I'm a theist who reads and enjoys your books. You've often made the point that different religions can have different faults, and criticisms that apply to (for instance) Christianity are not globally applicable to all religions. I believe you've even said that religions like my own (pantheism, essential monist, science-based variety) are in your view completely unnecessary, but not inherently evil or even provably wrong.
Yet many of your most fervent admirers approach atheism with the same faith-based, dogmatic belief as a medieval inquisitor's belief in Christianity... they invoke your name like the Pope's, and treat the non-existence of any form of deity (no matter how defined) as an article of holy writ, which cannot be gainsayed. They honestly have less open minds than most Protestants I know; they invariably start from a conclusion and proceed to redefine other people's words until they have convinced themselves they've "proved" that theists are all equally evil and that "religion poisons everything".
I was very impressed by your recommendation that the British Humanist Association use the word "probably" in their bus billboards, just as you use "almost certainly" in many of your own statements. That, to me, shows you are a scientist and a skeptic at heart, who has not blinded himself to the possibility of new evidence simply because it's unlikely.
How do you feel about being The Annointed Prophet of people who appear to be completely misunderstanding the problem of unreasoning faith, and the mental discipline required for the scientific method? Does it peeve you, or is it an acceptable burden under the circumstances?
I've seen every drive in a purchase batch fail within a single week. Expensive server-grade drives, too.
So, we mix our drives in RAID arrays. This is more important with larger drives and RAID5 (which I no longer use personally but others here still do) since in the time it takes to rebuild a RAID5, if you lose another disk or two you're sunk.
My thought on buying them separately is that you run the risk of getting devices with different firmware levels or other manufacturer revisions which would be less than ideal when raided together.
That's not exactly hard to check or manage, honestly.
We replace systems (disks included) when the 4 year warranty expires.
That explains a lot; you'll almost never see these kinds of problems. Most drives either fail in the first couple of weeks or they last past the warranty.
Your premise - that destroying production facilities for a commodity somehow does not raise prices - is untenable.
Everything else you are saying is rationalization of your false premise, and unconvincing. Supply and demand are not something you can wave away with propaganda about "stabilization". Saddam sold oil for less, which cut into the profits of American oil interests, and that's simply a fact. If you choose to deny physical realities I can't help you with that.
You're projecting on to others, at least in my case. I don't think the way you seem to, in two-sided confrontational memes; I am a registered Republican who frequently votes Libertarian or Green Party.
You claim I started with "oil is evil" as an axiom. This is patently false. If anything, I love oil. I use it every day. And that's why, like Nikola Tesla said around 1915, I don't want short-sighted idiots to burn it up. When I occasionally change the oil in my antique electric tractor I recycle it.
You imply that the USA has "stabilized oil producing areas in the Middle East" which tells me that either you haven't paid any attention at all to actual oil prices (for decades) or you have a very odd definition of "stablize" which includes radicalizing generations of Muslims in the Middle East, Africa, and Indonesia, destroying dozens of major production facilities, and turning formerly lovely cities into smoking wastelands.
See, I look at real things, not claims made by people who want to sell me stuff. If you do that, maybe some of the things that are baffling you will make sense?
For example, go downtown and look at the price of a can of motor oil. Write it down. Now wait until after the election and check again. Then, after you do that, try and tell me that US government policies are intended to keep oil inexpensive.
You have to be not just irrational, but willfully blind to believe that using military force to prevent Iraq, Iran and Venezuela from abandoning the petrodollar is some kind of effort to impoverish US oil producers who give billions to politicians. US government policy under Bush was essentially directed by oil companies, and Obama has certainly not made anything more than token moves against them.
I should be compensated if a private company wants to make money by reducing my quality of living.
Sure, but the anti-green, pro-corporate movement has no morals... only causes and crusades. As far as they are concerned, you personally will just have to suffer, so America can be Free and Strong. Freedom isn't free, as they will be sure to remind you - so buy lots of Halliburton and Texaco!
I was under the impression that the manufacturing processes to make the power plant / batteries for *POPULAR BRAND OF HYBRID VEHICLE* released the equivalent quantity of CO2 into the atmosphere as would be saved by the reduced CO2 released by the hybrid drive over it's serviceable life.
That's neo-con disinformation, operating at several levels, that is being distributed by marketing organizations like CNW. Not only is it factually incorrect, it also implies CO2 is the most significant car exhaust pollution issue, which it certainly isn't, and ignores the fact that auto batteries are recycled (in the USA) at a rate exceeding 95%.
There's also the issue of "service life". We all heard the stories of how buying a new Prius battery would cost more than the car, and we'd have to do it every three years - yet I have 130,000+ miles on my ten year old battery pack and it has had zero maintenance and zero problems. Other people have gone 300,000 miles with no issues. Good quality electric motors, such as the traction motors in Japanese hybrids, have a 40 year service life before rebuilding - and if the bearings are replaced at the first sign of heat or noise brushless motors can last over a hundred years. I have an 80 year old electric fan in my house (it has hand-wound coils and hand-cut steel gears in the oscillating mechanism) and it works better than modern plastic chinese-made fans - pushes more air and uses less energy, because it's extremely well made. Service life estimates based on worst-case fantasies of hybrid haters are clearly not realistic.
The net being a loss to society, as the process for making the batteries released toxic elements not used in making regular combustion engine cars.
Again, this is factually incorrect. Even if you accept the ridiculous definitions of pollution and service life, it's still just plain not true, and has been repeatedlydebunked in peer-reviewedliterature and in journals. Of course the Wall Street Journal and Fox News will keep repeating absurd anti-environment propaganda forever, but those are not reality-based news sources.
The answer is to tax pollution. I'm sure manufacturers could produce a cleaner car if there was money in it.
Good God, man, are you looking for a horse's head in your bed?
If there's one place where Republicans and Democrats come together, it's on their mad drive to destroy any semblance of well-regulated capitalism. Using the profit motive to drive technology forwards is anathema.
Sometimes I think there's a group of people who just want power to be expensive
We call them "Texas Oil Barons".
For the cost of reinstalling the slave-holding tyrants of Kuwait, we could have instead built a sustainable, biologically derived methane infrastructure that would deliver more gas at less cost than fracking, while creating career jobs on American soil.
But that would drive the price of Texas Oil down. Way down. Which cannot be allowed!
Now I can pull up the whole of human knowledge on my phone, if I know what to say to the device.
The only problem is you might actually think that's true!
I have books in my library that will never be on your phone, and my father has knowledge of the US Space Race in his head that wikipedia won't accept because it hasn't been published anywhere. Most of that knowledge will die with him, although of course a little bit has passed down to his grandchildren.
Pretty close! Former Rocket Scientist. With friends and family still in the business... but I sold out for those rectangular pieces of paper the government prints. The pay scale in any real science sucks, because there's so many people lining up to do it for pennies. So now I do make-work of no lasting value whatsoever, for much more money, which lets me adopt children and buy electric vehicles and stuff. It's a trade-off.
I've been down this road a few times - install separate ductwork leading in and out of the server/telco room (with the intakes on the opposite side of the building from your other ductwork) if you can possibly afford it.
Dirt and machine oil and metal filings can move surprising distances. Separate HVAC to the server room works far better than extra filters which just get clogged.
Also, like others have said - conduit for data lines to every workstation. Potentially cheaper than fiber (if you do it right the first time) and more durable and future-proof.
Given a choice, I'd rather see them stop forcing private citizens to use proprietary formats (like Microsoft Word) instead of organizing large payouts of taxpayer dollars to favored tech companies.
Why is it that USA space tech prefers water splashdowns instead of dry land like the Russians and Chinese?
IAAFRS. It's cheaper, safer, and fails more elegantly (more likely to give you a recoverable crew module that can be analyzed). Korolev might have preferred wet landings but the USSR's leadership did not trust the US Navy.
"Softer landings" doesn't quite cut it as a reason, for at the speed of the impact, water is just as hard as terra firma.
Nope, the capsules land very slowly, on the end of parachutes after significant braking.
Early Soviet designs eject the pilot & flight recorder on a sled which then parachutes down. The actual capsule pancakes at fairly high speed and is completely destroyed, unlike water-landed capsules.
Then there's the risk of crew drowning and/or craft loss thru sinking. That doesn't occur in dry land.
Those are very real risks, but keep in mind that the capsule is a viable space environment, so pretty similar to a submarine.
Being a brilliant business person is identifying market trends and acting on them. Which means finding out what people want and delivering it to them at prices they can afford. To do this you need to get people with the right skills together on a voluntary basis by offering them compensation that they need to agree with.
Nope, you can torture and enslave people, extort them, kidnap their families and be widely hailed as a brilliant business person. There's really no requirement at all that participation be "voluntary". Plenty of existing businesses, and even more historically, are or were based on exploitation of workers and/or customers.
In other words, it's up to the business person to get people together in such a way that everyone involved is benefiting and is better of than they would have been otherwise.
No, same mistake. You're confusing "worthwhile human being" or maybe "brilliant statesman" with "brilliant business person". Have you ever heard a first person account of how Steve Jobs interacted with Andy Herzfeld? Jobs was brutally verbally abusive, and used his ability to intimidate and dominate Herzfeld to create key components of the system that enriched Jobs (and, to a much lesser extent, Herzfeld) without any consideration for how this might harm anyone. Yet everyone considers Jobs a brilliant business person!
There are thousands more examples, from the New England slave trade to modern Chinese labor practices. I wish you were right, but you've added some things (like, basic human decency) that are not a part of this generation's definition of a brilliant business person.
A Jill Stein vote will not be seen as a call for some political integrity, unfortunately. It will be interpreted as a pro-sustainability, anti-plutocracy vote by the brains (the Rove/Matlin/Carville types) and as crazy, un-american hippy lunacy by the brain-washed and brainless.
Yeah, isn't it totally weird how fanatic Republicans won't admit that Obama is an intelligent man who speaks well?
It's equally weird how fanatic Democrats won't admit the significance of Obama's failure to fulfill his promises to hold telcos accountable for illegal wiretapping, roll back excessive Bush-era secrecy and claims of executive privilege, and end torture. If the man's morals are sufficiently flexible to both disavow and permit torture, that's pretty damn significant.
Well, there is garbage like you that lives on the crums and like a dog should be grateful for even being allowed to exist. And then there are individuals like me, with ambition, whose wants are achieved through ambition, and that shiny new car will be mine when I want it, because I have the capabilities to achieve my goals...
So you are right, your kind does need to learn how to seperate your "wants" from your "needs", because you are begging at my table, and I will only give you the minimum to cover your needs.
Hey, what is Mitt Romney doing on slashdot? Go back to Facebook, Mittens!
they would not have that problem if they did not release a totally broken chunk of shit in the first place
Traditionally (in the linux world) you release early and often, and it's up to the distributions not to package totally broken chunks of shit as their default install. Don't ask developers to hide their code until it is perfect (because that's impossible - real user feedback is required for good development) ask the distros to stop packaging the latest half-baked crap as if it were actually stable. That stuff should be optional packages.
Lately it seems like the major distros cherry-pick a few favored softwares that are not ready yet and include them as default, but then turn around and don't offer equally unstable stuff even as options. Look at the state of AoE support in Red Hat - why don't they track Fedora's AoE package, when they are including all kinds of X-crap from Fedora that is far less useful or stable?
A tree with many forks for work, and laptops, and home, and HTPC, etc. And therefore, it cannot be represented on slashdot, due to the so-called lameness filter.
Anyway, I started on Yggdrasil and now run quite a few distros simultaneously for different use cases.
Oh, and Fedora has been a huge disappointment, but RHEL is reasonably good for business purposes.
It did help that our local power utility subsidized these bulbs, they're expensive - between $40 - $50 a pop. I got mine for half price because of the subsidy.
No you got yours for half price up front, with the remaining half coming from either your electric bill or taxes over time. No such thing as a free lunch.
Or p'raps the remaining half was paid for by his neighbors, who did not convert to energy efficient bulbs. Without examining the power company's books, you really have no idea who paid for lunch... you're either guessing, or just filling in what you'd prefer to believe is true.
But you're right - it wasn't free!
Personally I'd rather have sustainable technology subsidies provided through pollution taxes, including carbon taxes. This nonsense of taxing middle-class income and then using the money to fund social goods is dumb; it punishes workers twice, first by penalizing wage income, and then by allowing polluters to externalize the costs of the cancer and land devaluation their pollution creates back on to the working public. In a well managed capitalism, instead of discouraging wage-earning, you'd be discouraging activities that poison the natural commons and destroy non-renewable resources.
But using necessary taxation to discourage activities destructive to everyone and encourage a work ethic is an antique idea, which post-Reagan politicians will only talk about during campaigns and never enact once in office. Once in office, it's tax the middle class and let the ultra-rich pollute with impunity, business as usual, regardless of party affiliations.
Short version: it simply can't compete with gasoline or lithium-ion batteries in most uses and does nothing to reduce dependencies on other sources of power, because usable amounts of free hydrogen do not occur in nature. You have to make hydrogen.
Slashdot Mirror
Without that huge capacitor, it's as dirty as it gets. And isn't the efficiency determined by the diode voltage drop?
Hey, look, I built a pedant cascade!
I'm a theist who reads and enjoys your books. You've often made the point that different religions can have different faults, and criticisms that apply to (for instance) Christianity are not globally applicable to all religions. I believe you've even said that religions like my own (pantheism, essential monist, science-based variety) are in your view completely unnecessary, but not inherently evil or even provably wrong.
Yet many of your most fervent admirers approach atheism with the same faith-based, dogmatic belief as a medieval inquisitor's belief in Christianity... they invoke your name like the Pope's, and treat the non-existence of any form of deity (no matter how defined) as an article of holy writ, which cannot be gainsayed. They honestly have less open minds than most Protestants I know; they invariably start from a conclusion and proceed to redefine other people's words until they have convinced themselves they've "proved" that theists are all equally evil and that "religion poisons everything".
I was very impressed by your recommendation that the British Humanist Association use the word "probably" in their bus billboards, just as you use "almost certainly" in many of your own statements. That, to me, shows you are a scientist and a skeptic at heart, who has not blinded himself to the possibility of new evidence simply because it's unlikely.
How do you feel about being The Annointed Prophet of people who appear to be completely misunderstanding the problem of unreasoning faith, and the mental discipline required for the scientific method? Does it peeve you, or is it an acceptable burden under the circumstances?
Here, have some Sputnik.
I've seen every drive in a purchase batch fail within a single week. Expensive server-grade drives, too.
So, we mix our drives in RAID arrays. This is more important with larger drives and RAID5 (which I no longer use personally but others here still do) since in the time it takes to rebuild a RAID5, if you lose another disk or two you're sunk.
That's not exactly hard to check or manage, honestly.
That explains a lot; you'll almost never see these kinds of problems. Most drives either fail in the first couple of weeks or they last past the warranty.
Your premise - that destroying production facilities for a commodity somehow does not raise prices - is untenable.
Everything else you are saying is rationalization of your false premise, and unconvincing. Supply and demand are not something you can wave away with propaganda about "stabilization". Saddam sold oil for less, which cut into the profits of American oil interests, and that's simply a fact. If you choose to deny physical realities I can't help you with that.
You're projecting on to others, at least in my case. I don't think the way you seem to, in two-sided confrontational memes; I am a registered Republican who frequently votes Libertarian or Green Party.
You claim I started with "oil is evil" as an axiom. This is patently false. If anything, I love oil. I use it every day. And that's why, like Nikola Tesla said around 1915, I don't want short-sighted idiots to burn it up. When I occasionally change the oil in my antique electric tractor I recycle it.
You imply that the USA has "stabilized oil producing areas in the Middle East" which tells me that either you haven't paid any attention at all to actual oil prices (for decades) or you have a very odd definition of "stablize" which includes radicalizing generations of Muslims in the Middle East, Africa, and Indonesia, destroying dozens of major production facilities, and turning formerly lovely cities into smoking wastelands.
See, I look at real things, not claims made by people who want to sell me stuff. If you do that, maybe some of the things that are baffling you will make sense?
For example, go downtown and look at the price of a can of motor oil. Write it down. Now wait until after the election and check again. Then, after you do that, try and tell me that US government policies are intended to keep oil inexpensive.
You have to be not just irrational, but willfully blind to believe that using military force to prevent Iraq, Iran and Venezuela from abandoning the petrodollar is some kind of effort to impoverish US oil producers who give billions to politicians. US government policy under Bush was essentially directed by oil companies, and Obama has certainly not made anything more than token moves against them.
Sure, but the anti-green, pro-corporate movement has no morals... only causes and crusades. As far as they are concerned, you personally will just have to suffer, so America can be Free and Strong. Freedom isn't free, as they will be sure to remind you - so buy lots of Halliburton and Texaco!
That's neo-con disinformation, operating at several levels, that is being distributed by marketing organizations like CNW. Not only is it factually incorrect, it also implies CO2 is the most significant car exhaust pollution issue, which it certainly isn't, and ignores the fact that auto batteries are recycled (in the USA) at a rate exceeding 95%.
There's also the issue of "service life". We all heard the stories of how buying a new Prius battery would cost more than the car, and we'd have to do it every three years - yet I have 130,000+ miles on my ten year old battery pack and it has had zero maintenance and zero problems. Other people have gone 300,000 miles with no issues. Good quality electric motors, such as the traction motors in Japanese hybrids, have a 40 year service life before rebuilding - and if the bearings are replaced at the first sign of heat or noise brushless motors can last over a hundred years. I have an 80 year old electric fan in my house (it has hand-wound coils and hand-cut steel gears in the oscillating mechanism) and it works better than modern plastic chinese-made fans - pushes more air and uses less energy, because it's extremely well made. Service life estimates based on worst-case fantasies of hybrid haters are clearly not realistic.
Again, this is factually incorrect. Even if you accept the ridiculous definitions of pollution and service life, it's still just plain not true, and has been repeatedly debunked in peer-reviewed literature and in journals. Of course the Wall Street Journal and Fox News will keep repeating absurd anti-environment propaganda forever, but those are not reality-based news sources.
Good God, man, are you looking for a horse's head in your bed?
If there's one place where Republicans and Democrats come together, it's on their mad drive to destroy any semblance of well-regulated capitalism. Using the profit motive to drive technology forwards is anathema.
You were doing great until the last sentence.
Hell, if you live in India, even the thorium fantasy is reasonable.
We call them "Texas Oil Barons".
For the cost of reinstalling the slave-holding tyrants of Kuwait, we could have instead built a sustainable, biologically derived methane infrastructure that would deliver more gas at less cost than fracking, while creating career jobs on American soil.
But that would drive the price of Texas Oil down. Way down. Which cannot be allowed!
The only problem is you might actually think that's true!
I have books in my library that will never be on your phone, and my father has knowledge of the US Space Race in his head that wikipedia won't accept because it hasn't been published anywhere. Most of that knowledge will die with him, although of course a little bit has passed down to his grandchildren.
Pretty close! Former Rocket Scientist. With friends and family still in the business... but I sold out for those rectangular pieces of paper the government prints. The pay scale in any real science sucks, because there's so many people lining up to do it for pennies. So now I do make-work of no lasting value whatsoever, for much more money, which lets me adopt children and buy electric vehicles and stuff. It's a trade-off.
I've been down this road a few times - install separate ductwork leading in and out of the server/telco room (with the intakes on the opposite side of the building from your other ductwork) if you can possibly afford it.
Dirt and machine oil and metal filings can move surprising distances. Separate HVAC to the server room works far better than extra filters which just get clogged.
Also, like others have said - conduit for data lines to every workstation. Potentially cheaper than fiber (if you do it right the first time) and more durable and future-proof.
If I owned Java and mySQL I'd be preaching the gospel of "The Cloud" too.
Given a choice, I'd rather see them stop forcing private citizens to use proprietary formats (like Microsoft Word) instead of organizing large payouts of taxpayer dollars to favored tech companies.
IAAFRS. It's cheaper, safer, and fails more elegantly (more likely to give you a recoverable crew module that can be analyzed). Korolev might have preferred wet landings but the USSR's leadership did not trust the US Navy.
Nope, the capsules land very slowly, on the end of parachutes after significant braking.
Early Soviet designs eject the pilot & flight recorder on a sled which then parachutes down. The actual capsule pancakes at fairly high speed and is completely destroyed, unlike water-landed capsules.
Those are very real risks, but keep in mind that the capsule is a viable space environment, so pretty similar to a submarine.
Nope, you can torture and enslave people, extort them, kidnap their families and be widely hailed as a brilliant business person. There's really no requirement at all that participation be "voluntary". Plenty of existing businesses, and even more historically, are or were based on exploitation of workers and/or customers.
No, same mistake. You're confusing "worthwhile human being" or maybe "brilliant statesman" with "brilliant business person". Have you ever heard a first person account of how Steve Jobs interacted with Andy Herzfeld? Jobs was brutally verbally abusive, and used his ability to intimidate and dominate Herzfeld to create key components of the system that enriched Jobs (and, to a much lesser extent, Herzfeld) without any consideration for how this might harm anyone. Yet everyone considers Jobs a brilliant business person!
There are thousands more examples, from the New England slave trade to modern Chinese labor practices. I wish you were right, but you've added some things (like, basic human decency) that are not a part of this generation's definition of a brilliant business person.
Well, there's always Jill Stein.
A Jill Stein vote will not be seen as a call for some political integrity, unfortunately. It will be interpreted as a pro-sustainability, anti-plutocracy vote by the brains (the Rove/Matlin/Carville types) and as crazy, un-american hippy lunacy by the brain-washed and brainless.
Yeah, isn't it totally weird how fanatic Republicans won't admit that Obama is an intelligent man who speaks well?
It's equally weird how fanatic Democrats won't admit the significance of Obama's failure to fulfill his promises to hold telcos accountable for illegal wiretapping, roll back excessive Bush-era secrecy and claims of executive privilege, and end torture. If the man's morals are sufficiently flexible to both disavow and permit torture, that's pretty damn significant.
Oh noes! I used PROFANITY!
Hey, what is Mitt Romney doing on slashdot? Go back to Facebook, Mittens!
Traditionally (in the linux world) you release early and often, and it's up to the distributions not to package totally broken chunks of shit as their default install. Don't ask developers to hide their code until it is perfect (because that's impossible - real user feedback is required for good development) ask the distros to stop packaging the latest half-baked crap as if it were actually stable. That stuff should be optional packages.
Lately it seems like the major distros cherry-pick a few favored softwares that are not ready yet and include them as default, but then turn around and don't offer equally unstable stuff even as options. Look at the state of AoE support in Red Hat - why don't they track Fedora's AoE package, when they are including all kinds of X-crap from Fedora that is far less useful or stable?
A tree with many forks for work, and laptops, and home, and HTPC, etc. And therefore, it cannot be represented on slashdot, due to the so-called lameness filter.
Anyway, I started on Yggdrasil and now run quite a few distros simultaneously for different use cases.
Oh, and Fedora has been a huge disappointment, but RHEL is reasonably good for business purposes.
Or p'raps the remaining half was paid for by his neighbors, who did not convert to energy efficient bulbs. Without examining the power company's books, you really have no idea who paid for lunch... you're either guessing, or just filling in what you'd prefer to believe is true.
But you're right - it wasn't free!
Personally I'd rather have sustainable technology subsidies provided through pollution taxes, including carbon taxes. This nonsense of taxing middle-class income and then using the money to fund social goods is dumb; it punishes workers twice, first by penalizing wage income, and then by allowing polluters to externalize the costs of the cancer and land devaluation their pollution creates back on to the working public. In a well managed capitalism, instead of discouraging wage-earning, you'd be discouraging activities that poison the natural commons and destroy non-renewable resources.
But using necessary taxation to discourage activities destructive to everyone and encourage a work ethic is an antique idea, which post-Reagan politicians will only talk about during campaigns and never enact once in office. Once in office, it's tax the middle class and let the ultra-rich pollute with impunity, business as usual, regardless of party affiliations.
I recommend Darryl McMahon's book if you want to see a solid analysis of hydrogen.
Short version: it simply can't compete with gasoline or lithium-ion batteries in most uses and does nothing to reduce dependencies on other sources of power, because usable amounts of free hydrogen do not occur in nature. You have to make hydrogen.