Is you argument that America naturally makes the best beer since it has more people trying to do so, or that the winner is chosen basically at random from the entrants so winning is simply a matter of stacking the deck?
How many businesses do you know of that encourage customers purchase less of their product? Energy producers won't encourage conservation unless their incentives are altered to make that rewarding. This is not so easy; if done naively you wind up with paradoxes like the most profitable power company being a shell company that exists only on paper and produces no power. (Don't believe it? Look at farm subsidies).
I can see why Microsoft has to plan ahead with the utility to produce the right amount of electricity, and agree to some penalty for a bad estimate, since the extra production and distribution capacity obviously are not free. But what's odd is that the fine for under-usage would be more expensive than the cost of full usage. You'd think the power company could at least reduce production somewhat and so give Microsoft partial credit for what they don't use.
We had webcams and LCDs for about a decade before we had a video phone service that actually worked and that (more importantly) was widely adopted. Toyota is far from building these things in the numbers that would justify a special-purpose implementation of a functionality that already works (hardware+software) off the shelf.
On the other hand, interest rates are ridiculously low, and gas prices are highly variable.
Electric vehicles seem to be one place where leasing might actually make sense. For the consumer it settles the issue of sticker price and uncertainties of resale price and battery longevity, because those are all built into the monthly lease payment. (Although by "settles" I just mean that it places electric vs. gas on a more equal footing and removes the unknowns, not necessarily that the numbers will now fall out in favor of electric).
Sadly, it's not this mystical infrastructure that's holding EVs back. IMHO the first factor is that their range is incompatible with the owners who could charge them.
You're assuming the infrastructure is charging stations. Maybe what we need is battery swap stations. That eliminates the range issue. But it's a huge chicken/egg problem.
What's most amusing, is watching these gigantic corporations try to innovate and fail. They have tremendous resources, but they're not set up to innovate. They're set up to scale up things. When they try to innovate they fail miserably. So if they can't do it, who will?
Tesla.
But if they go broke, I'm going to be pretty discouraged.
I tend to agree with you - I am pro electric car, pro solar, pro wind, and I hate how people lock at sticker price without regard to fuel costs.
But regardless of any other facts, Toyota's decision is discouraging. Not just because the developer of the Prius are experts and know what they're talking about, but because they are a huge (potential) player in the market itself. Even if they are for whatever reason wrong on the facts and could have successfully marketed their electric car, their exit from the market will set back cost reductions and market adoption by years.
I would be surprised if that were a big enough factor to account for such a strong correlation, but I can't fault your logic.
Hopefully the next step is a controlled experiment - give half the subjects BPA pills and placebos to the others and see if there is an effect. It doesn't seem overly risky given that BPA is already widely used.
A really good guy on my software development team spent almost a week trying to make a simple panel to display maps with OSM and never got it to work. There was a step of converting it from a sql database to something else that would always bomb out. I know it can be made to work, it just wasn't worth it when we tried.
First, your claim is dubious, and second, it's not a defense of the US in particular because any culture would claim exactly the same. Take the middle east. On the one hand we're shocked that Muslims are venting their anger over some nutcase propaganda film against our embassies and the other 99.5% of "westerners" who had nothing to do with it... yet what did I just say? "Muslims are venting." I did NOT say "0.5% of the Muslim fringe is venting," or whatever tiny fraction it is that are actually turning to violence. Can you spot the hypocrisy?
No. That would explain why obese people are more likely to misreport caloric intake. But if it were just under-reporting of calories by obese people, there would be no correlation with BPA in the bloodstream after adjusting for reported caloric intake unless obese people with high BPA tended to under-reported their calories MORE than people of the SAME WEIGHT with low BPA.
Now, what's harder to rule out is some underlying cause of both high BPA and weight gain for a given caloric intake. In other words, like Cholesterol, how much BPA is in your blood might NOT be a simple function of how much you eat. For example (and I am totally making this up) maybe there are differences in metabolism that cause some people to clear things from their blood more quickly - including both sugar and BPA.
There is not an infinite supply of BPA in any given bottle or water pipe. The thing with a pop can is it's single use, so you're always getting a fresh dose.
It's hard to control for caloric intake. You're relying on people self-reporting.
Nope! If your theory is that caloric intake is the real cause, what you must now explain is why misreporting of caloric intake (not caloric intake itself!) would be so strongly correlated with BPA in the bloodstream.
Some interesting cases to look at would be those with low BPA and high self-reported caloric intake (for example people eating pies or drinking sugared fountain drinks instead of drinking soda from cans), or people with high BPA and low caloric intake (such as people who drink lots of diet soda from cans).
And in general, I think while environmental factors do probably contribute in a small way to obesity, it seems silly to worry about these things when the real causes are pretty damn obvious: eating wrong and getting no exercise.
Oh boy, thanks for sharing your tremendously valuable Common Sense with us.
In fact this study is shocking and here is why (in bold):
The researchers pulled data from the 2003 to 2008 National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys, and after controlling for differences in ethnicity, age, caregiver education, income level, sex, caloric intake, television viewing habits and other factors, they found that children and adolescents with the highest levels of BPA in their urine had a 2.6 times greater chance of being obese than those with the lowest levels. Overall, 22.3 percent of those in the quartile with the highest levels of BPA were obese, compared with just 10.3 percent of those in the quartile with the lowest levels of BPA.
So here is what I pull from the emphasized bits:
No, it is not explained by caloric intake. Nor by physical activity (or at least a proxy for it).
The effect size is enormous. A 160% increase in risk of obesity!
The sample size is large: 10.3% and 22.3% are both relatively large proportions of subjects in the study. So this is almost certainly not a spurious correlation between rare events.
The idea of significantly impacting the obesity epidemic simply by replacing BPA with something else is hard to believe. But occasionally a technical breakthrough on what was previously considered an issue of character and morality does does occur, and can be revolutionary: consider birth control.
The USA have regulations that allow a minimum amount of poison x and poison y and poison z in their tap water?
Hello? That is considered to be a first world country? Your tap water contains weedkillers, that is ridiculous!
I hate to break this to you but there is a little of everything in everything. You just can't tell until you're able to count parts per million.
In the real world, we conduct our business in Office formats. Having LibreOffice do a halfass job of reading them is unacceptable.
I have LibreOffice on my home computer for my kids who are in grade school and edit Word documents for their classes all the time. It works fine.
Would I rely on LibreOffice at work? Regrettably, no; the documents are far more complex. Even MS Office for OSX does not cut the mustard. But for home use, I find LibreOffice to be good.
No, the lie of out of africa is this:
We were 100% human when we left africa, any differences that evolved separately since we left are superficial, like skin color.
The truth is that we left africa long before we were 'human'. Chinese evolved the way they are because they evolved from a pre-human creature which left africa and bred with the Denisovans which had already been evolving in Asia for a long time.
Again, the whole point is moot without a more specific definition of "human." No two humans have identical DNA (even identical twins probably have a mutation here or there). So it is a matter of degree. Although, by the most standard I can think of - "able to mate with people currently living" - I'd be willing to bet you're completely wrong.
Exactly... this seems to be a matter of degree. What percent of DNA do currently-living humans have in common? What percent of that is common with our "out of Africa" ancestors and was not anywhere else yet at that time? Certainly a little has changed since then, but how much?
I'm not challenging the usefulness of refining the science, but such refinements are often MUCH smaller than the margin of error of the layman's knowledge of the subject in the first place.
Buzzwords aside, a distributed server farm ("cloud") has redundant power supplies (in addition to redundant everything else) by simple virtue of geographic distance and replication. Maybe it is not cost-effective to have "uninterruptible" power at any single location. Just let this site go offline for a while as the others pick up the slack. You already need this redundancy to handle other failure modes anyways.
Good points, but how feasible is this outside some constrained programming model such as SQL queries? Yes, if all layers of the hardware/software stack were well-integrated and optimized it would be a different world. But it's hard to do that without making the programming model very complex. I don't think it's just a language problem; to get more information from the programmer they will most often have to make more decisions. (Which of this stuff could execute in parallel?) Just look at Itanium; they tried to exploit parallelism to hide latency. (At the instruction level it was explicit, but they hoped to overcome this through a smarter compiler). It didn't work out too well. It wasn't worth the extra effort and efforts to automate re-ordering weren't successful enough.
Second, what about NCQ? The consolidation of hundreds of server processes onto several VMs running on a powerful multi-core computers all accessing a shared underlying storage mechanism does offer quite a bit of opportunity for re-ordering. How much extra benefit would come from pushing this down to the lowest level - individual processes?
For once, this time the article does a good job of explaining the difference between a prototype airframe vs. an operational weapons platform. For example how long it took to make the YF-22 into the F22.
Slashdot Mirror
The blurb says the computer was being regularly backed up anyways.
Is you argument that America naturally makes the best beer since it has more people trying to do so, or that the winner is chosen basically at random from the entrants so winning is simply a matter of stacking the deck?
How many businesses do you know of that encourage customers purchase less of their product? Energy producers won't encourage conservation unless their incentives are altered to make that rewarding. This is not so easy; if done naively you wind up with paradoxes like the most profitable power company being a shell company that exists only on paper and produces no power. (Don't believe it? Look at farm subsidies).
I can see why Microsoft has to plan ahead with the utility to produce the right amount of electricity, and agree to some penalty for a bad estimate, since the extra production and distribution capacity obviously are not free. But what's odd is that the fine for under-usage would be more expensive than the cost of full usage. You'd think the power company could at least reduce production somewhat and so give Microsoft partial credit for what they don't use.
We had webcams and LCDs for about a decade before we had a video phone service that actually worked and that (more importantly) was widely adopted. Toyota is far from building these things in the numbers that would justify a special-purpose implementation of a functionality that already works (hardware+software) off the shelf.
Electric vehicles seem to be one place where leasing might actually make sense. For the consumer it settles the issue of sticker price and uncertainties of resale price and battery longevity, because those are all built into the monthly lease payment. (Although by "settles" I just mean that it places electric vs. gas on a more equal footing and removes the unknowns, not necessarily that the numbers will now fall out in favor of electric).
Ridiculous. Toyota has sold over 2.5 million Prius since 1997.
Ferrari has made less than 150,000 cars ever (since 1929) and currently sells about 7,000 per year.
You're assuming the infrastructure is charging stations. Maybe what we need is battery swap stations. That eliminates the range issue. But it's a huge chicken/egg problem.
Tesla.
But if they go broke, I'm going to be pretty discouraged.
But regardless of any other facts, Toyota's decision is discouraging. Not just because the developer of the Prius are experts and know what they're talking about, but because they are a huge (potential) player in the market itself. Even if they are for whatever reason wrong on the facts and could have successfully marketed their electric car, their exit from the market will set back cost reductions and market adoption by years.
Hopefully the next step is a controlled experiment - give half the subjects BPA pills and placebos to the others and see if there is an effect. It doesn't seem overly risky given that BPA is already widely used.
A really good guy on my software development team spent almost a week trying to make a simple panel to display maps with OSM and never got it to work. There was a step of converting it from a sql database to something else that would always bomb out. I know it can be made to work, it just wasn't worth it when we tried.
Insurance fraud is not new.
Fraud is not new.
The great thing with electronic records is it makes it easier to detect.
First, your claim is dubious, and second, it's not a defense of the US in particular because any culture would claim exactly the same. Take the middle east. On the one hand we're shocked that Muslims are venting their anger over some nutcase propaganda film against our embassies and the other 99.5% of "westerners" who had nothing to do with it... yet what did I just say? "Muslims are venting." I did NOT say "0.5% of the Muslim fringe is venting," or whatever tiny fraction it is that are actually turning to violence. Can you spot the hypocrisy?
Now, what's harder to rule out is some underlying cause of both high BPA and weight gain for a given caloric intake. In other words, like Cholesterol, how much BPA is in your blood might NOT be a simple function of how much you eat. For example (and I am totally making this up) maybe there are differences in metabolism that cause some people to clear things from their blood more quickly - including both sugar and BPA.
There is not an infinite supply of BPA in any given bottle or water pipe. The thing with a pop can is it's single use, so you're always getting a fresh dose.
Nope! If your theory is that caloric intake is the real cause, what you must now explain is why misreporting of caloric intake (not caloric intake itself!) would be so strongly correlated with BPA in the bloodstream.
Some interesting cases to look at would be those with low BPA and high self-reported caloric intake (for example people eating pies or drinking sugared fountain drinks instead of drinking soda from cans), or people with high BPA and low caloric intake (such as people who drink lots of diet soda from cans).
Oh boy, thanks for sharing your tremendously valuable Common Sense with us.
In fact this study is shocking and here is why (in bold):
So here is what I pull from the emphasized bits:
The idea of significantly impacting the obesity epidemic simply by replacing BPA with something else is hard to believe. But occasionally a technical breakthrough on what was previously considered an issue of character and morality does does occur, and can be revolutionary: consider birth control.
And if the button wasn't working, it probably wasn't plugged into anything.
I hate to break this to you but there is a little of everything in everything. You just can't tell until you're able to count parts per million.
I have LibreOffice on my home computer for my kids who are in grade school and edit Word documents for their classes all the time. It works fine.
Would I rely on LibreOffice at work? Regrettably, no; the documents are far more complex. Even MS Office for OSX does not cut the mustard. But for home use, I find LibreOffice to be good.
Again, the whole point is moot without a more specific definition of "human." No two humans have identical DNA (even identical twins probably have a mutation here or there). So it is a matter of degree. Although, by the most standard I can think of - "able to mate with people currently living" - I'd be willing to bet you're completely wrong.
I'm not challenging the usefulness of refining the science, but such refinements are often MUCH smaller than the margin of error of the layman's knowledge of the subject in the first place.
Buzzwords aside, a distributed server farm ("cloud") has redundant power supplies (in addition to redundant everything else) by simple virtue of geographic distance and replication. Maybe it is not cost-effective to have "uninterruptible" power at any single location. Just let this site go offline for a while as the others pick up the slack. You already need this redundancy to handle other failure modes anyways.
Second, what about NCQ? The consolidation of hundreds of server processes onto several VMs running on a powerful multi-core computers all accessing a shared underlying storage mechanism does offer quite a bit of opportunity for re-ordering. How much extra benefit would come from pushing this down to the lowest level - individual processes?
For once, this time the article does a good job of explaining the difference between a prototype airframe vs. an operational weapons platform. For example how long it took to make the YF-22 into the F22.