The data include only PV-generated electricity, without factoring in what is likely the most encouraging development in solar technology: concentrating solar power
They forgot to include another little detail. Cost of land. Because solar panels don't stack well (yet), therefore you do need a huge area to get a significant power output. That area won't be free, and it will require infrastructure - access roads, mounts, fences, etc.
While there is no doubt that solar is getting cheaper, and nuclear (thanks to increasing safety regulations, increasing costs in fissile material manufacture and increasing waste disposal) is getting more expensive; you still can't compare nuclear "cost per kWh" (which includes all those costs, profits, plus the cost of delivering it to you) to the cost of solar panels lying on a shelf in a manufacturer's warehouse. There are a few costs that haven't been accounted for on the solar side. It's apples to oranges.
"Everyone was guilty of something. Vimes knew that. Every copper knew it. That was how you maintained your authority: everyone, talking to a copper, was secretly afraid you could see their guilty secret written on their forehead. You couldn't, of course. But neither were you supposed to drag someone off the street and smash their fingers with a hammer until they told you what it was. "
If you put cameras everywhere, record everything, and use computers to dig through all that information, we are ALL going to jail for one reason or another. Heck, most of us wouldn't make it to adulthood. This monitoring should be passive, not active. Law enforcement should concentrate on deterring REAL crime. Yes, running a red light is dangerous. Educate or eventually enforce consequences for the ones who do it habitually. If governments were really concerned about "safety", red lights would be accompanied with barriers like at railroad crossings (and it probably would be cheaper than the camera system to boot). This is a shameless scramble for cash, driven by irresponsible and uncontrolled spending. Nothing more.
there was some fine print about a $50 administrative fee for doing so.
Oh that's cute. So either way, the town gets $50 if you're innocent, $75 if you don't contest the ticket and pay the fine, or $125 if you argue in court and lose.
You know we used to joke about these kinds of devices when I was a kid in the 70's. Only they were supposed to be in Russia...
Hell why don't they do away with B and C while they're at it.
The problem is not the scoring system, it's mediocre teachers who are just collecting a paycheck and 3 months vacation per year, and apathetic students who would rather be playing PS3 or XBox than learning about fractions.
Increasing the passing grade, if it has anything at all, will just artificially cause slackers to work a little harder to be able to scrape by again. It will not cause them to take an "interest" in the material. THAT can only be done by good teachers.
By the way, I never had anything less than an "A" in my life.
Please don't tell my girlfriend, she'll realize I've been faking being a semi-normal cool guy for years, and leave me.
Nah, she'll realize that you're more turned on by a new processor than by a pair of tits, and stay with you forever knowing you'll never cheat on her (except when you go to that site to download algorithms). You might have to give in and move out of the basement though. But not to worry - a good set of blackout curtains and it's almost the same. Plus as you get older the lack of dampness is easier on your rheumatism...
Seriously, you don't have to be an expert at this stuff to see that this is weak
Uh, yeah you do. I consider myself to be pretty smart, what with the 160 IQ and the medical degree and all. But superconductors just aren't my field. Put a bunch of words together that don't trigger alarm bells and sound plausible, and I'm a believer. Perhaps you need to take a look in the mirror and realize that you know more about this stuff than the average person. You are certainly more of an expert than I am:)
They wouldn't be tracking your mouse movements anywhere other than when you are on their page.
When I click on something, it is implied that I am giving them permission to do something. That's how the internet works, after all. Google and others have up to now taken liberties with click data, assuming that they can do what they want with it. And so far, no one has seriously objected.
However just visiting a page, with no warning that I am going to be "tracked", does not imply consent to be "tracked". I have indicated a desire to visit a page, nothing more.
They can already collect this data. It's called a "mouseover" event.
That is done by my browser, and the information stays on my browser. My browser doesn't (up to now) send mouseover events to a server and have the server read those and serve me content based on it. The HTML/javascript reacts in pre-arranged ways when the event happens, nothing more. No data leaves my computer.
meaning every keypress is sent directly to the host rather than text boxes being simple text boxes.
Again legally it could be argued that because the purpose of a text box is to collect data, the user is aware that what they enter into the box will be sent over the internet. So whether it's done instantly or after pressing Enter or a button is a moot point.
However the mouse is an input device between you and your computer. They are not allowed to listen in on THAT conversation, record it, process it, and even sell it, without your explicit permission. That permission, up to now, has been granted by the click of a link or a button. What they are trying to do is ASSUME that they have permission, without your consent. Hey I am not even a lawyer and I can see how tricky this can be. Real lawyers must be salivating...
What is the difference between this and a keylogger?
It's one thing to record commands I have sent to their computers by clicking. It's another thing entirely to track things I do on MY computer. I foresee a lot of legislation in Google's future.
sounds kinda odd for a site like that to do this, are they trying to scare people away?
They're probably trying to stay out of jail. Everyone knows that Chatroulette's "anonymity" is exploited to convince young girls to reveal their breasts, among other things.
No, no you don't. You wonder how you can discredit this report without actually examining its veracity, and you are a hypocrite for using bullshit, leading statements and logical fallacies
And you are a brainless twit who is unable to counter my argument and therefore resorts to attacking its structure instead of the argument itself. God forbid I had made spelling mistakes - oh wait, I guess I did with "data".
I haven't seen the study and guess what - neither have you.
Perhaps you consider yourself the better writer because of your degree in English and Philosophy, however you missed the part where you had to learn how to actually think. It gives me great pleasure to know that you have gotten so angry over my post. I hope you are pissed off all day. Branding people - who tend to exhibit highly variable personality traits - as "selfish elites" merely on the purchase of a single item is ridiculous. It's like saying that people who drink Pepsi are creative innovators. The study offers two choices - Independent Geek or Selfish Elite, and they presume to define the human race in this "either or" manner. Hello? Critical thinking 101. Meh, you're not worth it.
You assume that these "aliens" are likely to have the same limitations as us.
Not at all. However I do assume they will have limitations. Everything does. And I assume that in order to become a space-faring race they must be the type of critters that are into discovering things because I doubt that they'd evolve directly into spaceships and just zip off into the sky. I also assume that either they live a very long time and have perfect memories, or they must have some way of passing on knowledge to their young. The problem with wanting to discover things is that there are always more things to discover. In order to have progress you can't keep re-inventing the wheel. At some point you have to invent the axle. So I assume a society that discovers things and builds upon its discoveries, communicates with itself to avoid wasting time and effort, and given enough time will discover everything that there is TO discover.
Radio was "discovered" in the 1800's. It's pretty low tech stuff. I can't say how they will use it but at one point they have to come across it. Because it's there. And since it's a very useful way to study the cosmos (which is something else to "discover", I'd bet that effort would be invested in this area.
Of course if you're imagining aliens that will fly across the universe with mental power alone, never needing things like electricity, metallurgy, plastics, ceramics, chemistry, physics, biology (after all, if they are going to live in an artificial closed system for any amount of time they would have to know themselves), and lord knows what else, then good for you. I don't see where I'm being arrogant, however.
Or any other Apple product. But any study that comes off this way must be seriously flawed and is in no way scientific. First we have the problem of defining what a "selfish elite" is. Call me when the whole world agrees.
This is nothing but a smear campaign. Oh wait, the article says that this "data" was obtained by a "Consumer Research" firm, not the American Psychological Association, or some scientist. If we follow the money, I wonder who hired this company...
Or I offer you an alternative, at least in the human world: war. For one reason or another - war between neighbors, fighting over the ever more scarce resources, or war between classes when there is an uneven distribution of said resources. Not sure if xenos would be the same way - but "cheating" is certainly something that helps you compete better than the other "non cheating" guy. Cheating is built in to all our creatures' behavior here on earth - all critters rob food as often as they can, all critters use their strength or other resources to make sure that they get their (more than) fair share of the pie. You just have to watch fish feeding, stealing food from the others' very mouth. Seagulls swooping down to steal a tasty morsel before the slower guy. Dogs fighting and growling over food. Lions and polar bears warning each other away from a kill, while the carrion birds or arctic foxes steal a bite. Or humans promising to limit their oil output to quotas and secretly overproducing... everything cheats on this planet.
So I am sure that even on an alien world, there would be those who are better at looking out for number 1. This means there would automatically be "haves" and "have nots" (or "have less"). If only due to geography, there will always be an uneven distribution of something. The guy in the middle of the hive, and the guy on the edge. The guy at the head of the river with fresh water, and the guy at the mouth drinking dirty water (or the solvent of choice).
It's also logical to assume that a creature that has survived an evolutionary process will at least try to defend itself (or maybe not). If it does, then warfare must exist. If it doesn't, then those doomed to die would simply accept their fate, making the problem a lot simpler to deal with.
Then again, anyone who can build something that will survive long enough to cross intergalactic distances will impress me seriously. Therefore I argue that the number of worlds in the "universe" is finite - it's the number of planets in your galaxy. Short of wormholes, etc, I just don't see intergalactic travel at all. Hey we are talking many many orders of magnitude further away. Entropy is probably a universal phenomenon. Those ships are going to break down, given enough time. Even at the speed of light it would take millions of years.
But by the time the civilization collapses it's used up all of the readily available hydrocarbon deposits and metal deposits.
I'll give you the hydrocarbons (although those can be synthesized if you have an energy source) but metals? Come on man, no one is shooting metals out into space, never to return. Eventually it becomes cheaper to recycle, scavenge old garbage heaps, etc to recover "wasted" metals than to refine new ones. The metals aren't going anywhere. The problem is one of distribution - if you have an exponentially growing population, eventually there's less of "metal X" to go round per person so you could get shortages THAT way. Hopefully an "advanced" civilization can eventually control it's population. Most Western countries here on Earth have been having negative population growth rates if you subtract immigration, so it's not impossible to expect.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah - global warming is the new evolution. Successfultroll.jpg
Most of the earth was buried under glaciers as little as 100,000 years ago. Of course there is global warming. Only crackpots would deny it.
The cause, on the other hand...
I'm still not convinced it's us.
Hope and Change. Hope and Change. It's almost funny to watch.
The data include only PV-generated electricity, without factoring in what is likely the most encouraging development in solar technology: concentrating solar power
They forgot to include another little detail. Cost of land. Because solar panels don't stack well (yet), therefore you do need a huge area to get a significant power output. That area won't be free, and it will require infrastructure - access roads, mounts, fences, etc.
While there is no doubt that solar is getting cheaper, and nuclear (thanks to increasing safety regulations, increasing costs in fissile material manufacture and increasing waste disposal) is getting more expensive; you still can't compare nuclear "cost per kWh" (which includes all those costs, profits, plus the cost of delivering it to you) to the cost of solar panels lying on a shelf in a manufacturer's warehouse. There are a few costs that haven't been accounted for on the solar side. It's apples to oranges.
To be fair, he was including the sheep.
I appreciated their honesty,
Yeah, they were so honest, they forgot to tell you about the other 229,996 customers...
I'd say the lesson is "don't break the law"
Sorry, this calls for a Terry Pratchett quote:
"Everyone was guilty of something. Vimes knew that. Every copper knew it. That was how you maintained your authority: everyone, talking to a copper, was secretly afraid you could see their guilty secret written on their forehead. You couldn't, of course. But neither were you supposed to drag someone off the street and smash their fingers with a hammer until they told you what it was. "
If you put cameras everywhere, record everything, and use computers to dig through all that information, we are ALL going to jail for one reason or another. Heck, most of us wouldn't make it to adulthood. This monitoring should be passive, not active. Law enforcement should concentrate on deterring REAL crime. Yes, running a red light is dangerous. Educate or eventually enforce consequences for the ones who do it habitually. If governments were really concerned about "safety", red lights would be accompanied with barriers like at railroad crossings (and it probably would be cheaper than the camera system to boot). This is a shameless scramble for cash, driven by irresponsible and uncontrolled spending. Nothing more.
there was some fine print about a $50 administrative fee for doing so.
Oh that's cute. So either way, the town gets $50 if you're innocent, $75 if you don't contest the ticket and pay the fine, or $125 if you argue in court and lose.
You know we used to joke about these kinds of devices when I was a kid in the 70's. Only they were supposed to be in Russia...
Hell why don't they do away with B and C while they're at it.
The problem is not the scoring system, it's mediocre teachers who are just collecting a paycheck and 3 months vacation per year, and apathetic students who would rather be playing PS3 or XBox than learning about fractions.
Increasing the passing grade, if it has anything at all, will just artificially cause slackers to work a little harder to be able to scrape by again. It will not cause them to take an "interest" in the material. THAT can only be done by good teachers.
By the way, I never had anything less than an "A" in my life.
Microsoft's search for a viable business model continues.
Please don't tell my girlfriend, she'll realize I've been faking being a semi-normal cool guy for years, and leave me.
Nah, she'll realize that you're more turned on by a new processor than by a pair of tits, and stay with you forever knowing you'll never cheat on her (except when you go to that site to download algorithms). You might have to give in and move out of the basement though. But not to worry - a good set of blackout curtains and it's almost the same. Plus as you get older the lack of dampness is easier on your rheumatism...
Answer that and you'll get a Nobel Prize.
Meh. To get a Nobel prize one merely has to be elected as President of the United States. The bar has been lowered somewhat, of late.
Seriously, you don't have to be an expert at this stuff to see that this is weak
Uh, yeah you do. I consider myself to be pretty smart, what with the 160 IQ and the medical degree and all. But superconductors just aren't my field. Put a bunch of words together that don't trigger alarm bells and sound plausible, and I'm a believer. Perhaps you need to take a look in the mirror and realize that you know more about this stuff than the average person. You are certainly more of an expert than I am :)
It's the code that's open source, not the company. They are free to spend their money as they wish. Those of us who disagree can fork at any time.
They wouldn't be tracking your mouse movements anywhere other than when you are on their page.
When I click on something, it is implied that I am giving them permission to do something. That's how the internet works, after all. Google and others have up to now taken liberties with click data, assuming that they can do what they want with it. And so far, no one has seriously objected.
However just visiting a page, with no warning that I am going to be "tracked", does not imply consent to be "tracked". I have indicated a desire to visit a page, nothing more.
They can already collect this data. It's called a "mouseover" event.
That is done by my browser, and the information stays on my browser. My browser doesn't (up to now) send mouseover events to a server and have the server read those and serve me content based on it. The HTML/javascript reacts in pre-arranged ways when the event happens, nothing more. No data leaves my computer.
meaning every keypress is sent directly to the host rather than text boxes being simple text boxes.
Again legally it could be argued that because the purpose of a text box is to collect data, the user is aware that what they enter into the box will be sent over the internet. So whether it's done instantly or after pressing Enter or a button is a moot point.
However the mouse is an input device between you and your computer. They are not allowed to listen in on THAT conversation, record it, process it, and even sell it, without your explicit permission. That permission, up to now, has been granted by the click of a link or a button. What they are trying to do is ASSUME that they have permission, without your consent. Hey I am not even a lawyer and I can see how tricky this can be. Real lawyers must be salivating...
What is the difference between this and a keylogger?
It's one thing to record commands I have sent to their computers by clicking. It's another thing entirely to track things I do on MY computer. I foresee a lot of legislation in Google's future.
sounds kinda odd for a site like that to do this, are they trying to scare people away?
They're probably trying to stay out of jail. Everyone knows that Chatroulette's "anonymity" is exploited to convince young girls to reveal their breasts, among other things.
No, no you don't. You wonder how you can discredit this report without actually examining its veracity, and you are a hypocrite for using bullshit, leading statements and logical fallacies
And you are a brainless twit who is unable to counter my argument and therefore resorts to attacking its structure instead of the argument itself. God forbid I had made spelling mistakes - oh wait, I guess I did with "data".
I haven't seen the study and guess what - neither have you.
Perhaps you consider yourself the better writer because of your degree in English and Philosophy, however you missed the part where you had to learn how to actually think. It gives me great pleasure to know that you have gotten so angry over my post. I hope you are pissed off all day. Branding people - who tend to exhibit highly variable personality traits - as "selfish elites" merely on the purchase of a single item is ridiculous. It's like saying that people who drink Pepsi are creative innovators. The study offers two choices - Independent Geek or Selfish Elite, and they presume to define the human race in this "either or" manner. Hello? Critical thinking 101. Meh, you're not worth it.
You assume that these "aliens" are likely to have the same limitations as us.
Not at all. However I do assume they will have limitations. Everything does. And I assume that in order to become a space-faring race they must be the type of critters that are into discovering things because I doubt that they'd evolve directly into spaceships and just zip off into the sky. I also assume that either they live a very long time and have perfect memories, or they must have some way of passing on knowledge to their young. The problem with wanting to discover things is that there are always more things to discover. In order to have progress you can't keep re-inventing the wheel. At some point you have to invent the axle. So I assume a society that discovers things and builds upon its discoveries, communicates with itself to avoid wasting time and effort, and given enough time will discover everything that there is TO discover.
Radio was "discovered" in the 1800's. It's pretty low tech stuff. I can't say how they will use it but at one point they have to come across it. Because it's there. And since it's a very useful way to study the cosmos (which is something else to "discover", I'd bet that effort would be invested in this area.
Of course if you're imagining aliens that will fly across the universe with mental power alone, never needing things like electricity, metallurgy, plastics, ceramics, chemistry, physics, biology (after all, if they are going to live in an artificial closed system for any amount of time they would have to know themselves), and lord knows what else, then good for you. I don't see where I'm being arrogant, however.
It was supposed to be a joke. However I know it's bad form to make jokes about religions.
Or any other Apple product. But any study that comes off this way must be seriously flawed and is in no way scientific. First we have the problem of defining what a "selfish elite" is. Call me when the whole world agrees.
This is nothing but a smear campaign. Oh wait, the article says that this "data" was obtained by a "Consumer Research" firm, not the American Psychological Association, or some scientist. If we follow the money, I wonder who hired this company...
Or I offer you an alternative, at least in the human world: war. For one reason or another - war between neighbors, fighting over the ever more scarce resources, or war between classes when there is an uneven distribution of said resources. Not sure if xenos would be the same way - but "cheating" is certainly something that helps you compete better than the other "non cheating" guy. Cheating is built in to all our creatures' behavior here on earth - all critters rob food as often as they can, all critters use their strength or other resources to make sure that they get their (more than) fair share of the pie. You just have to watch fish feeding, stealing food from the others' very mouth. Seagulls swooping down to steal a tasty morsel before the slower guy. Dogs fighting and growling over food. Lions and polar bears warning each other away from a kill, while the carrion birds or arctic foxes steal a bite. Or humans promising to limit their oil output to quotas and secretly overproducing... everything cheats on this planet.
So I am sure that even on an alien world, there would be those who are better at looking out for number 1. This means there would automatically be "haves" and "have nots" (or "have less"). If only due to geography, there will always be an uneven distribution of something. The guy in the middle of the hive, and the guy on the edge. The guy at the head of the river with fresh water, and the guy at the mouth drinking dirty water (or the solvent of choice).
It's also logical to assume that a creature that has survived an evolutionary process will at least try to defend itself (or maybe not). If it does, then warfare must exist. If it doesn't, then those doomed to die would simply accept their fate, making the problem a lot simpler to deal with.
Then again, anyone who can build something that will survive long enough to cross intergalactic distances will impress me seriously. Therefore I argue that the number of worlds in the "universe" is finite - it's the number of planets in your galaxy. Short of wormholes, etc, I just don't see intergalactic travel at all. Hey we are talking many many orders of magnitude further away. Entropy is probably a universal phenomenon. Those ships are going to break down, given enough time. Even at the speed of light it would take millions of years.
No, the guy with the most ridiculous theory gets to prove his first. This means you.
You want proof then learn basic physics, then go to medical school and learn how eyes work. It's fairly obvious.
But by the time the civilization collapses it's used up all of the readily available hydrocarbon deposits and metal deposits.
I'll give you the hydrocarbons (although those can be synthesized if you have an energy source) but metals? Come on man, no one is shooting metals out into space, never to return. Eventually it becomes cheaper to recycle, scavenge old garbage heaps, etc to recover "wasted" metals than to refine new ones. The metals aren't going anywhere. The problem is one of distribution - if you have an exponentially growing population, eventually there's less of "metal X" to go round per person so you could get shortages THAT way. Hopefully an "advanced" civilization can eventually control it's population. Most Western countries here on Earth have been having negative population growth rates if you subtract immigration, so it's not impossible to expect.