That single person in the F150 probably needs its capabilities a fair bit of the time. Towing, hauling large loads, etc.. Given current prices for vehicles and registration, insurance, etc., it's likely cheaper to use the truck as a personal vehicle as well than to buy and maintain another vehicle.
I own a Prius and a Montero Sport. My wife and I can carpool, so the Prius gets a lot of miles on it. When I do use the SUV, I'm usually towing or have more in it than would fit in the surprisingly large cargo space of the Prius. There is often just one of us in the Montero, but we are usually either doing something that requires its abilities or are on our way to do so. Occasionally, we just need 2 cars. Not everyone can afford to do that. Hell, we probably shouldn't be doing it. In such a case, it makes sense to have the more capable vehicle.
Yeah, sometimes the driver just likes the truck. But everyone I know that owns one uses it as a truck, even if they do commute in it.
Kyoto has a number of problems that make it undesirable for the US. There are good reasons not to ratify it. I do think it would be good for us to do something like it, but I'm not satisfied with Kyoto as written.
Simply allowing those that can to work from home or locations closer to home would do far more for the environment and oil consumption than restricting people's vehicle choices. Good luck with that though. It requires managers that know what they are doing, and those are quite rare.
The problem with self-driving cars is that they ALL have to be self-driving for it to work properly. I suppose you could designate certain roads as automated only, but how do you enforce it if you do?
I guess you could add sensors of some kind all around to keep the car from hitting other cars that don't report position data. But if even one of them is off calibration by a little bit.... crash. RADAR isn't great, as there just isn't enough space for independent transmitters. LIDAR might work, but has similar problems.
Keep in mind, responsible people don't make good TV. I've attended large and small launches in person. They have always been run quite well in my view. They have restrictions on how close you can be to spectators with various size rockets and motors, and have good range safety protocols.
Like any large group, you will have individuals that don't like the rules. Most of the time, the rest of us will self-regulate them as best we can.
This is a somewhat dangerous hobby. Deployment failures happen, it's part of the hobby. We do our best to make sure it doesn't happen often, but hey, even to pros screw up once in a while.
I'm involved in rocketry, so here's a couple clues.:)
Yes, very big motors are available. Nothing on the scale of space shuttles or even most military missiles, but they do get quite large.
This change will allow us to buy and store motors for ourselves without having to get an explosives permit from BATF. This only makes sense, as APCP is NOT an explosive.
Note that we do regulate ourselves and are subject to other regulation from government as well. For example, to buy large motors, you have to get certified by one of the two industry groups. This allows experienced rocketeers to judge your ability to build and fly large high power rockets safely. Government also restricts our activities via the FAA (make sure we don't crash into airplanes), and Fire Marshalls (make sure we don't burn down neighborhoods). There are others, but those are the big ones. This case just gets the BATF out of our hair (we hope). There are still a number of regulations in place and most of us think those are fine.
Personally, I'd much rather have to notify the FAA and/or get permission to fly than have my rocket hit an aircraft. I do check the sky before I launch, but it helps. The FAA will let pilots know where we are flying and to what altitude, so that they can avoid us.
And I would propose that "No Child Left Behind" is what we get when we try to have the federal government take care of it. I think the better solution is to remove the barriers to competition. Allow parents to decide where their kids will go and where the money for that child's education will go. There should probably be some limitations, but that way, interested parents (like myself) could pick a school based on the child's needs and what they think will work well. With choice available, I could pick a school that teaches a little differently.
With even half of the money spent on the public education system per student, I could pay private school tuition for some existing schools. I expect more will pop up if there is a bigger market.
Politically, I don't consider myself aligning with any party all that well. I guess the Libertarians would be closest, but I have some issues with them as well. My concern with the federal government handling this is that I don't feel that they have done anything really all that well. There are a number of programs and such that sort of work, but nothing that I would consider a great success. They simply haven't proven to me that they should be entrusted with my child's education.
The funny thing is, I don't think it's that much work for most reasonable upgrades. I put 4GB of RAM in mine, it wasn't hard at all. Get a thin putty knife and an old credit card and it only takes a few minutes to pop it open. A few screws later and there are the SO-DIMM slots. I don't think they are much harder than most pre-built systems to get into.
Yeah, it's tightly packed inside, so things take a little more work to extract. Big deal. I expected that for such a tiny machine. The RAM is standard, as are the hard drives. Laptop parts, but you aren't going to fit desktop parts in a case that small. And a 1TB HD, really? Meh, all my big files live on a RAID server with automated backups, as the geek gods intended.:)
I think the point was that those on the far ends of the curve have different needs and they should be considered too. Yes, it's a difficult problem, but it's not an unsolvable one. I think many here would at least cut them some slack if there were any signs of movement on that.
It is unreasonable to expect everyone to keep up with the fastest runner, but it's also unreasonable to force the fastest to slow down to match the slowest. The only solution I can think of right this second is to separate the classes not by age, but by performance. If you're really good at math, you go to a class with other people who are really good at math. Not so good, and average classes are also needed. But that might make some student "feel bad" about whatever level they are in. Nevermind that it's to help them.
There IS some of that available at the HS level, but more could be done.
So all Amazon really has to do is change the advertising. Stop calling them audiobooks and call them what they are, e-books. Then make a bigger deal of the TTS on the Kindle. There, now they aren't "selling" an audiobook. They are selling an e-book on a device that happens to be able to read it to you via audio.
It's a text file with DRM, it's not like a normal audiobook where you have to pay someone to read it and for recording time in a studio. It doesn't deserve the same pricing as an audiobook, regardless of how well the device can render speach.
The UBW shows up as a serial port and you just send commands to it to toggle pins and do other stuff. For example, it has ADC support, so you could connect a thermistor and you can read the temp anywhere. Use the GPIOs and you can control stuff based on sensor readings.
Still in "hammer swatting a fly" territory though.:)
They do that where I currently work. Not only that, but the bar for "achieves" is now either that, or whatever you got LAST TIME, whichever is higher. So unless you want to be superman all the time, you have a negative incentive to do better than "achieves". I wonder if management ever thinks things through sometimes.
Landing on a runway isn't all that hard. Stressful as hell the first time you do it for real, but not that hard. Granted, I've never flown multi-engine jumbo jets, just small private planes. But the principles are the same. Flaps, throttle, and stick work basically the same as well. I'd be willing to bet I could land a simulator with someone talking me through the controls I've never used. I could probably find the more important ones, like say, landing gear, myself.
Actually, I think some really new planes have autoland. And autopilot is pretty simple in many planes. It just keeps altitude and heading from drifting. Many of the big jets do have real auto-nav, but from what I remember reading, it's not as simple to set up as telling your GPS where to go.
Of course, if all you need is city level accuracy, a handheld GPS unit in the cockpit is more than enough. Hell, the GPS in my phone would work.
Flying isn't all that hard, particularly if the trained pilot already got the jet off the ground. The big multi-engine jets are complex, but once you're in flight, you don't really need to know that much about them to crash them into a building.
If they wanted to get really fancy with the jets, they could set up a key sequence to transfer control to a remote system via satellite. That would really screw with the ter-ists.:) Auto-crash-into-the-ocean mode would be interesting as well, though less friendly to the passengers.:)
The thing I find amusing about this, is that they are stopping people now that they have gotten used to it. It will drive the more savvy to look around online for other options. And they will find things like bittorrent.
So they are driving people to the "illegal" ways of getting the exact same thing. And people are now less likely to see a moral problem with doing so since they were doing it with hulu just till they broke it. So now they get zero revenue from it, and people are still watching the shows from online sources. With the current software out there for automating the downloads, it's even better than Hulu for a lot of things. And you can get the shows in HD! Much of the stuff is easy enough for even my parents to use.
"Congress shall pass no law limiting the rights of persons to manipulate, operate, or otherwise utilize as they see fit any of their possessions or effects, nor the sale or trade of tools to be used for such purposes."
There ya go, "The Hacker's Amendment". And it leaves plenty of room for interpretation, just like the rest of the Constitution...
Unfortunately, if you are a gamer, there aren't alternatives available.:(
Sure there is, PS3, Xbox360, and Wii. They aren't the best for every game type, but there is no real reason they couldn't have a KB/Mouse interface. They all have USB ports available. And the Wii could even have devices that plug into the controllers. All that needs to happen is for the game developers to use them. Perhaps the graphics won't be as great as the top end quad-SLI rig, but there are always tradeoffs.
So, what's it worth to you? If the game companies start seeing a market shift, they will eventually take notice. Even if that shift is to consoles, or other OSes. Linux could be a kick-ass gaming platform if the card makers would release decent drivers and the game companies wrote to it. It's significantly lighter than Windows, leaving more resources to the games.
ITX can do it. Just get a board with an NVidia 8xxx or better chipset and use VDPAU. It's "beta" quality right now, but plays everything I have thrown at it, including some CPU killing Blu-Ray transcodes. And it does it while using ~5% of my X2 3800+ CPU. Amazing stuff.
You can add a PCI based VDPAU capable card for about $60 as well if you want to keep your existing setup.
The guide data fee is $20/year via SchedulesDirect. Hardly worth complaining about. I think this only works for USA users though. No idea on other countries as I don't live in them so I don't need guide data for them.:)
I built my Mythbox for about $300 including a nice case. The second frontend machine was about $200 as I didn't need a hard drive. I boot from a USB stick and get content from the main Myth machine or the fileserver. I need a couple more TB on the fileserver though. The 2TB I have on there is getting full.
Not using Boxee, they don't support running on 64-bit Linux. Or didn't when I looked into it anyway. Once they do, I'll consider adding them for the online content like Hulu.
Oh, I guess the tuner isn't included in those numbers. I use an HDHomeRun, dual OTA HD tuner box that connects via Ethernet. About $140. I was paying about $80/mo for DirecTV, now I use OTA and online for free. I would be paying for the internet connection anyway, so for this purpose, it's free. Less than 6 months for ROI on the main machine, another ~2 for the second box.
I'd actually start to be OK with that if I could direct that money to the school I want my kid to be educated in. The state monopoly on education is the problem. Breaking it is the only solution.
Until I can choose where my tax dollars are spent in the education of my children, there is a problem. I don't mind if the government wants to compete and run a school as well. No problem. So long as I can choose.
They use a Motorola Canopy based system. Spec speed is 5M/2M and I usually get the 5M down, the 2M up is a little harder. Usually it's closer to 1M. Not bad though, for what I need. I have had very little downtime, and the price is about the same as cable or DSL. Cable is Comcast with caps and blocked ports, DSL tops out at something stupidly low like 512k.
I get 1 static IP, no caps, and decent speed. Everything I need. If Qwest ever gets off their butts and rolls out something like FIOS, I'll consider them as well. I hear they are working on something, but not in my area.
Another one, fiber. You can push more data through a fiber than a coax, it doesn't cost much more to run, probably less if you calculate it per mbit/sec. And you can run a bundle of them at once to get a lot of bang for your buck.
Slashdot Mirror
That single person in the F150 probably needs its capabilities a fair bit of the time. Towing, hauling large loads, etc.. Given current prices for vehicles and registration, insurance, etc., it's likely cheaper to use the truck as a personal vehicle as well than to buy and maintain another vehicle.
I own a Prius and a Montero Sport. My wife and I can carpool, so the Prius gets a lot of miles on it. When I do use the SUV, I'm usually towing or have more in it than would fit in the surprisingly large cargo space of the Prius. There is often just one of us in the Montero, but we are usually either doing something that requires its abilities or are on our way to do so. Occasionally, we just need 2 cars. Not everyone can afford to do that. Hell, we probably shouldn't be doing it. In such a case, it makes sense to have the more capable vehicle.
Yeah, sometimes the driver just likes the truck. But everyone I know that owns one uses it as a truck, even if they do commute in it.
Kyoto has a number of problems that make it undesirable for the US. There are good reasons not to ratify it. I do think it would be good for us to do something like it, but I'm not satisfied with Kyoto as written.
Simply allowing those that can to work from home or locations closer to home would do far more for the environment and oil consumption than restricting people's vehicle choices. Good luck with that though. It requires managers that know what they are doing, and those are quite rare.
The problem with self-driving cars is that they ALL have to be self-driving for it to work properly. I suppose you could designate certain roads as automated only, but how do you enforce it if you do?
I guess you could add sensors of some kind all around to keep the car from hitting other cars that don't report position data. But if even one of them is off calibration by a little bit.... crash. RADAR isn't great, as there just isn't enough space for independent transmitters. LIDAR might work, but has similar problems.
Given how badly SGA sucked even compared to later seasons of SG1, SGU not having any new episodes might be preferable!
Keep in mind, responsible people don't make good TV. I've attended large and small launches in person. They have always been run quite well in my view. They have restrictions on how close you can be to spectators with various size rockets and motors, and have good range safety protocols.
Like any large group, you will have individuals that don't like the rules. Most of the time, the rest of us will self-regulate them as best we can.
This is a somewhat dangerous hobby. Deployment failures happen, it's part of the hobby. We do our best to make sure it doesn't happen often, but hey, even to pros screw up once in a while.
I'm involved in rocketry, so here's a couple clues. :)
Yes, very big motors are available. Nothing on the scale of space shuttles or even most military missiles, but they do get quite large.
This change will allow us to buy and store motors for ourselves without having to get an explosives permit from BATF. This only makes sense, as APCP is NOT an explosive.
Note that we do regulate ourselves and are subject to other regulation from government as well. For example, to buy large motors, you have to get certified by one of the two industry groups. This allows experienced rocketeers to judge your ability to build and fly large high power rockets safely. Government also restricts our activities via the FAA (make sure we don't crash into airplanes), and Fire Marshalls (make sure we don't burn down neighborhoods). There are others, but those are the big ones. This case just gets the BATF out of our hair (we hope). There are still a number of regulations in place and most of us think those are fine.
Personally, I'd much rather have to notify the FAA and/or get permission to fly than have my rocket hit an aircraft. I do check the sky before I launch, but it helps. The FAA will let pilots know where we are flying and to what altitude, so that they can avoid us.
And I would propose that "No Child Left Behind" is what we get when we try to have the federal government take care of it. I think the better solution is to remove the barriers to competition. Allow parents to decide where their kids will go and where the money for that child's education will go. There should probably be some limitations, but that way, interested parents (like myself) could pick a school based on the child's needs and what they think will work well. With choice available, I could pick a school that teaches a little differently.
With even half of the money spent on the public education system per student, I could pay private school tuition for some existing schools. I expect more will pop up if there is a bigger market.
Politically, I don't consider myself aligning with any party all that well. I guess the Libertarians would be closest, but I have some issues with them as well. My concern with the federal government handling this is that I don't feel that they have done anything really all that well. There are a number of programs and such that sort of work, but nothing that I would consider a great success. They simply haven't proven to me that they should be entrusted with my child's education.
Where do you work? I had to piss and moan to get 2GB of RAM! I would kill for 16GB.
The funny thing is, I don't think it's that much work for most reasonable upgrades. I put 4GB of RAM in mine, it wasn't hard at all. Get a thin putty knife and an old credit card and it only takes a few minutes to pop it open. A few screws later and there are the SO-DIMM slots. I don't think they are much harder than most pre-built systems to get into.
Yeah, it's tightly packed inside, so things take a little more work to extract. Big deal. I expected that for such a tiny machine. The RAM is standard, as are the hard drives. Laptop parts, but you aren't going to fit desktop parts in a case that small. And a 1TB HD, really? Meh, all my big files live on a RAID server with automated backups, as the geek gods intended. :)
You could do a lot of small tests.. I think those are called "quizzes". :)
I think the point was that those on the far ends of the curve have different needs and they should be considered too. Yes, it's a difficult problem, but it's not an unsolvable one. I think many here would at least cut them some slack if there were any signs of movement on that.
It is unreasonable to expect everyone to keep up with the fastest runner, but it's also unreasonable to force the fastest to slow down to match the slowest. The only solution I can think of right this second is to separate the classes not by age, but by performance. If you're really good at math, you go to a class with other people who are really good at math. Not so good, and average classes are also needed. But that might make some student "feel bad" about whatever level they are in. Nevermind that it's to help them.
There IS some of that available at the HS level, but more could be done.
Yes, I would. But I think Mr. Brick would be annoyed if I tried to stuff him into my Knidle. It's a small space for a person to try to live in. :D
So all Amazon really has to do is change the advertising. Stop calling them audiobooks and call them what they are, e-books. Then make a bigger deal of the TTS on the Kindle. There, now they aren't "selling" an audiobook. They are selling an e-book on a device that happens to be able to read it to you via audio.
It's a text file with DRM, it's not like a normal audiobook where you have to pay someone to read it and for recording time in a studio. It doesn't deserve the same pricing as an audiobook, regardless of how well the device can render speach.
Another option for interfacing: http://www.greta.dhs.org/UBW/
The UBW shows up as a serial port and you just send commands to it to toggle pins and do other stuff. For example, it has ADC support, so you could connect a thermistor and you can read the temp anywhere. Use the GPIOs and you can control stuff based on sensor readings.
Still in "hammer swatting a fly" territory though. :)
They do that where I currently work. Not only that, but the bar for "achieves" is now either that, or whatever you got LAST TIME, whichever is higher. So unless you want to be superman all the time, you have a negative incentive to do better than "achieves". I wonder if management ever thinks things through sometimes.
Landing on a runway isn't all that hard. Stressful as hell the first time you do it for real, but not that hard. Granted, I've never flown multi-engine jumbo jets, just small private planes. But the principles are the same. Flaps, throttle, and stick work basically the same as well. I'd be willing to bet I could land a simulator with someone talking me through the controls I've never used. I could probably find the more important ones, like say, landing gear, myself.
Actually, I think some really new planes have autoland. And autopilot is pretty simple in many planes. It just keeps altitude and heading from drifting. Many of the big jets do have real auto-nav, but from what I remember reading, it's not as simple to set up as telling your GPS where to go.
Of course, if all you need is city level accuracy, a handheld GPS unit in the cockpit is more than enough. Hell, the GPS in my phone would work.
Flying isn't all that hard, particularly if the trained pilot already got the jet off the ground. The big multi-engine jets are complex, but once you're in flight, you don't really need to know that much about them to crash them into a building.
If they wanted to get really fancy with the jets, they could set up a key sequence to transfer control to a remote system via satellite. That would really screw with the ter-ists. :) Auto-crash-into-the-ocean mode would be interesting as well, though less friendly to the passengers. :)
The thing I find amusing about this, is that they are stopping people now that they have gotten used to it. It will drive the more savvy to look around online for other options. And they will find things like bittorrent.
So they are driving people to the "illegal" ways of getting the exact same thing. And people are now less likely to see a moral problem with doing so since they were doing it with hulu just till they broke it. So now they get zero revenue from it, and people are still watching the shows from online sources. With the current software out there for automating the downloads, it's even better than Hulu for a lot of things. And you can get the shows in HD! Much of the stuff is easy enough for even my parents to use.
"Congress shall pass no law limiting the rights of persons to manipulate, operate, or otherwise utilize as they see fit any of their possessions or effects, nor the sale or trade of tools to be used for such purposes."
There ya go, "The Hacker's Amendment". And it leaves plenty of room for interpretation, just like the rest of the Constitution...
I like it! Vote Artraze!
Unfortunately, if you are a gamer, there aren't alternatives available. :(
Sure there is, PS3, Xbox360, and Wii. They aren't the best for every game type, but there is no real reason they couldn't have a KB/Mouse interface. They all have USB ports available. And the Wii could even have devices that plug into the controllers. All that needs to happen is for the game developers to use them. Perhaps the graphics won't be as great as the top end quad-SLI rig, but there are always tradeoffs.
So, what's it worth to you? If the game companies start seeing a market shift, they will eventually take notice. Even if that shift is to consoles, or other OSes. Linux could be a kick-ass gaming platform if the card makers would release decent drivers and the game companies wrote to it. It's significantly lighter than Windows, leaving more resources to the games.
Hauppage HD-PVR.
ITX can do it. Just get a board with an NVidia 8xxx or better chipset and use VDPAU. It's "beta" quality right now, but plays everything I have thrown at it, including some CPU killing Blu-Ray transcodes. And it does it while using ~5% of my X2 3800+ CPU. Amazing stuff.
You can add a PCI based VDPAU capable card for about $60 as well if you want to keep your existing setup.
The guide data fee is $20/year via SchedulesDirect. Hardly worth complaining about. I think this only works for USA users though. No idea on other countries as I don't live in them so I don't need guide data for them. :)
I built my Mythbox for about $300 including a nice case. The second frontend machine was about $200 as I didn't need a hard drive. I boot from a USB stick and get content from the main Myth machine or the fileserver. I need a couple more TB on the fileserver though. The 2TB I have on there is getting full.
Not using Boxee, they don't support running on 64-bit Linux. Or didn't when I looked into it anyway. Once they do, I'll consider adding them for the online content like Hulu.
Oh, I guess the tuner isn't included in those numbers. I use an HDHomeRun, dual OTA HD tuner box that connects via Ethernet. About $140. I was paying about $80/mo for DirecTV, now I use OTA and online for free. I would be paying for the internet connection anyway, so for this purpose, it's free. Less than 6 months for ROI on the main machine, another ~2 for the second box.
I'd actually start to be OK with that if I could direct that money to the school I want my kid to be educated in. The state monopoly on education is the problem. Breaking it is the only solution.
Until I can choose where my tax dollars are spent in the education of my children, there is a problem. I don't mind if the government wants to compete and run a school as well. No problem. So long as I can choose.
They use a Motorola Canopy based system. Spec speed is 5M/2M and I usually get the 5M down, the 2M up is a little harder. Usually it's closer to 1M. Not bad though, for what I need. I have had very little downtime, and the price is about the same as cable or DSL. Cable is Comcast with caps and blocked ports, DSL tops out at something stupidly low like 512k.
I get 1 static IP, no caps, and decent speed. Everything I need. If Qwest ever gets off their butts and rolls out something like FIOS, I'll consider them as well. I hear they are working on something, but not in my area.
Another one, fiber. You can push more data through a fiber than a coax, it doesn't cost much more to run, probably less if you calculate it per mbit/sec. And you can run a bundle of them at once to get a lot of bang for your buck.