Use of fossil fuels puts toxic emissions in the environment. Use of fossil fuels may contribute to global climate change. (I won't open that can of worms any further.) Use of fossil fuels puts our energy needs at the mercy of market manipulation and the state of international politics. Use of fossil fuels places our energy dependence on a resource that is not renewable - well, it does renew, but not in acceptable time frame for human needs. Use of fossil fuels puts a lot of the jobs and money in energy production outside the US borders.
I think it's clear we need something on the order of the Apollo Program, the massive undertaking that developed the technology to put humanity on the moon. Something similar should be put into place for energy. I'd prefer nuclear fission, from what I know of usable energy sources that still seems to be the most cost effective and resource efficient. But I am sure the cost and technology roadblocks to massive use of solar power, wind, tidal, solar space arrays, or even fusion energy would fall in short order if enough resources were directed at the problem.
Re:The original Parrot was an April Fool's joke
on
Parrot 1.0.0 Released
·
· Score: 1
www.indeed.com is a search engine to look through several different job sites. They have 18,000 Perl developer openings listed.
It doesn't have to be that way. There is ongoing research to produce biodiesel from sources like Miscanthus (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miscanthus), Switchgrass (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switchgrass) or Algae (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algae_fuel). We'll do more harm than good to the environment as long as we continue using biofuels sourced from palm oil or corn, but with the right sources biofuels are a win.
Any of those three sources I listed can be grown on land that is poorly suited to growing traditional food crops.
But for now, diesel is once again so cheap that biofuels are not cost effective.
SUVs, however, are better at improving the gene pool by helping to eliminate people who are stupid enough to buy and drive SUVs, which is not really their intended job, even if it is a net benefit to society.:)
The only problem is, in a fair number of cases innocents get taken out along with the SUV driver. Regardless of whether it's a child in the back, a pedestrian along the road, or the occupant of another car, collateral damage is not acceptable.
General Motors uses electronic power steering in a lot of their cars, and it works fine but gives the numb feeling you describe. In a lot of their newer models, they've gone back to hydraulic assist power steering, which gives far better steering feel but saps an extra mile per gallon of fuel economy. Electric steering was one of the reasons the previous Chevy Malibu and previous Chevy Impala offered best-in-class V6 sedan fuel economy. I believe cheaper General Motors models still use electric.
Most competing automakers use hydraulic steering, which is why the steering is generally better.
Higher octane fuels let you run the engine at a higher compression ratio, which is more mechanically efficient. So while the net amount of energy in the fuel does not change, higher octane fuel still permits more efficiency.
There's a reason performance cars often require, or at least benefit from, higher octane fuel.
Per what I wrote, US automaker product reliability is way up compared to where it was a few years ago. And the fuel economy of their larger vehicles is, in many cases, at or near best-in-class. Fuel economy was a factor, and the vehicles still ranked well or won. The vehicles are highly efficient for their size.
The Chevy Malibu and Saturn Aura are 5.7 inches (14.5 cm) longer but 2.1 inches (5.3 cm) narrower than the European and South American Market Honda Accord. The days of 8 meter long, 2 meter wide American sedans are dead. The Saturn Outlook crossover SUV and its cousins are the same size as a minivan, and only the upper trim levels of the Honda Odyssey offer better fuel economy. The fact that they're huge is the whole point - you can carry 8 people in reasonable comfort plus a reasonable amount of gear. If you aren't going to carry that many, buy something smaller.
For European market cars, some do sell well. But in many cases, the cost of selling the same model in the US is too high. The European Ford Focus is a good car, but the European model shares components with the Volvo S40, and could not profitably be offered at the $15,000 price you can buy a US market Focus. The Opel Astra is offered as a Saturn Astra, but it's one of the most expensive non-hybrid economy cars you can buy, so they collect dust in dealer lots.
Consumer Reports tends to have an anti-domestic bias, and their reliability research uses shoddy methods.
Edmunds.com, Dan Neil of the LA Times, and dozens of other automotive sources were just as brutally critical of Detroit products 6 years ago as Consumer Reports. More recently, all of the other sources have started to give domestic products good reviews when they felt the good reviews are earned. Consumer Reports is the stand out that, with very few exceptions, tends to ruthlessly criticize anything made by Detroit.
Their reliability research is:
1. Voluntary - so everyone who happily drives a Kia or anything else and completely forgets to fill out a survey will not contribute to the Consumer Reports database. If most Kia owners who fill the survey are unhappy and most Honda owners who fill the survey are happy, it's going to bias the results tremendously. Consumer Reports has no way to know.
2. Not quantified in terms of problems - If your car is in the shop because a coolant sensor failed or the transmission started to fall apart, either way it counts for a reliability problem.
3. Not quantified in terms of maintenance - My friend was proud because she only ever had scheduled maintenance on her Honda Accord, including replacement of the timing belt. I never had the replace the timing belt (or chain, whatever) on my Chevrolet Impala in over 100,000 miles of ownership. So the Chevy was cheaper to maintain ($150 in unscheduled maintenance in the first 120,000 miles of ownership) - but Consumer Reports does not measure that.
4. Does not deliver its figures in absolute terms - If the most reliable family sedan has a 3.2% chance of failure and the least reliable has a 4.5% chance of failure, the reliability rating of either should not factor strongly into the buying process. By most metrics, the least reliable car you can buy in 2008 is likely to have fewer mechanical defects in the first 100,000 miles of ownership than the most reliable car you could buy in 1998. The whole industry has made tremendous improvements in vehicle quality.
5. Delineates reliability ratings in 5 categories. A car with reliability 79% out of the absolute scale gets the same 4 stars as one with reliability 61% of the absolute scale, and that 18% may (depending upon the size of the absolute scale) be a big difference. It's certainly a bigger difference than the one between the car at 79% and 81%, and that 2% gap merits an additional star.
Research reliability stats from Truedelta.com, JD Powers, or any other source. GM product reliability is worlds ahead of where it was ten or twenty years back.
I've been treated like junk at a Honda dealership and at a Hyundai dealership, so bad dealership treatment is not unique to GM (for the record, a second Honda dealership treated us like royalty).
But I do think you have a legitimate point. Detroit made inferior products for so long that they lost the faith of most American buyers. It will take years of consistent quality to win it back, and that's time they don't have. I don't know what will happen.
And of course, none of the other automakers have brought an electric car like the Volt to market yet either. I suppose hackus believes the oil companies control every automaker.
The following GM products have won comparison tests and awards, including some 'car of the year' awards:
2007 Saturn Aura midsize sedan. 2008 Chevy Malibu sedan. 2008 Cadillac CTS luxury sport sedan. 2007 Saturn Outlook 8 passenger crossover SUV and its corporate cousins the 2007 GMC Acadia, 2008 Buick Enclave, and 2009 Chevy Traverse. 2008 Saturn Vue small SUV. 2007 Chevy Avalanche pickup. 2007 Chevy Silverado pickup (and GMC Sierra). 2007 Chevy Tahoe and Suburban fullsize SUV (and GMC Yukon and Cadillac Escalade). 2006 Chevy Corvette. 2008 Pontiac G8 large sedan.
The Aura, Malibu, CTS, Outlook, Acadia, Enclave, Traverse, and Vue all have 5 star crash ratings across the board from the US government, standard electronic stability control, and Good ratings in the Insurance Institute of Highway Safety front offset and side crash test.
The Aura and Malibu 4-cylinder models offer best-in-class midsize sedan fuel economy among non-hybrid models until the 2010 Fusion goes on sale later this spring. The Outlook and its three cousins offer best-in-class fuel economy for 8 passenger vehicles, with the sole exceptions of the 4-cylinder and hybrid trims of the Toyota Highlander. The Chevy Silverado Crew Cab 4WD pickup is longer, wider, and 800 pounds heavier than the Honda Ridgeline pickup, its engine displaces an additional 1.8 liters, it has 60 additional horsepower and 60 additional foot pounds of peak torque, it carries an additional 150 pounds in the bed and tows 2300 pounds more, and gets just 1 mile per gallon less in the city and on the highway.
GM's lineup is far from complete. The 2010 Buick LaCrosse will be a welcome replacement to the mostly useless current Buick sedans. With the exception of the G8 and the Solstice, Pontiac is limping along with a joke lineup. The 2011 Chevy Cruze, Chevy Volt, and Chevy Spark will be welcome fixes for the gaping weakness in GM's small vehicle offerings. But for the first time in more than 20 years, GM has a real selection of damn good products. That's not damn good for a domestic, it's damn good, period.
1. US gasoline is lower octane than European gasoline. The Astra engine was detuned from its European spec to use the cheapest fuel here, because almost all Americans buying economy cars expect to use the default low octane fuel.
2. GM, Ford, Honda, Toyota and Hyundai ALL sell diesel cars outside the US. Right now only Volkswagen and Mercedes offer diesel engine cars in the US because our diesel emission standards for non-commercial vehicles are very difficult to satisfy. If you're going to find the situation "offending", be offended by the automakers like Honda and Toyota who had plenty of resources to offer diesels in the US (unlike the domestic automakers) and still failed to do it.
Just as long as there isn't a fire. Since adding water to the aluminum releases hydrogen, and the fire itself melts off the top layer of aluminum, so that the water can get the next layer to release hydrogen, which melts off the following layer... your stored aluminum has more explosive combustion potential than gasoline.
I'm sure a chemist can explain it better than I can. I used to live near a company that refined aluminum as part of their production processes, and every few years they would have a fire or explosion you could hear five miles away.
?? Haskell is quite good for text processing. Java/Swing has excellent support.
I think you need to define your criteria better.
C++ is a superior choice for text processing if high performance is critical. Haskell is a relatively fast programming language, but not quite on par with C++. In terms of development time, Haskell can handle all sorts of text-processing abstractions with pretty compact code, and has a good regular expression library. So if developer time is critical, Haskell may well be a much better choice. I can't speak for Lisp.
I suspect Java/Swing is better supported across platforms than Perl/TK. Java/Swing is needlessly complex and has a nasty learning curve, but it works perfectly well. Perl/TK may be far easier to use or more productive (I wouldn't know, I've never done GUI programming with Perl).
The fellow was certainly egotistical. But I think his insults were almost necessary. He made an unholy fortune betting against sub-prime mortgages. Obviously he was one of the people smart enough to see what was coming for the financial and real estate markets in 2008. I think it drives home that a lot of people who at first glance look like they know what they're doing with high level finance are out of their league.
Sometimes you have to examine the social costs of your laws and policies. We could save ourselves plenty of money in the short term by ending laws against discrimination when hiring pregnant women and parents with young children, or by ending medical leave laws, or by shutting down the public schools.
But society ultimately benefits economically from the presence of an educated pool of labor. The children of those working parents grow up and get jobs. Those children educated in the public schools get jobs, and some of them even manage to get a good education. Those workers don't engage in criminal behavior, and they become your customers and employees. They also share tax burdens with you.
If the woman got fired for incompetence, or criminal activity, or unprofessional behavior, that's fine and her miscarriage is irrelevant. But within reason, our employment laws should be encouraging people who work to have children. If they found some excuse to dismiss her because of the expense, they were engaging in illegal - and more importantly, immoral - behavior.
The good is time. A land-based solar collection facility receives its maximum input of solar energy about 25% of the day, and works inefficiently or not at all when there is cloud cover. The amount of time energy can be collected is limited by the curvature of the earth - as the earth spins, the sun sinks over the horizon.
A solar array in space does not have to worry about cloud cover. And because it's many miles higher from the earth's surface than the land based solar panel, it can collect energy to beam to the ground for far longer - put it high enough, and you can get solar energy more than 90% of the day.
Considering the massive costs of putting one or more enormous solar arrays into space, I still don't see how this idea pays for itself. But after you've paid the construction costs, on an ongoing basis it's far more efficient than land-based solar.
Personally, I think we should be pursuing next generation nuclear power instead - there are nuclear reactor designs in production that don't use or create weapons-grade nuclear materials. And maybe Fusion power would not be perpetually 20 years in the future if we invested as much money in it as we spent on the Apollo program.
It's my understanding from some friends in the Scranton area that the judges are now open to civil lawsuits. So they have 5000 potential plaintiffs who can sue them for damages.
They also lose their state pensions, and I believe Pennsylvania has a law on the books preventing them from earning any profit from a book deal.
If you don't, then you have to accept the possibility of higher crime rates.
That's just it, capital punishment has not been statistically demonstrated to reduce crime rates. Capital punishment deters sane, reasonable people - which aren't the kind of people that commit capital crimes.
If someone raped or murdered a member of my family, I would be frothing at the mouth screaming for his or her death, and more than willing to personally kill them in retaliation. But it won't undo trauma or bring back the dead.
I would support capital punishment as a deterrent, but statistically it doesn't actually deter anyone. So no matter how much we hate these people, it's a waste of time. Nothing we do, no matter how vicious, is going to give those 5000 people their time back. All the criminal justice system can do is keep criminals out of circulation, it can't undo the damage.
From what I understand:
The judges involve get disbarred (cannot practice law again).
The judges lose their PA state pension for being convicted of a felony.
The judges' financial assets are up for grabs in 5000 civil lawsuits from the families and friends of 5000 poor, abused kids.
These guys, hopefully, will get out of prison in their mid 60s with no job skills they can use, no money, and nothing but Social Security to depend upon. That's probably the best justice we can get. If you believe in God, hope God pays them back.
We ran that test on our servers on the raw hard drives with NTFS filesystems, and then on Truecrypt-encrypted disks with NTFS filesystems. Believe it or not, the Truecrypt disks actually read and wrote data faster than the raw disks. The advantage wasn't huge, but it was a consistent 2 MB/s.
I can't believe the author of this article. There are two enormous benefits to a web application that he overlooks:
1. Software Updates. We deploy updates to the server when we're ready, and all clients get the updates immediately. End of story.
2. Tech Support. With our fat client software, any time there was almost any problem with a client PC we got a phone call. That included hundreds of times when power cords were disconnected, our software was inadvertently uninstalled, icons were accidentally renamed, hardware failed, PCs were stolen, and viruses caused problems. With our web based system, it's far easier to (politely) inform both the end users and their in-house support staff that a PC that can't access the internet for any reason is their own problem, not ours.
A web based system has plenty of its own headaches, but it's far easier than the fat client software it replaced.
Funny, the 10-12 second 0-60 mph times of the Toyota Prius and Honda Civic Hybrid was perfectly normal 20 years ago.
Only recently have we suddently decided that a V6 family sedan needs to effortlessly keep pace with all but the best 1960s muscle cars. There are pickup trucks on the road today that can haul two tons of gear faster than a 1980s truck would run when empty.
I love high performance cars, but I don't understand why suddenly economy cars need to run like greased lightning.
1. Tightening emissions standards make for more exhaust restrictions. Exhaust restrictions sap power and economy from the vehicles.
2. Vehicle fuel economy sticker ratings were revised downward by 10-20% by the EPA in 2007. A car rated at 33 miles per gallon today would have been rated 36-40 miles per gallon in 1988.
3. The US has very high emissions regulations for diesel engines. Thus far, only Volkswagen (and child company Audi) and Mercedes offer diesel engine passenger vehicles in the US, despite the fact that nearly every automaker - including Toyota, Honda, Ford, and General Motors - offers diesel engine vehicles overseas. Diesel is more energy dense than gasoline and can be combusted more efficiently, so diesels often get extremely good fuel economy. But people can't buy them.
4. Diesel fuel is expensive in the US. Environmentally, it may make sense to get 38 miles per gallon from a diesel instead of 28 miles per gallon from a gasoline engine. But financially, a lot of buyers break even or even save money getting the cheaper fuel.
5. Performance standards have increased dramatically. Family sedans today with 4 cylinder engines sport more power and faster acceleration than V8 family sedans from 1988. That extra power reduces fuel economy. Related to that, larger wheels in proportion to the total vehicle size are in style and having the engine turn a bigger wheel also requires more work.
6. Newer electronics, airbags, and crash safety structural improvements add weight, and of course weight saps fuel economy.
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Yeah, but I've yet to encounter a car or home boiler designed to run on burning paper.
I agree.
Use of fossil fuels puts toxic emissions in the environment. Use of fossil fuels may contribute to global climate change. (I won't open that can of worms any further.) Use of fossil fuels puts our energy needs at the mercy of market manipulation and the state of international politics. Use of fossil fuels places our energy dependence on a resource that is not renewable - well, it does renew, but not in acceptable time frame for human needs. Use of fossil fuels puts a lot of the jobs and money in energy production outside the US borders.
I think it's clear we need something on the order of the Apollo Program, the massive undertaking that developed the technology to put humanity on the moon. Something similar should be put into place for energy. I'd prefer nuclear fission, from what I know of usable energy sources that still seems to be the most cost effective and resource efficient. But I am sure the cost and technology roadblocks to massive use of solar power, wind, tidal, solar space arrays, or even fusion energy would fall in short order if enough resources were directed at the problem.
www.indeed.com is a search engine to look through several different job sites. They have 18,000 Perl developer openings listed.
The language is far from dead.
It doesn't have to be that way. There is ongoing research to produce biodiesel from sources like Miscanthus (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miscanthus), Switchgrass (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switchgrass) or Algae (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algae_fuel). We'll do more harm than good to the environment as long as we continue using biofuels sourced from palm oil or corn, but with the right sources biofuels are a win.
Any of those three sources I listed can be grown on land that is poorly suited to growing traditional food crops.
But for now, diesel is once again so cheap that biofuels are not cost effective.
SUVs, however, are better at improving the gene pool by helping to eliminate people who are stupid enough to buy and drive SUVs, which is not really their intended job, even if it is a net benefit to society. :)
The only problem is, in a fair number of cases innocents get taken out along with the SUV driver. Regardless of whether it's a child in the back, a pedestrian along the road, or the occupant of another car, collateral damage is not acceptable.
General Motors uses electronic power steering in a lot of their cars, and it works fine but gives the numb feeling you describe. In a lot of their newer models, they've gone back to hydraulic assist power steering, which gives far better steering feel but saps an extra mile per gallon of fuel economy. Electric steering was one of the reasons the previous Chevy Malibu and previous Chevy Impala offered best-in-class V6 sedan fuel economy. I believe cheaper General Motors models still use electric.
Most competing automakers use hydraulic steering, which is why the steering is generally better.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compression_ratio
Higher octane fuels let you run the engine at a higher compression ratio, which is more mechanically efficient. So while the net amount of energy in the fuel does not change, higher octane fuel still permits more efficiency.
There's a reason performance cars often require, or at least benefit from, higher octane fuel.
Per what I wrote, US automaker product reliability is way up compared to where it was a few years ago. And the fuel economy of their larger vehicles is, in many cases, at or near best-in-class. Fuel economy was a factor, and the vehicles still ranked well or won. The vehicles are highly efficient for their size.
The Chevy Malibu and Saturn Aura are 5.7 inches (14.5 cm) longer but 2.1 inches (5.3 cm) narrower than the European and South American Market Honda Accord. The days of 8 meter long, 2 meter wide American sedans are dead. The Saturn Outlook crossover SUV and its cousins are the same size as a minivan, and only the upper trim levels of the Honda Odyssey offer better fuel economy. The fact that they're huge is the whole point - you can carry 8 people in reasonable comfort plus a reasonable amount of gear. If you aren't going to carry that many, buy something smaller.
For European market cars, some do sell well. But in many cases, the cost of selling the same model in the US is too high. The European Ford Focus is a good car, but the European model shares components with the Volvo S40, and could not profitably be offered at the $15,000 price you can buy a US market Focus. The Opel Astra is offered as a Saturn Astra, but it's one of the most expensive non-hybrid economy cars you can buy, so they collect dust in dealer lots.
Consumer Reports tends to have an anti-domestic bias, and their reliability research uses shoddy methods.
Edmunds.com, Dan Neil of the LA Times, and dozens of other automotive sources were just as brutally critical of Detroit products 6 years ago as Consumer Reports. More recently, all of the other sources have started to give domestic products good reviews when they felt the good reviews are earned. Consumer Reports is the stand out that, with very few exceptions, tends to ruthlessly criticize anything made by Detroit.
Their reliability research is:
1. Voluntary - so everyone who happily drives a Kia or anything else and completely forgets to fill out a survey will not contribute to the Consumer Reports database. If most Kia owners who fill the survey are unhappy and most Honda owners who fill the survey are happy, it's going to bias the results tremendously. Consumer Reports has no way to know.
2. Not quantified in terms of problems - If your car is in the shop because a coolant sensor failed or the transmission started to fall apart, either way it counts for a reliability problem.
3. Not quantified in terms of maintenance - My friend was proud because she only ever had scheduled maintenance on her Honda Accord, including replacement of the timing belt. I never had the replace the timing belt (or chain, whatever) on my Chevrolet Impala in over 100,000 miles of ownership. So the Chevy was cheaper to maintain ($150 in unscheduled maintenance in the first 120,000 miles of ownership) - but Consumer Reports does not measure that.
4. Does not deliver its figures in absolute terms - If the most reliable family sedan has a 3.2% chance of failure and the least reliable has a 4.5% chance of failure, the reliability rating of either should not factor strongly into the buying process. By most metrics, the least reliable car you can buy in 2008 is likely to have fewer mechanical defects in the first 100,000 miles of ownership than the most reliable car you could buy in 1998. The whole industry has made tremendous improvements in vehicle quality.
5. Delineates reliability ratings in 5 categories. A car with reliability 79% out of the absolute scale gets the same 4 stars as one with reliability 61% of the absolute scale, and that 18% may (depending upon the size of the absolute scale) be a big difference. It's certainly a bigger difference than the one between the car at 79% and 81%, and that 2% gap merits an additional star.
Research reliability stats from Truedelta.com, JD Powers, or any other source. GM product reliability is worlds ahead of where it was ten or twenty years back.
I've been treated like junk at a Honda dealership and at a Hyundai dealership, so bad dealership treatment is not unique to GM (for the record, a second Honda dealership treated us like royalty).
But I do think you have a legitimate point. Detroit made inferior products for so long that they lost the faith of most American buyers. It will take years of consistent quality to win it back, and that's time they don't have. I don't know what will happen.
And of course, none of the other automakers have brought an electric car like the Volt to market yet either. I suppose hackus believes the oil companies control every automaker.
The following GM products have won comparison tests and awards, including some 'car of the year' awards:
2007 Saturn Aura midsize sedan. 2008 Chevy Malibu sedan. 2008 Cadillac CTS luxury sport sedan. 2007 Saturn Outlook 8 passenger crossover SUV and its corporate cousins the 2007 GMC Acadia, 2008 Buick Enclave, and 2009 Chevy Traverse. 2008 Saturn Vue small SUV. 2007 Chevy Avalanche pickup. 2007 Chevy Silverado pickup (and GMC Sierra). 2007 Chevy Tahoe and Suburban fullsize SUV (and GMC Yukon and Cadillac Escalade). 2006 Chevy Corvette. 2008 Pontiac G8 large sedan.
The Aura, Malibu, CTS, Outlook, Acadia, Enclave, Traverse, and Vue all have 5 star crash ratings across the board from the US government, standard electronic stability control, and Good ratings in the Insurance Institute of Highway Safety front offset and side crash test.
The Aura and Malibu 4-cylinder models offer best-in-class midsize sedan fuel economy among non-hybrid models until the 2010 Fusion goes on sale later this spring. The Outlook and its three cousins offer best-in-class fuel economy for 8 passenger vehicles, with the sole exceptions of the 4-cylinder and hybrid trims of the Toyota Highlander. The Chevy Silverado Crew Cab 4WD pickup is longer, wider, and 800 pounds heavier than the Honda Ridgeline pickup, its engine displaces an additional 1.8 liters, it has 60 additional horsepower and 60 additional foot pounds of peak torque, it carries an additional 150 pounds in the bed and tows 2300 pounds more, and gets just 1 mile per gallon less in the city and on the highway.
GM's lineup is far from complete. The 2010 Buick LaCrosse will be a welcome replacement to the mostly useless current Buick sedans. With the exception of the G8 and the Solstice, Pontiac is limping along with a joke lineup. The 2011 Chevy Cruze, Chevy Volt, and Chevy Spark will be welcome fixes for the gaping weakness in GM's small vehicle offerings. But for the first time in more than 20 years, GM has a real selection of damn good products. That's not damn good for a domestic, it's damn good, period.
1. US gasoline is lower octane than European gasoline. The Astra engine was detuned from its European spec to use the cheapest fuel here, because almost all Americans buying economy cars expect to use the default low octane fuel.
2. GM, Ford, Honda, Toyota and Hyundai ALL sell diesel cars outside the US. Right now only Volkswagen and Mercedes offer diesel engine cars in the US because our diesel emission standards for non-commercial vehicles are very difficult to satisfy. If you're going to find the situation "offending", be offended by the automakers like Honda and Toyota who had plenty of resources to offer diesels in the US (unlike the domestic automakers) and still failed to do it.
Just as long as there isn't a fire. Since adding water to the aluminum releases hydrogen, and the fire itself melts off the top layer of aluminum, so that the water can get the next layer to release hydrogen, which melts off the following layer... your stored aluminum has more explosive combustion potential than gasoline.
I'm sure a chemist can explain it better than I can. I used to live near a company that refined aluminum as part of their production processes, and every few years they would have a fire or explosion you could hear five miles away.
?? Haskell is quite good for text processing. Java/Swing has excellent support. I think you need to define your criteria better.
C++ is a superior choice for text processing if high performance is critical. Haskell is a relatively fast programming language, but not quite on par with C++. In terms of development time, Haskell can handle all sorts of text-processing abstractions with pretty compact code, and has a good regular expression library. So if developer time is critical, Haskell may well be a much better choice. I can't speak for Lisp.
I suspect Java/Swing is better supported across platforms than Perl/TK. Java/Swing is needlessly complex and has a nasty learning curve, but it works perfectly well. Perl/TK may be far easier to use or more productive (I wouldn't know, I've never done GUI programming with Perl).
The fellow was certainly egotistical. But I think his insults were almost necessary. He made an unholy fortune betting against sub-prime mortgages. Obviously he was one of the people smart enough to see what was coming for the financial and real estate markets in 2008. I think it drives home that a lot of people who at first glance look like they know what they're doing with high level finance are out of their league.
Sometimes you have to examine the social costs of your laws and policies. We could save ourselves plenty of money in the short term by ending laws against discrimination when hiring pregnant women and parents with young children, or by ending medical leave laws, or by shutting down the public schools.
But society ultimately benefits economically from the presence of an educated pool of labor. The children of those working parents grow up and get jobs. Those children educated in the public schools get jobs, and some of them even manage to get a good education. Those workers don't engage in criminal behavior, and they become your customers and employees. They also share tax burdens with you.
If the woman got fired for incompetence, or criminal activity, or unprofessional behavior, that's fine and her miscarriage is irrelevant. But within reason, our employment laws should be encouraging people who work to have children. If they found some excuse to dismiss her because of the expense, they were engaging in illegal - and more importantly, immoral - behavior.
The good is time. A land-based solar collection facility receives its maximum input of solar energy about 25% of the day, and works inefficiently or not at all when there is cloud cover. The amount of time energy can be collected is limited by the curvature of the earth - as the earth spins, the sun sinks over the horizon.
A solar array in space does not have to worry about cloud cover. And because it's many miles higher from the earth's surface than the land based solar panel, it can collect energy to beam to the ground for far longer - put it high enough, and you can get solar energy more than 90% of the day.
Considering the massive costs of putting one or more enormous solar arrays into space, I still don't see how this idea pays for itself. But after you've paid the construction costs, on an ongoing basis it's far more efficient than land-based solar.
Personally, I think we should be pursuing next generation nuclear power instead - there are nuclear reactor designs in production that don't use or create weapons-grade nuclear materials. And maybe Fusion power would not be perpetually 20 years in the future if we invested as much money in it as we spent on the Apollo program.
It's my understanding from some friends in the Scranton area that the judges are now open to civil lawsuits. So they have 5000 potential plaintiffs who can sue them for damages.
They also lose their state pensions, and I believe Pennsylvania has a law on the books preventing them from earning any profit from a book deal.
I hope they end up without a penny.
If you don't, then you have to accept the possibility of higher crime rates.
That's just it, capital punishment has not been statistically demonstrated to reduce crime rates. Capital punishment deters sane, reasonable people - which aren't the kind of people that commit capital crimes.
If someone raped or murdered a member of my family, I would be frothing at the mouth screaming for his or her death, and more than willing to personally kill them in retaliation. But it won't undo trauma or bring back the dead.
From what I understand:
These guys, hopefully, will get out of prison in their mid 60s with no job skills they can use, no money, and nothing but Social Security to depend upon. That's probably the best justice we can get. If you believe in God, hope God pays them back.
This page has some very simple disk testing which you can run in Linux or with cygwin for disk IO bandwidth: http://www.westnet.com/~gsmith/content/postgresql/pg-disktesting.htm
We ran that test on our servers on the raw hard drives with NTFS filesystems, and then on Truecrypt-encrypted disks with NTFS filesystems. Believe it or not, the Truecrypt disks actually read and wrote data faster than the raw disks. The advantage wasn't huge, but it was a consistent 2 MB/s.
Conduct your own tests.
I can't believe the author of this article. There are two enormous benefits to a web application that he overlooks:
1. Software Updates. We deploy updates to the server when we're ready, and all clients get the updates immediately. End of story.
2. Tech Support. With our fat client software, any time there was almost any problem with a client PC we got a phone call. That included hundreds of times when power cords were disconnected, our software was inadvertently uninstalled, icons were accidentally renamed, hardware failed, PCs were stolen, and viruses caused problems. With our web based system, it's far easier to (politely) inform both the end users and their in-house support staff that a PC that can't access the internet for any reason is their own problem, not ours.
A web based system has plenty of its own headaches, but it's far easier than the fat client software it replaced.
Funny, the 10-12 second 0-60 mph times of the Toyota Prius and Honda Civic Hybrid was perfectly normal 20 years ago.
Only recently have we suddently decided that a V6 family sedan needs to effortlessly keep pace with all but the best 1960s muscle cars. There are pickup trucks on the road today that can haul two tons of gear faster than a 1980s truck would run when empty.
I love high performance cars, but I don't understand why suddenly economy cars need to run like greased lightning.
6 reasons:
1. Tightening emissions standards make for more exhaust restrictions. Exhaust restrictions sap power and economy from the vehicles.
2. Vehicle fuel economy sticker ratings were revised downward by 10-20% by the EPA in 2007. A car rated at 33 miles per gallon today would have been rated 36-40 miles per gallon in 1988.
3. The US has very high emissions regulations for diesel engines. Thus far, only Volkswagen (and child company Audi) and Mercedes offer diesel engine passenger vehicles in the US, despite the fact that nearly every automaker - including Toyota, Honda, Ford, and General Motors - offers diesel engine vehicles overseas. Diesel is more energy dense than gasoline and can be combusted more efficiently, so diesels often get extremely good fuel economy. But people can't buy them.
4. Diesel fuel is expensive in the US. Environmentally, it may make sense to get 38 miles per gallon from a diesel instead of 28 miles per gallon from a gasoline engine. But financially, a lot of buyers break even or even save money getting the cheaper fuel.
5. Performance standards have increased dramatically. Family sedans today with 4 cylinder engines sport more power and faster acceleration than V8 family sedans from 1988. That extra power reduces fuel economy. Related to that, larger wheels in proportion to the total vehicle size are in style and having the engine turn a bigger wheel also requires more work.
6. Newer electronics, airbags, and crash safety structural improvements add weight, and of course weight saps fuel economy.
Any questions?