It's actually not (nearly) enough to make any noticeable difference at all. For that matter, what we already did has more impact, in the oposite direction. If you tear down a forest and make a road, or farmland, or a suburb out of it, then wind-friction with the ground decrease significantly.
Putting up windmills increase it, so in *principle* you're right. It's just that it's right in the same way that peeing in the ocean to make it warmer also theoretically has some effect, but in practice it's ignorable.
True a price-differential of ~35 is huge, and enough to make it cost-prohibitive for many applications. However that differential is shrinking, aand at the same time the storage/dollar ratio is rising quicker than peoples production of data grows.
If these two trends continue, more and more people will switch to SSD.
First, because a 5:1 premium is more acceptable than a 50:1 one. And second because a 5:1 premium, in a world where the storage you need costs $200 with the cheap option would mean paying $1000, which few people would do. Whereas in a world where a $100 disk has 3 times the capacity you need, payinng $150 instead for a solution that is large enough, and significantly faste, can make sense.
Witness how people buy laptops, despite higher performance for the same price in a desktop.
It's just that the performance of a modern laptop is good *enough* and it's cheap *enough*, so people -do- buy $700 laptops that have less capacity than a $500 desktop would. For the same reason, they may buy a $150 SSD-disk with less storage-capacity than a $100 HDD.
Sure, bartering works. But gold solves some of the same problems that money solves.
A problem with bartering is you need to find someone who has what you need AND lacks what you have. If you've got meat, but need petrol, you need someone which is in precisely the oposite situation. Trade is a lot easier when there's a universal method of payment.
Second, many barter-items have practical problems. You want to be able to *store* a bit of value. You want to be able to *transport* it easily. You don't want it to go down in value from being subjected to the hardships of both. You want it to be small, easily concealable and still equally valuable even if you decide to dig it down at some unmarked spot for a year.
Sure for immediate emergency of the how-to-survive-the-next-48-hours variety some reasonably unperishable food, drinkable water, simple first-aid supplies, or a gun with ammunition will be more useful than a few grams of gold.
But the advantaeg of the gold is on somewhat longer timescales. Odds are you can hide the gold, and a year from now, it'll still be valuable, and if you dig it back up, you can still use it for buying all those other things.
Oh they will treat real physical disease. It's not the sugarpill that helps you get better sooner, offcourse, it's the effect of your mental state on your physical wellbeing. It's entirely possible that the placebo-effect alone will let someone survive something they otherwise wouldn't.
True, my car lists consumption as literally zero when going downhill. But downhills sometimes require more than that, being so steep that you need to *brake* to keep your speed down. In which case regenerative braking, like this would be if put on a down-ramp makes sense.
Offcourse, some modern cars have regenerative brakes themselves, built-in.
Or even -minimum- copyright. The purpose of having it at all, is to encourage the creation of works. So it follows that the length of protesction, and the strength of protection should be the minimum required to stimulate such creation.
What length that is, and what strength that is, is offcourse debatable, but I haven't seen any coherent argument that todays rules aren't MASSIVE giveaways.
Does -anyone- honestly believe that there'd be less music released if copyright was for 28 years (the original terms in USA) rather than life-of-author plus 70 years ? Would *any* musicians go "Screw that, if I can only profit for the next 28 years, I'm not gonna bother!" -- does that sound plausible to you ?
Does anyone write computer-games, expecting to earn significantly from them for a period LONGER than 28 years ? I seriously doubt it, and I don't think it'll be easy to find anyone who -does- believe that.
In economic terms, 28 years is (more than!) two thirds of forever anyway. If you assume 4% deprecation pro year (i.e. that given a choice between $100 now or $104 one year from now, you consider both offers similarily attractive) then a fixed income-stream has 70% of it's value in the first 28 years.
And -that- is assuming the income-stream is fixed, which is HIGHLY unrealistic, to the contrary, I would guess that most copyrighted works have 90% of their sales in the first 5 years after release. For some classes of works, such as computergames even this is understating it, I bet most computer-games have 95% of their dollar-value in sales inside of the first 3 years after release.
This particular election is suspect, sure. But there's no particular reason hand-counting more votes need to take longer. The task is perfectly parallellisable afterall, so a larger country with more votes just need more people for counting.
Notice; I'm not saying Irans election is anything but suspect. I'm just saying there's no reason counting ~40M votes need to take significantly longer than counting ~1M votes. Yes you need 40 times as many counters. But other than that, it's easy enough.
I don't think it's possible that it's fair, actually. Did you look at the numbers, including the per.region ones ? No way did Ahmadinejad get 64% even in the hometown of Mousavi.
You're right that at the moment it'd be civil war, the country really is split, and the divide is HUGE. University-educated women from Teheran has a *gargantuan* difference to say average 50-year-old male village-dwellers.
But 70% of the population in Iran is 30 or less, and many of them *are* well-educated, and more than ready for a significantly larger dosis of democracy and religious freedom. And they're talking, among themselves and with the world outside. It seems calm, on the surface, few dare openly protest yet. But the ranks are swelling, silently, invisibly.
Iran is -so- in for a change, but it's possible the time isn't rife yet. Give it another decade...
He'd have the option for sure, but conventional weapons would be sufficient and I'm certain those are the ones that'd get used. The message is what counts, afterall. And the message he wants is: If you nuke us, we take you out. The idea is that nobody should be able to think they could *gain* something from doing so.
The USSR or similar enemies is one thing. A country that spends the same amount on its military in a year as the US spends in a day, is something entirely different.
A moot point anyway, because the leadership of Iran isn't crazy, and they know it. *if* a Iranian nuke ever goes off inside USA, then a month later, at most, they are no longer the leadership of Iran.
If there's one thing history has taught us, it's that people with power generally prefer holding onto it.
If he'd had 45% against 39%, with a semi-realistic distribution of the votes, fine, I'd have considered it possible. But as it is, with 2/3rds of the votes uniformly, including in areas where he'd *certainly* be losing such as the hometown of his main opponent ?
Forget it. It's not real. It's fraud, plain and simple.
Most of my work actually is from various internal projects (i.e. the "client" is a project of the same employer that I work for), nevertheless projects are "charged" for the resources they consume, to see which projects are worthwhile and which aren't.
So while no actual bills are sent, and no money changes hands, using a single day of "rush job" will make the project look as if it spent the same as using 3 days of "normal" time.
Oh, you just need to make it clear to them in a language they understand: Money.
We've got "rush-jobs", as in "drop whatever you're doing and do this NOW" jobs.
They are charged triple the normal rate. The intention is loud and clear: If it's not important enough that you're willing to pay triple to have it fixed right-now, then it's not a rush-job.
Works fine. I seldom get more than 2-3 rush-jobs in any given month.
I don't think so. What's legal and what's ethical are two completely different questions. Sometimes the answers to both questions are the same, and sometimes they're not.
I don't think they -should- be the same either, because there's a large set of actions that are unethical, yet the damage from laws against them would be significantly higher than the damage from the actions themselves, so it'd be a net loss for society to have such laws.
That's because english defaults to sex.
Atleast certain kinds of sentences do. And "I [verbed] her" is definitely one of those sentences that tend to mean sex.
Indeed -- I belong to those who think this is entirely okay.
What's the problem ? That people can now sometimes see -evidence- that you're just human, which includes doing some things in your teenages which you likely wouldn't with 30 ? It's not as if this wasn't always the case, and anyone who's not an idiot knows it.
If you where really much more of an idiot than the average Joe, then well, sucks to be you. But I -really- don't think it's much of a problem that acting like an idiot carries some risk that people in the future will learn that you acted like an idiot.
Electric bullet-trains are old technology, nothing new or exciting about them, they may or may not make sense, depending on traffic, distance, terrain and other well-known factors.
Producing electricity with solar-cells is also no new idea, it works perfectly fine, but the drawback has up until now been that the cost is higher than electricity from other sources.
This idea propose combining the two. Build a solar-cell-roof over the rails, and use the power from that to power the train.
While fine in principle, I don't quite see the advantage over seeing the two projects as separate. If the train makes sense, it makes sense independent of where it gets its power from. If the solar-cells can produce power at a price comparable to that from other sources, then they make sense, independently of if the power is used for running a train underneath, or just plain sold.
There's -one- advantage I guess, namely that you get to use the same land-area for two things, thus you don't need to purchase extra land to put the solar-cells on. This advantage is pretty limited though, given that a square-km of desert isn't exactly expensive, and I imagine the added cost of mounting the cells as a roof over a rail, rather than on standard racks would subtract more from the idea than the free-land adds to it.
That's the difference, and it's a rather huge difference.
Tailing someone costs significant time and resources, this tends to limit it to those cases where it's considered really important.
In contrast, reviewing the gps-logs of a 100 tracked vehicles can be done by a single man, using nothing more than a bog-standard PC.
It costs two orders of magnitude less, is a significant difference -- there's a significant risk that this will lead to the technique being used on the flimsiest of excuses, and for more prolonged periods.
The reason people, even smart well-educated ones ignore alerts, is that they're trained to.
You're bombarbed with useless alerts containing useless info all the time, which over time causes you to pay less and less attention to them. What is the use of "Program xyz caused a thsdgas in module drgasefasdfs at memory-address 0xab124134qab, here's a dump of the cpu-registers" It's just noise.
If I'm stupid enough to update during the workday, why does XP need to ask every 15 minutes if I want to reboot ? Why is there no option for "NO! I'll do it myself -- when I want to." (there's only "now" and "later", the latter meaning "nag me again in a few minutes")
Vista made it -worse- "Program X wants to do Y, do you want to allow this?" pops up all the time, usually in response to you 3 seconds earlier having explicitly asked for Y -- so the answer is an obvious yes.
When people get dozens of alerts a day, 95% of which contain nothing that is understandable or useful to them, it's no wonder they've learnt to ignore them and do whatever it takes to get them out of the way.
But it -is- worth it, well that or go to asynchrnous programming for more stuff.
Because in actual fact, currently Firefox will frequently stall the entire user-interface, and ALL tabs, for the reason that ONE of the tabs is doing something where it's waiting for something-or-other.
The result is, you've got 10 open tabs. One of them is waiting for java to initialize or something, and the result is that ALL the tabs, and indeed the entire application appears to hang, for 1-10 seconds.
And that's just stupid. Especially stupid when there's 3 other cores in the machine doing nothing but idling.
Correction; for anything worth something that cannot easily be verified to be what it claims to be.
It's really hard to tell an -actual- reall-old-coin from a fake really-old-coin. In contrast, there's no simple way of creating seemingly-real-but-fake Ixus-cameras.
Now, risks of never getting the goods at all and similar, still apply, if one pays beforehand. But assuming one gets it at all, and a quick inspection and test shows it looks and acts like an Ixus, it probably really is an ixus. (might be a stolen one though)
No. That doesn't actually work. To pick that single sentence to pieces, and conclude that it says nothing. It does. English is a context-sensitive language, and if I say:
"Selling; one Rolex Watch. 100% authentic. Guaranteed genuine"
Then infact, I *AM* claiming that the watch I am selling is a genuine, authenthic, rolex-watch. And if this isn't true, I'm comitting fraud. No if's and but's about it.
It's not worth it to spend $10 million to decide who will get $10million, and if you spend an hour each one 150K applications, you need 80 employees full-time for a year, which will cost you pretty close to that, when you include benefits, taxes etc.
I guess a lot of the suggestions are very similar, or very crappy, so can be dealt with quickly though, so should be realistic to give this a reasonable review with substantially less resurces, still it's going to require atleast a man-year or two.
True. There's some drift in what is "good enough".
But if what is considered "good enough" drifts upwards more slowly than the progress of technology, then it means that the cheapest "good enough" machine will be further and further behind the current state-of-the-art.
The switch from desktops to laptops is partly fueled by this. 10 years ago, laptops that where "good enough" where hideously expensive, and so most people bought a desktop.
Today, a laptop is still more expensive than a desktop, for the same performance. A terabyte desktop-drive is a lot cheaper than a terabyte of storage for a laptop, for example. But overwhelmingly, people don't care, because a 250GB laptop-drive is "good enough".
Slashdot Mirror
It's actually not (nearly) enough to make any noticeable difference at all. For that matter, what we already did has more impact, in the oposite direction. If you tear down a forest and make a road, or farmland, or a suburb out of it, then wind-friction with the ground decrease significantly.
Putting up windmills increase it, so in *principle* you're right. It's just that it's right in the same way that peeing in the ocean to make it warmer also theoretically has some effect, but in practice it's ignorable.
True a price-differential of ~35 is huge, and enough to make it cost-prohibitive for many applications. However that differential is shrinking, aand at the same time the storage/dollar ratio is rising quicker than peoples production of data grows.
If these two trends continue, more and more people will switch to SSD.
First, because a 5:1 premium is more acceptable than a 50:1 one. And second because a 5:1 premium, in a world where the storage you need costs $200 with the cheap option would mean paying $1000, which few people would do. Whereas in a world where a $100 disk has 3 times the capacity you need, payinng $150 instead for a solution that is large enough, and significantly faste, can make sense.
Witness how people buy laptops, despite higher performance for the same price in a desktop.
It's just that the performance of a modern laptop is good *enough* and it's cheap *enough*, so people -do- buy $700 laptops that have less capacity than a $500 desktop would. For the same reason, they may buy a $150 SSD-disk with less storage-capacity than a $100 HDD.
Sure, bartering works. But gold solves some of the same problems that money solves.
A problem with bartering is you need to find someone who has what you need AND lacks what you have. If you've got meat, but need petrol, you need someone which is in precisely the oposite situation. Trade is a lot easier when there's a universal method of payment.
Second, many barter-items have practical problems. You want to be able to *store* a bit of value. You want to be able to *transport* it easily. You don't want it to go down in value from being subjected to the hardships of both. You want it to be small, easily concealable and still equally valuable even if you decide to dig it down at some unmarked spot for a year.
Sure for immediate emergency of the how-to-survive-the-next-48-hours variety some reasonably unperishable food, drinkable water, simple first-aid supplies, or a gun with ammunition will be more useful than a few grams of gold.
But the advantaeg of the gold is on somewhat longer timescales. Odds are you can hide the gold, and a year from now, it'll still be valuable, and if you dig it back up, you can still use it for buying all those other things.
You forgot on-die cache in modern CPUs. HDD - SSD - RAM - CPU-cache - CPU-registers
Oh they will treat real physical disease. It's not the sugarpill that helps you get better sooner, offcourse, it's the effect of your mental state on your physical wellbeing. It's entirely possible that the placebo-effect alone will let someone survive something they otherwise wouldn't.
True, my car lists consumption as literally zero when going downhill. But downhills sometimes require more than that, being so steep that you need to *brake* to keep your speed down. In which case regenerative braking, like this would be if put on a down-ramp makes sense.
Offcourse, some modern cars have regenerative brakes themselves, built-in.
--Most of us here are for fair copyright--
Or even -minimum- copyright. The purpose of having it at all, is to encourage the creation of works. So it follows that the length of protesction, and the strength of protection should be the minimum required to stimulate such creation.
What length that is, and what strength that is, is offcourse debatable, but I haven't seen any coherent argument that todays rules aren't MASSIVE giveaways.
Does -anyone- honestly believe that there'd be less music released if copyright was for 28 years (the original terms in USA) rather than life-of-author plus 70 years ? Would *any* musicians go "Screw that, if I can only profit for the next 28 years, I'm not gonna bother!" -- does that sound plausible to you ?
Does anyone write computer-games, expecting to earn significantly from them for a period LONGER than 28 years ? I seriously doubt it, and I don't think it'll be easy to find anyone who -does- believe that.
In economic terms, 28 years is (more than!) two thirds of forever anyway. If you assume 4% deprecation pro year (i.e. that given a choice between $100 now or $104 one year from now, you consider both offers similarily attractive) then a fixed income-stream has 70% of it's value in the first 28 years.
And -that- is assuming the income-stream is fixed, which is HIGHLY unrealistic, to the contrary, I would guess that most copyrighted works have 90% of their sales in the first 5 years after release. For some classes of works, such as computergames even this is understating it, I bet most computer-games have 95% of their dollar-value in sales inside of the first 3 years after release.
This particular election is suspect, sure. But there's no particular reason hand-counting more votes need to take longer. The task is perfectly parallellisable afterall, so a larger country with more votes just need more people for counting.
Notice; I'm not saying Irans election is anything but suspect. I'm just saying there's no reason counting ~40M votes need to take significantly longer than counting ~1M votes. Yes you need 40 times as many counters. But other than that, it's easy enough.
I don't think it's possible that it's fair, actually. Did you look at the numbers, including the per.region ones ? No way did Ahmadinejad get 64% even in the hometown of Mousavi.
You're right that at the moment it'd be civil war, the country really is split, and the divide is HUGE. University-educated women from Teheran has a *gargantuan* difference to say average 50-year-old male village-dwellers.
But 70% of the population in Iran is 30 or less, and many of them *are* well-educated, and more than ready for a significantly larger dosis of democracy and religious freedom. And they're talking, among themselves and with the world outside. It seems calm, on the surface, few dare openly protest yet. But the ranks are swelling, silently, invisibly.
Iran is -so- in for a change, but it's possible the time isn't rife yet. Give it another decade...
He'd have the option for sure, but conventional weapons would be sufficient and I'm certain those are the ones that'd get used. The message is what counts, afterall. And the message he wants is: If you nuke us, we take you out. The idea is that nobody should be able to think they could *gain* something from doing so.
The USSR or similar enemies is one thing. A country that spends the same amount on its military in a year as the US spends in a day, is something entirely different.
A moot point anyway, because the leadership of Iran isn't crazy, and they know it. *if* a Iranian nuke ever goes off inside USA, then a month later, at most, they are no longer the leadership of Iran.
If there's one thing history has taught us, it's that people with power generally prefer holding onto it.
He didn't.
If he'd had 45% against 39%, with a semi-realistic distribution of the votes, fine, I'd have considered it possible. But as it is, with 2/3rds of the votes uniformly, including in areas where he'd *certainly* be losing such as the hometown of his main opponent ?
Forget it. It's not real. It's fraud, plain and simple.
It depends how the company is organized.
Most of my work actually is from various internal projects (i.e. the "client" is a project of the same employer that I work for), nevertheless projects are "charged" for the resources they consume, to see which projects are worthwhile and which aren't.
So while no actual bills are sent, and no money changes hands, using a single day of "rush job" will make the project look as if it spent the same as using 3 days of "normal" time.
Oh, you just need to make it clear to them in a language they understand: Money.
We've got "rush-jobs", as in "drop whatever you're doing and do this NOW" jobs.
They are charged triple the normal rate. The intention is loud and clear: If it's not important enough that you're willing to pay triple to have it fixed right-now, then it's not a rush-job.
Works fine. I seldom get more than 2-3 rush-jobs in any given month.
I don't think so. What's legal and what's ethical are two completely different questions. Sometimes the answers to both questions are the same, and sometimes they're not.
I don't think they -should- be the same either, because there's a large set of actions that are unethical, yet the damage from laws against them would be significantly higher than the damage from the actions themselves, so it'd be a net loss for society to have such laws.
That's because english defaults to sex. Atleast certain kinds of sentences do. And "I [verbed] her" is definitely one of those sentences that tend to mean sex.
Indeed -- I belong to those who think this is entirely okay.
What's the problem ? That people can now sometimes see -evidence- that you're just human, which includes doing some things in your teenages which you likely wouldn't with 30 ? It's not as if this wasn't always the case, and anyone who's not an idiot knows it.
If you where really much more of an idiot than the average Joe, then well, sucks to be you. But I -really- don't think it's much of a problem that acting like an idiot carries some risk that people in the future will learn that you acted like an idiot.
I don't quite see the point of this.
Electric bullet-trains are old technology, nothing new or exciting about them, they may or may not make sense, depending on traffic, distance, terrain and other well-known factors.
Producing electricity with solar-cells is also no new idea, it works perfectly fine, but the drawback has up until now been that the cost is higher than electricity from other sources.
This idea propose combining the two. Build a solar-cell-roof over the rails, and use the power from that to power the train.
While fine in principle, I don't quite see the advantage over seeing the two projects as separate. If the train makes sense, it makes sense independent of where it gets its power from. If the solar-cells can produce power at a price comparable to that from other sources, then they make sense, independently of if the power is used for running a train underneath, or just plain sold.
There's -one- advantage I guess, namely that you get to use the same land-area for two things, thus you don't need to purchase extra land to put the solar-cells on. This advantage is pretty limited though, given that a square-km of desert isn't exactly expensive, and I imagine the added cost of mounting the cells as a roof over a rail, rather than on standard racks would subtract more from the idea than the free-land adds to it.
So what's the advantage ?
That's the difference, and it's a rather huge difference.
Tailing someone costs significant time and resources, this tends to limit it to those cases where it's considered really important.
In contrast, reviewing the gps-logs of a 100 tracked vehicles can be done by a single man, using nothing more than a bog-standard PC.
It costs two orders of magnitude less, is a significant difference -- there's a significant risk that this will lead to the technique being used on the flimsiest of excuses, and for more prolonged periods.
The reason people, even smart well-educated ones ignore alerts, is that they're trained to.
You're bombarbed with useless alerts containing useless info all the time, which over time causes you to pay less and less attention to them. What is the use of "Program xyz caused a thsdgas in module drgasefasdfs at memory-address 0xab124134qab, here's a dump of the cpu-registers" It's just noise.
If I'm stupid enough to update during the workday, why does XP need to ask every 15 minutes if I want to reboot ? Why is there no option for "NO! I'll do it myself -- when I want to." (there's only "now" and "later", the latter meaning "nag me again in a few minutes")
Vista made it -worse- "Program X wants to do Y, do you want to allow this?" pops up all the time, usually in response to you 3 seconds earlier having explicitly asked for Y -- so the answer is an obvious yes.
When people get dozens of alerts a day, 95% of which contain nothing that is understandable or useful to them, it's no wonder they've learnt to ignore them and do whatever it takes to get them out of the way.
But it -is- worth it, well that or go to asynchrnous programming for more stuff.
Because in actual fact, currently Firefox will frequently stall the entire user-interface, and ALL tabs, for the reason that ONE of the tabs is doing something where it's waiting for something-or-other.
The result is, you've got 10 open tabs. One of them is waiting for java to initialize or something, and the result is that ALL the tabs, and indeed the entire application appears to hang, for 1-10 seconds.
And that's just stupid. Especially stupid when there's 3 other cores in the machine doing nothing but idling.
Correction; for anything worth something that cannot easily be verified to be what it claims to be.
It's really hard to tell an -actual- reall-old-coin from a fake really-old-coin. In contrast, there's no simple way of creating seemingly-real-but-fake Ixus-cameras.
Now, risks of never getting the goods at all and similar, still apply, if one pays beforehand. But assuming one gets it at all, and a quick inspection and test shows it looks and acts like an Ixus, it probably really is an ixus. (might be a stolen one though)
No. That doesn't actually work. To pick that single sentence to pieces, and conclude that it says nothing. It does. English is a context-sensitive language, and if I say:
"Selling; one Rolex Watch. 100% authentic. Guaranteed genuine"
Then infact, I *AM* claiming that the watch I am selling is a genuine, authenthic, rolex-watch. And if this isn't true, I'm comitting fraud. No if's and but's about it.
It depends, now doesn't it?
It's not worth it to spend $10 million to decide who will get $10million, and if you spend an hour each one 150K applications, you need 80 employees full-time for a year, which will cost you pretty close to that, when you include benefits, taxes etc.
I guess a lot of the suggestions are very similar, or very crappy, so can be dealt with quickly though, so should be realistic to give this a reasonable review with substantially less resurces, still it's going to require atleast a man-year or two.
True. There's some drift in what is "good enough".
But if what is considered "good enough" drifts upwards more slowly than the progress of technology, then it means that the cheapest "good enough" machine will be further and further behind the current state-of-the-art.
The switch from desktops to laptops is partly fueled by this. 10 years ago, laptops that where "good enough" where hideously expensive, and so most people bought a desktop.
Today, a laptop is still more expensive than a desktop, for the same performance. A terabyte desktop-drive is a lot cheaper than a terabyte of storage for a laptop, for example. But overwhelmingly, people don't care, because a 250GB laptop-drive is "good enough".
True. But digital goods typically have huge fixed costs and miniscule per-item costs.
If your per-item cost is $1 and your selling-price is $59, then halving the price really does require double sales to give the same profit.
Downloadable games (steam) have -very- low "per unit" costs.