It's time that voters opened their mind and started voting for polymaths instead of someone they can identify with. The latter is invariably a recipe for failure. You want someone who can make informed decisions about things you don't know about, not just those you feel for and the candidate claims to agree with.
In principle, you may well be right. In practice, well, in my state that's not an option.
That's because here in my state, write-in votes are no longer tallied or counted in any way. And of course there's no way to know what people actually voted for anyway, since we were the first state in the nation to have completely non-auditable voting machines. I vote, and I even volunteer to staff a voting booth, but I am not convinced that any citizen's vote is ever really counted at all. I just do it out of pure cussedness.
if you try to search for something illegal, at least have the intelligence to do it from brand new (or stolen) computer, without any ID already entered, with just created email accounts, from any "Free" wireless spot, and once you are done, you better burn this computer.
It's traditional to use the PC on your dickweed boss or cow-orker's desk.
My boss and colleagues are excellent, so I would have to use the head of HR's computer.
Luckily there's a building master key in the computer room's DR box.
If he were genuinely interested in making the government more accessible, he would have told them to adhere to strict HTML standards without vendor extensions, and W3C accessibility guidelines, so they work with any browser, whether mobile or not, or not even existing yet, instead of tailoring it to specific clients or types of clients.
Did it occur to you that a career politician is unlikely to know any of that?
It's really good advice, though. A website that is minimally styled and standards compliant lets the endpoint device determine optimal format, which means that end users can judge the quality and personal applicability of their devices by how well they render your content. Everybody wins - except crap vendors who can't deliver a good web experience without special coding on the server side, and crap web designers who over-specify their presentation layer or drive navigation through nontextual blobs. And frankly, we want the crap vendors and designers to lose, it's part of how the web is supposed to work.
Now you know why they call it the Cato Institute
on
HP To Cut 30,000 Jobs
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I like that idea. Enslave your people, fire them when they're worn and hire new slaves. What can possibly go wrong?
Auctionem uti faciat: vendat oleum, si pretium habeat, vinum, frumentum quod supersit vendat; boves vetulos, armenta delicula, oves deliculas, lanam, pelles, plostrum vetus, ferramenta vetera, servum senem, servum morbosum, et siquid aliut supersit, vendat. Patrem familias vendacem, non emacem esse oportet. -- De Agricultura, Marcus Porcius Cato, ~160 BC
"Sell worn-out oxen, blemished cattle, blemished sheep, wool, hides, an old wagon, old tools, an old slave, a sickly slave, and whatever else is superfluous. The master should have the selling habit, not the buying habit." -- Hooper & Ash public domain translation.
Randall's estimated cost of buying enough solar panels to power US homes for one year (based on extrapolating from 2005 data and California usage) doesn't really address the issue I thought we were talking about, which is that the original poster thinks solar panels can't produce a useful amount of power because they take up too much space.
However, I love XKCD and welcome any chance to link to Randall's work! So good job there.
PS: Bio-generated natural gas is the fuel of the future. It's carbon-neutral, it scales with population, it's possible to create it anywhere on Earth, and we already have all the infrastructure we need to distribute and use it. It's the cheapest, safest, least-polluting option, and it doesn't require militarized central facilities or poisoning the water table.
Only stupid people think a device that stores useful amounts of energy can be inherently "safe". Stupid people are dangerous! If you understand that energy storage has hazards, and take steps to understand and control those hazards, you can be perfectly safe.
Lithium Ion cells can burn or explode during the charging cycle or when shorted. This is simple fact, easily verified (don't breath the smoke!).
This is not normally a problem. In your laptop, the individual cells that make up the battery pack are connected with fusible links. These are basically very thin pieces of wire, that will melt at fairly low temperatures, that are glued to each Li-Ion cell.
When you are charging your battery pack, or if you foolishly short it out, the fusible links will melt before the Li-Ion cells have reached a high enough temperature to explode or burn. This will disconnect the cells from the power supply and/or short, so the battery pack will become instantly useless (instead of becoming a grenade or campfire).
If your lithium Ion battery pack in your laptop gets worse and worse for months or years and finally just won't hold a charge, it wore out normally. If one day it's just dead, with no warning at all, well your friend the fusible link probably saved your genitalia from laptop-induced cauterization.
The basic problem with this is that fusible links are not testable. You could test 99% of every batch, but you can't test the one in your laptop, because it's a one-use device like an explosive bolt.
But computer vendors have been very good about enforcing quality control on the Li-Ion packs they buy from battery vendors. If anyone's been hurt they've apparently been paid off handsomely, "Fight Club" style, and you can only see a few videos of spontaneously combusting laptops on the Intertubes. You're very unlikely to have your own mass-market laptop ever hurt you, basically because that's bad for business.
USPS has a different problem. Greedy bureaucrats cutting costs by hiring unskilled, ignorant monkeys to ship things. Gormless politicians creating workplaces that are dehumanizing and soul-destroying. The monkeys and dispirited humans who work in such places are quite likely to accidentally drive a metal object (think, forklift prong) deep into a pallet of Lithium Ion cells... and fusible links won't stop that short. And since it takes a while for a pallet of batteries to get into full blazing inferno mode, it could go unnoticed until well after the plane is off the runway.
Cast iron bathtubs, particularly antique ones, are very desirable and command high prices if they are in good condition.
I'm refitting a bathroom in a 160+ year old house. The bathroom was originally installed in the late 1930s. The prices for original-quality parts are jaw dropping - you can easily pay $1200 for a faucet set (although I don't).
In the trades, the old stuff that has survived is incredibly high quality, for the most part. Victorian machined brass plumbing, for example, is awesome! I have replaced worn out ABS, bristol and polybutalene that was attached to 90 year old figured and threaded brass in perfect condition. PEX is nice but it will never match hand-cut victorian red brass.
Something similar is true in computing; you see old VMS and PDP systems running all over the place, because of their extreme cost effectiveness. Unix derived OSes dominate cutting edge hardware, despite Unix's age and shortcomings. It's survival of the fittest - DECnet IV was better than DECnet/OSI, so almost nobody upgraded, even though DECnet IV was not perfect.
The problem is less one of "user replaceable batteries" than it is of "unique batteries". OTOH, with battery technology evolving as fast as it is... I'm not sure there's a clear fix for the problem.
Sure there is. Don't buy anything that uses unique batteries or proprietary storage media.
Use the free market, instead of being abused by it.
I wonder what sort of reaction there would be if instead of autism, this paper was dealing with a potential to detect/fix some more politically sensitive group such as the GLBT community
People with severe gayness can still function in the world, autism not so much, some can not even talk, they simply communicate through pointing and grunting.
OK, but if you can point and grunt, you fit the profile of the typical GUI user, right?
I live in a place that has wifi where you log in with password. It is encrypted, but after logged in you can still sniff everyone else on the network. It still doesn't make it right to do so.
Likewise, your internet traffic goes unencrypted when it leaves your house. It doesn't make it right for me to plug in to that in between your house and ISP and capture that data.
HTTPS and SSH cannot be sniffed on your wifi, nor does either one "go unencrypted" when it leaves your house. Broadband providers using DOCSIS protocols also are not sniffable by your neighbors.
However, I recommend you should worry more about "is it possible" and "is it likely" rather than "is it right". Our government and the big corporations (that's redundant, I know) clearly aren't at all concerned about your ideas of right and wrong.
You seem to have mistaken me for some caricature you have built in your mind. I have never in my entire life said the US invaded countries to get cheap oil - that is your narrative, not mine, my friend.
I don't know why people believe such illogical things, but reducing the supply of something never makes it cheaper, and turning a major oilfield into a series of flaming holes always reduces the supply of oil. Did you think Bush fils and pere were both unfamiliar with basic economics? Did you think their Texas Oil Baron constituency wanted oil to get cheaper? It's nonsensical.
So, ask yourself: What three countries recently tried to break the petrodollar? What happened to them? Do you know, without Google? If not, you have no idea what is going on in world politics.
With each of those pairs, you probably thought one was reasonably accurate while the other was wrong.
Well, no, I personally did not think that. But you're still absolutely right, those extremes are exactly how the newspapers and pundits spin everything, and they never have any problem finding someone in the group who is more than willing to play the stereotypical role. Well said!
From self-proclaimed "libertarians", self-proclaimed libertarian "leaders", and libertarian "think tanks".
Is it from some twisted right-wing propaganda?
Yes it is. It comes from the twisted right wing of libertarianism. If you can't get your fanatics under control, they are going to continue to shape your public image. Sorry.
We're already sanctioning Iran because they will take Euros or Yen for oil.
This is another straw for the camel; the American public is tired of invading Middle Eastern countries to keep the price of Texas oil high, so we need them to attack us.
Blood is already in the water, the sharks are circling.
The level of proof you are demanding, which is founded in a mindset of fear, is impossible to achieve. You can always find something to fear, when you are fundamentally a terrorized coward. The likelihood of any individual act of tinkering causing harm is tiny, and well worth risking, compared to the certainty of harm that will be caused by restricting the actions of people who have as yet done no harm.
If you still don't understand why prior restraint based on fear and suspicion is inimical to the social interaction of human beings, I doubt I can explain it to you. My apologies.
Your self-important concern trolling is more "thoughtful" than my "self-impotent" (whatever that means) reply?
You can go right ahead and assume that everyone you don't know is completely incompetent, but I'm pretty sure you're just judging based on what you see in the mirror every morning.
Without exception, every EV owner I have ever met was easily competent enough to understand what could and couldn't be safely modified on the vehicle. I cannot say the same for Internet concern trolls such as yourself.
Take out the regenerative braking (or worse, power during it) and stopping distances on hydraulic only could be substantially longer.
I own two vehicles with regenerative braking and the conventional brakes in both are capable of stopping in the minimum distance achievable given the limitations derived from the weight and speed of the vehicle and the reaction time of the driver (which is the biggest factor, incidentally). Also, in my vehicles, regen cannot be turned off in software. Also, in my vehicles, regen by design creates usable power, so it does not suffer at all from power failures.
Also, if the controller thinks it should be applying power there is no option to "put it in neutral" since there is probably no clutch or gearbox to disengage.
Both my vehicles have a neutral position implemented in hardware. The only EV that I know of that does not have a means of physically disengaging the drive motors from the wheels is the electric ox (which is basically a lawnmower). But this is not really a concern, anyway - it's trivial to cut power to a traction motor compared to disengaging a mechanical power train.
It's best not to recommend policies based on guesses at how these technologies have been implemented. The owners are usually in the best position to determine who should work on their vehicles and what work should be done - allowing ignorant politicians or profit-driven car vendors to make these determinations is not wise.
Many people want to make the things they aren't competent to do, or don't trust themselves to do, illegal for YOU to do - unless you hold special license. These people may well believe that they are inherently better than you, but they also have an instinctive willingness to obey authority figures such as Milgram's white-coated doctors and government-sponsored certification authorities.
In reality, you should be able to tinker however you will with anything you own, and simply held responsible for any harm that you do in the process. Full stop.
In the USA, we've gone from an idea that our economic and political systems should be designed and implemented so that they can survive immoral participants who purposely work against the good of their own group, to a completely different idea, that immoral participants are heroic and sociopath behaviour is something our children should aspire to. We used to say "the system should function despite the presence of greedy men" and now we say "greed is good". It seems like an inversion of the most historically successful indo-european value systems to me.
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You have to be kidding me.
Or was that an ironic take on the gay marriage debate? Please say yes.
In principle, you may well be right. In practice, well, in my state that's not an option.
That's because here in my state, write-in votes are no longer tallied or counted in any way. And of course there's no way to know what people actually voted for anyway, since we were the first state in the nation to have completely non-auditable voting machines. I vote, and I even volunteer to staff a voting booth, but I am not convinced that any citizen's vote is ever really counted at all. I just do it out of pure cussedness.
It's traditional to use the PC on your dickweed boss or cow-orker's desk.
My boss and colleagues are excellent, so I would have to use the head of HR's computer.
Luckily there's a building master key in the computer room's DR box.
Did it occur to you that a career politician is unlikely to know any of that?
It's really good advice, though. A website that is minimally styled and standards compliant lets the endpoint device determine optimal format, which means that end users can judge the quality and personal applicability of their devices by how well they render your content. Everybody wins - except crap vendors who can't deliver a good web experience without special coding on the server side, and crap web designers who over-specify their presentation layer or drive navigation through nontextual blobs. And frankly, we want the crap vendors and designers to lose, it's part of how the web is supposed to work.
or shootsnap
Auctionem uti faciat: vendat oleum, si pretium habeat, vinum, frumentum quod supersit vendat; boves vetulos, armenta delicula, oves deliculas, lanam, pelles, plostrum vetus, ferramenta vetera, servum senem, servum morbosum, et siquid aliut supersit, vendat. Patrem familias vendacem, non emacem esse oportet. -- De Agricultura, Marcus Porcius Cato, ~160 BC
"Sell worn-out oxen, blemished cattle, blemished sheep, wool, hides, an old wagon, old tools, an old slave, a sickly slave, and whatever else is superfluous. The master should have the selling habit, not the buying habit." -- Hooper & Ash public domain translation.
Furthermore, Carthage must be destroyed.
Randall's estimated cost of buying enough solar panels to power US homes for one year (based on extrapolating from 2005 data and California usage) doesn't really address the issue I thought we were talking about, which is that the original poster thinks solar panels can't produce a useful amount of power because they take up too much space.
However, I love XKCD and welcome any chance to link to Randall's work! So good job there.
PS: Bio-generated natural gas is the fuel of the future. It's carbon-neutral, it scales with population, it's possible to create it anywhere on Earth, and we already have all the infrastructure we need to distribute and use it. It's the cheapest, safest, least-polluting option, and it doesn't require militarized central facilities or poisoning the water table.
You might be interested in this infographic.
http://www.landartgenerator.org/blagi/archives/127
As it turns out, the world is remarkably large.
Only stupid people think a device that stores useful amounts of energy can be inherently "safe". Stupid people are dangerous! If you understand that energy storage has hazards, and take steps to understand and control those hazards, you can be perfectly safe.
Lithium Ion cells can burn or explode during the charging cycle or when shorted. This is simple fact, easily verified (don't breath the smoke!).
This is not normally a problem. In your laptop, the individual cells that make up the battery pack are connected with fusible links. These are basically very thin pieces of wire, that will melt at fairly low temperatures, that are glued to each Li-Ion cell.
When you are charging your battery pack, or if you foolishly short it out, the fusible links will melt before the Li-Ion cells have reached a high enough temperature to explode or burn. This will disconnect the cells from the power supply and/or short, so the battery pack will become instantly useless (instead of becoming a grenade or campfire).
If your lithium Ion battery pack in your laptop gets worse and worse for months or years and finally just won't hold a charge, it wore out normally. If one day it's just dead, with no warning at all, well your friend the fusible link probably saved your genitalia from laptop-induced cauterization.
The basic problem with this is that fusible links are not testable. You could test 99% of every batch, but you can't test the one in your laptop, because it's a one-use device like an explosive bolt.
But computer vendors have been very good about enforcing quality control on the Li-Ion packs they buy from battery vendors. If anyone's been hurt they've apparently been paid off handsomely, "Fight Club" style, and you can only see a few videos of spontaneously combusting laptops on the Intertubes. You're very unlikely to have your own mass-market laptop ever hurt you, basically because that's bad for business.
USPS has a different problem. Greedy bureaucrats cutting costs by hiring unskilled, ignorant monkeys to ship things. Gormless politicians creating workplaces that are dehumanizing and soul-destroying. The monkeys and dispirited humans who work in such places are quite likely to accidentally drive a metal object (think, forklift prong) deep into a pallet of Lithium Ion cells... and fusible links won't stop that short. And since it takes a while for a pallet of batteries to get into full blazing inferno mode, it could go unnoticed until well after the plane is off the runway.
Cast iron bathtubs, particularly antique ones, are very desirable and command high prices if they are in good condition.
I'm refitting a bathroom in a 160+ year old house. The bathroom was originally installed in the late 1930s. The prices for original-quality parts are jaw dropping - you can easily pay $1200 for a faucet set (although I don't).
In the trades, the old stuff that has survived is incredibly high quality, for the most part. Victorian machined brass plumbing, for example, is awesome! I have replaced worn out ABS, bristol and polybutalene that was attached to 90 year old figured and threaded brass in perfect condition. PEX is nice but it will never match hand-cut victorian red brass.
Something similar is true in computing; you see old VMS and PDP systems running all over the place, because of their extreme cost effectiveness. Unix derived OSes dominate cutting edge hardware, despite Unix's age and shortcomings. It's survival of the fittest - DECnet IV was better than DECnet/OSI, so almost nobody upgraded, even though DECnet IV was not perfect.
I just wanted to say that your comment was by far the most intelligent reply to my own. And I'm totally not kidding.
Your garden depends on winter to periodically kill diseases and pests.
Sure there is. Don't buy anything that uses unique batteries or proprietary storage media.
Use the free market, instead of being abused by it.
OK, but if you can point and grunt, you fit the profile of the typical GUI user, right?
HTTPS and SSH cannot be sniffed on your wifi, nor does either one "go unencrypted" when it leaves your house. Broadband providers using DOCSIS protocols also are not sniffable by your neighbors.
However, I recommend you should worry more about "is it possible" and "is it likely" rather than "is it right". Our government and the big corporations (that's redundant, I know) clearly aren't at all concerned about your ideas of right and wrong.
Hey, that's the combination on my luggage!
You seem to have mistaken me for some caricature you have built in your mind. I have never in my entire life said the US invaded countries to get cheap oil - that is your narrative, not mine, my friend.
I don't know why people believe such illogical things, but reducing the supply of something never makes it cheaper, and turning a major oilfield into a series of flaming holes always reduces the supply of oil. Did you think Bush fils and pere were both unfamiliar with basic economics? Did you think their Texas Oil Baron constituency wanted oil to get cheaper? It's nonsensical.
So, ask yourself: What three countries recently tried to break the petrodollar? What happened to them? Do you know, without Google? If not, you have no idea what is going on in world politics.
Well, no, I personally did not think that. But you're still absolutely right, those extremes are exactly how the newspapers and pundits spin everything, and they never have any problem finding someone in the group who is more than willing to play the stereotypical role. Well said!
From self-proclaimed "libertarians", self-proclaimed libertarian "leaders", and libertarian "think tanks".
Yes it is. It comes from the twisted right wing of libertarianism. If you can't get your fanatics under control, they are going to continue to shape your public image. Sorry.
We're already sanctioning Iran because they will take Euros or Yen for oil.
This is another straw for the camel; the American public is tired of invading Middle Eastern countries to keep the price of Texas oil high, so we need them to attack us.
Blood is already in the water, the sharks are circling.
The level of proof you are demanding, which is founded in a mindset of fear, is impossible to achieve. You can always find something to fear, when you are fundamentally a terrorized coward. The likelihood of any individual act of tinkering causing harm is tiny, and well worth risking, compared to the certainty of harm that will be caused by restricting the actions of people who have as yet done no harm.
If you still don't understand why prior restraint based on fear and suspicion is inimical to the social interaction of human beings, I doubt I can explain it to you. My apologies.
Your self-important concern trolling is more "thoughtful" than my "self-impotent" (whatever that means) reply?
You can go right ahead and assume that everyone you don't know is completely incompetent, but I'm pretty sure you're just judging based on what you see in the mirror every morning.
Without exception, every EV owner I have ever met was easily competent enough to understand what could and couldn't be safely modified on the vehicle. I cannot say the same for Internet concern trolls such as yourself.
I own two vehicles with regenerative braking and the conventional brakes in both are capable of stopping in the minimum distance achievable given the limitations derived from the weight and speed of the vehicle and the reaction time of the driver (which is the biggest factor, incidentally). Also, in my vehicles, regen cannot be turned off in software. Also, in my vehicles, regen by design creates usable power, so it does not suffer at all from power failures.
Both my vehicles have a neutral position implemented in hardware. The only EV that I know of that does not have a means of physically disengaging the drive motors from the wheels is the electric ox (which is basically a lawnmower). But this is not really a concern, anyway - it's trivial to cut power to a traction motor compared to disengaging a mechanical power train.
It's best not to recommend policies based on guesses at how these technologies have been implemented. The owners are usually in the best position to determine who should work on their vehicles and what work should be done - allowing ignorant politicians or profit-driven car vendors to make these determinations is not wise.
Many people want to make the things they aren't competent to do, or don't trust themselves to do, illegal for YOU to do - unless you hold special license. These people may well believe that they are inherently better than you, but they also have an instinctive willingness to obey authority figures such as Milgram's white-coated doctors and government-sponsored certification authorities.
In reality, you should be able to tinker however you will with anything you own, and simply held responsible for any harm that you do in the process. Full stop.
Look up "sociopath". ;)
In the USA, we've gone from an idea that our economic and political systems should be designed and implemented so that they can survive immoral participants who purposely work against the good of their own group, to a completely different idea, that immoral participants are heroic and sociopath behaviour is something our children should aspire to. We used to say "the system should function despite the presence of greedy men" and now we say "greed is good". It seems like an inversion of the most historically successful indo-european value systems to me.