Good, but even better, require that the bodyguards of politicians only be armed with this sort of vaporware gun. But then, I also want to require that federal politicians and EPA bureaucrats can only use cars that get better than average mileage according to the CAFE standards they impose on the rest of us.
I'm not confusing anything, the parent is. He wrote "the world's CO2 emissions" (which implies the total), not "the world's excess CO2 emissions" or "human CO2 emissions." Given all the emotion and hyperbole around this issue, I think it's important for language to be accurate.
That means American personal cars and homes produce between 1/4 and 1/5 of the world's CO2 emissions.
That can't be correct. Total human emissions of CO2 only account for about 3% of the world's CO2 emissions, so do you mean that American cars and homes account for between 1/4 and 1/5 of that 3%?
Google, so far, only uses the info to target ads to you. Not really a bad thing. I would rather see a targeted ad than one for Maxipads or Viagra.
I think you are missing the point here. The awkwardness and privacy concerns arise from the targeting: e.g. when a middle-aged guy gets a targeted ad for Viagra. Or, in my case, when some Google research about STDs later gave me targeted ads for STD tests.
The fringes of science are filled with all sorts of disreputable, crackpot ideas. Most are worthless, but every now and then one turns out to be true (e.g. Wegener's continental drift). Are there any such "cocktail party theories" that you intrigue you, and that you believe might deserve further investigation?
And related to that: Assuming no constraints regarding rights, what classic (or not so classic) science fiction stories would you like to adapt as movies or TV series?
I wouldn't shed a tear if malware authors and spammers started having fatal accidents. In fact, I'd love it if some tech billionaire had a private hit squad for just that purpose.
Yeah, OK, but I'm not objecting to shutting down noisy concerts that are bothering people. I'm objecting to using undercover cops to find out about the concerts ahead of time, before anyone complains. It's like having plainclothes cops follow people leaving McDonald's with takeout, just in case they later litter with their burger wrappers. It's too much enforcement for too minor a crime.
OK, I can see why cops go undercover to prevent murders and bank robberies and such, but to head off noise complaints? Is there some reason why simply to responding to noise complaints isn't enough? Are there no longer any murders, rapes, and robberies in Boston to investigate or prevent? What a waste.
The PDF has a very handy list of "notorious" sites, many of which were new to me. The RIAA should have Googled "Streisand Effect" before they released that....
I don't see how universal background checks are at the expense of freedoms anymore than a driver's license, fishing license, hunting license etc is.
I was going to use some of my mod points in this topic, but I can't let this go unanswered. There are many problems with "universal background checks", but the main thing I want to say is that none of those licenses require a background check, which is a far more intrusive procedure. AFAIK, nobody gets denied a driver's license because they once got busted for smoking pot. I'm surprised that you can't see the difference between a license, even a license with a test, and a background check.
I stand corrected re building websites. However, you are granting my point. While IE6/7 can be ignored now, for years they were the "standard." It would not have been possible, then, to tell corporate clients: "The price for building your website is $X, but if you want it to look right on the PCs in your office, the price will be $X+10%." That extra 10% was just an extra cost of doing business, and an extra aggravation, in a world with IE6/7. My dislike for those browsers is not "religious or idealogical," it's from having to spend time working around many large flaws in them that had no good reason it exist for so long (unless you want to subscribe to the theory that MS was screwing them up intentionally, in an attempt to disadvantage other browsers).
I have no problems at all with IE. I don't understand why people would "cheer for its demise".
If you don't hate IE, then you haven't been building websites. For years, the standard process for me was to write perfectly valid HTML and CSS that would render the same way in every other browser, and then spend time screwing around with it until it looked correct in IE. It added 10%, easily, to the cost of every project, and I've read of others claiming 30% or more.
"Hello, 911? I am trapped in my house at 123 Main St. by a gang of armed robbers. I'll blink a lamp to let you know a good time to break down the front door. I'm hiding under a bed, so shoot anyone else."
Once in an interview, Dan Bricklin (IIRC) said that in the early days they personally demonstrated VisiCalc at trade show booths. Sometimes accountants would actually cry, as they realized how many hours they'd spent adding up rows and columns of numbers, and how quickly they'd be able to do it with this new piece of software.
You know you've got a killer app when a demo causes members of your target market to realize how much your software is going to change their lives, and they burst into tears.
So the federal government is spending tax money (that it doesn't really have, and so must borrow) to subsidize the purchase of electric cars, and now that there are more of them, this cuts gas tax revenue to the states. That old saying about good intentions and roads comes to mind....
Your plan to fix an obvious lack of regulation is deregulation?
Your error is to think that this issue arises due to a "lack of regulation." Corporations and taxes are heavily regulated, so much so that that the complexity creates plenty of loopholes. Plus, different countries have different tax laws. Many countries have discovered the benefits of being "tax havens," and the countries that aren't don't like that.
We should all stop buying Apple products because of their tax evasion.
Tax evasion is illegal, by definition, and there's no indication Apple has done that. Tax avoidance is simply structuring finances to minimize taxes, and (if done correctly) is no more illegal than shopping carefully to minimize your grocery bill.
There's absolutely zero chance that anything like this is going to be more than a rare oddity in the US. This is only suited to young, single, in-shape people, almost all male, who don't mind getting exercise on their way to work or a date, and never need a vehicle that holds more than a bag of groceries, much less another person (or two or three). In fact, is there even room for one bag of groceries? Oh, and they are all daredevilish enough to not be worried about stiff winds tipping them over or all the trucks and SUVs that loom over them. So we're talking about an infinitesimal sliver of the population.
It also needs to be locked down because any two guys could just carry one away, but it's too big for existing bike racks, and many standard car parking places don't have anything to lock to. I predict these will be as popular as the Sinclair C-5.
Slashdot Mirror
Just get a lookalike actor and a decent makeup technician, and produce a perfectly "real" low-fi home video.
And, indeed, there was an online ad Looking for a Rob Ford look alike/imposter (Toronto), though it seems to date from January 2012, and of course it may be entirely unrelated.
Let cops and soldiers adopt this stuff first.
Good, but even better, require that the bodyguards of politicians only be armed with this sort of vaporware gun. But then, I also want to require that federal politicians and EPA bureaucrats can only use cars that get better than average mileage according to the CAFE standards they impose on the rest of us.
You've confused the total with the excess.
I'm not confusing anything, the parent is. He wrote "the world's CO2 emissions" (which implies the total), not "the world's excess CO2 emissions" or "human CO2 emissions." Given all the emotion and hyperbole around this issue, I think it's important for language to be accurate.
That means American personal cars and homes produce between 1/4 and 1/5 of the world's CO2 emissions.
That can't be correct. Total human emissions of CO2 only account for about 3% of the world's CO2 emissions, so do you mean that American cars and homes account for between 1/4 and 1/5 of that 3%?
I think you are missing the point here. The awkwardness and privacy concerns arise from the targeting: e.g. when a middle-aged guy gets a targeted ad for Viagra. Or, in my case, when some Google research about STDs later gave me targeted ads for STD tests.
P.S.: If this question does get submitted to Dyson, would someone please delete that first "you"? Thanks, and thanks for the upmods.
The fringes of science are filled with all sorts of disreputable, crackpot ideas. Most are worthless, but every now and then one turns out to be true (e.g. Wegener's continental drift). Are there any such "cocktail party theories" that you intrigue you, and that you believe might deserve further investigation?
And related to that: Assuming no constraints regarding rights, what classic (or not so classic) science fiction stories would you like to adapt as movies or TV series?
If it's one stolen loaf of bread or one burglarized home, I agree. But when the victims number in the millions, that changes the proportionality.
I wouldn't shed a tear if malware authors and spammers started having fatal accidents. In fact, I'd love it if some tech billionaire had a private hit squad for just that purpose.
Yeah, OK, but I'm not objecting to shutting down noisy concerts that are bothering people. I'm objecting to using undercover cops to find out about the concerts ahead of time, before anyone complains. It's like having plainclothes cops follow people leaving McDonald's with takeout, just in case they later litter with their burger wrappers. It's too much enforcement for too minor a crime.
OK, I can see why cops go undercover to prevent murders and bank robberies and such, but to head off noise complaints? Is there some reason why simply to responding to noise complaints isn't enough? Are there no longer any murders, rapes, and robberies in Boston to investigate or prevent? What a waste.
Why do I always get a slight shiver up my back when people say things like that...?
The Constitution may not be perfect, but it's better than what we have now.
The PDF has a very handy list of "notorious" sites, many of which were new to me. The RIAA should have Googled "Streisand Effect" before they released that....
I don't see how universal background checks are at the expense of freedoms anymore than a driver's license, fishing license, hunting license etc is.
I was going to use some of my mod points in this topic, but I can't let this go unanswered. There are many problems with "universal background checks", but the main thing I want to say is that none of those licenses require a background check, which is a far more intrusive procedure. AFAIK, nobody gets denied a driver's license because they once got busted for smoking pot. I'm surprised that you can't see the difference between a license, even a license with a test, and a background check.
I stand corrected re building websites. However, you are granting my point. While IE6/7 can be ignored now, for years they were the "standard." It would not have been possible, then, to tell corporate clients: "The price for building your website is $X, but if you want it to look right on the PCs in your office, the price will be $X+10%." That extra 10% was just an extra cost of doing business, and an extra aggravation, in a world with IE6/7. My dislike for those browsers is not "religious or idealogical," it's from having to spend time working around many large flaws in them that had no good reason it exist for so long (unless you want to subscribe to the theory that MS was screwing them up intentionally, in an attempt to disadvantage other browsers).
I have no problems at all with IE. I don't understand why people would "cheer for its demise".
If you don't hate IE, then you haven't been building websites. For years, the standard process for me was to write perfectly valid HTML and CSS that would render the same way in every other browser, and then spend time screwing around with it until it looked correct in IE. It added 10%, easily, to the cost of every project, and I've read of others claiming 30% or more.
"Hello, 911? I am trapped in my house at 123 Main St. by a gang of armed robbers. I'll blink a lamp to let you know a good time to break down the front door. I'm hiding under a bed, so shoot anyone else."
Once in an interview, Dan Bricklin (IIRC) said that in the early days they personally demonstrated VisiCalc at trade show booths. Sometimes accountants would actually cry, as they realized how many hours they'd spent adding up rows and columns of numbers, and how quickly they'd be able to do it with this new piece of software.
You know you've got a killer app when a demo causes members of your target market to realize how much your software is going to change their lives, and they burst into tears.
So the federal government is spending tax money (that it doesn't really have, and so must borrow) to subsidize the purchase of electric cars, and now that there are more of them, this cuts gas tax revenue to the states. That old saying about good intentions and roads comes to mind....
Opium wars go father back than petrol wars.
Maybe not: The 'Judaicum bitumen' is a famous deposit of native asphalt seeping through diapirs at the bottom of the Dead Sea, which comes occasionally to the surface through seismic activity in blocks of up to 100 tons in weight which are more than 99.99% pure. It was the object of the first known battle for a hydrocarbon deposit, between the Seleucids and the Nabateans in 312 B.C.
Your plan to fix an obvious lack of regulation is deregulation?
Your error is to think that this issue arises due to a "lack of regulation." Corporations and taxes are heavily regulated, so much so that that the complexity creates plenty of loopholes. Plus, different countries have different tax laws. Many countries have discovered the benefits of being "tax havens," and the countries that aren't don't like that.
We should all stop buying Apple products because of their tax evasion.
Tax evasion is illegal, by definition, and there's no indication Apple has done that. Tax avoidance is simply structuring finances to minimize taxes, and (if done correctly) is no more illegal than shopping carefully to minimize your grocery bill.
There's absolutely zero chance that anything like this is going to be more than a rare oddity in the US. This is only suited to young, single, in-shape people, almost all male, who don't mind getting exercise on their way to work or a date, and never need a vehicle that holds more than a bag of groceries, much less another person (or two or three). In fact, is there even room for one bag of groceries? Oh, and they are all daredevilish enough to not be worried about stiff winds tipping them over or all the trucks and SUVs that loom over them. So we're talking about an infinitesimal sliver of the population.
It also needs to be locked down because any two guys could just carry one away, but it's too big for existing bike racks, and many standard car parking places don't have anything to lock to. I predict these will be as popular as the Sinclair C-5.