Some building codes are written in blood. Many others are written in money. Specifically money from lumber companies who want everything to be made of wood, cement companies who want everything to be made with cement, contractors who want everything to be big and labor intensive to build, developers who want to market over-blown McMansions, and banks who want everything to be as expensive as possible so they get to write bigger loans.
We're not short on housing in this country (the USA). We're short on money to appease banks so that they'll let people actually live in said housing. Banks are currently tearing down forclosed houses in an attempt to drive real estate prices up, to get their gigantor loan money machine running again.
The truth is that we've already got a plethora of ways to build cheap houses, many of which are more environmentally friendly and durable than modern stick frame construction. The bank/developer/contractor/lumber cartel won't have it, though, because they've been making a lot of money off overvalued, shoddily constructed McMansions -- and they're the ones who write our building codes, so it's gonna be a tough nut to crack. Regulatory capture, anyone?
This -- along with many other great ways to build houses -- won't ever be used here, as long as we let mortgage brokers and McMansion contractors continue to define our building codes.
It's a hell of a machine, yes, but it's a solution in search of a problem.
I'm also curious what happened to your sense of wonder, inner child, and basic intellectual engagement with the universe around you. Were you born this jaded, or did you have to work at it?
CSS is for prima donnas or...Gmail. Javascript is for the clinically insane...or Gmail. Drupal is for geeks or...the White House. Ajax is for nerds or...Gmail.
And plain-jane HTML is for codgers and couch developers lucky enough to live a la-la land far simpler than the one inhabited by those of us who do this kind of stuff professionally.
My point is that it's silly and counterproductive to vilify particular toolsets whenever doofuses use them poorly. If we all turned off Javascript tomorrow the crappy web developers of the world would just find some other way to fuck with us.
Doesn't HTTP 2.0 include the ability to maintain a constant connection, so that each individual request doesn't need all the "Hi, I'm a server!" overhead?
Riiigght... Javascript increases by about 50Kb, so it's responsible for the other several hundred Kb of increase over the last few years?
Everyone realizes that gzipped jQuery is only 31Kb, right? I'm sick of people blaming Javascript for bloat. Do you realize how much work it would be to produce several hundred Kb of it? Much less think of reasons to produce that much?
I've been a web designer for years, and where the increases in page size I've seen actually come from is just plain old images. Monitors are bigger. That means web page designs need to be bigger. That means the images that make them up need to be bigger.
Think about it: it used to be common practice to design a fixed-width website to render on an 800x600 (or even 640x480) monitor. I remember doing them 450px wide, back in the dark ages. Now I do them at 960px, or wider if the audience is likely to have higher resolution monitors. That means the images that make up the layout need to be a little more than twice as wide, if they're made equally taller that's a little more than 4 times as many pixels, just to do the same old things at the new standard resolution.
Since bandwidth is less of an issue today (for the vast majority of people, anyway) we also compress our images less, in the name of things not looking like crap. When designing a website (especially a graphics-heavy one) you also need to spend more care on the stuff around the main design, for people with maximized browsers on high-resolution screens. So not only are we making images with 4X the pixels, compressed a little less, we need to add a few more images to the mix to maintain the same level of visual excitement for people using big screens.
On websites produced by competent people HTML5, CSS, Flash and Javascript have basically fuck-all to do with the recent ballooning of bandwidth. Specific implementations of Javascript that you happen to have a grudge against have less that fuck-all to do with it. It's just a fact of life that bigger screens connected to fatter pipes will wind up with more pixels piped to them. Deal with it.
That said, my portfolio website is only 300-odd Kb on the homepage, and it's CMS-driven, includes jQuery and is pretty damn heavy on the graphics. I like to think I'm sharper than the average copy-pasting "web designer," though.
Predator drones cost $3,234/hour to operate, according to Customs and Border Protection. TFA pegs the up-front cost of the drones as $20 million each (and CBP has eight of them and is buying one more). That means in total they've spent more than $200 million on this little boondoggle.
Even assuming that every single one of those arrests wouldn't have been made at all without the drone, that's over $41,000 per arrest in surveillance costs alone.
It doesn't sound like CBP is producing a great ROI.
So if you get cancer and are lucky enough to run up a mere $500,000 bill you'd only be on the hook for $108,000? Yeah, that's fucking spectacular health care coverage right there.
Sounds like a recipe for lots of people *needing* catastrophic health insurance.
The fucking demented thing about our system is that we could easily make it cheaper overall, just by paying more for routine health maintenance and checkups.
For example, my girlfriend had an impacted wisdom tooth, but her (free, provided by our college to poor people) coverage wouldn't cover the extraction until it got infected enough to warrant an emergency extraction. Luckily we could afford to pay out of pocket for it, but a lot of people they cover couldn't. So instead of covering a $300 15 minute scheduled surgery now, this insurer *chose* that they would rather cover a multi-thousand dollar emergency surgery at some indeterminate future date. A lot of our health care is structured to make these retarded sorts of choices, and it's fucking stupid.
She also has a cyst on her scalp that they won't cover - again - until it gets infected and the cost of dealing with it doubles (or more). WTF is wrong with us?
I'm pretty sure the GP means $7,200 per year for ONE PERSON, in pretty good health. A full family could easily be twice that, or several times their income if anyone happens to have a chronic condition...like maybe asthma.
Try $20,000-30,000 to insure a whole family on the open market. Still sound like it's a problem of priorities?
I understand where you're coming from, and when it comes to a lot of software I agree. I think office software is reaching a tipping point, though, where it is no longer *that* much better to go with Microsoft.
To extend the obligatory car analogy: Photoshop is a lot like the difference between a free Yugo and a $1000 Mercedes, but Office is more like the difference between a free Yugo and a $300 Yugo with a spoiler and a CD player. Microsoft Office is a piece of crap, and I honestly spend a lot of time fighting its bugs and "helpful" features.
Actually, a decent honest mechanic often *will* run such a quick diagnostic for free. Just last week our mechanic pressure washed my girlfriend's engine as part of troubleshooting some smoke coming off it. They didn't charge a dime for that, and in fact said "it was just some oil on the exhaust manifold, it's fine" because they know that by telling us the truth and not nickel and diming us they'll earn our trust and respect and we'll come back when we really need them. Maybe you need to find yourself a mechanic who treats you like a human being.
I failed to mention that I had already tried that supply on a different machine, but didn't have another one modern enough to run that particular new motherboard. I was 99% positive that it was busted, but just wanted to make *extra* sure before I RMA'd it. You kind of come off as an ass for your assumption that anybody who doesn't have piles of unused hardware laying around is definitely just some weak-sauce l33t haxx0r. I'll have you know I actually know rather a lot about hardware, and that particular box is still my only desktop 5 years later.
You say "bleeding edge" like self-assembled machines are inherently worse, but not only is it still my only desktop 5 years later, but since I got a new video card recently it still rivals the high end OEM machines that today still cost twice what it did 5 years ago. It has no windows, and no blinking lights - just a black rolled steel case with a power light and an HDD light. It's a well built, flawlessly functioning machine that I wouldn't trade for anything a big manufacturer makes, even today.
Helping customers who come in trying to decide if they need something is called "customer service," even if helping them involves analyzing (maybe with a tool?) their current situation. Businesses that practice this "customer service" tend to stay in business. Have you noticed the lack of big box stores in the world these days? There might be a correlation between that and their propensity for dishonest sales tactics.
That salesman probably assumed exactly what you did: "here's some dumb gamer geek in over his head, I bet I can dick him over." All that elitist BS got him was the loss of a sale (even a small one) that day and of a customer for life.
I did RMA the part, but didn't want to wait a week for the new one to arrive (this was before the days of Amazon Prime, back when fast shipping actually cost money). So I just opted for a refund and decided to spend a couple bucks more locally for the convenience of a working PSU *right now.*
I could regale you with tales of incompetent upsells I've gotten from other big box stores that have cemented my opinion, but I won't because I'm sure it's happened to you too.
I've seen people get to Facebook by typing in "google" in the address bar, clicking the first result (in the default Bing search), typing in "facebook," and clicking the first result. Seriously.
I once had what seemed to be a dud power supply, and I went to the Circuit City near my house because I knew they would have something that would work to replace it. I also figured they would have one of those gadgets for testing power supplies. So I took the power supply out and headed over.
Their support desk said they really preferred to troubleshoot the whole computer, then suggested I go home, put the power supply back in the case, then bring the whole thing back in and pay them $100 just to look at it. I said "no, it's almost certainly just the power supply, just plug it into that thing" and pointed at the tester sitting on the table next to them. After some convincing the guy finally did, and that was when it got *super* scam-tastic.
Luckily I could look over the counter and see that not all the green lights were on when he said "nope, looks like it works fine." I asked him why the +12V rail light hadn't come on, and he tried to tell me that it should work fine, even without +12V, and that that's normal. Of course that gave him an opening to try - again - to tell me to go home, put the (obviously defective) power supply back in the case and bring the whole thing in so they could get $100 just to put it on a shelf for a few days before calling me and saying "you don't have an operating system." To which I would say "no shit, I just built it and it's never even been powered on. Is the power supply broken? Of course it is, you dumb fucks."
If they had the balls to try and pull that shit on somebody like me, who comes in sporting a geek beard, holding a very fancy power supply and knowing at a glance which of their tools I need to borrow for 15 seconds...I shudder at the thought of what they must have pulled on people like - say - my mother.
I doubt any large chain repair service is any better. I hope the Geek Squad chokes and dies.
So by your reasoning if I drive 80 down a residential street it's OK if I kill a toddler - as long as I took "at least a certain amount of care" to avoid killing anybody? After all, I made sure not to be texting while I was speeding!
Slashdot Mirror
Some building codes are written in blood. Many others are written in money. Specifically money from lumber companies who want everything to be made of wood, cement companies who want everything to be made with cement, contractors who want everything to be big and labor intensive to build, developers who want to market over-blown McMansions, and banks who want everything to be as expensive as possible so they get to write bigger loans.
We're not short on housing in this country (the USA). We're short on money to appease banks so that they'll let people actually live in said housing. Banks are currently tearing down forclosed houses in an attempt to drive real estate prices up, to get their gigantor loan money machine running again.
The truth is that we've already got a plethora of ways to build cheap houses, many of which are more environmentally friendly and durable than modern stick frame construction. The bank/developer/contractor/lumber cartel won't have it, though, because they've been making a lot of money off overvalued, shoddily constructed McMansions -- and they're the ones who write our building codes, so it's gonna be a tough nut to crack. Regulatory capture, anyone?
This -- along with many other great ways to build houses -- won't ever be used here, as long as we let mortgage brokers and McMansion contractors continue to define our building codes.
It's a hell of a machine, yes, but it's a solution in search of a problem.
Chase isn't special. Most banks have those. OP must just have an exceptionally crappy one. I'd advise you find a bank that's less evil, BTW.
Their entire agency is already a fucking embarrassment to their country, a few agents "stealing" abandoned pocket change pales in comparison.
What, exactly, makes you think that?
I'm also curious what happened to your sense of wonder, inner child, and basic intellectual engagement with the universe around you. Were you born this jaded, or did you have to work at it?
"Did you lose your keys here under the streetlight?"
"Nope, but this is where the light is."
CSS is for prima donnas or...Gmail. Javascript is for the clinically insane...or Gmail. Drupal is for geeks or...the White House. Ajax is for nerds or...Gmail.
And plain-jane HTML is for codgers and couch developers lucky enough to live a la-la land far simpler than the one inhabited by those of us who do this kind of stuff professionally.
My point is that it's silly and counterproductive to vilify particular toolsets whenever doofuses use them poorly. If we all turned off Javascript tomorrow the crappy web developers of the world would just find some other way to fuck with us.
Doesn't HTTP 2.0 include the ability to maintain a constant connection, so that each individual request doesn't need all the "Hi, I'm a server!" overhead?
Relevant: http://xkcd.com/869/
Riiigght... Javascript increases by about 50Kb, so it's responsible for the other several hundred Kb of increase over the last few years?
Everyone realizes that gzipped jQuery is only 31Kb, right? I'm sick of people blaming Javascript for bloat. Do you realize how much work it would be to produce several hundred Kb of it? Much less think of reasons to produce that much?
I've been a web designer for years, and where the increases in page size I've seen actually come from is just plain old images. Monitors are bigger. That means web page designs need to be bigger. That means the images that make them up need to be bigger.
Think about it: it used to be common practice to design a fixed-width website to render on an 800x600 (or even 640x480) monitor. I remember doing them 450px wide, back in the dark ages. Now I do them at 960px, or wider if the audience is likely to have higher resolution monitors. That means the images that make up the layout need to be a little more than twice as wide, if they're made equally taller that's a little more than 4 times as many pixels, just to do the same old things at the new standard resolution.
Since bandwidth is less of an issue today (for the vast majority of people, anyway) we also compress our images less, in the name of things not looking like crap. When designing a website (especially a graphics-heavy one) you also need to spend more care on the stuff around the main design, for people with maximized browsers on high-resolution screens. So not only are we making images with 4X the pixels, compressed a little less, we need to add a few more images to the mix to maintain the same level of visual excitement for people using big screens.
On websites produced by competent people HTML5, CSS, Flash and Javascript have basically fuck-all to do with the recent ballooning of bandwidth. Specific implementations of Javascript that you happen to have a grudge against have less that fuck-all to do with it. It's just a fact of life that bigger screens connected to fatter pipes will wind up with more pixels piped to them. Deal with it.
That said, my portfolio website is only 300-odd Kb on the homepage, and it's CMS-driven, includes jQuery and is pretty damn heavy on the graphics. I like to think I'm sharper than the average copy-pasting "web designer," though.
Predator drones cost $3,234/hour to operate, according to Customs and Border Protection. TFA pegs the up-front cost of the drones as $20 million each (and CBP has eight of them and is buying one more). That means in total they've spent more than $200 million on this little boondoggle.
Even assuming that every single one of those arrests wouldn't have been made at all without the drone, that's over $41,000 per arrest in surveillance costs alone.
It doesn't sound like CBP is producing a great ROI.
So if you get cancer and are lucky enough to run up a mere $500,000 bill you'd only be on the hook for $108,000? Yeah, that's fucking spectacular health care coverage right there.
Are you slow?
Sounds like a recipe for lots of people *needing* catastrophic health insurance.
The fucking demented thing about our system is that we could easily make it cheaper overall, just by paying more for routine health maintenance and checkups.
For example, my girlfriend had an impacted wisdom tooth, but her (free, provided by our college to poor people) coverage wouldn't cover the extraction until it got infected enough to warrant an emergency extraction. Luckily we could afford to pay out of pocket for it, but a lot of people they cover couldn't. So instead of covering a $300 15 minute scheduled surgery now, this insurer *chose* that they would rather cover a multi-thousand dollar emergency surgery at some indeterminate future date. A lot of our health care is structured to make these retarded sorts of choices, and it's fucking stupid.
She also has a cyst on her scalp that they won't cover - again - until it gets infected and the cost of dealing with it doubles (or more). WTF is wrong with us?
I'm pretty sure the GP means $7,200 per year for ONE PERSON, in pretty good health. A full family could easily be twice that, or several times their income if anyone happens to have a chronic condition...like maybe asthma.
Try $20,000-30,000 to insure a whole family on the open market. Still sound like it's a problem of priorities?
Pull your head out of your ass.
I understand where you're coming from, and when it comes to a lot of software I agree. I think office software is reaching a tipping point, though, where it is no longer *that* much better to go with Microsoft.
To extend the obligatory car analogy: Photoshop is a lot like the difference between a free Yugo and a $1000 Mercedes, but Office is more like the difference between a free Yugo and a $300 Yugo with a spoiler and a CD player. Microsoft Office is a piece of crap, and I honestly spend a lot of time fighting its bugs and "helpful" features.
Actually, a decent honest mechanic often *will* run such a quick diagnostic for free. Just last week our mechanic pressure washed my girlfriend's engine as part of troubleshooting some smoke coming off it. They didn't charge a dime for that, and in fact said "it was just some oil on the exhaust manifold, it's fine" because they know that by telling us the truth and not nickel and diming us they'll earn our trust and respect and we'll come back when we really need them. Maybe you need to find yourself a mechanic who treats you like a human being.
I failed to mention that I had already tried that supply on a different machine, but didn't have another one modern enough to run that particular new motherboard. I was 99% positive that it was busted, but just wanted to make *extra* sure before I RMA'd it. You kind of come off as an ass for your assumption that anybody who doesn't have piles of unused hardware laying around is definitely just some weak-sauce l33t haxx0r. I'll have you know I actually know rather a lot about hardware, and that particular box is still my only desktop 5 years later.
You say "bleeding edge" like self-assembled machines are inherently worse, but not only is it still my only desktop 5 years later, but since I got a new video card recently it still rivals the high end OEM machines that today still cost twice what it did 5 years ago. It has no windows, and no blinking lights - just a black rolled steel case with a power light and an HDD light. It's a well built, flawlessly functioning machine that I wouldn't trade for anything a big manufacturer makes, even today.
Helping customers who come in trying to decide if they need something is called "customer service," even if helping them involves analyzing (maybe with a tool?) their current situation. Businesses that practice this "customer service" tend to stay in business. Have you noticed the lack of big box stores in the world these days? There might be a correlation between that and their propensity for dishonest sales tactics.
That salesman probably assumed exactly what you did: "here's some dumb gamer geek in over his head, I bet I can dick him over." All that elitist BS got him was the loss of a sale (even a small one) that day and of a customer for life.
I did RMA the part, but didn't want to wait a week for the new one to arrive (this was before the days of Amazon Prime, back when fast shipping actually cost money). So I just opted for a refund and decided to spend a couple bucks more locally for the convenience of a working PSU *right now.*
I could regale you with tales of incompetent upsells I've gotten from other big box stores that have cemented my opinion, but I won't because I'm sure it's happened to you too.
Nope, I intended to buy a power supply right then and there. Instead I took my business down the street because they were lying dicks about it.
I've seen people get to Facebook by typing in "google" in the address bar, clicking the first result (in the default Bing search), typing in "facebook," and clicking the first result. Seriously.
Such a reason: it costs zero dollars to buy a license.
I hate big box repair services so much.
I once had what seemed to be a dud power supply, and I went to the Circuit City near my house because I knew they would have something that would work to replace it. I also figured they would have one of those gadgets for testing power supplies. So I took the power supply out and headed over.
Their support desk said they really preferred to troubleshoot the whole computer, then suggested I go home, put the power supply back in the case, then bring the whole thing back in and pay them $100 just to look at it. I said "no, it's almost certainly just the power supply, just plug it into that thing" and pointed at the tester sitting on the table next to them. After some convincing the guy finally did, and that was when it got *super* scam-tastic.
Luckily I could look over the counter and see that not all the green lights were on when he said "nope, looks like it works fine." I asked him why the +12V rail light hadn't come on, and he tried to tell me that it should work fine, even without +12V, and that that's normal. Of course that gave him an opening to try - again - to tell me to go home, put the (obviously defective) power supply back in the case and bring the whole thing in so they could get $100 just to put it on a shelf for a few days before calling me and saying "you don't have an operating system." To which I would say "no shit, I just built it and it's never even been powered on. Is the power supply broken? Of course it is, you dumb fucks."
If they had the balls to try and pull that shit on somebody like me, who comes in sporting a geek beard, holding a very fancy power supply and knowing at a glance which of their tools I need to borrow for 15 seconds...I shudder at the thought of what they must have pulled on people like - say - my mother.
I doubt any large chain repair service is any better. I hope the Geek Squad chokes and dies.
And yet here you are...
The US considers looking in our general direction an unfriendly act.
So by your reasoning if I drive 80 down a residential street it's OK if I kill a toddler - as long as I took "at least a certain amount of care" to avoid killing anybody? After all, I made sure not to be texting while I was speeding!
Pedantic? Nerdy? Slashdot? Say it ain't so!
Don't they mean "Hadoop MapReduce?"