There is unrest in the forest, There is trouble with the trees, For the maples want more sunlight And the oaks ignore their pleas.
The trouble with the maples, (And they're quite convinced they're right) They say the oaks are just too lofty And they grab up all the light. But the oaks can't help their feelings If they like the way they're made. And they wonder why the maples Can't be happy in their shade.
There is trouble in the forest, And the creatures all have fled, As the maples scream "Oppression!" And the oaks just shake their heads
So the maples formed a union And demanded equal rights. "The oaks are just too greedy; We will make them give us light." Now there's no more oak oppression, For they passed a noble law, And the trees are all kept equal By hatchet, axe, and saw.
If this generates alpha particles as its "waste product", might that turn out to be a useful side effect? Don't we need a new source of industrial helium anyhow?
I'd rather see "us" (by which I mean the entire population of the planet) get MULTIPLE people to Mars, with enough of a support system that they can STAY THERE. And if that becomes the goal, why not the moon first? The challenges of habitation are much the same, but the energy and time costs are much less. Once it can be demonstrated that a self-sustaining extraterrestrial colony is possible, then it's time to go to Mars. Alternatively, if there is a breakthrough that reduces the energy required for the trip by an order of magnitude, then it may start to make sense to go.
Yeah, Afghanistan is going to be so much better -- where there is virtually no landline infrastructure and ALL communications, though probably orders of magnitude less than a major American city, are done over the air.
Also, there is the possibility that the people who got it right were picking up signs in the equipment around them, consciously or not. I'm sure you've heard the highly annoying Morse Code-like noise that bursts forth from amplified speakers if a cell phone is left nearby and it starts looking for a signal. That's a very obvious sign, but what if the effect were to make a certain fluorescent light flicker when it otherwise wouldn't, or to cause a tone to be emitted somewhere between 15 and 20 kHz where most people won't hear it? These people may not realize they're picking up on an effect once removed from the signal itself, but they are tuning in to an effect with a close enough correlation to be indistinguishable.
Do you think maybe the government feels they are doing such a great job there's no need to clamp down? From what I've seen, they are doing about as well as anyone could under the circumstances. Maybe they think that this will lead to good enough things being said (with a few bad ones for a "reality check") that they can pretend to be wide open and still come out of this looking good.
I'm so disappointed. I thought they were planning to put Giant Robot into space -- maybe a gigantic billboard of something like this. Just imagine the kawaii damage!
Mommy and Daddy want to install nannyware and have done so in the past? Don't interfere, let Little Sis pick a password that she can remember -- maybe the first letter of a sentence or other sequence she can remember -- and count on the fact that it's NOT WINDOWS to deal with the issue.
If the parents know enough to force nannyware onto a Debian box, they probably know enough to get around the password protection. More likely they'll download some Windows software and be totally mystified why it just won't install.
Clones are more different than identical twins. They start with th same DNA (just like a twin) but are subject to the same errors during development. In addition to that, however, they are growing in a different environment unlike twins who share at least the same environment for the first 9 months if talking about humans. Hence, clones are less similar than twins.
Not to mention that wherever the clone's DNA is extracted from, it has had additional time and opportunity to be damaged. The clone starts life fundamentally OLDER than the creature it was cloned from, even if there is no shortening of the telomeres.
If you plan to jump out of a plane, you check your parachute. But every time you drive, do you check your tires? Why not? The potential consequences are the same if your equipment fails.
The reason is that it takes far too much effort to be afraid of everything, so most people just try to take care of the really big things, then work their way down the list if the opportunity is there. It could easily be argued that he could afford to have his plane inspected regularly and not worry about it himself, but there is a reason most people die in terribly anticlimactic ways. That is because we spend so much of our lives doing anticlimactic things, and many of them entail some degree of risk whether we choose to think about it or not. The law of averages says even people who take risks will often die in totally unspectacular ways.
Sure we're not all going to die in a blogging accident, but I don't know anyone who thinks "I have to drive to work today, I had better make sure my will is in order". Not even in Los Angeles, just after it rains for the first time in months. After rolling the dice and surviving so many times before, why should today be any different?
It occurred to me only after reading your post, but maybe Fossett knew something everyone else didn't, and realized he could not go out the way Hunter S. Thompson did. Nobody would buy a "gun cleaning accident", but a mysterious flight to nowhere? Sad, and difficult for friends and family, but it just doesn't carry the same sort of stigma.
HST knew the people who understood him would know why he had to do what he did, and fuck everyone else.
We know the odds are greater than zero, because we have proof that it has happened once. "Infinitesimal" was probably a bad choice of word, as the anthropic principle shows the odds have to be finite. That is, we're here, so it can and does happen. It sets a lower bound on probability.
As a poker player, I have a corollary to the Infinite Monkeys theory, which I call the Infinite Donkeys theory. This theory holds that every possible event, no matter how unlikely, will happen if given sufficient opportunity (in this case if you play enough hands).
Though we do not know the parameters of the Drake equation, it is starting to appear that one of them -- planets in habitable zones -- is much larger than would have been guessed a couple decades ago. Even if the odds of all the cards falling in the right order is infinitesimal, it will happen if they are dealt out enough times. Don't be so quick to write off extraterrestrial life.
Replacement cost, plus a refund of the "warranty", plus the identity theft protection, would have been reasonable compensation if they'd 'fessed up and paid off as soon as they knew they weren't going to find it -- and if they had, we wouldn't be hearing about it now.
In this case, I think what she's entitled to is more along the lines of treble damages, plus the warranty cost, and identity theft protection -- and whatever punitive damages the court awards on top of that should be going to OLPC or something similar. The judgment should compensate her but not make her rich, but at the same time it should significantly sting Best Buy, so they don't just write this off as the cost of doing business. The money that falls in between (which would be the bulk of it) is a bit of a sticky wicket. It shouldn't go to the court, or they'll want to fine the fuck out of everyone for everything and keep it. It shouldn't go to the plaintiff, as she wasn't harmed THAT badly. It has to go to an uninvolved third party so there is no "woohoo, let's do it again! I'M RICH, BIATCH!"
There's another lesson to be learned, and it is best to learn it before you hit the Real World, or it hits you:
If you're going to do something that is officially forbidden, you need to NOT make yourself the easiest target. This doesn't mean being completely paranoid, only to remember the first rule of cow tipping: Always take someone slower than yourself.
Just because something is popular doesn't mean it's legal, and most illegal things became that way by being TOO popular for some influential group's liking. Booze, drugs, porn, file sharing, they all somehow manage to piss off people who really shouldn't give a shit -- people who will attempt to lock the world down for their own comfort if given half a chance. One must learn the seemingly mutually exclusive acts of flying under the radar, and finding other people who share one's interest.
There are plenty of slot-loading drives (car stereos most notably) that will totally barf on a mini-CD, but that does not make them custom-sized. The 80 mm discs are in fact conforming to a standard, albeit one many slot loader manufacturers have chosen not to support. 60 mm discs, business card discs, heart-shaped discs, etc. are all admittedly non-standard, and if they work, that's nice, but tough luck if they don't. The 80 mm discs really SHOULD work on everything, in the RFC sense of the word SHOULD.
I have found that my overclocks generally don't reach, or even establish, what the processor is actually capable. Something else always craps out first. Maybe it's the northbridge, or a cheap stick of RAM, or the SATA controller that craps out around 226 MHz and frags your entire disk (grr...).
Recently, if you're willing to invest in support hardware that's reasonably capable of overclocking, you're also able to afford a faster-out-of-the-box CPU but cheaper support hardware, which is the route I went this time around. I still tried to crank it up but I knew the wall I'd hit probably wouldn't be the CPU.
The most profitable price point for tri-cores would be where they sell all of them while minimally affecting the demand for quad-cores.
Imagine for a moment that the quad-core market is a seller's dream -- they can't get them out the door fast enough to meet demand. Some people would "settle" for the tri-core simply because they can't GET their quad. In this case, selling it at over 3/4 the cost of a quad probably isn't going to hurt quad sales at all, and the ideal price would be "whatever the market will bear". If the yield on the quads is sufficiently low (and it looks like it is for AMD), the price of quads may be totally irrelevant. They just aren't available. Of course if the competitor has quads to spare and you don't, you're screwed.
Conversely, imagine that demand for quad-cores is weak, and nobody (outside of server buyers) seems to want more than two. In that case, it might pay to sell the tri-cores for just slightly more than duals, just to move them. (They are the "misfit toys", after all.) As word gets out that three is indeed faster or smoother than two, demand will go up and prices can be adjusted accordingly. Some people may even be induced to go for four, rather than three.
I have to wonder if it is possible to build a FIVE core configuration while having only the memory controllers and bus for four -- and choose the four that will be used during testing. This could be the fastest four, or just the four that work if one is dead. Since the crossbars don't exist to support five, no fives would be shipped, and it is unlikely anyone could cobble one together from shipping parts. It would simply be for redundancy in production. Whether or not this is economically viable depends a whole lot on how much it improves yield, and particularly how much it improves the yield in the highest speed bins (not so much if the cores can run at different multipliers though).
Civil unions for any couple that wants one. I'd raise the cost of divorce though -- well, sort of. Instead of dividing the property between the ex-spouses, divide it up between the spouses and any underage children, though not necessarily evenly (let's face it, adult necessities have to be met or the children starve).
On the flip side of the coin, I'd get government out of the marriage business. Civil unions are a matter of contract, and government has every reason to uphold contracts. Marriage is for churches (temples, mosques, whatever) to handle, and it is whatever they say it is. Don't like what they have to say? Ordain yourself and have it your way. If you want to marry your Ford Mustang, go right ahead -- it has no legal standing.
Most studio films avoid recycling their voice actors in obvious ways, but this is far from the case for television where they are expected to voice at least THREE characters without "overtime pay". Think of your favorite cartoon and how many speaking characters might appear during the course of a single 22-minute episode, and you could probably still get all of the voice actors in a phone booth (without it having to be a TARDIS).
Let's look at The Simpsons, for example:
Dan Castellaneta: Homer Simpson, Grampa Abraham Simpson, Barney Gumble, Krusty the Clown, Groundskeeper Willie, Mayor Quimby, Hans Moleman, Sideshow Mel, Itchy, Kodos, Gil, Poochie, Squeaky-Voiced Teen, Burn's Lawyer, Mr. Teeny, Bill Clinton
I will refrain from doing the same for Hank Azaria or Harry Shearer, but most notable is the number of major characters that are the ONLY one performed by a given actor: Lisa Simpson is voiced by Yeardley Smith, who does no other characters (major or minor). Julie Kavner covers Marge and both sisters, which makes sense (they're SUPPOSED to sound a lot alike).
So just like the Omaha Beach film, you can cover a lot of ground with a small handful of talented, motivated, and organized voice actors, or possibly just one. The difference is that this is not new and has never required a lot of technology -- as amply demonstrated by Mel Blanc.
I have a solution for Caps Lock that can be easily done on a short-term basis, with no keyboard driver hacking.
Pop the key off with whatever is handy -- a bent paper clip will do if you're not carrying a pocketknife or screwdriver -- and wrap a rubber band around the stem of the key. Then put it back on. It may take a couple tries, but you'll find that this means the key has to be pressed REALLY HARD to activate it. Depending on the rubber band you've chosen, and how tightly you've wrapped it, you could have to stand up and LEAN on it, but you should still be able to activate it if required.
When the job is done (assuming this isn't pretty much your machine exclusively), pop the key back off, remove the rubber band, and put the key back on. Nobody will be the wiser.
My work keyboard is modified this way, but my setup pretty much ensures nobody will want to use it. If the Dvorak keyboard isn't intimidating enough, the mouse on the left screws almost everyone up. If someone can touch-type, they can just change the keyboard settings once logged in (and the login sequence is still in QWERTY), or log into another account which uses standard QWERTY, but I have a spare QWERTY keyboard hiding behind the monitors attached by USB just the same. The mouse they just have to deal with. Reach across and remember to reverse the buttons.
I also have both monitors rotated into Portrait mode, but this doesn't cause any usability issues. It does rule out the use of ClearType, but very few people in our office give a shit about that -- they're still trying to figure out why running at the native resolution of the LCD panel is such a great idea.
God, I had an Aquarius, and I guess the only thing that made it #3 on the list, rather than #1, is somewhat adequate space between the rubber keys.
I learned to program on that thing, with a "massive" 16KB expansion unit, and I even had it running amusing (to me, having my first computer) little games I got from magazines and adapted to its bastardized BASIC, or the few that I brewed up myself. I never got too attached to any program, as the tape drive system was notoriously unreliable -- I would often back up the same program to multiple tapes, and STILL not be able to read back any of them a few months later. Also the only printer available was a 40-column (4 inch) thermal printer that printed in BLUE. I couldn't even do my homework on this thing because I couldn't produce full-page width documents.
At least I got it as a gift, and I'm pretty sure my father got it mighty cheap. Fortunately I got my first PC about two and a half years later, a daisy wheel printer not long after that (dot-matrix printouts were verboten in many of my classes), and got on a fairly normal computing path. Even 360k floppies were quite a blessing after dealing with cassettes for so long!
Still, there are machines NOW out there with worse keyboards than these -- but such are the compromises inherent to pocket-size devices. The only excuse for 70's-80's computers was cheapness.
# single windshield wiper blade as a "cost-saving measure"(2)
I drive a 1989 Subaru XT-6, which has only one wiper, center-mounted. I do not believe the idea was cost savings, but in theory it does save some money to replace just one blade. Unfortunately, they only come in pairs so I end up buying two anyhow, and oxidation seems to set in just as fast for the one in the package as the one on the car. I guess it's like trying to buy one shoe.
The other downside is that it leaves a big spot dead center of the windshield unwiped, as the blade can't accommodate the change in curve as it sweeps out the path across the windshield. This certainly could be engineered away -- perhaps by a flat windshield, which would also be cheaper to manufacture -- but it is something they would have to consider. It probably was better when the springs in the wiper arm were younger, so this may not be an immediate problem for Tata.
33 HP is probably adequate for a vehicle expected to coexist peacefully with motorbikes and bumpy roads, as "launches" would be far less useful in day-to-day driving than they are in our highway-laden environment. I certainly do not regret having five times the power of this newly announced vehicle, but on the flip side it does get 21 mpg, as opposed to 60.
As for competing with the used car market, that is true, but the used cars are (by definition) no longer in production and will only get less common and harder to maintain as time goes on, unless they're ubiquitous like Honda Civics (even then, maintenance costs still escalate over time). Ultimately their toughest competition may turn out to be used Tatas.
Slashdot Mirror
To quote 20th century Canadian poet Neal Peart:
There is unrest in the forest,
There is trouble with the trees,
For the maples want more sunlight
And the oaks ignore their pleas.
The trouble with the maples,
(And they're quite convinced they're right)
They say the oaks are just too lofty
And they grab up all the light.
But the oaks can't help their feelings
If they like the way they're made.
And they wonder why the maples
Can't be happy in their shade.
There is trouble in the forest,
And the creatures all have fled,
As the maples scream "Oppression!"
And the oaks just shake their heads
So the maples formed a union
And demanded equal rights.
"The oaks are just too greedy;
We will make them give us light."
Now there's no more oak oppression,
For they passed a noble law,
And the trees are all kept equal
By hatchet, axe, and saw.
If this generates alpha particles as its "waste product", might that turn out to be a useful side effect? Don't we need a new source of industrial helium anyhow?
I'd rather see "us" (by which I mean the entire population of the planet) get MULTIPLE people to Mars, with enough of a support system that they can STAY THERE. And if that becomes the goal, why not the moon first? The challenges of habitation are much the same, but the energy and time costs are much less. Once it can be demonstrated that a self-sustaining extraterrestrial colony is possible, then it's time to go to Mars. Alternatively, if there is a breakthrough that reduces the energy required for the trip by an order of magnitude, then it may start to make sense to go.
Yeah, Afghanistan is going to be so much better -- where there is virtually no landline infrastructure and ALL communications, though probably orders of magnitude less than a major American city, are done over the air.
Also, there is the possibility that the people who got it right were picking up signs in the equipment around them, consciously or not. I'm sure you've heard the highly annoying Morse Code-like noise that bursts forth from amplified speakers if a cell phone is left nearby and it starts looking for a signal. That's a very obvious sign, but what if the effect were to make a certain fluorescent light flicker when it otherwise wouldn't, or to cause a tone to be emitted somewhere between 15 and 20 kHz where most people won't hear it? These people may not realize they're picking up on an effect once removed from the signal itself, but they are tuning in to an effect with a close enough correlation to be indistinguishable.
Do you think maybe the government feels they are doing such a great job there's no need to clamp down? From what I've seen, they are doing about as well as anyone could under the circumstances. Maybe they think that this will lead to good enough things being said (with a few bad ones for a "reality check") that they can pretend to be wide open and still come out of this looking good.
I'm so disappointed. I thought they were planning to put Giant Robot into space -- maybe a gigantic billboard of something like this. Just imagine the kawaii damage!
Mal-2
Mommy and Daddy want to install nannyware and have done so in the past? Don't interfere, let Little Sis pick a password that she can remember -- maybe the first letter of a sentence or other sequence she can remember -- and count on the fact that it's NOT WINDOWS to deal with the issue.
If the parents know enough to force nannyware onto a Debian box, they probably know enough to get around the password protection. More likely they'll download some Windows software and be totally mystified why it just won't install.
Mal-2
Not to mention that wherever the clone's DNA is extracted from, it has had additional time and opportunity to be damaged. The clone starts life fundamentally OLDER than the creature it was cloned from, even if there is no shortening of the telomeres.
Mal-2
Maybe to spread freedom? The freedom to download, the freedom to smoke pot... there must be others.
Could you bring some decent beer and some Tim Horton's coffee when you invade? Thanks!
Mal-2
If you plan to jump out of a plane, you check your parachute. But every time you drive, do you check your tires? Why not? The potential consequences are the same if your equipment fails.
The reason is that it takes far too much effort to be afraid of everything, so most people just try to take care of the really big things, then work their way down the list if the opportunity is there. It could easily be argued that he could afford to have his plane inspected regularly and not worry about it himself, but there is a reason most people die in terribly anticlimactic ways. That is because we spend so much of our lives doing anticlimactic things, and many of them entail some degree of risk whether we choose to think about it or not. The law of averages says even people who take risks will often die in totally unspectacular ways.
Sure we're not all going to die in a blogging accident, but I don't know anyone who thinks "I have to drive to work today, I had better make sure my will is in order". Not even in Los Angeles, just after it rains for the first time in months. After rolling the dice and surviving so many times before, why should today be any different?
Mal-2
It occurred to me only after reading your post, but maybe Fossett knew something everyone else didn't, and realized he could not go out the way Hunter S. Thompson did. Nobody would buy a "gun cleaning accident", but a mysterious flight to nowhere? Sad, and difficult for friends and family, but it just doesn't carry the same sort of stigma.
HST knew the people who understood him would know why he had to do what he did, and fuck everyone else.
Mal-2
We know the odds are greater than zero, because we have proof that it has happened once. "Infinitesimal" was probably a bad choice of word, as the anthropic principle shows the odds have to be finite. That is, we're here, so it can and does happen. It sets a lower bound on probability.
Mal-2
As a poker player, I have a corollary to the Infinite Monkeys theory, which I call the Infinite Donkeys theory. This theory holds that every possible event, no matter how unlikely, will happen if given sufficient opportunity (in this case if you play enough hands).
Though we do not know the parameters of the Drake equation, it is starting to appear that one of them -- planets in habitable zones -- is much larger than would have been guessed a couple decades ago. Even if the odds of all the cards falling in the right order is infinitesimal, it will happen if they are dealt out enough times. Don't be so quick to write off extraterrestrial life.
Mal-2
Replacement cost, plus a refund of the "warranty", plus the identity theft protection, would have been reasonable compensation if they'd 'fessed up and paid off as soon as they knew they weren't going to find it -- and if they had, we wouldn't be hearing about it now.
In this case, I think what she's entitled to is more along the lines of treble damages, plus the warranty cost, and identity theft protection -- and whatever punitive damages the court awards on top of that should be going to OLPC or something similar. The judgment should compensate her but not make her rich, but at the same time it should significantly sting Best Buy, so they don't just write this off as the cost of doing business. The money that falls in between (which would be the bulk of it) is a bit of a sticky wicket. It shouldn't go to the court, or they'll want to fine the fuck out of everyone for everything and keep it. It shouldn't go to the plaintiff, as she wasn't harmed THAT badly. It has to go to an uninvolved third party so there is no "woohoo, let's do it again! I'M RICH, BIATCH!"
Mal-2
There's another lesson to be learned, and it is best to learn it before you hit the Real World, or it hits you:
If you're going to do something that is officially forbidden, you need to NOT make yourself the easiest target. This doesn't mean being completely paranoid, only to remember the first rule of cow tipping: Always take someone slower than yourself.
Just because something is popular doesn't mean it's legal, and most illegal things became that way by being TOO popular for some influential group's liking. Booze, drugs, porn, file sharing, they all somehow manage to piss off people who really shouldn't give a shit -- people who will attempt to lock the world down for their own comfort if given half a chance. One must learn the seemingly mutually exclusive acts of flying under the radar, and finding other people who share one's interest.
Mal-2
There are plenty of slot-loading drives (car stereos most notably) that will totally barf on a mini-CD, but that does not make them custom-sized. The 80 mm discs are in fact conforming to a standard, albeit one many slot loader manufacturers have chosen not to support. 60 mm discs, business card discs, heart-shaped discs, etc. are all admittedly non-standard, and if they work, that's nice, but tough luck if they don't. The 80 mm discs really SHOULD work on everything, in the RFC sense of the word SHOULD.
Mal-2
I have found that my overclocks generally don't reach, or even establish, what the processor is actually capable. Something else always craps out first. Maybe it's the northbridge, or a cheap stick of RAM, or the SATA controller that craps out around 226 MHz and frags your entire disk (grr...).
Recently, if you're willing to invest in support hardware that's reasonably capable of overclocking, you're also able to afford a faster-out-of-the-box CPU but cheaper support hardware, which is the route I went this time around. I still tried to crank it up but I knew the wall I'd hit probably wouldn't be the CPU.
Mal-2
The most profitable price point for tri-cores would be where they sell all of them while minimally affecting the demand for quad-cores.
Imagine for a moment that the quad-core market is a seller's dream -- they can't get them out the door fast enough to meet demand. Some people would "settle" for the tri-core simply because they can't GET their quad. In this case, selling it at over 3/4 the cost of a quad probably isn't going to hurt quad sales at all, and the ideal price would be "whatever the market will bear". If the yield on the quads is sufficiently low (and it looks like it is for AMD), the price of quads may be totally irrelevant. They just aren't available. Of course if the competitor has quads to spare and you don't, you're screwed.
Conversely, imagine that demand for quad-cores is weak, and nobody (outside of server buyers) seems to want more than two. In that case, it might pay to sell the tri-cores for just slightly more than duals, just to move them. (They are the "misfit toys", after all.) As word gets out that three is indeed faster or smoother than two, demand will go up and prices can be adjusted accordingly. Some people may even be induced to go for four, rather than three.
I have to wonder if it is possible to build a FIVE core configuration while having only the memory controllers and bus for four -- and choose the four that will be used during testing. This could be the fastest four, or just the four that work if one is dead. Since the crossbars don't exist to support five, no fives would be shipped, and it is unlikely anyone could cobble one together from shipping parts. It would simply be for redundancy in production. Whether or not this is economically viable depends a whole lot on how much it improves yield, and particularly how much it improves the yield in the highest speed bins (not so much if the cores can run at different multipliers though).
Mal-2
Civil unions for any couple that wants one. I'd raise the cost of divorce though -- well, sort of. Instead of dividing the property between the ex-spouses, divide it up between the spouses and any underage children, though not necessarily evenly (let's face it, adult necessities have to be met or the children starve).
On the flip side of the coin, I'd get government out of the marriage business. Civil unions are a matter of contract, and government has every reason to uphold contracts. Marriage is for churches (temples, mosques, whatever) to handle, and it is whatever they say it is. Don't like what they have to say? Ordain yourself and have it your way. If you want to marry your Ford Mustang, go right ahead -- it has no legal standing.
Mal-2
Most studio films avoid recycling their voice actors in obvious ways, but this is far from the case for television where they are expected to voice at least THREE characters without "overtime pay". Think of your favorite cartoon and how many speaking characters might appear during the course of a single 22-minute episode, and you could probably still get all of the voice actors in a phone booth (without it having to be a TARDIS).
Let's look at The Simpsons, for example:
Dan Castellaneta: Homer Simpson, Grampa Abraham Simpson, Barney Gumble, Krusty the Clown, Groundskeeper Willie, Mayor Quimby, Hans Moleman, Sideshow Mel, Itchy, Kodos, Gil, Poochie, Squeaky-Voiced Teen, Burn's Lawyer, Mr. Teeny, Bill Clinton
I will refrain from doing the same for Hank Azaria or Harry Shearer, but most notable is the number of major characters that are the ONLY one performed by a given actor: Lisa Simpson is voiced by Yeardley Smith, who does no other characters (major or minor). Julie Kavner covers Marge and both sisters, which makes sense (they're SUPPOSED to sound a lot alike).
So just like the Omaha Beach film, you can cover a lot of ground with a small handful of talented, motivated, and organized voice actors, or possibly just one. The difference is that this is not new and has never required a lot of technology -- as amply demonstrated by Mel Blanc.
Mal-2
I have a solution for Caps Lock that can be easily done on a short-term basis, with no keyboard driver hacking.
Pop the key off with whatever is handy -- a bent paper clip will do if you're not carrying a pocketknife or screwdriver -- and wrap a rubber band around the stem of the key. Then put it back on. It may take a couple tries, but you'll find that this means the key has to be pressed REALLY HARD to activate it. Depending on the rubber band you've chosen, and how tightly you've wrapped it, you could have to stand up and LEAN on it, but you should still be able to activate it if required.
When the job is done (assuming this isn't pretty much your machine exclusively), pop the key back off, remove the rubber band, and put the key back on. Nobody will be the wiser.
My work keyboard is modified this way, but my setup pretty much ensures nobody will want to use it. If the Dvorak keyboard isn't intimidating enough, the mouse on the left screws almost everyone up. If someone can touch-type, they can just change the keyboard settings once logged in (and the login sequence is still in QWERTY), or log into another account which uses standard QWERTY, but I have a spare QWERTY keyboard hiding behind the monitors attached by USB just the same. The mouse they just have to deal with. Reach across and remember to reverse the buttons.
I also have both monitors rotated into Portrait mode, but this doesn't cause any usability issues. It does rule out the use of ClearType, but very few people in our office give a shit about that -- they're still trying to figure out why running at the native resolution of the LCD panel is such a great idea.
Mal-2
God, I had an Aquarius, and I guess the only thing that made it #3 on the list, rather than #1, is somewhat adequate space between the rubber keys.
I learned to program on that thing, with a "massive" 16KB expansion unit, and I even had it running amusing (to me, having my first computer) little games I got from magazines and adapted to its bastardized BASIC, or the few that I brewed up myself. I never got too attached to any program, as the tape drive system was notoriously unreliable -- I would often back up the same program to multiple tapes, and STILL not be able to read back any of them a few months later. Also the only printer available was a 40-column (4 inch) thermal printer that printed in BLUE. I couldn't even do my homework on this thing because I couldn't produce full-page width documents.
At least I got it as a gift, and I'm pretty sure my father got it mighty cheap. Fortunately I got my first PC about two and a half years later, a daisy wheel printer not long after that (dot-matrix printouts were verboten in many of my classes), and got on a fairly normal computing path. Even 360k floppies were quite a blessing after dealing with cassettes for so long!
Still, there are machines NOW out there with worse keyboards than these -- but such are the compromises inherent to pocket-size devices. The only excuse for 70's-80's computers was cheapness.
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How hard is it to set up a display that just forever reads "Buffering..."?
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I drive a 1989 Subaru XT-6, which has only one wiper, center-mounted. I do not believe the idea was cost savings, but in theory it does save some money to replace just one blade. Unfortunately, they only come in pairs so I end up buying two anyhow, and oxidation seems to set in just as fast for the one in the package as the one on the car. I guess it's like trying to buy one shoe.
The other downside is that it leaves a big spot dead center of the windshield unwiped, as the blade can't accommodate the change in curve as it sweeps out the path across the windshield. This certainly could be engineered away -- perhaps by a flat windshield, which would also be cheaper to manufacture -- but it is something they would have to consider. It probably was better when the springs in the wiper arm were younger, so this may not be an immediate problem for Tata.
33 HP is probably adequate for a vehicle expected to coexist peacefully with motorbikes and bumpy roads, as "launches" would be far less useful in day-to-day driving than they are in our highway-laden environment. I certainly do not regret having five times the power of this newly announced vehicle, but on the flip side it does get 21 mpg, as opposed to 60.
As for competing with the used car market, that is true, but the used cars are (by definition) no longer in production and will only get less common and harder to maintain as time goes on, unless they're ubiquitous like Honda Civics (even then, maintenance costs still escalate over time). Ultimately their toughest competition may turn out to be used Tatas.
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