I disagree. The point of those x/100 is that they usually combine many other reviews.
At heart, people really only give 3 reviews.
1) Bad
2) Meh
3) Good.
Yeah, some times you get "worst" and "best", but those really don't matter, except in unusual circumstances. They don't matter, as the average will deal with those situations.
You get 65 out of a hundred only when you compile a huge number of reviews.
Then you can get helpful stats. Simply take the average. If the average of 20 people is a scored of 2.7, out of 3, that becomes a 90 out of 100. At 1.5, the score is 50. etc. etc.
Yes, it is a cliche, but an accurate one. It became a cliche because of how often people make the mistake.
The quiet truth is that if you are sick or have any real health issues, you stop drinking alcohol. Alcohol is a powerful drug that affects your body in many ways. If you are not healthy, you often can not drink it.
Moreover, most healthy people in the US drink alcohol. It is one of the primary social activities that people engage in. Look at dating events, they almost always alcohol.
As such, people that do not drink alcohol fall into three general categories. Religious, Sickly, and Ex-Alcoholics.
So cause and effect were reversed. Being healthy lets you drink alcohol, rather than drinking alcohol making you healthy.
True. Question - is that anywhere near near the section that says it is OK to kill non-believer families that try to pass through your territory, kidnap their surviving children, blame it on Indians, and protect the guilty when the US government comes calling.
What, you don't think it's appropriate for me to bring up unrelated points?
You know what, you are right. We should all stop bringing up off-topic facts about the Mormons.
Where exactly did I say I was only talking about chemical batteries? Oh, I didn't? Could that perhaps be because I wasn't? I was talking about ALL methods of storing energy, not just batteries.
All methods have similar, if not identical problems.
You pump water up a hill, may cost you 100 kilowatts. An hour later, when you run the turbine on the water coming out, you get 70 kilowatts, if you are lucky.
As I said before, storage is an extremely DIFFICULT problem, not a simple one. We have been working on it for more than a hundred years and repeatedly FAILED.
As you said, we pump water up for later use in a turbine. Poor method.
We use electricity separate hydrogen from oxygen, store it then burn the hydrogen. Poor method.
We pump air into high pressure containers. Poor method.
We heat up salt. Poor method.
We spin gyros up to high speed. Poor method.
We pump electricity into batteries and/or capacitors. Poor method - but at least it is easily portable.
I did not make any assumptions - you did. And you made very very poor ones. In general, when you assume someone is an idiot, you are make an ass of yourself, not the opponent.
They don't just put a microphone on it. They make it always on and then they intentionally let themselves hear everything you say and transmit it over the internet.
They specifically gave themselves permission to eaves drop on all your conversations, not just after you say Hi TV.
My laptop needs a password to connect to the internet, and is set up by default to NOT turn on the mike.
Someone would have to hack my laptop to make it act like this TV
Some might argue that it's no worse than Facebook.
Which proves my point - only an idiot would buy one of these.
I have nothing to hide but am mortally offended that some asswipe wants to bug my home. It's my home, not yours.
Selling one of thee thigns is no different from going up to random hot women wearing a light summer dress and asking "Hey, can I take you picture with an infrared camera designed to see through thin clothing?"
It's legal to do, but it should also be legal to punch the slime bag trying to do it.
Facebook consists of the single largest privacy invasion ever invented. And they offer nothing that is not free elsewhere on the Internet, if not linked up under one password.
If the government asked people to do what Facebook asks, there'd be another revolution. But offer them minor services that they could do themselves and they willingly throw away everything Thomas Jefferson fought so hard to give them.
First of all, their are two major difference between the parties, that are affecting your thoughts:
1) Liberals call out and vilify their extremists. The Conservatives ELECT them. This is a major difference. There is no liberal equivalent in national politics of Palin, Cruz, Bachmann, or Christine O'donnell.
2) The Democrat party accepts moderates and centrists, while the Republicans kick them out.
This gives the false impression that the country has shifted left. No. The country has stayed the same, the GOP has become extremists.
The government is NOT larger than ever before - when you adjust for GDP. Inflation is the wrong measure. GDP is the right one. The bigger the economy, the more we need to spend.
You mistook prejudice and discrimination for conservative. The fact that the fight over such things has moved from race to sex is not a move from conservative to liberal or vice versa. Or are you seriously going to argue that being racist is a real, current conservative idea?
Finally, the far right has consistently and falsely argued that the media is against them. That is bull and always has been. The honest truth is the media is no different today than it has ever been - it tries to be impartial but fails .
I love your silly argument about Obamacare. There is no such thing. There is ROMNEYCARE, that Obama was forced to accept instead of what he really wanted.
It was rejected by the right because it was proposed by OBAMA, not by a GOP. It was an entirely partisan rejection. Lots of people knew exactly what was in it's pages. Merely passing a big law is not a problem - not when it was based on an existing law that was proven.
The HE argument is silly, the high kinetic energy of the rounds does more damage than most HE.
The thing about the navy is they generally have huge access to water, which works well for cooling.
The other complaints you have - about damaging the barrel, are the reason why we didn't have this 10 years ago, and the issues that they will solve over the next 10 years.
Will ships and aircraft continue to use missiles? Yes.
Will we continue to use gunpowder hand weapons, Yes.
But lasers and rail gun will eventually replace all the artillery style weapons that ships used to have. The lasers take out the fast moving airborne stuff, kinetic weapons take out the rest.
So basically they are absolutely perfect for controlling garbage trucks, allowing them to be run by a 2 man team of loaders instead of a 3 man team - 1 driver + 2 loaders.
Also, everything you describe are solvable problems, It will take some time and some
1) As per the old adage, a women has to work twice as hard to get half the credit. Or to remove the hyperbole, mediocre women don't become CEOS, only the very best do. So you are in effect comparing the top 5% of women CEO candidates, all of whom became CEO's, to the top 20% of male CEO candidates, all of whom became CEOs.
2) Selection bias. I.E. Companies run by morons refuse to consider a woman CEO. As such, the higher performance of the woman is due to the fact that none of them have moronic boards of directors sabotaging them.
This kind of thing just proves women can be good CEOs, rather than proving they make better CEOs.
First of all, I like your jokes. But for now, I will treat your reply as if it were 100% serious. If you saw the TED talk, then you would no the problem with your reply. Namely - which dictionary???
There is no 'official' dictionary - and the people that write dictionaries constantly update them by looking at how people actually use the language. I can make up my own dictionary - and so can you. Or you can use one of the many online 'slang' dictionaries.
As for "so largely and collectively misused such that it makes using them pointless as the meaning is now ambiguous." that is just tyrannical lies. Words never become ambiguous because of misuse - they gain secondary meanings. Ironic isn't it:D
Sometimes these secondary meanings take over the original ones, because they are far more important and interesting.
My personal favorite is DECIMATE. It originally meant to only kill one in ten. But that meaning is barely useful. Now it means to kill most of a force, a far more useful meaning.
This guy really nees to watch
Erin MckEan's TED talk.
Basically she is part of the large movement to throw out this kind of stupidity.
Languages come in two types: Living and Dead. Dead languages have solid grammatical rules that must be obeyed. Living languages are in flux, constantly evolving. What this person did is NO different than a British person going through all of Wikipedia and replacing the word Humor with Humour or Favorite with Favourite.
Words and Grammar CHANGE. Enough people use the word AINT, it gets imported into the language.
Why? Because living languages are comprised of words and phrases that take their meaning from the common usage, not from a book. If people understand a meaning, that is the meaning.
There is no language police outlawing people, no punishment - except for public disapproval and opinion - for misuse. This guy is not the public and has no right to disapprove of how the public uses the language.
A person should be able to survive without their technology.
But a business could NOT survive without it. I'll ignore the obvious requirements, (google needs the internet), but I bet Amazon could not survive as a phone based catalog system. Sure, catalogs existed before Amazon, but Amazon NEEDS the interente.
Similarly, just as businesses need the tech, schools also need the tech.
The main reason is competition. Just as businesses have to compete with each other, our schools have to compete with foreign schools.
Good enough for my daily life is NOT good enough to educate my children.
I despise people that talk about students, kids, or just other groups as if they were not human beings.
If anyone was to ask "Could I have too much tech?" I would laugh in their face.
Businesses do not go around asking, you know, perhaps the smartphone, laptop, and desktop I gave to my employees is too much. The idea is just plain ridiculous.
The real question is "Could the tech we are giving to students suck balls so bad that it is worthless?"
Because I have seen businesses give out crappy tech and I am sure some schools do as well. But the idea of 'too much', is just so inane it is not worth discussing.
You are correct in principle but wrong in practice.
Your belief that the fragile ecosystems would have self-destructed long ago is based on the belief that the ecosystem has always been fragile.
The truth is that the ecosystem USED to be dynamically stable, 100 years ago.
But then a top level predator came in and started screwing around with it. Namely Man. We divert water, and the dynamic ecosystem compensates. We kill the other predators, and it compensates. We fill the air with too much carbon di-oxide and it compensates. We pump poisons into and it compensates more.
But after all this stress, it has reached it's compensation capacity. Now it has BECOME fragile. It wasn't fragile 200, 100, or even 20 years ago.
The reason it didn't self-destruct long ago is that it was strong 100 years ago, but isn't anymore.
If you screw around with anything long enough, eventually it becomes fragile and tiny little change will push the whole thing over.
I am not saying that the mosquito will be that change. For all I know, we can do another 50 things before we push it over the edge. But I am saying that your argument is itself heavily flawed and does not hold water.
The patent issue is real. But that is not about science, it is about law and politics.
But the fear of 'setting genes loose' is pretty worthless.
It is based on several false concept 1) that normal life is stable and doesn't mutate. Cat's don't suddenly give birth to dogs. Mutations occur naturally ALL the time. As such, the few, tested mutations that humans can engineer are an insignificant risk compared to the number of natural ones. It's like living at the bottom of a mountain known to have land slides and being concerned that your neighbor has a catapult pointed away from your house, but some wind storm might turn the catapult around and activate it, firing a single boulder into your house.
2) That humans are far more powerful than we are. The fear is that the mutation created by scientist will be so incredibly different and unusual, that it will be dangerous. Not so. Genetics has been improving at a snail's pace. We can barely predict someone's eye color, let alone control it. The changes we are making are so insignificant - and will be for such a long time - that it's like being scared of a mouse. By the time that mouse is an elephant, we will have far more safeguards and know how to deal with it.
3) Finally and most importantly, it's based in ignorance. The non-scientist doesn't understand it therefore they fear it.
Biofuels are great, as long as they are made with waste products. That is, certain agricultural products create a lot of waste - we eat ears of corn, not the stalks.
The countries that have made biofuels work do it by using the waste products of edible plants.
There is no plant around that is anywhere close to profitable to grow just for fuel. That kind of agri-energy only 'works' if you give huge government subsidies.
But if you happen to be growing an edible plant with a high amount of agricultural waste, you can easily and profitably turn that waste into energy. Note, normally we do other things with that waste - turn it into fertilizer, etc. To be a truly viable bio-fuel, the biofuel creation process must be more profitable than the alternative disposal method.
Slashdot Mirror
At heart, people really only give 3 reviews.
1) Bad
2) Meh
3) Good.
Yeah, some times you get "worst" and "best", but those really don't matter, except in unusual circumstances. They don't matter, as the average will deal with those situations.
You get 65 out of a hundred only when you compile a huge number of reviews.
Then you can get helpful stats. Simply take the average. If the average of 20 people is a scored of 2.7, out of 3, that becomes a 90 out of 100. At 1.5, the score is 50. etc. etc.
What do you think the man mande exploration device's purpose is? To do the environmental study, discovery the needs of the native species.
The quiet truth is that if you are sick or have any real health issues, you stop drinking alcohol. Alcohol is a powerful drug that affects your body in many ways. If you are not healthy, you often can not drink it.
Moreover, most healthy people in the US drink alcohol. It is one of the primary social activities that people engage in. Look at dating events, they almost always alcohol.
As such, people that do not drink alcohol fall into three general categories. Religious, Sickly, and Ex-Alcoholics.
So cause and effect were reversed. Being healthy lets you drink alcohol, rather than drinking alcohol making you healthy.
What, you don't think it's appropriate for me to bring up unrelated points?
You know what, you are right. We should all stop bringing up off-topic facts about the Mormons.
All methods have similar, if not identical problems.
You pump water up a hill, may cost you 100 kilowatts. An hour later, when you run the turbine on the water coming out, you get 70 kilowatts, if you are lucky.
As I said before, storage is an extremely DIFFICULT problem, not a simple one. We have been working on it for more than a hundred years and repeatedly FAILED.
As you said, we pump water up for later use in a turbine. Poor method.
We use electricity separate hydrogen from oxygen, store it then burn the hydrogen. Poor method.
We pump air into high pressure containers. Poor method.
We heat up salt. Poor method.
We spin gyros up to high speed. Poor method.
We pump electricity into batteries and/or capacitors. Poor method - but at least it is easily portable.
I did not make any assumptions - you did. And you made very very poor ones. In general, when you assume someone is an idiot, you are make an ass of yourself, not the opponent.
If you came up with some kind of Shipstone (Heinlein's super battery) then your idea would work.
But using current technology, electrical storage is:
1) heavy
2) Expensive
3) Leaky (slowly losing power, converting it to heat)
4) Relatively short term - see leaky.
5) Limited lifespan (each charge cycle decreases how much the next one can hold).
6) inefficient - it takes 200 units to store 100 units.
So while your idea works in principle, in practice it fails.
They don't just put a microphone on it. They make it always on and then they intentionally let themselves hear everything you say and transmit it over the internet. They specifically gave themselves permission to eaves drop on all your conversations, not just after you say Hi TV. My laptop needs a password to connect to the internet, and is set up by default to NOT turn on the mike. Someone would have to hack my laptop to make it act like this TV
Which proves my point - only an idiot would buy one of these.
I have nothing to hide but am mortally offended that some asswipe wants to bug my home. It's my home, not yours.
Selling one of thee thigns is no different from going up to random hot women wearing a light summer dress and asking "Hey, can I take you picture with an infrared camera designed to see through thin clothing?"
It's legal to do, but it should also be legal to punch the slime bag trying to do it.
If the government asked people to do what Facebook asks, there'd be another revolution. But offer them minor services that they could do themselves and they willingly throw away everything Thomas Jefferson fought so hard to give them.
First of all, their are two major difference between the parties, that are affecting your thoughts:
1) Liberals call out and vilify their extremists. The Conservatives ELECT them. This is a major difference. There is no liberal equivalent in national politics of Palin, Cruz, Bachmann, or Christine O'donnell.
2) The Democrat party accepts moderates and centrists, while the Republicans kick them out.
This gives the false impression that the country has shifted left. No. The country has stayed the same, the GOP has become extremists.
The government is NOT larger than ever before - when you adjust for GDP. Inflation is the wrong measure. GDP is the right one. The bigger the economy, the more we need to spend.
You mistook prejudice and discrimination for conservative. The fact that the fight over such things has moved from race to sex is not a move from conservative to liberal or vice versa. Or are you seriously going to argue that being racist is a real, current conservative idea?
Finally, the far right has consistently and falsely argued that the media is against them. That is bull and always has been. The honest truth is the media is no different today than it has ever been - it tries to be impartial but fails .
I love your silly argument about Obamacare. There is no such thing. There is ROMNEYCARE, that Obama was forced to accept instead of what he really wanted.
It was rejected by the right because it was proposed by OBAMA, not by a GOP. It was an entirely partisan rejection. Lots of people knew exactly what was in it's pages. Merely passing a big law is not a problem - not when it was based on an existing law that was proven.
The thing about the navy is they generally have huge access to water, which works well for cooling.
The other complaints you have - about damaging the barrel, are the reason why we didn't have this 10 years ago, and the issues that they will solve over the next 10 years.
Will ships and aircraft continue to use missiles? Yes.
Will we continue to use gunpowder hand weapons, Yes.
But lasers and rail gun will eventually replace all the artillery style weapons that ships used to have. The lasers take out the fast moving airborne stuff, kinetic weapons take out the rest.
Also, everything you describe are solvable problems, It will take some time and some
No smoke screen can move that fast.
Mirrored surfaces would work - and would attract the hell out of any radar guided missile.
So basically, your argument is worthless.
Just like everyone should be taught the basics of chemistry and the basics of physics.
Not understanding how to code "Hello World" is equivalent to not knowing that hot things expand.
As such, computer languages should be a separate requirement in ADDITION to a foreign language, not instead of.
2) Selection bias. I.E. Companies run by morons refuse to consider a woman CEO. As such, the higher performance of the woman is due to the fact that none of them have moronic boards of directors sabotaging them.
This kind of thing just proves women can be good CEOs, rather than proving they make better CEOs.
It decreases fertility, enlarges the prostate, and causes other issues.
Many people I know admit to being addicted to Caffeine.
There is no 'official' dictionary - and the people that write dictionaries constantly update them by looking at how people actually use the language. I can make up my own dictionary - and so can you. Or you can use one of the many online 'slang' dictionaries.
As for "so largely and collectively misused such that it makes using them pointless as the meaning is now ambiguous." that is just tyrannical lies. Words never become ambiguous because of misuse - they gain secondary meanings. Ironic isn't it :D
Sometimes these secondary meanings take over the original ones, because they are far more important and interesting.
My personal favorite is DECIMATE. It originally meant to only kill one in ten. But that meaning is barely useful. Now it means to kill most of a force, a far more useful meaning.
If they did work, they get called DRUGS.
The prime examples is caffeine.
Languages come in two types: Living and Dead. Dead languages have solid grammatical rules that must be obeyed. Living languages are in flux, constantly evolving. What this person did is NO different than a British person going through all of Wikipedia and replacing the word Humor with Humour or Favorite with Favourite.
Words and Grammar CHANGE. Enough people use the word AINT, it gets imported into the language.
Why? Because living languages are comprised of words and phrases that take their meaning from the common usage, not from a book. If people understand a meaning, that is the meaning.
There is no language police outlawing people, no punishment - except for public disapproval and opinion - for misuse. This guy is not the public and has no right to disapprove of how the public uses the language.
But a business could NOT survive without it. I'll ignore the obvious requirements, (google needs the internet), but I bet Amazon could not survive as a phone based catalog system. Sure, catalogs existed before Amazon, but Amazon NEEDS the interente.
Similarly, just as businesses need the tech, schools also need the tech.
The main reason is competition. Just as businesses have to compete with each other, our schools have to compete with foreign schools.
Good enough for my daily life is NOT good enough to educate my children.
If anyone was to ask "Could I have too much tech?" I would laugh in their face.
Businesses do not go around asking, you know, perhaps the smartphone, laptop, and desktop I gave to my employees is too much. The idea is just plain ridiculous.
The real question is "Could the tech we are giving to students suck balls so bad that it is worthless?"
Because I have seen businesses give out crappy tech and I am sure some schools do as well. But the idea of 'too much', is just so inane it is not worth discussing.
Your belief that the fragile ecosystems would have self-destructed long ago is based on the belief that the ecosystem has always been fragile.
The truth is that the ecosystem USED to be dynamically stable, 100 years ago.
But then a top level predator came in and started screwing around with it. Namely Man. We divert water, and the dynamic ecosystem compensates. We kill the other predators, and it compensates. We fill the air with too much carbon di-oxide and it compensates. We pump poisons into and it compensates more.
But after all this stress, it has reached it's compensation capacity. Now it has BECOME fragile. It wasn't fragile 200, 100, or even 20 years ago.
The reason it didn't self-destruct long ago is that it was strong 100 years ago, but isn't anymore.
If you screw around with anything long enough, eventually it becomes fragile and tiny little change will push the whole thing over.
I am not saying that the mosquito will be that change. For all I know, we can do another 50 things before we push it over the edge. But I am saying that your argument is itself heavily flawed and does not hold water.
But the fear of 'setting genes loose' is pretty worthless.
It is based on several false concept 1) that normal life is stable and doesn't mutate. Cat's don't suddenly give birth to dogs. Mutations occur naturally ALL the time. As such, the few, tested mutations that humans can engineer are an insignificant risk compared to the number of natural ones. It's like living at the bottom of a mountain known to have land slides and being concerned that your neighbor has a catapult pointed away from your house, but some wind storm might turn the catapult around and activate it, firing a single boulder into your house.
2) That humans are far more powerful than we are. The fear is that the mutation created by scientist will be so incredibly different and unusual, that it will be dangerous. Not so. Genetics has been improving at a snail's pace. We can barely predict someone's eye color, let alone control it. The changes we are making are so insignificant - and will be for such a long time - that it's like being scared of a mouse. By the time that mouse is an elephant, we will have far more safeguards and know how to deal with it.
3) Finally and most importantly, it's based in ignorance. The non-scientist doesn't understand it therefore they fear it.
Biofuels are great, as long as they are made with waste products. That is, certain agricultural products create a lot of waste - we eat ears of corn, not the stalks. The countries that have made biofuels work do it by using the waste products of edible plants. There is no plant around that is anywhere close to profitable to grow just for fuel. That kind of agri-energy only 'works' if you give huge government subsidies. But if you happen to be growing an edible plant with a high amount of agricultural waste, you can easily and profitably turn that waste into energy. Note, normally we do other things with that waste - turn it into fertilizer, etc. To be a truly viable bio-fuel, the biofuel creation process must be more profitable than the alternative disposal method.