You mean all those Muslims who, much like the Minutemen and colonists, have risen up and overthrown oppressive regimes in many middle eastern countries?
You'd only be able to tell if it was a knife if you have it a point. But glass is sharp - you could make a knife with a squared blade and no tip that would still easily cut someone's throat with the edge. You could scribe it so you could snap it into the right shape.
There's any number of things an intelligent person can do, but to some degree the sad part about airport security is we only need to be able to catch the people who'd actually try something, and fortunately they're not very bright normally.
Which is still a different issue to coal power plants, where the entirety of the exercise is predicated on the burning of coal.
Greenhouse effect figures are also misleading: we focus on CO2 because its atmospheric lifetime is very long. Other, more potent compounds, do not last nearly as long in the upper atmosphere as CO2. There's also a matter of relative volume, and the energy requirements of storage.
The three gases you listed are all common etchant chemicals, used because they degrade into fluorine radicals which etch silicon. These are not difficult materials to degrade, and more importantly are essentially recyclable: unused product is still viable. More importantly though, and this is key: the quantities are very small. They're all etchants used in plasma etching processes, which are done at millibar pressures in the first place.
It also would've been suicide to not bail out the banks. Nobody wants that.
The problem with the bailout was what happened immediately after it: as soon as the bankers got the money, everyone was all too happy that "they'd really learned their lesson" and that new regulation was simply going to starve off the recovery!
Even if that were true, the only thing it means is that we should've picked a growth target, written some laws and said "these come into effect here, it's about 5 years away, you've been warned".
You could eliminate the non-defense discretionary budget 100% (elimiate every non-defense segment of the government) and we'd still be running a deficit.
And if you eliminated the defense budget 100%, we'd still be running a deficit.
In fact, our deficit would still be in the top five of all time....
If you paid off the entire US budget deficit, you'd be acting fiscally negligent and giving away revenue/
The US has absolutely no need, nor should it, hold no deficit. The only thing it needs to do is ensure that GDP grows, on average, slightly faster then the deficit does. If that can be maintained, then the portion of the budget needed to service the deficit will shrink - eventually being eaten up by inflation.
It would be foolish to try and actually pay off the entire deficit, since it's unnecessary. The only reason to engage in short term deficit reduction is to pull the total more in line with a figure consistent with GDP growth. And then of course you have the business cycle to modulate against: your going to expand the deficit in recessions, so you want to shrink it during boom times.
You also definitely don't want to cut spending during the recession, since all you're going to accomplish is cause a shrinking GDP to shrink faster.
The US, at present, doesn't even have a deficit problem. It has a "stupid war" problem. It has a tax problem from the Bush-era tax cuts. And it has economic suicide problem, in the form of the debt ceiling: a concept no other country implements, for good reason. Not raising the debt ceiling causes an immediate default for the worst possible reason: no reason at all. A country perfectly capable of servicing it's debt, that then chooses not to do so for no fiscal reason whatsoever is the worst kind of lending risk.
A final note on that: even if the US had no net deficit, it would still be necessary to raise the debt ceiling periodically, since the normal operation of business and government requires short term loans to sustain fluid fiscal policy. GDP growth would increase the size of these each year anyway, which means the amount needed over the short term would grow each year anyway. And that's assuming your straight up strangling the economy by refusing to make sound investments over the longer term with borrowed money.
Standing on "virus free" is a bad idea, as Apple is now learning.
Criminals look for the biggest target they can find - it was Windows, but now the same basic malware strategies are turning out to work on Mac OS (since most users assume "virus free" means "protected from all malware"). The malware game though has been more or less the only game in software since Vista/7 closed up a lot of holes.
Widespread Linux (say, Android) is just as vulnerable to those tricks as anyone else.
Some of the designs out there do use or propose to use NaCl - rather then looking for lower melting points they just acknowledge that raw heat capacity is more then enough. NaCl is also pretty unquestionably stable.
It's just NaCl - sodium salt, as we get from seawater. You could boil millions of tons of it out of the oceans and it wouldn't be missed, but why bother when we have lakes and aquifiers which need to be desalinated, or just the brine run-off from desalinization to produce drinking water along the coasts. Or you could roll through a desert and quarry up the sand, then mix it up with water to pull off the soluble products (salt).
There's also the fact that there's nothing about the manufacture of solar panels which requires the production of greenhouse gases: the furnaces used to make them are electrical. Though if we wanted to get fancy they could also be biogas, solar thermal etc. Or just powered by other solar panels.
This is exactly the same bait and switch as gets pulled with "nuclear power produces CO2 because of the mining and refining!". It ignores the pertinent issue which is that no part of the process requires or is even particularly dependent on the emission of CO2 since the power generation method is not based on hydrocarbon production. What aspects are are a legacy from current dominant power generation.
I do personally feel that knowing how one is doing relative to their peers is important. Why? Because in life you want to do BETTER than your peers! Everything that matters in life is based on competition. (OK, not everything... everything that isn't the subject of a Beatles song or 50.) Competition is the basis for earning scholarships, jobs, promotions etc. You've got to be better than the next guy to get ahead, it's just a (somewhat sad) fact of life.
Except most of the time you're not in clear direct competition with your peers.
Perhaps more importantly, almost everyone is going to be worse then someone. There's a lot of people in the world, a lot of factors affecting the definition of success - how exactly does one judge their own success? How should they?
Plenty of people the world over considered the big house to mean "they'd made it" and look where that ended up - plenty of people saddled with debt they probably shouldn't have taken on. But it did make them clearly ahead of someone - for a time.
Most of the time in life - there's no clear direct competition. Or, if there is, then you're in a losing game to start with, since for the vast majority of people, diversity in skill or availability is going to be what determines their fiscal compensation - not how "good" they are at their job.
With 6 billion people in the world, no matter how hard you work at one specific thing - statistically there's going to be someone better then you - probably a lot of people.
Do you know that they _ARE_ doing similar things in England?
In England, in some schools, students do not received grades, and they do not know how they fair inside their own class - because, according to those so-called "experts", they do not want to "hurt the feeling of those children who aren't doing well"
In other words, they _are_ doing everything they can to dumb down the future generations to the lowest common denominator
This is completely beside the (ridiculous) point of the article.
Does knowing how one is fairing relative to immediate classmates actually provide any benefit to the student? Do we think that constantly telling them how poorly (or how well) they are performing is going to actually adjust their final performance metrics?
Grades are not an education. Telling students how they perform against a nebulous average doesn't accomplish anything.
The grand realization of the Kahn academy has really been that the best performance metrics are when we test students against themselves and challenge them to improve their own accomplishments. And that depending at the point in time someone looks at the students, the struggling student may have just had trouble with one key concept, but then usually catches up quickly.
For someone so incensed by the idea of control, you should perhaps consider why "divide and conquer" is so highly regarded throughout history.
That stuff is real today, it's just mostly used in commercial scale building construction. Any new office blocks you've seen put up recently almost certainly use it.
Try dialing a touchscreen phone in your pocket without looking. It's extraordinarily difficult, because there's no texture or friction to the screen - your ability to know where things are is entirely inertial, unless you try and hug the edge of the screen to get an idea of where your fingers are.
That's the same situation as your example with a mouse, and it's the entirety of my original point: both types of interaction are "unnatural" if we're going to start throwing that word around.
People are very adept keyboard users in large part because keyboards provide all those missing sensations - you can feel the ridges of the keys, we have the raised sections on F and J to center your fingers without looking, and we have differently shaped keys for different purposes.
Something I remember finding very surprising was how difficult I found it typing on a physical keyboard with that "flat key" design to the top of it - the ridges between keys were very difficult to feel, and the flat top meant they didn't tend to center finger taps. It was absurdly easy to wind up typing off center, or hitting multiple keys at once because a lot of the normal haptic feedback just wasn't there.
That is not "easily", which was obviously my point. A mouse can have several buttons to hit and convey intent.
Your example is using one type of possible intent conveyance (long touch) to emulate another (right click). But it's still limited - it's not as effective, and we're removing an intent option (we can't use long touches for other things). With a mouse for example we can have right click and long right click, if we so choose.
There's also a lot of naturalistic fallacy which goes on in discussion about touchscreens - the idea that a touchscreen is more "natural" is a bit of weird one. Nothing about the way we use touchscreens with computers is "natural" - there's no changes in friction, texture or weight to appreciate and fundamentally its interacting with a digital screen, not a real object.
Humans are tool users - and have been for a very long time. The idea that using a mouse is "unnatural" just doesn't follow - our brains have been perfectly suited to appreciate abstracted control systems for a very long time. Hell, monkeys today can appreciate abstracted control systems, or things with odd kinematics.
Windows 8's existence has more or less made me pre-emptively switch to Linux Mint. The dealmaker was Cinnamon, which seemed like someone was finally saying "what the hell Gnome 3?" which also perfectly expresses my problems with Win 8.
Touch screens also have poor conveyance of intent.
You touch the screen - and that's about it. You can't hover with your fingers and then choose to click, you can't convey different intent (right-click, middle-click, other mouse buttons etc.) easily.
You also can't see what your clicking while you hold onto it if it's right under your finger.
While I'm sure the touchscreen has a bright future, the significant of the interface is currently being overstated - all the "cool stuff" ultimately will come from pairing touchscreens with other devices including traditional things like keyboards.
No but there's the coking coal used to produce the steel used in their manufacture. And the CO2 emitted from the cars of the work man who drive out to install and periodically inspect them...
You know what this all has in common? All these things are minor emissions, or substitutable emissions, which we at present don't worry about because worrying about CO2 emissions from your mining process is ridiculous when you're going to burn and emit tons of CO2 from the thing you're mining in the first place.
It's nuclear waste. There'll never be an enormous amount of it, and the last thing we should be doing is trying to hide it. Put it in appropriate repositories, and pay some people to keep an eye on it. Problem solved.
If in 5,000 years we for some reason have forgotten where it was put, and stopped watching it, then it implies catastrophe on a scale which makes any deaths completely irrelevant - I'd much rather focus on saving people today, then saving the unspecified survivors of some type of holocaust in the distant future.
Slashdot Mirror
You mean all those Muslims who, much like the Minutemen and colonists, have risen up and overthrown oppressive regimes in many middle eastern countries?
You'd only be able to tell if it was a knife if you have it a point. But glass is sharp - you could make a knife with a squared blade and no tip that would still easily cut someone's throat with the edge. You could scribe it so you could snap it into the right shape.
There's any number of things an intelligent person can do, but to some degree the sad part about airport security is we only need to be able to catch the people who'd actually try something, and fortunately they're not very bright normally.
Which is still a different issue to coal power plants, where the entirety of the exercise is predicated on the burning of coal.
Greenhouse effect figures are also misleading: we focus on CO2 because its atmospheric lifetime is very long. Other, more potent compounds, do not last nearly as long in the upper atmosphere as CO2. There's also a matter of relative volume, and the energy requirements of storage.
The three gases you listed are all common etchant chemicals, used because they degrade into fluorine radicals which etch silicon. These are not difficult materials to degrade, and more importantly are essentially recyclable: unused product is still viable. More importantly though, and this is key: the quantities are very small. They're all etchants used in plasma etching processes, which are done at millibar pressures in the first place.
It also would've been suicide to not bail out the banks. Nobody wants that.
The problem with the bailout was what happened immediately after it: as soon as the bankers got the money, everyone was all too happy that "they'd really learned their lesson" and that new regulation was simply going to starve off the recovery!
Even if that were true, the only thing it means is that we should've picked a growth target, written some laws and said "these come into effect here, it's about 5 years away, you've been warned".
And if you eliminated the defense budget 100%, we'd still be running a deficit.
In fact, our deficit would still be in the top five of all time....
If you paid off the entire US budget deficit, you'd be acting fiscally negligent and giving away revenue/
The US has absolutely no need, nor should it, hold no deficit. The only thing it needs to do is ensure that GDP grows, on average, slightly faster then the deficit does. If that can be maintained, then the portion of the budget needed to service the deficit will shrink - eventually being eaten up by inflation.
It would be foolish to try and actually pay off the entire deficit, since it's unnecessary. The only reason to engage in short term deficit reduction is to pull the total more in line with a figure consistent with GDP growth. And then of course you have the business cycle to modulate against: your going to expand the deficit in recessions, so you want to shrink it during boom times.
You also definitely don't want to cut spending during the recession, since all you're going to accomplish is cause a shrinking GDP to shrink faster.
The US, at present, doesn't even have a deficit problem. It has a "stupid war" problem. It has a tax problem from the Bush-era tax cuts. And it has economic suicide problem, in the form of the debt ceiling: a concept no other country implements, for good reason. Not raising the debt ceiling causes an immediate default for the worst possible reason: no reason at all. A country perfectly capable of servicing it's debt, that then chooses not to do so for no fiscal reason whatsoever is the worst kind of lending risk.
A final note on that: even if the US had no net deficit, it would still be necessary to raise the debt ceiling periodically, since the normal operation of business and government requires short term loans to sustain fluid fiscal policy. GDP growth would increase the size of these each year anyway, which means the amount needed over the short term would grow each year anyway. And that's assuming your straight up strangling the economy by refusing to make sound investments over the longer term with borrowed money.
Standing on "virus free" is a bad idea, as Apple is now learning.
Criminals look for the biggest target they can find - it was Windows, but now the same basic malware strategies are turning out to work on Mac OS (since most users assume "virus free" means "protected from all malware"). The malware game though has been more or less the only game in software since Vista/7 closed up a lot of holes.
Widespread Linux (say, Android) is just as vulnerable to those tricks as anyone else.
Some of the designs out there do use or propose to use NaCl - rather then looking for lower melting points they just acknowledge that raw heat capacity is more then enough. NaCl is also pretty unquestionably stable.
I can't tell if this is serious or not.
But: yes.
It's just NaCl - sodium salt, as we get from seawater. You could boil millions of tons of it out of the oceans and it wouldn't be missed, but why bother when we have lakes and aquifiers which need to be desalinated, or just the brine run-off from desalinization to produce drinking water along the coasts. Or you could roll through a desert and quarry up the sand, then mix it up with water to pull off the soluble products (salt).
There's also the fact that there's nothing about the manufacture of solar panels which requires the production of greenhouse gases: the furnaces used to make them are electrical. Though if we wanted to get fancy they could also be biogas, solar thermal etc. Or just powered by other solar panels.
This is exactly the same bait and switch as gets pulled with "nuclear power produces CO2 because of the mining and refining!". It ignores the pertinent issue which is that no part of the process requires or is even particularly dependent on the emission of CO2 since the power generation method is not based on hydrocarbon production. What aspects are are a legacy from current dominant power generation.
I do personally feel that knowing how one is doing relative to their peers is important. Why? Because in life you want to do BETTER than your peers! Everything that matters in life is based on competition. (OK, not everything ... everything that isn't the subject of a Beatles song or 50.) Competition is the basis for earning scholarships, jobs, promotions etc. You've got to be better than the next guy to get ahead, it's just a (somewhat sad) fact of life.
Except most of the time you're not in clear direct competition with your peers.
Perhaps more importantly, almost everyone is going to be worse then someone. There's a lot of people in the world, a lot of factors affecting the definition of success - how exactly does one judge their own success? How should they?
Plenty of people the world over considered the big house to mean "they'd made it" and look where that ended up - plenty of people saddled with debt they probably shouldn't have taken on. But it did make them clearly ahead of someone - for a time.
Most of the time in life - there's no clear direct competition. Or, if there is, then you're in a losing game to start with, since for the vast majority of people, diversity in skill or availability is going to be what determines their fiscal compensation - not how "good" they are at their job.
With 6 billion people in the world, no matter how hard you work at one specific thing - statistically there's going to be someone better then you - probably a lot of people.
You know I think I've been writing it that way for a while and never previously been corrected on it. Thank you.
"how they fair inside their own class"
"Does knowing how one is fairing relative to immediate classmates "
While I don't know how either of you are doing in the real world, it's a pretty fair bet that neither of you would fare very well on an English test.
But I bets both of you can al-jabber with the best of them!
I don't know what you think you've uncovered here. The OP made a statement, I referenced the statement accurately. Scandalous.
Do you know that they _ARE_ doing similar things in England?
In England, in some schools, students do not received grades, and they do not know how they fair inside their own class - because, according to those so-called "experts", they do not want to "hurt the feeling of those children who aren't doing well"
In other words, they _are_ doing everything they can to dumb down the future generations to the lowest common denominator
This is completely beside the (ridiculous) point of the article.
Does knowing how one is fairing relative to immediate classmates actually provide any benefit to the student? Do we think that constantly telling them how poorly (or how well) they are performing is going to actually adjust their final performance metrics?
Grades are not an education. Telling students how they perform against a nebulous average doesn't accomplish anything.
The grand realization of the Kahn academy has really been that the best performance metrics are when we test students against themselves and challenge them to improve their own accomplishments. And that depending at the point in time someone looks at the students, the struggling student may have just had trouble with one key concept, but then usually catches up quickly.
For someone so incensed by the idea of control, you should perhaps consider why "divide and conquer" is so highly regarded throughout history.
That stuff is real today, it's just mostly used in commercial scale building construction. Any new office blocks you've seen put up recently almost certainly use it.
Eraser for Windows is probably what you want. Though if you can't install anything, sdelete is probably more useful.
Try dialing a touchscreen phone in your pocket without looking. It's extraordinarily difficult, because there's no texture or friction to the screen - your ability to know where things are is entirely inertial, unless you try and hug the edge of the screen to get an idea of where your fingers are.
That's the same situation as your example with a mouse, and it's the entirety of my original point: both types of interaction are "unnatural" if we're going to start throwing that word around.
People are very adept keyboard users in large part because keyboards provide all those missing sensations - you can feel the ridges of the keys, we have the raised sections on F and J to center your fingers without looking, and we have differently shaped keys for different purposes.
Something I remember finding very surprising was how difficult I found it typing on a physical keyboard with that "flat key" design to the top of it - the ridges between keys were very difficult to feel, and the flat top meant they didn't tend to center finger taps. It was absurdly easy to wind up typing off center, or hitting multiple keys at once because a lot of the normal haptic feedback just wasn't there.
That is not "easily", which was obviously my point. A mouse can have several buttons to hit and convey intent.
Your example is using one type of possible intent conveyance (long touch) to emulate another (right click). But it's still limited - it's not as effective, and we're removing an intent option (we can't use long touches for other things). With a mouse for example we can have right click and long right click, if we so choose.
I was not factually incorrect in anyway.
Office on Wine is really the answer here unfortunately.
There's also a lot of naturalistic fallacy which goes on in discussion about touchscreens - the idea that a touchscreen is more "natural" is a bit of weird one. Nothing about the way we use touchscreens with computers is "natural" - there's no changes in friction, texture or weight to appreciate and fundamentally its interacting with a digital screen, not a real object.
Humans are tool users - and have been for a very long time. The idea that using a mouse is "unnatural" just doesn't follow - our brains have been perfectly suited to appreciate abstracted control systems for a very long time. Hell, monkeys today can appreciate abstracted control systems, or things with odd kinematics.
Windows 8's existence has more or less made me pre-emptively switch to Linux Mint. The dealmaker was Cinnamon, which seemed like someone was finally saying "what the hell Gnome 3?" which also perfectly expresses my problems with Win 8.
Touch screens also have poor conveyance of intent.
You touch the screen - and that's about it. You can't hover with your fingers and then choose to click, you can't convey different intent (right-click, middle-click, other mouse buttons etc.) easily.
You also can't see what your clicking while you hold onto it if it's right under your finger.
While I'm sure the touchscreen has a bright future, the significant of the interface is currently being overstated - all the "cool stuff" ultimately will come from pairing touchscreens with other devices including traditional things like keyboards.
No but there's the coking coal used to produce the steel used in their manufacture. And the CO2 emitted from the cars of the work man who drive out to install and periodically inspect them...
You know what this all has in common? All these things are minor emissions, or substitutable emissions, which we at present don't worry about because worrying about CO2 emissions from your mining process is ridiculous when you're going to burn and emit tons of CO2 from the thing you're mining in the first place.
Have a look at ships' hulls and see what saltwater does to metal.
Nothing because seawater corrosion is one of the most highly studied electrochemical effects in the world?
Not worry about the 100,000 year case?
It's nuclear waste. There'll never be an enormous amount of it, and the last thing we should be doing is trying to hide it. Put it in appropriate repositories, and pay some people to keep an eye on it. Problem solved.
If in 5,000 years we for some reason have forgotten where it was put, and stopped watching it, then it implies catastrophe on a scale which makes any deaths completely irrelevant - I'd much rather focus on saving people today, then saving the unspecified survivors of some type of holocaust in the distant future.
Eh, you can use breeders to turn 238 into 235 though - and it's a big part of the appeal of nuclear power to start with.