It's not like Nicaragua is known for having the most technologically advanced military in the world, and these guys were not on a combat mission...maybe it was just a budget-cutting measure?
Or maybe Firefox users pay off their car early and aren't as profitable....
I certainly fall into that category. Took out a 3-year loan for $6k on my car to get a $1k rebate, then paid it off in 6 months and only $85 of interest.
Assessing the risk of people is not evil, it is what they should be doing to run a good business. However, making conclusions about that risk--to the tune of 1.2% APR--based upon a single factor that is easily manipulated and impossible to verify is just stupid.
Well, apparently, since the only way to end this extremist imperialist inquisition is to remove the videos from *the entire Internet*. Only then will the British people be free to not watch them.
But then massively intrusive government would be infringing on privacy and freedom of speech! It's so much easier to just ask nicely and get them to stop saying what you don't like--and then the rest of the world benefits too!
Actually, it's the British who should dump a bunch of Youtube videos into the Thames. This time, they're the ones being forced to consume stuff they don't want by an overbearing empire. ^_^
Only an idiot would leave their TV on "wireless input takes priority" mode. Heck, I would love it if input priority was even an option on my monitors. Otherwise, if they're already displaying something there's nothing you can do about it.
By not voting, I can claim that I disagree with the System itself.
By voting, I cannot do that, since by definition, voting is accepting the system and the outcome.
Right. That's how you get your ego trip, while accomplishing nothing.
If I give you a vote to either die by lethal injection or a firing squad, should you vote?
If voting for democrats vs republicans was the difference between lethal injection and firing squad, I would not accept the system either--I would leave the country. You are blowing the problem way out of proportion and discounting any kind of pragmatic solution in the process.
In the opposite extreme, if I gave your class a vote between buying an apple pie and a pumpkin pie, and you wanted cherry pie (which the teacher said was too expensive) and refused to vote, how would your refusal make it more likely to get a cherry pie next time? It wouldn't. Your only real options would be to, next time, raise more money for pies, or lobby the teacher ahead of time. Refusing to vote and bragging that you don't accept the system isn't going to make people sympathize with your cause, it will just make them think you are an ass.
You are trying to shoehorn your own "consequences" onto something that is outside of the arena of those consequences. Does not work.
If your desired outcome is the destruction/recreation of the system itself, then you'd best start doing something more drastic than refusing to vote--my apologies if you already have your own constitutional revisionist party or violent extremist group. I fail to see how not voting achieves that goal any more than voting. If your goals are any less ambitious, then ignoring even the miniscule influence of your ballot is a waste of an opportunity.
You are a citizen of an elected government, and no matter what you do it's just as much your responsibility as anyone else's.
And then, when I deny the Authority of the election and elected government due to the corruption of the system, the government is no longer the end all be all of my Citizenship.
That is, my Citizenship in this country has higher precedence in Authority than the current elected government.
I fail to see how it is possible for citizenship to transcend the very authority that grants it. The purpose of holding citizenship is precisely to demonstrate your participation in the process of government--this goes back to the very origins of the word citizen. If you refuse to participate in the government--and perhaps deny its legitimacy altogether--then the only logical action is to absolve oneself of citizenship altogether.
By remaining a citizen and obeying the law, you are acknowledging the authority of the government. By refusing to vote, you merely assert that the rest of us are better suited to choosing a government than you are. As this conversation continues, I suspect you may right.
See how that works?
Regards.
Yes, I see that. You have very neatly proved my point that the only purpose of not voting is to satisfy your self-righteousness while taking for granted the benefits afforded by the system, imperfect though it is. I hope you are pleased that you have once again wasted an opportunity to influence the status quo, at least before your world domination plan goes into effect.
True, but I refuse to my support behind someone who is deceiving the populace so that they can obtain some measure of power.
The system is fucked, regardless of who gets put in there; the very nature of our government and our modern politics dictate this to be so. By not voting, I am not responsible for any of those people being in power.
You do realize that there is such a thing as felony negligence? Deciding to do nothing is just as much a decision as deciding to do something, and you are just as liable for that decision. You can decide to influence the election by voting, or you can decide to influence the election by not voting. If you truly desire the outcome encouraged by you not voting, then fine. But denying the consequences of your conscious decision is nothing more than an ego trip and does a disservice to you and to your country. You are a citizen of an elected government, and no matter what you do it's just as much your responsibility as anyone else's.
I thought so too, until I read an actual review of the actual car. It said explicitly that the gas engine can drive the wheels directly at highway speeds.
At speeds between 30 to 70 miles per hour (48 to 110 km/h) and if the battery is depleted, the internal combustion engine may engage (via a clutch) to assist the traction motor to drive the output, improving performance and boosting high-speed efficiency by 10 to 15 percent.
My apologies, sir. I am myself an amateur machinist--with only one semester of formal training but many hours of practice--and I realize citing that percentage was not the right way to estimate what would be "trivial" to meet. I in no way meant to downplay the fact that work can be incredibly precise in many cases with very little effort. Hardly a day goes by without me admiring the work machinists do for the lab I work in.
I was just having difficulty wrapping my head around how to finish a 5-meter-long dimension to half a millimeter. Even finding a reference length to compare against would be difficult. I wonder if they had to resort to some sort of optical measurement.
But that would send the message to that we were going to be there a while, and we don't want to make them feel like we're invading their country permanently...oops too late.
There are usually far better ways to design something than to require 0.01% accuracy of the machinist. Ordinary machining techniques are good down to 0.1%, beyond that difficulty and cost rises exponentially. Any commercial customer would know it was worth their time to redesign the assembly to need less accuracy, or fire the idiot who didn't change the default tolerances on the drawing and got a quote 100x more expensive than it should have been.
in most models, you actually controlled your speed with the throttle to the gas engine;
Not in Europe, anyway. Here its typically 750RPM when idling, 1500RPM when applying power. No other speeds are really useable because all the gas flow is in resonant pipes.
I believe you are correct, and I can correct my statement with a more perfect understanding:
You control wheel torque with the diesel throttle; when you throttle up, the engine gets more fuel and produces more power but the electric system regulates the engine speed to stay at 1500 rpm. Nowadays that is all handled electronically, but back in the day it was an actual mechanical throttle and independent electrical governor that controlled it.
No, it's the giant microwave antennas on the ground to receive the space-based solar power that will cause problems then. I forgot to mention that in my list.
What you described is a standard diesel-electric engine, which is essentially a diesel engine with an electric transmission. The engine was not always constant RPM; in most models, you actually controlled your speed with the throttle to the gas engine; forward, reverse and neutral were controlled by electrical switches. That configuration was invented almost a hundred years ago because it was physically impossible to build a 55,000 horsepower mechanical transmission. Battery-based hybrid locomotives have come into vogue in the last 20 years for yard switching, and more recently as long-haul engines, and were an obvious extension of the diesel-electric concept.
I used to wonder like the GP about the absence of all-electric-drive hybrids. The reason why hybrid cars like the Prius and the Volt use an electric-mechanical combination transmission is because it is more efficient for the gas engine to power the wheels directly when you're going 70mph, since it's close to peak efficiency there anyways. Then you don't need a larger, more expensive electric motor, and avoid losses in the electric transmission whenever possible. On the scale of a locomotive, this is physically impossible, but in an automobile it is the desired configuration.
And you think Mr. Fusion isn't going to have its own environmental issues? Solar installations mess up desert habitats, windmills kill birds, hydro dams screw with flood plains and fish migration, nuclear fission leaks radioactivity into the water table and/or atmosphere, coal mining turns mountains into slag heaps, oil periodically decimates ocean wildlife and keeps entire countries locked in hot or cold civil war, and wood used as a fuel results in rapid desertification. There is no "real answer", but you can choose where on that continuum you want to be.
If you RTFA, they mention configuring this super-efficient engine to run off any hydrocarbon or even hydrogen gas, which opens the way for a diverse energy economy including renewable hydrogen generation, home-drilled natural gas, ethanol, etc. If the goal is specifically to reduce oil dependence without shrinking the economy, that seems like a good way to do it. If the goal is to waste as much energy as we want without feeling guilty about it, then you'll need to take your logically-inconsistent pipe dreams elsewhere.
Well of course the people who actually go the airport think its worth it. Everybody else avoids the place, like you said. All that shows is how many people are willing to believe that it actually makes them safer.
Any unregulated use is going to have strict power limits, and if they start to interfere with licensed services we'll hear about it in the news. If there are truly unregulated frequencies I would love to hear about it; it was my understanding that everything under 200GHz was accounted for. Above that is almost exclusively and explicitly designated as Amateur spectrum, so the same rules apply.
The laws aren't created with any particular malintent, just cognizant of the fact that if anybody could transmit anything anywhere, then nobody could use any radio for anything, period. It's the system we've got and we need to work with it.
Amateur radio cannot replace the Internet--at least in the U.S. regulations both encryption and 1st- or 2nd-party commercial traffic are banned. So you can check your home email via unencrypted POP or browse the web casually (even with 3rd party ads), but you can't check your work email, buy anything, or technically use SSL or SSH at all. The only time "message obfuscation" of any kind permitted is when sending control signals to satellites. Amateur radios frequencies are specifically intended for experimental applications, and using it as a dedicated internet connection would constitute a fixed service. The laws could be different in Canada, of course, but I would be surprised if they were vastly different.
Slashdot Mirror
WHOOOSH
It's not like Nicaragua is known for having the most technologically advanced military in the world, and these guys were not on a combat mission...maybe it was just a budget-cutting measure?
Or maybe Firefox users pay off their car early and aren't as profitable....
I certainly fall into that category. Took out a 3-year loan for $6k on my car to get a $1k rebate, then paid it off in 6 months and only $85 of interest.
Assessing the risk of people is not evil, it is what they should be doing to run a good business. However, making conclusions about that risk--to the tune of 1.2% APR--based upon a single factor that is easily manipulated and impossible to verify is just stupid.
Well, apparently, since the only way to end this extremist imperialist inquisition is to remove the videos from *the entire Internet*. Only then will the British people be free to not watch them.
But then massively intrusive government would be infringing on privacy and freedom of speech! It's so much easier to just ask nicely and get them to stop saying what you don't like--and then the rest of the world benefits too!
Actually, it's the British who should dump a bunch of Youtube videos into the Thames. This time, they're the ones being forced to consume stuff they don't want by an overbearing empire. ^_^
LOL wrong thread, buddy. This one actually obeys the laws of physics.
Only an idiot would leave their TV on "wireless input takes priority" mode. Heck, I would love it if input priority was even an option on my monitors. Otherwise, if they're already displaying something there's nothing you can do about it.
By not voting, I can claim that I disagree with the System itself.
By voting, I cannot do that, since by definition, voting is accepting the system and the outcome.
Right. That's how you get your ego trip, while accomplishing nothing.
If I give you a vote to either die by lethal injection or a firing squad, should you vote?
If voting for democrats vs republicans was the difference between lethal injection and firing squad, I would not accept the system either--I would leave the country. You are blowing the problem way out of proportion and discounting any kind of pragmatic solution in the process.
In the opposite extreme, if I gave your class a vote between buying an apple pie and a pumpkin pie, and you wanted cherry pie (which the teacher said was too expensive) and refused to vote, how would your refusal make it more likely to get a cherry pie next time? It wouldn't. Your only real options would be to, next time, raise more money for pies, or lobby the teacher ahead of time. Refusing to vote and bragging that you don't accept the system isn't going to make people sympathize with your cause, it will just make them think you are an ass.
You are trying to shoehorn your own "consequences" onto something that is outside of the arena of those consequences. Does not work.
If your desired outcome is the destruction/recreation of the system itself, then you'd best start doing something more drastic than refusing to vote--my apologies if you already have your own constitutional revisionist party or violent extremist group. I fail to see how not voting achieves that goal any more than voting. If your goals are any less ambitious, then ignoring even the miniscule influence of your ballot is a waste of an opportunity.
You are a citizen of an elected government, and no matter what you do it's just as much your responsibility as anyone else's.
And then, when I deny the Authority of the election and elected government due to the corruption of the system, the government is no longer the end all be all of my Citizenship.
That is, my Citizenship in this country has higher precedence in Authority than the current elected government.
I fail to see how it is possible for citizenship to transcend the very authority that grants it. The purpose of holding citizenship is precisely to demonstrate your participation in the process of government--this goes back to the very origins of the word citizen. If you refuse to participate in the government--and perhaps deny its legitimacy altogether--then the only logical action is to absolve oneself of citizenship altogether.
By remaining a citizen and obeying the law, you are acknowledging the authority of the government. By refusing to vote, you merely assert that the rest of us are better suited to choosing a government than you are. As this conversation continues, I suspect you may right.
See how that works?
Regards.
Yes, I see that. You have very neatly proved my point that the only purpose of not voting is to satisfy your self-righteousness while taking for granted the benefits afforded by the system, imperfect though it is. I hope you are pleased that you have once again wasted an opportunity to influence the status quo, at least before your world domination plan goes into effect.
True, but I refuse to my support behind someone who is deceiving the populace so that they can obtain some measure of power.
The system is fucked, regardless of who gets put in there; the very nature of our government and our modern politics dictate this to be so. By not voting, I am not responsible for any of those people being in power.
You do realize that there is such a thing as felony negligence? Deciding to do nothing is just as much a decision as deciding to do something, and you are just as liable for that decision. You can decide to influence the election by voting, or you can decide to influence the election by not voting. If you truly desire the outcome encouraged by you not voting, then fine. But denying the consequences of your conscious decision is nothing more than an ego trip and does a disservice to you and to your country. You are a citizen of an elected government, and no matter what you do it's just as much your responsibility as anyone else's.
I'm sure my wife would be disturbed if it came down to me slipping a trojan on another person.
I thought so too, until I read an actual review of the actual car. It said explicitly that the gas engine can drive the wheels directly at highway speeds.
From Wikipedia:
At speeds between 30 to 70 miles per hour (48 to 110 km/h) and if the battery is depleted, the internal combustion engine may engage (via a clutch) to assist the traction motor to drive the output, improving performance and boosting high-speed efficiency by 10 to 15 percent.
My apologies, sir. I am myself an amateur machinist--with only one semester of formal training but many hours of practice--and I realize citing that percentage was not the right way to estimate what would be "trivial" to meet. I in no way meant to downplay the fact that work can be incredibly precise in many cases with very little effort. Hardly a day goes by without me admiring the work machinists do for the lab I work in.
I was just having difficulty wrapping my head around how to finish a 5-meter-long dimension to half a millimeter. Even finding a reference length to compare against would be difficult. I wonder if they had to resort to some sort of optical measurement.
But that would send the message to that we were going to be there a while, and we don't want to make them feel like we're invading their country permanently...oops too late.
There are usually far better ways to design something than to require 0.01% accuracy of the machinist. Ordinary machining techniques are good down to 0.1%, beyond that difficulty and cost rises exponentially. Any commercial customer would know it was worth their time to redesign the assembly to need less accuracy, or fire the idiot who didn't change the default tolerances on the drawing and got a quote 100x more expensive than it should have been.
in most models, you actually controlled your speed with the throttle to the gas engine;
Not in Europe, anyway. Here its typically 750RPM when idling, 1500RPM when applying power. No other speeds are really useable because all the gas flow is in resonant pipes.
I believe you are correct, and I can correct my statement with a more perfect understanding:
You control wheel torque with the diesel throttle; when you throttle up, the engine gets more fuel and produces more power but the electric system regulates the engine speed to stay at 1500 rpm. Nowadays that is all handled electronically, but back in the day it was an actual mechanical throttle and independent electrical governor that controlled it.
No, it's the giant microwave antennas on the ground to receive the space-based solar power that will cause problems then. I forgot to mention that in my list.
What you described is a standard diesel-electric engine, which is essentially a diesel engine with an electric transmission. The engine was not always constant RPM; in most models, you actually controlled your speed with the throttle to the gas engine; forward, reverse and neutral were controlled by electrical switches. That configuration was invented almost a hundred years ago because it was physically impossible to build a 55,000 horsepower mechanical transmission. Battery-based hybrid locomotives have come into vogue in the last 20 years for yard switching, and more recently as long-haul engines, and were an obvious extension of the diesel-electric concept.
I used to wonder like the GP about the absence of all-electric-drive hybrids. The reason why hybrid cars like the Prius and the Volt use an electric-mechanical combination transmission is because it is more efficient for the gas engine to power the wheels directly when you're going 70mph, since it's close to peak efficiency there anyways. Then you don't need a larger, more expensive electric motor, and avoid losses in the electric transmission whenever possible. On the scale of a locomotive, this is physically impossible, but in an automobile it is the desired configuration.
And you think Mr. Fusion isn't going to have its own environmental issues? Solar installations mess up desert habitats, windmills kill birds, hydro dams screw with flood plains and fish migration, nuclear fission leaks radioactivity into the water table and/or atmosphere, coal mining turns mountains into slag heaps, oil periodically decimates ocean wildlife and keeps entire countries locked in hot or cold civil war, and wood used as a fuel results in rapid desertification. There is no "real answer", but you can choose where on that continuum you want to be.
If you RTFA, they mention configuring this super-efficient engine to run off any hydrocarbon or even hydrogen gas, which opens the way for a diverse energy economy including renewable hydrogen generation, home-drilled natural gas, ethanol, etc. If the goal is specifically to reduce oil dependence without shrinking the economy, that seems like a good way to do it. If the goal is to waste as much energy as we want without feeling guilty about it, then you'll need to take your logically-inconsistent pipe dreams elsewhere.
Why? Take a private citizen
Kidnapping. Good start.
Epic tl;dr.
Well of course the people who actually go the airport think its worth it. Everybody else avoids the place, like you said. All that shows is how many people are willing to believe that it actually makes them safer.
Any unregulated use is going to have strict power limits, and if they start to interfere with licensed services we'll hear about it in the news. If there are truly unregulated frequencies I would love to hear about it; it was my understanding that everything under 200GHz was accounted for. Above that is almost exclusively and explicitly designated as Amateur spectrum, so the same rules apply.
The laws aren't created with any particular malintent, just cognizant of the fact that if anybody could transmit anything anywhere, then nobody could use any radio for anything, period. It's the system we've got and we need to work with it.
Amateur radio cannot replace the Internet--at least in the U.S. regulations both encryption and 1st- or 2nd-party commercial traffic are banned. So you can check your home email via unencrypted POP or browse the web casually (even with 3rd party ads), but you can't check your work email, buy anything, or technically use SSL or SSH at all. The only time "message obfuscation" of any kind permitted is when sending control signals to satellites. Amateur radios frequencies are specifically intended for experimental applications, and using it as a dedicated internet connection would constitute a fixed service. The laws could be different in Canada, of course, but I would be surprised if they were vastly different.
That would be really funny to see. I'd love to hear just how much it compresses--900GB of data, but only 100MB of information!