Seriously, this is more a piece of performance art than a manufacturing device.
And...?
Day 1, lesson 1 at critic's school. You cannot criticise something, be it a movie, book, song, painting, or a solar powered machine, for failing to do something it does not set out to do.
Was there anything in TFA that suggested that this thing was setting out to be an automated cash cow for mass producing furniture? I didn't see it.
The machine cranks out 1 piece per day, a maximum of 365 pieces per year. At that rate, how many years does it take to recoup the cost of the machine, with at least $500 worth of solar panels?
Where does this perverse notion come from that all of human endeavour must be about making a profit?
The only people who think the body count is too high are: people who lost someone close to them and therefore to whom one is too high a count; and people opposed to war without regard for body count. We lost more than 60,000 in Vietnam; 40,000 in Korea; more than a quarter million in WWII; more than 500,000 in the civil war.
So that makes the thousands lost in Iraq, a war started for dubious reasons, okay?
Something tells me your opinions don't represent those of a typical American.
"I can promise you no more than ten to twenty million dead, tops!"
As an Air Force veteran with two draftable daughters, I'd say relying on robots rather than having our troops shot at and bombed is a GOOD thing.
I'm not sure I agree. While it would take soldiers out of the line of fire and reduce casualties, it would also make pointless, bloody wars a lot more palatable to the populace, and far easier to justify... after all, the populist tide didn't turn against the Iraq war until the US body count really started going up.
Spot on. Furthermore, the more acceptable a war is to the populace of the attacking country, by way of making it look like an arcade game, the less acceptable it will be to the people on the receiving end of the crossfire who have their houses blown up with their children inside, have surviving relatives who were previously ambivalent about jihadism, and who don't have their grief paraded on a continuous loop on Fox 'News.' I wonder how many moderate people the US has managed to radicalize since this unprovoked war in Iraq was started.
This is the sort of thing that Wyat Cenack (sp?), senior military analyst on The Daily Show, described as RFC projects. "Really F***ing Cool."
Yes, this is all cool and impressive and all, but hang on a second. Why does the US still put so much faith in technology to fix all the world's problems?
I remember reading an article in The Economist years ago about an American-developed mine clearing system. It was a huge, expensively developed, bulldozer. Er, yes, a bulldozer. It had a few bells and whistles and looked like something dropped out of an Imperial Star Destroyer, but trust me, it was just a bulldozer. Well they found that it was less effective than the tried and tested British method of a trained guy with a metal detector and a big stick poking into the ground. I'll let you guess which was cheaper and more effective.
If the British had adopted in Northern Ireland the same tactics that the USA is adopting now in different parts of the world, the troubles in Northern Ireland would still be going strong, we'd have gone as far as full on civil war, and the Brits would be looking to the UN for support because they'd have pissed off so many Irish Republicans that bomb alerts in London would be a daily occurrence.
Air strikes in residential areas? Sending in troops to act as policemen when they can't even speak the local language? What the hell are they thinking? Do they seriously think that the battle for the hearts and minds of muslims is going to be won by UAVs, robotic birds, satellites, tanks, and legions of soldiers occupying other peoples' countries as if their sovereignty counts for nothing? Do they think the reaction will be any different than their own reaction would be if Iranian troops were occupying San Diego, bursting into peoples' homes in search of militants, and calling in air strikes to wedding receptions?
They need to learn a few lessons from the British. An insurgency and a poisonous militant mindset is not defeated by a standing army. It's defeated behind the scenes by the intelligence services, by infiltration, away from the prying eyes of the media and it's done for the purpose of getting the job done, not in public for the purpose of winning votes. The only thing done in public is consistent repudiation of violence as a means of achieving political aims, education about the futility of violence and how it achieves nothing but heartbreak for all involved (viewer discretion advised), and providing a peaceful political alternative to the physical force method. It's less glamorous and the boys don't get to play with their toys, but it's a lot more effective.
Spot on. I saw this mechanical computer on TV years ago, they were talking about how it was a noble attempt to model the economy but it's just too complicated an organism to be modelled by any means, to say nothing of a mechanical device. Sometimes the economy reacts differently when you poke it the same way depending on a myriad of other factors.
Another example is traffic. Some people assume that traffic can be modelled like water in pipes. "Road is congested? Make it wider and the congestion will ease." What they don't realise is that motorists are more intelligent than water particles. They can be aware of a widening of the pipes/roads and choose to go into a system at a certain point at a certain time to take advantage of the widened road, with the net result of a road that's just as congested at 4 lanes wide as it was at 3 lanes wide. There's also the matter of being able to move one's home to a different location along the road to avoid congestion. Others follow suit, and the congestion is back to where it was. Want to model that using water in pipes? Good luck!
I disagree. The size of your finger has not changed. This just means that when you press 'w' there's less chance of your finger spilling over into 'q' or 'e' because they've been moved away. And 'more dead space between the keys does not require a 'significantly bigger screen,' he achieved this by making the keys triangular instead of square.
If think this is a normal reaction, I hope you never reproduce. Your children will be more fucked up than even I am.
And if you think it isn't a normal reaction for a parent to get nervous when their child doesn't show up at the expected time, I hope you don't reproduce either.
Holy crap- you are, what we in the biz call, an over-reacting parent. Calm down and take it easy before you destroy your daughter's life.
Didja read the summary? His daughter went missing after she was put on the wrong bus. I'm not a parent, but even I'm alarmed at reading that. I don't blame the guy, and I think that the normal reaction of any parent in a stressful situation like that can hardly be called 'destroying his daughter's life.'
Screw 'em. I'd trust a pamphleteer over any of the sacred cow rags that are mentioned in the TFA.
'Pamphleteers,' by whom I presume you mean bloggers, are not journalists. Bloggers just cherry pick other peoples' hard work and add a few opinionated comments of their own to it. Journalists are professional people who do research and go through an editorial process before they get published. They are held accountable. Society needs this. It costs money. The money has to come from somewhere. The free news business model has been tried, and kudos to the newspapers for giving it their best shot, but it simply does not work. Screw em? No. Let's not 'screw em.' We need someone to uncover the next Watergate. We need someone to keep an eye on the war profiteers who charge $20 per washing machine load of laundry. We need someone to keep tabs on the polluters and bring it to the public's attention. If it means an exemption to anti-trust laws (that were written before newspapers ended up in this situation) then so be it. A professional news media is too important to be left to die.
I submit that believing some creator of the universe manifested its power in the form of a sacrificial holy man long ago is far less wacky then believing an intergalactic overlord imprisoned in a volcano who attached alien ghosts to primitive humans, causing all their problems.
And I submit that it's equally as crazy. The invisible man in the sky? Please!
In spite of all the shit they get, the Christians I've met in life have generally been very friendly and nice to me. Just good folks who believe what they believe. You have your bad apples, but that's true for every group in the world.
I'm afraid it's a bit more serious than a 'few bad apples' in the case of the Catholic Church. The Ryan Report was just part of one country's journey to confronting the reality of what its priests have done, I wonder how many more cases of pedophile priests there are around the world. We know that there have been cases like this in other countries. The Ryan Report could be the start of a global tsunami of truth that topples the CC from its position of prominence. How many more people have harrowing experiences like this poor fella?
"but leaving these con artists on the street while harassing scientology just seems unfair"
That's not how civil cases work. You can't just go after anyone and sue for damages based on them doing something not right to someone else. These are personal complaints against scientology by people who feel they've been wronged by the group. If someone else has been conned out of money by another group, it's up to them to try bring it before a court.
I get the impression from TFA that these are criminal fraud charges that are being brought in France, not civil cases.
It's been a while since I watched that race, but from memory I think Le Mans pit stops aren't the 4-second in-n-out with four fresh tyres and a full tank that you get in Formula 1. They last a bit longer than that.
The thing that annoyed me the most about the new Trek was the abundance of 'shaking the camera during filming' shots I was subjected to. Can we give that a rest?
Can't say I noticed any. (Or maybe you saw the Imax version?)
It wasn't as bad as NYPD Blue, I watched the first couple of minutes of that show and had to abandon the attempt because I was getting motion sickness.
Why they didn't buy a bunch of Segways for it, is beyond me.
Trikes are cheaper to buy than Segways which start at $2,400.
Trikes are cheaper to maintain than Segways.
Trikes are easier to maintain than Segways since all you need is a regular bike mechanic that can be found in any good bike store.
Segways require electrical power just to stand up, that kind of power costs money. Trikes don't use any power when standing up because they've got three wheels.
Segways require electrical power to operate, trikes don't and hence have a lower carbon footprint.
Segways have to be charged up, trikes don't.
Trikes are more efficient.
Trikes do pretty much the same job for a lot less money.
There's no enough room on a Segway to hold the equipment, there is enough room on a trike.
Riding a trike is a lot healthier than driving a Segway because it uses human power.
And the goal here isn't to improve quality, it's to lower it. People don't want these cars.
Higher fuel efficiency = lower quality? There's no demand for fuel efficient cars? This is the sort of nonsense that passes for 'insightful' around here these days? I'd like to know what these moderators are smoking - it couldn't be legal.
Do we really need ANOTHER, separate tax for these things? Don't make us feel all warm and fuzzy with something stupid like this. If you need money for things like firefighters, libraries, roads, potholes, policemen, trains, courts, freeways, and airports, why don't they just cut failing programs from the budget or increase the taxes that fund these items directly? Another tax means more paperwork, which means more waste. Typical government stupidity.
Ah, the magic 'just.'
Why don't you 'just' go and climb Mt Everest? Why don't you 'just' go and cure cancer?
Cutting waste is something that ALL governments attempt to do as part of the regular course of... governing. Every wannabe politician, like Ahnold here in California, has thought that they could magically 'just' make government more efficient and save the day with the budget. Once they get into power they soon realise that this financial alchemy has already been attempted and there comes a point when the only way to fund essential services is through TAXES! (Some people hate that word do I'll say it again) TAXES!
After all we've been through in the last few years I would have thought that the message was going to sink in that there's no such thing as a free lunch and that if you want stuff then you need to pay for it. Maybe another year or two of recession will wake people up.
It isn't a worthy cause. They are just looking for another way to squeeze even more out of us. NY already has some of the highest taxes in the country. I think by calling it a fat tax they hope to make it seem less egregious.
What they need to do is make serious budget cuts. Cut back on the state government. Unfortunately, the special interests groups are going to keep fighting for their piece of the budget when someone wants to cut it.
Quite right. Who needs firefighters, libraries, roads, fixed potholes, policemen, trains, courts, freeways and airports? Scrap it all and let's go back to living in a subsistence economy. Who wants all this civilisation crap anyway? Things were much better in the days of the founding fathers when all was well with the world and there was no need for any government.
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That's what happens when you continual elect democrats to office.
Roads go to shit but I'm sure there's no cuts in programs for illegal aliens.
Quite. Tax revenue is insufficient to pay for essential services - let's blame the Democrats who want to tax everyone to death.
Hang on...
Can what? Criticise it for failing to do something it does not set out to do? I disagree.
That's a different thing from criticising it for failing to do something it does not set out to do.
"Your atom bomb killed everyone!" Valid criticism.
"Your atom bomb does not take me to work in style while returning 30MPG!" Invalid criticism.
What exactly is perverse about producing more than you consume? That's what a profit is, after all.
Who said anything about profit being perverse? I said that it was perverse to suggest that EVERYTHING we do has to be profitable.
Seriously, this is more a piece of performance art than a manufacturing device.
And...?
Day 1, lesson 1 at critic's school. You cannot criticise something, be it a movie, book, song, painting, or a solar powered machine, for failing to do something it does not set out to do.
Was there anything in TFA that suggested that this thing was setting out to be an automated cash cow for mass producing furniture? I didn't see it.
The machine cranks out 1 piece per day, a maximum of 365 pieces per year. At that rate, how many years does it take to recoup the cost of the machine, with at least $500 worth of solar panels?
Where does this perverse notion come from that all of human endeavour must be about making a profit?
The only people who think the body count is too high are: people who lost someone close to them and therefore to whom one is too high a count; and people opposed to war without regard for body count. We lost more than 60,000 in Vietnam; 40,000 in Korea; more than a quarter million in WWII; more than 500,000 in the civil war.
So that makes the thousands lost in Iraq, a war started for dubious reasons, okay?
Something tells me your opinions don't represent those of a typical American.
"I can promise you no more than ten to twenty million dead, tops!"
As an Air Force veteran with two draftable daughters, I'd say relying on robots rather than having our troops shot at and bombed is a GOOD thing.
I'm not sure I agree. While it would take soldiers out of the line of fire and reduce casualties, it would also make pointless, bloody wars a lot more palatable to the populace, and far easier to justify... after all, the populist tide didn't turn against the Iraq war until the US body count really started going up.
Spot on. Furthermore, the more acceptable a war is to the populace of the attacking country, by way of making it look like an arcade game, the less acceptable it will be to the people on the receiving end of the crossfire who have their houses blown up with their children inside, have surviving relatives who were previously ambivalent about jihadism, and who don't have their grief paraded on a continuous loop on Fox 'News.' I wonder how many moderate people the US has managed to radicalize since this unprovoked war in Iraq was started.
Can you say 'Blowback?'
This is the sort of thing that Wyat Cenack (sp?), senior military analyst on The Daily Show, described as RFC projects. "Really F***ing Cool."
Yes, this is all cool and impressive and all, but hang on a second. Why does the US still put so much faith in technology to fix all the world's problems?
I remember reading an article in The Economist years ago about an American-developed mine clearing system. It was a huge, expensively developed, bulldozer. Er, yes, a bulldozer. It had a few bells and whistles and looked like something dropped out of an Imperial Star Destroyer, but trust me, it was just a bulldozer. Well they found that it was less effective than the tried and tested British method of a trained guy with a metal detector and a big stick poking into the ground. I'll let you guess which was cheaper and more effective.
If the British had adopted in Northern Ireland the same tactics that the USA is adopting now in different parts of the world, the troubles in Northern Ireland would still be going strong, we'd have gone as far as full on civil war, and the Brits would be looking to the UN for support because they'd have pissed off so many Irish Republicans that bomb alerts in London would be a daily occurrence.
Air strikes in residential areas? Sending in troops to act as policemen when they can't even speak the local language? What the hell are they thinking? Do they seriously think that the battle for the hearts and minds of muslims is going to be won by UAVs, robotic birds, satellites, tanks, and legions of soldiers occupying other peoples' countries as if their sovereignty counts for nothing? Do they think the reaction will be any different than their own reaction would be if Iranian troops were occupying San Diego, bursting into peoples' homes in search of militants, and calling in air strikes to wedding receptions?
They need to learn a few lessons from the British. An insurgency and a poisonous militant mindset is not defeated by a standing army. It's defeated behind the scenes by the intelligence services, by infiltration, away from the prying eyes of the media and it's done for the purpose of getting the job done, not in public for the purpose of winning votes. The only thing done in public is consistent repudiation of violence as a means of achieving political aims, education about the futility of violence and how it achieves nothing but heartbreak for all involved (viewer discretion advised), and providing a peaceful political alternative to the physical force method. It's less glamorous and the boys don't get to play with their toys, but it's a lot more effective.
Spot on. I saw this mechanical computer on TV years ago, they were talking about how it was a noble attempt to model the economy but it's just too complicated an organism to be modelled by any means, to say nothing of a mechanical device. Sometimes the economy reacts differently when you poke it the same way depending on a myriad of other factors.
Another example is traffic. Some people assume that traffic can be modelled like water in pipes. "Road is congested? Make it wider and the congestion will ease." What they don't realise is that motorists are more intelligent than water particles. They can be aware of a widening of the pipes/roads and choose to go into a system at a certain point at a certain time to take advantage of the widened road, with the net result of a road that's just as congested at 4 lanes wide as it was at 3 lanes wide. There's also the matter of being able to move one's home to a different location along the road to avoid congestion. Others follow suit, and the congestion is back to where it was. Want to model that using water in pipes? Good luck!
I disagree. The size of your finger has not changed. This just means that when you press 'w' there's less chance of your finger spilling over into 'q' or 'e' because they've been moved away. And 'more dead space between the keys does not require a 'significantly bigger screen,' he achieved this by making the keys triangular instead of square.
If think this is a normal reaction, I hope you never reproduce. Your children will be more fucked up than even I am.
And if you think it isn't a normal reaction for a parent to get nervous when their child doesn't show up at the expected time, I hope you don't reproduce either.
Holy crap- you are, what we in the biz call, an over-reacting parent. Calm down and take it easy before you destroy your daughter's life.
Didja read the summary? His daughter went missing after she was put on the wrong bus. I'm not a parent, but even I'm alarmed at reading that. I don't blame the guy, and I think that the normal reaction of any parent in a stressful situation like that can hardly be called 'destroying his daughter's life.'
Screw 'em. I'd trust a pamphleteer over any of the sacred cow rags that are mentioned in the TFA.
'Pamphleteers,' by whom I presume you mean bloggers, are not journalists. Bloggers just cherry pick other peoples' hard work and add a few opinionated comments of their own to it. Journalists are professional people who do research and go through an editorial process before they get published. They are held accountable. Society needs this. It costs money. The money has to come from somewhere. The free news business model has been tried, and kudos to the newspapers for giving it their best shot, but it simply does not work. Screw em? No. Let's not 'screw em.' We need someone to uncover the next Watergate. We need someone to keep an eye on the war profiteers who charge $20 per washing machine load of laundry. We need someone to keep tabs on the polluters and bring it to the public's attention. If it means an exemption to anti-trust laws (that were written before newspapers ended up in this situation) then so be it. A professional news media is too important to be left to die.
And I submit that it's equally as crazy. The invisible man in the sky? Please!
I'm afraid it's a bit more serious than a 'few bad apples' in the case of the Catholic Church. The Ryan Report was just part of one country's journey to confronting the reality of what its priests have done, I wonder how many more cases of pedophile priests there are around the world. We know that there have been cases like this in other countries. The Ryan Report could be the start of a global tsunami of truth that topples the CC from its position of prominence. How many more people have harrowing experiences like this poor fella?
"but leaving these con artists on the street while harassing scientology just seems unfair"
That's not how civil cases work. You can't just go after anyone and sue for damages based on them doing something not right to someone else. These are personal complaints against scientology by people who feel they've been wronged by the group. If someone else has been conned out of money by another group, it's up to them to try bring it before a court.
I get the impression from TFA that these are criminal fraud charges that are being brought in France, not civil cases.
Why the big air scoops on this car? Do they have a heat problem? They almost look like they are placed for tire cooling more than anything else.
You would think that they would try to make this the sleekest wind-cheatingest car they could instead of grabbing huge chunks of air.
Wind-cheating? The purpose of race car design isn't to reduce drag, the purpose is to generate maximum downforce.
It's been a while since I watched that race, but from memory I think Le Mans pit stops aren't the 4-second in-n-out with four fresh tyres and a full tank that you get in Formula 1. They last a bit longer than that.
you emit more carbon dioxide riding a trike than on a segway..
Source...?
The thing that annoyed me the most about the new Trek was the abundance of 'shaking the camera during filming' shots I was subjected to. Can we give that a rest?
Can't say I noticed any. (Or maybe you saw the Imax version?)
It wasn't as bad as NYPD Blue, I watched the first couple of minutes of that show and had to abandon the attempt because I was getting motion sickness.
Why they didn't buy a bunch of Segways for it, is beyond me.
Trikes are cheaper to buy than Segways which start at $2,400.
Trikes are cheaper to maintain than Segways.
Trikes are easier to maintain than Segways since all you need is a regular bike mechanic that can be found in any good bike store.
Segways require electrical power just to stand up, that kind of power costs money. Trikes don't use any power when standing up because they've got three wheels.
Segways require electrical power to operate, trikes don't and hence have a lower carbon footprint.
Segways have to be charged up, trikes don't.
Trikes are more efficient.
Trikes do pretty much the same job for a lot less money.
There's no enough room on a Segway to hold the equipment, there is enough room on a trike.
Riding a trike is a lot healthier than driving a Segway because it uses human power.
Want any more?
And the goal here isn't to improve quality, it's to lower it. People don't want these cars.
Higher fuel efficiency = lower quality? There's no demand for fuel efficient cars? This is the sort of nonsense that passes for 'insightful' around here these days? I'd like to know what these moderators are smoking - it couldn't be legal.
If we start chaining them down, kids will start having sedentary lifestyles!
Hang on...
Do we really need ANOTHER, separate tax for these things? Don't make us feel all warm and fuzzy with something stupid like this. If you need money for things like firefighters, libraries, roads, potholes, policemen, trains, courts, freeways, and airports, why don't they just cut failing programs from the budget or increase the taxes that fund these items directly? Another tax means more paperwork, which means more waste. Typical government stupidity.
Ah, the magic 'just.'
Why don't you 'just' go and climb Mt Everest? Why don't you 'just' go and cure cancer?
Cutting waste is something that ALL governments attempt to do as part of the regular course of... governing. Every wannabe politician, like Ahnold here in California, has thought that they could magically 'just' make government more efficient and save the day with the budget. Once they get into power they soon realise that this financial alchemy has already been attempted and there comes a point when the only way to fund essential services is through TAXES! (Some people hate that word do I'll say it again) TAXES!
After all we've been through in the last few years I would have thought that the message was going to sink in that there's no such thing as a free lunch and that if you want stuff then you need to pay for it. Maybe another year or two of recession will wake people up.
It isn't a worthy cause. They are just looking for another way to squeeze even more out of us. NY already has some of the highest taxes in the country. I think by calling it a fat tax they hope to make it seem less egregious.
What they need to do is make serious budget cuts. Cut back on the state government. Unfortunately, the special interests groups are going to keep fighting for their piece of the budget when someone wants to cut it.
Quite right. Who needs firefighters, libraries, roads, fixed potholes, policemen, trains, courts, freeways and airports? Scrap it all and let's go back to living in a subsistence economy. Who wants all this civilisation crap anyway? Things were much better in the days of the founding fathers when all was well with the world and there was no need for any government.
Whether or not this would fly will all come down to cost.
I bet that regardless of cost, it won't. Because, well, it's a train, and last time I checked trains couldn't fly. :-P
Au contraire.