I never called anybody a savage. What I did was compare the conditions in the region before and after industrialization. In Manhatten, you gained plentiful food within the means of most inhabitants, modern healthcare, and an abundance of acceptable quality cheap goods. In this Nigerian village, you still see huts, the only way to get the most basic of innoculations is by the charity of the West, and the benefits of the factories and plants are shipped elsewhere. It seems a pretty raw deal in the Nigerian case.
No it is not, as long as the taxation is a fixed percentage.
A fixed percentage of what exactly? You bought a 2-ton car! You owe us 5 pounds 6 ounces!
Markets need to be regulated so that people with guns don't come and 'distort the market' by paying for their goods with a promise not to kill you.
The protection of private property is not regulation, it's what government is *supposed* to spend most of their time doing.
Your true argument about negative externalities (which would be better served standing alone) is the crux of the issue. How do you decide how to ensure that the true cost of a product is paid, and where does the money go? My personaly opinion is a flat tax per gallon of gas, based on the pollution produced per gallon (obviously you shouldn't be paying as much on a cleaner blend), and the money should be converted to cash and burned (if you spend it on something, you might change the tax later to support that something and distort the gasoline market)
Taxing based on arbitrary parameters is not "letting the free market work". Letting the free market work would be saying that an Escalade takes more gas for a normal usage pattern than a Cavalier, and thus has a higher operating cost. The added utility of the larger vehicle must be greater than the delta in fuel consumption, or people wouldn't be driving them.
At one point or another, the people who lived there were completely self sufficient. The question you want to ask is whether living poor in an industrialized nation is better than the life of an iron-age villager.
The problem isn't that the Gates Foundation is investing in energy companies, the problem is that the companies they're investing in aren't taking steps they could to prevent people getting hurt. The example from the article is a village where people are sick because of fumes from the flare-off towers at an adjacent petroleum facility owned by a company the Gates Foundation has invested in. If they were bottling and selling the natural gas (or even just sequestering it underground), the people in the village would have cleaner air.
The scary part is that he IS running pool water straight to the computers. Interesting point about the radiated heat from the pipes though; from the pictures it's all uninsulated copper on the indoor portion of the system. As for building a heat pump, his next plan is to immerse the radiator from his air conditioner in pool water, with an aim at increased efficiency. Probably would have been a better idea just to do that project, and A/C the computer room rather than build this plumbing nightmare.
He mentioned already that the tops of his waterblocks corroded, so he replaced them with acrylic. Pool water just isn't all that nice a solution in general; he'd be much better off with a heat exchanger setup, so he could run distilled water with the usual anti-algae chemicals in the cooling loop (I'm guessing that enough watercooling additve to mix a pool is both cost prohibitive and not very healthy to swim in).
What, exactly, is the benefit of the.Net VM? There is only one full implementation of.Net (the MS one), and it runs on a single platform (Windows on x86). You might as well build native x86 code linked against Windows libraries for all the portability you have. And even if you're going to bother implementing the VM across a bunch of platforms, why not implement a standard library across a bunch of platforms and link native executables against that?
I'm not arguing that revolution is not often in order. What I'm arguing is that if you want to actually improve things, don't have the socialists run the revolution. Batista's government was not a good one, but Castro was probably not what most people were looking for either.
The poor always kill off the successful in socialist revolutions. They then proceed to wonder why their infrastructure collapses and everyone stays poor (with the exception of the leaders of the revolution, who take to their stolen riches quite happily).
The experimental scramjets have generated their own power. What they haven't done is provided the zero to mach 3 acceleration stage; that's been done with a conventional airplane and a rocket. Even a commercialized craft using a scramjet will probably need a more conventional engine to get off the ground and up to supersonic speeds.
Thrust isn't the issue here, the problem is getting the combustor to work at any speed above mach 1. Various existing planes go supersonic with engines that slow down the supersonic airstream before using it for combustion. This works, to a point. Past a certain point, the pressure and heat build up and either melt or explode the engine. On the Blackbird, for example, bypasses are built into the engine to vent a good portion of the air from the compressor; slowing down a mach 3 airstream creates so much heat and pressure that it would melt the titanium engine. To get to the high mach numbers mentioned, the engine needs to maintain supersonic flow throughout. Getting fuel to mix into a supersonic flow and burn at a given spot is tricky, and it's the current focus of scramjet research. These folks are using a mach 2 wind tunnel because the main issue is that the air is going supersonic, not exactly how supersonic it is going, and generating a mach 10 airstream to test in would be pretty blasted expensive.
While these "WebOS" things do remove the need for keeping your personal machine configured to run the backend, the servers running them could just as easily be running more practical applications that are accessed remotely. Remote access to a centrally administered server is a neat (if somewhat old) idea, but the web is distinctly the wrong delivery mechanism. It's not even like these products are truely 'web based'; the overwhelming majority of the systems in the article use flash to get the job done. Why not substitute 'X server' for 'flash player' and be done with it?
There's a bunch of parametric tools out there fighting over that space, but for what it does there's nothing in the leagure of AutoCAD.
Note how AutoCAD is not lumped with the large number of parametric tools, but in its own niche. If you're going to be doing mechanical design, by all means, get a parametric tool. There are great tools available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. But for simple, low-end 2D stuff, AutoCAD might better suit your needs.
Well, it *is* an industry standard. There's a bunch of parametric tools out there fighting over that space, but for what it does there's nothing in the leagure of AutoCAD. So, when someone says "I can't get AutoCAD for Mac, therefore Mac does not fit my needs", they're probably right.
What is the point of a script that asks a compromised operating system about the files that compose it? One of the first things that a rootkit should do when it modifies the environment is ensure that whenever system files are queried, the response is the 'correct' one.
well, or do something what the water companies do: run fiber near someone, and let them pay if they want to hook on.
Does your water company seriously do that? In my town, they wanted to run water to the middle of town to promote denser development. I have a nice little private well and live along the way, and they not only forced me to pay the $5K hookup charge to this new (totally uneeded) line, but also to pay for the pipe running out in the middle of the road, and to take on a monthly fee even though I already have a source of water. On top of it, they copied their work elsewhere in the area and didn't take care in repaving over the trench, so now the road is crap to drive on as well (some genius decided right where your left tires go was a nice place to put a bumpy strip over the pipe). I suppose I could have it worse; rather than pay the subscription+zero volume for the capped off pipe in the basement, an uncle of mine out in Washington State is actually prohibited from using water other than city water. This includes rainwater cisterns, for when there's a storm and the crap public water stops.
The primary issue seems to be a set of Javascript menus at the top of the site. The divs they're on are supposed to be hidden until the mouse hovers on the title, and they're not. This is a fairly common problem to have with sites in Opera, but by no means is there no easy way to implement this feature (ATI's site, for example, works fine). Funky menus is really the only bug I run into on a regular basis with Opera (apart from it simply not working with Google Calendar). It's gotten a lot better over the years (it even passes Acid2 now). I think that the devs acknowledge that it's not that popular a browser to test on; it comes with a big package of site-specific tweak settings so that more popular sites at least work right out of the box.
They're losing money on smaller denominations, sure, but the gain from large bills more than offsets it. The problem with widespread melting of coinage is that it will cause a greater need to produce the negative-profit small denominations, eventually upsetting the balance.
I've lived in an all-electric home for 15 years. The electric heaters keep the room pretty much exactly at the temperature you set on the thermostat. In addition, they make almost no noise (silent in operation, a little bit of popping from the housings expanding when they turn on at night) compared to the constant rushing sound of steam or water radiators. The glass-top electric stove heats up in under a minute, and in a definate win over gas can be cleaned just by wiping it down like the rest of the counter. Oh, and it can manage it's own surface temperature too, since it can turn the element on and off. Best of all: no pilot light to have go out and leave you with a smoking crater to return home to.
Oh, and since my power comes from the local nuclear plant, I'm not sending clouds of greenhouse gases and radioactive carbon isotopes billowing into the atmosphere.
The depressing part is that the house and the nuke plant were put up in the 70's... not new tech we're looking at here (the stove is an early-90's replacement for the original unit)
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Force the other guy to use j? Pretty sure the concept of imaginary numbers predated the idea of electrical current, anyway.
I never called anybody a savage. What I did was compare the conditions in the region before and after industrialization. In Manhatten, you gained plentiful food within the means of most inhabitants, modern healthcare, and an abundance of acceptable quality cheap goods. In this Nigerian village, you still see huts, the only way to get the most basic of innoculations is by the charity of the West, and the benefits of the factories and plants are shipped elsewhere. It seems a pretty raw deal in the Nigerian case.
No it is not, as long as the taxation is a fixed percentage.
A fixed percentage of what exactly? You bought a 2-ton car! You owe us 5 pounds 6 ounces!
Markets need to be regulated so that people with guns don't come and 'distort the market' by paying for their goods with a promise not to kill you.
The protection of private property is not regulation, it's what government is *supposed* to spend most of their time doing.
Your true argument about negative externalities (which would be better served standing alone) is the crux of the issue. How do you decide how to ensure that the true cost of a product is paid, and where does the money go? My personaly opinion is a flat tax per gallon of gas, based on the pollution produced per gallon (obviously you shouldn't be paying as much on a cleaner blend), and the money should be converted to cash and burned (if you spend it on something, you might change the tax later to support that something and distort the gasoline market)
Taxing based on arbitrary parameters is not "letting the free market work". Letting the free market work would be saying that an Escalade takes more gas for a normal usage pattern than a Cavalier, and thus has a higher operating cost. The added utility of the larger vehicle must be greater than the delta in fuel consumption, or people wouldn't be driving them.
At one point or another, the people who lived there were completely self sufficient. The question you want to ask is whether living poor in an industrialized nation is better than the life of an iron-age villager.
The problem isn't that the Gates Foundation is investing in energy companies, the problem is that the companies they're investing in aren't taking steps they could to prevent people getting hurt. The example from the article is a village where people are sick because of fumes from the flare-off towers at an adjacent petroleum facility owned by a company the Gates Foundation has invested in. If they were bottling and selling the natural gas (or even just sequestering it underground), the people in the village would have cleaner air.
The scary part is that he IS running pool water straight to the computers. Interesting point about the radiated heat from the pipes though; from the pictures it's all uninsulated copper on the indoor portion of the system. As for building a heat pump, his next plan is to immerse the radiator from his air conditioner in pool water, with an aim at increased efficiency. Probably would have been a better idea just to do that project, and A/C the computer room rather than build this plumbing nightmare.
He mentioned already that the tops of his waterblocks corroded, so he replaced them with acrylic. Pool water just isn't all that nice a solution in general; he'd be much better off with a heat exchanger setup, so he could run distilled water with the usual anti-algae chemicals in the cooling loop (I'm guessing that enough watercooling additve to mix a pool is both cost prohibitive and not very healthy to swim in).
Actually, prefixing statements with "It has been said" will probably result in the article getting a "weasel words" cleanup.
Sodding lot of good that does if the vendor of the VM is only going to build for Windows.
What, exactly, is the benefit of the .Net VM? There is only one full implementation of .Net (the MS one), and it runs on a single platform (Windows on x86). You might as well build native x86 code linked against Windows libraries for all the portability you have. And even if you're going to bother implementing the VM across a bunch of platforms, why not implement a standard library across a bunch of platforms and link native executables against that?
I'm not arguing that revolution is not often in order. What I'm arguing is that if you want to actually improve things, don't have the socialists run the revolution. Batista's government was not a good one, but Castro was probably not what most people were looking for either.
The poor always kill off the successful in socialist revolutions. They then proceed to wonder why their infrastructure collapses and everyone stays poor (with the exception of the leaders of the revolution, who take to their stolen riches quite happily).
The experimental scramjets have generated their own power. What they haven't done is provided the zero to mach 3 acceleration stage; that's been done with a conventional airplane and a rocket. Even a commercialized craft using a scramjet will probably need a more conventional engine to get off the ground and up to supersonic speeds.
Thrust isn't the issue here, the problem is getting the combustor to work at any speed above mach 1. Various existing planes go supersonic with engines that slow down the supersonic airstream before using it for combustion. This works, to a point. Past a certain point, the pressure and heat build up and either melt or explode the engine. On the Blackbird, for example, bypasses are built into the engine to vent a good portion of the air from the compressor; slowing down a mach 3 airstream creates so much heat and pressure that it would melt the titanium engine. To get to the high mach numbers mentioned, the engine needs to maintain supersonic flow throughout. Getting fuel to mix into a supersonic flow and burn at a given spot is tricky, and it's the current focus of scramjet research. These folks are using a mach 2 wind tunnel because the main issue is that the air is going supersonic, not exactly how supersonic it is going, and generating a mach 10 airstream to test in would be pretty blasted expensive.
I dunno, how many of these "WebOSs" have Flash support? These aren't exactly web pages, or even flashy Javascript.
While these "WebOS" things do remove the need for keeping your personal machine configured to run the backend, the servers running them could just as easily be running more practical applications that are accessed remotely. Remote access to a centrally administered server is a neat (if somewhat old) idea, but the web is distinctly the wrong delivery mechanism. It's not even like these products are truely 'web based'; the overwhelming majority of the systems in the article use flash to get the job done. Why not substitute 'X server' for 'flash player' and be done with it?
This is my exact statement, typo and all:
There's a bunch of parametric tools out there fighting over that space, but for what it does there's nothing in the leagure of AutoCAD.
Note how AutoCAD is not lumped with the large number of parametric tools, but in its own niche. If you're going to be doing mechanical design, by all means, get a parametric tool. There are great tools available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. But for simple, low-end 2D stuff, AutoCAD might better suit your needs.
Well, it *is* an industry standard. There's a bunch of parametric tools out there fighting over that space, but for what it does there's nothing in the leagure of AutoCAD. So, when someone says "I can't get AutoCAD for Mac, therefore Mac does not fit my needs", they're probably right.
What is the point of a script that asks a compromised operating system about the files that compose it? One of the first things that a rootkit should do when it modifies the environment is ensure that whenever system files are queried, the response is the 'correct' one.
well, or do something what the water companies do: run fiber near someone, and let them pay if they want to hook on.
Does your water company seriously do that? In my town, they wanted to run water to the middle of town to promote denser development. I have a nice little private well and live along the way, and they not only forced me to pay the $5K hookup charge to this new (totally uneeded) line, but also to pay for the pipe running out in the middle of the road, and to take on a monthly fee even though I already have a source of water. On top of it, they copied their work elsewhere in the area and didn't take care in repaving over the trench, so now the road is crap to drive on as well (some genius decided right where your left tires go was a nice place to put a bumpy strip over the pipe). I suppose I could have it worse; rather than pay the subscription+zero volume for the capped off pipe in the basement, an uncle of mine out in Washington State is actually prohibited from using water other than city water. This includes rainwater cisterns, for when there's a storm and the crap public water stops.
The primary issue seems to be a set of Javascript menus at the top of the site. The divs they're on are supposed to be hidden until the mouse hovers on the title, and they're not. This is a fairly common problem to have with sites in Opera, but by no means is there no easy way to implement this feature (ATI's site, for example, works fine). Funky menus is really the only bug I run into on a regular basis with Opera (apart from it simply not working with Google Calendar). It's gotten a lot better over the years (it even passes Acid2 now). I think that the devs acknowledge that it's not that popular a browser to test on; it comes with a big package of site-specific tweak settings so that more popular sites at least work right out of the box.
--not a shill, just a satisfied user
They're losing money on smaller denominations, sure, but the gain from large bills more than offsets it. The problem with widespread melting of coinage is that it will cause a greater need to produce the negative-profit small denominations, eventually upsetting the balance.
The highways are not something you just dump something on. They're not a truck.
...
They're a series of tubes.
And the faster the things move down the tubes, the more things you can move through the tubes
In Soviet Russia, bad technology analogy explains cars!
I've lived in an all-electric home for 15 years. The electric heaters keep the room pretty much exactly at the temperature you set on the thermostat. In addition, they make almost no noise (silent in operation, a little bit of popping from the housings expanding when they turn on at night) compared to the constant rushing sound of steam or water radiators. The glass-top electric stove heats up in under a minute, and in a definate win over gas can be cleaned just by wiping it down like the rest of the counter. Oh, and it can manage it's own surface temperature too, since it can turn the element on and off. Best of all: no pilot light to have go out and leave you with a smoking crater to return home to.
... not new tech we're looking at here (the stove is an early-90's replacement for the original unit)
Oh, and since my power comes from the local nuclear plant, I'm not sending clouds of greenhouse gases and radioactive carbon isotopes billowing into the atmosphere.
The depressing part is that the house and the nuke plant were put up in the 70's