Consider this an investment in science. It's expensive, and rarely pays out immediately. They probably learned quite a bit about how to manufacture and install these items through the mistakes found in the process. You won't see the improvements immediately, but you will within your lifetime. And no, I don't know what they'll be yet. I'm not psychic enough. Some research doesn't have a specific goal.
I would be happy to do that if there was one single new piece of technology involved in this project. But there wasn't. Not even remotely. It was just a big expensive show. Even if there were some huge new piece of technology that they were testing out in this case, it could have been done on a smaller scale without wasting so much cash.
research
n 1: systematic investigation to establish facts
2: a search for knowledge; "their pottery deserves more
research than it has received" [syn: {inquiry}, {enquiry}]
v 1: inquire into [syn: {search}, {explore}]
2: attempt to find out in a systematically and scientific
manner; "The student researched the history of that word"
A more appropriate word to apply to this project is "demonstration"... Or even better: "boondoggle"
boondoggle \boon"dog*gle\ n.
1. a useless, wasteful, or impractical project; -- especially
one authorized by a government agency as a favor to
partisans, to employ unemployed people, or in return for
corrupt payments.
[PJC]
Then 90% of it would have been misappropriated and used for personal projects of the administrators, and the other 10% would have gone to people who didn't really need it, but felt they were entitled to it.
How is that not what happened here? Doesn't it seem odd to you that the government paid to have this installed in a 3,000 sqft house owned by a really rich guy? And that anything learned by the project is going to be used to profit him and his ventures?
The New Jersey project, which opened in October 2006 after four years of planning and building, cost around $500,000, some $225,000 of which was provided by the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities.
So, a quarter million of their tax dollars were used to help this guy set up a clear demonstration of how ridiculous this technology is and to eliminate his electric bill... Return on investment? Near zero... But had the same money been used to, say, help elderly people on fixed incomes heat their houses?
Until you learn that the rig cost 5x what he would have spent on energy over his entire lifetime even though it will probably wear out in ten years. Also, now that his insurance company has read the story and knows he has a big ol' tank of hydrogen in his house he id uninsured, and uninsurable. Additionally, if anything ever does go wrong, his neighbors are sure to sue him into financial ruin.
Good job showing everybody how infeasible this kind of thing is though!
If you're going to troll, at least pick something that isn't so easily proven untrue. PS3 games are $60 just like 360 games. There isn't a single PS3 game that costs more than $60, and there are some that cost less.
Ironically, you can make the distance look better by doing less HDR crap in the foreground. The added shininess in the forground draws out the difference between the close stuff and the distant stuff. Besides, once you get over the "Ohh, that's new!" of the HDR lighting, you realize that it actually looks less realistic, and, if you're like me, it starts to piss you off anyway. It's just another hack so we can continue to pay nVidia and ATI for their existing IP that renders flat surfaces really well instead of moving forward and actually giving surfaces some depth.
Carmack might not force me to be unable to play and thus purchase his products, but other developers may force me to keep my wallet closed.
Re:Exit Polls are Inaccurate
on
Who won?
·
· Score: 1
You can order groceries online? How?
It depends on where you live. Around here we have Peapod. It's overpriced though.
Re:Exit Polls are Inaccurate
on
Who won?
·
· Score: 1
What? People wouldn't talk to pollsters because they'd just finished using an electronc voting machine?
That seems so stupid to you because it's not what I said at all.
Re:Exit Polls are Inaccurate
on
Who won?
·
· Score: 1
Presumably, the point of the paper trail is that you notice the machine recording your vote incorrectly and fix it before you talk to the exit poller. I bet the book leaves statistics about that sort of thing out though, huh? Hard to sell a book that contradicts itself.
Re:Exit Polls are Inaccurate
on
Who won?
·
· Score: 1
Have you been to the supermarket lately? If not (hell, you may order your groceries online...) go check one out... Watch how many people screw up using the PIN pad when paying with their debit card, and how many people are still intimidated by it and opt to write a check instead.
Sure, they're not any more complicated than writing a check (or pulling a lever, or filling in a bubble), but the old technology has been around so long that most anybody alive today became familiar with it when they were young.
Re:Exit Polls are Inaccurate
on
Who won?
·
· Score: 1
Are Democrat voters more likely to have computer skills below a certain threshold than Republicans? We don't know.
I wouldn't claim that. You can't say: "Oh.. You're a democrat, so perhaps you're not so good at using a computer". You couldn't find evidence of that because the members of a political party as large as the Democrats are such a diverse group that you can't easily apply that specific of a stereotype. But you can say: "Oh, you're over the age of 70", or "Oh, you come from a district with a notoriously poor school system, so there's a good chance you get intimidated by using computers" Another thing you can say about both of those groups may be that they are more likely to vote for one party more than the other. So while the most knowledgeable computer users out there may vote Democratic, if a demographic that is not so computer skillful also tends to vote democratic, it would put a whole pile of errors over in that column.
Another way this could happen is if the Republican candidates were nearer to the edge of the screen (This is pure speculation on my part. I've never used a touch screen voting system). Touch screens are notorious for being inaccurate if they get a crease in the conductive layer, or if the bezel is torqued down unevenly, and the usual symptom is that touches register to the outside of the display.
Executives have a very hard time seeing outside of their sphere of influence. If a telecommuting employee isn't promoted as much as they desire and deserve within a company, they will advance their career by changing jobs... It wouldn't matter if telecommuters never got a promotion. If they are both ambitious and deserving, they will still advance their career.
Re:Exit Polls are Inaccurate
on
Who won?
·
· Score: 1
As far as I can see, it could only not be true if Republican voters were on average better with computers than Democrat voters.
You don't see how certain population demographics could be less comfortable with computer use than others? And couldn't you see how if a particular demographic was less capable at using a computer they would still probably tend towards a single political party as a group?
one could still maintain that if a significant portion of the electorate were unable to operate the equipment, the election was unfair.
I'll buy that, but there's a long way between "unfair" and "rigged".
Re:Exit Polls are Inaccurate
on
Who won?
·
· Score: 1
The stupidity theory would predict an equal number of accidental votes for democrats as accidental votes for Republicans.
There are several ways this wouldn't be true. They happen to be the same types of reasons that would cause voters of a particular demographic choose one party over another.
As I've stated elsewhere, if we built consensus instead of manufacturing battles, sure, TV news ratings may plummet, but elections wouldn't be so close that a few percentage points would make a difference... We probably wouldn't have switched to the electronic machines in the first place.
Re:Exit Polls are Inaccurate
on
Who won?
·
· Score: 1
Problems with voting machines aside, if we spent our time as a society building consensus and caring about the greater good rather than polarizing the debate and backing issues out of the desire for power instead of the desire for progress, the elections wouldn't be as close, and this wouldn't be a problem.
Over the last 20 years, we have become more interested in drama and conflict over fact and civility. We allow our politicians (I'm talking both sides here) to get away with changing their story to back an issue in opposition of the other candidate just for the sake of disagreeing, and we have elected the candidate (I'm talking all branches of government) who had the best trash talk.
Instead of pointing fingers and having each side accuse the other of acting fraudulently when all the evidence (not the selective evidence that books and articles like this one provide) would cause a disinterested onlooker to laugh at how stupid we're being, perhaps we should introduce some moderation into our politics. Perhaps we should return to the era when 'balance' meant presenting reasonable facts relevant to the debate, and not presenting the views of every fringe minority in order to boost media drama.
But what do I know... If we went back to those days, most of the people who read Slashdot, for example, would go back to not caring about politics at all, and thus wouldn't vote. Turning people into polarized sheep seems to work...
Re:Exit Polls are Inaccurate
on
Who won?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Historically, exit polls have been amazingly accurate. Only in the last two elections have there been a wide disparity between the exit polling numbers and the official vote count.
Historically, elections haven't been as close as the last to elections. It is far easier to correctly predict an election using polling data when the difference in vote totals exceeds the margin of error. Most of the readers of this site weren't born the last time we had an election as close as 2000 and 2004.
Secondly, in the last election data, why is there a wide disparity between exit polling data and the official vote count primarily in areas that used touch-screen voting with no paper trail, but yet be dead-on in areas with paper ballots?
Probably because people clam up and act like morons when presented with a new electronic device for the first time. Massive conspiracy that nobody leaked, coincidental series of smaller conspiracies that also weren't leaked, or people being stupid when presented with a computer... Which seems more likely to you?
I just hope someone wins this battle quickly and we'll get one standard for both PCs and movies or if not at least drives/players capable of reading both.,
Not going to happen.
This is absolutely nothing like the Beta/VHS wars. Unlike back then, the electronics companies backing both formats own controlling interests in the content companies too. To lose the format war, all content providers have to stop backing your format, but the content provider owned by (HD-DVD consortium companies|Sony) will never stop backing their own format.
Either both technologies will be rejected by the consumer, or the formats will co-exist. Those are the only two possible outcomes.
The file size actually usually increases when you rar well-compressed video.
Theoretically, it's so people can download one file they're missing. Other reasons I've heard are that RARs are checksumed. The only real reason I can believe is that it prevents people from telling their bit-torrent client not to download the pirate group's ad file when it gets the rest of the torrent.
Whatever the reason, it's counterproductive. If the download isn't in viewable form, you have to keep two copies around in order to seed. Nobody does that, thus raring reduces the number of seeds after the initial rush to download a new torrent.
But when I see that stuff being offered to me as if it's some kind of precious gift, I'm flabbergasted. Why would someone give me Budweiser under the label "Chimay" and claim "it's just as good"? Why would I seek such things out?
Because it's 'rar'ed and broken down into 16MB chunks, of course.
The key, however, is rate of adoption. I simply see no reason whatsoever to panic. And truth be told, we *are* getting better with time. Modern cars pollute a tiny fraction of what they once did. Recycling programmes have gone from novelty to commonplace. Houses are better insulated, and now there is a major push on to improve the power efficiency of lighting. As long as these and similar initiatives continue, I think things will work out just fine.
Yet something that could have 10x greater an effect is still opposed by "environmentalists" everywhere: Nuclear Power.
Oh well.
You rarely hear talk of carbon sequestration technology either. If it doesn't get people out of their SUV, or turn people into hippies, most people don't actually care about the environment at all.
Slashdot Mirror
Consider this an investment in science. It's expensive, and rarely pays out immediately. They probably learned quite a bit about how to manufacture and install these items through the mistakes found in the process. You won't see the improvements immediately, but you will within your lifetime. And no, I don't know what they'll be yet. I'm not psychic enough. Some research doesn't have a specific goal.
I would be happy to do that if there was one single new piece of technology involved in this project. But there wasn't. Not even remotely. It was just a big expensive show. Even if there were some huge new piece of technology that they were testing out in this case, it could have been done on a smaller scale without wasting so much cash.
research
n 1: systematic investigation to establish facts
2: a search for knowledge; "their pottery deserves more
research than it has received" [syn: {inquiry}, {enquiry}]
v 1: inquire into [syn: {search}, {explore}]
2: attempt to find out in a systematically and scientific
manner; "The student researched the history of that word"
A more appropriate word to apply to this project is "demonstration"... Or even better: "boondoggle"
boondoggle \boon"dog*gle\ n.
1. a useless, wasteful, or impractical project; -- especially
one authorized by a government agency as a favor to
partisans, to employ unemployed people, or in return for
corrupt payments.
[PJC]
Then 90% of it would have been misappropriated and used for personal projects of the administrators, and the other 10% would have gone to people who didn't really need it, but felt they were entitled to it.
How is that not what happened here? Doesn't it seem odd to you that the government paid to have this installed in a 3,000 sqft house owned by a really rich guy? And that anything learned by the project is going to be used to profit him and his ventures?
Given the chemicals involved, I don't want to imagine that too hard.
...I'd be livid.
The New Jersey project, which opened in October 2006 after four years of planning and building, cost around $500,000, some $225,000 of which was provided by the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities.
So, a quarter million of their tax dollars were used to help this guy set up a clear demonstration of how ridiculous this technology is and to eliminate his electric bill... Return on investment? Near zero... But had the same money been used to, say, help elderly people on fixed incomes heat their houses?
Oh well.
Until you learn that the rig cost 5x what he would have spent on energy over his entire lifetime even though it will probably wear out in ten years. Also, now that his insurance company has read the story and knows he has a big ol' tank of hydrogen in his house he id uninsured, and uninsurable. Additionally, if anything ever does go wrong, his neighbors are sure to sue him into financial ruin.
Good job showing everybody how infeasible this kind of thing is though!
If you're going to troll, at least pick something that isn't so easily proven untrue. PS3 games are $60 just like 360 games. There isn't a single PS3 game that costs more than $60, and there are some that cost less.
Ironically, you can make the distance look better by doing less HDR crap in the foreground. The added shininess in the forground draws out the difference between the close stuff and the distant stuff. Besides, once you get over the "Ohh, that's new!" of the HDR lighting, you realize that it actually looks less realistic, and, if you're like me, it starts to piss you off anyway. It's just another hack so we can continue to pay nVidia and ATI for their existing IP that renders flat surfaces really well instead of moving forward and actually giving surfaces some depth.
Carmack might not force me to be unable to play and thus purchase his products, but other developers may force me to keep my wallet closed.
You can order groceries online? How?
It depends on where you live. Around here we have Peapod. It's overpriced though.
What? People wouldn't talk to pollsters because they'd just finished using an electronc voting machine?
That seems so stupid to you because it's not what I said at all.
Presumably, the point of the paper trail is that you notice the machine recording your vote incorrectly and fix it before you talk to the exit poller. I bet the book leaves statistics about that sort of thing out though, huh? Hard to sell a book that contradicts itself.
Have you been to the supermarket lately? If not (hell, you may order your groceries online...) go check one out... Watch how many people screw up using the PIN pad when paying with their debit card, and how many people are still intimidated by it and opt to write a check instead.
Sure, they're not any more complicated than writing a check (or pulling a lever, or filling in a bubble), but the old technology has been around so long that most anybody alive today became familiar with it when they were young.
Are Democrat voters more likely to have computer skills below a certain threshold than Republicans? We don't know.
I wouldn't claim that. You can't say: "Oh.. You're a democrat, so perhaps you're not so good at using a computer". You couldn't find evidence of that because the members of a political party as large as the Democrats are such a diverse group that you can't easily apply that specific of a stereotype. But you can say: "Oh, you're over the age of 70", or "Oh, you come from a district with a notoriously poor school system, so there's a good chance you get intimidated by using computers" Another thing you can say about both of those groups may be that they are more likely to vote for one party more than the other. So while the most knowledgeable computer users out there may vote Democratic, if a demographic that is not so computer skillful also tends to vote democratic, it would put a whole pile of errors over in that column.
Another way this could happen is if the Republican candidates were nearer to the edge of the screen (This is pure speculation on my part. I've never used a touch screen voting system). Touch screens are notorious for being inaccurate if they get a crease in the conductive layer, or if the bezel is torqued down unevenly, and the usual symptom is that touches register to the outside of the display.
Executives have a very hard time seeing outside of their sphere of influence. If a telecommuting employee isn't promoted as much as they desire and deserve within a company, they will advance their career by changing jobs... It wouldn't matter if telecommuters never got a promotion. If they are both ambitious and deserving, they will still advance their career.
As far as I can see, it could only not be true if Republican voters were on average better with computers than Democrat voters.
You don't see how certain population demographics could be less comfortable with computer use than others? And couldn't you see how if a particular demographic was less capable at using a computer they would still probably tend towards a single political party as a group?
one could still maintain that if a significant portion of the electorate were unable to operate the equipment, the election was unfair.
I'll buy that, but there's a long way between "unfair" and "rigged".
The stupidity theory would predict an equal number of accidental votes for democrats as accidental votes for Republicans.
There are several ways this wouldn't be true. They happen to be the same types of reasons that would cause voters of a particular demographic choose one party over another.
As I've stated elsewhere, if we built consensus instead of manufacturing battles, sure, TV news ratings may plummet, but elections wouldn't be so close that a few percentage points would make a difference... We probably wouldn't have switched to the electronic machines in the first place.
Problems with voting machines aside, if we spent our time as a society building consensus and caring about the greater good rather than polarizing the debate and backing issues out of the desire for power instead of the desire for progress, the elections wouldn't be as close, and this wouldn't be a problem.
Over the last 20 years, we have become more interested in drama and conflict over fact and civility. We allow our politicians (I'm talking both sides here) to get away with changing their story to back an issue in opposition of the other candidate just for the sake of disagreeing, and we have elected the candidate (I'm talking all branches of government) who had the best trash talk.
Instead of pointing fingers and having each side accuse the other of acting fraudulently when all the evidence (not the selective evidence that books and articles like this one provide) would cause a disinterested onlooker to laugh at how stupid we're being, perhaps we should introduce some moderation into our politics. Perhaps we should return to the era when 'balance' meant presenting reasonable facts relevant to the debate, and not presenting the views of every fringe minority in order to boost media drama.
But what do I know... If we went back to those days, most of the people who read Slashdot, for example, would go back to not caring about politics at all, and thus wouldn't vote. Turning people into polarized sheep seems to work...
Historically, exit polls have been amazingly accurate. Only in the last two elections have there been a wide disparity between the exit polling numbers and the official vote count.
Historically, elections haven't been as close as the last to elections. It is far easier to correctly predict an election using polling data when the difference in vote totals exceeds the margin of error. Most of the readers of this site weren't born the last time we had an election as close as 2000 and 2004.
Secondly, in the last election data, why is there a wide disparity between exit polling data and the official vote count primarily in areas that used touch-screen voting with no paper trail, but yet be dead-on in areas with paper ballots?
Probably because people clam up and act like morons when presented with a new electronic device for the first time. Massive conspiracy that nobody leaked, coincidental series of smaller conspiracies that also weren't leaked, or people being stupid when presented with a computer... Which seems more likely to you?
What are you using for a NAT/router? When I got the Fios, I had to get rid of my old linksys to get peak speeds.
That's why you rar the files for FTP.
That does not explain why you then put the rars in a torrent.
I just hope someone wins this battle quickly and we'll get one standard for both PCs and movies or if not at least drives/players capable of reading both.,
Not going to happen.
This is absolutely nothing like the Beta/VHS wars. Unlike back then, the electronics companies backing both formats own controlling interests in the content companies too. To lose the format war, all content providers have to stop backing your format, but the content provider owned by (HD-DVD consortium companies|Sony) will never stop backing their own format.
Either both technologies will be rejected by the consumer, or the formats will co-exist. Those are the only two possible outcomes.
The file size actually usually increases when you rar well-compressed video.
Theoretically, it's so people can download one file they're missing. Other reasons I've heard are that RARs are checksumed. The only real reason I can believe is that it prevents people from telling their bit-torrent client not to download the pirate group's ad file when it gets the rest of the torrent.
Whatever the reason, it's counterproductive. If the download isn't in viewable form, you have to keep two copies around in order to seed. Nobody does that, thus raring reduces the number of seeds after the initial rush to download a new torrent.
Even on a 50Mbit connection, I rarely get more than 900KB/sec on a single torrent.
But when I see that stuff being offered to me as if it's some kind of precious gift, I'm flabbergasted. Why would someone give me Budweiser under the label "Chimay" and claim "it's just as good"? Why would I seek such things out?
Because it's 'rar'ed and broken down into 16MB chunks, of course.
150KB? Move into the future... 900KB/sec on a well seeded torrent is *easy*.
Go to bed, and have your movie ready the next morning. Makes Netflix look slow.
The key, however, is rate of adoption. I simply see no reason whatsoever to panic. And truth be told, we *are* getting better with time. Modern cars pollute a tiny fraction of what they once did. Recycling programmes have gone from novelty to commonplace. Houses are better insulated, and now there is a major push on to improve the power efficiency of lighting. As long as these and similar initiatives continue, I think things will work out just fine.
Yet something that could have 10x greater an effect is still opposed by "environmentalists" everywhere: Nuclear Power.
Oh well.
You rarely hear talk of carbon sequestration technology either. If it doesn't get people out of their SUV, or turn people into hippies, most people don't actually care about the environment at all.