If they really hit their price, performance, and range targets, they might well sell 50,000 of them in the US.
Its been less than a day and they've already got 115,000 pre-orders, for a car that wont be delivered for another year. Given that you have to put down $1000 to pre-order, those aren't idle orders either. Seems your estimate of 50,000 vehicles MAX is a bit off.
Even if that were true (and I'd argue it isn't), the attacks also wouldn't have happened without long distance communications. So lets just get rid of them as well in the name of security, up to and including postal mail.
What? You say that long distance communications have an intrinsic utility that vastly dwarfs their occasional role in illegal behavior? You don't say.
The Internet Archive not only hosts a backup of the entire internet,
Not only don't they, but they let the current domain holder determine whether content archived when someone else owned the domain determine whether content will be shown. That crops up for me more than half the time. Otherwise, I might donate.
That's not really IA's fault. It's the fault of our copyright regime.
I don't think it is likely that humans will go beyond Mars in my lifetime (say the next 50 years or so), but never? Claiming that is just hubris. There is no way to state this with any degree of surety.
It is not a stretch beyond credibility to assume that humanity may be around for a few thousand years yet. Given all we've done in just the last 200 years, almost anything is possible given another 2000 years.
A whole 22 cents per person per year for a subscription. Very expensive.
It is when you consider that you're paying that for every member of faculty and every student. Not just those in the linguistic department. Those other departments need their own subscriptions. Before you know, you're spending tens - even hundreds - of thousands of dollars on subscriptions.
Given that the publisher doesn't pay for the articles, the peer review or the editing (for the most part), it does raise the question, what exactly is being paid for via those subscriptions.
You are forgetting about the cost of leasing/renting. Yes, if you can either pay 500 dollars now or pay 50 dollars a month for 10 months, you are better off with the latter. But that is almost never the case. It is more likely to be 50 dollars a month for a year (600 dollars total). You pay more to pay later.
Of course, in some cases, as with American cell phone contract (at least until recently,) the two options are rigged so that the monthly plan is equally cheap or even cheaper. This is usually done by conflating it with some kind of service and/or erecting hurdles to outright ownership.
No they can't. The pellets are accelerated out of the gun by the power an the explosive charge. They then loose velocity due to gravity and (far more importantly) air resistance. While the loss due to gravity is reversed once the pellets reach the top of their arc, the loss due to air resistance continues until they drop below their terminal velocity (the point at which air resistance and gravity cancel each other out).
Any sufficiently elevated shot will have the pellets reaching the earth at their terminal velocity (which is a fraction of the velocity that they leave the gun barrel at).
Very different scenario. All the Icelandic debt that was defaulted on was private (mainly privately held banks). The Icelandic government has never defaulted on any of its debt.
This is a REALLY mind boggling stupid test (or at least headline). Of course it is faster to immediately write stuff to disk as it becomes available, than to build the string in memory and then flush it to disk. Keep the IO bus full while the next write is prepared.
That doesn't change the fact that you should avoid touching the disk as much as possible, it just illustrates that if you must touch the disk, you should try to do it while the processor is busy doing other things (if possible).
Software purchases run into a huge problem versus hardware purchases. Buy hardware and once it it bough it is yours. Buy software and you inevitable learn the lesson M$ teaches, you have not yet finished buying it and you will have to buy it, again and again and again and again and again and again and again, gees how many versions where there of windows.
Whereas hardware lasts forever...
The problem with Windows isn't that you have to spring for a new version every now and then. Its that you only have one vendor for that upgrade.
... but who builds single dwellings from reinforced concrete or steel?
Just about everyone in Iceland. There are some houses built here out of wood, but the VAST majority are built using reinforced concrete (sometimes with a wooden roof though).
Building a car that gets a new traffic light right 99% of the time is probably trivial
Maybe. But considering that I go through about 15 traffic lights on my way to work (and then the same 15 again on my way home), a car that handled them correctly 99% of the time would have about a 1 in 3 of messing at least one of them up EACH DAY.
This is wrong on all counts. It is very much traditional for us Icelanders (yes I'm from Iceland) to transliterate eth (ð) as d and accented characters like á without the accent.
Th is only used to transliterate the thorn (which Slashdot refuses to render).
What is annoying is when the eth is transliterated as o. I have one in my last name and I've had trouble with checking in to flights booked via Expedia due to this nonsense.
Even a common place apendectomy has a mortality rate of about 2% last time I checked.
You must have checked it a VERY long time ago. It is true that the rate of complication is about 2-3%, but the MORTALITY rate (i.e. the number of people that die as a result of the surgery) is
estimated at one to two per 1,000,000 cases of appendicitis
...but you can turn off the plant to free more of the existing electricity...
No you can't. Aluminium plants take time to shut down. A sudden loss of electricity will destroy the equipment used to smelt it. So you'd need many hours to wind production down and then many hours to get it started again.
The last thing any aluminium smelting plants wants is downtime. That is why they are run 24/7. Shutting them down takes a very long time and costs a lot of money.
The banks, on the other hand, are very easy to "kill" — just stop using them. Unlike the government, they have no way to compel you.
Yes, "just" stop using them. Like we can "just" stop voting in all these rubbish politicians.
Most people can't stop doing business with them because they are already in debt and clearing that debt will take decades. Even if not in debt, not having a bank account and debit/credit card(s) and other financial services can cause you all manner of difficulties.
Banks, on top of providing essentially services, have built a money sucking machine. And they've made very sure to entangle the leeching part thoroughly in with the good bits.
The only way to address this, without plunging the economy into chaos, is for the government to step in and untangle it (cutting the proverbial Gordian knot). "Just" not doing business with the banks will either accomplish nothing (because you can't get enough people involved) or will precipitate a financial collapse.
Unfortunately, getting the government to do something about this "just" requires us to vote some decent people into office *sigh* yes, "just".
As if cutting/reducing services does not place a burden on its citizens?
If something can be cut without the citizens noticing it, then cut it (regardless of overall financial health, it's just waste).
But most services are there for a reason. It may be a lesser burden (especially if you take the long term view) to raise taxes than to allow certain services to degrade past the point of utility.
In most democracies there are usually two parties that most people vote for (Both of which are different shades of shit).
Citation needed!
Most (European anyway) democracies are parliamentary democracies with 4-6 major parties plus some number of smaller/fringe parties. Typically, no one party has a majority and coalition governments are the norm.
Slashdot Mirror
If they really hit their price, performance, and range targets, they might well sell 50,000 of them in the US.
Its been less than a day and they've already got 115,000 pre-orders, for a car that wont be delivered for another year. Given that you have to put down $1000 to pre-order, those aren't idle orders either. Seems your estimate of 50,000 vehicles MAX is a bit off.
Even if that were true (and I'd argue it isn't), the attacks also wouldn't have happened without long distance communications. So lets just get rid of them as well in the name of security, up to and including postal mail.
What? You say that long distance communications have an intrinsic utility that vastly dwarfs their occasional role in illegal behavior? You don't say.
The Internet Archive not only hosts a backup of the entire internet,
Not only don't they, but they let the current domain holder determine whether content archived when someone else owned the domain determine whether content will be shown. That crops up for me more than half the time. Otherwise, I might donate.
That's not really IA's fault. It's the fault of our copyright regime.
"Never" is a very long time.
I don't think it is likely that humans will go beyond Mars in my lifetime (say the next 50 years or so), but never? Claiming that is just hubris. There is no way to state this with any degree of surety.
It is not a stretch beyond credibility to assume that humanity may be around for a few thousand years yet. Given all we've done in just the last 200 years, almost anything is possible given another 2000 years.
A whole 22 cents per person per year for a subscription. Very expensive.
It is when you consider that you're paying that for every member of faculty and every student. Not just those in the linguistic department. Those other departments need their own subscriptions. Before you know, you're spending tens - even hundreds - of thousands of dollars on subscriptions.
Given that the publisher doesn't pay for the articles, the peer review or the editing (for the most part), it does raise the question, what exactly is being paid for via those subscriptions.
You are forgetting about the cost of leasing/renting. Yes, if you can either pay 500 dollars now or pay 50 dollars a month for 10 months, you are better off with the latter. But that is almost never the case. It is more likely to be 50 dollars a month for a year (600 dollars total). You pay more to pay later.
Of course, in some cases, as with American cell phone contract (at least until recently,) the two options are rigged so that the monthly plan is equally cheap or even cheaper. This is usually done by conflating it with some kind of service and/or erecting hurdles to outright ownership.
No they can't. The pellets are accelerated out of the gun by the power an the explosive charge. They then loose velocity due to gravity and (far more importantly) air resistance. While the loss due to gravity is reversed once the pellets reach the top of their arc, the loss due to air resistance continues until they drop below their terminal velocity (the point at which air resistance and gravity cancel each other out).
Any sufficiently elevated shot will have the pellets reaching the earth at their terminal velocity (which is a fraction of the velocity that they leave the gun barrel at).
...but taking Iceland as an example...
Very different scenario. All the Icelandic debt that was defaulted on was private (mainly privately held banks). The Icelandic government has never defaulted on any of its debt.
This is a REALLY mind boggling stupid test (or at least headline). Of course it is faster to immediately write stuff to disk as it becomes available, than to build the string in memory and then flush it to disk. Keep the IO bus full while the next write is prepared.
That doesn't change the fact that you should avoid touching the disk as much as possible, it just illustrates that if you must touch the disk, you should try to do it while the processor is busy doing other things (if possible).
I, for one, will be pronouncing it "Throat Warbler Mangrove"
Software purchases run into a huge problem versus hardware purchases. Buy hardware and once it it bough it is yours. Buy software and you inevitable learn the lesson M$ teaches, you have not yet finished buying it and you will have to buy it, again and again and again and again and again and again and again, gees how many versions where there of windows.
Whereas hardware lasts forever...
The problem with Windows isn't that you have to spring for a new version every now and then. Its that you only have one vendor for that upgrade.
Why all the venom for Google? You don't see Microsoft releasing patches for Windows XP.
Windows XP wasn't released on July 24, 2013.
And upgrades from Windows XP to Vista/7/8 also weren't free.
... but who builds single dwellings from reinforced concrete or steel?
Just about everyone in Iceland. There are some houses built here out of wood, but the VAST majority are built using reinforced concrete (sometimes with a wooden roof though).
Building a car that gets a new traffic light right 99% of the time is probably trivial
Maybe. But considering that I go through about 15 traffic lights on my way to work (and then the same 15 again on my way home), a car that handled them correctly 99% of the time would have about a 1 in 3 of messing at least one of them up EACH DAY.
We're looking for five nines here, minimum.
Firefox 360?
If they stay with the every 6 weeks release schedule, Firefox 360 should be out sometime in 2052.
This is wrong on all counts. It is very much traditional for us Icelanders (yes I'm from Iceland) to transliterate eth (ð) as d and accented characters like á without the accent.
Th is only used to transliterate the thorn (which Slashdot refuses to render).
What is annoying is when the eth is transliterated as o. I have one in my last name and I've had trouble with checking in to flights booked via Expedia due to this nonsense.
Even a common place apendectomy has a mortality rate of about 2% last time I checked.
You must have checked it a VERY long time ago. It is true that the rate of complication is about 2-3%, but the MORTALITY rate (i.e. the number of people that die as a result of the surgery) is
estimated at one to two per 1,000,000 cases of appendicitis
(Source: http://www.surgeryencyclopedia...)
Not 1 in 50 as a 2% mortality rate would indicate.
Because they only reduce drag at low speeds. At high speeds (commercial airlines fly at Mach 0.8-0.85 usually) they would increase drag, not lower it.
...but you can turn off the plant to free more of the existing electricity...
No you can't. Aluminium plants take time to shut down. A sudden loss of electricity will destroy the equipment used to smelt it. So you'd need many hours to wind production down and then many hours to get it started again.
The last thing any aluminium smelting plants wants is downtime. That is why they are run 24/7. Shutting them down takes a very long time and costs a lot of money.
The banks, on the other hand, are very easy to "kill" — just stop using them. Unlike the government, they have no way to compel you.
Yes, "just" stop using them. Like we can "just" stop voting in all these rubbish politicians.
Most people can't stop doing business with them because they are already in debt and clearing that debt will take decades. Even if not in debt, not having a bank account and debit/credit card(s) and other financial services can cause you all manner of difficulties.
Banks, on top of providing essentially services, have built a money sucking machine. And they've made very sure to entangle the leeching part thoroughly in with the good bits.
The only way to address this, without plunging the economy into chaos, is for the government to step in and untangle it (cutting the proverbial Gordian knot). "Just" not doing business with the banks will either accomplish nothing (because you can't get enough people involved) or will precipitate a financial collapse.
Unfortunately, getting the government to do something about this "just" requires us to vote some decent people into office *sigh* yes, "just".
Mod parent up!
Most insightful thing I've read on Slashdot in quite some time.
As if cutting/reducing services does not place a burden on its citizens?
If something can be cut without the citizens noticing it, then cut it (regardless of overall financial health, it's just waste).
But most services are there for a reason. It may be a lesser burden (especially if you take the long term view) to raise taxes than to allow certain services to degrade past the point of utility.
Sounds more like a reason not to buy in to the Apple/iOS ecosystem.
Now we are at 13.77B, the next may narrow it down to a date and time...
I bet it was a Monday.
In most democracies there are usually two parties that most people vote for (Both of which are different shades of shit).
Citation needed!
Most (European anyway) democracies are parliamentary democracies with 4-6 major parties plus some number of smaller/fringe parties. Typically, no one party has a majority and coalition governments are the norm.