A lot of electric power plants sit idle most of the time. They exist only for peak power demands. If most of those cars recharge overnight, you might not have to build a single extra plant.
I don't know stats. It may be that some would be needed. It may be that the peak power plants are the most inefficient and dirtiest. But it's not nearly as bad as you imply.
Some people have considered the possibility that Wilfred Voynich forged the Voynich Manuscript. Wilfred Voynich’s business was in buying and selling old manuscripts and again it is unlikely that he would have copied from French and Italian manuscripts written after Roger Bacon’s death or seen early Tarot cards like the Visconti-Sforza pack.
Then three paragraphs later, she says
If Wilfred Voynich considered Roger Bacon a suitable 13th century author of the Voynich Manuscript,...
She can't have it both ways. Either Voynich was too smart to have made such a clumsy mistake, or he was not. She makes it clear that both of these are her own opinions: first she disagrees that he would have been so clumsy as to fake it in a Roger Bacon style, then she says he considered Roger Bacon a possible author.
How would it save any lives? Very few hostages die. That would be bad for business; pirates don't get ransom for dead crew or sunken ships, and if they tried to, their negotiating credibility wold sink just as fast.
An experiment is a prediction of something whose result is not yet proven. Just as in, say, chemistry, you can make predictions and test them with an experiment, so for astronomy. You make a prediction about what will be observed under certain conditions. The experiment requires better telescopes to test, so 20 years later, when Hubble comes along, you test the predicted outcome, and possibly disprove the prediction. Or maybe you only need to make a new observation which no one has made yet to test your idea.
It may not be a classic mix-and-watch experiment, but it seems like one to me.
Here's why states hate this idea. Because it would allow the states to compete with each other to bring more shipping business into its state.
I think there's another reason, but I am only guessing... lawyers. Sales taxes really came into affect in the 1930s Great Depression, and I suspect that if states tried to push their mail order companies to collect out of state taxes, other states probably would have screamed bloody murder that their citizens were being charged for taxation without representation. And the mail order companies would have threatened to relocate to a friendlier state.
It would be even simpler to base the tax on the seller's location instead of the buyer's. But the entrenched interests would never stand for that.
You sound like you have dealt with taxes like I have. The worst part for me is that the couny is significant, they want their taxes too, but no one writes it down as part of their address, so you have to figure it out from the rest of the address.
See my comment above. There are NOT just 50 taxes, one per state. Not only do most cities and counties have their own taxes, so do hospital districts, mosquito abatement districts, transit districts, football stadium districts... we get a monthly tax update of around 100K records, each and every one a different jurisdiction with its own special set of taxes.
Canada is much simpler. One federal tax, and one provincial tax per province. No counties, cities, or mosquito abatement districts.
Europe would be the easiest of the bunch, except for their puny little VAT exclusion districts, but they are like a breath of fresh air compared to US taxes.
My comments here are mostly US-centric because those are the most screwed up taxes which cause the problem.
I write code which deals with sales taxes and they are a real mess. You can purchase monthly data which lists taxes for around 100K locations in the US. Part of the problem is that taxes vary by county, but no one writes down their county as part of their address. There are ways to figure it out using free source code and public domain data, but it takes work. If I can do this as only a small part of my job at my small company, Amazon can too, and apparently they do.
But that's a side show.
The real problem is that the powers that be decided that sales tax has to be based on where the buyer is, not the seller. Thus the seller needs an address detailed enough to determine the county and to calculate the correct tax of those 100K data records. In the days of brick and mortar stores only, this was simple. In fact, it actually looked like they seller's location, not the buyer's, because the buyer came to the store to buy. But mail order stores came along and got a big advantage as long as they had no physical presence in other states. And on the other hand, sales taxes didn't really come into play much at all until the 1930s Great Depression when states started looking for alternate sources of income. I don't know why they didn't charge based on seller's location; probably businesses threatened to leave the state, or other states complained about taxation without representation. I would not be surprised to find the lawyers had a big hand in this mess, bigger than mere politicians.
If, instead, the seller's location determined the tax, then the seller would have one tax rate which would seldom change. Every customer would be charged the same tax rate. No monthly data update, no trickery to determine the county, no contortions for all the strange deals various merchants have negotiated with various governments at various levels.
However, as much as I would love to not have to handle this chore any more, it won't change. I would love it if *somebody* would decree that the current system sucks and that the simplest fix is to switch to seller's location from buyer's location. But there are far too many entrenched interests. Amazon would immediately start negotiations with Washington state and threaten to move out if they didn't get their piggy little way. People would stop searching for web sites with no presence in their state, and thus no sales tax, and those companies would scream bloody murder.
I'm assuming American military bases are heavily armed environments.
You assume uselessly. The bases themselves may be heavily armed, but the soldiers on that base who would have to be wielding the arms are not in the practice of carrying said arms all over the place.
I vaguely remember reading accounts written by people with excellent memories and they found it a pain in the ass, remembering way too much. I got the impression that evolution had picked a decent general purpose default setting for how much we remember.
I disagree that steering wheels are intuitive. Both ships and cars used tillers at first, not steering wheels.
I also disagree about mapping a joystick to the movements of a car. There are only four movements in question. Left and right would take about 5 seconds of explanation to someone who knew nothing of them. Forward and backward to control speed isn't much more. The learning will come in how much to move them, and a few seconds in a parking lot will suffice to get the gist of it. After that it's just practice. I expect steering would take longer to fine tune with a joystick simply because the hand movements are so much less for similar changes, but then the speed control will be much easier than two foot pedals.
My wonder is if they have any plans for manual transmissions. You could have upshift/downshift buttons on the stick, like the military HOTAS (Hands On Throttle And Stick), but for a true manual tranny, you'd have to have a second joystick, presumably for the other hand. What would be neat would be if you could swap them so both lefties and righties could drive the same car.
This will have to be drive by wire, at least for the steering, or at least speed sensitive, otherwise some idiot will knock the joystick sideways at speed and roll. You can't do that in a car by accident, altho maybe on the AutoBahn going really fast...
Many many passengers talk on cell phones to get directions. Some even answer the driver's cell phone. You must live a sheltered exist with few friends who would do that for you.
I turn my cell phone off when I'm driving, actually.
I say again: You must live a very sheltered life to not have friends who would answer your cell phone for you while driving. You also must read a very sheltered version of my post to not comprehend that passengers might have good reason to use their own cell phones.
There is a general trend away from purpose built GPS navigators and toward GPS applications on smart phones. You must live a sheltered life with little contact with the technical world.
See above. And you must have lived a very sheltered life to have not come in contact with cars that have in-dash navigation systems....
And once more, you must read a very sheltered version of my post to not understand that there is a trend away from dedicated GPS units to GPS programs on general purpose smart phones.
I don't know why you think your military focus is of any use to you here. My military background never put blinders on my brain. I'd say you ought to demand your money back for all the good it does you in basic reading skills.
GPS, AM, FM are on different frequencies. You must live a sheltered life and not have had the opportunity to see many antennas and compare them.
Many many passengers talk on cell phones to get directions. Some even answer the driver's cell phone. You must live a sheltered exist with few friends who would do that for you.
There is a general trend away from purpose built GPS navigators and toward GPS applications on smart phones. You must live a sheltered life with little contact with the technical world.
Slashdot Mirror
A lot of electric power plants sit idle most of the time. They exist only for peak power demands. If most of those cars recharge overnight, you might not have to build a single extra plant.
I don't know stats. It may be that some would be needed. It may be that the peak power plants are the most inefficient and dirtiest. But it's not nearly as bad as you imply.
Not to try to prove that pile of pretend, but the Black Sea Flood comes to mind ...
John Smith was also one of the founders of Jamestown in 1607.
I bet ANYONE can join this game with the help of Wikipedia and google.
In one linked prior page, she says
Some people have considered the possibility that Wilfred Voynich forged the Voynich Manuscript. Wilfred Voynich’s business was in buying and selling old manuscripts and again it is unlikely that he would have copied from French and Italian manuscripts written after Roger Bacon’s death or seen early Tarot cards like the Visconti-Sforza pack.
Then three paragraphs later, she says
If Wilfred Voynich considered Roger Bacon a suitable 13th century author of the Voynich Manuscript, ...
She can't have it both ways. Either Voynich was too smart to have made such a clumsy mistake, or he was not. She makes it clear that both of these are her own opinions: first she disagrees that he would have been so clumsy as to fake it in a Roger Bacon style, then she says he considered Roger Bacon a possible author.
In your dreams, chickenhawk. If they haven't acted by now, this silly little news won't get their blood boiling any faster.
How would it save any lives? Very few hostages die. That would be bad for business; pirates don't get ransom for dead crew or sunken ships, and if they tried to, their negotiating credibility wold sink just as fast.
Probably. Too many Smiths in history.
What brought that nonsense into your head?
Machine guns? Plain old semi-autos do the trick better.
You sound like a typical hoplophobe, turning molehills into mountains, the better to scare yourself with.
Torpedoes! That really takes the cake!
An experiment is a prediction of something whose result is not yet proven. Just as in, say, chemistry, you can make predictions and test them with an experiment, so for astronomy. You make a prediction about what will be observed under certain conditions. The experiment requires better telescopes to test, so 20 years later, when Hubble comes along, you test the predicted outcome, and possibly disprove the prediction. Or maybe you only need to make a new observation which no one has made yet to test your idea.
It may not be a classic mix-and-watch experiment, but it seems like one to me.
Here's why states hate this idea. Because it would allow the states to compete with each other to bring more shipping business into its state.
I think there's another reason, but I am only guessing ... lawyers. Sales taxes really came into affect in the 1930s Great Depression, and I suspect that if states tried to push their mail order companies to collect out of state taxes, other states probably would have screamed bloody murder that their citizens were being charged for taxation without representation. And the mail order companies would have threatened to relocate to a friendlier state.
It would be even simpler to base the tax on the seller's location instead of the buyer's. But the entrenched interests would never stand for that.
You sound like you have dealt with taxes like I have. The worst part for me is that the couny is significant, they want their taxes too, but no one writes it down as part of their address, so you have to figure it out from the rest of the address.
Try 100K. We get a monthly update of 100K records.
See my comment above. There are NOT just 50 taxes, one per state. Not only do most cities and counties have their own taxes, so do hospital districts, mosquito abatement districts, transit districts, football stadium districts ... we get a monthly tax update of around 100K records, each and every one a different jurisdiction with its own special set of taxes.
Canada is much simpler. One federal tax, and one provincial tax per province. No counties, cities, or mosquito abatement districts.
Europe would be the easiest of the bunch, except for their puny little VAT exclusion districts, but they are like a breath of fresh air compared to US taxes.
My comments here are mostly US-centric because those are the most screwed up taxes which cause the problem.
I write code which deals with sales taxes and they are a real mess. You can purchase monthly data which lists taxes for around 100K locations in the US. Part of the problem is that taxes vary by county, but no one writes down their county as part of their address. There are ways to figure it out using free source code and public domain data, but it takes work. If I can do this as only a small part of my job at my small company, Amazon can too, and apparently they do.
But that's a side show.
The real problem is that the powers that be decided that sales tax has to be based on where the buyer is, not the seller. Thus the seller needs an address detailed enough to determine the county and to calculate the correct tax of those 100K data records. In the days of brick and mortar stores only, this was simple. In fact, it actually looked like they seller's location, not the buyer's, because the buyer came to the store to buy. But mail order stores came along and got a big advantage as long as they had no physical presence in other states. And on the other hand, sales taxes didn't really come into play much at all until the 1930s Great Depression when states started looking for alternate sources of income. I don't know why they didn't charge based on seller's location; probably businesses threatened to leave the state, or other states complained about taxation without representation. I would not be surprised to find the lawyers had a big hand in this mess, bigger than mere politicians.
If, instead, the seller's location determined the tax, then the seller would have one tax rate which would seldom change. Every customer would be charged the same tax rate. No monthly data update, no trickery to determine the county, no contortions for all the strange deals various merchants have negotiated with various governments at various levels.
However, as much as I would love to not have to handle this chore any more, it won't change. I would love it if *somebody* would decree that the current system sucks and that the simplest fix is to switch to seller's location from buyer's location. But there are far too many entrenched interests. Amazon would immediately start negotiations with Washington state and threaten to move out if they didn't get their piggy little way. People would stop searching for web sites with no presence in their state, and thus no sales tax, and those companies would scream bloody murder.
I'm assuming American military bases are heavily armed environments.
You assume uselessly. The bases themselves may be heavily armed, but the soldiers on that base who would have to be wielding the arms are not in the practice of carrying said arms all over the place.
Prominent examples are still anecdotal and not statistical, and therefore of little value in determining reality.
I'll bet Franklin had the sense of humor you seem to be missing. His kite would have whooshed right over your head.
It's 30 percent less diameter. .7 cubed means 1/3 the mass.
I vaguely remember reading accounts written by people with excellent memories and they found it a pain in the ass, remembering way too much. I got the impression that evolution had picked a decent general purpose default setting for how much we remember.
The relevance here?
Well, none to you. But to people who understand Goedel Escher and Bach, your arrogant ignorance is quite the giggle.
I disagree that steering wheels are intuitive. Both ships and cars used tillers at first, not steering wheels.
I also disagree about mapping a joystick to the movements of a car. There are only four movements in question. Left and right would take about 5 seconds of explanation to someone who knew nothing of them. Forward and backward to control speed isn't much more. The learning will come in how much to move them, and a few seconds in a parking lot will suffice to get the gist of it. After that it's just practice. I expect steering would take longer to fine tune with a joystick simply because the hand movements are so much less for similar changes, but then the speed control will be much easier than two foot pedals.
My wonder is if they have any plans for manual transmissions. You could have upshift/downshift buttons on the stick, like the military HOTAS (Hands On Throttle And Stick), but for a true manual tranny, you'd have to have a second joystick, presumably for the other hand. What would be neat would be if you could swap them so both lefties and righties could drive the same car.
This will have to be drive by wire, at least for the steering, or at least speed sensitive, otherwise some idiot will knock the joystick sideways at speed and roll. You can't do that in a car by accident, altho maybe on the AutoBahn going really fast ...
"when you get home" .... and when you get to work, your boss demands to see the website, can't, knows you've already looked at it, and fires your ass.
I say again: You must live a very sheltered life to not have friends who would answer your cell phone for you while driving. You also must read a very sheltered version of my post to not comprehend that passengers might have good reason to use their own cell phones.
And once more, you must read a very sheltered version of my post to not understand that there is a trend away from dedicated GPS units to GPS programs on general purpose smart phones.
I don't know why you think your military focus is of any use to you here. My military background never put blinders on my brain. I'd say you ought to demand your money back for all the good it does you in basic reading skills.
GPS, AM, FM are on different frequencies. You must live a sheltered life and not have had the opportunity to see many antennas and compare them.
Many many passengers talk on cell phones to get directions. Some even answer the driver's cell phone. You must live a sheltered exist with few friends who would do that for you.
There is a general trend away from purpose built GPS navigators and toward GPS applications on smart phones. You must live a sheltered life with little contact with the technical world.
I wondered why General Motors dropped the Oldsmobile brand.