as well as spotlight specific searches or even delete a site from the search results, a change which affects everyone who conducts that search in the future." Anyone else see anything wrong with this?
I want my results to be as agnostic as humanly possible, which means keep human hands out of my results.
Good. Have fun searching spam.
Seriously, even Google's PageRank stuff relies on "human hands" placing links to documents on web pages.
I got free real-time quotes with my E*Trade account readily enough. You do need to open an account and log in each time, and you do need to accept a legal agreement, but I don't think you need to actually pay for them.
The legal agreement was mostly "you can't sue us, or NASDAQ, or the NYSE or anybody, for giving you these quotes... and you can't, like, republish these to other people". It didn't seem excessive.
I guess Google will be more convenient than these, but it's not a huge deal. Besides, if you actually care about a 15-minute delay, you'll have your brokerage account open anyway.
That's only because Slashdot has both Complainers and Non-Complainers on any given topic, and the Complainers are the ones who enjoy posting most. So they do.
It is, of course, one thing to detract from those playing Guitar Hero when one has little music experience, and another thing when a music afficionado has devoted years of practice to learning how to really play music and sees people devoting great time and effort (and a nontrivial amount of money, for that matter) towards mastering some freakish simulacrum of real music, and expresses disappointment at untapped potential.
Tell me again how we should be glad gas prices are low "after inflation?" Offtopicish, but
care for a graph?
(They're actually nearing inflation-adjusted highs not seen since a brief stint in 1981, and before that, the 1910s. But there is always something a little funny when you inflation-adjust the price of something which is, itself, a component of most inflation indicies. (And they say that the CPI overstates inflation, too...)
Oh, don't worry, I'm actually trying to give the GP the benefit of the doubt and more-leeway-than-he-deserves with his argument (hence the 'zomg' in the crusades) before attacking it as nonsensical. But anyway...
When you throw Buddhists and Quakers and the Amish, or even the Mormons, into the "I support genocide!" boat, you've actually lost touch with reality. At least saying "Catholics" is excusable because you can go "zomg crusades".
But clearly, those deliberately backwards overly-religious peasants of the Pennsylvania countryside are possessed of a genocidal mania, and a menace to free thought worldwide!
I dunno. We could distract people for a bit by bashing another of their spectacularly stupid entries, though, Googlebot/2.1 on Unknown! Stupid Googlebot.:(
Why should the rest of us have to pay for other people's bad luck? 2. Because that's the entire purpose of insurance?
No, no, no, nonononono. That's the purpose of socialism. The purpose of insurance is to manage risk. Nobody here seems to understand this.
Is the purpose of your auto insurance so that you can pay for everyone else's bad driving when they have an accident? No. It's to manage the risk of your own driving.
And you pay a $120/mo premium when your average accident rate would only really cost you $100/mo because if you did get in an accident without insurance and had to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars, you could be totally and irrevocably Screwed for life, whereas you can presumably deal with terrible horrible burden of an extra $20 a month (that goes towards administrativia and profit) to avoid that.
If you are concerned about discrimination against healthy people, you should argue for dismantling the health insurance system altogether.
And if you're concerned about safe drivers, you should argue for dismantling the auto insurance system altogether.
Except, even safe drivers have accidents, or have their cars struck by lightning while sitting in the driveway (true story!) and unexpected things come up with regards to peoples' health. Risk is always out there.
And risk carries a price! A 1% chance of getting sick or injured this year and needing $100,000 dollars in treatment is worse than a 100% chance of spending $1000 a year on insurance against that. Why? Because that first $1000 doesn't mean nearly as much to you as the last $1000 after you've exhausted your life's savings and your kids' college funds and gone into debt. You can plan for the first $1000. That's why it's worth it. That's why you'll even pay more than $1000 in this hypothetical case, to cover the insurance company's administration and make it a profit. That is how insurance works.
And to that end, it is good to discriminate based on real likelihood of disease. I know you want to protect the frail and the ill, and are more than willing to grab at the pockets of the eeeevil greeeedy faceless insurance corporations to pay for it. But it doesn't work that way: oh, sure, you'll grab a few thousands here and there, but it just ends up raising the cost of insurance for everyone, and when it gets down to that level it's a very regressive tax on society, as it affects the middle class and the poor much more than the rich, who can easily afford such hikes.
In essence, people who argue for equality in insurance are misled. They don't want that. They really want something like socialized medicine, plain and simple.
The point of insurance is that you pay to get rid of your own risk. (Well, not to get rid of it entirely, but to get rid of the major consequence of something bad happening: having to pay a lot of money). If your risk is higher, you need to pay more. If your risk is lower, you get to pay less.
Consider extending your analogy. People with a lot of car accidents pay more for insurance. People with a clean record pay less. What would you think of a proposal that would make everyone pay the same amount for auto insurance? I'd think it would be pretty ridiculous, and I think you should too. And while one might moralize that people can't help their health so much as their driving habits, that's not the issue of an insurance company, Health or otherwise.
The problem is people who want some level of socialism and try to get it through insurance regulation and end up losing the free-market benefits while not even gaining much as a result. If you want other people to pay for your health care (and that of everyone else) stop beating around the bush and wagging your fingers at the insurance companies and admit you want socialized medicine. Then we can at least address it on its own terms.
Bah! You are forgetting LISP, which was not made up, but discovered! Like fractals or the Pythagorean theorem, an artifact of math, no more man's creation than the integers! LISP, the language from which the gods surely wrought the universe!
... actually, I too mostly hack things together with Perl.
Probably because they can get more power for their money out of building another few windmills than they could by strapping on a few wave generators.
These things are probably not optimized for wave-generation anyway. You'd be more concerned that your windmills can stay in one spot despite waves, and storms, and such. Otherwise, you're liable to lose windmills.
It appears they are suitable for small things along the roadside where the cost of installation of electrical service far outweighs the cost of electricity - signs along the highway, and such - and moreover things which aren't exactly the most critical infrastructure (like, oh, stoplights).
When it comes to things that chew lots of power, though, I'm sure there's no contest.
It reminds me of those solar garden-lights that they sell that you can just stick in the ground instead of digging trenches and running out conduits and getting the services of an electrician and such. They're not quite as bright as the wired kind, and they don't last the whole night (so you can't have them running in the early morning), but they're good enough for the job of glowing for a few hours in the evening after it gets dark and before you head indoors. They wouldn't exactly work to light up the inside of your house.
I disagree - while the skyscraper may not have all its demands met by solar, it would be a fine candidate, because it may enough consumption that it could guarantee that all the solar is being used, and seems more likely to have the capital for it than a smaller complex would.
The problem is that these things still do not make enough sense from the purely financial perspective. Electricity is cheap. Solar panels have a big up-front cost, and when you consider interest, maintenance, and such, the pay-back period is generally inferior to decent investments of the ordinary variety (stocks, bonds, real estate, etc).
Why spend money to save money, when you could spend money to make even-more-money?
The answer has to be some sort of moral impulse, and that's not really a way to get the backing of people who only want money from their investments.
Somehow or another (there are a lot of different and sometimes contradictory mechanisms at play) most people associate "chickens" (and eating chickens) with an enormously different set of concepts and moral ideals than they do wild birds of all sorts -- especially the big pretty ones like herons and such, but somewhat for any bird outside. Even pigeons and seagulls fare better, I think.
I hate to tell you this sparky but we do have a large amount of cheap energy. Not as cheap as it was just a few years ago but we do have a lot even now.
Yes, yes! Energy is fantastically cheap, even now! Three cheers for the West Virginia coal mines!
The United States already has a cheap and plentiful power source. It's called coal. As for fusion, it's anticipation of a cheap and plentiful and "clean" power source that has ostensibly played a role in keeping the Bush administration from starting a crackdown on fossil fuel use. If anything, it would vindicate a major portion of their environmental stance.
Slashdot Mirror
Good. Have fun searching spam.
Seriously, even Google's PageRank stuff relies on "human hands" placing links to documents on web pages.
I got free real-time quotes with my E*Trade account readily enough. You do need to open an account and log in each time, and you do need to accept a legal agreement, but I don't think you need to actually pay for them.
The legal agreement was mostly "you can't sue us, or NASDAQ, or the NYSE or anybody, for giving you these quotes... and you can't, like, republish these to other people". It didn't seem excessive.
I guess Google will be more convenient than these, but it's not a huge deal. Besides, if you actually care about a 15-minute delay, you'll have your brokerage account open anyway.
That's only because Slashdot has both Complainers and Non-Complainers on any given topic, and the Complainers are the ones who enjoy posting most. So they do.
Judging by just how many people have bothered to reply to the story so far, mmm, I'd say there's a good chance it's dead.
Here's a B-flat half-diminished seventh chord right back at you, buddy!
It is, of course, one thing to detract from those playing Guitar Hero when one has little music experience, and another thing when a music afficionado has devoted years of practice to learning how to really play music and sees people devoting great time and effort (and a nontrivial amount of money, for that matter) towards mastering some freakish simulacrum of real music, and expresses disappointment at untapped potential.
(They're actually nearing inflation-adjusted highs not seen since a brief stint in 1981, and before that, the 1910s. But there is always something a little funny when you inflation-adjust the price of something which is, itself, a component of most inflation indicies. (And they say that the CPI overstates inflation, too...)
Oh, don't worry, I'm actually trying to give the GP the benefit of the doubt and more-leeway-than-he-deserves with his argument (hence the 'zomg' in the crusades) before attacking it as nonsensical. But anyway...
When you throw Buddhists and Quakers and the Amish, or even the Mormons, into the "I support genocide!" boat, you've actually lost touch with reality. At least saying "Catholics" is excusable because you can go "zomg crusades".
But clearly, those deliberately backwards overly-religious peasants of the Pennsylvania countryside are possessed of a genocidal mania, and a menace to free thought worldwide!
Well, for starters, the government already owns the buses. That's got to be a major plus.
Anyone have a link to the material in question? (Is it in English?)
I dunno. We could distract people for a bit by bashing another of their spectacularly stupid entries, though, Googlebot/2.1 on Unknown! Stupid Googlebot. :(
No, no, no, nonononono. That's the purpose of socialism. The purpose of insurance is to manage risk. Nobody here seems to understand this.
Is the purpose of your auto insurance so that you can pay for everyone else's bad driving when they have an accident? No. It's to manage the risk of your own driving.
And you pay a $120/mo premium when your average accident rate would only really cost you $100/mo because if you did get in an accident without insurance and had to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars, you could be totally and irrevocably Screwed for life, whereas you can presumably deal with terrible horrible burden of an extra $20 a month (that goes towards administrativia and profit) to avoid that.
And if you're concerned about safe drivers, you should argue for dismantling the auto insurance system altogether.
Except, even safe drivers have accidents, or have their cars struck by lightning while sitting in the driveway (true story!) and unexpected things come up with regards to peoples' health. Risk is always out there.
And risk carries a price! A 1% chance of getting sick or injured this year and needing $100,000 dollars in treatment is worse than a 100% chance of spending $1000 a year on insurance against that. Why? Because that first $1000 doesn't mean nearly as much to you as the last $1000 after you've exhausted your life's savings and your kids' college funds and gone into debt. You can plan for the first $1000. That's why it's worth it. That's why you'll even pay more than $1000 in this hypothetical case, to cover the insurance company's administration and make it a profit. That is how insurance works.
And to that end, it is good to discriminate based on real likelihood of disease. I know you want to protect the frail and the ill, and are more than willing to grab at the pockets of the eeeevil greeeedy faceless insurance corporations to pay for it. But it doesn't work that way: oh, sure, you'll grab a few thousands here and there, but it just ends up raising the cost of insurance for everyone, and when it gets down to that level it's a very regressive tax on society, as it affects the middle class and the poor much more than the rich, who can easily afford such hikes.
In essence, people who argue for equality in insurance are misled. They don't want that. They really want something like socialized medicine, plain and simple.
The point of insurance is that you pay to get rid of your own risk. (Well, not to get rid of it entirely, but to get rid of the major consequence of something bad happening: having to pay a lot of money). If your risk is higher, you need to pay more. If your risk is lower, you get to pay less.
Consider extending your analogy. People with a lot of car accidents pay more for insurance. People with a clean record pay less. What would you think of a proposal that would make everyone pay the same amount for auto insurance? I'd think it would be pretty ridiculous, and I think you should too. And while one might moralize that people can't help their health so much as their driving habits, that's not the issue of an insurance company, Health or otherwise.
The problem is people who want some level of socialism and try to get it through insurance regulation and end up losing the free-market benefits while not even gaining much as a result. If you want other people to pay for your health care (and that of everyone else) stop beating around the bush and wagging your fingers at the insurance companies and admit you want socialized medicine. Then we can at least address it on its own terms.
Bah! You are forgetting LISP, which was not made up, but discovered! Like fractals or the Pythagorean theorem, an artifact of math, no more man's creation than the integers! LISP, the language from which the gods surely wrought the universe!
Probably because they can get more power for their money out of building another few windmills than they could by strapping on a few wave generators.
These things are probably not optimized for wave-generation anyway. You'd be more concerned that your windmills can stay in one spot despite waves, and storms, and such. Otherwise, you're liable to lose windmills.
It appears they are suitable for small things along the roadside where the cost of installation of electrical service far outweighs the cost of electricity - signs along the highway, and such - and moreover things which aren't exactly the most critical infrastructure (like, oh, stoplights).
When it comes to things that chew lots of power, though, I'm sure there's no contest.
It reminds me of those solar garden-lights that they sell that you can just stick in the ground instead of digging trenches and running out conduits and getting the services of an electrician and such. They're not quite as bright as the wired kind, and they don't last the whole night (so you can't have them running in the early morning), but they're good enough for the job of glowing for a few hours in the evening after it gets dark and before you head indoors. They wouldn't exactly work to light up the inside of your house.
I disagree - while the skyscraper may not have all its demands met by solar, it would be a fine candidate, because it may enough consumption that it could guarantee that all the solar is being used, and seems more likely to have the capital for it than a smaller complex would.
The problem is that these things still do not make enough sense from the purely financial perspective. Electricity is cheap. Solar panels have a big up-front cost, and when you consider interest, maintenance, and such, the pay-back period is generally inferior to decent investments of the ordinary variety (stocks, bonds, real estate, etc).
Why spend money to save money, when you could spend money to make even-more-money? The answer has to be some sort of moral impulse, and that's not really a way to get the backing of people who only want money from their investments.
Somehow or another (there are a lot of different and sometimes contradictory mechanisms at play) most people associate "chickens" (and eating chickens) with an enormously different set of concepts and moral ideals than they do wild birds of all sorts -- especially the big pretty ones like herons and such, but somewhat for any bird outside. Even pigeons and seagulls fare better, I think.
Random vaguely-offtopical bonus link: Polish chicken!
Yes, yes! Energy is fantastically cheap, even now! Three cheers for the West Virginia coal mines!
The United States already has a cheap and plentiful power source. It's called coal. As for fusion, it's anticipation of a cheap and plentiful and "clean" power source that has ostensibly played a role in keeping the Bush administration from starting a crackdown on fossil fuel use. If anything, it would vindicate a major portion of their environmental stance.
Apache benchmarker. If you have the right packages installed (e.g. 'apache2-utils' on Debian) it certainly exists on any Linux distro worth its salt.