At least as far as my experience goes, Apex players tend to have more features. They were the first to play MP3, ignore regions, disable macrovision, etc. However, they are a bit buggy, and are of lesser quality (both output and construction). Again from my experience, the bugs were not reproducible, and a reset of the machine cleared any problem.
Stop providing loaded, biased links to support your claims. It's like someone saying Linux sucks and then giving you a link at microsoft.com to 'prove' it.
A lot of people make comparisions between engineering and computer programming. I happen to work in an engineering firm, but have a degree in CS, so I am very aware of both sides of the analogy.
The analogy sucks.
The reason the analogy doesn't work is mainly because engineering deals with real-life physical problems. Also, engineering takes place in a realm of (generally) fixed possibilities.
You don't have to design a building to withstand 1,000 mi/h of wind because you know that will never happen. However, your program, to be anywhere near 'bug-free' (which can rarely be proven, of course) must be hardened against every combination of inputs. The effects of wind, and the behaviors of steel, etc. are very well known. You simply don't have this kind of data in programming, because you are almost always designing one-of-a-kind logic.
You make the implication that engineers don't make mistakes. That is far from the truth. The main reason why you don't hear about engineering mistakes is because of the massive QC effort that goes on. Most projects have at least 3 milestone levels, where plans are reviewed by the engineer's internal QC process, and then reviewed by the client's QC process. When you submit for jobs, part of your submission must document your QC process. No QC, no job.
If software companies put in anywhere near the same amount of effort on QC, you would see a definite improvement in software quality. However, it would be very difficult for software companies to achieve this. This is because the use of standards in engineering saves QC time by minimizing the amount of work that the reviewer must actually check. While many software companies do have internal standards and practices, the lack of industry-wide standards hinders the QC process. Libraries can assist here, but there is still a lot of unique logic being written for programs that simply isn't checked well enough.
People bitch about the costs of engineering (like the Big Dig), but fail to realize that more than 50% of the time is spent checking the work. A lot of money is spent to ensure that these things are safe. If you want a Mozilla or a Real Player that doesn't crash, I hope you're prepared to pay for it.
I don't know where your bitterness against programmers comes from, but you need to chill out (and it sounds like you could stand to learn a lot from a software engineering course).
Note: Many of my comments are in the context of public engineering projects. For private projects, plans are reviewed (in New Jersey) by the local Planning Board, as well as the Department of Community Affairs, a state agency.
listed C# and Java as their primary languages...C'mon now, we all know that those are good for small things and prototyping, but they aren't languages you write OSs or such in.
Funny, since most of the listings I see are not for OS developers, but Java developers. Go home troll.
Sorry. They may be educated by the English, but that is simply no substitute for using English your whole life. Effective communication can be made by non-native speakers, but to say that non-native speakers can speak a language better than native speakers is ludicrous.
Since a horse may not be at a track all day, GPS makes tracking the horse's distance and speed much easier. Plus, there is very little infrastructure to install with a GPS system, whereas your system would need to have sensors installed. The sensors for GPS are already installed, for all of us.
I'm not christian either. However you can't deny that the country is christian, when you look at the majority of our elected leaders, on both sides of the aisle.
By turning off the services that are affected by the worms before going online, being behind a NAT, and, sometimes, being a bit lucky. Of course, most Windows users would just be relying on the last one...
Yeah, but in America, as christian as we claim to be, we feel that the whole "do unto others" thing is a little overrated. So, forgive Iraq's debt, BUY OUR BEEF, and shutup!
Because driving, and riding, in a car is not a right, none of your freedoms have been limited here. Remember, your rights end where the next person's begin. That line is constantly moving in our society.
We do not even have mandatory vehicle safety inspections (closest thing are emissions tests).
Dunno where you live, but in New Jersey, they test many aspects of the vehicle. All lights are ensured to be operational in all modes. The horn and windshield wipers are checked to make sure they are functioning (I have failed due to worn windshield wipers). The parking brake is tested. Next, emissions are checked with the assistance of a dyno, because idle testing is not an accurate judge of the car's emissions. Cars after 1998 have the OBD (On-Board Diagnostic) test run on them. They plug the car's computer into the test computer and ensure all sensors are operating and reporting normal values. If your check engine light is on, your car will fail, and will need certified repairs (ouch!). After this is complete, the car is accellerated and then put into a hard brake onto a computerized sensor. The computer analyses the braking power of the vehicle and the performance of the tires. This computer then performs a test of the car's suspension, which jostles the wheels harder than a pothole filled road. The final test is a vacuum test on the gas cap, to ensure that evaporative emissions from the gasoline are not leaking into the air.
However, due to the volume of cars here, vehicles 1998 and later recieve 4 year clearance, and other vehicles recieve 2 year clearance. I believe commercial vehicles are still inspected yearly.
While I agree with your post for the most part, you have left out an important piece of the puzzle.
For smaller towns which have a highway or other major road passing through them, traffic tickets are a major source of revenue. Take away all the silly laws, and you take away some of that money. If you are a safe driver and don't get tickets, you are basically avoiding a tax. If all of these laws are eliminated, the town will need to raise taxes and cut spending to make up for the difference in revenue. Many people do not take into account that these laws aren't out to "get" people, they're out to make money!
So my question to you is this: Would you rather have some silly traffic laws that make stupid and careless people pay money to the government, or a simple tax where everyone* pays money to the government?
* Yes, not everyone pays taxes. However, that's not the point here.
This already exists in most states. Distracted driving is considered 'Careless Driving' in New Jersey, a 2 point offense. However if that action causes an accident, things get much more serious. For example, you can now get up to 10 years in jail if it is determined you caused an accident due to drowsiness.
I could build one with the slightest bit of information to start with.
Assuming it's a simple device, sure. However, I would doubt (and hope) that any such device would not be made so simple as to allow home production.
This device on the other hand, is a weapon in and of itself. Cause a traffic jam, prevent someone from driving away, etc.
No, that's ALL it does. It's not a weapon. It stops your car. That's IT. What criminal wants that? All they have after they've stopped your car is a STOPPED CAR. Not a very good getaway vehicle, especially since most people would be alerting the authorities with a cell phone as soon as it happened. I'm not saying no problems might come of such a device. I'm saying that any problems that come from such a device would be minimal.
If a device disabled the car, you would want it to seriously disable the car. I.E. one would not want to be able to flip a switch: car off, then flip a switch: car on. You would want it to be press a button: car off, intrusive procedure: car on. Carjacker wants to disable my car? He can have it. He just won't be able to move it.
Portable barricades (fences) could be in all cop cars, and put just ahead of the chase, where it can't be avoided.
Let's see.. a portable barricade that will stop a 2 ton vehicle travelling at 60 mi/h? Right. Portable if you happen to have a crane on-site. Actually, they already do this. They park the car across the road. Naturally this can cause great damage to the vehicle and is not the preferred solution (although obviously more desired than a loss of life).
Everyone else has already debunked your other great ideas, so clearly the solution isn't as simple as you make it out to be. Why there is this assumption that all criminals will magically be able to get these devices is beyond me. Scanners have been available forever and only a small percentage of criminals actually use them, and an even smaller percentage successfully use them (ever see an episode of COPS where they just keep using the radio because the guy was too dumb to turn the scanner down?). Scanners are readily made available, as well. Any device that we're talking about in this case would have to be a hack, which would reduce the availability even more. Also, as people mentioned above: who wants a device that can disable a car? Then all you have is a 2 ton brick, and no way to leave. I'm not saying there's no reason to be against this, but so far most of the reasons given to be against it don't cut it.
George Carlin pointed out years ago that car jackings came about due to car alarms
Perhaps, but the incidence of carjacking is drastically lower than auto theft. It's just that carjackings get play on the evening news, and auto theft doesn't, so we get the sense that there is some sort of 'epidemic' or 'crime wave'. Then you have the 'instill-fear' special report: how to protect you and your family from carjackings, make sure to watch at 11!
If it starts becoming a problem, you'll find that governments will start building dykes, or digging shoreline trenches to keep the water at bay.
This works great for Holland, or for small areas of countries (such as the example you provide). However, the total shoreline of the United States is huge! It would be the largest engineering project to date to reinforce the shorelines of the entire country. If a large rise in the water level did occur, I would suspect that not all of the shoreline would be protected, but based on the development on the shoreline in New Jersey, I would bet on a good portion of the shoreline requiring protection.
overnight temperatures are much hotter as well, but that may simply be due to the flock from suburbs into city communities.
Dunno where you live, but in the Northeast, it is quite the opposite, which would actually support your conclusion, imo. It is pretty much just an increase in the heat-island effect. Asphalt heats up during the day, and retains that heat into the evening hours, resulting in higher temperatures near the ground. As more people move out of the city, more pavement is required in what used to be considered rural areas.
Once again, upon any claims of a failing product, the anecdotal evidence to the contrary comes flying in!
What some people need to realize is that just because your unit works, that does not mean that all units will still be working after the same amount of time. Where are the people that yell "causation!=correllation" like its "four legs good, two legs bad"? They should be here yelling "one isn't a large enough sample"! This person was even accused of spreading FUD by a user whose Tivo is still functioning. Ridiculous.
I don't own a Tivo. I have no idea if they have an overheating problem or not. Even if I owned a Tivo, I would still not know if they have an overheating problem or not. I would only know if my Tivo had an overheating problem or not.
The problem is that roads are rarely standardized. For the same reason that we don't use prefabbed designs for the roads (only 'design guidelines', which still don't cover all situations), you wouldn't be able to use prefabbed road pieces. There are just too many variables to make it cost effective.
New techinques in concrete paving, specifically ultra thin whitetopping, are said to eliminate this noise. Expansion joints are still required, usually at 12 feet, iirc.
Slashdot Mirror
Or, if you're using Yahoo! Mail, click the box that says "Block HTML graphics in email messages from being downloaded" in your general preferences.
Nit:
At least as far as my experience goes, Apex players tend to have more features. They were the first to play MP3, ignore regions, disable macrovision, etc. However, they are a bit buggy, and are of lesser quality (both output and construction). Again from my experience, the bugs were not reproducible, and a reset of the machine cleared any problem.
Stop providing loaded, biased links to support your claims. It's like someone saying Linux sucks and then giving you a link at microsoft.com to 'prove' it.
India has a billion people. The US has about 300 million. Why is it any surprise that their movie production has surpassed ours?
A lot of people make comparisions between engineering and computer programming. I happen to work in an engineering firm, but have a degree in CS, so I am very aware of both sides of the analogy.
The analogy sucks.
The reason the analogy doesn't work is mainly because engineering deals with real-life physical problems. Also, engineering takes place in a realm of (generally) fixed possibilities.
You don't have to design a building to withstand 1,000 mi/h of wind because you know that will never happen. However, your program, to be anywhere near 'bug-free' (which can rarely be proven, of course) must be hardened against every combination of inputs. The effects of wind, and the behaviors of steel, etc. are very well known. You simply don't have this kind of data in programming, because you are almost always designing one-of-a-kind logic.
You make the implication that engineers don't make mistakes. That is far from the truth. The main reason why you don't hear about engineering mistakes is because of the massive QC effort that goes on. Most projects have at least 3 milestone levels, where plans are reviewed by the engineer's internal QC process, and then reviewed by the client's QC process. When you submit for jobs, part of your submission must document your QC process. No QC, no job.
If software companies put in anywhere near the same amount of effort on QC, you would see a definite improvement in software quality. However, it would be very difficult for software companies to achieve this. This is because the use of standards in engineering saves QC time by minimizing the amount of work that the reviewer must actually check. While many software companies do have internal standards and practices, the lack of industry-wide standards hinders the QC process. Libraries can assist here, but there is still a lot of unique logic being written for programs that simply isn't checked well enough.
People bitch about the costs of engineering (like the Big Dig), but fail to realize that more than 50% of the time is spent checking the work. A lot of money is spent to ensure that these things are safe. If you want a Mozilla or a Real Player that doesn't crash, I hope you're prepared to pay for it.
I don't know where your bitterness against programmers comes from, but you need to chill out (and it sounds like you could stand to learn a lot from a software engineering course).
Note: Many of my comments are in the context of public engineering projects. For private projects, plans are reviewed (in New Jersey) by the local Planning Board, as well as the Department of Community Affairs, a state agency.
listed C# and Java as their primary languages...C'mon now, we all know that those are good for small things and prototyping, but they aren't languages you write OSs or such in.
Funny, since most of the listings I see are not for OS developers, but Java developers. Go home troll.
Sorry. They may be educated by the English, but that is simply no substitute for using English your whole life. Effective communication can be made by non-native speakers, but to say that non-native speakers can speak a language better than native speakers is ludicrous.
Since a horse may not be at a track all day, GPS makes tracking the horse's distance and speed much easier. Plus, there is very little infrastructure to install with a GPS system, whereas your system would need to have sensors installed. The sensors for GPS are already installed, for all of us.
I'm not christian either. However you can't deny that the country is christian, when you look at the majority of our elected leaders, on both sides of the aisle.
By turning off the services that are affected by the worms before going online, being behind a NAT, and, sometimes, being a bit lucky. Of course, most Windows users would just be relying on the last one...
Yeah, but in America, as christian as we claim to be, we feel that the whole "do unto others" thing is a little overrated. So, forgive Iraq's debt, BUY OUR BEEF, and shutup!
Because driving, and riding, in a car is not a right, none of your freedoms have been limited here. Remember, your rights end where the next person's begin. That line is constantly moving in our society.
We do not even have mandatory vehicle safety inspections (closest thing are emissions tests).
Dunno where you live, but in New Jersey, they test many aspects of the vehicle. All lights are ensured to be operational in all modes. The horn and windshield wipers are checked to make sure they are functioning (I have failed due to worn windshield wipers). The parking brake is tested. Next, emissions are checked with the assistance of a dyno, because idle testing is not an accurate judge of the car's emissions. Cars after 1998 have the OBD (On-Board Diagnostic) test run on them. They plug the car's computer into the test computer and ensure all sensors are operating and reporting normal values. If your check engine light is on, your car will fail, and will need certified repairs (ouch!). After this is complete, the car is accellerated and then put into a hard brake onto a computerized sensor. The computer analyses the braking power of the vehicle and the performance of the tires. This computer then performs a test of the car's suspension, which jostles the wheels harder than a pothole filled road. The final test is a vacuum test on the gas cap, to ensure that evaporative emissions from the gasoline are not leaking into the air.
However, due to the volume of cars here, vehicles 1998 and later recieve 4 year clearance, and other vehicles recieve 2 year clearance. I believe commercial vehicles are still inspected yearly.
While I agree with your post for the most part, you have left out an important piece of the puzzle.
For smaller towns which have a highway or other major road passing through them, traffic tickets are a major source of revenue. Take away all the silly laws, and you take away some of that money. If you are a safe driver and don't get tickets, you are basically avoiding a tax. If all of these laws are eliminated, the town will need to raise taxes and cut spending to make up for the difference in revenue. Many people do not take into account that these laws aren't out to "get" people, they're out to make money!
So my question to you is this: Would you rather have some silly traffic laws that make stupid and careless people pay money to the government, or a simple tax where everyone* pays money to the government?
* Yes, not everyone pays taxes. However, that's not the point here.
I was going to reply to OP, but then I read your post. +1.
This already exists in most states. Distracted driving is considered 'Careless Driving' in New Jersey, a 2 point offense. However if that action causes an accident, things get much more serious. For example, you can now get up to 10 years in jail if it is determined you caused an accident due to drowsiness.
I could build one with the slightest bit of information to start with.
Assuming it's a simple device, sure. However, I would doubt (and hope) that any such device would not be made so simple as to allow home production.
This device on the other hand, is a weapon in and of itself. Cause a traffic jam, prevent someone from driving away, etc.
No, that's ALL it does. It's not a weapon. It stops your car. That's IT. What criminal wants that? All they have after they've stopped your car is a STOPPED CAR. Not a very good getaway vehicle, especially since most people would be alerting the authorities with a cell phone as soon as it happened. I'm not saying no problems might come of such a device. I'm saying that any problems that come from such a device would be minimal.
If a device disabled the car, you would want it to seriously disable the car. I.E. one would not want to be able to flip a switch: car off, then flip a switch: car on. You would want it to be press a button: car off, intrusive procedure: car on. Carjacker wants to disable my car? He can have it. He just won't be able to move it.
Portable barricades (fences) could be in all cop cars, and put just ahead of the chase, where it can't be avoided.
Let's see.. a portable barricade that will stop a 2 ton vehicle travelling at 60 mi/h? Right. Portable if you happen to have a crane on-site. Actually, they already do this. They park the car across the road. Naturally this can cause great damage to the vehicle and is not the preferred solution (although obviously more desired than a loss of life).
Everyone else has already debunked your other great ideas, so clearly the solution isn't as simple as you make it out to be. Why there is this assumption that all criminals will magically be able to get these devices is beyond me. Scanners have been available forever and only a small percentage of criminals actually use them, and an even smaller percentage successfully use them (ever see an episode of COPS where they just keep using the radio because the guy was too dumb to turn the scanner down?). Scanners are readily made available, as well. Any device that we're talking about in this case would have to be a hack, which would reduce the availability even more. Also, as people mentioned above: who wants a device that can disable a car? Then all you have is a 2 ton brick, and no way to leave. I'm not saying there's no reason to be against this, but so far most of the reasons given to be against it don't cut it.
George Carlin pointed out years ago that car jackings came about due to car alarms
Perhaps, but the incidence of carjacking is drastically lower than auto theft. It's just that carjackings get play on the evening news, and auto theft doesn't, so we get the sense that there is some sort of 'epidemic' or 'crime wave'. Then you have the 'instill-fear' special report: how to protect you and your family from carjackings, make sure to watch at 11!
If it starts becoming a problem, you'll find that governments will start building dykes, or digging shoreline trenches to keep the water at bay.
This works great for Holland, or for small areas of countries (such as the example you provide). However, the total shoreline of the United States is huge! It would be the largest engineering project to date to reinforce the shorelines of the entire country. If a large rise in the water level did occur, I would suspect that not all of the shoreline would be protected, but based on the development on the shoreline in New Jersey, I would bet on a good portion of the shoreline requiring protection.
overnight temperatures are much hotter as well, but that may simply be due to the flock from suburbs into city communities.
Dunno where you live, but in the Northeast, it is quite the opposite, which would actually support your conclusion, imo. It is pretty much just an increase in the heat-island effect. Asphalt heats up during the day, and retains that heat into the evening hours, resulting in higher temperatures near the ground. As more people move out of the city, more pavement is required in what used to be considered rural areas.
Once again, upon any claims of a failing product, the anecdotal evidence to the contrary comes flying in!
What some people need to realize is that just because your unit works, that does not mean that all units will still be working after the same amount of time. Where are the people that yell "causation!=correllation" like its "four legs good, two legs bad"? They should be here yelling "one isn't a large enough sample"! This person was even accused of spreading FUD by a user whose Tivo is still functioning. Ridiculous.
I don't own a Tivo. I have no idea if they have an overheating problem or not. Even if I owned a Tivo, I would still not know if they have an overheating problem or not. I would only know if my Tivo had an overheating problem or not.
The problem is that roads are rarely standardized. For the same reason that we don't use prefabbed designs for the roads (only 'design guidelines', which still don't cover all situations), you wouldn't be able to use prefabbed road pieces. There are just too many variables to make it cost effective.
New techinques in concrete paving, specifically ultra thin whitetopping, are said to eliminate this noise. Expansion joints are still required, usually at 12 feet, iirc.