Can any1 explain why it's a good idea to be messing around with a machine that 'might' produce teeny-tiny black holes that 'shouldn't' cause any problems?
Because whatever this machine is capable of doing, even more is happening in the upper atmosphere all the time.
The only people that will lose if health care is cleaned up are the insurance companies and the most dishonest drug companies
That is a true statement. Now how likely do you think that what the government is trying to do will in any way "clean up" the health care system? The plan most likely to pass forces the entire population to buy the insurance companies' product! Compared with plans that actually attempt to solve the problem it is clear that the only thing that congress will pass is corporate welfare for insurance companies and unions.
But to say that Bush is a "big spender" and "wasted" in comparison to the current administration seems to be a ridiculous statement, even from a simple look at the traditional positions of their respective parties.
I don't think that Obama has caught up yet if you compare the federal government's total unfunded liabilities before and after Medicare part D, but of course Obama has made rapid progress so far this year and he's well on his way. It seems like no one will believe that the government can't spend forever without limit until the credit card finally gets declined. Our only hope is that this happens as soon as possible.
We're going to get the worst of both worlds: no manned space exploration program and a white elephant "green" energy infrastructure that won't be good for much except making the investors who started the Chicago Climate Exchange richer.
or why not just get the hell out of deciding whats good for other cultures and peoples ?
Too be fair that particular criticism applies to a lot more than just one country. The list of nations that are not guilty of that now or in the recent past is quite small.
I find it amazing that even in a county like this, the public infrastructure is crumbling.
Why do you find it amazing? Even in a rich county there's not much money left over for good infrastructure after all the mandatory spending on bribe and kickback entitlements.
Practically all generators on the grid are three phase. In most urban areas the lines outside your house are three phase so it's not that much of a stretch to bring it into the house. The electric utilities would be much happier because they wouldn't need to worry about phase imbalances any more.
There is nothing special about the number three. We could use 16 phase power if we wanted to.
We could use 16 phase, but it doesn't really give you any advantages over 3 phases and it makes you use a lot more wires.
Three is special because it is the lowest number that provides all the benefits that you get from going polyphase.
The cost of the plug would come down with volume, and you could make smaller low amperage versions. No one makes a NEMA L15-5, but it would carry the same amount of power as a NEMA 5-15.
Anything that had a motor or an AC-DC converter will be more efficient with a three phase power supply, and even incandescent bulbs could easily be made to work by reconfiguring the filament into a delta.
I'll admit that once or twice I've missed a turn because I was thinking too intently about something else. Sometimes I've even pulled into my driveway and all of a sudden realized that I didn't remember the last few miles and wondering if I ran any stop lights.
I'm pretty sure that if something had happened during the trip that required a reaction (like a red light) that my awareness would have shifted back but you never know.
I know it's a hard problem, but people make it worse by taking shortcuts.
Imagine that you are building a 10 story office building but decide to cut costs at the beginning by skimping on the foundation. Everything's going fine until you get 4 stories built and then realize that it can't support any more weight. Now you're fucked because you can't fix the foundation without tearing what you've built so far.
The way to avoid this is to take the pain up front instead of trying to cheat by putting it off until later. Starting from the very beginning forbid yourself the use of the SQL UPDATE and DELETE commands. Just accept that table entries may not be edited or deleted once committed.
Instead of maing some data immutable you make it ALL immutable. It's about as much fun as shoving needles in your eyes but it's better than getting 75% done with the project and discovering that something that you thought didn't need to be immutable does.
The only way to do it is to make the system bitemporal. In then end you eliminate use of the UPDATE and DELETE SQL commands. Everything becomes an INSERT or SELECT.
If you are clever enough you should be able to do it with a relatively low resource investment by introducing the right type of microorganisms at the right time. Since those organisms will reproduce exponentially (given a sufficient quantity of food and energy) you can reduce the quantity you need to transport from earth to mars.
The tradeoff is that the process might take a few centuries. All the more reason to get started now.
There are certain errors that no amount of validation will catch. If one user is ordering supplies and creates a new entry "Blade, Hacksaw" and another user at the same time creates a "Hacksaw blade" both entries might be perfectly valid part descriptions. It takes a person to say definitely that yes, these entries actually represent the same item and should be combined.
I've never worked for a software company but as the "computer guy" I got to help move people from the "emailing spreadsheets around" workflow to basic MS Access database applications (I know just enough about databases to be horrified about the idea of using Access for critical business functions but it's better than Excel).
As the maintenance manager of a factory I got to help the plant manager make software purchasing decisions. I've come to the conclusion that mid-sized to large corporations should just bite the bullet and hire their own programmers. If it makes sense to design your product and design your own assembly lines and design your own tooling, jigs and fixtures then it makes sense to design your own software. Any cost savings you can achieve by outsourcing to a more specialized company never seems to materalize.
I don't think so but the possibility can't be ruled out without further investigation. Have you ever tried to expose a database application to users and subsequently lost all faith in humanity?
ERP could work if the vendors would realistically deal with GIGO.
Unless you lock down the permissions so tightly that the system is unusable, your users will enter bad data. They'll add new entries for objects that already exist, they'll misspell the name of an object and then create a new object instead of editing the one they just created. They'll make every possible data entry error you can imagine, and plenty that you can't.
We'd see a lot more progress in business software applications if all vendors would follow two rules:
Every piece of data that comes from the user must be editable in the future
Any interface that allows a user to create a new database entry MUST provide a method to merge duplicate entries.
Point 1. To kill an animal for food is different than to kill for fun. Cats are considered household pets in this country and not a food source. This constitutes a crime via animal cruelty. The site didn't even bother to have a graphic warning because it isn't required.
Point 2. I don't want to change the behavior of the rest of the world. I would just like it if things were more clear as to what content was where so parents who do not understand technology don't have to fear turning on their computer just like they don't have to fear turning on their TV.
Just as a matter of practicality, how do you enforce this? How do you deal with content hosted on entirely different continents? Will people who publish web sites need to get licenses? In order to prevent unauthorized sites will you outlaw all operating systems that allow people to publish without a license?
The only way to achieve the environment you desire is the Chinese / Saudi Arabian full censorship route.
It's not so much as requiring those on welfare to work as welfare is set up to keep those on welfare dependent.
There was a time when people who needed assistance received help from private organizations, churches and sometimes city or county governments. Back then it wasn't considered an "entitlement" so the people administering the assistance could deny it to people who where clearly abusing it and give it in ways that made it a hand up to people who really needed it.
Like anything else big government gets involved with once they touched it everything turned to shit.
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Because whatever this machine is capable of doing, even more is happening in the upper atmosphere all the time.
That is a true statement. Now how likely do you think that what the government is trying to do will in any way "clean up" the health care system? The plan most likely to pass forces the entire population to buy the insurance companies' product! Compared with plans that actually attempt to solve the problem it is clear that the only thing that congress will pass is corporate welfare for insurance companies and unions.
I don't think that Obama has caught up yet if you compare the federal government's total unfunded liabilities before and after Medicare part D, but of course Obama has made rapid progress so far this year and he's well on his way. It seems like no one will believe that the government can't spend forever without limit until the credit card finally gets declined. Our only hope is that this happens as soon as possible.
We're going to get the worst of both worlds: no manned space exploration program and a white elephant "green" energy infrastructure that won't be good for much except making the investors who started the Chicago Climate Exchange richer.
Too be fair that particular criticism applies to a lot more than just one country. The list of nations that are not guilty of that now or in the recent past is quite small.
Why do you find it amazing? Even in a rich county there's not much money left over for good infrastructure after all the mandatory spending on bribe and kickback entitlements.
I'm in the US. I hear that in Europe that some locations use three phase for large appliances but here residential three-phase is extremely rare.
Practically all generators on the grid are three phase. In most urban areas the lines outside your house are three phase so it's not that much of a stretch to bring it into the house. The electric utilities would be much happier because they wouldn't need to worry about phase imbalances any more.
We could use 16 phase, but it doesn't really give you any advantages over 3 phases and it makes you use a lot more wires.
Three is special because it is the lowest number that provides all the benefits that you get from going polyphase.
Like jury duty
I've long suggested sortition as an alternative to elections.
The cost of the plug would come down with volume, and you could make smaller low amperage versions. No one makes a NEMA L15-5, but it would carry the same amount of power as a NEMA 5-15.
Anything that had a motor or an AC-DC converter will be more efficient with a three phase power supply, and even incandescent bulbs could easily be made to work by reconfiguring the filament into a delta.
If there was some move to rewire the entire world with a single residential standard I'd vote for NEMA L15.
Single-phase power is a hack.
A person can be distracted by anything.
I'll admit that once or twice I've missed a turn because I was thinking too intently about something else. Sometimes I've even pulled into my driveway and all of a sudden realized that I didn't remember the last few miles and wondering if I ran any stop lights.
I'm pretty sure that if something had happened during the trip that required a reaction (like a red light) that my awareness would have shifted back but you never know.
I know it's a hard problem, but people make it worse by taking shortcuts.
Imagine that you are building a 10 story office building but decide to cut costs at the beginning by skimping on the foundation. Everything's going fine until you get 4 stories built and then realize that it can't support any more weight. Now you're fucked because you can't fix the foundation without tearing what you've built so far.
The way to avoid this is to take the pain up front instead of trying to cheat by putting it off until later. Starting from the very beginning forbid yourself the use of the SQL UPDATE and DELETE commands. Just accept that table entries may not be edited or deleted once committed.
Instead of maing some data immutable you make it ALL immutable. It's about as much fun as shoving needles in your eyes but it's better than getting 75% done with the project and discovering that something that you thought didn't need to be immutable does.
The only way to do it is to make the system bitemporal. In then end you eliminate use of the UPDATE and DELETE SQL commands. Everything becomes an INSERT or SELECT.
If you are clever enough you should be able to do it with a relatively low resource investment by introducing the right type of microorganisms at the right time. Since those organisms will reproduce exponentially (given a sufficient quantity of food and energy) you can reduce the quantity you need to transport from earth to mars.
The tradeoff is that the process might take a few centuries. All the more reason to get started now.
There are certain errors that no amount of validation will catch. If one user is ordering supplies and creates a new entry "Blade, Hacksaw" and another user at the same time creates a "Hacksaw blade" both entries might be perfectly valid part descriptions. It takes a person to say definitely that yes, these entries actually represent the same item and should be combined.
I've never worked for a software company but as the "computer guy" I got to help move people from the "emailing spreadsheets around" workflow to basic MS Access database applications (I know just enough about databases to be horrified about the idea of using Access for critical business functions but it's better than Excel).
As the maintenance manager of a factory I got to help the plant manager make software purchasing decisions. I've come to the conclusion that mid-sized to large corporations should just bite the bullet and hire their own programmers. If it makes sense to design your product and design your own assembly lines and design your own tooling, jigs and fixtures then it makes sense to design your own software. Any cost savings you can achieve by outsourcing to a more specialized company never seems to materalize.
I don't think so but the possibility can't be ruled out without further investigation. Have you ever tried to expose a database application to users and subsequently lost all faith in humanity?
ERP could work if the vendors would realistically deal with GIGO.
Unless you lock down the permissions so tightly that the system is unusable, your users will enter bad data. They'll add new entries for objects that already exist, they'll misspell the name of an object and then create a new object instead of editing the one they just created. They'll make every possible data entry error you can imagine, and plenty that you can't.
We'd see a lot more progress in business software applications if all vendors would follow two rules:
Sounds like we should get started with the terraforming.
Just as a matter of practicality, how do you enforce this? How do you deal with content hosted on entirely different continents? Will people who publish web sites need to get licenses? In order to prevent unauthorized sites will you outlaw all operating systems that allow people to publish without a license?
The only way to achieve the environment you desire is the Chinese / Saudi Arabian full censorship route.
It certainly won't propagate through a few inches of solid steel in any case.
In the year 2000 the US Navy still had a submarine that used a vacuum tube based system to monitor and control the nuclear reactor.
There was a time when people who needed assistance received help from private organizations, churches and sometimes city or county governments. Back then it wasn't considered an "entitlement" so the people administering the assistance could deny it to people who where clearly abusing it and give it in ways that made it a hand up to people who really needed it.
Like anything else big government gets involved with once they touched it everything turned to shit.