As for Musk, of course, he is a major crony capitalist; his business wouldn't exist without massive government support.
You seem to think that any business which takes advantage of government incentives involves cronyism. You are wrong. Elon Musk is the exact opposite of a crony capitalist. Elon Musk wasn't supposed to happen at all. He grew up in South Africa, and wasn't even a US Citizen until 2002. He had no US cronies whatsoever because he didn't live here, and he had no South African cronies because he was severely bullied as a child, to the point of being thrown down stairs and beaten unconscious. He was beaten by a bully and his cronies, which doesn't happen to people who have cronies of their own.
Elon Musk is an upstart immigrant entrepreneur who succeeded despite the best efforts of the crony capitalists to prevent it. Those automotive incentives Tesla Motors has taken advantage of were meant for GM and Ford, purely as window-dressing. GM and Ford were trying to greenwash themselves, and firmly believed that in their capital-intensive industry no brand new company could possible grow big enough to compete with them and actually qualify for those subsidies. The NTSHA safety testing regime was meant to be too difficult and too expensive for any tiny little startup to afford, let alone pass, let alone pass with a better rating than anything GM or Ford had on the road.
The people who run GM and Ford got together with their friends from prep school (their cronies) who had been elected to government to do a little harmless PR so they could fend off the environmentalist lobby a few more years. They knew no one was going to actually use those incentives because they knew they were the only ones big enough to be able to use them and they had already agreed not to actually use them at all. But it's illegal in the US to pass laws to benefit or harm specifically named entities, be they natural or artificial persons, so the law had to be written nominally generically, as these things always are, but with attempts at specificity that should have excluded anyone but the intended recipients. That's how actual crony capitalism works. Elon Musk was never supposed to be able to use that money, and especially not to use that money to prove that GM and Ford are liars when they had spent the previous three decades claiming it's impossible to make an electric car people would want to buy.
It's even worse with SpaceX. Before the creation of SpaceX, the United Launch Alliance was an illegal monopoly launch provider who had managed to push the price of a single rocket launch up to nearly half a billion dollars, so far in excess of actual expenses as to be ludicrous, and effectively affordable only by the US government. When SpaceX got permission to launch their first Falcon 1 rocket from Vandenberg, ULA intentionally delayed the launch of a Titan IV they had on a nearby pad for more than a year, trying to starve SpaceX out. Elon Musk figured it out, took down his rocket, stuffed it into an airplane, and flew it to the Kwajalein Atoll in the South Pacific to use the launch range there, which was too small for Titans and mostly ignored by ULA, and so safe from their machinations. To that point, Elon Musk had spent $90 million of his own money and $0 of any government money to develop the rocket.
The first Falcon launches were paid for by DARPA under a program to test new entrants into the market, but they paid only for the launches, not for the development of the rocket. And again, that program was never supposed to be used. ULA didn't qualify for it and knew that no one was going to challenge them in an extremely tightly regulated and capital intensive market. They let that program be created so they would have something to point to when people like me accused them of being an illegal monopoly. No one was ever supposed to use that money. Their cronies in government had assured them that no one could.
Over-represented in the House? How is that even possible?
Gerrymandering of state voting districts where left-leaning regions are carefully split up into chunks small enough to be grouped with right-leaning regions (usually rural) that just slightly outnumber them in terms of likely voters. A huge swath of suburban America has been effectively disenfranchised this way, unable to elect a House representative that actually represents their views. Only city centers are densely left-leaning enough to preclude such shenanigans. It's gotten so bad that voting districts in some states are actually discontiguous in order to overwhelm the left-leaning vote.
I might even drop to one set of clothing and pajamas if I could launder every night. Such a machine could create a huge change in the way people view clothing ownership/shopping.
You don't have a lot of contact with women, do you...
But what happens in 12 months? 24 months? The distribution needs to be maintained and updated and that takes resources and costs money. The business model will become stretched to include that indefinitely, so the only practical way is to use subscriptions, which many don't like.
I have a vague recollection of a company covered here on Slashdot that tried to do this by selling preconfigured hardware, a true turnkey solution. Profit margins on the gear was supposed to fund ongoing software maintenance, together with leveraging existing supported projects like ownCloud.
It sounded like a good idea and a viable business plan. Evidently it wasn't, because I've been unable to unearth any hint of its existence in my searches today.
As is so frequently the case, you're trying to solve a social problem with a purely technical solution. Would such a device work? Of course. Would many of the dozens of existing router products work, if properly configured? Yes. Does any of this matter? No. People don't care what devices on their network are doing as long as they appear to mostly be doing what they want. If they're doing other things, people are completely oblivious, and get petulant if you point out their ignorance.
The only market-driven solution is for Apple to make an IoT router and instruct all their fanboys to buy it for $400. ($600 for the gigabit capable one.)
The only real solution is the same as for every other tragedy of the commons. But that requires a competent legislature interested in doing its job, rather than a rabble of moronic sycophants of industry only competent at being elected.
Everyone and everything that defines her sense of happiness now will likely be dead and gone or so evolved that it is unrecognizable (like tech and hobbies).
We'll always have '80s music.
They'll call it 'classical' in 5 generations, but they'll play it.
It'll be interesting when the first shingle gets dropped by the installer, slides down the roof, and shatters when it lands in my garden leaving an infinite number of pieces of glass.
If it actually does land in your garden and not on a sidewalk, odds are it won't even chip, let alone shatter. Tempered glass is quite tough, and these tiles are as tough as needed to stand up to wind-driven hail stones. Simply being dropped into bushes or bare earth is unlikely to break one.
Of course. Same way you would for a slate or terra cotta roof. Which is to say, you mount it on the sub-roof and surround the mount point with the tiles. Very likely they will provide a mount point that is an integral tile size, with compatible edging. They'd be stupid not to.
My slate roof is nearly 70 years old now and still going strong. Should easily last another 70 and certainly till I am dead and buried.
Glass is exceedingly stable too. Very likely a tempered glass roof will also last 140 years. Their electricity output will probably be pitiful at the end of that time, but there's no reason for the material itself to have failed, any more than your slate will. The same sort of maintenance would keep the roof perfectly functional for its primary purpose—keeping the rain off.
That said, I was asking "half-life", every thing I read says they lose 20%+ efficiency in 10 years.
The other responder corrected the raw numbers but left out another important thing. Solar panels don't have a linear "half-life". They degrade somewhat linearly for the first 10-20 years but then it starts to level off. Eventually they stop degrading almost entirely. A coworker at a former job had some panels from the 80s that hadn't changed their output in a decade, at least not measurably. Modern panels are expected to exhibit the same behavior, while leveling off at a higher percentage of their original efficiency. Of course that hasn't been proven outside of accelerated aging experiments since modern panels simply aren't old enough yet, but it's likely to be true.
Yeah, the Tesla beats me to 60, but my 17 year old 911 smokes it 1 minute later when the Tesla battery dies. Tesla can't make a single lap around VIR, Car & Driver tried at the behest of fans and it went into limp mode and the brakes went soft and dangerous. It's a toy.
Good grief, it's a 7 passenger sedan. The fact that it could stay on pace with a Hellcat at all is outrageous. It's not a toy—it's a family car. Your 911 is a TOY.
Yeesh. You people.
Yes, it's just marketing. Of course it's marketing. But after 100 years of lies from internal combustion manufacturers, electric cars need some marketing.
I bought an electric lawnmower this year, which radically reduces my emissions of noxious fumes. What have you done, Internet Warrior?
I'm not sure I could cope with such a huge change in my lifestyle...
Sarcasm noted.
...so I make do with driving considerably less and walking much more...
As do I.
...growing as much of my own food as possible (with no added chemical inputs)...
That I don't do. My property is covered in trees.
...recycling approx 95% of everything I use / buy...
Same here. I don't even have trash service. Don't need it.
... and wearing an extra layer of clothing rather than putting the heating on when it's "slightly chilly".
That I've been doing since I was a child, a habit learned from my parents. I take it a bit further than they did—I've gone whole winters without turning on the heat, and it snows here.
He didn't manage to finish his VR swordfighting program, but somebody created Earth for him. Now all it needs is live data feeds of human movements from the CIA to be complete.
YOur issue is a non-issue. Human civilization began and has flourished in a fairly narrow band of climatological conditions. While, in the space of geological time, those conditions will change, the nice about geological time is that it is a LONG FUCKING TIME. What we're doing now is leading to major climactic changes in a very SHORT FUCKING TIME.
Which could have happened before. Probably happened before. If the theories about methane and permafrost are true, definitely happened before, and without human intervention, and on a far grander scale than any human affect so far. But we have zero evidence either way. Proxies more than a thousand years old simply don't have the granularity to show changes on the order of decades. This lovely XKCD is totally deceptive because it hides any and all fluctuations in the historical record that were on the order of the current fluctuation because they're invisible. No proxy can reconstruct them. The only one we can see is the current one. We have no proof whatsoever that it's unique. None.
Otherwise all your advocating is we fuck over our grandchildren because we're too stupid and evil and selfish to work towards the solution now.
Do you hate the future that much? Do your kids fill you with such loathing that you would just dispense with their welfare and pretend we can do nothing? What the fuck is wrong with you?
Hyperbole. Useless, stupid, blind, overblown, absurdly ridiculous hyperbole. A trend that's a mere few decades old doesn't even qualify as a change in climate. It's fucking weather. A trend, but still weather. Humanity has existed in a more or less recognizable form for 100,000 years. We survived the onset of an Ice Age. (Barely.) That is climate change. We survived the aftermath of the Ice Age. Flooding like you would not believe. (Possibly the origin of the pervasive Flood myths in human cultures the world over.) That is climate change. Oh, the snow is a two weeks late in Minnesota? Stop whining, asshole.
It's people like you that inspire climate change denial, in precisely the same way your political counterparts inspired Trump supporters. You rant and you rave, you attack and you berate, because you've internalized hysterical media that bears no fucking resemblance to the considered opinions of actual climate scientists. No, he doesn't hate his kids or yours, and you're a shithead for suggesting it.
You're a fucking End Times lunatic who has just picked a different hobby horse than the usual Second Coming bullshit, and you have just as much credibility. Take off the strap sandals and the white toga, put down your picket sign, shave off that scraggly-ass beard, and rejoin reality.
No, everything that humanity cares about will not flood. No, storm damage will not become universally catastrophic the world over. No, wildfires will not wipe out every forest on Earth. No, giant deserts will not form in the most inconvenient places possible and wipe out all food production. This is not the end of the world, no matter how much you might wish it. This is barely even NOTICEABLE .
Do you not get that? The changes are argued about because they're TINY. Within the margin of error of thermometer accuracy for any given year. There is no catastrophe to masturbate over here. They're having to wear jackets in Virginia this week, when they used to be in shirt sleeves. Boohoo. They're not wearing jackets in Minnesota yet this week. Boohoo. Get over yourself. The world will continue spinning, warm and green and fertile and habitable, long after your panic-stricken self is dead. We'll make adjustments as we go, and as needed.
I bought an electric lawnmower this year, which radically reduces my emissions of noxious fumes. What have you done, Internet Warrior?
I'm going to assume this is going to be a "Based On The Novel By" kind of thing, where they basically have a couple of plot elements from the book and nothing more.
You'll be lucky to get that much. (I say "you" because I don't have cable.) Unlike the other responder, I think the telekinetic sex cult chapters translate fine to TV. HBO though, not a basic cable channel. So they won't. This is going to be one of those adaptations where they keep some of the character names, and basically none of the plot. And they'll introduce spurious characters demanded by marketing. And the named characters will not resemble the book characters either physically or behaviorally. It's going to be a travesty.
and last year saw several record setting typhoons, that are ignored by the fallacious statement about hurricanes, including the Cyclone Chapala, the 2nd strongest cyclone ever recorded in the Arabian Sea, and the first to ever make landfall on the Arabian peninsula in Yemen.
So you're saying that Yemen got much more rainfall than normal and is likely to continue to? It's a desert, ya know. Now we know why Saudi Arabia is pumping oil just as fast as they can—they're trying to improve their climate and that of their neighbors.
The fancy doors added to the wow factor of the Model X. But they didn't deliver any utility, which is the point of an SUV.
Sure they did. They added the utility of being able to get in and out of the vehicle is those absolutely ridiculous California shopping mall parking lots with parking slots 3" wider than your car.
It's a case of design myopia. They solved a problem that's very near to them, and irrelevant to most of the rest of the country.
We need to look for changes that'll work...stop farming cows, for example. We can all, quite easily, give up beef and cow-milk.
What nonsense. Less than 300 years ago, North America was home to upwards of 30 million bison. Animals which have digestive systems quite similar to domestic cattle, so they produce similar amounts of methane by weight, and bison average some 30% heavier than your typical beef cattle breed. There are approximately 102 million cattle in the US and Canada. These numbers aren't anything like planet-destroying. A factor of three in bovine populations doesn't change the balance of the Earth so dramatically that it's anything to worry about.
There is no day/night arbitrage for residential customers.
Yes there is. And not just in California or the Southwest. I'm in the Midwest, and my daytime price is 9.45 cents per KWh while my nighttime price is 7.5 cents per KWh.
Of course with prices like that, I'll be one of the last customers in the country for which a Tesla Powerwall makes economic sense. Still, I could arbitrage.
Star Trek depicted a future where humans overcame sexism, racism, homophobia...
Yes, it did. By depicting those things as non-issues. Everyone on the bridge of the TOS Enterprise completely ignored the color of Uhura's skin. It wasn't relevant. That's how a non-racist society behaves.
SJWs are busily inventing new racism and sexism, constantly. Rather than ignoring race or gender in a person, it's the only thing that matters about the person. It's so fantastically wrong-headed, it'd be funny if it wasn't fucking up an entire generation, and an entire generation of entertainment.
I mean hey, primates rule the planet now, but its okay if a mass extinction wipes us all out, so long as some squirrel monkeys somewhere manage to survive the catastrophe, right?
Who needs squirrel monkeys? The raccoons have got this. Omnivorous, food hygiene practitioners, small-group socializers, long-lived (20 years), clever enough to open screw top jars and operate door knobs, currently exhibiting broad habitat adaptability, with agile paws and a highly developed sense of touch, raccoons stand a good chance of evolving into Earth's next sapient species if Earth's current sapient species suffers a mischief.
In any case, note that this issue is quite irrelevant to me. IMO, it isn’t more than wrong assumptions over lies over disproportionate extrapolations over nonsensical general ideas over unrealistic expectations, etc. (= manned trip to Mars and all what it entails). Thus, even in case of considering that our positions were close enough to have a fruitful conversation, I might have made the same decision.
So, why do you read Slashdot? The Apple News? The Hillary News?
Line of sight. 60 GHz stops dead when it runs into anything solid, including cloth. It's attenuated by the oxygen in air, but air being mostly nitrogen, the effect isn't too terrible. Mostly it's short range because it can't go through walls, can't go through a desk, can't go through a monitor, can't go through a couch.
Slashdot Mirror
As for Musk, of course, he is a major crony capitalist; his business wouldn't exist without massive government support.
You seem to think that any business which takes advantage of government incentives involves cronyism. You are wrong. Elon Musk is the exact opposite of a crony capitalist. Elon Musk wasn't supposed to happen at all. He grew up in South Africa, and wasn't even a US Citizen until 2002. He had no US cronies whatsoever because he didn't live here, and he had no South African cronies because he was severely bullied as a child, to the point of being thrown down stairs and beaten unconscious. He was beaten by a bully and his cronies, which doesn't happen to people who have cronies of their own.
Elon Musk is an upstart immigrant entrepreneur who succeeded despite the best efforts of the crony capitalists to prevent it. Those automotive incentives Tesla Motors has taken advantage of were meant for GM and Ford, purely as window-dressing. GM and Ford were trying to greenwash themselves, and firmly believed that in their capital-intensive industry no brand new company could possible grow big enough to compete with them and actually qualify for those subsidies. The NTSHA safety testing regime was meant to be too difficult and too expensive for any tiny little startup to afford, let alone pass, let alone pass with a better rating than anything GM or Ford had on the road.
The people who run GM and Ford got together with their friends from prep school (their cronies) who had been elected to government to do a little harmless PR so they could fend off the environmentalist lobby a few more years. They knew no one was going to actually use those incentives because they knew they were the only ones big enough to be able to use them and they had already agreed not to actually use them at all. But it's illegal in the US to pass laws to benefit or harm specifically named entities, be they natural or artificial persons, so the law had to be written nominally generically, as these things always are, but with attempts at specificity that should have excluded anyone but the intended recipients. That's how actual crony capitalism works. Elon Musk was never supposed to be able to use that money, and especially not to use that money to prove that GM and Ford are liars when they had spent the previous three decades claiming it's impossible to make an electric car people would want to buy.
It's even worse with SpaceX. Before the creation of SpaceX, the United Launch Alliance was an illegal monopoly launch provider who had managed to push the price of a single rocket launch up to nearly half a billion dollars, so far in excess of actual expenses as to be ludicrous, and effectively affordable only by the US government. When SpaceX got permission to launch their first Falcon 1 rocket from Vandenberg, ULA intentionally delayed the launch of a Titan IV they had on a nearby pad for more than a year, trying to starve SpaceX out. Elon Musk figured it out, took down his rocket, stuffed it into an airplane, and flew it to the Kwajalein Atoll in the South Pacific to use the launch range there, which was too small for Titans and mostly ignored by ULA, and so safe from their machinations. To that point, Elon Musk had spent $90 million of his own money and $0 of any government money to develop the rocket.
The first Falcon launches were paid for by DARPA under a program to test new entrants into the market, but they paid only for the launches, not for the development of the rocket. And again, that program was never supposed to be used. ULA didn't qualify for it and knew that no one was going to challenge them in an extremely tightly regulated and capital intensive market. They let that program be created so they would have something to point to when people like me accused them of being an illegal monopoly. No one was ever supposed to use that money. Their cronies in government had assured them that no one could.
You know the word Lügenpresse but you don't know that MSM means Main-Stream Media? Really?
He was referring to MSNBC in a back-handed way.
Over-represented in the House? How is that even possible?
Gerrymandering of state voting districts where left-leaning regions are carefully split up into chunks small enough to be grouped with right-leaning regions (usually rural) that just slightly outnumber them in terms of likely voters. A huge swath of suburban America has been effectively disenfranchised this way, unable to elect a House representative that actually represents their views. Only city centers are densely left-leaning enough to preclude such shenanigans. It's gotten so bad that voting districts in some states are actually discontiguous in order to overwhelm the left-leaning vote.
I might even drop to one set of clothing and pajamas if I could launder every night. Such a machine could create a huge change in the way people view clothing ownership/shopping.
You don't have a lot of contact with women, do you...
But what happens in 12 months? 24 months? The distribution needs to be maintained and updated and that takes resources and costs money. The business model will become stretched to include that indefinitely, so the only practical way is to use subscriptions, which many don't like.
I have a vague recollection of a company covered here on Slashdot that tried to do this by selling preconfigured hardware, a true turnkey solution. Profit margins on the gear was supposed to fund ongoing software maintenance, together with leveraging existing supported projects like ownCloud.
It sounded like a good idea and a viable business plan. Evidently it wasn't, because I've been unable to unearth any hint of its existence in my searches today.
Might have been just a proposal.
As is so frequently the case, you're trying to solve a social problem with a purely technical solution. Would such a device work? Of course. Would many of the dozens of existing router products work, if properly configured? Yes. Does any of this matter? No. People don't care what devices on their network are doing as long as they appear to mostly be doing what they want. If they're doing other things, people are completely oblivious, and get petulant if you point out their ignorance.
The only market-driven solution is for Apple to make an IoT router and instruct all their fanboys to buy it for $400. ($600 for the gigabit capable one.)
The only real solution is the same as for every other tragedy of the commons. But that requires a competent legislature interested in doing its job, rather than a rabble of moronic sycophants of industry only competent at being elected.
Everyone and everything that defines her sense of happiness now will likely be dead and gone or so evolved that it is unrecognizable (like tech and hobbies).
We'll always have '80s music.
They'll call it 'classical' in 5 generations, but they'll play it.
It'll be interesting when the first shingle gets dropped by the installer, slides down the roof, and shatters when it lands in my garden leaving an infinite number of pieces of glass.
If it actually does land in your garden and not on a sidewalk, odds are it won't even chip, let alone shatter. Tempered glass is quite tough, and these tiles are as tough as needed to stand up to wind-driven hail stones. Simply being dropped into bushes or bare earth is unlikely to break one.
Can you mount a satellite dish on them?
Of course. Same way you would for a slate or terra cotta roof. Which is to say, you mount it on the sub-roof and surround the mount point with the tiles. Very likely they will provide a mount point that is an integral tile size, with compatible edging. They'd be stupid not to.
My slate roof is nearly 70 years old now and still going strong. Should easily last another 70 and certainly till I am dead and buried.
Glass is exceedingly stable too. Very likely a tempered glass roof will also last 140 years. Their electricity output will probably be pitiful at the end of that time, but there's no reason for the material itself to have failed, any more than your slate will. The same sort of maintenance would keep the roof perfectly functional for its primary purpose—keeping the rain off.
That said, I was asking "half-life", every thing I read says they lose 20%+ efficiency in 10 years.
The other responder corrected the raw numbers but left out another important thing. Solar panels don't have a linear "half-life". They degrade somewhat linearly for the first 10-20 years but then it starts to level off. Eventually they stop degrading almost entirely. A coworker at a former job had some panels from the 80s that hadn't changed their output in a decade, at least not measurably. Modern panels are expected to exhibit the same behavior, while leveling off at a higher percentage of their original efficiency. Of course that hasn't been proven outside of accelerated aging experiments since modern panels simply aren't old enough yet, but it's likely to be true.
Yeah, the Tesla beats me to 60, but my 17 year old 911 smokes it 1 minute later when the Tesla battery dies. Tesla can't make a single lap around VIR, Car & Driver tried at the behest of fans and it went into limp mode and the brakes went soft and dangerous. It's a toy.
Good grief, it's a 7 passenger sedan. The fact that it could stay on pace with a Hellcat at all is outrageous. It's not a toy—it's a family car. Your 911 is a TOY.
Yeesh. You people.
Yes, it's just marketing. Of course it's marketing. But after 100 years of lies from internal combustion manufacturers, electric cars need some marketing.
I bought an electric lawnmower this year, which radically reduces my emissions of noxious fumes. What have you done, Internet Warrior?
I'm not sure I could cope with such a huge change in my lifestyle...
Sarcasm noted.
...so I make do with driving considerably less and walking much more...
As do I.
...growing as much of my own food as possible (with no added chemical inputs)...
That I don't do. My property is covered in trees.
...recycling approx 95% of everything I use / buy...
Same here. I don't even have trash service. Don't need it.
... and wearing an extra layer of clothing rather than putting the heating on when it's "slightly chilly".
That I've been doing since I was a child, a habit learned from my parents. I take it a bit further than they did—I've gone whole winters without turning on the heat, and it snows here.
Each to their own I guess.
Indeed.
He didn't manage to finish his VR swordfighting program, but somebody created Earth for him. Now all it needs is live data feeds of human movements from the CIA to be complete.
YOur issue is a non-issue. Human civilization began and has flourished in a fairly narrow band of climatological conditions. While, in the space of geological time, those conditions will change, the nice about geological time is that it is a LONG FUCKING TIME. What we're doing now is leading to major climactic changes in a very SHORT FUCKING TIME.
Which could have happened before. Probably happened before. If the theories about methane and permafrost are true, definitely happened before, and without human intervention, and on a far grander scale than any human affect so far. But we have zero evidence either way. Proxies more than a thousand years old simply don't have the granularity to show changes on the order of decades. This lovely XKCD is totally deceptive because it hides any and all fluctuations in the historical record that were on the order of the current fluctuation because they're invisible. No proxy can reconstruct them. The only one we can see is the current one. We have no proof whatsoever that it's unique. None.
Otherwise all your advocating is we fuck over our grandchildren because we're too stupid and evil and selfish to work towards the solution now.
Do you hate the future that much? Do your kids fill you with such loathing that you would just dispense with their welfare and pretend we can do nothing? What the fuck is wrong with you?
Hyperbole. Useless, stupid, blind, overblown, absurdly ridiculous hyperbole. A trend that's a mere few decades old doesn't even qualify as a change in climate. It's fucking weather. A trend, but still weather. Humanity has existed in a more or less recognizable form for 100,000 years. We survived the onset of an Ice Age. (Barely.) That is climate change. We survived the aftermath of the Ice Age. Flooding like you would not believe. (Possibly the origin of the pervasive Flood myths in human cultures the world over.) That is climate change. Oh, the snow is a two weeks late in Minnesota? Stop whining, asshole.
It's people like you that inspire climate change denial, in precisely the same way your political counterparts inspired Trump supporters. You rant and you rave, you attack and you berate, because you've internalized hysterical media that bears no fucking resemblance to the considered opinions of actual climate scientists. No, he doesn't hate his kids or yours, and you're a shithead for suggesting it.
You're a fucking End Times lunatic who has just picked a different hobby horse than the usual Second Coming bullshit, and you have just as much credibility. Take off the strap sandals and the white toga, put down your picket sign, shave off that scraggly-ass beard, and rejoin reality.
No, everything that humanity cares about will not flood. No, storm damage will not become universally catastrophic the world over. No, wildfires will not wipe out every forest on Earth. No, giant deserts will not form in the most inconvenient places possible and wipe out all food production. This is not the end of the world, no matter how much you might wish it. This is barely even NOTICEABLE .
Do you not get that? The changes are argued about because they're TINY. Within the margin of error of thermometer accuracy for any given year. There is no catastrophe to masturbate over here. They're having to wear jackets in Virginia this week, when they used to be in shirt sleeves. Boohoo. They're not wearing jackets in Minnesota yet this week. Boohoo. Get over yourself. The world will continue spinning, warm and green and fertile and habitable, long after your panic-stricken self is dead. We'll make adjustments as we go, and as needed.
I bought an electric lawnmower this year, which radically reduces my emissions of noxious fumes. What have you done, Internet Warrior?
I'm going to assume this is going to be a "Based On The Novel By" kind of thing, where they basically have a couple of plot elements from the book and nothing more.
You'll be lucky to get that much. (I say "you" because I don't have cable.) Unlike the other responder, I think the telekinetic sex cult chapters translate fine to TV. HBO though, not a basic cable channel. So they won't. This is going to be one of those adaptations where they keep some of the character names, and basically none of the plot. And they'll introduce spurious characters demanded by marketing. And the named characters will not resemble the book characters either physically or behaviorally. It's going to be a travesty.
and last year saw several record setting typhoons, that are ignored by the fallacious statement about hurricanes, including the Cyclone Chapala, the 2nd strongest cyclone ever recorded in the Arabian Sea, and the first to ever make landfall on the Arabian peninsula in Yemen.
So you're saying that Yemen got much more rainfall than normal and is likely to continue to? It's a desert, ya know. Now we know why Saudi Arabia is pumping oil just as fast as they can—they're trying to improve their climate and that of their neighbors.
The fancy doors added to the wow factor of the Model X. But they didn't deliver any utility, which is the point of an SUV.
Sure they did. They added the utility of being able to get in and out of the vehicle is those absolutely ridiculous California shopping mall parking lots with parking slots 3" wider than your car.
It's a case of design myopia. They solved a problem that's very near to them, and irrelevant to most of the rest of the country.
We need to look for changes that'll work...stop farming cows, for example. We can all, quite easily, give up beef and cow-milk.
What nonsense. Less than 300 years ago, North America was home to upwards of 30 million bison. Animals which have digestive systems quite similar to domestic cattle, so they produce similar amounts of methane by weight, and bison average some 30% heavier than your typical beef cattle breed. There are approximately 102 million cattle in the US and Canada. These numbers aren't anything like planet-destroying. A factor of three in bovine populations doesn't change the balance of the Earth so dramatically that it's anything to worry about.
There is no day/night arbitrage for residential customers.
Yes there is. And not just in California or the Southwest. I'm in the Midwest, and my daytime price is 9.45 cents per KWh while my nighttime price is 7.5 cents per KWh.
Of course with prices like that, I'll be one of the last customers in the country for which a Tesla Powerwall makes economic sense. Still, I could arbitrage.
Star Trek depicted a future where humans overcame sexism, racism, homophobia...
Yes, it did. By depicting those things as non-issues. Everyone on the bridge of the TOS Enterprise completely ignored the color of Uhura's skin. It wasn't relevant. That's how a non-racist society behaves.
SJWs are busily inventing new racism and sexism, constantly. Rather than ignoring race or gender in a person, it's the only thing that matters about the person. It's so fantastically wrong-headed, it'd be funny if it wasn't fucking up an entire generation, and an entire generation of entertainment.
I mean hey, primates rule the planet now, but its okay if a mass extinction wipes us all out, so long as some squirrel monkeys somewhere manage to survive the catastrophe, right?
Who needs squirrel monkeys? The raccoons have got this. Omnivorous, food hygiene practitioners, small-group socializers, long-lived (20 years), clever enough to open screw top jars and operate door knobs, currently exhibiting broad habitat adaptability, with agile paws and a highly developed sense of touch, raccoons stand a good chance of evolving into Earth's next sapient species if Earth's current sapient species suffers a mischief.
In any case, note that this issue is quite irrelevant to me. IMO, it isn’t more than wrong assumptions over lies over disproportionate extrapolations over nonsensical general ideas over unrealistic expectations, etc. (= manned trip to Mars and all what it entails). Thus, even in case of considering that our positions were close enough to have a fruitful conversation, I might have made the same decision.
So, why do you read Slashdot? The Apple News? The Hillary News?
Why do you need 32 GB?
Google Chrome.
What, you think anybody uses Safari? On purpose?
Ok, I'll bite. How far is "short range"?
Line of sight. 60 GHz stops dead when it runs into anything solid, including cloth. It's attenuated by the oxygen in air, but air being mostly nitrogen, the effect isn't too terrible. Mostly it's short range because it can't go through walls, can't go through a desk, can't go through a monitor, can't go through a couch.