BTW, some of these diseases really are quite extinct in the US.
They're not extinct, they're suppressed. Suppressed by what, you might ask? By the ubiquitous use of *vaccines*. Stop using vaccines and the diseases will rear their ugly heads once again. Diphtheria, measles, whooping cough, and polio are on the rise, and it's directly attributable to people (idiots, really) refusing to vaccinate their children. If you don't want to vaccinate your children because you think vaccinations don't work, aren't important, or pose a risk that they don't (such as autism or mental retardation), then you're part of the problem.
Are you saying the doctor would risk an anaphylactic shock after you told him your son is allergic to eggs?
Sure. Everything has a risk -- death is a potential risk of almost any medical treatment -- but the risks are usually far outweighed by the significant potential benefits. You risk death during almost any surgery, but the risk is so small in healthy individuals that it shouldn't be a deciding factor.
Also, some vaccines, like the flu vaccine, are only made with eggs. Fortunately, the amount of egg protein present in the vaccine is so small that reactions are very rare. Typically it means waiting around for 30-60 minutes after vaccination to look for signs of a reaction, which can then be treated before it escalates. The odds of having a reaction that's unresponsive to treatment are so staggeringly small that no one should use it as a deciding factor (with the disclaimer that this is not medical advice).
Agriculture needs a lot of water. That isn't some 20th century capitalist evil symbol of waste... that's just a fact of the process. It's like complaining that melting steel requires a lot of heat. Yeah it does. It's how you do it.
Yes, but "a lot" is not a useful number. How much beef do you eat? "A lot." How much water do cows drink? "A lot." The authors are claiming a specific number, but not explaining how they get it, or whether the same water is counted twice. How do they measure it? Do they use the same technique everywhere? Presumably not every farmer is using the same irrigation techniques or sources. For better or worse, there's runoff. There's water reprocessing plants. Evaporated water may be reintroduced back into the same supply. How do they measure water pollution, which they include in usage? Is polluted water unused for other things? Obviously it is, in some places, so why is it summed into usage? These are not nitpicks; the viability and veracity of their conclusions is directly dependent upon their measurement methodology.
The problem is not throttling per se, but that the threshold for reaching throttling on an "unlimited" account is *lower* than on a tiered plan (the top 5% is allegedly between 1.6 GB and 1.8 GB), and that using a sliding metric will trend usage downward over the long term. People will be fearful of reaching the throttling threshold, and so they will be unreasonably conservative in their use, which in turn lowers the bar for what constitutes the top 5%. Theoretically, "unlimited" could eventually be even more limited than a 200MB plan.
Obviously the best (and only) way to push back is to use as much data as possible on an unlimited plan, driving the ceiling upwards.
I'm not arguing that the externalities shouldn't be counted, I'm just questioning their method of counting, particularly since it isn't explained in any detail.
There are ways to cool without dumping heat into rivers and oceans or evaporating water. You could drive a bunch of Stirling Engines. You're not interested in the power from the Stirlings, just their use of the excess heat. How much would that cost though?
There are ways to cool without dumping heat into rivers and oceans or evaporating water. You could drive a bunch of Stirling Engines. You're not interested in the power from the Stirlings, just their use of the excess heat. How much would that cost though?
The need for "cooling" is a bit of a red herring. It's not strictly about keeping things from getting too hot, but about providing a sufficient temperature (and therefore pressure) differential. Such differentials would also be required to drive a Stirling Engine, and while they will function at a much smaller differential than a steam turbine, they will still have cooling requirements, otherwise they would achieve thermal equilibrium. And since Stirling engines are more useful for performing relatively slow mechanical work (you can gear them up, but gears have parasitic losses), you may well end up using more energy to create the same amount of electrical power as a steam turbine. That's just my armchair analysis, though I trust that the engineers who designed the plant have made optimal decisions in generator selection, so the fact that they're using steam turbines speaks for itself in that regard.
Most of the material on "Bullshit" is a case study in the obvious presented as insight. (The remaining material is actual bullshit presented as insight.)
The main thrust of the paper is that domestic consumption is a very small (less than 10%) fraction of water usage per person. Just a bit of math will tell you that a family of four consuming 5,000 gallons per month * 12 months / 4 people = 15,000 gallons per person per year -- nowhere close to the claim of 640,000 gallons (an olympic-size swimming pool).
Of course they don't explain how they get their other numbers, if or how they account for water reuse, or how they estimate water pollution (which is also included as water usage), so the whole thing is dubious at best. It appears to be a worst-case scenario hit job, and not particularly useful for planning or policy decisions. There's no question that we need to either produce or consume freshwater more efficiently, but it's not an exhaustible resource and so doesn't necessarily demand a minimization of "water footprint," especially defined as broadly as it is in this paper.
it could saddle us with an expensive and overreaching cyber-industrial complex.
Ignoring the ridiculous use of "cyber," you replaced the wrong word -- "cyber-industrial" doesn't imply any public-private collusion the way "military-industrial" does. Perhaps you meant military-cyber complex? Or government-cyber complex? But either way, internet technologies are an industry, so "military-industrial complex" has that covered already.
We need fewer logical magicians in politics and more logicians. It's easier to get a bill passed than to get a paper in Nature. There's something fundamentally wrong with that, and it's not Nature's standards.
Go to more concerts and sit by the speakers, or gun ranges without hearing protection... it'll take care of that irritating super-hearing for you right quick.
That's only true if the people buying Playstations/devices are their customers. Since Sony seems to make most/all of their money on licensing fees from developers, I'm betting end users are *not* the people Sony considers to be their customers.
BS. There's a 100% optional form available if you wish to register items you're taking abroad to avoid any hassles about duty on reentry, but it's sort of a waste of time IMHO which is absolutely not legal advise. If you have knowledge of any requisite form that millions of people departing the US each year are apparently not filling out, please let us know.
Slander has to be about somebody. He doesn't call Rick Santorum anything.
First, slander is verbal. Libel is defamation via the written word.
Second, he's clearly talking about Rick Santorm, and no judge or jury would see differently. But fortunately, merely calling someone names doesn't rise to the level of libel, especially for public figures, especially when it's clear satire.
Good idea. They should remove the link from search results for "santorum", and replace it instead with a disambiguation link. "Did you mean: the frothy mix of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex"
Slashdot Mirror
I'd say it's probably more certain that Adam and Eve didn't exist.
BTW, some of these diseases really are quite extinct in the US.
They're not extinct, they're suppressed. Suppressed by what, you might ask? By the ubiquitous use of *vaccines*. Stop using vaccines and the diseases will rear their ugly heads once again. Diphtheria, measles, whooping cough, and polio are on the rise, and it's directly attributable to people (idiots, really) refusing to vaccinate their children. If you don't want to vaccinate your children because you think vaccinations don't work, aren't important, or pose a risk that they don't (such as autism or mental retardation), then you're part of the problem.
From my experience, the people I know that take the most drugs are the ones that are the most ill
Selection bias much?
Are you saying the doctor would risk an anaphylactic shock after you told him your son is allergic to eggs?
Sure. Everything has a risk -- death is a potential risk of almost any medical treatment -- but the risks are usually far outweighed by the significant potential benefits. You risk death during almost any surgery, but the risk is so small in healthy individuals that it shouldn't be a deciding factor.
Also, some vaccines, like the flu vaccine, are only made with eggs. Fortunately, the amount of egg protein present in the vaccine is so small that reactions are very rare. Typically it means waiting around for 30-60 minutes after vaccination to look for signs of a reaction, which can then be treated before it escalates. The odds of having a reaction that's unresponsive to treatment are so staggeringly small that no one should use it as a deciding factor (with the disclaimer that this is not medical advice).
Pretty good analogy, aside from the fact that skinny people can generally eat more than fat people.
Agriculture needs a lot of water. That isn't some 20th century capitalist evil symbol of waste... that's just a fact of the process. It's like complaining that melting steel requires a lot of heat. Yeah it does. It's how you do it.
Yes, but "a lot" is not a useful number. How much beef do you eat? "A lot." How much water do cows drink? "A lot." The authors are claiming a specific number, but not explaining how they get it, or whether the same water is counted twice. How do they measure it? Do they use the same technique everywhere? Presumably not every farmer is using the same irrigation techniques or sources. For better or worse, there's runoff. There's water reprocessing plants. Evaporated water may be reintroduced back into the same supply. How do they measure water pollution, which they include in usage? Is polluted water unused for other things? Obviously it is, in some places, so why is it summed into usage? These are not nitpicks; the viability and veracity of their conclusions is directly dependent upon their measurement methodology.
Justice is for the rich.
If that's true then Dotcom can sleep soundly...
Quote fail.
The problem is not throttling per se, but that the threshold for reaching throttling on an "unlimited" account is *lower* than on a tiered plan (the top 5% is allegedly between 1.6 GB and 1.8 GB), and that using a sliding metric will trend usage downward over the long term. People will be fearful of reaching the throttling threshold, and so they will be unreasonably conservative in their use, which in turn lowers the bar for what constitutes the top 5%. Theoretically, "unlimited" could eventually be even more limited than a 200MB plan.
Obviously the best (and only) way to push back is to use as much data as possible on an unlimited plan, driving the ceiling upwards.
Mermaids.
I'm not arguing that the externalities shouldn't be counted, I'm just questioning their method of counting, particularly since it isn't explained in any detail.
There are ways to cool without dumping heat into rivers and oceans or evaporating water. You could drive a bunch of Stirling Engines. You're not interested in the power from the Stirlings, just their use of the excess heat. How much would that cost though?
There are ways to cool without dumping heat into rivers and oceans or evaporating water. You could drive a bunch of Stirling Engines. You're not interested in the power from the Stirlings, just their use of the excess heat. How much would that cost though?
The need for "cooling" is a bit of a red herring. It's not strictly about keeping things from getting too hot, but about providing a sufficient temperature (and therefore pressure) differential. Such differentials would also be required to drive a Stirling Engine, and while they will function at a much smaller differential than a steam turbine, they will still have cooling requirements, otherwise they would achieve thermal equilibrium. And since Stirling engines are more useful for performing relatively slow mechanical work (you can gear them up, but gears have parasitic losses), you may well end up using more energy to create the same amount of electrical power as a steam turbine. That's just my armchair analysis, though I trust that the engineers who designed the plant have made optimal decisions in generator selection, so the fact that they're using steam turbines speaks for itself in that regard.
Most of the material on "Bullshit" is a case study in the obvious presented as insight. (The remaining material is actual bullshit presented as insight.)
The main thrust of the paper is that domestic consumption is a very small (less than 10%) fraction of water usage per person. Just a bit of math will tell you that a family of four consuming 5,000 gallons per month * 12 months / 4 people = 15,000 gallons per person per year -- nowhere close to the claim of 640,000 gallons (an olympic-size swimming pool).
Of course they don't explain how they get their other numbers, if or how they account for water reuse, or how they estimate water pollution (which is also included as water usage), so the whole thing is dubious at best. It appears to be a worst-case scenario hit job, and not particularly useful for planning or policy decisions. There's no question that we need to either produce or consume freshwater more efficiently, but it's not an exhaustible resource and so doesn't necessarily demand a minimization of "water footprint," especially defined as broadly as it is in this paper.
it could saddle us with an expensive and overreaching cyber-industrial complex.
Ignoring the ridiculous use of "cyber," you replaced the wrong word -- "cyber-industrial" doesn't imply any public-private collusion the way "military-industrial" does. Perhaps you meant military-cyber complex? Or government-cyber complex? But either way, internet technologies are an industry, so "military-industrial complex" has that covered already.
Smart criminals will simply wait for the 1812 Overture.
We need fewer logical magicians in politics and more logicians. It's easier to get a bill passed than to get a paper in Nature. There's something fundamentally wrong with that, and it's not Nature's standards.
Go to more concerts and sit by the speakers, or gun ranges without hearing protection... it'll take care of that irritating super-hearing for you right quick.
Marriage is a sacred institution to these people, and being in the "married" club means being special.
Especially ironic when the Christian divoce rate is identical to the national average.
Marriage is sacred enough to preclude people you don't like I guess, as long as that person you don't like is someone other than your spouse.
Wake me up when they get to 11.
That's only true if the people buying Playstations/devices are their customers. Since Sony seems to make most/all of their money on licensing fees from developers, I'm betting end users are *not* the people Sony considers to be their customers.
BS. There's a 100% optional form available if you wish to register items you're taking abroad to avoid any hassles about duty on reentry, but it's sort of a waste of time IMHO which is absolutely not legal advise. If you have knowledge of any requisite form that millions of people departing the US each year are apparently not filling out, please let us know.
Slander has to be about somebody. He doesn't call Rick Santorum anything.
First, slander is verbal. Libel is defamation via the written word.
Second, he's clearly talking about Rick Santorm, and no judge or jury would see differently. But fortunately, merely calling someone names doesn't rise to the level of libel, especially for public figures, especially when it's clear satire.
Good idea. They should remove the link from search results for "santorum", and replace it instead with a disambiguation link. "Did you mean: the frothy mix of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex"
Sorry I don't have mod points; good post even with the mistakes.