Can you not see that a certain width of intersection and slowness of speed that, if the yellow goes off just as you enter the intersection, then you can easily be IN the intersection when your light turns red and it goes green the other way? You have done nothing wrong, but are not "running a red light" and in danger of getting hit by cross traffic. Does this sound right to you?
That has nothing to do with what I posted. The purpose of the yellow light duration doesn't change because municipalities abuse red light revenue cameras.
The purpose of the yellow light duration is not to ensure that a car can traverse the intersection within that duration. The purpose of the yellow light duration is to ensure that a vehicle traveling at the posted speed has enough time to observe the yellow light, decide if the distance to the intersection is sufficient to safely stop the vehicle, and safely stop the vehicle.
The DELAY on the green light for the orthogonal lanes is what needs to be proportional to the time it takes a vehicle to traverse the intersection.
I didn't hire him because I had a feeling that he wouldn't perform well in our company. You don't think that an HR person would actually say "I didn't hire him because XYZ was protected".
Also, in response to this:
It is illegal for an employer to discriminate based on medical conditions
... That depends greatly on the medical condition. Assume I'm colorblind. Want to bet that a media publishing firm could turn me down for a design job and break no laws? There are still pushes to keep colorblind people from becoming medical doctors because the belief is that they might miss a rash or color based symptom (jaundice?)
To say that it is illegal to discriminate based on medical conditions isn't exactly true.
They are longer with increased speed because it takes longer to stop from that higher speed. Yellow lights aren't about the width of the intersection and all about stopping distance before the intersection.
Unless the brain taps into some unknown force of nature, it can be completely simulated and run on any computer available today. Might run a little slow on a flip phone, but still..
That all depends on how narrowly you define 'unknown force of nature'. Let's imagine you simulate a basic door lock.
Do you assume the lock has two states? Locked/Unlocked
Do you assume the lock has 4 states? Locked+Keyinserted Locked+Keyremoved Unlocked+Keyinserted Unlocked+Keyremoved
Do you assume the lock has individual states each corresponding to the key entering the keyhole and the position of grooves to each tumbler. Do you then double these states to consider the period where the key is being removed from the keyhole?
As you can see, something as simple as a 'Door Lock' has an infinite number of states depending on how accurately your model needs to be. Don't think you need to simulate individual tumblers? I think you do, because the one on the interior side will receive much less wear than the ones closer to the keyhole, so it's likely that one will last longer, wear the key less, etc.
What you suggest is that everything could be simulated because it must follow known physics. However even if you assume that we have a perfect understanding of the physics which influences a neuron, we would still lack the understanding of how to apply those physical laws to a model which could be accurate enough to predict the behavior of a simulated neuron for any significant period of time.
Consider a single mote of dust in a sealed 1m^3 glass container with 1 mole of hydrogen sealed within. Tell me, with accuracy to 1.0e-90 meters where it will land if released from the interior top of the container.
One of the key differences is that when entities settle out of court, the plaintiff sets a settlement cost at an amount which would be reasonable to offset their losses.
ie: You broke my fence, I am typically entitled to the cost to a repair of that fence and attributable damages (cows wandered out via the gap). Such a cost might be $4000. However, perhaps we agree that because the fence was pretty degraded, it isn't fair for you to have to pay for the cost of replacing the fence (effectively giving me a NEW fence for free) but a portion of the cost commensurate to the value of the original needing repairs anyway fence.
The main difference, of course, is that the settlement amount tends to focus on repairing the actual harm done.
I only type in the browser when I absolutely need to type in the web browser.
For most of my web browsing, it's a pure click interface. Even on Chrome, I click on a new tab, and my most visited websites show up as thumbnails. Slashdot has a thumbnail, XKCD, Gmail, etc.
The removal of the button would be like Chrome suddenly removing all the tabs for websites and requiring that I type the first letters of the address in the addressbar every time I wanted to open a website.
It's not that one method is better than the other for all people, it's that there used to be two methods, and one was eliminated because people were told that the other method is better for you, therefore you must use it.
No, I don't want to haggle. It's annoying and a waste of time because the only time a 'good' deal occurs is when one side of the transaction gets a 'bad' deal.
I hate buying furniture, I hate buying cars, I hate buying anything where the price advertised isn't even a 'starting offer' it's a price that jumps up $2000 in useless fees which I then have to spend MY time to remove to get the product down to the price that both sides knew was the price the product was going to sell for in the first place.
Assuming a standard keyboard layout, you can't type 'Control Panel' using standard typing positions and your hand on the mouse.
Let's say you were browsing the internet and wanted to change something on the control panel. To do it your way means you have to take your right hand off the mouse and use it to type 'control panel' (or a portion of it. Though even 'co' requires your right hand)
Contrast that to the ability to just continue 'click click clicking' with the mouse. Sure, it seems like trival movement of the hands, but it interrupts the flow that people establish when performing their tasks.
With the start menu, people with both hands on the keyboard could use your method, and people using the mouse could use their method. Without the start menu, people using the mouse must now switch to using the keyboard as an input device.
In case you don't know what that is, it's a herbicide that would burn your throat if you got a whiff of it.
While another poster has pointed out the wiki page for the herbicide, what you state isn't really true.
I bought glyphosate specifically to target poison ivy on my property. I take chemicals pretty seriously, but after reading the warnings, looking up the risks, and working with it for a bit, it seemed pretty benign in terms of actual harmful chemicals (ie: I've purchased lye for making pretzels and that stuff is pretty dangerous).
Burning your throat if you get a whiff of it is simply not true (as inevitably I did get a whiff of it). Perhaps if it were a high concentration(like what would be encountered in production or shipping), but at the concentrations which you dillute it to in order to use it, there was no burning, no smell, and as far as adverse reactions?
The bits of poison ivy I actually touched caused me more skin damage than the glyphosate.
Also, larger hotter stars (than the Sun) don't stay in the main sequence nearly as long, so it's possible that some were just under the threshold to become neutron stars. There is no contradiction there
Very true. One of the things that always seemed counterintuitive, but obvious from a physics perspective, is that there are stars which have formed, burned insanely bright, and 'died', within the age of the Earth, let alone our Sun.
I've found that cross-realm LFD and LFR has simply encouraged people to behave like twats,
You've hit close to what killed WoW for me. Back in the early days I remember playing with a small group of 3 RL friends and about 10 other people we met while doing instances. Deadmines, Gnomergan, Scarlet Monestary, and then they released (can't remember the name, but it had the ogres)
It was tremendous fun to PLAY the game, you could discover hidden secrets, tough your way through a dungeon, and learn with your friends how to beat it. We took screenshots of cool places, beating simple bosses, or just have fun 'claiming' a zone in PvP (before there were even HKs) and trying to fight off the ever growing tide of similarly geared/leveled opponents.
Then, eventually things changed so that the instant you stepped into an instance, you were told exactly how a fight would proceed, which path to walk on in the exact manner to avoid pulling even 1 extra mob, and so on. The 'mystery' was removed and cataloged on some online datamining site. (Thottbot?) That wasn't too bad, you still got your group together from time to time and had fun, but then something happened, and you have identified it:
The meeting stones. No longer did people even care about the story of the zones a dungeon was in, and no longer did they really care who showed up when summoned. There was still some discussion, but you didn't have that, admittedly frustrating, but surprisingly community building task of pulling together a dungeon group.
Then you added in cross-realm groups and communication ceased. You didn't care about the person who got summoned into your group, in fact, you actively hated them because you had no connection to them, and they became a 20% surcharge on your group.
In one quick move, the community was mortally wounded, it didn't bleed out as fast as I expected, but it was certainly septic, and would slowly degrade and die while people wondered, 'why isn't this as fun as it was?'
(of course, there is a whole lot of other mistakes they made which compounded the min/max issues and forced players to play in scripted manners, but the biggest killer of WoW wasn't some instant Wow-killer game, but the poisoning of the community)
It still might be a fraud. Especially since Nestor convinced the operator in one case to switch on the feature that enabled the glitch. But hacking is out of the question.
I'm not so sure, I think it's pretty damned close to hacking.
Let's say I go to Amazon, and I discover that by clicking on a series of links, I get refunded 50% of my previous purchase. I don't know WHY that happens, but I figure out that it does, and now after every purchase, I click that series of links and get refunded that 50%.
Does it matter if I don't physically know that what those clicks are doing is causing a buffer overrun in some portion of Amazon's code which overwrites my previous order's value? (I'm not a hacker, so assume what I typed made sense) All I did was interact with Amazon's interface, yet it was clear that whatever it I was doing to that interface was refunding me money to which I was not entitled to.
I would argue that it IS hacking (but in a very shallow sense) when he used a known bug to cause a computer system to behave in a manner which he knew was incorrect. If he stopped at that point, I'd have a hard time justifying it as 'hacking' as we understand it to be, but when he took it further and used it to steal money, he made it clear that he understood his actions were causing the computer system to behave in a manner which was not intended by the owner of the system.
Again, not 'hacking', but so close to hacking that I'm not sure where I stand on the issue.
The thing is, the prototypes and mockups would be expected to be largely similar to the real thing, and not so wildly different.
I've done my share of military product demos. Prototypes and mockups WILL be different than the real thing. You tend to re-use your demo models for a LONG time because they are not cheap.
One of the units I used for a physical display was just a shell of the unit that was the first test run through the CNC mill and coating process.
Differences: 1. The connector for the final unit was different to accomodate EMI/EMC requirements 2. The milling process had a problem and didn't cut this unit properly, cutting a corner (literally), we used acrylic to build up the corner and painted it to look normal 3. The tray this item would normally be in failed shock/vib testing, the final production tray looked different. 4. A late requirement for extra capability resulted in the final production units having a 'growth' on the back of the units which made their XY profile look quite different than the prototype unit.
However, the unit was good enough for our purposes of giving people a general feel for the size/shape/weight. Unless you looked closely you wouldn't notice the fake corner. Without specific knowledge of the production units, you wouldn't know there should be a bulge in the back.
As for hiding details... the look of components can reveal a great deal about your industrial (or sourcing) capability. Something as simple as 45 degree angles vs 90 degree angles on a tube can reveal a great deal about what North Korea is capable of designing/producing. Maybe those 45 degree angle tubes indicate that they have figured out manufacturing trick XYZ which means they also have the capability to produce N, where N is a critical component in making the missiles reliable to greater than 1000 miles?
There are LOTS of reasons to hide details even if all you are doing is playing 'catch-up'. If you were trying to maintain a clandestine missile sourcing program, you probably wouldn't want the US learning that you managed to snag a bunch of components which are only produced in a certain country. You wouldn't want to risk having that supply source being cut off.
If you can't manage to hold a parade without breaking a rocket, what's the chances you'll be able to launch it without breaking it?
Every time you take a piece of equipment out, you risk breaking it. Even here in the US when procure equipment we procure spares to cover for the inevitable breakage.
The Presidential Limo got stuck in a driveway the other month, do you think the Secret Service is poorly trained? You don't think something like a mechanical failure on a caisson couldn't occur during a parade?
You would be an idiot to place your actual assets at risk to satisfy some authenticity requirement for a parade.
We clean them up, paint them, and turn them into static displays for putting outside of VFWs.
Of course the missiles used in a parade are going to vary, it is a huge waste (and security risk) to have your actual assets all placed in one location and out in the open. This isn't surprising at all.
No. Those mounts are semi-permanent and are not the type which would be used to permanently mount a HDD to a vehicle. The typical consumer mount is accessible to the user and allows for the user to reseat and adjust the ipod if it slips, or needs repositioning. Such a mount would not suffice to hold a HDD in a car as you would never want to have to worry about 'reseating' your HDD ever couple hundred of miles, you would need a permanent mount.
The problem is that with permanent mounts the HDD will experience a different vibration profile. You can't use shock absorbers because over time those wear out and once they are worn out they actually make the vibrations worse. If you don't design this part right, you are going to get a lot of bad press when your brand becomes associated with 'failing audio systems'.
I've actually designed avionics for helicopters, and I was quite surprised when starting out to discover some of the requirements that our reliability engineers demanded of us. Things like 'no shock absorbers' for electronics seemed counter intuitive, until I realized that while you might increase the reliability of a single part, you end up making the inevitable replacement process much more complicated. It was easier to design avionics which could withstand the vibrations than it was to handle the drawbacks of having vibration isolating mounts for the avionics.
So long story short, the types of mounts currently available for iPods may prevent the damaging vibrations, but the reason they are capable of withstanding these vibrations makes them unsuitable for permanent installations.
Because in a nation with the size and diversity of the US, advocates of Socialism seem willfully blind to the fact that there are people who would disagree with the implementation.
On smaller scales (maybe statewide?) it's a different story. If I don't like the way something is implemented I can move to a state with other people who have similar beliefs. In reality, that wouldn't be possible if such things were implemented across the entire US.
Your body absorbs a great amount of the shock/vib that a HDD would be subjected to in a vehicle. Your entire body helps dampen the vibrations.
I wouldn't be surprised if you took that same HDD based iPod, permanently mounted it to your vehicle, that over a large enough sample you would see a great deal more failures due to vibration than a similar group only carried by people (or simply 'mounted' by leaving it on the seat of the car)
You say it's too little too late, but what does that even matter? Sure, I doubt that you will revert your tablet to the stock software, but you far outside their target market. You are also a member of an astonishingly small community with respect to the overall size of the eReader market. (I'm running CM on all of my tablets and phones, so I'm part of that community, but it IS tiny in comparison)
Honest question, how is your statement any different than this situation:
"Car Manufacturer X's audio system is terrible. I gave up waiting on them updating the firmware and have now replaced the stock system with a new audio system. Too little, too late."
Yes, I can see how it might sour YOU to buying another car from Manufacturer X, but when you consider that 90% of people never even knew your issue existed, and that the issue is now moot, why would that even matter?
Slashdot Mirror
Can you not see that a certain width of intersection and slowness of speed that, if the yellow goes off just as you enter the intersection, then you can easily be IN the intersection when your light turns red and it goes green the other way? You have done nothing wrong, but are not "running a red light" and in danger of getting hit by cross traffic. Does this sound right to you?
That has nothing to do with what I posted. The purpose of the yellow light duration doesn't change because municipalities abuse red light revenue cameras.
The purpose of the yellow light duration is not to ensure that a car can traverse the intersection within that duration. The purpose of the yellow light duration is to ensure that a vehicle traveling at the posted speed has enough time to observe the yellow light, decide if the distance to the intersection is sufficient to safely stop the vehicle, and safely stop the vehicle.
The DELAY on the green light for the orthogonal lanes is what needs to be proportional to the time it takes a vehicle to traverse the intersection.
Good luck proving that.
I didn't hire him because I had a feeling that he wouldn't perform well in our company.
You don't think that an HR person would actually say "I didn't hire him because XYZ was protected".
Also, in response to this:
It is illegal for an employer to discriminate based on medical conditions
...
That depends greatly on the medical condition. Assume I'm colorblind. Want to bet that a media publishing firm could turn me down for a design job and break no laws? There are still pushes to keep colorblind people from becoming medical doctors because the belief is that they might miss a rash or color based symptom (jaundice?)
To say that it is illegal to discriminate based on medical conditions isn't exactly true.
They are longer with increased speed because it takes longer to stop from that higher speed. Yellow lights aren't about the width of the intersection and all about stopping distance before the intersection.
Unless the brain taps into some unknown force of nature, it can be completely simulated and run on any computer available today. Might run a little slow on a flip phone, but still..
That all depends on how narrowly you define 'unknown force of nature'. Let's imagine you simulate a basic door lock.
Do you assume the lock has two states? Locked/Unlocked
Do you assume the lock has 4 states?
Locked+Keyinserted
Locked+Keyremoved
Unlocked+Keyinserted
Unlocked+Keyremoved
Do you assume the lock has individual states each corresponding to the key entering the keyhole and the position of grooves to each tumbler. Do you then double these states to consider the period where the key is being removed from the keyhole?
As you can see, something as simple as a 'Door Lock' has an infinite number of states depending on how accurately your model needs to be. Don't think you need to simulate individual tumblers? I think you do, because the one on the interior side will receive much less wear than the ones closer to the keyhole, so it's likely that one will last longer, wear the key less, etc.
What you suggest is that everything could be simulated because it must follow known physics. However even if you assume that we have a perfect understanding of the physics which influences a neuron, we would still lack the understanding of how to apply those physical laws to a model which could be accurate enough to predict the behavior of a simulated neuron for any significant period of time.
Consider a single mote of dust in a sealed 1m^3 glass container with 1 mole of hydrogen sealed within. Tell me, with accuracy to 1.0e-90 meters where it will land if released from the interior top of the container.
One of the key differences is that when entities settle out of court, the plaintiff sets a settlement cost at an amount which would be reasonable to offset their losses.
ie: You broke my fence, I am typically entitled to the cost to a repair of that fence and attributable damages (cows wandered out via the gap). Such a cost might be $4000. However, perhaps we agree that because the fence was pretty degraded, it isn't fair for you to have to pay for the cost of replacing the fence (effectively giving me a NEW fence for free) but a portion of the cost commensurate to the value of the original needing repairs anyway fence.
The main difference, of course, is that the settlement amount tends to focus on repairing the actual harm done.
including internalizing all of the risks
Hope you like your new human-sized hamster ball.
I only type in the browser when I absolutely need to type in the web browser.
For most of my web browsing, it's a pure click interface. Even on Chrome, I click on a new tab, and my most visited websites show up as thumbnails. Slashdot has a thumbnail, XKCD, Gmail, etc.
The removal of the button would be like Chrome suddenly removing all the tabs for websites and requiring that I type the first letters of the address in the addressbar every time I wanted to open a website.
It's not that one method is better than the other for all people, it's that there used to be two methods, and one was eliminated because people were told that the other method is better for you, therefore you must use it.
Those not authoritative enough for you?
He never questioned their authenticity. He questioned their relevency.
Sounds like a homerun of an idea you have there. Could even use that in your marketing. Call the car the 'Homer'!
He would be, but he doesn't get invited to those sorts of parties.
We will need it eventually.
Someone might need it. I highly doubt we will need it.
No, I don't want to haggle. It's annoying and a waste of time because the only time a 'good' deal occurs is when one side of the transaction gets a 'bad' deal.
I hate buying furniture, I hate buying cars, I hate buying anything where the price advertised isn't even a 'starting offer' it's a price that jumps up $2000 in useless fees which I then have to spend MY time to remove to get the product down to the price that both sides knew was the price the product was going to sell for in the first place.
I'm glad you enjoy it, but I hate it.
Assuming a standard keyboard layout, you can't type 'Control Panel' using standard typing positions and your hand on the mouse.
Let's say you were browsing the internet and wanted to change something on the control panel. To do it your way means you have to take your right hand off the mouse and use it to type 'control panel' (or a portion of it. Though even 'co' requires your right hand)
Contrast that to the ability to just continue 'click click clicking' with the mouse. Sure, it seems like trival movement of the hands, but it interrupts the flow that people establish when performing their tasks.
With the start menu, people with both hands on the keyboard could use your method, and people using the mouse could use their method. Without the start menu, people using the mouse must now switch to using the keyboard as an input device.
In case you don't know what that is, it's a herbicide that would burn your throat if you got a whiff of it.
While another poster has pointed out the wiki page for the herbicide, what you state isn't really true.
I bought glyphosate specifically to target poison ivy on my property. I take chemicals pretty seriously, but after reading the warnings, looking up the risks, and working with it for a bit, it seemed pretty benign in terms of actual harmful chemicals (ie: I've purchased lye for making pretzels and that stuff is pretty dangerous).
Burning your throat if you get a whiff of it is simply not true (as inevitably I did get a whiff of it). Perhaps if it were a high concentration(like what would be encountered in production or shipping), but at the concentrations which you dillute it to in order to use it, there was no burning, no smell, and as far as adverse reactions?
The bits of poison ivy I actually touched caused me more skin damage than the glyphosate.
Also, larger hotter stars (than the Sun) don't stay in the main sequence nearly as long, so it's possible that some were just under the threshold to become neutron stars. There is no contradiction there
Very true. One of the things that always seemed counterintuitive, but obvious from a physics perspective, is that there are stars which have formed, burned insanely bright, and 'died', within the age of the Earth, let alone our Sun.
I've found that cross-realm LFD and LFR has simply encouraged people to behave like twats,
You've hit close to what killed WoW for me. Back in the early days I remember playing with a small group of 3 RL friends and about 10 other people we met while doing instances. Deadmines, Gnomergan, Scarlet Monestary, and then they released (can't remember the name, but it had the ogres)
It was tremendous fun to PLAY the game, you could discover hidden secrets, tough your way through a dungeon, and learn with your friends how to beat it. We took screenshots of cool places, beating simple bosses, or just have fun 'claiming' a zone in PvP (before there were even HKs) and trying to fight off the ever growing tide of similarly geared/leveled opponents.
Then, eventually things changed so that the instant you stepped into an instance, you were told exactly how a fight would proceed, which path to walk on in the exact manner to avoid pulling even 1 extra mob, and so on. The 'mystery' was removed and cataloged on some online datamining site. (Thottbot?) That wasn't too bad, you still got your group together from time to time and had fun, but then something happened, and you have identified it:
The meeting stones. No longer did people even care about the story of the zones a dungeon was in, and no longer did they really care who showed up when summoned. There was still some discussion, but you didn't have that, admittedly frustrating, but surprisingly community building task of pulling together a dungeon group.
Then you added in cross-realm groups and communication ceased. You didn't care about the person who got summoned into your group, in fact, you actively hated them because you had no connection to them, and they became a 20% surcharge on your group.
In one quick move, the community was mortally wounded, it didn't bleed out as fast as I expected, but it was certainly septic, and would slowly degrade and die while people wondered, 'why isn't this as fun as it was?'
(of course, there is a whole lot of other mistakes they made which compounded the min/max issues and forced players to play in scripted manners, but the biggest killer of WoW wasn't some instant Wow-killer game, but the poisoning of the community)
It still might be a fraud. Especially since Nestor convinced the operator in one case to switch on the feature that enabled the glitch. But hacking is out of the question.
I'm not so sure, I think it's pretty damned close to hacking.
Let's say I go to Amazon, and I discover that by clicking on a series of links, I get refunded 50% of my previous purchase. I don't know WHY that happens, but I figure out that it does, and now after every purchase, I click that series of links and get refunded that 50%.
Does it matter if I don't physically know that what those clicks are doing is causing a buffer overrun in some portion of Amazon's code which overwrites my previous order's value? (I'm not a hacker, so assume what I typed made sense) All I did was interact with Amazon's interface, yet it was clear that whatever it I was doing to that interface was refunding me money to which I was not entitled to.
I would argue that it IS hacking (but in a very shallow sense) when he used a known bug to cause a computer system to behave in a manner which he knew was incorrect. If he stopped at that point, I'd have a hard time justifying it as 'hacking' as we understand it to be, but when he took it further and used it to steal money, he made it clear that he understood his actions were causing the computer system to behave in a manner which was not intended by the owner of the system.
Again, not 'hacking', but so close to hacking that I'm not sure where I stand on the issue.
The thing is, the prototypes and mockups would be expected to be largely similar to the real thing, and not so wildly different.
I've done my share of military product demos. Prototypes and mockups WILL be different than the real thing. You tend to re-use your demo models for a LONG time because they are not cheap.
One of the units I used for a physical display was just a shell of the unit that was the first test run through the CNC mill and coating process.
Differences:
1. The connector for the final unit was different to accomodate EMI/EMC requirements
2. The milling process had a problem and didn't cut this unit properly, cutting a corner (literally), we used acrylic to build up the corner and painted it to look normal
3. The tray this item would normally be in failed shock/vib testing, the final production tray looked different.
4. A late requirement for extra capability resulted in the final production units having a 'growth' on the back of the units which made their XY profile look quite different than the prototype unit.
However, the unit was good enough for our purposes of giving people a general feel for the size/shape/weight. Unless you looked closely you wouldn't notice the fake corner. Without specific knowledge of the production units, you wouldn't know there should be a bulge in the back.
As for hiding details... the look of components can reveal a great deal about your industrial (or sourcing) capability. Something as simple as 45 degree angles vs 90 degree angles on a tube can reveal a great deal about what North Korea is capable of designing/producing. Maybe those 45 degree angle tubes indicate that they have figured out manufacturing trick XYZ which means they also have the capability to produce N, where N is a critical component in making the missiles reliable to greater than 1000 miles?
There are LOTS of reasons to hide details even if all you are doing is playing 'catch-up'. If you were trying to maintain a clandestine missile sourcing program, you probably wouldn't want the US learning that you managed to snag a bunch of components which are only produced in a certain country. You wouldn't want to risk having that supply source being cut off.
If you can't manage to hold a parade without breaking a rocket, what's the chances you'll be able to launch it without breaking it?
Every time you take a piece of equipment out, you risk breaking it. Even here in the US when procure equipment we procure spares to cover for the inevitable breakage.
The Presidential Limo got stuck in a driveway the other month, do you think the Secret Service is poorly trained? You don't think something like a mechanical failure on a caisson couldn't occur during a parade?
You would be an idiot to place your actual assets at risk to satisfy some authenticity requirement for a parade.
The whole point of the parade was to demonstrate that they had the weapons, though. Why hold the parade just to show off obvious fakes?
How combat ready do you think the aircraft (or missiles) at Wright Patterson AFB museum are?
Even the Blue Angels aircraft are modified and couldn't be used in combat right away (without modest retrofit ~72 hours).
What do we do with prototype units in the US?
We clean them up, paint them, and turn them into static displays for putting outside of VFWs.
Of course the missiles used in a parade are going to vary, it is a huge waste (and security risk) to have your actual assets all placed in one location and out in the open. This isn't surprising at all.
No. Those mounts are semi-permanent and are not the type which would be used to permanently mount a HDD to a vehicle. The typical consumer mount is accessible to the user and allows for the user to reseat and adjust the ipod if it slips, or needs repositioning. Such a mount would not suffice to hold a HDD in a car as you would never want to have to worry about 'reseating' your HDD ever couple hundred of miles, you would need a permanent mount.
The problem is that with permanent mounts the HDD will experience a different vibration profile. You can't use shock absorbers because over time those wear out and once they are worn out they actually make the vibrations worse. If you don't design this part right, you are going to get a lot of bad press when your brand becomes associated with 'failing audio systems'.
I've actually designed avionics for helicopters, and I was quite surprised when starting out to discover some of the requirements that our reliability engineers demanded of us. Things like 'no shock absorbers' for electronics seemed counter intuitive, until I realized that while you might increase the reliability of a single part, you end up making the inevitable replacement process much more complicated. It was easier to design avionics which could withstand the vibrations than it was to handle the drawbacks of having vibration isolating mounts for the avionics.
So long story short, the types of mounts currently available for iPods may prevent the damaging vibrations, but the reason they are capable of withstanding these vibrations makes them unsuitable for permanent installations.
Because in a nation with the size and diversity of the US, advocates of Socialism seem willfully blind to the fact that there are people who would disagree with the implementation.
On smaller scales (maybe statewide?) it's a different story. If I don't like the way something is implemented I can move to a state with other people who have similar beliefs. In reality, that wouldn't be possible if such things were implemented across the entire US.
Your body absorbs a great amount of the shock/vib that a HDD would be subjected to in a vehicle. Your entire body helps dampen the vibrations.
I wouldn't be surprised if you took that same HDD based iPod, permanently mounted it to your vehicle, that over a large enough sample you would see a great deal more failures due to vibration than a similar group only carried by people (or simply 'mounted' by leaving it on the seat of the car)
You say it's too little too late, but what does that even matter? Sure, I doubt that you will revert your tablet to the stock software, but you far outside their target market. You are also a member of an astonishingly small community with respect to the overall size of the eReader market. (I'm running CM on all of my tablets and phones, so I'm part of that community, but it IS tiny in comparison)
Honest question, how is your statement any different than this situation:
"Car Manufacturer X's audio system is terrible. I gave up waiting on them updating the firmware and have now replaced the stock system with a new audio system. Too little, too late."
Yes, I can see how it might sour YOU to buying another car from Manufacturer X, but when you consider that 90% of people never even knew your issue existed, and that the issue is now moot, why would that even matter?