And yet 747s are the most efficient known method for moving people from place to place. Funny how that works.
If you're speaking strictly of fuel efficiency, then bullshit. A 747 cruises at 650 mph. The highest number of seats currently in use on a 747 is 587 (most 747s have fewer seats due to first and business classes). This gives a maximum of 381,550 passenger miles per hour (source: Wikipedia).
My Corolla, on the other hand, gets between 37 and 40 miles per gallon on the highway. Since we packed 'em in like sardines on the jet, we might as well do the same for the car and stick five people in there. At the low end of the mileage range, that's 185 passenger miles per gallon. Pretty amazing feat Toyota has pulled off, eh? Almost doubling the efficiency of the most efficient mode of transportation ever conceived!
Even taking account the fact that a road route is longer than a great circle route, the car is still more efficient (15 gallons per passenger for the car, 24 for the 747 from JFK to LAX).
And if I recall correctly, trains are quite a bit more efficient than cars.
Now if you want to take time into account, or the infrastructure required to build a road/railroad across the country, then it's a slightly different story. But since the GP wasn't talking about those, it's a bit irrelevant.
If you don't see the connection between {needing padded shorts} and {upright bikes being uncomfortable to ride} then there's not a lot left that I can argue I guess.
I don't care if an upright is uncomfortable without padded shorts. I wear padded shorts and it's comfortable. The fact that it's uncomfortable without the shorts isn't all that telling - grabbing a hot pan is uncomfortable without using a potholder, but is perfectly fine with one. Likewise an upright for me.
And yes--compared to riding most recumbents--riding an upright bike is torture
Since you're using the word torture, your experiences don't match mine. Based on my experience, I wouldn't call riding an upright torture compared to anything. Again, I don't doubt a recumbent is more comfortable. But torture? Not for me.
How many pairs of padded riding shorts do you own?
I'm not entirely sure why that's relevant. I never said it was comfortable to ride without padded shorts. With them, I don't have pain or discomfort.
Look, all I'm saying is that your post made it sound as though riding an upright is the most uncomfortable thing in the world, that it's torture. Either you're exaggerating, or your experiences don't match mine.
Upright defenders tend to forget that people who spend money on recumbents nearly-always used to spend money on nice upright bikes; we know what it feels like to ride uprights.
No, you know what YOU feel like to ride an upright. You don't know what it feels like for ME to ride an upright. I don't get neck pain. I don't get hand pain or numbness. And my butt doesn't hurt (at least after the second ride of the season). And yes, I've spent a lot of time on a bike (my longest day is 130 miles, so I'm not talking about little 15 minute jaunts). You make it sound like it's torture to ride an upright. While I don't disagree that a recumbent is probably more comfortable, I read your post scratching my head thinking "huh... I don't have that problem".
This is the same reason that women get lower rates; they drive less than men.
Women get lower rates because the accidents they get into are likely to be fender-benders with small amounts of property damage and minor (if any) injuries. Men, on the other hand, get into their souped-up cars and drive at some absurd speed, crashing into thirteen cars and a few telephone poles before finally coming to a stop, having caused life-threatening injuries to a dozen people. And killing himself, of course, which is very ironic because he is, after all, invincible.
I drove 30,000 miles last year without a single accident.
Uhhh... is this cause for celebration? Seriously, 30,000 miles without an accident isn't much of an accomplishment. The U.S. accident rate is somewhere around 450,000 vehicle miles per accident (source).
If, for example, I got rearended myself and hit the car in front of me from the momentum, the second accident is my fault because I was "following too closely".
Not true. I contacted my insurance company's claims department and asked them this question after someone tried to tell me this. The claims person said it would be the fault of the driver that hit you. Which makes sense because for just about any distance you leave between you and the car in front of you, a car could rear-end you going fast enough to force you into the car in front of you.
What he specifically said is that there is always question in such a case as to whether the middle car rear-ended the lead car then got rear-ended himself, vs. the middle car getting rear-ended and forced into the lead car. He said they ask the lead driver if he felt one or two impacts. If one, its the latter case, and the rear car is at fault for both. If two, it's the former, and two drivers are at fault.
Many kids are growing up right now with no sense of trust
On a semi-related note, when did this whole "never talk to strangers" and "stranger danger" BS start? What a load of crap. Kids are more likely to get kidnapped/molested/whatever by someone they know than some random schmuck on the street.
No wonder everyone is so anti-social, when we had it hammered into our heads growing up that strangers are mean and scary.
You do realize that there are other people in the world besides yourself, right? And that those people have rights too? I have a right to swing my arms any way I want. This is so intrinsic and self-evident that the founders didn't feel the need to enumerate it as a right in the Constitution. But my right to swing my arms ends at someone else's nose. Likewise yelling fire. I have a right to speak what I want. I don't have a right to make a theater full of people run for their lives, potentially causing serious injury to one another. I don't think any reasonable person, even the founding fathers that wrote the amendment to begin with, would believe that this type of speech is protected.
And besides, there is no law specifically against yelling fire in a crowded theater. Most likely it would fall under disorderly conduct, false reporting, or something like that.
Next you're going to tell us that libel should be allowed because the Constitution guarantees freedom of the press.
Woops, now it's just a cartoon that's already been colored. Well, you get the idea.
At least you recognize that what you accomplished in two steps is not the same thing as what the OP accomplished in four. He took the color out. You didn't. I bet I can make the GIMP do in 1 step something that takes Photoshop a dozen, as long as they're two different things.
And as another poster mentioned, Photoshop isn't anywhere near 5 grand. In fact, the OP's method can be done with Elements, which comes free with a lot of cameras.
so in other words, in order for them to continue to provide a service to you,
Allowing me to update the software so that it behaves the way I had a reasonable expectation to believe it behaved when I purchased it is arguably not a service. When security flaws allow attackers to take over my computer, one could argue that Microsoft would be negligent by not fixing the flaws.
you must have originally purchased the software i nthe first place?
I DID purchase the software in the first place, thank you very much. But it's a little grating to constantly have Microsoft demanding proof that I did. As another poster said, I don't appreciate being made to feel as though I'm a criminal.
minus problems with false authentication, etc, what's the issue?
It phones home, for one thing. Without telling you it's going to do it.
Clear notice that this was an optional install. I could have elected not to install it and had my machine function as before.
Let's see... I just ran Microsoft Update, then I clicked "Custom". It tells me:
To use Microsoft Update, you must first install the latest version of some Windows components. This will allow your computer to work with these new features on the site:
More updates: Get updates for Windows and for popular Microsoft programs such as Microsoft Office in one place.
Faster updates: The latest Windows Installer (MSI) improves the way updates are installed, delivering updates in the smallest possible packages in the shortest amount of time.
Easier navigation: Now you can find updates by priority or by product while helpful links and important messages help ensure you are installing all high-priority updates for your computer.
No mention of WGA. So I click "Details" and lo and behold, it's the WGA Validation Tool that I must install. My only option is "Download and Install Now". There is no skip, ignore, anything. So as far as I can tell, in order to continue receiving updates, I must install this spyware. I don't feel that that qualifies as an "optional" install.
find it distressing that the CDC report is no more specific than 'significant' on the effects of secondhand smoke.... It spends a lot of effort talking about the bad things in smoke, but very little backing that up with Cancer rates and the like.
Did you even read the report? Try chapter 7. In particular, the section about lung cancer. How about this bit:
A total of eight cohort studies have evaluated secondhand smoke and the risk of lung cancer... All of the studies reported a higher risk among women whose husbands smoked than among women whose husbands did not smoke. The RR [relative risk; 1.0 being women whose husbands did not smoke] ranged from 1.18 to 2.02 among women whose husbands smoked.
Or on workplace smoke:
[The] effect of secondhand smoke exposure in the workplace on the risk of lung cancer among lifetime nonsmokers is remarkably consistent. On the basis of these 25 studies, the pooled RR estimate
associated with reported workplace secondhand smoke exposure was 1.22.
And on and on and on. The data is all there, including references to the studies from which the conclusions are drawn.
To me, it's a mild irritant, nothing more.
For some reason I have more faith in the Surgeon General and the CDC than some random Slashdot user.
Or, if you prefer it straight from the Surgeon General himself, you can go to the report on the CDC website.
Or, I can just provide an excerpt from the press release:
U.S. Surgeon General Richard H. Carmona today issued a comprehensive scientific report which concludes that there is no risk-free level of exposure to secondhand smoke.... "The scientific evidence is now indisputable: secondhand smoke is not a mere annoyance. It is a serious health hazard that can lead to disease and premature death in children and nonsmoking adults," [Carmona said].
But does it take a concious effort on the part of the recipient to receive this font? So, for example, if someone sends me a document and embeds one of these fonts into it, am I going to have any idea that it's there?
another poster trying to argue your side already made the laughable claim that the fraction of 1 percent of the global population that dies of aids is a significant portion.
A fraction of 1 percent of the United States population dies of cancer. Sounds pretty insignificant, eh? Until you find out that cancer accounts for 25% of all deaths in the United States. No longer so insignificant. Looking at the numbers without the context, as you're doing throughout this thread, is meaningless.
I'm not saying AIDS is the most important problem facing the world today. It's not. But to say funding AIDS research is pointless if it merely leaves the laptop project "underfunded" (not unfunded, mind you) is a gross underestimation of the seriousness of AIDS.
I already acknowledged that the part about a hundred different people was wrong, right after posting it. Thanks for pointing out the other part though.
I saw that a while ago, though the article now says Airbus abandoned the idea a few years back. In any event, the idea of standing-room only on a plane should be made illegal. There's a reason you're supposed to lean forward and hug your legs in a plane crash - your spine has very little compression strength. So any force running parallel to your spine (think a plane hitting the ground while you're sitting up - or worse, standing) is a very bad thing. Leaning forward makes that force more perpendicular to your spine. A plane full of standing folks in a crash is a plane with no survivors.
So the laptop project is the only way to "improve education and ultimately the quality of life"? Give me a break. There are plenty of other projects BMGF could fund to improve education other than the laptop one.
I'd also argue with saying that AIDS affects only a "statistically insignificant portion of humanity". Roughly one million sub-Saharan Africans died of AIDS last year (cite -- this site claims two million but we'll stick with one), out of a total population of around 650 million. That's 0.154% of the population. Compare that to the United States death rate due to cancer: 0.188% (565,000 deaths out of a population of 300 million). I'm sure you wouldn't say cancer affects a statistically insignificant portion of humanity.
Even when looking at the world population as a whole, it's not all that insignificant. The industrialized nations bring down the death rate. But since the laptop-for-everyone project specifically targets third-world nations, and most AIDS deaths occur in third-world nations, it's not entirely fair to take into account industrialized nations. This makes the disease that much more significant.
Look up the gift tax. You can only give $11,000 a year to any given person before you have to pay tax on the gift. And you can only give a million total in your lifetime before paying, so if you try to give $11,000 a year to a hundred different people, that's not going to work either.
Trust me, you weren't the first person to think of this;-)
Slashdot Mirror
And yet 747s are the most efficient known method for moving people from place to place. Funny how that works.
If you're speaking strictly of fuel efficiency, then bullshit. A 747 cruises at 650 mph. The highest number of seats currently in use on a 747 is 587 (most 747s have fewer seats due to first and business classes). This gives a maximum of 381,550 passenger miles per hour (source: Wikipedia).
A 747 burns, on average, 3,743 gallons of fuel per hour (source: International Civil Aviation Organization). This translates to 101 passenger miles per gallon.
My Corolla, on the other hand, gets between 37 and 40 miles per gallon on the highway. Since we packed 'em in like sardines on the jet, we might as well do the same for the car and stick five people in there. At the low end of the mileage range, that's 185 passenger miles per gallon. Pretty amazing feat Toyota has pulled off, eh? Almost doubling the efficiency of the most efficient mode of transportation ever conceived!
Even taking account the fact that a road route is longer than a great circle route, the car is still more efficient (15 gallons per passenger for the car, 24 for the 747 from JFK to LAX).
And if I recall correctly, trains are quite a bit more efficient than cars.
Now if you want to take time into account, or the infrastructure required to build a road/railroad across the country, then it's a slightly different story. But since the GP wasn't talking about those, it's a bit irrelevant.
If you don't see the connection between {needing padded shorts} and {upright bikes being uncomfortable to ride} then there's not a lot left that I can argue I guess.
I don't care if an upright is uncomfortable without padded shorts. I wear padded shorts and it's comfortable. The fact that it's uncomfortable without the shorts isn't all that telling - grabbing a hot pan is uncomfortable without using a potholder, but is perfectly fine with one. Likewise an upright for me.
And yes--compared to riding most recumbents--riding an upright bike is torture
Since you're using the word torture, your experiences don't match mine. Based on my experience, I wouldn't call riding an upright torture compared to anything. Again, I don't doubt a recumbent is more comfortable. But torture? Not for me.
How many pairs of padded riding shorts do you own?
I'm not entirely sure why that's relevant. I never said it was comfortable to ride without padded shorts. With them, I don't have pain or discomfort.
Look, all I'm saying is that your post made it sound as though riding an upright is the most uncomfortable thing in the world, that it's torture. Either you're exaggerating, or your experiences don't match mine.
Upright defenders tend to forget that people who spend money on recumbents nearly-always used to spend money on nice upright bikes; we know what it feels like to ride uprights.
No, you know what YOU feel like to ride an upright. You don't know what it feels like for ME to ride an upright. I don't get neck pain. I don't get hand pain or numbness. And my butt doesn't hurt (at least after the second ride of the season). And yes, I've spent a lot of time on a bike (my longest day is 130 miles, so I'm not talking about little 15 minute jaunts). You make it sound like it's torture to ride an upright. While I don't disagree that a recumbent is probably more comfortable, I read your post scratching my head thinking "huh... I don't have that problem".
note I was a pretty serious bike racer and wasn't dawdling along at 15 or 18 mph
:-)
Note that for the vast majority of the population, 15 or 18mph on a bike is about 10 mph faster than "dawdling"
This is the same reason that women get lower rates; they drive less than men.
Women get lower rates because the accidents they get into are likely to be fender-benders with small amounts of property damage and minor (if any) injuries. Men, on the other hand, get into their souped-up cars and drive at some absurd speed, crashing into thirteen cars and a few telephone poles before finally coming to a stop, having caused life-threatening injuries to a dozen people. And killing himself, of course, which is very ironic because he is, after all, invincible.
I drove 30,000 miles last year without a single accident.
Uhhh... is this cause for celebration? Seriously, 30,000 miles without an accident isn't much of an accomplishment. The U.S. accident rate is somewhere around 450,000 vehicle miles per accident (source).
If, for example, I got rearended myself and hit the car in front of me from the momentum, the second accident is my fault because I was "following too closely".
Not true. I contacted my insurance company's claims department and asked them this question after someone tried to tell me this. The claims person said it would be the fault of the driver that hit you. Which makes sense because for just about any distance you leave between you and the car in front of you, a car could rear-end you going fast enough to force you into the car in front of you.
What he specifically said is that there is always question in such a case as to whether the middle car rear-ended the lead car then got rear-ended himself, vs. the middle car getting rear-ended and forced into the lead car. He said they ask the lead driver if he felt one or two impacts. If one, its the latter case, and the rear car is at fault for both. If two, it's the former, and two drivers are at fault.
Many kids are growing up right now with no sense of trust
On a semi-related note, when did this whole "never talk to strangers" and "stranger danger" BS start? What a load of crap. Kids are more likely to get kidnapped/molested/whatever by someone they know than some random schmuck on the street.
No wonder everyone is so anti-social, when we had it hammered into our heads growing up that strangers are mean and scary.
You do realize that there are other people in the world besides yourself, right? And that those people have rights too? I have a right to swing my arms any way I want. This is so intrinsic and self-evident that the founders didn't feel the need to enumerate it as a right in the Constitution. But my right to swing my arms ends at someone else's nose. Likewise yelling fire. I have a right to speak what I want. I don't have a right to make a theater full of people run for their lives, potentially causing serious injury to one another. I don't think any reasonable person, even the founding fathers that wrote the amendment to begin with, would believe that this type of speech is protected.
And besides, there is no law specifically against yelling fire in a crowded theater. Most likely it would fall under disorderly conduct, false reporting, or something like that.
Next you're going to tell us that libel should be allowed because the Constitution guarantees freedom of the press.
Woops, now it's just a cartoon that's already been colored. Well, you get the idea.
At least you recognize that what you accomplished in two steps is not the same thing as what the OP accomplished in four. He took the color out. You didn't. I bet I can make the GIMP do in 1 step something that takes Photoshop a dozen, as long as they're two different things.
And as another poster mentioned, Photoshop isn't anywhere near 5 grand. In fact, the OP's method can be done with Elements, which comes free with a lot of cameras.
so in other words, in order for them to continue to provide a service to you,
Allowing me to update the software so that it behaves the way I had a reasonable expectation to believe it behaved when I purchased it is arguably not a service. When security flaws allow attackers to take over my computer, one could argue that Microsoft would be negligent by not fixing the flaws.
you must have originally purchased the software i nthe first place?
I DID purchase the software in the first place, thank you very much. But it's a little grating to constantly have Microsoft demanding proof that I did. As another poster said, I don't appreciate being made to feel as though I'm a criminal.
minus problems with false authentication, etc, what's the issue?
It phones home, for one thing. Without telling you it's going to do it.
Let's see... I just ran Microsoft Update, then I clicked "Custom". It tells me:
No mention of WGA. So I click "Details" and lo and behold, it's the WGA Validation Tool that I must install. My only option is "Download and Install Now". There is no skip, ignore, anything. So as far as I can tell, in order to continue receiving updates, I must install this spyware. I don't feel that that qualifies as an "optional" install.
Did you even read the report? Try chapter 7. In particular, the section about lung cancer. How about this bit:
Or on workplace smoke:
And on and on and on. The data is all there, including references to the studies from which the conclusions are drawn.
To me, it's a mild irritant, nothing more.
For some reason I have more faith in the Surgeon General and the CDC than some random Slashdot user.
Don't read the news much, do you?
Or, if you prefer it straight from the Surgeon General himself, you can go to the report on the CDC website.
Or, I can just provide an excerpt from the press release:
But does it take a concious effort on the part of the recipient to receive this font? So, for example, if someone sends me a document and embeds one of these fonts into it, am I going to have any idea that it's there?
"McDonaldsisation" is actually what I've heard that referred to. And it's not limited to your soft drink
Interestingly, I've never been in a McDonald's where you get your own soft drink. It's always been poured by the person behind the counter.
another poster trying to argue your side already made the laughable claim that the fraction of 1 percent of the global population that dies of aids is a significant portion.
A fraction of 1 percent of the United States population dies of cancer. Sounds pretty insignificant, eh? Until you find out that cancer accounts for 25% of all deaths in the United States. No longer so insignificant. Looking at the numbers without the context, as you're doing throughout this thread, is meaningless.
I'm not saying AIDS is the most important problem facing the world today. It's not. But to say funding AIDS research is pointless if it merely leaves the laptop project "underfunded" (not unfunded, mind you) is a gross underestimation of the seriousness of AIDS.
I already acknowledged that the part about a hundred different people was wrong, right after posting it. Thanks for pointing out the other part though.
I saw that a while ago, though the article now says Airbus abandoned the idea a few years back. In any event, the idea of standing-room only on a plane should be made illegal. There's a reason you're supposed to lean forward and hug your legs in a plane crash - your spine has very little compression strength. So any force running parallel to your spine (think a plane hitting the ground while you're sitting up - or worse, standing) is a very bad thing. Leaning forward makes that force more perpendicular to your spine. A plane full of standing folks in a crash is a plane with no survivors.
So the laptop project is the only way to "improve education and ultimately the quality of life"? Give me a break. There are plenty of other projects BMGF could fund to improve education other than the laptop one.
I'd also argue with saying that AIDS affects only a "statistically insignificant portion of humanity". Roughly one million sub-Saharan Africans died of AIDS last year (cite -- this site claims two million but we'll stick with one), out of a total population of around 650 million. That's 0.154% of the population. Compare that to the United States death rate due to cancer: 0.188% (565,000 deaths out of a population of 300 million). I'm sure you wouldn't say cancer affects a statistically insignificant portion of humanity.
Even when looking at the world population as a whole, it's not all that insignificant. The industrialized nations bring down the death rate. But since the laptop-for-everyone project specifically targets third-world nations, and most AIDS deaths occur in third-world nations, it's not entirely fair to take into account industrialized nations. This makes the disease that much more significant.
Whoops... ignore the second part of that, about a million total. It's not quite right.
Look up the gift tax. You can only give $11,000 a year to any given person before you have to pay tax on the gift. And you can only give a million total in your lifetime before paying, so if you try to give $11,000 a year to a hundred different people, that's not going to work either.
;-)
Trust me, you weren't the first person to think of this
That assumes you buy an MMO every year.
Which is certainly a point for buying new games, but his post seemed to focus on the financial aspects.