We are spending tons of money on education, and getting nothing for it.
Meanwhile, we're spending $650B on a Cold War-style military that's getting flummoxed by a handful of tribesmen with AK-47s. That's an even bigger failure.
What would you do if your pension plan -- that you've paid into for years -- suddenly decided that you need to be older to collect?
Then it might not go broke, like so many real-world pension plans have.
People live longer than they did when SS was introduced. If you live longer, you need to work longer. What's so hard to figure out about that?
IMO, Social Security should be allocated a fixed percentage of all national personal income, and the retirement age should be continuously adjusted to match the amount of money coming in. That takes all the demographic risks out of the system.
How about we feed the animals the foods they were DESIGNED to eat (i.e. Feed Cows GRASS, Not Corn).
Just because I feel like being pedantic, I'll point out that maize is a grass.
(However, I do remember a documentary that described how the diet being fed to mass market cattle alters the chemistry of their guts to promote the growth of dangerous bacterial strains.)
Re: A not so Crappy Approach
on
Autotools
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Hmmm... are you sure that you didn't mean the macro language M4? I thought that ML was the pure functional ancestor to languages like Haskell.
Anyway, I played around with M4 a little bit because I thought it looked handy for a few things. It has a deceptively simple specification that only takes a few pages, but it's one of the most extreme examples of "emergent behavior" I've encountered. Even simple tasks rapidly become mind boggling due to the deceptively tricky nature of recursive text substitutions and quoting. It's a real brain teaser of a language. It does seem like it would be a nifty tool if I spent enough time to really figure it out.
That's certainly a sad state of affairs when kids thing of Bing and they think of a search engine. Bing Crosby one of the greatest singers of all time playing second to a search engine.
Crosby isn't innocent on this issue himself. For decades he's been unfairly stealing the limelight from my favorite cherry cultivar.
Well, until the stylus starts wearing down and the grooves start smoothing out...
An extreme example of that was the all-mechanical antique Victrola that my parents had when I was a kid (along with a big stack of 78-rpm shellac records). All the sound energy was created by the action of the grooves on the needle.
The tone arm was a hollow horn with a big diaphragm on it, and it probably put more than 100 grams of force on the record. The steel needles it used only lasted for about a dozen plays before they became visibly worn and had to be tossed. The mechanical force from playing a record often caused a bunch of white residue to slough off the surface of the disk, which couldn't have been very good for the longevity of the recording. Needless to say, we didn't operate that thing very often.
IMO, the 200 mile exclusive zone is stupid when applied to tiny islets. They should have originally defined the exclusive zone as something like the *lesser* of 200 miles or 10 times the distance from the center of any landmass to the shore. That would make arbitrary little rocks that stick up out of the ocean much less likely to generate conflict.
Toaster-sized at 18''? That's a quite a toaster...
To be fair, the standard SI toaster was defined in 1897, when toasters were a novel luxury item and generally much larger due to the newness of the technology. The original standard toaster, made of solid iridium, is still kept in a vault in Paris.
In 1992, the standard toaster was redefined with dimensions based on the wavelength of a particular spectral line of light given off by a nichrome toaster heating element heated to exactly 1044 K.
A friend called my on my telephone line and told me out of the blue that the Elo rating system had been bested. I was so stunned I almost turned to stone. I said, "Dude, don't bring me down!". But the news slowly sunk in, and now I can't get it out of my head. But I'll tell you what, the jury is still out. I think there's gonna be a showdown, and then Elo will be back on top.
How about people that would vote for either, as long as they supported moderate positions?
Since the Republican party has been going through a systematic purge of members who fail purity tests by supporting moderate positions, that point is rapidly becoming moot.
These days, Richard Nixon would lose in the primaries because his policies make him a RINO.
but as for spreading humanity off the planet Earth that just isn't going to happen.
You're putting the cart waaay before the horse. If you want humanity to live on Mars, you better figure out how to terraform it first. There's no reason to set up any colonies for the foreseeable future. Nobody is going to live like a rat in a hole hiding from cosmic radiation on that desolate waterless treeless airless rock without going crazy. And for what purpose?
The place to start work on technologies for terraforming is right here on earth. We'll probably need a couple of centuries of development before we can think to begin field testing.
In the short term, like I said, we can do a national stunt and send a quick one-off flag planting mission. Just like the Moon, nobody will go back to Mars after that for a long, long time.
And how are we going to colonize other planets, such as Mars, if we don't colonize the Moon, first?
We don't. There is absolutely no reason to colonize Mars. The planet has nothing of value on it beyond science info, which can be collected with machines.
Maybe it's worth sending humans on an Apollo-style mission to plant a flag, snap photos, and pick up bragging rights, but that's about it.
A robotic probe on Mars will do in 10 years about as much work as one man or woman would do in one day
That's BS. First of all, people would be spending 99% of their time and effort trying to keep their own meatbag asses alive. Moreover, probes, (or better still, entire robotic science bases), can patiently do their work while scientists on earth take time to analyze results. Then armed with these results, they can direct the robots to do followups without the scheduling pressure of running out of life support and return launch windows.
I don't think that I've ever had to type in an amount. Like I said, for small amounts, It's often swipe and go. No pushing buttons or using pens of any kind.
Unless the store has one of those automatic coin dispensers (which about 98% of them don't), cash transactions can't hope to compete with that on speed.
The reason nobody's done those things again is that with advances in robotic technology, the only reason to send people to either the moon or the Challenger Deep is for a photo op. Both have already been done, and "me too" snapshots just aren't nearly as compelling.
also shoot 3D footage that may be incorporated in Avatar's sequel.
I think that it would be better to film for a sequel to Das Boot. We could watch the nervous faces of the crew look around as the metal hull of the submarine makes sickening groans under the increasing pressure. Every so often, a pipe would spring a leak and a burly guy in a tank top would have to tighten it with a huge monkey wrench. Then more guys would have to use sledge hammers jam wooden timbers into bulging bulkheads. Finally there would be life-and-death drama when the ballast fails to release at the bottom of the trench. That would make for a riveting thriller.
I don't. I pay off my credit card bills in full every month.
Use cash to pay for everything you can. I hate people who use plastic be it credit cards or debit cards for individual purchase of less than 10 dollars.
Too bad. I always swipe a credit card no matter how small the transaction, because it's faster than cash. A lot of stores don't even make you sign for small transactions these days. I also don't have to deal with bagfuls of loose change in my pockets. I hate waiting behind people in line while the cashier fumbles for and then doles out a dozen little physical tokens to each one of them. (Although I admit that's not nearly as infuriating as when I see someone start to pull out a checkbook after the final total gets rung up.)
This is the 21st century. The postal service is going down the tubes because electronic messaging is more efficient than physical paper. The Bureau of Printing and Engraving should follow suit.
Also consider that it costs a store money per transaction so you are actually being a jerk if you use our debit card for small purchases.
That issue is due to ineffective enforcement of antitrust laws. If the credit card cartels didn't have a near monopoly, transactions wouldn't cost more than a couple of cents, and credit cards would cost the store less than handling and securing paper money. (I'm sure that those armored car deliveries aren't cheap.)
I do my part to address this problem by generally voting for candidates who would tend to strengthen antitrust provisions.
By igniting hundreds of kilograms of fusion fuel within nanoseconds. Fusion reactors, OTOH, would typically have milligrams of fuel in them at any given time.
Did they lie to us and they are actually fission?
Kind of. A typical "fusion bomb" actually gets about 2/3 of its yield from fission. The fusion produces huge quantities of fast neutrons. They make the the "tamper" (a heavy tube that's required to compress the fusion fuel) out of cheap unenriched uranium. That uranium gets split by the fusion neutrons, tripling the yield almost for free.
we could always put the radioactive material back in the ground where we dug it up. i mean, its not like theres a net gain in radioactive material in a fission reactor
You forgot the little detail that we took a material that decays over billions of years and converted it into others that decay over thousands of years, resulting in radiation intensity higher by approximately the ratio of the two time periods.
The All-Stars version of Super Mario Bros. has inaccurate physics when jumping and breaking a brick
I think that *all* Mario games have inaccurate physics when jumping and breaking a brick. If they used accurate physics, Mario would fall to the ground unconscious immediately after whacking his head.
No. Read it again. One $2 CFL light bulb saved $50 in energy over the 6 incandescents it replaced.
You claimed that that the lifetime energy costs of that CFL exceeded that of the 6 incandescents it replaced and the energy to run them. I asked you: How can they make a profit since by your logic this CFL takes at least $50 of energy to manufacture? Is this some Chinese plot to take over the US by subsidizing each exported light bulb to the tune of $48?
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, but with a script you have a record of what was done.
True, unless your script was:
We are spending tons of money on education, and getting nothing for it.
Meanwhile, we're spending $650B on a Cold War-style military that's getting flummoxed by a handful of tribesmen with AK-47s. That's an even bigger failure.
What would you do if your pension plan -- that you've paid into for years -- suddenly decided that you need to be older to collect?
Then it might not go broke, like so many real-world pension plans have.
People live longer than they did when SS was introduced. If you live longer, you need to work longer. What's so hard to figure out about that?
IMO, Social Security should be allocated a fixed percentage of all national personal income, and the retirement age should be continuously adjusted to match the amount of money coming in. That takes all the demographic risks out of the system.
How about we feed the animals the foods they were DESIGNED to eat (i.e. Feed Cows GRASS, Not Corn).
Just because I feel like being pedantic, I'll point out that maize is a grass.
(However, I do remember a documentary that described how the diet being fed to mass market cattle alters the chemistry of their guts to promote the growth of dangerous bacterial strains.)
Hmmm... are you sure that you didn't mean the macro language M4? I thought that ML was the pure functional ancestor to languages like Haskell.
Anyway, I played around with M4 a little bit because I thought it looked handy for a few things. It has a deceptively simple specification that only takes a few pages, but it's one of the most extreme examples of "emergent behavior" I've encountered. Even simple tasks rapidly become mind boggling due to the deceptively tricky nature of recursive text substitutions and quoting. It's a real brain teaser of a language. It does seem like it would be a nifty tool if I spent enough time to really figure it out.
That's certainly a sad state of affairs when kids thing of Bing and they think of a search engine. Bing Crosby one of the greatest singers of all time playing second to a search engine.
Crosby isn't innocent on this issue himself. For decades he's been unfairly stealing the limelight from my favorite cherry cultivar.
Well, until the stylus starts wearing down and the grooves start smoothing out...
An extreme example of that was the all-mechanical antique Victrola that my parents had when I was a kid (along with a big stack of 78-rpm shellac records). All the sound energy was created by the action of the grooves on the needle.
The tone arm was a hollow horn with a big diaphragm on it, and it probably put more than 100 grams of force on the record. The steel needles it used only lasted for about a dozen plays before they became visibly worn and had to be tossed. The mechanical force from playing a record often caused a bunch of white residue to slough off the surface of the disk, which couldn't have been very good for the longevity of the recording. Needless to say, we didn't operate that thing very often.
IMO, the 200 mile exclusive zone is stupid when applied to tiny islets. They should have originally defined the exclusive zone as something like the *lesser* of 200 miles or 10 times the distance from the center of any landmass to the shore. That would make arbitrary little rocks that stick up out of the ocean much less likely to generate conflict.
Toaster-sized at 18''? That's a quite a toaster...
To be fair, the standard SI toaster was defined in 1897, when toasters were a novel luxury item and generally much larger due to the newness of the technology. The original standard toaster, made of solid iridium, is still kept in a vault in Paris.
In 1992, the standard toaster was redefined with dimensions based on the wavelength of a particular spectral line of light given off by a nichrome toaster heating element heated to exactly 1044 K.
For example, you are actually exposed to less radiation while onboard a US nuclear sub than you would receive on the surface.
This is especially true after all the missiles have been launched.
Is that you, Bruce?
No, my name is actually "Grroosss".
A friend called my on my telephone line and told me out of the blue that the Elo rating system had been bested. I was so stunned I almost turned to stone. I said, "Dude, don't bring me down!". But the news slowly sunk in, and now I can't get it out of my head. But I'll tell you what, the jury is still out. I think there's gonna be a showdown, and then Elo will be back on top.
How about people that would vote for either, as long as they supported moderate positions?
Since the Republican party has been going through a systematic purge of members who fail purity tests by supporting moderate positions, that point is rapidly becoming moot.
These days, Richard Nixon would lose in the primaries because his policies make him a RINO.
but as for spreading humanity off the planet Earth that just isn't going to happen.
You're putting the cart waaay before the horse. If you want humanity to live on Mars, you better figure out how to terraform it first. There's no reason to set up any colonies for the foreseeable future. Nobody is going to live like a rat in a hole hiding from cosmic radiation on that desolate waterless treeless airless rock without going crazy. And for what purpose?
The place to start work on technologies for terraforming is right here on earth. We'll probably need a couple of centuries of development before we can think to begin field testing.
In the short term, like I said, we can do a national stunt and send a quick one-off flag planting mission. Just like the Moon, nobody will go back to Mars after that for a long, long time.
And how are we going to colonize other planets, such as Mars, if we don't colonize the Moon, first?
We don't. There is absolutely no reason to colonize Mars. The planet has nothing of value on it beyond science info, which can be collected with machines.
Maybe it's worth sending humans on an Apollo-style mission to plant a flag, snap photos, and pick up bragging rights, but that's about it.
A robotic probe on Mars will do in 10 years about as much work as one man or woman would do in one day
That's BS. First of all, people would be spending 99% of their time and effort trying to keep their own meatbag asses alive. Moreover, probes, (or better still, entire robotic science bases), can patiently do their work while scientists on earth take time to analyze results. Then armed with these results, they can direct the robots to do followups without the scheduling pressure of running out of life support and return launch windows.
I don't think that I've ever had to type in an amount. Like I said, for small amounts, It's often swipe and go. No pushing buttons or using pens of any kind.
Unless the store has one of those automatic coin dispensers (which about 98% of them don't), cash transactions can't hope to compete with that on speed.
The reason nobody's done those things again is that with advances in robotic technology, the only reason to send people to either the moon or the Challenger Deep is for a photo op. Both have already been done, and "me too" snapshots just aren't nearly as compelling.
also shoot 3D footage that may be incorporated in Avatar's sequel.
I think that it would be better to film for a sequel to Das Boot. We could watch the nervous faces of the crew look around as the metal hull of the submarine makes sickening groans under the increasing pressure. Every so often, a pipe would spring a leak and a burly guy in a tank top would have to tighten it with a huge monkey wrench. Then more guys would have to use sledge hammers jam wooden timbers into bulging bulkheads. Finally there would be life-and-death drama when the ballast fails to release at the bottom of the trench. That would make for a riveting thriller.
Don't buy any thing that you cannot afford.
I don't. I pay off my credit card bills in full every month.
Use cash to pay for everything you can. I hate people who use plastic be it credit cards or debit cards for individual purchase of less than 10 dollars.
Too bad. I always swipe a credit card no matter how small the transaction, because it's faster than cash. A lot of stores don't even make you sign for small transactions these days. I also don't have to deal with bagfuls of loose change in my pockets. I hate waiting behind people in line while the cashier fumbles for and then doles out a dozen little physical tokens to each one of them. (Although I admit that's not nearly as infuriating as when I see someone start to pull out a checkbook after the final total gets rung up.)
This is the 21st century. The postal service is going down the tubes because electronic messaging is more efficient than physical paper. The Bureau of Printing and Engraving should follow suit.
Also consider that it costs a store money per transaction so you are actually being a jerk if you use our debit card for small purchases.
That issue is due to ineffective enforcement of antitrust laws. If the credit card cartels didn't have a near monopoly, transactions wouldn't cost more than a couple of cents, and credit cards would cost the store less than handling and securing paper money. (I'm sure that those armored car deliveries aren't cheap.)
I do my part to address this problem by generally voting for candidates who would tend to strengthen antitrust provisions.
So how do fusion bombs work?
By igniting hundreds of kilograms of fusion fuel within nanoseconds. Fusion reactors, OTOH, would typically have milligrams of fuel in them at any given time.
Did they lie to us and they are actually fission?
Kind of. A typical "fusion bomb" actually gets about 2/3 of its yield from fission. The fusion produces huge quantities of fast neutrons. They make the the "tamper" (a heavy tube that's required to compress the fusion fuel) out of cheap unenriched uranium. That uranium gets split by the fusion neutrons, tripling the yield almost for free.
we could always put the radioactive material back in the ground where we dug it up. i mean, its not like theres a net gain in radioactive material in a fission reactor
You forgot the little detail that we took a material that decays over billions of years and converted it into others that decay over thousands of years, resulting in radiation intensity higher by approximately the ratio of the two time periods.
The All-Stars version of Super Mario Bros. has inaccurate physics when jumping and breaking a brick
I think that *all* Mario games have inaccurate physics when jumping and breaking a brick. If they used accurate physics, Mario would fall to the ground unconscious immediately after whacking his head.
No. Read it again. One $2 CFL light bulb saved $50 in energy over the 6 incandescents it replaced.
You claimed that that the lifetime energy costs of that CFL exceeded that of the 6 incandescents it replaced and the energy to run them. I asked you: How can they make a profit since by your logic this CFL takes at least $50 of energy to manufacture? Is this some Chinese plot to take over the US by subsidizing each exported light bulb to the tune of $48?
Ok Captain Pyrex: Explain to me how they can sell an object that requires $50 of energy input for $2 retail.
It's been a very long time since I saw that movie, but one key thing sticks in my mind: That computer was the ultimate asshole.