I was a teacher in a rural farm school for 5 years. I can tell you first-hand that having contact information for parents is useless 75% of the time.
One of our huge challenges was trying to break the inertia of bad parent experiences in school 10-20 years ago. "I flunked out, so there's no hope for my kid." "I graduated, and look what it got me - I'm working on the farm like I was all my life. School doesn't do nuthin for ya!"
To be frank, parents can often be the biggest barrier to a student's education. This is especially true in undereducated/impoverished communities. Even encouraging your kid to hang around with different kids can have a profound effect on their performance in school.
It was rare for me to be able to get in touch with the parents of the most troublesome students. Why were they trouble students? Mainly because their parents weren't ever around disciplining them or doing their job as parents.
Typical parents were ones like the one who threatened his kid (bright, I got along with him, but failing my class for the second time. Dad asked why. I bluntly said, "He's plenty smart enough to pull an A, he just doesn't try at all.") with all sorts of stuff if he didn't pass. Three weeks later? Kid was gone for two week. Why? Family went on vacation... Had a meeting with a very bright kid's parents who had become a major stoner half-way through freshman year. His grades went from straight 100s (not just As) into the 50s. Parents were distraught. I pointed out how he was on time and handed everything in the first half, was late all the time and turned next to nothing in the second half of the year. A week later, the band instructor opened the case for the instrument he used, out fell a bowl and the leavings of the last oz he bought. As responsible parents....they threatened to sue the school because it could have been anyone's bowl and pot. Because the instrument case wasn't locked. A month later, after the school decided that they couldn't financially afford to suspend the kid, his parents bought him a new car. Convertible.
Now those were some of the parents I could get ahold of. For a large percent of kids, I couldn't get in touch with a parent. Ever. Phones disconnected, working two jobs, would just hang up on me. Would always have the kid answer the phone or get the mail, so all contact with the school was "junk mail" and "telemarketers". It was truly mind-boggling to me how disengaged parents were with the system. What was truly needed was a mandate that parents be involved with their kid's schooling. Of course, a lot would then turn out to be like the two I mentioned - there were a lot of parents like that where I worked.
The hate is because Blizzard is doing it utterly wrong.
Back in the late 90s, around 2000, we played a lot of SC. We'd host big lan parties where we would play. One of the beautiful things was that we could do this in an old farmhouse out in the country, with only a dialup connection. The second beautiful thing was that we all didn't have to have the game! We could spawn a copy on one computer, use the same disk in another, and all enjoy the game. It was awesome. It lead to lots of us buying the game to play when we weren't together on a lan.
My friend on the really sweet cable connection could host a game, and we could all connect to him. VIA his IP address. It didn't matter if the servers were up or not, or if we had a connection to BattleNet.
Now, that's all gone with SC2. We can only play if we all have a $50 copy of the game, and we all have a good internet connection. We can't dump 8 computers in anyone's random house and expect to play - we've got to make sure they have the bandwidth to do so. That's crap. That's a major step backwards. That's greed over loving your customers.
Additionally, it's the job of the server to make sure that the clients aren't cheating. Not the job of the client. And hacks don't matter in single-player. To ban me for doing something on my computer with software that I own which affects nobody but me is madness.
That's the where the hate comes from. You don't get to charge people $50 for your game, then deny them the ability to play the single-player missions because you don't like how they're playing. It's none of Blizzard's business. Likewise, suing people who create cheats is also treading a very thin line. It's akin to suing gun manufacturers because someone else murdered someone you care about.
SC1 was big because of how open it was. When the first SC2 demo games started coming out, and they started having issues connecting, it was clear that SC2 would never be able to be as big as SC1. You just can't do competitive, E-Sport style play if you're relying on an internet connection and someone else's authentication server and game server.
For the money, we're getting a lot less game than SC1, with a lot of restrictions that never existed before. Yes, cheating is an issue. But you know what? Draconian measures to prevent cheating are also an issue. What you're seeing is the alienation because Blizzard went far too far to that side, after building a reputation for being open and accommodating.
The issue involves a lot of people with an expendable income, an "ooh shiny!" mentality, and a boatload of excuses for the company. Some of us ditch corporations like the piles of garbage they are. Some of us don't.
I was a big SC fan. I was a big WC fan. But once they started suing rather than dealing, and once they decided to go with draconic copy protection, remove lan play, etc, I dropped them. I'm not buying SC2, I'm not buying another WC - they're off my list.
The real issue is that very few of us can detach from our irrational love for either a series or "oooh shiny!" to make this sort of rational decision. The group of us that used to play SC a lot looked at what Blizzard was doing and went, "That's bullshit. We're not buying that!" Well, 2/3 of us did. The other 1/3 said, "It's not that bad...everyone is moving to online only, all the time, excuses, excuses, excuses..." They bought the game, had a lot of issues, told us a lot of , "Well, it's not sooo bad...there's some lag when loading menus, but it's not real bad. Well, I can't play with my friend in Australia due to the region splits, but..."
If the entire world could run on rational thought rather than impulse and blind love, a lot of problems would be solved. As it is, such a sizable percentage of people can't do this that SC2 will make a boatload of money no matter how many customers they sue, ban, and mistreat.
Well, you're wrong on one part - I'm in the Midwest. In the last year my research group has sent people to Seattle, Massachusetts, Arizona, Germany, France, Corsica, and London. We're on tap for sending another few students to Corsica in 2011, along with a bunch to Puerto Rico, and a few back to Germany. My group isn't unique - the program I'm in has about 60 graduate students. In the last year we've hit every continent, and about 35% of the States for conferences and work related stuff.
Most students aren't as lucky as you.
Heh...in my department, they sure aren't - they're luckier! I'm sorry to hear that CalState treated you so poorly. There's really something special about a college program that dramatically expands your horizons. They do exist in the US - I'm in one now.
One of my fellow students gave an hour presentation on his three months of life and work in Antarctica last year. It was amazing. Another gave her rundown of working with NASA on satellite programs for remote sensing of the earth. I spent a week on the French seaside eating fresh oysters and drinking fine wine with giants in my field, talking shop and learning from them.
Experiences like that are what make college so valuable, and what separate it from wikipedia and anything you can get from a book or online. A good college is worth the price, no matter how high. A bad college isn't worth a dime.
Here's to hoping you find a good one some day, should it fit into your life path.
Hey - it worked really well for Uncyclopedia. It should work for college. Not like anyone would put stuff on the internet that wasn't true. I mean, The Onion is my major source for news....
The problem is that this is entirely dependent on what you want to do, and in what subject area you're studying.
I'm in a PhD program doing some climate related stuff which is highly dependent on computational fluid dynamics. I'm modeling the fluid dynamics of the North Atlantic to better help us understand its carbon uptake and transport.
The computational resources alone are waaaay out of most people's league. Without a grant for tens of thousands of dollars to put together a Rocks cluster with a high-bandwidth back end and many terabytes of high RPM storage and scratch drives, the work I'm doing would run in little better than real-time on your average desktop. No use in modeling 80 years of ocean circulation if it takes you that long to do it!
The experts I have access to far exceed what I can find on the internet. I got flown to France this spring for a conference with the rockstars of my field. I talked shop over a bottle of fine wine with the guy who wrote the seminal textbook for my field. I had lunch overlooking the harbor with a guy who wrote major parts of the IPCC climate models that the US uses.
While I agree with your first major paragraph, I have to completely disagree with the second. If I wasn't going to a major university, I wouldn't have had these chances. I wouldn't have tens of thousands of dollars of computation hardware at my fingertips. I wouldn't have known about some of the people I've met and learned from. I wouldn't have been granted a $1600 Euro plant ticket to go rub shoulders with the giants of my field.
I've learned more from Wikipedia (no, not the sources... the actual wiki pages) than I could ever have lerned in college. If the information is out there, why pay for a professor to present it to you when we now have a machine that presents it to us for free?
That shows a lacking of your college program, or a failure on your part. As an undergraduate, I learned a ton from a professor who had retired, but still had a full machine shop in the bottom of the main science building as his "office". He didn't teach a class, but he taught more than most of the other professors there. Again, I agree with your first major paragraph. But although that is true, it doesn't mean that a college education is without merit. No offense, (to you and all the rest) but what you're saying more likely applies to CE than to most other college degrees. There's more philosophy and code on the internet than you'd ever be able to get through. Most code can be run on your average desktop. Outside of mainframes, there's not much you can't model (slowly) on affordable hardware.
Just don't apply that to college as a whole - I'm sure that you can learn just as much English Lit online as you can in school. However, there are many fields where that's simply not true. Trust me...I wouldn't be suffering through graduate school right now if I could do this outside of it. I had a decent job, decent pay, and a lot of free time before this. I gave all that up for the things I've described. I'm not about to be running hundreds to thousands of gigaflops at home, with tends to hundreds of terabytes of storage. I can't easily get access to that on the internet. I can't get personal access to the people who are leaders in my field. Sit on a picnic table with them and pick their brain. That's what college can give you. If you can get what you need to do your job on the internet, great. Not everybody can.
Re:Really I would say Linux on the desktop is a sa
on
Desktop Linux Is Dead
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· Score: 1
This hits the nail on the head, and was what I came here (late) to say as well. When everything is online that people want, the OS doesn't matter. A standards based browser is all that's needed.
I can use all my social networking, Google Docs, photo uploads, IM, email, etc., from almost any OS. My 2 banks and my credit card all support any standards compliant browser. If I can get flash, (and here's to hoping HTML5 kills it) I can get videos from almost every site. (Is Netflix still being asinine about this? They may be a major hold-out.)
Other than games, which are being served on a console for a large percentage of people now, there's little that requires a certain OS for most people's day-to-day use.
Sure, corporate offices may be different, but they've always been different ecosystems. For home users, the "desktop" is becoming very irrelevant.
Of course, we're also seeing the appliance-ization of computers. As everyone moves to smart phones and consoles which now have full internet functionality, there seems to be a major shift from traditional desktop PCs as it is. I'd argue that the desktop PC is more dead than the OS that runs on it. In fact, as the volume of home desktops plummets, being replaced by smart phones and consoles, the chance for Linux to play a significant role may increase. If you're not making a profit due to large volume, the next step is to cut costs. The Windows OS is one pretty significant cost.
Don't post stuff like that - I've been burning karma for a few months saying the same thing.:-) Oddly enough, the post I reply to gets an "Insightful", and I get "off topic". Still...
All this place needs is an editor. If we had that, we'd see the quality shoot up quite a bit. My major hangup is that nowhere else has comments in any useful form. I know it's been a long tradition to complain about the editing here - I've been around for most of slashdot's history. But lately, it's just been insane. Two articles submitted, yet the one without a useful summary or links and filled with grammatical errors gets posted? Repeatedly? I block kdwason due to his ridiculously bad submissions, so he sends his shit to another 'editor', and it gets posted? Really?
Find me another site with a useful comment system, and I'm there.
Well, it seems the rest haven't heard how badly it failed - my hometown newspaper had an ad-supported online edition for years and years. A week or so ago they paywalled it.
I'm wondering how long it will take them to realize that only a dozen or so people visit their website every day now. It's not a large paper, and the bulk of their readership are 50+. If they're going to paywall, they might as well just get off the internet. I highly doubt it's worth keeping an internet presence for the money generated by 1 & 7 day subscriptions.
The other problem is when you have a massive influx of immigrants. Compared to a recent Mexican immigrant, I'm pretty "native". I was born here, as were my parents, my grand parents...
Native American is stupid terminology. How long does someone's family need to live in America to be "Native"? 100 years? 1000 years? 10,000 years?
When do you start to call it 'America'? Prior to Columbus, it sure wasn't.
As far as I'm concerned, in our modern times, "Native American" is as bad as "Indian".
Short answer: It depends on how much you're importing, and at what rate. Desalination plants are far cheaper in the long run than importing. But they cost a shitload more money up front. If you can't afford the investment, or aren't importing enough water to reach the cost of the investment, it makes sense to import.
As other posters have pointed out, water is in the range of $1.00-$0.50 US per cubic meter if you desalinate it. 3 billion gallons is only 11 million cubic meters. That's $6-$11 million dollars to desalinate, and probably a bit more than that to transport. Say $20-$50 million to transport, to be very generous. A desalination plant will cost you in the realm of a billion dollars. What possible reason would they want to spend a billion dollars, along with the yearly costs of labor, energy, upkeep, permits, etc? If they were doing 5-10x this much importing, it might start to make sense.
Were you planning to give them your spare desalination plant?
I was at an engineering lecture last week which touched on desalination lightly. The costs for a developed nation are laughably small. The relative cost for a developing nation, of course, is much higher. Generally, it's under $1 US per cubic meter. That's 1000 liters, ~250 gallons.
If you're creating an infrastructure to distribute water being shipped into a port, the cost to desalinate it there isn't going to depend on that infrastructure, as you need it for both.
As a comparison, this would be about $1/6 barrels of oil. I don't know what shipping costs of oil are, but I'm willing to bet it's the same ballpark. (I could only quickly find one number, which was around $1 per barrel of oil. If that's the case, and shipping water is the same cost, it's cheaper to desalinate it.)
End of this ramble is that it's probably cheaper to desalinate, but it requires less investment up front to import.
I agree completely. If you find that place, let me know. I've been looking for a couple months now. And if anyone here decides to recreate slashdot with functional editors, primary sources, and categories that means something, let me know. I'd love to poke my head in, and I'd probably be willing to help out.
Well, if you're looking for things to do with it, you could support an idiot who went back to grad school a decade late.....I might know one....had to stop drinking nice scotch...talk about a tragedy....
I went back go grad school a decade after my undergrad career. I moved 1000 miles away to do so. Up until this point, I had seen no reason to use Facebook. It seemed pretty stupid. Here's where I am now:
The younger generation uses Facebook in place of IM, Email, and in some cases, text messages. They use it in place of forums, fan sites, and other internet communities. They use it in place of google, notes in desks, graffiti on walls, and bullying in the halls. They use it in place of Craigs List, Ebay, classifieds, and pieces of paper with tear-off-strips with phone numbers on them.
In short, the generation that was high school and college in the mid 2000s has ignored our internet, and instead chosen it poorly implemented in a single website. Yes, it's all poorly done. But it's largely there. As is everyone they know.
I can't stand the bulk of Facebook. But there are a few things that are important. Now that I'm going to school with this crowd, they organize their social events through Facebook. BBQs, pick-up games, birthdays and other drinking events, outings, sports events, open mic nights, etc. It's all organized through Facebook. My choices were either ignore Facebook and not have a social life with my classmates, or suck it up. The other thing which I found awesome was friending my relatives I left 1000 miles away. It gives me a window onto their lives. How my autistic cousins are doing. How my grandparents' health is. How school is going for some of my cousins. My family's trips abroad. My sister's school career. My good friend's sons' sports activities. Stuff I miss, stuff I care about, but I don't have the time to call and ask about. When nothing goes on for my uncle for months, then he suddenly gets promoted, I know about it. If I called all my relatives every week, it'd be a massive time sink, and boring as hell 90% of the time.
Facebook is an RSS feed for the important events in the lives of my friends and family a thousand miles away. That's the real value for me.
Slashdot Mirror
Glad our editors figured that out and linked to the original story. I'd have hated to click on some garbage like that....
That's why the editors looked at the submission and threw it out.....didn't you notice?
Sold out quite some time back for ad views. Know where else to go? I'm looking.
Wait....so you mean the title and summary weren't utterly false, just to get ad views? Say is isn't so! Slashdot would never do that....
I was a teacher in a rural farm school for 5 years. I can tell you first-hand that having contact information for parents is useless 75% of the time.
One of our huge challenges was trying to break the inertia of bad parent experiences in school 10-20 years ago. "I flunked out, so there's no hope for my kid." "I graduated, and look what it got me - I'm working on the farm like I was all my life. School doesn't do nuthin for ya!"
To be frank, parents can often be the biggest barrier to a student's education. This is especially true in undereducated/impoverished communities. Even encouraging your kid to hang around with different kids can have a profound effect on their performance in school.
It was rare for me to be able to get in touch with the parents of the most troublesome students. Why were they trouble students? Mainly because their parents weren't ever around disciplining them or doing their job as parents.
Typical parents were ones like the one who threatened his kid (bright, I got along with him, but failing my class for the second time. Dad asked why. I bluntly said, "He's plenty smart enough to pull an A, he just doesn't try at all.") with all sorts of stuff if he didn't pass. Three weeks later? Kid was gone for two week. Why? Family went on vacation... Had a meeting with a very bright kid's parents who had become a major stoner half-way through freshman year. His grades went from straight 100s (not just As) into the 50s. Parents were distraught. I pointed out how he was on time and handed everything in the first half, was late all the time and turned next to nothing in the second half of the year. A week later, the band instructor opened the case for the instrument he used, out fell a bowl and the leavings of the last oz he bought. As responsible parents....they threatened to sue the school because it could have been anyone's bowl and pot. Because the instrument case wasn't locked. A month later, after the school decided that they couldn't financially afford to suspend the kid, his parents bought him a new car. Convertible.
Now those were some of the parents I could get ahold of. For a large percent of kids, I couldn't get in touch with a parent. Ever. Phones disconnected, working two jobs, would just hang up on me. Would always have the kid answer the phone or get the mail, so all contact with the school was "junk mail" and "telemarketers". It was truly mind-boggling to me how disengaged parents were with the system. What was truly needed was a mandate that parents be involved with their kid's schooling. Of course, a lot would then turn out to be like the two I mentioned - there were a lot of parents like that where I worked.
I've been looking for awhile - do you have some better options?
Your sig...heheh....HAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!!
How can one so "wise" have a sig like that?
The hate is because Blizzard is doing it utterly wrong.
Back in the late 90s, around 2000, we played a lot of SC. We'd host big lan parties where we would play. One of the beautiful things was that we could do this in an old farmhouse out in the country, with only a dialup connection. The second beautiful thing was that we all didn't have to have the game! We could spawn a copy on one computer, use the same disk in another, and all enjoy the game. It was awesome. It lead to lots of us buying the game to play when we weren't together on a lan.
My friend on the really sweet cable connection could host a game, and we could all connect to him. VIA his IP address. It didn't matter if the servers were up or not, or if we had a connection to BattleNet.
Now, that's all gone with SC2. We can only play if we all have a $50 copy of the game, and we all have a good internet connection. We can't dump 8 computers in anyone's random house and expect to play - we've got to make sure they have the bandwidth to do so. That's crap. That's a major step backwards. That's greed over loving your customers.
Additionally, it's the job of the server to make sure that the clients aren't cheating. Not the job of the client. And hacks don't matter in single-player. To ban me for doing something on my computer with software that I own which affects nobody but me is madness.
That's the where the hate comes from. You don't get to charge people $50 for your game, then deny them the ability to play the single-player missions because you don't like how they're playing. It's none of Blizzard's business. Likewise, suing people who create cheats is also treading a very thin line. It's akin to suing gun manufacturers because someone else murdered someone you care about.
SC1 was big because of how open it was. When the first SC2 demo games started coming out, and they started having issues connecting, it was clear that SC2 would never be able to be as big as SC1. You just can't do competitive, E-Sport style play if you're relying on an internet connection and someone else's authentication server and game server.
For the money, we're getting a lot less game than SC1, with a lot of restrictions that never existed before. Yes, cheating is an issue. But you know what? Draconian measures to prevent cheating are also an issue. What you're seeing is the alienation because Blizzard went far too far to that side, after building a reputation for being open and accommodating.
The issue involves a lot of people with an expendable income, an "ooh shiny!" mentality, and a boatload of excuses for the company. Some of us ditch corporations like the piles of garbage they are. Some of us don't.
I was a big SC fan. I was a big WC fan. But once they started suing rather than dealing, and once they decided to go with draconic copy protection, remove lan play, etc, I dropped them. I'm not buying SC2, I'm not buying another WC - they're off my list.
The real issue is that very few of us can detach from our irrational love for either a series or "oooh shiny!" to make this sort of rational decision. The group of us that used to play SC a lot looked at what Blizzard was doing and went, "That's bullshit. We're not buying that!" Well, 2/3 of us did. The other 1/3 said, "It's not that bad...everyone is moving to online only, all the time, excuses, excuses, excuses..." They bought the game, had a lot of issues, told us a lot of , "Well, it's not sooo bad...there's some lag when loading menus, but it's not real bad. Well, I can't play with my friend in Australia due to the region splits, but..."
If the entire world could run on rational thought rather than impulse and blind love, a lot of problems would be solved. As it is, such a sizable percentage of people can't do this that SC2 will make a boatload of money no matter how many customers they sue, ban, and mistreat.
Most students aren't as lucky as you.
Heh...in my department, they sure aren't - they're luckier! I'm sorry to hear that CalState treated you so poorly. There's really something special about a college program that dramatically expands your horizons. They do exist in the US - I'm in one now.
One of my fellow students gave an hour presentation on his three months of life and work in Antarctica last year. It was amazing. Another gave her rundown of working with NASA on satellite programs for remote sensing of the earth. I spent a week on the French seaside eating fresh oysters and drinking fine wine with giants in my field, talking shop and learning from them.
Experiences like that are what make college so valuable, and what separate it from wikipedia and anything you can get from a book or online. A good college is worth the price, no matter how high. A bad college isn't worth a dime.
Here's to hoping you find a good one some day, should it fit into your life path.
Hey - it worked really well for Uncyclopedia. It should work for college. Not like anyone would put stuff on the internet that wasn't true. I mean, The Onion is my major source for news....
I'm in a PhD program doing some climate related stuff which is highly dependent on computational fluid dynamics. I'm modeling the fluid dynamics of the North Atlantic to better help us understand its carbon uptake and transport.
The computational resources alone are waaaay out of most people's league. Without a grant for tens of thousands of dollars to put together a Rocks cluster with a high-bandwidth back end and many terabytes of high RPM storage and scratch drives, the work I'm doing would run in little better than real-time on your average desktop. No use in modeling 80 years of ocean circulation if it takes you that long to do it!
The experts I have access to far exceed what I can find on the internet. I got flown to France this spring for a conference with the rockstars of my field. I talked shop over a bottle of fine wine with the guy who wrote the seminal textbook for my field. I had lunch overlooking the harbor with a guy who wrote major parts of the IPCC climate models that the US uses.
While I agree with your first major paragraph, I have to completely disagree with the second. If I wasn't going to a major university, I wouldn't have had these chances. I wouldn't have tens of thousands of dollars of computation hardware at my fingertips. I wouldn't have known about some of the people I've met and learned from. I wouldn't have been granted a $1600 Euro plant ticket to go rub shoulders with the giants of my field.
I've learned more from Wikipedia (no, not the sources... the actual wiki pages) than I could ever have lerned in college. If the information is out there, why pay for a professor to present it to you when we now have a machine that presents it to us for free?
That shows a lacking of your college program, or a failure on your part. As an undergraduate, I learned a ton from a professor who had retired, but still had a full machine shop in the bottom of the main science building as his "office". He didn't teach a class, but he taught more than most of the other professors there. Again, I agree with your first major paragraph. But although that is true, it doesn't mean that a college education is without merit. No offense, (to you and all the rest) but what you're saying more likely applies to CE than to most other college degrees. There's more philosophy and code on the internet than you'd ever be able to get through. Most code can be run on your average desktop. Outside of mainframes, there's not much you can't model (slowly) on affordable hardware.
Just don't apply that to college as a whole - I'm sure that you can learn just as much English Lit online as you can in school. However, there are many fields where that's simply not true. Trust me...I wouldn't be suffering through graduate school right now if I could do this outside of it. I had a decent job, decent pay, and a lot of free time before this. I gave all that up for the things I've described. I'm not about to be running hundreds to thousands of gigaflops at home, with tends to hundreds of terabytes of storage. I can't easily get access to that on the internet. I can't get personal access to the people who are leaders in my field. Sit on a picnic table with them and pick their brain. That's what college can give you. If you can get what you need to do your job on the internet, great. Not everybody can.
This hits the nail on the head, and was what I came here (late) to say as well. When everything is online that people want, the OS doesn't matter. A standards based browser is all that's needed.
I can use all my social networking, Google Docs, photo uploads, IM, email, etc., from almost any OS. My 2 banks and my credit card all support any standards compliant browser. If I can get flash, (and here's to hoping HTML5 kills it) I can get videos from almost every site. (Is Netflix still being asinine about this? They may be a major hold-out.)
Other than games, which are being served on a console for a large percentage of people now, there's little that requires a certain OS for most people's day-to-day use.
Sure, corporate offices may be different, but they've always been different ecosystems. For home users, the "desktop" is becoming very irrelevant.
Of course, we're also seeing the appliance-ization of computers. As everyone moves to smart phones and consoles which now have full internet functionality, there seems to be a major shift from traditional desktop PCs as it is. I'd argue that the desktop PC is more dead than the OS that runs on it. In fact, as the volume of home desktops plummets, being replaced by smart phones and consoles, the chance for Linux to play a significant role may increase. If you're not making a profit due to large volume, the next step is to cut costs. The Windows OS is one pretty significant cost.
Don't post stuff like that - I've been burning karma for a few months saying the same thing. :-) Oddly enough, the post I reply to gets an "Insightful", and I get "off topic". Still...
All this place needs is an editor. If we had that, we'd see the quality shoot up quite a bit. My major hangup is that nowhere else has comments in any useful form. I know it's been a long tradition to complain about the editing here - I've been around for most of slashdot's history. But lately, it's just been insane. Two articles submitted, yet the one without a useful summary or links and filled with grammatical errors gets posted? Repeatedly? I block kdwason due to his ridiculously bad submissions, so he sends his shit to another 'editor', and it gets posted? Really?
Find me another site with a useful comment system, and I'm there.
Well, it seems the rest haven't heard how badly it failed - my hometown newspaper had an ad-supported online edition for years and years. A week or so ago they paywalled it.
I'm wondering how long it will take them to realize that only a dozen or so people visit their website every day now. It's not a large paper, and the bulk of their readership are 50+. If they're going to paywall, they might as well just get off the internet. I highly doubt it's worth keeping an internet presence for the money generated by 1 & 7 day subscriptions.
I came here to say the same - I blocked his articles for the amount of shit like this. Now he submits and gets someone else to post it? Really?
This may well be the straw which breaks my back...
The other problem is when you have a massive influx of immigrants. Compared to a recent Mexican immigrant, I'm pretty "native". I was born here, as were my parents, my grand parents...
Native American is stupid terminology. How long does someone's family need to live in America to be "Native"? 100 years? 1000 years? 10,000 years?
When do you start to call it 'America'? Prior to Columbus, it sure wasn't.
As far as I'm concerned, in our modern times, "Native American" is as bad as "Indian".
FBI Monitoring Station
Keeps the riff-raff out...
Short answer: It depends on how much you're importing, and at what rate. Desalination plants are far cheaper in the long run than importing. But they cost a shitload more money up front. If you can't afford the investment, or aren't importing enough water to reach the cost of the investment, it makes sense to import.
As other posters have pointed out, water is in the range of $1.00-$0.50 US per cubic meter if you desalinate it. 3 billion gallons is only 11 million cubic meters. That's $6-$11 million dollars to desalinate, and probably a bit more than that to transport. Say $20-$50 million to transport, to be very generous. A desalination plant will cost you in the realm of a billion dollars. What possible reason would they want to spend a billion dollars, along with the yearly costs of labor, energy, upkeep, permits, etc? If they were doing 5-10x this much importing, it might start to make sense.
Were you planning to give them your spare desalination plant?
I was at an engineering lecture last week which touched on desalination lightly. The costs for a developed nation are laughably small. The relative cost for a developing nation, of course, is much higher. Generally, it's under $1 US per cubic meter. That's 1000 liters, ~250 gallons.
If you're creating an infrastructure to distribute water being shipped into a port, the cost to desalinate it there isn't going to depend on that infrastructure, as you need it for both.
As a comparison, this would be about $1/6 barrels of oil. I don't know what shipping costs of oil are, but I'm willing to bet it's the same ballpark. (I could only quickly find one number, which was around $1 per barrel of oil. If that's the case, and shipping water is the same cost, it's cheaper to desalinate it.)
End of this ramble is that it's probably cheaper to desalinate, but it requires less investment up front to import.
I agree completely. If you find that place, let me know. I've been looking for a couple months now. And if anyone here decides to recreate slashdot with functional editors, primary sources, and categories that means something, let me know. I'd love to poke my head in, and I'd probably be willing to help out.
Because like me, you haven't found a better alternative yet?
I have more money than I know what to do with
Well, if you're looking for things to do with it, you could support an idiot who went back to grad school a decade late.....I might know one....had to stop drinking nice scotch...talk about a tragedy....
That's why slashdot has editors, instead of being just a user-submitted story aggregation site...
I went back go grad school a decade after my undergrad career. I moved 1000 miles away to do so. Up until this point, I had seen no reason to use Facebook. It seemed pretty stupid. Here's where I am now:
The younger generation uses Facebook in place of IM, Email, and in some cases, text messages. They use it in place of forums, fan sites, and other internet communities. They use it in place of google, notes in desks, graffiti on walls, and bullying in the halls. They use it in place of Craigs List, Ebay, classifieds, and pieces of paper with tear-off-strips with phone numbers on them.
In short, the generation that was high school and college in the mid 2000s has ignored our internet, and instead chosen it poorly implemented in a single website. Yes, it's all poorly done. But it's largely there. As is everyone they know.
I can't stand the bulk of Facebook. But there are a few things that are important. Now that I'm going to school with this crowd, they organize their social events through Facebook. BBQs, pick-up games, birthdays and other drinking events, outings, sports events, open mic nights, etc. It's all organized through Facebook. My choices were either ignore Facebook and not have a social life with my classmates, or suck it up. The other thing which I found awesome was friending my relatives I left 1000 miles away. It gives me a window onto their lives. How my autistic cousins are doing. How my grandparents' health is. How school is going for some of my cousins. My family's trips abroad. My sister's school career. My good friend's sons' sports activities. Stuff I miss, stuff I care about, but I don't have the time to call and ask about. When nothing goes on for my uncle for months, then he suddenly gets promoted, I know about it. If I called all my relatives every week, it'd be a massive time sink, and boring as hell 90% of the time.
Facebook is an RSS feed for the important events in the lives of my friends and family a thousand miles away. That's the real value for me.