This person mostly buys:
Chips, butter, bread cheese and deli meats. Risk of heart disease: HIGH. Please note this and consider raising premum... oh great.
So, you don't think you should pay higher premiums if you have a risky life style? Or rather, a life style known to cause problems later in life that would fall directly on a health coverage provider to pay for?
I'm with you. As soon as they stop charging me double because I smoke.
Hmmm. Randall's, Albertson's, and Kroeger's are all the same company. In fact, in that string of grocery stores in the article they listed of companies that said it violated privacy, they are all the same company.:)
When I was in Texas at a Kroeger's, my wife and I went and got a card to get a quick discount, filled it out with fake information. Then the cashier, who just happened to be the assistant manager, chuckled when I told him I had a Safeway's, Albertson's, and Randall's card in my wallet. He said I could've used any of them, they're all owned by the same people.:)
Aha! I just remembered another one. Awhile back my wife and I had a huge fight and we were separated for 10 months, during which time I lived in a swinging bachelor pad. There was this kid in the apartment complex who kept coming over and was really starting to get on my nerves. Well, one day he comes over and asks me for a condom. I had a bunch, hadn't used any of them, and wasn't likely to use any of them in the near future, but the fucker woke me up on my day off to ask me for a condom! SO I told him I'd gone crazy last night, had too much drink, and poked holes in all the condoms. Now that I thought better of it, I didn't want to give him any since they wouldn't work.
I spent 20 minutes arguing with him over whether or not he should use a condom with a hole in it, but the kid never once doubted that I had done it.:)
And I never did get back to sleep, that little bastard. (For the record, when I say 'kid', he was 16)
Hmm, let's see if I can throw more wrenches into the works.
QFC is owned by Starbuck's. So, if you shop at QFC with one of their cards, and you shop at Starbuck's with one of theirs, the parent corporation (Starbuck's, I believe) has access to a lot of information about you, which they can use to do some serious harm. For example, they know how often you buy discounted condoms on your card, they know if you're married and have a family (simply profiling your grocery habits will tell them that), and they know where you go. So you could be having a private affair and they know all about it.
Now, they might decide that your wife is their valued customer who they want to protect. Put yourself in her shoes.
Husband goes on cheating on you without you knowing
Get another husband
Extreme? That's the sort of thing what's-her-face was talking about at the end of the article.
Personally, I shop at Costco and they know all about what I buy. If I really wanted to do something private, like an affair, I wouldn't by supplies for it there. In case of a fight with my wife, she could subpoena the information to use as evidence against me. Not that I'll do anything like that, but you get the idea. Just because the information is private doesn't mean that someone can't use it to do you harm.
When it's all said and done, though, if Costco sold me meat that was going to kill me, I want them to tell me about it. If I bought a rubber from a dude at a gas station, used it, and went back the following week and he told me it was defective and offered a refund, I'd take it and ask for a pregnancy test, and thank him. There are ways to abuse the phrase "for your own good", but there are plenty of ways to use the phrase "for your own good" without abusing it. As long as the company isn't abusing it, I'm fine with it.
I also don't have a problem with a company tracking my spending habits at their store. They can use the aggregate information of all their customers to give better service, lower prices, and so forth, and keep me as a valued customer. Alternately, if I wanted to be a terrorist, I could use this system to establish a spotless persona that would never come under suspicion while purchasing my terrorist supplies in a more secure fashion. Now, if I come under suspicion, I'd have a paper trail that works to my advantage.
I'm all over privacy, believe me. I don't object to this system because there's so many ways I can personally abuse it, at least as many ways as the people with the system could abuse it. I don't want to see the system grow to a point where the government gets direct control over it, either. I don't want the government to ever have access to it. But it's not evil in and of itself, only the purposes to which it is put can be judged good or evil.
OK, I'll do that. The compiler does make a difference. I'm just thinking that we don't take the whole picture into account enough here on slashdot.
You're right about everything, except trying to imply, if that's what you were doing, that he used the 'wrong' compiler. In order to test execution speed of 32-bit vs 64-bit binaries, you need to use the same compiler to build the binaries.
See, it gets complicated when you use different compilers. Yes, GCC is likely to build better-optimized binaries for 32-bit. Yes, GCC has a reputation for not optimizing binaries very well in the first place. But if he didn't use the same compiler for both binaries, the results would have been seriously skewed in answering the question. The results would have called into question why he used different compilers, whether or not the different compilers were equal, and so forth.
To answer the question, he needed a compiler that could build both types of binaries to the same level of optimization, no matter how shitty. He wasn't trying to build the fastest binaries on earth, he was trying to build binaries that could be compared to one another in execution speed, using the same source code, and a compiler that would produce the same shitty executable.
Man, I'm going offtopic, but back in my oil-changing days...
Some new guy had started working, and his neck was redder than desert sand. He told me that his girlfriend's car had a blinker out on the left and he replaced the bulb and the light didn't come back on. I asked him if he checked his blinker fluid. He said he didn't know what blinker fluid was. I told him that blinker fluid sits in a reservoir in the middle of the car, and when you make a turn the fluid flows in the opposite direction of the turn, into the blinkers, to make sure that the electrical connection is good.
He spent 3 hours the next morning, on his day off, calling up parts stores and asking them if they had any blinker fluid. Poor guy. I had to break it to him slowly...
They've at best proved a supposition about a single architecture/process/compiler family. They have not proved a general case. Did they test on amd64? Alpha? Mips? No? Then why are they making unwarranted generalizations? Ah, they're retarded.
Actually, they didn't make generalizations. He very specifically stated that he only tested on a 64-bit Sparc, and an older one at that. He pointed out that while you can make some general conclusions, you can and should run tests on other architectures.
He also pointed out that he only tested a few applications, not a whole bunch of them. He was questioning conventional wisdom and wanted to know if there was any fact behind it, and he determined that there was. He did not determine the entire scope of the facts, and he did not claim to do so.
Sorry, I found it to be an interesting read, but you really have to take the first page seriously when he says "I only tested these things, so I can only conclude based on these tests, and it doesn't prove the general case." If you ignore that, then yes, you'll wind up with what you took away from the article.
Um, did you miss the part about how new air is being blown into the house and stale air being blown out? I didn't specify sizes, so it is safe to assume that the ventilation system would be sized properly. A baffle system allows you to turn off the fans when the air is fresh enough. Presumably, the baffles would be coated with aerogel for insulation as well. It's a solution to your problem.
And you're right, basic refrigeration has been around for awhile.:) Your point is that a habitable house with adequate ventilation can't be heated with a single candle, and I offered a solution. Whether my solution is new or decades old is irrelevant, because it's a solution.
Here's the problem in a little more detail:
To provide adequate ventilation, you have to pump out old air and pump in new air. Well, it doesn't have to be pumped at all, but that's not the point. The point is you have to have old air removed and new air added. When you do this, presumably you would bring in cold air, since you wouldn't be heating the house if the outside air wasn't cold. And you'd have to vent hot air. So, the solution is to remove the heat from outgoing air and insert it into incoming air, keeping the heat within the house and never letting any of it spill out.
This is a problem solved by basic refrigeration. In your refrigerator, your air conditioner, and a number of other gadgets, you put the heat inside the house into the freon, pump it outside, and dump it. In the case of your refrigerator, you're just dumping the heat into the kitchen and removing it from inside the box. I described a system that uses those same basic components to keep heat inside a box rather than remove it, that's all.
Stop and think about it--its EXACTLY the same reason that some people are afraid to fly, but don't mind driving, but statistically are much safer flying. BUT because plane crashes are liable to get far more coverage than even 1 fatality in a car wreck, many people believe flying is more dangerous. (As a note, there are some other reasons for being afraid of flying, but agoraphobia is rarely one of them (although I suppose claustrophobia might be)).
Heh. You reminded me of something. On September 11, 2001, a coworker of mine told me in a much aggrieved voice (and almost got slapped for acting so stupid) that now it's not safe to fly anywhere! Those people will take the planes and crash them all over the place!
I calmly pointed out that even if there were thousands of people in those towers, planes, and surrounding area that were killed, it was still statistically more dangerous to drive. I tried to get him to give me his car, but he was too busy being scared of terrorists to give me those. Had it been a different disaster that didn't provoke paranoia I probably could have gotten his car...
Yeah, but all it would take is one meltdown and we suddenly have a disaster a few orders of magnitude larger than 9/11.
So, let's see, a reactor in an isolated area melts down and kills 5000 people in two towers in manhattan?;)
Anyway, a reactor meltdown doesn't look like a mushroom, sorry. The reason insurance companies won't insure it is almost certainly entirely political and stupid society.
First, we built the A-bomb to kill *lots* of people as fast as possible. Remember, rate of fire is how wars are won, and it translates to rate of destruction. So we built one bomb that could do more damage than hundreds of our other bombs, dropped it twice, doing far less damage than we had already done, and the war was over. Right?
Then, for whatever reasons I've never bothered to find out, several other countries got ahold of "the bomb" and started building their own.
Somewhere along the lines, some scientists figured out how to use the nuclear reaction that was originally discovered and developed for the purpose of killing people instead used for generating power so people can live.
Then the effects of dropping bombs and various other nuclear testing comes out and we get to learn about radioisotopes and nuclear winter and so forth.
Then we get all these public campaigns trying to ban anything that says "nuclear" on it because they're afraid of the doctrine fondly known as Mutually Assured Destruction, toted as the reason the Soviets didn't nuke as and we didn't nuke them.
Chernobyl happens somewhere in the mix and people in the US go crazy because a Russian reactor exploded and killed thousands of people!
Later on, it's quietly published in the US that the Chernobyl disaster didn't really do that much damage after all. It's never mentioned that a fission reactor meltdown doesn't explode like the bombs we dropped in Japan did, because we're all taught that in schools. OR at least, we used to.
Over the next, what, 15 years or so? reporters in the US and others find all kinds of reason to point at Chernobyl as being the entire reason nuclear power is so *bad* for us. These are the same reporters who selectively report on Hussein's murderous past but ignore Bush's murderous present. The same reporters that selectively report what gets people's attention so that more advertisers will pay them more money to keep reporting that tripe, and talking trash about nuclear anything has been getting people's attention since the early parts of the cold war.
IT's really fucking annoying, when you get right to it, that the reason people block nuclear power is because they're too chickenshit to use it. It's actually cleaner than anything we currently use to power ourselves. Sure, storage of waste is a problem, but it's not insurmountable by any means. THere's no pollution dumped into the air hour after hour, and no big payload of pollution dumped anywhere, ever. Just because something says "nuclear" doesn't mean it's bad. My mom got her thyroid under control through "nuclear therapy". WIthout it, she'd be dead as a doornail. Nuclear warfare is bad, just like chemical warfare and biological warfare are all bad. Hell, you don't need a specialized version, you can just say "warfare is bad" and that's good enough. But chemical anything and biological anything both produce lots of good stuff for us.
So, yeah, anyway, the point is I agree with the general consensus that nuclear energy is good, Chernobyl was bad, but if Chernobyl is the worst disaster nuclear power can suffer it's definitely safer than pretty much any other power plant on the planet.
All the bad stuff you hear about Chernobyl is mostly politically motivated anyway. Just because the Russians aren't commies anymore doesn't mean US citizens view them with any less paranoia. And we just like to pull out Chernobyl especially when them Russians start dogging on us for anything in particular.;)
It probably happened when our Martian ancestors nuked the 5th planet for manufacturing weapons of mass destruction. THat plan totally backfired. LUckily, they had already settled the third planet...
The problem is ventilation. Even apart from the issue that you'd suffocate, houses that are too insulated are almost guaranteed get mold problems. You need a constant airflow, and that's where you get the major heat loss.
THe solution is refrigeration.:) I posted this elsewhere, but decided to come back and respond to you where it would be more useful.;)
You need an intake baffle and an exhaust baffle. ON the intake baffle you put a condensor and on the exhaust baffle you put an evaporator. Pump freon through the system, of course. You also need fans to keep the air flow going properly.
So, freon evaporates in the evaporator, sucking up heat from the air that is being blown out of the house. Then it gets pumped and compressed over to the condensor, where it it condenses into liquid and dumps its heat, right into the air blowing into the house. The heat is kept in the house that way.
Now, I realize the goal is energy-efficiency, and adding another refrigerator to your electric bill probably isn't energy-efficient, but it's my opinion that there's a solution to the efficient problems of air conditioning, I just haven't spent a lot of time on it--yet.:)
The solution is already well-known as well. You set up a condensor on your intake baffle and an evaporator on your exhaust baffle. Fresh air blowing into the house gets heat transferred to it and stale air getting blown out of the house transfers its heat. You use freon, of course, to transfer the heat from the exhaust baffle to the intake baffle.
Use some pretty high-powered fans, of course, because you want to make sure your air is flowing the right ways.
Not that this system would significantly affect your heating/cooling bill, since it's just another air conditioner to pay for.
Also, y'all might want to check out this Dallas indie radio station. There used to be substance in country music, and it's still around... under the radar.
As a matter of fact, the country music I generally wind up liking is the stuff with substance. See, while I'm a metalhead, heavy metal has gotten so commercialized in the last 10+ years that I'm finding a lot of the reasons I went to metal in the first place inapplicable now.:( I loved heavy metal back then because it wasn't commercialized, and the bands wrote all their own stuff, for better or for worse, and performed it, and so forth. Rock has been suffering for so many years it spawned the alternative movement in the first place.
Anyway, I find I like Charlie Daniels a lot, especially the song everyone likes, The Devil Down in Georgia. I even worked out the fiddle line on my guitar! It's been awhile since I beat on it, but I'd really like to thrash that one up. It's one of those classic songs that's a good song no matter what genre you try to adapt it to. Johnny Cash is always fun, and Willie Nelson as well (one of the few Austin musicians that ever pulled off a name). There's almost certainly some miscellaneous country bands I like, but it's gonna be just like the blues. That commercial shit you hear on the radio ain't it. Wanna hear the blues? Go to New Orleans, or hit up 6th street in Austin. That's where you hear it. I suspect country music is much the same.
Of course, so is metal, when you get right down to it.:)
My wife has been drifting away from country music in general. She's finally starting to see the manufactured product for what it is. She drifted away from rap for the same reasons. It probably helps that I'm always telling her how great rock'n'roll is.:) She hasn't sworn off the Dixie Chicks, and isn't likely to. We'll see what she does. Shania Twain is in the mix somewhere, but I've got it so buried under Anthrax that it doesn't come up very often.:)
Anyway, good talking to you. I'll probly run into you a bit more sometime.:)
I just learned more about the Dixie Chicks than I ever wanted to know.:) My wife was a fan of them when I met her, in 1995, and she immediately started accusing them of selling out. I see what she means, now.
I had originally thought you had posted complete songs, which would be copyright violation pretty obviously, even to me, and I'm (as I mentioned before) not a lawyer. But running 30-second to 1 minute sound bytes in the context you were running them, that sounds to me firmly like fair use. I thought it was interesting that the article has a guy who was complaining about them being mp3, and I got the impression that if they had been wav or even ogg (don't know if it was available then) they wouldn't have cared.
You've gotta remember that the music industry views mp3 as the sole work of the devil, and articles like the one you linked don't help much (it said that mp3s were CD-quality, and they're not). So it's entirely possible that had you used a different, less useful format, they wouldn't have complained so badly. They might have still, seeing as how it looks like they're trying to rewrite the Dixie Chicks' history...
I realize what I just read is fairly biased, but it does look like they were just after you because they considered your site an expose rather than a fan site. I wonder what Anthrax would do if I threw together a similar site about them? Hell, they'd probably link to it. They've never tried to rewrite their past. (still not sure how I feel about Anthrax since they spammed me)
In any case, I've never been a fan of the Dixie Chicks, and there's only a few country/western songs that I really like. Different folks, different strokes, I guess.;) But it always sucks when a band works really hard to become successful only to turn into a manufactured product. What's the point? I recently left a partnership, and one of the big reasons was because my partner had started worrying more about his interest in the company (and rating it more important than mine) than he did about the company itself. Sell-out, all the way. I can certainly sympathize with those that work their asses off alongside their best friends only to watch their best friends transform, like Michael Jackson in 'Thriller', into the monsters they had always fought not to become. Check out Anthrax and their song Imitation of Life for a much better commentary than I could give.:) It is directed at the hair bands in the '80s, but is every bit relevant to every field of music these days.
Of course the Italians won't need this device, if the space isn't big enough they tend to ram the other cars until it is;)
I've done that before in the US.:) I had parked in a space that had all kinds of room, and then when I came out, one of the cars had moved, and another car had pulled in its place and was touching my bumper. Know that rule about how you need like 6 inches to be able to pull out? Couldn't do it. There was 2 inches of clearance in the front, and none in the back. Luckily, my bumpers lined up with both of the other cars. I told my passengers to close their eyes (there were 4 people in my car with me) and started tapping away 'till there was room.:) Fun!
Not bad, not bad. I think I can beat you, though.:)
2001 Toyota Corolla, 27 years old (me). I was told to park between two poles that were so far apart I could have parked TWO corollas in there. So I pull up next to the front pole, cut the wheel, and turn. Almost smashed the front pole! Crap. Try again. Pull in, doing great, thinking I'm doing perfectly. I finish, declare I'm done, and look over at the guy giving me the test.
"Why don't you step out and look?"
Sure enough, I was 2 feet from the curb, with the white stripe marking the left-hand border of the space running right through the middle of my car. He assured me that that didn't mean I failed the test.
Ironically, I suppose, I went in there later with my big-ass truck. 3 in the tree, manual steering, manual brakes, and parked perfectly the first time.
Moral? Take the test in your daily driver, and *not* your wife's car. Had I taken the test in my truck, I probably would have scored very high, near perfect.:)
For the record, I had to take a driving test at that time because my old license had expired and I had moved to a new state, so they made me take the test.
But won't it? I mean, once we get to the point where parking is achieved by pressing the "Park" button, isn't there a reasonable expectation of such a system not laying tread to the neighbor's pooch? Or ramming the car behind you?
Do airliner pilots have to monitor the aircraft when it's on autopilot? Why?
When you offer automation, it has to come with a level of reliability and safety that the manufacturer could be held accountable if failure leads to damage.
There is no first-gen device that comes with the level of reliability and safety you're requiring, and very few machines every achieve it. Remember, even the best servers only reach 6 9s, and they don't have any moving parts.
Who do you blame if you set your cruise control at 65, and your car accelerates to 130 and causes a wreck? You didn't HAVE to use the automation, so does the blame lie on you?
Bad example. If your car set on cruise control goes too fast for some reason, you're sitting right there to hit the brake, just like you're supposed to do in this parking gadget. Last I heard, cruise control systems were required to shut down upon brake application. Another reason your example is bad is that even with cruise control, you still have to steer the car. That means the car is only doing part of the work. Just like this parking device. It's only doing part of the work. You still have to watch it.
Yeah, sure, one day I expect that cars will have automation systems reliable enough that you can sit in your car, spin the driver's seat around, screw your girlfriend, and speed along on the highway safely at 200+ mph. Or we'll have a better system of transportation. In any case, we're still in the very early days of automation as far as automobiles are concerned, and it's far too early to expect perfection while we're still laying the foundation.
With his reasoning, we should all be walking. THat's right, because that's doing it yourself. EVERY OTHER FORM OF TRANSPORTATION is specifically so we DON'T have to do it ourselves, because we'd never get there fast enough, or at all. Imagine if Columbus had said "Who needs a sailboat? We can swim just fine! Besides, you should always do things yourself."
Seriously, all these little "luxuries" add up over time to provide some serious transportation. Sure, it all looks like luxury right now, but I can think of quite a few concept cars that are supposed to go 200 mph down a freeway. What would you prefer? Plunking along at 70mph across the country because you have to drive yourself, or having a computer control your car to drive you at 200mph across the country? That would make a trip down to see my parents from where I'm at a weekend excursion instead of a 7-day roundtrip drive.
Yes, I prefer no power windows, but I actually prefer power locks. It's much more convenient to make sure *all* of my doors are locked by hitting one button than it is to visually inspect each one. I also prefer power brakes and power steering, for the most part. I drive an old, 4000 pound Chevy pickup that lacks power brakes and power steering, and believe me, those are very useful luxuries.
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This BSD crap is going too far. We might know what causes it (these protein fragments labeled 'prions'), but then again, we're not really sure.
Dude, BSD is dying, hadn't you heard? This BSD crap won't be going on for too much...
Oh wait, you weren't talking about kernels, were you?
This person mostly buys: Chips, butter, bread cheese and deli meats. Risk of heart disease: HIGH. Please note this and consider raising premum... oh great.
So, you don't think you should pay higher premiums if you have a risky life style? Or rather, a life style known to cause problems later in life that would fall directly on a health coverage provider to pay for?
I'm with you. As soon as they stop charging me double because I smoke.
Hmmm. Randall's, Albertson's, and Kroeger's are all the same company. In fact, in that string of grocery stores in the article they listed of companies that said it violated privacy, they are all the same company. :)
When I was in Texas at a Kroeger's, my wife and I went and got a card to get a quick discount, filled it out with fake information. Then the cashier, who just happened to be the assistant manager, chuckled when I told him I had a Safeway's, Albertson's, and Randall's card in my wallet. He said I could've used any of them, they're all owned by the same people. :)
Aha! I just remembered another one. Awhile back my wife and I had a huge fight and we were separated for 10 months, during which time I lived in a swinging bachelor pad. There was this kid in the apartment complex who kept coming over and was really starting to get on my nerves. Well, one day he comes over and asks me for a condom. I had a bunch, hadn't used any of them, and wasn't likely to use any of them in the near future, but the fucker woke me up on my day off to ask me for a condom! SO I told him I'd gone crazy last night, had too much drink, and poked holes in all the condoms. Now that I thought better of it, I didn't want to give him any since they wouldn't work.
I spent 20 minutes arguing with him over whether or not he should use a condom with a hole in it, but the kid never once doubted that I had done it. :)
And I never did get back to sleep, that little bastard. (For the record, when I say 'kid', he was 16)
Hmm, let's see if I can throw more wrenches into the works.
QFC is owned by Starbuck's. So, if you shop at QFC with one of their cards, and you shop at Starbuck's with one of theirs, the parent corporation (Starbuck's, I believe) has access to a lot of information about you, which they can use to do some serious harm. For example, they know how often you buy discounted condoms on your card, they know if you're married and have a family (simply profiling your grocery habits will tell them that), and they know where you go. So you could be having a private affair and they know all about it.
Now, they might decide that your wife is their valued customer who they want to protect. Put yourself in her shoes.
Extreme? That's the sort of thing what's-her-face was talking about at the end of the article.
Personally, I shop at Costco and they know all about what I buy. If I really wanted to do something private, like an affair, I wouldn't by supplies for it there. In case of a fight with my wife, she could subpoena the information to use as evidence against me. Not that I'll do anything like that, but you get the idea. Just because the information is private doesn't mean that someone can't use it to do you harm.
When it's all said and done, though, if Costco sold me meat that was going to kill me, I want them to tell me about it. If I bought a rubber from a dude at a gas station, used it, and went back the following week and he told me it was defective and offered a refund, I'd take it and ask for a pregnancy test, and thank him. There are ways to abuse the phrase "for your own good", but there are plenty of ways to use the phrase "for your own good" without abusing it. As long as the company isn't abusing it, I'm fine with it.
I also don't have a problem with a company tracking my spending habits at their store. They can use the aggregate information of all their customers to give better service, lower prices, and so forth, and keep me as a valued customer. Alternately, if I wanted to be a terrorist, I could use this system to establish a spotless persona that would never come under suspicion while purchasing my terrorist supplies in a more secure fashion. Now, if I come under suspicion, I'd have a paper trail that works to my advantage.
I'm all over privacy, believe me. I don't object to this system because there's so many ways I can personally abuse it, at least as many ways as the people with the system could abuse it. I don't want to see the system grow to a point where the government gets direct control over it, either. I don't want the government to ever have access to it. But it's not evil in and of itself, only the purposes to which it is put can be judged good or evil.
OK, I'll do that. The compiler does make a difference. I'm just thinking that we don't take the whole picture into account enough here on slashdot.
You're right about everything, except trying to imply, if that's what you were doing, that he used the 'wrong' compiler. In order to test execution speed of 32-bit vs 64-bit binaries, you need to use the same compiler to build the binaries.
See, it gets complicated when you use different compilers. Yes, GCC is likely to build better-optimized binaries for 32-bit. Yes, GCC has a reputation for not optimizing binaries very well in the first place. But if he didn't use the same compiler for both binaries, the results would have been seriously skewed in answering the question. The results would have called into question why he used different compilers, whether or not the different compilers were equal, and so forth.
To answer the question, he needed a compiler that could build both types of binaries to the same level of optimization, no matter how shitty. He wasn't trying to build the fastest binaries on earth, he was trying to build binaries that could be compared to one another in execution speed, using the same source code, and a compiler that would produce the same shitty executable.
That's all. :)
Man, I'm going offtopic, but back in my oil-changing days...
Some new guy had started working, and his neck was redder than desert sand. He told me that his girlfriend's car had a blinker out on the left and he replaced the bulb and the light didn't come back on. I asked him if he checked his blinker fluid. He said he didn't know what blinker fluid was. I told him that blinker fluid sits in a reservoir in the middle of the car, and when you make a turn the fluid flows in the opposite direction of the turn, into the blinkers, to make sure that the electrical connection is good.
He spent 3 hours the next morning, on his day off, calling up parts stores and asking them if they had any blinker fluid. Poor guy. I had to break it to him slowly...
They've at best proved a supposition about a single architecture/process/compiler family. They have not proved a general case. Did they test on amd64? Alpha? Mips? No? Then why are they making unwarranted generalizations? Ah, they're retarded.
Actually, they didn't make generalizations. He very specifically stated that he only tested on a 64-bit Sparc, and an older one at that. He pointed out that while you can make some general conclusions, you can and should run tests on other architectures.
He also pointed out that he only tested a few applications, not a whole bunch of them. He was questioning conventional wisdom and wanted to know if there was any fact behind it, and he determined that there was. He did not determine the entire scope of the facts, and he did not claim to do so.
Sorry, I found it to be an interesting read, but you really have to take the first page seriously when he says "I only tested these things, so I can only conclude based on these tests, and it doesn't prove the general case." If you ignore that, then yes, you'll wind up with what you took away from the article.
Um, did you miss the part about how new air is being blown into the house and stale air being blown out? I didn't specify sizes, so it is safe to assume that the ventilation system would be sized properly. A baffle system allows you to turn off the fans when the air is fresh enough. Presumably, the baffles would be coated with aerogel for insulation as well. It's a solution to your problem.
And you're right, basic refrigeration has been around for awhile. :) Your point is that a habitable house with adequate ventilation can't be heated with a single candle, and I offered a solution. Whether my solution is new or decades old is irrelevant, because it's a solution.
Here's the problem in a little more detail:
To provide adequate ventilation, you have to pump out old air and pump in new air. Well, it doesn't have to be pumped at all, but that's not the point. The point is you have to have old air removed and new air added. When you do this, presumably you would bring in cold air, since you wouldn't be heating the house if the outside air wasn't cold. And you'd have to vent hot air. So, the solution is to remove the heat from outgoing air and insert it into incoming air, keeping the heat within the house and never letting any of it spill out.
This is a problem solved by basic refrigeration. In your refrigerator, your air conditioner, and a number of other gadgets, you put the heat inside the house into the freon, pump it outside, and dump it. In the case of your refrigerator, you're just dumping the heat into the kitchen and removing it from inside the box. I described a system that uses those same basic components to keep heat inside a box rather than remove it, that's all.
Stop and think about it--its EXACTLY the same reason that some people are afraid to fly, but don't mind driving, but statistically are much safer flying. BUT because plane crashes are liable to get far more coverage than even 1 fatality in a car wreck, many people believe flying is more dangerous. (As a note, there are some other reasons for being afraid of flying, but agoraphobia is rarely one of them (although I suppose claustrophobia might be)).
Heh. You reminded me of something. On September 11, 2001, a coworker of mine told me in a much aggrieved voice (and almost got slapped for acting so stupid) that now it's not safe to fly anywhere! Those people will take the planes and crash them all over the place!
I calmly pointed out that even if there were thousands of people in those towers, planes, and surrounding area that were killed, it was still statistically more dangerous to drive. I tried to get him to give me his car, but he was too busy being scared of terrorists to give me those. Had it been a different disaster that didn't provoke paranoia I probably could have gotten his car...
Yeah, but all it would take is one meltdown and we suddenly have a disaster a few orders of magnitude larger than 9/11.
So, let's see, a reactor in an isolated area melts down and kills 5000 people in two towers in manhattan? ;)
Anyway, a reactor meltdown doesn't look like a mushroom, sorry. The reason insurance companies won't insure it is almost certainly entirely political and stupid society.
First, we built the A-bomb to kill *lots* of people as fast as possible. Remember, rate of fire is how wars are won, and it translates to rate of destruction. So we built one bomb that could do more damage than hundreds of our other bombs, dropped it twice, doing far less damage than we had already done, and the war was over. Right?
Then, for whatever reasons I've never bothered to find out, several other countries got ahold of "the bomb" and started building their own.
Somewhere along the lines, some scientists figured out how to use the nuclear reaction that was originally discovered and developed for the purpose of killing people instead used for generating power so people can live.
Then the effects of dropping bombs and various other nuclear testing comes out and we get to learn about radioisotopes and nuclear winter and so forth.
Then we get all these public campaigns trying to ban anything that says "nuclear" on it because they're afraid of the doctrine fondly known as Mutually Assured Destruction, toted as the reason the Soviets didn't nuke as and we didn't nuke them.
Chernobyl happens somewhere in the mix and people in the US go crazy because a Russian reactor exploded and killed thousands of people!
Later on, it's quietly published in the US that the Chernobyl disaster didn't really do that much damage after all. It's never mentioned that a fission reactor meltdown doesn't explode like the bombs we dropped in Japan did, because we're all taught that in schools. OR at least, we used to.
Over the next, what, 15 years or so? reporters in the US and others find all kinds of reason to point at Chernobyl as being the entire reason nuclear power is so *bad* for us. These are the same reporters who selectively report on Hussein's murderous past but ignore Bush's murderous present. The same reporters that selectively report what gets people's attention so that more advertisers will pay them more money to keep reporting that tripe, and talking trash about nuclear anything has been getting people's attention since the early parts of the cold war.
IT's really fucking annoying, when you get right to it, that the reason people block nuclear power is because they're too chickenshit to use it. It's actually cleaner than anything we currently use to power ourselves. Sure, storage of waste is a problem, but it's not insurmountable by any means. THere's no pollution dumped into the air hour after hour, and no big payload of pollution dumped anywhere, ever. Just because something says "nuclear" doesn't mean it's bad. My mom got her thyroid under control through "nuclear therapy". WIthout it, she'd be dead as a doornail. Nuclear warfare is bad, just like chemical warfare and biological warfare are all bad. Hell, you don't need a specialized version, you can just say "warfare is bad" and that's good enough. But chemical anything and biological anything both produce lots of good stuff for us.
So, yeah, anyway, the point is I agree with the general consensus that nuclear energy is good, Chernobyl was bad, but if Chernobyl is the worst disaster nuclear power can suffer it's definitely safer than pretty much any other power plant on the planet.
All the bad stuff you hear about Chernobyl is mostly politically motivated anyway. Just because the Russians aren't commies anymore doesn't mean US citizens view them with any less paranoia. And we just like to pull out Chernobyl especially when them Russians start dogging on us for anything in particular. ;)
All right, let's just nip this crazy "drop helium containers from the moon onto dry land" crap in the bud.
We do *not* want Bush sending marines to the moon to root out the people producing He bombs and dropping them onto our heads!
It probably happened when our Martian ancestors nuked the 5th planet for manufacturing weapons of mass destruction. THat plan totally backfired. LUckily, they had already settled the third planet...
Um, can we name it the Hazel Stone?
Better yet, let's name it the Gwen Novak. ;)
The problem is ventilation. Even apart from the issue that you'd suffocate, houses that are too insulated are almost guaranteed get mold problems. You need a constant airflow, and that's where you get the major heat loss.
THe solution is refrigeration. :) I posted this elsewhere, but decided to come back and respond to you where it would be more useful. ;)
You need an intake baffle and an exhaust baffle. ON the intake baffle you put a condensor and on the exhaust baffle you put an evaporator. Pump freon through the system, of course. You also need fans to keep the air flow going properly.
So, freon evaporates in the evaporator, sucking up heat from the air that is being blown out of the house. Then it gets pumped and compressed over to the condensor, where it it condenses into liquid and dumps its heat, right into the air blowing into the house. The heat is kept in the house that way.
Now, I realize the goal is energy-efficiency, and adding another refrigerator to your electric bill probably isn't energy-efficient, but it's my opinion that there's a solution to the efficient problems of air conditioning, I just haven't spent a lot of time on it--yet. :)
The solution is already well-known as well. You set up a condensor on your intake baffle and an evaporator on your exhaust baffle. Fresh air blowing into the house gets heat transferred to it and stale air getting blown out of the house transfers its heat. You use freon, of course, to transfer the heat from the exhaust baffle to the intake baffle.
Use some pretty high-powered fans, of course, because you want to make sure your air is flowing the right ways.
Not that this system would significantly affect your heating/cooling bill, since it's just another air conditioner to pay for.
Also, y'all might want to check out this Dallas indie radio station. There used to be substance in country music, and it's still around... under the radar.
As a matter of fact, the country music I generally wind up liking is the stuff with substance. See, while I'm a metalhead, heavy metal has gotten so commercialized in the last 10+ years that I'm finding a lot of the reasons I went to metal in the first place inapplicable now. :( I loved heavy metal back then because it wasn't commercialized, and the bands wrote all their own stuff, for better or for worse, and performed it, and so forth. Rock has been suffering for so many years it spawned the alternative movement in the first place.
Anyway, I find I like Charlie Daniels a lot, especially the song everyone likes, The Devil Down in Georgia. I even worked out the fiddle line on my guitar! It's been awhile since I beat on it, but I'd really like to thrash that one up. It's one of those classic songs that's a good song no matter what genre you try to adapt it to. Johnny Cash is always fun, and Willie Nelson as well (one of the few Austin musicians that ever pulled off a name). There's almost certainly some miscellaneous country bands I like, but it's gonna be just like the blues. That commercial shit you hear on the radio ain't it. Wanna hear the blues? Go to New Orleans, or hit up 6th street in Austin. That's where you hear it. I suspect country music is much the same.
Of course, so is metal, when you get right down to it. :)
My wife has been drifting away from country music in general. She's finally starting to see the manufactured product for what it is. She drifted away from rap for the same reasons. It probably helps that I'm always telling her how great rock'n'roll is. :) She hasn't sworn off the Dixie Chicks, and isn't likely to. We'll see what she does. Shania Twain is in the mix somewhere, but I've got it so buried under Anthrax that it doesn't come up very often. :)
Anyway, good talking to you. I'll probly run into you a bit more sometime. :)
I just learned more about the Dixie Chicks than I ever wanted to know. :) My wife was a fan of them when I met her, in 1995, and she immediately started accusing them of selling out. I see what she means, now.
I had originally thought you had posted complete songs, which would be copyright violation pretty obviously, even to me, and I'm (as I mentioned before) not a lawyer. But running 30-second to 1 minute sound bytes in the context you were running them, that sounds to me firmly like fair use. I thought it was interesting that the article has a guy who was complaining about them being mp3, and I got the impression that if they had been wav or even ogg (don't know if it was available then) they wouldn't have cared.
You've gotta remember that the music industry views mp3 as the sole work of the devil, and articles like the one you linked don't help much (it said that mp3s were CD-quality, and they're not). So it's entirely possible that had you used a different, less useful format, they wouldn't have complained so badly. They might have still, seeing as how it looks like they're trying to rewrite the Dixie Chicks' history...
I realize what I just read is fairly biased, but it does look like they were just after you because they considered your site an expose rather than a fan site. I wonder what Anthrax would do if I threw together a similar site about them? Hell, they'd probably link to it. They've never tried to rewrite their past. (still not sure how I feel about Anthrax since they spammed me)
In any case, I've never been a fan of the Dixie Chicks, and there's only a few country/western songs that I really like. Different folks, different strokes, I guess. ;) But it always sucks when a band works really hard to become successful only to turn into a manufactured product. What's the point? I recently left a partnership, and one of the big reasons was because my partner had started worrying more about his interest in the company (and rating it more important than mine) than he did about the company itself. Sell-out, all the way. I can certainly sympathize with those that work their asses off alongside their best friends only to watch their best friends transform, like Michael Jackson in 'Thriller', into the monsters they had always fought not to become. Check out Anthrax and their song Imitation of Life for a much better commentary than I could give. :) It is directed at the hair bands in the '80s, but is every bit relevant to every field of music these days.
Of course the Italians won't need this device, if the space isn't big enough they tend to ram the other cars until it is ;)
I've done that before in the US. :) I had parked in a space that had all kinds of room, and then when I came out, one of the cars had moved, and another car had pulled in its place and was touching my bumper. Know that rule about how you need like 6 inches to be able to pull out? Couldn't do it. There was 2 inches of clearance in the front, and none in the back. Luckily, my bumpers lined up with both of the other cars. I told my passengers to close their eyes (there were 4 people in my car with me) and started tapping away 'till there was room. :) Fun!
Not bad, not bad. I think I can beat you, though. :)
2001 Toyota Corolla, 27 years old (me). I was told to park between two poles that were so far apart I could have parked TWO corollas in there. So I pull up next to the front pole, cut the wheel, and turn. Almost smashed the front pole! Crap. Try again. Pull in, doing great, thinking I'm doing perfectly. I finish, declare I'm done, and look over at the guy giving me the test.
"Why don't you step out and look?"
Sure enough, I was 2 feet from the curb, with the white stripe marking the left-hand border of the space running right through the middle of my car. He assured me that that didn't mean I failed the test.
Ironically, I suppose, I went in there later with my big-ass truck. 3 in the tree, manual steering, manual brakes, and parked perfectly the first time.
Moral? Take the test in your daily driver, and *not* your wife's car. Had I taken the test in my truck, I probably would have scored very high, near perfect. :)
For the record, I had to take a driving test at that time because my old license had expired and I had moved to a new state, so they made me take the test.
But won't it? I mean, once we get to the point where parking is achieved by pressing the "Park" button, isn't there a reasonable expectation of such a system not laying tread to the neighbor's pooch? Or ramming the car behind you?
Do airliner pilots have to monitor the aircraft when it's on autopilot? Why?
When you offer automation, it has to come with a level of reliability and safety that the manufacturer could be held accountable if failure leads to damage.
There is no first-gen device that comes with the level of reliability and safety you're requiring, and very few machines every achieve it. Remember, even the best servers only reach 6 9s, and they don't have any moving parts.
Who do you blame if you set your cruise control at 65, and your car accelerates to 130 and causes a wreck? You didn't HAVE to use the automation, so does the blame lie on you?
Bad example. If your car set on cruise control goes too fast for some reason, you're sitting right there to hit the brake, just like you're supposed to do in this parking gadget. Last I heard, cruise control systems were required to shut down upon brake application. Another reason your example is bad is that even with cruise control, you still have to steer the car. That means the car is only doing part of the work. Just like this parking device. It's only doing part of the work. You still have to watch it.
Yeah, sure, one day I expect that cars will have automation systems reliable enough that you can sit in your car, spin the driver's seat around, screw your girlfriend, and speed along on the highway safely at 200+ mph. Or we'll have a better system of transportation. In any case, we're still in the very early days of automation as far as automobiles are concerned, and it's far too early to expect perfection while we're still laying the foundation.
LOL
Seriously, to respond to the GP poster anyway...
With his reasoning, we should all be walking. THat's right, because that's doing it yourself. EVERY OTHER FORM OF TRANSPORTATION is specifically so we DON'T have to do it ourselves, because we'd never get there fast enough, or at all. Imagine if Columbus had said "Who needs a sailboat? We can swim just fine! Besides, you should always do things yourself."
Seriously, all these little "luxuries" add up over time to provide some serious transportation. Sure, it all looks like luxury right now, but I can think of quite a few concept cars that are supposed to go 200 mph down a freeway. What would you prefer? Plunking along at 70mph across the country because you have to drive yourself, or having a computer control your car to drive you at 200mph across the country? That would make a trip down to see my parents from where I'm at a weekend excursion instead of a 7-day roundtrip drive.
Yes, I prefer no power windows, but I actually prefer power locks. It's much more convenient to make sure *all* of my doors are locked by hitting one button than it is to visually inspect each one. I also prefer power brakes and power steering, for the most part. I drive an old, 4000 pound Chevy pickup that lacks power brakes and power steering, and believe me, those are very useful luxuries.
PS. Offtopic sidenote: It's nice to see the Linux big boys in here with random Finnish coders like myself :)
Maybe you should re-read his username and look at his number, it's higher than mine. :)
His username is Eric S. Rayrnond. :)
It suprised me so much that I nearly dropped my razor into my corn flakes ;-)
Phew! I'm glad you avoided that accident!
Actually, the only sexism here is in your post. Nice try, but try again. :)
He did *not* say "Bitches need mo' time fo' talkin' on their cells, slapping the ho' kids, and puttin' on make up." :)
heading for that -1 Troll mod again