"That's silly, it would be used only for lawful purposes by the proper authorities."
Two of the homes listed in the first publication of gun owners' names have had their homes burglarized - and one of them only had their gun safe stolen.
Meanwhile, there have been calls by leglislators to confiscate guns - by forcing registration and/or using current registration lists.
Neither of those are "straw men." Indeed, they were mostly just predictions based on knowing how people think and act.
"Gun haters have to accept and get over the fact that guns are NOT going to be banned,"...then why are some people calling for gun bans? And trying to pass laws that effectively ban guns? And why are there many places in the US with fairly comprehensive gun bans, like Chicago?
"Once an academic has a job, they can then expect to work 60-80 hours per week for the first five to six years."
Sorry, but no.
You do realize that you're claiming that a new college teacher would be working 12 hour days, five days a week, at minimum? Up to almost seven days a week at the high end?
I spent a lot of time in college (attending and working), and the sight of a teacher - of any sort - working on campus during nights and weekends was rare indeed. Unless they were "counseling" a coed to improve her grades...
That final link is hilarious - if you think about the claims that are made in it.
He makes a big point of the "free" work he has to do prepping for the class (preparing the syllabus, et cetera), then adds in extra time during the semester for coming up with the tests - which should be part of preparing the syllabus.
Of course, for most college teachers, "preparation" is "what book do I read out of each week?" Total real time? About an hour.
He then talks about office hours - 8 hours per week, just sitting there waiting for the students to come bask in his knowledge. Never mind, of course, that most professors only get a few students per day, and they never spend more than a few minutes on each. Most of the rest of the time is spent doing that class prep he moans about.
In other words, he double counted most of the things he pretended that he does each week.
Let's look at this realistically...
Monday- Wednesday-Friday: 8-9 class 9-10 kill time until office hours 10-12, office hours (Two students drop in for ten minutes each, do all actual paperwork and class prep during this time.) 12-1 lunch 1-2 second class 2-3 office hours (One student, maybe. Grade papers until four if tests that week) Go home
Tuesday-Thursday: 9:30-11 third class 11-12 office hours (One student, maybe. Take early lunch if bored) 12-1 lunch 2-3:30 fourth class 3:30-4 office hours (Nobody shows up, go home early most days.) Go home
Here's the funny part... he pretends he has MORE work the second year. This assumes he lost all of his tests and prep paperwork from the previous semesters, and has to completely rebuild his syllabus from square one every semester. Um... nope. Hell, in a lot of cases, new professors get "hand-me-down" course outlines and support materials from the guys who had to teach the class in previous years.
...using climate change as an excuse to raise rates? A win-win.
If the scaremongers are right, they cover possible extra expenses... which have not - in any sense - shown up. No extra bad weather, hurricanes, et cetera. Just higher payouts from covering more people.
If they're wrong, the insurance companies get more money for free, and they get the environmental folks to help them get the rate increases approved from various government entities.
"We need to raise our rates to allow for extra payouts from climate change."
"Do we get a refund if you don't have to pay out more?"
"No. But don't you feel better knowing that we might?"
Increasing the number of scans per machine doesn't increase the usage of helium by any great amount - the major consumption of the gas is from ongoing leakage.
Once you have enough MRI machines in a given market, consumption is fairly stable.
On the other hand, once you have a saturated market in MRI hardware, the price of scans drops dramatically, which is why doctors here "overuse" the machines. That's also why you can get a walk-in appointment to get a full-body MRI for a few hundred bucks in much of the US, while it's a several-month wait list in most of the world (if it's available at all).
At one point, there were more MRI clinics in Orlando, Florida than there were in the entire United Kingdom - and quite a bit of the Orlando market was from people flying there from the UK and Canada to get immediate scans.
Build more helium extraction plants in natural gas refineries.
Really.
The reason helium was (relatively) cheap was that the US built a nice large extraction plant at a natural gas field with a very high concentration of helium. That field is starting to run out, so prices are naturally going up.
Helium is not, however, limited to that one field. There are many other natural gas fields with varying concentrations of helium, and all you need to do is add a cryogenic helium extraction plant to a natural gas refinery to pull that helium out of the existing gas feeds. This is already happening in a few places, and with current technology, it's not that expensive to build more plants. It's only cost effective in a field with higher concentrations of helium - but there are quite a few of those.
The United States has proven helium reserves of about fifty years... and unproven reserves of about a thousand times that. ("Proven" means "we know it's there," and "unproven" means "we're pretty sure it's there, but haven't gotten around to it yet for economic or legal reasons").
I played it for a while last year, then gave up on it.
I went in again this week to see how the game worked under the Free to Play model. It really didn't. The worst thing was finding out that you needed to buy an auction house license to use the AH in game.
That's the thing about "free to play." It's not free. It's just a lot of tiny little cheap things that add up to about the same amount as a "pay to play" game, except you have to spend a lot more time fiddling with the mechanics before you can even really play the game.
Richard Muller is a lot of things (a fairly good scientist for one), and the press keeps insisting he's a "former skeptic," but nobody seems to be able to find anything he's ever said that put him in the "skeptic" camp...
Yeah, that was something else I forgot to mention - I see (literally) hundreds of laptops, from all sorts of brands, each year.
I get all of the sob stories, all of the support nightmares, and then I get to make them work with random networks and projection systems.
The Toshibas are the ones that tend to be problem-free. That's why I bought mine. It's been pretty close to perfect for the last couple of years. The only thing I don't like is a minor design issue - they didn't put screw attachments for the external VGA connector, so you have to rely on friction (or gaff tape) to make sure the connector doesn't come off. That's almost universal nowadays, though, and if you're not a Power Point Ranger, it's a non-issue.
We're talking about a laptop that's traveled across the country (and out of the country) a few times, has been carried to work in a motorcycle backpack (a lot), and has been used to test out and operate high-end and low-end corporate video systems of all sorts. It's the machine we break out when we want to test a system that we aren't sure is working - if the system is working at all, something will show up. Of course, a lot of that comes from having an actual dedicated graphics chip (GeForce 310M) with a bit of dedicated graphics RAM (512 megs) - those shared memory machines tend to have issues with drivers and pushing signals through external ports. It's not really a massive gaming machine or anything like that, but it'll do a lot more than 90% of the "business" laptops out there.
I work with a lot of different laptop brands - I do convention and trade show computer support, among other things - and a lot of the "business class" machines out there are pretty weak in the specs department - no better (and often worse) than a good-quality "consumer" machine. Construction and case quality is often worse for the "business" machines.
I use a Toshiba Satellite A665 (a couple of years old). It's a 15.6" consumer-class machine, it has a full keyboard, a "real" graphics chip, and an i7 processor. I've only seen a few "business" machines actually in use in the last couple of years that come close in performance or specs. It's handled a lot of travel, been used for everything up to and including running high-res videos and animations on huge screens, and never even hiccuped. It also cost less than $900 when I got it. Machines with better specs are going for under $800 now.
Don't lock yourself into the "business" category - it's often just a way to get a few hundred bucks more out of a category-blinded MIS purchasing department.
Enough cooler, apparently, to more than balance out the relatively local heat we've seen in the US, which is caused by a regional weather situation that's also apparently starting to change.
Not the ones that show up as having dramatic expansion. Pretty much anything more than a mile inland isn't going to have a direct connection to the ocean.
The map has a lot of different levels for ocean rise, but they don't show the 0.3 meter "most probable" one from the current IPCC report.
The closest they have is one meter - three times the predicted level - and it doesn't seem to do much of anything - just a few inland lakes that magically rise in levels, even though they aren't connected to the sea.
Oh, well, I guess they'll fix that in version 2.0. Right?
Sure, it would be nice to have much more efficient solar cells, but there's another issue keeping costs up.
It's the home infrastructure.
Right now, it costs more to install the solar cells on a roof than it does to make them, and once you add in the cabling and battery/storage system for balancing the load or for nighttime use, the actual power generating part of the system is much less than half of the whole system cost. Increasing efficiency is great, and will let you cut the overall size of the system for a similar capacity, but the big issue is making a solar system that's easy to install, with cheap storage, for a lot less.
Cheap batteries and inexpensive support systems are the things we need now...
The original models also predicted a bunch of things that didn't come to pass by now.
For example, they assumed an accelerating world population growth (it's slowing).
There were a lot of other things - they assumed all growth was exponential, and all resource recovery was fairly linear.
Both of these were not really true, especially the food production numbers.
Sure, you can find a lot of charts in the original "The Limits to Growth" that peak and crash about 2030 - but you can also find a lot of charts that show peaks and crashes (that didn't happen) in the 1980s.
You have to remember that, basically, they have a love for exponential graphs and linear assumptions (like the use of lead in fuels, which basically stopped years ago).
If he's got the astronaut wings, then he's an astronaut.
Now, if he's no longer in the program, then he should list it on his resume and not under current occupation, but that's not really too big of a deal.
If the race is so close that being an astronaut would get him enough votes to make a difference, there are other issues they should probably go after first.
"stuff that didn't use any of their works, but used their rule set."
In other words, you used their works - the rule set.
It's amazing how often complaints like this boil down to "I wanted to use someone else's work, but was too cheap to buy the rights, but still wanted to either make money off of the thing or give it away for free."
Here's the thing: if you need the rules to make the game work, then the rules have value to you - and you should pay for them.
If not, then make up your own rules. This is the part that stops almost everyone with those "great ideas." I can't count the number of times I've been at conventions with game company people and heard something like this:
"Yeah, I have this great idea for an online game using (insert brand name). I want to use your trademarks, your company name, and your rule set, I don't want to pay you for it, there's no way it will make you any money, you're probably going to have to spend money on lawyers defending your trademarks somewhere along the way, and people are going to come whining to you when the product actually sucks. Here's the idea." (The idea stinks) "What do you think?"
Slashdot Mirror
"from stationary sources"
Kinda forgot automobiles and other vehicles.
Not to mention that once you exclude cars and power plants, third place is pretty far down the list.
Electric shock?
Much better.
Speaking of bad at reading comprehension: where did I disagree with the previous comment, other than my last paragraph?
I merely pointed out some additional information.
"That's silly, it would be used only for lawful purposes by the proper authorities."
Two of the homes listed in the first publication of gun owners' names have had their homes burglarized - and one of them only had their gun safe stolen.
Meanwhile, there have been calls by leglislators to confiscate guns - by forcing registration and/or using current registration lists.
Neither of those are "straw men." Indeed, they were mostly just predictions based on knowing how people think and act.
"Gun haters have to accept and get over the fact that guns are NOT going to be banned," ...then why are some people calling for gun bans? And trying to pass laws that effectively ban guns? And why are there many places in the US with fairly comprehensive gun bans, like Chicago?
"Once an academic has a job, they can then expect to work 60-80 hours per week for the first five to six years."
Sorry, but no.
You do realize that you're claiming that a new college teacher would be working 12 hour days, five days a week, at minimum? Up to almost seven days a week at the high end?
I spent a lot of time in college (attending and working), and the sight of a teacher - of any sort - working on campus during nights and weekends was rare indeed. Unless they were "counseling" a coed to improve her grades...
That final link is hilarious - if you think about the claims that are made in it.
He makes a big point of the "free" work he has to do prepping for the class (preparing the syllabus, et cetera), then adds in extra time during the semester for coming up with the tests - which should be part of preparing the syllabus.
Of course, for most college teachers, "preparation" is "what book do I read out of each week?" Total real time? About an hour.
He then talks about office hours - 8 hours per week, just sitting there waiting for the students to come bask in his knowledge. Never mind, of course, that most professors only get a few students per day, and they never spend more than a few minutes on each. Most of the rest of the time is spent doing that class prep he moans about.
In other words, he double counted most of the things he pretended that he does each week.
Let's look at this realistically...
Monday- Wednesday-Friday:
8-9 class
9-10 kill time until office hours
10-12, office hours (Two students drop in for ten minutes each, do all actual paperwork and class prep during this time.)
12-1 lunch
1-2 second class
2-3 office hours (One student, maybe. Grade papers until four if tests that week)
Go home
Tuesday-Thursday:
9:30-11 third class
11-12 office hours (One student, maybe. Take early lunch if bored)
12-1 lunch
2-3:30 fourth class
3:30-4 office hours (Nobody shows up, go home early most days.)
Go home
Here's the funny part... he pretends he has MORE work the second year. This assumes he lost all of his tests and prep paperwork from the previous semesters, and has to completely rebuild his syllabus from square one every semester. Um... nope. Hell, in a lot of cases, new professors get "hand-me-down" course outlines and support materials from the guys who had to teach the class in previous years.
...using climate change as an excuse to raise rates? A win-win.
If the scaremongers are right, they cover possible extra expenses... which have not - in any sense - shown up. No extra bad weather, hurricanes, et cetera. Just higher payouts from covering more people.
If they're wrong, the insurance companies get more money for free, and they get the environmental folks to help them get the rate increases approved from various government entities.
"We need to raise our rates to allow for extra payouts from climate change."
"Do we get a refund if you don't have to pay out more?"
"No. But don't you feel better knowing that we might?"
Different touchscreen technology.
Old-school surface capacitance touchscreen kiosks often lose calibration - or can be deliberately miscalibrated for fun and profit.
There were billboards all over Orlando for a while, offering whole-body MRIs for $500 cash.
You see, when you have a million-dollar machine, it's better to have an extra $500 in hand than an idle piece of hardware and no income.
Increasing the number of scans per machine doesn't increase the usage of helium by any great amount - the major consumption of the gas is from ongoing leakage.
Once you have enough MRI machines in a given market, consumption is fairly stable.
On the other hand, once you have a saturated market in MRI hardware, the price of scans drops dramatically, which is why doctors here "overuse" the machines. That's also why you can get a walk-in appointment to get a full-body MRI for a few hundred bucks in much of the US, while it's a several-month wait list in most of the world (if it's available at all).
At one point, there were more MRI clinics in Orlando, Florida than there were in the entire United Kingdom - and quite a bit of the Orlando market was from people flying there from the UK and Canada to get immediate scans.
Build more helium extraction plants in natural gas refineries.
Really.
The reason helium was (relatively) cheap was that the US built a nice large extraction plant at a natural gas field with a very high concentration of helium. That field is starting to run out, so prices are naturally going up.
Helium is not, however, limited to that one field. There are many other natural gas fields with varying concentrations of helium, and all you need to do is add a cryogenic helium extraction plant to a natural gas refinery to pull that helium out of the existing gas feeds. This is already happening in a few places, and with current technology, it's not that expensive to build more plants. It's only cost effective in a field with higher concentrations of helium - but there are quite a few of those.
The United States has proven helium reserves of about fifty years... and unproven reserves of about a thousand times that. ("Proven" means "we know it's there," and "unproven" means "we're pretty sure it's there, but haven't gotten around to it yet for economic or legal reasons").
I played it for a while last year, then gave up on it.
I went in again this week to see how the game worked under the Free to Play model. It really didn't. The worst thing was finding out that you needed to buy an auction house license to use the AH in game.
That's the thing about "free to play." It's not free. It's just a lot of tiny little cheap things that add up to about the same amount as a "pay to play" game, except you have to spend a lot more time fiddling with the mechanics before you can even really play the game.
Richard Muller is a lot of things (a fairly good scientist for one), and the press keeps insisting he's a "former skeptic," but nobody seems to be able to find anything he's ever said that put him in the "skeptic" camp...
Thanks, guys.
Yeah, that was something else I forgot to mention - I see (literally) hundreds of laptops, from all sorts of brands, each year.
I get all of the sob stories, all of the support nightmares, and then I get to make them work with random networks and projection systems.
The Toshibas are the ones that tend to be problem-free. That's why I bought mine. It's been pretty close to perfect for the last couple of years. The only thing I don't like is a minor design issue - they didn't put screw attachments for the external VGA connector, so you have to rely on friction (or gaff tape) to make sure the connector doesn't come off. That's almost universal nowadays, though, and if you're not a Power Point Ranger, it's a non-issue.
We're talking about a laptop that's traveled across the country (and out of the country) a few times, has been carried to work in a motorcycle backpack (a lot), and has been used to test out and operate high-end and low-end corporate video systems of all sorts. It's the machine we break out when we want to test a system that we aren't sure is working - if the system is working at all, something will show up. Of course, a lot of that comes from having an actual dedicated graphics chip (GeForce 310M) with a bit of dedicated graphics RAM (512 megs) - those shared memory machines tend to have issues with drivers and pushing signals through external ports. It's not really a massive gaming machine or anything like that, but it'll do a lot more than 90% of the "business" laptops out there.
"You obviously are willing to trade weight for specs"
I forgot to mention that my 15" machine is also very light for that size - less than seven pounds.
It certainly weighs less than most of the "business" laptops in the 16" range.
Which full-sized laptop with numeric keypad do you have?
I work with a lot of different laptop brands - I do convention and trade show computer support, among other things - and a lot of the "business class" machines out there are pretty weak in the specs department - no better (and often worse) than a good-quality "consumer" machine. Construction and case quality is often worse for the "business" machines.
I use a Toshiba Satellite A665 (a couple of years old). It's a 15.6" consumer-class machine, it has a full keyboard, a "real" graphics chip, and an i7 processor. I've only seen a few "business" machines actually in use in the last couple of years that come close in performance or specs. It's handled a lot of travel, been used for everything up to and including running high-res videos and animations on huge screens, and never even hiccuped. It also cost less than $900 when I got it. Machines with better specs are going for under $800 now.
Don't lock yourself into the "business" category - it's often just a way to get a few hundred bucks more out of a category-blinded MIS purchasing department.
...is trending cooler.
Enough cooler, apparently, to more than balance out the relatively local heat we've seen in the US, which is caused by a regional weather situation that's also apparently starting to change.
The current world record for a circumnavigation by a sailing ship is just over 45.5 days. Less than one tenth the time.
The record for a solo circumnavigation by a sailboat is under two months.
All this does is remind us how inefficient solar power is with current technology.
Not the ones that show up as having dramatic expansion. Pretty much anything more than a mile inland isn't going to have a direct connection to the ocean.
The map has a lot of different levels for ocean rise, but they don't show the 0.3 meter "most probable" one from the current IPCC report.
The closest they have is one meter - three times the predicted level - and it doesn't seem to do much of anything - just a few inland lakes that magically rise in levels, even though they aren't connected to the sea.
Oh, well, I guess they'll fix that in version 2.0. Right?
Sure, it would be nice to have much more efficient solar cells, but there's another issue keeping costs up.
It's the home infrastructure.
Right now, it costs more to install the solar cells on a roof than it does to make them, and once you add in the cabling and battery/storage system for balancing the load or for nighttime use, the actual power generating part of the system is much less than half of the whole system cost. Increasing efficiency is great, and will let you cut the overall size of the system for a similar capacity, but the big issue is making a solar system that's easy to install, with cheap storage, for a lot less.
Cheap batteries and inexpensive support systems are the things we need now...
The original models also predicted a bunch of things that didn't come to pass by now.
For example, they assumed an accelerating world population growth (it's slowing).
There were a lot of other things - they assumed all growth was exponential, and all resource recovery was fairly linear.
Both of these were not really true, especially the food production numbers.
Sure, you can find a lot of charts in the original "The Limits to Growth" that peak and crash about 2030 - but you can also find a lot of charts that show peaks and crashes (that didn't happen) in the 1980s.
You have to remember that, basically, they have a love for exponential graphs and linear assumptions (like the use of lead in fuels, which basically stopped years ago).
If he's got the astronaut wings, then he's an astronaut.
Now, if he's no longer in the program, then he should list it on his resume and not under current occupation, but that's not really too big of a deal.
If the race is so close that being an astronaut would get him enough votes to make a difference, there are other issues they should probably go after first.
"stuff that didn't use any of their works, but used their rule set."
In other words, you used their works - the rule set.
It's amazing how often complaints like this boil down to "I wanted to use someone else's work, but was too cheap to buy the rights, but still wanted to either make money off of the thing or give it away for free."
Here's the thing: if you need the rules to make the game work, then the rules have value to you - and you should pay for them.
If not, then make up your own rules. This is the part that stops almost everyone with those "great ideas." I can't count the number of times I've been at conventions with game company people and heard something like this:
"Yeah, I have this great idea for an online game using (insert brand name). I want to use your trademarks, your company name, and your rule set, I don't want to pay you for it, there's no way it will make you any money, you're probably going to have to spend money on lawyers defending your trademarks somewhere along the way, and people are going to come whining to you when the product actually sucks. Here's the idea." (The idea stinks) "What do you think?"