California is an example of the "bread and circuses" situation that happens when the population is TOO involved in direct government. When EVERYTHING is on the ballot as a proposition, bad things can happen.
In this state's case, a lot of things led to poor money situation, but two stand out: 1) when times were good, they didn't allow themselves a 'rainy day fund' and mandated that any surpluses had to be spent out. 2) Net taxes paid OUT to the federal gov. are staggering, and California is the gross highest - in 2001, their "balance of payments" figure was 58 BILLION dollars.
The moon is more important too, being that it shines at night. The sun only shines during the day when it's light out anyway
Reminds me of the time that "Bill Nye the Science Guy" gave a show/workshop in Waco, Texas and mentioned how the moon doesn't shine on its own, but reflects the sun, and quoted the Bible as saying the moon was a light. Several people stormed out, and he even got heckled. Story here.
And one of the main things I've observed lately is that sometimes it's the battery chargers that are ultimately the issue when problems start to become reoccurring.
Good article here on how to build your own smarter battery charger. They guy who put the article together recounts how his power tool batteries kept going bad. In passing he mentions that the charger that comes with many batteries isn't always compatible with the batteries, or that they sometimes are just badly designed.
My rule of thumb - if the batteries are charged and plugged in, but still warm hours later, something's going wrong.
I was under the impression that VMs couldn't be created with Player either
Might I introduce you to http://www.easyvmx.com/ ? Online creator of blank vms, complete to the spec you choose. Pretty nifty and fast, even if you do have access to regular vmware creation.
Ignorance is not stupidity. NASA has addressed the ignorance. Good for them.
Repeated ignorance, is stupidity, however. Falling for a "419 scam" once, is ignorance. Falling for a second is stupidity. "Ignorance" is "doesn't know", while "stupidity" is "won't know."
Or, as our former president once said: "Fool me once..."
I'm glad NASA is looking at this, but saddened that they have to.
As some fellow slashdotter has got in his signature: I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization.
I've heard the quote that "taxes are the cost of our civilization", but the contrary also fits; "taxes are the cost of our LACK of civilization."
Military, social security, medical care, etc. Most of the things for which money is forcibly taken by our government is used to provide for things because we AREN'T civilized. What would our taxes be if we didn't rob and kill each other? What would our taxes be if we actually took care of the poor and indigent among us voluntarily, or made a point of not getting them in that state in the first place?
To be sure, there are some 'commons' for which we pay that AREN'T about us being uncouth animals; roads, fire dept., etc.
Teaching BARELY falls on this line; as a former teacher, I can state that nobody gets into it for the money. Most of them can make MUCH more money in the private sector. 'Summers off' isn't true if you want to keep getting raises as they're tied to continuing education (which you usually do in the summers). Most teachers are in it because they LIKE teaching and LIKE the kids and LIKE the subject matter, and many would do it for cheap if they knew that they could still eat and not worry about medical bills. We have a HUGE number of retired or semi-retired adults (and stay-at-home parents) who would do it if we made it just plain practical. Over a hundred years ago, parents would take turns making meals for their kids' teacher.
Yes, lots of generalizations in the above, but the point is sound. If we were more civilized, we'd do a better job of taking care of each others' kids.
Once you've figured out how to price text books about the same as a best seller hard-cover book instead $100-200 a copy, I'll be willing to worry about teachers selling lesson plans.
My wife's grad school professor was sharing around a small, paperback non-fiction book about administration that she had picked up for ~$30 and in passing had asked the class what the books for HER OWN CLASS were running. The prof was genuinely shocked that the two thin books she had recommended for the class cost the students ~$200 of their own money (not covered by the scholarship that went with the internship). She said she was trying to keep the cost of the books at under $100, and didn't think that the books she had recommended cost that much.
This is a prof who didn't bother to look up the books online before choosing them for the class. It's MUCH WORSE when the prof recommends their OWN book.
I think the reason that only one dimension matters is that in our 'winner-take-all' federal election system, it will always be a battle between two people on a single line. Were there viable alternative parties, you would see dialog being pulled in other dimensions. For example: the Republican right is being torn apart now by religious conservatives and corporatists. Were alternatives out there, they could bicker it out in regular elections and Instant Runoff Voting or something similar would allow them to tug discussion into other directions/dimensions. Those on the 'left' or 'middle' may find their religious or financial angle more to their liking and be swayed. Picture three people standing at vertices of a triangle. Four candidates would put us into three dimensions, etc.
As Dennis Miller had said in (I believe) Bush Sr. vs. Dukakis: "It's like being asked who's a better cat, Rin Tin Tin or Lassie." Every year, we choose the 'lesser of two evils': choosing the politician we dislike the least.
I used to live in a Tri-City area outside of Chicago. The three towns were going to go in on a municipal internet system that would have provided TV, Phone, Internet, over fiber-optic.
I still live in that area - Geneva - and the Comcast dirty tricks were pretty bad. Actual lies daily in the mailbox were fair game, since they weren't selling anything, and it wasn't a candidate they were fighting for or against.
The referendum came up in an 'off-year', so the voters were an older bunch.
The thing that makes the Tri-Cities a ripe target for muni-broadband is that the town owns the poles, too. All of the utilities are leasing from the towns, and I don't believe it's exclusive. For example, our power is run over Geneva-owned wires, and the town buys the power from upstate and resells.
I do not understand why they don't make a diesel/electric hybrid vehicle, surely that would be a perfect mix?
There are some in-the works, but the catch is that hybrids work by taking the wild swings out of the tachometer. If you can keep the engine either off or steady, then you keep in the optimal power area for that engine. Gas engines have a fairly narrow "optimal" area, and thus benefit by being kept in this range. My 2001 Honda Insight (the little 2-seater model) with a CVT generally keeps the tach between 1500 and 3000 all the time, depending on travel speed.
Diesel engines have a very wide power band, such that they're almost always in the right range. Thus, they don't benefit as well from the use of a electric helper. There was a recent story here on/. where someone had shoved a diesel engine into an Insight (I don't know if old or new model). While they saw great MPG gains, it was also clear that the electric assist motor didn't come into play as often as it did with the old gas motor. The experimenters had future plans to try and change when the electric kicked in, but hadn't gotten to it.
Here in the US, diesel passenger cars are relatively rare and tend to be German imports (VW mostly, and a few older Mercedes); up until recently diesel fuel had a fairly high sulfur standard and the emissions were horrible. Early American diesel passenger cars were pretty poorly made, as well.
I agree with you that we don't need a law against texting any more than we need a law against doing surgery while driving, or assembling model plane while driving, or any other minutia.
However, it was pointed out to me that the goal is primarily that of getting the clue in to new drivers (primarily teens) that it's not a good idea. There's already a law against it, but enforcement is haphazard and unless it's explicitly spelled out, you won't get any recognition or buy-in by the youth. Once it's a law, they'll nod and either go with it or not, but will at least recognize it.
And nothing is leaked? I mean really, Not a single whistleblower in the government?
Terry Pratchet had said the same in a footnote in "The Hogfather". Don't have my copy handy, but he said it was amazing that the same government that people ascribed great incompetence to could also be responsible for hiding aliens, thought-control experiments, and all other sorts of weird, nefarious stuff. He closed the same footnote with this line: "The truth is out there - the lies are in your head."
In the swankier part of town, I saw some kid (16 tops) drive into the Target parking lot yesterday in a Z3. That car is as good as wrecked...
"Click and Clack", the NPR Car Talk guys had a woman call in one time trying to decide whether to get her 16 year old daughter the Z3 or the Z4 for her first car, and looking for recommendations from the hosts. They had recommended getting her daughter a coffin instead, and just saving all of the waiting.
If only there was some sort of token people could use to activate the meters.
With parking rates the way they are in the city, the number of needed is pretty impractical. The problem in the US is that larger value coins either haven't taken off ($1 coin - hen's teeth) and there's nothing larger.
A conspiracy theorist might point out at this point that coins are minted by the government, but that paper is run by the Federal Reserve - I can't back this up.
Up in Oregon, for at least one year (maybe more) hybrids and electric vehicles were charged double for their annual registration - $60 compared to $30 for a regular vehicle. This was also a year where Oregon was offering a 1000-1500 deduction for buying a hybrid. Left hand, meet right.
They have since stopped doing this, but the "fair share" argument was what railroaded it through.
Not to trivialize what you or anyone else goes through, and it's true that all forms of theft are hell for those who go through it, but my point was that in the current framing and the way that costs and cleanup are distributed, the sole responsibility for taking care of it is up to the person who's been 'robbed.' If someone physically steals your checkbook and forges a bunch of checks, you can go to the police and file a police report, then go to the bank and sign "I did not write these checks" on a few forms, and (other than sometimes the bounce fees) it's up to the bank which didn't check the signature as they're expected to do. This has happened to me, and the bank promptly gave me back the money. You may have had a peripheral responsibility - lost a checkbook - but it's essentially just paper until someone else treats it as more than that without really checking.
Yes, it's hell, but the problem is that YOU are ultimately responsible for all of the problems caused by someone else not really doing their job. My mother's next door neighbor has had many people open multiple credit lines, cell phone accounts and even commit crimes in his name. He carries a card with him at all times that tells the police "this isn't the man you're looking for", but has still ending up spending an hour at the station whenever he deals with the police (traffic stop, usually - he drives a lot for work).
In identity theft, your good name is 'stolen' because the people who are paid to guard it don't always do a great job, and limited in the tools at their disposal (such as relying on 'secrets' like your SS# and mother's maiden name).
I HATE this term. It's not identity theft. That implies that something of yours was stolen. As in "burglars broke into my car and stole my CDs, iPod, and identity." As in: "if I had locked the doors and hid the stuff under the seat it wouldn't have happened." This makes it your responsibility to bat cleanup for something that you really had no influence over.
What's really happening should be called "credit fraud" or "financial fraud". As in: some stranger wandered into a bank a thousand miles from my house with some personal info on me they got from a friend who works at the restaurant down the street and opened a credit card and bought a cell phone in my name, and the bank responsible didn't really check out the story before believing it. That should be THEIR responsibility to clean up.
The sooner we reframe the problem, the sooner something can actually be done about it. Until then, we will continue to have people trying to solve problems that they didn't cause and couldn't have really stopped.
Or perhaps letting her have access to several of the show based sites that have content for the kids
(Sid the Science Kid, Sesame Street, and several other PBS, Disney and Nick JR. shows)
I tried pressing a tangerine iMac G3 (450MHz, I think) into service and found that those PBS sites - frankly: any Flash stuff - would bring it to its knees. I had tried a fresh install of 10.3 (debated 10.4) and even tried a Ubuntu installation, but Gnash wasn't quite up to their Flash version detection tricks.
But: even under Mac OSes, the Flash sites would kill the poor thing. CPU would be completely pinned and the screen still couldn't update fast enough to make some of the games playable.
So if you see a 18-year old from New York use a SSN that was issued in 1968 to someone in California, you might just have a problem.
Before they required SS#s on tax returns, my younger brother got his number when he was 16 and began to work. For about two months, his employer kept getting 'you may have a problem' letters from the SS dept. Eventually, it was uncovered that the SS dept. had also given his number to a three year-old girl elsewhere. My brother ended up having to get a new SS#.
Doesn't disprove your point - eventually it got ironed out.
It stops when people are so fed up with this nonsense that they won't fly on airlines any more.
Amen. I've got a four person, 1200 mile trip to Florida planned in a few months, and time spent getting TO the airport, waiting at the airport, then getting back out at the other end, plus airfare costs and car rental all add up to make just driving the whole way viable.
What we're starting to see (even for business travel) is that the time spent trying to use air travel domestically is steadily going up, so that the 'might as well drive' radius is also going up. My wife was requested to arrive two hours early for a flight from Tucson to Phoenix - a flight so short that the 'fasten seat belts' light never turned off because ascent was immediately followed by descent (it was a layover for a flight to Chicago, so she had no choice).
A natural resource (accidentally ignited by humans) has destroyed a town completely.
Yes, Centralia is pretty bad, and the street and houses falling into the ground is pretty bad too, but trivial point; a LOT of the coal was surface air exposed. IIRC, if that much coal is exposed to air for long enough, it will gradually smolder.
Worse: underground, a cavern of coal can generate TREMENDOUS heat. Early attempts at fighting coal mine fires of this size with water were abandoned - the heat was high enough that it would break the water into oxygen and hydrogen and further feed the fire.
I once heard it described as "everyone has their own personal safety zone". When a person is involved in an activity - any - they subconsciously add up all of the risks, all of the benefits, and do what they need to get to their zone.
In the case of driving, a person in a little, old car on a rain-covered highway will adapt their behavior to get into their zone; slowing down, turning down the radio to increase concentration, etc. Change a variable (such as vehicle size) and the driver will recalculate. Wish I had the study, but somewhere it had been determined that when users moved up in vehicle size, seat belt usage dropped. This says nothing about different people in similar situations, but the same person across differing situations.
Related: deaths due to rollover are about four times higher in four-wheel drive vehicles than two-wheel-drive version of the same vehicle (I believe the Ford Bronco was used in that study). The introduction of anti-lock-brakes resulted in an uptick of single car ("went off road") accidents over non-ABS versions of the same cars - turns out drivers were steering into a skid which never happened.
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In this state's case, a lot of things led to poor money situation, but two stand out: 1) when times were good, they didn't allow themselves a 'rainy day fund' and mandated that any surpluses had to be spent out. 2) Net taxes paid OUT to the federal gov. are staggering, and California is the gross highest - in 2001, their "balance of payments" figure was 58 BILLION dollars.
Reminds me of the time that "Bill Nye the Science Guy" gave a show/workshop in Waco, Texas and mentioned how the moon doesn't shine on its own, but reflects the sun, and quoted the Bible as saying the moon was a light. Several people stormed out, and he even got heckled. Story here.
Good article here on how to build your own smarter battery charger. They guy who put the article together recounts how his power tool batteries kept going bad. In passing he mentions that the charger that comes with many batteries isn't always compatible with the batteries, or that they sometimes are just badly designed.
My rule of thumb - if the batteries are charged and plugged in, but still warm hours later, something's going wrong.
Might I introduce you to http://www.easyvmx.com/ ? Online creator of blank vms, complete to the spec you choose. Pretty nifty and fast, even if you do have access to regular vmware creation.
Repeated ignorance, is stupidity, however. Falling for a "419 scam" once, is ignorance. Falling for a second is stupidity. "Ignorance" is "doesn't know", while "stupidity" is "won't know."
Or, as our former president once said: "Fool me once..."
I'm glad NASA is looking at this, but saddened that they have to.
I've heard the quote that "taxes are the cost of our civilization", but the contrary also fits; "taxes are the cost of our LACK of civilization."
Military, social security, medical care, etc. Most of the things for which money is forcibly taken by our government is used to provide for things because we AREN'T civilized. What would our taxes be if we didn't rob and kill each other? What would our taxes be if we actually took care of the poor and indigent among us voluntarily, or made a point of not getting them in that state in the first place?
To be sure, there are some 'commons' for which we pay that AREN'T about us being uncouth animals; roads, fire dept., etc.
Teaching BARELY falls on this line; as a former teacher, I can state that nobody gets into it for the money. Most of them can make MUCH more money in the private sector. 'Summers off' isn't true if you want to keep getting raises as they're tied to continuing education (which you usually do in the summers). Most teachers are in it because they LIKE teaching and LIKE the kids and LIKE the subject matter, and many would do it for cheap if they knew that they could still eat and not worry about medical bills. We have a HUGE number of retired or semi-retired adults (and stay-at-home parents) who would do it if we made it just plain practical. Over a hundred years ago, parents would take turns making meals for their kids' teacher.
Yes, lots of generalizations in the above, but the point is sound. If we were more civilized, we'd do a better job of taking care of each others' kids.
My wife's grad school professor was sharing around a small, paperback non-fiction book about administration that she had picked up for ~$30 and in passing had asked the class what the books for HER OWN CLASS were running. The prof was genuinely shocked that the two thin books she had recommended for the class cost the students ~$200 of their own money (not covered by the scholarship that went with the internship). She said she was trying to keep the cost of the books at under $100, and didn't think that the books she had recommended cost that much.
This is a prof who didn't bother to look up the books online before choosing them for the class. It's MUCH WORSE when the prof recommends their OWN book.
I think the reason that only one dimension matters is that in our 'winner-take-all' federal election system, it will always be a battle between two people on a single line. Were there viable alternative parties, you would see dialog being pulled in other dimensions. For example: the Republican right is being torn apart now by religious conservatives and corporatists. Were alternatives out there, they could bicker it out in regular elections and Instant Runoff Voting or something similar would allow them to tug discussion into other directions/dimensions. Those on the 'left' or 'middle' may find their religious or financial angle more to their liking and be swayed. Picture three people standing at vertices of a triangle. Four candidates would put us into three dimensions, etc.
As Dennis Miller had said in (I believe) Bush Sr. vs. Dukakis: "It's like being asked who's a better cat, Rin Tin Tin or Lassie." Every year, we choose the 'lesser of two evils': choosing the politician we dislike the least.
I still live in that area - Geneva - and the Comcast dirty tricks were pretty bad. Actual lies daily in the mailbox were fair game, since they weren't selling anything, and it wasn't a candidate they were fighting for or against.
The referendum came up in an 'off-year', so the voters were an older bunch.
The thing that makes the Tri-Cities a ripe target for muni-broadband is that the town owns the poles, too. All of the utilities are leasing from the towns, and I don't believe it's exclusive. For example, our power is run over Geneva-owned wires, and the town buys the power from upstate and resells.
Disturbingly, as I read this right now, it's marked "(Score: 2, Informative)"
Where's the "+1: Too Much Informative" mod when you need it?
There are some in-the works, but the catch is that hybrids work by taking the wild swings out of the tachometer. If you can keep the engine either off or steady, then you keep in the optimal power area for that engine. Gas engines have a fairly narrow "optimal" area, and thus benefit by being kept in this range. My 2001 Honda Insight (the little 2-seater model) with a CVT generally keeps the tach between 1500 and 3000 all the time, depending on travel speed.
Diesel engines have a very wide power band, such that they're almost always in the right range. Thus, they don't benefit as well from the use of a electric helper. There was a recent story here on /. where someone had shoved a diesel engine into an Insight (I don't know if old or new model). While they saw great MPG gains, it was also clear that the electric assist motor didn't come into play as often as it did with the old gas motor. The experimenters had future plans to try and change when the electric kicked in, but hadn't gotten to it.
Here in the US, diesel passenger cars are relatively rare and tend to be German imports (VW mostly, and a few older Mercedes); up until recently diesel fuel had a fairly high sulfur standard and the emissions were horrible. Early American diesel passenger cars were pretty poorly made, as well.
However, it was pointed out to me that the goal is primarily that of getting the clue in to new drivers (primarily teens) that it's not a good idea. There's already a law against it, but enforcement is haphazard and unless it's explicitly spelled out, you won't get any recognition or buy-in by the youth. Once it's a law, they'll nod and either go with it or not, but will at least recognize it.
Terry Pratchet had said the same in a footnote in "The Hogfather". Don't have my copy handy, but he said it was amazing that the same government that people ascribed great incompetence to could also be responsible for hiding aliens, thought-control experiments, and all other sorts of weird, nefarious stuff. He closed the same footnote with this line: "The truth is out there - the lies are in your head."
"Click and Clack", the NPR Car Talk guys had a woman call in one time trying to decide whether to get her 16 year old daughter the Z3 or the Z4 for her first car, and looking for recommendations from the hosts. They had recommended getting her daughter a coffin instead, and just saving all of the waiting.
The number of COINS needed. Arrggh - didn't read the preview.
With parking rates the way they are in the city, the number of needed is pretty impractical. The problem in the US is that larger value coins either haven't taken off ($1 coin - hen's teeth) and there's nothing larger.
A conspiracy theorist might point out at this point that coins are minted by the government, but that paper is run by the Federal Reserve - I can't back this up.
They have since stopped doing this, but the "fair share" argument was what railroaded it through.
Yes, it's hell, but the problem is that YOU are ultimately responsible for all of the problems caused by someone else not really doing their job. My mother's next door neighbor has had many people open multiple credit lines, cell phone accounts and even commit crimes in his name. He carries a card with him at all times that tells the police "this isn't the man you're looking for", but has still ending up spending an hour at the station whenever he deals with the police (traffic stop, usually - he drives a lot for work).
In identity theft, your good name is 'stolen' because the people who are paid to guard it don't always do a great job, and limited in the tools at their disposal (such as relying on 'secrets' like your SS# and mother's maiden name).
I HATE this term. It's not identity theft. That implies that something of yours was stolen. As in "burglars broke into my car and stole my CDs, iPod, and identity." As in: "if I had locked the doors and hid the stuff under the seat it wouldn't have happened." This makes it your responsibility to bat cleanup for something that you really had no influence over.
What's really happening should be called "credit fraud" or "financial fraud". As in: some stranger wandered into a bank a thousand miles from my house with some personal info on me they got from a friend who works at the restaurant down the street and opened a credit card and bought a cell phone in my name, and the bank responsible didn't really check out the story before believing it. That should be THEIR responsibility to clean up.
The sooner we reframe the problem, the sooner something can actually be done about it. Until then, we will continue to have people trying to solve problems that they didn't cause and couldn't have really stopped.
I tried pressing a tangerine iMac G3 (450MHz, I think) into service and found that those PBS sites - frankly: any Flash stuff - would bring it to its knees. I had tried a fresh install of 10.3 (debated 10.4) and even tried a Ubuntu installation, but Gnash wasn't quite up to their Flash version detection tricks.
But: even under Mac OSes, the Flash sites would kill the poor thing. CPU would be completely pinned and the screen still couldn't update fast enough to make some of the games playable.
Before they required SS#s on tax returns, my younger brother got his number when he was 16 and began to work. For about two months, his employer kept getting 'you may have a problem' letters from the SS dept. Eventually, it was uncovered that the SS dept. had also given his number to a three year-old girl elsewhere. My brother ended up having to get a new SS#.
Doesn't disprove your point - eventually it got ironed out.
Amen. I've got a four person, 1200 mile trip to Florida planned in a few months, and time spent getting TO the airport, waiting at the airport, then getting back out at the other end, plus airfare costs and car rental all add up to make just driving the whole way viable.
What we're starting to see (even for business travel) is that the time spent trying to use air travel domestically is steadily going up, so that the 'might as well drive' radius is also going up. My wife was requested to arrive two hours early for a flight from Tucson to Phoenix - a flight so short that the 'fasten seat belts' light never turned off because ascent was immediately followed by descent (it was a layover for a flight to Chicago, so she had no choice).
Should qualify that: the new 2010 Insight wouldn't qualify but the discontinued 2-seater Insight would.
Yes, Centralia is pretty bad, and the street and houses falling into the ground is pretty bad too, but trivial point; a LOT of the coal was surface air exposed. IIRC, if that much coal is exposed to air for long enough, it will gradually smolder.
Worse: underground, a cavern of coal can generate TREMENDOUS heat. Early attempts at fighting coal mine fires of this size with water were abandoned - the heat was high enough that it would break the water into oxygen and hydrogen and further feed the fire.
Smithsonian Magazine had a great story on this a couple of years ago.
In the case of driving, a person in a little, old car on a rain-covered highway will adapt their behavior to get into their zone; slowing down, turning down the radio to increase concentration, etc. Change a variable (such as vehicle size) and the driver will recalculate. Wish I had the study, but somewhere it had been determined that when users moved up in vehicle size, seat belt usage dropped. This says nothing about different people in similar situations, but the same person across differing situations.
Related: deaths due to rollover are about four times higher in four-wheel drive vehicles than two-wheel-drive version of the same vehicle (I believe the Ford Bronco was used in that study). The introduction of anti-lock-brakes resulted in an uptick of single car ("went off road") accidents over non-ABS versions of the same cars - turns out drivers were steering into a skid which never happened.