I understand that it could be dangerous, but do you really think it's so dangerous that we are being willfully ignorant and sending people to their deaths?
No one's sending anyone anywhere, since we simply don't have the technology necessary to keep them alive for months which the journey takes without outside supplies, much less establish a colony. This venture is making promises it can't possibly keep, and when it fails it'll discredit legitimate projects; whether this genuine stupidity or cynical exploitation on the part of project leaders I can't say.
And for all the young Rand-bots, Love Canal was the norm for disposal of chemical waste before the creation of the EPA.
A true Randian ubermensch will violate fundamental laws of physics to make the problem go away for themselves, then watch everyone else die. And perhaps give them a little push to help nature on its way.
For all your whining about how the government can't do anything right, you little twits haven't grown up on top of a waste chemical disposal trench. Our tax dollars made sure of that.
Therefore stealing resources from the productive elites for the sake of protecting the looters, the latter which is a bad thing in itself. After all, those destined for greatness will become rich enough to move elsewhere, and those who can't afford to should just die already. Nothing matters except the ego of the supermen.
You really don't get how these people think, do you? For all its anti-government creed, Objectivism is simply another totalitarian philosophy about reorganizing society based on some lunatic's idea of how everything should work to reach some utopian state of eternal bliss. And like its contemporaries fascism and communism, it too is not shy about breaking eggs to make an omelette. So telling a Randroid your tax dollars helped close an open chemical sewer is about the same as telling a neo-Nazi your tax dollars helped bring down the Third Reich.
We can only hope Rand's nightmare vision for the world will fade with time and never get a chance to become reality, like Hitler's did in Germany.
After looking at all that crap for the 20 minutes it took to find the legit message I needed it left me with a desire to choke the life out of these parasitic fuckers.
Because slightly inconveniencing you is not only deserving of being raped 2500 times in a row but in fact far worse than molesting children. That's not at all insane, no sir.
I guess that shows if you absolutely must huff gasoline, at least get the unleaded stuff.
I can think of lots of other reasons why they would also be upset. But the non-Muslim reason is primary and not something you can wave away, even if you fix the other things.
Or it could be just a way of saying "God is on our side!", like people have in every conflict since time immemorial. Just like they have excused the actions of your own tribe while vilifying the members of others victimized by said actions. Which was bad enough for bronze age barbarians but is something we simply can't afford anymore in the modern world, so please stop doing that shit. Unless, of course, you fancy sitting in the dark, paying even more taxes for "defence" and wondering when someone finally goes over the line and drops a nuke on you.
They are also offended at our allowing gay marriage, perhaps instead the nation should stop placating the gay population and stone or execute them instead?
This must be why every islamic group on the planet is focusing on annihilating Sweden, where gay marriage has been legal since 2009. Oh sorry, I forgot: they'll destroy Denmark first, for publishing those Muhammed cartoons.
...Nope, it's still the United States that's enemy number one, despite all its evangelical gay-hate. I wonder why that is?
On the other hand, why does every single piece of art have to be solely judged by how much revenue it takes in?
They don't. However, opportunity costs do need to be considered - every penny spent on a particular piece of art is away from something else, since there's only so much coin going around. Also, public should have some say about how public money is spent.
I hate to say this as someome from the US, but the serving of yogurt from Starbucks has more culture than anything the big, mainstream movie houses churn out these days.
This is, of course, complete rubbish. Mainstream movies transmit and reinforce cultural memes. You're simply already surrounded by said memes, so you don't necessarily notice.
Political correctness flat out denies any pride in your heritage, unless you are part of some select minority.
No, it denies vilifying or ridiculing other heritages to make yours seem better by contrast. If you need to see "singing chinamen mispronouncing words" to feel pride about your non-chinese culture, and political correctness keeps you from broadcasting this fact for the entire world to see, then you should be thankful about it.
The factor that you've left out is, the corporations spend millions upon millions to brainwash the masses into believing that the corporate offerings are all there is.
Right. And is it actually accomplishing anything? At this point even the dimmest bulb has heard of Rule 34, and thus knows that fan works exist. Do you really think the average person is incapable of making the mental leap from "fan works exist" to "original works exist"? Especially since you can't take two steps in the Internet without running into someone referring to DeviantArt or their fursona or their tulpa or their Youtube music video or their webcomic or their fiction or whatever? Even copypasta counts as a creative work, and some creepypasta is actually pretty good.
And of course this is completely ignoring corporations like Valve, who are actively promoting indie content for sale through such little-used services like Steam. This is one instance where capitalism seems to have everything well in Invisible Hand.
Anyone who says otherwise is a dumb ape who doesn't grok basic post-scarcity economics.
And anyone who leads a comment with a clumsy and obvious ad hominem is shooting themselves in the foot: even if the rest of the post is well-reasoned, they've poisoned their own well.
You don't need giant indoor dam, you just need a giant outdoor tank higher than the surrounding region. The problem is, big tanks like that are kinda expensive. Millions of dollars.
Expensive and, more importantly, dangerous - storing large amounts of power would risk a rather large flood. It would make more sense to excavate an underground cavern and pump water out of it to store power. This is (likely) cheaper, safer and allows far more height difference, thus more power per same amount of water and storage space. And of course you get a huge cistern out of the deal, too.
Let's assume we excavate our cistern so we get a water head of 100m for our turbine. Also, let's assume the turbine+generator is 80% efficient. A single cubic meter of water weights one metric ton, so we'll get 1000kg*100m*9.8m/s^2 * 0.8 = 784 kJ = 217.8 kWh out of it.
According to Reuters, New York State's electricity usage peaked last summer at 33,955MW, so if we'd want to provide every single watt for, say, two weeks from our reservoir when fully loaded (completely empty of water) at maximum power draw, we'd ned to excavate 24h/d*14d*33955MW/217.8kWh/m^3= 53 million cubic meters of rock. This works out to a square 10 meters high and 2.3 kilometers on each direction (plus enough to compensate for support pillars). Expensive, yes, but also ridiculously oversized and perfectly doable with today's technology. Also, doubling the depth doubles the power contained in every cubic foot of water, leading to smaller cistern required.
Or we could focus tsunamis - and all other waves - to a reservoir and let it drain back to sea through turbines. Or we could build concentrated tidal power plants. Or whatever.
I don't understand why the utilities simply don't build out their grids to accept feed-in from customers' solar rigs, and then split their pricing structure into 1) grid access, and 2) net power supplied? Or is this too simple?
I suspect it's a matter of idling power plants being nonprofitable. Remember, all those solar panels are going to be varying their power production pretty much in lockstep, so the grid's net demand is going to vary by a huge amount. You could solve the problem by building storage capability, but that's an expensive investment that could drive the cost of grid tie-in to the point where people get their own batteries and disconnect.
Also, what happens if there's, say, a week-long spell of bad weather? It seems unlikely that people would accept "it was cloudy" as an explanation for why utility couldn't deliver enough power. That means it can't scrap its usually-unused power plants even if it builds energy storage but must keep them ready to go before batteries run dry. And that eats into profits.
Maybe; I was raised in a capitalist society, after all...
Well then, what are you complaining about? The company has decided that its current level of effort maximizes its expected profits. Sucks for you, but that's usually the outcome for the weaker party to a deal in a capitalist society (or any society, for that matter).
So just to use your own point...if emergency rooms (i.e. critically necessary medical services largely funded by the gov't) can't provide capacity necessary for the exception-circumstance...how is it reasonable to expect FedEx or UPS to do even more?
It seems unlikely that half of FedEx and UPS board of directors are actively trying to sabotage their company for ideological reasons. The same is not true of federal government - and sadly, this sickness seems to be spreading as well as the rest of American culture.
And before anyone asks the same question about gold or silver, gold has other uses, such as jewelry and electrical connector plating.
Saying gold price is driven by practical uses is like saying booze sales are driven by alcohol's usefulness as a disinfectant. It's stretching the truth way past the point where even Goatse would wince in sympathy. The only question left is what's driving it: psychological fixation on gold or worry about losing one's investment in it if Bitcoin takes some of its marketshare.
Cash has been around for a few thousand years, and is already slowly being phased out, precisely because it allows anonymous transactions not dependent on a third party.
Bitcoin et al are far too volatile to be used as a reserve of wealth, and have no intrinsic value.
Value is not a quality of an object but rather a subjective judgement of an agent evaluating said object, thus the concept of "intrinsic value" makes no sense. Which is a good thing, because otherwise trading wouldn't exist since at least one party would always be worse off afterwards, thus we'd be stuck raiding each other for ever.
Until the cache is so big that everything fits in it, you always win if you can double what you can cram into it.
Which is all nice and good except this implies your data structure was mostly pointers to begin with, so if you want to increase cache efficiency forget about pointer size and redesign them for better locality.
I suspect this is the real reason why this ABI has not caught wind: anyone who cares has already taken steps that render it pointless.
And, while I agree that the ATF has badly bungled the whole Waco fiasco, I have zero compassion for religious nuts.
Which is ironic, because it's precisely this attitude that's the difference between religiosity that's at worst a personal quirk and religiosity that makes you fly airplanes into buildings.
I'm pretty sure I would have kept my mouth shut. The worst thing you can do is make it easier for the feds.
Maybe. Then again, Silk Road was very public, and served to demonstrate that most drug users are perfectly functional individuals (since you can hardly get your hands on Bitcoins if you aren't) as well as threatened to turn drug cartel wars into nerds throwing insults at each other over the Internet. Both of these would be bad for the public perception required for the War on Drugs to keep popular support, which in turn would harm efforts to further militarize the police and curtail the rights of people - and even more cynically, to keep them from exploring altered states of consciousness and whatever opportunities for personal growth they might offer.
So it could well be that making it harder for feds to get a conviction resulted in rubber-hose decryption or threats of it.
At what point are you going to stop grasping at straws and accept peer reviewed facts that are in front of you?
What did it take to make tobacco industry admit tobacco is bad for your health? Now add the fact that oil industry is far larger and richer, and giving up fossil fuels is going to cause a drastic decrease in quality of life for most of us - at the very least we're looking at a decades-long global depression - so is it any wonder nothing gets done?
It's very human to refuse to believe anything you don't want to believe, and who wants to believe they're screwed?
It's all very well saying that, but morality is relative. You might well find our ancestors look back on us with much the same disgust.
Morality is relative, but it isn't random. Should our ancestors look on us with disgust due to any differences in our morality, we can show a record of the debate and arguments that led to those changes. They'd need to come up with novel arguments to have any justification for their disgust.
It's the way he said it, like if we knew, we'd find him and hang him, Internet anonymity not providing any protection. He's not afraid of the police; he's afraid of everyone.
And if he believed that, why would he post on an Internet board about the matter, and even use a pseudonym (which means someone so determined could cross-reference his posts and likely deduce his offline identity)?
That, and the rambling nature of the rest of his post, suggest an emo teen on a "nobody understands me" trip possibly aided by beer or pot, rather than a pedophile.
The general policy is not to pardon people when a law is removed from the books because there would be so many going back hundreds of years.
The cynic in me points out that pardoning victims of unjust laws by default would also promote people thinking about whether current laws are just - and by extension, the current social system. The Powers that Be are heavily invested in status quo, so the last thing they want is anyone questioning it.
Slashdot Mirror
No one's sending anyone anywhere, since we simply don't have the technology necessary to keep them alive for months which the journey takes without outside supplies, much less establish a colony. This venture is making promises it can't possibly keep, and when it fails it'll discredit legitimate projects; whether this genuine stupidity or cynical exploitation on the part of project leaders I can't say.
A true Randian ubermensch will violate fundamental laws of physics to make the problem go away for themselves, then watch everyone else die. And perhaps give them a little push to help nature on its way.
Therefore stealing resources from the productive elites for the sake of protecting the looters, the latter which is a bad thing in itself. After all, those destined for greatness will become rich enough to move elsewhere, and those who can't afford to should just die already. Nothing matters except the ego of the supermen.
You really don't get how these people think, do you? For all its anti-government creed, Objectivism is simply another totalitarian philosophy about reorganizing society based on some lunatic's idea of how everything should work to reach some utopian state of eternal bliss. And like its contemporaries fascism and communism, it too is not shy about breaking eggs to make an omelette. So telling a Randroid your tax dollars helped close an open chemical sewer is about the same as telling a neo-Nazi your tax dollars helped bring down the Third Reich.
We can only hope Rand's nightmare vision for the world will fade with time and never get a chance to become reality, like Hitler's did in Germany.
Because slightly inconveniencing you is not only deserving of being raped 2500 times in a row but in fact far worse than molesting children. That's not at all insane, no sir.
I guess that shows if you absolutely must huff gasoline, at least get the unleaded stuff.
Or it could be just a way of saying "God is on our side!", like people have in every conflict since time immemorial. Just like they have excused the actions of your own tribe while vilifying the members of others victimized by said actions. Which was bad enough for bronze age barbarians but is something we simply can't afford anymore in the modern world, so please stop doing that shit. Unless, of course, you fancy sitting in the dark, paying even more taxes for "defence" and wondering when someone finally goes over the line and drops a nuke on you.
This must be why every islamic group on the planet is focusing on annihilating Sweden, where gay marriage has been legal since 2009. Oh sorry, I forgot: they'll destroy Denmark first, for publishing those Muhammed cartoons.
...Nope, it's still the United States that's enemy number one, despite all its evangelical gay-hate. I wonder why that is?
And poles. Because it won't do much good to have intact transformers if they're unpowered because the wires are down.
They don't. However, opportunity costs do need to be considered - every penny spent on a particular piece of art is away from something else, since there's only so much coin going around. Also, public should have some say about how public money is spent.
This is, of course, complete rubbish. Mainstream movies transmit and reinforce cultural memes. You're simply already surrounded by said memes, so you don't necessarily notice.
No, it denies vilifying or ridiculing other heritages to make yours seem better by contrast. If you need to see "singing chinamen mispronouncing words" to feel pride about your non-chinese culture, and political correctness keeps you from broadcasting this fact for the entire world to see, then you should be thankful about it.
Right. And is it actually accomplishing anything? At this point even the dimmest bulb has heard of Rule 34, and thus knows that fan works exist. Do you really think the average person is incapable of making the mental leap from "fan works exist" to "original works exist"? Especially since you can't take two steps in the Internet without running into someone referring to DeviantArt or their fursona or their tulpa or their Youtube music video or their webcomic or their fiction or whatever? Even copypasta counts as a creative work, and some creepypasta is actually pretty good.
And of course this is completely ignoring corporations like Valve, who are actively promoting indie content for sale through such little-used services like Steam. This is one instance where capitalism seems to have everything well in Invisible Hand.
And anyone who leads a comment with a clumsy and obvious ad hominem is shooting themselves in the foot: even if the rest of the post is well-reasoned, they've poisoned their own well.
Expensive and, more importantly, dangerous - storing large amounts of power would risk a rather large flood. It would make more sense to excavate an underground cavern and pump water out of it to store power. This is (likely) cheaper, safer and allows far more height difference, thus more power per same amount of water and storage space. And of course you get a huge cistern out of the deal, too.
Let's assume we excavate our cistern so we get a water head of 100m for our turbine. Also, let's assume the turbine+generator is 80% efficient. A single cubic meter of water weights one metric ton, so we'll get 1000kg*100m*9.8m/s^2 * 0.8 = 784 kJ = 217.8 kWh out of it.
According to Reuters, New York State's electricity usage peaked last summer at 33,955MW, so if we'd want to provide every single watt for, say, two weeks from our reservoir when fully loaded (completely empty of water) at maximum power draw, we'd ned to excavate 24h/d*14d*33955MW/217.8kWh/m^3= 53 million cubic meters of rock. This works out to a square 10 meters high and 2.3 kilometers on each direction (plus enough to compensate for support pillars). Expensive, yes, but also ridiculously oversized and perfectly doable with today's technology. Also, doubling the depth doubles the power contained in every cubic foot of water, leading to smaller cistern required.
Or we could focus tsunamis - and all other waves - to a reservoir and let it drain back to sea through turbines. Or we could build concentrated tidal power plants. Or whatever.
I suspect it's a matter of idling power plants being nonprofitable. Remember, all those solar panels are going to be varying their power production pretty much in lockstep, so the grid's net demand is going to vary by a huge amount. You could solve the problem by building storage capability, but that's an expensive investment that could drive the cost of grid tie-in to the point where people get their own batteries and disconnect.
Also, what happens if there's, say, a week-long spell of bad weather? It seems unlikely that people would accept "it was cloudy" as an explanation for why utility couldn't deliver enough power. That means it can't scrap its usually-unused power plants even if it builds energy storage but must keep them ready to go before batteries run dry. And that eats into profits.
Well then, what are you complaining about? The company has decided that its current level of effort maximizes its expected profits. Sucks for you, but that's usually the outcome for the weaker party to a deal in a capitalist society (or any society, for that matter).
It seems unlikely that half of FedEx and UPS board of directors are actively trying to sabotage their company for ideological reasons. The same is not true of federal government - and sadly, this sickness seems to be spreading as well as the rest of American culture.
Saying gold price is driven by practical uses is like saying booze sales are driven by alcohol's usefulness as a disinfectant. It's stretching the truth way past the point where even Goatse would wince in sympathy. The only question left is what's driving it: psychological fixation on gold or worry about losing one's investment in it if Bitcoin takes some of its marketshare.
Cash has been around for a few thousand years, and is already slowly being phased out, precisely because it allows anonymous transactions not dependent on a third party.
Value is not a quality of an object but rather a subjective judgement of an agent evaluating said object, thus the concept of "intrinsic value" makes no sense. Which is a good thing, because otherwise trading wouldn't exist since at least one party would always be worse off afterwards, thus we'd be stuck raiding each other for ever.
Why after 6 months? Why not immediately? Competition's good, isn't it?
Of course, if you're offering a legally binding 6-month prior notice of termination under all circumstances to your employees, then fair's fair.
Which is all nice and good except this implies your data structure was mostly pointers to begin with, so if you want to increase cache efficiency forget about pointer size and redesign them for better locality.
I suspect this is the real reason why this ABI has not caught wind: anyone who cares has already taken steps that render it pointless.
Which is ironic, because it's precisely this attitude that's the difference between religiosity that's at worst a personal quirk and religiosity that makes you fly airplanes into buildings.
Maybe. Then again, Silk Road was very public, and served to demonstrate that most drug users are perfectly functional individuals (since you can hardly get your hands on Bitcoins if you aren't) as well as threatened to turn drug cartel wars into nerds throwing insults at each other over the Internet. Both of these would be bad for the public perception required for the War on Drugs to keep popular support, which in turn would harm efforts to further militarize the police and curtail the rights of people - and even more cynically, to keep them from exploring altered states of consciousness and whatever opportunities for personal growth they might offer.
So it could well be that making it harder for feds to get a conviction resulted in rubber-hose decryption or threats of it.
What did it take to make tobacco industry admit tobacco is bad for your health? Now add the fact that oil industry is far larger and richer, and giving up fossil fuels is going to cause a drastic decrease in quality of life for most of us - at the very least we're looking at a decades-long global depression - so is it any wonder nothing gets done?
It's very human to refuse to believe anything you don't want to believe, and who wants to believe they're screwed?
Morality is relative, but it isn't random. Should our ancestors look on us with disgust due to any differences in our morality, we can show a record of the debate and arguments that led to those changes. They'd need to come up with novel arguments to have any justification for their disgust.
And if he believed that, why would he post on an Internet board about the matter, and even use a pseudonym (which means someone so determined could cross-reference his posts and likely deduce his offline identity)?
That, and the rambling nature of the rest of his post, suggest an emo teen on a "nobody understands me" trip possibly aided by beer or pot, rather than a pedophile.
The cynic in me points out that pardoning victims of unjust laws by default would also promote people thinking about whether current laws are just - and by extension, the current social system. The Powers that Be are heavily invested in status quo, so the last thing they want is anyone questioning it.