Actually the Nissan Leaf gets about 4.5 miles per KWH.
That's.... optimistic. You can get 4.5 m/kWh, but doing so requires driving quite a bit more efficiently than most people do. 3.5 m/kWh is more typical, especially for those who do much freeway driving. Still, that's 11.4 miles on solar power, assuming a 4m^2 area, which is pretty generous. I'd say half that is more realistic, so call it 5 miles on a day of solar self-charging.
In my case, my LEAF is parked indoors basically 24x7, so solar panels on it wouldn't be worth much at all. I mostly drive it between my garage at home and the underground parking garage at work.
Dogs are more vicious then humans, but we humans completely dominate dogs.
We perfected warfare. Dogs hunt in packs, sure, but do they attack other packs of dogs, rape, enslave and pillage? For humans, warfare is an evolutionary strategy. If there was a nasty pack of dogs around, we'd extinguish them. Maybe we'd do it anyway, just for kicks.
And how is it that humans are so effective at warfare? Because we cooperate. Strategy is all about large-scale cooperation. Tactics is almost entirely about small-scale cooperation. Weapons-making is entirely dependent upon massive cooperation.
In my limited understanding (I've never bothered to look it up) all felons lose the right to own firearms, and to vote.
But after a few years, felons can get their rights restored through a judicial process. Good luck ever getting your name off the sex offender registry.
Keep in mind also, that many of the registered sex offenders committed such heinous acts as having sex with their girlfriend when they were both under age, or taking a leak in what they thought was an empty field, with no one to see. It's also worth considering that many of those on the registries are actually innocent. The consequences of the major sex crimes are so terrifying that DAs find it very easy to plea bargain for a guilty plea to a misdemeanor. Given the choice between pleading to a misdemeanor you didn't commit, with a fine and community service, and going to trial for a felony that would put you in jail for the rest of your life, what would you -- as an innocent man who didn't commit any of the crimes -- choose to do? Of course, only later do you discover that your plea bargain has put you on the registry for life... and with all of the details of your supposed crime kindly omitted to protect your privacy.
This stuff really happens. A lot. The system is badly broken.
We are not denying them their rights, when they commit a crime and break the law, they are voluntarily giving up their rights.
What rights, and for how long? There's a prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment in the Bill of Rights for a reason; the punishment must fit the crime. In the case of sex crimes, the lifelong punishment that comes after all jail time has been served, fines paid, etc. is almost always excessive.
I think Google is better-positioned to make this happen in a significant way than Dallas Semiconductor was. Also, the problems with passwords have become more acute.
There are devices in some smartphones which could implement TPM functionality, the smart card chip, AKA secure element, which is used by Google Wallet and similar. They don't have any kind of special access to the GPS hardware, though.
I'm not sure how comprehensive the default install is, this particular selection of search engines might have been configured by the person who packages it for Debian.
It probably comes with a few out of the box, but Chrome also automatically adds other sites to the list as you use them. I'm not sure how it works, exactly, but I think Chrome uses some sort of heuristic to recognize sites that provide a search function of some sort, and adds them to the list. My browser has several dozen different "search" sites in the list, including many that I didn't even realize had a search function.
Another non-obvious and really useful feature is that you can edit the "keyword" for each "search engine". I have several configured. For example, the web-based employee directory at work is called "teams" so I set that keyword to "t". To find someone I type "t" and then a space in the omnibox, then the name, or whatever search terms, then hit enter. I use amazon a lot, so I set its keyword to "a". "b" searches the bug tracker, "m" searches the internal corporate search engine, "bh" searches B&H photo, "map" searches Google Maps, "w" searches Wikipedia -- but since Google does a better job of searching Wikipedia than Wikipedia's search engine, I put in a URL that searches Google with a "site:wikipedia.org" added to the query.
Of course, if I don't type a shortcut and hit space, then the omnibox does its normal thing of trying to figure out if what I typed is a search or a URL.
If there's a site that is searchable that Chrome doesn't add to the list automatically, you can add it manually, just figure out the search URL and then put "%s" in where your search terms should go.
For example? (Proven, ready-to-deploy examples only, please... paper designs are always cheaper and more reliable.)
Also, I never said that the alternatives weren't cheaper... I just explained why we wouldn't "just do that". If the alternatives actually make sense economically, meaning it requires less total resources to produce and deliver the same energy to the places that need it at the times they need it, then we should "just do that". And barring artificial barriers imposed by regulatory agencies, we will "just do that", if it's really viable. Energy is a commodity and that's exactly what markets are best at.
That only counts to the extent that the fossil fuels and the other resources used to extract and deliver them, and to operate the plant, have alternative uses. On balance the value of fossil fuels as energy sources is much, much higher than their value as raw materials for other products, and the resources used to extract, deliver and convert them to usable energy are relatively small.
That's a reasonable approach, I suppose. Personally, if someone is in my house and I feel I need to shoot them, I want buckshot from the beginning. I couldn't care less about my furniture -- if I'm shooting someone it's to defend my life and my family's lives, so I want them stopped now, not three shells from now (nit: "round" refers to solid bullets, not shot shells).
Plus, most shotguns don't hold that many shells and contrary to common belief it's not only possible but quite easy to miss with a shotgun. Given that, I don't want to waste any shells.
No thanks. But if you like I can find you a dozen news reports of home intruders who were shot with birdshot and didn't even bother going to the hospital.
Which is exactly why this AWB is rather ill-timed from the gun control perspective, because right now we do have a court that will strike it down and set that precedent, and the composition of the court is very unlikely to change in the year or so it will take lawsuits challenging the ban to make it before the court. And once that precedent is established, SCOTUS tries very hard to avoid reversing itself.
This position ignores the other effect of restrictions on the mentally ill... it discourages people from seeking help when they need it.
I think more people are worried about those who are currently in the mental health system and able to purchase a weapon than they are about a current gun owner becoming a mental patient.
I agree that they are more worried about that. I disagree that the position makes sense. Mental illness causes great harm in many ways in society, and on balance the small number who grab a gun and shoot people cause negligible harm in comparison. Consider that nearly all homelessness is caused by mental illness -- and far more homeless people die of exposure every year than are shot by mentally ill people. Consider also that the vast majority of substance abuse, child abuse, spouse abuse, sexual abuse, etc. have their roots in mental illness. When you look at the amount of crime and the amount of injury, suffering and death caused by substance abuse alone... the total cost in any measure you care to examine is staggering.
Exacerbating a deep and widespread problem in order to combat a vanishingly rare problem is bad policy.
If we know we can prevent some or most of the damage by not use using dirty combustion methods,
Why wouldn't we?
That's an easy one. We wouldn't because the alternatives to those dirty combustion methods are more expensive. Note that "more expensive" doesn't mean "requires more money" because money isn't a real thing, it's just a placeholder. it means that the alternatives require more resources, whether they be raw materials, labor, etc., resources that could be applied to solving other problems like, perhaps, the aforementioned world hunger.
In fact, world hunger isn't a problem of insufficient production, it's a problem of transportation and distribution, and more expensive transportation will therefore (likely) directly result in more hunger.
It's all connected, and you can't push on one piece without moving some others. So it's never a question of "if we can just do this why don't we?". That's not to say that it might not be worth doing, but you can't simply ignore all of the other potential effects.
owning a gun expressly for that purpose will only cause the same reaction from the other party.
This is a very strong and completely unsupported assertion. Show me evidence that supports your claim. Note that anecdotes are not very good as evidence but if you want to use anecdotal evidence go ahead, and I'll match you 10 to 1.
Consider: Police carry guns for precisely the purpose that you claim will only increase harm.
How about the background check requirements? Do you think those accomplish anything, or not? The reason I ask is that in recent polling, a majority of gun owners support increased use of background checks to allow law-abiding and sane citizens to obtain guns more easily than criminals or insane people.
This position ignores the other effect of restrictions on the mentally ill... it discourages people from seeking help when they need it. This is already a huge problem in the United States, because of the stigma associated with mental illness, and more restrictions and especially mandatory reporting requirements -- because the info will be used for other purposes as well -- will exacerbate the problem. We need to provide greater access to treatment, not discourage people from seeking it.
We've already seen many cases of veterans avoiding treatment because the VA started reporting PTSD and other mental illnesses to the states for background check disqualification. So much so that the VA is reconsidering that policy, in spite of the military's large concerns about the potential for bad PR which could land on them if they "knew" a given soldier was dangerous and didn't act.
Also, how about the smaller magazine requirements? Do those do anything to reduce the number of murders (the idea being reduce the number of shots fired before a shooter has to reload or switch weapons)?
I see no statistical evidence that it will change anything. If you compare the outcomes of mass shootings performed by weapons with large vs small magazines there's no evidence that restricting magazine size will change the outcomes. Shooters with smaller magazines carry more of them (and reloading is a very fast operation, especially with a little practice), or carry more guns -- and changing guns takes virtually no time at all. In fact, the practice of grabbing another gun when your current gun is empty is often called a "New York reload".
So, no, as with most gun control legislation, this will inconvenience the law-abiding without significantly impacting mass shooting violence. And it will have no effect whatsoever on other gun crime, except to create a bunch of criminals out of otherwise law-abiding citizens who will refuse to give up their now-banned guns.
Slashdot Mirror
common sense
Common sense is neither.
Actually the Nissan Leaf gets about 4.5 miles per KWH.
That's.... optimistic. You can get 4.5 m/kWh, but doing so requires driving quite a bit more efficiently than most people do. 3.5 m/kWh is more typical, especially for those who do much freeway driving. Still, that's 11.4 miles on solar power, assuming a 4m^2 area, which is pretty generous. I'd say half that is more realistic, so call it 5 miles on a day of solar self-charging.
In my case, my LEAF is parked indoors basically 24x7, so solar panels on it wouldn't be worth much at all. I mostly drive it between my garage at home and the underground parking garage at work.
LOL
And you think convincing a woman to spend several hours per day playing video games is hard?
That's great until you have to use a different keyboard layout.
Or a different operating system which uses a different method of entering extended characters.
> Weapons-making is entirely dependent upon massive cooperation.
Human ancestors were fashioning stone weapons over two million years before we came around.
We're talking about "perfecting" war, which means modern weapons. How many people does it take to make an F-16? Or even a lowly 9mm handgun?
Ugg join NSA! Ugg say, only defense bad man spear, good man spear!
Ugg has a point. It's a supremely obvious one that I doubt taxed even Ugg's limited cognitive abilities, but still, Ugg has a point.
Dogs are more vicious then humans, but we humans completely dominate dogs.
We perfected warfare. Dogs hunt in packs, sure, but do they attack other packs of dogs, rape, enslave and pillage? For humans, warfare is an evolutionary strategy. If there was a nasty pack of dogs around, we'd extinguish them. Maybe we'd do it anyway, just for kicks.
And how is it that humans are so effective at warfare? Because we cooperate. Strategy is all about large-scale cooperation. Tactics is almost entirely about small-scale cooperation. Weapons-making is entirely dependent upon massive cooperation.
In my limited understanding (I've never bothered to look it up) all felons lose the right to own firearms, and to vote.
But after a few years, felons can get their rights restored through a judicial process. Good luck ever getting your name off the sex offender registry.
Keep in mind also, that many of the registered sex offenders committed such heinous acts as having sex with their girlfriend when they were both under age, or taking a leak in what they thought was an empty field, with no one to see. It's also worth considering that many of those on the registries are actually innocent. The consequences of the major sex crimes are so terrifying that DAs find it very easy to plea bargain for a guilty plea to a misdemeanor. Given the choice between pleading to a misdemeanor you didn't commit, with a fine and community service, and going to trial for a felony that would put you in jail for the rest of your life, what would you -- as an innocent man who didn't commit any of the crimes -- choose to do? Of course, only later do you discover that your plea bargain has put you on the registry for life... and with all of the details of your supposed crime kindly omitted to protect your privacy.
This stuff really happens. A lot. The system is badly broken.
We are not denying them their rights, when they commit a crime and break the law, they are voluntarily giving up their rights.
What rights, and for how long? There's a prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment in the Bill of Rights for a reason; the punishment must fit the crime. In the case of sex crimes, the lifelong punishment that comes after all jail time has been served, fines paid, etc. is almost always excessive.
I think Google is better-positioned to make this happen in a significant way than Dallas Semiconductor was. Also, the problems with passwords have become more acute.
There are devices in some smartphones which could implement TPM functionality, the smart card chip, AKA secure element, which is used by Google Wallet and similar. They don't have any kind of special access to the GPS hardware, though.
The paper is very interesting, but if you don't want to read the whole thing, just read the section under the heading "Moral".
I'm not sure how comprehensive the default install is, this particular selection of search engines might have been configured by the person who packages it for Debian.
It probably comes with a few out of the box, but Chrome also automatically adds other sites to the list as you use them. I'm not sure how it works, exactly, but I think Chrome uses some sort of heuristic to recognize sites that provide a search function of some sort, and adds them to the list. My browser has several dozen different "search" sites in the list, including many that I didn't even realize had a search function.
Another non-obvious and really useful feature is that you can edit the "keyword" for each "search engine". I have several configured. For example, the web-based employee directory at work is called "teams" so I set that keyword to "t". To find someone I type "t" and then a space in the omnibox, then the name, or whatever search terms, then hit enter. I use amazon a lot, so I set its keyword to "a". "b" searches the bug tracker, "m" searches the internal corporate search engine, "bh" searches B&H photo, "map" searches Google Maps, "w" searches Wikipedia -- but since Google does a better job of searching Wikipedia than Wikipedia's search engine, I put in a URL that searches Google with a "site:wikipedia.org" added to the query.
Of course, if I don't type a shortcut and hit space, then the omnibox does its normal thing of trying to figure out if what I typed is a search or a URL.
If there's a site that is searchable that Chrome doesn't add to the list automatically, you can add it manually, just figure out the search URL and then put "%s" in where your search terms should go.
Chrome rocks.
For example? (Proven, ready-to-deploy examples only, please... paper designs are always cheaper and more reliable.)
Also, I never said that the alternatives weren't cheaper... I just explained why we wouldn't "just do that". If the alternatives actually make sense economically, meaning it requires less total resources to produce and deliver the same energy to the places that need it at the times they need it, then we should "just do that". And barring artificial barriers imposed by regulatory agencies, we will "just do that", if it's really viable. Energy is a commodity and that's exactly what markets are best at.
That only counts to the extent that the fossil fuels and the other resources used to extract and deliver them, and to operate the plant, have alternative uses. On balance the value of fossil fuels as energy sources is much, much higher than their value as raw materials for other products, and the resources used to extract, deliver and convert them to usable energy are relatively small.
BP is also one of the biggest manufacturers of solar panels.
That's a reasonable approach, I suppose. Personally, if someone is in my house and I feel I need to shoot them, I want buckshot from the beginning. I couldn't care less about my furniture -- if I'm shooting someone it's to defend my life and my family's lives, so I want them stopped now, not three shells from now (nit: "round" refers to solid bullets, not shot shells).
Plus, most shotguns don't hold that many shells and contrary to common belief it's not only possible but quite easy to miss with a shotgun. Given that, I don't want to waste any shells.
And if they're wearing soft armor it won't do shit for them because it'll just cave in their chest cavity.
Newton's third law says you're full of shit. As does anyone with significant experience shooting things with shotguns.
No thanks. But if you like I can find you a dozen news reports of home intruders who were shot with birdshot and didn't even bother going to the hospital.
Which is exactly why this AWB is rather ill-timed from the gun control perspective, because right now we do have a court that will strike it down and set that precedent, and the composition of the court is very unlikely to change in the year or so it will take lawsuits challenging the ban to make it before the court. And once that precedent is established, SCOTUS tries very hard to avoid reversing itself.
I think more people are worried about those who are currently in the mental health system and able to purchase a weapon than they are about a current gun owner becoming a mental patient.
I agree that they are more worried about that. I disagree that the position makes sense. Mental illness causes great harm in many ways in society, and on balance the small number who grab a gun and shoot people cause negligible harm in comparison. Consider that nearly all homelessness is caused by mental illness -- and far more homeless people die of exposure every year than are shot by mentally ill people. Consider also that the vast majority of substance abuse, child abuse, spouse abuse, sexual abuse, etc. have their roots in mental illness. When you look at the amount of crime and the amount of injury, suffering and death caused by substance abuse alone... the total cost in any measure you care to examine is staggering.
Exacerbating a deep and widespread problem in order to combat a vanishingly rare problem is bad policy.
If we know we can prevent some or most of the damage by not use using dirty combustion methods, Why wouldn't we?
That's an easy one. We wouldn't because the alternatives to those dirty combustion methods are more expensive. Note that "more expensive" doesn't mean "requires more money" because money isn't a real thing, it's just a placeholder. it means that the alternatives require more resources, whether they be raw materials, labor, etc., resources that could be applied to solving other problems like, perhaps, the aforementioned world hunger.
In fact, world hunger isn't a problem of insufficient production, it's a problem of transportation and distribution, and more expensive transportation will therefore (likely) directly result in more hunger.
It's all connected, and you can't push on one piece without moving some others. So it's never a question of "if we can just do this why don't we?". That's not to say that it might not be worth doing, but you can't simply ignore all of the other potential effects.
owning a gun expressly for that purpose will only cause the same reaction from the other party.
This is a very strong and completely unsupported assertion. Show me evidence that supports your claim. Note that anecdotes are not very good as evidence but if you want to use anecdotal evidence go ahead, and I'll match you 10 to 1.
Consider: Police carry guns for precisely the purpose that you claim will only increase harm.
How about the background check requirements? Do you think those accomplish anything, or not? The reason I ask is that in recent polling, a majority of gun owners support increased use of background checks to allow law-abiding and sane citizens to obtain guns more easily than criminals or insane people.
This position ignores the other effect of restrictions on the mentally ill... it discourages people from seeking help when they need it. This is already a huge problem in the United States, because of the stigma associated with mental illness, and more restrictions and especially mandatory reporting requirements -- because the info will be used for other purposes as well -- will exacerbate the problem. We need to provide greater access to treatment, not discourage people from seeking it.
We've already seen many cases of veterans avoiding treatment because the VA started reporting PTSD and other mental illnesses to the states for background check disqualification. So much so that the VA is reconsidering that policy, in spite of the military's large concerns about the potential for bad PR which could land on them if they "knew" a given soldier was dangerous and didn't act.
Also, how about the smaller magazine requirements? Do those do anything to reduce the number of murders (the idea being reduce the number of shots fired before a shooter has to reload or switch weapons)?
I see no statistical evidence that it will change anything. If you compare the outcomes of mass shootings performed by weapons with large vs small magazines there's no evidence that restricting magazine size will change the outcomes. Shooters with smaller magazines carry more of them (and reloading is a very fast operation, especially with a little practice), or carry more guns -- and changing guns takes virtually no time at all. In fact, the practice of grabbing another gun when your current gun is empty is often called a "New York reload".
So, no, as with most gun control legislation, this will inconvenience the law-abiding without significantly impacting mass shooting violence. And it will have no effect whatsoever on other gun crime, except to create a bunch of criminals out of otherwise law-abiding citizens who will refuse to give up their now-banned guns.