It will take you far less effort to configure a PC emulator to look like stereotypical 15YO hardware, than it will to actually put together that hardware.
About five years ago I had a similar personal project, to find a way to replay some of the great DOS games I had lying around, most on floppies nearing the edge of unreadability. After screwing around with various compatibility modes in Windows and even going so far as to set up a multiboot system with real live DOS installed, I ended up just putting together half a dozen Bochs images running DOS under emulation with slightly different memory management configs (remember the bad old days of extended vs expanded memory and segmented vs flat and real vs protected vs unreal (flat real)?). Once I set up one image, I cloned it and reconfigured it to the rest in under an hour, then just had to remember which games needed which styles of memory management.
We tend to forget how much old hardware sucked. If I never have to manually hunt for an available base address, IRQ, and DMA channel again, I will consider myself blessed.
the Fifth Amendment protects you against self-incriminating testimony, but it is not an absolute bar against all kinds of self-incrimination.
Sure... And we didn't torture people at Gitmo - Al "Torquemada" Gonzalez made sure to redefine the term to make everything perfectly kosher.
When the government can just redefine pesky terms to mean whatever the hell it wants, yeah, the GP has it correct - We have no rights, except the right to do our best to stay under the radar and pray we never piss off the wrong person in power.
Naturally for a person that is not on average income it's difficult to understand proportion.
Naturally, for a person who doesn't need to pimp him/herself out to get reelected, it's difficult to understand the real damage here.
It takes millions of dollars per election cycle for any politician above the local-town-council level to get and keep their government meal-ticket. Joe Plumber doesn't have millions of dollars, and as a non-corporation, even if he did, he couldn't legally donate that much to a single candidate anyway. You know who does have millions of dollars, however, and contributes liberally to both sides of the political spectrum? Just about every industry-interest group on the planet.
When you complain about the ads on TV, you have to remember that you count as the product, not the customer.
When you complain about the law, remember the exact same thing - You didn't buy that law, the BPI/RIAA did.
What is the percentage of black, women, etc people with the skills and training that google, facebook, etc is looking for?
Black: Blacks make up only 3.6% of CS graduates, 6% of CE graduates, and 7% of generic IT graduates at the moment. Female: Female CS/CE graduates peaked in the '80s at 37%, and has fallen ever since to a current low of only 12%; the previous link also shows them at about 50% higher rates in generic IT, or 17% total.
Sorry if that doesn't give your axes a nice fine edge, folks, but the likes of Google, Yahoo, and Facebook don't hire only misogynist racists for their HR departments - In fact, all three soundly beat the above graduation rates, making them arguably biased against hiring white males.
Okay, so a lower minumum energy exists just past that peak... But even if the early universe reached the peak between the two valleys, why couldn't the Higgs' field have simply fallen back into the current local-but-not-global minimum?
Do deeper lows actually somehow attract the evolution of the field, or did $Deity flip a coin that, fortunately for us, came out heads instead of tails?
The problem is that the article is wrong to claim that neutrinos move at the speed of light - they have a non-zero mass and so must move slower than this.
I suspect the actual study, if not TFA, took that into consideration.
I actually find it more odd that the effects of mass on the neutrinos slowed them less than the effects of quantum gravity on the photons - The photons still lagged the neutrinos, rather than making up for a mere three hours' lag on a journey of 168,000 light-years? Truly mind-boggling! Kinda like driving from NYC to LA and still beating a flight that transfers at every airport on the way.
Lincoln was indeed handling a rebellion, and therefore had the right to suspend habeas corpus when the public safety required it.
And look where it got us - We still have a fundamental (pun intended) ideological divide between the North and the South, while the industrial revolution had already started and would shortly make the issue of human slavery moot.
A third of the country deciding to take their ball and go home doesn't count as a "rebellion", it counts as time to redraw the maps.
So, are you going to explain why a hundred drones delivering packages is magically much more dangerous than a truck-load of Amazon packages crashing into a packed school playground?
You mean other than the fact that a human driver in that situation would do their damnedest to avoid hitting any kids, while an out-of-control drone amounts to lobbing big rocks with whirring razor blades on top into the playground?
And let's look at this with a bit less over-the-top bonus drama - Realistically, both the truck and the drone would crash into a random building, and most likely not actually hit anyone directly. Now, if either of them starts a fire, which one goes unnoticed until half the block burns down? Even assuming the driver dies on impact, people notice a truck crashing into a building; not so much when one random 4th-floor window breaks and then you don't see or hear anything for a few minutes.
Yes, the FAA needs to get its head out of its ass and come up some reasonable conditions to play with drones. In this case, though, the FAA did its job as required.
Why do you think it came late? They probably had it running by the promised date, realized they'd make more money keeping it, kept it, then tried to sell it once it couldn't provide ROI. Of course they deserve to be sued.
Well, except for the part where it didn't meet the spec'd peformance goals and sucked down more power than expected as a bonus...
That is a foolish tactic. The amount of bitcoins he "could" have mined will be far, far smaller than the amount he paid for the ASIC. He'll end up suing for like $590 if he takes that route.
He paid $14k for the rig. At the current mining difficulty, he would have only made $8k in the six months since then. Sounds like a net loss, right?
In January alone, he would have made $12,000; In February, $9,500; in March, $6,000; in April, $2,500; in May, $2,000. And one last $1,200 for this month gives us a total of $33,200 just over the past six months (and admittedly, it would have stopped paying for just the power to run it within the next month or two), or a return of around 240% in a mere six months.
That doesn't involve the least bit of speculation except insofar as he believed that the manufacturer would deliver as described. Unless the defense lawyer manages to fill the trial with BS cyrpto-anarchist herp-derp-FUD, I expect he will at the very least get his money back - Or rather, his share of what remains after they throw in the towel and liquidate what little assets they have.
If you think this doesn't already happen in every city in the world, I have a parking spot... er... bridge to sell you.
The app in question just reduces the friction in the marketplace, effectively driving prices down to their fair value rather than the unpredictable climate we have now.
And when the state engages in profit-seeking on the public commons, the state has lost its moral right to control that space. We allow the state limited control of (for example, roads) because we all theoretically get equal access to those shared spaces. Holding them hostage to the highest bidder betrays the trust necessary for a commons to exist in the first place. In this situation, SF merely disapproves of a more efficient provider than themselves charging a premium on a service they fail to adequately provide. The goverment hates competition.
Social media advertisement is the sales guy sitting down at your table in the bar and trying to sell you a new refrigerator when you're hanging with friends because he saw you looking at refrigerators two weeks ago in a shop.
I agree with your analysis of the difference between social- and search-based ads, but would characterize the social marketing a bit differently.
The real problem with expecting "social" marketing to work comes from the fact that marketers remain utterly clueless about how social media works. They think they can just throw up a traditional business website on Facebook, magically get a critical mass of friends/followers (usually starting by compelling their coworkers to do so, which in turn leads to their coworkers creating a bunch of throwaway FB accounts to humor their boss), and then Step 3: Profit!
The few companies doing well on social media don't use it to explicitly advertise; sure, it gets their brand and image out there, but more in a "product placement" sense than in a "Have you checked your life insurance policy today" bashing-you-over-the-head style.
How does this not violate the 5th and/or 14th amendments to the Constitution?
Short answer: They have stopped even caring about the pretense of observing constitutional limitations on government abuses of power.
I wouldn't blame Bush or Obama, however - The process started before the ink even dried on the constitution, though it didn't get really bad until Lincoln - that great cultural icon - took us on the first big downward slide with his suspension of habeas corpus. More recently, Johnson takes the credit for really pushing us over the edge of the "slippery slope", with Nixon merely enjoying the ride down... And don't think Bush the elder resembled your kindly old grandad back when he ran the CIA - Ford brought him in as an axe-man in the midst of a wiretapping scandal (which paled in comparison to the recent NSA revelations), and he successfully pushed all that nasty illegal business back underground so the CIA could go on to run the world narcotics trade in the 80s without any pesky oversight.
I wouldn't say "broken by design", except insofar as the founding fathers left one critical point out - Betrayal of the public trust while "serving" in any official government capacity needs to unwaveringly convey a death sentence.
And it will come to that in the next few decades, no doubt - I'd really rather prefer it not happen in my lifetime, but we can all see the dust-clouds on the horizon.
Go after the desire, not the object of that desire.
I think I made my motivation entirely clear in the original response to you: "if we do insist on a constitutional amendment as the fix, we damned well need to target the 14th, not the 1st". So not shooting for any goals-by-proxy here; I make no attempts to hide my stance that the real problem here involves giving human rights to fictional entities.
Money, like speech, only has the value and power a person gives to it. There is nothing intrinsic about either, and it has absolutely no force of its own.
Quite true - But at least in the US, we hold one of those as a sacred right of citizenship, specifically protected from government oversight (whether or not the government has honored that right notwithstanding). Money, on the other hand, came as a distant afterthought - We used the Spanish Real until 1792, and even after that, right up until the Civil War, "dollar" literally meant a specific weight of silver (the same weight present in the Real) used as a medium of exchange.
All of which has no bearing, of course, on the basic fact that money isn't speech, no matter how you spin it. So in that regard, I suppose we agree, other than coming to different conclusions - Trying to conflate or discriminate between money and speech does count as a red herring, when the real problem involves non-humans having more power to decide our future than actual humans do.
"Money" describes tokens of value used in trade for goods and services. "Speech" describes, in its most abstract form, the communication of ideas. The two have entirely different purposes, different modalities, different styles of accountancy/accountability (as appropriate).
Now, if you want to debate whether or not companies can use as much money as they have to directly share their own opinions with the public, such as Chik-Fil-A coming out as anti-gay, we can talk. But Walmart anonymously pumping billions into anti-union candidates or Tyson buying their way into anti-agricultural-whistleblower laws, come about as far from "speech" as that ham sandwich does from a duck.
Exactly... If they want to restrict speech, they must amend the constitution. However, more and more people are starting to agree that the 1st amendment "goes too far"
I sincerely hope you meant that as sarcasm, but fear otherwise.
The first amendment has become a sad parody of itself, when we have "first amendment zones"; a press crippled by a tide of anti-whistleblower policies and laws; the complete disregard for religious proscriptions in business; and an inability to petition the government for redress of "classified" grievances... Among other offenses.
That said, we have a much simpler way of undoing the damage of Citizen's United than resorting to substantially gutting the first amendment: Money is not speech. Simple as that, really. Personally, I would go a step further, and point out that corporations are not people, but sadly, that boat sailed over a century ago. But if we do insist on a constitutional amendment as the fix, we damned well need to target the 14th, not the 1st.
False dichotomy. The computers can be sorted into useful and not before shipment.
TFA talks specifically about CRTs. It really doesn't matter whether or not they still work - You can't give the damned things away. If you leave it on the curb with a "free" sign, you'll come home to find someone has smashed the end off to get the five-pounds-of-copper yoke, and left the rest there for you to sweep up.
So if some 4th-worlders can make use of obsolete-but-still-functioning monitors, hey, great! Why wouldn't we let them have as many as they want?
AP is such BS. It only exists to make parents feel like their kid is smart.
I agree with you in spirit, but not quite for the same reasons.
A student doing well in AP calculus really will do better when they take "real" calculus. And they will still have to take calculus in college, because colleges don't consider AP credits as actually satisfying any requirements, they consider them nothing more than an elective.
Congrats, kid, you busted your ass for the last year of Highschool and it got you out of one semester of Basket Weaving 101 with that cute girl you see hanging out on the quad every day at lunch.:)
More to the topic at hand, though, you'll notice this involves taking AP stats vs CS, not calculus. AP stats has become popular because for non-mathphobes, it counts as an easy "A". By comparison, kids see both CS and calculus as really really hard. So we end up back at the fundamental motivation of the typical American student: Take the easiest courses that will satisfy the requirement.
If so, why should be worth tens of billions of dollars?
For the same reason gold served as money for thousands of years; for the same reason you let your employer (via the bank) pay you in 6.25x2.75 strips of colorful paper; for the same reason you carry a credit card; for the same reason some pacific island cultures collected cowrie shells: Because someone will give you tens of billions of dollars (actually more like half a trillion total market cap, BTW) in goods and/or services in exchange for them. Simple as that.
Now, if you want to get into the semantics of (commodity)money-vs-(fiat)currency-vs-specie, we can certainly split hairs here (to no real benefit for either of us beyond showing off our Google-foo). But in the most general meaning of the term, any reasonably fungible and liquid token of value counts as "money" as long as you can find someone who will accept it as payment.
And in that sense, I can readily spend BTC across the globe in exchange for just about anything. With a number of major online retailers now taking it, taxes and your local mom-n'-pop count as just about the only thing you can't use Bitcoin for.
You are space limited, it's a roof [...] I win again.
Context fail. To quote myself as the GGP here,
I don't give a damn about efficiency or how much space it takes up, I care about price per watt. Sell me 10-20KW of 5% efficient panels for 25 cents per watt, and you'd have a very happy customer. Hell, I might even go out and rearrange them weekly to decorate the "back 40" with messages for passing airplanes.
In fairness, if you don't live outside a city you might not recognize the phrase "back 40". It refers to large undeveloped sections of your property, as in "that 40 acres over there that I don't use" (though people generally use it figuratively, insofar as it rarely actually means 40 acres - Possibly as little as five acres, possibly in the thousands). For reference, one acre comes out to 43560ft^2, so yeah, I literally did mean that if I could save half the cost of the project by paving a quarter acre with cheap solar panels, consider me a happy customer.
Yes, you can save some on the inverter, yes, you can DIY it and get rid of X and Y and Z. But I absolutely 100% assure you, the numbers end up in the same place every time, for small installs, higher wattage panels are almost *always* the way to go. If you don't believe me DO THE MATH YOURSELF.
Okay, let's compare similar-capacity systems, and yes, I DIY (I set up my existing, albeit small-scale, system, so have a pretty good idea of the costs):
8 x 250 x 0.80 = $1600
+ $1500 for inverter
+ 8 x 4 x 3.37 = $107.84 for pressure treated 2x4 racking
+ $15 for permitting (where do you *live* that would charge $750 for permitting anything short of building an entire house???)
+ $50 + (8 x $10) = $130 for wiring
+ $50 for wiring final inspection (damned insurance company!)
+ $0 for install
= $3402.84, or 1.70 per Watt.
vs:
27 x 75 x 0.25 = $506.25
+ $1500 for inverter
+ 27 x 4 x 3.37 = $363.96 for pressure treated 2x4 racking
+ $15 for permitting
+ $50 + (27 x $10 = $320 for wiring
+ $50 for wiring final inspection
+ $0 for install
= $2755.20, or 1.38 per Watt.
Now extend that to a 5+KW array, and the cost gets better and better as your variable costs overtake your fixed costs - Using the same per-unit costs, a 5KW array would come out to only $0.89 per installed watt, vs $1.22 with the more expensive panels..
If installing a "toy" system, you have it absolutely correct - Unless paying an obscenely higher per-watt rate for the panels, more efficient panels work out in your favor. If installing a "real" system and don't have space as a constraint, get 'em as cheap per watt as you can, assuming comparable effective lifetimes.
The cabling and wiring needs to be done by an electrician
It needs to get inspected by an electrician. Not installed by one. You look up the gauge of wire you need, balance the series/parallel connections across your array to get the desired DC voltage at the inverter (usually 2-4 panels in series to get in the ballpark of 48V, then as many of those sets in parallel as you need to reach your target capacity), and pay Bill the Electrician half an hour's time to wave the wand of insurance blessing over it before you flip the switch on the grid tie.
I agree with you that for your average Joe, they should definitely have an electrician do it. For your average engineer who doesn't get confused about why you have so damned many wires on a typical two-way light switch? Not so much.
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously - This.
It will take you far less effort to configure a PC emulator to look like stereotypical 15YO hardware, than it will to actually put together that hardware.
About five years ago I had a similar personal project, to find a way to replay some of the great DOS games I had lying around, most on floppies nearing the edge of unreadability. After screwing around with various compatibility modes in Windows and even going so far as to set up a multiboot system with real live DOS installed, I ended up just putting together half a dozen Bochs images running DOS under emulation with slightly different memory management configs (remember the bad old days of extended vs expanded memory and segmented vs flat and real vs protected vs unreal (flat real)?). Once I set up one image, I cloned it and reconfigured it to the rest in under an hour, then just had to remember which games needed which styles of memory management.
We tend to forget how much old hardware sucked. If I never have to manually hunt for an available base address, IRQ, and DMA channel again, I will consider myself blessed.
the Fifth Amendment protects you against self-incriminating testimony, but it is not an absolute bar against all kinds of self-incrimination.
Sure... And we didn't torture people at Gitmo - Al "Torquemada" Gonzalez made sure to redefine the term to make everything perfectly kosher.
When the government can just redefine pesky terms to mean whatever the hell it wants, yeah, the GP has it correct - We have no rights, except the right to do our best to stay under the radar and pray we never piss off the wrong person in power.
Naturally for a person that is not on average income it's difficult to understand proportion.
Naturally, for a person who doesn't need to pimp him/herself out to get reelected, it's difficult to understand the real damage here.
It takes millions of dollars per election cycle for any politician above the local-town-council level to get and keep their government meal-ticket. Joe Plumber doesn't have millions of dollars, and as a non-corporation, even if he did, he couldn't legally donate that much to a single candidate anyway. You know who does have millions of dollars, however, and contributes liberally to both sides of the political spectrum? Just about every industry-interest group on the planet.
When you complain about the ads on TV, you have to remember that you count as the product, not the customer.
When you complain about the law, remember the exact same thing - You didn't buy that law, the BPI/RIAA did.
What is the percentage of black, women, etc people with the skills and training that google, facebook, etc is looking for?
Black: Blacks make up only 3.6% of CS graduates, 6% of CE graduates, and 7% of generic IT graduates at the moment.
Female: Female CS/CE graduates peaked in the '80s at 37%, and has fallen ever since to a current low of only 12%; the previous link also shows them at about 50% higher rates in generic IT, or 17% total.
Sorry if that doesn't give your axes a nice fine edge, folks, but the likes of Google, Yahoo, and Facebook don't hire only misogynist racists for their HR departments - In fact, all three soundly beat the above graduation rates, making them arguably biased against hiring white males.
"In addition to the disagreement between the parties as to the meaning of the agreed-upon claim construction"
I don't fully speak legalese, but the ruling had me literally LOL'ing. The threw everything from grammar naziism to stare decisis.
Okay, so a lower minumum energy exists just past that peak... But even if the early universe reached the peak between the two valleys, why couldn't the Higgs' field have simply fallen back into the current local-but-not-global minimum?
Do deeper lows actually somehow attract the evolution of the field, or did $Deity flip a coin that, fortunately for us, came out heads instead of tails?
The problem is that the article is wrong to claim that neutrinos move at the speed of light - they have a non-zero mass and so must move slower than this.
I suspect the actual study, if not TFA, took that into consideration.
I actually find it more odd that the effects of mass on the neutrinos slowed them less than the effects of quantum gravity on the photons - The photons still lagged the neutrinos, rather than making up for a mere three hours' lag on a journey of 168,000 light-years? Truly mind-boggling! Kinda like driving from NYC to LA and still beating a flight that transfers at every airport on the way.
Lincoln was indeed handling a rebellion, and therefore had the right to suspend habeas corpus when the public safety required it.
And look where it got us - We still have a fundamental (pun intended) ideological divide between the North and the South, while the industrial revolution had already started and would shortly make the issue of human slavery moot.
A third of the country deciding to take their ball and go home doesn't count as a "rebellion", it counts as time to redraw the maps.
So, are you going to explain why a hundred drones delivering packages is magically much more dangerous than a truck-load of Amazon packages crashing into a packed school playground?
You mean other than the fact that a human driver in that situation would do their damnedest to avoid hitting any kids, while an out-of-control drone amounts to lobbing big rocks with whirring razor blades on top into the playground?
And let's look at this with a bit less over-the-top bonus drama - Realistically, both the truck and the drone would crash into a random building, and most likely not actually hit anyone directly. Now, if either of them starts a fire, which one goes unnoticed until half the block burns down? Even assuming the driver dies on impact, people notice a truck crashing into a building; not so much when one random 4th-floor window breaks and then you don't see or hear anything for a few minutes.
Yes, the FAA needs to get its head out of its ass and come up some reasonable conditions to play with drones. In this case, though, the FAA did its job as required.
Why do you think it came late? They probably had it running by the promised date, realized they'd make more money keeping it, kept it, then tried to sell it once it couldn't provide ROI. Of course they deserve to be sued.
Well, except for the part where it didn't meet the spec'd peformance goals and sucked down more power than expected as a bonus...
That is a foolish tactic. The amount of bitcoins he "could" have mined will be far, far smaller than the amount he paid for the ASIC. He'll end up suing for like $590 if he takes that route.
He paid $14k for the rig. At the current mining difficulty, he would have only made $8k in the six months since then. Sounds like a net loss, right?
In January alone, he would have made $12,000; In February, $9,500; in March, $6,000; in April, $2,500; in May, $2,000. And one last $1,200 for this month gives us a total of $33,200 just over the past six months (and admittedly, it would have stopped paying for just the power to run it within the next month or two), or a return of around 240% in a mere six months.
That doesn't involve the least bit of speculation except insofar as he believed that the manufacturer would deliver as described. Unless the defense lawyer manages to fill the trial with BS cyrpto-anarchist herp-derp-FUD, I expect he will at the very least get his money back - Or rather, his share of what remains after they throw in the towel and liquidate what little assets they have.
It's based on holding public space hostage.
If you think this doesn't already happen in every city in the world, I have a parking spot... er... bridge to sell you.
The app in question just reduces the friction in the marketplace, effectively driving prices down to their fair value rather than the unpredictable climate we have now.
And when the state engages in profit-seeking on the public commons, the state has lost its moral right to control that space. We allow the state limited control of (for example, roads) because we all theoretically get equal access to those shared spaces. Holding them hostage to the highest bidder betrays the trust necessary for a commons to exist in the first place. In this situation, SF merely disapproves of a more efficient provider than themselves charging a premium on a service they fail to adequately provide. The goverment hates competition.
Social media advertisement is the sales guy sitting down at your table in the bar and trying to sell you a new refrigerator when you're hanging with friends because he saw you looking at refrigerators two weeks ago in a shop.
I agree with your analysis of the difference between social- and search-based ads, but would characterize the social marketing a bit differently.
The real problem with expecting "social" marketing to work comes from the fact that marketers remain utterly clueless about how social media works. They think they can just throw up a traditional business website on Facebook, magically get a critical mass of friends/followers (usually starting by compelling their coworkers to do so, which in turn leads to their coworkers creating a bunch of throwaway FB accounts to humor their boss), and then Step 3: Profit!
The few companies doing well on social media don't use it to explicitly advertise; sure, it gets their brand and image out there, but more in a "product placement" sense than in a "Have you checked your life insurance policy today" bashing-you-over-the-head style.
How does this not violate the 5th and/or 14th amendments to the Constitution?
Short answer: They have stopped even caring about the pretense of observing constitutional limitations on government abuses of power.
I wouldn't blame Bush or Obama, however - The process started before the ink even dried on the constitution, though it didn't get really bad until Lincoln - that great cultural icon - took us on the first big downward slide with his suspension of habeas corpus. More recently, Johnson takes the credit for really pushing us over the edge of the "slippery slope", with Nixon merely enjoying the ride down... And don't think Bush the elder resembled your kindly old grandad back when he ran the CIA - Ford brought him in as an axe-man in the midst of a wiretapping scandal (which paled in comparison to the recent NSA revelations), and he successfully pushed all that nasty illegal business back underground so the CIA could go on to run the world narcotics trade in the 80s without any pesky oversight.
I wouldn't say "broken by design", except insofar as the founding fathers left one critical point out - Betrayal of the public trust while "serving" in any official government capacity needs to unwaveringly convey a death sentence.
And it will come to that in the next few decades, no doubt - I'd really rather prefer it not happen in my lifetime, but we can all see the dust-clouds on the horizon.
Go after the desire, not the object of that desire.
I think I made my motivation entirely clear in the original response to you: "if we do insist on a constitutional amendment as the fix, we damned well need to target the 14th, not the 1st". So not shooting for any goals-by-proxy here; I make no attempts to hide my stance that the real problem here involves giving human rights to fictional entities.
Money, like speech, only has the value and power a person gives to it. There is nothing intrinsic about either, and it has absolutely no force of its own.
Quite true - But at least in the US, we hold one of those as a sacred right of citizenship, specifically protected from government oversight (whether or not the government has honored that right notwithstanding). Money, on the other hand, came as a distant afterthought - We used the Spanish Real until 1792, and even after that, right up until the Civil War, "dollar" literally meant a specific weight of silver (the same weight present in the Real) used as a medium of exchange.
All of which has no bearing, of course, on the basic fact that money isn't speech, no matter how you spin it. So in that regard, I suppose we agree, other than coming to different conclusions - Trying to conflate or discriminate between money and speech does count as a red herring, when the real problem involves non-humans having more power to decide our future than actual humans do.
Why not?
For the same reason a ham sandwich isn't a duck?
"Money" describes tokens of value used in trade for goods and services. "Speech" describes, in its most abstract form, the communication of ideas. The two have entirely different purposes, different modalities, different styles of accountancy/accountability (as appropriate).
Now, if you want to debate whether or not companies can use as much money as they have to directly share their own opinions with the public, such as Chik-Fil-A coming out as anti-gay, we can talk. But Walmart anonymously pumping billions into anti-union candidates or Tyson buying their way into anti-agricultural-whistleblower laws, come about as far from "speech" as that ham sandwich does from a duck.
Exactly... If they want to restrict speech, they must amend the constitution. However, more and more people are starting to agree that the 1st amendment "goes too far"
I sincerely hope you meant that as sarcasm, but fear otherwise.
The first amendment has become a sad parody of itself, when we have "first amendment zones"; a press crippled by a tide of anti-whistleblower policies and laws; the complete disregard for religious proscriptions in business; and an inability to petition the government for redress of "classified" grievances... Among other offenses.
That said, we have a much simpler way of undoing the damage of Citizen's United than resorting to substantially gutting the first amendment: Money is not speech. Simple as that, really. Personally, I would go a step further, and point out that corporations are not people, but sadly, that boat sailed over a century ago. But if we do insist on a constitutional amendment as the fix, we damned well need to target the 14th, not the 1st.
in fact there is a religion whose stated aim is to fight all who do not convert or accept a status designed to "make them feel subdued"
Scientology?
Here would be a link to a state college: http://creditevaluation.unl.ed...
Wow... I have to admit, that looks a HELL of a lot more appealing than what it got you at my uni!
I wonder if that more reflects the school itself, or just the passage of time since my school days.
False dichotomy. The computers can be sorted into useful and not before shipment.
TFA talks specifically about CRTs. It really doesn't matter whether or not they still work - You can't give the damned things away. If you leave it on the curb with a "free" sign, you'll come home to find someone has smashed the end off to get the five-pounds-of-copper yoke, and left the rest there for you to sweep up.
So if some 4th-worlders can make use of obsolete-but-still-functioning monitors, hey, great! Why wouldn't we let them have as many as they want?
AP is such BS. It only exists to make parents feel like their kid is smart.
:)
I agree with you in spirit, but not quite for the same reasons.
A student doing well in AP calculus really will do better when they take "real" calculus. And they will still have to take calculus in college, because colleges don't consider AP credits as actually satisfying any requirements, they consider them nothing more than an elective.
Congrats, kid, you busted your ass for the last year of Highschool and it got you out of one semester of Basket Weaving 101 with that cute girl you see hanging out on the quad every day at lunch.
More to the topic at hand, though, you'll notice this involves taking AP stats vs CS, not calculus. AP stats has become popular because for non-mathphobes, it counts as an easy "A". By comparison, kids see both CS and calculus as really really hard. So we end up back at the fundamental motivation of the typical American student: Take the easiest courses that will satisfy the requirement.
With the right colors, it's exactly money.
The secret service would like a word with you...
If so, why should be worth tens of billions of dollars?
For the same reason gold served as money for thousands of years; for the same reason you let your employer (via the bank) pay you in 6.25x2.75 strips of colorful paper; for the same reason you carry a credit card; for the same reason some pacific island cultures collected cowrie shells: Because someone will give you tens of billions of dollars (actually more like half a trillion total market cap, BTW) in goods and/or services in exchange for them. Simple as that.
Now, if you want to get into the semantics of (commodity)money-vs-(fiat)currency-vs-specie, we can certainly split hairs here (to no real benefit for either of us beyond showing off our Google-foo). But in the most general meaning of the term, any reasonably fungible and liquid token of value counts as "money" as long as you can find someone who will accept it as payment.
And in that sense, I can readily spend BTC across the globe in exchange for just about anything. With a number of major online retailers now taking it, taxes and your local mom-n'-pop count as just about the only thing you can't use Bitcoin for.
Context fail. To quote myself as the GGP here,
In fairness, if you don't live outside a city you might not recognize the phrase "back 40". It refers to large undeveloped sections of your property, as in "that 40 acres over there that I don't use" (though people generally use it figuratively, insofar as it rarely actually means 40 acres - Possibly as little as five acres, possibly in the thousands). For reference, one acre comes out to 43560ft^2, so yeah, I literally did mean that if I could save half the cost of the project by paving a quarter acre with cheap solar panels, consider me a happy customer.
Yes, you can save some on the inverter, yes, you can DIY it and get rid of X and Y and Z. But I absolutely 100% assure you, the numbers end up in the same place every time, for small installs, higher wattage panels are almost *always* the way to go. If you don't believe me DO THE MATH YOURSELF.
Okay, let's compare similar-capacity systems, and yes, I DIY (I set up my existing, albeit small-scale, system, so have a pretty good idea of the costs):
8 x 250 x 0.80 = $1600
+ $1500 for inverter
+ 8 x 4 x 3.37 = $107.84 for pressure treated 2x4 racking
+ $15 for permitting (where do you *live* that would charge $750 for permitting anything short of building an entire house???)
+ $50 + (8 x $10) = $130 for wiring
+ $50 for wiring final inspection (damned insurance company!)
+ $0 for install
= $3402.84, or 1.70 per Watt.
vs:
27 x 75 x 0.25 = $506.25
+ $1500 for inverter
+ 27 x 4 x 3.37 = $363.96 for pressure treated 2x4 racking
+ $15 for permitting
+ $50 + (27 x $10 = $320 for wiring
+ $50 for wiring final inspection
+ $0 for install
= $2755.20, or 1.38 per Watt.
Now extend that to a 5+KW array, and the cost gets better and better as your variable costs overtake your fixed costs - Using the same per-unit costs, a 5KW array would come out to only $0.89 per installed watt, vs $1.22 with the more expensive panels..
If installing a "toy" system, you have it absolutely correct - Unless paying an obscenely higher per-watt rate for the panels, more efficient panels work out in your favor. If installing a "real" system and don't have space as a constraint, get 'em as cheap per watt as you can, assuming comparable effective lifetimes.
The cabling and wiring needs to be done by an electrician
It needs to get inspected by an electrician. Not installed by one. You look up the gauge of wire you need, balance the series/parallel connections across your array to get the desired DC voltage at the inverter (usually 2-4 panels in series to get in the ballpark of 48V, then as many of those sets in parallel as you need to reach your target capacity), and pay Bill the Electrician half an hour's time to wave the wand of insurance blessing over it before you flip the switch on the grid tie.
I agree with you that for your average Joe, they should definitely have an electrician do it. For your average engineer who doesn't get confused about why you have so damned many wires on a typical two-way light switch? Not so much.