I can't help getting irritated that a veteran slashdotter doesn't read the rest of the thread before posting. See my earlier response to the other people who pointed out the difference in the geography of the two locations.
You shouldn't be so defensive -- nothing in my post implied that Americans are smarter or more advanced than people in other countries. Simply that I knew of an organization that had an interest in pursuing wind power but chose not to use it.
The great irony here is that as you were sitting in Scotland writing about my American arrogance, I was lying awake in bed late at night in America avidly reading a novel by an author who resides in Edinburgh. I have plenty of respect for the intelligence, abilities and achievements of people outside the U.S.
Even if it were a factor, Santa Clara is better geographically-suited for wind-generated power than DC (I've lived in both places).
Santa Clara is about 50 miles from an existing farm of thousands of wind turbines, which are situated on the eastern ridge of the Santa Clara Valley (a.k.a. Silicon Valley)
If Santa Clara wanted to build its own turbines, it could probably enter a joint agreement with nearby Santa Cruz county to build turbines on the western ridge that separates the valley from the Pacific Ocean. You won't find such strong, consistent winds anywhere near DC (hurricanes and tornados tend to be pretty sporadic).
Still, they've apparently decided not to use wind power.
It's not. The city sits in the middle of a valley, shielded from the winds blowing in off the Pacific Ocean.
But the city doesn't make its own electricity. It buys it on the open market, which means it spends a lot of time researching the market for the best mix of lowest price and environmental friendliness. There is a huge, surreal-looking farm of thousands of giant wind turbines in the mountains just 50 miles to the east, but the city doesn't buy electricity from them.
Silicon Valley's city of Santa Clara is very environmentally conscious. There are "Tree City USA" signs up all over the place, and the city-owned utility proudly trumpets the breakdown of its energy sources:
It gets 43% of its electricity from hydroelectric dams, 22% from geothermal, and another 4% from other renewable sources.
The city really focuses on finding plausible, cost-effective power sources, but for some reason it doesn't get any of its power from the wind. Perhaps the Santa Clarans know something the Danish don't?
It seems the British really do have pointless, drawn-out ceremonies for every little thing. But why did they choose September 12? What if a terrorist blows up the exhibit on the 11th? Then we'll never get to see how it ends.
...remember that what the Reuters/AP wires carry is all that most people will ever know about any particular issue
No. What the wires carry is all the people who read newspapers or other mediums that carry the unadulterated Reuters/AP stories will ever know about a particular issue.
Most people don't like to read serious newspapers... they don't have enough pie charts and they use big, headache-inducing words like "president" and "Gorbachev." So a lot of people read USA Today or tabloids which use catchy, easy-to-swallow words like "prez" and "Gorby." Those papers dumb the news down and cut out critical information their readers don't want to think about anyway.
A far larger portion of the population gets its news from television, which is not news at all. It's entertainment, soundbites, hype, ads and then one to four sentences about the news. Even the most well-intentioned copy writer cannot encapsulate "Trusted Computing" fairly in four spoken sentences, so everyone who watches the broadcast will be very poorly informed.
Then there's the largest group: the people whose news consists of the watered-down, telephone-game-tainted rumors they hear from the people they know. They don't watch/read the news because they don't want to.
Reuters is often trash compared to the AP or a good newspaper reporter's story, but it's far better than what most people will hear about this issue.
Great Scott! I was afraid this might happen, Marty.
By building and actually testing the impossible perpetual motion machine, they have created a paradox -- sucking them and half of Nashville into a rip in the space-time continuum. Mental note to self: cross Nashville off the list of places I planned to someday visit.
In the summer of '21, Philo T. Farnsworth was struck by an inspiration after plowing a field. He transmitted the first television image six years later on September 7, 1927.
What kind of inspiration did he get from plowing the field?
"Man, I have way too much free time on my hands if I'm out doing something boring like plowing a field. I think I'll stop and build a magical box that does nothing but consume the excess time with which people are burdened."
Makes me wonder about the inspiration for a lot of other things. Beer, curling, AOL...
Larry, could you write a Perl script that proves your existence to the non-believers?
My co-workers keep demonstrating magic tricks... turning pipes into python... making c look like ruby... unleashing a plague of locusts on exchange servers... all as proof of the power of their gods. Can you smite their firstborn or something? Just to shut them up? Thanks.
Advertise that your product offers much more than it really does.
If anyone complains about your false advertising (which is against the law), wait until after the product has secured its place in the market (and in people's homes/offices) before admitting anything.
Offer a full refund for the 12 people who would actually rather have their money back than live with their underperforming machines. Placate the rest with a downloadable version of a software product that's over a decade old (after all, the company's only cost-per-download is for the used bandwidth... it's not like they're giving away physical items)
Result:
the 12 people who knew they were ripped off shut up because get their money back
the FTC will never get involved over false advertising charges
the company still sells (number of units that would have been sold if its claims had been true - 12) units
the vast majority of consumers think they got something for nothing (software) and laud the company
Repeat with next product release.
Looks like a great deal for those who don't care about the bit depth of their PDA, and a way out for those who do my a$$... looks like a great marketing/disinformation strategy for Palm.
And no, this is not "the way business is done," this is "false advertising." Unfortunately, false advertising is only against the law if people complain.
And another one: Universal Music Group, Verve, Nathan, Canal+, Impulse!, Cegetel, USA Networks, Decca, Interscope, Geffen, A&M, Barclay, Armand Colin, L'Express, Universal Studios, Larousse, Sierra, MP3.com, MCA Records, Deutsche Grammophon, Cineplex, etc. All owned by the same corporate giant (Vivendi Universal).
You left out Vivendi Water (it goes by the name US Filter). That's right, Vivendi Universal is the largest operator of municipal and corporate water systems (tap water, sewers, etc.) and manufacturer of the parts used by those systems in the world. Oh, sure, your tap water might not seem like an entertainment venue, but wait until your sink starts spewing ruddy-colored liquid about a week before the artist Pink releases a new album.
Are you drinking Vivendi water? Vivendi supplies water to Honolulu, Tampa Bay, Oklahoma City, and other cities around the world. It also supplies water to Samsung, General Motors, BP Amoco, Chevron, Ford, Nestle (the Swiss food giant that recently bought HotPockets manufacturer Chef America and is looking to buy out American icon Hershey) and others.
And it's growing, as cities faced with the expensive proposition of upgrading hundred-year-old water systems look for alternatives. The problem is that companies like Vivendi promise the world at a great price in exchange for a 20-year-contract, and then they fail to deliver... leaving residents and businesses without clean drinking water. Be afraid.
an anonymous reader writes: "I'm working in China, and for the last 3 days Google and some other sites were not accessible. But since even sending SMS to europe didn't work I don't think it was censoring, more like routing problems of some sort. Anyway, Google is back and reports of slashdot blocking are also overrated:)"
This warrants an article on slashdot? It's quite likely that someone working for China's state-controlled media sent the message, hoping to improve China's image in the eyes of the world. China is willing to go to great lengths to make the world believe it's more politically acceptable than it really is because it needs to trade with us, however it draws the line before actually implementing reform.
I'll have to remember this article the next time I need a good laugh. Maybe I'll anonymously submit a story that consists solely of the following: "Your reports of Microsoft's animosity toward Linux are overrated. I am presently working on a Microsoft distribution of Linux." No links, no evidence, just hot air.
Pitfall ruined my brother's childhood. After watching me play Pitfall he was deathly afraid of the water (and tar pits for that matter) and never learned to swim. Of course, scaring the crap out of your little brother is every big brother's responsibility. Thank you, David Crane.
American search engine Google disappeared without a trace Monday morning in what party officials are calling a triumph of morality.
"Google was long known as a tool for hackers and perverts," said Truth Minister Chu. "It didn't serve any purpose for the greater good of the people, which is why it presumably went out of business without even a goodbye. Every economist knows this rude, erratic behavior is common among companies that can not find a way to serve the needs state."
Most good citizens won't even miss the Web site.
"It was too boring," said Jie Zhang, a rice farmer. "There was only one picture on the whole site and it was promoting the self-serving ideals of capitalist branding. Plus many of the pages were in other languages, so the site was useless to me. I'm glad I couldn't understand it, because I wouldn't want to be imprisoned for reading dangerous materials."
Many citizens said they have never used Google; they remain true to the official Chinese search engine: http:///www...
(If this had been a real news story, I would have linked to the source. If you still take it seriously after reading this, you deserve to be laughed at. A lot.)
CNN.com has a story about how researchers at Maya Designs, Inc. and Carnegie-Mellon are trying to come up with a remote control that controls everything in your house.
Really? If it can control my existing Universal Remote, I'll buy it, because no one else in my house seems to be able to figure out how to control it.
Too-Many-Cooks-In-The-Kitchen Law: At some point, it actually becomes more efficient to have multiple remotes.
Big deal. What's your karma like, genius? I bet you haven't even figured out how to get past "Excellent" yet.
Re:Please, AOLTW, switch to NS from IE for AOL..
on
Netscape 7.0 is Out
·
· Score: 2
Earth to iamsure: the browser war is over. We lost. One of the marks of a good Web developer is that he/she still codes as though the war is still going on, yet understands that everyone is sick of hearing them complain about it.
The world has changed since those days. AOL is on the defensive now, even within its own company. It swallowed Time Warner and boldly promised a new era that never happened, so now the angry and vengeful Time Warner execs are retaking the company, relegating the AOL execs to "their place" and forcing them to be fiscally responsible and accountable. Launching a browser war is not fiscally responsible from Time Warner's perspective; it's just a suicidal waste of money to appease those zealots they believe screwed up the company in the first place. Web Browser War II is not going to happen. Not by AOL's hand.
So stop complaining -- it's redundant, pointless, and hasn't been insightful in several years. The ability to create cross-browser code is one of the few reasons companies pay Web developers these days. Otherwise they would just buy their secretarial staff a FrontPage license.
What military applications exist for this new lullaby technology?
Can we scan the enemy's brainwaves and put him to sleep? Can we scan the brainwaves of foreign dignitaries while they visit the White House, put them to sleep and steal their pocket change and state secrets while they're out cold? How long will it take to weaponize these lullabies? Can the weapon be mounted on a satellite or disguised as a pack of cigarettes?
Dammit, you should have figured these things out before announcing this. We need to know and we need to know now.
Slashdot Mirror
You shouldn't be so defensive -- nothing in my post implied that Americans are smarter or more advanced than people in other countries. Simply that I knew of an organization that had an interest in pursuing wind power but chose not to use it.
The great irony here is that as you were sitting in Scotland writing about my American arrogance, I was lying awake in bed late at night in America avidly reading a novel by an author who resides in Edinburgh. I have plenty of respect for the intelligence, abilities and achievements of people outside the U.S.
Even if it were a factor, Santa Clara is better geographically-suited for wind-generated power than DC (I've lived in both places).
- Santa Clara is about 50 miles from an existing farm of thousands of wind turbines, which are situated on the eastern ridge of the Santa Clara Valley (a.k.a. Silicon Valley)
- If Santa Clara wanted to build its own turbines, it could probably enter a joint agreement with nearby Santa Cruz county to build turbines on the western ridge that separates the valley from the Pacific Ocean. You won't find such strong, consistent winds anywhere near DC (hurricanes and tornados tend to be pretty sporadic).
Still, they've apparently decided not to use wind power.Read my response to the question of Santa Clara's location.
But the city doesn't make its own electricity. It buys it on the open market, which means it spends a lot of time researching the market for the best mix of lowest price and environmental friendliness. There is a huge, surreal-looking farm of thousands of giant wind turbines in the mountains just 50 miles to the east, but the city doesn't buy electricity from them.
It gets 43% of its electricity from hydroelectric dams, 22% from geothermal, and another 4% from other renewable sources.
The city really focuses on finding plausible, cost-effective power sources, but for some reason it doesn't get any of its power from the wind. Perhaps the Santa Clarans know something the Danish don't?
It seems the British really do have pointless, drawn-out ceremonies for every little thing. But why did they choose September 12? What if a terrorist blows up the exhibit on the 11th? Then we'll never get to see how it ends.
Dr. Evil: Activate the unnecessarily-slow-moving crushing mechanism! I'm just going to watch from my Web browser and assume it all went to plan. What?
Most people don't like to read serious newspapers... they don't have enough pie charts and they use big, headache-inducing words like "president" and "Gorbachev." So a lot of people read USA Today or tabloids which use catchy, easy-to-swallow words like "prez" and "Gorby." Those papers dumb the news down and cut out critical information their readers don't want to think about anyway.
A far larger portion of the population gets its news from television, which is not news at all. It's entertainment, soundbites, hype, ads and then one to four sentences about the news. Even the most well-intentioned copy writer cannot encapsulate "Trusted Computing" fairly in four spoken sentences, so everyone who watches the broadcast will be very poorly informed.
Then there's the largest group: the people whose news consists of the watered-down, telephone-game-tainted rumors they hear from the people they know. They don't watch/read the news because they don't want to.
Reuters is often trash compared to the AP or a good newspaper reporter's story, but it's far better than what most people will hear about this issue.
By building and actually testing the impossible perpetual motion machine, they have created a paradox -- sucking them and half of Nashville into a rip in the space-time continuum. Mental note to self: cross Nashville off the list of places I planned to someday visit.
"Man, I have way too much free time on my hands if I'm out doing something boring like plowing a field. I think I'll stop and build a magical box that does nothing but consume the excess time with which people are burdened."
Makes me wonder about the inspiration for a lot of other things. Beer, curling, AOL...
My co-workers keep demonstrating magic tricks... turning pipes into python... making c look like ruby... unleashing a plague of locusts on exchange servers... all as proof of the power of their gods. Can you smite their firstborn or something? Just to shut them up? Thanks.
Then WHAM!!!
Now I'm stuck here. Anyone know where I can buy secondhand trilithium crystals and a really good radar system? Apparently, mine sucked.
- Advertise that your product offers much more than it really does.
- If anyone complains about your false advertising (which is against the law), wait until after the product has secured its place in the market (and in people's homes/offices) before admitting anything.
- Offer a full refund for the 12 people who would actually rather have their money back than live with their underperforming machines. Placate the rest with a downloadable version of a software product that's over a decade old (after all, the company's only cost-per-download is for the used bandwidth... it's not like they're giving away physical items)
- Result:
- the 12 people who knew they were ripped off shut up because get their money back
- the FTC will never get involved over false advertising charges
- the company still sells (number of units that would have been sold if its claims had been true - 12) units
- the vast majority of consumers think they got something for nothing (software) and laud the company
- Repeat with next product release.
Looks like a great deal for those who don't care about the bit depth of their PDA, and a way out for those who do my a$$... looks like a great marketing/disinformation strategy for Palm.And no, this is not "the way business is done," this is "false advertising." Unfortunately, false advertising is only against the law if people complain.
Are you drinking Vivendi water? Vivendi supplies water to Honolulu, Tampa Bay, Oklahoma City, and other cities around the world. It also supplies water to Samsung, General Motors, BP Amoco, Chevron, Ford, Nestle (the Swiss food giant that recently bought HotPockets manufacturer Chef America and is looking to buy out American icon Hershey) and others.
And it's growing, as cities faced with the expensive proposition of upgrading hundred-year-old water systems look for alternatives. The problem is that companies like Vivendi promise the world at a great price in exchange for a 20-year-contract, and then they fail to deliver... leaving residents and businesses without clean drinking water. Be afraid.
I'll have to remember this article the next time I need a good laugh. Maybe I'll anonymously submit a story that consists solely of the following: "Your reports of Microsoft's animosity toward Linux are overrated. I am presently working on a Microsoft distribution of Linux." No links, no evidence, just hot air.
Pitfall ruined my brother's childhood. After watching me play Pitfall he was deathly afraid of the water (and tar pits for that matter) and never learned to swim. Of course, scaring the crap out of your little brother is every big brother's responsibility. Thank you, David Crane.
"Google was long known as a tool for hackers and perverts," said Truth Minister Chu. "It didn't serve any purpose for the greater good of the people, which is why it presumably went out of business without even a goodbye. Every economist knows this rude, erratic behavior is common among companies that can not find a way to serve the needs state."
Most good citizens won't even miss the Web site.
"It was too boring," said Jie Zhang, a rice farmer. "There was only one picture on the whole site and it was promoting the self-serving ideals of capitalist branding. Plus many of the pages were in other languages, so the site was useless to me. I'm glad I couldn't understand it, because I wouldn't want to be imprisoned for reading dangerous materials."
Many citizens said they have never used Google; they remain true to the official Chinese search engine: http:///www...
(If this had been a real news story, I would have linked to the source. If you still take it seriously after reading this, you deserve to be laughed at. A lot.)
Too-Many-Cooks-In-The-Kitchen Law: At some point, it actually becomes more efficient to have multiple remotes.
The world has changed since those days. AOL is on the defensive now, even within its own company. It swallowed Time Warner and boldly promised a new era that never happened, so now the angry and vengeful Time Warner execs are retaking the company, relegating the AOL execs to "their place" and forcing them to be fiscally responsible and accountable. Launching a browser war is not fiscally responsible from Time Warner's perspective; it's just a suicidal waste of money to appease those zealots they believe screwed up the company in the first place. Web Browser War II is not going to happen. Not by AOL's hand.
So stop complaining -- it's redundant, pointless, and hasn't been insightful in several years. The ability to create cross-browser code is one of the few reasons companies pay Web developers these days. Otherwise they would just buy their secretarial staff a FrontPage license.
Pot. Kettle. Black.
Netscape retorts, "dinosaurs are extinct."
Kettle. Pot. Stoned.
Game. Set. Match.
Can we scan the enemy's brainwaves and put him to sleep? Can we scan the brainwaves of foreign dignitaries while they visit the White House, put them to sleep and steal their pocket change and state secrets while they're out cold? How long will it take to weaponize these lullabies? Can the weapon be mounted on a satellite or disguised as a pack of cigarettes?
Dammit, you should have figured these things out before announcing this. We need to know and we need to know now.