For instance the black death that wiped out 30% of Europe in the 1300s didn't become less virulent. But that is because its primary host was rodents, not humans, and there is evidence that it became less lethal to rodents as it spread.
That little factoid makes me uneasy. The primary host of this newest bird flu is birds, apparently many different species of birds. And it is so well adapted to the birds that it doesn't even cause them to exhibit symptoms. Combined with what I remember reading about wild migratory birds passing viruses between Asia, Europe, and North America, I feel very uneasy.
Yeah, the computations are simple, but not every driver is always going to have a bright kid in the back seat to do those calculations for him.
A driver's prime directive is keeping his vehicle in that ever changing sweet spot between making a dent in the landscape on the right, and bumping an approaching vehicle at a closing speed of 120+ mph (190+ kmh) on the left. Adding any unnecessary distractions, no matter how simple, is uncalled for. Perhaps it takes no more than 0.2 seconds to ballpark the math, but at a closing speed of 120 mph, that could be 4 feet (about 1.2 meters) of lateral travel. More than enough to smack that oncoming turnip truck in its big old front bumper.
The really stupid person is the one who insists on playing silly mental games in potentially lethal situations rather than devoting his attention to risk identification and avoidance. Road signs that state both mi. and km. are a good idea.
Gee, I hope I managed to express that in terms that our younger slashdotters will easily comprehend
As parent said, lots of different speed limits. Also in rural areas there are road signs like
"Last gas for 75 miles"
"Next rest area 43 miles"
"Road work begins in 33 miles. Trucks and cars with trailers must use alternate route 10 miles ahead. No gas stations on alternate route for 76 miles"
These are particularly meaningful in parts of Eastern Oregon, Idaho, Montana, etc, where there is nothing between gas stations and rest areas but sage brush, a few jack rabbits, and even fewer coyotes.
I heard tell of a billboard in the Mojave Desert that has an arrow pointing at the dirt under it and reads "Last shade for 150 miles." But that might be just crazy California talk.
Yes, road signs on turnpikes should be in both miles and kilometers, and speedometers should provide both mph and kph. The reason being safety: having to mentally convert between the systems is an unnecessary distraction for a driver who is attempting to keep a ton or more of lethal machine under control at high speed.
Where immediate safety is not a concern, let the vendor choose between the two systems. Most people these days can pull out their cell phone or pocket calculator and do any conversion they require. The few who cannot do this probably need other help in managing day to day activities so they can just ask someone how many kilograms are in a quart of blueberries.
Ah! The old 'feline is out of the sacculus' trick.
The answer to GP post is obvious: if the after is never done, then the envelope is never opened. At the end of time there will be a massive pile up of all the photons that have never been collapsed into one state or another, which probably will have something to do with the post universe having an excess of matter over antimatter. Or something.
[If this seems to make any kind of sense, then perhaps you should be studying on how to climb the mountain rather than wasting your time rubbing heads with slashdotters. Amusing though that can be.]
QM is not so hard, once a person realizes that quantum mechanics is all about semantics and has nothing to do with physics.
For instance, the difficulty in understanding this quantum entanglement of photons separated by time collapses into meaninglessness as soon as one accepts that "time" is an attribute of "observation" and has nothing to do with reality (whatever that might be).
As soon as you get past the desire to structure your memories in a simplistic linear fashion, you will realize that was zen, this is tao.
[Did author of this post intend to convey any kind of meaning to the reader? That doesn't matter--- what matters is whether the reader extracts any kind of meaning from the words of the author. Confused? Good. To be other than confused in this universe is to deny the reality of what you observe.]
At this point in the continuing "evolution" of the practice of psychiatry in America, the first questions should be
How many psychiatrists in the Society are themselves taking prescription psychoactive drugs? To what extent are these psychoactive agents affecting the collective cognitive capability of the Society?
In short, how sane is the Society itself at this point?
With the American NIH and now a British group of similar standing questioning the core validity of the Society's primary product of the last 10 years, these questions seem fully appropriate.
Why is this dreck being modded up? It has nothing to do with anything.
And yet I find it resonates loudly with the new DSM 5. Which is dreck that has nothing to do with the actual practice of psychiatry (but will enable so many physicians to justify so many more prescriptions for such devastating psychiatric problems as coping with the grief over the death of your thirteen year old cat).
I oppose nuclear power because even if the technology itself is completely safe, it requires management by human beings who inevitably corrupt and break the technology for any of a dozen different reasons. Everything from short term greed to impressing a girl friend, to simple curiosity about whether the backup safety features will really work if we push this button....
There is nothing at all wrong with nuclear technology if we only had a race of supermen to do it for us.
If that point ever existed, it would have been before 1955. It is much too late now to try to give that stuff away.
Getting it out of the tanks and into a form that could be transported presents the same problems TFA is talking about. If there was a way to manage those problems, then the USA could more easily vitrify the crud on site, rather than shipping it off.
Some guns are designed to be carried with the hammer at half cock and a round in the chamber. There is an internal safety (for example, check out "falling block safety" on google) and the gun cannot fire until the hammer is brought back to full cock. If there is a risk of foreign crud getting into the action, carrying with the chamber loaded removes the danger of a misfire when a round is jacked into the chamber.
So the behavior might be appropriate for the gun. It might not be irresponsible at all. There is no way of knowing from the information presented here.
So far, all I have seen mentioned here is that a biometric safety might prevent the gun from working when the shooter wants it to fire. However that is just one of three modes of safety failures. Another is that the safety can fail so that the gun is ready to fire although it looks like the safety is on. This is rare with today's active mechanical safeties, but it does sometimes happen. With an electronic system, it would be a much bigger worry. The third mode of failure is that even when the safety is on and functioning correctly, a gun might still fire if a round with a defective primer is chambered, or some foreign object has gotten into the action and functions as a surrogate firing pin, etc. With a biometric safety, there is the potential additional risk of electrically igniting the primer.
Basically there is nothing at all wrong with fission power technology; we know how to do it and we know how to do it safely (and we could probably figure out a safe way to store the waste, too).
But there is something fundamentally wrong with human beings since in any large undertaking you can be sure that some of them will NOT do the right thing for whatever reason: personal profit, or just plain stupidity. That's okay for a lot of things where failures are acceptable. It is not okay with nuclear power plants. To make good use of fission power we need to make better human beings who will not fuck up.
Fukushima is not done yet. While it is true that the chain reactions have stopped, there is sufficient decay heat being generated that managing its festering corpse is an on-going problem: structures are continuing to deform and fuel rods may still be rupturing. The potential for steam or chemical explosions capable of breaching the containment is still there. And might be for decades. No one has any experience in handling a zombie nuclear plant.
Persons who read only the simplified nuclear industry reports and analyses are neglecting the incredibly complex chemical problems that are happening in that environment of intense heat and multiple reactants, many of which have behaviors under those conditions that have never been explored in the laboratory. You could write a book about the chemistry happening in a candle's flame; what is going on in Fukushima is much more complex than that.
Hell, we don't even know how to handle the canned waste at Hanford; we don't even know how to figure out what is going on in those tanks. Fukushima is many times more complex than that.
I can see why a person might think that Win98 ran on top of DOS, since it used a chunk of DOS as a boot loader. But aside from that starter motor, it was more like WinNT than Win3.xx. It was supposed to be able to emulate DOS to support legacy DOS apps, but for the most part that did not work very well. Which was not entirely the fault of Microsoft: by that time virtually every major DOS software was using "undocumented" calls into the guts of DOS in ways that simply could not be emulated. If there had actually been a buried DOS layer to draw on, DOS software would have run better under Win98. Instead of crashing mysteriously so damn often.
As to Win95--- I stayed away from it and I advised my clients to stay away from it. I probably lost some business due to that decision, but I was focused on developing a solid client base, which meant offering sound products that would work well for my clients. It was clear that Win95 would have more down time and more repair costs than Win311, without offering enough added benefit to be worthwhile. So I had no experience with it and I have no idea how they mixed the WinNT parts with the DOS parts. I just know that it was done badly.
When IBM first rolled out the PC in 1980, they considered it an entry into the nascent hobbyist market and estimated that the market would dry up before 250,000 boxes were sold. That was in neither the business market nor the home market; it was the market for guys who shopped at Radio Shack back when you went to Radio Shack to get the resistors, coils, tubes, and such for your latest DIY with solder gun creation.
What then happened was Bricklin came out with a spreadsheet program for the first Apple (about the same time that IBM got the PC out the door), and suddenly businesses were interested in what microcomputers could do. Then along came Word Star for CPM, and Word Perfect for DOS, and a business market exploded. Then, and only then, did microcomputers start to move into the household market. It was not until DOS 3.3x, affordable 40 megabyte hard drives, and inexpensive dot matrix printers that the home market really began. That was around 1988 - 1990. (Win3.0 and the Intel 80386-SX that could run it halfway properly did not arrive until 1991).
Assuming guilt, this is a human wrapped in some kind of hell already. There but for the grace of (whatever) goes you. I know that it can be difficult, but have a little compassion. If you're not born a mad bomber, then how did you get that way? If you're born a mad bomber, what choices do you have in life?
That's very liberal of you. And reasonably well expressed.
This is not the venue for a discussion on the differences between liberalism and the common threads of the zennist, taoist, and similar approaches to life that emphasize holistic balance between all aspects of the human experience. I will only say that my life is much too complex, rich, and vibrant to be contained by the rational limitations of liberal thought.
This is not a case of "There except by the Grace of God go you or I". This is an entirely pragmatic case of: 1) make sure that this dangerous wreck of a human being never has an opportunity to destroy any more lives; 2) do whatever it takes to find out who wrecked the humanity of this college student before he succeeds in turning other youngsters into nihilists; 3) allow, and even encourage, the appropriate expressions of white hot anger in public forums, since that is by far healthier than bottling the stuff up. We have an entire country of individuals who have been pushed a bit closer to PTSD; wide scale venting is healthy. Liberal guilt trips about that venting are NOT therapeutic.
Parent post is right on. I was there at that time.
Microsoft succeeded because DOS had become dominant, thanks to IBM and its liberal policies toward PC clones in the 1980s. Businesses found that they needed PCs with Lotus 1-2-3 (or some other spreadsheet) and Word Perfect to stay competitive. Then when Microsoft broke its contractual arrangements with IBM and released a version of Windows that ran adequately under DOS (Win3.0), the consumer market burst into existence. It was mostly based on what today would be called piracy, with consumers buying a Win3.0/DOS3.3 box and installing Word Perfect from floppies they copied from their work computers. A lot of secretaries, legal assistants, and other clerical workers gained highly salable job skills that way, often with the clandestine support of their managers, who were hungry for staff who knew how to use word processors or spreadsheets.
Win95 was the first consumer Windows that ran, more or less, as its own OS rather than as a growth on top of DOS. It was not very good, and there was a strong market for Win3.11 (Windows for Workgroups) that continued until Win98 came out.
Good versions of Windows were 3.1, 3.11 (very good, especially with the nascent MS Office package), Win98 (also very good after the first round of upgrades), and WinXP. Win95, Win2000, and everything after WinXP were not so good, and a lot of serious users reverted to earlier versions.
I moved out of the Windows ecosystem many years ago, so I'm no longer tuned into what motivates people who continue to use Windows.
But from where I stand (somewhere in between CG graphics and web design), it looks like Microsoft has made it more difficult to modify workflows from WinXP to their newer versions than to continue to run WinXP as a virtual machine under a Linux distro. There is very little retraining needed by the minions, yet all the advantages of new hardware, disk management, clusters, etc. And of course the improved security of running the most vulnerable legacy stuff in a VM.
So whether Win8 is the best WinEvah or another dog doesn't matter, since the use of WinXP in VMs under Linux is a better way to go, whether you are looking at the economies, the retraining issues, future proofing, or any other business measure.
P.S.--- While I know I won't get any points for saying so, Microsoft also has to replace Ballmer with someone who knows how to run a business if it is to continue as a going concern. The guy is like a 14 year old kid who has been put in the driver's seat of a bulldozer. He is able to smash anything that is in his way. But he doesn't know how to keep his monster in repair, and he is finally running low on fuel and probably doesn't know how to refuel it, either. (Is that close enough to a car analogy to balance out the Ballmer critique?)
One of those choices is to use LEDs with their inherent limitations in existing fixtures. Other options are using the incandescents the fixtures were designed around, or CFLs. In many situations, despite the obvious inefficiencies, LEDs in existing fixtures may still be the best practice, at this time. The Energy Star rating is of use in determining this.
Nowhere in the article or in any other writing I have seen on the subject is it suggested that the Energy Star rating has any applicability outside of this narrow context (your posts being the sole exception, but an inappropriate one). And especially no one is suggesting that the E.S. rating be applied in any way to the design of the fixtures (except for your posts).
I imagine that you are thinking about selling a house that has lighting fixtures designed to take full advantage of LED strengths, and you also want to be able to say that all the lighting is Energy Star, just like the refrigerator, the oven, the water heater, and the furnace.
Too bad, you cannot do that yet. The Energy Star rating system is bogged down by reality and cannot expand as rapidly as your unbounded imagination. Sooner or later it may be extended to cover LEDs in fixtures designed for LEDs, but since some of the testing takes months to complete, don't hold your breath.
...The light distribution needed should be a matter of application. Efficient lighting also means not wasting light in directions that do not need to be illuminated. Instead of the 170 degree standard, the bulb should be quantified to what degree of lighting coverage it does achieve, and must be marketed accurately.
This is done already. When an application does not need the 170 degree (or greater) field of a Type A (general use) bulb, then one should consider using a Type R, Type PAR, or one of the other recognized bulb types. Choosing the wrong bulb for the application is definitely stupid.
TFA limits its discussion to Type A, which is appropriate for its purpose. It clearly says it is talking about Type A, although I can see that a speed reader might just jump right over that significant detail without noticing it. It is saying that in the Energy Star system, the omni-directional nature of Type A bulbs is now quantified (before LED bulbs there was no pressing need to do that).
Learn to read critically, people. There is more to good reading than just getting through an article in record time. Identifying significant details is also important, and in technical (versus pleasure) material, it is often critical. A good technical writer covers the subject in as few words as possible, which means every word is significant. If he says he is talking about Type A, then there is the clear implication that there are other categories that any reader with a working brain could google for if they needed to know more.
Those of us who have done web tech since the 1990s know full well that knowing the CSS properties has had damn little value.
Until fairly recently, what had value was knowing which of the CSS standards actually worked in the real world. Which meant keeping an eye on the blighted Microsoft browser versions, and waiting until the ones that were not standards compliant dropped below the level of significance for a web site's intended audience.
For the most part, now we can all use the standard CSS and those web developers who know their subject and have enough experience behind them to do a good job of it are doing so. There is still the matter of sorting out best practices: the standards provide a nice toolkit, but cannot provide any real world guidance in when to use the screwdriver when the hammer is the better choice. The community of web developers is working through that now.
Good standards have been Out There for a long time, but it is only recently that the browsers that held the Web captive to their non-standard crappy ways have lost their dominant influence. I am looking at you, Microsoft. You have held back the world in pursuit of your own profits since the 1990s, but no more. Firefox's success fixed that; now even Microsoft is forced to recognize that to be competitive today, you have to be playing by the same rules as everyone else. Otherwise, Firefox, Chrome, and Opera are going to eat your lunch.
Slashdot Mirror
For instance the black death that wiped out 30% of Europe in the 1300s didn't become less virulent. But that is because its primary host was rodents, not humans, and there is evidence that it became less lethal to rodents as it spread.
That little factoid makes me uneasy. The primary host of this newest bird flu is birds, apparently many different species of birds. And it is so well adapted to the birds that it doesn't even cause them to exhibit symptoms. Combined with what I remember reading about wild migratory birds passing viruses between Asia, Europe, and North America, I feel very uneasy.
Yeah, the computations are simple, but not every driver is always going to have a bright kid in the back seat to do those calculations for him.
A driver's prime directive is keeping his vehicle in that ever changing sweet spot between making a dent in the landscape on the right, and bumping an approaching vehicle at a closing speed of 120+ mph (190+ kmh) on the left. Adding any unnecessary distractions, no matter how simple, is uncalled for. Perhaps it takes no more than 0.2 seconds to ballpark the math, but at a closing speed of 120 mph, that could be 4 feet (about 1.2 meters) of lateral travel. More than enough to smack that oncoming turnip truck in its big old front bumper.
The really stupid person is the one who insists on playing silly mental games in potentially lethal situations rather than devoting his attention to risk identification and avoidance. Road signs that state both mi. and km. are a good idea.
Gee, I hope I managed to express that in terms that our younger slashdotters will easily comprehend
As parent said, lots of different speed limits. Also in rural areas there are road signs like
"Last gas for 75 miles"
"Next rest area 43 miles"
"Road work begins in 33 miles. Trucks and cars with trailers must use alternate route 10 miles ahead. No gas stations on alternate route for 76 miles"
These are particularly meaningful in parts of Eastern Oregon, Idaho, Montana, etc, where there is nothing between gas stations and rest areas but sage brush, a few jack rabbits, and even fewer coyotes.
I heard tell of a billboard in the Mojave Desert that has an arrow pointing at the dirt under it and reads "Last shade for 150 miles." But that might be just crazy California talk.
Yes, road signs on turnpikes should be in both miles and kilometers, and speedometers should provide both mph and kph. The reason being safety: having to mentally convert between the systems is an unnecessary distraction for a driver who is attempting to keep a ton or more of lethal machine under control at high speed.
Where immediate safety is not a concern, let the vendor choose between the two systems. Most people these days can pull out their cell phone or pocket calculator and do any conversion they require. The few who cannot do this probably need other help in managing day to day activities so they can just ask someone how many kilograms are in a quart of blueberries.
Ah! The old 'feline is out of the sacculus' trick.
The answer to GP post is obvious: if the after is never done, then the envelope is never opened. At the end of time there will be a massive pile up of all the photons that have never been collapsed into one state or another, which probably will have something to do with the post universe having an excess of matter over antimatter. Or something.
[If this seems to make any kind of sense, then perhaps you should be studying on how to climb the mountain rather than wasting your time rubbing heads with slashdotters. Amusing though that can be.]
QM is not so hard, once a person realizes that quantum mechanics is all about semantics and has nothing to do with physics.
For instance, the difficulty in understanding this quantum entanglement of photons separated by time collapses into meaninglessness as soon as one accepts that "time" is an attribute of "observation" and has nothing to do with reality (whatever that might be).
As soon as you get past the desire to structure your memories in a simplistic linear fashion, you will realize that was zen, this is tao.
[Did author of this post intend to convey any kind of meaning to the reader? That doesn't matter--- what matters is whether the reader extracts any kind of meaning from the words of the author. Confused? Good. To be other than confused in this universe is to deny the reality of what you observe.]
Good to know.
I haven't yet been burdened by one of these cards, but I do appreciate comments about how to disable the wireless withdrawals.
At this point in the continuing "evolution" of the practice of psychiatry in America, the first questions should be
How many psychiatrists in the Society are themselves taking prescription psychoactive drugs? To what extent are these psychoactive agents affecting the collective cognitive capability of the Society?
In short, how sane is the Society itself at this point?
With the American NIH and now a British group of similar standing questioning the core validity of the Society's primary product of the last 10 years, these questions seem fully appropriate.
Why is this dreck being modded up? It has nothing to do with anything.
And yet I find it resonates loudly with the new DSM 5. Which is dreck that has nothing to do with the actual practice of psychiatry (but will enable so many physicians to justify so many more prescriptions for such devastating psychiatric problems as coping with the grief over the death of your thirteen year old cat).
I oppose nuclear power because even if the technology itself is completely safe, it requires management by human beings who inevitably corrupt and break the technology for any of a dozen different reasons. Everything from short term greed to impressing a girl friend, to simple curiosity about whether the backup safety features will really work if we push this button....
There is nothing at all wrong with nuclear technology if we only had a race of supermen to do it for us.
If that point ever existed, it would have been before 1955. It is much too late now to try to give that stuff away.
Getting it out of the tanks and into a form that could be transported presents the same problems TFA is talking about. If there was a way to manage those problems, then the USA could more easily vitrify the crud on site, rather than shipping it off.
"Ungulate"
Sir:
You are nouning a perfectly good verb. Don't do that. It is NOT cromulent.
We now return this thread to the continuing discussion about the joys of ungulating with your cow orkers.
Did anyone hear a whoosh?
I'm pretty sure I just heard a softly whooshly sound.
Some guns are designed to be carried with the hammer at half cock and a round in the chamber. There is an internal safety (for example, check out "falling block safety" on google) and the gun cannot fire until the hammer is brought back to full cock. If there is a risk of foreign crud getting into the action, carrying with the chamber loaded removes the danger of a misfire when a round is jacked into the chamber.
So the behavior might be appropriate for the gun. It might not be irresponsible at all. There is no way of knowing from the information presented here.
So far, all I have seen mentioned here is that a biometric safety might prevent the gun from working when the shooter wants it to fire. However that is just one of three modes of safety failures. Another is that the safety can fail so that the gun is ready to fire although it looks like the safety is on. This is rare with today's active mechanical safeties, but it does sometimes happen. With an electronic system, it would be a much bigger worry. The third mode of failure is that even when the safety is on and functioning correctly, a gun might still fire if a round with a defective primer is chambered, or some foreign object has gotten into the action and functions as a surrogate firing pin, etc. With a biometric safety, there is the potential additional risk of electrically igniting the primer.
There is a lot of merit to parent post.
Basically there is nothing at all wrong with fission power technology; we know how to do it and we know how to do it safely (and we could probably figure out a safe way to store the waste, too).
But there is something fundamentally wrong with human beings since in any large undertaking you can be sure that some of them will NOT do the right thing for whatever reason: personal profit, or just plain stupidity. That's okay for a lot of things where failures are acceptable. It is not okay with nuclear power plants. To make good use of fission power we need to make better human beings who will not fuck up.
And we don't have a clue about how to do that.
Fukushima is not done yet. While it is true that the chain reactions have stopped, there is sufficient decay heat being generated that managing its festering corpse is an on-going problem: structures are continuing to deform and fuel rods may still be rupturing. The potential for steam or chemical explosions capable of breaching the containment is still there. And might be for decades. No one has any experience in handling a zombie nuclear plant.
Persons who read only the simplified nuclear industry reports and analyses are neglecting the incredibly complex chemical problems that are happening in that environment of intense heat and multiple reactants, many of which have behaviors under those conditions that have never been explored in the laboratory. You could write a book about the chemistry happening in a candle's flame; what is going on in Fukushima is much more complex than that.
Hell, we don't even know how to handle the canned waste at Hanford; we don't even know how to figure out what is going on in those tanks. Fukushima is many times more complex than that.
I can see why a person might think that Win98 ran on top of DOS, since it used a chunk of DOS as a boot loader. But aside from that starter motor, it was more like WinNT than Win3.xx. It was supposed to be able to emulate DOS to support legacy DOS apps, but for the most part that did not work very well. Which was not entirely the fault of Microsoft: by that time virtually every major DOS software was using "undocumented" calls into the guts of DOS in ways that simply could not be emulated. If there had actually been a buried DOS layer to draw on, DOS software would have run better under Win98. Instead of crashing mysteriously so damn often.
As to Win95--- I stayed away from it and I advised my clients to stay away from it. I probably lost some business due to that decision, but I was focused on developing a solid client base, which meant offering sound products that would work well for my clients. It was clear that Win95 would have more down time and more repair costs than Win311, without offering enough added benefit to be worthwhile. So I had no experience with it and I have no idea how they mixed the WinNT parts with the DOS parts. I just know that it was done badly.
No, you need to check your facts.
When IBM first rolled out the PC in 1980, they considered it an entry into the nascent hobbyist market and estimated that the market would dry up before 250,000 boxes were sold. That was in neither the business market nor the home market; it was the market for guys who shopped at Radio Shack back when you went to Radio Shack to get the resistors, coils, tubes, and such for your latest DIY with solder gun creation.
What then happened was Bricklin came out with a spreadsheet program for the first Apple (about the same time that IBM got the PC out the door), and suddenly businesses were interested in what microcomputers could do. Then along came Word Star for CPM, and Word Perfect for DOS, and a business market exploded. Then, and only then, did microcomputers start to move into the household market. It was not until DOS 3.3x, affordable 40 megabyte hard drives, and inexpensive dot matrix printers that the home market really began. That was around 1988 - 1990. (Win3.0 and the Intel 80386-SX that could run it halfway properly did not arrive until 1991).
Assuming guilt, this is a human wrapped in some kind of hell already. There but for the grace of (whatever) goes you. I know that it can be difficult, but have a little compassion. If you're not born a mad bomber, then how did you get that way? If you're born a mad bomber, what choices do you have in life?
That's very liberal of you. And reasonably well expressed.
This is not the venue for a discussion on the differences between liberalism and the common threads of the zennist, taoist, and similar approaches to life that emphasize holistic balance between all aspects of the human experience. I will only say that my life is much too complex, rich, and vibrant to be contained by the rational limitations of liberal thought.
This is not a case of "There except by the Grace of God go you or I". This is an entirely pragmatic case of: 1) make sure that this dangerous wreck of a human being never has an opportunity to destroy any more lives; 2) do whatever it takes to find out who wrecked the humanity of this college student before he succeeds in turning other youngsters into nihilists; 3) allow, and even encourage, the appropriate expressions of white hot anger in public forums, since that is by far healthier than bottling the stuff up. We have an entire country of individuals who have been pushed a bit closer to PTSD; wide scale venting is healthy. Liberal guilt trips about that venting are NOT therapeutic.
An excellent point. Thanks.
This is Slashdot. We have the technology. We can find a carbon neutral way to torture the hell out of this piece of trash wrapped in a human skin.
BTW, I agree with grandparent post:
On the one hand, we must maintain the due process of law that makes this country great. On the other hand, threads like this help us vent.
Parent post is right on. I was there at that time.
Microsoft succeeded because DOS had become dominant, thanks to IBM and its liberal policies toward PC clones in the 1980s. Businesses found that they needed PCs with Lotus 1-2-3 (or some other spreadsheet) and Word Perfect to stay competitive. Then when Microsoft broke its contractual arrangements with IBM and released a version of Windows that ran adequately under DOS (Win3.0), the consumer market burst into existence. It was mostly based on what today would be called piracy, with consumers buying a Win3.0/DOS3.3 box and installing Word Perfect from floppies they copied from their work computers. A lot of secretaries, legal assistants, and other clerical workers gained highly salable job skills that way, often with the clandestine support of their managers, who were hungry for staff who knew how to use word processors or spreadsheets.
Win95 was the first consumer Windows that ran, more or less, as its own OS rather than as a growth on top of DOS. It was not very good, and there was a strong market for Win3.11 (Windows for Workgroups) that continued until Win98 came out.
Good versions of Windows were 3.1, 3.11 (very good, especially with the nascent MS Office package), Win98 (also very good after the first round of upgrades), and WinXP. Win95, Win2000, and everything after WinXP were not so good, and a lot of serious users reverted to earlier versions.
I moved out of the Windows ecosystem many years ago, so I'm no longer tuned into what motivates people who continue to use Windows.
But from where I stand (somewhere in between CG graphics and web design), it looks like Microsoft has made it more difficult to modify workflows from WinXP to their newer versions than to continue to run WinXP as a virtual machine under a Linux distro. There is very little retraining needed by the minions, yet all the advantages of new hardware, disk management, clusters, etc. And of course the improved security of running the most vulnerable legacy stuff in a VM.
So whether Win8 is the best WinEvah or another dog doesn't matter, since the use of WinXP in VMs under Linux is a better way to go, whether you are looking at the economies, the retraining issues, future proofing, or any other business measure.
P.S.--- While I know I won't get any points for saying so, Microsoft also has to replace Ballmer with someone who knows how to run a business if it is to continue as a going concern. The guy is like a 14 year old kid who has been put in the driver's seat of a bulldozer. He is able to smash anything that is in his way. But he doesn't know how to keep his monster in repair, and he is finally running low on fuel and probably doesn't know how to refuel it, either. (Is that close enough to a car analogy to balance out the Ballmer critique?)
The light pattern IS a consumer choice.
One of those choices is to use LEDs with their inherent limitations in existing fixtures. Other options are using the incandescents the fixtures were designed around, or CFLs. In many situations, despite the obvious inefficiencies, LEDs in existing fixtures may still be the best practice, at this time. The Energy Star rating is of use in determining this.
Nowhere in the article or in any other writing I have seen on the subject is it suggested that the Energy Star rating has any applicability outside of this narrow context (your posts being the sole exception, but an inappropriate one). And especially no one is suggesting that the E.S. rating be applied in any way to the design of the fixtures (except for your posts).
I imagine that you are thinking about selling a house that has lighting fixtures designed to take full advantage of LED strengths, and you also want to be able to say that all the lighting is Energy Star, just like the refrigerator, the oven, the water heater, and the furnace.
Too bad, you cannot do that yet. The Energy Star rating system is bogged down by reality and cannot expand as rapidly as your unbounded imagination. Sooner or later it may be extended to cover LEDs in fixtures designed for LEDs, but since some of the testing takes months to complete, don't hold your breath.
This is just stupid....
Agreed. Something here is stupid.
...The light distribution needed should be a matter of application. Efficient lighting also means not wasting light in directions that do not need to be illuminated. Instead of the 170 degree standard, the bulb should be quantified to what degree of lighting coverage it does achieve, and must be marketed accurately.
This is done already. When an application does not need the 170 degree (or greater) field of a Type A (general use) bulb, then one should consider using a Type R, Type PAR, or one of the other recognized bulb types. Choosing the wrong bulb for the application is definitely stupid.
TFA limits its discussion to Type A, which is appropriate for its purpose. It clearly says it is talking about Type A, although I can see that a speed reader might just jump right over that significant detail without noticing it. It is saying that in the Energy Star system, the omni-directional nature of Type A bulbs is now quantified (before LED bulbs there was no pressing need to do that).
Learn to read critically, people. There is more to good reading than just getting through an article in record time. Identifying significant details is also important, and in technical (versus pleasure) material, it is often critical. A good technical writer covers the subject in as few words as possible, which means every word is significant. If he says he is talking about Type A, then there is the clear implication that there are other categories that any reader with a working brain could google for if they needed to know more.
Those of us who have done web tech since the 1990s know full well that knowing the CSS properties has had damn little value.
Until fairly recently, what had value was knowing which of the CSS standards actually worked in the real world. Which meant keeping an eye on the blighted Microsoft browser versions, and waiting until the ones that were not standards compliant dropped below the level of significance for a web site's intended audience.
For the most part, now we can all use the standard CSS and those web developers who know their subject and have enough experience behind them to do a good job of it are doing so. There is still the matter of sorting out best practices: the standards provide a nice toolkit, but cannot provide any real world guidance in when to use the screwdriver when the hammer is the better choice. The community of web developers is working through that now.
Good standards have been Out There for a long time, but it is only recently that the browsers that held the Web captive to their non-standard crappy ways have lost their dominant influence. I am looking at you, Microsoft. You have held back the world in pursuit of your own profits since the 1990s, but no more. Firefox's success fixed that; now even Microsoft is forced to recognize that to be competitive today, you have to be playing by the same rules as everyone else. Otherwise, Firefox, Chrome, and Opera are going to eat your lunch.