Batteries killed the electric car. The capacity is weak. The recharging takes forever. The efficiency is poor. They're full of toxic icky stuff.
Maybe the super-capacitors will somehow work out; if not, put your hope in fuel cells: when they finally get the storage worked out, whatever that turns out to be, you will be able to refuel in a jiffy.
Re:This was discovered in the US?
on
Treating the Dead
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
This is one of the big arguments against socialized medicine: since you can make $$$ off medicine, lots of people go into medicine to make $$$ and come up with new and interesting stuff. And this cannot be entirely replaced by government funding. And after the companies have made their billions off the drugs, the patents expire, and after a few decades you've got trillions of dollars worth of medical knowledge that you wouldn't have been able to get otherwise. The cost of this? The poor cannot afford the good medicine.
Other arguments against socialized medicine include: years-long queues for certain sorts of procedures (which aren't strictly Necessary, but may be Incredibly Useful), the sheer cost of paying for it, and a tricky sort of little moral hazard problem with implications against freedom. (Specifically, if the government has to pay for your health care, then a - you're probably less likely to try and take preventative measures to maintain your health since the Government will deal with it and you won't have to pay for it as heavily as you would otherwise; this contributes to a larger problem: b- being unhealthy means more money out of the federal budget, so the government has a big incentive to make unhealthy activity illegals, and the next thing you know, they could be forcing tofu cubes down your throat screaming "it's good for you!!!!!" when all you want is a hamburger, a simple hamburger, for the love of all that is holy - well, figuratively speaking, anyway; you get the idea.)
The unarguable fact that's in support of socialized medicine is "it will make certain peoples' lives better". It will also probably make people's lives worse - rich people, healthy people who pay taxes, and Future people. For typical middle-class people, it's less than clear.
CALIFORNIA LABOR CODE SECTION 2870 INVENTION ON OWN TIME - EXEMPTION FROM AGREEMENT
(a) Any provision in an employment agreement which provides that an employee shall assign, or offer to assign, any of employee's rights in an invention to employee's employer shall not apply to an invention that the employee developed entirely on employee's own time without using the employer's equipment, supplies, facilities, or trade secret information except for those inventions that either:
(1) Relate at the time of conception or reduction to practice of the invention to the employer's business, or actual or demonstrably anticipated research or development of the employer; or (2) Result from any work performed by the employee for the employer.
(b) To the extent a provision in an employment agreement purports to require an employee to assign an invention otherwise excluded from being required to be assigned under subdivision (a), the provision is against the public policy of this state and is unenforceable.
Java is an astounding success, and a wildly popular language.
In the enterprise. Java in the browser is widely acknowledged to be not-so-spectacular at best, even given modern advances.
But most business-level development these is being done in either Java (or occasionally C#, for the suckers) and Java still
dominates in a truly amazing way. In its way, it's the modern COBOL- somewhat verbose and clunky, but EVERYWHERE, and Going Nowhere.
Fortunately for the world, it's brain-damage factor is a puny fraction of what COBOL's was.
In summary, if you'd like to say that Java on the desktop was ultimately a pretty lukewarm experience, that's certainly one thing. But you said it yourself - servers and OSs and server-side stuff.
I got a taste of San Francisco values when I visited and saw the Lunar New Year parade. There were people from the Falun Gong who would have liked to have marched in the parade, but they were not allowed. The reasons for this essentially were a) sucking up to the Chinese lobby and b) sucking it up to the Gay lobby (since the group condemns homosexuality). There were some quotes of officials, I think, making ludicrous comparisons about how letting them march would be like letting the KKK march in the Martin Luther King Day parade. (I think I could make a better case for it being like Martin Luther King marching at the KKK rally... though that's not really the case; we haven't seen, for example, anyone nailed to an upside-down cross and set on fire, on either side...)
Sadly, actions really don't really speak louder than words where Special Interest Politics are concerned, and so the San Francisco status quo can continue to market itself with terms like "compassion, tolerance, respect". But I would remind those people that it's not really tolerance if you agree with the people you're Tolerating. And, to bring the discussion back to the article, it's not really free speech if you can't write disturbing, mean, or hateful things.
It may not be formalized as what we consider "property rights", but even in Nature, aside from mere territoriality, you might see a notion that if some creature has done some work, they are entitled to dispose the fruits of that work: a bird defends her nest, the bees defend their honey, a fox protects its den. As creatures capable of abstract communication, large-scale organization, formalization and policing of principles, we have devised a formal system that attempts to preserve this idea: if I have obtained an iPod, it is not yours to take away. It's mine. And when this system falls apart, then things are not so bright; people are less willing to work to make their lives better or get nice stuff if the money and stuff is simply going to vanish, people cannot improve a home if they are not allowed to by some landlord, and many "common" areas suffer because no one individual has enough stake in a matter to take care of them (and no recourse if someone should destroy their work).
While it not without pitfalls, property systems such as our own really do seem to work spectacularly well; compare the typical American residence to the typical Soviet residence, and you might get some notion of what I'm talking about. Land, and its initial distribution, is one of the big stumbling blocks in forming such a system, as can be witnessed in some third-world economies - Europe seems to have sort of eased its way into the matter as a transition away from feudal land ownership, while America was settled on a sort of "first come, first serve" basis that, aside from the flagrant steamrolling over the natives business, seems to have worked out well enough.
Please note that the "free market" about which you're complaining deserves its name in quotes, because insofar as these the issues you are complaining about are market issues, they are not Free, and insofar as they are free, they are not market issues. Buying legislation is just rent-seeking and as old as the hills.
Free Markets and Free Enterprise don't mean the freedom of Enterprise to do whatever the heck they feel like. It means a freedom for people to engage in enterprise (you know, selling things to each other) as long as they're both willing and able to do so.
Nothing in this is contradictory with democracy or against human rights.
The contribution of funds to influence the political process is an entirely nonmarket affair. Blaming market economics for the hazards which are induced are roughly equivalent to saying "Hey, this guy got a job with $COMPANY and used the money to buy a gun and shoot people. $COMPANY is antithetical to human rights!".)
but CS is not about "programming languages", it's about algorithms, logic, and deeper concepts.
Symbol tables. Compile-time versus run-time bindings of all types.
Memory management techniques. Garbage collection. Parameter passing techniques. The Stack. Imperative languages, functional languages, and that third kind - whatever Prolog was. Scope, scope, scope! Closures. Deterministic finite automata! (And push-down automata). Lexing. Unambiguous grammars, derivations, parse tables.
CS is not just about programming languages, but my four credit-hour class says it's certainly a topic.:) The important stuff that CS is not about, I think, is stuff like "Java 2 Enterprise Edition application servers" and "Microsoft.NET framework" and "Ruby on Rails" and "Web Services" and "AJAX" and "how do I set up a code repository and versioning system" and all sorts of handy things that are relevant to actually slapping something together for the firm that's employing you.
It's being auctioned on SEOBidding.com - as in, Search Engine Optimization - not the nice, XHTML+accessibility+no-broken-links kind of SEO, but the scum-of-the-earth kind that snaps up a domain where the registration has lapsed, and puts up a site with a) ads and b) links to other sites, so they can steal the page-rank.
...I get some chains and tie my Second Life avatar to some trees in the virtual forest? That sounds potentially, ah, "kinky". Especially the bit about the chains. I understand they're fairly popular there.
If you go for it, you could find yourself making some, ah, interesting new friends.
In their defense, at least Microsoft seems to be doing something to place this on computer games and other related products, instead of just expecting to put it on Random Stuff like I seem to understand the CueCat hoped for. Give them a half-ounce of credit where it's due, hmm?
Hey. This is the military. It's their job to worry about what happens when something goes down, since if they're ever in a war, someone might take things down.
As for the rest of the Western world, I actually don't think most people do rely on GPS in any significant manner: most of their travel is to and from work and around town, in a place where they know the way. Modern civilian GPS systems, generally used for travel and trips and such, are as much used for their give-me-directions capabilities as they are for the you-are-here capabilities. If they stopped working, they'd be replaced by visits to Google Maps and such...
The reason most childfree people are childfree is because they were smarter earlier and able to comprehend the needs and difficulties of child-rearing, weighed it against the benefits and decided voluntarily to have nothing to do with it. Does that always mean they're smarter? One could instead say they're just more self-centered, or materialistic. I know that not everyone is capable of appreciating a potential family as well as others. But to paint that preference as "intelligent" and implying a that the inverse is stupid is uncalled for. In forty years, some of those career-minded people will surely be sad and lonely and wonder how stupid they were to think they were chasing happiness while they were burning themselves out for an empty career.
(Some. Others will still be having the time of their lives.)
I will say that the sad part is when Mr. and Mrs. Career decide that they want to start Raising a Family now as the next thing on their checklist at age 45, and they can't handle rambunctious youngsters (which they don't have the energy to handle) and have gotten so used to everything being about themselves... or, worse, when they try to live vicariously through their kids and pressure them into doing umpteen billion things, instead of letting them choose their life...
My parents married young, while my dad was in graduate school, and we didn't even have enough money to afford the subway. We made use of the community garden, and my mother did some baking out of our apartment to help support us. I helped pat the dough when I was, like, 2 or 3... my first word was "hot", since the oven was, well, hot... and if you asked them, or anyone of their five kids, if they would have traded away one child for a slightly richer lifestyle, or even just waited another five years or so for something similar, well... No. It wouldn't be worth it. The love in a family can truly be greater more than all the riches in the world. They regret they didn't get married even a little earlier.
I don't know anyone who regrets having had children. I know they exist, though, and this makes me sad.
Not only are kids *much* smarter
than some politicians want to make them sound, it's a thinly veiled attempt to legislate morality. (again) Riiiight. Because (effectiveness of anything aside) all those antedeluvian conservatives are just trying to enforce their own narrow-minded world view which unjustly classifies, oh, stalkers, pedophiles and rapists as a "danger to society". This prudish, dogmatic grandstanding has no place in a free society! Stalkers are just misunderstood, and a truly just society would surely recognize their tendencies as a healthy, valid expression of their own individual volition!
But what "it" were you talking about with legislating morality again? The article and summary don't seem to point out anything in particular... Oh! I'm sorry. Were you just ranting?
A remote controlled lock? Via Ethernet? In all honesty, that is one of the stupidest ideas I have heard in a LONG time. Hey. Our school has one of those key-card systems, where you can have a card to open the locks... or open them on a schedule... and stuff like that... and they do connect on Ethernet (they have their own virtual LAN, but anyway...)
Kids picked on me in middle school. No one stood up for me. Kids picked up on me in high school. No one really stood up for me. Kids picked on me in college (in the midst of the typical reckless wanton hedonism). I ignored them, found a small cluster of friends; I'm graduating in ~30 days, and have accepted a job in California for over $70k/yr. (In the midst of even more reckless wanton hedonism, surely, but I think I'll manage somehow.)
Is he right about the existence of a culture of indifference, a culture of alienation, reckless wanton hedonism, and such? Dude, my local Franciscan priest was just talking about exactly that the Sunday before the incident. Is he right to point out problems in the school system? Dude, primary education is pretty vicious! Do you get to shoot people up because of all that? Umm, no. His theory of moral responsibility for the killings holds water about as well as a colander: it all drains away if you look at it for more than a moment; most people (fortunately) seem to realize that.
Maybe some good can yet come of the deaths, but I think he's largely been counterproductive and has not helped his cause one little bit.
It should be important for would-be martyrs comparing themselves to Jesus to note that, by most accounts, Jesus didn't take anybody with him when he went down. I mean, his buddy Peter tried that stunt and sliced off somebody's ear, but he got yelled at for it, and some claim that Jesus even went and put it back on.
The book is full of half-answered questions, followed by sweeping generalizations. The irony is that the authors criticize "expertise" constantly (such as in the real-estate agent case), but then turn around and make sweeping statements that depend on their own status as experts. My local expert (a fellow with a Ph.D. in economics) has a similar opinion, and doesn't really consider anything in it particularly insightful to begin with.
Actually, since we're talking about all that infrastructure and electricity, why not use stabilized welded track and run a bullet train? I'll do a one-up on that!
Sir, there's nothing on earth
Like a genuine,
Bona fide,
Electrified,
Six-car
Monorail!
I think it's a tunnelfromnowhere as well. From both points of view.
Re:How about the route to Canada and Continental U
on
The World's Longest Tunnel
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Will that enable truck traffic all the way to say, LA?
Sounds like a good trick for the ruskies to get us to pay for most of it then threaten to take back Alaska. It's not like Putin is a nice soft fuzzy benevolent character or anything.... If the Russkies wanted to invade Alaska, what good would a tunnel do? Send through the ground troops? I'm sure that would work reeeeeealy well, especially after a few strategic collapses...
They have Boats for that sort of thing; it'd be a lot more practical.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe the super-capacitors will somehow work out; if not, put your hope in fuel cells: when they finally get the storage worked out, whatever that turns out to be, you will be able to refuel in a jiffy.
Other arguments against socialized medicine include: years-long queues for certain sorts of procedures (which aren't strictly Necessary, but may be Incredibly Useful), the sheer cost of paying for it, and a tricky sort of little moral hazard problem with implications against freedom. (Specifically, if the government has to pay for your health care, then a - you're probably less likely to try and take preventative measures to maintain your health since the Government will deal with it and you won't have to pay for it as heavily as you would otherwise; this contributes to a larger problem: b- being unhealthy means more money out of the federal budget, so the government has a big incentive to make unhealthy activity illegals, and the next thing you know, they could be forcing tofu cubes down your throat screaming "it's good for you!!!!!" when all you want is a hamburger, a simple hamburger, for the love of all that is holy - well, figuratively speaking, anyway; you get the idea.)
The unarguable fact that's in support of socialized medicine is "it will make certain peoples' lives better". It will also probably make people's lives worse - rich people, healthy people who pay taxes, and Future people. For typical middle-class people, it's less than clear.
CALIFORNIA LABOR CODE SECTION 2870
INVENTION ON OWN TIME - EXEMPTION FROM AGREEMENT
(a) Any provision in an employment agreement which provides that an employee
shall assign, or offer to assign, any of employee's rights in an invention to employee's employer shall
not apply to an invention that the employee developed entirely on employee's own time without
using the employer's equipment, supplies, facilities, or trade secret information except for those
inventions that either:
(1) Relate at the time of conception or reduction to practice of the invention to
the employer's business, or actual or demonstrably anticipated research or development of the
employer; or
(2) Result from any work performed by the employee for the employer.
(b) To the extent a provision in an employment agreement purports to require an
employee to assign an invention otherwise excluded from being required to be assigned under
subdivision (a), the provision is against the public policy of this state and is unenforceable.
In the enterprise. Java in the browser is widely acknowledged to be not-so-spectacular at best, even given modern advances. But most business-level development these is being done in either Java (or occasionally C#, for the suckers) and Java still dominates in a truly amazing way. In its way, it's the modern COBOL- somewhat verbose and clunky, but EVERYWHERE, and Going Nowhere. Fortunately for the world, it's brain-damage factor is a puny fraction of what COBOL's was.
In summary, if you'd like to say that Java on the desktop was ultimately a pretty lukewarm experience, that's certainly one thing. But you said it yourself - servers and OSs and server-side stuff.
This story is about your rights. Slashdot is online. Therefore, it is "Your Rights Online".
Sadly, actions really don't really speak louder than words where Special Interest Politics are concerned, and so the San Francisco status quo can continue to market itself with terms like "compassion, tolerance, respect". But I would remind those people that it's not really tolerance if you agree with the people you're Tolerating. And, to bring the discussion back to the article, it's not really free speech if you can't write disturbing, mean, or hateful things.
It may not be formalized as what we consider "property rights", but even in Nature, aside from mere territoriality, you might see a notion that if some creature has done some work, they are entitled to dispose the fruits of that work: a bird defends her nest, the bees defend their honey, a fox protects its den. As creatures capable of abstract communication, large-scale organization, formalization and policing of principles, we have devised a formal system that attempts to preserve this idea: if I have obtained an iPod, it is not yours to take away. It's mine. And when this system falls apart, then things are not so bright; people are less willing to work to make their lives better or get nice stuff if the money and stuff is simply going to vanish, people cannot improve a home if they are not allowed to by some landlord, and many "common" areas suffer because no one individual has enough stake in a matter to take care of them (and no recourse if someone should destroy their work).
While it not without pitfalls, property systems such as our own really do seem to work spectacularly well; compare the typical American residence to the typical Soviet residence, and you might get some notion of what I'm talking about. Land, and its initial distribution, is one of the big stumbling blocks in forming such a system, as can be witnessed in some third-world economies - Europe seems to have sort of eased its way into the matter as a transition away from feudal land ownership, while America was settled on a sort of "first come, first serve" basis that, aside from the flagrant steamrolling over the natives business, seems to have worked out well enough.
Please note that the "free market" about which you're complaining deserves its name in quotes, because insofar as these the issues you are complaining about are market issues, they are not Free, and insofar as they are free, they are not market issues. Buying legislation is just rent-seeking and as old as the hills.
Free Markets and Free Enterprise don't mean the freedom of Enterprise to do whatever the heck they feel like. It means a freedom for people to engage in enterprise (you know, selling things to each other) as long as they're both willing and able to do so. Nothing in this is contradictory with democracy or against human rights.
The contribution of funds to influence the political process is an entirely nonmarket affair. Blaming market economics for the hazards which are induced are roughly equivalent to saying "Hey, this guy got a job with $COMPANY and used the money to buy a gun and shoot people. $COMPANY is antithetical to human rights!".)
Symbol tables. Compile-time versus run-time bindings of all types. Memory management techniques. Garbage collection. Parameter passing techniques. The Stack. Imperative languages, functional languages, and that third kind - whatever Prolog was. Scope, scope, scope! Closures. Deterministic finite automata! (And push-down automata). Lexing. Unambiguous grammars, derivations, parse tables.
CS is not just about programming languages, but my four credit-hour class says it's certainly a topic. :) The important stuff that CS is not about, I think, is stuff like "Java 2 Enterprise Edition application servers" and "Microsoft .NET framework" and "Ruby on Rails" and "Web Services" and "AJAX" and "how do I set up a code repository and versioning system" and all sorts of handy things that are relevant to actually slapping something together for the firm that's employing you.
Wow! The underscore makes all the difference!
As for the auction, I hope they choke on it.
...I get some chains and tie my Second Life avatar to some trees in the virtual forest? That sounds potentially, ah, "kinky". Especially the bit about the chains. I understand they're fairly popular there. If you go for it, you could find yourself making some, ah, interesting new friends.In their defense, at least Microsoft seems to be doing something to place this on computer games and other related products, instead of just expecting to put it on Random Stuff like I seem to understand the CueCat hoped for. Give them a half-ounce of credit where it's due, hmm?
As for the rest of the Western world, I actually don't think most people do rely on GPS in any significant manner: most of their travel is to and from work and around town, in a place where they know the way. Modern civilian GPS systems, generally used for travel and trips and such, are as much used for their give-me-directions capabilities as they are for the you-are-here capabilities. If they stopped working, they'd be replaced by visits to Google Maps and such...
I will say that the sad part is when Mr. and Mrs. Career decide that they want to start Raising a Family now as the next thing on their checklist at age 45, and they can't handle rambunctious youngsters (which they don't have the energy to handle) and have gotten so used to everything being about themselves... or, worse, when they try to live vicariously through their kids and pressure them into doing umpteen billion things, instead of letting them choose their life...
My parents married young, while my dad was in graduate school, and we didn't even have enough money to afford the subway. We made use of the community garden, and my mother did some baking out of our apartment to help support us. I helped pat the dough when I was, like, 2 or 3... my first word was "hot", since the oven was, well, hot... and if you asked them, or anyone of their five kids, if they would have traded away one child for a slightly richer lifestyle, or even just waited another five years or so for something similar, well... No. It wouldn't be worth it. The love in a family can truly be greater more than all the riches in the world. They regret they didn't get married even a little earlier.
I don't know anyone who regrets having had children. I know they exist, though, and this makes me sad.
But what "it" were you talking about with legislating morality again? The article and summary don't seem to point out anything in particular... Oh! I'm sorry. Were you just ranting?
Is he right about the existence of a culture of indifference, a culture of alienation, reckless wanton hedonism, and such? Dude, my local Franciscan priest was just talking about exactly that the Sunday before the incident. Is he right to point out problems in the school system? Dude, primary education is pretty vicious! Do you get to shoot people up because of all that? Umm, no. His theory of moral responsibility for the killings holds water about as well as a colander: it all drains away if you look at it for more than a moment; most people (fortunately) seem to realize that.
Maybe some good can yet come of the deaths, but I think he's largely been counterproductive and has not helped his cause one little bit.
It should be important for would-be martyrs comparing themselves to Jesus to note that, by most accounts, Jesus didn't take anybody with him when he went down. I mean, his buddy Peter tried that stunt and sliced off somebody's ear, but he got yelled at for it, and some claim that Jesus even went and put it back on.
pray, verb, transitive:To make a devout, fervent, or earnest request for something. It's been used in secular contexts plenty in the past.
Sir, there's nothing on earth
Like a genuine,
Bona fide,
Electrified,
Six-car
Monorail!
In a tunnel!
I think it's a tunnelfromnowhere as well. From both points of view.
They have Boats for that sort of thing; it'd be a lot more practical.