Nope...it's how I can get everyone's attention and who's looking at me?
This has a good deal of truth to it -- OTOH, winning a competition is also a good way to get everyone's attention. Therefore, in the circumstances where an electric car can outperform traditional ICE cars, it should also gain a following.
First, You cannot charge a president with a crime while in office.
Actually, you can. It's against current DOJ guidelines, but that doesn't mean they can't make an exception to their own guidelines if they feel it's appropriate to do so. Then it would be up to the courts to decide if the indictment can stand or not.
As a hypothetical example, let's imagine that some President decided to walk down 5th avenue in broad daylight, point an assault rifle at a nearby crowd, and summarily murder several dozen people while on live TV. Do you really think that law enforcement would just nod their heads and say "yeah, he committed mass murder, but he's the President so we'll just have to wait until after he's out of office to do anything about it"? That seems very unlikely.
I don't claim the current situation is comparable to that, but it demonstrates that indicting a President could and would happen under sufficiently dire circumstances.
Trump is not a businessman, he just plays one on TV. His actual profession (before politics) was money-laundering using sketchy real estate deals as a front. Pretending to be a "successful businessman" was just a useful way to explain where all that extra cash came from.
I would have said it's stupid because you can get a remote-controlled car (or etc) to do the same thing for about 1% of the price... but if you're flush with cash and really want to capture the public's attention, maybe a $22,000 robot-dog suicide bomber is the way to go.
So, um good job Kim, taking a desperate attempt at mitigating a massive environmental disaster that could have blanketed half a hemisphere in radioactive fallout and trying to parlay it into a gesture of goodwill?
Well, why wouldn't he? He's got nothing to lose by doing so, and by playing to Trump's ego he might better be able to manipulate him.
What's this "turn it horizontal" nonsense about? There's no time for that!
A properly reusable rocket should just require a new upper stage to be lowered into place on top of the just-landed/still-vertical first stage, a quick 5-minute refuel, and then back to work!
If SpaceX can't get shorter turnaround times than Southwest, then what's the point?;)
Concerns about Facebook taking over the world aside, this makes some sense.
The biggest problem any virtual currency has is the onboarding problem -- how do you get people to actually start using your currency, and to assign any non-zero value to it?
Facebook already has millions (billions?) of users "onboard" so it has a big head start in that area, which it could use to its advantage.
My hope is that Facebook doesn't just try to create "yet another virtual currency", however; that's been done to death already, and I don't think anyone really wants their money to be controlled by Facebook anyway.
The real potential use-case for Facebook would be in social authentication -- e.g. if they could use the blockchain to help the platform authenticate genuine posts and automatically filter out trolls, scammers, etc. I'm not sure if that's doable or not, but that would be of much more value to the world than "Facebook Flooz".
What changed is that previously North Korea did not have a deployable nuclear weapons stockpile. Now they do.
Now that North Korea is able to negotiate from a position of strength, they are willing to negotiate -- but if you think North Korea is ever going to give away their nuclear stockpile, which they see as the sole guarantor of their survival, you're going to be disappointed. North Koreans aren't dumb, they saw what happened to Muammar Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein.
Over long term yes the house wins. Law of large numbers and all that. But over a short time period - say one hour or one day - you can easily win. I've done it, I won 5 grand playing blackjack one night when I was 22 years old. It was exhilarating.
^ This is exactly the answer to the previous poster's question: gambling takes advantage of peoples' natural tendency to focus more on the near-term and less on the long-term. In the short run, gambling looks like a risky but potentially lucrative (and therefore exciting) "business opportunity". In the long term, it's obviously a scam, but that doesn't count for much with people who are not in the habit of thinking about the long term.
Laws of physics aren't just suggestions. 50 mpg requires the car to suck.
Tesla manufactures an 18-wheeler(!) that gets better than 50mpg (equivalent) and by all accounts it doesn't suck.
If that is possible using today's technology, there's no reason you couldn't scale it down (either as a pure electric or a hybrid) to the scale of any consumer-style vehicle on the market today.
How about the reason that many of their customers want to buy something besides a volt or a prius style vehicle?
There's no reason fuel-efficient vehicles can't be produced in any style. You want a 50+mpg Hummer, go ahead! There's nothing preventing anyone from manufacturing one; hybrid and electric technology works even for larger and less-aerodynamic vehicles.
50mpg is not a realistic number for fuel consumption on anything you'd be willing to buy.
The Chevy Volt and the Toyota Prius both do better than 50mpg, and plenty of people are willing to buy them. They are both based on years-old technology, so there's no reason (outside of laziness and a race-to-the-bottom mentality) that carmakers can't do even better going forward.
Or try this older-technology test, which is equivalent:
1) Obtain two empty boxes 2) Into the first box, place a red marble and a blue marble 3) Put on a blindfold so you can't see anything 4) While blindfolded, reach into the box with the marbles and take out one of the marbles, and put it into the other box 5) Close both boxes and seal them shut 6) Remove the blindfold 7) Mail one of the boxes to Alpha Centauri 8) When it gets there, open the box you didn't mail, and note what color marble is in it 9) Enjoy the "faster than light communication" -- you just "instantaneously" learned the color of a marble located four light years away!
Most of what people dream about is silly or irrelevant, even with respect to their own life. Occasionally there might be a nugget of insight that is relevant to the dreamer, but if you're hoping to get something useful to you from somebody else's unconscious, you're just setting yourself up for disappointment.
OTOH, if you were simply offended by Horowitz' subconscious assessment of forks, and felt the need to go on the record about that, then I think there is nothing more to discuss here.
I'll probably be modded down into oblivion for having a contrary opinion but I wish the USA would just get it over and annex Canada and Mexico already. Once people get over the knee-jerk reaction and actually think about what this would mean
Unless you get their permission first (and you can't), what it would mean is war on at least two fronts, and probably more. Even assuming the USA can beat both countries militarily (and then occupy them successfully, despite a complete lack of moral legitimacy), it's unlikely the rest of the world would stand for the USA going full-Lebensraum on its neighbors and allies.
At the very least, it would be extremely destabilizing, since every other major country would take it as signalling "open season" on their neighbors. Any semblance of diplomatic infrastructure more refined than "me want, me stronger, me take" would be destroyed for the forseeable future.
It's unlikely the benefits of "a unified currency" would outweigh the drawbacks of "endless war".
Why wouldn't I be serious? Do you want to be stuck on this rock forever? What if an asteroid hits?
I can only speak for myself, but I'm quite happy to be stuck on this rock -- it's (more or less) exactly the sort of rock my ancestors evolved to thrive on, so it suits me fine. In fact, I think it's quite pleasant, especially when compared to the available alternatives.
As far as the risk of an asteroid hitting the Earth and killing me, that is something to be vaguely concerned about, but it's hard to see how traveling into outer space would reduce my chances of an early death -- rather quite the opposite.
(Yes, I know, you intended "you" to refer to the entire human species, not to me as an individual -- but the fate of the species as a whole isn't a big concern of mine, and even if it was, I think at this stage any offworld colonies would be so dependent on Earth for equipment and supplies that they would all die out within a few years of Earth's demise anyway, making their existence or non-existence a non-factor for the foreseeable future. A more practical near-term approach to preserving the human species would involve setting up an asteroid tracking and orbit-modification system, as well as more serious efforts towards dealing with carbon emissions and nuclear proliferation)
Ha ha! As if that will make any difference. It's America, you just vote in some other bums.
All bums are not created equal. The trick is for voters to accurately evaluate the bumminess of each bum, and choose the less-bummy bum in each election. That way, in the best-case scenario, we slowly work our way up the bum-gradient, and even in the worst-case scenario, while things don't improve, they don't degrade either.
Saying it won't make any difference only discourages voters from evaluating the candidates carefully, which increases the chances of them accidentally choosing the bummier bum, and thereby making things worse than they were before.
Slashdot Mirror
It's 20 fucking 18. Is putting a satellite into orbit really headline news?
It gave you your chance to complain about something, didn't it?
Where things get really interesting is when you try to fly the plane with one wingtip folded, and the other one extended.
Nope.. .it's how I can get everyone's attention and who's looking at me?
This has a good deal of truth to it -- OTOH, winning a competition is also a good way to get everyone's attention. Therefore, in the circumstances where an electric car can outperform traditional ICE cars, it should also gain a following.
Car cover. That is it.
I like this solution. Glue a few cameras to the outside and mount their displays on the dashboard, and you can even use it while driving :)
Nobody said the solutions would be cheap, convenient, or easy.
That said, you could look into using Lyft/Uber/taxis/etc.
First, You cannot charge a president with a crime while in office.
Actually, you can. It's against current DOJ guidelines, but that doesn't mean they can't make an exception to their own guidelines if they feel it's appropriate to do so. Then it would be up to the courts to decide if the indictment can stand or not.
As a hypothetical example, let's imagine that some President decided to walk down 5th avenue in broad daylight, point an assault rifle at a nearby crowd, and summarily murder several dozen people while on live TV. Do you really think that law enforcement would just nod their heads and say "yeah, he committed mass murder, but he's the President so we'll just have to wait until after he's out of office to do anything about it"? That seems very unlikely.
I don't claim the current situation is comparable to that, but it demonstrates that indicting a President could and would happen under sufficiently dire circumstances.
They elected Trump as a giant "fuck YOU!" to BOTH the Democrat AND Republican "establishment".
Yes -- that is a technique commonly known as "cutting of your nose to spite your face".
And, if Trump is still an effective thorn in the sides of both (R) & (D) in 2020, guess who's going to be throwing a reelection gala?
Most people who cut off their own nose don't do it a second time.
Trump is not a businessman, he just plays one on TV. His actual profession (before politics) was money-laundering using sketchy real estate deals as a front. Pretending to be a "successful businessman" was just a useful way to explain where all that extra cash came from.
I would have said it's stupid because you can get a remote-controlled car (or etc) to do the same thing for about 1% of the price... but if you're flush with cash and really want to capture the public's attention, maybe a $22,000 robot-dog suicide bomber is the way to go.
So, um good job Kim, taking a desperate attempt at mitigating a massive environmental disaster that could have blanketed half a hemisphere in radioactive fallout and trying to parlay it into a gesture of goodwill?
Well, why wouldn't he? He's got nothing to lose by doing so, and by playing to Trump's ego he might better be able to manipulate him.
What's this "turn it horizontal" nonsense about? There's no time for that!
A properly reusable rocket should just require a new upper stage to be lowered into place on top of the just-landed/still-vertical first stage, a quick 5-minute refuel, and then back to work!
If SpaceX can't get shorter turnaround times than Southwest, then what's the point? ;)
Concerns about Facebook taking over the world aside, this makes some sense.
The biggest problem any virtual currency has is the onboarding problem -- how do you get people to actually start using your currency, and to assign any non-zero value to it?
Facebook already has millions (billions?) of users "onboard" so it has a big head start in that area, which it could use to its advantage.
My hope is that Facebook doesn't just try to create "yet another virtual currency", however; that's been done to death already, and I don't think anyone really wants their money to be controlled by Facebook anyway.
The real potential use-case for Facebook would be in social authentication -- e.g. if they could use the blockchain to help the platform authenticate genuine posts and automatically filter out trolls, scammers, etc. I'm not sure if that's doable or not, but that would be of much more value to the world than "Facebook Flooz".
Transaction 1: $10,000 buy the car wheels and chassis; Transaction 2: $10,000 buy the engine; Transaction 3: $10,000 buy the rest of the car.
Yeah, they know about that trick; it's illegal too.
What changed is that previously North Korea did not have a deployable nuclear weapons stockpile. Now they do.
Now that North Korea is able to negotiate from a position of strength, they are willing to negotiate -- but if you think North Korea is ever going to give away their nuclear stockpile, which they see as the sole guarantor of their survival, you're going to be disappointed. North Koreans aren't dumb, they saw what happened to Muammar Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein.
Over long term yes the house wins. Law of large numbers and all that. But over a short time period - say one hour or one day - you can easily win. I've done it, I won 5 grand playing blackjack one night when I was 22 years old. It was exhilarating.
^ This is exactly the answer to the previous poster's question: gambling takes advantage of peoples' natural tendency to focus more on the near-term and less on the long-term. In the short run, gambling looks like a risky but potentially lucrative (and therefore exciting) "business opportunity". In the long term, it's obviously a scam, but that doesn't count for much with people who are not in the habit of thinking about the long term.
Laws of physics aren't just suggestions. 50 mpg requires the car to suck.
Tesla manufactures an 18-wheeler(!) that gets better than 50mpg (equivalent) and by all accounts it doesn't suck.
If that is possible using today's technology, there's no reason you couldn't scale it down (either as a pure electric or a hybrid) to the scale of any consumer-style vehicle on the market today.
How about the reason that many of their customers want to buy something besides a volt or a prius style vehicle?
There's no reason fuel-efficient vehicles can't be produced in any style. You want a 50+mpg Hummer, go ahead! There's nothing preventing anyone from manufacturing one; hybrid and electric technology works even for larger and less-aerodynamic vehicles.
50mpg is not a realistic number for fuel consumption on anything you'd be willing to buy.
The Chevy Volt and the Toyota Prius both do better than 50mpg, and plenty of people are willing to buy them. They are both based on years-old technology, so there's no reason (outside of laziness and a race-to-the-bottom mentality) that carmakers can't do even better going forward.
Or try this older-technology test, which is equivalent:
1) Obtain two empty boxes
2) Into the first box, place a red marble and a blue marble
3) Put on a blindfold so you can't see anything
4) While blindfolded, reach into the box with the marbles and take out one of the marbles, and put it into the other box
5) Close both boxes and seal them shut
6) Remove the blindfold
7) Mail one of the boxes to Alpha Centauri
8) When it gets there, open the box you didn't mail, and note what color marble is in it
9) Enjoy the "faster than light communication" -- you just "instantaneously" learned the color of a marble located four light years away!
I'm going to wait for the 16K screens to come out. I calculate that will finally be enough pixels to make "The Emoji Movie" watchable.
Because this is how you end up watering your crops with Brawndo.
Different people dream about different things.
Most of what people dream about is silly or irrelevant, even with respect to their own life. Occasionally there might be a nugget of insight that is relevant to the dreamer, but if you're hoping to get something useful to you from somebody else's unconscious, you're just setting yourself up for disappointment.
OTOH, if you were simply offended by Horowitz' subconscious assessment of forks, and felt the need to go on the record about that, then I think there is nothing more to discuss here.
I'll probably be modded down into oblivion for having a contrary opinion but I wish the USA would just get it over and annex Canada and Mexico already. Once people get over the knee-jerk reaction and actually think about what this would mean
Unless you get their permission first (and you can't), what it would mean is war on at least two fronts, and probably more. Even assuming the USA can beat both countries militarily (and then occupy them successfully, despite a complete lack of moral legitimacy), it's unlikely the rest of the world would stand for the USA going full-Lebensraum on its neighbors and allies.
At the very least, it would be extremely destabilizing, since every other major country would take it as signalling "open season" on their neighbors. Any semblance of diplomatic infrastructure more refined than "me want, me stronger, me take" would be destroyed for the forseeable future.
It's unlikely the benefits of "a unified currency" would outweigh the drawbacks of "endless war".
Why wouldn't I be serious? Do you want to be stuck on this rock forever? What if an asteroid hits?
I can only speak for myself, but I'm quite happy to be stuck on this rock -- it's (more or less) exactly the sort of rock my ancestors evolved to thrive on, so it suits me fine. In fact, I think it's quite pleasant, especially when compared to the available alternatives.
As far as the risk of an asteroid hitting the Earth and killing me, that is something to be vaguely concerned about, but it's hard to see how traveling into outer space would reduce my chances of an early death -- rather quite the opposite.
(Yes, I know, you intended "you" to refer to the entire human species, not to me as an individual -- but the fate of the species as a whole isn't a big concern of mine, and even if it was, I think at this stage any offworld colonies would be so dependent on Earth for equipment and supplies that they would all die out within a few years of Earth's demise anyway, making their existence or non-existence a non-factor for the foreseeable future. A more practical near-term approach to preserving the human species would involve setting up an asteroid tracking and orbit-modification system, as well as more serious efforts towards dealing with carbon emissions and nuclear proliferation)
Ha ha! As if that will make any difference. It's America, you just vote in some other bums.
All bums are not created equal. The trick is for voters to accurately evaluate the bumminess of each bum, and choose the less-bummy bum in each election. That way, in the best-case scenario, we slowly work our way up the bum-gradient, and even in the worst-case scenario, while things don't improve, they don't degrade either.
Saying it won't make any difference only discourages voters from evaluating the candidates carefully, which increases the chances of them accidentally choosing the bummier bum, and thereby making things worse than they were before.