Was 9/11 tragic? Yes. Should the perpetrators be brought to justice? Yes?
And is the best way to do so by effectively blowing up two countries and directly or indirectly causing the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqi and Afghanistan civilians? Not to mention the military casualties on both sides?
If you want to prove that you care about "human life", then talk to me about those deaths.
"...and how best to bend facts for your propaganda purposes..."
Given the above, if I were you I think I'd remember that saying about people who live in glass houses...
"... and we just don't know where it can be safely stored for 30,000 years."
Oh please. Research the term "half-life", and then get back to me when you have half an education. Anything that's going to be seriously radioactive for 30,000 years is going to be an alpha emitter. Whose highly dangerous particles need massive shielding between you and the source, like that provided by, say, a piece of paper. Rule of thumb: highly energetic equals extremely short half life.
There are two problems in the quoted fragment: The use of "we" and the use of "safely". We, because with people like you in the picture it's obvious that WE don't have a clue. Safely, because everyone who's against it defines "safe" as zero risk, when NOTHING in this world is zero risk. You're at risk from a meteorite bashing your brains out while you sleep. Are the odds against it? Yes. Is the risk zero? No.
Last time I checked, I believe it's said that in 10,000 years all of the material of which speak so alarmingly would still be radioactive. Well, at least as radioactive as the raw ore from which it came. You know, like rocks? Which we've had buried in the ground unshielded, leaking dangerous trace amounts of radioactively into our groundwater supplies for a few billion years or so. I tell you, someone should DO something!
Not to belittle this, but we've had two major, ultimately worst-case radiological events occur: Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And yet, both of those sites are habitable today. Millions of people live there, work there, play there. Let's repeat that. Two atomic BOMBS.
And you want to bitch about the "dangers" of a material fused into glass, tucked behind shields, and buried in a fucking mountain?
Dude, you ought to pay LESS attention to the nonsense. You've been brainwashed by too many b-grade science-fiction movies with giant radioactively mutated spiders/scorpions/bats.
How about sleeping in your house for a couple of months with the gas on and the pilot lights out? Or maybe just one night with a little carbon monoxide in your room? Or maybe just pull all of the insulation off your electrical cords?
There are plenty of things that are "not safe" if improperly used or handled. Which just proved... nothing.
Besides, don't you think some people might notice relatively quickly when 25,000 homeowners call in to report that their power's out? That, if implemented, there just might be one or two, or even three safeguards involved? Perhaps you should see what we already do to safeguard the nuclear materials that are already used around you from day to day? (Material structure analysis, cancer radiation therapy, and so on.)
Also, when discussing radioactivity there's also a few little facts that need to be considered, like how much radioactivity? And what type? Some things are highly radioactive, generating a tremendous amount of alpha particles that you need... an entire sheet of paper to block. I live in Denver, the mile high city, where you can pickup a nice dose, relatively speaking, just by spending the day in the park.
So I agree with, "You need to go learn a lot more about physics, radioactivity, power generation, the biological effects of radiation, logic, risk assessment, and terrorism before continuing to make assertions that are based on false assumptions." Especially since you seem to be in the all-risk-is-unacceptable any-radiation-whatsoever-is-bad camp.
I'm sure you worked hard on that analysis, but I'm not sure I'm buying it. In the first series there were plenty of comments like "the force runs strong in our family", with the implication that it was in fact an inherited trait. Further, in E1 much of made of the fact of the NUMBER of midichlorians present in Anakin's blood.
That indicates to me that everyone has them to one extent or the other . You just needed a lot of them to be a Jedi, and some people are more predisposed to this than others, just like some people will always be faster than I am, be able to jump higher, or whatever.
Futher, I'm not sure the chancellor or the senators would agree that the Jedi sit on top of the heap. Again, to me they're more like... ah... an independent watchdog group of wandering warrior monks whose job it is to make sure everyone plays by the rules. Think Zen Texas Ranger.
The real problems lay in the fact that the scripts sucked, the acting and directing was heavy-handed, and they depended too much on FX sequences and not enough on characterization and character interaction. And all of those because, fundamentally, George simply wasn't up to the task.
I don't suppose you noticed the flash card slot. The Kindle will hold roughly 200 books BEFORE needing a extra $30 memory card. Text isn't music or video file-size-wise.
Titles can be backed up to a drive, or simply deleted and downloaded again from Amazon as needed. Then again, I'd think a single 4GB flash card would last most people quite a while.
Twenty to thirty dollar NYT hardcover bestsellers cost $9.95. Other book prices can range all of the way down to $1.99.
Then again, in the future I expect things like textbooks may be more than that. 'Course, on the other foot, one reason textbooks are supposed to be expensive are their relatively limited production runs. Not a problem with ebooks.
Didn't we just cover this with the iPhone, which IIRC, still holds a (roughly) 80 percent charge after 400-500 FULL charging cycles.
Only drive fifty miles a day, and that's 2,000-2,500 overnight recharges, at which point you're STILL at 80%. As such, your depreciation costs are just a little bit off...
Irrelevant anyway. Current estimates indicate that two/thirds of the American public could easily drive plug-in hybrids before we'd need to seriously consider expanding our energy infrastructure.
Also, usage is currently highest during the day, lowest at night. A large number of cars charging up at night would actually help serve to balance the production mechanisms. And an excess of energy produced during the day conventionally or with large-scale solar could be used in several ways to "store" power for latter delivery.
There's also the possibility of putting thin-film or printed-nanoscale solar panels on the roofs of the cars themselves, such that they help recharge themselves while sitting in the parking lot or in the driveway.
Look for solutions, and stop creating fake problems of the "well, it would seem to me" variety.
I love these sort of comments from a username of ethanol-fueled, another federally subsidized program that simply moves the fuel expense into another arena.
You've trotted this out before, and been refuted before. I'll only add that your kid might think twice about the gas hog if it's going to cost him $200-300 a month to run it.
If we drove mostly electric cars today and someone was trying to introduce a new high-performance vehicle powered by gasoline, I suspect many, many people would be pointing out the dangers of driving around with 15 gallons or so of an explosive, combustible fuel. And the refueling dangers. And the environmental impact. And...
You get the idea.
"The car was removed from the market because it was economically unviable."
Yeah, stop selling 'em and it's hard to make a profit. From the film, and from outside reading, it's pretty clear that the automakers didn't want to have to comply with the zero-emissions air quality board regulations [fact], and as such worked to get the law changed as to the "as many as the public demands" statute [fact]. At which time they simply needed to continue building each and every one by hand and reverse-market them such that sales dropped to the point where they were in fact "economically unviable".
That said, given the expensive cars that some people will buy, I'm not going for the economically unviable argument there either. Tesla has, IIRC, sold out their entire first year's production run... at $100,000 a pop.
Just as counter-point, for years I read books, including most of the Baen library, on a HP iPaq PDA in true uber-geek fashion. I think I had maybe a hundred titles on a device I could slip into a jacket pocket. The screen, while not great, was eminently readable due to the backlighting, high contrast, and Microsoft Reader's sub-pixel LCD addressing.
All-in-all, it was just a little paperback on which you turned pages a bit more often.
Move into the future, and we have the iPhone, with a screen resolution that leaves the iPaq's in the dust. While the iPhone may not be the perfect book reader, it has two MAJOR advantages over a Kindle.
First, the Kindle means I have to carry and manage yet another device, and charger, and cables, and who knows what else. Second, and related to the first, no matter what I'm carrying I ALWAYS have my iPhone with me.
When Apple releases the iPhone SDK I strongly suspect that Amazon will port the Kindle reader to it. They are trying to expand the ebook market, after all. And when it happens I'll probably buy a few.
Amazon states that a current NY Times bestseller that might be $27.95 MSRP and $19.85 on Amazon will be $9.95 on the Kindle. They're definitely in the ballpark on price.
"... they chose not to require approval of ads before they were shown on their website..."
And just how would you approve them? Watch them to see if they do anything suspicous? Examine thousands of lines of Flash code for each and every version of every ad? Hope that an imported JPEG doesn't contain a new 0-day exploit of which no one has heard?
"People with something worthwhile to publish would continue to publish..."
Assuming, of course, that they could afford to do so. Servers aren't free. Bandwidth isn't free. And time isn't free. The end result of what you propose is either subscription-based sites or services (you're probably too young to remember them) or "free" sites sponsored only by those with pockets deep enough to do so. (And probably serving up an agenda to boot.)
But I'm wasting my time. Your word choice (exploit, garbage) tells me that you're firmly in the camp that assumes that advertising serves no useful purpose whatsoever. And yet I'm sure you demand and consume (and download) ad-free professionally-produced content.
I like books. I don't, however, keep ALL of my books. Some are just time fillers and others are just worth (barely) the paper on which they're printed.
While I might like to keep some books in paper format (like art books), I might in fact welcome the day when I could replace a half-ton or so of books and shelves (literally) with a large hard drive and a few readers. Keep in mind that many of us no longer think we need to move around huge collections of vinyl and plastic just in order to have a music collection.
I wouldn't say price, I'd say multiplicity. Do you really want to carry yet another device around? And the chargers and batteries and cables and other junk that always goes with?
"I *really* don't think you can make an argument that your average person will put out $400 for an e-reader."
I think that's why Apple missed the boat on this one. But they seem locked on the notion that a "portable media device" means something that can play music and movies. They seem to forget that there are other forms of media that are older and yet in many ways more popular than CDs and DVDs and their digitized equivalents.
And, personally, I think the iPhone would be a very nice reader. I know I'd sacrifice some of the advantages of a Kindle NOT to have yet another device to lug around and recharge. See: Amazon Introduces Kindle; Apple Introduces Nothing
Slashdot Mirror
Was 9/11 tragic? Yes. Should the perpetrators be brought to justice? Yes?
And is the best way to do so by effectively blowing up two countries and directly or indirectly causing the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqi and Afghanistan civilians? Not to mention the military casualties on both sides?
If you want to prove that you care about "human life", then talk to me about those deaths.
"...and how best to bend facts for your propaganda purposes..."
Given the above, if I were you I think I'd remember that saying about people who live in glass houses...
"... and we just don't know where it can be safely stored for 30,000 years."
Oh please. Research the term "half-life", and then get back to me when you have half an education. Anything that's going to be seriously radioactive for 30,000 years is going to be an alpha emitter. Whose highly dangerous particles need massive shielding between you and the source, like that provided by, say, a piece of paper. Rule of thumb: highly energetic equals extremely short half life.
There are two problems in the quoted fragment: The use of "we" and the use of "safely". We, because with people like you in the picture it's obvious that WE don't have a clue. Safely, because everyone who's against it defines "safe" as zero risk, when NOTHING in this world is zero risk. You're at risk from a meteorite bashing your brains out while you sleep. Are the odds against it? Yes. Is the risk zero? No.
Last time I checked, I believe it's said that in 10,000 years all of the material of which speak so alarmingly would still be radioactive. Well, at least as radioactive as the raw ore from which it came. You know, like rocks? Which we've had buried in the ground unshielded, leaking dangerous trace amounts of radioactively into our groundwater supplies for a few billion years or so. I tell you, someone should DO something!
Not to belittle this, but we've had two major, ultimately worst-case radiological events occur: Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And yet, both of those sites are habitable today. Millions of people live there, work there, play there. Let's repeat that. Two atomic BOMBS.
And you want to bitch about the "dangers" of a material fused into glass, tucked behind shields, and buried in a fucking mountain?
Dude, you ought to pay LESS attention to the nonsense. You've been brainwashed by too many b-grade science-fiction movies with giant radioactively mutated spiders/scorpions/bats.
How about sleeping in your house for a couple of months with the gas on and the pilot lights out? Or maybe just one night with a little carbon monoxide in your room? Or maybe just pull all of the insulation off your electrical cords?
There are plenty of things that are "not safe" if improperly used or handled. Which just proved... nothing.
Besides, don't you think some people might notice relatively quickly when 25,000 homeowners call in to report that their power's out? That, if implemented, there just might be one or two, or even three safeguards involved? Perhaps you should see what we already do to safeguard the nuclear materials that are already used around you from day to day? (Material structure analysis, cancer radiation therapy, and so on.)
Also, when discussing radioactivity there's also a few little facts that need to be considered, like how much radioactivity? And what type? Some things are highly radioactive, generating a tremendous amount of alpha particles that you need... an entire sheet of paper to block. I live in Denver, the mile high city, where you can pickup a nice dose, relatively speaking, just by spending the day in the park.
So I agree with, "You need to go learn a lot more about physics, radioactivity, power generation, the biological effects of radiation, logic, risk assessment, and terrorism before continuing to make assertions that are based on false assumptions." Especially since you seem to be in the all-risk-is-unacceptable any-radiation-whatsoever-is-bad camp.
I'm sure you worked hard on that analysis, but I'm not sure I'm buying it. In the first series there were plenty of comments like "the force runs strong in our family", with the implication that it was in fact an inherited trait. Further, in E1 much of made of the fact of the NUMBER of midichlorians present in Anakin's blood.
That indicates to me that everyone has them to one extent or the other . You just needed a lot of them to be a Jedi, and some people are more predisposed to this than others, just like some people will always be faster than I am, be able to jump higher, or whatever.
Futher, I'm not sure the chancellor or the senators would agree that the Jedi sit on top of the heap. Again, to me they're more like... ah... an independent watchdog group of wandering warrior monks whose job it is to make sure everyone plays by the rules. Think Zen Texas Ranger.
The real problems lay in the fact that the scripts sucked, the acting and directing was heavy-handed, and they depended too much on FX sequences and not enough on characterization and character interaction. And all of those because, fundamentally, George simply wasn't up to the task.
"I do not have the device..."
Enough said.
I don't suppose you noticed the flash card slot. The Kindle will hold roughly 200 books BEFORE needing a extra $30 memory card. Text isn't music or video file-size-wise.
Titles can be backed up to a drive, or simply deleted and downloaded again from Amazon as needed. Then again, I'd think a single 4GB flash card would last most people quite a while.
Twenty to thirty dollar NYT hardcover bestsellers cost $9.95. Other book prices can range all of the way down to $1.99.
Then again, in the future I expect things like textbooks may be more than that. 'Course, on the other foot, one reason textbooks are supposed to be expensive are their relatively limited production runs. Not a problem with ebooks.
"... hybrids simply aren't worth the price from a strictly economic perspective..."
Tell me that next summer at $4.50 a gallon.
Didn't we just cover this with the iPhone, which IIRC, still holds a (roughly) 80 percent charge after 400-500 FULL charging cycles.
Only drive fifty miles a day, and that's 2,000-2,500 overnight recharges, at which point you're STILL at 80%. As such, your depreciation costs are just a little bit off...
Irrelevant anyway. Current estimates indicate that two/thirds of the American public could easily drive plug-in hybrids before we'd need to seriously consider expanding our energy infrastructure.
Also, usage is currently highest during the day, lowest at night. A large number of cars charging up at night would actually help serve to balance the production mechanisms. And an excess of energy produced during the day conventionally or with large-scale solar could be used in several ways to "store" power for latter delivery.
There's also the possibility of putting thin-film or printed-nanoscale solar panels on the roofs of the cars themselves, such that they help recharge themselves while sitting in the parking lot or in the driveway.
Look for solutions, and stop creating fake problems of the "well, it would seem to me" variety.
I love these sort of comments from a username of ethanol-fueled, another federally subsidized program that simply moves the fuel expense into another arena.
You've trotted this out before, and been refuted before. I'll only add that your kid might think twice about the gas hog if it's going to cost him $200-300 a month to run it.
If we drove mostly electric cars today and someone was trying to introduce a new high-performance vehicle powered by gasoline, I suspect many, many people would be pointing out the dangers of driving around with 15 gallons or so of an explosive, combustible fuel. And the refueling dangers. And the environmental impact. And...
You get the idea.
"The car was removed from the market because it was economically unviable."
Yeah, stop selling 'em and it's hard to make a profit. From the film, and from outside reading, it's pretty clear that the automakers didn't want to have to comply with the zero-emissions air quality board regulations [fact], and as such worked to get the law changed as to the "as many as the public demands" statute [fact]. At which time they simply needed to continue building each and every one by hand and reverse-market them such that sales dropped to the point where they were in fact "economically unviable".
That said, given the expensive cars that some people will buy, I'm not going for the economically unviable argument there either. Tesla has, IIRC, sold out their entire first year's production run... at $100,000 a pop.
Just as counter-point, for years I read books, including most of the Baen library, on a HP iPaq PDA in true uber-geek fashion. I think I had maybe a hundred titles on a device I could slip into a jacket pocket. The screen, while not great, was eminently readable due to the backlighting, high contrast, and Microsoft Reader's sub-pixel LCD addressing.
All-in-all, it was just a little paperback on which you turned pages a bit more often.
Move into the future, and we have the iPhone, with a screen resolution that leaves the iPaq's in the dust. While the iPhone may not be the perfect book reader, it has two MAJOR advantages over a Kindle.
First, the Kindle means I have to carry and manage yet another device, and charger, and cables, and who knows what else. Second, and related to the first, no matter what I'm carrying I ALWAYS have my iPhone with me.
When Apple releases the iPhone SDK I strongly suspect that Amazon will port the Kindle reader to it. They are trying to expand the ebook market, after all. And when it happens I'll probably buy a few.
Amazon states that a current NY Times bestseller that might be $27.95 MSRP and $19.85 on Amazon will be $9.95 on the Kindle. They're definitely in the ballpark on price.
"... they chose not to require approval of ads before they were shown on their website..."
And just how would you approve them? Watch them to see if they do anything suspicous? Examine thousands of lines of Flash code for each and every version of every ad? Hope that an imported JPEG doesn't contain a new 0-day exploit of which no one has heard?
Approval isn't the answer. Nor is inspection.
Is that an ad? Kind of hypocritical, don't you think?
"People with something worthwhile to publish would continue to publish..."
Assuming, of course, that they could afford to do so. Servers aren't free. Bandwidth isn't free. And time isn't free. The end result of what you propose is either subscription-based sites or services (you're probably too young to remember them) or "free" sites sponsored only by those with pockets deep enough to do so. (And probably serving up an agenda to boot.)
But I'm wasting my time. Your word choice (exploit, garbage) tells me that you're firmly in the camp that assumes that advertising serves no useful purpose whatsoever. And yet I'm sure you demand and consume (and download) ad-free professionally-produced content.
And according to a German security site, the ID is the same for every phone that was tested. Conspiracy hats off. Case closed.
Maybe now we can discuss if the Kindle knows which pages you're lingering over and transmits suspicous activity to the NSA...
"People who read books like books."
I like books. I don't, however, keep ALL of my books. Some are just time fillers and others are just worth (barely) the paper on which they're printed.
While I might like to keep some books in paper format (like art books), I might in fact welcome the day when I could replace a half-ton or so of books and shelves (literally) with a large hard drive and a few readers. Keep in mind that many of us no longer think we need to move around huge collections of vinyl and plastic just in order to have a music collection.
Times change.
I wouldn't say price, I'd say multiplicity. Do you really want to carry yet another device around? And the chargers and batteries and cables and other junk that always goes with?
"I *really* don't think you can make an argument that your average person will put out $400 for an e-reader."
I think that's why Apple missed the boat on this one. But they seem locked on the notion that a "portable media device" means something that can play music and movies. They seem to forget that there are other forms of media that are older and yet in many ways more popular than CDs and DVDs and their digitized equivalents.
And, personally, I think the iPhone would be a very nice reader. I know I'd sacrifice some of the advantages of a Kindle NOT to have yet another device to lug around and recharge. See: Amazon Introduces Kindle; Apple Introduces Nothing
No, numbnuts, that might be an additional reason, but one pays primarily to help support a free site.
(Given that rationale, I can guess just how much "support" your favorite bands and musicians get...)
" And if your [sic] stupid enough to do that..."
Always interesting to see how the "smart" people are thinking. (grin)