"So let me get this straight. You don't trust me, and I'm just some guy typing on slashdot, probably thousands of miles away from you."
Couldn't have put it better myself. And actually, you're not "just some guy typing on slashdot", you're just some guy typing on slashdot with very little exhibited knowledge and lots of hysteria. I wouldn't trust you to make me a cheese sandwich absent convincing proof that you actually can. Heck, for all I know you look like an Asian also. As opposed, that is, to a crew cut white dude driving a perfectly ordinary rental truck.
As to whether I would trust the lady in question...? Far too little data to tell, and I wasn't there. From the people who were actually there, I'm inclined to forgive what has turned out to be a relatively harmless error. But I have to wonder about people who sit at home with no protoboard-wielding Asians in front of them (and no knowledge of electronics in their heads, evidently) and wax dramatic about how wires are scary.
"I saw what she was wearing and trust me, it looked like a bomb."
This is hilarious. Why in the world should I trust you? And why are you talking as if you have some special knowledge of what she was wearing or what bombs look like? There's pictures of the thing all over the news. It looks like a pedestrian blinky-light circuit on a protoboard. Perhaps, if one wants to stretch, it looks like a prototype for the sort of circuit that one might use on a movie prop of a bomb. And one might be advised to remember that movies aren't actually real.
Somebody has been pulling one over on you.
Glucosamine is a slaughter house product made from
cow snouts. Usually the little piece of cartilage
right between the nostrils.
You got my hopes up. Alas, no such luck. Chondrotin, the stuff that often goes with glucosamine, is made of cow cartilage. Most glucosamine is in fact made of shellfish shells. Thusly the big red warnings on the side of the bottle for people who are allergic to shellfish. Next I suppose you're going to tell me that chorizo isn't made of pig cheeks...?
In EVE, attachment to an infeasible set of victory conditions is the root of all suffering.
If you don't have the time, interest, or resources to play the alliance sumo-wrestling game, of course it's not going to be fun. IMHO, it doesn't seem fun even if you do have the time. Go out and shoot something already -- or at least do something else. There are plenty of goals that can be accomplished in EVE if you have a plan and the will to execute that plan.
Of course, a group of new players might come by and crush you just for the fun of it. Good luck fighting off a fleet of thirty destroyers when you're flying a battleship.
That sounds like a great idea! I've been thinking lately that it's such a waste to run my CD player off of batteries in the car when I've got a perfectly usable car jack right there. I'll just get one of those inverter thingies and plug the AC adapter into that!...or not.
From all checked baggage, yes -- that's been the rule for as long as I can remember. But have they changed the rule about "smoking materials carried on your person" that would seem to allow lighters? Oddly enough, I don't pay much attention to the rules on flammable materials in planes, but my recollection is that you can carry lighters and other personal-type flammable things in your carryon.
I'm not up on the latest stuff, I guess, but I though that the bomb-sniffers were looking largely or entirely for nitrates. I'd find it kind of surprising that they would look for alcohols, given that alcohols are common in cleaning products, cosmetic products, and of course beverages, all of which are likely to come in contact with (or leak in) people's luggage.
Additionally, I'm pretty sure that methanol is about as volatile as isopropyl alcohol, which is to say pretty volatile. I think you'd have to completely soak the bag, and then not air it out afterwards, to leave any residue after a few days.
And even if they did test for alcohols, and you came in with a bag dripping in (and reeking of) methanol, I doubt you'd get "flagged as a terrorist". More likely, you'd just get your bag gone through, as at least in my local airport, the bomb-sniffer things seem to be used as first-pass screening to select bags to search by hand.
Now, I don't know that you'd be able to carry the actual fuel cells on the plane -- it would depend on the size of the container and how it was sealed. If it was like a print cartridge, it would go through, just as you can carry on print cartridges now (You can, right? I'd actually never thought of it before). If it was like a fuel bottle for a camping stove, then it wouldn't go through.
Given my boyfriend's handwriting? I'd sooner he email me than either. In fact, I may have to email this to him... he'd find the mental image of either of us writing "elegant script, each letter lovingly crafted by an absent heart" to be utterly hilarious.
Watch me get such an item in the mail tomorrow.
In any case, we evidently have different aesthetic standards as well as views on romance. I tend toward a neat and functional sort of style, and my handwriting reflects that style. Just today, I was rather bummed because I couldn't find my preferred type of paper -- E-2 paper -- and had to settle for ordinary quad graph paper. It's not green, it doesn't have the nice border, and I think the squares are bigger.
I can see the traditional appeal of your carefully crafted love letter (creamy paper, scented with your love's perfume?), but I also see a certain appeal in carefully laid out equations and diagrams on the aforementioned E-2 paper.
I still sign in cursive out of a vague sense of superstition, but I'm not entirely sure that it's necessary. A signature is written at speed, and is contained in the muscle memory of the signer; a forger has to do it slower and it will not look the same. What you write at this speed shouldn't make any difference, so long as it has enough complexity (e.g. everyone can write a straight line). My signature, being in cursive as it is, has not evolved from the standard style as much as my printing has, since I have printed tons more stuff than I have written in cursive -- in that respect, I think that if I were to sign printed it would be more unique.
Ooh, yes, that is a factor that I didn't put into my off the cuff calculations. Considering I'm a short walk away from asking people who have made a career out of studying this stuff, I really should put a little more research into my answers.
My vague mental impression is that there will not be a major crisis in oil production during my career (which is a)a while and b)probably not as a petroleum engineer), but I don't recall whether that estimate is based on simple decline curves or on estimates of world consumption.
Another thing that I didn't think about is that we do have a viable fallback energy source, at least for electricity production (and thereby, back on topic, transportation), in the form of nuclear energy. The oil price would probably not have to rise too terribly high to cover the costs of decommissioning and to inspire some good methods for waste disposal and reuse, and I think that ultimately if it came between maintaining our quality of life and "I ain't having none of them nuklear bomb thingies", then most people would get along with it fairly well.
Now *I'm* the flaming optimist in the room. Also, I'm starting to be frightened by the depth of thought I've seen in these threads. Maybe if I find a web filter that blocks pages with the word 'copyright' in them, my urge to abandon Earth and create a new civilization on one of Jupiter's moons will pass.
Ding! Points to you! One minor point: Oil reserves haven't really been proven incorrect, it's just that they don't mean what people think they do. First of all, oil reserves are based on average oil prices, because as the price of oil increases the number of economic deposits increases. Second, oil reserves are based entirely on known deposits. We might guess that there's "a lot of oil in them thar hills", but it doesn't show up in reserve reports until someone's actually goes and drills the area.
I think you're a bit of an optimist, though, in saying that we will stop burning oil because of price in the next 30 years. We know from the reserve figures cited that from technical availibility (not dealing with political munge), the current average oil prices can be sustained for that thirty year period, and at that point prices will increase, creating reserves that we will then go through at that price level. Actually, all that takes place continually, but for convenience we can consider a stair step model.
In order for us to stop burning oil, though, there must be some alternative of lower cost that we can switch to -- otherwise we'll get all the way down to sending horizontal drilling gnomes to sponge up residual oil, still using it as a power source (or, alternatively, abandoning industrialization for lack of power), because there's no better alternative. I don't really see such an alternative source surfacing in the next 30 years, though, unless a giant breakthrough is made in finding cheap, dense energy.
Not a radically different car, but yes I think there are significant differences, at least for some people. I'm currently driving a 12-year-old car that'll roll over for the second time sometime this year, with only two major repairs in its lifetime (one of them turned out to be a waste of time, but don't mind my bitterness). I can get it repaired at any arbitrary mechanic (and get it screwed up at any arbirtrary mechanic, again excuse the bitterness).Also, I am fairly familiar with the standard procedures to deal with minor common faults and diagnose more serious problems.
With a car of substantially different design from the previous standard of burning something to make car go vroom, my concern would be that it would be hard to find a mechanic to service the thing, either at the time of purchase or later on, or that the design would turn out not to be viable for the long-term ownership scheme that I favor. Now, I haven't looked into this much, because I have no reason to change cars and many reasons not to, but the marketing I think is necessary to reassure people that if they go for this thing they won't wind up searching junkyards six years later for a replacement reverse frobjinator for a car that sank without trace two years after it was release, or wind up by the side of the road going "Now, it's positive to positive, negative to *fzzzt!*... er, I guess not on this car..."
Are you taking into account the effects of price increases? Oil reserves are based on the oil that is feasible to extract at current oil prices and technological levels, and there are plenty of uneconomic wells that are shut in waiting for a price increase or some new gimmick.
Judging from your figures, I think you may have hit on the amount of reserves at current oil prices -- which is at about 40 years, I think. What will eventually happen is that (average) oil prices will creep up as the cost of recovery increases. Which is a problem, but not as bad a problem as a major energy source that underlies our economy up and going dry in 40 years.
Hopefully, too, it's a problem that leads to its own solution, as costs to produce other forms of energy should decrease with time and research, and higher oil prices will lead to more pressure to develop alternate sources.
In some ways, I think that we overestimate the scope of the energy problem, and in some ways I think we don't understand how deeply screwed we may be if we don't find some acceptable new primary energy source. For instance, I'm rather dubious about a lot of energy sources that casual environmentalists toss out as the solution to the world's energy problems. A lot of them sound really nifty keen, but would be an utter wreck to implement on a large enough scale to be a primary source of energy for industrialized nations.
What if the code they wrote is good, and documented? then would they be engineers?
If the code that they wrote is good and documented, then they would be good programmers. If they had X years of experience in the field, and passed a certification exam, and signed off that the code was good and that they took legal responsibility for it, then they would be engineers, in the context that the grandparent means.
Ethics has nothing to do with engineering.
Ethics have nothing to do with engineering? _Now_ you tell me -- that's two credit hours of my life that I won't get back! Some people may think that military aircraft shouldn't exist; those people probably do not design military aircraft. However, engineers also have documented ethical codes that they have to follow -- for example, not misleading people or concealing a danger to the public. If a PE is found to be in violation of those codes, they can lose their certification, just like a lawyer can be disbarred.
I really don't. I don't think a person needs to be pitied if they just have a different sense of aesthetics from me. Personally, reading this article makes me think of dusting off my copy of Sims. Virtual protestors of the virtual McDonalds? It's more interesting than peeing on the carpet, for sure!
And corporate whore? Wouldn't that be more of a corporate john? Anyway, if McDonalds really doesn't care any more about me than whether I'm buying a hamburger or not (I'm crushed!), that's fine. It's not like I care about them on a deep, personal, non-provider-of-hamburgers level either.
Well, I did some digging. The preemption of local regulations on antennas is in
97.15b , and that requires state and local governments to 'reasonably accomodate' amateur radio operations. Nothing about homeowner's associations, and though the ARRL has requested that they be included, so far the FCC has been unwilling to do that. You can't contract to something that's illegal, as you said, but you can contract to not do something that's otherwise legal for you to do.
Nevertheless, a person who is seeking a TV antenna in a covenant-controlled area would be well served by getting in contact with a ham (One who, unlike myself, has more than a couple of years experience basically being licensed and occasionally talking with the local club repeater. Not _on_ the repeater. _With_ the repeater. Living in a RF hole sucks sometimes.), as they often have to deal with this sort of thing and therefore have valuable information about how to either negotiate an equitable solution or sneak in a suitable antenna.
"Oh, no. No antennas here. That is a perfectly ordinary flagpole/electric fence/modern sculpture/crank-up tower mounted in the bed of a pickup truck with a funny license plate. I am a perfectly ordinary and compliant member of this idyllic community, and I would never even consider having odd or unusual hobbies that might disturb the delicate sensibilies of my neighbors. Nothing to see here, move along."
And yeah, I fail to see the advantage of these communities. "So what do I get for painting my house the Official Beige?" "Well, you get to live in a neighborhood where everyone else paints their house Official Beige." "Woo freaking hoo." I think I'll take the plane as a neighbor, thanks much. I get to have my antenna farm, and he gets to rotate -- and if he doesn't like the antennas, he can rotate anyway!
You were successful at this? My impression was that the homeowners association rules couldn't be bypassed by PRB-1, because they're private contracts that you supposedly entered into of your own free will.
Slashdot Mirror
Couldn't have put it better myself. And actually, you're not "just some guy typing on slashdot", you're just some guy typing on slashdot with very little exhibited knowledge and lots of hysteria. I wouldn't trust you to make me a cheese sandwich absent convincing proof that you actually can. Heck, for all I know you look like an Asian also. As opposed, that is, to a crew cut white dude driving a perfectly ordinary rental truck.
As to whether I would trust the lady in question...? Far too little data to tell, and I wasn't there. From the people who were actually there, I'm inclined to forgive what has turned out to be a relatively harmless error. But I have to wonder about people who sit at home with no protoboard-wielding Asians in front of them (and no knowledge of electronics in their heads, evidently) and wax dramatic about how wires are scary.
This is hilarious. Why in the world should I trust you? And why are you talking as if you have some special knowledge of what she was wearing or what bombs look like? There's pictures of the thing all over the news. It looks like a pedestrian blinky-light circuit on a protoboard. Perhaps, if one wants to stretch, it looks like a prototype for the sort of circuit that one might use on a movie prop of a bomb. And one might be advised to remember that movies aren't actually real.
You got my hopes up. Alas, no such luck. Chondrotin, the stuff that often goes with glucosamine, is made of cow cartilage. Most glucosamine is in fact made of shellfish shells. Thusly the big red warnings on the side of the bottle for people who are allergic to shellfish. Next I suppose you're going to tell me that chorizo isn't made of pig cheeks...?
In EVE, attachment to an infeasible set of victory conditions is the root of all suffering.
If you don't have the time, interest, or resources to play the alliance sumo-wrestling game, of course it's not going to be fun. IMHO, it doesn't seem fun even if you do have the time. Go out and shoot something already -- or at least do something else. There are plenty of goals that can be accomplished in EVE if you have a plan and the will to execute that plan.
Of course, a group of new players might come by and crush you just for the fun of it. Good luck fighting off a fleet of thirty destroyers when you're flying a battleship.
That sounds like a great idea! I've been thinking lately that it's such a waste to run my CD player off of batteries in the car when I've got a perfectly usable car jack right there. I'll just get one of those inverter thingies and plug the AC adapter into that! ...or not.
From all checked baggage, yes -- that's been the rule for as long as I can remember. But have they changed the rule about "smoking materials carried on your person" that would seem to allow lighters? Oddly enough, I don't pay much attention to the rules on flammable materials in planes, but my recollection is that you can carry lighters and other personal-type flammable things in your carryon.
I'm not up on the latest stuff, I guess, but I though that the bomb-sniffers were looking largely or entirely for nitrates. I'd find it kind of surprising that they would look for alcohols, given that alcohols are common in cleaning products, cosmetic products, and of course beverages, all of which are likely to come in contact with (or leak in) people's luggage.
Additionally, I'm pretty sure that methanol is about as volatile as isopropyl alcohol, which is to say pretty volatile. I think you'd have to completely soak the bag, and then not air it out afterwards, to leave any residue after a few days.
And even if they did test for alcohols, and you came in with a bag dripping in (and reeking of) methanol, I doubt you'd get "flagged as a terrorist". More likely, you'd just get your bag gone through, as at least in my local airport, the bomb-sniffer things seem to be used as first-pass screening to select bags to search by hand.
Now, I don't know that you'd be able to carry the actual fuel cells on the plane -- it would depend on the size of the container and how it was sealed. If it was like a print cartridge, it would go through, just as you can carry on print cartridges now (You can, right? I'd actually never thought of it before). If it was like a fuel bottle for a camping stove, then it wouldn't go through.
Watch me get such an item in the mail tomorrow.
In any case, we evidently have different aesthetic standards as well as views on romance. I tend toward a neat and functional sort of style, and my handwriting reflects that style. Just today, I was rather bummed because I couldn't find my preferred type of paper -- E-2 paper -- and had to settle for ordinary quad graph paper. It's not green, it doesn't have the nice border, and I think the squares are bigger.
I can see the traditional appeal of your carefully crafted love letter (creamy paper, scented with your love's perfume?), but I also see a certain appeal in carefully laid out equations and diagrams on the aforementioned E-2 paper.
I still sign in cursive out of a vague sense of superstition, but I'm not entirely sure that it's necessary. A signature is written at speed, and is contained in the muscle memory of the signer; a forger has to do it slower and it will not look the same. What you write at this speed shouldn't make any difference, so long as it has enough complexity (e.g. everyone can write a straight line). My signature, being in cursive as it is, has not evolved from the standard style as much as my printing has, since I have printed tons more stuff than I have written in cursive -- in that respect, I think that if I were to sign printed it would be more unique.
My vague mental impression is that there will not be a major crisis in oil production during my career (which is a)a while and b)probably not as a petroleum engineer), but I don't recall whether that estimate is based on simple decline curves or on estimates of world consumption.
Another thing that I didn't think about is that we do have a viable fallback energy source, at least for electricity production (and thereby, back on topic, transportation), in the form of nuclear energy. The oil price would probably not have to rise too terribly high to cover the costs of decommissioning and to inspire some good methods for waste disposal and reuse, and I think that ultimately if it came between maintaining our quality of life and "I ain't having none of them nuklear bomb thingies", then most people would get along with it fairly well.
Now *I'm* the flaming optimist in the room. Also, I'm starting to be frightened by the depth of thought I've seen in these threads. Maybe if I find a web filter that blocks pages with the word 'copyright' in them, my urge to abandon Earth and create a new civilization on one of Jupiter's moons will pass.
I think you're a bit of an optimist, though, in saying that we will stop burning oil because of price in the next 30 years. We know from the reserve figures cited that from technical availibility (not dealing with political munge), the current average oil prices can be sustained for that thirty year period, and at that point prices will increase, creating reserves that we will then go through at that price level. Actually, all that takes place continually, but for convenience we can consider a stair step model.
In order for us to stop burning oil, though, there must be some alternative of lower cost that we can switch to -- otherwise we'll get all the way down to sending horizontal drilling gnomes to sponge up residual oil, still using it as a power source (or, alternatively, abandoning industrialization for lack of power), because there's no better alternative. I don't really see such an alternative source surfacing in the next 30 years, though, unless a giant breakthrough is made in finding cheap, dense energy.
With a car of substantially different design from the previous standard of burning something to make car go vroom, my concern would be that it would be hard to find a mechanic to service the thing, either at the time of purchase or later on, or that the design would turn out not to be viable for the long-term ownership scheme that I favor. Now, I haven't looked into this much, because I have no reason to change cars and many reasons not to, but the marketing I think is necessary to reassure people that if they go for this thing they won't wind up searching junkyards six years later for a replacement reverse frobjinator for a car that sank without trace two years after it was release, or wind up by the side of the road going "Now, it's positive to positive, negative to *fzzzt!*... er, I guess not on this car..."
Judging from your figures, I think you may have hit on the amount of reserves at current oil prices -- which is at about 40 years, I think. What will eventually happen is that (average) oil prices will creep up as the cost of recovery increases. Which is a problem, but not as bad a problem as a major energy source that underlies our economy up and going dry in 40 years.
Hopefully, too, it's a problem that leads to its own solution, as costs to produce other forms of energy should decrease with time and research, and higher oil prices will lead to more pressure to develop alternate sources.
In some ways, I think that we overestimate the scope of the energy problem, and in some ways I think we don't understand how deeply screwed we may be if we don't find some acceptable new primary energy source. For instance, I'm rather dubious about a lot of energy sources that casual environmentalists toss out as the solution to the world's energy problems. A lot of them sound really nifty keen, but would be an utter wreck to implement on a large enough scale to be a primary source of energy for industrialized nations.
If the code that they wrote is good and documented, then they would be good programmers. If they had X years of experience in the field, and passed a certification exam, and signed off that the code was good and that they took legal responsibility for it, then they would be engineers, in the context that the grandparent means.
Ethics has nothing to do with engineering.
Ethics have nothing to do with engineering? _Now_ you tell me -- that's two credit hours of my life that I won't get back! Some people may think that military aircraft shouldn't exist; those people probably do not design military aircraft. However, engineers also have documented ethical codes that they have to follow -- for example, not misleading people or concealing a danger to the public. If a PE is found to be in violation of those codes, they can lose their certification, just like a lawyer can be disbarred.
And corporate whore? Wouldn't that be more of a corporate john? Anyway, if McDonalds really doesn't care any more about me than whether I'm buying a hamburger or not (I'm crushed!), that's fine. It's not like I care about them on a deep, personal, non-provider-of-hamburgers level either.
Nevertheless, a person who is seeking a TV antenna in a covenant-controlled area would be well served by getting in contact with a ham (One who, unlike myself, has more than a couple of years experience basically being licensed and occasionally talking with the local club repeater. Not _on_ the repeater. _With_ the repeater. Living in a RF hole sucks sometimes.), as they often have to deal with this sort of thing and therefore have valuable information about how to either negotiate an equitable solution or sneak in a suitable antenna. "Oh, no. No antennas here. That is a perfectly ordinary flagpole/electric fence/modern sculpture/crank-up tower mounted in the bed of a pickup truck with a funny license plate. I am a perfectly ordinary and compliant member of this idyllic community, and I would never even consider having odd or unusual hobbies that might disturb the delicate sensibilies of my neighbors. Nothing to see here, move along."
And yeah, I fail to see the advantage of these communities.
"So what do I get for painting my house the Official Beige?"
"Well, you get to live in a neighborhood where everyone else paints their house Official Beige."
"Woo freaking hoo."
I think I'll take the plane as a neighbor, thanks much. I get to have my antenna farm, and he gets to rotate -- and if he doesn't like the antennas, he can rotate anyway!
You were successful at this? My impression was that the homeowners association rules couldn't be bypassed by PRB-1, because they're private contracts that you supposedly entered into of your own free will.