This blows my mind continually. I hate the Apple marketing, I hate the stupid white headphones, and I hate the iTunes music store.
However, as an EE, I think the iPod is a god-damn miracle. It's incredibly well-designed, tightly engineered, and not really much more expensive than any of its competitors these days. It is, simply put, a triumph of user-centered design, at least in regards to the interface.
Is it the only interface out there? No. Is it the only great interface that's possible? No! Is it the only great interface out there? Yes.
The only thing that's even come close, in my book, was the Archos running Rockbox -- generally speaking, when manufacturers fuck up the UI, they do it in the firmware or with those CRAP joystick input devices. Since basically no one has clued in to the fact that open firmware for an otherwise impossible-to-copy device poses no threat to sales, firmware on otherwise well-designed devices (iRiver, etc) languishes in shittiness. When someone develops a good open firmware standard for portable audio devices, we'll really be getting somewhere.
It's not even that Apple has the best hardware engineers or the best platform -- the iPod uses the PortalPlayer architecture, and so have a number of other companies' entries. They've just all sucked.
IAAPDESE(I Am A Product Design Embedded Systems Engineer), and I work for a company that does MP3 players, among other things. We worked on one of the most recent entrants in 5GB HDD space.
I watched this product be crippled by the client's overwhelming urges to satisfy their industrial design (read: aesthetics) people, who knew precisely dick about what makes a really good interface. Unsurprisingly, it has bombed in the market despite good media coverage, and has been discontinued indefinitely.
Apple, on the other hand, generally pays attention to that stuff. It's not that they're the only ones who can. It's that they're the only ones who do -- everyone else is clawing at the market with money-losing bullshit products instead of regrouping, taking a year off, and designing a *really* well-though-out device.
Personally, I use an iRiver iHP140 -- I need record capability -- but I lust after the new one with the non-joystick controls...
Actually, most industrialized second/third-world countries (for lack of a better term -- think South America, China, India) ALREADY do this:)
There are thousands of people who comb through the dumps of India and southeast Asia for metals and other materials that they can get a small bounty on from re-melters. It's a surprisingly big business in those places. Kind of like the Indian ship-dismantlement yards.
Just as oil scarcity will lead to more and more high-tech, low-yield extraction methods, a high concentration of metals/plastics/whatever in the dumps will inevitably lead to large-scale profitable dumpster-diving in the US.
FCC regulations are actually notably more lax than the comparable CE regs for consumer electronics. A lot of this may be due to the high density of population in europe/japan as compared to the US. That is, when you have a more product-dense environment, you have to set the bar higher for emissions. IAAEEICPD. (I am an electrical engineer in consumer product design)
The root cause of Japan's superior gadgetology is Japanese culture, and Japanese tech infrastructure:
1: They buy the super-cool gadgets and phones in large numbers, while Americans are relative Luddites. High literacy, education, and high pop. density amplify the fad-effect.
2: Very roughly, Japan has ~1/3 the total US population, in about the same space as california. For radio-based services, like cell/SMS, you can reach many times more people with the same equipment.
To wit: We have corridors of cell coverage along our interstates in many places, but also have ten-thousand-square-mile swaths in the mountains and deserts where there are no towers and no people at all.
In Japan, on the other hand, you would be hard-pressed to throw a dart into a map and land on a square mile containing less than 100 people. Even greater concentrations of population in cities exaggerates the effect.
Japan's population density was 327 people per square kilometer in 1990. The US is more like 30 people per square kilometer --
1) Take a business plan built around distributing a wireless service, or having a physical retail presence within N miles of M people 2) Increase population density 10-fold 3) ??? 4) Profit!!!
>> tucked in an innocent-looking file called >>'Lycos screensaver to fight spam.zip.'
In other news, a man in Reseda, CA, was shocked to discover that he'd been fleeced by a fraudulent business who's innocent-looking byline was: "US Grreen CarrRd L0ttery 2005"
Seriously -- doesn't this seem like further proof that the people writing these lame-ass virii are really only interested in duping the dumbest of the dumb? I mean, they could've given it the exact same name as the real executable and caught some *vaguely* savvy people... Why not?
My company uses engineering contractors all the time. Their typical hourly rates are anywhere from 2.5 to 5 times the general employee salaries, ballpark $60 to $150. This is typical in the design biz. If you are hot sh!t, you can ask for $150. It all depends on who the money's coming from.
We also sometimes hire contractors full time after working with them -- contracting is both a useful tool for professionals who want greater control of their free time AND a useful networking/recruiting tool for the contractors themselves -- we can bring someone in for a project, and if we like them a lot, try to bring them on board permanently.
Even when you pull 70-80 bucks an hour, the hustle required to keep contract work lined up without long dry spells is a lot of stress, and I know many guys who've switched back and forth several times, doing contracting or fulltiming until they got sick of the associated hassles of either.
But no question, if you're going to take a contract position and you're a real, qualified professional engineer/coder of dignity, you should look for your compensation to be at least 1.5-2x your salaried hourly wage, just to break even. It may seem like you're getting a sweet deal making just a bit more than your old hourly, but the expected value of a contractors salary is significantly lower than a fulltime worker, given that when the work is done, you're gone. Making up for a 401k and such takes a big increase in hourly rate.
Remember, the company is gaining a lot by the flexibility of hiring you short term -- charge accordingly.
No, really: No conspiracy here!
on
230mph Electric Car
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
>Would you feel safe driving 80MPH down the freeway, >in a car that only weighs 400 pounds?
Yes, actually, I would. It's called a "motorcycle", and it's two or three times as fuel-efficent as a car. Well, actually, maybe "safe" isn't quite the right word. Would you settle for "well, I'm not dead *yet*?";)
>Suspicious is fine, but there is plenty of >evidence to support that fact. Just look at the >story of GM pulling their EV1 from the market, >despite great demand, or the similar story behind > every other major manufacturer's story.
Disclaimer: I'm 100% for the adoption full-electrics for daily transport. It makes monetary and statistical sense to me, at least in urban areas. Of course, I'm also for CarShare programs and mass transit, which I think are considerably more effective at reducing unnecessary driving, but that's a bit more challenging to Americans (I am one).
Anyway: I worked at a company that helped design the EV1 (several years prior), and when I started there we had one as a company car. I hear the EV1 held up quite frequently as the example of all that is great and wonderful and yet being smashed down by the iron fist of GM, and I am highly skeptical. Why is this?
Prepare yourselves...
The EV1 was a poorly built, miserably designed junker of an electric car. I've seen nice EVs, which I would gladly own, like the little Honda and Th!nk cars, but the EV1 plain sucked. Build quality was below unfinished prototype, all the buttons and dash controls were mounted terribly and felt worse, it had the *worst* windshield in the history of automotive design (made me feel like I was wearing coke-bottle glasses [I'm 20/20]), and it was in the shop at least once a month to repair all the random stuff that kept breaking. The cabin was uncomfortable, the visibility poor, and the stereo sucked.
Driving it was similarly underwhelming. The narrow rear axle gave a very loose, sliding, tail-happy turn, but the drive was in the front wheels, preventing the driver from *utilizing* said tail motion for anything save sideswiping bushes. Acceleration was brisk, but kneecapped by the front wheel drive and poor tires -- you could probably keep up in a stock 4-cylinder camry.
Now, I understand that environmental soundness is not about performance. I am all for small, fuel-efficient cars. However, I also think that a small, fuel-efficient car CAN be fun to drive -- just as racing 50cc GP bikes takes incredible skill to maintain speed around a track, driving a small, efficient car to the limits is *way* more entertaining for me than having to rein in a 300hp monster.
To this end, the EV1 was a dismal failure. Sure, everyone who had one wanted to keep it, because it was neat and there *weren't any other options* for an electric. To some people it was worthwhile as a novelty, or simply as an environmental statement, both valid concerns. However, I personally watched the amount of time/money that went into keeping the thing running, and I am *quite* willing to believe that GM would have had a financial fiasco on its hands had it continued to build/sell them.
Not to bag on EVs in general -- they're great and becoming more viable all the time. But the EV1 is a poor choice of idols for the EV movement. Take a look at Th!nk if you want to see a cool little EV that's really been oppressed by The Man.
Have you *flown an airplane* recently, rather than riding in one?
This impression of the air traffic control system is incredibly oversimplified, and mostly backwards. The actual implementation involves a large number of parallel tracks at various altitude levels while air traffic control, which is run by very trained people in tandem with some very good computers, routes planes on these "roads". In fact, the margin of safety required in three dimensions is HIGHER than in two -- the likelihood of any two objects in random trajectories in 3-space colliding is tiny by comparison to the same situation in 2-space. If you've ever flown from LA to SF, you might notice the parallel sets of contrails where the last few planes have gone just a few hours previous. It's neat to see.
Anyway: The airway system is unbelievably simple relative to the incredible variety of complicated situations on streets. There is only one kind of sky, and it's full of air. Excepting thunderstorms, you can drive a big jet straight through pretty much any part of the sky, and all the references needed to guide it can be computed internally (like pitch/roll/yaw) or from simple external means (like GPS). A vehicle must contend with terrain, markings and the lack thereof, pedestrians, ever-changing road geometries and new construction, and myriad other complications.
Also -- auto-pilot is not a complete solution. Yes, we've gotten good enough at control systems to keep a very complicated plane flying straight and level, and avionics assist in every aspect of commercial airline flight (can't steer a jet without hydraulics anyhow), but dynamic situational analysis is still the province of the mind rather than the computer.
All of this ignores the difference in volume, too. There are thousands of planes in the air most of the time, virtually all of which have fairly well-planned routes and destinations. There are tens of millions of cars, whose destinations often change, and which don't plan their schedules weeks or months in advance.
Computerized driving (esp. in a world where people are still allowed to drive, too) is a MUCH harder problem than air traffic control.
It took me until college to realize I had the disposable income to buy lots of cool yoyos -- I just wish they'd been making cheap, good ball-bearing ones when I was a kid...
Seriously! I was expecting an article on the similarities between software development and the painstaking process of crafting a fine, smokey Black Forest or a deliciously spicy-hot Coppa -- or at least something about ham in re spam.
is selling multiple colors of a product a nickable "Feature"? I think the last guy to consider color irrelevant in product marketing was *Henry Ford*...
Gee, maybe they should apply for a business patent.
Claimed: A device or product, available in multiple colors, such that the customer might buy a white one, or possibly (!) a *blue* or *pink* one!
Heh, you've got me all wrong, and I agree with you heartily. I don't regret voting for Kerry, and of course I know that a stronger showing by Kerry is better political ammunition for the long run.
But since when were these forums for *anything but* shooting ones mouth off out of context?
I was merely intending to highlight the absurdity of calling a vote for Kerry a "waste" *in comparison to a vote for Nader*. Parent implied that since Kerry didn't win, one would have been correct to vote for Nader to express the more radical viewpoint more effectively. I disagree, since if you don't win, it's all a bigger waste -- your guy isn't making the decisions. While the strength of the Democratic showing in the election will help keep the court nominees reasonable, that's a second-order effect in my eyes. When I say "a waste" I mean that I fear for the Miranda decision and possibly Roe v. Wade. My whole *point* is that you vote for the acceptable candidate who has the best chance of winning, because it's a single-vote game.
I'm as glad as anyone that it was as close as it was (which is not very), but I take issue with your characterization of a mandate -- a mandate is about how many people *support* you, not about how fragmented the opposition is. Having a chaotic pool of opponents just means you're likely to win, not that you're necessarily a huge favorite of the majority.
In the specific case of Nader I don't for one second buy that a normally Bush-supporting person would vote for Nader. I don't think their worldviews have any meaningful intersection, and I think it's disingenuous of Nader to imply otherwise. He can do as he pleases, of course.
"Had Kerry won, would be be talking about terrified liberals?"
Of course we would, and we'd be right. The liberals are just afraid of different things. You've highlighted the point beautifully: we're now in such a state in the world that fear is the greatest motivator in selecting a leader.
Ranked-choice voting gives you the option to vote both your conscience and your fears! How liberating!;P
Me, I'm afraid of people who are afraid of too many things. In my imperfect world, kids don't get tracked by RFID, they can bring markers and Leatherman tools to school, and they get taught how to take care of themselves rather than counting on the government or religious leaders to do it for them. I don't see either major party representing that. Sigh.
Portable wireless speakers are retarded. I don't need to spend 10 bucks on batteries every few days, and I don't need my shitty portable speakers to have 6 feet of stereo separation between them.
What, do people think that putting two 5-dollar cost-of-goods speakers 6 feet apart for "big stereo image" makes them sound like anything other than the crap they're made of? Good speakers are large, heavy, and permanently installed with wires hidden.
There IS, however, a use for this stuff. If I need it wireless, it's because I need to move around. If I need to move around, it's pretty safe to say I will piss of *everyone* if my music moves around with me (see: bumps in the trunk) A wireless set of high-quality in-ear-canal headphones (Etymotics make some, Sony makes some, Apple too now) could be *great*.
They have very little driver travel, so the power consumption is small, and properly designed you could have a combination headset/headphone setup with passable-not-great quality. It would kick ass to be able to wear headphones under my hat and not have those pesky wires.
Anyone else use Etymotics and have the painful experience of snagging a wire on a doorknob? Accidentally yanking things out of the ear canal ain't fun.
You're almost certainly right that the third party share is unusually low, but I don't think low third party turnouts are bad in our current predicament:
Until we have ranked-choice voting, there's zero realistic chance of a third party doing *anything but* spoiling, and the low percentages are a good indicator of people's recognizance of that sad fact. Bush was really, really bad, and even a centrist would (I thought) be an obviously massive improvement. Kerry had a realistic *chance* to help that. Anyway, that's irrelevant:
I want ranked choice as much as anyone and more than most, and I'd love to see the Green/Libertarian platforms (which have a surprising amount of *real* fiscal conservatism in'em) have their day -- but they will only do so in that context. In our current two party setup, you vote for the closest-to-center candidate who is still on your side, because the most people will see him as acceptable.
Ranked choice voting eliminates the necessity of that compromise, because acceptability is implicit in your rankings. It's a beautiful concept, and has been implemented here in San Francisco quite successfully in this very election.
I don't for a second think that a thoroughly chaotic 30-party system like turns up in young democracies is in any way better than our two. In that situation, the complexities of the deals parties have to cut in order to get votes are too much for even a diligent and informed voter to parse. Volatility in those systems is *absurd*. Maximizing public utility is all about gathering information on acceptability -- which RCV accomplishes.
If you want to be able to vote for the Green/Lib candidate and *really* help the world, start raising hell for ranked choice.
>> would a vate for Nader or Badnarik really have been wasted given that Kerry did not win anyway?
Is this a troll?
Yes. Yes, of *course* they would have been wasted. The presidential election is a winner-take-all game. If you don't win, your vote was wasted, no matter WHO it was for: Kerry, Nader or Leonard Peltier.
Good for you if voting for a fringe candidate makes you *feel* better, but here's a news flash:
BUSH WON. YOUR VOTE DIDN'T IMPACT ANYTHING AND NEITHER DID MINE. If you seriously think that in moving to the center the Democrats failed to excite enough radical leftists to vote, I'd point you to the turnouts, the popular vote percentages, and the 20+ percent of Americans who classify themselves as Evangelicals. Anyone, left or right, who's so stupid as to view an election as a moral rather than game-theoretic undertaking deserves exactly what they get. And in this case, it goes for the winners, too. Bush's stated policy is basically "Morality and faith are more important than getting it right." He will be proven horribly wrong after we hit peak oil.
The country has been taken over by a MAJORITY of terrified conservatives, not a fringe group, and they're going to ride the peak-oil bomb straight to the bottom.
Wait, you mean they don't use 5.25" floppies anymore? Data will never be the same! Nooooooooooooooooooooooo!!
Seriously, who comes up with these headlines?
MP3 may lose favor over time for any number of perfectly good reasons, but this is essentially *nothing* like the 8-track.
MP3 is capable of being played on pretty much any PC, and it's big enough that any music player which eschews it will immediately flop -- it's an audio codec, NOT a physical media standard. As such, it's very easy for people to continue to play MP3s on their computers indefinitely, whether or not the have a particular hardware configuration.
Slashdot Mirror
This blows my mind continually. I hate the Apple marketing, I hate the stupid white headphones, and I hate the iTunes music store.
However, as an EE, I think the iPod is a god-damn miracle. It's incredibly well-designed, tightly engineered, and not really much more expensive than any of its competitors these days. It is, simply put, a triumph of user-centered design, at least in regards to the interface.
Is it the only interface out there? No.
Is it the only great interface that's possible? No!
Is it the only great interface out there? Yes.
The only thing that's even come close, in my book, was the Archos running Rockbox -- generally speaking, when manufacturers fuck up the UI, they do it in the firmware or with those CRAP joystick input devices. Since basically no one has clued in to the fact that open firmware for an otherwise impossible-to-copy device poses no threat to sales, firmware on otherwise well-designed devices (iRiver, etc) languishes in shittiness. When someone develops a good open firmware standard for portable audio devices, we'll really be getting somewhere.
It's not even that Apple has the best hardware engineers or the best platform -- the iPod uses the PortalPlayer architecture, and so have a number of other companies' entries. They've just all sucked.
IAAPDESE(I Am A Product Design Embedded Systems Engineer), and I work for a company that does MP3 players, among other things. We worked on one of the most recent entrants in 5GB HDD space.
I watched this product be crippled by the client's overwhelming urges to satisfy their industrial design (read: aesthetics) people, who knew precisely dick about what makes a really good interface. Unsurprisingly, it has bombed in the market despite good media coverage, and has been discontinued indefinitely.
Apple, on the other hand, generally pays attention to that stuff. It's not that they're the only ones who can. It's that they're the only ones who do -- everyone else is clawing at the market with money-losing bullshit products instead of regrouping, taking a year off, and designing a *really* well-though-out device.
Personally, I use an iRiver iHP140 -- I need record capability -- but I lust after the new one with the non-joystick controls...
I, for one, welcome our new stressed-out Si-based overlords.
Actually, most industrialized second/third-world countries (for lack of a better term -- think South America, China, India) ALREADY do this :)
There are thousands of people who comb through the dumps of India and southeast Asia for metals and other materials that they can get a small bounty on from re-melters. It's a surprisingly big business in those places. Kind of like the Indian ship-dismantlement yards.
Just as oil scarcity will lead to more and more high-tech, low-yield extraction methods, a high concentration of metals/plastics/whatever in the dumps will inevitably lead to large-scale profitable dumpster-diving in the US.
Mine the landfills!
This is tangential, but:
FCC regulations are actually notably more lax than the comparable CE regs for consumer electronics. A lot of this may be due to the high density of population in europe/japan as compared to the US. That is, when you have a more product-dense environment, you have to set the bar higher for emissions. IAAEEICPD. (I am an electrical engineer in consumer product design)
The root cause of Japan's superior gadgetology is Japanese culture, and Japanese tech infrastructure:
1: They buy the super-cool gadgets and phones in large numbers, while Americans are relative Luddites. High literacy, education, and high pop. density amplify the fad-effect.
2: Very roughly, Japan has ~1/3 the total US population, in about the same space as california. For radio-based services, like cell/SMS, you can reach many times more people with the same equipment.
To wit: We have corridors of cell coverage along our interstates in many places, but also have ten-thousand-square-mile swaths in the mountains and deserts where there are no towers and no people at all.
In Japan, on the other hand, you would be hard-pressed to throw a dart into a map and land on a square mile containing less than 100 people. Even greater concentrations of population in cities exaggerates the effect.
Japan's population density was 327 people per square kilometer in 1990. The US is more like 30 people per square kilometer --
1) Take a business plan built around distributing a wireless service, or having a physical retail presence within N miles of M people
2) Increase population density 10-fold
3) ???
4) Profit!!!
first post?
no way.
China cracks me up.
>> tucked in an innocent-looking file called
>>'Lycos screensaver to fight spam.zip.'
In other news, a man in Reseda, CA, was shocked to discover that he'd been fleeced by a fraudulent business who's innocent-looking byline was:
"US Grreen CarrRd L0ttery 2005"
Seriously -- doesn't this seem like further proof that the people writing these lame-ass virii are really only interested in duping the dumbest of the dumb? I mean, they could've given it the exact same name as the real executable and caught some *vaguely* savvy people... Why not?
I have to ask:
When did 900 words become a "Long Article"?
They weren't lying about the impressive whiskers, though...
My company uses engineering contractors all the time. Their typical hourly rates are anywhere from 2.5 to 5 times the general employee salaries, ballpark $60 to $150. This is typical in the design biz. If you are hot sh!t, you can ask for $150. It all depends on who the money's coming from.
We also sometimes hire contractors full time after working with them -- contracting is both a useful tool for professionals who want greater control of their free time AND a useful networking/recruiting tool for the contractors themselves -- we can bring someone in for a project, and if we like them a lot, try to bring them on board permanently.
Even when you pull 70-80 bucks an hour, the hustle required to keep contract work lined up without long dry spells is a lot of stress, and I know many guys who've switched back and forth several times, doing contracting or fulltiming until they got sick of the associated hassles of either.
But no question, if you're going to take a contract position and you're a real, qualified professional engineer/coder of dignity, you should look for your compensation to be at least 1.5-2x your salaried hourly wage, just to break even. It may seem like you're getting a sweet deal making just a bit more than your old hourly, but the expected value of a contractors salary is significantly lower than a fulltime worker, given that when the work is done, you're gone. Making up for a 401k and such takes a big increase in hourly rate.
Remember, the company is gaining a lot by the flexibility of hiring you short term -- charge accordingly.
>Would you feel safe driving 80MPH down the freeway, >in a car that only weighs 400 pounds?
;)
Yes, actually, I would. It's called a "motorcycle", and it's two or three times as fuel-efficent as a car. Well, actually, maybe "safe" isn't quite the right word. Would you settle for "well, I'm not dead *yet*?"
>Suspicious is fine, but there is plenty of
>evidence to support that fact. Just look at the
>story of GM pulling their EV1 from the market,
>despite great demand, or the similar story behind
> every other major manufacturer's story.
Disclaimer: I'm 100% for the adoption full-electrics for daily transport. It makes monetary and statistical sense to me, at least in urban areas. Of course, I'm also for CarShare programs and mass transit, which I think are considerably more effective at reducing unnecessary driving, but that's a bit more challenging to Americans (I am one).
Anyway:
I worked at a company that helped design the EV1 (several years prior), and when I started there we had one as a company car. I hear the EV1 held up quite frequently as the example of all that is great and wonderful and yet being smashed down by the iron fist of GM, and I am highly skeptical. Why is this?
Prepare yourselves...
The EV1 was a poorly built, miserably designed junker of an electric car. I've seen nice EVs, which I would gladly own, like the little Honda and Th!nk cars, but the EV1 plain sucked. Build quality was below unfinished prototype, all the buttons and dash controls were mounted terribly and felt worse, it had the *worst* windshield in the history of automotive design (made me feel like I was wearing coke-bottle glasses [I'm 20/20]), and it was in the shop at least once a month to repair all the random stuff that kept breaking. The cabin was uncomfortable, the visibility poor, and the stereo sucked.
Driving it was similarly underwhelming. The narrow rear axle gave a very loose, sliding, tail-happy turn, but the drive was in the front wheels, preventing the driver from *utilizing* said tail motion for anything save sideswiping bushes. Acceleration was brisk, but kneecapped by the front wheel drive and poor tires -- you could probably keep up in a stock 4-cylinder camry.
Now, I understand that environmental soundness is not about performance. I am all for small, fuel-efficient cars. However, I also think that a small, fuel-efficient car CAN be fun to drive -- just as racing 50cc GP bikes takes incredible skill to maintain speed around a track, driving a small, efficient car to the limits is *way* more entertaining for me than having to rein in a 300hp monster.
To this end, the EV1 was a dismal failure. Sure, everyone who had one wanted to keep it, because it was neat and there *weren't any other options* for an electric. To some people it was worthwhile as a novelty, or simply as an environmental statement, both valid concerns. However, I personally watched the amount of time/money that went into keeping the thing running, and I am *quite* willing to believe that GM would have had a financial fiasco on its hands had it continued to build/sell them.
Not to bag on EVs in general -- they're great and becoming more viable all the time. But the EV1 is a poor choice of idols for the EV movement. Take a look at Th!nk if you want to see a cool little EV that's really been oppressed by The Man.
whoops. in above:
In fact, the margin of safety required in three dimensions is HIGHER than in two
should read:
In fact, the chance of collision in three dimensions is orders LOWER than in two.
Have you *flown an airplane* recently, rather than riding in one?
This impression of the air traffic control system is incredibly oversimplified, and mostly backwards. The actual implementation involves a large number of parallel tracks at various altitude levels while air traffic control, which is run by very trained people in tandem with some very good computers, routes planes on these "roads". In fact, the margin of safety required in three dimensions is HIGHER than in two -- the likelihood of any two objects in random trajectories in 3-space colliding is tiny by comparison to the same situation in 2-space. If you've ever flown from LA to SF, you might notice the parallel sets of contrails where the last few planes have gone just a few hours previous. It's neat to see.
Anyway:
The airway system is unbelievably simple relative to the incredible variety of complicated situations on streets. There is only one kind of sky, and it's full of air. Excepting thunderstorms, you can drive a big jet straight through pretty much any part of the sky, and all the references needed to guide it can be computed internally (like pitch/roll/yaw) or from simple external means (like GPS). A vehicle must contend with terrain, markings and the lack thereof, pedestrians, ever-changing road geometries and new construction, and myriad other complications.
Also -- auto-pilot is not a complete solution. Yes, we've gotten good enough at control systems to keep a very complicated plane flying straight and level, and avionics assist in every aspect of commercial airline flight (can't steer a jet without hydraulics anyhow), but dynamic situational analysis is still the province of the mind rather than the computer.
All of this ignores the difference in volume, too. There are thousands of planes in the air most of the time, virtually all of which have fairly well-planned routes and destinations. There are tens of millions of cars, whose destinations often change, and which don't plan their schedules weeks or months in advance.
Computerized driving (esp. in a world where people are still allowed to drive, too) is a MUCH harder problem than air traffic control.
What, nobody here likes yoyos? or yoyo tricks anymore?
Get'em a 15 dollar ball-bearing yoyo and a copy of The Yonomicon and watch'em turn into amateur knot-theorists!
It took me until college to realize I had the disposable income to buy lots of cool yoyos -- I just wish they'd been making cheap, good ball-bearing ones when I was a kid...
Seriously! I was expecting an article on the similarities between software development and the painstaking process of crafting a fine, smokey Black Forest or a deliciously spicy-hot Coppa -- or at least something about ham in re spam.
Take that, semantic web!
is selling multiple colors of a product a nickable "Feature"? I think the last guy to consider color irrelevant in product marketing was *Henry Ford*...
;)
Gee, maybe they should apply for a business patent.
Claimed: A device or product, available in multiple colors, such that the customer might buy a white one, or possibly (!) a *blue* or *pink* one!
Sadly, someone's probably already filed it.
Heh, you've got me all wrong, and I agree with you heartily. I don't regret voting for Kerry, and of course I know that a stronger showing by Kerry is better political ammunition for the long run.
;P
But since when were these forums for *anything but* shooting ones mouth off out of context?
I was merely intending to highlight the absurdity of calling a vote for Kerry a "waste" *in comparison to a vote for Nader*. Parent implied that since Kerry didn't win, one would have been correct to vote for Nader to express the more radical viewpoint more effectively. I disagree, since if you don't win, it's all a bigger waste -- your guy isn't making the decisions. While the strength of the Democratic showing in the election will help keep the court nominees reasonable, that's a second-order effect in my eyes. When I say "a waste" I mean that I fear for the Miranda decision and possibly Roe v. Wade. My whole *point* is that you vote for the acceptable candidate who has the best chance of winning, because it's a single-vote game.
I'm as glad as anyone that it was as close as it was (which is not very), but I take issue with your characterization of a mandate -- a mandate is about how many people *support* you, not about how fragmented the opposition is. Having a chaotic pool of opponents just means you're likely to win, not that you're necessarily a huge favorite of the majority.
In the specific case of Nader I don't for one second buy that a normally Bush-supporting person would vote for Nader. I don't think their worldviews have any meaningful intersection, and I think it's disingenuous of Nader to imply otherwise. He can do as he pleases, of course.
"Had Kerry won, would be be talking about terrified liberals?"
Of course we would, and we'd be right. The liberals are just afraid of different things. You've highlighted the point beautifully: we're now in such a state in the world that fear is the greatest motivator in selecting a leader.
Ranked-choice voting gives you the option to vote both your conscience and your fears!
How liberating!
Me, I'm afraid of people who are afraid of too many things. In my imperfect world, kids don't get tracked by RFID, they can bring markers and Leatherman tools to school, and they get taught how to take care of themselves rather than counting on the government or religious leaders to do it for them. I don't see either major party representing that. Sigh.
Portable wireless speakers are retarded. I don't need to spend 10 bucks on batteries every few days, and I don't need my shitty portable speakers to have 6 feet of stereo separation between them.
What, do people think that putting two 5-dollar cost-of-goods speakers 6 feet apart for "big stereo image" makes them sound like anything other than the crap they're made of? Good speakers are large, heavy, and permanently installed with wires hidden.
There IS, however, a use for this stuff.
If I need it wireless, it's because I need to move around.
If I need to move around, it's pretty safe to say I will piss of *everyone* if my music moves around with me (see: bumps in the trunk)
A wireless set of high-quality in-ear-canal headphones (Etymotics make some, Sony makes some, Apple too now) could be *great*.
They have very little driver travel, so the power consumption is small, and properly designed you could have a combination headset/headphone setup with passable-not-great quality. It would kick ass to be able to wear headphones under my hat and not have those pesky wires.
Anyone else use Etymotics and have the painful experience of snagging a wire on a doorknob? Accidentally yanking things out of the ear canal ain't fun.
Pardon my formatting earlier.
You're almost certainly right that the third party share is unusually low, but I don't think low third party turnouts are bad in our current predicament:
Until we have ranked-choice voting, there's zero realistic chance of a third party doing *anything but* spoiling, and the low percentages are a good indicator of people's recognizance of that sad fact. Bush was really, really bad, and even a centrist would (I thought) be an obviously massive improvement. Kerry had a realistic *chance* to help that. Anyway, that's irrelevant:
I want ranked choice as much as anyone and more than most, and I'd love to see the Green/Libertarian platforms (which have a surprising amount of *real* fiscal conservatism in'em) have their day -- but they will only do so in that context. In our current two party setup, you vote for the closest-to-center candidate who is still on your side, because the most people will see him as acceptable.
Ranked choice voting eliminates the necessity of that compromise, because acceptability is implicit in your rankings. It's a beautiful concept, and has been implemented here in San Francisco quite successfully in this very election.
I don't for a second think that a thoroughly chaotic 30-party system like turns up in young democracies is in any way better than our two. In that situation, the complexities of the deals parties have to cut in order to get votes are too much for even a diligent and informed voter to parse. Volatility in those systems is *absurd*.
Maximizing public utility is all about gathering information on acceptability -- which RCV accomplishes.
If you want to be able to vote for the Green/Lib candidate and *really* help the world, start raising hell for ranked choice.
>> would a vate for Nader or Badnarik really have been wasted given that Kerry did not win anyway? Is this a troll? Yes. Yes, of *course* they would have been wasted. The presidential election is a winner-take-all game. If you don't win, your vote was wasted, no matter WHO it was for: Kerry, Nader or Leonard Peltier. Good for you if voting for a fringe candidate makes you *feel* better, but here's a news flash: BUSH WON. YOUR VOTE DIDN'T IMPACT ANYTHING AND NEITHER DID MINE. If you seriously think that in moving to the center the Democrats failed to excite enough radical leftists to vote, I'd point you to the turnouts, the popular vote percentages, and the 20+ percent of Americans who classify themselves as Evangelicals. Anyone, left or right, who's so stupid as to view an election as a moral rather than game-theoretic undertaking deserves exactly what they get. And in this case, it goes for the winners, too. Bush's stated policy is basically "Morality and faith are more important than getting it right." He will be proven horribly wrong after we hit peak oil. The country has been taken over by a MAJORITY of terrified conservatives, not a fringe group, and they're going to ride the peak-oil bomb straight to the bottom.
Wait, you mean they don't use 5.25" floppies anymore? Data will never be the same! Nooooooooooooooooooooooo!! Seriously, who comes up with these headlines? MP3 may lose favor over time for any number of perfectly good reasons, but this is essentially *nothing* like the 8-track. MP3 is capable of being played on pretty much any PC, and it's big enough that any music player which eschews it will immediately flop -- it's an audio codec, NOT a physical media standard. As such, it's very easy for people to continue to play MP3s on their computers indefinitely, whether or not the have a particular hardware configuration.