Sure, you could worry about that, but do you think the world would be a better place if nobody was doing this research?
I understand what you're saying, I just think it's weird. Seperately, almost all of Google's projects would receive near universal praise (exceptions being, among others, privacy nuts and the whole wi-fi data collecting scandal). Yet somehow a lot of people are criticizing them just because they're all being done by Google.
No, I'm not wearing a Google T-shirt while writing this. It's in the laundry.
I don't follow that line of thinking. This kind of development will
(1) improve quality of life for everyone using it, because they can do other things while driving (2) increase fuel efficiency and therefore save money for everyone using it, while reducing fuel demand and reducing fuel prices for everyone (3) cause less accidents, saving money on hospitals and insurance (4) lower transport costs, saving everyone money
So you end up with a streamlined economy with the same production as before, and on average everyone has more money. The problem is the "on average" part: you'd probably have a large number of unemployed people. However, all that added money has to go somewhere, and there will be increased demand in other sectors such as housekeeping, gardening and entertainment. In general, less time and money spent on things that are necessary and more time and money spent on things that make life better.
The same thing has happened countless times in history: when people figured out how to use animals to plow fields, they didn't need 95% of their population working in agriculture anymore. And so some people took up pottery. And when they made a machine to make pots faster, some people started making wine. And a few centuries later, with mechanical wine presses, slashdot was born.
It's been done with OpenTTD. It's a remake of the old Transport Tycoon Deluxe, using open source code (reverse engineered instead of released by the original owners, but that's not the point) and the original graphics. For those who don't own a copy of the original game and thus don't have the right to use the graphics, there's an open source package file.
Sure, it's probably a lot easier to create a graphics pack for a 2D game than a 3D game like RTCW, but this still opens new doors.
They say it's based on an old experiment where they DID test "more testosterone" against "less testosterone", which yielded results that allow you to say something about testosterone.
What they did, though, is an experiment that tests "younger and more testosterone" against "older and less testosterone", which does not allow you to say testosterone did it. It could also be the age difference, and as long as you're testing two variables against each other simultaneously, you'll never know which one causes the effects. They could have tested young CEOs with lots of testosterone against young CEOs with little testosterone, but they didn't.
All while reserving the right to take the lead in depleting the world's oil reserves without paying out the nose for it. You know, this is the reason some people don't like America(ns like you).
There's a difference between malfunctioning alarms and very sensitive alarms. If there's a tiny little problem that could turn into something (even remotely) potentially catastrophic, it needs to be fixed. If people ignore it, that's because of a bad safety policy or being dangerously understaffed. Both of these are easily fixed if capable people are in charge, and both of these are inexcusable in this kind of environment.
I know, it happens off of the land so "civilians" are safe
There are still civilians working on those platforms. This time, fortunately, none of them died and only one got injured, but we should think about the people living on these big exploding metal buildings.
Someone who's in marketing recently told me this story, which demonstrates the most important aspect of marketing: target audience selection. Disclaimer, before I continue: marketeers don't usually go this far.
You pick a random stock. You then send a letter to 4000 people saying this stock will rise, and a letter to 4000 other people saying it will fall. Wait two days, see what it does. Divide the 4000 people who got the right prediction into two groups of 2000.
Pick a new random stock. Tell 2000 people it'll rise, tell the other 2000 it'll fall. Wait two days, see what it does, repeat with two groups of 1000.
You now have 1000 people who have received three consecutive correct predictions from you. Remind them how much they could have made if they followed your advice in the last week, then start charging them for stock market advice.
Wish I had mod points right now. Your post is Interesting, Informative, Insightful, and Well-written. Given the declining quality of English written on/. these days, that last one merits extra karma by itself.
Three 5.25" drive bays above each other can hold a case with four 3.5" drive bays and a 120mm fan. Thermaltake sells them, as do zillions of other companies.
I think it's funny how the only plug against this whole centrifuge technology to clean up oil is based on what the end-quality of "oil" will come out of them?
It's not THAT funny. If you're not filtering out "decent quality oil", you might as well not use centrifuges at all and just pump the oil-water mixture into a tanker and ferry it to shore-based facilities. The quality of the oil coming out is an indication of the quality of the centrifuge. That, and the quality of the water coming out.
EENRUM - The first potatoes, which a company called Biemond (based in Eenrum), fed with salt water, were lifted on a test field on the island of Texel on friday.
Biemond is breeding new races of potatoes, and together with Fobek in the Frisian town of Sint Annaparochie, wants to develop potatoes that are resistant to salt water.
Due to rising sea levels companies expect farmers to increasingly have to deal with salt water on their fields.
The biggest mistakes Google Translate made were due to use of the word "piepers" for "potatoes". It was incorrectly translated as squeaker and pager - at least I think it's incorrectly. I've never heard anyone use those words when talking about potatoes.
Fortunately you don't have to secure the entire area. You just have to secure safe transit lanes for merchant shipping.
This picture might be old, but it does illustrate the point. There are dozens of traffic lanes in the Indian Ocean, and if you secure one the pirates will attack the next. You can't expect to secure dozens of shipping lanes, each thousands of miles long.
Regarding your other post,
Yes. When the Somalis are willing to behave in the manner of civilized nations then they can have the same rights as those civilized nations. As long as they permit their citizens to commit crimes on the high seas they have no grounds to complain when we deny them access to those same seas.
I'd hardly call Somalia a nation. It's an area that's been in civil war for almost 20 years, there's about 30 groups struggling over control, their waters are being plundered by international fishing ships, and "in the coastal areas of war-ridden Somalia, piracy still is the only show in town, the only booming economy." (source)
Words like "nation" and "allowing" their "citizens" don't apply here. It's harder to survive there than most of us can imagine, and piracy is their one source of income.
If you won't take my word for it (and I sincerely hope you won't), I suggest you read this article, written by someone who spent the last 17 years covering the situation in Somalia, and knows what he's talking about.
Going off-topic here, but seriously, "dealt with them"?
Yes, they did something, but they hardly solved the problem. Piracy in Somalia is still a booming business with massive return on investment, and the payments to individual pirates are ridiculously high compared to Somali average wages. This means there are a lot of interested investors, and there's a near endless supply of expendable people to send on the actual missions.
Trying to solve this situation with military presence in the area (by means of military ships) simply isn't feasible, because of the size of the area. If you secure the Gulf of Aden, which, by the way, is one of the busiest shipping routes in the world, pirates will simply travel further east into the Indian Ocean, as they have on previous occasions. For example, this story is about a ship hijacked 700 nautical miles from the Somali coast. That's a two to three days' journey for a pirate mothership traveling around 12 knots.
The only way we can solve the situation in the seas around Somalia is by solving the situation in Somalia itself. Somalia needs a stable government with an active police force and/or army to do something about the criminals that are ruling the country today.
I believe a lot of it has to do with Hollywood, since that's where most of us non-Americans get the largest part of our image of America. Bullying is probably (I can't say for sure, having never attended an American high school) overrepresented in high school movies and TV series, because it's more interesting to watch than average teens just going about their daily lives.
Indeed. Also, consider this: if you stand on both feet simultaneously for half a second during the transfer, your feet would be 2.2 meters or 7 feet apart.
Actually, the Metre was "Originally intended to be one ten-millionth of the distance from the Earth's equator to the North Pole"
The gram: Originally defined as "the absolute weight of a volume of pure water equal to the cube of the hundredth part of a metre, and at the temperature of melting ice"
Compare this to some imperial units:
The foot: The popular belief is that the original standard was the length of a man's foot. [...] Some believe that the original measurement of the English foot was from King Henry I, who had a foot 12 inches long; he wished to standardize the unit of measurement in England.
The acre was approximately the amount of land tillable by one man behind an ox in one day.
A grain is a unit of measurement of mass that is based upon the mass of a single seed of a typical cereal.
My conclusion: SI units are based on less arbitrary (original) definitions than imperial units. The new definitions using "speed of light, properties of atoms, etc." didn't really change their magnitudes, they just reduced the tiny variations.
You are entitled to use the Steam Software for your own use, but you are not entitled to: (i) sell, grant a security interest in or transfer reproductions of the Steam Software to other parties in any way, nor to rent, lease or license the Steam Software to others without the prior written consent of Valve
and also:
When you complete Steam's registration process, you create a Steam account ("Account"). Your Account may also include billing information you provide to us for the purchase of Subscriptions. You are solely responsible for all activity on your Account and for the security of your computer system. You may not reveal, share or otherwise allow others to use your password or Account. You agree that you are personally responsible for the use of your password and Account and for all of the communication and activity on Steam that results from use of your login name and password. You may not sell or charge others for the right to use your Account, or otherwise transfer your Account.
(emphasis added by me)
I know illegal doesn't mean impossible, but that's another discussion.
I can by electricity generated by coal, oil and gas between $1-2 dollars per Kwh. If I replaced my electric with solar panels and batteries, my cost would be $4-5 dollars per Kwh.
Where did you get those numbers? I guess you made them up, but if that's really what you're paying, you're getting ripped off.
According to this, the average price for residential electricity in the U.S. is 10.86 cents per kWh.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, you could worry about that, but do you think the world would be a better place if nobody was doing this research?
I understand what you're saying, I just think it's weird. Seperately, almost all of Google's projects would receive near universal praise (exceptions being, among others, privacy nuts and the whole wi-fi data collecting scandal). Yet somehow a lot of people are criticizing them just because they're all being done by Google.
No, I'm not wearing a Google T-shirt while writing this. It's in the laundry.
I don't follow that line of thinking. This kind of development will
(1) improve quality of life for everyone using it, because they can do other things while driving
(2) increase fuel efficiency and therefore save money for everyone using it, while reducing fuel demand and reducing fuel prices for everyone
(3) cause less accidents, saving money on hospitals and insurance
(4) lower transport costs, saving everyone money
So you end up with a streamlined economy with the same production as before, and on average everyone has more money. The problem is the "on average" part: you'd probably have a large number of unemployed people. However, all that added money has to go somewhere, and there will be increased demand in other sectors such as housekeeping, gardening and entertainment. In general, less time and money spent on things that are necessary and more time and money spent on things that make life better.
The same thing has happened countless times in history: when people figured out how to use animals to plow fields, they didn't need 95% of their population working in agriculture anymore. And so some people took up pottery. And when they made a machine to make pots faster, some people started making wine. And a few centuries later, with mechanical wine presses, slashdot was born.
Long story short: people adapt.
And started thinking about what size a gnome must be in order to not be a gnome.
It's been done with OpenTTD. It's a remake of the old Transport Tycoon Deluxe, using open source code (reverse engineered instead of released by the original owners, but that's not the point) and the original graphics. For those who don't own a copy of the original game and thus don't have the right to use the graphics, there's an open source package file.
Sure, it's probably a lot easier to create a graphics pack for a 2D game than a 3D game like RTCW, but this still opens new doors.
the meaning of the word is ambiguous. So we are both right.
Also, you're both wrong.
They say it's based on an old experiment where they DID test "more testosterone" against "less testosterone", which yielded results that allow you to say something about testosterone.
What they did, though, is an experiment that tests "younger and more testosterone" against "older and less testosterone", which does not allow you to say testosterone did it. It could also be the age difference, and as long as you're testing two variables against each other simultaneously, you'll never know which one causes the effects. They could have tested young CEOs with lots of testosterone against young CEOs with little testosterone, but they didn't.
Adding a large tub full of water to your car probably doesn't save any energy at all. If you do try this, see what it does to your gas mileage.
All while reserving the right to take the lead in depleting the world's oil reserves without paying out the nose for it. You know, this is the reason some people don't like America(ns like you).
There's a difference between malfunctioning alarms and very sensitive alarms. If there's a tiny little problem that could turn into something (even remotely) potentially catastrophic, it needs to be fixed. If people ignore it, that's because of a bad safety policy or being dangerously understaffed. Both of these are easily fixed if capable people are in charge, and both of these are inexcusable in this kind of environment.
I know, it happens off of the land so "civilians" are safe
There are still civilians working on those platforms. This time, fortunately, none of them died and only one got injured, but we should think about the people living on these big exploding metal buildings.
Someone who's in marketing recently told me this story, which demonstrates the most important aspect of marketing: target audience selection. Disclaimer, before I continue: marketeers don't usually go this far.
You pick a random stock. You then send a letter to 4000 people saying this stock will rise, and a letter to 4000 other people saying it will fall. Wait two days, see what it does. Divide the 4000 people who got the right prediction into two groups of 2000.
Pick a new random stock. Tell 2000 people it'll rise, tell the other 2000 it'll fall. Wait two days, see what it does, repeat with two groups of 1000.
You now have 1000 people who have received three consecutive correct predictions from you. Remind them how much they could have made if they followed your advice in the last week, then start charging them for stock market advice.
Wish I had mod points right now. Your post is Interesting, Informative, Insightful, and Well-written. Given the declining quality of English written on /. these days, that last one merits extra karma by itself.
Three 5.25" drive bays above each other can hold a case with four 3.5" drive bays and a 120mm fan. Thermaltake sells them, as do zillions of other companies.
Is it on slashdot because it is news, or is it news because it's on slashdot?
This discussion is now about philosophy.
I think it's funny how the only plug against this whole centrifuge technology to clean up oil is based on what the end-quality of "oil" will come out of them?
It's not THAT funny. If you're not filtering out "decent quality oil", you might as well not use centrifuges at all and just pump the oil-water mixture into a tanker and ferry it to shore-based facilities. The quality of the oil coming out is an indication of the quality of the centrifuge. That, and the quality of the water coming out.
Eenrum potato resistant to salt water
EENRUM - The first potatoes, which a company called Biemond (based in Eenrum), fed with salt water, were lifted on a test field on the island of Texel on friday.
Biemond is breeding new races of potatoes, and together with Fobek in the Frisian town of Sint Annaparochie, wants to develop potatoes that are resistant to salt water.
Due to rising sea levels companies expect farmers to increasingly have to deal with salt water on their fields.
The biggest mistakes Google Translate made were due to use of the word "piepers" for "potatoes". It was incorrectly translated as squeaker and pager - at least I think it's incorrectly. I've never heard anyone use those words when talking about potatoes.
Fortunately you don't have to secure the entire area. You just have to secure safe transit lanes for merchant shipping.
This picture might be old, but it does illustrate the point. There are dozens of traffic lanes in the Indian Ocean, and if you secure one the pirates will attack the next. You can't expect to secure dozens of shipping lanes, each thousands of miles long.
Regarding your other post,
Yes. When the Somalis are willing to behave in the manner of civilized nations then they can have the same rights as those civilized nations. As long as they permit their citizens to commit crimes on the high seas they have no grounds to complain when we deny them access to those same seas.
I'd hardly call Somalia a nation. It's an area that's been in civil war for almost 20 years, there's about 30 groups struggling over control, their waters are being plundered by international fishing ships, and "in the coastal areas of war-ridden Somalia, piracy still is the only show in town, the only booming economy." (source)
Words like "nation" and "allowing" their "citizens" don't apply here. It's harder to survive there than most of us can imagine, and piracy is their one source of income.
If you won't take my word for it (and I sincerely hope you won't), I suggest you read this article, written by someone who spent the last 17 years covering the situation in Somalia, and knows what he's talking about.
Going off-topic here, but seriously, "dealt with them"?
Yes, they did something, but they hardly solved the problem. Piracy in Somalia is still a booming business with massive return on investment, and the payments to individual pirates are ridiculously high compared to Somali average wages. This means there are a lot of interested investors, and there's a near endless supply of expendable people to send on the actual missions.
Trying to solve this situation with military presence in the area (by means of military ships) simply isn't feasible, because of the size of the area. If you secure the Gulf of Aden, which, by the way, is one of the busiest shipping routes in the world, pirates will simply travel further east into the Indian Ocean, as they have on previous occasions. For example, this story is about a ship hijacked 700 nautical miles from the Somali coast. That's a two to three days' journey for a pirate mothership traveling around 12 knots.
The only way we can solve the situation in the seas around Somalia is by solving the situation in Somalia itself. Somalia needs a stable government with an active police force and/or army to do something about the criminals that are ruling the country today.
Clearly, $400,000 per downloaded song is not enough. They should raise their demands by 3992%, and everything will be OK.
I believe a lot of it has to do with Hollywood, since that's where most of us non-Americans get the largest part of our image of America. Bullying is probably (I can't say for sure, having never attended an American high school) overrepresented in high school movies and TV series, because it's more interesting to watch than average teens just going about their daily lives.
The best way to win a fight is by never fighting at all.
Nope, that's the worst way to win a fight. It is, however, the best way to never lose a fight.
You say semantics, I say statistics.
Indeed. Also, consider this: if you stand on both feet simultaneously for half a second during the transfer, your feet would be 2.2 meters or 7 feet apart.
Actually, the Metre was "Originally intended to be one ten-millionth of the distance from the Earth's equator to the North Pole"
The gram: Originally defined as "the absolute weight of a volume of pure water equal to the cube of the hundredth part of a metre, and at the temperature of melting ice"
Compare this to some imperial units:
The foot:
The popular belief is that the original standard was the length of a man's foot. [...] Some believe that the original measurement of the English foot was from King Henry I, who had a foot 12 inches long; he wished to standardize the unit of measurement in England.
The acre was approximately the amount of land tillable by one man behind an ox in one day.
A grain is a unit of measurement of mass that is based upon the mass of a single seed of a typical cereal.
My conclusion: SI units are based on less arbitrary (original) definitions than imperial units. The new definitions using "speed of light, properties of atoms, etc." didn't really change their magnitudes, they just reduced the tiny variations.
You can lend and sell Steam games as long as you create a different account per game - at least that's what people tell me.
That's not what the Steam Subscriber Agreement says:
You are entitled to use the Steam Software for your own use, but you are not entitled to: (i) sell, grant a security interest in or transfer reproductions of the Steam Software to other parties in any way, nor to rent, lease or license the Steam Software to others without the prior written consent of Valve
and also:
When you complete Steam's registration process, you create a Steam account ("Account"). Your Account may also include billing information you provide to us for the purchase of Subscriptions. You are solely responsible for all activity on your Account and for the security of your computer system. You may not reveal, share or otherwise allow others to use your password or Account. You agree that you are personally responsible for the use of your password and Account and for all of the communication and activity on Steam that results from use of your login name and password. You may not sell or charge others for the right to use your Account, or otherwise transfer your Account.
(emphasis added by me)
I know illegal doesn't mean impossible, but that's another discussion.
I can by electricity generated by coal, oil and gas between $1-2 dollars per Kwh. If I replaced my electric with solar panels and batteries, my cost would be $4-5 dollars per Kwh.
Where did you get those numbers? I guess you made them up, but if that's really what you're paying, you're getting ripped off.
According to this, the average price for residential electricity in the U.S. is 10.86 cents per kWh.