GM's problem stems from the fact that they've had since the oil embargos in the 70's to improve their auto's milage. No intelligent person can argue successfully that GM's engines aren't a lot more efficient than they used to be. It's that they've wasted all of these efficiency gains on increasing horsepower to drive heavier cars more quickly.
GM's had 30 years to bring fuel efficiency & milage to the forefront of their goals. I have no sympathy for its demise.
I hope they put this toward something useful, rather than blow its time on SETI.
Even if we find life outside our solar system, the aftermath would not be worth-while. We would most likely not be able to communicate with them, and even if we could, we would have to perfect quantum mechanics and have teleportation working properly before communication is practical.
You use traffic fatalities per year and total astronaut deaths. Sure, the odds of dieing in a space craft are higher than on the road, but your numbers are significantly off.
Even within the US, there are many different types of voting. Let's have a little glimpse at how complex the voting procedure can be for electing a president. For the sake of simplicity, we will ignore the Independent "Party."
Beginning with the Caucuses, a voter has the opportunity to vote in either: A) The Democratic Caucus B) The GOP Caucus
In the Democratic Caucus, each candidate must have at least 15(?)% of the precinct's vote in order to get representation. If (s)he does not, then those votes are redistributed. In the GOP Caucus, there is no redistribution/re-voting, if a candidate initially gets 3% of the precinct's vote, then that is how much of the vote (s)he receives.
Voters choose which candidates they wish to represent each party, but can only participate in 1 caucus. Once the candidates are elected for the parties, then voters choose between which party (because there is only one candidate for each party.) At this point, voting becomes very simple. However, starting from the beginning, there are many ways one can vote.
Overview:
A - Winner amongst x-z x y z B - Winner amongst u-w u v w
Let's say someone has xPyPz, and uPvPw, where x is strictly preferred to y Because of transitivity, xPz and uPw Then let's include a comparison between the A's and B's. xPyPzPuPvPw
So voter i strictly prefers A to B.
Initially, one might conclude that because x is i's favorite candidate, that the voter would participate in A's caucus and give their vote to x. However, there may be an instance where i participates in B's caucus.
Let's say that the polls are showing that the overall population's preferences are uIvPyIzPxPw, where the population is indifferent between u&v,y&z, prefers u&v to y&z, x is the second least-liked outcome, and the population absolutely does not want w to win.
In this instance, it would be beneficial for voter i to participate in B's caucus and vote for w. If enough i's do this, then the the preference order for B will become: (1) w (2) u,v - u and v tie for second and lose the nomination.
This process, while hurting i in the sense that (s)he can not experience total satisfaction, is better off than voting for any candidate within pool A in round 1 (the Caucus round.)
This concept is called "Sophisticated Voting," and this is one demonstration of how the whole presidential election could be skewed. Add in people who strictly prefer B to A, and then this gets incredibly more complex.
The whole voting process (in general, not just the one used by the US), are actually very interesting. We only covered a few in one of my Economics courses, but it was interesting to read Economic journal articles and books about things like Arrow's Impossibility Theorem, Condorcet Procedures, and the like. I strongly recommend you all to take an Economics course that covers this type of material if given the opportunity, because I think it's far more interesting than the typical stuff covered in typical Micro and Macro courses.
1) CDs are overpriced. Here in Vancouver, CDs usually cost between $15.99 and $24.99. (Yes, you read that right. No, these are not special edition or imports.) If CDs sold for around $5, not as many people would bother illegally downloading music. It wouldn't be worth the trouble plus you can get the artwork, lyrics and something to physically "own". No, the problem is that Gen Y thinks that they have to have *everything* and have it *now.* They take the term "immediate gratification" and epitomize it. For the most part, Gen Y is unwilling to weigh priorities and deffer consumption but spends more than it should to be as happy as they can immediately. Unbeknown to them, it catches up to them, and rather quickly, as well. But they're standing around with their heads too far up their asses to realize this.
2) Most new popular music today is disposable and no one wants to pay for this crap. (Now get off my lawn.) I don't think this is unique to music today. Just look at all the crap that came out in the 90's. And in the 80's. We just forgot about it because we didn't want to remember it. There was a bunch of crap before, and for the most part, people didn't go out in droves to pay for it then. How many albums did Vanilla Ice have that went Platinum since Extremely Live? Somehow Cool As Ice went gold, but that rode off of To The Extreme's fame and people thinking that he could redeem his self from Extremely Live.
It'll never happen. Forget about the music industries, movie industries, and just think about how huge of an effect this would have. If this were to happen, then scholarly journals would lose a ton of their membership because many people could wait it out, and then they would hike subscription dues, which would lose even more people.
If this were a serious proposition, you could safely bet your left nut that Harvard would be sending out their best to fight against it, and they'd probably win.
1) Hot secretary sitting outside 2) Giant, twin mahogany doors 3) Giant windows overlooking the Boston Harbor or some other body of water 4) Balcony overlooking said body of water 5) At least 30 stories from the ground 6) Big desk 7) Comfortable leather chair 8) Hot secretary 9) Not-so-mini mini bar 10) Mini golf game 11) Phone with speaker-phone and an accessible mute button 12) HiFi stereo 13) Nice big-screen television 14) Only computer-related equipment is a laptop (no printer, this is why I have a hot secretary) 15) Hot secretary
Can we get the last 8 years of our lives back? How about the thousands of Americans that've died in combat, and the resulting 100,000+ innocent Iraqi's that've died as a consequence of this bastard?
This will drastically reduce the size of several of our common devices such as Bluetooth headsets, cell phones, iPods (and other MP3 players), digital cameras, etc. How small, exactly, are you and your hands? Or, perhaps a better question to ask is, how large is your battery with respect to your phone? I have a small phone (Nokia 3220). The phone's dimensions are 104 x 44 x 18.8 mm, and the battery is maybe 1/8 of its size, if that large. My broken phone (Sony Ericsson T630i), is 102 x 43 x 17 mm. Granted, this phone's battery was proportionally larger than the one in my Nokia, but still, I couldn't imagine the thing much smaller. The only way you could shrink it is on the Z dimension, perhaps from 17mm down to 15. But you still need something to hold on to.
Myself, I don't believe I could, let alone want to, regularly handle a phone that is much smaller than my 3220. And I can't imagine the public accepting a Zoolander phone
But the whole argument with ribbons is the same as QWERTY v DVORAK. If we all abanonded QWERTY, imagine the hell that would follow, even though DVORAK is more efficient.
Just because there's a status quo doesn't mean that it's efficient, let alone the most efficient system possible. What Microsoft, as well as many other groups, like GNOME and Apple, are doing is trying to find something more efficient than what is out there now. I think it's a great movement. All of the fogies out there, you can stick with Lotus Notes and DOS for all I care. What I'm looking for is some form of progression.
Come on, after working with Office 2007 for the past four months, I have grown very accustomed to it. I still have 2003 at home, but 2007 isn't bad. In fact, I find that I'm able to mix the different components much better than in 2003.
But then again, maybe that's because I'm more adaptable. The people at PC World appear to be fogies, with their complaint about Office 2007 being the ribbon. They're probably the same kind of people who needed a seminar in order to figure out what all those little buttons across the top 10% of the screen are supposed to do in Office 2003, and had no clue that they also were in the menus until a second seminar.
You're joking, right? When on Windows, I use Outlook. When on Linux, I use Evolution. I'd rather have my calendaring/address book/email client both archive information locally and access servers via a protocol like IMAP than rely soley on an online service which relies predominately on advertising revenues that are derived from scanning my documents. I can't count how many times my internet connection's been down in the past 4 months, but I've nearly always been able to retrieve what I've needed because my clients store information locally. Plus, I don't have to worry about anyone making money off of what I consider private, not public.
And apparently this is one of the issues that the Market cannot solve before it's too late. I wonder, if this legislature were passed 10 years ago, how fewer Ford F-150's and F-250's would people see outside of the countryside and how many more Ford Rangers? There's no practical purpose for 99% of city and suburban pickup drivers to be driving anything more powerful than a Ford Ranger. Hell, my grandpa was a farmer his whole life and drove Ford Rangers instead of F-150's or F-250's, and he managed just fine.
On a side-note:
Does this give any increase in the probability of Citroen selling cars in the US in the next 10 years? Because I'd love to have a C5 or a C6
When was the last time we launched something with an intended lifespan of 30+ years? I can't recall (not to say that there *aren't*) any projects in the past 10-20 years. Granted, Spirit may end up running for a total of 30 years, but it's been running unexpectedly for a while already, and had no intentions of running for 1 year, let alone 30.
Is there any way to get the US public behind a long-term investment like the Voyagers again?
Like possibly Model 101 or T-1000? The damn thing just won't die! And when it goes down, and just when you think it might, *just might* be dead for good this time, it comes back alive! Let's keep those things on Mars, and be sure as hell they never make their way back to Earth!
For what you're going to be teaching your students, there are plenty of good coding programs to use. Sure, you can use Dreamweaver's WYSIWYG, but that results in horrible coding and a big question mark of what's under the hood.
As for Photoshop and Flash, can't you get a discounted Photoshop by getting CS1 or CS2? But I wouldn't even get CS#, because that would be a huge waste of money. Just get Elements and your students will be able to do all that you expect of them for a highschool class and a hell of a lot less expensive.
So, recommendations: Drop dreamweaver, and select Photoshop and Flash CS2.
I remember plenty of fun, academic games that I used to play.
Number Munchers, Super Number Munchers, Donald Duck's Playground, Oregon Trail, Oregon Trial 2, anything involving Sesame Street.
Of course, it's easier to make educational games for children. Part of the reason is that even if they don't know how to play the game as it was intended, they'll play it a different way. I suppose this is also mimicked by adults with Grand Theft Auto, but then again, adults aren't learning much other than the various ways of killing prostitutes.
I mean, it's not like Germany isn't devoid of really good phones already. Hell, I can't imagine them waiting much longer than the Finns for a new Nokia, or the Swedes waiting for a new Sony-Ericsson. What does the US have? That's right, Motorola. And I believe that's why the iPhone is so huge in the 'States.
Slashdot Mirror
GM's problem stems from the fact that they've had since the oil embargos in the 70's to improve their auto's milage. No intelligent person can argue successfully that GM's engines aren't a lot more efficient than they used to be. It's that they've wasted all of these efficiency gains on increasing horsepower to drive heavier cars more quickly.
GM's had 30 years to bring fuel efficiency & milage to the forefront of their goals. I have no sympathy for its demise.
I hope they put this toward something useful, rather than blow its time on SETI.
Even if we find life outside our solar system, the aftermath would not be worth-while. We would most likely not be able to communicate with them, and even if we could, we would have to perfect quantum mechanics and have teleportation working properly before communication is practical.
You use traffic fatalities per year and total astronaut deaths. Sure, the odds of dieing in a space craft are higher than on the road, but your numbers are significantly off.
is that it's getting incredibly expensive as well.
Even within the US, there are many different types of voting. Let's have a little glimpse at how complex the voting procedure can be for electing a president. For the sake of simplicity, we will ignore the Independent "Party."
Beginning with the Caucuses, a voter has the opportunity to vote in either:
A) The Democratic Caucus
B) The GOP Caucus
In the Democratic Caucus, each candidate must have at least 15(?)% of the precinct's vote in order to get representation. If (s)he does not, then those votes are redistributed.
In the GOP Caucus, there is no redistribution/re-voting, if a candidate initially gets 3% of the precinct's vote, then that is how much of the vote (s)he receives.
Voters choose which candidates they wish to represent each party, but can only participate in 1 caucus. Once the candidates are elected for the parties, then voters choose between which party (because there is only one candidate for each party.) At this point, voting becomes very simple. However, starting from the beginning, there are many ways one can vote.
Overview:
A - Winner amongst x-z
x
y
z
B - Winner amongst u-w
u
v
w
Let's say someone has xPyPz, and uPvPw, where x is strictly preferred to y
Because of transitivity, xPz and uPw
Then let's include a comparison between the A's and B's.
xPyPzPuPvPw
So voter i strictly prefers A to B.
Initially, one might conclude that because x is i's favorite candidate, that the voter would participate in A's caucus and give their vote to x. However, there may be an instance where i participates in B's caucus.
Let's say that the polls are showing that the overall population's preferences are uIvPyIzPxPw, where the population is indifferent between u&v,y&z, prefers u&v to y&z, x is the second least-liked outcome, and the population absolutely does not want w to win.
In this instance, it would be beneficial for voter i to participate in B's caucus and vote for w. If enough i's do this, then the the preference order for B will become:
(1) w
(2) u,v - u and v tie for second and lose the nomination.
This process, while hurting i in the sense that (s)he can not experience total satisfaction, is better off than voting for any candidate within pool A in round 1 (the Caucus round.)
This concept is called "Sophisticated Voting," and this is one demonstration of how the whole presidential election could be skewed. Add in people who strictly prefer B to A, and then this gets incredibly more complex.
The whole voting process (in general, not just the one used by the US), are actually very interesting. We only covered a few in one of my Economics courses, but it was interesting to read Economic journal articles and books about things like Arrow's Impossibility Theorem, Condorcet Procedures, and the like. I strongly recommend you all to take an Economics course that covers this type of material if given the opportunity, because I think it's far more interesting than the typical stuff covered in typical Micro and Macro courses.
It'll never happen. Forget about the music industries, movie industries, and just think about how huge of an effect this would have. If this were to happen, then scholarly journals would lose a ton of their membership because many people could wait it out, and then they would hike subscription dues, which would lose even more people.
If this were a serious proposition, you could safely bet your left nut that Harvard would be sending out their best to fight against it, and they'd probably win.
1) Hot secretary sitting outside
2) Giant, twin mahogany doors
3) Giant windows overlooking the Boston Harbor or some other body of water
4) Balcony overlooking said body of water
5) At least 30 stories from the ground
6) Big desk
7) Comfortable leather chair
8) Hot secretary
9) Not-so-mini mini bar
10) Mini golf game
11) Phone with speaker-phone and an accessible mute button
12) HiFi stereo
13) Nice big-screen television
14) Only computer-related equipment is a laptop (no printer, this is why I have a hot secretary)
15) Hot secretary
Can we get the last 8 years of our lives back? How about the thousands of Americans that've died in combat, and the resulting 100,000+ innocent Iraqi's that've died as a consequence of this bastard?
To withstand a /.'ing?
Only one way to find out....
Hell's Angles
Myself, I don't believe I could, let alone want to, regularly handle a phone that is much smaller than my 3220. And I can't imagine the public accepting a Zoolander phone
But the whole argument with ribbons is the same as QWERTY v DVORAK. If we all abanonded QWERTY, imagine the hell that would follow, even though DVORAK is more efficient.
Just because there's a status quo doesn't mean that it's efficient, let alone the most efficient system possible. What Microsoft, as well as many other groups, like GNOME and Apple, are doing is trying to find something more efficient than what is out there now. I think it's a great movement. All of the fogies out there, you can stick with Lotus Notes and DOS for all I care. What I'm looking for is some form of progression.
Come on, after working with Office 2007 for the past four months, I have grown very accustomed to it. I still have 2003 at home, but 2007 isn't bad. In fact, I find that I'm able to mix the different components much better than in 2003.
But then again, maybe that's because I'm more adaptable. The people at PC World appear to be fogies, with their complaint about Office 2007 being the ribbon. They're probably the same kind of people who needed a seminar in order to figure out what all those little buttons across the top 10% of the screen are supposed to do in Office 2003, and had no clue that they also were in the menus until a second seminar.
Soo, the NSA has unlimited lives?
You're joking, right? When on Windows, I use Outlook. When on Linux, I use Evolution. I'd rather have my calendaring/address book/email client both archive information locally and access servers via a protocol like IMAP than rely soley on an online service which relies predominately on advertising revenues that are derived from scanning my documents. I can't count how many times my internet connection's been down in the past 4 months, but I've nearly always been able to retrieve what I've needed because my clients store information locally. Plus, I don't have to worry about anyone making money off of what I consider private, not public.
Because it was truly an upgrade from Win98SE (and especially ME)?
And apparently this is one of the issues that the Market cannot solve before it's too late. I wonder, if this legislature were passed 10 years ago, how fewer Ford F-150's and F-250's would people see outside of the countryside and how many more Ford Rangers? There's no practical purpose for 99% of city and suburban pickup drivers to be driving anything more powerful than a Ford Ranger. Hell, my grandpa was a farmer his whole life and drove Ford Rangers instead of F-150's or F-250's, and he managed just fine.
On a side-note:
Does this give any increase in the probability of Citroen selling cars in the US in the next 10 years? Because I'd love to have a C5 or a C6
When was the last time we launched something with an intended lifespan of 30+ years? I can't recall (not to say that there *aren't*) any projects in the past 10-20 years. Granted, Spirit may end up running for a total of 30 years, but it's been running unexpectedly for a while already, and had no intentions of running for 1 year, let alone 30.
Is there any way to get the US public behind a long-term investment like the Voyagers again?
Like possibly Model 101 or T-1000? The damn thing just won't die! And when it goes down, and just when you think it might, *just might* be dead for good this time, it comes back alive! Let's keep those things on Mars, and be sure as hell they never make their way back to Earth!
There was a game of "Monopoly" in London a while back that did this. I believe it's called Monopoly Live
Honestly, people still use Dreamweaver?
For what you're going to be teaching your students, there are plenty of good coding programs to use. Sure, you can use Dreamweaver's WYSIWYG, but that results in horrible coding and a big question mark of what's under the hood.
As for Photoshop and Flash, can't you get a discounted Photoshop by getting CS1 or CS2? But I wouldn't even get CS#, because that would be a huge waste of money. Just get Elements and your students will be able to do all that you expect of them for a highschool class and a hell of a lot less expensive.
So, recommendations: Drop dreamweaver, and select Photoshop and Flash CS2.
I remember plenty of fun, academic games that I used to play.
Number Munchers, Super Number Munchers, Donald Duck's Playground, Oregon Trail, Oregon Trial 2, anything involving Sesame Street.
Of course, it's easier to make educational games for children. Part of the reason is that even if they don't know how to play the game as it was intended, they'll play it a different way. I suppose this is also mimicked by adults with Grand Theft Auto, but then again, adults aren't learning much other than the various ways of killing prostitutes.
I mean, it's not like Germany isn't devoid of really good phones already. Hell, I can't imagine them waiting much longer than the Finns for a new Nokia, or the Swedes waiting for a new Sony-Ericsson. What does the US have? That's right, Motorola. And I believe that's why the iPhone is so huge in the 'States.
so when can I run it on Windows?