Someone needs to mod you up. I won't mod Anonymous Cowards on principle (and don't have any points now anyway), but...I was going to write a huge screed saying why the grandparent post is idiotic, but you summed it up so much more eloquently than I could ever have brought myself to do.
Who are these foreigners who are so altruistic as to log in to Netflix -- thus far, a US-only service -- to rate a movie and write a review of it wholly for the benefit of people subscribed to a service the reviewers themselves cannot benefit from?
Come to that, can you even enter a rating and/or review without being a subscriber?
It costs about 50,000 miles worth of gasoline, at 25mpg average, to build a new car (energy cost). Even if you upgraded from a 25 mpg old car (like mine) to a 50mpg hybrid, the gas savings are not going to be enough to offset that initial manufacturing cost.
A lot of others have questioned the accuracy of these numbers, but let's assume they're true.
Upgrading from a 25mpg to a 50mpg car saves you the equivalent of 25mpg, right? If your new car cost the energy equivalent of 50,000 miles at 25mpg, it costs 2000 gallons of gas. You're saving 25mpg, and so your break-even point is 50,000 miles. So as long as you drive your new car at least 50,000 miles (or, more accurately, you and all subsequent owners of your new 50mpg car drive it a total of 50,000 miles or more), we've all come out ahead by saving energy.
Visible light is roughly from 380 to 750 nm, which corresponds to frequencies of 400 to 790 THz. That's a bandwidth of 390 THz.
The article says the thingamajig in question operates over "wavelengths of light ranging from about 1 to 18 gigahertz", which I'm going to assume means frequencies from 1 to 18 GHz, which comes to a bandwidth of 17 Ghz.
390 THz / 17 GHz = 22,941.1765.
So, the visible light spectrum represents a bandwidth of only a bit more than four orders of magnitude more than the thingamajig's ability.
Have I calculated something wrong, or is the article wildly inaccurate?
This is so boring, and I'm only wasting my time responding because I want to encourage people not to post stuff like this.
Why? Is it preventing you from seeing a more deserving story?
Or maybe it represents a flood of information you can't handle, being the only story posted to the front page that hour?
I'm thinking maybe someone doesn't like that Obama got elected, or perhaps that people are enthused about him having been elected, and would prefer anything Obama-related to be pretended away.
I was a little taken aback that Montalban made the front page here, but McGoohan didn't. I advise everyone to go to the firehose and rememdy the situation.
I'd say the categorization you mention is warranted and then some. Licensing is set up on a thing because it would be a danger to the public to allow just anyone to do that thing. I defy anyone here to honestly argue that medical licensing is just a bunch of unnecessary Big Brother meddling.
You guys are all giving each other high fives over Obama's FCC pick, and what you do not get is that commercially, he's going to be a very strong IP guy and a lot of you are going to be disappointed in that.
Think, people! How does a man who does venture capital for web startups NOT wind up being strongly in favor of copyright enforcement, software patents, and all the litigation that this board has come to despise?
Small problem: the FCC has nothing to do with Imaginary Property, copyright enforcement, nor software patents. Thank you, drive through.
Bush brought us $4/gallon gasoline to appease his corporate masters, and Obama's going to kill the open internet, to do the same.
Wow, you really are a loon. The open Internet pretty much made Obama President. Even if you're so cynical about him (before he's even taken office, mind you) that you think he's purely in it for the cash, why would he bite the hand that feeds him?
A long time ago (we're talkin' 1987 or so here), I wrote a Klondike solitaire game for the PC (CGA, whoo hoo). One of the controls was to toggle auto-play on/off. When enabled, the game would play for you (according to some algorithm I made up[1]). There was even a speed control too, so you could slow it down to see it doing its stuff, or speed up, to the point of having it finish off the game in a flash. It would even quit the game when it saw there were no further possible moves.
Prior to that, I had a history of modifying preexisting BASIC games to self-play, just for fun, and to see how far I could theoretically go if I had perfect and infinitely fast gaming reflexes (which is far from the reality...).
[1] I remember running a test to see how often it won if it played the whole game start to finish -- it ended up winning about 1/15 of the time (this was using single-card flips from the hand).
Um...wouldn't planting trees be a (very small) way of...say it with me...offsetting your CO2 emissions?
Unless you believe that it isn't possible to spend money to remove CO2 from the atmosphere, then the concept of carbon offsets are completely valid. If you have a problem with the way a particular carbon-offset company accomplishes the task (or fails to), then point a finger and name a name. Otherwise, shut up about what you haven't thought out.
This "haw haw, carbon offsets are like Catholic indulgences, haw haw" crap people keep spewing when they want to shrug off their lack of doing anything to be a part of the solution is insulting to the intelligence. It says that the concept of removing CO2 from the atmosphere is the same as the concept of removing sin from one's soul. Last I checked, CO2 is pretty well-established as something that really exists and can really be removed from the atmosphere, using physical processes. Duh?
If your goal is to be able to repel, on a permanent basis, the government (in the form of the police or military or both), or to overthrow the government completely, you're going to need quite a bit more than a gun. Or many guns. Or a whole army of your own, complete with modern armaments and vehicles.
I know what you're going to say next: what about Iraq? To that, I say: better sell those guns and use the money to take IED-building classes, because that's what's been the only thing coming close to keeping the occupiers bothered.
Hammers might be a bad example, but guns are a lot less dangerous than cars. In fact, we are all much more likely to be killed by a car than a gun.
Firearms are involved in 0.6% of accidental deaths nationally. Most accidental deaths involve, or are due to: motor vehicles (39%),
Uh-huh. And more people drown per year than die of plutonium poisoning. Clearly, you're safer swallowing plutonium than water. Right?
Now, let's back up and ask the correct question: what is the probability of being killed, given a certain amount of time hanging around a car vs. a gun? I'm guessing you get a very different answer.
Unlike a car, however, only a gun can protect you from an assailant.
O RLY? I bet you'd have a pretty tough time taking my wallet if I'm driving in my car.
Believe me, I could kill a lot more people with the SUV than I could with all three guns and a wheelbarrow full of ammo. Just hit a crowded parade area, with jam-packed sidewalks, one fine day and start mowing people down. You can keep that up a lot longer in an SUV than you can shooting on the street corner (before a cop shoots you or the crowd jumps you). I can go 400 miles on a tank of gas, I could mow down most of a parade route before the cops boxed me in and shot me.
You seem to think people are just wisps of paper that you would run through, as in an unrealistic videogame. In actual fact, human bodies weigh 100-200 pounds each (more, in many places), which sucks up your momentum fast. You wouldn't get far into that crowd before you got bogged down in broken bones and blood-slick entrails, after which, you'll have your SUV overturned and your body torn to shreds by the angry mob, all around you. The guns, on the other hand, would allow you to snipe from long distances at people's skulls for weeks or even months, in various locations, unseen, till you finally slipped up and someone caught you.
Also, the SUV can at least carry you from place to place (even if inefficiently and expensively). The guns, I understand, make poor hammers, worse can openers, and party noisemakers that tend to ruin the mood.
Alternatively, we can use electric trains to transport the stuff, and then generate the electricity with nuclear power.
Um...why not use the biofuel to generate the electricity? Or just run the train on biofuel? I'm pretty sure current diesel tanker trucks also run on diesel, and they manage to come nowhere near to using up the amount of fuel they're transporting...
That was a rhetorical question, since we all know the answer - the corporates only want Republicans and Democrats in the public eye.
I imagine that might limit the number of bribes they have to hand out, but the real answer is structural.
The "first past the post" voting system we have in this country more or less guarantees there will only be two viable candidates for any single-seat election. If we did something as simple as Approval Voting -- using checkboxes instead of radio buttons -- we'd be loads better off.
Ronald Regan called from 1980, and wants his trickle-down economics policy back. This is a bullshit lie, and I'll give you two examples of why.
You've got this exactly backwards. Reagan argued that taxing the rich less would mean they invest the difference, and that would somehow magically end up in the hands of the working man. This proposal is to create jobs (not cut taxes) for the working and middle classes (not the rich) and the money would be spent (not invested). It's watering the roots instead of the flowers.
Not to mention, when it's built, we all have more connectivity (infrastructure), which will only help matters for decades to come.
As to whether the people will spend the money or invest it, I'm fairly sure they'll be spending a good deal more than if they didn't have jobs.
The remainder of your points seem to be arguing for favoring small business over big corporations, which I'll wholeheartedly endorse.
Despite the economic hard times, money keeps pouring in for President-elect Barack Obama's inaugural festivities.
The inaugural committee is releasing the names of those who give $200 or more. It is refusing money from labor unions, corporations, political action committees, foreigners and Washington lobbyists.
Doesn't matter how good he is, one thing wrong and it's "HE'S JUST LIKE ALL THE REST, BLARRRHGGGHH!". Give the man a chance to actually be president, for corn's sake.
Slashdot Mirror
Someone needs to mod you up. I won't mod Anonymous Cowards on principle (and don't have any points now anyway), but...I was going to write a huge screed saying why the grandparent post is idiotic, but you summed it up so much more eloquently than I could ever have brought myself to do.
Kudos.
HONK HONK! Massive musical ignorance, coming through!
Who are these foreigners who are so altruistic as to log in to Netflix -- thus far, a US-only service -- to rate a movie and write a review of it wholly for the benefit of people subscribed to a service the reviewers themselves cannot benefit from?
Come to that, can you even enter a rating and/or review without being a subscriber?
A lot of others have questioned the accuracy of these numbers, but let's assume they're true.
Upgrading from a 25mpg to a 50mpg car saves you the equivalent of 25mpg, right? If your new car cost the energy equivalent of 50,000 miles at 25mpg, it costs 2000 gallons of gas. You're saving 25mpg, and so your break-even point is 50,000 miles. So as long as you drive your new car at least 50,000 miles (or, more accurately, you and all subsequent owners of your new 50mpg car drive it a total of 50,000 miles or more), we've all come out ahead by saving energy.
So what's the problem?
Let's do a little math.
Visible light is roughly from 380 to 750 nm, which corresponds to frequencies of 400 to 790 THz. That's a bandwidth of 390 THz.
The article says the thingamajig in question operates over "wavelengths of light ranging from about 1 to 18 gigahertz", which I'm going to assume means frequencies from 1 to 18 GHz, which comes to a bandwidth of 17 Ghz.
390 THz / 17 GHz = 22,941.1765.
So, the visible light spectrum represents a bandwidth of only a bit more than four orders of magnitude more than the thingamajig's ability.
Have I calculated something wrong, or is the article wildly inaccurate?
Why? Is it preventing you from seeing a more deserving story?
Or maybe it represents a flood of information you can't handle, being the only story posted to the front page that hour?
I'm thinking maybe someone doesn't like that Obama got elected, or perhaps that people are enthused about him having been elected, and would prefer anything Obama-related to be pretended away.
Don't worry, vindictive hounding is the Republican's strong suit. See: Clinton.
I was a little taken aback that Montalban made the front page here, but McGoohan didn't. I advise everyone to go to the firehose and rememdy the situation.
I'd say the categorization you mention is warranted and then some. Licensing is set up on a thing because it would be a danger to the public to allow just anyone to do that thing. I defy anyone here to honestly argue that medical licensing is just a bunch of unnecessary Big Brother meddling.
Small problem: the FCC has nothing to do with Imaginary Property, copyright enforcement, nor software patents. Thank you, drive through.
Wow, you really are a loon. The open Internet pretty much made Obama President. Even if you're so cynical about him (before he's even taken office, mind you) that you think he's purely in it for the cash, why would he bite the hand that feeds him?
A long time ago (we're talkin' 1987 or so here), I wrote a Klondike solitaire game for the PC (CGA, whoo hoo). One of the controls was to toggle auto-play on/off. When enabled, the game would play for you (according to some algorithm I made up[1]). There was even a speed control too, so you could slow it down to see it doing its stuff, or speed up, to the point of having it finish off the game in a flash. It would even quit the game when it saw there were no further possible moves.
Prior to that, I had a history of modifying preexisting BASIC games to self-play, just for fun, and to see how far I could theoretically go if I had perfect and infinitely fast gaming reflexes (which is far from the reality...).
[1]
I remember running a test to see how often it won if it played the whole game start to finish -- it ended up winning about 1/15 of the time (this was using single-card flips from the hand).
I don't suppose it could be fundamental scientific research?
Naw, that could never be. It's about something that causes you intellectual discomfort, and must therefore be some sort of vast nefarious conspiracy.
I know, right? Like this:
Sin? Floodwater.
Original Sin? Storms.
Which leads us to the total scam known as the "levy".
Yeah, right! How dumb do these Hydrological Engineering cultists think we are?
[Citation needed]
Um...wouldn't planting trees be a (very small) way of...say it with me...offsetting your CO2 emissions?
Unless you believe that it isn't possible to spend money to remove CO2 from the atmosphere, then the concept of carbon offsets are completely valid. If you have a problem with the way a particular carbon-offset company accomplishes the task (or fails to), then point a finger and name a name. Otherwise, shut up about what you haven't thought out.
This "haw haw, carbon offsets are like Catholic indulgences, haw haw" crap people keep spewing when they want to shrug off their lack of doing anything to be a part of the solution is insulting to the intelligence. It says that the concept of removing CO2 from the atmosphere is the same as the concept of removing sin from one's soul. Last I checked, CO2 is pretty well-established as something that really exists and can really be removed from the atmosphere, using physical processes. Duh?
If your goal is to be able to repel, on a permanent basis, the government (in the form of the police or military or both), or to overthrow the government completely, you're going to need quite a bit more than a gun. Or many guns. Or a whole army of your own, complete with modern armaments and vehicles.
I know what you're going to say next: what about Iraq? To that, I say: better sell those guns and use the money to take IED-building classes, because that's what's been the only thing coming close to keeping the occupiers bothered.
Uh-huh. And more people drown per year than die of plutonium poisoning. Clearly, you're safer swallowing plutonium than water. Right?
Now, let's back up and ask the correct question: what is the probability of being killed, given a certain amount of time hanging around a car vs. a gun? I'm guessing you get a very different answer.
O RLY? I bet you'd have a pretty tough time taking my wallet if I'm driving in my car.
You seem to think people are just wisps of paper that you would run through, as in an unrealistic videogame. In actual fact, human bodies weigh 100-200 pounds each (more, in many places), which sucks up your momentum fast. You wouldn't get far into that crowd before you got bogged down in broken bones and blood-slick entrails, after which, you'll have your SUV overturned and your body torn to shreds by the angry mob, all around you. The guns, on the other hand, would allow you to snipe from long distances at people's skulls for weeks or even months, in various locations, unseen, till you finally slipped up and someone caught you.
Also, the SUV can at least carry you from place to place (even if inefficiently and expensively). The guns, I understand, make poor hammers, worse can openers, and party noisemakers that tend to ruin the mood.
People seem to have forgotten that Archie Bunker was a negative example, not a positive one.
Uh...I thought that was because everyone can clean their houses, but not many can build their own computers.
Um...why not use the biofuel to generate the electricity? Or just run the train on biofuel? I'm pretty sure current diesel tanker trucks also run on diesel, and they manage to come nowhere near to using up the amount of fuel they're transporting...
That's a good point...this might be worth it just to hear a V1A@R4 spam read by the silky-smooth voiceover guy who does the Lexus ads.
I imagine that might limit the number of bribes they have to hand out, but the real answer is structural.
The "first past the post" voting system we have in this country more or less guarantees there will only be two viable candidates for any single-seat election. If we did something as simple as Approval Voting -- using checkboxes instead of radio buttons -- we'd be loads better off.
You've got this exactly backwards. Reagan argued that taxing the rich less would mean they invest the difference, and that would somehow magically end up in the hands of the working man. This proposal is to create jobs (not cut taxes) for the working and middle classes (not the rich) and the money would be spent (not invested). It's watering the roots instead of the flowers.
Not to mention, when it's built, we all have more connectivity (infrastructure), which will only help matters for decades to come.
As to whether the people will spend the money or invest it, I'm fairly sure they'll be spending a good deal more than if they didn't have jobs.
The remainder of your points seem to be arguing for favoring small business over big corporations, which I'll wholeheartedly endorse.
Please don't go into the differences between "loose" and "tight" in an Oprah thread.
O RLY?
Doesn't matter how good he is, one thing wrong and it's "HE'S JUST LIKE ALL THE REST, BLARRRHGGGHH!". Give the man a chance to actually be president, for corn's sake.