Also, the headline is wrong, to put it mildly. As they normally do, the solar-electric propagandists came up with that 5% number by doing math that makes no sense - using POWER USED for the numerator and ELECTRICITY GENERATED for the denominator. Most power isn't electricity, so the number is bogus. Also, California uses a lot more power (and electricity) than they generate, so it's double bogus.
I say the number is "wrong", but MOST solar-electric stories on Slashdot make the exact same "mistake". When someone making an argument consistently screws up the math in the same way, after the error has been pointed out the them many times, that could be called "lying".
The useful number is "how much of the power we use can be generated from ________?" In the case of solar-electric in California, it's less than 2%. That's good in the sense that it's about the correct amount to generate in terms of resources used vs power generated. More would wasteful and hurt people's standard of living. For example: It would be silly to use the sun to heat water, in order to drive a turbine, in order to generate electricity, in order heat a coil, in order to heat water for your shower. If you want hot water for a shower and you have bright sun, just pipe the water for the shower through a large black pipe and heat it directly. That's much more efficient than the Rube Goldberg approach of adding turbines, generators, etc. to it. If you want hot water and have hot water, just use the hot water - it's wasteful to convert it into electricity and back again. Under that kind of analysis, solar electric SHOULD be about 2%. Other sources are better for most of the needs of most of the people in most places, for most of the year.
Microsoft does "me too". Apple did well with the ipod, Microsoft called up China and ordered a cheap copy. Nintendo and the other companies had good game consoles, Microsoft stuck their name on one, apparently without having much of a clue about the market they were entering. They then lose a billion dollars or so on each, stubbornly refusing to admit failure.
Google checks out the market, then releases something that's best-in-class, or often fairly unique, being the first major offering of it's type. They spend a ten or twenty million trying it out. If it only breaks even, they move on to the next idea. They don't keep at a losing strategy, losing a billion dollars on something. Instead, they move on to the next idea until they find which one will make them a billion dollars.
At the end of the day, that's the difference- Microsoft's big initiatives that they really push for years lose a billion dollars, Google's big projects that they really push make a billion dollars.
* Google tried "me too" once, with Google+. Fortunately for them, they can well afford one big error because they are winning big in a dozen other areas.
It's more convenient to plug in a dongle and be done than to plug in a dongle, connect a smartphone, and then hope your application works with the Chromecast. A real hdmi connection will outperform the Chromecast screencasting by a couple orders of magnitude. Since it's Chromebook-like hardware, it'll run Ubuntu or other Linux - the same OS running on everything from desktops and radios to super computers. Programs can be written in any language. It has full remote management capability (ssh etc.) so you can set it up and everything from your desktop, using the same methods you use to manage servers over a network, unlike a smartphone.
I have one use-case right away. We want to hang a monitor or TV on the wall as a kind of digital bulletin board that has constant updates. This device would be perfect. We COULD use a smartphone and a dongle, but just a dongle (no smartphone needed) makes it simpler, and running Linux on the dongle means it's more powerful and flexible- I can program it in Perl, C, Ruby, or PHP rather than being forced to write an Android app in Java.
The government web site doesn't work with any operating system. It doesn't work with any version of the #1 most popular desktop operating system, Windows. It doesn't work with IE, Spartan, Chrome, or Firefox. The government web site plain refuses to work. And by the way, it's a web form a friggin form tag. Many eight-year-olds can build that and make it work.
You equate that with the private company's HARDWARE which works just fine with the predominant operating system, and also works just fine with some versions of minor operating systems. It just has an issue on one version of an OS that few people use. I use OS X, so it might bug me, but that's quite different from "doesn't work at all, under any OS.
Based on the technical women I've worked with, I have to agree with one thing you said:
Women comprise over 50% of population and any... that can tap that... suddenly has a tremendous advantantage
Kidding, of course. Seriously, what you said is true not only of countries, but of COMPANIES. Companies who hire and promote people who do well have a tremendous, almost insurmountable advantage. A company who wasted half of their good people and good candidates would quickly be beat by the competition. Therefore, tremendous successful companies like Google MUST be promoting people who are both technically and with "people skills", employees who work well with others. If Google systematically ignored half the available talent, Apple or Microsoft would wipe the floor with them. They'd never had gotten this big because Yahoo would have had twice as many really good people. Therefore natural forces are such that companies that identify and nurture effective people (effective technically and as a team member) will grow and will win.
Based on the headline, you've decided the governor is stupid. Presumably, you'd vote against stupid politicians, or at least wouldn't vote for him.
The article expalins that the governor once accidentally sent a completely blank email from his Blackberry - he sat on the button or whatever. A guy whose only email was a blank'one sent accidentally is a guy who doesn't use email. Exactly as the governor said, after he was elected he quit using email, to avoid a Hilary situation. He's exactly right - sitting on your phone once doesn't suddenly turn you into someone who uses email for their work.
Yet, with no interest in the facts, you decided based on a clickbait HEADLINE whether or not you'd support the guy. Whatever headline you saw first decided your position, and you end up voting for dumb politicians. Fyi, there is a connection.
I CAN tell you why PHP 3.x and 4.x were used in a lot of projects with security problems. I've made many posts here going into detail. The biggest thing was probably autoglobals. That was insane for a WEB language, even one then intended to be easy. It might make sense for local macros (vbscript) that are supposed to be written by non-programmers.
If you combined few of PHP 4.x blind spots with stupid Plesk running the script via suexec, you either found out you quickly got owned, or more often got owned and didn't even know it.
PHP really sucked in terms of security and there were several very clear reasons for that. Some will say even old PHP could be used to write secure software. Nope, not with the default PHP.INI configuration. Even a blank, empty PHP script contained a significant security risk.
Things are MUCH improved. People who actually know something about language design have gotten involved. Rasmus has said publicly that he doesn't know anything about language design and early versions of PHP proved that. Of course, he wasn't originally creating a programming language, PHP was a CMS, written in Perl. It was ABused as a general purpose programming language, and it didn't do a good job in that role, because it wasn't designed for that role. The newer versions ARE designed as a general purpose web programming language, and they are much better suited to the task.
Let's have a look at molten salt. In order to be more than fair to molten salt proponents, let's take a salt company's marketing numbers and pretend they are actual numbers reliably achievable in the real world.
Torresol claims that in the summer, their molten-salt plant, Gemasolar, can provide power for 24 hours (barring any clouds or rain), so that's what "works just fine" as far as molten salt. They say they are hoping to get it up to 110 GWh/year., and it covers 185 hectares (0.7 square miles), and it cost $419M to build.
The US uses about 2,300,000 GWh/year of energy. Dividing by 110 GWh per power plant, we'd need about 21,000 plants the size of Gemasolar. That would cover 14,600 square miles and cost $9 trillion. That's more than the country spends on food in a decade, just to build it. That doesn't include distribution costs to get it from wherever you can find huge tracks of open, flat land to build the plant and off to the cities.
If you do all this, you've covered a 24-hour period in the summer. As long as you don't have a large weather pass over the country, you're fine. Large storm systems only come every three weeks or so, so your $9 trillion and 14,600 square miles of land does cover our energy needs for a couple of weeks.
> which has a handy graph showing 6 solar farms in desert areas that would work
From 1:00 PM to 3:00 PM, modulo Loster's utter BS. If we believe his silliness, than solar covers us for a few hours, on sunny days. How about the other 21-22 hours per day? I know, you'll just do pumped storage, right? Pump a bunch of water into reservoirs and use it to power hydro plants. Brilliant idea. How big do these reservoirs need to be? Well, see GP. No matter if you fill the reservoirs with rivers or with pumps, you still need a few billion gallons of water, all sitting 30 at least 30 meters above the turbines.
> Yes but we are talking about infants here, how do they even know that cars means speed and power?
Technically, we're not talking about infants, but rather toddlers and above - those able to say "car! To quote you, for example, "A kindergarten..". My littlest doesn't yet pronounce any words, she's working hard on "no", but it comes out "nyam". She sees that cars are big a little bit scary. So yes, by the time they can say "car" and certainly by the time they can ride a bike ("a kindergarten") , tey know that cars are big and fast and powerful enough to carry the whole family around.
My baby, who again cannot yet speak, also knows that the cat is soft and fluffy and she likes to press her face into the cat's fur. Soft and fluffy is comfy, she wants to be close to that. Big, loud and fast is a bit scary. Surprise, she's a girl!
>. So why do I not see an article where it says that Houston and it Suburbs are 100% green over a 3 month period.
Houston doesn't happen to be located beneath a mountain range, where it would get a nice flow of water coming in during the rainy season. Houston also chooses to have affordable electricity available year round. Steady, affordable energy is directly related to all the jobs which Californians are moving to Houston for.
Houston also doesn't happen to have the volcanic fault line that Costa Rica uses for geothermal - less than 1% of locations on earth have that. California does have geothermal potential, the rest of the US does not.
You're spot on about the combination. The US has a couple of places suitable for geothermal, a couple for hydro, etc. If you do the research and the arithmetic, you find that renewables can make a significant impact - 11% to 13% of our total energy needs. That's significant. For the rest, we have the choice of natural gas and other petroleum, or nuclear. At least until we develop some Star Trek quantum generator.
You said "look at Hoover Dam". Okay, I'm looking. I see it's situated in a nice canyon, flooded 100 square miles, and provides less than 1/10,000th of our energy needs. If you go find another 10,000 nice deep canyons, we can flood 1,000,000 miles of land and be okay, until there's a drought.
Since we don't actually have 10,000 canyons, you end up needing to flood basically the entire area between the Rocky Mountains and the Appalachians - I've done the math.
Costa Rica has a population of a few million - think Houston and it's suburbs. They have a couple of dams, which is great when they get heavy rains. Their experience might be interesting to one or two American cities (the ones nearest Niagara Falls, specifically) ; it's nothing like powering the entire United States.
Yep, those who are wired for hunting and fighting just might have an interest in speed and power. Around the house, the car is by far the finest example of speed and power a kid will encounter. Who would have thoughy a Mustang, Ram, or Bronco could engage that part of the brain.
You might even notice that little boys have a disturbing* tendency to violently crash their toy cars, on purpose. Worse, dad doesn't even sit down and talk to the poor disturbed kid because dad is too busy watching football or rugby. We don't outgrow it; we graduate from watching toy cars crash together to watching large men crash into each other.
* Disturbing to some moms and imasculated men. If that includes you, your condition is not permanent; you CAN get your balls back. You just have to decide you want them back. Do not ask your wife for permission on this one.
Does "the media" cause young girls to associate boobs with women, and therefore cause the girls to later grow boobs, or is there perhaps a biological thing called hormones, which effect all manner of gender differences?
Of you look at people who take testerone or other steroids, you'll find that it has a very obvious effect on their behavior, by way of the hormone's effect on the brain. Over the course of millions of years, male brains evolved around their essential tasks of "go kill something and drag it home for dinner" along with "fight off the predator". See how muscle cars and football might stimulate something in the male brain which is now lacking in means to express the "kill something and drag it home" instinct? For these millions of years, females had a different role, to which their brains adapted. Neither is better or worse, our brains and other parts are different.
* obviously I'm speaking of the majority of men vs the majority of women. Exceptions exist - Chrisley probably wouldn't have survived and reproduced in the days of hunting wild boars to eat.
The truth about these agencies is bad. There is no need, and I would say it is harmful, to so distort their statements as to be lying about what they said. This story only harms whatever credibility Privacy International may have had.
What the court response actually said is that a court can grant a search warrant in a criminal case, not just a national a security related case. Okay, so what is the process for such warrants and under what conditions are they granted? What limitations are put on those warrants? What are the consequences for proceeding without a warrant or beyond a warrant? Those are very important questions, which need to be addressed. Pretending those questions don't exist and falsely claiming "they said they can spy on anyone they want, any time they want" is HARMFUL to privacy. A guaranteed way to always lose a fight is by misunderstanding what the fight is. PI has grossly misstated what we're fighting and done is all a disservice in doing so.
true, however many solutions WERE thought impracti
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You have a point. On the other hand, many approaches that WERE impractical 10 or 20 years ago are quite practical now. Consider any solution that in involves a modern computer. Twenty years ago, you'd need a cluster of computers to do what can now be done on a cheap prepaid phone. Any solution to an individual's daily hassles that involves a multi-Ghz processor was written off as impractical. Now, there's an app for that.
Then there are all of the building-blocks that have become available. Facial recognition and machine vision in general cost a few million dollars ten or twenty years ago. Now it's a readily available service already built into the Android OS. When you have readily available modules to easily do what used to cost huge amounts of money, things suddenly become practical that weren't before.
Additionally, but in the same vein, the experts doing all the deep study for decades wouldn't have even THOUGHT of how to leverage technologies which were not available at the time. Knowing about the different technologies that are available or likely to become available, one sometimes sees solutions that you wouldn't think about if you weren't familiar with the tools.
Lastly, in my experience domain experts know a lot about how things are done. Their idea of how things should be done is often based on how they were taught to do it. That's an entirely different mindset from looking at it fresh and considering which methods are actually best suited to the current situation. I've been able to significantly improve processes simply by asking "why"? "Why is this data held in a Word document (actually three versions of the same document) rather than a spreadsheet?". The domain experts knew exactly which version of the Word document to send to each person, and had procedures for change control so that updates to one version normally ended up being reflected in the other versions. I pointed out the "hide column" menu item in Excel and now they no longer need to maintain three different copies of the data in order to look at different sets of attributes.
>. If one is not ignorant, then one need not concern themselves with such things.
You seem like the type of person who appreciates good information. Here's something I found interesting. It turns out that the people "ignorant" about computers are at significantly LOWER risk of exploits than those who work in IT, and the highest risk are programmers.
The highest amount of _damage_ is executives, but IT workers and programmers get hit more often, not less. I suspect it's because we a) install a lot more software, like VNC, open source stuff that occasionally is distributed with trojan attached, etc. b) muck about with admin privileges, allowing exceptions in our firewalls and such, and possibly c) have an inflated sense of security we attribute to our knowledge. I'm not sure of those reasons are correct, but statistically we do get exploited more often.
>. The reality is that the smart money is now with those who divest in fossil fuels first and put their earnings in alternative energy stocks will be the big winners
To be a bit more specific, the journal Nature has called Nanosolar "the poster child for Silicon Valley's interest in solar power". That sounds like an interesting stock. You might want to consider putting some of your money in that company.
Six years after Nature started pumping Nanosolar, in 2012 they announced they planned to actually start making solar panels pretty soon. I understand their stock is _real_ cheap right now.
Also, I heard Obama is backing two other promising companies, Fisker and Solyndra. He says they'll do great, so you might scoop up some of their stock.
I'm sure there is still some culture of embrace, extend, extinguish within Microsoft. I'm sure some in the business products group still feel like they have no competition and they can treat customers as poorly as they wish. However, the worst elements of Microsoft's culture were rooted in their monopoly, the fact that they could do whatever they wanted and customers would still buy from them. Today, the MAJORITY of hardware purchased runs Android, not Windows. I think Microsoft has taken that fact to heart in some ways.
The SAG rate sheet specifies about $3,400 per week for most performers. Recognizing that they only get paid for the time they are on set, not the "work" time put into going to auditions, etc, so figure that's about $1,700 per week of work that they put in.
$1,700 week - yeah sounds like interchangeable people to me. Not the people hiring agents to negotiate for them.
A productivity difference of 10X-20X is well documented. I've seen it several times. Note that's average productivity over a year, not consistently every day. Here's an example:
I've seen more than one instance in which a average, "competent" developer will spend 10 days writing a module to add feature X to some software, to solve business need Y. The expert/guru/rockstar will spend ten minutes changing a setting to solve the same problem.
So the average person spent ten working days, the expert spent ten minutes in this one case. The expert could then be only equally as productive for the rest of day and they will have accomplished in one day more than the first person accomplished in ten days. I very often solve business needs by _removing_ code, removing a restriction or problem. You can imagine that removing a blocking problem can easily be ten times as productive as the typical approach of solving new problems or handling new tasks by building new systems. Simply asking "why can't we use the existing system for this new task?", then tweaking the existing system to handle the new requirement, can be hugely more productive than starting out with the idea that new tasks require new systems to be built.
> wouldn't pay a couple of hours worth of work for union representation, what makes anyone think a developer would give 10-20% to an agent
The people who would want a union are precisely the opposite of those who would want an agent, in general. The union is about COLLECTIVE bargaining, "we all get _____". There's no "I", it's about "we, the workers", who are essentially interchangeable. An agent is about "here's why I'm special and you want to hire me, and I want ___, which you should give me because only I can give you ____".
Google isn't saying you can;t run a porn site. They'll even index your porn site and send traffic to it. They just don't want to run a porn site. Blogger is Google's site. They don't want THEIR site to be a porn site.
You start by implying that it's NOT too complicated for the average person. You then state that criminal cases are decided by a jury and civil cases by a judge, which is incorrect on both points. Criminal cases are frequently heard by a judge only. In fact, the in the majority of criminal cases there is no jury - the judge solely makes the final decision after reviewing the plea agreement. Civil cases routinely include a jury.
So unfortunately it seems to be too complicated for you to grasp even the basics.
Slashdot Mirror
Also, the headline is wrong, to put it mildly. As they normally do, the solar-electric propagandists came up with that 5% number by doing math that makes no sense - using POWER USED for the numerator and ELECTRICITY GENERATED for the denominator. Most power isn't electricity, so the number is bogus. Also, California uses a lot more power (and electricity) than they generate, so it's double bogus.
I say the number is "wrong", but MOST solar-electric stories on Slashdot make the exact same "mistake". When someone making an argument consistently screws up the math in the same way, after the error has been pointed out the them many times, that could be called "lying".
The useful number is "how much of the power we use can be generated from ________?" In the case of solar-electric in California, it's less than 2%. That's good in the sense that it's about the correct amount to generate in terms of resources used vs power generated. More would wasteful and hurt people's standard of living. For example:
It would be silly to use the sun to heat water, in order to drive a turbine, in order to generate electricity, in order heat a coil, in order to heat water for your shower. If you want hot water for a shower and you have bright sun, just pipe the water for the shower through a large black pipe and heat it directly. That's much more efficient than the Rube Goldberg approach of adding turbines, generators, etc. to it. If you want hot water and have hot water, just use the hot water - it's wasteful to convert it into electricity and back again. Under that kind of analysis, solar electric SHOULD be about 2%. Other sources are better for most of the needs of most of the people in most places, for most of the year.
Microsoft does "me too". Apple did well with the ipod, Microsoft called up China and ordered a cheap copy. Nintendo and the other companies had good game consoles, Microsoft stuck their name on one, apparently without having much of a clue about the market they were entering. They then lose a billion dollars or so on each, stubbornly refusing to admit failure.
Google checks out the market, then releases something that's best-in-class, or often fairly unique, being the first major offering of it's type. They spend a ten or twenty million trying it out. If it only breaks even, they move on to the next idea. They don't keep at a losing strategy, losing a billion dollars on something. Instead, they move on to the next idea until they find which one will make them a billion dollars.
At the end of the day, that's the difference- Microsoft's big initiatives that they really push for years lose a billion dollars, Google's big projects that they really push make a billion dollars.
* Google tried "me too" once, with Google+. Fortunately for them, they can well afford one big error because they are winning big in a dozen other areas.
It's more convenient to plug in a dongle and be done than to plug in a dongle, connect a smartphone, and then hope your application works with the Chromecast. A real hdmi connection will outperform the Chromecast screencasting by a couple orders of magnitude. Since it's Chromebook-like hardware, it'll run Ubuntu or other Linux - the same OS running on everything from desktops and radios to super computers. Programs can be written in any language. It has full remote management capability (ssh etc.) so you can set it up and everything from your desktop, using the same methods you use to manage servers over a network, unlike a smartphone.
I have one use-case right away. We want to hang a monitor or TV on the wall as a kind of digital bulletin board that has constant updates. This device would be perfect. We COULD use a smartphone and a dongle, but just a dongle (no smartphone needed) makes it simpler, and running Linux on the dongle means it's more powerful and flexible- I can program it in Perl, C, Ruby, or PHP rather than being forced to write an Android app in Java.
The government web site doesn't work with any operating system. It doesn't work with any version of the #1 most popular desktop operating system, Windows. It doesn't work with IE, Spartan, Chrome, or Firefox. The government web site plain refuses to work. And by the way, it's a web form a friggin form tag. Many eight-year-olds can build that and make it work.
You equate that with the private company's HARDWARE which works just fine with the predominant operating system, and also works just fine with some versions of minor operating systems. It just has an issue on one version of an OS that few people use. I use OS X, so it might bug me, but that's quite different from "doesn't work at all, under any OS.
Based on the technical women I've worked with, I have to agree with one thing you said:
Women comprise over 50% of population and any ... that can tap that ... suddenly has a tremendous advantantage
Kidding, of course. Seriously, what you said is true not only of countries, but of COMPANIES. Companies who hire and promote people who do well have a tremendous, almost insurmountable advantage. A company who wasted half of their good people and good candidates would quickly be beat by the competition. Therefore, tremendous successful companies like Google MUST be promoting people who are both technically and with "people skills", employees who work well with others. If Google systematically ignored half the available talent, Apple or Microsoft would wipe the floor with them. They'd never had gotten this big because Yahoo would have had twice as many really good people. Therefore natural forces are such that companies that identify and nurture effective people (effective technically and as a team member) will grow and will win.
Based on the headline, you've decided the governor is stupid. Presumably, you'd vote against stupid politicians, or at least wouldn't vote for him.
The article expalins that the governor once accidentally sent a completely blank email from his Blackberry - he sat on the button or whatever. A guy whose only email was a blank'one sent accidentally is a guy who doesn't use email. Exactly as the governor said, after he was elected he quit using email, to avoid a Hilary situation. He's exactly right - sitting on your phone once doesn't suddenly turn you into someone who uses email for their work.
Yet, with no interest in the facts, you decided based on a clickbait HEADLINE whether or not you'd support the guy. Whatever headline you saw first decided your position, and you end up voting for dumb politicians. Fyi, there is a connection.
I CAN tell you why PHP 3.x and 4.x were used in a lot of projects with security problems. I've made many posts here going into detail. The biggest thing was probably autoglobals. That was insane for a WEB language, even one then intended to be easy. It might make sense for local macros (vbscript) that are supposed to be written by non-programmers.
If you combined few of PHP 4.x blind spots with stupid Plesk running the script via suexec, you either found out you quickly got owned, or more often got owned and didn't even know it.
PHP really sucked in terms of security and there were several very clear reasons for that. Some will say even old PHP could be used to write secure software. Nope, not with the default PHP.INI configuration. Even a blank, empty PHP script contained a significant security risk.
Things are MUCH improved. People who actually know something about language design have gotten involved. Rasmus has said publicly that he doesn't know anything about language design and early versions of PHP proved that. Of course, he wasn't originally creating a programming language, PHP was a CMS, written in Perl. It was ABused as a general purpose programming language, and it didn't do a good job in that role, because it wasn't designed for that role. The newer versions ARE designed as a general purpose web programming language, and they are much better suited to the task.
Let's have a look at molten salt. In order to be more than fair to molten salt proponents, let's take a salt company's marketing numbers and pretend they are actual numbers reliably achievable in the real world.
Torresol claims that in the summer, their molten-salt plant, Gemasolar, can provide power for 24 hours (barring any clouds or rain), so that's what "works just fine" as far as molten salt. They say they are hoping to get it up to 110 GWh/year., and it covers 185 hectares (0.7 square miles), and it cost $419M to build.
The US uses about 2,300,000 GWh/year of energy. Dividing by 110 GWh per power plant, we'd need about 21,000 plants the size of Gemasolar. That would cover 14,600 square miles and cost $9 trillion. That's more than the country spends on food in a decade, just to build it. That doesn't include distribution costs to get it from wherever you can find huge tracks of open, flat land to build the plant and off to the cities.
If you do all this, you've covered a 24-hour period in the summer. As long as you don't have a large weather pass over the country, you're fine. Large storm systems only come every three weeks or so, so your $9 trillion and 14,600 square miles of land does cover our energy needs for a couple of weeks.
> which has a handy graph showing 6 solar farms in desert areas that would work
From 1:00 PM to 3:00 PM, modulo Loster's utter BS. If we believe his silliness, than solar covers us for a few hours, on sunny days. How about the other 21-22 hours per day? I know, you'll just do pumped storage, right? Pump a bunch of water into reservoirs and use it to power hydro plants. Brilliant idea. How big do these reservoirs need to be? Well, see GP. No matter if you fill the reservoirs with rivers or with pumps, you still need a few billion gallons of water, all sitting 30 at least 30 meters above the turbines.
> Yes but we are talking about infants here, how do they even know that cars means speed and power?
Technically, we're not talking about infants, but rather toddlers and above - those able to say "car! To quote you, for example, "A kindergarten ..". My littlest doesn't yet pronounce any words, she's working hard on "no", but it comes out "nyam". She sees that cars are big a little bit scary. So yes, by the time they can say "car" and certainly by the time they can ride a bike ("a kindergarten") , tey know that cars are big and fast and powerful enough to carry the whole family around.
My baby, who again cannot yet speak, also knows that the cat is soft and fluffy and she likes to press her face into the cat's fur. Soft and fluffy is comfy, she wants to be close to that. Big, loud and fast is a bit scary. Surprise, she's a girl!
>. So why do I not see an article where it says that Houston and it Suburbs are 100% green over a 3 month period.
Houston doesn't happen to be located beneath a mountain range, where it would get a nice flow of water coming in during the rainy season. Houston also chooses to have affordable electricity available year round. Steady, affordable energy is directly related to all the jobs which Californians are moving to Houston for.
Houston also doesn't happen to have the volcanic fault line that Costa Rica uses for geothermal - less than 1% of locations on earth have that. California does have geothermal potential, the rest of the US does not.
You're spot on about the combination. The US has a couple of places suitable for geothermal, a couple for hydro, etc. If you do the research and the arithmetic, you find that renewables can make a significant impact - 11% to 13% of our total energy needs. That's significant. For the rest, we have the choice of natural gas and other petroleum, or nuclear. At least until we develop some Star Trek quantum generator.
You said "look at Hoover Dam". Okay, I'm looking. I see it's situated in a nice canyon, flooded 100 square miles, and provides less than 1/10,000th of our energy needs. If you go find another 10,000 nice deep canyons, we can flood 1,000,000 miles of land and be okay, until there's a drought.
Since we don't actually have 10,000 canyons, you end up needing to flood basically the entire area between the Rocky Mountains and the Appalachians - I've done the math.
Costa Rica has a population of a few million - think Houston and it's suburbs. They have a couple of dams, which is great when they get heavy rains. Their experience might be interesting to one or two American cities (the ones nearest Niagara Falls, specifically) ; it's nothing like powering the entire United States.
Yep, those who are wired for hunting and fighting just might have an interest in speed and power. Around the house, the car is by far the finest example of speed and power a kid will encounter. Who would have thoughy a Mustang, Ram, or Bronco could engage that part of the brain.
You might even notice that little boys have a disturbing* tendency to violently crash their toy cars, on purpose. Worse, dad doesn't even sit down and talk to the poor disturbed kid because dad is too busy watching football or rugby. We don't outgrow it; we graduate from watching toy cars crash together to watching large men crash into each other.
* Disturbing to some moms and imasculated men. If that includes you, your condition is not permanent; you CAN get your balls back. You just have to decide you want them back. Do not ask your wife for permission on this one.
Does "the media" cause young girls to associate boobs with women, and therefore cause the girls to later grow boobs, or is there perhaps a biological thing called hormones, which effect all manner of gender differences?
Of you look at people who take testerone or other steroids, you'll find that it has a very obvious effect on their behavior, by way of the hormone's effect on the brain. Over the course of millions of years, male brains evolved around their essential tasks of "go kill something and drag it home for dinner" along with "fight off the predator". See how muscle cars and football might stimulate something in the male brain which is now lacking in means to express the "kill something and drag it home" instinct? For these millions of years, females had a different role, to which their brains adapted. Neither is better or worse, our brains and other parts are different.
* obviously I'm speaking of the majority of men vs the majority of women. Exceptions exist - Chrisley probably wouldn't have survived and reproduced in the days of hunting wild boars to eat.
The truth about these agencies is bad. There is no need, and I would say it is harmful, to so distort their statements as to be lying about what they said. This story only harms whatever credibility Privacy International may have had.
What the court response actually said is that a court can grant a search warrant in a criminal case, not just a national a security related case. Okay, so what is the process for such warrants and under what conditions are they granted? What limitations are put on those warrants? What are the consequences for proceeding without a warrant or beyond a warrant? Those are very important questions, which need to be addressed. Pretending those questions don't exist and falsely claiming "they said they can spy on anyone they want, any time they want" is HARMFUL to privacy. A guaranteed way to always lose a fight is by misunderstanding what the fight is. PI has grossly misstated what we're fighting and done is all a disservice in doing so.
You have a point. On the other hand, many approaches that WERE impractical 10 or 20 years ago are quite practical now. Consider any solution that in involves a modern computer. Twenty years ago, you'd need a cluster of computers to do what can now be done on a cheap prepaid phone. Any solution to an individual's daily hassles that involves a multi-Ghz processor was written off as impractical. Now, there's an app for that.
Then there are all of the building-blocks that have become available. Facial recognition and machine vision in general cost a few million dollars ten or twenty years ago. Now it's a readily available service already built into the Android OS. When you have readily available modules to easily do what used to cost huge amounts of money, things suddenly become practical that weren't before.
Additionally, but in the same vein, the experts doing all the deep study for decades wouldn't have even THOUGHT of how to leverage technologies which were not available at the time. Knowing about the different technologies that are available or likely to become available, one sometimes sees solutions that you wouldn't think about if you weren't familiar with the tools.
Lastly, in my experience domain experts know a lot about how things are done. Their idea of how things should be done is often based on how they were taught to do it. That's an entirely different mindset from looking at it fresh and considering which methods are actually best suited to the current situation. I've been able to significantly improve processes simply by asking "why"? "Why is this data held in a Word document (actually three versions of the same document) rather than a spreadsheet?". The domain experts knew exactly which version of the Word document to send to each person, and had procedures for change control so that updates to one version normally ended up being reflected in the other versions. I pointed out the "hide column" menu item in Excel and now they no longer need to maintain three different copies of the data in order to look at different sets of attributes.
>. If one is not ignorant, then one need not concern themselves with such things.
You seem like the type of person who appreciates good information. Here's something I found interesting. It turns out that the people "ignorant" about computers are at significantly LOWER risk of exploits than those who work in IT, and the highest risk are programmers.
The highest amount of _damage_ is executives, but IT workers and programmers get hit more often, not less. I suspect it's because we a) install a lot more software, like VNC, open source stuff that occasionally is distributed with trojan attached, etc. b) muck about with admin privileges, allowing exceptions in our firewalls and such, and possibly c) have an inflated sense of security we attribute to our knowledge. I'm not sure of those reasons are correct, but statistically we do get exploited more often.
>. The reality is that the smart money is now with those who divest in fossil fuels first and put their earnings in alternative energy stocks will be the big winners
To be a bit more specific, the journal Nature has called Nanosolar "the poster child for Silicon Valley's interest in solar power". That sounds like an interesting stock. You might want to consider putting some of your money in that company.
Six years after Nature started pumping Nanosolar, in 2012 they announced they planned to actually start making solar panels pretty soon. I understand their stock is _real_ cheap right now.
Also, I heard Obama is backing two other promising companies, Fisker and Solyndra. He says they'll do great, so you might scoop up some of their stock.
I'm sure there is still some culture of embrace, extend, extinguish within Microsoft. I'm sure some in the business products group still feel like they have no competition and they can treat customers as poorly as they wish. However, the worst elements of Microsoft's culture were rooted in their monopoly, the fact that they could do whatever they wanted and customers would still buy from them. Today, the MAJORITY of hardware purchased runs Android, not Windows. I think Microsoft has taken that fact to heart in some ways.
The SAG rate sheet specifies about $3,400 per week for most performers. Recognizing that they only get paid for the time they are on set, not the "work" time put into going to auditions, etc, so figure that's about $1,700 per week of work that they put in.
$1,700 week - yeah sounds like interchangeable people to me. Not the people hiring agents to negotiate for them.
A productivity difference of 10X-20X is well documented. I've seen it several times. Note that's average productivity over a year, not consistently every day. Here's an example:
I've seen more than one instance in which a average, "competent" developer will spend 10 days writing a module to add feature X to some software, to solve business need Y. The expert/guru/rockstar will spend ten minutes changing a setting to solve the same problem.
So the average person spent ten working days, the expert spent ten minutes in this one case. The expert could then be only equally as productive for the rest of day and they will have accomplished in one day more than the first person accomplished in ten days. I very often solve business needs by _removing_ code, removing a restriction or problem. You can imagine that removing a blocking problem can easily be ten times as productive as the typical approach of solving new problems or handling new tasks by building new systems. Simply asking "why can't we use the existing system for this new task?", then tweaking the existing system to handle the new requirement, can be hugely more productive than starting out with the idea that new tasks require new systems to be built.
> wouldn't pay a couple of hours worth of work for union representation, what makes anyone think a developer would give 10-20% to an agent
The people who would want a union are precisely the opposite of those who would want an agent, in general. The union is about COLLECTIVE bargaining, "we all get _____". There's no "I", it's about "we, the workers", who are essentially interchangeable. An agent is about "here's why I'm special and you want to hire me, and I want ___, which you should give me because only I can give you ____".
Google isn't saying you can;t run a porn site. They'll even index your porn site and send traffic to it. They just don't want to run a porn site. Blogger is Google's site. They don't want THEIR site to be a porn site.
Google doesn't want to run a porn site. That makes them evil?
You start by implying that it's NOT too complicated for the average person. You then state that criminal cases are decided by a jury and civil cases by a judge, which is incorrect on both points. Criminal cases are frequently heard by a judge only. In fact, the in the majority of criminal cases there is no jury - the judge solely makes the final decision after reviewing the plea agreement. Civil cases routinely include a jury.
So unfortunately it seems to be too complicated for you to grasp even the basics.