From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Tue Jul 18 2000 - 09:10:17 MDT
John Clark wrote:
>
> What about the $1500 toilet seat, did it have accelerometers mounted on it to measure
> resonances and vibration modes too?
My father, who is more antigovernment than I am, hates the example of
the $1500 toilet seat. Mention it to him, and he'll start explaining
all the things that toilet seats on military aircraft have to do. (For
some reason, I don't recall what any of them are.)
Personally, I think that the military does often make a mess of such
things: that the military bureaucracy will prefer a shoddy military
component to a reliable civilian one, and that the bidding system
overspecifies far beyond the range of reason or sanity. Nonetheless,
there is nothing inherently ridiculous about a $1500 toilet seat.
--
sentience@pobox.com Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
http://singinst.org/beyond.html
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