The media steered clear of the overturned million dollar verdict. Most appeals where the original outlandish settlement is overturned is never talked about in the media.
I don't think a million was outlandish at all. The only thing corporations understand is money. That was well demonstrated by the fact they had been previously cited for dangerous too-hot coffee and had ignored the citations.
Even a million dollars was not enough in my opinion because in the end it was the bad PR that made McDonalds fix the problem, not the judgement itself. We should be able to use the courts to get corporations to change their bad ways and not have to rely on the randomness of bad press.
so one can reasonably expect it to be served at any temperature up to boiling. Simple physics limits the maximum temperature. McDonald's is not, and cannot be, at fault for serving "too hot" coffee, regardless of the serving temperature others use. The OP burned themselves.
This concept is oh so wrong. Coffee can indeed be too hot. All it has to be is signifcantly hotter than would normally be expected. Serving coffee at 200 degrees rather than the 160 degrees all other restaurants serve it is really a trap for the consumer.
To illustrate, everyone expects brakes on cars to work about the same. similar pedal pressure stops the cars in a similar distance. Suppose one car maker decided to adjust the brakes on its cars so they take twice as long to stop and then they don't tell anyone. The cars will still stop just as fast if you press the brakes hard enough, but still people get injured. After a few hundred rear-enders they get sued, and rightly so. There are norms for many things, and when a company violates those norms and as a result injures people, they are liable. It makes no difference whether the brakes don;t stop you as fast as standard brakes or the coffee is hotter than standard coffee, the company is liable and NOT the consumer.
During this time I saw the local McDonalds put improvised lids on their self-serve coffee pots to make it even hotter than the hotplate would make it. This made the coffee so hot it was dangerous. You had to be careful not to let the steam burn your fingers as you took the plastic lid off the pot to pour it. I knew the coffee was really hot because I poured mine, but the people in the dive-thru getting coffee handed to them had no idea how absurdly hot it was.
If the reviewers have played a final build of the game, what's the BFD?
Reviewers, reschmooers. Here is the best (but old) example I can give about the value of reviews. The film The Sound of Music was blasted by reviewers as a terrible movie. It went on to be nominated for ten academy awards, and won five. It became one fo the top box office winners of all time.
So the reviewers think King Kong is Best Game? Maybe so, but the generally poor quality of reviewers is what the BFD is about giving out the award before the game is released. Frankly, I smell marketing crap.
No one's buying an xbox 360 anyway...The original has been out for 4 years and there are still only two exclusives that I would play on it and one port that I would play over the PS2 or GC versions...
Now I know you may find this hard to comprehend, but YOU are not EVERYONE.
Whether it's justifiable to curtail freedom for the purpose of safety isn't even the right argument, though, because that's not what they're doing. They're curtailing freedom for the appearance of safety, dedicating their time and money (or rather, your money if you live or work here) towards measures that are highly visible, highly intrusive -- and fundamentally useless.
exactly right. The next logical question is WHY are we being given the appearance of safety over actual safety? There are two reasons:
1) Politics. The administration needs to appear to be strong to satisfy their political goals and the easiest way to do that is to be seen confiscating dangerous terrorist tools at airports such as nail files and toenail clippers. Long lines give the illusion of security.
2) Incompetence. It is much easier to give the illusion of security than to provide real security. When the people in charge of security are incompetent political hacks, illusion is the best they can do. One perfect example of security incompetence is diverting vauable resources to minutely screen people with one-way tickets when no terrorist would ever use one. In fact, this incompetent fixation wth one-way tickets *decreases* security since it is almost a certainty that any future terrorists will have round-trip tickets.
Yeah, they meant those statements to be so "absolute". I wonder what thought about military conscription (depravation of liberty) during the revolutionary war (a war that protected and defended liberty and freedom)
hmmm???
Before that smarmy overly smug "hmmm???" you were just ill-informed - afterwards you became an ill-informed know it all.
There was no conscription during the Revolutionary War. Continental Army soldiers were paid volunteers. The military paid cash bonuses to entice people to enlist. Late in the war state militias were federalized, but those soldiers, too, were paid volunteers and no one was forced to join the militias.
So... security isn't a good cause? And... we should just blindly assume that no sacrifice of personal convenience or liberty for securit would ever be necessary or wise?
No, the point is that not EVERY sacrifice of personal convenience or liberty for security reasons is necessary or wise.
I plan to move to another US state soon. If I buy a two way ticket to save myself from an anal probe, can I get a refund for the unused return trip? Is train security less intrusive?
You can get a refund for a return fare in theory, but it won;t be half the ticket cost. The airline will deduct a ticket change fee, make the ticket price the full-fare, one-way, last minute fare and you will get almost nothing back. You might even owe them money because one-way fares are often absurdly expensive. It may be cheaper to buy an on-sale round trip ticket well in advance and simply throw the return ticket away.
FYI the airlines say not using part of your ticket is illegal, but I think they are full of it. To be on the safe side don't tell the airline people you aren't going to use all the ticket segments.
The idea that corporations are sick, twisted, self-serving entities is as absurd as the idea that they are caring, giving entities. There are only people. Everything else if fiction.
One person's fiction is another person's truth I guess. I disagree that corporations are as good as the people who work in them. There is some sort of herd mentality that goes on in corporatons where good people turn into corpororate monsters. That herd mentality extends from the executive suite to the loading docks. I have seen time and again people do things in a corporate environment that they would never do as indviduals. Lieing, stealing, backstabbing, exposing people to hazardous materials and worse - ostensibly all for the good of the company - are common everyday behaviors in the corporate world, and most of the people wouldn't think of doing the same to their neighbors. Corporations are universally much worse than the individuals in them.
So you think the corporaton you invest in is good and wise because they say so? Think about it - have you ever heard ANY company, from Enron to Hooker Chemical to Wal-Mart say they are anything but great, wonderful, philanthropic pillars of benevolence and honesty?
You don't want more effort in data interpretation - you want it organized in a way that you find more useful. I interpreted it according to my stated objective, which was NOT to compare similar cars (although I allowed someone to do that). My goal was to layout the CHEAPEST option, for which I chose to compare the hybrid to the economy car. I'm glad someone finally admitted the math is correct. If you can now realize the conclusion is stating the hybrid has a long ways to go to be the CHEAPEST option, then I think we'll see eye to eye.
I have to wonder why you bothered. The hypothesis you *appeared* to address in the article (and it would have been a very interesting one) was that the expense of the hybrid systems in hybrid cars cost more than they saved. In fact, and to my surprise, your real hypothesis appears to be that cheap cars are cheaper to own than expensive cars. You just happened to pick hybrid cars as examples of expensive cars. No news there! What a waste of all that data.
But I have to admit that you did prove what you set out to prove: cheap cars are cheaper than expensive cars, even when the expensive cars are hybrids. Sheesh. I can't beleive I wasted my time on this.
Slashdot is great, but you guys don't know the definition of "wrong." The point of the article was to compare the hybrid and see if its higher price could be compensated for with its fuel efficiency. The answer is no - as shown in the article. I mentioned many other factors for consideration, including value retention, tax breaks and many others, but they do not prove my calculations wrong. The numbers you provided are dubious and unsupported. How can you expect anyone to take them seriously? Empty claims don't get anyone anywhere.
You're the author? Great, I'm glad to be able to address you directly. Your article was very informative and had lots of great information. I was always unsure if a hybrid was worth the extra price or not, and your data convinced me that it was, all other things being equal. You did all my hard work for me, thanks. However, you somehow came to the conclusion that the hybrid is NOT economically advantageous, when your data clearly indicates that it is.
I mentioned many other factors for consideration, including value retention, tax breaks and many others, but they do not prove my calculations wrong.
Yes, you *mentioned* them, but you did not include them in your calculations. Even though the math you did had no mistakesm it simply does not support your conclusions. I'll leave it up to the semanticists as to whether or not that is a math error.
The numbers you provided are dubious and unsupported. That's odd because they are your data. What you called negative savings in Table 9 I simply called Cost of Ownership (COO). Seemed more intuitive.
Until something big changes, though, the industry-high efficiency can't economically offset the steep sticker price
Your data actually indicates the opposite, that the cost of ownership for the Insight is $40 -$50 less per month than for the comparable Accord - if you include value retention. I don't see how you can justify your conclusion that the sticker price of the Insight is not offset, since it is cheaper to operate an Insight than an Accord despite its higher initial price. At the end of 60 months the Insight owner has $2-3,000 more in his pocket than the Accord owner (again using your data). What I think you may have been saying was that the GAS SAVINGS alone does not offset the additional cost, and you would be right, but that is a strange parameter to use rather than total cost of ownership. You could just as easily have said that the cost of the savings on hybrid brake pads did not justify the higher price. We all agree that would be silly and wrong, but it is just as wrong to use only gas savings to show that the higher initial price is unjustified economically. The only directly applicable metric is total Cost of Ownership, not gas cost.
Table 9 has some problems. You divided the cars up in three categories: Hybrids, Better than Hybrids, and Worse than Hybrids. Unfortunately you used 'negative savings' (aka Cost of Ownership, or COO) to rank them. The problem with doing this is that the purchase price of the autos are included in the the COO and in most of your examples the cost of the vehicle has little relationship to it being a hybrid. One simply cannot compare the $47,000 Lexus hybrid SUV with a $13,000 gas Geo because only a small, unknown part of the Lexus' higher price is due to its hybrid technology. This confounding factor means it is simply not possible to make any meaningful conclusions about the value of a Hybrid $47,000 SUV vs a gas $13,000 econobox. What you should have done was compare similar cars - for example a Ford Escape hybrid and Ford Escape gas version, or a Lexus hybrid SUV and a Lexus gas SUV, or even as I did, a Honda Insight and Honda Accord.
I don;t want you to think I am flaming you, the article was interesting for the copious data you compiled. However, I wish you had put a bit more effort into data interpretation.
Your ideas for further research are nice, but they don't make the math included in the article wrong. The article specifically states (footnote 21) that only comparison only covers the life of the loan. Within the stated scope, the math is correct.
I don't know about the math being wrong, but the methodology and conclusions certainly are. Here is his conclusion:
Gas-electric hybrids are the most fuel-efficient passenger cars on the road and ecologically there isn't a more viable option. Until something big changes, though, the industry-high efficiency can't economically offset the steep sticker price.
That's incorrect even using his own data. What he did not do is factor in the 75% resale value of, for example, the Honda Inight vs the 56% resale value of the Accord. These two cars are in the same automotive niche except for their power systems. When resale value is included the Insight costs approximately $50 PER MONTH LESS TO OPERATE over the 60 month period in question than the Accord. That is a whopping $3,000 savings over 60 months for the Insight even including its $2,000 cost premium over the Accord. This $3,000 savings doesn't even include the Federal tax rebates that would be several hundred dollars, improving the economic advantage of buying an Insight even further.
Why Table 9 would be included, ostensibly indicating that the Insight is more exensive to operate than an Accord for example, but not including tax breaks or resale values I don't know. I suspect he had a hypothesis to "prove" and he selectively used the data to do it.
So yes, it is safe to say that the math and the logic he used to come up with his conclusion that hybrids are not cost-effective for the buyer were wrong.
Don't try to hand me that sarcasm. The creditors are corporatoins, but surprise...the corporations can declare bankruptcy just as easily as ever, and they are doing it more and more frequently, mainly to rid themselves of employees, unions, pensions and retirement plans. You will never get me gooey-eyed about the poor, poor corporations that need that money. They just declare bankruptcy, come back with the same name and the same management, and the CEOs never even miss a million dollar paycheck. If it's good enough for the corporations to violate their promises to pay I think it's ok for individuals to do the same to them.
There IS a reason they are held in Cuba and NOT in the US. We explicitly do not want to give these thugs Constitutional rights as they do not deserve it.
I guess you better go give a lecture to the Supreme Court then, because that's not what they say. Since the founding of this country US military bases in foreign lands, embassies, etc. have been considered US territory, where the laws of the United States apply. This sort of convoluted self-serving hyper-technical arguement, something a three year old could see through, is typical of the Bush administration.
We explicitly do not want to give these thugs Constitutional rights as they do not deserve it.
Maybe, maybe not, but America deserves better. Besides, if they are guilty what do we have to fear from putting them in front of a judge and jury?
Oh, I will address one of your other points. Pebble bed reactors have virtually no issues with reactor vessels, since they physically can't melt down.
I'm sure you will correct me if I am wrong, but I do not believe there are any pebble bed power-gen plants in the US. One might as well say fusion power plants will have no containment vessels therefore nuclear energy is safe.
The error in the construction of the containment vessel at TMI was not the only error that saved us from a major disaster. I won't go into details, but the nuclear air-cleaning system was also installed wrong. When the operators tried to open a backup air cleaning system to prevent a fire in the main carbon bed (caused by radioactive decay from radioactive particles trapped there) they were really closing it off. The only thing that saved them was that the consturction crew had installed the diverter valve 45 degrees off so it wouldn't close all the way. Enough air was ACCIDENTALLY diverted to the auxilliary system do allow the main bed to cool.
That is exactly the kind of thing that tells me power companies don't have the will or ability to safely run these reactors. Until power company managemet is held accountable with prison terms for willful violations of correct procedure they will cut corners with safety. They know they will never serve a day in jail no matter how much they screw up, nor will they ever be held financially liable.
Basically, you just wait until everyone gets tired of it, then you knock down their pieces with yours. Some helpful hints: 1. Take as long as possible deciding troop placement, using obscure algorithms 2. To decide where to attack, make a large probability diagram with all possible outcomes 3. Roll all dice one at a time, saying a short prayer over each one of them. In Elvish, if possible
Hmmmm... Sounds like this would have been great advice for Rummy.
They aren't 'silly statistics', or irrelevant. The grandparent was pointing out that the "doomsday" scenario often touted by the antinukers is "the spacecraft will burn up and plutonium dust will be dispersed over a huge area!". His post directly addressed that scenario and showed it to be...silly. Nice job.
You are unfairly adjusting the arguement to be more favorable to you. The original parent never said the above, he stated that radioactive materials from a failed launch could be hazardous. I think that's true. You falsely attributed the above extreme statement to him, but in fact your quote is your interpretation of what some unnamed "antinukers" might have said.
However, the parent's statitics *are* silly. To say that the radioactive hazard from a failed launch of a nuclear reactor would be unimportant because uranium is emitted by coal-fired power plants is silly for many reasons, one of which is that the uranium emitted by coal-fred plants is not reactor-grade and the uranium in a reactor is...well, reactor grade. Or the fissionble material may even be plutonium.
What he is pointing out is that a) burning coal has some nasty and not well known side effects and b) dispersing even quite large amounts of "deadly nuclear material" into the atmosphere pales by comparision
The first part is certainly true, and I do not argue with that part of his post. It is a good point and coal-fired power plants are the dirtiest of the dirty (no matter the PR spin of the "new clean coal") However in part b you are once again changing the original arguement to make it easier for you to rebutt. Original parent said nothng about distrbuting the reactor's uranium or plutonium into the atmosphere and neither did I. YOU said that.
I said nothing against nuclear power - you put those words into my mouth. However, now that you mention it...
As bad as coal is, when you have a major accident at a coal-fired plant you just have a fire or explosion and maybe a few people killed, but when it is at a nuclear reactor you have trouble of a whole other magnitude.
I was an industrial safety and health professional for many years in the chemical and pharmaceutical industries, so I know exactly how far companies will go to save a dollar. While in theory nuclear power is cleaner than coal and is better for the environmet in the short term, in reality the operators of these plants will never take safety seriously. Oh sure, they mouth the words, but when it comes time to wring a few more dollars out of a reactor by cutting staff or maintenance they will do it. When the stock price is down and the CEO is risking his million dollar bonus as a result they will forget about expensive preventative maintenance and monitoring.
Every major nuclear power plant release has been the result of human error, either in the design, construction, operation or maintenance of the plants. Do you know that the containment vessel at Three Mile Island was not breached by the super-heated core simply because it was incorrectly constructed? Large voids had been left in its concrete walls by an incompetent (or cheap) contractor. Those voids unexpectedly slowed the erosion of the vessel walls enough for the operators to regain control. Don't you think it scary that had the containmet vessel been built to spec with solid concrete there would have been a containment breach with core meltdown? Do I trust nuclear power - sure I do, but I do NOT trust the power companies who want to run them on the cheap nor the construction companies that build them on the cheap.
Just a simple high power rifle with a scope, and you could pick off these pirates when they're coming in their dinky open boats way before they get into range to shoot anywhere near accurately. Hell, given a machine gun,...
Well as someone else pointed out shooting from a moving platform is easier said than done, PLUS you would be shooting at a small boat that was even more mobile than your shooting platform.
Secondly, what is to say that there is only one boat? The attacks described in the weekly piracy metioned a "mothership" that had the ability to launch multiple small attack boats. Even with a machine gun you might very well be unable to deter multiple simultaneous attacks from multiple directions. Of course there is nothing to prevent the pirates from having machine guns in each boat. I could easily see the situation getting pretty desperate pretty quickly even with a machine gun for defense.
Everything seems real easy to solve sitting at home in an armchair, and people always make the assumption that terrorists and pirates are not too bright and are easily deterred, but that is not always correct. Remember, when the US was in Mogadishu we had machine guns, snipers, and attack helicopters and we STILL got our butts kicked. Don't underestimate your opponent.
As I write this it occurs to me that these pirates could effectively neutralize a defensive machine gun or rifle by simply putting some women and children on the bows of their attack boats.
That's jsut it, vertical turbines can never be as efficient as horizontal (propeller style). There's a reason airplanes use horizontal propellers; they are more efficient.
There is a logic flaw in your arguement. You are incorrectly assuming that the operational parameters are always optimal for both propellers and vert. turbines, but that skews the arguement in your favor. How efficient is a propeller if it is broken by high winds or is disengaged at wind speeds where the vert. turbine can still operate? If it isn't running it has zero efficiency.
We do know that since the vert. turbine will operate at all winds speeds acceptable for the propeller, but the propeller will not operate at the 50-70 mph speeds acceptable for the vert. turbine there are times when the vert. turbine will be infinitely more efficient than the propeller generator.
What is really important, however, is efficiency over time. If a gust of 70 mph wind breaks the propeller generator and it is down for six months for repairs the vert. turbine that was not damaged will win hands down for efficiency of power production.
I recall seeing stats to the effect that we put 25 *tons* of bomb grade Uranium into the air each year from coal combustion. Suddenly a few pounds of heavily shielded Uranium on a Space-X Falcon doesn't seem all that serious.
It would be pretty goddamned serious if it was spread out in my yard or in my neighborhood or in my city. It is all about concentration. I get very tired of people trying to use silly statitics like this to rationalize how hazardous materials are really harmless. By your logic because power plants put millions of tons of carbon monoxide into the air every year it is somehow proved that fraction of a pound of it in the air of my garage isn't going to kill me dead?
I still don't think that this is going to change anything for TiVo (good or bad)
In a sense you are right from a services point of view, but the most interesting part of the article comes at the very end where it says that payments between Yahoo and Tivo will largely be made in promotional trades. This is exactly what Tivo needs. Their profits have never been large enough to do any real large scale advertising or promotions since they started their business. This will give them a lot of much needed exposure to a demographic (non technology-fearing Yahoo visitors) most likely to buy Tivo but who have never really known what it was about. I think this is a very good move for Tivo.
What????? People drink frothy carbonated water all the time and they don't drop dead. It's slightly acidic if anything. It's not this uber chemical of doom.
Not so "slightly". In an industial environment it is illegal to pour any liquid down a drain that has the pH of a carbonated beverage. Pouring your Coke down the drain at home may not be much of a problem, but putting thousands of gallons into the river would be. And we are talking about the prospect of putting billions of tons of acidic liquid in deepwater CO2 storage each year. I think this is a really stupid idea.
You'd notice the improvement if you saw something twice as detailed, particularly if you saw it side-by-side. I'm reading this page on a 1800x1440 monitor. It's substantially better than the 1600x1200 that I was using. I want much more,
I don't think you would see the difference. In traditional photography there is a term called the "circle of confusion" that describes the resolving power of the human eye. All the resoultion in the world, if it is beyond the circle of confusion, will not be perceived by the human eye as more detailed.
In fact i think there may be too much resolution these days in any event. I still remember seeing Matrix III at an IMAX theater in NYC and having to look away during the close-ups of Lawrence Fishburne's face.
Even on my HDTV at home it is pretty clear that HD can be used very badly by photographers, particularly when they show close-ups of faces. Videographers have been trained on SD camera techniques and often get way too close when they film in HD. Personally I'm not interested in seeing pimples, nose hairs and spittle. I keep waiting for software to be developed to automatically de-rez faces while keeping the backgrounds sharp, or for the directors to wise up and use the new technology better by opening up the traditional in-your-face close-up.
And doggone it, while I'm on a roll about poor videography, why can't news photographers figure out that all news stations cover up the bottom 25% of the screen with scrolls and other crap? Can't they figure out that they have to put the important parts of their images in the top 2/3 of the frame?
Slashdot Mirror
There were at least two Tom Swift Jr. series, I think
There was the original Tom Swift series (1940's I think) and then in the Tom Swift, Jr. series, 50's and 60's.
The media steered clear of the overturned million dollar verdict. Most appeals where the original outlandish settlement is overturned is never talked about in the media.
I don't think a million was outlandish at all. The only thing corporations understand is money. That was well demonstrated by the fact they had been previously cited for dangerous too-hot coffee and had ignored the citations.
Even a million dollars was not enough in my opinion because in the end it was the bad PR that made McDonalds fix the problem, not the judgement itself. We should be able to use the courts to get corporations to change their bad ways and not have to rely on the randomness of bad press.
so one can reasonably expect it to be served at any temperature up to boiling. Simple physics limits the maximum temperature. McDonald's is not, and cannot be, at fault for serving "too hot" coffee, regardless of the serving temperature others use. The OP burned themselves.
This concept is oh so wrong. Coffee can indeed be too hot. All it has to be is signifcantly hotter than would normally be expected. Serving coffee at 200 degrees rather than the 160 degrees all other restaurants serve it is really a trap for the consumer.
To illustrate, everyone expects brakes on cars to work about the same. similar pedal pressure stops the cars in a similar distance. Suppose one car maker decided to adjust the brakes on its cars so they take twice as long to stop and then they don't tell anyone. The cars will still stop just as fast if you press the brakes hard enough, but still people get injured. After a few hundred rear-enders they get sued, and rightly so. There are norms for many things, and when a company violates those norms and as a result injures people, they are liable. It makes no difference whether the brakes don;t stop you as fast as standard brakes or the coffee is hotter than standard coffee, the company is liable and NOT the consumer.
During this time I saw the local McDonalds put improvised lids on their self-serve coffee pots to make it even hotter than the hotplate would make it. This made the coffee so hot it was dangerous. You had to be careful not to let the steam burn your fingers as you took the plastic lid off the pot to pour it. I knew the coffee was really hot because I poured mine, but the people in the dive-thru getting coffee handed to them had no idea how absurdly hot it was.
If the reviewers have played a final build of the game, what's the BFD?
Reviewers, reschmooers. Here is the best (but old) example I can give about the value of reviews. The film The Sound of Music was blasted by reviewers as a terrible movie. It went on to be nominated for ten academy awards, and won five. It became one fo the top box office winners of all time.
So the reviewers think King Kong is Best Game? Maybe so, but the generally poor quality of reviewers is what the BFD is about giving out the award before the game is released. Frankly, I smell marketing crap.
No one's buying an xbox 360 anyway...The original has been out for 4 years and there are still only two exclusives that I would play on it and one port that I would play over the PS2 or GC versions...
Now I know you may find this hard to comprehend, but YOU are not EVERYONE.
Whether it's justifiable to curtail freedom for the purpose of safety isn't even the right argument, though, because that's not what they're doing. They're curtailing freedom for the appearance of safety, dedicating their time and money (or rather, your money if you live or work here) towards measures that are highly visible, highly intrusive -- and fundamentally useless.
exactly right. The next logical question is WHY are we being given the appearance of safety over actual safety? There are two reasons:
1) Politics. The administration needs to appear to be strong to satisfy their political goals and the easiest way to do that is to be seen confiscating dangerous terrorist tools at airports such as nail files and toenail clippers. Long lines give the illusion of security.
2) Incompetence. It is much easier to give the illusion of security than to provide real security. When the people in charge of security are incompetent political hacks, illusion is the best they can do. One perfect example of security incompetence is diverting vauable resources to minutely screen people with one-way tickets when no terrorist would ever use one. In fact, this incompetent fixation wth one-way tickets *decreases* security since it is almost a certainty that any future terrorists will have round-trip tickets.
Yeah, they meant those statements to be so "absolute". I wonder what thought about military conscription (depravation of liberty) during the revolutionary war (a war that protected and defended liberty and freedom)
hmmm???
Before that smarmy overly smug "hmmm???" you were just ill-informed - afterwards you became an ill-informed know it all.
There was no conscription during the Revolutionary War. Continental Army soldiers were paid volunteers. The military paid cash bonuses to entice people to enlist. Late in the war state militias were federalized, but those soldiers, too, were paid volunteers and no one was forced to join the militias.
What do you think about that? Hhmmm???
So... security isn't a good cause? And... we should just blindly assume that no sacrifice of personal convenience or liberty for securit would ever be necessary or wise?
No, the point is that not EVERY sacrifice of personal convenience or liberty for security reasons is necessary or wise.
I plan to move to another US state soon. If I buy a two way ticket to save myself from an anal probe, can I get a refund for the unused return trip? Is train security less intrusive?
You can get a refund for a return fare in theory, but it won;t be half the ticket cost. The airline will deduct a ticket change fee, make the ticket price the full-fare, one-way, last minute fare and you will get almost nothing back. You might even owe them money because one-way fares are often absurdly expensive. It may be cheaper to buy an on-sale round trip ticket well in advance and simply throw the return ticket away.
FYI the airlines say not using part of your ticket is illegal, but I think they are full of it. To be on the safe side don't tell the airline people you aren't going to use all the ticket segments.
Security for trains is essentially zero.
The idea that corporations are sick, twisted, self-serving entities is as absurd as the idea that they are caring, giving entities. There are only people. Everything else if fiction.
One person's fiction is another person's truth I guess. I disagree that corporations are as good as the people who work in them. There is some sort of herd mentality that goes on in corporatons where good people turn into corpororate monsters. That herd mentality extends from the executive suite to the loading docks. I have seen time and again people do things in a corporate environment that they would never do as indviduals. Lieing, stealing, backstabbing, exposing people to hazardous materials and worse - ostensibly all for the good of the company - are common everyday behaviors in the corporate world, and most of the people wouldn't think of doing the same to their neighbors. Corporations are universally much worse than the individuals in them.
So you think the corporaton you invest in is good and wise because they say so? Think about it - have you ever heard ANY company, from Enron to Hooker Chemical to Wal-Mart say they are anything but great, wonderful, philanthropic pillars of benevolence and honesty?
You don't want more effort in data interpretation - you want it organized in a way that you find more useful. I interpreted it according to my stated objective, which was NOT to compare similar cars (although I allowed someone to do that). My goal was to layout the CHEAPEST option, for which I chose to compare the hybrid to the economy car. I'm glad someone finally admitted the math is correct. If you can now realize the conclusion is stating the hybrid has a long ways to go to be the CHEAPEST option, then I think we'll see eye to eye.
I have to wonder why you bothered. The hypothesis you *appeared* to address in the article (and it would have been a very interesting one) was that the expense of the hybrid systems in hybrid cars cost more than they saved. In fact, and to my surprise, your real hypothesis appears to be that cheap cars are cheaper to own than expensive cars. You just happened to pick hybrid cars as examples of expensive cars. No news there! What a waste of all that data.
But I have to admit that you did prove what you set out to prove: cheap cars are cheaper than expensive cars, even when the expensive cars are hybrids. Sheesh. I can't beleive I wasted my time on this.
Slashdot is great, but you guys don't know the definition of "wrong." The point of the article was to compare the hybrid and see if its higher price could be compensated for with its fuel efficiency. The answer is no - as shown in the article. I mentioned many other factors for consideration, including value retention, tax breaks and many others, but they do not prove my calculations wrong. The numbers you provided are dubious and unsupported. How can you expect anyone to take them seriously? Empty claims don't get anyone anywhere.
You're the author? Great, I'm glad to be able to address you directly. Your article was very informative and had lots of great information. I was always unsure if a hybrid was worth the extra price or not, and your data convinced me that it was, all other things being equal. You did all my hard work for me, thanks. However, you somehow came to the conclusion that the hybrid is NOT economically advantageous, when your data clearly indicates that it is.
I mentioned many other factors for consideration, including value retention, tax breaks and many others, but they do not prove my calculations wrong.
Yes, you *mentioned* them, but you did not include them in your calculations. Even though the math you did had no mistakesm it simply does not support your conclusions. I'll leave it up to the semanticists as to whether or not that is a math error.
The numbers you provided are dubious and unsupported.
That's odd because they are your data. What you called negative savings in Table 9 I simply called Cost of Ownership (COO). Seemed more intuitive.
Until something big changes, though, the industry-high efficiency can't economically offset the steep sticker price
Your data actually indicates the opposite, that the cost of ownership for the Insight is $40 -$50 less per month than for the comparable Accord - if you include value retention. I don't see how you can justify your conclusion that the sticker price of the Insight is not offset, since it is cheaper to operate an Insight than an Accord despite its higher initial price. At the end of 60 months the Insight owner has $2-3,000 more in his pocket than the Accord owner (again using your data).
What I think you may have been saying was that the GAS SAVINGS alone does not offset the additional cost, and you would be right, but that is a strange parameter to use rather than total cost of ownership. You could just as easily have said that the cost of the savings on hybrid brake pads did not justify the higher price. We all agree that would be silly and wrong, but it is just as wrong to use only gas savings to show that the higher initial price is unjustified economically. The only directly applicable metric is total Cost of Ownership, not gas cost.
Table 9 has some problems. You divided the cars up in three categories: Hybrids, Better than Hybrids, and Worse than Hybrids. Unfortunately you used 'negative savings' (aka Cost of Ownership, or COO) to rank them. The problem with doing this is that the purchase price of the autos are included in the the COO and in most of your examples the cost of the vehicle has little relationship to it being a hybrid. One simply cannot compare the $47,000 Lexus hybrid SUV with a $13,000 gas Geo because only a small, unknown part of the Lexus' higher price is due to its hybrid technology. This confounding factor means it is simply not possible to make any meaningful conclusions about the value of a Hybrid $47,000 SUV vs a gas $13,000 econobox. What you should have done was compare similar cars - for example a Ford Escape hybrid and Ford Escape gas version, or a Lexus hybrid SUV and a Lexus gas SUV, or even as I did, a Honda Insight and Honda Accord.
I don;t want you to think I am flaming you, the article was interesting for the copious data you compiled. However, I wish you had put a bit more effort into data interpretation.
I don't know about the math being wrong, but the methodology and conclusions certainly are. Here is his conclusion:
That's incorrect even using his own data. What he did not do is factor in the 75% resale value of, for example, the Honda Inight vs the 56% resale value of the Accord. These two cars are in the same automotive niche except for their power systems. When resale value is included the Insight costs approximately $50 PER MONTH LESS TO OPERATE over the 60 month period in question than the Accord. That is a whopping $3,000 savings over 60 months for the Insight even including its $2,000 cost premium over the Accord. This $3,000 savings doesn't even include the Federal tax rebates that would be several hundred dollars, improving the economic advantage of buying an Insight even further.
Why Table 9 would be included, ostensibly indicating that the Insight is more exensive to operate than an Accord for example, but not including tax breaks or resale values I don't know. I suspect he had a hypothesis to "prove" and he selectively used the data to do it.
So yes, it is safe to say that the math and the logic he used to come up with his conclusion that hybrids are not cost-effective for the buyer were wrong.
Because creditors are charities, right?
Don't try to hand me that sarcasm. The creditors are corporatoins, but surprise...the corporations can declare bankruptcy just as easily as ever, and they are doing it more and more frequently, mainly to rid themselves of employees, unions, pensions and retirement plans. You will never get me gooey-eyed about the poor, poor corporations that need that money. They just declare bankruptcy, come back with the same name and the same management, and the CEOs never even miss a million dollar paycheck. If it's good enough for the corporations to violate their promises to pay I think it's ok for individuals to do the same to them.
There IS a reason they are held in Cuba and NOT in the US. We explicitly do not want to give these thugs Constitutional rights as they do not deserve it.
I guess you better go give a lecture to the Supreme Court then, because that's not what they say. Since the founding of this country US military bases in foreign lands, embassies, etc. have been considered US territory, where the laws of the United States apply. This sort of convoluted self-serving hyper-technical arguement, something a three year old could see through, is typical of the Bush administration.
We explicitly do not want to give these thugs Constitutional rights as they do not deserve it.
Maybe, maybe not, but America deserves better. Besides, if they are guilty what do we have to fear from putting them in front of a judge and jury?
Get a grip. We're hardly perfect, and at least if she loses the suit and files bankruptcy, she can still get her kids to a doctor.
At least in Canada she still CAN file for bankruptcy. Not so in the US these days since the Repugs changed the bankruptcy laws.
Oh, I will address one of your other points. Pebble bed reactors have virtually no issues with reactor vessels, since they physically can't melt down.
I'm sure you will correct me if I am wrong, but I do not believe there are any pebble bed power-gen plants in the US. One might as well say fusion power plants will have no containment vessels therefore nuclear energy is safe.
The error in the construction of the containment vessel at TMI was not the only error that saved us from a major disaster. I won't go into details, but the nuclear air-cleaning system was also installed wrong. When the operators tried to open a backup air cleaning system to prevent a fire in the main carbon bed (caused by radioactive decay from radioactive particles trapped there) they were really closing it off. The only thing that saved them was that the consturction crew had installed the diverter valve 45 degrees off so it wouldn't close all the way. Enough air was ACCIDENTALLY diverted to the auxilliary system do allow the main bed to cool.
That is exactly the kind of thing that tells me power companies don't have the will or ability to safely run these reactors. Until power company managemet is held accountable with prison terms for willful violations of correct procedure they will cut corners with safety. They know they will never serve a day in jail no matter how much they screw up, nor will they ever be held financially liable.
Basically, you just wait until everyone gets tired of it, then you knock down their pieces with yours. Some helpful hints:
1. Take as long as possible deciding troop placement, using obscure algorithms
2. To decide where to attack, make a large probability diagram with all possible outcomes
3. Roll all dice one at a time, saying a short prayer over each one of them. In Elvish, if possible
Hmmmm... Sounds like this would have been great advice for Rummy.
What he is pointing out is that a) burning coal has some nasty and not well known side effects and b) dispersing even quite large amounts of "deadly nuclear material" into the atmosphere pales by comparision
Just a simple high power rifle with a scope, and you could pick off these pirates when they're coming in their dinky open boats way before they get into range to shoot anywhere near accurately. Hell, given a machine gun,...
Well as someone else pointed out shooting from a moving platform is easier said than done, PLUS you would be shooting at a small boat that was even more mobile than your shooting platform.
Secondly, what is to say that there is only one boat? The attacks described in the weekly piracy metioned a "mothership" that had the ability to launch multiple small attack boats. Even with a machine gun you might very well be unable to deter multiple simultaneous attacks from multiple directions. Of course there is nothing to prevent the pirates from having machine guns in each boat. I could easily see the situation getting pretty desperate pretty quickly even with a machine gun for defense.
Everything seems real easy to solve sitting at home in an armchair, and people always make the assumption that terrorists and pirates are not too bright and are easily deterred, but that is not always correct. Remember, when the US was in Mogadishu we had machine guns, snipers, and attack helicopters and we STILL got our butts kicked. Don't underestimate your opponent.
As I write this it occurs to me that these pirates could effectively neutralize a defensive machine gun or rifle by simply putting some women and children on the bows of their attack boats.
That's jsut it, vertical turbines can never be as efficient as horizontal (propeller style). There's a reason airplanes use horizontal propellers; they are more efficient.
There is a logic flaw in your arguement. You are incorrectly assuming that the operational parameters are always optimal for both propellers and vert. turbines, but that skews the arguement in your favor. How efficient is a propeller if it is broken by high winds or is disengaged at wind speeds where the vert. turbine can still operate? If it isn't running it has zero efficiency.
We do know that since the vert. turbine will operate at all winds speeds acceptable for the propeller, but the propeller will not operate at the 50-70 mph speeds acceptable for the vert. turbine there are times when the vert. turbine will be infinitely more efficient than the propeller generator.
What is really important, however, is efficiency over time. If a gust of 70 mph wind breaks the propeller generator and it is down for six months for repairs the vert. turbine that was not damaged will win hands down for efficiency of power production.
I recall seeing stats to the effect that we put 25 *tons* of bomb grade Uranium into the air each year from coal combustion. Suddenly a few pounds of heavily shielded Uranium on a Space-X Falcon doesn't seem all that serious.
It would be pretty goddamned serious if it was spread out in my yard or in my neighborhood or in my city. It is all about concentration. I get very tired of people trying to use silly statitics like this to rationalize how hazardous materials are really harmless. By your logic because power plants put millions of tons of carbon monoxide into the air every year it is somehow proved that fraction of a pound of it in the air of my garage isn't going to kill me dead?
I still don't think that this is going to change anything for TiVo (good or bad)
In a sense you are right from a services point of view, but the most interesting part of the article comes at the very end where it says that payments between Yahoo and Tivo will largely be made in promotional trades. This is exactly what Tivo needs. Their profits have never been large enough to do any real large scale advertising or promotions since they started their business. This will give them a lot of much needed exposure to a demographic (non technology-fearing Yahoo visitors) most likely to buy Tivo but who have never really known what it was about. I think this is a very good move for Tivo.
What????? People drink frothy carbonated water all the time and they don't drop dead. It's slightly acidic if anything. It's not this uber chemical of doom.
Not so "slightly". In an industial environment it is illegal to pour any liquid down a drain that has the pH of a carbonated beverage. Pouring your Coke down the drain at home may not be much of a problem, but putting thousands of gallons into the river would be. And we are talking about the prospect of putting billions of tons of acidic liquid in deepwater CO2 storage each year. I think this is a really stupid idea.
You'd notice the improvement if you saw something twice as detailed, particularly if you saw it side-by-side. I'm reading this page on a 1800x1440 monitor. It's substantially better than the 1600x1200 that I was using. I want much more,
I don't think you would see the difference. In traditional photography there is a term called the "circle of confusion" that describes the resolving power of the human eye. All the resoultion in the world, if it is beyond the circle of confusion, will not be perceived by the human eye as more detailed.
In fact i think there may be too much resolution these days in any event. I still remember seeing Matrix III at an IMAX theater in NYC and having to look away during the close-ups of Lawrence Fishburne's face.
Even on my HDTV at home it is pretty clear that HD can be used very badly by photographers, particularly when they show close-ups of faces. Videographers have been trained on SD camera techniques and often get way too close when they film in HD. Personally I'm not interested in seeing pimples, nose hairs and spittle. I keep waiting for software to be developed to automatically de-rez faces while keeping the backgrounds sharp, or for the directors to wise up and use the new technology better by opening up the traditional in-your-face close-up.
And doggone it, while I'm on a roll about poor videography, why can't news photographers figure out that all news stations cover up the bottom 25% of the screen with scrolls and other crap? Can't they figure out that they have to put the important parts of their images in the top 2/3 of the frame?