Oh God the idiotic answer of "Nobody needs an SUV except XYZ".
How the hell did this get modded "insightful"?
It contradicts itself on every other line, eg. "cars are bad because some cars don't have roof racks!". "Cars are bad because not all cars have big engines!".
I don't really expect much more from SUV drivers though. The one thing they all have in common is that they need an SUV. The rest is just a list of weak justifications. I suspect the real reason behind it is they believe that only poor people drive cars.
Oh God the idiotic answer of "Nobody needs an SUV except XYZ".
- Modern cars are often rather small, making them worthless for big trips with young children (try to fit two decent strollers in the trunk of something that isn't a Crown Vic, I dare you).
"Often"? But not always....
- The towing capacity of the average modern car is about 1000 lbs (many actually explicitly state NO towing WHATSOEVER). This means that families owning a house, where every couple of months you want to haul a large item home will need to oftentimes rent another vehicle for that purpose. Why not just buy a more versatile vehicle to start with?
So...instead of renting every couple of months, or...glub forbid...getting it delivered, we're supposed to haul around an extra ton of metal on the daily commute?
- Modern cars have small engines. This is great around the town, but on the highway, mileage suffers horribly. SUVs get much better highway mileage (not better than cars, but not all that far away) because they often put an appropriately sized engine in them.
a) Not all cars have small engines. b) Fuel consumption on the highway is all about aerodynamics. No matter how you dice it, bigger is worse - it has to shove more air out of the way.
- Some modern cars (not all) do not support roof racks. So you can't even use it to bring a bicycle with you (since you can't tow with it, either) on a small fun trip.
So...get one that does?
- If you like to do your own repair work, modern cars are hell on earth due to their cramped engine compartments, unibody construction, and independent suspension (of course, most SUVs have that nowadays too, but not *all* are terrible to work on the way it generally is with cars).
Basic maintenance (oil, plugs, filters) is as easy on a car as it is on an SUV. I don't know exactly you think you need to do to a modern engine but there's very little that can be improved by taking it apart these days.
- They quit making station wagons (give or take) so those customers bought SUVs (which are now being downsized to CUVs, which I guess is the modern day station wagon).
There's big cars. There's even station-wagon shaped cars. In tests, most of them hold more than SUVs.
- It sucks ass getting a flat in a car on a long trip, since most modern cars have a toy tire, or worse, tire goop and an inflator ("clown shoes" as I like to call it). Many SUVs offer a full size spare--extremely handy!
What if you get two flats? Have you thought about that...!?
- Stop using gasoline, use LPG or CNG and all of a sudden driving a V8 doesn't matter anymore (for your pocketbook or the environment). Once you go V8 with propane, you will not go back--the savings over a 4-banger gasoline car along with the actual enjoyment of driving will say to you "What have I been missing?!?!"
YMMV but I don't enjoy driving an SUV anywhere near as much as driving my MR2. There's no way I'd want to drive an SUV on the daily commute.
Most mid-range cars are better to drive than SUVs, too.
I doubt a 3D printer can achieve the economies of scale of traditional molding of plastic parts. There's also going to be a lot of parts which simply cannot be printed, eg. motors, heating elements, etc. You also have to factor in the construction times. Not everybody lives in a basement and has ten hours a day free for hacking about (I wish I did!)
In short, commercial producers will always have an edge over home made.
Lots of stuff is delicate and/or weird shaped. When you need to move house (or whatever) you need something to put it in for safe transportation. If you've got space for 'em, you keep the original boxes.
People keep the packaging for returns and because selling your mint condition iDevice with mint condition packaging means you get higher resell value on eBay.
Ah, the joys of owning an iDevice. You have to constantly plan ahead financially for when the next version comes out.
Europe already has expensive gas due to taxes and the roads aren't filled with electric cars. It'll still take some time.
OTOH we have roads filled with diesel cars. Diesel cars are usually more expensive to buy than gas cars. This shows that people *are* capable of looking beyond the initial purchase price.
Perhaps its time that we realize that intellectual property is not in the best interests of society
Intellectual property is in the interests of society, it stops big companies from using people's music on top-selling DVDs all around the world.
The problem with intellectual property is when individuals are being fined millions of dollars for sharing half a dozen songs, when the internet is being wrecked in the name of preventing piracy even though anybody with half a brain knows it can't be stopped, when consumers are being screwed over by DRM, when young artists are being ripped off by experienced con-men in suits, etc.
ie. There's no sense of proportion in the laws, they're going way too far in the direction of the corporations instead of towards the consumers.
I'll have to wait until I see it in person, but native 48fps will have to be a whole other world better than what the 120hz tv's software intrapolation does to 24fps film, cause that's distracting as all hell.
The main difference will be that they can pan sideways smoothly. Apart from that I bet you'll have to look very closely to see a difference.
I think people are too often thinking Raspberry Pi as a mini-sized desktop computer,
To all those people:
It's got 256Mb RAM. I don't know how lean-and-mean their OS is but I doubt it can open more than a couple of windows before you run out. I'm not even sure Firefox could open a couple of pages without using it up.
When you run out of RAM you're swapping to an SD card. Think about that for a moment...
If you just want some I/O lines and simple development, get an Arduino.
Comparing the two by price is a bit disingenuous. You can roll-your-own Arduino for about $3 when you want to make a permanent device. That's ten Arduinos for every Pi.
if I want to go into some manner of production and make alot...I can incorperate the atmega directly into my design, and go from a $30 part "development platform" to a $3 part with a few bits of support (crystal, voltage regulator...)
You don't really need either of those. ATmega chips have an internal 16Mhz clock and aren't very fussy about voltage. The only reason you'd need a regulator is if the things you connect to it need a regulated supply.
But yeah, a $3 chip and a piece of perf board are all you need for the production version of your Arduino project. You can even get the chips with less legs and make things really tiny, eg eight pin Arduino.
Yep....and on the subject of myths, the 'insect-size-drone' thing is pure psych-ops, ie. it doesn't exist. They've been denying the existence of insect drones since the 1970s.
PS: The thing in the insect article's photo is CGI created for a competition.
There's a reason pilots are allowed to fly solo after only a few hours training but car drivers need many more (25 hours minimum where I live and even then you have to display an 'L' on your car for the first year to warn other drivers).
Slashdot Mirror
Better to do small-scale experiments now than to try large ones when the emergency is here.
Because let's face it, CO2 reduction ain't gonna happen. Talk to the people: Every single one of them has an excuse for not reducing their CO2 output.
Politicians don't care much because it doesn't gain votes and by the time the shit hits the fan they'll be retired in a cozy mansion on a mountain.
Like it or not, all that's left is geoengineering.
Oh God the idiotic answer of "Nobody needs an SUV except XYZ".
How the hell did this get modded "insightful"?
It contradicts itself on every other line, eg. "cars are bad because some cars don't have roof racks!". "Cars are bad because not all cars have big engines!".
I don't really expect much more from SUV drivers though. The one thing they all have in common is that they need an SUV. The rest is just a list of weak justifications. I suspect the real reason behind it is they believe that only poor people drive cars.
Oh God the idiotic answer of "Nobody needs an SUV except XYZ".
- Modern cars are often rather small, making them worthless for big trips with young children (try to fit two decent strollers in the trunk of something that isn't a Crown Vic, I dare you).
"Often"? But not always....
- The towing capacity of the average modern car is about 1000 lbs (many actually explicitly state NO towing WHATSOEVER). This means that families owning a house, where every couple of months you want to haul a large item home will need to oftentimes rent another vehicle for that purpose. Why not just buy a more versatile vehicle to start with?
So...instead of renting every couple of months, or...glub forbid...getting it delivered, we're supposed to haul around an extra ton of metal on the daily commute?
- Modern cars have small engines. This is great around the town, but on the highway, mileage suffers horribly. SUVs get much better highway mileage (not better than cars, but not all that far away) because they often put an appropriately sized engine in them.
a) Not all cars have small engines.
b) Fuel consumption on the highway is all about aerodynamics. No matter how you dice it, bigger is worse - it has to shove more air out of the way.
- Some modern cars (not all) do not support roof racks. So you can't even use it to bring a bicycle with you (since you can't tow with it, either) on a small fun trip.
So...get one that does?
- If you like to do your own repair work, modern cars are hell on earth due to their cramped engine compartments, unibody construction, and independent suspension (of course, most SUVs have that nowadays too, but not *all* are terrible to work on the way it generally is with cars).
Basic maintenance (oil, plugs, filters) is as easy on a car as it is on an SUV. I don't know exactly you think you need to do to a modern engine but there's very little that can be improved by taking it apart these days.
- They quit making station wagons (give or take) so those customers bought SUVs (which are now being downsized to CUVs, which I guess is the modern day station wagon).
There's big cars. There's even station-wagon shaped cars. In tests, most of them hold more than SUVs.
- It sucks ass getting a flat in a car on a long trip, since most modern cars have a toy tire, or worse, tire goop and an inflator ("clown shoes" as I like to call it). Many SUVs offer a full size spare--extremely handy!
What if you get two flats? Have you thought about that...!?
- Stop using gasoline, use LPG or CNG and all of a sudden driving a V8 doesn't matter anymore (for your pocketbook or the environment). Once you go V8 with propane, you will not go back--the savings over a 4-banger gasoline car along with the actual enjoyment of driving will say to you "What have I been missing?!?!"
YMMV but I don't enjoy driving an SUV anywhere near as much as driving my MR2. There's no way I'd want to drive an SUV on the daily commute.
Most mid-range cars are better to drive than SUVs, too.
I doubt a 3D printer can achieve the economies of scale of traditional molding of plastic parts. There's also going to be a lot of parts which simply cannot be printed, eg. motors, heating elements, etc. You also have to factor in the construction times. Not everybody lives in a basement and has ten hours a day free for hacking about (I wish I did!)
In short, commercial producers will always have an edge over home made.
Roy packaging has to be designed so that children can't get the stuff out of the boxes in the stores.
If you've ever seen a child in a roy store you'll understand why the packaging needs to kevlar/half inch plexiglass.
Really? That ain't normal, dude.
Lots of stuff is delicate and/or weird shaped. When you need to move house (or whatever) you need something to put it in for safe transportation. If you've got space for 'em, you keep the original boxes.
People keep the packaging for returns and because selling your mint condition iDevice with mint condition packaging means you get higher resell value on eBay.
Ah, the joys of owning an iDevice. You have to constantly plan ahead financially for when the next version comes out.
Any increase in performance without reducing size is a step forwards.
If speed increases, for example, we'd go from 4GHz to 120GHz
Not without making the electrical pathways an awful lot shorter...
Yeah, because brain size alone is directly equivalent to intelligence. I would venture that the authors of this study have rather small brains.
It's pretty well correlated if you compare the ratio of body:brain.
Which they're doing. It even says so in the summary.
But like the climategate thing, people aren't interested in hearing that the accusers were wrong in the end.
They're interested when it's funny and important people are being embarrassed.
Yay! Let's hope they can put those whining, money grubbing telecom companies out of business.
Europe already has expensive gas due to taxes and the roads aren't filled with electric cars. It'll still take some time.
OTOH we have roads filled with diesel cars. Diesel cars are usually more expensive to buy than gas cars. This shows that people *are* capable of looking beyond the initial purchase price.
Perhaps its time that we realize that intellectual property is not in the best interests of society
Intellectual property is in the interests of society, it stops big companies from using people's music on top-selling DVDs all around the world.
The problem with intellectual property is when individuals are being fined millions of dollars for sharing half a dozen songs, when the internet is being wrecked in the name of preventing piracy even though anybody with half a brain knows it can't be stopped, when consumers are being screwed over by DRM, when young artists are being ripped off by experienced con-men in suits, etc.
ie. There's no sense of proportion in the laws, they're going way too far in the direction of the corporations instead of towards the consumers.
Yep, the Arduino is just a breakout board with a built-in serial chip to let you access it from your PC (with "avrdude" - learn about that).
Fun fact: The serial chip is often another ATmega chip which has been programmed as a USB to serial device. Essentially you have two Arduinos on there
We're talking about desktop replacement.
OK, you've got one. How bad is it when you open something that starts swapping? Everything I've read says the performance suddenly drops off a cliff.
Yes, but there wasn't much in those windows. These days we expect more.
I'll have to wait until I see it in person, but native 48fps will have to be a whole other world better than what the 120hz tv's software intrapolation does to 24fps film, cause that's distracting as all hell.
The main difference will be that they can pan sideways smoothly. Apart from that I bet you'll have to look very closely to see a difference.
Perhaps 48 fps pushes the animation into an uncanny valley.
Nah. An increase in frame rate isn't going to change the film's subject matter (which is what the uncanny valley is about).
3D is a *much* bigger change than this is and nobody brought up uncanny valleys for 3D.
I think people are too often thinking Raspberry Pi as a mini-sized desktop computer,
To all those people:
It's got 256Mb RAM. I don't know how lean-and-mean their OS is but I doubt it can open more than a couple of windows before you run out. I'm not even sure Firefox could open a couple of pages without using it up.
When you run out of RAM you're swapping to an SD card. Think about that for a moment...
If you need video output or a fast CPU, get a Pi.
If you just want some I/O lines and simple development, get an Arduino.
Comparing the two by price is a bit disingenuous. You can roll-your-own Arduino for about $3 when you want to make a permanent device. That's ten Arduinos for every Pi.
if I want to go into some manner of production and make alot...I can incorperate the atmega directly into my design, and go from a $30 part "development platform" to a $3 part with a few bits of support (crystal, voltage regulator...)
You don't really need either of those. ATmega chips have an internal 16Mhz clock and aren't very fussy about voltage. The only reason you'd need a regulator is if the things you connect to it need a regulated supply.
But yeah, a $3 chip and a piece of perf board are all you need for the production version of your Arduino project. You can even get the chips with less legs and make things really tiny, eg eight pin Arduino.
"I'm much more daring with these boards because I have five of them (if I burned out my arduino mega that'd be a painful learning experience).
Be careful. The specs would indicate the Pi is *much* easier to trash than an Arduino.
The Mega is a bummer because it's only available in surface mount. The Arduino Uno chip can be replaced for $3 if you do bad things to it.
it's been a topic of research since 1900
Mythbusters don't do research, they only do experiments.
Obligatory XKCD
Yep. ...and on the subject of myths, the 'insect-size-drone' thing is pure psych-ops, ie. it doesn't exist. They've been denying the existence of insect drones since the 1970s.
PS: The thing in the insect article's photo is CGI created for a competition.
There's a reason pilots are allowed to fly solo after only a few hours training but car drivers need many more (25 hours minimum where I live and even then you have to display an 'L' on your car for the first year to warn other drivers).