It's not unfair, all new cars are a "bad buy" since they lose a significant portion of the sticker price the instant you drive it off the dealer's lot.
When buying a car, a consumer will weigh the cost of a new car against the cost of a used car. You suck at finances if you don't at least look at both options. Given the fact that you can often carry over the warranty if the used car is relatively new, a well maintained used car is a perfectly valid comparison to a brand new car.
So, $35,000 for a new Volt, or $12,000 + $2000 per year (gas cost assuming $5 per gallon and 12k miles) for a used Camry? It's going to all of that 10 year warranty to make the Volt worth it to a price-conscious consumer, since cost of ownership (not counting maintenance, since I have no way of estimating the Volt's maintenance yet) won't match up until that time.
Yeah, seriously. I mean, what employer is going to let an employee get away with STEALING $0.5 worth of power per day? Do you think them fools?
Seriously man. Even if the price doubles an employer will never feel the hurt. You think "They will when they have 1000 employees plugging in!", but companies of that size have operating budgets in the tens to hundreds of millions per year, $500-$1000 per day for something that boosts employee moral AND lets them throw a big-ol' "We're Green, See!" on their marketing material is something they will gladly spend.
I'm assuming you are from Europe, in which case the geography is much different. Europe is much more densely populated than the US, with fewer roads and a lower percentage of drivers. Things like public transportation, which reduces the load on roads, are not as practical in most situations.
So what we have is more roads and more use, which means it is significantly more expensive to maintain them. Hence, crappier roads.
You're using the wrong numbers for the epa estimates, capacity != total electricity generated.
You need to use net generation per year to compare total energy consumption demands. The 1 gigawatt capacity is essentially the maximum amount of electricity that can be delivered at a given moment. Current US production is 2000gwh per year with coal alone, and totals about 4000gwh. We also import more energy than that as it is. Granted, if there were 1 million Volts on the road we would need to double our current production or buy more energy than we do, but 1 million electric vehicles is a very high number since a very large percentage of vehicles on the road are work vehicles for which electric is (currently) not suitable, before you even get to the other reasons people might not buy an EV.
Since the Volt can only run 40 miles on its battery before needing a charge, and it uses 25kwh per 100 miles, the battery capacity is apparently about 10kwh, give or take. If it takes an hour to charge (it takes much longer than that at the moment), it would require 10 gigawatts of capacity to accomodate 1 million vehicles. That's a drop in the bucket (relatively speaking).
All the same, we'll need to work out better energy production somehow, I say a few billion of this bailout money should be going to nuclear fusion research. Cheap, plentiful, clean, and about as safe as anything else we use. If you can get it to work, that is.
That's nice and complicated and all, but a breach in the verification machine invalidates the entire process. The validation machine can easilly show a valid count but actually record an invalid count, and there is no way you would know the difference. Vote goes to validation machine, as well as a locked-box printout and a paper printout the voter takes to the validation machine. Voter validates their vote, but what is shown on-screen does not match what is recorded in the database. The vote is then believed to be correctly counted, but is in fact not correct.
The paper printouts would not match the electronic vote talley, but since it has gone through the verification process by that point it is much less likely to be suspected of a problem. Also, since a counting mistake is impossible in an uncompromised machine, and the verification process virtually eliminates mistaken votes, there would need to be significant evidence of a breach before a paper count would take place, and a paper count is the only way to catch that sort of breach in security.
Also, the second lock-box paper count is superfluous if the voter is turning in a paper ballot to verify. The ballot must be turned in, or you run into the problem of selling/coercing votes if voters get to keep a copy of their ballot.
You realize that is exactly how the poor used to be kept out of the voting process, right?
In the early days of the good 'ol US of A, only men who owned land were permitted to vote. Obviously, if you didn't own land and weren't a man, you did not have enough vested interest or mental faculty to have a say in government.
When that was found to be illegal, the requirements changed and you had to pass a reading test in order to vote. This kept the majority of the poor out of the voting process. That too was eventually struck down.
Just because you cannot read, don't own land, or don't know the "platform" (what a fucking retarded concept, btw) of the particular party you are voting for does not mean you don't have a vested interest in the political system and the right to vote for who you see fit.
Minimum requirements are all about excluding people who don't fit your idea of who should be running the government, and the entire concept is extremely immoral and unethical.
It has also been shown to be unconstitutional every time the idea comes up.
Ballot box stuffing has practical limits that are very, very small compared to electronic vote fraud. I.e. you can only have so many extra ballot boxes before someone gets wise in the counting. When the recording, consolodating, and counting of the votes all happens in a machine(s) that is opaque to observers, the potential for recognizing a problem is much much lower.
Ummm, you do realize that hardware is always the least expensive part of any computing solution, right?
Even super-computers with million-dollar hardware costs are nothing compared to the tens of millions of dollars spent on the design and implimentation of that same system. As you scale down the application, the disparity between hardware and labor only increases. Case and point - a $1500 POS system costs less than it costs to employ the teenager operating it for minimum wage in just over one month. Forget about what it costs in labor to design that same system - you're talking hundreds of thousands of dollars as a low estimate if designing it from scratch.
Dude, what world are you living in where labor is cheaper than hardware?
There are still good companies out there, worth building a career within the company. They are few and far between, but they are gems and you don't want to miss them because you follow some blanked idea that "All companies are evil, all managers are bad, and the only way to get a raise is to quit."
I am a contractor with an engineering group of a large company, so I essentially have two managers. One who I work for, and one who actually determines my pay and employment. The one I work for recently changed, the old manager was a bulldog and fought for his subordinates, stood up to upper management, and generally was so effective they strong-armed him into a promotion to groom him for upper management. His replacement is not as hard-nosed and bulldogish, but he's still a quality manager that goes to bat for his people. He's actually working to get me and another employee in the same position moved to another contracting company, which would both lower his costs and double our pay.
On the flip side, my manager who actually determines my pay and such, sucks monkey nuts. She's a nice lady, but rolls over for upper management. She actually told me that she should have paid me more initially, but couldn't get me a raise now. What do you think that did for my work ethic?
Seriously though, keep an eye out for the gems out there. If you find one, jump at it, it is a much much nicer environment to work in, and they do exist. Particularly with companies that have histories that stretch back further than the early 90's.
Not totally disagreeing with you here, but just pointing out a few things:
Scientists are not teaching their beliefs as fact...
Scientists aren't doing the teaching generally, by the time scientists are doing the teaching the students are way, way beyond the idea of a theory as fact.
Since Theory is taught in a science class to the true scientific definition of Theory...
That would be nice if it were true, but it's not. Theory may be defined properly (i.e. a framework for explaining the current facts as we know them), particularly in a high-school class, but most public school curriculums high-school level and below do not refer to Evolution as a theory. It is simply Evolution. They say X and Y happened, not "the theory of evolution states that X and Y happened", not "Scientists have pieced things together, and we currently believe X and Y happened". At best you'll get a tiny blurb on the fact that Evolution is a theory, but half the time the information is portrayed as if the writers of the text books were standing there watching it happen, and that there is no room for an alternate interpretation.
With science, there is always room for an alternate interpretation of the facts. Scientists generally pick the itnerpretation that works best, and when that interpretation breaks down it must be revised or scrapped altogether. This is currently happening all over the place in physics - the current theories work for 99% of the facts, but for that last 1% they fall apart. That proves they are definitely wrong, but do they just need a tweak, or are there entirely different theories that describe what happens better? That's what the whole push for a unified theory of physics is about, and there aught to be one, it's just that nobody has figured it out yet.
My point is, as soon as you shut the door to any other possibility, you've crossed the line and what you believe is no longer science, it's dogma. Our education system spits out millions of kids a year who believe evolution is a fact, and not simply a framework that describes the facts.
If you think conglomerations are going to roll over and just let Cloud computing manage their corporate sensitive information you're completely loony.
Do you have any idea what you are talking about? Corporations do this all the time, it's called contracting a service.
Hell, I work for one of the largest companies in the world, and the powers that be recently decided it would be a good idea to contract all of our security to a firm in India.
If you think they would be skiddish about letting Microsoft or Google manage their data, you are pretty ignorant about the way Corporate America, and corporations globally, think and operate.
Ummm... do you not understand why Windows dominates the market? I mean, other than the occasional underhanded marketing strategy, that is.
They maintain dominance because there are all sorts of tools, like SharePoint, Visio, Office, and an assload of non-MS software that ONLY works in Windows. For the majority of this stuff the Linux/Mac alternative either does not exist or is of inferior quality. Until that changes, nothing will eat into a significant portion of MS market share.
OS X (and a product like ChromOS, if done right) have some more room in the market to grap people who don't need Windows-only tools, but there is a viscious cycle that severely hampers progress on the Windows front. The more Windows PCs there are, the less likely a vendor will spend millions of dollars on a tool for an OS other than Windows. The fewer quality tools there are for non-Windows OSs, the less likely people will switch to a non-Windows OS. The cycle continues until someone wants to upset the balance, bucks the trend and creates a quality tool for the non-Windows OSs. Then Windows market share diminishes.
Because of this, it is only rarely that the Windows market share is diminished. Things that can really kill Windows' market share though, are fuckups like Vista which may kill compatibility with tools that are keeping people on the Windows platform (hence the quick release of a new OS with better compatibility - Win7), and a star player like Google potentially luring software makers into making non-Windows tools. Apple has had success doing these, but even still they have only managed to grab an extra 5% of the market in a decade or so. That obviously pisses MS off, but doesn't spell the doom of Windows any time soon.
Honestly, at best I see ChromeOS grabbing a 1% market share if it is an awesome OS. More than likely it will be less than that, and I think Google's motives are a long ways from knocking Windows out of the market.
Right and it was somehow not IE's FTP client that allowed you to connect via FTP.
You've got to remember, IE was initially (and still is) just an extention of Explorer, the file manager for windows. It was an extention that allowed Explorer to access the Internet, Internet Explorer. Even today, with IE 7 and 8 which are much different than the old IEs, the majority of the program is still wrapped up in Explorer.
The only thing substantially different between the two is the UI used in web browsing, but did you ever notice how seamlessly the two switch between each other? Depending on what address you type in, the UI changes. It's because they are the same program. The IE app you get from MS is simply the trappings related to the web browsing aspect.
That's kinda why the EU hitting MS so hard on the browser of all things didn't make much sense to me. It is basically just an extension of the file manager. If they're using monopolistic market manipulation to keep vendors from bundling other browsers, fine the hell out of them until they stop, and if they don't ban them from trade in the EU. But making them strip the browser? WTF? Mozilla gives way their browser, why can't MS? Why can't they bundle it with their own damn OS? I understand forcing them to enable others to set the default browser, that makes sense, but the rest of it doesn't to me.
I used Netscape instead of IE, and it was pretty damn bloated. The feature-set was just barely worth dealing with the sluggish performance. Especially since IE wasn't exactly a lean mean browsing machine at the time. If it had been, the would not have needed to abuse their position.
I also think the EU's ruling that shipping windows with IE as illegal doesn't make a lot of sense, given all the other stuff they ship with windows and always have shipped with windows. Why is only one of them a bad thing? If the others are ok, why is the browser not?
Have you ever actually watched the news on TV? Especially cable news?
It's just a morbid form of entertainment, 99% of the time you aren't getting anything useful out of it, and would do better getting your news elsewhere.
Posting contract changes on a leapord's ass and calling it public notice, now that's brilliant.
Fortunately, our forefathers had the forsight to design a system in which a private citizen is perfectly capable of suing the government itself, and winning.
Such clauses are unenforceable, since federal contract law already require agreement to any amendments by both parties in order to be valid. State laws don't trump that, though it can become a battle to prove it so.
If you sue for breach of contract, you would not be able to maintain the un-amended contract if the phone company wants to drop it as a result of the suit and they can show it does not result in damage to you by doing so.
Those clauses are basically only in there to make you think you can't sue, and therefore don't sue. They also put them in there because it is better to have part of a contract struck down than to realize you didn't have your ass covered down the line. There is always the chance they'll land a dumbass judge who will see things their way on some absurd clause.
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It's not unfair, all new cars are a "bad buy" since they lose a significant portion of the sticker price the instant you drive it off the dealer's lot.
When buying a car, a consumer will weigh the cost of a new car against the cost of a used car. You suck at finances if you don't at least look at both options. Given the fact that you can often carry over the warranty if the used car is relatively new, a well maintained used car is a perfectly valid comparison to a brand new car.
So, $35,000 for a new Volt, or $12,000 + $2000 per year (gas cost assuming $5 per gallon and 12k miles) for a used Camry? It's going to all of that 10 year warranty to make the Volt worth it to a price-conscious consumer, since cost of ownership (not counting maintenance, since I have no way of estimating the Volt's maintenance yet) won't match up until that time.
Yeah, seriously. I mean, what employer is going to let an employee get away with STEALING $0.5 worth of power per day? Do you think them fools?
Seriously man. Even if the price doubles an employer will never feel the hurt. You think "They will when they have 1000 employees plugging in!", but companies of that size have operating budgets in the tens to hundreds of millions per year, $500-$1000 per day for something that boosts employee moral AND lets them throw a big-ol' "We're Green, See!" on their marketing material is something they will gladly spend.
I'm assuming you are from Europe, in which case the geography is much different. Europe is much more densely populated than the US, with fewer roads and a lower percentage of drivers. Things like public transportation, which reduces the load on roads, are not as practical in most situations.
So what we have is more roads and more use, which means it is significantly more expensive to maintain them. Hence, crappier roads.
Damnit, I mis-calculated myself.
The US generates 4 terrawatt-hours per year, not gigawatt hours.
In light of that, so long as EVs are primarily charged on off-peak hours there is litterally no problem at all with 1 million EVs on the road.
You're using the wrong numbers for the epa estimates, capacity != total electricity generated.
You need to use net generation per year to compare total energy consumption demands. The 1 gigawatt capacity is essentially the maximum amount of electricity that can be delivered at a given moment. Current US production is 2000gwh per year with coal alone, and totals about 4000gwh. We also import more energy than that as it is. Granted, if there were 1 million Volts on the road we would need to double our current production or buy more energy than we do, but 1 million electric vehicles is a very high number since a very large percentage of vehicles on the road are work vehicles for which electric is (currently) not suitable, before you even get to the other reasons people might not buy an EV.
Since the Volt can only run 40 miles on its battery before needing a charge, and it uses 25kwh per 100 miles, the battery capacity is apparently about 10kwh, give or take. If it takes an hour to charge (it takes much longer than that at the moment), it would require 10 gigawatts of capacity to accomodate 1 million vehicles. That's a drop in the bucket (relatively speaking).
All the same, we'll need to work out better energy production somehow, I say a few billion of this bailout money should be going to nuclear fusion research. Cheap, plentiful, clean, and about as safe as anything else we use. If you can get it to work, that is.
That's nice and complicated and all, but a breach in the verification machine invalidates the entire process. The validation machine can easilly show a valid count but actually record an invalid count, and there is no way you would know the difference. Vote goes to validation machine, as well as a locked-box printout and a paper printout the voter takes to the validation machine. Voter validates their vote, but what is shown on-screen does not match what is recorded in the database. The vote is then believed to be correctly counted, but is in fact not correct.
The paper printouts would not match the electronic vote talley, but since it has gone through the verification process by that point it is much less likely to be suspected of a problem. Also, since a counting mistake is impossible in an uncompromised machine, and the verification process virtually eliminates mistaken votes, there would need to be significant evidence of a breach before a paper count would take place, and a paper count is the only way to catch that sort of breach in security.
Also, the second lock-box paper count is superfluous if the voter is turning in a paper ballot to verify. The ballot must be turned in, or you run into the problem of selling/coercing votes if voters get to keep a copy of their ballot.
You realize that is exactly how the poor used to be kept out of the voting process, right?
In the early days of the good 'ol US of A, only men who owned land were permitted to vote. Obviously, if you didn't own land and weren't a man, you did not have enough vested interest or mental faculty to have a say in government.
When that was found to be illegal, the requirements changed and you had to pass a reading test in order to vote. This kept the majority of the poor out of the voting process. That too was eventually struck down.
Just because you cannot read, don't own land, or don't know the "platform" (what a fucking retarded concept, btw) of the particular party you are voting for does not mean you don't have a vested interest in the political system and the right to vote for who you see fit.
Minimum requirements are all about excluding people who don't fit your idea of who should be running the government, and the entire concept is extremely immoral and unethical.
It has also been shown to be unconstitutional every time the idea comes up.
You mean the guy who got caught? Nice example.
Ballot box stuffing has practical limits that are very, very small compared to electronic vote fraud. I.e. you can only have so many extra ballot boxes before someone gets wise in the counting. When the recording, consolodating, and counting of the votes all happens in a machine(s) that is opaque to observers, the potential for recognizing a problem is much much lower.
I've had irony smoothies, they taste terrible. It's got that real strong metallic taste and is just gross in general.
Lol, fucking moron.
Ummm, you do realize that hardware is always the least expensive part of any computing solution, right?
Even super-computers with million-dollar hardware costs are nothing compared to the tens of millions of dollars spent on the design and implimentation of that same system. As you scale down the application, the disparity between hardware and labor only increases. Case and point - a $1500 POS system costs less than it costs to employ the teenager operating it for minimum wage in just over one month. Forget about what it costs in labor to design that same system - you're talking hundreds of thousands of dollars as a low estimate if designing it from scratch.
Dude, what world are you living in where labor is cheaper than hardware?
Your advice is a little overly-cynical.
There are still good companies out there, worth building a career within the company. They are few and far between, but they are gems and you don't want to miss them because you follow some blanked idea that "All companies are evil, all managers are bad, and the only way to get a raise is to quit."
I am a contractor with an engineering group of a large company, so I essentially have two managers. One who I work for, and one who actually determines my pay and employment. The one I work for recently changed, the old manager was a bulldog and fought for his subordinates, stood up to upper management, and generally was so effective they strong-armed him into a promotion to groom him for upper management. His replacement is not as hard-nosed and bulldogish, but he's still a quality manager that goes to bat for his people. He's actually working to get me and another employee in the same position moved to another contracting company, which would both lower his costs and double our pay.
On the flip side, my manager who actually determines my pay and such, sucks monkey nuts. She's a nice lady, but rolls over for upper management. She actually told me that she should have paid me more initially, but couldn't get me a raise now. What do you think that did for my work ethic?
Seriously though, keep an eye out for the gems out there. If you find one, jump at it, it is a much much nicer environment to work in, and they do exist. Particularly with companies that have histories that stretch back further than the early 90's.
Not totally disagreeing with you here, but just pointing out a few things:
Scientists are not teaching their beliefs as fact...
Scientists aren't doing the teaching generally, by the time scientists are doing the teaching the students are way, way beyond the idea of a theory as fact.
Since Theory is taught in a science class to the true scientific definition of Theory...
That would be nice if it were true, but it's not. Theory may be defined properly (i.e. a framework for explaining the current facts as we know them), particularly in a high-school class, but most public school curriculums high-school level and below do not refer to Evolution as a theory. It is simply Evolution. They say X and Y happened, not "the theory of evolution states that X and Y happened", not "Scientists have pieced things together, and we currently believe X and Y happened". At best you'll get a tiny blurb on the fact that Evolution is a theory, but half the time the information is portrayed as if the writers of the text books were standing there watching it happen, and that there is no room for an alternate interpretation.
With science, there is always room for an alternate interpretation of the facts. Scientists generally pick the itnerpretation that works best, and when that interpretation breaks down it must be revised or scrapped altogether. This is currently happening all over the place in physics - the current theories work for 99% of the facts, but for that last 1% they fall apart. That proves they are definitely wrong, but do they just need a tweak, or are there entirely different theories that describe what happens better? That's what the whole push for a unified theory of physics is about, and there aught to be one, it's just that nobody has figured it out yet.
My point is, as soon as you shut the door to any other possibility, you've crossed the line and what you believe is no longer science, it's dogma. Our education system spits out millions of kids a year who believe evolution is a fact, and not simply a framework that describes the facts.
If you think conglomerations are going to roll over and just let Cloud computing manage their corporate sensitive information you're completely loony.
Do you have any idea what you are talking about? Corporations do this all the time, it's called contracting a service.
Hell, I work for one of the largest companies in the world, and the powers that be recently decided it would be a good idea to contract all of our security to a firm in India.
If you think they would be skiddish about letting Microsoft or Google manage their data, you are pretty ignorant about the way Corporate America, and corporations globally, think and operate.
Ummm... do you not understand why Windows dominates the market? I mean, other than the occasional underhanded marketing strategy, that is.
They maintain dominance because there are all sorts of tools, like SharePoint, Visio, Office, and an assload of non-MS software that ONLY works in Windows. For the majority of this stuff the Linux/Mac alternative either does not exist or is of inferior quality. Until that changes, nothing will eat into a significant portion of MS market share.
OS X (and a product like ChromOS, if done right) have some more room in the market to grap people who don't need Windows-only tools, but there is a viscious cycle that severely hampers progress on the Windows front. The more Windows PCs there are, the less likely a vendor will spend millions of dollars on a tool for an OS other than Windows. The fewer quality tools there are for non-Windows OSs, the less likely people will switch to a non-Windows OS. The cycle continues until someone wants to upset the balance, bucks the trend and creates a quality tool for the non-Windows OSs. Then Windows market share diminishes.
Because of this, it is only rarely that the Windows market share is diminished. Things that can really kill Windows' market share though, are fuckups like Vista which may kill compatibility with tools that are keeping people on the Windows platform (hence the quick release of a new OS with better compatibility - Win7), and a star player like Google potentially luring software makers into making non-Windows tools. Apple has had success doing these, but even still they have only managed to grab an extra 5% of the market in a decade or so. That obviously pisses MS off, but doesn't spell the doom of Windows any time soon.
Honestly, at best I see ChromeOS grabbing a 1% market share if it is an awesome OS. More than likely it will be less than that, and I think Google's motives are a long ways from knocking Windows out of the market.
Right and it was somehow not IE's FTP client that allowed you to connect via FTP.
You've got to remember, IE was initially (and still is) just an extention of Explorer, the file manager for windows. It was an extention that allowed Explorer to access the Internet, Internet Explorer. Even today, with IE 7 and 8 which are much different than the old IEs, the majority of the program is still wrapped up in Explorer.
The only thing substantially different between the two is the UI used in web browsing, but did you ever notice how seamlessly the two switch between each other? Depending on what address you type in, the UI changes. It's because they are the same program. The IE app you get from MS is simply the trappings related to the web browsing aspect.
That's kinda why the EU hitting MS so hard on the browser of all things didn't make much sense to me. It is basically just an extension of the file manager. If they're using monopolistic market manipulation to keep vendors from bundling other browsers, fine the hell out of them until they stop, and if they don't ban them from trade in the EU. But making them strip the browser? WTF? Mozilla gives way their browser, why can't MS? Why can't they bundle it with their own damn OS? I understand forcing them to enable others to set the default browser, that makes sense, but the rest of it doesn't to me.
I used Netscape instead of IE, and it was pretty damn bloated. The feature-set was just barely worth dealing with the sluggish performance. Especially since IE wasn't exactly a lean mean browsing machine at the time. If it had been, the would not have needed to abuse their position.
I also think the EU's ruling that shipping windows with IE as illegal doesn't make a lot of sense, given all the other stuff they ship with windows and always have shipped with windows. Why is only one of them a bad thing? If the others are ok, why is the browser not?
Why the hell would you assume the Canadian government would do a better job of it?
So you can have your empty, shallow life on YOUR schedule, damnit!
Slacker! I waste 12 hours a day on the job surfing the net.
Have you ever actually watched the news on TV? Especially cable news?
It's just a morbid form of entertainment, 99% of the time you aren't getting anything useful out of it, and would do better getting your news elsewhere.
Posting contract changes on a leapord's ass and calling it public notice, now that's brilliant.
Fortunately, our forefathers had the forsight to design a system in which a private citizen is perfectly capable of suing the government itself, and winning.
Because in many instances the "public" option is superior and/or significantly less expensive than the private option.
Name one.
Such clauses are unenforceable, since federal contract law already require agreement to any amendments by both parties in order to be valid. State laws don't trump that, though it can become a battle to prove it so.
If you sue for breach of contract, you would not be able to maintain the un-amended contract if the phone company wants to drop it as a result of the suit and they can show it does not result in damage to you by doing so.
Those clauses are basically only in there to make you think you can't sue, and therefore don't sue. They also put them in there because it is better to have part of a contract struck down than to realize you didn't have your ass covered down the line. There is always the chance they'll land a dumbass judge who will see things their way on some absurd clause.
That's also an unenforceable clause. You'd have to sue for breach of contract, but you'd win. It's a federal statute, state laws don't trump it.