A quick google search shows that there are, by the most wild estimate, 600 people on the planet, at most, who are over the age of 110. More like 150 to 300.
Yes we know that people who are very old are rare. Rare does not equal nonexistent. At least in the US denying someone service on account of age is a civil rights violation. The fact that it is a rare problem does not excuse them from failing to deal with the problem properly.
Raising the age to 130 just means there's an extra 20 years of potential pension fraud or incorrect payments.
That is not and should never be the problem of the customer. The bank can suck it up and deal with the problem in other ways. Go visit the customer if they are that worried about it. Old people often need help anyway.
Probably because it's not arbitrary; most people don't live to be 110, and everybody knows you're supposed to perform sanity checking. According to a quick google search (the height of scholarly rigor,) there's maybe 300 people in the world who are older than 110 years. The most wild estimate is 600.
Ok so then why was that sanity check not performed? It seems obvious that the system should be able to handle ages that people have actually reached even if only on occasion. 130 would have covered it at least for the time being and the programmers could have figured that out with about 60 seconds research on google.
On the other hand, fraud is a real thing, not to mention straight up human error; somebody dies, they don't get taken out of the system, so the money keeps going out.
Not a valid excuse to deny someone service who has done nothing wrong. Plenty of other and better ways to deal with the fraud problem.
Programmers don't generally throw in arbitrary rules like that...
Like hell they don't. They do it all the time unintentionally and sometimes very much intentionally. The entire Y2K problem was from tens of thousands of programmers arbitrarily taking short cuts in their programming creating arbitrary rules in regards to what seemed like corner cases at the time. Happens all the time, especially when the programmers don't fully understand the problem they are being asked to solve. The software we use to run our company is positively riddled with arbitrary restrictions which interfere with the efficient conduct of our business. The guys who programmed it are smart enough and decent folks but they don't actually use the software themselves so they don't really understand the limitations they are creating along the way.
I'd say it's more likely they were given a specific business rule that prevented people over 100 from claiming pension cheques to reduce a fraud vector.
Highly unlikely. Laziness and/or incompetence are far more likely origins of this problem.
What DO they teach them in Sunday School these days...
Fiction. But nobody really reads or even really believes the bible anymore anyway. People just pick and choose the bits of it to follow that suit their particular sensibilities and pretend that only those bits are the "word of god". In fact most of them don't even read the bits they follow. Someone else reads those bits and that someone else tells them what they want them to mean. Must be nice to have a world view unencumbered by evidence or logic or responsibility...
This looks like another conservative trope about how the Federal Government wastes money, and somehow the private sector never does.
Arguably the private sector wastes FAR more money than the government does. 90+% of new businesses fail. Even the most successful companies make investments constantly that don't all pan out. The difference is usually that we have a lot less visibility into their failures nor do we have a lot of say over them unless we are investors. We are all "investors" in a sense in the government so we are a lot more sensitive to government waste as a result. But to pretend that the private sector is universally more efficient at everything is just demonstrably absurd. There are some tasks the government is far more efficient at than the private sector and vice-versa. The key is to know which is which and to not conflate the two.
I fucking care. NASA gets less money every year from the US government. I'd prefer they don't waste it on stupid space suits they have no need for.
The question is whether it was obviously wasteful at the time the decision was made to fund the suit development. I don't know the answer to that either way but it's unfair to judge in hindsight if it wasn't clear at the time. R&D isn't some magic results dispenser that money in equals results out. Sometimes we pay a lot of money to learn what doesn't work. That's useful too though admittedly frustrating at times.
I'd prefer NASA be spending their limited budget on more robotic probes, since they have had excellent success with those so far, than some stupid goal of putting more very fragile and relatively useless meatbags in space.
And I feel that NASA should be spending more money putting humans into space and that we get huge value from doing so. Want to know the fun bit? We're both right. The difference is that I think we should be fighting to get more NASA funding and you apparently are meekly accepting the status quo. I want more humans in space AND more robots.
You're drawing a false equivalency. Yes, Trump is wasting a massive amount of tax payer dollars on his useless golf trips. But this money wouldn't go to NASA anyway.
It's not a false equivalency and you seem to have missed the point. And nobody argued that Trumps wasted money was going to go to NASA so that is a strawman. Waste is waste and tax dollars spent are fungible. Trump flying to his resort to play golf and line his own pocket is very obviously wasteful and unnecessary and arguably violates the emoluments clause of the Constitution. A decision to invest in a space suit that in hind sight we didn't need is waste of a different sort but still waste. Though I would argue a FAR more acceptable sort of waste. At least the space suit development was an attempt to do something potentially valuable to the taxpayers even if it didn't work out and we probably learned something useful in the process.
North Slope of Alaska. Siberia. Anyplace in the enormous expanse of the boreal forest / not-so-permafrost and targa regions that encircles the planet.
You're talking about places, not the amount of actual stuff that needs to get there that could be economically transported by airship. It would have to have such a huge cost advantage to overcome the need for in place roads and other infrastructure.
Roads are becoming a big issue with global warming (which, of course isn't happening except in the arctic and nearby regions). Even a month less of ice road makes a number of projects economically infeasible because helicopters and bulldozers don't get along all that well.
If the ice is melting on the north shore then you don't need an airship. You need an ocean going ship which will be MUCH cheaper and more reliable than any airship. It's not like you are going to send an airship during a winter storm anyway...
Of course, we are talking about things that are on the edge of possible, much less not actually existing at present. But the market is probably there if you can deliver.
You're just doing a hand wave and assuming that stuff we currently send by truck is practical to be transported by airship. It's not remotely clear that this is the case. If it were obviously economically sane companies like ExxonMobil have a lot of smart people who would try to make it work. They spend billions on technology and the cost of an airship wouldn't be a big deal at all to them. To a degree you're arguing that the profit motive of oil and gas companies isn't actually that strong.
That has yet to be established. Building a small number of very large airships is an extremely expensive endeavor. It's not even remotely clear that there is enough business for them to recoup their cost much less be a cheaper solution. If you have actual data to support it being a cheaper solution and for the value of the business to be had by all means share with the rest of the class. This is not remotely the first time this has been discussed on slashdot and those who think it is a good idea (and it might be) almost universally assume it is economically viable despite a near complete lack of evidence to support that assertion.
That's what technology is after all, the ability to do things more efficiently.
Just because you come up with a technological solution it does not automatically follow that it is more economically efficient than the alternatives.
Plus: who gets to decide what's "frivolous"? Certainly not you.
The market decides what is frivolous ultimately. But that doesn't mean I cannot look at a project and determine that there is high probability of it being frivolous without spending the money to build it. I could be wrong of course but I'd be mildly surprised if this turned into an economical solution to a real world problem. If it were obviously a better solution to a pressing problem chances are someone would have already done it. We've known how to build large airships for about a century.
This could be used to carry large ungainly freight, like lifting a factory-built house onto a mountainside.
I'm rather dubious that there is sufficient market demand for remote heavy lifting to make it economically viable. I could be wrong of course and I'm certainly no expert but is getting heavy equipment into rural locations a really big unsolved problem? We don't seem unable to get heavy equipment into pretty remote locations today. Superficially it sounds like a solution looking for a problem.
Then of course there is the seemingly needless use of (probably) helium on what stands a strong chance of being a frivolous project. While we aren't going to imminently run out of helium, the supply on Earth is finite and should be tended carefully.
You are missing the point that almost each Tesla owner has is own personal gas station at home where charging occurs most of the time.
The key word there is "most". For EVs to supplant ICEs there will have to be ubiquitous charging infrastructure available for nearly all situations, not just most. Long trips, rural travel, people without garages, etc. There is a lot of infrastructure that needs to be built to turn Pinocchio into a real boy. Right now there are relatively few people who can own an EV as their sole automobile because of the fueling limitations. This more than anything else is what holds EVs back from wide spread acceptance.
No, for a car that can do 200+ miles on a single charge why would you even want a generator in tow?
Umm... because I want to drive farther than 200 miles or I'm going to a location where the options to recharge are poor to nonexistent. I do that routinely. My parents live far enough away that there is no EV on the market today that could reach them without a recharge along the way. My gas powered truck can reach them on a single tank of gas easily. Furthermore it's more than a little rude to arrive at someone's house and ask if you can mooch some of their electrons so you can get home. There are precisely zero conveniently located recharge stations along the route and even if there were the best case recharge time (Tesla Supercharger) would add the better part of an hour to the trip - each way. It's even worse if you are traveling to someplace rural. It's pretty easy to carry some extra cans of gasoline. Pretty hard to get electrons when you are nowhere close to the grid.
I wouldn't mind having a towable gas/diesel range extender for long trips until they can get a critical mass of recharge stations with adequately fast recharge times available. I'm an EV enthusiast but it's important to make allowances for the fact that the technology and infrastructure are still works in progress.
Overnight charging is the best way to charge an EV. Utterly painless, takes no time, hardly useless.
Explain to me how overnight charging is going to enable an EV with a range of 200 miles to drive from Detroit to NYC. Or do you live in a fantasy land where people never go more than a short distance from their house? Exactly how do you propose people who don't own a garage and/or who have to park on a street charge their vehicles?
There is a clear and obvious market for being able to recharge an electric vehicle in a manner similar to filling up at a gas station. To pretend otherwise is just dumb if you actually want to see EVs replace gas powered vehicles. We don't necessarily need charging stations on every street corner like gas stations but we do need them.
For some people, the greater battery capacity of newer EVs means even less need for higher capacity chargers. The greater the battery capacity the less the need to recharge quickly while on the road.
You could have an EV with a range of 1000 miles and there would still be a need for gas station style recharges in reasonable amounts of time. Less need does not equal zero need.
Ok, so it's like the SCOTUS and pornography; you'll know it when you see it.
Sort of but really it's more of a consensus thing. There is debate about it but by and large the dividing line in most people's heads between sports and games seems to be the involvement of gross motor skills and manipulation of physical objects and/or other people. It's not clear to me that we would need to be dogmatic about it but that seems to be where the consensus about it lies at the moment. I don't see any principled reason why there couldn't be a sport involving gross motor skills centered around a computer. There just don't happen to be a lot of them currently. But I think few people would say that Starcraft or the like involve meaningful gross motor skills and it certainly doesn't involve manipulating anything tangible. Like most bits of language things mean what they are accepted to mean by consensus. The consensus might change but for now it seems pretty clear that few people think computer games are accurately described as a "sport". Whether this is a useful distinction is a separate question which I leave to others.
So, the followup question would be: you have teams of competitive StarCraft players who train in amounts and methods very similar to atheletes, and who play for cash prizes, sponsorship deals, and what not; what term would you say applies?
What's wrong with "gaming" or "professional gaming" if money is involved? They seem to want to use the word "sport" to eliminate stigma (real or perceived) around the activity but I see nothing wrong with simply being proud of it being a game and owning the term. Kind of like how geek and nerd don't carry the stigma they once did. I certainly like to play games and I don't feel any stigma in calling them games.
Out of curiosity, how would you define 'sports', and what is it about, say, competitive LoL or StarCraft that doesn't meet that definition?
The answer is fairly straightforward though perhaps unsatisfyingly ambiguous. If you say you play sports to someone, nobody is going to ask which computer game you play. They are going to be thinking something involving gross motor skills 99.9999% of the time. Ergo it isn't a sport under commonly accepted uses of the term. That might change in time but ask 100 people today if computer gaming is a sport and the answer will overwhelmingly be no. QED it isn't a sport.
If you want to get pedantic about definitions you can make all sorts of activities that aren't widely regarded as sports fit a given definition but I think that serves little purpose. Poker is on ESPN but is it a sport? Few would say so. That's not to say poker or computer games aren't fully deserving of respect but calling them a sport is something most people will not agree with. So called eSports are their own thing but saying they are sports a bit of appropriation of a term that doesn't fit. Like how soy milk is marketed as "milk" when in fact it is actually a type of juice. It conflates two concepts in order to profit from the confusion. Getting overly pedantic about the definitions merely leads to pointless arguments. If you want to call competitive StarCraft a "sport" I'm not going to call you foolish and I get what you are saying but I still don't think of it as a sport and neither will most other people.
Of course there are differences between even the "traditional" sports. If you watch the Olympics you'll see two major categories. There are competitions with objective criteria (i.e. track) and those with subjective criteria (i.e. gymnastics). The former determines a winner through objectively measurable criteria such as who can run a course in the least amount of time. The later typically judges aesthetics and in practical terms are simply dance competitions. Nothing wrong with either one but in some important ways they aren't quite the same thing and one could argue they might be deserving of different labels.
In other sports, runners who live at sea-level are disadvantaged in competition against runners who live high up in the mountains.
Actually not true. High altitude training is most effective when you aren't at high altitude all the time. It's the people who can train at altitude for periods of time and then return to low altitudes that see the best results.
The life of athletes is full of unfairness.
Which has what exactly to do with this conversation? I have mad respect for top gamers but they aren't athletes in any widely accepted use of the word.
Instead of homicide, you just have to deal with ridiculous amounts of homeless people that make Hawaii resemble a third world country, sleeping on sidewalks, defecating and peeing everywhere.
I've been to Hawaii a number of times and not in the tourist trap parts either. Doesn't remotely fit my anecdotal observations. There are more homeless people in Chicago than in Hawaii.
For an actual tournament with significant money on the table, if they need that improved ping they'll simply have to travel to attain it.
You do realize that describes a tiny minority of the people who actually play any given game, right? Most people just want to play and compete with their "friends". Less fun to do that if you are experiencing a significant handicap even for casual play.
Featureless except for a generic tablet screen in the middle. No awe-inspiring gauge cluster. No pleasing lines and curves.
You find gauge clusters "awe-inspiring"? You need to get out more my friend if that really impresses you.
What the hell were they thinking? This is Tesla, damnit. They should be making a car that blows you away when you sit behind the wheel.
Have you sat behind the wheel of one? How do you know it won't blow you away? Given that the car hasn't entered production yet you seem awfully quick to judge...
Yes, supercharging is much worse for the environment than regular charging.
That might be one of the most strained arguments I've ever heard. Talk about missing the big picture...
And supercharging isn't as energy efficient in itself either - the heat loss is larger than with slower charging.
Even if we stipulate that is true, it still better than burning fossil fuels to move a vehicle. A lot better. Just because the heat loss is some arbitrary amount larger when charging quickly doesn't make it a bad idea. Slow charging is only useful in a garage overnight when you aren't going to use the car for many hours. Any heat losses for rapid charging are more than made up for by not burning gasoline/diesel.
In countries that produce a good part of the electricity from coal and oil, that's not a good thing.
As opposed to burning the oil directly in a car? Weird logic you have there. An internal combustion engine is hugely inefficient and pollutes badly and you are arguing that a few supercharger stations are somehow a bad thing?
Instead of pulling into a supercharger and spending up to an hour recharging, couldn't they just pop my battery out and put a fully pre-charged on back in?
Technically possible but economically infeasible. Tesla's were designed to allow this and it proved to be economically not viable. They had a program and shut it down. For it to really work you would have to have a standard sized battery pack, widely used, with a customer base far larger than Tesla is likely to achieve in the near future to justify the cost of the infrastructure. To understate things greatly, swapping out a car battery pack is a wee bit harder than changing a laptop or cell phone battery. It requires significant and expensive automation to do quickly, not just a burly guy with a wrench and a lift. For it to make any kind of economic sense you need a critical mass of EV owning customers which we are in no danger of reaching in the next 5-10 years at minimum.
Realistically, fast recharging is a better solution in the long run due to network effects. It's going to be nigh-impossible to get car makers to agree on a standard sized battery pack and battery mounting system. Unless you have a substantial network of battery swap stations available (which we don't) there is no added value to swapping the batteries over existing infrastructure. It's comparatively easy to incrementally improve the charging infrastructure for fast charging. It's almost economically impossible to build a useful battery swap network incrementally. Worse, if fast (less than 20 min) recharging ever becomes viable any investment in a battery swap network would become instantly unprofitable.
So does Tesla follow Apple on the battery replacement issue?
Are you seriously comparing the $12000+ battery pack on a car designed to last the better part of a decade to the one in your cell phone? No, Tesla is not following Apple's lead on batteries. That would not be wise of them nor practical.
Actually he does: opt out. It won't kill you to only buy entertainment which is DRM-free
True but a bit of a dodge really. That's like arguing that I always have the option to leave the US if I don't like the president. Technically true but highly unrealistic for all but the most severe cases of oppression. DRM is a problem (whether they realize it or not) but for most people it isn't something that they care about on a deep level so long as it doesn't conspicuously interfere with their daily lives. It's one of many little bits of friction in our daily lives which we have to work around. Fortunately we have some people fighting the good fight so there is hope.
This is not anticipated to be tolerable by 99% of the population. They don't actually know, because they'll never try it
I'm not about to try all sorts of things that I'm pretty sure I won't enjoy. To be sure I'm probably wrong about some of them but I am quite certain I've got a better idea about what I am willing to tolerate than anyone else.
This is how powerful corporations control people: by manipulating their unexamined assumptions of what they can tolerably live with.
Where do you get the idea that people do not examine what matters to them? People do this all the time.
They reasoned more or less thus: if happiness is having all your wants satisfied, the surest path to happiness is to want less.
Argument from a false premise. Happiness demonstrably does not arise from having all your wants satisfied and it's not automatic that wanting less will result in having more of your wants fulfilled.
If we want to do sound bite philosophy I think a better version is thus: Success is getting what you want. Happiness is wanting what you get.
Too broad a brush unless you specify where it is winning. Some places it very much is succeeding, others not so much. Some types of software are absolutely dominated by free software and in some other categories it is, near as makes no difference, non-existent. Good luck finding any company with accounting software or CAD software that is free (speech or beer) and better than the closed source options. (spoiler: none exist) Proprietary software is in no danger of extinction any time soon no matter how much we all might wish for such a state of affairs.
Is there a modern computer or mobile device that doesn't run GNU software?
Pretty sure there is basically no GNU software on an iPhone. I'm sure you can hack/jailbreak the device to get it to run but a good approximation of nobody actually bothers to do that.
You are jumping to a conclusion that may be false, however.
I'm not jumping to any conclusion. We spend WAY too much on our military relative to our actual needs. This is not even a point of debate. There is no rational justification for the US spending more money than the next 8 largest military budgets combined, especially given that most of them are allies.
$600 billion sounds like a lot, but we can't tell if it's actually going to the sort of expenses within defense that we think or not.
$600 billion IS a lot of money. We know perfectly well where most of it goes. The vast majority goes to operations, personnel, procurement, and R&D. Most of this is already a matter of public record if you can be bothered to actually look.
No, but I am going to argue if she spent $100 on that stapler, Or if she hired her nephew's high-priced stapler service company to come in and deliver 10 staplers for $500, because the federal government has a LOT of secretaries, and there's going to be a need for MANY staplers, so it is naturally important that when they get these staplers, the government has applied a procedure, so they're getting good deals on such things.
First of all, you are stepping over a dollar to pick up a nickel. We're spending a trillion dollars on something like the F35 and you're concerned someone might have overpaid for a stapler? That's idiotic and wasteful. You'll spend more tax dollars trying to track the stapler than the value of the stapler. Second, I've been through the government procurement process. It doesn't work at all like you seem to think it does. Third, there already are very well respected oversight agencies like the GAO who do a pretty good job keeping an eye on how government agencies spend their money.
No.... That is not a fundamental principle of accounting.
It most certainly is a fundamental principle of accounting. Talk to anyone who actually is an accountant if you don't believe me. Seriously, I'm a certified accountant and this is stuff they talk about in Accounting 101 classes. You really have no idea what you are talking about. Seriously, if you can show a way to track even the most minor spending details in an economically productive way there is a Nobel prize in it for you.
That is a lazy accountant's principle that only holds water before the event of data-driven companies.
It's adorable how you think data driven means tracking everything to a wasteful degree. Being data driven doesn't mean all data is economically worth tracking even when it is possible to track. It has nothing to do with laziness and everything to do with being fiscally responsible. Only an idiot spends more money to track something than the value that will be received from tracking it. If there is economic value in tracking something then it will be tracked. If the economic value of tracking something (not required by law) is less than the cost that would be incurred to track it then it is a waste of money by definition. Every single company on the planet follows this principle. Stuff you sell to customers gets tracked. Large asset purchases get tracked. Minor expenses like office supplies generally are not and it would be a monumental waste of money and time to try. They are given a budget and if the budget gets exceeded then questions get asked about why. This is how it works in the real world for both companies and governments.
If you work for $Big_Retailer, and you buy a stapler from your office, you pay with a Company CC, and Accounting gets the invoice from you and posts the expense to the ledger, or you file a PO for your stapler, and accounting posts the expense to the ledger, Etc, and an Asset tag gets fixed to the stapler.
Slashdot Mirror
A quick google search shows that there are, by the most wild estimate, 600 people on the planet, at most, who are over the age of 110. More like 150 to 300.
Yes we know that people who are very old are rare. Rare does not equal nonexistent. At least in the US denying someone service on account of age is a civil rights violation. The fact that it is a rare problem does not excuse them from failing to deal with the problem properly.
Raising the age to 130 just means there's an extra 20 years of potential pension fraud or incorrect payments.
That is not and should never be the problem of the customer. The bank can suck it up and deal with the problem in other ways. Go visit the customer if they are that worried about it. Old people often need help anyway.
Probably because it's not arbitrary; most people don't live to be 110, and everybody knows you're supposed to perform sanity checking. According to a quick google search (the height of scholarly rigor,) there's maybe 300 people in the world who are older than 110 years. The most wild estimate is 600.
Ok so then why was that sanity check not performed? It seems obvious that the system should be able to handle ages that people have actually reached even if only on occasion. 130 would have covered it at least for the time being and the programmers could have figured that out with about 60 seconds research on google.
On the other hand, fraud is a real thing, not to mention straight up human error; somebody dies, they don't get taken out of the system, so the money keeps going out.
Not a valid excuse to deny someone service who has done nothing wrong. Plenty of other and better ways to deal with the fraud problem.
Programmers don't generally throw in arbitrary rules like that...
Like hell they don't. They do it all the time unintentionally and sometimes very much intentionally. The entire Y2K problem was from tens of thousands of programmers arbitrarily taking short cuts in their programming creating arbitrary rules in regards to what seemed like corner cases at the time. Happens all the time, especially when the programmers don't fully understand the problem they are being asked to solve. The software we use to run our company is positively riddled with arbitrary restrictions which interfere with the efficient conduct of our business. The guys who programmed it are smart enough and decent folks but they don't actually use the software themselves so they don't really understand the limitations they are creating along the way.
I'd say it's more likely they were given a specific business rule that prevented people over 100 from claiming pension cheques to reduce a fraud vector.
Highly unlikely. Laziness and/or incompetence are far more likely origins of this problem.
What DO they teach them in Sunday School these days...
Fiction. But nobody really reads or even really believes the bible anymore anyway. People just pick and choose the bits of it to follow that suit their particular sensibilities and pretend that only those bits are the "word of god". In fact most of them don't even read the bits they follow. Someone else reads those bits and that someone else tells them what they want them to mean. Must be nice to have a world view unencumbered by evidence or logic or responsibility...
This looks like another conservative trope about how the Federal Government wastes money, and somehow the private sector never does.
Arguably the private sector wastes FAR more money than the government does. 90+% of new businesses fail. Even the most successful companies make investments constantly that don't all pan out. The difference is usually that we have a lot less visibility into their failures nor do we have a lot of say over them unless we are investors. We are all "investors" in a sense in the government so we are a lot more sensitive to government waste as a result. But to pretend that the private sector is universally more efficient at everything is just demonstrably absurd. There are some tasks the government is far more efficient at than the private sector and vice-versa. The key is to know which is which and to not conflate the two.
I fucking care. NASA gets less money every year from the US government. I'd prefer they don't waste it on stupid space suits they have no need for.
The question is whether it was obviously wasteful at the time the decision was made to fund the suit development. I don't know the answer to that either way but it's unfair to judge in hindsight if it wasn't clear at the time. R&D isn't some magic results dispenser that money in equals results out. Sometimes we pay a lot of money to learn what doesn't work. That's useful too though admittedly frustrating at times.
I'd prefer NASA be spending their limited budget on more robotic probes, since they have had excellent success with those so far, than some stupid goal of putting more very fragile and relatively useless meatbags in space.
And I feel that NASA should be spending more money putting humans into space and that we get huge value from doing so. Want to know the fun bit? We're both right. The difference is that I think we should be fighting to get more NASA funding and you apparently are meekly accepting the status quo. I want more humans in space AND more robots.
You're drawing a false equivalency. Yes, Trump is wasting a massive amount of tax payer dollars on his useless golf trips. But this money wouldn't go to NASA anyway.
It's not a false equivalency and you seem to have missed the point. And nobody argued that Trumps wasted money was going to go to NASA so that is a strawman. Waste is waste and tax dollars spent are fungible. Trump flying to his resort to play golf and line his own pocket is very obviously wasteful and unnecessary and arguably violates the emoluments clause of the Constitution. A decision to invest in a space suit that in hind sight we didn't need is waste of a different sort but still waste. Though I would argue a FAR more acceptable sort of waste. At least the space suit development was an attempt to do something potentially valuable to the taxpayers even if it didn't work out and we probably learned something useful in the process.
North Slope of Alaska. Siberia. Anyplace in the enormous expanse of the boreal forest / not-so-permafrost and targa regions that encircles the planet.
You're talking about places, not the amount of actual stuff that needs to get there that could be economically transported by airship. It would have to have such a huge cost advantage to overcome the need for in place roads and other infrastructure.
Roads are becoming a big issue with global warming (which, of course isn't happening except in the arctic and nearby regions). Even a month less of ice road makes a number of projects economically infeasible because helicopters and bulldozers don't get along all that well.
If the ice is melting on the north shore then you don't need an airship. You need an ocean going ship which will be MUCH cheaper and more reliable than any airship. It's not like you are going to send an airship during a winter storm anyway...
Of course, we are talking about things that are on the edge of possible, much less not actually existing at present. But the market is probably there if you can deliver.
You're just doing a hand wave and assuming that stuff we currently send by truck is practical to be transported by airship. It's not remotely clear that this is the case. If it were obviously economically sane companies like ExxonMobil have a lot of smart people who would try to make it work. They spend billions on technology and the cost of an airship wouldn't be a big deal at all to them. To a degree you're arguing that the profit motive of oil and gas companies isn't actually that strong.
This is a cheaper solution.
That has yet to be established. Building a small number of very large airships is an extremely expensive endeavor. It's not even remotely clear that there is enough business for them to recoup their cost much less be a cheaper solution. If you have actual data to support it being a cheaper solution and for the value of the business to be had by all means share with the rest of the class. This is not remotely the first time this has been discussed on slashdot and those who think it is a good idea (and it might be) almost universally assume it is economically viable despite a near complete lack of evidence to support that assertion.
That's what technology is after all, the ability to do things more efficiently.
Just because you come up with a technological solution it does not automatically follow that it is more economically efficient than the alternatives.
Plus: who gets to decide what's "frivolous"? Certainly not you.
The market decides what is frivolous ultimately. But that doesn't mean I cannot look at a project and determine that there is high probability of it being frivolous without spending the money to build it. I could be wrong of course but I'd be mildly surprised if this turned into an economical solution to a real world problem. If it were obviously a better solution to a pressing problem chances are someone would have already done it. We've known how to build large airships for about a century.
This could be used to carry large ungainly freight, like lifting a factory-built house onto a mountainside.
I'm rather dubious that there is sufficient market demand for remote heavy lifting to make it economically viable. I could be wrong of course and I'm certainly no expert but is getting heavy equipment into rural locations a really big unsolved problem? We don't seem unable to get heavy equipment into pretty remote locations today. Superficially it sounds like a solution looking for a problem.
Then of course there is the seemingly needless use of (probably) helium on what stands a strong chance of being a frivolous project. While we aren't going to imminently run out of helium, the supply on Earth is finite and should be tended carefully.
You are missing the point that almost each Tesla owner has is own personal gas station at home where charging occurs most of the time.
The key word there is "most". For EVs to supplant ICEs there will have to be ubiquitous charging infrastructure available for nearly all situations, not just most. Long trips, rural travel, people without garages, etc. There is a lot of infrastructure that needs to be built to turn Pinocchio into a real boy. Right now there are relatively few people who can own an EV as their sole automobile because of the fueling limitations. This more than anything else is what holds EVs back from wide spread acceptance.
No, for a car that can do 200+ miles on a single charge why would you even want a generator in tow?
Umm... because I want to drive farther than 200 miles or I'm going to a location where the options to recharge are poor to nonexistent. I do that routinely. My parents live far enough away that there is no EV on the market today that could reach them without a recharge along the way. My gas powered truck can reach them on a single tank of gas easily. Furthermore it's more than a little rude to arrive at someone's house and ask if you can mooch some of their electrons so you can get home. There are precisely zero conveniently located recharge stations along the route and even if there were the best case recharge time (Tesla Supercharger) would add the better part of an hour to the trip - each way. It's even worse if you are traveling to someplace rural. It's pretty easy to carry some extra cans of gasoline. Pretty hard to get electrons when you are nowhere close to the grid.
I wouldn't mind having a towable gas/diesel range extender for long trips until they can get a critical mass of recharge stations with adequately fast recharge times available. I'm an EV enthusiast but it's important to make allowances for the fact that the technology and infrastructure are still works in progress.
It has worked extremly well. The majority of gadgets nowadays - and not just phones - use micro-USB for charging.
The downside being that microUSB sucks as a physical connector.
Also microUSB is terrible for charging your electric vehicle... ahem. :-)
Overnight charging is the best way to charge an EV. Utterly painless, takes no time, hardly useless.
Explain to me how overnight charging is going to enable an EV with a range of 200 miles to drive from Detroit to NYC. Or do you live in a fantasy land where people never go more than a short distance from their house? Exactly how do you propose people who don't own a garage and/or who have to park on a street charge their vehicles?
There is a clear and obvious market for being able to recharge an electric vehicle in a manner similar to filling up at a gas station. To pretend otherwise is just dumb if you actually want to see EVs replace gas powered vehicles. We don't necessarily need charging stations on every street corner like gas stations but we do need them.
For some people, the greater battery capacity of newer EVs means even less need for higher capacity chargers. The greater the battery capacity the less the need to recharge quickly while on the road.
You could have an EV with a range of 1000 miles and there would still be a need for gas station style recharges in reasonable amounts of time. Less need does not equal zero need.
Ok, so it's like the SCOTUS and pornography; you'll know it when you see it.
Sort of but really it's more of a consensus thing. There is debate about it but by and large the dividing line in most people's heads between sports and games seems to be the involvement of gross motor skills and manipulation of physical objects and/or other people. It's not clear to me that we would need to be dogmatic about it but that seems to be where the consensus about it lies at the moment. I don't see any principled reason why there couldn't be a sport involving gross motor skills centered around a computer. There just don't happen to be a lot of them currently. But I think few people would say that Starcraft or the like involve meaningful gross motor skills and it certainly doesn't involve manipulating anything tangible. Like most bits of language things mean what they are accepted to mean by consensus. The consensus might change but for now it seems pretty clear that few people think computer games are accurately described as a "sport". Whether this is a useful distinction is a separate question which I leave to others.
So, the followup question would be: you have teams of competitive StarCraft players who train in amounts and methods very similar to atheletes, and who play for cash prizes, sponsorship deals, and what not; what term would you say applies?
What's wrong with "gaming" or "professional gaming" if money is involved? They seem to want to use the word "sport" to eliminate stigma (real or perceived) around the activity but I see nothing wrong with simply being proud of it being a game and owning the term. Kind of like how geek and nerd don't carry the stigma they once did. I certainly like to play games and I don't feel any stigma in calling them games.
Google said today it is taking its first attempt to combat the circulation of "fake news" on its search engine.
That should be easy. Just delete anything said or tweeted by Donald Trump. Viola, less fake news.
Out of curiosity, how would you define 'sports', and what is it about, say, competitive LoL or StarCraft that doesn't meet that definition?
The answer is fairly straightforward though perhaps unsatisfyingly ambiguous. If you say you play sports to someone, nobody is going to ask which computer game you play. They are going to be thinking something involving gross motor skills 99.9999% of the time. Ergo it isn't a sport under commonly accepted uses of the term. That might change in time but ask 100 people today if computer gaming is a sport and the answer will overwhelmingly be no. QED it isn't a sport.
If you want to get pedantic about definitions you can make all sorts of activities that aren't widely regarded as sports fit a given definition but I think that serves little purpose. Poker is on ESPN but is it a sport? Few would say so. That's not to say poker or computer games aren't fully deserving of respect but calling them a sport is something most people will not agree with. So called eSports are their own thing but saying they are sports a bit of appropriation of a term that doesn't fit. Like how soy milk is marketed as "milk" when in fact it is actually a type of juice. It conflates two concepts in order to profit from the confusion. Getting overly pedantic about the definitions merely leads to pointless arguments. If you want to call competitive StarCraft a "sport" I'm not going to call you foolish and I get what you are saying but I still don't think of it as a sport and neither will most other people.
Of course there are differences between even the "traditional" sports. If you watch the Olympics you'll see two major categories. There are competitions with objective criteria (i.e. track) and those with subjective criteria (i.e. gymnastics). The former determines a winner through objectively measurable criteria such as who can run a course in the least amount of time. The later typically judges aesthetics and in practical terms are simply dance competitions. Nothing wrong with either one but in some important ways they aren't quite the same thing and one could argue they might be deserving of different labels.
In other sports, runners who live at sea-level are disadvantaged in competition against runners who live high up in the mountains.
Actually not true. High altitude training is most effective when you aren't at high altitude all the time. It's the people who can train at altitude for periods of time and then return to low altitudes that see the best results.
The life of athletes is full of unfairness.
Which has what exactly to do with this conversation? I have mad respect for top gamers but they aren't athletes in any widely accepted use of the word.
Instead of homicide, you just have to deal with ridiculous amounts of homeless people that make Hawaii resemble a third world country, sleeping on sidewalks, defecating and peeing everywhere.
I've been to Hawaii a number of times and not in the tourist trap parts either. Doesn't remotely fit my anecdotal observations. There are more homeless people in Chicago than in Hawaii.
For an actual tournament with significant money on the table, if they need that improved ping they'll simply have to travel to attain it.
You do realize that describes a tiny minority of the people who actually play any given game, right? Most people just want to play and compete with their "friends". Less fun to do that if you are experiencing a significant handicap even for casual play.
Featureless except for a generic tablet screen in the middle. No awe-inspiring gauge cluster. No pleasing lines and curves.
You find gauge clusters "awe-inspiring"? You need to get out more my friend if that really impresses you.
What the hell were they thinking? This is Tesla, damnit. They should be making a car that blows you away when you sit behind the wheel.
Have you sat behind the wheel of one? How do you know it won't blow you away? Given that the car hasn't entered production yet you seem awfully quick to judge...
Yes, supercharging is much worse for the environment than regular charging.
That might be one of the most strained arguments I've ever heard. Talk about missing the big picture...
And supercharging isn't as energy efficient in itself either - the heat loss is larger than with slower charging.
Even if we stipulate that is true, it still better than burning fossil fuels to move a vehicle. A lot better. Just because the heat loss is some arbitrary amount larger when charging quickly doesn't make it a bad idea. Slow charging is only useful in a garage overnight when you aren't going to use the car for many hours. Any heat losses for rapid charging are more than made up for by not burning gasoline/diesel.
In countries that produce a good part of the electricity from coal and oil, that's not a good thing.
As opposed to burning the oil directly in a car? Weird logic you have there. An internal combustion engine is hugely inefficient and pollutes badly and you are arguing that a few supercharger stations are somehow a bad thing?
Instead of pulling into a supercharger and spending up to an hour recharging, couldn't they just pop my battery out and put a fully pre-charged on back in?
Technically possible but economically infeasible. Tesla's were designed to allow this and it proved to be economically not viable. They had a program and shut it down. For it to really work you would have to have a standard sized battery pack, widely used, with a customer base far larger than Tesla is likely to achieve in the near future to justify the cost of the infrastructure. To understate things greatly, swapping out a car battery pack is a wee bit harder than changing a laptop or cell phone battery. It requires significant and expensive automation to do quickly, not just a burly guy with a wrench and a lift. For it to make any kind of economic sense you need a critical mass of EV owning customers which we are in no danger of reaching in the next 5-10 years at minimum.
Realistically, fast recharging is a better solution in the long run due to network effects. It's going to be nigh-impossible to get car makers to agree on a standard sized battery pack and battery mounting system. Unless you have a substantial network of battery swap stations available (which we don't) there is no added value to swapping the batteries over existing infrastructure. It's comparatively easy to incrementally improve the charging infrastructure for fast charging. It's almost economically impossible to build a useful battery swap network incrementally. Worse, if fast (less than 20 min) recharging ever becomes viable any investment in a battery swap network would become instantly unprofitable.
So does Tesla follow Apple on the battery replacement issue?
Are you seriously comparing the $12000+ battery pack on a car designed to last the better part of a decade to the one in your cell phone? No, Tesla is not following Apple's lead on batteries. That would not be wise of them nor practical.
Actually he does: opt out. It won't kill you to only buy entertainment which is DRM-free
True but a bit of a dodge really. That's like arguing that I always have the option to leave the US if I don't like the president. Technically true but highly unrealistic for all but the most severe cases of oppression. DRM is a problem (whether they realize it or not) but for most people it isn't something that they care about on a deep level so long as it doesn't conspicuously interfere with their daily lives. It's one of many little bits of friction in our daily lives which we have to work around. Fortunately we have some people fighting the good fight so there is hope.
This is not anticipated to be tolerable by 99% of the population. They don't actually know, because they'll never try it
I'm not about to try all sorts of things that I'm pretty sure I won't enjoy. To be sure I'm probably wrong about some of them but I am quite certain I've got a better idea about what I am willing to tolerate than anyone else.
This is how powerful corporations control people: by manipulating their unexamined assumptions of what they can tolerably live with.
Where do you get the idea that people do not examine what matters to them? People do this all the time.
They reasoned more or less thus: if happiness is having all your wants satisfied, the surest path to happiness is to want less.
Argument from a false premise. Happiness demonstrably does not arise from having all your wants satisfied and it's not automatic that wanting less will result in having more of your wants fulfilled.
If we want to do sound bite philosophy I think a better version is thus: Success is getting what you want. Happiness is wanting what you get.
Free software is winning.
Too broad a brush unless you specify where it is winning. Some places it very much is succeeding, others not so much. Some types of software are absolutely dominated by free software and in some other categories it is, near as makes no difference, non-existent. Good luck finding any company with accounting software or CAD software that is free (speech or beer) and better than the closed source options. (spoiler: none exist) Proprietary software is in no danger of extinction any time soon no matter how much we all might wish for such a state of affairs.
Is there a modern computer or mobile device that doesn't run GNU software?
Pretty sure there is basically no GNU software on an iPhone. I'm sure you can hack/jailbreak the device to get it to run but a good approximation of nobody actually bothers to do that.
You are jumping to a conclusion that may be false, however.
I'm not jumping to any conclusion. We spend WAY too much on our military relative to our actual needs. This is not even a point of debate. There is no rational justification for the US spending more money than the next 8 largest military budgets combined, especially given that most of them are allies.
$600 billion sounds like a lot, but we can't tell if it's actually going to the sort of expenses within defense that we think or not.
$600 billion IS a lot of money. We know perfectly well where most of it goes. The vast majority goes to operations, personnel, procurement, and R&D. Most of this is already a matter of public record if you can be bothered to actually look.
No, but I am going to argue if she spent $100 on that stapler, Or if she hired her nephew's high-priced stapler service company to come in and deliver 10 staplers for $500, because the federal government has a LOT of secretaries, and there's going to be a need for MANY staplers, so it is naturally important that when they get these staplers, the government has applied a procedure, so they're getting good deals on such things.
First of all, you are stepping over a dollar to pick up a nickel. We're spending a trillion dollars on something like the F35 and you're concerned someone might have overpaid for a stapler? That's idiotic and wasteful. You'll spend more tax dollars trying to track the stapler than the value of the stapler. Second, I've been through the government procurement process. It doesn't work at all like you seem to think it does. Third, there already are very well respected oversight agencies like the GAO who do a pretty good job keeping an eye on how government agencies spend their money.
No.... That is not a fundamental principle of accounting.
It most certainly is a fundamental principle of accounting. Talk to anyone who actually is an accountant if you don't believe me. Seriously, I'm a certified accountant and this is stuff they talk about in Accounting 101 classes. You really have no idea what you are talking about. Seriously, if you can show a way to track even the most minor spending details in an economically productive way there is a Nobel prize in it for you.
That is a lazy accountant's principle that only holds water before the event of data-driven companies.
It's adorable how you think data driven means tracking everything to a wasteful degree. Being data driven doesn't mean all data is economically worth tracking even when it is possible to track. It has nothing to do with laziness and everything to do with being fiscally responsible. Only an idiot spends more money to track something than the value that will be received from tracking it. If there is economic value in tracking something then it will be tracked. If the economic value of tracking something (not required by law) is less than the cost that would be incurred to track it then it is a waste of money by definition. Every single company on the planet follows this principle. Stuff you sell to customers gets tracked. Large asset purchases get tracked. Minor expenses like office supplies generally are not and it would be a monumental waste of money and time to try. They are given a budget and if the budget gets exceeded then questions get asked about why. This is how it works in the real world for both companies and governments.
If you work for $Big_Retailer, and you buy a stapler from your office, you pay with a Company CC, and Accounting gets the invoice from you and posts the expense to the ledger, or you file a PO for your stapler, and accounting posts the expense to the ledger, Etc, and an Asset tag gets fixed to the stapler.
Nobody is going to put an asset tag on a