It's a bit ironic to see this story when copper just fell below $2/lb. Old copper pennies are still worth more than face, but the current clad pennies are worth less than face again. We have a bear market in commodities the past few years to thank for this. I seem to recall that nickels had something like $0.07 of metal in them a few years ago, and now it's about $0.027 according to coinflation.com.
Of course it's good to think about this, because it's only a matter of time before commodities go up in price again, and it becomes a real problem. Again. We won't think about it though. There are too man other bigger problems.
I learned this the hard way when I used to work on cars. You know those lights that people hang when the hood is up? I got the light and screwed a regular bulb into it. Burned a couple out. Then somebody told me I needed a heavy duty bulb. No more problems.
Meanwhile in Afghanistan, a marine is un-crating a gift basket with a letter expressing "joy and cooperation in our future". Nothing unusual with supply. Moves on to next crate without thinking about it.
Maybe when we get rid of "different name for astronaut depending on country", we can go to work on the much more pressing "different name for group depending on animal" problem. The Chinese could appoint a zu of taikonauts to work on that.
He also says widgets are great, and that despite living in only the 2nd or 3rd generation to be able to have widgets, they are not only essential but should be mixed into soda and consumed with every meal. The road to the future is paved with widgets, upon which we hold numerous patents. So. Buy widgets. Buy them by the truck load. Buy them TODAY!
The problem with judging climatology based on average temperature after X years is this: All you have to do is come up with a hand full of models in a reasonable distribution around where we already are. The more models, the better chance you have of being "uncannily accurate". See the problem? It's just like the old stock market trick of finding 256 analysts who make buy/sell recommendations on 8 stocks. Then you interview the "genius" who made 8 correct calls.
In the case of climate, the model is much more convincing if you judge it based on more data points. We want to see a model that has a very close match to the *curve* of the actual data.
In the case of stock-market analysts you want to see enough picks over a long enough time frame so that the odds of the analyst being lucky as opposed to good are astronomically low.
This is Slashdot, where there are all kinds of boxes under the tree; but none of them is a hug box. Merry Christmas, and if that offends you then FOAD.
This is why sailors don't use left and right. They use port and starboard, which are specified as port being left if you are at the front of the ship looking in the forward direction of travel. If they just said "left" or "right", the instruction was actually ambiguous. Another poster already pointed out that in this context, you have "stage left" and "stage right" which serves the same purpose as the nautical terms.
I guess this won't bar product placement though. What distinguishes between "placement" and "native ads" anyway? Placement has gotten pretty ridiculous in some media. You know, I used to enjoy the Tonight Show monologue, right up through Leno. Come to think of it, even Leno did placements with his "products that shouldn't merge" routine; but at least it was funny. Sort of. Now I play a game with the Tonight Show and some of the other late night shows. When the first product placement appears, I turn the TV off and go to bed. Very often I fail to make it through the entire monologue.
Designer: We've designed a new hammer. We've moved beyond the traditional "head and handle" paradigm. Meet: EggHammer. A simple egg-shaped piece of iron that you hold in your hand with a small flat area on one end. No handle. No join to wear out. Simple. Elegant. The egg shape fits in the palm. The flat end hits the nail. Best of all, you can put it on the shelf and it will stand there as an objet d'art resting on the flat surface. $199.00.
Carpenter: Dafuq? All the force from pounding goes right into my wrist like this. It's like pounding nails with a rock. What the hell are you babbling about? When I'm done with my hammers I hang them on nails I pounded into this board... with a hammer that doesn't suck rocks, which is what you're trying to sell me for TEN TIMES THE PRICE OF A REGULAR HAMMER.
It's true that the panels aren't 100% efficient. What energy doesn't go out over the wires either gets absorbed, reflected, or grounded. Grounded? Yes, you could heat up the metal frames and that heat could find its way into the ground, which is usually a pretty good heat sink. That's probably negligible though. Much of the heat would get transferred to the air. Some would get reflected back--even though the panels are dark in visible light, infrared might be another matter.
The real devil is in what the panels replace. You have to compare the panels to what they're replacing. Another poster said putting the panels in the desert would make things cooler. If you're covering sparse vegetation and hot rocks with panels, and taking out some energy in the form of electricity that makes sense.
North Carolina isn't desert though. They're going to put those panels over land that probably used to be either woods, pasture, or fields full of some agricultural product. Plants can cool things down in a number of ways that might be more effective than the removal of energy in electrical form by panels. Aside from that, if the electricity is consumed locally it's a zero-sum game.
I'm sure there are some more fine points I'm missing here; but the main point is that the equation is a bit more complicated than just a simple thermodynamic analysis of the panels.
I don't know when they bought Flickr, but it was under her tenure that they imposed infinite scrolling on us, and made Pro a nearly valueless product for many people. I hope they can spin out Flickr somehow, and make it for all the users again, not just a lame attempt to play to tablet people. Nothing against tablet people, but the world is more than quick-flipping through pictures and memes with text on the picture. For some of us, the prose under our pictures is just as important as the picture itself and when you make viewers hunt for the prose they won't do it. They'll just go "this picture isn't very sensational" and move on. So sad. End rant.
p.s., A wikipedia style non-profit for Flickr might not be a bad idea.
Too lazy to find the link, but I seem to recall that NASA not only QA'd code for manned missions, but had two teams. Each team was composed of developers of equal caliber, and one team had no other job but making the other team "look bad" in the friendliest of ways--because it was of vital importance and potentially heart-breaking to an entire nation and even the world if something went wrong.
Now of course, Yahoo is not sending men to the Moon. It's understandable that you can dial it back a bit for a mere web site, but dialing it down to zero sounds pretty damned stupid.
Oh, BTW, if I'm wrong about how NASA's red vs. blue development work, I'm sure somebody will correct me. You might even say that this post is QA'd. Yahoo management will take everything I say at face value though. BTW, Yahoo, you owe me $1,358,345.23 for that back-end I wrote. You can trust me on that because I'm a developer and my contract specified no QA for any aspect of the project, which totally exists because I say so.
OMG! It's already happening. He meant to say "fuck yourself with a 10-foot rusty pipe wrapped in barbed wire and smeared with Habanero peppers", but it was auto-corrected. Authorization: section 5, quoting for demonstration purposes. Signed, Director section 5, unit 3, December 8, 2015.
p.s., I'm not sure how long that last hack will actually work. Grabbed the test sections and units off 4chan this morning.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a bit ironic to see this story when copper just fell below $2/lb. Old copper pennies are still worth more than face, but the current clad pennies are worth less than face again. We have a bear market in commodities the past few years to thank for this. I seem to recall that nickels had something like $0.07 of metal in them a few years ago, and now it's about $0.027 according to coinflation.com.
Of course it's good to think about this, because it's only a matter of time before commodities go up in price again, and it becomes a real problem. Again. We won't think about it though. There are too man other bigger problems.
I learned this the hard way when I used to work on cars. You know those lights that people hang when the hood is up? I got the light and screwed a regular bulb into it. Burned a couple out. Then somebody told me I needed a heavy duty bulb. No more problems.
Hid GWX kb numbers, went to manual updates. Haven't had problems with it.
Meanwhile in Afghanistan, a marine is un-crating a gift basket with a letter expressing "joy and cooperation in our future". Nothing unusual with supply. Moves on to next crate without thinking about it.
These allegedly later versions sound like a huge step backwards.
Maybe when we get rid of "different name for astronaut depending on country", we can go to work on the much more pressing "different name for group depending on animal" problem. The Chinese could appoint a zu of taikonauts to work on that.
If some twit has code like "hello"[5]=0 and you wonder why all your code is going to hell, maybe this will prevent it.
He also says widgets are great, and that despite living in only the 2nd or 3rd generation to be able to have widgets, they are not only essential but should be mixed into soda and consumed with every meal. The road to the future is paved with widgets, upon which we hold numerous patents. So. Buy widgets. Buy them by the truck load. Buy them TODAY!
The problem with judging climatology based on average temperature after X years is this: All you have to do is come up with a hand full of models in a reasonable distribution around where we already are. The more models, the better chance you have of being "uncannily accurate". See the problem? It's just like the old stock market trick of finding 256 analysts who make buy/sell recommendations on 8 stocks. Then you interview the "genius" who made 8 correct calls.
In the case of climate, the model is much more convincing if you judge it based on more data points. We want to see a model that has a very close match to the *curve* of the actual data.
In the case of stock-market analysts you want to see enough picks over a long enough time frame so that the odds of the analyst being lucky as opposed to good are astronomically low.
"But what keeps you from ataching the same frame of reference to left and right as you do to port and starbord?"
The lack of a clear convention in other contexts.
Assuming you're right about the medical scenario, it's because doctors are taught that as a convention. The general public isn't.
This is Slashdot, where there are all kinds of boxes under the tree; but none of them is a hug box. Merry Christmas, and if that offends you then FOAD.
This is why sailors don't use left and right. They use port and starboard, which are specified as port being left if you are at the front of the ship looking in the forward direction of travel. If they just said "left" or "right", the instruction was actually ambiguous. Another poster already pointed out that in this context, you have "stage left" and "stage right" which serves the same purpose as the nautical terms.
I guess this won't bar product placement though. What distinguishes between "placement" and "native ads" anyway? Placement has gotten pretty ridiculous in some media. You know, I used to enjoy the Tonight Show monologue, right up through Leno. Come to think of it, even Leno did placements with his "products that shouldn't merge" routine; but at least it was funny. Sort of. Now I play a game with the Tonight Show and some of the other late night shows. When the first product placement appears, I turn the TV off and go to bed. Very often I fail to make it through the entire monologue.
Drive a gord, the greenest vehicle on the planet. Grow 'em in your back yard and put wheels on 'em. Sorry. I'm just in that kind of mood.
Designer: We've designed a new hammer. We've moved beyond the traditional "head and handle" paradigm. Meet: EggHammer. A simple egg-shaped piece of iron that you hold in your hand with a small flat area on one end. No handle. No join to wear out. Simple. Elegant. The egg shape fits in the palm. The flat end hits the nail. Best of all, you can put it on the shelf and it will stand there as an objet d'art resting on the flat surface. $199.00.
Carpenter: Dafuq? All the force from pounding goes right into my wrist like this. It's like pounding nails with a rock. What the hell are you babbling about? When I'm done with my hammers I hang them on nails I pounded into this board... with a hammer that doesn't suck rocks, which is what you're trying to sell me for TEN TIMES THE PRICE OF A REGULAR HAMMER.
Designer: you don't understand design.
It's true that the panels aren't 100% efficient. What energy doesn't go out over the wires either gets absorbed, reflected, or grounded. Grounded? Yes, you could heat up the metal frames and that heat could find its way into the ground, which is usually a pretty good heat sink. That's probably negligible though. Much of the heat would get transferred to the air. Some would get reflected back--even though the panels are dark in visible light, infrared might be another matter.
The real devil is in what the panels replace. You have to compare the panels to what they're replacing. Another poster said putting the panels in the desert would make things cooler. If you're covering sparse vegetation and hot rocks with panels, and taking out some energy in the form of electricity that makes sense.
North Carolina isn't desert though. They're going to put those panels over land that probably used to be either woods, pasture, or fields full of some agricultural product. Plants can cool things down in a number of ways that might be more effective than the removal of energy in electrical form by panels. Aside from that, if the electricity is consumed locally it's a zero-sum game.
I'm sure there are some more fine points I'm missing here; but the main point is that the equation is a bit more complicated than just a simple thermodynamic analysis of the panels.
I don't know when they bought Flickr, but it was under her tenure that they imposed infinite scrolling on us, and made Pro a nearly valueless product for many people. I hope they can spin out Flickr somehow, and make it for all the users again, not just a lame attempt to play to tablet people. Nothing against tablet people, but the world is more than quick-flipping through pictures and memes with text on the picture. For some of us, the prose under our pictures is just as important as the picture itself and when you make viewers hunt for the prose they won't do it. They'll just go "this picture isn't very sensational" and move on. So sad. End rant.
p.s., A wikipedia style non-profit for Flickr might not be a bad idea.
A lot of people rush to Orwell references, but this seems like a genuine attempt at Newspeak to me.
Too lazy to find the link, but I seem to recall that NASA not only QA'd code for manned missions, but had two teams. Each team was composed of developers of equal caliber, and one team had no other job but making the other team "look bad" in the friendliest of ways--because it was of vital importance and potentially heart-breaking to an entire nation and even the world if something went wrong.
Now of course, Yahoo is not sending men to the Moon. It's understandable that you can dial it back a bit for a mere web site, but dialing it down to zero sounds pretty damned stupid.
Oh, BTW, if I'm wrong about how NASA's red vs. blue development work, I'm sure somebody will correct me. You might even say that this post is QA'd. Yahoo management will take everything I say at face value though. BTW, Yahoo, you owe me $1,358,345.23 for that back-end I wrote. You can trust me on that because I'm a developer and my contract specified no QA for any aspect of the project, which totally exists because I say so.
Unless a third pedant already spoke up.
2345 A3DF 5782
This guy probably wished he had a radio.
Amen, brother. I don't go anywhere without my mutated anthrax. For duck huntin'.
OMG! It's already happening. He meant to say "fuck yourself with a 10-foot rusty pipe wrapped in barbed wire and smeared with Habanero peppers", but it was auto-corrected. Authorization: section 5, quoting for demonstration purposes. Signed, Director section 5, unit 3, December 8, 2015.
p.s., I'm not sure how long that last hack will actually work. Grabbed the test sections and units off 4chan this morning.
FDR wasn't Hitler either. Literally the anti-Hitler... and he put people in camps. It's not so simple.