Yeah. This is very much true. Normally if there is the threat of snow, people rush the grocery stores to buy milk, bread etc. Even if the weather reports says it will be half an inch and gone the next day, it is still the same thing. The interesting thing is that even if you have lived in a snowy region and you know that you probably shouldn't panic for such a minor amount, you can still get caught up in this cycle. My parents are from Michigan originally (lived there for 30 years) and they have been living in North Georgia for around 30 years now -- they usually head to the store as well. The problem is, if you don't also rush to the store with everyone else, then there's a good chance you might not be able to get anything that you need from a grocery store for several days even after the snow is gone. So in the end, even people that aren't really worried, or people not in an area that is supposed to get snow, end up going out on the roads because they are worried that they might not be able to get any food supplies...
Except in South Michigan. A/K/A Florida (Michigan actually had a welfare office in Miami).
RIght after Xmas 1990 snow hit Florida, and we're not talking the once-every-4-years flurries sometimes seen as far south as Tampa. This was a full inch or 2 that actually stuck to the ground and covered roads.
They closed the Interstate highways as far south as Daytona and even the convenience stores were closed. Because Florida has absolutely no equipment or even training for snow. And many of the bridges were vaulting, so lots of luck if the road gets slippery.
They dumped sand in critical places. No shortage of that down there. Salt is plentiful too, but it's mostly in the water.
The lack of living grandparents probably has a negative effect on a child, or even might prevent his birth. Not a large effect, though.
Studies have indicated that even members outside the direct family tree can have an effect. For example, aunts who help with child-rearing or support and even bachelor members of harem-oriented species such as sea lions.
I feel my vote is useless anyways no mater who I vote for. Still I did vote for a 3rd party so I can go on to bitch about Obama and if he lost then the ass who won too
It's never useless.
If nothing else, it puts the bastard who did get elected on notice that their mandate isn't as overwhelming as they'd like to pretend it is.
Large mammals managed to survive for a long, long time before people came to Americas and then, shortly after people came, they were killed off by "climate and environmental changes"? Sounds a bit fishy to me!
Tobacco comes from the Americas. They obviously all died of smoking-related illnesses!
Sure, mammoths are tasty, but my dogs won't even touch sabertooth meat. That stuff is nasty.
Seriously.
In general, herbivores are tasty. Carnivores and omnivores? No way. A friend of mine in Alaska had to kill the neighborhood grizzly bear, and, indeed, even his dogs wouldn't eat the meet. They ended up having to bury it (though I suppose burning would have worked, too).
Obama got it because tbey wanted to slap George Bush in the face. He should have declined because that is beneath the presidency to participate in such an exercise.
Although this case may also be seen as a slap at the president, at least Snowden wpuld arguably deserve it, if you approve of him.
The Nobel Peace Prize was originally established by someone who had created what he considered a horrible weapon of war to honor and encourage people who had worked to promote and enable world peace.
Not for not being George W Bush, not even for uncovering a lot of contra-democratic practices. It is, after all, not a "democracy" prize. And by that standard Yasser Arafat actually is more entitled to it than either Obama or Snowden. Not by much, since while dealing peace with one hand, he still had the other under the table dealing war, as we later discovered, but at least to some degree.
As to whether Obama should have turned it down specifically because it was awarded to slap GWB in the face, I'm not certain I'd go that far. We already knew that US Presidents cannot be looked to as exemplars of virtue.
On the other hand, he really should have refused it for the simple reason that he hadn't done anything specifically to promote peace at the time. And that was before the drones.
"First you convince large quantities of people to vote against their best interests. That's unfortunately very easy. I was reading yesterday a (ahem) "discussion" on returning to 90% taxation for the top tier. "How would you like it if the government stole 90% of YOUR income was a common retort", yet you can pretty much count on none of them ever becoming wealthy enough to qualify"
So wait a moment, the fact that people have a sense of morality and do not approve of theft even when they are guaranteed that they will not personally be victimized is a *problem* for you?
Classic. The whole problem with the world is that the oppressed are not wretched enough.
Q.E.D.
The "taxes are theft" fallacy. You're EXACTLY the kind of manipulant that I was illustrating.
Taxes are often a waste, although where the waste is is depends on who you are asking. From the same jar of soundbites: "If you don't like it, why don't you go somewhere else?" There's a difference between waste and theft. One of the biggest differences between them is that you pay taxes to keep the real, literal thieves - both domestic and foreign - from your door. You pay for a lot of other, less desirable (to you) things as well, but efficiency isn't a hallmark of government, and for that we should all be very, very grateful.
By homing in on a single "moral" issue, you've identified yourself with the second group in the list. We've got your number come election time, sucker.
If you want to argue that government is immoral, that's not a problem for me. But I'm not worried as much about minor immoralities any more than I am about whether governments should be pushing moralities on others when the very foundations of the Republic are under attack. It smacks too much of worrying about motes in other people's eyes when one's own has a 2x4 in it.
Just as an aside, I refuse to get all panicked about taxes on people with far more money they than they need to live comfortably because for many years I was paying over 35% of my own income in taxes and living a lot better than I do now under lower taxes. Plus, most people never qualified for the 90% bracket. To do so, you've got to be swimming in money to begin with. It's not a case where the hit comes from people who are barely squeaking by as it is. We actually have more of that particular curse now than we did then.
Truly wealthy people complain about taxes, yes (don't we all?). But if the level of taxation is actually hitting you where you live, you weren't that rich to begin with. For one thing, you apparently cannot afford a good tax consultant.
First you convince large quantities of people to vote against their best interests. That's unfortunately very easy. I was reading yesterday a (ahem) "discussion" on returning to 90% taxation for the top tier. "How would you like it if the government stole 90% of YOUR income was a common retort", yet you can pretty much count on none of them ever becoming wealthy enough to qualify. Nor that even after being plundered of 9/10ths of their income (which isn't the same as assets) that the putative victims could still buy and sell their defenders by the busload.
Secondly, you distract voters on secondary issues. If you get enough people to vote against a more pro-freedom candidate because he's "too Liberal" instead of the fact that he's willing to fight against further deterioration of our alleged principles, or make single-focus campaigns acceptable (Tax Cuts for EVERYONE! No killing BABIES! I'll say NO to DRUGS!).
Thirdly, organize elections into single-party primaries. This is a proven technique for filtering out moderates, because the extremists vote for extremists, the moderates tend not to show (and in any event, being moderate for a party isn't the same as moderate for the population as a whole).
Fourth, turn the election from one-person-one-vote to one-dollar-one-vote. Obviously not literally, and dollars don't buy that many votes in the USA, but they do buy bigger megaphones, and sometimes an election can come down to whomever can shout the loudest.
Fifth, encourage a feeling of hopelessness. "My Vote doesn't count". "Voting third-party is just throwing your vote away". "The system is rigged, so why bother?"
And finally, give them tenure once elected. Much of the strength of democracy as implemented in the USA is that we have, in effect, a mini-revolution every few years. If a bad idea comes along, you don't have to live with it until its proponents die off if you can vote in fresh blood. But unlike the Presidency, Congress is designed for long-term membership. Not only is there the natural power of the incumbency, but if you can get your guy onto a major pork committe, you can ensure that no matter how he/she rapes the rest of the country - or even your own district - that this critter will bribe the voters with military bases, construction projects, and other perks.
Must have been an April fools article. Since when is a garlic press useful?
In my case, since last night when I made dinner. A garlic press smashes cell walls in a way that results in more intense flavor (and less graininess) than simply mincing.
Nevertheless, all of those thing can work just fine with ABS plastic, since they are primarily compressive loads.
That part I'm more skeptical about, since I have a plastic potato ricer: something very definitely compressive. And I always worry that the handle or plunger will snap when I feed it an especially stubborn load. The handle is more of a shearing load, but the plunger is pure compression.
After Bush had already stated that you're either with "us" (meaning him) or you're with the terrorists and the American public were still bleating like sheep.
Way to take it out of context and put your own spin on it. Bush was addressing foreign nations at that point in his speech. The "us" he was referring to, was the majority of Americans who supported some sort of retaliation for 9/11. But by all means, go ahead and tout your revisionist history.
"Revisitionist History"?
This was the era where a politician caught in public without his/her American Flag lapel pin was accused of "hating freedom". So yes, it was by no means just foreign nations that that particular leverage was being applied to.
If we'd really been looking simply for retaliation, we wouldn't have allowed ourselves to be stampeded into Iraq, where Saddam Hussein hated Al-Quaeda.
Bush asked Congress for authorization and CONGRESS authorized the actions first.
After Bush had already stated that you're either with "us" (meaning him) or you're with the terrorists and the American public were still bleating like sheep.
And what will replace it? I'm sure this has been asked before but I don't know the answer. Library literally means a collection of books—static, physically recorded information—the kind of thing future libraries are least likely to collect. It's quite a transformation. Library is coming to mean a gathering/making place of things drawn dynamically from elsewhere.
It may mean literally a collection of books, but it didn't stay that way very long, I'm sure. Libraries in the real world are typically collections of cultural resources, and while books may be what they're most famous for, that's not all you'll usually find there. At one time at least, our local system allowed you to check out paintings and other forms of art. I've checked out more than a few audio recordings in various media. More recently, the local branch has a pretty nice collection of movies and TV shows on DVD. And, of course, now we have public Internet access there. And newspapers/other periodicals. I suspect maybe even Lego blocks in the kid's section.
Actual manufacturing facilities aren't traditionally libary resources, but unlike a machine or woodworking shop, 3D printers are fairly quiet and won't litter the place with metal filings or sawdust.
As for gathering, the local libraries also have public meeting rooms, used as polling places, club meeting sites, and so forth. So maybe not as big a transformation as it seems.
On the other hand, having ridden one down from factory to near-junkyard, I can tell you which parts get harder to find replacements for over the years.
The "go" parts tend to be pretty generic, and in modern cars with everything packed in tight and assembled by machine, the expensive component of the repair is generally the labor. The "pretty" parts, on the other hand, are changed often on a yearly basis and even something as basic as rubber window trim gets hard to find after a decade when the original has rotted out. Much less stuff like taillight lenses. So if you could print up a an exact replacement without having to scour junkyards, it would be great.
The UK does not get a lot of hurricanes. There is an important distinction between hurricanes and cyclones in general, as the UK does get extratropical cyclones plenty, although I don't know of the statistics suggesting which country gets more of those.
What the UK gets a goodly quantity of is former hurricanes. Hurricanes that spawn off West Africa, move west towards the Carribbean and US, then turn north, then northeast and head straight towards Ireland and Wales. By the time they reach about 40 degrees North or so, they lose tropical characteristics, but persist as large areas of weather moving towards the UK. I think that in some cases, they then head towards places like Germany, where they name them and call them "Orkans", but I'm not sure that all Orkans were originally Atlantic storms or vice versa.
Hurricanes spawned in the Gulf of Mexico are less likely to make it to Europe, since in order to escape the Gulf, they have to cross land, which deflates them severely. Plus some Gulf hurricanes end up in the Pacific instead of taking the northeast track. Hurricane Ivan several years back came up from the Gulf, crossed Georgia into the Atlantic, then headed South and west back into Florida, giving some residents multiple hits from the same storm.
A Corporation is NOT a one-person-per-vote democracy. It is one-SHARE-per-vote.
Sometimes it is not even one-share-per-vote. Thanks to inventive structures involving different share classes, the owners of a tiny minority of shares can sometimes end up controlling the majority of the vote.
Yup. The most common version of this is Preferred Stock. Although I once got suckered into buying shares of a start-up that had a class with the worst of common and the worst of preferred shares combined.
OK. I am actually a free market libertarian software engineer. This does bother me, but I would suggest that the solution to these sorts of problems is exposure rather than laws. I don't feel that my ability to market my skills is significantly affected. I don't need to work for any company that would underpay me. Even though these are big companies, the percentage of software engineers they hire is a small percentage of the total.
As far as examples of negative aspects of the free market go, this is pretty mild.
I would suggest that a free market approach would be to go one step further and have shareholders conspire to limit CEO salaries. Those cut into corporate profits as well.
Lots of luck.
A Corporation is NOT a one-person-per-vote democracy. It is one-SHARE-per-vote.
And guess who owns the majority of the shares in most corporations?
One or two good EMP's and 99.95% of the e-books are gone forever. Floppy discs and CD-rom's last a few decades, perhaps. Paper lasts ~500 years or so. One of these three is much more resilient to disaster than the other two.
Depends on the disaster. You could probably keep the entire library on a Terabyte drive and easily afford 2 or 3 spares, including offsite backup. And, as far as I'm aware (which isn't very), an EMP would only fry the controller electronics and leave the media intact. Though, fortunately, EMPs are not an everyday occurrence and hopefully won't become one. Lightning strikes on the other hand...
Conversely, paper books burn quite well, as Ray Bradbury once noted. They even provide their own fuel. I can personally attest to what a flood will do to them, and then of course, there are roaches, silverfish, bookworms, and so forth.
There are two ways to be "resilent". One is in the durability of the current media, one is in the durability of the content. Physical paper is durable physically, but replicating what's printed on it is a non-trivial task, and even if you did back up your dead tree books with spares, they'd still require a lot of physical space and climate control. On the other hand, I have files that were originally created on 8-inch floppy disks. I have doubts that after all these years I could still make those old drives in the garage read them (much less the computer with the controller that operates them), but since I migrated the content from media to media over the years, I still have the information, even though the original physical media is now essentially useless.
I like the idea of lending e-readers in *addition* to books. XO Tablet is $125. Comparable to the cost of 10-20 midrange books, but it does provide free access to the 40,000 books on Project Gutenberg. My thinking was mostly that WiFi deployment is cheaper than a) routing ethernet cables everywhere and b) making desktop space for everyone with a device. Books would also require grant money.
The trick in my opinion is to get access to a cheap device that is not locked to any particular content ecosystem.
There are much cheaper readers than that. For example, the low-end Nook units. And, unless they've removed functionality, it's quite easy to get content in a variety of formats into them. The standard Nook format is epub, which is available direct from Gutenberg.
I think that some may be assuming that a WiFi device wouldn't be appropriate for lending to homes without WiFi, but that's not really true. Assuming you do retain a physical library, as long as it has WiFi, it really doesn't take appreciably longer to download a book and carry it home than it does to check out a physical book. You don't need WiFi to read the book, only to transfer it.
My grass doesn't care if your sick and it needs to be cut. Sorry I will find someone else to do it.
This is the Wal-Mart approach to service. Which is to say, no service. Only getting the Low Price Always counts.
Not the quality of the product, not the fact that your regular vendor knows you and can anticipate your needs - for example, not to run the hedge trimmers over the prize rosebushes, nothing but the pay-at-the register dollar amount. Future costs be damned, and so what if the cheap imported cat food kills poor Snuggles. Everything must operate at 110% for 100% of the time, with no reserve capacity to handle unexpected loads or breakdowns or even normal maintenance. Otherwise, it's "inefficient" and should be replaced with something that can be persuaded to be more co-operative.
This is the attitude that poor people have that helps them feel richer than they are, and that rich people have when buying something that they don't really care about.
Slashdot Mirror
Give us a break. We're shredding as fast as we can.
And at this point, the rest of the globe probably would say we deserved it.
Yeah. This is very much true. Normally if there is the threat of snow, people rush the grocery stores to buy milk, bread etc. Even if the weather reports says it will be half an inch and gone the next day, it is still the same thing. The interesting thing is that even if you have lived in a snowy region and you know that you probably shouldn't panic for such a minor amount, you can still get caught up in this cycle. My parents are from Michigan originally (lived there for 30 years) and they have been living in North Georgia for around 30 years now -- they usually head to the store as well. The problem is, if you don't also rush to the store with everyone else, then there's a good chance you might not be able to get anything that you need from a grocery store for several days even after the snow is gone. So in the end, even people that aren't really worried, or people not in an area that is supposed to get snow, end up going out on the roads because they are worried that they might not be able to get any food supplies...
Except in South Michigan. A/K/A Florida (Michigan actually had a welfare office in Miami).
RIght after Xmas 1990 snow hit Florida, and we're not talking the once-every-4-years flurries sometimes seen as far south as Tampa. This was a full inch or 2 that actually stuck to the ground and covered roads.
They closed the Interstate highways as far south as Daytona and even the convenience stores were closed. Because Florida has absolutely no equipment or even training for snow. And many of the bridges were vaulting, so lots of luck if the road gets slippery.
They dumped sand in critical places. No shortage of that down there. Salt is plentiful too, but it's mostly in the water.
The lack of living grandparents probably has a negative effect on a child, or even might prevent his birth. Not a large effect, though.
Studies have indicated that even members outside the direct family tree can have an effect. For example, aunts who help with child-rearing or support and even bachelor members of harem-oriented species such as sea lions.
I feel my vote is useless anyways no mater who I vote for. Still I did vote for a 3rd party so I can go on to bitch about Obama and if he lost then the ass who won too
It's never useless.
If nothing else, it puts the bastard who did get elected on notice that their mandate isn't as overwhelming as they'd like to pretend it is.
Large mammals managed to survive for a long, long time before people came to Americas and then, shortly after people came, they were killed off by "climate and environmental changes"? Sounds a bit fishy to me!
Tobacco comes from the Americas. They obviously all died of smoking-related illnesses!
Something tells me elephants won't pay attention to barbed wire fences.
I dunno. Elephants are supposed to be pretty thin-skinned.
Assuming they don't just rip the posts out of the ground or something. They're also relatively smart.
What's wrong with you?
Sure, mammoths are tasty, but my dogs won't even touch sabertooth meat. That stuff is nasty.
Seriously.
In general, herbivores are tasty. Carnivores and omnivores? No way. A friend of mine in Alaska had to kill the neighborhood grizzly bear, and, indeed, even his dogs wouldn't eat the meet. They ended up having to bury it (though I suppose burning would have worked, too).
So.. no bacon for you?
Obama got it because tbey wanted to slap George Bush in the face. He should have declined because that is beneath the presidency to participate in such an exercise.
Although this case may also be seen as a slap at the president, at least Snowden wpuld arguably deserve it, if you approve of him.
The Nobel Peace Prize was originally established by someone who had created what he considered a horrible weapon of war to honor and encourage people who had worked to promote and enable world peace.
Not for not being George W Bush, not even for uncovering a lot of contra-democratic practices. It is, after all, not a "democracy" prize. And by that standard Yasser Arafat actually is more entitled to it than either Obama or Snowden. Not by much, since while dealing peace with one hand, he still had the other under the table dealing war, as we later discovered, but at least to some degree.
As to whether Obama should have turned it down specifically because it was awarded to slap GWB in the face, I'm not certain I'd go that far. We already knew that US Presidents cannot be looked to as exemplars of virtue.
On the other hand, he really should have refused it for the simple reason that he hadn't done anything specifically to promote peace at the time. And that was before the drones.
"First you convince large quantities of people to vote against their best interests. That's unfortunately very easy. I was reading yesterday a (ahem) "discussion" on returning to 90% taxation for the top tier. "How would you like it if the government stole 90% of YOUR income was a common retort", yet you can pretty much count on none of them ever becoming wealthy enough to qualify"
So wait a moment, the fact that people have a sense of morality and do not approve of theft even when they are guaranteed that they will not personally be victimized is a *problem* for you?
Classic. The whole problem with the world is that the oppressed are not wretched enough.
Q.E.D.
The "taxes are theft" fallacy. You're EXACTLY the kind of manipulant that I was illustrating.
Taxes are often a waste, although where the waste is is depends on who you are asking. From the same jar of soundbites: "If you don't like it, why don't you go somewhere else?" There's a difference between waste and theft. One of the biggest differences between them is that you pay taxes to keep the real, literal thieves - both domestic and foreign - from your door. You pay for a lot of other, less desirable (to you) things as well, but efficiency isn't a hallmark of government, and for that we should all be very, very grateful.
By homing in on a single "moral" issue, you've identified yourself with the second group in the list. We've got your number come election time, sucker.
If you want to argue that government is immoral, that's not a problem for me. But I'm not worried as much about minor immoralities any more than I am about whether governments should be pushing moralities on others when the very foundations of the Republic are under attack. It smacks too much of worrying about motes in other people's eyes when one's own has a 2x4 in it.
Just as an aside, I refuse to get all panicked about taxes on people with far more money they than they need to live comfortably because for many years I was paying over 35% of my own income in taxes and living a lot better than I do now under lower taxes. Plus, most people never qualified for the 90% bracket. To do so, you've got to be swimming in money to begin with. It's not a case where the hit comes from people who are barely squeaking by as it is. We actually have more of that particular curse now than we did then.
Truly wealthy people complain about taxes, yes (don't we all?). But if the level of taxation is actually hitting you where you live, you weren't that rich to begin with. For one thing, you apparently cannot afford a good tax consultant.
Or, you know - rigged voting mechanisms.
Oh, it's rigged alright.
First you convince large quantities of people to vote against their best interests. That's unfortunately very easy. I was reading yesterday a (ahem) "discussion" on returning to 90% taxation for the top tier. "How would you like it if the government stole 90% of YOUR income was a common retort", yet you can pretty much count on none of them ever becoming wealthy enough to qualify. Nor that even after being plundered of 9/10ths of their income (which isn't the same as assets) that the putative victims could still buy and sell their defenders by the busload.
Secondly, you distract voters on secondary issues. If you get enough people to vote against a more pro-freedom candidate because he's "too Liberal" instead of the fact that he's willing to fight against further deterioration of our alleged principles, or make single-focus campaigns acceptable (Tax Cuts for EVERYONE! No killing BABIES! I'll say NO to DRUGS!).
Thirdly, organize elections into single-party primaries. This is a proven technique for filtering out moderates, because the extremists vote for extremists, the moderates tend not to show (and in any event, being moderate for a party isn't the same as moderate for the population as a whole).
Fourth, turn the election from one-person-one-vote to one-dollar-one-vote. Obviously not literally, and dollars don't buy that many votes in the USA, but they do buy bigger megaphones, and sometimes an election can come down to whomever can shout the loudest.
Fifth, encourage a feeling of hopelessness. "My Vote doesn't count". "Voting third-party is just throwing your vote away". "The system is rigged, so why bother?"
And finally, give them tenure once elected. Much of the strength of democracy as implemented in the USA is that we have, in effect, a mini-revolution every few years. If a bad idea comes along, you don't have to live with it until its proponents die off if you can vote in fresh blood. But unlike the Presidency, Congress is designed for long-term membership. Not only is there the natural power of the incumbency, but if you can get your guy onto a major pork committe, you can ensure that no matter how he/she rapes the rest of the country - or even your own district - that this critter will bribe the voters with military bases, construction projects, and other perks.
Must have been an April fools article. Since when is a garlic press useful?
In my case, since last night when I made dinner. A garlic press smashes cell walls in a way that results in more intense flavor (and less graininess) than simply mincing.
Nevertheless, all of those thing can work just fine with ABS plastic, since they are primarily compressive loads.
That part I'm more skeptical about, since I have a plastic potato ricer: something very definitely compressive. And I always worry that the handle or plunger will snap when I feed it an especially stubborn load. The handle is more of a shearing load, but the plunger is pure compression.
After Bush had already stated that you're either with "us" (meaning him) or you're with the terrorists and the American public were still bleating like sheep.
Way to take it out of context and put your own spin on it. Bush was addressing foreign nations at that point in his speech. The "us" he was referring to, was the majority of Americans who supported some sort of retaliation for 9/11. But by all means, go ahead and tout your revisionist history.
"Revisitionist History"?
This was the era where a politician caught in public without his/her American Flag lapel pin was accused of "hating freedom". So yes, it was by no means just foreign nations that that particular leverage was being applied to.
If we'd really been looking simply for retaliation, we wouldn't have allowed ourselves to be stampeded into Iraq, where Saddam Hussein hated Al-Quaeda.
Bush asked Congress for authorization and CONGRESS authorized the actions first.
After Bush had already stated that you're either with "us" (meaning him) or you're with the terrorists and the American public were still bleating like sheep.
A couple of thousand dollars for a 3D printer or free replaces hundreds of thousands of dollars in equipment - and specific skills and training.
Bingo! I remember a quote about the Video Toaster appliance that was popular back in the late 1980's:
"It's like getting a Mercedes Benz for $100".
And what will replace it? I'm sure this has been asked before but I don't know the answer. Library literally means a collection of books—static, physically recorded information—the kind of thing future libraries are least likely to collect. It's quite a transformation. Library is coming to mean a gathering/making place of things drawn dynamically from elsewhere.
It may mean literally a collection of books, but it didn't stay that way very long, I'm sure. Libraries in the real world are typically collections of cultural resources, and while books may be what they're most famous for, that's not all you'll usually find there. At one time at least, our local system allowed you to check out paintings and other forms of art. I've checked out more than a few audio recordings in various media. More recently, the local branch has a pretty nice collection of movies and TV shows on DVD. And, of course, now we have public Internet access there. And newspapers/other periodicals. I suspect maybe even Lego blocks in the kid's section.
Actual manufacturing facilities aren't traditionally libary resources, but unlike a machine or woodworking shop, 3D printers are fairly quiet and won't litter the place with metal filings or sawdust.
As for gathering, the local libraries also have public meeting rooms, used as polling places, club meeting sites, and so forth. So maybe not as big a transformation as it seems.
Most cars are more plastic than metal.
Not the important parts.
On the other hand, having ridden one down from factory to near-junkyard, I can tell you which parts get harder to find replacements for over the years.
The "go" parts tend to be pretty generic, and in modern cars with everything packed in tight and assembled by machine, the expensive component of the repair is generally the labor. The "pretty" parts, on the other hand, are changed often on a yearly basis and even something as basic as rubber window trim gets hard to find after a decade when the original has rotted out. Much less stuff like taillight lenses. So if you could print up a an exact replacement without having to scour junkyards, it would be great.
The UK does not get a lot of hurricanes. There is an important distinction between hurricanes and cyclones in general, as the UK does get extratropical cyclones plenty, although I don't know of the statistics suggesting which country gets more of those.
What the UK gets a goodly quantity of is former hurricanes. Hurricanes that spawn off West Africa, move west towards the Carribbean and US, then turn north, then northeast and head straight towards Ireland and Wales. By the time they reach about 40 degrees North or so, they lose tropical characteristics, but persist as large areas of weather moving towards the UK. I think that in some cases, they then head towards places like Germany, where they name them and call them "Orkans", but I'm not sure that all Orkans were originally Atlantic storms or vice versa.
Hurricanes spawned in the Gulf of Mexico are less likely to make it to Europe, since in order to escape the Gulf, they have to cross land, which deflates them severely. Plus some Gulf hurricanes end up in the Pacific instead of taking the northeast track. Hurricane Ivan several years back came up from the Gulf, crossed Georgia into the Atlantic, then headed South and west back into Florida, giving some residents multiple hits from the same storm.
Japanese tech is the high-priced stuff these days.
Because it kicks butt?
Because they don't do cheap junk anymore. That's what China is for, these days.
So, when is the next China mission to the Moon?
I guess cheap knock offs don't work well on the moon either.
But Japanese ones kick your butt!
This isn't the 1960's. Japanese tech is the high-priced stuff these days.
A Corporation is NOT a one-person-per-vote democracy. It is one-SHARE-per-vote.
Sometimes it is not even one-share-per-vote. Thanks to inventive structures involving different share classes, the owners of a tiny minority of shares can sometimes end up controlling the majority of the vote.
Yup. The most common version of this is Preferred Stock. Although I once got suckered into buying shares of a start-up that had a class with the worst of common and the worst of preferred shares combined.
OK. I am actually a free market libertarian software engineer. This does bother me, but I would suggest that the solution to these sorts of problems is exposure rather than laws. I don't feel that my ability to market my skills is significantly affected. I don't need to work for any company that would underpay me. Even though these are big companies, the percentage of software engineers they hire is a small percentage of the total.
As far as examples of negative aspects of the free market go, this is pretty mild.
I would suggest that a free market approach would be to go one step further and have shareholders conspire to limit CEO salaries. Those cut into corporate profits as well.
Lots of luck.
A Corporation is NOT a one-person-per-vote democracy. It is one-SHARE-per-vote.
And guess who owns the majority of the shares in most corporations?
One or two good EMP's and 99.95% of the e-books are gone forever. Floppy discs and CD-rom's last a few decades, perhaps. Paper lasts ~500 years or so.
One of these three is much more resilient to disaster than the other two.
Depends on the disaster. You could probably keep the entire library on a Terabyte drive and easily afford 2 or 3 spares, including offsite backup. And, as far as I'm aware (which isn't very), an EMP would only fry the controller electronics and leave the media intact. Though, fortunately, EMPs are not an everyday occurrence and hopefully won't become one. Lightning strikes on the other hand...
Conversely, paper books burn quite well, as Ray Bradbury once noted. They even provide their own fuel. I can personally attest to what a flood will do to them, and then of course, there are roaches, silverfish, bookworms, and so forth.
There are two ways to be "resilent". One is in the durability of the current media, one is in the durability of the content. Physical paper is durable physically, but replicating what's printed on it is a non-trivial task, and even if you did back up your dead tree books with spares, they'd still require a lot of physical space and climate control. On the other hand, I have files that were originally created on 8-inch floppy disks. I have doubts that after all these years I could still make those old drives in the garage read them (much less the computer with the controller that operates them), but since I migrated the content from media to media over the years, I still have the information, even though the original physical media is now essentially useless.
I like the idea of lending e-readers in *addition* to books. XO Tablet is $125. Comparable to the cost of 10-20 midrange books, but it does provide free access to the 40,000 books on Project Gutenberg. My thinking was mostly that WiFi deployment is cheaper than a) routing ethernet cables everywhere and b) making desktop space for everyone with a device. Books would also require grant money.
The trick in my opinion is to get access to a cheap device that is not locked to any particular content ecosystem.
There are much cheaper readers than that. For example, the low-end Nook units. And, unless they've removed functionality, it's quite easy to get content in a variety of formats into them. The standard Nook format is epub, which is available direct from Gutenberg.
I think that some may be assuming that a WiFi device wouldn't be appropriate for lending to homes without WiFi, but that's not really true. Assuming you do retain a physical library, as long as it has WiFi, it really doesn't take appreciably longer to download a book and carry it home than it does to check out a physical book. You don't need WiFi to read the book, only to transfer it.
My grass doesn't care if your sick and it needs to be cut. Sorry I will find someone else to do it.
This is the Wal-Mart approach to service. Which is to say, no service. Only getting the Low Price Always counts.
Not the quality of the product, not the fact that your regular vendor knows you and can anticipate your needs - for example, not to run the hedge trimmers over the prize rosebushes, nothing but the pay-at-the register dollar amount. Future costs be damned, and so what if the cheap imported cat food kills poor Snuggles. Everything must operate at 110% for 100% of the time, with no reserve capacity to handle unexpected loads or breakdowns or even normal maintenance. Otherwise, it's "inefficient" and should be replaced with something that can be persuaded to be more co-operative.
This is the attitude that poor people have that helps them feel richer than they are, and that rich people have when buying something that they don't really care about.
Music? No problem... most of us here in our offices like music.
However, one lady has planned 3 weddings in the past 2 years, as well as various conferences and stuff that is barely job related.
And, I found out last week that her son is getting married, so we're going thru another wedding plan....
Sounds like she's in the wrong line of work!