It would be more effective to pass legislation to end the local monopolies that are granted to service providers, and to force pipe owners to lease to competitors at reasonable market rates (or, frankly, to move the infrastructure into the public sector, as we've done with every other major utility).
If consumers were allowed real choice, we wouldn't need to worry about net neutrality legislation...This is the same as passing a law to make everyone drive the same car, and then another law to make them run the same speed on all grades of gasoline.
Agreed, but there are better ways to store it. Hydrogen requires as much or more than simpler generation methods. I mean, you could put up a tower with a big fricking weight on it, and use the excess energy to drive the weight to the top of the tower...And it could stay there forever, without costing any more energy.
Hydrogen on the other hand, slips out of every containment vessel, so the longer you have to store it, the less there is.
It's just more bullshit, frankly. My area is heavily black, and morally conservative. Put those together, and you get conservative democrats. He does have a few liberal things: he's mildly pro-environment, and votes for certain types of social programs.
The problem with hydropower is that, when you suck energy out of a hydro system, you cause all the suspended solids to precipitate to the bottom.
In other words: put in hydro, and all your shit fills up with dirt. I'll leave it to you to fill in the reasons why San Fransisco wouldn't want their harbor to silt up.
So what? Practical electrical transfer distance is greater than the width of the continental US, but our crappy, inefficient grid makes that sort of thing impossible.
If we fixed the grid, we'd save ourselves electricity all down the line.
That makes no sense. If your goal is to store energy that would otherwise be wasted, it's still in your best interest to choose the most effective method of doing that.
Hydrogen generation is only slightly better than just not bothering to store it at all.
The problem with hydrogen is entirely wrapped up in how hard it is to store, so it makes sense to bring it up whenever you talk about hydrogen.
Until you can come up with a vessel that can store hydrogen for a long period of time without it all escaping, there is no point in pushing hydrogen generation. There are a lot of other energy storage methods that are more efficient (compressed air, water, heat, batteries, etc).
For example, when dealing with liberals, there was no backfire effect when correcting the misconception that George Bush banned stem cell research (he in fact restricted it to a specific set of cell lines).
I assume you mean, "He only allowed federally funded research on certain lines."
You can hardly blame people for getting it wrong when no one bothers to actually say what he actually did. The only reason I know it is because I knew enough about the government to go, "Wait, what?" when the news started talking about him "banning research".
The thing that irritates me the most about the GOP is their attitude toward their OWN people. God forbid you don't do EXACTLY what everyone else does. People mock the dems for not being completely unified, but I think that's a good thing. I think the damn legislators ought to be out there using what brains they have, representing THEIR people.
The state where I live, it's absolutely the worst. The gop at the state level is extremely intolerant of other voices within the party, so if you have an opinion that differs from the majority, you hide it, or the state party will actively campaign against you in the primaries.
My local US rep is a dem...probably the most conservative dem in the entire house...and the republicans have run multi-million dollar campaigns against him for the last 3 election cycles. They can't even effectively campaign against him because he's a morally conservative, anti-tax hawk, so they have to field these whackjob wingnuts...It's ugly. They get crushed every election. And they're gearing up to fight him again, because he has a D after his name, and it drives them fucking MAD.
I once got charged with cheating in a lit class because I put a bunch of verbatim quotes from the book in as part of my argument...I guess they thought I was the least subtle cheater EVER.
I had to sit and quote shit at them for 10 minutes.
Yea, and it'll also reduce the incentive for people to squat and typo-squat domain names.
I'm frankly tired of all that crap: if ICANN wants to deal with the rampant squatting, I'll start supporting "address bar for addresses only" thinking. Until then, I'd rather google hijack me to a meaningful result than accidentally direct myself to some damn squatter site.
NO. Jesus, walk a little bit people. If you've got to get somewhere faster, ride a bike, take a cab, take the train, drive your car.
Putting moving sidewalks everywhere is about the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard. Forget the exercise argument: imagine the fricking maintenance costs!
Silly. Most developed countries have trouble keeping their population steady without extra immigration. Hell, Russia was running a government thing a few years back that if you had a kid that was conceived inside a specific set of months, you got a free washing machine, or something similar.
Unrelated, but it's silly to completely pay off your house. If you finance it at 4% interest and you invest that money in a long term CD, you'll be making 2% MORE than the interest on the home loan over the same period, and that doesn't even count the tax benefit.
They believe the tax is unfair, and they're compensating their employees who have to pay it.
Seems legit to me: not like there is a law that says everyone has to be paid the same if they do the same work...If I'm working next to a guy who's worked at the company for the same amount of time as me, who made a better deal when he got hired and now makes more than me, I should be able to sue? (I wish: I am a shitty negotiator)
You can be "secular married" by walking in front of a judge and signing a piece of paper. And indeed, if you're church married, after your church wedding you have to go to the courthouse to sign a legal marriage certificate.
But you can't do that if you're gay. The problem isn't even religion! Plenty of churches will gay marry a couple, so if all you want is the religious bit, you're fine. But if you want the legal status, you're fucked.
What gay people want is the right to visit their partners in the hospital, the right to deal with their estate, take care of their kids, all the shit that straight people get for free.
I'm not gay. Hell, I don't even have any gay friends who aren't total closet cases. But that this shit has managed to stay an issue for this long blows my fucking mind. It's pure discrimination, and it should not be fucking tolerated.
So it's more efficient to put up giant transmitters and blast out a signal that can be accessed clearly from the fricking moon, across a mindbogglingly wide swath of the spectrum, than it is to only send the data to the people who are requesting it?
Maybe efficient isn't the word you were looking for?
If you want to know if I voted in the last election, that information actually is publicly available. This is so that the public can see who voted, and tally that with the number of recorded votes.
But what I put on my ballot is not attached to my name, therefore not public.
By the same token, signing a petition to put a referendum up for a public vote ought to be public information, so that we can verify that a number of real people actually want this.
But the people who actually voted in favor of it is protected, like all voting.
In my mind this flap over the people who signed the petition is all horseshit. Getting the referendum on the ballot is meaningless...unless the majority of people think it's a good idea.
You need to win THEIR hearts, not the hearts of some minority who signed a petition. This is an attempt to shame people who asked a question, just because you didn't like the answer.
Eh. There is no magic bullet. You'd be surprised at how often people resist even obvious innovations. I just got my attic re-insulated, and I heard from every damn neighbor the same tired crap: "What, you don't have insulation? (I do, but it's old and only about 4 inches thick at this point)" "What, you cold?" (because insulation only keeps heat IN, apparently)
800 bucks worth of insulation, and my heating bill dropped 30%. Should pay for itself before fall.
Yep yep. Too many moving parts. You can drop a tape, and 999 times out of 1000 it'll be fine. Hard drives? Hell, it could die of vibration damage in transit!
Tapes are small, disposable, cheap, reliable. Hard drives are maybe 2 of those.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a lot free-er in Europe, which is probably why Europe has better (and cheaper) service.
The free market could solve our problems, but given that ISP's are granted local monopolies by the fricking government, there is no free market.
The solution is to actually CREATE a free market, and let fair competition solve the issue.
It would be more effective to pass legislation to end the local monopolies that are granted to service providers, and to force pipe owners to lease to competitors at reasonable market rates (or, frankly, to move the infrastructure into the public sector, as we've done with every other major utility).
If consumers were allowed real choice, we wouldn't need to worry about net neutrality legislation...This is the same as passing a law to make everyone drive the same car, and then another law to make them run the same speed on all grades of gasoline.
Agreed, but there are better ways to store it. Hydrogen requires as much or more than simpler generation methods. I mean, you could put up a tower with a big fricking weight on it, and use the excess energy to drive the weight to the top of the tower...And it could stay there forever, without costing any more energy.
Hydrogen on the other hand, slips out of every containment vessel, so the longer you have to store it, the less there is.
No, no I really do.
What's worse? Their individual stupidity, or their collective stupidity? A herd is almost always dumber than it's individual members.
It's just more bullshit, frankly. My area is heavily black, and morally conservative. Put those together, and you get conservative democrats. He does have a few liberal things: he's mildly pro-environment, and votes for certain types of social programs.
The problem with hydropower is that, when you suck energy out of a hydro system, you cause all the suspended solids to precipitate to the bottom.
In other words: put in hydro, and all your shit fills up with dirt. I'll leave it to you to fill in the reasons why San Fransisco wouldn't want their harbor to silt up.
So what? Practical electrical transfer distance is greater than the width of the continental US, but our crappy, inefficient grid makes that sort of thing impossible.
If we fixed the grid, we'd save ourselves electricity all down the line.
That makes no sense. If your goal is to store energy that would otherwise be wasted, it's still in your best interest to choose the most effective method of doing that.
Hydrogen generation is only slightly better than just not bothering to store it at all.
The problem with hydrogen is entirely wrapped up in how hard it is to store, so it makes sense to bring it up whenever you talk about hydrogen.
Until you can come up with a vessel that can store hydrogen for a long period of time without it all escaping, there is no point in pushing hydrogen generation. There are a lot of other energy storage methods that are more efficient (compressed air, water, heat, batteries, etc).
For example, when dealing with liberals, there was no backfire effect when correcting the misconception that George Bush banned stem cell research (he in fact restricted it to a specific set of cell lines).
I assume you mean, "He only allowed federally funded research on certain lines."
You can hardly blame people for getting it wrong when no one bothers to actually say what he actually did. The only reason I know it is because I knew enough about the government to go, "Wait, what?" when the news started talking about him "banning research".
The thing that irritates me the most about the GOP is their attitude toward their OWN people. God forbid you don't do EXACTLY what everyone else does. People mock the dems for not being completely unified, but I think that's a good thing. I think the damn legislators ought to be out there using what brains they have, representing THEIR people.
The state where I live, it's absolutely the worst. The gop at the state level is extremely intolerant of other voices within the party, so if you have an opinion that differs from the majority, you hide it, or the state party will actively campaign against you in the primaries.
My local US rep is a dem...probably the most conservative dem in the entire house...and the republicans have run multi-million dollar campaigns against him for the last 3 election cycles. They can't even effectively campaign against him because he's a morally conservative, anti-tax hawk, so they have to field these whackjob wingnuts...It's ugly. They get crushed every election. And they're gearing up to fight him again, because he has a D after his name, and it drives them fucking MAD.
I once got charged with cheating in a lit class because I put a bunch of verbatim quotes from the book in as part of my argument...I guess they thought I was the least subtle cheater EVER.
I had to sit and quote shit at them for 10 minutes.
We did that too. The only thing worse than an exam with a cheat sheet was an exam with a cheat sheet AND the book.
*Shudder*
Yea, and it'll also reduce the incentive for people to squat and typo-squat domain names.
I'm frankly tired of all that crap: if ICANN wants to deal with the rampant squatting, I'll start supporting "address bar for addresses only" thinking. Until then, I'd rather google hijack me to a meaningful result than accidentally direct myself to some damn squatter site.
NO. Jesus, walk a little bit people. If you've got to get somewhere faster, ride a bike, take a cab, take the train, drive your car.
Putting moving sidewalks everywhere is about the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard. Forget the exercise argument: imagine the fricking maintenance costs!
Silly. Most developed countries have trouble keeping their population steady without extra immigration. Hell, Russia was running a government thing a few years back that if you had a kid that was conceived inside a specific set of months, you got a free washing machine, or something similar.
Unrelated, but it's silly to completely pay off your house. If you finance it at 4% interest and you invest that money in a long term CD, you'll be making 2% MORE than the interest on the home loan over the same period, and that doesn't even count the tax benefit.
Use that money. Don't let it sit and rot.
They believe the tax is unfair, and they're compensating their employees who have to pay it.
Seems legit to me: not like there is a law that says everyone has to be paid the same if they do the same work...If I'm working next to a guy who's worked at the company for the same amount of time as me, who made a better deal when he got hired and now makes more than me, I should be able to sue? (I wish: I am a shitty negotiator)
The problem is, that's ALREADY the way it is!
You can be "secular married" by walking in front of a judge and signing a piece of paper. And indeed, if you're church married, after your church wedding you have to go to the courthouse to sign a legal marriage certificate.
But you can't do that if you're gay. The problem isn't even religion! Plenty of churches will gay marry a couple, so if all you want is the religious bit, you're fine. But if you want the legal status, you're fucked.
What gay people want is the right to visit their partners in the hospital, the right to deal with their estate, take care of their kids, all the shit that straight people get for free.
I'm not gay. Hell, I don't even have any gay friends who aren't total closet cases. But that this shit has managed to stay an issue for this long blows my fucking mind. It's pure discrimination, and it should not be fucking tolerated.
So it's more efficient to put up giant transmitters and blast out a signal that can be accessed clearly from the fricking moon, across a mindbogglingly wide swath of the spectrum, than it is to only send the data to the people who are requesting it?
Maybe efficient isn't the word you were looking for?
If you want to know if I voted in the last election, that information actually is publicly available. This is so that the public can see who voted, and tally that with the number of recorded votes.
But what I put on my ballot is not attached to my name, therefore not public.
By the same token, signing a petition to put a referendum up for a public vote ought to be public information, so that we can verify that a number of real people actually want this.
But the people who actually voted in favor of it is protected, like all voting.
In my mind this flap over the people who signed the petition is all horseshit. Getting the referendum on the ballot is meaningless...unless the majority of people think it's a good idea.
You need to win THEIR hearts, not the hearts of some minority who signed a petition. This is an attempt to shame people who asked a question, just because you didn't like the answer.
Damn that would suck...Buy your first legal beer, and then WHAM, needler to the back of the head.
Eh. There is no magic bullet. You'd be surprised at how often people resist even obvious innovations. I just got my attic re-insulated, and I heard from every damn neighbor the same tired crap: "What, you don't have insulation? (I do, but it's old and only about 4 inches thick at this point)" "What, you cold?" (because insulation only keeps heat IN, apparently)
800 bucks worth of insulation, and my heating bill dropped 30%. Should pay for itself before fall.
Yep yep. Too many moving parts. You can drop a tape, and 999 times out of 1000 it'll be fine. Hard drives? Hell, it could die of vibration damage in transit!
Tapes are small, disposable, cheap, reliable. Hard drives are maybe 2 of those.