I'm just not seeing the similarities to the Intrepid. I mean sure it looks more like the Intrepid than my Fathers 1950's Pontiac Chieftain, but that's not saying a lot.
No kidding. I just saw someone today vow to vote for a likely pedophile, definitely a racist, misogynistic, and homophobic senate candidate because he is more strongly pro 2nd amendment than his competition. The sad thing is I'm definitely a 2nd amendment guy, but I'd much rather risk a little more firearm regulation than see such a contemptible candidate elected.
You made the assertion that the only technological advancement to come out of the Apollo program was Teflon.
The first demonstrated IC was towards the end of 1958, patent applied for in early 1959. An improved silicon version was iterated later in 1959. So yes, the IC was technically invented before the start of the Apollo started in 1961. However the Apollo program is what brought the funding and resources to advance the state of the art by leaps and bounds into computers that could be trusted to control spacecrafts.
If it's too bland pay for a custom paint job or something, perhaps with some hot lesbians on the hood.
But more seriously what car has ever had universal aesthetic appeal? The Model S is pretty much what I imagined cars of the future would look like as a kid. The body design is mostly functional, anything past that is superfluous. I'm not interested in paying thousands of dollars for something just because it looks cool unless it is actually a work of art.
I agree with the Admin office solution. However my school system is a ridiculous failure in this regard. First, the admin office stops answering the phone within ten minutes of school ending for the day. Second the bus system apparently doesn't have much of a maintenance budget because my kids bus breaks down a few times every school year, which can mean they get home up to an hour and a half late. When your kid is late getting home there is no number we can call to find out what is going on. The school actually has a robocall and email system setup for telling parents about all kinds of stuff we don't really care about, but apparently they can't be bothered to configure it for pushing notifications about bus breakdowns. Then there was the time that my kid got distracted talking to a friend and missed the bus home, it was nearly an hour before the admin staff, who wouldn't answer our calls, let the kid call us.
All that to say that I still don't think my kid should have a cell phone during the school day. But I see no reason that they shouldn't be able to keep one in a locker or something. And given how crap the communication can be through the proper channels I can't blame other parents for wanting their kid to have a cell phone available.
I don't know that casualties on the NK side really figure in to it for the USA. The problem with getting involved in any kind of shooting war with NK is that the SK capital city is within easy artillery range of NK. And NK has for decades now had enough firepower aimed at Seoul to reduce much of it to rubble within minutes of the start of hostilities. That's a city and metropolitan area with a population of around 35 million people. There is basically no known military option available that won't likely end up with millions of people, who are our allies, ending up dead. If NK starts a shooting war then we'll likely have to go all in, but it'd be extremely foolish for us to try and knock out Kim as a preemptive solution to the possibility that he could launch on a few of our cities.
They can both find success in the effort of getting to Mars even if only one of them can be first. After all the true success of the Apollo program wasn't sending American astronauts to the moon, it was the advances in technology that we made along the way. Those advances were a huge factor in shaping the world and culture we live in today. If we get even a quarter of the benefit out of Mars race I'd count it as a huge success for everyone involved.
I remember hearing, when I lived in California for a time, that the "golden grasses" on the hills was actually an invasive species brought by the Spanish hundreds of years ago. The native grasses are better at retaining moisture in the dry climate and stayed green year round. The invasive grass dies off after the rains stop in the winter but is thick enough that it chokes out the native grasses that would otherwise flourish. All that dead grass dries out and makes for ready tinder whenever a wildfire starts up.
Thing is, heavy cloud cover doesn't automatically mean no power produced from solar. I suppose for some installations input below a certain threshold might actually result in their system not being able to harvest energy at all. My parents have had a PV solar array for coming up on a decade now. My Dad loves to show off the near real time stats for the array every time we go to visit. The only time I've ever seen it generating no electricity was when the panels were covered in six inches of snow. On cloudy days the array generates less power but still a significant amount. I'm not sure how well concentrated solar works with cloud cover, but I've seen video of fresnel lenses burning concrete driveways on cloudy days. On the other hand cloudy weather also reduces energy needs, the AC has to run less and in the winter clouds help insulate against raidiative cooling losses into space.
From the wikipedia page I linked: "The salt melts at 131 ÂC (268 ÂF). It is kept liquid at 288 ÂC (550 ÂF) in an insulated "cold" storage tank. The liquid salt is pumped through panels in a solar collector where the focused sun heats it to 566 ÂC (1,051 ÂF). It is then sent to a hot storage tank. With proper insulation of the tank the thermal energy can be usefully stored for up to a week.[13] When electricity is needed, the hot molten-salt is pumped to a conventional steam-generator to produce superheated steam for driving a conventional turbine/generator set as used in any coal or oil or nuclear power plant. A 100-megawatt turbine would need a tank of about 9.1 metres (30 ft) tall and 24 metres (79 ft) in diameter to drive it for four hours by this design."
They don't really say if that is 400 MW at the end of a week or whether that is using it as soon as the tank is topped up. If you used large spherical vacuum insulated tanks you could possibly retain nearly half of the salts temperature over the course of a week. Storing an entire weeks worth of energy seems a little silly though honestly. It makes sense for small localized power solutions but you can make use of power grids to share power across very large geographic areas. And even with your much larger and more pessimistic estimates, 2200 square miles of dedicated space for clean energy is very possibly worth it.
You could in theory store enough energy to power the entire USA for a week in about 15 square miles of insulated tanks holding molten salts. I based that on the fact that a 100 MW generator can run for 4 hours off a 30x80 foot storage tank. The problem of course becomes finding enough space to fill up with solar concentration farms to heat that much molten salt. You could always use other sources of power to heat the salts but then you start to incur efficiency losses.
I don't mind judging people for their ridiculous decisions. If they don't get negative feedback they'll just keep on train wrecking their finances and being a general burden on society. I've known more than a few couples that would fritter away what tiny income they had on worthless stuff like cable TV packages, gigantic TV sets, and commemorative plates, then go begging for help buying groceries.
I knew one family where only one of the parents could work, the other was disabled, but not receiving disability because he had worked for decades for cash under the table. The one who could work was a CPA but preferred to work her own hours as a hair dresser because she didn't like working in an office. Their heating bills were high because they couldn't be bothered to bundle up with blankets or comforters. They had a $100+ month cable TV bill, for the guy sitting at home all day, while the public library was about a mile away. Both adults had new smart phones with expensive data plans. And somehow when it came time to buy groceries they were broke as could be and had to beg assistance from a local church every month.
That isn't to say that all people in bad financial situations are deserving of ridicule. But I've sure met a few who could do with a giant heaping serving of shame for making little to no effort to improve their situation while leeching off others. I know still more people that are constantly flirting with disaster by racking up debt and keeping nothing in reserve to handle emergencies.
I would say there isn't anything wrong with funding a bit of luxury in your life so long as it isn't preventing you from preparing for a future. When I was a young adult practically all of my friends spent 100% of their paychecks every week, and frequently more. I wasn't quite as bad about spending on frivolities, but I still managed to not save much at all. In my 30's I finally started saving for an eventual retirement and got my finances straightened out pretty well. So while I'm on track now I'm a decade behind where I could easily have been.
When I think back the one place where I really wasted incredible amounts of money was eating out at restaurants constantly. While doing that was fun, I mostly did it out of laziness. Eating out for lunch every workday was costing me around $3000 a year. That is a crazy amount of money to spend to avoid a couple minutes of food prep a day. And that isn't even considering what I spend on dinners and weekends.
The last time I got together with a bunch of my friends there was only one other guy who had his finances together. Everyone else was just kind of getting by paycheck to paycheck. And trust me they're not exactly living it up in the moment. I've got a retirement plan and when I reach those goals I'll be done with this day job garbage. My friends will likely be working until they're in a grave or incapacitated, at which time hopefully some family member will be able to care for or support them.
You don't have to save every penny and live a life of sworn poverty, like my parents did. But going full yolo with personal finances is a great way to end up destitute sooner, rather than later. You have to find a middle ground of some kind.
In the US no one is forced to take over the estate of a deceased family member. By accepting the estate you take on all the assets, with both positive and negative values. It is patently foolish to take on an estate which has a negative value to you. The only real exception I can think of is married couples where the estate is shared, so even if one dies the other is likely left holding the bag for any debts. Though the nature of a married joint estates should come as no surprise to pretty much anyone as it's been a staple of married drama for centuries.
That Corolla sounds like a lemon, so far as Corollas go. I had one that was 20 years old for about a year and it never broke down on me, hell the AC even worked, though the cassette deck didn't. The one we have now has had the battery go dead a couple times, and the transmission needed tightening up once upon a time, but it's going on 13 years old now. I guess it wouldn't surprise me for it to have more gremlins show up in the next few years but I fully expect to get another 7 years of use out of it before seriously considering replacing it.
All that said all electric vehicles like Tesla is making should be incredibly more reliable than even the stalwart Corollas. There is simply so much less in the way of moving parts and volatile chemicals to manage. I really hope that by the time my Corolla wears out I'll be able to replace it with an electric vehicle like the Model 3.
I think it depends a lot on your choice of lifestyle. I gave up carrying a cell phone almost a decade ago and very rarely miss it, we're talking a couple times a year tops. That said I'm a sedentary person who's a homebody. I spend the vast majority of my waking time at work or at home. When I'm driving from place to place it's in high population density areas. About the only time I'm more than 15 miles from home is the couple times a year when I travel on major interstates to visit family. All that said I would probably still have a cell phone if my employer hadn't banned them from the workplace. When I realized I'd be spending considerable amounts of money every month for a device I'd likely go whole months without needing I ditched it.
I haven't really noticed any issues with keeping up with society. I'm always on a computer at work. At home I use my computer extensively, the wife would say constantly. When people ask for a phone number they get my home or work number, and have no idea if it's a cell or landline unless they specifically ask.
The only way I could see not having a cellphone costing you a job offer is if the hiring manager assumes that a phone number is a cell, that is setup for sending and receiving text messages, then instead of professionally calling to extend a job offer sends a text. At which point I have to ask myself do I really want to work for an employer that already demonstrates so little professional competence. Well actually I'm spared having to ponder that because not having a cell phone automatically filters out such idiots.
This reminded me of a tower defense game I played once. There was a little pet you could find if you made it through enough waves on a high enough difficulty. The graphic for the pet was a giraffe running on a treadmill, which I thought was a hilariously self aware touch.
I saw something about that elsewhere and I get the feeling their talking about absolute numbers of child brides, not rates. The USA and of course other very populous countries end up with high absolute numbers because there are just so many people. I find it incredibly unlikely that the USA is anywhere near the rates that UNICEF identifies for other less developed parts of the world, like 4 in 10 for sub-Saharan Africa.
Digging into the numbers I can find online one study found 167k marriages involving children in the USA between 2000 and 2010. The CDC says the average year in the USA results in 2,140,272 marriages, though I didn't see what years they were using for that number. Anyways the math is pretty easy, 16,700 child marriages a year divided by 2,000,000 marriages a year (rounding down considerably to be on the safe side) gives us 0.835% of marriages in the USA involving a child. I'll grant you that is a higher number than I would have thought, and it certainly warrants our attention as a society. It is, however, considerably less panic inducing than touting the line that child marriage is common place or that the USA is the world leader in child brides.
Who's trying to save the internet from the Government? The concern here is that the Government is removing regulation that keeps the monopolistic communication companies from ruining the internet. The regulation was good and worked to keep the internet healthy. The problem here isn't government control, it is corporate lackeys placed into influential government positions specifically to remove regulatory hurdles for the corporations.
Given George Carlins observations about the phallic shape of our weapons this conclusion would make sense. Of course the most obvious counter argument would be that we have no idea what shapes an alien phallus might take.
Is 40 hours really that unreasonable for this sort of game? I'm not interested in this genre of game and so I'm not aware of what the expected play time is. And the games I play don't usually have earned currency that you can spend on new characters and loot crates. That said I can, and have, put in 40 hours of gaming over the course of a long weekend. So is that kind of time investment to unlock what I presume to be one of the best characters in the game really unreasonable? It sounds like at least 600,000 people on reddit think so.
The hilarious thing to me about that is I've been conditioned to see those blocks of color with words as typically being a copy paste from elsewhere. I frequently just keep scrolling without even attempting to read it because I presume it isn't something my friend actually wrote.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm just not seeing the similarities to the Intrepid. I mean sure it looks more like the Intrepid than my Fathers 1950's Pontiac Chieftain, but that's not saying a lot.
No kidding. I just saw someone today vow to vote for a likely pedophile, definitely a racist, misogynistic, and homophobic senate candidate because he is more strongly pro 2nd amendment than his competition. The sad thing is I'm definitely a 2nd amendment guy, but I'd much rather risk a little more firearm regulation than see such a contemptible candidate elected.
You made the assertion that the only technological advancement to come out of the Apollo program was Teflon.
The first demonstrated IC was towards the end of 1958, patent applied for in early 1959. An improved silicon version was iterated later in 1959. So yes, the IC was technically invented before the start of the Apollo started in 1961. However the Apollo program is what brought the funding and resources to advance the state of the art by leaps and bounds into computers that could be trusted to control spacecrafts.
If it's too bland pay for a custom paint job or something, perhaps with some hot lesbians on the hood.
But more seriously what car has ever had universal aesthetic appeal? The Model S is pretty much what I imagined cars of the future would look like as a kid. The body design is mostly functional, anything past that is superfluous. I'm not interested in paying thousands of dollars for something just because it looks cool unless it is actually a work of art.
I agree with the Admin office solution. However my school system is a ridiculous failure in this regard. First, the admin office stops answering the phone within ten minutes of school ending for the day. Second the bus system apparently doesn't have much of a maintenance budget because my kids bus breaks down a few times every school year, which can mean they get home up to an hour and a half late. When your kid is late getting home there is no number we can call to find out what is going on. The school actually has a robocall and email system setup for telling parents about all kinds of stuff we don't really care about, but apparently they can't be bothered to configure it for pushing notifications about bus breakdowns. Then there was the time that my kid got distracted talking to a friend and missed the bus home, it was nearly an hour before the admin staff, who wouldn't answer our calls, let the kid call us.
All that to say that I still don't think my kid should have a cell phone during the school day. But I see no reason that they shouldn't be able to keep one in a locker or something. And given how crap the communication can be through the proper channels I can't blame other parents for wanting their kid to have a cell phone available.
Wikipedia, and the citations identified therein, would beg to differ.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Have any sources for your Teflon assertion?
I seem to remember Skyfall having a pretty awkward scene. Hell even the Honest Trailer for the movie called it out as glamorizing rape.
I don't know that casualties on the NK side really figure in to it for the USA. The problem with getting involved in any kind of shooting war with NK is that the SK capital city is within easy artillery range of NK. And NK has for decades now had enough firepower aimed at Seoul to reduce much of it to rubble within minutes of the start of hostilities. That's a city and metropolitan area with a population of around 35 million people. There is basically no known military option available that won't likely end up with millions of people, who are our allies, ending up dead. If NK starts a shooting war then we'll likely have to go all in, but it'd be extremely foolish for us to try and knock out Kim as a preemptive solution to the possibility that he could launch on a few of our cities.
They can both find success in the effort of getting to Mars even if only one of them can be first. After all the true success of the Apollo program wasn't sending American astronauts to the moon, it was the advances in technology that we made along the way. Those advances were a huge factor in shaping the world and culture we live in today. If we get even a quarter of the benefit out of Mars race I'd count it as a huge success for everyone involved.
I remember hearing, when I lived in California for a time, that the "golden grasses" on the hills was actually an invasive species brought by the Spanish hundreds of years ago. The native grasses are better at retaining moisture in the dry climate and stayed green year round. The invasive grass dies off after the rains stop in the winter but is thick enough that it chokes out the native grasses that would otherwise flourish. All that dead grass dries out and makes for ready tinder whenever a wildfire starts up.
Thing is, heavy cloud cover doesn't automatically mean no power produced from solar. I suppose for some installations input below a certain threshold might actually result in their system not being able to harvest energy at all. My parents have had a PV solar array for coming up on a decade now. My Dad loves to show off the near real time stats for the array every time we go to visit. The only time I've ever seen it generating no electricity was when the panels were covered in six inches of snow. On cloudy days the array generates less power but still a significant amount. I'm not sure how well concentrated solar works with cloud cover, but I've seen video of fresnel lenses burning concrete driveways on cloudy days. On the other hand cloudy weather also reduces energy needs, the AC has to run less and in the winter clouds help insulate against raidiative cooling losses into space.
From the wikipedia page I linked:
"The salt melts at 131 ÂC (268 ÂF). It is kept liquid at 288 ÂC (550 ÂF) in an insulated "cold" storage tank. The liquid salt is pumped through panels in a solar collector where the focused sun heats it to 566 ÂC (1,051 ÂF). It is then sent to a hot storage tank. With proper insulation of the tank the thermal energy can be usefully stored for up to a week.[13] When electricity is needed, the hot molten-salt is pumped to a conventional steam-generator to produce superheated steam for driving a conventional turbine/generator set as used in any coal or oil or nuclear power plant. A 100-megawatt turbine would need a tank of about 9.1 metres (30 ft) tall and 24 metres (79 ft) in diameter to drive it for four hours by this design."
They don't really say if that is 400 MW at the end of a week or whether that is using it as soon as the tank is topped up. If you used large spherical vacuum insulated tanks you could possibly retain nearly half of the salts temperature over the course of a week. Storing an entire weeks worth of energy seems a little silly though honestly. It makes sense for small localized power solutions but you can make use of power grids to share power across very large geographic areas. And even with your much larger and more pessimistic estimates, 2200 square miles of dedicated space for clean energy is very possibly worth it.
You could in theory store enough energy to power the entire USA for a week in about 15 square miles of insulated tanks holding molten salts. I based that on the fact that a 100 MW generator can run for 4 hours off a 30x80 foot storage tank. The problem of course becomes finding enough space to fill up with solar concentration farms to heat that much molten salt. You could always use other sources of power to heat the salts but then you start to incur efficiency losses.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I don't mind judging people for their ridiculous decisions. If they don't get negative feedback they'll just keep on train wrecking their finances and being a general burden on society. I've known more than a few couples that would fritter away what tiny income they had on worthless stuff like cable TV packages, gigantic TV sets, and commemorative plates, then go begging for help buying groceries.
I knew one family where only one of the parents could work, the other was disabled, but not receiving disability because he had worked for decades for cash under the table. The one who could work was a CPA but preferred to work her own hours as a hair dresser because she didn't like working in an office. Their heating bills were high because they couldn't be bothered to bundle up with blankets or comforters. They had a $100+ month cable TV bill, for the guy sitting at home all day, while the public library was about a mile away. Both adults had new smart phones with expensive data plans. And somehow when it came time to buy groceries they were broke as could be and had to beg assistance from a local church every month.
That isn't to say that all people in bad financial situations are deserving of ridicule. But I've sure met a few who could do with a giant heaping serving of shame for making little to no effort to improve their situation while leeching off others. I know still more people that are constantly flirting with disaster by racking up debt and keeping nothing in reserve to handle emergencies.
I would say there isn't anything wrong with funding a bit of luxury in your life so long as it isn't preventing you from preparing for a future. When I was a young adult practically all of my friends spent 100% of their paychecks every week, and frequently more. I wasn't quite as bad about spending on frivolities, but I still managed to not save much at all. In my 30's I finally started saving for an eventual retirement and got my finances straightened out pretty well. So while I'm on track now I'm a decade behind where I could easily have been.
When I think back the one place where I really wasted incredible amounts of money was eating out at restaurants constantly. While doing that was fun, I mostly did it out of laziness. Eating out for lunch every workday was costing me around $3000 a year. That is a crazy amount of money to spend to avoid a couple minutes of food prep a day. And that isn't even considering what I spend on dinners and weekends.
The last time I got together with a bunch of my friends there was only one other guy who had his finances together. Everyone else was just kind of getting by paycheck to paycheck. And trust me they're not exactly living it up in the moment. I've got a retirement plan and when I reach those goals I'll be done with this day job garbage. My friends will likely be working until they're in a grave or incapacitated, at which time hopefully some family member will be able to care for or support them.
You don't have to save every penny and live a life of sworn poverty, like my parents did. But going full yolo with personal finances is a great way to end up destitute sooner, rather than later. You have to find a middle ground of some kind.
In the US no one is forced to take over the estate of a deceased family member. By accepting the estate you take on all the assets, with both positive and negative values. It is patently foolish to take on an estate which has a negative value to you. The only real exception I can think of is married couples where the estate is shared, so even if one dies the other is likely left holding the bag for any debts. Though the nature of a married joint estates should come as no surprise to pretty much anyone as it's been a staple of married drama for centuries.
That Corolla sounds like a lemon, so far as Corollas go. I had one that was 20 years old for about a year and it never broke down on me, hell the AC even worked, though the cassette deck didn't. The one we have now has had the battery go dead a couple times, and the transmission needed tightening up once upon a time, but it's going on 13 years old now. I guess it wouldn't surprise me for it to have more gremlins show up in the next few years but I fully expect to get another 7 years of use out of it before seriously considering replacing it.
All that said all electric vehicles like Tesla is making should be incredibly more reliable than even the stalwart Corollas. There is simply so much less in the way of moving parts and volatile chemicals to manage. I really hope that by the time my Corolla wears out I'll be able to replace it with an electric vehicle like the Model 3.
I was thinking that a retouched version of the old Slashdot link trolling picture would be optimal.
I think it depends a lot on your choice of lifestyle. I gave up carrying a cell phone almost a decade ago and very rarely miss it, we're talking a couple times a year tops. That said I'm a sedentary person who's a homebody. I spend the vast majority of my waking time at work or at home. When I'm driving from place to place it's in high population density areas. About the only time I'm more than 15 miles from home is the couple times a year when I travel on major interstates to visit family. All that said I would probably still have a cell phone if my employer hadn't banned them from the workplace. When I realized I'd be spending considerable amounts of money every month for a device I'd likely go whole months without needing I ditched it.
I haven't really noticed any issues with keeping up with society. I'm always on a computer at work. At home I use my computer extensively, the wife would say constantly. When people ask for a phone number they get my home or work number, and have no idea if it's a cell or landline unless they specifically ask.
The only way I could see not having a cellphone costing you a job offer is if the hiring manager assumes that a phone number is a cell, that is setup for sending and receiving text messages, then instead of professionally calling to extend a job offer sends a text. At which point I have to ask myself do I really want to work for an employer that already demonstrates so little professional competence. Well actually I'm spared having to ponder that because not having a cell phone automatically filters out such idiots.
This reminded me of a tower defense game I played once. There was a little pet you could find if you made it through enough waves on a high enough difficulty. The graphic for the pet was a giraffe running on a treadmill, which I thought was a hilariously self aware touch.
I saw something about that elsewhere and I get the feeling their talking about absolute numbers of child brides, not rates. The USA and of course other very populous countries end up with high absolute numbers because there are just so many people. I find it incredibly unlikely that the USA is anywhere near the rates that UNICEF identifies for other less developed parts of the world, like 4 in 10 for sub-Saharan Africa.
Digging into the numbers I can find online one study found 167k marriages involving children in the USA between 2000 and 2010. The CDC says the average year in the USA results in 2,140,272 marriages, though I didn't see what years they were using for that number. Anyways the math is pretty easy, 16,700 child marriages a year divided by 2,000,000 marriages a year (rounding down considerably to be on the safe side) gives us 0.835% of marriages in the USA involving a child. I'll grant you that is a higher number than I would have thought, and it certainly warrants our attention as a society. It is, however, considerably less panic inducing than touting the line that child marriage is common place or that the USA is the world leader in child brides.
Who's trying to save the internet from the Government? The concern here is that the Government is removing regulation that keeps the monopolistic communication companies from ruining the internet. The regulation was good and worked to keep the internet healthy. The problem here isn't government control, it is corporate lackeys placed into influential government positions specifically to remove regulatory hurdles for the corporations.
Given George Carlins observations about the phallic shape of our weapons this conclusion would make sense. Of course the most obvious counter argument would be that we have no idea what shapes an alien phallus might take.
Is 40 hours really that unreasonable for this sort of game? I'm not interested in this genre of game and so I'm not aware of what the expected play time is. And the games I play don't usually have earned currency that you can spend on new characters and loot crates. That said I can, and have, put in 40 hours of gaming over the course of a long weekend. So is that kind of time investment to unlock what I presume to be one of the best characters in the game really unreasonable? It sounds like at least 600,000 people on reddit think so.
The hilarious thing to me about that is I've been conditioned to see those blocks of color with words as typically being a copy paste from elsewhere. I frequently just keep scrolling without even attempting to read it because I presume it isn't something my friend actually wrote.