In other words, causes, no matter how big, don't really get power until they can pay enough to be taken seriously. That might mean lobbying, marketing, or awareness campaigns, but it still takes money to look like your cause has merit.
I wonder how many of these groups first use their influence to gain a source of public funding. Which would entrench their position.
Heinlein's 1966 classic The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress is wonderful and visionary on many levels but still tripped over some contemporary assumptions. Like one big computer ran everything, including the phone system. It could synthesize audio but it had to jump through fancy hoops to do video.
The other assumption made here was that it wasn't too difficult to create a functional AI. Something which modern authors don't tend to consider as easy as producing video good enough to fool people.
Most authors back in Asimov's day saw the world like that - astrogators using books of navigation tables, slide rules, taking sextant readings from the stars, etc.
An obvious example of this would Heinlein's "Starman Jones" from 1953. Where the use of such tables forms a critical part of the plot. With the real Apollo Guidance Computer being far more "user friendly":)
So one person guesses in the mid-19th century that we will have horseless carriages in the future--but also thinks they'll run on steam engines and cause great depletion of our wood and coal supplies.
The first steam driven vehicles date from the early 19th century. One of the problems with the London Steam Carriage (of 1803) was that it cost more to run than a horse drawn carriage (needing a fireman in addition to a driver.) There were steam cars built which used liquid (petroleum based) fuels too.
Another person forsees an interstate highway system, but thinks it will be used for giant horse-drawn land trains.
By the mid 19th century nobody would seriously consider trains drawn by anything other than a locomotive. Even around the turn of the 20th century there was plenty of competition between steam, internal combustion (both types) and electric engines when it came to "horseless carriages". Ironically a century old electric car can have a similar range to a modern one.
No as was already pointed out, North America is a continent, South America is a differnet continent and Central America is a region where
the two connect.
Rather "Central America" is the southern part of "North America".
Yeah, and how hard is it to divide 22 by 7 with a twig in the dirt, "Mr. Mathematician"? That's also an acceptable approximation of Pi that is 4.0249943477E-2 percent off the "true value".
http://www.homepower.com/articles/wind-power/design-installation/ask-experts-car-alternator-wind-turbine
"A car alternator is a bad choice for a wind generator. The efficiency in normal use is never more than about 60 percent."
Wind is a poor way to generate electricity in the first place. Since the available power varies randomly. Even the most primative of steam engines would be a better choice.
Windows 7 has been hands-down more solid and stable. In the 4.5 years I have been running it, on 5 PCs, I can count the number of BSODs I've had on one hand -- and those are typically attributable to unstable, unsigned device drivers.
5 PCs is no kind of "enterprise" setup. There's also no way to directly upgrade from XP to 7. The only way is a reinstall then finding out which applications still work with 7. Worst case senario being applications which install without any obvious issues, start up apparently fine, but certain functionional is either missing or different. Or maybe applications need to be "upgraded" with the new version being functionally different.
It is like if you buy a car from a Toyota dealership. It comes with a 3 year warranty, Toyota fix things that break on the car for 3 years. After 3 years they no longer provide free repairs, and you *gasp* must pay to have things fixed and replaced.
Plenty of places have laws that require goods to be of "reasonable quality". In the case of a manufacturing defect these can be applicable for considerably longer than 3 years. (Possibly with seller, rather than maker, having to pay.) A problem with software is that it can fall outside the scope of such laws. Even if it's sold as a "widget".
Software doesn't have "mechanical" wear, but it has ongoing discovery of security vulnerabilities that require maintenance from the vendor. Delivering that maintenance costs money.
Such vulnerabilities can also be introduced by "maintenance". Also they can't be easily related to some metric of usage or time, unlike mechanical "wear".
Here's a small Parrot drone at 1553 feet in the UK. It's little, but if it was sucked into a jet engine, the engine would definitely be damaged and might fail. In 2013, someone was flying a drone near JFK in New York and the drone had a near miss with a jetliner.
Unless drones were to start flying in large numbers of "flocks" they are unlikely to be as big a hazard to aircraft as birds.
By the law, their authority starts at something like 700 feet. Stay below that and they have no business saying anything one way or the other about it.
These drones pose no threat to conventional aircraft because they operate at closer to ten thousand feet... not under 700.
You'd typically find aircraft operating down to zero feet at or near airports. Also aircraft performing things such as powerline surveys and firefighting can be flying very low. So there might be cause for concern. But obviously not a big worry if the FAA has effectivly sat on this for several years.
And commercial flights of drones are forbidden in the US. The FAA is writing the regulations about what is and isn't going to be allowed, but until they finish that, any commercial flights of drone is in violation of the existing rules. I'm not sure why it's so hard for Libertarians to grasp that.
The point is that what this guy was doing in no way fits the definition of "commercial".
Shockingly, and unsurprisingly, by limiting themselves to the last 500 years, such pesky issues as the Medieval Warm Period go away,
Often the LIA, MWP, RWP, etc. Are waved away as "not global" / "local". By someone unwilling/able to give an objective metric for "global" vs "local". (Often the same applies with "weather" vs "climate".)
You have it backwards, please point me to the authoritative record of temperatures to within say a quarter of a degree C for the last 500 years.
Alternativly use "proxies" which are equally accurate over those 500 years. Otherwise a switch between "proxies" and "instruments" involves an apples to oranges comparison.
Celsius only came up with his temperature scale in 1742 and Fahrenheit in 1724. So what scale was used in 1514? Also the results cannot be more accurate than the raw data.
And they're / we're doing that because all of the global warming extremists want to wreck prosperity in pursuing actions that will not work.
No doubt lining their own pockets in the process. Unless they ate really daft politicans.
The US simply pauperizing itself in trying to use extremely expensive "clean" energy won't do a damn thing to get India and China to quit digging coal, and we cannot support out population without petroleum anyway.
Since wind and solar require some form of backup, typically natural gas power stations run very inefficently, they can be very "dirty". If the idea were to cut burning of fossil fuels then nuclear electricity generation and/or Air/Water Fuel Synthesis is a far more sensible way to go about things.
posting the fake 97% number just shows your stupidity,
look at how the number came to be, it's fucking junk.
Thing is that simply making such "consensus" claims, regardless of how accurate or not the numbers might be, effectivly demonstrates that what is going on isn't "science" in the first place.
the other half is switching to nuclear fuel (renewables don't do it because they always come combined with natural gas power plants).
The real irony is that nuclear fission is more accuratly called "renewable" than wind and solar in the first place. That's even before you counsider that a nuclear power plant is actually capable of generating electricity whereas wind and solar "farms" are a bad joke in that respect.
SSL is a much worse problem in itself. Relying on some "trustworthy" certificate authority sounds like a good idea, huh?
This might be more an issue of how it is being used. Not everything using SSL also uses "certificate authorities". Theres also no reason why software which odes can't give a warning if the CA were to unexpectedly change.
It's a completely broken idea, especially in this age when the worst enemy is the own government.
Has there been a time, at least within modern history, where this has not really been the case?
Phase transitions generally require quite a lot of energy.
Phase translations involve energy refered to as "latent heat". However the latent heat of boilng and that of freezing (along with the specific heat capacity in any phase) depend very much on the substance involved,
Does that software run on Linux? If not, is there a comparable piece of software that would have all the functionality we need? If not, can we live without the missing functionality?
If you get to the end of those questions and the answer is "no", then you should probably cut your losses and accept that you'll have to stick with Windows.
In many many cases you can subsitute "Windows 7" or "Windows 8" for "Linux". Thus being a reason for many people not wanting to "upgrade" from Windows XP. There are likely to be situations where a migration to a Linux distribution is going to be easier than a migration to Windows 7/8 and associated "upgrades". Where the current setup is Windows XP "stick with" simply isn't an option.
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Even in our (Australia's) supposedly modern democracy, politicians can say anything at all to get elected and can't be held to it once they are.
Is there any place where politicians held to what they say in their campaign or political parties are held to what's in their manifesto?
In other words, causes, no matter how big, don't really get power until they can pay enough to be taken seriously. That might mean lobbying, marketing, or awareness campaigns, but it still takes money to look like your cause has merit.
I wonder how many of these groups first use their influence to gain a source of public funding. Which would entrench their position.
Sure, and your retina can't see VGA resolution resolution either.
Not if you stand far enough away from the screen...
e,g, if it's the visor on your "cleaning suit".
Heinlein's 1966 classic The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress is wonderful and visionary on many levels but still tripped over some contemporary assumptions. Like one big computer ran everything, including the phone system. It could synthesize audio but it had to jump through fancy hoops to do video.
The other assumption made here was that it wasn't too difficult to create a functional AI. Something which modern authors don't tend to consider as easy as producing video good enough to fool people.
Most authors back in Asimov's day saw the world like that - astrogators using books of navigation tables, slide rules, taking sextant readings from the stars, etc.
:)
An obvious example of this would Heinlein's "Starman Jones" from 1953. Where the use of such tables forms a critical part of the plot. With the real Apollo Guidance Computer being far more "user friendly"
So one person guesses in the mid-19th century that we will have horseless carriages in the future--but also thinks they'll run on steam engines and cause great depletion of our wood and coal supplies.
The first steam driven vehicles date from the early 19th century. One of the problems with the London Steam Carriage (of 1803) was that it cost more to run than a horse drawn carriage (needing a fireman in addition to a driver.) There were steam cars built which used liquid (petroleum based) fuels too.
Another person forsees an interstate highway system, but thinks it will be used for giant horse-drawn land trains.
By the mid 19th century nobody would seriously consider trains drawn by anything other than a locomotive.
Even around the turn of the 20th century there was plenty of competition between steam, internal combustion (both types) and electric engines when it came to "horseless carriages". Ironically a century old electric car can have a similar range to a modern one.
No as was already pointed out, North America is a continent, South America is a differnet continent and Central America is a region where the two connect.
Rather "Central America" is the southern part of "North America".
Yeah, and how hard is it to divide 22 by 7 with a twig in the dirt, "Mr. Mathematician"? That's also an acceptable approximation of Pi that is 4.0249943477E-2 percent off the "true value".
Or memorise 3.1419 or 3.142...
http://www.homepower.com/articles/wind-power/design-installation/ask-experts-car-alternator-wind-turbine "A car alternator is a bad choice for a wind generator. The efficiency in normal use is never more than about 60 percent."
Wind is a poor way to generate electricity in the first place. Since the available power varies randomly. Even the most primative of steam engines would be a better choice.
Or they could do the sane thing and move their employees off of decade-old hardware.
:)
Presumably you won't be boarding a bus, train or commercial flight then
Windows 7 has been hands-down more solid and stable. In the 4.5 years I have been running it, on 5 PCs, I can count the number of BSODs I've had on one hand -- and those are typically attributable to unstable, unsigned device drivers.
5 PCs is no kind of "enterprise" setup. There's also no way to directly upgrade from XP to 7. The only way is a reinstall then finding out which applications still work with 7. Worst case senario being applications which install without any obvious issues, start up apparently fine, but certain functionional is either missing or different. Or maybe applications need to be "upgraded" with the new version being functionally different.
It is like if you buy a car from a Toyota dealership. It comes with a 3 year warranty, Toyota fix things that break on the car for 3 years. After 3 years they no longer provide free repairs, and you *gasp* must pay to have things fixed and replaced.
Plenty of places have laws that require goods to be of "reasonable quality".
In the case of a manufacturing defect these can be applicable for considerably longer than 3 years. (Possibly with seller, rather than maker, having to pay.)
A problem with software is that it can fall outside the scope of such laws. Even if it's sold as a "widget".
Software doesn't have "mechanical" wear, but it has ongoing discovery of security vulnerabilities that require maintenance from the vendor. Delivering that maintenance costs money.
Such vulnerabilities can also be introduced by "maintenance". Also they can't be easily related to some metric of usage or time, unlike mechanical "wear".
Here's a small Parrot drone at 1553 feet in the UK. It's little, but if it was sucked into a jet engine, the engine would definitely be damaged and might fail. In 2013, someone was flying a drone near JFK in New York and the drone had a near miss with a jetliner.
Unless drones were to start flying in large numbers of "flocks" they are unlikely to be as big a hazard to aircraft as birds.
By the law, their authority starts at something like 700 feet. Stay below that and they have no business saying anything one way or the other about it.
These drones pose no threat to conventional aircraft because they operate at closer to ten thousand feet... not under 700.
You'd typically find aircraft operating down to zero feet at or near airports. Also aircraft performing things such as powerline surveys and firefighting can be flying very low. So there might be cause for concern. But obviously not a big worry if the FAA has effectivly sat on this for several years.
And commercial flights of drones are forbidden in the US. The FAA is writing the regulations about what is and isn't going to be allowed, but until they finish that, any commercial flights of drone is in violation of the existing rules. I'm not sure why it's so hard for Libertarians to grasp that.
The point is that what this guy was doing in no way fits the definition of "commercial".
Shockingly, and unsurprisingly, by limiting themselves to the last 500 years, such pesky issues as the Medieval Warm Period go away,
Often the LIA, MWP, RWP, etc. Are waved away as "not global" / "local". By someone unwilling/able to give an objective metric for "global" vs "local". (Often the same applies with "weather" vs "climate".)
Yea, look at this ice core data. Much warmer in the past, with no anthropogenic CO2 influence.
Also this data shows CO2 following temperature rather than vice versa.
You have it backwards, please point me to the authoritative record of temperatures to within say a quarter of a degree C for the last 500 years.
Alternativly use "proxies" which are equally accurate over those 500 years.
Otherwise a switch between "proxies" and "instruments" involves an apples to oranges comparison.
Celsius only came up with his temperature scale in 1742 and Fahrenheit in 1724. So what scale was used in 1514?
Also the results cannot be more accurate than the raw data.
And they're / we're doing that because all of the global warming extremists want to wreck prosperity in pursuing actions that will not work.
No doubt lining their own pockets in the process. Unless they ate really daft politicans.
The US simply pauperizing itself in trying to use extremely expensive "clean" energy won't do a damn thing to get India and China to quit digging coal, and we cannot support out population without petroleum anyway.
Since wind and solar require some form of backup, typically natural gas power stations run very inefficently, they can be very "dirty". If the idea were to cut burning of fossil fuels then nuclear electricity generation and/or Air/Water Fuel Synthesis is a far more sensible way to go about things.
posting the fake 97% number just shows your stupidity,
look at how the number came to be, it's fucking junk.
Thing is that simply making such "consensus" claims, regardless of how accurate or not the numbers might be, effectivly demonstrates that what is going on isn't "science" in the first place.
the other half is switching to nuclear fuel (renewables don't do it because they always come combined with natural gas power plants).
The real irony is that nuclear fission is more accuratly called "renewable" than wind and solar in the first place. That's even before you counsider that a nuclear power plant is actually capable of generating electricity whereas wind and solar "farms" are a bad joke in that respect.
SSL is a much worse problem in itself. Relying on some "trustworthy" certificate authority sounds like a good idea, huh?
This might be more an issue of how it is being used. Not everything using SSL also uses "certificate authorities". Theres also no reason why software which odes can't give a warning if the CA were to unexpectedly change.
It's a completely broken idea, especially in this age when the worst enemy is the own government.
Has there been a time, at least within modern history, where this has not really been the case?
Phase transitions generally require quite a lot of energy.
Phase translations involve energy refered to as "latent heat". However the latent heat of boilng and that of freezing (along with the specific heat capacity in any phase) depend very much on the substance involved,
Does that software run on Linux?
If not, is there a comparable piece of software that would have all the functionality we need?
If not, can we live without the missing functionality?
If you get to the end of those questions and the answer is "no", then you should probably cut your losses and accept that you'll have to stick with Windows.
In many many cases you can subsitute "Windows 7" or "Windows 8" for "Linux". Thus being a reason for many people not wanting to "upgrade" from Windows XP.
There are likely to be situations where a migration to a Linux distribution is going to be easier than a migration to Windows 7/8 and associated "upgrades". Where the current setup is Windows XP "stick with" simply isn't an option.