I don't have a car at all. If I buy a gasoline can and fill it regularly, will a car grow in my driveway? How much gas will it take before it can drive me around? thx
A car can grow on your driveway, if you provide the right conditions. Cars, like any growing organism, require certain nutrients and environmental
conditions to grow. Gas would be the source of energy for the car, analogous to sunlight in the case of plants.
First, an asphalt driveway would be required to provide heavy hydrocarbons, particles of tyre rubber, silt, and a small amount of common salt. A seed will also be
required, this would be a car exhaust muffler/silencer. This contains all of the genetic information required for the car to grow correctly. Place the muffler on the
driveway, and apply small (100ml or less) amounts of gasoline to it every day. Do this when the temperature is 10-16 degrees celsius, and regular small rain
showers are expected.
First, the muffler will appear to go slightly rusty; this is an important stage and NOT a failure. Soon the rust will 'grow' in volume, increasing the overall size of the
muffler. This is the 'germination' of the seed. Double the amount of gas per day and allow to grow over 1 month. Ensure regular watering if there is not at least 1 rain
shower every 2 days, sufficient to wet the driveway and cause water to run off it. The car must be allowed to dry periodically, in rainy weather shelter the car (for
example with a rain cover) to allow it to dry at least once per week.
After 1 month a full car will appear, but it is not yet developed enough for the doors to be opened or for it to be driven. Wait a further week, and until the windows
appear slightly grubby. Then the car can be opened for the first time. Within a short time of doing this, fill the tank with at least 2 gallons / 9 litres of gas, and start the
car using the key that should already be in the ignition. Allow it to idle for 10 minutes.
Once you have inspected the car for any defects, it can be driven. The local licensing department or DMV should be informed before using the car on a public road.
Do not exceed 4,500RPM for the first 5,000 miles.
You can now enjoy your home-grown car, and with regular feeding, exercise and maintenance it will develop onto the ideal car to fulfil your needs and express your
personality, while respecting your financial means. Eventually, upon receiving a sufficient amount of windscreen washer fluid (the sperm) the car will reproduce by
allowing the muffler to fall of (the seed) at a location of its choosing. Cars like to plant at rough sections of second-rate arterial roads, particularly near intersections or
roundabouts. Often seeding can be triggered by a light collision with another car. They also favour speed bumps, although selection is against reproducing
in car parks, as the owner of the car will often stop to collect the muffler, ruining any chances of its germination.
Slashdot readers are shown by a recent survey to have significantly higher IQ scores than average, yet with higher rates of social anxiety. What is it about Slashdot that makes its readers so smart, yet so awkward?
THIS JUST IN- people who buy the most gas/petrol also tend to have larger cars than average. Scientists are trying to find out why putting more gas in a car's tank causes the car to grow.
Police say they're looking for a short chubby-faced man with ginger hair, wearing a black-and-white striped outfit, a black eye mask, red gloves, a black cape with yellow lining and a red tie with hamburger detail. The man is linked to previous thefts of foodstuffs (primarily hamburgers) from McDonalds.
I do generally agree with most of your points, but I feel that you slightly misunderstand the true meaning of 'wealth'. Wealth is as much about the subjective usefulness of things as their raw amounts. For example, a car consists of more 'wealth' than the raw materials, capital and labour used to make it; that increase is what gives a profit to the car makers.
A very extreme example would be silicon based electronics. A very small amount of a very cheap substance can be made into a very valuable microprocessor, and the 'value' of an average processor (in computational terms) increases every year due to advances in technology. So long as technology advances, more value and wealth can be extracted from the same amount of raw material or labour.
In a world where 'everyone is wealthy' compared to today, everyone will be able to afford more goods and services in exchage for the same amount of labour input. This would be achieved by greater labour effeciency, mostly due to increased mechanisation and computerisation continuing on recent trends. What wouldn't change would be the amount of raw labour the 'average' person could afford to buy from someone else. If everyone is wealthy, then no-one would be prepared to work for cheap. Butlers etc will always require relative wealth to purchase.
If you take a modern developed country today in isolation, you can see the effects of mass wealth. I'll take the UK as an example (only because that's where I am). Compared to 200 years ago, 'everyone is wealthy'. What this means is that with the possible exception of the very poorest (bottom 5% or less) everyone has access to or owns manufactured goods such as relatively advanced homes with utility supplies, almost everyone owns a TV and phone, most have cars, clothes are cheap and plentiful, food (despite recent price rises) is cheap enough that 'obesity' is a public health concern. Yes, most of these things have been made cheaper by offshore manufacturing (eg in China) but the point is that they wouldn't be that much more expensive is produced domestically. All these things are 'cheap' because they require an ever decreasing amount of human effort to produce. What isn't cheaper is human time. Household servants, hand made clothes etc etc are still relatively expensive (and will always be) and are the mark of relative wealth.
In summary, the 'wealth' of the world can increase for as long as technology advances, even with hard limited natural resources and labour supplies. If a machine of any kind (mechanical, electronic, robotic, whatever) can assist in the production of something; and the technology of said machine continues to advance; then the something will become ever 'cheaper'. If a majority of things are cheaper, then the majority of people are wealthier. In the long term, this will manifest itself as either people having access to more stuff/services for doing the same amount of work, or people will do less work to achieve the same standard of living.
Interest though is fundamental for keeping money flowing from the unproductive to the productive.
As things are in the interest-bearing world, if you (or someone else) has some idea that can/will be sufficiently useful to people that it will make money, interest makes the money of the already wealthy available to you to borrow, such that you can get the capital to implement the idea. The lender makes money, and you (hopefully) make money too.
If there is no interest, then people with money or other wealth have less incentive to lend it out. The only investment that could take place would be direct ("I'll give you $10,000 for 30% of the company") without the lubrication that the banking system provides.
Yes, let's ban trucks because we don't like them (even though they work) and because this alternative is cool, and to hell with the increased costs of absolutely everything./sarcasm
It's always 'nice' to get an insight into the mind of someone like you, thanks.
I did start typing a long and detailed comment, but FF crashed and lost it. Fantastic.
Anyway, as others here have pointed out, the setup and construction costs would be immense, and the system would need to carry very large amounts of freight to be economically sensible. The only way for this to be achieved would be for it to have a monopoly over a certain area, either by mandate or practical necessity.
Various cities worldwide have had underground freight railways (Chicago and london, to name two) but they both ran up against the fact that it is much cheaper to put freight on trucks/vans running on the existing road network. I think that will always be the case, with road transport continuing to provide the most economical transport of relatively small amounts of stuff (up to 30 tonnes) over short distances (less than say 200 miles). Quite probably the 'trucks' in the future may be driverless, and will almost certainly not be fuelled by petrodiesel, but they will still be trucks and will run on a relatively cheap to build and maintain multipurpose road network (which is essentially just a web of hard flat surfaces).
Railways are fantastic for moving large quantities (tens to hundreds of tonnes) of freight from the same 'A' to the same 'B' a long distance away (say over 200 miles); but having to stop the entire train to load/unload along the way kills effeciency for multidrop or smaller loads. Having small rail vehicles achieves similar effeciencies to road, but you still have the problem of the running surface (the rails) needing to direct traffic and be controlled somehow. Road vehicles (whether human driven or not) direct themselves on an unchanging surface. It's true that roads with anything above a low level of traffic often need traffic control of some kind (eg lights) but railways do too.
Around here you can get a single road sign that tells you that the next town is 14 miles away, but the next exit is in 300 metres. If you take it, 1 1/2 miles down that road there is a 7.5 metric tonne weight limit, and a low bridge with 14ft 6in clearance...:p
Agreed. If your package isn't packed well enough to withstand at least a 3ft drop onto concrete, and at least 20kg of pressure without breaking, you're doing it wrong. Obvious carelessness aside, there is NO carrier that will gently carry your package around wearing kid gloves, before putting it on the passenger seat of their van/truck with the seatbelt around it. All packages get tossed into that backs of trucks where they rattle around with 5 other packages on top of them, before being sorted by automated machines or dropped by forklifts. If you're sending something *that* fragile, cough the extra for a specialist carrier. Marking a package as 'fragile' doesn't work, largely because probably 75% of all packages are marked fragile, even when they're clearly not. Deopt workers quickly learn to ignore such markings, especially when the boss is cracking the whip shouting "faster! faster!".
Strangely enough, UPS is one of the better carriers here in the UK, possibly because as an outsider in the UK market they try harder than the incumbents. If you really want something broken, send it ParcelForce. They could crush a solid aluminium block:P
This does work both ways, actually. With the UK system, if a few people in your area start drawing BIG power the local substation can cope. If lots of people do, then both the substation and the local (and underground) 240v main needs replacing.
Under the US system, drawing big power means that your nearest transformer (on a pole outside) needs replacing; but you've got a relatively high voltage line running along your street on poles, with (I would guess) a decent spare capacity and it's relatively easy to replace too.
Re:Along the same lines:
on
Linux Radio
·
· Score: 1
Linux.fm links to its "sister station"White Noise FM.....
Wow, 'White Noise FM' seems quite big around here. It's being rebroadcast almost everywhere on the dial where a music station isn't.
I don't know what you think, but I find that the attitude of a news source to updating-in-place depends on their background. A newspaper-owned site will usually have a mindset of an article being 'published' and then staying the same (like a printed newspaper); whereas a broadcaster's site will often consider the news to be an ever-evolving narrative, and see nothing wrong with altering a web article to reflect later developments.
Personally, considering that web news is text based and archivable, I would consider a newspaper to be the nearest offline cousin and would rather that web news was persistent as a historical record. The idea of articles changing silently seems a little Orwellian to me. It can be very useful to know what the news was, even if it later transpired to be wrong.
I'm sure that BP did cut a lot of corners that they really should not have, and that this lead to the Deepwater Horizon accident.
On the other hand however there will always be 'more that could have been done' in absolutely every situation, by anybody. There's a fine line between taking into account genuine concerns, and listening to every crank or someone with something to sell peddling expensive solutions to minor risks. Nothing is ever entirely risk-free, and there will ALWAYS be more tests, more safely equipment, more drills etc etc that could have been implemented.
In summary, there's a difference between saying, for example in the event of a car wreck "the driver shouldn't have been drinking" (a genuine concern) and "the driver should have taken weekly driving exams, fitted 2ft of foam rubber to the front of his car, and drove everywhere at 10mph max" (the 'more' that could doubtless have been done). I'm not saying that's the case here, but it's worth bearing in mind.
I apologise if this didn't come across in my posts, but my ire was directed entirely at the guy who started banging on about 'market forces' etc based on a parcel company temporarily misplacing a parcel within their own building.
As you say, shit happens, and the amount of shit that can happen is proportional to the size or the complexity of the system in which happenings can occur. If people can make mistakes, then it follows that collections of people will also make mistakes, whether a corporation, government department, co-op, syndicate or knitting circle. There's no political or ideological argument there.
Thank you for your sterling contribution and hopeful termination of this stream of mindpiss that unfortunately I allowed myself to be drawn into.
If you believe in limited government, then it follows that it's a matter of corporate policy whether to ship radioactive materials, which would be completely unregulated. The free market would decide where those rods would end up, and disclosing anything about them would be strictly determined be the effect on the bottom line.
Yes, because other than government regulation there is no possible incentive for FedEx (and others) to not lose packages. It is only the "Packages Must Be Delivered To Their Proper Recipient Act of 1942" that regulates them into doing so. It's also not as though FedEx might want to avoid the bad publicity of misplacing radioactive rods.
Indeed, any form of limited government could never work, the only realistic option is unlimited government./sarcasm
Yes but its an editor's job to review that kind of thing before putting it on the front page - or at least appending an update to the bottom of the article (as they sometimes do for bigger stories)
there was a spate of building houses from wood in the 80's. That's about when those ones opposite went up. Maybe the codes were temporarily laxed?
If you mean what I think you mean there's some of those opposite my childhood home too, (almost exactly like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Builder's_tudorbethan.jpg )- I thought the wood on the exterior was cosmetic with brick/something else underneath the wood and render. I might of course be wrong.
As for the prefab, the type I was referring to was not for 'project' type council houses. This was for individual custom house builds. You wouldn't know it was a prefab build by looking at it. It just happened to be on my bike ride to work near Munich so I was watching with interest. The main structure (ground floor sections, ground floor walls, 1st floor sections, 1st floor walls) went up in, I kid you not, 2 days. I watched my wood-framed house in Canada being built and although I had the same 'fook me that was quick' feeling once the main framing started, it was by no means even comparable to the speed the prefab one in Munich went up.
These are just my observations.
I heard before that pre-fab was popular in mainland Europe. Probably the extensive use for council housing in the UK created a stigma for pre-fab that still exists here (along with render and almost anything not visibly brick).
Thinking about it, all of the buildings I can think of that have exposed wood like that mentioned above also have a lot of exposed brick as well, probably as 'reassurance' to buyers- "yes, it is brick-built". Even industrial or big retail buildings here that are obviously steel framed and clad have exterior brickwork up to the first floor level. I guess Brits 'like' and insist on brick.
Since you mentioned codes, I believe that the current UK codes do allow wood framed buildings, where I live now is genuinely part timber framed (its a strange building and too long a story for here). I would suggest that the enduring lack of new timber or prefab housing in the UK is a quirk of the national housing market, rather than any technical or regulatory reason.
I always wonder this. Even in non-hurricane zones, houses in Europe (England & Germany is all I know about) are made of brick or poured/prefabbed concrete.
In England at least, this has a lot to do with the first building codes brought in after the Great Fire Of London in 1666 . The codes specified non-flammable building materials, eg brick or stone.
To this day, almost all (if not all) houses are brick built, including the suburban tracts that would look familiar to Americans. AFAIK pre-fab concrete was a big thing in the 1950s-60s, mostly for government-built 'council houses' and especially tower blocks (what a USian might call a 'project'). This method fell out of favour in the UK after a pre-fab concrete tower block partially collapsed after a gas explosion in 1968: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronan_Point
Slashdot Mirror
I don't have a car at all. If I buy a gasoline can and fill it regularly, will a car grow in my driveway? How much gas will it take before it can drive me around? thx
A car can grow on your driveway, if you provide the right conditions. Cars, like any growing organism, require certain nutrients and environmental conditions to grow. Gas would be the source of energy for the car, analogous to sunlight in the case of plants.
First, an asphalt driveway would be required to provide heavy hydrocarbons, particles of tyre rubber, silt, and a small amount of common salt. A seed will also be required, this would be a car exhaust muffler/silencer. This contains all of the genetic information required for the car to grow correctly. Place the muffler on the driveway, and apply small (100ml or less) amounts of gasoline to it every day. Do this when the temperature is 10-16 degrees celsius, and regular small rain showers are expected.
First, the muffler will appear to go slightly rusty; this is an important stage and NOT a failure. Soon the rust will 'grow' in volume, increasing the overall size of the muffler. This is the 'germination' of the seed. Double the amount of gas per day and allow to grow over 1 month. Ensure regular watering if there is not at least 1 rain shower every 2 days, sufficient to wet the driveway and cause water to run off it. The car must be allowed to dry periodically, in rainy weather shelter the car (for example with a rain cover) to allow it to dry at least once per week.
After 1 month a full car will appear, but it is not yet developed enough for the doors to be opened or for it to be driven. Wait a further week, and until the windows appear slightly grubby. Then the car can be opened for the first time. Within a short time of doing this, fill the tank with at least 2 gallons / 9 litres of gas, and start the car using the key that should already be in the ignition. Allow it to idle for 10 minutes.
Once you have inspected the car for any defects, it can be driven. The local licensing department or DMV should be informed before using the car on a public road. Do not exceed 4,500RPM for the first 5,000 miles.
You can now enjoy your home-grown car, and with regular feeding, exercise and maintenance it will develop onto the ideal car to fulfil your needs and express your personality, while respecting your financial means. Eventually, upon receiving a sufficient amount of windscreen washer fluid (the sperm) the car will reproduce by allowing the muffler to fall of (the seed) at a location of its choosing. Cars like to plant at rough sections of second-rate arterial roads, particularly near intersections or roundabouts. Often seeding can be triggered by a light collision with another car. They also favour speed bumps, although selection is against reproducing in car parks, as the owner of the car will often stop to collect the muffler, ruining any chances of its germination.
Slashdot readers are shown by a recent survey to have significantly higher IQ scores than average, yet with higher rates of social anxiety. What is it about Slashdot that makes its readers so smart, yet so awkward?
THIS JUST IN- people who buy the most gas/petrol also tend to have larger cars than average. Scientists are trying to find out why putting more gas in a car's tank causes the car to grow.
Police say they're looking for a short chubby-faced man with ginger hair, wearing a black-and-white striped outfit, a black eye mask, red gloves, a black cape with yellow lining and a red tie with hamburger detail. The man is linked to previous thefts of foodstuffs (primarily hamburgers) from McDonalds.
I do generally agree with most of your points, but I feel that you slightly misunderstand the true meaning of 'wealth'. Wealth is as much about the subjective usefulness of things as their raw amounts. For example, a car consists of more 'wealth' than the raw materials, capital and labour used to make it; that increase is what gives a profit to the car makers.
A very extreme example would be silicon based electronics. A very small amount of a very cheap substance can be made into a very valuable microprocessor, and the 'value' of an average processor (in computational terms) increases every year due to advances in technology. So long as technology advances, more value and wealth can be extracted from the same amount of raw material or labour.
In a world where 'everyone is wealthy' compared to today, everyone will be able to afford more goods and services in exchage for the same amount of labour input. This would be achieved by greater labour effeciency, mostly due to increased mechanisation and computerisation continuing on recent trends. What wouldn't change would be the amount of raw labour the 'average' person could afford to buy from someone else. If everyone is wealthy, then no-one would be prepared to work for cheap. Butlers etc will always require relative wealth to purchase.
If you take a modern developed country today in isolation, you can see the effects of mass wealth. I'll take the UK as an example (only because that's where I am). Compared to 200 years ago, 'everyone is wealthy'. What this means is that with the possible exception of the very poorest (bottom 5% or less) everyone has access to or owns manufactured goods such as relatively advanced homes with utility supplies, almost everyone owns a TV and phone, most have cars, clothes are cheap and plentiful, food (despite recent price rises) is cheap enough that 'obesity' is a public health concern. Yes, most of these things have been made cheaper by offshore manufacturing (eg in China) but the point is that they wouldn't be that much more expensive is produced domestically. All these things are 'cheap' because they require an ever decreasing amount of human effort to produce. What isn't cheaper is human time. Household servants, hand made clothes etc etc are still relatively expensive (and will always be) and are the mark of relative wealth.
In summary, the 'wealth' of the world can increase for as long as technology advances, even with hard limited natural resources and labour supplies. If a machine of any kind (mechanical, electronic, robotic, whatever) can assist in the production of something; and the technology of said machine continues to advance; then the something will become ever 'cheaper'. If a majority of things are cheaper, then the majority of people are wealthier. In the long term, this will manifest itself as either people having access to more stuff/services for doing the same amount of work, or people will do less work to achieve the same standard of living.
Interest though is fundamental for keeping money flowing from the unproductive to the productive.
As things are in the interest-bearing world, if you (or someone else) has some idea that can/will be sufficiently useful to people that it will make money, interest makes the money of the already wealthy available to you to borrow, such that you can get the capital to implement the idea. The lender makes money, and you (hopefully) make money too.
If there is no interest, then people with money or other wealth have less incentive to lend it out. The only investment that could take place would be direct ("I'll give you $10,000 for 30% of the company") without the lubrication that the banking system provides.
Assuming that the study/costs are favourable, fair enough.
To my angry brain, it looked you were proposing a switch no matter what. If that's not the case (which is how it appears now) then I apologise :)
Yes, let's ban trucks because we don't like them (even though they work) and because this alternative is cool, and to hell with the increased costs of absolutely everything. /sarcasm
It's always 'nice' to get an insight into the mind of someone like you, thanks.
I did start typing a long and detailed comment, but FF crashed and lost it. Fantastic.
Anyway, as others here have pointed out, the setup and construction costs would be immense, and the system would need to carry very large amounts of freight to be economically sensible. The only way for this to be achieved would be for it to have a monopoly over a certain area, either by mandate or practical necessity.
Various cities worldwide have had underground freight railways (Chicago and london, to name two) but they both ran up against the fact that it is much cheaper to put freight on trucks/vans running on the existing road network. I think that will always be the case, with road transport continuing to provide the most economical transport of relatively small amounts of stuff (up to 30 tonnes) over short distances (less than say 200 miles). Quite probably the 'trucks' in the future may be driverless, and will almost certainly not be fuelled by petrodiesel, but they will still be trucks and will run on a relatively cheap to build and maintain multipurpose road network (which is essentially just a web of hard flat surfaces).
Railways are fantastic for moving large quantities (tens to hundreds of tonnes) of freight from the same 'A' to the same 'B' a long distance away (say over 200 miles); but having to stop the entire train to load/unload along the way kills effeciency for multidrop or smaller loads. Having small rail vehicles achieves similar effeciencies to road, but you still have the problem of the running surface (the rails) needing to direct traffic and be controlled somehow. Road vehicles (whether human driven or not) direct themselves on an unchanging surface. It's true that roads with anything above a low level of traffic often need traffic control of some kind (eg lights) but railways do too.
In conclusion; very cool, but pointless IMO
Needless unit mixing is a British speciality :P
Around here you can get a single road sign that tells you that the next town is 14 miles away, but the next exit is in 300 metres. If you take it, 1 1/2 miles down that road there is a 7.5 metric tonne weight limit, and a low bridge with 14ft 6in clearance... :p
Agreed. If your package isn't packed well enough to withstand at least a 3ft drop onto concrete, and at least 20kg of pressure without breaking, you're doing it wrong. Obvious carelessness aside, there is NO carrier that will gently carry your package around wearing kid gloves, before putting it on the passenger seat of their van/truck with the seatbelt around it. All packages get tossed into that backs of trucks where they rattle around with 5 other packages on top of them, before being sorted by automated machines or dropped by forklifts. If you're sending something *that* fragile, cough the extra for a specialist carrier. Marking a package as 'fragile' doesn't work, largely because probably 75% of all packages are marked fragile, even when they're clearly not. Deopt workers quickly learn to ignore such markings, especially when the boss is cracking the whip shouting "faster! faster!".
Strangely enough, UPS is one of the better carriers here in the UK, possibly because as an outsider in the UK market they try harder than the incumbents. If you really want something broken, send it ParcelForce. They could crush a solid aluminium block :P
This does work both ways, actually. With the UK system, if a few people in your area start drawing BIG power the local substation can cope. If lots of people do, then both the substation and the local (and underground) 240v main needs replacing.
Under the US system, drawing big power means that your nearest transformer (on a pole outside) needs replacing; but you've got a relatively high voltage line running along your street on poles, with (I would guess) a decent spare capacity and it's relatively easy to replace too.
Linux.fm links to its "sister station"White Noise FM .....
Wow, 'White Noise FM' seems quite big around here. It's being rebroadcast almost everywhere on the dial where a music station isn't.
I don't know what you think, but I find that the attitude of a news source to updating-in-place depends on their background. A newspaper-owned site will usually have a mindset of an article being 'published' and then staying the same (like a printed newspaper); whereas a broadcaster's site will often consider the news to be an ever-evolving narrative, and see nothing wrong with altering a web article to reflect later developments.
Personally, considering that web news is text based and archivable, I would consider a newspaper to be the nearest offline cousin and would rather that web news was persistent as a historical record. The idea of articles changing silently seems a little Orwellian to me. It can be very useful to know what the news was, even if it later transpired to be wrong.
In a truly shocking development on here, I did actually read TFA ;)
As an 'other side of the political spectrum' example, BBC online news regularly update stories in place too. As Tom Jones says, "It's not unusual.." :)
I'm sure that BP did cut a lot of corners that they really should not have, and that this lead to the Deepwater Horizon accident.
On the other hand however there will always be 'more that could have been done' in absolutely every situation, by anybody. There's a fine line between taking into account genuine concerns, and listening to every crank or someone with something to sell peddling expensive solutions to minor risks. Nothing is ever entirely risk-free, and there will ALWAYS be more tests, more safely equipment, more drills etc etc that could have been implemented.
In summary, there's a difference between saying, for example in the event of a car wreck "the driver shouldn't have been drinking" (a genuine concern) and "the driver should have taken weekly driving exams, fitted 2ft of foam rubber to the front of his car, and drove everywhere at 10mph max" (the 'more' that could doubtless have been done). I'm not saying that's the case here, but it's worth bearing in mind.
I agree with you, 100%.
I apologise if this didn't come across in my posts, but my ire was directed entirely at the guy who started banging on about 'market forces' etc based on a parcel company temporarily misplacing a parcel within their own building.
As you say, shit happens, and the amount of shit that can happen is proportional to the size or the complexity of the system in which happenings can occur. If people can make mistakes, then it follows that collections of people will also make mistakes, whether a corporation, government department, co-op, syndicate or knitting circle. There's no political or ideological argument there.
Thank you for your sterling contribution and hopeful termination of this stream of mindpiss that unfortunately I allowed myself to be drawn into.
You're right, a government organisation (or a government regulated organisation) never lost anything, ever.
If you believe in limited government, then it follows that it's a matter of corporate policy whether to ship radioactive materials, which would be completely unregulated. The free market would decide where those rods would end up, and disclosing anything about them would be strictly determined be the effect on the bottom line.
Yes, because other than government regulation there is no possible incentive for FedEx (and others) to not lose packages. It is only the "Packages Must Be Delivered To Their Proper Recipient Act of 1942" that regulates them into doing so. It's also not as though FedEx might want to avoid the bad publicity of misplacing radioactive rods.
Indeed, any form of limited government could never work, the only realistic option is unlimited government. /sarcasm
Yes but its an editor's job to review that kind of thing before putting it on the front page - or at least appending an update to the bottom of the article (as they sometimes do for bigger stories)
Slashdot has editors?
The article linked actually says they already found them. What is with these craptastic and sensationalist titles today?
Have you considered the slight possibility that when this story was submitted to /. the rods were missing, and have been found (and TFA updated) since?
According to TFA the rods have now been recovered, unopened at a FedEx facility in Knoxville. Panic over.
If humans screw up the earth to the point where it becomes unlivable, our species deserves to just become extinct.
That's like saying "If a bus driver screws up enough to cause a crash, then everybody on the freeway deserves to die".
Why don't YOU top yourself for the good of the universe, you misanthropic parrot-talking douchebag.
there was a spate of building houses from wood in the 80's. That's about when those ones opposite went up. Maybe the codes were temporarily laxed?
If you mean what I think you mean there's some of those opposite my childhood home too, (almost exactly like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Builder's_tudorbethan.jpg )- I thought the wood on the exterior was cosmetic with brick/something else underneath the wood and render. I might of course be wrong.
As for the prefab, the type I was referring to was not for 'project' type council houses. This was for individual custom house builds. You wouldn't know it was a prefab build by looking at it. It just happened to be on my bike ride to work near Munich so I was watching with interest. The main structure (ground floor sections, ground floor walls, 1st floor sections, 1st floor walls) went up in, I kid you not, 2 days. I watched my wood-framed house in Canada being built and although I had the same 'fook me that was quick' feeling once the main framing started, it was by no means even comparable to the speed the prefab one in Munich went up. These are just my observations.
I heard before that pre-fab was popular in mainland Europe. Probably the extensive use for council housing in the UK created a stigma for pre-fab that still exists here (along with render and almost anything not visibly brick).
Thinking about it, all of the buildings I can think of that have exposed wood like that mentioned above also have a lot of exposed brick as well, probably as 'reassurance' to buyers- "yes, it is brick-built". Even industrial or big retail buildings here that are obviously steel framed and clad have exterior brickwork up to the first floor level. I guess Brits 'like' and insist on brick.
Since you mentioned codes, I believe that the current UK codes do allow wood framed buildings, where I live now is genuinely part timber framed (its a strange building and too long a story for here). I would suggest that the enduring lack of new timber or prefab housing in the UK is a quirk of the national housing market, rather than any technical or regulatory reason.
I always wonder this. Even in non-hurricane zones, houses in Europe (England & Germany is all I know about) are made of brick or poured/prefabbed concrete.
In England at least, this has a lot to do with the first building codes brought in after the Great Fire Of London in 1666 . The codes specified non-flammable building materials, eg brick or stone.
To this day, almost all (if not all) houses are brick built, including the suburban tracts that would look familiar to Americans. AFAIK pre-fab concrete was a big thing in the 1950s-60s, mostly for government-built 'council houses' and especially tower blocks (what a USian might call a 'project'). This method fell out of favour in the UK after a pre-fab concrete tower block partially collapsed after a gas explosion in 1968: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronan_Point
So, voluntarily paying for news that you want to read is bad in comparison to being forced to pay for news that you might not want to read?