Well, two things. First, editing the registry is a hell of a lot easier, because it's a unified database, not a collection of odd files each with their own syntax. Second, I can't remember the last time I HAD to edit the registry. I had to muck with config files all the time in linux.
God bless you. I'm just glad you're still on board. I'm that much closer to my goal of having legions of devoted stalkers posting various obscure nonsequitors after each and every one of my posts.
I have fantasies that one day I'll be sitting in a group meeting, and I'll say something mundane, like "We need to replace the diode bars in the pump lasers" and all of a sudden you'll open the door, walk in the room and say "In soviet russia subject of article main verb of article in present tense YOU!" and then turn and leave. I'm also hoping you're a hot woman, but it would be too much coincidence that the one person on/. who's a hot woman would also be the one person on/. who's decided to stalk me. But before recently I'd thought both has infinitessimal probability of existence, but you've shown me that sometimes in this crazy life, hope is worth something.
Maybe I should stalk YOU. I would, except you post a lot. It makes me jealous.
I still have LaTeX on my resume? Man, that is embarassing. I should fix that.
Now, on to more pressing matters: Caltech only succeeds because even smart people can be afraid of airplanes and bad weather. And Swarthmore College has more nobel winners per capita than Caltech. Your ball.
Apache was the first http server? I thought CERN's was. And I thought the first widely used server was something out of NCSA or Netscape. If not, then I guess I'm wrong.
Slope of progress? Like, do you measure that in utils, or what?
I measure it in the amount of time it takes me to configure a new printer. Isn't that how everybody does it?
NOW you're talking crack. What an inane statement first of all. Still beat linux in what way? Again, what are your criteria?
It will be self evident when you use longhorn and then use linux, the same way its self evident when you use OS X and then use linux. (Or in most people's case, not use linux.) Remember, you're part of a brainwashed minority and hang out with people who agree with you. Most people in the real world don't use linux, and don't want to. Every once in a while you run across somebody like me who's used linux and hangs out in places like/. and yet knows the truth about linux and I come across as strange, when it's really you who has lost touch. Try to remember a time when you didn't think it was logical to edit text files in buried/etc to fix things. I know, it's hard.
Anyway, if you want specifics, and I agree I omitted any, MS will have a rendered graphics engine before linux, and they will have a DB filesystem (or at least an overlay) before linux. And they will continue to have far better dev tools than linux has. And people in the real world will continue to use MS products while you guys huddle in your insular support groups and kid yourselves into thinking linux is JUST about to take over the world. Meanwhile, MS and Apple will be working hard full time (as opposed to in their 20% time) and risking real money (as opposed to free weekend time) to really change things in a timely way. And then we'll have a round of never to be finished open source projects parrotting MS and Apple's latest work like the ones we have now which aim implement their current work (like C# and rendered graphics, etc.)
If Apple has only done the trivial, you have to wonder why nobody in the OSS community could do anything remotely as good in five times the time. But, yeah, Apple is a bitch about giving back. Won't argue with that, except to ask you why they should.
And you're right about the Start Button. Totally lame idea. So why the hell can't OSS figure out something better than to copy such a lame idea? Why don't we have works of staggering genius coming out of OSS where we don't even recognize the desktop it's so new? There's no money to be lost. There's nothing holding back innovation. Why do we get clones of commercial products? Why don't we have crazy experimental GUIs where windows are done away with (they are overrated, anyway, and only arbitratily limit your view of what you're currently doing)? Why don't we have completely new blank-slate ideas coming out of OSS like shells which pipe XML instead of text? Because real innovation takes a lot of time and money. Would that it didn't, but it always has, and an idealistic quasi religious movement created by an old hippie who's somehow conned a generation of programmers into thinking economics doesn't exist can't change that.
I get paid quite a bit to write Free Software, as do a lot of my friends. The teenage hacker in his mom's basement is terribly '90s; you really need to update your cliches.
If you get paid to write it, then obviously it's not what I was referring to. If somebody wants to pay you and then give away what you do, that's their money to possibly waste. But the vast majority of OSS work doesn't get done that way. Just pointing out that it's working out well for you is meaningless.
Yes, Longhorn '08 will probably be spiffy compared to Linux '05. I don't plan to be running Linux '05 then.
My guess is that linux 08 will function a lot like Linux 05. We'll see, but with the exception of some nice icons, Linux '05 works pretty much like Linux '02. Still running on a graphics system mostly written in the 80s and based on UNIX architecture designed in 70s and rewritten in the 80s. The reason Linux looks like such an impressive achievement is that most of it isn't Linux. Shit, I wasn't supposed to say that here...
Just because not all OS apps are copies of MS programs doesn't mean that most MS programs don't get copied by OS apps. I agree with the GP. Just look at GNOME. It's practically got a fucking start menu. And if tabbed browsing is an example of innovation in OSS, then I'd say the GP's point is nearly proven. Apache isn't innovative so much as a really nice job on an existing idea. (Though not stolen from MS, granted.)
In the standard litany of why OSS is great (most of which I agree with) timely innovation is not often mentioned. And as an example I give you OS X. It beats the hell out of anything in the linux or freebsd camps, and it didn't take them very long. The underpinnings (openstep, freebsd) have always been there for the taking by anybody in the OSS community yet it took Apple to produce what I think (and many others do, too) is the first decent version of UNIX for the desktop.
Anyway, it's funny that this kind of thing is even debated. There was a time before the brainwashing when it was considered patently obvious that you get better product when you pay people to build it. Thank god the OSS true believers haven't turned their attention to civil engineering. Hasn't anybody else noticed that the slope of progress on linux is far less than for Mac OS X, or even Windows? Even if Microsoft gets Longhorn out in 2008, it will still beat linux. And by that point Apple will be selling something that makes both look like a Speak 'n' Spell.
You can get a latte at Starbucks for, shit, like $4.50. Why enforce unreasonable requirements upon the system such as "it must play music?"
With a PC you can do different stuff. You can serve your music to other nodes on your home LAN, you can reprogram it at will if you use Myth TV, you can do a bunch of stuff that is tied to the fact that underlying everything is a PC, as opposed to some inscrutible and closed embedded system used by an OEM. Unless the Japanese start selling recievers running linux...
However, if your only concern is sound quality and aren't looking to do anything geeky, then you're right... If getting scored +5 Interesting for pointing out the trivially obvious can be considered being right. Wait, I must be new here...
This is probably redundant here, but I'm SO sick of hearing the media companies bitch about how expensive it is to make movies. Total bullshit. They make a profit on EVERY movie, even the bad ones. (This is after all formats are accounted for.) What kind of goddam industry do you make money even when you royally fuck up? They can kiss my ass. They should try living in an industry with a real market where you pay for your failures.
For some reason, once a media company is big enough, they can ram pricing down our throats ($10 for a movie, commercials included, no matter how good or bad the movie) and they control so much distribution that even Water World made money. So, I have no sympathy for them. God, I hate MBA weenies. They have such a perverted and mercenary view of the world.
Very interesting! What is the reason you wouldn't recommend it. The smell?
I was thinking that if I could find biodiesel from a source like the frying oil from a restaurant, then I could drive around while always smelling the delicious scent of fried chicken. I would probably gain too much weight, though.
You're missing the point. ALL cars do better on the highway than the city. The point was that hybrids don't do much better than non-hybrids. The reason? Why would they? A hybrid is just an overengineered gasoline powered car to make environmentalists feel better and fulfil the mandates of ignorant California lawmakers. Unless you forget, the source of ALL power in a hybrid is ultimately gas. The only difference is that a hybrid does some tricks to waste less energy when idling and recover some energy when stopping. These differences are mitigated almost completely when driving on a highway.
And who knows how much better they really are for the environment when you factor in the effects of the chemicals in the batteries which have to be replaced every so many years and all the extra costs associated with their production. Money wasted is money that could've been used for something more efficient in helping the environment. But there's really no reason to expect much from them. Hybrids weren't the idea of anybody with any qualifications in science or engineering. They came about because a bunch of well meaning do-gooders with law degrees who got voted into state office in California decided they'd force car makers to do so. Nobody in their right minds would waste their time with hybrids otherwise. They are a lot of effort and money for very little improvement or what can be done with existing technology.
My Jetta TDI gets 50 MPG. In theory, it can run on biodiesel, too.
In Boston, the main problem is people from Boston. Anyway, I'm guessing whatever causes the problems in your city, even if it's people from Italy, starts to make everybody drive like that out of neccessity. That's what I meant about homogeneity of driving. People, out of fear for their lives, are forced to adopt the driving habits of the most aggressive among them. This is why driving is still hellish outside, but near Boston, because there are enough of us asshole Boston drivers out for a spin in the suburbs that we bring the dysfunction of the city with us.
This is why I plan to move back to Colorado posthaste following my putative graduation in a few years.
Obviously, I haven't sampled all the drivers in Europe. But I've been as far north as Stockholm and as south as Rome, and if there is ONE stereotype about Europeans that seems to be fairly true (and I think most are false, or only regionally true) it is that they drive like they're crazy. Given how much mixing occurs between region's drivers, and driving habits tend to homogenize around a common attitude (I learned that living in the Northeast!) I think it's not unreasonable.
Anyway, you have a very going point about the latitude. I can't imagine that doesn't hurt.
Well, to be clear and single out what we're talking about, I'm saying that the popular explanation is totally wrong. Not simplified. I think I understand what the problem is, however: My understanding of the popular explanation is that the argument is two *particles* that were together at the front of the wing, one passing just above and the other passing just below, will end up together. This is different than saying that streamlines will have the same velocity once they eventually end up together behind the wing. I can see why that is true to the extent they really end up together. So even if the streamlines' velocity syncs up, particles in each stream won't be. At least in MY textbook, the picture was that the two particles meet up again. In reality, the particle going above the wing ends up ahead of the one below, and they never meet again. So maybe the confusion was that we were talking about two different things when referring to the "textbook picture".
The popular explanation is flat out wrong. It's one of the worst examples of misinformation ever to achieve the status of scientific common wisdom. I remember reading it in my highschool textbooks, too. And incompressible flow doesn't require the adjascent volumes which separate above and below the wing to ever meet, either. I'm not sure I understand what you mean by your contradiction. In reality the two streams never truly meet, so there is no situation where you've got an instantaneous abrupt change in pressure. I'm sure theres a turbulent layer separating them right behind the trailing edge. But the reality is close to the idealized theory; you have a quickly moving stream very close to a slower moving one. This is why airplanes always shed vortices off the tips of their wings. (Vorticity is conserved in inviscid flow, which air approximately is, I believe.)
Requiring a course of study that takes almost as long as college to do something as simple as driving a car is overkill, and tantamount to an insult to the citizens of Finland, if you ask me. It's also a waste of money and symptomatic of a overly intrusive government. It's exactly the kind of mentality that leads my stupid country to put warnings on mugs. So I agree with you completely that we have similar problems, and just different traditions about how those problems manifest.
I think it's very telling that despite Finland's required bachelors degree in driving, and with all its expense, America is actually a safer place to drive. (Another poster pointed out that per mile America is the safest in the world.) It also goes to show that people's attitudes and sense of responsibility is more important than anything overreaching government could possibly do. I've been to Europe enough to see that the attitudes of the citizens about driving is pretty abysmal. For all our faults, Americans seen to drive pretty well, and that's obviously not a function of our government taking that responsibility for us.
For what it's worth, when *I* was young I used to be liberal and think like you.:-)
There's a lot less to hit until there are a lot of people using these things, which is what the creator wants. Mid-air collisions and crashes occur with regular planes now, and you think this guy's vision of the general public flying everywhere won't increase that number? But hey, thanks for calling me stupid, asshole.
Well, you run your mouth off about things you know nothing about, and it happens. You're welcome. The people who are advocating popular aviation usage (and it's not just Moller) have given this a lot of thought. Infinitely more than you gave before posting your piss poor opinion. They don't rely on a big central computer, for one. They rely on people mostly flying on their own, with separation assistance from ATC and the fact that the sky offers so much space and so many opportunities for routes that the total capacity is huge. Current air-to-air collisions usually occur in the cogested airspace of an airport, and between low-tech airplanes without traffic information. The idea for popular flying (as envisioned by NASA) involves every airplane having a display showing the location of every other airplane in real-time. Furthermore, with VTOL machines like the skycar, there is no need for airports and the points of congestion they create. En route, there is so much airspace out there you could have every American flying at once and they could still have miles of separation.
As for my statement about 2D highways and nobody crashing: my point was that we are able to 'see and avoid' in the confined space of a highway, where everybody is forced to the same altitude, without a central computer. Why would you think we'd need a central computer to keep us separated when in the LESS restrictive environment of 3D airspace, where you'd have an extra dimension (really an extra two) to work with to avoid people? The issues is making flying as intuitive as driving a car, and making information about the location of other aircraft available to the pilot (it's not today, in most cases). People are working on it, and the fact that air-to-air collisions exist with the 60s era technology used in private aviation today is not cogent. Your ignorant alarmism really wasn't very helpful in the discussion, and your tantrum at the end of your last message wasn't very impressive.
Everybody at some point is a new driver, so Finland's system does treat everybody like a complete idiot at some point, and it costs a lot of money. It's different than a drinking age. In fact, there is a driving age. If you're old enough to drive, however, there's no reason to be assumed to be a complete idiot. If you really need three years to be considered worthy of full driving rights, nobody should drive.
Anyway, I'd be willing to have every American treated like a complete idiot, including the concommitant further decline of our ability to take responsibility for ourselves, if it would save a significant number of lives. However, I still think the jury is out on that. You don't need to normalize by the number of people in each country, but by the total number of miles driven. Given the significantly larger size of America, and our sparser population, I'd guess we drive a heck of a lot more than they do in Finland, so I imagine our accident rate per mile is not as different as it looks. Maybe we should raise the driving age, though.:-)
For flying cars to ever work you'd need insane amounts of safety systems for every kind of failure. We're talking backup systems for the backup systems that backup the backup systems.
They have that.
You'd also need central traffic network computers to control them, because there's no way in hell the vast majority of the population could fly something at 100MPH with any safety. You think a fender bender is bad? Wait until it also makes you fall 200 feet out of the sky.
People do it all the time. It's easier to fly at 200 MPH than drive at 40. Trust me. There's a lot less to hit in the sky. Under ATC, you're miles away from the nearest thing at your altitude. Remember, you're taking the people from a 2D surface and putting them in a 3D sky. A whole new dimension opens up in which to separate people. There's tons of sky. They're not going to be as stupid as you are and assume everybody will just stick to the same routes and altitude, like they did on the Jetsons.
And don't try to imagine the death and devestation the first time the traffic system fails (insert "lol crash" jokes here).
Why would an ATC failure crash every airplane? We drive on a 2D highway with other cars and nobody crashes. I'm sure a 3D sky with miles of separation between each car will allow for people to avoid each other even if they lose contact with ATC. Maybe we won't even need central control but will rely on onboard traffic displays.
Of course, anyone can figure all this out pretty easily. I'm being over-critical.
Actually, you're talking out of your ass about a subject you know nothing of.
Jesus christ. We should just put a moratorium on aerospace subjects on/... Bernoullis principle AND Newton both explain flight perfectly well. They are both consistent, and different ways of looking at the same thing. The pressure differential predicted by Bernouli is exactly the lift. And the transfer of momentum to the airstream predicts the same lift.
The only thing that's wrong with the high school physics book picture is that absolutely nothing requires the air particles passing over/under the wing to ever meet again. In fact, they can't, because the rotation of air around the wing (faster over the top) is essential to lift.
I'm guessing you're not an aerospace engineer. (Neither am I.) But thanks for the aerodynamics lecture, nonetheless. For what it's worth, at high speeds I'm sure a lot of lift is created by the various small "wings" on the car. An F1 racer is able to generate "lift" downwards equal to its weight, for example. It's very hard to intuitively figure out lift from just looking at something. So don't. They have computers for that, but unfortunately they don't post to/. or we'd actually get some decent posts when aerospace stuff comes up.
The question is: is the highway safety record in Finland so much better than the US's that it justifies treating every adult like a mentally retarded infant and costing so much money that could otherwise be put to more productive use? I'm seriously asking. I'd say anything over about 20% improvement would justify it. Cars kill a lot of people.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, two things. First, editing the registry is a hell of a lot easier, because it's a unified database, not a collection of odd files each with their own syntax. Second, I can't remember the last time I HAD to edit the registry. I had to muck with config files all the time in linux.
I have fantasies that one day I'll be sitting in a group meeting, and I'll say something mundane, like "We need to replace the diode bars in the pump lasers" and all of a sudden you'll open the door, walk in the room and say "In soviet russia subject of article main verb of article in present tense YOU!" and then turn and leave. I'm also hoping you're a hot woman, but it would be too much coincidence that the one person on /. who's a hot woman would also be the one person on /. who's decided to stalk me. But before recently I'd thought both has infinitessimal probability of existence, but you've shown me that sometimes in this crazy life, hope is worth something.
Maybe I should stalk YOU. I would, except you post a lot. It makes me jealous.
Now, on to more pressing matters: Caltech only succeeds because even smart people can be afraid of airplanes and bad weather. And Swarthmore College has more nobel winners per capita than Caltech. Your ball.
Apache was the first http server? I thought CERN's was. And I thought the first widely used server was something out of NCSA or Netscape. If not, then I guess I'm wrong.
I measure it in the amount of time it takes me to configure a new printer. Isn't that how everybody does it?
NOW you're talking crack. What an inane statement first of all. Still beat linux in what way? Again, what are your criteria?
It will be self evident when you use longhorn and then use linux, the same way its self evident when you use OS X and then use linux. (Or in most people's case, not use linux.) Remember, you're part of a brainwashed minority and hang out with people who agree with you. Most people in the real world don't use linux, and don't want to. Every once in a while you run across somebody like me who's used linux and hangs out in places like /. and yet knows the truth about linux and I come across as strange, when it's really you who has lost touch. Try to remember a time when you didn't think it was logical to edit text files in buried /etc to fix things. I know, it's hard.
Anyway, if you want specifics, and I agree I omitted any, MS will have a rendered graphics engine before linux, and they will have a DB filesystem (or at least an overlay) before linux. And they will continue to have far better dev tools than linux has. And people in the real world will continue to use MS products while you guys huddle in your insular support groups and kid yourselves into thinking linux is JUST about to take over the world. Meanwhile, MS and Apple will be working hard full time (as opposed to in their 20% time) and risking real money (as opposed to free weekend time) to really change things in a timely way. And then we'll have a round of never to be finished open source projects parrotting MS and Apple's latest work like the ones we have now which aim implement their current work (like C# and rendered graphics, etc.)
If Apple has only done the trivial, you have to wonder why nobody in the OSS community could do anything remotely as good in five times the time. But, yeah, Apple is a bitch about giving back. Won't argue with that, except to ask you why they should.
And you're right about the Start Button. Totally lame idea. So why the hell can't OSS figure out something better than to copy such a lame idea? Why don't we have works of staggering genius coming out of OSS where we don't even recognize the desktop it's so new? There's no money to be lost. There's nothing holding back innovation. Why do we get clones of commercial products? Why don't we have crazy experimental GUIs where windows are done away with (they are overrated, anyway, and only arbitratily limit your view of what you're currently doing)? Why don't we have completely new blank-slate ideas coming out of OSS like shells which pipe XML instead of text? Because real innovation takes a lot of time and money. Would that it didn't, but it always has, and an idealistic quasi religious movement created by an old hippie who's somehow conned a generation of programmers into thinking economics doesn't exist can't change that.
If you get paid to write it, then obviously it's not what I was referring to. If somebody wants to pay you and then give away what you do, that's their money to possibly waste. But the vast majority of OSS work doesn't get done that way. Just pointing out that it's working out well for you is meaningless.
Yes, Longhorn '08 will probably be spiffy compared to Linux '05. I don't plan to be running Linux '05 then.
My guess is that linux 08 will function a lot like Linux 05. We'll see, but with the exception of some nice icons, Linux '05 works pretty much like Linux '02. Still running on a graphics system mostly written in the 80s and based on UNIX architecture designed in 70s and rewritten in the 80s. The reason Linux looks like such an impressive achievement is that most of it isn't Linux. Shit, I wasn't supposed to say that here...
In the standard litany of why OSS is great (most of which I agree with) timely innovation is not often mentioned. And as an example I give you OS X. It beats the hell out of anything in the linux or freebsd camps, and it didn't take them very long. The underpinnings (openstep, freebsd) have always been there for the taking by anybody in the OSS community yet it took Apple to produce what I think (and many others do, too) is the first decent version of UNIX for the desktop.
Anyway, it's funny that this kind of thing is even debated. There was a time before the brainwashing when it was considered patently obvious that you get better product when you pay people to build it. Thank god the OSS true believers haven't turned their attention to civil engineering. Hasn't anybody else noticed that the slope of progress on linux is far less than for Mac OS X, or even Windows? Even if Microsoft gets Longhorn out in 2008, it will still beat linux. And by that point Apple will be selling something that makes both look like a Speak 'n' Spell.
With a PC you can do different stuff. You can serve your music to other nodes on your home LAN, you can reprogram it at will if you use Myth TV, you can do a bunch of stuff that is tied to the fact that underlying everything is a PC, as opposed to some inscrutible and closed embedded system used by an OEM. Unless the Japanese start selling recievers running linux...
However, if your only concern is sound quality and aren't looking to do anything geeky, then you're right... If getting scored +5 Interesting for pointing out the trivially obvious can be considered being right. Wait, I must be new here...
For some reason, once a media company is big enough, they can ram pricing down our throats ($10 for a movie, commercials included, no matter how good or bad the movie) and they control so much distribution that even Water World made money. So, I have no sympathy for them. God, I hate MBA weenies. They have such a perverted and mercenary view of the world.
Ah, I feel better now. Thanks.
I wish I'd thought of that: post a useful link, get it wrong, repost. Double your karma. Nicely done!
Given that at least one of the O's in OO.o stands for 'Open', tell me again why they need Sun?
I was thinking that if I could find biodiesel from a source like the frying oil from a restaurant, then I could drive around while always smelling the delicious scent of fried chicken. I would probably gain too much weight, though.
And who knows how much better they really are for the environment when you factor in the effects of the chemicals in the batteries which have to be replaced every so many years and all the extra costs associated with their production. Money wasted is money that could've been used for something more efficient in helping the environment. But there's really no reason to expect much from them. Hybrids weren't the idea of anybody with any qualifications in science or engineering. They came about because a bunch of well meaning do-gooders with law degrees who got voted into state office in California decided they'd force car makers to do so. Nobody in their right minds would waste their time with hybrids otherwise. They are a lot of effort and money for very little improvement or what can be done with existing technology.
My Jetta TDI gets 50 MPG. In theory, it can run on biodiesel, too.
This is why I plan to move back to Colorado posthaste following my putative graduation in a few years.
Anyway, you have a very going point about the latitude. I can't imagine that doesn't hurt.
Well, to be clear and single out what we're talking about, I'm saying that the popular explanation is totally wrong. Not simplified. I think I understand what the problem is, however: My understanding of the popular explanation is that the argument is two *particles* that were together at the front of the wing, one passing just above and the other passing just below, will end up together. This is different than saying that streamlines will have the same velocity once they eventually end up together behind the wing. I can see why that is true to the extent they really end up together. So even if the streamlines' velocity syncs up, particles in each stream won't be. At least in MY textbook, the picture was that the two particles meet up again. In reality, the particle going above the wing ends up ahead of the one below, and they never meet again. So maybe the confusion was that we were talking about two different things when referring to the "textbook picture".
Work hours in college? Now that's a loaded question...
The popular explanation is flat out wrong. It's one of the worst examples of misinformation ever to achieve the status of scientific common wisdom. I remember reading it in my highschool textbooks, too. And incompressible flow doesn't require the adjascent volumes which separate above and below the wing to ever meet, either. I'm not sure I understand what you mean by your contradiction. In reality the two streams never truly meet, so there is no situation where you've got an instantaneous abrupt change in pressure. I'm sure theres a turbulent layer separating them right behind the trailing edge. But the reality is close to the idealized theory; you have a quickly moving stream very close to a slower moving one. This is why airplanes always shed vortices off the tips of their wings. (Vorticity is conserved in inviscid flow, which air approximately is, I believe.)
I think it's very telling that despite Finland's required bachelors degree in driving, and with all its expense, America is actually a safer place to drive. (Another poster pointed out that per mile America is the safest in the world.) It also goes to show that people's attitudes and sense of responsibility is more important than anything overreaching government could possibly do. I've been to Europe enough to see that the attitudes of the citizens about driving is pretty abysmal. For all our faults, Americans seen to drive pretty well, and that's obviously not a function of our government taking that responsibility for us.
For what it's worth, when *I* was young I used to be liberal and think like you. :-)
Well, you run your mouth off about things you know nothing about, and it happens. You're welcome. The people who are advocating popular aviation usage (and it's not just Moller) have given this a lot of thought. Infinitely more than you gave before posting your piss poor opinion. They don't rely on a big central computer, for one. They rely on people mostly flying on their own, with separation assistance from ATC and the fact that the sky offers so much space and so many opportunities for routes that the total capacity is huge. Current air-to-air collisions usually occur in the cogested airspace of an airport, and between low-tech airplanes without traffic information. The idea for popular flying (as envisioned by NASA) involves every airplane having a display showing the location of every other airplane in real-time. Furthermore, with VTOL machines like the skycar, there is no need for airports and the points of congestion they create. En route, there is so much airspace out there you could have every American flying at once and they could still have miles of separation.
As for my statement about 2D highways and nobody crashing: my point was that we are able to 'see and avoid' in the confined space of a highway, where everybody is forced to the same altitude, without a central computer. Why would you think we'd need a central computer to keep us separated when in the LESS restrictive environment of 3D airspace, where you'd have an extra dimension (really an extra two) to work with to avoid people? The issues is making flying as intuitive as driving a car, and making information about the location of other aircraft available to the pilot (it's not today, in most cases). People are working on it, and the fact that air-to-air collisions exist with the 60s era technology used in private aviation today is not cogent. Your ignorant alarmism really wasn't very helpful in the discussion, and your tantrum at the end of your last message wasn't very impressive.
Anyway, I'd be willing to have every American treated like a complete idiot, including the concommitant further decline of our ability to take responsibility for ourselves, if it would save a significant number of lives. However, I still think the jury is out on that. You don't need to normalize by the number of people in each country, but by the total number of miles driven. Given the significantly larger size of America, and our sparser population, I'd guess we drive a heck of a lot more than they do in Finland, so I imagine our accident rate per mile is not as different as it looks. Maybe we should raise the driving age, though. :-)
They have that.
You'd also need central traffic network computers to control them, because there's no way in hell the vast majority of the population could fly something at 100MPH with any safety. You think a fender bender is bad? Wait until it also makes you fall 200 feet out of the sky.
People do it all the time. It's easier to fly at 200 MPH than drive at 40. Trust me. There's a lot less to hit in the sky. Under ATC, you're miles away from the nearest thing at your altitude. Remember, you're taking the people from a 2D surface and putting them in a 3D sky. A whole new dimension opens up in which to separate people. There's tons of sky. They're not going to be as stupid as you are and assume everybody will just stick to the same routes and altitude, like they did on the Jetsons.
And don't try to imagine the death and devestation the first time the traffic system fails (insert "lol crash" jokes here).
Why would an ATC failure crash every airplane? We drive on a 2D highway with other cars and nobody crashes. I'm sure a 3D sky with miles of separation between each car will allow for people to avoid each other even if they lose contact with ATC. Maybe we won't even need central control but will rely on onboard traffic displays.
Of course, anyone can figure all this out pretty easily. I'm being over-critical.
Actually, you're talking out of your ass about a subject you know nothing of.
The only thing that's wrong with the high school physics book picture is that absolutely nothing requires the air particles passing over/under the wing to ever meet again. In fact, they can't, because the rotation of air around the wing (faster over the top) is essential to lift.
I'm guessing you're not an aerospace engineer. (Neither am I.) But thanks for the aerodynamics lecture, nonetheless. For what it's worth, at high speeds I'm sure a lot of lift is created by the various small "wings" on the car. An F1 racer is able to generate "lift" downwards equal to its weight, for example. It's very hard to intuitively figure out lift from just looking at something. So don't. They have computers for that, but unfortunately they don't post to /. or we'd actually get some decent posts when aerospace stuff comes up.
The question is: is the highway safety record in Finland so much better than the US's that it justifies treating every adult like a mentally retarded infant and costing so much money that could otherwise be put to more productive use? I'm seriously asking. I'd say anything over about 20% improvement would justify it. Cars kill a lot of people.