While they're certainly allowed and make sense... they're also socialist. You know who else has a Federal Constitutional Republic? Most of Europe. Also Canada. And they happen to also have more socialist programs. You know who didn't have those things that "make sense"? The United States of America, while it was still a Federal Constitutional Republic, just a hundred years ago. Maybe in a hundred years, they'll think this healthcare thing "makes sense under a federal constitutional republic", and be arguing about some new socialist proposition using the exact same rhetoric we're seeing here...
More for optimism, perhaps, but any idea how well Koku (enough Rice to feed a person for a year) worked for Feudal Japan? Seems like a reasonable measure of value to use as a base for currency. I know it was used, but I have no idea whether it suffered from similar issues to the gold or silver standards.
Well, it isn't entirely out of the question, but I thought it was the money from the wood pulp paper industry, tobacco & alcohol, and cotton and wool that are keeping marijuana out. The drug aspect is just an easy thing to point at to keep the general growing for industrial use banned. Or at least, that was the big conspiracy theory on it. Maybe they've moved on to newer and more elaborate ones.
Either way, there's definitely more to the Drug War than it appears.
The Solar Deaths (from what I recall of seeing this information previously) were mostly roof-installation deaths, and comparable to other roof work per man-hour required. However, the Solar Panel installation required more time on top of the standard roof work, so could be and was measured separately. Having safety guidelines and actually having them enforced are very different propositions.
I suppose if you include freak mirror accidents for the focused solar heat arrays (should any have ever occurred), that would qualify as well. There's more to solar power than just the direct Photo-voltaic Cell Arrays you're considering.
That said, why not include it? If the argument against Nuclear power stems from "It's Dangerous!", and statistics that show, per functional unit of output, it's safer than any other form of electricity generation, that seems pretty valid as a counter argument. If we went with number of workers per terawatt-hour, that would just show how efficiently we were using available manpower. Showing deaths per worker might show general safety concerns in terms of what an employee might want to know, but isn't terribly relevant in terms of which technology is the "safest" (in terms of deaths, anyway) for end users to get the amount of electricity they demand.
"sequence of events is "Apple builds a phone that revolutionizes the smart phone market, everybody including HTC tries to rip off Apple, Apple uses patents to defend against the ripping off, and Google gives HTC patents to countersue with the goal that they can continue to rip off Apple". That is offensive in every meaning of the word."
Nope. That's a defensive use from Google and offensive use from Apple. The fact that you _think_ that Apple "deserves" to be a monopolist has nothing to do with it.
I thought it was "Apple copies a bunch of smart ideas from other companies and markets well, finally allowing phones that have already been in production prior to sell, other people ramp up production as the market shifts, Apple sues companies that originally invented the technologies using bogus patents regarding shape or obvious extensions of existing patents those other companies already own, or regarding automatic syntax highlighting and linking to alternate functionality, to stifle competition, Google purchases a suite of patents that cover the technologies in question and allow affiliates to borrow them to defend themselves and counter-sue Apple."
However, I might have missed something somewhere. It's possible Apple actually had a good original idea in there somewhere -- those don't get as much press as all of the ridiculous patent claims being made and used in court.
I used Mac OS (up to and including OS X) and haven't much cared for them. I also used an AIX system, and a few varieties of Linux and BSD. I still spend most of my time in Windows, where I have enough control to deal with things (Mac OS tends to hide the real controls pretty heavily), but enough ease-of-use that I can get things done without reading man pages for hours. Also, games. Which is really what I spend most of my time doing anyway.
That said, I suspect at least some of that "Ease-of-Use" is from early mindset lock-in in many ways -- I used DOS and Windows early, and learned the quirks there and have no desire to go learning the quirks of something else for marginal benefit (and yes, I do believe that for my personal use (read: games) it would be of marginal benefit at best to be switching to Linux or Mac, and likely considerable detriment). However, I believe that some is that Linux (and all fo the other *IX variants), despite all the attempts otherwise, is still not terribly non-power-user friendly, and Macs are at the opposite end of the spectrum, being power-user unfriendly, but easy to use for someone who just wants to click a button and have things "just work" -- as long as you're ok with doing it in the only allowed way as prescribed by Apple (note: this might be my dislike of iTunes leaking through into my thoughts of general Mac OS behavior, since that's most of what I've used Macs for recently). Windows is generally somewhere in between, and hated by both for it.
In terms of Operating a System, I would say Windows 7 works "well" -- though perhaps you have some alternate definition to "runs the programs I tell it to, when I tell it to, and generally behave nicely".
I've done that... and only the ones I've installed and expect to regularly check for updates are doing automated internet calls. If you're referring to a pre-built machine, that's not Microsoft's fault, nor is Windows to blame. That's the individual manufacturer (e.g. Dell, HP, eMachines, etc...) that are pre-installing all sorts of trial packages and such. That's like claiming Linux is terrible OS because you bought a machine that had several rootkits, trojans, and viruses installed on it by the guy who sold it to you. It isn't the OS that's to blame here.
If you're going to complain about such things, at least make sure you direct it at the right place.
DeBeers allegedly have lots of diamonds that they hold in vaults to reduce supply and artificially drive up costs. And apparently bought rough diamonds from competitors to maintain monopoly control. As they have in the past acted to control supply in that fashion, it would not be surprising if they continue to do so, and continue to lie tot he world that diamonds are as rare as they claim them to be. Along with probably lying about the "supply running low" as diamond mines are fully exploited, and purposely reducing production to allow the mines to be operated longer.
I have no idea how much of that is accurate, but it seems to come up any time diamonds are mentioned.
If it is a fallacy, why should any child ever believe a teacher?
Short Answer: Absent additional data, they shouldn't. And I didn't. I questioned teachers. If they could show me in an experiment, cite sources, demonstrate the logical proof, then I'd accept that bit. And when they started the next unit, they'd have to do it again. My teachers were wrong, occasionally egregiously so. Surprisingly, only one broke down in tears when torn apart by the more vicious of my classmates due to such an error. Many noted it gracefully. Some updated their plans (noting that human understanding is constantly advancing, and it's difficult to keep up on every change, so it's important to question and seek your own answers). Some left their plans alone (noting that while new understandings may be more accurate for those interested in the subject, older models are close enough and more easily understood and perfectly suitable for most people not directly in the field; for example: Newtonian Physics vs. Relativity).
I admit that I was rather annoyed to do the same dungeon with the same group at 85 that I had just run at 84 and suddenly I was out of mana when healing where at 84 I'd had no problems. The jump in mana cost was very steep, and even though I'd managed to maintain excellent gear it was still a very unsatisfactory shock to directly lose power because I gained a level (as opposed to losing relative power due to enemies being stronger, which would be just fine).
The LFG/RDF tool is already Battle-group restricted (or was), since you share Instance Servers with your Battle-group already. Unless they expanded it somewhere to larger clusters and I missed it, I think you'd have to restrict to Realm-Only to reduce the number of people it could reach. I suspect at this point, the best you'd see is an option of "My Server Only" for it, so people who don't care aren't unnecessarily restricted.
I will admit it isn't for everyone, and I respect people who actually do lug around large amounts of gear for regular use having vehicles appropriate for that. That would be opposing SUVs that have never touched dirt, ride mostly empty, with a single occupant. I will also note I was a little unfair in my comment earlier, I apologize for that.
I have a feeling as I get older, I'll probably also stop riding in harsher weather conditions, but if I can manage to ride a couple months out of the year, that's still better than not at all. Drive for the rainy days, or the extreme ends of the seasons, or if I know I need to do a major shopping run or the like before or after work or otherwise will need a larger vehicle, and bike the rest.
I ride in any weather. I lived in Upstate New York for most of my life prior to L.A. -- biking in the rain isn't bad if you're prepared for it. I biked in L.A. traffic -- also not that bad - it was the same air you'd breathe almost anywhere else, as most people don't have A/C or filtered air. I'm currently in Texas, and ride in 100+ temperatures right now in the summer, and was out in the freezing weather in the winter. I never envy the people in the cars going by, as my commute is short enough that neither A/C nor heating would kick in before I got to work, so I'd either be shivering in my car all the way, or over heated much worse due to the literal greenhouse-style heating a car would undergo in the sun. Either way, it would be at least as uncomfortable, if not worse, in the car, albeit for less time. On bike, I'm geared for the environment, and my movement keeps me quite warm through the winter rains, and my full-body rain gear both makes me visible and keeps me dry. I'd say more people would end up wetter on their ill-prepared runs from the vehicle to the building due to local rains catching them off-guard than I ever have.
So while I have altered my lifestyle some to be able to enjoy a much better commute, your comments on weather and unfavorable conditions wouldn't deter me. I'd still find the 30 minute twice-per-day bike ride a better commute. A bicycle is a fine vehicle for any able-bodied human of any age.
I admit, I don't go pick up my relatives. When people fly in, I set them up with a Shared-Ride van, and sometimes they have to wait upwards of an extra 10 minutes so the van can fill with people heading the same direction. As for my future vehicle, I expect I'll buy a station-wagon type vehicle, but that's because I also intend to go camping, and will need space for extra gear when that happens. However, I know plenty of people who get along just fine without needing multiple cars, or even a single large car in order to have a family. Sure, it might take a little more planning and a little more personal effort to skip on the environmental waste, but that's what happens when you attempt to internalize external costs. That said, I'm sure your life is tough and you just can't spare that extra effort. It's ok. I understand. I'm sure your children's children's children will be happy only hearing stories and seeing pictures of Earth-That-Was, as they can't go out now since you couldn't be bothered to reduce your environmental impact. I'm just sad that mine will also need to be ok with that, because of what you choose to do.
Your 10 km trip is done at 20 km/h, which is nicely matching the statistics at Wikipedia. In a car that distance in a typical US city, in a typical rush hour traffic can be covered in 1/3 of the time - in 10 minutes. Parking in US cities on a home to work trip is usually not a problem (provided by the company, provided by your rental place, included with your house, etc.) This means that you will save 2*20 minutes (total 40 minutes) per day. If you work as most people, that amounts to 220 work days per year and 8800 minutes (146 hours, about a week) of your life spent in traffic, among exhausts of cars, breathing all these carcinogens. Are you a suicider, or what? That can't be good for you.
I ride along neighborhood streets. Yes, cars go by, but I'm breathing the same air that you would if you went out to do some gardening (assuming you have a lawn, though it seems more likely you're in dense urban center from your descriptions, even if you then talk about living in the hills where one would expect the air is quite clean). Most people pay large sums of money to enjoy a vacation in the clean air I have available, I suppose. However, my previous commute, also by bike, was near L.A. I went right by LAX... on the beach side. So to answer your question... I'm pretty sure I don't have much better to do than ride along the beach for 60 minutes, enjoying the sound of surf and the freshest air available, and also getting to exercise out in nature instead of paying for a gym or gym equipment. Or, more recently, 30 minutes either along nice forested streets with bike lanes or on small neighborhood streets typical of suburban America.
In fact, I see plenty of people who drive home just so they can bike along the same roads I commute on in their leisure time. There are even people who take vacations simply to enjoy what is my daily commute. It's quite safe - you can attach some lights for night cycling, and with appropriate local zoning and transportation design, you have designated bike lanes and bike paths that keep drivers from being impacted by cyclist traffic, and keep cyclists from being unexpectedly in the way of a tired driver.
On occasion I will rent a car or truck to move larger objects as needed -- but most of the time, shopping is done via the bike, or online and deliveries come to my apartment directly. In the future, I fully expect to own a vehicle more permanently to be able to handle child-related emergencies and other parent-type requirements more easily, but still do the majority of my daily commuting by bike. It doesn't work for everyone -- but with minor adjustments to attitude and lifestyle changes, it can work for a lot more than you seem to believe.
Yes, the Pinto was the one that would be the origin of that sort of story. The Exploding Gas Tank could have been fixed by a $1 plastic bit, and they knew that before they went to manufacturing.
The semi-conductor industry (that would be 'computer chips' to the layman) has been crushing proclaimed unmovable "physical limits" that are always 10 years away with clockwork regularity for decades, and that is the industry riding edge of our physical understanding of the world. Most industries have not even scratched the surface of what is possible. Anyone who predicts the end of technological development in our lifetime is a god damn fool like all the fools who made the same prediction before them.
Well, yes... and they hit them. Every single time, those predictions of hard physical limits were accurate. The technology continued to advance by changing to a different physical system to side-step the limit, until they ran out of alternatives. The rise of the multi-core processor, and the need for programmers to finally learn proper parallel programming and threading techniques is the result. They couldn't directly improve the main core the way they had been - they hit a hard physical limit under present fabrication techniques. If you want to continue to work as you used to, with single-threaded programs, your modern processor is really not that much better than one 5 years ago. They're running about the same instruction sets and have almost identical clock rates. Things progressed quite rapidly until they hit that level, then that form of growth plateaued, and the companies involved moved to focus on other areas of growth they could exploit. From what I recall of the more recent advances, they improved the pipeline some, improved caching considerably, and moved into multi-core and multi-threaded designs, but no longer do you get to know your current processor is better than your old one by seeing that the clock rate is significantly higher.
See, you're missing the exact same thing in the old predictions as you are in the current ones. They're all made with a Ceteris Paribus clause. For example, here's an easy one: if we continue to grow the human population at the current rate with no other changes (e.g. not moving them off-world, or body shapes changing, or building additional habitation measures), the surface of the Earth will eventually be covered entirely by human flesh. What will change? Likely rate of growth -- we exhaust food supplies and other resources and large sections of the population stop reproducing more than necessary to prevent negative population growth and we settle into a steady-state. Technology -- we get people off-world, or downloaded into computer bodies, or add more vertical layers (e.g. the modern city). All sorts of things will change... but there is a physical hard limit to terrestrial population growth.
Similarly, we have that nice one about energy usage -- we can't continue to grow energy use without improving efficiency to reduce the entropy-loss, or developing a heat-sink of some sort to eject excess energy off-planet, or evolving human bodies to prefer a higher-temperature environment, or whatever else might come along. What's the point? There is a physical limit in place, and we are actually approaching it. Some sort of change is necessary. If your long term business projections rely on continuous growth of, say, energy usage, your projection is wrong. Energy usage needs to plateau at some point or the seas boil, so plan for that and determine the most likely changes that will occur, and include that in your projections instead.
Most likely, it will be one of slowing certain types of growth, much like one can see in some highly developed nations already. Populations shrinking over all in some countries for reasons that aren't war or famine or disease -- just low birth rates. Fancy that. I guess it isn't exponential growth after all.
The Republicans and Democrats compromised once when they agreed to the spending back when they passed this thing called the Budget. This bill is working out how to pay for the spending they already approved.
I typically vote Democrat (or third party). However, I was strongly considering voting for McCain until Palin entered. Had McCain beaten Bush in 2000, it would have been a tough choice there as well. If Bush had declined to run in 2004, McCain would have been a much better choice over Kerry. If it had come to Hillary vs. McCain in 2008, and Palin (or an equivalent) was not in the VP slot, I would have gone to that side. He doesn't energize the Republican Conservative Base, true, but he is a great candidate as a Centrist, and he is... I guess I want to say "rational". Willing to listen to arguments, see evidence, and change his opinion when he realizes he was wrong. He's also willing to stick to an unpopular opinion when he believes he's right. I can understand why the Republicans don't all like him -- he's not a dogmatic yes-man. He's willing to cross party lines to get things done. He compromises, and makes deals, and listens to all of his constituents, not just the ones that fund him, or that think the way he already does.
Obama pulled off a very smooth campaign, and held the center well, but McCain was a serious threat to Obama losing the Democratic Base until Palin entered the race. With his health problems making surviving his full term a serious question, no one on the liberal-side of the Republicans and into the Conservative Democrats wanted to see Palin take over. She might have helped him recover the Conservative Republicans, but she lost him the Center and Swing Votes.
Each CC transaciton attracts a higher fee paid by the merchant (that's who you're paying) to be paid to the bank. This can be as high as 3%. The cost of this is passed back on to you, the customer in the form of higher prices. The net effect is to increase the cost of whatever you're trying to purchase without increasing revenue to the company you're purchasing from.
Please dont tell me that you're naive enough to think the bank was giving you free money, they paid you back out of the % the bank got from the merchant.
Paying by direct debit or bank transfer does not attract such high fees.
Perhaps it is different in Australia, but in most stores in the United States, that fee is entirely hidden from the customer. The store signs up for a given Credit Card Service, and all customers (regardless of payment type) pay the same prices at the Point of Sale. Some few merchants will charge extra for Credit Card usage, but it's not common. If that fee were transparently passed along to consumers, I suspect fewer would use Credit Cards as they do presently, but I couldn't say how many would voluntarily drop the Credit Card from their purchase cycle. Probably far fewer than I'd like to expect.
I have a credit card. It has no balance beyond what I bought this month. It has never carried a balance between months. I have never owed interest on it. Having a Credit Card is not the same as In Debt To A Credit Card. Everything I have is paid for. My monthly debt is all my monthly expenses, which are paid for at month's end. I have money in multiple accounts earning interest.
Now here's the difference between you and I... I'm one month ahead of you in terms of investing (I can invest my paycheck immediately, since I delay payments for food and such by about half-a-month on average via the credit card), and if I ever need to buy something that costs more than what I can afford out of pocket, I can get a better loan since I have a solid and established credit record.
All computer output has aliasing. Analog does not. The aliasing can be very fine grained indeed, but it never goes away.
Within physics, at some point, there is no analog. Just very fine-grained digital. Or so I was told by the physicists when I was in college, in regards to Planck-lengths.
Dreaming, creating, love, etc, its all output based on input just like a computer.
There are no facts to back up your belief, and having no evidence to the contrary is no more valid than saying that no evidence of the lack of a god is evidence that one exists.
From another of your posts -- I think there are plenty of facts for this. Most of them involve the use of illicit substances, though even alcohol will give you a bit of it. Input: Chemicals. Output: Change in behavior. Input: Appropriate placement of specific transmitter chemicals. Output: Emotion.
But really, let me take this back to the basic premise:
Brains do more than compute. They originate ideas, they dream, they create, they appreciate, they love and they hate and they hurt.
[citation needed]
You have accepted that brains follow physics (everything does). You dismissed that as a meaningless statement. It isn't. Presuming that physics includes causal determinism, then brains also follow causal chain-reactions, so where can this "origination" come from? There's no origination - just chemicals reacting according to physics. Photons enter my eyes, that causes an electro-chemical reaction cascade that results in finger motions tapping keys, resulting in electrical signals, resulting in some magnetic changes to a disk, and then some more electrical signals and photons from your screen of my words hit your eyes on your end. From within the system, I may appear to be appreciating, originating, dreaming... but it's all a physical causal chain. It's a fundamental problem in Philosophy of Mind -- how can you insert consciousness, origination, doing more than pure processing and computing, into a purely physical world without breaking physics?
If bicycles had the same risks as auto/motorcyles do, they would require them. Remember, horses, pedestrians, and even bicycles were there before cars -- motor vehicles are the interloper, not the bicycle. But you bring up a good point -- cyclists and motorists don't have equal rights to road use. Cyclists actually have a right to use the road, motorists obtain it only as a privilege.
Slashdot Mirror
While they're certainly allowed and make sense... they're also socialist. You know who else has a Federal Constitutional Republic? Most of Europe. Also Canada. And they happen to also have more socialist programs. You know who didn't have those things that "make sense"? The United States of America, while it was still a Federal Constitutional Republic, just a hundred years ago. Maybe in a hundred years, they'll think this healthcare thing "makes sense under a federal constitutional republic", and be arguing about some new socialist proposition using the exact same rhetoric we're seeing here...
More for optimism, perhaps, but any idea how well Koku (enough Rice to feed a person for a year) worked for Feudal Japan? Seems like a reasonable measure of value to use as a base for currency. I know it was used, but I have no idea whether it suffered from similar issues to the gold or silver standards.
Well, it isn't entirely out of the question, but I thought it was the money from the wood pulp paper industry, tobacco & alcohol, and cotton and wool that are keeping marijuana out. The drug aspect is just an easy thing to point at to keep the general growing for industrial use banned. Or at least, that was the big conspiracy theory on it. Maybe they've moved on to newer and more elaborate ones.
Either way, there's definitely more to the Drug War than it appears.
The Solar Deaths (from what I recall of seeing this information previously) were mostly roof-installation deaths, and comparable to other roof work per man-hour required. However, the Solar Panel installation required more time on top of the standard roof work, so could be and was measured separately. Having safety guidelines and actually having them enforced are very different propositions.
I suppose if you include freak mirror accidents for the focused solar heat arrays (should any have ever occurred), that would qualify as well. There's more to solar power than just the direct Photo-voltaic Cell Arrays you're considering.
That said, why not include it? If the argument against Nuclear power stems from "It's Dangerous!", and statistics that show, per functional unit of output, it's safer than any other form of electricity generation, that seems pretty valid as a counter argument. If we went with number of workers per terawatt-hour, that would just show how efficiently we were using available manpower. Showing deaths per worker might show general safety concerns in terms of what an employee might want to know, but isn't terribly relevant in terms of which technology is the "safest" (in terms of deaths, anyway) for end users to get the amount of electricity they demand.
I would guess that it is exactly what it says, Electrolysis of Blood (more specifically, the water in the blood).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrolysis_of_water
"sequence of events is "Apple builds a phone that revolutionizes the smart phone market, everybody including HTC tries to rip off Apple, Apple uses patents to defend against the ripping off, and Google gives HTC patents to countersue with the goal that they can continue to rip off Apple". That is offensive in every meaning of the word."
Nope. That's a defensive use from Google and offensive use from Apple. The fact that you _think_ that Apple "deserves" to be a monopolist has nothing to do with it.
I thought it was "Apple copies a bunch of smart ideas from other companies and markets well, finally allowing phones that have already been in production prior to sell, other people ramp up production as the market shifts, Apple sues companies that originally invented the technologies using bogus patents regarding shape or obvious extensions of existing patents those other companies already own, or regarding automatic syntax highlighting and linking to alternate functionality, to stifle competition, Google purchases a suite of patents that cover the technologies in question and allow affiliates to borrow them to defend themselves and counter-sue Apple."
However, I might have missed something somewhere. It's possible Apple actually had a good original idea in there somewhere -- those don't get as much press as all of the ridiculous patent claims being made and used in court.
I used Mac OS (up to and including OS X) and haven't much cared for them. I also used an AIX system, and a few varieties of Linux and BSD. I still spend most of my time in Windows, where I have enough control to deal with things (Mac OS tends to hide the real controls pretty heavily), but enough ease-of-use that I can get things done without reading man pages for hours. Also, games. Which is really what I spend most of my time doing anyway.
That said, I suspect at least some of that "Ease-of-Use" is from early mindset lock-in in many ways -- I used DOS and Windows early, and learned the quirks there and have no desire to go learning the quirks of something else for marginal benefit (and yes, I do believe that for my personal use (read: games) it would be of marginal benefit at best to be switching to Linux or Mac, and likely considerable detriment). However, I believe that some is that Linux (and all fo the other *IX variants), despite all the attempts otherwise, is still not terribly non-power-user friendly, and Macs are at the opposite end of the spectrum, being power-user unfriendly, but easy to use for someone who just wants to click a button and have things "just work" -- as long as you're ok with doing it in the only allowed way as prescribed by Apple (note: this might be my dislike of iTunes leaking through into my thoughts of general Mac OS behavior, since that's most of what I've used Macs for recently). Windows is generally somewhere in between, and hated by both for it.
In terms of Operating a System, I would say Windows 7 works "well" -- though perhaps you have some alternate definition to "runs the programs I tell it to, when I tell it to, and generally behave nicely".
I've done that... and only the ones I've installed and expect to regularly check for updates are doing automated internet calls. If you're referring to a pre-built machine, that's not Microsoft's fault, nor is Windows to blame. That's the individual manufacturer (e.g. Dell, HP, eMachines, etc...) that are pre-installing all sorts of trial packages and such. That's like claiming Linux is terrible OS because you bought a machine that had several rootkits, trojans, and viruses installed on it by the guy who sold it to you. It isn't the OS that's to blame here.
If you're going to complain about such things, at least make sure you direct it at the right place.
DeBeers allegedly have lots of diamonds that they hold in vaults to reduce supply and artificially drive up costs. And apparently bought rough diamonds from competitors to maintain monopoly control. As they have in the past acted to control supply in that fashion, it would not be surprising if they continue to do so, and continue to lie tot he world that diamonds are as rare as they claim them to be. Along with probably lying about the "supply running low" as diamond mines are fully exploited, and purposely reducing production to allow the mines to be operated longer.
I have no idea how much of that is accurate, but it seems to come up any time diamonds are mentioned.
If it is a fallacy, why should any child ever believe a teacher?
Short Answer: Absent additional data, they shouldn't. And I didn't. I questioned teachers. If they could show me in an experiment, cite sources, demonstrate the logical proof, then I'd accept that bit. And when they started the next unit, they'd have to do it again. My teachers were wrong, occasionally egregiously so. Surprisingly, only one broke down in tears when torn apart by the more vicious of my classmates due to such an error. Many noted it gracefully. Some updated their plans (noting that human understanding is constantly advancing, and it's difficult to keep up on every change, so it's important to question and seek your own answers). Some left their plans alone (noting that while new understandings may be more accurate for those interested in the subject, older models are close enough and more easily understood and perfectly suitable for most people not directly in the field; for example: Newtonian Physics vs. Relativity).
Who do you think runs the campaigns? The politician you elected?
I admit that I was rather annoyed to do the same dungeon with the same group at 85 that I had just run at 84 and suddenly I was out of mana when healing where at 84 I'd had no problems. The jump in mana cost was very steep, and even though I'd managed to maintain excellent gear it was still a very unsatisfactory shock to directly lose power because I gained a level (as opposed to losing relative power due to enemies being stronger, which would be just fine).
The LFG/RDF tool is already Battle-group restricted (or was), since you share Instance Servers with your Battle-group already. Unless they expanded it somewhere to larger clusters and I missed it, I think you'd have to restrict to Realm-Only to reduce the number of people it could reach. I suspect at this point, the best you'd see is an option of "My Server Only" for it, so people who don't care aren't unnecessarily restricted.
I will admit it isn't for everyone, and I respect people who actually do lug around large amounts of gear for regular use having vehicles appropriate for that. That would be opposing SUVs that have never touched dirt, ride mostly empty, with a single occupant. I will also note I was a little unfair in my comment earlier, I apologize for that.
I have a feeling as I get older, I'll probably also stop riding in harsher weather conditions, but if I can manage to ride a couple months out of the year, that's still better than not at all. Drive for the rainy days, or the extreme ends of the seasons, or if I know I need to do a major shopping run or the like before or after work or otherwise will need a larger vehicle, and bike the rest.
I ride in any weather. I lived in Upstate New York for most of my life prior to L.A. -- biking in the rain isn't bad if you're prepared for it. I biked in L.A. traffic -- also not that bad - it was the same air you'd breathe almost anywhere else, as most people don't have A/C or filtered air. I'm currently in Texas, and ride in 100+ temperatures right now in the summer, and was out in the freezing weather in the winter. I never envy the people in the cars going by, as my commute is short enough that neither A/C nor heating would kick in before I got to work, so I'd either be shivering in my car all the way, or over heated much worse due to the literal greenhouse-style heating a car would undergo in the sun. Either way, it would be at least as uncomfortable, if not worse, in the car, albeit for less time. On bike, I'm geared for the environment, and my movement keeps me quite warm through the winter rains, and my full-body rain gear both makes me visible and keeps me dry. I'd say more people would end up wetter on their ill-prepared runs from the vehicle to the building due to local rains catching them off-guard than I ever have.
So while I have altered my lifestyle some to be able to enjoy a much better commute, your comments on weather and unfavorable conditions wouldn't deter me. I'd still find the 30 minute twice-per-day bike ride a better commute. A bicycle is a fine vehicle for any able-bodied human of any age.
I admit, I don't go pick up my relatives. When people fly in, I set them up with a Shared-Ride van, and sometimes they have to wait upwards of an extra 10 minutes so the van can fill with people heading the same direction. As for my future vehicle, I expect I'll buy a station-wagon type vehicle, but that's because I also intend to go camping, and will need space for extra gear when that happens. However, I know plenty of people who get along just fine without needing multiple cars, or even a single large car in order to have a family. Sure, it might take a little more planning and a little more personal effort to skip on the environmental waste, but that's what happens when you attempt to internalize external costs. That said, I'm sure your life is tough and you just can't spare that extra effort. It's ok. I understand. I'm sure your children's children's children will be happy only hearing stories and seeing pictures of Earth-That-Was, as they can't go out now since you couldn't be bothered to reduce your environmental impact. I'm just sad that mine will also need to be ok with that, because of what you choose to do.
Your 10 km trip is done at 20 km/h, which is nicely matching the statistics at Wikipedia. In a car that distance in a typical US city, in a typical rush hour traffic can be covered in 1/3 of the time - in 10 minutes. Parking in US cities on a home to work trip is usually not a problem (provided by the company, provided by your rental place, included with your house, etc.) This means that you will save 2*20 minutes (total 40 minutes) per day. If you work as most people, that amounts to 220 work days per year and 8800 minutes (146 hours, about a week) of your life spent in traffic, among exhausts of cars, breathing all these carcinogens. Are you a suicider, or what? That can't be good for you.
I ride along neighborhood streets. Yes, cars go by, but I'm breathing the same air that you would if you went out to do some gardening (assuming you have a lawn, though it seems more likely you're in dense urban center from your descriptions, even if you then talk about living in the hills where one would expect the air is quite clean). Most people pay large sums of money to enjoy a vacation in the clean air I have available, I suppose. However, my previous commute, also by bike, was near L.A. I went right by LAX... on the beach side. So to answer your question... I'm pretty sure I don't have much better to do than ride along the beach for 60 minutes, enjoying the sound of surf and the freshest air available, and also getting to exercise out in nature instead of paying for a gym or gym equipment. Or, more recently, 30 minutes either along nice forested streets with bike lanes or on small neighborhood streets typical of suburban America.
In fact, I see plenty of people who drive home just so they can bike along the same roads I commute on in their leisure time. There are even people who take vacations simply to enjoy what is my daily commute. It's quite safe - you can attach some lights for night cycling, and with appropriate local zoning and transportation design, you have designated bike lanes and bike paths that keep drivers from being impacted by cyclist traffic, and keep cyclists from being unexpectedly in the way of a tired driver.
On occasion I will rent a car or truck to move larger objects as needed -- but most of the time, shopping is done via the bike, or online and deliveries come to my apartment directly. In the future, I fully expect to own a vehicle more permanently to be able to handle child-related emergencies and other parent-type requirements more easily, but still do the majority of my daily commuting by bike. It doesn't work for everyone -- but with minor adjustments to attitude and lifestyle changes, it can work for a lot more than you seem to believe.
Yes, the Pinto was the one that would be the origin of that sort of story. The Exploding Gas Tank could have been fixed by a $1 plastic bit, and they knew that before they went to manufacturing.
http://motherjones.com/politics/1977/09/pinto-madness
The semi-conductor industry (that would be 'computer chips' to the layman) has been crushing proclaimed unmovable "physical limits" that are always 10 years away with clockwork regularity for decades, and that is the industry riding edge of our physical understanding of the world. Most industries have not even scratched the surface of what is possible. Anyone who predicts the end of technological development in our lifetime is a god damn fool like all the fools who made the same prediction before them.
Well, yes... and they hit them. Every single time, those predictions of hard physical limits were accurate. The technology continued to advance by changing to a different physical system to side-step the limit, until they ran out of alternatives. The rise of the multi-core processor, and the need for programmers to finally learn proper parallel programming and threading techniques is the result. They couldn't directly improve the main core the way they had been - they hit a hard physical limit under present fabrication techniques. If you want to continue to work as you used to, with single-threaded programs, your modern processor is really not that much better than one 5 years ago. They're running about the same instruction sets and have almost identical clock rates. Things progressed quite rapidly until they hit that level, then that form of growth plateaued, and the companies involved moved to focus on other areas of growth they could exploit. From what I recall of the more recent advances, they improved the pipeline some, improved caching considerably, and moved into multi-core and multi-threaded designs, but no longer do you get to know your current processor is better than your old one by seeing that the clock rate is significantly higher.
See, you're missing the exact same thing in the old predictions as you are in the current ones. They're all made with a Ceteris Paribus clause. For example, here's an easy one: if we continue to grow the human population at the current rate with no other changes (e.g. not moving them off-world, or body shapes changing, or building additional habitation measures), the surface of the Earth will eventually be covered entirely by human flesh. What will change? Likely rate of growth -- we exhaust food supplies and other resources and large sections of the population stop reproducing more than necessary to prevent negative population growth and we settle into a steady-state. Technology -- we get people off-world, or downloaded into computer bodies, or add more vertical layers (e.g. the modern city). All sorts of things will change... but there is a physical hard limit to terrestrial population growth.
Similarly, we have that nice one about energy usage -- we can't continue to grow energy use without improving efficiency to reduce the entropy-loss, or developing a heat-sink of some sort to eject excess energy off-planet, or evolving human bodies to prefer a higher-temperature environment, or whatever else might come along. What's the point? There is a physical limit in place, and we are actually approaching it. Some sort of change is necessary. If your long term business projections rely on continuous growth of, say, energy usage, your projection is wrong. Energy usage needs to plateau at some point or the seas boil, so plan for that and determine the most likely changes that will occur, and include that in your projections instead.
Most likely, it will be one of slowing certain types of growth, much like one can see in some highly developed nations already. Populations shrinking over all in some countries for reasons that aren't war or famine or disease -- just low birth rates. Fancy that. I guess it isn't exponential growth after all.
The Republicans and Democrats compromised once when they agreed to the spending back when they passed this thing called the Budget. This bill is working out how to pay for the spending they already approved.
I typically vote Democrat (or third party). However, I was strongly considering voting for McCain until Palin entered. Had McCain beaten Bush in 2000, it would have been a tough choice there as well. If Bush had declined to run in 2004, McCain would have been a much better choice over Kerry. If it had come to Hillary vs. McCain in 2008, and Palin (or an equivalent) was not in the VP slot, I would have gone to that side. He doesn't energize the Republican Conservative Base, true, but he is a great candidate as a Centrist, and he is... I guess I want to say "rational". Willing to listen to arguments, see evidence, and change his opinion when he realizes he was wrong. He's also willing to stick to an unpopular opinion when he believes he's right. I can understand why the Republicans don't all like him -- he's not a dogmatic yes-man. He's willing to cross party lines to get things done. He compromises, and makes deals, and listens to all of his constituents, not just the ones that fund him, or that think the way he already does.
Obama pulled off a very smooth campaign, and held the center well, but McCain was a serious threat to Obama losing the Democratic Base until Palin entered the race. With his health problems making surviving his full term a serious question, no one on the liberal-side of the Republicans and into the Conservative Democrats wanted to see Palin take over. She might have helped him recover the Conservative Republicans, but she lost him the Center and Swing Votes.
Each CC transaciton attracts a higher fee paid by the merchant (that's who you're paying) to be paid to the bank. This can be as high as 3%. The cost of this is passed back on to you, the customer in the form of higher prices. The net effect is to increase the cost of whatever you're trying to purchase without increasing revenue to the company you're purchasing from.
Please dont tell me that you're naive enough to think the bank was giving you free money, they paid you back out of the % the bank got from the merchant.
Paying by direct debit or bank transfer does not attract such high fees.
Perhaps it is different in Australia, but in most stores in the United States, that fee is entirely hidden from the customer. The store signs up for a given Credit Card Service, and all customers (regardless of payment type) pay the same prices at the Point of Sale. Some few merchants will charge extra for Credit Card usage, but it's not common. If that fee were transparently passed along to consumers, I suspect fewer would use Credit Cards as they do presently, but I couldn't say how many would voluntarily drop the Credit Card from their purchase cycle. Probably far fewer than I'd like to expect.
I have a credit card. It has no balance beyond what I bought this month. It has never carried a balance between months. I have never owed interest on it. Having a Credit Card is not the same as In Debt To A Credit Card. Everything I have is paid for. My monthly debt is all my monthly expenses, which are paid for at month's end. I have money in multiple accounts earning interest.
Now here's the difference between you and I... I'm one month ahead of you in terms of investing (I can invest my paycheck immediately, since I delay payments for food and such by about half-a-month on average via the credit card), and if I ever need to buy something that costs more than what I can afford out of pocket, I can get a better loan since I have a solid and established credit record.
All computer output has aliasing. Analog does not. The aliasing can be very fine grained indeed, but it never goes away.
Within physics, at some point, there is no analog. Just very fine-grained digital. Or so I was told by the physicists when I was in college, in regards to Planck-lengths.
Dreaming, creating, love, etc, its all output based on input just like a computer.
There are no facts to back up your belief, and having no evidence to the contrary is no more valid than saying that no evidence of the lack of a god is evidence that one exists.
From another of your posts -- I think there are plenty of facts for this. Most of them involve the use of illicit substances, though even alcohol will give you a bit of it. Input: Chemicals. Output: Change in behavior. Input: Appropriate placement of specific transmitter chemicals. Output: Emotion.
But really, let me take this back to the basic premise:
Brains do more than compute. They originate ideas, they dream, they create, they appreciate, they love and they hate and they hurt.
[citation needed]
You have accepted that brains follow physics (everything does). You dismissed that as a meaningless statement. It isn't. Presuming that physics includes causal determinism, then brains also follow causal chain-reactions, so where can this "origination" come from? There's no origination - just chemicals reacting according to physics. Photons enter my eyes, that causes an electro-chemical reaction cascade that results in finger motions tapping keys, resulting in electrical signals, resulting in some magnetic changes to a disk, and then some more electrical signals and photons from your screen of my words hit your eyes on your end. From within the system, I may appear to be appreciating, originating, dreaming... but it's all a physical causal chain. It's a fundamental problem in Philosophy of Mind -- how can you insert consciousness, origination, doing more than pure processing and computing, into a purely physical world without breaking physics?
I suspect it was just a hopeful mod. Sometimes it's hard to tell the difference between satire and fundamentalist views.
If bicycles had the same risks as auto/motorcyles do, they would require them. Remember, horses, pedestrians, and even bicycles were there before cars -- motor vehicles are the interloper, not the bicycle. But you bring up a good point -- cyclists and motorists don't have equal rights to road use. Cyclists actually have a right to use the road, motorists obtain it only as a privilege.