This movie did a lot of things right, and I'm going to watch it again, but there are many things that make me question whether it should have been made as a Star Wars movie.
Visually it's great. It looks like a Star Wars movie, and speaking as a fan I'm glad they used so many practical effects instead of computer generated effects.
Plot-wise it is a bit of a roller-coaster ride. Ups and downs. Some funny moments.
But when you think about the overall story and what is going on, it's bleak and depressing, far beyond what is tonally appropriate for Star Wars.
Spoilers follow. This whole topic is spoilery anyway.
People didn't like how The Empire Strikes Back ended on a "down" note. Oh my gosh, this movie was at least a thousand times bleaker. Apparently after the big success of blowing up the second Death Star and the death of the Emperor, the Rebellion spent the next 40 years or so losing and losing and losing. The Rebellion starts the movie with one capital ship, a medical ship and some sort of freighter or something; and only a few dozen X-Wing fighters. Then they take horrific losses and end the movie with literally a couple of dozen surviving members on board a battered old freighter. The only senior figure left in the Rebellion is Leia. They have no resources, and no allies (the allies they thought they had did not come when they were needed the most).
This is so bleak and depressing that it's painful to think about. But at least we get Luke training Rey as a Jedi, right? Oh no; Luke is bitter, and instead of learning from what happened and moving on, he spent decades in self-imposed exile; he said, in so many words, that he went to that planet to die. And in fact he didn't give Rey any useful training. He promised three lessons, and gave two, and they were great lessons if her big problem was that she was stuck-up and had an inflated sense of her own importance; her actual problem was that she was truly gifted in the Force yet had no idea what to do or how to use the Force, in short that she needed good training.
Then there is the whole Finn and Rose sub-plot where they try to get a codebreaker. Their efforts are worse than useless. The codebreaker somehow figured out that the rebels were sneaking away and tipped off the First Order. (I really don't know how a codebreaker could figure this out; Finn couldn't have told him because Finn didn't know either.) The rebel plan to sneak away was working until the codebreaker tipped off the bad guys, so something like 90% of the surviving rebels died because of that codebreaker guy.
And why did they take the risk of the whole codebreaker thing? Because the Vice Admiral didn't tell Poe that she actually had a plan, and she went out of her way to let him think she had no plan and everyone was going to die. Was this to "teach him a lesson"? Makes no sense, and that lesson came at a horrific cost.
I hope that the writers have a plan already for Episode IX. The story is at such a low point that it will take a truly amazing plan to have the Rebellion come roaring back and defeat the bad guys.
Now, I'll briefly talk about stuff I liked.
I really enjoyed the bit at the beginning where Poe was all alone in an X-Wing in front of the First Order ships. Some people say all the comedy fell flat, but the bit where he was stalling for time by pretending he wasn't hearing anything was IMHO laugh-out-loud funny.
I think that one of the stupidest George Lucas ideas from the prequels is being redeemed. (Not midichlorians... that bit of stupidity is irredeemable.) There was this prophecy of "the one who will bring balance to the Force" and that whole thing went nowhere in the prequels. Well, maybe Rey is about to bring balance to the Force. She isn't afraid of the Dark Side and the Dark Side doesn't seem to be pushing her to do evil things... and Yoda seems to think she will do better without the historical teachings of the Jedi. Maybe she will be able to embra
What do you mean free? It's built into the purchase price.
"Free" in the informal sense that a Tesla owner is free to use the Supercharger at any time for no incremental cost. Not "free" in the sense of "free lunch".
If there's anyone who needs fast-charging stations I'd expect it to be the commercial drivers.
If there's anyone who should be paying for their own electricity instead of getting it for free, I'd expect it to be the commercial drivers.
Unless they can swap cars part way they're going to have to re-charge during the work day.
A $500 Tesla wall charger can charge at one-quarter the speed of a Supercharger. A private commercial Supercharger is available that can charge at half the speed of a Tesla public Supercharger.
If commercial drivers are swamping the fast-charging stations it's because they desperately need them for their Teslas to be a viable option.
0) The change isn't retroactive, so current users can continue to do what they have been doing.
1) The cost for electricity to run a Tesla is roughly one-third the cost of gasoline to run a similar gasoline car. A commercial user will save money operating a Tesla even if they need to invest in a private charging solution.
2) For the Tesla semi truck, they will build out special truck charging stations with the new truck charging connector. Those will not offer unlimited free power, but Tesla says that the new semi will pay for itself within two years just on the cost savings vs. buying diesel fuel for a conventional semi truck.
I've read through the commentary so far. Sheesh, people, did Tesla kill your father or something?
Tesla has offered unlimited use of the Superchargers to most of their customers. They initially offered it to everyone, then they announced a change ahead of time (and not retroactive). Then they decided to make their deal more generous, and just to make sure the more-generous deal applied to everyone they announced a one-time retroactive change to give unlimited Supercharger use to all Model S and Model X customers as of that date.
Unlimited use of the Supercharger goes with the car, so every car that ever had it still has it. Buy a used Tesla that has unlimited Supercharger use, you get that benefit. This hasn't changed.
Now they announced their "Supercharger Fair Use" policy that commercial users will no longer be permitted unlimited free use of the Superchargers... and that's only on new sales of Tesla cars, so anyone who has already been running a business and using the Superchargers is still being allowed to continue doing it.
What if you want to buy a Tesla in 2018 and use it for a business? You still can, just install a Tesla wall connector and you can charge the car from empty to full in less time than it takes you to get a good night's sleep. (If you have a 240 Volt circuit with enough Watts you can charge a Tesla at one-quarter the speed of a Supercharger... at your home or business!)
What if you want to operate a whole fleet of Teslas as a taxi service or something? Tesla will sell you a private Supercharger station you can set up. Rumor has it a two-station Supercharger costs about $60K, and rumor has it that Tesla might give it free with a bulk purchase of 10 cars:
To those of you wailing that Tesla can control who uses their Supercharger stations: yeah, they can, but so far they haven't abused this in any way; and they can't stop you (and don't want to stop you) from setting up your own charging solution.
It's true that gas stations don't control who can get gas there. But they don't give the gas for free to anyone... they charge money which is why they don't care who gets it. Also, gas stations are pretty well built-out everywhere, while Tesla is frantically building new Supercharger stations; IMHO Tesla is looking after their ordinary customers by trying to keep a few users from disproportionately using the Superchargers.
And note that all Telsas can use all the other charging stations for all the other cars, with an adapter. If you are so worried about the Supercharger, get a CHAdeMO adapter; this will charge a Tesla about half as fast as a Supercharger station, which is still pretty darn fast.
If you read all the above and you still think Tesla is doing something wrong here, I'm really curious as to just what it might be. Maybe you think Tesla should promise to just give free unlimited power forever to everyone without limit? That doesn't seem very reasonable to me.
you are saying that Python is only suitable for professional developers
Actually, I never said any such thing. IMHO Python is just plain an all-around easy to use language that's easy to understand. Every language has some weird stuff that you just have to get past to understand how it works; Python has less of it than any other language I've used. My nephew was able to write working Python programs at age 10... he didn't spend any time on "automated tests with 100% code coverage" and yet his programs worked.
Static type checks can be an effective tool but they are not the be-all end-all of software development. If you can't override them they can be a time-wasting straitjacket; if you can override them you can still shoot your foot if you aren't careful; and in any event a program that passes a static type check may still have lots of bugs in it.
It is really nice to know that once your code compiles, one large class of potential errors will be absent.
I've spent plenty of time working with statically typed languages, and I know exactly what you mean. However, (a) for people who haven't learned software development, having to declare types is another hurdle to jump over; and (b) you seem to be ignoring the whole thing about Python enabling static type checking if you want to use it. (The Python interpreter doesn't do the checking, you would have to use an external tool; but IDEs could build it in, and Excel could as well if the Excel team agrees with you that static typing is desirable.
And VBA could (but does not) be compiled to efficient code without relying on complex runtime analysis.
And that's a weak point on Python: it's hard to optimize. PyPy watches code run and optimizes when it sees commonly repeated code, but it's really hard to optimize Python at compile time. The language is super-dynamic, by design, and that has a price.
But for most people, just using the built-ins means that the important work is done at C speed (by library code or built-in Python features). For SciPy the heavy lifting is mostly done by compiled Fortran library code.
Python is just yet another scripting language that offers nothing really new.
Python is an extremely popular language and its user base is growing, not shrinking. Perhaps there is some merit in Python you don't see.
(a) Python has strong typing, just dynamic rather than static. Most Python developers would tell you, and I would agree, that you should be testing your code with unit tests and assertions, and catching type errors at runtime is acceptable.
(b) Some Python developers, including the "Benevolent Dictator for Life" Guido van Rossum, feel that Python should have optional static typing, and it is now available. If you think it would help you, you can simply start using it.
Because it's optional, it's not built into the language compiler; it's a separate tool you run. You can automate running the tool if you like.
Python 3 supports "annotations" that are saved with your code; they do nothing by themselves. But a static analysis tool can use those annotations to do a static type check and give you a type error even before you try running your code.
P.S. One of the reasons that Guido van Rossum decided Python needed optional static typing is that large companies such as Google and Microsoft were using their own hand-rolled static checking solutions; they would declare functions with special comments and then write checking tools that would parse the special comments. By building the type annotations into the language, Python has standardized on one particular way of doing the annotations. Now IDEs support it and people can share code. As the Zen of Python says: "There should be one, and preferably only one, obvious way to do it."
Changing editors can *totally* mess up the whitespace.
Not if you have been following Python's official standard (called PEP 8) and you have been using all spaces. I use vim, and vim has a setting to auto-expand tabs to spaces, plus I use the autoindent, so my code is always correctly indented and I never really need to think about it.
Also, with Python 3, it's no longer just a warning if someone sabotages your white space by inserting some tabs; it's an error. So if someone does somehow sabotage the code by doing some wrong thing with a text editor, that person should find out before ever committing the changes into version control. (And any developer who commits changes without testing them at all is no doubt causing you worse problems than messing up Python whitespace.)
That and the fact that 2.x code can't run virtually unmodified on 3.x interpreters really pisses me off. Perl, for all its warts, just needs
use perl4;
at the top of the file right after the crunchbang and you're good to go with an old as dirt script on the newest interpreters.
Python 2.7 can run Python 2.0 code virtually unmodified. Python 3.x can run a lot of Python 2.x code unmodified, but there are some incompatible changes; the change from Python 2 to 3 was because the Python devs wanted to clean up the language in ways that would break programs. Thus Python 2 and Python 3 are really different languages that happen to be really really closely related.
Ironically many of the incompatible changes from Python 2 to Python 3 were caused by removing language warts. IMHO they succeeded very well; I recommend Python 3 for people who want to learn programming. There are fewer things that are surprising or weird for new programmers. (Example: 1/2 now evaluates to 0.5 rather than 0. Changing type to float was deemed less surprising than the integer division with no remainder behavior of Python 2.x. I agree with this decision, especially as Python has an operator,//, that lets you explicitly ask for integer division with no remainder.)
It's really easy to port Python 2.x code to Python 3.x; the Python devs provided a tool called 2to3 that does a good job. It's reliable: you can count on the code Just Working once it's updated.
It's also easy to port Python 2.x code to a new code file that runs equally well on Python 2.x and Python 3.x (using a library called six). This uses a hacked-up version of 2to3 called modernize (or another one called futurize).
Some people question the decisions made in the change from Python 2 to Python 3, but I'm a full-time Python dev who has been using Python for a decade, and IMHO the changes were really good. They didn't go crazy and make a totally new language, but the changes are worthwhile. (In particular, the Unicode changes all by themselves were worth the hassles.) Python 2 is already a really great language, but Python 3 is even better. And Python 3.6 is both faster and more memory-efficient than any version of Python 2.x. (The earlier versions of Python 3.x had slower performance than Python 2.x so the improvements used to come at a cost. Now it's win/win.)
I hope your rage at the Python 2 / Python 3 incompatibilities won't keep you from checking out Python 3.
However, all the really good sites for this have already been built, and if you try to build more, environmentalists will try to block you.
The battery technology I am keeping my eye on is liquid metal batteries as developed by Ambri. Their batteries are heavy so they would be lousy for cars, but for massive fixed power installations the weight wouldn't matter. They had some engineering details to figure out but I guess they got things working a year ago. I'm not sure why we haven't heard more news about them, maybe they have customers quietly trying out their batteries and they don't have any large-scale buys yet. Or I wonder if there is some catch I haven't figured out. But this would appear to be a more cost-effective solution than lithium ion batteries, if it works.
I've spent a lot of time on the Microsoft campus, and some time in various nearby buildings that are not connected to the campus but are also owned by Microsoft. Microsoft has a lot of people who need office space.
The original building designs were optimized for largest possible number of window offices. They are shaped like a plus sign or X when viewed from above and are two stories. (Example: building 4) Most of them have no parking underneath them. When those were built, Microsoft just used flat parking lots.
As the campus grew they started building "double-X" buildings (example: Building 9), which were the size of two of the older buildings glued together. Still flat parking lots.
As the campus continued to grow, they built some larger three-story buildings, this time with no sort of X shape at all, just conventional buildings. Buildings 16, 17, and 18 were built together in a little cluster and have three floors of underground parking.
Additional buildings have been filled in here and there over the campus. For example, Building 37 is shoehorned in right next to Building 6, the last of the single-X buildings.
None of the new buildings are X shaped, that seems like it's never coming back. Anyway Building 37 has a multi-level parking garage right next to it.
So the trend already has been toward more efficient buildings, with more floors, and with big parking garages. But they've run out of room to slide new buildings in next to old buildings, and they have already bought or rented an amazing number of nearby buildings. If they want more office space, the only way is to start replacing old buildings with more efficient new ones.
The article says the plan will take 7 years, which makes sense. No way will they raze the campus and build a new one in one shot... they already have issues with crowding, so it would make no sense to destroy all the buildings at once. It will happen a few buildings at a time in an orderly fashion.
I am pretty sure that modern designs will be significantly more energy-efficient than the old X buildings, which I'm certain were not designed for efficiency; maximizing for window offices also maximizes for radiating heat away through windows during the winter. And those windows are not modern insulating windows either. I figure Microsoft will use modern HVAC that will be more efficient than whatever the old buildings have, and by making larger buildings that pack more people in the number of available offices will go up (which IMHO is the real driving force behind this effort).
It looks like they have planned to make it a pleasant place even though density of people will be increased. It's already a pretty pleasant place.
I've seen a bunch of Indian folks playing cricket on one of the fields. That part of the article makes perfect sense to me... the demand is already there, why not give those folks a first-class cricket pitch.
The biggest change shown in the video is that the entire interior of the campus will be car-free. They will have a ring road around the new campus, and I guess giant parking garages on the ring, and then people will walk between the new campus buildings. I'm sure they will have golf carts and Segways and such for services and security. But anyway right now cars come and go all the time, including a whole fleet of official Microsoft "shuttles" (which are mostly Toyota Priuses as far as I know). So going car-free will be a really big change.
According to my power bill, 87% of my electricity comes from hydro and 11% comes from nuclear.
Where do you live, Newhalem? (mostly kidding) But seriously, as far as I know, Microsoft gets power from Puget Sound Energy, and PSE says they get 31% from hydro:
Sadly 37% is coal. But 22% natural gas and 9% wind.
I did some Google searches and I found that you are correct: Washington just has a single coal plant, and it will shut down its coal burning by 2025. I believe it will burn natural gas after that; it already has a combined cycle gas turbine power unit, operating alongside the two coal power units. Since the two coal power units produce 1340 megaWatts and the combined cycle unit produces only 248 megaWatts, presumably they will be building more non-coal power units.
There is a book with the not-at-all-pretentious title Games for the Superintelligent that contains various brain-teasers and such. In the introduction, a guy explained that he calculated how many calories it would take to bring a glass full of icy cold drink up to body temperature (which would happen after drinking it); then he got a diet book and looked up how many Calories were in one glass of the drink (gin and tonic or whatever his preferred booze drink was). He found the diet book number was lower than the number from his calculations, and therefore claimed that he ought to be able to lie on a hammock drinking his favorite drink and shedding Calories like mad. Easiest diet plan ever. He ended this with something like "P.S. I tried it and it didn't work."
I was just a kid when I read this and it bugged me for a long time. If he did the math right, why didn't it work? Eventually I figured out that the diet book was giving him numbers in Calories, and he did his temperature change calculation in calories. So there was a factor of 1000 difference between the two numbers, and the food value of his booze was significantly more Calories than his body used to warm the drink. No wonder "it didn't work".
I used to make myself an iced mocha drink every day. I had the recipe perfected: my favorite espresso beans, the right amount of Hershey's syrup, a particular brand of vanilla soy milk I liked, and ice. So good. About 400 Calories (more properly: kcal) and almost all of the Calories from sugar.
I looked forward to drinking that every day. Some days I had two.
Then I read a book called Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle that convinced me that refined carbs were a bad idea in general, and sugar a bad idea in particular. I had heard/read a lot of conflicting things about diet ("sugar is bad for you! no, fat is what you must avoid!") and this book didn't have any single shocking new thing, but put all the pieces together convincingly.
At the time my blood triglycerides level was worryingly high. From the book, I believed my diet was a major contributing factor, and I needed to stop enjoying my daily iced mochas.
When I stopped I really missed them. When I wasn't allowing myself to have them I started to really crave them.
I started drinking my espresso shots straight-up. No sugar, no milk, just espresso into my mouth. I figured: lots of people like black coffee; maybe I could learn to like it. After about a month I got used to the taste of coffee and started to like it. These days I drink strong coffee instead of straight-up espresso just so it takes a bit longer to drink and I have more time to enjoy it.
My blood triglycerides level went back down, by the way.
I think you had a more extreme case of this than I did, but I felt similar cravings and I totally believe your story.
Then you are a fool. As a canadian, I've been in physical encounters with people where they have drawn weapons. If I or they had a gun instead of a knife, things would have ended much worse for someone.
Okay, here's a thought experiment for you. What if we took an area where it was not generally legal to carry a pistol, and changed the laws so that it became generally legal to carry a pistol? Would violence go up, go down, stay the same? By your argument, it should go up.
Well, the experiment has been tried, and violence was observed to go down.
Does this prove that legalizing concealed carry causes violent crime rates to drop? No, because correlation does not prove causation. However, if your argument were valid, concealed carry would cause an increase in violence, and this data clearly contradicts this proposition.
So, you were rude to me, and you offered your own opinion as if it were fact, and the facts don't agree with your opinion.
Most guns used in crimes are smuggled from the USA at extreme risk.
It's not legal to possess crack cocaine anywhere in the USA. Yet crack addicts buy it everywhere all the time. So I'm not sure what your point is... if your argument is that the laws in Canada keep criminals from getting firearms, could you please explain how the crack addicts get crack?
For that matter, since it's against the law to commit murder, why do murders still occur?
The laws shape the culture.
That's an interesting idea but I notice you didn't support it with any kind of references or statistics or anything. I'll grant that laws can exert some kind of influence on culture but I reject the idea that government has the power to directly shape culture, that if it could just pass the right laws human nature could change. I disagree with you on this point, but I won't insult you.
[the Japanese] don't seem to be spending any time shooting people at music festivals, churches or schools every other week.
I'm not sure if you are trolling but I think this is in fact a valid point, and it's one of the reasons why I and others are opposed to banning firearms.
I recommend a book called The Samurai, the Mountie, and the Cowboy which analyzes gun control and gun violence in Japan, Canada, and the USA. The conclusion of the book: gun misuse is overwhelmingly a cultural thing. Japan may have gun control laws, but it's not the laws that keeps gun violence low there, it's the culture.
I believe that even if the USA adopted the exact same laws that Japan has, gun violence in the USA wouldn't change very much. Changing the culture is much harder but also much more likely to have an effect.
BTW Japan has a whole lot of suicides. Someone who is really super upset there is more likely to kill himself rather than trying to kill a bunch of others.
Japan doesn't have as many as the USA. Japan has a smaller population, so one would expect fewer events, but even after adjusting for population it's less. However, it's not zero.
The US military has put all of its eggs into one basket. The military needs new planes and the only available new plane is the F-35. Therefore, there is only one reasonable course of action: deal with it. If the repair facilities are not up to snuff, then spend the money and do what needs to be done. There is no Plan B (or "Plane B" since we are talking about planes here).
I read both articles.
The first article makes the case that "concurrency" has been a disaster. "Concurrency" is the idea that the new plane was delivered in generations. The first F-35 planes delivered are much less capable than the final generation (the "Block 3F" plane, which is scheduled for release now, over a decade after the first F-35 flew). The first article's main outrage is that several hundred early-gen F-35 planes may never be upgraded to Block 3F; the military is seriously considering leaving them unfit for any other use than as trainers, and using the money thus freed up to just buy more newer-gen F35s.
I am not an expert on military stuff or on government procurement, so please take my opinions with a grain of salt. That said: I am not convinced that "concurrency" has been a disaster. The F-35 is truly a quantum leap in the state of the art of military aircraft; its "sensor fusion" features are dramatically more advanced than the F-22. We are just now getting the Block 3F features. Would we really have been better served by the plane remaining vaporware until 2017? Didn't the early flight hours with the F-35 give us useful information? Is there no value to having pilots training on the real aircraft? Hasn't it been useful to fly the F-35 in training exercises to see how well it actually does? I am not competent to put a price tag estimate on how much value there is in all of the above. But I did find a recent article from Forbes where someone makes the case that "concurrency" has been a net win for the F-35 program, so please read this and decide whether you buy his arguments:
By the way, I would not be in favor of a new fighter jet program being run the same way as the F-35 program was run... I think that now that the F-35 has (with great pain) demonstrated the quantum leap in fighter performance, a follow-on program should be able to be run as more of an incremental development, with less risk and drama.
The second article is about how several branches of the military are behind schedule on building maintenance facilities for the F-35, and how that is impacting readiness numbers. As I said above, my only comment on this: we have no choice but the F-35, so we just need to spend the money and fix the problem.
Also, one thing to keep in mind about the F-35: because of its unique combination of stealth, sensors, and flight range, it can do missions with fewer aircraft than 3rd-generation fighters:
One scenario called for a four-ship of F-35Bs to launch from an amphibious assault ship into a "double-digit" (examples might include S-300 or Buk-M1) surface-to-air missile and high-end fighter threat environment to hit a strategic target. While such a mission might be "marginally successful"--at best--when flown by a dozen or more aircraft like the Hornet, the four F-35Bs completed the scenario with near impunity. "It was like watching a pack of dogs going after something," Davis said.
A person has to wonder if a Slashdot faction commenting on this story has an "agenda."
My only agenda is to hope that Tesla succeeds, because I like the advances they have made in the state of the art. (For example, Tesla "SuperCharger" is a better charging technology than anything else available.) I don't want to see them hurting their employees, but I don't really think they need to hurt their employees to succeed.
Everyone agrees that Tesla's production process had problems and needed to improve. Tesla claims they have improved.
According to Tesla's official blog post, they went from having a worse-than-average safety record in their factory, to having a better-than-average record. I haven't heard anything about it getting worse again, and I'm pretty sure that would be widely reported news if it happened.
Also, one of their improvements was adding a third shift, so that work would happen 24 hours a day. This greatly reduced overtime, and was welcomed by the line workers. From the blog post: "Last year, we added a third shift to reduce the overtime burden on each team member and to improve safety. We did this because our employees asked for it, and because it was the right thing to do."
Parts were stacked high in contradiction of Lean Manufacturing dogma, and in contrast with the Maryville, Ohio Honda plant he had observed, the Tesla shop floor activity was frenetic. The Honda plant, by contrast, had its assembly line running so smoothly that the workers did not appear to be breaking a sweat.
Honda has been making cars since 1963 (and motorcycles before then). They have had just a bit more time to fine-tune their operations.
Tesla has spent big money on overhauling their production process. They are planning to crank out a very large number of Model 3 cars per year, and they can't do that with a labor-intensive process. Tesla says that the Model 3 has been designed to be easy to manufacture, using lessons learned while manufacturing their other cars.
There are over a half-million Model 3 cars on pre-order. If Tesla can sort out their production line and get those cars delivered in a timely fashion, they will be heroes. If not, they will be in huge trouble and possibly will go bankrupt.
The Tesla Model S is an incredible automobile, they tell me
It really is.
and maybe the problem with it is that it is incredible that Tesla is able to sell an automobile of that sophistication for the price they charge without it all being smoke-and-mirrors of burning out its workers and fleecing its investors to contribute the labor and money to in effect give away what are effectively hand-built quarter million-dollar cars?
From what I have read, a Model S costs Tesla about $30K to make, so no, they are not giving away effectively hand-built cars, they are making a solid profit on each car sold.
The stories of 70-hour work weeks of relentless pressure are just sour grapes from slackers who deserved to be cut loose?
Tesla says that since they added the third shift (sometime in 2016) that the average number of hours worked per week is 42. Do you have newer data that contradicts this?
here are just some "bottlenecks" to be worked out? While their "body" line tooling is still being put together in some undisclosed location in Southeast Michigan?
I had no idea what you were talking about here. Google found this for me:
some doper wants to "blaze up" in a bar/restaurant
Welcome to Washington State.
I'm not sure what you meant by this, but the law in Washington State is clear: marijuana consumption is not legal if done in public. "Blazing up" in a bar/restaurant is illegal in Washington State.
Hotels and restaurants often post signs reminding people of this, and threatening to call the cops if this law is broken. The places I go don't seem to have a problem with people trying to break this law.
Read for yourself:
Public Use – It is illegal to consume marijuana in view of the public.
I couldn't find anything quite as convenient as the above story for MSNBC, but here's a wikipedia page about MSNBC controversies. Multiple of the controversies are related to fake or dishonest news, such as a video of Mitt Romney edited in a deceptive way by MSNBC news itself.
What Petraeus did was far more serious than what Clinton did. He set up a secret method of passing classified information to a person that he knew was not authorized to handle classified information.
Hillary Clinton engaged in a conspiracy to have secure data transferred to an insecure system. She had people who worked for her reading secure emails off the secure email system, and then typing a summary and emailing the summary to her personal server, so she could read the summaries on her BlackBerry. Later she said she never got anything that had been marked classified... which was technically true, as the typed summaries omitted any mention of classification.
She at least once had her maid go into the SCIF in her house and get a fax.
Her lawyer had possession of a USB "thumb drive" containing all of her emails.
This Politico article is a pretty friendly article to Hillary Clinton, trying to make the case that what she did wasn't all that big a deal, but it includes a section about the summaries of secure info being sent to insecure email address. The article claims it wasn't that big a deal because the State Department IT situation was so broken that people commonly did things like that just to get their jobs done.
For Clinton, she did not set up her server with a primary function of handling classified information, a comparatively small fraction of the documents on it were classified.
The only acceptable fraction is 0%. She had over 2000 email chains containing classified info, over 100 email chains that were classified at the time, over 20 of which were "Top Secret", and including things that any sensible person would know were secret like the satellite data. 22 emails were so sensitive that no part of them has been released to the public, not even redacted.
Also, she had a duty to take care of secure info in a secure way, but in testimony she swore under oath that she had no idea what she was doing: she didn't know that the marking "(c)" might mean that a document was classified, etc.
And, most importantly, there was no evidence that she intended to pass classified information to unauthorized parties. Historically, there have been very different punishments handed out for people who miss-handled classified information, and those who conduct espionage. The difference is in the intent.
Note that Brian Nishimura was not found to have had any ill intent. He had copies of secure information on an insecure device, and that was game over for him. Yet he was treated far more harshly than Hillary Clinton was treated. Are you okay with that? I'm not.
A common meme is: "The Republicans already tried to look into this and couldn't make anything stick. So clearly Hillary Clinton was innocent and the Republicans are just digging for dirt and hoping to find something." Variations on this have already been posted in this discussion.
What's extraordinary here is that the Director of the FBI intervened personally on Hillary Clinton's behalf. He wrote a draft of his speech exonerating her before the FBI ever interviewed her. Her aides were given broad immunity, which is usually used to compel people to talk[1], but then they were allowed to just say things like "I don't remember". Hillary Clinton, or someone working for her, wiped her email server after a subpoena was issued requiring her to hand it over to Congress, and there were absolutely no consequences from that. A usual FBI investigation would collect as much evidence as possible as early as possible, but that wasn't done in this case... the Anthony Weiner/Huma Abedin copies of Hillary Clinton emails were found during an investigation of Weiner, but they should have been found earlier. When the FBI is actually investigating they are thorough about collecting evidence. They should have grabbed every computer Hillary ever touched, and as Huma Abedin was an aide to Hillary, every computer Huma ever touched. (They could have copied the hard disks and given the computers back right away.)
Most extraordinary of all: the Director of the FBI claimed that "no reasonable prosecutor" would prosecute Hillary Clinton as no proof of ill intent was found, yet the laws she broke do not require intent but only require proof of mishandling of data.
...prosecutors are not required to prove motive. [...] Clinton could have been prosecuted either for willfully mishandling classified information or for doing so through gross negligence.
Consider what happened to David Petraeus. He was guilty, but what he did wasn't even a tenth as serious as what Hillary Clinton did. But the Director of the FBI didn't whitewash the investigation for him, so his career was over. (By the way, he didn't go to prison, so he still got better treatment than the "little people" would get. Consider the case of Bryan H. Nishimura. I would say that what Nishimura did wasn't even a thousandth as serious as what Hillary Clinton did, but he was treated much more harshly than she was. Note that he wasn't charged with any "intent", just the mishandling of data.)
I'm pretty sure that if a member of the Trump administration mishandles classified data, he or she won't get the special treatment that Hillary Clinton got. But the Democrats will get a President elected again sometime in the future and I would like to get a precedent established that the laws apply to Democrats as much as to Trump and his staff. I know that the law is not enforced perfectly even-handedly in this country (or any country in the real world) but I am appalled at the epic whitewashing done on behalf of Hillary Clinton to protect
I've read a lot of discussion of Teslas online, and I've repeatedly seen comments like "Well, I think the Tesla interiors are cheap. My BMWs and Mercedes are much nicer, let alone my Bentley. I sold the Tesla and bought a Jaguar."
In fairness to Tesla, I've also seen a lot of comments like "I have six cars, and since I got the Tesla I find I'm just not driving the others anymore. The Telsa is just so fun to drive." But the point is that the praise was always about how the Tesla is for driving, and not that the car is some kind of status symbol. I've never seen comments like "BMWs are passe, if you want to impress people drive a Tesla."
Of course these rich people are always talking about the most expensive Tesla models, like a Model S P100D. Those cars have acceleration like a million-dollar supercar.
Industrial policy remains controversial. Defined as the attempt by government to promote the growth of particular industrial sectors and companies, there have been successes, but also many expensive failures. Policy may be designed to support or restructure old, struggling sectors, such as steel or textiles, or to try to construct new industries, such as robotics or nanotechnology. Neither tack has met with much success. Governments rarely evaluate the costs and benefits properly.
But as I said, the tax rebate for BEVs is one of the better ways to do it and I think it has worked.
Slashdot Mirror
Clearly this was a joke yet it was moderated as "Informative". Moderation humor?
I am pretty sure that "PSA" in this context means Public Service Announcement.
This movie did a lot of things right, and I'm going to watch it again, but there are many things that make me question whether it should have been made as a Star Wars movie.
Visually it's great. It looks like a Star Wars movie, and speaking as a fan I'm glad they used so many practical effects instead of computer generated effects.
Plot-wise it is a bit of a roller-coaster ride. Ups and downs. Some funny moments.
But when you think about the overall story and what is going on, it's bleak and depressing, far beyond what is tonally appropriate for Star Wars.
Spoilers follow. This whole topic is spoilery anyway.
People didn't like how The Empire Strikes Back ended on a "down" note. Oh my gosh, this movie was at least a thousand times bleaker. Apparently after the big success of blowing up the second Death Star and the death of the Emperor, the Rebellion spent the next 40 years or so losing and losing and losing. The Rebellion starts the movie with one capital ship, a medical ship and some sort of freighter or something; and only a few dozen X-Wing fighters. Then they take horrific losses and end the movie with literally a couple of dozen surviving members on board a battered old freighter. The only senior figure left in the Rebellion is Leia. They have no resources, and no allies (the allies they thought they had did not come when they were needed the most).
This is so bleak and depressing that it's painful to think about. But at least we get Luke training Rey as a Jedi, right? Oh no; Luke is bitter, and instead of learning from what happened and moving on, he spent decades in self-imposed exile; he said, in so many words, that he went to that planet to die. And in fact he didn't give Rey any useful training. He promised three lessons, and gave two, and they were great lessons if her big problem was that she was stuck-up and had an inflated sense of her own importance; her actual problem was that she was truly gifted in the Force yet had no idea what to do or how to use the Force, in short that she needed good training.
Then there is the whole Finn and Rose sub-plot where they try to get a codebreaker. Their efforts are worse than useless. The codebreaker somehow figured out that the rebels were sneaking away and tipped off the First Order. (I really don't know how a codebreaker could figure this out; Finn couldn't have told him because Finn didn't know either.) The rebel plan to sneak away was working until the codebreaker tipped off the bad guys, so something like 90% of the surviving rebels died because of that codebreaker guy.
And why did they take the risk of the whole codebreaker thing? Because the Vice Admiral didn't tell Poe that she actually had a plan, and she went out of her way to let him think she had no plan and everyone was going to die. Was this to "teach him a lesson"? Makes no sense, and that lesson came at a horrific cost.
I hope that the writers have a plan already for Episode IX. The story is at such a low point that it will take a truly amazing plan to have the Rebellion come roaring back and defeat the bad guys.
Now, I'll briefly talk about stuff I liked.
I really enjoyed the bit at the beginning where Poe was all alone in an X-Wing in front of the First Order ships. Some people say all the comedy fell flat, but the bit where he was stalling for time by pretending he wasn't hearing anything was IMHO laugh-out-loud funny.
I think that one of the stupidest George Lucas ideas from the prequels is being redeemed. (Not midichlorians... that bit of stupidity is irredeemable.) There was this prophecy of "the one who will bring balance to the Force" and that whole thing went nowhere in the prequels. Well, maybe Rey is about to bring balance to the Force. She isn't afraid of the Dark Side and the Dark Side doesn't seem to be pushing her to do evil things... and Yoda seems to think she will do better without the historical teachings of the Jedi. Maybe she will be able to embra
My quick reply, which I wrote in about a minute: +5, Informative.
My carefully researched post, with 5 reference links, which took much longer to write: modded down as Troll.
Huh, that will teach me to work hard. From now on I'll stick to being lazy instead.
What do you mean free? It's built into the purchase price.
"Free" in the informal sense that a Tesla owner is free to use the Supercharger at any time for no incremental cost. Not "free" in the sense of "free lunch".
If there's anyone who needs fast-charging stations I'd expect it to be the commercial drivers.
If there's anyone who should be paying for their own electricity instead of getting it for free, I'd expect it to be the commercial drivers.
Unless they can swap cars part way they're going to have to re-charge during the work day.
A $500 Tesla wall charger can charge at one-quarter the speed of a Supercharger. A private commercial Supercharger is available that can charge at half the speed of a Tesla public Supercharger.
If commercial drivers are swamping the fast-charging stations it's because they desperately need them for their Teslas to be a viable option.
0) The change isn't retroactive, so current users can continue to do what they have been doing.
1) The cost for electricity to run a Tesla is roughly one-third the cost of gasoline to run a similar gasoline car. A commercial user will save money operating a Tesla even if they need to invest in a private charging solution.
2) For the Tesla semi truck, they will build out special truck charging stations with the new truck charging connector. Those will not offer unlimited free power, but Tesla says that the new semi will pay for itself within two years just on the cost savings vs. buying diesel fuel for a conventional semi truck.
I've read through the commentary so far. Sheesh, people, did Tesla kill your father or something?
Tesla has offered unlimited use of the Superchargers to most of their customers. They initially offered it to everyone, then they announced a change ahead of time (and not retroactive). Then they decided to make their deal more generous, and just to make sure the more-generous deal applied to everyone they announced a one-time retroactive change to give unlimited Supercharger use to all Model S and Model X customers as of that date.
Unlimited use of the Supercharger goes with the car, so every car that ever had it still has it. Buy a used Tesla that has unlimited Supercharger use, you get that benefit. This hasn't changed.
Now they announced their "Supercharger Fair Use" policy that commercial users will no longer be permitted unlimited free use of the Superchargers... and that's only on new sales of Tesla cars, so anyone who has already been running a business and using the Superchargers is still being allowed to continue doing it.
What if you want to buy a Tesla in 2018 and use it for a business? You still can, just install a Tesla wall connector and you can charge the car from empty to full in less time than it takes you to get a good night's sleep. (If you have a 240 Volt circuit with enough Watts you can charge a Tesla at one-quarter the speed of a Supercharger... at your home or business!)
What if you want to operate a whole fleet of Teslas as a taxi service or something? Tesla will sell you a private Supercharger station you can set up. Rumor has it a two-station Supercharger costs about $60K, and rumor has it that Tesla might give it free with a bulk purchase of 10 cars:
https://electrek.co/2016/10/03/tesla-to-deliver-its-largest-privately-owned-supercharger-station-to-a-taxi-fleet-in-montreal/
To those of you wailing that Tesla can control who uses their Supercharger stations: yeah, they can, but so far they haven't abused this in any way; and they can't stop you (and don't want to stop you) from setting up your own charging solution.
It's true that gas stations don't control who can get gas there. But they don't give the gas for free to anyone... they charge money which is why they don't care who gets it. Also, gas stations are pretty well built-out everywhere, while Tesla is frantically building new Supercharger stations; IMHO Tesla is looking after their ordinary customers by trying to keep a few users from disproportionately using the Superchargers.
And note that all Telsas can use all the other charging stations for all the other cars, with an adapter. If you are so worried about the Supercharger, get a CHAdeMO adapter; this will charge a Tesla about half as fast as a Supercharger station, which is still pretty darn fast.
If you read all the above and you still think Tesla is doing something wrong here, I'm really curious as to just what it might be. Maybe you think Tesla should promise to just give free unlimited power forever to everyone without limit? That doesn't seem very reasonable to me.
you are saying that Python is only suitable for professional developers
Actually, I never said any such thing. IMHO Python is just plain an all-around easy to use language that's easy to understand. Every language has some weird stuff that you just have to get past to understand how it works; Python has less of it than any other language I've used. My nephew was able to write working Python programs at age 10... he didn't spend any time on "automated tests with 100% code coverage" and yet his programs worked.
Static type checks can be an effective tool but they are not the be-all end-all of software development. If you can't override them they can be a time-wasting straitjacket; if you can override them you can still shoot your foot if you aren't careful; and in any event a program that passes a static type check may still have lots of bugs in it.
It is really nice to know that once your code compiles, one large class of potential errors will be absent.
I've spent plenty of time working with statically typed languages, and I know exactly what you mean. However, (a) for people who haven't learned software development, having to declare types is another hurdle to jump over; and (b) you seem to be ignoring the whole thing about Python enabling static type checking if you want to use it. (The Python interpreter doesn't do the checking, you would have to use an external tool; but IDEs could build it in, and Excel could as well if the Excel team agrees with you that static typing is desirable.
And VBA could (but does not) be compiled to efficient code without relying on complex runtime analysis.
And that's a weak point on Python: it's hard to optimize. PyPy watches code run and optimizes when it sees commonly repeated code, but it's really hard to optimize Python at compile time. The language is super-dynamic, by design, and that has a price.
But for most people, just using the built-ins means that the important work is done at C speed (by library code or built-in Python features). For SciPy the heavy lifting is mostly done by compiled Fortran library code.
Python is just yet another scripting language that offers nothing really new.
Python is an extremely popular language and its user base is growing, not shrinking. Perhaps there is some merit in Python you don't see.
VBA has static typing which Python does not.
(a) Python has strong typing, just dynamic rather than static. Most Python developers would tell you, and I would agree, that you should be testing your code with unit tests and assertions, and catching type errors at runtime is acceptable.
(b) Some Python developers, including the "Benevolent Dictator for Life" Guido van Rossum, feel that Python should have optional static typing, and it is now available. If you think it would help you, you can simply start using it.
Because it's optional, it's not built into the language compiler; it's a separate tool you run. You can automate running the tool if you like.
Python 3 supports "annotations" that are saved with your code; they do nothing by themselves. But a static analysis tool can use those annotations to do a static type check and give you a type error even before you try running your code.
The tool is called "mypy":
http://mypy-lang.org/
P.S. One of the reasons that Guido van Rossum decided Python needed optional static typing is that large companies such as Google and Microsoft were using their own hand-rolled static checking solutions; they would declare functions with special comments and then write checking tools that would parse the special comments. By building the type annotations into the language, Python has standardized on one particular way of doing the annotations. Now IDEs support it and people can share code. As the Zen of Python says: "There should be one, and preferably only one, obvious way to do it."
Changing editors can *totally* mess up the whitespace.
Not if you have been following Python's official standard (called PEP 8) and you have been using all spaces. I use vim, and vim has a setting to auto-expand tabs to spaces, plus I use the autoindent, so my code is always correctly indented and I never really need to think about it.
Also, with Python 3, it's no longer just a warning if someone sabotages your white space by inserting some tabs; it's an error. So if someone does somehow sabotage the code by doing some wrong thing with a text editor, that person should find out before ever committing the changes into version control. (And any developer who commits changes without testing them at all is no doubt causing you worse problems than messing up Python whitespace.)
That and the fact that 2.x code can't run virtually unmodified on 3.x interpreters really pisses me off. Perl, for all its warts, just needs
use perl4;
at the top of the file right after the crunchbang and you're good to go with an old as dirt script on the newest interpreters.
Python 2.7 can run Python 2.0 code virtually unmodified. Python 3.x can run a lot of Python 2.x code unmodified, but there are some incompatible changes; the change from Python 2 to 3 was because the Python devs wanted to clean up the language in ways that would break programs. Thus Python 2 and Python 3 are really different languages that happen to be really really closely related.
Ironically many of the incompatible changes from Python 2 to Python 3 were caused by removing language warts. IMHO they succeeded very well; I recommend Python 3 for people who want to learn programming. There are fewer things that are surprising or weird for new programmers. (Example: 1/2 now evaluates to 0.5 rather than 0. Changing type to float was deemed less surprising than the integer division with no remainder behavior of Python 2.x. I agree with this decision, especially as Python has an operator, //, that lets you explicitly ask for integer division with no remainder.)
It's really easy to port Python 2.x code to Python 3.x; the Python devs provided a tool called 2to3 that does a good job. It's reliable: you can count on the code Just Working once it's updated.
It's also easy to port Python 2.x code to a new code file that runs equally well on Python 2.x and Python 3.x (using a library called six). This uses a hacked-up version of 2to3 called modernize (or another one called futurize).
Some people question the decisions made in the change from Python 2 to Python 3, but I'm a full-time Python dev who has been using Python for a decade, and IMHO the changes were really good. They didn't go crazy and make a totally new language, but the changes are worthwhile. (In particular, the Unicode changes all by themselves were worth the hassles.) Python 2 is already a really great language, but Python 3 is even better. And Python 3.6 is both faster and more memory-efficient than any version of Python 2.x. (The earlier versions of Python 3.x had slower performance than Python 2.x so the improvements used to come at a cost. Now it's win/win.)
I hope your rage at the Python 2 / Python 3 incompatibilities won't keep you from checking out Python 3.
I always imagined pumping water uphill into a reservoir to feed hydroelectric turbines as a way of storing power
It's not just something you imagined; it's done all the time.
pumped-storage hydroelectricity
However, all the really good sites for this have already been built, and if you try to build more, environmentalists will try to block you.
The battery technology I am keeping my eye on is liquid metal batteries as developed by Ambri. Their batteries are heavy so they would be lousy for cars, but for massive fixed power installations the weight wouldn't matter. They had some engineering details to figure out but I guess they got things working a year ago. I'm not sure why we haven't heard more news about them, maybe they have customers quietly trying out their batteries and they don't have any large-scale buys yet. Or I wonder if there is some catch I haven't figured out. But this would appear to be a more cost-effective solution than lithium ion batteries, if it works.
http://www.windpowerengineering.com/industry-news/ambri-reaches-milestone-commercializing-liquid-metal-batteries-grid-scale-storage/
I've spent a lot of time on the Microsoft campus, and some time in various nearby buildings that are not connected to the campus but are also owned by Microsoft. Microsoft has a lot of people who need office space.
The original building designs were optimized for largest possible number of window offices. They are shaped like a plus sign or X when viewed from above and are two stories. (Example: building 4) Most of them have no parking underneath them. When those were built, Microsoft just used flat parking lots.
As the campus grew they started building "double-X" buildings (example: Building 9), which were the size of two of the older buildings glued together. Still flat parking lots.
As the campus continued to grow, they built some larger three-story buildings, this time with no sort of X shape at all, just conventional buildings. Buildings 16, 17, and 18 were built together in a little cluster and have three floors of underground parking.
Additional buildings have been filled in here and there over the campus. For example, Building 37 is shoehorned in right next to Building 6, the last of the single-X buildings.
None of the new buildings are X shaped, that seems like it's never coming back. Anyway Building 37 has a multi-level parking garage right next to it.
So the trend already has been toward more efficient buildings, with more floors, and with big parking garages. But they've run out of room to slide new buildings in next to old buildings, and they have already bought or rented an amazing number of nearby buildings. If they want more office space, the only way is to start replacing old buildings with more efficient new ones.
The article says the plan will take 7 years, which makes sense. No way will they raze the campus and build a new one in one shot... they already have issues with crowding, so it would make no sense to destroy all the buildings at once. It will happen a few buildings at a time in an orderly fashion.
I am pretty sure that modern designs will be significantly more energy-efficient than the old X buildings, which I'm certain were not designed for efficiency; maximizing for window offices also maximizes for radiating heat away through windows during the winter. And those windows are not modern insulating windows either. I figure Microsoft will use modern HVAC that will be more efficient than whatever the old buildings have, and by making larger buildings that pack more people in the number of available offices will go up (which IMHO is the real driving force behind this effort).
It looks like they have planned to make it a pleasant place even though density of people will be increased. It's already a pretty pleasant place.
I've seen a bunch of Indian folks playing cricket on one of the fields. That part of the article makes perfect sense to me... the demand is already there, why not give those folks a first-class cricket pitch.
The biggest change shown in the video is that the entire interior of the campus will be car-free. They will have a ring road around the new campus, and I guess giant parking garages on the ring, and then people will walk between the new campus buildings. I'm sure they will have golf carts and Segways and such for services and security. But anyway right now cars come and go all the time, including a whole fleet of official Microsoft "shuttles" (which are mostly Toyota Priuses as far as I know). So going car-free will be a really big change.
According to my power bill, 87% of my electricity comes from hydro and 11% comes from nuclear.
Where do you live, Newhalem? (mostly kidding) But seriously, as far as I know, Microsoft gets power from Puget Sound Energy, and PSE says they get 31% from hydro:
https://www.pse.com/aboutpse/E...
Sadly 37% is coal. But 22% natural gas and 9% wind.
I did some Google searches and I found that you are correct: Washington just has a single coal plant, and it will shut down its coal burning by 2025. I believe it will burn natural gas after that; it already has a combined cycle gas turbine power unit, operating alongside the two coal power units. Since the two coal power units produce 1340 megaWatts and the combined cycle unit produces only 248 megaWatts, presumably they will be building more non-coal power units.
http://www.power-technology.com/projects/centralia/
But it's still possible to use coal power from out of state, as discussed here: https://www.opb.org/news/article/the-northwest-struggles-with-coal-generated-power-from-out-of-state/
About that.
There is a book with the not-at-all-pretentious title Games for the Superintelligent that contains various brain-teasers and such. In the introduction, a guy explained that he calculated how many calories it would take to bring a glass full of icy cold drink up to body temperature (which would happen after drinking it); then he got a diet book and looked up how many Calories were in one glass of the drink (gin and tonic or whatever his preferred booze drink was). He found the diet book number was lower than the number from his calculations, and therefore claimed that he ought to be able to lie on a hammock drinking his favorite drink and shedding Calories like mad. Easiest diet plan ever. He ended this with something like "P.S. I tried it and it didn't work."
I was just a kid when I read this and it bugged me for a long time. If he did the math right, why didn't it work? Eventually I figured out that the diet book was giving him numbers in Calories, and he did his temperature change calculation in calories. So there was a factor of 1000 difference between the two numbers, and the food value of his booze was significantly more Calories than his body used to warm the drink. No wonder "it didn't work".
I completely believe your story.
I used to make myself an iced mocha drink every day. I had the recipe perfected: my favorite espresso beans, the right amount of Hershey's syrup, a particular brand of vanilla soy milk I liked, and ice. So good. About 400 Calories (more properly: kcal) and almost all of the Calories from sugar.
I looked forward to drinking that every day. Some days I had two.
Then I read a book called Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle that convinced me that refined carbs were a bad idea in general, and sugar a bad idea in particular. I had heard/read a lot of conflicting things about diet ("sugar is bad for you! no, fat is what you must avoid!") and this book didn't have any single shocking new thing, but put all the pieces together convincingly.
At the time my blood triglycerides level was worryingly high. From the book, I believed my diet was a major contributing factor, and I needed to stop enjoying my daily iced mochas.
When I stopped I really missed them. When I wasn't allowing myself to have them I started to really crave them.
I started drinking my espresso shots straight-up. No sugar, no milk, just espresso into my mouth. I figured: lots of people like black coffee; maybe I could learn to like it. After about a month I got used to the taste of coffee and started to like it. These days I drink strong coffee instead of straight-up espresso just so it takes a bit longer to drink and I have more time to enjoy it.
My blood triglycerides level went back down, by the way.
I think you had a more extreme case of this than I did, but I felt similar cravings and I totally believe your story.
Then you are a fool. As a canadian, I've been in physical encounters with people where they have drawn weapons. If I or they had a gun instead of a knife, things would have ended much worse for someone.
Okay, here's a thought experiment for you. What if we took an area where it was not generally legal to carry a pistol, and changed the laws so that it became generally legal to carry a pistol? Would violence go up, go down, stay the same? By your argument, it should go up.
Well, the experiment has been tried, and violence was observed to go down.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/jul/14/murder-rates-drop-as-concealed-carry-permits-soar-/
Does this prove that legalizing concealed carry causes violent crime rates to drop? No, because correlation does not prove causation. However, if your argument were valid, concealed carry would cause an increase in violence, and this data clearly contradicts this proposition.
So, you were rude to me, and you offered your own opinion as if it were fact, and the facts don't agree with your opinion.
Most guns used in crimes are smuggled from the USA at extreme risk.
It's not legal to possess crack cocaine anywhere in the USA. Yet crack addicts buy it everywhere all the time. So I'm not sure what your point is... if your argument is that the laws in Canada keep criminals from getting firearms, could you please explain how the crack addicts get crack?
For that matter, since it's against the law to commit murder, why do murders still occur?
The laws shape the culture.
That's an interesting idea but I notice you didn't support it with any kind of references or statistics or anything. I'll grant that laws can exert some kind of influence on culture but I reject the idea that government has the power to directly shape culture, that if it could just pass the right laws human nature could change. I disagree with you on this point, but I won't insult you.
[the Japanese] don't seem to be spending any time shooting people at music festivals, churches or schools every other week.
I'm not sure if you are trolling but I think this is in fact a valid point, and it's one of the reasons why I and others are opposed to banning firearms.
I recommend a book called The Samurai, the Mountie, and the Cowboy which analyzes gun control and gun violence in Japan, Canada, and the USA. The conclusion of the book: gun misuse is overwhelmingly a cultural thing. Japan may have gun control laws, but it's not the laws that keeps gun violence low there, it's the culture.
I believe that even if the USA adopted the exact same laws that Japan has, gun violence in the USA wouldn't change very much. Changing the culture is much harder but also much more likely to have an effect.
BTW Japan has a whole lot of suicides. Someone who is really super upset there is more likely to kill himself rather than trying to kill a bunch of others.
P.S. Mass murder events do happen in Japan: http://time.com/4423216/mass-killings-japan-tsukui/
Japan doesn't have as many as the USA. Japan has a smaller population, so one would expect fewer events, but even after adjusting for population it's less. However, it's not zero.
how about outrageously priced adaptors so Teslas can use other EV chargers
The most common EV charger is SAE J1772 standard. A Tesla comes with an adapter to charge at a J1772 charger. It costs $95 to replace.
https://shop.tesla.com/us/en/product/vehicle-accessories/model-s_x_3-sae-j1772-charging-adapter.html?sku=1067348-00-A
Teslas also come with an adapter kit that allows charging from 120 Volt or 240 Volt outlets. $550 to replace it.
https://shop.tesla.com/us/en/product/vehicle-accessories/model-s_x-mobile-connector-bundle.html?sku=1025821-00-G
Tesla also has a CHAdeMO adapter. $450 to buy one.
https://shop.tesla.com/us/en/product/vehicle-accessories/model-s_x-chademo-adapter.html?sku=1036392-10-D
A Tesla can charge pretty much anywhere with adapters.
The US military has put all of its eggs into one basket. The military needs new planes and the only available new plane is the F-35. Therefore, there is only one reasonable course of action: deal with it. If the repair facilities are not up to snuff, then spend the money and do what needs to be done. There is no Plan B (or "Plane B" since we are talking about planes here).
I read both articles.
The first article makes the case that "concurrency" has been a disaster. "Concurrency" is the idea that the new plane was delivered in generations. The first F-35 planes delivered are much less capable than the final generation (the "Block 3F" plane, which is scheduled for release now, over a decade after the first F-35 flew). The first article's main outrage is that several hundred early-gen F-35 planes may never be upgraded to Block 3F; the military is seriously considering leaving them unfit for any other use than as trainers, and using the money thus freed up to just buy more newer-gen F35s.
I am not an expert on military stuff or on government procurement, so please take my opinions with a grain of salt. That said: I am not convinced that "concurrency" has been a disaster. The F-35 is truly a quantum leap in the state of the art of military aircraft; its "sensor fusion" features are dramatically more advanced than the F-22. We are just now getting the Block 3F features. Would we really have been better served by the plane remaining vaporware until 2017? Didn't the early flight hours with the F-35 give us useful information? Is there no value to having pilots training on the real aircraft? Hasn't it been useful to fly the F-35 in training exercises to see how well it actually does? I am not competent to put a price tag estimate on how much value there is in all of the above. But I did find a recent article from Forbes where someone makes the case that "concurrency" has been a net win for the F-35 program, so please read this and decide whether you buy his arguments:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/lorenthompson/2017/09/29/how-concurrency-in-building-the-f-35-fighter-has-proven-to-be-a-big-plus/#7cd2b7bc7147
By the way, I would not be in favor of a new fighter jet program being run the same way as the F-35 program was run... I think that now that the F-35 has (with great pain) demonstrated the quantum leap in fighter performance, a follow-on program should be able to be run as more of an incremental development, with less risk and drama.
The second article is about how several branches of the military are behind schedule on building maintenance facilities for the F-35, and how that is impacting readiness numbers. As I said above, my only comment on this: we have no choice but the F-35, so we just need to spend the money and fix the problem.
Also, one thing to keep in mind about the F-35: because of its unique combination of stealth, sensors, and flight range, it can do missions with fewer aircraft than 3rd-generation fighters:
http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/f-35b-stealth-fighter-how-the-us-marine-corps-could-dominate-17198
So even if it turns
A person has to wonder if a Slashdot faction commenting on this story has an "agenda."
My only agenda is to hope that Tesla succeeds, because I like the advances they have made in the state of the art. (For example, Tesla "SuperCharger" is a better charging technology than anything else available.) I don't want to see them hurting their employees, but I don't really think they need to hurt their employees to succeed.
Everyone agrees that Tesla's production process had problems and needed to improve. Tesla claims they have improved.
Here's an article about that:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidmarquet/2017/06/04/elon-musk-safety-autopilot/#5d8a4b9a7a88
According to Tesla's official blog post, they went from having a worse-than-average safety record in their factory, to having a better-than-average record. I haven't heard anything about it getting worse again, and I'm pretty sure that would be widely reported news if it happened.
Also, one of their improvements was adding a third shift, so that work would happen 24 hours a day. This greatly reduced overtime, and was welcomed by the line workers. From the blog post: "Last year, we added a third shift to reduce the overtime burden on each team member and to improve safety. We did this because our employees asked for it, and because it was the right thing to do."
Parts were stacked high in contradiction of Lean Manufacturing dogma, and in contrast with the Maryville, Ohio Honda plant he had observed, the Tesla shop floor activity was frenetic. The Honda plant, by contrast, had its assembly line running so smoothly that the workers did not appear to be breaking a sweat.
Honda has been making cars since 1963 (and motorcycles before then). They have had just a bit more time to fine-tune their operations.
Tesla has spent big money on overhauling their production process. They are planning to crank out a very large number of Model 3 cars per year, and they can't do that with a labor-intensive process. Tesla says that the Model 3 has been designed to be easy to manufacture, using lessons learned while manufacturing their other cars.
Recently Tesla shared a video of the robots making Model 3 cars: http://bgr.com/2017/10/09/tesla-model-3-elon-musk-video-production-line/
There are over a half-million Model 3 cars on pre-order. If Tesla can sort out their production line and get those cars delivered in a timely fashion, they will be heroes. If not, they will be in huge trouble and possibly will go bankrupt.
The Tesla Model S is an incredible automobile, they tell me
It really is.
and maybe the problem with it is that it is incredible that Tesla is able to sell an automobile of that sophistication for the price they charge without it all being smoke-and-mirrors of burning out its workers and fleecing its investors to contribute the labor and money to in effect give away what are effectively hand-built quarter million-dollar cars?
From what I have read, a Model S costs Tesla about $30K to make, so no, they are not giving away effectively hand-built cars, they are making a solid profit on each car sold.
The stories of 70-hour work weeks of relentless pressure are just sour grapes from slackers who deserved to be cut loose?
Tesla says that since they added the third shift (sometime in 2016) that the average number of hours worked per week is 42. Do you have newer data that contradicts this?
here are just some "bottlenecks" to be worked out? While their "body" line tooling is still being put together in some undisclosed location in Southeast Michigan?
I had no idea what you were talking about here. Google found this for me:
Welcome to Washington State.
I'm not sure what you meant by this, but the law in Washington State is clear: marijuana consumption is not legal if done in public. "Blazing up" in a bar/restaurant is illegal in Washington State.
Hotels and restaurants often post signs reminding people of this, and threatening to call the cops if this law is broken. The places I go don't seem to have a problem with people trying to break this law.
Read for yourself:
https://lcb.wa.gov/mj-education/know-the-law
Can you cite some, or indeed any, examples?
Here's an article listing ten recent instances where CNN reported fake news. With citations for everything.
http://thefederalist.com/2017/10/23/10-times-cnn-told-us-an-apple-was-a-banana/
I couldn't find anything quite as convenient as the above story for MSNBC, but here's a wikipedia page about MSNBC controversies. Multiple of the controversies are related to fake or dishonest news, such as a video of Mitt Romney edited in a deceptive way by MSNBC news itself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSNBC_controversies
P.S. Here's a story from February listing 16 fake news stories. Some were CNN, some other outlets.
http://thefederalist.com/2017/02/06/16-fake-news-stories-reporters-have-run-since-trump-won/
What Petraeus did was far more serious than what Clinton did. He set up a secret method of passing classified information to a person that he knew was not authorized to handle classified information.
Hillary Clinton engaged in a conspiracy to have secure data transferred to an insecure system. She had people who worked for her reading secure emails off the secure email system, and then typing a summary and emailing the summary to her personal server, so she could read the summaries on her BlackBerry. Later she said she never got anything that had been marked classified... which was technically true, as the typed summaries omitted any mention of classification.
She at least once had her maid go into the SCIF in her house and get a fax.
Her lawyer had possession of a USB "thumb drive" containing all of her emails.
This Politico article is a pretty friendly article to Hillary Clinton, trying to make the case that what she did wasn't all that big a deal, but it includes a section about the summaries of secure info being sent to insecure email address. The article claims it wasn't that big a deal because the State Department IT situation was so broken that people commonly did things like that just to get their jobs done.
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/09/hillary-clinton-emails-2016-server-state-department-fbi-214307
For Clinton, she did not set up her server with a primary function of handling classified information, a comparatively small fraction of the documents on it were classified.
The only acceptable fraction is 0%. She had over 2000 email chains containing classified info, over 100 email chains that were classified at the time, over 20 of which were "Top Secret", and including things that any sensible person would know were secret like the satellite data. 22 emails were so sensitive that no part of them has been released to the public, not even redacted.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/how-clintons-email-scandal-took-root/2016/03/27/ee301168-e162-11e5-846c-10191d1fc4ec_story.html
Also, she had a duty to take care of secure info in a secure way, but in testimony she swore under oath that she had no idea what she was doing: she didn't know that the marking "(c)" might mean that a document was classified, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillary_Clinton_email_controversy#Classified_information_in_emails
And, most importantly, there was no evidence that she intended to pass classified information to unauthorized parties. Historically, there have been very different punishments handed out for people who miss-handled classified information, and those who conduct espionage. The difference is in the intent.
Note that Brian Nishimura was not found to have had any ill intent. He had copies of secure information on an insecure device, and that was game over for him. Yet he was treated far more harshly than Hillary Clinton was treated. Are you okay with that? I'm not.
A common meme is: "The Republicans already tried to look into this and couldn't make anything stick. So clearly Hillary Clinton was innocent and the Republicans are just digging for dirt and hoping to find something." Variations on this have already been posted in this discussion.
What's extraordinary here is that the Director of the FBI intervened personally on Hillary Clinton's behalf. He wrote a draft of his speech exonerating her before the FBI ever interviewed her. Her aides were given broad immunity, which is usually used to compel people to talk[1], but then they were allowed to just say things like "I don't remember". Hillary Clinton, or someone working for her, wiped her email server after a subpoena was issued requiring her to hand it over to Congress, and there were absolutely no consequences from that. A usual FBI investigation would collect as much evidence as possible as early as possible, but that wasn't done in this case... the Anthony Weiner/Huma Abedin copies of Hillary Clinton emails were found during an investigation of Weiner, but they should have been found earlier. When the FBI is actually investigating they are thorough about collecting evidence. They should have grabbed every computer Hillary ever touched, and as Huma Abedin was an aide to Hillary, every computer Huma ever touched. (They could have copied the hard disks and given the computers back right away.)
Most extraordinary of all: the Director of the FBI claimed that "no reasonable prosecutor" would prosecute Hillary Clinton as no proof of ill intent was found, yet the laws she broke do not require intent but only require proof of mishandling of data.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/447209/hillary-clinton-e-mail-investigation-grand-jury-subpoenas
Consider what happened to David Petraeus. He was guilty, but what he did wasn't even a tenth as serious as what Hillary Clinton did. But the Director of the FBI didn't whitewash the investigation for him, so his career was over. (By the way, he didn't go to prison, so he still got better treatment than the "little people" would get. Consider the case of Bryan H. Nishimura. I would say that what Nishimura did wasn't even a thousandth as serious as what Hillary Clinton did, but he was treated much more harshly than she was. Note that he wasn't charged with any "intent", just the mishandling of data.)
I'm pretty sure that if a member of the Trump administration mishandles classified data, he or she won't get the special treatment that Hillary Clinton got. But the Democrats will get a President elected again sometime in the future and I would like to get a precedent established that the laws apply to Democrats as much as to Trump and his staff. I know that the law is not enforced perfectly even-handedly in this country (or any country in the real world) but I am appalled at the epic whitewashing done on behalf of Hillary Clinton to protect
I've read a lot of discussion of Teslas online, and I've repeatedly seen comments like "Well, I think the Tesla interiors are cheap. My BMWs and Mercedes are much nicer, let alone my Bentley. I sold the Tesla and bought a Jaguar."
In fairness to Tesla, I've also seen a lot of comments like "I have six cars, and since I got the Tesla I find I'm just not driving the others anymore. The Telsa is just so fun to drive." But the point is that the praise was always about how the Tesla is for driving, and not that the car is some kind of status symbol. I've never seen comments like "BMWs are passe, if you want to impress people drive a Tesla."
Of course these rich people are always talking about the most expensive Tesla models, like a Model S P100D. Those cars have acceleration like a million-dollar supercar.
P100D is the third-fastest car in the world
For a more comprehensive exploration of the merits and problems of government picking winners and losers, please read:
http://www.economist.com/node/16741043
But as I said, the tax rebate for BEVs is one of the better ways to do it and I think it has worked.