That people can't think for themselves? And that they'll vote for whomever won the previous primaries?
Many people will, yes. Welcome to democracy, where some people have intellectually valid reasons for how they vote, and other's don't. Hell, welcome to life.
Just have one set date, on which the whole nation will vote who they want as their president, and have all candidates run for it.
Sorry, that would be a complete disaster in a plurality election. Plurality elections only work well if there are exactly two viable candidates. With three or more viable candidates, the spoiler effect damages their integrity, and in an election with, say, ten candidates, you might as well choose a candidate at random. Think about it: in a race with, say, three liberals and one conservative on the ticket, who would win? Right, always the conservative, because around half the population would vote for him, while the other half would split their vote between the similar candidates, and therefore each liberal candidate's vote count would be divided by three. That's why there is such a strong incentive to winnow the field down to two candidates as quickly as possible.
Other voting systems handle multi-candidate elections better, but until/unless we adopt one of them, the current system of primaries is largely inevitable.
I do want to thank you for not trumpeting that "hundred years of war" bullshit that Obama keeps claiming was McCain's intention even when he knows damn well it wasn't.
What, then, is McCain's intention? Clearly it's not "100 years of war", but "we'll stay as long as we have to until" could easily stretch into decades of occupation. If people are looking for an open-ended, deadline-free commitment in Iraq, then okay, but everybody should be clear that that is what McCain is advocating.
The only way he could "unite" would be to either be so bad that everyone hates him (Bush is a uniter in this regard!) or be a complete moderate and not change anything (and of course his campaign is built on "CHANGE", another empty word).
.... or be so inspiring and competent that people and politicians from both parties rally around his leadership. Is that likely to happen? Probably not for 100% of the country, or even 75%. But given, say, the backing of 70% of the country and a majority in both houses of Congress, I think that would enough "unity" to start really working at solving this country's problems.
You cannot unite people in politics when politics is by nature divisive
You left out "as currently practiced". Divide-and-conquer is one political strategy, and it's an effective one, but it's not the only one.
Re:Doesn't even have to be live life...
on
The Phoenix Has Landed
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· Score: 5, Insightful
A human skeleton? Not very high. But any skeleton? In areas that used to be underwater, you often find fossilized imprints of shellfish, etc, every few inches.
What about nuclear energy? Do you support that or do you prefer existing solutions?
Haha, it's the old false choice fallacy. In fact, I prefer nuclear energy over coal and petroleum, but I also prefer wind/solar/wave/hydro over nuclear.
Then, you amend copyright laws to make child porn non-copyrightable.
Is child porn copyrightable now? Technically it probably is, but as a practical matter it isn't, because you can't exactly sue somebody for pirating your kiddy porn. The first thing the judge would do is have you arrested for making it.
In any case, perverts would still pay for kiddy porn simply because it is difficult to get otherwise. The scarcity is created by the anti-child-porn laws, not copyright laws.
Re:Why does Qt get such kudos?
on
In-Depth With Qt 4.4
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· Score: 5, Informative
But for the cost of one license for MSDN you can only license one application for Qt development, both per year.
Huh? A Qt license is expensive, but once you have it you can create all the Qt apps you want. At least, that's what my Qt license says. I think you have been misinformed.
But, per application, recurring per year, its expensive
Again, there is no "per application" charge. The "per year" charge is if you want support -- if you don't want/need support, just buy the Qt license and don't renew it after a year. You'll still be able to use the version you bought indefinitely.
And should we port to Linux and Mac OS/X, our licensing fees for MSDN would be £453 (approx $1116) and our Qt fees would be $126,000).
Are you talking about porting a.net app to Mac and Linux? Most Win32 apps wouldn't be "ported" so much as "rewritten from scratch", and for a non-trivial app the rewrite would cost a lot more than $126,000 in developer time. Maybe C#/.net apps run just as well on Linux and OS/X as they do under Windows, but if so that is news to me. Portability what makes Qt worth the money... being able to support Linux, Windows, and Mac with a single codebase that you only have to write and debug once is a huge win.
rather that I would not be able to offset the costs of this vehicle through the use of solar panels, because of two reasons.
1. My vehicle will not be at home during the day.
I think this has a solution, at least in theory:
1. Put solar panels on your roof at home. 2. Your home solar panels generate power during the day, which you feed into the grid and sell to your local electric utility 3. At night, you bring your EV home and buy power from the grid to recharge it
The cost and the profit cancel out, et voila, "free" power for your car!:^)
And why would I want to buy a $25K car that effectively has a 4 gallon fuel tank? Not to mention the rather anemic performance?
The main reason would be so that you wouldn't have to buy gas for it. How important that is to you will probably depend on how much the gas costs. What will gas prices be next year? In five years? In ten years? (Don't forget that there are lots of new car owners in China and India that will be competing with you for that same gasoline)
A car like that is only useful as a commuter-car - drive it to work, drive it home, maybe drive it to the store now and then. Which means I'd still need another car for doing everything else a car is for.
Depending on your lifestyle, it might make sense to just rent a car if you need to do things that the electric can't handle. Or borrow a friend's car. How often do you drive more than 100 miles in a day?
Better to buy just one car that can do everything I need, than two cars.
That's an entirely reasonable conclusion given your current conditions. However, conditions change, and you may reach a different result in a few years (e.g. if gas reaches $10/gallon).
This shouldn't be taken as a Micr$oft bash as much as an example of poor planning.
Or perhaps an example of really good planning. If I was planning to make sure a few million potentially incriminating emails never found their way into the public eye, that is how I might do it. Certainly if I had spent a number of meetings discussing how and when Americans should torture people I would be motivated to do so.
I may well be over simplifying things, but isn't the basic problem of global warming a matter of too much energy in the biosphere?
No, the problem is that carbon dioxide is acting as a blanket, trapping too much heat beneath it.
How is adding more energy to the equation going to do anything but make it worse?
It's not a heat beam, it's a microwave beam. There's a big difference between the two. The amount of heat generated by the beam when it reaches the receiver would be insignificant, and it would generate no heat when going through the atmosphere, because the wavelength chosen would be one that is transparent with respect to air. So the net effect would be practically zero added heat. (Even if you count the heat generated by the motors powered by the resulting electricity, it's still insignificant compared to the heat trapped by CO2 in the atmosphere) And if we use that device to replace traditional fossil fuels, then its net effect would be a significant reduction in CO2 output.
There are good reasons why in-orbit solar power isn't a good idea at this time, but your reason isn't one of them.
NASA blew it by doing a study that purported to show it would be too expensive.
Actually, NASA's study got it exactly right. The amount of solar-collecting material you'd need to place into orbit is large enough that you'd spend a lot more energy and money getting it into orbit then you'd ever get back from it once it was functional. Things may have improved since then (more efficient rockets, lighter solar panels, etc), but I doubt they've improved so much as to make the plane feasible yet. I'd re-do the feasibility studies after the space elevator is up and working, getting enough mass into orbit will be a lot cheaper then:^)
Wire is much more efficient and airmen have a chance to see and avoid it.
It seems to me that airmen see a line of tall towers with blinky red lights at the top, they should know not to fly between the towers whether they see wires between them or not. Even without the possibility of microwave death beams (tm), the wires might just be too small for them to see. Surely they teach this sort of thing in flight school?
That said, I wonder exactly what the consequences would be for an airplane that flew through a tightly focused microwave power beam? Sliced in half?
It's probably the obvious thing: Apple doesn't want an existing PASemi product so much as access to PASemi's crack team of engineers. That way, the next time Apple wants to make product X, it can order these guys to design a chip that fits that product perfectly.
If there was a way to make $2/gallon gas it would be already on the market.
Interesting logic you're using there. Shall we take it a bit further, and assert that there are no more discoveries worth discovering, because if there were they would "already be on the market"?
The problem with this plan is that it doesn't scale out. It's subject to the Windmill effect, where it's contesting with other uses for land, and eventually, it will be a source of clutter on the landscape.
That isn't really a significant concern. There's plenty of empty, sun-drenched space in the desert that nobody wants to use for anything else.
Space-based solar, on the other hand, suffers from a much bigger problem: the cost of launching material into orbit is so outrageously high that space-based solar won't be economically feasible until a major breakthrough (say, a working space elevator) is achieved. And even then -- say, for the sake of argument, that we found a way to launch satellites into orbit for free -- it's not clear to me that the costs of simply maintaining a large fleet of solar power satellites in their orbits wouldn't be significant. After all the analysis, it's likely to be cheaper and easier to harvest solar power on the ground. Yes, you have to harvest more sunlight since its intensity has been reduced by the atmosphere, but on the plus side, when something breaks it's a lot easier to fix it. You also don't have to worry about your power plant accidentally de-orbiting and landing on someone's house...:^)
If we could build such, it would herald a new golden age of mankind
I think that's a great plan for the 23rd century, but we need a plan that will get us through the 21st and 22nd intact, first.
When solar power can be stored and transported similarly at competitive costs to world oil distribution markets, the solar energy market will be ready
That may soon be true, if not in the way you imagine. As the cost of oil continues its inevitable climb upward (finite supply + infinite demand == higher prices), alternative power sources will become competitive and eventually, much cheaper than oil.
That's nothing more than a massively economically inefficient subsidy (payoff) to politically connected constituents
And yet massive subsidies were what brought the oil industry's infrastructure to where it is today. I don't see why the same mechanism that got one thing accomplished couldn't be used to get another thing accomplished as well. Sometimes you simply need to get the job done, even if it is expensive and inefficient to do it.
I was listening to an interview with one of the techies who does load balancing on the UK's national grid who said that wind and solar (any form) give him the willies because they're so unreliable from minute-to-minute.
That, as I understand it, is one of the advantages of thermal solar over photovoltaic and wind.... the heat stored in the molten salt acts as a buffer (a giant thermal flywheel, if you will), so that if the sun goes behind a cloud for a few minutes (or even a few hours), the plant's energy output doesn't immediately drop. Indeed, that's how the thermal solar plants are able to reliably generate power even during that regular solar outage we call 'night'. Combine that with the cost advantages (no expensive silicon required, just glass and concrete!) and I'd bet your UK tech guy would be a good deal more comfortable with thermal solar than he is with PV.
Jesus people. Is it really so hard to WATCH your kids?
Righeous indignation aside, yes. That is to say, it's impossible to do anything perfectly 100% of the time, always. No matter how hard you watch the kids, there will always be that one time when you're momentarily distracted and you look back and your kid isn't in sight anymore. At that point, you have to run around looking for them, hoping that you'll find them in the next few minutes because the more time that passes, the farther away they could be.
GPS is probably overkill for home, but I can certainly see the use of it in a crowded theme park, etc.
Yeah, and real developers should know that you don't do testing/developing on a production system, i.e. don't install beta development builds of the iPhone OS on your actual phone.
On the other hand, iPhones aren't terribly cheap. Not everybody has a second $399 to spend for a separate "development iPhone". For those who are willing to take that extra risk in order to save some money, developing on their regular iPhone may be the best choice.
The thing is, the only reason most people run Windows is so they can run legacy Windows applications. A Windows that can't run Windows apps? Yeah, that'll sell like an iPod that can't play MP3s.
Jebus, didn't anybody actually read the article? Win7 will run "legacy" Windows apps using a virtual machine environment, analogous to how MacOS/X used to run MacOS 9 apps. Nowhere does it suggest that you won't be able to run your legacy Windows applications under Win7.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm. Care to provide some shred of evidence for that assertion? Anything at all?
Many people will, yes. Welcome to democracy, where some people have intellectually valid reasons for how they vote, and other's don't. Hell, welcome to life.
Just have one set date, on which the whole nation will vote who they want as their president, and have all candidates run for it.
Sorry, that would be a complete disaster in a plurality election. Plurality elections only work well if there are exactly two viable candidates. With three or more viable candidates, the spoiler effect damages their integrity, and in an election with, say, ten candidates, you might as well choose a candidate at random. Think about it: in a race with, say, three liberals and one conservative on the ticket, who would win? Right, always the conservative, because around half the population would vote for him, while the other half would split their vote between the similar candidates, and therefore each liberal candidate's vote count would be divided by three. That's why there is such a strong incentive to winnow the field down to two candidates as quickly as possible.
Other voting systems handle multi-candidate elections better, but until/unless we adopt one of them, the current system of primaries is largely inevitable.
What, then, is McCain's intention? Clearly it's not "100 years of war", but "we'll stay as long as we have to until" could easily stretch into decades of occupation. If people are looking for an open-ended, deadline-free commitment in Iraq, then okay, but everybody should be clear that that is what McCain is advocating.
You cannot unite people in politics when politics is by nature divisive
You left out "as currently practiced". Divide-and-conquer is one political strategy, and it's an effective one, but it's not the only one.
A human skeleton? Not very high. But any skeleton? In areas that used to be underwater, you often find fossilized imprints of shellfish, etc, every few inches.
Do you support that or do you prefer existing solutions?
Haha, it's the old false choice fallacy. In fact, I prefer nuclear energy over coal and petroleum, but I also prefer wind/solar/wave/hydro over nuclear.
Is child porn copyrightable now? Technically it probably is, but as a practical matter it isn't, because you can't exactly sue somebody for pirating your kiddy porn. The first thing the judge would do is have you arrested for making it.
In any case, perverts would still pay for kiddy porn simply because it is difficult to get otherwise. The scarcity is created by the anti-child-porn laws, not copyright laws.
Huh? A Qt license is expensive, but once you have it you can create all the Qt apps you want. At least, that's what my Qt license says. I think you have been misinformed.
But, per application, recurring per year, its expensive
Again, there is no "per application" charge. The "per year" charge is if you want support -- if you don't want/need support, just buy the Qt license and don't renew it after a year. You'll still be able to use the version you bought indefinitely.
And should we port to Linux and Mac OS/X, our licensing fees for MSDN would be £453 (approx $1116) and our Qt fees would be $126,000).
Are you talking about porting a
1. My vehicle will not be at home during the day.
I think this has a solution, at least in theory:
1. Put solar panels on your roof at home.
2. Your home solar panels generate power during the day, which you feed into the grid and sell to your local electric utility
3. At night, you bring your EV home and buy power from the grid to recharge it
The cost and the profit cancel out, et voila, "free" power for your car!
The main reason would be so that you wouldn't have to buy gas for it. How important that is to you will probably depend on how much the gas costs. What will gas prices be next year? In five years? In ten years? (Don't forget that there are lots of new car owners in China and India that will be competing with you for that same gasoline)
A car like that is only useful as a commuter-car - drive it to work, drive it home, maybe drive it to the store now and then. Which means I'd still need another car for doing everything else a car is for.
Depending on your lifestyle, it might make sense to just rent a car if you need to do things that the electric can't handle. Or borrow a friend's car. How often do you drive more than 100 miles in a day?
Better to buy just one car that can do everything I need, than two cars.
That's an entirely reasonable conclusion given your current conditions. However, conditions change, and you may reach a different result in a few years (e.g. if gas reaches $10/gallon).
Or perhaps an example of really good planning. If I was planning to make sure a few million potentially incriminating emails never found their way into the public eye, that is how I might do it. Certainly if I had spent a number of meetings discussing how and when Americans should torture people I would be motivated to do so.
No, the problem is that carbon dioxide is acting as a blanket, trapping too much heat beneath it.
How is adding more energy to the equation going to do anything but make it worse?
It's not a heat beam, it's a microwave beam. There's a big difference between the two. The amount of heat generated by the beam when it reaches the receiver would be insignificant, and it would generate no heat when going through the atmosphere, because the wavelength chosen would be one that is transparent with respect to air. So the net effect would be practically zero added heat. (Even if you count the heat generated by the motors powered by the resulting electricity, it's still insignificant compared to the heat trapped by CO2 in the atmosphere) And if we use that device to replace traditional fossil fuels, then its net effect would be a significant reduction in CO2 output.
There are good reasons why in-orbit solar power isn't a good idea at this time, but your reason isn't one of them.
Actually, NASA's study got it exactly right. The amount of solar-collecting material you'd need to place into orbit is large enough that you'd spend a lot more energy and money getting it into orbit then you'd ever get back from it once it was functional. Things may have improved since then (more efficient rockets, lighter solar panels, etc), but I doubt they've improved so much as to make the plane feasible yet. I'd re-do the feasibility studies after the space elevator is up and working, getting enough mass into orbit will be a lot cheaper then
It seems to me that airmen see a line of tall towers with blinky red lights at the top, they should know not to fly between the towers whether they see wires between them or not. Even without the possibility of microwave death beams (tm), the wires might just be too small for them to see. Surely they teach this sort of thing in flight school?
That said, I wonder exactly what the consequences would be for an airplane that flew through a tightly focused microwave power beam? Sliced in half?
It's probably the obvious thing: Apple doesn't want an existing PASemi product so much as access to PASemi's crack team of engineers. That way, the next time Apple wants to make product X, it can order these guys to design a chip that fits that product perfectly.
Interesting logic you're using there. Shall we take it a bit further, and assert that there are no more discoveries worth discovering, because if there were they would "already be on the market"?
If you're only interested in products and don't care about discoveries, then you're on the wrong site. Try amazon.com instead.
Who said anything about solar panels? The article is about solar thermal power, which is a completely different technology.
That isn't really a significant concern. There's plenty of empty, sun-drenched space in the desert that nobody wants to use for anything else.
Space-based solar, on the other hand, suffers from a much bigger problem: the cost of launching material into orbit is so outrageously high that space-based solar won't be economically feasible until a major breakthrough (say, a working space elevator) is achieved. And even then -- say, for the sake of argument, that we found a way to launch satellites into orbit for free -- it's not clear to me that the costs of simply maintaining a large fleet of solar power satellites in their orbits wouldn't be significant. After all the analysis, it's likely to be cheaper and easier to harvest solar power on the ground. Yes, you have to harvest more sunlight since its intensity has been reduced by the atmosphere, but on the plus side, when something breaks it's a lot easier to fix it. You also don't have to worry about your power plant accidentally de-orbiting and landing on someone's house...
If we could build such, it would herald a new golden age of mankind
I think that's a great plan for the 23rd century, but we need a plan that will get us through the 21st and 22nd intact, first.
That may soon be true, if not in the way you imagine. As the cost of oil continues its inevitable climb upward (finite supply + infinite demand == higher prices), alternative power sources will become competitive and eventually, much cheaper than oil.
That's nothing more than a massively economically inefficient subsidy (payoff) to politically connected constituents
And yet massive subsidies were what brought the oil industry's infrastructure to where it is today. I don't see why the same mechanism that got one thing accomplished couldn't be used to get another thing accomplished as well. Sometimes you simply need to get the job done, even if it is expensive and inefficient to do it.
That, as I understand it, is one of the advantages of thermal solar over photovoltaic and wind.... the heat stored in the molten salt acts as a buffer (a giant thermal flywheel, if you will), so that if the sun goes behind a cloud for a few minutes (or even a few hours), the plant's energy output doesn't immediately drop. Indeed, that's how the thermal solar plants are able to reliably generate power even during that regular solar outage we call 'night'. Combine that with the cost advantages (no expensive silicon required, just glass and concrete!) and I'd bet your UK tech guy would be a good deal more comfortable with thermal solar than he is with PV.
Knowing which building to look in is still way better than "he could be anywhere in the state by now"....
Righeous indignation aside, yes. That is to say, it's impossible to do anything perfectly 100% of the time, always. No matter how hard you watch the kids, there will always be that one time when you're momentarily distracted and you look back and your kid isn't in sight anymore. At that point, you have to run around looking for them, hoping that you'll find them in the next few minutes because the more time that passes, the farther away they could be.
GPS is probably overkill for home, but I can certainly see the use of it in a crowded theme park, etc.
On the other hand, iPhones aren't terribly cheap. Not everybody has a second $399 to spend for a separate "development iPhone". For those who are willing to take that extra risk in order to save some money, developing on their regular iPhone may be the best choice.
Jebus, didn't anybody actually read the article? Win7 will run "legacy" Windows apps using a virtual machine environment, analogous to how MacOS/X used to run MacOS 9 apps. Nowhere does it suggest that you won't be able to run your legacy Windows applications under Win7.