It's strange to me how people will say "free speech is incredibly important" and then say "you should not be accountable for your words". If words are important (and I believe they are) why shouldn't you be accountable for them? If you shouldn't be, why hold anyone accountable for anything? You can utterly destroy someone by spreading rumors about them.
Words are much more powerful than guns or bombs or weapons of mass destruction (that's why free speech is so important). But free speech is not cowardly speech. If you really believe what you are saying, why don't you think it's important enough to stand behind your words (even if that may mean prosecution or death)? Forget anonymity, it is just another word for cowardice. The last thing we need is more worthless cowards cluttering up the air with their idle words.
You may want to consider the software development cycle in you thoughts on the subject. Apple thinks it's better not to include features that aren't yet ready for prime time and risk getting flak from people like yourself. Other companies tend to shove every feature into the release they can think of whether it's ready or not. Apple's approach is why they consistently have a better user experience.
There are broader social implications to UFO sightings. How common are UFO sightings? What impacts do UFO enthusiasts have on broader society? How have UFO sightings changed over time, and what can that tell us about the phenomenon. It is possible to debunk almost anything by explaining it away, but it's important to know that explications are merely hypotheses and do not represent a scientific endeavor in themselves.
Like most (all?) college courses, this class would be a bunch of meaningless bullshit. But it seems unfair to exclude this particular field of study simply because many academics thumb their noses at it. I say bring on the "UFO Studies" graduates!
I'm sure that these companies would be happy to put in a firm bid. The problem is that doesn't make sense for this kind of project. For one thing, the project goals are not firm, and they will change during the course of the project. Another problem is the companies will take engineering uncertainties into account when they put in their bid to shield themselves from risk. That means the government will end up paying more.
Keep in mind the government is also stuck with a firm contract, that means they will have to pay down the road, even when they decide they no longer need the technology. For your plan to work, some fundamental changes will need happen at NASA, because they are going to need to set goals 10 years out and stick with them through changing government administrations. Even if you do that, you'd probably be better off sticking with cost plus. It's the only thing that makes sense given the small market and large risk.
My company does a lot of cost plus work. We would love to do firm pricing because it would mean more opportunity for profit. The problem is that it means more risk on the part of the client, so they never go for it. NASA is in the same boat.
What is everyone's beef with cost plus? You have to pay the costs, of course, because you can't seriously expect a company to work for you at a loss, and you have to give them a plus so that they will work on your project instead of something else. It's common sense. Am I missing something? What's the alternative? Do you pay for services you receive some other way?
Re:It's not a computer, it's a living-room applian
on
iPad Review
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· Score: 1
I see. I'm claiming we'll shift away from interfaces that require a keyboard and mouse towards interfaces where mufti-touch will be the primary method of user interface. I'm sure the keyboard will still be around, but I think it will be an accessory for those applications that benefit from it.
Failure to accept an assertion is not the same as failing to understand that an assertion has been made
Evolution and the big bang are not a matter of opinion. If a person says that the earth really is at the center of the universe, even if scientists think it is not, how in the world would you call that person scientifically literate? Part of being literate is to both understand and accept scientific constructs.
Those are not, in any practical sense of the word, facts. Whether or not they are literally true, speculating about what might have happened millions of years ago is of little real importance to people living today.
Am I to believe that the scientific construct a used to make a scientific discovery is as important as the discovery itself? It isn't. Scientific constructs have no intrinsic value.
They'd better start throttling their heavy users now, or they will face criticism later on once everyone figures out how bad it is for you. It will be like fast food all over again.
It sounds like you at least tried to do something. And I agree it doesn't make sense to prevent violence through violence.
My beef with voting is this. One day me and three friends were standing in a parking lot trying to decide what to do. Me and my friends wife wanted to watch Fiddler on the Roof. Her husband wanted to do anything but that and the third friend was ambivalent. I suggested we put it to a vote. My friend said "no, were not putting it to a vote". That ended our conversation and we found something else to do.
The sole function of voting is getting people to go along with whatever the government tells them to do. As an added bonus, people can claim to have done something by voting when in fact they've done nothing. People who voted against the war are still happy to burn foregin oil in their cars because, hey they didn't vote for it, right?
I don't think this will ever be a viable way to store energy for load balancing. I think a better way to do that would be to store hydrogen and burn it as needed in a combined cycle plant. A combined cycle plant only costs about $0.50 per watt, while this sodium-sulfur battery costs $6.25 per watt. Using electrolysis with a combined cycle plant would give you about 50% efficiency, while the battery has 75%. Wind power costs $1.50 per watt to install and is available about 20% of the time. So if you want to produce one Watt of continuous power using wind and electrolysis it's going to cost $1.50 /.2 /.5 + $0.50 = $15.50, while doing it with wind and a battery costs $1.50 /.2 /.75 + $6.25 = $16.25.
There are other benefits to storing and burning hydrogen. The number one being storing more energy costs little extra (you just need a bigger hydrogen tank). Also, if your peak load is a lot higher than your average, it doesn't cost a lot extra to have a combined cycle generator that can supply your peak load. Finally, if you need to add extra energy to the combined cycle system you can buy gas or whatever and reform it into hydrogen (or just burn it directly).
So, just how many nukes do they have? It's kind of hard to mention a nation that doesn't officially have any, but almost certainly does have them, isn't it? Don't worry about it, we would never attack them anyway.
The soldiers do not have full situational awareness, nor do they have luxury of sitting around to find out. You are comfortably sitting in front of a computer watching the video, with the luxury of knowing everything that is going due to investigations that others have carried out for you. The soldiers, on the other hand, are on the battlefield, providing air support to a ground patrol in real time. Waiting to know all the facts means waiting until the patrol is attacked. Their job is not to wait. Do you understand?
Most people I know with trucks or vans or SUVs use them enough to justify having them. This law will leave them out in the cold. It won't bother me, I don't even own a car. But this law makes it less likely that will change. Situations like mine are the reason you will see fewer sales.
Re:It's not a computer, it's a living-room applian
on
iPad Review
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· Score: 1
I'm not saying that my implimentation of windowing is cumbersome, I'm saying that the idea itself is cumbersome. It's designed to mimic the way we'd use a real desktop, along with all it's limitations. And I did say you'd need to keep the keyboard, didn't I?
Most people have no idea what it is like to be in a situation like this (me included). But if you really think about it, it's easy to understand why this kind of thing happens. Most of us would do the same things in the same situations.
The main problem, for everyone involved is thoughtlessness. Soldiers are not in a position where they can consider their actions, because waiting to take action is often fatal. And regardless of their best efforts it is impossible to wage a war without killing innocent people.
The problem is not the soldiers, nor even the military establishment. The problem is, in fact, the thoughtless public who gladly pays soldiers to go out and kill our "enemy" so that they may continue to enjoy the conveniences an active military provides. Don't bother telling me that you "voted" against it and so it is not your fault. That kind of rationalization simply proves how thoughtless you really are. Our participation in a system that causes these things is what truly needs to be judged. Reflecting on the effects of your own actions, and using judgment to decide what actions to take is the only kind of judgment that matters.
Re:It's not a computer, it's a living-room applian
on
iPad Review
·
· Score: 1
I don't think this ever will be . . . a replacement computer, even for stuff as simple as writing emails.
Someday devices like the iPad will completely replace computing as it it known today. Windowing operating systems never really made sense from a user-interface perspective (have you ever noticed how cumbersome it is to move windows and icons around on you desktop?), but no one could figure out a better way to do a GUI at the time. Now with multitouch navigation we are seeing people shift away from the mouse and keyboard. It's easy to see that a work environment with a number of "slate" computers could be much better than the monitor/keyboard/mouse layout. The only thing you will have to keep from the old way of doing things is your keyboard.
As an identical twin, I can tell you that your idea stinks. If my brother commits a crime, and I deny it, I don't think I should be charged with obstruction of justice. I don't know what he's doing at any given time of the day. I couldn't tell you what he's doing right now. He could be robbing a jewelry store for all I know.
We have seen time and time again that governments will form, grow in power and reach, and ultimately collapse in on themselves. All governments seem to be headed in this direction, and they all seem to be doomed to the same fate. It seems that they will continue to expand until at some point in the future they will collapse under their own weight.
The US government was founded on the idea that limiting government can be beneficial. But they didn't go far enough. They designed the government defensively, with a mind toward preventing the growth of government power rather than building a philosophy of continually depreciating governmental authority. Any defensive strategy will ultimately fail because it's designers are not capable of knowing every possible contingency when they design it.
The founding fathers seemed to believe that a certain limited government would always be necessary, as you say, to protect the people. If I were to build a government (and I likely would not, because as you may have noticed, I actually am an anarchist), it would do everything the government currently does, but have to goal of eventually rendering itself obsolete.
Believe it or not, it is possible for people to govern themselves (and I don't mean by democracy). But it requires a willingness to make personal sacrifices, and take personal responsibility that most don't currently possess. By governing people, you shield them from needing to make decisions for themselves. But an inability to make decisions for yourself ultimately means you will not be able to take responsibility for yourself (how can you be responsible for a decision you did not make?).
By continually depreciating the role of government, you would continually teach people to take responsibility for themselves in new ways. You don't have to believe that government can be eliminated to know that people taking personal responsibility is a good thing. This strategy seems to be unpopular because it inevitably means that people will get hurt (some will die) to make it a reality. If people can't stomach the thought of losing their retirement plan to a bad investment, how much more will the be repelled by the thought they may lose their life to a criminal who should be behind bars?
My apologies for writing you treatise in defense of anarchy. Thanks for taking the time to read it (if you got all the way down here, that is:-)
Living in a free society means being willing to live with and respect the decisions of others. Once you believe that people must be forced to do the right thing, you've given up on the Idea that we can live together in peace and harmony. Believing that is far worse than the harm anyone can achieve by buying a car. This is what I meant when I said politicians are too cynical.
Believe it or not, there are many applications that smaller vehicles are not well suited for (off road applications, construction work and transporting many people for example).
You've been taken by the oldest ploy in politics. They are telling you "these regulations aren't for you, but are for someone else". All government regulations are for you. The government is only capable of passing regulations on people and the burden of any government action will ultimately fall on your shoulders.
Think about it this way, will these new regulations affect your ability to buy the car of your choosing? Yes, it will because manufacturers will need to balance the number of low mileage vehicles they sell with the number of high mileage vehicles to maintain an average that meets the regulations. That means they will change their line-up and may charge higher prices to dissuade customers from buying the lower mileage vehicles. Ultimately, that means that low mileage vehicles will either not be offered, or will be offered at a price that some will not be able to afford.
Does this bother manufacturers? You bet, because the resulting line-up will be less appealing, and that means fewer sales. Should you be bothered as well? Most certainly absolutely yes! You may no longer be able to buy/afford a vehicle that meets your needs once these regulations take effect.
Slashdot Mirror
It's strange to me how people will say "free speech is incredibly important" and then say "you should not be accountable for your words". If words are important (and I believe they are) why shouldn't you be accountable for them? If you shouldn't be, why hold anyone accountable for anything? You can utterly destroy someone by spreading rumors about them.
Words are much more powerful than guns or bombs or weapons of mass destruction (that's why free speech is so important). But free speech is not cowardly speech. If you really believe what you are saying, why don't you think it's important enough to stand behind your words (even if that may mean prosecution or death)? Forget anonymity, it is just another word for cowardice. The last thing we need is more worthless cowards cluttering up the air with their idle words.
You may want to consider the software development cycle in you thoughts on the subject. Apple thinks it's better not to include features that aren't yet ready for prime time and risk getting flak from people like yourself. Other companies tend to shove every feature into the release they can think of whether it's ready or not. Apple's approach is why they consistently have a better user experience.
There are broader social implications to UFO sightings. How common are UFO sightings? What impacts do UFO enthusiasts have on broader society? How have UFO sightings changed over time, and what can that tell us about the phenomenon. It is possible to debunk almost anything by explaining it away, but it's important to know that explications are merely hypotheses and do not represent a scientific endeavor in themselves.
Like most (all?) college courses, this class would be a bunch of meaningless bullshit. But it seems unfair to exclude this particular field of study simply because many academics thumb their noses at it. I say bring on the "UFO Studies" graduates!
I'm sure that these companies would be happy to put in a firm bid. The problem is that doesn't make sense for this kind of project. For one thing, the project goals are not firm, and they will change during the course of the project. Another problem is the companies will take engineering uncertainties into account when they put in their bid to shield themselves from risk. That means the government will end up paying more.
Keep in mind the government is also stuck with a firm contract, that means they will have to pay down the road, even when they decide they no longer need the technology. For your plan to work, some fundamental changes will need happen at NASA, because they are going to need to set goals 10 years out and stick with them through changing government administrations. Even if you do that, you'd probably be better off sticking with cost plus. It's the only thing that makes sense given the small market and large risk.
My company does a lot of cost plus work. We would love to do firm pricing because it would mean more opportunity for profit. The problem is that it means more risk on the part of the client, so they never go for it. NASA is in the same boat.
What is everyone's beef with cost plus? You have to pay the costs, of course, because you can't seriously expect a company to work for you at a loss, and you have to give them a plus so that they will work on your project instead of something else. It's common sense. Am I missing something? What's the alternative? Do you pay for services you receive some other way?
I see. I'm claiming we'll shift away from interfaces that require a keyboard and mouse towards interfaces where mufti-touch will be the primary method of user interface. I'm sure the keyboard will still be around, but I think it will be an accessory for those applications that benefit from it.
Failure to accept an assertion is not the same as failing to understand that an assertion has been made
Those are not, in any practical sense of the word, facts. Whether or not they are literally true, speculating about what might have happened millions of years ago is of little real importance to people living today.
Am I to believe that the scientific construct a used to make a scientific discovery is as important as the discovery itself? It isn't. Scientific constructs have no intrinsic value.
They'd better start throttling their heavy users now, or they will face criticism later on once everyone figures out how bad it is for you. It will be like fast food all over again.
It sounds like you at least tried to do something. And I agree it doesn't make sense to prevent violence through violence.
My beef with voting is this. One day me and three friends were standing in a parking lot trying to decide what to do. Me and my friends wife wanted to watch Fiddler on the Roof. Her husband wanted to do anything but that and the third friend was ambivalent. I suggested we put it to a vote. My friend said "no, were not putting it to a vote". That ended our conversation and we found something else to do.
The sole function of voting is getting people to go along with whatever the government tells them to do. As an added bonus, people can claim to have done something by voting when in fact they've done nothing. People who voted against the war are still happy to burn foregin oil in their cars because, hey they didn't vote for it, right?
I don't think this will ever be a viable way to store energy for load balancing. I think a better way to do that would be to store hydrogen and burn it as needed in a combined cycle plant. A combined cycle plant only costs about $0.50 per watt, while this sodium-sulfur battery costs $6.25 per watt. Using electrolysis with a combined cycle plant would give you about 50% efficiency, while the battery has 75%. Wind power costs $1.50 per watt to install and is available about 20% of the time. So if you want to produce one Watt of continuous power using wind and electrolysis it's going to cost $1.50 / .2 / .5 + $0.50 = $15.50, while doing it with wind and a battery costs $1.50 / .2 / .75 + $6.25 = $16.25.
There are other benefits to storing and burning hydrogen. The number one being storing more energy costs little extra (you just need a bigger hydrogen tank). Also, if your peak load is a lot higher than your average, it doesn't cost a lot extra to have a combined cycle generator that can supply your peak load. Finally, if you need to add extra energy to the combined cycle system you can buy gas or whatever and reform it into hydrogen (or just burn it directly).
So, just how many nukes do they have? It's kind of hard to mention a nation that doesn't officially have any, but almost certainly does have them, isn't it? Don't worry about it, we would never attack them anyway.
The soldiers do not have full situational awareness, nor do they have luxury of sitting around to find out. You are comfortably sitting in front of a computer watching the video, with the luxury of knowing everything that is going due to investigations that others have carried out for you. The soldiers, on the other hand, are on the battlefield, providing air support to a ground patrol in real time. Waiting to know all the facts means waiting until the patrol is attacked. Their job is not to wait. Do you understand?
Most people I know with trucks or vans or SUVs use them enough to justify having them. This law will leave them out in the cold. It won't bother me, I don't even own a car. But this law makes it less likely that will change. Situations like mine are the reason you will see fewer sales.
I'm not saying that my implimentation of windowing is cumbersome, I'm saying that the idea itself is cumbersome. It's designed to mimic the way we'd use a real desktop, along with all it's limitations. And I did say you'd need to keep the keyboard, didn't I?
Most people have no idea what it is like to be in a situation like this (me included). But if you really think about it, it's easy to understand why this kind of thing happens. Most of us would do the same things in the same situations.
The main problem, for everyone involved is thoughtlessness. Soldiers are not in a position where they can consider their actions, because waiting to take action is often fatal. And regardless of their best efforts it is impossible to wage a war without killing innocent people.
The problem is not the soldiers, nor even the military establishment. The problem is, in fact, the thoughtless public who gladly pays soldiers to go out and kill our "enemy" so that they may continue to enjoy the conveniences an active military provides. Don't bother telling me that you "voted" against it and so it is not your fault. That kind of rationalization simply proves how thoughtless you really are. Our participation in a system that causes these things is what truly needs to be judged. Reflecting on the effects of your own actions, and using judgment to decide what actions to take is the only kind of judgment that matters.
Someday devices like the iPad will completely replace computing as it it known today. Windowing operating systems never really made sense from a user-interface perspective (have you ever noticed how cumbersome it is to move windows and icons around on you desktop?), but no one could figure out a better way to do a GUI at the time. Now with multitouch navigation we are seeing people shift away from the mouse and keyboard. It's easy to see that a work environment with a number of "slate" computers could be much better than the monitor/keyboard/mouse layout. The only thing you will have to keep from the old way of doing things is your keyboard.
What's wrong with AAC?
As an identical twin, I can tell you that your idea stinks. If my brother commits a crime, and I deny it, I don't think I should be charged with obstruction of justice. I don't know what he's doing at any given time of the day. I couldn't tell you what he's doing right now. He could be robbing a jewelry store for all I know.
We have seen time and time again that governments will form, grow in power and reach, and ultimately collapse in on themselves. All governments seem to be headed in this direction, and they all seem to be doomed to the same fate. It seems that they will continue to expand until at some point in the future they will collapse under their own weight.
The US government was founded on the idea that limiting government can be beneficial. But they didn't go far enough. They designed the government defensively, with a mind toward preventing the growth of government power rather than building a philosophy of continually depreciating governmental authority. Any defensive strategy will ultimately fail because it's designers are not capable of knowing every possible contingency when they design it.
The founding fathers seemed to believe that a certain limited government would always be necessary, as you say, to protect the people. If I were to build a government (and I likely would not, because as you may have noticed, I actually am an anarchist), it would do everything the government currently does, but have to goal of eventually rendering itself obsolete.
Believe it or not, it is possible for people to govern themselves (and I don't mean by democracy). But it requires a willingness to make personal sacrifices, and take personal responsibility that most don't currently possess. By governing people, you shield them from needing to make decisions for themselves. But an inability to make decisions for yourself ultimately means you will not be able to take responsibility for yourself (how can you be responsible for a decision you did not make?).
By continually depreciating the role of government, you would continually teach people to take responsibility for themselves in new ways. You don't have to believe that government can be eliminated to know that people taking personal responsibility is a good thing. This strategy seems to be unpopular because it inevitably means that people will get hurt (some will die) to make it a reality. If people can't stomach the thought of losing their retirement plan to a bad investment, how much more will the be repelled by the thought they may lose their life to a criminal who should be behind bars?
My apologies for writing you treatise in defense of anarchy. Thanks for taking the time to read it (if you got all the way down here, that is :-)
The wifi version's model number is A1337, how cool is that?
Living in a free society means being willing to live with and respect the decisions of others. Once you believe that people must be forced to do the right thing, you've given up on the Idea that we can live together in peace and harmony. Believing that is far worse than the harm anyone can achieve by buying a car. This is what I meant when I said politicians are too cynical.
That's nice, but we're not just talking about Hummers. In fact we're not talking about Hummers at all because the brand was discontinued.
Believe it or not, there are many applications that smaller vehicles are not well suited for (off road applications, construction work and transporting many people for example).
This is true, however 35 mpg is the combined fleet average. It will mean that fewer large trucks will be sold.
You've been taken by the oldest ploy in politics. They are telling you "these regulations aren't for you, but are for someone else". All government regulations are for you. The government is only capable of passing regulations on people and the burden of any government action will ultimately fall on your shoulders.
Think about it this way, will these new regulations affect your ability to buy the car of your choosing? Yes, it will because manufacturers will need to balance the number of low mileage vehicles they sell with the number of high mileage vehicles to maintain an average that meets the regulations. That means they will change their line-up and may charge higher prices to dissuade customers from buying the lower mileage vehicles. Ultimately, that means that low mileage vehicles will either not be offered, or will be offered at a price that some will not be able to afford.
Does this bother manufacturers? You bet, because the resulting line-up will be less appealing, and that means fewer sales. Should you be bothered as well? Most certainly absolutely yes! You may no longer be able to buy/afford a vehicle that meets your needs once these regulations take effect.