You seem like you have a bone to pick. Don't you think stopping the shuttle was a rational decision given the fiscal constraints they had? They could have kept flying it, but that would have left a lot less money to develop anything new or fly interesting robotic missions. They knew they had a reliable partner to space in Russia, so I'm not sure why you object to the decision so strongly. NASA will (eventually) have several modern and relatively inexpensive methods to get astronauts into orbit - currently the private companies are scheduled for sometime in 2018 and the much more ambitious Orion capsule should fly (sans humans) shortly thereafter.
Thanks for the clarification. This was not always the case, and so I haven't bothered with their automotive recommendations for a long time. Maybe I'll give it a fresh look. I'd still like to see a repair cost metric figured into the ratings - that $1000 extended warranty is usually a rip-off, but if you are a BMW owner and need a $7500 transmission, you'll wish you had it.
I'd just like the data so that I can make my own decision. At one point in my life, my time was pretty worthless (monetarily speaking) and swapping out parts on my cheap, old Chevy with 150k+ was well worth the occasional tow. Now I would have zero patience for that crap.
California must be doing something right if the population has grown so much.
Yeah, it has habitable land right on the coast with good weather and lots of arable land. See also: Eastern US. California just happens to be huge - it's only the 11th most dense state - 9 of the top 10 are on the eastern seaboard with Ohio being the only inland state.
I don't know anything about Tesla's power windows - that was just an example. My point is that your stereo going on the blink is a much less serious problem than being stranded on the side of the road with a mechanical failure. I personally weigh the mechanical failure much more highly than the stereo, so a magazine without this shared value is just a notch above useless.
Well, if they can't figure out a way to aggregate and present data from their thousands of survey respondents in such a way, they will continue to be useless to me. I'm not sure why they can't aggregate repair information - they already do it for maintenance costs. I suppose it would still be useful for people who trade in their car every 5 years.
The affordability of technology is not in question - almost all of these kids have an X-Box, tablet, and smartphone. But think back to your first computer, I'll use a C64 as an example - it was essentially a piece of garbage. You turned it on and it did nothing. Even if you had software, you had to know the magical commands to make it chooch. Turning it on made it just blink a cursor. Your natural curiosity made you type other things besides the magical commands that loaded "River Raid". You learned other magical commands. You recorded random shit to the tape deck and played it back on the stereo.
Now pretend you instead got an X-Box. You put a disk in and start playing a game. There's nothing to screw with outside of the game (in fact, it's pretty locked down). Smart phones and tablets have great fuck-around factor, but you need a PC to program them. Even if you just play with online programming, you really need at least a bluetooth keyboard unless you want to go nuts. But most importantly, there is no natural path to discovering the low level. You are presented with only the high level and there is never even a hint or a peak at the underbelly of the beast unless someone points it out to you. There is no enigmatic blinking cursor.
I'm obviously not suggesting that "hour of code" will do the same as a blinking cursor, but it might just be the only hint of the inner workings that some of these kids get. Maybe one or two of them pester their parents for a $149 Chromebook instead of the newest Madden.
And yet you still had a C64. I think I'm probably the same age as you, by the way, based on your timeline. For me it was an Apple IIe and it was 1984. But my parents bought that because it is what they had at my school (and an upgrade from the II+ my dad used at work). My parents were awesome and got me computer magazines (with the programs to type in by hand...) to support my habit. There are a substantial number of kids with XBoxes, smartphones, and tablets, but you wouldn't believe how many households have no computer. The mind boggles at what fun we could have had with a $149 Chromebook in developer mode back in the mid 80s...:)
But how will a kid know if they are drawn to programming if it is never introduced? It's not like all 30 of those kids have parents doing that, or even a computer at home other than a tablet or smartphone.
All of what you say might or might not be true, but none of it is captured in the Consumer Reports data. I personally have found my Japanese cars to be more reliable, but also more expensive to fix. My shittiest car was a Chevy Blazer, and I replaced the transmission 3 times... but at the end of the day I had the car for well over 150k+ miles (the speedometer stopped working...) and each transmission rebuild cost only $600 dollars. I'm in a different phase of life now and appreciate the reliability more than the ease of repair, but it would still be good information to have. My latest fix on my Toyota involved a simple radiator swap and the entire AC unit had to be removed for access. This made a quick and cheap repair quite expensive.
You can nitpick his language, but he has a point - Consumer Reports "reliability" ratings blow. They count every problem equally - a power window going on the fritz has the same weight as the transmission falling out the bottom. Add to this that they do not consider the cost of the repair - a Chevy might have an alternator that is less reliable than a Honda, but also costs half as much to replace. Nowhere is that reflected in the rankings. When I'm buying a car I want to know what the total cost of ownership is, how likely it is to leave me stranded, and how much it will cost me to fix in the event that it breaks down - it does not answer any of those questions.
The damage to human health from exhaust fumes is orders of magnitude higher than the damage from car accidents, and that will be true whether the cars are silent or noisy.
Wait, what? If the decision is whether or not to make electric cars noisier, why does emissions enter into the discussion at all? You said it yourself - the emissions don't change irrespective of the noise level.
Electric cars are only silent when they're going slowly...and when they're going slowly, they don't cause much harm if they hit you
Words like "silent", "slowly", and "much harm" are squishy words. Use dB, MPH, and some hard measure of harm - dollars would be good enough.
A different drivetrain may lead to different driving habits, and those second order effects may be much more important in determining accident rates.
That could be - it's an interesting hypothesis and it seems feasible to test for it.
The closest thing I've seen to a "forever" roof in common use here in the US is slate... and the people in my 70+ year old development spend more over a 5 or 10 year period replacing individual shingles than I will replacing the entire roof. Plus, if the substrate rots out or something like that they have to drop $40k to replace what would cost me $5-10k. You have to like the look, because you can't make an economic argument.
Disagree... $1000-1500 seems to be the sweet spot for features and build quality. Higher than that and you are starting to pay more in profit margins than in incremental capability and lower than that and you get into race-to-the-bottom quality and frustrating feature omission issues. For Windows machines I usually start looking at the $1200 price point and go up or down from there. Macs are in their own little bizarro world, but I've had good luck with quality (typing this on a late 2008 MacBook Pro!).
Obviously you will find exceptions at both ends of the scale. And I do - purely as an amateur - edit photos and videos, so screen cost alone is often what bumps me into the $1200 range. For web, email, and basic office stuff, my kids' Chromebook is actually awesome. Fantastic battery life, zero dicking around with the OS, small, durable, and under $200.
I'm inclined to agree, but it's also reasonable to care about the freedoms of all people rather than just the small arbitrary group that you were born into.
It's not reasonable if I have it right. Slashdot probably has "personal data" about Russian users, but is not intentionally stored in Russia. It's a law completely at odds with the global, distributed nature of the internet.
I don't think your insulation is as good as you think - I have "adequate" insulation - but not great - and dark shingles, yet my roof stays snowy for several days.
I don't consider 20+ years from asphalt to be "poor lifetime". Figure $5000-ish every 20 years and you have a roof for $250/year. That's pretty good compared to other maintenance expenses - hell, that's lower than my monthly electric/gas bill.
I don't know about that... snow is very reflective. If you live in a snowy place, then you know that you don't really need to get all the snow off of the walk/driveway, just down to where some brown/black is exposed. At that point, the sun can warm up the substrate and melt the snow. If you don't do that, the snow hangs around forever. The heaters wouldn't even need to melt 100% of the snow - just a scattered pattern that would let the sun heat up the dark-colored panels and work its sunny magic.
And yet, I - like most smart phone owners - have an Android phone that cost less than $200. There is no monopoly here, only a company that has a happy and loyal customer base.
Slashdot Mirror
You seem like you have a bone to pick. Don't you think stopping the shuttle was a rational decision given the fiscal constraints they had? They could have kept flying it, but that would have left a lot less money to develop anything new or fly interesting robotic missions. They knew they had a reliable partner to space in Russia, so I'm not sure why you object to the decision so strongly. NASA will (eventually) have several modern and relatively inexpensive methods to get astronauts into orbit - currently the private companies are scheduled for sometime in 2018 and the much more ambitious Orion capsule should fly (sans humans) shortly thereafter.
Thanks for the clarification. This was not always the case, and so I haven't bothered with their automotive recommendations for a long time. Maybe I'll give it a fresh look. I'd still like to see a repair cost metric figured into the ratings - that $1000 extended warranty is usually a rip-off, but if you are a BMW owner and need a $7500 transmission, you'll wish you had it.
I'd just like the data so that I can make my own decision. At one point in my life, my time was pretty worthless (monetarily speaking) and swapping out parts on my cheap, old Chevy with 150k+ was well worth the occasional tow. Now I would have zero patience for that crap.
California must be doing something right if the population has grown so much.
Yeah, it has habitable land right on the coast with good weather and lots of arable land. See also: Eastern US. California just happens to be huge - it's only the 11th most dense state - 9 of the top 10 are on the eastern seaboard with Ohio being the only inland state.
Using my logic only? You had some other path. I can deduce that it wasn't "hour of code", but that's all I've got.
I don't know anything about Tesla's power windows - that was just an example. My point is that your stereo going on the blink is a much less serious problem than being stranded on the side of the road with a mechanical failure. I personally weigh the mechanical failure much more highly than the stereo, so a magazine without this shared value is just a notch above useless.
Agree 100%. All of those kids have access to insane supercomputer hardware by 80s standards. But there is no enigmatic blinking cursor...
Well, if they can't figure out a way to aggregate and present data from their thousands of survey respondents in such a way, they will continue to be useless to me. I'm not sure why they can't aggregate repair information - they already do it for maintenance costs. I suppose it would still be useful for people who trade in their car every 5 years.
The affordability of technology is not in question - almost all of these kids have an X-Box, tablet, and smartphone. But think back to your first computer, I'll use a C64 as an example - it was essentially a piece of garbage. You turned it on and it did nothing. Even if you had software, you had to know the magical commands to make it chooch. Turning it on made it just blink a cursor. Your natural curiosity made you type other things besides the magical commands that loaded "River Raid". You learned other magical commands. You recorded random shit to the tape deck and played it back on the stereo.
Now pretend you instead got an X-Box. You put a disk in and start playing a game. There's nothing to screw with outside of the game (in fact, it's pretty locked down). Smart phones and tablets have great fuck-around factor, but you need a PC to program them. Even if you just play with online programming, you really need at least a bluetooth keyboard unless you want to go nuts. But most importantly, there is no natural path to discovering the low level. You are presented with only the high level and there is never even a hint or a peak at the underbelly of the beast unless someone points it out to you. There is no enigmatic blinking cursor.
I'm obviously not suggesting that "hour of code" will do the same as a blinking cursor, but it might just be the only hint of the inner workings that some of these kids get. Maybe one or two of them pester their parents for a $149 Chromebook instead of the newest Madden.
And yet you still had a C64. I think I'm probably the same age as you, by the way, based on your timeline. For me it was an Apple IIe and it was 1984. But my parents bought that because it is what they had at my school (and an upgrade from the II+ my dad used at work). My parents were awesome and got me computer magazines (with the programs to type in by hand...) to support my habit. There are a substantial number of kids with XBoxes, smartphones, and tablets, but you wouldn't believe how many households have no computer. The mind boggles at what fun we could have had with a $149 Chromebook in developer mode back in the mid 80s... :)
But how will a kid know if they are drawn to programming if it is never introduced? It's not like all 30 of those kids have parents doing that, or even a computer at home other than a tablet or smartphone.
All of what you say might or might not be true, but none of it is captured in the Consumer Reports data. I personally have found my Japanese cars to be more reliable, but also more expensive to fix. My shittiest car was a Chevy Blazer, and I replaced the transmission 3 times... but at the end of the day I had the car for well over 150k+ miles (the speedometer stopped working...) and each transmission rebuild cost only $600 dollars. I'm in a different phase of life now and appreciate the reliability more than the ease of repair, but it would still be good information to have. My latest fix on my Toyota involved a simple radiator swap and the entire AC unit had to be removed for access. This made a quick and cheap repair quite expensive.
You can nitpick his language, but he has a point - Consumer Reports "reliability" ratings blow. They count every problem equally - a power window going on the fritz has the same weight as the transmission falling out the bottom. Add to this that they do not consider the cost of the repair - a Chevy might have an alternator that is less reliable than a Honda, but also costs half as much to replace. Nowhere is that reflected in the rankings. When I'm buying a car I want to know what the total cost of ownership is, how likely it is to leave me stranded, and how much it will cost me to fix in the event that it breaks down - it does not answer any of those questions.
The damage to human health from exhaust fumes is orders of magnitude higher than the damage from car accidents, and that will be true whether the cars are silent or noisy.
Wait, what? If the decision is whether or not to make electric cars noisier, why does emissions enter into the discussion at all? You said it yourself - the emissions don't change irrespective of the noise level.
Electric cars are only silent when they're going slowly...and when they're going slowly, they don't cause much harm if they hit you
Words like "silent", "slowly", and "much harm" are squishy words. Use dB, MPH, and some hard measure of harm - dollars would be good enough.
A different drivetrain may lead to different driving habits, and those second order effects may be much more important in determining accident rates.
That could be - it's an interesting hypothesis and it seems feasible to test for it.
The closest thing I've seen to a "forever" roof in common use here in the US is slate... and the people in my 70+ year old development spend more over a 5 or 10 year period replacing individual shingles than I will replacing the entire roof. Plus, if the substrate rots out or something like that they have to drop $40k to replace what would cost me $5-10k. You have to like the look, because you can't make an economic argument.
Disagree... $1000-1500 seems to be the sweet spot for features and build quality. Higher than that and you are starting to pay more in profit margins than in incremental capability and lower than that and you get into race-to-the-bottom quality and frustrating feature omission issues. For Windows machines I usually start looking at the $1200 price point and go up or down from there. Macs are in their own little bizarro world, but I've had good luck with quality (typing this on a late 2008 MacBook Pro!).
Obviously you will find exceptions at both ends of the scale. And I do - purely as an amateur - edit photos and videos, so screen cost alone is often what bumps me into the $1200 range. For web, email, and basic office stuff, my kids' Chromebook is actually awesome. Fantastic battery life, zero dicking around with the OS, small, durable, and under $200.
"Object oriented" is known for a lot of things, but terseness is not one of them.
I'm inclined to agree, but it's also reasonable to care about the freedoms of all people rather than just the small arbitrary group that you were born into.
It will do a little of that, but I suspect the consequences will lean heavily toward even more speech suppression of the Russian people.
It's not reasonable if I have it right. Slashdot probably has "personal data" about Russian users, but is not intentionally stored in Russia. It's a law completely at odds with the global, distributed nature of the internet.
I don't think your insulation is as good as you think - I have "adequate" insulation - but not great - and dark shingles, yet my roof stays snowy for several days.
I don't consider 20+ years from asphalt to be "poor lifetime". Figure $5000-ish every 20 years and you have a roof for $250/year. That's pretty good compared to other maintenance expenses - hell, that's lower than my monthly electric/gas bill.
I don't know about that... snow is very reflective. If you live in a snowy place, then you know that you don't really need to get all the snow off of the walk/driveway, just down to where some brown/black is exposed. At that point, the sun can warm up the substrate and melt the snow. If you don't do that, the snow hangs around forever. The heaters wouldn't even need to melt 100% of the snow - just a scattered pattern that would let the sun heat up the dark-colored panels and work its sunny magic.
Apple is selling at monopoly prices.
And yet, I - like most smart phone owners - have an Android phone that cost less than $200. There is no monopoly here, only a company that has a happy and loyal customer base.
Shellac dang it. Vinyl is too slow and the almost digital-like noise floor ruins the stage. A steel needle is the only way to listen.