Just stopping a company from doing it AGAIN doesn't mean you get compensation for when it was done to YOU, which is what a class-action lawsuit should usually be about.
If class-action lawsuits don't make money for the lawyers, then they won't happen at all.
You should think of class-actions as an outsourcing of regulation to the private sector. If the government won't regulate corporate behavior, then profit-seeking law firms will.
Ask yourself this: Should we have more class actions, or fewer? Answer: I dunno.
the true value of helium is not reflected in the current market price.
If you truly believe that you are smarter than the market, then buy up the super-cheap helium, pay the storage cost, and sell it at a big profit when the market finally corrects. Then come back here and post a picture of your yacht. Good luck.
Just keep in mind that people have been predicting a "helium crisis" for decades, and so far they have all been wrong. The price of helium is still low, and there are plenty of capped wells available to boost production if needed. Helium is produced as a by product of natural gas liquefaction, and many conventional wells with high helium content are capped because they can't compete on cost with fracked gas from shale, which does not contain helium.
The United States is, by far, the world's largest producer of helium.
At great cost with money that should go for the next generation of spacecraft.
Look, Kepler served its purpose. It confirmed over a thousand exo-planets, and thousands more unconfirmed. It is not particularly useful to find a few hundred or even a thousand more. Kepler has been in space for 10 years, and was built with tech even older than that. It is time to move on.
We need a NEW spacecraft that can detect smaller planets, planets further from their star, and even exo-moons. We need to be able to look for spectroscopic signs of O2 in star-crossing exo-planets, which may mean life. Spending $500M on a refueling mission will accomplish none of this.
So why would you use anything other than Nitrogen?
It is often a blend. Liquid N2 is cheaper if it isn't pure, containing argon as well, which is about 1% of the atmosphere. Then you can add some helium to the mix if the fire danger is expected to be high, along the ceiling. The helium will make the gas blend rise.
If you are more concerned about liquid fires that burn near the ground, you can use a gas mixture of partially or mostly CO2, which is heavier than air and will create a smothering layer on the floor. CO2 is easier to store under pressure since it will liquify at about 5 atm.
Of course you also want to add mercaptan or some other odorant to make it stink, so a leak is immediately noticed. You don't want to smother people instead of fires.
The people claiming they are "wildly popular" are the people trying to sell them. So they have a self-interest in exaggerating.
I have a Dutch friend. I sent her a link to this story, and she said she has never seen one, or even heard of them before, although she also admits she would have no interest in the titles currently published in this format (mostly chick-fiction (trashy novels)).
Now back to my e-reader...
Indeed. I see no advantage of this format over etext, and several obvious disadvantages.
choice 3: program the fucking car to not get in that situation in the first place.
That is not always possible. If the SDC is driving on a two-lane road with guide rails on both sides, and an oncoming car suddenly swerves directly in front of it, there is no possible way to avoid an accident. You can't avoid or anticipate immediate actions by other vehicles.
Was that headline copied-and-pasted directly from Google Translate?
Probably. It is a direct translation from Chinese. "100 million cell phones" in Chinese is "Yi bu shouji". The "bu" is the "measure word" for cell phones (shouji) and translates roughly as "units", and that is how Google translates it.
Linguistic trivia: English occasionally uses "measure words", like "Five head of cattle", "Three ears of corn", "Two pieces of furniture". But in Chinese they are used for almost all nouns, and it is a real pain in the butt to try to remember which measure word goes with which noun. It can even depend on the shape. For instance you say "yi zhi gou" to mean "one zhi of dog" but if it is a long skinny dog like a dachshund you can say "yi tiao gou" where "tiao" is the measure word for long skinny things like belts or neckties, so it means roughly "one strip of dog".
My first guess would be that users would fill the inflatable legs and torso with water, to trip the weight sensor in the seat.
My guess is they wouldn't bother. This "you or me" scenario is so implausible and unlikely that there a million other things you could do to better improve your survival.
Yes, I think so. It came out in 1994, so the timeframe is right. The helmet looks the same, and the "Dactyl Nightmare" sounds exactly like the game I played all those years ago.
The passengers have seatbelts, air bags, and crumple zones to lessen their injuries
The question is usually framed to already take that into account. They way I have heard it is:
Choice 1: Hit pedestrian. Choice 2: Drive off a cliff and kill the passenger.
It may be an interesting philosophical question, but it has little to do with reality. A scenario like that is almost never going to happen, and even if it did, a human driver would be faced with the same split second dilemma and be no more likely to make the "correct" decision (whatever that is).
Far more important is that the SDC would have much better reaction time, more braking distance, better control of steering, more situational awareness of other traffic, and thus better able to kill no one.
I bought into the hype, having wanted to try VR since 1992
In the mid 90s (95 or 96?) a VR arcade opened on Pier 39 in San Francisco. You paid, like $5, and got some bulky helmet with goggles and a gun. Then they turned it on, and you were attacked by dinosaurs, as well as the other players. Since computers were a zillion times slower than today, everything was just a mesh with no filled polygons, but it was still really cool. There was even a pterodactyl that grabbed you and soared into the air. When it dropped you, it took a second or two to realize you weren't falling.
I thought, wow, this is going to be big. But it didn't happen. The arcade closed, and 22 years later VR is still a fizzle. It doesn't make sense to me.
Does anyone else remember the arcade? Were you as impressed as I was?
Banned for breaking the rules, not for having a conservative political ideology. Mainstream social media platforms don't want people spewing hate speech
"Hate speech" is an ideological concept. Liberals are against it, and conservatives think it is "politically correctness" run amok.
Saying it is not about political ideology, because it is about "hate speech" (a politically ideological concept) is a contradiction.
Bans on "hate speech" may look reasonable if you look at the worst racist garbage being posted. But any power to ban will be abused, and "hate speech" has been used to justify censorship of calm rational express of conservative opinions, such as banning speeches at state run universities. That is government censorship of political speech, precisely what the Constitution was designed to prevent.
Even if you are unwilling to defend free speech on principle, you should defend it for practical reasons. As a liberal, you need to realize that you are LOSING the ideological debate. The right has been winning elections, and dominating nearly every branch of government. Much of this is because they try to convince their political opponents, while progressives try to silence theirs.
When people take the "ideological turing test" (a liberal tries to impersonate a conservative or vice versa), conservatives do way better. Conservatives understand liberals. They just disagree with them. But liberals tend to not even understand conservative viewpoints, misrepresent them, and sound fake to actual conservatives. It is hard to win over the middle ground, when you don't even understand your opponents.
then Facebook/Twitter/etc. doesn't have to bake your KKK cake, either.
I don't see anyone questioning their legal right to ban speech they don't like. They are private companies and can do whatever they want. The question is whether that is the right thing to do, and whether it is good for our society to have more and more segregation of people with opposing viewpoints.
Also, the new ship will have a lower top speed. The original Titanic was built for speed. Additionally, the ship was sailing at top speed to get a PR boost by setting a new speed record for an Atlantic crossing. People wanted to travel between Europe and North America as quickly as possible, and would pay a premium to get there faster. Much of the interior was taken up with powerful steam engines, exhaust stacks, and fuel.
Today, anyone in a rush will fly. People on cruise ships are in no hurry, and the ship board time is a big part of the experience. So the ship will have a smaller engine, and a lower top speed. Several of the 4 smoke stacks are fake, with only the exterior mounted on top of the ship. Stairwells are placed in the interior space that would be used by real smoke stacks.
it would be pretty bad if banks started booting customers who said things they didn't like.
That may be where we are headed. Conservatives and liberals once talked to each other. Then they started reading different newspapers, watching different TV channels, and moved to different forums on social media. Then forums got banned, and they moved to different social media platforms. Now platforms are being banned, so the next step may be for different ideological groups to have their own app-stores, payment processors, etc.
What is next? "Conservative" and "liberal" grocery stores? Conservatives banned from Whole Foods, and liberals banned from Walmart? Where will Libertarians shop?
All this polarization can't be good for our society.
My kids have three options: 1. Paypal 2. Debit card 3. WePay
My daughter has had a debit card since she was 8 (3rd grade). Giving a kid a bank account and a debit card is a great way to teach them responsibility and money management. When she was 10, I helped her connect her account to Paypal so she could make online purchases. She has a WePay account in RMB on her cellphone, so her grandparents can give her hong bao.
And use said $5 Raspberry Pi Zero through what display, when the parent allows three hours of screen time per week?
I don't limit my kids screen time. I believe in "positive" parenting ("You have to do A, B, & C") not negative parenting ("You can't do A, B, & C"). Once my kids are done with their schoolwork, their chores, and work assignments, they can do what they want with the rest of their time.
They have built numerous projects using Raspberry Pi kits, and their tech knowledge is far beyond where I was at their age.
No. It MUST be located on the equator. It is tethered to a counterweight in orbit. The satellite will trace a great circle around the center-of-mass of the earth. An equatorial orbit is the only orbit that will pull directly upward for the entire orbit.
Most proposals put the base on a barge located in the equatorial Atlantic or Pacific. The barge will make it easy to access and service, and also allow it to move slightly to avoid orbital debris.
Slashdot Mirror
workers really need an union to stand up to bs like that!
The workers would have to pay union dues.
The corporation paid for the lawsuit.
So the lawyers gave the workers a better deal than they would have got from a union.
The lawyers can keep up to 1% for their expenses.
This is effectively an abolition of class action lawsuits.
Law firms are businesses, not charities.
Lawyers will get nothing. Harmed consumers will get nothing. Corporations will have impunity.
Just stopping a company from doing it AGAIN doesn't mean you get compensation for when it was done to YOU, which is what a class-action lawsuit should usually be about.
If class-action lawsuits don't make money for the lawyers, then they won't happen at all.
You should think of class-actions as an outsourcing of regulation to the private sector. If the government won't regulate corporate behavior, then profit-seeking law firms will.
Ask yourself this: Should we have more class actions, or fewer? Answer: I dunno.
the true value of helium is not reflected in the current market price.
If you truly believe that you are smarter than the market, then buy up the super-cheap helium, pay the storage cost, and sell it at a big profit when the market finally corrects. Then come back here and post a picture of your yacht. Good luck.
Just keep in mind that people have been predicting a "helium crisis" for decades, and so far they have all been wrong. The price of helium is still low, and there are plenty of capped wells available to boost production if needed. Helium is produced as a by product of natural gas liquefaction, and many conventional wells with high helium content are capped because they can't compete on cost with fracked gas from shale, which does not contain helium.
The United States is, by far, the world's largest producer of helium.
A DSV-1 with suitable payload could get there.
At great cost with money that should go for the next generation of spacecraft.
Look, Kepler served its purpose. It confirmed over a thousand exo-planets, and thousands more unconfirmed. It is not particularly useful to find a few hundred or even a thousand more. Kepler has been in space for 10 years, and was built with tech even older than that. It is time to move on.
We need a NEW spacecraft that can detect smaller planets, planets further from their star, and even exo-moons. We need to be able to look for spectroscopic signs of O2 in star-crossing exo-planets, which may mean life. Spending $500M on a refueling mission will accomplish none of this.
So why would you use anything other than Nitrogen?
It is often a blend. Liquid N2 is cheaper if it isn't pure, containing argon as well, which is about 1% of the atmosphere. Then you can add some helium to the mix if the fire danger is expected to be high, along the ceiling. The helium will make the gas blend rise.
If you are more concerned about liquid fires that burn near the ground, you can use a gas mixture of partially or mostly CO2, which is heavier than air and will create a smothering layer on the floor. CO2 is easier to store under pressure since it will liquify at about 5 atm.
Of course you also want to add mercaptan or some other odorant to make it stink, so a leak is immediately noticed. You don't want to smother people instead of fires.
I'm sure at $120k/fill ...
Who said it costs $120k/fill? TFA does not say that. It says 120 liters, which costs about $1k.
Liquid helium costs about $5 per liter. So 120 liters is worth about $600. No recovery effort could possibly be cost effective for such a small leak.
Also 120 liters of liquid Helium is NOT 90,000 cubic meters of gas. It is about 90 cubic meters.
I'm from Holland and I've never even seen one.
The people claiming they are "wildly popular" are the people trying to sell them. So they have a self-interest in exaggerating.
I have a Dutch friend. I sent her a link to this story, and she said she has never seen one, or even heard of them before, although she also admits she would have no interest in the titles currently published in this format (mostly chick-fiction (trashy novels)).
Now back to my e-reader...
Indeed. I see no advantage of this format over etext, and several obvious disadvantages.
choice 3: program the fucking car to not get in that situation in the first place.
That is not always possible. If the SDC is driving on a two-lane road with guide rails on both sides, and an oncoming car suddenly swerves directly in front of it, there is no possible way to avoid an accident. You can't avoid or anticipate immediate actions by other vehicles.
Was that headline copied-and-pasted directly from Google Translate?
Probably. It is a direct translation from Chinese. "100 million cell phones" in Chinese is "Yi bu shouji". The "bu" is the "measure word" for cell phones (shouji) and translates roughly as "units", and that is how Google translates it.
Linguistic trivia: English occasionally uses "measure words", like "Five head of cattle", "Three ears of corn", "Two pieces of furniture". But in Chinese they are used for almost all nouns, and it is a real pain in the butt to try to remember which measure word goes with which noun. It can even depend on the shape. For instance you say "yi zhi gou" to mean "one zhi of dog" but if it is a long skinny dog like a dachshund you can say "yi tiao gou" where "tiao" is the measure word for long skinny things like belts or neckties, so it means roughly "one strip of dog".
You can buy Xiaomi phones on Amazon, eBay, etc.
I have one, but I only use it as my Chinese burner phone. It is a nice phone. I have never used it in America. I use an iPhone stateside.
My first guess would be that users would fill the inflatable legs and torso with water, to trip the weight sensor in the seat.
My guess is they wouldn't bother. This "you or me" scenario is so implausible and unlikely that there a million other things you could do to better improve your survival.
This, in a nutshell, is everything wrong with our society. We have way too many people who think that jaywalking and prison rape are equivalent.
In most countries, jaywalking is not even a crime. In America, it is mostly used by the police to target young people and minorities.
Was it this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Yes, I think so. It came out in 1994, so the timeframe is right. The helmet looks the same, and the "Dactyl Nightmare" sounds exactly like the game I played all those years ago.
You sing praise of Chromebook as if Google is a saint.
Not the same. Microsoft was a monopoly, and their Windows is still a monoculture, with many applications that run on only that platform.
ChromeBooks are different. Almost everything is done in the browser, and can also be done on a Windows laptop or MacBook. There is no lock-in.
Give a kid a Windows PC and they learn how to use Windows.
Give a kid a ChromeBook and they learn how to use the Internet.
The passengers have seatbelts, air bags, and crumple zones to lessen their injuries
The question is usually framed to already take that into account. They way I have heard it is:
Choice 1: Hit pedestrian.
Choice 2: Drive off a cliff and kill the passenger.
It may be an interesting philosophical question, but it has little to do with reality. A scenario like that is almost never going to happen, and even if it did, a human driver would be faced with the same split second dilemma and be no more likely to make the "correct" decision (whatever that is).
Far more important is that the SDC would have much better reaction time, more braking distance, better control of steering, more situational awareness of other traffic, and thus better able to kill no one.
I bought into the hype, having wanted to try VR since 1992
In the mid 90s (95 or 96?) a VR arcade opened on Pier 39 in San Francisco. You paid, like $5, and got some bulky helmet with goggles and a gun. Then they turned it on, and you were attacked by dinosaurs, as well as the other players. Since computers were a zillion times slower than today, everything was just a mesh with no filled polygons, but it was still really cool. There was even a pterodactyl that grabbed you and soared into the air. When it dropped you, it took a second or two to realize you weren't falling.
I thought, wow, this is going to be big. But it didn't happen. The arcade closed, and 22 years later VR is still a fizzle. It doesn't make sense to me.
Does anyone else remember the arcade? Were you as impressed as I was?
So what, three of the four are fake? Why not just say three?
Because I don't know if that is correct.
Banned for breaking the rules, not for having a conservative political ideology. Mainstream social media platforms don't want people spewing hate speech
"Hate speech" is an ideological concept. Liberals are against it, and conservatives think it is "politically correctness" run amok.
Saying it is not about political ideology, because it is about "hate speech" (a politically ideological concept) is a contradiction.
Bans on "hate speech" may look reasonable if you look at the worst racist garbage being posted. But any power to ban will be abused, and "hate speech" has been used to justify censorship of calm rational express of conservative opinions, such as banning speeches at state run universities. That is government censorship of political speech, precisely what the Constitution was designed to prevent.
Even if you are unwilling to defend free speech on principle, you should defend it for practical reasons. As a liberal, you need to realize that you are LOSING the ideological debate. The right has been winning elections, and dominating nearly every branch of government. Much of this is because they try to convince their political opponents, while progressives try to silence theirs.
When people take the "ideological turing test" (a liberal tries to impersonate a conservative or vice versa), conservatives do way better. Conservatives understand liberals. They just disagree with them. But liberals tend to not even understand conservative viewpoints, misrepresent them, and sound fake to actual conservatives. It is hard to win over the middle ground, when you don't even understand your opponents.
then Facebook/Twitter/etc. doesn't have to bake your KKK cake, either.
I don't see anyone questioning their legal right to ban speech they don't like. They are private companies and can do whatever they want. The question is whether that is the right thing to do, and whether it is good for our society to have more and more segregation of people with opposing viewpoints.
Also, the new ship will have a lower top speed. The original Titanic was built for speed. Additionally, the ship was sailing at top speed to get a PR boost by setting a new speed record for an Atlantic crossing. People wanted to travel between Europe and North America as quickly as possible, and would pay a premium to get there faster. Much of the interior was taken up with powerful steam engines, exhaust stacks, and fuel.
Today, anyone in a rush will fly. People on cruise ships are in no hurry, and the ship board time is a big part of the experience. So the ship will have a smaller engine, and a lower top speed. Several of the 4 smoke stacks are fake, with only the exterior mounted on top of the ship. Stairwells are placed in the interior space that would be used by real smoke stacks.
They way I look at it is like this: Police yourselves so the gov't doesn't have to.
If corporations ban speech under threat of government coercion, how is that any different than the government directly censoring speech?
it would be pretty bad if banks started booting customers who said things they didn't like.
That may be where we are headed. Conservatives and liberals once talked to each other. Then they started reading different newspapers, watching different TV channels, and moved to different forums on social media. Then forums got banned, and they moved to different social media platforms. Now platforms are being banned, so the next step may be for different ideological groups to have their own app-stores, payment processors, etc.
What is next? "Conservative" and "liberal" grocery stores? Conservatives banned from Whole Foods, and liberals banned from Walmart? Where will Libertarians shop?
All this polarization can't be good for our society.
And send the $5 to the online store how?
My kids have three options:
1. Paypal
2. Debit card
3. WePay
My daughter has had a debit card since she was 8 (3rd grade). Giving a kid a bank account and a debit card is a great way to teach them responsibility and money management. When she was 10, I helped her connect her account to Paypal so she could make online purchases. She has a WePay account in RMB on her cellphone, so her grandparents can give her hong bao.
And use said $5 Raspberry Pi Zero through what display, when the parent allows three hours of screen time per week?
I don't limit my kids screen time. I believe in "positive" parenting ("You have to do A, B, & C") not negative parenting ("You can't do A, B, & C"). Once my kids are done with their schoolwork, their chores, and work assignments, they can do what they want with the rest of their time.
They have built numerous projects using Raspberry Pi kits, and their tech knowledge is far beyond where I was at their age.
Ideally located there
No. It MUST be located on the equator. It is tethered to a counterweight in orbit. The satellite will trace a great circle around the center-of-mass of the earth. An equatorial orbit is the only orbit that will pull directly upward for the entire orbit.
Most proposals put the base on a barge located in the equatorial Atlantic or Pacific. The barge will make it easy to access and service, and also allow it to move slightly to avoid orbital debris.