I visited my uncle and my cousins there many times back in the day. Odessa being a city port and the gateway to the West during the time of the Soviets, it has always been a place of shady deals , full of snake oil salesmen, pickpocketters and all kinds of mafia types. This stuff has been going on there for very long time. People from Odessa always had an air of entitlement to them.
Overall beautiful city by the Black Sea, but has some of the nastiest people I have ever met (my uncle doesn't live there anymore...)
COMPANY: Our technology is so good we can't even sell it. But of course if you are willing to pay a premium we might consider it....
COSTOMER: Oh, wow. This shit has to be good if they can't sell it. We have to see if HP will sell it to _us_. We'll even offer them to pay extra.
COMPANY: Suckers...!
...
Reminds of when I went shopping for cars with my uncle in Odessa, Ukraine. This guy was selling used cars. At the end of the lot he had a car covered under a sheet. My uncle asks, what's model you have there. He said "That's not for sale." He then proceeded to tell us how that was a special model blah blah blah. Then my uncle talked him into selling it, payed extra for the 'special' features. Then as we drove away it, the salesman took the sheet and put it on the car right next to it. Seems like HP is doing the same thing here...
Horseshit. US is predicated on so much more than "good" and "bad"
Llamashit. I want to see you find the same nice job with a fellony conviction and without it. The employer won't bother asking you what happened, was it a mistake, what were the circumstances, no, you have a label of a "bad" person for the rest of your life attached to your face. Good luck.
The bottom line is as soon as someone was _ever_ convicted of a fellony or was in prison for any ammount of time that person is a "bad" person in the eyes of our society. The judicial system is also, surprise, part of our society. The law also works in on a binary system. For example, the day before your 21st birthday you break the law if you drink, a day after you are fine. What? Did you mature during that 24 hours and now you are a responsible adult? With most laws out there you either break the law or you don't. Yes, how much punishment you get depends of the judges' and prosecutors' mood that day. But it doesn't matter, all it takes is for a person to sit in the defendant's seat in court and they are a "bad" person sometimes even regardless of the outcome of the trial.
The courts have struggled for centuries with levels of culpability, so don't go around belittling those struggles by declaring unilaterally that they want to sort people into "good" and "bad" categories.
Well, they obviously failed, so I think I'll continue belittling them, if that's alright with you...
Yes, you are right, Mr. CS terminology nazi;-) FSM is an algorithm. I was just assuming that a FSM is the only and best algorithm for that one specific hypothetical task. It was just one of the algorithms that came to my mind that I thought is inherently not concurrent / parallelizable so one could have a 1000 cores but that one finite state machine would have to go from state to state in a sequential manner on one single core .
The standard question is "Why do bad things happen to good people"?. Well, usually those "bad things" are caused by other people who did something "bad" to other people. (This of course excludes natural calamities). However, as one of the grandparent posts pointed it, "good people" and "bad people" are not that different. The same "hero" who saves a little child from a burning building might not be that different than thief who robs a bank. That would certainly be very hard for us to digest and we just take the mental shortcut and apply the stereotypical labels of "hero" and "vilain".
In reality there is no clear and permanent classification of people into "good" and "bad". The "good" person from yesterday might be a "bad" person today because of the circumstances they were put in. The "good cop, doing his job at work, might go home and beat his wife", and so on. Our society, our legal system though wants to make that binary classification because it is less painful for us to admit that we could also do "bad" thing once in a while and we surely like to think of ourselves as "good people".
A lot of the criminals when asked why they commited the crime would answer "I don't know why I did it." Notice I am not advocating that we should not punish the offenders or that individuals should not be responsible for their actions (those damn genes made me do it!), but rather that we shouldn't hastily judge and categorize people with permanent overgeneralized labels such as "he is evil" and "I am good". In case of a habitual offender or were a clear pattern of bad behavior occurs perhaps such labels are valid, however there are moments and circumstances were even the sanest and "best" of us can do pretty bad things.
making a piece of code make good use of a number of processors is often a non-trivial exercise.
True, but the many benefits from a multicore system don't come from necessarily runnning one process with shared data on multiple cores (i.e. threading) but running multiple processes that are fairly isolated in parallel. One could be the Ruby interpreter,other could be your database, the other a monitoring or security application, another a backup deamon and so on.
Concurrent programming in shared data environment is very difficult. And besides, some tasks are inherently sequential like a finite state machine for example.
In other words, I don't think that I wasted my money by buying a Core 2 Duo laptop instead of a single core machine. I notice a very real performance improvement because of an extra core. I run a numerical simulation module on one core and the system and other stuff like browsing the web and office apps can have an extra core all to themselves!
There is no ethical problem here. (At least the way I see it and my ethics does not necessary = other's ethics). As the author of the project he can change the license as he pleases. What others see as deliberate attempt at not disclosing the change can just be laziness. If the license is included with the distribution and clearly readable it is the responsability of the user to check it.
BUT if the software was GPL before then that old version is still GPL (imagine it has been forked or integrated in other GPL software or that Linus changed the Linux kernel license to something commercial and restrictive ). Then when those using his software when upgrading should check the license. If they want to fork it or include it as part of other software then they should definetly check the license of that release.
Of course there are a whole bunch of interesting cases to consider. What if the software is released under GPL for only 1 hour and then (perhaps after consulting with a lawyer) the license is changed. If someone downloaded it within that hour can they treat it as GPL even though now it has a different license but it is the same software? Or what if someone steals my code and slaps a GPL license on it and then claims that I released it as GPL initially and that changed to the current license. It will be my word against theirs...and then we'll end up with something like SCO vs. IBM probably
Ideally there would need to be a portable (foldable) USB keyboard that is small yet comfortable to type on, with OLED keys and a switch such that one could easily switch between QWERTY and Dvorak. The user could load any keyconfigs, and use it for FPS gaming, video editing and even Photoshop. I would pay $200+ for such a gem. For now, I'll just dream about it...
Yes, yes, I know the Optimus Keyboard by the Lebedev studio from Russia : here , it's just that it is not small enough to carry around and I am not sure if it can store keymapping and switch them externally without having a specialized driver for it....
You've nailed it. It is in fact all about the media. What we see and care about and talk about is what the media lets us see and hear. For instance, think of a smaller scale. How come when a cute blonde girl gets kidnapped the whole country in an uproar? But do you know that there are hundreds of girls that are not blonde and cute that also get kidnapped killed and raped but the media never bothers to make it a story and consequency we as a society never "bother to care".
Same thing in Darfur, we know about it only as much as the media tells us. If CNN decided to make Darfur the main news item for a whole week, you'd be surprized how you'd have all this charity effort, everyone would be collecting money, sending aid, before you know the government will get involved and so on. Even though I despise hollywood and it's puppets but I admire the few actors (like Clooney for ex.) who bother to go to Africa, even if just to atract attention to the problem.
Wasn't there a new item that US does not lead the world in innovation and tech progress anymore. I believe it....
IP laws are so ridiculous here that they end up slowing down innovation rather than encouraging it. When you have patent hogs that all they do is accumulate overly generalized, broad patents, then sit and wait until someone uses them, then wait some more until 5 or 10 years pass and only then sue! "Oh, gee, we just noticed that, everyone is using a mouse pointing device and we had a patent for it filed in 1971, so we'll just sue the whole world for it and get rich?" I don't really see this modus operandi as being conducive to innovation, it is all just a get rich quick business...
This can also somehow go back to the fact that most people don't think rationally and don't know math and statistics very well. If they would just realize that they have a higher chance of slipping, falling and breaking their spine in the shower or drowning in their swimming pool than even seeing a terrorist in person, they would be better off. But they don't. So what we should be scared and afraid is our own stupidity not anything else. Right now our stupidity controls us. It can be an indirect control because the government and the big corporations can learn to control us because of our inablity to think rationally. They scream "OMG! TEH TERRORISTS!" and we hand them our freedom, our money and bend over for them to rape us any way they want. Yep, the terrorists won, we should at least have the smarts to realize that fact...
It's alright. US is already behind as far as technological progess goes. Our school systems are crap, our students math and science scores rank near the bottom of the civilized nation's scores. We have been in a stupid war for the last 5 years or so, we have overspent our money, our president is a moron and we are so scared of terrorists that we threw away democracy and freedom and put babies on the no-fly lists. Call me pessimistic and alarmist, but I see this country going downhill. It was a great country, it reached it's peak and now it is on a long an steady decline.
I think US will be in the position to bully others only for so long. Pretty soon we might have to be the ones taking orders...
They weren't. A lot of the pirated copies in China and Russia look very convincing (no hand written titles on pieces of tissue paper), instead they are high quality reproductions of the originial artwork. The only cost the pirate needs to worry about is the cost of blank media (cents/copy), packaging (could be significant for a quality reproduction, say $1/copy), distribution (pay the person on the street who sells the stuff) + average cost of equipment and upkeep and that's about it. The rest is pure profit. So it is a good business. It is a good business for MPIAA for that matter as well, except they have to recover the cost of actually making the movie...
I guess the fear might be that such cheap copies of hollywood crap will spill into the US and Western European markets and cut into the profits of RIAA/MPAA and friends. But then again in U.S. and Western Europe we have our broadband and Pirate Bay / BTJunkie / etc. so we can get our share of hollywood crap for $0.
there is still money to be made, just don't expect chinese consumers to fork over 15% of their annual income for a lousy hollywood movie
The problem, according to ??AA is that hollywood movies (all lousy at best, as you mentioned) are not necessities, in other words if the Chinese cannot afford them so be it, they shouldn't watch them. And leave it up to us, the "cultured" and "soffisticated" to pay $20 for garbage like that.
I would actually support hollywood cracking down on those who watch their crap and don't pay. Not because I like hollywood but because I hope people will realize that crap like that is really not worth paying for and/or risking a lawsuit and instead invest their money (that $20) in something better. The same goes for Microsoft, let them go after each pirate and remotely disable all of those "suspicious" windows installs. I think the majority of people who pirate windows already realized that the quality of the product they would be getting if they would buy it "fair and square" is not worth the price, and maybe then they'll switch to a free operating system (say Ubuntu) or pay money for a quality product (OS X).
Yes, the subcompacts and ultracompacts are cheaper and many choose them because of no other choice but you also have to consider that there are plenty of used vehicles of any size brand and price. Heck if I want I can afford a Mercedes if I am willing to get it with 200,000 miles on it. So if the "poor" young people really want they could afford something big (like a truck or a used SUV). But there is a large segment of them who do want a small car. I am on of them. If someone gave me an SUV, a Hummer or a truck tomorrow and told me I cannot sell it and must drive it, I wouldn't take it, I would choose a Honda Fit (the sport version probably), a BMW Cooper or even the Mercedes Smart Car. I am not a fanatical pro environment person, I just simply like the smaller cars, I guess the marketing from Honda or Scion brainwashed me, who knows...most likely it is the rebellion against the older generation who chose to drive huge tanks instead of cars and the fact that I lived in Europe for a long time...
You mean have families like the Europeans, South Americans and the Rest-of-the-civilised-world...
SUV's are not necessarily more expensive, and smaller cars are not always a 'forced' choice because of a low income (besides there are used cars of any size/brand for any price range), look at a BMW Cooper, it is not a cheap car @ $24k only $3k cheaper than a Toyota 4Runner SUV @ $27k. But of course you probably grew up in America and just like anyone else here have (yes, including myself) been brainwashed that "Big=safe", "big=more status=better". That might have been true but things don't stay the same.
Ever seen what a SUV does to a cute little Honda Civic in a crash?.
Well then take the city bus or don't drive at all. Unless you drive a tank or a semitruck there will always be a bigger larger car that will crush you like a pancake, in other words, have you ever seen what a huge Volvo semi does to an SUV in a crash.... A small ultra-compact car with a rollcage (like some Mercedes models) might actually do better in such a crash! Check out the Mercedes Smart frontal test crash @ 140mph here
You are absolutely right. According to the government data from a couple of years ago, those driving SUV's were no safer than those driving regular cars. The additional size and weight meant additional risk of rollover wich offset the protection provided by the larger frame. So everyone puts their precious little babies in a huge SUV only to have it roll over and have those babies bounce in there like hamsters in a wheel that spins too fast for them to run in.
Besides a smaller car equiped with a rollcage (some ultracompact Mercedes cars have that) could fare pretty well in a collision with an SUV.
if somebody actually did develop a solar powered car that had performance characteristics comparable to compact gasoline-powered cars and was in the same ballpark in terms of price
Will never happen. Even if you had 100% solar power utilization (impossible, now it's about 15-20%) and lived on top of the atmosphere so you get all the sunlight without having it dispersed by and absorbed by the atmosphere (so you'd have about 1.3kW/m^2 available) and sunshine 365days/year you still couldn't have a highway safe car because the car would need to be quite heavy so it can travel on the highways along the semi-trucks and Hummers. So even if you had a pretty large (surface-wise = 4 m^2) you could get a (very!) theoretical maximum of 5kW ~= 5kW / 746 W/hp ~= 7hp. Even some lawnmawers have more power than that...
Re:We'll fix that right after we get cold fusion.
on
X Prize For a 100-MPG Car
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Given the choice between trying to change a deep-rooted social behavior and solving the technical problem of making a minivan/Hummer/whatever that gets 100MPG, I'd say the technical problem is far more feasible to solve.
You would be surprized how easily the "unwashed masses" can be manipulated by the media and marketing. Most people my age ( genY'ers) want smaller cars that are cute and fuel efficient. For many years American car companies have pushed "Bigger=more status=better" and everyone bought it, but some manufacturers have realized that they need to cater to the new generation since we'll be the ones making money and therefore buying the cars.
For us they are pushing "Smaller+cuter=smarter=better" (and it must have an iPod plug somewhere!), at least that is the stereotype. But of course marketing is a two-way street. If any compeny invests enough into it, it will manage to change our perceptions. For example if Honda decided to sell us Pink Elephants on Wheels and spent a billion dollars in marketing, you can be sure that there will be a lot of people in this country how will just "have" to have a pink elephant on wheels.
Plus I think there is always a tendency of the new generation to reject the values and mores of their parents, not for any reason, just 'cause, so they can be different. That should help those in marketing who want to cater to genY'ers. (If our parents wanted big cars, then we will necessarily want small ones; if they wanted dull colors, we'll probably want more exotic, brighter colors and so on...). Today many people my age get their first job, go shopping for cars and a lot of them look at Honda Fit and Toyota Yaris, at Scion, Chevy Aveo's etc. None of my friends ever said that they wanted to go buy an SUV, a minivan, a big-ass truck or a Hummer.
35,000**7 ways, or 64,339,296,875,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.
...
The Sun will have burned out long before people run out of creative ways to say things
Ah, yes, throw some big meaningless numbers at people and they'll think your post contains experimental data and will take your word as authority because they don't know any better. That usually works well in the academia, especially psychology, sociology and other "ologies"...
Except that people don't randomly choose words from their vocabulary when they talk (maybe you do, I don't know...). For example there aren't that many ways to say that "Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher is a allegory" it contains 10 words (ok, 6 could be stopwords). That is a phrase that will probably be written hundreds, if not thousands of times by students because Poe is studied very often in American highschools and in colleges. Does it mean that all of those students plagiarized? Maybe... I don't know. There is no way to tell just by spotting that one phrase. Actually if someone was copying the paper and they have more than half a brain, they 'll paraphrase the text ( a thesaurus will work nicely as a tool). Until Turnitin's software actually extracts meaning from text and uses it effectively it will be easy to bypass their checks and there will be loads of false positives.
Knowing someone cheats and being able to prove it is a whole different question. For example if he heard his classmates brag about downloading the paper they can't really tell the professor much. It will be "he said, she said" kind of stuff and someone might as well make that up about anyone that anoys them (like the guy who sat next to me during an exam and chewed gum really loudly ) -- if I was really evil I could have gone to the professor and told them he cheated.
Then if were to point a finger towards one of my classmates and accuse them of cheating to a professor but the professor couldn't prove anything, I would have to see that classmate every day, take classes with them and might even be forced to collaborate with them on projects during the rest of my University career. That would make me think twice before calling someone a cheater without having good evidence (such as a specific website they bought the paper from and so on.)
If they were to bust anyone for cheating they should look really closely at frat boys and sorority girls. Fraternities and sororities usually maintain loads of previously solved homeworks and exams to help the newcomers "get through" college while being drunk half of the time. But if I was to tell a professor that "Ms. Blondie McParty" told her friends she cheated and I overheard, it would be my word against that of 20 clones "Ms. Blondie McParty" and friends. I think I would rather not bother and move on. My children will have to deal the a shitty educational system...
Slashdot Mirror
Overall beautiful city by the Black Sea, but has some of the nastiest people I have ever met (my uncle doesn't live there anymore...)
COMPANY: Our technology is so good we can't even sell it. But of course if you are willing to pay a premium we might consider it....
COSTOMER: Oh, wow. This shit has to be good if they can't sell it. We have to see if HP will sell it to _us_. We'll even offer them to pay extra.
COMPANY: Suckers...!
Reminds of when I went shopping for cars with my uncle in Odessa, Ukraine. This guy was selling used cars. At the end of the lot he had a car covered under a sheet. My uncle asks, what's model you have there. He said "That's not for sale." He then proceeded to tell us how that was a special model blah blah blah. Then my uncle talked him into selling it, payed extra for the 'special' features. Then as we drove away it, the salesman took the sheet and put it on the car right next to it. Seems like HP is doing the same thing here...
I hope they need Python or Java developers. Perhaps black bears could use some custom software to optimize their search for berries...
Llamashit. I want to see you find the same nice job with a fellony conviction and without it. The employer won't bother asking you what happened, was it a mistake, what were the circumstances, no, you have a label of a "bad" person for the rest of your life attached to your face. Good luck.
The bottom line is as soon as someone was _ever_ convicted of a fellony or was in prison for any ammount of time that person is a "bad" person in the eyes of our society. The judicial system is also, surprise, part of our society. The law also works in on a binary system. For example, the day before your 21st birthday you break the law if you drink, a day after you are fine. What? Did you mature during that 24 hours and now you are a responsible adult? With most laws out there you either break the law or you don't. Yes, how much punishment you get depends of the judges' and prosecutors' mood that day. But it doesn't matter, all it takes is for a person to sit in the defendant's seat in court and they are a "bad" person sometimes even regardless of the outcome of the trial.
The courts have struggled for centuries with levels of culpability, so don't go around belittling those struggles by declaring unilaterally that they want to sort people into "good" and "bad" categories.
Well, they obviously failed, so I think I'll continue belittling them, if that's alright with you...
Yes, you are right, Mr. CS terminology nazi ;-) FSM is an algorithm. I was just assuming that a FSM is the only and best algorithm for that one specific hypothetical task. It was just one of the algorithms that came to my mind that I thought is inherently not concurrent / parallelizable so one could have a 1000 cores but that one finite state machine would have to go from state to state in a sequential manner on one single core .
In reality there is no clear and permanent classification of people into "good" and "bad". The "good" person from yesterday might be a "bad" person today because of the circumstances they were put in. The "good cop, doing his job at work, might go home and beat his wife", and so on. Our society, our legal system though wants to make that binary classification because it is less painful for us to admit that we could also do "bad" thing once in a while and we surely like to think of ourselves as "good people".
A lot of the criminals when asked why they commited the crime would answer "I don't know why I did it." Notice I am not advocating that we should not punish the offenders or that individuals should not be responsible for their actions (those damn genes made me do it!), but rather that we shouldn't hastily judge and categorize people with permanent overgeneralized labels such as "he is evil" and "I am good". In case of a habitual offender or were a clear pattern of bad behavior occurs perhaps such labels are valid, however there are moments and circumstances were even the sanest and "best" of us can do pretty bad things.
True, but the many benefits from a multicore system don't come from necessarily runnning one process with shared data on multiple cores (i.e. threading) but running multiple processes that are fairly isolated in parallel. One could be the Ruby interpreter,other could be your database, the other a monitoring or security application, another a backup deamon and so on.
Concurrent programming in shared data environment is very difficult. And besides, some tasks are inherently sequential like a finite state machine for example.
In other words, I don't think that I wasted my money by buying a Core 2 Duo laptop instead of a single core machine. I notice a very real performance improvement because of an extra core. I run a numerical simulation module on one core and the system and other stuff like browsing the web and office apps can have an extra core all to themselves!
BUT if the software was GPL before then that old version is still GPL (imagine it has been forked or integrated in other GPL software or that Linus changed the Linux kernel license to something commercial and restrictive ). Then when those using his software when upgrading should check the license. If they want to fork it or include it as part of other software then they should definetly check the license of that release.
Of course there are a whole bunch of interesting cases to consider. What if the software is released under GPL for only 1 hour and then (perhaps after consulting with a lawyer) the license is changed. If someone downloaded it within that hour can they treat it as GPL even though now it has a different license but it is the same software? Or what if someone steals my code and slaps a GPL license on it and then claims that I released it as GPL initially and that changed to the current license. It will be my word against theirs...and then we'll end up with something like SCO vs. IBM probably
Yes, yes, I know the Optimus Keyboard by the Lebedev studio from Russia : here , it's just that it is not small enough to carry around and I am not sure if it can store keymapping and switch them externally without having a specialized driver for it....
Same thing in Darfur, we know about it only as much as the media tells us. If CNN decided to make Darfur the main news item for a whole week, you'd be surprized how you'd have all this charity effort, everyone would be collecting money, sending aid, before you know the government will get involved and so on. Even though I despise hollywood and it's puppets but I admire the few actors (like Clooney for ex.) who bother to go to Africa, even if just to atract attention to the problem.
Yes, I am sarcastic..[sigh]
IP laws are so ridiculous here that they end up slowing down innovation rather than encouraging it. When you have patent hogs that all they do is accumulate overly generalized, broad patents, then sit and wait until someone uses them, then wait some more until 5 or 10 years pass and only then sue! "Oh, gee, we just noticed that, everyone is using a mouse pointing device and we had a patent for it filed in 1971, so we'll just sue the whole world for it and get rich?" I don't really see this modus operandi as being conducive to innovation, it is all just a get rich quick business...
This can also somehow go back to the fact that most people don't think rationally and don't know math and statistics very well. If they would just realize that they have a higher chance of slipping, falling and breaking their spine in the shower or drowning in their swimming pool than even seeing a terrorist in person, they would be better off. But they don't. So what we should be scared and afraid is our own stupidity not anything else. Right now our stupidity controls us. It can be an indirect control because the government and the big corporations can learn to control us because of our inablity to think rationally. They scream "OMG! TEH TERRORISTS!" and we hand them our freedom, our money and bend over for them to rape us any way they want. Yep, the terrorists won, we should at least have the smarts to realize that fact...
I think US will be in the position to bully others only for so long. Pretty soon we might have to be the ones taking orders...
They weren't. A lot of the pirated copies in China and Russia look very convincing (no hand written titles on pieces of tissue paper), instead they are high quality reproductions of the originial artwork. The only cost the pirate needs to worry about is the cost of blank media (cents/copy), packaging (could be significant for a quality reproduction, say $1/copy), distribution (pay the person on the street who sells the stuff) + average cost of equipment and upkeep and that's about it. The rest is pure profit. So it is a good business. It is a good business for MPIAA for that matter as well, except they have to recover the cost of actually making the movie...
there is still money to be made, just don't expect chinese consumers to fork over 15% of their annual income for a lousy hollywood movie
The problem, according to ??AA is that hollywood movies (all lousy at best, as you mentioned) are not necessities, in other words if the Chinese cannot afford them so be it, they shouldn't watch them. And leave it up to us, the "cultured" and "soffisticated" to pay $20 for garbage like that.
I would actually support hollywood cracking down on those who watch their crap and don't pay. Not because I like hollywood but because I hope people will realize that crap like that is really not worth paying for and/or risking a lawsuit and instead invest their money (that $20) in something better. The same goes for Microsoft, let them go after each pirate and remotely disable all of those "suspicious" windows installs. I think the majority of people who pirate windows already realized that the quality of the product they would be getting if they would buy it "fair and square" is not worth the price, and maybe then they'll switch to a free operating system (say Ubuntu) or pay money for a quality product (OS X).
Will they have sex with 13 year old horny students?
Acutally you should advertise not as 5G that sounds meager, make it 5000MB WOW! how about 5000000KB KABOOM!!! or 5000000000 bytes KRAZY KOOL !!!
Yes, the subcompacts and ultracompacts are cheaper and many choose them because of no other choice but you also have to consider that there are plenty of used vehicles of any size brand and price. Heck if I want I can afford a Mercedes if I am willing to get it with 200,000 miles on it. So if the "poor" young people really want they could afford something big (like a truck or a used SUV). But there is a large segment of them who do want a small car. I am on of them. If someone gave me an SUV, a Hummer or a truck tomorrow and told me I cannot sell it and must drive it, I wouldn't take it, I would choose a Honda Fit (the sport version probably), a BMW Cooper or even the Mercedes Smart Car. I am not a fanatical pro environment person, I just simply like the smaller cars, I guess the marketing from Honda or Scion brainwashed me, who knows...most likely it is the rebellion against the older generation who chose to drive huge tanks instead of cars and the fact that I lived in Europe for a long time...
SUV's are not necessarily more expensive, and smaller cars are not always a 'forced' choice because of a low income (besides there are used cars of any size/brand for any price range), look at a BMW Cooper, it is not a cheap car @ $24k only $3k cheaper than a Toyota 4Runner SUV @ $27k. But of course you probably grew up in America and just like anyone else here have (yes, including myself) been brainwashed that "Big=safe", "big=more status=better". That might have been true but things don't stay the same.
Ever seen what a SUV does to a cute little Honda Civic in a crash?.
Well then take the city bus or don't drive at all. Unless you drive a tank or a semitruck there will always be a bigger larger car that will crush you like a pancake, in other words, have you ever seen what a huge Volvo semi does to an SUV in a crash.... A small ultra-compact car with a rollcage (like some Mercedes models) might actually do better in such a crash! Check out the Mercedes Smart frontal test crash @ 140mph here
Besides a smaller car equiped with a rollcage (some ultracompact Mercedes cars have that) could fare pretty well in a collision with an SUV.
Will never happen. Even if you had 100% solar power utilization (impossible, now it's about 15-20%) and lived on top of the atmosphere so you get all the sunlight without having it dispersed by and absorbed by the atmosphere (so you'd have about 1.3kW/m^2 available) and sunshine 365days/year you still couldn't have a highway safe car because the car would need to be quite heavy so it can travel on the highways along the semi-trucks and Hummers. So even if you had a pretty large (surface-wise = 4 m^2) you could get a (very!) theoretical maximum of 5kW ~= 5kW / 746 W/hp ~= 7hp. Even some lawnmawers have more power than that...
You would be surprized how easily the "unwashed masses" can be manipulated by the media and marketing. Most people my age ( genY'ers) want smaller cars that are cute and fuel efficient. For many years American car companies have pushed "Bigger=more status=better" and everyone bought it, but some manufacturers have realized that they need to cater to the new generation since we'll be the ones making money and therefore buying the cars.
For us they are pushing "Smaller+cuter=smarter=better" (and it must have an iPod plug somewhere!), at least that is the stereotype. But of course marketing is a two-way street. If any compeny invests enough into it, it will manage to change our perceptions. For example if Honda decided to sell us Pink Elephants on Wheels and spent a billion dollars in marketing, you can be sure that there will be a lot of people in this country how will just "have" to have a pink elephant on wheels.
Plus I think there is always a tendency of the new generation to reject the values and mores of their parents, not for any reason, just 'cause, so they can be different. That should help those in marketing who want to cater to genY'ers. (If our parents wanted big cars, then we will necessarily want small ones; if they wanted dull colors, we'll probably want more exotic, brighter colors and so on...). Today many people my age get their first job, go shopping for cars and a lot of them look at Honda Fit and Toyota Yaris, at Scion, Chevy Aveo's etc. None of my friends ever said that they wanted to go buy an SUV, a minivan, a big-ass truck or a Hummer.
The Sun will have burned out long before people run out of creative ways to say things
Ah, yes, throw some big meaningless numbers at people and they'll think your post contains experimental data and will take your word as authority because they don't know any better. That usually works well in the academia, especially psychology, sociology and other "ologies"...
Except that people don't randomly choose words from their vocabulary when they talk (maybe you do, I don't know...). For example there aren't that many ways to say that "Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher is a allegory" it contains 10 words (ok, 6 could be stopwords). That is a phrase that will probably be written hundreds, if not thousands of times by students because Poe is studied very often in American highschools and in colleges. Does it mean that all of those students plagiarized? Maybe... I don't know. There is no way to tell just by spotting that one phrase. Actually if someone was copying the paper and they have more than half a brain, they 'll paraphrase the text ( a thesaurus will work nicely as a tool). Until Turnitin's software actually extracts meaning from text and uses it effectively it will be easy to bypass their checks and there will be loads of false positives.
Then if were to point a finger towards one of my classmates and accuse them of cheating to a professor but the professor couldn't prove anything, I would have to see that classmate every day, take classes with them and might even be forced to collaborate with them on projects during the rest of my University career. That would make me think twice before calling someone a cheater without having good evidence (such as a specific website they bought the paper from and so on.)
If they were to bust anyone for cheating they should look really closely at frat boys and sorority girls. Fraternities and sororities usually maintain loads of previously solved homeworks and exams to help the newcomers "get through" college while being drunk half of the time. But if I was to tell a professor that "Ms. Blondie McParty" told her friends she cheated and I overheard, it would be my word against that of 20 clones "Ms. Blondie McParty" and friends. I think I would rather not bother and move on. My children will have to deal the a shitty educational system...