Given our current financial crisis, I can't help adding a bit more Kipling:
As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.
The "Gods of the Copybook Headings" are exactly what you are describing.
Kipling was widely regarded as an Imperialist, but in fact he believed in the fundamental equality of all human beings - the heroes of Kim are, respectively, Irish, Afghan, East Indian and Tibetan Buddhist - the importance of blue-collar workers, and the importance of a stable economy based on mutual trust. It's a pity he has no modern equivalent.
Whose newspapers are now behind a paywall? Whose online readers are widely believed to have nosedived? Who wants to prop up their business model by slowly working to outlaw all free content on the Web?
Anybody who thought it was a good idea to buy their internet connection from a media company obviously doesn't understand how capitalism works.
Slightly OT, the failure to understand the need to separate content from channel was one of the major failings of the last British Government, along with Mandelson's "Digital Economy Act", which basically gave citizens no redress against these coercive lawyers. I'm waiting to see if Ed Miliband will get this, and consign Mandelson to the dustbin. But I'm not hopeful.
Have journalists ever had such a herd mentality? Probably. What we are seeing is that #2 in the list - Google - has transformed their jobs. Search means that everybody is singing from the first page returned. Nowadays, you can read ten articles on the same subject and get only two points of view - over the top pro and anti. Apple is dying. Apple is cool. Obama is the saviour. Obama is a Muslim. A mildly centric British politician is suddenly "Red Ed". In three weeks he'll be accused of selling out to the Right.
Meanwhile, strangely, the real world goes on. Acer is the big growth story in laptops. Android has the (world) expanding market share in phones. Client/server computing is growing very rapidly, in a new guise, with very interesting things happening. But they don't actually make for exciting stories, just like the rise and rise of Hyundai gets less attention than Ferraris that catch fire.
The moral? Go to journalists to find out what incurious people are thinking.
It seems you do not understand the nature of statistics. "significant evidence" is a statistical measure for which there are well-defined measurements. In any field of science, including social science like polling, "significant" has a precise meaning. In this case, the difference was not significant.
Journalism, by the way, is not science. In fact, it is usually the enemy of science.
The Cold War arose because of the Russian fear of the nuclear-armed US (they had after all nearly been destroyed by Germany, a smaller country) and their desire to create buffer zones in the West of the Soviet Union. That, and what that notorious left-winger Eisenhower called the "military-industrial complex".
However, as I suspect that you're writing that from your parents' basement, I doubt that you actually know any history, or were even around for the Cold War."We are too easily impressed by small wars nowadays"- if you knew any history, you would know that the Western invasion of Germany was a limited war because high casualties would not be accepted by the American and British public. Read up on Eisenhower. You need to learn about the greatest American general.
The maximum Young's Modulus for any material is ultimately determined by the strength of the strongest possible covalent bond. A foil that could not be dented with a sledgehammer could not be made of ordinary matter, and anything not made of ordinary matter would only interact weakly with it (and by extension us.) Or, expressed more technically, your Major is writing fecal matter deriving from an animal of genus bos.
If they can afford what are presumably Dualit Vario toasters, in red finish, perhaps this is why NASA is so often over-budget. This is evidence of why Big Government is evil.
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For the irony challenged, I don't really think NASA scientists are overpaid. What does the Tea Party use to make the toast at its tea parties, anyway?
When I wrote "HP makes money out of ink. That's basically it." I meant that selling ink is the main profitability engine of the printer division. I did not mean "it is the only way HP make money". I meant "because HP makes money on ink sales rather than making it up front with printer sales, they need to turn printer sales into volume ink sales to make a profit". I didn't spell it out but, you know, most Slashdot readers are quite intelligent and they don't need things spelt out to them.
As for your other comment, your attempt to be snide fails to take into account that I did mention that this is what I found from a non-peer-reviewed, informal study. I can write this stuff in academicese if I have to, but this was an informal post on Slashdot. And, as it happens, my work is very closely involved with the printing industry and predicting trends. I am as sure as I can be that HP have done marketing studies on this and identified the characteristics of the at-home and home-business market very thoroughly, and I strongly suspect that their conclusions are close to mine - though with the numbers included. I don't have to post everything.
Anyway, Mr. Critical Facilities, isn't your nick rather a host to fortune? Because it strikes me that you are so keen to be seen to be smart that your critical facilities sometimes don't get much of a look in.
From TFA: " Wiltshire, west of London..." I know we are a very small country and Australia is a very big one, but not everything in this country has to be defined by reference to London. Wiltshire, from where I am posting this, is in the South of England. London is East of Wiltshire, and nothing whatever to do with this story, which is about a (very) English author who lives (sensibly) in Wiltshire.
For the benefit of the rest of the world, Wiltshire is East of Redmond and West of Moscow...rant over.
We live in a semi-rural area (edge of a market town.) We buy everything local that we can (food we don't grow...) and everything else comes via the WWW. The postal service is highly reliable.
Unfortunately there are two factors against this: private companies that want to get rid of the PO so they can raise prices and profit, and the postal service in our awful cities. Politicians live in London, so they think everywhere is as bad as London and are willing to be persuaded that privatised post will be magically better. (When the privatised post has to travel the same delivery routes, and finds out, it will be too late.)
Slightly OT, our biggest problem is London-based pols believing that everywhere is like London and trying to fix what isn't broken, whether it is hospitals, schools, traffic or crime. High time we went for a Singapore solution.
HP makes money out of ink. That's basically it. So giving you an almost-free tablet that integrates seamlessly with an HP printer encourages you to print stuff when before you would have just made a note, or read it on-screen. A lot of home printing is done by (mostly) women printing out recipes, knitting patterns, things like that (I'm not being sexist, this is the result of a pop survey of my own). Getting them to print them out without thinking on a color printer = $$$.
Canon have a different approach to the same end - they have a print driver for Android that prints photos to their pixma printers. Another way to encourage ink usage.
The difficulty is that the banks won't lend to improve infrastructure, as nobody is sure where the demand will go. In fact, I have some sympathy for the carrier. When O2, which is in my view a pretty [comment redacted owing to libel laws in UK] telecoms supplier, introduced the iPhone, our company was using O2. I noticed that every time a visitor with an iPhone entered our offices, calls started to drop out. I guessed that there wasn't enough bandwidth to the cell tower, and the iPhone was getting prioritised. I couldn't prove what was going on but I was suspicious. I jumped up and down and we switched to Vodafone; problem disappeared. I guess a supplier introducing a new, potentially high bandwidth device, would be careful so that, in the language of sales consultancy, they don't turn POCs into PPOCs (pissed off customers into permanently pissed off customers.)
I have no idea where you get this from. Plant stems and dead leaves roughly have a composition as if they were made of CnH2nOn, i.e. approx. 1 atom of carbon to each water molecule. This is because the basic building block of plant matter is a 6-carbon sugar. If you don't understand this I am sure Wikipedia will help.
Now, the carbon came from the atmosphere and so did the water. The basic equation here is n(H2O) + n(CO2) -> n(CH2O) + n(O2), with carbon dioxide removed from the air and replaced with oxygen. Since hay and dead leaves are pretty dry, the effective water content is likely to be equivalent to a centimeter of rain equivalent at most.
Looking at grasses, the main structural rigidity element is silicon dioxide, which is why grass stems are abrasive.
This means that removing plant stems and dead leaves only really removes very small amounts of nitrogen and elements other than CHO, and insignificant amounts of water. The silica arises from stone weathering, again not morally a problem.
The problem arises, in fact, from the removal of the actual crop. It is this that contains the essential soil elements you mention - the N,P,S, the trace elements like potassium,magnesium, selenium and chromium - that have to be replenished with either fertiliser or manure. Removing the parts of the plant that are actually waste from the view of plant reproduction is not a problem. The manure produced by ruminants contains the trace elements because their diet contains plant fruiting bodies and tubers. If you tried to feed cows on straw rather than hay, you would rapidly appreciate the difference - though you wouldn't last long as a dairy farmer.
As for 50ft topsoil....merely to have written this suggests your connection with farming is extremely tenuous. I on the other hand live in a farming district, I'm well aware of local farming practices, and we grow a lot of our own fruit and vegetables. It isn't naive to know what parts of the plant represent renewables, and what part represents non-renewables.
They are talking about using what is almost entirely carbon,hydrogen and oxygen - stalks, leaves and bark. Plants convert as much of their available nitrogen as possible into fruiting bodies or over-winter energy stores (tubers). Leaves of deciduous plants actually fulfil some of the function of our kidneys; when they turn brown and drop off, this is because all available nitrogen and minerals has been extracted, and waste products are transported to the leaves, preventing buildup. Deciduous plants are more successful than conifers partly because of this efficient mechanism for recycling biological assets.
In organic farming it's common to plant winter crops that fix nitrogen and then plow them in in the spring, but this is completely different from plowing in straw. Until burning of stubble was banned in Europe, this was the commonest fate of straw. Plowing it in has downsides - including returning pest eggs, fungi and viruses to the soil. Removing it completely would have many of the benefits of stubble burning with none of the pollution downsides. I suspect this is neither unworkable nor naive, but it is a solution that doesn't involve lots of pork and so will be resisted by bureaucrats.
Rather than down mod this rather silly comment, I'll take it seriously. Fascism is a political system in which corporations collude with an autocratic government in exchange for special treatment. (Some people would say that Berlusconi's Italy is not that far off it.) Here, the Government is refusing to let corporations behave in an anti-competitive manner, whether they waste money on lawyers doing it, or agree to be good and keep the lawyers out. That looks to me like democracy. As for companies behaving like that - it's very common. And not always a bad thing. It usually only works if the workers cannot go elsewhere an earn more. That suggests, given the location of these companies, and the sort of people that they employ, that they would not earn more anywhere else. Actually, holding down wages at the top of a profession is sometimes a good thing; it makes for more economic stability given the fluctuations in the business cycle.
Samsung simply don't get it, do they? Unlike Hyundai/Kia, another Korean corp which really does get it, big time.
I know that the screen is very expensive, and that the technology is impressive (much more so than the iPad, given it fits just as much in a smaller space.) But if Samsung want to get big market share, they absolutely have to get it into the hands of developers, and this means initially selling it as a loss leader. My view is that, like Nokia with the N900, the marketing drones are unhappy about it and are trying to kill it because they want to protect their existing netbook and UMPC market. Unfortunately their UMPCs are overpriced for what they do, and their netbooks are not the industry best. They really need to leverage their OLED capability to grow market share. IBM marketing tried to strangle the IBM PC in trying to protect the minicomputer line, and look where it got them.
Samsung actually need to sell it for 70% of the price of an iPad, even if they lose money on the first million sales. It needs to be slightly cheaper than a phone because it will be perceived as a small netbook, not a large phone. They could do it fairly easily by having a "50% off if you can prove you are a developer/business IT systems engineer". To make 7 inch tablets really useful, developers need to develop for the format, and to do this they need to believe there will be volume sales.
Hyundai has gone from being a joke to being a very serious car producer by understanding that you have to give the customer a lot for the money, on thin margins, until you are taken seriously as a long-term, high quality supplier; and then people will pay you as much as they will pay your competitors.
The real reason is that US buyers mostly want unnecessarily high power ratings from engines, and don't want to pay for expensive engineering. A small number do, and rather more Europeans do, which is why you can buy so many fuel-efficient cars in Europe.
The truth is that weight mainly affects acceleration, outside towns, while aerodynamics affects fuel consumption rather more. That's why the latest hybrids have such interesting shapes, especially around the rear end where the airflow detaches from the body.
As a real world, example, the Econetic Ford Fiesta is now available in the US, meeting full US specs. It produces 120BHP, more than European versions, but the NYT review mocks it for its low power and suggests it is slower than a rowing boat. That's nonsense, but it's the sort of thing rednecks like to believe. It does about 40MPUSG. It would have been hard to achieve that in a 1990 Fiesta, which would typically get around 28-33MPUSG. Yet it is much safer and much faster.
To be blunt, the real problem for economy cars in the US is the US mindset, which so often sees mere size as better than quality engineering. The mindset won't change until gasoline reaches about $5 per USG, and given the number of AGW-deniers among the current crop of Republican candidates, and Koch funding of the Tea Party, it's more likely someone will get invaded for their oil first.
Sorry if this is a bit of a rant, but my point isn't anti-US. It's complaining that the US has many of the world's best engineers who could fix all the problems of peak oil and overconsumption - but their own countrymen won't let them.
hereThis WP article can be read in the context of the parent article in just so many ways. I particularly like "Church booleans are the Church encoding of the boolean values true and false", which could be taken as a sideswipe at the way so many religions distort truth and falsehood.
Your comment is particularly nice because, of course, Alonzo Church collaborated with Alan Turing, and both of those atheists would have been equally horrified at yet another example of the way that some so-called Christians seek to exclude any information that is incompatible with their "truth".
I believe Ferrari have just had a recall of their latest model over a design fault that can set fire to plastic insulation in a wing. This makes a serious point. The investment to make a fully reliable modern car from the first production run is stupendous. We shouldn't be surprised if niche manufacturers, or new market entrants, have teething troubles.
Obviously I am an alpha in this society; an educated middle class professional, son of a "bridge officer" and with all my children in professions. I'm allowed to comment on things from my own point of view.
However, you miss a vital point. In BNW the lower classes were not poor and downtrodden. Quite the reverse. They were well treated and society was arranged to reinforce their own feelings of self worth. It's made clear that they exist because the human need for social order means an alpha-only society would fight itself to death - but the gammas and deltas are happy gammas and deltas, conditioned to enjoy their routine of light work and entertainment. Alphas do not validate their lives by oppressing gammas. BNW does not describe a society that complete nutter Ayn Rand would approve.
Huxley thought he was describing a dystopia, and failed. When I read BNW as a nerdy teenager I thought it was a really good idea. In Huxley's world, nerds get to live with other nerds on islands and build their own ideal societies, unbothered by the power mad, conformists and the stupid. Mustapha Mond, the world controller, is practically a Platonic philosopher-king. BNW is only a dystopia if you are conventionally religious, or have inflated ideas of the importance of the human race.
Slashdot Mirror
As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.
The "Gods of the Copybook Headings" are exactly what you are describing.
Kipling was widely regarded as an Imperialist, but in fact he believed in the fundamental equality of all human beings - the heroes of Kim are, respectively, Irish, Afghan, East Indian and Tibetan Buddhist - the importance of blue-collar workers, and the importance of a stable economy based on mutual trust. It's a pity he has no modern equivalent.
Anybody who thought it was a good idea to buy their internet connection from a media company obviously doesn't understand how capitalism works.
Slightly OT, the failure to understand the need to separate content from channel was one of the major failings of the last British Government, along with Mandelson's "Digital Economy Act", which basically gave citizens no redress against these coercive lawyers. I'm waiting to see if Ed Miliband will get this, and consign Mandelson to the dustbin. But I'm not hopeful.
Meanwhile, strangely, the real world goes on. Acer is the big growth story in laptops. Android has the (world) expanding market share in phones. Client/server computing is growing very rapidly, in a new guise, with very interesting things happening. But they don't actually make for exciting stories, just like the rise and rise of Hyundai gets less attention than Ferraris that catch fire.
The moral? Go to journalists to find out what incurious people are thinking.
I know - Blackadder got their first.
Journalism, by the way, is not science. In fact, it is usually the enemy of science.
However, as I suspect that you're writing that from your parents' basement, I doubt that you actually know any history, or were even around for the Cold War."We are too easily impressed by small wars nowadays"- if you knew any history, you would know that the Western invasion of Germany was a limited war because high casualties would not be accepted by the American and British public. Read up on Eisenhower. You need to learn about the greatest American general.
The maximum Young's Modulus for any material is ultimately determined by the strength of the strongest possible covalent bond. A foil that could not be dented with a sledgehammer could not be made of ordinary matter, and anything not made of ordinary matter would only interact weakly with it (and by extension us.) Or, expressed more technically, your Major is writing fecal matter deriving from an animal of genus bos.
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For the irony challenged, I don't really think NASA scientists are overpaid. What does the Tea Party use to make the toast at its tea parties, anyway?
As for your other comment, your attempt to be snide fails to take into account that I did mention that this is what I found from a non-peer-reviewed, informal study. I can write this stuff in academicese if I have to, but this was an informal post on Slashdot. And, as it happens, my work is very closely involved with the printing industry and predicting trends. I am as sure as I can be that HP have done marketing studies on this and identified the characteristics of the at-home and home-business market very thoroughly, and I strongly suspect that their conclusions are close to mine - though with the numbers included. I don't have to post everything.
Anyway, Mr. Critical Facilities, isn't your nick rather a host to fortune? Because it strikes me that you are so keen to be seen to be smart that your critical facilities sometimes don't get much of a look in.
For the benefit of the rest of the world, Wiltshire is East of Redmond and West of Moscow...rant over.
Unfortunately there are two factors against this: private companies that want to get rid of the PO so they can raise prices and profit, and the postal service in our awful cities. Politicians live in London, so they think everywhere is as bad as London and are willing to be persuaded that privatised post will be magically better. (When the privatised post has to travel the same delivery routes, and finds out, it will be too late.)
Slightly OT, our biggest problem is London-based pols believing that everywhere is like London and trying to fix what isn't broken, whether it is hospitals, schools, traffic or crime. High time we went for a Singapore solution.
HP web printing is an awful kludge. HP have to do something quick before Google Print makes printing vendor-agnostic.
Canon have a different approach to the same end - they have a print driver for Android that prints photos to their pixma printers. Another way to encourage ink usage.
I didn't know that. Thanks for the information. At the time, I was just very annoyed indeed and wanted a fix.
The difficulty is that the banks won't lend to improve infrastructure, as nobody is sure where the demand will go. In fact, I have some sympathy for the carrier. When O2, which is in my view a pretty [comment redacted owing to libel laws in UK] telecoms supplier, introduced the iPhone, our company was using O2. I noticed that every time a visitor with an iPhone entered our offices, calls started to drop out. I guessed that there wasn't enough bandwidth to the cell tower, and the iPhone was getting prioritised. I couldn't prove what was going on but I was suspicious. I jumped up and down and we switched to Vodafone; problem disappeared. I guess a supplier introducing a new, potentially high bandwidth device, would be careful so that, in the language of sales consultancy, they don't turn POCs into PPOCs (pissed off customers into permanently pissed off customers.)
Now, the carbon came from the atmosphere and so did the water. The basic equation here is n(H2O) + n(CO2) -> n(CH2O) + n(O2), with carbon dioxide removed from the air and replaced with oxygen. Since hay and dead leaves are pretty dry, the effective water content is likely to be equivalent to a centimeter of rain equivalent at most.
Looking at grasses, the main structural rigidity element is silicon dioxide, which is why grass stems are abrasive.
This means that removing plant stems and dead leaves only really removes very small amounts of nitrogen and elements other than CHO, and insignificant amounts of water. The silica arises from stone weathering, again not morally a problem.
The problem arises, in fact, from the removal of the actual crop. It is this that contains the essential soil elements you mention - the N,P,S, the trace elements like potassium,magnesium, selenium and chromium - that have to be replenished with either fertiliser or manure. Removing the parts of the plant that are actually waste from the view of plant reproduction is not a problem. The manure produced by ruminants contains the trace elements because their diet contains plant fruiting bodies and tubers. If you tried to feed cows on straw rather than hay, you would rapidly appreciate the difference - though you wouldn't last long as a dairy farmer.
As for 50ft topsoil....merely to have written this suggests your connection with farming is extremely tenuous. I on the other hand live in a farming district, I'm well aware of local farming practices, and we grow a lot of our own fruit and vegetables. It isn't naive to know what parts of the plant represent renewables, and what part represents non-renewables.
In organic farming it's common to plant winter crops that fix nitrogen and then plow them in in the spring, but this is completely different from plowing in straw. Until burning of stubble was banned in Europe, this was the commonest fate of straw. Plowing it in has downsides - including returning pest eggs, fungi and viruses to the soil. Removing it completely would have many of the benefits of stubble burning with none of the pollution downsides. I suspect this is neither unworkable nor naive, but it is a solution that doesn't involve lots of pork and so will be resisted by bureaucrats.
Rather than down mod this rather silly comment, I'll take it seriously. Fascism is a political system in which corporations collude with an autocratic government in exchange for special treatment. (Some people would say that Berlusconi's Italy is not that far off it.) Here, the Government is refusing to let corporations behave in an anti-competitive manner, whether they waste money on lawyers doing it, or agree to be good and keep the lawyers out. That looks to me like democracy. As for companies behaving like that - it's very common. And not always a bad thing. It usually only works if the workers cannot go elsewhere an earn more. That suggests, given the location of these companies, and the sort of people that they employ, that they would not earn more anywhere else. Actually, holding down wages at the top of a profession is sometimes a good thing; it makes for more economic stability given the fluctuations in the business cycle.
I know that the screen is very expensive, and that the technology is impressive (much more so than the iPad, given it fits just as much in a smaller space.) But if Samsung want to get big market share, they absolutely have to get it into the hands of developers, and this means initially selling it as a loss leader. My view is that, like Nokia with the N900, the marketing drones are unhappy about it and are trying to kill it because they want to protect their existing netbook and UMPC market. Unfortunately their UMPCs are overpriced for what they do, and their netbooks are not the industry best. They really need to leverage their OLED capability to grow market share. IBM marketing tried to strangle the IBM PC in trying to protect the minicomputer line, and look where it got them.
Samsung actually need to sell it for 70% of the price of an iPad, even if they lose money on the first million sales. It needs to be slightly cheaper than a phone because it will be perceived as a small netbook, not a large phone. They could do it fairly easily by having a "50% off if you can prove you are a developer/business IT systems engineer". To make 7 inch tablets really useful, developers need to develop for the format, and to do this they need to believe there will be volume sales.
Hyundai has gone from being a joke to being a very serious car producer by understanding that you have to give the customer a lot for the money, on thin margins, until you are taken seriously as a long-term, high quality supplier; and then people will pay you as much as they will pay your competitors.
The truth is that weight mainly affects acceleration, outside towns, while aerodynamics affects fuel consumption rather more. That's why the latest hybrids have such interesting shapes, especially around the rear end where the airflow detaches from the body.
As a real world, example, the Econetic Ford Fiesta is now available in the US, meeting full US specs. It produces 120BHP, more than European versions, but the NYT review mocks it for its low power and suggests it is slower than a rowing boat. That's nonsense, but it's the sort of thing rednecks like to believe. It does about 40MPUSG. It would have been hard to achieve that in a 1990 Fiesta, which would typically get around 28-33MPUSG. Yet it is much safer and much faster.
To be blunt, the real problem for economy cars in the US is the US mindset, which so often sees mere size as better than quality engineering. The mindset won't change until gasoline reaches about $5 per USG, and given the number of AGW-deniers among the current crop of Republican candidates, and Koch funding of the Tea Party, it's more likely someone will get invaded for their oil first.
Sorry if this is a bit of a rant, but my point isn't anti-US. It's complaining that the US has many of the world's best engineers who could fix all the problems of peak oil and overconsumption - but their own countrymen won't let them.
Young men are more impulsive than old ones. But I don't work for a business school, so you should just reject that as anecdotal evidence.
Your comment is particularly nice because, of course, Alonzo Church collaborated with Alan Turing, and both of those atheists would have been equally horrified at yet another example of the way that some so-called Christians seek to exclude any information that is incompatible with their "truth".
I believe Ferrari have just had a recall of their latest model over a design fault that can set fire to plastic insulation in a wing. This makes a serious point. The investment to make a fully reliable modern car from the first production run is stupendous. We shouldn't be surprised if niche manufacturers, or new market entrants, have teething troubles.
However, you miss a vital point. In BNW the lower classes were not poor and downtrodden. Quite the reverse. They were well treated and society was arranged to reinforce their own feelings of self worth. It's made clear that they exist because the human need for social order means an alpha-only society would fight itself to death - but the gammas and deltas are happy gammas and deltas, conditioned to enjoy their routine of light work and entertainment. Alphas do not validate their lives by oppressing gammas. BNW does not describe a society that complete nutter Ayn Rand would approve.
Huxley thought he was describing a dystopia, and failed. When I read BNW as a nerdy teenager I thought it was a really good idea. In Huxley's world, nerds get to live with other nerds on islands and build their own ideal societies, unbothered by the power mad, conformists and the stupid. Mustapha Mond, the world controller, is practically a Platonic philosopher-king. BNW is only a dystopia if you are conventionally religious, or have inflated ideas of the importance of the human race.