Not much I can do to further goad your skepticism, so I'll let you be relaxed. Having been in various places around the planet during earthquakes, most of them benign, I'll grant you your relaxation.
Or perhaps a lot of little, benign microquakes that lead to a Fukushima..... or worse. I can't believe that someone has the brass to insinuate that these are benign in any way. It's PR you're listening to, IMHO.
I do get the point: fracking enables earthquakes. The hubris is that they predict, small, trivial little, meaningless earthquakes without knowing about the rest of the system's capacity to be influenced by these events.
Those teensy-weensy little earthquakes are just helping things!
Yes: there's a correlation between fracking and earthquakes. Tell me you can vet any information relating to data suggesting that these iddy-biddy earthquakes are just, well, fine! The theory posited sounds like it's right out of a PR manual.
Small earthquakes are also symptoms of larger shifts. You do them no favor by inducing them, or allowing their tap water to ignite as natural gas gets pumped up through aquifers.
>- Less competition - less incentive to reduce prices or improve services
Mergers do that; not the best idea in a competitively shrinking market
>- Another round of layoffs, probably numbering in the thousands, possibly tens of thousands.
Sorry, that's one benefit of mergers for the companies. These days, nothing is forever.
>- More customers on less spectrum, with at least initially multiple network standards making spectrum sharing even harder.
That's until a "4g" network is rolled out. It also makes the merged body look less digestible by Sprint or Verizon.
>- More costly spectrum refarming
You must be a stockholder.
>- Either maintenance of four largely incompatible networks (2GSM, IS95/2000, UMTS, and LTE) or the migration of all IS95/2000 customers to 2GSM/UMTS/LTE, at considerable cost.
AT&T deals with this, and to a lesser extent, it will bite each carrier as well. 2GSM is on the way out; in seven years LTE will dominate, for better and worse.
>- Funds spent on the above that could be spent on rolling out 3G to uncovered areas, or rolling out LTE. Or improving their deteriorating customer service.
No, the funds were going to be spent anyway on LTE and expanding coverage. Customer service? You want service?
>Oh, and to add insult to injury, there'll be one less alternative existing T-Mobile customers can jump to in the event T-Mobile gets worse. Which it will.
We agree on this one, but Metro was having trouble with the same financing you cite as impediments to T-Mobile growth. You can't have it both ways.
>Also, from a phone geek's PoV, this is a merger between a company that's always been hostile towards customers having control over their own devices, and one that used to be liberal on the subject but has become more and more controlling lately. And directors of the former will be taking up prominent roles in the new company.
T-Mobile is no more awful than AT&T. I can get my T-Mobile phones unlocked in a few days. I can brute-force them if need-be. That a combined board might have strange people in it was out of your and my control anyway.
>This is a terrible, terrible, idea, and the people behind it are terrible, terrible, people.
I think the idea is neutral, and the people behind it are trying to survive. Can't blame them for that. How they are terrible otherwise is unknown to me, save they've squandered tonnage of goodwill. In the US, I otherwise have Verizon and you couldn't give me a free AT&T or Sprint phone and "service".
Tempest in a teapot. Not to dismiss your obvious hopes and dreams for T-Mobile, but these are carriers and they have no soul-- none of them.
I thought the same thing. At first, it smelled of astroturf, but then, there are a few customers that exactly know the score, but these are rare individuals. To have them readily poised to salt SlashDot takes preparation. The news broke yesterday, so that's perhaps sufficient time to sculpt something together into a comment. Oh, wait.....
I wonder if: the WH picks up a phone and calls somebody in the Chinese Embassy or straight to the right contact and says: yo, is this yours? Do you realize we interpret these things as an act of war?
Or does this online Spy Vs Spy game continue until something really evil happens?
It's not so tough to look inside a payload and scoop out an address and say: oh look! Chinese! But that's not necessarily where the original attackers are from: they are from anywhere, but the address was in a Chinese CIDR block somewhere, on a system that may or may not have been externally controlled from anywhere in the world.
Politically, however, the finger was pointed at China. Whether it was pointed correctly or not isn't really known. For now, however, if you believe the WH, then it's Chinese. But Chinese "patriots" or Chinese military or Chinese officials or who? No mention is made. Could be someone over-stoked on caffeine at an all-night CyberCafe for all we know.
Yes, Apple users can easily find alternatives. But Apple didn't fire anyone but their map contract with Google, did they? Who is their greatest rival in phones? Ummm, let's see. Microsoft? No. RIM? No. Palm/WebOS? Nope.
Ummm, let's see here. Could it be Google? With Android?
It's true that Cook advised people to use an alternative in his apology to users: Bing.
Personally, and IMHO, I don't want to have anything to do with Google, as their ToS suck, and they're as trustworthy as opposing counsel.
Re:More bias from women than from men, against wom
on
Sexism In Science
·
· Score: 1
How do you know I'm not your Daughter??
Re:More bias from women than from men, against wom
on
Sexism In Science
·
· Score: 1
This is about testosterone vs estrogen, and strident sexist attitudes based on fear and delusion. You're talking common sense and egalitarianism, which has no place here. Soon you'll be trying to let women control their own bodies.
And I'm sure that in their own minds, they needed to break dependence on Google. Will they start offering broad-based search next? How about real mail? Maybe something else that they believe that Google uses to encroach upon their user turf that Microsoft doesn't already have sewn-up?
Sometimes the best tactic is to let the creative-if-blustering types do what they do well: create and bluster, but in the back room. Serial entrepreneurs often do well because they have the ego needed to push thru ideas into really profitable businesses, with a few dead ones along the way. No one is perfect.
High collaboration and creativity is very productive, and productivity is helpful for rapid growth. Then move the blusterers out into new ideas, where they can regenerate. Some people are really good at cash-cow business, while others know how to start low and do rapid business building. Some will grow with a business, others need new challenges. It's not a talent easily given to aphorisms. And sometimes, it's not pretty.
To all of your questions, yes, I know the answers. I refute your crack costs as smoke-and-mirror numbers. The price of a gallon varies in ways that has nothing to do with transportation and C-store lease costs. It is designed specifically to maximize the highest sustainable price possible.
Random numbers? No, coldly calculated numbers designed to maximize shareholder return. If you believe differently, you're a fool.
The process has become, that ugly place where the court has stated that they must start the comment period sometime before March of 2013.
Socrates aside, one can still opt out, and as mentioned elsewhere, there seems to be no pleasure taken in the procedurally advised frisk.
I don't agree that it's a good practice for many reasons, a lot of them presuming guilt, invasion of privacy and dignity, and so forth. But the constitutionally prescribed process is underway, although the TSA has been given too much time to comply. An enormous event occurs if/when the xray machines are removed, and I'm hoping they don't replace it with something even more draconian or fraught with travel delays or indignities. That's the message that I hope isn't lost. Yes, I like airport security, but better ways must be found of dealing with the issues than what the TSA does now.
Some quick research reveals: Root cost for a gallon of gas today: Crude portion: $1.62 Refining costs per gallon: $0.42/gal Typical combined federal and state tax per gallon: $0.60 Total so far: $2.64 Price per gallon down the street: $3.86 Gross profit before transportation, etc: $1.22/gal
If one were to cut down the base price of the barrel (at 55gal/barrel) to say, a non-speculative $60/barrel, the price would drop proportionately. In my region, there is only random rhyme and reason for the 45c/gal price differential between neighborhoods. Do the C-Stores need revenue to support their operations? Sure. But they make hardly any money from fuel sales today anyway.
Rest assured that burning fossil fuels both in the form of gas and coal indeed do contribute very heavily (not completely) to global weather change. That's my truck with your statement. Yes, electric vehicles are a probably contributor to the success of a reverse of the problem. True that there are some projections that say that the inflection point for reversal is rapidly passing, and we're in for a very long term problem. The answer is unclear. But the fact that we have all these bodies and all these needs for transport, and all these horrible uses of fuels to accomplish this begs for reversal. On this we can agree. First: we need realistic birth control.
Because you left out important details about the divorce between Microsoft and IBM over OS/2 and what would become WindowsNT. Was Microsoft nefarious? Mostly. Was IBM trying to be proprietary? Yup. Was there animosity? Big time. Back then, it was a clash of the titans. Microsoft won; IBM won.
If I was trying to recover my costs and found my trade secrets stolen, I'd do something about that. Microsoft had already invented an application called Windows that ran on top of DOS. That became an application that ran on top of DOS called versions Windows 2.0-ME. WindowsNT was to be a native OS, not an application, whose code bases were to merge at Windows 2000. They kinda did that. It was much uglier than that, but I'm trying to forget the pain.
I'd like them to start first with the oil monopoly. If they recovered just half the profits, the price of a gallon of gas would drop significantly.
They're never going to nationalize ISPs, just as there's no utility regulatory reform on a national basis. Constitutionally, there's only so much the FCC can do. Then the states can twist it however they want, within their boundaries. Easement/right-of-way law, tariffs, it's all rife for abuse.
I can agree you'll save with a heatpump over standard filament lightbulbs, watt for watt.
In terms of efficiency, it's not measured in the way that you're doing it, but you're using more ephemeral terms, so yours is valid within the context you describe.
Is saying saving 75% more accurate? Yes. I'm an old school engineer that says that you get 100% efficiency as a max value in a measurable domain. Mine's the math freak engineer's valuation, yours explains it from the cost savings perspective.
Slashdot Mirror
You're eating out of their hand.
Not much I can do to further goad your skepticism, so I'll let you be relaxed. Having been in various places around the planet during earthquakes, most of them benign, I'll grant you your relaxation.
Or perhaps a lot of little, benign microquakes that lead to a Fukushima..... or worse. I can't believe that someone has the brass to insinuate that these are benign in any way. It's PR you're listening to, IMHO.
http://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/energy/blogs/study-links-flammable-tap-water-to-fracking to start.
Use any search engine; decide for yourself.
I do get the point: fracking enables earthquakes. The hubris is that they predict, small, trivial little, meaningless earthquakes without knowing about the rest of the system's capacity to be influenced by these events.
Those teensy-weensy little earthquakes are just helping things!
Yes: there's a correlation between fracking and earthquakes. Tell me you can vet any information relating to data suggesting that these iddy-biddy earthquakes are just, well, fine! The theory posited sounds like it's right out of a PR manual.
Small earthquakes are also symptoms of larger shifts. You do them no favor by inducing them, or allowing their tap water to ignite as natural gas gets pumped up through aquifers.
Then let me reply to these:
>- Less competition - less incentive to reduce prices or improve services
Mergers do that; not the best idea in a competitively shrinking market
>- Another round of layoffs, probably numbering in the thousands, possibly tens of thousands.
Sorry, that's one benefit of mergers for the companies. These days, nothing is forever.
>- More customers on less spectrum, with at least initially multiple network standards making spectrum sharing even harder.
That's until a "4g" network is rolled out. It also makes the merged body look less digestible by Sprint or Verizon.
>- More costly spectrum refarming
You must be a stockholder.
>- Either maintenance of four largely incompatible networks (2GSM, IS95/2000, UMTS, and LTE) or the migration of all IS95/2000 customers to 2GSM/UMTS/LTE, at considerable cost.
AT&T deals with this, and to a lesser extent, it will bite each carrier as well. 2GSM is on the way out; in seven years LTE will dominate, for better and worse.
>- Funds spent on the above that could be spent on rolling out 3G to uncovered areas, or rolling out LTE. Or improving their deteriorating customer service.
No, the funds were going to be spent anyway on LTE and expanding coverage. Customer service? You want service?
>Oh, and to add insult to injury, there'll be one less alternative existing T-Mobile customers can jump to in the event T-Mobile gets worse. Which it will.
We agree on this one, but Metro was having trouble with the same financing you cite as impediments to T-Mobile growth. You can't have it both ways.
>Also, from a phone geek's PoV, this is a merger between a company that's always been hostile towards customers having control over their own devices, and one that used to be liberal on the subject but has become more and more controlling lately. And directors of the former will be taking up prominent roles in the new company.
T-Mobile is no more awful than AT&T. I can get my T-Mobile phones unlocked in a few days. I can brute-force them if need-be. That a combined board might have strange people in it was out of your and my control anyway.
>This is a terrible, terrible, idea, and the people behind it are terrible, terrible, people.
I think the idea is neutral, and the people behind it are trying to survive. Can't blame them for that. How they are terrible otherwise is unknown to me, save they've squandered tonnage of goodwill. In the US, I otherwise have Verizon and you couldn't give me a free AT&T or Sprint phone and "service".
Tempest in a teapot. Not to dismiss your obvious hopes and dreams for T-Mobile, but these are carriers and they have no soul-- none of them.
I thought the same thing. At first, it smelled of astroturf, but then, there are a few customers that exactly know the score, but these are rare individuals. To have them readily poised to salt SlashDot takes preparation. The news broke yesterday, so that's perhaps sufficient time to sculpt something together into a comment. Oh, wait.....
I wonder if: the WH picks up a phone and calls somebody in the Chinese Embassy or straight to the right contact and says: yo, is this yours? Do you realize we interpret these things as an act of war?
Or does this online Spy Vs Spy game continue until something really evil happens?
It's not so tough to look inside a payload and scoop out an address and say: oh look! Chinese! But that's not necessarily where the original attackers are from: they are from anywhere, but the address was in a Chinese CIDR block somewhere, on a system that may or may not have been externally controlled from anywhere in the world.
Politically, however, the finger was pointed at China. Whether it was pointed correctly or not isn't really known. For now, however, if you believe the WH, then it's Chinese. But Chinese "patriots" or Chinese military or Chinese officials or who? No mention is made. Could be someone over-stoked on caffeine at an all-night CyberCafe for all we know.
Yes, Apple users can easily find alternatives. But Apple didn't fire anyone but their map contract with Google, did they? Who is their greatest rival in phones? Ummm, let's see. Microsoft? No. RIM? No. Palm/WebOS? Nope.
Ummm, let's see here. Could it be Google? With Android?
It's true that Cook advised people to use an alternative in his apology to users: Bing.
Personally, and IMHO, I don't want to have anything to do with Google, as their ToS suck, and they're as trustworthy as opposing counsel.
How do you know I'm not your Daughter??
This is about testosterone vs estrogen, and strident sexist attitudes based on fear and delusion. You're talking common sense and egalitarianism, which has no place here. Soon you'll be trying to let women control their own bodies.
And I'm sure that in their own minds, they needed to break dependence on Google. Will they start offering broad-based search next? How about real mail? Maybe something else that they believe that Google uses to encroach upon their user turf that Microsoft doesn't already have sewn-up?
Sometimes the best tactic is to let the creative-if-blustering types do what they do well: create and bluster, but in the back room. Serial entrepreneurs often do well because they have the ego needed to push thru ideas into really profitable businesses, with a few dead ones along the way. No one is perfect.
High collaboration and creativity is very productive, and productivity is helpful for rapid growth. Then move the blusterers out into new ideas, where they can regenerate. Some people are really good at cash-cow business, while others know how to start low and do rapid business building. Some will grow with a business, others need new challenges. It's not a talent easily given to aphorisms. And sometimes, it's not pretty.
To all of your questions, yes, I know the answers. I refute your crack costs as smoke-and-mirror numbers. The price of a gallon varies in ways that has nothing to do with transportation and C-store lease costs. It is designed specifically to maximize the highest sustainable price possible.
Random numbers? No, coldly calculated numbers designed to maximize shareholder return. If you believe differently, you're a fool.
Clickbait, in its more raw form. Worse, people voted it up to get here in the first place.
Where's that stated? As a frequent flier, it's never happened to me. No fun, yes. embarrassing? No. Necessary to opt-out? I believe so.
The process has become, that ugly place where the court has stated that they must start the comment period sometime before March of 2013.
Socrates aside, one can still opt out, and as mentioned elsewhere, there seems to be no pleasure taken in the procedurally advised frisk.
I don't agree that it's a good practice for many reasons, a lot of them presuming guilt, invasion of privacy and dignity, and so forth. But the constitutionally prescribed process is underway, although the TSA has been given too much time to comply. An enormous event occurs if/when the xray machines are removed, and I'm hoping they don't replace it with something even more draconian or fraught with travel delays or indignities. That's the message that I hope isn't lost. Yes, I like airport security, but better ways must be found of dealing with the issues than what the TSA does now.
Some quick research reveals:
Root cost for a gallon of gas today:
Crude portion: $1.62
Refining costs per gallon: $0.42/gal
Typical combined federal and state tax per gallon: $0.60
Total so far: $2.64
Price per gallon down the street: $3.86
Gross profit before transportation, etc: $1.22/gal
If one were to cut down the base price of the barrel (at 55gal/barrel) to say, a non-speculative $60/barrel, the price would drop proportionately. In my region, there is only random rhyme and reason for the 45c/gal price differential between neighborhoods. Do the C-Stores need revenue to support their operations? Sure. But they make hardly any money from fuel sales today anyway.
Rest assured that burning fossil fuels both in the form of gas and coal indeed do contribute very heavily (not completely) to global weather change. That's my truck with your statement. Yes, electric vehicles are a probably contributor to the success of a reverse of the problem. True that there are some projections that say that the inflection point for reversal is rapidly passing, and we're in for a very long term problem. The answer is unclear. But the fact that we have all these bodies and all these needs for transport, and all these horrible uses of fuels to accomplish this begs for reversal. On this we can agree. First: we need realistic birth control.
Because you left out important details about the divorce between Microsoft and IBM over OS/2 and what would become WindowsNT. Was Microsoft nefarious? Mostly. Was IBM trying to be proprietary? Yup. Was there animosity? Big time. Back then, it was a clash of the titans. Microsoft won; IBM won.
If I was trying to recover my costs and found my trade secrets stolen, I'd do something about that. Microsoft had already invented an application called Windows that ran on top of DOS. That became an application that ran on top of DOS called versions Windows 2.0-ME. WindowsNT was to be a native OS, not an application, whose code bases were to merge at Windows 2000. They kinda did that. It was much uglier than that, but I'm trying to forget the pain.
I'd like them to start first with the oil monopoly. If they recovered just half the profits, the price of a gallon of gas would drop significantly.
They're never going to nationalize ISPs, just as there's no utility regulatory reform on a national basis. Constitutionally, there's only so much the FCC can do. Then the states can twist it however they want, within their boundaries. Easement/right-of-way law, tariffs, it's all rife for abuse.
It's a more subtle point.
I can agree you'll save with a heatpump over standard filament lightbulbs, watt for watt.
In terms of efficiency, it's not measured in the way that you're doing it, but you're using more ephemeral terms, so yours is valid within the context you describe.
Is saying saving 75% more accurate? Yes. I'm an old school engineer that says that you get 100% efficiency as a max value in a measurable domain. Mine's the math freak engineer's valuation, yours explains it from the cost savings perspective.
Both.Are.True.
And efficiencies were stated in incomparable measurements.
We can agree that heat pumps are vastly more efficient per watt used. But the efficiency numbers aren't comparable. This is my argument.
Heat pumps give additive overall system efficiency, but not in the same way light bulbs do.