Wouldn't an increase in competition theoretically tend to cause them to make their products better, not worse?
I always thought the decline in quality was related to growing pains from upping the horsepower to meet modern expectations (those 1980s run-forever diesels tended to be pretty sluggish) and, for non-G-series SUV's, starting up production in America and working out all the bugs that go along with opening new factories.
I'm curious as to how you see their new Japanese competition fitting into the picture?
My theory is that the yellow-car paragraph was inserted into the story by a wayward computer to generate visits to the NY Times' health guide entry on flatulence through the gratuitous auto-hyperlink on the word "gas" in this sentence:
"Why did we evolve with brains that salute our shrewdness for buying the neon yellow car with bad gas mileage?"
1. An artistically-inclined person looking over your shoulder might be able to draw your image about as well as you can. With a conventional keyboard password, I can block the keyboard with my body so others can't see what I'm typing, and I can pretend to press keys that aren't in my password so even if they can see, they are thrown off. There is less you can do to block a screen you have to look at to draw properly.
2. Some people's hands shake when they've had too much caffeine, most people's fingers get stiff when they've been out in the cold, and some people have degenerative diseases which make typing a one-letter-at-a-time proposition. Drawing would be very difficult in all of these circumstances. Perhaps this is why TFA says that 5% of users couldn't recreate their image within three attempts a week after first coming up with it.
I don't think this technology is going anywhere any time soon.
I don't think that the environmental impact of me flushing my toilet is quite as great as the production of an iphone. TFA refers to a Greenpeace article in which certain hazardous substances, which other cellphone manufacturers have stopped using, were found in the iPhone. My latest turd, on the other hand, is comprised entirely of recycled Twizzlers, which contain none of these hazardous substances. The 1.6 gallons of water used by the toilet ends up getting re-used to irrigate a nearby park.
There are a number of studies which find that Roundup is both persistent in the environment and toxic to humans. The EPA calls it "extremely persistent under typical application conditions" and epidemiological studies have linked it to miscarriages, premature birth, and lymphoma. A number of these studies are summarized in a Journal of Pesticide Reform article reprinted here. I'd prefer to see us grow crops less densely on more land using fewer poisons, and stop exporting so much subsidized food that we're destroying the third world's ability to feed itself through local agriculture.
I agree that next-generation nuclear electricity generation could be much cleaner than using fossil fuels. As long as we're getting all the electricity we can from renewable resources like solar and wind, there's no reason to let nuclear's past keep us from giving it a shot in the future. Greenpeace are being fuddy-duddies on this issue and should open their minds to the possibility that the right kind of nuclear power can be better than the oil power it could replace.
Electronics can of course be used in many ways to help solve environmental problems, but that is a separate issue from the environmental problems caused by their production and disposal. Unfortunately, since lately both of these processes have tended to happen more in China, US citizens are much less able to influence their environmental impact than if it all happened here. The fact that the worst electronic-related pollution occurs in someone else's back yard leads many Americans to assume that electronics are a lot less harmful to the environment than they are. Even so, pollution from high-tech manufacturing has given Silicon Valley the greatest concentration of Superfund sites in the nation.
The only entities with enough cash and willpower to get international laws passed are multinational corporations. They make more money on "terminator" crops than on naturally-reproducing ones, and they make more money on patentable crops than on public-domain crops. Therefore, I don't anticipate GMO's being reigned in by international laws any time soon.
It's important to understand that the point of arrangements like the WTO is to take sovereignty away from national governments and put questions of what gets produced where, by whom, and with what environmental impact solely in the hands of multinational corporations (which they call "the free market" although it does not resemble at all the free market described by Adam Smith.) Posters in previous threads have complained that Greenpeace works against globalization; I assume that the reason Greenpeace does this is because once the world is "globalized," or in the hands of the multinationals, there is no possibility for democratic action to improve environmental conditions at the national level because a "globalized" world leaves no real power at the national level. And while I trust the US government about as far as I can throw it, I trust multinational corporations even less. The Federal government is a necessary evil which we need as a countervailing force, and to whatever extent we can remove corporate influence and increase citizen influence over the government, it will be a more effective countervailing force.
There are of course much cleaner designs for nuclear reactors on the drawing boards, which could produce a small fraction of the waste of the current 1970s-era plants. There are also some great renewable energy ideas out there languishing for lack of funds. If we took the 200 billion we're spending in our unsuccessful attempt to colonize Iraq and spent it instead on developing high-efficiency solar systems, I bet we'd make some serious progress (and probably considerably fewer people would be killed or injured.) That 200 billion would equal 13 times the amount spent on solar research by the Federal government since the 1950s. Dominating and draining the world's oil supplies is a simple and wrong solution to meeting our energy needs. We need to work smarter than that.
I sincerely hope that you are trolling and do not seriously believe that:
(1) the mishandling of lead, solvents, beryllium, and other substances used in the manufacture of electronic devices is not a serious environmental problem which has led to death, disease, and birth defects in this country and others,
(2) genetically modifying crops so that they can survive massive doses of herbicides (such as Roundup) which eventually run off into our waterways cannot possibly cause serious environmental problems in downstream ecosystems, and
(3) Thousands of tons of high-level nuclear waste from reactors which will be deadly for longer than our lifetimes do not in fact exist.
Either way, I'm impressed by the extremity of your statements.
Wait a second... Salman Rushdie? Don't you mean Britney Spears? Or are you stuck in a parallel universe where highbrow authors rule the airwaves and pop tarts grovel for table scraps of media attention while dodging reactionary assassination attempts?
Having recently played 2600 Yar's Revenge for the first time in over 20 years, I completely agree with you. The graphics were atrocious, and the gameplay wasn't that good. I can remember having fun playing that game for hours when I was much younger, but the test of time shows that it sucks. The arcade Star Wars game, and even the arcade Moon Patrol, on the other hand, hold up pretty well.
BTW, the irony of the inventor of Chuck E. Cheese talking about a "race to the bottom" is incredible. If that isn't schlock, I don't know what is.
GP might have a domain rather than an email address... I find that 98% of the incoming email to my domain is spam, and 90% of it is to bogus email addresses within my domain (apparently auto-generated using some list of possible names.) I use a whitelist of legit email addresses within my domain, so anyone trying to send an email to an address that doesn't exist is disconnected instantly.
Even so, these spam attempts take up a lot of my bandwidth, and I can't change domain names because it's a commercial domain with a lot of customers.
The Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution says "No person shall be... deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law..." and the Fourteenth Amendment says "No State shall... deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law..." - these "due process" clauses can be viewed as justification for overturning unreasonable judgments. It's the closest thing we have to a statement that "the operations of our court system should make sense" and therefore it's what we turn to when faced with a situation where they don't.
To me, the fact that they agreed on a fine of a quarter-million dollars for sharing some music is an indicator that at least a strong majority were idiots.
Although a case could be made that some or all of them were evil instead of stupid.
(Grampa and Bart pay a visit to Herman's Military Antiques.)
Herman: What's the password?
Grampa: Let me in, you idiot!
Herman: Right you are!
(Herman lets them in the store.)
Grampa: So, Herman, has the large-type edition of this month's Solider Of Fortune come in yet?
Herman: Uh, not yet. But, can I interest you in some authentic Nazi underpants?
And with that, the episode, and this thread, was Godwinned.
I find that my wrists start to hurt if I put the feet on the back of the keyboard up - it forces my wrists to bend backwards, which they don't like to do. My piano teachers always stressed keeping the forearms up and letting the fingers curl down naturally; if I do something like that at the computer keyboard, I find I don't have wrist pain.
I've suggested this to a number of coworkers, and it has reduced their wrist pain in most cases. Obviously your experience is different... people's bodies can vary considerably.
My other favorite workstation ergonomic discovery is a using a trackball instead of a mouse. This lets me make all those tiny little precision movements with my fingers, which are good at that sort of thing, instead of with my forearm, which seems to be better at larger, less precise motions. This keeps my forearm from cramping up during long computing sessions.
I've found that the best ways to motivate myself to learn something, and actually retain what I've learned, is to have a use for the information, and to teach it to others.
Assuming you know a computer language, writing a computer program is a great way to do both of these things, since programming can be looked at as teaching the computer how to solve problems.
Start writing a program that is likely to involve the kind of math you want to learn, and since the development of your app will be dead in the water until you learn and successfully apply the math, you will have a great motivator for learning it and getting it right. Just get your hands on an applied math (applied algebra, applied calculus, etc.) book and look at the kinds of problems it has in it, then write programs to solve those kinds of problems. I would pick the books up at a used book store or thrift shop, since there's no need to spend big bucks on the latest shiny new edition from Amazon or a college bookstore.
I'm not aware of any innovations in the field of genocide that have come from the third world in the last century... Nazi gas chambers, chemical weapons such as Agent Orange, bomblets, and modern biological weapons were all first-world inventions, and as far as I know that's the state of the art to this day.
"Kill lots of people with machetes" is the only technique of genocide the third world can manage without First World help, and that's not an innovation - it's a throwback to prehistoric times. Am I missing something here?
For my (admittedly not-cutting-edge) workplace, OO with Thunderbird would be an acceptable email client if it could:
Interface with Exchange to display email that lives on the Exchange server, rather than downloading the email to the client via SMTP, and
Get a directory of internal email addresses either from the Exchange server or through Active Directory when used with Exchange 2000 or later, so people can send email within the organization by simply typing someone's name in the "to:" box, or hitting "to:" to look people up.
I assume that the first problem could be solved by using IMAP, and the second with some sort of LDAP implementation? I'd love to use OO more, but my users have proven that they can't remember people's email addresses, making directory integration that works similarly to Outlook's a deal-maker. (If I could replace the Exchange server with a FOSS substitute, that would be great as well!) Has anyone implemented something like this? I don't need to get anything up to the level of MS's latest package (sharepoint et al, which would be silly for us) but I would like to figure out how to get something working together about as well as Outlook 2000 does with Exchange 2000, as the users are happy with that combination.
Valve problems are one particular type of heart disease that is often congenital, however, they are also not nearly as common as heart attack and stroke, which are strongly linked to lifestyle. For example, this report from the American Heart Association shows that out of nearly 7 million heart procedures performed in 2004, only about 100,000 were valve operations - less than two percent.
The US Center for Disease Control states that "Much of the burden of heart disease and stroke could be eliminated by reducing their major risk factors: high blood pressure, high blood cholesterol, tobacco use, diabetes, physical inactivity, and poor nutrition."
So although you and your family fall into a small percentage of heart patients where lifestyle is probably not a factor, this does not make the well-recognized fact that most heart disease is strongly linked to lifestyle, as recognized by the CDC, the AHA, the AMA and every other evidence-based medical organization which has looked at epidemiological studies done in the United States.
I'm sorry to hear about your family's bad valves, and I apologize if you took my statements, based on broad statistics, as a criticism of your family's eating habits. Although only surgery is likely to fix your valves, you still get to choose your lifestyle, and this could determine whether you simply have inherited bad valves, or bad valves plus clogged arteries, which are a much, much more common killer.
Also on the clean air issue, it might be nice if our government stopped subsidizing Big Tobacco's marketing campaigns to sell cigarettes in other countries.
That program is a contender for The Thing That Epitomizes What's Wrong With Our Government. One of many...
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Wouldn't an increase in competition theoretically tend to cause them to make their products better, not worse?
I always thought the decline in quality was related to growing pains from upping the horsepower to meet modern expectations (those 1980s run-forever diesels tended to be pretty sluggish) and, for non-G-series SUV's, starting up production in America and working out all the bugs that go along with opening new factories.
I'm curious as to how you see their new Japanese competition fitting into the picture?
When refill ink is outlawed, only outlaws will have refill ink!
My theory is that the yellow-car paragraph was inserted into the story by a wayward computer to generate visits to the NY Times' health guide entry on flatulence through the gratuitous auto-hyperlink on the word "gas" in this sentence:
"Why did we evolve with brains that salute our shrewdness for buying the neon yellow car with bad gas mileage?"
Oh, Computers! So naughty, and so complex!
1. An artistically-inclined person looking over your shoulder might be able to draw your image about as well as you can. With a conventional keyboard password, I can block the keyboard with my body so others can't see what I'm typing, and I can pretend to press keys that aren't in my password so even if they can see, they are thrown off. There is less you can do to block a screen you have to look at to draw properly.
2. Some people's hands shake when they've had too much caffeine, most people's fingers get stiff when they've been out in the cold, and some people have degenerative diseases which make typing a one-letter-at-a-time proposition. Drawing would be very difficult in all of these circumstances. Perhaps this is why TFA says that 5% of users couldn't recreate their image within three attempts a week after first coming up with it.
I don't think this technology is going anywhere any time soon.
Did anyone else read "...indulge in the time-honored tradition of its founder..." and immediately picture them cross-dressing?
...is that you do not talk about the football game.
"I'm sorry honey, but I can't tell you how the game went. That would be illegal."
Apparently the powers-that-be want to turn the NFL into an NSL!
I don't think that the environmental impact of me flushing my toilet is quite as great as the production of an iphone. TFA refers to a Greenpeace article in which certain hazardous substances, which other cellphone manufacturers have stopped using, were found in the iPhone. My latest turd, on the other hand, is comprised entirely of recycled Twizzlers, which contain none of these hazardous substances. The 1.6 gallons of water used by the toilet ends up getting re-used to irrigate a nearby park.
There are a number of studies which find that Roundup is both persistent in the environment and toxic to humans. The EPA calls it "extremely persistent under typical application conditions" and epidemiological studies have linked it to miscarriages, premature birth, and lymphoma. A number of these studies are summarized in a Journal of Pesticide Reform article reprinted here. I'd prefer to see us grow crops less densely on more land using fewer poisons, and stop exporting so much subsidized food that we're destroying the third world's ability to feed itself through local agriculture.
I agree that next-generation nuclear electricity generation could be much cleaner than using fossil fuels. As long as we're getting all the electricity we can from renewable resources like solar and wind, there's no reason to let nuclear's past keep us from giving it a shot in the future. Greenpeace are being fuddy-duddies on this issue and should open their minds to the possibility that the right kind of nuclear power can be better than the oil power it could replace.
Electronics can of course be used in many ways to help solve environmental problems, but that is a separate issue from the environmental problems caused by their production and disposal. Unfortunately, since lately both of these processes have tended to happen more in China, US citizens are much less able to influence their environmental impact than if it all happened here. The fact that the worst electronic-related pollution occurs in someone else's back yard leads many Americans to assume that electronics are a lot less harmful to the environment than they are. Even so, pollution from high-tech manufacturing has given Silicon Valley the greatest concentration of Superfund sites in the nation.
The only entities with enough cash and willpower to get international laws passed are multinational corporations. They make more money on "terminator" crops than on naturally-reproducing ones, and they make more money on patentable crops than on public-domain crops. Therefore, I don't anticipate GMO's being reigned in by international laws any time soon.
It's important to understand that the point of arrangements like the WTO is to take sovereignty away from national governments and put questions of what gets produced where, by whom, and with what environmental impact solely in the hands of multinational corporations (which they call "the free market" although it does not resemble at all the free market described by Adam Smith.) Posters in previous threads have complained that Greenpeace works against globalization; I assume that the reason Greenpeace does this is because once the world is "globalized," or in the hands of the multinationals, there is no possibility for democratic action to improve environmental conditions at the national level because a "globalized" world leaves no real power at the national level. And while I trust the US government about as far as I can throw it, I trust multinational corporations even less. The Federal government is a necessary evil which we need as a countervailing force, and to whatever extent we can remove corporate influence and increase citizen influence over the government, it will be a more effective countervailing force.
There are of course much cleaner designs for nuclear reactors on the drawing boards, which could produce a small fraction of the waste of the current 1970s-era plants. There are also some great renewable energy ideas out there languishing for lack of funds. If we took the 200 billion we're spending in our unsuccessful attempt to colonize Iraq and spent it instead on developing high-efficiency solar systems, I bet we'd make some serious progress (and probably considerably fewer people would be killed or injured.) That 200 billion would equal 13 times the amount spent on solar research by the Federal government since the 1950s. Dominating and draining the world's oil supplies is a simple and wrong solution to meeting our energy needs. We need to work smarter than that.
I sincerely hope that you are trolling and do not seriously believe that:
(1) the mishandling of lead, solvents, beryllium, and other substances used in the manufacture of electronic devices is not a serious environmental problem which has led to death, disease, and birth defects in this country and others,
(2) genetically modifying crops so that they can survive massive doses of herbicides (such as Roundup) which eventually run off into our waterways cannot possibly cause serious environmental problems in downstream ecosystems, and
(3) Thousands of tons of high-level nuclear waste from reactors which will be deadly for longer than our lifetimes do not in fact exist.
Either way, I'm impressed by the extremity of your statements.
Wait a second... Salman Rushdie? Don't you mean Britney Spears? Or are you stuck in a parallel universe where highbrow authors rule the airwaves and pop tarts grovel for table scraps of media attention while dodging reactionary assassination attempts?
If so, are there any vacancies?
Having recently played 2600 Yar's Revenge for the first time in over 20 years, I completely agree with you. The graphics were atrocious, and the gameplay wasn't that good. I can remember having fun playing that game for hours when I was much younger, but the test of time shows that it sucks. The arcade Star Wars game, and even the arcade Moon Patrol, on the other hand, hold up pretty well.
BTW, the irony of the inventor of Chuck E. Cheese talking about a "race to the bottom" is incredible. If that isn't schlock, I don't know what is.
General Motors and electric streetcars.
GP might have a domain rather than an email address... I find that 98% of the incoming email to my domain is spam, and 90% of it is to bogus email addresses within my domain (apparently auto-generated using some list of possible names.) I use a whitelist of legit email addresses within my domain, so anyone trying to send an email to an address that doesn't exist is disconnected instantly.
Even so, these spam attempts take up a lot of my bandwidth, and I can't change domain names because it's a commercial domain with a lot of customers.
For those who don't recognize the reference, here's a Wikipedia article on Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish.
...and when the threats stop, you know something bad is going to happen!
The Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution says "No person shall be... deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law..." and the Fourteenth Amendment says "No State shall... deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law..." - these "due process" clauses can be viewed as justification for overturning unreasonable judgments. It's the closest thing we have to a statement that "the operations of our court system should make sense" and therefore it's what we turn to when faced with a situation where they don't.
To me, the fact that they agreed on a fine of a quarter-million dollars for sharing some music is an indicator that at least a strong majority were idiots.
Although a case could be made that some or all of them were evil instead of stupid.
(Grampa and Bart pay a visit to Herman's Military Antiques.)
Herman: What's the password?
Grampa: Let me in, you idiot!
Herman: Right you are!
(Herman lets them in the store.)
Grampa: So, Herman, has the large-type edition of this month's Solider Of Fortune come in yet?
Herman: Uh, not yet. But, can I interest you in some authentic Nazi underpants?
And with that, the episode, and this thread, was Godwinned.
(from Bart the General)
I find that my wrists start to hurt if I put the feet on the back of the keyboard up - it forces my wrists to bend backwards, which they don't like to do. My piano teachers always stressed keeping the forearms up and letting the fingers curl down naturally; if I do something like that at the computer keyboard, I find I don't have wrist pain.
I've suggested this to a number of coworkers, and it has reduced their wrist pain in most cases. Obviously your experience is different... people's bodies can vary considerably.
My other favorite workstation ergonomic discovery is a using a trackball instead of a mouse. This lets me make all those tiny little precision movements with my fingers, which are good at that sort of thing, instead of with my forearm, which seems to be better at larger, less precise motions. This keeps my forearm from cramping up during long computing sessions.
I've found that the best ways to motivate myself to learn something, and actually retain what I've learned, is to have a use for the information, and to teach it to others.
Assuming you know a computer language, writing a computer program is a great way to do both of these things, since programming can be looked at as teaching the computer how to solve problems.
Start writing a program that is likely to involve the kind of math you want to learn, and since the development of your app will be dead in the water until you learn and successfully apply the math, you will have a great motivator for learning it and getting it right. Just get your hands on an applied math (applied algebra, applied calculus, etc.) book and look at the kinds of problems it has in it, then write programs to solve those kinds of problems. I would pick the books up at a used book store or thrift shop, since there's no need to spend big bucks on the latest shiny new edition from Amazon or a college bookstore.
I'm not aware of any innovations in the field of genocide that have come from the third world in the last century... Nazi gas chambers, chemical weapons such as Agent Orange, bomblets, and modern biological weapons were all first-world inventions, and as far as I know that's the state of the art to this day.
"Kill lots of people with machetes" is the only technique of genocide the third world can manage without First World help, and that's not an innovation - it's a throwback to prehistoric times. Am I missing something here?
- Interface with Exchange to display email that lives on the Exchange server, rather than downloading the email to the client via SMTP, and
- Get a directory of internal email addresses either from the Exchange server or through Active Directory when used with Exchange 2000 or later, so people can send email within the organization by simply typing someone's name in the "to:" box, or hitting "to:" to look people up.
I assume that the first problem could be solved by using IMAP, and the second with some sort of LDAP implementation? I'd love to use OO more, but my users have proven that they can't remember people's email addresses, making directory integration that works similarly to Outlook's a deal-maker. (If I could replace the Exchange server with a FOSS substitute, that would be great as well!) Has anyone implemented something like this? I don't need to get anything up to the level of MS's latest package (sharepoint et al, which would be silly for us) but I would like to figure out how to get something working together about as well as Outlook 2000 does with Exchange 2000, as the users are happy with that combination.Valve problems are one particular type of heart disease that is often congenital, however, they are also not nearly as common as heart attack and stroke, which are strongly linked to lifestyle. For example, this report from the American Heart Association shows that out of nearly 7 million heart procedures performed in 2004, only about 100,000 were valve operations - less than two percent.
The US Center for Disease Control states that "Much of the burden of heart disease and stroke could be eliminated by reducing their major risk factors: high blood pressure, high blood cholesterol, tobacco use, diabetes, physical inactivity, and poor nutrition."
So although you and your family fall into a small percentage of heart patients where lifestyle is probably not a factor, this does not make the well-recognized fact that most heart disease is strongly linked to lifestyle, as recognized by the CDC, the AHA, the AMA and every other evidence-based medical organization which has looked at epidemiological studies done in the United States.
I'm sorry to hear about your family's bad valves, and I apologize if you took my statements, based on broad statistics, as a criticism of your family's eating habits. Although only surgery is likely to fix your valves, you still get to choose your lifestyle, and this could determine whether you simply have inherited bad valves, or bad valves plus clogged arteries, which are a much, much more common killer.
"Wake me when robot wives are cheap and effective!"
Also on the clean air issue, it might be nice if our government stopped subsidizing Big Tobacco's marketing campaigns to sell cigarettes in other countries.
That program is a contender for The Thing That Epitomizes What's Wrong With Our Government. One of many...