What about allowing people to have a display name (that by default is the same as the real name), and the option of exposing the real name to selected circles?
Give us the ability to filter comment posts out if the real name is hidden, and I think market balance would be achieved.
I'm not talking about filtering posts, if gringer is in my circles, as he probably would be, I wanna see gringer's public posts, what I'm talking about is post comments, where gringer posts "What about allowing people to have... " and instantly he gets 500 anonymous comments trying to sell pills, "my political party is better than the other party", troll troll troll.
Who says you have to buy one? Is Google even validating false names? From what I've seen they're only banning online nicknames. "Fake name" taken literally is just that, an impersonated name, not some absurd word-combination alias.
Eventually someone with a minor grudge would probably report you and then you're gone unless you send them "proof".
Oh woe is me my Smart phone has all the features of a High end computer 8 years ago
Sorry for being way off topic, but one thing sorely horribly missing is CAD. Not a viewer but real CAD.
I'm not asking to spend an eight hour shift doing drawings on a tiny little touch screen; that would be pure hell.
But it would be a miracle if I could pull up a print and spend 90 seconds making a trivial edit, instead of trying to involve a cad draftsman back in the office over email or sms.
Sorry, I really don't want to talk or even interact with anyone not accountable for their actions. (And yes, my account name has a real name behind it so I am accountable, too.) Generally, it's no big deal. However, it's a problem just often enough that I want to be able to report "jerkish" behavior when necessary. And I want someone to do something about it. (I am not allowed to shoot these people.) Sites that do not respond these reports lose my business. Just my 2 cents. Literally.
Just as a helpful warning to you, I tried our strategy when debating an anonymous coward on G+ and they got all creepy, just short of where I felt the need to report them for making personal threats. As a group I've seen they get really freaky when people suggest they aren't worth paying attention to them... like they're going to find a way to force people to pay attention to them, even if its in a very bad way, if you know what I mean. Think of recent atrocities in the news, kind of getting attention. Just letting you know whats coming your way; I've gotten threatened for the thoughtcrime of not caring what ACs post, and I've seen others get threatened for the same reason. AC's really are attention seeking creeps. I think it has a lot more to do with the "coward" part of AC rather than the "anonymous" part of AC. I'm not really worried, because someone too scared to use their real name is probably too scared to actually do anything; on the other hand a lot of people convinced themselves the weirdos wouldn't actually do anything bad before columbine, norway, OKC, 911, unibomber, etc.
Not if they don't join specially BECAUSE of the real name policy.
How hard is it to buy a fake name? 20 million mostly uneducated illegal aliens figured it out without much trouble; Shouldn't be hard at all for me to get a paper documented anonymous G+ account if I really want one.
Its probably cheaper and easier to get on G+ with a paper documented fake name, than pay for an play WOW or other MMORPGs. Yet its not free, which keeps the lowlifes (astroturfers, trolls, spammers) out. Its a good balance.
Don't make it sound like we are the resistance in France during WWII fighting the Germans and everything is infinitely expensive in lives and money and the slightest security slip up means kilodeaths. Just find the local drunken college student or the illegal in the home depot parking lot, talk for a bit, do the obvious, and you're golden.
How about this instead... if we are doing no wrong what is the harm of using false names? Why not exhibit some trust? Let a person's action dictate if their account gets killed off.
If anonymous, they can have an infinite number of accounts to spam and troll from. The harm is the destruction of the ecosystem and community all for some pill spam and some 12 year olds making fart jokes. And thats before the professional astroturfers move in and really ruin the neighborhood.
ability for people to be private in any meaningful way.
Code words for spamming, trolling, and PR astroturfing.
I am thrilled G+ doesn't allow psuedonyms. Makes it a much higher class establishment. Rob Malda and I are in each others circles, what could be better?
If G+ was the only social network / web bloggy thing on the internet, if 1% of the population violently disliked a policy of theirs, I guess that would be bad. But they aren't.
Lets visit a paradise of psudonyms, how about my local, not dead yet, newspaper web site. The comments sections are nothing but a dead wasteland of political extremist astroturfers screaming the same corporate / party talking points at each other over and over, spammers trying to sell shoes (wtf?) and pills, and 4chan/goonsquad style shock trollers. Everyone else has been successfully repelled away. Seriously. No normal human beings use it because its a toxic waste dump.
Which brings up the obvious question that always has to be asked... who benefits? Say G+ allows 4chan/. zerohedge style psudeonyms. Who benefits? Mostly I suppose any competitor, since the users of G+ will be strongly repelled. Also PR astroturfing firms will benefit. Who else makes more money? Hmm.
Lets say G+ allows the rabble in, and the rabble repels everyone as they always do. Then whats the point? Who will ye annointed ones, ye whistle-blowers and ye wikileakers tell their important secrets to? The spammer selling dick pills? The political party talking point autopost-bot? No one's perl script will care what they post.
One thing I've noticed in debates on G+ about anonymity is the straw dog always trotted out that unless G+ allows fake names, we'll never have whistleblowers and anonymous leaks. All of which happened before G+ was invented, so presumably could continue to happen after. Furthermore, all the people trotting out that straw dog have NEVER added anything positive to the ecosystem in general or that argument in specific other than "nah nah naah naa na, you don't know who I am, ha ha ha". Anyone trotting out that straw dog better be carrying a wikileaks-grade release, or their just annoying poseurs at best.
And increasing the debt ceiling only gives the addict a little more dope. It doesn't prevent the inevitable reckoning that we are on the verge of. The government has maxed out every credit card they have. The Federal government is broke and they want another credit card.
The only point of this D vs R debate is who is going to get the blame. It has nothing to do with changing the inevitable outcome. Thats what I find profoundly uninteresting about the whole topic... not really interested in who gets the blame, and its way too long until the next elections for it to have any effect. So, its all basically a bunch of noise.
The titanic is headed full speed ahead into the iceberg. One side wants to increase speed to flank, so the coal men earn a little more money. The other side want to decrease speed to 3/4 to save coal, and to embarass the helmsman. Everyone is eventually gonna drown anyway.
The Business Plot was the attempt to overthrow the US government and in specific overthrow FDR and install a fascist dictatorship. The history of that can be seen by watching this video.
Read about Smedley Darlington Butler and how he single handedly saved the nation from a coup.
Looks like sometime between Smedley and now, they won. So why are they still agitating?
The inclination is crazy high because the russians only had a site at something like 45 degrees (roughly as far north as Wisconsin).
There are two separate effects:
1) The closer you are to the equator the more mass you can boost because the equator is spinning rather quickly... obviously about a timezone per hour...
2) Out of inclination launches are possible, but they waste tons of fuel. You can launch into any inclination orbit from any latitude, it just costs a ton of fuel.
Go play with Orbiter for awhile, get a feel for orbital mechanics.
You're not fighting gravity, so ultra high Isp engines will work, all of which use huge amounts of power, then again, may as well do "something" with excess electrical power...
Also ultra high ISP engines have another pleasant side effect of not really requiring a structural analysis... if the engine is only pushing with 5 pounds of force, the station is probably not going to crumble, saving a lot of structural analysis.
The problem is, to save money, everything was cut, so the only purpose left for the station after the cuts was to be someplace for the shuttle to go, and the only purpose left for the shuttle after 30 years was to go to the station. What happens now that the shuttle is gone? Hmm I'm thinking another taco bell floating landing target in the pacific ocean is in store...
Furthermore, NASA operates on a "project basis" and the ISS construction project is basically over, so its about time to deorbit the ISS. There is no ongoing purpose, all the cool ideas of things you could do with a station were all cut to save money, and you can't add them now, because the bureaucratic time required to spin them up to speed exceeds the predicted lifetime of the station . NASA does not operate on a "army base basis" where its a permanent or semi-permanent thing like Cape Canaveral. So by the time you could get the ISS into an equatorial orbit with a high Isp thruster, it would be past time to deorbit it...
get someone to finance it with big big big big big big money.
Yes I was mystified why Rolex etc isn't paying all the bills, or if they are, why they aren't showing up on the site.
I can almost see the magazine ads now. Its like a perfect made for PR - puff piece moment. Probably even get some journalist coverage that way.
I bet Rolex only has to sell a handful of those "presidents" or "submariner" things to finance the whole LN project... That's how it is with a luxury product.
I concur that the design was compromised by military requirements, and that they flew some military/secret missions.
This doesn't change the fact that the orbiters were owned & operated by NASA.
By your argument, you might as well claim that due to the involvement of von Braun and others, the Saturn 5 was a Nazi rocket ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin's_law )
Hmmm. The SR-71 was decommissioned (sorta) and NASA got to fly it for awhile. Does not mean it wasn't a military plane. Also the S5 was all imperial measurements, wasn't it? All UTS threaded screws instead of ISO metric or whatever the Germans used, etc? I don't remember.
I think we can both agree that the borders of this binary decision are both fuzzy and arbitrary and in good faith we can come to opposite conclusions.
I don't think I've ever met someone who hates Mercurial.
Everyone hates a VCS the first time it frustrates them. This only means practically no one uses Hg.
The key is which VCS, that they've used, do they hate the least. The answer almost universally seems to be GIT.
I use GIT as a distributed backup, sorta. I always had nightmares about losing the SVN server and all the backups (F5 tornado? Riots? Giant city eating fire?). I had offsite backup but only 5 miles away... With GIT all my deployments have a complete set of all development data. Disk space is cheap so I don't care. Also I can keep working when the LAN is having issues.
I hate GIT, don't get me wrong. Some of the syntax almost seems intentionally obtuse; No VCS is more appropriate for ESR's intercal compiler than GIT. I just hate GIT less than... everything else I've used, and I think I've used all the open source ones.
If that is "building your own", I guess I can say proudly that I built my own washing machine, in that I bought a washing machine, put it in place, plumbed it in and switched it on...
Don't laugh so hard at this... 99.9999% of modern americans who sign a contract with a corporate house builder will go around telling people "I'm building a house!". In fact pretty much anything real estate related, if an american signs a contract, they don't do the labor but socially claim for all the labor... "I put a new roof on my house (No, a team of illegal aliens put a roof on your house; you merely paid for it)"
The weird part is my Grandfather actually did build his own house... Sears used to sell kits of everything you need, he bought one, and spent most of a summer swinging a hammer (This was in the 50s so no pneumatic nail guns, and he was a middle manager not a carpenter which is why it took "most of a summer"). The house is still standing, and looked pretty good last time I saw it.
As the second great depression winds on, I've noticed a change in workforce. This attitude is fine if the owner does not socially mix with the workers. But, already, building contractors have changed from illegals when they put my roof on, to meth heads when they put my garage siding on. Very soon as unemployment spirals up, average middle class people might be in construction again, and its going to be socially awkward when someone starts bragging at church "how I put up a fence" and the guy in front of him turns around and says "uh, actually, that was me"
So why is virtualisation better than stuffing your physical servers to capacity rather than adding overhead of multiple o/s
You're forgetting you can make virtualization hosts that are not identical.
I have a box with a very elaborate disk array, another box that has a very elaborate high speed network, another thats just a slush server that holds little stuff that takes up space. So... The web cache lives on the box with the high speed network, and the database lives on the fast ethernet connected box with the elaborate disk array. Also, darn near without telling the end users, I can almost instantly and transparently move images around on the different slush boxes depending on load.
I think the whole checked luggage thing is more of a way for them to artificially lower their prices.
Also baggage fees are not taxed / not taxed at the same rate as passenger fees.
They should simplify it and if you're willing to carry it, its free, and if you want to check it, you pay "UPS" "Fedex" airmail type rate. That also gets them out of the lost luggage problem. Especially on a return trip, I'd be more than willing to go "UPS ground" to my house and save them the cost of airmail and save me the time of picking the bags up.
A battery electric-powered ultralight aircraft has been flying for the last year.
Flying FOR A YEAR? Crap. My Volt only goes 35 miles then I have to charge it or burn gas. I want one of those airplane batteries!
The solar impulse guys are planning on about one month. My experience with lithium batteries seems to be either they die at about 50 charge cycles or they run for about 500 cycles, with few failures in between... if they get a good set of batts then 2 or 3 years would be possible.
The study assumes 10% "strongly convinced" vs 90% "opinion-less". This is not very realistic. When you change the parameters to 10/80/10 you get a fluctuation between the two extrems (as to be expected).
Maybe its all a long winded way of saying "first social network to 10% of the population wins" Myspace never quite made it, FB made it, now we're stuck with it.
there's no excuse for power-inefficient servers nowadays
Sure there is. Its a capital expense vs an ongoing perhaps off budget expense.
In most situations, power is cheap compared to labor and equipment. Its very easy to get in a penny wise pound foolish situation... Use half the power by spending twice as much on the equipment, and, if still in use, it'll pay for itself in 2111. That raid array is just wasting power keeping all 5 drives powered up, we'll just leave one unplugged all the time till we need it. That tape backup robot uses a lot of electricity, I guess we don't need backups.
"green" marketing is all about paying dollars worth of embedded / manufactured energy, to save pennies per year of energy.
This is before we get into labor costs.. The environmental costs of having a thousand admins maintaining a million Arduino cluster to replace one guy and one amd64 box is much worse than the total power consumed by the big amd64 box, even if the adruinos were magically solar powered or something.
Slashdot Mirror
I've honestly never tried this, but would a remote desktop application like VNC or LogMeIn work well enough for that kind of task?
Theoretically, but in the networking business I'm out there because there is no network... Otherwise I could VPN in over the internet...
Which brings up all kinds of file synchronization issues, version control, etc.
What about allowing people to have a display name (that by default is the same as the real name), and the option of exposing the real name to selected circles?
Give us the ability to filter comment posts out if the real name is hidden, and I think market balance would be achieved.
I'm not talking about filtering posts, if gringer is in my circles, as he probably would be, I wanna see gringer's public posts, what I'm talking about is post comments, where gringer posts "What about allowing people to have ... " and instantly he gets 500 anonymous comments trying to sell pills, "my political party is better than the other party", troll troll troll.
Who says you have to buy one? Is Google even validating false names? From what I've seen they're only banning online nicknames. "Fake name" taken literally is just that, an impersonated name, not some absurd word-combination alias.
Eventually someone with a minor grudge would probably report you and then you're gone unless you send them "proof".
Oh woe is me my Smart phone has all the features of a High end computer 8 years ago
Sorry for being way off topic, but one thing sorely horribly missing is CAD. Not a viewer but real CAD.
I'm not asking to spend an eight hour shift doing drawings on a tiny little touch screen; that would be pure hell.
But it would be a miracle if I could pull up a print and spend 90 seconds making a trivial edit, instead of trying to involve a cad draftsman back in the office over email or sms.
Sorry, I really don't want to talk or even interact with anyone not accountable for their actions. (And yes, my account name has a real name behind it so I am accountable, too.) Generally, it's no big deal. However, it's a problem just often enough that I want to be able to report "jerkish" behavior when necessary. And I want someone to do something about it. (I am not allowed to shoot these people.) Sites that do not respond these reports lose my business. Just my 2 cents. Literally.
Just as a helpful warning to you, I tried our strategy when debating an anonymous coward on G+ and they got all creepy, just short of where I felt the need to report them for making personal threats. As a group I've seen they get really freaky when people suggest they aren't worth paying attention to them... like they're going to find a way to force people to pay attention to them, even if its in a very bad way, if you know what I mean. Think of recent atrocities in the news, kind of getting attention. Just letting you know whats coming your way; I've gotten threatened for the thoughtcrime of not caring what ACs post, and I've seen others get threatened for the same reason. AC's really are attention seeking creeps. I think it has a lot more to do with the "coward" part of AC rather than the "anonymous" part of AC. I'm not really worried, because someone too scared to use their real name is probably too scared to actually do anything; on the other hand a lot of people convinced themselves the weirdos wouldn't actually do anything bad before columbine, norway, OKC, 911, unibomber, etc.
Not if they don't join specially BECAUSE of the real name policy.
How hard is it to buy a fake name? 20 million mostly uneducated illegal aliens figured it out without much trouble; Shouldn't be hard at all for me to get a paper documented anonymous G+ account if I really want one.
Its probably cheaper and easier to get on G+ with a paper documented fake name, than pay for an play WOW or other MMORPGs. Yet its not free, which keeps the lowlifes (astroturfers, trolls, spammers) out. Its a good balance.
Don't make it sound like we are the resistance in France during WWII fighting the Germans and everything is infinitely expensive in lives and money and the slightest security slip up means kilodeaths. Just find the local drunken college student or the illegal in the home depot parking lot, talk for a bit, do the obvious, and you're golden.
Yes, that's exactly why Facebook never worked...
And linkedin.
How about this instead... if we are doing no wrong what is the harm of using false names? Why not exhibit some trust? Let a person's action dictate if their account gets killed off.
If anonymous, they can have an infinite number of accounts to spam and troll from. The harm is the destruction of the ecosystem and community all for some pill spam and some 12 year olds making fart jokes. And thats before the professional astroturfers move in and really ruin the neighborhood.
ability for people to be private in any meaningful way.
Code words for spamming, trolling, and PR astroturfing.
I am thrilled G+ doesn't allow psuedonyms. Makes it a much higher class establishment. Rob Malda and I are in each others circles, what could be better?
If G+ was the only social network / web bloggy thing on the internet, if 1% of the population violently disliked a policy of theirs, I guess that would be bad. But they aren't.
Lets visit a paradise of psudonyms, how about my local, not dead yet, newspaper web site. The comments sections are nothing but a dead wasteland of political extremist astroturfers screaming the same corporate / party talking points at each other over and over, spammers trying to sell shoes (wtf?) and pills, and 4chan/goonsquad style shock trollers. Everyone else has been successfully repelled away. Seriously. No normal human beings use it because its a toxic waste dump.
Which brings up the obvious question that always has to be asked... who benefits? Say G+ allows 4chan /. zerohedge style psudeonyms. Who benefits? Mostly I suppose any competitor, since the users of G+ will be strongly repelled. Also PR astroturfing firms will benefit. Who else makes more money? Hmm.
Lets say G+ allows the rabble in, and the rabble repels everyone as they always do. Then whats the point? Who will ye annointed ones, ye whistle-blowers and ye wikileakers tell their important secrets to? The spammer selling dick pills? The political party talking point autopost-bot? No one's perl script will care what they post.
One thing I've noticed in debates on G+ about anonymity is the straw dog always trotted out that unless G+ allows fake names, we'll never have whistleblowers and anonymous leaks. All of which happened before G+ was invented, so presumably could continue to happen after. Furthermore, all the people trotting out that straw dog have NEVER added anything positive to the ecosystem in general or that argument in specific other than "nah nah naah naa na, you don't know who I am, ha ha ha". Anyone trotting out that straw dog better be carrying a wikileaks-grade release, or their just annoying poseurs at best.
And increasing the debt ceiling only gives the addict a little more dope. It doesn't prevent the inevitable reckoning that we are on the verge of. The government has maxed out every credit card they have. The Federal government is broke and they want another credit card.
The only point of this D vs R debate is who is going to get the blame. It has nothing to do with changing the inevitable outcome. Thats what I find profoundly uninteresting about the whole topic... not really interested in who gets the blame, and its way too long until the next elections for it to have any effect. So, its all basically a bunch of noise.
The titanic is headed full speed ahead into the iceberg. One side wants to increase speed to flank, so the coal men earn a little more money. The other side want to decrease speed to 3/4 to save coal, and to embarass the helmsman. Everyone is eventually gonna drown anyway.
Business Plot.
The Business Plot was the attempt to overthrow the US government and in specific overthrow FDR and install a fascist dictatorship. The history of that can be seen by watching this video.
Read about Smedley Darlington Butler and how he single handedly saved the nation from a coup.
Looks like sometime between Smedley and now, they won. So why are they still agitating?
The inclination is crazy high because the russians only had a site at something like 45 degrees (roughly as far north as Wisconsin).
There are two separate effects:
1) The closer you are to the equator the more mass you can boost because the equator is spinning rather quickly... obviously about a timezone per hour...
2) Out of inclination launches are possible, but they waste tons of fuel. You can launch into any inclination orbit from any latitude, it just costs a ton of fuel.
Go play with Orbiter for awhile, get a feel for orbital mechanics.
http://orbit.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/
Wouldn't that take a huge amount of fuel?
You're not fighting gravity, so ultra high Isp engines will work, all of which use huge amounts of power, then again, may as well do "something" with excess electrical power...
Also ultra high ISP engines have another pleasant side effect of not really requiring a structural analysis... if the engine is only pushing with 5 pounds of force, the station is probably not going to crumble, saving a lot of structural analysis.
The problem is, to save money, everything was cut, so the only purpose left for the station after the cuts was to be someplace for the shuttle to go, and the only purpose left for the shuttle after 30 years was to go to the station. What happens now that the shuttle is gone? Hmm I'm thinking another taco bell floating landing target in the pacific ocean is in store...
Furthermore, NASA operates on a "project basis" and the ISS construction project is basically over, so its about time to deorbit the ISS. There is no ongoing purpose, all the cool ideas of things you could do with a station were all cut to save money, and you can't add them now, because the bureaucratic time required to spin them up to speed exceeds the predicted lifetime of the station . NASA does not operate on a "army base basis" where its a permanent or semi-permanent thing like Cape Canaveral. So by the time you could get the ISS into an equatorial orbit with a high Isp thruster, it would be past time to deorbit it...
get someone to finance it with big big big big big big money.
Yes I was mystified why Rolex etc isn't paying all the bills, or if they are, why they aren't showing up on the site.
I can almost see the magazine ads now. Its like a perfect made for PR - puff piece moment. Probably even get some journalist coverage that way.
I bet Rolex only has to sell a handful of those "presidents" or "submariner" things to finance the whole LN project... That's how it is with a luxury product.
I concur that the design was compromised by military requirements, and that they flew some military/secret missions.
This doesn't change the fact that the orbiters were owned & operated by NASA.
By your argument, you might as well claim that due to the involvement of von Braun and others, the Saturn 5 was a Nazi rocket ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin's_law )
Hmmm. The SR-71 was decommissioned (sorta) and NASA got to fly it for awhile. Does not mean it wasn't a military plane. Also the S5 was all imperial measurements, wasn't it? All UTS threaded screws instead of ISO metric or whatever the Germans used, etc? I don't remember.
I think we can both agree that the borders of this binary decision are both fuzzy and arbitrary and in good faith we can come to opposite conclusions.
I don't think I've ever met someone who hates Mercurial.
Everyone hates a VCS the first time it frustrates them. This only means practically no one uses Hg.
The key is which VCS, that they've used, do they hate the least. The answer almost universally seems to be GIT.
I use GIT as a distributed backup, sorta. I always had nightmares about losing the SVN server and all the backups (F5 tornado? Riots? Giant city eating fire?). I had offsite backup but only 5 miles away... With GIT all my deployments have a complete set of all development data. Disk space is cheap so I don't care. Also I can keep working when the LAN is having issues.
I hate GIT, don't get me wrong. Some of the syntax almost seems intentionally obtuse; No VCS is more appropriate for ESR's intercal compiler than GIT. I just hate GIT less than ... everything else I've used, and I think I've used all the open source ones.
If that is "building your own", I guess I can say proudly that I built my own washing machine, in that I bought a washing machine, put it in place, plumbed it in and switched it on...
Don't laugh so hard at this... 99.9999% of modern americans who sign a contract with a corporate house builder will go around telling people "I'm building a house!". In fact pretty much anything real estate related, if an american signs a contract, they don't do the labor but socially claim for all the labor... "I put a new roof on my house (No, a team of illegal aliens put a roof on your house; you merely paid for it)"
The weird part is my Grandfather actually did build his own house... Sears used to sell kits of everything you need, he bought one, and spent most of a summer swinging a hammer (This was in the 50s so no pneumatic nail guns, and he was a middle manager not a carpenter which is why it took "most of a summer"). The house is still standing, and looked pretty good last time I saw it.
As the second great depression winds on, I've noticed a change in workforce. This attitude is fine if the owner does not socially mix with the workers. But, already, building contractors have changed from illegals when they put my roof on, to meth heads when they put my garage siding on. Very soon as unemployment spirals up, average middle class people might be in construction again, and its going to be socially awkward when someone starts bragging at church "how I put up a fence" and the guy in front of him turns around and says "uh, actually, that was me"
What insights can you provide to the /. crowd about building the clock?
Project management anecdotes about the clock project?
So why is virtualisation better than stuffing your physical servers to capacity rather than adding overhead of multiple o/s
You're forgetting you can make virtualization hosts that are not identical.
I have a box with a very elaborate disk array, another box that has a very elaborate high speed network, another thats just a slush server that holds little stuff that takes up space. So... The web cache lives on the box with the high speed network, and the database lives on the fast ethernet connected box with the elaborate disk array. Also, darn near without telling the end users, I can almost instantly and transparently move images around on the different slush boxes depending on load.
I think the whole checked luggage thing is more of a way for them to artificially lower their prices.
Also baggage fees are not taxed / not taxed at the same rate as passenger fees.
They should simplify it and if you're willing to carry it, its free, and if you want to check it, you pay "UPS" "Fedex" airmail type rate. That also gets them out of the lost luggage problem. Especially on a return trip, I'd be more than willing to go "UPS ground" to my house and save them the cost of airmail and save me the time of picking the bags up.
A battery electric-powered ultralight aircraft has been flying for the last year.
Flying FOR A YEAR? Crap. My Volt only goes 35 miles then I have to charge it or burn gas. I want one of those airplane batteries!
The solar impulse guys are planning on about one month. My experience with lithium batteries seems to be either they die at about 50 charge cycles or they run for about 500 cycles, with few failures in between... if they get a good set of batts then 2 or 3 years would be possible.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Impulse
a turbine driven engine will probably eat most flammable crap thrown at it
Soot and ash production make them extremely unhappy. Even the finest powdered anthracite coal just isn't clean enough. Other than that, yes correct.
Just make it so the site only shows the likes/dislikes of people who are in your circles. Trust networks are a proven, decade-old concept.
Which was already the plan. The point of these businesses is to sell to ignorant marketing departments... not to thwart the might GOOG.
Kind of like how most of the money in spamming is in selling spamming services to wannabes, not selling what is in the emails.
The study assumes 10% "strongly convinced" vs 90% "opinion-less". This is not very realistic. When you change the parameters to 10/80/10 you get a fluctuation between the two extrems (as to be expected).
Maybe its all a long winded way of saying "first social network to 10% of the population wins" Myspace never quite made it, FB made it, now we're stuck with it.
there's no excuse for power-inefficient servers nowadays
Sure there is. Its a capital expense vs an ongoing perhaps off budget expense.
In most situations, power is cheap compared to labor and equipment. Its very easy to get in a penny wise pound foolish situation... Use half the power by spending twice as much on the equipment, and, if still in use, it'll pay for itself in 2111. That raid array is just wasting power keeping all 5 drives powered up, we'll just leave one unplugged all the time till we need it. That tape backup robot uses a lot of electricity, I guess we don't need backups.
"green" marketing is all about paying dollars worth of embedded / manufactured energy, to save pennies per year of energy.
This is before we get into labor costs.. The environmental costs of having a thousand admins maintaining a million Arduino cluster to replace one guy and one amd64 box is much worse than the total power consumed by the big amd64 box, even if the adruinos were magically solar powered or something.