It's not quite the same result. If the manufacturer is resposible, then consumers of computers bear the cost. In the current system, everyone bears the cost whether they're buying computer equipment or not.
Income tax was very, very popular with the public when it passed. Otherwise ammending the constitution would never have happened. They perceived, correctly, that existing tax methods (like sales tax) were regressive, in the sense that they had more impact on the poor than on the rich.
Big government, in fact, has very, very little to do with how tax is collected -- money is money, when it's spent. Every industrialized country uses some combination of income tax, sales tax, and so-forth.
> so you actually believe they are going to ouright suspend the constitution
They ALREADY HAVE suspended large portions of it, in the Patriot Act, and the Fatherland Security Act, which is why people are outraged.
Re:Economic incentives do work...
on
Solar Power Play
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
> Supporting preliminary research is not a damn good reason; it's a pretty damn poor one.
How else is preliminary research funded? Practically every new technology of the last century, from the food you eat to the computers you use, has been developed with public funding. Very few private organizations have enough of a cash buffer to fund these developments that have clear long-term economic advantages.
Re:Step in the right direction, but...
on
Solar Power Play
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I disagree, for two reasons. First, as everyone does, you're only looking at the supply side. In fact, we waste astronomical amounts of power, and talking about any energy source is rather silly before fixing our technology on the demand side.
Second, cheap PV would be financially attractive to the home owner. You don't need dedicated land except for high density housing and industrial demands. The main blocking issue for roof-top PV is not efficiency, but cost. We can get about 15% efficiency, but only at great cost. Very cheap, very low efficiency PV is currently running around 1% efficient. Some claim you need about 5% to be viable. I think this is high, at least for some markets. 3% could power a California home (mild climate) if demand-side leaks have been fixed.
It seems likely that the low-end designs will improve efficiency before the high-efficiency designs can bring their manufacturing costs down significantly.
Re:Send the Sales VP to California!
on
Solar Power Play
·
· Score: 2
>After all, the energy being converted to electricity comes from somewhere -- and while the effect of coverting matter such as oil or uranium to energy is necessarily quite local, the effect of taking that energy out of the environment is less clear...
Taking it out of the environment? What do you mean? It all ends up as heat. Installed on roof-tops I can't think of any change this would cause, except decreasing regional over-heating caused by asphalt roofs. Installed in a desert, I expect the impact would be even smaller.
Also keep in mind that these devices aren't terribly efficient (and don't need to be -- they just need to be cheap), so most of it's going directly to heat, anyway, just like it did before.
> Remember that Bill Clinton -- the gift of god to Democrats
*cough* *cough* *cough* What?
Don't confuse rabid Clinton hating by Republicans with approval by Democrats. The fact that we don't hallucinate murders or hold him responsible for the criminal actions of conservative corporate CEO's -- as Republicans have -- doesn't mean we actually like him much.
Or at least how right-wing kooks want you to believe it is.
You're overlooking two things. First, solar thermal. Most of our power demands are for thermal applications, which are cheap and easy to do with solar. Photovoltaics get all the press because they're "sexy", even though they don't collect much power.
Second, demand. It's very, very easy to lower demand without changing lifestyle, because we currently waste enormous amounts of energy. California demonstrated that during the last manufactured energy crisis. Basically, if *any* effort is made to lower energy use, demand drops dramatically. In particular, it's easier, cheaper, and affects our lifestyle less to lower demand, rather than pouring more money into centralized power generation so we can turn around and waste it again.
It wasn't and isn't taught in the public schools, or by the "liberal" media. This subject has been surveyed numerous times, and the result is always the same: public school teachers barely touch the subject because they'd lose their jobs if they did. American students on the whole don't know the theory, and those that do have learned it by researching it for themselves. In a typical public school classroom evolution might be mentioned a time or two with none of the details spell out, and none of the evidence presented.
Your own post demonstrates this: "Someone PLEASE point me to some genuine, hard proof that evolution is reality because I assure you that I have never seen any".
There are endless books on the subject, and evidence that spans nearly every scientific discipline.
In case anyone actually believes this load of spoodge, I highly recommend researching it yourself. There's hardly a single true statement in the entire post.
If you eat simple carbs all the time, you're going to be eating too many calories, anyway. This is not revolutionary news, or in any way out of line with standard dietary recommendations of the last half century.
And if eating more fat was effective at making people eat less, why are people eating MORE fat and also MORE of everything else? Eating more fat hasn't had the effect you claim.
Low-carb zealots who are losing weight are doing it because they're eating fewer calories and more vegetables. This isn't news.
> Everyone has been pushing this anti-fat nonsense, yet Americans are getting fatter and fatter, heart disease is on the up as is diabetes, and millions of Americans find that they can't control their cholesterol no matter how hard they try - and now they are on dangerous liver-killing drugs to try.
This is bullshit. Americans are getting fatter because they're EATING MORE FAT, as well as eating more of everything else. The only fat statistic that's gone DOWN is the percentage of fat Americans are eating at part of their complete diet. But the absolute amount of fat they're consuming has gone up, because they are eating more of everything.
One glaring problem with this, and the answer in the interview: oven thermometers are notoriously inaccurate. Being off by 10 or 15F is very, very common. Telling his viewers to use 140F seems pretty irresponsible. He probably has accurate equipment, but hardly any home cook does.
This is probably why the goverment recommends a higher temperature: you have to make recommedations based on the equipment people actually use, rather than what is technically possible in a lab.
Re:Why _do_ people buy Ximian?
on
Inside Ximian
·
· Score: 2
I've had it happen on redhat 6.2 through 7.1, dozens of times. In some cases I was able to track down what the problem was. For a long time it mishandled disk space, always assuming it had more when and where it wanted, and would segfault when this failed. For a long time it would always segfault on SMP systems for reasons I wasn't able to determine.
Segfaults are annoying, but they wouldn't bother quite so much if they didn't always happen while transacting rpms, because that really shits things.
Just ran the latest version a couple days ago on a 6.2 system, and once again it segfaulted.
Then there are the endless other bugs: broken mirror support (i.e. doesn't connect where it says it's connecting), broken mirrors (craps out when the mirror doesn't have a file that should be there), mishandling of dependencies, etc. etc.
In my six or so years with linux, Red Carpet is hands-down the least reliable program I've ever used.
Re:Why _do_ people buy Ximian?
on
Inside Ximian
·
· Score: 0, Flamebait
On the other hand, Red Carpet remains the quickest way to destroy a perfectly functioning Linux box.
How old is this program, now? And the latest versions still segfault in the middle of rpm transactions, leaving the system unusable. I've lost track of how many times I've seen this happen.
Having nicely polished gnome packages is good, and all, but with an installer that routinely eats the rpm database, it's not really worth it. Amusingly, after it does this, the installer is no longer able to install or remove anything because dependency checks always fail.
It's good to see someone looking at the demand side. Once you do, it's obvious that our only problem is demand -- not supply.
There were scads of common devices in my house that were wasting virtually all of the power they consumed (90% or more) -- computers, inkjet printer, scanner, ethernet and usb hubs, monitors, instant hot-water (under-the-sink tank style), microwave, laptop, cordless phones, cordless mixer, etc. etc.
In all these cases the "off" or "idle" states burned significant amounts of power ALL DAY LONG. When you multiply the load by 24 hrs, suddenly "small" loads become not-so-small as a percentage of your total usage.
Things with rechargable batteries (cordless appliances) were particularly bad. The charging circuits have not been well designed, so they leak A LOT of power after the battery is charged. They leak even more when the battery gets a bit old, because they don't hold charge well any more, and the charging circuit doesn't have any mechanism for figuring this out.
The laptop had a battery that would only hold charge for 10 or 15 minutes, so it was plugged in all the time. Turns out being plugged in and "off", it was drawing HUGE amounts of power trying to charge the fried battery. Solution was to remove the battery.
I've done the same measurements with a digital watt-hour meter, with similar results. It's not unusual for an American appliance to be wasting over 90% of the energy it consumes (high "off" state leakage that runs 24 hours a day compared to the few hours a week that the device is in use).
> This is one of the most intelligent, enlightened defenses of faith that I have ever seen.
Really? I couldn't find any concrete statement in the entire thing -- a rambling, meaningless reply that said nothing beyond "I believe because I want to". He dismissively claims there's evidence if you look -- the most substantive thing he says -- but he brushes by it as though it weren't that important, probably because it's patently false.
From this reply it appears his belief is, as usual, based on nothing more than his desire for it to be true.
Evolution is a theory in the same manner as the "theory of gravity", and "copernican theory", and "atomic theory", which is to say by every standard of science evolution is a fact.
"Radio" means receiving radio waves. This is obvious. No one said it discovered a stereo dolby demodulator. They said it discovered radio. You may find this trivial, but it's only trivial in hindsight. Radio was astonishing when it was discovered, and it's interesting to see a genetic algorithm without information about radio stumble across it as a solution.
Trying to redefine "radio" to be limited to the norms of consumer electronics is absurd.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not quite the same result. If the manufacturer is resposible, then consumers of computers bear the cost. In the current system, everyone bears the cost whether they're buying computer equipment or not.
Income tax was very, very popular with the public when it passed. Otherwise ammending the constitution would never have happened. They perceived, correctly, that existing tax methods (like sales tax) were regressive, in the sense that they had more impact on the poor than on the rich.
Big government, in fact, has very, very little to do with how tax is collected -- money is money, when it's spent. Every industrialized country uses some combination of income tax, sales tax, and so-forth.
yeah, but so did everyone else.
> so you actually believe they are going to ouright suspend the constitution
They ALREADY HAVE suspended large portions of it, in the Patriot Act, and the Fatherland Security Act, which is why people are outraged.
> Supporting preliminary research is not a damn good reason; it's a pretty damn poor one.
How else is preliminary research funded? Practically every new technology of the last century, from the food you eat to the computers you use, has been developed with public funding. Very few private organizations have enough of a cash buffer to fund these developments that have clear long-term economic advantages.
I disagree, for two reasons. First, as everyone does, you're only looking at the supply side. In fact, we waste astronomical amounts of power, and talking about any energy source is rather silly before fixing our technology on the demand side.
Second, cheap PV would be financially attractive to the home owner. You don't need dedicated land except for high density housing and industrial demands. The main blocking issue for roof-top PV is not efficiency, but cost. We can get about 15% efficiency, but only at great cost. Very cheap, very low efficiency PV is currently running around 1% efficient. Some claim you need about 5% to be viable. I think this is high, at least for some markets. 3% could power a California home (mild climate) if demand-side leaks have been fixed.
It seems likely that the low-end designs will improve efficiency before the high-efficiency designs can bring their manufacturing costs down significantly.
>After all, the energy being converted to electricity comes from somewhere -- and while the effect of coverting matter such as oil or uranium to energy is necessarily quite local, the effect of taking that energy out of the environment is less clear...
Taking it out of the environment? What do you mean? It all ends up as heat. Installed on roof-tops I can't think of any change this would cause, except decreasing regional over-heating caused by asphalt roofs. Installed in a desert, I expect the impact would be even smaller.
Also keep in mind that these devices aren't terribly efficient (and don't need to be -- they just need to be cheap), so most of it's going directly to heat, anyway, just like it did before.
xoscope -- for a totally cheap solution (uses audio-in on your soundboard).
bitscope -- a more serious microcontroller-on-the-serial-port solution.
you can find them from google.
> Remember that Bill Clinton -- the gift of god to Democrats
*cough* *cough* *cough*
What?
Don't confuse rabid Clinton hating by Republicans with approval by Democrats. The fact that we don't hallucinate murders or hold him responsible for the criminal actions of conservative corporate CEO's -- as Republicans have -- doesn't mean we actually like him much.
Seen at the Seventh Sense Fashion Show in Santa Cruz last year:
http://www.sosaywe.com/cdgirls.htm
> Many people have done the math on social security
And you apparently haven't read any of them.
> but at least I will tell it like it is
Or at least how right-wing kooks want you to believe it is.
You're overlooking two things. First, solar thermal. Most of our power demands are for thermal applications, which are cheap and easy to do with solar. Photovoltaics get all the press because they're "sexy", even though they don't collect much power.
Second, demand. It's very, very easy to lower demand without changing lifestyle, because we currently waste enormous amounts of energy. California demonstrated that during the last manufactured energy crisis. Basically, if *any* effort is made to lower energy use, demand drops dramatically. In particular, it's easier, cheaper, and affects our lifestyle less to lower demand, rather than pouring more money into centralized power generation so we can turn around and waste it again.
It wasn't and isn't taught in the public schools, or by the "liberal" media. This subject has been surveyed numerous times, and the result is always the same: public school teachers barely touch the subject because they'd lose their jobs if they did. American students on the whole don't know the theory, and those that do have learned it by researching it for themselves. In a typical public school classroom evolution might be mentioned a time or two with none of the details spell out, and none of the evidence presented.
Your own post demonstrates this: "Someone PLEASE point me to some genuine, hard proof that evolution is reality because I assure you that I have never seen any".
There are endless books on the subject, and evidence that spans nearly every scientific discipline.
> The majority of the Slashdot community includes people who are able to think objectively and logically
+5 funny
In case anyone actually believes this load of spoodge, I highly recommend researching it yourself. There's hardly a single true statement in the entire post.
If you eat simple carbs all the time, you're going to be eating too many calories, anyway. This is not revolutionary news, or in any way out of line with standard dietary recommendations of the last half century.
And if eating more fat was effective at making people eat less, why are people eating MORE fat and also MORE of everything else? Eating more fat hasn't had the effect you claim.
Low-carb zealots who are losing weight are doing it because they're eating fewer calories and more vegetables. This isn't news.
> Everyone has been pushing this anti-fat nonsense, yet Americans are getting fatter and fatter, heart disease is on the up as is diabetes, and millions of Americans find that they can't control their cholesterol no matter how hard they try - and now they are on dangerous liver-killing drugs to try.
This is bullshit. Americans are getting fatter because they're EATING MORE FAT, as well as eating more of everything else. The only fat statistic that's gone DOWN is the percentage of fat Americans are eating at part of their complete diet. But the absolute amount of fat they're consuming has gone up, because they are eating more of everything.
One glaring problem with this, and the answer in the interview: oven thermometers are notoriously inaccurate. Being off by 10 or 15F is very, very common. Telling his viewers to use 140F seems pretty irresponsible. He probably has accurate equipment, but hardly any home cook does.
This is probably why the goverment recommends a higher temperature: you have to make recommedations based on the equipment people actually use, rather than what is technically possible in a lab.
I've had it happen on redhat 6.2 through 7.1, dozens of times. In some cases I was able to track down what the problem was. For a long time it mishandled disk space, always assuming it had more when and where it wanted, and would segfault when this failed. For a long time it would always segfault on SMP systems for reasons I wasn't able to determine.
Segfaults are annoying, but they wouldn't bother quite so much if they didn't always happen while transacting rpms, because that really shits things.
Just ran the latest version a couple days ago on a 6.2 system, and once again it segfaulted.
Then there are the endless other bugs: broken mirror support (i.e. doesn't connect where it says it's connecting), broken mirrors (craps out when the mirror doesn't have a file that should be there), mishandling of dependencies, etc. etc.
In my six or so years with linux, Red Carpet is hands-down the least reliable program I've ever used.
On the other hand, Red Carpet remains the quickest way to destroy a perfectly functioning Linux box.
How old is this program, now? And the latest versions still segfault in the middle of rpm transactions, leaving the system unusable. I've lost track of how many times I've seen this happen.
Having nicely polished gnome packages is good, and all, but with an installer that routinely eats the rpm database, it's not really worth it. Amusingly, after it does this, the installer is no longer able to install or remove anything because dependency checks always fail.
It's good to see someone looking at the demand side. Once you do, it's obvious that our only problem is demand -- not supply.
There were scads of common devices in my house that were wasting virtually all of the power they consumed (90% or more) -- computers, inkjet printer, scanner, ethernet and usb hubs, monitors, instant hot-water (under-the-sink tank style), microwave, laptop, cordless phones, cordless mixer, etc. etc.
In all these cases the "off" or "idle" states burned significant amounts of power ALL DAY LONG. When you multiply the load by 24 hrs, suddenly "small" loads become not-so-small as a percentage of your total usage.
Things with rechargable batteries (cordless appliances) were particularly bad. The charging circuits have not been well designed, so they leak A LOT of power after the battery is charged. They leak even more when the battery gets a bit old, because they don't hold charge well any more, and the charging circuit doesn't have any mechanism for figuring this out.
The laptop had a battery that would only hold charge for 10 or 15 minutes, so it was plugged in all the time. Turns out being plugged in and "off", it was drawing HUGE amounts of power trying to charge the fried battery. Solution was to remove the battery.
I've done the same measurements with a digital watt-hour meter, with similar results. It's not unusual for an American appliance to be wasting over 90% of the energy it consumes (high "off" state leakage that runs 24 hours a day compared to the few hours a week that the device is in use).
> This is one of the most intelligent, enlightened defenses of faith that I have ever seen.
Really? I couldn't find any concrete statement in the entire thing -- a rambling, meaningless reply that said nothing beyond "I believe because I want to". He dismissively claims there's evidence if you look -- the most substantive thing he says -- but he brushes by it as though it weren't that important, probably because it's patently false.
From this reply it appears his belief is, as usual, based on nothing more than his desire for it to be true.
> To the best of my knowledge,
Well, there's the problem. Educate yourself.
Evolution is a theory in the same manner as the "theory of gravity", and "copernican theory", and "atomic theory", which is to say by every standard of science evolution is a fact.
"Radio" means receiving radio waves. This is obvious. No one said it discovered a stereo dolby demodulator. They said it discovered radio. You may find this trivial, but it's only trivial in hindsight. Radio was astonishing when it was discovered, and it's interesting to see a genetic algorithm without information about radio stumble across it as a solution.
Trying to redefine "radio" to be limited to the norms of consumer electronics is absurd.