Well funny funny. As I get home today my 23" Samsung monitor has a line of vertical stuck-on pixels. Warranty expired 2 years ago. Ordered........another Samsung, an LED model, a third the power consumption of my current one. I'll use this old one on my computer in the basement where I have my reloading equipment till it dies completely, however long that takes.
Sad thing is that my 17" Trinitron CRT was bought used and then was in service by me for 8 years and I still have it as a backup, since it's such a nice monitor. On the flip side though, this monitor was a cheap one with a 1 year warranty instead of a 3 year and cost less than a third of what the Trinitron would have cost new. Meh, I got my money's worth.
Interesting observation, just looking at me I can see several brand loyaltys.
Home networking. D-Link. (Used to be linksys, but their reliability was crap so out they went.)
Monitors. Samsung all the way.
Hard drives. Western Digital. (I'll consider buying an SSD when WD starts making them.)
Do you ever stop to ask yourself WHY the workers choose the sweatshop? Could it possibly be because it is their least bad option? The fact is that those "sweatshops" typically pay several times the wages of other jobs available to those workers. What are YOU doing to improve the lives of those workers? Condemn them to lives as subsistence farmers?
"Cheap labor" is not why companies are fleeing the US. It is because the US is over-regulated In the late 19th century the US paid the highest wages and produced the lowest cost goods. Even today, there are places in the world with lower wages then China, yet the produce next to nothing.
1. God put junk code in our DNA for no good reason. It doesn't do anything, its just there.
This is a bald assertion on your part. Our understanding is far from complete. How do you know it doesn't do anything? 200 years ago there were many of structures in the human body to which science could assign no function. Today that is no longer the case. How do you know the same is not true of "Junk" DNA?
Ironic, isn't it. A scientist assuming a designer will look at junk DNA and say, "Is there a function here that I don't know about?" A scientist assuming no designer will not even bother to look, since it's just "junk".
Why are you telling me this? *I'm* not attempting to shut down debate by moderating any opposing opinions "Troll". I'm questioning the validity of the data and the conclusions made from that questionable data, as well as the political/ideological motivations of many of those pushing the AGW agenda. When scientists like Mann at the CRU destroy original unaltered climate data rather than turn a copy over to someone else so that his and his colleague's research can be checked/duplicated, you'll forgive me if I am quite skeptical.
Imagine if it was reversed, someone published a paper showing that what we are seeing is nothing more than natural variability and who then did exactly what Mann did, would anybody take anything they published seriously?
"Troll-like tendencies" like disagreeing with the group-think and having critical-thinking abilities. Yes, Copernicus and Galileo were quite familiar. I'm in good company.
*Sigh*, Galileo did not get int trouble for teaching heliocentric theory.
Galleleo had no evidence for heliocentric theory being true and could not answer the quite serious scientific objection raised by other scientists about the lack of observed stellar parallax. (The stellar parallax is there, but was not observable using instruments of the day.) Galileo could also not answer the equally serious objection concerning the lack of perceived motion of the earth. Remember that Newtonian physics was still 60 years away and the first successful measurements of stellar parallax did not happen until 1838. At that time, claiming heliocentric theory as true would be like a professor going around today claiming that string theory is true. They would get an intellectual beat down of epic proportions by their fellow scientists because the evidence is not yet there to support such a statement. Teaching string theory as a theory today is OK. Teaching it as a fact is not.
Galileo was free to teach heliocentrism as a theory, nobody ever got into trouble for that. What got him into trouble was claiming heliocentrisim was true, without being able to prove it, everyone who disagreed, regardless of the valid scientific objections, was an idiot, and he, a layman in the area of philosophy and scripture, was going to reinterpret scripture for the church. Remember this is less than 100 years after the Protestant reformation.
His best "evidence", since he couldn't answer the stellar parallax or lack of perceived motion objections, was to suggest that the tides was evidence of heliocentrism because with the earth rotating on its axis as well as moving around the sun meant that all the water was sloshing around the oceans. Yes, Galileo thought the Earth was a giant snow-globe. Try and put forth that theory in science class tomorrow and see where that gets you.
The Church was the leading sponsor of the new science at that time and Galileo himself was funded by the church. The leading astronomers of the time were Jesuit priests. They were open to Galileo's theory but told him the evidence for it was inconclusive. (It was.) This was the view of the greatest astronomer of the age, Tyco Brahe.
The Church's view of heliocentrism was hardly a dogmatic one. When Cardinal Bellarmine met with Galileo he said,
"While experience tells us plainly that the earth is standing still, if there were a real proof that the sun is in the center of the universe...and that the sun goes not go round the earth but the earth round the sun, then we should have to proceed with great circumspection in explaining passages of scripture which appear to teach the contrary, and rather admit that we did not understand them than declare an opinion to be false which is proved to be true. But this is not a thing to be done in haste, and as for myself, I shall not believe that there are such proofs until they are shown to me."
Galileo had no such proofs and Cardinal Bellarmine's view is hardly unreasonable.
Did the church overreact? Probably. However the story has been blown completely out of context by anti-catholic propaganda from hundreds of years ago.
Sorry, the problem is not Microsoft, it's you installing Windows XP on a machine that old. Our customer service people at work are running 3ghz P4's and they ONLY run our billing software and we are going to be trashing those machines later this year because they are so slow. We are debating about going with an Atom or E350 based board or just future proof things by using the 1155 boards we use for the DVRs we sell.
All my computers at home are built with the old stuff from work, a P4 would be thrown in the dumpster and never made it to my car. If it's not a dual core I don't bother with it. They are too old, too power hungry, and too slow. You're so spoiled with modern hardware you're forgetting what life used to be like. I still have my P166 MMX laptop with Windows 98 and installing Windows 98 takes half a day. If you're not on food stamps, using ISA slots, or in a 3rd world country you have no reason to be running a single core P4. The local thrift shops have dual core computers.
You also neglected to say how much RAM you had in that machine. My bets are it had 512mb or less, likely 256mb unless you upgraded it. OF COURSE XP is gonna drag ass with that little RAM. You're trying to tow a boat with a Ford Fiesta and then trying to blame YOUR poor planning on the Fiesta. Though to be fair, you admit to having next to no recent Windows experience, so chalk this up as a learning experience for future reference.
You do know you don't have to use "random" ipv6 addresses? Use usefull patterns/prefixes if you are afraid you'll miss the tree your are looking for in your forest. Or write a script to convert hex to octets if that helps you. But be sure to use a fixed font, that helps a lot with hex.
Or they could have designed it properly in the first place so you don't have to bother with any of that.
That all might work groovy pants if you're the one who set it up, What about the contractor like me who has over 100 customer sites with all of them having their own "useful patterns/prefixes" that only makes sense to them? Sure there is some variability with IP4, but there's not that much. I hope the IT department likes me calling them every time there's a networking problem.
"write a script to convert hex to octets"
Hmmmm, reminds me of the phrase, "Just recompile the kernel". Hey hairyfeet, is this starting to remind you of something?
What planet do you live on where you can read hex as fluently as numbers?
They should have simply added extra octets in such a way that 20 years down the line we can easily add more if needed. Going from 4 to 6 would have solved any addressing problems for the foreseeable future and sub-netting conventions and such would have remained the same. There is no practical need to have so many addresses, it makes the whole system incredibly cumbersome. IP6 is just as needlessly complex as 32 digit phone numbers.
The market is biatchslapping the people who came up with IPv6 for its stupid design decisions as evidenced by its poor adoption.
Frankly their tech is 70s era at best and our modern jammers make those old SA/2 Guidelines pretty much just telephone pole obstacle courses.
Ummmmm, SA2's have had a passive guidance mode since the 70's that simply locks onto the jammer. The North Vietnamese used it quite effectively to sweep aircraft with jammers from the sky. They only got a limited number with passive guidance though, mainly so the Soviets could see how well they worked, the Soviet's sending the North Vietnamese mainly their old stock without passive guidance.
The Iraqi SA2's were "monkey models", also without passive guidance, thus why they were so ineffective against US aircraft.
Whether the guy is an idiot, a troll, or just a dumbass doesn't change one simple fact...Free Trade DOES NOT WORK because it is just what we see in TFA, we are simply exporting our pollution to the third world!
Non sequitur logical fallacy. Your argument basically breaks down to, "China lets corps pollute at will, therefore Free trade is bad." Sorry, that's bad logic.
Saudi government: "The US lets Women work in whatever job they want, therefore Free Trade is bad. This is why we should simply not allow trade with countries that don't have similar gender regulations to us, because all that is happening is the mutilnationals are playing three card monty with the gender roles and they enjoy higher profits the more they exploit women.
Apartheid South African: The US lets blacks compete with white workers, therefore Free Trade is bad. This is why we should simply not allow trade with countries that don't have similar race regulations to us, because all that is happening is the mutilnationals are playing three card monty with the workers and they enjoy higher profits the more they hire non-white workers.
Frenchman: The US has a 40 hour workweek, therefore Free Trade is bad. This is why we should simply not allow trade with countries that don't have similar environmental regulations to us, because all that is happening is the mutilnationals are playing three card monty with the exploiting the worker and they enjoy higher profits the more they hire 40 hour workers."
EVERY economic activity exports "X" to "Y". The reason companies and corporations are leaving the US in droves is not because of things like scrubbers on smokestacks, it's because of the high taxes and simply insane amounts of business regulations that exist in the US that make producing things too expensive while doing little to protect anything except a bureaucrats job.. In the 19th century, US companies paid the highest wages and produced the lowest cost goods.
The only reason the Chinese government can get away with this pollution is:
1. Chinese government does not enforce private property rights.
2. The Chinese people as a whole feel that the pollution produced is worth the economic benefits to them. They prefer the increased material wealth over the non-polluted environment.
3. Westerners are not as riled up about pollution as you think they are.
Just like the west, the Chinese will eventually get rich enough to be able to afford to care about the environment. Restricting trade will not reduce that pollution, Chinese factories will simply retool to produce for domestic consumption, which is what the US did for much of the 19th century. The US has had a trade embargo against Cuba for what, 50 years? Is their environmental policy up to first world specs? What about North Korea? If anything, restricting free trade hurts the environment because not only does the government have a scapegoat, they can justify the pollution under the auspice of there being no alternative.
On the flip side though, this has helped drive down the costs of chip manufacturing. In the past you could only run equipment for a few years before having to either trash it or start producing other lower margin chips because everything went obsolete so fast.
Now though, they can amortize the cost of the equipment over a longer period of time because they know the chips will be in production for longer. Meaning production costs are lower,which lead to lower prices for consumers.
how many people you think are still running 600MHz P3s like what originally came with XP? I get something that old and its straight to the dump, do not pass go.
[Hippie Voice]
Hey now man. I still have my Dual Slot 1 Mobo and two 600mhtz PIII processors in the rafters of my garage. Old school dual core, back when running dual core meant something man.
Also have my dual Socket 370 board with Intel Confidential PIIIs with unlocked multipliers. Good days those were.
[/Hippie Voice]
Sorry, what is "Rollerball"? I was looking at history. You know, like the East India Company, or the industrial revolution robber barons, just to name a few examples.
No, you have been reading propaganda, not history.
The East India Company was backed and subsidized by the British government in the form of special tax and regulatory privileges. Check your history book about something involving Boston and Tea in the late 1700's. Those weren't East Indian Company troops enforcing the Tea Tax.
The "Robber Barons" were nothing of the sort. They were the ones who made your lifestyle today possible. Lets look at Standard Oil for example.
(From roman_mir)
Standard oil was the company that always reduced prices of its product over DECADES and was very successful because it could deliver an ever cheapening, good quality product to the market. The company that had 150 competitors by 1911.
By 1870 Standard Oil had 4% of the market share. The tools and technologies it invested in allowed it to create efficiencies and cut costs and pass cost savings to the consumers.
1869, price of refined oil was 30 cents per gallon.
1874, price of refined oil was 10 cents per gallon.
1885, price of refined oil was 8 cents per gallon.
1897, price of refined oil was 5.9 cents per gallon.
So by 1897 the prices were 5.9 cents, you can calculate how many times the prices fell from 1869 levels as an exercise.
The same thing with Carnegie, through his efforts the price of steel fell by about 90% thanks to his innovation and increased efficiency. Vanderbilt did similar in steamships and railroads. James J. Hill's Great Northern Railroad turned a profit in 1893 when the government subsidized railroads all went bankrupt. (The post-civil war transcontinental railroad was a shoddily built financial disaster.) I recommend you read the book, "The Myth of the Robber Barron's", to get some real history in your head as to what they did.
Do you consider Steve Jobs a Robber Barron? Is society worse off because of him? Would we be better ff if the world had never seen his innovations? Does his getting rich make everyone else poorer? If someone today developed a way that cut the price of gasoline in half, would you resent him for becoming rich or thank him for making your life better by halving the price of gasoline?
cpu6502 listed three distinct actions.
1) Suck money directly from your paycheck.
2) Bust down the door of your house.
3) Drag you off to jail.
NONE of those are possible without government being involved in some form backing that behavior. Ford goon tries to suck money from my paycheck? The local sheriff hauls them off the jail for theft. Bust down my door? They get carried out in a body bag and I bill the goons estate for the cost of the bullet. Drag me off to Jail? As soon as both of us show up the goon will be the one in jail and I'll be pressing charges for kidnapping.
None of those amount to forcing me to buy their products, nor did I say anything about being forced to buy their products. You are putting words in my mouth and I kindly ask that you stop.
Then WHY did you respond to: The government can suck money directly from your paycheck, or bust down the door of your house, or drag you off to jail. A corporation can not. by saying: And why can't a corporation do anything of those things? Government, that's why.
All I did was point out your statement as false by pointing out the reason corporations don't do those things is because it is not and cannot be profitable to do so. If I have misunderstood you then take the time to clarify your statement. What you write after that is nothing more than bald assertions about how the world without strong government would resemble something from the movie "Rollerball" with nothing to back up such statements.
Well I just use the 10k number as a starting point, as I said one could sell it and use a cash for clunkers (or offer special government financing for the poor to get the hogs off the road) that would bring a 15k car into the realm of even those on minimum wage.
Our main disagreement between you and I on this seems to be the method to help the poor have cars. If you only make $8 an hour, you are too poor to be even considering buying a new car. That is not cruel, that's just reality. The LAST thing you would want is the government foisting debt onto the poor. In my view, the way you get those gas hogs off the road is not by having the government blow more money, but by making new cars cheaper to the middle class so those cars exist in greater abundance on the used market. That greater abundance of cheaper, more fuel efficient cars will make the gas hogs unprofitable to keep on the road because people will have an alternative.
But notice how i got modded down for pissing on a sacred cow, the electric car. i do hope you agree that that tech is a dead end with current tech.......
As far as I can see. Electric cars are dead end tech period. Physics itself says that electric cars will always suck because of energy density. Gasoline, Diesel, and even LNG are very energy dense methods of storing energy. Batteries are simply too bulky and heavy to ever compete. Even at 100% effeciency an electric car will still suck because the batteries physically can't store enough energy to matter. Check out the chart.
To electric car proponents: Note that Lithium Ion is the best battery tech we have today and it's at the bottom left of the chart. Then compare with Gasoline. "Better batteries" are not going to solve the problem as we are already at about 50% of the theoretical maximum density from current battery tech. Bettery Tech needs to improve by 30 times to even START competing with gasoline and that is physically impossible. Batteries do lots of things well. Powering a car is not one of them. If you want to build/ buy an electric car, go ahead. Just do not expect me to subsidize it.
Hydrogen is a no-go for numerous reasons as well. The cheapest way to produce it is by cracking natural gas, you might as well just have dual fuel gasoline/LNG powered cars if you are going to try that. Then there are the problems of a hydrogen storage tank vs a natural gas one, again relating to energy density.
We know how to make VERY clean and efficient diesel cars NOW, this can be done with current tech with no major hurdles.
My dad's 1989 Chevy Sprint got 50 MPG without too much effort. They were actually surprisingly safe for front seat passengers, i know several people who totaled theirs, one at 75 mph. (Bit of a death trap for those in the back, but one has to weigh risks.) He parked it out at my uncle's farm about 10 years ago because the clutch wore out. I keep thinking about what it would take to put it on the road again. New clutch and some new hoses is about all I can think of.
You would think so, but if you can sell these for $10 instead of $100 people won't care than they generate half the power and last 1 year instead of 30. If people cared about quality Wal-Mart would have trouble pulling a profit.
Wrong, If people thought the quality of Wal-Mart products was unacceptable, THEN they would have trouble pulling a profit. Given the price, the quality is acceptable for most people.
"Quality" is relative. A $30 microwave may indeed only last 4 years and have a 5% defect rage compared to a $100 microwave that lasts 8 years and has a 1% defect rate, but the consumer may value the extra $70 more than the lower defect rate and longer lifespan and so choosing the $30 microwave is the correct choice. Not to mention that buying two $30 microwaves is still cheaper then buying the higher quality $100 one.
(Not to mention most people don't keep their microwave clean.)
That's more than twice as expensive as what I pay for electricity here in North Dakota. Average price in the US is 12 cents per kWh.
That is what I hear. But when I itemize my total tax bill I pay $5 fixed per month plus about 20 cents pew kWh. This with the bill saying I am paying 8 cents per kWh. There are other variable charges that bring in the other 12 cents.
Well then that is your own personal situation and by all means you should do what makes financial sense for you. For the majority of the country though, it doesn't. If it makes sense because of subsidies, expect people like me to be strongly against it.
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It's not that we are against it. We are against subsidizing it. Many of us are in touch with reality and see that aside from limited situations it is not cost effective.
- over 20 years of amortisation 1 kWh solar costs around 16 cents. If you use most the solar generated electricity yourself, thats grid parity in most regions.
That's more than twice as expensive as what I pay for electricity here in North Dakota. Average price in the US is 12 cents per kWh.
You also don't mention that if you end up having to redo your roof halfway through, because you installed the panels halfway through its 20 year life, you destroy any cost savings. Unanticipated repairs can also easily destroy any cost savings.
That is only true of companies that pay no/little dividend. People who own those are speculators.
I own stock in several Canadian oil and gas companies that all pay more than a 5% cash dividend. (One has an 11% dividend because I bought it at an undervalued price.) The stock going up or down from month or month doesn't matter to me, what matters is the dividend yield relative to what I paid for those shares and what the company is doing to maintain or increase the dividend over the long term. One came out with a plan to reduce the dividend for two quarters to pay down some debt with the intention of eventually being able to increase the dividend. The price dropped by about 10% IIRC as the short termers were flushed out, I didn't budge. Sure enough, 6 months later they had the debt paid down and returned the dividend to "normal". 6 months later they increased the dividend per share.
If you buy stock just because you think it will go up, you are a speculator, not an investor. If you buy stock because of good P/E and good dividend, then you are investing.
In fact as i have said before if you REALLY want to change the USA in a big way its not electric cars, its a "people's car" that gets 40MPG+ (if its diesel so it can be run on bio fuels so much the better) that comes in at under $10k. If you look up the stats you'll see the average age of a car on the road now is 11 years and the average MPG is barely 20, so by doubling that and at the same time making it cheap enough most of the working poor could afford one (and if you were to offer a cash for clunkers deal then, again so much the better) you could toss all those big gas hogs practically overnight and cut way the hell down on our need for oil.
The only way to meet that price point is to abolish all the safety and environmental regulations that make new cars so obese and expensive. (Do I REALLY need a catalytic converter in North Dakota?) The fuel economy standards are what killed off the station wagon and pushed people into SUVs. Right now you can buy 4 seater dune buggy's that cost $8,000 new. Slap on another $1,500 to $2,000 in bodywork so it is completely enclosed for bad weather and you might be able to pull it off for $10K. Something like that would work for an around-town car.
Perhaps someone could just built the old VW bugs with a slightly modernized design. At a low enough price point people would buy.
I really think that new cars for the poor is a fools errand though as I doubt people would buy such a car. (Though I think companies should be allowed to try.) What I think would be more productive is cheaper cars for the middle class, around $15K perhaps, so that 5 years from now they will be abundant and affordable on the used market for the poor to buy.
What really infuriates me is the government safety mandates on things like airbags. The research that I find shows that they cost 3 times more than the economic benefit they give, but more importantly, what newer and more effective safety technologies are we NOT getting because the money is forcibly being spent on airbags? I would argue that because of airbag mandates we are NOT getting foam metal crumple zones in our cars, which would increase the structural integrity of the car, increase effectiveness of seat-belts, and allow cars to be built lighter for improved MPG. Not only are we not getting them, but the research into it has probably been slowed because of money instead going into airbags.
Let the insurance companies figure it out. If someone wants to buy a car without airbags then let them and let their insurance company charge them accordingly. I honestly think it would be a wash, yes airbag cars are slightly less safe, but the cars are less likely to have to be totaled in a minor crash.
And why can't a corporation do anything of those things? Government, that's why.
I hate to break this to you, but Rollerball is not a documentary. I'm sorry to have to shatter your entire worldview.
How would it be profitable for Ford, in a true free market, to go around and force people in North Dakota to buy Ford vehicles? Mercenaries are very expensive and the local areas would have their own private police/security forces that would oppose them along with local citizenry. Where has this ever happened in history?
The only reason it is profitable for corporations to send GOVERNMENT to do the same is because the corporations do not pay the full cost of of that coercion, society at large pays for it, not the corporation itself. Halliburton doesn't pay the costs of the US going to war. If you could somehow force the corporations to pay the full costs of that enforcement you would see them suddenly not be so supportive of it because it would be unprofitable.
I find it curious that, no matter what happens, the government is NEVER to blame for any mishap in the economy despite the governments heavy involvement. I run across people like that in the jails I do work in all the time. NOTHING is ever their fault, everything is "someone else's" fault.
They then hold up one repealed regulation as proof that the economy was "deregulated" while ignoring the thousands of new regulations that were enacted or ignore how regulations that were NOT repealed functioned absent the repealed regulation.
Slashdot Mirror
Well funny funny. As I get home today my 23" Samsung monitor has a line of vertical stuck-on pixels. Warranty expired 2 years ago. Ordered........another Samsung, an LED model, a third the power consumption of my current one. I'll use this old one on my computer in the basement where I have my reloading equipment till it dies completely, however long that takes.
Sad thing is that my 17" Trinitron CRT was bought used and then was in service by me for 8 years and I still have it as a backup, since it's such a nice monitor. On the flip side though, this monitor was a cheap one with a 1 year warranty instead of a 3 year and cost less than a third of what the Trinitron would have cost new. Meh, I got my money's worth.
Interesting observation, just looking at me I can see several brand loyaltys.
Home networking. D-Link. (Used to be linksys, but their reliability was crap so out they went.)
Monitors. Samsung all the way.
Hard drives. Western Digital. (I'll consider buying an SSD when WD starts making them.)
Do you ever stop to ask yourself WHY the workers choose the sweatshop? Could it possibly be because it is their least bad option? The fact is that those "sweatshops" typically pay several times the wages of other jobs available to those workers. What are YOU doing to improve the lives of those workers? Condemn them to lives as subsistence farmers?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxBzKkWo0mo&feature=g-u-u
"Cheap labor" is not why companies are fleeing the US. It is because the US is over-regulated In the late 19th century the US paid the highest wages and produced the lowest cost goods. Even today, there are places in the world with lower wages then China, yet the produce next to nothing.
1. God put junk code in our DNA for no good reason. It doesn't do anything, its just there.
This is a bald assertion on your part. Our understanding is far from complete. How do you know it doesn't do anything? 200 years ago there were many of structures in the human body to which science could assign no function. Today that is no longer the case. How do you know the same is not true of "Junk" DNA?
Ironic, isn't it. A scientist assuming a designer will look at junk DNA and say, "Is there a function here that I don't know about?" A scientist assuming no designer will not even bother to look, since it's just "junk".
Why are you telling me this? *I'm* not attempting to shut down debate by moderating any opposing opinions "Troll". I'm questioning the validity of the data and the conclusions made from that questionable data, as well as the political/ideological motivations of many of those pushing the AGW agenda. When scientists like Mann at the CRU destroy original unaltered climate data rather than turn a copy over to someone else so that his and his colleague's research can be checked/duplicated, you'll forgive me if I am quite skeptical.
Imagine if it was reversed, someone published a paper showing that what we are seeing is nothing more than natural variability and who then did exactly what Mann did, would anybody take anything they published seriously?
"Troll-like tendencies" like disagreeing with the group-think and having critical-thinking abilities. Yes, Copernicus and Galileo were quite familiar. I'm in good company.
*Sigh*, Galileo did not get int trouble for teaching heliocentric theory.
http://i224.photobucket.com/albums/dd11/GilRuiz1/galileo_02.jpg
Galleleo had no evidence for heliocentric theory being true and could not answer the quite serious scientific objection raised by other scientists about the lack of observed stellar parallax. (The stellar parallax is there, but was not observable using instruments of the day.) Galileo could also not answer the equally serious objection concerning the lack of perceived motion of the earth. Remember that Newtonian physics was still 60 years away and the first successful measurements of stellar parallax did not happen until 1838. At that time, claiming heliocentric theory as true would be like a professor going around today claiming that string theory is true. They would get an intellectual beat down of epic proportions by their fellow scientists because the evidence is not yet there to support such a statement. Teaching string theory as a theory today is OK. Teaching it as a fact is not.
Galileo was free to teach heliocentrism as a theory, nobody ever got into trouble for that. What got him into trouble was claiming heliocentrisim was true, without being able to prove it, everyone who disagreed, regardless of the valid scientific objections, was an idiot, and he, a layman in the area of philosophy and scripture, was going to reinterpret scripture for the church. Remember this is less than 100 years after the Protestant reformation.
His best "evidence", since he couldn't answer the stellar parallax or lack of perceived motion objections, was to suggest that the tides was evidence of heliocentrism because with the earth rotating on its axis as well as moving around the sun meant that all the water was sloshing around the oceans. Yes, Galileo thought the Earth was a giant snow-globe. Try and put forth that theory in science class tomorrow and see where that gets you.
The Church was the leading sponsor of the new science at that time and Galileo himself was funded by the church. The leading astronomers of the time were Jesuit priests. They were open to Galileo's theory but told him the evidence for it was inconclusive. (It was.) This was the view of the greatest astronomer of the age, Tyco Brahe.
The Church's view of heliocentrism was hardly a dogmatic one. When Cardinal Bellarmine met with Galileo he said,
"While experience tells us plainly that the earth is standing still, if there were a real proof that the sun is in the center of the universe...and that the sun goes not go round the earth but the earth round the sun, then we should have to proceed with great circumspection in explaining passages of scripture which appear to teach the contrary, and rather admit that we did not understand them than declare an opinion to be false which is proved to be true. But this is not a thing to be done in haste, and as for myself, I shall not believe that there are such proofs until they are shown to me."
Galileo had no such proofs and Cardinal Bellarmine's view is hardly unreasonable.
Did the church overreact? Probably. However the story has been blown completely out of context by anti-catholic propaganda from hundreds of years ago.
ageing yet speedy little 3ghz p4
Sorry, the problem is not Microsoft, it's you installing Windows XP on a machine that old. Our customer service people at work are running 3ghz P4's and they ONLY run our billing software and we are going to be trashing those machines later this year because they are so slow. We are debating about going with an Atom or E350 based board or just future proof things by using the 1155 boards we use for the DVRs we sell.
All my computers at home are built with the old stuff from work, a P4 would be thrown in the dumpster and never made it to my car. If it's not a dual core I don't bother with it. They are too old, too power hungry, and too slow. You're so spoiled with modern hardware you're forgetting what life used to be like. I still have my P166 MMX laptop with Windows 98 and installing Windows 98 takes half a day. If you're not on food stamps, using ISA slots, or in a 3rd world country you have no reason to be running a single core P4. The local thrift shops have dual core computers.
You also neglected to say how much RAM you had in that machine. My bets are it had 512mb or less, likely 256mb unless you upgraded it. OF COURSE XP is gonna drag ass with that little RAM. You're trying to tow a boat with a Ford Fiesta and then trying to blame YOUR poor planning on the Fiesta. Though to be fair, you admit to having next to no recent Windows experience, so chalk this up as a learning experience for future reference.
Siri always seems to mistake what I say for something dirty. I was trying to send a VPN address to a coworker via SMS and said "VPN address x.x.x.x"
What Siri thought I said, "Zip in a dress." It got the address right though.
It's better than most, but still infuriatingly inaccurate on so many things even when I am in a quiet environment talking slowly..
You do know you don't have to use "random" ipv6 addresses? Use usefull patterns/prefixes if you are afraid you'll miss the tree your are looking for in your forest. Or write a script to convert hex to octets if that helps you. But be sure to use a fixed font, that helps a lot with hex.
Or they could have designed it properly in the first place so you don't have to bother with any of that.
That all might work groovy pants if you're the one who set it up, What about the contractor like me who has over 100 customer sites with all of them having their own "useful patterns/prefixes" that only makes sense to them? Sure there is some variability with IP4, but there's not that much. I hope the IT department likes me calling them every time there's a networking problem.
"write a script to convert hex to octets"
Hmmmm, reminds me of the phrase, "Just recompile the kernel". Hey hairyfeet, is this starting to remind you of something?
What planet do you live on where you can read hex as fluently as numbers?
They should have simply added extra octets in such a way that 20 years down the line we can easily add more if needed. Going from 4 to 6 would have solved any addressing problems for the foreseeable future and sub-netting conventions and such would have remained the same. There is no practical need to have so many addresses, it makes the whole system incredibly cumbersome. IP6 is just as needlessly complex as 32 digit phone numbers.
The market is biatchslapping the people who came up with IPv6 for its stupid design decisions as evidenced by its poor adoption.
Frankly their tech is 70s era at best and our modern jammers make those old SA/2 Guidelines pretty much just telephone pole obstacle courses.
Ummmmm, SA2's have had a passive guidance mode since the 70's that simply locks onto the jammer. The North Vietnamese used it quite effectively to sweep aircraft with jammers from the sky. They only got a limited number with passive guidance though, mainly so the Soviets could see how well they worked, the Soviet's sending the North Vietnamese mainly their old stock without passive guidance.
The Iraqi SA2's were "monkey models", also without passive guidance, thus why they were so ineffective against US aircraft.
Whether the guy is an idiot, a troll, or just a dumbass doesn't change one simple fact...Free Trade DOES NOT WORK because it is just what we see in TFA, we are simply exporting our pollution to the third world!
Non sequitur logical fallacy. Your argument basically breaks down to, "China lets corps pollute at will, therefore Free trade is bad." Sorry, that's bad logic.
Saudi government: "The US lets Women work in whatever job they want, therefore Free Trade is bad. This is why we should simply not allow trade with countries that don't have similar gender regulations to us, because all that is happening is the mutilnationals are playing three card monty with the gender roles and they enjoy higher profits the more they exploit women.
Apartheid South African: The US lets blacks compete with white workers, therefore Free Trade is bad. This is why we should simply not allow trade with countries that don't have similar race regulations to us, because all that is happening is the mutilnationals are playing three card monty with the workers and they enjoy higher profits the more they hire non-white workers.
Frenchman: The US has a 40 hour workweek, therefore Free Trade is bad. This is why we should simply not allow trade with countries that don't have similar environmental regulations to us, because all that is happening is the mutilnationals are playing three card monty with the exploiting the worker and they enjoy higher profits the more they hire 40 hour workers."
EVERY economic activity exports "X" to "Y". The reason companies and corporations are leaving the US in droves is not because of things like scrubbers on smokestacks, it's because of the high taxes and simply insane amounts of business regulations that exist in the US that make producing things too expensive while doing little to protect anything except a bureaucrats job.. In the 19th century, US companies paid the highest wages and produced the lowest cost goods.
The only reason the Chinese government can get away with this pollution is:
1. Chinese government does not enforce private property rights.
2. The Chinese people as a whole feel that the pollution produced is worth the economic benefits to them. They prefer the increased material wealth over the non-polluted environment.
3. Westerners are not as riled up about pollution as you think they are.
Just like the west, the Chinese will eventually get rich enough to be able to afford to care about the environment. Restricting trade will not reduce that pollution, Chinese factories will simply retool to produce for domestic consumption, which is what the US did for much of the 19th century. The US has had a trade embargo against Cuba for what, 50 years? Is their environmental policy up to first world specs? What about North Korea? If anything, restricting free trade hurts the environment because not only does the government have a scapegoat, they can justify the pollution under the auspice of there being no alternative.
On the flip side though, this has helped drive down the costs of chip manufacturing. In the past you could only run equipment for a few years before having to either trash it or start producing other lower margin chips because everything went obsolete so fast.
Now though, they can amortize the cost of the equipment over a longer period of time because they know the chips will be in production for longer. Meaning production costs are lower,which lead to lower prices for consumers.
how many people you think are still running 600MHz P3s like what originally came with XP? I get something that old and its straight to the dump, do not pass go.
[Hippie Voice]
Hey now man. I still have my Dual Slot 1 Mobo and two 600mhtz PIII processors in the rafters of my garage. Old school dual core, back when running dual core meant something man.
Also have my dual Socket 370 board with Intel Confidential PIIIs with unlocked multipliers. Good days those were.
[/Hippie Voice]
Sorry, what is "Rollerball"? I was looking at history. You know, like the East India Company, or the industrial revolution robber barons, just to name a few examples.
No, you have been reading propaganda, not history.
The East India Company was backed and subsidized by the British government in the form of special tax and regulatory privileges. Check your history book about something involving Boston and Tea in the late 1700's. Those weren't East Indian Company troops enforcing the Tea Tax.
The "Robber Barons" were nothing of the sort. They were the ones who made your lifestyle today possible. Lets look at Standard Oil for example.
(From roman_mir)
Standard oil was the company that always reduced prices of its product over DECADES and was very successful because it could deliver an ever cheapening, good quality product to the market. The company that had 150 competitors by 1911.
By 1870 Standard Oil had 4% of the market share. The tools and technologies it invested in allowed it to create efficiencies and cut costs and pass cost savings to the consumers.
1869, price of refined oil was 30 cents per gallon.
1874, price of refined oil was 10 cents per gallon.
1885, price of refined oil was 8 cents per gallon.
1897, price of refined oil was 5.9 cents per gallon.
So by 1897 the prices were 5.9 cents, you can calculate how many times the prices fell from 1869 levels as an exercise.
The same thing with Carnegie, through his efforts the price of steel fell by about 90% thanks to his innovation and increased efficiency. Vanderbilt did similar in steamships and railroads. James J. Hill's Great Northern Railroad turned a profit in 1893 when the government subsidized railroads all went bankrupt. (The post-civil war transcontinental railroad was a shoddily built financial disaster.) I recommend you read the book, "The Myth of the Robber Barron's", to get some real history in your head as to what they did.
Do you consider Steve Jobs a Robber Barron? Is society worse off because of him? Would we be better ff if the world had never seen his innovations? Does his getting rich make everyone else poorer? If someone today developed a way that cut the price of gasoline in half, would you resent him for becoming rich or thank him for making your life better by halving the price of gasoline?
cpu6502 listed three distinct actions.
1) Suck money directly from your paycheck.
2) Bust down the door of your house.
3) Drag you off to jail.
NONE of those are possible without government being involved in some form backing that behavior. Ford goon tries to suck money from my paycheck? The local sheriff hauls them off the jail for theft. Bust down my door? They get carried out in a body bag and I bill the goons estate for the cost of the bullet. Drag me off to Jail? As soon as both of us show up the goon will be the one in jail and I'll be pressing charges for kidnapping.
None of those amount to forcing me to buy their products, nor did I say anything about being forced to buy their products. You are putting words in my mouth and I kindly ask that you stop.
Then WHY did you respond to: The government can suck money directly from your paycheck, or bust down the door of your house, or drag you off to jail. A corporation can not. by saying: And why can't a corporation do anything of those things? Government, that's why.
All I did was point out your statement as false by pointing out the reason corporations don't do those things is because it is not and cannot be profitable to do so. If I have misunderstood you then take the time to clarify your statement. What you write after that is nothing more than bald assertions about how the world without strong government would resemble something from the movie "Rollerball" with nothing to back up such statements.
Well I just use the 10k number as a starting point, as I said one could sell it and use a cash for clunkers (or offer special government financing for the poor to get the hogs off the road) that would bring a 15k car into the realm of even those on minimum wage.
Our main disagreement between you and I on this seems to be the method to help the poor have cars. If you only make $8 an hour, you are too poor to be even considering buying a new car. That is not cruel, that's just reality. The LAST thing you would want is the government foisting debt onto the poor. In my view, the way you get those gas hogs off the road is not by having the government blow more money, but by making new cars cheaper to the middle class so those cars exist in greater abundance on the used market. That greater abundance of cheaper, more fuel efficient cars will make the gas hogs unprofitable to keep on the road because people will have an alternative.
But notice how i got modded down for pissing on a sacred cow, the electric car. i do hope you agree that that tech is a dead end with current tech.......
As far as I can see. Electric cars are dead end tech period. Physics itself says that electric cars will always suck because of energy density. Gasoline, Diesel, and even LNG are very energy dense methods of storing energy. Batteries are simply too bulky and heavy to ever compete. Even at 100% effeciency an electric car will still suck because the batteries physically can't store enough energy to matter. Check out the chart.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c6/Energy_density.svg
To electric car proponents: Note that Lithium Ion is the best battery tech we have today and it's at the bottom left of the chart. Then compare with Gasoline. "Better batteries" are not going to solve the problem as we are already at about 50% of the theoretical maximum density from current battery tech. Bettery Tech needs to improve by 30 times to even START competing with gasoline and that is physically impossible. Batteries do lots of things well. Powering a car is not one of them. If you want to build/ buy an electric car, go ahead. Just do not expect me to subsidize it.
Hydrogen is a no-go for numerous reasons as well. The cheapest way to produce it is by cracking natural gas, you might as well just have dual fuel gasoline/LNG powered cars if you are going to try that. Then there are the problems of a hydrogen storage tank vs a natural gas one, again relating to energy density.
We know how to make VERY clean and efficient diesel cars NOW, this can be done with current tech with no major hurdles.
My dad's 1989 Chevy Sprint got 50 MPG without too much effort. They were actually surprisingly safe for front seat passengers, i know several people who totaled theirs, one at 75 mph. (Bit of a death trap for those in the back, but one has to weigh risks.) He parked it out at my uncle's farm about 10 years ago because the clutch wore out. I keep thinking about what it would take to put it on the road again. New clutch and some new hoses is about all I can think of.
You would think so, but if you can sell these for $10 instead of $100 people won't care than they generate half the power and last 1 year instead of 30. If people cared about quality Wal-Mart would have trouble pulling a profit.
Wrong, If people thought the quality of Wal-Mart products was unacceptable, THEN they would have trouble pulling a profit. Given the price, the quality is acceptable for most people.
"Quality" is relative. A $30 microwave may indeed only last 4 years and have a 5% defect rage compared to a $100 microwave that lasts 8 years and has a 1% defect rate, but the consumer may value the extra $70 more than the lower defect rate and longer lifespan and so choosing the $30 microwave is the correct choice. Not to mention that buying two $30 microwaves is still cheaper then buying the higher quality $100 one.
(Not to mention most people don't keep their microwave clean.)
That's more than twice as expensive as what I pay for electricity here in North Dakota. Average price in the US is 12 cents per kWh.
That is what I hear. But when I itemize my total tax bill I pay $5 fixed per month plus about 20 cents pew kWh. This with the bill saying I am paying 8 cents per kWh. There are other variable charges that bring in the other 12 cents.
Well then that is your own personal situation and by all means you should do what makes financial sense for you. For the majority of the country though, it doesn't. If it makes sense because of subsidies, expect people like me to be strongly against it.
-Why is slashdot so anti-solar? I don't get it.
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It's not that we are against it. We are against subsidizing it. Many of us are in touch with reality and see that aside from limited situations it is not cost effective.
- over 20 years of amortisation 1 kWh solar costs around 16 cents. If you use most the solar generated electricity yourself, thats grid parity in most regions.
That's more than twice as expensive as what I pay for electricity here in North Dakota. Average price in the US is 12 cents per kWh.
You also don't mention that if you end up having to redo your roof halfway through, because you installed the panels halfway through its 20 year life, you destroy any cost savings. Unanticipated repairs can also easily destroy any cost savings.
That is only true of companies that pay no/little dividend. People who own those are speculators.
I own stock in several Canadian oil and gas companies that all pay more than a 5% cash dividend. (One has an 11% dividend because I bought it at an undervalued price.) The stock going up or down from month or month doesn't matter to me, what matters is the dividend yield relative to what I paid for those shares and what the company is doing to maintain or increase the dividend over the long term. One came out with a plan to reduce the dividend for two quarters to pay down some debt with the intention of eventually being able to increase the dividend. The price dropped by about 10% IIRC as the short termers were flushed out, I didn't budge. Sure enough, 6 months later they had the debt paid down and returned the dividend to "normal". 6 months later they increased the dividend per share.
If you buy stock just because you think it will go up, you are a speculator, not an investor. If you buy stock because of good P/E and good dividend, then you are investing.
In fact as i have said before if you REALLY want to change the USA in a big way its not electric cars, its a "people's car" that gets 40MPG+ (if its diesel so it can be run on bio fuels so much the better) that comes in at under $10k. If you look up the stats you'll see the average age of a car on the road now is 11 years and the average MPG is barely 20, so by doubling that and at the same time making it cheap enough most of the working poor could afford one (and if you were to offer a cash for clunkers deal then, again so much the better) you could toss all those big gas hogs practically overnight and cut way the hell down on our need for oil.
The only way to meet that price point is to abolish all the safety and environmental regulations that make new cars so obese and expensive. (Do I REALLY need a catalytic converter in North Dakota?) The fuel economy standards are what killed off the station wagon and pushed people into SUVs. Right now you can buy 4 seater dune buggy's that cost $8,000 new. Slap on another $1,500 to $2,000 in bodywork so it is completely enclosed for bad weather and you might be able to pull it off for $10K. Something like that would work for an around-town car.
http://gokartsusa.com/BMSDuneBuggy1000-2.aspx
50 HP, 5 speed manual tyranny.
Perhaps someone could just built the old VW bugs with a slightly modernized design. At a low enough price point people would buy.
I really think that new cars for the poor is a fools errand though as I doubt people would buy such a car. (Though I think companies should be allowed to try.) What I think would be more productive is cheaper cars for the middle class, around $15K perhaps, so that 5 years from now they will be abundant and affordable on the used market for the poor to buy.
What really infuriates me is the government safety mandates on things like airbags. The research that I find shows that they cost 3 times more than the economic benefit they give, but more importantly, what newer and more effective safety technologies are we NOT getting because the money is forcibly being spent on airbags? I would argue that because of airbag mandates we are NOT getting foam metal crumple zones in our cars, which would increase the structural integrity of the car, increase effectiveness of seat-belts, and allow cars to be built lighter for improved MPG. Not only are we not getting them, but the research into it has probably been slowed because of money instead going into airbags.
Let the insurance companies figure it out. If someone wants to buy a car without airbags then let them and let their insurance company charge them accordingly. I honestly think it would be a wash, yes airbag cars are slightly less safe, but the cars are less likely to have to be totaled in a minor crash.
You seem to forget NBC and the Zimmerman 911 tape.
And why can't a corporation do anything of those things? Government, that's why.
I hate to break this to you, but Rollerball is not a documentary. I'm sorry to have to shatter your entire worldview.
How would it be profitable for Ford, in a true free market, to go around and force people in North Dakota to buy Ford vehicles? Mercenaries are very expensive and the local areas would have their own private police/security forces that would oppose them along with local citizenry. Where has this ever happened in history?
The only reason it is profitable for corporations to send GOVERNMENT to do the same is because the corporations do not pay the full cost of of that coercion, society at large pays for it, not the corporation itself. Halliburton doesn't pay the costs of the US going to war. If you could somehow force the corporations to pay the full costs of that enforcement you would see them suddenly not be so supportive of it because it would be unprofitable.
I find it curious that, no matter what happens, the government is NEVER to blame for any mishap in the economy despite the governments heavy involvement. I run across people like that in the jails I do work in all the time. NOTHING is ever their fault, everything is "someone else's" fault.
They then hold up one repealed regulation as proof that the economy was "deregulated" while ignoring the thousands of new regulations that were enacted or ignore how regulations that were NOT repealed functioned absent the repealed regulation.
HD video, music, photos. ETC. Even grandma can fill a 1TB hard drive with HD video without even trying.