1. I never said OBD/PCM was the *only* tool to use. I just said it was exceedingly useful... and it is.
2. What do field reprogrammable maps have to do with diagnostic error codes? It basically means you can "overclock" your cars engine... nothing else. It has nothing to do with diagnostics.
3. Cars *DO* self adjust. Most cars store and use performance data from the last 5,000 miles. The dealership is not reprogramming your PCM for high altitude driving. They are clearing the data the PCM has from low altitude, the PCM then gathers and uses high-altitude data. You can accomplish the same thing by disconnecting your battery for an hour. Any mechanic worth a d*mn knows this.
4. I will readily admit that there are some OBD codes that are voodoo but they do get cracked. It's a computer... hack it.
I'm not trying to be a jack*ss... I have friends in the automotive industry... most don't. I'm just trying to say there's a solution there... we just need to improve it.
There already is a government mandated standard for getting access to engine information. It's called OBD and you read codes off with a $100 reader. Your local AutoZone, etc. will usually even let you borrow a reader if you need to.
OBD defines a set of specific codes for specific errors or measurements. It also allows manufacturers to define their own codes and measurements. I don't know of single vehicle whose manufacturer specific codes are not publicly available. Okay, you may have to pull out a book or look it up online (e.g. here is the list of codes for may BMW E46 3-series) but it's out there and it's an amazing thing. The newer cars will even give you details like your exact fuel/air mixture... in real-time. 9 times out of 10 the code pulled off the reader will tell me exactly what's wrong my car.
It amazes me how many hobbyist and even professional mechanics complain about this. The tools are there, and cheap, just learn how to use them.
They weren't warned of tornadoes... forest fires... etc.
I'm certain these things cause more deaths than AM radio. Seriously... what were these jackholes thinking?
The simple fact of the matter is that what you perceive as a "better" image, others won't. You may look at the primary subject matter, other will look at that and the background. You may be concerned about the contrast on the picture while others will look at the colors.
While I understand that you're really looking for a good median there is truth to the axiom that "a picture says a thousand words". Anytime you monkey with it, you're stripping at least a few those words away.
I think a better question is not "how do a compress this picture" but "what pictures should I keep".
Just my $.02
I've been doing a lot of federal contract work over the bast 6-7 years and I can guess the first 4-5 digits of most people's SSN's off the top of my head. The first three digits are a easy.
Grew up in Texas and now live in NYC. Yes the pace of life here is different but it's very easy to "smell the roses"... Central Park, Prospect Park, Fort Tyron. The north half of the Hudson trail, which is in Manhattan, is basically a forest. Even the urban areas can be relaxing... I'll eat breakfast on the breakwater of the BPC North Marina every now in then. 2-3 blocks from ground zero but you can watch all the boats glide by on the Hudson... it's relaxing (until the !#$!@#%! tourists show up:p).
Your home is what you make of it.
No. Kent State is being brought up to refute the poster stating that people in the US don't protest because they were scared too. I did not draw any comparisons between the situation in Iran and Kent State other than the fact that there were protests and people died in them.
Additionally... you're right... we don't have all the facts about the protests in Iran but a lot of what we do have is from the protesters themselves so it is probably not completely unbiased.
I'm guessing you've never lived in D.C. or New York were protests are common things. Among the dozens or hundreds a year, there's at least one protest against the NYPD for a shooting, rape, etc. That puts the protesters directly up against the people they're protesting against. And a lot of these are a few dozen people but some are large, loud and pissed. There was a police shooting in NYC a few years ago and Jesse Jackson lead a march on City Hall. The crowd was loud enough I could hear them through a closed office door on the twentieth floor.
Actually just look back at the 2000 presidential election, there was a lot of protesting against the results in Florida... across the country. The tea parties earlier this year were protests.
So yes... US citizens can and do protest. Thankfully we live in a country where that usually doesn't lead to bloodshed... but even that has happened on very rare occasion. Complete with pictures of people being shot and dying.
I didn't make my point clear. *All* IPv6 traffic goes through SWIP... no matter what. Even ipv6.he.net goes through Amsterdam, and HE has three IPv6 peering sites in NYC. It seems to me that if BGP was setup properly it would use an HE router instead. So I'm going to make a WAG and say either:
1. They only peer with SWIP for IPv6
2. They didn't implement BGP properly
Either way, routing all NYC IPv6 traffic through a 6to4 router in Europe doesn't make sense.
That's because you're using your own tunnel... not there's. If I setup a hurricane tunnel on my router than I would have the same trace. My comment centers around the fact that this is Time Warners *default* behavior. So, as more users start to use IPv6 aware apps there will be increased traffic going to the gateway that TW is using in Amsterdam... which is silly.
However, they're being really evil and routing all their traffic through SWIP's 6 network... Which means everything gets routed over to Amsterdam and then back. e.g.:
C:\Users\Mike>tracert -6 ipv6.google.com
Tracing route to ipv6.l.google.com [2001:4860:b004::68] over a maximum of 30 hops:
1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms 2002:185a:90f:1234::1 2 * * * Request timed out. 3 109 ms 107 ms 109 ms ams-core-1.tengige0-0-0-0.swip.net [2a00:800:0:1::1:1] 4 110 ms 110 ms 109 ms ams16-core-1.gigabiteth4-0-0.swip.net [2a00:800:0:1::2b:1] 5 105 ms 109 ms 107 ms pr61.ams04.net.google.com [2001:7f8:1::a501:5169:1]
Well googles local AMS server handles it but you get the idea. It's slower and you have to wonder how long before SWIP gets pissed.
I'm not sure which cars you've been working on, but the OBD-II interface on my 2001 BMW provides an insane amount of information. Fuel flows, air flows, oxygen sensor voltage, etc... all real time.
A lot of times people are just using those little $100-200 hand held OBD-II readers you can buy at PepBoys. Those just flash the error codes and maybe some real time information. Repair shops will have a dedicated console or a laptop with software that can display all the additional information.
Your right in that it won't always tell you the specific problem... a busted catalytic convert will show up as a bad post-cat O2 sensor. However, it does provide very detailed and specific information that allows you narrow down the problem before you even start tooling on the car.
I have worked with companies that implement and use "algorithmic" trading. The real problem is that algorithmic trading doesn't try to beat the market... it tries to beat other algorithmic traders. The idea is to get the trades in before anyone else and there is only so much analysis you can do in a given period of time. Honestly, there's no real analysis to it... it's snap judgments based off a few dozen indicators.
It's the equivalent of saying you should guess all C's on standardized tests. On average it works... but you should be shooting for better than average.
Just because it's a desert doesn't mean it gets no precipitation, just very little. It's been averaging 4" a year at the south pole since they started taking measurements. Besides, the idea of it being too cold to snow is a myth:
http://www.weatherimagery.com/blog/too-cold-to-snow/
I'm not hand waving it away. Which benchmarks, which applications? I can find benchmarks that have Opteron's outperforming Xeon's and vice-a-versa. There are benchmarks where Vista outperforms Windows 7 and... again... vica versa.
Making blanket statements like "Windows doesn't scale" is FUD. It's correct to say that Samba scales much better on linux than Windows 2003 File Server does on the same hardware. However, Oracle Database server scales equally well on both platforms.
As always... use the right tool for the job and make an informed decision. Which it sounds like you did for your environment. However, having supported Java App Servers, Seibel, Oracle, MS-SQL, etc. in HP/HA environments I can tell your blanket statement is not correct.
This is common FUD and the same was said of Linux until a few years ago. Don't confuse application scalability with OS scalability. Windows 2003 and 2008 server scale well and properly support NUMA systems (2000 and NT did not)... however most applications are not written or run in a scalable manner. The OS has no knowledge of an applications threading or memory access patterns and unless the application takes some proactive measures, performance will suffer on any platform.
And.. I don't see what's so hard about right clicking an app in program manager and clicking "set affinity". Affinity can be permanently set with the imagecfg utility.
I've never understood why video card manufacturers play there cards so close to the vest. The magic sauce is in the hardware... not the API that interfaces with it. Yes... the API gives some insight into what the hardware is doing... but not enough to reverse engineer the product.
It used to be that cable channels were for public access, religious stations and poorly scrambled movie channels (that teenage boys would still watch late at night... *cough*)
More and more, cable content is proving to be equal to or even superior to what broadcast television offers. The Closer, Burn Notice, Monk, etc. are all pulling in strong ratings. Yes... Idol pulled in a 14.8 rating last week and The Closer pulled in a 3.6. But... there are three broadcast channels and a ton of cable channels. The NFL moving Monday Night Football to ESPN and playing certain games only on the NFL network was one of the final signs. The broadcast networks have managed to keep this in their court for years... b/c it's a cash cow. They can't anymore... b/c of declining viewership. Death by a thousand paper cuts.
Broadcast TV won't go away... but their programming is going to focus more and more on local news and cheap "pop" programming (like Idol).
This is not a knock on Wine or Wine developers. Hear me out.
Applications develop to a platform. While Wine is technically a platform... it's raison d'être is to emulate the Windows platform. So... asking Windows developers to support it is essentially double-think. You're writing to the emulation platform and not the platform it's supposed to be emulating.
For arguments sake lets say the Redhat or the Debian group came out and said they were going to recognize applications that ran on the Linux 2.4 or 2.2 kernel. The immediate question would be... why? Why are we writing to this standard instead of the current 2.6 standard?
Like I said... this is not a knock on Wine. More and more apps are running on it everyday... which means they're meeting their goal of emulation. Rewarding programs just b/c they don't exercise the full windows API is a step backwards.... for everyone. Recognize the companies that step in and fill the gap so their programs do work. Recognize progress not stagnation.
Air Force one isn't flown like a normal passenger jet. One key difference is they always land with enough fuel to take off and get to a safe location (preferably a US or friendly military base). Landing overweight like this is extremely stressful on the plane's airframe. That's why you see commercial jets dump or burn off fuel before an emergency landing.
Another problem is that, since there are only 2 and both have to be available 24-7, upgrading them is really not possible. For example, if they were to re-engine them they would have to pull one off the line and spend months doing the refit and testing.
Ext3 is a hack on top of Ext2. It's popular b/c distributions default to it b/c it's easy to support and when you hit "create filesystem" it defaults to ext2/3.
In the long run... XFS is...
1. Faster.
2. Resizable. You buy another hard drive and just add it. It takes a while but it works.
3. Built for journaling.
Ext2/3 has it's place. Boot partions and portable drives. But to indicate that ext3 or even ext4 is state of the are or has "won the war" and that xfs or jfs haven't gained traction is... well... wrong.
I gave up running games on my PC a long time ago. I can buy a $500 video card or I can run a workstation with 8 gig's of RAM, a mediocre video card and a hardware RAID card. It's insanely fast for applications, development, etc.
If I want to play a game... I fire up my Xbox (which I paid for) and pop in my game (that I paid for) and it just works. Everytime.
The difference is if I try to build or install something on linux... sometimes it takes some work. With the Xbox I just hit "start" and I good to go.
My workstation is for work and my console is for play.
I consider myself pretty laid back and accepting of just about anything... but there are things on the internet that just don't belong there. Be it videos of people being killed, pictures of pre-pubescent(*) children, viruses that screw up networks and spam that clogs up networks at will.
If the net does not police itself, then the government will and it will go down hill from there. Can you imagine the FCC regulating content on the internet? China has already done this and Australia is starting to.
(*) I make the distinction of pre-pubescent b/c even in the United States the laws vary about when and how someone will be considered an adult and I want to dispel the straw man of "Well... in some countries a 15 y/o is an adult so you're infringing on their beliefs." No where is someone 10 or under considered an adult. Yet there are people on the net who deal with sexual material of this age or under.
Actually... 80 is the speed limit in very rural Texas and many states have a speed limit of 75 in rural areas. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_limits_in_the_United_States. If you've ever driven in rural west Texas, Montana, etc... you know that the roads are very flat and you can easily see 2-3+ miles out in front of you. There is no reason you can't go 80mph in dry daylight conditions. The Texas DPS was actually for raising the speed limits. They're actually trying to raise it on sections of The Dallas North Tollway and the GWB Tollway as well... because they're basically autobahns. Very flat, very straight pieces of road... and so smooth.
You're also neglecting the fact that other people do speed. I had an incident in Colorado where I was driving a rent car and didn't consider the altitude. I merged and ended up cutting off a trucker who was in the right hand lane and was going well over the speed limit. The a**hole tried to cut me off 5-6 times before I finally pulled off at a state trooper station between Denver and Colorado Springs.
Actually... many states in the US do not allow a full license until your 18. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driver's_license_in_the_United_States. However, the definition of "Full License" varies from state to state. As one of the posts below this pointed out... there are many states where driving is pretty much a necessity (Alaska, Montana, the Dakotas, west Texas, etc.). At it's widest my grandfather's ranch was about 30 miles across... and if we had to bring cattle back we weren't dragging them behind a horse. However, we weren't driving on a public road either.
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1. I never said OBD/PCM was the *only* tool to use. I just said it was exceedingly useful... and it is. 2. What do field reprogrammable maps have to do with diagnostic error codes? It basically means you can "overclock" your cars engine... nothing else. It has nothing to do with diagnostics. 3. Cars *DO* self adjust. Most cars store and use performance data from the last 5,000 miles. The dealership is not reprogramming your PCM for high altitude driving. They are clearing the data the PCM has from low altitude, the PCM then gathers and uses high-altitude data. You can accomplish the same thing by disconnecting your battery for an hour. Any mechanic worth a d*mn knows this. 4. I will readily admit that there are some OBD codes that are voodoo but they do get cracked. It's a computer... hack it. I'm not trying to be a jack*ss... I have friends in the automotive industry... most don't. I'm just trying to say there's a solution there... we just need to improve it.
There already is a government mandated standard for getting access to engine information. It's called OBD and you read codes off with a $100 reader. Your local AutoZone, etc. will usually even let you borrow a reader if you need to.
... in real-time. 9 times out of 10 the code pulled off the reader will tell me exactly what's wrong my car.
OBD defines a set of specific codes for specific errors or measurements. It also allows manufacturers to define their own codes and measurements. I don't know of single vehicle whose manufacturer specific codes are not publicly available. Okay, you may have to pull out a book or look it up online (e.g. here is the list of codes for may BMW E46 3-series) but it's out there and it's an amazing thing. The newer cars will even give you details like your exact fuel/air mixture
It amazes me how many hobbyist and even professional mechanics complain about this. The tools are there, and cheap, just learn how to use them.
They weren't warned of tornadoes... forest fires... etc. I'm certain these things cause more deaths than AM radio. Seriously... what were these jackholes thinking?
The simple fact of the matter is that what you perceive as a "better" image, others won't. You may look at the primary subject matter, other will look at that and the background. You may be concerned about the contrast on the picture while others will look at the colors. While I understand that you're really looking for a good median there is truth to the axiom that "a picture says a thousand words". Anytime you monkey with it, you're stripping at least a few those words away. I think a better question is not "how do a compress this picture" but "what pictures should I keep". Just my $.02
I've been doing a lot of federal contract work over the bast 6-7 years and I can guess the first 4-5 digits of most people's SSN's off the top of my head. The first three digits are a easy.
Grew up in Texas and now live in NYC. Yes the pace of life here is different but it's very easy to "smell the roses"... Central Park, Prospect Park, Fort Tyron. The north half of the Hudson trail, which is in Manhattan, is basically a forest. Even the urban areas can be relaxing... I'll eat breakfast on the breakwater of the BPC North Marina every now in then. 2-3 blocks from ground zero but you can watch all the boats glide by on the Hudson... it's relaxing (until the !#$!@#%! tourists show up :p).
Your home is what you make of it.
No. Kent State is being brought up to refute the poster stating that people in the US don't protest because they were scared too. I did not draw any comparisons between the situation in Iran and Kent State other than the fact that there were protests and people died in them. Additionally... you're right... we don't have all the facts about the protests in Iran but a lot of what we do have is from the protesters themselves so it is probably not completely unbiased.
I'm guessing you've never lived in D.C. or New York were protests are common things. Among the dozens or hundreds a year, there's at least one protest against the NYPD for a shooting, rape, etc. That puts the protesters directly up against the people they're protesting against. And a lot of these are a few dozen people but some are large, loud and pissed. There was a police shooting in NYC a few years ago and Jesse Jackson lead a march on City Hall. The crowd was loud enough I could hear them through a closed office door on the twentieth floor.
Actually just look back at the 2000 presidential election, there was a lot of protesting against the results in Florida... across the country. The tea parties earlier this year were protests.
So yes... US citizens can and do protest. Thankfully we live in a country where that usually doesn't lead to bloodshed... but even that has happened on very rare occasion. Complete with pictures of people being shot and dying.
I didn't make my point clear. *All* IPv6 traffic goes through SWIP... no matter what. Even ipv6.he.net goes through Amsterdam, and HE has three IPv6 peering sites in NYC. It seems to me that if BGP was setup properly it would use an HE router instead. So I'm going to make a WAG and say either:
1. They only peer with SWIP for IPv6
2. They didn't implement BGP properly
Either way, routing all NYC IPv6 traffic through a 6to4 router in Europe doesn't make sense.
That's because you're using your own tunnel... not there's. If I setup a hurricane tunnel on my router than I would have the same trace. My comment centers around the fact that this is Time Warners *default* behavior. So, as more users start to use IPv6 aware apps there will be increased traffic going to the gateway that TW is using in Amsterdam... which is silly.
However, they're being really evil and routing all their traffic through SWIP's 6 network... Which means everything gets routed over to Amsterdam and then back. e.g. :
C:\Users\Mike>tracert -6 ipv6.google.com
Tracing route to ipv6.l.google.com [2001:4860:b004::68] over a maximum of 30 hops:
1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms 2002:185a:90f:1234::1
2 * * * Request timed out.
3 109 ms 107 ms 109 ms ams-core-1.tengige0-0-0-0.swip.net [2a00:800:0:1::1:1]
4 110 ms 110 ms 109 ms ams16-core-1.gigabiteth4-0-0.swip.net [2a00:800:0:1::2b:1]
5 105 ms 109 ms 107 ms pr61.ams04.net.google.com [2001:7f8:1::a501:5169:1]
Well googles local AMS server handles it but you get the idea. It's slower and you have to wonder how long before SWIP gets pissed.
I'm not sure which cars you've been working on, but the OBD-II interface on my 2001 BMW provides an insane amount of information. Fuel flows, air flows, oxygen sensor voltage, etc... all real time. A lot of times people are just using those little $100-200 hand held OBD-II readers you can buy at PepBoys. Those just flash the error codes and maybe some real time information. Repair shops will have a dedicated console or a laptop with software that can display all the additional information. Your right in that it won't always tell you the specific problem... a busted catalytic convert will show up as a bad post-cat O2 sensor. However, it does provide very detailed and specific information that allows you narrow down the problem before you even start tooling on the car.
I have worked with companies that implement and use "algorithmic" trading. The real problem is that algorithmic trading doesn't try to beat the market... it tries to beat other algorithmic traders. The idea is to get the trades in before anyone else and there is only so much analysis you can do in a given period of time. Honestly, there's no real analysis to it... it's snap judgments based off a few dozen indicators. It's the equivalent of saying you should guess all C's on standardized tests. On average it works... but you should be shooting for better than average.
Just because it's a desert doesn't mean it gets no precipitation, just very little. It's been averaging 4" a year at the south pole since they started taking measurements. Besides, the idea of it being too cold to snow is a myth: http://www.weatherimagery.com/blog/too-cold-to-snow/
I'm not hand waving it away. Which benchmarks, which applications? I can find benchmarks that have Opteron's outperforming Xeon's and vice-a-versa. There are benchmarks where Vista outperforms Windows 7 and ... again... vica versa.
Making blanket statements like "Windows doesn't scale" is FUD. It's correct to say that Samba scales much better on linux than Windows 2003 File Server does on the same hardware. However, Oracle Database server scales equally well on both platforms.
As always... use the right tool for the job and make an informed decision. Which it sounds like you did for your environment. However, having supported Java App Servers, Seibel, Oracle, MS-SQL, etc. in HP/HA environments I can tell your blanket statement is not correct.
This is common FUD and the same was said of Linux until a few years ago. Don't confuse application scalability with OS scalability. Windows 2003 and 2008 server scale well and properly support NUMA systems (2000 and NT did not)... however most applications are not written or run in a scalable manner. The OS has no knowledge of an applications threading or memory access patterns and unless the application takes some proactive measures, performance will suffer on any platform. And.. I don't see what's so hard about right clicking an app in program manager and clicking "set affinity". Affinity can be permanently set with the imagecfg utility.
I've never understood why video card manufacturers play there cards so close to the vest. The magic sauce is in the hardware... not the API that interfaces with it. Yes... the API gives some insight into what the hardware is doing... but not enough to reverse engineer the product.
It used to be that cable channels were for public access, religious stations and poorly scrambled movie channels (that teenage boys would still watch late at night... *cough*) More and more, cable content is proving to be equal to or even superior to what broadcast television offers. The Closer, Burn Notice, Monk, etc. are all pulling in strong ratings. Yes... Idol pulled in a 14.8 rating last week and The Closer pulled in a 3.6. But... there are three broadcast channels and a ton of cable channels. The NFL moving Monday Night Football to ESPN and playing certain games only on the NFL network was one of the final signs. The broadcast networks have managed to keep this in their court for years... b/c it's a cash cow. They can't anymore... b/c of declining viewership. Death by a thousand paper cuts. Broadcast TV won't go away... but their programming is going to focus more and more on local news and cheap "pop" programming (like Idol).
This is not a knock on Wine or Wine developers. Hear me out.
Applications develop to a platform. While Wine is technically a platform... it's raison d'être is to emulate the Windows platform. So... asking Windows developers to support it is essentially double-think. You're writing to the emulation platform and not the platform it's supposed to be emulating.
For arguments sake lets say the Redhat or the Debian group came out and said they were going to recognize applications that ran on the Linux 2.4 or 2.2 kernel. The immediate question would be... why? Why are we writing to this standard instead of the current 2.6 standard?
Like I said... this is not a knock on Wine. More and more apps are running on it everyday... which means they're meeting their goal of emulation. Rewarding programs just b/c they don't exercise the full windows API is a step backwards.... for everyone. Recognize the companies that step in and fill the gap so their programs do work. Recognize progress not stagnation.
Air Force one isn't flown like a normal passenger jet. One key difference is they always land with enough fuel to take off and get to a safe location (preferably a US or friendly military base). Landing overweight like this is extremely stressful on the plane's airframe. That's why you see commercial jets dump or burn off fuel before an emergency landing. Another problem is that, since there are only 2 and both have to be available 24-7, upgrading them is really not possible. For example, if they were to re-engine them they would have to pull one off the line and spend months doing the refit and testing.
Ext3 is a hack on top of Ext2. It's popular b/c distributions default to it b/c it's easy to support and when you hit "create filesystem" it defaults to ext2/3. In the long run... XFS is... 1. Faster. 2. Resizable. You buy another hard drive and just add it. It takes a while but it works. 3. Built for journaling. Ext2/3 has it's place. Boot partions and portable drives. But to indicate that ext3 or even ext4 is state of the are or has "won the war" and that xfs or jfs haven't gained traction is... well... wrong.
I gave up running games on my PC a long time ago. I can buy a $500 video card or I can run a workstation with 8 gig's of RAM, a mediocre video card and a hardware RAID card. It's insanely fast for applications, development, etc. If I want to play a game... I fire up my Xbox (which I paid for) and pop in my game (that I paid for) and it just works. Everytime. The difference is if I try to build or install something on linux... sometimes it takes some work. With the Xbox I just hit "start" and I good to go. My workstation is for work and my console is for play.
I consider myself pretty laid back and accepting of just about anything... but there are things on the internet that just don't belong there. Be it videos of people being killed, pictures of pre-pubescent(*) children, viruses that screw up networks and spam that clogs up networks at will. If the net does not police itself, then the government will and it will go down hill from there. Can you imagine the FCC regulating content on the internet? China has already done this and Australia is starting to. (*) I make the distinction of pre-pubescent b/c even in the United States the laws vary about when and how someone will be considered an adult and I want to dispel the straw man of "Well... in some countries a 15 y/o is an adult so you're infringing on their beliefs." No where is someone 10 or under considered an adult. Yet there are people on the net who deal with sexual material of this age or under.
Actually... 80 is the speed limit in very rural Texas and many states have a speed limit of 75 in rural areas. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_limits_in_the_United_States. If you've ever driven in rural west Texas, Montana, etc... you know that the roads are very flat and you can easily see 2-3+ miles out in front of you. There is no reason you can't go 80mph in dry daylight conditions. The Texas DPS was actually for raising the speed limits. They're actually trying to raise it on sections of The Dallas North Tollway and the GWB Tollway as well... because they're basically autobahns. Very flat, very straight pieces of road... and so smooth. You're also neglecting the fact that other people do speed. I had an incident in Colorado where I was driving a rent car and didn't consider the altitude. I merged and ended up cutting off a trucker who was in the right hand lane and was going well over the speed limit. The a**hole tried to cut me off 5-6 times before I finally pulled off at a state trooper station between Denver and Colorado Springs.
Actually... many states in the US do not allow a full license until your 18. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driver's_license_in_the_United_States. However, the definition of "Full License" varies from state to state. As one of the posts below this pointed out... there are many states where driving is pretty much a necessity (Alaska, Montana, the Dakotas, west Texas, etc.). At it's widest my grandfather's ranch was about 30 miles across... and if we had to bring cattle back we weren't dragging them behind a horse. However, we weren't driving on a public road either.