Once in a blue moon when it decides to, Honda builds a better Ferrari. Similar performance to the contemporary 348, with typical Japanese reliability and user-friendliness.
Of course, Dell isn't Honda. Dell isn't even GM. Imagine if Kia led the car market and you have something close to Dell.
Every so often I'll think to myself "Wouldn't I just really rather read the unadorned RSS feeds for my favorite sites?" But I always end up going back to old-fashioned browsing.
The best sites use design to aggregate information in such a way that it's easy to see what the site judges to be most important, so that the user can see plenty of information at once, and so the pages load quickly. Just saying "screw design, it's about content" is too simple.
It seems to me that, by and large, design (of non-link-farm sites) has gotten way better over the last couple years. Web design has gotten most of the way from just another IT responsibility into a real profession equaling other kinds of design in difficulty and prestige (and in user happiness when it's done right).
I used to be a huge Sony fanboy... they always had the most intuitive interfaces on consumer electronics, the best remote controls, and the best TV pictures, as well as the occasional wacky but totally innovative product like the WM-DD9 audiophile Walkman or the STR-GX1ES egg-control receiver.
But now I agree with parent, and it's pretty sad. The consumer electronics are overstyled, ordinarily engineered junk like we used to get from the likes of JVC. Some of the laptops have pretty designs, but they're flimsy and will be very hard to support in 5 years with their nonstandard hardware. And there's the bizarre ATRAC scheme and the rootkit.
The one piece of current (well, they still make a similar model) Sony hardware that I had to buy was an S-Master Pro digital amp (in a STR-DA5000ES receiver). It sounds fantastic -- better imaging than audiophile component setups costing thousands more. I probably better buy another one for when this one breaks, because at this rate Sony will manage to turn it to shit before long.
I've never understood the big deal with tabs. What's the difference between having tons of tabs open and tons of windows open? Either you have a cluttered overfull taskbar (on Windows) or a cluttered overfull tab bar.
I suppose the tab bar may be a little easier to read because of Windows's brain-dead taskbar implementation.
But the systems I use all day are OS X systems. With those systems, windows are actually easier to deal with than tabs. There is no way to see the content of all the tabs at once (unless I use Shiira, which despite being very promising isn't quite ready for prime time yet). If I have pages open in separate windows, I can Exposé to see them all at once.
The other thing I don't get is what people who have 30-40 tabs open at once are actually doing with all those pages. I can't remember a project where I needed more than 6-8 web pages open at once. I have a sneaking suspicion it's some combination of disorganization and the compulsive need to feel busy that seems to have overtaken modern life.
some hardware (which you'll need anyway) comes with lite versions of pro level packages like Reason or Ableton.
funny you should mention that... I have hardware which came with each of these packages.
They all have similar limitations, which they share with GarageBand: a lack of flexibility with respect to control changes, a very limited selection of software instruments, a lack of decent effects. In other words, they are packages for the hobbyist, not the even semi-serious music maker.
For that market, GarageBand is unique because of its user-friendliness. Drop someone who's never made music into Ableton Live Lite and they'll look around, mess around with menus, and eventually go "Huh?" and lose interest. Drop them into GarageBand and they'll have some sort of cacophony going within fifteen minutes. (Whether this is humane to the user's cat is left as an exercise to the reader. Cats for Dell.)
Any serious musician is going to need the real thing anyway (although GarageBand is surprisingly good for quickly sketching rough ideas). And, what do you know, in that market Logic Pro stomps the competition (IMHO YMMV etc).
With its optical in/out, silence, profusion of ports and powerful processor the Core Duo Mini strikes me as a surprisingly good studio machine if you max out the RAM and add a 7200rpm HD. Musicians don't need mega-graphics (although dual-monitor support would be nice) and the silence and small size are golden.
God damn, where are my mod points when I need them? (Score:6, Insightful)
Rationalization is a powerful force. It's absolutely amazing how many people really believe that eliminating civil society would improve their lives despite pervasive evidence to the contrary... when what they really want is just to keep a few extra bucks a month. They complain they don't use public services.
Then they drive on fancy new roads, call the fire department to rescue their treed cat, expect the plane they're getting on will be well-maintained mechanically (even though they will shop for hours for a $1 lower fare), buy beef in the grocery store without a second thought, and feel free to insult/. posters without the fear of being shot to death.
Show me a non-hypocritical anti-government libertarian and I'll show you a survivalist wacko.
The structure of social security may encourage irresponsible government accounting practices, but the fact remains that it's the single most effective step in U.S. history toward reducing poverty among those who can't work.
which I say because the reasons that have been given don't hold water
How exactly doesn't "IBM won't build a mobile G5, Freescale won't push our G4 past 1.67 GHz on a 167 MHz FSB, and so our laptops and mini are TOO DAMN SLOW" hold water?
My laptop is a 1.5 GHz PB G4. I love using it because the design and ergonomics are perfect. But it's embarrassingly, painfully slow compared with any higher-end Windows book from the last year or so. Once more apps are native and the 64-bit mobile processor (Merom) is here I'll be thrilled to switch.
The problem with your position is that you are fighting to make peoples' lives worse.
No, I am fighting to make my life better. I am sick of paying huge taxes to massively subsidize the sorts of shortsighted individual decisions which lead to social problems. I am not "fascist"; I am not trying to restrict anyone's right to live, work, drive wherever and whenever they want to, no matter what pathologies those decisions may lead to for all of us. I just want people to bear the costs of those decisions themselves, not pick them from my pocket.
(I'll use an example from metro Seattle here because it's where I'm most familiar with the specifics... but my points apply everywhere.)
Seattle's eastern suburbs are in the first phases of a project to double the width of their trunk freeway, I-405, in a project that will cost approximately $15 billion (in capital costs only, mind you) when it's done. This is $3000, not including interest on the bonds, for every resident of Washington state, including me. The purpose of this expansion is to enable the construction of yet more far-flung edge developments... so that people can
spend MORE time driving
use MORE pesticides on their redundant and unused lawns
pollute the air MORE
have even less options to lead a physically healthy lifestyle because it's impossible to walk or cycle anywhere, and because they spend so much time driving they have to eat fast food instead of cooking
and have no sense of community because they are always in their cars.
What you're telling me is that I should pay thousands in order that other people can keep doing these things to themselves. I'm sick of it. If you want to solve the problems associated with inevitable road congestion, avoid them by moving closer to work. It's basic economics: you can choose your huge unused lot, or you can choose convenience. Don't make me pay so you can avoid that choice.
The stress of driving on an overcrouded road takes a horrible toll on people and has a drastic negative impact on their quality of life.
Cry me a river. If the worst stress I have to put up with every day is waiting in some traffic and dealing with the occasional bad driver, life is pretty damn good.
People time-shift their travel to accommodate undersized highways, they don't eliminate it.
They still have to go to work, but if there is a particularly nasty bottleneck between work and home, they may move (or change jobs). Subsidizing people's ability to live ridiculous distances away from their work, as we do by mindlessly paying billions to expand roads whenever they get congested, leads to both excess air pollution and social problems exacerbated by 1) people spending time driving instead of with family/friends and 2) people not really belonging to a community because they're never there.
And, yes, the more roads we build, the farther out people choose to live. The roads fill up as fast as you build them.
Of course, with the internet, there aren't the same problems with encouraging people to download more GB of data. If we really wanted the sort of internet service that would keep us in the technological lead, we would stop giving whiny monopolists cushy protections and instead aggressively subsidize infrastructure improvements necessary for better service and more extensive competition.
Lawyers are not paid to "give the smack down." They're paid to achieve the best possible result for clients. Once in a while, that may involve being forceful. But, more often, that involves succeeding in negotiations and working with the opposition to achieve a resolution that works for both parties. Even in litigation, things go more smoothly for everyone when opposing counsel have a good working relationship.
If I were a client, I wouldn't touch Abdala with a ten-foot pole; I wouldn't trust her to have the good judgment and professional collegiality necessary to get me a good result. If I were a lawyer, I'd dread any situation where I had to work with her, and I certainly wouldn't hire her to work in my firm.
I am not entirely sure why people even keep buying laptops with hotels now offering Internet kiosks. Why lug a laptop, have to show it to homeland security at the airport, then worry about it getting broken, damaged or destroyed just so you can run e-mail, excel, and word?
Because, on the road, email, web, text editor, ssh, and Word are all I usually need to run? And I really don't want to spend hours working in some kiosk in someone else's computing environment?
I don't see why you want massive computing power in every situation, unless all you do is stare at the frame rates in $WHATEVER_FPS. No, my PowerBook can't run Logic Pro (usefully) or chomp through enormous images in Photoshop like my dual G5. But I don't need it to. I can wait for that until I get home (where, after all, my RAID array, huge monitors, and music equipment are).
And I really don't want to lug 10 pounds instead of 4.6 or have a battery that lasts half an hour. You want those things, fine, go buy your Alienware. But it's kind of weird you assume everyone has your exact priorities.
Incidentally, I think a laptop is one of the few purchases in which the value of the item depreciates faster than of a new car. That's impressive.
How long have you been using computers if you think this is surprising? How is it different from any other piece of computer equipment?
Then either you didn't read TFA, or you don't have a clue how utility planning, provisioning, and billing works. Or is it both?
Well, if you feel I'm so ignorant, thanks for informing me so comprehensively.
In any case, I don't see what's wrong with my analogy. What's being proposed is beyond "variable pricing [or] access reliability." As many posters pointed out we already have that in internet service. What's being proposed, in case you didn't read TFA/follow this issue, is variable priority for traffic depending on where it originates and what type of traffic it is. Especially in areas with only one or two PHYSICAL choices for non-dialup internet service (which would be most areas), this effectively means the end of all non-corporate-approved content unless regulatory action is taken fast. All packets containing media (or, with not too much of a leap of imagination, political) content that don't originate from trusted servers will either be blocked outright or given such a low priority as to make the service useless.
It's exactly what would happen if your electricity would suddenly only power your Sony Official Rootkit DVD player. Explain to me how I was so clueless again?
Imagine if your electric company could cut a deal with Sony, under which you couldn't get power for your cheap Chinese region-free DVD player but instead had to buy a Sony to watch Region 1 DVDs and were out of luck for the rest. Something analogous is in danger of happening to our internet access.
I drive an SUV for two reasons: 1) Room to haul kids and crap, and 2) safety. It is the biggest myth in history that big cars are somehow less safe than small cars. Read my lips (and read the research): WEIGHT = SAFETY
Except that statistics simply don't support your conclusion. Look at any study on nhtsa.gov and you will see that fatality rates are roughly the same for cars, pickups and SUVs despite the larger vehicles' increased weight.
Why? Poor maneuverability. Yes, you have a better chance of surviving a completely unforeseen T-bone or head-on if you're in a heavy vehicle. But you have a much better chance of *avoiding* most accidents, which don't fit that description, in a small car. You can stop much quicker -- a bad car can stop from highway speed in less space than a good SUV. You can make much quicker evasive maneuvers without the danger of rolling, or of just plain losing your grip because the tires can't make 5000 lbs. change direction that quickly. And (except for monsters like a Grand Cherokee SRT-8) most cars can considerably outaccelerate most SUVs.
I know how to drive large vehicles. I drove 60-foot, 58,000-pound articulated city buses in downtown Seattle for 5 years, full-time, with a perfect safety record. And I'd *much* rather be driving a smaller car -- my driving skill allows me to use the small car's maneuverability to avoid even more accidents. I've had at least 3 near misses in my Taurus SHO and Acura TSX that, in an Expedition, would have given me a choice between an accident and a rollover.
Environut concerns? Again, it's not 1985 anymore. SUVs are not the devil they're made out to be.
Strange new definition of "environut": someone who wants to avoid devastating the U.S. economy by flooding Manhattan. Dude, it's simple math. SUV = 15 mpg. Ordinary car = 30 mpg. All that gas goes out the tailpipe as CO2 + H2O. There's twice as much CO2 from the SUV. And, as if that weren't enough, SUVs have more generous standards for non-greenhouse pollutants.
Note that we've been arguing about "SUV" but my arguments apply equally to large pickups used for personal transportation. I'm not trying to take away people's freedom to drive them. But let's recognize their cost and increased difficulty to drive safely. Higher gas taxes, weight fees and mandatory CDLs.
This is completely self-perpetuating, and your answer is just "There's nothing we can do about it."
There is no reason a vehicle has to be 18 feet long and weigh 5000 pounds to be safe or perform adequately. They are that big because people like big vehicles, plain and simple. Why? Who knows. Probably a combination of 1) misguided feelings of safety and 2) dick size.
Because of its superior responsiveness and its unwillingness to roll or tip, I feel far safer driving a 2500-pound Honda Civic with good tires than a monster Ford truck. Statistics on the frequency (as opposed to severity) of accidents not related to reckless/negligent driving bear my intuition out.
Half the solution is to make the cost of driving large vehicles reflect their social cost, through increased gas taxes, registration fees based on vehicle weight, and requiring a CDL with the attendant fees and training for all trucks over 5000 lbs. or over 78" high. The other half of the solution is to convince people that driving your 200-pound self to the grocery store in a 5000-pound truck is stupid.
This was true when converters first were installed in the 1970s. It's not true anymore.
Most of the progress in emissions technology in the last 15 years has involved getting cats to warm up progressively more quickly. Automakers have found ways to locate the cats closer to the exhaust manifold (or even within it in a few cases), to make the exhaust manifold lighter so it doesn't soak up so much heat before it gets to the cat, to make the exhaust gases themselves hotter, and even in a few cases to electrically preheat the cat. Today, your cat is working within a minute or two of a cold start, at most. Even if you're driving to the store five minutes from your house the cat is dramatically reducing your emissions.
It drives me batshit when I see ricers taking off their cats, which are directly responsible for the considerable improvement in the particulate situation since the '60s, to gain 2 hp. If they weren't so cheap, they'd realize that high-performance exhaust systems with cats are everywhere and work just as well to reduce backpressure enough to kill the motor's low-end torque.
I just can't understand why people ever leave anything in a car for any reason.
Everyday in the newspaper you see cars getting broken into. Everyone you know has probably had his car broken into. If you leave anything at all visible, your car *will* get broken into. Even just a couple CDs.
But still... I see laptops in cars all the damn time (even though I have two relatives who've had laptops stolen from cars), and last year in Seattle the police chief had his *gun* stolen from his unmarked car.
No insurance company should ever cover anything stolen from a car under any circumstances. Anyone who has their employer's belongings stolen from a car should be fired. And loss of personal data from a car should be prima facie evidence of negligence; in other words, each of those 100,000 customers should be able to sue the company and recover for the time and money it takes them to reinvent their financial lives, and possibly also for potential damages from misuse of the information.
Genre, in my (very large) collection, only serves one function: to distinguish "classical" (which in fact encompasses probably 20 genres) from "nonclassical" (even more). Even then it fails with a few borderline cases (think Edgar Meyer/Bela Fleck collaboration). Genre is too imprecise a tool to use for searching, so why bother?
Don't bother with ID3 databases, either. Even if one were "accurate," it would not be right for most individual listeners. Here's a small list of the problems I encounter when trying to use tags pulled from a database, even when there are no obvious typos or fuckups...
For non-classical music:
- Genres are wacked (duh)
- Both artist and album names often differ from what the album cover says: shortened or on the other hand made "more informative"
- Year is wrong. I don't give a fuck when the album (or even worse, the greatest hits collection) was first sold. I care when the song was put in its final form (if I can find out)
- Song titles may be shortened, and almost always have gratuitous Caps At The Start Of Each Word whether or not the artist put them there
- Due to changes in the database over the years fields may be switched or missing
For classical music and opera the situation is far worse. I have my own tagging system refined during years of keeping digital music and figuring out how best to shoehorn orchestra/chorus/conductor/soloist(s)/ensembles/mo vement titles/opus numbers/acts/scenes into "Artist," "Song," "Album" and "Grouping" fields. I would hazard the guess that for any serious classical music listener there is no point in a database -- different information is important to all of us and we will all perform the field-consolidation shuffle differently. We can whine about the need for entirely new tagging systems but we are enough of a minority that no one listens, so in the meantime, we have to Optimize Very Highly.
In short, just type the damn information in yourself if you want it to be accurate. There is no other way.
...so damn hard to clean... take every key cap off, clean it on five sides... for 104 keycaps that's a lot of work.
But I don't know how a lot of people can use their keyboards, especially for hours a day. Whenever I'm in any office I see all these keyboards where the keys have turned various shades of brown and feel rough to the touch. Eeeew.
I've lived most of my life in various parts of the north end. Greenlake, Northgate, View Ridge, U-district. (The exception is Magnolia.)
People in the U-district are mellow, although the neighboring University Park area is not. People in Magnolia and my part of Greenlake (by Albertsons, RIP) certainly had their issues -- I heard about more than a few blocked-view lawsuits in Magnolia, and someone once left one of my Greenlake neighbors a nasty note when she replaced a (rusty) metal mailbox with a plastic one. ("Destroying the character of the neighborhood" was how the concerned citizen put it.)
But the best Seattle thing that happened to me was just last year... I was sharing a View Ridge house with 2 roommates. One of my roommates parked his car on the street, legally. The woman next door, whose car was already parked next to his, came out of her house and chased him, saying it was "her" parking spot, and what did he think he was doing using the street when we had a driveway? Pointing out the parking spot was legal and public did nothing to mollify her. She wouldn't talk to any of us after that. If I hadn't been parking my car in the garage I would have made sure to park it there every day...
Because of ADA or because the transportation companies realized it woul make good market sense?
This is the whole *problem* with your anti-regulatory logic. In many settings the disabled are not enough of a presence to make a real dent in the market... yet, unlike other market participants, they can't just go and change the conditions that are causing the market not to serve them.
In the transit case, it was *not* the market but the ADA, through lawsuits, that prompted the changes. A market solution would have had disabled people who needed to get somewhere begging for charity as they had for the previous hundred years, because transportation for the disabled is expensive, disabled people tend to be poor, and the market just won't support private services. In contrast, once there was an ADA, within a decade there was a revolution in urban transportation (at least in the more progressive markets) for disabled riders. I am happy to pay a few more bucks in taxes to have a disability-friendly transportation network so people can get around with independence and dignity.
Businesses start to focus on a particular group of people.
Yes, they should. Again, the disabled, unlike secular bookbuyers, people with hair, or fat people, are not going to be served naturally by the market -- exactly because of the reasons you describe. They are not that numerous and it is expensive to serve them. Our choice as a society is to marginalize them in the name of market logic or to spend a little collective money to ensure they can live under the same conditions as everyone else.
This is not to say the current system is entirely fair. Small businesses facing unreasonable costs to achieve ADA compliance should be offered partial subsidies, so they don't bear a disproportionate burden. Still, what kind of 2-story elevator would have cost $150k? One with gold doors? And why would you need a special license under the ADA to build a ramp? Yes, you need a contractor license, but you needed that anyway. Your examples are fishy because you're starting with an ideological agenda instead of the facts.
I tried using your approach with my Mom. It got her nowhere. The concepts were just too abstract and too far removed from her ideas of what a computer did or could be used for.
I finally broke through with a task-centered approach. "Open Word. See... you can type anything you want. Now choose 'Save.' That's a file... Now open iTunes. That track there, that I imported from your CD... that's also a file." By showing her examples I was able to give her something to attach the abstract concepts to. Similarly, she did not understand "directories" until she understood what these "files" were that she could organize in "directories."
The great shortcoming of interfaces today is that they don't allow enough configuration of "simple" or "complex." When you first turn on a machine, it should ask you: "Do you like computers?" Then: "How comfortable are you with computers?" If the answer is "I'm dal20402's Mom," then the machine should not show ANYTHING except a documents folder and an annotated list of applications. Conversely, a power user on the same OS should be able to display everything.
Error handling also needs work. No current OS is good enough at diagnosing errors and offering feedback useful to the n00b. The machine should be able to say to the user: "My file system is corrupt. Run Disk Utility."...not "4E 02 24 AB 65 23..." even under difficult circumstances. But error handling is unglamorous, so developers don't spend enough time on it. If it were well done, we would need to spend a lot less time explaining things over and over again.
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Of course, Dell isn't Honda. Dell isn't even GM. Imagine if Kia led the car market and you have something close to Dell.
Every so often I'll think to myself "Wouldn't I just really rather read the unadorned RSS feeds for my favorite sites?" But I always end up going back to old-fashioned browsing.
The best sites use design to aggregate information in such a way that it's easy to see what the site judges to be most important, so that the user can see plenty of information at once, and so the pages load quickly. Just saying "screw design, it's about content" is too simple.
It seems to me that, by and large, design (of non-link-farm sites) has gotten way better over the last couple years. Web design has gotten most of the way from just another IT responsibility into a real profession equaling other kinds of design in difficulty and prestige (and in user happiness when it's done right).
But now I agree with parent, and it's pretty sad. The consumer electronics are overstyled, ordinarily engineered junk like we used to get from the likes of JVC. Some of the laptops have pretty designs, but they're flimsy and will be very hard to support in 5 years with their nonstandard hardware. And there's the bizarre ATRAC scheme and the rootkit.
The one piece of current (well, they still make a similar model) Sony hardware that I had to buy was an S-Master Pro digital amp (in a STR-DA5000ES receiver). It sounds fantastic -- better imaging than audiophile component setups costing thousands more. I probably better buy another one for when this one breaks, because at this rate Sony will manage to turn it to shit before long.
I suppose the tab bar may be a little easier to read because of Windows's brain-dead taskbar implementation.
But the systems I use all day are OS X systems. With those systems, windows are actually easier to deal with than tabs. There is no way to see the content of all the tabs at once (unless I use Shiira, which despite being very promising isn't quite ready for prime time yet). If I have pages open in separate windows, I can Exposé to see them all at once.
The other thing I don't get is what people who have 30-40 tabs open at once are actually doing with all those pages. I can't remember a project where I needed more than 6-8 web pages open at once. I have a sneaking suspicion it's some combination of disorganization and the compulsive need to feel busy that seems to have overtaken modern life.
funny you should mention that... I have hardware which came with each of these packages.
They all have similar limitations, which they share with GarageBand: a lack of flexibility with respect to control changes, a very limited selection of software instruments, a lack of decent effects. In other words, they are packages for the hobbyist, not the even semi-serious music maker.
For that market, GarageBand is unique because of its user-friendliness. Drop someone who's never made music into Ableton Live Lite and they'll look around, mess around with menus, and eventually go "Huh?" and lose interest. Drop them into GarageBand and they'll have some sort of cacophony going within fifteen minutes. (Whether this is humane to the user's cat is left as an exercise to the reader. Cats for Dell.)
Any serious musician is going to need the real thing anyway (although GarageBand is surprisingly good for quickly sketching rough ideas). And, what do you know, in that market Logic Pro stomps the competition (IMHO YMMV etc).
With its optical in/out, silence, profusion of ports and powerful processor the Core Duo Mini strikes me as a surprisingly good studio machine if you max out the RAM and add a 7200rpm HD. Musicians don't need mega-graphics (although dual-monitor support would be nice) and the silence and small size are golden.
Rationalization is a powerful force. It's absolutely amazing how many people really believe that eliminating civil society would improve their lives despite pervasive evidence to the contrary... when what they really want is just to keep a few extra bucks a month. They complain they don't use public services.
Then they drive on fancy new roads, call the fire department to rescue their treed cat, expect the plane they're getting on will be well-maintained mechanically (even though they will shop for hours for a $1 lower fare), buy beef in the grocery store without a second thought, and feel free to insult /. posters without the fear of being shot to death.
Show me a non-hypocritical anti-government libertarian and I'll show you a survivalist wacko.
Politics 101: Programs that only serve the poor get no support.
If we want social security at all, then we have to serve at least most of the electorate with it.
it doesn't pay enough to be useful as a retirement program.
Tell that to these 13 million people.
The structure of social security may encourage irresponsible government accounting practices, but the fact remains that it's the single most effective step in U.S. history toward reducing poverty among those who can't work.
How exactly doesn't "IBM won't build a mobile G5, Freescale won't push our G4 past 1.67 GHz on a 167 MHz FSB, and so our laptops and mini are TOO DAMN SLOW" hold water?
My laptop is a 1.5 GHz PB G4. I love using it because the design and ergonomics are perfect. But it's embarrassingly, painfully slow compared with any higher-end Windows book from the last year or so. Once more apps are native and the 64-bit mobile processor (Merom) is here I'll be thrilled to switch.
No, I am fighting to make my life better. I am sick of paying huge taxes to massively subsidize the sorts of shortsighted individual decisions which lead to social problems. I am not "fascist"; I am not trying to restrict anyone's right to live, work, drive wherever and whenever they want to, no matter what pathologies those decisions may lead to for all of us. I just want people to bear the costs of those decisions themselves, not pick them from my pocket.
(I'll use an example from metro Seattle here because it's where I'm most familiar with the specifics... but my points apply everywhere.)
Seattle's eastern suburbs are in the first phases of a project to double the width of their trunk freeway, I-405, in a project that will cost approximately $15 billion (in capital costs only, mind you) when it's done. This is $3000, not including interest on the bonds, for every resident of Washington state, including me. The purpose of this expansion is to enable the construction of yet more far-flung edge developments... so that people can
What you're telling me is that I should pay thousands in order that other people can keep doing these things to themselves. I'm sick of it. If you want to solve the problems associated with inevitable road congestion, avoid them by moving closer to work. It's basic economics: you can choose your huge unused lot, or you can choose convenience. Don't make me pay so you can avoid that choice.
The stress of driving on an overcrouded road takes a horrible toll on people and has a drastic negative impact on their quality of life.
Cry me a river. If the worst stress I have to put up with every day is waiting in some traffic and dealing with the occasional bad driver, life is pretty damn good.
They still have to go to work, but if there is a particularly nasty bottleneck between work and home, they may move (or change jobs). Subsidizing people's ability to live ridiculous distances away from their work, as we do by mindlessly paying billions to expand roads whenever they get congested, leads to both excess air pollution and social problems exacerbated by 1) people spending time driving instead of with family/friends and 2) people not really belonging to a community because they're never there.
And, yes, the more roads we build, the farther out people choose to live. The roads fill up as fast as you build them.
Of course, with the internet, there aren't the same problems with encouraging people to download more GB of data. If we really wanted the sort of internet service that would keep us in the technological lead, we would stop giving whiny monopolists cushy protections and instead aggressively subsidize infrastructure improvements necessary for better service and more extensive competition.
If I were a client, I wouldn't touch Abdala with a ten-foot pole; I wouldn't trust her to have the good judgment and professional collegiality necessary to get me a good result. If I were a lawyer, I'd dread any situation where I had to work with her, and I certainly wouldn't hire her to work in my firm.
Because, on the road, email, web, text editor, ssh, and Word are all I usually need to run? And I really don't want to spend hours working in some kiosk in someone else's computing environment?
I don't see why you want massive computing power in every situation, unless all you do is stare at the frame rates in $WHATEVER_FPS. No, my PowerBook can't run Logic Pro (usefully) or chomp through enormous images in Photoshop like my dual G5. But I don't need it to. I can wait for that until I get home (where, after all, my RAID array, huge monitors, and music equipment are).
And I really don't want to lug 10 pounds instead of 4.6 or have a battery that lasts half an hour. You want those things, fine, go buy your Alienware. But it's kind of weird you assume everyone has your exact priorities.
Incidentally, I think a laptop is one of the few purchases in which the value of the item depreciates faster than of a new car. That's impressive.
How long have you been using computers if you think this is surprising? How is it different from any other piece of computer equipment?
Well, if you feel I'm so ignorant, thanks for informing me so comprehensively.
In any case, I don't see what's wrong with my analogy. What's being proposed is beyond "variable pricing [or] access reliability." As many posters pointed out we already have that in internet service. What's being proposed, in case you didn't read TFA/follow this issue, is variable priority for traffic depending on where it originates and what type of traffic it is. Especially in areas with only one or two PHYSICAL choices for non-dialup internet service (which would be most areas), this effectively means the end of all non-corporate-approved content unless regulatory action is taken fast. All packets containing media (or, with not too much of a leap of imagination, political) content that don't originate from trusted servers will either be blocked outright or given such a low priority as to make the service useless.
It's exactly what would happen if your electricity would suddenly only power your Sony Official Rootkit DVD player. Explain to me how I was so clueless again?
Imagine if your electric company could cut a deal with Sony, under which you couldn't get power for your cheap Chinese region-free DVD player but instead had to buy a Sony to watch Region 1 DVDs and were out of luck for the rest. Something analogous is in danger of happening to our internet access.
Except that statistics simply don't support your conclusion. Look at any study on nhtsa.gov and you will see that fatality rates are roughly the same for cars, pickups and SUVs despite the larger vehicles' increased weight.
Why? Poor maneuverability. Yes, you have a better chance of surviving a completely unforeseen T-bone or head-on if you're in a heavy vehicle. But you have a much better chance of *avoiding* most accidents, which don't fit that description, in a small car. You can stop much quicker -- a bad car can stop from highway speed in less space than a good SUV. You can make much quicker evasive maneuvers without the danger of rolling, or of just plain losing your grip because the tires can't make 5000 lbs. change direction that quickly. And (except for monsters like a Grand Cherokee SRT-8) most cars can considerably outaccelerate most SUVs.
I know how to drive large vehicles. I drove 60-foot, 58,000-pound articulated city buses in downtown Seattle for 5 years, full-time, with a perfect safety record. And I'd *much* rather be driving a smaller car -- my driving skill allows me to use the small car's maneuverability to avoid even more accidents. I've had at least 3 near misses in my Taurus SHO and Acura TSX that, in an Expedition, would have given me a choice between an accident and a rollover.
Environut concerns? Again, it's not 1985 anymore. SUVs are not the devil they're made out to be.
Strange new definition of "environut": someone who wants to avoid devastating the U.S. economy by flooding Manhattan. Dude, it's simple math. SUV = 15 mpg. Ordinary car = 30 mpg. All that gas goes out the tailpipe as CO2 + H2O. There's twice as much CO2 from the SUV. And, as if that weren't enough, SUVs have more generous standards for non-greenhouse pollutants.
Note that we've been arguing about "SUV" but my arguments apply equally to large pickups used for personal transportation. I'm not trying to take away people's freedom to drive them. But let's recognize their cost and increased difficulty to drive safely. Higher gas taxes, weight fees and mandatory CDLs.
There is no reason a vehicle has to be 18 feet long and weigh 5000 pounds to be safe or perform adequately. They are that big because people like big vehicles, plain and simple. Why? Who knows. Probably a combination of 1) misguided feelings of safety and 2) dick size.
Because of its superior responsiveness and its unwillingness to roll or tip, I feel far safer driving a 2500-pound Honda Civic with good tires than a monster Ford truck. Statistics on the frequency (as opposed to severity) of accidents not related to reckless/negligent driving bear my intuition out.
Half the solution is to make the cost of driving large vehicles reflect their social cost, through increased gas taxes, registration fees based on vehicle weight, and requiring a CDL with the attendant fees and training for all trucks over 5000 lbs. or over 78" high. The other half of the solution is to convince people that driving your 200-pound self to the grocery store in a 5000-pound truck is stupid.
Most of the progress in emissions technology in the last 15 years has involved getting cats to warm up progressively more quickly. Automakers have found ways to locate the cats closer to the exhaust manifold (or even within it in a few cases), to make the exhaust manifold lighter so it doesn't soak up so much heat before it gets to the cat, to make the exhaust gases themselves hotter, and even in a few cases to electrically preheat the cat. Today, your cat is working within a minute or two of a cold start, at most. Even if you're driving to the store five minutes from your house the cat is dramatically reducing your emissions.
It drives me batshit when I see ricers taking off their cats, which are directly responsible for the considerable improvement in the particulate situation since the '60s, to gain 2 hp. If they weren't so cheap, they'd realize that high-performance exhaust systems with cats are everywhere and work just as well to reduce backpressure enough to kill the motor's low-end torque.
Although anyone with sensitive corporate information in a home has a problem.
Everyday in the newspaper you see cars getting broken into. Everyone you know has probably had his car broken into. If you leave anything at all visible, your car *will* get broken into. Even just a couple CDs.
But still... I see laptops in cars all the damn time (even though I have two relatives who've had laptops stolen from cars), and last year in Seattle the police chief had his *gun* stolen from his unmarked car.
No insurance company should ever cover anything stolen from a car under any circumstances. Anyone who has their employer's belongings stolen from a car should be fired. And loss of personal data from a car should be prima facie evidence of negligence; in other words, each of those 100,000 customers should be able to sue the company and recover for the time and money it takes them to reinvent their financial lives, and possibly also for potential damages from misuse of the information.
Next solution please.
Don't bother with ID3 databases, either. Even if one were "accurate," it would not be right for most individual listeners. Here's a small list of the problems I encounter when trying to use tags pulled from a database, even when there are no obvious typos or fuckups...
For non-classical music:
- Genres are wacked (duh)
- Both artist and album names often differ from what the album cover says: shortened or on the other hand made "more informative"
- Year is wrong. I don't give a fuck when the album (or even worse, the greatest hits collection) was first sold. I care when the song was put in its final form (if I can find out)
- Song titles may be shortened, and almost always have gratuitous Caps At The Start Of Each Word whether or not the artist put them there
- Due to changes in the database over the years fields may be switched or missing
For classical music and opera the situation is far worse. I have my own tagging system refined during years of keeping digital music and figuring out how best to shoehorn orchestra/chorus/conductor/soloist(s)/ensembles/mo vement titles/opus numbers/acts/scenes into "Artist," "Song," "Album" and "Grouping" fields. I would hazard the guess that for any serious classical music listener there is no point in a database -- different information is important to all of us and we will all perform the field-consolidation shuffle differently. We can whine about the need for entirely new tagging systems but we are enough of a minority that no one listens, so in the meantime, we have to Optimize Very Highly.
In short, just type the damn information in yourself if you want it to be accurate. There is no other way.
But I don't know how a lot of people can use their keyboards, especially for hours a day. Whenever I'm in any office I see all these keyboards where the keys have turned various shades of brown and feel rough to the touch. Eeeew.
People in the U-district are mellow, although the neighboring University Park area is not. People in Magnolia and my part of Greenlake (by Albertsons, RIP) certainly had their issues -- I heard about more than a few blocked-view lawsuits in Magnolia, and someone once left one of my Greenlake neighbors a nasty note when she replaced a (rusty) metal mailbox with a plastic one. ("Destroying the character of the neighborhood" was how the concerned citizen put it.)
But the best Seattle thing that happened to me was just last year... I was sharing a View Ridge house with 2 roommates. One of my roommates parked his car on the street, legally. The woman next door, whose car was already parked next to his, came out of her house and chased him, saying it was "her" parking spot, and what did he think he was doing using the street when we had a driveway? Pointing out the parking spot was legal and public did nothing to mollify her. She wouldn't talk to any of us after that. If I hadn't been parking my car in the garage I would have made sure to park it there every day...
This is the whole *problem* with your anti-regulatory logic. In many settings the disabled are not enough of a presence to make a real dent in the market... yet, unlike other market participants, they can't just go and change the conditions that are causing the market not to serve them.
In the transit case, it was *not* the market but the ADA, through lawsuits, that prompted the changes. A market solution would have had disabled people who needed to get somewhere begging for charity as they had for the previous hundred years, because transportation for the disabled is expensive, disabled people tend to be poor, and the market just won't support private services. In contrast, once there was an ADA, within a decade there was a revolution in urban transportation (at least in the more progressive markets) for disabled riders. I am happy to pay a few more bucks in taxes to have a disability-friendly transportation network so people can get around with independence and dignity.
Businesses start to focus on a particular group of people.
Yes, they should. Again, the disabled, unlike secular bookbuyers, people with hair, or fat people, are not going to be served naturally by the market -- exactly because of the reasons you describe. They are not that numerous and it is expensive to serve them. Our choice as a society is to marginalize them in the name of market logic or to spend a little collective money to ensure they can live under the same conditions as everyone else.
This is not to say the current system is entirely fair. Small businesses facing unreasonable costs to achieve ADA compliance should be offered partial subsidies, so they don't bear a disproportionate burden. Still, what kind of 2-story elevator would have cost $150k? One with gold doors? And why would you need a special license under the ADA to build a ramp? Yes, you need a contractor license, but you needed that anyway. Your examples are fishy because you're starting with an ideological agenda instead of the facts.
I finally broke through with a task-centered approach. "Open Word. See... you can type anything you want. Now choose 'Save.' That's a file... Now open iTunes. That track there, that I imported from your CD... that's also a file." By showing her examples I was able to give her something to attach the abstract concepts to. Similarly, she did not understand "directories" until she understood what these "files" were that she could organize in "directories."
The great shortcoming of interfaces today is that they don't allow enough configuration of "simple" or "complex." When you first turn on a machine, it should ask you: "Do you like computers?" Then: "How comfortable are you with computers?" If the answer is "I'm dal20402's Mom," then the machine should not show ANYTHING except a documents folder and an annotated list of applications. Conversely, a power user on the same OS should be able to display everything.
Error handling also needs work. No current OS is good enough at diagnosing errors and offering feedback useful to the n00b. The machine should be able to say to the user: "My file system is corrupt. Run Disk Utility." ...not "4E 02 24 AB 65 23..." even under difficult circumstances. But error handling is unglamorous, so developers don't spend enough time on it. If it were well done, we would need to spend a lot less time explaining things over and over again.