Boston cream donuts actually contain mind control drugs, and the coffee is primarily nicotine and chocolate to get people addicted and keep them coming back for the donuts. I know, I use to work there baking and filling muffins with hallucinogenics.
Fair enough, I was just trying to point out they'd stand a better chance of getting my vote if they focused on what they were actually doing/did rather than focusing on what their opposite is doing wrong. Especially when what they're focusing on seems to be extremely superficial non-political issues. Every time I hear a conservative poke fun at Trudeau's hair or how good he's only going to win because of his charming smile attracting the female vote it just makes me want to punch them in the mouth and vote Liberal for no other reason than to be spiteful to the ignorant racists sexist masses the conservative party seems to be turning into. Up until I actually researched the first attack ad the cons put out on Trudeau, days before he was even elected as the party leader, and found out it was all BS and taken completely out of context I would have voted against Trudeau in the next election. So really the cons screwed themselves over with that one.
It's actually kind of weird because that's what I expected, but most of the people I met in NC were actually really nice and didn't come off as the super major bible thumpers I was expecting them to be. It's a shame their very visible representatives or overly vocal religious extremist make them out to look so foolish.
Probably the same thing the student was thinking. They were trying to make themselves look more intelligent by pointing out flaws that no one else wasted a glance on. All they ended up doing was wasting time in a meeting no one wants to be in and made themselves look like douches that no one wants to work with.
And yes that actually happened. I was given a "pass" on geography because the teacher didn't want me back in his class, and frankly I didn't want to be there. I don't know what my Mom was screaming at the principal, but I'm guessing because I was only at that school for six months anyway the principal didn't think it would be worth the PR nightmare to fail me.
I don't think anything I said eluded to what I believe the Liberals, Conservatives or NDP would do if they were the ones in power. All I said, other than providing a bunch of factual numbers, was I don't like Harper's Bush Jr., ignorance is bliss, leadership style. Which is basically to lock the media out, fire or gag anyone that can provide evidence his policies aren't based on facts and and flood every channel with attack and economic action plan ads.
The conservatives have done a few good things under Harper, but they choose to focus on things Trudeau said over a decade ago for a documentary taken out of context or his non-existent pot smoking habit (especially since the cons are the ones that legalized pot for medical use) or that he's having some female degrading women and politics event (because you know women don't need to know or care about politics) rather than saying, "Yeah, you like tax cuts? Guess what, we did that for you Canada! You like not being dragged into a world wide recession? We did that for you to! You like not having your housing market crash? Yep, that's us as well!".
Then it seems we as a society have a problem on our hands
I don't really think so. There are spelling and grammar nazis, but even here on/. most people just let small things go. It's really only the extremely superficial anally detail orientated people that have a problem, and honestly no one can stand working with them so they generally just don't get hired. They become an embarrassment to management when they start sending out mass e-mails berating coworkers in other divisions with other managers.
Yes communication is important and we should do our best to be correct, but if you're going to sit around wasting time arguing with or belittling someone for a misspelling, you've got bigger issues and need to get out of your mom's basement more often. A real professional will just skim over it and realize it was probably a mistake not worth mentioning.
I still remember when I first moved from Nova Scotia to North Carolina and having an argument with the geography teacher over where Nova Scotia was located. After about five minutes of arguing we went to the map and I was kicked out of class for the rest of the year for "show boating" as he put it. Then even when I was living in Bar Harbor, Main I still met people that didn't know where *Canada* was. It's like come on, Main is right on the border with New Brunswick and there's a ferry that runs from Bar Harbor to Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, How could you not know where Canada was?
The rest of the world loves to joke about how bad Americans are with geography, but I've lived it first hand. To be fair though, we did have to spend a lot of time memorizing the 50 states and their capitols and the 100 counties in NC. So I can see where geography for the rest of the world might get neglected. When I was in middle school in Nova Scotia we covered the ten provinces and two territories (it's three territories now) of Canada, which is a piece of cake as long as you don't have to spell Saskatchewan.
Well, to be fair the Cons won the majority with just 39% of the vote so 61% of Canadians didn't vote for them. The problem is most of the seats are in Ontario (NDP/Con 95), BC (Con/NDP 28), Alberta (Con 21), Saskatchewan(Con 14) make up 158 of 282 seats, which is 56% of the seats for four out of 13 provinces and territories. Alberta, the Texas of Canada, and Saskatchewan are almost competently conservative. Ontario and BC are at least half Con. So conservatively speaking (pun intended) there's about 96 seats, or 37% of Canada.
Nova Scotia (Con/Lib 11), Newfoundland (Lib/Con 10), PEI (Lib/Con 4) and New Brunswick (Con 7) only make up 32 seats altogether, less than 12%. The territories have 3 seats, just over 1%. Who cares how they voted, sorry guys. Quebec is the only province that has any amount of sway with 75 seats, but they voted almost completely NDP, which showed as the NDP is the official opposition with 103 seats. Then there's poor lonely Manitoba (NDP/Con 14) out there all on his own.
The only way to get the conservatives out would be to get Ontario, Quebec and BC to vote NDP or Liberal. Saskatchewan and Alberta are always going to be conservative. The Maritimes can be swayed, but will always default to liberal, not that it matters with only 32 seats combine. We might as well join up with the territories and their 3 seats in the "no one cares about you" category. Ontario and Quebec are really the only two that matter for an election, they do have a large percentage of the population, but they were each guaranteed a minimum number of seats under confederation so even if they only had 100 people living in each province they'd still have the majority sway over Canada.
Then there's the "The Fair Representation Act" (passed with the Con's majority in 2011 to take effect in the 2015 election) which grants even more seats to Ontario, Quebec, Alberta and BC so it's likely the Cons will win another majority because they basically set it up so the provinces that are most likely to vote them in, with the exception of Quebec, also have the most seats. For Quebec the Con's continue to give special rewards in the hope that catering to them will pick up a few conservative ridings. They basically set the board so they can't lose.
Canada is much more left-wing (~60%) than right-wing (~40%), but we have two left wing parties that split the left vote allowing the right-wing to monopolize. Which consequentially was because of the 2003 merger of the two right-wing parties and the event that gave Harper his initial minority government and lead to the cons being in charge for the last 10 years. If it was still two right, two left parties the Con's wouldn't have a chance, and IF we ever go to a two party system because the Liberals and NDP merge they'll cripple the conservatives.
Not that I have anything against the Cons. I personally don't like Harper or agree with his Bush Jr., ignorance is bliss, leadership style, but I like a lot of the core conservative values. Unfortunately, execution is everything and the Cons have just sucked at it since Harper took the wheel.
This is why Canada is going to take over the world.
By the time anyone is willing to take the reports of some fisherman in slicks and a dingy sinking battle ships seriously we'll own three quarters of the world. The only country that *could* do anything about it is the US and we'll just stop printing Canada on world maps and globes, the Americans will never find us. The plan is working perfectly, eh.
the irony of obvious solecisms would be a bit too much
Just so you know I did get that part, which is the only reason I replied to your post.
Unfortunately it's exponentially difficult to type on a phone while using/. mobile on a train where you can't see a whole post to review it, there's no preview button, the phone is constantly trying to "suggest" proper spellings, when you click back to correct a word without hitting space the last sentence you typed is deleted (I don't know if that's my phone or/. mobile, but it's annoying) and the environment is rattling and shaking. I try to give everyone the benefit of the doubt knowing spell check doesn't always work, auto correct will sometimes replace words it doesn't like, sometimes people are for whatever reason in a hurry and don't have the time to go back and review or sometimes people spell words differently. I've had/. posters tear into me because of how I spell worlds like metre and colour, in Canada we use the French and proper English spellings. Sometimes I just make a mistake.
As you pointed out "in the grand scheme of things", I'm not going to spend hours going over a post and having people check and recheck it before I submit it to/., especially when submitting from my phone. If it's a huge issue for someone, it's probably someone I don't care to talk to anyway. Seriously who want's to have a conversation or debate with someone that doesn't care about the content of a message and only wants to pick apart the syntax. Don't computers do enough of that for/to us! If I'm reading a thread and all someone can do is point out two incorrect letters or a missing apostasy, they clearly have nothing to add. That isn't a jab at your ironic retort to my misspelling of "subjectively" or misuse of "prof's"
Also, as I elaborated in an above response, I only let the co-op students go (two separate students, two separate occasions) because they went into a meeting and picked apart the client supplied design document. If you're a co-op student and you go into a board meeting, you keep your mouth shut unless someone specifically talks to you. Not tell a client that has a $60K contract with your employer they're a moron for misspelling a few words. The co-op students didn't have the common sense to do that and felt showing off to boost their own egos by belittling others was more important than seeing how business is conducted. As a result of that poor performance, I don't want them back working with or for me.
Exactly. The reason I let those co-op students, on two separate co-ops on two separate occasions, go was because they walked into a board meeting with the clients and instead of sitting down and shutting up, as a student should, they proceeded to pick apart the design documents right in front of the people that provided them. You don't sit down in front of someone who has a $40K - $60K contract with you and tell them they're morons for missing a comma or a minor typo. You especially don't let a co-op student do that. Hopefully those students leaned a valuable lesson about proper place, proper time, but I wouldn't have them back working for me just in case that lesson didn't sink in. They can cost someone else a huge contract, but not me.
It must really kill people who care about that sort of thing that once they're out in the real world no one cares what they think. I've let co-op students go and made sure they weren't hired by my company because they complained about someone's style and fixated minor spelling / grammar errors in a design doc, not written by me.
If you want to program a computer you have to be better than one. If you're going to segfault on a comma there are real computers that require attention. Go back to school where it's appreciated.
P.S replying on a phone and/. mobile is crap. I always give the benefit of the doubt, not knowing the platform someone might have to use.
Typing classes were some of my favorites. Sure there was a lot of repetition, but we did get to play some game. And there was no boring memorization/regurgitation/essay BS like history, English, or a ton of other subjectivity marked courses where the profs favorites got the best marks.
I wouldn't dispute that. I just personally haven't read anything that can prove fracking is harmful, cover up or not, so I'm indifferent to it.
Well I guess indifferent might not be the right term. My preference would be to err on the side of caution and not use fracking until it's proven not to be harmful. I would also prefer we develop and use other energy sources besides oil, so that's kind of another tick against it. I do understand that coal and oil are are primary energy sources at the moment so unfortunately until the other technologies are up to snuff we really have no choice.
Actually, No. I'm indifferent to fracking, because I haven't read any conclusive evidence it's a harmful process, but they don't just use water. Fracking chemicals are trade secrets. In most places, I don't know where they do, fracking companies don't disclose what's in them.
We had a great public run utility, NS Power, back in the 80's. Then the 90's conservative government sold the utility to Emera. Politicians don't like having to explain why power rates need to go up, even if it's just by a half a percent. So they sold off the utility and spun it that the private sector would be able to provide better rates and service.
Unfortunately the opposite happened. We have monthly power outages because of "salt vapor" accumulating on power lines. In the last ten years rates have shot up uncontrollably, because people are using less power. Now NS Power is making NS Tax payers pay for an undersea power link cable to Newfoundland so they can pipe power through Nova Scotia to sell to the states.
Where things went wrong was when the conservatives sold NS Power to Emera they *guaranteed* Emera a monopoly with a fixed ROI. In short they screwed us. Having a privately owned power corp would have been fine if it was open to competition and they actually had to compete for business or would be allowed to fail thus forcing them to actually manage their company rather than just passing CEO bonuses off to rate payers.
And that's true, but the cost is going to be significantly higher to maintain hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of solar panels, along with the tech in the road to transmit to the car, than it would be to download a few hundred megs of data. Which I don't do by the way because in Canada, at least in Nova Scotia, it's too expensive to have that kind of data plan considering I've never used more than half a Gig. I definitely wouldn't trust NS Power to keep the price reasonable.
I'd need to see actual figures and estimated costs before I could really decide if it's something I'd take advantage of, but like I said, I think it's a great idea.
I like that idea, but the problem becomes who's going to pay for the solar panels and their upkeep? Maybe charge people based on how far along the route they drive, but it'll most likely be a tax and everyone, with or without a car, will pay. It might fly up here in Canada, or in Europe, or in Japan, but no way Americans will do it.
I don't disagree with the clogged motorways issue, which isn't a problem for me. Mainly because I don't live in a HUGE city. Although I think self driving cars and technology would help solve some of that issue.
Halifax/Dartmouth is more of a small to medium size city so we don't have the commuter issues larger cities have, but our transit system sucks. If you want people to use transit then it has to work, it has to be more convenient or cheaper than owning a car. In Halifax it just isn't.
Thanks. I do hate to sound militant about it, but I've had a lot of close calls driving and 99% of the time it's because of other people and it would have been entirely preventable if those people were to just do what they're suppose to be doing. So I just can't see how this technology could *possibly* be worse than the existing situation.
Who hasn't been driving down the highway and seen someone texting, or shaving, or putting on makeup, or screaming at their four year old in the back seat. We just have too much to do to provide 100% focus on driving so it only seems logical we should let a computer do it for us. Sure the system isn't going to be perfect at first, but there's no reason it can't be made better and better over time.
We put up people driving because it's just too convenient, regardless of the danger we're putting ourselves in, so if there's a way to make it safer we should be doing it. For starters it's way to easy for people to get drivers permits. I have a cousin that failed his drivers test four times and passed on the fifth try, he's crashed three cars in the last ten years and only stopped driving because he couldn't afford insurance anymore.
We could also have mandatory retesting for the drivers test every five years or every two years after 65. My grandfather faked his way through his eye test when he was 78 and was allowed to keep driving even though he had had major eye surgery and couldn't even see anymore. That was until he almost killed an eight year old. Had someone gotten in a car with him they would have known he couldn't see well enough to drive. Mental faculties are also a consideration, as people get older and aren't as quick to react, which actually having someone in the car with the driver would be able to easily assess.
There's no valid reason in my mind why this technology couldn't work and why we couldn't make it work in the situations it's less reliable. You can see people throwing everything they have at it, but almost always you can use the, "how is that any different than now?" argument and point out umteen billion situations where it would be more convenient (being able to go to a bar and have a car to take you home, blind/disabled people being able to have personal transport, not having to give up your car when you get old) and safer (no more issues with texting, distracted, drunk, fatigued, stupid drivers).
Slashdot Mirror
*Standing ovation*
I totally read that in Patrick Stewart's voice.
Boston cream donuts actually contain mind control drugs, and the coffee is primarily nicotine and chocolate to get people addicted and keep them coming back for the donuts. I know, I use to work there baking and filling muffins with hallucinogenics.
Fair enough, I was just trying to point out they'd stand a better chance of getting my vote if they focused on what they were actually doing/did rather than focusing on what their opposite is doing wrong. Especially when what they're focusing on seems to be extremely superficial non-political issues. Every time I hear a conservative poke fun at Trudeau's hair or how good he's only going to win because of his charming smile attracting the female vote it just makes me want to punch them in the mouth and vote Liberal for no other reason than to be spiteful to the ignorant racists sexist masses the conservative party seems to be turning into. Up until I actually researched the first attack ad the cons put out on Trudeau, days before he was even elected as the party leader, and found out it was all BS and taken completely out of context I would have voted against Trudeau in the next election. So really the cons screwed themselves over with that one.
It's actually kind of weird because that's what I expected, but most of the people I met in NC were actually really nice and didn't come off as the super major bible thumpers I was expecting them to be. It's a shame their very visible representatives or overly vocal religious extremist make them out to look so foolish.
Probably the same thing the student was thinking. They were trying to make themselves look more intelligent by pointing out flaws that no one else wasted a glance on. All they ended up doing was wasting time in a meeting no one wants to be in and made themselves look like douches that no one wants to work with.
BTW, it's spelled "Maine". ;-)
Thanks, I wasn't paying attention.
And yes that actually happened. I was given a "pass" on geography because the teacher didn't want me back in his class, and frankly I didn't want to be there. I don't know what my Mom was screaming at the principal, but I'm guessing because I was only at that school for six months anyway the principal didn't think it would be worth the PR nightmare to fail me.
I don't think anything I said eluded to what I believe the Liberals, Conservatives or NDP would do if they were the ones in power. All I said, other than providing a bunch of factual numbers, was I don't like Harper's Bush Jr., ignorance is bliss, leadership style. Which is basically to lock the media out, fire or gag anyone that can provide evidence his policies aren't based on facts and and flood every channel with attack and economic action plan ads.
The conservatives have done a few good things under Harper, but they choose to focus on things Trudeau said over a decade ago for a documentary taken out of context or his non-existent pot smoking habit (especially since the cons are the ones that legalized pot for medical use) or that he's having some female degrading women and politics event (because you know women don't need to know or care about politics) rather than saying, "Yeah, you like tax cuts? Guess what, we did that for you Canada! You like not being dragged into a world wide recession? We did that for you to! You like not having your housing market crash? Yep, that's us as well!".
Then it seems we as a society have a problem on our hands
I don't really think so. There are spelling and grammar nazis, but even here on /. most people just let small things go. It's really only the extremely superficial anally detail orientated people that have a problem, and honestly no one can stand working with them so they generally just don't get hired. They become an embarrassment to management when they start sending out mass e-mails berating coworkers in other divisions with other managers.
Yes communication is important and we should do our best to be correct, but if you're going to sit around wasting time arguing with or belittling someone for a misspelling, you've got bigger issues and need to get out of your mom's basement more often. A real professional will just skim over it and realize it was probably a mistake not worth mentioning.
I still remember when I first moved from Nova Scotia to North Carolina and having an argument with the geography teacher over where Nova Scotia was located. After about five minutes of arguing we went to the map and I was kicked out of class for the rest of the year for "show boating" as he put it. Then even when I was living in Bar Harbor, Main I still met people that didn't know where *Canada* was. It's like come on, Main is right on the border with New Brunswick and there's a ferry that runs from Bar Harbor to Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, How could you not know where Canada was?
The rest of the world loves to joke about how bad Americans are with geography, but I've lived it first hand. To be fair though, we did have to spend a lot of time memorizing the 50 states and their capitols and the 100 counties in NC. So I can see where geography for the rest of the world might get neglected. When I was in middle school in Nova Scotia we covered the ten provinces and two territories (it's three territories now) of Canada, which is a piece of cake as long as you don't have to spell Saskatchewan.
Well, to be fair the Cons won the majority with just 39% of the vote so 61% of Canadians didn't vote for them. The problem is most of the seats are in Ontario (NDP/Con 95), BC (Con/NDP 28), Alberta (Con 21), Saskatchewan(Con 14) make up 158 of 282 seats, which is 56% of the seats for four out of 13 provinces and territories. Alberta, the Texas of Canada, and Saskatchewan are almost competently conservative. Ontario and BC are at least half Con. So conservatively speaking (pun intended) there's about 96 seats, or 37% of Canada.
Nova Scotia (Con/Lib 11), Newfoundland (Lib/Con 10), PEI (Lib/Con 4) and New Brunswick (Con 7) only make up 32 seats altogether, less than 12%. The territories have 3 seats, just over 1%. Who cares how they voted, sorry guys. Quebec is the only province that has any amount of sway with 75 seats, but they voted almost completely NDP, which showed as the NDP is the official opposition with 103 seats. Then there's poor lonely Manitoba (NDP/Con 14) out there all on his own.
The only way to get the conservatives out would be to get Ontario, Quebec and BC to vote NDP or Liberal. Saskatchewan and Alberta are always going to be conservative. The Maritimes can be swayed, but will always default to liberal, not that it matters with only 32 seats combine. We might as well join up with the territories and their 3 seats in the "no one cares about you" category. Ontario and Quebec are really the only two that matter for an election, they do have a large percentage of the population, but they were each guaranteed a minimum number of seats under confederation so even if they only had 100 people living in each province they'd still have the majority sway over Canada.
Then there's the "The Fair Representation Act" (passed with the Con's majority in 2011 to take effect in the 2015 election) which grants even more seats to Ontario, Quebec, Alberta and BC so it's likely the Cons will win another majority because they basically set it up so the provinces that are most likely to vote them in, with the exception of Quebec, also have the most seats. For Quebec the Con's continue to give special rewards in the hope that catering to them will pick up a few conservative ridings. They basically set the board so they can't lose.
Canada is much more left-wing (~60%) than right-wing (~40%), but we have two left wing parties that split the left vote allowing the right-wing to monopolize. Which consequentially was because of the 2003 merger of the two right-wing parties and the event that gave Harper his initial minority government and lead to the cons being in charge for the last 10 years. If it was still two right, two left parties the Con's wouldn't have a chance, and IF we ever go to a two party system because the Liberals and NDP merge they'll cripple the conservatives.
Not that I have anything against the Cons. I personally don't like Harper or agree with his Bush Jr., ignorance is bliss, leadership style, but I like a lot of the core conservative values. Unfortunately, execution is everything and the Cons have just sucked at it since Harper took the wheel.
This is why Canada is going to take over the world.
By the time anyone is willing to take the reports of some fisherman in slicks and a dingy sinking battle ships seriously we'll own three quarters of the world. The only country that *could* do anything about it is the US and we'll just stop printing Canada on world maps and globes, the Americans will never find us. The plan is working perfectly, eh.
the irony of obvious solecisms would be a bit too much
Just so you know I did get that part, which is the only reason I replied to your post.
/. mobile on a train where you can't see a whole post to review it, there's no preview button, the phone is constantly trying to "suggest" proper spellings, when you click back to correct a word without hitting space the last sentence you typed is deleted (I don't know if that's my phone or /. mobile, but it's annoying) and the environment is rattling and shaking. I try to give everyone the benefit of the doubt knowing spell check doesn't always work, auto correct will sometimes replace words it doesn't like, sometimes people are for whatever reason in a hurry and don't have the time to go back and review or sometimes people spell words differently. I've had /. posters tear into me because of how I spell worlds like metre and colour, in Canada we use the French and proper English spellings. Sometimes I just make a mistake.
/., especially when submitting from my phone. If it's a huge issue for someone, it's probably someone I don't care to talk to anyway. Seriously who want's to have a conversation or debate with someone that doesn't care about the content of a message and only wants to pick apart the syntax. Don't computers do enough of that for/to us! If I'm reading a thread and all someone can do is point out two incorrect letters or a missing apostasy, they clearly have nothing to add. That isn't a jab at your ironic retort to my misspelling of "subjectively" or misuse of "prof's"
Unfortunately it's exponentially difficult to type on a phone while using
As you pointed out "in the grand scheme of things", I'm not going to spend hours going over a post and having people check and recheck it before I submit it to
Also, as I elaborated in an above response, I only let the co-op students go (two separate students, two separate occasions) because they went into a meeting and picked apart the client supplied design document. If you're a co-op student and you go into a board meeting, you keep your mouth shut unless someone specifically talks to you. Not tell a client that has a $60K contract with your employer they're a moron for misspelling a few words. The co-op students didn't have the common sense to do that and felt showing off to boost their own egos by belittling others was more important than seeing how business is conducted. As a result of that poor performance, I don't want them back working with or for me.
Exactly. The reason I let those co-op students, on two separate co-ops on two separate occasions, go was because they walked into a board meeting with the clients and instead of sitting down and shutting up, as a student should, they proceeded to pick apart the design documents right in front of the people that provided them. You don't sit down in front of someone who has a $40K - $60K contract with you and tell them they're morons for missing a comma or a minor typo. You especially don't let a co-op student do that. Hopefully those students leaned a valuable lesson about proper place, proper time, but I wouldn't have them back working for me just in case that lesson didn't sink in. They can cost someone else a huge contract, but not me.
It must really kill people who care about that sort of thing that once they're out in the real world no one cares what they think. I've let co-op students go and made sure they weren't hired by my company because they complained about someone's style and fixated minor spelling / grammar errors in a design doc, not written by me.
/. mobile is crap. I always give the benefit of the doubt, not knowing the platform someone might have to use.
If you want to program a computer you have to be better than one. If you're going to segfault on a comma there are real computers that require attention. Go back to school where it's appreciated.
P.S replying on a phone and
Typing classes were some of my favorites. Sure there was a lot of repetition, but we did get to play some game. And there was no boring memorization/regurgitation/essay BS like history, English, or a ton of other subjectivity marked courses where the profs favorites got the best marks.
I wouldn't dispute that. I just personally haven't read anything that can prove fracking is harmful, cover up or not, so I'm indifferent to it.
Well I guess indifferent might not be the right term. My preference would be to err on the side of caution and not use fracking until it's proven not to be harmful. I would also prefer we develop and use other energy sources besides oil, so that's kind of another tick against it. I do understand that coal and oil are are primary energy sources at the moment so unfortunately until the other technologies are up to snuff we really have no choice.
I totally know people that would kill their wives to go to an off world colony, prison or not.
It's not hunting unless you also eat it. If you don't eat it, it's just being an ass. Which most cats are, but that's beside the point.
Actually, No. I'm indifferent to fracking, because I haven't read any conclusive evidence it's a harmful process, but they don't just use water. Fracking chemicals are trade secrets. In most places, I don't know where they do, fracking companies don't disclose what's in them.
We had a great public run utility, NS Power, back in the 80's. Then the 90's conservative government sold the utility to Emera. Politicians don't like having to explain why power rates need to go up, even if it's just by a half a percent. So they sold off the utility and spun it that the private sector would be able to provide better rates and service.
Unfortunately the opposite happened. We have monthly power outages because of "salt vapor" accumulating on power lines. In the last ten years rates have shot up uncontrollably, because people are using less power. Now NS Power is making NS Tax payers pay for an undersea power link cable to Newfoundland so they can pipe power through Nova Scotia to sell to the states.
Where things went wrong was when the conservatives sold NS Power to Emera they *guaranteed* Emera a monopoly with a fixed ROI. In short they screwed us. Having a privately owned power corp would have been fine if it was open to competition and they actually had to compete for business or would be allowed to fail thus forcing them to actually manage their company rather than just passing CEO bonuses off to rate payers.
And that's true, but the cost is going to be significantly higher to maintain hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of solar panels, along with the tech in the road to transmit to the car, than it would be to download a few hundred megs of data. Which I don't do by the way because in Canada, at least in Nova Scotia, it's too expensive to have that kind of data plan considering I've never used more than half a Gig. I definitely wouldn't trust NS Power to keep the price reasonable.
I'd need to see actual figures and estimated costs before I could really decide if it's something I'd take advantage of, but like I said, I think it's a great idea.
I like that idea, but the problem becomes who's going to pay for the solar panels and their upkeep? Maybe charge people based on how far along the route they drive, but it'll most likely be a tax and everyone, with or without a car, will pay. It might fly up here in Canada, or in Europe, or in Japan, but no way Americans will do it.
I don't disagree with the clogged motorways issue, which isn't a problem for me. Mainly because I don't live in a HUGE city. Although I think self driving cars and technology would help solve some of that issue.
Halifax/Dartmouth is more of a small to medium size city so we don't have the commuter issues larger cities have, but our transit system sucks. If you want people to use transit then it has to work, it has to be more convenient or cheaper than owning a car. In Halifax it just isn't.
Thanks. I do hate to sound militant about it, but I've had a lot of close calls driving and 99% of the time it's because of other people and it would have been entirely preventable if those people were to just do what they're suppose to be doing. So I just can't see how this technology could *possibly* be worse than the existing situation.
Who hasn't been driving down the highway and seen someone texting, or shaving, or putting on makeup, or screaming at their four year old in the back seat. We just have too much to do to provide 100% focus on driving so it only seems logical we should let a computer do it for us. Sure the system isn't going to be perfect at first, but there's no reason it can't be made better and better over time.
We put up people driving because it's just too convenient, regardless of the danger we're putting ourselves in, so if there's a way to make it safer we should be doing it. For starters it's way to easy for people to get drivers permits. I have a cousin that failed his drivers test four times and passed on the fifth try, he's crashed three cars in the last ten years and only stopped driving because he couldn't afford insurance anymore.
We could also have mandatory retesting for the drivers test every five years or every two years after 65. My grandfather faked his way through his eye test when he was 78 and was allowed to keep driving even though he had had major eye surgery and couldn't even see anymore. That was until he almost killed an eight year old. Had someone gotten in a car with him they would have known he couldn't see well enough to drive. Mental faculties are also a consideration, as people get older and aren't as quick to react, which actually having someone in the car with the driver would be able to easily assess.
There's no valid reason in my mind why this technology couldn't work and why we couldn't make it work in the situations it's less reliable. You can see people throwing everything they have at it, but almost always you can use the, "how is that any different than now?" argument and point out umteen billion situations where it would be more convenient (being able to go to a bar and have a car to take you home, blind/disabled people being able to have personal transport, not having to give up your car when you get old) and safer (no more issues with texting, distracted, drunk, fatigued, stupid drivers).
I guess I should have made sure she actually graduated high school before letting her cut my hair and write my posts. That was all my mistake, sorry.