Here's my abnormal driving situation story. I had just taken the off-ramp from the freeway when the radio started acting funny. Being a gadget geek, I set about trying to figure out what was the problem. A few seconds later I suddenly remembered, "Hey, I'm supposed to be driving!" I looked up to see myself about to plow into a car at the bottom of the ramp stopped at a red light.
I slammed on the brakes, but due to the ramp going downhill it wasn't going to stop me quickly enough. To the right was a guardrail and a ledge. To the left was a curb, a small dirt lane, then the wall leading up to the freeway. I made a split-second decision that the dirt lane was my best choice. I spun the wheel left, hit the curb, blew out two tires and destroyed a third, jumped the curb, then jogged the wheel right. I made it onto the dirt, avoided the wall, and stopped beside the car I had been about to hit.
Thinking about how an automated system might handle the same scenario, I can think of multiple ways it could fail. First the ramp was downhill, and so my braking distance was increased. An automated system might get confused by that because a simple accelerometer cannot distinguish between angle of the ramp and deceleration. You need a gyroscope to correctly determine orientation. Consequently, even if the car had automatically applied the brakes when it sensed me approaching the stopped car, it might have already been too late.
Second, the dirt path wasn't big enough for my car - I ended up two wheels up, two wheels still on the off-ramp (that's actually probably what kept me from hitting the freeway wall). Fortunately the car stopped at the light was in the middle of his lane, not glued to the left. An automated system would probably try to (1) prevent me from driving up a curb, (2) refuse to aim the car towards a wall, and (3) prohibit entry into a dirt lane too small for the car's width.
Finally, given the obstacles to my front and left, an automated system may have been confused by or decided that going off the ledge to the right was the best option.
This isn't to say that these sorts of problems can't be overcome by a computer. It's just to point out the convoluted sorts of trade-offs a computer may be forced to evaluate when faced with an "abnormal" driving situation. I do not envy the programmer tasked with developing generic accident-avoidance routines designed to cope with all abnormal situations.
Is Microsoft's Price Model For the Surface Justifiable?
Rather than ask the straightforward question "Is the Surface priced too high?", you reworded it into a clumsier question so that Betteridge's law of headlines would yield the answer you wanted.
This is not new. The first incident like this (that I know of) was in South Korea in 2005. It (and similar events) culminated in a law essentially stripping out anonymity online. It hasn't worked that well as most anonymous forums have simply moved overseas.
This is one of the truly new problems created by the Internet, and I look forward to watching how society struggles with coming up with a solution for it. The "lynch mob" analogy doesn't really work since members of mob aren't truly anonymous (though the KKK tried to achieve that), and the potential geographic separation between tormentor and victim is literally worldwide. So while there have been similar problems in the past, none are quite like this one.
And every man has a penis so they could potentially rape a woman. Every screwdriver could potentially be used to break into a house. Every Internet connection could potentially be used to download copyrighted material.
An argument that someone has to be pre-prohibited from potentially doing something bad has to have more to it than an unsubstantiated assertion that "Google will resort to all sorts of tricks." Otherwise you can ban just about anything under the premise of protecting the greater good. It's an ugly argument that has seen the presumption of innocence tossed out when it comes to copyright violations on the Internet. Someone files a DMCA complaint against you and you're presumed guilty until you prove your innocence, simply because you could be violating a copyright holder's rights.
That's one benefit Google got from combining the privacy policies - obviously the one which makes Google look worst so it's the reason most commonly trotted out. The flip side is by having each service have its own privacy policy, users had to keep track of each separate privacy policy (and Google's employees working on multiple products were uncertain of what they could and couldn't do with the data). Subtle differences between policies got lost amidst the similarities. Consolidating everything into a single unified "Google policy" made it easier for users to know what they were getting and for Google to know what it could do.
There are pros and cons to either approach. Anyone telling you one is universally better than the other is selling you something. Stripped of any nefarious advertising and creepy privacy invasion overtones, the default condition would be for Google to consolidate them into one policy simply to reduce bureaucracy and paperwork. So I think the onus should be on those advocating separate policies to justify why the benefits of having them separate outweigh the drawbacks.
Actually, my experience has been that most religious bigots aren't actually religious. They are bigots first and foremost, or rather psychotic or borderline psychotic and just want to be able to hate and do bad things to other people. They will latch onto whatever convenient excuse they can come up with to justify their behavior, such as citing specific parts of religious texts out of context while ignoring the parts which contradict their behavior. e.g. abusive husbands citing the Bible verse telling wives to obey their husbands, while completely unaware of the very next verse which tells husbands to love their wives. Even in the complete absence of organized religion (e.g. Communist China), you still see widespread bigotry in the form of prejudice based on what region of the country someone comes from.
My current hypothesis is that there's just something about human nature which makes us want to feel superior to others. That can manifest itself as being religiously moral (e.g. judging others by values they don't believe in), adhering to science and atheism (e.g. the constant bashing of religion on slashdot), coming from a more "sophisticated" cultural background (e.g. characterization of Southerners as backwards uneducated "trailer trash"), high school cliques (the stereotypical jocks vs nerds), belief in conspiracy theories ("how can you be so naive as to believe the government"), and even gossip ("I know something you don't know" and presumably that makes me superior). My guess as to the mechanism behind it is that people don't have enough time (nor interest) to join every social group there is. Consequently they try to seek self-affirmation of the groups they belong to (even when there wasn't a choice, such as what region of the country you come from). If your group is better than others, then obviously you made a better choice or were luckier at birth and thus are a superior human being.
It is a measure of trust. No one, trusts that the US will not screw with GPS if it would give them a military or economic advantage. Sure they say right now that they won't, but who knows what will happen in 5, 10 or 15 years in the future.
It has nothing to do with trust. There is nothing the U.S. or any country could do to gain the trust of other countries with a crucial technology like GPS. If Galileo had been developed first, the U.S., Russians, and Chinese wouldn't want to be reliant upon it either, so this has nothing to do with the U.S. being less trustworthy. The US-haters and the US-hater-haters are just casting it as a trust issue to troll and have something to argue about
GPS is just a technology which has become so pervasive and useful that it's become essential to modern life. And any country that's capable will want to make sure it controls anything essential which it's dependent upon. If you need a car to get to work, and you neighbor has an extra car which he says you're free to use any time, you're still gonna buy your own car. Not because you don't trust your neighbor, but because you'd feel awfully stupid if you could afford a car but didn't get one, and one day your neighbor through no fault of his own were unable to lend you his car. The exceptions (e.g. Panama and Suez canals) are only where cost or physical constraints limit the number of essentials which can be built.
And all of these systems work as accuracy enhancers and fully capable backups to each other. So it's not like a lot of duplicated effort is being put in with no gain.
I guess it worked on you then since you've forgotten all these MP3 players (Creative etc.), phones (Nokia, Sony Ericsson etc.), tablets (Microsoft etc.) that was before Apple.
Actually, that's something else I've noticed about Apple. Their hype/marketing/RDF/whatever is so good that many laypeople mistakenly believe that Apple invented a lot of that stuff. GUI, MP3 player, smartphone, thin tablet (Archos was trending in that direction before the iPad), touchscreens, multi-touch, pinch to zoom, slide to unlock, and on and on. Most of my non-tech friends think Apple invented all of those, even though they invented none of it. The last time I've seen mass misunderstanding to this extent was right after Windows 95, when a lot of my non-tech friends thought Microsoft invented the Internet.
The one thing Apple is really good at though is understanding laypeople. They know how to design and product and UI so that the average Joe will know how to use it and even enjoy it. The opposite of most Linux distros. I think that's one of the reasons they're disliked by technophiles. Technophiles would rather try to teach laypeople how the technology works. Apple just dumbs it down to their level. Laypeople of course prefer the latter approach, which is why Linux on the desktop is still a niche market.
The case is regarding items manufacturered in foreign countries and intended for sale in those countries. NOT items manufactured in foreign countries intended for sale in the United States.
"Not intended for sale in the U.S." is code for "I want to benefit from the lower cost of manufacturing overseas, but I don't want my customers to benefit from lower prices due to those lowered manufacturing costs. I want the entirety of the benefit to go straight into my pocket."
Outsourcing is a two-way street. If we're free to send jobs and manufacturing overseas, then we must also be free to bring the products of that overseas manufacturing back into the country.
Phone numbers are a relic from the early 20th century, when it was incredibly difficult to transmit information in a machine-readable format across wires. 10 digits was about the extent of the "character set" you could use while keeping pulse dialing times relatively short.
We need a system like DNS which will automatically convert an easier-to-remember text string to your phone number, much like domain names are converted to IP addresses. Smartphone phone books automatically do this to some extent, linking people's email addresses with their phone numbers. But there needs to be a universal methodology for doing this. (And require each text string be linked to an owned phone number, to prevent squatting on good phrases like has happened with domain names.)
except that the entire document was presented to the court and the jury. [...]. That's how trials work. The jury gets to see the entire document, hear both interpretations, and figure out who they think is more credible.
Given how quickly the jury returned with a verdict, it's pretty clear the jury didn't actually look at the entire document, and based their judgment solely on the interpretations. So yeah, that's how trials are supposed to work. But obviously it wasn't how it actually worked in this case.
The perjury clause only requires that the claimant be a legitimate copyright holder. It does not require that the allegedly infringing work be reasonably similar to the copyrighted work. In other words, I can send a DMCA notice claiming your website on Python programming infringes my copyright on a video about snakes. As long as I really hold a copyright on a video about snakes, I am not perjuring myself.
This is one of the stupid broken parts of the DMCA which really needs to be fixed. All laws should have some sense of reciprocity - like when Apple asked for an injunction banning Samsung's products from the market prior to trial, they first had to put up a bond to compensate Samsung for losses should the ban end up being overturned. People filing a DMCA claim should likewise be required to put up a bond to compensate the alleged infringer for costs should they eventually be cleared of infringement.
The only reason this is even an issue is because right now we have this weird situation where Monsanto has a patent on something which multiplies and spreads naturally, but isn't responsible for how it multiplies and spreads. Consequently they're able to sue people who come across the genes through "non-contractual" methods. Monsanto's lawyers have gamed the system so that they reap the rewards from distribution, while they bear no responsibility for it so others pay the price for it. If you made Monsanto responsible for distribution, this simply wouldn't be an issue. Monsanto would get money from use of the patented seed, but they would also be responsible (fiscally and legally) for making sure that seed did not end up where it wasn't intended.
If I were to invent and patent nanobots which self-replicated and spread through the air, and they became so pervasive they could be found everywhere including in people's bodies, do you honestly think I should be able to sue every living person for patent infringement? That's silly. I should be responsible for controlling how my nanobots spread. If I'm unable to control their spread so they'll stay out of the way of people who don't wish to obtain them, then others should not be forced to pay for my failure to control their distribution.
1) European (UK) gallons are 20% bigger than US gallons.
2) European fuel mileage is determined using a different test than U.S. EPA mileage. There's less stop-and-go in the EU tests.
Consequently it's not unusual for models which hit 50+ MPG in the EU to not even break 40 MPG in the EPA tests. CAFE uses a different test than EPA though. I'm not sure how CAFE mileage stacks up to EU mileage.
3) Diesel contains about 12%-15% more mass and energy per gallon. Consequently it also puts out about 12%-15% more pollutants per gallon. So unless you're comparing on price or range on same sized fuel tank, you need to tweak diesel's MPG down to draw a fair comparison with gasoline MPG.
4) When you distil a barrel of oil, some of it will naturally distil into diesel, some into gasoline. It's relatively easy to convert heavy fuels like diesel into gasoline. It's very difficult and expensive to convert light fuels like gasoline and kerosene into diesel. Consequently the most energy-efficient approach is to just take the fractions of diesel and gasoline which comes out naturally from the distillation process. The next-most energy-efficient approach is to favor gasoline.
So for consumption you want to err on the side which favors gasoline consumption. Diesel is only a cost-effective fuel competitor to gasoline because there are lots of gas-consuming cars. If you lower gasoline consumption below the production from natural distillation, diesel starts to become much more expensive. Whereas if gasoline consumption rises above natural production fractions, you can simply cook diesel a bit to break it down and make more gasoline.
Yeah, the problem is getting people to actually buy the high-mileage cars. Here's U.S. car and light truck sales data since 1931. Light trucks are a separate category under CAFE, and don't have to get as high MPG. Consequently they can be built bigger (relatively) and with more powerful engines. From 1931 to the 1970s (when CAFE was first implemented), light truck sales represented about 15%-20% of passenger vehicle sales. Since CAFE was implemented, light truck sales have climbed to over 50%.
People in general want the big, powerful "cars" and don't care if they get crappy mileage. Forcing the manufacturers to improve mileage isn't going to change that. It makes me think CAFE is partially based on the conspiracy theory that automakers could make 100 MPG cars, but are all in cahoots with oil companies to keep mileage low. That simply isn't the case - consumers are the ones favoring low mileage cars because of the advantages they offer: extra space, extra safety, more power.
If you want to encourage increased average vehicle mileage, this supply-side market manipulation just doesn't work that well. It needs to be done via demand-side market manipulation. Jack up fuel taxes to make gasoline more expensive. Then people will start to favor fuel economy more over size, safety, and power.
We missed our chance in the 1980s-1990s. When replacing manufacturing jobs with robots became viable, we should've gone whole hog with that. Replacing assembly line workers with robots, and retraining those workers for other jobs like operating and maintaining those robots or getting into the growing computer industry. Instead we opted to protect those low-skill but (compared to robots) high-wage jobs. Consequently when another country offered to do the same assembly line jobs for a lower price, the jobs (and the manufacturing) went there.
Protecting the status quo at the expense of progress is usually a bad idea, irrespective of politics. Foxconn is doing the smart thing and aggressively adding robots to their assembly lines, so a country like Vietnam or Thailand doesn't do unto them what they did unto us.
Long-term though, I don't think the problem is as bad as you fear. The increased productivity from a modern economy means a smaller and smaller percentage of your productivity (roughly, time spent working) is devoting to actually making things that are necessary for life like food, housing, transportation. A larger percentage can be spent on doing optional things like eating out, going on vacations, etc. Contrast this to medieval times when the average person had to work the fields 12 hours a day just to produce enough food to feed himself (on average). Of course there are some exceptions (e.g. HDTVs, which are manufactured but are entertainment), but the overall percentages will shift away from manufacturing and towards service as economic progress marches forward. (And I include dissemination of expertise in service; so an IT consultant is part of the service economy.)
I'm registered independent, but tend to vote conservative. What you're saying doesn't really have much to do with the individual votes of Obama and Biden; it has more to do with the Senate Appropriations Committee and how funding bills are crafted. The Committee and in particular its chairman has disproportionate influence over what bills get funded. While they can't make sure a bill is funded, they can make damn sure that a bill isn't funded. If you want to get your pet bills funded, you have to pay quid pro quo the members of the Committee (and in particular the chairman) by voting for funding bills they want. Like the Bridge to Nowhere.
This isn't a Democrat or Republican thing. At the time the Bridge to Nowhere was first funded, the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee was Ted Stevens (R - Alaska), and Alaska got a disproportionate amount of federal money. Before him it was (except for two years) Robert Byrd (D - West Virginia), and West Virginia got a disproportionate amount of federal money. The chairman is currently Daniel Inouye (D - Hawaii), so I expect Hawaii will be getting a disproportionate amount of federal money. Statistically, it's a pretty blatant correlative indicator of corruption. The engineer in me thinks it's an obvious sign that the system isn't functioning effectively and needs to be tweaked. But alas that's not how politics works.
No, you're paying the price for turning the state into one big freeway.
Sometimes stereotypes just turn out not to be true. State by state driving data is available from NHTSA . Toss those numbers into a spreadsheet and you find that California is 41st in miles driven per capita (8644 miles/person vs. a national average of 9589 miles/person). and 35th in miles per driver (13,592 miles/driver vs. a national average of 14,118 miles/driver). I would imagine though that the extensive freeway system means that the gallons consumed per mile driven is lower in California than the national average.
State mi/person mi/driver WY 16,965 22,835.. filler to get past slashdot's filter MS 13,414 20,664.. filler to get past slashdot's filter AL 13,409 16,858.. filler to get past slashdot's filter OK 12,692 20,326.. filler to get past slashdot's filter ND 12,260 17,108.. filler to get past slashdot's filter NM 12,258 18,012.. filler to get past slashdot's filter MO 11,819 16,690.. filler to get past slashdot's filter IN 11,672 13,651.. filler to get past slashdot's filter VT 11,578 14,129.. filler to get past slashdot's filter GA 11,502 17,167.. filler to get past slashdot's filter AR 11,466 16,123.. filler to get past slashdot's filter MT 11,292 15,040.. filler to get past slashdot's filter TN 11,081 15,944.. filler to get past slashdot's filter KY 11,046 16,274.. filler to get past slashdot's filter ME 10,956 14,264.. filler to get past slashdot's filter SD 10,865 14,728.. filler to get past slashdot's filter NC 10,707 15,662.. filler to get past slashdot's filter MN 10,663 17,261.. filler to get past slashdot's filter NE 10,622 14,377.. filler to get past slashdot's filter SC 10,596 14,721.. filler to get past slashdot's filter KS 10,458 14,707.. filler to get past slashdot's filter WI 10,441 14,377.. filler to get past slashdot's filter FL 10,389 14,033.. filler to get past slashdot's filter WV 10,358 15,923.. filler to get past slashdot's filter IA 10,291 14,485.. filler to get past slashdot's filter VA 10,239 15,211.. filler to get past slashdot's filter ID 10,058 14,767.. filler to get past slashdot's filter LA 10,000 14,499.. filler to get past slashdot's filter DE 9,942 12,875.. filler to get past slashdot's filter NH 9,920 12,599.. filler to get past slashdot's filter MI 9,877 13,775.. filler to get past slashdot's filter MD 9,700 14,325.. filler to get past slashdot's filter OH 9,695 14,044.. filler to get past slashdot's filter UT 9,577 16,015.. filler to get past slashdot's filter AZ 9,364 13,516.. filler to get past slashdot's filter CO 9,297 12,421.. filler to get past slashdot's filter TX 9,265 15,438.. filler to get past slashdot's filter OR 8,798 12,193.. filler to get past slashdot's filter CT 8,749 10,662.. filler to get past slashdot's filter CA 8,644 13,592.. filler to get past slashdot's filter WA 8,480 11,201.. filler to get past slashdot's filter NJ 8,297 12,267.. filler to get past slashd
Nobody should be hired/fired or not based on whether they smoke cigarettes. ------ Yes, cigarettes are not good for you in the long run. But it isn't anybody's business what you do or don't do with your own body. ---- It is idiotic how harshly non-smokers try to wean smokers off cigarettes.
I agree being a smoker shouldn't be an automatic disqualifer for a job. However you're wrong when you say that it isn't anybody's business but your own. If the job comes with health insurance, then the insurance rates the company is charged are based on the overall health of the pool (the employees). If the pool has more higher risk people, the premiums could go up to compensate. Refusing to hire smokers could just be a strategy to minimize health insurance costs.
The worms aren't necessary, and neither is the $40k price tag. There are already composting toilets available commercially in the $500-$2000 range. And even that's overpriced because they're relatively new. I've heard of people making their own with a 5 gallon bucket (cheapest way to test for yourself how well they work). All you need is a handful of peat moss or coconut husk, and a spoonful of microbes to get the process started.
And before you ask, no they don't stink. The stinky smell comes from anerobic bacteria breaking down fecal matter. When you immerse feces in water, it cuts off the oxygen supply which kills the aerobic bacteria, and the stinky anerobic bacteria flourish. Because a composting toilet channels liquids away from the solids reservoir (the 5 gallon bucket works better for men), the aerobic bacteria dominate and break down the feces without causing the stink. Think about how much biomass there is outdoors in wild animals. If all their feces stank that badly as a sewage treatment plant, we'd never want to go outside.
They're starting to become popular aboard boats, where dumping laws require toilets flush into holding tanks which can to be pumped out back at the harbor. These holding tanks and their plumbing tend to leak and stink up the boat after some years.
Given the patent trolling of the last decade, it's become clear that you have to patent everything you do, no matter how silly, simple, broad, or obvious. If you don't and someone else patents it, you could be sued for $billions. Even if you win in court, you'll still be out millions in legal fees. If you can avoid all that with a $10k patent application, it's a simple choice.
NASA is regularly forced to do shitty high-profile, useless and pathetic "interstellar internet" stunts
Actually, it's pretty important. The rovers don't communicate directly with Earth. They transmit to satellites orbiting Mars, which relay it to ground stations here on Earth, which relay it to JPL. So adding another hop to the Internet isn't that big an investment of resources, and is probably good practice for when this will become more commonplace (do you really want to coordinate the broadcast schedules of dozens of rovers on Mars, or do you want it to work like auto-routing Internet packets?). It's come a long way since Apollo, when the moon landing was broadcast live to the world by sticking a video camera in front of a monitor at a ground station in Australia.
All of these are taken into account in the price of a gallon of gas or kWh of electricity. Since most of our electricity is produced from relatively cheap domestic coal, electricity costs per mile for an EV are about a quarter to a third the gasoline costs per mile for an ICE. As oil gets harder to come by, that price differential will increase. OTOH if biofuels take off, that price differential will decrease.
Petrol and diesel engines in cars, especially starting and stopping a lot, are appallingly inefficient. Less than 30% of the energy in the fuels gets used for moving - and then there is braking. Throw away all that good energy as - heat? Fantastic!
Electric motors are really good at stop/start - especially with regenerative braking.
Power plants are really efficient.
You can't selectively look at only the inefficiencies of internal combustion engines in a comparison.
The best power plants (at least the ones burning coal or gas) are about 45%-60% efficient. Coal is about 33%-45%, while some of the newer gas plants are pushing 60%. Let's go with 50% as an average. That's being rather generous since the vast majority of the world's electricity comes from coal. But the short-term trend seems to be more emphasis on gas (gas and oil have picked up the slack since nuclear fell out of favor after Fukushima - hooray short-sighted fear mongering).
Transmission losses over power lines are on the order of 1%-3%. So call it 98% efficient.
Charging losses are the big one. The faster you recharge a battery, the more of the energy is converted into heat instead of stored chemically. This puts EVs in a catch-22. They need to be charged quickly overnight (relative to capacity) if the vehicle is going to be used daily. But if you charge them too quickly the drop in charging efficiency defeats the purpose of using an EV instead of an ICE. Real-world charging efficiency of the Tesla Roadster is about 80%. If you use a quick-charger as advocates suggest to get around the range problem, that can quickly plummet to 50% or lower. For this reason, the most likely long-term solution for "charging" batteries on a long trip will simply be to swap out the battery pack for a pre-charged one. As you'll see, if you rely on quick charges you end up less efficient than an ICE.
I'll assume discharge losses are zero. Discharging also generates waste heat too, but I can't find any real-world figures on this for EVs. I'll assume the large capacity relative to the load in an EV keeps this to a minimum.
Electric motor efficiency is about 90%-95%. Yes they can hit 97%, but those are typically found in laboratories, not mass production vehicles. Efficiency drops at lower load, but let's ignore that since a similar thing happens with an ICE.
An ICE's automatic transmission (torque converter) can hit 90%-95% efficiency. Yes, blew me away the first time I learned that considering it's just fluid squirting onto turbine blades. But ~75 years of R&D has brought it a long way.
After the motor and transmission I assume the EV and ICE vehicle are the same in terms of energy losses. You could argue the EV weighs less, but then you're talking about something with an extremely short range. The Tesla S model with ~300 mile range weighs as much as an SUV (4900 lbs). Wheel, friction, and aerodynamic losses are pretty much the same.
So yes the EV is more efficient overall, but it's not that much better than the "appallingly inefficient" ICE. For EVs to really shine, we need to move away from fossil fuels for electricity, and shift to nuclear and renewables. (Incidentally, a similar analysis for hydrogen drops its efficiency down near ICE levels. Factor in the enormous difficulties of transporting and handling hydrogen fuel, and until nuclear and renewables generate the vast majority of our electricity, hydrogen fuel cell powered cars simply aren't viable.)
Regenerative braking helps, but you can put it on an ICE too (aka hybrid). It only recaptures about 30% of the vehicle's kinetic energy, so strategies like timing lights so cars hit fewer reds, keeping your speed down (kinetic energy goes as the square of speed, so stopping from 60 mph wastes nearly 80% more energy than stopping from 45 mph), and constructing good freeways and freeway access can be as or more effective at saving energy.
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Here's my abnormal driving situation story. I had just taken the off-ramp from the freeway when the radio started acting funny. Being a gadget geek, I set about trying to figure out what was the problem. A few seconds later I suddenly remembered, "Hey, I'm supposed to be driving!" I looked up to see myself about to plow into a car at the bottom of the ramp stopped at a red light.
I slammed on the brakes, but due to the ramp going downhill it wasn't going to stop me quickly enough. To the right was a guardrail and a ledge. To the left was a curb, a small dirt lane, then the wall leading up to the freeway. I made a split-second decision that the dirt lane was my best choice. I spun the wheel left, hit the curb, blew out two tires and destroyed a third, jumped the curb, then jogged the wheel right. I made it onto the dirt, avoided the wall, and stopped beside the car I had been about to hit.
Thinking about how an automated system might handle the same scenario, I can think of multiple ways it could fail. First the ramp was downhill, and so my braking distance was increased. An automated system might get confused by that because a simple accelerometer cannot distinguish between angle of the ramp and deceleration. You need a gyroscope to correctly determine orientation. Consequently, even if the car had automatically applied the brakes when it sensed me approaching the stopped car, it might have already been too late.
Second, the dirt path wasn't big enough for my car - I ended up two wheels up, two wheels still on the off-ramp (that's actually probably what kept me from hitting the freeway wall). Fortunately the car stopped at the light was in the middle of his lane, not glued to the left. An automated system would probably try to (1) prevent me from driving up a curb, (2) refuse to aim the car towards a wall, and (3) prohibit entry into a dirt lane too small for the car's width.
Finally, given the obstacles to my front and left, an automated system may have been confused by or decided that going off the ledge to the right was the best option.
This isn't to say that these sorts of problems can't be overcome by a computer. It's just to point out the convoluted sorts of trade-offs a computer may be forced to evaluate when faced with an "abnormal" driving situation. I do not envy the programmer tasked with developing generic accident-avoidance routines designed to cope with all abnormal situations.
Rather than ask the straightforward question "Is the Surface priced too high?", you reworded it into a clumsier question so that Betteridge's law of headlines would yield the answer you wanted.
This is not new. The first incident like this (that I know of) was in South Korea in 2005. It (and similar events) culminated in a law essentially stripping out anonymity online. It hasn't worked that well as most anonymous forums have simply moved overseas.
This is one of the truly new problems created by the Internet, and I look forward to watching how society struggles with coming up with a solution for it. The "lynch mob" analogy doesn't really work since members of mob aren't truly anonymous (though the KKK tried to achieve that), and the potential geographic separation between tormentor and victim is literally worldwide. So while there have been similar problems in the past, none are quite like this one.
And every man has a penis so they could potentially rape a woman. Every screwdriver could potentially be used to break into a house. Every Internet connection could potentially be used to download copyrighted material.
An argument that someone has to be pre-prohibited from potentially doing something bad has to have more to it than an unsubstantiated assertion that "Google will resort to all sorts of tricks." Otherwise you can ban just about anything under the premise of protecting the greater good. It's an ugly argument that has seen the presumption of innocence tossed out when it comes to copyright violations on the Internet. Someone files a DMCA complaint against you and you're presumed guilty until you prove your innocence, simply because you could be violating a copyright holder's rights.
That's one benefit Google got from combining the privacy policies - obviously the one which makes Google look worst so it's the reason most commonly trotted out. The flip side is by having each service have its own privacy policy, users had to keep track of each separate privacy policy (and Google's employees working on multiple products were uncertain of what they could and couldn't do with the data). Subtle differences between policies got lost amidst the similarities. Consolidating everything into a single unified "Google policy" made it easier for users to know what they were getting and for Google to know what it could do.
There are pros and cons to either approach. Anyone telling you one is universally better than the other is selling you something. Stripped of any nefarious advertising and creepy privacy invasion overtones, the default condition would be for Google to consolidate them into one policy simply to reduce bureaucracy and paperwork. So I think the onus should be on those advocating separate policies to justify why the benefits of having them separate outweigh the drawbacks.
Actually, my experience has been that most religious bigots aren't actually religious. They are bigots first and foremost, or rather psychotic or borderline psychotic and just want to be able to hate and do bad things to other people. They will latch onto whatever convenient excuse they can come up with to justify their behavior, such as citing specific parts of religious texts out of context while ignoring the parts which contradict their behavior. e.g. abusive husbands citing the Bible verse telling wives to obey their husbands, while completely unaware of the very next verse which tells husbands to love their wives. Even in the complete absence of organized religion (e.g. Communist China), you still see widespread bigotry in the form of prejudice based on what region of the country someone comes from.
My current hypothesis is that there's just something about human nature which makes us want to feel superior to others. That can manifest itself as being religiously moral (e.g. judging others by values they don't believe in), adhering to science and atheism (e.g. the constant bashing of religion on slashdot), coming from a more "sophisticated" cultural background (e.g. characterization of Southerners as backwards uneducated "trailer trash"), high school cliques (the stereotypical jocks vs nerds), belief in conspiracy theories ("how can you be so naive as to believe the government"), and even gossip ("I know something you don't know" and presumably that makes me superior). My guess as to the mechanism behind it is that people don't have enough time (nor interest) to join every social group there is. Consequently they try to seek self-affirmation of the groups they belong to (even when there wasn't a choice, such as what region of the country you come from). If your group is better than others, then obviously you made a better choice or were luckier at birth and thus are a superior human being.
It has nothing to do with trust. There is nothing the U.S. or any country could do to gain the trust of other countries with a crucial technology like GPS. If Galileo had been developed first, the U.S., Russians, and Chinese wouldn't want to be reliant upon it either, so this has nothing to do with the U.S. being less trustworthy. The US-haters and the US-hater-haters are just casting it as a trust issue to troll and have something to argue about
GPS is just a technology which has become so pervasive and useful that it's become essential to modern life. And any country that's capable will want to make sure it controls anything essential which it's dependent upon. If you need a car to get to work, and you neighbor has an extra car which he says you're free to use any time, you're still gonna buy your own car. Not because you don't trust your neighbor, but because you'd feel awfully stupid if you could afford a car but didn't get one, and one day your neighbor through no fault of his own were unable to lend you his car. The exceptions (e.g. Panama and Suez canals) are only where cost or physical constraints limit the number of essentials which can be built.
And all of these systems work as accuracy enhancers and fully capable backups to each other. So it's not like a lot of duplicated effort is being put in with no gain.
Actually, that's something else I've noticed about Apple. Their hype/marketing/RDF/whatever is so good that many laypeople mistakenly believe that Apple invented a lot of that stuff. GUI, MP3 player, smartphone, thin tablet (Archos was trending in that direction before the iPad), touchscreens, multi-touch, pinch to zoom, slide to unlock, and on and on. Most of my non-tech friends think Apple invented all of those, even though they invented none of it. The last time I've seen mass misunderstanding to this extent was right after Windows 95, when a lot of my non-tech friends thought Microsoft invented the Internet.
The one thing Apple is really good at though is understanding laypeople. They know how to design and product and UI so that the average Joe will know how to use it and even enjoy it. The opposite of most Linux distros. I think that's one of the reasons they're disliked by technophiles. Technophiles would rather try to teach laypeople how the technology works. Apple just dumbs it down to their level. Laypeople of course prefer the latter approach, which is why Linux on the desktop is still a niche market.
"Not intended for sale in the U.S." is code for "I want to benefit from the lower cost of manufacturing overseas, but I don't want my customers to benefit from lower prices due to those lowered manufacturing costs. I want the entirety of the benefit to go straight into my pocket."
Outsourcing is a two-way street. If we're free to send jobs and manufacturing overseas, then we must also be free to bring the products of that overseas manufacturing back into the country.
Phone numbers are a relic from the early 20th century, when it was incredibly difficult to transmit information in a machine-readable format across wires. 10 digits was about the extent of the "character set" you could use while keeping pulse dialing times relatively short.
We need a system like DNS which will automatically convert an easier-to-remember text string to your phone number, much like domain names are converted to IP addresses. Smartphone phone books automatically do this to some extent, linking people's email addresses with their phone numbers. But there needs to be a universal methodology for doing this. (And require each text string be linked to an owned phone number, to prevent squatting on good phrases like has happened with domain names.)
Given how quickly the jury returned with a verdict, it's pretty clear the jury didn't actually look at the entire document, and based their judgment solely on the interpretations. So yeah, that's how trials are supposed to work. But obviously it wasn't how it actually worked in this case.
The perjury clause only requires that the claimant be a legitimate copyright holder. It does not require that the allegedly infringing work be reasonably similar to the copyrighted work. In other words, I can send a DMCA notice claiming your website on Python programming infringes my copyright on a video about snakes. As long as I really hold a copyright on a video about snakes, I am not perjuring myself.
This is one of the stupid broken parts of the DMCA which really needs to be fixed. All laws should have some sense of reciprocity - like when Apple asked for an injunction banning Samsung's products from the market prior to trial, they first had to put up a bond to compensate Samsung for losses should the ban end up being overturned. People filing a DMCA claim should likewise be required to put up a bond to compensate the alleged infringer for costs should they eventually be cleared of infringement.
The only reason this is even an issue is because right now we have this weird situation where Monsanto has a patent on something which multiplies and spreads naturally, but isn't responsible for how it multiplies and spreads. Consequently they're able to sue people who come across the genes through "non-contractual" methods. Monsanto's lawyers have gamed the system so that they reap the rewards from distribution, while they bear no responsibility for it so others pay the price for it. If you made Monsanto responsible for distribution, this simply wouldn't be an issue. Monsanto would get money from use of the patented seed, but they would also be responsible (fiscally and legally) for making sure that seed did not end up where it wasn't intended.
If I were to invent and patent nanobots which self-replicated and spread through the air, and they became so pervasive they could be found everywhere including in people's bodies, do you honestly think I should be able to sue every living person for patent infringement? That's silly. I should be responsible for controlling how my nanobots spread. If I'm unable to control their spread so they'll stay out of the way of people who don't wish to obtain them, then others should not be forced to pay for my failure to control their distribution.
Diesel cars are not a panacea.
1) European (UK) gallons are 20% bigger than US gallons.
2) European fuel mileage is determined using a different test than U.S. EPA mileage. There's less stop-and-go in the EU tests.
Consequently it's not unusual for models which hit 50+ MPG in the EU to not even break 40 MPG in the EPA tests. CAFE uses a different test than EPA though. I'm not sure how CAFE mileage stacks up to EU mileage.
3) Diesel contains about 12%-15% more mass and energy per gallon. Consequently it also puts out about 12%-15% more pollutants per gallon. So unless you're comparing on price or range on same sized fuel tank, you need to tweak diesel's MPG down to draw a fair comparison with gasoline MPG.
4) When you distil a barrel of oil, some of it will naturally distil into diesel, some into gasoline. It's relatively easy to convert heavy fuels like diesel into gasoline. It's very difficult and expensive to convert light fuels like gasoline and kerosene into diesel. Consequently the most energy-efficient approach is to just take the fractions of diesel and gasoline which comes out naturally from the distillation process. The next-most energy-efficient approach is to favor gasoline.
So for consumption you want to err on the side which favors gasoline consumption. Diesel is only a cost-effective fuel competitor to gasoline because there are lots of gas-consuming cars. If you lower gasoline consumption below the production from natural distillation, diesel starts to become much more expensive. Whereas if gasoline consumption rises above natural production fractions, you can simply cook diesel a bit to break it down and make more gasoline.
Yeah, the problem is getting people to actually buy the high-mileage cars. Here's U.S. car and light truck sales data since 1931. Light trucks are a separate category under CAFE, and don't have to get as high MPG. Consequently they can be built bigger (relatively) and with more powerful engines. From 1931 to the 1970s (when CAFE was first implemented), light truck sales represented about 15%-20% of passenger vehicle sales. Since CAFE was implemented, light truck sales have climbed to over 50%.
People in general want the big, powerful "cars" and don't care if they get crappy mileage. Forcing the manufacturers to improve mileage isn't going to change that. It makes me think CAFE is partially based on the conspiracy theory that automakers could make 100 MPG cars, but are all in cahoots with oil companies to keep mileage low. That simply isn't the case - consumers are the ones favoring low mileage cars because of the advantages they offer: extra space, extra safety, more power.
If you want to encourage increased average vehicle mileage, this supply-side market manipulation just doesn't work that well. It needs to be done via demand-side market manipulation. Jack up fuel taxes to make gasoline more expensive. Then people will start to favor fuel economy more over size, safety, and power.
We missed our chance in the 1980s-1990s. When replacing manufacturing jobs with robots became viable, we should've gone whole hog with that. Replacing assembly line workers with robots, and retraining those workers for other jobs like operating and maintaining those robots or getting into the growing computer industry. Instead we opted to protect those low-skill but (compared to robots) high-wage jobs. Consequently when another country offered to do the same assembly line jobs for a lower price, the jobs (and the manufacturing) went there.
Protecting the status quo at the expense of progress is usually a bad idea, irrespective of politics. Foxconn is doing the smart thing and aggressively adding robots to their assembly lines, so a country like Vietnam or Thailand doesn't do unto them what they did unto us.
Long-term though, I don't think the problem is as bad as you fear. The increased productivity from a modern economy means a smaller and smaller percentage of your productivity (roughly, time spent working) is devoting to actually making things that are necessary for life like food, housing, transportation. A larger percentage can be spent on doing optional things like eating out, going on vacations, etc. Contrast this to medieval times when the average person had to work the fields 12 hours a day just to produce enough food to feed himself (on average). Of course there are some exceptions (e.g. HDTVs, which are manufactured but are entertainment), but the overall percentages will shift away from manufacturing and towards service as economic progress marches forward. (And I include dissemination of expertise in service; so an IT consultant is part of the service economy.)
I'm registered independent, but tend to vote conservative. What you're saying doesn't really have much to do with the individual votes of Obama and Biden; it has more to do with the Senate Appropriations Committee and how funding bills are crafted. The Committee and in particular its chairman has disproportionate influence over what bills get funded. While they can't make sure a bill is funded, they can make damn sure that a bill isn't funded. If you want to get your pet bills funded, you have to pay quid pro quo the members of the Committee (and in particular the chairman) by voting for funding bills they want. Like the Bridge to Nowhere.
This isn't a Democrat or Republican thing. At the time the Bridge to Nowhere was first funded, the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee was Ted Stevens (R - Alaska), and Alaska got a disproportionate amount of federal money. Before him it was (except for two years) Robert Byrd (D - West Virginia), and West Virginia got a disproportionate amount of federal money. The chairman is currently Daniel Inouye (D - Hawaii), so I expect Hawaii will be getting a disproportionate amount of federal money. Statistically, it's a pretty blatant correlative indicator of corruption. The engineer in me thinks it's an obvious sign that the system isn't functioning effectively and needs to be tweaked. But alas that's not how politics works.
Sometimes stereotypes just turn out not to be true. State by state driving data is available from NHTSA . Toss those numbers into a spreadsheet and you find that California is 41st in miles driven per capita (8644 miles/person vs. a national average of 9589 miles/person). and 35th in miles per driver (13,592 miles/driver vs. a national average of 14,118 miles/driver). I would imagine though that the extensive freeway system means that the gallons consumed per mile driven is lower in California than the national average.
Gasoline subsidies work out to a bit over 1 cent per gallon. Federal and state fuel taxes are about 30 cents per gallon.
I agree being a smoker shouldn't be an automatic disqualifer for a job. However you're wrong when you say that it isn't anybody's business but your own. If the job comes with health insurance, then the insurance rates the company is charged are based on the overall health of the pool (the employees). If the pool has more higher risk people, the premiums could go up to compensate. Refusing to hire smokers could just be a strategy to minimize health insurance costs.
The worms aren't necessary, and neither is the $40k price tag. There are already composting toilets available commercially in the $500-$2000 range. And even that's overpriced because they're relatively new. I've heard of people making their own with a 5 gallon bucket (cheapest way to test for yourself how well they work). All you need is a handful of peat moss or coconut husk, and a spoonful of microbes to get the process started.
And before you ask, no they don't stink. The stinky smell comes from anerobic bacteria breaking down fecal matter. When you immerse feces in water, it cuts off the oxygen supply which kills the aerobic bacteria, and the stinky anerobic bacteria flourish. Because a composting toilet channels liquids away from the solids reservoir (the 5 gallon bucket works better for men), the aerobic bacteria dominate and break down the feces without causing the stink. Think about how much biomass there is outdoors in wild animals. If all their feces stank that badly as a sewage treatment plant, we'd never want to go outside.
They're starting to become popular aboard boats, where dumping laws require toilets flush into holding tanks which can to be pumped out back at the harbor. These holding tanks and their plumbing tend to leak and stink up the boat after some years.
Given the patent trolling of the last decade, it's become clear that you have to patent everything you do, no matter how silly, simple, broad, or obvious. If you don't and someone else patents it, you could be sued for $billions. Even if you win in court, you'll still be out millions in legal fees. If you can avoid all that with a $10k patent application, it's a simple choice.
Actually, it's pretty important. The rovers don't communicate directly with Earth. They transmit to satellites orbiting Mars, which relay it to ground stations here on Earth, which relay it to JPL. So adding another hop to the Internet isn't that big an investment of resources, and is probably good practice for when this will become more commonplace (do you really want to coordinate the broadcast schedules of dozens of rovers on Mars, or do you want it to work like auto-routing Internet packets?). It's come a long way since Apollo, when the moon landing was broadcast live to the world by sticking a video camera in front of a monitor at a ground station in Australia.
All of these are taken into account in the price of a gallon of gas or kWh of electricity. Since most of our electricity is produced from relatively cheap domestic coal, electricity costs per mile for an EV are about a quarter to a third the gasoline costs per mile for an ICE. As oil gets harder to come by, that price differential will increase. OTOH if biofuels take off, that price differential will decrease.
You can't selectively look at only the inefficiencies of internal combustion engines in a comparison.
The best power plants (at least the ones burning coal or gas) are about 45%-60% efficient. Coal is about 33%-45%, while some of the newer gas plants are pushing 60%. Let's go with 50% as an average. That's being rather generous since the vast majority of the world's electricity comes from coal. But the short-term trend seems to be more emphasis on gas (gas and oil have picked up the slack since nuclear fell out of favor after Fukushima - hooray short-sighted fear mongering).
Transmission losses over power lines are on the order of 1%-3%. So call it 98% efficient.
Charging losses are the big one. The faster you recharge a battery, the more of the energy is converted into heat instead of stored chemically. This puts EVs in a catch-22. They need to be charged quickly overnight (relative to capacity) if the vehicle is going to be used daily. But if you charge them too quickly the drop in charging efficiency defeats the purpose of using an EV instead of an ICE. Real-world charging efficiency of the Tesla Roadster is about 80%. If you use a quick-charger as advocates suggest to get around the range problem, that can quickly plummet to 50% or lower. For this reason, the most likely long-term solution for "charging" batteries on a long trip will simply be to swap out the battery pack for a pre-charged one. As you'll see, if you rely on quick charges you end up less efficient than an ICE.
I'll assume discharge losses are zero. Discharging also generates waste heat too, but I can't find any real-world figures on this for EVs. I'll assume the large capacity relative to the load in an EV keeps this to a minimum.
Electric motor efficiency is about 90%-95%. Yes they can hit 97%, but those are typically found in laboratories, not mass production vehicles. Efficiency drops at lower load, but let's ignore that since a similar thing happens with an ICE.
An ICE's automatic transmission (torque converter) can hit 90%-95% efficiency. Yes, blew me away the first time I learned that considering it's just fluid squirting onto turbine blades. But ~75 years of R&D has brought it a long way.
After the motor and transmission I assume the EV and ICE vehicle are the same in terms of energy losses. You could argue the EV weighs less, but then you're talking about something with an extremely short range. The Tesla S model with ~300 mile range weighs as much as an SUV (4900 lbs). Wheel, friction, and aerodynamic losses are pretty much the same.
So what's the final tally?
ICE = 30% * 90% = 27% efficient
EV = 50% * 98% * 80% * (100%) * 92.5% = 36% efficient
So yes the EV is more efficient overall, but it's not that much better than the "appallingly inefficient" ICE. For EVs to really shine, we need to move away from fossil fuels for electricity, and shift to nuclear and renewables. (Incidentally, a similar analysis for hydrogen drops its efficiency down near ICE levels. Factor in the enormous difficulties of transporting and handling hydrogen fuel, and until nuclear and renewables generate the vast majority of our electricity, hydrogen fuel cell powered cars simply aren't viable.)
Regenerative braking helps, but you can put it on an ICE too (aka hybrid). It only recaptures about 30% of the vehicle's kinetic energy, so strategies like timing lights so cars hit fewer reds, keeping your speed down (kinetic energy goes as the square of speed, so stopping from 60 mph wastes nearly 80% more energy than stopping from 45 mph), and constructing good freeways and freeway access can be as or more effective at saving energy.