Here is data for China, and here is data for the US.
You'll notice that around the year 2000, China produced approximately 800 million metric tons of CO2, and the US produced approximately 1.5 billion metric tons of CO2. Since then, China has actually managed to decrease its emissions, and I believe ours have increased.
The point was, and it was a very shallow one, that the shouting match is much, much funnier. Death has a tendency to sap an otherwise hilarious gunfight of much of its humor/humour.:)
I assumed Robin was stretching the truth, at the very least. Also, of course, this is a very old monologue. (Not that they didn't have guns, then, either, but probably fewer of them had guns.) I believe Robin was just trying to be funny, and was taking a few liberties in that pursuit...
As Robin Williams said, "In England, if you commit a crime, the police don't have a gun and you don't have a gun. If you commit a crime, the police will say 'Stop, or I'll say stop again.'"
When they label the Florida graph as "Electronic Voting", are they suggesting that all of Florida voted electronically? I see no graph for "Paper Voting" for Florida. Similarly, of the 9 states that are shown, graphs only exist for either paper or electronic voting.
I would find it more believable if they showed all 100 graphs, and not just the 9 that seem to support their point-of-view. Actually, one would expect them to be able to find approximately 25 paper voting graphs where Kerry did as well or better than exit polls suggest, and 25 electronic voting graphs where Bush did better than exit polls suggest, assuming there was no bias in either system. Furthermore, one would expect that either Bush or Kerry would have more than half of the discrepancies in their favor.
In short, for a site that is devoted to "media studies", you would think they would know how to present data in a convincing manner at least. I'd also like to see it in an honest manner, but that might be expecting too much.:)
And no, I'm not saying that irregularities don't exist - the county comparison in Florida is quite intriguing - just that the particular web-site you provided for state by state comparison is very lacking.
As the article notes, while humans can be outrun by almost every mammal in the sprint, there are only a very few wild animals with comparable endurance - the horse, the wolf, and the hyena. No other mammals can run a marathon.
I recently finished the Marine Corps Marathon, and I don't recall seeing any horses, wolves, or hyenas. Just out of curiosity, I searched for all of these (as last names), and although I didn't find any horses or hyeynas, it would appear that I ran with several wolves (or at least Wolfs). Of course, I think this has less to do with evolutionary pressure than fiduciary pressure. The entrance fee for the MCM (and most marathons) is fairly steep ($85).
The point was that if and when said deer and tree causes the front person to slam on the brakes. The car(s) behind it can immediately react in the same manner.
What if the person doesn't have enough time to even begin to put on the brakes? Or, assuming the car is automated, what if the car only has two feet warning? Sure, it can begin to apply the brakes, but it will be stopping far quicker than its "minimum" stopping time. Additionally, assuming that the lanes to its left and right are filled with cars separated by only 5 cm, it would have no way to avoid the accident either. The car 5 cm behind it would certainly plow into it, and a wonderful chain reaction will be started. Now instead of the 20 car pile-up, we can have a 200 car pile-up. Of course, trees are fairly rare around free-ways (especially in the middle of free-ways ), but it could just as easy be a chair falling off the dilapidated old truck in front of you.
To summarize, the problem comes up when the car is stopping due to circumstances beyond its control. I suppose it could broadcast an SOS on a high-powered band so that cars several (or even dozens of) car lengths behind it could put on their brakes to reduce the size of the pile-up, but the first few cars in the pile-up would most likely become caskets for their passengers.
Will the cars be able to download the deer thoughts and know they are about to have a collision and slow down in a controlled manner?:) Or compute that a tree is about to fall down and block the road? In a perfect world, drafting sounds great, but in our world it's quite dangerous (as many a trucker will tell you).
Actually, the truly pedantic would point out that the word average can mean median, mode, mean, or even other statistical measures. Therefore, the AC is only correct if the sig's author meant "mean", whereas the sig's author clearly meant "median". Of course, his sig is still only true when the median value is not actually held by anyone (which requires an even number of/. readers, and we all know that/. readers are odd).
always seem to be more important to most people than "Speed Limit 65" (or 55, or 75, etc.)?
Only rationale I can think of is that "everyone else is doing it" so I need to drive that fast to survive. Ah, but then you wouldn't be so anxious to pass "some people" who "seem to think they own the lane". Also, I've driven at the speed limit the vast majority of my driving life-time, and I'm still alive. It's also much more relaxing, btw, to be the one driving 65, than the one trying to pass the one driving 65, and no amount of horn honking will change that.:)
I'll admit I've been more likely to break the Speed Limit law than the Keep Right rule, but I try to obey both. Btw, the Keep Right rule does not apply everywhere. Some states prefer that you keep the far right lane open for incoming traffic, and of course anyone who's lived in a big city knows that sometimes the right lane is exit only (or sometimes even two or three right lanes!). Still, it is polite to stay as far right as possible (unless you're blocking incoming traffic), so I'm not discouraging that. I'm just encouraging people to remember all of the safety rules.
In my youthful-indiscretion period I had a tendency to put as little money as possible into my car, meaning that sometimes my tires were as bald as Dick Cheney.
Would cars know how well they're being taken care of, and what their actual stopping distance is? Would they know to increase the distance from the car in front of them if the roads were wet or icy? If cars did adjust their distance to correspond to their individual stopping distance, would this allow other cars to be set in "agressive mode" (or manual mode) and cut in front of cars with larger stopping distances, forcing them to slow down more? (One of my pet peeves, now that I do tend to leave one car/10 mph distance to the car in front of me.)
That's why I wanted to stop at Venus. They've already fouled up their atmosphere so much, what's a little nuclear waste going to do?
Yeah, I know I blamed it earlier on our Atlantean fore-fathers, but it turns out that I was inadvertently reading some retroactively edited history from the Republican Venusians who were trying to put the blame elsewhere. I'm sorry for ever believing our Atlantean fore-fathers could be guilty of such a crime!
Of course, on the other hand, if we dump it on the Venusians, we'll actually be given them plenty of fuel that they could reprocess into Plutonium, and make nuclear weapons with! Forget I suggested such a thing!
Prohibits operating a reusable suborbital rocket under a permit for carrying any property or human being for compensation or hire.
Is this suggesting that the government would be prohibited from being compensated, or that private industry would be prohibited from being compensated. If that latter, then...?
In short, although I initially supported this bill (i.e., before I actually read any of it), now I'm not so sure...
Why can't we simply send the damn crap into the sun?
That'd be really, really expensive. (Of course, building a safe storage facility ain't cheap!) As hard to understand as it might be, going "downhill" to the sun still requires enormous amounts of energy. I think we should just dump it in Venus like our Atlantean fore-fathers did!
I'm not sure. Here are a couple of thoughts though:
It obviously needs to be at least a little outside of geosynch orbit so that the c-o-m is at geosynch orbit.
Although no matter how dense the ribbon is, one wouldn't need to go more than 2x geosynch orbit if the ribbon went straight up, the ribbon will definitely have curvature, and that curvature will lengthen it. (Rereading the story, it merely says 60,000 miles in length, not in height!)
They might want to take advantage of the extra height to sling-shot payloads out of Earth's orbit (or at least to even higher orbits). The end-point of the elevator will be going faster than orbital speed at that point, so it's just like whirling a weight around your head by a string - cut the string and the object gets thrown away. (Of course you personally probably have a very low gravitational attraction, so it's not just like whirling a weight around your head by a string, but work with me here.)
I agree that it sounds evil worded this way (or thought about this way), and yet, the pragmatist in me agrees (I assume) that there is some validity in the approach.
I've always thought that a fundamental flaw in Communist theory (as espoused by Marx as opposed to as practiced by any real regime) is that it ignores the fundamental flaws of human nature. As a species, "doing the right thing" tends not to be a driving force for us. As my old world history teacher used to say, "Communism would only work in two places - heaven, where they don't need it, and hell, where they already have it."
A tax based on how far you drive does make a certain amount of sense (ignoring the method used), in that tax-payer money goes to building and maintaining roads. However, as someone who drives a high MPG car (Honda Civic), I admit that I prefer methods that target gas guzzlers disproportionately. Of course, one could also argue that gas guzzlers tend to do more harm to the environment, etc., and should pay more, but then that kind of sounds like they're buying the right to poison us.
Of course, what it really boils down to is a new tax that they can add on to existing taxes to pay for even more government programs, preferably to benefit people who made large contributions to the winners' campaigns.
Thankfully, the H2 is not trendy in C'ville
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Killer Ozone?
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· Score: 1
Speaking as one of the ones living in an area where the H2 is not trendy (Charlottesville, VA, and I don't think it's a coincidence that we were declared the best city to live in the US!), I was not making a bad joke (or even a good one!). That H2 stood for Hummer2 never crossed my mind until someone pointed it out.
Of course, this gets back to all the other acronym's used on slashdot (e.g., LSB not standing for least significant bit). Whether an acronym/abbreviation is obvious or not depends on one's experience more than a lot of people account for - frequently including myself. I'm not attempting to slam the submitters/editors - I'm just making the point.
I'm making the same assumptions that many are making (and in fact I have made) that when votes are undercounted in counties that vote Democratic or votes are overcounted in counties that vote Republican, it tends to benefit Republicans. Likewise, in Palm Beach there were 88,000 more votes than voters. (I.e., votes were overcounted.) Since Kerry votes outnumbered Bush votes 3:2, it seems logical that counting votes twice in Palm Beach would tend to benefit Kerry. Unfortunately, no one (that I know of) has reported exactly how the actual count changed the discrepancy (if this is even actually known), but that would seem to support the liberal media conspiracy theory, wouldn't it?
You'll notice that I mentioned in my previous post that I used the qualifier almost to modify definitely. I.e., I acknowledged that the article did not make it crystal clear that the error benefited Democrats, just that logical assumptions would lead one to that conclusion.
That would make sense, and does seem more logical than making such an obvious mistake. Didn't occur to me.
Re:Not very scientific
on
Killer Ozone?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Why I agree that using correlation to suggest causation is a very weak argument, there are several other studies that demonstrate that ozone is definitively bad for us. What I don't understand is, how is this news? I was taught this back in the early 80's, based purely off of human physiology data. It was made very clear to us that ozone near the ground was bad, ozone high up in the ozone layer is good, and there's no way (known) to move ozone from the "bad place" to the "good place".
Slashdot Mirror
You'll notice that around the year 2000, China produced approximately 800 million metric tons of CO2, and the US produced approximately 1.5 billion metric tons of CO2. Since then, China has actually managed to decrease its emissions, and I believe ours have increased.
The point was, and it was a very shallow one, that the shouting match is much, much funnier. Death has a tendency to sap an otherwise hilarious gunfight of much of its humor/humour. :)
I assumed Robin was stretching the truth, at the very least. Also, of course, this is a very old monologue. (Not that they didn't have guns, then, either, but probably fewer of them had guns.) I believe Robin was just trying to be funny, and was taking a few liberties in that pursuit...
Yes, that's the beginning of Robin's monologue.
As Robin Williams said, "In England, if you commit a crime, the police don't have a gun and you don't have a gun. If you commit a crime, the police will say 'Stop, or I'll say stop again.'"
When they label the Florida graph as "Electronic Voting", are they suggesting that all of Florida voted electronically? I see no graph for "Paper Voting" for Florida. Similarly, of the 9 states that are shown, graphs only exist for either paper or electronic voting.
I would find it more believable if they showed all 100 graphs, and not just the 9 that seem to support their point-of-view. Actually, one would expect them to be able to find approximately 25 paper voting graphs where Kerry did as well or better than exit polls suggest, and 25 electronic voting graphs where Bush did better than exit polls suggest, assuming there was no bias in either system. Furthermore, one would expect that either Bush or Kerry would have more than half of the discrepancies in their favor.
In short, for a site that is devoted to "media studies", you would think they would know how to present data in a convincing manner at least. I'd also like to see it in an honest manner, but that might be expecting too much. :)
And no, I'm not saying that irregularities don't exist - the county comparison in Florida is quite intriguing - just that the particular web-site you provided for state by state comparison is very lacking.
I recently finished the Marine Corps Marathon, and I don't recall seeing any horses, wolves, or hyenas. Just out of curiosity, I searched for all of these (as last names), and although I didn't find any horses or hyeynas, it would appear that I ran with several wolves (or at least Wolfs). Of course, I think this has less to do with evolutionary pressure than fiduciary pressure. The entrance fee for the MCM (and most marathons) is fairly steep ($85).
What if the person doesn't have enough time to even begin to put on the brakes? Or, assuming the car is automated, what if the car only has two feet warning? Sure, it can begin to apply the brakes, but it will be stopping far quicker than its "minimum" stopping time. Additionally, assuming that the lanes to its left and right are filled with cars separated by only 5 cm, it would have no way to avoid the accident either. The car 5 cm behind it would certainly plow into it, and a wonderful chain reaction will be started. Now instead of the 20 car pile-up, we can have a 200 car pile-up. Of course, trees are fairly rare around free-ways (especially in the middle of free-ways ), but it could just as easy be a chair falling off the dilapidated old truck in front of you.
To summarize, the problem comes up when the car is stopping due to circumstances beyond its control. I suppose it could broadcast an SOS on a high-powered band so that cars several (or even dozens of) car lengths behind it could put on their brakes to reduce the size of the pile-up, but the first few cars in the pile-up would most likely become caskets for their passengers.
Will the cars be able to download the deer thoughts and know they are about to have a collision and slow down in a controlled manner? :) Or compute that a tree is about to fall down and block the road? In a perfect world, drafting sounds great, but in our world it's quite dangerous (as many a trucker will tell you).
Than Virginia, Georgia, or Wyoming? :) I currently live in VA, grew up in GA (was born in BRD), and I think WY has a very high speed limit.
I got the impression that you were from that little island across the pond. :)
(I know, you're tired of trying to educate us ignorant USians, right?)
Actually, the truly pedantic would point out that the word average can mean median, mode, mean, or even other statistical measures. Therefore, the AC is only correct if the sig's author meant "mean", whereas the sig's author clearly meant "median". Of course, his sig is still only true when the median value is not actually held by anyone (which requires an even number of /. readers, and we all know that /. readers are odd).
Only rationale I can think of is that "everyone else is doing it" so I need to drive that fast to survive. Ah, but then you wouldn't be so anxious to pass "some people" who "seem to think they own the lane". Also, I've driven at the speed limit the vast majority of my driving life-time, and I'm still alive. It's also much more relaxing, btw, to be the one driving 65, than the one trying to pass the one driving 65, and no amount of horn honking will change that. :)
I'll admit I've been more likely to break the Speed Limit law than the Keep Right rule, but I try to obey both. Btw, the Keep Right rule does not apply everywhere. Some states prefer that you keep the far right lane open for incoming traffic, and of course anyone who's lived in a big city knows that sometimes the right lane is exit only (or sometimes even two or three right lanes!). Still, it is polite to stay as far right as possible (unless you're blocking incoming traffic), so I'm not discouraging that. I'm just encouraging people to remember all of the safety rules.
Ahhh, it's nice to no longer live in a big city.
In my youthful-indiscretion period I had a tendency to put as little money as possible into my car, meaning that sometimes my tires were as bald as Dick Cheney.
Would cars know how well they're being taken care of, and what their actual stopping distance is? Would they know to increase the distance from the car in front of them if the roads were wet or icy? If cars did adjust their distance to correspond to their individual stopping distance, would this allow other cars to be set in "agressive mode" (or manual mode) and cut in front of cars with larger stopping distances, forcing them to slow down more? (One of my pet peeves, now that I do tend to leave one car/10 mph distance to the car in front of me.)
That's why I wanted to stop at Venus. They've already fouled up their atmosphere so much, what's a little nuclear waste going to do?
Yeah, I know I blamed it earlier on our Atlantean fore-fathers, but it turns out that I was inadvertently reading some retroactively edited history from the Republican Venusians who were trying to put the blame elsewhere. I'm sorry for ever believing our Atlantean fore-fathers could be guilty of such a crime!
Of course, on the other hand, if we dump it on the Venusians, we'll actually be given them plenty of fuel that they could reprocess into Plutonium, and make nuclear weapons with! Forget I suggested such a thing!
Is this suggesting that the government would be prohibited from being compensated, or that private industry would be prohibited from being compensated. If that latter, then ...?
In short, although I initially supported this bill (i.e., before I actually read any of it), now I'm not so sure...
That'd be really, really expensive. (Of course, building a safe storage facility ain't cheap!) As hard to understand as it might be, going "downhill" to the sun still requires enormous amounts of energy. I think we should just dump it in Venus like our Atlantean fore-fathers did!
I'm not sure. Here are a couple of thoughts though:
Just some WAGs.
I agree that it sounds evil worded this way (or thought about this way), and yet, the pragmatist in me agrees (I assume) that there is some validity in the approach.
I've always thought that a fundamental flaw in Communist theory (as espoused by Marx as opposed to as practiced by any real regime) is that it ignores the fundamental flaws of human nature. As a species, "doing the right thing" tends not to be a driving force for us. As my old world history teacher used to say, "Communism would only work in two places - heaven, where they don't need it, and hell, where they already have it."
A tax based on how far you drive does make a certain amount of sense (ignoring the method used), in that tax-payer money goes to building and maintaining roads. However, as someone who drives a high MPG car (Honda Civic), I admit that I prefer methods that target gas guzzlers disproportionately. Of course, one could also argue that gas guzzlers tend to do more harm to the environment, etc., and should pay more, but then that kind of sounds like they're buying the right to poison us.
Of course, what it really boils down to is a new tax that they can add on to existing taxes to pay for even more government programs, preferably to benefit people who made large contributions to the winners' campaigns.
Speaking as one of the ones living in an area where the H2 is not trendy (Charlottesville, VA, and I don't think it's a coincidence that we were declared the best city to live in the US!), I was not making a bad joke (or even a good one!). That H2 stood for Hummer2 never crossed my mind until someone pointed it out.
Of course, this gets back to all the other acronym's used on slashdot (e.g., LSB not standing for least significant bit). Whether an acronym/abbreviation is obvious or not depends on one's experience more than a lot of people account for - frequently including myself. I'm not attempting to slam the submitters/editors - I'm just making the point.
I'm making the same assumptions that many are making (and in fact I have made) that when votes are undercounted in counties that vote Democratic or votes are overcounted in counties that vote Republican, it tends to benefit Republicans. Likewise, in Palm Beach there were 88,000 more votes than voters. (I.e., votes were overcounted.) Since Kerry votes outnumbered Bush votes 3:2, it seems logical that counting votes twice in Palm Beach would tend to benefit Kerry. Unfortunately, no one (that I know of) has reported exactly how the actual count changed the discrepancy (if this is even actually known), but that would seem to support the liberal media conspiracy theory, wouldn't it?
You'll notice that I mentioned in my previous post that I used the qualifier almost to modify definitely. I.e., I acknowledged that the article did not make it crystal clear that the error benefited Democrats, just that logical assumptions would lead one to that conclusion.
That would make sense, and does seem more logical than making such an obvious mistake. Didn't occur to me.
Why I agree that using correlation to suggest causation is a very weak argument, there are several other studies that demonstrate that ozone is definitively bad for us. What I don't understand is, how is this news? I was taught this back in the early 80's, based purely off of human physiology data. It was made very clear to us that ozone near the ground was bad, ozone high up in the ozone layer is good, and there's no way (known) to move ozone from the "bad place" to the "good place".
I do not think that H2 means what you think it means.