In no small part because a Coal fired plant can spew a tremendous amount of general gunk into the air for "free" if they paid the "true cost" of the pollution they generate, perhaps the equation would be different? True cost is hard to define so of course you can define your terms so that nuclear is cheaper, or still more expensive, of course if you count C02 into the equation.. It's even more fuzzy... But my point remains..
A significant issue in many of these teen fatalities and crashes isn't lack of ability to operate the car, it's speeding, racing or distraction. Those are much harder to combat through driver training than simply failing to recover from a skid.
Traffic is also a factor, it's an often overlooked fact that there are plenty of areas in any country where the snarl of aggressive drivers and high relative velocity traffic make driving far more confusing a task than other areas.
New regulations, promoting new efficiencies can lead to R&D and actually help the economy. The thing the rules need make sense, and be implemented across an entire industry, nationwide would be very nice, worldwide would be ideal. (At least in the sense of all the nations with the same power and video signal anyway.) The insane thing is the multiple state and federal rules trying to accomplish the same thing.
These sort of state mandates are STUPID. Stupid because industries have to react to an ever increasing morass of standards across the country, stupid because, while California is a large state and has more resources than say.. Rhode Island I suppose, it's a state, they've done this to other industries and it's terribly counterproductive and just stupid. Why?
1: State Legislators are experts in... What? Being Lawyers? Possibly running state Government, how many scientists, engineers, people who understand how a particular industry or technology works actually got to provide their input into this bill?
2: Abiding by these sort of rules is expensive, terribly complicated and time consuming, time is money after all. If some new rule was agreed on by the Feds, or a group of states got together and put together a single rule to cover all the states, nifty. In this future you're going to have to prove you've got California certified TVs and when MA or MI decides it wants it's own rule? But the idiots in their state legislature define "energy saving" in a different way, then you'll have another set of headaches, which will in turn make TVs more expensive, which helps no one at all.
3: Did anyone from the land of fruits and nuts consider whether this was worthwhile or not? This costs money will making these devices more energy efficient result in an actual savings for anyone involved? It's more than possible that more efficient TVs will require more total energy in their cradle to grave lifecycle than lower efficiency TVs. Is the savings worth the effort? Did they just spout an idiot factoid about how much current all the TVs in the state of CA draw at one time? Or did they look at what percentage of the states electrical usage is about TV consumption, I'd wager the percentage is pretty small. Will reducing it do any good?
4: Wouldn't the best way to reduce electrical consumption be to charge more for it on an increasing scale? The first so many KWH are sold to you at rate X, then when you reach 100% of the mean usage for that month you pay 1.5XKWH, then at 200% 2XKWH.. Etc. Make the people who use the most pay the most, wow what a concept. (Unrelated most of my electric bill is usually just for the privilege of having electricity, if I'm not running my AC my total bill is essentially unchanged by my energy consumption, there's essentially zero incentive for me to save energy with lights, TVs etc. I can't tell by my bill how much I use any of those things.)
See also, Compact fluorescent bulbs SUCK and are awful, annoying, hard on the eyes and do not start properly a large percentage of the time. Their alleged lifespan in hours is a complete fantasy and they seem to last about twice as long as incandescent bulbs, fix all that and I'll switch.
Intellectual property is not bullshit. If I make an album, or write a novel, it's my intellectual property. I should expect to have some reasonable right to be the only one selling this new creative work for a certain period of time. Otherwise I'm hosed. Ditto for software, if my company produces a cool new software application, and we want to charge $49.95 for a license to use each copy, nifty. We should have that right. It's not the entire concept of copyright intellectual property or patents that have been the problem.
The PROBLEM is that certain companies think they can write anything they want into a "license" and that other mega-companies have tried to wedge this concept of a "license" to use something into actual products we buy, then they went and patented business practices vague descriptions of software routines endless copyright and trademark status for questionable products. The "endowment" if you will of certain people's creative works into ageless eldritch monstrosities like Disney.[1] These are the reasons to object to Intellectual Property, in practice, it's not the concept itself that is to blame. (Short version, shoot all lawyers)
1: If I create a character, write a novel, a story make a movie etc. It's MINE and I should be able to retain some rights to profit from its distribution and reproduction, etc. However the idea that this right should be transferable to a faceless corporation and that it should be infinitely extensible is not defensible. Something like life of the Author plus 20 or 50 or something should surely be sufficient, there's not incentive for ME to create new original works in knowing that the descendants of the people that I sell the rights to distribute to can count on their descendants stockholders profiting from my original work.
Yeah! This! I thought that's what sports IS? Who can run fastest jump highest etc? If it's original equipment she's legal and a woman for sports purposes as far as I'm concerned. Otherwise we'll have to handicap track and field and let judges decide who "tried the hardest" and I'll be out there competing for 100M gold in 4 years with my 100 M time of 32.8, but I'll be trying like crazy!
4 Million with it on uhm.. I think it was the medium hard setting, the "arcade" setting, as I remember it the Williams boxes had a bunch of dip switches you could set and I'm thinking was "7" for the arcades with the odd "5" for department stores and stuff, but I am old. Interestingly a friend of mine and I who could both get a few million got bored and plopped in a quarter, and I drove and he shot thinking that would be funny and we die right away. We got nearly our high scores combined. There has never been a video game as much fun as robotron 2084, for me anyway, and I doubt there ever will.
It's the combined efforts of the worlds real superheroes to sabotage this thing before it can bring about the end of the world via vacuum collapse, symmetry breaking black hole creation or raising R'lyeh from it's watery grave.
The current generation in charge is the baby boomers. Free love, no rules going to overcome all the stuffy puritanical "squareness" of the preceding generations. So good luck with that.
The two things you have to credit to Reagan for, are meeting with Gorby and telling them straight-up we weren't going to lose the arms race, and also meeting with Gorby and convincing him that he (Reagan) wasn't an insane cowboy and that we could actually work towards disarmament or at least peace. But really Gorbachev is the one who let them tear down the wall. He's the one who apparently convinced at least most of the ultra hard liners the west wasn't going to nuke them without warning or invade Russia or whatever they were afraid of, it was MTV & Coca Cola (Consumer culture, and a little freedom) that brought down the evil empire, not star wars or threats. Without the little bit of freedom and the little bit of openness that coup might have succeeded and those crazy bastards could have started WWIII in short order. Reagan's confrontational tactics and arms build up would have been judged very differently by our CHUD descendents in some post-apocalyptic world.
We haven't found this whole test to be complete and utter rubbish by now? I can't believe that this thing has the scientific value of measuring the bumps on the heads of your patients I can't see how screwing it up by giving out the images to the public could possibly make a single bit of difference. They are random blots of ink, they show them to people. They compare the answers those people give to a set of answers given by a variety of other people. Seriously, that's the test, they might as well use chicken guts. The whole thing seems utterly ridiculous to me.
So they blatantly violate who knows how many anti-trust laws and abuse their near monopoly to finally destroy google. You know this day has been coming, we all do. Then they pay a "huge" fine five years from now when the government finally gets around to punishing them for it.. Say four, five hundred million dollars? A billion this time. Brilliant, that's a great investment if you're MS.
Truthfully I have much more faith that the current administrations folks will at least take a hard look at the tactics that Microsoft has used in the past and uses now.
True, the US government doesn't stand a chance against Microsoft, I thought we'd been through this before? We'll end up with an Uber Enterprise zone with 0% taxes on anything and legalized murder if Balmer signs off on it and this zone will consist of the redmond campus only. Also Google will be found to be a hurtful monopoly and bombed, but only after they can get Live search to actually find anything at all.
But, by how much? Enough to justify the expense of painting my roof white? That's going to cost money and it's going to have to be done more than once per lifetime of the roof. Also my house wants the most cooling during the summer, during the day when I'm not there, so it's easier to just let it be hot.
This is a good idea, as far as it goes. I live in Indiana, if I paint my roof white, I pay less to cool it in the summer... but more to heat it in the winter? Is my heater "greener" than my air conditioner? (probably, but does this margin justify the paint?) So often this kind of thing just assumes the whole planet is someplace like Texas or California or Florida... Yeah white roofs make a LOT of sense there, why in the heck would you have a black one? But those places are not the whole planet.
Just like moving the mouse no Disk in the drive was a standard troubleshooting step for me back in these days. I used to have theories, but I don't remember them. But it seemed to be a common cause of machines failing to boot or crashing during installs.
Don't forget the fun of a failed windows 9X install, where halfway through it just decides it's not going to work and the only thing that seems to work is to try again.
The real money in many of the fields is at the interface, the guy who can program controls and work on controls and know all about the inner workings of them, has a job at the manufacturer, but the guy who can fix it, who can work on equipment that is controlled by computers, is often getting a really nice paycheck. Ditto for the innovators who can invent upgrade etc.
How much to install an ethernet? I know there was a quote for $10,000 to interface all our machine tools via ethernet. So there's about $1,000 for the conduit and cable, $200 for ethernet. $8,700 for putting network cards in machine tools? Doesn't sound like a bad gig to me. But yet "shop class" would be required.
This whole "addicts need to hit rock bottom" thing is a meaningless trope spouted by a bunch of 12 step folks who are pitching a faith, not science based approach to dealing with a particular addiction. Then taking this faith based approach to a particular addiction, and extrapolating it to other addictive behaviors.... So while it's not an entirely worthless hypothesis, it's far too vague to really be a useful statement. Certainly it shouldn't be trotted out over and over as a "FACT" It's got damn little to do with science and it's a pretty difficult to define or test thing anyway.
Also since at least a good portion of the people we're talking about here have much more of a mental illness problem, and are in fact depressed or developing some kind of OCD, and are not "alcoholic" or game-oholic or whatever, they don't need to hit "rock bottom" and one shouldn't expect them to follow this religous 12 step regimen to get better. Depressives don't need to hit "rock bottom" they need help, "bottom" probably means a succesful suicide attempt in that context.
It's way off topic but I don't doub that AA does help folks and that it may be a useful vehicle for people who turn to it and follow it's 12 step program. That's not the same thing as pointing out that it's not at all a scientific approach, a peer reviewed treatment plan etc. Just 'cause they say some things does not make those things so.
I'm disturbed at some of the replies to this.
1: Guys, you don't abandon a whole human being to a problem like this without at least taking a shot at helping him. It may not help, it may not work, but it will at least help you later not to feel so terrible if he goes over the edge and hangs himself or something.
2: This IS a problem, there are more than a few "He's an adult, leave him alone" responses. Those of you who posted this are either trolling or need to get some help and close your WoW account as well. I'd grant that playing a game every day isn't a problem, maybe not even for a couple of hours every day. But when you don't leave the house and stop eating it is a problem.
3: Small steps and just getting him out of the house, and getting him some exercise, those are your best bets assuming that he's not blocking or avoiding other serious problems such as depression or failing out of college or whatever, if he's having those problems as well he may need more serious help, getting him hooked up with some outside help anonymously can make a huge difference, with an illness like depression finally having someone to talk to about it can be an immense and sudden relief, and often it's better if that someone isn't friends or family.
So? Ebay security consultant? Seriously, WTF does that have to do with knowing whether or not something is stolen? I don't doubt he knows a lot about online security, and ebay scams. Maybe this is a bit of a stretch but most of things I've seen stolen in the actual real world were just... Well stolen, you know? Picked up off a table at a starbucks or snatched from the back of an unlocked car... How exactly does being an Ebay security consultant empower one to determine the physical chain of custody of a particular piece of equipment? Now, if we read his side of the story it doesn't sound like it's stolen. Truthfully I don't like his side of the story, he rants and raves about how they're calling him a "thief" I don't see it that way. I do think their entire policy on this matter looks pretty stupid, and counterproductive. I just fail to see how being an ebay security consultant enables one to tell if things are stolen or not... I measure things for a living and I can't tell how much you weigh based on an e-mail.
Electric slime, leads to robotic slime, or slime robots at any rate, from there it's just a matter of time until we have to face nuclear powered slime robots. At which point we are doomed. Thanks guys.
Slashdot Mirror
In no small part because a Coal fired plant can spew a tremendous amount of general gunk into the air for "free" if they paid the "true cost" of the pollution they generate, perhaps the equation would be different? True cost is hard to define so of course you can define your terms so that nuclear is cheaper, or still more expensive, of course if you count C02 into the equation.. It's even more fuzzy... But my point remains..
A significant issue in many of these teen fatalities and crashes isn't lack of ability to operate the car, it's speeding, racing or distraction. Those are much harder to combat through driver training than simply failing to recover from a skid. Traffic is also a factor, it's an often overlooked fact that there are plenty of areas in any country where the snarl of aggressive drivers and high relative velocity traffic make driving far more confusing a task than other areas.
New regulations, promoting new efficiencies can lead to R&D and actually help the economy. The thing the rules need make sense, and be implemented across an entire industry, nationwide would be very nice, worldwide would be ideal. (At least in the sense of all the nations with the same power and video signal anyway.) The insane thing is the multiple state and federal rules trying to accomplish the same thing.
These sort of state mandates are STUPID. Stupid because industries have to react to an ever increasing morass of standards across the country, stupid because, while California is a large state and has more resources than say.. Rhode Island I suppose, it's a state, they've done this to other industries and it's terribly counterproductive and just stupid. Why? 1: State Legislators are experts in... What? Being Lawyers? Possibly running state Government, how many scientists, engineers, people who understand how a particular industry or technology works actually got to provide their input into this bill? 2: Abiding by these sort of rules is expensive, terribly complicated and time consuming, time is money after all. If some new rule was agreed on by the Feds, or a group of states got together and put together a single rule to cover all the states, nifty. In this future you're going to have to prove you've got California certified TVs and when MA or MI decides it wants it's own rule? But the idiots in their state legislature define "energy saving" in a different way, then you'll have another set of headaches, which will in turn make TVs more expensive, which helps no one at all. 3: Did anyone from the land of fruits and nuts consider whether this was worthwhile or not? This costs money will making these devices more energy efficient result in an actual savings for anyone involved? It's more than possible that more efficient TVs will require more total energy in their cradle to grave lifecycle than lower efficiency TVs. Is the savings worth the effort? Did they just spout an idiot factoid about how much current all the TVs in the state of CA draw at one time? Or did they look at what percentage of the states electrical usage is about TV consumption, I'd wager the percentage is pretty small. Will reducing it do any good? 4: Wouldn't the best way to reduce electrical consumption be to charge more for it on an increasing scale? The first so many KWH are sold to you at rate X, then when you reach 100% of the mean usage for that month you pay 1.5XKWH, then at 200% 2XKWH.. Etc. Make the people who use the most pay the most, wow what a concept. (Unrelated most of my electric bill is usually just for the privilege of having electricity, if I'm not running my AC my total bill is essentially unchanged by my energy consumption, there's essentially zero incentive for me to save energy with lights, TVs etc. I can't tell by my bill how much I use any of those things.) See also, Compact fluorescent bulbs SUCK and are awful, annoying, hard on the eyes and do not start properly a large percentage of the time. Their alleged lifespan in hours is a complete fantasy and they seem to last about twice as long as incandescent bulbs, fix all that and I'll switch.
Intellectual property is not bullshit. If I make an album, or write a novel, it's my intellectual property. I should expect to have some reasonable right to be the only one selling this new creative work for a certain period of time. Otherwise I'm hosed. Ditto for software, if my company produces a cool new software application, and we want to charge $49.95 for a license to use each copy, nifty. We should have that right. It's not the entire concept of copyright intellectual property or patents that have been the problem. The PROBLEM is that certain companies think they can write anything they want into a "license" and that other mega-companies have tried to wedge this concept of a "license" to use something into actual products we buy, then they went and patented business practices vague descriptions of software routines endless copyright and trademark status for questionable products. The "endowment" if you will of certain people's creative works into ageless eldritch monstrosities like Disney.[1] These are the reasons to object to Intellectual Property, in practice, it's not the concept itself that is to blame. (Short version, shoot all lawyers) 1: If I create a character, write a novel, a story make a movie etc. It's MINE and I should be able to retain some rights to profit from its distribution and reproduction, etc. However the idea that this right should be transferable to a faceless corporation and that it should be infinitely extensible is not defensible. Something like life of the Author plus 20 or 50 or something should surely be sufficient, there's not incentive for ME to create new original works in knowing that the descendants of the people that I sell the rights to distribute to can count on their descendants stockholders profiting from my original work.
You guys are going to mod this up to +5 funny, right? If this isn't the funniest thing I've read this morning... Well no it is.
Yeah! This! I thought that's what sports IS? Who can run fastest jump highest etc? If it's original equipment she's legal and a woman for sports purposes as far as I'm concerned. Otherwise we'll have to handicap track and field and let judges decide who "tried the hardest" and I'll be out there competing for 100M gold in 4 years with my 100 M time of 32.8, but I'll be trying like crazy!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jvqPvDUEW8 It's a spaceship. It's here to bring our machines to life and wipe us out. No one else read Trucks?/Saw Maximum Overdrive?
4 Million with it on uhm.. I think it was the medium hard setting, the "arcade" setting, as I remember it the Williams boxes had a bunch of dip switches you could set and I'm thinking was "7" for the arcades with the odd "5" for department stores and stuff, but I am old. Interestingly a friend of mine and I who could both get a few million got bored and plopped in a quarter, and I drove and he shot thinking that would be funny and we die right away. We got nearly our high scores combined. There has never been a video game as much fun as robotron 2084, for me anyway, and I doubt there ever will.
It's the combined efforts of the worlds real superheroes to sabotage this thing before it can bring about the end of the world via vacuum collapse, symmetry breaking black hole creation or raising R'lyeh from it's watery grave.
The current generation in charge is the baby boomers. Free love, no rules going to overcome all the stuffy puritanical "squareness" of the preceding generations. So good luck with that.
The two things you have to credit to Reagan for, are meeting with Gorby and telling them straight-up we weren't going to lose the arms race, and also meeting with Gorby and convincing him that he (Reagan) wasn't an insane cowboy and that we could actually work towards disarmament or at least peace. But really Gorbachev is the one who let them tear down the wall. He's the one who apparently convinced at least most of the ultra hard liners the west wasn't going to nuke them without warning or invade Russia or whatever they were afraid of, it was MTV & Coca Cola (Consumer culture, and a little freedom) that brought down the evil empire, not star wars or threats. Without the little bit of freedom and the little bit of openness that coup might have succeeded and those crazy bastards could have started WWIII in short order. Reagan's confrontational tactics and arms build up would have been judged very differently by our CHUD descendents in some post-apocalyptic world.
We haven't found this whole test to be complete and utter rubbish by now? I can't believe that this thing has the scientific value of measuring the bumps on the heads of your patients I can't see how screwing it up by giving out the images to the public could possibly make a single bit of difference. They are random blots of ink, they show them to people. They compare the answers those people give to a set of answers given by a variety of other people. Seriously, that's the test, they might as well use chicken guts. The whole thing seems utterly ridiculous to me.
So they blatantly violate who knows how many anti-trust laws and abuse their near monopoly to finally destroy google. You know this day has been coming, we all do. Then they pay a "huge" fine five years from now when the government finally gets around to punishing them for it.. Say four, five hundred million dollars? A billion this time. Brilliant, that's a great investment if you're MS.
Truthfully I have much more faith that the current administrations folks will at least take a hard look at the tactics that Microsoft has used in the past and uses now.
True, the US government doesn't stand a chance against Microsoft, I thought we'd been through this before? We'll end up with an Uber Enterprise zone with 0% taxes on anything and legalized murder if Balmer signs off on it and this zone will consist of the redmond campus only. Also Google will be found to be a hurtful monopoly and bombed, but only after they can get Live search to actually find anything at all.
But, by how much? Enough to justify the expense of painting my roof white? That's going to cost money and it's going to have to be done more than once per lifetime of the roof. Also my house wants the most cooling during the summer, during the day when I'm not there, so it's easier to just let it be hot.
This is a good idea, as far as it goes. I live in Indiana, if I paint my roof white, I pay less to cool it in the summer... but more to heat it in the winter? Is my heater "greener" than my air conditioner? (probably, but does this margin justify the paint?) So often this kind of thing just assumes the whole planet is someplace like Texas or California or Florida... Yeah white roofs make a LOT of sense there, why in the heck would you have a black one? But those places are not the whole planet.
Just like moving the mouse no Disk in the drive was a standard troubleshooting step for me back in these days. I used to have theories, but I don't remember them. But it seemed to be a common cause of machines failing to boot or crashing during installs. Don't forget the fun of a failed windows 9X install, where halfway through it just decides it's not going to work and the only thing that seems to work is to try again.
The real money in many of the fields is at the interface, the guy who can program controls and work on controls and know all about the inner workings of them, has a job at the manufacturer, but the guy who can fix it, who can work on equipment that is controlled by computers, is often getting a really nice paycheck. Ditto for the innovators who can invent upgrade etc. How much to install an ethernet? I know there was a quote for $10,000 to interface all our machine tools via ethernet. So there's about $1,000 for the conduit and cable, $200 for ethernet. $8,700 for putting network cards in machine tools? Doesn't sound like a bad gig to me. But yet "shop class" would be required.
This whole "addicts need to hit rock bottom" thing is a meaningless trope spouted by a bunch of 12 step folks who are pitching a faith, not science based approach to dealing with a particular addiction. Then taking this faith based approach to a particular addiction, and extrapolating it to other addictive behaviors.... So while it's not an entirely worthless hypothesis, it's far too vague to really be a useful statement. Certainly it shouldn't be trotted out over and over as a "FACT" It's got damn little to do with science and it's a pretty difficult to define or test thing anyway. Also since at least a good portion of the people we're talking about here have much more of a mental illness problem, and are in fact depressed or developing some kind of OCD, and are not "alcoholic" or game-oholic or whatever, they don't need to hit "rock bottom" and one shouldn't expect them to follow this religous 12 step regimen to get better. Depressives don't need to hit "rock bottom" they need help, "bottom" probably means a succesful suicide attempt in that context. It's way off topic but I don't doub that AA does help folks and that it may be a useful vehicle for people who turn to it and follow it's 12 step program. That's not the same thing as pointing out that it's not at all a scientific approach, a peer reviewed treatment plan etc. Just 'cause they say some things does not make those things so.
I'm disturbed at some of the replies to this. 1: Guys, you don't abandon a whole human being to a problem like this without at least taking a shot at helping him. It may not help, it may not work, but it will at least help you later not to feel so terrible if he goes over the edge and hangs himself or something. 2: This IS a problem, there are more than a few "He's an adult, leave him alone" responses. Those of you who posted this are either trolling or need to get some help and close your WoW account as well. I'd grant that playing a game every day isn't a problem, maybe not even for a couple of hours every day. But when you don't leave the house and stop eating it is a problem. 3: Small steps and just getting him out of the house, and getting him some exercise, those are your best bets assuming that he's not blocking or avoiding other serious problems such as depression or failing out of college or whatever, if he's having those problems as well he may need more serious help, getting him hooked up with some outside help anonymously can make a huge difference, with an illness like depression finally having someone to talk to about it can be an immense and sudden relief, and often it's better if that someone isn't friends or family.
You beat me to this. But dang... As much as I loathe stupid faceplant/idiot hurts self videos... This is fun.
So? Ebay security consultant? Seriously, WTF does that have to do with knowing whether or not something is stolen? I don't doubt he knows a lot about online security, and ebay scams. Maybe this is a bit of a stretch but most of things I've seen stolen in the actual real world were just... Well stolen, you know? Picked up off a table at a starbucks or snatched from the back of an unlocked car... How exactly does being an Ebay security consultant empower one to determine the physical chain of custody of a particular piece of equipment? Now, if we read his side of the story it doesn't sound like it's stolen. Truthfully I don't like his side of the story, he rants and raves about how they're calling him a "thief" I don't see it that way. I do think their entire policy on this matter looks pretty stupid, and counterproductive. I just fail to see how being an ebay security consultant enables one to tell if things are stolen or not... I measure things for a living and I can't tell how much you weigh based on an e-mail.
Electric slime, leads to robotic slime, or slime robots at any rate, from there it's just a matter of time until we have to face nuclear powered slime robots. At which point we are doomed. Thanks guys.