So... they need to stop pretending that somehow the next president will magically be better than Obama.
The next president will be white.
Hate to say it, but its the only differentiator that logically explains the behavior we are seeing out of the Republican party. It explains a distressing amount of the last 8 years, actually. The Republican party in Congress has essentially been on an 8 year universal filibuster.
We are going to need oil for at least another 30 years. How can I say this? Simple. Boeing has been making planes...
Here's another for you: used cars. It takes a newly-built car about 30 years to cycle (almost) completely out of the market. The average age of a car on US roads today is more than 11 years old. There are 14 million cars on US roads that are 25 years old or older.
So even if the entire auto industry switched to electric next year (which they aren't even close to doing), we'd still need gasoline production for 30 more years.
That was all horseshit. Low oil prices never created a threat of recession. Except maybe...
Well, here in Oklahoma it has indeed caused a recession, as Oil and gas extraction and processing is our #1 (legal) industry. There are some areas of Texas and Alaska that probably aren't particularly peppy right now either. However, for the country at large you are quite correct.
Solutions are someone else's problem. I don't live there, so fixing it isn't really my department.
I will say as a life-long Okie and a minor student of economics (well...I took 101 and 102 in college at least. Got A's.) that price controls rub me very wrong as well. We've never had such a thing here, and my brain has trouble wrapping itself around the concept of them ever being a solution for anything. Temporary stop-gap, perhaps. But they can easily be overwhelmed by market forces, which seems to be exactly what is happening here. There's needs to be a more fundamental solution to the problem.
Loosening their silly zoning so that more high-density housing could be built would perhaps be a good start.
I guess you didn't read the article. Things like soup kitchens and shelters are being evicted too. Short of scavenging pigeons on the streets, even the homeless are being priced out of the Bay.
Yeah, they want to keep the money they earned in their paychecks. How dare they?
"Paychecks"? Oh, my sweet country mouse...
Rich people by and large don't get most of their money from paychecks, and those aren't the taxes they concentrate on. They fight hard for new and better tax breaks for things like capital gains, inheritance, second homes, etc. These are situations where they barely lift a finger (if at all). Paychecks are for suckers like us.
A whiny sense of entitlement that makes claim to something scarce simply because they want it. This is especially amusing (or would be, if these people didn't vote) in its predictableness, coming from the usual lefty/artist/aging-or-rebooted-hippie sector
It comes from rich people too. Say you talk about actually paying for that expensive military they love so much by getting rid of their tax breaks on capital gains, inheritance, or second homes. Then you'll hear all sorts of talk about how they are entitled to every penny of their financial windfalls. Or talk about getting rid of the strict zoning laws that were put in back in the end of the Civil Rights era to provide backdoor ways to prevent poor blacks from living near rich white people. Then you'll hear all sorts of talk about how reducing property values of rich people when cheaper houses are built nearby is unfair to the rich people. The exact same argument in reverse.
We just don't call it "whining" or "entitlement" then. Those words are reserved for poor people.
...and people having loud animated conversations on their cell phones in crowded public spaces are rude.
Serious question here: What exactly makes that rude? Are people equally rude if the person they are having the conversation with happens to be present, rather than on the other end of a phone?
I actually don't like phones (although I love having a portable internet connection). However, conversations, up to a certain (very high) volume, seem to be considered perfectly acceptable on public transit, even though I often find them even more distracting. If those are OK, why is it bad when you physically remove one of the participants? What's the standard here?
Thank you! That was in fact the first story I was thinking about. Couldn't find it in my offline files, and couldn't remember enough details to help Google find it for me.
I've heard some really interesting stories about Drum memory.
Since you had to wait for your desired read/write location to rotate under the head, and since this was back in the CISC era when the execution time of every instruction was known and published, developers would "optimize" their memory accesses by placing their data on the drum in the exact spot that each byte would be under the head when the instruction to read or write it was processed.
Even more interestingly, at least one platform made use of this architecture by using an assembly language that effectively had a goto at the end of every instruction. That way you could scatter your code on the drum to perform the same optimization.
I saw another story about early rotating-drum systems being put on USN ships. Supposedly the first time they tried to turn at sea the navigators discovered the hard way that the designers failed to account for the gyroscopic property of having a large rotating metal drum on board...
I hate the term AI. There is no intelligence in it. "AI" programs are still computer programs that execute the series of steps it was told to execute
My first CS prof back in the 80's explained it as "AI is stuff that is hard...today." He went on to explain that when he was a student, things like CPU load balancing and garbage collection were considered "AI".
I didn't say it was an IBM. I said our protocol uses IBM-format floats. I don't think the PDP-11's used that format, so that's probably the footprints of yet another old computer, long since upgraded.
I've found that sometimes old systems leave footprints that last far beyond the computers themselves.
For example, a couple of years ago we had this working networked system that we wanted to upgrade one computer of. The issue was that the protocol used to talk between the systems was a custom network layer written on top of a serial protocol called DR-11W. The cards were rather hard to find, the hardware very finicky to get talking right, and finding good docs for our custom layer was a real challenge.
I eventually found out in researching it that DR-11W was in fact the serial printer port on the original PDP-11's back in the 70's. Neither machine was a PDP-11, but since every upgrade ever done was one computer at a time, we've had to maintain this PDP-11 printer port communications interface for the last 40 years. The protocol even required converting all floating-point values to IBM's old format even though neither side used that format! The conversion's not trivial either.
Our one vendor for these cards has since gone out of business. The story I heard is that they lost their building lease, and didn't feel like it was worth it to move. So it looks like next upgrade, the PDP-11 printer port networking may finally die.
The moral here is that just because the 40-year-old computer may be physically gone, it might not really be gone.
Where did this oddball bit of Libertarian dogma come from?
If we had competing public transport companies, one could've switched
Major cities do not run public transport because its a money-maker. They run it, usually at least somewhat subsidized by taxpayers, because their city needs an affordable public transportation system to operate smoothly.
The purpose of public transport is to provide a transportation grid that your citizens (particularly those without access to private personal transport) can use to get wherever they want/need to go around your city effectively. In general there isn't competition for that from private companies not because the city doesn't allow it, but because private companies don't want to do that. In fact, the profit motive would not allow them to. If it was left up to competing private companies, the only bus routes a city would have would lead to its racetracks and casinos (but the bonus is the rides would probably be free. At least inbound.).
That you can make a moon landing implies you have the capability of creating a rocket that can accurately leave the atmosphere, return through the atmosphere, and hit the rough vicinity of a designated target. That's also what nuclear-tipped ICBMs have to do. But of course, other countries on this planet that might see themselves targets of yours might plausibly paint you as a horrible warmonger if you just announce that you now have the capability of launching nuclear ICBMs at them. But nobody can complain about a "moon landing". That's noble!
This is why "moon landing" has always been geopolitical code for "ICBM capability". Its likely no mistake South Korea is announcing this now, while North Korean has been a particularly unstable pest recently.
ET mostly gets the title these days because its release was such a famous fiasco.
Until fairly recently, what was generally agreed to be the worst Atari game ever, and quite possibly the worst in history, was a game called Custer's Revenge. Not only was the gameplay pretty cruddy, but the idea behind it was just repellent. The object was to kill as many "Indians" as possible and rape their women. Not even kidding. It was made by a porn producer.
Even by the standards of cultural sensitivity in the late 1970's, this was going too far. Atari tried to sue to keep the game off their console, and it was exhibit A for a long while of why console platform makers have to keep control of their platform (a theory which governs game console licensing to this day).
That was the end of a cold pulse during the last glaciation (Ice Age). At the time...
In North America, the ice covered essentially all of Canada and extended roughly to the Missouri and Ohio Rivers, and eastward to Manhattan. In addition to the large Cordilleran Ice Sheet in Canada and Montana, alpine glaciers advanced and (in some locations) ice caps covered much of the Rocky Mountains further south
Sea levels were *far* lower then, due to all the ice. So this is just what it looks like when all that utterly ridiculous amount of ice starts to melt. So that was the reason then. What's the reason today?
There is something to be said for using an industry where people know who the others are.
Uber has cab companies beat all to hell on that. I can look up the ratings on my Uber driver before I get in their car. When I call a cab company, I have no clue who's going to show up. In fact, I have no real clue who the company is. I once thought I'd be responsible and call around to different companies from the yellow pages get the best rate. I tried three different companies, and the same person picked up the phone for all off them.
There's far, far more accountability with an Uber driver.
Except you can never buy the cable card, the cable company "rents" it to you at the same price that a cable box would cost to rent.
Not quite true. They do rent them, but Cox is currently charging me a bit over $5 a month total for all of mine, and I have 6 in various TiVos. Two of their Cox set-top boxes would run me far more than $5 a month. I was pleasantly surprised my cable bill dropped a smidge when I upgraded TiVos to the CableCard versions.
Now what they don't tell you is that those cable cards are buggy as hell. Once they are set up right they work like a champ forever, but I had to go through about 15 of them to find a set that worked. Their installer they finally sent over who is a CableCard install expert told me that's not really all that unusual. He brings all the extra he can get his hands on whenever he gets sent out somewhere.
The main issue here I think is that this isn't the typical customer install path, and it makes Cox less money. So while the government makes them support it, the cable company has little incentive to make it more painless.
Even with that though, I'm quite happy with this setup.
is Eske Willerslev 's discovery [nature.com] of people that were genetically closely related to modern Europeans but who lived in Siberia. It turns out that these people contributed significantly to the groups that settled the Americas, meaning that Native Americans and Europeans are actually very closely connected by genetic bonds that stretch back way, way, way, way before Columbus (as in 24000 years ago)...
Interesting. I'd heard relations like that proposed by linguists 30 years ago, and more recently links of PIE ancestors to Siberian people a decade ago. But there are so many proposed macro-language families, that could just be luck.
Now all someone needs to do is use that app to set up a burkha rental booth in front of that checkpoint when its discovered. You give a large deposit for your rental burkha, don't get pinched by the pigs, then drop your burkha off at the deposit booth on the other side of the morality police checkpoint, where you get most of your deposit back.
Millions of young Arabs really did take to the streets demanding liberty, and dignity, and justice..... It wasn’t a mirage. We really do exist.
We’re not a minority, either. We only appear to be a minority because we’re not organized; we’re not on the menu. When the only options presented are black or white, it does not mean that red or green or blue are a minority. When the only options presented are religious authoritarianism or nationalistic fascism, it does not mean that a third option doesn’t exist. It’s just not on the menu.
Since gas is between $1-$2 a gallon now I think the need for hybrids has passed.
"Passed" isn't quite the right word. These prices are something Saudi Arabia is doing on purpose to try to run all the US shale oil producers out of business. If their plan works (Mwaahahahah! Good kitty), presumably they will then be able to go right back up to the higher prices they were selling Oil at 5 years ago.
Slashdot Mirror
So... they need to stop pretending that somehow the next president will magically be better than Obama.
The next president will be white.
Hate to say it, but its the only differentiator that logically explains the behavior we are seeing out of the Republican party. It explains a distressing amount of the last 8 years, actually. The Republican party in Congress has essentially been on an 8 year universal filibuster.
We are going to need oil for at least another 30 years. How can I say this? Simple. Boeing has been making planes...
Here's another for you: used cars. It takes a newly-built car about 30 years to cycle (almost) completely out of the market. The average age of a car on US roads today is more than 11 years old. There are 14 million cars on US roads that are 25 years old or older.
So even if the entire auto industry switched to electric next year (which they aren't even close to doing), we'd still need gasoline production for 30 more years.
That was all horseshit. Low oil prices never created a threat of recession. Except maybe ...
Well, here in Oklahoma it has indeed caused a recession, as Oil and gas extraction and processing is our #1 (legal) industry. There are some areas of Texas and Alaska that probably aren't particularly peppy right now either. However, for the country at large you are quite correct.
Solutions are someone else's problem. I don't live there, so fixing it isn't really my department.
I will say as a life-long Okie and a minor student of economics (well...I took 101 and 102 in college at least. Got A's.) that price controls rub me very wrong as well. We've never had such a thing here, and my brain has trouble wrapping itself around the concept of them ever being a solution for anything. Temporary stop-gap, perhaps. But they can easily be overwhelmed by market forces, which seems to be exactly what is happening here. There's needs to be a more fundamental solution to the problem.
Loosening their silly zoning so that more high-density housing could be built would perhaps be a good start.
I guess you didn't read the article. Things like soup kitchens and shelters are being evicted too. Short of scavenging pigeons on the streets, even the homeless are being priced out of the Bay.
Yeah, they want to keep the money they earned in their paychecks. How dare they?
"Paychecks"? Oh, my sweet country mouse...
Rich people by and large don't get most of their money from paychecks, and those aren't the taxes they concentrate on. They fight hard for new and better tax breaks for things like capital gains, inheritance, second homes, etc. These are situations where they barely lift a finger (if at all). Paychecks are for suckers like us.
A whiny sense of entitlement that makes claim to something scarce simply because they want it. This is especially amusing (or would be, if these people didn't vote) in its predictableness, coming from the usual lefty/artist/aging-or-rebooted-hippie sector
It comes from rich people too. Say you talk about actually paying for that expensive military they love so much by getting rid of their tax breaks on capital gains, inheritance, or second homes. Then you'll hear all sorts of talk about how they are entitled to every penny of their financial windfalls. Or talk about getting rid of the strict zoning laws that were put in back in the end of the Civil Rights era to provide backdoor ways to prevent poor blacks from living near rich white people. Then you'll hear all sorts of talk about how reducing property values of rich people when cheaper houses are built nearby is unfair to the rich people. The exact same argument in reverse.
We just don't call it "whining" or "entitlement" then. Those words are reserved for poor people.
The problem here is that a city, even in the Bay area, needs low and mid wage workers too in order to function.
Think about it this way: How is the Bay Area tech industry going to function when there's nobody left to staff their Starbucks'?
...and people having loud animated conversations on their cell phones in crowded public spaces are rude.
Serious question here: What exactly makes that rude? Are people equally rude if the person they are having the conversation with happens to be present, rather than on the other end of a phone?
I actually don't like phones (although I love having a portable internet connection). However, conversations, up to a certain (very high) volume, seem to be considered perfectly acceptable on public transit, even though I often find them even more distracting. If those are OK, why is it bad when you physically remove one of the participants? What's the standard here?
Thank you! That was in fact the first story I was thinking about. Couldn't find it in my offline files, and couldn't remember enough details to help Google find it for me.
I've heard some really interesting stories about Drum memory.
Since you had to wait for your desired read/write location to rotate under the head, and since this was back in the CISC era when the execution time of every instruction was known and published, developers would "optimize" their memory accesses by placing their data on the drum in the exact spot that each byte would be under the head when the instruction to read or write it was processed.
Even more interestingly, at least one platform made use of this architecture by using an assembly language that effectively had a goto at the end of every instruction. That way you could scatter your code on the drum to perform the same optimization.
I saw another story about early rotating-drum systems being put on USN ships. Supposedly the first time they tried to turn at sea the navigators discovered the hard way that the designers failed to account for the gyroscopic property of having a large rotating metal drum on board...
We had winter already? When was that?
I hate the term AI. There is no intelligence in it. "AI" programs are still computer programs that execute the series of steps it was told to execute
My first CS prof back in the 80's explained it as "AI is stuff that is hard...today." He went on to explain that when he was a student, things like CPU load balancing and garbage collection were considered "AI".
I didn't say it was an IBM. I said our protocol uses IBM-format floats. I don't think the PDP-11's used that format, so that's probably the footprints of yet another old computer, long since upgraded.
I've found that sometimes old systems leave footprints that last far beyond the computers themselves.
For example, a couple of years ago we had this working networked system that we wanted to upgrade one computer of. The issue was that the protocol used to talk between the systems was a custom network layer written on top of a serial protocol called DR-11W. The cards were rather hard to find, the hardware very finicky to get talking right, and finding good docs for our custom layer was a real challenge.
I eventually found out in researching it that DR-11W was in fact the serial printer port on the original PDP-11's back in the 70's. Neither machine was a PDP-11, but since every upgrade ever done was one computer at a time, we've had to maintain this PDP-11 printer port communications interface for the last 40 years. The protocol even required converting all floating-point values to IBM's old format even though neither side used that format! The conversion's not trivial either.
Our one vendor for these cards has since gone out of business. The story I heard is that they lost their building lease, and didn't feel like it was worth it to move. So it looks like next upgrade, the PDP-11 printer port networking may finally die.
The moral here is that just because the 40-year-old computer may be physically gone, it might not really be gone.
If we had competing public transport companies, one could've switched
Major cities do not run public transport because its a money-maker. They run it, usually at least somewhat subsidized by taxpayers, because their city needs an affordable public transportation system to operate smoothly.
The purpose of public transport is to provide a transportation grid that your citizens (particularly those without access to private personal transport) can use to get wherever they want/need to go around your city effectively. In general there isn't competition for that from private companies not because the city doesn't allow it, but because private companies don't want to do that. In fact, the profit motive would not allow them to. If it was left up to competing private companies, the only bus routes a city would have would lead to its racetracks and casinos (but the bonus is the rides would probably be free. At least inbound.).
That you can make a moon landing implies you have the capability of creating a rocket that can accurately leave the atmosphere, return through the atmosphere, and hit the rough vicinity of a designated target. That's also what nuclear-tipped ICBMs have to do. But of course, other countries on this planet that might see themselves targets of yours might plausibly paint you as a horrible warmonger if you just announce that you now have the capability of launching nuclear ICBMs at them. But nobody can complain about a "moon landing". That's noble!
This is why "moon landing" has always been geopolitical code for "ICBM capability". Its likely no mistake South Korea is announcing this now, while North Korean has been a particularly unstable pest recently.
ET mostly gets the title these days because its release was such a famous fiasco.
Until fairly recently, what was generally agreed to be the worst Atari game ever, and quite possibly the worst in history, was a game called Custer's Revenge. Not only was the gameplay pretty cruddy, but the idea behind it was just repellent. The object was to kill as many "Indians" as possible and rape their women. Not even kidding. It was made by a porn producer.
Even by the standards of cultural sensitivity in the late 1970's, this was going too far. Atari tried to sue to keep the game off their console, and it was exhibit A for a long while of why console platform makers have to keep control of their platform (a theory which governs game console licensing to this day).
In North America, the ice covered essentially all of Canada and extended roughly to the Missouri and Ohio Rivers, and eastward to Manhattan. In addition to the large Cordilleran Ice Sheet in Canada and Montana, alpine glaciers advanced and (in some locations) ice caps covered much of the Rocky Mountains further south
Sea levels were *far* lower then, due to all the ice. So this is just what it looks like when all that utterly ridiculous amount of ice starts to melt. So that was the reason then. What's the reason today?
There is something to be said for using an industry where people know who the others are.
Uber has cab companies beat all to hell on that. I can look up the ratings on my Uber driver before I get in their car. When I call a cab company, I have no clue who's going to show up. In fact, I have no real clue who the company is. I once thought I'd be responsible and call around to different companies from the yellow pages get the best rate. I tried three different companies, and the same person picked up the phone for all off them.
There's far, far more accountability with an Uber driver.
Except you can never buy the cable card, the cable company "rents" it to you at the same price that a cable box would cost to rent.
Not quite true. They do rent them, but Cox is currently charging me a bit over $5 a month total for all of mine, and I have 6 in various TiVos. Two of their Cox set-top boxes would run me far more than $5 a month. I was pleasantly surprised my cable bill dropped a smidge when I upgraded TiVos to the CableCard versions.
Now what they don't tell you is that those cable cards are buggy as hell. Once they are set up right they work like a champ forever, but I had to go through about 15 of them to find a set that worked. Their installer they finally sent over who is a CableCard install expert told me that's not really all that unusual. He brings all the extra he can get his hands on whenever he gets sent out somewhere.
The main issue here I think is that this isn't the typical customer install path, and it makes Cox less money. So while the government makes them support it, the cable company has little incentive to make it more painless.
Even with that though, I'm quite happy with this setup.
is Eske Willerslev 's discovery [nature.com] of people that were genetically closely related to modern Europeans but who lived in Siberia. It turns out that these people contributed significantly to the groups that settled the Americas, meaning that Native Americans and Europeans are actually very closely connected by genetic bonds that stretch back way, way, way, way before Columbus (as in 24000 years ago)...
Interesting. I'd heard relations like that proposed by linguists 30 years ago, and more recently links of PIE ancestors to Siberian people a decade ago. But there are so many proposed macro-language families, that could just be luck.
Now all someone needs to do is use that app to set up a burkha rental booth in front of that checkpoint when its discovered. You give a large deposit for your rental burkha, don't get pinched by the pigs, then drop your burkha off at the deposit booth on the other side of the morality police checkpoint, where you get most of your deposit back.
If we've learned anything from the Arab Spring it's that most of the people living there favor these types of religiously oppressive governments, ...
Then you have indeed learned nothing from the Arab Spring.
Millions of young Arabs really did take to the streets demanding liberty, and dignity, and justice. .... It wasn’t a mirage. We really do exist.
We’re not a minority, either. We only appear to be a minority because we’re not organized; we’re not on the menu. When the only options presented are black or white, it does not mean that red or green or blue are a minority. When the only options presented are religious authoritarianism or nationalistic fascism, it does not mean that a third option doesn’t exist. It’s just not on the menu.
Since gas is between $1-$2 a gallon now I think the need for hybrids has passed.
"Passed" isn't quite the right word. These prices are something Saudi Arabia is doing on purpose to try to run all the US shale oil producers out of business. If their plan works (Mwaahahahah! Good kitty), presumably they will then be able to go right back up to the higher prices they were selling Oil at 5 years ago.