do you really think I'll put up with your bullshit instead of spending another $5k on batteries and going totally off-grid, costing you even your scammy $14/month "connection charge"?
Hmm. $5,000 up-front in order save $14/month? Those batteries will pay for themselves in only 29 years, yay! Or rather, they would pay for themselves if they lasted that long, which they definitely won't.
So yes, the power company really does think you'll put up with their bullshit -- or at least, that most people will.
Instead, [power companies] want to coast on coal plants and grid they built out, much of it long ago - and keep slamming your checks.
Well, sure -- those coal plants cost a fair amount of money to build, and the longer they can keep them running, the more they can amortize that cost.
Of course, while that's a rational policy for the power companies, it's not rational for society as a whole, since it's the rest of us who end up paying the costs of the carbon pollution (in the form of flood damage, crop losses, war, etc). A carbon-emissions tax would go a long way towards re-aligning the power companies' economic incentives to better reflect those of society at large.
Seems like what the world really needs is a way to combine (excess solar electricity) and (excess atmospheric CO2) back into some kind of useful hydrocarbon fuel.
Then your "storage device" could simply be the underground tanks at the local gas station, which would partially refill themselves each afternoon by siphoning off the excess electricity to create gasoline.
TFA implies he caused the delay, when in fact incompetent airport security staff caused the delay.
I'll go you one further, and suggest that inadequate airport design caused the delay.
In particular, hiring a human being to stare at a hallway for 8 hours a day to make sure nobody walks this way instead of that way is not a good design. People -- even well-trained, competent people, with the best intentions -- are notoriously bad at doing mind-numbingly tedious tasks like this for hours at a time.
Machines, on the other hand, could be employed to do the same job more effectively and reliably. It doesn't even need to be particularly high-tech: a simple one-way turnstile (perhaps augmented with a video camera to sound an alarm if the turnstile is tampered with or somehow bypassed) would do a more reliable job, and as a side benefit would not need to be paid a salary.
It's the 'pre-installed' part that's key. There are lots of times when I sit down at a Windows machine, and I either don't have the owner's permission to install stuff, or even if I do it's going to take 30 minutes just to get everything installed, before I can even start working on the actual problems at hand.
Just as a quick jab, maybe I want poor Canadians to be paid by rich beachfront property owning Miamians? Just something to think about.
Hmm, a sort of environmental extortion racket? I like it, but somehow the Canadians don't strike me as quite the type to try it. Maybe I'm wrong about that.:)
Inflation: It would cost more today to retard economic growth and combat climate change than it will in 2025.
Are you sure? Because while the relevant technologies will have no doubt advanced by 2025, the scale of the problem will be that much larger by that time as well. It's not obvious (to me anyway) how one would predict where the "sweet spot" would be, or if there even is going to be one -- it's entirely possible that the problems will continuously grow faster than the technology needed to solve them, so that it will never be cheaper or easier to combat climate change than it is today.
It seems that we are going to have to fight off aliens for our survival.
Er, why does it seem that?
Is it because any aliens that come here are going to want to take our resources? That seems unlikely, since any aliens capable of coming here would also be quite capable of gathering all the raw materials they need from other locations closer to wherever they came from -- avoiding interstellar freight costs is a huge incentive. (the exception might be "exotic" materials that can be found only on Earth, e.g. DNA, which might explain the cattle abductions -- but they only need samples of that since it's straightforward enough to duplicate as necessary)
The standard IT solution for this problem is to encode the data as DNA and inject it into a few dozen cockroaches, which you then drive to the nearest KFC and set free.
If you ever need to restore from backup, just put some twinkies in a bowl outside your door, and some copies of your data will be available to you by morning.
The problems I have with it are the government favoring it over a neutral policy and mandates forcing me to use it when it's not yet the least costly.
That raises the question: Least costly to whom?
If, for example, the carbon emissions from your cheap energy today are going to result in my air conditioning bill doubling next year, shouldn't you be held liable to compensate me for the costs you incurred?
Or on a larger scale, if Shell's tar-sands pollution over the next few years causes Miami to have to be evacuated in, say, 2025, should the cost of losing Miami and relocating all of its people not be somehow factored in to our calculations about what is really "cheapest"? Otherwise we're just robbing Peter to pay Paul.
Hmm. So you get easy access to amazing hardware that previous generations could only fantasize about, at bargain-basement prices, and still you manage to find a way to get upset about it, because somewhere out there, somebody might be making a profit by supplying you with products you want at a price you're willing to pay.
I'm finding it a bit difficult to feel much sympathy for your plight.
So store a movie on the first 2 GB and watch it while the rest of the data copies off.
OP does point to a real issue though -- drive capacity is increasing faster than drive bandwidth. That means that as time goes on, it takes longer and longer for full-disk operations (e.g. drive backups) to complete.
Since NAND access is (at least in principle) parallelizable, perhaps there is some new SD interface that can increase the transfer rate so that we can keep up for a while longer? I certainly don't much look forward to waiting 15 hours to make a copy of my 5TB SD card...
but if a political party (let's say the GOP) proposed general tax cuts that apply to everyone, it would be mocked and pilloried by the commie libs who post here. Why?
Commie lib here: because the GOP's tax cut proposals always amount to massive cuts for their hyper-rich campaign donors, coupled with a fig-leaf of minor tax savings for everyone else, followed one year later by the inevitable budget crunch
that then impacts the quality of life of everyone except those who can afford to seal themselves away from society. It's a grift -- everyone but the GOP's campaign funders end up poorer afterwards.
I nominate: 3a) discreetly getting notifications during meetings. Did no one else catch the part about its buzzer being inaudible?
The first killer app for the Apple watch will be two-way Morse-code base communication using the buzzer, for discreet Googling of the answers during tests. (of course, mastering this technique will actually require more work than just learning the test material, but that won't stop anybody)
Apparently Apple agrees with you, as they are not selling it yet.
This comes out and, cool as it may be, I can't think of very many uses for it that aren't exceedingly niche.
That may be so, but let's not rule out the "something I can wear just to get more attention from the people I want more attention from" application. That application has sold lots of other types of jewelry for centuries, and much of that other jewelry costs a good bit more AND doesn't put a realistic animated butterfly flapping its wings and changing colors on your wrist.
Until then any talk of "ending the war" is as silly as claiming you can tear down a dam because the river stopped flowing. It stopped flowing because of the dam.
Eh, the idea was that once the Iraqis had built up their own dam, slightly downstream from the US-built temporary dam, that we could remove the US dam and let the Iraqi dam take over.
Unfortunately, it looks like the Iraqi dam was made out of paper-mache...:(
Slashdot Mirror
do you really think I'll put up with your bullshit instead of spending another $5k on batteries and going totally off-grid, costing you even your scammy $14/month "connection charge"?
Hmm. $5,000 up-front in order save $14/month? Those batteries will pay for themselves in only 29 years, yay! Or rather, they would pay for themselves if they lasted that long, which they definitely won't.
So yes, the power company really does think you'll put up with their bullshit -- or at least, that most people will.
Instead, [power companies] want to coast on coal plants and grid they built out, much of it long ago - and keep slamming your checks.
Well, sure -- those coal plants cost a fair amount of money to build, and the longer they can keep them running, the more they can amortize that cost.
Of course, while that's a rational policy for the power companies, it's not rational for society as a whole, since it's the rest of us who end up paying the costs of the carbon pollution (in the form of flood damage, crop losses, war, etc). A carbon-emissions tax would go a long way towards re-aligning the power companies' economic incentives to better reflect those of society at large.
Seems like what the world really needs is a way to combine (excess solar electricity) and (excess atmospheric CO2) back into some kind of useful hydrocarbon fuel.
Then your "storage device" could simply be the underground tanks at the local gas station, which would partially refill themselves each afternoon by siphoning off the excess electricity to create gasoline.
Dunno if it will actually happen, but it's not beyond the realm of possibility.
No doubt you are in favor of other policies with "long tradition", like slavery, corruption, and the death penalty, right?
Well, that sure escalated quickly. ("You know who else was in favor of policies with long tradition? Hitler.")
TFA implies he caused the delay, when in fact incompetent airport security staff caused the delay.
I'll go you one further, and suggest that inadequate airport design caused the delay.
In particular, hiring a human being to stare at a hallway for 8 hours a day to make sure nobody walks this way instead of that way is not a good design. People -- even well-trained, competent people, with the best intentions -- are notoriously bad at doing mind-numbingly tedious tasks like this for hours at a time.
Machines, on the other hand, could be employed to do the same job more effectively and reliably. It doesn't even need to be particularly high-tech: a simple one-way turnstile (perhaps augmented with a video camera to sound an alarm if the turnstile is tampered with or somehow bypassed) would do a more reliable job, and as a side benefit would not need to be paid a salary.
Take a look at Red hat's CygWin. http://www.redhat.com/services...
It's the 'pre-installed' part that's key. There are lots of times when I sit down at a Windows machine, and I either don't have the owner's permission to install stuff, or even if I do it's going to take 30 minutes just to get everything installed, before I can even start working on the actual problems at hand.
Gullibility unfortunately is a survival mechanism.
I'd say trust is a survival mechanism. Gullibility is trusting people you should not be trusting, and I don't think it has much survival value :)
And fuck you if you say Windows isn't stable
Oh, it's stable enough these days. Windows' real unforgivable sin is that it ships without bash, vim, and ssh pre-installed.
The diagram is of a hypthetical super-laptop that contains the intersection of all the components of the various models that use that chassis
My God -- quantum computing has arrived!
What if I want a Model 3 but without the battery and the electric motor? I'm going to mod mine, Flintstones-style.
Perhaps you would be interested in a BMW i8?
Just as a quick jab, maybe I want poor Canadians to be paid by rich beachfront property owning Miamians? Just something to think about.
Hmm, a sort of environmental extortion racket? I like it, but somehow the Canadians don't strike me as quite the type to try it. Maybe I'm wrong about that. :)
Inflation: It would cost more today to retard economic growth and combat climate change than it will in 2025.
Are you sure? Because while the relevant technologies will have no doubt advanced by 2025, the scale of the problem will be that much larger by that time as well. It's not obvious (to me anyway) how one would predict where the "sweet spot" would be, or if there even is going to be one -- it's entirely possible that the problems will continuously grow faster than the technology needed to solve them, so that it will never be cheaper or easier to combat climate change than it is today.
It seems that we are going to have to fight off aliens for our survival.
Er, why does it seem that?
Is it because any aliens that come here are going to want to take our resources? That seems unlikely, since any aliens capable of coming here would also be quite capable of gathering all the raw materials they need from other locations closer to wherever they came from -- avoiding interstellar freight costs is a huge incentive. (the exception might be "exotic" materials that can be found only on Earth, e.g. DNA, which might explain the cattle abductions -- but they only need samples of that since it's straightforward enough to duplicate as necessary)
Old news. This was attempted over 2000 years ago, and it ended badly.
Phooey. It only failed because they didn't use XML.
The standard IT solution for this problem is to encode the data as DNA and inject it into a few dozen cockroaches, which you then drive to the nearest KFC and set free.
If you ever need to restore from backup, just put some twinkies in a bowl outside your door, and some copies of your data will be available to you by morning.
The problems I have with it are the government favoring it over a neutral policy and mandates forcing me to use it when it's not yet the least costly.
That raises the question: Least costly to whom?
If, for example, the carbon emissions from your cheap energy today are going to result in my air conditioning bill doubling next year, shouldn't you be held liable to compensate me for the costs you incurred?
Or on a larger scale, if Shell's tar-sands pollution over the next few years causes Miami to have to be evacuated in, say, 2025, should the cost of losing Miami and relocating all of its people not be somehow factored in to our calculations about what is really "cheapest"? Otherwise we're just robbing Peter to pay Paul.
Given a couple of hundred million years things would probably be back to plentiful when it comes to all those resources.
Possibly true, but that isn't much help for those of us who plan to live (and have our descendants live) during the next few centuries.
if I had the capacity to mine gold on an asteroid I certainly woukd not 'land' it in a nation but in international waters.
Given the relative densities of gold and water, you might want to reconsider that plan ;^)
Hmm. So you get easy access to amazing hardware that previous generations could only fantasize about, at bargain-basement prices, and still you manage to find a way to get upset about it, because somewhere out there, somebody might be making a profit by supplying you with products you want at a price you're willing to pay.
I'm finding it a bit difficult to feel much sympathy for your plight.
So store a movie on the first 2 GB and watch it while the rest of the data copies off.
OP does point to a real issue though -- drive capacity is increasing faster than drive bandwidth. That means that as time goes on, it takes longer and longer for full-disk operations (e.g. drive backups) to complete.
Since NAND access is (at least in principle) parallelizable, perhaps there is some new SD interface that can increase the transfer rate so that we can keep up for a while longer? I certainly don't much look forward to waiting 15 hours to make a copy of my 5TB SD card...
but if a political party (let's say the GOP) proposed general tax cuts that apply to everyone, it would be mocked and pilloried by the commie libs who post here. Why?
Commie lib here: because the GOP's tax cut proposals always amount to massive cuts for their hyper-rich campaign donors, coupled with a fig-leaf of minor tax savings for everyone else, followed one year later by the inevitable budget crunch
that then impacts the quality of life of everyone except those who can afford to seal themselves away from society. It's a grift -- everyone but the GOP's campaign funders end up poorer afterwards.
I nominate: 3a) discreetly getting notifications during meetings. Did no one else catch the part about its buzzer being inaudible?
The first killer app for the Apple watch will be two-way Morse-code base communication using the buzzer, for discreet Googling of the answers during tests. (of course, mastering this technique will actually require more work than just learning the test material, but that won't stop anybody)
Then I'd argue that it is too early to sell it.
Apparently Apple agrees with you, as they are not selling it yet.
This comes out and, cool as it may be, I can't think of very many uses for it that aren't exceedingly niche.
That may be so, but let's not rule out the "something I can wear just to get more attention from the people I want more attention from" application. That application has sold lots of other types of jewelry for centuries, and much of that other jewelry costs a good bit more AND doesn't put a realistic animated butterfly flapping its wings and changing colors on your wrist.
A bus will only get a few mpg, but carries a lot more people.
Sometimes it does. I see a lot of buses driving around 90+% empty.
I learned the one, what's it called? it has the little turtle that moves around in straight lines? Is that one still in use?
Ah, you're thinking of LOGO. It isn't widely used anymore, except as a niche language for cruise missile guidance systems.
Until then any talk of "ending the war" is as silly as claiming you can tear down a dam because the river stopped flowing. It stopped flowing because of the dam.
Eh, the idea was that once the Iraqis had built up their own dam, slightly downstream from the US-built temporary dam, that we could remove the US dam and let the Iraqi dam take over.
Unfortunately, it looks like the Iraqi dam was made out of paper-mache... :(