Lets just clear up everyone's confusion. Diesel is and always has been more efficient per gallon due to combustion via compression as well as the higher inherent energy content of diesel fuel versus the Otto cycle that uses a spark ignition and generally heptane/octane (collectively known as gasoline). That said, diesel fuel results in REAL POLLUTION. The kind that causes cancer, burning eyes, asthma, headaches etc.
Quoted from Wikipedia: "Emissions from diesel vehicles have been reported to be significantly more harmful than those from petrol vehicles. Diesel combustion exhaust is a source of atmospheric soot and fine particles, which is a component of the air pollution implicated in human cancer, heart and lung damage, and mental functioning. Moreover, diesel exhaust contains contaminants listed as carcinogenic for humans by the IARC (part of the World Health Organization of the United Nations), as present in their List of IARC Group 1 carcinogens. Diesel exhaust pollution is thought to account for around one quarter of the pollution in the air in previous decades, and a high share of sickness caused by automotive pollution.
Using diesel for passenger vehicles or anywhere other than a powerplant or other application with room for a large, advanced air scrubber on the exhaust is and always has been a bad idea.
First off, I am not against humanoid robots, I can imagine some pretty useful applications for a convincingly humanoid robot. That being said, there is no such issue right now because they are all squarely in the uncanny valley and generally creepy AF.
Secondly, all we are talking about here is an EMO switch (Emergency Manual Override)
which is pretty standard on virtually every piece of mechanical hardware that could potentially hurt someone. From the cord that can be yanked out of the wall to the keyed switch in your car, to every industrial robot I have ever worked on or designed, they all have an EMO in one form or another. If I were ever to work on a humaniform (Azzimovian term for it) robot that was strong enough to hurt someone (again if, most likely the design would shoot for inherently weak motors that could not incur injury to a user during interaction) I would definitely include an EMO that is easily accessible. Even Data from Star Trek TNG had such a switch in the middle of his back.
That these pointy headed politicians somehow think that this would not be inherently built in just shows both their hubris and lack of understanding of the current state of the art. I think the main reason for this move toward legislation is to attempt to tax robots as you would tax a worker to generate additional revenue for the struggling EU. Everything else is just BS to try and legitimize a money grab by the politicians.
Womble, we know that the fetus is viable on it's own after 20 weeks of gestation, so at that point, from a scientific standpoint the only difference between a fetus and a baby is location of residence and method of getting nutrients. Further, we have scientifically advanced our definition of human life (and human death) as the presence of lack of brain activity. For the fetus, this begins at around 6 weeks. Thus, from our current understanding and legal definition of human life, which we apply across the board to all human beings (except for the fetus, due to a mistake by 7 attorneys in black robes 43 years ago), human life begins at around 6 weeks after conception, and a fetus is certainly a human being at 20 weeks.
As you can tell I have a strong pro-life position, and I have thoroughly researched the issue as I personally had to make a choice on the issue of one life or another. 99% of pro-life advocates believe in exceptions for abortion in cases where the life of the mother is in danger, where abortion is a sad but necessary procedure. We do not agree that abortion for the convenience of the mother or father is acceptable. Carrying to term and childbirth are difficult consequences for irresponsible unprotected sex, but adoption is a far better option for the mental and physical health of everyone involved over 99% of the time.
Just 2.8% of women surveyed claimed that their abortion was over concerns for maternal health in the one survey that is available on the subject. The actual stats are un-knowable because no solid studies have been performed thanks to the pro-abortion lobbies who want to obfuscate the issue. We do know that maternal childbirth related deaths in the US are at 0.0185% vs Brazil at 0.055% which has strict anti-abortion laws. Assuming all the difference has nothing to do with quality of health care or delivery facilities (which it doesn't), we are talking about a 0.037% difference in maternal childbirth mortality rates. You and I think nothing of jumping in a car where your risk of dying over three years of driving is 0.033% or about the delta in risk rates. The odds of dying from a legal abortion are higher but comparable with any invasive medical procedure. Again, impossible to find exact stats due to obfuscation at the highest levels. These numbers for medically necessary abortions hardly scratch the surface on the 54,000,000 abortions since Roe v Wade.
The fact that you have to attack a person's religious beliefs instead of simply using facts like I have above shows just how weak your pro-abortion position is. Science since 1973 continues to show that the practice of abortion on demand is taking the life of another human being. There is a reason that no federal law has ever been passed making abortion legal, and that is that anyone who spends time actually digging into the facts (or who becomes pregnant and watches the ultrasound) can conclude that a fetus is a human life. In 100 years, society will look back at abortion in much the same way we look back at slavery. Amazed and disgusted that a civilized society could condone the savage abuse of a innocent, defenseless portion of the population for convenience.
So I am assuming by your post that you are Canadian, and from what I have read above, it is still pervasive in Canada that retailers will hide a few of an item in a low traffic area at a jacked up price for 30 days so they can then advertise a sale that is not really a discount from what they would actually sell it at. So the only difference from the US and Canada is that you are regularly suckered into paying average or more on a "sale" that is not really a discount from the actual price and you THINK you are protected, but in the end are still getting gamed regularly by retailers.
In the US we were smart enough to see how easy such a law could be manipulated and instead focused on fostering competition (as an earlier post cited, US Amazon lists new from multiple sellers/used from multiple sellers on top of the sold by Amazon direct price and it is trivial to check other retailers as well.) Competition allows savvy consumers to check prices at a few competing stores online (everyone I know does this on any purchase over around $50). Thus, one retailer can play the game of discounting from MSRP or from a higher price, but it is relatively easy to check another retailer and compare prices. Because of competition, and especially online where moving your purchase to a different source is 5 seconds of typing, retailers cannot afford to be un-competitive on pricing. The net result is lower prices all the time for all consumers in the US. Are there exceptions where this breaks down? Of course, but overall, I will take my system over yours any day, as it gives a better result in the real world and is much harder to circumvent by retailers looking to boost their bottom line.
People around the world like to bash on the US (with only 319 million people), but when shit hits their fan, they always come to us begging for help, and guess what, we always do (3x more humanitarian aid than the EU with 743 million people and China with 1,360 million didn't even make the top twenty). Yes we are the richest and most powerful (which was not an accident by they way, it was a combination of hard work and the best, most fair social and economic structure on the planet for 200+ continuous years), and you better pray to whatever god you worship it stays that way, because if China or Russia ever becomes the dominant superpower, be prepared to bend over and kiss your ass goodbye.
Note that I did say parade. I agree that Mayer was probably just incompetent, but Yahoo had 7 different CEOs and most of them were looking to pump up Yahoo stock rather than to build a financially viable model and then each pulled the rip cord on their golden parachute and moved on.
I hope you realize that the moisture/rain cycle, jet stream and global currents all work to spread heat out over the planet and the planet loses more heat preferentially to space the hotter it is locally as a function of the fourth power of the absolute temperature (293K = 20C = 68F). Thus, all of these mechanisms work to keep the hot places (i.e. equatorial zone) from getting much hotter, while the colder places become much more comfortable and habitable. The places you thought you were able to count off would actually only be something like 0.2C warmer on average than they are now. Sorry to burst your bubble.
(Hint: Death valley is not the hottest place on the planet because it gets the most solar radiation, or looses the least, it is because it is largely isolated from the mechanisms I described above, and not coincidentally it looses a lot more that usual heat at night due to radiation and can drop below freezing.)
Your erroneous assumption is that the polar caps median or average temperature is -4C. This is not the case. TLDR summary: Arctic temperature range is -58C to 30C depending on the time of year and time of day. Interpolating 5C into observed sea level rise is something like 2.5 inches of sea level rise. Not exactly something that you would even notice in 99.9% of the planet. The other 0.1% may have to adapt or move, but such is life. (It takes 26,300 cubic miles of water to raise the sea level by 1".)
You are assuming that runaway greenhouse effect is likely, and using as an example a completely different planet, 30% closer to the sun with a 98% CO2 atmosphere (vs our 0.04% atmospheric CO2)?!?! My argument is that all the CO2 we are releasing was once living matter on the planet and we know past CO2 levels were higher during very lush planetary times and we did not have runaway greenhouse effects and got from prehistoric times to now without global flooding. My argument is both more similar (same planet, same orbit, same atmosphere) and more reasonable (we have a historical record supporting my assertion, there is no historical record that elevated CO2 levels ever lead in the past to greenhouse runaway.)
Excerpt from my response to another post above:
First off, if all the ice on the planet melted, sea levels would rise 230ft. I live 15miles from the coast and my current elevation is 775 feet, so yeah, not really worried on that one. (Further, these figures do not account for the exponential increase in dissolved water in the atmosphere with increased temperatures, so the actual rise is somewhat lower).
Beyond that, NO ONE thinks that all the ice would melt. (If someone tells you that they are full of shit.) The Arctic temperature range is -58C to 30C depending on the time of year and time of day, Antarctic is a bit higher. Changing those temperatures to -53C to 35C is not going to change the fact that for most of the time, most water that hits the polar caps is frozen and will stay frozen. Experts still hotly debate whether or not the elevated temperatures which cause more moisture in the atmosphere would significantly increase the annual snowfall rate on the polar caps, actually significantly increasing the rate of ice accumulation. Sea levels have risen 2.9mm per year since 1993, even with the slight 0.6C warming we have seen since then. From 1870 to 2004 sea levels rose an average of 3mm per year or about 7.7inches over 134 years. Not even a blip of increase or anywhere near a cataclysmic rise or a cataclysmic increase in sea levels like you are asserting. Anyone who tells you that sea level rise is a foregone conclusion with global warming is lying to you.
First off, if all the ice on the planet melted, sea levels would rise 230ft. I live 15miles from the coast and my current elevation is 775 feet, so yeah, not really worried on that one. (Further, these figures do not account for the exponential increase in dissolved water in the atmosphere with increased temperatures, so the actual rise is somewhat lower). (strike one)
Beyond that, NO ONE thinks that all the ice would melt. (If someone tells you that they are full of shit.) The Arctic temperature range is -58C to 30C depending on the time of year and time of day, Antarctic is a bit higher. Changing those temperatures to -53C to 35C is not going to change the fact that for most of the time, most water that hits the polar caps is frozen and will stay frozen. Experts still hotly debate whether or not the elevated temperatures which cause more moisture in the atmosphere would significantly increase the annual snowfall rate on the polar caps, actually significantly increasing the rate of ice accumulation. Sea levels have risen 2.9mm per year since 1993, even with the slight 0.6C warming we have seen since then. From 1870 to 2004 sea levels rose an average of 3mm per year or about 7.7inches over 134 years. Not even a blip of increase or anywhere near a cataclysmic rise or a cataclysmic increase in sea levels like you are asserting. Anyone who tells you that sea level rise is a foregone conclusion with global warming is lying to you. (strike two)
Taking scientific advice from a (even popular) web comic strip written by an ex-software engineer completely lacking in the hard sciences (he even insists on disclaimers as a non-expert on his work because of this) is not helping your cause. He is just regurgitating the erroneous assumptions of the so called "climate scientists" who are as much scientists as my local sanitation engineer is an engineer. (See that last link above, that graph shows just how wildly off these "scientists" were with their models vs reality.) They can barely predict the weather 3 days from now and you blindly trust their models of 100 years from now when they have been consistently wrong for the last 15 years? Sorry, no thanks. (strike three)
You can educate yourself or continue in self righteous PC ignorance, up to you. As you can see here, though, you are hardly batting 1000...
And this, ladies and gentlemen is what a parade of mismanagement looks like. Corporate raider CEO after corporate raider CEO trying to pump up short term valuation at the expense of long term viability.
I have said it before, I will say it again. Every executive level and board member should be required by law to receive all compensation above 10x median employee salary as stock options that start to mature in 5 years and mature 20% per year. Thus, if they get $10M per year pay, something like $9.4M is tied up for 5 years and they don't get 100% out of their first years pay until the 10th year. Force these slash and burn CEOs who are only looking to line their pockets to ensure long term corporate viability.
"Not the hottest we have seen in the tiny span of time we have been keeping records compared to geologic and astronomical time frames."
I know it's not as good of click bait, but honestly, this is a non story. Call me when it is 5C hotter globally and I might actually care (or I might not, honestly warmer temperatures have been historically good for life in general and humans in particular).
This exactly. In other news, incompetent third world military is incompetent. They get advanced imaging FLIR hardware and have zero clue of the thermodynamics behind it or what things look like in IR, see commercial flight from nearby airport and think it is UFO... Not shocking at all, the only shocking thing is how desperate Slashdot is for some fake news clickbait.
I have been using FLIR cameras for almost 20 years now, and unless you understand the principles behind what is going on, some everyday things can look pretty bizarre (like the candles having a much larger corona in IR than in visible light.) If you give a FLIR to a bunch of high school graduates fresh out of whatever counts for training in south America and tell them that it can see things you normally can't without getting into the details, mis-identifications like this are very likely, I'm just glad they were too far away to try to shoot down their "UFO"...
However, if you want to stay, first and foremost, put the effort into where you have control: yourself. You need to take a long hard look in the mirror. Look at your work history over the last 5 years. How has it been? Talk to other colleagues you have worked with (besides the person you have an issue with). Ask them for one thing that you could improve. If they all say you should schedule fewer meetings, your "gaslighter" may simply be done putting up with your excessive meetings and is sending you a direct message (did s/he ever mention this to you before). I try to ask my manager every 4 months what I could do better (I actually have a reminder on my calendar). It follows that you must take the advice you get to heart and really work on the area your manager suggests as well. You would be amazed at how this raises your credibility with management and at the same time can often give you avenues for improvement that you had not considered before.
I have worked in engineering for many years now, and I NEVER leave files I need on common/shared or any networked locations accessible to others unless there is strict version control/tracking/rollback in effect. Working in a team environment it is just too easy for someone else to delete a file or overwrite it on accident with no malice at all, just in the course of doing work. I always keep my files on my local machine and back up to a USB drive every few days and then put copies on the network drive (I don't care how many times management asks for me to work out of network locations, it is stupid and I don't do it). This resolves your changed/deleted files issue.
Next, I tend to take notes during or after meetings formal or informal and email them out to the team immediately after with a header something along the lines of "to review my understanding of our last meeting/conversation etc." and then list off the key points as well as any action items and who is responsible for them. This is an effective way of mitigating people who have selective amnesia later on, and would resolve that issue that you have with this co worker.
I do most of this as a matter of course because of various people over the years who have exhibited one type of behavior or another, but at the end of the day, doing this makes you a better, more valuable employee and I can almost guarantee that one of two things will happen, either you will realize that it was you creating the problems all along and you will become better at doing your job, or the gaslighter employee will be thwarted and forced to do his own work and his rockstar reputation will be diminished as contradictions start to come to light. This won't solve all of your problems, but it will go a long ways.
Fire his ass and get a leader with vision. The iPhone is slumped because there is nothing to drive sales. NO ONE WANTS A THIN PHONE if it means poor battery life and a weak frame that can bend during normal use. Give me more features like an IR camera, night vision camera, an internal LED projector, plug in keyboard and screen for desktop functionality, stereoscopic cameras for 3D pictures, a waterproof design, a much tougher screen (this is not even that hard, you basically just make your screen plastic with a top replaceable layer. When the layer gets scratched, you replace it. The plastic screen will not shatter, and the top layer protects the main screen from scratches.)
There is still a lot of potential for smart phones; Apple used to be innovating, now they are coasting on their trendy consumer base, but that will push them back to a 5% market share.
Invid, I was never hoping that they would change the original, just release a Minecraft 2, like every other hit game out there that has 5 sequels now.
I was like you for maybe 4 years, but the last time I played, I had all my goodies down in a mine and popped a rock and water flooded in pushing me into a 2 block tall corner with lava under it. I couldn't jump out and died and all my gear and items burned up. The whole perma-death thing with hours of items and gear is not really my idea of relaxing.
Older people do cause fatal accidents as well, but look at my post above. The stats on young drivers are 4x higher than the older crowd. The argument against a universal lock is you could also be in a train, bus or could be a passenger. The point is at some age, we trust the user is mature enough to only use it in a safe situation and not when they are the driver. They also know that distracted driving is illegal yes, but it is a scientifically proven fact that most young people suffer from invincibility syndrome where they think that it will never happen to them. The older you get the more people you know die from this or that, and reality sets in (trust me, it will happen) and you become much more aware of risks and risk averse.
When a small group of people (i.e. drunk drivers, text drivers, facetime drivers etc.) choose to put the entire population at risk because they are either too stupid or careless or sociopathic to make the right choice that the other 99% of us make every day, then the government must step in and pass laws to punish them and make it as difficult as possible to engage in those behaviors that put us all at risk.
That is one of the most basic functions of government, to protect the people from threats, both foreign and domestic.
So you are going to conflate unavoidable risk of a stroke or other medical event with a completely avoidable risk of some 20 year old jackass facetiming while driving? You may want to take that logical thinking expansion course at your local community college.
With parental consent and supervision you can consume alcohol at any age in the US (what do you think is in most cold medicine anyway)? The alcohol problem in the US is due to the lack of parents educating their children on proper and safe use of alcohol. Instead the 18-24 (gee what a coincidence) group learn to go to parties and get hammered out of their gourds. Who do they learn this from? Others of the same age with similarly poor judgement and risk assessment skills. What is the consequence? Over 30% of all accident deaths involved a drunk driver in 2010.
We routinely restrict young peoples privileges because we know that they are young, inexperienced and generally stupid at assessing risk. We know because we were once young as well. This has as much to do with ageism as preventing children from accessing firearms. Traffic accident is one of the leading causes of death of the 18-25 demographic. We already prohibit under 21 from drinking, and 16 year olds get a driving permit which limits their driving privileges instead of a full license. I am suggesting that from 16-24 drivers get a provisional license or some such which requires that they have a phone feature installed that locks all features other than hands free calling when the phone is moving more than 10MPH.
Here are some facts to chew on: - 11 teens die every day as a result of texting while driving. - According to a AAA poll, 94% of teen drivers acknowledge the dangers of texting and driving, but 35% admitted to doing it anyway. *huge flag that there is poor judgement in this age group* - 21% of teen drivers involved in fatal accidents were distracted by their cell phones. - Teen drivers are 4x more likely than adults to get into car crashes or near-crashes when talking or texting on a cell phone.
The issue I am concerned with is judgement. With teen drivers being 4x more likely to crash or almost crash with the cell phone than adults, that kind of blows your argument to shreds that there is not a judgement problem. Rational people know by now that texting/messing with your phone and driving is not safe. Children by definition are not rational.
I am also fine with a universal popup on all phones if moving more than 10MPH that warns that using the phone while driving other than hands free calling is a criminal offense punishable by jail time or heavy fine with an option to either use the phone or silence all incoming texts/calls etc until the vehicle parks.
Lets see how many "tolerant" progressives show how enlightened they are by down modding as Troll and then AC posting a very unpersuasive F-U to my post because they "feel" so strongly that they must be right. Just remember that ad homonym is the last bastion of a dying argument.
The entire CO2/anthropogenic global warming argument is a canard, and is only believed by the climate "scientists" whose jobs/grants depend on it and those without a degree in hard physical science or those who just believe whatever their told. The "all scientists believe global warming" bullshit came from a cherry picked poll with no scientific methodology and therefore no accuracy and they are following the Nazi path that a lie told long enough and loud enough will be believed. Truth is many climate scientists do not agree with global warming; I can point to dozens, and that is not an exhaustive list by any means, those are just people willing to be abused in the name of truth by the fascist global warming nuts. The rest of us would like to keep our day jobs.
The reality is that plant growth on land/in oceans is limited by atmospheric/free CO2. Right now environuts are running around with their hair on fire because they say CO2 is at 400 PPM (parts per million) or 0.04%, which in and of its self is debatable (cities and power plants among others create localized plumes of elevated CO2, if your monitoring is anywhere near a plume, then you are measuring the plume instead of true ambient levels).
Here are a few facts: Every fossil fuel that is burned today was once living matter, either plant or animal (undisputed fact). Thus it was once part of the natural CO2 planetary cycle and at a time when life was flourishing. But somehow, re-adding that carbon to the planetary system after being trapped in coal or oil or natural gas deposits will throw the world out of balance and make the world too hot to be habitable? Completely irrational on the face of it.
More facts: The oceans contain 37.4T tons of suspended carbon, land biomass has 2000-3000B tons. The atmosphere contains 720B tons of CO2 and humans contribute only 6B tons additional load on this balance. The oceans, land and atmosphere exchange CO2 continuously so the additional load by humans is ~0.0146% of the overall global exchange. A 1% change in the balance between oceans and air would cause a CO2 change 71 times larger than anything we could produce. Anyone who thinks that natural interchanges like this don't vary over time by more than 0.015% is an idiot and no student of history. We know for a fact that the planet has been both much hotter and much cooler than current day.
I bought Minecraft in early Alpha mid 2010, and I have played and enjoyed it for a number of years. However, I was really hoping with the MS purchase that they would do a 2.0 since the graphics and 1M cube block resolution with 8 bit quality textures makes my eyes hurt these days (I like pretty things).
As MS milks Minecraft for every penny it's worth, I have moved on to a new game to satisfy my creative adventuring with more complexity and far prettier graphics, Empyrion. It is an Indy still in Alpha (5.0), but has a lot of potential and is a cross between Minecraft and what No Mans Sky should have been. (this is just my own personal opinion, but if you like Minecraft or the idea of No Mans Sky, you should check it out.)
This is equivalent to the facilities guy at work installing new doors with no locks and then a thief putting locks on all the doors with a note to pay him $200 to get the keys to the new locks; it is almost a public service in this case. Heads should roll for this stupidity, though most at the executive level have such a poor understanding of good security practices who knows.
This exactly, and until the DMCA gets gutted, the consumer will continue to get screwed over. The DMCA won't get fixed until people stop with the us vs them trap and demand that politicians represent the interests of the voters instead of the interests of the lobbyists.
I couldn't find the original journal article, but this WSJ article lays it out pretty clearly. The tests they use are from the 1960s and among other things, not checking for higher brain function with an EEG is a real problem for me.
An excerpt: " In a 1999 article in the peer-reviewed journal Anesthesiology, Gail A. Van Norman, a professor of anesthesiology at the University of Washington, reported a case in which a 30-year-old patient with severe head trauma began breathing spontaneously after being declared brain dead. The physicians said that, because there was no chance of recovery, he could still be considered dead. The harvest proceeded over the objections of the anesthesiologist, who saw the donor move, and then react to the scalpel with hypertension."
Those of you looking to avoid pain may not like it if you can feel yourself being slowly dissected...
Don't know what you are talking about. It is extremely simple and I think even built in to the GPS be able to detect the speed of the phone within a few MPH (dx/dt). Detecting if the driver is using face time as opposed to a passenger is almost impossible for GPS alone, but yeah, it is felony stupid to text/facetime/play with your phone while driving. There should be a federal law that locks all features on a phone except hands free calls for drivers 16-24 years of age, considering it is consistently that "invincible" demographic that is killing people while driving and messing with the phone.
AC posts obnoxious ad homonym from a dark corner of his mothers basement. Another victory for AC posters everywhere!
The US has the top health care system in the world, we have developed over 80% of all drugs (when you account for where the actual research is done), we develop a vast majority of all medical procedures and equipment. These advances for all humanity are then disseminated around the world, and it is all done for profit.
If you think our health care is so terrible, please, by all means, go to Cuba for your next medical treatment. Unless you are politically connected, expect to get a communist brand bandage/aspirin and sent on your way. The reality is that health care takes massive time and effort. You can either let economics decide who gets care (with the addition of the law that no one gets turned away at the ER, and the Hippocratic oath thrown in the mix) or you can let a bureaucrat who is looking to better his political outlook by making friends and influencing people (what you get in Cuba).
Taking it out of the theoretical, on a personal level, I know two people who have had just under $1M of health care costs. One had insurance that paid for everything, the other had essentially no money and their insurance ran out, so the pharmaceutical donated the meds to them free and the doctor donated his time. They both got world class care, in spite of your concern about the profit motive.
Slashdot Mirror
Lets just clear up everyone's confusion. Diesel is and always has been more efficient per gallon due to combustion via compression as well as the higher inherent energy content of diesel fuel versus the Otto cycle that uses a spark ignition and generally heptane/octane (collectively known as gasoline). That said, diesel fuel results in REAL POLLUTION. The kind that causes cancer, burning eyes, asthma, headaches etc.
Quoted from Wikipedia:
"Emissions from diesel vehicles have been reported to be significantly more harmful than those from petrol vehicles. Diesel combustion exhaust is a source of atmospheric soot and fine particles, which is a component of the air pollution implicated in human cancer, heart and lung damage, and mental functioning. Moreover, diesel exhaust contains contaminants listed as carcinogenic for humans by the IARC (part of the World Health Organization of the United Nations), as present in their List of IARC Group 1 carcinogens. Diesel exhaust pollution is thought to account for around one quarter of the pollution in the air in previous decades, and a high share of sickness caused by automotive pollution.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Using diesel for passenger vehicles or anywhere other than a powerplant or other application with room for a large, advanced air scrubber on the exhaust is and always has been a bad idea.
First off, I am not against humanoid robots, I can imagine some pretty useful applications for a convincingly humanoid robot. That being said, there is no such issue right now because they are all squarely in the uncanny valley and generally creepy AF.
Secondly, all we are talking about here is an EMO switch (Emergency Manual Override)
https://www.google.com/search?...
which is pretty standard on virtually every piece of mechanical hardware that could potentially hurt someone. From the cord that can be yanked out of the wall to the keyed switch in your car, to every industrial robot I have ever worked on or designed, they all have an EMO in one form or another. If I were ever to work on a humaniform (Azzimovian term for it) robot that was strong enough to hurt someone (again if, most likely the design would shoot for inherently weak motors that could not incur injury to a user during interaction) I would definitely include an EMO that is easily accessible. Even Data from Star Trek TNG had such a switch in the middle of his back.
That these pointy headed politicians somehow think that this would not be inherently built in just shows both their hubris and lack of understanding of the current state of the art. I think the main reason for this move toward legislation is to attempt to tax robots as you would tax a worker to generate additional revenue for the struggling EU. Everything else is just BS to try and legitimize a money grab by the politicians.
Womble, we know that the fetus is viable on it's own after 20 weeks of gestation, so at that point, from a scientific standpoint the only difference between a fetus and a baby is location of residence and method of getting nutrients. Further, we have scientifically advanced our definition of human life (and human death) as the presence of lack of brain activity. For the fetus, this begins at around 6 weeks. Thus, from our current understanding and legal definition of human life, which we apply across the board to all human beings (except for the fetus, due to a mistake by 7 attorneys in black robes 43 years ago), human life begins at around 6 weeks after conception, and a fetus is certainly a human being at 20 weeks.
As you can tell I have a strong pro-life position, and I have thoroughly researched the issue as I personally had to make a choice on the issue of one life or another. 99% of pro-life advocates believe in exceptions for abortion in cases where the life of the mother is in danger, where abortion is a sad but necessary procedure. We do not agree that abortion for the convenience of the mother or father is acceptable. Carrying to term and childbirth are difficult consequences for irresponsible unprotected sex, but adoption is a far better option for the mental and physical health of everyone involved over 99% of the time.
Just 2.8% of women surveyed claimed that their abortion was over concerns for maternal health in the one survey that is available on the subject. The actual stats are un-knowable because no solid studies have been performed thanks to the pro-abortion lobbies who want to obfuscate the issue. We do know that maternal childbirth related deaths in the US are at 0.0185% vs Brazil at 0.055% which has strict anti-abortion laws. Assuming all the difference has nothing to do with quality of health care or delivery facilities (which it doesn't), we are talking about a 0.037% difference in maternal childbirth mortality rates. You and I think nothing of jumping in a car where your risk of dying over three years of driving is 0.033% or about the delta in risk rates. The odds of dying from a legal abortion are higher but comparable with any invasive medical procedure. Again, impossible to find exact stats due to obfuscation at the highest levels. These numbers for medically necessary abortions hardly scratch the surface on the 54,000,000 abortions since Roe v Wade.
https://www.washingtonpost.com...
http://www.factcheck.org/2012/...
http://www.politifact.com/new-...
http://riskcalculator.facs.org...
The fact that you have to attack a person's religious beliefs instead of simply using facts like I have above shows just how weak your pro-abortion position is. Science since 1973 continues to show that the practice of abortion on demand is taking the life of another human being. There is a reason that no federal law has ever been passed making abortion legal, and that is that anyone who spends time actually digging into the facts (or who becomes pregnant and watches the ultrasound) can conclude that a fetus is a human life. In 100 years, society will look back at abortion in much the same way we look back at slavery. Amazed and disgusted that a civilized society could condone the savage abuse of a innocent, defenseless portion of the population for convenience.
http://www.whattoexpect.com/pr...
So I am assuming by your post that you are Canadian, and from what I have read above, it is still pervasive in Canada that retailers will hide a few of an item in a low traffic area at a jacked up price for 30 days so they can then advertise a sale that is not really a discount from what they would actually sell it at. So the only difference from the US and Canada is that you are regularly suckered into paying average or more on a "sale" that is not really a discount from the actual price and you THINK you are protected, but in the end are still getting gamed regularly by retailers.
In the US we were smart enough to see how easy such a law could be manipulated and instead focused on fostering competition (as an earlier post cited, US Amazon lists new from multiple sellers/used from multiple sellers on top of the sold by Amazon direct price and it is trivial to check other retailers as well.) Competition allows savvy consumers to check prices at a few competing stores online (everyone I know does this on any purchase over around $50). Thus, one retailer can play the game of discounting from MSRP or from a higher price, but it is relatively easy to check another retailer and compare prices. Because of competition, and especially online where moving your purchase to a different source is 5 seconds of typing, retailers cannot afford to be un-competitive on pricing. The net result is lower prices all the time for all consumers in the US. Are there exceptions where this breaks down? Of course, but overall, I will take my system over yours any day, as it gives a better result in the real world and is much harder to circumvent by retailers looking to boost their bottom line.
People around the world like to bash on the US (with only 319 million people), but when shit hits their fan, they always come to us begging for help, and guess what, we always do (3x more humanitarian aid than the EU with 743 million people and China with 1,360 million didn't even make the top twenty). Yes we are the richest and most powerful (which was not an accident by they way, it was a combination of hard work and the best, most fair social and economic structure on the planet for 200+ continuous years), and you better pray to whatever god you worship it stays that way, because if China or Russia ever becomes the dominant superpower, be prepared to bend over and kiss your ass goodbye.
https://www.theguardian.com/ne...
Note that I did say parade. I agree that Mayer was probably just incompetent, but Yahoo had 7 different CEOs and most of them were looking to pump up Yahoo stock rather than to build a financially viable model and then each pulled the rip cord on their golden parachute and moved on.
I hope you realize that the moisture/rain cycle, jet stream and global currents all work to spread heat out over the planet and the planet loses more heat preferentially to space the hotter it is locally as a function of the fourth power of the absolute temperature (293K = 20C = 68F). Thus, all of these mechanisms work to keep the hot places (i.e. equatorial zone) from getting much hotter, while the colder places become much more comfortable and habitable. The places you thought you were able to count off would actually only be something like 0.2C warmer on average than they are now. Sorry to burst your bubble.
(Hint: Death valley is not the hottest place on the planet because it gets the most solar radiation, or looses the least, it is because it is largely isolated from the mechanisms I described above, and not coincidentally it looses a lot more that usual heat at night due to radiation and can drop below freezing.)
Your erroneous assumption is that the polar caps median or average temperature is -4C. This is not the case. TLDR summary: Arctic temperature range is -58C to 30C depending on the time of year and time of day. Interpolating 5C into observed sea level rise is something like 2.5 inches of sea level rise. Not exactly something that you would even notice in 99.9% of the planet. The other 0.1% may have to adapt or move, but such is life. (It takes 26,300 cubic miles of water to raise the sea level by 1".)
You are assuming that runaway greenhouse effect is likely, and using as an example a completely different planet, 30% closer to the sun with a 98% CO2 atmosphere (vs our 0.04% atmospheric CO2)?!?! My argument is that all the CO2 we are releasing was once living matter on the planet and we know past CO2 levels were higher during very lush planetary times and we did not have runaway greenhouse effects and got from prehistoric times to now without global flooding. My argument is both more similar (same planet, same orbit, same atmosphere) and more reasonable (we have a historical record supporting my assertion, there is no historical record that elevated CO2 levels ever lead in the past to greenhouse runaway.)
Excerpt from my response to another post above:
First off, if all the ice on the planet melted, sea levels would rise 230ft. I live 15miles from the coast and my current elevation is 775 feet, so yeah, not really worried on that one. (Further, these figures do not account for the exponential increase in dissolved water in the atmosphere with increased temperatures, so the actual rise is somewhat lower).
http://www.amnh.org/ology/feat... [amnh.org]
Beyond that, NO ONE thinks that all the ice would melt. (If someone tells you that they are full of shit.) The Arctic temperature range is -58C to 30C depending on the time of year and time of day, Antarctic is a bit higher. Changing those temperatures to -53C to 35C is not going to change the fact that for most of the time, most water that hits the polar caps is frozen and will stay frozen. Experts still hotly debate whether or not the elevated temperatures which cause more moisture in the atmosphere would significantly increase the annual snowfall rate on the polar caps, actually significantly increasing the rate of ice accumulation. Sea levels have risen 2.9mm per year since 1993, even with the slight 0.6C warming we have seen since then. From 1870 to 2004 sea levels rose an average of 3mm per year or about 7.7inches over 134 years. Not even a blip of increase or anywhere near a cataclysmic rise or a cataclysmic increase in sea levels like you are asserting. Anyone who tells you that sea level rise is a foregone conclusion with global warming is lying to you.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp... [drroyspencer.com]
First off, if all the ice on the planet melted, sea levels would rise 230ft. I live 15miles from the coast and my current elevation is 775 feet, so yeah, not really worried on that one. (Further, these figures do not account for the exponential increase in dissolved water in the atmosphere with increased temperatures, so the actual rise is somewhat lower). (strike one)
http://www.amnh.org/ology/feat...
Beyond that, NO ONE thinks that all the ice would melt. (If someone tells you that they are full of shit.) The Arctic temperature range is -58C to 30C depending on the time of year and time of day, Antarctic is a bit higher. Changing those temperatures to -53C to 35C is not going to change the fact that for most of the time, most water that hits the polar caps is frozen and will stay frozen. Experts still hotly debate whether or not the elevated temperatures which cause more moisture in the atmosphere would significantly increase the annual snowfall rate on the polar caps, actually significantly increasing the rate of ice accumulation. Sea levels have risen 2.9mm per year since 1993, even with the slight 0.6C warming we have seen since then. From 1870 to 2004 sea levels rose an average of 3mm per year or about 7.7inches over 134 years. Not even a blip of increase or anywhere near a cataclysmic rise or a cataclysmic increase in sea levels like you are asserting. Anyone who tells you that sea level rise is a foregone conclusion with global warming is lying to you. (strike two)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp...
Taking scientific advice from a (even popular) web comic strip written by an ex-software engineer completely lacking in the hard sciences (he even insists on disclaimers as a non-expert on his work because of this) is not helping your cause. He is just regurgitating the erroneous assumptions of the so called "climate scientists" who are as much scientists as my local sanitation engineer is an engineer. (See that last link above, that graph shows just how wildly off these "scientists" were with their models vs reality.) They can barely predict the weather 3 days from now and you blindly trust their models of 100 years from now when they have been consistently wrong for the last 15 years? Sorry, no thanks. (strike three)
You can educate yourself or continue in self righteous PC ignorance, up to you. As you can see here, though, you are hardly batting 1000...
And this, ladies and gentlemen is what a parade of mismanagement looks like. Corporate raider CEO after corporate raider CEO trying to pump up short term valuation at the expense of long term viability.
I have said it before, I will say it again. Every executive level and board member should be required by law to receive all compensation above 10x median employee salary as stock options that start to mature in 5 years and mature 20% per year. Thus, if they get $10M per year pay, something like $9.4M is tied up for 5 years and they don't get 100% out of their first years pay until the 10th year. Force these slash and burn CEOs who are only looking to line their pockets to ensure long term corporate viability.
"Not the hottest we have seen in the tiny span of time we have been keeping records compared to geologic and astronomical time frames."
I know it's not as good of click bait, but honestly, this is a non story. Call me when it is 5C hotter globally and I might actually care (or I might not, honestly warmer temperatures have been historically good for life in general and humans in particular).
This exactly. In other news, incompetent third world military is incompetent. They get advanced imaging FLIR hardware and have zero clue of the thermodynamics behind it or what things look like in IR, see commercial flight from nearby airport and think it is UFO... Not shocking at all, the only shocking thing is how desperate Slashdot is for some fake news clickbait.
I have been using FLIR cameras for almost 20 years now, and unless you understand the principles behind what is going on, some everyday things can look pretty bizarre (like the candles having a much larger corona in IR than in visible light.) If you give a FLIR to a bunch of high school graduates fresh out of whatever counts for training in south America and tell them that it can see things you normally can't without getting into the details, mis-identifications like this are very likely, I'm just glad they were too far away to try to shoot down their "UFO"...
If it is really that bad, leave.
However, if you want to stay, first and foremost, put the effort into where you have control: yourself. You need to take a long hard look in the mirror. Look at your work history over the last 5 years. How has it been? Talk to other colleagues you have worked with (besides the person you have an issue with). Ask them for one thing that you could improve. If they all say you should schedule fewer meetings, your "gaslighter" may simply be done putting up with your excessive meetings and is sending you a direct message (did s/he ever mention this to you before). I try to ask my manager every 4 months what I could do better (I actually have a reminder on my calendar). It follows that you must take the advice you get to heart and really work on the area your manager suggests as well. You would be amazed at how this raises your credibility with management and at the same time can often give you avenues for improvement that you had not considered before.
I have worked in engineering for many years now, and I NEVER leave files I need on common/shared or any networked locations accessible to others unless there is strict version control/tracking/rollback in effect. Working in a team environment it is just too easy for someone else to delete a file or overwrite it on accident with no malice at all, just in the course of doing work. I always keep my files on my local machine and back up to a USB drive every few days and then put copies on the network drive (I don't care how many times management asks for me to work out of network locations, it is stupid and I don't do it). This resolves your changed/deleted files issue.
Next, I tend to take notes during or after meetings formal or informal and email them out to the team immediately after with a header something along the lines of "to review my understanding of our last meeting/conversation etc." and then list off the key points as well as any action items and who is responsible for them. This is an effective way of mitigating people who have selective amnesia later on, and would resolve that issue that you have with this co worker.
I do most of this as a matter of course because of various people over the years who have exhibited one type of behavior or another, but at the end of the day, doing this makes you a better, more valuable employee and I can almost guarantee that one of two things will happen, either you will realize that it was you creating the problems all along and you will become better at doing your job, or the gaslighter employee will be thwarted and forced to do his own work and his rockstar reputation will be diminished as contradictions start to come to light. This won't solve all of your problems, but it will go a long ways.
Fire his ass and get a leader with vision. The iPhone is slumped because there is nothing to drive sales. NO ONE WANTS A THIN PHONE if it means poor battery life and a weak frame that can bend during normal use. Give me more features like an IR camera, night vision camera, an internal LED projector, plug in keyboard and screen for desktop functionality, stereoscopic cameras for 3D pictures, a waterproof design, a much tougher screen (this is not even that hard, you basically just make your screen plastic with a top replaceable layer. When the layer gets scratched, you replace it. The plastic screen will not shatter, and the top layer protects the main screen from scratches.)
There is still a lot of potential for smart phones; Apple used to be innovating, now they are coasting on their trendy consumer base, but that will push them back to a 5% market share.
Invid, I was never hoping that they would change the original, just release a Minecraft 2, like every other hit game out there that has 5 sequels now.
I was like you for maybe 4 years, but the last time I played, I had all my goodies down in a mine and popped a rock and water flooded in pushing me into a 2 block tall corner with lava under it. I couldn't jump out and died and all my gear and items burned up. The whole perma-death thing with hours of items and gear is not really my idea of relaxing.
Older people do cause fatal accidents as well, but look at my post above. The stats on young drivers are 4x higher than the older crowd. The argument against a universal lock is you could also be in a train, bus or could be a passenger. The point is at some age, we trust the user is mature enough to only use it in a safe situation and not when they are the driver. They also know that distracted driving is illegal yes, but it is a scientifically proven fact that most young people suffer from invincibility syndrome where they think that it will never happen to them. The older you get the more people you know die from this or that, and reality sets in (trust me, it will happen) and you become much more aware of risks and risk averse.
When a small group of people (i.e. drunk drivers, text drivers, facetime drivers etc.) choose to put the entire population at risk because they are either too stupid or careless or sociopathic to make the right choice that the other 99% of us make every day, then the government must step in and pass laws to punish them and make it as difficult as possible to engage in those behaviors that put us all at risk.
That is one of the most basic functions of government, to protect the people from threats, both foreign and domestic.
So you are going to conflate unavoidable risk of a stroke or other medical event with a completely avoidable risk of some 20 year old jackass facetiming while driving? You may want to take that logical thinking expansion course at your local community college.
With parental consent and supervision you can consume alcohol at any age in the US (what do you think is in most cold medicine anyway)? The alcohol problem in the US is due to the lack of parents educating their children on proper and safe use of alcohol. Instead the 18-24 (gee what a coincidence) group learn to go to parties and get hammered out of their gourds. Who do they learn this from? Others of the same age with similarly poor judgement and risk assessment skills. What is the consequence? Over 30% of all accident deaths involved a drunk driver in 2010.
We routinely restrict young peoples privileges because we know that they are young, inexperienced and generally stupid at assessing risk. We know because we were once young as well. This has as much to do with ageism as preventing children from accessing firearms. Traffic accident is one of the leading causes of death of the 18-25 demographic. We already prohibit under 21 from drinking, and 16 year olds get a driving permit which limits their driving privileges instead of a full license. I am suggesting that from 16-24 drivers get a provisional license or some such which requires that they have a phone feature installed that locks all features other than hands free calling when the phone is moving more than 10MPH.
Here are some facts to chew on:
- 11 teens die every day as a result of texting while driving.
- According to a AAA poll, 94% of teen drivers acknowledge the dangers of texting and driving, but 35% admitted to doing it anyway. *huge flag that there is poor judgement in this age group*
- 21% of teen drivers involved in fatal accidents were distracted by their cell phones.
- Teen drivers are 4x more likely than adults to get into car crashes or near-crashes when talking or texting on a cell phone.
https://www.edgarsnyder.com/ca...
The issue I am concerned with is judgement. With teen drivers being 4x more likely to crash or almost crash with the cell phone than adults, that kind of blows your argument to shreds that there is not a judgement problem. Rational people know by now that texting/messing with your phone and driving is not safe. Children by definition are not rational.
I am also fine with a universal popup on all phones if moving more than 10MPH that warns that using the phone while driving other than hands free calling is a criminal offense punishable by jail time or heavy fine with an option to either use the phone or silence all incoming texts/calls etc until the vehicle parks.
Lets see how many "tolerant" progressives show how enlightened they are by down modding as Troll and then AC posting a very unpersuasive F-U to my post because they "feel" so strongly that they must be right. Just remember that ad homonym is the last bastion of a dying argument.
The entire CO2/anthropogenic global warming argument is a canard, and is only believed by the climate "scientists" whose jobs/grants depend on it and those without a degree in hard physical science or those who just believe whatever their told. The "all scientists believe global warming" bullshit came from a cherry picked poll with no scientific methodology and therefore no accuracy and they are following the Nazi path that a lie told long enough and loud enough will be believed. Truth is many climate scientists do not agree with global warming; I can point to dozens, and that is not an exhaustive list by any means, those are just people willing to be abused in the name of truth by the fascist global warming nuts. The rest of us would like to keep our day jobs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The reality is that plant growth on land/in oceans is limited by atmospheric/free CO2. Right now environuts are running around with their hair on fire because they say CO2 is at 400 PPM (parts per million) or 0.04%, which in and of its self is debatable (cities and power plants among others create localized plumes of elevated CO2, if your monitoring is anywhere near a plume, then you are measuring the plume instead of true ambient levels).
Here are a few facts: Every fossil fuel that is burned today was once living matter, either plant or animal (undisputed fact). Thus it was once part of the natural CO2 planetary cycle and at a time when life was flourishing. But somehow, re-adding that carbon to the planetary system after being trapped in coal or oil or natural gas deposits will throw the world out of balance and make the world too hot to be habitable? Completely irrational on the face of it.
More facts: The oceans contain 37.4T tons of suspended carbon, land biomass has 2000-3000B tons. The atmosphere contains 720B tons of CO2 and humans contribute only 6B tons additional load on this balance. The oceans, land and atmosphere exchange CO2 continuously so the additional load by humans is ~0.0146% of the overall global exchange. A 1% change in the balance between oceans and air would cause a CO2 change 71 times larger than anything we could produce. Anyone who thinks that natural interchanges like this don't vary over time by more than 0.015% is an idiot and no student of history. We know for a fact that the planet has been both much hotter and much cooler than current day.
http://www.climate4you.com/ima...
https://noconsensus.wordpress....
I bought Minecraft in early Alpha mid 2010, and I have played and enjoyed it for a number of years. However, I was really hoping with the MS purchase that they would do a 2.0 since the graphics and 1M cube block resolution with 8 bit quality textures makes my eyes hurt these days (I like pretty things).
As MS milks Minecraft for every penny it's worth, I have moved on to a new game to satisfy my creative adventuring with more complexity and far prettier graphics, Empyrion. It is an Indy still in Alpha (5.0), but has a lot of potential and is a cross between Minecraft and what No Mans Sky should have been. (this is just my own personal opinion, but if you like Minecraft or the idea of No Mans Sky, you should check it out.)
http://store.steampowered.com/...
This is equivalent to the facilities guy at work installing new doors with no locks and then a thief putting locks on all the doors with a note to pay him $200 to get the keys to the new locks; it is almost a public service in this case. Heads should roll for this stupidity, though most at the executive level have such a poor understanding of good security practices who knows.
Don't plug in the Ethernet cable/give it your WiFi password. Smart TV becomes dumb again.
This exactly, and until the DMCA gets gutted, the consumer will continue to get screwed over. The DMCA won't get fixed until people stop with the us vs them trap and demand that politicians represent the interests of the voters instead of the interests of the lobbyists.
I couldn't find the original journal article, but this WSJ article lays it out pretty clearly. The tests they use are from the 1960s and among other things, not checking for higher brain function with an EEG is a real problem for me.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB...
An excerpt: " In a 1999 article in the peer-reviewed journal Anesthesiology, Gail A. Van Norman, a professor of anesthesiology at the University of Washington, reported a case in which a 30-year-old patient with severe head trauma began breathing spontaneously after being declared brain dead. The physicians said that, because there was no chance of recovery, he could still be considered dead. The harvest proceeded over the objections of the anesthesiologist, who saw the donor move, and then react to the scalpel with hypertension."
Those of you looking to avoid pain may not like it if you can feel yourself being slowly dissected...
Don't know what you are talking about. It is extremely simple and I think even built in to the GPS be able to detect the speed of the phone within a few MPH (dx/dt). Detecting if the driver is using face time as opposed to a passenger is almost impossible for GPS alone, but yeah, it is felony stupid to text/facetime/play with your phone while driving. There should be a federal law that locks all features on a phone except hands free calls for drivers 16-24 years of age, considering it is consistently that "invincible" demographic that is killing people while driving and messing with the phone.
AC posts obnoxious ad homonym from a dark corner of his mothers basement. Another victory for AC posters everywhere!
The US has the top health care system in the world, we have developed over 80% of all drugs (when you account for where the actual research is done), we develop a vast majority of all medical procedures and equipment. These advances for all humanity are then disseminated around the world, and it is all done for profit.
If you think our health care is so terrible, please, by all means, go to Cuba for your next medical treatment. Unless you are politically connected, expect to get a communist brand bandage/aspirin and sent on your way. The reality is that health care takes massive time and effort. You can either let economics decide who gets care (with the addition of the law that no one gets turned away at the ER, and the Hippocratic oath thrown in the mix) or you can let a bureaucrat who is looking to better his political outlook by making friends and influencing people (what you get in Cuba).
Taking it out of the theoretical, on a personal level, I know two people who have had just under $1M of health care costs. One had insurance that paid for everything, the other had essentially no money and their insurance ran out, so the pharmaceutical donated the meds to them free and the doctor donated his time. They both got world class care, in spite of your concern about the profit motive.