How do people who live in places where a lot of people don't have a car get around that? Get a taxi/rent a truck? Not ever carry large amounts of things?
I hate how in this whole auto debate everyone seems to ignore the Toyota plants in Kentucky and Michigan and the Honda plants in Ohio and Alabama. The Honda plant in my hometown directly or indirectly employs probably a third of my neighbors.
Moreover, both car companies are publicly traded in the US. I have some friends who have made a killing on Toyota stock in recent years.
Yes, GM is owned by America, and its American operations are bigger, but the car companies that actually make good cars are making a fair number of them here, too.
That's great if there's an alternative. For those of us who live out where they have to drive somewhere, the inability to find a parking space is what keeps me away from downtown areas any time I can possibly avoid it.
Sometimes I wish that city centers just had a giant ring of parking garages on the perimeter and no cars allowed beyond that point.
I'm sorry, was the US so incredibly uncivilized for the 150+ years before the government started spending over 30% of our GDP? We're getting close to the portion of our total output that we spent to fight world war II.
You know, when you look at history, this is pretty much what every social/cultural/racial group with enough of a technological or organizational advantage to pull it off has done.
Pretty much the same thing happens in biology.
So why is it a bad thing if you're on the winning side?;-)
What frustrates me is that the right seems to have ceded any form of argument about "so what should we do about it?" to the 'environmentalist' left, and instead attacked the very concept beyond the point of reason.
Ok, so if we assume global warming is happening:
1) Is it on the whole bad thing? you hear all of the likely problems, but no one in the mainstream is talking about the advantages of longer growing seasons in greenland. 2) How much of it can and do we actually control? 3) What are the best ways to combat it? Are there ways to do so without massive government intervention? (or in a way that requires government to have less regulatory power, such as a flat carbon "tax" to add a market pressure for innovation).
Because the liberals are the only ones with a proposed solution, if things finally get to the point where most people agree a solution is needed, theirs is the one we'll be stuck with.
Instead of cursive, anyway. When I got to college they spent our first quarter teaching everyone how to write again.
It's a whole "typeface" (ha) designed entirely to be legible no matter how bad your handwriting is. Sounds like it meets all the modern needs of handwriting pretty well.
I never found any of the "benefits" of cursive to really help me - the extra motion in the letters always canceled out the benefits of a smoother stroke.
The interior of my old titanium powerbook is one of the cleanest bits of engineering I've seen in a laptop. The equivalently-priced xps I use at work is, by comparison, a hack job in cheap plastic.
Doesn't mean the PC doesn't have better specs, though.
Have you ever watched engineers and artists try to mix:) Well, ok, have you ever watched engineers try to mix with anyone? but artists seem to be a special challenge.
I have a few artist friends that I find similar interests to work with, but once you get that next degree of separation to the friends that they made in art school versus the friends I made in engineering, it just gets really awkward:) And if you're really unlucky, someone will bring up Obama or Ron Paul.
It's a great idea if you can make it work, though.
The frustrating part about global warming is that we are presented by our leaders with two solutions: either drastically increase government power and regulation and cripple the economy (and pretend like it won't hurt the economy), or stick our heads in the sand and say it won't happen.
No one wants to talk about tradeoffs, about cost-benefit analysis of what we can do to control (control, not stop) global warming. The world has always been changing temperatures - there is some level of fluctuation that will *not* be more than we can handle. What about market-driven solutions? What about just moving people in FLorida inland a bit? How are we *actually* going to deal with the fact that most of the world doesn't give a shit if the sea level rises five feet if it means that they get to have an energy-driven economy that allows them to eat three times a day?
This false argument of "massive crippling government taxes (or false government taxes that actually end up being a subsidy to energy companies, a la Europe's model)" versus "completely deny that it might exist" isn't helping anyone. There is pretty strong evidence that it is getting warmer. There is decent evidence that it may be impacted at least partially by our output. But no one really knows how bad it's going to be yet... so let's drop the panic attack and see about finding some interim solutions that will only slow down the economy, not slam the brakes so hard we all fly into the windshield.
My point was that we need to continue to develop to keep current with technology. F-16's, F-15's, and F-18's are built on 1970's tech. They have no stealth and worse flight characteristics than the F-22. The F-22 eats their lunch, and so do the newer planes built by the rest of the world. You said we aren't fighting air to air wars any more - I countered that we still need to be prepared to.
Also, the new F-22's aren't just so we can have shiny new planes, but to replace existing F-15's. It's part of a slow replacement of older planes with new planes. If we keep canceling all of our replacement planes, the old F-15 airframes will have to last well past their expiration dates, not to mention the fact that if we *do* get in a war where we need them, we will be relying on tech that was produced before I was born to win. We aren't growing the size of the air force - we're replacing outdated parts.
The only future war that will actually matter will involve a real air force.
Your "future war" is imperialistic peacekeeping - going into a poorly developed country and trying to control it, for good or evil. Saying we don't need air power is like saying that the British empire didn't need cannon, because all of the natives they were subduing only had bows and arrows.
There are a few constants in the history of nations, and one of those is that peace between powers has never lasted longer than a few decades. The countries we are fighting in now will never pose a real threat to America - they can hurt us, but they can't take over our land or our government. Even if the Taliban got their hands on a nuclear bomb, the relative threat to the country as a whole would still be an order of magnitude less than the theoretical threat of a less friendly China, India, Russia, or European Union.
On the micro scale, adapting the armed forces to Iraq and Afghanistan is important, because it improves our ability to achieve our political goals there, and hopefully results in a lot fewer dead GI's. Maybe it'll even reduce the drain on our economy of the whole mess by a bit.
But for the continuance of America as an economic and military power, even as an independent state (which is the root cause of having a military to begin with, I would argue, more so than allowing politicians to overthrow third world despots), we still need to have the capability to take on those who actually have the power to harm us, which means that air superiority matters.
Drones still cannot approach the effectiveness of real planes in air to air combat. They are replacing aircraft for many strike roles, but even then, the flexibility and adaptability just isn't there. They'll be used to complement our air force, but they're a long way away from replacing it.
Still, for dropping 1-2 smart bombs onto a terrorist hideout, they're a much better choice.
My car's ECM, at least, has no idea what time it is.
Yes, there are ways to connect a cell phone call to a driver in many cases. But it seems like in nearly any case where there is more than one person in the car, it would be a very difficult case to prove.
Not to mention the fact that even if someone was talking a cell phone and it was distracting them, in most cases that is irrelevant to determining fault in an accident. It's the swerving out of your lane or a failure to yield that was the actual cause of the accident - and they can prove that whether you had a cell or not. If we start demonizing cell phone usage in legal terms, we'll hit the wonderful place we are now regarding drunk driving - where if you are barely legally intoxicated and someone else blatantly violates traffic law, you will often still be found at fault because you were "recklessly" driving drunk.
I just think this is a problem best solved through education, not more make-work for traffic cops.
You'd have the time of the call, and the cell phone. Do you know *exactly* when the crash occurred? Do you know who else was in the car? A defense lawyer can punch a million holes in this argument.
From my personal experience as a student: have everyone work on the same problem, on their own computer, in "groups" where they are encouraged to bounce questions off of each other at will. This has always been in my experience the best way to code almost anything. There is no substitute for having someone with whom you can easily go "hey, wait, this doesn't make sense, what do you think" any time you get stuck.
You get all the experience of doing the code completely yourself, all the logical benefits of working through problems with a partner like in pair coding, and none of the boredom of having to wait while someone writes out their method declarations. Just get the kids skype and make them write their programs at the same time.
In has been my strong experience that pair coding is only helpful for conceptually difficult code - it isn't that useful to have someone catch your syntax errors, that's what the compiler is for. But it is also useful to have a second mind available at any moment when you just aren't sure of the way of something.
And I will never argue that careful cross breeding can't improve a dog. I'm just arguing that getting a mix automatically doesn't really mean anything in and of itself in terms of health. I mean, that's how all new breeds were created to begin with.
How are you going to *enforce* it. It's not even something like drunk driving where you can give the guy a blood test and find out if he's been drinking. It'd be damn near impossible to prove that that specific person was on the phone at the moment of the accident, unless the phone gets embedded in their cheek.
Moreover, what of the dangers of eating and driving? Of having two kids arguing in the backseat? What about dropping a cigarette (my mom was hit by someone who did that). When are we going to stop trying to ban the possible dangerous behavior and just make people responsible for their actions.
I'm all for public awareness campaigns - parents come down hard on your kids about driving, push it in all driving schools, whatever. But any law I can see being passed is just for publicity and some more money to the traffic officer retirement funds.
It's because being "behind" in these things always means more regulation, more laws, more taxes, more control ceded to a federal authority. There are trade-offs, trade-offs that are unfortunately skewed by the fact that the self-interest of those designing government programs in no way coincides with the interests of those whom the laws effect.
We're behind in health-care in efficiency and global availability, but we lead the world by a wide margin in the quality of the best care and research into new and better treatments.
Education here is fucked up - but not as bad as people think it is, and not when you take into account the fact that most countries track people into vocational fields much earlier. And none of the people I think you mean are voting in the only likely way to improve it, which is to give some real competition in the form of vouchers. No Child Left Behind, the most destructive piece of education policy in recent history, was a strongly bi-partisan affair.
We also lead the world in gun freedom, are fairly far up there in protection of freedom of speech, and pay a lower percentage of our income in taxes than most of Europe. I'm no hugely patriotic guy - but I get a little sick of the 'why are we so far behind Europe' crap. If the dangers of talking on a cell phone are not bad enough to convince people not to do it, what makes you think that the off chance that a cop sees you through your window (assuming there is a cop - and we have to either hire more traffic cops or take people off of real crime) and gives you a ticket is going to convince people to stop? If this ever gets passed, it'll be just one more source of income for the local police department.
I love mutts (they are all I have ever owned, as we've always gotten shelter dogs) but this sentiment (common though it is) is complete bullshit.
The majority of our mutts have had the same hip, joint, and elbow problems that people complain about in purebreds. Why? Since they were accidents, there were no genetic checks for whether the parents had those diseases, no care to make sure that recessive traits were not combined, and no thought whatsoever as to whether the parents were good specimens of the breed or genetic rejects. These are all things that every responsible breeder, who loves their dogs and cares about the future of the breed, checks before they create an puppies.
Yes, there are a ton of problems with purebreds - mostly because people buy purebred dogs based on how cute they look as puppies, and from pet stores. This means they are a) encouraging commercial breeders to select for cuteness as puppies instead of overall health of the dog (this is a problem in some small breeds, who can have eyes that are barely attached because big eyes are "cute") and b) purchasing breeds without any connection to the breeder, so they have no idea whether they made good choices in breeding the dog or not.
Most of the distorted, unhealthy purebreds you see in the various exposes on bad purebreds are dogs that the major members of the breed clubs would never have bred.
Now, there's a whole separate argument of how much the AKC works to defend careful breeders and how much it represents the commercial puppy mills, but that's not the industry as a whole. In general, in Europe the breed clubs mandate testing for most genetic concerns.
The whole point of good breeding is to limit the bad genes in the available gene pool - whether those genes select for behavior, health, or appearance. Many breeders are working very hard to eliminate diseases from the better lines in their breed, and some have been quite successful.
A mutt just means you are getting random genetics instead of hand-picked ones. If you have a good person doing the picking, you're actually less likely to have problems.
As for the base idea in this article - it is really so expensive to train drug dogs that it is not cheaper to spend $1k each for decently bred dogs and have 70% of them wash out than to spend more than 100 times that on the dogs themselves?
I really loved the system they have set up at ACCAD at Ohio State. They had some clustering software running on all of the workstations that could take it over when it wasn't in use. So you had a very nice computer lab and a render farm all rolled into one. And as a user you could set how much you wanted to share while you were working - so if you were just web browsing, the second core could be churning away on someone's render, but if you were using Maya yourself you could have it all to yourself.
I really wish I remember what the software was, and I'm sure this is a common arrangement at these sorts of facilities, but I remember being impressed at the execution of it.
Seriously. I would absolutely love it if I could buy every game that EA or Ubisoft or Sierra has ever published for $5-$20 over a downloadable service. Obviously there is a market for cheap used games - for anything that can be made digital (reducing your distribution costs to near zero) why not put it out there and let people buy it for cheap?
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How do people who live in places where a lot of people don't have a car get around that? Get a taxi/rent a truck? Not ever carry large amounts of things?
I hate how in this whole auto debate everyone seems to ignore the Toyota plants in Kentucky and Michigan and the Honda plants in Ohio and Alabama. The Honda plant in my hometown directly or indirectly employs probably a third of my neighbors.
Moreover, both car companies are publicly traded in the US. I have some friends who have made a killing on Toyota stock in recent years.
Yes, GM is owned by America, and its American operations are bigger, but the car companies that actually make good cars are making a fair number of them here, too.
That's great if there's an alternative. For those of us who live out where they have to drive somewhere, the inability to find a parking space is what keeps me away from downtown areas any time I can possibly avoid it.
Sometimes I wish that city centers just had a giant ring of parking garages on the perimeter and no cars allowed beyond that point.
I'm sorry, was the US so incredibly uncivilized for the 150+ years before the government started spending over 30% of our GDP? We're getting close to the portion of our total output that we spent to fight world war II.
http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/us_20th_century_chart.html
You know, when you look at history, this is pretty much what every social/cultural/racial group with enough of a technological or organizational advantage to pull it off has done.
Pretty much the same thing happens in biology.
So why is it a bad thing if you're on the winning side? ;-)
What frustrates me is that the right seems to have ceded any form of argument about "so what should we do about it?" to the 'environmentalist' left, and instead attacked the very concept beyond the point of reason.
Ok, so if we assume global warming is happening:
1) Is it on the whole bad thing? you hear all of the likely problems, but no one in the mainstream is talking about the advantages of longer growing seasons in greenland.
2) How much of it can and do we actually control?
3) What are the best ways to combat it? Are there ways to do so without massive government intervention? (or in a way that requires government to have less regulatory power, such as a flat carbon "tax" to add a market pressure for innovation).
Because the liberals are the only ones with a proposed solution, if things finally get to the point where most people agree a solution is needed, theirs is the one we'll be stuck with.
Instead of cursive, anyway. When I got to college they spent our first quarter teaching everyone how to write again.
It's a whole "typeface" (ha) designed entirely to be legible no matter how bad your handwriting is. Sounds like it meets all the modern needs of handwriting pretty well.
I never found any of the "benefits" of cursive to really help me - the extra motion in the letters always canceled out the benefits of a smoother stroke.
The interior of my old titanium powerbook is one of the cleanest bits of engineering I've seen in a laptop. The equivalently-priced xps I use at work is, by comparison, a hack job in cheap plastic.
Doesn't mean the PC doesn't have better specs, though.
Have you ever watched engineers and artists try to mix :) Well, ok, have you ever watched engineers try to mix with anyone? but artists seem to be a special challenge.
I have a few artist friends that I find similar interests to work with, but once you get that next degree of separation to the friends that they made in art school versus the friends I made in engineering, it just gets really awkward :) And if you're really unlucky, someone will bring up Obama or Ron Paul.
It's a great idea if you can make it work, though.
The frustrating part about global warming is that we are presented by our leaders with two solutions: either drastically increase government power and regulation and cripple the economy (and pretend like it won't hurt the economy), or stick our heads in the sand and say it won't happen.
No one wants to talk about tradeoffs, about cost-benefit analysis of what we can do to control (control, not stop) global warming. The world has always been changing temperatures - there is some level of fluctuation that will *not* be more than we can handle. What about market-driven solutions? What about just moving people in FLorida inland a bit? How are we *actually* going to deal with the fact that most of the world doesn't give a shit if the sea level rises five feet if it means that they get to have an energy-driven economy that allows them to eat three times a day?
This false argument of "massive crippling government taxes (or false government taxes that actually end up being a subsidy to energy companies, a la Europe's model)" versus "completely deny that it might exist" isn't helping anyone. There is pretty strong evidence that it is getting warmer. There is decent evidence that it may be impacted at least partially by our output. But no one really knows how bad it's going to be yet... so let's drop the panic attack and see about finding some interim solutions that will only slow down the economy, not slam the brakes so hard we all fly into the windshield.
My point was that we need to continue to develop to keep current with technology. F-16's, F-15's, and F-18's are built on 1970's tech. They have no stealth and worse flight characteristics than the F-22. The F-22 eats their lunch, and so do the newer planes built by the rest of the world. You said we aren't fighting air to air wars any more - I countered that we still need to be prepared to.
Also, the new F-22's aren't just so we can have shiny new planes, but to replace existing F-15's. It's part of a slow replacement of older planes with new planes. If we keep canceling all of our replacement planes, the old F-15 airframes will have to last well past their expiration dates, not to mention the fact that if we *do* get in a war where we need them, we will be relying on tech that was produced before I was born to win. We aren't growing the size of the air force - we're replacing outdated parts.
The only future war that will actually matter will involve a real air force.
Your "future war" is imperialistic peacekeeping - going into a poorly developed country and trying to control it, for good or evil. Saying we don't need air power is like saying that the British empire didn't need cannon, because all of the natives they were subduing only had bows and arrows.
There are a few constants in the history of nations, and one of those is that peace between powers has never lasted longer than a few decades. The countries we are fighting in now will never pose a real threat to America - they can hurt us, but they can't take over our land or our government. Even if the Taliban got their hands on a nuclear bomb, the relative threat to the country as a whole would still be an order of magnitude less than the theoretical threat of a less friendly China, India, Russia, or European Union.
On the micro scale, adapting the armed forces to Iraq and Afghanistan is important, because it improves our ability to achieve our political goals there, and hopefully results in a lot fewer dead GI's. Maybe it'll even reduce the drain on our economy of the whole mess by a bit.
But for the continuance of America as an economic and military power, even as an independent state (which is the root cause of having a military to begin with, I would argue, more so than allowing politicians to overthrow third world despots), we still need to have the capability to take on those who actually have the power to harm us, which means that air superiority matters.
Drones still cannot approach the effectiveness of real planes in air to air combat. They are replacing aircraft for many strike roles, but even then, the flexibility and adaptability just isn't there. They'll be used to complement our air force, but they're a long way away from replacing it.
Still, for dropping 1-2 smart bombs onto a terrorist hideout, they're a much better choice.
Is there a list adjusted for per capita gdp?
My car's ECM, at least, has no idea what time it is.
Yes, there are ways to connect a cell phone call to a driver in many cases. But it seems like in nearly any case where there is more than one person in the car, it would be a very difficult case to prove.
Not to mention the fact that even if someone was talking a cell phone and it was distracting them, in most cases that is irrelevant to determining fault in an accident. It's the swerving out of your lane or a failure to yield that was the actual cause of the accident - and they can prove that whether you had a cell or not. If we start demonizing cell phone usage in legal terms, we'll hit the wonderful place we are now regarding drunk driving - where if you are barely legally intoxicated and someone else blatantly violates traffic law, you will often still be found at fault because you were "recklessly" driving drunk.
I just think this is a problem best solved through education, not more make-work for traffic cops.
Which means that he should have been tried in a court of law with a jury, and the prosecution should have had to prove that he did have he money.
Just because we think someone is an asshole should not mean we get to imprison them.
You'd have the time of the call, and the cell phone. Do you know *exactly* when the crash occurred? Do you know who else was in the car? A defense lawyer can punch a million holes in this argument.
From my personal experience as a student: have everyone work on the same problem, on their own computer, in "groups" where they are encouraged to bounce questions off of each other at will. This has always been in my experience the best way to code almost anything. There is no substitute for having someone with whom you can easily go "hey, wait, this doesn't make sense, what do you think" any time you get stuck.
You get all the experience of doing the code completely yourself, all the logical benefits of working through problems with a partner like in pair coding, and none of the boredom of having to wait while someone writes out their method declarations. Just get the kids skype and make them write their programs at the same time.
In has been my strong experience that pair coding is only helpful for conceptually difficult code - it isn't that useful to have someone catch your syntax errors, that's what the compiler is for. But it is also useful to have a second mind available at any moment when you just aren't sure of the way of something.
And I will never argue that careful cross breeding can't improve a dog. I'm just arguing that getting a mix automatically doesn't really mean anything in and of itself in terms of health. I mean, that's how all new breeds were created to begin with.
How are you going to *enforce* it. It's not even something like drunk driving where you can give the guy a blood test and find out if he's been drinking. It'd be damn near impossible to prove that that specific person was on the phone at the moment of the accident, unless the phone gets embedded in their cheek.
Moreover, what of the dangers of eating and driving? Of having two kids arguing in the backseat? What about dropping a cigarette (my mom was hit by someone who did that). When are we going to stop trying to ban the possible dangerous behavior and just make people responsible for their actions.
I'm all for public awareness campaigns - parents come down hard on your kids about driving, push it in all driving schools, whatever. But any law I can see being passed is just for publicity and some more money to the traffic officer retirement funds.
It's because being "behind" in these things always means more regulation, more laws, more taxes, more control ceded to a federal authority. There are trade-offs, trade-offs that are unfortunately skewed by the fact that the self-interest of those designing government programs in no way coincides with the interests of those whom the laws effect.
We're behind in health-care in efficiency and global availability, but we lead the world by a wide margin in the quality of the best care and research into new and better treatments.
Education here is fucked up - but not as bad as people think it is, and not when you take into account the fact that most countries track people into vocational fields much earlier. And none of the people I think you mean are voting in the only likely way to improve it, which is to give some real competition in the form of vouchers. No Child Left Behind, the most destructive piece of education policy in recent history, was a strongly bi-partisan affair.
We also lead the world in gun freedom, are fairly far up there in protection of freedom of speech, and pay a lower percentage of our income in taxes than most of Europe. I'm no hugely patriotic guy - but I get a little sick of the 'why are we so far behind Europe' crap. If the dangers of talking on a cell phone are not bad enough to convince people not to do it, what makes you think that the off chance that a cop sees you through your window (assuming there is a cop - and we have to either hire more traffic cops or take people off of real crime) and gives you a ticket is going to convince people to stop? If this ever gets passed, it'll be just one more source of income for the local police department.
I love mutts (they are all I have ever owned, as we've always gotten shelter dogs) but this sentiment (common though it is) is complete bullshit.
The majority of our mutts have had the same hip, joint, and elbow problems that people complain about in purebreds. Why? Since they were accidents, there were no genetic checks for whether the parents had those diseases, no care to make sure that recessive traits were not combined, and no thought whatsoever as to whether the parents were good specimens of the breed or genetic rejects. These are all things that every responsible breeder, who loves their dogs and cares about the future of the breed, checks before they create an puppies.
Yes, there are a ton of problems with purebreds - mostly because people buy purebred dogs based on how cute they look as puppies, and from pet stores. This means they are a) encouraging commercial breeders to select for cuteness as puppies instead of overall health of the dog (this is a problem in some small breeds, who can have eyes that are barely attached because big eyes are "cute") and b) purchasing breeds without any connection to the breeder, so they have no idea whether they made good choices in breeding the dog or not.
Most of the distorted, unhealthy purebreds you see in the various exposes on bad purebreds are dogs that the major members of the breed clubs would never have bred.
Now, there's a whole separate argument of how much the AKC works to defend careful breeders and how much it represents the commercial puppy mills, but that's not the industry as a whole. In general, in Europe the breed clubs mandate testing for most genetic concerns.
The whole point of good breeding is to limit the bad genes in the available gene pool - whether those genes select for behavior, health, or appearance. Many breeders are working very hard to eliminate diseases from the better lines in their breed, and some have been quite successful.
A mutt just means you are getting random genetics instead of hand-picked ones. If you have a good person doing the picking, you're actually less likely to have problems.
As for the base idea in this article - it is really so expensive to train drug dogs that it is not cheaper to spend $1k each for decently bred dogs and have 70% of them wash out than to spend more than 100 times that on the dogs themselves?
I really loved the system they have set up at ACCAD at Ohio State. They had some clustering software running on all of the workstations that could take it over when it wasn't in use. So you had a very nice computer lab and a render farm all rolled into one. And as a user you could set how much you wanted to share while you were working - so if you were just web browsing, the second core could be churning away on someone's render, but if you were using Maya yourself you could have it all to yourself.
I really wish I remember what the software was, and I'm sure this is a common arrangement at these sorts of facilities, but I remember being impressed at the execution of it.
Why do you need 100 plates when you can fit the algorithm on a t-shirt?
Seriously. I would absolutely love it if I could buy every game that EA or Ubisoft or Sierra has ever published for $5-$20 over a downloadable service. Obviously there is a market for cheap used games - for anything that can be made digital (reducing your distribution costs to near zero) why not put it out there and let people buy it for cheap?