Agreed. How does this in ANY way belong in the science section of slashdot?
While it didn't happen, I thought that there might be an interesting aside about the usefulness of the Drake Equation. I've heard multiple people say things along the lines of 'there's simply no way to test this to see if it's a valid equation.' So I assumed if it was used for a smaller purpose we might be able to test the ideas behind it and see whether they're valid. If they work for finding a girlfriend, maybe the overall idea works for the existence of aliens.
Sadly, there was no discussion of this in the article. I'd like someone to think of the significance in any sense. He said there'd be 26 people for him in England and now he has a girlfriend of 6 months. What does this mean for the validity of the equation?
Please read for comprehension. Note that the article "the" (in "the herbicide") makes the line refer specifically to Roundup, not herbicides in general. Farmers who use "Roundup Ready" corn do not use less Roundup, although they may (or may not) use less of other herbicides.
Indeed, they use much more Roundup because they use Roundup, period. It will kill non-Roundup ready corn just as readily as weeds, so it was NEVER used before. Now only it is used.
I can't imagine why any farmer would use Roundup and then other herbicides because simply but, it gets the job done. Plants die, and how! No sane farmer would waste his money applying multiple other herbicides, especially since there will simply be no weeds after using Roundup once. And by the time weeds might roll around again, the corn has grown a nice shady canopy over the field so there's no light for them anyhow. Problem solved. Amount of herbicide used much reduced, and limited to a time well before the corn is even remotely ready to be harvested.
Bottom line: if you care about overuse of herbicide Roundup-ready corn is a win-win situation.
How is patent encumbered food products a win for environmentalism? And you're talking about how silly anti-GMO fever is in an article saying how some of these products may actually be harmful?
Well, everyone has their own hotbutton issues. Organ damage is obviously one I would empathize with, but for as long as I can remember there have been people wailing and gnashing teeth about how our topsoil is disappearing and Iowa will become a desert in 50 years. Then, when something comes along to help that, queue the wailing and gnashing of teeth again over herbicies and GMO.
I guess it depends what you've been raised with as important. Being a farm kids the land is pretty important to me, and turning the lush farmlands of Iowa into a desert hits me emotionally as well as logically. I'm terribly happy that the chances of it are lessened now due to advances in science. Organ failure is bad, but I'll wait for corroborating studies before the gnashing ensues. But I've already seen firsthand topsoil NOT being washed away in droves from flooded farmland and that makes me very happy.
It's worth noting that this is entirely different from the so-called "Roundup Ready" crops which by definition encourage the farmer to use potentially toxic doses of the herbicide.
That's odd, I have heard the exact opposite from farmers. I grew up on a farm and my father still farms. He and many other use GM corn that is 'Roundup Ready'. They love it because it lets them use less herbicide. Before, they had to pick and choose herbicides so that they didn't kill the corn. Got milkweed? Use this one. Water hemp? Sorry, use a different one. This could lead to multiple applications and lots of herbicide being used overall. Even if you use just a little, having to reapply different herbicide several times increases the overall amount.
Now, they apply Roundup once and use much less herbicide than before. It's also much more effective. It's so effective in fact that many farmers have switched to no-till farming methods. This is a tremendous gain because it saves a lot of topsoil. Tilling helps to eliminate weeds so most people practiced it so they could avoid herbicides (they're expensive!). But it didn't quite deliver good yields. My dad used to say 'No-till is easy. No-till, no-crop, no check!'. Now he uses it and swears by it. You used to see so much dust kicked up on a windy day that you thought you'd suffocate. Whenever there was a flood the runoff was black - that was our topsoil going away.
But thanks to no-till and Roundup-ready corn we are saving the topsoil and using overall fewer chemicals to grow our food. This is a tremendous win for environmentalists. It's too bad they got caught up in anti-GMO fever.
I can certainly solve tech problems without being technical. If a potential option is 'don't do it at all' then the tech problems associated with it are null and void. If my IT guy comes in and says that our new whatever system is broken, has been broken and will probably be broken for the foreseeable future and that this is costing us money I certainly have the option of saying 'Trash it and go back to the old system' instead of 'Frobnicate the tech until it works right. Here's a bunch of money.' A non-technical solution to a technical problem. Not everything can be solved by fitting more tech into a solution. Sometimes the solution is less.
I'd say that you're both wrong. Preventing someone from getting polio doesn't generally make them more likely to get tuberculosis.
Well, it does in a way. Dead people are 100% immune to all diseases including tuberculosis. One of the many pitfalls of blindly using statistics without considering their meaning...
Imagine, for sake of argument, that(instead of a bunch of noble savages living in harmony with nature) the story had involved a rugged, self-sufficient band of human colonists, instead. These brave, decent, souls renounce the venality and softness, and collectivism of a dying earth and strike out to build their own future, by their own honest labor, on a different planet. A couple of generations later, the sinister corpronational minions of earth show up, looking to take what they have built. Had this been the story, the writer of that review would have loved it(and he wouldn't have been the only one, how many westerns involve the struggle by plain honest folks to hold on to their land in the face of corruption and oppression?). For extra credit, the story could even have been a thinly veiled allegory about abuse of Eminent Domain, that would really have gotten them going.
Yes, but that didn't happen at all. Instead, you get a made up perfect race who are totally blameless. Screw allegories about Native Americans and whatnot - Native Americans were people. Respecting the land is one thing (and I find it to be a highly respectable belief). But jacking into the world itself? That's like... cheating. Yes, it's science fiction. But it feels like science fiction used to set up a perfect blameless straw race. And obviously we're meant to root for them because the people that oppose them are the perfect bad guys.
Okay, so we have this setup and what exactly are we supposed to learn? People who were created perfect are the good guys and humans are the bad guys? Well, duh. Humans don't match up to perfect people. I knew that already. So it doesn't feel very sporting to make the bad guys into your enemies and use this false situation you've cooked up to make them look bad. It's wish-fulfillment at its best.
And screw the fact that several billion humans die as a result. A few bad guys halfway across our reachable universe? Yeah, perfect reason for Mother Theresa, Ghandi, Barack Obama and every other good person to die.
That's the effect of having most of your clients be business travelers. If they can expense it, chances are they'll buy it. So if they need WiFi to do work, they just charge it and the company pays for it. Companies don't care, so the hotels win.
Yes, all the individual cells are the same. In fact the Roomba 400 series (don't know about later ones) has an odd battery pack with an odd connector and odd screws holding it all together. When you get past the triangular slot screws and get the battery open you find... an array of 'C' size NiMH batteries wired in parallel. Which you can replace with similar batteries of equal or greater capacity (NiMH's are finicky about charging rates, Li-On and Li-Poly not as much).
Actually, I think all of this is getting better. Battery choice was much harder back when you had NiCad or NiMH batteries which were harder to charge. If you wanted to squeeze more capacity in you had to redesign your charge circuit to some extent or make do with charging slower and/or reduced battery performance. The newer chemistries have simpler charging methods.
But these damn laptops keep getting more powerful despite staying the same size. It's no surprise you'll have to redesign the battery pack every couple of years just to maintain performance and size. With a large garden implement you've got plenty of room to put any old battery in and leave room to spare for your aftermarket enhanced battery pack or future upgrades.
There just aren't as many pressures affecting those batteries as there are laptop batteries. Until batteries have an excess of capacity there probably won't be standard packs. In the mean time, the gains a company gets from overdesigning the battery outweigh the costs. Especially since people will pay for smaller and longer lasting batteries.
Why would anybody try to recreate their analysis exactly?
To verify that the methods they said they used produce the same results when you do it with the same data. A basic double check.
If someone claimed in a paper that they just added two integers together and got a fraction you could either say 'Impossible' and leave (ignoring the possibility that they have legitimately discovered something new about addition) or try it and see for yourself. Of course, if they just say 'Given an integer A and an integer B, we combine them with these methods and get 7.5 thus proving our point' it gets dicey. What if you tried lots of numbers with their method and never got 7.5? Why should you believe that you're doing it right, or that it works at all? Sure it might be out there somewhere, but why not just show all of your work?
If you can't prove their method with their own numbers, why would you try to prove it with different numbers and take the chance you're doing it wrong? Or why would you abandon their method and 'do your own analysis'? What if their methods are ingenious? Would you limit yourself to old methods if newer, better ones are available?
Naming it Enterprise doesn't give me a headache. I can buy naming just about anything Enterprise because there is a tradition of the name (obviously the original starship Enterprise wasnt' named after itself!). What gives me the headache is that this supposed 'spaceship' in the Star Trek universe never went into space (in our universe at least...).
Re:So let me get this straight...
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Less Than Free
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Are you serious? Have you tried Verizon lately? Adding a button that you have to press to pay for the service is an improvement. Usually they just don't tell you it's free, charge you, then have sex with your mother just for kicks.
Look I know it's 'cool' to take dumps on pop culture here on Slashdot, but if you can't respect the talent and practice it takes to dance and can't appreciate the beauty involved then you are lacking an appreciation for some of the greater things in life.
Is Dancing With the Stars the best dancing you'll ever see? Probably not (though if you treat other dancing competitions with the same respect as Dancing With the Stars then it might be). Is it a gimmick? Yeah. At the end of the equation is there something worthwhile AND entertaining going on? I would say so. TV could actually do much, much worse.
Ah, I was unaware that he is British. I always thought by his accent that he was Swedish or something else Norse. Perhaps they should change his vocalizer to include a Cockney accent. It should also randomly insert words like 'Cheerio!' and 'Blimey!' into his speech.
Not for laughs mind you. Just so people are aware he's British.:)
The Rather case was also not something you can claim as serious bias. The fact is everyone knows Bush deserted his guard service, possible to avoid drug testing in his flight physical because he was a heavy cocaine user at the time. The guard commander's secretary said what was in the letter was pretty plausible.
Whoa whoa whoa, it's not bias because it's true? Or, more accurately, you think it's true and you also assert everyone else thinks it's true? Why might everyone else think that it's true? Perhaps because Dan Rather said so? And lots of people didnt' catch the rest of the scandal where it was shown that the evidence was faked? Apparently though, you didn't catch the rest of the scandal because you insist it's real without any evidence that I can see except for the beliefs of others. And then you go on a tirade about how much you hate Bush and demagogue him. Your bias is clearly showing which makes me glad you weren't modded informative. In a post about how bias is undesirable you basically said 'Dan Rather isn't biased because I agree with him. Fuck Bush!'
Let's face it - some people will gravitate to the 'facts' that they agree with and leave all others in the dust. Whether it's Fox News or Dan Rather or the White House Press Secretary some people just want to be left in the dark.
He could work in an area where safety requires him to be able to hear things happening around him. That would prevent him from wearing earphones, and listening to music without them would be disturbing to other people. So, no music:(
You have to remember that the sheet is the entirety of the dimensions of that proposed system. So they ball isn't 'falling' into the gravity well because our gravity is drawing it down, it's 'falling' because it has to travel on the sheet and it's attempting to travel straight. But the sheet is curved due to the weight, so it follows the sheet into the curve/gravity well.
We don't have enough arable land on planet earth to fully convert from oil to biofuel.
Furthermore, it's a physical fuel that must be grown (on land, using fertilizers, pesticides and farm machinery), processed (expending energy) and then transported (expending energy).
Biofuel is only cheap because of gullible (or corrupt) politicians.
It is undesirable to convert all of our usage of oil for gasoline to biofuels and anyone who thinks that is the purpose of biofuels should pay attention to your points. They are 100% correct.
However, biofuels have one major advantage over solar, wind and hydro: you can run your car. YOUR car off of them. TODAY - or more accurately, tomorrow after you upgrade your gaskets and seals so they won't be dissolved. But that's cheap compared to buying a new electric car. There are millions of cars on the road today that will run on specifically two types of fuel: oil-derived fuels or biofuels. And, while there should be better options such as mass-transit we need to realize that right now those options don't exist for millions of people. If oil was gone tomorrow and you needed to get to work, you would use biofuels, not solar panels.
In short - wind, hydro, solar - yes! But for your HOUSE, not your car.
What a joke that first link is. Truly. Some vague hand waving, a distortion of numbers and a couple of meaningless graphs can convince some people of anything.
Citation needed? Honestly, economics is numbers - and yes, numbers based on assumptions. He produced numbers and you vaguely attack the assumptions?
It (intentionally I'll assume given the source) also misses the obvious, if it's going to include "benefits" it'd better include the enormously inflated cost of health care! Oh it doesn't? Then it's less than meaningless, it's misleading.
I don't understand what you're getting at - health care is explicitly mentioned in the article. True, health care may cost more than it should, but do you have any proof that an inflation of health care costs accounts for all of the increase in benefits? And that the quality of care hasn't improved? Go ahead, show me the studies that show we're getting much less for our dollar than we did before. Show me how people are dying earlier and there are fewer effective treatments available than in 1970. A cursory examination shows that there are more drugs and more effective drugs available, less invasive surgeries, more types of surgeries available and that people are living longer. Yes, there are some people who have no insurance at all but that's not the point of this - that's a social issue not an economic one. Please don't tell me that health care is the same as in 1970, and DON'T tell me that even if it's better it shouldn't cost more.
In 1970 my father, a lowly mechanic purchased a nice house (on 70% of his wage), supported a wife and raised three children in a solid middle class household.
Look, I've said it once I'll say it again - use some damn numbers. What did you dad make? What did the house cost? How many square foot? How much did it cost for utilities? Who did your dad work for? What was his retirement plan? How much was his 401K match? There is honestly no comparison when all you provide are vague adjectives.
39 years later his son, a white collar computer programmer raising three children and supporting a wife can't afford to buy a house on 100% of his wage in ANY POPULATION CENTRE.
Sure you can. If you want the same house your dad got I'm sure you can afford it. Same size probably, right in the middle of a 'population center'. It's downtown in the ghetto. Houses there are cheap and I'm sure it's not more than you had when you were growing up.
But that's not what you want. You want a big house - a NEW house. Not in the ghetto. In a subdivision. With a gate and a pool and some nice illegal immigrant to come and mow your lawn. Hell that's where I live. Yes, it's expensive - I wish it weren't. But I don't pretend that it's the house my parents raised three children in - the one that is barely big enough to function as a garage for two cars (its current job). I have it a lot better than my parents and yes - it costs a bit more.
Functionally lower-middle class, one car not two, not to mention working twice as many hours and getting half the benefits!
Once again man, citation needed. I for one don't believe that you have it worse than your parents. I just can't see any way. What do you have? Cable? Internet? How many computers? How many TVs? DVD player? New car or used? How many bedrooms? What do you eat? Fresh vegetables? Do you buy 'organic' produce?
Christ I can hardly count the ways that we have it better and we dont' even think about it. Do we deserve a new car and a big house? Probably not. Can a lot of us afford it? Yes! Can a lot of us BARELY afford it and complain about how much our life sucks when we saddle ourselves with debt (in a way our parents never would have)? YES! Our lives have gotten better, but our sense of entitlement has grown too large.
I agree wholeheartedly with that quote but we must remind ourselves that it isn't government who loads us down with debt, prevents us from saving and ties us to our jobs - it's us! Everyone wants a house (a BIG one!) without considering what it will do to their financial independence. People make gross financial decisions based on a multitude of assumptions (assuming I keep my job, get consistent 2% pay raises for 10 years, assuming gas stays at $1.00/gallon... yes, I can afford this house) and then their plans fall apart when ANY of them fail. This isn't government-mandated stupidity: it's pathetic me-too'ism (if John can own a house I'm sure I can! John's an idiot!) and lack of foresight. Government hasn't taxed us to a subsistence level and demolished all of our financial plans - we just never made them in the first place.
Why not let the voters vote for projects AND the taxes to fund them? If they want another school, then they get a property tax increase of $3.15 on all property in area X.
You do realize that is done very often right? The terminology they use is bonds. You'll go to a city council meeting where they're discussing an X million dollar bond to build a new school, they say for an average home with tax burden of $Y it will be $Y+Z now (where Z is typically on the order of $3 as you mentioned) per year for say 30 years. Then people talk and the city council votes yea or nay. Ideally they vote close to what people want (it's more typical at lower levels of government, of course, everyone still expects the council to vote closest to what they and only they want, so fewer people are any happier because of it).
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Agreed. How does this in ANY way belong in the science section of slashdot?
While it didn't happen, I thought that there might be an interesting aside about the usefulness of the Drake Equation. I've heard multiple people say things along the lines of 'there's simply no way to test this to see if it's a valid equation.' So I assumed if it was used for a smaller purpose we might be able to test the ideas behind it and see whether they're valid. If they work for finding a girlfriend, maybe the overall idea works for the existence of aliens.
Sadly, there was no discussion of this in the article. I'd like someone to think of the significance in any sense. He said there'd be 26 people for him in England and now he has a girlfriend of 6 months. What does this mean for the validity of the equation?
Please read for comprehension. Note that the article "the" (in "the herbicide") makes the line refer specifically to Roundup, not herbicides in general. Farmers who use "Roundup Ready" corn do not use less Roundup, although they may (or may not) use less of other herbicides.
Indeed, they use much more Roundup because they use Roundup, period. It will kill non-Roundup ready corn just as readily as weeds, so it was NEVER used before. Now only it is used.
I can't imagine why any farmer would use Roundup and then other herbicides because simply but, it gets the job done. Plants die, and how! No sane farmer would waste his money applying multiple other herbicides, especially since there will simply be no weeds after using Roundup once. And by the time weeds might roll around again, the corn has grown a nice shady canopy over the field so there's no light for them anyhow. Problem solved. Amount of herbicide used much reduced, and limited to a time well before the corn is even remotely ready to be harvested.
Bottom line: if you care about overuse of herbicide Roundup-ready corn is a win-win situation.
How is patent encumbered food products a win for environmentalism? And you're talking about how silly anti-GMO fever is in an article saying how some of these products may actually be harmful?
Well, everyone has their own hotbutton issues. Organ damage is obviously one I would empathize with, but for as long as I can remember there have been people wailing and gnashing teeth about how our topsoil is disappearing and Iowa will become a desert in 50 years. Then, when something comes along to help that, queue the wailing and gnashing of teeth again over herbicies and GMO.
I guess it depends what you've been raised with as important. Being a farm kids the land is pretty important to me, and turning the lush farmlands of Iowa into a desert hits me emotionally as well as logically. I'm terribly happy that the chances of it are lessened now due to advances in science. Organ failure is bad, but I'll wait for corroborating studies before the gnashing ensues. But I've already seen firsthand topsoil NOT being washed away in droves from flooded farmland and that makes me very happy.
It's worth noting that this is entirely different from the so-called "Roundup Ready" crops which by definition encourage the farmer to use potentially toxic doses of the herbicide.
That's odd, I have heard the exact opposite from farmers. I grew up on a farm and my father still farms. He and many other use GM corn that is 'Roundup Ready'. They love it because it lets them use less herbicide. Before, they had to pick and choose herbicides so that they didn't kill the corn. Got milkweed? Use this one. Water hemp? Sorry, use a different one. This could lead to multiple applications and lots of herbicide being used overall. Even if you use just a little, having to reapply different herbicide several times increases the overall amount.
Now, they apply Roundup once and use much less herbicide than before. It's also much more effective. It's so effective in fact that many farmers have switched to no-till farming methods. This is a tremendous gain because it saves a lot of topsoil. Tilling helps to eliminate weeds so most people practiced it so they could avoid herbicides (they're expensive!). But it didn't quite deliver good yields. My dad used to say 'No-till is easy. No-till, no-crop, no check!'. Now he uses it and swears by it. You used to see so much dust kicked up on a windy day that you thought you'd suffocate. Whenever there was a flood the runoff was black - that was our topsoil going away.
But thanks to no-till and Roundup-ready corn we are saving the topsoil and using overall fewer chemicals to grow our food. This is a tremendous win for environmentalists. It's too bad they got caught up in anti-GMO fever.
I can certainly solve tech problems without being technical. If a potential option is 'don't do it at all' then the tech problems associated with it are null and void. If my IT guy comes in and says that our new whatever system is broken, has been broken and will probably be broken for the foreseeable future and that this is costing us money I certainly have the option of saying 'Trash it and go back to the old system' instead of 'Frobnicate the tech until it works right. Here's a bunch of money.' A non-technical solution to a technical problem. Not everything can be solved by fitting more tech into a solution. Sometimes the solution is less.
I'd say that you're both wrong. Preventing someone from getting polio doesn't generally make them more likely to get tuberculosis.
Well, it does in a way. Dead people are 100% immune to all diseases including tuberculosis. One of the many pitfalls of blindly using statistics without considering their meaning...
Imagine, for sake of argument, that(instead of a bunch of noble savages living in harmony with nature) the story had involved a rugged, self-sufficient band of human colonists, instead. These brave, decent, souls renounce the venality and softness, and collectivism of a dying earth and strike out to build their own future, by their own honest labor, on a different planet. A couple of generations later, the sinister corpronational minions of earth show up, looking to take what they have built. Had this been the story, the writer of that review would have loved it(and he wouldn't have been the only one, how many westerns involve the struggle by plain honest folks to hold on to their land in the face of corruption and oppression?). For extra credit, the story could even have been a thinly veiled allegory about abuse of Eminent Domain, that would really have gotten them going.
Yes, but that didn't happen at all. Instead, you get a made up perfect race who are totally blameless. Screw allegories about Native Americans and whatnot - Native Americans were people. Respecting the land is one thing (and I find it to be a highly respectable belief). But jacking into the world itself? That's like... cheating. Yes, it's science fiction. But it feels like science fiction used to set up a perfect blameless straw race. And obviously we're meant to root for them because the people that oppose them are the perfect bad guys.
Okay, so we have this setup and what exactly are we supposed to learn? People who were created perfect are the good guys and humans are the bad guys? Well, duh. Humans don't match up to perfect people. I knew that already. So it doesn't feel very sporting to make the bad guys into your enemies and use this false situation you've cooked up to make them look bad. It's wish-fulfillment at its best.
And screw the fact that several billion humans die as a result. A few bad guys halfway across our reachable universe? Yeah, perfect reason for Mother Theresa, Ghandi, Barack Obama and every other good person to die.
That's the effect of having most of your clients be business travelers. If they can expense it, chances are they'll buy it. So if they need WiFi to do work, they just charge it and the company pays for it. Companies don't care, so the hotels win.
Regardless, this guy still casts Bruce Campbell in his movies. That's a win right there.
Yes, all the individual cells are the same. In fact the Roomba 400 series (don't know about later ones) has an odd battery pack with an odd connector and odd screws holding it all together. When you get past the triangular slot screws and get the battery open you find... an array of 'C' size NiMH batteries wired in parallel. Which you can replace with similar batteries of equal or greater capacity (NiMH's are finicky about charging rates, Li-On and Li-Poly not as much).
Actually, I think all of this is getting better. Battery choice was much harder back when you had NiCad or NiMH batteries which were harder to charge. If you wanted to squeeze more capacity in you had to redesign your charge circuit to some extent or make do with charging slower and/or reduced battery performance. The newer chemistries have simpler charging methods.
But these damn laptops keep getting more powerful despite staying the same size. It's no surprise you'll have to redesign the battery pack every couple of years just to maintain performance and size. With a large garden implement you've got plenty of room to put any old battery in and leave room to spare for your aftermarket enhanced battery pack or future upgrades.
There just aren't as many pressures affecting those batteries as there are laptop batteries. Until batteries have an excess of capacity there probably won't be standard packs. In the mean time, the gains a company gets from overdesigning the battery outweigh the costs. Especially since people will pay for smaller and longer lasting batteries.
Why would anybody try to recreate their analysis exactly?
To verify that the methods they said they used produce the same results when you do it with the same data. A basic double check.
If someone claimed in a paper that they just added two integers together and got a fraction you could either say 'Impossible' and leave (ignoring the possibility that they have legitimately discovered something new about addition) or try it and see for yourself. Of course, if they just say 'Given an integer A and an integer B, we combine them with these methods and get 7.5 thus proving our point' it gets dicey. What if you tried lots of numbers with their method and never got 7.5? Why should you believe that you're doing it right, or that it works at all? Sure it might be out there somewhere, but why not just show all of your work?
If you can't prove their method with their own numbers, why would you try to prove it with different numbers and take the chance you're doing it wrong? Or why would you abandon their method and 'do your own analysis'? What if their methods are ingenious? Would you limit yourself to old methods if newer, better ones are available?
Naming it Enterprise doesn't give me a headache. I can buy naming just about anything Enterprise because there is a tradition of the name (obviously the original starship Enterprise wasnt' named after itself!). What gives me the headache is that this supposed 'spaceship' in the Star Trek universe never went into space (in our universe at least...).
Are you serious? Have you tried Verizon lately? Adding a button that you have to press to pay for the service is an improvement. Usually they just don't tell you it's free, charge you, then have sex with your mother just for kicks.
Look I know it's 'cool' to take dumps on pop culture here on Slashdot, but if you can't respect the talent and practice it takes to dance and can't appreciate the beauty involved then you are lacking an appreciation for some of the greater things in life.
Is Dancing With the Stars the best dancing you'll ever see? Probably not (though if you treat other dancing competitions with the same respect as Dancing With the Stars then it might be). Is it a gimmick? Yeah. At the end of the equation is there something worthwhile AND entertaining going on? I would say so. TV could actually do much, much worse.
Ah, I was unaware that he is British. I always thought by his accent that he was Swedish or something else Norse. Perhaps they should change his vocalizer to include a Cockney accent. It should also randomly insert words like 'Cheerio!' and 'Blimey!' into his speech. Not for laughs mind you. Just so people are aware he's British. :)
The Rather case was also not something you can claim as serious bias. The fact is everyone knows Bush deserted his guard service, possible to avoid drug testing in his flight physical because he was a heavy cocaine user at the time. The guard commander's secretary said what was in the letter was pretty plausible.
Whoa whoa whoa, it's not bias because it's true? Or, more accurately, you think it's true and you also assert everyone else thinks it's true? Why might everyone else think that it's true? Perhaps because Dan Rather said so? And lots of people didnt' catch the rest of the scandal where it was shown that the evidence was faked? Apparently though, you didn't catch the rest of the scandal because you insist it's real without any evidence that I can see except for the beliefs of others. And then you go on a tirade about how much you hate Bush and demagogue him. Your bias is clearly showing which makes me glad you weren't modded informative. In a post about how bias is undesirable you basically said 'Dan Rather isn't biased because I agree with him. Fuck Bush!'
Let's face it - some people will gravitate to the 'facts' that they agree with and leave all others in the dust. Whether it's Fox News or Dan Rather or the White House Press Secretary some people just want to be left in the dark.
He could work in an area where safety requires him to be able to hear things happening around him. That would prevent him from wearing earphones, and listening to music without them would be disturbing to other people. So, no music :(
Volt-Amps are not equivalent to watts so the math isn't a simple comparison. It's complicated.
You have to remember that the sheet is the entirety of the dimensions of that proposed system. So they ball isn't 'falling' into the gravity well because our gravity is drawing it down, it's 'falling' because it has to travel on the sheet and it's attempting to travel straight. But the sheet is curved due to the weight, so it follows the sheet into the curve/gravity well.
We don't have enough arable land on planet earth to fully convert from oil to biofuel.
Furthermore, it's a physical fuel that must be grown (on land, using fertilizers, pesticides and farm machinery), processed (expending energy) and then transported (expending energy).
Biofuel is only cheap because of gullible (or corrupt) politicians.
It is undesirable to convert all of our usage of oil for gasoline to biofuels and anyone who thinks that is the purpose of biofuels should pay attention to your points. They are 100% correct.
However, biofuels have one major advantage over solar, wind and hydro: you can run your car. YOUR car off of them. TODAY - or more accurately, tomorrow after you upgrade your gaskets and seals so they won't be dissolved. But that's cheap compared to buying a new electric car. There are millions of cars on the road today that will run on specifically two types of fuel: oil-derived fuels or biofuels. And, while there should be better options such as mass-transit we need to realize that right now those options don't exist for millions of people. If oil was gone tomorrow and you needed to get to work, you would use biofuels, not solar panels.
In short - wind, hydro, solar - yes! But for your HOUSE, not your car.
It's the shuffle. That's the IDEA. It's a BAD idea but I think it's exactly what they were looking for.
What a joke that first link is. Truly. Some vague hand waving, a distortion of numbers and a couple of meaningless graphs can convince some people of anything.
Citation needed? Honestly, economics is numbers - and yes, numbers based on assumptions. He produced numbers and you vaguely attack the assumptions?
It (intentionally I'll assume given the source) also misses the obvious, if it's going to include "benefits" it'd better include the enormously inflated cost of health care! Oh it doesn't? Then it's less than meaningless, it's misleading.
I don't understand what you're getting at - health care is explicitly mentioned in the article. True, health care may cost more than it should, but do you have any proof that an inflation of health care costs accounts for all of the increase in benefits? And that the quality of care hasn't improved? Go ahead, show me the studies that show we're getting much less for our dollar than we did before. Show me how people are dying earlier and there are fewer effective treatments available than in 1970. A cursory examination shows that there are more drugs and more effective drugs available, less invasive surgeries, more types of surgeries available and that people are living longer. Yes, there are some people who have no insurance at all but that's not the point of this - that's a social issue not an economic one. Please don't tell me that health care is the same as in 1970, and DON'T tell me that even if it's better it shouldn't cost more.
In 1970 my father, a lowly mechanic purchased a nice house (on 70% of his wage), supported a wife and raised three children in a solid middle class household.
Look, I've said it once I'll say it again - use some damn numbers. What did you dad make? What did the house cost? How many square foot? How much did it cost for utilities? Who did your dad work for? What was his retirement plan? How much was his 401K match? There is honestly no comparison when all you provide are vague adjectives.
39 years later his son, a white collar computer programmer raising three children and supporting a wife can't afford to buy a house on 100% of his wage in ANY POPULATION CENTRE.
Sure you can. If you want the same house your dad got I'm sure you can afford it. Same size probably, right in the middle of a 'population center'. It's downtown in the ghetto. Houses there are cheap and I'm sure it's not more than you had when you were growing up.
But that's not what you want. You want a big house - a NEW house. Not in the ghetto. In a subdivision. With a gate and a pool and some nice illegal immigrant to come and mow your lawn. Hell that's where I live. Yes, it's expensive - I wish it weren't. But I don't pretend that it's the house my parents raised three children in - the one that is barely big enough to function as a garage for two cars (its current job). I have it a lot better than my parents and yes - it costs a bit more.
Functionally lower-middle class, one car not two, not to mention working twice as many hours and getting half the benefits!
Once again man, citation needed. I for one don't believe that you have it worse than your parents. I just can't see any way. What do you have? Cable? Internet? How many computers? How many TVs? DVD player? New car or used? How many bedrooms? What do you eat? Fresh vegetables? Do you buy 'organic' produce?
Christ I can hardly count the ways that we have it better and we dont' even think about it. Do we deserve a new car and a big house? Probably not. Can a lot of us afford it? Yes! Can a lot of us BARELY afford it and complain about how much our life sucks when we saddle ourselves with debt (in a way our parents never would have)? YES! Our lives have gotten better, but our sense of entitlement has grown too large.
I agree wholeheartedly with that quote but we must remind ourselves that it isn't government who loads us down with debt, prevents us from saving and ties us to our jobs - it's us!
Everyone wants a house (a BIG one!) without considering what it will do to their financial independence. People make gross financial decisions based on a multitude of assumptions (assuming I keep my job, get consistent 2% pay raises for 10 years, assuming gas stays at $1.00/gallon... yes, I can afford this house) and then their plans fall apart when ANY of them fail. This isn't government-mandated stupidity: it's pathetic me-too'ism (if John can own a house I'm sure I can! John's an idiot!) and lack of foresight. Government hasn't taxed us to a subsistence level and demolished all of our financial plans - we just never made them in the first place.
Heck, there are even videos of him on YouTube speaking about to this....
Quick! Censor those! His opinions can't be allowed to see the light of day! They're too dangerous!
Why not let the voters vote for projects AND the taxes to fund them? If they want another school, then they get a property tax increase of $3.15 on all property in area X.
You do realize that is done very often right? The terminology they use is bonds. You'll go to a city council meeting where they're discussing an X million dollar bond to build a new school, they say for an average home with tax burden of $Y it will be $Y+Z now (where Z is typically on the order of $3 as you mentioned) per year for say 30 years. Then people talk and the city council votes yea or nay. Ideally they vote close to what people want (it's more typical at lower levels of government, of course, everyone still expects the council to vote closest to what they and only they want, so fewer people are any happier because of it).