You have no basis to judge me, you AC piece of shit. Show me your history? Let me see your upvotes?
I went through some of my history just a moment ago, and most of the original posts I put up... that is, the first ones in a thread, tend to a get a fair number of upvotes.
I'm an intelligent, educated, interesting, and thoughtful person. Do I swear or treat people acting in a degenerate manner like degenerates? Yep.
The world is only as screwed up as it is because there are too many insincere nice people lying to fucking retards. I'm doing my part to balance the scales.
That is a good point about drugs or various industrial chemicals getting in there.
I'm not entirely sure how you process all that out. One would assume and hope that they have some quality control system monitoring what is actually in the water.
You might be right that that is just a general deal killer. The toxic chemicals is something you could deal with pretty easily. You just track toxins in the water and try to follow them back to the source. Then you fine the shit out of the company and shunt future toxic run off into a separate treatment facility.
The point you're making that is very compelling is the drugs. Those are going to be everywhere and people can't really help peeing out trace amounts of the drugs they take. Filtering those drugs out might be hard and more importantly some of them have big effects on our bodies even in very trace amounts.
So yeah... good point. I don't know how you'd deal with that.
As to composting human waste, I'd point out that it smells like pretty much the worst thing ever. I don't think composting as many people understand it is scalable.
I think for human waste, the first step has to be subjecting it to extreme temperatures. Charcoal it. THEN you can compost it. That will kill all microorganisms in it and render it biologically inert. You could technically eat someone else's poop at that point and it wouldn't pose a health risk. It would taste like charcoal... which isn't great but... it won't really hurt you.
Yes, the pilot/driver needs to see outside but none of the passengers need to see outside. And yet they always have windows because people like to look outside.
I'm always baffled by people that ask for proof on things without bothering to state what they would consider valid evidence. I'm sure I could get you a report from some scientists and engineers that said it was safe. But I'm rather certain you wouldn't accept that as evidence.
Which means I'm somewhat at a loss as to what you even mean when you ask for proof? Theoretically, what could I possibly say or post or provide that you would accept and then say "okay, I accept it is safe"?
As to proving safety versus inferring it... that is a good point, however, I'll point out that if they're wrong millions of people are going to get very sick very quickly.
So I frankly doubt they're cutting too many corners with the safety because if they do... politicians might literally go to jail. Which is normally almost impossible.
The yuck factor is childishness. If the water is safe then the water is safe.
One of the things I've been looking at are things like pee-ponics and similar very short cycle waste processing systems. It sounds gross, but most of the grossness is just a bacteria issue. I saw someone pushing a solar toliet that subjects the poop to a couple thousand degrees of temperature and basically kicks out desiccated charcoal. That charcoal could be ground up and added to fertilizer. No poop smell because the bacteria are dead and in any case that temperature causes the poop to change chemically into something else. As to pee, you can filter the urine through bacterial cultures that will convert the the urine quite quickly into liquid fertilizer.
I think NASA said that it takes about six liters of algae to produce enough oxygen for one person? I don't know if that is six liters compressed and in a much larger volume of water or not. I assume so. But you could build personal biodomes for people that recycle all the biological waste from the house on a daily basis. Mix some worms in to chew up the kitchen scraps and maybe some eddible mushrooms to break down wood.
All these systems tend to need is sunlight enough sense to understand you don't mix certain things together, and a bit of patience.
I'm currently building a climate control system that manages all sorts of environmental factors in my house using some ardinios and a pi. Just for fun. And I think this could just be expanded out to manage a much more dramatic life support system.
People should also give a look at the Earth Ships which have a similar quality in that they're capable of keeping people alive for years without outside support... providing their own power, recycling water about 4 times in the house before replacing it, and fully able to generate enough food to feed the residents. And all that while being in the otherwise inhospitable locations like the middle of the desert or something.
Then look at all my posts that get 5+ informative, dipshit. I imagine you can manage that.
As to what percentage of my comments get replies, that is true for everyone. Most comments from most people don't get many replies.
This is especially true if you make a comment not in reply to someone else but directly in reply to the article. People often reply to comments directed at them but whether or not anyone responds to a comment you make on an article is more variable.
What is more, you cannot judge me because you are an AC.
Log in and then judge me. We'll just have a little look at YOUR history, shit for brains.
Conspiracy implies secrecy. The deals developers enter into to release EXCLUSIVE content are not secret. They are well known by pretty much everyone. Except you.
Wait what? You're saying experts in the punch card era were upset when computers could be programmed with a keyboard sans punch cards?
Surely you jest? No. Experts were quite happy with doing away with that bullshit.
To this day, some experts do prefer a text interface but that is not a generational thing. Everyone that knows how to script or program prefers text based interfaces because graphical scripting or programming is generally shit. And so people are generally for the text based interfaces in those contexts because they simply are more powerful.
That said, I can't think of any experts that are against GUIs entirely. So this notion that you can impose any new change on the system and ignore expert opinion is specious. You're basically arguing for change for change sake at this point.
You do realize that my overall karma is "excellent" right, bingo? The vast majority of discussions go well with me. But if people are being stupid then I'm going to call it stupid when I see it... no hesitation, no mercy, no remorse.
This 70 billion dollar rail project that was uneconomical at 35 billion? Stupid. It is a stupid program supported exclusively by crooks, idiots, and people not paying attention. Its dumb. its 70 billion dollars spent that we can't afford on something we don't need or even want. Its dumb. And apparently it is going to have to be built and be useless for years on end before the people not paying attention realize "huh, no one uses that piece of shit".
What delicate little flowers like you want is for people to lie to you and pretend that your idiotic comments are not in fact idiotic.
Sorry, bingo... you're stupid.
So tired of the stupid bitter troll ACs... This site would be so much better if you couldn't comment anonymously. At the very least require people to comment using sock puppet accounts.
You talk about MY comment history, but what about yours? Oh that's right, you don't have a comment history because you're anonymous. You could be advocating pedophilia in every post and it would be impossible to for anyone to really nail that down because you just blend into the foggy haze of other fucktard ACs on this forum.
Kindly find the most convenient bridge and jump off it.
As to your trust in their cost estimates when they have no track record of accurate predictions, you're welcome to your opinions but I don't accept them as a credible source for cost estimates. Period.
As to metro traffic along the way, that isn't a state wide issue but rather a city issue. It is also a city issue that both cities were dealing with prior to this quite successfully and at a radically lower cost.
As to the risk of money being sipheoned, a good deal of it has already found its way into the general fund's pension from what I'm to understand. So... not so much.
As to I-5 etc, you're conflating the roads with the airport, with the rail. Each have different purposes and contexts. The airport is for fast passanger traffic between cities. The roads are for slower economical transport to anywhere. The rails are mostly useful for economical bulk transport of goods and not passangers.
US rail has been expanding and been quite profitable over the last 20 years or so. But for GOODS... not people. Rail for people has been uneconomical since before the airplane. Cars and buses are superior to the train for economy and flexibility.
You can say "but my train is really fast"... but it isn't actually because you're not taking a direct route and you're not going full speed the whole way. You're slowing down through certain areas where the local communities won't tolerate a train that goes that fast through their area. That means your train is a lot slower than you think it is. And the costs of the train are so absurdly uneconomical that it is just a stupid concept.
As to name calling undermining my position, that is ad hominem on your part. My arguments are sound on their own merit regardless of whether I tell you to suck my dick at the end or not.;)
Logic, bitch... Do you know it?:D
It is not my responsibility to be nice to you or to polite or to treat you with respect. I don't have to do these things to win an argument. How you "Feel" about something at the end is utterly irrelevant. We are not children. Feelings don't matter.
I am right and all this talking is keeping you from your responsibilities in my pants. Seriously... you're wrong. And while you might be upset that I'm rubbing it in, that's my right. What else can I take from you in this discussion besides doing this?
This is the crotch hump you get subjected to after getting shot in the face in an FPS. It is the least to which I am entitled. And I will take it.
Nonsense, a good many of the developers on consoles were pretty much paid by MS to develop for the xbox when they were previously successfully developing for the PC. What is more, many devs port their games back to the PC in any case. So... wrong.
Depends. If she's a fucking land whale then you can't blame the lack of an erection on the porn. If she's just "a normal woman" then I'm calling bullshit. Naked woman in front of me... in the flesh... erection is happening. Especially if she's prepared to put in any effort what so ever to put the man in the mood. Women go on and on about how they need foreplay and rub this and touch that... and don't go too fast. Etc.
Well, do men have to have such blue balls that they spurt at the first sight of nipples? Worst case, there is some heavy petting that happens before intercourse. Apparently this is the end of masculinity. Give me a fucking break.
I was very disappointed with his article because his study from the 70s was very interesting. But the idiocy of his recent situation makes me wonder if perhaps he's always been an incompetent boob.
The longer they last and the more maintainable they are the better the economy.
What is more, the panels are typically not recycled along with more electronic shit in this country. It mostly goes to a land fill somewhere. You should know that.
As to it being expensive to do things in precisely the way the factory does it... of course. The point is to do it in a way that takes logistical limitations into consideration.
As to communism, I am advocating communism no more than a person that says he'd like to be able to cook his own food is advocating for communism.
People own tools and fabrication equipment already. You can go to the hardware store right now and buy a Dremel. Apparently that makes you a communist.
I fucking hate politically charged language when it serves only to introduce drama and sophistry into what is otherwise a very simple discussion.
Which is my long winded way of saying, don't bring fucking politics into a discussion about solar panel fabrication. It is obnoxious.
As to estimates from the state, they've been wrong with pretty much every estimate so far... so I don't regard their estimates are credible.
And neither should you. If they had any track record at accurately predicting costs than that would be one thing but they don't.
As to corruption with other projects, the other projects are less senational, less likely to get big federal dollars, and involve so many departments that covering up the corruption is harder.
One big fucking project is easier to manipulate and siphon funds from.
As to tens of billions, that depends entirely on how silly you want to be with your contractors. Bid it out properly after planning things out before hand so you're not changing the plan half way through renovation and it could be quite reasonable.
My impression of LAX is first that they need a satellite parking facility with a public shuttle to the LAX terminals. That would reduce the number of cars showing up at the terminals dramatically.
Next, I would make sure that all the mass transit in the city ACTUALLY connects to the airport. The taxi lobbies have succeeded over the years in making buses etc not quite connect to most airports. Connect the city's mass transit to the airport. In most cases this just means changing bus stop destinations by a couple blocks.
Now that we have people actually getting to the airport more efficiently and we have reduced traffic congestion we have to deal with congestion inside the actual building. To that end, there are several choke points in the LAX terminals. If we increase the number of entrances we will reduce the pressure at each individual entrance. What is more, the airport administration is aware of flight times and passenger manifests. They can move personnel from one check point to another... increasing or decreasing man power as needed. This is more efficient in labor costs and provides faster service for passengers. The TSA etc should be encouraged to do the same thing. So terminals that are going to have a lot of people go through them have extra staff and when traffic to that specific terminal goes down you shift labor to other terminals.
Now that we've got people in the smallest groups possible and we've load balanced the staff, we should look at optimizing the security process. The three things going on with the security process that slow it down is that everyone has to take their shoes off, everyone has to remove every little bit of metal from their bodies, and laptops which everyone is carrying have to be taken out and placed flat in a tray. As to getting a person through security, a person can be patted down in less time than it takes for a person to take off their shoes, take off their belt, etc, then go through the scanner, then put it all back on again. As such, a pat downs should actually be preferred. They're faster and just as accurate. Maintain the scanner as a backup system for people that don't like to be touched. If you're okay being touched you can go through the system faster so long as the security people see to you immediately.
As to luggage etc, I'm not sure if there is a way to optimize this but we should find another way to check laptops in luggage without forcing people to take the laptops out of the luggage. I don't credit that this totally impossible. I expect it is entirely viable. What screeners should do I think is check it inside the bag first. If there is a problem because they can't see something etc then make an exception with that user. But the majority of people that go through probably won't need to have their laptop removed from their bag and that will speed up the line considerably.
Ideally we haven't had to take our shoes off. But if we have then provide better seating on the far side of the security check point for people to put stuff back on again. Keep in mind, we're concerned with the efficiency and experience of the traveler.
Once you get to this point, the airlines are almost entirely in control and things are generally pretty efficient.
Who here thinks watching porn causes men to not be able to get erections with women? Dumb.
A more relevant question they should be asking is why are men seeking escapes form society? The assumption he's making is that this is just an addiction and that men would otherwise WANT to be part of society. But most of the people that get sucked off into games and pornography are checking out.
That is an effect and not a cause. The cause is that there are various things in modern society that are hostile to young men. We can all feel it. And if that becomes stressful and alienating then why not check out? What is society offering you to make you want to participate?
A big part of how societies work is that they encourage, reward, and facilitate constructive participation in a group culture and society. But if given members of that society do not feel encouraged, rewarded, or able to organize then that leads to disconnection. Men drop off the system.
And since they're not doing anything productive they might as well entertain themselves.
And thus the games.
Look at the college rates. They're not only not graduating but they're not even going in the first place. That is people that are checking out. They don't see the point of investing the time and energy and so they don't.
If you want to change that then you effect it THERE. Treating the symptoms won't do anything for you.
in regards to driving, a daily commute by car is obviously not possible. My point was that it was inexpensive.
As to someone commuting DAILY from LA to SF... in what scenario are you assuming that any significant number of people would do that?
The only people that could consider that even remotely reasonable are people that could afford the plane trip... and even they wouldn't like it because that is a slog.
You're justifying a 50 to 70 billion dollar project on what a tiny fraction of the population would ever do.
Can you offer a justification for this besides "the 1 percent would really like it!" Because that's what your commute argument boils down to. No one else is doing that. You think the average person is going to pay 85 dollars a DAY to commute to work by bullet train?
No.
The commute argument is silly unless you're talking about someone that is making a significant amount of money or is getting their fare paid by the company. And in either case, we already have people that do that by AIRPLANE.
As to issues that make airports slow, sure there are lots of issues with them but none of it is inherent to the form of travel itself but is instead due to poor management of the airports.
Here is what is static and fixed.
An airplane must have a runway. An airplane must have time to load passengers, time to taxi, time to take off, time to fly to its destination, time to land, time to taxi, time to unload.
Everything else is the airport.
So... either tell me what portion of the fixed aspect of the airplane's actual travel is making it slow or admit it is the fucking airport and then we just have to fix the issue there.
The TSA might not be the only issue but it is a BIG fucking issue. Deal with that, deal with some of the congestion issues... and airplanes will not only continue to be faster, but people that are terrible at using airports won't feel so stupid when they go through the process.
As to weather being an impediment... We're talking about Los Angeles to San Francisco. Weather is not really an issue here. SF sometimes has fog which causes the FAA to say a plane shouldn't land. But they can land entirely on instruaments if they're not being pussies about it. Alternatively, you can land in Oakland which doesn't really get the same kind of fog. LAX to Oakland is still faster than you stupid boondoggle train.
As to us needing an alternative, we don't need a 70 billion dollar train that only goes between two destinations, more expensively than an airplane, and more slowly.
That's what we call "stupid".
As to the benefits of ye olde transport service... Comical. I note that you haven't really mentioned any of those benefits. You said something about weather which just made me feel sorry for you. This is CALIFORNIA. Do you know what our weathermen say every day "Looks like its going to be a nice day out"... Even when it rains it isn't a big deal. And we don't get snow, or sleet, or hurricanes, or any of that other bullshit.
I'm actually kind of offended you presumed to question how much I knew about the state of California when clearly you're completely fucking clueless.
It is actually very rare that you can't play a game because it is ATI or nVidia. Typically you just have hardware specific bugs at worst and they are generally patched out in a couple weeks after release.
So... whatever.
As to the number of AAA games on PCs declining, not really. The PC market is not shrinking and while we are often subjected to console port trash, the reality is that the market is significantly more vibrant than anything the consoles have going for them.
As to piracy, it is an issue on the PC but only for single player games. And even then you have to take into consideration the geometrically larger installation base. A game released on the PC generally reaches a lot more people and a lot more countries than releasing something on a console.
And again, if piracy bothers you, then make multiplayer a core feature of the game and the game will connect to your servers and you can verify integrity and authentication on login.
This isn't rocket science. Diablo 3 for example has basically no piracy despite having a very prominent single player campaign.
Beyond this, there is piracy on the console it is just slightly less common because you have to chip your console. Chip your console at a cost of about 30 dollars and you can pirate like crazy.
As to steam, steam's DRM is possibly the weakest DRM I've seen besides having none at all. The actual value of steam is that it is a social network for gamers, includes built in voice chat, maintains updates for games making sure that every game has the latest update which is auto installed, steam backs up your games in their system so you can remove it from your machine and then reinstall from steam at any time, and of course it is the primary store at this point for games.
That updating feature is very important because it was how steam got internet cafes to use them. You install steam on a gaming machine and then quickly click through a dozen games in your liberary you want installed on the machine and they're all installed on the machine without any further intervention. And they're kept up to date automatically there after.
This was key for the counterstrike players.
Look, you don't know shit about PC gaming... no offense. And I kind of suspect you're not going to own up to that. So lets just end this here. I don't think we can have a profitable discussion when you're pretending to understand things you don't.
As to lan parties, what planning is required to pick a box up and then put it down in another room?
Do you want me to draw you a picture?
You're again offering a lack of choices as a feature. Never mind that the consoles all have downloadable little games on them that are often not very good.
And you're also ignoring that the PC gaming industry is fucking massive.
As to no one in this thread but someone somewhere else... no. I reject your premise and even if it were valid, which it isn't, it is not relevant to what we are talking about here by your own admission.
Get on topic or prove that EVERYONE is talking about that or otherwise demonstrate that my argument should in any way take what is effectively a strawman lying down.
You don't get to tell me what my argument is... I regret that you've prepared for an argument no one is having with you but it is not my obligation to argue in a way that you expect nor is it acceptable for you to just plow along anyway as if I did say things which I did not say.
Give me a break.
As to flying cars this was already addressed by flying cars that have already been made. They work like a normal car on the road with a wheel. When you get into the air, the wheel becomes a "yoke" and operates similarly to the way that a commercial airline yoke functions. Just as on the ground, turning right or left will generally cause the plane to turn that way... though the mechanics are more complicated. I forget which flaps are moved. Pulling the nose up or down is caused by pushing the yoke forward or pulling it back. Just as you would expect.
As I remember, turning the wheel turns the tail flaps and pushing the yoke right or left causes the main wing flaps to move. I don't remember all the technical names as I'm neither a pilot nor a flying expert. However, I am a vast repository of largely useless information. And your example happened to be one I could rebut from memory. So again... your argument actually backfired... flying cars addressed that. Choose another analogy if you like but I think your entire premise is on poor footing.
The point is to make things operate in a way that people familiar with the technology would expect. Going fucking crazy with it and doing all sorts of unintuitive things is a mistake.
One thing that they keep fucking up is thinking that intuition is only judged or best judged by people that know literally nothing about the technology. So they'll hand it to grand mothers or something and then on that judge what they should do. Never mind that the people familiar with the tech would have different assumptions and inclinations and those people are VASTLY more valuable and important users because they will ACTUALLY use your products because they've ACTUALLY used them before which implied they'll ACTUALLY use them again.
I was watching the VISTA focus groups when vista came out and they kept handing their crap to... I don't know... uncontacted Amazonian tribals or something. Just complete muppets. And then they were taking their opinions on GUI design over people like me that actually use the fucking thing.
I do not have enough foot long pink rubber dildos to jam up their asses... it is a pity.
Imagine if you were designing a gun and to test the intuitive nature of your gun, you handed it to people that had no idea what a gun was or how to use it. And then you used that to try and redesign the entire gun from the ground up to be more intelligible to people that knew NOTHING about it.
How well is that gun going to sell or be received by anyone likely to actually buy it? Exactly. People are going to say "where is the trigger?" "where is the grip?"... and some fucktard is going to say "well in our focus groups we determined that really people new to guns find this "rock" shape more intuitive so we make our gun to look like a fucking stone.
>_
Some companies need a firing squad... just to thin the herd of the really really stupid ideas.
As to airports being shit, what is easier... buying land in a strip from LA to SF, hiring thousands of engineers, laying hundreds of miles of precision track, buying lots of bullet trains, running power and maintenance access to the track because bullet trains are electric, dealing with the political NIMYism crap, and then maintaining this uneconomical monstrosity in perpetuity... or fixing the airport so the TSA doesn't waste our time?
If you choose the bullet train it means you're clueless or it means you're a corrupt politicians sucking off the federal tit.
It is vastly easier and vastly cheaper and vastly more beneficial to just fix the airport. It would cost a fraction of the amount to just restructure some of the terminals and gates so that most of the time in line went away. Nearly all the waiting time people bitch about is security. The actual logistics of getting from the car, bus, taxi, to the front of the airport isn't any different than the train station.
And there's no reason why the innards of the airport have to be so fucked up. So, unfuck them. Any twat could do it. I'd even trust you to do it and you are an especially myopic little munchkin.
We also probably need more airports in Los Angles at the very least. Most people fly out of LAX and that means a long commute to the airport when really airports should be more distributed so that we can fly from those smaller airports directly to wherever.
As to airplanes not always leaving on schedule, they actually usually do especially in California. They tend not to as much in the east coast because the weather is shitty. But if the weather is good... and in southern california it is... pretty much always... then that isn't an issue for the planes. Sure you can have equipment break downs etc but that is going to happen with anything. You think your stupid trains aren't ever going to break? Dream on.
As to wasting time in the car, depends on the purpose of your trip. If you're trying to get from point A to point B as cheaply as possible, the car or a bus wins.
if you want speed, then take an airplane. My airplane will beat your bullet train EVEN with the time in the terminals. Hands down.
One of the things you halfwits don't seem to get is that the train isn't even taking a direct route from LA to SF. It is weaving all over the fucking place and large portions of the journey are going to be speed limited for NIMBYism. Which means that speed you think you're going to get isn't going to happen.
And even if it did, which it won't, you STILL wouldn't beat the plane. EVEN with the terminal time unless you're utterly incompetent at dealing with airports which any business air travel commuter is not.
If you travel for business by plane with any frequency you learn how to deal with airports.
1. You get a Federal security pass... I forget what they're called, but they cost about 50 bucks and require you to go to a federal building and get interviewed by some government people. And when they conclude that you're not a terrorist, they give you an ID that lets you bypass the TSA pretty much entirely. So if you hate the TSA, you get one of those.
2. Just like rush hour, you understand when the airport is really busy and when it is not. Try to time your movements around that. It isn't hard and it isn't especially inconvenient. It requires that your plane take off an hour early sometimes if you need to get out of a really busy airport before it locks up.
3. If you travel a lot with any airline, they put you on their frequent flyer program. And pretty much all of them get you preferential treatment from that airline. That means not waiting in lines, access to special luxury waiting rooms with full service bars and no screaming children, and of course when it comes time to board you tend to get on the plane before or immediately after they get the handicapped people on the plane.
And here is the thing I really really like about airplanes - They go EVERYWHERE. Your train is point to point. Utterly inflexible. My plane... Goes ANYwhere.
For fast passenger transport over long distances, nothing competes with airplanes. Nothing comes even remotely close.
Slashdot Mirror
You have no basis to judge me, you AC piece of shit. Show me your history? Let me see your upvotes?
I went through some of my history just a moment ago, and most of the original posts I put up... that is, the first ones in a thread, tend to a get a fair number of upvotes.
I'm an intelligent, educated, interesting, and thoughtful person. Do I swear or treat people acting in a degenerate manner like degenerates? Yep.
The world is only as screwed up as it is because there are too many insincere nice people lying to fucking retards. I'm doing my part to balance the scales.
Fuck off.
That is a good point about drugs or various industrial chemicals getting in there.
I'm not entirely sure how you process all that out. One would assume and hope that they have some quality control system monitoring what is actually in the water.
You might be right that that is just a general deal killer. The toxic chemicals is something you could deal with pretty easily. You just track toxins in the water and try to follow them back to the source. Then you fine the shit out of the company and shunt future toxic run off into a separate treatment facility.
The point you're making that is very compelling is the drugs. Those are going to be everywhere and people can't really help peeing out trace amounts of the drugs they take. Filtering those drugs out might be hard and more importantly some of them have big effects on our bodies even in very trace amounts.
So yeah... good point. I don't know how you'd deal with that.
As to composting human waste, I'd point out that it smells like pretty much the worst thing ever. I don't think composting as many people understand it is scalable.
I think for human waste, the first step has to be subjecting it to extreme temperatures. Charcoal it. THEN you can compost it. That will kill all microorganisms in it and render it biologically inert. You could technically eat someone else's poop at that point and it wouldn't pose a health risk. It would taste like charcoal... which isn't great but... it won't really hurt you.
Yes, the pilot/driver needs to see outside but none of the passengers need to see outside. And yet they always have windows because people like to look outside.
Why would a driverless car be any different?
Next issue.
What would you consider proof?
I'm always baffled by people that ask for proof on things without bothering to state what they would consider valid evidence. I'm sure I could get you a report from some scientists and engineers that said it was safe. But I'm rather certain you wouldn't accept that as evidence.
Which means I'm somewhat at a loss as to what you even mean when you ask for proof? Theoretically, what could I possibly say or post or provide that you would accept and then say "okay, I accept it is safe"?
As to proving safety versus inferring it... that is a good point, however, I'll point out that if they're wrong millions of people are going to get very sick very quickly.
So I frankly doubt they're cutting too many corners with the safety because if they do... politicians might literally go to jail. Which is normally almost impossible.
The yuck factor is childishness. If the water is safe then the water is safe.
One of the things I've been looking at are things like pee-ponics and similar very short cycle waste processing systems. It sounds gross, but most of the grossness is just a bacteria issue. I saw someone pushing a solar toliet that subjects the poop to a couple thousand degrees of temperature and basically kicks out desiccated charcoal. That charcoal could be ground up and added to fertilizer. No poop smell because the bacteria are dead and in any case that temperature causes the poop to change chemically into something else. As to pee, you can filter the urine through bacterial cultures that will convert the the urine quite quickly into liquid fertilizer.
I think NASA said that it takes about six liters of algae to produce enough oxygen for one person? I don't know if that is six liters compressed and in a much larger volume of water or not. I assume so. But you could build personal biodomes for people that recycle all the biological waste from the house on a daily basis. Mix some worms in to chew up the kitchen scraps and maybe some eddible mushrooms to break down wood.
All these systems tend to need is sunlight enough sense to understand you don't mix certain things together, and a bit of patience.
I'm currently building a climate control system that manages all sorts of environmental factors in my house using some ardinios and a pi. Just for fun. And I think this could just be expanded out to manage a much more dramatic life support system.
People should also give a look at the Earth Ships which have a similar quality in that they're capable of keeping people alive for years without outside support... providing their own power, recycling water about 4 times in the house before replacing it, and fully able to generate enough food to feed the residents. And all that while being in the otherwise inhospitable locations like the middle of the desert or something.
I get one or two a day and can't make more than about 25 posts in a day. So... nonsense.
No, fuckwit.
http://www.webpronews.com/how-...
MS paid 1 billion dollars to developers so they would keep their game exclusive to the Xbox.
You're a retard. Go off and die somewhere.
Then look at all my posts that get 5+ informative, dipshit. I imagine you can manage that.
As to what percentage of my comments get replies, that is true for everyone. Most comments from most people don't get many replies.
This is especially true if you make a comment not in reply to someone else but directly in reply to the article. People often reply to comments directed at them but whether or not anyone responds to a comment you make on an article is more variable.
What is more, you cannot judge me because you are an AC.
Log in and then judge me. We'll just have a little look at YOUR history, shit for brains.
Conspiracy implies secrecy. The deals developers enter into to release EXCLUSIVE content are not secret. They are well known by pretty much everyone. Except you.
I'm bored with you now.
End of discussion.
Good day.
Wait what? You're saying experts in the punch card era were upset when computers could be programmed with a keyboard sans punch cards?
Surely you jest? No. Experts were quite happy with doing away with that bullshit.
To this day, some experts do prefer a text interface but that is not a generational thing. Everyone that knows how to script or program prefers text based interfaces because graphical scripting or programming is generally shit. And so people are generally for the text based interfaces in those contexts because they simply are more powerful.
That said, I can't think of any experts that are against GUIs entirely. So this notion that you can impose any new change on the system and ignore expert opinion is specious. You're basically arguing for change for change sake at this point.
You do realize that my overall karma is "excellent" right, bingo? The vast majority of discussions go well with me. But if people are being stupid then I'm going to call it stupid when I see it... no hesitation, no mercy, no remorse.
This 70 billion dollar rail project that was uneconomical at 35 billion? Stupid. It is a stupid program supported exclusively by crooks, idiots, and people not paying attention. Its dumb. its 70 billion dollars spent that we can't afford on something we don't need or even want. Its dumb. And apparently it is going to have to be built and be useless for years on end before the people not paying attention realize "huh, no one uses that piece of shit".
What delicate little flowers like you want is for people to lie to you and pretend that your idiotic comments are not in fact idiotic.
Sorry, bingo... you're stupid.
So tired of the stupid bitter troll ACs... This site would be so much better if you couldn't comment anonymously. At the very least require people to comment using sock puppet accounts.
You talk about MY comment history, but what about yours? Oh that's right, you don't have a comment history because you're anonymous. You could be advocating pedophilia in every post and it would be impossible to for anyone to really nail that down because you just blend into the foggy haze of other fucktard ACs on this forum.
Kindly find the most convenient bridge and jump off it.
As to your trust in their cost estimates when they have no track record of accurate predictions, you're welcome to your opinions but I don't accept them as a credible source for cost estimates. Period.
As to metro traffic along the way, that isn't a state wide issue but rather a city issue. It is also a city issue that both cities were dealing with prior to this quite successfully and at a radically lower cost.
As to the risk of money being sipheoned, a good deal of it has already found its way into the general fund's pension from what I'm to understand. So... not so much.
As to I-5 etc, you're conflating the roads with the airport, with the rail. Each have different purposes and contexts. The airport is for fast passanger traffic between cities. The roads are for slower economical transport to anywhere. The rails are mostly useful for economical bulk transport of goods and not passangers.
US rail has been expanding and been quite profitable over the last 20 years or so. But for GOODS... not people. Rail for people has been uneconomical since before the airplane. Cars and buses are superior to the train for economy and flexibility.
You can say "but my train is really fast"... but it isn't actually because you're not taking a direct route and you're not going full speed the whole way. You're slowing down through certain areas where the local communities won't tolerate a train that goes that fast through their area. That means your train is a lot slower than you think it is. And the costs of the train are so absurdly uneconomical that it is just a stupid concept.
As to name calling undermining my position, that is ad hominem on your part. My arguments are sound on their own merit regardless of whether I tell you to suck my dick at the end or not. ;)
Logic, bitch... Do you know it? :D
It is not my responsibility to be nice to you or to polite or to treat you with respect. I don't have to do these things to win an argument. How you "Feel" about something at the end is utterly irrelevant. We are not children. Feelings don't matter.
I am right and all this talking is keeping you from your responsibilities in my pants. Seriously... you're wrong. And while you might be upset that I'm rubbing it in, that's my right. What else can I take from you in this discussion besides doing this?
This is the crotch hump you get subjected to after getting shot in the face in an FPS. It is the least to which I am entitled. And I will take it.
Nonsense, a good many of the developers on consoles were pretty much paid by MS to develop for the xbox when they were previously successfully developing for the PC. What is more, many devs port their games back to the PC in any case. So... wrong.
You're right. Consoles are great for small children.
Buy them the new Nintendo console and you've got a point.
If you bring up the Xbox or PS4 then you're talking about someone that can manage this if they want to.
Depends. If she's a fucking land whale then you can't blame the lack of an erection on the porn. If she's just "a normal woman" then I'm calling bullshit. Naked woman in front of me... in the flesh... erection is happening. Especially if she's prepared to put in any effort what so ever to put the man in the mood. Women go on and on about how they need foreplay and rub this and touch that... and don't go too fast. Etc.
Well, do men have to have such blue balls that they spurt at the first sight of nipples? Worst case, there is some heavy petting that happens before intercourse. Apparently this is the end of masculinity. Give me a fucking break.
I was very disappointed with his article because his study from the 70s was very interesting. But the idiocy of his recent situation makes me wonder if perhaps he's always been an incompetent boob.
The longer they last and the more maintainable they are the better the economy.
What is more, the panels are typically not recycled along with more electronic shit in this country. It mostly goes to a land fill somewhere. You should know that.
As to it being expensive to do things in precisely the way the factory does it... of course. The point is to do it in a way that takes logistical limitations into consideration.
As to communism, I am advocating communism no more than a person that says he'd like to be able to cook his own food is advocating for communism.
People own tools and fabrication equipment already. You can go to the hardware store right now and buy a Dremel. Apparently that makes you a communist.
I fucking hate politically charged language when it serves only to introduce drama and sophistry into what is otherwise a very simple discussion.
Which is my long winded way of saying, don't bring fucking politics into a discussion about solar panel fabrication. It is obnoxious.
As to estimates from the state, they've been wrong with pretty much every estimate so far... so I don't regard their estimates are credible.
And neither should you. If they had any track record at accurately predicting costs than that would be one thing but they don't.
As to corruption with other projects, the other projects are less senational, less likely to get big federal dollars, and involve so many departments that covering up the corruption is harder.
One big fucking project is easier to manipulate and siphon funds from.
As to tens of billions, that depends entirely on how silly you want to be with your contractors. Bid it out properly after planning things out before hand so you're not changing the plan half way through renovation and it could be quite reasonable.
My impression of LAX is first that they need a satellite parking facility with a public shuttle to the LAX terminals. That would reduce the number of cars showing up at the terminals dramatically.
Next, I would make sure that all the mass transit in the city ACTUALLY connects to the airport. The taxi lobbies have succeeded over the years in making buses etc not quite connect to most airports. Connect the city's mass transit to the airport. In most cases this just means changing bus stop destinations by a couple blocks.
Now that we have people actually getting to the airport more efficiently and we have reduced traffic congestion we have to deal with congestion inside the actual building. To that end, there are several choke points in the LAX terminals. If we increase the number of entrances we will reduce the pressure at each individual entrance. What is more, the airport administration is aware of flight times and passenger manifests. They can move personnel from one check point to another... increasing or decreasing man power as needed. This is more efficient in labor costs and provides faster service for passengers. The TSA etc should be encouraged to do the same thing. So terminals that are going to have a lot of people go through them have extra staff and when traffic to that specific terminal goes down you shift labor to other terminals.
Now that we've got people in the smallest groups possible and we've load balanced the staff, we should look at optimizing the security process. The three things going on with the security process that slow it down is that everyone has to take their shoes off, everyone has to remove every little bit of metal from their bodies, and laptops which everyone is carrying have to be taken out and placed flat in a tray. As to getting a person through security, a person can be patted down in less time than it takes for a person to take off their shoes, take off their belt, etc, then go through the scanner, then put it all back on again. As such, a pat downs should actually be preferred. They're faster and just as accurate. Maintain the scanner as a backup system for people that don't like to be touched. If you're okay being touched you can go through the system faster so long as the security people see to you immediately.
As to luggage etc, I'm not sure if there is a way to optimize this but we should find another way to check laptops in luggage without forcing people to take the laptops out of the luggage. I don't credit that this totally impossible. I expect it is entirely viable. What screeners should do I think is check it inside the bag first. If there is a problem because they can't see something etc then make an exception with that user. But the majority of people that go through probably won't need to have their laptop removed from their bag and that will speed up the line considerably.
Ideally we haven't had to take our shoes off. But if we have then provide better seating on the far side of the security check point for people to put stuff back on again. Keep in mind, we're concerned with the efficiency and experience of the traveler.
Once you get to this point, the airlines are almost entirely in control and things are generally pretty efficient.
Who here thinks watching porn causes men to not be able to get erections with women? Dumb.
A more relevant question they should be asking is why are men seeking escapes form society? The assumption he's making is that this is just an addiction and that men would otherwise WANT to be part of society. But most of the people that get sucked off into games and pornography are checking out.
That is an effect and not a cause. The cause is that there are various things in modern society that are hostile to young men. We can all feel it. And if that becomes stressful and alienating then why not check out? What is society offering you to make you want to participate?
A big part of how societies work is that they encourage, reward, and facilitate constructive participation in a group culture and society. But if given members of that society do not feel encouraged, rewarded, or able to organize then that leads to disconnection. Men drop off the system.
And since they're not doing anything productive they might as well entertain themselves.
And thus the games.
Look at the college rates. They're not only not graduating but they're not even going in the first place. That is people that are checking out. They don't see the point of investing the time and energy and so they don't.
If you want to change that then you effect it THERE. Treating the symptoms won't do anything for you.
It is faster, gives the user more control, is more responsive, is more secure, etc.
It is generally better in most circumstances for anything serious.
in regards to driving, a daily commute by car is obviously not possible. My point was that it was inexpensive.
As to someone commuting DAILY from LA to SF... in what scenario are you assuming that any significant number of people would do that?
The only people that could consider that even remotely reasonable are people that could afford the plane trip... and even they wouldn't like it because that is a slog.
You're justifying a 50 to 70 billion dollar project on what a tiny fraction of the population would ever do.
Can you offer a justification for this besides "the 1 percent would really like it!" Because that's what your commute argument boils down to. No one else is doing that. You think the average person is going to pay 85 dollars a DAY to commute to work by bullet train?
No.
The commute argument is silly unless you're talking about someone that is making a significant amount of money or is getting their fare paid by the company. And in either case, we already have people that do that by AIRPLANE.
As to issues that make airports slow, sure there are lots of issues with them but none of it is inherent to the form of travel itself but is instead due to poor management of the airports.
Here is what is static and fixed.
An airplane must have a runway.
An airplane must have time to load passengers, time to taxi, time to take off, time to fly to its destination, time to land, time to taxi, time to unload.
Everything else is the airport.
So... either tell me what portion of the fixed aspect of the airplane's actual travel is making it slow or admit it is the fucking airport and then we just have to fix the issue there.
The TSA might not be the only issue but it is a BIG fucking issue. Deal with that, deal with some of the congestion issues... and airplanes will not only continue to be faster, but people that are terrible at using airports won't feel so stupid when they go through the process.
As to weather being an impediment... We're talking about Los Angeles to San Francisco. Weather is not really an issue here. SF sometimes has fog which causes the FAA to say a plane shouldn't land. But they can land entirely on instruaments if they're not being pussies about it. Alternatively, you can land in Oakland which doesn't really get the same kind of fog. LAX to Oakland is still faster than you stupid boondoggle train.
As to us needing an alternative, we don't need a 70 billion dollar train that only goes between two destinations, more expensively than an airplane, and more slowly.
That's what we call "stupid".
As to the benefits of ye olde transport service... Comical. I note that you haven't really mentioned any of those benefits. You said something about weather which just made me feel sorry for you. This is CALIFORNIA. Do you know what our weathermen say every day "Looks like its going to be a nice day out"... Even when it rains it isn't a big deal. And we don't get snow, or sleet, or hurricanes, or any of that other bullshit.
I'm actually kind of offended you presumed to question how much I knew about the state of California when clearly you're completely fucking clueless.
Comical.
We're done. Your opinion isn't worth yak vomit.
Good day.
It is actually very rare that you can't play a game because it is ATI or nVidia. Typically you just have hardware specific bugs at worst and they are generally patched out in a couple weeks after release.
So... whatever.
As to the number of AAA games on PCs declining, not really. The PC market is not shrinking and while we are often subjected to console port trash, the reality is that the market is significantly more vibrant than anything the consoles have going for them.
As to piracy, it is an issue on the PC but only for single player games. And even then you have to take into consideration the geometrically larger installation base. A game released on the PC generally reaches a lot more people and a lot more countries than releasing something on a console.
And again, if piracy bothers you, then make multiplayer a core feature of the game and the game will connect to your servers and you can verify integrity and authentication on login.
This isn't rocket science. Diablo 3 for example has basically no piracy despite having a very prominent single player campaign.
Beyond this, there is piracy on the console it is just slightly less common because you have to chip your console. Chip your console at a cost of about 30 dollars and you can pirate like crazy.
As to steam, steam's DRM is possibly the weakest DRM I've seen besides having none at all. The actual value of steam is that it is a social network for gamers, includes built in voice chat, maintains updates for games making sure that every game has the latest update which is auto installed, steam backs up your games in their system so you can remove it from your machine and then reinstall from steam at any time, and of course it is the primary store at this point for games.
That updating feature is very important because it was how steam got internet cafes to use them. You install steam on a gaming machine and then quickly click through a dozen games in your liberary you want installed on the machine and they're all installed on the machine without any further intervention. And they're kept up to date automatically there after.
This was key for the counterstrike players.
Look, you don't know shit about PC gaming... no offense. And I kind of suspect you're not going to own up to that. So lets just end this here. I don't think we can have a profitable discussion when you're pretending to understand things you don't.
... Hey bingo?
As to lan parties, what planning is required to pick a box up and then put it down in another room?
Do you want me to draw you a picture?
You're again offering a lack of choices as a feature. Never mind that the consoles all have downloadable little games on them that are often not very good.
And you're also ignoring that the PC gaming industry is fucking massive.
We're done. You're wasting my time.
As to no one in this thread but someone somewhere else... no. I reject your premise and even if it were valid, which it isn't, it is not relevant to what we are talking about here by your own admission.
Get on topic or prove that EVERYONE is talking about that or otherwise demonstrate that my argument should in any way take what is effectively a strawman lying down.
You don't get to tell me what my argument is... I regret that you've prepared for an argument no one is having with you but it is not my obligation to argue in a way that you expect nor is it acceptable for you to just plow along anyway as if I did say things which I did not say.
Give me a break.
As to flying cars this was already addressed by flying cars that have already been made. They work like a normal car on the road with a wheel. When you get into the air, the wheel becomes a "yoke" and operates similarly to the way that a commercial airline yoke functions. Just as on the ground, turning right or left will generally cause the plane to turn that way... though the mechanics are more complicated. I forget which flaps are moved. Pulling the nose up or down is caused by pushing the yoke forward or pulling it back. Just as you would expect.
As I remember, turning the wheel turns the tail flaps and pushing the yoke right or left causes the main wing flaps to move. I don't remember all the technical names as I'm neither a pilot nor a flying expert. However, I am a vast repository of largely useless information. And your example happened to be one I could rebut from memory. So again... your argument actually backfired... flying cars addressed that. Choose another analogy if you like but I think your entire premise is on poor footing.
The point is to make things operate in a way that people familiar with the technology would expect. Going fucking crazy with it and doing all sorts of unintuitive things is a mistake.
One thing that they keep fucking up is thinking that intuition is only judged or best judged by people that know literally nothing about the technology. So they'll hand it to grand mothers or something and then on that judge what they should do. Never mind that the people familiar with the tech would have different assumptions and inclinations and those people are VASTLY more valuable and important users because they will ACTUALLY use your products because they've ACTUALLY used them before which implied they'll ACTUALLY use them again.
I was watching the VISTA focus groups when vista came out and they kept handing their crap to... I don't know... uncontacted Amazonian tribals or something. Just complete muppets. And then they were taking their opinions on GUI design over people like me that actually use the fucking thing.
I do not have enough foot long pink rubber dildos to jam up their asses... it is a pity.
Imagine if you were designing a gun and to test the intuitive nature of your gun, you handed it to people that had no idea what a gun was or how to use it. And then you used that to try and redesign the entire gun from the ground up to be more intelligible to people that knew NOTHING about it.
How well is that gun going to sell or be received by anyone likely to actually buy it? Exactly. People are going to say "where is the trigger?" "where is the grip?"... and some fucktard is going to say "well in our focus groups we determined that really people new to guns find this "rock" shape more intuitive so we make our gun to look like a fucking stone.
>_
Some companies need a firing squad... just to thin the herd of the really really stupid ideas.
I've lived in California for all my life, twat.
As to airports being shit, what is easier... buying land in a strip from LA to SF, hiring thousands of engineers, laying hundreds of miles of precision track, buying lots of bullet trains, running power and maintenance access to the track because bullet trains are electric, dealing with the political NIMYism crap, and then maintaining this uneconomical monstrosity in perpetuity... or fixing the airport so the TSA doesn't waste our time?
If you choose the bullet train it means you're clueless or it means you're a corrupt politicians sucking off the federal tit.
It is vastly easier and vastly cheaper and vastly more beneficial to just fix the airport. It would cost a fraction of the amount to just restructure some of the terminals and gates so that most of the time in line went away. Nearly all the waiting time people bitch about is security. The actual logistics of getting from the car, bus, taxi, to the front of the airport isn't any different than the train station.
And there's no reason why the innards of the airport have to be so fucked up. So, unfuck them. Any twat could do it. I'd even trust you to do it and you are an especially myopic little munchkin.
We also probably need more airports in Los Angles at the very least. Most people fly out of LAX and that means a long commute to the airport when really airports should be more distributed so that we can fly from those smaller airports directly to wherever.
As to airplanes not always leaving on schedule, they actually usually do especially in California. They tend not to as much in the east coast because the weather is shitty. But if the weather is good... and in southern california it is... pretty much always... then that isn't an issue for the planes. Sure you can have equipment break downs etc but that is going to happen with anything. You think your stupid trains aren't ever going to break? Dream on.
As to wasting time in the car, depends on the purpose of your trip. If you're trying to get from point A to point B as cheaply as possible, the car or a bus wins.
if you want speed, then take an airplane. My airplane will beat your bullet train EVEN with the time in the terminals. Hands down.
One of the things you halfwits don't seem to get is that the train isn't even taking a direct route from LA to SF. It is weaving all over the fucking place and large portions of the journey are going to be speed limited for NIMBYism. Which means that speed you think you're going to get isn't going to happen.
And even if it did, which it won't, you STILL wouldn't beat the plane. EVEN with the terminal time unless you're utterly incompetent at dealing with airports which any business air travel commuter is not.
If you travel for business by plane with any frequency you learn how to deal with airports.
1. You get a Federal security pass... I forget what they're called, but they cost about 50 bucks and require you to go to a federal building and get interviewed by some government people. And when they conclude that you're not a terrorist, they give you an ID that lets you bypass the TSA pretty much entirely. So if you hate the TSA, you get one of those.
2. Just like rush hour, you understand when the airport is really busy and when it is not. Try to time your movements around that. It isn't hard and it isn't especially inconvenient. It requires that your plane take off an hour early sometimes if you need to get out of a really busy airport before it locks up.
3. If you travel a lot with any airline, they put you on their frequent flyer program. And pretty much all of them get you preferential treatment from that airline. That means not waiting in lines, access to special luxury waiting rooms with full service bars and no screaming children, and of course when it comes time to board you tend to get on the plane before or immediately after they get the handicapped people on the plane.
And here is the thing I really really like about airplanes - They go EVERYWHERE. Your train is point to point. Utterly inflexible. My plane... Goes ANYwhere.
For fast passenger transport over long distances, nothing competes with airplanes. Nothing comes even remotely close.