Biofuels from macrocrops are generally infeasible, especially corn.
Biofuels from algae are energy-positive, consume much smaller areas, and are currently our best hope of weaning ourselves from foreign oil. If we had invested in bioprocessing techniques for algae the way we invested in securing our oil supply halfway around the world, we would be an oil-producing country by now.
Yes, and: Lumber and bricks make it very easy to build something that will fall on you and very hard to make a house. Steel and wire make it very easy to build something that will snap and kill thousands and very hard to build the Golden Gate Bridge. The solution is not to build the world out of Nerf. The solution is to keep Nature's fry cooks out of skilled labor jobs.
Haven't you figured out by now that corporations do not pay for things like that, their customers do?
This sort of statement always puzzles me -- why do people assume that the price of goods is strongly dependent on the cost to produce them when there's ample evidence that this is false? Shoes cost $2 to make and are sold for $80, etc.
A company does not think "Oh, we just need to make $x million in profit, and we'll stop there." If a company can produce a widget X at $2, then develops a way to produce it at $1, what will it charge for the widget? AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE WITHOUT KILLING DEMAND. In absence of competition, it will not reduce price -- and this is more true as demand elasticity falls.
Now, a drastic supply cost drop may allow the company to support price structures unavailable before (100 people will buy a Ferrari that costs $50k to make for $75k, but 1000X will buy a Ferrari that costs $5k to make for $50k, etc.) But since they're negotiating over a one-time cost for licensing, that's not likely to happen.
In short, if the largest profit comes from people buying a NiftyPhone for $300, that's what it'll get sold for. If you start at the beginning and make the company pay $1 million for licensing, they'll STILL get the most profit by selling NiftyPhones for $300. And if you waived that licensing cost -- or even gave them $1 million outright -- would they sell the NiftyPhone for less, out of the goodness of their heart? Nope.
(This is simplified, but not as heavily simplified as the Joe's Bait Shack "We Pass The Savings On To You" model, and it's generally more accurate.)
Agreed. They're not doing 200 hours (or even 200 man-hours) of paperwork -- it shouldn't take a Master's Thesis to get a FISA warrant.
In fact, the admission that they have to spend an additional 200 hours gathering evidence is a clear admission of wrongdoing on their part. Our Constitution provides security against arbitrary searches and seizures; if it takes 200 additional hours to gather enough evidence to form a mere suspicion of wrongdoing, then the initial justification for the wiretap must be fairly flimsy.
So we can add "recipes.com" to the list of corporations who will sue their users if they don't like what you're doing? Does anybody have a recent copy of the list?
I'm adding this place to the list of companies to stay away from. I'm pretty sure fifty cents off a bag of flour or whatever is not worth it. Even if you manage to print off two copies.
An expensive advertising campaign, even if annoying, also demonstrates that the company is doing well enough to spend money on, well, an expensive advertising campaign I didn't realize the effectiveness of this until I started looking at changing car insurance companies. I realized I hadn't heard of a few companies, but I subjectively felt like the ones I had heard of on national TV advertisements were more stable before I had even started comparing insurer ratings.
It's the same reason banks have big buildings and nice pens chained to the desk. You feel more confident putting money somewhere you don't think will disappear tomorrow; a bank with the investment of an expensive building and a damn great vault is less likely to disappear with your money.
Those who would like to draw parallels with guys buying expensive sportscars or peacocks spending valuable chemical energy on impressive plumage to make a deeper point may wish to do so.
Good point. It's definitely interesting. I think sometimes it's good to see science and engineering as human pursuits, but even when it may look like the spittle is flying across with the packets, these are just two intelligent guys with differing points of view who would probably buy each other a beer when they're done for the day.
Even Linus and Andy Tanenbaum respect each other, I think. Otherwise they wouldn't care what the hell the other thought. The verbal fencing is just nerdy snark at DEFCON 2. If you can't read "You would've failed in my class" with a chuckle, then you've been watching too much politics on TV. Linus would've wrecked the curve in Tanenbaum's class. He didn't design a monolithic kernel structure out of ignorance; he had a goal, and he thought that was the best way to go about it.
I wouldn't quite say "nothing to see here"...but there's no actual malice. These are two guys who are smarter than I am; I read what they think and why, and am smarter for it on both sides.
Pretexting? What's that? Pretexting is the practice of pretending to be someone else in order to obtain personal information on a person, such as telephone or banking records. Ohh. You mean wire fraud.
This sounds like a wonderful idea. Either it's automated, or there's a person doing it, and in both cases, bluetooth is short-range. If it's a little automated box, take a hammer to it.
And if it's a person doing it, dude, I've still got the hammer.
If I'm correct, it's also used to treat lactic acidosis, so it's already at your local pharmacy in a form certified safe to swallow. Assuming you've got cancer, you've probably got a doctor already. Feign an overabundance of lactic acid and see if he'll write you a scrip. (Or, depending on his trust in you, try honesty and beg him to let you try some.)
Re:Mod me offtopic, but...
on
Who won?
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· Score: 1
...why the fuck do people care if someone knows how they vote? Your boss: We've got a big election coming up, and we want to make sure [Republican/Democrat/Silly Party candidate] wins. You get this afternoon off to vote. Bring me back your voting slip or you're fired.
It would definitely be nice to find out, as then we could kill two birds with one stone, if we could harvest the algae that's creating the dead zone off Oregon's coast.
Imagine it: energy suppliers and environmentalists agreeing with each other; dogs and cats, living together; mass hysteria!
But if you're acting as an omnipotent outside force, experimenting with improvements on the organisms you've built, then you're saying . . . you're the God of Evolution!
There are Gods of War, Gods of Harvest, Thunder Gods, why not a God of Evolution? Try tossing that into an Intelligent Design argument. That oughta stir that argument up.
Of course you're going to have problems with the video from the floor being copyrighted if laws themselves are copyrighted! See this article from LawMeme. A nonprofit website in Texas attempted to include area building codes that had been written by a company called SBCCI. SBCCI sued, saying that their copyright had been violated by this publication of the laws, as they made $72 per copy sold by them. A judge ruled in their favor, allowing them to restrict the public laws, saying that $72 was "sufficiently free" for citizens' access.
(This isn't the only instance, but searching for "copyrighted law" returns more chaff than wheat, thanks to arguments over copyright law in general. Bonus points for more citations, as I'm interested in this.)
Indeed, if you bought a house in the 1920s, you'd have to pay property taxes today. These taxes would support city services, the road to your street, police to serve and protect, and a fire department for when your kids play with matches. The land and the house represent scarce resources in demand by you and your neighbors and have an inherent value.
Those 10 slain orcs and 200 gold pieces don't represent anything. Blizzard servers giveth and taketh away, orcs regenerate and do not represent scarce resources, and cops don't show up to fight the PK'ers. Admins could go crazy and fluctuate the currency wildly without regulation -- and I don't think ANYBODY wants the US Treasury department to start regulating how many points you can get in a video game.
No, this is something different and stupid. You'd support the government getting their cut when the "virtual" money is exchanged for real money. That's sensible. This issue is about treating in-game points (virtual money) WITHIN THE GAME, just because there are external agents willing to trade points for money.
I'll wander away from the SL mechanics itself for a more familiar example: You've just slain ten ogres with your ogre-slaying knife, +9 against ogres, or whatever. The ogres drop 200 gold. So you go to the shops and get a new helmet.
Should you be taxed on your "income" gained by slaying ogres? Should you have to pay sales tax at the shops? NO, OF COURSE NOT!
The fact that some yahoos will sell you 200 gold for five bucks is IRRELEVANT. You're playing a GAME. Tax the yahoos on the ACTUAL income they get for exchanging gold for money, sure. Tax ME for playing a game and slaying ogres? Morons.
Unfortunately, the best way to fix this is to take a step away from reality and call the gold "points" or "magic beans" or such. It breaks the suspension of disbelief, but it's the only way to keep this from happening. Politicians think the Internet IS a series of tubes: tubes that lead right into their pockets. Bastards.
Funny you should say this...I use mp3 players constantly. I started with a Korean player with an 8 segment display I got off lik-sang years and years ago, the first disc-based hardware mp3 player.
Anyway, I've always been a fan of iRiver. I bought a ChromeX, then a SlimX, then a H320. All were excellent and are still running. BUT a few months ago I bought an iRiver T-series flash player. I had to flash the firmware with a hacked Korean version to use it in Linux and treat it as a USB drive. Then, a few days later, the back came off when I was running. (Possibly my fault, I might not have put it in firmly enough, so I'll give them the benefit of the doubt.) Then yesterday the thing started going crazy, thinking that "hold" was on when it was not, then powering off immediately after powering up.
Today I'm switching back to my solid-as-a-tank H320 for the gym, but for the upcoming Austin Distance Challenge races, I'm hoping to get the SanDisk player mentioned yesterday. The T-series is indeed the dud you're referring to.
If you're TA'ing, you should have the Java-fu to do it. It's not hard. We used one for our classes, and we worked out a really nice compromise.
When the program was submitted, it was compiled and trivially rejected if it failed to compile. This is worth the price of admission right here, since people whose code "compiles on their machine" get multiple chances to recognize the error of their ways. (Some people think students should get points taken off for this; that's a philisophical discussion I won't go into.)
We ran it in a separate TA account so that if one student does "rm -rf *" he doesn't hurt anything before he's escorted out of the department.
There are a suite of tests that are run on the program, and a score is given, generally 10 points per test. That's the "base score." Now, if your students are good and your assignments are fair, with multiple tries and different outputs at least half the students will get 100. The point of the "try until you get it right" method is to guide the students to the right answer.
Then the TA hand-grades the non-100s in the traditional way, but he doesn't try TOO awfully hard, because the students get the opportunity for a "regrade." The TA steps through the grading with the student in person, explaining what went wrong.
This is a great solution for courses that use homework to get students to explore the language and possible solutions; it may not be the best solution for classes where the grades for homework are significant.
If you don't want to wear the stereotypical spandex bike-wear, there are good mountain-bike shorts that have the chamois padding so you're comfortable, but they look like regular cargo shorts. They're nice and comfy.
Slashdot Mirror
Biofuels from macrocrops are generally infeasible, especially corn.
Biofuels from algae are energy-positive, consume much smaller areas, and are currently our best hope of weaning ourselves from foreign oil. If we had invested in bioprocessing techniques for algae the way we invested in securing our oil supply halfway around the world, we would be an oil-producing country by now.
Yes, and:
Lumber and bricks make it very easy to build something that will fall on you and very hard to make a house.
Steel and wire make it very easy to build something that will snap and kill thousands and very hard to build the Golden Gate Bridge.
The solution is not to build the world out of Nerf. The solution is to keep Nature's fry cooks out of skilled labor jobs.
Haven't you figured out by now that corporations do not pay for things like that, their customers do?
This sort of statement always puzzles me -- why do people assume that the price of goods is strongly dependent on the cost to produce them when there's ample evidence that this is false? Shoes cost $2 to make and are sold for $80, etc.
A company does not think "Oh, we just need to make $x million in profit, and we'll stop there." If a company can produce a widget X at $2, then develops a way to produce it at $1, what will it charge for the widget? AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE WITHOUT KILLING DEMAND. In absence of competition, it will not reduce price -- and this is more true as demand elasticity falls.
Now, a drastic supply cost drop may allow the company to support price structures unavailable before (100 people will buy a Ferrari that costs $50k to make for $75k, but 1000X will buy a Ferrari that costs $5k to make for $50k, etc.) But since they're negotiating over a one-time cost for licensing, that's not likely to happen.
In short, if the largest profit comes from people buying a NiftyPhone for $300, that's what it'll get sold for. If you start at the beginning and make the company pay $1 million for licensing, they'll STILL get the most profit by selling NiftyPhones for $300. And if you waived that licensing cost -- or even gave them $1 million outright -- would they sell the NiftyPhone for less, out of the goodness of their heart? Nope.
(This is simplified, but not as heavily simplified as the Joe's Bait Shack "We Pass The Savings On To You" model, and it's generally more accurate.)
Agreed. They're not doing 200 hours (or even 200 man-hours) of paperwork -- it shouldn't take a Master's Thesis to get a FISA warrant.
In fact, the admission that they have to spend an additional 200 hours gathering evidence is a clear admission of wrongdoing on their part. Our Constitution provides security against arbitrary searches and seizures; if it takes 200 additional hours to gather enough evidence to form a mere suspicion of wrongdoing, then the initial justification for the wiretap must be fairly flimsy.
Recipes.com? I must've been really hungry when I wrote this. *sigh*
So we can add "recipes.com" to the list of corporations who will sue their users if they don't like what you're doing? Does anybody have a recent copy of the list?
I'm adding this place to the list of companies to stay away from. I'm pretty sure fifty cents off a bag of flour or whatever is not worth it. Even if you manage to print off two copies.
An expensive advertising campaign, even if annoying, also demonstrates that the company is doing well enough to spend money on, well, an expensive advertising campaign I didn't realize the effectiveness of this until I started looking at changing car insurance companies. I realized I hadn't heard of a few companies, but I subjectively felt like the ones I had heard of on national TV advertisements were more stable before I had even started comparing insurer ratings.
It's the same reason banks have big buildings and nice pens chained to the desk. You feel more confident putting money somewhere you don't think will disappear tomorrow; a bank with the investment of an expensive building and a damn great vault is less likely to disappear with your money.
Those who would like to draw parallels with guys buying expensive sportscars or peacocks spending valuable chemical energy on impressive plumage to make a deeper point may wish to do so.
This is shameful. It's 2007, Google. SSL has been a (reasonable) standard since 1996. USE IT.
Favorite buzzword phrase: "free cloud-based hosting and streaming solution".
Cloud-based? I haven't heard that one before.
Vapourware.
Good point. It's definitely interesting. I think sometimes it's good to see science and engineering as human pursuits, but even when it may look like the spittle is flying across with the packets, these are just two intelligent guys with differing points of view who would probably buy each other a beer when they're done for the day.
Even Linus and Andy Tanenbaum respect each other, I think. Otherwise they wouldn't care what the hell the other thought. The verbal fencing is just nerdy snark at DEFCON 2. If you can't read "You would've failed in my class" with a chuckle, then you've been watching too much politics on TV. Linus would've wrecked the curve in Tanenbaum's class. He didn't design a monolithic kernel structure out of ignorance; he had a goal, and he thought that was the best way to go about it.
I wouldn't quite say "nothing to see here"...but there's no actual malice. These are two guys who are smarter than I am; I read what they think and why, and am smarter for it on both sides.
Yes, the Internet is full of things that can be dangerous. Fortunately, all that's needed to save you is applying a little critical thinking.
Curiously enough, that's also the cure for cutting through most of the BS that Congress tries to pass off every day. Two for the price of one!
It might surprise the Slashdot crowd to know that *some* people like Vista.
Nope. Dude, the Internet gave birth to Furries. I am no longer shocked at what *some* people like.
Pretexting? What's that?
Pretexting is the practice of pretending to be someone else in order to obtain personal information on a person, such as telephone or banking records.
Ohh. You mean wire fraud .
Nope. We'll keep that illegal, thanks.
This sounds like a wonderful idea. Either it's automated, or there's a person doing it, and in both cases, bluetooth is short-range. If it's a little automated box, take a hammer to it.
And if it's a person doing it, dude, I've still got the hammer.
I expect this to be a short-lived phenomenon.
If I'm correct, it's also used to treat lactic acidosis, so it's already at your local pharmacy in a form certified safe to swallow. Assuming you've got cancer, you've probably got a doctor already. Feign an overabundance of lactic acid and see if he'll write you a scrip. (Or, depending on his trust in you, try honesty and beg him to let you try some.)
...why the fuck do people care if someone knows how they vote?
Your boss: We've got a big election coming up, and we want to make sure [Republican/Democrat/Silly Party candidate] wins. You get this afternoon off to vote. Bring me back your voting slip or you're fired.
It would definitely be nice to find out, as then we could kill two birds with one stone, if we could harvest the algae that's creating the dead zone off Oregon's coast.
Imagine it: energy suppliers and environmentalists agreeing with each other; dogs and cats, living together; mass hysteria!
But if you're acting as an omnipotent outside force, experimenting with improvements on the organisms you've built, then you're saying . . . you're the God of Evolution!
There are Gods of War, Gods of Harvest, Thunder Gods, why not a God of Evolution? Try tossing that into an Intelligent Design argument. That oughta stir that argument up.
Of course you're going to have problems with the video from the floor being copyrighted if laws themselves are copyrighted!
See this article from LawMeme. A nonprofit website in Texas attempted to include area building codes that had been written by a company called SBCCI. SBCCI sued, saying that their copyright had been violated by this publication of the laws, as they made $72 per copy sold by them. A judge ruled in their favor, allowing them to restrict the public laws, saying that $72 was "sufficiently free" for citizens' access.
(This isn't the only instance, but searching for "copyrighted law" returns more chaff than wheat, thanks to arguments over copyright law in general. Bonus points for more citations, as I'm interested in this.)
Much better argument than mine. Excellent point.
Indeed, if you bought a house in the 1920s, you'd have to pay property taxes today. These taxes would support city services, the road to your street, police to serve and protect, and a fire department for when your kids play with matches. The land and the house represent scarce resources in demand by you and your neighbors and have an inherent value.
Those 10 slain orcs and 200 gold pieces don't represent anything. Blizzard servers giveth and taketh away, orcs regenerate and do not represent scarce resources, and cops don't show up to fight the PK'ers. Admins could go crazy and fluctuate the currency wildly without regulation -- and I don't think ANYBODY wants the US Treasury department to start regulating how many points you can get in a video game.
This is just greed.
No, this is something different and stupid.
You'd support the government getting their cut when the "virtual" money is exchanged for real money. That's sensible. This issue is about treating in-game points (virtual money) WITHIN THE GAME, just because there are external agents willing to trade points for money.
I'll wander away from the SL mechanics itself for a more familiar example: You've just slain ten ogres with your ogre-slaying knife, +9 against ogres, or whatever. The ogres drop 200 gold. So you go to the shops and get a new helmet.
Should you be taxed on your "income" gained by slaying ogres?
Should you have to pay sales tax at the shops?
NO, OF COURSE NOT!
The fact that some yahoos will sell you 200 gold for five bucks is IRRELEVANT. You're playing a GAME. Tax the yahoos on the ACTUAL income they get for exchanging gold for money, sure. Tax ME for playing a game and slaying ogres? Morons.
Unfortunately, the best way to fix this is to take a step away from reality and call the gold "points" or "magic beans" or such. It breaks the suspension of disbelief, but it's the only way to keep this from happening. Politicians think the Internet IS a series of tubes: tubes that lead right into their pockets. Bastards.
Funny you should say this...I use mp3 players constantly. I started with a Korean player with an 8 segment display I got off lik-sang years and years ago, the first disc-based hardware mp3 player.
Anyway, I've always been a fan of iRiver. I bought a ChromeX, then a SlimX, then a H320. All were excellent and are still running. BUT a few months ago I bought an iRiver T-series flash player. I had to flash the firmware with a hacked Korean version to use it in Linux and treat it as a USB drive. Then, a few days later, the back came off when I was running. (Possibly my fault, I might not have put it in firmly enough, so I'll give them the benefit of the doubt.) Then yesterday the thing started going crazy, thinking that "hold" was on when it was not, then powering off immediately after powering up.
Today I'm switching back to my solid-as-a-tank H320 for the gym, but for the upcoming Austin Distance Challenge races, I'm hoping to get the SanDisk player mentioned yesterday. The T-series is indeed the dud you're referring to.
If you're TA'ing, you should have the Java-fu to do it. It's not hard. We used one for our classes, and we worked out a really nice compromise.
When the program was submitted, it was compiled and trivially rejected if it failed to compile. This is worth the price of admission right here, since people whose code "compiles on their machine" get multiple chances to recognize the error of their ways. (Some people think students should get points taken off for this; that's a philisophical discussion I won't go into.)
We ran it in a separate TA account so that if one student does "rm -rf *" he doesn't hurt anything before he's escorted out of the department.
There are a suite of tests that are run on the program, and a score is given, generally 10 points per test. That's the "base score." Now, if your students are good and your assignments are fair, with multiple tries and different outputs at least half the students will get 100. The point of the "try until you get it right" method is to guide the students to the right answer.
Then the TA hand-grades the non-100s in the traditional way, but he doesn't try TOO awfully hard, because the students get the opportunity for a "regrade." The TA steps through the grading with the student in person, explaining what went wrong.
This is a great solution for courses that use homework to get students to explore the language and possible solutions; it may not be the best solution for classes where the grades for homework are significant.
If you don't want to wear the stereotypical spandex bike-wear, there are good mountain-bike shorts that have the chamois padding so you're comfortable, but they look like regular cargo shorts. They're nice and comfy.