You miss the point. Cities vary, and the fact that *you* happen to live in a city where this vehicle is not the most practical option for commuting doesn't disprove that. There are hundreds of cities in the US with populations in the 100K to 200K with average commute times of under twenty-five minutes. There are a number of cities with average commute times approaching fifteen minutes, Some cities in the sub 100K range have commute times of under twelve minutes (Dubuque: 11.8 minutes).
What's more people in cities where the average commute is longer or demands running the AC for hours at a time while stuck in traffic don't all have that kind of commute. Stay at home moms and dads, for example. American households very often have two cars, and not uncommonly three. My next door neighbors have *four*. In a three car household, what are the chances that one electric vehicle would be practical, provided it had operational advantages?
The problem with tech enthusiasts is that we imagine *ourselves* using a technology as the benchmark of its practicality. That's not a very good measure. What's more, we miss the importance of *cost*.
It is obviously possible to get greater range if you make the car fabulously expensive. At $100,000, a 200 mile range electric car is impractical for most people even if it is cheap to operate. If we go to the other extreme, a (hypothetical) $15,000 car with a 100 mile range could be practical for *many* people as a second or third car. And why not? While plug-in hybrids are probably the sweet spot for a general purpose electric vehicle, a pure electric vehicle would be much simpler and might fill a particular niche need. I doubt most households could charge more than one electric vehicle for heavy everyday use.
It's *price* that will determine whether this vehicle workable or not. If they can get the price low enough, the decision to make an affordable niche vehicle would be wise. Much of the cost of operating an electric vehicle is amortizing the cost of the battery. Using a cheap battery keeps that cost down
If somebody could sell a 100 mile range electric car at the right price, they'd probably sell as many as they could make in the short run. As their production and sales volume climbed, that would make investments in better battery technology financially feasible since the system would have a proven market.
To me, the biggest reason to send humans to Mars orbit and not land is to do systems tests — the first Lunar missions with people on them didn't land either.
So what you're saying is we've got to fly before we can walk.
Oh, it's no big deal now, but if the keyboards get a little more powerful it isn't hard to think of ways of exploiting them.
One obvious advantage to infecting a keyboard is conventional methods for dealing with malware aren't going to detect the infection. It has a lot of the same advantages as a BIOS virus.
One could conceivably infect a whole shipment of keyboards headed for a company of industrial espionage purposes. Resources are currently pretty slim for doing much more, but if we imagine keyboards getting a little more powerful, then it won't be necessary to get physical access to the keyboard. The keyboard could be programmed to log in to the computer at 3AM (using your password) and fire up a command line to send the password to some Internet site.
This kind of a wake-up call. Sooner or later somebody will dream up a reason to make keyboards smart enough to be a problem; we can see Apple has already taken the first steps down that road, although we appear to be far from the point where it is a practical concern.
Did they have the user's consent? Does the user have to be aware he is giving consent?
I think it's clear that in a contract, not understanding the contract doesn't mean you get to interpret the contract to mean what you *thought* it meant. But at some point deceptive tactics can make a contract provision unconscionable, particularly in an EULA situation like this.
I DO NOT understand why people are so against nationalized health care here
I'll explain it to you.
Anybody who's looked seriously at this issue realizes we have a parallel national (nationalized if you prefer that term) system. Actual multiple ones, notably medicare and the armed forces Tricare system. And these systems work well, arguably better than private insurance. But nobody wants to use this as a counterexample to the argument "Any kind of Government run health are system will be a disaster."
Why?
Because that would scare the bejeezus out of the private health insurance industry. The whole rationale for the "private insurance with a public option" design of Obamacare is the assumption that US Government can't run an acceptable program. Obama doesn't believe this, but he believes that he can't convince the American people of this. "Aha!" you say, "But Tricare and Medicare prove the US Government can run a health care system." But proof isn't the same as convincing. The insurance companies would immediately go DEFCON 1. They'd spend every dime they had to make sure nothing happened, and American politics being what it is, they'd succeed.
Nearly everybody agrees this has to be fixed. The industry naturally wants the fix to look as much like what we have now as possible. They don't want a public option unless it is legally restricted so that most people won't find it acceptable. A public option most people would be happy with would be the camel's nose of single payer in the tent.
So passengers seldom use drive up ATMs? Sure, but if you were blind you'd be driven around a lot more so the need to use an ATM as a passenger would be a lot more common for you.
So why don't they require ATMs on BOTH sides of the car? Because that would be an unreasonable financial burden on the banks. Slapping some braille on the one ATM they're installing isn't.
Why don't the blind passengers get out of the car and use the walk-in ATM (assuming there is one)? For the same reason drivers don't. It's even more inconvenient for them; they've got to find their way to the walk-in. Even if the passenger has to get out of the car and walk around the front to use the ATM, it's bound to be a hell of a lot more convenient. In fact, it's almost certainly safer in most instances.
It seems humorously incongruous at first, but it doesn't take much imagination to see that requiring braille on ATMs is a sensible and moderate accommodation to the needs of blind folks. It doesn't make sense to make a *political* issue out of it, unless you're looking for a story that says the government is oppressing the banks. That rings a bit hollow these days.
What about when I get hit by a *sighted* driver? Some of them aren't as capable as others. Am I not supposed to sue the less capable ones?
Compare your reflexes and situational awareness to one of the great race drivers of all time, like Jackie Stewart. It is very likely that in a world where that degree of ability was average, you'd be considered a cripple. Yet it is a perfectly acceptable risk in this world for you to drive, even though your driving ability falls far short of the best. So is the test of suitability relative? Or absolute? Is it OK for you to drive because the risk posed to society is about average, or because it is acceptably low?
Let's stipulate that until cars become autonomous, a sighted driver will be safer than a blind one. Can some blind drivers, perhaps the *best* of them, reach an acceptable level of risk? I don't know; that's the point of technological research.
I think the whole point of this is that the visual aspects of the driving task could be taken over by a machine. Obviously it's not a good idea to issue licenses *today*. The article has it right when it compares this to the moon landing. The difference between a test drive like this and issuing licenses to blind people is like the difference between landing on the moon and having a moon colony.
This is like maxing out your credit card to pay for your overdrawn checking account. Now that you've done this, and once the money thus garnered is spent to repay the principle, how do you plan to pay the interest on that credit card??
Not really.
There is no line of credit or credit card to max out. This is more like taking out a second mortgage on your home to get your business over a rough patch. Is that wise? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. In any case *of course* the business loses money on this transaction viewed in isolation from preserving its ability to make money in the future.
It depends on assumptions about the future. Maxing out your credit card to pay for expenses is usually a bad move because credit cards are *expensive* loans. A business line of credit secured with your house would be better because the interest rate is more reasonable.
The cost of this particular maneuver depends on assumptions about how long state revenues will stay depressed, and how much real estate will appreciate before it rebounds. Then the money will be paid out of normal revenues.
In general, *average* cost is a good guide for making decisions about things like reasonable chargeback rates. How much should NASA charge the DoD for the next launch? How much should we charge the XYZ satellite program for a repair mission? Those are questions where you start from average cost.
Marginal costs are what you go by if you want to know how much it's going to hurt. Can we afford to launch six missions instead of five this year? If you count the average cost rather than marginal, your double counting things like employee benefits and R&D.
But there's even more to consider. It costs money to keep a program running too. So let's say we're about ready to wrap it up for the Shuttle program, but we decide that we just need one more launch 18 months out. So we really ought to consider adding the expense of keeping everyone on the payroll for a couple years to the marginal cost of that one launch. If we were launching five or six shuttle missions a year, we'd look at those costs as overhead. Either way, these are still future expenditures.
It also costs money to shut a program down, which is something to take into consideration.
Finally, marginal value is something that can change in different situations. If it turns out our shuttle replacement is delayed by, say, five years, then the value of another shuttle mission is much higher.
That's a lot of the same factors that went into the F-22 program decision. The point was to keep the program running in case we needed it; the marginal value of a couple more F-22s was nil. The average cost assigned to the F-22s inflated the cost of the final couple of units, but so would the very low production volume. And there was the issue of the F-35. If we had the F-35 deployed now and knew exactly how well it might augment the F-22 fleet if we needed more air superiority power, it have been a simpler decision.
(1) Yes, they do have to pay rent. Where will the rent come from? From the proceeds of selling the building.
(2) Yes, they want to buy it back, they will pay more for it than they got. The rent money they'll have sent will be gone forever.
(3) Yes, the state will end up losing money on this.
(4) No, it is not a BS accounting scheme, it's actually quite straightforward. It might be a bad financial decision. Or it might not.
You see, this is not about saving money. It's about having enough cash on hand to pay the bills. From a financial standpoint, it's a lot like taking a loan. Does it make sense to take a loan to buy a car, even though you end up spending a *lot* more? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. If you don't need the car, it doesn't make sense. If you have the cash on hand to buy the car without risking running out, it doesn't make sense to take the loan unless you've got really *excellent* investments. If you don't have the cash to buy a car, and you *need* a car to get a job, then the loan makes sense.
Does this make sense for a state? Well, the deal is you get cash up front but in the end pay a fee for the use of that cash, just like a loan. The alternative is to either (a) obtain more cash or (b) eliminate current cash outlays. In other words, raise taxes or cut spending.
If you raise taxes, you may delay the economic recovery in your state as businesses choose to relocate to places with lower taxes.
If you cut spending, you may store up problems like bridges that need to be replaced because they hadn't been painted; an increasingly ignorant and unemployable population; greater costs of fire, crime, and public health crises which are borne in an arbitrary way by random population members, which *also* cause businesses and people to relocate.
Now if you can find the cash you need by identifying *wasteful spending* that accomplishes absolutely nothing, then hallelujah! On the other hand, reducing spending on *useful* things isn't always a financial bargain.
Well, *you* do. Whether you can make your decision stick depends on convincing enough other voters of your position.
Don't like how your tax dollars are spent? Well, who did you vote for? Did you volunteer or send money? Did you canvass your neighbors?
The dollar value of your outrage's justification is equal to the value of the effort and money you put in to shift policy on this issue.
I'm sorry, I don't mean to take this out on you personally. I just *hate* the meme that we're helpless victims, because it's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Well, the law *does* apply to these entities. And the *can* be made to lose.
True things: large entities can get statues passed. Large entities can use the threat of the economic burden of lawsuits to create de facto privileges for themselves.
False things: you can't *ever* win in court against a wealthy enough company.
Well, this is a rational stance to take towards sunk costs... if you have a time machine.
Suppose you buy a very expensive car, and figure out that it costs an average of $1.00 per mile to operate it over its lifetime, half of which represents the investment in the car itself. You look at a hundred mile trip, which you can take by bus or car, and the bus costs $60. Is it rational to take the bus because the averaged cost of the car trip is forty dollars more? No, because taking the bus doesn't magically get you $50 of investment sunk in the car back. In fact, no matter how you slice it, you're spending $10 more to take the bus.
Now if that trip is a waste of time, if it is worthless, then of course you shouldn't drive *or* take the bus. You should stay home. I *think* that's what you are saying. That's a reasonable position depending on what's important to you. But you can't say people who *do* want access to space should ignore the difference between average and marginal costs, because if we *do* end up going there the wrong decision means more dollars out of everyone's pocket for no good purpose.
Really, the only practical solution to the back catalog problem is some form of downloading.
Starbucks might have another piece of the puzzle here. It's a destination. I work at home, and I frequently go there for a change of scenery. While I am there they sell me coffee and music.
I wonder if these two factors could be combined: destination and download. The labels are afraid to let their IP into the wild of public downloads, but maybe if you could go to a real nice store with a staff that really knows music, sample the wares and walk out with music on some medium, that would make better use of the back catalog.
The problem as I see it is that there's no way for people to discover they want all that stuff which the record companies own. The slow death of independent radio, the strangling of Internet radio, leaves consumers with no way of learning about the product. The record companies aren't going to put it into the public domain because they don't want competition. And artists in the back catalog are deprived of royalties they might have earned. So if they aren't going to sell that old stuff, copyright is doing none of the things it is supposed to do.
One thing I did not emphasize in my post that might be important to you is this: if you make it sound like a *huge* sacrifice to volunteer, then people take you at your word. If you take the attitude "this is something you can do and you'll find it reasonably interesting and rewarding," people are much more open to that.
The important point (other than respect) is not to try motivating people by raising stakes. Yes, if you are very charismatic, you might convince a surprising number of people to move with you to Guyana to drink the Kool-Aid, but you're making your job harder than it needs to be.
It's like Apple's 0.99/track pricing policy. You *hope* you'll love the track, expect it'll most likely be OK, but at under a buck you won't be put out if it sucks.
I suspect that there won't be much or any flavor difference between organic produce and conventionally farmed produce, provided every other factor is controlled to be equal.
When you buy local produce, there are economic disadvantages due to the lower scale of production, but these can be a blessing in disguise. Start with variety. If you are going to pick a tomato in California's central valley and have that tomato in a salad in Boston, you've got to pick a variety of tomato that travels well. Ideally, you want a strain that is durable as tennis ball, even if it tastes like a tennis ball. Also, you don't want the tomato to be ripe when you pick it, otherwise every place it is handled will sprout rot. Instead you pick it green, and you gas it with ethylene, which acts as a plant hormone to cause ripening effects like color change. However the tomato is in some respects still a green tomato. It doesn't have the sugars that develop when the tomato ripens on the plant, and no doubt there are other compounds more subtle.
A local tomato can be of a variety chosen for the best taste, even if that variety travels poorly. If it is delivered straight to your house or to the farmer's market, it can be picked at peak ripeness, even if that means it will be rotting in a week or so.
The same thing goes for many other kinds of produce, like corn. The supermarket banana is a variety called the "Cavendish". It's not a bad banana, but it is said to be far from the best in taste. It is the variety that travels best. Fortunately or unfortunately, the Cavendish may become commercially extinct in the next decade, because of plant pathogens exploiting the scale of the Cavendish production. The hunt is on for a variety of bananas that is resistant to fungal diseases, and if that variety is found, it won't necessarily be the tastiest. It is possible that the era of abundant cheap bananas in temperate supermarkets will end, in which case people in tropical climates will continue to enjoy their local varieties.
kick the editors who compose headlines in the nuts.
What people will come away from the BBC article with is:
Organic 'has no health benefits'
What the researcher says is:
Our review indicates that there is currently no evidence to support the selection of organically over conventionally produced foods on the basis of nutritional superiority.
[emphasis mine]
Now how are we to interpret the lack of evidence? It depends on how the evidence is gathered. This appears to be a meta study looking at data in published research. The researcher did not (nor does he claim) collect evidence himself to answer this question. Nor did the researchers who collected the data he is using attempt to answer this broad question. He tried to see if evidence collected for more specific purposes could answer the question, however the bar for disproving the null hypothesis in this situation is very high. Still, it's worth looking, because data is hard to come by. Nutrition science is shockingly underfunded for such an important field. Every time I've tried to look up abstracts on nutrition subjects, it seems there is very little data in relation to the volume of literature when compared to other fields.
It seems to me the researcher gets it just right here: the published evidence does not support the hypothesis. Since the published evidence was not collected for that purpose, that's a far cry from disproving the hypothesis. He even points out that nutrition is not the sole justification for choosing organic produce, and is careful to couch what he says to avoid implying that. But he can't win. Reporters are fanning out across the UK soliciting "man in the street" opinions of the headline writer's opinion of the research.
And this is the BBC, whose news makes American hard news look like Entertainment Tonight. I shudder to think what American "news" outlets will do with this.
Why would we *expect* the benchmarks for *the same hardware* to be very different under *controlled* conditions? You're just aggregating small differences in things like system call overhead over a long, long time. Why *should* the battery life playing a movie be any different, unless one or the other OSs had horribly broken power management?
The place where things get gnarly is on the edge; when you have *just* enough resources to run the current set of tasks; when you're just about to run out of memory, or the hard disk heads are skipping all over the place and disk I/O requests are piling up. These devices aren't intended for severe work loads, so the relevant questions are how many resources do these operating systems consume and does it leave enough headroom for what you have in mind?
A third question I learned to ask from using Vista is how much statistical spread is there in the average performance. Mildly poky performance is something you can live with. Great performance 99% of the time and 1% of time encountering painful slowness is much worse. Find a benchmark that measures that under a wide variety of realistic circumstances and you have a winner.
When I was in college, I was in a volunteer group. I took a project leadership position, and I was warned that the people volunteering for us were unreliable and unpleasant to work with. Later I was pleasantly surprised to find that not to be the case. Of course people did mess up from time to time and sometimes people found themselves over-committed, but on balance I found the volunteers cheerful, eager and reliable as I could reasonably expect under the circumstances.
I found other project leaders would talk about *the same people* I worked with successfully as if they were totally unreliable. What was mystifying is that I am so *not* a nice guy. I'm not a *bad* guy, either, but I'm kind of gruff and impatient, and I don't mince words either.
So I watched how *they* managed volunteers, and compared to how *I* managed volunteers.
I'd say, "Can you do such and so on Saturday? You'll need to show up at noon and stay until four. You can? Good. Do you want to scare up some helpers or would you like to take care of that? Great, thanks. Give me a call if anything changes."
They'd say, "Look, we really, really need somebody to do such and so. I know you're *so* busy, and I really hate to ask you to do this, but nobody else can and we're desperate. Can you, PLEASE? Really? Are you *sure*? It'll be a disaster if nobody shows up so I really need to know for sure. Really? OK I know this is a HUGE sacrifice for you."
The conclusion I came to was that the other guys were trying way too hard to be nice, and so they were failing on an epic scale. It didn't even *occur* to me to try to be nice, and so I didn't commit any of their horrible mistakes.
I think the problem with the phony "nice" approach was it demonstrated lack of respect in so many ways. First of all their attitude practically radiated their lack of confidence in the volunteer. They assumed the volunteer didn't want to volunteer, and would volunteer just to shut them up (probably true) and then not show up (also often true). They assumed the volunteer would be swayed by flattery (you're so busy), guilt (it'll be a disaster if you don't show up), twisted pride (this is a job so horrible nobody but you would consent to do).
It's hard not to step on that disrespect third rail now and then, but these guys were jumping up and down on it from the get-go. It's ALWAYS a mistake. If you want a guy to leave, you should just say, "Sorry, this isn't working out. Let's move on." Getting snarky on them just means they'll stay and work like malcontents.
Linus's post is perfectly understandable. I don't think it shows towering ego and arrogance. We all get exasperated now and then. He's trying to be nice about it, but he just can't help himself. He's only human. It doesn't *matter* whether he's right or wrong, he let his exasperation show. When you're on the receiving end of that it comes across as disrespectful. Sometimes *trying* to express your exasperation *nicely* is even worse. It's patronizing.
One thing I learned is that people will do good work for no money before they'll do good work for no respect. And the best people won't work at all without respect.
Personally, I think that plot in most games is window dressing; it doesn't really seem to matter much. Story plots seem to be a lot more potent than game plots. A story's plot can change the world, be it *Uncle Tom's Cabin*, *Mein Kampf*, or the latest political conspiracy theory of your choice. I doubt we'll ever see a computer game that will have that kind of propaganda power.
I'm not entirely sure why there is a disparity between games and stories, but I think it might be a left brain/right brain thing. You can only immerse yourself in a story if you allow it to take over your faculties of language and logic. Video games achieve the experience of flow state by taking up spatial and motor faculties.
Slashdot Mirror
You miss the point. Cities vary, and the fact that *you* happen to live in a city where this vehicle is not the most practical option for commuting doesn't disprove that. There are hundreds of cities in the US with populations in the 100K to 200K with average commute times of under twenty-five minutes. There are a number of cities with average commute times approaching fifteen minutes, Some cities in the sub 100K range have commute times of under twelve minutes (Dubuque: 11.8 minutes).
What's more people in cities where the average commute is longer or demands running the AC for hours at a time while stuck in traffic don't all have that kind of commute. Stay at home moms and dads, for example. American households very often have two cars, and not uncommonly three. My next door neighbors have *four*. In a three car household, what are the chances that one electric vehicle would be practical, provided it had operational advantages?
The problem with tech enthusiasts is that we imagine *ourselves* using a technology as the benchmark of its practicality. That's not a very good measure. What's more, we miss the importance of *cost*.
It is obviously possible to get greater range if you make the car fabulously expensive. At $100,000, a 200 mile range electric car is impractical for most people even if it is cheap to operate. If we go to the other extreme, a (hypothetical) $15,000 car with a 100 mile range could be practical for *many* people as a second or third car. And why not? While plug-in hybrids are probably the sweet spot for a general purpose electric vehicle, a pure electric vehicle would be much simpler and might fill a particular niche need. I doubt most households could charge more than one electric vehicle for heavy everyday use.
It's *price* that will determine whether this vehicle workable or not. If they can get the price low enough, the decision to make an affordable niche vehicle would be wise. Much of the cost of operating an electric vehicle is amortizing the cost of the battery. Using a cheap battery keeps that cost down
If somebody could sell a 100 mile range electric car at the right price, they'd probably sell as many as they could make in the short run. As their production and sales volume climbed, that would make investments in better battery technology financially feasible since the system would have a proven market.
To me, the biggest reason to send humans to Mars orbit and not land is to do systems tests — the first Lunar missions with people on them didn't land either.
So what you're saying is we've got to fly before we can walk.
Oh, it's no big deal now, but if the keyboards get a little more powerful it isn't hard to think of ways of exploiting them.
One obvious advantage to infecting a keyboard is conventional methods for dealing with malware aren't going to detect the infection. It has a lot of the same advantages as a BIOS virus.
One could conceivably infect a whole shipment of keyboards headed for a company of industrial espionage purposes. Resources are currently pretty slim for doing much more, but if we imagine keyboards getting a little more powerful, then it won't be necessary to get physical access to the keyboard. The keyboard could be programmed to log in to the computer at 3AM (using your password) and fire up a command line to send the password to some Internet site.
This kind of a wake-up call. Sooner or later somebody will dream up a reason to make keyboards smart enough to be a problem; we can see Apple has already taken the first steps down that road, although we appear to be far from the point where it is a practical concern.
Ah, but that's the point in question.
Did they have the user's consent? Does the user have to be aware he is giving consent?
I think it's clear that in a contract, not understanding the contract doesn't mean you get to interpret the contract to mean what you *thought* it meant. But at some point deceptive tactics can make a contract provision unconscionable, particularly in an EULA situation like this.
I'll explain it to you.
Anybody who's looked seriously at this issue realizes we have a parallel national (nationalized if you prefer that term) system. Actual multiple ones, notably medicare and the armed forces Tricare system. And these systems work well, arguably better than private insurance. But nobody wants to use this as a counterexample to the argument "Any kind of Government run health are system will be a disaster."
Why?
Because that would scare the bejeezus out of the private health insurance industry. The whole rationale for the "private insurance with a public option" design of Obamacare is the assumption that US Government can't run an acceptable program. Obama doesn't believe this, but he believes that he can't convince the American people of this. "Aha!" you say, "But Tricare and Medicare prove the US Government can run a health care system." But proof isn't the same as convincing. The insurance companies would immediately go DEFCON 1. They'd spend every dime they had to make sure nothing happened, and American politics being what it is, they'd succeed.
Nearly everybody agrees this has to be fixed. The industry naturally wants the fix to look as much like what we have now as possible. They don't want a public option unless it is legally restricted so that most people won't find it acceptable. A public option most people would be happy with would be the camel's nose of single payer in the tent.
Why? So blind *passengers* can use them.
So passengers seldom use drive up ATMs? Sure, but if you were blind you'd be driven around a lot more so the need to use an ATM as a passenger would be a lot more common for you.
So why don't they require ATMs on BOTH sides of the car? Because that would be an unreasonable financial burden on the banks. Slapping some braille on the one ATM they're installing isn't.
Why don't the blind passengers get out of the car and use the walk-in ATM (assuming there is one)? For the same reason drivers don't. It's even more inconvenient for them; they've got to find their way to the walk-in. Even if the passenger has to get out of the car and walk around the front to use the ATM, it's bound to be a hell of a lot more convenient. In fact, it's almost certainly safer in most instances.
It seems humorously incongruous at first, but it doesn't take much imagination to see that requiring braille on ATMs is a sensible and moderate accommodation to the needs of blind folks. It doesn't make sense to make a *political* issue out of it, unless you're looking for a story that says the government is oppressing the banks. That rings a bit hollow these days.
I disagree.
This thing won't go into production if it is incapable of recognizing and avoiding a cyclist (as many meat drivers are).
Also, if I have to claim a lane for safety purposes, it won't get pissed and cut me off.
What about when I get hit by a *sighted* driver? Some of them aren't as capable as others. Am I not supposed to sue the less capable ones?
Compare your reflexes and situational awareness to one of the great race drivers of all time, like Jackie Stewart. It is very likely that in a world where that degree of ability was average, you'd be considered a cripple. Yet it is a perfectly acceptable risk in this world for you to drive, even though your driving ability falls far short of the best. So is the test of suitability relative? Or absolute? Is it OK for you to drive because the risk posed to society is about average, or because it is acceptably low?
Let's stipulate that until cars become autonomous, a sighted driver will be safer than a blind one. Can some blind drivers, perhaps the *best* of them, reach an acceptable level of risk? I don't know; that's the point of technological research.
I think the whole point of this is that the visual aspects of the driving task could be taken over by a machine. Obviously it's not a good idea to issue licenses *today*. The article has it right when it compares this to the moon landing. The difference between a test drive like this and issuing licenses to blind people is like the difference between landing on the moon and having a moon colony.
This is like maxing out your credit card to pay for your overdrawn checking account. Now that you've done this, and once the money thus garnered is spent to repay the principle, how do you plan to pay the interest on that credit card??
Not really.
There is no line of credit or credit card to max out. This is more like taking out a second mortgage on your home to get your business over a rough patch. Is that wise? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. In any case *of course* the business loses money on this transaction viewed in isolation from preserving its ability to make money in the future.
It depends on assumptions about the future. Maxing out your credit card to pay for expenses is usually a bad move because credit cards are *expensive* loans. A business line of credit secured with your house would be better because the interest rate is more reasonable.
The cost of this particular maneuver depends on assumptions about how long state revenues will stay depressed, and how much real estate will appreciate before it rebounds. Then the money will be paid out of normal revenues.
Of course. We need to know the marginal costs.
But it's not the whole story.
In general, *average* cost is a good guide for making decisions about things like reasonable chargeback rates. How much should NASA charge the DoD for the next launch? How much should we charge the XYZ satellite program for a repair mission? Those are questions where you start from average cost.
Marginal costs are what you go by if you want to know how much it's going to hurt. Can we afford to launch six missions instead of five this year? If you count the average cost rather than marginal, your double counting things like employee benefits and R&D.
But there's even more to consider. It costs money to keep a program running too. So let's say we're about ready to wrap it up for the Shuttle program, but we decide that we just need one more launch 18 months out. So we really ought to consider adding the expense of keeping everyone on the payroll for a couple years to the marginal cost of that one launch. If we were launching five or six shuttle missions a year, we'd look at those costs as overhead. Either way, these are still future expenditures.
It also costs money to shut a program down, which is something to take into consideration.
Finally, marginal value is something that can change in different situations. If it turns out our shuttle replacement is delayed by, say, five years, then the value of another shuttle mission is much higher.
That's a lot of the same factors that went into the F-22 program decision. The point was to keep the program running in case we needed it; the marginal value of a couple more F-22s was nil. The average cost assigned to the F-22s inflated the cost of the final couple of units, but so would the very low production volume. And there was the issue of the F-35. If we had the F-35 deployed now and knew exactly how well it might augment the F-22 fleet if we needed more air superiority power, it have been a simpler decision.
Yes, but if you don't know whether that's the marginal or average cost you don't know what the figure you are doing with *means*.
OK, answers to your question:
(1) Yes, they do have to pay rent. Where will the rent come from? From the proceeds of selling the building.
(2) Yes, they want to buy it back, they will pay more for it than they got. The rent money they'll have sent will be gone forever.
(3) Yes, the state will end up losing money on this.
(4) No, it is not a BS accounting scheme, it's actually quite straightforward. It might be a bad financial decision. Or it might not.
You see, this is not about saving money. It's about having enough cash on hand to pay the bills. From a financial standpoint, it's a lot like taking a loan. Does it make sense to take a loan to buy a car, even though you end up spending a *lot* more? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. If you don't need the car, it doesn't make sense. If you have the cash on hand to buy the car without risking running out, it doesn't make sense to take the loan unless you've got really *excellent* investments. If you don't have the cash to buy a car, and you *need* a car to get a job, then the loan makes sense.
Does this make sense for a state? Well, the deal is you get cash up front but in the end pay a fee for the use of that cash, just like a loan. The alternative is to either (a) obtain more cash or (b) eliminate current cash outlays. In other words, raise taxes or cut spending.
If you raise taxes, you may delay the economic recovery in your state as businesses choose to relocate to places with lower taxes.
If you cut spending, you may store up problems like bridges that need to be replaced because they hadn't been painted; an increasingly ignorant and unemployable population; greater costs of fire, crime, and public health crises which are borne in an arbitrary way by random population members, which *also* cause businesses and people to relocate.
Now if you can find the cash you need by identifying *wasteful spending* that accomplishes absolutely nothing, then hallelujah! On the other hand, reducing spending on *useful* things isn't always a financial bargain.
Well, *you* do. Whether you can make your decision stick depends on convincing enough other voters of your position.
Don't like how your tax dollars are spent? Well, who did you vote for? Did you volunteer or send money? Did you canvass your neighbors?
The dollar value of your outrage's justification is equal to the value of the effort and money you put in to shift policy on this issue.
I'm sorry, I don't mean to take this out on you personally. I just *hate* the meme that we're helpless victims, because it's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I think one must make distinctions between capital and non-capital spending.
Think education is too expensive? Try ignorance and you'll find out what "expensive" means.
Well, the law *does* apply to these entities. And the *can* be made to lose.
True things: large entities can get statues passed. Large entities can use the threat of the economic burden of lawsuits to create de facto privileges for themselves.
False things: you can't *ever* win in court against a wealthy enough company.
Well, it may not be against *statutory* law, but common law may have something to say about this, if the question is ever put to it.
Well, this is a rational stance to take towards sunk costs ... if you have a time machine.
Suppose you buy a very expensive car, and figure out that it costs an average of $1.00 per mile to operate it over its lifetime, half of which represents the investment in the car itself. You look at a hundred mile trip, which you can take by bus or car, and the bus costs $60. Is it rational to take the bus because the averaged cost of the car trip is forty dollars more? No, because taking the bus doesn't magically get you $50 of investment sunk in the car back. In fact, no matter how you slice it, you're spending $10 more to take the bus.
Now if that trip is a waste of time, if it is worthless, then of course you shouldn't drive *or* take the bus. You should stay home. I *think* that's what you are saying. That's a reasonable position depending on what's important to you. But you can't say people who *do* want access to space should ignore the difference between average and marginal costs, because if we *do* end up going there the wrong decision means more dollars out of everyone's pocket for no good purpose.
Really, the only practical solution to the back catalog problem is some form of downloading.
Starbucks might have another piece of the puzzle here. It's a destination. I work at home, and I frequently go there for a change of scenery. While I am there they sell me coffee and music.
I wonder if these two factors could be combined: destination and download. The labels are afraid to let their IP into the wild of public downloads, but maybe if you could go to a real nice store with a staff that really knows music, sample the wares and walk out with music on some medium, that would make better use of the back catalog.
The problem as I see it is that there's no way for people to discover they want all that stuff which the record companies own. The slow death of independent radio, the strangling of Internet radio, leaves consumers with no way of learning about the product. The record companies aren't going to put it into the public domain because they don't want competition. And artists in the back catalog are deprived of royalties they might have earned. So if they aren't going to sell that old stuff, copyright is doing none of the things it is supposed to do.
One thing I did not emphasize in my post that might be important to you is this: if you make it sound like a *huge* sacrifice to volunteer, then people take you at your word. If you take the attitude "this is something you can do and you'll find it reasonably interesting and rewarding," people are much more open to that.
The important point (other than respect) is not to try motivating people by raising stakes. Yes, if you are very charismatic, you might convince a surprising number of people to move with you to Guyana to drink the Kool-Aid, but you're making your job harder than it needs to be.
It's like Apple's 0.99/track pricing policy. You *hope* you'll love the track, expect it'll most likely be OK, but at under a buck you won't be put out if it sucks.
That's an apples to oranges comparison... er....
I suspect that there won't be much or any flavor difference between organic produce and conventionally farmed produce, provided every other factor is controlled to be equal.
When you buy local produce, there are economic disadvantages due to the lower scale of production, but these can be a blessing in disguise. Start with variety. If you are going to pick a tomato in California's central valley and have that tomato in a salad in Boston, you've got to pick a variety of tomato that travels well. Ideally, you want a strain that is durable as tennis ball, even if it tastes like a tennis ball. Also, you don't want the tomato to be ripe when you pick it, otherwise every place it is handled will sprout rot. Instead you pick it green, and you gas it with ethylene, which acts as a plant hormone to cause ripening effects like color change. However the tomato is in some respects still a green tomato. It doesn't have the sugars that develop when the tomato ripens on the plant, and no doubt there are other compounds more subtle.
A local tomato can be of a variety chosen for the best taste, even if that variety travels poorly. If it is delivered straight to your house or to the farmer's market, it can be picked at peak ripeness, even if that means it will be rotting in a week or so.
The same thing goes for many other kinds of produce, like corn. The supermarket banana is a variety called the "Cavendish". It's not a bad banana, but it is said to be far from the best in taste. It is the variety that travels best. Fortunately or unfortunately, the Cavendish may become commercially extinct in the next decade, because of plant pathogens exploiting the scale of the Cavendish production. The hunt is on for a variety of bananas that is resistant to fungal diseases, and if that variety is found, it won't necessarily be the tastiest. It is possible that the era of abundant cheap bananas in temperate supermarkets will end, in which case people in tropical climates will continue to enjoy their local varieties.
kick the editors who compose headlines in the nuts.
What people will come away from the BBC article with is:
What the researcher says is:
[emphasis mine]
Now how are we to interpret the lack of evidence? It depends on how the evidence is gathered. This appears to be a meta study looking at data in published research. The researcher did not (nor does he claim) collect evidence himself to answer this question. Nor did the researchers who collected the data he is using attempt to answer this broad question. He tried to see if evidence collected for more specific purposes could answer the question, however the bar for disproving the null hypothesis in this situation is very high. Still, it's worth looking, because data is hard to come by. Nutrition science is shockingly underfunded for such an important field. Every time I've tried to look up abstracts on nutrition subjects, it seems there is very little data in relation to the volume of literature when compared to other fields.
It seems to me the researcher gets it just right here: the published evidence does not support the hypothesis. Since the published evidence was not collected for that purpose, that's a far cry from disproving the hypothesis. He even points out that nutrition is not the sole justification for choosing organic produce, and is careful to couch what he says to avoid implying that. But he can't win. Reporters are fanning out across the UK soliciting "man in the street" opinions of the headline writer's opinion of the research.
And this is the BBC, whose news makes American hard news look like Entertainment Tonight. I shudder to think what American "news" outlets will do with this.
Why would we *expect* the benchmarks for *the same hardware* to be very different under *controlled* conditions? You're just aggregating small differences in things like system call overhead over a long, long time. Why *should* the battery life playing a movie be any different, unless one or the other OSs had horribly broken power management?
The place where things get gnarly is on the edge; when you have *just* enough resources to run the current set of tasks; when you're just about to run out of memory, or the hard disk heads are skipping all over the place and disk I/O requests are piling up. These devices aren't intended for severe work loads, so the relevant questions are how many resources do these operating systems consume and does it leave enough headroom for what you have in mind?
A third question I learned to ask from using Vista is how much statistical spread is there in the average performance. Mildly poky performance is something you can live with. Great performance 99% of the time and 1% of time encountering painful slowness is much worse. Find a benchmark that measures that under a wide variety of realistic circumstances and you have a winner.
When I was in college, I was in a volunteer group. I took a project leadership position, and I was warned that the people volunteering for us were unreliable and unpleasant to work with. Later I was pleasantly surprised to find that not to be the case. Of course people did mess up from time to time and sometimes people found themselves over-committed, but on balance I found the volunteers cheerful, eager and reliable as I could reasonably expect under the circumstances.
I found other project leaders would talk about *the same people* I worked with successfully as if they were totally unreliable. What was mystifying is that I am so *not* a nice guy. I'm not a *bad* guy, either, but I'm kind of gruff and impatient, and I don't mince words either.
So I watched how *they* managed volunteers, and compared to how *I* managed volunteers.
I'd say, "Can you do such and so on Saturday? You'll need to show up at noon and stay until four. You can? Good. Do you want to scare up some helpers or would you like to take care of that? Great, thanks. Give me a call if anything changes."
They'd say, "Look, we really, really need somebody to do such and so. I know you're *so* busy, and I really hate to ask you to do this, but nobody else can and we're desperate. Can you, PLEASE? Really? Are you *sure*? It'll be a disaster if nobody shows up so I really need to know for sure. Really? OK I know this is a HUGE sacrifice for you."
The conclusion I came to was that the other guys were trying way too hard to be nice, and so they were failing on an epic scale. It didn't even *occur* to me to try to be nice, and so I didn't commit any of their horrible mistakes.
I think the problem with the phony "nice" approach was it demonstrated lack of respect in so many ways. First of all their attitude practically radiated their lack of confidence in the volunteer. They assumed the volunteer didn't want to volunteer, and would volunteer just to shut them up (probably true) and then not show up (also often true). They assumed the volunteer would be swayed by flattery (you're so busy), guilt (it'll be a disaster if you don't show up), twisted pride (this is a job so horrible nobody but you would consent to do).
It's hard not to step on that disrespect third rail now and then, but these guys were jumping up and down on it from the get-go. It's ALWAYS a mistake. If you want a guy to leave, you should just say, "Sorry, this isn't working out. Let's move on." Getting snarky on them just means they'll stay and work like malcontents.
Linus's post is perfectly understandable. I don't think it shows towering ego and arrogance. We all get exasperated now and then. He's trying to be nice about it, but he just can't help himself. He's only human. It doesn't *matter* whether he's right or wrong, he let his exasperation show. When you're on the receiving end of that it comes across as disrespectful. Sometimes *trying* to express your exasperation *nicely* is even worse. It's patronizing.
One thing I learned is that people will do good work for no money before they'll do good work for no respect. And the best people won't work at all without respect.
The Chinese take virtue ethics very seriously.
Personally, I think that plot in most games is window dressing; it doesn't really seem to matter much. Story plots seem to be a lot more potent than game plots. A story's plot can change the world, be it *Uncle Tom's Cabin*, *Mein Kampf*, or the latest political conspiracy theory of your choice. I doubt we'll ever see a computer game that will have that kind of propaganda power.
I'm not entirely sure why there is a disparity between games and stories, but I think it might be a left brain/right brain thing. You can only immerse yourself in a story if you allow it to take over your faculties of language and logic. Video games achieve the experience of flow state by taking up spatial and motor faculties.
if they consume entertainment that glorifies gansters, e.g. this quote from the 1949 Jimmy Cagney Movie White Heat: