If things keep going the way they are going, most of these ridiculously expensive strike fighters will be obsolete eventually, anyway.
I'm sure there will always be special uses for manned fighters (interception/air-to-air defense, etc), but for the large part it's going to be much more cost effective to build and operate 10 UAVs vs. 1 F-22 or F-35.
Oh, and the US already has almost 200 F-22s. "Make a difference" at what? If more than 200 F-22s are ever required in a conflict, the world in general is going to be pretty much fucked, anyway.
Why would you wait overnight to charge? A Tesla can be charged in an hour at a Supercharger, which they are putting up all over the place on both coasts. If you are already planning on driving 16+ hours in a single day, then what's another 2-3? Or for those who want to enjoy their long drives (electric or gasoline car, either way) break it up into two days and it's even less of an issue.
Oh, and that's $30 for 1000 miles in a big luxury car that can seat 7 if necessary and go from 0-60 in 4 seconds if you feel like it. Let's see the piece of shit econobox you claim can get over 50 miles a gallon do either of those.
Except Tesla is *profitable* and wants to expand and *increase* that profitability. $35M will be peanuts to CA in a couple of years if Tesla keep growing at their current pace and paying corporate taxes (not to mention the job creation, cash infusion into the CA economy, etc).
So, yeah, wow, that $1 per CA citizen tax break is going to be a disaster...
Wait, Silk Road users are going to sue the government to get back the bitcoins they received for selling illegal drugs? Yeah, that'll work, I'm sure the US government would happily give confiscated cash back to drug dealers when threatened with a *lawsuit*...
Most of the poor cant cook and do not own all the special tools you have to cook with
Wow, this is not only completely wrong, it's braindead. Sorry, but wow.
"Most of the poor can't cook"?? You do realize basic cooking by humans has been around for what, 100,000 years, and wasn't invented by Martha Stewart and the Food Network, right? Traditionally "the poor" were the ones who HAD to make their family's food supply last, and so were excellent and creative cooks. And besides, this thread wasn't even particularly talking about "the poor", just someone's comment that fast food is somehow by definition cheaper than cooking your own food (no matter who it is eating it).
I'm thinking you have no clue as to how poor people in the bottom 20% really are. These people are on the street.
Holy christ, poor != homeless, how sheltered are you?? And you are saying *I* don't have a clue, heh. The majority of homeless people (which is a TINY fraction of the population, ie. like 0.2%) have some sort of mental illness anyway (thank you Reagan for cutting mental health care and abandoning them), and are not really going to be worrying about their own healthy lifestyle. We're talking the 50 million people who have a place to live, some sort of kitchen (at least with a stove, or even a hot plate and toaster oven, which is all you really need), yet are below the poverty line.
And those prices are silly, go to Goodwill and you can get a whole set of usable pots for under $20.
Besides, many of those below that poverty line can actually get their basic staples like I mentioned (meat, bread, dairy, produce) subsidized via food stamps, WIC, etc. But they won't get their fast food paid for that way.
I don't think you quite know how cheap what goes *into* McDonald's meals really is...
Potatoes: last for months if stored correctly, and you can get them for $0.50 per pound. Potato chips, on the other hand, are about $4.50 per pound. McDonald's medium fries: ~1/4/lb: $1.49
You can cut potatoes, toss with a bit of oil and salt and bake them and will get a much healthier and tastier side for 1/10 the price. Or of course you can boil and mash them, bake them whole, or a dozen other ways for variety and little to no extra cost.
Ground beef (of McDonald's quality): $3/lb, i.e. $0.75 for 1/4 lb American cheese (" "): $3/lb, ie. about $0.30 a slice Buns: $3 for *24* at Costco - $0.12 ea
[all of these will last for months when frozen] And most condiments last many months in the fridge.
A single quarter pounder (which is 1/4 lb of meat, of course) : $3.69
You can fry and build a burger in 10 minutes at home for half of the cost of McDonald's (and again it will probably be fresher and taste better).
Drink: you can get a 2L of Coke for the same price as a medium drink at McDonald's. Make it Diet Coke and it's not particularly unhealthy, either.
Or replace the meat above with a chicken breast for a healthier meal for even less.
Fast food is for the lazy, not the cheap. Not that I don't mind it once in a while (but god no, not McDonald's).
You're naive and gullible if you believe what the PR mouthpiece says during damage control after-the-fact.
You're a moron if you will believe the high level corporate and legal speculations of an outsourced tier 1 customer care agent over the official position of the company. Especially when that official position was it was a mistake that would be corrected, and it was within a day. AND additionally: it's even BACK FOR PURCHASE AGAIN.
Apparently it was removed for purchase for a few days because it was being aired on ABC yesterday, and is now offered again on all streaming services that carry it. But you, like the original article and submission, decided it made more sense to make up some huge conspiracy theory rather than find out the truth, which is that Disney asked streaming providers to stop selling it this week so they could air it on ABC exclusively, and then re-release it the day afterwards. In fact, it turns out it didn't even go away on VUDU or iTunes, because they didn't make a mistake and remove it for existing users like Amazon did.
What's makes your gullibility worse is the fact that amazon have done this before [nytimes.com].
That's a completely invalid comparison. The 1984 issue was because some random company self-published it as an eBook without having the rights, and so Amazon was required to refund people's money and remove the book. As I already said in another post, if you buy a stolen TV and the owner or police track it down, they will make you return it even if you didn't know it was stolen (and in that case you probably won't get your money back).
IEDs and suicide bombers don't work very well when there are large-barbed wire fences between the two sides. Besides, these are all basically the same things (explosive objects) and the only real difference is the delivery mechanism. In this case mortars are by *far* the cheapest (in terms of cost/resources/risk/etc) delivery mechanism, which is why they are used by Hezbollah, etc against Israel.
The proper counter to that is to find a cheap way to destroy them (in terms of recurring costs - sure, the NRE for this project was probably *huge*). Iron Dome costs almost $50k per missile vs. what, like $300-$400 for a mortar round. A big diesel truck with a laser would seem to be a much more cost effective solution in the long term.
Really bad analogy. It's more like someone buying a McRib, paying for it, and then the McDonald's employee saying "oh crap, sorry, we no longer sell the McRib" and giving him his money back, when he just didn't know that in fact his store was temporarily out of ground-up-pressed-and-frozen-vaguely-meat-like patties.
Also, it's rare these days that tier 1 customer care workers actually work for the company anyway. They are mostly outsourced. Trying to pretend an honest mistake (if dumb, since the worker shouldn't be speculating on business issues they don't understand) by a subcontracted support worker means the company is now somehow evil and should be held to that person's statement is absurd.
A companies customer service department absolutely represents that company.
They represent the company only as far as their JOB DUTY, which is to answer the phones and try to fix the customer's problem to the best of their ability (which isn't always that high, hence the usual tiered support model). Not to speculate on the company's legal contracts and business decisions. Similarly, you probably don't want Amazon's lawyers trying to help you reset your password or their warehouse workers writing their mobile apps.
I have written articles where I relied (and properly cited) calls to a companies CS department.
Like I said in another post, if the McDonald's cashier tells you he heard they make their burgers out of whale meat, are you going to accuse McDonald's of murdering endangered animals? If you want to try to resolve a problem or want a refund, call customer support. If you want to know exactly *why* the problem happened, talk to engineering (or to someone in the company who has), otherwise you will probably NOT get an accurate answer. If you think you will, then you are not a very good journalist.
Also, I have a hard time believing you are even a mediocre blogger, let alone a journalist. At least all of the other responses to this thread have had half-decent grammar. I'm not even one to pick on grammar much, but you want people to believe you are a journalist? Seriously?
Except it's not in Amazon's interest to *do* this intentionally, especially if it's not in the contract that they need to (which it clearly isn't or they wouldn't have been able to fix the problem a day later).
I have worked at a company doing similar movie streaming, and the only time (by contract with the content owners) that video would actually be removed permanently (even for those who purchased it) would be if it was found that the content was not in fact owned by the company who "licensed" it. In which case customers get a full refund, but since it was basically sold illegally in the first place that's life - if you unknowingly buy a stolen TV and the owner/police finds out, you have to give it back, too (and you probably won't even get your money back).
But anyway, so, yeah, you can either believe that they made a mistake, one of their thousands of minimally trained customer care reps misunderstood what happened, and Amazon quickly corrected it; or that it was a giant conspiracy with a masterful followup coverup story freely provided by the first Amazon employee with a clue anyone actually ASKED, even though there was no net upside for Amazon in any way to take the movie away or cover it up in the first place.
A McDonald's drive through cashier told me he thinks they make their Filet O' Fish out of humpback whale meat. How could he be wrong, he's a McDonald's employee! IMO, it's as good as a a public admission from the CEO. Call Greenpeace, it's time to start an international boycott!
Obviously not. You really want to pretend some guy in a call center can make no mistakes and his word is law around Amazon? You either clearly have never worked in any situation with customer support, or you are just being contrarian for no good reason. Or more likely both, since a 14 year old can understand the difference between a low paid unskilled worker's opinions and a company's official position.
The TorrentFreak "article" you referenced is just quoting the BoingBoing article, so that's the same source. And NEITHER of them actually asked Amazon about it, they just took the word of a user, who took the word of a random customer care person. It's amazing how many people seem to think customer care (usually low paid outsourced phone support people working from a script) somehow are "what a company tells the customer" like it's somehow the official and unerring policy statement of a $100B business.
The Guardian, on the other hand, actually asked Amazon. So did AllThingsD and Ars Technica who both confirmed it was a mistake (and according to AllThingsD has already been fixed).
That's the difference between journalism and blogging. Some journalists actually do some research instead of reposting 2nd hand rumors without confirmation. Sort of like your post vs. mine, in fact;)
Because they didn't remove the content from all users' libraries, they made a mistake. I mean, Christ, even the headline to the quoted article is "Amazon accidentally removes Disney Christmas special from owners' accounts."
And in the article Amazon responded to the issue explaining it was a mistake and would be fixed:
Amazon blamed the removal on "a temporary issue with some of our catalog data" which it says has been fixed, adding that "customers should never lose access to their Amazon Instant Video purchases."
It's a data error, not a conspiracy. Jeez. This is such a non-issue blown out of proportion by the article author and misrepresented by the submitter. As usual...
Because the SAME message has been randomly posted a bunch of times as replies to completely unrelated topics. I guess you are confirming that you at least spent the effort to copy and paste it? Bravo for you. But it's still spam.
You'd think/. would at least be able to auto-reject recurring spam posts that are 100% identical. (though I do have to admit beta.slashdot.org is pretty awful...)
Unless you also have little fans attached to each bulb circulating the heat generated rather than letting it sit near the ceiling, etc, they most definitely to NOT approach 100% efficiency.
No way it's even a gain over electric heating (let alone gas). Real electric heating (not some super-low end space heater) almost *always* involves a fan, which distributes the heat properly. Passive radiation from light fixtures that are mostly on the ceiling is MUCH less efficient in terms of useful heat because the heat stays up near the ceiling (or goes into the floor above, the attic, etc).
And besides, even in Wisconsin heat is only necessary for under 6 months of the year. The rest of the time it's counter-productive, sometimes requiring fans, AC, etc to lower the temperature.
and a lot of people have older furnaces that are fairly inefficient.
Actually, some of the older furnaces can be the most efficient, depending on the heat distribution. My parents' furnace is almost *90* years old. But it's a hot water radiator system. While it takes a LONG time to heat up (or cool down) compared to forced air, once it's up to temperature it's WAY more efficient.
Slashdot Mirror
If things keep going the way they are going, most of these ridiculously expensive strike fighters will be obsolete eventually, anyway.
I'm sure there will always be special uses for manned fighters (interception/air-to-air defense, etc), but for the large part it's going to be much more cost effective to build and operate 10 UAVs vs. 1 F-22 or F-35.
Oh, and the US already has almost 200 F-22s. "Make a difference" at what? If more than 200 F-22s are ever required in a conflict, the world in general is going to be pretty much fucked, anyway.
Why would you wait overnight to charge? A Tesla can be charged in an hour at a Supercharger, which they are putting up all over the place on both coasts. If you are already planning on driving 16+ hours in a single day, then what's another 2-3? Or for those who want to enjoy their long drives (electric or gasoline car, either way) break it up into two days and it's even less of an issue.
Oh, and that's $30 for 1000 miles in a big luxury car that can seat 7 if necessary and go from 0-60 in 4 seconds if you feel like it. Let's see the piece of shit econobox you claim can get over 50 miles a gallon do either of those.
Yup, the Lion cells are made by Panasonic in Japan, but the packs are assembled in Palo Alto, CA.
Except Tesla is *profitable* and wants to expand and *increase* that profitability. $35M will be peanuts to CA in a couple of years if Tesla keep growing at their current pace and paying corporate taxes (not to mention the job creation, cash infusion into the CA economy, etc).
So, yeah, wow, that $1 per CA citizen tax break is going to be a disaster...
The tulips are dying, the tulips are dying!!
Wait, Silk Road users are going to sue the government to get back the bitcoins they received for selling illegal drugs? Yeah, that'll work, I'm sure the US government would happily give confiscated cash back to drug dealers when threatened with a *lawsuit*...
Most of the poor cant cook and do not own all the special tools you have to cook with
Wow, this is not only completely wrong, it's braindead. Sorry, but wow.
"Most of the poor can't cook"?? You do realize basic cooking by humans has been around for what, 100,000 years, and wasn't invented by Martha Stewart and the Food Network, right? Traditionally "the poor" were the ones who HAD to make their family's food supply last, and so were excellent and creative cooks. And besides, this thread wasn't even particularly talking about "the poor", just someone's comment that fast food is somehow by definition cheaper than cooking your own food (no matter who it is eating it).
I'm thinking you have no clue as to how poor people in the bottom 20% really are. These people are on the street.
Holy christ, poor != homeless, how sheltered are you?? And you are saying *I* don't have a clue, heh. The majority of homeless people (which is a TINY fraction of the population, ie. like 0.2%) have some sort of mental illness anyway (thank you Reagan for cutting mental health care and abandoning them), and are not really going to be worrying about their own healthy lifestyle. We're talking the 50 million people who have a place to live, some sort of kitchen (at least with a stove, or even a hot plate and toaster oven, which is all you really need), yet are below the poverty line.
And those prices are silly, go to Goodwill and you can get a whole set of usable pots for under $20.
Besides, many of those below that poverty line can actually get their basic staples like I mentioned (meat, bread, dairy, produce) subsidized via food stamps, WIC, etc. But they won't get their fast food paid for that way.
McDonald's small fries are $1.19, small side salad is $1.
Small soft drink is $1, small milk is $1.
So, no, he didn't add $2, he subtracted $0.19.
I don't think you quite know how cheap what goes *into* McDonald's meals really is...
Potatoes: last for months if stored correctly, and you can get them for $0.50 per pound. Potato chips, on the other hand, are about $4.50 per pound. /lb: $1.49
McDonald's medium fries: ~1/4
You can cut potatoes, toss with a bit of oil and salt and bake them and will get a much healthier and tastier side for 1/10 the price. Or of course you can boil and mash them, bake them whole, or a dozen other ways for variety and little to no extra cost.
Ground beef (of McDonald's quality): $3 /lb, i.e. $0.75 for 1/4 lb /lb, ie. about $0.30 a slice
American cheese (" "): $3
Buns: $3 for *24* at Costco - $0.12 ea
[all of these will last for months when frozen]
And most condiments last many months in the fridge.
A single quarter pounder (which is 1/4 lb of meat, of course) : $3.69
You can fry and build a burger in 10 minutes at home for half of the cost of McDonald's (and again it will probably be fresher and taste better).
Drink: you can get a 2L of Coke for the same price as a medium drink at McDonald's. Make it Diet Coke and it's not particularly unhealthy, either.
Or replace the meat above with a chicken breast for a healthier meal for even less.
Fast food is for the lazy, not the cheap. Not that I don't mind it once in a while (but god no, not McDonald's).
Don't get me started about all of the dihydrogen monoxide chemical additives in food these days. I mean, some places even sell it in bottles!
You're naive and gullible if you believe what the PR mouthpiece says during damage control after-the-fact.
You're a moron if you will believe the high level corporate and legal speculations of an outsourced tier 1 customer care agent over the official position of the company. Especially when that official position was it was a mistake that would be corrected, and it was within a day. AND additionally: it's even BACK FOR PURCHASE AGAIN.
http://www.amazon.com/Prep-Landing/dp/B0069YE7KA/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1387308803&sr=8-1&keywords=prep+%26+landing
Apparently it was removed for purchase for a few days because it was being aired on ABC yesterday, and is now offered again on all streaming services that carry it. But you, like the original article and submission, decided it made more sense to make up some huge conspiracy theory rather than find out the truth, which is that Disney asked streaming providers to stop selling it this week so they could air it on ABC exclusively, and then re-release it the day afterwards. In fact, it turns out it didn't even go away on VUDU or iTunes, because they didn't make a mistake and remove it for existing users like Amazon did.
What's makes your gullibility worse is the fact that amazon have done this before [nytimes.com].
That's a completely invalid comparison. The 1984 issue was because some random company self-published it as an eBook without having the rights, and so Amazon was required to refund people's money and remove the book. As I already said in another post, if you buy a stolen TV and the owner or police track it down, they will make you return it even if you didn't know it was stolen (and in that case you probably won't get your money back).
IEDs and suicide bombers don't work very well when there are large-barbed wire fences between the two sides. Besides, these are all basically the same things (explosive objects) and the only real difference is the delivery mechanism. In this case mortars are by *far* the cheapest (in terms of cost/resources/risk/etc) delivery mechanism, which is why they are used by Hezbollah, etc against Israel.
The proper counter to that is to find a cheap way to destroy them (in terms of recurring costs - sure, the NRE for this project was probably *huge*). Iron Dome costs almost $50k per missile vs. what, like $300-$400 for a mortar round. A big diesel truck with a laser would seem to be a much more cost effective solution in the long term.
Really bad analogy. It's more like someone buying a McRib, paying for it, and then the McDonald's employee saying "oh crap, sorry, we no longer sell the McRib" and giving him his money back, when he just didn't know that in fact his store was temporarily out of ground-up-pressed-and-frozen-vaguely-meat-like patties.
Also, it's rare these days that tier 1 customer care workers actually work for the company anyway. They are mostly outsourced. Trying to pretend an honest mistake (if dumb, since the worker shouldn't be speculating on business issues they don't understand) by a subcontracted support worker means the company is now somehow evil and should be held to that person's statement is absurd.
A companies customer service department absolutely represents that company.
They represent the company only as far as their JOB DUTY, which is to answer the phones and try to fix the customer's problem to the best of their ability (which isn't always that high, hence the usual tiered support model). Not to speculate on the company's legal contracts and business decisions. Similarly, you probably don't want Amazon's lawyers trying to help you reset your password or their warehouse workers writing their mobile apps.
I have written articles where I relied (and properly cited) calls to a companies CS department.
Like I said in another post, if the McDonald's cashier tells you he heard they make their burgers out of whale meat, are you going to accuse McDonald's of murdering endangered animals? If you want to try to resolve a problem or want a refund, call customer support. If you want to know exactly *why* the problem happened, talk to engineering (or to someone in the company who has), otherwise you will probably NOT get an accurate answer. If you think you will, then you are not a very good journalist.
Also, I have a hard time believing you are even a mediocre blogger, let alone a journalist. At least all of the other responses to this thread have had half-decent grammar. I'm not even one to pick on grammar much, but you want people to believe you are a journalist? Seriously?
Except it's not in Amazon's interest to *do* this intentionally, especially if it's not in the contract that they need to (which it clearly isn't or they wouldn't have been able to fix the problem a day later).
I have worked at a company doing similar movie streaming, and the only time (by contract with the content owners) that video would actually be removed permanently (even for those who purchased it) would be if it was found that the content was not in fact owned by the company who "licensed" it. In which case customers get a full refund, but since it was basically sold illegally in the first place that's life - if you unknowingly buy a stolen TV and the owner/police finds out, you have to give it back, too (and you probably won't even get your money back).
But anyway, so, yeah, you can either believe that they made a mistake, one of their thousands of minimally trained customer care reps misunderstood what happened, and Amazon quickly corrected it; or that it was a giant conspiracy with a masterful followup coverup story freely provided by the first Amazon employee with a clue anyone actually ASKED, even though there was no net upside for Amazon in any way to take the movie away or cover it up in the first place.
A McDonald's drive through cashier told me he thinks they make their Filet O' Fish out of humpback whale meat. How could he be wrong, he's a McDonald's employee! IMO, it's as good as a a public admission from the CEO. Call Greenpeace, it's time to start an international boycott!
Obviously not. You really want to pretend some guy in a call center can make no mistakes and his word is law around Amazon? You either clearly have never worked in any situation with customer support, or you are just being contrarian for no good reason. Or more likely both, since a 14 year old can understand the difference between a low paid unskilled worker's opinions and a company's official position.
The TorrentFreak "article" you referenced is just quoting the BoingBoing article, so that's the same source. And NEITHER of them actually asked Amazon about it, they just took the word of a user, who took the word of a random customer care person. It's amazing how many people seem to think customer care (usually low paid outsourced phone support people working from a script) somehow are "what a company tells the customer" like it's somehow the official and unerring policy statement of a $100B business.
The Guardian, on the other hand, actually asked Amazon. So did AllThingsD and Ars Technica who both confirmed it was a mistake (and according to AllThingsD has already been fixed).
That's the difference between journalism and blogging. Some journalists actually do some research instead of reposting 2nd hand rumors without confirmation. Sort of like your post vs. mine, in fact ;)
Because they didn't remove the content from all users' libraries, they made a mistake. I mean, Christ, even the headline to the quoted article is "Amazon accidentally removes Disney Christmas special from owners' accounts."
And in the article Amazon responded to the issue explaining it was a mistake and would be fixed:
Amazon blamed the removal on "a temporary issue with some of our catalog data" which it says has been fixed, adding that "customers should never lose access to their Amazon Instant Video purchases."
It's a data error, not a conspiracy. Jeez. This is such a non-issue blown out of proportion by the article author and misrepresented by the submitter. As usual...
Because the SAME message has been randomly posted a bunch of times as replies to completely unrelated topics. I guess you are confirming that you at least spent the effort to copy and paste it? Bravo for you. But it's still spam.
You'd think /. would at least be able to auto-reject recurring spam posts that are 100% identical.
(though I do have to admit beta.slashdot.org is pretty awful...)
...only OpenBSD would catch up in every OTHER category...
Unless you also have little fans attached to each bulb circulating the heat generated rather than letting it sit near the ceiling, etc, they most definitely to NOT approach 100% efficiency.
and certainly is better than electrical heating.
No way it's even a gain over electric heating (let alone gas). Real electric heating (not some super-low end space heater) almost *always* involves a fan, which distributes the heat properly. Passive radiation from light fixtures that are mostly on the ceiling is MUCH less efficient in terms of useful heat because the heat stays up near the ceiling (or goes into the floor above, the attic, etc).
And besides, even in Wisconsin heat is only necessary for under 6 months of the year. The rest of the time it's counter-productive, sometimes requiring fans, AC, etc to lower the temperature.
and a lot of people have older furnaces that are fairly inefficient.
Actually, some of the older furnaces can be the most efficient, depending on the heat distribution. My parents' furnace is almost *90* years old. But it's a hot water radiator system. While it takes a LONG time to heat up (or cool down) compared to forced air, once it's up to temperature it's WAY more efficient.