No, it's not. Like the parent said, it's a necessity. Banning people from doing whatever they must to survive is neither effective nor reasonable.
So no-one can ever be stopped from driving where you live? In the UK there are quite a few classes of people not allowed to drive. Children, people banned for the more serious traffic offences, the blind and poor sighted, and older people who fail the driving re-test they must take periodically. How they get around is their own problem. One solution is not to live somewhere they can only reach by driving a car. I live in a remote area and I accept that one day, when I get old, I might have to move into a city.
FTA, it takes around 1 nanoampere to ring the bell once. It rings around around 2 Hz. Thus it takes 2 nanoampere a second, which works out to 7200 nanoampere-hours.
What idiots modded this as "Informative"?
He seems to think that a nanoampere is a unit of energy. Then suddenly he converts " 2 nanoampere a second" to "nanoampere-hours" which in terms of dimensional analysis means he has somehow acquired a T (ie time) squared component from somewhere !
If driving efficiency is your goal, step #1 is ditching the manual shifter. You don't have the remotest hope of beating the computer at that game anymore.
Wrong. Even setting aside the fact that an auto transmission has less mechanical efficiency. The computer cannot see the road ahead, it generally bases its decisions on the present moment, which can be wrong. My car is auto and it often makes wrong decisions about what gear to be in (I often override it).
In recognition of this, some up-market cars have started using GPS positioning so that the transmission can anticipate hills and bends etc, but even that cannot anticipate a traffic situation ahead.
If it really were a problem we should expect to see cars that are quieter than average involved in proportionally more collisions that cars that are more noisy. [But] I've not seen one speck of evidence that quiet cars get in more accidents due to their sound levels.
Might have something to do with the type of person who drives these cars. A kid who removes the baffles in his silencer (US "muffler"?) is probably the type who is more likely to have accidents than the type of driver attracted to a smooth, quiet car. An effect that might well outweigh the "safety" of a louder approach noise.
Not to mention the massive advances of the Industrial Revolution, continuing through the technical advances of the 19th and the first two-thirds of the 20th. Since then things have become pretty lame in the West, which now largely spends its time and money navel gazing, and wondering whether it is being politically correct enough. Which is why China and India are now getting ahead of the West, having no such distractions.
These things are to do with fashion. Currently, "diversity" is in fashion in the West, and whatever is in fashion is likely to attract brighter, younger people. If homogeneity were in fashion, that would attract brighter people. As a historical example, early medieval monasteries, about as homogeneous as communities could get (at the time) attracted the brightest young men. That is because they were in fashion at the time; and even if you did not want actually want to join one, you sponsored one if you were rich enough. The monks wanted to get away from the bustling, hedonistic, "vibrant", "diverse" society outside, which they saw as a world that would not last much longer, and was descending to Hell. Of couse, by the late middle ages many of the monks had become "diverse" and "vibrant" themselves, meaning that they had turned some monasteries into bawdy houses and drinking dens. One reason why Henry VIII could dissolve them.
The fashion for diversity might soon be over however, now that people are beginning to see how it works in practice, especially recently.
On the contrary, I think the BEST thing that happened to computers was to have a monstrously dominant OS to build upon.
It would have been the best thing to happen if it had been a decent OS. DOS wasn't it, nor was Windows before NT/XP. It was meant to be Unix. Even Microsoft meant it to be Unix- that is why they wrote Xenix. DOS, the "Quick and Dirty Operating System they bought in to fulfil their IBM contract because they had nothing else ready, was meant as a stop gap. But when MS did finish writing Xenix for the PC they only pitched it at the corporate and academic market and left the peasants up to their necks in the crap that was DOS.
Having a common platform to build upon was what allowed the golden age of the PC to explode.
I would not describe the dog's breakfasts that were DOS and Win 3.x and Win9x/ME as a "Golden Age". I would say there was a first Golden Age with the non PC, non Microsoft micros in the 80's when there was a DOS equivalent in CP/M, used on higher end micros. Then there was a second Golden Age that corresponded with the life of XP.
And the PC age did not exactly explode. As late as 1990 for example the Amiga 3000 was introduced, running Unix and superior to its contemporary PCs. It took about ten years for PCs to oust other micros, and for some time PCs were used mainly in clerical and admin roles. For home, non-PC micros prevailed for a long time, and techies ot work (when we could still make our own buying decisions) tended to use Unix systems for heavy lifting or things like Amigas for smaller odd jobs. At least where I worked.
I live in the U.S... cellular customers pay to receive the call.
That is absolutely barmy, barmy, barmy. How can anyone possibly be held responsible for paying for something they did not want and did not initiate? No wonder you get bombarded with calls.
People who sign up to it get on average twice as many nuisance calls as people who don't sign up to it
That is slightly misleading. Your link says:-
A survey... found that those registered with the TPS did report a decrease in calls. But they still received an average of ten in the past month, compared with five for those who had not signed up.
In other words, people are more likely to sign up to the TPS if they are getting more calls in the first place. Not suprising. And then the calls they get are reduced. My experience with the TPS has been fairly good : calls certainly reduced. However, the TPS itself hardly seems to do anything (apart from keeping the list). I have complained about callers to them several times and never received any feedback. They say they issue fines of 1.5 million GBP last year -that's nothing.
> Before the Europeans caved in and allowed the Islamists in, the EU was largely a civil place to live. No longer.
Give or take few million gassings of jews, a few million Romani exterminations,.."
That is the point isn't it? A non-homogeneous population is far more prone to these atrocities. The examples you give are where and when the population was not homogeneous. I could give many more too in the past (eg Saxons-Britons, Danes-Saxons), and they often started with someone (Tony Blair is a modern example) inviting a foreign people in because they thought they would lend power or money to their own elbow, an idea which then backfired. Such atrocities will occur even more in future with the trouble being stored up now.
Europe gets bullied easily and they encourage it by their behavior and reactions. Muslim extremists sense this weakness and exploit it. Expect more censorship and fear.
I'm not sure what fear you are talking about. My reaction to this crap is anger, not fear, nor is fear a reaction I see in others I know. On the contrary, I want to kick those terrorists' arses. Looking at the Liveleak video I find myself wishing I was down there with a gun myself so I could have a shot at the bastards. I was in the military myself once, and it was not because of fear that I carried a gun at that time.
For me, the next best thing to kicking their arses myself is seeing someone else doing so, hence I am all for measures that will lead to that end. So let's post those cartoons everywhere now, to get the bastards to come out and show themselves.
There are several problems which have caused what you refer to as childish comments.
1) Gates is involved. Gates is a proven corporate rogue who, while a significant section of the World's population admire him (generally those more ignorant of his history, some even thinking he invented computers), he only generates dislike and cynicism among those concerned about his history of cheating and extortion. They see his "green" and "humanitarian" activities merely as an attempt to repair his bad reputation.
2) Technology for recycling sewerage has existed for years. Gates is posing as if he were involved in a new inverntion.
3) There are some simple low-tech solutions to these problems. Water shortages tend to occur where settlements have sprung up in areas in past times where water was adequate (they would not have been settled otherwise) but it has since ceased to be, or because a past irrigation/water supply system has broken down through neglect.. A better solution might be for the people to give it up and move to a location nearer a river from which water can easily be piped (using wind pumps) and filtered much more easily than sewerage can. In fact they may already be near enough.
Plastic piping is really quite cheap, wind pumps are low-tech, and the rivers of the world currently dump vast quantities of fresh water into the sea every day. I understand that there are stacks of plastic pipes in some African villages, put there by humanitarians for making water supplies, that no-one has actually bothered to assemble. What is needed is some organisation and effort, perhaps by the villagers themselves. So what chance of maintaining Gates' apparatus?
I am probably one of those you consider unintelligent, childish etc as I have made some critical comments earlier, but keep it going because I feel very secure against that. Just to make sure here it is again:- :
Associating his name to a device like this dovetails into the kind of programs his foundation has been funding in Africa and other countries
"Dovetailing" his name into this turns me straight off the idea. Here is one of the biggest corporate rogues the World has ever seen trying to rescue his massive negative karma by thowing money (of which he has so much that he could not possibly spend directly on himself) at what he thinks are do-good projects. Actually, there is nothing new about processing sewerage enough to make it drinkable.
He should be giving a proportion of his money back to the people he has cheated first. Then he can do what he likes with the rest.
Please explain how I take a train, bus, or car from Seattle to London
Please explain why you really need to. Let me guess : to attend a conference on organising conferences? A conference on designing aircraft for taking people to conferences on designing aircraft? A conference on marketing holiday flights?
In my work I see others who make careers out of travelling to meetings all over the place, then writing reports on the meetings they had. No-one ever reads the reports. It is all bullshit.
...and not have air travel. Shall we return to the world where no one knows anything about any other country except what others tell them? That's worked out great throughout history--fear of the unknown and distrust of "that hostile foreign nation over there" has probably lead to half the wars we've had.
So it's strange that most wars have been between people and nations that have known each other only too well. The medieval wars between England and France, such as the Hundred Years War, were basically family disputes. Until about 1400 the English kings and their courts were culturally French, considered themselves French, and even spoke French - but they still fought the French. The foot soldiers of course didn't give a shit and were there for the plunder - nothing has changed there then.
Then there are civil wars, more common and vicious than international ones, between people who live together, just as most murders are committed within a family or social circle. Things like 9/11 are the result of the global export of what were once localised fueds.
OTOH, Europeans never fought American Indians until, well, early globalisation. It is a common fallacy to assume that people who know each other must get to love each other.
Yet these alternatives produce much more CO2 to get from certain point A to B... Imagine 200 cars driving from Finland to Sweden
Flying is, for most common routes, VERY efficient after you also consider how much cargo the planes carry..
He mentioned "train car bus". You picked cars, which are the worst for efficiency, but only slightly worse than aircraft. Trains and buses are far better.
As for aircraft carrying freight, that is so inefficient that it is only used for premium freight, such as mail and high value stuff.
Until a local hospital calls you to let you know your kids got a broken leg...
And yet....... somehow we've been able to survive all this time without everyone having instant access to us.
Talk about your first world problems.
All the time "we" have been around (unless you or me are >70 yo) there have been phones. And back when there were not, hospitals were localised enough for one to have sent a runner or despatched a telegram for hand delivery to where you lived if things were life threatening. They did that sort of thing in those days.
Stop feeling guilty about the First World. Nothing to stop a runner being sent in the Third World (who largely have cell phones these days anyway).
I run Linux but very often have Windows XP running in a VM for one reason or another. I would love one of these guys to phone me so I can fuck him around with my VM, but they never do. How does one get onto their list?
Slashdot Mirror
No, it's not. Like the parent said, it's a necessity. Banning people from doing whatever they must to survive is neither effective nor reasonable.
So no-one can ever be stopped from driving where you live? In the UK there are quite a few classes of people not allowed to drive. Children, people banned for the more serious traffic offences, the blind and poor sighted, and older people who fail the driving re-test they must take periodically. How they get around is their own problem. One solution is not to live somewhere they can only reach by driving a car. I live in a remote area and I accept that one day, when I get old, I might have to move into a city.
I've found only one free antivirus where the nag screens can be turned off and stay off. ... Panda
I have just followed your link, and it looks like it is free only for a 30 day trial.
FTA, it takes around 1 nanoampere to ring the bell once. It rings around around 2 Hz. Thus it takes 2 nanoampere a second, which works out to 7200 nanoampere-hours.
What idiots modded this as "Informative"?
He seems to think that a nanoampere is a unit of energy. Then suddenly he converts " 2 nanoampere a second" to "nanoampere-hours" which in terms of dimensional analysis means he has somehow acquired a T (ie time) squared component from somewhere !
Batteries have a reasonably constant voltage during most of their discharge cycle.
Different types differ, and you don't know what type of battery this one is.
If driving efficiency is your goal, step #1 is ditching the manual shifter. You don't have the remotest hope of beating the computer at that game anymore.
Wrong. Even setting aside the fact that an auto transmission has less mechanical efficiency. The computer cannot see the road ahead, it generally bases its decisions on the present moment, which can be wrong. My car is auto and it often makes wrong decisions about what gear to be in (I often override it).
In recognition of this, some up-market cars have started using GPS positioning so that the transmission can anticipate hills and bends etc, but even that cannot anticipate a traffic situation ahead.
If it really were a problem we should expect to see cars that are quieter than average involved in proportionally more collisions that cars that are more noisy. [But] I've not seen one speck of evidence that quiet cars get in more accidents due to their sound levels.
Might have something to do with the type of person who drives these cars. A kid who removes the baffles in his silencer (US "muffler"?) is probably the type who is more likely to have accidents than the type of driver attracted to a smooth, quiet car. An effect that might well outweigh the "safety" of a louder approach noise.
You don't need people's opinion on a fact.
Yes, but don't you see? This is going to settle the argument once and for all. Who better to ask than the US Senate?
Not to mention the massive advances of the Industrial Revolution, continuing through the technical advances of the 19th and the first two-thirds of the 20th. Since then things have become pretty lame in the West, which now largely spends its time and money navel gazing, and wondering whether it is being politically correct enough. Which is why China and India are now getting ahead of the West, having no such distractions.
These things are to do with fashion. Currently, "diversity" is in fashion in the West, and whatever is in fashion is likely to attract brighter, younger people. If homogeneity were in fashion, that would attract brighter people. As a historical example, early medieval monasteries, about as homogeneous as communities could get (at the time) attracted the brightest young men. That is because they were in fashion at the time; and even if you did not want actually want to join one, you sponsored one if you were rich enough. The monks wanted to get away from the bustling, hedonistic, "vibrant", "diverse" society outside, which they saw as a world that would not last much longer, and was descending to Hell. Of couse, by the late middle ages many of the monks had become "diverse" and "vibrant" themselves, meaning that they had turned some monasteries into bawdy houses and drinking dens. One reason why Henry VIII could dissolve them.
The fashion for diversity might soon be over however, now that people are beginning to see how it works in practice, especially recently.
On the contrary, I think the BEST thing that happened to computers was to have a monstrously dominant OS to build upon.
It would have been the best thing to happen if it had been a decent OS. DOS wasn't it, nor was Windows before NT/XP. It was meant to be Unix. Even Microsoft meant it to be Unix- that is why they wrote Xenix. DOS, the "Quick and Dirty Operating System they bought in to fulfil their IBM contract because they had nothing else ready, was meant as a stop gap. But when MS did finish writing Xenix for the PC they only pitched it at the corporate and academic market and left the peasants up to their necks in the crap that was DOS.
Having a common platform to build upon was what allowed the golden age of the PC to explode.
I would not describe the dog's breakfasts that were DOS and Win 3.x and Win9x/ME as a "Golden Age". I would say there was a first Golden Age with the non PC, non Microsoft micros in the 80's when there was a DOS equivalent in CP/M, used on higher end micros. Then there was a second Golden Age that corresponded with the life of XP.
And the PC age did not exactly explode. As late as 1990 for example the Amiga 3000 was introduced, running Unix and superior to its contemporary PCs. It took about ten years for PCs to oust other micros, and for some time PCs were used mainly in clerical and admin roles. For home, non-PC micros prevailed for a long time, and techies ot work (when we could still make our own buying decisions) tended to use Unix systems for heavy lifting or things like Amigas for smaller odd jobs. At least where I worked.
This time the data was analyzed in real time and triggered an alarm so other radio-telescopes could look at it in other wavelengths, etc.
As it (or at least the interesting bit) lasted "the span of a millisecond", those other radio-telescope operators must have acted pretty quick.
I live in the U.S ... cellular customers pay to receive the call.
That is absolutely barmy, barmy, barmy. How can anyone possibly be held responsible for paying for something they did not want and did not initiate? No wonder you get bombarded with calls.
Does the caller pay anything?
People who sign up to it get on average twice as many nuisance calls as people who don't sign up to it
That is slightly misleading. Your link says :-
... found that those registered with the TPS did report a decrease in calls. But they still received an average of ten in the past month, compared with five for those who had not signed up.
A survey
In other words, people are more likely to sign up to the TPS if they are getting more calls in the first place. Not suprising. And then the calls they get are reduced. My experience with the TPS has been fairly good : calls certainly reduced. However, the TPS itself hardly seems to do anything (apart from keeping the list). I have complained about callers to them several times and never received any feedback. They say they issue fines of 1.5 million GBP last year -that's nothing.
> Before the Europeans caved in and allowed the Islamists in, the EU was largely a civil place to live. No longer.
Give or take few million gassings of jews, a few million Romani exterminations, .."
That is the point isn't it? A non-homogeneous population is far more prone to these atrocities. The examples you give are where and when the population was not homogeneous. I could give many more too in the past (eg Saxons-Britons, Danes-Saxons), and they often started with someone (Tony Blair is a modern example) inviting a foreign people in because they thought they would lend power or money to their own elbow, an idea which then backfired. Such atrocities will occur even more in future with the trouble being stored up now.
Europe gets bullied easily and they encourage it by their behavior and reactions. Muslim extremists sense this weakness and exploit it. Expect more censorship and fear.
I'm not sure what fear you are talking about. My reaction to this crap is anger, not fear, nor is fear a reaction I see in others I know. On the contrary, I want to kick those terrorists' arses. Looking at the Liveleak video I find myself wishing I was down there with a gun myself so I could have a shot at the bastards. I was in the military myself once, and it was not because of fear that I carried a gun at that time.
For me, the next best thing to kicking their arses myself is seeing someone else doing so, hence I am all for measures that will lead to that end. So let's post those cartoons everywhere now, to get the bastards to come out and show themselves.
There are several problems which have caused what you refer to as childish comments.
:- :
1) Gates is involved. Gates is a proven corporate rogue who, while a significant section of the World's population admire him (generally those more ignorant of his history, some even thinking he invented computers), he only generates dislike and cynicism among those concerned about his history of cheating and extortion. They see his "green" and "humanitarian" activities merely as an attempt to repair his bad reputation.
2) Technology for recycling sewerage has existed for years. Gates is posing as if he were involved in a new inverntion.
3) There are some simple low-tech solutions to these problems. Water shortages tend to occur where settlements have sprung up in areas in past times where water was adequate (they would not have been settled otherwise) but it has since ceased to be, or because a past irrigation/water supply system has broken down through neglect.. A better solution might be for the people to give it up and move to a location nearer a river from which water can easily be piped (using wind pumps) and filtered much more easily than sewerage can. In fact they may already be near enough.
Plastic piping is really quite cheap, wind pumps are low-tech, and the rivers of the world currently dump vast quantities of fresh water into the sea every day. I understand that there are stacks of plastic pipes in some African villages, put there by humanitarians for making water supplies, that no-one has actually bothered to assemble. What is needed is some organisation and effort, perhaps by the villagers themselves. So what chance of maintaining Gates' apparatus?
I am probably one of those you consider unintelligent, childish etc as I have made some critical comments earlier, but keep it going because I feel very secure against that. Just to make sure here it is again
Gates talks shit, sells shit, and is a shit.
What the fuck is "mountain spring water"?
Ask the those bottled water companies that sell the stuff labelled as such.
Do you think that the people around Bill Gates would let him drink that water if it wasn't safe ?
It would not suprise me.
Associating his name to a device like this dovetails into the kind of programs his foundation has been funding in Africa and other countries
"Dovetailing" his name into this turns me straight off the idea. Here is one of the biggest corporate rogues the World has ever seen trying to rescue his massive negative karma by thowing money (of which he has so much that he could not possibly spend directly on himself) at what he thinks are do-good projects. Actually, there is nothing new about processing sewerage enough to make it drinkable.
He should be giving a proportion of his money back to the people he has cheated first. Then he can do what he likes with the rest.
Please explain how I take a train, bus, or car from Seattle to London
Please explain why you really need to. Let me guess : to attend a conference on organising conferences? A conference on designing aircraft for taking people to conferences on designing aircraft? A conference on marketing holiday flights?
In my work I see others who make careers out of travelling to meetings all over the place, then writing reports on the meetings they had. No-one ever reads the reports. It is all bullshit.
...and not have air travel. Shall we return to the world where no one knows anything about any other country except what others tell them? That's worked out great throughout history--fear of the unknown and distrust of "that hostile foreign nation over there" has probably lead to half the wars we've had.
So it's strange that most wars have been between people and nations that have known each other only too well. The medieval wars between England and France, such as the Hundred Years War, were basically family disputes. Until about 1400 the English kings and their courts were culturally French, considered themselves French, and even spoke French - but they still fought the French. The foot soldiers of course didn't give a shit and were there for the plunder - nothing has changed there then.
Then there are civil wars, more common and vicious than international ones, between people who live together, just as most murders are committed within a family or social circle. Things like 9/11 are the result of the global export of what were once localised fueds.
OTOH, Europeans never fought American Indians until, well, early globalisation. It is a common fallacy to assume that people who know each other must get to love each other.
Yet these alternatives produce much more CO2 to get from certain point A to B ... Imagine 200 cars driving from Finland to Sweden
Flying is, for most common routes, VERY efficient after you also consider how much cargo the planes carry..
He mentioned "train car bus". You picked cars, which are the worst for efficiency, but only slightly worse than aircraft. Trains and buses are far better.
As for aircraft carrying freight, that is so inefficient that it is only used for premium freight, such as mail and high value stuff.
Until a local hospital calls you to let you know your kids got a broken leg...
And yet....... somehow we've been able to survive all this time without everyone having instant access to us.
Talk about your first world problems.
All the time "we" have been around (unless you or me are >70 yo) there have been phones. And back when there were not, hospitals were localised enough for one to have sent a runner or despatched a telegram for hand delivery to where you lived if things were life threatening. They did that sort of thing in those days.
Stop feeling guilty about the First World. Nothing to stop a runner being sent in the Third World (who largely have cell phones these days anyway).
Is his name Lenny?
It's Lenny
I run Linux but very often have Windows XP running in a VM for one reason or another. I would love one of these guys to phone me so I can fuck him around with my VM, but they never do. How does one get onto their list?
was the magic number 65536?
That's enough complaints for anybody.