Let me start by saying that I think that non-competes are generally bullshit. I personally gave up some benefits to avoid signing one where I work, just on principle.
That said, for high-level people with insider information, it may be a special case that I could be persuaded to accept. In any event, this guy only has 8 months left on his contract. The summary leaves out that vital little detail.
It's a good way to watch TV, so long as you don't mind being a season behind. They also have a good selection of older movies. Much of the AFI top 100 is there... that'll keep you busy. If you really must see a newer release, there's always Red Box.
Okay, I've seen "Odd Jobs". Some people have weird jobs and I don't doubt your claims that you get work done on a toy. Some people make money setting up model railroads, too. But for most, I still stand by my assertion that it's a toy. It is certainly designed as a toy. That you can use it as a tool is great, and yeah, for you maybe Ben's advice holds. For the other 99.999% of the smartphone buying public, applying Franklin's statement is very inappropriate.
As an aside, Ben never got to see microelectronics or mass production. Ben lived in the day where a reasonably educated elite could have a firm grasp of every single scientific book published at the time. It was almost an expectation in some circles. Of course Ben wouldn't be "a huge fan" of people not being to use tools they bought... in his day, anyone could learn to build or alter the tool.
can't find a purebred human is a bit like saying we can't find a purebred dog.
Dog breeding is similar, but different. First of all, you would never buy a "purebred" dog unless the breeder could produce a certificate proving such. That's because I could conceivably breed a golden retriever with an "unpure" dog and get something that looks just like a golden retriever. Thus, a dog "breed" is really just a paper trail and a group of similar features. Most dogs don't have a breed at all - they are mutts. So the whole concept of "breeds" is only useful for the select few who either want or need a specific kind of dog. I'm actually glad you brought up wolves... those are the natural state of dogs. Are there purebred wolves walking around?
Where dogs differ is that the different breeds of dogs differ in ways that are much greater than the ways humans differ. Hell, a Chihuahua and a Great Dane probably can't physically even mate. There is no human analogue.
I also think many would agree that some breeds are smarter and easier to train than others, that it's not just the same mind in the body of everything from a Chihuahua to a Great Dane.
Right, but again you have a high amount of "purity" in dogs. Every Great Dane can have a similar temperament, because the original population of Great Danes was very very small. This is also why purebred dogs have so many genetic disorders - the gene pool is far too shallow. You can find similar human population on islands an such, but in general humans intermingle far too much to make generalizations about temperament and such. If there is strong selection pressure on a population in isolation, sure, humans are just as susceptible as dogs - though we don't get to reproductive age as fast so the effect is much slower. Humans have a knack for getting around, though.
Even just the few centuries of slavery where only the strong were picked, survived and bred have led to quite measurable differences between Afro-Americans and Africans.
I'd love to see your source on this. Don't you think this has just a little to do with the inter-mating with Europeans? Many of Thomas Jefferson's descendants are black, and he was not even an anomaly. How many white masters had teenage sons and female slaves? How many white masters were themselves consorting with a female slave? It was quite common.
It's just a bit more politically correct to use intelligence rather than skin color as deciding factor, if you find any correlation though then hell is loose.
I wouldn't ever try to argue that you will not find common traits correlate. But then this correlation is not very useful, because you'd still have to test for the trait if you actually wanted to do something. As a simple example, if science finds a correlation between math aptitude and folds at the corners of your eyes (Asian-style), you'd still be an idiot to hire a math teacher based on their race.
Not to casually talk about genocide, but the logic is to trim the evolutionary tree much like when you trim a physical tree.
Even if you agree with the concept, I've seen enough horribly pruned trees in my neighborhood to know that humans suck at predicting what should get cut and what should stay. In the long term, natural selection will do a far better job of keep us fit for our environment. In my opinion, people would "prune" the gene pool so that it resembled themselves... naturally, they are the most "fit".
It's the only place where races intermingle anymore.
I still don't know how you define "race" - but you are completely wrong. People in the mountains of India look partly Chinese. People in far eastern Russia look partly Chinese. South America is almost completely racially mixed. The Caribbean is almost completely mixed. Even in Africa, you will see a wide range of skin colors that clearly indicates a mixed heritage.
anyone who != their_native_race is dead too
First you'd have to tell me exactly what a native race is? What arbitrary point in time do you choose to freeze the "races". Is it 600 years ago prior to the European explorations? Is it 1300 years ago when the Muslims conquered Spain? Is it 2000 years ago when the Greeks were intermingling with the Egyptians and the Jews were in Ethiopia?
Take a look at this graphic and tell me what point in time you decided to freeze human migration and declare the races pure. Careful! If you go back 35,000 years you eliminate Native Americans as a race altogether. And if you freeze history 50,000 years ago you won't have any Europeans! But go ahead, keep trying to lump people into arbitrary bins based on their various features if it makes you feel better. Personally, I think green eyes should stay the hell away from blue eyes. God made 'em different races, after all. And since there is a genetic basis to eye color, my completely arbitrary classification must be scientific!
It's "tossed around" because of things like the average American "black" having 1/3 of their genes coming from European ancestors. Do they have a "race"? What about Obama? Does he have a "race"? If you posit that he's 50% "black" and 50% "white", then what of his children? They have a mother with some undetermined amount of European and African ancestry. How many generations do you try to keep track of? How many do you go back with? Do you have some kind of a genetic or physical test that can determine his "race" with any kind of scientific rigor?
Even that chart you linked has all sorts of little red marks in the supposed purple "race". So yes, you can say things like "people with an ancestor from x region are more likely to have y trait". But that is worlds different from being able to toss people into categories. All it takes is for one of those ancestors with y trait to walk over to another part of the world and mate to throw off your classification system... that's not of very much use.
I might side with you if there were any content. The article consisted of some micrographs and a lot of "duh" speculation. I came away with very little new information. It took them a huge block of text to tell me that they don't know what 60% of the chip does.
Last I checked they had to evacuate 20,000 people. Horrible? Yes. In the context of 20,000 people getting killed and hundreds of thousands displaced? Not that bad. Fukushima is part of a larger disaster. The long term economic effect is probably lower than the recent BP oil spill in the US, and I'd wager lower than all of the industrial chemicals that got washed all over the place in the tsunami. Yet we continue to drill for oil and we continue to build industry.
Nuclear is worthy of the same cost-benefit analysis of any other human undertaking.
Coal does not have dangerous side-effects lasting hundreds of thousands or millions of years
That statement is very ambiguous. Coal certainly does have have side-effects that last hundreds of years. I mean, just the toxic streams and open pits from last century should clue you in to that. Thousands? I suppose time will tell. Certainly mercury in fish is a coal problem, and I'm not sure it will go away on the scale of "hundreds" of years - but I'm certainly open to be enlightened if you know of some study of the problem. If you buy into the greenhouse gas problem, then fundamentally altering the climate seems like a "thousands" problem as well.
Nuclear power operators do not pay decommissioning costs up front
How is paying for decommissioning costs prior to plant closure not paying up front? Like I said, they get the estimates wrong (low, naturally) so ratepayers/taxpayers get sacked with some portion of the cleanup - but that's a hell of a lot better than every other industry, where 100% of the cost is picked up by things like Superfund or directly by taxpayers. Many of those Superfund sites are far worse than any nuclear site is likely to get.
Even if "some portion" were paid, it's still a major concern that the remaining costs (in many cases the majority) are indeed "left to taxpayers".
Agreed. Any new plant should have to set aside more money now that we have a better grip on decommissioning costs.
And the problem is that they've gotten snubbed due to politics.
When you have more demand than supply, how else do you decide? I suppose they could auction them, but then people would complain about how that favors the richer facilities - and really it just amounts to another political decision. A lotto might have worked, but then you risk some location out in the sticks getting one. Maybe a lotto combined with high entrance requirements... but then politics would be involved in the entrance requirements.
I think I would have favored putting one at the Smithsonian, and then anyone who could put enough money in escrow to transport and store the thing could enter a lotto for the remaining shuttles.
The same can be said of coal. At least with nukes, they have traditionally required the decommissioning costs be paid up-front. Yes, they have underestimated them - but at least some portion is paid and not left to taxpayers or spread to industry like Superfund.
Most of the world does not consist of large cities surrounded by hydro sources, good winds, bright sunshine, and wide open spaces. Norway can build dams - good for them. That's not going to help places like the US that are all dammed up already. Offshore wind power is great, as is solar and geothermal. As these ramp up, though, I'd much rather have some modern nukes operating than to continue to run these 30-40 year old dinosaurs.
Chernobyl is a boogyman. No one here would (I hope) propose building such a plant. At the time it was built, it was known to be a reckless design in the West, and there aren't any power plants in the West without containment. In other words, even if the whole democratic world was united in being "against" nuclear power in 1983, that reactor still would have been built.
But your relativism doesn't make nuclear desirable. It is another bad (and probably worse) energy source because it is INHERENTLY DANGEROUS!
Coal has killed more people than nuclear. The only thing coal lacks is a roped-off area like Chernobyl - instead it has spread it's poison over the entire planet. And no, I'm not talking about CO2.
And if you replaced all of the coal-fired power plants around the world with nuclear, how many accidents do you think we would be having annually?
I'll pretend this isn't rhetorical and answer your very loaded question. First, would it be wise to replace "all" coal-fired plants with nuclear? I don't think so. You only want nuclear in modern countries with a stable, strong government capable of regulating the plants. Second, nuclear already pumps out 8.4% of the power in the US and coal puts out 23%. We've had exactly 1 major accident in the US (3 Mile Island) in, what, 40 years of commercial nuclear power? So ignore safety advances for the moment and take 1/40 and multiply it by 3.73. You can expect a major accident every 10 years. Of course, that analysis is simplistic and does not account for actually retrofitting plants as safer standards evolve, so it is probably conservative. It is also based on a single accident, so there may not be enough data.
Fucking moron.
You should probably educate yourself a bit before calling someone that.
And some people still wonder why the public are opposed to nuclear power.
I don't wonder why. I see a media that gets readership/viewership with sensationalist headlines. I see a nuclear industry that feels backed into a corner and so releases pro-nuclear statements that are laughable in any context, let alone in the midst of one of the worst nuclear accidents of all time.
But at the end of the day, the facts are these: 1. The direct cause of this nuclear accident was a catastrophic earthquake and tsunami. 2. The earthquake/tsunami has killed thousands - maybe 20,000 when all is said and done. The nuclear accident has killed 0. In the long term, it probably has shortened the lives of some plant workers. I'm sure it will get blamed for a couple of hundred cancers. 4. The earthquake/tsunami has caused hundreds of BILLIONS of dollars in damage. It will take decades to rebuild. The nuclear accident will probably take 10 years or so and hundreds of MILLIONS of dollars to clean up.
In other words, in the context of the greater disaster, Fukushima is a mess and complicates reconstruction and rescue - but it is not really comparable in numeric terms. We should certainly learn lessons from it and retrofit plants using these lessons - and close those that can't be fixed. But abandon nuclear power? In favor of what? Coal?
Slashdot Mirror
So then... we gather that either you are against emotions, law, authority, etc. or you just like to make lists.
Or perhaps
Step 1 ) Remove sensitive information
Hasn't this bitten people in the past when they shared a Word document that had quick save enabled or something like that?
Let me start by saying that I think that non-competes are generally bullshit. I personally gave up some benefits to avoid signing one where I work, just on principle.
That said, for high-level people with insider information, it may be a special case that I could be persuaded to accept. In any event, this guy only has 8 months left on his contract. The summary leaves out that vital little detail.
It's a good way to watch TV, so long as you don't mind being a season behind. They also have a good selection of older movies. Much of the AFI top 100 is there... that'll keep you busy. If you really must see a newer release, there's always Red Box.
some of us do real work on these devices
Okay, I've seen "Odd Jobs". Some people have weird jobs and I don't doubt your claims that you get work done on a toy. Some people make money setting up model railroads, too. But for most, I still stand by my assertion that it's a toy. It is certainly designed as a toy. That you can use it as a tool is great, and yeah, for you maybe Ben's advice holds. For the other 99.999% of the smartphone buying public, applying Franklin's statement is very inappropriate.
As an aside, Ben never got to see microelectronics or mass production. Ben lived in the day where a reasonably educated elite could have a firm grasp of every single scientific book published at the time. It was almost an expectation in some circles. Of course Ben wouldn't be "a huge fan" of people not being to use tools they bought... in his day, anyone could learn to build or alter the tool.
Trading liberty for safety
LOL, I don't think Ben Franklin was talking about toys.
can't find a purebred human is a bit like saying we can't find a purebred dog.
Dog breeding is similar, but different. First of all, you would never buy a "purebred" dog unless the breeder could produce a certificate proving such. That's because I could conceivably breed a golden retriever with an "unpure" dog and get something that looks just like a golden retriever. Thus, a dog "breed" is really just a paper trail and a group of similar features. Most dogs don't have a breed at all - they are mutts. So the whole concept of "breeds" is only useful for the select few who either want or need a specific kind of dog. I'm actually glad you brought up wolves... those are the natural state of dogs. Are there purebred wolves walking around?
Where dogs differ is that the different breeds of dogs differ in ways that are much greater than the ways humans differ. Hell, a Chihuahua and a Great Dane probably can't physically even mate. There is no human analogue.
I also think many would agree that some breeds are smarter and easier to train than others, that it's not just the same mind in the body of everything from a Chihuahua to a Great Dane.
Right, but again you have a high amount of "purity" in dogs. Every Great Dane can have a similar temperament, because the original population of Great Danes was very very small. This is also why purebred dogs have so many genetic disorders - the gene pool is far too shallow. You can find similar human population on islands an such, but in general humans intermingle far too much to make generalizations about temperament and such. If there is strong selection pressure on a population in isolation, sure, humans are just as susceptible as dogs - though we don't get to reproductive age as fast so the effect is much slower. Humans have a knack for getting around, though.
Even just the few centuries of slavery where only the strong were picked, survived and bred have led to quite measurable differences between Afro-Americans and Africans.
I'd love to see your source on this. Don't you think this has just a little to do with the inter-mating with Europeans? Many of Thomas Jefferson's descendants are black, and he was not even an anomaly. How many white masters had teenage sons and female slaves? How many white masters were themselves consorting with a female slave? It was quite common.
It's just a bit more politically correct to use intelligence rather than skin color as deciding factor, if you find any correlation though then hell is loose.
I wouldn't ever try to argue that you will not find common traits correlate. But then this correlation is not very useful, because you'd still have to test for the trait if you actually wanted to do something. As a simple example, if science finds a correlation between math aptitude and folds at the corners of your eyes (Asian-style), you'd still be an idiot to hire a math teacher based on their race.
Not to casually talk about genocide, but the logic is to trim the evolutionary tree much like when you trim a physical tree.
Even if you agree with the concept, I've seen enough horribly pruned trees in my neighborhood to know that humans suck at predicting what should get cut and what should stay. In the long term, natural selection will do a far better job of keep us fit for our environment. In my opinion, people would "prune" the gene pool so that it resembled themselves... naturally, they are the most "fit".
It's the only place where races intermingle anymore.
I still don't know how you define "race" - but you are completely wrong. People in the mountains of India look partly Chinese. People in far eastern Russia look partly Chinese. South America is almost completely racially mixed. The Caribbean is almost completely mixed. Even in Africa, you will see a wide range of skin colors that clearly indicates a mixed heritage.
anyone who != their_native_race is dead too
First you'd have to tell me exactly what a native race is? What arbitrary point in time do you choose to freeze the "races". Is it 600 years ago prior to the European explorations? Is it 1300 years ago when the Muslims conquered Spain? Is it 2000 years ago when the Greeks were intermingling with the Egyptians and the Jews were in Ethiopia?
Take a look at this graphic and tell me what point in time you decided to freeze human migration and declare the races pure. Careful! If you go back 35,000 years you eliminate Native Americans as a race altogether. And if you freeze history 50,000 years ago you won't have any Europeans! But go ahead, keep trying to lump people into arbitrary bins based on their various features if it makes you feel better. Personally, I think green eyes should stay the hell away from blue eyes. God made 'em different races, after all. And since there is a genetic basis to eye color, my completely arbitrary classification must be scientific!
It's "tossed around" because of things like the average American "black" having 1/3 of their genes coming from European ancestors. Do they have a "race"? What about Obama? Does he have a "race"? If you posit that he's 50% "black" and 50% "white", then what of his children? They have a mother with some undetermined amount of European and African ancestry. How many generations do you try to keep track of? How many do you go back with? Do you have some kind of a genetic or physical test that can determine his "race" with any kind of scientific rigor?
Even that chart you linked has all sorts of little red marks in the supposed purple "race". So yes, you can say things like "people with an ancestor from x region are more likely to have y trait". But that is worlds different from being able to toss people into categories. All it takes is for one of those ancestors with y trait to walk over to another part of the world and mate to throw off your classification system... that's not of very much use.
Both? I mean, I know that race has no scientific basis, but surely whatever system you use includes more than two? Or is it just "us" and "them"?
That telescope is going to be pointed at little humans of all colors running around on Earth.
Phew! For a minute there I thought they were going to be racist about their surveillance!
I might side with you if there were any content. The article consisted of some micrographs and a lot of "duh" speculation. I came away with very little new information. It took them a huge block of text to tell me that they don't know what 60% of the chip does.
Last I checked they had to evacuate 20,000 people. Horrible? Yes. In the context of 20,000 people getting killed and hundreds of thousands displaced? Not that bad. Fukushima is part of a larger disaster. The long term economic effect is probably lower than the recent BP oil spill in the US, and I'd wager lower than all of the industrial chemicals that got washed all over the place in the tsunami. Yet we continue to drill for oil and we continue to build industry.
Nuclear is worthy of the same cost-benefit analysis of any other human undertaking.
Coal does not have dangerous side-effects lasting hundreds of thousands or millions of years
That statement is very ambiguous. Coal certainly does have have side-effects that last hundreds of years. I mean, just the toxic streams and open pits from last century should clue you in to that. Thousands? I suppose time will tell. Certainly mercury in fish is a coal problem, and I'm not sure it will go away on the scale of "hundreds" of years - but I'm certainly open to be enlightened if you know of some study of the problem. If you buy into the greenhouse gas problem, then fundamentally altering the climate seems like a "thousands" problem as well.
Nuclear power operators do not pay decommissioning costs up front
How is paying for decommissioning costs prior to plant closure not paying up front? Like I said, they get the estimates wrong (low, naturally) so ratepayers/taxpayers get sacked with some portion of the cleanup - but that's a hell of a lot better than every other industry, where 100% of the cost is picked up by things like Superfund or directly by taxpayers. Many of those Superfund sites are far worse than any nuclear site is likely to get.
Even if "some portion" were paid, it's still a major concern that the remaining costs (in many cases the majority) are indeed "left to taxpayers".
Agreed. Any new plant should have to set aside more money now that we have a better grip on decommissioning costs.
Can't or doesn't?
VM is wholly owned by Sprint.
They also have the Enola Gay and an SR-71. Very cool museum - well worth the trip out there if you are in the DC area.
And the problem is that they've gotten snubbed due to politics.
When you have more demand than supply, how else do you decide? I suppose they could auction them, but then people would complain about how that favors the richer facilities - and really it just amounts to another political decision. A lotto might have worked, but then you risk some location out in the sticks getting one. Maybe a lotto combined with high entrance requirements... but then politics would be involved in the entrance requirements.
I think I would have favored putting one at the Smithsonian, and then anyone who could put enough money in escrow to transport and store the thing could enter a lotto for the remaining shuttles.
The same can be said of coal. At least with nukes, they have traditionally required the decommissioning costs be paid up-front. Yes, they have underestimated them - but at least some portion is paid and not left to taxpayers or spread to industry like Superfund.
"Compensation costs" != cleanup/rebuilding costs
Comparing nuclear to coal is fucking bullshit.
Not in most of the world, it isn't.
Most of the world does not consist of large cities surrounded by hydro sources, good winds, bright sunshine, and wide open spaces. Norway can build dams - good for them. That's not going to help places like the US that are all dammed up already. Offshore wind power is great, as is solar and geothermal. As these ramp up, though, I'd much rather have some modern nukes operating than to continue to run these 30-40 year old dinosaurs.
Chernobyl is a boogyman. No one here would (I hope) propose building such a plant. At the time it was built, it was known to be a reckless design in the West, and there aren't any power plants in the West without containment. In other words, even if the whole democratic world was united in being "against" nuclear power in 1983, that reactor still would have been built.
A coal plant doesn't make large areas of land uninhabitable for decades, and nuclear does, but they can't admit this.
Someone needs to Google "Centralia". Sure, it isn't a major city, but that's as much luck as anything else. Fukushima isn't in a major city, either.
But your relativism doesn't make nuclear desirable. It is another bad (and probably worse) energy source because it is INHERENTLY DANGEROUS!
Coal has killed more people than nuclear. The only thing coal lacks is a roped-off area like Chernobyl - instead it has spread it's poison over the entire planet. And no, I'm not talking about CO2.
And if you replaced all of the coal-fired power plants around the world with nuclear, how many accidents do you think we would be having annually?
I'll pretend this isn't rhetorical and answer your very loaded question. First, would it be wise to replace "all" coal-fired plants with nuclear? I don't think so. You only want nuclear in modern countries with a stable, strong government capable of regulating the plants. Second, nuclear already pumps out 8.4% of the power in the US and coal puts out 23%. We've had exactly 1 major accident in the US (3 Mile Island) in, what, 40 years of commercial nuclear power? So ignore safety advances for the moment and take 1/40 and multiply it by 3.73. You can expect a major accident every 10 years. Of course, that analysis is simplistic and does not account for actually retrofitting plants as safer standards evolve, so it is probably conservative. It is also based on a single accident, so there may not be enough data.
Fucking moron.
You should probably educate yourself a bit before calling someone that.
And some people still wonder why the public are opposed to nuclear power.
I don't wonder why. I see a media that gets readership/viewership with sensationalist headlines. I see a nuclear industry that feels backed into a corner and so releases pro-nuclear statements that are laughable in any context, let alone in the midst of one of the worst nuclear accidents of all time.
But at the end of the day, the facts are these:
1. The direct cause of this nuclear accident was a catastrophic earthquake and tsunami.
2. The earthquake/tsunami has killed thousands - maybe 20,000 when all is said and done. The nuclear accident has killed 0. In the long term, it probably has shortened the lives of some plant workers. I'm sure it will get blamed for a couple of hundred cancers.
4. The earthquake/tsunami has caused hundreds of BILLIONS of dollars in damage. It will take decades to rebuild. The nuclear accident will probably take 10 years or so and hundreds of MILLIONS of dollars to clean up.
In other words, in the context of the greater disaster, Fukushima is a mess and complicates reconstruction and rescue - but it is not really comparable in numeric terms. We should certainly learn lessons from it and retrofit plants using these lessons - and close those that can't be fixed. But abandon nuclear power? In favor of what? Coal?