GM cars are crap for mileage. Even the tiny Aveo gets crap mileage.. my Nissan Sentra from 1984 got 10mpg better than that car does.. and Aveo's not actually MADE in the USA! A model T gets 25mpg... and weighed close to a minivan, in 100 years we haven't done better?
I'm going a bit off-topic here, but looking around, Ford claims that the Model T was 20HP and had a max speed of 45mph. 13-21MPG. (Still better than some cars these days.)
Model T's were 1200LB (same source as above). Wikipedia lists the Toyota Corolla's curb weight nearly double that at 2304LB, yet my dad's gets over 40MPG. (Mostly used for highway driving.) We get similar for the Tercel. Of course, those are both Toyotas.
We should certainly be doing a lot better, I'll agree, but there are a lot of differences between the Model T and modern vehicles that help counter gains in engine efficiency. These days most people drive automatics, which hurts mileage. People drive faster. People want more horsepower. People want air conditioning. And sadly, a lot of people want really big vehicles.
There is a qualitative difference between monitoring phone numbers of international calls, and monitoring data of local calls and local internet traffic.
I sincerely don't understand why so many Americans think that right and wrong stop at the US border.
Haven't you read the Declaration of Independence? 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men who live in United States are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights...'
One of the rights, as later explained in the Constitution, is the freedom from unwarranted search.
It would be a false dichotomy if it were presented as a dichotomy. But it wasn't, so it's not.
Why not make it so that all cars have to have a minimum MPG of much more than 35MPG?
I explained quite plainly why. You can complain that the number should be higher, but why setting a minimum is the worst of the two options we've discussed has already been stated. "These aren't the only two choices, so why not do the worse of these two?" is kind of a dumb question.:-)
It's totally insignificant.
No. It's totally achievable and not very stringent, but it's significants is measured against how well we would do without the change, not how well it's possible to do. This is a significant improvement. Ignoring the I85 nonsense, it's a 27% improvement, assuming car companies (and consumers) won't freely go far beyond the minimum required--and they sure don't seem to be.
There's no reason even a big SUV shouldn't be able to exceed 35MPG.
You mean other than physics, technology costs, and the like?
Unfortunately, while 35MPG sounds good the bill is little more than a whitewash, with a loophole large enough to drive an SUV through. Apparently once again the 35MPG is a "fleet" standard, so not every vehicle has to meet it as long as the fleet as a whole does.
That's not a loophole. That's an intelligent, effective solution. In order to meet the standards, car companies can either improve all cars to X MPG (very expensive) or subsidise high-MPG vehicles, thus allowing people to get large vehicles if they really want and making it easier for low-income people to get fuel-efficient vehicles. Both solutions have the same effect on emissions, yet the latter does so without taking away people's freedom to drive a ridiculously massive SUV and with the added bonus of rewarding people for buying fuel-efficient vehicles.
Option 0: Don't use a search engine, do get privacy. Privacy for free, by default.
Option 1: In exchange for surrendering some privacy, you get to use a quality search engine only marginally annoying ads.
Nothing is free. When a car dealership provides you with oil changes for life, the cost is built into the price. The only difference is what you perceive to be the baseline price (and, yes, the default). If you don't like the idea of being charged for privacy, think of it as not being paid for giving up your privacy. They're the same thing.
I don't think he was saying he leaked like that with one or two tabs. It was that he's not one of the people with one or two tabs and that he keeps it open for a long time, though admittedly he didn't really say he had more tabs--just that he left it open, and that it grows to gigabytes 'in short order'.
I was considering calling his claim 'bull' tantamount to saying he's lying. It could just mean he's mistaken, of course, so I was being a it unfair there.
Right now, memory usage (perhaps not leaks--I don't really know) is the only issue that annoys me about Firefox more than it does on other browsers, and nothing makes me happier than them putting so much emphasis on improving that. (Of course, this is partly because I can use (often leaky) extensions to deal with any the other deficiencies.)
This is also a very old bug, but even the newer comments are finding >1GB in memory (or memory+swap): https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=51028 -- This is when loading massive testcases, however.
We know it's very possible for Firefox to break 1GB. Sometimes it's even reasonable for such a thing to occur. Sometimes it's not. Seems immature and counter-productive to declare that anyone who says they experience this is lying just because they don't put enough effort into helping us fix it.
I don't know what MikeBabcock is doing (and, yeah, if 'gigabytes' means 2+, I'm a bit sceptical, largely because it's quite unusual to have that much), but I don't have much cause to doubt his claim. Maybe he has Firebug or another memory-hogging extension installed (not Firefox's fault). Maybe he's browsing large photos or intense AJAX apps. When I want to use YouTube or browse photos on Flickr, I always open another browser, because otherwise I'll have to restart Firefox when it swells to using half my memory and that again in swap. If I had 2GB of memory, I suspect it would use more than 1GB. If I give it that much cache, I think it probably should. Unused memory is wasted memory. Unfortunately, setting config.trim_on_minimise=true and minimising only temporarily seems to release the memory, and doesn't release the swap.
stating FF leaks memory is worse than wrong: it's a malicious attack
That's strange. All over people are praising that over 300 leaks have been fixed in Gecko 1.9 (Firefox 2 -> Firefox 3). So the current release has (or had--minor releases fix some) 300+ leaks, but it's worse than wrong to say it leaks memory?
The newest versions might not leak much, but we've had some maor leaks in the not-too-distant past. Gecko 1.8 (1.7?) had a huge leak that actually made me switch to Opera for the most part until it was fixed. ( https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=241518 ) That was a bit over a year ago, but there are obviously other, lesser leaks. Yes, most of the major problems are features (fbcache), memory fragmentation, or extensions, but there are still issues. For most of what I do, Firefox is good enough. If I spent all day browsing Flickr, I don't think it would be--certainly not under my current configuration + extensions. And that's a darn shame, because no other browser can match it, as far as I'm concerned.
I leave FF on all the time since I'm running an AJAX app that updates all the time.
Um, I wonder where all that memory's going...
If keeping an AJAX app open for a long time increases the memory usage, that's what is known as a memory leak, which is precisely the sort of bug we're claiming exists and that you seem to be rolling your eyes at. 'Oh, that's not a bug--AJAX apps have to keep every past request in memory!' No, they don't. There's no reason to, and if Firefox does (it doesn't, as best I can tell--but Firebug does) then that's a bigger bug than the eventListener bug in Gecko 1.8(?) (which caused me to start using Opera as my primary browser while awaiting a bugfix).
Good job, you got him. Those hundred of people reporting 1GB+ memory usage with Firefox were all Microsoft shills and Opera fanboys. Thank you for your anecdotal proof. You've done OSS a great service with your mighty debunking powers, sir!
Firefox never takes 1GB of RAM on my laptop either, so I always figured all these people reporting problems were lying. Okay, sure, I only have 512MB, and Firefox will occasionally take around 300MB (+>200MB swap), even while competing with numerous other applications, but the only way I could picture Firefox taking 1GB of memory would be if a person had a different system than me, and we all know that's bull, right? Everyone runs the same OS and applications, visits the same web pages, has the same hardware, keeps the same cache/fastback/etc. configuration...no possible way people could have a different experience than us. If they dispute this, they're lying, plain and simple!
An internet-only source is inherently less credible because it allows any Tom, Dick or Harry with an internet connection to edit it.
Really? I think I'm going to head over to Whitehouse.gov and fix up a few errors (read: lies). Then I think I'll inform Amazon.com that I'm the actual author of the Harry Potter books. (Okay, the Whitehouse isn't Internet-only, I guess, but even most that are aren't wikiwikiwebs.)
I realised I should probably be using the originals, but I mostly played Aquanoid, I tried Arkanoid and Breakout (DOS ports, or possibly samely-named clone), but didn't like them much, so the name faded from memory. Actually, the first one I really played was 'Bricks' in the mid-to-late-80s.
3.) If you're really so up your own ass as to actually believe Pong is the best game ever, what do you suggest for a future title? How many balls and paddles can you add before you've totally exhaust the third-person-timewaste platform and we're having the same discussion?
See, that's the thing: we don't evaluate games on the potential for sequels. We evaluate them on how much we enjoy playing the game itself, and for how long they stay enjoyable. I guess.that's why we're not in marketing.
Personally, I was never a huge fan of Pong, but Aquanoid and the like are essentially Pong and I found them great fun. I think Tetris may have them all beat, though.
If I'm interpreting their statistics correctly--and it's possible that I'm not--the overall number of lawsuits has dropped by 50%, but the overall cost of settlements has only dropped 23%. This suggests to me that although the incidence of lawsuits was substantially reduced, the cost per lawsuit rose quite a bit.
I'd expect people to be more willing to accept 'Oops, sorry, I screwed up' for minor errors than for major life-changing mistakes.
You're right that they need to narrow it down to individual doctors. If it's that some doctors apologise more effectively, then admitting to the error may be irrational for some. If it's that pretty much any doctor will get a reduced cost overall, it's not. From the information provided, we can't tell which. I suspect it's a bit of each.
Yahoo! did this when they purchased Geocities--non-exclusive rights to all our content--and we all got quite upset about it. I did, anyway, and I know I wasn't alone Google has Google Pages, which I believe is essentially the same as Geocities, just, you know, a googol times better.
I hated it when Yahoo! did this, and I hate it when Google does it.
There may be important differences, of course. It's been a long time.
The TLC claims that the technology will not be used to invade drivers' privacy but will provide real-time maps and help passengers recover lost property.
Oh, well okay then. If the government promises not to abuse its power then we should trust it.
Yes, the ACLU isn't defending the Second Amendment the way I'd like it defended. Neither is the International Red Cross or the EFF. None of them are fighting against it, though. I'm perfectly happy to support a group that fights for nine of the first ten amendments so long as they don't fight against the other one. I'm not going to forgo defending most of my rights to spite a group for failing to deal with one of them. That would just be childish. Take a portion of what you'd give the ACLU and give it to the NRA. A portion. Not all.
Absolutely true, but they don't just consider the number of people. They consider a huge number of variables, some out of our control and some not. They can lower those percentages by not insuring people over the age of fifty (that's bad), or by paying people to not smoke (that's good).
If it's guaranteed that one person will get a $100 000 bill, you're right. In health insurance, it's not. It's a 0.1% chance for each person that they'll get a $100 000 bill. If someone has the ability to cut their risk in half, down to to a 0.05% risk, (without increasing anyone else's risk in the process), that will lower the over all cost by $50.
What we're talking about is offering people willing to do that some money. Could pay them $50, thus breaking even. Could pay them $40 and lower everyone's premium by one cent. By paying me $40 to lower my own risk, everyone has saved money, not just me.
Doing such and such changes the cost by $X. This system internalises the externalities, and that's a Very Good Thing. (Clearly we should only be doing this when someone can lower their risk.)
(Yes, the article [or summary--didn't read TFA] talks about charging people for raising their risk instead of paying them to lower it, but it gives exactly the same results, ignoring any psychological reactions to perceived differences and however that will effect behaviour. Economists like to pretend we're perfectly rational beings, but we really aren't. Present it as a carrot instead of a stick and it should work well.)
So if sick people need to pay more than healthy people, what's the point of having insurance? Healthy people then shouldn't need to pay anything, as they aren't costing anyoen anything. And sick people should pay everything, as only they need it.
No health insurance: The guy with cancer pays millions. The guy in perfect health pays nothing. The graph is not just hills and valleys, but mile-high peaks and mile-deep crevasses.
Same premiums for everyone: The guy with cancer pays X. The guy in perfect health pays X. The graph is a flat line.
Higher premiums for risky people: The guy with cancer pays X and the guy with perfect health pays Y < X. The graph is has hills and valleys, but it's fairly flat.
You're question is how anything other than #2 could be better than #1. Don't ignore the middle ground presented by #3. Raising my premiums by fifty dollars a month because I'm at high risk for cancer is an inconvenience, but still a far, far cry from charging me the full millions of dollars for my treatment could end up costing. The question is whether it's better than option #1. I don't know if it is, but I can see how it could be.
If I want to engage in risky behaviour under system #1, my deterrent is that it might end up hurting my health. If I want to engage in risky behaviour under system #3, my deterrent is that it might end up hurting my health and it's certain to hurt me financially. We get the benefit of #2 (if I can afford a slightly higher premium, I can do dangerous stuff and still get health care) and the benefit of #1 (I should some of the financial burden for my choices, thus reducing the burden of people who don't do risky stuff, and reducing the likelihood of me doing risky stuff.
My fear, of course, would be that as we get better at predicting risks, the insurance companies would refine the payments to the point where health insurance premiums match your health costs almost perfectly. At that point, yes, system #2 has become identical to #1. But we're not close to that yet, and a little bit of regulation can keep us from going there at all.
(I know this post is clumsily put together. Sorry.)
Here's something that might go wrong for Diebold: The media could stop completely ignoring the reports and inform the millions of people with their heads still in the sand.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm going a bit off-topic here, but looking around, Ford claims that the Model T was 20HP and had a max speed of 45mph. 13-21MPG. (Still better than some cars these days.)
Model T's were 1200LB (same source as above). Wikipedia lists the Toyota Corolla's curb weight nearly double that at 2304LB, yet my dad's gets over 40MPG. (Mostly used for highway driving.) We get similar for the Tercel. Of course, those are both Toyotas.
We should certainly be doing a lot better, I'll agree, but there are a lot of differences between the Model T and modern vehicles that help counter gains in engine efficiency. These days most people drive automatics, which hurts mileage. People drive faster. People want more horsepower. People want air conditioning. And sadly, a lot of people want really big vehicles.
Haven't you read the Declaration of Independence? 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men who live in United States are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights...'
One of the rights, as later explained in the Constitution, is the freedom from unwarranted search.
But those aren't the only two possible solutions.
I didn't suggest they were.
I call false dichotomy.
It would be a false dichotomy if it were presented as a dichotomy. But it wasn't, so it's not.
Why not make it so that all cars have to have a minimum MPG of much more than 35MPG?
I explained quite plainly why. You can complain that the number should be higher, but why setting a minimum is the worst of the two options we've discussed has already been stated. "These aren't the only two choices, so why not do the worse of these two?" is kind of a dumb question. :-)
It's totally insignificant.
No. It's totally achievable and not very stringent, but it's significants is measured against how well we would do without the change, not how well it's possible to do. This is a significant improvement. Ignoring the I85 nonsense, it's a 27% improvement, assuming car companies (and consumers) won't freely go far beyond the minimum required--and they sure don't seem to be.
There's no reason even a big SUV shouldn't be able to exceed 35MPG.
You mean other than physics, technology costs, and the like?
That's not a loophole. That's an intelligent, effective solution. In order to meet the standards, car companies can either improve all cars to X MPG (very expensive) or subsidise high-MPG vehicles, thus allowing people to get large vehicles if they really want and making it easier for low-income people to get fuel-efficient vehicles. Both solutions have the same effect on emissions, yet the latter does so without taking away people's freedom to drive a ridiculously massive SUV and with the added bonus of rewarding people for buying fuel-efficient vehicles.
I do think the E85 part should be removed.
Option 0: Don't use a search engine, do get privacy. Privacy for free, by default.
Option 1: In exchange for surrendering some privacy, you get to use a quality search engine only marginally annoying ads.
Nothing is free. When a car dealership provides you with oil changes for life, the cost is built into the price. The only difference is what you perceive to be the baseline price (and, yes, the default). If you don't like the idea of being charged for privacy, think of it as not being paid for giving up your privacy. They're the same thing.
Those services offered something like 2MB until Google provided real competition.
I don't think he was saying he leaked like that with one or two tabs. It was that he's not one of the people with one or two tabs and that he keeps it open for a long time, though admittedly he didn't really say he had more tabs--just that he left it open, and that it grows to gigabytes 'in short order'.
I was considering calling his claim 'bull' tantamount to saying he's lying. It could just mean he's mistaken, of course, so I was being a it unfair there.
Right now, memory usage (perhaps not leaks--I don't really know) is the only issue that annoys me about Firefox more than it does on other browsers, and nothing makes me happier than them putting so much emphasis on improving that. (Of course, this is partly because I can use (often leaky) extensions to deal with any the other deficiencies.)
We know it's very possible for Firefox to break 1GB. Sometimes it's even reasonable for such a thing to occur. Sometimes it's not. Seems immature and counter-productive to declare that anyone who says they experience this is lying just because they don't put enough effort into helping us fix it.
I don't know what MikeBabcock is doing (and, yeah, if 'gigabytes' means 2+, I'm a bit sceptical, largely because it's quite unusual to have that much), but I don't have much cause to doubt his claim. Maybe he has Firebug or another memory-hogging extension installed (not Firefox's fault). Maybe he's browsing large photos or intense AJAX apps. When I want to use YouTube or browse photos on Flickr, I always open another browser, because otherwise I'll have to restart Firefox when it swells to using half my memory and that again in swap. If I had 2GB of memory, I suspect it would use more than 1GB. If I give it that much cache, I think it probably should. Unused memory is wasted memory. Unfortunately, setting config.trim_on_minimise=true and minimising only temporarily seems to release the memory, and doesn't release the swap.
That's strange. All over people are praising that over 300 leaks have been fixed in Gecko 1.9 (Firefox 2 -> Firefox 3). So the current release has (or had--minor releases fix some) 300+ leaks, but it's worse than wrong to say it leaks memory?
The newest versions might not leak much, but we've had some maor leaks in the not-too-distant past. Gecko 1.8 (1.7?) had a huge leak that actually made me switch to Opera for the most part until it was fixed. ( https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=241518 ) That was a bit over a year ago, but there are obviously other, lesser leaks. Yes, most of the major problems are features (fbcache), memory fragmentation, or extensions, but there are still issues. For most of what I do, Firefox is good enough. If I spent all day browsing Flickr, I don't think it would be--certainly not under my current configuration + extensions. And that's a darn shame, because no other browser can match it, as far as I'm concerned.
If keeping an AJAX app open for a long time increases the memory usage, that's what is known as a memory leak, which is precisely the sort of bug we're claiming exists and that you seem to be rolling your eyes at. 'Oh, that's not a bug--AJAX apps have to keep every past request in memory!' No, they don't. There's no reason to, and if Firefox does (it doesn't, as best I can tell--but Firebug does) then that's a bigger bug than the eventListener bug in Gecko 1.8(?) (which caused me to start using Opera as my primary browser while awaiting a bugfix).
Good job, you got him. Those hundred of people reporting 1GB+ memory usage with Firefox were all Microsoft shills and Opera fanboys. Thank you for your anecdotal proof. You've done OSS a great service with your mighty debunking powers, sir!
Firefox never takes 1GB of RAM on my laptop either, so I always figured all these people reporting problems were lying. Okay, sure, I only have 512MB, and Firefox will occasionally take around 300MB (+>200MB swap), even while competing with numerous other applications, but the only way I could picture Firefox taking 1GB of memory would be if a person had a different system than me, and we all know that's bull, right? Everyone runs the same OS and applications, visits the same web pages, has the same hardware, keeps the same cache/fastback/etc. configuration...no possible way people could have a different experience than us. If they dispute this, they're lying, plain and simple!
Why should it be noticed? How is that the least bit relevant?
Wait...and you're calling other people dim? ;-)
Really? I think I'm going to head over to Whitehouse.gov and fix up a few errors (read: lies). Then I think I'll inform Amazon.com that I'm the actual author of the Harry Potter books. (Okay, the Whitehouse isn't Internet-only, I guess, but even most that are aren't wikiwikiwebs.)
I realised I should probably be using the originals, but I mostly played Aquanoid, I tried Arkanoid and Breakout (DOS ports, or possibly samely-named clone), but didn't like them much, so the name faded from memory. Actually, the first one I really played was 'Bricks' in the mid-to-late-80s.
Cut me some slack, though. I'm only 25. :-)
See, that's the thing: we don't evaluate games on the potential for sequels. We evaluate them on how much we enjoy playing the game itself, and for how long they stay enjoyable. I guess.that's why we're not in marketing.
Personally, I was never a huge fan of Pong, but Aquanoid and the like are essentially Pong and I found them great fun. I think Tetris may have them all beat, though.
Your post is only three lines long, and you still couldn't maintain a consistent position throughout.
We need a new mod option: -1 Whoosh! ;-)
I'd expect people to be more willing to accept 'Oops, sorry, I screwed up' for minor errors than for major life-changing mistakes.
You're right that they need to narrow it down to individual doctors. If it's that some doctors apologise more effectively, then admitting to the error may be irrational for some. If it's that pretty much any doctor will get a reduced cost overall, it's not. From the information provided, we can't tell which. I suspect it's a bit of each.
Yahoo! did this when they purchased Geocities--non-exclusive rights to all our content--and we all got quite upset about it. I did, anyway, and I know I wasn't alone Google has Google Pages, which I believe is essentially the same as Geocities, just, you know, a googol times better.
I hated it when Yahoo! did this, and I hate it when Google does it.
There may be important differences, of course. It's been a long time.
Oh, well okay then. If the government promises not to abuse its power then we should trust it.
So we're done here right?
Yes, the ACLU isn't defending the Second Amendment the way I'd like it defended. Neither is the International Red Cross or the EFF. None of them are fighting against it, though. I'm perfectly happy to support a group that fights for nine of the first ten amendments so long as they don't fight against the other one. I'm not going to forgo defending most of my rights to spite a group for failing to deal with one of them. That would just be childish. Take a portion of what you'd give the ACLU and give it to the NRA. A portion. Not all.
Absolutely true, but they don't just consider the number of people. They consider a huge number of variables, some out of our control and some not. They can lower those percentages by not insuring people over the age of fifty (that's bad), or by paying people to not smoke (that's good).
If it's guaranteed that one person will get a $100 000 bill, you're right. In health insurance, it's not. It's a 0.1% chance for each person that they'll get a $100 000 bill. If someone has the ability to cut their risk in half, down to to a 0.05% risk, (without increasing anyone else's risk in the process), that will lower the over all cost by $50.
What we're talking about is offering people willing to do that some money. Could pay them $50, thus breaking even. Could pay them $40 and lower everyone's premium by one cent. By paying me $40 to lower my own risk, everyone has saved money, not just me.
Doing such and such changes the cost by $X. This system internalises the externalities, and that's a Very Good Thing. (Clearly we should only be doing this when someone can lower their risk.)
(Yes, the article [or summary--didn't read TFA] talks about charging people for raising their risk instead of paying them to lower it, but it gives exactly the same results, ignoring any psychological reactions to perceived differences and however that will effect behaviour. Economists like to pretend we're perfectly rational beings, but we really aren't. Present it as a carrot instead of a stick and it should work well.)
Higher premiums for risky people: The guy with cancer pays X and the guy with perfect health pays Y < X. The graph is has hills and valleys, but it's fairly flat.
You're question is how anything other than #2 could be better than #1. Don't ignore the middle ground presented by #3. Raising my premiums by fifty dollars a month because I'm at high risk for cancer is an inconvenience, but still a far, far cry from charging me the full millions of dollars for my treatment could end up costing. The question is whether it's better than option #1. I don't know if it is, but I can see how it could be.
If I want to engage in risky behaviour under system #1, my deterrent is that it might end up hurting my health. If I want to engage in risky behaviour under system #3, my deterrent is that it might end up hurting my health and it's certain to hurt me financially. We get the benefit of #2 (if I can afford a slightly higher premium, I can do dangerous stuff and still get health care) and the benefit of #1 (I should some of the financial burden for my choices, thus reducing the burden of people who don't do risky stuff, and reducing the likelihood of me doing risky stuff.
My fear, of course, would be that as we get better at predicting risks, the insurance companies would refine the payments to the point where health insurance premiums match your health costs almost perfectly. At that point, yes, system #2 has become identical to #1. But we're not close to that yet, and a little bit of regulation can keep us from going there at all.
(I know this post is clumsily put together. Sorry.)
Here's something that might go wrong for Diebold: The media could stop completely ignoring the reports and inform the millions of people with their heads still in the sand.
But I'm not holding my breath.