>>You're outdated republican view of the state is unworkable, especially in a modern society with the infrastructure required to compete for the wealth necessary to defend any of our rights.
Actually, having a Hierarchical government structure is superior to a flat federal government in many areas. If you think that the same educational policies would work just as well as in Hawaii and Alaska as in South Carolina (and I've worked with a lot of districts in South Carolina), you're grossly mistaken.
On a more fundamental level, power tends to aggregate and become corrupt in a single source of government. Hence we have three branches of government, which are antagonistic to each other. And hence we have state and local governments.
The current system actually works as well as any government of such a large country could work.
>>South Carolina agreed and ratified the Constitution, there was no justification for secession or the violence that followed, they committed immoral rebellion.
Actually, they could secede. There was nothing in the Constitution that said they couldn't, so they could, by Amendment X. So it was legal, though Lincoln wouldn't admit it. "Immoral Rebellion" is meaningless claptrap, as is the rest of your post.
>>The right has fought a successful campaign over the last 30 years or so to move the center to the right.
Really? Do we still have people openly talking about bombing countries to the stone age? Do we have left wing and right wing candidates both supporting building more nukes (Kennedy was more 'right wing' on this issue than Nixon). He led the US into Vietnam.
If he was president today, you'd label him 'bug-fuck insane', as you so eloquently put it.
The opposite is actually true. Government has shifted pretty far to the left. The Republicans of today are all for big governments and increased spending. Not that Democrats are any better, they just want bigger government and more spending in different areas. A Republican governator sued the federal government for not doing enough about global warming, for crying out loud.
I've looked into a lot of these claims, and most of them are nonsense.
I personally debunked the UC Berkeley study (cough) which "proved" the Flordia results were rigged. Though they hid it in a bunch of technical nonsense, essentially what they said was that they had a model to predict the outcome of results in Florida (based on past elections in 1996 and 2000) and since the 2004 numbers were different from what they expected, the results were rigged. QED.
Needless to say, this is complete hokum, and they should have been laughed out of the room instead of published.
Seems to me there's more evidence for a vast left wing conspiracy.:p
>>On a somewhat unrelated topic, why don't you want to upgrade to Vista?
Vista runs games 30% slower, enough said.
>>So far, the *vast* majority of people who I know that have taken the plunge love it almost without exception. I certainly hate going back to XP every day at work.
I installed it on my mother's machine as a guinea pig, ran some benchmarks before and after the upgrade, looked at the driver support for Vista (especially 64-bit Vista) and decided there was no way in hell I was going to upgrade my own machine until the issues (esp. the performance issues) were resolved.
(Well, actually I did buy Vista, for my Mom's machine, as a guinea pig...)
Why I didn't buy Vista for my own machine, is simple. Games run 30% slower on it.
As someone who buys RAM with the fastest timings just to squeeze an extra three or four percent out of a game, "upgrading" to Vista is unthinkable. And looking at the situation with the NVIDIA drivers, just makes it even worse. They are quite horrid, and 64-bit compatibility is entirely lacking, as in, they don't work at all.
So, I'm going to do what everyone else is doing, which is to sit on my hands, and wait for some compelling reason to come out, wait for Vista SP2's release, and then finally upgrade.
The fact that it's being adopted slowly is absolutely no surprise to me. All of my techie friends have had the same reaction as me... even my Microsoft-employee friend only installed it on one of his three computers at home.
Agreed. Every time I've watched their show, they make some gross procedural or statistical error. Not that the show isn't enjoyable, but it does piss me off when they decisively say their conclusion without using methods with any sort of validity.
I've wanted to write an article like that for a while now.
There are massive differences between the resolution conversion chips. Two more or less identical models, a 42" Sony and a Sharp, look exactly the same in 1080p format. But in 720, the Sharp looks *terrible*, whereas the Sony still looks pretty good. The upconverters used in a lot of set top boxes are the el cheapo ones, so what you may be seeing are simply artifacts from the conversion.
That said, I have very sensitive eyes too, and have to return more than half of the monitors I buy due to defects of one kind or another that other people have a hard time seeing. I can easily see the difference between the different HD formats, especially on small details like text in the background. I can only stand a 1080p set, and even those bug me since they're not as good as LCD monitors.
The price difference between 720p and 1080p sets are a lot bigger than you'd think. With a quick search: Sony Grand Wega 42" 1080p: $2100 Sony Grand Wega 42" 1080i: $1800 Sony Grand Wega 42" 720p: $1400
On most models I've been looking at (have been going TV shopping recently), the step up from a 1080i model to 1080p is on the order of a $2000 to $3000 (+50%!) price jump within the same model family.
You can find cheap 1080p kits, but a lot of them, like the Sharp Aquos, have hidden issues, like it's inability to display SD TV signals very well (SD signals look like total crap on an Aquos, in fact).
As an experiment, I've turned on my phone during plane flights (the EM interference from cell phones is more or less a fairy tale) a couple times, and found that it's easily possible to make calls at a few thousand feet (such as during takeoff or landing), and occasional reception higher up. Suitable for sending text messages, at least.
When I moved away from San Francisco two weeks ago, I noticed the amount of asshatery dropping correspondingly.
Not all areas of the world have people acting like jackasses in equal numbers. Hell, in the 10 miles or so it took me to get my U-Haul and drive back to my house, I counted seven (seven!) individual acts of asshatery on the road. Such as: At a four way stop, one guy goes. Then the guy in the next lane goes. But the next man in line at the same line as the first decides HE'S WAITED LONG ENOUGH and guns it, speeding in front of the second guy going, and blaring his horn the whole way because that second damn guy was in his way. Seven things, all that bad, within probably half an hour of driving.
As a San Diego native, I'm used to bad traffic, but the levels of jackasses on the road is much much lower than in the Bay Area.
And in Fresno (population over a million, now, so you can't call it small town America), it's very common to be the exact opposite of San Francisco. Drivers will wave each other through a 4-way stop, people will brake to make room for you when you want to change lanes. People will leave gaps at a red light so people pulling out of the gas station can get out, etc.
All the talk in this thread about 1% of people being sociopaths, etc., doesn't explain the dramatic different rates of asshatery between different regions.
>>Are you kidding? California is practically ideal for high-speed rail.
Uh, heh. We still don't have a normal rail system that works. It takes from 5AM to 8PM to travel from SD to SF up the coast, and there isn't even a rail line over the Grapevine. The "fast" rail line that runs up the central valley requires Amtrak passengers to take a train from SD to LA, get off, get on a BUS, take the bus to Bakersfield, and then get back on a train. A north/south high speed line would have to overcome two mountain ranges and negotiate urban areas that are very expensive to build through.
As someone who drives back and forth between the Bay Area and SD once or twice a month, I would love to have the ability to travel from SD to SF in about 3 or 4 hours (http://www.cahighspeedrail.ca.gov/route/default.a sp), but given the massive cost, I have doubts it'll ever get implemented.
The point is, windmill farms go up in wilderness areas, and kill tons of birds, many of which are endangered species. Thus, it actually becomes illegal to build them.
I'm not saying wind power is bad, for this reason, but that it is a dirty secret of the wind power industry that a lot of environmental groups are opposed to them, for this reason. I dislike wind power because it is not cost-efficient. They are expensive to build and maintain, you have to run long power lines to them in inaccessible regions, which result in transmission losses and high maintenance costs, with the net result that power from wind costs triple what oil or nuclear costs.
Al Gore is relevant insofar as he is the perfect example of our dependence on energy. As much as he crusades about CO2 emissions, he takes a private jet instead of flying coach, and spends energy and CO2 in much vaster amounts than the average American that he hates so much.
In other words, though it seems rather obvious, and people don't seem to grasp it: people aren't going to not spend energy. If I am hungry, I will drive to the grocery store or restaurant, and buy food.
The Hexaflouride problem, and other nuclear waste issues have been solved, at the engineering level, as has the problem of designing safe reactors. We simply lack the political will to switch to nuclear power. A third of all our C02 emissions comes from power plants. Switching to nuclear power could save nearly all of that, especially if nuclear power is used to power the building of the new plants. Nuclear power is also one of the most efficient, ratio-wise, in energy output over its lifetime versus energy consumed to build it. During the operating of a nuclear power plant, it produces negligible amounts of atmospheric pollutants.
If countries are actually serious about reducing their CO2 emissions, it is brain dead for them to continue operating coal and oil plants when nuclear is such a better alternative.
Instead of being petty, come up with stats. I gave you an article showing 4000 birds a year chopped up in the Bay Area. Surely you could do the same for skyscrapers.
Nuclear power is cheaper and cleaner than other sources (or at least comparatively clean and cheap), but it removes our reliance on foreign oil, and will make a bigger difference for CO2 emissions than any number of Al Gores replacing their lightbulbs with CFDs (while zipping around the world in their private jets) will do.
Actually, the cost per megawatt hour for nuclear power INCLUDES the disposal and decomissioning fees, unlike any other source of energy (which get to expense it separately).
The GP was correct, on a per-site basis, nuclear is much safer than coal, and modern reactor designs don't have the same criticality risks that old reactors had.
Slashdot Mirror
>>You're outdated republican view of the state is unworkable, especially in a modern society with the infrastructure required to compete for the wealth necessary to defend any of our rights.
Actually, having a Hierarchical government structure is superior to a flat federal government in many areas. If you think that the same educational policies would work just as well as in Hawaii and Alaska as in South Carolina (and I've worked with a lot of districts in South Carolina), you're grossly mistaken.
On a more fundamental level, power tends to aggregate and become corrupt in a single source of government. Hence we have three branches of government, which are antagonistic to each other. And hence we have state and local governments.
The current system actually works as well as any government of such a large country could work.
>>South Carolina agreed and ratified the Constitution, there was no justification for secession or the violence that followed, they committed immoral rebellion.
Actually, they could secede. There was nothing in the Constitution that said they couldn't, so they could, by Amendment X. So it was legal, though Lincoln wouldn't admit it. "Immoral Rebellion" is meaningless claptrap, as is the rest of your post.
>>The right has fought a successful campaign over the last 30 years or so to move the center to the right.
Really? Do we still have people openly talking about bombing countries to the stone age? Do we have left wing and right wing candidates both supporting building more nukes (Kennedy was more 'right wing' on this issue than Nixon). He led the US into Vietnam.
If he was president today, you'd label him 'bug-fuck insane', as you so eloquently put it.
The opposite is actually true. Government has shifted pretty far to the left. The Republicans of today are all for big governments and increased spending. Not that Democrats are any better, they just want bigger government and more spending in different areas. A Republican governator sued the federal government for not doing enough about global warming, for crying out loud.
Oh, Kucinich, you whacky dog. What will you think up next?
Seriously. Who let him off his meds?
I've looked into a lot of these claims, and most of them are nonsense.
:p
I personally debunked the UC Berkeley study (cough) which "proved" the Flordia results were rigged. Though they hid it in a bunch of technical nonsense, essentially what they said was that they had a model to predict the outcome of results in Florida (based on past elections in 1996 and 2000) and since the 2004 numbers were different from what they expected, the results were rigged. QED.
Needless to say, this is complete hokum, and they should have been laughed out of the room instead of published.
Seems to me there's more evidence for a vast left wing conspiracy.
>>On a somewhat unrelated topic, why don't you want to upgrade to Vista?
Vista runs games 30% slower, enough said.
>>So far, the *vast* majority of people who I know that have taken the plunge love it almost without exception. I certainly hate going back to XP every day at work.
I installed it on my mother's machine as a guinea pig, ran some benchmarks before and after the upgrade, looked at the driver support for Vista (especially 64-bit Vista) and decided there was no way in hell I was going to upgrade my own machine until the issues (esp. the performance issues) were resolved.
(Well, actually I did buy Vista, for my Mom's machine, as a guinea pig...)
Why I didn't buy Vista for my own machine, is simple. Games run 30% slower on it.
As someone who buys RAM with the fastest timings just to squeeze an extra three or four percent out of a game, "upgrading" to Vista is unthinkable. And looking at the situation with the NVIDIA drivers, just makes it even worse. They are quite horrid, and 64-bit compatibility is entirely lacking, as in, they don't work at all.
So, I'm going to do what everyone else is doing, which is to sit on my hands, and wait for some compelling reason to come out, wait for Vista SP2's release, and then finally upgrade.
The fact that it's being adopted slowly is absolutely no surprise to me. All of my techie friends have had the same reaction as me... even my Microsoft-employee friend only installed it on one of his three computers at home.
Agreed. Every time I've watched their show, they make some gross procedural or statistical error. Not that the show isn't enjoyable, but it does piss me off when they decisively say their conclusion without using methods with any sort of validity.
I've wanted to write an article like that for a while now.
There are massive differences between the resolution conversion chips. Two more or less identical models, a 42" Sony and a Sharp, look exactly the same in 1080p format. But in 720, the Sharp looks *terrible*, whereas the Sony still looks pretty good. The upconverters used in a lot of set top boxes are the el cheapo ones, so what you may be seeing are simply artifacts from the conversion.
That said, I have very sensitive eyes too, and have to return more than half of the monitors I buy due to defects of one kind or another that other people have a hard time seeing. I can easily see the difference between the different HD formats, especially on small details like text in the background. I can only stand a 1080p set, and even those bug me since they're not as good as LCD monitors.
The price difference between 720p and 1080p sets are a lot bigger than you'd think. With a quick search:
Sony Grand Wega 42" 1080p: $2100
Sony Grand Wega 42" 1080i: $1800
Sony Grand Wega 42" 720p: $1400
On most models I've been looking at (have been going TV shopping recently), the step up from a 1080i model to 1080p is on the order of a $2000 to $3000 (+50%!) price jump within the same model family.
You can find cheap 1080p kits, but a lot of them, like the Sharp Aquos, have hidden issues, like it's inability to display SD TV signals very well (SD signals look like total crap on an Aquos, in fact).
FTEQuake (http://www.fteqw.com/) supports Quake 1, 2 and 3 maps, and can connect to servers of all the different flavors of quake.
It's fun playing Quake 1 with shaders and advanced lighting. =)
Of course, I have to recommend CustomTF. =) (www.customtf.com)
As an experiment, I've turned on my phone during plane flights (the EM interference from cell phones is more or less a fairy tale) a couple times, and found that it's easily possible to make calls at a few thousand feet (such as during takeoff or landing), and occasional reception higher up. Suitable for sending text messages, at least.
Sky Phones. This will only keep the amount of calls on planes down because Sky Phones charge such ridiculous rates to talk to people.
If they cared about courtesy at all, they'd have banned Sky Phones too.
When I moved away from San Francisco two weeks ago, I noticed the amount of asshatery dropping correspondingly.
Not all areas of the world have people acting like jackasses in equal numbers. Hell, in the 10 miles or so it took me to get my U-Haul and drive back to my house, I counted seven (seven!) individual acts of asshatery on the road. Such as: At a four way stop, one guy goes. Then the guy in the next lane goes. But the next man in line at the same line as the first decides HE'S WAITED LONG ENOUGH and guns it, speeding in front of the second guy going, and blaring his horn the whole way because that second damn guy was in his way. Seven things, all that bad, within probably half an hour of driving.
As a San Diego native, I'm used to bad traffic, but the levels of jackasses on the road is much much lower than in the Bay Area.
And in Fresno (population over a million, now, so you can't call it small town America), it's very common to be the exact opposite of San Francisco. Drivers will wave each other through a 4-way stop, people will brake to make room for you when you want to change lanes. People will leave gaps at a red light so people pulling out of the gas station can get out, etc.
All the talk in this thread about 1% of people being sociopaths, etc., doesn't explain the dramatic different rates of asshatery between different regions.
>>Are you kidding? California is practically ideal for high-speed rail.
a sp), but given the massive cost, I have doubts it'll ever get implemented.
Uh, heh. We still don't have a normal rail system that works. It takes from 5AM to 8PM to travel from SD to SF up the coast, and there isn't even a rail line over the Grapevine. The "fast" rail line that runs up the central valley requires Amtrak passengers to take a train from SD to LA, get off, get on a BUS, take the bus to Bakersfield, and then get back on a train. A north/south high speed line would have to overcome two mountain ranges and negotiate urban areas that are very expensive to build through.
As someone who drives back and forth between the Bay Area and SD once or twice a month, I would love to have the ability to travel from SD to SF in about 3 or 4 hours (http://www.cahighspeedrail.ca.gov/route/default.
I'd prefer it was permanent as well. It's depressing getting out of work when it's pitch black.
If the chips are made by Intel though, the world ending in heat death would be quite likely.
The only significant issue is having the political will to switch over to nuclear.
It irks me to no end that people will get up in arms over CO2 emissions and then be opposed to nuclear power.
So you don't have the numbers. It's okay.
The point is, windmill farms go up in wilderness areas, and kill tons of birds, many of which are endangered species. Thus, it actually becomes illegal to build them.
I'm not saying wind power is bad, for this reason, but that it is a dirty secret of the wind power industry that a lot of environmental groups are opposed to them, for this reason. I dislike wind power because it is not cost-efficient. They are expensive to build and maintain, you have to run long power lines to them in inaccessible regions, which result in transmission losses and high maintenance costs, with the net result that power from wind costs triple what oil or nuclear costs.
Al Gore is relevant insofar as he is the perfect example of our dependence on energy. As much as he crusades about CO2 emissions, he takes a private jet instead of flying coach, and spends energy and CO2 in much vaster amounts than the average American that he hates so much.
In other words, though it seems rather obvious, and people don't seem to grasp it: people aren't going to not spend energy. If I am hungry, I will drive to the grocery store or restaurant, and buy food.
The Hexaflouride problem, and other nuclear waste issues have been solved, at the engineering level, as has the problem of designing safe reactors. We simply lack the political will to switch to nuclear power. A third of all our C02 emissions comes from power plants. Switching to nuclear power could save nearly all of that, especially if nuclear power is used to power the building of the new plants. Nuclear power is also one of the most efficient, ratio-wise, in energy output over its lifetime versus energy consumed to build it. During the operating of a nuclear power plant, it produces negligible amounts of atmospheric pollutants.
If countries are actually serious about reducing their CO2 emissions, it is brain dead for them to continue operating coal and oil plants when nuclear is such a better alternative.
Instead of being petty, come up with stats. I gave you an article showing 4000 birds a year chopped up in the Bay Area. Surely you could do the same for skyscrapers.
Nuclear power is cheaper and cleaner than other sources (or at least comparatively clean and cheap), but it removes our reliance on foreign oil, and will make a bigger difference for CO2 emissions than any number of Al Gores replacing their lightbulbs with CFDs (while zipping around the world in their private jets) will do.
Check the second link. Read other sources if you like. The conclusion is nuclear is at least as cheap as coal, and possibly much cheaper.
Actually, the cost per megawatt hour for nuclear power INCLUDES the disposal and decomissioning fees, unlike any other source of energy (which get to expense it separately).
In San Francisco? Doubtful. It's 4000 birds a year just in the Bay Area, killed by the wind farms here.
In terms of safety, reliability, prudence and, now, price the renewable resources win.
v ersy#Economics
a sters_by_death_toll#Flood_disastersa sters_by_death_toll#Coal_mine_disastersa sters_by_death_toll#Nuclear_accidents
No, Nuclear is much, much cheaper than any "alternative" energy sources.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_contro
Safety? Reliability?
Compare
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_and_dis
and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_and_dis
with
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_and_dis
The GP was correct, on a per-site basis, nuclear is much safer than coal, and modern reactor designs don't have the same criticality risks that old reactors had.
You should probably also realize that modern nuclear reactor designs do not have the risk for meltdown that Chernobyl and 3 Mile Island had.
Statements like this are pure FUD.