Item ID is a 2 byte value in the game. So every item: 2 bytes + 2 Bytes for enchantment + 3 x 2 bytes for gems + 1 byte for reforge... let's say 2. 12 bytes per item total. Player's can have about 100 bag slots and 200 bank slots for a total of 300. so 300x12 = 3600 bytes/toon. 50 toons max... 180KBytes per account.
But yes. I agree. Let a player's storage hold more... even if 1 player takes up 1 Megabyte of storage then you can fit 1 million players on a single terabyte hard drive. If blizzard's hard up I'll personally provide them with the three modern drives they need to provide players with essentially unlimited storage.
Scale instances to the gear level. There is too much content already. I've been playing for three years and haven't seen half the raids. From WotLK I have completed Naxx and NONE of the other raids. My guild was too small to tackle content regularly. My guildies were great, helpful people who were excellent people. What? "find another guild" you say? Are you seriously indicating that something that is a *game* should motivate and encourage affiliation based on performance and not on friendship? I'd be happy to go back and spend time in older raids if they were challenging. Put together a group, figure out the average iLevel and then scale the damage and healing for the instances. Bam. All content becomes fresh.
Allow raid compositions of more/less than 10/25 players (and scale the instance). "One raid member can't make it tonight?" you're fucked. "Oh, you have one too many" Too bad, benched.
Allow players to create instances and content. If it is about providing enough challenging content to keep players interested (and it should be... I can't take another random Zul) then Blizzard needs to get over its love of canon/lore and simply release tools that allow players to create their own instances. Yeah, the story lines won't remain consistent but so what. Limit what can drop in the player instances and have a system for obtaining Blizzards approval. Then you would have more content, faster than any player could keep up with.
Get rid of the dependence on guild membership to tackle content. World of Warcraft is clearly designed by individuals with a juvenile high school mentality. guilds are just popularity cliques.You want to raid? You must have a guild to be successful in end-game content (which EVERYONE pays for but few people get to see in a timely fashion). If your guild falls apart, or is great people but too small, or you can't make the 80% attendance requirement, or your employment schedule shifts and takes you out of your scheduled night... you're screwed. no raiding for you unless you find a new guild. Make changes that de-emphsize guild membership as a requirement for experiencing game content. Provide power to the individual to choose content.
Forget about the damn chinese/gold/gear farmers. Drop the whole idea of raid locks. This is put in to prevent people from farming content and becoming geared "too quickly", whatever that means. SO FUCKING WHAT? I don't care if somebody else is getting a free ride. How does their success diminish my ability to play? Why punish me so that I can't honestly grind gear at my pace? If they're geared but they can't play I'll just avoid them. There's no rational reason concerning game play for lockouts. Yes. it prevents guilds/groups from farming gear for new players. But So what? Again another punishment for honest players. It could also be implemented better. Progression can be controlled through iLevel limits for instance entrances and also through content dependencies instead.
World of Walkcraft. Get rid of the damn corpse runs. No reason for them. At the very least when you die just cause the respawn at the instance entrance. Waiting/walking is not "fun". Nobody loves those zones were the graeyards are super far away. That run back really lets you relax and get in touch with yourself. Helps you contemplate your mistake and improve too.
Remove all the penalties for dying. Yes. I get the durability penalty. that makes sense as providing a major, reliable and continuous gold sink to maintain the stability of the economies. But rez sickness is stupid. more stupid is the "oh, you died again quickly? PENALTY BOX!" The disappointment of dying is enough of a punishment. Dying frequently is its own punishment. The time lost to rebuff, wait for mana, instant boss/mob reset is enough. Waiting for 2 minutes after Bloodlord Mandokir kills you is just stupid.
Random Raid Finder. Yes. I know this is coming but it's coming wrong. It will only allow grouping for lower level raids and not the current tier. Why? Stupid. Just another limit enforcing
How the hell does wikipedia not represent a work of creative genius while the great wall of china does? Building a wall like that doesn't take any genius; just a tremendous ego, piles of rock and a ton of disposable slaves. It also doesn't contribute a damn thing to the advancement or future of mankind. But it's big and you can touch it and people are impressed by big stupid things that they can understand.
Don't you get it??? It's not the government deciding here... it's popular vote. The votes are being cast by a number of constituents... including those who understand the benefits of science and those who believe in the benefits of welfare and social programs. Understanding this are you really surprised that NSF loses here?
How about we look at this again but eliminate several typical graphing mistakes....
First, let's have all axes start at zero, not at, say, 33% of the range. This would immediately
show that there is less disparity between average lifetime then the presenter attempts to make
you perceive.
second let's have a non-logarithm axes for a typical unit that is thought of as linear... money.
Third, if we are going to compare wealth then we should be comparing amount of money
held vs what it can buy, not just raw money per person. Sure people in the Congo have far less
dollars per person than Japan. But a loaf of bread and the supplies they want to buy are far, far
cheaper. In other words, it is possible for a smaller amount of currency from economy A to buy more
goods and services in economy B. You need to account for this in determining "wealth".
You can't just exchange currency rates to determine who is better off.
Lastly, You also have to dollar adjust for inflation even for specific countries over time. A typical
mid-range american car in 2010 costs around US$25000; in 1977... US$5000. So, yes we might
have more dollars per person in the US today but you're going to need 5 times as many dollars
as you had 33 years ago in order to just break even.
And, while we are at it. I would get rid of the enthusiastic and "compelling" presentation
acting. This is always a sign of attempting to market more than is really there. It is science
through how the presenter can make you "feel" and it leads to poor knee-jerk decisions.
Wait, hasn't emacs and unix's "man" pages been doing this forever? In emacs I can type ctrl-s and then a search term and all instances are highlighted. In man I can type/searchterm and all instances are highlighted.
And both of these existed LONG before 1999. How the hell did this get a patent?
When the hell are security "professionals" going to wake up and realize that secure access to something requires three items: identification, authentication and authorization. You CANNOT store the authentication credential with the identification. It is 100% stupid to store the pin on the identification device. Authentication credentials and authorization decisions must be kept by, and made by, the service provider. The only item that should be left with the consumer is an identification badge.
For instance, a national "ID Card" is actually a good thing IF the only thing it has stored on it or about it is the owners identification, i.e. name and unique ID number. The ONLY thing the card should provide is a way to contact a national database/server which requires two things, the unique, public ID number from the card and a fingerprint (which is NOT stored or printed on the card in any way). The ONLY information the server should return is "Yes" or "No". But see... the fingerprint cannot be stored on the card in way for the same reason that the pin in the post should never be stored on the card. If somebody other than the legitimate owner comes into possession of the card then he possesses both the identification AND the authentication pieces of the puzzle and can do whatever the legitimate owner was authorized to do.
Seriously, does anybody believe that jurors (possible the worst dregs of society) are capable of understanding the responsibilities of a judicial oath. Hell the judge should have awarded her extra credit for demonstrating the ability to use a computer for something other than a paperweight.
Please, for the love of facts and reason go look some up before blaming defense spending that brought citizens a multitude of technological innovations for their investment. Military spending (all of it) doesn't even make 54% of the budget. it's actually less than half of what you quoted for 2009. And MOST of that isn't to fund the two wars you speak of.
Though I will give you credit for correctly identifying the looming crisis that is the unfunded liabilities.
First: history has shown that Americans don't care for rail transportation. Otherwise Amtrak would actually make a profit. But instead Americans choose the efficiency of time, and take a plane, or the efficiency of their schedule and take their cars when and where they want.
Second, while high speed rail works well in Japan or Europe, do you have any idea how much bigger the United states? The single state of Alaska is bigger than all of Japan and Texas alone is over half its size. And if you haven't traveled across Texas or other large states such as Montana, Wyoming or Nebraska... THERE AIN'T NOTHING THERE. There's nothing worth while to stop a train at. So while Japan can count on the commerce and traffic from Osaka, Nagoya, Kyoto and Tokyo on a rail line... In the same distance in california from Los Angeles... Nothing. Maybe San Diego and almost to San Francisco. But quite frankly, there isn't enough inter-city commerce between these locations to support commuter rail service. This might work from Washington DC to New york city but even that's a stretch. The distances are so great it just makes it more valuable for the few who need to commute it to do so by air.
So yeah. 'nother super waste of tax payer dollars. You'd be better off just dividing the $8B and give 100,000 homeless people $80K each. But sure, we're $3 TRILLION in debt for just the last two years, why not go for broke... literally.
IT jobs suck. I've been a systems and network administrator. It really, really sucks. The job is an endless list of problems that everybody expects you to solve instantly. Nobody realizes that the number of pieces of technology that you mastered outnumbers their marketing/managing/accounting skills 10:1 and are more complex. You're viewed as nothing but a cost; nobody attributes any profit to you. They always think their technology ideas are better than yours. You get labeled as anti-social and unfriendly because you wind up living isolated at night fixing trouble calls that woke you up. "Oh, you know about computers... Can you take a look at mine?" is acceptable but "Oh, you know accounting... can you do my taxes for me this year?" is not.
So yeah. Women are proving they're smarter than men by avoiding all this anguish and lack of appreciation.
Easy. Stop carrying bulk mail. Raise envelope postal rates to $2 per message. I'll easily pay $50/year additional to
not get junk bulk mail.
But basically... they're screwed. We shouldn't be sending anything that can fit in an envelope anymore. Send it as a
PDF or email instead. Then you could simply restrict deliveries to individual recipients instead of long routes. Turn USPS
into UPS.
Hmmm. China outstripping the US in terms of advancement? you don't say. How could a country unburdened with civil rights or workplace safety laws, unbound by global health treaties or other economic regulations, willing to consume energy at an unlimited place possible be outstripping a country paralyzed by an abundance of laws, regulation, politics and bureaucracy??
Face it were doomed. The president and congress have no desire to trim down all that crap. And yet, we keep voting their type into power. Face it, it is not the president that Bill Gates & Friends should be talking to about this problem... it's the American people that need this education.
Need I say more? We reasonably reject your ideas but your counter-argument is we're "wackos". I also like that you stacked a heavily flawed recent theory in the same category as a much more solidly proven theory. I can't believe in the one without believing in the other? Otherwise, I'm a wacko. Nice.
If we could only learn about other cultures, we wouldn't want to go to war.
What??? You seriously believe this?? We live in an age of communication. Where any
information can be learned from any point on the globe. We know where every culture is
and what political decisions they made that morning. And yet... war... everywhere you
look. Intolerance and strife between cultures abounds unchecked.
"learning about other cultures" does jack-squat to prevent wars. Wars are not the result
of culture ignorance.
I have said this for years! Imagine you've been on a very long cross-country drive. You come across a small town. What are your priorities? Get gas, Get food, go to the bathroom and dump your trash. A basic pit stop.
Well this is exactly the case with interstellar travel. It isn't easy! You're limited by the speed of light. To get from one system to the next takes a long time. And when they get here they're gonna do the same thing... To get "gas" they're gonna drain of the sun of all its hydrogen. Food... Us. All of it. All the plants, all the animals all the humans... It's a very, very long trip to the next system; gonna need more than a snack to tie them over. The only thing they're gonna leave behind is their trash.
We do not want to meet an alien race because all it is going to mean to them is a pit stop.
Some insight here... The rules I explained is for the passing of measures and motions. Not for the election of representatives. Motions and measures can only be passed or defeated. Either in favor of against. Only two choices. In these cases majority and 2/3 are well defined and useful.
What you complain of is the problems associated with plurality voting systems such as used to elect representatives in the United States. The voting population typically misunderstands and believes that their votes are governed by (or should be by) a majority. However, the reality is that the bylaws of these bodies have adopted policies by which a vote is won by plurality; not majority. Thus it is valid for Texas (or anywhere else in the US) to be governed by somebody who failed to attract the majority of votes.
2/3 votes are defined as passing if the number of votes in favor is greater than or equal to twice the number of votes against. Period. No need to dick around with fractions at all. Take the number votes against and double it. Is that greater than the number of votes in favor? Yes. it is defeated. No. It passes. So double 70... 140. That is greater than 136. So defeated. In the original vote however... 64 against doubled is 128 which is less than 139 and so it passes. I'm not certain why they needed a recount at all?
Other things that people screw up: It is the count of votes in favor and against that matter. It has nothing to do with the number of representatives. So the fact that at least three members didn't vote the first time doesn't matter. Also, there is never a need to call for or count "those abstaining." The fact that they did not vote in favor of or for against implies abstention. Abstention votes have no bearing on a motion. Lastly, as long as a quorum is reached (minimum number of representatives present is met) then it doesn't matter how many vote... You could have a quorum of 150 people and if only two vote in favor and 1 votes against while the remaining 147 have decided not to vote or have fallen asleep... the motion passes.
This damn topic comes up all the time... Faster driving equals {more deaths, higher fuel consumption, etc}. And it's crap. Let's see... Even if given our current conditions deaths were reduced by slower average speeds the proposition of the article would not necessarily save lives.
Fine, build tighter setbacks... That means bringing the buildings closer to the road. This would lead to people living, playing and existing closer to the road. This means people stepping off their front porch and WHAM! Basically, were is the study that shows that bringing the buildings closer doesn't increase deaths more than is decreased by the reduction of velocity?
Do you REALLY want to decrease traffic fatalities? Fine.. Kill drunk drivers. No you don't get a second chance. Next, require driver road tests for licensing... EVERY year. Not just a "sign here on the dotted line"... but a god-damn TEST! Do it in a simulator. Simulate stalling an engine. Simulate a blown tire. Simulate a skid on ice. Simulate a 5 yr old jumping in front of you. Measure reaction times. Basically do for drivers what airline pilots have to go through. You don't have to handle everything 100% but you do need to achieve some sort of success to pass. No this is not insane. Pilots have to do it and the probability of them harming someone is far less than the operator of a motor vehicle. Thus we should actually require more of a motor vehicle operator. This would either weed out EVERYONE who is a poor driver or force them to educate and train themselves well enough to be acceptable drivers.
Yes, it is partially a function of government vs private.
There is no reward, profit or other motivation to cause a government to be efficient. In fact, the opposite is true. A government which fails to be efficient is rewarded with an increase in size in order to cope with its assigned workload. Being wasteful is rewarded by being able to tax/collect/acquire more resources.
Private sector on the other hand is required by definition to be self-sufficient. They cannot acquire more resources without paying for it. They must trade one resource for another. In order to grow they must add value to the resources they already have (which can be argued a trade of effort, time or creativity) or become more efficient with what they already have.
Thus, it IS a function of government vs private. Your example of multinationals or large companies only serves to show that some private operations also fail to be efficient. If they were government entities then they would prove to be even less efficient.
And this theory is utter crap. An error rate of 1:10,000 (yes, that's the rate given about 200 complaints in 2M cars) is way too high to be caused by random electromagnetic interference. When was the last time you saw your processor kick out a wrong bit? Yes, it could be happening but not by EMF. But let us assume EMF is changing bits... The entire automotive industry uses CAN bus for inter-process communication and CAN bus has CRC built into it's frames. In fact it has a Hamming distance of 6 and so can detect up to 5 erroneous bits in a packet. So the chances of acting upon "corrupt data" is rediculously low. Much, much lower than 1:10,000. If they don't use CAN in this particular instance then are certainly using a similar protocol and they ALL have CRC capabilities.
This problem is a simple "software making the wrong decision" problem. It's a software bug. period.
Yes, I think people are idiots. lots of accidents are cause by poorly maintained floormats, doing your lipstick, texting, etc. This isn't the problem here. There are way too many incidents of various natures to be accounted for by this.
Yes, I think electromagnetic radiation exists. Yes, it can produce measurable effects. This, is also, not the problem here. EMF does not cause motors to turn with any appreciable torque. Modern electronics are sufficiently robust to this type of sporadic interference to account for this.
The problem here is in the code. I have written embedded software. It is WAAAY too easy to make a subtle mistake in an embedded environment that has limited processing power, highly asynchronous processing and a multitude of cooperating software and hardware modules. Further more, it can be a total bitch to debug these environments and the faults that they can exhibit can be nearly impossible to reproduce. And in EVERY case where I've seen "Hey, it shouldn't do that. The code doesn't have it doing that!" it turns that yes, it was doing exactly what the code had it do under those circumstances. So, Want to save time and money? Ignore looking at anything other than code. Analyze the hell out of the software and you will find the culprit lurking there. You can put me on record for predicting this. (if they even 'fess up to the cause once found.)
"All men are created equal" is bullshit, and you know it. Some people ARE superior to others. Name whatever metric you wish but you will find success and failure. Don't believe me? Then what is the point of dating? Why not just marry the first person you meet after age 18? (Answer: because I'm correct.)
So where is the law of nature that prohibits the superior from living while the inferior die off? Oh, wait... that's right, in fact the opposite rule exists.
I fucking hate this crippled socialist thinking that says if everybody can't have something then nobody gets it. Utter crap.
This is totally true! Alfred Kinsey used it to great affect in his landmark survey on sexual practices. When he interviewed a person he didn't ask "Have you ever kissed somebody of the same sex?" which is a straightforward clinical question to figure out how many people have had a homosexual kiss. Instead he asked "How old were you when you first kissed somebody of the same sex?"
The difference is huge. The first can be considered accusatory, similar to "Have you ever robbed a gas station?". Whether the person has ever done this or not doesn't matter; they want to avoid being blamed as it seems the question is trying to uncover a secret. But the second approach starts with a question that assumes that everybody does it; that the "secret" is in fact well known. In other words... "How old were you when you robbed your first store?" has two benefits A) it presents the person with a question that assumes that he has already done it. So there is less benefit to lying. B) it implies that everybody does it at some age and therefore it is an acceptable behavior. Including the interviewer, thus answering truthfully appears to gain you allies or a supportive group.
Slashdot Mirror
Item ID is a 2 byte value in the game. So every item: 2 bytes + 2 Bytes for enchantment + 3 x 2 bytes for gems + 1 byte for reforge... let's say 2. 12 bytes per item total. Player's can have about 100 bag slots and 200 bank slots for a total of 300. so 300x12 = 3600 bytes/toon. 50 toons max... 180KBytes per account.
But yes. I agree. Let a player's storage hold more... even if 1 player takes up 1 Megabyte of storage then you can fit 1 million players on a single terabyte hard drive. If blizzard's hard up I'll personally provide them with the three modern drives they need to provide players with essentially unlimited storage.
Scale instances to the gear level. There is too much content already. I've been playing for three years and haven't seen half the raids. From WotLK I have completed Naxx and NONE of the other raids. My guild was too small to tackle content regularly. My guildies were great, helpful people who were excellent people. What? "find another guild" you say? Are you seriously indicating that something that is a *game* should motivate and encourage affiliation based on performance and not on friendship? I'd be happy to go back and spend time in older raids if they were challenging. Put together a group, figure out the average iLevel and then scale the damage and healing for the instances. Bam. All content becomes fresh.
Allow raid compositions of more/less than 10/25 players (and scale the instance). "One raid member can't make it tonight?" you're fucked. "Oh, you have one too many" Too bad, benched.
Allow players to create instances and content. If it is about providing enough challenging content to keep players interested (and it should be... I can't take another random Zul) then Blizzard needs to get over its love of canon/lore and simply release tools that allow players to create their own instances. Yeah, the story lines won't remain consistent but so what. Limit what can drop in the player instances and have a system for obtaining Blizzards approval. Then you would have more content, faster than any player could keep up with.
Get rid of the dependence on guild membership to tackle content. World of Warcraft is clearly designed by individuals with a juvenile high school mentality. guilds are just popularity cliques.You want to raid? You must have a guild to be successful in end-game content (which EVERYONE pays for but few people get to see in a timely fashion). If your guild falls apart, or is great people but too small, or you can't make the 80% attendance requirement, or your employment schedule shifts and takes you out of your scheduled night... you're screwed. no raiding for you unless you find a new guild. Make changes that de-emphsize guild membership as a requirement for experiencing game content. Provide power to the individual to choose content.
Forget about the damn chinese/gold/gear farmers. Drop the whole idea of raid locks. This is put in to prevent people from farming content and becoming geared "too quickly", whatever that means. SO FUCKING WHAT? I don't care if somebody else is getting a free ride. How does their success diminish my ability to play? Why punish me so that I can't honestly grind gear at my pace? If they're geared but they can't play I'll just avoid them. There's no rational reason concerning game play for lockouts. Yes. it prevents guilds/groups from farming gear for new players. But So what? Again another punishment for honest players. It could also be implemented better. Progression can be controlled through iLevel limits for instance entrances and also through content dependencies instead.
World of Walkcraft. Get rid of the damn corpse runs. No reason for them. At the very least when you die just cause the respawn at the instance entrance. Waiting/walking is not "fun". Nobody loves those zones were the graeyards are super far away. That run back really lets you relax and get in touch with yourself. Helps you contemplate your mistake and improve too.
Remove all the penalties for dying. Yes. I get the durability penalty. that makes sense as providing a major, reliable and continuous gold sink to maintain the stability of the economies. But rez sickness is stupid. more stupid is the "oh, you died again quickly? PENALTY BOX!" The disappointment of dying is enough of a punishment. Dying frequently is its own punishment. The time lost to rebuff, wait for mana, instant boss/mob reset is enough. Waiting for 2 minutes after Bloodlord Mandokir kills you is just stupid.
Random Raid Finder. Yes. I know this is coming but it's coming wrong. It will only allow grouping for lower level raids and not the current tier. Why? Stupid. Just another limit enforcing
How the hell does wikipedia not represent a work of creative genius while the great wall of china does? Building a wall like that doesn't take any genius; just a tremendous ego, piles of rock and a ton of disposable slaves. It also doesn't contribute a damn thing to the advancement or future of mankind. But it's big and you can touch it and people are impressed by big stupid things that they can understand.
Don't you get it??? It's not the government deciding here... it's popular vote. The votes are being cast by a number of constituents... including those who understand the benefits of science and those who believe in the benefits of welfare and social programs. Understanding this are you really surprised that NSF loses here?
How about we look at this again but eliminate several typical graphing mistakes....
First, let's have all axes start at zero, not at, say, 33% of the range. This would immediately show that there is less disparity between average lifetime then the presenter attempts to make you perceive.
second let's have a non-logarithm axes for a typical unit that is thought of as linear... money.
Third, if we are going to compare wealth then we should be comparing amount of money held vs what it can buy, not just raw money per person. Sure people in the Congo have far less dollars per person than Japan. But a loaf of bread and the supplies they want to buy are far, far cheaper. In other words, it is possible for a smaller amount of currency from economy A to buy more goods and services in economy B. You need to account for this in determining "wealth". You can't just exchange currency rates to determine who is better off.
Lastly, You also have to dollar adjust for inflation even for specific countries over time. A typical mid-range american car in 2010 costs around US$25000; in 1977... US$5000. So, yes we might have more dollars per person in the US today but you're going to need 5 times as many dollars as you had 33 years ago in order to just break even.
And, while we are at it. I would get rid of the enthusiastic and "compelling" presentation acting. This is always a sign of attempting to market more than is really there. It is science through how the presenter can make you "feel" and it leads to poor knee-jerk decisions.
Wait, hasn't emacs and unix's "man" pages been doing this forever? In emacs I can type ctrl-s and then a search term and all instances are highlighted. In man I can type /searchterm and all instances are highlighted.
And both of these existed LONG before 1999. How the hell did this get a patent?
When the hell are security "professionals" going to wake up and realize that secure access to something requires three items: identification, authentication and authorization. You CANNOT store the authentication credential with the identification. It is 100% stupid to store the pin on the identification device. Authentication credentials and authorization decisions must be kept by, and made by, the service provider. The only item that should be left with the consumer is an identification badge.
For instance, a national "ID Card" is actually a good thing IF the only thing it has stored on it or about it is the owners identification, i.e. name and unique ID number. The ONLY thing the card should provide is a way to contact a national database/server which requires two things, the unique, public ID number from the card and a fingerprint (which is NOT stored or printed on the card in any way). The ONLY information the server should return is "Yes" or "No". But see... the fingerprint cannot be stored on the card in way for the same reason that the pin in the post should never be stored on the card. If somebody other than the legitimate owner comes into possession of the card then he possesses both the identification AND the authentication pieces of the puzzle and can do whatever the legitimate owner was authorized to do.
Security: it's simple. f*cking learn it.
Seriously, does anybody believe that jurors (possible the worst dregs of society) are capable of understanding the responsibilities of a judicial oath. Hell the judge should have awarded her extra credit for demonstrating the ability to use a computer for something other than a paperweight.
Please, for the love of facts and reason go look some up before blaming defense spending that brought citizens a multitude of technological innovations for their investment. Military spending (all of it) doesn't even make 54% of the budget. it's actually less than half of what you quoted for 2009. And MOST of that isn't to fund the two wars you speak of.
Though I will give you credit for correctly identifying the looming crisis that is the unfunded liabilities.
First: history has shown that Americans don't care for rail transportation. Otherwise Amtrak would actually make a profit. But instead Americans choose the efficiency of time, and take a plane, or the efficiency of their schedule and take their cars when and where they want.
Second, while high speed rail works well in Japan or Europe, do you have any idea how much bigger the United states? The single state of Alaska is bigger than all of Japan and Texas alone is over half its size. And if you haven't traveled across Texas or other large states such as Montana, Wyoming or Nebraska... THERE AIN'T NOTHING THERE. There's nothing worth while to stop a train at. So while Japan can count on the commerce and traffic from Osaka, Nagoya, Kyoto and Tokyo on a rail line... In the same distance in california from Los Angeles... Nothing. Maybe San Diego and almost to San Francisco. But quite frankly, there isn't enough inter-city commerce between these locations to support commuter rail service. This might work from Washington DC to New york city but even that's a stretch. The distances are so great it just makes it more valuable for the few who need to commute it to do so by air.
So yeah. 'nother super waste of tax payer dollars. You'd be better off just dividing the $8B and give 100,000 homeless people $80K each. But sure, we're $3 TRILLION in debt for just the last two years, why not go for broke... literally.
I am depressed that my generation is now officially called *THAT* generation.
Proof that women ARE actually smarter than men.
IT jobs suck. I've been a systems and network administrator. It really, really sucks. The job is an endless list of problems that everybody expects you to solve instantly. Nobody realizes that the number of pieces of technology that you mastered outnumbers their marketing/managing/accounting skills 10:1 and are more complex. You're viewed as nothing but a cost; nobody attributes any profit to you. They always think their technology ideas are better than yours. You get labeled as anti-social and unfriendly because you wind up living isolated at night fixing trouble calls that woke you up. "Oh, you know about computers... Can you take a look at mine?" is acceptable but "Oh, you know accounting... can you do my taxes for me this year?" is not.
So yeah. Women are proving they're smarter than men by avoiding all this anguish and lack of appreciation.
Easy. Stop carrying bulk mail. Raise envelope postal rates to $2 per message. I'll easily pay $50/year additional to not get junk bulk mail.
But basically... they're screwed. We shouldn't be sending anything that can fit in an envelope anymore. Send it as a PDF or email instead. Then you could simply restrict deliveries to individual recipients instead of long routes. Turn USPS into UPS.
Hmmm. China outstripping the US in terms of advancement? you don't say. How could a country unburdened with civil rights or workplace safety laws, unbound by global health treaties or other economic regulations, willing to consume energy at an unlimited place possible be outstripping a country paralyzed by an abundance of laws, regulation, politics and bureaucracy??
Face it were doomed. The president and congress have no desire to trim down all that crap. And yet, we keep voting their type into power. Face it, it is not the president that Bill Gates & Friends should be talking to about this problem... it's the American people that need this education.
fundamentalist wackos
Need I say more? We reasonably reject your ideas but your counter-argument is we're "wackos". I also like that you stacked a heavily flawed recent theory in the same category as a much more solidly proven theory. I can't believe in the one without believing in the other? Otherwise, I'm a wacko. Nice.
If we could only learn about other cultures, we wouldn't want to go to war.
What??? You seriously believe this?? We live in an age of communication. Where any information can be learned from any point on the globe. We know where every culture is and what political decisions they made that morning. And yet... war... everywhere you look. Intolerance and strife between cultures abounds unchecked.
"learning about other cultures" does jack-squat to prevent wars. Wars are not the result of culture ignorance.
I have said this for years! Imagine you've been on a very long cross-country drive. You come across a small town. What are your priorities? Get gas, Get food, go to the bathroom and dump your trash. A basic pit stop.
Well this is exactly the case with interstellar travel. It isn't easy! You're limited by the speed of light. To get from one system to the next takes a long time. And when they get here they're gonna do the same thing... To get "gas" they're gonna drain of the sun of all its hydrogen. Food... Us. All of it. All the plants, all the animals all the humans... It's a very, very long trip to the next system; gonna need more than a snack to tie them over. The only thing they're gonna leave behind is their trash.
We do not want to meet an alien race because all it is going to mean to them is a pit stop.
Some insight here... The rules I explained is for the passing of measures and motions. Not for the election of representatives. Motions and measures can only be passed or defeated. Either in favor of against. Only two choices. In these cases majority and 2/3 are well defined and useful.
What you complain of is the problems associated with plurality voting systems such as used to elect representatives in the United States. The voting population typically misunderstands and believes that their votes are governed by (or should be by) a majority. However, the reality is that the bylaws of these bodies have adopted policies by which a vote is won by plurality; not majority. Thus it is valid for Texas (or anywhere else in the US) to be governed by somebody who failed to attract the majority of votes.
2/3 votes are defined as passing if the number of votes in favor is greater than or equal to twice the number of votes against. Period. No need to dick around with fractions at all. Take the number votes against and double it. Is that greater than the number of votes in favor? Yes. it is defeated. No. It passes. So double 70... 140. That is greater than 136. So defeated. In the original vote however... 64 against doubled is 128 which is less than 139 and so it passes. I'm not certain why they needed a recount at all?
Other things that people screw up: It is the count of votes in favor and against that matter. It has nothing to do with the number of representatives. So the fact that at least three members didn't vote the first time doesn't matter. Also, there is never a need to call for or count "those abstaining." The fact that they did not vote in favor of or for against implies abstention. Abstention votes have no bearing on a motion. Lastly, as long as a quorum is reached (minimum number of representatives present is met) then it doesn't matter how many vote... You could have a quorum of 150 people and if only two vote in favor and 1 votes against while the remaining 147 have decided not to vote or have fallen asleep... the motion passes.
This damn topic comes up all the time... Faster driving equals {more deaths, higher fuel consumption, etc}. And it's crap. Let's see... Even if given our current conditions deaths were reduced by slower average speeds the proposition of the article would not necessarily save lives.
Fine, build tighter setbacks... That means bringing the buildings closer to the road. This would lead to people living, playing and existing closer to the road. This means people stepping off their front porch and WHAM! Basically, were is the study that shows that bringing the buildings closer doesn't increase deaths more than is decreased by the reduction of velocity?
Do you REALLY want to decrease traffic fatalities? Fine.. Kill drunk drivers. No you don't get a second chance. Next, require driver road tests for licensing... EVERY year. Not just a "sign here on the dotted line"... but a god-damn TEST! Do it in a simulator. Simulate stalling an engine. Simulate a blown tire. Simulate a skid on ice. Simulate a 5 yr old jumping in front of you. Measure reaction times. Basically do for drivers what airline pilots have to go through. You don't have to handle everything 100% but you do need to achieve some sort of success to pass. No this is not insane. Pilots have to do it and the probability of them harming someone is far less than the operator of a motor vehicle. Thus we should actually require more of a motor vehicle operator. This would either weed out EVERYONE who is a poor driver or force them to educate and train themselves well enough to be acceptable drivers.
Yes, it is partially a function of government vs private.
There is no reward, profit or other motivation to cause a government to be efficient. In fact, the opposite is true. A government which fails to be efficient is rewarded with an increase in size in order to cope with its assigned workload. Being wasteful is rewarded by being able to tax/collect/acquire more resources.
Private sector on the other hand is required by definition to be self-sufficient. They cannot acquire more resources without paying for it. They must trade one resource for another. In order to grow they must add value to the resources they already have (which can be argued a trade of effort, time or creativity) or become more efficient with what they already have.
Thus, it IS a function of government vs private. Your example of multinationals or large companies only serves to show that some private operations also fail to be efficient. If they were government entities then they would prove to be even less efficient.
And this theory is utter crap. An error rate of 1:10,000 (yes, that's the rate given about 200 complaints in 2M cars) is way too high to be caused by random electromagnetic interference. When was the last time you saw your processor kick out a wrong bit? Yes, it could be happening but not by EMF. But let us assume EMF is changing bits... The entire automotive industry uses CAN bus for inter-process communication and CAN bus has CRC built into it's frames. In fact it has a Hamming distance of 6 and so can detect up to 5 erroneous bits in a packet. So the chances of acting upon "corrupt data" is rediculously low. Much, much lower than 1:10,000. If they don't use CAN in this particular instance then are certainly using a similar protocol and they ALL have CRC capabilities.
This problem is a simple "software making the wrong decision" problem. It's a software bug. period.
Yes, I think people are idiots. lots of accidents are cause by poorly maintained floormats, doing your lipstick, texting, etc. This isn't the problem here. There are way too many incidents of various natures to be accounted for by this.
Yes, I think electromagnetic radiation exists. Yes, it can produce measurable effects. This, is also, not the problem here. EMF does not cause motors to turn with any appreciable torque. Modern electronics are sufficiently robust to this type of sporadic interference to account for this.
The problem here is in the code. I have written embedded software. It is WAAAY too easy to make a subtle mistake in an embedded environment that has limited processing power, highly asynchronous processing and a multitude of cooperating software and hardware modules. Further more, it can be a total bitch to debug these environments and the faults that they can exhibit can be nearly impossible to reproduce. And in EVERY case where I've seen "Hey, it shouldn't do that. The code doesn't have it doing that!" it turns that yes, it was doing exactly what the code had it do under those circumstances.
So, Want to save time and money? Ignore looking at anything other than code. Analyze the hell out of the software and you will find the culprit lurking there. You can put me on record for predicting this. (if they even 'fess up to the cause once found.)
"All men are created equal" is bullshit, and you know it. Some people ARE superior to others. Name whatever metric you wish but you will find success and failure. Don't believe me? Then what is the point of dating? Why not just marry the first person you meet after age 18? (Answer: because I'm correct.)
So where is the law of nature that prohibits the superior from living while the inferior die off? Oh, wait... that's right, in fact the opposite rule exists.
I fucking hate this crippled socialist thinking that says if everybody can't have something then nobody gets it. Utter crap.
This is totally true! Alfred Kinsey used it to great affect in his landmark survey on sexual practices. When he interviewed a person he didn't ask "Have you ever kissed somebody of the same sex?" which is a straightforward clinical question to figure out how many people have had a homosexual kiss. Instead he asked "How old were you when you first kissed somebody of the same sex?"
The difference is huge. The first can be considered accusatory, similar to "Have you ever robbed a gas station?". Whether the person has ever done this or not doesn't matter; they want to avoid being blamed as it seems the question is trying to uncover a secret. But the second approach starts with a question that assumes that everybody does it; that the "secret" is in fact well known. In other words... "How old were you when you robbed your first store?" has two benefits A) it presents the person with a question that assumes that he has already done it. So there is less benefit to lying. B) it implies that everybody does it at some age and therefore it is an acceptable behavior. Including the interviewer, thus answering truthfully appears to gain you allies or a supportive group.