Right. So an article on this other system can get through all that review with errors or at least with interpretations that are in dispute and unlike on Wikipedia those issues can't be fixed. Well they can be fixed but only after another shit storm of review and if those reviewers agrees etc etc. Wikis are excellent ways to document and organize knowledge in a relatively casual and cheap manner. Stanford setup a system that is slow, potentially still open to bias, definitely still open to mistakes, and requires much more resources. Comparing the two systems is like comparing a scooter to a tank.

I think they're including failure by the maintenance staff, airplane manufacturer, etc as human error.

I have an Addams Family machine and it isn't too bad. I had to pay someone to take a look at it when we first got it because it was reseting (turned out just to be a harness problem) but lots of the typical repairs require no more than maybe some pliers or a soldering iron. I'm pretty sure that many machines in arcades could be fixed pretty easily but the arcade owners are too lazy or won't take the few minutes to figure out what needs to be done. Parts aren't even that expensive. A whole flipper kit is only like twenty bucks, bulbs are cheap in bulk, etc.

Yeah Stern is pretty much the only company I know of that still makes new machines. There are a lot of collectors still out there though. The real shame is that Stern's new machines are apparently not all that great. I've heard they'll change the graphics on an old playing field setup and then release it as a new machine which is really lame. The creativity in the older machines is much better. I have an Addams Family machine which is in great working order. I had to spend some time and money to get it working well again though.

On the HTC EVO you can get 2.2 now if you go to settings > system update > HTC software update. They're rolling out the update notifications in waves I hear but you can force the upgrade if you want to right now. So far it hasn't been a huge change for me but the little tweaks have been positive so far.

Joking? I work in the aircraft industry and most of the mechanical problems we see are due to human error. There's almost certainly some selection bias but at least a good chunk of mechanical problems are the fault of the airline, not random.

End game WoW content is a great example of how multiplayer can suck. You have to depend on others to get anything done. While this can be fun if you can schedule your life around game time and find a good group to group up with regularly, the vast majority of people can't do that with their lives. So instead you occasionally get in with a group of randoms and no matter how good you are the success is based on the collective which is bad at least as much as it is good. Obviously that's what the game is but too often developers apply the same logic to their other games instead of making them compelling in other ways.

Well don't feel bad. I really liked the original Starcraft. In fact I started back with Warcraft and played through all the sequels and expansions for Warcraft and Starcraft games as they came out. I was never a huge fan of multiplayer. I never really understood how I was doing so poorly relative to random people I was being matched with until I watched some videos. Just watching the clicking makes my hand hurt. The stupid mechanic of moving the unit being attacked away over and over is obnoxious. Multiplayer usually turns me off because it means other people factor into my gaming which means other people can make my gaming time suck. That's not fun.

They did respond. They're effectively saying, "this is stupid." They don't need to give more of a response because while Apple has created a few phones Nokia and RIM have created hundreds of different models from the stupid to the very cutting edge smart phone. It is like Starbucks getting into the light bulb industry and telling GE they're doing it wrong. It isn't worth dignifying with a response.

Yeah for a second I thought I was supposed to be upset because they're letting people get so close. Sixty five feet can be annoyingly close to a work site at sea.

Okay I guess you could just have a really fancy cable that splits that power/video/internet/usb/etc mess out into standard connectors to be hooked up to my wall/tivo/access point/computers (or whatever)/etc but that is going to be the mother of all cables. More likely you'll need yet another powered splitter box to do the transition. I like the idea of fewer cables but I don't see the value of this unless we're going to all get our homes rewired to have these master plugs instead of wall outlets.

I do not like Tesla because they take Lotus Elises and screw them up. I can't support a car company that has a business of messing up my favorite car.

Coat everything in a thick and bulky neutral colored plastic shell and charge $40,000 and you'll start to have an actual medical imaging product.

As an engineer I agree with this message. I made a twitter account because my phone really seemed to want one and I thought a few entertainers I like might have good tweets. So far they don't and twitter still seems stupid.

I use PDFs daily and to my knowledge they still don't re-position and re-scale content. That's the same reason PDFs suck for books. Unless you're on a screen that the PDF was laid out for you're going to be dealing with wasted space or scrolling a lot. Now for a target device (like the ipad) I agree that it seems reasonable to just have a vertical and horizontal version of each page maybe even with some hooks to swap automatically.