You are forgetting that roads are also heavily subsidized.
And you're forgetting that everybody benefits from those roads - that's why they're subsidized.
And everyone benefits from Mass Transit too. Even if you don't use Mass Transit, you benefit from cleaner air, less congested roads, and an improved over-all economy. (Cities with good Mass Transit are generally considered more desirable- which brings in more employers and people wanting to live there, which improves your property values, the tax the city brings in... and along with that more amenities for citizens).
Also most of the business centers of this city aren't places you want to raise kids. No, the bus system sucks. If you want to go downtown and back on a weekday during business hours you're cool. If downtown were the center of the pizza and you wanted to go to the next slice or the next one over, you have to go to the center, wait, then come back, there isn't really a slice to slice option in most cases. If you want to get anywhere other than business hours on a weekday - good luck. I've tried riding the bus in this city, there are bus stops that are supposed to have a bus every fifteen minutes, you're lucky to get one every forty five.
I've found this true in most places I've been in the US. There's a reason for this. The reason cities aren't planned around efficient mass transportation is because most people, other than the desperately poor, don't use mass transportation (and shut up people in NYC and DC you're the exception not the norm).
The reason only the poor use mass transportation is because mass transportation sucks. The reason mass transportation sucks is because only the desperately poor use it.
It's a vicious cycle. If cities were more dense and planned around mass transportation to begin with it would be more efficient. It would take you where you needed to go in a more timely manner. More people would use it, so it would have more funding, so it would be a better experience. To break the cycle of crappy mass transit you need to spend a lot of money; but no one is willing to do that because Mass transit sucks and has low desirability for most people... thus the cycle continues and never improves.
The only reason I drive rather than commute by train is that it's a lot cheaper for two people to drive than it is to get the train.
The only reason I drive rather than commute by mass transit is that I live in the US and mass transit is almost non-existent outside of a few major cities.
Yep, I'm done with a lot of nonsense so I'm returning to the old days of putting my own server online. Not hosted by somebody else, completely under my own control.
My Web page (No Java)
No JavaScript perhaps?
I can't see how it matters if Java, Perl, or ASP were used on the server side generation of the webpage. It's all the same to the end-user.
Prettier, more environmentally conscious (at least in areas that would naturally be woodlands)- the dry parts of the Midwest can still grow maize for all I care.
A surprising amount of corn is grown entirely or primarily using rainfall as a water source. If the dry parts grow it, then they have to pump water...
Grass related plants tend to do better with low water than forested areas do. Dry areas tend to be natural grasslands and areas with more rainfall tend to be natural woodlands. Maize being a grass is more suited to low rainfall than woodlands would be. My point being, I don't think we should be foresting natural grasslands, but if an area can naturally sustain trees, that might be a better "crop". If you can't guess- I'm strongly against the subsidization of maize.
You're using the information I provided to bill me?
I didn't think you'd be THAT gullible...
Facebook is a bit like Santa Clause. He knows when you are sleeping, he knows when you're awake, he knows if you've been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake. Facebook knows everything about you.
In fact the only difference is Facebook doesn't leave you presents and doesn't wear a red suit.
Indeed. That's the very first thought that came to my mind. Even if it doesn't act as a gateway to malware, the only people who will end up taking the time to use this is advertising people. You're not going to write a interactive e-mail for your buddy to ask him if he's watching the game tonight.
The one thing that makes FB not worth the time as a video platform are the mid-roll ads. With YT, $10, and I don't worry about ads, or just download what I want to watch for when I'm out camping and want to watch something before crashing. FB, a 10 second video can have 30 second ads in it, making it all but unwatchable, with zero skip buttons. Because of this, coupled with the fact that almost everything on FB is a video (most static pictures have been turned into looping vids even), it is too much of a pain to bother with for any meaningful content.
Dear Facebook User,
thank you for your valuable feedback. We will now collect $10 off you each month to provide videos without ads. You don't even need to give us your cardnumber, security code, or any other identifying numbers, we know them all already.
Mining asteroids to get more iron is, of course, an option, albeit an expensive one. But for a cheaper alternative, we could plant fast-growing trees and make up for the lower density of the soft wood by using a process like this to turn it into something stronger.
Give it 100 years we will have microbes creating wood planks for us that are stronger than any that trees produce now and maybe stronger than steel. Much cheaper than mining asteroids, and in reality we're probably closer to being able to do that than we are to be able to mine asteroids in any economically feasible fashion.
just recycling an infinitely renewable inorganic compound or metal?
I never followed that "logic".
Trees grow ridiculously slowly. And no, you can't just plant a few fast-growers (in a mono-culture even) and call it the same as an ancient complex forest eco system that sustained tens of thousands of species in an elegant balance of cycles!
Carbon also gets locked up in trees... whilst trees grow, that's carbon out of the atmosphere. Where wood is used to build houses (that's carbon out of the atmosphere)... Yes, obviously it takes burning fuel to build those houses and prep that wood... but it takes even more with steel.
Trees may grow slowly, but that's all for the best- they provide a habitant for wildlife whilst they grow (regrettably mono-culture isn't the best for wildlife), This also means you need more hectares to get enough for building. Here in the US, we stupidly subsidize maize (but not other fruits and veg to the same extent)- even though maize is one of the least healthy foods you can get and adds to the obesity epidemic. (we're using tax money subsidies to make ourselves fat).... but that's a topic for another day.
Wouldn't it be better if instead of so many fields filled with maize we had trees growing on a lot of it instead? Prettier, more environmentally conscious (at least in areas that would naturally be woodlands)- the dry parts of the Midwest can still grow maize for all I care.
However in east germany the communists managed to give every one: o education he was capable of o housing and clothing o a job, for his entire life o a kindergarden place for every kid o jobs for women, because of above and plenty of other things...
We have not even NOW in west germany a kindergaeden place for every kid, even so that it is demanded by law since a few years and you can sue your town to provide one.
Yeah, don't get me wrong. I'm glad to live in the West, in a democracy and free from religious oppression; but some of these "backwards" places do have their shining moments. You mentioned the communists above... I will point out another unlikely source of "socialist utopia"... the lands controlled by Islamic State. OK... so yeah, you can get your head cut off for worshipping incorrectly... but.
Free housing for anyone who couldn't afford their own. Free clothing for anyone who couldn't afford their own. Food for anyone without the means to feed themselves. As part of their strict religious doctrine, they had to house, feed, and clothe anyone who showed up and needed it... and they did too. Even if you showed up, as a heathen on their doorstep and asked for sanctuary, they would see you in... of course they would expect you to convert and potentially go kill some other innocent people... maybe even yourself... but no one was denied the basic necessities... unless you consider freedom of religion and freedom to be alive to be necessities.
Let me know when it isn't flammable. Firefighters dread when they are called to 'modern' wood structures, whose lightweight construction fails rapidly when exposed to flame. That neat high-tech truss with its gang-nail plates will collapse in just minutes. That's why sprinklers should be required in new construction houses.
Modern wood structures CAN be safer than steel with very little added cost. The wood is given flame retardant and can actually maintain structural integrity better than steel. Steel tends to warp and lose strength well below it's melting point- and below what it takes modern treated wood to burn. If properly treated wood is SAFER than steel in a fire.
RuPaul's Drag Race is a Viacom property. It's a great show. Imagine Duck Dynasty, except a lot more gay and with singing fabulous songs instead of slaughtering a bunch of water fowl.
I'm only half-joking.
Only half joking... because Duck Dynasty features a bunch of bears with cut off sleeves rolling in the mud together.
Especially if they are only searchable separately. It's hard enough just to go back and forth between Netflix and Prime and keep track of who has what.
Buy a Roku or an Amazon Firestick. Either can be had for $25 to $30 if you get them on a good sale. They both allow you to search across all your channels.
Great - I'll bet eventually they will pull their stuff back to their own network and I'll have YASB (yet another streaming bill) to pay.
They say ad supported... so there may not be a bill... as long as you're willing to sit through adverts (which isn't that one of the main reasons we abandoned cable in the first place- to get away from ads?)
If Viacom remove their content from other providers- this splintering hurts consumers because as you say- yet another site. If they leave their content on Netflix, et al, and just give an option to go to their site and get it then that is good.
I've already reached my saturation point. I'll just deal with less choice rather than add another subscription. I miss BBC shows from Netflix and Hulu- so many have gone since BritBox started up... but I'm not paying for it. I'd like to see Star Trek, but I'm not paying for CBS. I'll deal with fewer shows before I will deal with paying yet another location.
Face recognition just isn't good enough yet for that kind of risk. They have way too high of a false positive rate, but odds are the higher ups will pull a coverup to hid that and claim great success instead. As to a portable version with much less processing power, it's just begging to be less accurate. Of course there will also be false negatives that will let wanted criminals get away, unless they're caught by the normal methods, but I'm more worried about the innocents that will be jailed.
As long as positives are treated as "possible" suspects and not "definite criminals" false-positives aren't a problem. Just check their ID and see if they are the right match or not. I can leap to assumptions about how police in various countries might act, but I can't say with any accuracy.
I'm not opposed to police using facial recognition glass to find suspects in a crowd; I am opposed to them (or videos) being used as a log of who went where- if non-criminals are tracked and logged with their movements recorded... that gets into the "too creepy and authoritarian" path. As long as the glasses are just used to identify "possible-suspects" where a computer algorithm legitimately makes a match, I'm ok.
Don't log the negative faces- and everyone is innocent until proven guilty... that's the golden rule here.
Wikipedia is also more accurate than many people give it credit. I know there was a study done several years ago comparing Wikipedia's articles against Encyclopedia Britannica. They had experts in certain fields look at articles picked at random. There were fewer errors per page (and more overall information) in Wikipedia than there was in EB.
Sure, people deface pages all the time; but overall, despite getting a bad reputation as being inaccurate, it's more accurate than traditional encyclopedias.
So by your logic, if we caught every criminal and then gave them a stern warning, that would deter all crime... That makes no sense.
The truth is that serious penalties combined with a high likelihood of getting caught are what deters crime. Additionally, life sentences and death penalties eliminate RECIDIVISM which at least in the US pushes above 70% in 5 years, meaning we could significantly reduce crime rates with more life sentences for serious crimes.
I'm not saying that. But if we caught every criminal and gave them one year in jail it would deter a lot more than if we only caught 5% of them- and gave them life sentences.
Slashdot Mirror
because of winding streets and fenced yards.
Whether the yard is fenced or not makes no difference. You should not be on it unless you have permission from the owner.
You are forgetting that roads are also heavily subsidized.
And you're forgetting that everybody benefits from those roads - that's why they're subsidized.
And everyone benefits from Mass Transit too. Even if you don't use Mass Transit, you benefit from cleaner air, less congested roads, and an improved over-all economy. (Cities with good Mass Transit are generally considered more desirable- which brings in more employers and people wanting to live there, which improves your property values, the tax the city brings in... and along with that more amenities for citizens).
Also most of the business centers of this city aren't places you want to raise kids. No, the bus system sucks. If you want to go downtown and back on a weekday during business hours you're cool. If downtown were the center of the pizza and you wanted to go to the next slice or the next one over, you have to go to the center, wait, then come back, there isn't really a slice to slice option in most cases. If you want to get anywhere other than business hours on a weekday - good luck. I've tried riding the bus in this city, there are bus stops that are supposed to have a bus every fifteen minutes, you're lucky to get one every forty five.
I've found this true in most places I've been in the US. There's a reason for this. The reason cities aren't planned around efficient mass transportation is because most people, other than the desperately poor, don't use mass transportation (and shut up people in NYC and DC you're the exception not the norm).
The reason only the poor use mass transportation is because mass transportation sucks. The reason mass transportation sucks is because only the desperately poor use it.
It's a vicious cycle. If cities were more dense and planned around mass transportation to begin with it would be more efficient. It would take you where you needed to go in a more timely manner. More people would use it, so it would have more funding, so it would be a better experience. To break the cycle of crappy mass transit you need to spend a lot of money; but no one is willing to do that because Mass transit sucks and has low desirability for most people... thus the cycle continues and never improves.
The only reason I drive rather than commute by train is that it's a lot cheaper for two people to drive than it is to get the train.
The only reason I drive rather than commute by mass transit is that I live in the US and mass transit is almost non-existent outside of a few major cities.
Yep, I'm done with a lot of nonsense so I'm returning to the old days of putting my own server online. Not hosted by somebody else, completely under my own control.
My Web page (No Java)
No JavaScript perhaps?
I can't see how it matters if Java, Perl, or ASP were used on the server side generation of the webpage. It's all the same to the end-user.
Prettier, more environmentally conscious (at least in areas that would naturally be woodlands)- the dry parts of the Midwest can still grow maize for all I care.
A surprising amount of corn is grown entirely or primarily using rainfall as a water source. If the dry parts grow it, then they have to pump water...
Grass related plants tend to do better with low water than forested areas do. Dry areas tend to be natural grasslands and areas with more rainfall tend to be natural woodlands. Maize being a grass is more suited to low rainfall than woodlands would be. My point being, I don't think we should be foresting natural grasslands, but if an area can naturally sustain trees, that might be a better "crop". If you can't guess- I'm strongly against the subsidization of maize.
You're using the information I provided to bill me?
I didn't think you'd be THAT gullible...
Facebook is a bit like Santa Clause. He knows when you are sleeping, he knows when you're awake, he knows if you've been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake. Facebook knows everything about you.
In fact the only difference is Facebook doesn't leave you presents and doesn't wear a red suit.
If you send me an email in anything other than plain text it's not even going to get downloaded from the mailserver.
So you didn't get the Amazon gift card for $1000 I sent you?
What a great way to spread malicious code!
Indeed. That's the very first thought that came to my mind. Even if it doesn't act as a gateway to malware, the only people who will end up taking the time to use this is advertising people. You're not going to write a interactive e-mail for your buddy to ask him if he's watching the game tonight.
The one thing that makes FB not worth the time as a video platform are the mid-roll ads. With YT, $10, and I don't worry about ads, or just download what I want to watch for when I'm out camping and want to watch something before crashing. FB, a 10 second video can have 30 second ads in it, making it all but unwatchable, with zero skip buttons. Because of this, coupled with the fact that almost everything on FB is a video (most static pictures have been turned into looping vids even), it is too much of a pain to bother with for any meaningful content.
Dear Facebook User,
thank you for your valuable feedback. We will now collect $10 off you each month to provide videos without ads. You don't even need to give us your cardnumber, security code, or any other identifying numbers, we know them all already.
Have a good day and thank you for using Facebook
Mining asteroids to get more iron is, of course, an option, albeit an expensive one. But for a cheaper alternative, we could plant fast-growing trees and make up for the lower density of the soft wood by using a process like this to turn it into something stronger.
Give it 100 years we will have microbes creating wood planks for us that are stronger than any that trees produce now and maybe stronger than steel. Much cheaper than mining asteroids, and in reality we're probably closer to being able to do that than we are to be able to mine asteroids in any economically feasible fashion.
just recycling an infinitely renewable inorganic compound or metal?
I never followed that "logic".
Trees grow ridiculously slowly. And no, you can't just plant a few fast-growers (in a mono-culture even) and call it the same as an ancient complex forest eco system that sustained tens of thousands of species in an elegant balance of cycles!
Carbon also gets locked up in trees... whilst trees grow, that's carbon out of the atmosphere. Where wood is used to build houses (that's carbon out of the atmosphere)... Yes, obviously it takes burning fuel to build those houses and prep that wood... but it takes even more with steel.
Trees may grow slowly, but that's all for the best- they provide a habitant for wildlife whilst they grow (regrettably mono-culture isn't the best for wildlife), This also means you need more hectares to get enough for building. Here in the US, we stupidly subsidize maize (but not other fruits and veg to the same extent)- even though maize is one of the least healthy foods you can get and adds to the obesity epidemic. (we're using tax money subsidies to make ourselves fat).... but that's a topic for another day.
Wouldn't it be better if instead of so many fields filled with maize we had trees growing on a lot of it instead? Prettier, more environmentally conscious (at least in areas that would naturally be woodlands)- the dry parts of the Midwest can still grow maize for all I care.
How many parsecs?
*hides*
Are you planning a Kessel run?
However in east germany the communists managed to give every one: ...
o education he was capable of
o housing and clothing
o a job, for his entire life
o a kindergarden place for every kid
o jobs for women, because of above
and plenty of other things
We have not even NOW in west germany a kindergaeden place for every kid, even so that it is demanded by law since a few years and you can sue your town to provide one.
Yeah, don't get me wrong. I'm glad to live in the West, in a democracy and free from religious oppression; but some of these "backwards" places do have their shining moments. You mentioned the communists above... I will point out another unlikely source of "socialist utopia"... the lands controlled by Islamic State. OK... so yeah, you can get your head cut off for worshipping incorrectly... but.
Free housing for anyone who couldn't afford their own. Free clothing for anyone who couldn't afford their own. Food for anyone without the means to feed themselves. As part of their strict religious doctrine, they had to house, feed, and clothe anyone who showed up and needed it... and they did too. Even if you showed up, as a heathen on their doorstep and asked for sanctuary, they would see you in... of course they would expect you to convert and potentially go kill some other innocent people... maybe even yourself... but no one was denied the basic necessities... unless you consider freedom of religion and freedom to be alive to be necessities.
Let me know when it isn't flammable. Firefighters dread when they are called to 'modern' wood structures, whose lightweight construction fails rapidly when exposed to flame. That neat high-tech truss with its gang-nail plates will collapse in just minutes. That's why sprinklers should be required in new construction houses.
Modern wood structures CAN be safer than steel with very little added cost. The wood is given flame retardant and can actually maintain structural integrity better than steel. Steel tends to warp and lose strength well below it's melting point- and below what it takes modern treated wood to burn. If properly treated wood is SAFER than steel in a fire.
RuPaul's Drag Race is a Viacom property. It's a great show. Imagine Duck Dynasty, except a lot more gay and with singing fabulous songs instead of slaughtering a bunch of water fowl.
I'm only half-joking.
Only half joking... because Duck Dynasty features a bunch of bears with cut off sleeves rolling in the mud together.
The ads are in French and require Flash to play.
Je n'installerai pas Flash
Britain has some not so secret secret bases too... They even have sign posts pointing to them:
http://www.exec-comms.com/Pict...
Especially if they are only searchable separately. It's hard enough just to go back and forth between Netflix and Prime and keep track of who has what.
Buy a Roku or an Amazon Firestick. Either can be had for $25 to $30 if you get them on a good sale. They both allow you to search across all your channels.
Great - I'll bet eventually they will pull their stuff back to their own network and I'll have YASB (yet another streaming bill) to pay.
They say ad supported... so there may not be a bill... as long as you're willing to sit through adverts (which isn't that one of the main reasons we abandoned cable in the first place- to get away from ads?)
If Viacom remove their content from other providers- this splintering hurts consumers because as you say- yet another site. If they leave their content on Netflix, et al, and just give an option to go to their site and get it then that is good.
I've already reached my saturation point. I'll just deal with less choice rather than add another subscription. I miss BBC shows from Netflix and Hulu- so many have gone since BritBox started up... but I'm not paying for it. I'd like to see Star Trek, but I'm not paying for CBS. I'll deal with fewer shows before I will deal with paying yet another location.
Everyone will know others' secrets, and then there will be no secrets between the humans,
I know what you did last summer.
Face recognition just isn't good enough yet for that kind of risk.
They have way too high of a false positive rate, but odds are the higher ups will pull a coverup to hid that and claim great success instead.
As to a portable version with much less processing power, it's just begging to be less accurate.
Of course there will also be false negatives that will let wanted criminals get away, unless they're caught by the normal methods, but I'm more worried about the innocents that will be jailed.
As long as positives are treated as "possible" suspects and not "definite criminals" false-positives aren't a problem. Just check their ID and see if they are the right match or not. I can leap to assumptions about how police in various countries might act, but I can't say with any accuracy.
I'm not opposed to police using facial recognition glass to find suspects in a crowd; I am opposed to them (or videos) being used as a log of who went where- if non-criminals are tracked and logged with their movements recorded... that gets into the "too creepy and authoritarian" path. As long as the glasses are just used to identify "possible-suspects" where a computer algorithm legitimately makes a match, I'm ok.
Don't log the negative faces- and everyone is innocent until proven guilty... that's the golden rule here.
Wikipedia is also more accurate than many people give it credit. I know there was a study done several years ago comparing Wikipedia's articles against Encyclopedia Britannica. They had experts in certain fields look at articles picked at random. There were fewer errors per page (and more overall information) in Wikipedia than there was in EB.
Sure, people deface pages all the time; but overall, despite getting a bad reputation as being inaccurate, it's more accurate than traditional encyclopedias.
. . . until they could perfect a robot that could commit suicide due to poor working conditions.
Came here to say that by cutting 10k jobs they will save a fortune on safety netting.
So by your logic, if we caught every criminal and then gave them a stern warning, that would deter all crime... That makes no sense.
The truth is that serious penalties combined with a high likelihood of getting caught are what deters crime. Additionally, life sentences and death penalties eliminate RECIDIVISM which at least in the US pushes above 70% in 5 years, meaning we could significantly reduce crime rates with more life sentences for serious crimes.
I'm not saying that. But if we caught every criminal and gave them one year in jail it would deter a lot more than if we only caught 5% of them- and gave them life sentences.