Okay, now I see where you're coming from. Your logic is unassailable, but it is predicated on the false assumption that the model of reality used in today's generally accepted accounting priniciples is in fact the reality itself.
There is nothing false about the accounting models, when they are used for the purposes they were developed to serve. But they were not developed for cross-industry comparisons of overall costs and efficiencies. (Mostly they were developed to track whether the stockholder dividends of a corporation are as large as is reasonably possible.)
An appropriate model for electrical generation, distribution and usage is fairly simple. There are high start-up costs associated with generation and distribution systems, and low operating costs. Transmission losses are easily quantifiable and are the most significant costs of distribution. Repair and replacement costs can be amortized over decades. There are only a few parts of the system that require daily maintenance.
OTOH, there is no single accounting model for petroleum extraction, preparation, distribution, and usage. Instead there are numerous models of different parts that chain together and interlink with each other. It is easy to lose sight of the fact that at an industry-wide level, operating costs include bunker oil and crew costs for the super tankers, refinery costs, pipeline maintenance costs including pumps, heaters, inspections for corrosion, replacement of failing pipes, and so forth. And all the costs associated with the fleet of delivery trucks that bring product to the service stations.
Rather than unconsciously cherrypicking which of these petroleum costs should be
considered in this discussion, imagine summing them all together and then comparing that sum with the overheads for electric distribution.
Electricity is definitely the most efficient way to move power around:
One gallon of gasoline will release 36.6 kWh of energy when burned at 100% efficiency, but gas engines being what they are, I will only see at best 70% of that at the wheels. So we're talking at best around 25 kWh per gallon. That is costing me about $0.12USD per useable kWh-- more than twice what I'm paying for electric power at the house. A battery exchange system would have economies of scale and lower off-peak power costs that would be even better.
Congratulations on your Prius-- probably a wise decision, if you can keep it running for 20 or 25 years. My vehicle of choice is powered by pasta and Clif Bars. It gets me around town quite well.
I was hoping for some tough questions. Hmmph, silly troll. Oh well...
Who owns the batteries?... Does a new car come with a battery? etc
I would think a new electric car would probably come with a battery installed since otherwise it would be hard to drive it off the lot. I expect that the batteries would be owned by Exxon, Shell, BP, etc. It would be hard for a newcomer to break into the vehicle power distribution industry since the infrastructure these businesses have is so massive. It would be a fairly easy thing to for them to convert from petroleum products to electricity. The costs of conversion would be largely offset by the savings in reduced operating costs as pipelines and refineries were taken off line.
Since battery exchanges are really only needed for long trips...
Huh? For short trips to the grocery store you just push your car there?
Batteries would be exchanged when their charge was lower than what the driver would like to have at the moment. The same way most of us fill our tanks when the gas guage gets lower than we're comfortable with. It would be easy to prorate the cost of the recharged battery by the amount of charge left in the battery just removed from service.
Forget about being able to plug your car into a 110 or 220 volt extension cord in your garage. A whole block doing that, let alone an entire suburb? That would be silly. Inefficient. Cause of brownouts. A fire hazard. Just silly.
Who would run this special lifting machinery? No more self service stations?
Does the average driver have that much trouble using a self-service drive-through automated car wash? Why would a self-service drive-through automated battery exchange booth be any more difficult? Do you think an industry like the auto industry couldn't standardize form factors to make this possible? Does your computer have any USB ports? Do you think the dozens of vehicle power distributors and automotive manufacturers could come up with a standard, like the thousands of computer peripheral manufacturers have been able to do?
Shipping tons of batteries from central large power plants is inefficient compared to a tanker truck filled with diesel fuel.
Using wires to ship electricity around the country is the most efficient way of transporting power we've got. The last mile of distribution between the recharging center and the service station would be by specialized truck in a lot of cases, but that cost is a small fraction of the total. On the whole, distributing power this way, especially when you factor in things like the use of off-peak generating capacity and regenerative braking, makes a whole lot more economic sense than piping combustible hazmat liquids all over the country, moving them around in frail tank trucks and so on.
While hydrocarbons might well be the most dense way of storing energy that we have at the moment, electricity is certainly the lowest cost way of moving energy around. The economic advantages of changing a transportation system from petroleum to electric are sufficient reasons to do this on their own. The global and local environmental advantages are important, too, of course.
Interesting conversation. Still looking for the tough questions, like "How can I show the girls how macho I am when my wheels are whisper quiet?"
How do you charge such a 300 mile battery in any where near a comparable amount of time that it now takes to fill a gas tank?
I know! I know!
Convert all the gas stations to swapping stations. Exchange the low battery for one that's fully charged, having been on an off-peak-hour charger for a couple of days or so. Would take less time than we now spend waiting for the soccermom in the shiny SUV to fill her tank.
Heck, I bet the automakers could come up with a worldwide standard form for removable batteries in less than a month. It's as simple as standardized railroad guages, not something really hard like DVD formats.
Since this discussion is overtly about proper uses of words, please use accurate wording in your statements. "Piracy" is an internationally recognized crime involving theft and violence. It has nothing at all to do with copyright violations, where nothing is stolen, there is no violence, and there is only this vague concept of "damages": something that can only be estimated statistically in terms of "lost" potential sales (where the keyword is "potential": there is no defined way to estimate the number of sales that might have occurred in some alternate universe where the copyright had not been violated).
To repeat: there is no theft here. There is no violence done to any MS employee or any MS property. There is no piracy here. Stop blowing things out of proportion.
...are fraudulent copies,...
Again, since this discussion is supposed to be about the accurate usage of one word and the concept it conveys, please stop misrepresenting reality by abusing other words and concepts. The unlicensed copies you refer to may or may not be fraudulently represented: if the purchaser knows that the copy must be an unlicensed one, there is no fraud in the transaction. The transaction may or may not still be legal, but it certainly isn't fraudulent. I think most people who have been provided with MS software at a ridiculously low price are aware that it must be an unlicensed copy. I know that there are many transactions where the unlicensed status is a prominent part of the deal: it is a selling point, and the buyer values the goods partly because they are unlicensed.
...they are NOT genuine.
Not by the logic presented in the parent post. There was none there; only a pastiche of inappropriate terms.
Let me give all the Microsoft fanboys here the respect that they deserve. But I do wish to point out that TFA is definitely correct in saying Microsoft is attempting to erode the english language by subverting the meaning of "genuine" for its own corporate purposes.
It is clear from the usage Microsoft is attempting to establish that they want "genuine" to become an antonym for "licensed". "Licensed" already has a very good antonym: "unlicensed". "Genuine" means something entirely different: it is a statement about the provenance of the item in question-- where it came from. It has nothing to do with the quality of the item: a Rolex is still a genuine Rolex after it is hit by a sledgehammer.
All accurate unlicensed copies of CDs containing Microsoft software are as genuine as any licensed copy. Because all of these accurate copies, licensed or not, originated from the same source. That source is Microsoft.
Microsoft has a reasonable beef about unlicensed copies of its software, and can take reasonable measures to address the issue. Marketing Department attempts to redefine the jargon of law and the english language are not, imho, reasonable measures. They are disruptive and ridiculous, and a kind of FUD that is poisoning Microsoft's future market, when it becomes time for Microsoft to bite the bullet and begin selling to the Linux and BSD users (cultures that are traditionally more concerned with engineering concepts like clarity and accuracy).
The crux of their argument is that they are a British company, doing business in Britain, and thus are not subject to US jurisdiction.
That's apparently only part of it. There is also the fact that they were not served notice of the court's actions in a way recognized as legal in either the UK or any part of the USA. Process cannot be served by email.
I was thinking that it would have been good for someone to file a Friend of the Court brief to bring to the court's attention the fact that it did not have jurisdiction. That would have allowed the judge a good way of dismissing the suit. But the more I have read about this case, the more the actions that the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois has taken in this matter suggest that replacing the judge with one who is competently knowledgeable about the way the world works today is really what is important.
It's just *weird* working with Google. At times, even frustrating. There's absolutely zero visibility into the company and their practices. And from what I know from Google insiders, it doesn't get any better once you're there.
The mushroom management model is still a moneymaker, huh?
While I do applaud Jimmy Wales for taking the moral high road on this one, I also have to acknowledge that it looks like his decision was much easier to make than the decisions that Google, Yahoo, and others have faced.
How could Wikipedia comply with anyone's demand for censorship, even if it wanted to? Its core structure makes that impossible. What, would each article have a little NFCNNN button that any of us could push? ("Not For China No No No")
Hmm, it is interesting that someone on slashdot thinks truth tables are 'funny'.
Yep, I agree with parent: in formal english, 'or' alone is the non-exclusive OR (and an exclusive XOR is phrased as 'either... or...'.
That said, in sloppy english where the XOR is clearly implied by context, the word 'either' is often dropped. Thus the question: "Is she a lying blackhat or a truthful whitehat?" (But note that two possible replies are "She is neither," and "She is both"-- and either of these would be a denial that the implied XOR is an appropriate model of reality.) So a good practice when encountering the word 'or' is to see if inserting 'either' in front of the first clause can be done without changing the sense of the sentence.
Another thing: in typical english conversations, short-circuit evaluation of non-exclusive OR clauses is permitted. Thus with the original question "Is Patricia Dunn a liar or incompetent?" there is no need to explore whether she is incompetent if it is shown that she is a liar, and vice versa.
In this particular case, events have already demonstrated that Patricia Dunn has been so incompetent in handling this investigation that she now finds herself the cause of a major scandal that is damaging HP stockholders' interests. So whether she is also a liar is no longer an issue (wrt the scope of the article): since she is incompetent, she should do the only honorable thing left for her to do and fall on her sword.
When she is out shopping her resume around again, other potential employers might be concerned about whether she was also a liar as well as being incompetent. But that isn't in the scope of TFA.
Why don't we do the math on that *before* we start messing with the net mass of the planet, hm?
Okay. The math isn't terribly hard. Google is great on this kind of thing (hint, start by googling "1 earth mass").
If we could build a space elevator then drop a million tons of stuff down it every day, it would take around 200 million years to increase the Earth's mass by one billionth of one percent.
The addition to planetary mass by any amount that we could reasonably expect to bring down a space elevator is insignificant.
I am feeling SO disappointed with my fellow slashdotters.
I've read through every comment on this thread that is scored 2 or above, and every one of you is seeing less than half of the space elevator's potential. You are all so one-way in your thinking.
Let me try to prime the pump of your imaginations...
Visualize a one pound iron ball, sitting in your hand. How much energy would that ball release on impact if you are on an airplane at 5,000 feet and you drop it out the window? Do you think it might break a car's windshield? Do you think it might put a heck of a dent in a car's roof?
Now drop it from 23,000 miles....
So long as we move enough mass down the space elevator, we can capture enough energy using existing regenerative braking technologies to power lifting side. If we move more mass down than that, the space elevator becomes a power generator. And the beauty of this is, it isn't important what we move downward, so long as we can put some kind regenerative braking on it.
As we begin to explore space elevator technologies, we should also begin to think about how to start nudging a near Earth asteroid into a position where we can get at it easily when we are ready to start dropping things down the elevator shaft. Ion engines might be the ticket. At first it won't matter much what we drop down the shaft, but eventually we'll get more picky.
At some point we'll want to build a solar powered distillery at the end of our string, so we can deliver bottled water mined from comets or icy asteroids to the thirsty. We'd do the bottling at the surface, after running the water through 23,000 miles of water wheels and turbines. And we'd probably build a solar furnace at Strings End to reduce nickel iron asteroids to ingots that would fit special drop tubes.
Well, that's it. I'm tired of playing Heinlein. Somebody else can imagine the distribution system for the surplus power.
What do you think a space elevator will use, fairy dust? It will consume vast quantities of energy both to build and to operate.
I agree with you on the "build" phase for sure. Well, I also agree with you on part of the operational overhead: moving mass upstairs is going to cost energy.
But don't forget that a space elevator works both ways, and masses moving down the elevator are going to be returning energy to the system. When we reach the point where we are moving more mass downward than upward, the space elevator becomes a net energy generator.
Prolly someone should start brainstorming ways to jockey asteroids and comets into position for easy mining. While we can drop anything down a 23,000 mile long shaft and get energy from its descent, prolly chunks of nickel-iron asteroids and slurpies of cometary methane ices would be more useful than other stuff.
...And new aspects of the internet have been evolving to engage these extraverts.
Which also benefits us intraverts. I'm now aware of many more local activities than I used to be. For instance, I participated in a group bicycle ride last weekend (of about 1,000 people) that I would never have been aware of if I hadn't been lurking on a bike-oriented local news list. Had a fun time. Actually talked with half a dozen strangers at the watering stations.
I'm not quite sure how the phrase "archaic institutional culture" that I used in my OP transmogrified into "some unreasoning bias against pop culture that the original comment claimed." This is probably one of those puzzlements of communication between carbon-based life forms. Silicon rulz.
Among the people I converse with on a daily basis, "institutional culture" is understood to be that part of of a corporation or bureaucracy that is expressed in its mission statements, values, policies and procedures, as well as implicitly through peer pressure. It determines which behaviors are rewarded, which ones are tolerated, and which meet expressions of disapproval. A new employee who doesn't fit the institutional culture will tend to change, or will move on fairly quickly. Please review these posts in with that understanding in mind.
It has been an interesting conversation. Thank you.
It's online version is probably simply an online version of their print one...
Uh, that's my point. Britannica has been treating the web as if it were just a new kind of printing press. They don't seem to recognize that the web is an entirely different medium and that the old methods of developing articles need to be reviewed and thoroughly revised.
While the online version is about twice as large as the print version, it seems that the additional articles are the ones that either didn't make it through the proofing/editing/revising cycle in time to get into print, or were dropped in favor of other articles that were deemed more suitable to the limitations of the paper product.
There was quite a furor about a year ago, when the journal Nature published research that showed Wikipedia was comparable in accuracy to Britannica wrt scientific articles. The response from Britannica was quite enlightening, and can be summed up thusly: they just don't seem to get it. Not yet.
I trust that they will get it soon. If they don't, and they fold, it will leave a big void. There is no other authoritative source as easily accessable as the Encyclopedia Britannica. So I'm hoping they can re-invent themselves into something that fits this new age as well as the original encyclopedias fit the latter part of the 1700s.
So Britannica is crippled by its archaic technology? Yet my understanding is that its online version is limited in many ways when compared to Wikipedia. Maybe the real limiting factor with Britannica is its archaic institutional culture?
The way you Americans abbreviate Bachelor of Science is most appropriate, as your suggestion seems like complete BS;)
It gets worse. In the USA there are Registered Nurses with Associate Degrees in Nursing, Bachelor of Science in Nursing, Masters degrees, and Ph.D.s So we have the following:
Another Dumb Nurse
Bull Sh*t Nurse
More of the Same
Pile it Higher and Deeper
It would be funnier if there wasn't so much anecdotal evidence that this is, to some extent, true.
OTOH, there is a lot to be said for keeping graphic development like charts local, rather than shared among a group. The workflow I envision is using Google Spreadsheets for data collection and shared reference resources where its collaborative nature really shines. Then develop summary reports and graphics by downloading and importing into Excel or OpenOffice and having at it.
I shudder to think of what business graphics produced by a committee would look like, or how long it would take to decide what color to paint each of the slices of the pie. Also, developing locally would help assure that the impact of the graphics on your audience wasn't diminished by their prior exposure to the rough drafts.
And much more than that as you move inland. The Coast Range forces maritime air that has been at equilibrium with the Pacific Ocean for thousands of miles to rise from sea level at Newport to 2,000 - 3,000 feet in half a dozen miles. Most of the water gets dumped in the hills, not on the beaches and coves.
I agree that Oregon streambed management is a shambles. Hopefully we are now on the right track. But Bureau of Land Management and the other involved agencies have a pretty dismal track record.
Please see my other post about the rivers of this area. Basically, they are not as small in volume as you might think, since the basins they drain are temperate rainforests that receive 80+ inches of rain a year. Also this region is intensively logged using clearcut methods, and changes in the run-off after removal of the forest are probably happening. It is possible that the dead zone is caused by sylvicultural practices.
Many locals in the area believe that logging practices destroyed the salmon fishery over the last 30 years.
Saying there are no long rivers in this area is of course true, but it is also misleading.
The Oregon Coast Range is one of very few temperate rain forests in the world. In the area around Cape Perpetua, the annual rainfall is 80 inches. All that water runs off to the ocean through those short rivers, as well as hundreds of smaller creeks that empty directly into the surf. Those short rivers, in the aggregate, move about as much water per year as the Willamette River, which drains the rest of western Oregon.
Since the area has been intensively logged over the last 30 years, and since there has been some major changes in logging practice during that time, it is quite possible that human activities are somehow causing this dead zone. Consider that these are the most dense forest habitats anywhere, carrying about 900 tons of biomass per acre
see The Temperate Rainforest. Then consider that a clear cut logging operation removes all of this biomass in a matter of weeks from a 20 to 100 acre tract. The raw land that is then exposed to these heavy rains is mostly clays and mudstones. It is reasonable to expect that the run-off from recently logged mountainsides is qualitatively different than it was before the logging.
I expect that this is being looked at by the people who are studying the dead zone. There is a lot of feeling that logging in this area caused the collapse of the salmon fishery that used to be a thriving industry around Cape Perpetua.
Now when you get your blood pressure back under control and can achieve that state of mind that is receptive to learning new things, you really should try reading up on what is known about the pain experience (and probably about withdrawal, habituation, and dependency). Doing so is very likely to improve the quality of the rest of your life, and might even make it possible for you to come to better terms with some of your memories.
As to the severity of your pain experiences, I do not and I have not made any judgment about those. You state that some of the worst were triggered by physiologic withdrawal from opioids. Some other people go through opioid withdrawal without feeling that same kind of intense pain experience. That doesn't deny your experience. It is not an "either - or" kind of thing.
I find it interesting that you somehow know that I have no first hand knowledge of intense pain or of opioid withdrawal. You seem to have very advanced extra sensory perception. Or maybe you are just very, very wrong. Since I'm not about to show off my scars and boo-boos on Slashdot, this is going to remain unresolved. It would be wise of you to learn to live with a certain amount of ambiguity, especially concerning the personal history of strangers.
One other thing-- don't confuse clinical detachment with a lack of empathy. There is no way in hell that I am going to enable drug-seeking behaviors with expressions of sympathy. You've got a damn tough road ahead of you, but apparently from what you have written you have faced as bad or worse and gotten through it. It's stupid to dwell on how bad the problems are. It saps you of the energy you need to meet them and beat them. Deal with it; don't waste time and energy talking about it.
Here is something written more than 100 years ago by a fellow who had just had one leg amputated for tuberculosis of the bone (an excruciatingly painful disease), and was refusing to let the doctors amputate his other leg: Invictus.
I stand by my statements. My career in nursing has involved work with trauma patients and substance abuse clients. I've seen my share of opioid withdrawals and I used to keep up with the research appropriate to patient care concerns.
Don't tell me about pain, honey. Assisting people as they deal with pain, from all kinds of sources, was my vocation for too many years. A heart attack victim who requires heroic amounts of intravenous morphine (the drug of choice because it relaxes coronary vasoconstriction as well as being a powerful analgesic) during the first days of his crisis becomes physiologically addicted and experiences withdrawal symptoms later on. Those symptoms don't have the same cognitive representation for him as they do for the substance abuser, and the affective ("emotional") responses are very different. So his withdrawal is often a flu-like inconvenience while he deals with the world-shaking issues he faces, such as whether he can go back to his old job, and whether sex will ever be the same for him again.
But for the substance abuser whose whole life has become an orbit around his habit, the very same kind of withdrawal IS a world-shaking problem. He is like a planet whose sun has gone nova and winked out of existence; his outer world is burned up and the core of him that remains is now on a free trajectory through a cold and empty universe. That is an incredibly painful experience. But although it is triggered by the physiologic withdrawal, it is NOT the withdrawal. If it were, we would have a much lower survival rate for heart attacks, eh?
Anyone who actually cares enough to research pain and the way it manifests would find the Wikipedia article on pain a good place to start. I've just given it a quick look-over, and it seems to provide a pretty good overview while remaining accessable to the lay person. I suspect that one could get a very good idea of the complexity of pain as a human experience by following the links in that article.
That just sparked a minor epiphany. IIRC, Xena was a mortal woman who acquired the power to destroy the Gods. And now her namesake celestial body has demonstrated the similar power of destroying a planet named after one of those Gods, by stirring up a bunch of astronomical hot air many AU from its center of gravity. That's heavy, dude. I mean, isn't it amazing how reality recapitulates fiction?
I think "Xena" should definitely become the official name of this planet-destroying roundish body that orbits about the Sun and is bigger than a breadbox but apparently is pretty friendly with its neighbors.
Of course if the 4% of astronomers who decide such things find that Xena isn't all that tolerant of neighbors, then I guess it will become the nineth planet, eh?
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, now I see where you're coming from. Your logic is unassailable, but it is predicated on the false assumption that the model of reality used in today's generally accepted accounting priniciples is in fact the reality itself.
There is nothing false about the accounting models, when they are used for the purposes they were developed to serve. But they were not developed for cross-industry comparisons of overall costs and efficiencies. (Mostly they were developed to track whether the stockholder dividends of a corporation are as large as is reasonably possible.)
An appropriate model for electrical generation, distribution and usage is fairly simple. There are high start-up costs associated with generation and distribution systems, and low operating costs. Transmission losses are easily quantifiable and are the most significant costs of distribution. Repair and replacement costs can be amortized over decades. There are only a few parts of the system that require daily maintenance.
OTOH, there is no single accounting model for petroleum extraction, preparation, distribution, and usage. Instead there are numerous models of different parts that chain together and interlink with each other. It is easy to lose sight of the fact that at an industry-wide level, operating costs include bunker oil and crew costs for the super tankers, refinery costs, pipeline maintenance costs including pumps, heaters, inspections for corrosion, replacement of failing pipes, and so forth. And all the costs associated with the fleet of delivery trucks that bring product to the service stations.
Rather than unconsciously cherrypicking which of these petroleum costs should be considered in this discussion, imagine summing them all together and then comparing that sum with the overheads for electric distribution.
Electricity is definitely the most efficient way to move power around:
One gallon of gasoline will release 36.6 kWh of energy when burned at 100% efficiency, but gas engines being what they are, I will only see at best 70% of that at the wheels. So we're talking at best around 25 kWh per gallon. That is costing me about $0.12USD per useable kWh-- more than twice what I'm paying for electric power at the house. A battery exchange system would have economies of scale and lower off-peak power costs that would be even better.
Congratulations on your Prius-- probably a wise decision, if you can keep it running for 20 or 25 years. My vehicle of choice is powered by pasta and Clif Bars. It gets me around town quite well.
I was hoping for some tough questions. Hmmph, silly troll. Oh well...
Who owns the batteries?... Does a new car come with a battery? etc
I would think a new electric car would probably come with a battery installed since otherwise it would be hard to drive it off the lot. I expect that the batteries would be owned by Exxon, Shell, BP, etc. It would be hard for a newcomer to break into the vehicle power distribution industry since the infrastructure these businesses have is so massive. It would be a fairly easy thing to for them to convert from petroleum products to electricity. The costs of conversion would be largely offset by the savings in reduced operating costs as pipelines and refineries were taken off line.
Since battery exchanges are really only needed for long trips...
Huh? For short trips to the grocery store you just push your car there?
Batteries would be exchanged when their charge was lower than what the driver would like to have at the moment. The same way most of us fill our tanks when the gas guage gets lower than we're comfortable with. It would be easy to prorate the cost of the recharged battery by the amount of charge left in the battery just removed from service.
Forget about being able to plug your car into a 110 or 220 volt extension cord in your garage. A whole block doing that, let alone an entire suburb? That would be silly. Inefficient. Cause of brownouts. A fire hazard. Just silly.
Who would run this special lifting machinery? No more self service stations?
Does the average driver have that much trouble using a self-service drive-through automated car wash? Why would a self-service drive-through automated battery exchange booth be any more difficult? Do you think an industry like the auto industry couldn't standardize form factors to make this possible? Does your computer have any USB ports? Do you think the dozens of vehicle power distributors and automotive manufacturers could come up with a standard, like the thousands of computer peripheral manufacturers have been able to do?
Shipping tons of batteries from central large power plants is inefficient compared to a tanker truck filled with diesel fuel.
Using wires to ship electricity around the country is the most efficient way of transporting power we've got. The last mile of distribution between the recharging center and the service station would be by specialized truck in a lot of cases, but that cost is a small fraction of the total. On the whole, distributing power this way, especially when you factor in things like the use of off-peak generating capacity and regenerative braking, makes a whole lot more economic sense than piping combustible hazmat liquids all over the country, moving them around in frail tank trucks and so on.
While hydrocarbons might well be the most dense way of storing energy that we have at the moment, electricity is certainly the lowest cost way of moving energy around. The economic advantages of changing a transportation system from petroleum to electric are sufficient reasons to do this on their own. The global and local environmental advantages are important, too, of course.
Interesting conversation. Still looking for the tough questions, like "How can I show the girls how macho I am when my wheels are whisper quiet?"
How do you charge such a 300 mile battery in any where near a comparable amount of time that it now takes to fill a gas tank?
I know! I know!
Convert all the gas stations to swapping stations. Exchange the low battery for one that's fully charged, having been on an off-peak-hour charger for a couple of days or so. Would take less time than we now spend waiting for the soccermom in the shiny SUV to fill her tank.
Heck, I bet the automakers could come up with a worldwide standard form for removable batteries in less than a month. It's as simple as standardized railroad guages, not something really hard like DVD formats.
Now ask a tough question!
Warning: rant follows.
Inasmuch as pirated copies of Windows...
Since this discussion is overtly about proper uses of words, please use accurate wording in your statements. "Piracy" is an internationally recognized crime involving theft and violence. It has nothing at all to do with copyright violations, where nothing is stolen, there is no violence, and there is only this vague concept of "damages": something that can only be estimated statistically in terms of "lost" potential sales (where the keyword is "potential": there is no defined way to estimate the number of sales that might have occurred in some alternate universe where the copyright had not been violated).
To repeat: there is no theft here. There is no violence done to any MS employee or any MS property. There is no piracy here. Stop blowing things out of proportion.
Again, since this discussion is supposed to be about the accurate usage of one word and the concept it conveys, please stop misrepresenting reality by abusing other words and concepts. The unlicensed copies you refer to may or may not be fraudulently represented: if the purchaser knows that the copy must be an unlicensed one, there is no fraud in the transaction. The transaction may or may not still be legal, but it certainly isn't fraudulent. I think most people who have been provided with MS software at a ridiculously low price are aware that it must be an unlicensed copy. I know that there are many transactions where the unlicensed status is a prominent part of the deal: it is a selling point, and the buyer values the goods partly because they are unlicensed.
Not by the logic presented in the parent post. There was none there; only a pastiche of inappropriate terms.
Let me give all the Microsoft fanboys here the respect that they deserve. But I do wish to point out that TFA is definitely correct in saying Microsoft is attempting to erode the english language by subverting the meaning of "genuine" for its own corporate purposes.
It is clear from the usage Microsoft is attempting to establish that they want "genuine" to become an antonym for "licensed". "Licensed" already has a very good antonym: "unlicensed". "Genuine" means something entirely different: it is a statement about the provenance of the item in question-- where it came from. It has nothing to do with the quality of the item: a Rolex is still a genuine Rolex after it is hit by a sledgehammer.
All accurate unlicensed copies of CDs containing Microsoft software are as genuine as any licensed copy. Because all of these accurate copies, licensed or not, originated from the same source. That source is Microsoft.
Microsoft has a reasonable beef about unlicensed copies of its software, and can take reasonable measures to address the issue. Marketing Department attempts to redefine the jargon of law and the english language are not, imho, reasonable measures. They are disruptive and ridiculous, and a kind of FUD that is poisoning Microsoft's future market, when it becomes time for Microsoft to bite the bullet and begin selling to the Linux and BSD users (cultures that are traditionally more concerned with engineering concepts like clarity and accuracy).
The crux of their argument is that they are a British company, doing business in Britain, and thus are not subject to US jurisdiction.
That's apparently only part of it. There is also the fact that they were not served notice of the court's actions in a way recognized as legal in either the UK or any part of the USA. Process cannot be served by email.
I was thinking that it would have been good for someone to file a Friend of the Court brief to bring to the court's attention the fact that it did not have jurisdiction. That would have allowed the judge a good way of dismissing the suit. But the more I have read about this case, the more the actions that the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois has taken in this matter suggest that replacing the judge with one who is competently knowledgeable about the way the world works today is really what is important.
It's just *weird* working with Google. At times, even frustrating. There's absolutely zero visibility into the company and their practices. And from what I know from Google insiders, it doesn't get any better once you're there.
The mushroom management model is still a moneymaker, huh?
While I do applaud Jimmy Wales for taking the moral high road on this one, I also have to acknowledge that it looks like his decision was much easier to make than the decisions that Google, Yahoo, and others have faced.
How could Wikipedia comply with anyone's demand for censorship, even if it wanted to? Its core structure makes that impossible. What, would each article have a little NFCNNN button that any of us could push? ("Not For China No No No")
"Britain and America are two cultures separated by a common language"
(Attributed to Winston Churchill)
Hmm, it is interesting that someone on slashdot thinks truth tables are 'funny'.
Yep, I agree with parent: in formal english, 'or' alone is the non-exclusive OR (and an exclusive XOR is phrased as 'either ... or ...'.
That said, in sloppy english where the XOR is clearly implied by context, the word 'either' is often dropped. Thus the question: "Is she a lying blackhat or a truthful whitehat?" (But note that two possible replies are "She is neither," and "She is both"-- and either of these would be a denial that the implied XOR is an appropriate model of reality.) So a good practice when encountering the word 'or' is to see if inserting 'either' in front of the first clause can be done without changing the sense of the sentence.
Another thing: in typical english conversations, short-circuit evaluation of non-exclusive OR clauses is permitted. Thus with the original question "Is Patricia Dunn a liar or incompetent?" there is no need to explore whether she is incompetent if it is shown that she is a liar, and vice versa.
In this particular case, events have already demonstrated that Patricia Dunn has been so incompetent in handling this investigation that she now finds herself the cause of a major scandal that is damaging HP stockholders' interests. So whether she is also a liar is no longer an issue (wrt the scope of the article): since she is incompetent, she should do the only honorable thing left for her to do and fall on her sword.
When she is out shopping her resume around again, other potential employers might be concerned about whether she was also a liar as well as being incompetent. But that isn't in the scope of TFA.
Why don't we do the math on that *before* we start messing with the net mass of the planet, hm?
Okay. The math isn't terribly hard. Google is great on this kind of thing (hint, start by googling "1 earth mass").
If we could build a space elevator then drop a million tons of stuff down it every day, it would take around 200 million years to increase the Earth's mass by one billionth of one percent.
The addition to planetary mass by any amount that we could reasonably expect to bring down a space elevator is insignificant.
I am feeling SO disappointed with my fellow slashdotters.
I've read through every comment on this thread that is scored 2 or above, and every one of you is seeing less than half of the space elevator's potential. You are all so one-way in your thinking.
Let me try to prime the pump of your imaginations...
Visualize a one pound iron ball, sitting in your hand. How much energy would that ball release on impact if you are on an airplane at 5,000 feet and you drop it out the window? Do you think it might break a car's windshield? Do you think it might put a heck of a dent in a car's roof?
Now drop it from 23,000 miles....
So long as we move enough mass down the space elevator, we can capture enough energy using existing regenerative braking technologies to power lifting side. If we move more mass down than that, the space elevator becomes a power generator. And the beauty of this is, it isn't important what we move downward, so long as we can put some kind regenerative braking on it.
As we begin to explore space elevator technologies, we should also begin to think about how to start nudging a near Earth asteroid into a position where we can get at it easily when we are ready to start dropping things down the elevator shaft. Ion engines might be the ticket. At first it won't matter much what we drop down the shaft, but eventually we'll get more picky.
At some point we'll want to build a solar powered distillery at the end of our string, so we can deliver bottled water mined from comets or icy asteroids to the thirsty. We'd do the bottling at the surface, after running the water through 23,000 miles of water wheels and turbines. And we'd probably build a solar furnace at Strings End to reduce nickel iron asteroids to ingots that would fit special drop tubes.
Well, that's it. I'm tired of playing Heinlein. Somebody else can imagine the distribution system for the surplus power.
What do you think a space elevator will use, fairy dust? It will consume vast quantities of energy both to build and to operate.
I agree with you on the "build" phase for sure. Well, I also agree with you on part of the operational overhead: moving mass upstairs is going to cost energy.
But don't forget that a space elevator works both ways, and masses moving down the elevator are going to be returning energy to the system. When we reach the point where we are moving more mass downward than upward, the space elevator becomes a net energy generator.
Prolly someone should start brainstorming ways to jockey asteroids and comets into position for easy mining. While we can drop anything down a 23,000 mile long shaft and get energy from its descent, prolly chunks of nickel-iron asteroids and slurpies of cometary methane ices would be more useful than other stuff.
And now the extraverts are getting on board...
...And new aspects of the internet have been evolving to engage these extraverts.
Which also benefits us intraverts. I'm now aware of many more local activities than I used to be. For instance, I participated in a group bicycle ride last weekend (of about 1,000 people) that I would never have been aware of if I hadn't been lurking on a bike-oriented local news list. Had a fun time. Actually talked with half a dozen strangers at the watering stations.
I'm not quite sure how the phrase "archaic institutional culture" that I used in my OP transmogrified into "some unreasoning bias against pop culture that the original comment claimed." This is probably one of those puzzlements of communication between carbon-based life forms. Silicon rulz.
Among the people I converse with on a daily basis, "institutional culture" is understood to be that part of of a corporation or bureaucracy that is expressed in its mission statements, values, policies and procedures, as well as implicitly through peer pressure. It determines which behaviors are rewarded, which ones are tolerated, and which meet expressions of disapproval. A new employee who doesn't fit the institutional culture will tend to change, or will move on fairly quickly. Please review these posts in with that understanding in mind.
It has been an interesting conversation. Thank you.
It's online version is probably simply an online version of their print one...
Uh, that's my point. Britannica has been treating the web as if it were just a new kind of printing press. They don't seem to recognize that the web is an entirely different medium and that the old methods of developing articles need to be reviewed and thoroughly revised.
While the online version is about twice as large as the print version, it seems that the additional articles are the ones that either didn't make it through the proofing/editing/revising cycle in time to get into print, or were dropped in favor of other articles that were deemed more suitable to the limitations of the paper product.
There was quite a furor about a year ago, when the journal Nature published research that showed Wikipedia was comparable in accuracy to Britannica wrt scientific articles. The response from Britannica was quite enlightening, and can be summed up thusly: they just don't seem to get it. Not yet.
I trust that they will get it soon. If they don't, and they fold, it will leave a big void. There is no other authoritative source as easily accessable as the Encyclopedia Britannica. So I'm hoping they can re-invent themselves into something that fits this new age as well as the original encyclopedias fit the latter part of the 1700s.
So Britannica is crippled by its archaic technology? Yet my understanding is that its online version is limited in many ways when compared to Wikipedia. Maybe the real limiting factor with Britannica is its archaic institutional culture?
The way you Americans abbreviate Bachelor of Science is most appropriate, as your suggestion seems like complete BS ;)
It gets worse. In the USA there are Registered Nurses with Associate Degrees in Nursing, Bachelor of Science in Nursing, Masters degrees, and Ph.D.s So we have the following:
It would be funnier if there wasn't so much anecdotal evidence that this is, to some extent, true.
Good day to you, painehope.
OTOH, there is a lot to be said for keeping graphic development like charts local, rather than shared among a group. The workflow I envision is using Google Spreadsheets for data collection and shared reference resources where its collaborative nature really shines. Then develop summary reports and graphics by downloading and importing into Excel or OpenOffice and having at it.
I shudder to think of what business graphics produced by a committee would look like, or how long it would take to decide what color to paint each of the slices of the pie. Also, developing locally would help assure that the impact of the graphics on your audience wasn't diminished by their prior exposure to the rough drafts.
68 Inches in Newport.
And much more than that as you move inland. The Coast Range forces maritime air that has been at equilibrium with the Pacific Ocean for thousands of miles to rise from sea level at Newport to 2,000 - 3,000 feet in half a dozen miles. Most of the water gets dumped in the hills, not on the beaches and coves.
I agree that Oregon streambed management is a shambles. Hopefully we are now on the right track. But Bureau of Land Management and the other involved agencies have a pretty dismal track record.
Please see my other post about the rivers of this area. Basically, they are not as small in volume as you might think, since the basins they drain are temperate rainforests that receive 80+ inches of rain a year. Also this region is intensively logged using clearcut methods, and changes in the run-off after removal of the forest are probably happening. It is possible that the dead zone is caused by sylvicultural practices.
Many locals in the area believe that logging practices destroyed the salmon fishery over the last 30 years.
Saying there are no long rivers in this area is of course true, but it is also misleading.
The Oregon Coast Range is one of very few temperate rain forests in the world. In the area around Cape Perpetua, the annual rainfall is 80 inches. All that water runs off to the ocean through those short rivers, as well as hundreds of smaller creeks that empty directly into the surf. Those short rivers, in the aggregate, move about as much water per year as the Willamette River, which drains the rest of western Oregon.
Since the area has been intensively logged over the last 30 years, and since there has been some major changes in logging practice during that time, it is quite possible that human activities are somehow causing this dead zone. Consider that these are the most dense forest habitats anywhere, carrying about 900 tons of biomass per acre see The Temperate Rainforest. Then consider that a clear cut logging operation removes all of this biomass in a matter of weeks from a 20 to 100 acre tract. The raw land that is then exposed to these heavy rains is mostly clays and mudstones. It is reasonable to expect that the run-off from recently logged mountainsides is qualitatively different than it was before the logging.
I expect that this is being looked at by the people who are studying the dead zone. There is a lot of feeling that logging in this area caused the collapse of the salmon fishery that used to be a thriving industry around Cape Perpetua.
So call me a tree hugger.
Oh, my.
I've apparently touched a nerve or two.
I am so sorry, dear.
Now when you get your blood pressure back under control and can achieve that state of mind that is receptive to learning new things, you really should try reading up on what is known about the pain experience (and probably about withdrawal, habituation, and dependency). Doing so is very likely to improve the quality of the rest of your life, and might even make it possible for you to come to better terms with some of your memories.
As to the severity of your pain experiences, I do not and I have not made any judgment about those. You state that some of the worst were triggered by physiologic withdrawal from opioids. Some other people go through opioid withdrawal without feeling that same kind of intense pain experience. That doesn't deny your experience. It is not an "either - or" kind of thing.
I find it interesting that you somehow know that I have no first hand knowledge of intense pain or of opioid withdrawal. You seem to have very advanced extra sensory perception. Or maybe you are just very, very wrong. Since I'm not about to show off my scars and boo-boos on Slashdot, this is going to remain unresolved. It would be wise of you to learn to live with a certain amount of ambiguity, especially concerning the personal history of strangers.
One other thing-- don't confuse clinical detachment with a lack of empathy. There is no way in hell that I am going to enable drug-seeking behaviors with expressions of sympathy. You've got a damn tough road ahead of you, but apparently from what you have written you have faced as bad or worse and gotten through it. It's stupid to dwell on how bad the problems are. It saps you of the energy you need to meet them and beat them. Deal with it; don't waste time and energy talking about it.
Here is something written more than 100 years ago by a fellow who had just had one leg amputated for tuberculosis of the bone (an excruciatingly painful disease), and was refusing to let the doctors amputate his other leg: Invictus.
I stand by my statements. My career in nursing has involved work with trauma patients and substance abuse clients. I've seen my share of opioid withdrawals and I used to keep up with the research appropriate to patient care concerns.
Don't tell me about pain, honey. Assisting people as they deal with pain, from all kinds of sources, was my vocation for too many years. A heart attack victim who requires heroic amounts of intravenous morphine (the drug of choice because it relaxes coronary vasoconstriction as well as being a powerful analgesic) during the first days of his crisis becomes physiologically addicted and experiences withdrawal symptoms later on. Those symptoms don't have the same cognitive representation for him as they do for the substance abuser, and the affective ("emotional") responses are very different. So his withdrawal is often a flu-like inconvenience while he deals with the world-shaking issues he faces, such as whether he can go back to his old job, and whether sex will ever be the same for him again.
But for the substance abuser whose whole life has become an orbit around his habit, the very same kind of withdrawal IS a world-shaking problem. He is like a planet whose sun has gone nova and winked out of existence; his outer world is burned up and the core of him that remains is now on a free trajectory through a cold and empty universe. That is an incredibly painful experience. But although it is triggered by the physiologic withdrawal, it is NOT the withdrawal. If it were, we would have a much lower survival rate for heart attacks, eh?
Anyone who actually cares enough to research pain and the way it manifests would find the Wikipedia article on pain a good place to start. I've just given it a quick look-over, and it seems to provide a pretty good overview while remaining accessable to the lay person. I suspect that one could get a very good idea of the complexity of pain as a human experience by following the links in that article.
And if other bodies ( such as xena )...
Wow.
That just sparked a minor epiphany. IIRC, Xena was a mortal woman who acquired the power to destroy the Gods. And now her namesake celestial body has demonstrated the similar power of destroying a planet named after one of those Gods, by stirring up a bunch of astronomical hot air many AU from its center of gravity. That's heavy, dude. I mean, isn't it amazing how reality recapitulates fiction?
I think "Xena" should definitely become the official name of this planet-destroying roundish body that orbits about the Sun and is bigger than a breadbox but apparently is pretty friendly with its neighbors.
Of course if the 4% of astronomers who decide such things find that Xena isn't all that tolerant of neighbors, then I guess it will become the nineth planet, eh?