No, but are there any gasoline powered vehicles that can go around 100 miles on ~$3? That same trip will cost you around $15 and rising in even a more economical gas powered vehicle. True at the moment the economics don't quite work out, electric vehicles being more expensive than their gasoline counterparts. But its getting pretty close. Unless there are major advances electric vehicles won't completely replace gas anytime soon but they would suffice for most peoples daily commute and the more people that are willing switching to electric vehicles the longer those who need/want the range and convenience of gas vehicles will be able to afford it.
Yet another reason not to buy/network these "smart" appliances. I'm all for more use of the internet & connectivity, but not with basic utilities (HVAC, Electric, Water, Fridge/Freezer, Septic, maybe TV). Maybe some basic outputs, like sending out an email warning that your furnace is malfunctioning or your water pressure has dropped but only through unidirectional protocols that are impossible to hack or secondary health monitoring systems that even if hacked would be physically unable to effect the operation of the appliance. I don't want my fridge to try to talk me into helping out a Nigerian prince, my furnace being held for ransom by a piece of malware or my TV flashing male enhancement/porn advertisements when the kids are trying to watch a Disney show/film.
"All the time"? There were only about 613 fatal gun accidents in 2007. That compared to at least 67,740 incidents of self-defense with a firearm a year and possibly far more (NRA claims 2.5 M but likely inflated). Especially when you compare the number of private firearms (somewhere around 300 Million) with the number of crimes even vaguely associated with a firearm per year (~400,000) it amazing how rare firearm related crime is (0.1%).
Aren't judges supposed to be impartial adjudicators? This judges statements read like an NSA PR release touting all of the "wonders" of the NSA program without providing any evidence or noting any of the drawbacks.
Isn't the Liver one of the easiest organs to transplant and least difficult to acquire? You can get simply cut off a moderate part of a living donors liver and sew it into a recipient and both livers will grow back to normal size within weeks. It sounds like it will practically grow itself with the right mixture of nutrients. At least start off with something a little more difficult, like a thyroid gland or a segment of skin.
"over-saturated from the rapid adoption of solar power"
Ok, even if that is true it should be possible to rig a solar installation so that it could fill the power requirements of the house during the day but not back-feed any power into the grid. It wouldn't be as advantageous for the solar installations as they would end up with a bill for the power they used during the night but it would drastically decrease their grid costs, especially if AC is the primary power cost. However it seems obvious that power grid issues are not the primary "issue" for utilities, as evidenced by this excerpt from a report quoted in the article “Not only does solar steal share of new electricity demand, it parasitically steals demand from previously installed generation, and does at the most valuable ‘peak’ part of the demand curve.”. 'Peak' power is supposed to be more expensive for utilities, necessitating higher rates and special metering. If its so difficult and costly why aren't they welcoming a decrease in the strain? The only way this would make sense is that it has been used simply as an excuse for increasing profits.
So when you go through 3+ bulk packs of CFL bulbs (8 bulbs each, with each bulb rated for almost a year of continual operation) in 6 months in a house with only about a dozen light fixtures that doesn't suggest something is up with the supposed service life? We do have an old farm house so I suppose it could be something with our electricity but even if that is the case it suggests that there are some situations where CFLs are simply not practical.
Sure there are many applications where CFLs and LED's are far preferable to incandescents, however there are some instances where at least CFLs are not very effective. In our living room and kitchen for example CFLs don't last long due to the lights in those rooms being turned on/off often (in one instance 4 bulbs lasted less than a month). There are also applications (work lamps, outdoor lights, wellhouse heating) where incandescents work far better than at least CFLs. Halogens can take up some of the slack in those instances I suppose but banning a proven, simple and effective lighting technology and replacing it with several technologies that have far better energy efficiency, but have a less than stellar quality record & contain toxic chemicals seems questionable at best, idiotic at worst.
Maybe its something wacky about our power or something but CFLs don't work with crap where I live. They last less than half as long as other bulbs and don't seem to provide enough light unless they have been on for 5 minutes or more. I swear that we changed out all of the bulbs in a ceiling fan/4 port light and within a couple weeks half of them were dead and within a month so were the remaining two. I've had good luck with halogens and I'd like to try these new incandescent and maybe LED's in a few places but I won't touch CFLs. Also there are some applications where you WANT a light that generates heat, I know well houses that need just a little heat to keep from freezing in winter use a standard incandescent bulb as a heat source.
10,000 firearm related homicides, and a total yearly mortality rate of over 2 MILLION! Thats less than 0.5% of all annual deaths in the US. Most of those are probably due to gang warfare, which isn't going to stop even if you could magically remove all civilian firearms in the US. Speaking more directly to firearms. Most estimates say that there are at least 270 Million civilian firearms in the US, that means that only 0.0037% of firearms are misused each year. You want to penalize probably in the neighborhood of 100 Million people for the actions of less than 10,000. If you're really looking to save lives we need to fix hospitals, medical malpractice is estimated to kill almost 200,000 a year.
Because limiting use of force to government personnel will never turn around and bite you. All of those countries that ban (or severely restrict) civilian firearm ownership (Mexico, China, North Korea, etc) are such peaceful, pleasant, freedom loving places.
Ah Boston PD, you show yet again how absolutely crazy you are. The saddest thing of all, suspect that lack of action in regards to stolen vehicles & and the insanely high (99.99%) false positive rate are not the reasons for their "suspending" of the program. All of those hits in the police employee parking lot that they'd rather not address is probably by the far the largest driving factor.
Feinstein again, that woman needs to be banned from government by a constitutional amendment. She is the epitome of what is wrong with current politics, she's a hypocrite, she'll jump on any bandwagon that gets her press, she has the common sense of an unsupervised teenager with a platinum credit card in a mall and she will twist the facts or outright lie to get her way. Oh and she's just plain crazy to boot.
I took a tour to a wind farm as a kind of fact finding when they were trying to put one in my area (eventually killed by NIMBY's, none of which went on any of the offered tours). Sure they make noise but your example is quite accurate, its about as much as wind through trees. Standing with one looming overhead it was barely perceivable with no traffic, no trees in the area and everyone quite from a just finished speech from one of the guides. Even standing right at the base it was less noise then you would have standing by a maple on a mildly windy fall day. We were told that some atmospheric conditions could significantly increase the noise (humidity, low temperatures) but if it can increase turbine noise it probably increases other local noises as well (traffic, trees, etc).
Most of those occurrences were during a time of war, a war that eventually ended. What we have today with the advent of the "war on terrorism" and the now fading "war on drugs" is a state of perpetual "war" because they are such an abstract concept. They also tended to target a very small portion of the population (Japanese, communists, anarchists, etc) whereas today the government targets large swaths of the population, the only thing keeping the system in check is limits on prosecutor & correction facility resources. One of the few pluses to the economic downturn is it finally put a dent in those resources, up until 2008 the inmate population was increasing at the same obscene rate it had since the 70's/80's. After that it "miraculous" began declining.
And how do we know the officers smelled anything? A five minute internet search can come up with case after case where officers claimed one thing (including writing it up in police reports, testifying in court, etc) and later video evidence proved they were telling bold faced lies (Hollywood Florida Framing, BART shooting, OWS protests, Michael Dehererra Beating, Rodney King, Danziger Bridge shootings, etc), oh I'm sorry they "misremembered" the incident. When an independent lab confirms traces of drugs I'll believe it, Until then I personally don't consider an officers statements to carry any more weight than the suspects.
Propaganda can absolutely be lies, it just doesn't have to be. Take the Iraq war, we were told it was necessary to keep WMD's out if Saddams hands and prevent support of terrorism. Years of searching & investigations after we invaded it was proven beyond all doubt that the WMD claims were completely unfounded and the Iraqis had gone out of their way to get rid of the chemical & biological weapons. In addition no concrete terrorist ties were found pre-invasion, in fact it is widely believed that the Iraq invasion became a 'cause celebre' event amongst extremest groups actually resulting in a worldwide increase in terrorist groups/ideology.
Sorry to break it to you but that "statistic" is a bunch of BS. Everyone in the US pays taxes of some sort. I'm not particularly high on the tax scale (about $36k a year) and I estimate that i pay at least 30% of my income in local, state, federal and specific taxes (sales, gas, property, vehicle, etc). MAYBE some very poor (or very rich) people can avoid some of those taxes but EVERYONE pays at least a few of them.
I'm all for blocking obvious CP search terms, but 10,000? How many of those terms could also be for perfectly legitimate purposes? I know one time I was trying to look a certain kind of bridge type for something (biglegs? thicklegs? something like that) on one of the image search sites and I got a bunch of rear shots of scantly clad women. Anyone with a basic understanding of the English language knows that many words have two meanings, throw in abbreviations & slang and they can have 10, throw in various phrases and your hitting the hundreds.
Thats splitting the hair mighty thin, a couple year difference that occurred almost 200 years ago. Especially when there seemed to be absolutely no interest in the islands until the Europeans began colonizing them.
"But still, Argentina has the right to ask to have them back."
Besides being close geographically what claim does Argentina have to the Falklands? At least from what I can find the only time that its population was primarily Argentinian was back around 1774-1811 when the British and Spanish (originally French) settlements were temporarily abandoned (fear of war?) until roughly the 1840s when the British settlements were reestablished. Before the Europeans colonized the islands there may have been some prehistoric settlements and a very short lived occupation by the a Buenos Aires garrison back in 1832 that ended in mutiny but not much else.
If it was an occupation I would agree wholeheartedly. However if what I am reading is correct the people (mostly of European decent) currently living there have been doing so for around 200 years. Even the first known settlement, around 323 years ago, was of English origin. A referendum held in march of this year had a 99.8% vote to remain a colony of the UK. People should have the ability to associate with others based on their own determination, not geographic location.
Someone was way off, I thought I read something this morning putting its demise somewhere around Siberia/Alaska? I'm also surprised anyone saw it, the Falkland Islands aren't exactly populated. I think its somewhere in the neighborhood of 3,000 people, the average 36 square mile county has that around me and the Falkland Islands are over 4,700 square miles.
True, I suppose there are other considerations that should be noted as well. Back during that big power outage a few years back we still had a basement wood stove, even without power it kept the house decent while other people were scrambling for kerosene heaters to stay above freezing. Our new setup (external wood boiler hooked to central heating system) cannot heat the home without power, we do have a generator that could be rigged to run the system but if it wasn't working we would be SOL.
"But how long does it take to go out yourself saw up that cord of wood"
We mostly heat with wood, if you were really ambitious you could chop up an entire seasons worth of wood with two to three people over a weekend. We're a bit more layed back, a few hours every other weekend or so. Even from a small 10 acre family owned woods cutting only pre-seasoned (already dead & mostly dry but still sill standing) trees you could probably heat 3 homes or more sustainably.
Slashdot Mirror
"anything close to the miles-per-tank"
No, but are there any gasoline powered vehicles that can go around 100 miles on ~$3? That same trip will cost you around $15 and rising in even a more economical gas powered vehicle. True at the moment the economics don't quite work out, electric vehicles being more expensive than their gasoline counterparts. But its getting pretty close. Unless there are major advances electric vehicles won't completely replace gas anytime soon but they would suffice for most peoples daily commute and the more people that are willing switching to electric vehicles the longer those who need/want the range and convenience of gas vehicles will be able to afford it.
Yet another reason not to buy/network these "smart" appliances. I'm all for more use of the internet & connectivity, but not with basic utilities (HVAC, Electric, Water, Fridge/Freezer, Septic, maybe TV). Maybe some basic outputs, like sending out an email warning that your furnace is malfunctioning or your water pressure has dropped but only through unidirectional protocols that are impossible to hack or secondary health monitoring systems that even if hacked would be physically unable to effect the operation of the appliance. I don't want my fridge to try to talk me into helping out a Nigerian prince, my furnace being held for ransom by a piece of malware or my TV flashing male enhancement/porn advertisements when the kids are trying to watch a Disney show/film.
"gun related "accidents" happen all the time"
"All the time"? There were only about 613 fatal gun accidents in 2007. That compared to at least 67,740 incidents of self-defense with a firearm a year and possibly far more (NRA claims 2.5 M but likely inflated). Especially when you compare the number of private firearms (somewhere around 300 Million) with the number of crimes even vaguely associated with a firearm per year (~400,000) it amazing how rare firearm related crime is (0.1%).
Aren't judges supposed to be impartial adjudicators? This judges statements read like an NSA PR release touting all of the "wonders" of the NSA program without providing any evidence or noting any of the drawbacks.
Isn't the Liver one of the easiest organs to transplant and least difficult to acquire? You can get simply cut off a moderate part of a living donors liver and sew it into a recipient and both livers will grow back to normal size within weeks. It sounds like it will practically grow itself with the right mixture of nutrients. At least start off with something a little more difficult, like a thyroid gland or a segment of skin.
"over-saturated from the rapid adoption of solar power"
Ok, even if that is true it should be possible to rig a solar installation so that it could fill the power requirements of the house during the day but not back-feed any power into the grid. It wouldn't be as advantageous for the solar installations as they would end up with a bill for the power they used during the night but it would drastically decrease their grid costs, especially if AC is the primary power cost. However it seems obvious that power grid issues are not the primary "issue" for utilities, as evidenced by this excerpt from a report quoted in the article “Not only does solar steal share of new electricity demand, it parasitically steals demand from previously installed generation, and does at the most valuable ‘peak’ part of the demand curve.”. 'Peak' power is supposed to be more expensive for utilities, necessitating higher rates and special metering. If its so difficult and costly why aren't they welcoming a decrease in the strain? The only way this would make sense is that it has been used simply as an excuse for increasing profits.
So when you go through 3+ bulk packs of CFL bulbs (8 bulbs each, with each bulb rated for almost a year of continual operation) in 6 months in a house with only about a dozen light fixtures that doesn't suggest something is up with the supposed service life? We do have an old farm house so I suppose it could be something with our electricity but even if that is the case it suggests that there are some situations where CFLs are simply not practical.
Sure there are many applications where CFLs and LED's are far preferable to incandescents, however there are some instances where at least CFLs are not very effective. In our living room and kitchen for example CFLs don't last long due to the lights in those rooms being turned on/off often (in one instance 4 bulbs lasted less than a month). There are also applications (work lamps, outdoor lights, wellhouse heating) where incandescents work far better than at least CFLs. Halogens can take up some of the slack in those instances I suppose but banning a proven, simple and effective lighting technology and replacing it with several technologies that have far better energy efficiency, but have a less than stellar quality record & contain toxic chemicals seems questionable at best, idiotic at worst.
Maybe its something wacky about our power or something but CFLs don't work with crap where I live. They last less than half as long as other bulbs and don't seem to provide enough light unless they have been on for 5 minutes or more. I swear that we changed out all of the bulbs in a ceiling fan/4 port light and within a couple weeks half of them were dead and within a month so were the remaining two. I've had good luck with halogens and I'd like to try these new incandescent and maybe LED's in a few places but I won't touch CFLs. Also there are some applications where you WANT a light that generates heat, I know well houses that need just a little heat to keep from freezing in winter use a standard incandescent bulb as a heat source.
10,000 firearm related homicides, and a total yearly mortality rate of over 2 MILLION! Thats less than 0.5% of all annual deaths in the US. Most of those are probably due to gang warfare, which isn't going to stop even if you could magically remove all civilian firearms in the US. Speaking more directly to firearms. Most estimates say that there are at least 270 Million civilian firearms in the US, that means that only 0.0037% of firearms are misused each year. You want to penalize probably in the neighborhood of 100 Million people for the actions of less than 10,000. If you're really looking to save lives we need to fix hospitals, medical malpractice is estimated to kill almost 200,000 a year.
Because limiting use of force to government personnel will never turn around and bite you. All of those countries that ban (or severely restrict) civilian firearm ownership (Mexico, China, North Korea, etc) are such peaceful, pleasant, freedom loving places.
Ah Boston PD, you show yet again how absolutely crazy you are. The saddest thing of all, suspect that lack of action in regards to stolen vehicles & and the insanely high (99.99%) false positive rate are not the reasons for their "suspending" of the program. All of those hits in the police employee parking lot that they'd rather not address is probably by the far the largest driving factor.
Feinstein again, that woman needs to be banned from government by a constitutional amendment. She is the epitome of what is wrong with current politics, she's a hypocrite, she'll jump on any bandwagon that gets her press, she has the common sense of an unsupervised teenager with a platinum credit card in a mall and she will twist the facts or outright lie to get her way. Oh and she's just plain crazy to boot.
I took a tour to a wind farm as a kind of fact finding when they were trying to put one in my area (eventually killed by NIMBY's, none of which went on any of the offered tours). Sure they make noise but your example is quite accurate, its about as much as wind through trees. Standing with one looming overhead it was barely perceivable with no traffic, no trees in the area and everyone quite from a just finished speech from one of the guides. Even standing right at the base it was less noise then you would have standing by a maple on a mildly windy fall day. We were told that some atmospheric conditions could significantly increase the noise (humidity, low temperatures) but if it can increase turbine noise it probably increases other local noises as well (traffic, trees, etc).
Most of those occurrences were during a time of war, a war that eventually ended. What we have today with the advent of the "war on terrorism" and the now fading "war on drugs" is a state of perpetual "war" because they are such an abstract concept. They also tended to target a very small portion of the population (Japanese, communists, anarchists, etc) whereas today the government targets large swaths of the population, the only thing keeping the system in check is limits on prosecutor & correction facility resources. One of the few pluses to the economic downturn is it finally put a dent in those resources, up until 2008 the inmate population was increasing at the same obscene rate it had since the 70's/80's. After that it "miraculous" began declining.
And how do we know the officers smelled anything? A five minute internet search can come up with case after case where officers claimed one thing (including writing it up in police reports, testifying in court, etc) and later video evidence proved they were telling bold faced lies (Hollywood Florida Framing, BART shooting, OWS protests, Michael Dehererra Beating, Rodney King, Danziger Bridge shootings, etc), oh I'm sorry they "misremembered" the incident. When an independent lab confirms traces of drugs I'll believe it, Until then I personally don't consider an officers statements to carry any more weight than the suspects.
Propaganda can absolutely be lies, it just doesn't have to be. Take the Iraq war, we were told it was necessary to keep WMD's out if Saddams hands and prevent support of terrorism. Years of searching & investigations after we invaded it was proven beyond all doubt that the WMD claims were completely unfounded and the Iraqis had gone out of their way to get rid of the chemical & biological weapons. In addition no concrete terrorist ties were found pre-invasion, in fact it is widely believed that the Iraq invasion became a 'cause celebre' event amongst extremest groups actually resulting in a worldwide increase in terrorist groups/ideology.
Sorry to break it to you but that "statistic" is a bunch of BS. Everyone in the US pays taxes of some sort. I'm not particularly high on the tax scale (about $36k a year) and I estimate that i pay at least 30% of my income in local, state, federal and specific taxes (sales, gas, property, vehicle, etc). MAYBE some very poor (or very rich) people can avoid some of those taxes but EVERYONE pays at least a few of them.
I'm all for blocking obvious CP search terms, but 10,000? How many of those terms could also be for perfectly legitimate purposes? I know one time I was trying to look a certain kind of bridge type for something (biglegs? thicklegs? something like that) on one of the image search sites and I got a bunch of rear shots of scantly clad women. Anyone with a basic understanding of the English language knows that many words have two meanings, throw in abbreviations & slang and they can have 10, throw in various phrases and your hitting the hundreds.
Thats splitting the hair mighty thin, a couple year difference that occurred almost 200 years ago. Especially when there seemed to be absolutely no interest in the islands until the Europeans began colonizing them.
"But still, Argentina has the right to ask to have them back."
Besides being close geographically what claim does Argentina have to the Falklands? At least from what I can find the only time that its population was primarily Argentinian was back around 1774-1811 when the British and Spanish (originally French) settlements were temporarily abandoned (fear of war?) until roughly the 1840s when the British settlements were reestablished. Before the Europeans colonized the islands there may have been some prehistoric settlements and a very short lived occupation by the a Buenos Aires garrison back in 1832 that ended in mutiny but not much else.
"That said, the land should belong to Argentina."
If it was an occupation I would agree wholeheartedly. However if what I am reading is correct the people (mostly of European decent) currently living there have been doing so for around 200 years. Even the first known settlement, around 323 years ago, was of English origin. A referendum held in march of this year had a 99.8% vote to remain a colony of the UK. People should have the ability to associate with others based on their own determination, not geographic location.
Someone was way off, I thought I read something this morning putting its demise somewhere around Siberia/Alaska? I'm also surprised anyone saw it, the Falkland Islands aren't exactly populated. I think its somewhere in the neighborhood of 3,000 people, the average 36 square mile county has that around me and the Falkland Islands are over 4,700 square miles.
True, I suppose there are other considerations that should be noted as well. Back during that big power outage a few years back we still had a basement wood stove, even without power it kept the house decent while other people were scrambling for kerosene heaters to stay above freezing. Our new setup (external wood boiler hooked to central heating system) cannot heat the home without power, we do have a generator that could be rigged to run the system but if it wasn't working we would be SOL.
"But how long does it take to go out yourself saw up that cord of wood"
We mostly heat with wood, if you were really ambitious you could chop up an entire seasons worth of wood with two to three people over a weekend. We're a bit more layed back, a few hours every other weekend or so. Even from a small 10 acre family owned woods cutting only pre-seasoned (already dead & mostly dry but still sill standing) trees you could probably heat 3 homes or more sustainably.