Um, no. B&N's online store is the Nook store. It's right there in the article.
Fictionwise's purchase by B&N was just part of the roll-out of the Nook so they'd have titles and licensing agreements in place. And they didn't 'close' Fictionwise as much as 'merge it into the Nook store'.
That's because Costco pays fucking dividends so people who own the stock make a share of the profits.
Ah, investing money in a company to make a cut of the actual profits of the company, an insanely novel idea of corporate ownership that might just catch on one of these days. (It is the 1300s, right? I think my computer's clock is wrong.)
Well, then, this discussion is over. Those who believe 'Science can observe what has happened, predict what will happen, and test those predictions, with everyone paying attention to the theory that has best predicted things in the past because that means it will best predict things in future.' can sit over here.
And those who believe that science cannot do that can sit over there and die from pneumonia when the bloodletting doesn't work. (Who knows, maybe bloodletting will work better than antibiotics _this_ time.)
This is, of course, assuming that quantum theory continues to work long enough for this to be posted on the internet. It seems sorta dubious, you people using the internet like that.
I wasn't saying that they were delusional, either. I was just point out that skeptic:deniers::odd theories:delusional
There are really three sorts of deniers out there. Those who deny it because it is in their best financial interest to do so and don't actually really believe what they're saying, those who deny it simply because they been told it was false and never had any experience to the contrary (Which, like I was trying to say, does not make them 'deniers', just like a guy who thinks aliens are in his closed closet is not delusional.), and the 'denier', the person who refuses accept it despite evidence to the contrary.
The second type is sometimes hard to see, because he will look like the third type for a single argument. There are plenty of people who have only read right-wing conspiracy loon stuff about this, and show up, and quickly get their asses handed to them, and _stop talking about it_. They become unsure of the facts, and, like a normal person, their beliefs about those facts change. Sometimes they hear enough nonsense again that they become more sure again, and come back and argue later, but the point is, facts do change their mind, even if lies can change it back.
But the third type...oh, the third type. Those are people who do not actually believe climate change is a hoax, but they _believe_ they believe. They know they are supposed to believe that, so they try to act like they believe that.
But while they claim to believe something that has been demonstrated to be not true (Like delusional people) you can distinguish them from people with actual delusions by the fact they invent rationals. They will deny the evidence exists, when they are presented with the evidence they will deny it is correct, when it is demonstrated correct, they attempt to explain it in other ways, when that fails they attempt to blah blah.
It's often observed that it's not about being correct, but that is an understatement. It's not even about convincing anyone else. In their mind, it is about _doing the right thing_, believing something despite the fact they know it's not true. Basically, they're attempting to be delusional and failing badly.
I'm not entirely sure what you're saying, but it's easy to track someone's eyes relative to the _tracker's_ POV. You put a camera above a computer screen, it can easily know what what you're looking at once it's calibrated correctly.
The hard part is actually figuring what the person is looking at when it _isn't_ a computer generated picture, and isn't head-on. Hell, it's hard enough for a computer to figure out the _distance_ to something in a video image.
Basically, the camera would have to identify someone's face and their eyes in the face. This is somewhat possible.
It would then have to figure out the distance to their face. Then, using the distance and the angle of their eyes, it would know roughly where they were looking. This is also, possibly, something that can be done.
It would then have to generate a 3D map of the world and figuring out what they were looking at, which is completely impossibly currently. Generating a 3D map of the world is _hard_, especially from the limited data of a single, randomly-positioned camera. Especially when this has to be done every second or so. (As the point is to measure where people look on average.)
And this is assuming that cameras can actually identify who is male and who is female, which I find a bit dubious.
At some point in the future, portable computers will be powerful enough to keep updated a map of the room room they're in, along with every single known person tagged with a name and unknown people tagged with all sorts of description information. And at _that_ point, it would be rather easy to make 'gaydar', and in fact there's some odd privacy issues there with eye tracking I've never seen anyone talking about, especially as so much of eye movement is not under conscious control and _not even the person looking_ knows it happened. (I forget what's it's called, but the eye moves a lot more often than we think, because the eye _turns off_ when it does that.)
But computers can't do that now. It might be possible to set up cameras watching people in known locations, and other people in other known locations (like seating at a bar or something) and create enough of a 3D map that a computer can calculate this stuff, although it still wouldn't be real time, and I suspect that a human being going in and tagging each person as 'attractive female' or 'unattractive male' might be needed. But a random room and a random camera on a person? Not likely.
I don't think that's how 'gaydar' is supposed to work. Straight people can have gaydar, and gay people might not. (Gay people probably _try_ to have it, but that doesn't mean it works.)
You actually could implement a gaydar feature, though. It theoretically should be possible to statistically detect slight sexual attraction towards others. Watch other people's sightline, and check their pupils for dilation and what their eye stops on, etc. You could even detect heartrate and temperature changes.(1)
It probably would only work on average, but, hey, so does real gaydar. In fact, that exact mechanism is one of the ways that gaydar is proposed to work: People with gaydar might subconsciously detect who is subconsciously attracted to whom.
1) I was going to point out nothing currently sold can do detect heartrate or tempurature, but nothing currently sold can even figure out the sightlines of other people, much less detect if the person being looked at is male or female. No one of this is actually technically possible at the moment.
I'm sorry, but you seem to simply not understand. You're saying that IPCC predictions so far have been good, implying that these people have shown that they can predict the climate well. I'm telling you: the accuracy of their current predictions tells you nothing about the accuracy of their future predictions.
That is quite possibly the stupidest fucking thing I've ever heard.
Hey, idiot. The accuracy of current predictions does tell us how accurate future ones will be. That's how predictions work. That's how science works. That's how the universe works. The same effect happens when the same cause happens, and if we can figure those out, we can predict things, and unless the goddamn laws of physics random change, those predictions will continue to be true.
For the people reading, please note that stenvar did not say 'The events are predicted for the wrong reason', or 'The predictions are not accurate'. He said 'Correctly prediction and modeling things accurately now can tell us nothing about what's going to happen in the future.'
And now AGW denialists have now reached Last Thursdayism. They are now denying that the past is in any indicative of the future. Wow. Just wow.
That's a blatant lie, and there is no point in trying to have a scientific discussion with a liar.
Yes, and the IPPC reports released a decade ago that predicted this extreme weather tells us nothing about extreme weather now, right? So we must not be having any. I think that's how the logic works.
How is relocating to a position closer to your side of the debate an example of moving the goalposts? The intent of "moving the goalposts" is to move away in a manner that excludes new input, not to accept it and shift to a more similar outlook. By your definition, debate is meaningless because anyone giving way on either side is committing a fallacy.
Erm, that's exactly what 'moving the goalposts' is. He stood there and asserted something that was not true, that the 'predictions' were all off. That was the entire damn point of his post.
And then, when I pointed out that the accepted predictions made by the actual scientific community were true, and when they fail they tend to fail in the direction of underpredicting changes, he instantly asserted that that wasn't important, the predictions are correct, and 'the biggest problem with IPCC and AGW activists is the actions they propose.'
That's pretty much the definition of changing the goalposts. He objected to something for one reason in a previous post, but when I showed up with frankly a bare minimum of knowledge and not even actually quoting any numbers, with information that anyone could trivially _Google_, he instantly changed his objection to something else, and now it's somehow my job to argue against his new idiotic strawman position about what 'activists' do? (Which, you will note, he didn't cite, so whenever I justify them he can always assert 'Oh, that's not what I mean, I mean some other thing.')
Yeah, anyone who's ever participated or seen a discussion like this knows where this is going. So instead I just pointed out the fact he just admitted he was completely and utterly wrong about climate change according to his own words, and now that he accepts, he instantly has carefully weighed 'all' the proposals (Which he doesn't bother to list) and rejected them.
Hilariously, yesterday, I rented a SUV, a Chevy Equanox, with an estimated gas mileage. The main screen shows it generally over time (25 mpg, which seems rather low to me, but, then again, it is an SUV. And renters probably drive it like crap.), but there's a screen you can flip to to get second-to-second estimates...which range wildly from 70 mpg to 0 mpg!
I haven't had to drive it when it's cold yet, but who knows what that would say then.
The IPCC collects other people's predictions, and it contains so many that it would be amazing if some of them weren't "remarkably accurate".
Erm, no. Just no. The iPCC releases a single report roughly every six years, all but the first one have been fairly accurate, and the first one got the amount of CO2 released by humans wrong. The math in all of them is basically the same, and if you put in the amount of CO2 actually released, they all are correct, on average at least. (There's a idiotic graph showing how all of the IPCC's predictions are too high this year, which they are. But, uh, firstly, 'this year' is not what the IPCC predicts, but an average, and secondly, we're in the middle of a world-wide recession, which probably means CO2 usage has been less than predicted.)
But mathematically and statistically, good prediction over the exponential part of a sigmoidal growth curve tells you nothing about the future.
I don't think you know what 'statistically' means. A good prediction is, by the definition of 'good prediction', statistically likely to tell you things about stuff you do not know. The entire premise of prediction is that they are statistical representations of things, and 'good' ones are accurate.
And I rather suspect you've poorly copied and pasted that from somewhere, because asserting that the climate is changing exponentially is rather surreal for a denier to do. It's math techobbabble. What you've actually said is that we don't know where climate change, after the increase, will start leveling off.
That, uh, is true. At some point, more CO2 will produce diminishing returns in the environment. Look at Venus, for example. If you pumped as much CO2 out there as we do here, you'd get almost no reaction.
But that has no actual bearing on anything, and asserting it's actually a sigmoidal growth curve is completely surreal for a denier. So you admit that every ton of CO2 is not only making things worse, but each one causes a larger change than the one before it?
'Sure, every time I pour a scoop of sugar on the floor it causes even more ants to show up than last time I did that, but eventually we will run out of nearby ants and my pouring sugar on the ground will result in less ants per sugar scoop showing up! And logically, there's a finite amount of ants, so at some point we'll get zero new ants showing ups! So all your models of this place being infested with ants are wrong.'
Dude...the place is already infested with ants. Whether or not they end up covering the entire floor, as my model suggests, or only a quarter of the floor as your invented wishful thinking suggests, is somewhat moot.
In addition, none of those predictions so far involve the mechanisms that are actually supposed to cause problems, namely tipping points and positive feedback.
We are actually living in a world with problems. We now have droughts and massive hurricanes and weather problems that, statistically speaking, are crazy and due to climate change.
However, you're wrong. IPCC predictions that we are currently in have positive feedback in them, and in fact the IPCC has been criticized for apparently underestimating that, as I pointed out earlier. Ice has, via some positive feedback mechanism that we don't fully understand, have started melting faster than predictions, cause more sea level rise and faster feedback. (And temperature increases caused by CO2 had the same problem back in the 90s, until the IPCC figured out what was going on there.)
That is the real problem with your theory. Yes, no one fully understand the positive feedback in the climate, and we could be wrong in our estimates. The problem is, uh, it appears we don't understand it in the wrong direction and it's larger than we keep estimating! We're ahead of predictions.
And in any system with positive feedback and a finite ability to change inputs, tipping points exist by definition.
Anyone who thinks that minimum wage, or anything that generally costs corporations the same on average across the entire economy like requirements for handicap access, can cause 'bankruptcy' does not actually understand how the economy and inflation work. In fact, raising everyone's wages by 5% would, almost by definition, have no effect on the economy, because inflation would just undo it.
And as for 'some industries would completely fail', that is the stupidiest thing I've ever heard. Any job that is important enough that failing to fill it would cause industries to fill by definition is important enough that companies in that industry will be willing to pay whatever is required to get it done. Granted, that might mean they cannot actually afford to exist, but uh, that raises the rather surreal idea, that the industry itself is somehow important enough that we should care if it fails, and there are people employed in it that are required for it, but those people somehow are so unimportant they shouldn't be paid anything.
That is a pretty insane idea. Either the industry is important and people need it, and thus the people who actually make it work are important, and hence people will be willing (Or, rather, have no choice) to pay more for this needed industry to cover the extra wages. You can't refuse to pay an extra 3% at the grocery to cover the fact that people there are now getting paid more.
Or, alternately, the industry is so unimportant that people would not be willing to cover the extra wages, in which case...who the hell cares if it fails? Perhaps there really is a, I dunno, pet-sitter industry, where people are paid $5 to watch people's pet, and that's all they're willing to pay so at $10 an hour such an industry would not exist...and? Why do we care?
Yeah, and why are people demonizing murderers? Many of them have helped solve the problem of murder by being sent to prison themselves, thus reducing the amount of murderers on the street!
Seriously, you can't be that stupid. You just listed problems companies created and then were forced by law to stop doing.
Although to be fair, the problems were usually created innocently enough. No one understood the real danger of lead, no one really considered how coal dust caused problems, no one know about CFCs. This would be enough to get them off the hook if they had voluntarily changed their behavior when it became clear what was going on...but every a single problem in that list was solved, by a law, after a long and hard fight with the corporations who opposed the change.
The difference is, in many ways, the same as the difference between a delusion and a mistake.
A 'delusion', in the medical sense, is a belief held despite clear evidence to the contrary. The belief has to be 'incorrigible', unchanging despite actual real presented evidence.
Now, there are 'bizarre delusions' that are prima facie untrue, like the belief you are hundreds of feet tall, when you are currently inside a room. Or the belief that you are dead and rotting. (That one is a real, and common enough it has a name, delusion.) Those are delusional under the concept that they violate how reality actually works, and no one should ever believe them if their brain is working correctly.
But barring that, you are not delusional even if you believe something that no reasonable person would believe. You can believe whatever you want, as long as no one presents evidence otherwise.
You only have what is called a 'non-bizarre delusion' if you believe something that, had a reasonable person held that belief, and been exposed to the same evidence as you, they would have change their belief. And you don't.
For example, you are not delusional if you think aliens are hiding in your closet. That could, possibly, be true. Aliens are a thing, if only imaginary, and the closet presumably exists. (If you are seeing a closet where there is not one, you are not delusional, you are hallucinating, which is an entirely different problem.) Aliens in the closet has, shall we say, a probability of 0.00001%, instead of the flat 0% of you being taller than the house yet somehow fitting inside it.
You are delusional if someone shows you the inside of the closet and the lack of aliens, and you continue to believe aliens are in there.(1)
Likewise, there's a difference between skeptics and deniers. Deniers are people when, presented with information that would have made a reasonable person change their mind...don't. (They are not, however, delusional, because they generally don't really 'believe' anything about it one way or the other, they just think they believe it because believing it is what 'their side' does. Most people don't really 'believe' in most abstract facts they've learned.)
1) You're thinking 'Oh, they'll just say they're invisible, or they teleport out before someone opens the door and back when it closes. So no one can ever really prove it's a delusional belief.'. But an interesting fact of actual delusional people is that often are completely illogical about their delusion, and will often end up asserting that the closet was not, in fact, checked, or there were aliens in there when it was checked, or they must have been wrong earlier but now the aliens are there. They're not trying to invent rationals about why there were no aliens there, because, in their mind, there are aliens there, it's not a debatable point. Rationals are what you invent when you don't really believe something but want to, (Or, as I said above, think you believe.). You don't bother inventing them if you're suffering from a hardware error in your brain forcing belief on you.
And having checked a wide range of predictions and statements by AGW activists, I can say that a large fraction of them are scientifically either unsupported or plain wrong.
You can, indeed, say that.
You can lie in many other ways, also.
The IPCC's predictions have been remarkable accurate. The only reason they're ever very wrong is that scientists can't magically know how much CO2 we'll release in advance. So, yes, some predictions in the 1990s overshot, because we reduced emissions.
The mathematical model they have produced, however, is correct. You take the math, you put in the actual rise in CO2 instead of the projected rise, and you get essentially the correct temperature change. Although they did underestimate the effect of CO2 a bit in the first report, and still are currently underestimating the rise in sea level, which frankly has gotten a little worrying.
So the only time the predictions have predicted too much change on average (No, individual years do not count, it's a prediction of _average_ change.) has been when the IPCC said 'We predict that humans will release X tons of CO2 into the air in the next decade and it will cause Y change', and humans decided to only release.8X tons or something.
Pretending their 'model' is bad is like pretending a car's miles per gallon is not a valid prediction because it can't tell you how long it will take before you have to fill up the tank. Yeah, that's not how predictions work. They told you the mileage on the highway, they told you the mileage in a city, you start doing other things, they have no idea. Climate change modeling is the prediction of what will happen if humans do specific things, and failure to predict human behavior correctly does not mean the model has failed, as that is not the actual job of the model.
Now, if you want to criticize the IPCC report by saying 'I do not think humans will release that much, I think they will reduce emissions, so blah blah...', that would be fine...but strangely, the people criticizing the IPCC always seem to be the very people who don't think emissions need to be reduced.
And while I have singled the IPCC out here, other climate change predictions are essentially the same, just trying to take into account they think the IPCC doesn't have a good handle on, like how much of this change is due to feedback.
I find the idea that that 12-volt battery would be dead the most astonishing part of all this, and I would _really_ like some more information about this supposed fact.
Either Telsa is designing cars where somehow driving the car around can drain that. (How the fuck would that even work? The electric engine can work off a standard 12-volt car battery?!?!)
Or that was done deliberately, probably by, as you suggest, leaving the lights on, and not understanding that wouldn't drain the main battery. He deliberately ran out of main power, and pulled into a gas station and shut his car off and left the lights on so he'd _completely_ run out and make his point. Except, of course, that's not how it works, and he ended up draining the wrong battery, one that should never fail.(1)
If someone runs out of gas, and when the tow truck shows up their _battery is dead_, either they are idiots who don't know you shouldn't operate accessories with the car off, or they're trying to 'break' their car.
1) Seriously, never. The reason batteries have problems in ICE cars is that alternator fail or overvoltage, which the Tesla does not have, being charged via very sophisticated electrical system that would, if screwed up, break the main battery long before the 12-volt one. And the batteries 'fail' in the sense of being unable to prove enough amperage to run the starting electric engine, which the Tesla _also_ does not have. There's really no reasonable circumstances where the Telsa's 12-volt battery should fail beside it just getting too old or just running things when the car is off, and it has a _lot_ less wear and tear than in a normal car.
No, by letting the car sit in the cold, Broder made the car estimate the range as via a cold battery.
Cooling down batteries does not deplete their charge when they are warmed back up. Cold batteries are much worse at discharging power, as their chemical processes are slowed down.(1) Which is why the car heats the battery back up.
So basically, you get much worse range when your battery is frozen solid, but luckily it will rapidly heat up. Just like, uh, an internal combustion engine.
Sometimes I get annoyed at the fact that gauges on stuff lie to me. Did you know everyone phone's power gauge is lying? They charge to 100%, stop charging until they reach 95%, and then charge again...but every single phone will report 100% while it's doing that, and even after you take it off the charger. And then most of them keep lying until you reach 75%, which they show as 80%, _then_ they fix it by rapidly dropping to the real value. Annoys the heck out of me...just tell me the truth.
But then I run across idiots like Broder and realize that if the things actually reported what is _really_ going on, it will become some giant scandal about how Model X phone won't charge past 95%.
I wonder what sort of estimated mpg you'd get if the car tried to figure it out ten seconds after starting a frozen gasoline car. Probably like 3 mpg. OMG! What a scandal!
1) In fact, there's an old wife's tale that, because cooling down batteries slows discharge, you should stick unused batteries in the freezer, so they will discharge less, so they will last longer. That theory does not actually work for various reasons, but the fact that frozen batteries work worse, and then work better when heated back up, is a real fact.
There was absolutely nothing wrong with the Ford Merkur, besides the stupid name and the fact it occupied an idiotic location in the market so didn't sell.
And the problem with the Renault was reliability over time, something that it would have been rather hard to know when it first came out. That was also, essentially the problem with the Chevy Vega, which everyone loved in 1971...and had managed to have _two_ recalls by mid-1972.
Naming a new car that, unknown to everyone, _falls apart over time_ as 'Car of the Year' is not the same thing as naming one that supposedly gets much worse range than claimed. Now, if the claim is that Telsa Motor's cars fell apart over time, that would be something else. But Motor Trend does _test_ cars, so they do indeed test the range of cars...they just do not have a time machine.
Most local Chamber of Commerce's are beneficial to the area they're in. (Or alternately they're just a little club that does nothing at all except collect dues and meet once a month.) And most of them are explicitly non-partisan, and have almost no money, and if they do have money, they almost always end up _doing things_ with it, not running ads to convince voters of things. For example, the local Chamber in my town purchased a defunct theater and set up a non-profit in it to attempt to draw tourists to the town.
I'm sure some local Chambers have had problems, but in general, the 'averaged' wishes of local businesses tend to fairly closely match the community's wishes. (And it certainly matches the community more than any _individual_ business.) Yes, being business owners, they often look at the world via business-colored glasses, so you might finding them opposing a local sale tax increase or something that the county needs, but that's about it.
The 'US Chamber of Commerce', OTOH, is essentially a front for the pro-corporatism arm of the Republican Party, which has a hell of a lot of money, and uses it to lobby for Republican candidates. With an amazing amount of _foreign_ money.
Incidentally, a lot of local Chambers have, without really thinking about it, joined the US Chamber of Commerce. This often is against their rule to be non-partisan, and should be pointed out to them. Likewise, a lot of large corporations have joined in violation of _their_ stated non-partisan position.
Now if you want a more peaceful, less brutal Revolution, all you have to do is do it very slowly.
The problem with what Marx thought would happen is that he assumed the rich and powerful would never let the poor have any political power, which was, indeed, a reasonable assumption at the time he wrote.
In fact, people forget that what Marx 'predicted' had actually happened several times before. The French Revolution, and so on. The poor get fed up, and seize power...but power was always seized by a small group of people, and before long they were rich and in charge. (In fact, power was always seized by _the very next rung down_, not by the bottom.)
The failure on Marx's part is that he did realize what advances in communication and travel would result in. They allow the poor to organize in ways they were never able to do so before, and, just as importantly, leave if circumstances were not to their liking. Meanwhile, it means the excesses of the rich get known to everyone. At some point, you stopped being able to send the police out to beat up strikers...and if you did everyone knew. With advances in camera technology, it's harder and harder to even try to _arrest_ people for invalid reasons.
So instead of the workers overthrowing the government, we have workers forcing concessions from the rich, both via unions and via political action.
Granted, the rich have fought this for the last century, and even somewhat managed to force it backward in places, and their current attempt to purchase the government in the US is proceeding apace, but it appears to be a rather inexorable slide towards the 'poor' being charge. Or, rather, the majority being charge.
And once they're in charge, the majority won't put up with that sort of bullshit forever. Perhaps more to the point, without _rigging the game_, the rich would never continue to be as rich as they are anyway. Ask why CEOs get paid so much. Ask why all sorts of largess somehow falls out of corporations towards the rich, and all sort of largess falls out of the government towards corporations. Ask why we're constantly 'privating' things so corporations can make a profit from government functions, instead of the government just hiring people to do it. Ask why we bail out banks instead of mortgage holders. Without the power structure _actively_ diverting money to the rich, the rich would rapidly stop being rich.
And that's without the poor deciding to take their money away, which is, indeed, a possibility. (Especially as the entitle asshats can't stop their entitled behavior even after they've blown up the economy. 'JUMP, YOU FUCKERS' indeed.) But even if that doesn't happen, the rich will slowly run out of money. (Because they don't fucking do anything except stand around 'owning' shit and charging us rent to use it, so all the government or even other corporations really has to do is provide alternatives to that. E.g., It's a Wonderful Life. Where's that bank you Occupy guys are working on?)
At some point the majority of people will actually have some sort of ownership stake in the place they live and work, as opposed to 75% of the stuff being owned by 10% of the people, and the 'communist revolution' will have sorta happened without anyone noticing.
The workers don't need to 'seize the means of production'. Half of them just need to get a small business loan and start up their own means of production, and the other half just need to join a union, and force the owner of the means of production to actually start paying them...including stock options. And everyone needs to stop electing superich entitle assholes to run the government and file a shareholder lawsuit when those assholes are hired at insane wages to run the corporation that they now have stock in.
The real joke is the banking 'industry' no longer even does what it's supposed to do: Take money from people and lend it out. Now, money to lend out come from the Federal Reserve.
And if we're going to do that, why do we need lending banks?
Let's just set up Fed Reserve branches in towns. People can put their money in them, and get Fed Reserve interest. (Which, of course, the Fed would manipulate to try to keep inflation sane.)
Or non-profits that then loan the Fed money, or buy government bonds. Whatever. The point is, 'holding money' banks should be perfectly safe, and not safe in the 'insured' sense, but safe in the 'Money cannot be lost by the _bank_' sense. (Although some sort of Federal backstop in cases of illiquidity would be reasonable. If the bank miscalculates and has no cash but a bunch of bonds that mature in 6 months, we can deal with that situation.)
The only thing that the private banking industry should be doing is loans. Credit cards, mortgages, etc. And they should get that money from _investors_ and borrowing from the Fed, and none of it should be insured. (At least not by the government.)
I understand why the banking system ended up how it is, but it actually makes no sense at this point in time. The actual 'storing money' service, which is all that 90% of people want in their bank, needs to exist and be completely risk-free. Not just risk-free for the people putting money in it, but risk-free _entirely_ so that the government doesn't need to bail it out. (And there's never any reason for the government to bail the loan _issuing_ banks out.)
I'm seeing a lot of confusion in this article. Everyone needs to remember AIG IS NOT A BANK. AIG is an insurance company.
AIG was not the people participating running the 'slice up mortgages and resell them' hot potato game that the banking industry had become. No, they were the people who cleverly looked at that with an outside eye and said 'Hey, would you people like to buy some insurance in case that entire insane stupid money orgy fall apart and everyone realizes it's all built on total shitpile mortages? You would! Alright!'.
And then, astonishingly enough, it did fall apart, and AIG owned approximately a fifteen bajillion dollars to the banks that had purchased said insurance. Why, it's almost as if insuring trillions of dollars of completely idiotic business plans was a bad idea!
They functionally did the equivalent of selling homeowner insurance to people who operated a drunken flaming torch juggling and firework-reselling business employing known arsonists. On top of their gasoline-soaked straw-roof lit entirely by candles. During a drought. Inside a forest fire. While the house was actually already on fire.
And in a total surprise to everyone, those houses all burnt down and AIG had to pay for it all, and didn't have enough money. In a just universe, they'd be completely and utterly bankrupt.
The problem is, they also insured, like, uh, everyone else. Car insurance, life insurance, retirement insurance, annuities, everything.
And unlike the banking industry, which has things like FDIC insurance for deposits, there is no Federal bankstop if, for example, you die and your life insurance company can't cover the payout.
One where every row has a monetary (and time) cost, which is conveniently close to the one we live in. On a huge database, pulling a specific set of rows from a date range may or may not actually align well with how the database is sharded. If you've been partitioning the table by the "URL" column, and now you want to query by the "timestamp" column for a single "URL" value, you're likely going to be doing all your work on a single shard, on a single server. Conversely, if you partition the table by timestamp, all searches for the most recent data will be hammering one server.
Likewise, if you are looking at a specific URL in the NoSQL structure you described, all searches for that will be hammering one server. Wow, it's almost like how a database is used is important to know when it's built, and it's always possible to have a 'sideways' use.
And, of course, you have fallen back on the 'huge database' nonsense which the NoSQL people always fall back on. Despite the fact you are standing there and admitting that NoSQL is slower than an RDBMS.
Which, uh, makes it slower for searching huge databases also.
Again, you're missing the point of the example. It's not that the columns are blank - it's that they don't exist. They aren't taking space in the database, they aren't compressed, and they aren't null. They simply aren't.
Ah, the 'feature' of NoSQL, where the size of empty fields suddenly becomes desperately important for people to care about. Because, of course, it's not like people would throw absurd amounts of data in the NoSQL databases, or tout the ability to do that in the same post they've become worried about the size of empty fields....oh, wait.
Yet again, you seem to be missing the point: There is no pre-built plan. There is no black magic to optimizing NoSQL queries, because there is no strict schema. In an RDBMS, the tables are laid out and optimized according to how they're expected to be used, so that the expected queries will be fast. NoSQL typically acts more like data warehousing, where they absorb information as quickly as possible, and make no assumptions about how it will be accessed in the future. No, you don't get the same blazing-fast read access when you're running a complicated query through a widely-distributed cluster, but nothing is ever slower because of how the server's configured.
At least you know what NoSQL actually is: A weirdly complicated file store of consistently-formatted files.
Now, the real question is: In what way is NoSQL better than a filesystem of JSON or XML files?
Obviously, there are some advantages, like the fact that NoSQL has built-in 'file' and record locking and consistency checks.
But, other than that. In what way would just _putting the records in files_ and importing them into SQL be worse?
Apparently they do. As one example from a prior job working with medical data in a nice big multi-million-dollar Oracle server, I was outright told that a particular query would not run, and the DBAs would not let it run, because I was asking for patient records by their address. The address fields weren't indexed, and to add such an index would be far too intense an operation to do immediately. I could fill out forms and jump through hoops and beg for the index to be added in the next software update, but that wasn't planned for a few years.
Very often, DBAs are assholes. And often, they are idiots. Sometimes, they are both.
There are plenty of perfectly functional ways to get that data from the database without slowing down the server, although without indexes it would probably be a somewhat slow response. And, as you pointed out, the failure was due to lack of indexing, which, uh, is trivially solvable, even if the DBAs didn't want to do it. (I have no idea why you would need to wait for a 'software update' for that, unless the DBAs just refused to do anything except at that time. Which is entirely possible.)
All this is nonsense, period. Jobs have requirements. Sometimes those requirements are a button-up shirt, sometimes those requirements are to work on Sunday, sometimes those requirements are to serve people ham, sometimes those requirements are to sell contraceptives, sometimes those requirements are to get flu shots.
If people have religious objections to doing those things, they need to find another employer. (Of course, job duties should be clearly explained in advance so that people can actually decide whether or not to take the job.)
Now, yes, it's illegal for employers to discriminate on the basis of religion, so if, for example, a gas station decided, to keep from having to employ Jews and Muslims, that all workers must eat a piece of ham upon arrival at work (For an absurd example), yeah, okay, that's a lawsuit, because there is no logical reason to have workers do that except to exclude certain religions.
But things that are perfectly reasonable job duties? No. Workers don't get to claim some sort of religious exception.
And please note that I say this as someone who is _incredibly_ pro-worker and in favor of all sorts of corporate restriction...in fact, that is precisely _why_ I say that: Because 90% of the time these 'kowtowing to worker religions' end up being that some workers and their employers share a religion, so the workers get away with whatever they want, and meanwhile other minority-religion workers keep silent out of fear of losing their job. (How many workplaces follow Kosher rules, for example? How many banks have some way to keep Muslim employees from having to charge people interest?)
The idea that 'religion' lets people opt out of their job is an _incredibly_ bad policy to start that is used almost solely for _majority_ religions to argue even more special privileges, and a really bad idea for the country at large to get in its head that is how things are supposed to work.
Although it is a less stupid idea that _corporations_ somehow have freedom of religion, and thus don't have to follow any laws that 'they' don't believe in, another idiotic idea that has shown up recently. (Hint: Corporations do not have beliefs.) This is yet another incredibly stupid and destructive idea. If you do not wish to follow some part of corporate law because that part is against your religion, btzzzzz, you don't get to form a corporation and get the special privileges we've given corporations under the law _because_ they follow corporate law...thank you for playing.
The main benefit to the flu vaccine for hospital staff, is that it keeps the hospital staff healthy.
There is no reliable evidence to show that it increases the likelihood that patients will be less likely to come down with the flu.
These two sentences appear to be in conflict with each other. If the staff is not sick (Or, at least, not _as_ sick.), it seems much less likely they will infect patients.
Slashdot Mirror
Um, no. B&N's online store is the Nook store. It's right there in the article.
Fictionwise's purchase by B&N was just part of the roll-out of the Nook so they'd have titles and licensing agreements in place. And they didn't 'close' Fictionwise as much as 'merge it into the Nook store'.
That's because Costco pays fucking dividends so people who own the stock make a share of the profits.
Ah, investing money in a company to make a cut of the actual profits of the company, an insanely novel idea of corporate ownership that might just catch on one of these days. (It is the 1300s, right? I think my computer's clock is wrong.)
Well, then, this discussion is over. Those who believe 'Science can observe what has happened, predict what will happen, and test those predictions, with everyone paying attention to the theory that has best predicted things in the past because that means it will best predict things in future.' can sit over here.
And those who believe that science cannot do that can sit over there and die from pneumonia when the bloodletting doesn't work. (Who knows, maybe bloodletting will work better than antibiotics _this_ time.)
This is, of course, assuming that quantum theory continues to work long enough for this to be posted on the internet. It seems sorta dubious, you people using the internet like that.
I wasn't saying that they were delusional, either. I was just point out that skeptic:deniers::odd theories:delusional
There are really three sorts of deniers out there. Those who deny it because it is in their best financial interest to do so and don't actually really believe what they're saying, those who deny it simply because they been told it was false and never had any experience to the contrary (Which, like I was trying to say, does not make them 'deniers', just like a guy who thinks aliens are in his closed closet is not delusional.), and the 'denier', the person who refuses accept it despite evidence to the contrary.
The second type is sometimes hard to see, because he will look like the third type for a single argument. There are plenty of people who have only read right-wing conspiracy loon stuff about this, and show up, and quickly get their asses handed to them, and _stop talking about it_. They become unsure of the facts, and, like a normal person, their beliefs about those facts change. Sometimes they hear enough nonsense again that they become more sure again, and come back and argue later, but the point is, facts do change their mind, even if lies can change it back.
But the third type...oh, the third type. Those are people who do not actually believe climate change is a hoax, but they _believe_ they believe. They know they are supposed to believe that, so they try to act like they believe that.
But while they claim to believe something that has been demonstrated to be not true (Like delusional people) you can distinguish them from people with actual delusions by the fact they invent rationals. They will deny the evidence exists, when they are presented with the evidence they will deny it is correct, when it is demonstrated correct, they attempt to explain it in other ways, when that fails they attempt to blah blah.
It's often observed that it's not about being correct, but that is an understatement. It's not even about convincing anyone else. In their mind, it is about _doing the right thing_, believing something despite the fact they know it's not true. Basically, they're attempting to be delusional and failing badly.
And then, of course, there are just the trolls.
I'm not entirely sure what you're saying, but it's easy to track someone's eyes relative to the _tracker's_ POV. You put a camera above a computer screen, it can easily know what what you're looking at once it's calibrated correctly.
The hard part is actually figuring what the person is looking at when it _isn't_ a computer generated picture, and isn't head-on. Hell, it's hard enough for a computer to figure out the _distance_ to something in a video image.
Basically, the camera would have to identify someone's face and their eyes in the face. This is somewhat possible.
It would then have to figure out the distance to their face. Then, using the distance and the angle of their eyes, it would know roughly where they were looking. This is also, possibly, something that can be done.
It would then have to generate a 3D map of the world and figuring out what they were looking at, which is completely impossibly currently. Generating a 3D map of the world is _hard_, especially from the limited data of a single, randomly-positioned camera. Especially when this has to be done every second or so. (As the point is to measure where people look on average.)
And this is assuming that cameras can actually identify who is male and who is female, which I find a bit dubious.
At some point in the future, portable computers will be powerful enough to keep updated a map of the room room they're in, along with every single known person tagged with a name and unknown people tagged with all sorts of description information. And at _that_ point, it would be rather easy to make 'gaydar', and in fact there's some odd privacy issues there with eye tracking I've never seen anyone talking about, especially as so much of eye movement is not under conscious control and _not even the person looking_ knows it happened. (I forget what's it's called, but the eye moves a lot more often than we think, because the eye _turns off_ when it does that.)
But computers can't do that now. It might be possible to set up cameras watching people in known locations, and other people in other known locations (like seating at a bar or something) and create enough of a 3D map that a computer can calculate this stuff, although it still wouldn't be real time, and I suspect that a human being going in and tagging each person as 'attractive female' or 'unattractive male' might be needed. But a random room and a random camera on a person? Not likely.
Gaydar: Tags an icon over any other Gaydar user.
I don't think that's how 'gaydar' is supposed to work. Straight people can have gaydar, and gay people might not. (Gay people probably _try_ to have it, but that doesn't mean it works.)
You actually could implement a gaydar feature, though. It theoretically should be possible to statistically detect slight sexual attraction towards others. Watch other people's sightline, and check their pupils for dilation and what their eye stops on, etc. You could even detect heartrate and temperature changes.(1)
It probably would only work on average, but, hey, so does real gaydar. In fact, that exact mechanism is one of the ways that gaydar is proposed to work: People with gaydar might subconsciously detect who is subconsciously attracted to whom.
1) I was going to point out nothing currently sold can do detect heartrate or tempurature, but nothing currently sold can even figure out the sightlines of other people, much less detect if the person being looked at is male or female. No one of this is actually technically possible at the moment.
I'm sorry, but you seem to simply not understand. You're saying that IPCC predictions so far have been good, implying that these people have shown that they can predict the climate well. I'm telling you: the accuracy of their current predictions tells you nothing about the accuracy of their future predictions.
That is quite possibly the stupidest fucking thing I've ever heard.
Hey, idiot. The accuracy of current predictions does tell us how accurate future ones will be. That's how predictions work. That's how science works. That's how the universe works. The same effect happens when the same cause happens, and if we can figure those out, we can predict things, and unless the goddamn laws of physics random change, those predictions will continue to be true.
For the people reading, please note that stenvar did not say 'The events are predicted for the wrong reason', or 'The predictions are not accurate'. He said 'Correctly prediction and modeling things accurately now can tell us nothing about what's going to happen in the future.'
And now AGW denialists have now reached Last Thursdayism. They are now denying that the past is in any indicative of the future. Wow. Just wow.
That's a blatant lie, and there is no point in trying to have a scientific discussion with a liar.
Yes, and the IPPC reports released a decade ago that predicted this extreme weather tells us nothing about extreme weather now, right? So we must not be having any. I think that's how the logic works.
How is relocating to a position closer to your side of the debate an example of moving the goalposts? The intent of "moving the goalposts" is to move away in a manner that excludes new input, not to accept it and shift to a more similar outlook. By your definition, debate is meaningless because anyone giving way on either side is committing a fallacy.
Erm, that's exactly what 'moving the goalposts' is. He stood there and asserted something that was not true, that the 'predictions' were all off. That was the entire damn point of his post.
And then, when I pointed out that the accepted predictions made by the actual scientific community were true, and when they fail they tend to fail in the direction of underpredicting changes, he instantly asserted that that wasn't important, the predictions are correct, and 'the biggest problem with IPCC and AGW activists is the actions they propose.'
That's pretty much the definition of changing the goalposts. He objected to something for one reason in a previous post, but when I showed up with frankly a bare minimum of knowledge and not even actually quoting any numbers, with information that anyone could trivially _Google_, he instantly changed his objection to something else, and now it's somehow my job to argue against his new idiotic strawman position about what 'activists' do? (Which, you will note, he didn't cite, so whenever I justify them he can always assert 'Oh, that's not what I mean, I mean some other thing.')
Yeah, anyone who's ever participated or seen a discussion like this knows where this is going. So instead I just pointed out the fact he just admitted he was completely and utterly wrong about climate change according to his own words, and now that he accepts, he instantly has carefully weighed 'all' the proposals (Which he doesn't bother to list) and rejected them.
Fuck. That. Shit. I'm not playing along.
Hilariously, yesterday, I rented a SUV, a Chevy Equanox, with an estimated gas mileage. The main screen shows it generally over time (25 mpg, which seems rather low to me, but, then again, it is an SUV. And renters probably drive it like crap.), but there's a screen you can flip to to get second-to-second estimates...which range wildly from 70 mpg to 0 mpg!
I haven't had to drive it when it's cold yet, but who knows what that would say then.
The IPCC collects other people's predictions, and it contains so many that it would be amazing if some of them weren't "remarkably accurate".
Erm, no. Just no. The iPCC releases a single report roughly every six years, all but the first one have been fairly accurate, and the first one got the amount of CO2 released by humans wrong. The math in all of them is basically the same, and if you put in the amount of CO2 actually released, they all are correct, on average at least. (There's a idiotic graph showing how all of the IPCC's predictions are too high this year, which they are. But, uh, firstly, 'this year' is not what the IPCC predicts, but an average, and secondly, we're in the middle of a world-wide recession, which probably means CO2 usage has been less than predicted.)
But mathematically and statistically, good prediction over the exponential part of a sigmoidal growth curve tells you nothing about the future.
I don't think you know what 'statistically' means. A good prediction is, by the definition of 'good prediction', statistically likely to tell you things about stuff you do not know. The entire premise of prediction is that they are statistical representations of things, and 'good' ones are accurate.
And I rather suspect you've poorly copied and pasted that from somewhere, because asserting that the climate is changing exponentially is rather surreal for a denier to do. It's math techobbabble. What you've actually said is that we don't know where climate change, after the increase, will start leveling off.
That, uh, is true. At some point, more CO2 will produce diminishing returns in the environment. Look at Venus, for example. If you pumped as much CO2 out there as we do here, you'd get almost no reaction.
But that has no actual bearing on anything, and asserting it's actually a sigmoidal growth curve is completely surreal for a denier. So you admit that every ton of CO2 is not only making things worse, but each one causes a larger change than the one before it?
'Sure, every time I pour a scoop of sugar on the floor it causes even more ants to show up than last time I did that, but eventually we will run out of nearby ants and my pouring sugar on the ground will result in less ants per sugar scoop showing up! And logically, there's a finite amount of ants, so at some point we'll get zero new ants showing ups! So all your models of this place being infested with ants are wrong.'
Dude...the place is already infested with ants. Whether or not they end up covering the entire floor, as my model suggests, or only a quarter of the floor as your invented wishful thinking suggests, is somewhat moot.
In addition, none of those predictions so far involve the mechanisms that are actually supposed to cause problems, namely tipping points and positive feedback.
We are actually living in a world with problems. We now have droughts and massive hurricanes and weather problems that, statistically speaking, are crazy and due to climate change.
However, you're wrong. IPCC predictions that we are currently in have positive feedback in them, and in fact the IPCC has been criticized for apparently underestimating that, as I pointed out earlier. Ice has, via some positive feedback mechanism that we don't fully understand, have started melting faster than predictions, cause more sea level rise and faster feedback. (And temperature increases caused by CO2 had the same problem back in the 90s, until the IPCC figured out what was going on there.)
That is the real problem with your theory. Yes, no one fully understand the positive feedback in the climate, and we could be wrong in our estimates. The problem is, uh, it appears we don't understand it in the wrong direction and it's larger than we keep estimating! We're ahead of predictions.
And in any system with positive feedback and a finite ability to change inputs, tipping points exist by definition.
Incidentally, I find
Anyone who thinks that minimum wage, or anything that generally costs corporations the same on average across the entire economy like requirements for handicap access, can cause 'bankruptcy' does not actually understand how the economy and inflation work. In fact, raising everyone's wages by 5% would, almost by definition, have no effect on the economy, because inflation would just undo it.
And as for 'some industries would completely fail', that is the stupidiest thing I've ever heard. Any job that is important enough that failing to fill it would cause industries to fill by definition is important enough that companies in that industry will be willing to pay whatever is required to get it done. Granted, that might mean they cannot actually afford to exist, but uh, that raises the rather surreal idea, that the industry itself is somehow important enough that we should care if it fails, and there are people employed in it that are required for it, but those people somehow are so unimportant they shouldn't be paid anything.
That is a pretty insane idea. Either the industry is important and people need it, and thus the people who actually make it work are important, and hence people will be willing (Or, rather, have no choice) to pay more for this needed industry to cover the extra wages. You can't refuse to pay an extra 3% at the grocery to cover the fact that people there are now getting paid more.
Or, alternately, the industry is so unimportant that people would not be willing to cover the extra wages, in which case...who the hell cares if it fails? Perhaps there really is a, I dunno, pet-sitter industry, where people are paid $5 to watch people's pet, and that's all they're willing to pay so at $10 an hour such an industry would not exist...and? Why do we care?
Yeah, and why are people demonizing murderers? Many of them have helped solve the problem of murder by being sent to prison themselves, thus reducing the amount of murderers on the street!
Seriously, you can't be that stupid. You just listed problems companies created and then were forced by law to stop doing.
Although to be fair, the problems were usually created innocently enough. No one understood the real danger of lead, no one really considered how coal dust caused problems, no one know about CFCs. This would be enough to get them off the hook if they had voluntarily changed their behavior when it became clear what was going on...but every a single problem in that list was solved, by a law, after a long and hard fight with the corporations who opposed the change.
The difference is, in many ways, the same as the difference between a delusion and a mistake.
A 'delusion', in the medical sense, is a belief held despite clear evidence to the contrary. The belief has to be 'incorrigible', unchanging despite actual real presented evidence.
Now, there are 'bizarre delusions' that are prima facie untrue, like the belief you are hundreds of feet tall, when you are currently inside a room. Or the belief that you are dead and rotting. (That one is a real, and common enough it has a name, delusion.) Those are delusional under the concept that they violate how reality actually works, and no one should ever believe them if their brain is working correctly.
But barring that, you are not delusional even if you believe something that no reasonable person would believe. You can believe whatever you want, as long as no one presents evidence otherwise.
You only have what is called a 'non-bizarre delusion' if you believe something that, had a reasonable person held that belief, and been exposed to the same evidence as you, they would have change their belief. And you don't.
For example, you are not delusional if you think aliens are hiding in your closet. That could, possibly, be true. Aliens are a thing, if only imaginary, and the closet presumably exists. (If you are seeing a closet where there is not one, you are not delusional, you are hallucinating, which is an entirely different problem.) Aliens in the closet has, shall we say, a probability of 0.00001%, instead of the flat 0% of you being taller than the house yet somehow fitting inside it.
You are delusional if someone shows you the inside of the closet and the lack of aliens, and you continue to believe aliens are in there.(1)
Likewise, there's a difference between skeptics and deniers. Deniers are people when, presented with information that would have made a reasonable person change their mind...don't. (They are not, however, delusional, because they generally don't really 'believe' anything about it one way or the other, they just think they believe it because believing it is what 'their side' does. Most people don't really 'believe' in most abstract facts they've learned.)
1) You're thinking 'Oh, they'll just say they're invisible, or they teleport out before someone opens the door and back when it closes. So no one can ever really prove it's a delusional belief.'. But an interesting fact of actual delusional people is that often are completely illogical about their delusion, and will often end up asserting that the closet was not, in fact, checked, or there were aliens in there when it was checked, or they must have been wrong earlier but now the aliens are there. They're not trying to invent rationals about why there were no aliens there, because, in their mind, there are aliens there, it's not a debatable point. Rationals are what you invent when you don't really believe something but want to, (Or, as I said above, think you believe.). You don't bother inventing them if you're suffering from a hardware error in your brain forcing belief on you.
And having checked a wide range of predictions and statements by AGW activists, I can say that a large fraction of them are scientifically either unsupported or plain wrong.
You can, indeed, say that.
You can lie in many other ways, also.
The IPCC's predictions have been remarkable accurate. The only reason they're ever very wrong is that scientists can't magically know how much CO2 we'll release in advance. So, yes, some predictions in the 1990s overshot, because we reduced emissions.
The mathematical model they have produced, however, is correct. You take the math, you put in the actual rise in CO2 instead of the projected rise, and you get essentially the correct temperature change. Although they did underestimate the effect of CO2 a bit in the first report, and still are currently underestimating the rise in sea level, which frankly has gotten a little worrying.
So the only time the predictions have predicted too much change on average (No, individual years do not count, it's a prediction of _average_ change.) has been when the IPCC said 'We predict that humans will release X tons of CO2 into the air in the next decade and it will cause Y change', and humans decided to only release .8X tons or something.
Pretending their 'model' is bad is like pretending a car's miles per gallon is not a valid prediction because it can't tell you how long it will take before you have to fill up the tank. Yeah, that's not how predictions work. They told you the mileage on the highway, they told you the mileage in a city, you start doing other things, they have no idea. Climate change modeling is the prediction of what will happen if humans do specific things, and failure to predict human behavior correctly does not mean the model has failed, as that is not the actual job of the model.
Now, if you want to criticize the IPCC report by saying 'I do not think humans will release that much, I think they will reduce emissions, so blah blah...', that would be fine...but strangely, the people criticizing the IPCC always seem to be the very people who don't think emissions need to be reduced.
And while I have singled the IPCC out here, other climate change predictions are essentially the same, just trying to take into account they think the IPCC doesn't have a good handle on, like how much of this change is due to feedback.
I find the idea that that 12-volt battery would be dead the most astonishing part of all this, and I would _really_ like some more information about this supposed fact.
Either Telsa is designing cars where somehow driving the car around can drain that. (How the fuck would that even work? The electric engine can work off a standard 12-volt car battery?!?!)
Or that was done deliberately, probably by, as you suggest, leaving the lights on, and not understanding that wouldn't drain the main battery. He deliberately ran out of main power, and pulled into a gas station and shut his car off and left the lights on so he'd _completely_ run out and make his point. Except, of course, that's not how it works, and he ended up draining the wrong battery, one that should never fail.(1)
If someone runs out of gas, and when the tow truck shows up their _battery is dead_, either they are idiots who don't know you shouldn't operate accessories with the car off, or they're trying to 'break' their car.
1) Seriously, never. The reason batteries have problems in ICE cars is that alternator fail or overvoltage, which the Tesla does not have, being charged via very sophisticated electrical system that would, if screwed up, break the main battery long before the 12-volt one. And the batteries 'fail' in the sense of being unable to prove enough amperage to run the starting electric engine, which the Tesla _also_ does not have. There's really no reasonable circumstances where the Telsa's 12-volt battery should fail beside it just getting too old or just running things when the car is off, and it has a _lot_ less wear and tear than in a normal car.
No, by letting the car sit in the cold, Broder made the car estimate the range as via a cold battery.
Cooling down batteries does not deplete their charge when they are warmed back up. Cold batteries are much worse at discharging power, as their chemical processes are slowed down.(1) Which is why the car heats the battery back up.
So basically, you get much worse range when your battery is frozen solid, but luckily it will rapidly heat up. Just like, uh, an internal combustion engine.
Sometimes I get annoyed at the fact that gauges on stuff lie to me. Did you know everyone phone's power gauge is lying? They charge to 100%, stop charging until they reach 95%, and then charge again...but every single phone will report 100% while it's doing that, and even after you take it off the charger. And then most of them keep lying until you reach 75%, which they show as 80%, _then_ they fix it by rapidly dropping to the real value. Annoys the heck out of me...just tell me the truth.
But then I run across idiots like Broder and realize that if the things actually reported what is _really_ going on, it will become some giant scandal about how Model X phone won't charge past 95%.
I wonder what sort of estimated mpg you'd get if the car tried to figure it out ten seconds after starting a frozen gasoline car. Probably like 3 mpg. OMG! What a scandal!
1) In fact, there's an old wife's tale that, because cooling down batteries slows discharge, you should stick unused batteries in the freezer, so they will discharge less, so they will last longer. That theory does not actually work for various reasons, but the fact that frozen batteries work worse, and then work better when heated back up, is a real fact.
I don't know why you're asserting that Consumer Reports has not 'tested' it, when everyone's posting links to them: http://news.consumerreports.org/cars/2012/11/video-tesla-model-s-drive---the-electric-car-that-shatters-every-myth.html
Granted, that might not be an official 'test', but people at CR do, in fact, assert it gets over 200 miles per charge without any pampering.
There was absolutely nothing wrong with the Ford Merkur, besides the stupid name and the fact it occupied an idiotic location in the market so didn't sell.
And the problem with the Renault was reliability over time, something that it would have been rather hard to know when it first came out. That was also, essentially the problem with the Chevy Vega, which everyone loved in 1971...and had managed to have _two_ recalls by mid-1972.
Naming a new car that, unknown to everyone, _falls apart over time_ as 'Car of the Year' is not the same thing as naming one that supposedly gets much worse range than claimed. Now, if the claim is that Telsa Motor's cars fell apart over time, that would be something else. But Motor Trend does _test_ cars, so they do indeed test the range of cars...they just do not have a time machine.
Most local Chamber of Commerce's are beneficial to the area they're in. (Or alternately they're just a little club that does nothing at all except collect dues and meet once a month.) And most of them are explicitly non-partisan, and have almost no money, and if they do have money, they almost always end up _doing things_ with it, not running ads to convince voters of things. For example, the local Chamber in my town purchased a defunct theater and set up a non-profit in it to attempt to draw tourists to the town.
I'm sure some local Chambers have had problems, but in general, the 'averaged' wishes of local businesses tend to fairly closely match the community's wishes. (And it certainly matches the community more than any _individual_ business.) Yes, being business owners, they often look at the world via business-colored glasses, so you might finding them opposing a local sale tax increase or something that the county needs, but that's about it.
The 'US Chamber of Commerce', OTOH, is essentially a front for the pro-corporatism arm of the Republican Party, which has a hell of a lot of money, and uses it to lobby for Republican candidates. With an amazing amount of _foreign_ money.
Incidentally, a lot of local Chambers have, without really thinking about it, joined the US Chamber of Commerce. This often is against their rule to be non-partisan, and should be pointed out to them. Likewise, a lot of large corporations have joined in violation of _their_ stated non-partisan position.
Now if you want a more peaceful, less brutal Revolution, all you have to do is do it very slowly.
The problem with what Marx thought would happen is that he assumed the rich and powerful would never let the poor have any political power, which was, indeed, a reasonable assumption at the time he wrote.
In fact, people forget that what Marx 'predicted' had actually happened several times before. The French Revolution, and so on. The poor get fed up, and seize power...but power was always seized by a small group of people, and before long they were rich and in charge. (In fact, power was always seized by _the very next rung down_, not by the bottom.)
The failure on Marx's part is that he did realize what advances in communication and travel would result in. They allow the poor to organize in ways they were never able to do so before, and, just as importantly, leave if circumstances were not to their liking. Meanwhile, it means the excesses of the rich get known to everyone. At some point, you stopped being able to send the police out to beat up strikers...and if you did everyone knew. With advances in camera technology, it's harder and harder to even try to _arrest_ people for invalid reasons.
So instead of the workers overthrowing the government, we have workers forcing concessions from the rich, both via unions and via political action.
Granted, the rich have fought this for the last century, and even somewhat managed to force it backward in places, and their current attempt to purchase the government in the US is proceeding apace, but it appears to be a rather inexorable slide towards the 'poor' being charge. Or, rather, the majority being charge.
And once they're in charge, the majority won't put up with that sort of bullshit forever. Perhaps more to the point, without _rigging the game_, the rich would never continue to be as rich as they are anyway. Ask why CEOs get paid so much. Ask why all sorts of largess somehow falls out of corporations towards the rich, and all sort of largess falls out of the government towards corporations. Ask why we're constantly 'privating' things so corporations can make a profit from government functions, instead of the government just hiring people to do it. Ask why we bail out banks instead of mortgage holders. Without the power structure _actively_ diverting money to the rich, the rich would rapidly stop being rich.
And that's without the poor deciding to take their money away, which is, indeed, a possibility. (Especially as the entitle asshats can't stop their entitled behavior even after they've blown up the economy. 'JUMP, YOU FUCKERS' indeed.) But even if that doesn't happen, the rich will slowly run out of money. (Because they don't fucking do anything except stand around 'owning' shit and charging us rent to use it, so all the government or even other corporations really has to do is provide alternatives to that. E.g., It's a Wonderful Life. Where's that bank you Occupy guys are working on?)
At some point the majority of people will actually have some sort of ownership stake in the place they live and work, as opposed to 75% of the stuff being owned by 10% of the people, and the 'communist revolution' will have sorta happened without anyone noticing.
The workers don't need to 'seize the means of production'. Half of them just need to get a small business loan and start up their own means of production, and the other half just need to join a union, and force the owner of the means of production to actually start paying them...including stock options. And everyone needs to stop electing superich entitle assholes to run the government and file a shareholder lawsuit when those assholes are hired at insane wages to run the corporation that they now have stock in.
Viva la revolution.
Amen.
The real joke is the banking 'industry' no longer even does what it's supposed to do: Take money from people and lend it out. Now, money to lend out come from the Federal Reserve.
And if we're going to do that, why do we need lending banks?
Let's just set up Fed Reserve branches in towns. People can put their money in them, and get Fed Reserve interest. (Which, of course, the Fed would manipulate to try to keep inflation sane.)
Or non-profits that then loan the Fed money, or buy government bonds. Whatever. The point is, 'holding money' banks should be perfectly safe, and not safe in the 'insured' sense, but safe in the 'Money cannot be lost by the _bank_' sense. (Although some sort of Federal backstop in cases of illiquidity would be reasonable. If the bank miscalculates and has no cash but a bunch of bonds that mature in 6 months, we can deal with that situation.)
The only thing that the private banking industry should be doing is loans. Credit cards, mortgages, etc. And they should get that money from _investors_ and borrowing from the Fed, and none of it should be insured. (At least not by the government.)
I understand why the banking system ended up how it is, but it actually makes no sense at this point in time. The actual 'storing money' service, which is all that 90% of people want in their bank, needs to exist and be completely risk-free. Not just risk-free for the people putting money in it, but risk-free _entirely_ so that the government doesn't need to bail it out. (And there's never any reason for the government to bail the loan _issuing_ banks out.)
I'm seeing a lot of confusion in this article. Everyone needs to remember AIG IS NOT A BANK. AIG is an insurance company.
AIG was not the people participating running the 'slice up mortgages and resell them' hot potato game that the banking industry had become. No, they were the people who cleverly looked at that with an outside eye and said 'Hey, would you people like to buy some insurance in case that entire insane stupid money orgy fall apart and everyone realizes it's all built on total shitpile mortages? You would! Alright!'.
And then, astonishingly enough, it did fall apart, and AIG owned approximately a fifteen bajillion dollars to the banks that had purchased said insurance. Why, it's almost as if insuring trillions of dollars of completely idiotic business plans was a bad idea!
They functionally did the equivalent of selling homeowner insurance to people who operated a drunken flaming torch juggling and firework-reselling business employing known arsonists. On top of their gasoline-soaked straw-roof lit entirely by candles. During a drought. Inside a forest fire. While the house was actually already on fire.
And in a total surprise to everyone, those houses all burnt down and AIG had to pay for it all, and didn't have enough money. In a just universe, they'd be completely and utterly bankrupt.
The problem is, they also insured, like, uh, everyone else. Car insurance, life insurance, retirement insurance, annuities, everything.
And unlike the banking industry, which has things like FDIC insurance for deposits, there is no Federal bankstop if, for example, you die and your life insurance company can't cover the payout.
So guess what we, the taxpayers, had to do?
One where every row has a monetary (and time) cost, which is conveniently close to the one we live in. On a huge database, pulling a specific set of rows from a date range may or may not actually align well with how the database is sharded. If you've been partitioning the table by the "URL" column, and now you want to query by the "timestamp" column for a single "URL" value, you're likely going to be doing all your work on a single shard, on a single server. Conversely, if you partition the table by timestamp, all searches for the most recent data will be hammering one server.
Likewise, if you are looking at a specific URL in the NoSQL structure you described, all searches for that will be hammering one server. Wow, it's almost like how a database is used is important to know when it's built, and it's always possible to have a 'sideways' use.
And, of course, you have fallen back on the 'huge database' nonsense which the NoSQL people always fall back on. Despite the fact you are standing there and admitting that NoSQL is slower than an RDBMS.
Which, uh, makes it slower for searching huge databases also.
Again, you're missing the point of the example. It's not that the columns are blank - it's that they don't exist. They aren't taking space in the database, they aren't compressed, and they aren't null. They simply aren't.
Ah, the 'feature' of NoSQL, where the size of empty fields suddenly becomes desperately important for people to care about. Because, of course, it's not like people would throw absurd amounts of data in the NoSQL databases, or tout the ability to do that in the same post they've become worried about the size of empty fields. ...oh, wait.
Yet again, you seem to be missing the point: There is no pre-built plan. There is no black magic to optimizing NoSQL queries, because there is no strict schema. In an RDBMS, the tables are laid out and optimized according to how they're expected to be used, so that the expected queries will be fast. NoSQL typically acts more like data warehousing, where they absorb information as quickly as possible, and make no assumptions about how it will be accessed in the future. No, you don't get the same blazing-fast read access when you're running a complicated query through a widely-distributed cluster, but nothing is ever slower because of how the server's configured.
At least you know what NoSQL actually is: A weirdly complicated file store of consistently-formatted files.
Now, the real question is: In what way is NoSQL better than a filesystem of JSON or XML files?
Obviously, there are some advantages, like the fact that NoSQL has built-in 'file' and record locking and consistency checks.
But, other than that. In what way would just _putting the records in files_ and importing them into SQL be worse?
Apparently they do. As one example from a prior job working with medical data in a nice big multi-million-dollar Oracle server, I was outright told that a particular query would not run, and the DBAs would not let it run, because I was asking for patient records by their address. The address fields weren't indexed, and to add such an index would be far too intense an operation to do immediately. I could fill out forms and jump through hoops and beg for the index to be added in the next software update, but that wasn't planned for a few years.
Very often, DBAs are assholes. And often, they are idiots. Sometimes, they are both.
There are plenty of perfectly functional ways to get that data from the database without slowing down the server, although without indexes it would probably be a somewhat slow response. And, as you pointed out, the failure was due to lack of indexing, which, uh, is trivially solvable, even if the DBAs didn't want to do it. (I have no idea why you would need to wait for a 'software update' for that, unless the DBAs just refused to do anything except at that time. Which is entirely possible.)
All this is nonsense, period. Jobs have requirements. Sometimes those requirements are a button-up shirt, sometimes those requirements are to work on Sunday, sometimes those requirements are to serve people ham, sometimes those requirements are to sell contraceptives, sometimes those requirements are to get flu shots.
If people have religious objections to doing those things, they need to find another employer. (Of course, job duties should be clearly explained in advance so that people can actually decide whether or not to take the job.)
Now, yes, it's illegal for employers to discriminate on the basis of religion, so if, for example, a gas station decided, to keep from having to employ Jews and Muslims, that all workers must eat a piece of ham upon arrival at work (For an absurd example), yeah, okay, that's a lawsuit, because there is no logical reason to have workers do that except to exclude certain religions.
But things that are perfectly reasonable job duties? No. Workers don't get to claim some sort of religious exception.
And please note that I say this as someone who is _incredibly_ pro-worker and in favor of all sorts of corporate restriction...in fact, that is precisely _why_ I say that: Because 90% of the time these 'kowtowing to worker religions' end up being that some workers and their employers share a religion, so the workers get away with whatever they want, and meanwhile other minority-religion workers keep silent out of fear of losing their job. (How many workplaces follow Kosher rules, for example? How many banks have some way to keep Muslim employees from having to charge people interest?)
The idea that 'religion' lets people opt out of their job is an _incredibly_ bad policy to start that is used almost solely for _majority_ religions to argue even more special privileges, and a really bad idea for the country at large to get in its head that is how things are supposed to work.
Although it is a less stupid idea that _corporations_ somehow have freedom of religion, and thus don't have to follow any laws that 'they' don't believe in, another idiotic idea that has shown up recently. (Hint: Corporations do not have beliefs.) This is yet another incredibly stupid and destructive idea. If you do not wish to follow some part of corporate law because that part is against your religion, btzzzzz, you don't get to form a corporation and get the special privileges we've given corporations under the law _because_ they follow corporate law...thank you for playing.
The main benefit to the flu vaccine for hospital staff, is that it keeps the hospital staff healthy.
There is no reliable evidence to show that it increases the likelihood that patients will be less likely to come down with the flu.
These two sentences appear to be in conflict with each other. If the staff is not sick (Or, at least, not _as_ sick.), it seems much less likely they will infect patients.