It should be noted that virtually all diesel engines are significantly more efficent than their gasoline counterparts. I'm pretty sure VW used to have some tiny diesels that could do 50+ mpg.
We have the technology to make insanely efficent cars. Why we don't is completely beyond me.
Cigarettes are a somewhat bad analogy to make. Research has shown that niccotine is a highly-effective antidepressant, and that many smokers are actually self-medicating themselves for depression.
It's not as clear-cut of a "choice" as you'd think, which is a big part of what makes it hard to quit.
That said, smoking IS one of the worst things you can do to your body.
"An eye for an eye will make the whole world blind." -- Gandhi
Suing a well-respected charitable organization would be a very bad move for a company as large as Starbucks. Oxfam isn't PETA or Greenpeace -- their goal is aid and development, not advocacy. They screwed up, Starbucks (and others) corrected them, and they now need to put the whole mess behind them.
The best PR move Starbucks could do would be to continue what they're doing now, and pledge some money to help the farmers out until a permanent solution is reached. It would be a drop in the bucket for a company the size of Starbucks, and would be great to boost their public image.
On top of that, the data recovery process would be complicated tenfold if the hard drive is using NTFS, HFS+, or any of the other modern proprietary filesystems that really aren't understood that well by anyone other than their original developers.
An encrypted file(system) would be even worse, especially if it were heavily fragmented. Filtering out the "noise" and piecing together the entire file would be quite difficult.
I'm not saying any of this is exactly impossible, but it would seem like it'd be excessively difficult to accomplish. If someone's willing to expend these sorts of resources to recover your tracks, you should probably consider a safer line of work.
Okay. We may or may not be causing global warming. I will grant you that the climate change we're currently experiencing isn't 100% our fault.
However, as you mentioned, the planet will "adjust" to reach a point of equilibrium. The problem is that this "adjustment" could very well kill us all if it's dramatic enough.
We need to figure out the source of global warming, and stop it or slow it down as much as possible so that things can remain the way they are. Otherwise, we'll have to take the change in stride, and modify the way our society functions in order to adapt to it (ie. move every major city on the planet 20+ miles inland).
Verizon didn't exist 10 years ago. That's where they were.
Of course, if you want to complain about the baby bells, you can blame the Telecommunications act (the one that broke up AT&T) for that. The baby bells didn't have enough capital to make any sort of infrastructure improvements, which is why the phone network remained relatively stagnant for 20 years.
I'm not sure what you're talking about with contracts. Virtually all DSL, Cable, and Satellite providers have them. IIRC, Verizon's contract length was pretty short as long as you didn't sign yourself up for some sort of special promotion. My local cable company I believe locks you in for a year and a half.
Verizon installed 1.5mbps DSL to every home in my town before the cable company even offered 2-way internet service (remember those cable/pots hybrid modems?). By the time the cable company had decent 4mbps service, verizon had 3mbps DSL at half the cost, with FTTP soon to follow.
I don't want to put Verizon foward as a shining beacon of perfection -- they're certainly not. However, in my case, they beat the the cable company by a pretty sizable margin.
(Could you possibly be thinking of Verizon Wireless's arcane contract system? If so, consider that they're a separate company with Verizon only having a 55% stake)
Sorry, but even if we didn't hate Muslim extremists, they'd still hate us.
Uhmm. I don't even know where to begin with this one.
Iran's (democraticaly elected) hard-line government (which has only been in power for a couple of years) was dealt a pretty severe blow yesterday in --- democratic elections in which moderate conservatives took the majority.
The US is also entirely responsible for the present government in Iran. Go read up on the 1979 revolution if you want the full gory details. The government we put in place was much, much worse than what's there now.
Muslims don't hate America A select few highly-visible extremists do. That's what makes them extremists. Christian extremists (and there are a lot of them in the US) hate Muslims as well. One is currently serving as our president. Don't forget the other side of the story. As a Christian, I can safely say that I do not hold feelings of hatred twoard any religion, race, or culture, and can say that the majority of Christians feel the same way. Islam is no different, and in fact, the Qur'an and Sunnah actually build upon the teachings of tolerance set forth in the New Testament.
Islamic political thought has taken a fairly sharp turn to a moderate/conservative ideology (in the traditional small-government sense of the word). As it currently stands, many Muslims are ready to accept/tolerate western values into their culture as a simple admission that 1/3 of the world's Muslims are not living under an Islamic government (and seem to be getting along just fine).
So yes. There are Muslims that hate America, and there are Americans that hate Muslims. Deal with it, and do the best you can to reduce the hatred amongst your own people. Don't go making blanket statements about hundreds of millions of people. That's how wars start.
True, but at least Firefox lets me pick which extensions I run.
My problem with Opera has never been about the compliance. I used Mozilla from the beginning, ran Konqueror frequently, and toyed around with Safari on the mac when it was in its infancy. Sites that "don't work" don't seem to irk me as much as other people.
Opera is fast. Noticably faster I'd argue, than anything else I've used on Windows or Linux (not much experience with the Mac end of things).
But I don't use Opera. It feels bloated. Sure it's fast, but the UI feels awkward and clunky. There were a few releases a two or three years ago that yanked out most of the cruft, but they seem to have gone back to their old ways of including too many features. Even though these features are actually useful and well-implemented, I find that I don't need many of them, and that they get in the way too often, which is completely overwhelming for a new user.
Zotero is an insanely useful Firefox extension that I find myself using more and more. However, I'm damn glad it's not built-in to the browser, because most people simply don't need it.
Firefox's initial rise to popularity came from the fact that the author forked the Mozilla tree, and ripped everything out that was unnecessary, resulting in a lean, fast browser that was charmingly simple to use. (Unfortunately, like Opera, as time has gone on, a lot of that crap has been put back in, but that's a story for another day)
Also, HFCS is linked to Type II Diabetes, not Type I --- just like most "junk food", as approximately 90% of Type II patients are obese.
The fact that HFCS is used so widely, or even at all should be embarrasing to the American people. It's widely agreed upon that it tastes worse than raw sugar, is significantly unhealthier, and is more expensive to grow (without government subsidies). However, thanks to subsidized-capitalism, food manufacturers have little choice but to use HFCS in order to stay afloat.
the iTunes argument doesn't really hold water, as iTunes is released separately from the OS, and just about every major Music-playing app I know of breaks the standard UI conventions. iTunes, Winamp, and Windows Media Player all do. Out of those three, I'd say that iTunes makes the best effort to fit into the surrounding UI, while maintaining a sense of identity and uniqueness.
If you want to complain about Safari, take a look at Firefox. It doesn't really integrate fully into *any* OS, given that it uses XUL instead of whatever native toolkits are available.
I'd actually say that Mail feels similar to iTunes. Apple seems to be gradually migrating all their applications over to the smooth grey color scheme. This effort obviously takes time. I can't say that I fully approve of Mail's appearance compared to some of the other smooth grey applications out there. The toolbar is kind of ugly.
Cablevision was having some pretty serious problems in Northern NJ (sidenote: nobody calls it upstate. that's reserved for NY). They started wiring my town several years ago, with the go-ahead from the town, and the assumption that the present (terrible) cable company (RCN at the time) would lose its franchise once the install was completed. I think there was a stipulation that if RCN also improved its service, it would be allowed to stay and exist in a duopoly.
Years went by. The installation crawled along, and finally ground to a halt. Cablevision was out of money. RCN went bankrupt and withdrew from the region, leaving the area without any sort of decent cable service. There's a new provider that's using the fractured and incomplete RCN/Cablevision network, but it's just as bad as it's always been.
It's a sleazy industry that simply doesn't care about its customers. Verizon is a godsend, even if they are a large anonymous corporation. At least it's some sort of competition. I've been on satellite TV and DSL (and now FioS) for several years now and have absolutely zero regrets.
The point of all this eye candy is that ever since the Vista/OS X graphics libraries got rewritten, all 2-D desktop graphics functions are handled by the normally-dormant video card instead of the CPU. Because the video card typically sits around doing nothing, it can be used for all sorts of superfluous effects.
In practice this translates to a decrease in CPU usage by the windowing interface at best, and break-even at worst.
This is no longer true, as ruled by the supreme court in two separate rulings this past year (1, 2).
Although the cop will still be held responsible for his/her actions, the evidence is admissable, and for all intents and purposes, the 4th ammendment is null and void. How this didn't generate more attention when it happened is beyond my comprehension.
In more than 10,000 exposures, there were six cases of blistering and one instance of second-degree burns in a laboratory accident, the documents claim.
Now, although these statistics seem to indicate that the weapon's relatively safe as far as non-lethal crowd-control goes, one's got to ask...
If this weapon hasn't been deployed yet, where on earth did they find 10,000 willing test subjects to try this thing out, all the time keeping it top-secret? Sounds to me like there's a very serious human/animal-rights violation going on here (apart from the obvious implications of actually using the thing in practice)
I'm not that familiar with the subject, but from what I understand, crude oil gets separated into several parts at the refinery, and the part that's used to make gasoline is different than the part that makes plastics.
I mean, you can walk to either of those two states from anywhere in DC in less time than it takes to commute to Manhattan from long island.
You can also walk to either of the two state from anywhere in DC in less time than it takes to drive. If you've ever had the "humbling" experience of driving on the beltway, you know exactly what I'm talking about.
DC was never really meant to become a bustling metropolis, and you can tell that there is still quite a bit of resistance to that fact, as indicated by the architects of I-95 completely ignoring the effects of routing a major road through such a large city.
Give DC back to Virginia or Maryland (or better yet, just make a brand-new state for northern virginia + DC --- Northern VA is nothing like the rest of the state.) While we're at it, we might as well give NYC, Long Island, and Philadelphia to New Jersey for the same reason.....
$100 computers will offer hope, and widespread open source adoption will bring deep innovation and economic improvement anywhere
Really? Will they? That's a pretty bold statement without much to back it up. I'm skeptical to say the least.
How will widespread adoption of IT help Thailand's economy at the present? I'm having a very difficult time imagining how teaching computer skills to Thailand's children will help them in the long-run, especially living in an agrarian society.
Personally, I feel that public health and public infrastructure are much higher priorities for a developing nation. If you want to improve education, that's great too --- but do it by hiring teachers, building schools, and buying books, and NOT blowing billions ($USD) on laptops.
Well, Europe's been around longer, and they've got fewer trees to work with.
The poorly-constructed buildings are gone after a generation or two, while the well-made ones last virtually forever, as is the case in much of Europe. After awhile, you're left with a ton of very old, very solidly-made buildings. Think of it as architectural darwinism.
Also, wood is cheap, and people these days generally don't plan 75-100 years into the future.
I've noticed that in recent years, even steel and concrete construction is being done poorly. Pity.
The bystander effect is a well-known and well-documented psychological phenomenon.
If more people are present, it is *significantly less likely* that anyone will intervene at all. Go read up on it. It's absolutely frightening, but picturing myself in that sort of situation, I definitely see how it applies.
The difference with having thousands of tiny asteroids is that due to the incresed surface area, they would burn up in the atmosphere. Likewise, once the tiny asteroids break apart, they're doing to drift in various directions, resulting in a much wider area of impact.
This, I think, would be survivable (never mind the improbability of an asteroid "the size of texas")
Slashdot Mirror
It should be noted that virtually all diesel engines are significantly more efficent than their gasoline counterparts. I'm pretty sure VW used to have some tiny diesels that could do 50+ mpg.
We have the technology to make insanely efficent cars. Why we don't is completely beyond me.
Cigarettes are a somewhat bad analogy to make. Research has shown that niccotine is a highly-effective antidepressant, and that many smokers are actually self-medicating themselves for depression.
It's not as clear-cut of a "choice" as you'd think, which is a big part of what makes it hard to quit.
That said, smoking IS one of the worst things you can do to your body.
"An eye for an eye will make the whole world blind." -- Gandhi
Suing a well-respected charitable organization would be a very bad move for a company as large as Starbucks. Oxfam isn't PETA or Greenpeace -- their goal is aid and development, not advocacy. They screwed up, Starbucks (and others) corrected them, and they now need to put the whole mess behind them.
The best PR move Starbucks could do would be to continue what they're doing now, and pledge some money to help the farmers out until a permanent solution is reached. It would be a drop in the bucket for a company the size of Starbucks, and would be great to boost their public image.
On top of that, the data recovery process would be complicated tenfold if the hard drive is using NTFS, HFS+, or any of the other modern proprietary filesystems that really aren't understood that well by anyone other than their original developers.
An encrypted file(system) would be even worse, especially if it were heavily fragmented. Filtering out the "noise" and piecing together the entire file would be quite difficult.
I'm not saying any of this is exactly impossible, but it would seem like it'd be excessively difficult to accomplish. If someone's willing to expend these sorts of resources to recover your tracks, you should probably consider a safer line of work.
You know, I'm actually a tiny bit frightened by the fact that this got modded as informative.
Okay. We may or may not be causing global warming. I will grant you that the climate change we're currently experiencing isn't 100% our fault.
However, as you mentioned, the planet will "adjust" to reach a point of equilibrium. The problem is that this "adjustment" could very well kill us all if it's dramatic enough.
We need to figure out the source of global warming, and stop it or slow it down as much as possible so that things can remain the way they are. Otherwise, we'll have to take the change in stride, and modify the way our society functions in order to adapt to it (ie. move every major city on the planet 20+ miles inland).
Verizon didn't exist 10 years ago. That's where they were.
Of course, if you want to complain about the baby bells, you can blame the Telecommunications act (the one that broke up AT&T) for that. The baby bells didn't have enough capital to make any sort of infrastructure improvements, which is why the phone network remained relatively stagnant for 20 years.
I'm not sure what you're talking about with contracts. Virtually all DSL, Cable, and Satellite providers have them. IIRC, Verizon's contract length was pretty short as long as you didn't sign yourself up for some sort of special promotion. My local cable company I believe locks you in for a year and a half.
Verizon installed 1.5mbps DSL to every home in my town before the cable company even offered 2-way internet service (remember those cable/pots hybrid modems?). By the time the cable company had decent 4mbps service, verizon had 3mbps DSL at half the cost, with FTTP soon to follow.
I don't want to put Verizon foward as a shining beacon of perfection -- they're certainly not. However, in my case, they beat the the cable company by a pretty sizable margin.
(Could you possibly be thinking of Verizon Wireless's arcane contract system? If so, consider that they're a separate company with Verizon only having a 55% stake)
Uhmm. I don't even know where to begin with this one.
Iran's (democraticaly elected) hard-line government (which has only been in power for a couple of years) was dealt a pretty severe blow yesterday in --- democratic elections in which moderate conservatives took the majority.
The US is also entirely responsible for the present government in Iran. Go read up on the 1979 revolution if you want the full gory details. The government we put in place was much, much worse than what's there now.
Muslims don't hate America A select few highly-visible extremists do. That's what makes them extremists. Christian extremists (and there are a lot of them in the US) hate Muslims as well. One is currently serving as our president. Don't forget the other side of the story. As a Christian, I can safely say that I do not hold feelings of hatred twoard any religion, race, or culture, and can say that the majority of Christians feel the same way. Islam is no different, and in fact, the Qur'an and Sunnah actually build upon the teachings of tolerance set forth in the New Testament.
Islamic political thought has taken a fairly sharp turn to a moderate/conservative ideology (in the traditional small-government sense of the word). As it currently stands, many Muslims are ready to accept/tolerate western values into their culture as a simple admission that 1/3 of the world's Muslims are not living under an Islamic government (and seem to be getting along just fine).
So yes. There are Muslims that hate America, and there are Americans that hate Muslims. Deal with it, and do the best you can to reduce the hatred amongst your own people. Don't go making blanket statements about hundreds of millions of people. That's how wars start.
Eh. This wouldn't be entirely necessary, as the elite classes of the world are already under the impression that the earth revolves around them.
True, but at least Firefox lets me pick which extensions I run.
My problem with Opera has never been about the compliance. I used Mozilla from the beginning, ran Konqueror frequently, and toyed around with Safari on the mac when it was in its infancy. Sites that "don't work" don't seem to irk me as much as other people.
Opera is fast. Noticably faster I'd argue, than anything else I've used on Windows or Linux (not much experience with the Mac end of things).
But I don't use Opera. It feels bloated. Sure it's fast, but the UI feels awkward and clunky. There were a few releases a two or three years ago that yanked out most of the cruft, but they seem to have gone back to their old ways of including too many features. Even though these features are actually useful and well-implemented, I find that I don't need many of them, and that they get in the way too often, which is completely overwhelming for a new user.
Zotero is an insanely useful Firefox extension that I find myself using more and more. However, I'm damn glad it's not built-in to the browser, because most people simply don't need it.
Firefox's initial rise to popularity came from the fact that the author forked the Mozilla tree, and ripped everything out that was unnecessary, resulting in a lean, fast browser that was charmingly simple to use. (Unfortunately, like Opera, as time has gone on, a lot of that crap has been put back in, but that's a story for another day)
Also, HFCS is linked to Type II Diabetes, not Type I --- just like most "junk food", as approximately 90% of Type II patients are obese.
The fact that HFCS is used so widely, or even at all should be embarrasing to the American people. It's widely agreed upon that it tastes worse than raw sugar, is significantly unhealthier, and is more expensive to grow (without government subsidies). However, thanks to subsidized-capitalism, food manufacturers have little choice but to use HFCS in order to stay afloat.
If I saw a missile/rocket flying through the sky near the DC suburbs, I'd be running underground as fast as I could.
the iTunes argument doesn't really hold water, as iTunes is released separately from the OS, and just about every major Music-playing app I know of breaks the standard UI conventions. iTunes, Winamp, and Windows Media Player all do. Out of those three, I'd say that iTunes makes the best effort to fit into the surrounding UI, while maintaining a sense of identity and uniqueness.
If you want to complain about Safari, take a look at Firefox. It doesn't really integrate fully into *any* OS, given that it uses XUL instead of whatever native toolkits are available.
I'd actually say that Mail feels similar to iTunes. Apple seems to be gradually migrating all their applications over to the smooth grey color scheme. This effort obviously takes time. I can't say that I fully approve of Mail's appearance compared to some of the other smooth grey applications out there. The toolbar is kind of ugly.
You don't get out much, do you?
Cablevision was having some pretty serious problems in Northern NJ (sidenote: nobody calls it upstate. that's reserved for NY). They started wiring my town several years ago, with the go-ahead from the town, and the assumption that the present (terrible) cable company (RCN at the time) would lose its franchise once the install was completed. I think there was a stipulation that if RCN also improved its service, it would be allowed to stay and exist in a duopoly.
Years went by. The installation crawled along, and finally ground to a halt. Cablevision was out of money. RCN went bankrupt and withdrew from the region, leaving the area without any sort of decent cable service. There's a new provider that's using the fractured and incomplete RCN/Cablevision network, but it's just as bad as it's always been.
It's a sleazy industry that simply doesn't care about its customers. Verizon is a godsend, even if they are a large anonymous corporation. At least it's some sort of competition. I've been on satellite TV and DSL (and now FioS) for several years now and have absolutely zero regrets.
Actually, no.
The point of all this eye candy is that ever since the Vista/OS X graphics libraries got rewritten, all 2-D desktop graphics functions are handled by the normally-dormant video card instead of the CPU. Because the video card typically sits around doing nothing, it can be used for all sorts of superfluous effects.
In practice this translates to a decrease in CPU usage by the windowing interface at best, and break-even at worst.
This is no longer true, as ruled by the supreme court in two separate rulings this past year (1, 2).
Although the cop will still be held responsible for his/her actions, the evidence is admissable, and for all intents and purposes, the 4th ammendment is null and void. How this didn't generate more attention when it happened is beyond my comprehension.
Now, although these statistics seem to indicate that the weapon's relatively safe as far as non-lethal crowd-control goes, one's got to ask...
If this weapon hasn't been deployed yet, where on earth did they find 10,000 willing test subjects to try this thing out, all the time keeping it top-secret? Sounds to me like there's a very serious human/animal-rights violation going on here (apart from the obvious implications of actually using the thing in practice)
I'm not that familiar with the subject, but from what I understand, crude oil gets separated into several parts at the refinery, and the part that's used to make gasoline is different than the part that makes plastics.
You can also walk to either of the two state from anywhere in DC in less time than it takes to drive. If you've ever had the "humbling" experience of driving on the beltway, you know exactly what I'm talking about.
DC was never really meant to become a bustling metropolis, and you can tell that there is still quite a bit of resistance to that fact, as indicated by the architects of I-95 completely ignoring the effects of routing a major road through such a large city.
Give DC back to Virginia or Maryland (or better yet, just make a brand-new state for northern virginia + DC --- Northern VA is nothing like the rest of the state.) While we're at it, we might as well give NYC, Long Island, and Philadelphia to New Jersey for the same reason.....
I'm not sure I'd eat anything labeled as an "ipple"
Really? Will they? That's a pretty bold statement without much to back it up. I'm skeptical to say the least.
How will widespread adoption of IT help Thailand's economy at the present? I'm having a very difficult time imagining how teaching computer skills to Thailand's children will help them in the long-run, especially living in an agrarian society.
Personally, I feel that public health and public infrastructure are much higher priorities for a developing nation. If you want to improve education, that's great too --- but do it by hiring teachers, building schools, and buying books, and NOT blowing billions ($USD) on laptops.
Well, Europe's been around longer, and they've got fewer trees to work with.
The poorly-constructed buildings are gone after a generation or two, while the well-made ones last virtually forever, as is the case in much of Europe. After awhile, you're left with a ton of very old, very solidly-made buildings. Think of it as architectural darwinism.
Also, wood is cheap, and people these days generally don't plan 75-100 years into the future.
I've noticed that in recent years, even steel and concrete construction is being done poorly. Pity.
The bystander effect is a well-known and well-documented psychological phenomenon.
If more people are present, it is *significantly less likely* that anyone will intervene at all. Go read up on it. It's absolutely frightening, but picturing myself in that sort of situation, I definitely see how it applies.
The difference with having thousands of tiny asteroids is that due to the incresed surface area, they would burn up in the atmosphere. Likewise, once the tiny asteroids break apart, they're doing to drift in various directions, resulting in a much wider area of impact.
This, I think, would be survivable (never mind the improbability of an asteroid "the size of texas")