Or course, I'm an electrical guy and my work there focused mostly on the battery/ultracapacitor pack, so I'm not familiar with how they would handle it...
So if you're the eletrical guy, how many volts & amps was this thing running?
To make any real difference you power input has to be HUGE... many thousands of watts. 1,000 watts is only 1.34 horsepower. If you want even a mere ten horse power on a 12V system you're talking about 833 AMPs or current.
That's not exactly accurate. If that where true, an engie would put out 0ft/lbs of torque at it's idle rpm (~800rpm). You know this is false because if you put your car in drive/first and leave you foot off the gas, (slow clutch release on manuals), the car will move, usually at about 3-5mph.
No, my car will stall out and die.
Some cars are programmed so that when you press in the clutch it automatically raises the idle RPM to help keep you from stalling.
Also, you're forgetting about this thing called the flywheel, which stores momentum to help keep you from stalling when you try to take off.
Combining those two things, your car might not stall and die, but your understanding of the mechanics here is clearly messed up.
It's as simple as this:
If there's a surplus of torque, the engine is going to accelerate.
Uh, having torque does not make an engine accelerate. In order for a gas engine to accelerate the spark needs to advance.
This is total nonsense.
If you have extra torque (after subtracting all your frictional losses) the engine is going to accelerate.
Spark advance is a mere optimization of the combustion. There are plenty of engines out the that DON'T EVEN HAVE spark advance and still manage to accelerate.
That said, many people drive 20,000 miles per year, and for them, the 3x ($3000-6000) savings may be worth it or at least around the break even point.
Except the the more miles you drive, the more likely they are to be highway miles. If you're driving mostly highway miles you're better off with a fuel efficient regular car rather than a hybrid. On the highway, the hybrid system is just extra weight.
Wouldn't being able to partition any normal program into a program that executes (efficiently) on multiple CPU's basically require that someone solves the halting problem?
I bring this up because because it seems like, in order to partition the tasks efficiently, you'd basically need to be able to predict what the program was trying to do in advance.... and if you could predict what a program was going to do in advance of actually running it, it would seem like you have just solved the halting problem.
Any CS folks care to weigh in? This isn't really my field, but I'm quite interested to know one way or the other.
If you short something to that angle iron it's going to fry lots of things. Not to mention zapping you pretty good if you touch a live wire at 120 volts while leaning on it.
Put a resistor in the ground line. At least a hundred kiloohm. Doesn't have to be high wattage, anything will do.
Really, this is exactly what ESD mats are for. Even if he puts a resistor to ground on the bar, it won't prevent the bar from shorting circuits on a PCB to each other, thereby frying whatever touches it.
People keep mentioning multimeters, but I don't see how they can be useful if you don't have schematics.
Power supply voltages. Is your +5V output from your power supply really 5V or is it 4.5V?
when it comes to something that is already put together and doesn't have schematics, damnit I'm lost.
So sit down and draw some schematics. That's what I did when my speedometer quit working. Eventually I traced the problem to a bad $0.20 rectifier diode, but being able to look at the signal flow on paper made it easier to understand what was going on.
But how do I know that isn't a symptom of some other issue elsewhere in the system.
It's had to know for sure, but a lot of the trick is knowing what the individual parts should look like (electrically) and how they tend to fail.
In your case I would guess three causes for the bad cap: Age, overvoltage, or reverse polartiry.
So next you sit there and think of what might cause overvoltage (bad regulator) or reverse polarity (no obvious choice.. maybe the wrong wall wart got plugged into it).
Or in a computer. How do you go through it and see anything useful? Or a radio or TV? It just seems impossible without schematics because you don't know the values you should be looking for or even when should those values appear on that circuit.
You know what the deivce is supposed to do and you have the numbers on the parts (usually). Learn to read values off resistors and capacitors and look up datasheets for other parts online.
For a basic intro I reccommend and of the books by Forrest Mims, especially "Getting Started in Electronics". Those books are generally very approachable.
I'm in the process of setting up my workbench now. What do you have for solder equipment?
I have a Hakko 936, a pair of hot tweezers and a cheap vaccum bulb desoldering iron. For magnification I use an Optivisor, but I soom will have a Bausch and Lomb Stereozoom 7 up and running:)
What do you use for lighting?
Also, beer is a great idea. I was leaning towards a milling machine, but maybe what I really need is a kegerator...
I've used Whia, Xcelite, Erem and some others that I forget. IMO, VOMM is the best.
Also, on the illuminated mangnifier, try before you buy. We have one at work that I believe wasn't cheap, but its not very useful.
I recommend shelling out the money for a real stereomicroscope with a boom stand.
If you really don't have the money for that, I reccommend an Optivisor.
Those lighted magnifiers and big and clunky and always seem to be in the way of your hands.
If you're really broke or think someone is going to steal them, buy a set of cheap eye loupes.
Only if you need it for drilling. Otherwise it's unnecessarily heavy and bulky, and very likely without low enough torque settings.
Right now I probably put in and take out hundreds of screws in a day. They're all small screws.
For this I use a Milwaukee 2.4V regular old electric screwdriver.
It's smaller than a drill, so I can get it where I need it AND the battery alone for my drill weighs more than the whole screwdriver.
Bear in mind this isn't a cheap POS screwdriver, it's properly sized for the job, and has two batteries, so I have one on charge at all times.
I wouldn't think about using either of my two cordless drills on a #2 screw. They'd snap it off in a heart beat.
If I was building a deck or doing drywall, sure, I'd use the drills, but for electronic devices with a bunch of #2 and #4 screws, no way.
For working on my car, I just bought a nice IR air powered pistol grip screwdriver. Do not bring that one out in public:) Sure, I already had an impact gun and an air ratchet, but not everything needs than much torque.
The bigger problem is that all of Europe has high unemployment.,br>
It's not that high if you do an apples-to-apples comparison instead of using the obviously skewed data the US policticians like to use.
The other reason is to have the infrastructure in place to combat a Mac virus if and when it comes out.
I can see your point but...
the funny thing about this is that if you already have the infrastructure in place to patch the security hole, everybody who actually updates their system isn't going to need the new virus scanner update anyways. They'll be immune.
It's sort of like carrying around a can of fix-a-flat AND a full-size spare.
Convergence sounds so logical when you put it into a business plan. It sounds so great when you ask people if it's what they want. "Do you want one device that cooks your meals, washes the dishes AND entertains you while you eat?" Sure, they say. In the real world, though, convergence devices almost never work in the long run.
You realize you're typing on a computer right?
Convergence is great provided:
There is synergy between the devices being coverged.
The convergence is excuted well.
The obvious problem in this case is not that we don't want a cellphone that can play music but that it is intentionally crippled.
Personally, I'd love to have a device that could be a PDA, MP3 player, cellphone, and wifi/voip device all in one. The only problem is that cellphone companies always end up making things like that suck because thye try and squeeze money out of you for stupid shit. Like charging you $10 to transfer YOUR phone numbers to your new phone.
They're not going to be able to do that if your phone syncs like a Palm. They're not going to get ringtone money if you can use your own music. They're not going to get as many cellphone minutes if you can use wifi when its availible.
For example, one often hears conspiracy theories that GM could make a car that gets a zillion MPG, but big oil pays them to keep it in the dark. About three minutes of economics refutes this, by demonstrating that GM could make more selling the advanced cars than big oil would be willing to pay.
Economics can say anything, it's all about what costs you include.
For example, if we add in the ultimate cost of being assasinated, suddenly pissing off powerful people just doesn't seem as appealing anymore.
If you consider the cost of loosing your oil oligopoly vs. the price of buying a few politicians, you can see how one might say just about anything they want by considering what costs they do and do not tell you about.
Whatever the reason for its lack of certain features, it is clearly not to protect other companies, or even other divisions within Apple. If these features could be included at a competitive price, Apple would make more money by including them than it would lose elsewhere. Despite the looney theories, any MBA and Apple executive would know this.
This isn't really true. Look at "netMD" for example, or even the original minidisc. If sony had opened up the format enough, they would have sold tons of them.
But because they decided to enforce ridiculous restrictions on the user (look at Sony's version of the ipod for example), they failed.
The reality is that companies don't always do what's best for themselves or the consumer. Businesses do not always have perfect knowedge of the market and even if they did, the executives leading them still might choose to disregard it.
Sometimes this is bad (lost profit), sometimes it is good (going above and beyond OSHA regs to protect workers).
I'm sorry, you seem to be confused about the difference between an anpple and an orange. People's gas tanks DO blow up, and cars DO crash. Tires do fail, and engines breakdown.
Right, so obviously the right thing to do is to multiply the number of people killed in a failure times the failure rate.
Of course you're not doing that because it would show how paranoid and ridiculous you're being.
Right now the claim that you're making an apples to apples comparison is laughable.
However, due to very high profile disasters (ala 3-Mile Island and Chernobyl), the American public is deathly afraid of just the idea.
I don't think it's really just the disasters that are the problem. My parent's generation spent quite a while being afraid of getting vaporized in a nuclear holocaust. For them, the word nuclear has some pretty strong negative connotations.
Macs are not exempt from these rules. All machines, including Macs, are required to have properly managed user accounts, auto updates, antivirus, anti spyware, a firewall of some kind, etc.
What's funny about this is it points out the obvious failing of anti-virus software: The anti-virus company has to already have a copy of the virus.
Since nobody has any for OSX, the software is useless.
(Sure there might be some random use like telling your windows friends they're infected, but for its core purpose, it's useless. It will not protect you from one single virus because there isn't one in it's database.)
Companies also vastly overrate the importance of virus scanning. A decent security policy is much more important. An example would be stripping all execuatble attachments by default and making the user jump through a hoop or two to get them. Unlike a virus scanner, this protects you from viruses that both are and aren't in the database and doesn't cost you any update fees.
I'd argue that giving the software company a heads up to find a fix would be more responsible than immediate disclosure.
That definately preferable from the software company's point of view.
As a user, I want to know immediately. If there's no fix yet, fine. I'll make the choice to either run the risk, shut down or switch to an alternate.
There's also a fundmental problem where thousands of people could be getting hacked, but if they're only reporting it to the vendor, it's easy for them to take their time and then report it as a "low-level risk".
To replace telnet, they had to throw something out there that anyone could use and customize in any capacity (including extensions).
GPL allows all of the above:)
Whether or not you agree, and whether or not they are right, some of the companies out there want the freedom to customize code without releasing the changes.
And I want a Ferrari... doesn't mean you have to give it to me, especially for free.
Microsoft's breaking of Kerberos is just a minimal example of what can go wrong here.
It's not that it's 100% terrible that OpenSSH is BSD liscensed, but it seems like a bad idea for a package where the two main concerns are interoperability and security.
The BSD licensing has made it possible for commercial OSes to have an SSH implementation by default. That ubiquity is what killed telnet. By helping companies like Microsoft, Sun, and Apple, the OpenSSH project has helped everyone.
Except that BSD liscensing allows compaines like Microsoft the pervert a standard protocol, so that it is no longer interoperable, nor "ubiquitous"...perhaps not even secure.
There is nothing the prevents Microsoft from distributing a GPL'ed product except their own internal decisions.
The biggest difference is, of course, that they would have to publish any changes. To me, it seems obvious the you should WANT them publish any changes to SSH.
They don't need to misappropriate the money to profit from the 180 day time period. Just by having a large sum of money for a given period of time allows you to make short term investments and such.
Further more, that have it conveniently decided that they are NOT and bank, therefore they are exempt from federal reserve requirement. This means that there's plenty of potential for a "bank run" on Paypal.
The New Orleans buses are underwater. I imagine that many of the buses in the area are damaged as well, if they already weren't used to evacuate people.
Are you nuts?
There are PLENTY of buses around. Shit buses from here in upstate freakin new york could have been there by now. You think every bus between here and there is inoperable?
Drive on what roads? The Hurricane didn't just destroy New Orleans. A bus carrying people overturned just the other day, killing at least one. The roads are in really bad shape.
So fix them. Sheesh, the hurricane is over.
It's not like every single road needs to be clear.
I don't see why you're making excuses for the obvious total fuckup that is going on right now. They knew what to expect. We, as country, have the resources to tackle it. The problem is obviously at an admisitrative level.
None of this would be possible without government interference in the market, which is the antithesis of capitalism.
This isn't really true. In order do have a decent "free market", you need to have a government that goes around and enforces rules and also changes rules when it finds out they are broken.
The whole idea of a capitalist market relies on a bunch of assumptions that simply aren't true unless there's someone going around and FORCING things to be this way. For example, capitalism breaks down when one player has enough influence to dominate the market, or when costs are not properly accounted for (say environmental damage due to dumping five tons of mercury into a reservoir).
It's important to realize that you can make economics say anything you want, it's all about how you arrange your costs. Part of the government's role is to arrange these costs so that the final product of capitalism is most beneficial to society.
Unfortuately, the government simply isn't acting in this interest. This however, does not mean that the gov't should do nothing at all. Without government intervention, we'd would be pretty screwed. I already live near the most polluted lake in America. Imagine if ALL our lakes were like that. Imagine if there were no restrictions on the chemicals I can put in your food. Imagine if I could fire you for ANY reason. Don't wanna take it up the ass today? Too bad, you're fired, no severance, no unemployment.
What, someone stole your identity? You didn't really make all those credit card purchases? Too bad, we don't have to even investigate, we're just going to charge you anyways. Next time be more careful.
One problem with multiple patent companies - patents need to be centrally referenced to prevent doubling of them. This needs a central body. Say, the patent office.
Shoot! You better not tell those internet folks that this whole DNS thing will never work!
Really, there are countless examples of with this isn;t a problem at all. It's a non-issue.
Slashdot Mirror
Or course, I'm an electrical guy and my work there focused mostly on the battery/ultracapacitor pack, so I'm not familiar with how they would handle it...
So if you're the eletrical guy, how many volts & amps was this thing running?
To make any real difference you power input has to be HUGE... many thousands of watts. 1,000 watts is only 1.34 horsepower. If you want even a mere ten horse power on a 12V system you're talking about 833 AMPs or current.
That's not exactly accurate. If that where true, an engie would put out 0ft/lbs of torque at it's idle rpm (~800rpm). You know this is false because if you put your car in drive/first and leave you foot off the gas, (slow clutch release on manuals), the car will move, usually at about 3-5mph.
No, my car will stall out and die.
Some cars are programmed so that when you press in the clutch it automatically raises the idle RPM to help keep you from stalling.
Also, you're forgetting about this thing called the flywheel, which stores momentum to help keep you from stalling when you try to take off.
Combining those two things, your car might not stall and die, but your understanding of the mechanics here is clearly messed up.
It's as simple as this:
If there's a surplus of torque, the engine is going to accelerate.
Uh, having torque does not make an engine accelerate. In order for a gas engine to accelerate the spark needs to advance.
This is total nonsense.
If you have extra torque (after subtracting all your frictional losses) the engine is going to accelerate.
Spark advance is a mere optimization of the combustion. There are plenty of engines out the that DON'T EVEN HAVE spark advance and still manage to accelerate.
That said, many people drive 20,000 miles per year, and for them, the 3x ($3000-6000) savings may be worth it or at least around the break even point.
Except the the more miles you drive, the more likely they are to be highway miles. If you're driving mostly highway miles you're better off with a fuel efficient regular car rather than a hybrid. On the highway, the hybrid system is just extra weight.
Wouldn't being able to partition any normal program into a program that executes (efficiently) on multiple CPU's basically require that someone solves the halting problem?
I bring this up because because it seems like, in order to partition the tasks efficiently, you'd basically need to be able to predict what the program was trying to do in advance.... and if you could predict what a program was going to do in advance of actually running it, it would seem like you have just solved the halting problem.
Any CS folks care to weigh in? This isn't really my field, but I'm quite interested to know one way or the other.
If you short something to that angle iron it's going to fry lots of things. Not to mention zapping you pretty good if you touch a live wire at 120 volts while leaning on it. Put a resistor in the ground line. At least a hundred kiloohm. Doesn't have to be high wattage, anything will do.
Really, this is exactly what ESD mats are for. Even if he puts a resistor to ground on the bar, it won't prevent the bar from shorting circuits on a PCB to each other, thereby frying whatever touches it.
People keep mentioning multimeters, but I don't see how they can be useful if you don't have schematics.
Power supply voltages. Is your +5V output from your power supply really 5V or is it 4.5V?
when it comes to something that is already put together and doesn't have schematics, damnit I'm lost.
So sit down and draw some schematics. That's what I did when my speedometer quit working. Eventually I traced the problem to a bad $0.20 rectifier diode, but being able to look at the signal flow on paper made it easier to understand what was going on.
But how do I know that isn't a symptom of some other issue elsewhere in the system.
It's had to know for sure, but a lot of the trick is knowing what the individual parts should look like (electrically) and how they tend to fail.
In your case I would guess three causes for the bad cap: Age, overvoltage, or reverse polartiry.
So next you sit there and think of what might cause overvoltage (bad regulator) or reverse polarity (no obvious choice.. maybe the wrong wall wart got plugged into it).
Or in a computer. How do you go through it and see anything useful? Or a radio or TV? It just seems impossible without schematics because you don't know the values you should be looking for or even when should those values appear on that circuit.
You know what the deivce is supposed to do and you have the numbers on the parts (usually). Learn to read values off resistors and capacitors and look up datasheets for other parts online.
For a basic intro I reccommend and of the books by Forrest Mims, especially "Getting Started in Electronics". Those books are generally very approachable.
I'm in the process of setting up my workbench now. What do you have for solder equipment?
:)
I have a Hakko 936, a pair of hot tweezers and a cheap vaccum bulb desoldering iron. For magnification I use an Optivisor, but I soom will have a Bausch and Lomb Stereozoom 7 up and running
What do you use for lighting?
Also, beer is a great idea. I was leaning towards a milling machine, but maybe what I really need is a kegerator...
Xcelite also makes the best needlenose pliers and tweezers I've ever used.
Xcelite tweezers are nothing compared to VOMM.
VOMM is a German company that makes ONLY tweezers. They seem to start at about $15 a piece.
Here's an example.
I've used Whia, Xcelite, Erem and some others that I forget. IMO, VOMM is the best.
Also, on the illuminated mangnifier, try before you buy. We have one at work that I believe wasn't cheap, but its not very useful.
I recommend shelling out the money for a real stereomicroscope with a boom stand.
If you really don't have the money for that, I reccommend an Optivisor.
Those lighted magnifiers and big and clunky and always seem to be in the way of your hands.
If you're really broke or think someone is going to steal them, buy a set of cheap eye loupes.
A cordless drill is better than a screwdriver.
:) Sure, I already had an impact gun and an air ratchet, but not everything needs than much torque.
Only if you need it for drilling. Otherwise it's unnecessarily heavy and bulky, and very likely without low enough torque settings.
Right now I probably put in and take out hundreds of screws in a day. They're all small screws.
For this I use a Milwaukee 2.4V regular old electric screwdriver.
It's smaller than a drill, so I can get it where I need it AND the battery alone for my drill weighs more than the whole screwdriver.
Bear in mind this isn't a cheap POS screwdriver, it's properly sized for the job, and has two batteries, so I have one on charge at all times.
I wouldn't think about using either of my two cordless drills on a #2 screw. They'd snap it off in a heart beat.
If I was building a deck or doing drywall, sure, I'd use the drills, but for electronic devices with a bunch of #2 and #4 screws, no way.
For working on my car, I just bought a nice IR air powered pistol grip screwdriver. Do not bring that one out in public
The bigger problem is that all of Europe has high unemployment. ,br>
It's not that high if you do an apples-to-apples comparison instead of using the obviously skewed data the US policticians like to use.
The other reason is to have the infrastructure in place to combat a Mac virus if and when it comes out.
I can see your point but...
the funny thing about this is that if you already have the infrastructure in place to patch the security hole, everybody who actually updates their system isn't going to need the new virus scanner update anyways. They'll be immune.
It's sort of like carrying around a can of fix-a-flat AND a full-size spare.
You realize you're typing on a computer right?
Convergence is great provided:
The obvious problem in this case is not that we don't want a cellphone that can play music but that it is intentionally crippled.
Personally, I'd love to have a device that could be a PDA, MP3 player, cellphone, and wifi/voip device all in one. The only problem is that cellphone companies always end up making things like that suck because thye try and squeeze money out of you for stupid shit. Like charging you $10 to transfer YOUR phone numbers to your new phone.
They're not going to be able to do that if your phone syncs like a Palm. They're not going to get ringtone money if you can use your own music. They're not going to get as many cellphone minutes if you can use wifi when its availible.
They are holding us back, dammit.
For example, one often hears conspiracy theories that GM could make a car that gets a zillion MPG, but big oil pays them to keep it in the dark. About three minutes of economics refutes this, by demonstrating that GM could make more selling the advanced cars than big oil would be willing to pay.
Economics can say anything, it's all about what costs you include.
For example, if we add in the ultimate cost of being assasinated, suddenly pissing off powerful people just doesn't seem as appealing anymore.
If you consider the cost of loosing your oil oligopoly vs. the price of buying a few politicians, you can see how one might say just about anything they want by considering what costs they do and do not tell you about.
Whatever the reason for its lack of certain features, it is clearly not to protect other companies, or even other divisions within Apple. If these features could be included at a competitive price, Apple would make more money by including them than it would lose elsewhere. Despite the looney theories, any MBA and Apple executive would know this.
This isn't really true. Look at "netMD" for example, or even the original minidisc. If sony had opened up the format enough, they would have sold tons of them.
But because they decided to enforce ridiculous restrictions on the user (look at Sony's version of the ipod for example), they failed.
The reality is that companies don't always do what's best for themselves or the consumer.
Businesses do not always have perfect knowedge of the market and even if they did, the executives leading them still might choose to disregard it.
Sometimes this is bad (lost profit), sometimes it is good (going above and beyond OSHA regs to protect workers).
I'm sorry, you seem to be confused about the difference between an anpple and an orange. People's gas tanks DO blow up, and cars DO crash. Tires do fail, and engines breakdown.
Right, so obviously the right thing to do is to multiply the number of people killed in a failure times the failure rate.
Of course you're not doing that because it would show how paranoid and ridiculous you're being.
Right now the claim that you're making an apples to apples comparison is laughable.
However, due to very high profile disasters (ala 3-Mile Island and Chernobyl), the American public is deathly afraid of just the idea.
I don't think it's really just the disasters that are the problem. My parent's generation spent quite a while being afraid of getting vaporized in a nuclear holocaust. For them, the word nuclear has some pretty strong negative connotations.
Macs are not exempt from these rules. All machines, including Macs, are required to have properly managed user accounts, auto updates, antivirus, anti spyware, a firewall of some kind, etc.
What's funny about this is it points out the obvious failing of anti-virus software: The anti-virus company has to already have a copy of the virus.
Since nobody has any for OSX, the software is useless.
(Sure there might be some random use like telling your windows friends they're infected, but for its core purpose, it's useless. It will not protect you from one single virus because there isn't one in it's database.)
Companies also vastly overrate the importance of virus scanning. A decent security policy is much more important. An example would be stripping all execuatble attachments by default and making the user jump through a hoop or two to get them. Unlike a virus scanner, this protects you from viruses that both are and aren't in the database and doesn't cost you any update fees.
I'd argue that giving the software company a heads up to find a fix would be more responsible than immediate disclosure.
That definately preferable from the software company's point of view.
As a user, I want to know immediately. If there's no fix yet, fine. I'll make the choice to either run the risk, shut down or switch to an alternate.
There's also a fundmental problem where thousands of people could be getting hacked, but if they're only reporting it to the vendor, it's easy for them to take their time and then report it as a "low-level risk".
To replace telnet, they had to throw something out there that anyone could use and customize in any capacity (including extensions).
:)
GPL allows all of the above
Whether or not you agree, and whether or not they are right, some of the companies out there want the freedom to customize code without releasing the changes.
And I want a Ferrari... doesn't mean you have to give it to me, especially for free.
Microsoft's breaking of Kerberos is just a minimal example of what can go wrong here.
It's not that it's 100% terrible that OpenSSH is BSD liscensed, but it seems like a bad idea for a package where the two main concerns are interoperability and security.
The BSD licensing has made it possible for commercial OSes to have an SSH implementation by default. That ubiquity is what killed telnet. By helping companies like Microsoft, Sun, and Apple, the OpenSSH project has helped everyone.
...perhaps not even secure.
Except that BSD liscensing allows compaines like Microsoft the pervert a standard protocol, so that it is no longer interoperable, nor "ubiquitous"
There is nothing the prevents Microsoft from distributing a GPL'ed product except their own internal decisions.
The biggest difference is, of course, that they would have to publish any changes. To me, it seems obvious the you should WANT them publish any changes to SSH.
They don't need to misappropriate the money to profit from the 180 day time period. Just by having a large sum of money for a given period of time allows you to make short term investments and such.
Further more, that have it conveniently decided that they are NOT and bank, therefore they are exempt from federal reserve requirement.
This means that there's plenty of potential for a "bank run" on Paypal.
The New Orleans buses are underwater. I imagine that many of the buses in the area are damaged as well, if they already weren't used to evacuate people.
Are you nuts?
There are PLENTY of buses around. Shit buses from here in upstate freakin new york could have been there by now. You think every bus between here and there is inoperable?
Drive on what roads? The Hurricane didn't just destroy New Orleans. A bus carrying people overturned just the other day, killing at least one. The roads are in really bad shape.
So fix them. Sheesh, the hurricane is over.
It's not like every single road needs to be clear.
I don't see why you're making excuses for the obvious total fuckup that is going on right now. They knew what to expect. We, as country, have the resources to tackle it. The problem is obviously at an admisitrative level.
This is ridiculous. We're the richest nation in the world, and it takes us over 7 days to evacuate 100,000 poor people from a disaster area?
Exactly, this is simply fucking ridiculous.
Step one:
Get a bunch of school buses. This should be easy as hell. There's probably over two hundred just in my county (although I'm not nearby).
Step two:
Put food on the buses and drive the to New Orleans. This should take ONE DAY.
Step three:
Drop off the food and put fifty people on each bus.
Step four:
Drive the buses out to somewhere with food and water.
BAM! You're done.
I see this taking a MAXIMUM of three to four days. And that's if we had NO WARNING, which isn't the case here.
None of this would be possible without government interference in the market, which is the antithesis of capitalism.
This isn't really true.
In order do have a decent "free market", you need to have a government that goes around and enforces rules and also changes rules when it finds out they are broken.
The whole idea of a capitalist market relies on a bunch of assumptions that simply aren't true unless there's someone going around and FORCING things to be this way. For example, capitalism breaks down when one player has enough influence to dominate the market, or when costs are not properly accounted for (say environmental damage due to dumping five tons of mercury into a reservoir).
It's important to realize that you can make economics say anything you want, it's all about how you arrange your costs. Part of the government's role is to arrange these costs so that the final product of capitalism is most beneficial to society.
Unfortuately, the government simply isn't acting in this interest. This however, does not mean that the gov't should do nothing at all. Without government intervention, we'd would be pretty screwed. I already live near the most polluted lake in America. Imagine if ALL our lakes were like that. Imagine if there were no restrictions on the chemicals I can put in your food. Imagine if I could fire you for ANY reason. Don't wanna take it up the ass today? Too bad, you're fired, no severance, no unemployment.
What, someone stole your identity? You didn't really make all those credit card purchases? Too bad, we don't have to even investigate, we're just going to charge you anyways. Next time be more careful.
One problem with multiple patent companies - patents need to be centrally referenced to prevent doubling of them. This needs a central body. Say, the patent office.
Shoot! You better not tell those internet folks that this whole DNS thing will never work!
Really, there are countless examples of with this isn;t a problem at all. It's a non-issue.