Credit reporting agencies, when functioning as intended, allow individual risk to be borne by the risky individual. Without them, the interest rate has to reflect the overall risk that banks must take by loaning to individuals.
In other words, if you have good credit, you really don't want to get rid of the idea entirely, if it can be made to function as it's supposed to.
Similarly, insurance companies must average over all of their customers. Evaluating the risk allows them to charge more appropriate rates to individuals. Without the ability to segregate based on risk, people who wisely build their homes well above a flood plain end up subsidising people who build right up on edge of the beach, who, ironically, are typically much better off financially than their inland-dwelling counterparts.
The whole point of blowing mod-points when posting in a discussion is so you don't have the conflict of interest between poster and moderator in the same discussion. Your last statement is an admission that you're circumventing the spirit of the rule deliberately.
Needless to say, you probably shouldn't have included such an admission, but it is irrelevant. I am pretty sure you lose any moderation you make in a discussion if you post in it, even as anonymous coward. Unless, of course, you're going out of your way to disguise your identity.
As a graphic designer, you already know why you shouldn't use an inkjet printer at all to produce prints for sale. But if you don't, the reason is dithering. For sellable products, you'd be better off with a dye sublimation or photographic process.
As a potential customer, I know which one I'd buy. I've seen inkjet printed graphic art at my local coffee shop, and while it is certainly better than why my personal printer could put out (not by much, though, not counting the fact I wouldn't be able to produce the high quality images in the first place). But I wouldn't buy them, because they still look like cheesy printouts from anywhere other than a number of steps back. In lightly colored areas, there are easily visible dots all over the place, and in darker areas details are missing.
When I look at the pictures, I sometimes think I'd buy the digital version of that, then take that digital version to CVS and print it on their photo-printer that has pretty poor consistency with regard to color space, but still is far superior to inkjet. Of course, if the artist had used a more appropriate process for their art, that wouldn't be necessary.* But most of the time, I simply lose interest around the time I see the dots.
For a lot less than $20 (actually, a more than fair price listed on a few of the pictures on display in the aforementioned coffee shop), I can visit stock.xchng and crop and print out one of their images for personal use. I could probably send one of those images to a printer and get a really high quality print for my home, but that exceeds the level of effort and expenditure at which I'd rather actually pay an artist and get something I really like instead of cobbling together something I kind-of think is sort-of cool.
*some of the prints do have labels that indicate they can be purchased in other forms, but IMO the prints on display should be in the most stunning and/or accurate medium the artist has available.
No matter how high-quality your ink-jet printer is, or high-quality your inks are, I can see the dots. And the dots make even the most stunning images look cheesy.
150 sheets? seriously? You can't even get through a single ream without changing the inks? damn. I mean, you'd think they'd design these things so you can buy the two items together... (yes, yes, I know the answer is HP-branded 125 sheet reams...)
Of course they do. They kept the wrong Steve. The Steve they did keep must have brought in guys like him, who are, at least, good at figuring out how to pare the requirements down to what the engineers they do have are capable of and still have a product that works well for quite a few people.
Well, where are the protests? I mean, aside from the Iranians setting up roadside bombs, where are the people with signs, marching through the streets? Iraq has a population larger than California, but they can't muster a single crowd of dirty hippie-alikes?
Maybe the problem isn't that the Iraqis fear we will stay, but when we will leave. Perhaps the reason we're not training the Iraqi security force quickly enough (remember, the benchmark for starting the withdrawal?) is that the people who would join are afraid we will pull out before completion leaving them and their families high and dry for retaliation. Where would this fear be coming from, I wonder?
If you've got a couple of pyros, they're a problem that needs to be dealt with. But if you've got a whole troop full of 'em, you should probably consider that there's something wrong with the rest of the campout that the most interesting part was poking around with volatile hydrocarbons in the campfire. From your post, I have to wonder if you're punishments aren't better thought out than the activities.
note: you should not be the one thinking up the activities, that's for the PLC to decide, but if they're uncreative, there's nothing wrong with a nudge or two. Ideally, they should be pretty much too exhausted from the rest of the day to be thinking about conflagratory shenanigans.
For instance, A canoe trip is a good start. A canoe trip with at least two portages, and some kind of inter patrol competition is quite a bit better.
What about the cancer-causing materials already present in buildings? What about cancer-causing materials in the plane that are simply unavoidable (like soot from burning non-survivors) In that case, lowering the probability of a crash actually lowers the probability of crash-related long-term effects.
No, you save more lives by preventing crashes than by making existing levels of crashing less cancer-causing.
At a rate of 1 per 4 months, it would take me half of a lifetime to accumulate 100 dead bulbs. It is hazardous waste. Even with the neighbours, as suggested by another poster, that cuts it down, what? to three years? And then I have spend an two hours in an enclosed space with hundreds of fragile glass vials of mercury. If I were to ask them to contribute enough to actually make this trip worthwhile to me, they'd be getting ripped off.
What needs to be done, before we really start pushing these things, is to get the local waste management services to set up collection points. My transfer station already has separate bins for paper, plastic, and metals waste, and everyone uses them. (although it is a recycling-mandatory community...) If they add an extra bin for CFLs, keep their "we want to soak businesses" plan for full-size tubes, then I think people would use them.
It's all well and good to say, "you're supposed to recycle that" or "You're supposed to dispose of that in a special way" but that special way shouldn't be obscure and difficult for a product produced on the scale of CFLs. If it's too difficult for the waste management companies to manage CFL waste, then it's high time we consider the possibility they might not be the ideal replacement for incandescents.
A huge aperture, you mean. If your sensor is large enough to take low-noise pictures out of any lens, it's large enough. Actually, the larger your sensor, the MORE light you need. So you'd want the smallest sensor you could find that still was low-noise. What you need is more light which means you need a very wide aperture. Large enough to mitigate the vibration, and then even larger to compensate for the magnification. Fortunately, the physical dimensions of the lens only increase by a factor of 1.41 for every 2x increase in light-gathering ability.
Corpses can't get cancer. Airliner crashes tend not to be all that survivable. Air travel is as safe as it is because they tend not to be all the frequent either. Which is really quite amazing considering they must shave the safety factor down low enough to be ~50% fuel mass and still have enough mass-budget left to carry significant cargo and passengers.
So, reducing the chance of crash by even a small factor is worth a cost of increasing risk of cancer in crash survivors by the another small amount. To paraphrase, The needs of the many, in this case, outweigh the needs of the few.. or the none.
Just need to have non-stupid options. Every four or five months, I check with my state's waste management website for how to handle the tricky stuff (like fluorescent tubes and button batteries), mostly because that's about how often I lose a CFL. Their answer is that I must drive halfway across the state (it's a small state, but the way the roads are, half-way across might as well be all the way across). Also, I have to make a special appointment for the privilege.
I might consider doing this when my CRT monitor finally fails, but somehow I doubt that burning 12 gallons of gasoline for a single compact bulb is less harmful to the environment than tossing it in with the regular trash. And if it's not, then there's no point in my continuing to use them, as the 12 gallons of gasoline puts the lifetime cost well over that which regular light bulbs would've been over the same time period. They fail to break often enough that just accumulating a bunch of spent CFLs is really an option. It'd take me ten years to fill a small box with 'em, and frankly, I don't want to store hazardous waste for that long.
The items aren't exactly very large or numerous. I fail to see why they can't just put one or more small bins at the transfer station for them. How much space would a whole town's worth of expired button batteries need to take, anyway?
sincerely doubt any terrorist wants to "kill everyone", leave that for depressed teenagers. Terrorists usually want more power, a return to prior power, the end of an occupation or freedom of movement in a 'free market' (an end to trade embargos). In the case of anti-US terrorism, they probably feel they are fighting a gigantic geo-strategic and economic machine that has historically exerted power over them, so reducing their options in many areas. The U.S is the target of so much terrorism because it plays nastily and such with a hard-hand abroad. So, terrorists play very unfairly back, resorting to all sorts of horrific and unquestionably sickening measures in turn.
You're making a mistake here: Those are what your goals would be if you were a "terrorist." But the real terrorists are not guerilla fighters taking pot-shots at an army they couldn't defeat openly. They target civilians. And here's the kicker: They target civilians of both sides of the conflict. So your evidence that their motivations and your projected motivations in similar circumstances would coincide is rather scant.
Just because it's not progressive, which means that higher income levels are progressively taxed higher rates, does not mean that it's regressive which in this context means that higher income levels are progressively taxed lower rates.
Fairtax doesn't do that. It is, at its heart, a VAT. If that was all it was, all spending would be taxed at the same rate. Those with more wealth would be taxed higher amounts than those with less. But all the money gets taxed because it all eventually gets spent.
But fairtax doesn't stop there. It also provides for an allowance on the first so-many dollars spent. Since this tax-rebate is held to a constant ceiling, it is a lower percentage of a higher-income than lower-income. It is an inelegant solution, but it puts Fairtax weakly in the progressive column.
A 30% tax (and, IIRC, ~17% was the proposed level) would cause no such thing if, as per the fairtax plan, it was enacted while eliminating the other taxes (income, etc) that amount to the same percentage. It is a truism that a revenue neutral tax-code change removes exactly the same amount of money from the economy.
It should also be noted that a progressive income tax doesn't, as you'd think, tax the rich more. It taxes the becoming rich more. It is an obstacle to separate the already-wealthy from the becoming-wealthy, and since it was implemented by the already-wealthy, you should consider the possibility that it may even have been one of their goals.
I've got some friends who do that, too. (well not coin collecting. That's the height of boring. But at least the coins have some value)
Have you ever thought about asking him, why bother? I mean, if he's got Netflix, he can go through more movies in a week than he's got time to watch. Logically, it makes no sense to horde them, especially since you can always re-queue a movie if you ever want to see it again, and doubly especially since if you use Netflix, the HD transition happens transparently: you don't have to re-buy all your disks as they come out again, you can just rent the most advanced version there is.
Later when digital-download is prevalent, there will be even less reason to maintain a huge movie-library.
Irrespective of the backup-copy aspects, I can't see making yourself a criminal just because to satisfy some pointless urge to collect all the mostly mediocre films you watch..
Gets very little mention on slashdot. You'd think that HP and Lexmark made all the ink-jets there ever were. But let's review its features.
1) the ink-low meter is an optical sensor coupled with a small prism on the bottom of the ink tank. It shouldn't be able to tell the level of the tank until the tank is quite low. This seems like a disadvantage, but:
2) The ink tanks are clear plastic. All you have to do is lift the cover, and you can visually inspect them.
3) The inks are sold separately. All the colors. Not just some silly Black / Color
4) the inks are relatively inexpensive. They're not cheap, but they are much less than HP for the same amount of ink.
5) They've usually had both replaceable inks AND replaceable print heads. No need to choose between economy of cartridges vs. quality of printing.
But, possibly because of all the weird HP fanboi/bashing and not nearly enough Canon fanbois (or even bashing...),They have decided to go down that that road and has eliminated many of these advantages with the introduction of PIXMA. So thanks for not noticing them while they really were the kings of inkjet. Now my color printer is CVS.
Slashdot Mirror
Credit reporting agencies, when functioning as intended, allow individual risk to be borne by the risky individual. Without them, the interest rate has to reflect the overall risk that banks must take by loaning to individuals.
In other words, if you have good credit, you really don't want to get rid of the idea entirely, if it can be made to function as it's supposed to.
Similarly, insurance companies must average over all of their customers. Evaluating the risk allows them to charge more appropriate rates to individuals. Without the ability to segregate based on risk, people who wisely build their homes well above a flood plain end up subsidising people who build right up on edge of the beach, who, ironically, are typically much better off financially than their inland-dwelling counterparts.
If you think "Security through Obscurity" is bad, try telling everyone your passwords and see how well "Security through perfect information" works.
The whole point of blowing mod-points when posting in a discussion is so you don't have the conflict of interest between poster and moderator in the same discussion. Your last statement is an admission that you're circumventing the spirit of the rule deliberately.
Needless to say, you probably shouldn't have included such an admission, but it is irrelevant. I am pretty sure you lose any moderation you make in a discussion if you post in it, even as anonymous coward. Unless, of course, you're going out of your way to disguise your identity.
Good post otherwise, though.
On the other hand, can you really call beers like "Utopias" beer?
If they're egg-shaped, how can you call them saucers? I thought a saucer had to at least be shaped like a plate or low-level spaghetti cook...
As a graphic designer, you already know why you shouldn't use an inkjet printer at all to produce prints for sale. But if you don't, the reason is dithering. For sellable products, you'd be better off with a dye sublimation or photographic process.
As a potential customer, I know which one I'd buy. I've seen inkjet printed graphic art at my local coffee shop, and while it is certainly better than why my personal printer could put out (not by much, though, not counting the fact I wouldn't be able to produce the high quality images in the first place). But I wouldn't buy them, because they still look like cheesy printouts from anywhere other than a number of steps back. In lightly colored areas, there are easily visible dots all over the place, and in darker areas details are missing.
When I look at the pictures, I sometimes think I'd buy the digital version of that, then take that digital version to CVS and print it on their photo-printer that has pretty poor consistency with regard to color space, but still is far superior to inkjet. Of course, if the artist had used a more appropriate process for their art, that wouldn't be necessary.* But most of the time, I simply lose interest around the time I see the dots.
For a lot less than $20 (actually, a more than fair price listed on a few of the pictures on display in the aforementioned coffee shop), I can visit stock.xchng and crop and print out one of their images for personal use. I could probably send one of those images to a printer and get a really high quality print for my home, but that exceeds the level of effort and expenditure at which I'd rather actually pay an artist and get something I really like instead of cobbling together something I kind-of think is sort-of cool.
*some of the prints do have labels that indicate they can be purchased in other forms, but IMO the prints on display should be in the most stunning and/or accurate medium the artist has available.
No matter how high-quality your ink-jet printer is, or high-quality your inks are, I can see the dots. And the dots make even the most stunning images look cheesy.
150 sheets? seriously? You can't even get through a single ream without changing the inks? damn. I mean, you'd think they'd design these things so you can buy the two items together... (yes, yes, I know the answer is HP-branded 125 sheet reams...)
Of course they do. They kept the wrong Steve. The Steve they did keep must have brought in guys like him, who are, at least, good at figuring out how to pare the requirements down to what the engineers they do have are capable of and still have a product that works well for quite a few people.
Well, where are the protests? I mean, aside from the Iranians setting up roadside bombs, where are the people with signs, marching through the streets? Iraq has a population larger than California, but they can't muster a single crowd of dirty hippie-alikes?
Maybe the problem isn't that the Iraqis fear we will stay, but when we will leave. Perhaps the reason we're not training the Iraqi security force quickly enough (remember, the benchmark for starting the withdrawal?) is that the people who would join are afraid we will pull out before completion leaving them and their families high and dry for retaliation. Where would this fear be coming from, I wonder?
If you've got a couple of pyros, they're a problem that needs to be dealt with. But if you've got a whole troop full of 'em, you should probably consider that there's something wrong with the rest of the campout that the most interesting part was poking around with volatile hydrocarbons in the campfire. From your post, I have to wonder if you're punishments aren't better thought out than the activities.
note: you should not be the one thinking up the activities, that's for the PLC to decide, but if they're uncreative, there's nothing wrong with a nudge or two. Ideally, they should be pretty much too exhausted from the rest of the day to be thinking about conflagratory shenanigans.
For instance, A canoe trip is a good start. A canoe trip with at least two portages, and some kind of inter patrol competition is quite a bit better.
Yes it is. What do you think the drilling platforms are made of, wood? No, they're going to be plenty irony.
Wasn't that a Seinfeld episode?
What about the cancer-causing materials already present in buildings? What about cancer-causing materials in the plane that are simply unavoidable (like soot from burning non-survivors) In that case, lowering the probability of a crash actually lowers the probability of crash-related long-term effects.
No, you save more lives by preventing crashes than by making existing levels of crashing less cancer-causing.
At a rate of 1 per 4 months, it would take me half of a lifetime to accumulate 100 dead bulbs. It is hazardous waste. Even with the neighbours, as suggested by another poster, that cuts it down, what? to three years? And then I have spend an two hours in an enclosed space with hundreds of fragile glass vials of mercury. If I were to ask them to contribute enough to actually make this trip worthwhile to me, they'd be getting ripped off.
What needs to be done, before we really start pushing these things, is to get the local waste management services to set up collection points. My transfer station already has separate bins for paper, plastic, and metals waste, and everyone uses them. (although it is a recycling-mandatory community...) If they add an extra bin for CFLs, keep their "we want to soak businesses" plan for full-size tubes, then I think people would use them.
It's all well and good to say, "you're supposed to recycle that" or "You're supposed to dispose of that in a special way" but that special way shouldn't be obscure and difficult for a product produced on the scale of CFLs. If it's too difficult for the waste management companies to manage CFL waste, then it's high time we consider the possibility they might not be the ideal replacement for incandescents.
A huge aperture, you mean. If your sensor is large enough to take low-noise pictures out of any lens, it's large enough. Actually, the larger your sensor, the MORE light you need. So you'd want the smallest sensor you could find that still was low-noise.
What you need is more light which means you need a very wide aperture. Large enough to mitigate the vibration, and then even larger to compensate for the magnification. Fortunately, the physical dimensions of the lens only increase by a factor of 1.41 for every 2x increase in light-gathering ability.
You still hear that 'i' before 'e' song, eh? Weird.
Corpses can't get cancer. Airliner crashes tend not to be all that survivable. Air travel is as safe as it is because they tend not to be all the frequent either. Which is really quite amazing considering they must shave the safety factor down low enough to be ~50% fuel mass and still have enough mass-budget left to carry significant cargo and passengers.
So, reducing the chance of crash by even a small factor is worth a cost of increasing risk of cancer in crash survivors by the another small amount. To paraphrase, The needs of the many, in this case, outweigh the needs of the few.. or the none.
Just need to have non-stupid options. Every four or five months, I check with my state's waste management website for how to handle the tricky stuff (like fluorescent tubes and button batteries), mostly because that's about how often I lose a CFL. Their answer is that I must drive halfway across the state (it's a small state, but the way the roads are, half-way across might as well be all the way across). Also, I have to make a special appointment for the privilege.
I might consider doing this when my CRT monitor finally fails, but somehow I doubt that burning 12 gallons of gasoline for a single compact bulb is less harmful to the environment than tossing it in with the regular trash. And if it's not, then there's no point in my continuing to use them, as the 12 gallons of gasoline puts the lifetime cost well over that which regular light bulbs would've been over the same time period. They fail to break often enough that just accumulating a bunch of spent CFLs is really an option. It'd take me ten years to fill a small box with 'em, and frankly, I don't want to store hazardous waste for that long.
The items aren't exactly very large or numerous. I fail to see why they can't just put one or more small bins at the transfer station for them. How much space would a whole town's worth of expired button batteries need to take, anyway?
You're making a mistake here: Those are what your goals would be if you were a "terrorist." But the real terrorists are not guerilla fighters taking pot-shots at an army they couldn't defeat openly. They target civilians. And here's the kicker: They target civilians of both sides of the conflict. So your evidence that their motivations and your projected motivations in similar circumstances would coincide is rather scant.
No government organization is ever temporary.
Just because it's not progressive, which means that higher income levels are progressively taxed higher rates, does not mean that it's regressive which in this context means that higher income levels are progressively taxed lower rates.
Fairtax doesn't do that. It is, at its heart, a VAT. If that was all it was, all spending would be taxed at the same rate. Those with more wealth would be taxed higher amounts than those with less. But all the money gets taxed because it all eventually gets spent.
But fairtax doesn't stop there. It also provides for an allowance on the first so-many dollars spent. Since this tax-rebate is held to a constant ceiling, it is a lower percentage of a higher-income than lower-income. It is an inelegant solution, but it puts Fairtax weakly in the progressive column.
A 30% tax (and, IIRC, ~17% was the proposed level) would cause no such thing if, as per the fairtax plan, it was enacted while eliminating the other taxes (income, etc) that amount to the same percentage. It is a truism that a revenue neutral tax-code change removes exactly the same amount of money from the economy.
It should also be noted that a progressive income tax doesn't, as you'd think, tax the rich more. It taxes the becoming rich more. It is an obstacle to separate the already-wealthy from the becoming-wealthy, and since it was implemented by the already-wealthy, you should consider the possibility that it may even have been one of their goals.
Ok, I'll bite. Why GOP?
It prints directly onto the disk? that's pretty neat. Do you need special disks for that, though?
I've got some friends who do that, too. (well not coin collecting. That's the height of boring. But at least the coins have some value)
Have you ever thought about asking him, why bother? I mean, if he's got Netflix, he can go through more movies in a week than he's got time to watch. Logically, it makes no sense to horde them, especially since you can always re-queue a movie if you ever want to see it again, and doubly especially since if you use Netflix, the HD transition happens transparently: you don't have to re-buy all your disks as they come out again, you can just rent the most advanced version there is.
Later when digital-download is prevalent, there will be even less reason to maintain a huge movie-library.
Irrespective of the backup-copy aspects, I can't see making yourself a criminal just because to satisfy some pointless urge to collect all the mostly mediocre films you watch..
Gets very little mention on slashdot. You'd think that HP and Lexmark made all the ink-jets there ever were. But let's review its features.
1) the ink-low meter is an optical sensor coupled with a small prism on the bottom of the ink tank. It shouldn't be able to tell the level of the tank until the tank is quite low. This seems like a disadvantage, but:
2) The ink tanks are clear plastic. All you have to do is lift the cover, and you can visually inspect them.
3) The inks are sold separately. All the colors. Not just some silly Black / Color
4) the inks are relatively inexpensive. They're not cheap, but they are much less than HP for the same amount of ink.
5) They've usually had both replaceable inks AND replaceable print heads. No need to choose between economy of cartridges vs. quality of printing.
But, possibly because of all the weird HP fanboi/bashing and not nearly enough Canon fanbois (or even bashing...),They have decided to go down that that road and has eliminated many of these advantages with the introduction of PIXMA. So thanks for not noticing them while they really were the kings of inkjet. Now my color printer is CVS.