Yes that's why the problem with the high speed rail plan is political, not technical.
Can you imagine the size of the shitstorm that would happen if the government nabbed all that land? It would be insane. The lawsuits alone would cost billions.
On the other hand, a bunch of pylons is fine - they don't split your land in half, and the footprint is relatively small.
Yes, the actual high speed rail technology is a concept that's been done before - however, stomping over all of that privately owned land between LA and SF is a political concept that's completely infeasible at this point in time.
Although Elon Musk is using a bunch of existing technology in new ways, his plan is politically feasible - and it's not like we would just start building the Hyperloop without doing a proof-of-concept first. If it turns out that the idea doesn't scale, we'd do something else.
Those would be terrible in practice though - crud would accumulate in the ridges, and it would get in the way when you want to do something wherever it is.
Yes, because professional snipers in the world's most-funded army are going to use an off-the-shelf commercial product, and not say some super expensive custom-made equipment that exactly fits their mission parameters.
They're totally going to use some equipment that basically amounts to an iPod wired to a laser and duct taped to their rifle.
Are there climatologists who claim global warming will destroy civilization?
Because from what I've seen, they mostly just say it'll cause drastic changes over the next hundred years, which is fairly well supported; whether or not those changes cause some sort of societal collapse depends on how we handle them.
Erm have you actually read Christy's stuff? He disagrees on the magnitude of the effect of climate change on humans, the quantity of our contribution, and which mitigation measures we should take if any - not about whether or not climate change is happening, or if we contribute anything to it.
And there are real scientists, respected climatologists, who are asking "how do we know?" about global warming. And some are coming to different conclusions.
Name one who isn't Richard Lindzen, and you might have a point. Until then you're pretty much just making stuff up.
I don't want to fund research on gun violence either.
Well congratulations then, that's actually been passed into law. It's nearly impossible for academics to get the raw data they would need to do research, entirely due to that one amendment to some random bill.
The overall impression is that life tends to "stagnate": once life evolves into an efficient survival mechanism, there's no pressure to evolve further. Evolution aims at being a better "fit" for the unchanging environment, but more complexity is simply not needed.
Yeah, one thing to keep in mind is that our world has had several such plateaus, during which (as far as we can tell) no sentient life evolved.
I wouldn't be surprised if life is exceptionally common out there in the universe, but it really seems like life that's capable of leaving its planet is nearly unheard of.
My point was that even with Google having not having said even a single peep about fiber in the Bay Area at all, I think they're still more likely to come around and wire up my parents house than Verizon is - despite Verizon having announced their fiber plan eight years ago.
My parents live in the Bay Area, and my dad's been talking about how the very moment Verizon FIOS shows up at our house he's buying it.
He's been saying that since 2005.
It's been eight goddamn years and Verizon has been dragging their asses the whole time. At this rate, Google Fiber will get to my parent's area before Verizon pulls collective their thumbs out of their asses.
The Ogre: Designer's Edition kickstarter is going to ship about a year after their initial estimate, largely because the amount of support they got was ridiculously over their initial expectations.
Same thing with the Shadowrun Returns project, to the point where that was basically the first thing Jordan said in the first video update after the Kickstarter ended.
You just have to take Miyamoto's words to heart - a delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is bad forever.
Simcity was cool in the 80's & early 90's, but now? I doubt it.
Wow, do you really think that? I hope you're just being bombastic for the sake of karma, because it's flat out not right.
The SimWhatever line of games have always had significantly wider appeal than "core" games like X-Wing vs Tie Fighter. Just look at how many people played The Sims, and how much money EA made off of that series - it's ridiculous. Any game that has this sort of mass appeal is going to sell well. There's people out there who haven't played a computer game in decades lined up to buy the new SimCity, just because they remember playing one of the older versions when they were younger. Even if you don't think it's "cool", there's a few million people out there who disagree with you.
The difference is, this is the first time anyone has tried to pull these always-online DRM shenanigans with a well-known mass market game. In fact, that's probably why there's been such a huge outcry - a lot of people are actually buying the game, and realizing that it's unplayable as released. They're not as willing to take EA's bullshit as the benighted Diablo fanboys who suffered through Error 37, so this time we're actually seeing effective backlash.
I don't think you understand how communications are "blocked". It's not like the enemy puts up some sort of magical barrier that keeps radio waves from going to their destination; what they do is flood every wavelength they can reach with noise, making it so the drones can't hear the base station.
The problem with that is it makes whatever's doing the blocking a huge target - it's literally like putting up a huge glowing sign saying "blow me up, I'm a military asset". That sort of blocking would only last as long as it takes to blow up its location with whatever artillery you have handy.
The result is that the most effective communication happens in person. Period.
People keep on making this mistake here.
The most effective communication FOR YOU happens in person. Communication is a skill, and one you're refusing to learn.
You are a manager. It is your job to communicate. If you are having trouble communicating with some of your employees, it is your job to figure out how to communicate with them. If you are so bad at communicating with remote workers that you are required to bring them in house full-time just to do your job, that is a failure on your part.
And that's okay, really - since you're the manager, you do have the latitude to make other people's lives worse in order to cover for your personal failings. It's part of the great power that comes with being in charge of people. It's just not the sort of thing you should be expounding as some sort of immutable "the way things are", since there's plenty of companies out there who manage it.
Nobody talked to each other, requirements were mis-interpreted, and every little thing had to be documented because nobody was in the room when changes were made. Decisions (code and business) that could have been made over a 15 minute conversation instead took days of E-mail chains.
It sounds like your office had a severe communication issue, which you resolved by getting people to talk to each other.
There's ways to do that which don't rely on putting everyone in the same room. Yes, they require more discipline, but it's worked great for other companies - for instance, here's a StackOverflow blog post about it.
Thing is though that the at-will employment relationship is very much lopsided in favor of the employer.
Sure, you can just quit and walk away whenever you want to - but why would you do that? Your boss sucks? The environment is terrible? You've got a better offer somewhere else? In pretty much every case, the professional thing is to tough it out for two weeks and give notice at your current employer.
There's almost nothing, short of illegal activities or conditions, that makes it okay to just walk away without warning - while in theory you have the power to do so, in practice actually doing so without a really really good reason will get you blackballed in the industry as an untrustworthy flake.
And even if you do decide to just walk out, it's still not something you can do on a whim - you really need to make sure you've got something to keep you afloat while looking for a new job, if you're going to just abandon ship like that. Since you'll have to plan it anyway, there's really no reason to give your current employer the middle finger and just walk out on them.
On the other hand, in an at-will environment, the company can fire you for no reason whenever they want to. And they will. The company has pretty much zero incentive to give warning, and garners zero negative publicity for doing so. They're not going to worry about your mortgage payments, or how you're going to find money for food or gas - they'll just do it, preferably out of the blue.
So yeah, while "at will" sounds like a great system, in practice it hands all the power over to the employer while retaining nothing for the employees.
Dude, are you seriously trying to argue that a Tesla employee told the reporter "sure man, I know the car's only displaying 32 miles of charge left but you're totally okay to go for 61 miles"?
Here's an image where the Tesla blog highlighted the data this idiot published himself - he knew the car was saying "you've got 32 miles left", he knew his next stop was more than 32 miles away, and he in fact published that he drove 51 miles, 19 of which were on an "empty" battery.
The thing is, the days really do have to be mandatory - otherwise, you get those people who basically live in the office and never use vacation time ruining it for everyone else. They almost never do more work, they're just slower at it (because they're burnt out from never taking any time off, it's a chicken and egg thing I guess). The worst part is that because "butts in seats" is an easily quantifiable metric (significantly easier than, say, "work quality" or "features completed"), managers tend to even encourage that self-destructive behavior.
That's pretty much how the USA got to where it is right now, in fact - we have the worst time off laws of almost any nation, and it's largely because of the ridiculously overblown Protestant "you should either be working, eating or sleeping" work ethic. We would probably get more done as a country if we had more time off.
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Yes that's why the problem with the high speed rail plan is political, not technical.
Can you imagine the size of the shitstorm that would happen if the government nabbed all that land? It would be insane. The lawsuits alone would cost billions.
On the other hand, a bunch of pylons is fine - they don't split your land in half, and the footprint is relatively small.
Yes, the actual high speed rail technology is a concept that's been done before - however, stomping over all of that privately owned land between LA and SF is a political concept that's completely infeasible at this point in time.
Although Elon Musk is using a bunch of existing technology in new ways, his plan is politically feasible - and it's not like we would just start building the Hyperloop without doing a proof-of-concept first. If it turns out that the idea doesn't scale, we'd do something else.
Maximum capacity of something that will never get fucking built is utterly irrelevant.
The current high speed rail plan is so completely infeasible, you might as well say the system will have infinite capacity.
The border patrol considers everything within a hundred miles of any coast or national border to be under its jurisdiction.
Here's a map of what that looks like. Note that it completely covers pretty much all of the major population centers.
Those would be terrible in practice though - crud would accumulate in the ridges, and it would get in the way when you want to do something wherever it is.
Flush ones would be the way to go.
Yes, because professional snipers in the world's most-funded army are going to use an off-the-shelf commercial product, and not say some super expensive custom-made equipment that exactly fits their mission parameters.
They're totally going to use some equipment that basically amounts to an iPod wired to a laser and duct taped to their rifle.
Are there climatologists who claim global warming will destroy civilization?
Because from what I've seen, they mostly just say it'll cause drastic changes over the next hundred years, which is fairly well supported; whether or not those changes cause some sort of societal collapse depends on how we handle them.
Erm have you actually read Christy's stuff? He disagrees on the magnitude of the effect of climate change on humans, the quantity of our contribution, and which mitigation measures we should take if any - not about whether or not climate change is happening, or if we contribute anything to it.
Name one who isn't Richard Lindzen, and you might have a point. Until then you're pretty much just making stuff up.
Well congratulations then, that's actually been passed into law. It's nearly impossible for academics to get the raw data they would need to do research, entirely due to that one amendment to some random bill.
Yeah, one thing to keep in mind is that our world has had several such plateaus, during which (as far as we can tell) no sentient life evolved.
I wouldn't be surprised if life is exceptionally common out there in the universe, but it really seems like life that's capable of leaving its planet is nearly unheard of.
My point was that even with Google having not having said even a single peep about fiber in the Bay Area at all, I think they're still more likely to come around and wire up my parents house than Verizon is - despite Verizon having announced their fiber plan eight years ago.
My parents live in the Bay Area, and my dad's been talking about how the very moment Verizon FIOS shows up at our house he's buying it.
He's been saying that since 2005.
It's been eight goddamn years and Verizon has been dragging their asses the whole time. At this rate, Google Fiber will get to my parent's area before Verizon pulls collective their thumbs out of their asses.
Which, I think, is the point of Google Fiber.
Dude, some ISPs are already injecting ads into web content that you access through them. If it's a choice between that and Google knowing that I look at Slashdot ten times a day, I'm pretty okay with the loss of privacy.
The Ogre: Designer's Edition kickstarter is going to ship about a year after their initial estimate, largely because the amount of support they got was ridiculously over their initial expectations.
Same thing with the Shadowrun Returns project, to the point where that was basically the first thing Jordan said in the first video update after the Kickstarter ended.
You just have to take Miyamoto's words to heart - a delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is bad forever.
There's still $5 games on Kickstarter, it's just gotten big enough thay now there's $20 and $30 games too.
Wow, do you really think that? I hope you're just being bombastic for the sake of karma, because it's flat out not right.
The SimWhatever line of games have always had significantly wider appeal than "core" games like X-Wing vs Tie Fighter. Just look at how many people played The Sims, and how much money EA made off of that series - it's ridiculous. Any game that has this sort of mass appeal is going to sell well. There's people out there who haven't played a computer game in decades lined up to buy the new SimCity, just because they remember playing one of the older versions when they were younger. Even if you don't think it's "cool", there's a few million people out there who disagree with you.
The difference is, this is the first time anyone has tried to pull these always-online DRM shenanigans with a well-known mass market game. In fact, that's probably why there's been such a huge outcry - a lot of people are actually buying the game, and realizing that it's unplayable as released. They're not as willing to take EA's bullshit as the benighted Diablo fanboys who suffered through Error 37, so this time we're actually seeing effective backlash.
I imagine whoever "snitched" only did so after they realized that the EU was being completely idiotic and not checking up on their own.
That's probably because there's actually been competition in your area; if there's nobody but TWC in your area, your service isn't changing.
I don't think you understand how communications are "blocked". It's not like the enemy puts up some sort of magical barrier that keeps radio waves from going to their destination; what they do is flood every wavelength they can reach with noise, making it so the drones can't hear the base station.
The problem with that is it makes whatever's doing the blocking a huge target - it's literally like putting up a huge glowing sign saying "blow me up, I'm a military asset". That sort of blocking would only last as long as it takes to blow up its location with whatever artillery you have handy.
People keep on making this mistake here.
The most effective communication FOR YOU happens in person. Communication is a skill, and one you're refusing to learn.
You are a manager. It is your job to communicate. If you are having trouble communicating with some of your employees, it is your job to figure out how to communicate with them. If you are so bad at communicating with remote workers that you are required to bring them in house full-time just to do your job, that is a failure on your part.
And that's okay, really - since you're the manager, you do have the latitude to make other people's lives worse in order to cover for your personal failings. It's part of the great power that comes with being in charge of people. It's just not the sort of thing you should be expounding as some sort of immutable "the way things are", since there's plenty of companies out there who manage it.
It sounds like your office had a severe communication issue, which you resolved by getting people to talk to each other.
There's ways to do that which don't rely on putting everyone in the same room. Yes, they require more discipline, but it's worked great for other companies - for instance, here's a StackOverflow blog post about it.
Thing is though that the at-will employment relationship is very much lopsided in favor of the employer.
Sure, you can just quit and walk away whenever you want to - but why would you do that? Your boss sucks? The environment is terrible? You've got a better offer somewhere else? In pretty much every case, the professional thing is to tough it out for two weeks and give notice at your current employer.
There's almost nothing, short of illegal activities or conditions, that makes it okay to just walk away without warning - while in theory you have the power to do so, in practice actually doing so without a really really good reason will get you blackballed in the industry as an untrustworthy flake.
And even if you do decide to just walk out, it's still not something you can do on a whim - you really need to make sure you've got something to keep you afloat while looking for a new job, if you're going to just abandon ship like that. Since you'll have to plan it anyway, there's really no reason to give your current employer the middle finger and just walk out on them.
On the other hand, in an at-will environment, the company can fire you for no reason whenever they want to. And they will. The company has pretty much zero incentive to give warning, and garners zero negative publicity for doing so. They're not going to worry about your mortgage payments, or how you're going to find money for food or gas - they'll just do it, preferably out of the blue.
So yeah, while "at will" sounds like a great system, in practice it hands all the power over to the employer while retaining nothing for the employees.
Dude, are you seriously trying to argue that a Tesla employee told the reporter "sure man, I know the car's only displaying 32 miles of charge left but you're totally okay to go for 61 miles"?
Here's an image where the Tesla blog highlighted the data this idiot published himself - he knew the car was saying "you've got 32 miles left", he knew his next stop was more than 32 miles away, and he in fact published that he drove 51 miles, 19 of which were on an "empty" battery.
The thing is, the days really do have to be mandatory - otherwise, you get those people who basically live in the office and never use vacation time ruining it for everyone else. They almost never do more work, they're just slower at it (because they're burnt out from never taking any time off, it's a chicken and egg thing I guess). The worst part is that because "butts in seats" is an easily quantifiable metric (significantly easier than, say, "work quality" or "features completed"), managers tend to even encourage that self-destructive behavior.
That's pretty much how the USA got to where it is right now, in fact - we have the worst time off laws of almost any nation, and it's largely because of the ridiculously overblown Protestant "you should either be working, eating or sleeping" work ethic. We would probably get more done as a country if we had more time off.