About zero percent of the plumbing currently in place for gasoline can be used with liquid hydrogen.
Every liquid hydrogen pump installed will involve either building a new gas station, or ripping out and refitting an existing one.
All of that is a stupid waste of energy and material when we already have a vast and robust Electrical Distribution System going to pretty much every home in North America.
I'm not so sure I've seen any plant generating 1.2 volts at its anode, either.
There was a lot in this story that was lamer than that, including the handwaving about efficiency.
The least efficient part about our current chemical-energy systems is the production and delivery of the liquid chemicals. We need to get away from the idea that we need to have a tank of something in our vehicles.
Approval voting says the person who gets the most approval wins the election. 50% is not a criterion. You could add it as one, but it shouldn't be necessary. If nobody ran who was acceptable then you'd have a more serious problem than just your method of counting the votes.
it denies some a voice, which is good. NOT!
It denies nobody a voice. You approve of the candidates you approve of, and do not approve of the ones you do not approve of. If you choose to approve of only one candidate, that is your choice. If you choose to approve of none of them or all of them, that is also your choice. Your voice is clearly heard as long as you are handed a ballot.
Monotonic: if y is a function of x, and x is increasing, y does not change direction (this allows for "montonically increasing" and "monotonically decreasing").
Sigmoidal: of or like a sigmoid function. A sigmoid function rises slowly at first, then quickly, then slowly again. The significant change in the output comes in a small range of change in the input. A sigmoid function is monotonically increasing and never has zero slope.
What it means is, if someone has a fairly low approval rating, they can have a very low effectiveness; and if they have a slightly higher approval rating, they can have a very high effectiveness. Gaining more approval than that may not increase effectiveness greatly, but in all cases more approval means more effectiveness.
Third party candidates don't win because they don't look better than the other candidates.
Skip Condorcet and go for straight Approval Voting.
The math of the Condorcet method messes up the simple relation between Approval and Effectiveness. It gives the opposition an irrelevant excuse to keep bad arguments alive well past the election. Approval Voting removes the either-or restriction, increasing a candidate's "percentage of the vote" in all cases (he gets the people who would have plural-voted for him, plus those who couldn't choose). Effectiveness is monotonic with approval, and sigmoidal, so reaching a threshold of approval assures high effectiveness. Very simple to show and very simple to compute.
Apple is doing well because it is no longer a boutique computer company.
It now uses Intel CPUs and Linux operating systems, and it sells cell phones.
Apple has grown by becoming a different company.
Essentially, Steve Jobs shut Apple down, gave the money back to the shareholders, then asked them to invest in a new company with the same name and address.
Apparently, they only apply the same $5k limit as applies to any white-collar theft.
The law needs to be changed so that identity theft, which causes more than just the $5k in damages, is a felony at a much lower monetary level.
Since a smudge like that on a credit report can cost $tens of thousands of lost access to credit, using someone else's identity in the commission of a fraud should immediately be a felony.
Simple to do. Call your state legislator and tell them to change that portion of the criminal code. Given the current identity-theft hysteria, he'll run on it. If it works, within a few years it will propagate to the rest of the states.
If your buddy had had a worse lawyer (and he could easily have) or a less coherent judge (and he could easily have; some jurisdictions have no minimum qualification for judgeship other than "he was elected") then that prosecutor could have put him in jail.
The legal system isn't about right and wrong. It's about the perception of the person making the decision between guilt and innocence. If that's a biased judge or juror, you have your work cut out for you.
Cops in really nice neighborhoods are well-funded. Really nice neighborhoods get that way because the cops are effective, and crime is rare. All they have to do is publicize the occasional burglary or rape (things that will never go away in any neighborhood) and they get the PR they need to keep their budget.
It's completely cynical to think that the system is keeping crime alive for PR benefit. First, they don't have to; criminals are who they are and we can't change that. Second, the cops are almost always behind the curve, not ahead of it. Simple matter of not being able to predict the future. And third, even in the nice neighborhoods the police are always underfunded and overworked. They get shit pay to do a deadly job with the worst schedules imaginable.
As for the politicians, that's your fault. Says so in the constitution of the jurisdiction they ran in. Find some decent people to run next time.
In case you haven't noticed (and there's no way you haven't noticed), there is never an exact replica of a commercial product available in the open-source world. There are usually a couple of attempts at doing the same basic job, but there are always critical features that are unimplemented or implemented in such a way as to make them fail to saitsfy the buyer's business requirements.
You are willing to modify your business to work with the available features. That isn't a choice in real companies where changing one person's process causes a hundred or a thousand other people to have to be trained to deal with it.
Or you could.. ya know.. discover that there's vulnerabilities inherent in the system and just use cash instead. Using cards (even debit) causes price inflation. Cash is king.
But your cash is counterfeit. Please step to the side and speak with the nice policeman. Thank you.
How about the government leaves us alone and sees to its actual responsibilities and, oh i don't know, obeys its own laws and attempts to embody American ideals? Just a suggestion.
Vote for Obama and you'll get a chance of seeing that.
Your phone isn't telling you either the strength of your signal or the SNR.
It's telling you which level of transmit power it is using.
If your phone can show n bars, it has n+1 transmit power levels. Subtract the number of bars it shows from n+1 and you will know the integer value that is in its transmit-power variable. If you see 0 bars, your transmit power is cranked up to 4, for example.
Why does it vary the transmit power? Sometimes it's because the tower is measuring the power that it sees from your phone, and sends back an increase-power or decrease-power code in one of the messages they are exchanging. Your phone can't measure these things (waste of space and power). The tower doesn't want you blasting other phones off their links, either. If your phone can't see a signal it will simply go to full power and broadcasts connection requests (this is why your phone dies quickly when you go roaming).
If the tower can't see you any more, it just doesn't say anything. If you can't see the tower, you start transmitting at full power. "Can't see you" includes rejecting packets that are corrupted by noise. So if there is a enough noise to make the signal unrecoverable, regardless of the real signal strength, your phone will be trying to get through by going to full power.
The fact that some phones continue to send balky noises to your earpiece is a feature. It is giving you what it has rather than resetting the connection.
And the noise that causes those balky noises in your earpiece may not be radio noise in your area. They could be radio noise at the other end, or errors in any part of the transmission chain between your tower and the other end. There will never be a way to measure the end-to-end bit-error-rate in a cell phone. No point telling you in a number what you can already hear.
"Ionization" is only the source of cancer in those cases where the DNA molecules are disturbed by ionic chemical reactions.
Cancer is a scrambling of DNA in such a way that it still produces a cell that can reproduce itself. In malignant cancer, it reproduces itself out of control. In metastatic cancer, it spreads its influence to other organs and other types of cells.
Anyone who ever thinks that "free radicals" and "ions" are the only cause of cancer, and that by ingesting "anti-oxidants" you can control anything other than the ion content of the first drop of stomach acid it encounters, is a total moron and a sucker for snake oil.
Considering that Gore is talking about every person on Earth having to stop being so selfish and every company on Earth stop competing to kill the future, Al Gore is remarkably calm.
He should be ranting, exposing right-wing and corporate hypocrisy with scandalous examples, and generally taking anyone who disagrees with him off at the knees.
He's holding back plenty. And his opponents are befuddled and apopleptic about it. They can't refute his facts, and they can't attack his person, so they make things up and hope some stick.
"They taste like pork when roasted. We should wait a few hundred years until there are enough of them that they won't mind our taking some home with us every year."
"Some economists believe that America's current financial predicament was brought about by deregulation of the banking system, allowing banks to create currency by lending far more than they owned. Some economists believe that the current predicament is due to huge federal budget deficits. Some economists believe the current predicament is due to trade imbalance. I'm sure there are other theories out there."
The predicament was caused by people borrowing more than they had a reasonable expectation to be able to repay.
This included the banks. They didn't lend vapor. They may have borrowed the money themselves, but it was real when they did.
The borrowers, public and bank alike, all expected that someone would give them future payments that they could use to make their loan payments.
At some point, the last one in the chain stopped collecting. In the case of the current crisis, it was those who had bought expensive real estate expecting payment in the form of reselling at a profit.
They and everyone back along the chain is finding out what happens when speculation overprices real goods bought on credit.
Those people should rightly go bankrupt and start emptying trashcans for the rest of us. The banks that they will never repay should also go bankrupt and leave space for the rest of the banks to serve us.
It is the process of the government indemnify these failures that is oversupplying the economy with money. If the failures were simply allowed to happen, the economy would balance goods with credit with cash and we'd all be fine, except the people who gambled, knowingly, and failed.
Slashdot Mirror
If you had a pencil, you could add your comments to each map.
About zero percent of the plumbing currently in place for gasoline can be used with liquid hydrogen.
Every liquid hydrogen pump installed will involve either building a new gas station, or ripping out and refitting an existing one.
All of that is a stupid waste of energy and material when we already have a vast and robust Electrical Distribution System going to pretty much every home in North America.
I'm not so sure I've seen any plant generating 1.2 volts at its anode, either.
There was a lot in this story that was lamer than that, including the handwaving about efficiency.
The least efficient part about our current chemical-energy systems is the production and delivery of the liquid chemicals. We need to get away from the idea that we need to have a tank of something in our vehicles.
Approval voting says the person who gets the most approval wins the election. 50% is not a criterion. You could add it as one, but it shouldn't be necessary. If nobody ran who was acceptable then you'd have a more serious problem than just your method of counting the votes.
it denies some a voice, which is good. NOT!
It denies nobody a voice. You approve of the candidates you approve of, and do not approve of the ones you do not approve of. If you choose to approve of only one candidate, that is your choice. If you choose to approve of none of them or all of them, that is also your choice. Your voice is clearly heard as long as you are handed a ballot.
Monotonic: if y is a function of x, and x is increasing, y does not change direction (this allows for "montonically increasing" and "monotonically decreasing").
Sigmoidal: of or like a sigmoid function. A sigmoid function rises slowly at first, then quickly, then slowly again. The significant change in the output comes in a small range of change in the input. A sigmoid function is monotonically increasing and never has zero slope.
What it means is, if someone has a fairly low approval rating, they can have a very low effectiveness; and if they have a slightly higher approval rating, they can have a very high effectiveness. Gaining more approval than that may not increase effectiveness greatly, but in all cases more approval means more effectiveness.
how do you classify the people who fit in BOTH groups?
As a lie group.
i.e., if someone says they both understand binary and get laid, it's a lie.
Third party candidates don't win because they don't look better than the other candidates.
Skip Condorcet and go for straight Approval Voting.
The math of the Condorcet method messes up the simple relation between Approval and Effectiveness. It gives the opposition an irrelevant excuse to keep bad arguments alive well past the election. Approval Voting removes the either-or restriction, increasing a candidate's "percentage of the vote" in all cases (he gets the people who would have plural-voted for him, plus those who couldn't choose). Effectiveness is monotonic with approval, and sigmoidal, so reaching a threshold of approval assures high effectiveness. Very simple to show and very simple to compute.
Apple is doing well because it is no longer a boutique computer company.
It now uses Intel CPUs and Linux operating systems, and it sells cell phones.
Apple has grown by becoming a different company.
Essentially, Steve Jobs shut Apple down, gave the money back to the shareholders, then asked them to invest in a new company with the same name and address.
No, just a felony.
Apparently, they only apply the same $5k limit as applies to any white-collar theft.
The law needs to be changed so that identity theft, which causes more than just the $5k in damages, is a felony at a much lower monetary level.
Since a smudge like that on a credit report can cost $tens of thousands of lost access to credit, using someone else's identity in the commission of a fraud should immediately be a felony.
Simple to do. Call your state legislator and tell them to change that portion of the criminal code. Given the current identity-theft hysteria, he'll run on it. If it works, within a few years it will propagate to the rest of the states.
You can sue the thief.
If your buddy had had a worse lawyer (and he could easily have) or a less coherent judge (and he could easily have; some jurisdictions have no minimum qualification for judgeship other than "he was elected") then that prosecutor could have put him in jail.
The legal system isn't about right and wrong. It's about the perception of the person making the decision between guilt and innocence. If that's a biased judge or juror, you have your work cut out for you.
Cops in really nice neighborhoods are well-funded. Really nice neighborhoods get that way because the cops are effective, and crime is rare. All they have to do is publicize the occasional burglary or rape (things that will never go away in any neighborhood) and they get the PR they need to keep their budget.
It's completely cynical to think that the system is keeping crime alive for PR benefit. First, they don't have to; criminals are who they are and we can't change that. Second, the cops are almost always behind the curve, not ahead of it. Simple matter of not being able to predict the future. And third, even in the nice neighborhoods the police are always underfunded and overworked. They get shit pay to do a deadly job with the worst schedules imaginable.
As for the politicians, that's your fault. Says so in the constitution of the jurisdiction they ran in. Find some decent people to run next time.
In case you haven't noticed (and there's no way you haven't noticed), there is never an exact replica of a commercial product available in the open-source world. There are usually a couple of attempts at doing the same basic job, but there are always critical features that are unimplemented or implemented in such a way as to make them fail to saitsfy the buyer's business requirements.
You are willing to modify your business to work with the available features. That isn't a choice in real companies where changing one person's process causes a hundred or a thousand other people to have to be trained to deal with it.
Or you could.. ya know.. discover that there's vulnerabilities inherent in the system and just use cash instead. Using cards (even debit) causes price inflation. Cash is king.
But your cash is counterfeit. Please step to the side and speak with the nice policeman. Thank you.
How about the government leaves us alone and sees to its actual responsibilities and, oh i don't know, obeys its own laws and attempts to embody American ideals? Just a suggestion.
Vote for Obama and you'll get a chance of seeing that.
Why are we dicking around with the small-fry when we should be impeaching the President for authorizing giving up Valerie Plame as a CIA agent?
That action destroyed a multi-decade espionage program and resulted in the deaths of assets and allies in the field.
There is no clearer definition of treason.
Your phone isn't telling you either the strength of your signal or the SNR.
It's telling you which level of transmit power it is using.
If your phone can show n bars, it has n+1 transmit power levels. Subtract the number of bars it shows from n+1 and you will know the integer value that is in its transmit-power variable. If you see 0 bars, your transmit power is cranked up to 4, for example.
Why does it vary the transmit power? Sometimes it's because the tower is measuring the power that it sees from your phone, and sends back an increase-power or decrease-power code in one of the messages they are exchanging. Your phone can't measure these things (waste of space and power). The tower doesn't want you blasting other phones off their links, either. If your phone can't see a signal it will simply go to full power and broadcasts connection requests (this is why your phone dies quickly when you go roaming).
If the tower can't see you any more, it just doesn't say anything. If you can't see the tower, you start transmitting at full power. "Can't see you" includes rejecting packets that are corrupted by noise. So if there is a enough noise to make the signal unrecoverable, regardless of the real signal strength, your phone will be trying to get through by going to full power.
The fact that some phones continue to send balky noises to your earpiece is a feature. It is giving you what it has rather than resetting the connection.
And the noise that causes those balky noises in your earpiece may not be radio noise in your area. They could be radio noise at the other end, or errors in any part of the transmission chain between your tower and the other end. There will never be a way to measure the end-to-end bit-error-rate in a cell phone. No point telling you in a number what you can already hear.
Gore is from a rich family. His family house is huge and old. The number quoted could easily be the green version.
He does practice what he preaches.
Blaming your wastefulness on the propaganda value of his electric bill makes you the hypocrite, here.
"Ionization" is only the source of cancer in those cases where the DNA molecules are disturbed by ionic chemical reactions.
Cancer is a scrambling of DNA in such a way that it still produces a cell that can reproduce itself. In malignant cancer, it reproduces itself out of control. In metastatic cancer, it spreads its influence to other organs and other types of cells.
Anyone who ever thinks that "free radicals" and "ions" are the only cause of cancer, and that by ingesting "anti-oxidants" you can control anything other than the ion content of the first drop of stomach acid it encounters, is a total moron and a sucker for snake oil.
I don't know why people don't get that Communism is just the limit of laissez-faire capitalism where the fittest monopoly goes to total success.
Regulate capitalism properly and it will never look like that.
Considering that Gore is talking about every person on Earth having to stop being so selfish and every company on Earth stop competing to kill the future, Al Gore is remarkably calm.
He should be ranting, exposing right-wing and corporate hypocrisy with scandalous examples, and generally taking anyone who disagrees with him off at the knees.
He's holding back plenty. And his opponents are befuddled and apopleptic about it. They can't refute his facts, and they can't attack his person, so they make things up and hope some stick.
"They taste like pork when roasted. We should wait a few hundred years until there are enough of them that they won't mind our taking some home with us every year."
If you want the course credit, you have to agree to let the proctor watch you take the test.
That isn't spying. It's school.
The fact that he's an expert on this subject does not mean he is always right about this subject.
"Yes, you are voting for Al Gore."
"I'm sorry, you double-voted for Al Gore and Pat Buchanan. Please destroy this ballot and request another."
"Excuse me, did you mean to leave this chad hanging?"
This technology is going to be here at least a decade too late...
"Some economists believe that America's current financial predicament was brought about by deregulation of the banking system, allowing banks to create currency by lending far more than they owned. Some economists believe that the current predicament is due to huge federal budget deficits. Some economists believe the current predicament is due to trade imbalance. I'm sure there are other theories out there."
The predicament was caused by people borrowing more than they had a reasonable expectation to be able to repay.
This included the banks. They didn't lend vapor. They may have borrowed the money themselves, but it was real when they did.
The borrowers, public and bank alike, all expected that someone would give them future payments that they could use to make their loan payments.
At some point, the last one in the chain stopped collecting. In the case of the current crisis, it was those who had bought expensive real estate expecting payment in the form of reselling at a profit.
They and everyone back along the chain is finding out what happens when speculation overprices real goods bought on credit.
Those people should rightly go bankrupt and start emptying trashcans for the rest of us. The banks that they will never repay should also go bankrupt and leave space for the rest of the banks to serve us.
It is the process of the government indemnify these failures that is oversupplying the economy with money. If the failures were simply allowed to happen, the economy would balance goods with credit with cash and we'd all be fine, except the people who gambled, knowingly, and failed.