I love how people refuse to....
on
Who Needs Radio?
·
· Score: 1
acknowledge us lefties and our favorite NPR affiliates.
I fucking HATE Rush Limbaugh, but god bless his big fat mouth and his big fat show. I even listen to it, just go get my stomach acid acting up.
Of course, the genreral population couldnt give a shit about talk/news radio. Listening to people talk is hard. You have to think about what your're listening to. Thinking is hard.
Talk radio has a near zero chance of a car full of mallrats calling in a on a cellular phone, making a few poorly crafted double entendres, and finishing up the call with a group "WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!"
VIVA LA TALK AND NEWS RADIO!
The best possible thing that could happen if commercial music based radio went the fuck away and we had nothing but free access to the full spectrum of crackpots and their calls.
I mean, now great would the advertisements be then?
"Do you like FOOTBALL?!?!?! Are you conservative econoimists ready to party with the hottest babes we got to offer!?!
Shutdown Quicken, Put Down that Wall Street Journal, Loosen That Tie, and get yer flabby buttcheeks on down to Lichstein & Andersen's CPA-Lovin' Monday Night Football Bash at Cheetahs!
We've grown so rapidly in the past 100 years or so as a species, gorwing in population and advancing so rapidly with technology, that we're all caught up in doing more more more and blazing ahead as fast as we can market it.
BUT, we're not taking the time to sit and think out our decisions about how technology shuld be implemented and it's long term effects completely.
(Then again, what do I know. If I'm so goddamn smart howcome I don't have a fucking job?)
...that Media hasn't picked up on this and tried to run a weeklong series of: "scare you into being more afraid so you'll buy more shit to feel secure" reports.
I mean lookit the possibilityes: "SOLAR FLARES! THE SKIN DAMAGE IT CAN DO TO THE CHILDREN"
"WHat if THE CHILDREN need to make an emergency sell phone call! It wont go through BECAUSE OF THE SUN!"
"Solar Flares: Terrorism?"
oh, wait. this science. science hard to understand. science make channel changer change channel. put science in minute 29.
Just because nature did something a certain way, does not mean that that is the right way.
Right and wrong are human ideas. Nature just does what it does (typically, by the aforementioned laws of physics.)
Last I checked, nature didn't give a damn that the fires in southern california not only burned trees buut peoples houses is seen as "wrong" by most people, and "right" by a some of them.
Nature didn't care that these fires were started by some goofballs going something "wrong", either.
Nature just sees that the fire has a crapload of fuel, and is burning it.
If I had to give nature some human qualities, Is say Ol' Mom Nature is pissing herself laughing watching us stop a fire that is going insanely crazy because we wouldn't let smaller natural ones thin out that property-value-raising forest
THE "Natural Law" i speak of is: Living things have a tendency to die, either through beoming old and worn out, or through outside forces.
Actually its not just a tendancy, it WILL happen eventally...
"On a long enough timeline, everyones survival rate drops to zero"
(of course, many laws having loopholes, those trees that breed by sending roots just along the ground a few yards to grow a new trunk are technically just one gigantic organism, and theoretically could live forever with a good environment - Sequoias, maybe?)
...and the death of one organism makes room for others around it.
As far as reproduction goes, outside forces that kill off the parents IS self limiting. Two parents nees the resources for two people. They have six children (as a sidenote, in the past parents hade to create eight or ten children just to get six of them to live long enough to be useful, and thats assuming childbirth didnt knock off the female) and now their family uses the resources for eight people. When the parents die off, the families need for resources for goes down to six people, making room for the next generation.
The longer the parents live, the more resources they eat up that could be for their children and grandchildren.
Before you post, I am WELL AWARE of the intangible benefits of grandparents helping raise their grndchildren, being a product of it myself.
[The thing is: How many grandparents are doing this and not spending their later years playing golf in arizona and driving to the drugstore in their golf carts?]
Other intangibles: What is the stress in resources on an extended family (and a community) when grandpa spends a year or seven in the hospital recovering from a stroke on life support that in earlier times would have given him a quick out with less pain and suffering.
What about the stress on soceity taking care of people with debilitating illnesses that can barely take care of themselves, requiring constant care (RESOURCES), after some hero doctor has brought them back from their second or third (etc.) flatline?
Do YOU wanna spend the last 15 or 20 years of your life causing your family unintentional grief while youre barely strong enough to change the channel on the clicker and eating all your meals theorugh a straw? Mainly because as a soceity we've totally given up on the concept of being able to let go?
Its Death, people. its gonna get all of us. The WORST thign we can do is not dealt with it head on.
+--+--+--+
[News Note On all of this] What about that woman in Florida that FLAT OUT SAID she didnt want her life to degrade to the level of being a really expensive-to-take-care-of-houseplant? Take her off the machines and she'd die naturally. She wouldnt even FEEL IT at a conscious level. She's no longer has any consciousness.
She EXERCISED HER RIGHT as a Fully Coherent Adult to say "Do Not Do This To Me" and how much hand wringing and pain and resources are being WASTED on this bullshit?
The main reason for which being a politician saw an opening to garner points with the right-wingers by taking the emptional pain of her parents and turining it into a circus?
Parents who simply cannot face the facts that shes gone and thats that.
Remember, by Legal Statute, Parents lose their position as the people who make decisions in these situations when an adult is married. Those responsibilities transfer to the sopuse.
I realise that the "inventory" isnt really physical stuff, but distributing the digital tracks still will cost the company SOMETHING in distribution and paying to distribute the song in the forst place.
and how many of these pre-paid Cards will be purchased as GIFTS that never get redeemed?
Interesting businessy factoid on these card thingies: In many cases, gift cards/gift certificates can add up to a bigass liability on the balance sheet of companies that issue them. It can add up to a nasty accounting issue if done wrong.
figure this: You print up 10,000 cards to put on the shelves for sale at $14.99. They go out to the public and are sold.
You now must have the $149,900 worth of shit in stock to cover people using them, because you technically just sold that "inventory".
Also, electronically based gift cards are a bit of an issue, especially if theyre not registered in some way. One pissed off stockeroom employee at WalMart with sticky fingers can take home a free $600 worth of music downloads for his friends in his pocket without making much of a bulge.
Now you have $600 of "inventory" you have to give them and you get nothing for it.
The problem with that theory is that thanks to the wonders of medical technology, we can save people who should by natural law be removed to make space for the next guy. The fun byproduct of this is we tank a lot of resources to do so, which makes things more irritating (i wouldnt go quite as far as to say "hard") for that same next guy.
Technology also keeps us protected from natural law which would be knocking us off at a much quicker pace.
and dont forget that as the base of the car argument, the single occupancy vehicle way of civil planning is just plain wrong.
As far as spam goes, I think we should form a "self limiting" force of punching those fuckers in the gonads. Repeatedly. Hard.
this is totally not on topic and vaguely disgusting, but a supporting reply...
THe whole of the traffic system rests on the shoulders of the police who enforce the laws and their ability to make snap judgements.
Way back when, i was driving home from work, about a 20 minute trp on a two laner with nowhere to stop in case of "emergencies."
About 5 minutes into the trip, nature called. NOt only called, but was banging on the door with one of those tank thingies with a ram on it like the LAPD SWAT teams have on TV.
This led to a white knuckling of the steering wheel, pedal to the metal, teeth clenched, bent forward in pain, tears streaming from the eyes kind of maniacial drive to cover the last miles of the trip WITHOUT HITTING ANY POTHOLES to get to sweet release.
of course there was a cop sitting there watching traffic from the top of a hill, and he saw me barreling down from a mile away.
I was NOT slowing down. The fucker could give me a ticket at my house.
I looked at him through squinted eyes, he looked at me and turned on the party lights. Once I got close enough for him to see my distorted with gastric pain face, waving him off frantically with one hand like a dancing queen on fire, that "touching cloth" look of terror on my face, he smiled, and turned off the lights.
I wonder if once IE has pop-up blocking popups will go the hell away?
More importantly, will Popup blocking be turned on by default; and if not what silly name will Microsoft give the function to make it painfully hard for the average schmo to find?
Actually, congress set 25 mpg as reasonable for SUVs quite some time ago, after being lobbied to death by the automotive industry.
http://www.energyfoundation.org/national/FactShe et Auto.cfm
"Congress established Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards in 1975"
also see: http://www.policyalmanac.org/environment/arc hive/c rs_cafe_standards.shtml
"Refocusing on Fuel Economy: SUVs, OPEC, and Kyoto Recent developments have focused fresh attention on the CAFE standards and fuel economy in general. The sharp increase in crude oil and gasoline prices that began in 1999 has brought into higher relief the continuing loss of market share of passenger cars to the larger, multipurpose sport utility vehicles (SUVs) that are subject to the less stringent light-truck fuel economy standard. A 1996 study conducted for the Department of Transportation found that consumers valued the larger vehicles for their versatility and roominess, and the availability of four-wheel drive. The increasing market share of these vehicles, combined with their lower average fuel economy, has contributed to a lowering in overall average fuel economy since the mid-1980s. "
A truly interesting statistic of this article states tthat US gasoline consumption equates to roughly 9 million barrels of oil PER DAY.
[Personal Note] Take your SUV and shove it in your ass [/Personal Note]
Just HOW MUCH shit do corporations expect all of us to buy in the fucking first place?
You wanna keep your profits from taking a huge dump after some time? Stop trying to get all of us to buy your product the second it dumps onto the market.
DON'T spend 30 million dollars in marketing and advertising just to skew the natural bell curve.
If the product is good, people will buy it, period.
People need to learn a litlte patience and get a fat hunk of common sense and stuff like this won't be news anymore.
...is not the fact that Branding is shining shit and calling it gold...is not the fact that they chose a cool fire-breathing lizard that may or may not infringe on the copyright of a certain cool fire breathing guy in a rubber suit....is not if people are GOING to get confused...IS the fact that people already ARE confused.
How many times have you tried to help someone who isn't a/. reader that is having an issue with "their internet."
To the overwhelming majority of the uninitiated, MSIE IS the internet. Outlook Express IS email.
These are the people that do not install programs they just bought from CompUSA, but "I got this disk and I downloaded it and the goddamn thing keeps asking me where to put the thing! I don't care, I just want it to work!"
These are the people that think they need to install the software each and every time they want to use it.
These are the people that wind up with automatic 1-900 dialers in their Start Menu.
These are the people we need to sit down with one at a fucking time and teach them - gently - the difference between their PC and their TV.
The Mozilla organization should first and foremost worry about keeping their product top-notch and let themselves get widespread like theyre doing already.
How did I find out about mozilla? A friend told me about it, showed me where to get it, and I got rid of Opera. I've shown it to a half dozen people over the past year and they all use it as their primary browser.
Interesting side note - 5 of these 6 people were ASTOUNDED at the fact that they could also use the mozilla mail client; that they were ALLOWED to use mozilla as their mail client, and nobody could force them otherwise. Yes, I'll probably create a few more pro-bono tech support calls for myself, but thats time I'm more than willing to donate to educate my "family."
Basically, they sould stop wasting their time with this. Redo the website for the stupids, and get back to writing good software, and let the rest of us evangelize. Its not like they're trying to MAKE ALL THE MONEY or something.
or ARE THEY?!?
[random thoughts] Branding. What the hell are they going to do, set up a paypal account and use that cash to buy TV spots.
Maybe that just need to call the 2.0 release "Mozilla... Optimized!"
God forbid Mozilla goes for-profit. There will be rioting in the pipes [/random thoughts]
I thought GWB already HAD plans in motion for cutting down all the trees and sucking out all the oil?
Hmmm... raize millions of acres of untouched wilderness and definately fuck it up or clear out ten acres to put one building down in a remote area where the remote case of catastrophic failure will fuck it up.
yeah, I'd go with the millions of acres, too. I don't live there. fuck caribou.
Possible solution to kickstarting this: We all get together and buy a crapload of land somewhere out in the middle of nowwhere (Make it somewhere where marketing types dont want to go so they can't fuck up our little utopia by trying to brand and sell it yeas before it's ready to go Gold), incorporate the new town of Nerdville, and write Toshiba a letter saying "COME ON DOWN!"
Maybe we should just get an island out in international waters and declare ourselves the soverign state of Nerdonia. We could have cool high-tech passports and build giligans-island style pedal powered coconut cars and everything! We could even get out own top level domain.nerd (screw ICANN and their 2 character standard)
Wait.... until we got the reactor going it'd be a pain in the ass making enough power for fat bandwidth. Maybe solar charging up flywheel batteries?
Someone post an article about this and we can hash it all out as a separate discussion.
One of the big concerns everyone seems to have with these things is "How are we going to guard them?"
This is so simple it hurts when it hits you in the fase.
Assuming these reactors really dont have a footprint much bigger than a warehouse, put them in places that are ALREADY heavily guarded.
Military bases, Prisons, and maybe some of the bigger Airports.
The actual core is buried in the ground (bury it DEEP, who fucking cares) and surrounded by dirt and concrete, so unless the Mole-Men get a bug up their ass, its doubtful an underground attack would go unnoticed. [all you'd need is a cheap seismograph and voila! You can pick up unusual digging.]
The surface building is in an area thats heavily guarded anyway, so all we really would need to do is make sure the current guards are doign their fucking job, which they're supposed to be doing in the first place.
Also, maybe the the death row inmates and the multiple-lifers can work on the crews in the buildings. Make that a trade off for big screen TVs or less shitty cells or something. These would be the same guys that got their shit together and now work the scared straight programs and do other truly useful functions in the prisons already.
As far as dealing with the waste products, I'd personally rather have to truck a treetrunk sized core to some bigass site in the middle of the desert every 20 years than belch a few more hundred thousand tons of shit into the air over that same time period. For fucks sake, we can protect 635 legislators and their staffs form terrorists, I'd think the logistics of a truck going one way slowly wouldn't be too hard.
This might be tough in Alaska, where folks are spread out all over the place, but should be fairly easy in the lower 48, and who says you cant put in a bank of four of these little cores in more densely populated areas? One AA battery is good, four is better, and only slightly harder to add in.
another thought: To make it even more idiot proof, take as many of the computers out amd make all the controlls big analog levers and handles, computers can do the monitoring. Remove the chance of the system itself being flummoxed by a busted motherboard, adn everyones happier (and busier!)
A) the "dirty bomb" (a current favorite among hte fear mongering media) made out of radioactive materials is generally NOTHING like the multiple-megaton weapons that make the big fancy mushroom clouda. These are bombs that expode conventionally, and through said explosion, scatter radioactive materials around an area, creating a hot zone that will possibly kill, probably sicken, some people right near the area, but mainly just go to scare the millions of people into knee-jerk reactions though non-understanding.
B) Making a cheap and nasty little dirty bomb can be easily done by stealing the Cesium 137 out of a few hospitals (canisters of it are used in x-ray machines - i think its an xray machine). The added benefit of this is that the material is a very fine powder that can get spread widely by the wind.
One of these canisters got loose in Brazil once. Resulted in killing four and made a few people sick. THe cleanup was a tad nasty. People heard about it, and thousands of them showed up at hospitals to get checked out for possible contamination. This was after local officials told them "Look, you were in the immediate area, youre going to be fine." People still stood on line at hospitals, choking hospital resources and generally fucking up their ability to take care of those that were really hurt.
Stealing a fat hunk of reactor core would involve about a million times work, and unless they wannt rub the thing against a cheese grater for a while, they're left with one solid hunk of radioactive material, which is fairly easy to handle, contain, and bury somewhere.
[again, go read that NOVA site.]
C) Your average goober (read: 98% of the population) is completely unaware of that fact that we're constantly being bombarded with "background radiation" every second of every day. They're also unaware that our skin does a pretty good job of fending that low-level shit off.
D) Imagine if mass media existed at today's level in Edison's time. Getting people to accept the fact that electricity was not going to jump out of an unused outlet (or a wire) and kill you [in everyday non-dubmass use] would be next to impossible, and/. would have to be implemented using little peices of paper, fine point pens, and hundreds of thousands of really, really tired carrier pigeons.
E) People Die. Its something we all do, and ya can't avoid it, so stop fucking scaring yourselves into non-action. You can only hope its not going to be horrible. Generally, not being a stupidass - and keeping yourself aware of (AWARE, not SCARED) the other stupidasses around you - will go a long way in accomplishing this.
"Yes, honey, I in fact DO need to stand right near the hot woman in my ofice and follow her around all day long, otherwise I can't download porn at work all day long....uh..."
Well, technically it wouldn't be hiding, and I assume the software running/. would allow for the addition of a "Gearhead" section fairly easily?
What about it, you single-digit-user-numbered admins, gearhead.slashdot.com? I mean, hell, what could it hurt? The fanatical Ford -vs- Chevy debate would allow for some interesting modding and in reality, isn't that much different from the Apple -vs- Windows silliness.
'cept maybe for the tooth count of the participants.
Slashdot Mirror
acknowledge us lefties and our favorite NPR affiliates.
I fucking HATE Rush Limbaugh, but god bless his big fat mouth and his big fat show. I even listen to it, just go get my stomach acid acting up.
Of course, the genreral population couldnt give a shit about talk/news radio.
Listening to people talk is hard.
You have to think about what your're listening to.
Thinking is hard.
Talk radio has a near zero chance of a car full of mallrats calling in a on a cellular phone, making a few poorly crafted double entendres, and finishing up the call with a group "WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!"
VIVA LA TALK AND NEWS RADIO!
The best possible thing that could happen if commercial music based radio went the fuck away and we had nothing but free access to the full spectrum of crackpots and their calls.
I mean, now great would the advertisements be then?
"Do you like FOOTBALL?!?!?! Are you conservative econoimists ready to party with the hottest babes we got to offer!?!
Shutdown Quicken, Put Down that Wall Street Journal, Loosen That Tie, and get yer flabby buttcheeks on down to Lichstein & Andersen's CPA-Lovin' Monday Night Football Bash at Cheetahs!
Drink specials! Scotch on the rocks? One Dollar! "
man, that's be so boss.
We've grown so rapidly in the past 100 years or so as a species, gorwing in population and advancing so rapidly with technology, that we're all caught up in doing more more more and blazing ahead as fast as we can market it.
BUT, we're not taking the time to sit and think out our decisions about how technology shuld be implemented and it's long term effects completely.
(Then again, what do I know. If I'm so goddamn smart howcome I don't have a fucking job?)
...that Media hasn't picked up on this and tried to run a weeklong series of: "scare you into being more afraid so you'll buy more shit to feel secure" reports.
I mean lookit the possibilityes:
"SOLAR FLARES! THE SKIN DAMAGE IT CAN DO TO THE CHILDREN"
"WHat if THE CHILDREN need to make an emergency sell phone call! It wont go through BECAUSE OF THE SUN!"
"Solar Flares: Terrorism?"
oh, wait.
this science.
science hard to understand.
science make channel changer change channel.
put science in minute 29.
More that you want to have to scoop the shit for, that how many.
Say the average elephant weighs 5 tons. (yes/no?)
Thats about 400 million elephants.
Thats a lot of shit.
Just because nature did something a certain way, does not mean that that is the right way.
Right and wrong are human ideas. Nature just does what it does (typically, by the aforementioned laws of physics.)
Last I checked, nature didn't give a damn that the fires in southern california not only burned trees buut peoples houses is seen as "wrong" by most people, and "right" by a some of them.
Nature didn't care that these fires were started by some goofballs going something "wrong", either.
Nature just sees that the fire has a crapload of fuel, and is burning it.
If I had to give nature some human qualities, Is say Ol' Mom Nature is pissing herself laughing watching us stop a fire that is going insanely crazy because we wouldn't let smaller natural ones thin out that property-value-raising forest
Check this, in further offtopic discussion
Nature doesn't care that were causing all these problems for ourselves.
That's all us: babbling emotionally at each other and hoping we can figure out a way to make a buck off of it.
Actually its not just a tendancy, it WILL happen eventally...
"On a long enough timeline, everyones survival rate drops to zero"
As far as reproduction goes, outside forces that kill off the parents IS self limiting. Two parents nees the resources for two people. They have six children (as a sidenote, in the past parents hade to create eight or ten children just to get six of them to live long enough to be useful, and thats assuming childbirth didnt knock off the female) and now their family uses the resources for eight people. When the parents die off, the families need for resources for goes down to six people, making room for the next generation.
The longer the parents live, the more resources they eat up that could be for their children and grandchildren.
Before you post, I am WELL AWARE of the intangible benefits of grandparents helping raise their grndchildren, being a product of it myself.
[The thing is: How many grandparents are doing this and not spending their later years playing golf in arizona and driving to the drugstore in their golf carts?]
Other intangibles: What is the stress in resources on an extended family (and a community) when grandpa spends a year or seven in the hospital recovering from a stroke on life support that in earlier times would have given him a quick out with less pain and suffering.
What about the stress on soceity taking care of people with debilitating illnesses that can barely take care of themselves, requiring constant care (RESOURCES), after some hero doctor has brought them back from their second or third (etc.) flatline?
Do YOU wanna spend the last 15 or 20 years of your life causing your family unintentional grief while youre barely strong enough to change the channel on the clicker and eating all your meals theorugh a straw? Mainly because as a soceity we've totally given up on the concept of being able to let go?
Its Death, people. its gonna get all of us. The WORST thign we can do is not dealt with it head on.
+--+--+--+
[News Note On all of this]
What about that woman in Florida that FLAT OUT SAID she didnt want her life to degrade to the level of being a really expensive-to-take-care-of-houseplant? Take her off the machines and she'd die naturally. She wouldnt even FEEL IT at a conscious level.
She's no longer has any consciousness.
She EXERCISED HER RIGHT as a Fully Coherent Adult to say "Do Not Do This To Me" and how much hand wringing and pain and resources are being WASTED on this bullshit?
The main reason for which being a politician saw an opening to garner points with the right-wingers by taking the emptional pain of her parents and turining it into a circus?
Ref: CNN for various articles on the stupidity
Parents who simply cannot face the facts that shes gone and thats that.
Its sad, but its the facts.
[/News Note O
I realise that the "inventory" isnt really physical stuff, but distributing the digital tracks still will cost the company SOMETHING in distribution and paying to distribute the song in the forst place.
and how many of these pre-paid Cards will be purchased as GIFTS that never get redeemed?
Interesting businessy factoid on these card thingies:
In many cases, gift cards/gift certificates can add up to a bigass liability on the balance sheet of companies that issue them. It can add up to a nasty accounting issue if done wrong.
figure this: You print up 10,000 cards to put on the shelves for sale at $14.99. They go out to the public and are sold.
You now must have the $149,900 worth of shit in stock to cover people using them, because you technically just sold that "inventory".
Also, electronically based gift cards are a bit of an issue, especially if theyre not registered in some way. One pissed off stockeroom employee at WalMart with sticky fingers can take home a free $600 worth of music downloads for his friends in his pocket without making much of a bulge.
Now you have $600 of "inventory" you have to give them and you get nothing for it.
The problem with that theory is that thanks to the wonders of medical technology, we can save people who should by natural law be removed to make space for the next guy. The fun byproduct of this is we tank a lot of resources to do so, which makes things more irritating (i wouldnt go quite as far as to say "hard") for that same next guy.
Technology also keeps us protected from natural law which would be knocking us off at a much quicker pace.
and dont forget that as the base of the car argument, the single occupancy vehicle way of civil planning is just plain wrong.
As far as spam goes, I think we should form a "self limiting" force of punching those fuckers in the gonads. Repeatedly. Hard.
this is totally not on topic and vaguely disgusting, but a supporting reply...
THe whole of the traffic system rests on the shoulders of the police who enforce the laws and their ability to make snap judgements.
Way back when, i was driving home from work, about a 20 minute trp on a two laner with nowhere to stop in case of "emergencies."
About 5 minutes into the trip, nature called. NOt only called, but was banging on the door with one of those tank thingies with a ram on it like the LAPD SWAT teams have on TV.
This led to a white knuckling of the steering wheel, pedal to the metal, teeth clenched, bent forward in pain, tears streaming from the eyes kind of maniacial drive to cover the last miles of the trip WITHOUT HITTING ANY POTHOLES to get to sweet release.
of course there was a cop sitting there watching traffic from the top of a hill, and he saw me barreling down from a mile away.
I was NOT slowing down. The fucker could give me a ticket at my house.
I looked at him through squinted eyes, he looked at me and turned on the party lights. Once I got close enough for him to see my distorted with gastric pain face, waving him off frantically with one hand like a dancing queen on fire, that "touching cloth" look of terror on my face, he smiled, and turned off the lights.
THats my poop story for the day.
I htink MP3s are so detestable becasue the average user cna now create them unlimited times and they sound just as good as ever.
If users couldnt just clickety clickety click their way to doing it, noone would have raised an eyebrow.
I wonder if once IE has pop-up blocking popups will go the hell away?
More importantly, will Popup blocking be turned on by default; and if not what silly name will Microsoft give the function to make it painfully hard for the average schmo to find?
Actually, congress set 25 mpg as reasonable for SUVs quite some time ago, after being lobbied to death by the automotive industry.
e et Auto.cfm
c hive/c rs_cafe_standards.shtml
http://www.energyfoundation.org/national/FactSh
"Congress established Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards in 1975"
also see:
http://www.policyalmanac.org/environment/ar
"Refocusing on Fuel Economy:
SUVs, OPEC, and Kyoto Recent developments have focused fresh attention on the CAFE standards and fuel economy in general. The sharp increase in crude oil and gasoline prices that began in 1999 has brought into higher relief the continuing loss of market share of passenger cars to the larger, multipurpose sport utility vehicles (SUVs) that are subject to the less stringent light-truck fuel economy standard. A 1996 study conducted for the Department of Transportation found that consumers valued the larger vehicles for their versatility and roominess, and the availability of four-wheel drive. The increasing market share of these vehicles, combined with their lower average fuel economy, has contributed to a lowering in overall average fuel economy since the mid-1980s. "
A truly interesting statistic of this article states tthat US gasoline consumption equates to roughly 9 million barrels of oil PER DAY.
[Personal Note]
Take your SUV and shove it in your ass
[/Personal Note]
You know, I think we need to appeal to the /. gods to add another category for moderation, namely
Smartass Remark
Not quite funny, but not trolling for a fight.
Just making a stupid smartass remark.
go ahead, now you can mod this down, too.
I'm just sayin'
Just HOW MUCH shit do corporations expect all of us to buy in the fucking first place?
You wanna keep your profits from taking a huge dump after some time? Stop trying to get all of us to buy your product the second it dumps onto the market.
DON'T spend 30 million dollars in marketing and advertising just to skew the natural bell curve.
If the product is good, people will buy it, period.
People need to learn a litlte patience and get a fat hunk of common sense and stuff like this won't be news anymore.
The measure, approved 97-0, is considered the stiffest of a handful of anti-spam bills floating in Congress.
Doesn't the Senate have 100 members?
What I wanna know is; Who were those three slackers, where the fuck were they, and if they abstained form voting - WHO'S POCKET ARE THEY IN?
We need to find them out, and expose them as SPAM LOVING FACISTS!
Great press!
...is not the fact that Branding is shining shit and calling it gold ...is not the fact that they chose a cool fire-breathing lizard that may or may not infringe on the copyright of a certain cool fire breathing guy in a rubber suit ....is not if people are GOING to get confused ...IS the fact that people already ARE confused.
/. reader that is having an issue with "their internet."
How many times have you tried to help someone who isn't a
To the overwhelming majority of the uninitiated, MSIE IS the internet. Outlook Express IS email.
These are the people that do not install programs they just bought from CompUSA, but "I got this disk and I downloaded it and the goddamn thing keeps asking me where to put the thing! I don't care, I just want it to work!"
These are the people that think they need to install the software each and every time they want to use it.
These are the people that wind up with automatic 1-900 dialers in their Start Menu.
These are the people we need to sit down with one at a fucking time and teach them - gently - the difference between their PC and their TV.
The Mozilla organization should first and foremost worry about keeping their product top-notch and let themselves get widespread like theyre doing already.
How did I find out about mozilla? A friend told me about it, showed me where to get it, and I got rid of Opera. I've shown it to a half dozen people over the past year and they all use it as their primary browser.
Interesting side note - 5 of these 6 people were ASTOUNDED at the fact that they could also use the mozilla mail client; that they were ALLOWED to use mozilla as their mail client, and nobody could force them otherwise. Yes, I'll probably create a few more pro-bono tech support calls for myself, but thats time I'm more than willing to donate to educate my "family."
Basically, they sould stop wasting their time with this. Redo the website for the stupids, and get back to writing good software, and let the rest of us evangelize. Its not like they're trying to MAKE ALL THE MONEY or something.
or ARE THEY?!?
[random thoughts]
Branding. What the hell are they going to do, set up a paypal account and use that cash to buy TV spots.
Maybe that just need to call the 2.0 release "Mozilla... Optimized!"
God forbid Mozilla goes for-profit. There will be rioting in the pipes
[/random thoughts]
My Point is even more strongly proven!
please read that one sentence as:
belch a few more trillion (yes, trillion with a "t") tons of shit into the air over that same time period.
using the above number: in 30 years, coal power plants would create: 732 trillion tons of waste CO2
Maybe that number will scare the guy who's afriad of nuke power.
The funny thing about that is it would take approximately two seconds to add some jacasvript to put the focus back to where it belongs.
I'd be embarrassed to have it publically known I won money doing a weasely thing for a weasely company.
I thought GWB already HAD plans in motion for cutting down all the trees and sucking out all the oil?
Hmmm... raize millions of acres of untouched wilderness and definately fuck it up or clear out ten acres to put one building down in a remote area where the remote case of catastrophic failure will fuck it up.
yeah, I'd go with the millions of acres, too. I don't live there. fuck caribou.
see... i was using sarcasm there...
Possible solution to kickstarting this: We all get together and buy a crapload of land somewhere out in the middle of nowwhere (Make it somewhere where marketing types dont want to go so they can't fuck up our little utopia by trying to brand and sell it yeas before it's ready to go Gold), incorporate the new town of Nerdville, and write Toshiba a letter saying "COME ON DOWN!"
.nerd
Maybe we should just get an island out in international waters and declare ourselves the soverign state of Nerdonia. We could have cool high-tech passports and build giligans-island style pedal powered coconut cars and everything! We could even get out own top level domain
(screw ICANN and their 2 character standard)
Wait.... until we got the reactor going it'd be a pain in the ass making enough power for fat bandwidth. Maybe solar charging up flywheel batteries?
Someone post an article about this and we can hash it all out as a separate discussion.
[I got dibs on being minister of foolery!]
One of the big concerns everyone seems to have with these things is "How are we going to guard them?"
This is so simple it hurts when it hits you in the fase.
Assuming these reactors really dont have a footprint much bigger than a warehouse, put them in places that are ALREADY heavily guarded.
Military bases, Prisons, and maybe some of the bigger Airports.
The actual core is buried in the ground (bury it DEEP, who fucking cares) and surrounded by dirt and concrete, so unless the Mole-Men get a bug up their ass, its doubtful an underground attack would go unnoticed. [all you'd need is a cheap seismograph and voila! You can pick up unusual digging.]
The surface building is in an area thats heavily guarded anyway, so all we really would need to do is make sure the current guards are doign their fucking job, which they're supposed to be doing in the first place.
Also, maybe the the death row inmates and the multiple-lifers can work on the crews in the buildings. Make that a trade off for big screen TVs or less shitty cells or something. These would be the same guys that got their shit together and now work the scared straight programs and do other truly useful functions in the prisons already.
As far as dealing with the waste products, I'd personally rather have to truck a treetrunk sized core to some bigass site in the middle of the desert every 20 years than belch a few more hundred thousand tons of shit into the air over that same time period. For fucks sake, we can protect 635 legislators and their staffs form terrorists, I'd think the logistics of a truck going one way slowly wouldn't be too hard.
This might be tough in Alaska, where folks are spread out all over the place, but should be fairly easy in the lower 48, and who says you cant put in a bank of four of these little cores in more densely populated areas? One AA battery is good, four is better, and only slightly harder to add in.
another thought: To make it even more idiot proof, take as many of the computers out amd make all the controlls big analog levers and handles, computers can do the monitoring. Remove the chance of the system itself being flummoxed by a busted motherboard, adn everyones happier (and busier!)
General thoughts, in no specific order...
/. would have to be implemented using little peices of paper, fine point pens, and hundreds of thousands of really, really tired carrier pigeons.
A) the "dirty bomb" (a current favorite among hte fear mongering media) made out of radioactive materials is generally NOTHING like the multiple-megaton weapons that make the big fancy mushroom clouda. These are bombs that expode conventionally, and through said explosion, scatter radioactive materials around an area, creating a hot zone that will possibly kill, probably sicken, some people right near the area, but mainly just go to scare the millions of people into knee-jerk reactions though non-understanding.
B) Making a cheap and nasty little dirty bomb can be easily done by stealing the Cesium 137 out of a few hospitals (canisters of it are used in x-ray machines - i think its an xray machine). The added benefit of this is that the material is a very fine powder that can get spread widely by the wind.
One of these canisters got loose in Brazil once. Resulted in killing four and made a few people sick. THe cleanup was a tad nasty. People heard about it, and thousands of them showed up at hospitals to get checked out for possible contamination. This was after local officials told them "Look, you were in the immediate area, youre going to be fine." People still stood on line at hospitals, choking hospital resources and generally fucking up their ability to take care of those that were really hurt.
[If you get a chance, find that Dirty Bomb special NOVA did a while back. This is the ref for that cesium info above]
Stealing a fat hunk of reactor core would involve about a million times work, and unless they wannt rub the thing against a cheese grater for a while, they're left with one solid hunk of radioactive material, which is fairly easy to handle, contain, and bury somewhere.
[again, go read that NOVA site.]
C) Your average goober (read: 98% of the population) is completely unaware of that fact that we're constantly being bombarded with "background radiation" every second of every day. They're also unaware that our skin does a pretty good job of fending that low-level shit off.
D) Imagine if mass media existed at today's level in Edison's time. Getting people to accept the fact that electricity was not going to jump out of an unused outlet (or a wire) and kill you [in everyday non-dubmass use] would be next to impossible, and
E) People Die. Its something we all do, and ya can't avoid it, so stop fucking scaring yourselves into non-action. You can only hope its not going to be horrible. Generally, not being a stupidass - and keeping yourself aware of (AWARE, not SCARED) the other stupidasses around you - will go a long way in accomplishing this.
"Yes, honey, I in fact DO need to stand right near the hot woman in my ofice and follow her around all day long, otherwise I can't download porn at work all day long. ...uh..."
Is there a gearhead Slashdot hiding out there?
/. would allow for the addition of a "Gearhead" section fairly easily?
Well, technically it wouldn't be hiding, and I assume the software running
What about it, you single-digit-user-numbered admins, gearhead.slashdot.com? I mean, hell, what could it hurt? The fanatical Ford -vs- Chevy debate would allow for some interesting modding and in reality, isn't that much different from the Apple -vs- Windows silliness.
'cept maybe for the tooth count of the participants.