But a large part of the problem is that too many institutions consider the combination of a name and a number to be proof of identity. Take away this, and it's not nearly as problematic.
Yes, it's bad. But anyone willing to pay a hundred bucks to register a corporation in Illinois can buy practically the same information from the DMV.
Now do you know this for a fact, or are you merely speculating? I know people who work for AT&T, and, well, not everyone there is, as we say, the sharpest knife in the drawer.
During one labor shortage, it was planned to have middle level managers from corporate manning the maintenance trucks. Not that most of them would be able to tell the difference between the phone lines and power lines anyway, but the fact that upper management expected middle management to don hard hats and do dangerous manual labor is telling.
No, I had to ask my neighbor, whose former roommate's sister's last boyfriend knew a guy at the power company who could get him a manual on how do it by wiring your own transformer using 13 feet of copper pipe, a few steel rods, some scavenged copper wire, and duct tape.
Some geeks' home labs are more equal than others. Now, back to winding the coils for my particle accelerator... (Did you know you can get 440 wired residential without a permit?)
Yes, but AT&T pays for the infrastructure maintenance costs regardless of the actual utilization. That is, whatever bandwidth they *don't* sell is simply wasted. It's not like the gas station, where unsold gasoline remains in the tank and can be sold later. Therefore, it doesn't make sense to charge on a bandwidth basis for most consumers, because you'll actually decrease your revenues while your costs remain fixed. If anything, you want to bill more customers a flat rate (which, admittedly, has its own drawbacks).
Imagine, for a moment, if you bought infrastructure equipment, and sold only the capacity you could actually deliver at any given time? Regardless of whether your equipment is fully utilized or underutilized, you still have to pay the cost of the electricity to power it, and the real estate in which it is housed.
This is why flat pricing models are a good idea. Imagine for a moment if AT&T charged by the byte, and people stopped using all that bandwidth to save money. AT&T's income would decrease, but not their cost of business (hey, they've already bought the equipment, might as well use it...)
If AT&T charges a flat rate, they can predict their income and plan accordingly. However, if they charge by the byte, then they have to deal with fluctuating income from one quarter to the next. Not only this, but there are perhaps a sizable portion of their customers who will instead try to minimize their costs. With a fixed rate plan, they have no option. But with a pay-per-byte plan, users like me could use their services for pennies a month. AT&T is about to come to terms with the fact that most users will opt for using less bandwidth and forking over less money per month. The reason why people pay so much for data plans is because they have to, not because they want to. Give the people the ability to save money, and they will take advantage of it.
These kinds of plans have been tried before, and they always fail. Email is cheap, bandwidth-wise, and movies can be had from Netflix for less than the cost of the bandwidth used by the net.
Why didn't Google direct her to use the adjacent pedestrian path instead? It would seem that given two choices, Google's walking directions service should have chosen the pedestrian path instead of the highway without a sidewalk.
The driver's lawyer will probably claim she was partially responsible because she chose to walk down a stretch of road without a sidewalk. Hence, she needs an excuse, i.e. Google. Suing them both, and having them both point the finger at the other probably gives her a better chance of winning than suing either separately.
If I can make $25K more per year if I move, chances are I'll move.
I sincerely hope you factor in the relative cost of housing before making a decision like that. I could make half my salary working downstate and still support a much better standard of living. For what I paid for my 3 bedroom condo, I could buy a 5000 square foot house with 3 car garage and detached apartment (I almost did, btw, but the market wouldn't let me sell...) Likewise, moving from 50k job in a small-medium size midwestern town to a place like San Francisco at 75k will put you squarely in the poor house.
I have a college degree and work in a salaried position in a large metropolitan area. My uncle has a high school education and lives in a rural area. Compared to him,
I have a lower standard of living. He can afford a house; I cannot, even though I make nearly *four times* what he does.
I work more hours than he does. He's paid for every hour he works, and can do work on the side without being sued by his employer. I, OTOH, am salaried, routinely have to work weekends, and my employer claims any invention I create while employed by them, whether invented on my time or theirs.
I pay for health insurance, which means I must go through an arduous appeal process before they deny my claims. He doesn't have health insurance, so he can just be billed directly.
I have an employer which *arbitrarily* cuts salary and benefits from one year to the next. To reward us for our efforts to keep the company profitable in the midst of a recession, the CEO cut retirement benefits. He, OTOH, works for a fixed hourly rate which cannot be lowered without the serious threat of a strike.
I'm not bitter; I really believe my life has been improved by having a college degree. However, those who think a degree will improve your standard of material living are grossly mistaken. Even though I work with white-collar folks, they're just as vindictive and greedy and dishonest as their blue collar counterparts; however, they feel it is somehow "different" because they justify it with more eloquent terms. They point to the absolute dollar value of compensation as proof that they're somehow better than their blue-collar counterparts, yet fail to realize the income relative to expenses is about the same, and in terms of actual ownership, seldom have more (and often less) than their "unsophisticated" blue collar counterparts.
Everyone wants to work on the latest and greatest stuff, no one wants to maintain or even release patches.
I don't really know how to address this, except by the people who think they are going to be the next great video game designer remaining unemployed.
Here's how you address it: you hire one of those 9 out of 10 CS graduates who "Just got in it for the money". Had you offices in the Midwest, you'd have no problem finding programmers whose only ambition is to crunch out brain-dead code until they can move into management. Trust me, I work with these people and they're even worse than the primadonnas interested only in the "cool" things. Naturally, not everyone can be the next game programmer, or work on cool things, but you probably don't want to hire those whose only ambition is to do the grunt work.
Typically, the primadonna has to have his ego coaxed into doing the grunt work. But you can usually count on him to do it fast, and not to make a total mess of things. Granted, some people have a higher estimation of their abilities than their peers. But at least someone passionate about coding can be inspired to improve their code; they'll actually accept coding standards once reasonably explained. But here's a short list of problems with the typical "career type":
Because they don't have the intelligence or the initiative to do things right, they'll happily plod along, even when the given design can't possibly work, or can't be delivered on time. And when it does fail, rather than trying to understand *why* it failed, or *what* they could do differently next time, they blame their coworkers/subordinates, etc.
They are more sensitive to the political implications than the technical ramifications of their decisions. Consequently, they'll often run with an inefficient, or sometimes even incorrect design so as to placate their superiors. And once again, the blame always lies with *someone else*.
And speaking of blame, they'll frequently blame others when things go wrong, and even sometimes when they don't. There are *certain people* at the office around whom I can't have a technical discussion with coworkers because they understand neither about what we are talking, nor that such conversations are a normal part of the job. I've actually been reprimanded for discussing architectural decisions, because "we've already decided on the architecture..." Which is great, but the fact that you've decided doesn't help me understand it better. Supposedly, we're all mind readers here, and no discussion is necessary.
The career types usually promise unrealistic deadlines, and write horribly unmaintainable code. After all, writing code is just a stepping stone into management, and maintaining that code will soon become *someone else's* problem, not theirs...
And perhaps the worst part is that they have a corrosive effect on teamwork and morale. With a politician in the office, *no one* wants to do the grunt work out of fear that it will adversely affect their career.
It's easier to convince a rock-star programmer that documentation is necessary than it is to convince the career-track political programmer that a race condition is a problem, that architecture matters, that maintainability and scalability are important. Just the other day, I had a department manager question the value of writing reusable code - in fact, he was so hostile as to suggest that it wasn't worth our time to make code reusable... (And not only that, but reported to my boss that my suggestion otherwise was "distracting to what we're trying to accomplish here"...)
I know the starry-eyed programmers can be a handful at times, but those indifferent to technical issues will lay a minefield in your company. Suddenly, years after they've moved on, you'll find your new hires telling you the projects they built aren't worth salvaging, that you'll have to start over, etc... I've seen these types move into management and turn an otherwise fun profession into a death march. You don't want the stupid, or the political, types of people writing code. They'll set your company up for failure every time.
In the first place, a hybrid's starter was designed for frequent starts, and the engine in a hybrid is much smaller than that of a normal car. In the second place, the computer controls the granularity of the duty cycle, I would imagine, to limit the frequency of starts to that for which the starter was designed.
You know, I heard about a guy who did that. He had it all worked out - he had a second set of keys, he locked his doors during the deliveries...
He never thought a bunch of drunken college kids would be able to force the window down and steal his car, but they did. And he got a ticket on top of that - for leaving the car unattended with the keys in the ignition, which is a crime where I live.
I could afford replacing the starter. I couldn't afford to replace the car.
It's going to be a long time before new drilling is permitted in the Gulf of Mexico...
Which, I believe, is BP's intent. Without new wells being drilled, the cost of oil certainly won't go down - who knows, it might even go up?! Granted, they might not have intended to spill, but...
Their first attempt was to salvage the well. That's understandable, but...
By the time that attempt failed, they were already on the hook for a massive cleanup effort anyway. It looks like at this point, BP stands nothing to gain by the expeditious closure of the well, especially in light of the fact that they're liability is *statutorily limited* by federal law, a limit which they've probably hit already.
If they drag their heels to the point where public opinion turns against allowing new wells, well, all the better. Without more competition, they'll be able to raise the price of oil anyway, or at least have a *plausible* reason for doing so.
BP isn't going to pay for this. BP's customers will. Hardly makes any sense for them to do anything about it now, don't you think?
Honestly, if you were the CEO, why would you want to take such a massive loss this quarter when July is rapidly approaching? Why not defer the cost of cleanup a little so the shareholders don't take it in the shorts? I mean, the well and platform are already lost.
I say this as someone who has ported Linux to a new platform: building the toolchain and porting the code is part of the fun. If it's a popular processor, and all you have to do is define the specific architecture, plan on spending a few days (on the toolchain, that is). If it's something completely new, for example - a processor not yet supported by gcc... Well, you might as well make an ongoing project of it, host it on sourceforge, etc...
Granted, they *should* provide the toolchain, especially if it is OS software, but they are not strictly obligated. It is entirely possible they are using a proprietary compiler which they can't release to the public. This happens a lot in the embedded world.
In all likelihood, they are either using a proprietary toolchain which they can't release, or they are one of those companies where cost controls everything, and the effort to post the toolchain and hosting space is just a nickel too much. There's a good learning opportunity here - while you'll probably have to do a little detective work to get things working, and maybe even port it to a FOSS compiler.
I used to deliver pizzas for a living. Which meant that I would shut off and restart my car about 3 to 4 times an hour.
After doing it for a while, I figured out that I would need to replace my starter every six months to a year. This is a *very* bad idea - think of how many stoplights the average commuter stops at during their commute home.
I never understood the fuss over being unable to skip the previews until I had to watch a DVD on a Windows computer. Turns out that for the first decade of the DVD's existence, I had been using Linux to watch DVDs, and had never seen the unskippable previews. I honestly didn't even know they were there!
If there is a God and an afterlife, there's no point in despairing about just how bad people have made the present, because, well, you've got the hope for better things.
If there isn't, well, then your struggle is for the minds of those 30%. Believe it or not, those 25% aren't as inflexible as you might believe. Perhaps you're one of them - maybe you're absolutely convinced that you're right, and perhaps no amount of evidence would convince you otherwise. Hopefully not, but if you're open to the possibility of changing your mind...
The key to changing someone's mind is understanding *why* they believe what they do. Some other posters have advocated ridiculing people, but calling people names won't change anyone's mind. Ridiculing positions is perhaps a little better, but still tends to encourage people to redouble their efforts to defend their position. Trying to understand someone else's position often leads to a better understanding of why they believe what they do, and more importantly, the rare moment when they're willing to listen to yours.
A very famous Christian evangelist once said, "You don't win anyone to Christ by winning arguments..." Indeed, there are people posting on/. who really believe that winning the argument will change someone's mind.
Look, the right wing wackos aren't claiming that the founding fathers wanted to establish a Christian Theocracy. They're claiming the government was formed using Christian principles, based on the Christian understanding of the world. The intention was that a Christian nation would regard the Church as authoritative on matters of morality, and the Government merely the public servant of the Christian nation. Thus, the Government wasn't supposed to meddle in the affairs of religion ( hence the term, separation of Church and State) as it had in England, where the monarchy had established their own church when the Vatican wouldn't kowtow to a certain monarch. The Puritans were very sensitive to government meddling in religion.
But this notion that the founding fathers never intended the nation to be Christian is a curious one, as many of them were Christians themselves, and openly lamented that if America abandoned Christianity, this "experiment with democracy" would fail. Indeed, as the French revolution(s!) showed, and later Communism in the USSR and China showed, democracies founded on secular principles ultimately fail in their supposed aims, often becoming machines of the very oppression they rail against. Democracy, as the founders understood it, was only suitable for those with the moral principles to employ it virtuously. Which at the time, meant being Christian.
Subaru had an Continuously Variable Electronic Transmission back in the late 80's, early 90's. It was novel, but it didn't sell so well.
When it comes down to it, a hydrostatic transmission is probably more costly than a traditional one. Furthermore, it probably brings only a marginal increase in efficiency, if it produces any increase at all. Continuously variable transmissions are much more important in heavy duty applications where sudden drivetrain shock can destroy the drivetrain, and quite possibly the load to which it is attached. A car can jerk forward suddenly without incurring much damage, but the same relative movement attached to a plow would tend to break things.
For cars, consider that a modern torque converter can double the engine torque going into the transmission. The torque converter is continuously variable in the range of ~.5:1 to 1:1, which, when coupled with a four or five speed transmission, can keep the engine in its peak power band for the entire range of speeds and accelerations demanded by the driver.
USB can support up to 255 devices on a single bus. With a USB hub and a few 1.5+ TB USB hard drives, you'd be set. Your absolute storage limit would probably be somewhere in the 500 TB range, after which you could just by another box, and repeat.
I guess that beauty isn't really in the eye of the beholder anymore. I'm reticent to rate anyone in this study because I don't see anything good coming of it.
In the first place, science has no place rating attractiveness. Beauty is *supposed* to be subjective, not objective. Imagine, for a moment if how someone might feel if their body shape had been *scientifically proven* unattractive. Nothing good can come of this.
Speaking of nothing good, we've seen how women are especially sensitive to body image. Normally, it's been an anecdotal thing, but this could be a cosmetic marketer's wet dream come true. The entire cosmetics industry - including cosmetic surgery - relies heavily on women being unable to see themselves as naturally beautiful; if there was some ostensibly *objective* way of showing a woman to be, shall we say, less-than-optimally-attractive, there would of course arise a large demand for whatever product or service "corrected" the problem. Instead of seeing the natural variety in body shape, they'd all appear about the same. Which would frustrate the many men and women who find society's idea of an attractive body, well, rather plain and uninteresting.
Speaking of fault tolerance, I find it rather remarkable that an object containing sensitive electronics which sits in storage for several years before being used can, under widely varying conditions, find its way to a target that even an expert sniper couldn't hit, and explode correctly. An object moving nearly 1000 meters per second has perhaps a one millisecond margin of error for optimal effectiveness against an armored target such as a tank or bunker. Especially considering that the same margin of error in a car would make a difference of only a few inches.
And yet a human can routinely park a car with the same tolerance.
Yep, theoretically it's a logical fallacy. Most of us understand that. But history says otherwise - several times throughout history, society finds itself on the downhill slide of the slippery slope.
In terms of logic, yes, a slippery slope is a fallacy. But, as the Bush years and "post 9/11 world" rhetoric have shown, fear is a powerful motivator. Could your average American be induced to give up their freedoms, perhaps little by little, for the promise of increased safety? By all means, (sadly) YES!
Guided missiles have been able to direct a few hundred pounds of ordnance traveling at mach 5 into a spot the size of a trash can for the last few decades now. The fact that a computer can park a car with perfect precision - while cool - is hardly revolutionary.
Liability and lawyers have done more to keep advancements like these from the market than any engineering challenge every has. The first time a car parallel parks into a toddler, you can kiss the feature goodbye.
While I don't intend any sexism, the fact is that parallel parking is difficult, and many women would rather have the car do it than try it themselves. Parking assist (without the tire-scorching 180) is going to be a very popular feature among the minivan crowd.
This is *really bad* from a freedom perspective. As soon as computers can reliably and safely drive cars, anyone who *dares* drive the car themselves will be considered negligent; they'll probably pass a law against it. And with pervasive networking, you can be assured the police will have the ability to remotely disable your vehicle, should the need arise (the can already do it with GM vehicles, which is problematic enough...). I do not look forward to a future where my movement *in my own vehicle* can be arbitrarily and capriciously monitored and regulated remotely.
You can do better than that if you're trying to troll. But seriously, your post shows a complete lack of critical analysis and reasoning skills. Even the article you linked to quotes, "If just looking at the southern hemisphere, however, 2009 proved the warmest yet recorded since record-taking began in 1880."
You can avoid much embarrassment by downloading the actual data and running the stats yourself. It's not a single-year thing, it's a decade-long trend. One which looks surprisingly similar to what happened in the 1900-1910 timeframe. And it doesn't look good for AGW proponents at this point, even if you use their adjusted data. But that's not my point.
The article to which you linked is a classic example of the blind leading the blind. The *second* sentence is qualified in such a way so that it is not false, but the conclusion drawn is deliberately misleading. Global warming, we are told, is not about *local* changes, but changes happening to the entire planet. Hence, a warmer Southern Hemisphere is not really a problem if the Northern Hemisphere is proportionately colder. Your case of chronic inability to apply critical reasoning to what you read is sadly, an epidemic now.
The problem is not so much the issue of global warming, but rather, that we have a public at large who are:
Generally ignorant of the principles of science, and
Unable to perform even rudimentary critical thinking, and
Conditioned to trust whatever someone in authority tells them.
Even if climate scientists found a perfect model for global climate tomorrow, one which predicted weather with 100% accuracy, you would still have global warming pundits. Even if the model predicted global cooling. The problem is that the average layperson can be manipulated by well-articulated, albeit factually false, statements. And they vote. Understanding AGW is more of a political science question than a question of the science - even though the science is questionable (at this point). At some point, though, we will know the definitive answer, but regardless of which way the political question is decided, it has about a 50% chance of being wrong and costing everyone a lot of money.
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But a large part of the problem is that too many institutions consider the combination of a name and a number to be proof of identity. Take away this, and it's not nearly as problematic.
Yes, it's bad. But anyone willing to pay a hundred bucks to register a corporation in Illinois can buy practically the same information from the DMV.
Yes, but those models work more for the consumer than the provider.
Now do you know this for a fact, or are you merely speculating? I know people who work for AT&T, and, well, not everyone there is, as we say, the sharpest knife in the drawer.
During one labor shortage, it was planned to have middle level managers from corporate manning the maintenance trucks. Not that most of them would be able to tell the difference between the phone lines and power lines anyway, but the fact that upper management expected middle management to don hard hats and do dangerous manual labor is telling.
No, I had to ask my neighbor, whose former roommate's sister's last boyfriend knew a guy at the power company who could get him a manual on how do it by wiring your own transformer using 13 feet of copper pipe, a few steel rods, some scavenged copper wire, and duct tape.
Well!
Some geeks' home labs are more equal than others. Now, back to winding the coils for my particle accelerator... (Did you know you can get 440 wired residential without a permit?)
Yes, but AT&T pays for the infrastructure maintenance costs regardless of the actual utilization. That is, whatever bandwidth they *don't* sell is simply wasted. It's not like the gas station, where unsold gasoline remains in the tank and can be sold later. Therefore, it doesn't make sense to charge on a bandwidth basis for most consumers, because you'll actually decrease your revenues while your costs remain fixed. If anything, you want to bill more customers a flat rate (which, admittedly, has its own drawbacks).
Imagine, for a moment, if you bought infrastructure equipment, and sold only the capacity you could actually deliver at any given time? Regardless of whether your equipment is fully utilized or underutilized, you still have to pay the cost of the electricity to power it, and the real estate in which it is housed.
This is why flat pricing models are a good idea. Imagine for a moment if AT&T charged by the byte, and people stopped using all that bandwidth to save money. AT&T's income would decrease, but not their cost of business (hey, they've already bought the equipment, might as well use it...)
If AT&T charges a flat rate, they can predict their income and plan accordingly. However, if they charge by the byte, then they have to deal with fluctuating income from one quarter to the next. Not only this, but there are perhaps a sizable portion of their customers who will instead try to minimize their costs. With a fixed rate plan, they have no option. But with a pay-per-byte plan, users like me could use their services for pennies a month. AT&T is about to come to terms with the fact that most users will opt for using less bandwidth and forking over less money per month. The reason why people pay so much for data plans is because they have to, not because they want to. Give the people the ability to save money, and they will take advantage of it.
These kinds of plans have been tried before, and they always fail. Email is cheap, bandwidth-wise, and movies can be had from Netflix for less than the cost of the bandwidth used by the net.
If I can make $25K more per year if I move, chances are I'll move.
I sincerely hope you factor in the relative cost of housing before making a decision like that. I could make half my salary working downstate and still support a much better standard of living. For what I paid for my 3 bedroom condo, I could buy a 5000 square foot house with 3 car garage and detached apartment (I almost did, btw, but the market wouldn't let me sell...) Likewise, moving from 50k job in a small-medium size midwestern town to a place like San Francisco at 75k will put you squarely in the poor house.
I have a college degree and work in a salaried position in a large metropolitan area. My uncle has a high school education and lives in a rural area. Compared to him,
I'm not bitter; I really believe my life has been improved by having a college degree. However, those who think a degree will improve your standard of material living are grossly mistaken. Even though I work with white-collar folks, they're just as vindictive and greedy and dishonest as their blue collar counterparts; however, they feel it is somehow "different" because they justify it with more eloquent terms. They point to the absolute dollar value of compensation as proof that they're somehow better than their blue-collar counterparts, yet fail to realize the income relative to expenses is about the same, and in terms of actual ownership, seldom have more (and often less) than their "unsophisticated" blue collar counterparts.
Everyone wants to work on the latest and greatest stuff, no one wants to maintain or even release patches.
I don't really know how to address this, except by the people who think they are going to be the next great video game designer remaining unemployed.
Here's how you address it: you hire one of those 9 out of 10 CS graduates who "Just got in it for the money". Had you offices in the Midwest, you'd have no problem finding programmers whose only ambition is to crunch out brain-dead code until they can move into management. Trust me, I work with these people and they're even worse than the primadonnas interested only in the "cool" things. Naturally, not everyone can be the next game programmer, or work on cool things, but you probably don't want to hire those whose only ambition is to do the grunt work.
Typically, the primadonna has to have his ego coaxed into doing the grunt work. But you can usually count on him to do it fast, and not to make a total mess of things. Granted, some people have a higher estimation of their abilities than their peers. But at least someone passionate about coding can be inspired to improve their code; they'll actually accept coding standards once reasonably explained. But here's a short list of problems with the typical "career type":
It's easier to convince a rock-star programmer that documentation is necessary than it is to convince the career-track political programmer that a race condition is a problem, that architecture matters, that maintainability and scalability are important. Just the other day, I had a department manager question the value of writing reusable code - in fact, he was so hostile as to suggest that it wasn't worth our time to make code reusable... (And not only that, but reported to my boss that my suggestion otherwise was "distracting to what we're trying to accomplish here"...)
I know the starry-eyed programmers can be a handful at times, but those indifferent to technical issues will lay a minefield in your company. Suddenly, years after they've moved on, you'll find your new hires telling you the projects they built aren't worth salvaging, that you'll have to start over, etc... I've seen these types move into management and turn an otherwise fun profession into a death march. You don't want the stupid, or the political, types of people writing code. They'll set your company up for failure every time.
In the first place, a hybrid's starter was designed for frequent starts, and the engine in a hybrid is much smaller than that of a normal car. In the second place, the computer controls the granularity of the duty cycle, I would imagine, to limit the frequency of starts to that for which the starter was designed.
You know, I heard about a guy who did that. He had it all worked out - he had a second set of keys, he locked his doors during the deliveries...
He never thought a bunch of drunken college kids would be able to force the window down and steal his car, but they did. And he got a ticket on top of that - for leaving the car unattended with the keys in the ignition, which is a crime where I live.
I could afford replacing the starter. I couldn't afford to replace the car.
It's going to be a long time before new drilling is permitted in the Gulf of Mexico...
Which, I believe, is BP's intent. Without new wells being drilled, the cost of oil certainly won't go down - who knows, it might even go up?! Granted, they might not have intended to spill, but...
Honestly, if you were the CEO, why would you want to take such a massive loss this quarter when July is rapidly approaching? Why not defer the cost of cleanup a little so the shareholders don't take it in the shorts? I mean, the well and platform are already lost.
I say this as someone who has ported Linux to a new platform: building the toolchain and porting the code is part of the fun. If it's a popular processor, and all you have to do is define the specific architecture, plan on spending a few days (on the toolchain, that is). If it's something completely new, for example - a processor not yet supported by gcc... Well, you might as well make an ongoing project of it, host it on sourceforge, etc...
Granted, they *should* provide the toolchain, especially if it is OS software, but they are not strictly obligated. It is entirely possible they are using a proprietary compiler which they can't release to the public. This happens a lot in the embedded world.
In all likelihood, they are either using a proprietary toolchain which they can't release, or they are one of those companies where cost controls everything, and the effort to post the toolchain and hosting space is just a nickel too much. There's a good learning opportunity here - while you'll probably have to do a little detective work to get things working, and maybe even port it to a FOSS compiler.
I used to deliver pizzas for a living. Which meant that I would shut off and restart my car about 3 to 4 times an hour.
After doing it for a while, I figured out that I would need to replace my starter every six months to a year. This is a *very* bad idea - think of how many stoplights the average commuter stops at during their commute home.
I never understood the fuss over being unable to skip the previews until I had to watch a DVD on a Windows computer. Turns out that for the first decade of the DVD's existence, I had been using Linux to watch DVDs, and had never seen the unskippable previews. I honestly didn't even know they were there!
I understand where you are coming from.
If there is a God and an afterlife, there's no point in despairing about just how bad people have made the present, because, well, you've got the hope for better things.
If there isn't, well, then your struggle is for the minds of those 30%. Believe it or not, those 25% aren't as inflexible as you might believe. Perhaps you're one of them - maybe you're absolutely convinced that you're right, and perhaps no amount of evidence would convince you otherwise. Hopefully not, but if you're open to the possibility of changing your mind...
The key to changing someone's mind is understanding *why* they believe what they do. Some other posters have advocated ridiculing people, but calling people names won't change anyone's mind. Ridiculing positions is perhaps a little better, but still tends to encourage people to redouble their efforts to defend their position. Trying to understand someone else's position often leads to a better understanding of why they believe what they do, and more importantly, the rare moment when they're willing to listen to yours.
A very famous Christian evangelist once said, "You don't win anyone to Christ by winning arguments..." Indeed, there are people posting on /. who really believe that winning the argument will change someone's mind.
Look, the right wing wackos aren't claiming that the founding fathers wanted to establish a Christian Theocracy. They're claiming the government was formed using Christian principles, based on the Christian understanding of the world. The intention was that a Christian nation would regard the Church as authoritative on matters of morality, and the Government merely the public servant of the Christian nation. Thus, the Government wasn't supposed to meddle in the affairs of religion ( hence the term, separation of Church and State) as it had in England, where the monarchy had established their own church when the Vatican wouldn't kowtow to a certain monarch. The Puritans were very sensitive to government meddling in religion.
But this notion that the founding fathers never intended the nation to be Christian is a curious one, as many of them were Christians themselves, and openly lamented that if America abandoned Christianity, this "experiment with democracy" would fail. Indeed, as the French revolution(s!) showed, and later Communism in the USSR and China showed, democracies founded on secular principles ultimately fail in their supposed aims, often becoming machines of the very oppression they rail against. Democracy, as the founders understood it, was only suitable for those with the moral principles to employ it virtuously. Which at the time, meant being Christian.
Subaru had an Continuously Variable Electronic Transmission back in the late 80's, early 90's. It was novel, but it didn't sell so well.
When it comes down to it, a hydrostatic transmission is probably more costly than a traditional one. Furthermore, it probably brings only a marginal increase in efficiency, if it produces any increase at all. Continuously variable transmissions are much more important in heavy duty applications where sudden drivetrain shock can destroy the drivetrain, and quite possibly the load to which it is attached. A car can jerk forward suddenly without incurring much damage, but the same relative movement attached to a plow would tend to break things.
For cars, consider that a modern torque converter can double the engine torque going into the transmission. The torque converter is continuously variable in the range of ~.5:1 to 1:1, which, when coupled with a four or five speed transmission, can keep the engine in its peak power band for the entire range of speeds and accelerations demanded by the driver.
USB can support up to 255 devices on a single bus. With a USB hub and a few 1.5+ TB USB hard drives, you'd be set. Your absolute storage limit would probably be somewhere in the 500 TB range, after which you could just by another box, and repeat.
I guess that beauty isn't really in the eye of the beholder anymore. I'm reticent to rate anyone in this study because I don't see anything good coming of it.
In the first place, science has no place rating attractiveness. Beauty is *supposed* to be subjective, not objective. Imagine, for a moment if how someone might feel if their body shape had been *scientifically proven* unattractive. Nothing good can come of this.
Speaking of nothing good, we've seen how women are especially sensitive to body image. Normally, it's been an anecdotal thing, but this could be a cosmetic marketer's wet dream come true. The entire cosmetics industry - including cosmetic surgery - relies heavily on women being unable to see themselves as naturally beautiful; if there was some ostensibly *objective* way of showing a woman to be, shall we say, less-than-optimally-attractive, there would of course arise a large demand for whatever product or service "corrected" the problem. Instead of seeing the natural variety in body shape, they'd all appear about the same. Which would frustrate the many men and women who find society's idea of an attractive body, well, rather plain and uninteresting.
Speaking of fault tolerance, I find it rather remarkable that an object containing sensitive electronics which sits in storage for several years before being used can, under widely varying conditions, find its way to a target that even an expert sniper couldn't hit, and explode correctly. An object moving nearly 1000 meters per second has perhaps a one millisecond margin of error for optimal effectiveness against an armored target such as a tank or bunker. Especially considering that the same margin of error in a car would make a difference of only a few inches.
And yet a human can routinely park a car with the same tolerance.
Yep, theoretically it's a logical fallacy. Most of us understand that. But history says otherwise - several times throughout history, society finds itself on the downhill slide of the slippery slope.
In terms of logic, yes, a slippery slope is a fallacy. But, as the Bush years and "post 9/11 world" rhetoric have shown, fear is a powerful motivator. Could your average American be induced to give up their freedoms, perhaps little by little, for the promise of increased safety? By all means, (sadly) YES!
You can do better than that if you're trying to troll. But seriously, your post shows a complete lack of critical analysis and reasoning skills. Even the article you linked to quotes, "If just looking at the southern hemisphere, however, 2009 proved the warmest yet recorded since record-taking began in 1880."
You can avoid much embarrassment by downloading the actual data and running the stats yourself. It's not a single-year thing, it's a decade-long trend. One which looks surprisingly similar to what happened in the 1900-1910 timeframe. And it doesn't look good for AGW proponents at this point, even if you use their adjusted data. But that's not my point.
The article to which you linked is a classic example of the blind leading the blind. The *second* sentence is qualified in such a way so that it is not false, but the conclusion drawn is deliberately misleading. Global warming, we are told, is not about *local* changes, but changes happening to the entire planet. Hence, a warmer Southern Hemisphere is not really a problem if the Northern Hemisphere is proportionately colder. Your case of chronic inability to apply critical reasoning to what you read is sadly, an epidemic now.
The problem is not so much the issue of global warming, but rather, that we have a public at large who are:
Even if climate scientists found a perfect model for global climate tomorrow, one which predicted weather with 100% accuracy, you would still have global warming pundits. Even if the model predicted global cooling. The problem is that the average layperson can be manipulated by well-articulated, albeit factually false, statements. And they vote. Understanding AGW is more of a political science question than a question of the science - even though the science is questionable (at this point). At some point, though, we will know the definitive answer, but regardless of which way the political question is decided, it has about a 50% chance of being wrong and costing everyone a lot of money.