Our equivalent is just called the AA. We don't feel the need to put an extra letter in to denote nationality, because of course ours is the original one that everyone else's is just a little regional version of.
In that vein I think BT should rename to "Telecom", or T and BA to "Airways", or A. No need for those extra Bs on the front.
Usually the car is just rolling when possible, with the kinetic energy of the car eaten up as it rolls but also keeping the engine running with _no_ fuel consumption at all
If your engine is running, it's consuming fuel. It'll consume much less fuel when you're just rolling along, but even if it's just ticking over then some energy is being used to make the moving parts move, and generate the sound/heat of an idle engine.
It really doesn't matter how people try to slice it, these plates are fuelled by cars which are fuelled by petrol. Any energy generated by the plate has to have been extracted from the cars' motion and eventually the car will make up the difference by burning some extra fuel. The only way this can make sense is if energy would have been taken from the cars' motion by braking, and the plate is recovering a little electricity from what would otherwise have been waste heat.
Sounds like they've tried to put these things only in places where drivers are slowing down anyway, so it'll be helping cars to slow down and picking up some energy in the process. Sounds ok in principle, but I'll bet not every single car is going to be braking in the spots they choose, so whether it's a net gain (a slight increase in efficiency due to less waste heat from braking) depends on how well placed the plates are. If they screw up and most people are trying to accelerate when they go over the plate then it's an epic failure of a scheme and just conning each supermarket visitor out of a little bit of fuel.
Of course the whole thing is small potatoes really when compared to the energy a car wastes in the normal course of things. You can try to minimise it by avoiding accelerating any more than necessary, and braking as little as possible (just take your foot off the gas well in advance of where you would normally brake and only use the brakes if you need to slow down faster than that), but even then a car is not an efficient machine.
I'm pretty sure my CPU (or the radiator on the back of my graphics card) is already heating my room... it always seem to be a little warmer in here than the rest of the house.
Sounds like we're in agreement then. My beef with 'copyright' is directed at the abuses and misuses of the system. If it can be made to work than I have no problem in principle with the idea of a limited time monopoly.
Just seems like 'rebooting' copyright will only be a temporary fix - until the cycle of lobbying and intimidation tactics works its way round again. Then again maybe they don't have to time to build that back up again before it's pushed to irrelevance by some new thing, who knows.
Yes, yes, we all know about 'The Cathedral and the Bazaar', but your characterisation of science as a cathedral with priests is way out of line. The same spirit of taking what works and building on it is the foundation of scientific endeavour. There's no "one true way" or revered holy texts of science, only what works. When something is found to not work, it has to be changed or discarded...
You can try belittling qualifications, but getting qualified isn't some sort of indoctrination process (or at least it shouldn't be, granted it might resemble indoctrination in some places, but I submit that those places are turning out bad scientists, however qualified they are). As science advances, the necessary knowledge, experience and learning to make a meaningful contribution only grows, meaning people have to spend those years of study and specialisation, learning about what's gone before, to reach a point in a field where they can do something new.
The problem we're having now is that the massive extensions to copyright terms mean that the writer is getting decades of pay for his day's work (ok, so you can't write a book in a day, but you get my point). Also that more often than not, it's a large corporation collecting decades of pay for no work on their part. Then using that money to lobby for further extensions to their payday and fund lawsuits against people who break the laws they paid for.
The system of copyright needs to be reformed now that we're living in a world where copying is easy and free, I know the creative types need to be compensated for their efforts, but the whole "limited time monopoly" thing didn't work out. Maybe it could be restored to sense if the monopoly period was slashed down to something more reasonable, to the point where things enter the public domain within the lifespan of people who see the original release. Alternatively, we'd need to find a different way to compensate them... we had art and music and writing for a long time before we invented copyright, there must be a way to make it work.
On the other hand, remember the end of Into the Wild Green Yonder? Fry and Leela saying they loved each other... just before they noticed the wormhole. Then the whole thing ended on a kiss (ok technically a kiss followed by an exterior shot of swooping into a wormhole, but you know what I mean.
Sigh... for a second there I thought we were having a discussion rather than an argument. All I wanted to say was that sugar is a readily available foodstuff and it's not exactly a normal reaction to be made mentally incapable for days at a time just from eating the stuff. After all, starch and other carbohydrates are digested into glucose before they can be absorbed in your intestines, eating sugar itself just speeds the process, which will have various effects but shouldn't be immediately damaging.
I am perfectly well aware that the refined sugar we eat today isn't a natural part of our diet, but it's still an energy source, it's not poison... so the whole "may as well breathe exhaust fumes and do drugs" thing was a tad unnecessary and a total misrepresentation of what I was saying.
Bottom line, you demonstrated your lack of interest in talking about the subject like an adult when you decided to put an infantile little insult in at the end there. I apologise for the misunderstanding.
Every so often I check out what Dell's offering at the top and bottom end of their range, then look up the price of parts to match their spec. This is all using brand new components from decent brands, and it still invariably comes in cheaper than Dell's price.
Not just a little bit cheaper either; with the slack in the budget the last time I checked I could double the RAM and hard disk space and go up a level on the graphics card and CPU before it got more expensive.
Maybe their prices are just extortionate if you buy from the UK, and for laptops self-build isn't really an option, but for a run-of-the-mill desktop I'll be damned if I'm going to Dell.
It looks that way immediately after you post it, because the reply box drops down directly below what you're responding to - otherwise, on a discussion with a lot of threads, it might have to open it a long way down the page to show it in its proper place. Judging by the post times, it's all showing up as it ought to now.
As to why you'd want to be accustomed to sugar... because it seems an extreme reaction to be quite so debilitated by such a common type of food. For better or worse there are lots of things that contain a lot of sugar, and even if you choose to avoid them by preference, it'd be an advantage to have the option of getting a quick energy boost from something sugary without your mental capabilities disappearing.
Hold up, your kids are rendered incapable for days at a time by sugar? That does not sound natural...
I'm with you as far as free'n'easy sugar being a modern thing that's doing us no good, and that we're most likely better off without it, but even if a natural human diet is one of lean meat and complex carbs, we're supposed to be able to eat sugar.
Kinda reminds me of one of the suggestions for why Morgan Spurlock was so badly affected by his McDonalds diet - it's possible that his normal vegan diet had left him unprepared to handle a sudden influx of fat and protein, and accordingly he responded to it much more dramatically than a normal person.
I don't suggest you change anything if what you're doing is working, but it might be that being accustomed to small amounts of sugar would avoid a person being made 'brain dead' by sugary foods and coke.
At around the point where you suggested "Massively Popular Bills" I realised that this sounds far too much like Digg for me to think it a good way to run a country.
More annoying are the sites in the middle ground - if they don't require flash/javascript then everything's happy and wonderful, and if the site visible breaks when it doesn't have things enabled then I can decide whether I want to turn them on, but when I get what looks like a working site, but secretly it requires scripting to do something banal, then it all breaks down when I try to do something.
Happens all too often with scripts being used to open either separate pages or popup-style information windows. I click the link and all that happens is that the page reloads... which can be rather annoying. Almost as often as that I'll middle click to open such things in a new window and it'll just put up a blank page with some javascript in the address bar, but that'll happen whether java's enabled or not.
Cookies too... too many sites will silently fail when you don't have cookies enabled. Others will have a message to say that I need to enable cookies before the site will do some thing or other. The latter is preferable to the former, but even better would be a site that works without all the extras being enabled. Bare minimum should be that it's functional with nothing over and above HTML, and if it needs more than that it can ask for it (note: method of asking for it should not itself require flash/scripts/cookies)
To become a saint you can either perform a miracle, or die for your faith as a martyr... so he could qualify either way.
The requirement to be dead that the other guy mentioned is so that all their actions can be considered before they're declared a saint. Thus avoiding the possibility of a saint doing something evil after being sainted.
I'm not sure that's entirely true... or at least not true in all cases/for every person.
I spend what probably amounts to far too much time at the computer... I keep myself entertained but I'm equally aware that it's probably excessive. By your thinking I should immediately notice if I were to 'quit' the internet and find myself craving it or whatever.
And yet, on occasion I've gone away for a week to places without any internet connection... there wasn't a whole lot to do (family holiday, so the destination wasn't chosen on the basis of what I would want to do) but I didn't spend all day wishing I was back online. I got bored, I dealt with it.
Some people probably can get addicted to things aside from a full-on physical addiction, but the qualifiers in that sentence are important - maybe it's a personality trait, maybe people are just not choosing the alternatives in the normal course of things and would find something else to do if their "addiction" were suddenly unavailable.
You know... you're right, the lean and/or muscled people of the world are doing good, the real master plan is to use the poor as a food source, the obese as a carbon sink, and all the space this frees up can be populated by whoever's left over.
For shitty places that no-one wants to live in, carpet them with solar panels (or the sealed tombs of the dead fat people) and that solves some more problems, then we all dance under a rainbow or something.
On second thoughts, we might be able to make the fat-storage thing more efficient by feeding vast quantities of plant material to captive fat people, then regularly siphoning off some body fat via liposuction and burying it. Assuming their appetites continue unabated this would keep up a steady flow of stored carbon to put back into the ground.
Fat contains a lot of carbon - what we ought to be doing is feeding the lean/muscled people from overpopulated countries to the starving (for their better nutritional content) whist also shooting the morbidly obese ones and burying them in concrete tombs as a way to fight global warming.
Technically he didn't say that the less intrusive forms of DRM were unreasonable, all I see is that he argued against the suggestion that they aren't DRM. Which is fair enough, they do seek to authenticate users and prevent illicit copying (or at least prevent illicit copies from making use of full functionality). It is reasonable DRM, but it's still DRM.
I know 'DRM' is essentially shorthand for 'evil' around these parts, but he didn't say that...
But I flat out reject the assumption that piracy is a good thing. It is just people justifying their immoral behavior.
I agree it's not a good thing, but isn't it possible that having some "customers" pirate the game is better than not having them at all, all else being equal? i.e. if you had the choice between either 10 thousand sales, or 10 thousand sales and 90 thousand free downloads, it might be worth having the downloaders. [NB: numbers imaginary, I have no freakin clue how many people buy things]
The value to the company of having a larger user base may well be a good thing (although whether it's an overall benefit or cost is down to specifics, like costs from providing servers/support to freeloaders). No doubt having everyone pay for it would be the best situation, but like I say, if the choice is between a person not playing, or having them pirating, having them in the game may be the better option.
Offence is likely to be taken when what you compare a person to doesn't match up with their own assessment of themselves.
Comparing religious belief with belief in unicorns is essentially shorthand for "religious belief X is as imaginary as a unicorn, which is to say entirely imaginary". The believer is of course going to disagree, and may be offended by the suggestion that they are wrong.
I suppose someone who's nonreligious, but believes in unicorns might have the same feeling in reverse ("How dare you compare the absolute truth of unicorns with that made up God") but that doesn't happen so often... religious belief is a lot more common, and considering its claims to be imaginary is a lot less universal (to understate it). Hence why we use unicorns as a point of comparison instead of saying, "You might as well believe in God".
As for comparisons between religious folks and the psychologically impaired... well there's actually some evidence that superstitious, supernatural and religious beliefs (specifically those attributing intentions and deliberate causation to coincidence and chance) stem from a childlike understanding of the world. The brain is wired to see other minds and intentional actions even when they aren't there... takes some time to get out of that mode of thought, regardless of whether your thinking is religious or scientific in nature (plus we tend to resort to simpler thinking when under stress).
Sciency examples would be something like "The ozone layer exists to protect us from UV light" or "This mutation happened so that the species could survive better". There's no deliberate action there, these things are happy coincidences. They happen to have the same effect as the intentions described, but it's not a purposeful thing. It's equivalent to "Trees have bark so animals can scratch their itchy backs" - maybe animals can scratch an itch on tree bark, but that's not why it's there.
Slashdot Mirror
A typical racecar produces about 400 kilowatts. A medium model wind turbine (with a 50m tower) produces about 600 kilowatts.
So what you're saying is, we should mount a 50m wind turbine on top of racecars?
Our equivalent is just called the AA. We don't feel the need to put an extra letter in to denote nationality, because of course ours is the original one that everyone else's is just a little regional version of.
In that vein I think BT should rename to "Telecom", or T and BA to "Airways", or A. No need for those extra Bs on the front.
Usually the car is just rolling when possible, with the kinetic energy of the car eaten up as it rolls but also keeping the engine running with _no_ fuel consumption at all
If your engine is running, it's consuming fuel. It'll consume much less fuel when you're just rolling along, but even if it's just ticking over then some energy is being used to make the moving parts move, and generate the sound/heat of an idle engine.
It really doesn't matter how people try to slice it, these plates are fuelled by cars which are fuelled by petrol. Any energy generated by the plate has to have been extracted from the cars' motion and eventually the car will make up the difference by burning some extra fuel. The only way this can make sense is if energy would have been taken from the cars' motion by braking, and the plate is recovering a little electricity from what would otherwise have been waste heat.
Sounds like they've tried to put these things only in places where drivers are slowing down anyway, so it'll be helping cars to slow down and picking up some energy in the process. Sounds ok in principle, but I'll bet not every single car is going to be braking in the spots they choose, so whether it's a net gain (a slight increase in efficiency due to less waste heat from braking) depends on how well placed the plates are. If they screw up and most people are trying to accelerate when they go over the plate then it's an epic failure of a scheme and just conning each supermarket visitor out of a little bit of fuel.
Of course the whole thing is small potatoes really when compared to the energy a car wastes in the normal course of things. You can try to minimise it by avoiding accelerating any more than necessary, and braking as little as possible (just take your foot off the gas well in advance of where you would normally brake and only use the brakes if you need to slow down faster than that), but even then a car is not an efficient machine.
I'm pretty sure my CPU (or the radiator on the back of my graphics card) is already heating my room... it always seem to be a little warmer in here than the rest of the house.
Sounds like we're in agreement then. My beef with 'copyright' is directed at the abuses and misuses of the system. If it can be made to work than I have no problem in principle with the idea of a limited time monopoly.
Just seems like 'rebooting' copyright will only be a temporary fix - until the cycle of lobbying and intimidation tactics works its way round again. Then again maybe they don't have to time to build that back up again before it's pushed to irrelevance by some new thing, who knows.
You're thinking of "The British Isles"
You can see the semantics explained in the form of a Venn diagram here - http://qntm.org/?uk
Yes, yes, we all know about 'The Cathedral and the Bazaar', but your characterisation of science as a cathedral with priests is way out of line. The same spirit of taking what works and building on it is the foundation of scientific endeavour. There's no "one true way" or revered holy texts of science, only what works. When something is found to not work, it has to be changed or discarded...
You can try belittling qualifications, but getting qualified isn't some sort of indoctrination process (or at least it shouldn't be, granted it might resemble indoctrination in some places, but I submit that those places are turning out bad scientists, however qualified they are). As science advances, the necessary knowledge, experience and learning to make a meaningful contribution only grows, meaning people have to spend those years of study and specialisation, learning about what's gone before, to reach a point in a field where they can do something new.
The problem we're having now is that the massive extensions to copyright terms mean that the writer is getting decades of pay for his day's work (ok, so you can't write a book in a day, but you get my point). Also that more often than not, it's a large corporation collecting decades of pay for no work on their part. Then using that money to lobby for further extensions to their payday and fund lawsuits against people who break the laws they paid for.
The system of copyright needs to be reformed now that we're living in a world where copying is easy and free, I know the creative types need to be compensated for their efforts, but the whole "limited time monopoly" thing didn't work out. Maybe it could be restored to sense if the monopoly period was slashed down to something more reasonable, to the point where things enter the public domain within the lifespan of people who see the original release. Alternatively, we'd need to find a different way to compensate them... we had art and music and writing for a long time before we invented copyright, there must be a way to make it work.
On the other hand, remember the end of Into the Wild Green Yonder? Fry and Leela saying they loved each other... just before they noticed the wormhole. Then the whole thing ended on a kiss (ok technically a kiss followed by an exterior shot of swooping into a wormhole, but you know what I mean.
Soylent Green is people
Google is people
Therefore Google is Soylent Green
Sigh... for a second there I thought we were having a discussion rather than an argument. All I wanted to say was that sugar is a readily available foodstuff and it's not exactly a normal reaction to be made mentally incapable for days at a time just from eating the stuff. After all, starch and other carbohydrates are digested into glucose before they can be absorbed in your intestines, eating sugar itself just speeds the process, which will have various effects but shouldn't be immediately damaging.
I am perfectly well aware that the refined sugar we eat today isn't a natural part of our diet, but it's still an energy source, it's not poison... so the whole "may as well breathe exhaust fumes and do drugs" thing was a tad unnecessary and a total misrepresentation of what I was saying.
Bottom line, you demonstrated your lack of interest in talking about the subject like an adult when you decided to put an infantile little insult in at the end there. I apologise for the misunderstanding.
Every so often I check out what Dell's offering at the top and bottom end of their range, then look up the price of parts to match their spec. This is all using brand new components from decent brands, and it still invariably comes in cheaper than Dell's price.
Not just a little bit cheaper either; with the slack in the budget the last time I checked I could double the RAM and hard disk space and go up a level on the graphics card and CPU before it got more expensive.
Maybe their prices are just extortionate if you buy from the UK, and for laptops self-build isn't really an option, but for a run-of-the-mill desktop I'll be damned if I'm going to Dell.
It looks that way immediately after you post it, because the reply box drops down directly below what you're responding to - otherwise, on a discussion with a lot of threads, it might have to open it a long way down the page to show it in its proper place. Judging by the post times, it's all showing up as it ought to now.
As to why you'd want to be accustomed to sugar... because it seems an extreme reaction to be quite so debilitated by such a common type of food. For better or worse there are lots of things that contain a lot of sugar, and even if you choose to avoid them by preference, it'd be an advantage to have the option of getting a quick energy boost from something sugary without your mental capabilities disappearing.
The human sense of taste is fascinating, it's like 'the lab' from NCIS except it's made out of a few square inches of meat.
You just won my "favourite sentence of the week" award.
Hold up, your kids are rendered incapable for days at a time by sugar? That does not sound natural...
I'm with you as far as free'n'easy sugar being a modern thing that's doing us no good, and that we're most likely better off without it, but even if a natural human diet is one of lean meat and complex carbs, we're supposed to be able to eat sugar.
Kinda reminds me of one of the suggestions for why Morgan Spurlock was so badly affected by his McDonalds diet - it's possible that his normal vegan diet had left him unprepared to handle a sudden influx of fat and protein, and accordingly he responded to it much more dramatically than a normal person.
I don't suggest you change anything if what you're doing is working, but it might be that being accustomed to small amounts of sugar would avoid a person being made 'brain dead' by sugary foods and coke.
At around the point where you suggested "Massively Popular Bills" I realised that this sounds far too much like Digg for me to think it a good way to run a country.
More annoying are the sites in the middle ground - if they don't require flash/javascript then everything's happy and wonderful, and if the site visible breaks when it doesn't have things enabled then I can decide whether I want to turn them on, but when I get what looks like a working site, but secretly it requires scripting to do something banal, then it all breaks down when I try to do something.
Happens all too often with scripts being used to open either separate pages or popup-style information windows. I click the link and all that happens is that the page reloads... which can be rather annoying. Almost as often as that I'll middle click to open such things in a new window and it'll just put up a blank page with some javascript in the address bar, but that'll happen whether java's enabled or not.
Cookies too... too many sites will silently fail when you don't have cookies enabled. Others will have a message to say that I need to enable cookies before the site will do some thing or other. The latter is preferable to the former, but even better would be a site that works without all the extras being enabled. Bare minimum should be that it's functional with nothing over and above HTML, and if it needs more than that it can ask for it (note: method of asking for it should not itself require flash/scripts/cookies)
To become a saint you can either perform a miracle, or die for your faith as a martyr... so he could qualify either way.
The requirement to be dead that the other guy mentioned is so that all their actions can be considered before they're declared a saint. Thus avoiding the possibility of a saint doing something evil after being sainted.
I'm not sure that's entirely true... or at least not true in all cases/for every person.
I spend what probably amounts to far too much time at the computer... I keep myself entertained but I'm equally aware that it's probably excessive. By your thinking I should immediately notice if I were to 'quit' the internet and find myself craving it or whatever.
And yet, on occasion I've gone away for a week to places without any internet connection... there wasn't a whole lot to do (family holiday, so the destination wasn't chosen on the basis of what I would want to do) but I didn't spend all day wishing I was back online. I got bored, I dealt with it.
Some people probably can get addicted to things aside from a full-on physical addiction, but the qualifiers in that sentence are important - maybe it's a personality trait, maybe people are just not choosing the alternatives in the normal course of things and would find something else to do if their "addiction" were suddenly unavailable.
You know... you're right, the lean and/or muscled people of the world are doing good, the real master plan is to use the poor as a food source, the obese as a carbon sink, and all the space this frees up can be populated by whoever's left over.
For shitty places that no-one wants to live in, carpet them with solar panels (or the sealed tombs of the dead fat people) and that solves some more problems, then we all dance under a rainbow or something.
On second thoughts, we might be able to make the fat-storage thing more efficient by feeding vast quantities of plant material to captive fat people, then regularly siphoning off some body fat via liposuction and burying it. Assuming their appetites continue unabated this would keep up a steady flow of stored carbon to put back into the ground.
Fat contains a lot of carbon - what we ought to be doing is feeding the lean/muscled people from overpopulated countries to the starving (for their better nutritional content) whist also shooting the morbidly obese ones and burying them in concrete tombs as a way to fight global warming.
Technically he didn't say that the less intrusive forms of DRM were unreasonable, all I see is that he argued against the suggestion that they aren't DRM. Which is fair enough, they do seek to authenticate users and prevent illicit copying (or at least prevent illicit copies from making use of full functionality). It is reasonable DRM, but it's still DRM.
I know 'DRM' is essentially shorthand for 'evil' around these parts, but he didn't say that...
But I flat out reject the assumption that piracy is a good thing. It is just people justifying their immoral behavior.
I agree it's not a good thing, but isn't it possible that having some "customers" pirate the game is better than not having them at all, all else being equal? i.e. if you had the choice between either 10 thousand sales, or 10 thousand sales and 90 thousand free downloads, it might be worth having the downloaders. [NB: numbers imaginary, I have no freakin clue how many people buy things]
The value to the company of having a larger user base may well be a good thing (although whether it's an overall benefit or cost is down to specifics, like costs from providing servers/support to freeloaders). No doubt having everyone pay for it would be the best situation, but like I say, if the choice is between a person not playing, or having them pirating, having them in the game may be the better option.
Offence is likely to be taken when what you compare a person to doesn't match up with their own assessment of themselves.
Comparing religious belief with belief in unicorns is essentially shorthand for "religious belief X is as imaginary as a unicorn, which is to say entirely imaginary". The believer is of course going to disagree, and may be offended by the suggestion that they are wrong.
I suppose someone who's nonreligious, but believes in unicorns might have the same feeling in reverse ("How dare you compare the absolute truth of unicorns with that made up God") but that doesn't happen so often... religious belief is a lot more common, and considering its claims to be imaginary is a lot less universal (to understate it). Hence why we use unicorns as a point of comparison instead of saying, "You might as well believe in God".
As for comparisons between religious folks and the psychologically impaired... well there's actually some evidence that superstitious, supernatural and religious beliefs (specifically those attributing intentions and deliberate causation to coincidence and chance) stem from a childlike understanding of the world. The brain is wired to see other minds and intentional actions even when they aren't there... takes some time to get out of that mode of thought, regardless of whether your thinking is religious or scientific in nature (plus we tend to resort to simpler thinking when under stress).
Sciency examples would be something like "The ozone layer exists to protect us from UV light" or "This mutation happened so that the species could survive better". There's no deliberate action there, these things are happy coincidences. They happen to have the same effect as the intentions described, but it's not a purposeful thing. It's equivalent to "Trees have bark so animals can scratch their itchy backs" - maybe animals can scratch an itch on tree bark, but that's not why it's there.
Don't be silly, the Sun isn't news... it's more like a comic, but the jokes aren't as clever.