And of course every time someone levels this criticism it completely ignores the complimentary question: how many hours will a mechanical spinning-platter HD last doing all out full-speed sustained reads and writes 24/7?
At least flash drives have a predictable failure timeline, whereas HDs simply have a vague MTBF and could easily fail much sooner (or much later!) than that.
I could be wrong, but you sound like you're being sarcastic, which is a pretty stupid attitude to have here.
Let's say you have a crappy unoptimized database. You can spend tens of thousands of dollars' worth of programmer time to fix it up and optimize it so that it runs fast on your current hardware. Or you can spend perhaps one tenth of the money to upgrade to a super-fast disk, achieving the same end result. Which one is the smarter move?
It's true that there are downsides to term limits such as you mention, it's just that I and many other people think that they are outweighed by the upsides. It's worthwhile to eliminate the few good career politicians in order to eliminate a whole crowd of bad ones. And for long-term problems, nobody cares about this stuff already, and term limits simply can't make it worse because we're already at the bottom.
Term limits should add to the diversity of the system. Power within a political party mostly goes with the political power given to the individual. This is not 100% true, but generally the most powerful party figures are those who hold high offices. By kicking them out of their political offices after a certain period of time, we'll be greatly curbing their influence within the party, and this in turn will allow the party to better accommodate fresh ideas.
That's just a potentially inadequate point. That's not what "straw man" means. A "straw man" is a very specific logical fallacy which involves responding to an argument which is different from the one which was actually made, generally in order to respond to an argument which is easier to refute.
My understanding of Sterling-cycle engines is that the greater the delta in temperature between the heat source and the heat sink, the greater the efficiency. Mobile applications have only air for a heat sink, and thus are non-ideal.
This is true of any heat engine, not just Stirling engines. If internal combustion engines have done fine with only the air as a heat sink for the past 100 years or so, I don't see why it would suddenly become a show-stopper for a Stirling engine.
As a federal system, the US is considerably more complicated. I honestly don't know exactly how it's set up. There are nationwide federal standards, but they probably aren't comprehensive and won't apply to all roads. Roads are owned/maintained by either the individual states or the individual counties, and sometimes they're built using federal money with certain strings attached like maintaining federal standards on those roads, so you can see where it gets kind of complicated.
Beyond the standards, there's also the enforcement of them. A town might put up a deliberately difficult speed limit change and get away with it because there are no applicable standards which say they can't. Or such a thing might actually be illegal but nobody's enforcing that fact. Either way, you as the driver are screwed.
The US tends to put more power into local governments than many places. This is actually a good thing in many ways, but stupid fee-grabbing town governments are one of the downsides to it.
Supporting a government budget on the basis of fines collected from illegal activities is reprehensible. It's an obvious conflict of interest and I'm frankly amazed that people allow it to be done at all.
Sometimes you can't see the town until you're practically on top of both the town and their deliberately hidden speed limit sign. You consummate asshole.
Those drivers are already ignoring the speed limits anyway, so what purpose do they serve?
Around here, the speed limits on the highways are 55. (In a big city.) Whenever volume hasn't reached the point of causing a jam, the actual speeds vary anywhere from 55-60 in the far right lane to 70-80 in the far left lane. I've never seen the police actually pull anyone over. I've seen them on the side of the road with the lights flashing talking to a driver in another car, so apparently they do pull people over, but I've never seen it actually happen. I can only assume that they don't start pulling people over until past 80 miles per hour.
Given that a huge number of drivers are going 70+, and the police ignore them, what purpose does a 55MPH speed limit on these roads serve?
I'd like to know what area you live in where the precise boundary of a town can be sighted from so far off.
Around where I live, there are these things called hills and trees which often prevent me from sighting a collection of dwellings until I am essentially in it. A drastic change in speed limit with no warning placed in the right location will have me driving at what appears to be a safe speed for conditions and terrain, and suddenly have to heavily brake for the changed speed limit.
If they want to lower the speed limit in town, fine. Post the sign in a place which gives me sufficient warning to slow down smoothly.
You should always be in a position to where you can make a crash stop and come to a halt before hitting anything beyond the current range of your vision. However, a speed limit sign does not merit a crash stop! I should not have to slam on my brakes, cause undue wear and tear to my vehicle, and in traffic risk people behind me not being as prepared as I am to brake just because some small town enjoys fleecing people for speeding fines.
All I can say is that if you're detecting irrationality in the opinions of everybody who strongly disagrees with you, you're using the concept to avoid giving people a fair hearing.
Except that I don't do that. There are plenty of positions which are strongly opposed to mine which, in my opinion, do not involve being irrational. Faulty logic, perhaps, or insufficient information, or even just different priorities, yes. But I do not "detect irrationality in the opinions of everybody who strongly disagrees".
But in this particular case, I detect irrationality because it's there. This really shouldn't be up for debate, IMO. These people have their rational brain held hostage by their emotional brain. Children do that to us. They're designed to. It's in our genes, we really can't avoid it. And it enables all sorts of good survival behavior. But it also means that when somebody's genes makes them unable to see the big picture because they're too focused on their kids, I'm going to call them on it.
I've talked to these people. I've talked facts. I've had them admit that my position is the more rational one, and still not change their minds. I've had them actually tell me that I was being too rational, and that the emotional response that they admitted was wrong from an objective viewpoint was still the correct course of action.
Let me say that again: some of these people who I've talked to have a rational side, are able to comprehend a rational argument, follow my argument and agree with it, and still reject it because they deliberately follow their emotions instead.
So please forgive me if I don't consider their opinions to be the product of rational minds.
Honestly, how am I supposed to discuss things with someone who thinks that this sort of thing is worthwhile? It's like trying to talk sense into a white supremacist. Their position isn't based on rational thinking, and no matter what you say they're never going to be convinced that black people are people.
OK fine, remove the "marginal" from my statement. They want to destroy the foundation of Western freedom and democracy just to increase their kid's safety. Better?
I can disagree with people without belittling them when they have a reasonable position. A lot of people who don't agree with me have reasonable positions. But parents who want to censor the world to protect their children do not. Their position deserves belittlement.
Yeah, they're not nanny statists, they're just incredibly selfish.
What else do you call someone who wants to destroy the foundation of Western democracy and freedom just to make marginal increases in their children's safety?
The universe has no center, as far as is known. Physical laws work the same in any frame of reference. Choosing the Earth as the center of your coordinate system produces results which are just as correct as any other way.
Such a technique makes astronomical objects a lot harder to work with, but that doesn't make it wrong, merely impractical.
Actually a lot of people are bothered by it. The jailbreak community is thriving and doesn't seem to be hurting at all from the introduction of an official store.
They contain delicate electronics which would corrode very rapidly when not taken care of. Furthermore, they contain tritium, which has a very short half life and which must be replenished regularly. After four decades of neglect they will have become useless.
Nuclear bombs aren't an item which you can simply leave on the shelf until you need them. They require constant maintenance and care to remain in working condition.
The problem is that the obligation is getting twisted into "make a profit for shareholders soon", with an almost total lack of concern for the long term.
Apple is actually one of the better companies in this regard, but a lot of companies are running into trouble because they think that shareholder value means pumping up their upcoming Q7 results no matter what.
Slashdot Mirror
And of course every time someone levels this criticism it completely ignores the complimentary question: how many hours will a mechanical spinning-platter HD last doing all out full-speed sustained reads and writes 24/7?
At least flash drives have a predictable failure timeline, whereas HDs simply have a vague MTBF and could easily fail much sooner (or much later!) than that.
I could be wrong, but you sound like you're being sarcastic, which is a pretty stupid attitude to have here.
Let's say you have a crappy unoptimized database. You can spend tens of thousands of dollars' worth of programmer time to fix it up and optimize it so that it runs fast on your current hardware. Or you can spend perhaps one tenth of the money to upgrade to a super-fast disk, achieving the same end result. Which one is the smarter move?
It's true that there are downsides to term limits such as you mention, it's just that I and many other people think that they are outweighed by the upsides. It's worthwhile to eliminate the few good career politicians in order to eliminate a whole crowd of bad ones. And for long-term problems, nobody cares about this stuff already, and term limits simply can't make it worse because we're already at the bottom.
Term limits should add to the diversity of the system. Power within a political party mostly goes with the political power given to the individual. This is not 100% true, but generally the most powerful party figures are those who hold high offices. By kicking them out of their political offices after a certain period of time, we'll be greatly curbing their influence within the party, and this in turn will allow the party to better accommodate fresh ideas.
That's just a potentially inadequate point. That's not what "straw man" means. A "straw man" is a very specific logical fallacy which involves responding to an argument which is different from the one which was actually made, generally in order to respond to an argument which is easier to refute.
My understanding of Sterling-cycle engines is that the greater the delta in temperature between the heat source and the heat sink, the greater the efficiency. Mobile applications have only air for a heat sink, and thus are non-ideal.
This is true of any heat engine, not just Stirling engines. If internal combustion engines have done fine with only the air as a heat sink for the past 100 years or so, I don't see why it would suddenly become a show-stopper for a Stirling engine.
As a federal system, the US is considerably more complicated. I honestly don't know exactly how it's set up. There are nationwide federal standards, but they probably aren't comprehensive and won't apply to all roads. Roads are owned/maintained by either the individual states or the individual counties, and sometimes they're built using federal money with certain strings attached like maintaining federal standards on those roads, so you can see where it gets kind of complicated.
Beyond the standards, there's also the enforcement of them. A town might put up a deliberately difficult speed limit change and get away with it because there are no applicable standards which say they can't. Or such a thing might actually be illegal but nobody's enforcing that fact. Either way, you as the driver are screwed.
The US tends to put more power into local governments than many places. This is actually a good thing in many ways, but stupid fee-grabbing town governments are one of the downsides to it.
And if no autopsies are done to confirm the disease, you know this how? Oh right, it's a wild-all guess dressed up as fact.
Supporting a government budget on the basis of fines collected from illegal activities is reprehensible. It's an obvious conflict of interest and I'm frankly amazed that people allow it to be done at all.
Sometimes you can't see the town until you're practically on top of both the town and their deliberately hidden speed limit sign. You consummate asshole.
Those drivers are already ignoring the speed limits anyway, so what purpose do they serve?
Around here, the speed limits on the highways are 55. (In a big city.) Whenever volume hasn't reached the point of causing a jam, the actual speeds vary anywhere from 55-60 in the far right lane to 70-80 in the far left lane. I've never seen the police actually pull anyone over. I've seen them on the side of the road with the lights flashing talking to a driver in another car, so apparently they do pull people over, but I've never seen it actually happen. I can only assume that they don't start pulling people over until past 80 miles per hour.
Given that a huge number of drivers are going 70+, and the police ignore them, what purpose does a 55MPH speed limit on these roads serve?
I'd like to know what area you live in where the precise boundary of a town can be sighted from so far off.
Around where I live, there are these things called hills and trees which often prevent me from sighting a collection of dwellings until I am essentially in it. A drastic change in speed limit with no warning placed in the right location will have me driving at what appears to be a safe speed for conditions and terrain, and suddenly have to heavily brake for the changed speed limit.
If they want to lower the speed limit in town, fine. Post the sign in a place which gives me sufficient warning to slow down smoothly.
You should always be in a position to where you can make a crash stop and come to a halt before hitting anything beyond the current range of your vision. However, a speed limit sign does not merit a crash stop! I should not have to slam on my brakes, cause undue wear and tear to my vehicle, and in traffic risk people behind me not being as prepared as I am to brake just because some small town enjoys fleecing people for speeding fines.
All I can say is that if you're detecting irrationality in the opinions of everybody who strongly disagrees with you, you're using the concept to avoid giving people a fair hearing.
Except that I don't do that. There are plenty of positions which are strongly opposed to mine which, in my opinion, do not involve being irrational. Faulty logic, perhaps, or insufficient information, or even just different priorities, yes. But I do not "detect irrationality in the opinions of everybody who strongly disagrees".
But in this particular case, I detect irrationality because it's there. This really shouldn't be up for debate, IMO. These people have their rational brain held hostage by their emotional brain. Children do that to us. They're designed to. It's in our genes, we really can't avoid it. And it enables all sorts of good survival behavior. But it also means that when somebody's genes makes them unable to see the big picture because they're too focused on their kids, I'm going to call them on it.
I've talked to these people. I've talked facts. I've had them admit that my position is the more rational one, and still not change their minds. I've had them actually tell me that I was being too rational, and that the emotional response that they admitted was wrong from an objective viewpoint was still the correct course of action.
Let me say that again: some of these people who I've talked to have a rational side, are able to comprehend a rational argument, follow my argument and agree with it, and still reject it because they deliberately follow their emotions instead.
So please forgive me if I don't consider their opinions to be the product of rational minds.
I'm pretty sure that nothing is going to change their minds, so this is no loss.
Honestly, how am I supposed to discuss things with someone who thinks that this sort of thing is worthwhile? It's like trying to talk sense into a white supremacist. Their position isn't based on rational thinking, and no matter what you say they're never going to be convinced that black people are people.
And conversely, static analysis tools often have little trouble finding cases that humans can't find on their own.
They are different. That humans can do things the computer can't currently do is not really very interesting.
OK fine, remove the "marginal" from my statement. They want to destroy the foundation of Western freedom and democracy just to increase their kid's safety. Better?
I can disagree with people without belittling them when they have a reasonable position. A lot of people who don't agree with me have reasonable positions. But parents who want to censor the world to protect their children do not. Their position deserves belittlement.
Yeah, they're not nanny statists, they're just incredibly selfish.
What else do you call someone who wants to destroy the foundation of Western democracy and freedom just to make marginal increases in their children's safety?
With a margin of error of 1%, yes.
There's nothing wrong about geocentrism.
The universe has no center, as far as is known. Physical laws work the same in any frame of reference. Choosing the Earth as the center of your coordinate system produces results which are just as correct as any other way.
Such a technique makes astronomical objects a lot harder to work with, but that doesn't make it wrong, merely impractical.
It's nothing so complex. The reason people do this is simple: people are, for the most part, total idiots and total assholes.
Actually a lot of people are bothered by it. The jailbreak community is thriving and doesn't seem to be hurting at all from the introduction of an official store.
They contain delicate electronics which would corrode very rapidly when not taken care of. Furthermore, they contain tritium, which has a very short half life and which must be replenished regularly. After four decades of neglect they will have become useless.
Nuclear bombs aren't an item which you can simply leave on the shelf until you need them. They require constant maintenance and care to remain in working condition.
Think of it as an implicit endorsement of piracy. If you can't play purchased media on your 100% legitimate hardware, then the choice is clear.
The problem is that the obligation is getting twisted into "make a profit for shareholders soon", with an almost total lack of concern for the long term.
Apple is actually one of the better companies in this regard, but a lot of companies are running into trouble because they think that shareholder value means pumping up their upcoming Q7 results no matter what.