Probably, because it's easier and less impactful (assuming everything works right) to park a well on a tiny spot within a huge tract, than it is to park massive banks of solar collecting/reflecting structures all over the same place.
Not saying that an oil well can't create a large bit of pollution when/if something goes drastically wrong, but the footprint is probably going to be a lot smaller, will require less material to be dragged in and set up, less roads to be built for maintenance, etc.
Before you say it, I have nothing against solar power per se, but it does make sense to consider that it likely requires more land, materials, and maintenance to set up and operate a solar plant than it would to maintain a couple of wells and (possibly) a pipeline or two.
I believe the interview where PETA's president equated the life of a child as no better than the life of any animal was when the idea of lacking 'compassion' sunk in. Quotes like:
"The smallest form of life, even an ant or a clam, is equal to a human being." - Ingrid Newkirk
"After a speech on animal rights in 1989, an audience member asked Regan, "If you were aboard a lifeboat with a baby and a dog, and the boat capsized, would you rescue the baby or the dog?" Regan responded, "(If) it were a retarded baby, and a bright dog, I'd save the dog."
(citations upon request, but I'm sure there's even more - they have a pretty harsh history of saying similar things in an endless grab for camera-time.)
Their groundbreaking work identified a single network core, or hub, that may be key to the workings of both hemispheres of the brain.
...pfft! The male gender of the species' "hub" is connected by a pair of some really long leads... they go down the spine, and connect directly to the testicles.
The female of the species' "hub" goes straight to the left ring finger.
How much friggin' tax money did these guys spend discovering what we've already known for at least six millennia now?
I do 3D/CG artwork as a hobby. Whenever I do a render, or the polygon count in a scene gets over 300,000 or so, things take longer to render.
with a decent multi-threaded render engine and enough cores and RAM laying about, I can easily build far more complex scenes without having to set aside hours (or days) on end just to render the thing (esp. concerning animation, which averages at least 24 renders per second of runtime).
I'm sure that as game engine coders get comfortable with multi-core, the framerates will rise appreciably as well, without a sacrifice in eye-candy or physics. (Indeed - where once you were stuck with a maximum of 150 non-player polys viewable in an old Unreal Tournament map, you can now stretch that out by orders of magnitude... and eventually with multi-core, get some very nice physics and eye-candy out of the deal.)
Not sure why you get modded up. Does it _really_ matter to you whether you are sales peon I or sales peon II or sales peon XVIIVMC?
If each of these sales peons get bonuses and commissions, then the it's not just 'promotions' that drive them, is it?
Also, as a business grows, all departments grow (and divide, then sub-divide...) - including sales.
In a sales department, there will only be so many territorial managers. There will only be so many sales directors.
What kind of promotions did you have in mind?
See above. Also note that most CEO's come from (wait for it...) sales and business backgrounds. Ever wonder why that is? Even in the tech world - how many lines of code or chip designs do you think Paul Otellini accomplished? Samuel Palmisano? How about Steve Ballmer (I honestly don't know the answer in his case...)?
For every Steve Jobs and Sergey Brin, there's at least 100 Samuel Palmisanos (IBM, in case you're curious) and Paul Otellinis, who have never written a line of code, or held a soldering iron.
Color me someone who never got the "Oooo, I just got promoted for doing the same job over and over again".
No matter what the field, it's never the case... management (or rather, fighting both ends of it to get what you need done, done) will insure that.;)
Could be, but that could be solved (at least physically) by using daughterboards/Slot 1 like rigs and by physically breaking up the CPU into discrete chips (which in turn would offer an interesting way to upgrade... don't want to buy a whole new CPU? No problem, just buy some additional 'core pack' chips and plug 'em into empty daughterboard slots).
Never underestimate the ingenuity of an engineer when there's a potential to make shitloads of money off of the solution, even if that solution isn't the most optimal or elegant.
...then again, I can see it as an argument for vendors to finally --finally!-- stop counting "processors" as their license limit metric. And yes VMWare, I'm talking to you too when I say that.
Without dredging the labyrinth of the state ethics codes, I only have my own experiences as an educator in Utah. I began first as a secondary education teacher at a state technical school, then got shifted into teaching at the collegiate level as the school became a college. I was allowed to write curricula and guidebooks for the courses, but no self-required textbooks (we actually signed copyright agreements that counted everything as "work-for-hire". It was lifted afterwards, but with the 'thou shalt not racket' limitation.)
One of my old guidebooks (badly mangled) can still be found still floating around online. It was really fun (heh) getting it copylefted.
Depends on the books... sometimes (but only sometimes) the extra books come in handy as reference material to help you complete the coursework. OTOH, any decent prof will usually describe them as such in the course description and curriculum guides.
Nowadays, most profs aren't allowed (by either law, Board of Regents ethics codes, or by school policy) to require their own authored textbooks for taking their own classes.
OTOH, this hasn't stopped a "scratch my back and I'll scratch yours" racket where two profs teaching the same subject in different schools or states will each require the other's authored textbook (at some pretty hefty prices) as part of the coursework.
(IIRC, it depends on locality, and some may have a limit on what they can charge otherwise for the things).
Err... what? Even in the enterprise, I'm seeing Windows being scaled back, replaced, and sometimes outright gutted.
(funny you should mention Sharepoint... I replaced it @ work with TikiWiki for my department. Seems the folks I worked with hated having to email half-mile long URLs to each other just to point someone to a corp Sharepoint-stored file or message;) ). IOW, it's only "hot" among all-Windows shops.
I do agree that MS has a large presence in the corporate world now, but I suspect that if Windows 7 is nothing more than Vista Mark II, and if Moore's Law can't keep up with the bloat factor, this will change drastically (which is why I said "It's not what a company has already done, but what they're wanting to do.").
And no, no amount of book-cooking by Microsoft (counting all OEM and end-user license sales --including XP sales-- as Vista ones) will change that.
Who are you going to take business process advice from? While microsoft's ethics are dubious at best it's very hard to argue with success.
But why latch onto the tail end of a 20-year-old monopoly who by all rights is beginning to falter, and seems to have no vision at all for the next 20?
That's what would worry me more. It's not what a company has already done, but what they're wanting to do.
Wow. Where is this alleged paradise where Program Managers STFU and pay attention to the coders? Where testers don't get to touch it until it's ready for testing?
Yep - same story here on using off-the-shelf parts. My dual G5 got bigger SATA disks and RAM that way.
There was once a time when you had to do some serious tricks to get your own video upgrade from bog-standard parts, but those days are long, long gone.
I have yet to have come across a single problem doing my own upgrades... including the video card BIOS flash (back then, you had to flash the BIOS on a 3d-accelerated PC vidcard to get the Mac to deal with it... but with the advent of Intel Macs, no biggie).
Although I do think the article misses out on something: The reason Dell doesn't have to gouge the consumer is because they're too busy gouging business customers for server upgrade parts (both Dell and HP are friggin' EVIL about what they charge for the stuff, and sometimes finding it third-party is a raging bitch to do).
Oh, I didn't mean if all the ice melted off both poles... I meant the differential - as in, there should be one as things get more 'melty' (heh - 5 hours' sleep last night).
The North Pole melting entirely should see just a little rise (save for what Greenland, Alaska, and the Canadian islands contribute). Antarctica OTOH? It'll be a huge contributor, since the ratio of land-ice to sea-ice is (rough guess) the opposite of what you would find on the North end of things.
Re: New Scientist. I hope you don't mind my skepticism, but I find myself viewing them not so much as a scientific journal as an editorial one. e.g. they assume the premises of the "myths" they set to dispel as being extreme at best.
Well... I often find myself forced to walk among folks who would never wear the badge "geek", "intellectual" (or even "Internet User" in some cases). At the weekly farmers' markets, at a store (the ones that sell, say, auto parts as opposed to computer parts), at the train stops... places like that.
Kind, normal people for the most part, but they have an irritating habit of only paying as much attention to the issues as can be contained in a typical evening news sound bite. So when they hear that Al Gore says this or that, they quote him at length as if he did all the work. Back when Gore (ill-advisedly) said he facilitated the Internet's birth, and world+dog took that to say that he claimed to invent the Internet, these folks (to an alarmingly large degree) took it as Gospel.
I guess I should explain... I live in Western Oregon, where IMHO the state's political/ideological color shouldn't be blue (450â"495 nm), but ultraviolet (just past 450nm should do it...) I see more "Impeach Bush" bumper stickers on my way to work in the morning than raindrops on a typical Oregon winter's day. Think "polar opposite of Texas" here.
And, just like in Texas, you would be amazed and frightened at what an alarming number of ordinary folks in these parts believe to be unshakeable truth...
Well, there is the medieval British Grape/Wine industry, the medieval Viking coastal settlements (with everything including agriculture) in Greenland, and numerous other examples that would have been impossible to have happen, even in recent times. IIRC, the Viking settlements died off in Greenland awhile later when temperatures started dropping again. I guess I could go scrounging it up, but we both know about Google and I hope I've provided enough to serve as a starting point.
Massive coastal flooding I believe was a scare that was thrown around quite a bit (see also "Waterworld", with Kevin Costner). I do agree with your argument on that matter as concerns the North Pole.
That said, err, when summer returns to Antarctica, does this mean that a more-than-appreciable amount of its ice dissolves, which (barring the ice shelves around it) means higher sea levels? If so, that would be easy enough to measure - I wonder if anyone has tried to do that...
True... now here's the converse: Al Gore is no climatologist, either - but that didn't stop him from writing a book and being pointed at as some sort of authority on climate by the populace at large.
Not trying to pick a debate, but I do want to point out something.
It doesn't require any sort of degree to use logic in order to take what's out there data-wise, and form a hypothesis (or opinion) that can withstand scrutiny. All that is required is logical skill, intellect, a lot of research, a little wisdom, and patience enough to see the argument (pro or con) come together.
I honestly don't care about who advances the opinion, I care about the logical progression of the argument. I also care about whether or not the supporting facts are as complete as possible, in context, and not in disregard of facts which oppose the conclusion. See also the reasons why ad hominem and appeals to authority are counted as fallacious.
Slashdot Mirror
Probably, because it's easier and less impactful (assuming everything works right) to park a well on a tiny spot within a huge tract, than it is to park massive banks of solar collecting/reflecting structures all over the same place.
Not saying that an oil well can't create a large bit of pollution when/if something goes drastically wrong, but the footprint is probably going to be a lot smaller, will require less material to be dragged in and set up, less roads to be built for maintenance, etc.
Before you say it, I have nothing against solar power per se, but it does make sense to consider that it likely requires more land, materials, and maintenance to set up and operate a solar plant than it would to maintain a couple of wells and (possibly) a pipeline or two.
I believe the interview where PETA's president equated the life of a child as no better than the life of any animal was when the idea of lacking 'compassion' sunk in. Quotes like:
"The smallest form of life, even an ant or a clam, is equal to a human being." - Ingrid Newkirk
"After a speech on animal rights in 1989, an audience member asked Regan, "If you were aboard a lifeboat with a baby and a dog, and the boat capsized, would you rescue the baby or the dog?" Regan responded, "(If) it were a retarded baby, and a bright dog, I'd save the dog."
(citations upon request, but I'm sure there's even more - they have a pretty harsh history of saying similar things in an endless grab for camera-time.)
...with beaconing that kicks in whenever work decides to intrude on things.
Their groundbreaking work identified a single network core, or hub, that may be key to the workings of both hemispheres of the brain.
The female of the species' "hub" goes straight to the left ring finger.
How much friggin' tax money did these guys spend discovering what we've already known for at least six millennia now?
I do 3D/CG artwork as a hobby. Whenever I do a render, or the polygon count in a scene gets over 300,000 or so, things take longer to render.
with a decent multi-threaded render engine and enough cores and RAM laying about, I can easily build far more complex scenes without having to set aside hours (or days) on end just to render the thing (esp. concerning animation, which averages at least 24 renders per second of runtime).
I'm sure that as game engine coders get comfortable with multi-core, the framerates will rise appreciably as well, without a sacrifice in eye-candy or physics. (Indeed - where once you were stuck with a maximum of 150 non-player polys viewable in an old Unreal Tournament map, you can now stretch that out by orders of magnitude... and eventually with multi-core, get some very nice physics and eye-candy out of the deal.)
Not sure why you get modded up. Does it _really_ matter to you whether you are sales peon I or sales peon II or sales peon XVIIVMC?
If each of these sales peons get bonuses and commissions, then the it's not just 'promotions' that drive them, is it?
Also, as a business grows, all departments grow (and divide, then sub-divide...) - including sales.
In a sales department, there will only be so many territorial managers. There will only be so many sales directors.
What kind of promotions did you have in mind?
See above. Also note that most CEO's come from (wait for it...) sales and business backgrounds. Ever wonder why that is? Even in the tech world - how many lines of code or chip designs do you think Paul Otellini accomplished? Samuel Palmisano? How about Steve Ballmer (I honestly don't know the answer in his case...)?
For every Steve Jobs and Sergey Brin, there's at least 100 Samuel Palmisanos (IBM, in case you're curious) and Paul Otellinis, who have never written a line of code, or held a soldering iron.
Color me someone who never got the "Oooo, I just got promoted for doing the same job over and over again".
No matter what the field, it's never the case... management (or rather, fighting both ends of it to get what you need done, done) will insure that.
Actually, I think this is the one case where you could honestly say "...it's turtles all the way down!" and not get laughed at.
Could be, but that could be solved (at least physically) by using daughterboards/Slot 1 like rigs and by physically breaking up the CPU into discrete chips (which in turn would offer an interesting way to upgrade... don't want to buy a whole new CPU? No problem, just buy some additional 'core pack' chips and plug 'em into empty daughterboard slots).
Never underestimate the ingenuity of an engineer when there's a potential to make shitloads of money off of the solution, even if that solution isn't the most optimal or elegant.
...then again, I can see it as an argument for vendors to finally --finally!-- stop counting "processors" as their license limit metric. And yes VMWare, I'm talking to you too when I say that.
Actually, it's "bow thee down..."
Heretic.
You'll burn for this.
I'm calling them now...
I'm getting a ringtone...
Without dredging the labyrinth of the state ethics codes, I only have my own experiences as an educator in Utah. I began first as a secondary education teacher at a state technical school, then got shifted into teaching at the collegiate level as the school became a college. I was allowed to write curricula and guidebooks for the courses, but no self-required textbooks (we actually signed copyright agreements that counted everything as "work-for-hire". It was lifted afterwards, but with the 'thou shalt not racket' limitation.)
One of my old guidebooks (badly mangled) can still be found still floating around online. It was really fun (heh) getting it copylefted.
Depends on the books... sometimes (but only sometimes) the extra books come in handy as reference material to help you complete the coursework. OTOH, any decent prof will usually describe them as such in the course description and curriculum guides.
Easy enough to get around:
Some profs have been doing this for years to circumvent similar laws...
Nowadays, most profs aren't allowed (by either law, Board of Regents ethics codes, or by school policy) to require their own authored textbooks for taking their own classes.
OTOH, this hasn't stopped a "scratch my back and I'll scratch yours" racket where two profs teaching the same subject in different schools or states will each require the other's authored textbook (at some pretty hefty prices) as part of the coursework.
(IIRC, it depends on locality, and some may have a limit on what they can charge otherwise for the things).
Err... what? Even in the enterprise, I'm seeing Windows being scaled back, replaced, and sometimes outright gutted.
(funny you should mention Sharepoint... I replaced it @ work with TikiWiki for my department. Seems the folks I worked with hated having to email half-mile long URLs to each other just to point someone to a corp Sharepoint-stored file or message
I do agree that MS has a large presence in the corporate world now, but I suspect that if Windows 7 is nothing more than Vista Mark II, and if Moore's Law can't keep up with the bloat factor, this will change drastically (which is why I said "It's not what a company has already done, but what they're wanting to do.").
And no, no amount of book-cooking by Microsoft (counting all OEM and end-user license sales --including XP sales-- as Vista ones) will change that.
Bill, is that you? I thought retirees didn't get homesick for the old office until at least 12 months into retirement... ;)
Reg'ds,
Who are you going to take business process advice from? While microsoft's ethics are dubious at best it's very hard to argue with success.
But why latch onto the tail end of a 20-year-old monopoly who by all rights is beginning to falter, and seems to have no vision at all for the next 20?
That's what would worry me more. It's not what a company has already done, but what they're wanting to do.
Wow. Where is this alleged paradise where Program Managers STFU and pay attention to the coders? Where testers don't get to touch it until it's ready for testing?
Yep - same story here on using off-the-shelf parts. My dual G5 got bigger SATA disks and RAM that way.
There was once a time when you had to do some serious tricks to get your own video upgrade from bog-standard parts, but those days are long, long gone.
I have yet to have come across a single problem doing my own upgrades... including the video card BIOS flash (back then, you had to flash the BIOS on a 3d-accelerated PC vidcard to get the Mac to deal with it... but with the advent of Intel Macs, no biggie).
Although I do think the article misses out on something: The reason Dell doesn't have to gouge the consumer is because they're too busy gouging business customers for server upgrade parts (both Dell and HP are friggin' EVIL about what they charge for the stuff, and sometimes finding it third-party is a raging bitch to do).
He was always ridiculed for claiming to have "invented" the internet, even though he never said such a thing.
You may want to, you know, read what you respond to before responding to it.
Oh, I didn't mean if all the ice melted off both poles... I meant the differential - as in, there should be one as things get more 'melty' (heh - 5 hours' sleep last night).
The North Pole melting entirely should see just a little rise (save for what Greenland, Alaska, and the Canadian islands contribute). Antarctica OTOH? It'll be a huge contributor, since the ratio of land-ice to sea-ice is (rough guess) the opposite of what you would find on the North end of things.
Re: New Scientist. I hope you don't mind my skepticism, but I find myself viewing them not so much as a scientific journal as an editorial one. e.g. they assume the premises of the "myths" they set to dispel as being extreme at best.
Well... I often find myself forced to walk among folks who would never wear the badge "geek", "intellectual" (or even "Internet User" in some cases). At the weekly farmers' markets, at a store (the ones that sell, say, auto parts as opposed to computer parts), at the train stops... places like that.
Kind, normal people for the most part, but they have an irritating habit of only paying as much attention to the issues as can be contained in a typical evening news sound bite. So when they hear that Al Gore says this or that, they quote him at length as if he did all the work. Back when Gore (ill-advisedly) said he facilitated the Internet's birth, and world+dog took that to say that he claimed to invent the Internet, these folks (to an alarmingly large degree) took it as Gospel.
I guess I should explain... I live in Western Oregon, where IMHO the state's political/ideological color shouldn't be blue (450â"495 nm), but ultraviolet (just past 450nm should do it...) I see more "Impeach Bush" bumper stickers on my way to work in the morning than raindrops on a typical Oregon winter's day. Think "polar opposite of Texas" here.
And, just like in Texas, you would be amazed and frightened at what an alarming number of ordinary folks in these parts believe to be unshakeable truth...
Citation?
Well, there is the medieval British Grape/Wine industry, the medieval Viking coastal settlements (with everything including agriculture) in Greenland, and numerous other examples that would have been impossible to have happen, even in recent times. IIRC, the Viking settlements died off in Greenland awhile later when temperatures started dropping again. I guess I could go scrounging it up, but we both know about Google and I hope I've provided enough to serve as a starting point.
Massive coastal flooding I believe was a scare that was thrown around quite a bit (see also "Waterworld", with Kevin Costner). I do agree with your argument on that matter as concerns the North Pole.
That said, err, when summer returns to Antarctica, does this mean that a more-than-appreciable amount of its ice dissolves, which (barring the ice shelves around it) means higher sea levels? If so, that would be easy enough to measure - I wonder if anyone has tried to do that...
Seals, their primary food source, are also under pressure because they need the ice to birth.
Really? Because if that's the case, the ones that live down here on the Oregon Coast have been well and truly fscked for quite a few centuries now.
(They get rained on a lot during Winter, if that helps...)
True... now here's the converse: Al Gore is no climatologist, either - but that didn't stop him from writing a book and being pointed at as some sort of authority on climate by the populace at large.
Not trying to pick a debate, but I do want to point out something.
It doesn't require any sort of degree to use logic in order to take what's out there data-wise, and form a hypothesis (or opinion) that can withstand scrutiny. All that is required is logical skill, intellect, a lot of research, a little wisdom, and patience enough to see the argument (pro or con) come together.
I honestly don't care about who advances the opinion, I care about the logical progression of the argument. I also care about whether or not the supporting facts are as complete as possible, in context, and not in disregard of facts which oppose the conclusion. See also the reasons why ad hominem and appeals to authority are counted as fallacious.