You don't understand the markets, obviously. Once a stock is bought in an IPO, the company has the money, and you've got a piece of paper, and what you do with it after that has zero -- zero -- effect on that company thereafter, and no, you can't take your 100 shares of GE and demand a clock-radio either. They're out of the picture at that point, entirely. They can choose, or not, to pay a dividend, and can change that at any moment, no recourse on your part for common stock (there are tiers of things where you have more control out there).
If you do things that drive the stock price up and down, the only people affected are other owners of that stock, which may or may not include the issuing company. They're pretty much out of the picture at that point. The only reason they want a high price is so they can get a high price should they arbitrarily (and with no recourse by you) decide to dilute your shares by issuing more to get more cash.
Thus, 99.99% of market trading is all you and the other traders - the companies are mostly uninterested other than for ego reasons (and because it's cheap to pay CEOs in stock etc). It isn't necessarily a zero sum game either. Just today, I sold some stocks, in the morning, as they'd hit my targets at last, and I wanted to take risk off the table. Obviously someone else bought them. Those stocks continued to go up all day. So they made money too, assuming they sold at the close. Later, who knows. The thing that makes the markets tick is that we all have different ideas about what something is worth right now, to that particular player. For every buyer there's a seller.
Investing, buy and hold, is for idiots too lazy who feel like there's a set-and-forget way to riches. Nope, TANSTAAFL in this like everything else. If you did that 10 years ago -- you lost money, both in nominal dollars and certainly in purchasing power. If you trade, you surf the waves and it's all skill, sometimes thrilling. The other players know the score, you're not taking candy from babies, but from idiots with more money than brains, and you know the saying about fools and their money (and yeah, a lot of those fools work for the big banks and I'm doing my level best to steal *my* tax dollars back from those jerks). You musta drank the kool-aid sold by some investment manager who doesn't want to have to work for a living paying attention, and who is afraid that if you ever get "out" - no matter how wise that might be in the situation -- you won't get back in -- with HIM and prop up his butt with fees anymore.
And what likely happened was something with the Swissie. Currencies are usually traded with a metric crapload of leverage, else the tiny fraction of a percent *normal* differences in the moves make them not worth trading at all, and they need to be traded some for price discovery to make the system work.
The Swiss recently did a jaw droopingly stupid desperation move on their currency. They pegged it to the euro, in the attempt to stem their own currency's appreciation, which was ruining their trade with other countries, being thought of as "safe" in a time of turmoil, when so much cash was out of the other markets due to fear (the rest was going into gold). This resulted in a HISTORIC move of over 8.5% in something that normally moves.1% at most a day, overnight...That's a big enough move to really hurt (or help, depending on which side of a trade you're on) a normal trader. Now, with 100x leverage -- wow - even a tiny bet adds up very quickly, for or against you. With 100x leverage, everything is multiplied 100x -- except the money you have to put down to open the trade. In a gross oversimplification, you can bet $1, but lose $100 in that case. Meaning he might not even had had that huge a bet on. A lot of "safety obcessed" individuals also got hammered on this one. (and soon enough, on T bills when the bond vigilantes come out and treat us like the bankrupt jerks we are -- they'll be around as soon as BenB and TimG stop buying them in debt monetization).
Most people figured that when that happened, the safe trade would switch entirely to gold. The thing is, the Swiss needed tons of instant dough to buy Euros with all of a sudden. So they sold tons of gold (literally) and tried to do it when the western markets weren't open. That was too much for the Asian retail investors to eat, so gold went down too -- they (for reasons that should be obvious) didn't give anyone a heads up on this, except perhaps a few special friends, so the whole deal caught everyone completely off. It will fail, but the Swiss had no choice but to try it or face ruin anyway - their currency was so overvalued that they could sell nothing to anyone else, and no country can live with that very long.
Y'all might want to go look at zerohedge (no link, their servers are chronically overloaded as is - but a few more snarks won't hurt the place, just not all slashdot please) for some more on this. Sometimes they publish microsecond graphs of what the *headline reading* bots are doing too, they don't like HFT either, but it had nothing to do with this one. I used to think with my signal processing experience I could blow those bots off, as some of them seem pretty stupid. But they are a little ahead of most slashdotters in text understanding -- they actually can read the news tickers and adjust based on the headlines and content(!).
The SEC is more or less completely owned by the people they are supposed to regulate. Too small, they don't care about you. Too big, they're already bribing you. Middle size is all they do, and they do little of that.
It's like with drugs where the big dealer turns in the smaller competition once in awhile to the bribed cops, so everyone gets a benefit -- cops look good, getting a bust, big dealer gets rid of competition, all go home happy, well...almost all. It's a dirty game, but you can still win at poker even with a cheating dealer, if he's not after you personally.
This was on NPR this morning, early. So give credit!
Actually, what they claim as justification for this huge mess is that if they now have real specifics about why people are going to the doctor, they can then engage in "prevention" as in -- make skis illegal to stop this horrible epidemic.
This in fact is the single best argument against government funded health care in any guise (including forcing us to use the existing broken rapacious insurance system in the most blatant crony capitalism ever shown in public)
Because once everyone's on the dole, and "the government" eg us, are paying for it, there's no end of temptation for them to tell us how to live in detail, to keep profits high and costs down. A world of everything not mandatory being forbidden is where this goes inevitably. Fight it, or suck it up, but realize what's coming so you can do it honestly.
So I won't show up in this, but some of us got going and got it right way back when. I run 4 buildings on my campus off two independent solar systems, no power company wires come within half a mile of me.
I probably use less electricity than most - all our "vampire" loads are on switched power, turned off when not in use, no blinking clocks on things that don't need them (and never did). Doesn't matter so much now as the system has grown, but walking lightly on the earth (and I'm no greenie) seems like a good plan generally, it's better to work with nature than attempt to dominate it -- revenge can be pretty fierce if you don't succeed.
The system has and does support a computer lab (about 10 machines back when I ran a consultancy here), a machine shop - big tools, welders, and now a physics lab in addition to all the usual home entertainment stuff and lighting -- mostly CCFL, but other types too (even good old halogens for reading and the stereo microscope where they rule). Freezer in an unheated room, freezes two liter bottles of water to put in coolers used as refrigerators in the houses. Saves a ton. In fact, nearly all we do could be done in an on-grid house, whereupon you'd find out why they are called the power company -- they find a way to increase all the other non-electricity charges till you pay the same anyway -- same thing as is called Cramming when the phone companies do it.
As I started with bare land, and built on that, I found out something really interesting. In most counties, including mine, the county has delegated the issuance and enforcement of building permits to guess who, the aptly named "power company". Ha! So all four of my dwellings needed no permits, and are "barns" insofar as taxes go. Now, think how much money that saves yearly -- and now recalculate the payoff time for solar. Laughing all the way to the bank on that one!
Yup. This has been true for a long time. Why should Generous Electric not make motors with too little iron and copper, saving themselves some money if the only increase in cost is to the end-user.
And the energy ratings still suck on most appliances, and seem to be going away again. I live off the grid, I care, but lately you can't find a consumption (or even wattage when running) rating on a cheap refrigerator at Lowes...Blank stare is the best you can get. If you do care, it used to be you could go to Graingers, pay a little more, and get a premium motor, same type, with 90% efficiency, instead of 60-70% at best shipped in your appliance. Of course, it was all on you to do it.
More radical - I'm now using an old maytag wringer washer with a DC motor on a variable drive, and you know what? It does a better job with less water than the new stuff for most things...you have more control than the dumb computer UI with presets.
Yeah, a couple knots is all Java can keep up with (if that). That garbage collection really screws up anything with realtime involved. On top of the basic slowness, that is. It's a great excuse for hardware designers to overbuild everything with tons of buffers, though.
Check your hardware for being broken then. I have gnome 2 (U 10.04) set up so close that people who've only used windows can barely tell any difference. One new hire, after being productive in their first hours on a system, finally grinned and asked what super reliable new, fast, version of windows I'd put on the machine. Nuff said.
You ought to see *any* opsys on a huge 8 thread i9 with SSD. Bios takes far longer than the opsys, in my case ubuntu 10.4 64 bit (because I have 16 gigs ram on that box).
Agree -- all my linux machines are 10.4. Ran some of the newer stuff in virtual box. Ewwww, it stank utterly. I don't need the opsys itself to be entertaining, I just want it to load my programs and get the heck out of the way, except for providing them services. Done. 10.4 does that, the newer stuff, not. Hope they get over it before the next LTS, or I'll be distro shopping myself.
And we make people use their real names. When we didn't we got too many nut-cases and almost-real bots. As a result, discussion is polite and stays more on topic. The rest of the web can have the lusers with weird handles, suits me fine. Flame wars don't.
I've been saying the same thing for years myself, and experienced it firsthand. The bigs just cross license, no money need change hands. A little guy with just one patent can't play in that game, and can't do squat without violating some bunch of stupid patented stuff.
Because most diesel fuel is used in big trucks, which do a lot more damage to roads than cars do for the same fuel consumption, and the tax is applied accordingly. The diesel is actually easier to refine crude into than gasoline and cheaper to make -- the rest the government gets.
FWIW, I own a brand new 2011 cruze LT (gasoline), and I love the thing. It gets 31 mpg driving in the mountains, no highway miles at all, and that engine is about as high tech as it gets. To get the zippy performance, this engine is tuned for a narrow power band, but this doesn't matter with the great tranny it has. Once the turbo spins up a little, it's quick as you'd ever need -- not as quick as my 2010 Camaro SS, but fine for non competitive driving.
All that talk of torque is silly. The engine isn't connected direct to the tires, it goes through an impedance matching device called a transmission. The comparison above is like comparing watts (horsepower) and amps (torque), without mentioning voltage -- volts times amps equals watts....doh.
+10 insightful. Even on a landline, why is it anyone who has your number thinks you want to waste time on them any time it's convenient for THEM? At least I can be "away from the phone" on my landline that doesn't take messages. Now I'm supposed to be able to be hassled 24/7 with a cel always on me? Heck with that. And I'm supposed to pay for that "privilege". Heck with that too.
And yes, I've had experience with the "it can't be turned off" sorcerers apprentice billing machine, even AFTER the humans I could talk to said I owed them zero, and then the collection agencies that bought the debt one after another -- 5 years later, and yes, they dinged my credit rating, not that a multimillionaire needs one real bad. I should sue the fskers myself as a class of one -- but there are so many people, practically 100% of those I know who have been customers, it'd probably make a nice big class for that issue alone - you just can't turn them off no matter what! Takes entitlement mentality to an entirely new level.
Only two collection agencies in a year? Man, you're having much better luck with Verizons run-on-forever billing robots than anyone I know. I know at least 10 stories like this where I know the person involved (and one is me). They sure are good at billing, eh? What's really funny, revealed through an FOIA requst the fed fought, is that Verizon was at the fed cheap money window even ahead of most of the big banks -- couldn't make payroll, according to them, without emergency aid (nor could McDonalds or Harley). You'd think....
Seconded. And another geek/developer visited recently and noticed the same thing with no prompting. WinXP boots like the wind in Virtual Box....but not so great on identical hardware "native". Though I suppose it's not identical -- VB only shows a windows XP instance a nicely optimized fixed set of hardware, nothing for windows to search for new hardware on, unless you explicitly add something from a VB menu. I think this might be due to a difference in philosophies in setting up hardware in the first place. With say, Ubutntu 10.04, if it's there during install, it's nothing, it just works, but adding it later is a pain (not much, but some). Windows seems to check the entire universe at the drop of a hat (or any boot). That has to take time, and there's just nothing much to check in a simple virtual machine.
I wish they'd donate me a few drums of the very hottest waste they can produce. I'd bury it in my backyard surrounded with thermocouples and have nighttime power input to augment my successful solar system that's been doing it for me since 1980, other than "February" which is a time of darkness here.
Sure, my solar system only gives me maybe 10kwh a day -- but I've learned to run a machine shop, an electronics shop, a computer network, and life in general off it. You adapt.
And that's the real issue -- people won't willingly turn off the big screen TV at 2 am because it's not demanded of them now, and they think they are entitled to hot water at 6 am when it's expensive and hard to do, instead of at noon when it's free, more or less. I just don't weld when the sun ain't shining.
While there are for sure some technical issues -- nothing is simple -- they are not the real problem. It's humans, always has been.
Mostly agree. There never has been, and probably never will be a one size fits all solution. So? Use each technology where it works best and reduces total cost (however you measure that, some would include pollution) the most. Here in SW VA, I've been pure solar since around 1980 -- and the original panels and inverters are still putting out in my system, though I've been through two sets of crappy lead-acid batteries during that time. It's enough to run A/C, my machine shop, welders, computer network, and sometimes dummy loads I have to use to keep from ruining batteries from overcharge. It just plain works, even with 30 year old tech -- all that spin about "gee, look, they'll be 2% more efficient or 3% cheaper in just a few years is put out by people who sell something other than solar. Kinda like that hydrogen economy that's not coming but boosted by some big oil people (who BTW, make most of the best solar panels -- they know the music is going to stop and want to ensure a chair when it does)
Any power I don't need from the grid (never been connected here) means more for someone who can't use solar and has to use something else, probably a mix of coal, gas, nuclear -- it works out. In fact, in the farther north, the thermal techs work better as the cooling side of the steam plant is easier to do. We have to think like system designers here, as it's a system we're working with, and one that includes humans and their demands -- and foibles.
I'm not a huge fan of nuclear, not because of the physics (I am, after all, a physicist) but due to the stupidity of humans doing a good job running it. We don't reprocess fuel, or use more advanced ones, because of the fear of proliferation. We can't store it safely because of NIMBY stupidity...many have a knee jerk reaction to any mention of nuclear -- even NMR was renamed MRI in the medical business because of this. And look at Fukishima -- 10k plus dead of natural causes -- almost no reporting, but wow, even today you can find headlines about those reactors, which to my knowledge have resulted in just about two dangerous (1/4 sV) doses so far, and no deaths so far. That's emotions out of control and people with agendas using the event, ignoring the real tragedies of others, to push their views and fears. Sick in the extreme.
Fusion would be nice -- it's what I'm working on myself, and self-funded so I'm no charlatan sucking the public teat for something that always seems to be far off -- I'm making progress due to advantages I (and some others in my group and blog) have over big science -- we can change on a dime when we find out new things, and are not limited to the rather ignorant tokomak approach which keeps promising that if we just build one more, bigger, it'll work this time. I'd have fired the lot of those tenure-perk seeking idiots on rev 2, we're on what, rev 5 or 6 now? But nothing else gets money unless you do it yourself.
I think the reality is that we need to learn how to manage humans better, and build nuclear fission for awhile, letting any new fossil plants run off their lifetimes, maybe converting some to natgas if that frakking thing turns out well (maybe, maybe not, and truly, not all that much is projected compared to demand -- at best a few human generations worth, that's no solution, just a band aid).
Meanwhile, we should be doing R&D and not so limited to just one approach for either fission or fusion, there are several contenders that make a lot more sense scientifically, but not till a lot more man hours are put into working them out. But we're not doing any of that, and that's just "not right". Hence, my putting MY OWN FORTUNE at risk to do something, since no one else has the will to do it. Maybe it pays off, maybe not - jury is out at the moment, but it seems worth doing and setting an example.
Oh, I earned that fortune developing high tech products, such as you probably own. I maintain it by out-trading the masters of the universe on the markets, my "day job". So far, so good. Compared to a good engineer, most of those financial super-brains are little kids, shortsighted and just ignorant of how things really work.
They're the MEDIA industry. Politicians get or lose their jobs based on media exposure. Both know darn well that all the media business would have to do is make some small changes in what gets aired, what music is promoted and so forth - the simple truth about the politicians coming out would not only remove all the current ones from office -- people might not wait for election time to do it, either.
Just a few "interestingly allegorical" movies and some decent protest music from a few of the "manufactured bands" and there you have it. That industry has a bigger stick to wave around than most realize. Yeah, you might be fine, but despite everyone "knowing better" advertising still works, the water torture eventually gets through and actually does "create demand".
In this case, piece of cake since everybody's already pissed. Just focus it a little and ID the perps a little more...
Note how rare it is media reminds us they're now getting government (us in other words) to pay for "stopping piracy"? Of course, if it's not in their best interests (as perceived by them) then it's not in the news. Since they are living well off the current legal situation, they don't want it changed so much, but change the current situation, and they pull out all the stops on those who try to get the change going.
Is what you need to become if you want to do crimes of money these days. If our government was serious, this crap would be toast instantly. See how quick they got the DC Sniper after he gave them no more than a Cayman Island bank account number.
Think "what would Harry Harrison do?".
This proves that
A: We're not serious about this.
B: It's probably half the government itself in an attempt to create people believing they need even more power.
+ several for good point. It'd be nice to see the dirt, and the fact there's plenty should be obvious simply by what happens daily.
I think that might be a doomed to failure exercise. Since the politicians and their masters have gotten good at this stuff, they don't speak where there's a tape recorder -- Nixon taught them that -- and they don't send this stuff in emails -- the insider traders getting caught taught them that. Remember, the pols *specialty* is doing corruption without getting caught.
Slashdot Mirror
If you do things that drive the stock price up and down, the only people affected are other owners of that stock, which may or may not include the issuing company. They're pretty much out of the picture at that point. The only reason they want a high price is so they can get a high price should they arbitrarily (and with no recourse by you) decide to dilute your shares by issuing more to get more cash.
Thus, 99.99% of market trading is all you and the other traders - the companies are mostly uninterested other than for ego reasons (and because it's cheap to pay CEOs in stock etc). It isn't necessarily a zero sum game either. Just today, I sold some stocks, in the morning, as they'd hit my targets at last, and I wanted to take risk off the table. Obviously someone else bought them. Those stocks continued to go up all day. So they made money too, assuming they sold at the close. Later, who knows. The thing that makes the markets tick is that we all have different ideas about what something is worth right now, to that particular player. For every buyer there's a seller.
Investing, buy and hold, is for idiots too lazy who feel like there's a set-and-forget way to riches. Nope, TANSTAAFL in this like everything else. If you did that 10 years ago -- you lost money, both in nominal dollars and certainly in purchasing power. If you trade, you surf the waves and it's all skill, sometimes thrilling. The other players know the score, you're not taking candy from babies, but from idiots with more money than brains, and you know the saying about fools and their money (and yeah, a lot of those fools work for the big banks and I'm doing my level best to steal *my* tax dollars back from those jerks). You musta drank the kool-aid sold by some investment manager who doesn't want to have to work for a living paying attention, and who is afraid that if you ever get "out" - no matter how wise that might be in the situation -- you won't get back in -- with HIM and prop up his butt with fees anymore.
The Swiss recently did a jaw droopingly stupid desperation move on their currency. They pegged it to the euro, in the attempt to stem their own currency's appreciation, which was ruining their trade with other countries, being thought of as "safe" in a time of turmoil, when so much cash was out of the other markets due to fear (the rest was going into gold). This resulted in a HISTORIC move of over 8.5% in something that normally moves .1% at most a day, overnight...That's a big enough move to really hurt (or help, depending on which side of a trade you're on) a normal trader. Now, with 100x leverage -- wow - even a tiny bet adds up very quickly, for or against you. With 100x leverage, everything is multiplied 100x -- except the money you have to put down to open the trade. In a gross oversimplification, you can bet $1, but lose $100 in that case. Meaning he might not even had had that huge a bet on. A lot of "safety obcessed" individuals also got hammered on this one. (and soon enough, on T bills when the bond vigilantes come out and treat us like the bankrupt jerks we are -- they'll be around as soon as BenB and TimG stop buying them in debt monetization).
Most people figured that when that happened, the safe trade would switch entirely to gold. The thing is, the Swiss needed tons of instant dough to buy Euros with all of a sudden. So they sold tons of gold (literally) and tried to do it when the western markets weren't open. That was too much for the Asian retail investors to eat, so gold went down too -- they (for reasons that should be obvious) didn't give anyone a heads up on this, except perhaps a few special friends, so the whole deal caught everyone completely off. It will fail, but the Swiss had no choice but to try it or face ruin anyway - their currency was so overvalued that they could sell nothing to anyone else, and no country can live with that very long.
Y'all might want to go look at zerohedge (no link, their servers are chronically overloaded as is - but a few more snarks won't hurt the place, just not all slashdot please) for some more on this. Sometimes they publish microsecond graphs of what the *headline reading* bots are doing too, they don't like HFT either, but it had nothing to do with this one. I used to think with my signal processing experience I could blow those bots off, as some of them seem pretty stupid. But they are a little ahead of most slashdotters in text understanding -- they actually can read the news tickers and adjust based on the headlines and content(!).
The SEC is more or less completely owned by the people they are supposed to regulate. Too small, they don't care about you. Too big, they're already bribing you. Middle size is all they do, and they do little of that. It's like with drugs where the big dealer turns in the smaller competition once in awhile to the bribed cops, so everyone gets a benefit -- cops look good, getting a bust, big dealer gets rid of competition, all go home happy, well...almost all. It's a dirty game, but you can still win at poker even with a cheating dealer, if he's not after you personally.
This in fact is the single best argument against government funded health care in any guise (including forcing us to use the existing broken rapacious insurance system in the most blatant crony capitalism ever shown in public)
Because once everyone's on the dole, and "the government" eg us, are paying for it, there's no end of temptation for them to tell us how to live in detail, to keep profits high and costs down. A world of everything not mandatory being forbidden is where this goes inevitably. Fight it, or suck it up, but realize what's coming so you can do it honestly.
But every week, someone wins each of those lotteries, and in sad comment on state of things, it's their only chance of ever getting rich too.
The system has and does support a computer lab (about 10 machines back when I ran a consultancy here), a machine shop - big tools, welders, and now a physics lab in addition to all the usual home entertainment stuff and lighting -- mostly CCFL, but other types too (even good old halogens for reading and the stereo microscope where they rule). Freezer in an unheated room, freezes two liter bottles of water to put in coolers used as refrigerators in the houses. Saves a ton. In fact, nearly all we do could be done in an on-grid house, whereupon you'd find out why they are called the power company -- they find a way to increase all the other non-electricity charges till you pay the same anyway -- same thing as is called Cramming when the phone companies do it.
As I started with bare land, and built on that, I found out something really interesting. In most counties, including mine, the county has delegated the issuance and enforcement of building permits to guess who, the aptly named "power company". Ha! So all four of my dwellings needed no permits, and are "barns" insofar as taxes go. Now, think how much money that saves yearly -- and now recalculate the payoff time for solar. Laughing all the way to the bank on that one!
More on my forums, link below.
Yup. This has been true for a long time. Why should Generous Electric not make motors with too little iron and copper, saving themselves some money if the only increase in cost is to the end-user. And the energy ratings still suck on most appliances, and seem to be going away again. I live off the grid, I care, but lately you can't find a consumption (or even wattage when running) rating on a cheap refrigerator at Lowes...Blank stare is the best you can get. If you do care, it used to be you could go to Graingers, pay a little more, and get a premium motor, same type, with 90% efficiency, instead of 60-70% at best shipped in your appliance. Of course, it was all on you to do it. More radical - I'm now using an old maytag wringer washer with a DC motor on a variable drive, and you know what? It does a better job with less water than the new stuff for most things...you have more control than the dumb computer UI with presets.
It's been tried. 2nd chapter of acts, bible. And check title grammar, gheez.
Yeah, a couple knots is all Java can keep up with (if that). That garbage collection really screws up anything with realtime involved. On top of the basic slowness, that is. It's a great excuse for hardware designers to overbuild everything with tons of buffers, though.
Check your hardware for being broken then. I have gnome 2 (U 10.04) set up so close that people who've only used windows can barely tell any difference. One new hire, after being productive in their first hours on a system, finally grinned and asked what super reliable new, fast, version of windows I'd put on the machine. Nuff said.
Mod parent up. Factual.
Still writing new apps in ...perl...Gtk....and C (mostly for embedded where C++ is too bulky).
You ought to see *any* opsys on a huge 8 thread i9 with SSD. Bios takes far longer than the opsys, in my case ubuntu 10.4 64 bit (because I have 16 gigs ram on that box).
Agree -- all my linux machines are 10.4. Ran some of the newer stuff in virtual box. Ewwww, it stank utterly. I don't need the opsys itself to be entertaining, I just want it to load my programs and get the heck out of the way, except for providing them services. Done. 10.4 does that, the newer stuff, not. Hope they get over it before the next LTS, or I'll be distro shopping myself.
And we make people use their real names. When we didn't we got too many nut-cases and almost-real bots. As a result, discussion is polite and stays more on topic. The rest of the web can have the lusers with weird handles, suits me fine. Flame wars don't.
I've been saying the same thing for years myself, and experienced it firsthand. The bigs just cross license, no money need change hands. A little guy with just one patent can't play in that game, and can't do squat without violating some bunch of stupid patented stuff.
Because most diesel fuel is used in big trucks, which do a lot more damage to roads than cars do for the same fuel consumption, and the tax is applied accordingly. The diesel is actually easier to refine crude into than gasoline and cheaper to make -- the rest the government gets. FWIW, I own a brand new 2011 cruze LT (gasoline), and I love the thing. It gets 31 mpg driving in the mountains, no highway miles at all, and that engine is about as high tech as it gets. To get the zippy performance, this engine is tuned for a narrow power band, but this doesn't matter with the great tranny it has. Once the turbo spins up a little, it's quick as you'd ever need -- not as quick as my 2010 Camaro SS, but fine for non competitive driving. All that talk of torque is silly. The engine isn't connected direct to the tires, it goes through an impedance matching device called a transmission. The comparison above is like comparing watts (horsepower) and amps (torque), without mentioning voltage -- volts times amps equals watts....doh.
+10 insightful. Even on a landline, why is it anyone who has your number thinks you want to waste time on them any time it's convenient for THEM? At least I can be "away from the phone" on my landline that doesn't take messages. Now I'm supposed to be able to be hassled 24/7 with a cel always on me? Heck with that. And I'm supposed to pay for that "privilege". Heck with that too.
And yes, I've had experience with the "it can't be turned off" sorcerers apprentice billing machine, even AFTER the humans I could talk to said I owed them zero, and then the collection agencies that bought the debt one after another -- 5 years later, and yes, they dinged my credit rating, not that a multimillionaire needs one real bad. I should sue the fskers myself as a class of one -- but there are so many people, practically 100% of those I know who have been customers, it'd probably make a nice big class for that issue alone - you just can't turn them off no matter what! Takes entitlement mentality to an entirely new level.
Only two collection agencies in a year? Man, you're having much better luck with Verizons run-on-forever billing robots than anyone I know. I know at least 10 stories like this where I know the person involved (and one is me). They sure are good at billing, eh? What's really funny, revealed through an FOIA requst the fed fought, is that Verizon was at the fed cheap money window even ahead of most of the big banks -- couldn't make payroll, according to them, without emergency aid (nor could McDonalds or Harley). You'd think....
Seconded. And another geek/developer visited recently and noticed the same thing with no prompting. WinXP boots like the wind in Virtual Box....but not so great on identical hardware "native". Though I suppose it's not identical -- VB only shows a windows XP instance a nicely optimized fixed set of hardware, nothing for windows to search for new hardware on, unless you explicitly add something from a VB menu. I think this might be due to a difference in philosophies in setting up hardware in the first place. With say, Ubutntu 10.04, if it's there during install, it's nothing, it just works, but adding it later is a pain (not much, but some). Windows seems to check the entire universe at the drop of a hat (or any boot). That has to take time, and there's just nothing much to check in a simple virtual machine.
I wish they'd donate me a few drums of the very hottest waste they can produce. I'd bury it in my backyard surrounded with thermocouples and have nighttime power input to augment my successful solar system that's been doing it for me since 1980, other than "February" which is a time of darkness here.
Sure, my solar system only gives me maybe 10kwh a day -- but I've learned to run a machine shop, an electronics shop, a computer network, and life in general off it. You adapt.
And that's the real issue -- people won't willingly turn off the big screen TV at 2 am because it's not demanded of them now, and they think they are entitled to hot water at 6 am when it's expensive and hard to do, instead of at noon when it's free, more or less. I just don't weld when the sun ain't shining.
While there are for sure some technical issues -- nothing is simple -- they are not the real problem. It's humans, always has been.
Mostly agree. There never has been, and probably never will be a one size fits all solution. So? Use each technology where it works best and reduces total cost (however you measure that, some would include pollution) the most. Here in SW VA, I've been pure solar since around 1980 -- and the original panels and inverters are still putting out in my system, though I've been through two sets of crappy lead-acid batteries during that time. It's enough to run A/C, my machine shop, welders, computer network, and sometimes dummy loads I have to use to keep from ruining batteries from overcharge. It just plain works, even with 30 year old tech -- all that spin about "gee, look, they'll be 2% more efficient or 3% cheaper in just a few years is put out by people who sell something other than solar. Kinda like that hydrogen economy that's not coming but boosted by some big oil people (who BTW, make most of the best solar panels -- they know the music is going to stop and want to ensure a chair when it does)
Any power I don't need from the grid (never been connected here) means more for someone who can't use solar and has to use something else, probably a mix of coal, gas, nuclear -- it works out. In fact, in the farther north, the thermal techs work better as the cooling side of the steam plant is easier to do. We have to think like system designers here, as it's a system we're working with, and one that includes humans and their demands -- and foibles.
I'm not a huge fan of nuclear, not because of the physics (I am, after all, a physicist) but due to the stupidity of humans doing a good job running it. We don't reprocess fuel, or use more advanced ones, because of the fear of proliferation. We can't store it safely because of NIMBY stupidity...many have a knee jerk reaction to any mention of nuclear -- even NMR was renamed MRI in the medical business because of this. And look at Fukishima -- 10k plus dead of natural causes -- almost no reporting, but wow, even today you can find headlines about those reactors, which to my knowledge have resulted in just about two dangerous (1/4 sV) doses so far, and no deaths so far. That's emotions out of control and people with agendas using the event, ignoring the real tragedies of others, to push their views and fears. Sick in the extreme.
Fusion would be nice -- it's what I'm working on myself, and self-funded so I'm no charlatan sucking the public teat for something that always seems to be far off -- I'm making progress due to advantages I (and some others in my group and blog) have over big science -- we can change on a dime when we find out new things, and are not limited to the rather ignorant tokomak approach which keeps promising that if we just build one more, bigger, it'll work this time. I'd have fired the lot of those tenure-perk seeking idiots on rev 2, we're on what, rev 5 or 6 now? But nothing else gets money unless you do it yourself.
I think the reality is that we need to learn how to manage humans better, and build nuclear fission for awhile, letting any new fossil plants run off their lifetimes, maybe converting some to natgas if that frakking thing turns out well (maybe, maybe not, and truly, not all that much is projected compared to demand -- at best a few human generations worth, that's no solution, just a band aid). Meanwhile, we should be doing R&D and not so limited to just one approach for either fission or fusion, there are several contenders that make a lot more sense scientifically, but not till a lot more man hours are put into working them out. But we're not doing any of that, and that's just "not right". Hence, my putting MY OWN FORTUNE at risk to do something, since no one else has the will to do it. Maybe it pays off, maybe not - jury is out at the moment, but it seems worth doing and setting an example.
Oh, I earned that fortune developing high tech products, such as you probably own. I maintain it by out-trading the masters of the universe on the markets, my "day job". So far, so good. Compared to a good engineer, most of those financial super-brains are little kids, shortsighted and just ignorant of how things really work.
They're the MEDIA industry. Politicians get or lose their jobs based on media exposure. Both know darn well that all the media business would have to do is make some small changes in what gets aired, what music is promoted and so forth - the simple truth about the politicians coming out would not only remove all the current ones from office -- people might not wait for election time to do it, either.
Just a few "interestingly allegorical" movies and some decent protest music from a few of the "manufactured bands" and there you have it. That industry has a bigger stick to wave around than most realize. Yeah, you might be fine, but despite everyone "knowing better" advertising still works, the water torture eventually gets through and actually does "create demand".
In this case, piece of cake since everybody's already pissed. Just focus it a little and ID the perps a little more...
Note how rare it is media reminds us they're now getting government (us in other words) to pay for "stopping piracy"? Of course, if it's not in their best interests (as perceived by them) then it's not in the news. Since they are living well off the current legal situation, they don't want it changed so much, but change the current situation, and they pull out all the stops on those who try to get the change going.
Is what you need to become if you want to do crimes of money these days. If our government was serious, this crap would be toast instantly. See how quick they got the DC Sniper after he gave them no more than a Cayman Island bank account number. Think "what would Harry Harrison do?".
This proves that
A: We're not serious about this.
B: It's probably half the government itself in an attempt to create people believing they need even more power.
Hey, HR tries! They demand meaningless Certs, degrees, and 5 years experience in things that have only existed for two!
+ several for good point. It'd be nice to see the dirt, and the fact there's plenty should be obvious simply by what happens daily.
I think that might be a doomed to failure exercise. Since the politicians and their masters have gotten good at this stuff, they don't speak where there's a tape recorder -- Nixon taught them that -- and they don't send this stuff in emails -- the insider traders getting caught taught them that. Remember, the pols *specialty* is doing corruption without getting caught.