While it is true that the power of brakes exceeds the power of the engine, you are forgetting about brake fade (from heat). Brakes lose stopping power quickly as they heat up. I know a thing or two about this because auto racing is my hobby. Believe me, heat-related brake failure is a real problem and it's scary as hell when it happens.
Car & Driver magazine just did a very good test and analysis of the "Runaway Toyota" problem. In a nutshell, if the problem happens at low speed it is fairly easy to stop the car (the stopping distance increases slightly). However, at high speed, the brakes fade prior to stopping and the car does not stop. Interestingly, most drive-by-wire systems have a fail-safe that detects acceleration during braking and cuts fuel to the engine just enough to slow it down while leaving it running enough to keep power steering functional. That's what Toyota should do as well. A firmware patch.
What power do we have against natural oligopolies? Where else are you going to go? Should you just get along without the internet? Or iTunes?
This is a classic case of where government regulation is appropriate. Monopolies and oligopolies never police themselves. Why would they? That doesn't increase profit.
Competition is great! But until we have some broadband competition in America, government involvement is essential.
For example, Apple has taken some marketshare away from Powerpoint with Keynote (insofar as I've seen people using it instead of MS Office), but only because they have a captive market to sell to.
Huh? In what way does Apple have a captive market? Mac users have choices; MS Office 2004, NeoOffice, OpenOffice, or Keynote. I personally used Office 2004 for several years. I chose to buy iWork 08 because it's a great applications suite! Now I find myself using it almost exclusively.
Mac users are a discerning lot. We are not forced into anything.
In what way does the skepticism of laymen undermine the consensus of climate scientists? You have to ask the question; "Why am I skeptical?". Are you skeptical because you are privy to peer-reviewed science that undermines the consensus? Or (more likely), does it just "seems like" it's all a hoax?
Most people operate purely in the realm of what "seems right", which has little correlation to what is right.
And I am baffled by the statement; "Correlation is not causation". I'm not betting against a strong correlation.
Ciao
Rick
Re:The Saddam/911 myth persists because powerful
on
Why Myths Persist
·
· Score: 1
Puleeze! I'll grant you that Cheney or Bush did not say "Saddam blew up the Twin Towers" specifically. But what the heck do you think that they were doing when they mentioned 9/11 and Saddam in the same breath many times? This is how propaganda works!
You don't have to, nor even want to make specific claims. Specific claims can be verified or falsified. Instead you create the illusion of whatever you want the sheep to believe and hammer it into their skull. Eventually, they will believe whatever you want them to believe. It's just Propaganda 101.
Bush even admitted as much; "You have to catapult the propaganda".
It's easy to see who uses a technology and who just carps about it. On to the debunking:
1) Better inform the developers of Eclipse, Netbeans, Oxygen, Limewire, GWT, Tomcat, Azureus,... never mind, the list is too long. There is no other technology even competes for multiple platform application development.
2) Wha?? How can you tell? Are you somehow privy to implementation details of all these slow web services? Sounds like either a major security leak or you are omniscient.
3) I don't even know what the hell this one is about. Not enough logic here to even argue with. Java is not the only language running on the JVM. And in what way does C# resemble C++? It's closer to Java!.NET is not unsuccessful, but it's hardly a raging success outside the die-hard MS development houses.
You have it backwards. A scientific theory must be testable, and testing does not prove that something is true. Rather, it may at most prove that the theory is false. That's a big difference. "Not False" is not equivalent to "Is True". As far as science is concerned, there are no absolute truths, only ever-improving theories.
So, whomever claims that Gore is promoting "Junk Science" must publish evidence that demonstrates where the science wrong. End of discussion. (I wish)
The non-farm worker productivity rate has been increasing by about 2.8% a year or so for some time now. Naturally the tech companies attribute this increase to technology.
One could argue with how worker productivity is measured (I don't have a clue about that), but it's at least a data point. The article offers no data points. Rather it offers anecdotes and how people feel.
I am by no means a tech "fan-boy", I suspect that we have redefined productivity to include how effectively we deal with technology (see, it's recursive). I doubt that it has much to do with goods and services, but I'm just pulling that out of my hat. Much like the article.
Well, I know nothing about the internals of Asterisk. But I am experienced with Linux and a couple of other OSS projects. In my opinion, a lot of OSS projects tend to be hair-balls. Evidently, the "Million monkeys in front of a million keyboards" principle is at play.
the secret game (Cisco and Nortel being the worst offenders)
Care to elaborate on this? Cisco also sells a lot of SIP gear and are very serious about standards.
Cisco's proprietary thing is SCCP, but SCCP not secret. Cisco tried to take SCCP to the standards committees, but that got shot down by competitors on the committees.
Cisco sells SCCP products out of necessity, it's the only way to support the "300 classic PBX features". Standard SIP cannot do it (yet), and SIP with proprietary extensions is no better than SCCP. When the SIP evolves to support the rich PBX feature set, Cisco will be right there (in fact CIsco is involved in the SIP standards).
Agreed, however, you forgot one category: C++ bigots.
I recently worked on a (successful) large Java project. A large group of old crusty C++ "experts" moved onto the project and convinced management that Java was too slow and too large. They further convinced management that they could port the huge application from Java to C++ in 2 months. Yes, that's right 2 months (the original application has been in development for over 3 years).
Long story sort, it's been close to a year now, the C++ application is dramatically larger than the Java application (about 4x) and is no faster. It's also full of memory leaks and bugs.
As the "fine" article stated, Java is a bit slower than C (60% the speed of), but Java is in general not slower and larger than C++.
You have a point, especially about the corporate media.
I am greatly amused by the old conservative saw of the liberal media. There was a time when the media was liberal, but not anymore. Journalism is dead in America. Thank God for the internet.
Yeah, Europeans have a reputation for being cosmopolitan. While Americans have always been more self-absorbed. It's part of our culture... We don't need no durn furriners, this is Amurica!
Slashdot Mirror
While it is true that the power of brakes exceeds the power of the engine, you are forgetting about brake fade (from heat). Brakes lose stopping power quickly as they heat up. I know a thing or two about this because auto racing is my hobby. Believe me, heat-related brake failure is a real problem and it's scary as hell when it happens.
Car & Driver magazine just did a very good test and analysis of the "Runaway Toyota" problem. In a nutshell, if the problem happens at low speed it is fairly easy to stop the car (the stopping distance increases slightly). However, at high speed, the brakes fade prior to stopping and the car does not stop. Interestingly, most drive-by-wire systems have a fail-safe that detects acceleration during braking and cuts fuel to the engine just enough to slow it down while leaving it running enough to keep power steering functional. That's what Toyota should do as well. A firmware patch.
Ciao
This is a classic case of where government regulation is appropriate. Monopolies and oligopolies never police themselves. Why would they? That doesn't increase profit.
Competition is great! But until we have some broadband competition in America, government involvement is essential.
Huh? In what way does Apple have a captive market? Mac users have choices; MS Office 2004, NeoOffice, OpenOffice, or Keynote. I personally used Office 2004 for several years. I chose to buy iWork 08 because it's a great applications suite! Now I find myself using it almost exclusively.
Mac users are a discerning lot. We are not forced into anything.
Ciao,
Rick
Most people operate purely in the realm of what "seems right", which has little correlation to what is right.
And I am baffled by the statement; "Correlation is not causation". I'm not betting against a strong correlation.
Ciao
Rick
Puleeze! I'll grant you that Cheney or Bush did not say "Saddam blew up the Twin Towers" specifically. But what the heck do you think that they were doing when they mentioned 9/11 and Saddam in the same breath many times? This is how propaganda works!
You don't have to, nor even want to make specific claims. Specific claims can be verified or falsified. Instead you create the illusion of whatever you want the sheep to believe and hammer it into their skull. Eventually, they will believe whatever you want them to believe. It's just Propaganda 101.
Bush even admitted as much; "You have to catapult the propaganda".
It's easy to see who uses a technology and who just carps about it. On to the debunking:
1) Better inform the developers of Eclipse, Netbeans, Oxygen, Limewire, GWT, Tomcat, Azureus, ... never mind, the list is too long. There is no other technology even competes for multiple platform application development.
2) Wha?? How can you tell? Are you somehow privy to implementation details of all these slow web services? Sounds like either a major security leak or you are omniscient.
3) I don't even know what the hell this one is about. Not enough logic here to even argue with. Java is not the only language running on the JVM. And in what way does C# resemble C++? It's closer to Java! .NET is not unsuccessful, but it's hardly a raging success outside the die-hard MS development houses.
Oh the humanity!
Ciao,
Rick
So, whomever claims that Gore is promoting "Junk Science" must publish evidence that demonstrates where the science wrong. End of discussion. (I wish)
Ciao,
Rick
One could argue with how worker productivity is measured (I don't have a clue about that), but it's at least a data point. The article offers no data points. Rather it offers anecdotes and how people feel.
I am by no means a tech "fan-boy", I suspect that we have redefined productivity to include how effectively we deal with technology (see, it's recursive). I doubt that it has much to do with goods and services, but I'm just pulling that out of my hat. Much like the article.
- 97.3% of all statistics are made up
Well, I know nothing about the internals of Asterisk. But I am experienced with Linux and a couple of other OSS projects. In my opinion, a lot of OSS projects tend to be hair-balls. Evidently, the "Million monkeys in front of a million keyboards" principle is at play.
Care to elaborate on this? Cisco also sells a lot of SIP gear and are very serious about standards.
Cisco's proprietary thing is SCCP, but SCCP not secret. Cisco tried to take SCCP to the standards committees, but that got shot down by competitors on the committees.
Cisco sells SCCP products out of necessity, it's the only way to support the "300 classic PBX features". Standard SIP cannot do it (yet), and SIP with proprietary extensions is no better than SCCP. When the SIP evolves to support the rich PBX feature set, Cisco will be right there (in fact CIsco is involved in the SIP standards).
Agreed, however, you forgot one category: C++ bigots. I recently worked on a (successful) large Java project. A large group of old crusty C++ "experts" moved onto the project and convinced management that Java was too slow and too large. They further convinced management that they could port the huge application from Java to C++ in 2 months. Yes, that's right 2 months (the original application has been in development for over 3 years). Long story sort, it's been close to a year now, the C++ application is dramatically larger than the Java application (about 4x) and is no faster. It's also full of memory leaks and bugs. As the "fine" article stated, Java is a bit slower than C (60% the speed of), but Java is in general not slower and larger than C++.
I am greatly amused by the old conservative saw of the liberal media. There was a time when the media was liberal, but not anymore. Journalism is dead in America. Thank God for the internet.
Yeah, Europeans have a reputation for being cosmopolitan. While Americans have always been more self-absorbed. It's part of our culture... We don't need no durn furriners, this is Amurica!
We have become a nation of ignorant slackers.
We are prime targets for demagogues like Bush, O'Reilly, Limbaugh, etc. Who all prey upon our ignorance and insecurities.
Though, I doubt that Europe is much better... Just a different set of players.