arrangement than we are. But we do still benefit. Indeed, a positive trade balance of 10 million dollars that results in exporting at 20 million and importing at 10 million is a great deal worse than a trade balance of -10 million dollars that results from exporting 90 million and importing 100 million.
We had a pretty big deficit in the nineties, when the economy was way too good to be true. A negative trade balance does not automatically equal doom and destruction, and as I said above it also does not mean that our wealth is vanishing overseas never to return.
When we import more than we export, the exchange rates automatically shift, devaluing our currency internationally, relative to other world currencies (well, the ones that float; pegged currencies, which until recently included the renminbi, don't entirely follow the rules, which complicates things somewhat). Devaluation of our currency sounds bad, but it is necessary and has an upside: overseas, the more favorable exchange rate makes our exports, priced in dollars, come out cheaper in the local currency, so they can compete better, which allows us to export more, which tends to push the balance of trade back toward zero. Domestically, the rising exchange values of foreign currencies make imports more expensive in dollars, which allows locally-produced products (where applicable) to compete better.
Yes, a trade deficit can be maintained over the course of several years, or even several decades. But it can only go so far, as long as exchange rates float, because the higher the trade deficit is the more it drives exchange rates in a direction that will push the trade deficit back toward zero. A run-away effect where the balance of trade gets more and more unbalanced indefinitely is not possible, unless exchange rates are artificially fixed (e.g., by use of gold standards or pegging).
You mention China particularly, but our exchange rate with China has been floating since 2005. If they sell us too much junk, the exchange rate will shift and make their junk more expensive here, and our junk more expensive there, pushing things back the other direction.
An increase in personal debt (say, by taking out a loan, or using a credit card) allows individuals to buy more than they make; if they buy mostly imports, this creates a temporary imbalance that's small if it's just one guy but can be large in aggregate. In the case of the US trade deficit in the last thirty years, this is one of the major causes. But it's inherently limited and nominally temporary, because the loans have to be repaid, and the credit card bills are going to come due. (Yes, bankruptcy can disrupt this, and the lending agency can get caught holding the bag on that. But lending agencies are supposed to know what risks they're taking when they lend out the money and account for that, and usually they mostly do.)
There are other complicating factors, besides spending more than we make, that cause the dollar values of imports and exports to not match up quite exactly over the short and medium term. Inflation and exchange-rate shifts both occur continuously; whereas, imports and exports can happen in chunks at any time, so the real-value calculations can get complicated. Foreign investors (including foreign governments) can and often do deliberately hold US currency as an investment, as well as assets that are pegged to the US dollar, such as U
> Your first DWI should be a mulligan
Meh. If everyone can get away with it once, people will figure they can do it until they get caught, and by then they'll already be in the habit. I say, nip it in the bud: you get caught driving drunk, you never drive on the public roads again. Put a private track in your back yard and drive around that, where you won't put other people at risk.
The problem is, in order for such penalties to actually have any value, they have to be enforced, and that means the penalties for driving illegally after your license is revoked have to be *really* severe -- significantly more severe than the penalty of never driving again. Otherwise they'll all just drive illegally (and probably drunk to boot). With as much value as most Americans place on driving, to be significantly more severe than permanent loss of license we're talking along the lines of, if you keep driving after your license is revoked, we start cutting off popular and/or interesting parts of your anatomy with each offense, or something like that. Which would be in danger of running afoul of some court's interpretation of the eighth amendment.
> I get 40mpg on the highway, and 35-36 or so around town.
Yeah. We used to get that kind of mileage with our 1987 Plymouth Horizon.
Here's why: in the 70s, there was an "energy crisis", a series of events that lead to shortages of gas, higher prices, and, importantly, concern that this situation would escalate in the future. (For further details, see the Wikipedia article, 1970s Energy Crisis.) This got a lot of media attention, and people started to think of it as important. It got to be such a big deal, that it started to impact people's buying behavior, so that cars that were more fuel-efficient started to sell better.
The automobile industry caught onto this, and so they started to make fuel efficiency a design priority. By the late eighties, it was relatively common for smaller vehicles to get 40mpg on the freeway. The whole thing culminated finally during the Clinton administration, when Geo introduced a vehicle that they advertised as "the loophole" to the (proposed) gasoline tax increase. Only, by then, most car buyers had started to think in other directions. OPEC had, due to infighting, largely lost its ability to stay within quota, and other sources of oil had opened up, including Russian oil (remember, the wall came down in the fall of '89, and the curtain followed not long after that). BP had also increased production in the North Sea, and the United States had increased production as well.
In the late eighties and early nineties, vehicle safety ratings started to get a lot of press, and also people started to care more about the amount of space in (and behind) the back seat. It didn't take the automobile industry long to adjust: within a few years, they changed their design priorities. The subcompact car gave way to the midsize sedan. The minivan was introduced, and before long the term "SUV" was coined.
Things could (and probably eventually will) swing back the other direction. But no, the last two decades of automobile development have not focused much on fuel efficiency. (Well, there are the hybrids, but those are sort of a side-line of development that the car companies kept going to hedge their bets. They don't sell hardly any of them compared to regular cars. They're really a niche product.)
> Indy cars, for example, are vastly lighter than any standard American
> cars, and they crash at extremely high speeds with very few fatalities
Indy cars don't drive on regular roads and and participate in collisions involving regular vehicles.
> The problem is that vastly overweight cars are dangerous to other cars on the road.
Yes, exactly.
It's true that weight is definitely not the only or even the most important factor in determining the safety for the occupants of a particular vehicle. But it is *a* factor, and cars don't just drive in a vacuum, on empty roads with no other vehicles.
In the real world, if your car can't take being hit at 65mph by an SUV and still provide some measure of protection for the occupants, it's not safe to drive on the freeway.
> horsepower sells more cars than MPG.
Cup holders, interior space, and separate temperature controls for each seat also sell more cars than MPG.
The main reason for this is basic arithmetic. The gas mileage a car gets has surprisingly little impact on how much it costs to maintain the car. Even if you could save twenty dollars a week on gas, that only adds up to a little over a thousand dollars a year. That sounds like a lot of money, but only until you compare it to what car repairs and insurance cost per year, not to mention the cost of the car itself.
If it were really a priority to make fuel efficiency matter in people's car-buying decisions, the obvious way to do that would be to increase the excise tax on gas, repeatedly, until it permanently drives the prices at the pump up by two or three orders of magnitude. If gas were twelve bucks a gallon, then a 40% savings would start to be worth *real* money, the kind of money people take into consideration when spending thousands of dollars on a vehicle. (Also, if gas were twelve bucks a gallon, it would be economically feasible to make and sell alcohol-based fuels that compete with gas.)
However, promising to do that isn't necessarily a good way to get elected to a federal office. Promising to make the car companies sell cars that use less gas sounds better to most voters.
Personally, I'm not too worried. If the environmentalists have been right about our use of non-renewable resources all along, then it follows that we'll be running out of economical sources of petroleum in a few years anyway, and then supply and demand forces will naturally raise gas prices and the problem will solve itself.
> No, we're in the shitter because our constitution grants a minority party veto power
That's actually a very important protection here.
In some countries, it wouldn't be so important, but those countries all have multiple viable parties. The US is naturally a de facto two-party system, because our demographics just work out that way. (The list of political parties has changed several times in our history, most often because one of the parties split in half, but it never takes more than a couple of elections before we're back to having exactly two relevant parties. The others fade into obscurity very quickly. This is not a coincidence.)
When you only have two parties, you generally have one party that's a majority all by itself. That would be very dangerous if the minority party didn't have any ability to hold them back.
> I'm driving an 11 year old car. It's in great condition, comfortable,
> reliable, safe, gets good gas mileage...why should I replace it?
Because, your neighbors across the street might get a new car, and where would you be then? Playing catch-up, that's where. If you want to stay ahead of them, you have to get your new car first! Also, you want to make sure you get one just a little more expensive than what your neighbors can really afford. That way, *they'll* be trying to catch up with you, and not quite succeeding. That's what it's all about, right?
Right?
(For the record, I don't even own a car.)
> Not only have I purchased better quality, but someone in America was paid for making those T's
That doesn't actually make any difference to the economy. Money doesn't just vanish when it's spent overseas. It always makes its way back, usually sooner rather than later. If that weren't happening, the exchange rates would shift and then it would happen. That's the main advantage of having a fiat currency with floating exchange rates. Every dime you spend overseas is a dime some foreigner is going to spend on your exports. (The downside is, inflation is harder to control than when you're on a specie exchange standard.)
I agree about quality though. If the shirts you're buying last longer, then they're worth more, obviously. That by itself is absolutely a good enough reason to buy them, even if they cost a little more (assuming you're buying for an adult whose shirt size doesn't change often).
There can be other quality issues besides how long something lasts, too. I paid $160 for my last pair of shoes. I've been buying shoes made by a company called SAS (motto, which I swear on Dave Barry's last column that I'm not making up: "Our shoemaking is fifty years behind the times"), and they're darned expensive, but I buy them anyway because they fit better. I have unusually-shaped feet. Most shoes are too narrow across the toes for me, which is painful. I could get shoes for probably around $100 that would last just about as long, by buying four sizes too long in width EEEEEE, but I don't want them. Having shoes that fit reasonably well is worth an extra $60/pair to me, and then some.
Are the shoes made in the US? I don't know, and I don't care.
Microsoft was constantly doing that too. Every time a nice and really useful piece of freeware came along, they started figuring out how they could reproduce it in the next major version of DOS. DOSKEY became DOSEDIT. The third-party "move" freeware became a standard command in DOS 5. NU became undelete in DOS 6. Even Stacker, which was way more trouble than it was worth, became DoubleSpace, which was also way more trouble than it was worth.
> It's one of those hacks that is cool because it's deeply
> wrong, not something that is in any way sensible.
Let me know when they get it working in Lynx. That would be something to see.
(I know about the old aalib port of quake, but IMO running it through a text-mode browser would be going a step further into perverse awesomeness.)
It isn't just names, either. Apostrophes and other special characters show up all kinds of places in data where naive programmers tend to imagine they won't appear. Did you know a less-than symbol can show up in a book title? Oh, yes, and if you aren't doing entity-encoding when you build HTML from the data you will get a surprise. With experience, you eventually learn to write the code so that it will either accept those characters as part of the data and handle them as such, or in cases where that's not desirable (like, say, non-numeric characters in a year field) catch them preemptively and issue a clear error message to the user. SQL injection is a particularly easy thing to fix, because you can just use prepared statements with bound variables, but nearly every program of any size or complexity is going to run into situations where it has to do more complex data checking. User-entered data is going to have stuff in it that you didn't anticipate. Every programmer has to learn this lesson, and most have to learn it repeatedly until they eventually become near-paranoid and borderline obsessive about it.
I was gratified when users came to me complaining that they got an error message about time travel not being permitted. Ha! I *knew* it was a good idea to write a test for the end of an appointment being before the beginning of the same appointment. I don't even want to *think* about the bugs that would have ensued if that data had got into the database. The routine that checks whether a room is free at a certain time wouldn't have handled it correctly, that's for certain.
You're not just paranoid. The data really are out to get you. You have to be ready for them, ready for *anything* they may throw at your code. If you're not careful, they'll get you.
Except that, in most cases, random letters in the ranges a-z and A-Z are not where you're going to find most of your problems. The major sources of bugs that can be uncovered by random data are assumptions that programmers (sometimes subconsciously) make about what the data are going to be like.
The most obvious of these are assumptions like "a newline can't occur in a single-line field" (a mistake web developers often make, because they assume the data are coming from an HTML input element that only allows single-line data; but an attacker can in fact send anything they want in an http request), or "nobody's going to have a single-quote character in their name" (hello, SQL injection attack). This sort of thing is probably not a major factor in Office, because it's common for documents to have those kinds of characters in them. There might be a couple of weird old control characters (like the ASCII NUL, 000), but those bugs were probably found aeons ago.
A second major category of problematic assumptions assumptions has to do with languages and code pages and character sets. When software that was written to assume a particular character set (like ASCII, or Latin-1) or even just one code page at a time (like, whichever one is the system default) has to be extended to support more (like, especially, Unicode), you run into all kinds of nasties. Again, though, Office probably had to deal with these issues a couple of versions ago. They may have found a few more, but at this point it's probably not the most fertile ground any more.
When you're dealing with file formats, however, there are also things like "the value at offset 0x003C from the beginning of the object header contains the size of the object, which can never be more than 0xFFFF" and "an object can embed another object by referencing it, but there are never any circular references, because the software doesn't allow the user to put an object inside itself". These sorts of assumptions pop up every time you write or change code that reads a file format, so they never go away really. This sort of thing is probably *most* of what the Office team found, I suspect.
> take census forms and check them for finger prints?
... don't do ANY of their own paperwork.
How would you determine whose prints are on any given form?
In the first place, there's not a one-to-one relationship between people and forms, since most people live in a household with other people. If there were one form per person, that would lead to a much less accurate census, because more people would decide not to bother.
Even if somehow magically there were a form for every person, you still don't have any way to know whose fingerprints are on it. About a third of the population does not fill out ANY of their own paperwork, ever. They don't file their own taxes, fill out their own applications for government "assistance" (i.e., handouts), don't fill out their own census,
Young people get their mothers to do all that stuff for them (yes, even if their mothers live in a different town). Old people get their kids to do it, or their neighbors, or that nice lady at the library, or anyone else they think they can talk into it. Disabled people get their aides to do it all for them. Some people feel they're too busy for such menial things and just pay somebody to do all their paperwork. Others are afraid to try because they don't know how because they've never done it before, so they whine and plead and beg until someone takes pity on them and just does it. Some people just take it for granted that you always get somebody to do that stuff for you, because that's what their parents always did. Some people can't read (about ten times as many people as will admit it). And of course some people are just lazy. There are a lot of reasons, but they all add up.
The long and short of it is, you can't assume that the fingerprints on the form belong to any of the people whose names are on the form. They very well might not.
> How can anything be worse than emacs? Why bother trying to get worse?
.NET, which has, among other things, pervasive Visual Basic scripting. The VB scripting engine is now so fundamental to VS.NET that the editing features are all implemented in VB (sort of like how the editing features in Emacs are implemented in lisp). It's also now more completely integrated with Exchange, SQL Server, IIS, and Active Directory. For example, source code indentation styles can now be centrally managed in Group Policy. You can even put custom VB.NET code in a GPO, so that everyone's Visual Studio .NET behaves in the same customized manner throughout your entire domain forest.
Apparently you haven't seen the news today. Microsoft announced a beta release of the new Visual Studio
In other news, Glenn Beck has announced that he has secured a major source of funding for his 2012 election campaign, and if he doesn't get the GOP nomination, he'll run for President anyway on an independent ticket. He says he's got some great ideas for how to get people excited about the election, and he wants to start campaigning in earnest as soon as the summer of 2011.
> He's probably thinking of the aardvark, numbat, echidna,
> or pangolin, which are all colloquially known as "anteaters"
> but don't eat ants and aren't in the same family.
Wait, the word "anteater" has another meaning besides being a synonym for "aardvark"?
I did not know that. I've always been under the impression that the two words were different names for the same animal. That thing in the "anteater" article looks more like a sloth. Every drawing of an "anteater" that I've ever seen looks a lot more like an aardvark.
Echidnas DO eat ants, but I've never heard them called "anteaters" until this moment. I don't know much about pangolins, and I've never heard of a numbat until now.
Nah, liquid nitrogen is for wannabes. Liquid helium is a little better, but what you really want is a solid metallic-hydrogen heat pipe...
Apparently vigor wasn't vile enough. vi need a text-editing abomination with more vim. Got to keep up with Microsoft. What shall we call this one? The names viper and elvis are already taken. How about vinegar? vice? violate? vitiate?
37 out of 40 people think they are the 1 person out of 40 who's just fine. 36 of them are mistaken.
Currently I am in the unfortunate position of living in a community that puts NO fluorine in the water, because of the irrational "It's a poison!" argument. Since I've moved here, I've gone from having no dental problems to now having CONSTANT dental problems. (I've started buying fluoride mouth rinse in an attempt to ameliorate the situation, but you can't really use the stuff often enough to make up for not having fluoride in the water.)
But do you know what happens if there's a bit "too much" fluoride in your water supply? Your teeth turn dark yellow, and you get no dental cavities at ALL. The amount needed to pose any significant health risk is much greater than the amount needed to turn your teeth yellow. Consequently, an independent lab test is not required. If your teeth are closer to white than brown, the levels of fluorine in your water are safe.
> The PlayStation 3 is the only product I know that loses features throughout its lifecycle.
Apparently this guy doesn't use Gnome much.