Energy-costs aren't high enough that it makes a difference to the end-consumer, in many cases.
Let's look at the maths for a fairly typical consumer wanting a new 50" TV, watching it for an average of 4 hours/day.
Alternative A: Plasma, $2000, 450W. Alternative B: LCD, $2500, 200W.
Now, 4 hours a day for a year is around 1450 hours, so A will consume around 650Kwh and B will consume around 290Kwh. The difference is 360Kwh, where I live this power will cost you about $40.
In -principle- he'll have saved back the 500 extra he paid for the TV in 12 years, assuming he keeps it that long...
But it just plain doesn't register in the wallet anyway. If we say he -does- keep the TV for 10 years, then the total bill for TV these 10 years looks something like this:
A: $2000 + $70(power)*10 + $40(cable)*120 = $7500
B: $2500 + $30(power)*10 + $40(cable)*120 = $7600
In this particular example, the plasma even ends up being the cheaper alternative. Even if plasma and lcd cost the same, the plasma would still cost only $400 more over the 10-year period, or put differently $3 more each monthh.
Not zero. But 0.1W is completely sufficient for responding to power-on ir-signals. And downloading background-data does not need to be continous, the most common type of data is electronic program-guides, and updating them (with say the next 10 days worth of programming) once a night is completely sufficient.
So, a long-term average of less than a single W should be easily achievable, and that's a hell of a lot better than a long-term average of 15W. It's 125KWh/year worth of difference infact.
Agreed. But it is, frankly, ridicolous to need to draw 20 watts 75% of the time in order to keep a tv-guide updated. Downloading such a guide once a day, and doing it when the TV is on anyway would be completely sufficient. And that would mean the TV would only need to wake from deep-sleep and come up to downloading-tv-guide levels of powerusage at most once a day. (never if the TV is used atleast once ever 24 hours)
A TV-guide is what, 5MB of data ? MY EEE-pc can download 5MB worth of data using wireless networking in about 10 seconds, using sligthly under 10W. There's a WORLD between using 10W for 10 seconds, on one hand, and using 20W for 60.000 seconds on the other hand.
And being enough "on" to be able to detect a incoming "power-on" IR-signal is easily doable with 0.1W or less.
So, reasonable would be 0.1W almost the entire time, 10W for a minute or two once a day.
Re:Among insiders this is a well-known phenomenon.
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I think you're needlessly provoked because you didn't fully read what I wrote, or atleast you ignored parts of it.
I said *AT*THE*MOMENT* I never claimed that America was at no point involved in wars over issued more important to the US public, such as WW-II. And it's obvious to everyone that when the US public really genuinely care about the issues at stake, they're willing to accept much higher losses, without turning against the war as such.
But at the MOMENT (like I said) most of the wars USA are involved in are over issues which the average American doesn't consider very crucial. It's atleast my honest impression that really, people don't care THAT much who leads Iraq. Sure, Saddam was a dictator and an asshole of the worst sort, but let's face it, that's also true for dozens of other state-leaders today.
And when you don't really care about the issue, the most realistic way of beating usa (not in the sense of military win, but in the sense of suceeding in having american soldiers remove themselves from your country) is to make the price to pay high, for an issue that people in USA don't really care about.
There's a limit to how many dead Americans the general public in USA will accept for an issue that they really don't care that deeply about. 4000 dead, and something like 30K wounded (more than that if you include wounded from non-enemy-action) is a high price to pay for... for what exactly ?
Sure. If your point is that if the issue was important to you, you'd have stayed even at high cost, I agree absolutely. It's just that it ain't. And that seems the pattern for most of the military actions abroad of the US military these last few decades.
How many of the military actions performed by the US military abroad in the last 20 years do you REALLY care about ? Some, perhaps. But I'll guess that most missions have been performed on issues that aren't really close to the heart of the average American.
I agree absolutely that the financial price didn't get you out of Vietnam. Infact I said PRECISELY that; that you care more about the count of coffins than you care about the count of dollars. I do suggest that the high number of dead in the vietnam war contributed to creating the opposition to the war. 60000 dead US soldiers, and 5 times that wounded played a role here.
This is, by the way, in my eyes a compliment to the American people. I do share the opinion that in general, human suffering is more important than financial cost.
Re:Among insiders this is a well-known phenomenon.
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Nah. That's silly. The criteria for taking over a role isn't to be better in EVERY way. It's enough to be, in sum total, the better choice. Evaluating choices has more than one criteria, and you don't need to excel in EVERY criteria to be the best choice.
For example, it's perfectly possible that a somewhat higher reaction-time can be compensated by an ability to perform higher-G turns, in many situations initiating a 20G turn after 0.4 seconds may be superior to initiating a 5G-turn after 0.3 seconds. (random fabricated example)
And for some high-risk missions, the fact that these are UNMANNED is by itself a large advantage, it means that if the mission goes horribly wrong, the risk to pilot-lives is significantly lower. Losing a pilot is expensive, in 3 ways. First pilots cost real cash. Second, losses on your own side are bad for morale. Third, and perhaps most significantly, loosing pilots is bad for popular support back home in USA for the mission.
The last point is essential. At the moment, the only way to beat USA in a war is to convince the us public that they no longer want to pay the price of the war. And the price they care most about is coffins coming back home. So-and-so many billions doesn't make the same impression.
If the count of dead US soldiers in Iraq was 10 times what it is, US-troops would be out already. If they where 1/10th what they are, Obama wouldn't have needed to promise withdrawal to win the election.
True that. So those people will only "convert" the day they buy a new computer -- and the new computer comes pre-installed with something other than IE.
And -that- again is only likely to happen when MS loses the market-dominance on the desktop, which is certainly further out than them losing the browser-dominance. (I see about 33% non-IE, however I see only about 5% non-windows in my logs)
It is true that you can be in orbit 100km up. But you need velocity for that, rather a lot of it too. If you climb 100km up this cable, and then let go, what happens is you plunge back down to earth, because you have only a small fraction of the horisontal velocity needed to be in orbit.
That is why SpaceShip One wasn't even remotely close to being in orbit, despite having reached an altitude of 100km.
More spesifically, you need a velocity of around 8km/s, and the cable, at that altitude, will have a velocity of around 0.5km/s. So, to insert yourself in LEO, you need to climb to 100km altitude, and then do a 7.5km/s rocket-burn or something. Which ain't all that much easier than just doing a 9km/s burn starting from earth. (9 not 8 because if you're starting from earth you'll lose some energy to atmospheric friction the first 20km or so)
It so follows that this women do not, at all, take the best-profit decision and thus, are economically irrational.
That follows if your definition of "economically rational" is always taking the decision with the best financial reward, without concern for other costs and rewards.
But I don't know anyone who even CLAIM that people are, or should be, rational in THIS silly sense of the word. More commonly people define a economically rational decision as making the choice that gives the best benefit/cost ratio. In other words, taking a job that you find pleasant, where you'll earn $X can be the rational choice even if you're offered an unpleasant job at $3*X, assuming the value you place on having the more pleastant job is higher than $2*X.
That fails to work with most sensibly designed token-systems, because there's either a timestamp involved, or the tokens are required in a certain sequence.
For example, to log into my bank, I need to enter my account-number and pin, then it'll ask me for say token #37, which I can get from the token-thing. If a phisher got my pin and account-number and somehow convinced me to enter a few tokens, he'd still have low odds of suceeding, because he doesn't KNOW which tokens to ask me for, since he doesn't know which ones the bank will ask for next time.
He can MITM-it offcourse, but even this is tricky since a user-side SSL-certificate is used, he could get this, but it requires 3 tokens and most people would get suspicious since normal logins normally only require a single one.
It's worse than that actually. The distance to Geosynch is 36000 km. Moving at a 100 km/h (about 55mph) you'd still be underway for 360 hours. There's no way any climbing-mechanism that depends on mechanical transfer from the ribbon will be able to climb even close to fast enough to make the thing practical.
The demonstration shows a climbrate of around 0.1m/s at which speed it'd reach geosynchornous orbit after about 15 years of climbing. Dumbest idea ever.
I don't think they'll "go away" either, but honestly I don't care.
When one browser has 80-90% market-share, it becomes the benchmark. If something works on it, but not in the others, the others will be seen as having a fault, even if it's the others who are conforming to specs.
When a browser has 40% market-share, everyone is able to comprehend that developing stuff in a manner that works only on this single browser would be a major blunder. And if something fails to work in it, but works with the other 60% of market-share, the fault will be placed where it belongs.
It's no goal to had IE eliminated, competition is healthy.
But it IS a goal to have healthy thriving competition, where no single browser dominates to the degree that people stop caring about compatibility with standards. It was like that for a while; "IE is the de-facto standard anyway", people where saying. They're saying it less these days, and that's a good thing.
But if, as you say, breastfeeding in public is a nesecity (I don't agree that it is by the way), then that means that people may happen to see it whether they like it or not. There are lots of actions that MAY offend someone or other but which we generally allow anyway. A society where every action that offends nobody at all is allowed isn't a very free society.
I was mostly adressing the second, and very common on slashdot, claim "It's private property, the owners can set whatever rules they want"
That is factually incorrect. And that was my point. Yes it's private property. But no, it does NOT follow from this that whatever rules the owners want are acceptable, or even legal. A ban on breastfeeding in a mall comes pretty close to denying access at all to mothers with young children, keep in mind that a typical mall has ONE owner and ONE set of rules for a large shopping-center, and it may well be surrounded by nothing much but a (also privately owned) parking-lot.
There is no right not to be offended. Living in a free society means that OTHERS are also free, including the freedom to do things that may offend or annoy.
Probably most of these will be true, it's hardly surprising that mostly the world continues as it has.
The IE-thing though, I see sligthly differently. It's true that most people use IE. But it is also true that IE has seen a steady decline the last 2 years. Like you, I think the trends will continue much as they are, but that still means a continous downwards trend.
For the websites we run at work (I work for a web-development company that carries the websites of around 1500 norwegian companies, including a dozen of the larger ones) 2 years ago we saw 80% IE on average (more on grandma-type websites, less on technical ones), one year ago it was at about 73%, and now in december it was at 65%.
I don't care much about IE, but I do care about healthy competition. My ideal world would have no single browser above 50%. That's the best guarantee that people will not develop exclusively for ONE browser.
In practice they may get away with just asking you to leave, without stating a reason. It depends on the business in question though. If you're in a public mall, where obviously the general public is welcomed, I think it's legitimate to politely ask -why- your presence isn't wanted. And there's lots of answers to that that are illegal.
Individually, you're not going to be able to do anything about it, unless they admit it. But collectively sure. In other words, if you're black, and they ask you to leave, without stating a reason, you probably have to leave. But if you can sucessfully show that they -generally- chase away black people who try to shop in their mall, then that's a completely different thing.
Private property is all well and good, but private land isn't equivalent to a sovereign state, i.e. law still applies ALSO to the owner of the property, and that includes anti-discrimination-law.
52Kwh is not that good actually. It's the same energy you get from about 10 pounds of petrol, or 1.3 gallons. Most cars have gas-tanks sligthly larger than 2 gallons, for a reason. And to get that amount of energy, you need 280 pounds of this, and extra weight invariably means -lower- range for the same energy.
Oh, you can drive a while with 1.3 gallons worth of energy, sure. But it's not a good range for a modern car. (most cars have tanks about 10 times this size, though this range isn't really needed, just practical. A car with a 300 mile range is perfectly fine, especially if it charges quickly (minutes). But a car with a 50-mile range is going to be limiting even if it can recharge in a few minutes. (which is frankly unlikely, consider the amps needed, try to spec the needed cables....)
It's sad how pitiful everything-but-hydrocarbons is as energy-storage.
I mean, these are pie-in-the-sky ultracaps, who knows if they'll ever live up to the promised given in the description.
But even if they do. 280 pounds for 50Kwh of energy ? 50Kwh of energy from petrol weighs on the order of 10 pounds, from diesel on the order of 8-9 pounds.
So, even if this turns out to work as well as expected, it's still a factor of 30 or so worse as energy-storage than plain-old-hydrocarbons. It's really amazing the oomph that that liquid holds.
Okay, so in the real world it's somewhat better. An electrical motor is more efficient than a modern combustion-engine, let's be generous and say by a factor of 2. But you're still talking a factor of 15.
Which means you either need to drag around 15 times as many pounds for energy-storage, or you're going to have to accept a lower range, lower performance, or some combination thereof. (in reality, probably the latter)
Oh, get me right, I'd be deligthed to have something like this work out. It's just depresing to look at how far behind electrical storage really is, relative to chemical.
This is possible. Certainly, for you individually, it's always going to be safer to walk away from a small localized fire instead of trying to extinguish it.
If the fire is in a building with other people in it, it can be less clear-cut, it depends on -how- small the fire is, and how quickly you could safely evacuate the building.
But offcourse we care about damage to property too, not only life. I live in a condominium with 6 apartments side-by-side, each apartment is a fire-cell where fire should stay in one cell for atleast 1 hour. (operative word being "should")
Still, letting a fire do it's thing to my apartment would mean a high risk of total destruction of my apartment and the stuff in it, and a medium risk of totaling the building. That is high enough that it is -worth- a slight risk. The trick is in sanely evaluating the risk under pressure.
It's not insane at all, there need to be some sort of way of dealing with people who just don't respond. Remember this isn't criminal law.
For example, here's how it works in Norways small claims court;
Plaintiff delivers a complaint.
Complaint is delivered (by certified mail) to the accused, the letter states in clear terms that he should respond in 3 weeks to avoid a default judgement. (i.e. no response will be interpreted as you agree with the complaint)
If no answer comes, it is assumed the plaintiff is right, and a default judgement is entered. This is sent to the accused, again by certified mail.
There is a 3 week limit for reporting the case to a higher court, if nobody does within this limit, the judgement is valid.
Normally that's the last word. If you received -2- certified-mail letters from the court, and choose not to respond to any of them, then you can and will get a judgement against you. There are exceptions, but they are rare and few. If you can show that you had a good reason for not responding, you can get a retrial. (for example, I know this has happened to people who where analphabets)
It's not enough to simply don't respond. You need to REPEATEDLY accept certified-mail (which here atleast means physically signing for the reception and presenting ID) and THEN fail to respond to it. Keep in mind that tort law ain't criminal law.
Actually, that may be politically correct, but it's not true.
Sure, everyone has strong and weak sides, but nevertheless, the tendency is for some people to know a lot about a huge array of topics, and other people being pretty unknowledgeable about pretty much everything.
That nobody can specialize in everything is however true.
You do need one surgeon, and a different cryptographer, true. But still, the odds is that either of them will know more about the basics of the work of the other than a random person you ask on the street.
That is true. The computer is simply very different, so modeling our strengths is just as hard as our weaknesses.
It's trivial for an AI-controlled enemy to get headshots all the time. It's trivial for the AI to have complete knowledge of the battlefield and state of all items and characters on it. Humans can't do that.
It's a lot -less- than trivial for an AI to notice patterns in the enemy and exploit them. Thus the same approach tends to work 100 times against the same AI. It can't learn from its mistakes.
Nonsense, writing to raid-5 should not be "dog slow".
In the absolute worst case (silly raid-setup with one deficated parity disk rather than spread-out-parity) and writing of only a single block, and the parity-disk and the disk holding that block both being on the same channel, so writing needs to be sequential, you'd absolutely worst case end up with half the speed of a single disk.
In real-life a 4+1 raid-5 setup is about 3 times as fast as a single disk, sometimes more. It depends on write-pattersn offcourse, but quite often you write many blocks close to eachother (i.e. a nonfragmented file significantly larger than a single block) so what happens is you need 5 writes to write those 4 blocks, but those 5 writes can happen in parallell since they're to different disks.
Calculating the parity should be down in the noise. Your CPU is much MUCH faster than your disks, and it's not as if xor is a fancy operation or anything. I've never been able to load the CPU more than 1-2% by fully loading the i/o-capacity of a raid-5 array.
There's many reasons. That may be one of them, I guess. It's possible you're right, that in essence, having been social democrats for most of the last 50 years is beneficial for this kind of stability, because the increased social safety-net means there's less of a frustrated underclass. On the flipside the same thing means higher taxes for the rich (which sucks if you're rich) and less ultra-rich than in for example USA.
That is indeed part of the problem. It's also part of the problem that for a country as rich as the USA, you guys have insane differences in standards-of-living (i.e. your GINI-index is literally on banana-republic levels) Since these kinds of crimes are more prevalent in the lower classes, the size of the lower classes matter a lot.
To be fair, the scandinavian countries have a high gun-ownership, despite the heavy regulation. It's overwhelmingly hunting-weapons though, and there is indeed a very low gun-homicide-rate. There are quite a few more gun-suicides, but I personally don't consider those equally bad.
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Energy-costs aren't high enough that it makes a difference to the end-consumer, in many cases.
Let's look at the maths for a fairly typical consumer wanting a new 50" TV, watching it for an average of 4 hours/day.
Alternative A: Plasma, $2000, 450W. Alternative B: LCD, $2500, 200W.
Now, 4 hours a day for a year is around 1450 hours, so A will consume around 650Kwh and B will consume around 290Kwh. The difference is 360Kwh, where I live this power will cost you about $40.
In -principle- he'll have saved back the 500 extra he paid for the TV in 12 years, assuming he keeps it that long...
But it just plain doesn't register in the wallet anyway. If we say he -does- keep the TV for 10 years, then the total bill for TV these 10 years looks something like this:
A: $2000 + $70(power)*10 + $40(cable)*120 = $7500
B: $2500 + $30(power)*10 + $40(cable)*120 = $7600
In this particular example, the plasma even ends up being the cheaper alternative. Even if plasma and lcd cost the same, the plasma would still cost only $400 more over the 10-year period, or put differently $3 more each monthh.
Not zero. But 0.1W is completely sufficient for responding to power-on ir-signals. And downloading background-data does not need to be continous, the most common type of data is electronic program-guides, and updating them (with say the next 10 days worth of programming) once a night is completely sufficient.
So, a long-term average of less than a single W should be easily achievable, and that's a hell of a lot better than a long-term average of 15W. It's 125KWh/year worth of difference infact.
Agreed. But it is, frankly, ridicolous to need to draw 20 watts 75% of the time in order to keep a tv-guide updated. Downloading such a guide once a day, and doing it when the TV is on anyway would be completely sufficient. And that would mean the TV would only need to wake from deep-sleep and come up to downloading-tv-guide levels of powerusage at most once a day. (never if the TV is used atleast once ever 24 hours)
A TV-guide is what, 5MB of data ? MY EEE-pc can download 5MB worth of data using wireless networking in about 10 seconds, using sligthly under 10W.
There's a WORLD between using 10W for 10 seconds, on one hand, and using 20W for 60.000 seconds on the other hand.
And being enough "on" to be able to detect a incoming "power-on" IR-signal is easily doable with 0.1W or less.
So, reasonable would be 0.1W almost the entire time, 10W for a minute or two once a day.
I think you're needlessly provoked because you didn't fully read what I wrote, or atleast you ignored parts of it.
I said *AT*THE*MOMENT* I never claimed that America was at no point involved in wars over issued more important to the US public, such as WW-II. And it's obvious to everyone that when the US public really genuinely care about the issues at stake, they're willing to accept much higher losses, without turning against the war as such.
But at the MOMENT (like I said) most of the wars USA are involved in are over issues which the average American doesn't consider very crucial. It's atleast my honest impression that really, people don't care THAT much who leads Iraq. Sure, Saddam was a dictator and an asshole of the worst sort, but let's face it, that's also true for dozens of other state-leaders today.
And when you don't really care about the issue, the most realistic way of beating usa (not in the sense of military win, but in the sense of suceeding in having american soldiers remove themselves from your country) is to make the price to pay high, for an issue that people in USA don't really care about.
There's a limit to how many dead Americans the general public in USA will accept for an issue that they really don't care that deeply about. 4000 dead, and something like 30K wounded (more than that if you include wounded from non-enemy-action) is a high price to pay for... for what exactly ?
Sure. If your point is that if the issue was important to you, you'd have stayed even at high cost, I agree absolutely. It's just that it ain't. And that seems the pattern for most of the military actions abroad of the US military these last few decades.
How many of the military actions performed by the US military abroad in the last 20 years do you REALLY care about ?
Some, perhaps. But I'll guess that most missions have been performed on issues that aren't really close to the heart of the average American.
I agree absolutely that the financial price didn't get you out of Vietnam. Infact I said PRECISELY that; that you care more about the count of coffins than you care about the count of dollars. I do suggest that the high number of dead in the vietnam war contributed to creating the opposition to the war. 60000 dead US soldiers, and 5 times that wounded played a role here.
This is, by the way, in my eyes a compliment to the American people. I do share the opinion that in general, human suffering is more important than financial cost.
Nah. That's silly. The criteria for taking over a role isn't to be better in EVERY way. It's enough to be, in sum total, the better choice. Evaluating choices has more than one criteria, and you don't need to excel in EVERY criteria to be the best choice.
For example, it's perfectly possible that a somewhat higher reaction-time can be compensated by an ability to perform higher-G turns, in many situations initiating a 20G turn after 0.4 seconds may be superior to initiating a 5G-turn after 0.3 seconds. (random fabricated example)
And for some high-risk missions, the fact that these are UNMANNED is by itself a large advantage, it means that if the mission goes horribly wrong, the risk to pilot-lives is significantly lower. Losing a pilot is expensive, in 3 ways. First pilots cost real cash. Second, losses on your own side are bad for morale. Third, and perhaps most significantly, loosing pilots is bad for popular support back home in USA for the mission.
The last point is essential. At the moment, the only way to beat USA in a war is to convince the us public that they no longer want to pay the price of the war. And the price they care most about is coffins coming back home. So-and-so many billions doesn't make the same impression.
If the count of dead US soldiers in Iraq was 10 times what it is, US-troops would be out already. If they where 1/10th what they are, Obama wouldn't have needed to promise withdrawal to win the election.
True that. So those people will only "convert" the day they buy a new computer -- and the new computer comes pre-installed with something other than IE.
And -that- again is only likely to happen when MS loses the market-dominance on the desktop, which is certainly further out than them losing the browser-dominance. (I see about 33% non-IE, however I see only about 5% non-windows in my logs)
That's actually not true.
It is true that you can be in orbit 100km up. But you need velocity for that, rather a lot of it too. If you climb 100km up this cable, and then let go, what happens is you plunge back down to earth, because you have only a small fraction of the horisontal velocity needed to be in orbit.
That is why SpaceShip One wasn't even remotely close to being in orbit, despite having reached an altitude of 100km.
More spesifically, you need a velocity of around 8km/s, and the cable, at that altitude, will have a velocity of around 0.5km/s. So, to insert yourself in LEO, you need to climb to 100km altitude, and then do a 7.5km/s rocket-burn or something. Which ain't all that much easier than just doing a 9km/s burn starting from earth. (9 not 8 because if you're starting from earth you'll lose some energy to atmospheric friction the first 20km or so)
That follows if your definition of "economically rational" is always taking the decision with the best financial reward, without concern for other costs and rewards.
But I don't know anyone who even CLAIM that people are, or should be, rational in THIS silly sense of the word. More commonly people define a economically rational decision as making the choice that gives the best benefit/cost ratio. In other words, taking a job that you find pleasant, where you'll earn $X can be the rational choice even if you're offered an unpleasant job at $3*X, assuming the value you place on having the more pleastant job is higher than $2*X.
That fails to work with most sensibly designed token-systems, because there's either a timestamp involved, or the tokens are required in a certain sequence.
For example, to log into my bank, I need to enter my account-number and pin, then it'll ask me for say token #37, which I can get from the token-thing. If a phisher got my pin and account-number and somehow convinced me to enter a few tokens, he'd still have low odds of suceeding, because he doesn't KNOW which tokens to ask me for, since he doesn't know which ones the bank will ask for next time.
He can MITM-it offcourse, but even this is tricky since a user-side SSL-certificate is used, he could get this, but it requires 3 tokens and most people would get suspicious since normal logins normally only require a single one.
It's worse than that actually. The distance to Geosynch is 36000 km. Moving at a 100 km/h (about 55mph) you'd still be underway for 360 hours. There's no way any climbing-mechanism that depends on mechanical transfer from the ribbon will be able to climb even close to fast enough to make the thing practical.
The demonstration shows a climbrate of around 0.1m/s at which speed it'd reach geosynchornous orbit after about 15 years of climbing. Dumbest idea ever.
I don't think they'll "go away" either, but honestly I don't care.
When one browser has 80-90% market-share, it becomes the benchmark. If something works on it, but not in the others, the others will be seen as having a fault, even if it's the others who are conforming to specs.
When a browser has 40% market-share, everyone is able to comprehend that developing stuff in a manner that works only on this single browser would be a major blunder. And if something fails to work in it, but works with the other 60% of market-share, the fault will be placed where it belongs.
It's no goal to had IE eliminated, competition is healthy.
But it IS a goal to have healthy thriving competition, where no single browser dominates to the degree that people stop caring about compatibility with standards. It was like that for a while; "IE is the de-facto standard anyway", people where saying. They're saying it less these days, and that's a good thing.
But if, as you say, breastfeeding in public is a nesecity (I don't agree that it is by the way), then that means that people may happen to see it whether they like it or not. There are lots of actions that MAY offend someone or other but which we generally allow anyway. A society where every action that offends nobody at all is allowed isn't a very free society.
I was mostly adressing the second, and very common on slashdot, claim "It's private property, the owners can set whatever rules they want"
That is factually incorrect. And that was my point. Yes it's private property. But no, it does NOT follow from this that whatever rules the owners want are acceptable, or even legal. A ban on breastfeeding in a mall comes pretty close to denying access at all to mothers with young children, keep in mind that a typical mall has ONE owner and ONE set of rules for a large shopping-center, and it may well be surrounded by nothing much but a (also privately owned) parking-lot.
There is no right not to be offended. Living in a free society means that OTHERS are also free, including the freedom to do things that may offend or annoy.
Probably most of these will be true, it's hardly surprising that mostly the world continues as it has.
The IE-thing though, I see sligthly differently. It's true that most people use IE. But it is also true that IE has seen a steady decline the last 2 years. Like you, I think the trends will continue much as they are, but that still means a continous downwards trend.
For the websites we run at work (I work for a web-development company that carries the websites of around 1500 norwegian companies, including a dozen of the larger ones) 2 years ago we saw 80% IE on average (more on grandma-type websites, less on technical ones), one year ago it was at about 73%, and now in december it was at 65%.
I don't care much about IE, but I do care about healthy competition. My ideal world would have no single browser above 50%. That's the best guarantee that people will not develop exclusively for ONE browser.
In practice they may get away with just asking you to leave, without stating a reason. It depends on the business in question though. If you're in a public mall, where obviously the general public is welcomed, I think it's legitimate to politely ask -why- your presence isn't wanted. And there's lots of answers to that that are illegal.
Individually, you're not going to be able to do anything about it, unless they admit it. But collectively sure. In other words, if you're black, and they ask you to leave, without stating a reason, you probably have to leave. But if you can sucessfully show that they -generally- chase away black people who try to shop in their mall, then that's a completely different thing.
Private property is all well and good, but private land isn't equivalent to a sovereign state, i.e. law still applies ALSO to the owner of the property, and that includes anti-discrimination-law.
52Kwh is not that good actually. It's the same energy you get from about 10 pounds of petrol, or 1.3 gallons. Most cars have gas-tanks sligthly larger than 2 gallons, for a reason. And to get that amount of energy, you need 280 pounds of this, and extra weight invariably means -lower- range for the same energy.
Oh, you can drive a while with 1.3 gallons worth of energy, sure. But it's not a good range for a modern car. (most cars have tanks about 10 times this size, though this range isn't really needed, just practical. A car with a 300 mile range is perfectly fine, especially if it charges quickly (minutes). But a car with a 50-mile range is going to be limiting even if it can recharge in a few minutes. (which is frankly unlikely, consider the amps needed, try to spec the needed cables....)
It's sad how pitiful everything-but-hydrocarbons is as energy-storage.
I mean, these are pie-in-the-sky ultracaps, who knows if they'll ever live up to the promised given in the description.
But even if they do. 280 pounds for 50Kwh of energy ? 50Kwh of energy from petrol weighs on the order of 10 pounds, from diesel on the order of 8-9 pounds.
So, even if this turns out to work as well as expected, it's still a factor of 30 or so worse as energy-storage than plain-old-hydrocarbons. It's really amazing the oomph that that liquid holds.
Okay, so in the real world it's somewhat better. An electrical motor is more efficient than a modern combustion-engine, let's be generous and say by a factor of 2. But you're still talking a factor of 15.
Which means you either need to drag around 15 times as many pounds for energy-storage, or you're going to have to accept a lower range, lower performance, or some combination thereof. (in reality, probably the latter)
Oh, get me right, I'd be deligthed to have something like this work out. It's just depresing to look at how far behind electrical storage really is, relative to chemical.
This is possible. Certainly, for you individually, it's always going to be safer to walk away from a small localized fire instead of trying to extinguish it.
If the fire is in a building with other people in it, it can be less clear-cut, it depends on -how- small the fire is, and how quickly you could safely evacuate the building.
But offcourse we care about damage to property too, not only life. I live in a condominium with 6 apartments side-by-side, each apartment is a fire-cell where fire should stay in one cell for atleast 1 hour. (operative word being "should")
Still, letting a fire do it's thing to my apartment would mean a high risk of total destruction of my apartment and the stuff in it, and a medium risk of totaling the building. That is high enough that it is -worth- a slight risk. The trick is in sanely evaluating the risk under pressure.
Normally that's the last word. If you received -2- certified-mail letters from the court, and choose not to respond to any of them, then you can and will get a judgement against you. There are exceptions, but they are rare and few. If you can show that you had a good reason for not responding, you can get a retrial. (for example, I know this has happened to people who where analphabets) It's not enough to simply don't respond. You need to REPEATEDLY accept certified-mail (which here atleast means physically signing for the reception and presenting ID) and THEN fail to respond to it. Keep in mind that tort law ain't criminal law.
Actually, that may be politically correct, but it's not true.
Sure, everyone has strong and weak sides, but nevertheless, the tendency is for some people to know a lot about a huge array of topics, and other people being pretty unknowledgeable about pretty much everything.
That nobody can specialize in everything is however true.
You do need one surgeon, and a different cryptographer, true. But still, the odds is that either of them will know more about the basics of the work of the other than a random person you ask on the street.
That is true. The computer is simply very different, so modeling our strengths is just as hard as our weaknesses.
It's trivial for an AI-controlled enemy to get headshots all the time. It's trivial for the AI to have complete knowledge of the battlefield and state of all items and characters on it. Humans can't do that.
It's a lot -less- than trivial for an AI to notice patterns in the enemy and exploit them. Thus the same approach tends to work 100 times against the same AI. It can't learn from its mistakes.
Consumer raid-cards are generally crap, true. There's no reason for anyone ever to buy $100 raid-cards.
Either use software-raid, or if you're more serious, buy a good raid-card. The el-cheapo raidcards are pointless.
Nonsense, writing to raid-5 should not be "dog slow".
In the absolute worst case (silly raid-setup with one deficated parity disk rather than spread-out-parity) and writing of only a single block, and the parity-disk and the disk holding that block both being on the same channel, so writing needs to be sequential, you'd absolutely worst case end up with half the speed of a single disk.
In real-life a 4+1 raid-5 setup is about 3 times as fast as a single disk, sometimes more. It depends on write-pattersn offcourse, but quite often you write many blocks close to eachother (i.e. a nonfragmented file significantly larger than a single block) so what happens is you need 5 writes to write those 4 blocks, but those 5 writes can happen in parallell since they're to different disks.
Calculating the parity should be down in the noise. Your CPU is much MUCH faster than your disks, and it's not as if xor is a fancy operation or anything. I've never been able to load the CPU more than 1-2% by fully loading the i/o-capacity of a raid-5 array.
There's many reasons. That may be one of them, I guess. It's possible you're right, that in essence, having been social democrats for most of the last 50 years is beneficial for this kind of stability, because the increased social safety-net means there's less of a frustrated underclass. On the flipside the same thing means higher taxes for the rich (which sucks if you're rich) and less ultra-rich than in for example USA.
That is indeed part of the problem. It's also part of the problem that for a country as rich as the USA, you guys have insane differences in standards-of-living (i.e. your GINI-index is literally on banana-republic levels) Since these kinds of crimes are more prevalent in the lower classes, the size of the lower classes matter a lot.
To be fair, the scandinavian countries have a high gun-ownership, despite the heavy regulation. It's overwhelmingly hunting-weapons though, and there is indeed a very low gun-homicide-rate. There are quite a few more gun-suicides, but I personally don't consider those equally bad.