Another chrono-American here who wishes for more general ability to move between the voice and text worlds: Parent was given the impression that GV was being canceled because Google has a history of blipping in and out of experimental technologies too fast.
Actually, the Tenaha TX scandal resulted in an admission of guilt, a mountain of stolen personal assets, a big settlement and a change in the town's police procedures, but the cops involved were quietly eased into other jobs without serving the five consecutive life sentences that would have been morally justified by their actions.
Yet when we film the police, it makes them more jerkish. Why is that? If we live in a surveillance society, why don't we have a countervailing right to surveill back? If there is an accusation of excess in police interactions, footage from both sides could be the best evidence of what actually happened.
Freedom to shop around would help us a lot even before patent reform. Pharma companies routinely sell the same product at radically different prices in different markets, depending on what each market will bear; in Mexico, for example, our familiar branded drugs - not fakes or generics, and manufactured by the same American companies - are available for a fraction of the price, because that's what Mexico's market will bear. Prices are a lot higher in the US because pharma has paid for laws in place that prevent us from shopping around, as we can for hard disks or flatscreens, on the global online market. Not long ago Google had to pay half a billion dollars to the federosaurus because it hosted Canadian pharmacy ads on its site. How many cheap drugs for needy children might that sum have bought?
" Problem is that quacks always think they are qualified, and we have the entire morass of the pseudo-health industry."
Quackery flourishes today, amid all that regulation that putatively protects us from ourselves. People who believe in homeopathy or paleo diets or that polio is caused by evil spirits can already ply their trade, so all the anti-competition laws do is prevent the rest of us from getting real healthcare at open-market prices. So far as I'm concerned, the quackery believers can't autodarwinate and get out of our way soon enough.
Because the crisis, by exposing the clubby and monopolistic nature of the current healthcare process, will cause its economic model to collapse. The feds will undoubtedly try to impose price controls, because this is the only way they know how to respond in such a situation. At that point, healthcare will FINALLY have to accept the more open-market approach that so many of us have suggested: prices "on the wall" for all procedures so the consumer can make open choices, freedom to shop around worldwide for better drug prices, freedom of entry to the field for technical specialists (nurse/practitioners, midwives, et. al.), and an end to artificially limited med school openings and artificial barriers to employment in the field when practitioners move to different states.
I'll be glad to see the old insurance companies go, too. How often have you had to go on a road trip with half the right number of pills because you have to wait until a certain calendar date to get a refill?
Each of us operates according to the standards of our chosen field. Here, for example, is how the codemonkeys at Adobe would treat cancer:
1. Select the Clone Stamp tool; 2. Click on an area of normal skin that has the same illumination as the cancerous area; 3. Use Clone Stamp to copy the selected normal area to the tumor site; 4. Use Spot Healing Brush to smooth any edge mismatches at the boundary of the cloned area; 5. Apply a very light Gaussian Blur to the whole region.
See! No more having to throw away a perfectly good model because cancer develops in the middle of a shoot. But oops - forgot that vital last step for any Adobe product:
6. Unexpectedly abort to the OS without saving because you detected a trivial licensing glitch in this copy of the application.
I actually did live in the time you describe, and guess what: people like you complained in precisely the same terms about what the amount of TV we watched was doing to our minds. And what do you miss, exactly, when you are "no longer interacting with" that fascinating intellectual ferment of souls you meet on the city bus?
This capability is called Seed Disk, and you can do it once for $100 one-time extra. But you have to use Crashplan's own drive, which is 1T max. In the OP's case, that will shave about four months off his five year backup time.
Get out of coal, replace it with nuclear, and eliminate all subsidies for the unsightly sprawl of the new generation of renewable trinkets.
Yes, there are good renewable power sources: concentrated, zero emissions, with a small environmental footprint per gigawatt of output. THIS is a renewable power source done right: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...
...but one that even governments would have to abide by?
Something like this would be impossible to enforce (and by whom?), but it could serve as a point of moral reference, like the Hays Code. we could even set up a private body, say a crowdsourced wiki tribunal, that could act as a clearinghouse for violation reports so we could net-smae those we saw as violators.
Or failing that, issue a set of black robes to the nine Slashdotters with the highest karma in each given year, then have them vote on each case.
People still keep paying to "register a star" for loved ones, even in full knowledge that the act has no official status, even for the plebeian billions of stars on astro patrol photographs. So why not set up an official, central registry that would auction off naming rights on stars, minor asteroids, minor KBOs, exoplanets, and extraterrestrial mountains and craters. The proceeds would become grants for astronomy and space science. It would be your state's vanity plate registry writ cosmically large.
Let the human ego pay for the telescopes and probes that taxpayers won't.
Crashplan does back up NAS shares, but given its internal overhead it only sips data at the rate of about three months per terabyte. That initial backup of your RAID could be accomplished in a scant five years, so long as your provider doesn't impose a usage cap.
When you see reflexive use of irrelevant legal obstacles applied serially to every project Just Because, you know there's an anti-human agenda going on, especially when discussion of the project in online fora is laced with posts explicitly wishing for "reduction in human population" and faux nostalgia for primitive living standards.
Consider Ivanpah itself. A solar thermal plant is a tall skinny power planted in the ground with an ammonia circulation between a heat collector atop the tower and a heat sink (radiator) at the bottom. The tower is surrounded by a field of passive mirrors, each with a sun position sensor and independent tracking positioners. From the time the sun rises, each mirror simply keeps itself positioned to reflect its patch of sunlight onto the top of the tower, which gets hot enough from the sum of the mirrors to feed a Carnot-cycle generating plant.
Opponents of the plant (note the use of terms like "Big Solar" in their screeds; whenever ANY energy source gets concentrated enough to actually create some energy, it becomes Evil.) had to be really creative to figure out how a project like this could damage the environment, given that the ammonia recirculates and the high temperature at the top of the generating tower is not created by "making" sunlight; the illumination on it comes from moving the sunlight falling on each mirror to one spot on the tower. Each mirror stands up above the ground on poles, so that the total environmental effect of the array is a patch of shaded ground in the middle of a totally empty desert. The idea that such a thing affects the desert tortoise, a species which has lived in the open desert for millions of years. in any way is an insult to our intelligence. IF tortoises don't like the shade, they can sidle over a few feet.
How would I fix this problem? By changing the rules by which activists get use of the legal system. For each type of energy project, let us develop standard designs. Safety, siting and environmental impact would be components of the standard. As each such design gets a science/engineering signoff, developers would have an automatic right to build an energy plant of the approved design. To file in court, opponents would have to prove that some aspect of the standard for that source had been violated ("Aha - a windmill closer than half a mile from the nearest house!").
I would be concerned if it were effectively spying on us. If they really had the superpowers we fear, they could almost for free regain most of the public confidence they lost in the past year by nailing the Cryptolocker or Target perpetrators. And this would not be redoing routine police work, but attacking a problem that police, even if Nigeria had them, are clueless at solving.
I have really fast broadband over cable, so I signed up for the online backup service Crashplan so I would have an offsite copy of all my data. I ran into two killer problems: notwithstanding my blistering upload capacity, the backup service still plods along at 500kb or less, meaning that my 1T archive disk will take about six months to backup. The cherry on top is that my ISP imposes a usage cap, which prevents me from taking advantage of even that speed. If optical discs of 300G or more become available, I will be all over them like scandal on politicians.
Their ability to scoop up such a trove of data on our use of the Internet seems really fearsome, but what is their actual ability to make use of the data? They could use their tools plus the US global enforcement powers to nail Internet frauds like the Cryptolocker ransomware, thereby redeeming the bad press they been getting since Snowdon. That they are not doing so tells me that they probably cannot do so.
Of course desalination is going to require more energy, which is why the 'activists' oppose every energy project that comes along, even these: http://www.kcet.org/news/the_b... If there's an opportunity to stick it to the human species, they will take it.
It's not even a hidden agenda. It's openly expressed in some of the other posts right in this thread.
Slashdot Mirror
Another chrono-American here who wishes for more general ability to move between the voice and text worlds: Parent was given the impression that GV was being canceled because Google has a history of blipping in and out of experimental technologies too fast.
Actually, the Tenaha TX scandal resulted in an admission of guilt, a mountain of stolen personal assets, a big settlement and a change in the town's police procedures, but the cops involved were quietly eased into other jobs without serving the five consecutive life sentences that would have been morally justified by their actions.
Details: https://www.aclu.org/blog/crim...
Yet when we film the police, it makes them more jerkish. Why is that? If we live in a surveillance society, why don't we have a countervailing right to surveill back? If there is an accusation of excess in police interactions, footage from both sides could be the best evidence of what actually happened.
I have had two different houses in different towns flooded.
...I'd love to see the new President being driven slowly through New Jersey in his Tesla, mooning Gov. Christie.
Freedom to shop around would help us a lot even before patent reform. Pharma companies routinely sell the same product at radically different prices in different markets, depending on what each market will bear; in Mexico, for example, our familiar branded drugs - not fakes or generics, and manufactured by the same American companies - are available for a fraction of the price, because that's what Mexico's market will bear. Prices are a lot higher in the US because pharma has paid for laws in place that prevent us from shopping around, as we can for hard disks or flatscreens, on the global online market. Not long ago Google had to pay half a billion dollars to the federosaurus because it hosted Canadian pharmacy ads on its site. How many cheap drugs for needy children might that sum have bought?
" Problem is that quacks always think they are qualified, and we have the entire morass of the pseudo-health industry."
Quackery flourishes today, amid all that regulation that putatively protects us from ourselves. People who believe in homeopathy or paleo diets or that polio is caused by evil spirits can already ply their trade, so all the anti-competition laws do is prevent the rest of us from getting real healthcare at open-market prices. So far as I'm concerned, the quackery believers can't autodarwinate and get out of our way soon enough.
The same more competitive culture exists for any elective procedure, such as plastic surgery, which is not covered by "insurance."
Because the crisis, by exposing the clubby and monopolistic nature of the current healthcare process, will cause its economic model to collapse. The feds will undoubtedly try to impose price controls, because this is the only way they know how to respond in such a situation. At that point, healthcare will FINALLY have to accept the more open-market approach that so many of us have suggested: prices "on the wall" for all procedures so the consumer can make open choices, freedom to shop around worldwide for better drug prices, freedom of entry to the field for technical specialists (nurse/practitioners, midwives, et. al.), and an end to artificially limited med school openings and artificial barriers to employment in the field when practitioners move to different states.
I'll be glad to see the old insurance companies go, too. How often have you had to go on a road trip with half the right number of pills because you have to wait until a certain calendar date to get a refill?
Each of us operates according to the standards of our chosen field. Here, for example, is how the codemonkeys at Adobe would treat cancer:
1. Select the Clone Stamp tool;
2. Click on an area of normal skin that has the same illumination as the cancerous area;
3. Use Clone Stamp to copy the selected normal area to the tumor site;
4. Use Spot Healing Brush to smooth any edge mismatches at the boundary of the cloned area;
5. Apply a very light Gaussian Blur to the whole region.
See! No more having to throw away a perfectly good model because cancer develops in the middle of a shoot. But oops - forgot that vital last step for any Adobe product:
6. Unexpectedly abort to the OS without saving because you detected a trivial licensing glitch in this copy of the application.
I can infer that you're a climatologist, not an astronomer.
I actually did live in the time you describe, and guess what: people like you complained in precisely the same terms about what the amount of TV we watched was doing to our minds. And what do you miss, exactly, when you are "no longer interacting with" that fascinating intellectual ferment of souls you meet on the city bus?
This capability is called Seed Disk, and you can do it once for $100 one-time extra. But you have to use Crashplan's own drive, which is 1T max. In the OP's case, that will shave about four months off his five year backup time.
Having once lived in Japan, i've been kicking myself for not having climbed Mt. Gox before those tourists trampled all over it.
Get out of coal, replace it with nuclear, and eliminate all subsidies for the unsightly sprawl of the new generation of renewable trinkets.
Yes, there are good renewable power sources: concentrated, zero emissions, with a small environmental footprint per gigawatt of output. THIS is a renewable power source done right: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...
...but one that even governments would have to abide by?
Something like this would be impossible to enforce (and by whom?), but it could serve as a point of moral reference, like the Hays Code. we could even set up a private body, say a crowdsourced wiki tribunal, that could act as a clearinghouse for violation reports so we could net-smae those we saw as violators.
Or failing that, issue a set of black robes to the nine Slashdotters with the highest karma in each given year, then have them vote on each case.
People still keep paying to "register a star" for loved ones, even in full knowledge that the act has no official status, even for the plebeian billions of stars on astro patrol photographs. So why not set up an official, central registry that would auction off naming rights on stars, minor asteroids, minor KBOs, exoplanets, and extraterrestrial mountains and craters. The proceeds would become grants for astronomy and space science. It would be your state's vanity plate registry writ cosmically large.
Let the human ego pay for the telescopes and probes that taxpayers won't.
This is exactly what happened to me when I signed up for it: my 1T disk crashed at the 52% point in the initial big backup.
Crashplan does back up NAS shares, but given its internal overhead it only sips data at the rate of about three months per terabyte. That initial backup of your RAID could be accomplished in a scant five years, so long as your provider doesn't impose a usage cap.
" And as an environmentalist, I am always in favor of massive investments in green energy"
So please, for the sake of us all on the coast and inland, try to talk other greens into supporting carbon-free energy projects.
When you see reflexive use of irrelevant legal obstacles applied serially to every project Just Because, you know there's an anti-human agenda going on, especially when discussion of the project in online fora is laced with posts explicitly wishing for "reduction in human population" and faux nostalgia for primitive living standards.
Consider Ivanpah itself. A solar thermal plant is a tall skinny power planted in the ground with an ammonia circulation between a heat collector atop the tower and a heat sink (radiator) at the bottom. The tower is surrounded by a field of passive mirrors, each with a sun position sensor and independent tracking positioners. From the time the sun rises, each mirror simply keeps itself positioned to reflect its patch of sunlight onto the top of the tower, which gets hot enough from the sum of the mirrors to feed a Carnot-cycle generating plant.
Opponents of the plant (note the use of terms like "Big Solar" in their screeds; whenever ANY energy source gets concentrated enough to actually create some energy, it becomes Evil.) had to be really creative to figure out how a project like this could damage the environment, given that the ammonia recirculates and the high temperature at the top of the generating tower is not created by "making" sunlight; the illumination on it comes from moving the sunlight falling on each mirror to one spot on the tower. Each mirror stands up above the ground on poles, so that the total environmental effect of the array is a patch of shaded ground in the middle of a totally empty desert. The idea that such a thing affects the desert tortoise, a species which has lived in the open desert for millions of years. in any way is an insult to our intelligence. IF tortoises don't like the shade, they can sidle over a few feet.
How would I fix this problem? By changing the rules by which activists get use of the legal system. For each type of energy project, let us develop standard designs. Safety, siting and environmental impact would be components of the standard. As each such design gets a science/engineering signoff, developers would have an automatic right to build an energy plant of the approved design. To file in court, opponents would have to prove that some aspect of the standard for that source had been violated ("Aha - a windmill closer than half a mile from the nearest house!").
That's with the old technology. If the graphene scheme is workable, we would no longer be stuck with R-O and distillation.
I would be concerned if it were effectively spying on us. If they really had the superpowers we fear, they could almost for free regain most of the public confidence they lost in the past year by nailing the Cryptolocker or Target perpetrators. And this would not be redoing routine police work, but attacking a problem that police, even if Nigeria had them, are clueless at solving.
I have really fast broadband over cable, so I signed up for the online backup service Crashplan so I would have an offsite copy of all my data. I ran into two killer problems: notwithstanding my blistering upload capacity, the backup service still plods along at 500kb or less, meaning that my 1T archive disk will take about six months to backup. The cherry on top is that my ISP imposes a usage cap, which prevents me from taking advantage of even that speed. If optical discs of 300G or more become available, I will be all over them like scandal on politicians.
Their ability to scoop up such a trove of data on our use of the Internet seems really fearsome, but what is their actual ability to make use of the data? They could use their tools plus the US global enforcement powers to nail Internet frauds like the Cryptolocker ransomware, thereby redeeming the bad press they been getting since Snowdon. That they are not doing so tells me that they probably cannot do so.
Of course desalination is going to require more energy, which is why the 'activists' oppose every energy project that comes along, even these: http://www.kcet.org/news/the_b...
If there's an opportunity to stick it to the human species, they will take it.
It's not even a hidden agenda. It's openly expressed in some of the other posts right in this thread.