You support public financing of elections then? Because without the support of large political parties, no one can get elected if even a House seat costs millions.
The problem is that a server is any system that receives and replies to requests for information. So depending on what software you use, you're running a server even if you're just using a personal computer. Use BitTorrent to download a Linux ISO? Are you uploading data? Then you're a server.
I talked to several support monkeys at Comcast before I was escalated to someone with some knowledge. They told me (and I had them send me an email with a record of our conversation) that as long as I'm not hosting a full site or receiving a lot of email on my connection, they don't care if I'm using VNC or SSH or even HTTP on port 80.
And if you're outside of your house you're looking at a connection that's usually less than 512kbps, thanks to woefully asymmetrical broadband speeds. And it's somewhere without a sprinkler system, redundant power supplies and redundant network connections and rolling backups.
Don't get me wrong, I've got a home server, too, but I still have a web host with 250GB of space for backups, email, and my picture gallery.
That's part of the issue: There's too many freaking options. If you're running PHP, you have two choices. If you're running Ruby on Rails, you've got one choice. With Java there's hundreds of choices to make and without experience you have no idea where to begin. It took me weeks to figure out how to get a JSP page to query a database, and I'm pretty sure I'm doing it wrong.
And I've found that Eclipse doesn't "fire up" so much as "smolder."
I think there's a strong correlation between how we view other Americans and how other Americans act. If you have low expectations of someone, then that person will probably only meet those low expectations. In the past we had very high expectations of US citizens, and that helped us to become the greatest nation on the planet. Now, not so much.
Well, that's all well and good, but how do you learn it? If it takes days to get an environment running, how do you learn the language in a reasonable amount of time? I remember a couple years ago I wanted to learn JSP because a lot of employers were asking for experience in it. By the end of the day, I was about halfway through configuring Eclipse before I gave up.
I saw the screen cast on Ruby on Rails and decided I wanted to learn it, so I sat down and followed a quick set of instructions and had my own application done in a couple hours. I've yet to find a screencast of someone going from nothing to a working blog engine in JSP or Spring/Hibernate.
I'm constantly amazed at my fellow American's lack of spirit. Why can't the government run health care, like is done in every other industrialized nation very effectively? Because Americans suck at governing. Why can't we implement a high speed rail network and strong zoning to combat sprawl? Because Americans are stubborn asses. Why can't we try new ways of dealing with traffic? Because Americans are stupid.
If Americans really are that way, then maybe we shouldn't be the greatest country on the planet.
One part of that problem has already been solved: These vehicles will be charged during off-peak times, overnight usually, when electricity demand is at its lowest. There's enough capacity for about 25% of the US auto fleet to be plug-in as long as they're charged during off-peak times. In fact, there's ideas out there to use some of the energy stored in these plug-ins to supplement the grid during peak usage, thus taking strain off of the grid.
The rest of the problems are, well, still problems.
BTW: How do you use so much power? I've got a 1250 square foot house with two people and two PCs running non-stop and I barely use 10kWh/day.
Roundabouts are far more efficient at traffic control than stop lights. Rather than stopping traffic entirely for one or two cars, traffic keeps moving. When you have a smaller road intersecting with a larger, a roundabout naturally causes the heavier traffic to move more easily through while not preventing people on the less travelled roads from moving at all. It also reduces traffic speeds by presenting approaching cars with a green wall and a sharp turn, forcing them to slow down at the intersection like they're supposed to. They also make it safer for pedestrians by giving them an island of safety in the busy intersection as well as forcing them to look in only one direction to make sure traffic is clear. Finally, you don't have cars crossing each other's paths of travel, so "left hook" accidents are eliminated.
My biggest suggestion, other than more control over zoning to eliminate massive subdivisions that create traffic problems, would be to replace traffic light intersections with roundabouts wherever possible.
True, I can't take other people, but grocery shopping is pretty easy as long as the loads are small. It's perfect for carrying one or two day's worth of food home between the hook on the dashboard, the underseat compartment and the rear rack. I've even fit a whole watermelon under my seat. Besides, 90% of my driving is to and from work, and I the weather is amenable to it about 9 months out of the year.
In the winter I still ride as long as there's no precipitation, and I'm in Lancaster, PA. If you've got the right gear it's not too bad. I've also got a Mazda Protege for those days I really can't ride or those trips I can't make with it. But most of the time the only action it sees is moving it once every couple weeks to avoid the meter maids.
But compared to spending $25,000 on a hybrid and wasting a lot more resources, the scooter's a fantastic idea. Being able to park on the sidewalk downtown or those end-caps in parking lots is a definite plus.
I've recently started programming web apps in Java for work and I have to say I'm unimpressed. In the time it's taken me to read instructions on how to get a development environment up and running on either Windows or OS X, I could have started doing actual work with PHP, Ruby on Rails, TurboGears or *shudder* ASP.NET.
I look at it and think "Jeez, does it really need to be this freaking complicated?"
That article was probably based on a study by a marketing research firm that has been widely discounted as bunk because of the irrational assumptions in made about hybrid vehicles versus conventional vehicles.
Not only that, but hybrids also work on improving technologies that are necessary for electric vehicles. High-output motors, energy management systems, regenerative braking, batteries and ultracapacitors are all being perfected in hybrids. Plugin hybrids are the next step before full-electric vehicles, and Toyota's going to have one in 2009.
Most people will resist, and even those who don't are likely to go back to their old ways because people are inherently lazy and will take the path of least resistance whenever possible.
Then we simply need to make the path of least resistance also the most efficient. Any system designer will tell you that you need to make the best choice the default one, because people will overwhelmingly choose the default.
I've heard stories from solar power installers about people wanting to install systems on top of a hill surrounded by trees that would only get about 4 hours of light a day, meaning that they'd need about 50% more panels than normal to cover the cost. Then the installers go into the house and see conventional light bulbs and old, inefficient appliances and just shake their head.
It would be better for people to be spending money increasing efficiency and tightening up their houses than to buy whole new solar panels.
And if they're going to be putting up solar panels, why not do it in an intelligent way? For about $600, you can take one or two rooms off of the grid entirely with a system that will scale easily by adding another charge controller or inverter. I'm hoping to take my fridge off the grid in a little bit for about that price, with the added benefit of keeping my stuff cold when the power goes out.
I blame two groups: Surburban teenage year old girls and their mothers. Bear with me on this.
Almost every movie released is aiming for that PG-13 rating. Just edgy enough to be "cool" but still accessible to the cash cows of the market: Teenagers. And because girls are more social than boys, they're going to see movies in larger groups more regularly. Boys are content to sit at home and play video games or sports. So the movies, even if they're action movies, have something to attract teenage girls. Why do you think Kirsten Dunst sang TWICE in Spiderman 3?
The same goes for the rest of popular culture. Reality TV is HUGE not because adults watch it, but because it presents teenage girls with ridiculous social situations for them to comment on. American Idol is HUGE because it combines two things thirteen year old girls love; people singing inane pop songs and voicing one's opinion about them. The fact that Heroes has lasted as long as it has is merely a pleasantly surprising fluke.
Their mothers are constantly worried about their precious little children. And doubly worried if they're "only girls." They're scared about trans fats and sexual predators and sex and violence in movies and car accidents and terrorism, ignorant of the fact that these things aren't really issues anymore. The chances that some guy's gonna pull your daughter into a car and molest her are astronomically small when compared to the chance that your uncle or husband's friend is going to molest them, and even then it's highly unlikely. The chances of dying in a car accident when you're wearing your seat belt are actually fairly small if you're driving a late model passenger car. And the best way to make sure your kids eat healthy isn't to read food labels, it's to not buy over-processed junk in the first place. And in terms of pure probability, your adorable little Brittany or Taylor is more likely to die slipping and falling in the shower than being killed by an evil terrorist mastermind.
But this doesn't stop these mothers from buying massive SUVs and demanding that sex offenders be tracked their entire lives and avoiding cities like the plague and insisting on eliminating "harmful foods" through legislation. They make completely emotional decisions based on insufficient information. And the news media, who are more interested in ratings than in telling the truth, cater to them with tales of horrible murders, scary food additives, terrorist masterminds, and a show where they dupe idiotic men into meeting a teenage girl for sex.
I'd rather not have to wait too long and try avoiding spoilers. If I waited for Season 3 of BSG, the Galactica Atmo Drop wouldn't have had the same effect, because I'd have heard about it already.
What I'd like to do is get everything from iTunes. And if it weren't for the ridiculous pricing from Comcast, it would actually be cheaper. But since I'm paying for it anyway, and because of the botched job the installer did that gave me Sci Fi (but not, unfortunately, Discovery), I might as well just watch it and keep the goddamn commercials. At least I can mute the TV when they come on.
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You support public financing of elections then? Because without the support of large political parties, no one can get elected if even a House seat costs millions.
The problem is that a server is any system that receives and replies to requests for information. So depending on what software you use, you're running a server even if you're just using a personal computer. Use BitTorrent to download a Linux ISO? Are you uploading data? Then you're a server.
I talked to several support monkeys at Comcast before I was escalated to someone with some knowledge. They told me (and I had them send me an email with a record of our conversation) that as long as I'm not hosting a full site or receiving a lot of email on my connection, they don't care if I'm using VNC or SSH or even HTTP on port 80.
WEP? Thanks for the free wifi, buddy!
And if you're outside of your house you're looking at a connection that's usually less than 512kbps, thanks to woefully asymmetrical broadband speeds. And it's somewhere without a sprinkler system, redundant power supplies and redundant network connections and rolling backups.
Don't get me wrong, I've got a home server, too, but I still have a web host with 250GB of space for backups, email, and my picture gallery.
That's part of the issue: There's too many freaking options. If you're running PHP, you have two choices. If you're running Ruby on Rails, you've got one choice. With Java there's hundreds of choices to make and without experience you have no idea where to begin. It took me weeks to figure out how to get a JSP page to query a database, and I'm pretty sure I'm doing it wrong.
And I've found that Eclipse doesn't "fire up" so much as "smolder."
I think there's a strong correlation between how we view other Americans and how other Americans act. If you have low expectations of someone, then that person will probably only meet those low expectations. In the past we had very high expectations of US citizens, and that helped us to become the greatest nation on the planet. Now, not so much.
Well, that's all well and good, but how do you learn it? If it takes days to get an environment running, how do you learn the language in a reasonable amount of time? I remember a couple years ago I wanted to learn JSP because a lot of employers were asking for experience in it. By the end of the day, I was about halfway through configuring Eclipse before I gave up.
I saw the screen cast on Ruby on Rails and decided I wanted to learn it, so I sat down and followed a quick set of instructions and had my own application done in a couple hours. I've yet to find a screencast of someone going from nothing to a working blog engine in JSP or Spring/Hibernate.
I'm constantly amazed at my fellow American's lack of spirit. Why can't the government run health care, like is done in every other industrialized nation very effectively? Because Americans suck at governing. Why can't we implement a high speed rail network and strong zoning to combat sprawl? Because Americans are stubborn asses. Why can't we try new ways of dealing with traffic? Because Americans are stupid.
If Americans really are that way, then maybe we shouldn't be the greatest country on the planet.
One part of that problem has already been solved: These vehicles will be charged during off-peak times, overnight usually, when electricity demand is at its lowest. There's enough capacity for about 25% of the US auto fleet to be plug-in as long as they're charged during off-peak times. In fact, there's ideas out there to use some of the energy stored in these plug-ins to supplement the grid during peak usage, thus taking strain off of the grid.
The rest of the problems are, well, still problems.
BTW: How do you use so much power? I've got a 1250 square foot house with two people and two PCs running non-stop and I barely use 10kWh/day.
Roundabouts are far more efficient at traffic control than stop lights. Rather than stopping traffic entirely for one or two cars, traffic keeps moving. When you have a smaller road intersecting with a larger, a roundabout naturally causes the heavier traffic to move more easily through while not preventing people on the less travelled roads from moving at all. It also reduces traffic speeds by presenting approaching cars with a green wall and a sharp turn, forcing them to slow down at the intersection like they're supposed to. They also make it safer for pedestrians by giving them an island of safety in the busy intersection as well as forcing them to look in only one direction to make sure traffic is clear. Finally, you don't have cars crossing each other's paths of travel, so "left hook" accidents are eliminated.
My biggest suggestion, other than more control over zoning to eliminate massive subdivisions that create traffic problems, would be to replace traffic light intersections with roundabouts wherever possible.
True, I can't take other people, but grocery shopping is pretty easy as long as the loads are small. It's perfect for carrying one or two day's worth of food home between the hook on the dashboard, the underseat compartment and the rear rack. I've even fit a whole watermelon under my seat. Besides, 90% of my driving is to and from work, and I the weather is amenable to it about 9 months out of the year.
In the winter I still ride as long as there's no precipitation, and I'm in Lancaster, PA. If you've got the right gear it's not too bad. I've also got a Mazda Protege for those days I really can't ride or those trips I can't make with it. But most of the time the only action it sees is moving it once every couple weeks to avoid the meter maids.
But compared to spending $25,000 on a hybrid and wasting a lot more resources, the scooter's a fantastic idea. Being able to park on the sidewalk downtown or those end-caps in parking lots is a definite plus.
I've recently started programming web apps in Java for work and I have to say I'm unimpressed. In the time it's taken me to read instructions on how to get a development environment up and running on either Windows or OS X, I could have started doing actual work with PHP, Ruby on Rails, TurboGears or *shudder* ASP.NET.
I look at it and think "Jeez, does it really need to be this freaking complicated?"
And considering how utterly hideous Java interfaces are, I'm not going to hold my breath on this one.
They tried to make trinary version of the software, but they found it was hard to make it compatible with various systems.
125cc Motor Scooter: $2500
Year of insurance for 125cc motor scooter: $98
Tank of premium gas for 125cc motor scooter: $3.84
Getting 80mpg: Priceless.
That article was probably based on a study by a marketing research firm that has been widely discounted as bunk because of the irrational assumptions in made about hybrid vehicles versus conventional vehicles.
And with all your fancy technology and fancy driving you're still 10mpg under what I get on my fun-to-drive motor scooter.
Try doing that with more than one person in the car and we'll talk about your good gas mileage.
Not only that, but hybrids also work on improving technologies that are necessary for electric vehicles. High-output motors, energy management systems, regenerative braking, batteries and ultracapacitors are all being perfected in hybrids. Plugin hybrids are the next step before full-electric vehicles, and Toyota's going to have one in 2009.
Then we simply need to make the path of least resistance also the most efficient. Any system designer will tell you that you need to make the best choice the default one, because people will overwhelmingly choose the default.
Can I use the network like I want, without interference from Verizon? Will they block port 80 or Bittorrent?
I've heard stories from solar power installers about people wanting to install systems on top of a hill surrounded by trees that would only get about 4 hours of light a day, meaning that they'd need about 50% more panels than normal to cover the cost. Then the installers go into the house and see conventional light bulbs and old, inefficient appliances and just shake their head.
It would be better for people to be spending money increasing efficiency and tightening up their houses than to buy whole new solar panels.
And if they're going to be putting up solar panels, why not do it in an intelligent way? For about $600, you can take one or two rooms off of the grid entirely with a system that will scale easily by adding another charge controller or inverter. I'm hoping to take my fridge off the grid in a little bit for about that price, with the added benefit of keeping my stuff cold when the power goes out.
I blame two groups: Surburban teenage year old girls and their mothers. Bear with me on this.
Almost every movie released is aiming for that PG-13 rating. Just edgy enough to be "cool" but still accessible to the cash cows of the market: Teenagers. And because girls are more social than boys, they're going to see movies in larger groups more regularly. Boys are content to sit at home and play video games or sports. So the movies, even if they're action movies, have something to attract teenage girls. Why do you think Kirsten Dunst sang TWICE in Spiderman 3?
The same goes for the rest of popular culture. Reality TV is HUGE not because adults watch it, but because it presents teenage girls with ridiculous social situations for them to comment on. American Idol is HUGE because it combines two things thirteen year old girls love; people singing inane pop songs and voicing one's opinion about them. The fact that Heroes has lasted as long as it has is merely a pleasantly surprising fluke.
Their mothers are constantly worried about their precious little children. And doubly worried if they're "only girls." They're scared about trans fats and sexual predators and sex and violence in movies and car accidents and terrorism, ignorant of the fact that these things aren't really issues anymore. The chances that some guy's gonna pull your daughter into a car and molest her are astronomically small when compared to the chance that your uncle or husband's friend is going to molest them, and even then it's highly unlikely. The chances of dying in a car accident when you're wearing your seat belt are actually fairly small if you're driving a late model passenger car. And the best way to make sure your kids eat healthy isn't to read food labels, it's to not buy over-processed junk in the first place. And in terms of pure probability, your adorable little Brittany or Taylor is more likely to die slipping and falling in the shower than being killed by an evil terrorist mastermind.
But this doesn't stop these mothers from buying massive SUVs and demanding that sex offenders be tracked their entire lives and avoiding cities like the plague and insisting on eliminating "harmful foods" through legislation. They make completely emotional decisions based on insufficient information. And the news media, who are more interested in ratings than in telling the truth, cater to them with tales of horrible murders, scary food additives, terrorist masterminds, and a show where they dupe idiotic men into meeting a teenage girl for sex.
There's plenty of stuff I want. Advertising stuff I can afford is a totally different proposition.
I'd rather not have to wait too long and try avoiding spoilers. If I waited for Season 3 of BSG, the Galactica Atmo Drop wouldn't have had the same effect, because I'd have heard about it already.
What I'd like to do is get everything from iTunes. And if it weren't for the ridiculous pricing from Comcast, it would actually be cheaper. But since I'm paying for it anyway, and because of the botched job the installer did that gave me Sci Fi (but not, unfortunately, Discovery), I might as well just watch it and keep the goddamn commercials. At least I can mute the TV when they come on.
Only broadband alternative is Verizon DSL, which is slower and, well, from Verizon.