It depends. We've needed lots of new power plants in the past few decades, so subsides for high-output plants was important. Renewable power is only just starting to be a viable major power source- most government funding towards renewable should still be focused on research. Indiana has hundreds if not thousands of turbines erected or being erected, for example, so renewable power isn't being neglected (I don't know about elsewhere, I just see these turbines a lot). The problem is wind and solar are only good enough right now to take some of the burden off traditional plants. Without storage capacity to even out effective wind and solar generation, I don't see us shutting down many coal plants.
Any restructuring to subsidies should take into account whether renewable is a viable alternative- if you use subsidies to force people to build wind turbines when they needed a reliable coal plant (intended forcing or not), and they end up with problems because of it, people will quickly dislike wind power and turn against renewable power. I want to see the US replace its capacity with renewable plus the occasional nuclear plant (with breeder reactors of course), but only when we are ready for it.
Mentioning taxes, wind turbines in the US currently get highly favorable depreciation rules, which I expect are not accounted for in the numbers in the article. Given just in Indiana I've seen several new, large wind farms (and they're still building), I expect the indirect subsidy with the depreciation is a considerable number. (If someone does the research on this, mod him up).
It often takes an understanding of a subject before you learn to appreciate it. For example, I appreciate control systems (as a mechanical engineering undergrad), but it took two classes to understand enough of it to know that. Many engineers I talk to say they got into their field after taking a class or two on the subject and it growing on them. Saying education is only important for things you don't like is not exactly true (though I can agree self-exploration is most important once education has run its course).
I picked a school that focuses on undergraduate education (Rose-Hulman), and other than tenure (which I don't see abused here), I can't really relate to any of the criticisms on this list. Of course, I expect fewer than 1% of people reading this to have heard of my school, all because it doesn't focus on research like all those Unis that are doing it wrong.
While the article does touch on small schools doing a better job of education, I just want to emphasize it is mainly the big-name schools that have this problem. It only seems to be a universal issue because the schools doing it right get no attention.
There are the people who just believe what the government says, and they cause problems for the rest of us thanks to their letting the government do all the thinking for them. Some of those people wise up to the idea that the government is happy to lie to them, but gain no real wisdom and let the loudest anti-government media think for them. That leads to a lot of people reading Wikileaks in all of its anti-government glory and think that's the whole story. These unthinking people remain just as much of a problem for us, despite Wikileaks having a great opportunity to educate.
Properly used as one of many sources, Wikileaks is a great site, but they like to emphasize the most damaging details of leaks as opposed to seeking the truth. Their press releases can be some of the most biased writing I have ever seen (given it doesn't actually lie). The site is a great idea, and a good place to leak information is a vital resource for democracy, but I hate Wikileaks due to how they ruin a lot of the integrity that such a site could have; they abuse their influence to push an agenda just as much as the people they are trying to fight. I am sure Assange is the reason behind most of what I hate about Wikileaks- so no I don't agree with your premise at all.
He might have meant journalist as in a professional, not the many people out there who use the title "journalist" when publishing editorials presented as facts.
The officer's decision to pull the guy over is the only thing he did right. I could understand if he made some small mistakes, but the way he handles the whole thing is unprofessional at best- I find the police officer was nearly as much of a danger as the cyclist.
I don't know how accurate it is, but I've heard an interesting explanation that Saddam had to make us think we had WMDs and hope we were bluffing about attacking- the alternative was show he wasn't a military threat to Iran (with their yet-to-cool grudge about the war between them). If true, Saddam did his part in selling the WMD lie to everyone.
If someone comes knocking at my door claiming to be law enforcement, I would feel safest asking their names, calling 911 and getting in touch with the police/FBI to verify those agents are supposed to be at my house. Of course, I expect my door to be knocked down before I get a chance to do that.
WHOOSH! Inception was considered a big gamble, being a very different movie, big budget, and no ability to relate the story in the trailers. If you liked Inception better than standard turn-your-brain-off faire, paying for the movie in some way tells the executives to back off and let the artists do what they want more of the time. As soon as you say you'll pirate, you have no voice as far as businesses are concerned. I agree torrents are a better product than DVDs (therefore I avoid both), but beyond that you sound more self-centered than the execs who are making you complain in the first place.
Sorry to flame but it's hard to oppose the media companies when it implies I support people like you. If you don't want to pay, learn to boycott properly, then come and complain.
The article was really short yet you still didn't read it: it mentions how an actor will do a much better job jumping from a real explosion than someone on the set saying "explosion". In general, the more an actor can interact with his environment and the other characters in the scene, the better they will do (hence Jackie Chan and the like being more entertaining to watch).
Well he failed on the phony physics department for me. The hallway fight scene had a constant angular velocity, yet the car was rolling in a jerky fashion (as it should). The hallway really needed to move in a more chaotic fashion to properly fit the physics it was supposed to correspond with. (This is a small detail, so I certainly still think he did an amazing job, but this did break the illusion during the movie for me).
The movie requires really well-done special effects to pull of the story correctly. They did an amazing job of making the effects complement the plot- they neither fell too short nor overdid it. The storyline is of course the most interesting part of the movie, but the ability to tie the deep plot and effects together so well was one of the most obvious indicators of the talent that went into making the movie.
If we have a true competitive market, I think we have a better shot of having proper net neutrality than if the government set the rules (therefore having the power to later change those rules). The only reason I support the government enforcing net neutrality is because right now I have zero trust in the ISPs to do anything in favor of the customer.
Er, we can't fight every war worth fighting, as shown by the war budgets being one of the biggest areas of contention. Stopping the malicious dictators and warlords does nothing if we can't stabilize the country we "save"- letting countries fall back into chaos would ruin support for such wars, too (better to spend the effort on something more permanent). We can barely sustain two long-term occupations without hurting our country. Fighting at an unsustainable level would just be counter-productive, not to mention we need to be capable of resuming the Korean War without withdrawing many troops from occupation efforts (letting North Korea effectively hold one or more occupied countries hostage is one of the last things we need).
One more thing: China is importing a lot of resources from oppressive-government countries. Trying to topple those governments and give the resources back to the people would not go well with China, and they'd make that all to clear for us.
If we manage to figure out this whole democracy-building-from-scratch thing (Japan wasn't from scratch the way Afghanistan is), and we manage to turn fossil fuels obsolete (cheaply), we might be capable of stabilizing the world. Until then, you are calling people naive, yet playing naive yourself when it suits you.
Some of my arguments are specific (North Korea, China), but the general arguments (we can't over-extend, we need foreign powers to remain neutral at worst, etc.) are easy to extrapolate- I don't feel like doing hours of research to flesh out a slashdot argument. I'm sure some of my points can be argued invalid (not claiming to be an expert is an understatement), but if you give it a chance and think about it, the evil dictators out there are the easy to fix part of the overall human rights abuse problem.
I wrote to my representative (a republican) about my support for net neutrality when the FCC brought it up. The response was the standard republican stance of less regulation and letting market competition sort things out. Thinking about it, I would be hard pressed to decide between net neutrality enforcement or a competitive market. Of course, I never got a response when I asked what the plans were to give us that competitive market.
The argument that the military likes to use (plausible, but up to you whether you buy it) is that because we have a lot of nukes, and a lot of allies, those allies don't care to build nukes while they feel protected by ours. If we didn't have those nukes, many of our allies would suddenly start nuclear programs so they can defend themselves. At that point, not-so-friendly neighbors of those nuclear programs would feel threatened and want nukes of their own. Before you know it, most countries capable of making/buying a nuke are doing so, and the chance of one being used to trigger a large-scale nuclear war goes way up.
As much as some countries may hate us, in general we can be trusted only to use our nukes if thoroughly provoked. Given we can't un-learn nuclear weapons technology, I do believe the US and Russia having (reasonable) nuclear stockpiles improves stability. While I might trust the EU to be more level-headed than either the US or Russia, it probably helps stability when the stockpiles are in countries that you can trust will use them if it is called for. Regardless, I generally feel safest if I just try to forget the whole thing, as there will never be a comfortable solution.
Personally, I think the most likely trigger for nuclear war would be a city-killing meteor falling on Moscow.
So if we have any material gain from a war, that excludes any chance at a moral motive too? Some people are willing to support a war if it is just. Others will support a war if they profit. Yet others will support a war that defends our country. While all three motives have some debate to them, they all apply on some level to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
Saying we should either declare war on every threat to human rights or not go to war all is an absurd way to define whether we are fighting on moral grounds. I am sure there is plenty of motive for the war in the name of greater profits, but that has nothing to do with whether it is moral or not. Unfortunately, likely the only way for the morally motivated camp to get anywhere is to pander to the moneyed interests (hence your Iraq-but-not-Sudan theory).
Whether any moral-based efforts are effective enough to justify the war is another debate, I just don't agree with your implication that you either support or fight those profiting, rather than just tolerate them as a necessary evil.
Well to give them the benefit of the doubt, this isn't a bad study for estimating what percent of torrenting is legal. Even if most files happened to be legal, most of the traffic itself is sharing illegal files. To me that is a far more useful metric than what percent of files out there are legal.
The summary completely misses that the focus of the article is on blind pedestrians, but if you did RTFA you would know slow and attentive have little to do with the issue here (although the article mentions bicyclists, which I doubt is relevant to the blind pedestrian issue).
Specifically, cars running on electric power are quiet compared to a car running on gasoline, so hybrids and EVs have a safety flaw (however minor). Sure, I doubt you were entirely serious in your comment, but this is a serious issue that many seem to take lightly (such as those providing the half-baked statistical studies). Car companies are working on a solution, so soon enough your comment may apply to the remaining casualties.
Slashdot Mirror
It depends. We've needed lots of new power plants in the past few decades, so subsides for high-output plants was important. Renewable power is only just starting to be a viable major power source- most government funding towards renewable should still be focused on research. Indiana has hundreds if not thousands of turbines erected or being erected, for example, so renewable power isn't being neglected (I don't know about elsewhere, I just see these turbines a lot). The problem is wind and solar are only good enough right now to take some of the burden off traditional plants. Without storage capacity to even out effective wind and solar generation, I don't see us shutting down many coal plants.
Any restructuring to subsidies should take into account whether renewable is a viable alternative- if you use subsidies to force people to build wind turbines when they needed a reliable coal plant (intended forcing or not), and they end up with problems because of it, people will quickly dislike wind power and turn against renewable power. I want to see the US replace its capacity with renewable plus the occasional nuclear plant (with breeder reactors of course), but only when we are ready for it.
Mentioning taxes, wind turbines in the US currently get highly favorable depreciation rules, which I expect are not accounted for in the numbers in the article. Given just in Indiana I've seen several new, large wind farms (and they're still building), I expect the indirect subsidy with the depreciation is a considerable number. (If someone does the research on this, mod him up).
If their boss actually follows what happens at DefCon, that boss might be smart enough to know how to handle the situation without firing anybody.
It often takes an understanding of a subject before you learn to appreciate it. For example, I appreciate control systems (as a mechanical engineering undergrad), but it took two classes to understand enough of it to know that. Many engineers I talk to say they got into their field after taking a class or two on the subject and it growing on them. Saying education is only important for things you don't like is not exactly true (though I can agree self-exploration is most important once education has run its course).
I picked a school that focuses on undergraduate education (Rose-Hulman), and other than tenure (which I don't see abused here), I can't really relate to any of the criticisms on this list. Of course, I expect fewer than 1% of people reading this to have heard of my school, all because it doesn't focus on research like all those Unis that are doing it wrong.
While the article does touch on small schools doing a better job of education, I just want to emphasize it is mainly the big-name schools that have this problem. It only seems to be a universal issue because the schools doing it right get no attention.
Check IGN- some of my favorite reviews there are when they give a game a 2 or lower.
There are the people who just believe what the government says, and they cause problems for the rest of us thanks to their letting the government do all the thinking for them. Some of those people wise up to the idea that the government is happy to lie to them, but gain no real wisdom and let the loudest anti-government media think for them. That leads to a lot of people reading Wikileaks in all of its anti-government glory and think that's the whole story. These unthinking people remain just as much of a problem for us, despite Wikileaks having a great opportunity to educate.
Properly used as one of many sources, Wikileaks is a great site, but they like to emphasize the most damaging details of leaks as opposed to seeking the truth. Their press releases can be some of the most biased writing I have ever seen (given it doesn't actually lie). The site is a great idea, and a good place to leak information is a vital resource for democracy, but I hate Wikileaks due to how they ruin a lot of the integrity that such a site could have; they abuse their influence to push an agenda just as much as the people they are trying to fight. I am sure Assange is the reason behind most of what I hate about Wikileaks- so no I don't agree with your premise at all.
He might have meant journalist as in a professional, not the many people out there who use the title "journalist" when publishing editorials presented as facts.
On the positive side, invading Pakistan should make India very friendly with us. Think how much you could be saving on bulk curry!
The officer's decision to pull the guy over is the only thing he did right. I could understand if he made some small mistakes, but the way he handles the whole thing is unprofessional at best- I find the police officer was nearly as much of a danger as the cyclist.
I don't know how accurate it is, but I've heard an interesting explanation that Saddam had to make us think we had WMDs and hope we were bluffing about attacking- the alternative was show he wasn't a military threat to Iran (with their yet-to-cool grudge about the war between them). If true, Saddam did his part in selling the WMD lie to everyone.
If someone comes knocking at my door claiming to be law enforcement, I would feel safest asking their names, calling 911 and getting in touch with the police/FBI to verify those agents are supposed to be at my house. Of course, I expect my door to be knocked down before I get a chance to do that.
WHOOSH! Inception was considered a big gamble, being a very different movie, big budget, and no ability to relate the story in the trailers. If you liked Inception better than standard turn-your-brain-off faire, paying for the movie in some way tells the executives to back off and let the artists do what they want more of the time. As soon as you say you'll pirate, you have no voice as far as businesses are concerned. I agree torrents are a better product than DVDs (therefore I avoid both), but beyond that you sound more self-centered than the execs who are making you complain in the first place.
Sorry to flame but it's hard to oppose the media companies when it implies I support people like you. If you don't want to pay, learn to boycott properly, then come and complain.
The article was really short yet you still didn't read it: it mentions how an actor will do a much better job jumping from a real explosion than someone on the set saying "explosion". In general, the more an actor can interact with his environment and the other characters in the scene, the better they will do (hence Jackie Chan and the like being more entertaining to watch).
Well he failed on the phony physics department for me. The hallway fight scene had a constant angular velocity, yet the car was rolling in a jerky fashion (as it should). The hallway really needed to move in a more chaotic fashion to properly fit the physics it was supposed to correspond with. (This is a small detail, so I certainly still think he did an amazing job, but this did break the illusion during the movie for me).
The movie requires really well-done special effects to pull of the story correctly. They did an amazing job of making the effects complement the plot- they neither fell too short nor overdid it. The storyline is of course the most interesting part of the movie, but the ability to tie the deep plot and effects together so well was one of the most obvious indicators of the talent that went into making the movie.
If we have a true competitive market, I think we have a better shot of having proper net neutrality than if the government set the rules (therefore having the power to later change those rules). The only reason I support the government enforcing net neutrality is because right now I have zero trust in the ISPs to do anything in favor of the customer.
Er, we can't fight every war worth fighting, as shown by the war budgets being one of the biggest areas of contention. Stopping the malicious dictators and warlords does nothing if we can't stabilize the country we "save"- letting countries fall back into chaos would ruin support for such wars, too (better to spend the effort on something more permanent). We can barely sustain two long-term occupations without hurting our country. Fighting at an unsustainable level would just be counter-productive, not to mention we need to be capable of resuming the Korean War without withdrawing many troops from occupation efforts (letting North Korea effectively hold one or more occupied countries hostage is one of the last things we need).
One more thing: China is importing a lot of resources from oppressive-government countries. Trying to topple those governments and give the resources back to the people would not go well with China, and they'd make that all to clear for us.
If we manage to figure out this whole democracy-building-from-scratch thing (Japan wasn't from scratch the way Afghanistan is), and we manage to turn fossil fuels obsolete (cheaply), we might be capable of stabilizing the world. Until then, you are calling people naive, yet playing naive yourself when it suits you.
Some of my arguments are specific (North Korea, China), but the general arguments (we can't over-extend, we need foreign powers to remain neutral at worst, etc.) are easy to extrapolate- I don't feel like doing hours of research to flesh out a slashdot argument. I'm sure some of my points can be argued invalid (not claiming to be an expert is an understatement), but if you give it a chance and think about it, the evil dictators out there are the easy to fix part of the overall human rights abuse problem.
I wrote to my representative (a republican) about my support for net neutrality when the FCC brought it up. The response was the standard republican stance of less regulation and letting market competition sort things out. Thinking about it, I would be hard pressed to decide between net neutrality enforcement or a competitive market. Of course, I never got a response when I asked what the plans were to give us that competitive market.
The argument that the military likes to use (plausible, but up to you whether you buy it) is that because we have a lot of nukes, and a lot of allies, those allies don't care to build nukes while they feel protected by ours. If we didn't have those nukes, many of our allies would suddenly start nuclear programs so they can defend themselves. At that point, not-so-friendly neighbors of those nuclear programs would feel threatened and want nukes of their own. Before you know it, most countries capable of making/buying a nuke are doing so, and the chance of one being used to trigger a large-scale nuclear war goes way up.
As much as some countries may hate us, in general we can be trusted only to use our nukes if thoroughly provoked. Given we can't un-learn nuclear weapons technology, I do believe the US and Russia having (reasonable) nuclear stockpiles improves stability. While I might trust the EU to be more level-headed than either the US or Russia, it probably helps stability when the stockpiles are in countries that you can trust will use them if it is called for. Regardless, I generally feel safest if I just try to forget the whole thing, as there will never be a comfortable solution.
Personally, I think the most likely trigger for nuclear war would be a city-killing meteor falling on Moscow.
So if we have any material gain from a war, that excludes any chance at a moral motive too? Some people are willing to support a war if it is just. Others will support a war if they profit. Yet others will support a war that defends our country. While all three motives have some debate to them, they all apply on some level to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
Saying we should either declare war on every threat to human rights or not go to war all is an absurd way to define whether we are fighting on moral grounds. I am sure there is plenty of motive for the war in the name of greater profits, but that has nothing to do with whether it is moral or not. Unfortunately, likely the only way for the morally motivated camp to get anywhere is to pander to the moneyed interests (hence your Iraq-but-not-Sudan theory).
Whether any moral-based efforts are effective enough to justify the war is another debate, I just don't agree with your implication that you either support or fight those profiting, rather than just tolerate them as a necessary evil.
Well to give them the benefit of the doubt, this isn't a bad study for estimating what percent of torrenting is legal. Even if most files happened to be legal, most of the traffic itself is sharing illegal files. To me that is a far more useful metric than what percent of files out there are legal.
Uh, no. The Spanish professor didn't say this was relevant, so clearly you have no idea what statistics are.
Come back when you know what a desviación estándar is.
The summary completely misses that the focus of the article is on blind pedestrians, but if you did RTFA you would know slow and attentive have little to do with the issue here (although the article mentions bicyclists, which I doubt is relevant to the blind pedestrian issue).
Specifically, cars running on electric power are quiet compared to a car running on gasoline, so hybrids and EVs have a safety flaw (however minor). Sure, I doubt you were entirely serious in your comment, but this is a serious issue that many seem to take lightly (such as those providing the half-baked statistical studies). Car companies are working on a solution, so soon enough your comment may apply to the remaining casualties.
So in other words, they are seeing if this design is worth its salt?