" then leave the people there to their own devices." AH, so blow up all their shit then just leave. I see. You're pretty rude, aren't you?
To be fair, AQ was not exactly enmeshed in the general population there; they were separate, in training camps and mountain bases. We didn't need to go into the cities to bomb AQ to smithereens.
And how else would you do it? Take over the country and set up a puppet government that's thoroughly corrupt, taking decades and bankrupting yourself in the process? How's that working out for us right now?
The PC was better because it had an open architecture and was expandable. The others mostly weren't. On top of that, the PC was cloned (because of its open architecture), making for much more competition. It's a lot better to have a crappier standard that you can get interchangeable parts from multiple manufacturers for, than a superior standard that you can only get from one place at an inflated price.
But yeah, modern refrigerators use what.. 50W average? Unless there's a huge COP (and it can't be more than 15 for a 4C fridge in a 25C room), it's probably less than the lighting or a couple sleeping adults.
My point exactly. Even if we did come up with some elaborate way of improving the total system efficiency by piggy-backing onto the house's A/C or whatever, the actual energy savings would be quite minimal compared to the expense required to achieve that gain. At current energy prices, it just isn't worth it (and refrigerators have gotten more efficient by themselves in the last few decades too, don't forget). But who knows what'll happen in the future if energy gets more expensive.
All that moisture would just help mold and mildew grow.
Mold and mildew isn't a problem where I live; it's a desert here in Arizona, there's barely any humidity in the winter air at all. Humid air from the dryer is a good thing.
There are coils, not there is (there's) coils. But I digress.
Wrong. "There's [plural words]" is perfectly acceptable colloquial speech. I'm not writing a formal dissertation here, this is Slashdot.
If you still have soap in your clothes when you dry them, you're either using way too much soap (quite likely; lots of people make this mistake, thinking they need 4x as much detergent as they really do), or you need a new washer. The rinses (multiple) are supposed to get rid of all that. "Wash byproducts"? Like what? There shouldn't be anything going into the dryer except wet, clean clothing. The clothing material thing I might buy, but even there you should be using heat appropriate for the fabrics; unless it's all cotton, don't use high heat, turn it down to low or medium (another common mistake people make is using high heat all the time).
How is living another day not a good thing? Yes, the investors and backers may be screwed, but who cares about them? The only important people are the executives, and as long as they get more bonuses, that's all they care about.
Take a short drive to Phoenix. It's dry in the winter (it's dry all year, except during the "monsoon season" in the summer), and while not exactly "cold", it can be chilly enough to want a little bit of heat, and the small amount of humidity that dryer exhaust would add to the air isn't a problem, instead it's probably welcome.
Maybe, maybe not. Remember, in many places in the country (including meth-head infested areas like Phoenix), we have copper thieves getting themselves electrocuted so they can steal electrical cables, plus people stealing catalytic converters from underneath parked vehicles. I'm not sure how large this "server hut" is, but I sure hope it isn't on wheels like a trailer or else it'll be easily stolen.
here we are helping a nation that is going to allow the Taliban back with open arms the moment we leave, and possibly even sooner.
This is the crux of the problem: we're spending an insane amount of money on this place, and short of exterminating all the males there, there's absolutely nothing we can do to prevent it from becoming exactly like it was before we invaded. The afghanistan campaign should have taken no longer than 6 months at the very most: bomb all of AQ's training camps and caves and wipe them out so they're no longer a global threat, and then leave the people there to their own devices. "Nation building" simply doesn't work in a place where there's no real civilization and tribalism reigns supreme.
Yes, you can. You obviously wouldn't use the servers as the sole heat source in a pizza oven, but you could use their waste heat to keep the oven warm, so that the mean heating element doesn't have to use as much energy to reach the operating temperature. Granted the savings would probably be minimal, but it can be done. But it probably would take a while to recoup the investment in actually putting it all together.
There's a lot of energy-saving things involving heating and cooling that can be done that people don't bother with because the return on investment would probably be too long. For instance, everyone has a refrigerator in their house, which produces a fair amount of heat in cooling its interior (there's coils on the backside, for cooling the compressor). In the winter, this is no problem, since you want your house warm anyway, but in the summer this is counteracting your house's A/C, making it work harder to keep it cool inside. What if there were some way of diverting that heat to the outside of the house in the summer, but in cooler months keeping it inside? It could be done with some custom ducting, a fan, and temperature-controlled louvers. But you never see this because that's a lot of work, and therefore expense, when the gains are probably minimal.
Similarly, clothes dryers produce a LOT of waste heat, but this is usually just ducted outside. My house actually has a diverter box in the ductwork so that in the wintertime, I can move the flap and let all the hot air blow into the house (through an additional screen to keep the lint down), which reduces my heating bills. Unfortunately most houses don't bother with this, though it'd probably have a much bigger effect than the refrigerator idea above.
As energy costs rise, I imagine we'll be seeing a lot more energy-saving strategies like these.
Maybe, maybe not. It's very pragmatic to sit out an election if there's zero chance your candidate will be elected, and you don't like the two "electable" ones, because time is valuable. Also, I've never seen write-in candidates shown in election results; I wrote in a Presidential candidate in 2008 and never saw my choice shown in the rankings at all (he was on the ballot in some other states, just not mine, so it wasn't like I just wrote in some random person's name), so I really question the usefulness of write-ins at anything but local elections. There's not much point to it if they're not even going to report it.
Finally, a very small voter turn-out also shows that the people are refusing to "play the game", and shows protest as well. You may not see it like that, but others do. It should be fairly obvious from what's going on these days that Americans really are pissed about what's going on in politics, not merely apathetic (the economy's in the shitter, remember? voters are always angry when the economy sucks), so if the turn-out is low, it's not because of apathy. You calling it so doesn't make it so.
"ArsonSmith" hit the nail on the head. Sure, in retrospect, Jim Crow laws are bad. However, go back to 1776 and try to get everyone in the 13 colonies to agree to that. There's a reason the Founders compromised on slavery: they couldn't get the southern states to agree to it, and with a compromise on that issue (and further compromises in later years), the union would have fallen apart and the British would have won.
Sure, I agree gays should be allowed to marry. However, there's a lot of people who don't agree to that. You apparently don't like it, but this is a democracy, where the people have the right to vote for their leaders. If a candidate takes an extremely unpopular position, he's not going to be elected. If an elected leader takes an extremely unpopular position, he won't be re-elected, and his competitor will promise to overturn the unpopular thing, get the electorate riled up over it, and then do so when he's in office, so doing an extremely unpopular thing is quite likely to be futile and short-lived. What good is it to create a new law legalizing gay marriage, only to have the opposition overturn it in 2 years (assuming it's that unpopular, I'm just using it as a hypothetical example).
This is the whole reason we have separate countries, separate states, etc.: because people can't all agree on the same thing. Women should be allowed to drive cars too (subject to appropriate licensing and testing like anyone else), however if your state merged with Saudi Arabia and let them all vote, you might find that women are now banned from driving where you live, because you're associated with a bunch of people who think very differently from you, and who vote for leaders that reflect their attitudes, no matter how backwards and wrong. By having states with more power, states that want to do something different, like legalizing marijuana, legalizing gay marriage, banning smoking in restaurants, teaching Creationism in public schools, banning the teaching of Creationism in science classes, etc. can do so much more easily, whereas making these changes at the national level in a nation with over 300M people of very different attitudes is rather difficult. If you find you don't like the attitude of your fellow voters and the laws that result from their voting, then it's a fairly simple task to pack up your stuff and move to another state (and in the Northeast, that might only be a short drive away). Packing up your stuff and moving to another country because you're tired of the politics where you are, however, is a much more difficult task.
What the fuck are you talking about? It's "mob rule" for people to have a state government with elections, but it's not "mob rule" to have a national government with elections?
No, not exactly. What he's saying is that only one author should write books set in a magical land with wizards and dragons, and while that author could write a whole series of such books, no other author should have wizards and dragons in their books. So I guess that means any fantasy author other than Tolkein sucks and can't come up with their own ideas. Then again, I'm pretty sure Tolkein didn't invent dragons and wizards all by himself, so you shouldn't give him a chance either, let alone all the other fantasy authors.
Same goes for space-based sci-fi. Whoever the first author to dream up a sci-fi book involving aliens on another planet was, all others after him suck and can't come up with their own ideas, so you shouldn't bother with them. I'm guessing that means only HG Wells is OK.
Exactly; there's a lot of reinvention of the wheel going on, especially in the computer world, such as people coming up with yet another new programming language because they didn't like the other ones for some reason. Obligatory XKCD. It's fun learning something that's truly new and interesting and actually useful. It's not fun learning some stupid half-assed new shit that someone make up because they had too much time on their hands and wanted to make a name for themselves; a good example of this is GNOME 3.
It's not "apathetic" to sit out an election where both of the choices are bad. It's called "not wasting your time". Of course, you can argue that they should vote in a third-party candidate instead, or a white-in candidate, even though there's roughly zero chance those candidates will be elected.
You don't make any sense here. What's wrong with state's rights? Do you really think everything should be uniform nation-wide, and the national government should set all laws? Why is it "feudal" if the people of a state elect a state government that decides the laws for them, but somehow it's great if the people of a much-larger country do the exact same thing? The only difference is the number of people who have to agree on something; it's a lot easier to get ~10M people to buy into some new policy than ~310M.
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I agree completely. I hope this goes very badly for Apple. They couldn't deserve it more.
" then leave the people there to their own devices."
AH, so blow up all their shit then just leave.
I see. You're pretty rude, aren't you?
To be fair, AQ was not exactly enmeshed in the general population there; they were separate, in training camps and mountain bases. We didn't need to go into the cities to bomb AQ to smithereens.
And how else would you do it? Take over the country and set up a puppet government that's thoroughly corrupt, taking decades and bankrupting yourself in the process? How's that working out for us right now?
The PC was better because it had an open architecture and was expandable. The others mostly weren't. On top of that, the PC was cloned (because of its open architecture), making for much more competition. It's a lot better to have a crappier standard that you can get interchangeable parts from multiple manufacturers for, than a superior standard that you can only get from one place at an inflated price.
Apple's corporate culture favors aggressive psychopaths. Microsoft's corporate culture favors incompetent and overweight psychopaths.
But yeah, modern refrigerators use what.. 50W average? Unless there's a huge COP (and it can't be more than 15 for a 4C fridge in a 25C room), it's probably less than the lighting or a couple sleeping adults.
My point exactly. Even if we did come up with some elaborate way of improving the total system efficiency by piggy-backing onto the house's A/C or whatever, the actual energy savings would be quite minimal compared to the expense required to achieve that gain. At current energy prices, it just isn't worth it (and refrigerators have gotten more efficient by themselves in the last few decades too, don't forget). But who knows what'll happen in the future if energy gets more expensive.
All that moisture would just help mold and mildew grow.
Mold and mildew isn't a problem where I live; it's a desert here in Arizona, there's barely any humidity in the winter air at all. Humid air from the dryer is a good thing.
There are coils, not there is (there's) coils. But I digress.
Wrong. "There's [plural words]" is perfectly acceptable colloquial speech. I'm not writing a formal dissertation here, this is Slashdot.
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002447.html
Yep, and they also have portable sawzalls so they can steal catalytic converters!
If you still have soap in your clothes when you dry them, you're either using way too much soap (quite likely; lots of people make this mistake, thinking they need 4x as much detergent as they really do), or you need a new washer. The rinses (multiple) are supposed to get rid of all that. "Wash byproducts"? Like what? There shouldn't be anything going into the dryer except wet, clean clothing. The clothing material thing I might buy, but even there you should be using heat appropriate for the fabrics; unless it's all cotton, don't use high heat, turn it down to low or medium (another common mistake people make is using high heat all the time).
How is living another day not a good thing? Yes, the investors and backers may be screwed, but who cares about them? The only important people are the executives, and as long as they get more bonuses, that's all they care about.
Take a short drive to Phoenix. It's dry in the winter (it's dry all year, except during the "monsoon season" in the summer), and while not exactly "cold", it can be chilly enough to want a little bit of heat, and the small amount of humidity that dryer exhaust would add to the air isn't a problem, instead it's probably welcome.
I live in Phoenix. A little extra humidity inside in the wintertime is a welcome thing.
Maybe, maybe not. Remember, in many places in the country (including meth-head infested areas like Phoenix), we have copper thieves getting themselves electrocuted so they can steal electrical cables, plus people stealing catalytic converters from underneath parked vehicles. I'm not sure how large this "server hut" is, but I sure hope it isn't on wheels like a trailer or else it'll be easily stolen.
here we are helping a nation that is going to allow the Taliban back with open arms the moment we leave, and possibly even sooner.
This is the crux of the problem: we're spending an insane amount of money on this place, and short of exterminating all the males there, there's absolutely nothing we can do to prevent it from becoming exactly like it was before we invaded. The afghanistan campaign should have taken no longer than 6 months at the very most: bomb all of AQ's training camps and caves and wipe them out so they're no longer a global threat, and then leave the people there to their own devices. "Nation building" simply doesn't work in a place where there's no real civilization and tribalism reigns supreme.
It definitely wouldn't work where I live, in Phoenix Arizona. Half the area's inhabitants are meth-heads who'll steal anything that isn't bolted down.
Yes, you can. You obviously wouldn't use the servers as the sole heat source in a pizza oven, but you could use their waste heat to keep the oven warm, so that the mean heating element doesn't have to use as much energy to reach the operating temperature. Granted the savings would probably be minimal, but it can be done. But it probably would take a while to recoup the investment in actually putting it all together.
There's a lot of energy-saving things involving heating and cooling that can be done that people don't bother with because the return on investment would probably be too long. For instance, everyone has a refrigerator in their house, which produces a fair amount of heat in cooling its interior (there's coils on the backside, for cooling the compressor). In the winter, this is no problem, since you want your house warm anyway, but in the summer this is counteracting your house's A/C, making it work harder to keep it cool inside. What if there were some way of diverting that heat to the outside of the house in the summer, but in cooler months keeping it inside? It could be done with some custom ducting, a fan, and temperature-controlled louvers. But you never see this because that's a lot of work, and therefore expense, when the gains are probably minimal.
Similarly, clothes dryers produce a LOT of waste heat, but this is usually just ducted outside. My house actually has a diverter box in the ductwork so that in the wintertime, I can move the flap and let all the hot air blow into the house (through an additional screen to keep the lint down), which reduces my heating bills. Unfortunately most houses don't bother with this, though it'd probably have a much bigger effect than the refrigerator idea above.
As energy costs rise, I imagine we'll be seeing a lot more energy-saving strategies like these.
Sorry, I should have said "99% of the country's voting population".
Maybe, maybe not. It's very pragmatic to sit out an election if there's zero chance your candidate will be elected, and you don't like the two "electable" ones, because time is valuable. Also, I've never seen write-in candidates shown in election results; I wrote in a Presidential candidate in 2008 and never saw my choice shown in the rankings at all (he was on the ballot in some other states, just not mine, so it wasn't like I just wrote in some random person's name), so I really question the usefulness of write-ins at anything but local elections. There's not much point to it if they're not even going to report it.
Finally, a very small voter turn-out also shows that the people are refusing to "play the game", and shows protest as well. You may not see it like that, but others do. It should be fairly obvious from what's going on these days that Americans really are pissed about what's going on in politics, not merely apathetic (the economy's in the shitter, remember? voters are always angry when the economy sucks), so if the turn-out is low, it's not because of apathy. You calling it so doesn't make it so.
"ArsonSmith" hit the nail on the head. Sure, in retrospect, Jim Crow laws are bad. However, go back to 1776 and try to get everyone in the 13 colonies to agree to that. There's a reason the Founders compromised on slavery: they couldn't get the southern states to agree to it, and with a compromise on that issue (and further compromises in later years), the union would have fallen apart and the British would have won.
Sure, I agree gays should be allowed to marry. However, there's a lot of people who don't agree to that. You apparently don't like it, but this is a democracy, where the people have the right to vote for their leaders. If a candidate takes an extremely unpopular position, he's not going to be elected. If an elected leader takes an extremely unpopular position, he won't be re-elected, and his competitor will promise to overturn the unpopular thing, get the electorate riled up over it, and then do so when he's in office, so doing an extremely unpopular thing is quite likely to be futile and short-lived. What good is it to create a new law legalizing gay marriage, only to have the opposition overturn it in 2 years (assuming it's that unpopular, I'm just using it as a hypothetical example).
This is the whole reason we have separate countries, separate states, etc.: because people can't all agree on the same thing. Women should be allowed to drive cars too (subject to appropriate licensing and testing like anyone else), however if your state merged with Saudi Arabia and let them all vote, you might find that women are now banned from driving where you live, because you're associated with a bunch of people who think very differently from you, and who vote for leaders that reflect their attitudes, no matter how backwards and wrong. By having states with more power, states that want to do something different, like legalizing marijuana, legalizing gay marriage, banning smoking in restaurants, teaching Creationism in public schools, banning the teaching of Creationism in science classes, etc. can do so much more easily, whereas making these changes at the national level in a nation with over 300M people of very different attitudes is rather difficult. If you find you don't like the attitude of your fellow voters and the laws that result from their voting, then it's a fairly simple task to pack up your stuff and move to another state (and in the Northeast, that might only be a short drive away). Packing up your stuff and moving to another country because you're tired of the politics where you are, however, is a much more difficult task.
Do you actually have a real point to make? Doesn't seem like it. The fact is, Germany produces high-value goods, Greece doesn't.
Or are you one of those people who think everyone should get the same pay no matter what their job is?
What the fuck are you talking about? It's "mob rule" for people to have a state government with elections, but it's not "mob rule" to have a national government with elections?
No, not exactly. What he's saying is that only one author should write books set in a magical land with wizards and dragons, and while that author could write a whole series of such books, no other author should have wizards and dragons in their books. So I guess that means any fantasy author other than Tolkein sucks and can't come up with their own ideas. Then again, I'm pretty sure Tolkein didn't invent dragons and wizards all by himself, so you shouldn't give him a chance either, let alone all the other fantasy authors.
Same goes for space-based sci-fi. Whoever the first author to dream up a sci-fi book involving aliens on another planet was, all others after him suck and can't come up with their own ideas, so you shouldn't bother with them. I'm guessing that means only HG Wells is OK.
Exactly; there's a lot of reinvention of the wheel going on, especially in the computer world, such as people coming up with yet another new programming language because they didn't like the other ones for some reason. Obligatory XKCD. It's fun learning something that's truly new and interesting and actually useful. It's not fun learning some stupid half-assed new shit that someone make up because they had too much time on their hands and wanted to make a name for themselves; a good example of this is GNOME 3.
It's not "apathetic" to sit out an election where both of the choices are bad. It's called "not wasting your time". Of course, you can argue that they should vote in a third-party candidate instead, or a white-in candidate, even though there's roughly zero chance those candidates will be elected.
Most of the other half voted for Gore, so they're idiots too. That makes roughly 99% of the country's population idiots.
You don't make any sense here. What's wrong with state's rights? Do you really think everything should be uniform nation-wide, and the national government should set all laws? Why is it "feudal" if the people of a state elect a state government that decides the laws for them, but somehow it's great if the people of a much-larger country do the exact same thing? The only difference is the number of people who have to agree on something; it's a lot easier to get ~10M people to buy into some new policy than ~310M.