Umm, obviously most of the citizens must be unaware of that. I see home bake sales used for fundraising for various charities and non-profits. I doubt they are licensed as food manufacturers;)
LOL. What you're claiming is that if I'm trading stocks or being employed, I need a business license too? Because obviously I can make money from my wages, and from trading stocks. Heck, my retirement account is making me money, too.
Income from ads should be taxed similar to rental property income. You don't typically need a business license in the U.S. to rent a room in your house/apartment -- you simply report rental income together with your wages, capital gains, and whatnot.
Hey now, let's not mix the federal and local taxes here. In the U.S., localities have right to collect sales tax on everything you sell (with some exceptions). That's the only way selling a book on Amazon or a knick-knack on eBay can be taxed!
If you sell something you own you typically generate no gains on it -- thus there's no income to be taxed. Thus nothing to report on your state or federal income tax forms.
Oh boy. The price you sell a used car for is not a capital gain! The capital gain, if any, would be if you'd buy the car for less than you sold it for. When you sell a used car, you typically are at a loss, even if you get a lot of money for it -- since you already gave up even more money when you got it.
Sterilizing a glass bottle for reuse(say a milk jar) takes more natural gas to heat the water than it'd take to simply make a new plastic jug.
This doesn't seem to pass the smell test.
For a blown plastic extrusion (like a jug), you have to heat up and pressurize the feedstock (granules). A little of that energy goes into the forming, but most is lost when the resulting bottles are cooled off -- this heat is not being recovered in typical plants AFAIK. If you factor in the natural gas used to make the feedstock, you're dealing with a lot of it. PE granulate is typically made out of natural gas. Of course the feedstock could be recycled. But I can hardly believe that a new (HD)PE milk jug takes less natural gas to make than a glass bottle takes to sterilize it. I'll try and run the numbers, I'm curious.
I know it's easy to recover heat from slightly dirty water used for bottle sterilization. That water can be running in a closed loop if you really want to, with a flash vaporizer used to get rid of contaminates. All this can be done while retaining most of the heat and only pumping it across one gradient (pre-vs-post flash). This process can be optimized very well. You still lose heat to the bottle itself, but that's a lower temperature than when extruding a new glass or plastic bottle, so the amount of heat lost to that is lower, too.
I generally agree with your like of thinking except for what I've specifically addressed:
I would think that recycling centers would be more industrialized and manpower intensive than landfills. So, you would employ more people and have more capital equipment.
You're saying it like if it were somehow universally good. It's not. Employment for employment's sake is not good at all. Being industrialized for its own sake is neither good. If recycling as an economic proposition is good, then the employment and capital purchases it generates are just nice windfall, but the argument doesn't work backwards. Your argument reads like what they did in much of the socialist eastern Europe back in the 70s: they'd import brand new, say, milk bottling lines. They'd leave out the part that put the bottles into crates, and have a bunch of ladies standing in their aprons and rubber boots doing the crating job. Never mind that the ladies were calf-deep in glass shards from all the broken bottles that slipped their hands. But hey, viva socialism and jobs for everyone!
As for property values: Having only recently bought a house, I think that it's a hoot of a way of thinking. Instead of renting you are able to generate some equity. That's good in itself. I'm getting equity where previously the rental property owner was getting it instead. So it's just an extra benefit, nothing that I intrinsically care about. Hanging onto property values like if they were end-all, be-all is just plain silly. Sure, you're in for a world of hurt if property values tank and you have to sell the place and move while owing a lot on it. That's unfortunate, yes, and I don't know yet what would be a good solution for that, other than not lending more than say 50% of property value for residential mortgages -- and excluding a lot of homebuyers.
But maybe then the property values would sink to be more in line with the underlying material and labor cost of the structure. In a lot of residential U.S. markets, even markets where there is a seeming oversupply of vacant homes, the houses sell for a good few times more than it would cost to have them built if you were willing to be your own general contractor (and had kept your cool). That's what almost no money down loans have done to property values, and I don't think it's any good.
I started recycling once I moved into the house, and our garbage stream has decreased by an order of magnitude. The monstrous garbage can usually has, at worst, maybe a dozen small bags loosely filling up the lower quarter of its volume. Before that we used to have completely full garbage can every week, and that with jumping quite some on the contents to pack them in. But the problem is that most of the recyclables are still uneconomical to process, so they end up on the landfill anyway. They only take a different route while getting there. The worst part is that the local solid waste authority provides next to no feedback. So I don't really know how easy it is for them to process the recyclables. We do all that we can imagine would help them. Examples:
- Gallon latex paint cans are "recyclable", but hardly so unless you work on it. The components are recyclable, though. So I pull off the steel lid ring and the steel handle, remove the paper overwrap label, and peel off the dried latex paint as much as I can -- whether it's good enough to be taken into the recycled HDPE stream I just don't know. Latex is nasty stuff, I presume it could gum up the grinders and whatnot. Such paint can disassembly requires tools, and some strength and dexterity. It's not merely a sorting job. Of course I'm dealing with painting at the moment, so this won't be an issue in a few more months.
- Much of paper packaging has some sort of plastic overwrap or tape on it, we always peel that off and dump it.
- I have no clue how good the recycling sorting people are when dealing with unlabeled plastics -- I presume if they were trained, they could recognize them, but what's the reality? A lot
I know of course about glass bottle reuse -- it's not recycling, and that's the key here. The bottles go through a rinse cycle, and then are re-labeled if they had paper labels to begin with, then they are checked for neck integrity, they get filled, capped, and off they go again. This process is not very different from dealing with new bottles, save for the amount of rinsing necessary, and possible inspection. The latter can be quite involved, and even them I'm always wary of "pranksters" (vandals, really) who think it'd be cool to superglue something to the inside of the bottle.
I also use the supermarket bags for garbage. Works wonderfully.
What I'm worried about is that even if I had a big family, a dog raised on junk will probably be as healthy as if I had eaten junk.
Certainly some of the food scraps are pretty healthy and we don't eat them just because of the texture: let's say veggie/fruit peelings supposedly have more vitamins and/or minerals in them. Of course I don't know how they affect the overall health of the GI tract due to their texture. Maybe the skin sticks to the lining of $organ ?
But whatever meat scraps the dog would get would be probably high on fat. Unless you overcook, that is.
What I don't exactly know is whether rats can really get into typical plastic trash containers with lids. It's a tough call for a squirrel to climb the one I've got -- it can only do so if it peruses one of the stiffener ridges, and even then it's awkward and they do it only occasionally. I don't know if rats are as good climbers as squirrels are. They could of course jump on top if the location allowed that -- they'd have to climb something else first. Perhaps in a city alley that'd be easier, but in suburbs where the containers can have ample clearance around them I don't quite see it. Maybe I just didn't really see rats in action, so feel free to chalk it up to my ignorance if the reality is different.
About the only way I've seen "vermin" get to the trash is by jumping from something nearby onto the trash can, and transferring the momentum onto the can, making it tumble. You need an animal larger than a rat for that methinks, and it needs to be a climber/jumper. Not a racoon for sure -- they are the ones I see most often here, apart from deer, bunnies and squirrels.
Re 1: I'm all for it as long as it's shown that the cost of transporting the bottles back to the bottling company won't exceed the cost of transporting them onto the landfill + the cost of making replacement bottles. This requires some thought put into the collection system. Re 2: Yay! Re 3: Software: I disagree, it's too hard to enforce. Hardware: all for it. Higher priced but longer-lasting hardware may well open up markets for leaner software. Re 4: Double yay! Especially those clear plastic overwraps, with thermowelded seames, that seem indestructible. Recently I've bought a pair of scissors packaged like that. Couldn't get to the damn thing without a sharp tool of some kind. Re 5: Not only people will reuse those pesky plastic grocery bags that way, this will also encourage people to have small kitchen garbage cans. In the U.S. it's quite popular to have enormous garbage cans in the kitchen. They are often marketed with indications as to how tightly they close, so that your kitchen doesn't smell like a city dump. I'm always looking at it and thinking: maybe, just maybe, you should use 5x smaller garbage bags and take the trash out more often so that it doesn't smell like, you know, garbage? Sigh...
Not even that. You need to be able to safely handle black plastic garbage bags. They should not be toxic to people who routinely handle them (think garbage bag production lines -- they are not set up like asbestos remediation projects, for a reason). IOW: Good luck with that.
In a lot of this discussion, there's so much stupidity induced by simple lack of knowledge of physical reality. And we're talking about things that can be verified at zero cost. Do the effing experiment before you spew nonsense. Black plastic, my ass. I will give concrete examples below.
In many beverage bottles, the cap and the bottle are made of different kinds of plastic. Say you have a PET bottle. Go, grab another one. Rub them together. Your teeth may well hurt, the sound is nasty, right? Well, it so happens that PET-on-PET is not self lubricating. If you made PET caps for PET bottles, they'd seize up after one or two cycles. Thus a cap for a PET bottle is made from a different kind of plastic, perhaps HDPE. Now PET-on-HDPE is self lubricating. What a concept!
Now grab a PET bottle, factory-closed with a HDPE or whatnot cap. Full of a carbonated beverage. Shake it up. Go ahead, try it. Shake it like a Polaroid picture, baby. Now drop it from chest height onto concrete. In all likelihood, it'll survive. It's a tough little bitch, isn't it.
Now let's grab an empty PET bottle. PET is a thermoplastic resin: it'll soften when heated up. Get some disused metal cookware, or a small Pyrex dish, and melt some PET -- enough to get a layer perhaps 2mm thick. After it cools down, cut out a strip and do a tension test. You can look on Youtube for ideas how to do it homebrew style. Now repeat the experiment with a small bit of HDPE mixed in. 5% should be enough. Repeat your tension test. You may want to redo the melts a couple of times to see what the spread is and whether your results hold their own. In case you're impatient: PET mixed with almost anything else loses its mechanical properties. It either becomes brittle, or has piss-poor tensile strength, or it flows like crap when you want to extrude it, or or or.
A real life PET bottle with a HDPE cap has a heat-shrink label, printed on a plastic substrate that is often neither PET nor HDPE.
The biggest problem with recycling plastics is the missing economy of scale. Everything for virgin plastic has been optimized to hell over the last 100 years or so. The processes for re-processing post-consumer plastic waste are AFAIK about where plastics were in the 1920s, as far as energetic efficiency goes. No citation for that, it's something that an engineer who works in PET reprocessing told me.
Wait a minute, you're telling me that I could feed my dog solely following:
- vegetable and fruit peelings, seeds and less appealing leftovers (say apple cores) - small amount of veggie/fruit discards (outer leafs from greens, occasional spoiled veggie/fruit from an otherwise good bunch/box) - egg shells - meat discards (skin, fat, etc)
Are you serious -- is there, seriously, something big that I missed?
You have to be very careful what you claim. Exactly what sort of paper do you collect? It is a whole world of difference between collecting post-consumer recyclable paper vs. collecting from commercial sources where the paper has not reached the consumer just yet -- say scrap from printing processes, compacted packaging from retail, etc.
I mostly agree, but as far as cans go, they don't have to be very clean to go into the smelter. Smelting can deal with excess carbon, perhaps with excess nitrogen too. That's what's mostly in organic matter, right?
You've just said that government considers it worthwhile to throw good money after bad. Busywork for its own sake, paid for by the taxpayers. Let me know if you ever hold a public office, I'll avoid that constituency. Thanks.
Re:Not remotely similar to the Microsoft situation
on
The Case For Oracle
·
· Score: 0, Redundant
Look, it's perfectly fine that it is theoretically possible to crack pretty much everything besides one-key pads and quantum cryptographic channels. I'm OK with that. What I was getting at was that Sony messed up for no good reason. I rest my case.
I forgot to add: that's also the reason why, for a suitably experienced driver, a car with automatic transmission has a potential of being safer -- there is an order of magnitude less deadtime between braking and acceleration. This gives you a real safety advantage when switching langes on a congested road -- whether it's a freeway or not.
An alternative would be a stick shift with automatic clutch, but those aren't all that popular.
First of all, I'm neither routinely speeding nor tailgating. Yet, when you're on a congested freeway, where traffic is moving maybe at 25 km/h, good luck not tailgating -- the distance between cars is maybe a quarter of car's length, and if you need to switch lanes you have to push yourself around. This is a cultural thing, so if you're in a blessed place where this is unnecessary, consider yourself lucky.
A week ago I drove in a place where if there is any distance from the car in front of you, people will cut you off with a foot or two to spare. And where you will be driving in circles, or getting anywhere but closer to your destination if you are not aggressive and pushy. Had I taken the cab, the only difference would be that I'd be a passenger for a driver who'd do the same.
OTOH, when I was in Sydney, the cab driver there was absolutely reckless simply because that's how he was -- there was no reason for it, and the roads were almost empty. I don't drive like that.
Once you've perceived a threat it takes no longer to move your right foot 2 inches than it does to press the brake with your left foot.
Nope, not true, sorry, tested it myself. Maybe, somehow, it's true for you, but I doubt it.
As for anticipation: that's precisely what I'm doing. I'm anticipating that I may need to react very quickly. I don't know what your driving experience is, but I suggest you visit Boston, MA, and drive there for a bit. There is little in the way of anticipation when you're driving in a completely new environment -- it's mostly reactive driving. Sure, it'd be ideal if I'd sit down for a couple of hours, familiarize myself with the route to be taken from satellite imagery and Street View, memorize everything, and go from there. But then I'd have no time to post on Slashdot, for one.
You also seem to make up my words: I have never said that paying attention is somehow unnecessary. You need both: you need to pay attention, and you need to give yourself the quickest reaction time possible.
There is a reason race drivers use both feet. They don't do it for kicks. It gives them a real advantage when it comes to safety and performance on the track. Same advantage applies in normal driving conditions.
Slashdot Mirror
If I'm employed and get my salary, I regularly exchange my services for money. According to you it's a business? LOL.
Not on the IRS forms. On the state forms. And not for every state, for example NH doesn't care, they have no sales tax.
Umm, obviously most of the citizens must be unaware of that. I see home bake sales used for fundraising for various charities and non-profits. I doubt they are licensed as food manufacturers ;)
LOL. What you're claiming is that if I'm trading stocks or being employed, I need a business license too? Because obviously I can make money from my wages, and from trading stocks. Heck, my retirement account is making me money, too.
Income from ads should be taxed similar to rental property income. You don't typically need a business license in the U.S. to rent a room in your house/apartment -- you simply report rental income together with your wages, capital gains, and whatnot.
Hey now, let's not mix the federal and local taxes here. In the U.S., localities have right to collect sales tax on everything you sell (with some exceptions). That's the only way selling a book on Amazon or a knick-knack on eBay can be taxed!
If you sell something you own you typically generate no gains on it -- thus there's no income to be taxed. Thus nothing to report on your state or federal income tax forms.
IANAL, so please correct me if I'm wrong.
IOW, it's like SCO asking people to kindly pay the Linux licensing fees or else. Nice.
Oh boy. The price you sell a used car for is not a capital gain! The capital gain, if any, would be if you'd buy the car for less than you sold it for. When you sell a used car, you typically are at a loss, even if you get a lot of money for it -- since you already gave up even more money when you got it.
Sterilizing a glass bottle for reuse(say a milk jar) takes more natural gas to heat the water than it'd take to simply make a new plastic jug.
This doesn't seem to pass the smell test.
For a blown plastic extrusion (like a jug), you have to heat up and pressurize the feedstock (granules). A little of that energy goes into the forming, but most is lost when the resulting bottles are cooled off -- this heat is not being recovered in typical plants AFAIK. If you factor in the natural gas used to make the feedstock, you're dealing with a lot of it. PE granulate is typically made out of natural gas. Of course the feedstock could be recycled. But I can hardly believe that a new (HD)PE milk jug takes less natural gas to make than a glass bottle takes to sterilize it. I'll try and run the numbers, I'm curious.
I know it's easy to recover heat from slightly dirty water used for bottle sterilization. That water can be running in a closed loop if you really want to, with a flash vaporizer used to get rid of contaminates. All this can be done while retaining most of the heat and only pumping it across one gradient (pre-vs-post flash). This process can be optimized very well. You still lose heat to the bottle itself, but that's a lower temperature than when extruding a new glass or plastic bottle, so the amount of heat lost to that is lower, too.
I generally agree with your like of thinking except for what I've specifically addressed:
I would think that recycling centers would be more industrialized and manpower intensive than landfills. So, you would employ more people and have more capital equipment.
You're saying it like if it were somehow universally good. It's not. Employment for employment's sake is not good at all. Being industrialized for its own sake is neither good. If recycling as an economic proposition is good, then the employment and capital purchases it generates are just nice windfall, but the argument doesn't work backwards. Your argument reads like what they did in much of the socialist eastern Europe back in the 70s: they'd import brand new, say, milk bottling lines. They'd leave out the part that put the bottles into crates, and have a bunch of ladies standing in their aprons and rubber boots doing the crating job. Never mind that the ladies were calf-deep in glass shards from all the broken bottles that slipped their hands. But hey, viva socialism and jobs for everyone!
As for property values: Having only recently bought a house, I think that it's a hoot of a way of thinking. Instead of renting you are able to generate some equity. That's good in itself. I'm getting equity where previously the rental property owner was getting it instead. So it's just an extra benefit, nothing that I intrinsically care about. Hanging onto property values like if they were end-all, be-all is just plain silly. Sure, you're in for a world of hurt if property values tank and you have to sell the place and move while owing a lot on it. That's unfortunate, yes, and I don't know yet what would be a good solution for that, other than not lending more than say 50% of property value for residential mortgages -- and excluding a lot of homebuyers.
But maybe then the property values would sink to be more in line with the underlying material and labor cost of the structure. In a lot of residential U.S. markets, even markets where there is a seeming oversupply of vacant homes, the houses sell for a good few times more than it would cost to have them built if you were willing to be your own general contractor (and had kept your cool). That's what almost no money down loans have done to property values, and I don't think it's any good.
I started recycling once I moved into the house, and our garbage stream has decreased by an order of magnitude. The monstrous garbage can usually has, at worst, maybe a dozen small bags loosely filling up the lower quarter of its volume. Before that we used to have completely full garbage can every week, and that with jumping quite some on the contents to pack them in. But the problem is that most of the recyclables are still uneconomical to process, so they end up on the landfill anyway. They only take a different route while getting there. The worst part is that the local solid waste authority provides next to no feedback. So I don't really know how easy it is for them to process the recyclables. We do all that we can imagine would help them. Examples:
- Gallon latex paint cans are "recyclable", but hardly so unless you work on it. The components are recyclable, though. So I pull off the steel lid ring and the steel handle, remove the paper overwrap label, and peel off the dried latex paint as much as I can -- whether it's good enough to be taken into the recycled HDPE stream I just don't know. Latex is nasty stuff, I presume it could gum up the grinders and whatnot. Such paint can disassembly requires tools, and some strength and dexterity. It's not merely a sorting job. Of course I'm dealing with painting at the moment, so this won't be an issue in a few more months.
- Much of paper packaging has some sort of plastic overwrap or tape on it, we always peel that off and dump it.
- I have no clue how good the recycling sorting people are when dealing with unlabeled plastics -- I presume if they were trained, they could recognize them, but what's the reality? A lot
I know of course about glass bottle reuse -- it's not recycling, and that's the key here. The bottles go through a rinse cycle, and then are re-labeled if they had paper labels to begin with, then they are checked for neck integrity, they get filled, capped, and off they go again. This process is not very different from dealing with new bottles, save for the amount of rinsing necessary, and possible inspection. The latter can be quite involved, and even them I'm always wary of "pranksters" (vandals, really) who think it'd be cool to superglue something to the inside of the bottle.
I also use the supermarket bags for garbage. Works wonderfully.
What I'm worried about is that even if I had a big family, a dog raised on junk will probably be as healthy as if I had eaten junk.
Certainly some of the food scraps are pretty healthy and we don't eat them just because of the texture: let's say veggie/fruit peelings supposedly have more vitamins and/or minerals in them. Of course I don't know how they affect the overall health of the GI tract due to their texture. Maybe the skin sticks to the lining of $organ ?
But whatever meat scraps the dog would get would be probably high on fat. Unless you overcook, that is.
What I don't exactly know is whether rats can really get into typical plastic trash containers with lids. It's a tough call for a squirrel to climb the one I've got -- it can only do so if it peruses one of the stiffener ridges, and even then it's awkward and they do it only occasionally. I don't know if rats are as good climbers as squirrels are. They could of course jump on top if the location allowed that -- they'd have to climb something else first. Perhaps in a city alley that'd be easier, but in suburbs where the containers can have ample clearance around them I don't quite see it. Maybe I just didn't really see rats in action, so feel free to chalk it up to my ignorance if the reality is different.
About the only way I've seen "vermin" get to the trash is by jumping from something nearby onto the trash can, and transferring the momentum onto the can, making it tumble. You need an animal larger than a rat for that methinks, and it needs to be a climber/jumper. Not a racoon for sure -- they are the ones I see most often here, apart from deer, bunnies and squirrels.
I do agree about dogs vs. fellow humans ;)
I think you're onto something.
Re 1: I'm all for it as long as it's shown that the cost of transporting the bottles back to the bottling company won't exceed the cost of transporting them onto the landfill + the cost of making replacement bottles. This requires some thought put into the collection system.
Re 2: Yay!
Re 3: Software: I disagree, it's too hard to enforce. Hardware: all for it. Higher priced but longer-lasting hardware may well open up markets for leaner software.
Re 4: Double yay! Especially those clear plastic overwraps, with thermowelded seames, that seem indestructible. Recently I've bought a pair of scissors packaged like that. Couldn't get to the damn thing without a sharp tool of some kind.
Re 5: Not only people will reuse those pesky plastic grocery bags that way, this will also encourage people to have small kitchen garbage cans. In the U.S. it's quite popular to have enormous garbage cans in the kitchen. They are often marketed with indications as to how tightly they close, so that your kitchen doesn't smell like a city dump. I'm always looking at it and thinking: maybe, just maybe, you should use 5x smaller garbage bags and take the trash out more often so that it doesn't smell like, you know, garbage? Sigh...
Not even that. You need to be able to safely handle black plastic garbage bags. They should not be toxic to people who routinely handle them (think garbage bag production lines -- they are not set up like asbestos remediation projects, for a reason). IOW: Good luck with that.
In a lot of this discussion, there's so much stupidity induced by simple lack of knowledge of physical reality. And we're talking about things that can be verified at zero cost. Do the effing experiment before you spew nonsense. Black plastic, my ass. I will give concrete examples below.
In many beverage bottles, the cap and the bottle are made of different kinds of plastic. Say you have a PET bottle. Go, grab another one. Rub them together. Your teeth may well hurt, the sound is nasty, right? Well, it so happens that PET-on-PET is not self lubricating. If you made PET caps for PET bottles, they'd seize up after one or two cycles. Thus a cap for a PET bottle is made from a different kind of plastic, perhaps HDPE. Now PET-on-HDPE is self lubricating. What a concept!
Now grab a PET bottle, factory-closed with a HDPE or whatnot cap. Full of a carbonated beverage. Shake it up. Go ahead, try it. Shake it like a Polaroid picture, baby. Now drop it from chest height onto concrete. In all likelihood, it'll survive. It's a tough little bitch, isn't it.
Now let's grab an empty PET bottle. PET is a thermoplastic resin: it'll soften when heated up. Get some disused metal cookware, or a small Pyrex dish, and melt some PET -- enough to get a layer perhaps 2mm thick. After it cools down, cut out a strip and do a tension test. You can look on Youtube for ideas how to do it homebrew style. Now repeat the experiment with a small bit of HDPE mixed in. 5% should be enough. Repeat your tension test. You may want to redo the melts a couple of times to see what the spread is and whether your results hold their own. In case you're impatient: PET mixed with almost anything else loses its mechanical properties. It either becomes brittle, or has piss-poor tensile strength, or it flows like crap when you want to extrude it, or or or.
A real life PET bottle with a HDPE cap has a heat-shrink label, printed on a plastic substrate that is often neither PET nor HDPE.
Class dismissed.
The biggest problem with recycling plastics is the missing economy of scale. Everything for virgin plastic has been optimized to hell over the last 100 years or so. The processes for re-processing post-consumer plastic waste are AFAIK about where plastics were in the 1920s, as far as energetic efficiency goes. No citation for that, it's something that an engineer who works in PET reprocessing told me.
Wait a minute, you're telling me that I could feed my dog solely following:
- vegetable and fruit peelings, seeds and less appealing leftovers (say apple cores)
- small amount of veggie/fruit discards (outer leafs from greens, occasional spoiled veggie/fruit from an otherwise good bunch/box)
- egg shells
- meat discards (skin, fat, etc)
Are you serious -- is there, seriously, something big that I missed?
You have to be very careful what you claim. Exactly what sort of paper do you collect? It is a whole world of difference between collecting post-consumer recyclable paper vs. collecting from commercial sources where the paper has not reached the consumer just yet -- say scrap from printing processes, compacted packaging from retail, etc.
I mostly agree, but as far as cans go, they don't have to be very clean to go into the smelter. Smelting can deal with excess carbon, perhaps with excess nitrogen too. That's what's mostly in organic matter, right?
You've just said that government considers it worthwhile to throw good money after bad. Busywork for its own sake, paid for by the taxpayers. Let me know if you ever hold a public office, I'll avoid that constituency. Thanks.
Agreed. Very insightful.
Look, it's perfectly fine that it is theoretically possible to crack pretty much everything besides one-key pads and quantum cryptographic channels. I'm OK with that. What I was getting at was that Sony messed up for no good reason. I rest my case.
I forgot to add: that's also the reason why, for a suitably experienced driver, a car with automatic transmission has a potential of being safer -- there is an order of magnitude less deadtime between braking and acceleration. This gives you a real safety advantage when switching langes on a congested road -- whether it's a freeway or not.
An alternative would be a stick shift with automatic clutch, but those aren't all that popular.
First of all, I'm neither routinely speeding nor tailgating. Yet, when you're on a congested freeway, where traffic is moving maybe at 25 km/h, good luck not tailgating -- the distance between cars is maybe a quarter of car's length, and if you need to switch lanes you have to push yourself around. This is a cultural thing, so if you're in a blessed place where this is unnecessary, consider yourself lucky.
A week ago I drove in a place where if there is any distance from the car in front of you, people will cut you off with a foot or two to spare. And where you will be driving in circles, or getting anywhere but closer to your destination if you are not aggressive and pushy. Had I taken the cab, the only difference would be that I'd be a passenger for a driver who'd do the same.
OTOH, when I was in Sydney, the cab driver there was absolutely reckless simply because that's how he was -- there was no reason for it, and the roads were almost empty. I don't drive like that.
I don't know of any widely used secure key storage chip/die solutions being cracked. I'd welcome links. Nuff said.
Once you've perceived a threat it takes no longer to move your right foot 2 inches than it does to press the brake with your left foot.
Nope, not true, sorry, tested it myself. Maybe, somehow, it's true for you, but I doubt it.
As for anticipation: that's precisely what I'm doing. I'm anticipating that I may need to react very quickly. I don't know what your driving experience is, but I suggest you visit Boston, MA, and drive there for a bit. There is little in the way of anticipation when you're driving in a completely new environment -- it's mostly reactive driving. Sure, it'd be ideal if I'd sit down for a couple of hours, familiarize myself with the route to be taken from satellite imagery and Street View, memorize everything, and go from there. But then I'd have no time to post on Slashdot, for one.
You also seem to make up my words: I have never said that paying attention is somehow unnecessary. You need both: you need to pay attention, and you need to give yourself the quickest reaction time possible.
There is a reason race drivers use both feet. They don't do it for kicks. It gives them a real advantage when it comes to safety and performance on the track. Same advantage applies in normal driving conditions.