This looks like one overconfident sailor who had planned to bring friends with modest sailing experience out for a day on the water and refused to let high, gusting winds hold him back.

They couldn't control the boat enough to keep the mainsail up in gusty winds, and if they had the boat would likely be leaning and flagging soo far over in choppy seas that the passengers would be right to be scared of the boom taking one of them out. It doesn't look like there is an outboard motor, so I guess they somehow got out of the slip and away from docks on just the jib, then hit the real wind gusts.

And now the video starts with mainsail down and getting in the way, jib not fully up but providing some pull, and that pull being lost to waves and poor steering. The sailor is messing with lines up front while the tiller is manned by someone who is waaay out of their element, and who begins to just jack-knife the thing from 0:20 onwards, halting all forward momentum. I don't want to come down on that person too hard, because none of them should have been out there that day, and the sailor should have been manning the till or at least yelling very specific orders at the top of his lungs well before the situation got this bad. No idea why they don't have an outboard motor, maybe they lost it. If its a rental, that rental agency should not have let them go out there.

(grammar edits)

Sure. There are some in here:
http://www.unusuallocomotion.com/pages/more-documentation/20-one-2-or-3-tracked-rigid-vehicles-light.html

... and about 7/8's of the way down this page:
http://snegohod-tuning.ru/istoriya-snegoxoda.html

We had similar units in Canada in the 60's (with , not quite as speedy as the electric jobby shown here) with I believe (not 100%) some of the early Kohler or perhaps OMC single cylinder gas engines. One could stand on a small foot board that was skidded along behind, steering with two large handles (like a roto tiller), and then behind that there was a sled with high enough walls that you could haul firewood, straw bales, sacks of whatever without them spilling out. They were geared rather high, so not a lot of speed but that's what was required to keep the torque up on these 2 strokes.

Hope this helps a bit.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

I agree with most of your points. I would like to make a small defense of the inability to change things in OS X. With mutability can come a lot of overhead and chaos. There is something to be said for an iron hand on the tiller of user interfaces - but only if you trust the group making decisions.

I am not a UX expert. Up until Lion I trusted the UX people at Apple to have a better idea about how humans can optimally interact with a computer. For the most part, I think they were right. Up until Lion - now I think I'm starting to be sold a crock. The decisions they have made don't seem to be based on making efficient interactions happen - but instead about some grand unified melding of Macs and iOS devices. It's bullshit.

The mandatory click to focus thing is really a taste thing. For me, personally it drives me batty. I don't want focus until I've clicked.

Bouncy in your face icons - agreed, annoying - but not as bad modal windows you have to dismiss.


>> ^srd:

>> ^dag:
Up until Lion I would completely disagree with you and say the UX of OS X is simply the best. Yes, I'm talking against Windows 7, Gnome, KDE et al. Now however, I'm starting to cast a wandering eye back towards Linux.
Windows 7 however, is a frigging awful experience any way you slice it. It's stupid little things like the alt-tab selecting whatever window is in the background when really you just want to cycle through the icons. Also, I can't believe they still haven't killed the dysfunctional bloatware ridden system tray. The retarded nanny-ware labyrinth that has to be navigated to connect to a wireless network makes my eyes bleed.
The way I'm feeling now is that all operating systems suck hard, but OS X sucks a little less, at least until Lion - which, again, is starting to suck much harder for all the reasons outlined in this video - and more.


Gnome, KDE, Windows et al have been scampering after the OSX UX for some years now, and I agreee have been doing it rather badly. And this is a trend I'm very skeptical of. However, if you like the workflow that OSX/Quarz imposes, I'm sure you can be happy with it. Where I take exception is having no choice except for what some people in a meeting in Cupertino decide is how I should do my work.
Things that really put me off:
- Menu bar at the top of the screen instead of attached to the individual application... Sure, thats traditional on apple computers and that made sense back in the days when the Mac didn't have real multitasking. But nowadays it's just terribly confusing and imposes longer mouse travel distances.
- Mandatory click-to-focus, which can be seen as a neccessary corrolary of the previous point. I've been using the focus-follows-mouse model (without raise-on-focus) for 15 years now and the difference is jarring. Imagine having to click away an overlay on each and every page you go to in your browser.
- Bouncy in-your-face animations and notification boxes that are reminiscent of Paperclip. Shut up already and get out of my face, I'm trying to work, not playing a game of whack-an-icon.
- Apple marketing OSX as 64 bit but delivering it in 32 bit mode and not telling you until you a) find out by accident and then b) spend 10 minutes gooling around until you find the command to switch it to 64bit default mode (no GUI level preference here for whatever reason).
I'd be a lot happier if I had a choice. Either by having real preferences that goes beyond what color scheme do I want and in what way do I want to stroke my touchpad to do what. Or open up the possibility for alternative window managers.
For all the "think different" attitude that Apple likes to spread, the OSX ecosystem seems to be hard at work to remove individual preferences. Apple turned into the opposite of what the 1984 commercial implied.
Dag, if you're looking at linux again, both KDE and Gnome (especially Gnome 3) are IMO horrible too. If you don't like them, give XFCE a go. I've been using it since '03 IIRC, when I grew tired of Blackbox. And you'd be in good company too

Can't we get someone loco to perform a very late term abortion on these bozos? The crazies aborted Dr. Tiller, we should get at least one back...

@Porksandwich those all sound like good ideas. I especially like the idea of trying to make rehabilitation more of a core function of our justice system. It seems like once someone's been found guilty, society at large just writes them off as if they're no longer fully human.

The whole concept of justice and crime and punishment is just rife with deep philosophical questions.

Take A Clockwork Orange for example. What's the just way to deal with someone like Alex? Lock him up? Execute him? Brainwash him so he's rendered physiologically incapable of giving in to his dark impulses? But he's a special case, and clearly mentally ill. A mental hospital is almost certainly the right place for him.

How about someone like Scott Roeder, who murdered Dr. George Tiller for running an abortion clinic? He's probably not clinically insane, he's just acting in what he considers a highly moral fashion -- he's preventing the extermination of hundreds, if not thousands of innocent lives, by taking the life of one man, knowing that his life, and possibly even his immortal soul is forfeit in doing so. I say that's mental illness too, but there's more than a few people out there who think he's a hero and a martyr. Would it be serving justice if we could "cure" him of his convictions? I'm not entirely comfortable with that, but I don't see how he's safe to release back into society with his beliefs intact.

How about Lloyd Blankfein, or Tony Hayward? They gambled the lives and livelihoods of millions of people, knowing that it was a "heads I win", "tails they lose" situation. But that's their entire job function -- to find a way to exploit economic opportunities to make money, wherever they find them. Every pressure on them inside the company and within the culture they live in was for them to do the immoral, profitable thing. In this case, I think these guys' real crime is that they gave in to peer pressure, which is not exactly a tremendous moral failing. Shouldn't we blame those who pressured them? Maybe the entire social and economic structure that's designed to encourage this kind of behavior in the first place? What court can rule on that?

Instead, on VS, the only debate people seem to want to have is "are cops evil or not?"

Since when is life so black and white?

Love KO and I miss Moyers.
When he first came out with his reporting on the Bush administration I literally jumped out of my chair and yelled, "YES!" I had been demoralized by the corporate media's lockstep following of talking points. In the desert of lies that I had been hearing--finally a voice of reason.
I love Jon Stewart, but when he compares KO to O'Liely I can't help but think, "I don't think Dr. Tiller would agree."

I agree Xax....and I thought he had retired the voice after the murder of Dr. Tiller?

It's amusing to watch Walsh weasel like that.

O'Reilly: Do late term fetuses have any rights at all?
Walsh: You know, that's a really tough question... /Weasel /weasel /weasel.

It doesn't help her case that Tiller's late term abortions were all (as in 100%) performed due to fraudulent "mental hardship" medical exemptions granted by Tiller and his friend, the rubberstamp.

Her whole bit about chemotherapy is smokescreen - read the facts, people.

>> ^TangledThorns:
On a side note the girl describing her experience with an abortion by Tiller was chilling. Using saline that burns the baby to death and then push it out into a toilet... awful.


What did you think they did, put a lollipop under a 1 tonne weight and wait for the featus to come get it Wile E. Coyote style?!?

I don't think anyone would quibble with the fact that abortion is not a pleasant process for anyone involved, particularly the featus.. So it's good that 'bleeding hearts' are actually out there councilling women who are considering abortion so that it's not the first option, it's the last... Rather than shooting doctors, blowing up clinics and making an ass of themselves on television.

Or would you prefer the mother go and get a coathanger and try to scrape the baby out, not only 'terminating it' (let's call a spade a spade, tearing it to pieces), but massively increasing the chances that she will die from either a placental haemorrhage or sepsis? Two deaths for the price of one sounds good to the right wing?

I'm not sure if you're a troll yet, but you definitely don't seem to fit in with the crowd here. Bill didn't PWN anybody, all he did was talk loud and in circles, like he normally does. And, as for "Killing Babies" you're definitely in the wrong place because there's a large base of people on the sift who are Pro-choice.

And you want to talk about changing the subject? How bout at the end, where she calls him out on having people actually listen to the garbage that's been spewed from him and took it to the point of killing people, TWICE, and then all he can say of is "We know where you're coming from, coming up next."



>> ^TangledThorns:
I saw this when it was aired and Bill pwn3d Joan Walsh. She is nothing more than a bleeding heart liberal who kept trying to change the subject. Good for Bill to call her out on doing that and making her admit she supports killing babies.
On a side note the girl describing her experience with an abortion by Tiller was chilling. Using saline that burns the baby to death and then push it out into a toilet... awful.

I saw this when it was aired and Bill pwn3d Joan Walsh. She is nothing more than a bleeding heart liberal who kept trying to change the subject. Good for Bill to call her out on doing that and making her admit she supports killing babies.

On a side note the girl describing her experience with an abortion by Tiller was chilling. Using saline that burns the baby to death and then push it out into a toilet... awful.

That what O'Reilly said to the chump that killed Tiller.

>> ^Jowkie:
Hate is a strong word, but I can say with confidence that I hate Bill O' Reilly.


^ahem - This is excusable.

>> ^EndAll:
I hope one day some nutty fucker pulls a Tiller-style assassination on old O'Reilly, as he's leaving the studio.


^This is not.

There is a big difference between having emotions (even strong ones) and suggesting that someone should act on them.

I hope one day some nutty fucker pulls a Tiller-style assassination on old O'Reilly, as he's leaving the studio.

>> ^thepinky:But don't you think, despite the comfort of our domestic situation and the ease and profitability of abusing the people of other lands, that people are passionate about this?

Look at any successful CD campaign, from MK Gandhi, to MLK, to general strikes, they are all structured around a single premise, people breaking the law they want changed. How would you break the law which makes it legal to offshore industry to despotic countries with no environmental controls? how would you break the law/policy which puts military contractors above the law?

CD is a great tool for taking control of your own life, it's a very poor tool for trying to effect the lives of others.

Don't you think it's slightly, I donno, pitiful to have decided that drastic action is ineffectual before even attempting it

That is an entirely different question.

Consider the Tiller assassination, terrorism is clearly an effective form of drastic action. These acts of terror will have the same effect as outlawing late term abortion, since everybody willing to preform them must live in a prison of their own making in order not to get shot by some nut-job. People are not lining up to provide this service, when the current crop die off/are assassinated, their will likely be nobody to take their place.

Clearly there are drastic means other that CD, they are more morally complicated, but the options exist.