... the noise - you get to hear all the details of everyone's conversations. And as if having to listen to everyone else's conversations isn't bad enough, you also have the assholes who feel the need to conduct every conversation on the goddamn speakerphone! It used to drive me insane.
But seriously, it's really not that hard to type acronyms with the shift key
Seriously, it is. I've tried it, and not only is it massively slower, it's almost physically painful to do. And I really doubt I'm some kind of a freak in this regard, because if it was so easy to type in allcaps without capslock, why is there a capslock?
I continue to be amazed at the number of people lining up to tell me that I'm all screwed up for preferring to use the keyboard the way it's designed to be used. Don't like capslock? Fine, don't use it, remap it, whatever. But for me it's a no-kidding requirement, and I won't be buying any system that doesn't include it. I'm not sure why so many people feel the need to tell me that my personal opinion is factually incorrect.
For what it's worth, I have entirely normal sized hands (I bought a pair of gloves last week in medium and would probably have been better off with a large.)
And quite frankly, I find your numbers literally impossible to believe. With capslock, your fingers are free to just type. Without it, you need to continually switch back and forth between both little fingers to free up the appropriate hand: {right shift}SE{left shift}N{right shift}TE{left shift}N{right shift}CE... 5 context shifts just for one word. My times for the same sentence you typed were almost four times as long without capslock.
And finally, it really doesn't matter to me how proficient you are with or without capslock; or whether or not you like it. Don't like it? Fine, don't use it. For me, it's a requirement, and I won't be buying any system that doesn't include it.
I took a "proper" typing skills class back in the days of the IBM Selectric, and I can promise you that "proper" typing of all-caps words was and is done with the capslock key.
Dude, have you ever even used a keyboard? Type the word "NATO" with capslock. Then type it using the shift key. That's a very short word, and yet you practically need to twist your hands into pretzels to type it without capslock, and it massively slows down your typing.
Call me when you've actually tried typing something that's partially in all-caps.
My work involves the typing of a lot of acronyms... which I sometimes do on Google docs. The lack of a capslock key would make my (work) life almost indescribably painful. Accordingly, I won't be buying a Chrome notebook.
Just about every operating system warns you when your capslock button is on during logon. For other password dialogs, you would generally notice the problem when typing in your username, so I can't help but think this is a pretty minor problem IRL.
Besides, there's been a movement to ditch it for ages now, and thus far nobody's complained.
You just haven't been paying attention. Every time this subject comes up on slashdot, a bunch of people (including me) complain about it.
Besides, anyone who still wants to use all caps still has the shift button.
You have got to be freaking kidding me. Type "NATO" using the shift key. Go ahead, I'll wait. And that's an easy one. I have to type acronyms all day long, and doing so without a caps lock key is a recipe for carpal tunnel syndrome, not to mention a massive slowdown in my typing rate.
Don't like capslock? Fine - don't use or remap it. But you can have my capslock key when you pry it from my cold dead fingers. I won't be buying a Chrome laptop.
I work in the defense industry, which means I type acronyms. A LOT of acronyms. The lack of a capslock key would make the device so painful for me to use for work purposes that I just wouldn't. And therefore wouldn't buy it.
... while in general I think consenting adults ought to be able to make any sort of love arrangements they want, I do have a couple of issues with polygamy. For one thing, polygamy as it's actually practiced in North America tends to involve multiple marriages arranged between a man and some number of women, by the leader of some religious sect. I question whether there's true "consent" involved here.
Also, your choice of words is interesting: "polygamy" vs. "polyandry" or "polyamory". Meaning, the union of one man and multiple women. If this kind of arrangement would become widespread, you'd have the male half of society divided into two groups: the lucky few who were able to score a wife (or several), and the remaining masses who would have little hope of ever reproducing. Given the destabilizing nature of that, I think society has a vested interest in maintaining at least some semblance of equality of opportunity to find a mate.
Does that mean I think multiple marriage arrangements ought to be illegal? I'm not sure. But I'd be a lot more inclined to support the idea if 1) it didn't involve semi-coercion for the parties involved, and 2) there was support for arrangements other than 1 man - multiple women.
Dude, this material, even if the theory of stable roentgenium is correct (and realistically, it's probably not) would be found in the amounts of a few atoms per gold nugget. So there's not enough of this stuff on earth to make a shotgun pellet, much less a tank. You'd have to make it synthetically in particle accelerators. And that would take an eternity and cost a fortune, if it was possible at all.
How does the presence of a previously unknown stable state make this such a great energetic material? For this to be the case, there would have to be a big energy difference between the stable and unstable states, and if that were the case, all of the stuff in the unstable state would promptly convert to the stable state.
And in any case, we've already got lots of really good energetic materials for rockets and/or bombs that are a lot easier to make than roentgenium.
For instance, the extra gasoline cost of a 30 MPG car over an electric car is around $9000 after 100,000. I'd say this is about the limit to the reliability of a gasoline car.
My 1986 F-150 ran for well over 225k miles. My 1999 F-150 is currently at 178k and still going strong. And I doubt I'm especially unusual here.
Just because people CHOOSE to replace their vehicles after 100k miles doesn't mean that's as long as they can run.
I think that's pretty plausible, actually. Also, something the GP doesn't point out - even if the Volt isn't profitable in the gross margin sense now, it's quite possible that it will become so. As economies of scale begin to kick in for the suppliers, the price for components is likely to drop - so that even if GM is losing money on every car today, that situation may well turn around as sales increase.
Distributing the power generation capability does a lot of really nice things for you: 1) it cuts down on the number of big cross-country transmission lines you need (and their attendant losses), 2) reduces the probability that a single bad event can take out a huge amount of your generating capability, and 3) evens out your production - instead of a huge peak in solar production around noon Mountain time, your solar production starts off on the east coast in the morning (Eastern Time), and continues fairly smoothly until afternoon (Pacific Time).
As for home solar thermal, you aren't going to generate electricity that way, but you can certainly heat your house and make hot water that way.
Most of the US is net-metered, so during the bright part of the day you're producing more power than you use, and push back the excess into the grid, making your meter run backwards. If you're not net-metered, it's probably not cost-effective to do solar PV at all. If you need to be totally off the grid, for one thing, you're going to need to cut way back on consumption, because you're not going to be be able to generate huge amounts of power. But given that, a battery system for nighttime doesn't have to be THAT huge. It is quite expensive, though. I was looking into a solar PV system a while back, and although ours was going to be grid-connected, I talked about off-grid systems with our consultant. His recommendation for off-grid people is to skip the batteries and just use a diesel generator to get you through the night - it's a lot more cost effective.
If the Android ecosystem gets involved in a race to the bottom, their customer base will defect en masse to iPhone, RIM, Palm, or whatever Nokia is doing. And the Android manufacturers understand that quite well. So I think a race to the bottom situation is highly unlikely.
The implication, I guess, is that it's not really a good thing for consumers? Umm, why? Turning phones into a commodity forces manufacturers to compete on price and quality, which in turn drives down their profit margins. Yes, it's probably not so good for phone manufacturers, but it's DEFINITELY a good thing for consumers.
Can't see the video at work, so maybe I'm missing something. But this really seems like pie-in-the-sky to me. A couple of things:
Solar panels aren't made of silica, they're made of silicon. Sure, you make silicon from silica, but the process is very expensive and capital intensive. And the Sahara is kind of a tough place to do capital intensive stuff.
High temperature superconductors... where to start? For one thing, they're made of tremendously rare materials - things like ytrrium barium copper oxide. Again, very expensive. Also, "high-temperature" is a relative term - you still need to keep these things below about 100k, which is not much above the boiling point of nitrogen. Keeping long wires that cold is a tricky engineering problem. Finally, high temperature superconductor materials are notoriously bad at being wires: they're mostly quite brittle and hard to work into usable shapes.
I'm not really sure why the organizers are determined to do this in the most difficult way possible. There's sand and sun all over the place, including many that are a lot closer to electrical markets (the US southwest, for example). So why not just build these things there and sidestep the whole issue of superconducting wires? This plan doesn't make sense to me.
I accuse you of being a rapist! And if you don't have anything to hide, you should be willing to go to trial... what? You don't want your life ruined by scurrilous allegations? Shut up and fly (at your own expense) to whatever country I designate so we can interrogate you.
I'm pretty sure that the Constitution does not allow for the government to assassinate people with trial, for example. I'm pretty sure that she doesn't even understand the Constitution well enough to decide whether her beliefs are in accordance with it.
Sure, she has a lot of followers, but that's because we have a big electorate. In percentage terms, her numbers ain't so hot. The latest number I saw was "unfavorable" of around 38% and "favorable" less than 25%, with lots of undecided, don't know enough to say, etc. And with so much negative material available, you can bet that in the heat of a campaign, the balance would likely tip even further against her.
The tricky part is that her numbers are highly skewed by party - potential GOP voters like her a lot better than the electorate at large (at this stage of the game they haven't figured out likely voter models yet, so these are registered voter numbers). We could end up in a situation where she manages a victory in the Republican primaries on the strength of tea-party votes, but then gets crushed in the general.
Sure, "most" of our oil is sourced within North America. But some very significant fraction comes from elsewhere. Around 40% of our consumption is from domestic sources, another 15-20% is from elsewhere in North America. The rest comes from elsewhere in the world - some from stable, friendly places (Norway, the UK), some from relatively friendly but not so stable places (e.g. Nigeria), and some from not-so-friendly but relatively stable places (e.g. Venezuela), and some from places that are both unstable and less than completely friendly (e.g. various middle east locations). So, yeah, "most" of our oil is domestically sourced. But we're still sending money by the supertanker load to a bunch of places we'd probably rather not be sending it. And we most certainly are dependent on it, as our economy would rapidly go into a tailspin if the overseas spigots were shut off.
Hint: being sold by your neighbor to the CIA, blindfolding, extraditing, torture, more flying, Guantanamo Bay, ten years of lock-down will turn ANYBODY and his brother into a so-called "terrorist".
Don't forget: having your home country/province/town/ invaded and or bombed. That's another pretty powerful motivator. So Janet, how about asking Barack to stop doing all that stuff?
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... the noise - you get to hear all the details of everyone's conversations. And as if having to listen to everyone else's conversations isn't bad enough, you also have the assholes who feel the need to conduct every conversation on the goddamn speakerphone! It used to drive me insane.
Seriously, it is. I've tried it, and not only is it massively slower, it's almost physically painful to do. And I really doubt I'm some kind of a freak in this regard, because if it was so easy to type in allcaps without capslock, why is there a capslock?
I continue to be amazed at the number of people lining up to tell me that I'm all screwed up for preferring to use the keyboard the way it's designed to be used. Don't like capslock? Fine, don't use it, remap it, whatever. But for me it's a no-kidding requirement, and I won't be buying any system that doesn't include it. I'm not sure why so many people feel the need to tell me that my personal opinion is factually incorrect.
For what it's worth, I have entirely normal sized hands (I bought a pair of gloves last week in medium and would probably have been better off with a large.)
And quite frankly, I find your numbers literally impossible to believe. With capslock, your fingers are free to just type. Without it, you need to continually switch back and forth between both little fingers to free up the appropriate hand: {right shift}SE{left shift}N{right shift}TE{left shift}N{right shift}CE... 5 context shifts just for one word. My times for the same sentence you typed were almost four times as long without capslock.
And finally, it really doesn't matter to me how proficient you are with or without capslock; or whether or not you like it. Don't like it? Fine, don't use it. For me, it's a requirement, and I won't be buying any system that doesn't include it.
I took a "proper" typing skills class back in the days of the IBM Selectric, and I can promise you that "proper" typing of all-caps words was and is done with the capslock key.
Dude, have you ever even used a keyboard? Type the word "NATO" with capslock. Then type it using the shift key. That's a very short word, and yet you practically need to twist your hands into pretzels to type it without capslock, and it massively slows down your typing.
Call me when you've actually tried typing something that's partially in all-caps.
I would barely be able to function without capslock.
My work involves the typing of a lot of acronyms... which I sometimes do on Google docs. The lack of a capslock key would make my (work) life almost indescribably painful. Accordingly, I won't be buying a Chrome notebook.
I'm from Minnesota, you insensitive clod!
Just about every operating system warns you when your capslock button is on during logon. For other password dialogs, you would generally notice the problem when typing in your username, so I can't help but think this is a pretty minor problem IRL.
You just haven't been paying attention. Every time this subject comes up on slashdot, a bunch of people (including me) complain about it.
You have got to be freaking kidding me. Type "NATO" using the shift key. Go ahead, I'll wait. And that's an easy one. I have to type acronyms all day long, and doing so without a caps lock key is a recipe for carpal tunnel syndrome, not to mention a massive slowdown in my typing rate.
Don't like capslock? Fine - don't use or remap it. But you can have my capslock key when you pry it from my cold dead fingers. I won't be buying a Chrome laptop.
I work in the defense industry, which means I type acronyms. A LOT of acronyms. The lack of a capslock key would make the device so painful for me to use for work purposes that I just wouldn't. And therefore wouldn't buy it.
... while in general I think consenting adults ought to be able to make any sort of love arrangements they want, I do have a couple of issues with polygamy. For one thing, polygamy as it's actually practiced in North America tends to involve multiple marriages arranged between a man and some number of women, by the leader of some religious sect. I question whether there's true "consent" involved here.
Also, your choice of words is interesting: "polygamy" vs. "polyandry" or "polyamory". Meaning, the union of one man and multiple women. If this kind of arrangement would become widespread, you'd have the male half of society divided into two groups: the lucky few who were able to score a wife (or several), and the remaining masses who would have little hope of ever reproducing. Given the destabilizing nature of that, I think society has a vested interest in maintaining at least some semblance of equality of opportunity to find a mate.
Does that mean I think multiple marriage arrangements ought to be illegal? I'm not sure. But I'd be a lot more inclined to support the idea if 1) it didn't involve semi-coercion for the parties involved, and 2) there was support for arrangements other than 1 man - multiple women.
Dude, this material, even if the theory of stable roentgenium is correct (and realistically, it's probably not) would be found in the amounts of a few atoms per gold nugget. So there's not enough of this stuff on earth to make a shotgun pellet, much less a tank. You'd have to make it synthetically in particle accelerators. And that would take an eternity and cost a fortune, if it was possible at all.
How does the presence of a previously unknown stable state make this such a great energetic material? For this to be the case, there would have to be a big energy difference between the stable and unstable states, and if that were the case, all of the stuff in the unstable state would promptly convert to the stable state.
And in any case, we've already got lots of really good energetic materials for rockets and/or bombs that are a lot easier to make than roentgenium.
My 1986 F-150 ran for well over 225k miles. My 1999 F-150 is currently at 178k and still going strong. And I doubt I'm especially unusual here.
Just because people CHOOSE to replace their vehicles after 100k miles doesn't mean that's as long as they can run.
Of course, it's a given that the workers are at fault here, because it's unpossible that management could have screwed it up. Give me a fucking break.
I think that's pretty plausible, actually. Also, something the GP doesn't point out - even if the Volt isn't profitable in the gross margin sense now, it's quite possible that it will become so. As economies of scale begin to kick in for the suppliers, the price for components is likely to drop - so that even if GM is losing money on every car today, that situation may well turn around as sales increase.
Distributing the power generation capability does a lot of really nice things for you: 1) it cuts down on the number of big cross-country transmission lines you need (and their attendant losses), 2) reduces the probability that a single bad event can take out a huge amount of your generating capability, and 3) evens out your production - instead of a huge peak in solar production around noon Mountain time, your solar production starts off on the east coast in the morning (Eastern Time), and continues fairly smoothly until afternoon (Pacific Time).
As for home solar thermal, you aren't going to generate electricity that way, but you can certainly heat your house and make hot water that way.
Most of the US is net-metered, so during the bright part of the day you're producing more power than you use, and push back the excess into the grid, making your meter run backwards. If you're not net-metered, it's probably not cost-effective to do solar PV at all. If you need to be totally off the grid, for one thing, you're going to need to cut way back on consumption, because you're not going to be be able to generate huge amounts of power. But given that, a battery system for nighttime doesn't have to be THAT huge. It is quite expensive, though. I was looking into a solar PV system a while back, and although ours was going to be grid-connected, I talked about off-grid systems with our consultant. His recommendation for off-grid people is to skip the batteries and just use a diesel generator to get you through the night - it's a lot more cost effective.
If the Android ecosystem gets involved in a race to the bottom, their customer base will defect en masse to iPhone, RIM, Palm, or whatever Nokia is doing. And the Android manufacturers understand that quite well. So I think a race to the bottom situation is highly unlikely.
The implication, I guess, is that it's not really a good thing for consumers? Umm, why? Turning phones into a commodity forces manufacturers to compete on price and quality, which in turn drives down their profit margins. Yes, it's probably not so good for phone manufacturers, but it's DEFINITELY a good thing for consumers.
Can't see the video at work, so maybe I'm missing something. But this really seems like pie-in-the-sky to me. A couple of things:
I'm not really sure why the organizers are determined to do this in the most difficult way possible. There's sand and sun all over the place, including many that are a lot closer to electrical markets (the US southwest, for example). So why not just build these things there and sidestep the whole issue of superconducting wires? This plan doesn't make sense to me.
I accuse you of being a rapist! And if you don't have anything to hide, you should be willing to go to trial... what? You don't want your life ruined by scurrilous allegations? Shut up and fly (at your own expense) to whatever country I designate so we can interrogate you.
Get the picture?
I'm pretty sure that the Constitution does not allow for the government to assassinate people with trial, for example. I'm pretty sure that she doesn't even understand the Constitution well enough to decide whether her beliefs are in accordance with it.
Sure, she has a lot of followers, but that's because we have a big electorate. In percentage terms, her numbers ain't so hot. The latest number I saw was "unfavorable" of around 38% and "favorable" less than 25%, with lots of undecided, don't know enough to say, etc. And with so much negative material available, you can bet that in the heat of a campaign, the balance would likely tip even further against her.
The tricky part is that her numbers are highly skewed by party - potential GOP voters like her a lot better than the electorate at large (at this stage of the game they haven't figured out likely voter models yet, so these are registered voter numbers). We could end up in a situation where she manages a victory in the Republican primaries on the strength of tea-party votes, but then gets crushed in the general.
Sure, "most" of our oil is sourced within North America. But some very significant fraction comes from elsewhere. Around 40% of our consumption is from domestic sources, another 15-20% is from elsewhere in North America. The rest comes from elsewhere in the world - some from stable, friendly places (Norway, the UK), some from relatively friendly but not so stable places (e.g. Nigeria), and some from not-so-friendly but relatively stable places (e.g. Venezuela), and some from places that are both unstable and less than completely friendly (e.g. various middle east locations). So, yeah, "most" of our oil is domestically sourced. But we're still sending money by the supertanker load to a bunch of places we'd probably rather not be sending it. And we most certainly are dependent on it, as our economy would rapidly go into a tailspin if the overseas spigots were shut off.
Don't forget: having your home country/province/town/ invaded and or bombed. That's another pretty powerful motivator. So Janet, how about asking Barack to stop doing all that stuff?