I'm in the US and I don't get nonsense calls on my cell phone either. In fact, it's one of the reasons I dropped landline service altogether: The call breakdown on my landline was as follows:
50% bellsouth asking if I wanted to upgrade my service. If i didn't say no in just the right way, i'd have to call and have it reduced back to the minimum again later.
40% some company claiming to be florida state troopers doing a fundraiser. when asked point blank if the caller in fact was a state trooper, the answer was no
9% other telemarketers. kept low by my being on the do-not-call list. "charity" above aparantly can call with impunity
1% wrong numbers
4 (not a percent. just something like four calls in like 2 years) friends and family. (to be fair i'd anticipated the transition and had been telling everyone to use the cell as primary.)
On the cell however, no telemarketers (it's not on any do not call list either), even fewer wrong numbers. S/N is very very high. Plus it costs less than then landline was costing me and has free long distance, caller id, voicemail, etc. built right in. I won't say cell companies are saints, but I've NEVER recieved a call from sprint trying to upgrade my service.
Both parties don't get billed. The mobile user pays for the mobile usage, it doesn't matter whether he makes the call or recieves it. actual phone-network costs are far lower than the mobile-part costs, so the phone companies generally fold that into the mobile pricing.
This makes the mobile phone transparent to the caller: they don't get charged more to call a mobile phone than they would to call a regular phone in the same area code as the mobile.
Which is good for the mobile user: he could, if he so desired, entirely eliminate land-line service without burdening businesses he may have a relationship with.
There are certain advantages to both systems, but the "caller pays" system is a little rude on the part of the mobile owner. Forcing your friends bills to go up because you chose to use an expensive gadget is a tad selfish don't you think?
What makes you think we can change faster? or more appropriately: what makes you think we can change faster and still maintain the current level of prosperity? and frankly, what makes you think rushing these technologies out would still be able to roll out at the same efficiency?
an example from the consumer end: suppose you bought a brand new car the year before hybrids rolled out, does it make sense to trash that car and buy a hybrid right away? of course it doesn't! making your new hybrid to replace a practically brand-new car would be far more wasteful than the energy you'd save by driving it.
Photovoltaic is being produced and taken up quietly about as quickly as it can be right now, wind has always been squirrely except for a few areas of high-reliability, but that's improving. Nuclear is the only thing I can think of that's being mindlessly blocked right now, and it's traditionally been blocked by environmentalists!
If there's something you want to buy but can't (rather than something you want others to buy who won't), by all means, make a lot of noise and figure out why you can't buy it. But keep in mind that others refusal to take up your pet technology right away may have more to do with their more complete analysis of the total cost and total environmental costs and discovering it's not worth it to retool or rebuild before plant EOL.
So your argument sounds an awful lot like the "John Kerry" method of campaigning: "We're on the right track, but we're not on the right track enough."
Laptops have a problem with surface area: they don't have enough to dissipate a heck of a lot of heat, but adding more means adding more [empty] volume, which reduces the number of laps they can fit on top of.
But a desktop is not optimized for volume/mass. using low-power components would definately allow cooler, quieter, and even slightly smaller designs.
Four years ago DVDs were still catching on, after about two decades of VHS. Now a new format is on the scene less than half a decade after DVD became dominant. The only thing we've really learned is that it's stupid to maintain your own personal video library, since everything's just going to have to be re-released in the new format anyway. so.. the real winners are netflix and people who like uncluttered furnishings.
"Since we have no idea how the climate in general works, probably our best bet on that front is to not dump shittons of CO2 into the air."
No one really thinks its a great idea to dump any kind of industrial waste into the air we breathe. At best, they think that it's a drop in the bucket and at worst they think that the negative effects are mitigated by the products of industry.
The responsible thing to do would be to phase out plants with toward more efficient plants and lower emmission overall or even zero emmissions, but it requires a realism about the nature of the industry and thermodynamics (you can't just regulate "better efficiency" someone has to actually figure out how and implement it.)
The absolute worst thing to do is to shut down all industry overnight and demand "clean" alternatives tomorrow. Especially since such a drastic change would require MASSIVE shift in industrial demographics and require retraining of huge proportions of the workforce. (not to mention the suffering and death resulting from the loss of production capacity in the interim)
So we make the changes we can, adopt the new technologies as they become available, and encourage frugality. Which is exactly what we're doing now.
Indeed, Hans Blix has shown they won't find it even if it is there.
It's not his fault though. He was an egoist, and an egoist can't be expected to do the job asked of him. Not when there's a much more important-sounding job right there for the taking. So he fancied himself a diplomat and apparantly thought his job was to prevent war.
He shan't be blamed, even if his course of action was ironically, the one choice that all but guaranteed an armed conflict: half-assed inspections and cover-your-ass ambiguous (and sometimes contradictory) reports peppered with political statements that should've disqualified him as the leader of a cold, impartial team of observers.
Indeed. Pirate films rarely show their subjects engaged in actual piracy. It's like the unspoken rule of formula-films. In fact, I can't think of a single one off the top of my head.
Ok, I know you were making fun of those people, but that's a bit of a pet peeve of mine: people who call others "noob" for using the most effective weapon in the game, or choosing their battles carefully. People, realize that if a less experienced player than you is killing you more than you're killing them, they are using superior tactics. Adapt. (ok it's possible they're outright cheating, but that's outside the scope of this rant.)
Rising to their challenge is exactly what makes the game fun, not racking up an enormous number of kills using some byzantine code of warfare that only the "elite" are privy to. Now granted, due to imperfect game design, there are some superior tactical positions and weapons that make the game rather boring (i.e. camping & the BFG du jour), but those are problems that can be solved with insightful level design, patches, and administrator options disallowing certain weapons/behaviors. If it is allowed, it is fair game.
I used to love campers and BFGers. The former are easy targets once you understand the level, and the latter are so confident in their superior weapon that they rarely catch you sneaking up behind them with the knife. Easy money. Until they learn not to do that, that is, but then becomes more challenging and fun. There is a lot more to a fun combat game than everyone running into an open field, jumping around like drug-crazed hyenas, and spraying bullets around haphazardly in a winner-takes-all twitch fest of epilepsy.
Just an FYI, she could've done SCUBA without the surgery. Quite a few manufacturers offer corrective lenses as replacements for the standard lenses in their masks. In fact, on a trip to the keys, I found shops which rent such masks. If she was/is becoming nearsighted, there's even a mask that is supposedly significantly better than a traditional mask (its shape creates a lens out of the air/water interface so us normal-vision people would have to wear contacts)
The problem with that argument is the huge infrastructure it implies. Current space operations require components from so many specialized vendors from so many different places on earth that it would be extremely difficult to duplicate that effort on the moon. As in build the entire manufacturing capability necessary and staff it with experts of the same caliber as the ones currently being used.
Such an undertaking is likely to occur after we have solved the get stuff off the earth cheaply problem, which only makes it even less likely to make much sense. So the first lunar product must be something that is simple to produce, useful enough to be needed on the earth, and made of materials relatively more abundant on the moon or use a process sufficiently more efficient on the moon such that it is economically feasable to go there to get/make it.
Well I'm glad lecithin worked for you, but IIRC, "The Juiceman" made the same claims about mashed up carrots and plums.
The reason modern medical science stays away from these miracle all-purpos elixirs has nothing to do with conspiracy and evertying to do with the scientific method. Since the effects are so varied and often not particularly pronounced, it is often impossible to isolate them in any stastically meaningfully way.
The tricky part is that the unenforced laws do not get public outcry for repeal. Instead of making a bad situation better by avoiding them, well-meaning peace officers create a situation for capricious application of the law. It is a circumstance which invites corruption. Sidestepping the pain of enforcement meerly prolongs the miscarriage of justice.
In fact, all you have to do is look at speed limit enforcement for a powerful example. The typical driver is pretty much always at risk of prosecution, since the traffic typically exceeds the speed limit and it is unsafe to buck the traffic just to go slower. It creates a revinue stream for the enforcing community, but what is the problem? most people get away with speeding right?
The problem is that it has become a sort of "motorist farming" whereby enforcement is just low enough that everyone speeds. People don't get traffic tickets because they were violating the law, they get them because they are unlucky. If enforcement was absolute, the revinue would dry up as people took extra care not to exceed the limits and to raise them in places where it is anachronistically low.
Fortunately this example is trivial enough that we can take our time solving it, but it is a useful example because it is a common experience.
We are a nation of laws. It is the social pact which allows us to exist as equals, President and fry cook alike. If it is ok to disobey some laws but not others, or only at certain times, in a non-coded fashion, what will our nation become? There is a word for a government which has ceased to govern by law and instead governs by the whims of men. That name is Tyranny.
I wouldn't get on an airplane designed and built by the editors of Funk & Wagnell's or Britannica either. But I would read about airplanes, and maybe get some ideas on how to find the right people from any of the three. In fact, of those options, wikipedia is the only one with a possibility of having a link to the official site of a real airplane manufacturer, dealer, or classified-ad type thingie.
Encyclopedias are NOT references. They are research tools.
Also, Wikipedia's vast repository of popular TV show plots makes it an ideal tool to avoid having to actually watch the shows to feign interest in your cow orker's small talk.
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I'm in the US and I don't get nonsense calls on my cell phone either. In fact, it's one of the reasons I dropped landline service altogether: The call breakdown on my landline was as follows:
50% bellsouth asking if I wanted to upgrade my service. If i didn't say no in just the right way, i'd have to call and have it reduced back to the minimum again later.
40% some company claiming to be florida state troopers doing a fundraiser. when asked point blank if the caller in fact was a state trooper, the answer was no
9% other telemarketers. kept low by my being on the do-not-call list. "charity" above aparantly can call with impunity
1% wrong numbers
4 (not a percent. just something like four calls in like 2 years) friends and family. (to be fair i'd anticipated the transition and had been telling everyone to use the cell as primary.)
On the cell however, no telemarketers (it's not on any do not call list either), even fewer wrong numbers. S/N is very very high. Plus it costs less than then landline was costing me and has free long distance, caller id, voicemail, etc. built right in. I won't say cell companies are saints, but I've NEVER recieved a call from sprint trying to upgrade my service.
Never trust a man who thinks 4 fl. oz is an appropriate serving size for beer.
Both parties don't get billed. The mobile user pays for the mobile usage, it doesn't matter whether he makes the call or recieves it. actual phone-network costs are far lower than the mobile-part costs, so the phone companies generally fold that into the mobile pricing.
This makes the mobile phone transparent to the caller: they don't get charged more to call a mobile phone than they would to call a regular phone in the same area code as the mobile.
Which is good for the mobile user: he could, if he so desired, entirely eliminate land-line service without burdening businesses he may have a relationship with.
There are certain advantages to both systems, but the "caller pays" system is a little rude on the part of the mobile owner. Forcing your friends bills to go up because you chose to use an expensive gadget is a tad selfish don't you think?
Adam Smith encourages frugality.
What makes you think we can change faster? or more appropriately: what makes you think we can change faster and still maintain the current level of prosperity? and frankly, what makes you think rushing these technologies out would still be able to roll out at the same efficiency?
an example from the consumer end: suppose you bought a brand new car the year before hybrids rolled out, does it make sense to trash that car and buy a hybrid right away? of course it doesn't! making your new hybrid to replace a practically brand-new car would be far more wasteful than the energy you'd save by driving it.
Photovoltaic is being produced and taken up quietly about as quickly as it can be right now, wind has always been squirrely except for a few areas of high-reliability, but that's improving. Nuclear is the only thing I can think of that's being mindlessly blocked right now, and it's traditionally been blocked by environmentalists!
If there's something you want to buy but can't (rather than something you want others to buy who won't), by all means, make a lot of noise and figure out why you can't buy it. But keep in mind that others refusal to take up your pet technology right away may have more to do with their more complete analysis of the total cost and total environmental costs and discovering it's not worth it to retool or rebuild before plant EOL.
So your argument sounds an awful lot like the "John Kerry" method of campaigning: "We're on the right track, but we're not on the right track enough."
Laptops have a problem with surface area: they don't have enough to dissipate a heck of a lot of heat, but adding more means adding more [empty] volume, which reduces the number of laps they can fit on top of.
But a desktop is not optimized for volume/mass. using low-power components would definately allow cooler, quieter, and even slightly smaller designs.
You refer to the urban heat-island hypothesis. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_Heat_Island_Eff ect
Four years ago DVDs were still catching on, after about two decades of VHS. Now a new format is on the scene less than half a decade after DVD became dominant. The only thing we've really learned is that it's stupid to maintain your own personal video library, since everything's just going to have to be re-released in the new format anyway. so.. the real winners are netflix and people who like uncluttered furnishings.
"Since we have no idea how the climate in general works, probably our best bet on that front is to not dump shittons of CO2 into the air."
No one really thinks its a great idea to dump any kind of industrial waste into the air we breathe. At best, they think that it's a drop in the bucket and at worst they think that the negative effects are mitigated by the products of industry.
The responsible thing to do would be to phase out plants with toward more efficient plants and lower emmission overall or even zero emmissions, but it requires a realism about the nature of the industry and thermodynamics (you can't just regulate "better efficiency" someone has to actually figure out how and implement it.)
The absolute worst thing to do is to shut down all industry overnight and demand "clean" alternatives tomorrow. Especially since such a drastic change would require MASSIVE shift in industrial demographics and require retraining of huge proportions of the workforce. (not to mention the suffering and death resulting from the loss of production capacity in the interim)
So we make the changes we can, adopt the new technologies as they become available, and encourage frugality. Which is exactly what we're doing now.
Because they don't want the risk of amex? or because amex doesn't want the risk of them?
Indeed, Hans Blix has shown they won't find it even if it is
there.
It's not his fault though. He was an egoist, and an egoist can't be expected to do the job asked of him. Not when there's a much more important-sounding job right there for the taking. So he fancied himself a diplomat and apparantly thought his job was to prevent war.
He shan't be blamed, even if his course of action was ironically, the one choice that all but guaranteed an armed conflict: half-assed inspections and cover-your-ass ambiguous (and sometimes contradictory) reports peppered with political statements that should've disqualified him as the leader of a cold, impartial team of observers.
Indeed. Pirate films rarely show their subjects engaged in actual piracy. It's like the unspoken rule of formula-films. In fact, I can't think of a single one off the top of my head.
Based on what experience do you believe UN inspectors capable of finding uranium?
How do you synchronize timing across a 1 THz chip?
Ok, I know you were making fun of those people, but that's a bit of a pet peeve of mine: people who call others "noob" for using the most effective weapon in the game, or choosing their battles carefully. People, realize that if a less experienced player than you is killing you more than you're killing them, they are using superior tactics. Adapt. (ok it's possible they're outright cheating, but that's outside the scope of this rant.)
Rising to their challenge is exactly what makes the game fun, not racking up an enormous number of kills using some byzantine code of warfare that only the "elite" are privy to. Now granted, due to imperfect game design, there are some superior tactical positions and weapons that make the game rather boring (i.e. camping & the BFG du jour), but those are problems that can be solved with insightful level design, patches, and administrator options disallowing certain weapons/behaviors. If it is allowed, it is fair game.
I used to love campers and BFGers. The former are easy targets once you understand the level, and the latter are so confident in their superior weapon that they rarely catch you sneaking up behind them with the knife. Easy money. Until they learn not to do that, that is, but then becomes more challenging and fun. There is a lot more to a fun combat game than everyone running into an open field, jumping around like drug-crazed hyenas, and spraying bullets around haphazardly in a winner-takes-all twitch fest of epilepsy.
Just an FYI, she could've done SCUBA without the surgery. Quite a few manufacturers offer corrective lenses as replacements for the standard lenses in their masks. In fact, on a trip to the keys, I found shops which rent such masks. If she was/is becoming nearsighted, there's even a mask that is supposedly significantly better than a traditional mask (its shape creates a lens out of the air/water interface so us normal-vision people would have to wear contacts)
Isn't Craig's List already entirely ads?
The problem with that argument is the huge infrastructure it implies. Current space operations require components from so many specialized vendors from so many different places on earth that it would be extremely difficult to duplicate that effort on the moon. As in build the entire manufacturing capability necessary and staff it with experts of the same caliber as the ones currently being used.
Such an undertaking is likely to occur after we have solved the get stuff off the earth cheaply problem, which only makes it even less likely to make much sense. So the first lunar product must be something that is simple to produce, useful enough to be needed on the earth, and made of materials relatively more abundant on the moon or use a process sufficiently more efficient on the moon such that it is economically feasable to go there to get/make it.
In fact, if you want to be pedantic, the shuttle is the name for the entire stack, the thing that orbits and later lands is called the orbiter.
The thing that destroyed Columbia happened during the powered phase.
I find that very hard to believe given how thin the paint would've been and how rigid the foam actually was.
Slowing down is a kind of acceleration.
Well I'm glad lecithin worked for you, but IIRC, "The Juiceman" made the same claims about mashed up carrots and plums.
The reason modern medical science stays away from these miracle all-purpos elixirs has nothing to do with conspiracy and evertying to do with the scientific method. Since the effects are so varied and often not particularly pronounced, it is often impossible to isolate them in any stastically meaningfully way.
disclaimer: IANAMD.
The tricky part is that the unenforced laws do not get public outcry for repeal. Instead of making a bad situation better by avoiding them, well-meaning peace officers create a situation for capricious application of the law. It is a circumstance which invites corruption. Sidestepping the pain of enforcement meerly prolongs the miscarriage of justice.
In fact, all you have to do is look at speed limit enforcement for a powerful example. The typical driver is pretty much always at risk of prosecution, since the traffic typically exceeds the speed limit and it is unsafe to buck the traffic just to go slower. It creates a revinue stream for the enforcing community, but what is the problem? most people get away with speeding right?
The problem is that it has become a sort of "motorist farming" whereby enforcement is just low enough that everyone speeds. People don't get traffic tickets because they were violating the law, they get them because they are unlucky. If enforcement was absolute, the revinue would dry up as people took extra care not to exceed the limits and to raise them in places where it is anachronistically low.
Fortunately this example is trivial enough that we can take our time solving it, but it is a useful example because it is a common experience.
We are a nation of laws. It is the social pact which allows us to exist as equals, President and fry cook alike. If it is ok to disobey some laws but not others, or only at certain times, in a non-coded fashion, what will our nation become? There is a word for a government which has ceased to govern by law and instead governs by the whims of men. That name is Tyranny.
Me either, but it certainly is odd to call a sport football in which the ball is a nearly perfect sphere and not in any way shaped like a foot.
I wouldn't get on an airplane designed and built by the editors of Funk & Wagnell's or Britannica either. But I would read about airplanes, and maybe get some ideas on how to find the right people from any of the three. In fact, of those options, wikipedia is the only one with a possibility of having a link to the official site of a real airplane manufacturer, dealer, or classified-ad type thingie.
Encyclopedias are NOT references. They are research tools.
Also, Wikipedia's vast repository of popular TV show plots makes it an ideal tool to avoid having to actually watch the shows to feign interest in your cow orker's small talk.