Offering help as a way of dissing your competitor? Kinda tacky, Elon. Reminds me of the old joke:
"How many sopranos does it take to change a light bulb?" "Two. One to climb the ladder, and the other to say 'if that's too high for you, honey, I'll get it.'"
Just something to think about for the future: that was a great post up until the moment you threw in the disgusting stereotype about drunk irishmen. If you'd just left out that phrase, I'd be thinking to myself "hunh, what an insightful comment" rather than "christ, look at this racist twat."
Sake, sato, and choujiu... those cultures didn't exactly skip the rotten grains. And clean water is only part of the point of booze: the other goal is to put some calories from perishable foods into long-term storage, which tea doesn't really do.
Making and eating cheese, beer, and bread define what it is to be fully human. Any dirty ape can go club a mammoth and bring it back to its den, but to domesticate two different kinds of creatures (a mammal and a bacterium, or a grass and a yeast) and use one to rot the other and come out with something even tastier than the original? That requires massive intelligence, communication, tool use, planning, and social structure.
(PS: if any modern cultures exist that don't eat cheese, beer, or bread, I don't mean to imply that they're not fully human. Their current environment might not have the resources to do these things, but you can bet their ancestors knew how.)
Let N be the number of bits of real entropy in an item of human memory. N is somewhere between 50 and 70. (Proof: you can remember RWOLZEKBYT or "correct horse battery staple" if you have to, but you've got no prayer of remembering RWOLZEKBYTDUQLZPEJNB or Rw3L$E5Kÿ(t. )
Let 2^R be the instruction rate of the largest computer affordable by a large nation or corporation. R is about 56 at the moment.
2^(N - R) is the number of seconds before we're all completely fucked.
The medical community isn't serious about cancer research, because if they were they'd be pouring money into researching alternative forms of medicine that are more advanced than traditional biology, including crystal therapy and homeopathy. Which based on the evidence are two of the simplest ways to cure cancer.
None of this applies to the United States. The idea that there is a net move from gas to coal in the United States, is patently false.
Agree.
Operators of coal plants are routinely shutting them down these days as the cost of known regulation (and the threat of future regulations) makes them uneconomic to retrofit, especially in the current low power price environment.
It's not the cost of regulation that's causing coal to shut down, it's the straight-up cost of fuel vs cost of electricity.
Proof? This fall I visited the Brayton Point coal power plant in southern Massachusetts. Because they're in Mass, they've been forced to install every last state-of-the-art pollution control device on the planet, including most recently $600 million to build two enormous cooling towers. They've already complied with the regulations you say are causing coal plants to shut down, and they have a gigantic bill to pay off -- that bill doesn't go away if they sit idle. So you'd think they would run the plant every day, even if they only made a nickel of net profit. But since the fracking boom, they only run the plant once every few days, when the price of electricity is highest: at other times, the cost of coal is greater than the sale price of electricity.
Murray Energy... layed off miners and other workers the day after Obama's re-election claiming that Obama's war against coal meant that he could no longer afford to keep people employed.
Yet, Slashdot has posted a story saying worldwide demand for coal is up.
The global picture is very different from the American picture. Worldwide, gas is expensive, and coal is cheap. In the US, fracking has caused the price of gas to plunge. (European gas prices have doubled since the 2009 crash; in the US they've *dropped* by 20% since then.)
I teach a college class on energy: we visited a New England coal power plant a couple of months ago. They only operate the plant one day out of four now, because they can't compete against natural gas plants.
So TFA is right, from a European perspective (the article is from a UK site). And in the US, Murray Energy *is* feeling the squeeze. But not because of Obama's "war against coal": coal companies are losing out to gas due to cold hard free-market capitalism, and Murray's taking the opportunity to kick his workers to the curb just before the holidays (as he's done before), and blame his political enemy for it.
I suspect, but can't verify, that most of the "250,000 patents" protecting your average smartphone are for not-phone-specific elements within it. Not sure what you mean by "patents on these devices [are] simpler": they may be available off the shelf, but the price tag is based on the fact that in the end someone's got to pay the patentor.
Oh, come on. The "patent system is screwed up" argument started with software and algorithms, and continued with patents on DNA and organisms. And yeah, in those cases it was pretty clear the patent system wasn't working as intended. I'm with you on that one. But now here at Slashdot we're upset that ingenious physical devices, devices that took years of work to design and whose operation is by no means obvious, should not be patented.
There can be no question that something like a SAW filter is a new, non-obvious, useful device. So at this point, you're arguing that patents should not exist at all. And I won't follow you there.
You really have no idea how much brainpower went into designing the individual components within a cell phone. An iPhone is a miracle the first time you see one, then it's a handy tool, and then your familiarity makes it seem blindingly obvious. But tens of thousands of people spent billions of person-hours figuring out how to build the thousands of unique devices inside. And I think those people should receive some reward for their efforts.
Software-defined radio is not some magic wand you wave and poof! wireless telecom. It eventually gets down to physical RF hardware. And when that hardware operates in the gigahertz band (which it will have to do unless you want the FCC on your ass), you need high-tech RF transceiver hardware like SAW filters and gigahertz amplifiers, which are patented *in their own right* as electronic components, whether they're in a phone or not.
Too many computer programmers are used to accomplishing miracles in software, and they forget that somewhere in the background, there's an electrical engineer that made their miracle possible.
But 100% of his >50%-confidence predictions came true. In the future, he should be more sure of his predictions.
No, there's a conditional probability bias here. The question isn't, "what are the odds that Silver will get every state right?" The question is, "what are the odds that Silver would get every state right, *given* that he was correct about the overall result?" Because we wouldn't be having this conversation if he'd predicted a win for Romney.
Knowing something about the overall result affects the likelihood of specific individual outcomes. Knowing that the average grade in my Calculus class was an A does make it more likely that I personally got a good grade. If this sounds weird, Google the "Monty Hall problem", which will really bend your brain.
Romney was trending upward until Hurricane Sandy hit, then started sliding back down.)
Factually wrong. Every poll I've seen, and every forecast model, shows a gradual trend toward Obama over the last six months of the year, a short spike for Romney after the first debate, followed by a continued slide toward Obama, which accelerated after the second and third debate -- at least a week before Sandy hit.
Check out Nate Silver's model data for confirmation, since you seem to appreciate it.
Unlike the GP, I'm not going to insult you. But I will ask, why *shouldn't* an area with a small fraction of the total population receive a small fraction of the attention and resources? I'm sure you can find reasons why your region is crucial to the nation's well-being, but I can make that argument anywhere. Why do rural areas deserve disproportionate attention?
I also question whether Democrats' policies are actually more anti-rural than Republicans', but that's for another time.
Slashdot Mirror
Offering help as a way of dissing your competitor? Kinda tacky, Elon. Reminds me of the old joke:
"How many sopranos does it take to change a light bulb?"
"Two. One to climb the ladder, and the other to say 'if that's too high for you, honey, I'll get it.'"
The cap on H-1B and other visas should be set at 7 billion people.
Racist. Twat.
Bonus racist points for "I can't be racist, I have Irish friends!"
Just something to think about for the future: that was a great post up until the moment you threw in the disgusting stereotype about drunk irishmen. If you'd just left out that phrase, I'd be thinking to myself "hunh, what an insightful comment" rather than "christ, look at this racist twat."
"Congressmen Porkbarrel, R, MA replied: "I'm sorry I cant hear you over the sound of all this bribe money""
As a resident of Massachusetts, I'm insulted. Congressman Porkbarrel is a Democrat.
As a general rule, anyone who uses the term "warfighter" is desperately trying to sell you something.
Sake, sato, and choujiu... those cultures didn't exactly skip the rotten grains. And clean water is only part of the point of booze: the other goal is to put some calories from perishable foods into long-term storage, which tea doesn't really do.
Making and eating cheese, beer, and bread define what it is to be fully human. Any dirty ape can go club a mammoth and bring it back to its den, but to domesticate two different kinds of creatures (a mammal and a bacterium, or a grass and a yeast) and use one to rot the other and come out with something even tastier than the original? That requires massive intelligence, communication, tool use, planning, and social structure.
(PS: if any modern cultures exist that don't eat cheese, beer, or bread, I don't mean to imply that they're not fully human. Their current environment might not have the resources to do these things, but you can bet their ancestors knew how.)
You know, your argument would be more persuasive if you knew the difference between a million and a billion.
Remember folks. You can vote for the elephant or you can vote for the donkey, but either way, you're voting for the mouse.
No you can't. Not if I ask you to memorize a bunch of other phrases of the same type, and keep them all in your head for months.
But even if N = 100 (which is what it is in your phrase), it's fixed. R in my equation goes up by 1 every 18 months (Moore's Law).
So another way of looking at it is, the time until we're fucked is 2^(N - R) seconds, or (N - R) * 18 months, whichever comes first.
Let N be the number of bits of real entropy in an item of human memory. N is somewhere between 50 and 70. (Proof: you can remember RWOLZEKBYT or "correct horse battery staple" if you have to, but you've got no prayer of remembering RWOLZEKBYTDUQLZPEJNB or Rw3L$E5Kÿ(t. )
Let 2^R be the instruction rate of the largest computer affordable by a large nation or corporation. R is about 56 at the moment.
2^(N - R) is the number of seconds before we're all completely fucked.
The medical community isn't serious about cancer research, because if they were they'd be pouring money into researching alternative forms of medicine that are more advanced than traditional biology, including crystal therapy and homeopathy. Which based on the evidence are two of the simplest ways to cure cancer.
Agree.
It's not the cost of regulation that's causing coal to shut down, it's the straight-up cost of fuel vs cost of electricity.
Proof? This fall I visited the Brayton Point coal power plant in southern Massachusetts. Because they're in Mass, they've been forced to install every last state-of-the-art pollution control device on the planet, including most recently $600 million to build two enormous cooling towers. They've already complied with the regulations you say are causing coal plants to shut down, and they have a gigantic bill to pay off -- that bill doesn't go away if they sit idle. So you'd think they would run the plant every day, even if they only made a nickel of net profit. But since the fracking boom, they only run the plant once every few days, when the price of electricity is highest: at other times, the cost of coal is greater than the sale price of electricity.
The global picture is very different from the American picture. Worldwide, gas is expensive, and coal is cheap. In the US, fracking has caused the price of gas to plunge. (European gas prices have doubled since the 2009 crash; in the US they've *dropped* by 20% since then.)
I teach a college class on energy: we visited a New England coal power plant a couple of months ago. They only operate the plant one day out of four now, because they can't compete against natural gas plants.
So TFA is right, from a European perspective (the article is from a UK site). And in the US, Murray Energy *is* feeling the squeeze. But not because of Obama's "war against coal": coal companies are losing out to gas due to cold hard free-market capitalism, and Murray's taking the opportunity to kick his workers to the curb just before the holidays (as he's done before), and blame his political enemy for it.
Okay, my bad, real bolo rounds us much shorter wire. Whatever.
Bolo round. Two slugs molded around the ends of a six-foot length of steel wire.
(Yes this is a real thing.)
I suspect, but can't verify, that most of the "250,000 patents" protecting your average smartphone are for not-phone-specific elements within it. Not sure what you mean by "patents on these devices [are] simpler": they may be available off the shelf, but the price tag is based on the fact that in the end someone's got to pay the patentor.
Oh, come on. The "patent system is screwed up" argument started with software and algorithms, and continued with patents on DNA and organisms. And yeah, in those cases it was pretty clear the patent system wasn't working as intended. I'm with you on that one. But now here at Slashdot we're upset that ingenious physical devices, devices that took years of work to design and whose operation is by no means obvious, should not be patented.
There can be no question that something like a SAW filter is a new, non-obvious, useful device. So at this point, you're arguing that patents should not exist at all. And I won't follow you there.
You really have no idea how much brainpower went into designing the individual components within a cell phone. An iPhone is a miracle the first time you see one, then it's a handy tool, and then your familiarity makes it seem blindingly obvious. But tens of thousands of people spent billions of person-hours figuring out how to build the thousands of unique devices inside. And I think those people should receive some reward for their efforts.
Software-defined radio is not some magic wand you wave and poof! wireless telecom. It eventually gets down to physical RF hardware. And when that hardware operates in the gigahertz band (which it will have to do unless you want the FCC on your ass), you need high-tech RF transceiver hardware like SAW filters and gigahertz amplifiers, which are patented *in their own right* as electronic components, whether they're in a phone or not.
Too many computer programmers are used to accomplishing miracles in software, and they forget that somewhere in the background, there's an electrical engineer that made their miracle possible.
None of it's even evidence.
No, there's a conditional probability bias here. The question isn't, "what are the odds that Silver will get every state right?" The question is, "what are the odds that Silver would get every state right, *given* that he was correct about the overall result?" Because we wouldn't be having this conversation if he'd predicted a win for Romney.
Knowing something about the overall result affects the likelihood of specific individual outcomes. Knowing that the average grade in my Calculus class was an A does make it more likely that I personally got a good grade. If this sounds weird, Google the "Monty Hall problem", which will really bend your brain.
Factually wrong. Every poll I've seen, and every forecast model, shows a gradual trend toward Obama over the last six months of the year, a short spike for Romney after the first debate, followed by a continued slide toward Obama, which accelerated after the second and third debate -- at least a week before Sandy hit.
Check out Nate Silver's model data for confirmation, since you seem to appreciate it.
Unlike the GP, I'm not going to insult you. But I will ask, why *shouldn't* an area with a small fraction of the total population receive a small fraction of the attention and resources? I'm sure you can find reasons why your region is crucial to the nation's well-being, but I can make that argument anywhere. Why do rural areas deserve disproportionate attention?
I also question whether Democrats' policies are actually more anti-rural than Republicans', but that's for another time.
No, Maine and Nebraska (the states you're talking about) are winner-take-all within each congressional district.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_College_(United_States)#Congressional_District_Method