I agree that Congress has multiply failed the American people, both for the reasons you cite and more. But Bush has also failed his responsibility to the American people and the US Constitution. It is reasonable to hold Bush personally responsible for the actions of his Administration. Unfortunately it makes no sense to hold Congress responsible as an institution. Each citizen must hold their representative to Congress personally responsible.
Unfortunately there are only 2 ways I can think of to investigate improprieties of a Presidential Administration, through a special prosecutor appointed by that or a later Administration, or by Congress. And only Congress has the power within the US to hold that Administration accountable.
Ultimately this is where Congress failed the American people most miserably. They failed to investigate the egregiously illegal and immoral acts of the Bush Administration, largely because the Democrats were afraid of the same quagmire that befell the Reublicans after the Clinton impeachment hearings.
"Your guys are chasing after Bush on a presumption of guilt of something,"
First, Bush Administration has de-facto admitted to both losing official communication, and claiming official communication is not required to be released contrary to well established law.
There is legitimate reason to question the Bush Admin's judgment on what is personal and what is not, on what is required to be released and what is not. At this juncture the Bush Admin should be required to open all communication to outside auditors. That is one of the many reasons a special prosecutor should be appointed by Obama to review actions of the Bush Admin and publicize findings where required by law or where illegal activities are discovered.
the submitter meant Arab? The less intelligent among us have conflated Muslim and Arab, and not been able to integrate the idea of Islamofacists not representing the broader Muslim community, just like we frequently attribute the more negative aspects of Christianofacists to all Christians. Perhaps the author did this on purpose, or perhaps it was inadvertent. But without knowing, calling him/her a...tard was unnecessary.
What is your complaint or concern with using Newegg or Netflix for ratings? Both of them sell multiple similar products, so artificially increasing the rating of a specific product has almost no utility to them. There are many other choices. What's more, you have already paid your dues to Netflix, so they have no incentive whatsoever to encourage you to rent another movie from them. Additionally it decreases the utility of their rating system, and perhaps their whole service, if they have disappointed customers that feel betrayed by the rating they read.
On a per-passenger basis an airliner is about as fuel-efficient as an SUV
Not at all. Fuel economy for a Boeing or Airbus plane built after 1990 and filled to 75% capacity should be about 60 mpg per person. I wasn't in the mood to do the math, but this article from Boeing implies a 747 built in 2002 and filled to 75% capacity gets better than 80 mpg per person.
http://www.boeing.com/commercial/news/feature/mileage.html
Spars are rarely the life limiting factor of aircraft unless they are involved in an incident. Generally fuel burn, repetitive MX demands, and corrosion control make the plane uneconomical to fly. I'd believe AF1 gets some extra abuse, but commercial aircraft suffer daily abuse too.
Most airlines sold off their -200s because they were older and uneconomical with higher fuel prices and lower passenger loads. AF1 is one of the last -200s to enter service. I have less faith than you that someone in the government made a thoroughly researched and rational financial case to replace AF1 in 2020.
I doubt if the POTUS has to make extended travel arrangements due to airport restrictions we'd particularly hear about it. They would probably arrange for Marine One in the US. Overseas who knows. If he is meeting a head of state possibly they would arrange to meet in another location.
But part of the idea of a smaller plane is that it looks like the POTUS will need to expand his diplomatic footprint to some smaller countries and a smaller aircraft might be beneficial getting in and out of some of those countries. I don't know if the operational envelope of the other planes in the POTUS entourage are better or worse than AF1 where a smaller AF1 would increase their options.
the current craft are 19 years old and pushing the uneconomical part of the maintenance spectrum; they have a lot of hours on them. Time to retire them and get new planes.
I highly doubt it. Planes are regularly flown somewhat economically for 30 years, which granted is almost the age they will be when the AF1 replacement is planned to be ready. Northwest still flies a considerable number of DC-9s with an average age of 35 years. With 2 aircraft, I bet the AF1s have less than 30k hours each. Commercial planes are flown to 80 or 100k hours, that's over 22 years of 10 hour days every single day.
The time and expense in acquiring new AF1s are mostly in the customization for long duration missions, survivability, and communications. This plan to replace AF1 circa 2020 is probably a misuse of taxpayer money. The current aircraft should be refitted where necessary including re-engined and flown to 2030 at least.
The AF1 mission has not changed enough to need a new airframe with much improved performance characteristics. If anything as another poster pointed out, the President could probably use a smaller supplement aircraft like a 737 or maybe 787 for visiting less developed nations, and flying into smaller closer in airports to his final destination that can't handle a 747 or A380.
Like an idiot I didn't test my cable connection speed for a while before upgrading. It's possible the download speed is a little faster than I had at their next to top tier. I've only had the top tier since Christmas. I figure I'll give it a month, contact them once if no improvement, and after another month downgrade to my old package if it is not better.
Sending a statement by email would probably violate the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act unless it was PGP encrypted email. The financial institution could send a link by email to download the file on their website after signing in. Physical mail, while not theoretically secure, is considered secure by law. That is why the penalties are so stiff for mail tampering.
We have this in most of Texas, though I think it is generally provided by the incumbent electric carrier, and not the competitive electric carriers. It is called average billing. For people who have trouble budgeting or live closer to the edge I can see it would be valuable. But for me it seems like an unnecessary distraction because I always have enough cash onhand to pay my utilities at least.
I have Time Warner in Dallas and live in a older poorer neighborhood (so probably oversubscription is limited), but the rich neighborhood is only a couple blocks away. I pay $50/mo for 10 mbps service with the 16 mbps temporary speed boost. I actually see 3.5-4.5 mbps consistently or 35%-45% of the advertised nominal bandwidth, and I never see the speed boost.
This is the fastest advertised residential internet option in my neighborhood. There are 2 other options. AT&T fastest offering is 6 mbps for $35/mo plus the required $15/mo landline which I don't need. And of course I could get slow and expensive satellite. Those are the ONLY residential options.
Don't think I haven't considered switching to AT&T, but I suspect their speed wouldn't be a whole lot greater. And with cable internet I get free local stations because they don't bother filtering them. Cable modem performance depends entirely on your service provider policies and their plant investment and maintenance. You're lucky.
I got a Netflix player for Christmas too, and I'm sold on Roku. They seem to be committed to supplying quality products, communicating with their customers, and being part of the Open Source community. Check out their website and user forums. Too bad their other hardware is pretty pricey. The box is rock solid in build, software quality, and usability.
Currently there are 1,140 Starz movies, so if you agree with Styopa, that leaves 10,860 "sucky" movies. A considerable number of those 11k movies are independent or foreign, and have more than 3.5 stars. So there is a lot more quality content than Styopa implies. Personally I think a lot of the big hollywood, mass market movies the Starz channel carries is the real dreck.
I've been using the box on my 6mbs/256kbs cable connection and have mostly had a good "3 of 4 stars" picture quality. I've never had a stutter or dropped frame, and only once had rebuffering while I was also downloading an Ubuntu distro. Using QoS fixed that. It sounds like the eric conspiracy's real problem is either his internet service, or his computer if that is what he is using.
When was the last time you or your company raised a stink to Microsoft about performance or compatibility of something and you got it resolved (and rolled into a Windows Update that went out to all users)?
I bet only Fortune 100 companies can get a call back from a Microsoft Engineer with a resolution to a problem. And I bet there are only a handful of cases where the resolution flowed upstream. This kind of stuff happens every day with FOSS.
And those 99.9% of FOSS users that don't have the expertise to fix something can pay the 0.1% who can, and will roll it upstream. It is exactly because of paid development and industry support resolutions that gets rolled upstream that has driven FOSS to be so successful.
Depends on how you measure reliable. I probably have 3 power outages a year due to storms. I have probably 5 days a year with brownouts significant enough to cause my UPS to kick on one or more times that day (sometimes it jackhammers on and off).
I've had one UPS fail on me causing no further damage, and one UPS not provide power due to an old battery. So far in 8 years I have never had a UPS cause damage to equipment.
I am a Vista hater after experiencing it, though I would agree the "memory hog" critiques are somewhat off-base. Vista is good at pre-catching. And the fact it is using 1 or 2 gigs "doing nothing" isn't a problem.
What is a problem is that Vista is flat-out stupidly dog-slow on a computer with less than 2 gigs and no ReadyBoost. It doesn't matter what memory Vista is actually using, it is just SLOOOOOOW... That kind of resource intensiveness is obscene.
If a PHB implemented a mission critical app in Access poorly, I understand your wrath.
But frequently a project or analysis needs more capabilities than Excel provides, and the project isn't yet seen as business critical, and the timeliness or expense of getting IT on it is prohibitive. Access shines in these instances where a non-IT person can do some rather sophisticated data acquisition and analysis.
If years later you get called in to detangle an Access database that through feature-and-scope-creep has turned into an important business tool that needs a higher level of reliability, take it as a triumph of the common man and modern software, and as your responsibility and privilege to elevate this application to the next level.
I think what Hojima was trying to say is if we were to recycle the waste stream more conventionally (rather than plasmating, electrofying, and gassificating it, sic) it would be more efficient. The root problem is not that we want to efficiently dispose of our waste, the root problem is we want to efficiently refine and reuse the raw materials we need to create new products.
Take aluminum cans for example. If we run them through plasma gassification, we might get back half the energy used in creating them if we are lucky. But if we were to recycle them for new aluminum products, the recycling process uses something like 1/20th the power that would be required to produce new replacement aluminum. It's much more efficient to recycle aluminum rather than plasma gassify it for electricity and syngas.
This doesn't even take into account the fact some day we will basically run out of affordable ores and fossil fuels used to create many products like metal and plastic. We really should look at recycling everything we can that is not renewable.
Every commodity might have a different efficiency point on whether it is worthwhile to recycle or plasma gassify.
Historically all aircraft have been self-trimming, otherwise they were more likely than not to end up a big smoking hole in the ground. Another notable exception is the Concorde, which predates the F-117.
But with fly by wire, there is really no reason for aircraft to fly stable. The difference between normal flight with the aircraft under pilot control, and autopilot, is a shade of grey. If the computer is always flying the aircraft why make the aircraft more stable, when you could make the aircraft more responsive or more efficient instead and have the computer keep it on the straight and narrow.
We had a 1983 Cadillac Eldorado with the digital trip computer with instant and average MPG readout. After a bunch of measurements, and some derivatives, I discovered it got the best MPG at 45 MPH.
I've had lots of disagreements with people over the years. But so far, I have been the only person with recorded data to prove my position rather than seat of the pants opinion. Fun stuff.
With an Airbus Fly-By-Wire aircraft, or really any FBW aircraft system, you never had control in the first place. The computer takes your inputs, divines your intentions, and based on the operational envelope of the plane, attempts to control the plane in a similar way that won't endanger it.
There is a debate in aircraft control circles about how explicit a FBW system should react to commands. You could make them totally explicit where they are really no different than manual controls (this would allow you to do anything, even just stupidly dangerous), or you can make them completely autonomous where they try more to divine your intentions and make the plane react similarly (in this case the plane might not allow you to do something even moderately dangerous that could be necessary at the time). Airbus seems to lean towards the latter, Boeing towards the former.
The incident you refer to is Air France flight 296.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_296
There is a controversy surrounding it, but I have read somewhere that most aviation experts believe the FBW system got stuck in "Landing" mode and wouldn't switch to what it should have interpreted as a take off-go around command.
You are correct about Boeing planes before the 777, they are all manual controls with stick shakers. The 777 and probably all future planes including the 787 will be FBW. They will shake their stick at you when you are doing something dangerous, but they will also probably not allow you to do something dangerously stupid just as Airbus does to a varying degree.
Airbus started the trend in transport aircraft with the A320. I don't remember how many aircraft after that have been developed.
Boeing waited longer due to philosophical differences on how airplanes should be controlled. The 777 and 787 are the only Boeing planes with FBW. You can buy a brand new 737 or 747 today and you still get mechanical controls, with an electronic stick vibrator to warn you when you are doing something bad for the plane.
I don't see many people here saying it is unfair parents monitor or control their kids. What has been said is this is just like alcohol and the dichotomy of US and Europe. If you "protect" kids, when the limitations end at the arbitrary age of majority, they frequently make many more and dangerous mistakes.
I think it would be safer and wiser for parents to not limit the car, but to discuss appropriate behavior with the car, and monitor its location and speed. When the kids violate appropriate behavior, parents can chose some type of punishment.
Also, parents are legally responsible for most behavior of their children, as they should be. Since we don't allow children the rights of an adult, we should not hold them responsible for most poor "adult" behavior. But saying parents are accountable, any further than financially, for their children's behavior is dangerous to do and generally inaccurate. The only counter example I can think of is truancy, and I don't agree with putting parents in jail for children's truancy unless they are an enabler.
If you think insurance is a scam
I don't think many homeowners from Katrina and Ike said that until their claim was refused because their loss was caused by "storm surge" instead of wind damage, when more of the damage was above the water line.
and why you should be asked to partially subsidize their choice
Even those of us that live in relatively safe areas of states with certain parts that are risk prone frequently argue the generally rich people who live on the coast, in the mountains, or wherever, shouldn't have to subsidize their lavish and risky lifestyle.
Dry pavement stopping distance is best at about 15% slip and wet pavement stopping distance is best at 0% slip. Seems to make sense that additional energy is dissipated in the transition from not skidding to skidding.
Slashdot Mirror
That's not Shuffle sized, that's Nano sized. I'd go running with a Shuffle, but I would't bother with a Nano or Clip.
I agree that Congress has multiply failed the American people, both for the reasons you cite and more. But Bush has also failed his responsibility to the American people and the US Constitution. It is reasonable to hold Bush personally responsible for the actions of his Administration. Unfortunately it makes no sense to hold Congress responsible as an institution. Each citizen must hold their representative to Congress personally responsible.
Unfortunately there are only 2 ways I can think of to investigate improprieties of a Presidential Administration, through a special prosecutor appointed by that or a later Administration, or by Congress. And only Congress has the power within the US to hold that Administration accountable.
Ultimately this is where Congress failed the American people most miserably. They failed to investigate the egregiously illegal and immoral acts of the Bush Administration, largely because the Democrats were afraid of the same quagmire that befell the Reublicans after the Clinton impeachment hearings.
"Your guys are chasing after Bush on a presumption of guilt of something,"
First, Bush Administration has de-facto admitted to both losing official communication, and claiming official communication is not required to be released contrary to well established law.
There is legitimate reason to question the Bush Admin's judgment on what is personal and what is not, on what is required to be released and what is not. At this juncture the Bush Admin should be required to open all communication to outside auditors. That is one of the many reasons a special prosecutor should be appointed by Obama to review actions of the Bush Admin and publicize findings where required by law or where illegal activities are discovered.
the submitter meant Arab? The less intelligent among us have conflated Muslim and Arab, and not been able to integrate the idea of Islamofacists not representing the broader Muslim community, just like we frequently attribute the more negative aspects of Christianofacists to all Christians. Perhaps the author did this on purpose, or perhaps it was inadvertent. But without knowing, calling him/her a ...tard was unnecessary.
What is your complaint or concern with using Newegg or Netflix for ratings? Both of them sell multiple similar products, so artificially increasing the rating of a specific product has almost no utility to them. There are many other choices. What's more, you have already paid your dues to Netflix, so they have no incentive whatsoever to encourage you to rent another movie from them. Additionally it decreases the utility of their rating system, and perhaps their whole service, if they have disappointed customers that feel betrayed by the rating they read.
Not at all. Fuel economy for a Boeing or Airbus plane built after 1990 and filled to 75% capacity should be about 60 mpg per person. I wasn't in the mood to do the math, but this article from Boeing implies a 747 built in 2002 and filled to 75% capacity gets better than 80 mpg per person. http://www.boeing.com/commercial/news/feature/mileage.html
Spars are rarely the life limiting factor of aircraft unless they are involved in an incident. Generally fuel burn, repetitive MX demands, and corrosion control make the plane uneconomical to fly. I'd believe AF1 gets some extra abuse, but commercial aircraft suffer daily abuse too.
Most airlines sold off their -200s because they were older and uneconomical with higher fuel prices and lower passenger loads. AF1 is one of the last -200s to enter service. I have less faith than you that someone in the government made a thoroughly researched and rational financial case to replace AF1 in 2020.
I doubt if the POTUS has to make extended travel arrangements due to airport restrictions we'd particularly hear about it. They would probably arrange for Marine One in the US. Overseas who knows. If he is meeting a head of state possibly they would arrange to meet in another location.
But part of the idea of a smaller plane is that it looks like the POTUS will need to expand his diplomatic footprint to some smaller countries and a smaller aircraft might be beneficial getting in and out of some of those countries. I don't know if the operational envelope of the other planes in the POTUS entourage are better or worse than AF1 where a smaller AF1 would increase their options.
I highly doubt it. Planes are regularly flown somewhat economically for 30 years, which granted is almost the age they will be when the AF1 replacement is planned to be ready. Northwest still flies a considerable number of DC-9s with an average age of 35 years. With 2 aircraft, I bet the AF1s have less than 30k hours each. Commercial planes are flown to 80 or 100k hours, that's over 22 years of 10 hour days every single day.
The time and expense in acquiring new AF1s are mostly in the customization for long duration missions, survivability, and communications. This plan to replace AF1 circa 2020 is probably a misuse of taxpayer money. The current aircraft should be refitted where necessary including re-engined and flown to 2030 at least.
The AF1 mission has not changed enough to need a new airframe with much improved performance characteristics. If anything as another poster pointed out, the President could probably use a smaller supplement aircraft like a 737 or maybe 787 for visiting less developed nations, and flying into smaller closer in airports to his final destination that can't handle a 747 or A380.
Like an idiot I didn't test my cable connection speed for a while before upgrading. It's possible the download speed is a little faster than I had at their next to top tier. I've only had the top tier since Christmas. I figure I'll give it a month, contact them once if no improvement, and after another month downgrade to my old package if it is not better.
Sending a statement by email would probably violate the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act unless it was PGP encrypted email. The financial institution could send a link by email to download the file on their website after signing in. Physical mail, while not theoretically secure, is considered secure by law. That is why the penalties are so stiff for mail tampering.
We have this in most of Texas, though I think it is generally provided by the incumbent electric carrier, and not the competitive electric carriers. It is called average billing. For people who have trouble budgeting or live closer to the edge I can see it would be valuable. But for me it seems like an unnecessary distraction because I always have enough cash onhand to pay my utilities at least.
I have Time Warner in Dallas and live in a older poorer neighborhood (so probably oversubscription is limited), but the rich neighborhood is only a couple blocks away. I pay $50/mo for 10 mbps service with the 16 mbps temporary speed boost. I actually see 3.5-4.5 mbps consistently or 35%-45% of the advertised nominal bandwidth, and I never see the speed boost.
This is the fastest advertised residential internet option in my neighborhood. There are 2 other options. AT&T fastest offering is 6 mbps for $35/mo plus the required $15/mo landline which I don't need. And of course I could get slow and expensive satellite. Those are the ONLY residential options.
Don't think I haven't considered switching to AT&T, but I suspect their speed wouldn't be a whole lot greater. And with cable internet I get free local stations because they don't bother filtering them. Cable modem performance depends entirely on your service provider policies and their plant investment and maintenance. You're lucky.
I got a Netflix player for Christmas too, and I'm sold on Roku. They seem to be committed to supplying quality products, communicating with their customers, and being part of the Open Source community. Check out their website and user forums. Too bad their other hardware is pretty pricey. The box is rock solid in build, software quality, and usability.
Currently there are 1,140 Starz movies, so if you agree with Styopa, that leaves 10,860 "sucky" movies. A considerable number of those 11k movies are independent or foreign, and have more than 3.5 stars. So there is a lot more quality content than Styopa implies. Personally I think a lot of the big hollywood, mass market movies the Starz channel carries is the real dreck.
I've been using the box on my 6mbs/256kbs cable connection and have mostly had a good "3 of 4 stars" picture quality. I've never had a stutter or dropped frame, and only once had rebuffering while I was also downloading an Ubuntu distro. Using QoS fixed that. It sounds like the eric conspiracy's real problem is either his internet service, or his computer if that is what he is using.
When was the last time you or your company raised a stink to Microsoft about performance or compatibility of something and you got it resolved (and rolled into a Windows Update that went out to all users)?
I bet only Fortune 100 companies can get a call back from a Microsoft Engineer with a resolution to a problem. And I bet there are only a handful of cases where the resolution flowed upstream. This kind of stuff happens every day with FOSS.
And those 99.9% of FOSS users that don't have the expertise to fix something can pay the 0.1% who can, and will roll it upstream. It is exactly because of paid development and industry support resolutions that gets rolled upstream that has driven FOSS to be so successful.
Depends on how you measure reliable. I probably have 3 power outages a year due to storms. I have probably 5 days a year with brownouts significant enough to cause my UPS to kick on one or more times that day (sometimes it jackhammers on and off).
I've had one UPS fail on me causing no further damage, and one UPS not provide power due to an old battery. So far in 8 years I have never had a UPS cause damage to equipment.
I am a Vista hater after experiencing it, though I would agree the "memory hog" critiques are somewhat off-base. Vista is good at pre-catching. And the fact it is using 1 or 2 gigs "doing nothing" isn't a problem.
What is a problem is that Vista is flat-out stupidly dog-slow on a computer with less than 2 gigs and no ReadyBoost. It doesn't matter what memory Vista is actually using, it is just SLOOOOOOW... That kind of resource intensiveness is obscene.
If a PHB implemented a mission critical app in Access poorly, I understand your wrath.
But frequently a project or analysis needs more capabilities than Excel provides, and the project isn't yet seen as business critical, and the timeliness or expense of getting IT on it is prohibitive. Access shines in these instances where a non-IT person can do some rather sophisticated data acquisition and analysis.
If years later you get called in to detangle an Access database that through feature-and-scope-creep has turned into an important business tool that needs a higher level of reliability, take it as a triumph of the common man and modern software, and as your responsibility and privilege to elevate this application to the next level.
I think what Hojima was trying to say is if we were to recycle the waste stream more conventionally (rather than plasmating, electrofying, and gassificating it, sic) it would be more efficient. The root problem is not that we want to efficiently dispose of our waste, the root problem is we want to efficiently refine and reuse the raw materials we need to create new products.
Take aluminum cans for example. If we run them through plasma gassification, we might get back half the energy used in creating them if we are lucky. But if we were to recycle them for new aluminum products, the recycling process uses something like 1/20th the power that would be required to produce new replacement aluminum. It's much more efficient to recycle aluminum rather than plasma gassify it for electricity and syngas.
This doesn't even take into account the fact some day we will basically run out of affordable ores and fossil fuels used to create many products like metal and plastic. We really should look at recycling everything we can that is not renewable. Every commodity might have a different efficiency point on whether it is worthwhile to recycle or plasma gassify.
Historically all aircraft have been self-trimming, otherwise they were more likely than not to end up a big smoking hole in the ground. Another notable exception is the Concorde, which predates the F-117.
But with fly by wire, there is really no reason for aircraft to fly stable. The difference between normal flight with the aircraft under pilot control, and autopilot, is a shade of grey. If the computer is always flying the aircraft why make the aircraft more stable, when you could make the aircraft more responsive or more efficient instead and have the computer keep it on the straight and narrow.
We had a 1983 Cadillac Eldorado with the digital trip computer with instant and average MPG readout. After a bunch of measurements, and some derivatives, I discovered it got the best MPG at 45 MPH.
I've had lots of disagreements with people over the years. But so far, I have been the only person with recorded data to prove my position rather than seat of the pants opinion. Fun stuff.
With an Airbus Fly-By-Wire aircraft, or really any FBW aircraft system, you never had control in the first place. The computer takes your inputs, divines your intentions, and based on the operational envelope of the plane, attempts to control the plane in a similar way that won't endanger it.
There is a debate in aircraft control circles about how explicit a FBW system should react to commands. You could make them totally explicit where they are really no different than manual controls (this would allow you to do anything, even just stupidly dangerous), or you can make them completely autonomous where they try more to divine your intentions and make the plane react similarly (in this case the plane might not allow you to do something even moderately dangerous that could be necessary at the time). Airbus seems to lean towards the latter, Boeing towards the former.
The incident you refer to is Air France flight 296. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_296 There is a controversy surrounding it, but I have read somewhere that most aviation experts believe the FBW system got stuck in "Landing" mode and wouldn't switch to what it should have interpreted as a take off-go around command.
You are correct about Boeing planes before the 777, they are all manual controls with stick shakers. The 777 and probably all future planes including the 787 will be FBW. They will shake their stick at you when you are doing something dangerous, but they will also probably not allow you to do something dangerously stupid just as Airbus does to a varying degree.
You can only do this with Fly-By-Wire.
Airbus started the trend in transport aircraft with the A320. I don't remember how many aircraft after that have been developed.
Boeing waited longer due to philosophical differences on how airplanes should be controlled. The 777 and 787 are the only Boeing planes with FBW. You can buy a brand new 737 or 747 today and you still get mechanical controls, with an electronic stick vibrator to warn you when you are doing something bad for the plane.
I don't see many people here saying it is unfair parents monitor or control their kids. What has been said is this is just like alcohol and the dichotomy of US and Europe. If you "protect" kids, when the limitations end at the arbitrary age of majority, they frequently make many more and dangerous mistakes.
I think it would be safer and wiser for parents to not limit the car, but to discuss appropriate behavior with the car, and monitor its location and speed. When the kids violate appropriate behavior, parents can chose some type of punishment.
Also, parents are legally responsible for most behavior of their children, as they should be. Since we don't allow children the rights of an adult, we should not hold them responsible for most poor "adult" behavior. But saying parents are accountable, any further than financially, for their children's behavior is dangerous to do and generally inaccurate. The only counter example I can think of is truancy, and I don't agree with putting parents in jail for children's truancy unless they are an enabler.
If you think insurance is a scam
I don't think many homeowners from Katrina and Ike said that until their claim was refused because their loss was caused by "storm surge" instead of wind damage, when more of the damage was above the water line.
and why you should be asked to partially subsidize their choice
Even those of us that live in relatively safe areas of states with certain parts that are risk prone frequently argue the generally rich people who live on the coast, in the mountains, or wherever, shouldn't have to subsidize their lavish and risky lifestyle.
According to research by this company
http://www.racelogic.co.uk/
Dry pavement stopping distance is best at about 15% slip and wet pavement stopping distance is best at 0% slip. Seems to make sense that additional energy is dissipated in the transition from not skidding to skidding.