I'm not an Obama guy, but how can you on successive lines ask for rationalization and berate somebody because their name sounds kind of similar to things you don't like?
Here, at $4.00/gallon and 30 MPG, $10 will take you about 75 miles. An average banana will give you about 105 calories. For most people, biking burns about 34 calories/mile. So, one extra banana will take you about 3 miles (far short of the 75 miles driving). Of course if you're eating comfort food or taking in more calories than you need even when you're not burning them, biking makes great sense - Although, however practical, I'm not sure it's fair to factor in those excess calories into a theoretical price-per-mile analysis. But if you can bike that far on one extra banana, you must either be an exceptionally efficient biker or be losing a lot of weight.
Maybe things are different in your area - US$10 to drive 25 miles round trip seems obscene by my standards. I commute a very hilly ~20 miles round trip for about US$2.35. But, as always, YMMV.
If your calories are all coming from spaghetti, you need to balance your diet. Graduate, get a job, and visit a farmer's market. For my math, I refer you here.
While I see your numbers, they bear no resemblance to the car that I drive, so your mileage number is quite high.
If you want to drive a gas-guzzler, that's your right, but don't buy an SUV and then pretend to help the planet by biking instead of driving it. 30 MPG isn't that big a stretch - Even very inexpensive cars can manage that. My car cost me ~$15k new back in Jan-2001 and gets me to and from work at about 34 MPG.
Also, my behavior changes when I drive. I am much more likely to "swing by" the Home Depot to get a new hose or something.
If you don't have the self control to resist driving all over the place randomly every time you start up your car, maybe driving isn't for you. Good call - stick to your bike.
And if you do that to include food, then you must also include maintenance costs...
Definitely. As I've pointed out in previous posts, if you can eliminate a car from your budget by using a bike - It's a no brainer. But, most people just keep the car in their garage rather than driving it. The main maintenance costs involved with a car are from ownership/insurance/etc, not from per-mile usage.
...as well as the secondary benefits to biking (ie, no gym membership, commuting = exercising) etc.
Agreed. I bike avidly. In fact - I drive to work and then bike recreationally. So, for me, the bike is pure expense. I do it for enjoyment and exercise. But, I stand by my statement that biking purely as a per-mile transport costs more than driving a car that would otherwise be sitting in your garage.
I'm interested still to see your math, but suspect you to be a troll.
Fine. I figure ~$10/day for food. I ate on a lot less than that back in college, but my diet now is much better for me (fruit/veggies/lean meat/etc). And I prefer to buy local goods which typically costs more, but makes me feel better because they're not mass produced and then transported all over the place. For an average person biking at 15 mph, biking burns ~34 calories/mile. People, on average, eat about 2,000 calories per day. So, biking for an average guy like me costs ~$0.17/mile.
Now, assuming that your car gets 30 MPG and gas costs $4.00/gallon, driving costs ~$0.13/gallon - Noticeably cheaper. Like I said, if you don't eat well, if you can eliminate a car from your life, or if you take into account the many other benefits of biking, it's a great thing to do. I bike all the time. But, assuming that you're keeping your car and eat reasonably (i.e. you don't just pound down spaghetti and ramen noodles 3 time a day), it doesn't save on a per-mile basis. Not trying to troll, just trying to point out what I consider an interesting statistic. Of course, if you can bike 75 miles a day like you claimed in your previous post while spending only $8/day on nutrition, my hat goes off to you - You're truly a much better human specimen than me.
Not trying to be an ass, but I blew off several other posts that were twisting my words around, so I kind of unloaded here. And, I hate being called a troll - Sorry if I came off brutish.
Anything that they DO compromise on is NOT a core value for them.
I'm not an Obama guy - His lack of experience scares me and his "message", although well spoken and charismatic, seems empty. I was a big backer of McCain until a few years back when he stopped fighting Bush and started morphing into him...
That said, I don't want a leader in the White House. We have one now and he's lead us into a complete quagmire. I want a representative.
At $4/gallon and 30 MPG, $10 will take you ~75 miles. If you're biking 75 miles a day and only eating $8 worth of food, you're either a super-human biker or not eating a balanced diet.
I think I can say that Americas education system has never produced the quantity and quality of talent necessary for real innovation in space. The US has always relied on immigrants. Your victory in the space race was in part due to the fact that World War 2 drove the best rocket scientists out of Europe.
It got us out of WW2 too. Frankly, our German scientists were better than their German scientists...
For someone who replaces their car with a bicycle there is no way you can argue that they aren't saving money.
Agreed. Replacing a car is a no-brainer. Unfortunately, most people ride their bikes and leave their car in garage rather than replacing it.
Even if you ignore the fact that most Americans ALREADY eat too much food, which makes them FAT, and that if they rode their bicycle they'd actually lose fat and save a whole bunch of money in potential medical bills; most people ENJOY eating anyway. The bicycle riding *might* cost an extra $50 dollars in food...but it is still a significant savings.
Yup. Like I said, there are a lot of great reasons to bike - I do it myself. But $$/mile isn't one of them.
1) Cars require more resources to build initially 2) Cars require more resources to run per mile (not just in terms of the fossil fuels themselves vs. human energy, but also in terms of the energy required to transport those fossil fuels around the world [hint, it's much greater than the energy used to bring you a peach or two] - 50% of the world's energy is burned just in transporting OTHER energy around the planet). 3) Cars cost more to maintain 4) Exercise is good for you and there are dozens of uncounted, beneficial health effects which will save you money later.
I agree entirely with (1), (3), and (4). If you believe (2), you're bad at math, eating crap, or are paying for parking (as somebody else pointed out). That was the only point I was trying to make. Sorry if that wasn't clear.
There are a lot of great reasons to bike, but $$ isn't one of them.
It is in this city -- and, I imagine, many others -- but that's due to how expensive it is to park rather than gas.
Good call - I've never had to work anywhere where I had to pay for my own parking. I only factored in price-per-mile (and left out all kinds of random overhead - If you can actually eliminate a car from your life, it makes a big difference). Sometimes I forget that not everyone shares my life-style - Shallow, I know.
That's not true, I'm proud that the food that I eat powers me across town not some hydrocarbons bought in some country I really don't give a damn about. In other words, I walk or take a bike.
For the record, assuming that you consume a fairly healthy, well-balanced, and at least minimally palatable diet, it still consumes more resources to walk/bike than it does to drive - Do the math. But, food stores are more renewable than petroleum so I commend you - I just object when people claim to bike to save money. There are a lot of great reasons to bike, but $$ isn't one of them.
It says they will also concentrate on bio fuels.
That's the part that bugs me. Bio fuels are neat and, when they're made from materials that would otherwise go to waste, they're great. But growing crops just to produce bio fuels is BS. It wastes resources, is bad for the planet, and takes food out of people's mouths. Of course, it is a step up from paying farmers not to plant anything...
It was the plane that didn't make it out of Pennsylvania, the one aimed at Congress.
Admittedly off-topic, but I'm curious. You really think that the 4th plane was aimed at Congress? I've always assumed that it was a second striker for the Pentagon. The first Pentagon plane hit an area that was under repair and didn't house any top brass. That was easily obtained information - Something that I assume that the planners knew. But putting a second plane into the other side would have made a mess - Heavily populated especially during an evacuation due to the impact from the first plane. And the style kind of fits based on the twin towers - 2 planes per site. Just my speculation.
Back on-topic.
The difference between terrorism and ordinary murder is the intended victim - politicians.
I'm not so sure that you're correct in assuming that the push against terrorism is based on a fear of death by the politicians. They're not trying to save their skins, just their jobs. There's no fundamental difference between the war on terror and the war on drugs - It's a popular platform for politicians to rally on or rail against. It's exciting, it's patriotic, and it wins votes. Disgusting? Yes. Cowardly? Yes. But not a literal attempt to survive.
Because it's amusing? If only they had tagged it with a Monty-Python style foot and posted it to 'idle' so that we had some indication that it was silly instead of serious news...
...if it was a request then I could understand not granting immunity. If it was demanded by the government, then it would be justifiable to grant them immunity.
"I was just following orders" is not a valid defense.
You will also have to give out all of your personal information to every 2 bit site on the internet to spam you with.
Only if you want to take advantage of the services they're offering. If the price they ask (your personal information) is more than you're willing to pay, nobody will make you sign up.
If they want you to register and their TOS says "Enter any name and birth date you feel like here:", then put in whatever you'd like. If it says "Enter your name and birth date here or go away:", then either you need to enter your name and birth date, go away, or commit fraud. In most cases, fraud is an acceptable and very common option and it's almost never enforced. But that doesn't necessarily make it legal - This case will decide that.
They listed me as a co-author on a paper that I hadn't read (much less written).
They used some of my research and attempted to apply techniques that I developed to a similar situation and, because of that and the fact that we'd collaborated on the project that I developed those techniques for, they felt it was appropriate. If I had known what they were doing, I'd have happily helped (especially since they apparently only partially understood what I was doing and I believe that even a small amount of input from me would have helped them tremendously). Maybe "cite" isn't the best term, but it seemed OK at the time.
Obviously, you should run a wire from your tinfoil hat to a conductive grounding strip attached to the heel of your shoe.
Actually, the devices I've used connect to the toe of your shoe, not the heel - Both heels are often lifted while walking. And you need to be sure that you run wires to both feet instead of just one. Also, unless you have a conductive floor (we did when we were using these, but for a very different purpose), spikes are more effective than strips. But you need to plan for the terrain. 1/4" spikes are fine for walking (and very effective for grounding) in damp vegetation or earth but may impede your progress on asphalt. In that case, you'll need very shallow spikes and will just have to accept limited grounding unless you're willing to run a very long cable to a copper rod.
1) Subliminal messages don't work. It's a sham that a psychologist made with fake data that scared the crap out of politicians so that a law was implemented quickly and people fear it to this day (though I still do fear spammers using this, as they have no morals).
So... Why exactly do you fear it if it doesn't work?
Because audible spam in my head would be even worse than the e-mailed spam in my in-box or the visible spam on billboards (and bus stops, sides of buildings/cars, etc.)
How does the author know it was about him and not some other schmuck with his name?
I just searched Google for "gnick" - A moniker that, I thought, would be rather obscure. Of the first 100 hits, 1 related to me - A long expired digg post. What was strange, though, was that I had to click through a few others because they sure sounded like me, but turned out to be somebody else.
I've also "ego-surfed" (a new term to me) using my given name. I found a lot related to me, some immigration stuff about my great-grandfather (with whom I share a first and last name) who brought my grandfather with him when he moved to the US, some of my publications, some publications that I had to peruse to be sure that I hadn't been cited without permission (somebody else with my fairly unusual name apparently works in a very similar, obscure field in California), and one publication where I had in fact been cited without my permission.
Long story short - Even with first hand knowledge I don't know whether my web presence relates to me or not without some in-depth investigation.
Since the point of the experiment wasn't to test the operating system, why give the test subjects the operating system currently most affected by malaware[sic]?
Sorry for replying to the same comment twice, but I have to add this: This was sponsored by McAfee. Why in the hell would they give away Linux or Mac boxes? They try to sell products for those operating systems, but they make up almost none of their market base.
Since the point of the experiment wasn't to test the operating system, why give the test subjects the operating system currently most affected by malaware[sic]?
Because the point of the experiment was to test the effect of replying to spam which has nothing to do with the operating system. They gave away PCs with the most popular operating system since they assumed that's what most of their participants would want.
Slashdot Mirror
explain that rationally:
Iraq Hussein Osama
I'm not an Obama guy, but how can you on successive lines ask for rationalization and berate somebody because their name sounds kind of similar to things you don't like?
Here, at $4.00/gallon and 30 MPG, $10 will take you about 75 miles. An average banana will give you about 105 calories. For most people, biking burns about 34 calories/mile. So, one extra banana will take you about 3 miles (far short of the 75 miles driving). Of course if you're eating comfort food or taking in more calories than you need even when you're not burning them, biking makes great sense - Although, however practical, I'm not sure it's fair to factor in those excess calories into a theoretical price-per-mile analysis. But if you can bike that far on one extra banana, you must either be an exceptionally efficient biker or be losing a lot of weight.
Maybe things are different in your area - US$10 to drive 25 miles round trip seems obscene by my standards. I commute a very hilly ~20 miles round trip for about US$2.35. But, as always, YMMV.
If your calories are all coming from spaghetti, you need to balance your diet. Graduate, get a job, and visit a farmer's market. For my math, I refer you here.
While I see your numbers, they bear no resemblance to the car that I drive, so your mileage number is quite high.
If you want to drive a gas-guzzler, that's your right, but don't buy an SUV and then pretend to help the planet by biking instead of driving it. 30 MPG isn't that big a stretch - Even very inexpensive cars can manage that. My car cost me ~$15k new back in Jan-2001 and gets me to and from work at about 34 MPG.
Also, my behavior changes when I drive. I am much more likely to "swing by" the Home Depot to get a new hose or something.
If you don't have the self control to resist driving all over the place randomly every time you start up your car, maybe driving isn't for you. Good call - stick to your bike.
And if you do that to include food, then you must also include maintenance costs...
Definitely. As I've pointed out in previous posts, if you can eliminate a car from your budget by using a bike - It's a no brainer. But, most people just keep the car in their garage rather than driving it. The main maintenance costs involved with a car are from ownership/insurance/etc, not from per-mile usage.
...as well as the secondary benefits to biking (ie, no gym membership, commuting = exercising) etc.
Agreed. I bike avidly. In fact - I drive to work and then bike recreationally. So, for me, the bike is pure expense. I do it for enjoyment and exercise. But, I stand by my statement that biking purely as a per-mile transport costs more than driving a car that would otherwise be sitting in your garage.
I'm interested still to see your math, but suspect you to be a troll.
Fine. I figure ~$10/day for food. I ate on a lot less than that back in college, but my diet now is much better for me (fruit/veggies/lean meat/etc). And I prefer to buy local goods which typically costs more, but makes me feel better because they're not mass produced and then transported all over the place. For an average person biking at 15 mph, biking burns ~34 calories/mile. People, on average, eat about 2,000 calories per day. So, biking for an average guy like me costs ~$0.17/mile.
Now, assuming that your car gets 30 MPG and gas costs $4.00/gallon, driving costs ~$0.13/gallon - Noticeably cheaper. Like I said, if you don't eat well, if you can eliminate a car from your life, or if you take into account the many other benefits of biking, it's a great thing to do. I bike all the time. But, assuming that you're keeping your car and eat reasonably (i.e. you don't just pound down spaghetti and ramen noodles 3 time a day), it doesn't save on a per-mile basis. Not trying to troll, just trying to point out what I consider an interesting statistic. Of course, if you can bike 75 miles a day like you claimed in your previous post while spending only $8/day on nutrition, my hat goes off to you - You're truly a much better human specimen than me.
Not trying to be an ass, but I blew off several other posts that were twisting my words around, so I kind of unloaded here. And, I hate being called a troll - Sorry if I came off brutish.
Now more than ever, YMMV.
Maybe it's hard to tell the two of them apart since Obama started compromising his core values in order to "move to the center"?
--
Obama '08
I'm so confused right now...
how are you going to lead the country?
Leaders do NOT compromise their core values.
Anything that they DO compromise on is NOT a core value for them.
I'm not an Obama guy - His lack of experience scares me and his "message", although well spoken and charismatic, seems empty. I was a big backer of McCain until a few years back when he stopped fighting Bush and started morphing into him...
That said, I don't want a leader in the White House. We have one now and he's lead us into a complete quagmire. I want a representative.
At $4/gallon and 30 MPG, $10 will take you ~75 miles. If you're biking 75 miles a day and only eating $8 worth of food, you're either a super-human biker or not eating a balanced diet.
I think I can say that Americas education system has never produced the quantity and quality of talent necessary for real innovation in space. The US has always relied on immigrants. Your victory in the space race was in part due to the fact that World War 2 drove the best rocket scientists out of Europe.
It got us out of WW2 too. Frankly, our German scientists were better than their German scientists...
For someone who replaces their car with a bicycle there is no way you can argue that they aren't saving money.
Agreed. Replacing a car is a no-brainer. Unfortunately, most people ride their bikes and leave their car in garage rather than replacing it.
Even if you ignore the fact that most Americans ALREADY eat too much food, which makes them FAT, and that if they rode their bicycle they'd actually lose fat and save a whole bunch of money in potential medical bills; most people ENJOY eating anyway. The bicycle riding *might* cost an extra $50 dollars in food...but it is still a significant savings.
Yup. Like I said, there are a lot of great reasons to bike - I do it myself. But $$/mile isn't one of them.
1) Cars require more resources to build initially
2) Cars require more resources to run per mile (not just in terms of the fossil fuels themselves vs. human energy, but also in terms of the energy required to transport those fossil fuels around the world [hint, it's much greater than the energy used to bring you a peach or two] - 50% of the world's energy is burned just in transporting OTHER energy around the planet).
3) Cars cost more to maintain
4) Exercise is good for you and there are dozens of uncounted, beneficial health effects which will save you money later.
I agree entirely with (1), (3), and (4). If you believe (2), you're bad at math, eating crap, or are paying for parking (as somebody else pointed out). That was the only point I was trying to make. Sorry if that wasn't clear.
There are a lot of great reasons to bike, but $$ isn't one of them.
It is in this city -- and, I imagine, many others -- but that's due to how expensive it is to park rather than gas.
Good call - I've never had to work anywhere where I had to pay for my own parking. I only factored in price-per-mile (and left out all kinds of random overhead - If you can actually eliminate a car from your life, it makes a big difference). Sometimes I forget that not everyone shares my life-style - Shallow, I know.
Cheers.
That's not true, I'm proud that the food that I eat powers me across town not some hydrocarbons bought in some country I really don't give a damn about. In other words, I walk or take a bike.
For the record, assuming that you consume a fairly healthy, well-balanced, and at least minimally palatable diet, it still consumes more resources to walk/bike than it does to drive - Do the math. But, food stores are more renewable than petroleum so I commend you - I just object when people claim to bike to save money. There are a lot of great reasons to bike, but $$ isn't one of them.
It says they will also concentrate on bio fuels.
That's the part that bugs me. Bio fuels are neat and, when they're made from materials that would otherwise go to waste, they're great. But growing crops just to produce bio fuels is BS. It wastes resources, is bad for the planet, and takes food out of people's mouths. Of course, it is a step up from paying farmers not to plant anything...
Great, now I'm depressed.
It was the plane that didn't make it out of Pennsylvania, the one aimed at Congress.
Admittedly off-topic, but I'm curious. You really think that the 4th plane was aimed at Congress? I've always assumed that it was a second striker for the Pentagon. The first Pentagon plane hit an area that was under repair and didn't house any top brass. That was easily obtained information - Something that I assume that the planners knew. But putting a second plane into the other side would have made a mess - Heavily populated especially during an evacuation due to the impact from the first plane. And the style kind of fits based on the twin towers - 2 planes per site. Just my speculation.
Back on-topic.
The difference between terrorism and ordinary murder is the intended victim - politicians.
I'm not so sure that you're correct in assuming that the push against terrorism is based on a fear of death by the politicians. They're not trying to save their skins, just their jobs. There's no fundamental difference between the war on terror and the war on drugs - It's a popular platform for politicians to rally on or rail against. It's exciting, it's patriotic, and it wins votes. Disgusting? Yes. Cowardly? Yes. But not a literal attempt to survive.
Why did this fake story even get posted?
Because it's amusing? If only they had tagged it with a Monty-Python style foot and posted it to 'idle' so that we had some indication that it was silly instead of serious news...
...if it was a request then I could understand not granting immunity. If it was demanded by the government, then it would be justifiable to grant them immunity.
"I was just following orders" is not a valid defense.
Of course the government is above the law...
I hope to god that was sarcasm.
You will also have to give out all of your personal information to every 2 bit site on the internet to spam you with.
Only if you want to take advantage of the services they're offering. If the price they ask (your personal information) is more than you're willing to pay, nobody will make you sign up.
If they want you to register and their TOS says "Enter any name and birth date you feel like here:", then put in whatever you'd like. If it says "Enter your name and birth date here or go away:", then either you need to enter your name and birth date, go away, or commit fraud. In most cases, fraud is an acceptable and very common option and it's almost never enforced. But that doesn't necessarily make it legal - This case will decide that.
How can someone cite you without permission?
They listed me as a co-author on a paper that I hadn't read (much less written).
They used some of my research and attempted to apply techniques that I developed to a similar situation and, because of that and the fact that we'd collaborated on the project that I developed those techniques for, they felt it was appropriate. If I had known what they were doing, I'd have happily helped (especially since they apparently only partially understood what I was doing and I believe that even a small amount of input from me would have helped them tremendously). Maybe "cite" isn't the best term, but it seemed OK at the time.
...a tinfoil hat may be necessary to keep the Secret Police out of your head.
But what do I do about the Dream Police!?!
Obviously, you should run a wire from your tinfoil hat to a conductive grounding strip attached to the heel of your shoe.
Actually, the devices I've used connect to the toe of your shoe, not the heel - Both heels are often lifted while walking. And you need to be sure that you run wires to both feet instead of just one. Also, unless you have a conductive floor (we did when we were using these, but for a very different purpose), spikes are more effective than strips. But you need to plan for the terrain. 1/4" spikes are fine for walking (and very effective for grounding) in damp vegetation or earth but may impede your progress on asphalt. In that case, you'll need very shallow spikes and will just have to accept limited grounding unless you're willing to run a very long cable to a copper rod.
1) Subliminal messages don't work. It's a sham that a psychologist made with fake data that scared the crap out of politicians so that a law was implemented quickly and people fear it to this day (though I still do fear spammers using this, as they have no morals).
So... Why exactly do you fear it if it doesn't work?
Because audible spam in my head would be even worse than the e-mailed spam in my in-box or the visible spam on billboards (and bus stops, sides of buildings/cars, etc.)
How does the author know it was about him and not some other schmuck with his name?
I just searched Google for "gnick" - A moniker that, I thought, would be rather obscure. Of the first 100 hits, 1 related to me - A long expired digg post. What was strange, though, was that I had to click through a few others because they sure sounded like me, but turned out to be somebody else.
I've also "ego-surfed" (a new term to me) using my given name. I found a lot related to me, some immigration stuff about my great-grandfather (with whom I share a first and last name) who brought my grandfather with him when he moved to the US, some of my publications, some publications that I had to peruse to be sure that I hadn't been cited without permission (somebody else with my fairly unusual name apparently works in a very similar, obscure field in California), and one publication where I had in fact been cited without my permission.
Long story short - Even with first hand knowledge I don't know whether my web presence relates to me or not without some in-depth investigation.
Since the point of the experiment wasn't to test the operating system, why give the test subjects the operating system currently most affected by malaware[sic]?
Sorry for replying to the same comment twice, but I have to add this: This was sponsored by McAfee. Why in the hell would they give away Linux or Mac boxes? They try to sell products for those operating systems, but they make up almost none of their market base.
Since the point of the experiment wasn't to test the operating system, why give the test subjects the operating system currently most affected by malaware[sic]?
Because the point of the experiment was to test the effect of replying to spam which has nothing to do with the operating system. They gave away PCs with the most popular operating system since they assumed that's what most of their participants would want.
The Nigerian prince send her millions.
She got 1000 Valium for $4.
Her lover was more satisfied.
And she won an iPod.
And lived happily ever after. =)
Damn. If your girlfriend can put on 6 gnick's in 1 month - You're dating a really BIG woman. Let's see - 185 lbs * 6 = .... Wow.
Sadly, I have a tough enough time finding women willing to put on 1 gnick for 1 night...