Because the state guaranteed the transaction occurred with neither party killing the other
Last time I purchased something in California... I do not recall there being a bomb proof barrier between me and the sales person that had been built by the state.
Yet, unless you arranged the purchase over Craigslist and met the seller in a bad part of town (in which case you're probably not paying any taxes anyway), law enforcement and regulation from the state and federal government has helped ensure that the clerk at the convenience store is not going to hit you over the head with a baseball bat and take your money, and you can walk into a huge big-box store and not worry that the roof is going to fall on your head - but if something like that does happen, then you'll be relying on government to find and punish that sales clerk, or to dig you out of the rubble from the store after a freak snowstorm made the roof collapse
In some countries you may pay less (or no taxes), but can't count on the general freedom and safety that we rely on every day as we go about our lives.
Only if you are paying that much a month in gas... I try not to... and I drive what the state calls an SUV.
Heck, even over 5 years, the savings is *only* 10k, which only brings the effective price of the 40k car down to 30k... which is still more than most of us are willing/able to pay for something newer.
Maybe *most* of us won't pay $30K for a car, but the average new car price in the USA is $31K so that brings it within reach of a lot of potential buyers.
No, it's bad when Tesla gets a tax break and it's bad when Airbus and Boeing get tax breaks. Businesses should not get tax breaks, ever, for any reason.
Why not? Any business tax is equivalent to a tax on citizens since anything that increases the cost of doing business (including taxes), gets passed along to consumers and employees through increased product costs or lower salaries. Many would argue that business taxes shouldn't exist at all.
I understand why this is modded Funny, but also, isn't this (combined with a lack of belief in contraception) kind of a true picture of part of the problem in the starving African nations?
I think that has more to do with lack of education about birth control, outright shunning of birth control for cultural/religious reasons, and knowing that if you want to have one child, then you better have more than one baby since there's a good chance that at least one of them isn't going to live to be an adult, than having too much time on their hands. When you're extremely poor and trying to scrape out a living any way you can, that doesn't leave a whole lot of spare time for recreational sex.
Well it could be that Google is actively developing robots, so there's that. And if nobody around you is talking about automation/robots, they are the idiots getting replaced by it.
Or, maybe they've already been replaced? I just asked my coworker if he's a robot, and he immediately said "no", which is exactly what you'd expect a robot trying to hide his identity to say! Now he's whispering with a coworker and pointing to me -- obviously, they are planning the robot revolution.
you do realize the population of the US is only 330 milion currently.
You're talking a very long way off if so.
But when we have robots to do all of the work and everyone is unemployed, we'll all have a lot more time to have sex, so the population will skyrocket.
I'm 37 and robots still can't perform the simple things I wanted them to do when I was 4
A robotic arm that can attach to drywall and is light enough to not need drywall anchors or drill into a stud. It is mounted above and/or behind the door. With the push of a remote, it opens/closes the door. I shouldn't have to replace the whole damn door. The robotic arm should adapt to a traditional door.
Why would you need or want a robot arm that can do that when you can just buy a simple automatic door opener?
Even if it's light enough to hang on drywall without screwing into a stud, anything that moves and exerts force on the drywall is going to work loose eventually-- better to mount it to a stud, even if it's a high-tech robot arm.
Robot, find my keys. No, the keys do not have an RFID tag. I know you don't know where they are right now. Systematically search for them without trampling pets or trashing my shit.
Who wants a robot searching through the entire house? What if your girlfriend dropped the keys down her shirt? Let the robot fondle her too many times in search of keys and you may find that she no longer needs *you*!.
Shave me. Don't poke new holes in my face.
I don't even trust other humans to do that for me - and not even (*especially* not even) a barber with a straight razor, no matter how close the shave will be.
Scan every girl in the club. Breakdown the odds each girl could get pregnant tonight. Weed out those menstruating. OK, yeah, I definitely did not think about that when I was in 4. The tricorder fantasies came later.
You forgot the most important criteria "Identify which of the fertile (or infertile, depending on your preference) girls would be willing to go out with you"... which, if you're using a robot to screen out women based on where they are in their menstrual cycle, is easy to answer.... None of them.
Though a better way to get the kind of woman you're seeking would be to visit a brothel (legal or otherwise...). If all you're looking for is safe sex, it's much better to go to a professional.
I could certainly imagine some kind of hormone detector that can sample the air around the woman (or maybe her breath) could do what you want, but you don't need a robot for that.
Like me. I live alone, and so I don't cook very often. Mostly I get home from work, heat something up quickly and that is dinner.
I started on a daily multivitamin about a year ago, and have since generally felt better. For the minimal expense I will stick with my daily multivitamin.
YMMV.
You mean you took a pill that you thought would make you feel better and you felt better? That's not really evidence that the additional vitamins did anything but give you well fortified urine.
Another key point here (with both devices that we're talking about) is that they both have to fly indoors. Usually when that's the case (especially with that flying bike, holy shit it's HUGE!) it's due to 'wind being an obstacle'.
Just because it has to fly indoors today doesn't mean that it couldn't some day be constructed to allow outdoors use. It's not like there are no "craft" that fly outdoors with large, fragile wings.
The heavier than air craft built by bicycle mechanics I was talking about was not a pedal powered aircraft but rather, a much earlier model of airplane
I bet you $200 that you'll never ever ever see on out in the real world (I'll give you 10 years - and I expect US dollars).
Look, I'm not trying to down-play the invention itself, it's got a few good things about it, like I said, the radio-vision is cool. However I'll bet that in the end, all that gets used is the radio-vision, as the whole battle of "lift" has already been fought out in all practical manner possible.
That's the point. It's not meant to be a finished product that Amazon will use to deliver packages to you tomorrow, it's a proof of concept that uses some interesting technology. A completely autonomous, obstacle avoiding, flapped wing aircraft that weighs less than 20g is awfully impressive.
These days there are simply to many requirements for safety reasons for some "spinning winged" craft to make a breakthrough.
So, it can turn on, fly at a certain height, and avoid things - all for 9 minutes. I mean, yeah that's sorta cool how they utilize the stereo vision, and that it's got the ability to slow one if it's "wings" in order to avoid things. But it looks like it's only going to work indoors, with all fans off. Being that there's no way to control it, seems like it'd be less than entertaining, other than to present to an unsuspecting audience, like slashdot. Other than that, troll me into oblivion, I suspect it's lame.
If you think that's lame, I heard that some idiot bike mechanic brothers demonstrated a so-called flying machine that could barely get 10 feet off the ground and couldn't even stay in the air for 60 seconds. What a joke! It's clear that it's doomed to fail since the early prototype was so limited.
If there's a movie I want to own, I purchase a used DVD from Amazon and rip it myself -- then I can transcode it to any format I want (even extracting audio-only to listen to in the car if I want to), and no one can later decide that they didn't mean to sell it to me and reverse the purchase, and even if the vendor I bought it from goes out of business or leaves the streaming business, I don't have to worry about how I'll be able to access the content that I already "own".
Plus, the used DVD is typically cheaper than the streaming "purchase" fee.
I'm sure many people skip the DVD middleman and just go straight to PirateBay to download their very own copy for free. I still don't know why the movie industry insists on making purchased content much less convenient than readily available pirated content. I don't mind paying a fair price for content, but why do I have to go through hoops to use that content the way I want to?
How is using an electric bulb as a heater better than using an electrical resistance heater?
Because a large amount of the "heat" output from an electric bulb is IR radiation, rather than convective heat. That IR is absorbed directly by your skin, rather than heating the air around you, which makes you feel equivalently warm at a lower ambient temperature. It also heats surfaces other than your skin, which means things like tables and chairs are going to be above ambient temperature (rather than below in a purely convective environment with heatsinking), so when you sit on a chair or put your hands on a table, you are less likely to get an icy chill, which directly affects perceived temperature and comfort.
Please, stop with your fake scientific explanation. If you're 2 meters from a 100W electric bulb that's radiating 100% of its energy as IR (which excludes the substantial conductive and convective losses), your body is receiving around 2 watts per square meter. Since your body has about 2 square meters of skin, you're feeling around 2 watts of energy across the entire half of your body pointed toward the light.
You'll need a lot more than a few light bulbs to keep you warm.
Radiant heat does work, but you need a more heat than the few watts of energy you feel from a light bulb.
> You'd need 15 100W Bulbs to replace the heat of a single 1500W plug-in heater.
You must not be married. Turning on 15 lights and leaving them on is not a challenge for the average Canadian wife. They do it naturally.
But who has 15 lamps in a single room? My furnace generates around 40,000 btus/hour or around 12KW worth of heat. I don't have 120 bulbs in the house that I could turn on to replace the heat from the furnace.
How big of a problem is breaking CFL's? In over 10 years of using CFL's, I haven't broken any. but then, the only non-CFL I remember breaking is one where the base was stuck in the sock and the bulb broke when I was twisting it.
Spending 15 minutes in cleanup for something that happens very rarely seems like a small tradeoff. If the longer lifetime of CFL's let's me avoid one bulb change of a bulb that requires me to go out to the garage to get a ladder, then it's already saved me more time that it would take to clean up a CFL.
On the surface, this seems great...much more energy efficient (e.g. less electrical consumption, less energy converted to heat, etc.), good quality of light (finally), and they last a long time, but the mercury threat will spell the demise of these. Unfortunately, it will take a few decades of these being tossed into the waste stream and the obligatory horrific mercury-caused maladies as it "may be toxic to blood, kidneys, liver, brain, peripheral nervous system, central nervous system." Fantastic...environmentalists and politicians making decisions based on emotions rather than on science.
Approximately 0.0234 mg of mercury—plus carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide—releases into the air per 1 kwh of electricity that a coal-fired power plant generates. Over the 7500-hour average range of one CFL, then, a plant will emit 13.16 mg of mercury to sustain a 75-watt incandescent bulb but only 3.51 mg of mercury to sustain a 20-watt CFL (the lightning equivalent of a 75-watt traditional bulb). Even if the mercury contained in a CFL was directly released into the atmosphere, an incandescent would still contribute 4.65 more milligrams of mercury into the environment over its lifetime.
You need to think of a bigger picture. In an easy bak oven the "LIGHT" is a waste product. In areas and times fo the year that a person it running a heater, the light bulb gives you both Light and heat, so only the magnetic field is a waste.
And in areas and times of the year that you use air conditioning, the A/C is doing extra work to remove the waste heat from the bulbs. So except for those people that use electrical resistance heating in the winter and never use air conditioning or fans to keep their house cool, more efficient lighting still saves them money.
The power consumption advantages are often nullified by the mortality rate of modern lighting if your power fluctuates as it does in many rural and semi-rural areas. I demand reliability. BTW incandescent bulbs are nice for heating my well pump house and chicken coop. I can buy separate heaters, but they cost more and nullify any ecological advantages from running "eco bulbs" to light those places.
That depends on whether or not you always need heat when you need light. If you run the bulbs all night long because you need heat but not neccessarily light, then using a dedicated heater makes sense -- especially when it won't "burn out" and need to be replaced every 1000 hours.
If you sometimes need light but not heat (like in the summer where you might be running a fan to *remove* heat), then using efficient bulbs is a win.
Why not just put a heavy tax on the light bulbs instead of banning them?
That way you can raise some revenue and make improvements, while people who really want incandescents can get them (like science teachers teaching V = IR, or people who really prefer the spectrum and don't care too much about the cost).
Light bulbs are not good for teaching V=IR since the resistance varies with the heat of the filament, so diverge from calculations at low current. Better to use resistors.
Slashdot Mirror
Last time I purchased something in California... I do not recall there being a bomb proof barrier between me and the sales person that had been built by the state.
Yet, unless you arranged the purchase over Craigslist and met the seller in a bad part of town (in which case you're probably not paying any taxes anyway), law enforcement and regulation from the state and federal government has helped ensure that the clerk at the convenience store is not going to hit you over the head with a baseball bat and take your money, and you can walk into a huge big-box store and not worry that the roof is going to fall on your head - but if something like that does happen, then you'll be relying on government to find and punish that sales clerk, or to dig you out of the rubble from the store after a freak snowstorm made the roof collapse
In some countries you may pay less (or no taxes), but can't count on the general freedom and safety that we rely on every day as we go about our lives.
Only if you are paying that much a month in gas... I try not to... and I drive what the state calls an SUV.
Heck, even over 5 years, the savings is *only* 10k, which only brings the effective price of the 40k car down to 30k... which is still more than most of us are willing/able to pay for something newer.
Maybe *most* of us won't pay $30K for a car, but the average new car price in the USA is $31K so that brings it within reach of a lot of potential buyers.
No, it's bad when Tesla gets a tax break and it's bad when Airbus and Boeing get tax breaks. Businesses should not get tax breaks, ever, for any reason.
Why not? Any business tax is equivalent to a tax on citizens since anything that increases the cost of doing business (including taxes), gets passed along to consumers and employees through increased product costs or lower salaries. Many would argue that business taxes shouldn't exist at all.
Fusion is easy.
Fusion with a decent gain factor is hard.
I thought it was only *controlled* fusion that was hard. Producing energy using fusion was tested and working over 50 years ago.
I understand why this is modded Funny, but also, isn't this (combined with a lack of belief in contraception) kind of a true picture of part of the problem in the starving African nations?
I think that has more to do with lack of education about birth control, outright shunning of birth control for cultural/religious reasons, and knowing that if you want to have one child, then you better have more than one baby since there's a good chance that at least one of them isn't going to live to be an adult, than having too much time on their hands. When you're extremely poor and trying to scrape out a living any way you can, that doesn't leave a whole lot of spare time for recreational sex.
Well it could be that Google is actively developing robots, so there's that. And if nobody around you is talking about automation/robots, they are the idiots getting replaced by it.
Or, maybe they've already been replaced? I just asked my coworker if he's a robot, and he immediately said "no", which is exactly what you'd expect a robot trying to hide his identity to say! Now he's whispering with a coworker and pointing to me -- obviously, they are planning the robot revolution.
I always thought Twiki was a completely useless design.and Dr Theopolis should have been a dialup server someplace.
I thought he was a dial-up server, was his whole brain in that little device Twiki carried around his neck?
you do realize the population of the US is only 330 milion currently.
You're talking a very long way off if so.
But when we have robots to do all of the work and everyone is unemployed, we'll all have a lot more time to have sex, so the population will skyrocket.
If robots were treated only as tools instead of weapons or pets, we wouldn't have to worry about an uprising.
Weapons *are* tools. They are only worrisome in the hands of other humans. Or pets. Or uprising robots.
"Suddenly, everybody's talking about robots and robotics. ..."
Obviously I'm going to the wrong parties, no one around me is talking about robots.
I'm 37 and robots still can't perform the simple things I wanted them to do when I was 4
A robotic arm that can attach to drywall and is light enough to not need drywall anchors or drill into a stud. It is mounted above and/or behind the door. With the push of a remote, it opens/closes the door. I shouldn't have to replace the whole damn door. The robotic arm should adapt to a traditional door.
Why would you need or want a robot arm that can do that when you can just buy a simple automatic door opener?
Even if it's light enough to hang on drywall without screwing into a stud, anything that moves and exerts force on the drywall is going to work loose eventually-- better to mount it to a stud, even if it's a high-tech robot arm.
Robot, find my keys. No, the keys do not have an RFID tag. I know you don't know where they are right now. Systematically search for them without trampling pets or trashing my shit.
Who wants a robot searching through the entire house? What if your girlfriend dropped the keys down her shirt? Let the robot fondle her too many times in search of keys and you may find that she no longer needs *you*!.
Shave me. Don't poke new holes in my face.
I don't even trust other humans to do that for me - and not even (*especially* not even) a barber with a straight razor, no matter how close the shave will be.
Scan every girl in the club. Breakdown the odds each girl could get pregnant tonight. Weed out those menstruating. OK, yeah, I definitely did not think about that when I was in 4. The tricorder fantasies came later.
You forgot the most important criteria "Identify which of the fertile (or infertile, depending on your preference) girls would be willing to go out with you"... which, if you're using a robot to screen out women based on where they are in their menstrual cycle, is easy to answer.... None of them.
Though a better way to get the kind of woman you're seeking would be to visit a brothel (legal or otherwise...). If all you're looking for is safe sex, it's much better to go to a professional.
I could certainly imagine some kind of hormone detector that can sample the air around the woman (or maybe her breath) could do what you want, but you don't need a robot for that.
Like me. I live alone, and so I don't cook very often. Mostly I get home from work, heat something up quickly and that is dinner.
I started on a daily multivitamin about a year ago, and have since generally felt better. For the minimal expense I will stick with my daily multivitamin.
YMMV.
You mean you took a pill that you thought would make you feel better and you felt better? That's not really evidence that the additional vitamins did anything but give you well fortified urine.
Another key point here (with both devices that we're talking about) is that they both have to fly indoors. Usually when that's the case (especially with that flying bike, holy shit it's HUGE!) it's due to 'wind being an obstacle'.
Just because it has to fly indoors today doesn't mean that it couldn't some day be constructed to allow outdoors use. It's not like there are no "craft" that fly outdoors with large, fragile wings.
The heavier than air craft built by bicycle mechanics I was talking about was not a pedal powered aircraft but rather, a much earlier model of airplane
I bet you $200 that you'll never ever ever see on out in the real world (I'll give you 10 years - and I expect US dollars).
Look, I'm not trying to down-play the invention itself, it's got a few good things about it, like I said, the radio-vision is cool. However I'll bet that in the end, all that gets used is the radio-vision, as the whole battle of "lift" has already been fought out in all practical manner possible.
That's the point. It's not meant to be a finished product that Amazon will use to deliver packages to you tomorrow, it's a proof of concept that uses some interesting technology. A completely autonomous, obstacle avoiding, flapped wing aircraft that weighs less than 20g is awfully impressive.
These days there are simply to many requirements for safety reasons for some "spinning winged" craft to make a breakthrough.
Good thing it's not a "spinning winged" craft.
So, it can turn on, fly at a certain height, and avoid things - all for 9 minutes. I mean, yeah that's sorta cool how they utilize the stereo vision, and that it's got the ability to slow one if it's "wings" in order to avoid things. But it looks like it's only going to work indoors, with all fans off. Being that there's no way to control it, seems like it'd be less than entertaining, other than to present to an unsuspecting audience, like slashdot. Other than that, troll me into oblivion, I suspect it's lame.
If you think that's lame, I heard that some idiot bike mechanic brothers demonstrated a so-called flying machine that could barely get 10 feet off the ground and couldn't even stay in the air for 60 seconds. What a joke! It's clear that it's doomed to fail since the early prototype was so limited.
Lots, and lots, of spying. Russia is masturbating over the opportunity to offer free WiFi.
Would it be any more difficult to spy with hardwired connections?
If there's a movie I want to own, I purchase a used DVD from Amazon and rip it myself -- then I can transcode it to any format I want (even extracting audio-only to listen to in the car if I want to), and no one can later decide that they didn't mean to sell it to me and reverse the purchase, and even if the vendor I bought it from goes out of business or leaves the streaming business, I don't have to worry about how I'll be able to access the content that I already "own".
Plus, the used DVD is typically cheaper than the streaming "purchase" fee.
I'm sure many people skip the DVD middleman and just go straight to PirateBay to download their very own copy for free. I still don't know why the movie industry insists on making purchased content much less convenient than readily available pirated content. I don't mind paying a fair price for content, but why do I have to go through hoops to use that content the way I want to?
How is using an electric bulb as a heater better than using an electrical resistance heater?
Because a large amount of the "heat" output from an electric bulb is IR radiation, rather than convective heat. That IR is absorbed directly by your skin, rather than heating the air around you, which makes you feel equivalently warm at a lower ambient temperature. It also heats surfaces other than your skin, which means things like tables and chairs are going to be above ambient temperature (rather than below in a purely convective environment with heatsinking), so when you sit on a chair or put your hands on a table, you are less likely to get an icy chill, which directly affects perceived temperature and comfort.
Please, stop with your fake scientific explanation. If you're 2 meters from a 100W electric bulb that's radiating 100% of its energy as IR (which excludes the substantial conductive and convective losses), your body is receiving around 2 watts per square meter. Since your body has about 2 square meters of skin, you're feeling around 2 watts of energy across the entire half of your body pointed toward the light.
You'll need a lot more than a few light bulbs to keep you warm.
Radiant heat does work, but you need a more heat than the few watts of energy you feel from a light bulb.
> You'd need 15 100W Bulbs to replace the heat of a single 1500W plug-in heater.
You must not be married. Turning on 15 lights and leaving them on is not a challenge for the average Canadian wife. They do it naturally.
But who has 15 lamps in a single room? My furnace generates around 40,000 btus/hour or around 12KW worth of heat. I don't have 120 bulbs in the house that I could turn on to replace the heat from the furnace.
I'm all for being environmentally friendly but CFLs are nasty...look what you gotta do if you break one: http://www2.epa.gov/cfl/cleaning-broken-cfl
How big of a problem is breaking CFL's? In over 10 years of using CFL's, I haven't broken any. but then, the only non-CFL I remember breaking is one where the base was stuck in the sock and the bulb broke when I was twisting it.
Spending 15 minutes in cleanup for something that happens very rarely seems like a small tradeoff. If the longer lifetime of CFL's let's me avoid one bulb change of a bulb that requires me to go out to the garage to get a ladder, then it's already saved me more time that it would take to clean up a CFL.
On the surface, this seems great...much more energy efficient (e.g. less electrical consumption, less energy converted to heat, etc.), good quality of light (finally), and they last a long time, but the mercury threat will spell the demise of these. Unfortunately, it will take a few decades of these being tossed into the waste stream and the obligatory horrific mercury-caused maladies as it "may be toxic to blood, kidneys, liver, brain, peripheral nervous system, central nervous system." Fantastic...environmentalists and politicians making decisions based on emotions rather than on science.
You know what else contains mercury? Coal.
http://www.popularmechanics.com/home/reviews/news/4217864
Approximately 0.0234 mg of mercury—plus carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide—releases into the air per 1 kwh of electricity that a coal-fired power plant generates. Over the 7500-hour average range of one CFL, then, a plant will emit 13.16 mg of mercury to sustain a 75-watt incandescent bulb but only 3.51 mg of mercury to sustain a 20-watt CFL (the lightning equivalent of a 75-watt traditional bulb). Even if the mercury contained in a CFL was directly released into the atmosphere, an incandescent would still contribute 4.65 more milligrams of mercury into the environment over its lifetime.
You need to think of a bigger picture. In an easy bak oven the "LIGHT" is a waste product. In areas and times fo the year that a person it running a heater, the light bulb gives you both Light and heat, so only the magnetic field is a waste.
And in areas and times of the year that you use air conditioning, the A/C is doing extra work to remove the waste heat from the bulbs. So except for those people that use electrical resistance heating in the winter and never use air conditioning or fans to keep their house cool, more efficient lighting still saves them money.
The power consumption advantages are often nullified by the mortality rate of modern lighting if your power fluctuates as it does in many rural and semi-rural areas.
I demand reliability.
BTW incandescent bulbs are nice for heating my well pump house and chicken coop. I can buy separate heaters, but they cost more and nullify any ecological advantages from running "eco bulbs" to light those places.
That depends on whether or not you always need heat when you need light. If you run the bulbs all night long because you need heat but not
neccessarily light, then using a dedicated heater makes sense -- especially when it won't "burn out" and need to be replaced every 1000 hours.
If you sometimes need light but not heat (like in the summer where you might be running a fan to *remove* heat), then using efficient bulbs is a win.
What is the purpose of this insane scheme?
To help people that can't do math, do the math.
Did your little anecdote have a point?
I think he's pretending that it takes 90W of CFL's to be equivalent to a single 100W incandescent.
Why not just put a heavy tax on the light bulbs instead of banning them?
That way you can raise some revenue and make improvements, while people who really want incandescents can get them (like science teachers teaching V = IR, or people who really prefer the spectrum and don't care too much about the cost).
Light bulbs are not good for teaching V=IR since the resistance varies with the heat of the filament, so diverge from calculations at low current. Better to use resistors.