I think there's a lot of value in looking at how to use hydrogen generated with renewables, especially when the source like solar or wind is capable of generating when the power isn't needed. During those periods the efficiency of energy conversion to hydrogen almost seems like it shouldn't matter because the energy is essentially free -- we can generate it but don't have any other use for it.
I wonder what the value of American-owned assets nationalized by Castro would be worth today had they never been nationalized. My guess is that it has to be at least Cuba's "cost" or worse.
It'd also be interesting to know the value of the lost productivity imposed by Cuba's communist economics.
Why not a diesel generator on board to charge the batteries? 30 miles doesn't seem adequate for most bus lines around here -- I figure most local busses run a route end-end of about 12 miles in about 2 hours, so a single bus could likely run the route 4 times in a shift.
The busses could be charged at the bus garage overnight and a generator consuming way less fuel than an engine could be used to extend the battery runtime. Kohler says their 20kw diesel generator uses about 2 gph at 100% load.
It means my iPhone 6 Plus order won't be backordered forever and I'll get it right away.
The Galaxy Note is the only Android I've ever been interested in, but then only for its size. The 6 Plus is only.2" -- sorry, 5.55555556 Ã-- 10^-5 American football fields -- smaller than a Note.
Now I can have an iPhone in the Note size, which is what I wanted all along.
I saw a "Good Guys" circular from the late 1980s yesterday and they had a Motorola "car phone" for sale in there for $1200. IIRC, it must have been a bag phone because I remember they said it was portable from car-car in the ad.
That's like $2500 in today's purchasing power-- can you imagine $2500 these days for an analog-only mobile phone? And what do you suppose calls were back then, 50 cents or more per minute, closer $1/minute in contemporary purchasing power?
About the only thing good about those bag phones was they had more transmit power.
Then the schools can damn well buy the calculators for their students.
Because school districts taxing property owners and buying calculators is so much more efficient than students obtaining their own calculators with that same money.
IMHO, one of the big problems with "$technology_items for every student" is that parents incorrectly look at this as a windfall entitlement -- free stuff for their kids that they don't have to buy themselves, when that's more or less exactly what's happening -- the district taxes the property owners and the taxes buy the stuff. TANSTAAFL.
In some ways, though, there is a free lunch component because schools are usually funded by property taxes which includes many properties without kids, shifting the burden of goodies for kids to people without kids.
A lot of insurance policies do cover temporary housing, and it wouldn't surprise me if they do maintain "inventory" in the form of preferential arrangements with hotels, especially the extended stay kind.
If Yelp has salespeople it's very easy to see that the salespeople have a motivation to punish businesses that don't play ball and they can do it without involving Yelp-the-company at all, by either doing it themselves or by farming it out if they worry about it getting linked back to them.
This seems to be one of those "plausible deniability" kind of rackets where the company has sales people who only get paid if they make sales and an official policy against doing something shady to obtain those sales, yet its well understood among the sales people that they should do X.
It also reminds me of the way Walmart exploits hourly workers -- the store manager is held to some financial goal. The corporation has a policy against making employees work off the clock, but it's a policy enforced at the store level by store managers. All Walmart has to do is squeeze the manager with financial targets he can only reach by ripping off employees.
I think the best thing the US could do is see Putin for what he basically is, a mafia boss. Once you realize that is how he has structured and is running the political economy of Russia it seems to me to be clearer on how to deal with him.
Putin may be as rough and tough personally as his public persona is made out to be, but he's only really as strong as the people he surrounds himself let him be. If they can be made to believe that backing him is a losing game he can be undermined and neutralized. I'm hoping that some bright boys from the State Department have watched the Godfather and the Sopranos enough times to figure this out and have factored this into the sanctions they've been selectively imposing so that the guys Putin needs to keep himself on top start to ask questions and wonder if there's maybe somebody else better for business.
Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin's head of the NKVD was probably more dangerous, ruthless and powerful than even Putin imagines himself to be in his wildest dreams. Stalin was afraid of him. Yet he wound up with a bullet in his head in Lubyanka.
Who are we dealing with here? Pretty young actresses have a shelf life like ripe peaches and an army of agents, publicists and ego-strokers whose number one mission in life is to make sure they wring maximum monetization out of their celebrity looks.
I'll Jennifer Lawrence some credit, she's a great actress, but don't think for a moment that this entire celebrity enterprise isn't about turning looks into money. It sure as hell isn't about "art" or their credibility as artists.
What seems to be missing from any of this photo hacking "scandal" is any kind of questions about what kind of narcissism it takes to start taking your own nude selfies. Are we supposed to just believe this is some kind of creative personal expression, like every normal wife/mother/sister we know strips down and does nude selfies? Or is it more likely this is just a byproduct of the inevitable self-absorbption that comes from a cynical and tireless self-promotion?
And, really, I don't care -- the morality doesn't bother me a bit, but I'm not going to think for a minute there's not more than a little neurotic behavior. And given the long history of leaked video *tape*, how fucking stupid do you have to be as an A-list celebrity to think "Oh, I can take snaps of my tits on my phone and upload them to the cloud and nobody will ever see them."
I'm not entirely sure school shootings are even a real social phenomenon and not just some media fueled phenomenon.
They seem to more or less date back to Colorado with very few before that (purposeful shootings, at least as distinct from criminal activity that just happened to be on school property). After that they seemed to kind of follow in the same mode, disaffected people lashing out against a major symbol of their disaffection.
Is it a trend or is it merely an inspiration shared to the disaffected by the media?
Are they exceptions? Kate Winslet, Ann Hathaway and Marion Cotillard have all done extensive nudity yet remain highly regarded actresses. You could just as easily say that good acting is an exception and nudity is just a superfluous criteeia.
I think a lot of it is complicated by the twisted American view of nudity. It's often only put in for scandal and titillation and seldom used in a realistic manner. A lot of people talk about "unnecessary" which I think is begs the question as to what "necessary" nudity is.
As far as I know, Jennifer Lawrence has never done a nude scene in a movie. Is some of the outrage due to that maybe Jennifer Lawrence as an actress is more appealing/alluring in some roles because she's not been seen on screen nude and thus manages to increase her allure by keeping the mystery alive (although X-Men and American Hustle did about everything possible to reveal that mystery)
It does seem to be something of a female celebrity career trope that when they hit a mature phase of their careers they start opting for roles that involve a lot of nudity under some kind of guise that it's a challenging or artistically complex thing to do. Usually the more explicit the nudity and/or sex the greater press it draws and with any luck a bump to the actress' career.
I'm not implying she doesn't have other, better reasons to be annoyed -- celebrities are people too, and like their privacy. I'm just curious to what extent the outrage isn't somewhat motivated by a celebrity's desire to flog an image of sexuality for maximum return.
There's times I think that the "anti opiate" forces would be against anything that made pain sufferers feel better. It's like there's some kind of morality subtext that's really "pro pain" and opposed to feeling better (unless of course it was due to praying to Jesus).
Russian gas is a double-edged sword for Russia. It's economy is already on the skids, a boycott of Russian gas by the EU (to the extent is practical) makes it worse. I think the oligarchs will go a long ways with Putin but there is a point at which they might like being rich more than they fear Putin.
I also think that anything that looks like real brinksmanship with the US that could lead to a shooting war would be defused by the Chinese. On paper, they'd love to see the US and Russia beat the shit out of each other, but at the end of the day it would eviscerate the Chinese economy and lead to a ton of turmoil. China moves forward with the US and collapses without it. When push comes to shove, they will back the US over Russia because they can move forward without Russia.
"In order to continue to maintain control over the economy and manipulate financial markets, banks will probably have to get some laws passed that give us control over bitcoin."
It wasn't about the metaphysics, because of course, he's kind of right. Although if you listen to someone who is an actual philosophy professor with a background in metaphysics and epistemology they make pretty convincing arguments against this kind of thinking.
What bothered me was the kind of smarmy, know-it-all attitude he had.
Ironically (or not) the comment I made was based on a story I had heard told about the philosopher George Berkeley's "immaterialism". This theory denies the existence of material substance and instead contends that familiar objects like tables and chairs are only ideas in the minds of perceivers, and as a result cannot exist without being perceived.
He had arrived in the rain someplace and couldn't enter because a door or gate was locked and he pounded on the door to be let in. A competing philosopher whose name I don't remember was slow in opening it and let Berkeley continue to pound on the door in the rain.
Berkeley became angry at being left in the rain and became agitated. The philosopher with whom he disagreed with yelled out "George! Calm down! Just stop perceiving the door and you'll be able to walk right in."
I was riding the bus home from the University about 20 years ago and this guy in front of me was going on and on to this girl sitting next to him, sprouting some Philosophy 101 nonsense about how "How do I know you're real, and not just a figment of my imagination?"
After about 15 minutes of this I couldn't take it anymore and I looked at the girl and said "Go ahead and punch this guy in the nose, and then ask him whether he still wonders whether you're a figment of your imagination."
And in most areas, how "full" is the coax line between my house and the fiber node? Ie, how much of the usable coax bandwidth has been allocated to cable channels, on-demand viewing, phone service, alarm monitoring, and Internet access?
Has switching from NTSC analog to all those HD channels (even though they are compressed, etc) been a net gain in usable bandwidth on the coax or just a wash?
I always just wonder if Comcast isn't just trying to keep that coax cable capable of handing TV and Internet by various means of suppressing bandwidth consumption on Internet usage.
The suck for Comcast is when that coax cable "runs out" of bandwidth and there's no room to cram yet another HD sports channel on. A project to migrate from coax to fiber would be a total nightmare for them.
I'm not trying to defend or justify anything they do, I'm sure it's at least half oriented towards nickle and diming and profiting off of manufactured scarcity but coax cable shared by many dwellings seems like a major bottleneck that will eventually have to be addressed and it will not be cheap.
Yeah, I never got to the installation phase of anything because as you say I began to worry about what MIGHT get installed as this VM can get to my production network. They are on separate subnets but not for security reasons; I run this VM for connecting to client systems when they want VPN software installed, which is why it has its own unique public IP. A dumb subnet scanner wouldn't hurt, but something smart might.
I am tempted to spin up a special VM on a totally isolated VLAN with connectivity to anything but a dedicated firewall which would pick up a NAT address from the cable modem (and thus not compromise any of my statics, I think it gets NAT'd to my static range gateway address). I'd probably skip the snapshot and just set the disk to independent/non persistent so changes would be long-term impossible between boots.
It's still not perfect, there are potential security risks in the hypervisor, but a patched ESXi 5.5 doesn't scare me like an OS hosted hypervisor would.
What they did was crazy -- access to a live PC on their internal network? What do you bet there were cached admin credentials on it from cloning or initial setup, too.
I happened to have a VM I use for testing up and running and I snapshotted it and figured I'd follow along with him just to see what he wanted done. This VM is on its own VLAN and behind its own firewall and public IP, but I kind of got cold feet about creds that could be on the machine or connectivity to my production LAN so I stopped before anything got installed (and I reverted to the snapshot, too).
Anyway, after I quit playing along I started to gently question who he said he was and the guy became really abusive and threatening, like he was going to save up for a plane ticket to fly to the US and beat me up or something if I didn't keep going. I was really kind of surprised at how far he took it.
At that point I figured dishing it out was fine, so I went full-on nasty with him and again I was surprised at his willingness to keep it up, especially considering I was pretty harsh.
iPhones have had the ability to be remote wiped for a long time. Yet I have not heard of a pandemic of hacker-led mass bricking of iPhones. Dirty hipsters and their iPhones have been at the center of a lot of protests yet we haven't heard of mass iPhone shutdowns by the police in response to demonstrations.
I think government/law enforcement already have the powers they physically need to fuck with cell phones. Between Stingray devices and the ability to present national security letters to carriers or service providers, if they wanted to they could get IMEIs blacklisted or get someone like Apple to brick a specific phone.
I think this just finally cuts off the ability of the cell carriers to encourage and profit from theft by activating stolen phones. Maybe if we treated AT&T stores like pawn shops and told them it was loss of their licenses and jail time for trafficking in stolen property if they activated stolen phones the kill switches wouldn't be necessary, but because corporate profits and lobbying we don't.
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I think there's a lot of value in looking at how to use hydrogen generated with renewables, especially when the source like solar or wind is capable of generating when the power isn't needed. During those periods the efficiency of energy conversion to hydrogen almost seems like it shouldn't matter because the energy is essentially free -- we can generate it but don't have any other use for it.
Please do tell me about these Soviet-style communist economies which have flourished and persisted with the growth and wealth accumulation.
I wonder what the value of American-owned assets nationalized by Castro would be worth today had they never been nationalized. My guess is that it has to be at least Cuba's "cost" or worse.
It'd also be interesting to know the value of the lost productivity imposed by Cuba's communist economics.
Why not a diesel generator on board to charge the batteries? 30 miles doesn't seem adequate for most bus lines around here -- I figure most local busses run a route end-end of about 12 miles in about 2 hours, so a single bus could likely run the route 4 times in a shift.
The busses could be charged at the bus garage overnight and a generator consuming way less fuel than an engine could be used to extend the battery runtime. Kohler says their 20kw diesel generator uses about 2 gph at 100% load.
It means my iPhone 6 Plus order won't be backordered forever and I'll get it right away.
The Galaxy Note is the only Android I've ever been interested in, but then only for its size. The 6 Plus is only .2" -- sorry, 5.55555556 Ã-- 10^-5 American football fields -- smaller than a Note.
Now I can have an iPhone in the Note size, which is what I wanted all along.
I saw a "Good Guys" circular from the late 1980s yesterday and they had a Motorola "car phone" for sale in there for $1200. IIRC, it must have been a bag phone because I remember they said it was portable from car-car in the ad.
That's like $2500 in today's purchasing power-- can you imagine $2500 these days for an analog-only mobile phone? And what do you suppose calls were back then, 50 cents or more per minute, closer $1/minute in contemporary purchasing power?
About the only thing good about those bag phones was they had more transmit power.
Then the schools can damn well buy the calculators for their students.
Because school districts taxing property owners and buying calculators is so much more efficient than students obtaining their own calculators with that same money.
IMHO, one of the big problems with "$technology_items for every student" is that parents incorrectly look at this as a windfall entitlement -- free stuff for their kids that they don't have to buy themselves, when that's more or less exactly what's happening -- the district taxes the property owners and the taxes buy the stuff. TANSTAAFL.
In some ways, though, there is a free lunch component because schools are usually funded by property taxes which includes many properties without kids, shifting the burden of goodies for kids to people without kids.
A lot of insurance policies do cover temporary housing, and it wouldn't surprise me if they do maintain "inventory" in the form of preferential arrangements with hotels, especially the extended stay kind.
If Yelp has salespeople it's very easy to see that the salespeople have a motivation to punish businesses that don't play ball and they can do it without involving Yelp-the-company at all, by either doing it themselves or by farming it out if they worry about it getting linked back to them.
This seems to be one of those "plausible deniability" kind of rackets where the company has sales people who only get paid if they make sales and an official policy against doing something shady to obtain those sales, yet its well understood among the sales people that they should do X.
It also reminds me of the way Walmart exploits hourly workers -- the store manager is held to some financial goal. The corporation has a policy against making employees work off the clock, but it's a policy enforced at the store level by store managers. All Walmart has to do is squeeze the manager with financial targets he can only reach by ripping off employees.
I think the best thing the US could do is see Putin for what he basically is, a mafia boss. Once you realize that is how he has structured and is running the political economy of Russia it seems to me to be clearer on how to deal with him.
Putin may be as rough and tough personally as his public persona is made out to be, but he's only really as strong as the people he surrounds himself let him be. If they can be made to believe that backing him is a losing game he can be undermined and neutralized. I'm hoping that some bright boys from the State Department have watched the Godfather and the Sopranos enough times to figure this out and have factored this into the sanctions they've been selectively imposing so that the guys Putin needs to keep himself on top start to ask questions and wonder if there's maybe somebody else better for business.
Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin's head of the NKVD was probably more dangerous, ruthless and powerful than even Putin imagines himself to be in his wildest dreams. Stalin was afraid of him. Yet he wound up with a bullet in his head in Lubyanka.
Who are we dealing with here? Pretty young actresses have a shelf life like ripe peaches and an army of agents, publicists and ego-strokers whose number one mission in life is to make sure they wring maximum monetization out of their celebrity looks.
I'll Jennifer Lawrence some credit, she's a great actress, but don't think for a moment that this entire celebrity enterprise isn't about turning looks into money. It sure as hell isn't about "art" or their credibility as artists.
What seems to be missing from any of this photo hacking "scandal" is any kind of questions about what kind of narcissism it takes to start taking your own nude selfies. Are we supposed to just believe this is some kind of creative personal expression, like every normal wife/mother/sister we know strips down and does nude selfies? Or is it more likely this is just a byproduct of the inevitable self-absorbption that comes from a cynical and tireless self-promotion?
And, really, I don't care -- the morality doesn't bother me a bit, but I'm not going to think for a minute there's not more than a little neurotic behavior. And given the long history of leaked video *tape*, how fucking stupid do you have to be as an A-list celebrity to think "Oh, I can take snaps of my tits on my phone and upload them to the cloud and nobody will ever see them."
I'm not entirely sure school shootings are even a real social phenomenon and not just some media fueled phenomenon.
They seem to more or less date back to Colorado with very few before that (purposeful shootings, at least as distinct from criminal activity that just happened to be on school property). After that they seemed to kind of follow in the same mode, disaffected people lashing out against a major symbol of their disaffection.
Is it a trend or is it merely an inspiration shared to the disaffected by the media?
Are they exceptions? Kate Winslet, Ann Hathaway and Marion Cotillard have all done extensive nudity yet remain highly regarded actresses. You could just as easily say that good acting is an exception and nudity is just a superfluous criteeia.
I think a lot of it is complicated by the twisted American view of nudity. It's often only put in for scandal and titillation and seldom used in a realistic manner. A lot of people talk about "unnecessary" which I think is begs the question as to what "necessary" nudity is.
As far as I know, Jennifer Lawrence has never done a nude scene in a movie. Is some of the outrage due to that maybe Jennifer Lawrence as an actress is more appealing/alluring in some roles because she's not been seen on screen nude and thus manages to increase her allure by keeping the mystery alive (although X-Men and American Hustle did about everything possible to reveal that mystery)
It does seem to be something of a female celebrity career trope that when they hit a mature phase of their careers they start opting for roles that involve a lot of nudity under some kind of guise that it's a challenging or artistically complex thing to do. Usually the more explicit the nudity and/or sex the greater press it draws and with any luck a bump to the actress' career.
Could Jennifer Lawrence ALSO be motivated by the fact that being nude in a movie is some way passé now -- ie, taking a role with nudity would no longer bring any added celebrity or notoriety because we've already seen that?
I'm not implying she doesn't have other, better reasons to be annoyed -- celebrities are people too, and like their privacy. I'm just curious to what extent the outrage isn't somewhat motivated by a celebrity's desire to flog an image of sexuality for maximum return.
There's times I think that the "anti opiate" forces would be against anything that made pain sufferers feel better. It's like there's some kind of morality subtext that's really "pro pain" and opposed to feeling better (unless of course it was due to praying to Jesus).
Why couldn't they make a race track similar to a slot car track, although without the slot?
Russian gas is a double-edged sword for Russia. It's economy is already on the skids, a boycott of Russian gas by the EU (to the extent is practical) makes it worse. I think the oligarchs will go a long ways with Putin but there is a point at which they might like being rich more than they fear Putin.
I also think that anything that looks like real brinksmanship with the US that could lead to a shooting war would be defused by the Chinese. On paper, they'd love to see the US and Russia beat the shit out of each other, but at the end of the day it would eviscerate the Chinese economy and lead to a ton of turmoil. China moves forward with the US and collapses without it. When push comes to shove, they will back the US over Russia because they can move forward without Russia.
"In order to continue to maintain control over the economy and manipulate financial markets, banks will probably have to get some laws passed that give us control over bitcoin."
"Keep honking, I'm reloading"
It wasn't about the metaphysics, because of course, he's kind of right. Although if you listen to someone who is an actual philosophy professor with a background in metaphysics and epistemology they make pretty convincing arguments against this kind of thinking.
What bothered me was the kind of smarmy, know-it-all attitude he had.
Ironically (or not) the comment I made was based on a story I had heard told about the philosopher George Berkeley's "immaterialism". This theory denies the existence of material substance and instead contends that familiar objects like tables and chairs are only ideas in the minds of perceivers, and as a result cannot exist without being perceived.
He had arrived in the rain someplace and couldn't enter because a door or gate was locked and he pounded on the door to be let in. A competing philosopher whose name I don't remember was slow in opening it and let Berkeley continue to pound on the door in the rain.
Berkeley became angry at being left in the rain and became agitated. The philosopher with whom he disagreed with yelled out "George! Calm down! Just stop perceiving the door and you'll be able to walk right in."
I was riding the bus home from the University about 20 years ago and this guy in front of me was going on and on to this girl sitting next to him, sprouting some Philosophy 101 nonsense about how "How do I know you're real, and not just a figment of my imagination?"
After about 15 minutes of this I couldn't take it anymore and I looked at the girl and said "Go ahead and punch this guy in the nose, and then ask him whether he still wonders whether you're a figment of your imagination."
And in most areas, how "full" is the coax line between my house and the fiber node? Ie, how much of the usable coax bandwidth has been allocated to cable channels, on-demand viewing, phone service, alarm monitoring, and Internet access?
Has switching from NTSC analog to all those HD channels (even though they are compressed, etc) been a net gain in usable bandwidth on the coax or just a wash?
I always just wonder if Comcast isn't just trying to keep that coax cable capable of handing TV and Internet by various means of suppressing bandwidth consumption on Internet usage.
The suck for Comcast is when that coax cable "runs out" of bandwidth and there's no room to cram yet another HD sports channel on. A project to migrate from coax to fiber would be a total nightmare for them.
I'm not trying to defend or justify anything they do, I'm sure it's at least half oriented towards nickle and diming and profiting off of manufactured scarcity but coax cable shared by many dwellings seems like a major bottleneck that will eventually have to be addressed and it will not be cheap.
Yeah, I never got to the installation phase of anything because as you say I began to worry about what MIGHT get installed as this VM can get to my production network. They are on separate subnets but not for security reasons; I run this VM for connecting to client systems when they want VPN software installed, which is why it has its own unique public IP. A dumb subnet scanner wouldn't hurt, but something smart might.
I am tempted to spin up a special VM on a totally isolated VLAN with connectivity to anything but a dedicated firewall which would pick up a NAT address from the cable modem (and thus not compromise any of my statics, I think it gets NAT'd to my static range gateway address). I'd probably skip the snapshot and just set the disk to independent/non persistent so changes would be long-term impossible between boots.
It's still not perfect, there are potential security risks in the hypervisor, but a patched ESXi 5.5 doesn't scare me like an OS hosted hypervisor would.
What they did was crazy -- access to a live PC on their internal network? What do you bet there were cached admin credentials on it from cloning or initial setup, too.
I took a call from one of these guys.
I happened to have a VM I use for testing up and running and I snapshotted it and figured I'd follow along with him just to see what he wanted done. This VM is on its own VLAN and behind its own firewall and public IP, but I kind of got cold feet about creds that could be on the machine or connectivity to my production LAN so I stopped before anything got installed (and I reverted to the snapshot, too).
Anyway, after I quit playing along I started to gently question who he said he was and the guy became really abusive and threatening, like he was going to save up for a plane ticket to fly to the US and beat me up or something if I didn't keep going. I was really kind of surprised at how far he took it.
At that point I figured dishing it out was fine, so I went full-on nasty with him and again I was surprised at his willingness to keep it up, especially considering I was pretty harsh.
iPhones have had the ability to be remote wiped for a long time. Yet I have not heard of a pandemic of hacker-led mass bricking of iPhones. Dirty hipsters and their iPhones have been at the center of a lot of protests yet we haven't heard of mass iPhone shutdowns by the police in response to demonstrations.
I think government/law enforcement already have the powers they physically need to fuck with cell phones. Between Stingray devices and the ability to present national security letters to carriers or service providers, if they wanted to they could get IMEIs blacklisted or get someone like Apple to brick a specific phone.
I think this just finally cuts off the ability of the cell carriers to encourage and profit from theft by activating stolen phones. Maybe if we treated AT&T stores like pawn shops and told them it was loss of their licenses and jail time for trafficking in stolen property if they activated stolen phones the kill switches wouldn't be necessary, but because corporate profits and lobbying we don't.