I think we need to thank GWB for these efforts for carbon emission. He allowed our Gas prices to go over $4.00 a gallon
Agreed - I was astonished that people voted for his re-election as prices were spiraling upwards. Though, I don't think there was a single green thought at the highest levels that year, as I recall, the oil companies posted all time record high profits that year.
In 1911, you couldn't drive across the US in a petrol powered vehicle and expect to fill up in 5 minutes wherever you pleased, either. So, should we have focused on grass eating cars then?
"sporty" family cars will leave all but the hottest 1970s era sports or muscle cars in the dust, especially when handling is considered.
Granted on handling, but I don't believe you ever experienced big block performance first hand. Virtually anything under 3 tons weight with a 454cid engine (and un-restrictive breathing) will completely smoke a "sporty" 3 liter sedan, even today. Of course, not many people are willing to put up with 7mpg to go with the acceleration and top speed that those kinds of displacement bring (and they get far less MPG when opening the throttle.)
In my book, if it doesn't have a big block, it's a weak muscle car.
Is GameStop any worse than used book stores? How about used clothing stores? If developers want to make their software licenses one user non-transferable, they need to get very up-front about it, quiet, subtle after the sale policy changes that have that effect are a good way to enrage your potential future customers.
I, and my children, can put our PS3 away and forget about it, we did it for a year just recently, and if it gets too annoying, we'll do it again.
Well, I suppose when I forked out ~$50 for something titled "Prologue" I should have expected support to be cut after a couple of years, but since my console YLOD'ed I let it rest for a year before buying a $250 replacement (that, itself, had a Blu-Ray drive failure after one month) So, returning to play the game after a year off, I find that "online play will be discontinued in 3 weeks, please consider purchasing our new full version of the game" - oh, what's that, the full version requires a functioning BD? F you very much mister software developer, there are more enjoyable things to do with $300 than buy a game that, itself, wants you to buy a $600 control set if you want to be "truly competitive."
I have, thank you. The PSN won't take my CC anymore and I'm in no mood to make another call to customer support to get it unlocked for the privilege of continued abuse.
since the environuts have lost the polar bear debate
In whose mind? Compare global warming awareness today to 10 years ago - there are significant policies in place and continued effort at carbon emission reductions....
I bought a QNAP TS-109 about 5 years ago, it worked great as a central storage for everything.... until... its power supply went flaky and couldn't handle the drive anymore. RAID doesn't do you much good when the drive controller goes down. Worse, the TS-109 kept files in some kind of format that was unreadable by Ubuntu, OS-X, Windows, and my local Linux Guru's hobby farm of machines - could see the partitioning, but the data partition was unreadable. Months later, after grieving the loss of 1TB of files, I reformatted the drive and it works fine, but the TS-109 can now only manage to power internal laptop drives, the bigger desktop drives are too much for it.
Now I have a pair of 2TB external USB drives, one is live and powered 24-7, the other is powered up periodically to back up the live one. These drives can plug into virtually any host (including a TS-109) and be read, the live drive is currently hooked up to an ASUS eee nettop running XP, more than sufficient to serve media files, very cool and quiet, and files written by vanilla XP are probably going to be supported for some time to come.
There are better things to do than what I'm doing, mirroring to the cloud comes to mind, when a hurricane approaches, I copy the "core" stuff out to storage on our ISP.
ICD-9 billing specialists are already "highly trained, skilled information workers," this just means that ICD-10 will create a higher bar to entry and a more elite and well paid position converting M.D. scribble to auditable, reimbursable coding.
Notice the complete lack of connection to reality in all of the above...
They undoubtedly are updating the designs, if nothing else just to make them manufacturable by today's infrastructure - whether or not the updates are net improvements remains to be seen...
My bank hasn't been paying inflation matching interest for the past 5 to 10 years, I think it was 5 years ago that "insured savings" rates dropped essentially to zero. You are thinking of the Regan years when you could lock in a 5 year CD at more than 8% annual interest, while inflation was running well below 4%.
Maybe, but that's not what they're saying. They're saying they get affected by wifi and cell towers and nothing else. That's like the showerhead vs. rain example. It's stupidly insane.
Take a large enough population sample, and you'll find people who have a problem from showerheads that have no problem with naturally occuring rain... actually, that particular example is pretty easy to explain, showerheads spew "safe" water from the treatment plant containing fairly large quantities of chlorine / ammonia (gasp!) flouride, and God knows what-all.
Cell towers vs natural EM is also pretty distinct, cell towers emit in a focused band with much stronger patterning - more likely to find some weird resonance than the white noise coming from solar flares... not saying that I think it's common or that we're all suffering from it, but I wouldn't have to adjust my world view much if it was discovered that a certain (very very small) subset of the population really was affected.
In 2003, I briefly considered working for a TMS company, but wrote them off as crackpots - they came to my attention just after I had investigated possible employment with a cryonics company, so my BS meter was a little jumpy at the time... TMS is real, it's not just a strong magnetic field, it's a strongly dynamic magnetic field that causes real temporary depolarization of neurons within an inch or so of the transducer. Nobody is going to slip one of these into your pillow without you noticing - but it does do pretty freaky stuff similar to what they were doing with cryo-cooling of specific brain regions during surgery for research back in the 1970s, and it's mostly non-invasive and reversible, they think, at least until you induce a seizure.
Is it because we are less ignorant and more informed of what were otherwise "hidden" issues, or have we physically evolved into people weaker constitutions?
I don't think our physical constitutions are weaker, but the environment is more challenging in some places than it was 30 years ago, and less in others, like steel mill towns for example.
I think the primary effect is one of broader knowledge. 30 years ago, if you had some 1 in 100,000 disease, doctors would scratch their heads and tell you to take two aspirin and call them in the morning. If it wasn't better, they'd likely shrug, refer you to their favorite associate specialist, and he'd diagnose you with whatever he could treat and see if that helped. Now, you can join a support group with thousands of people suffering from the same condition and compare notes - patterns that went unrecognized are discovered and valid courses of treatment are established - my personal recent favorite is wheat-gluten intolerance, which went from complete crack-pottery association about 7 years ago to mostly accepted as fact today (in some cases, at least.)
There will always be psycho-somatic conditions (and, for what it's worth, the placebo effect is real in its own right), hopefully with enough knowledge sharing, most of the people who think they are suffering from an imagined condition can be helped to identify what's really going on and get more effective relief.
I don't know how much you make, but for a very large portion of the population, they already spend well more than 10% of their annual income on transportation.
I make a good salary, but mostly my % cost of transportation is low because I drive an old car and maintain it, no payments, insurance costs more than maintenance. Having kept this car for 21 years, I don't factor in cost of replacement...
Life is short, and the modern "ideal" of working 8 hours + 1 for lunch + 1 to 2 more spent in a daily commute, doesn't leave nearly enough "me" time in the equation, by my reckoning, anyway.
If there was a straight "autodrive" replacement vehicle available today (same cost to own and operate, same flexibility of scheduling, etc. as my current car), I would take the autodrive option in a second. At the point that it starts costing more than 10% of my annual income to own and operate, I think it's a clear pass. At least zipping around populated areas in a multi-ton death machine gives a twice daily sense of power and control, something that is clearly lacking in activities like waiting at a bus stop, in the rain.
I've gotten.really good at not accelerating when i see a red and reaching the light just as it turns green. It's fun to zip past everybody who previously raced to the red.
I did this to a Ferrari once (I was in a 10 year old Honda Civic), blew by him at 55+ when he was just getting rolling. Seconds later, he blew by me at 55+55.... good fun.
Re: steering lockup, yes, true, though it shouldn't take long for anyone to learn that, and if you're a hard-core hyper-miler, you can install a kill-button on the dash that leaves the steering unlocked (though power steering will still loose boost...) Even with an easy-kill button (or, even some of the automatic systems that have been deployed by various manufacturers), I still maintain that the drops of fuel saved (idle vs off) are not worth the distraction. If it was a big (measurable?) savings, the major manufacturers would have implemented it across the board to help them meet CAFE standards 20 years ago.
Coasting when possible and using the brakes as little as possible do help, as does capping speed at 55mph (or even 45mph) before air resistance becomes significant.
I too speak from a position of Minecraft ignorance (I 'think' I logged on once, long ago, when the first Minecraft story piqued my interest, that first hand experience left me mostly unpiqueable for Minecraft since then).
Anyway, I -believe- the fuss is mostly because Minecraft Classic is a "free" to play game in which creations are "free" for others to copy - so it's kind of a "best of" meld of Free Software, Legos, and Second Life.
Personally, it looks like a ginormous time-sink to me.
------
It's a scary day when ginormous doesn't trigger the spell-checker.
when you're perfectly synchronized with the traffic lights at 30 mph, you are also at 60 and 120:)
Not really, but I do know for a fact (having learned while working in the FDOT district 6 planning office, and personally experienced first hand many times) that the lights on US1 in South Dade county (Miami) are synchronized well above the speed limit in the direction of rush hour traffic flow. Speed limit is mostly 45, but if you can manage to keep moving at an average speed of 55-60 (sometimes 65), you can get green lights all the way from Homestead into Downtown. Having lived there for nearly 20 years, I never saw speed enforcement, or traffic rule enforcement of any kind, for that matter, on that part of US1 during rush hours.
Disclaimer: I moved away from Miami in 2003 - what goes on there now may be different, but probably not.
They had stripe following demo vehicles in the 1950s. Look far enough into the future, and the "cheapest" cars will be the ones that drive themselves - drivers will pay a premium for manual control. Actually, I think right now we are all paying the premium for manual control, already the "system" (counting roads, signals, vehicles, garages, etc.) would be cheaper overall if every vehicle were automatically driven. Today's tech can handle 100% automated vehicle traffic, what it can't handle is mixing automatic with the manual drivers and holding the manufacturers automatic drivers to a higher standard of liability than the manual drivers.
Not saying I am in favor of an automatic vehicle system, just because something is cheaper or more efficient does not mean it is "better."
The city of Gainesville, Florida, has installed a dozen or so roundabouts... drivers here have no clue what to do with them, 50% approach them according to roundabout rules, the other 50% approach them as if they are some kind of four way stop - you would think that this would improve over time, but over the last 5 years, it has not.
The installation pattern here seems to have nothing to do with improvement of traffic flow, here it seems more geared toward creating a speed reducing obstacle in an otherwise perfectly straight road with a posted speed of 30 or 35mph.
(with the shift stick in neutral, so the car doesn't brake on the engine)
On a modern car this is bad for fuel consumption - in neutral, the engine is burning fuel to idle, but under engine-braking conditions the ECU cuts the fuel entirely. So if you used the brakes (wasting kinetic energy as heat) and then put the car in neutral to avoid slowing down further, you wasted a load of fuel. Better to just let the engine brake the whole way.
True, but missing a sense of scale. The "load of fuel" used to idle an engine (at high vacuum) during the few seconds that you could engine brake before coming to a stop is rather small compared to the "load of fuel" that would be required to bring yourself back up to speed.
If you want to be a hyper-miler, then kill the engine altogether anytime you are not using it for acceleration or cruise - I wouldn't advise this for most people, it's more important to focus on the traffic situation around you than conserving a half a gram of gasoline - if you add up all those tiny drops of fuel saved over 30 years, they probably won't pay for a single collision repair.
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I have a crime predictor that boasts better than 99.9% accuracy. It always returns "not a criminal."
I agree with you, sadly, though, the USA retains >1% of population in prisons at any given time.
I think we need to thank GWB for these efforts for carbon emission. He allowed our Gas prices to go over $4.00 a gallon
Agreed - I was astonished that people voted for his re-election as prices were spiraling upwards. Though, I don't think there was a single green thought at the highest levels that year, as I recall, the oil companies posted all time record high profits that year.
In 1911, you couldn't drive across the US in a petrol powered vehicle and expect to fill up in 5 minutes wherever you pleased, either. So, should we have focused on grass eating cars then?
"sporty" family cars will leave all but the hottest 1970s era sports or muscle cars in the dust, especially when handling is considered.
Granted on handling, but I don't believe you ever experienced big block performance first hand. Virtually anything under 3 tons weight with a 454cid engine (and un-restrictive breathing) will completely smoke a "sporty" 3 liter sedan, even today. Of course, not many people are willing to put up with 7mpg to go with the acceleration and top speed that those kinds of displacement bring (and they get far less MPG when opening the throttle.)
In my book, if it doesn't have a big block, it's a weak muscle car.
Is GameStop any worse than used book stores? How about used clothing stores? If developers want to make their software licenses one user non-transferable, they need to get very up-front about it, quiet, subtle after the sale policy changes that have that effect are a good way to enrage your potential future customers.
I, and my children, can put our PS3 away and forget about it, we did it for a year just recently, and if it gets too annoying, we'll do it again.
Well, I suppose when I forked out ~$50 for something titled "Prologue" I should have expected support to be cut after a couple of years, but since my console YLOD'ed I let it rest for a year before buying a $250 replacement (that, itself, had a Blu-Ray drive failure after one month) So, returning to play the game after a year off, I find that "online play will be discontinued in 3 weeks, please consider purchasing our new full version of the game" - oh, what's that, the full version requires a functioning BD? F you very much mister software developer, there are more enjoyable things to do with $300 than buy a game that, itself, wants you to buy a $600 control set if you want to be "truly competitive."
I have, thank you. The PSN won't take my CC anymore and I'm in no mood to make another call to customer support to get it unlocked for the privilege of continued abuse.
since the environuts have lost the polar bear debate
In whose mind? Compare global warming awareness today to 10 years ago - there are significant policies in place and continued effort at carbon emission reductions....
Thus, war won't happen without a lot of suffering,
There, fixed that for ya, and when has war ever been without suffering?
I bought a QNAP TS-109 about 5 years ago, it worked great as a central storage for everything.... until... its power supply went flaky and couldn't handle the drive anymore. RAID doesn't do you much good when the drive controller goes down. Worse, the TS-109 kept files in some kind of format that was unreadable by Ubuntu, OS-X, Windows, and my local Linux Guru's hobby farm of machines - could see the partitioning, but the data partition was unreadable. Months later, after grieving the loss of 1TB of files, I reformatted the drive and it works fine, but the TS-109 can now only manage to power internal laptop drives, the bigger desktop drives are too much for it.
Now I have a pair of 2TB external USB drives, one is live and powered 24-7, the other is powered up periodically to back up the live one. These drives can plug into virtually any host (including a TS-109) and be read, the live drive is currently hooked up to an ASUS eee nettop running XP, more than sufficient to serve media files, very cool and quiet, and files written by vanilla XP are probably going to be supported for some time to come.
There are better things to do than what I'm doing, mirroring to the cloud comes to mind, when a hurricane approaches, I copy the "core" stuff out to storage on our ISP.
ICD-9 billing specialists are already "highly trained, skilled information workers," this just means that ICD-10 will create a higher bar to entry and a more elite and well paid position converting M.D. scribble to auditable, reimbursable coding.
Notice the complete lack of connection to reality in all of the above...
They undoubtedly are updating the designs, if nothing else just to make them manufacturable by today's infrastructure - whether or not the updates are net improvements remains to be seen...
As I recall, when Bush proposed "back to the Moon", they were already talking about a return to Apollo type capsules.
My bank hasn't been paying inflation matching interest for the past 5 to 10 years, I think it was 5 years ago that "insured savings" rates dropped essentially to zero. You are thinking of the Regan years when you could lock in a 5 year CD at more than 8% annual interest, while inflation was running well below 4%.
Maybe, but that's not what they're saying. They're saying they get affected by wifi and cell towers and nothing else. That's like the showerhead vs. rain example. It's stupidly insane.
Take a large enough population sample, and you'll find people who have a problem from showerheads that have no problem with naturally occuring rain... actually, that particular example is pretty easy to explain, showerheads spew "safe" water from the treatment plant containing fairly large quantities of chlorine / ammonia (gasp!) flouride, and God knows what-all.
Cell towers vs natural EM is also pretty distinct, cell towers emit in a focused band with much stronger patterning - more likely to find some weird resonance than the white noise coming from solar flares... not saying that I think it's common or that we're all suffering from it, but I wouldn't have to adjust my world view much if it was discovered that a certain (very very small) subset of the population really was affected.
In 2003, I briefly considered working for a TMS company, but wrote them off as crackpots - they came to my attention just after I had investigated possible employment with a cryonics company, so my BS meter was a little jumpy at the time... TMS is real, it's not just a strong magnetic field, it's a strongly dynamic magnetic field that causes real temporary depolarization of neurons within an inch or so of the transducer. Nobody is going to slip one of these into your pillow without you noticing - but it does do pretty freaky stuff similar to what they were doing with cryo-cooling of specific brain regions during surgery for research back in the 1970s, and it's mostly non-invasive and reversible, they think, at least until you induce a seizure.
Is it because we are less ignorant and more informed of what were otherwise "hidden" issues, or have we physically evolved into people weaker constitutions?
I don't think our physical constitutions are weaker, but the environment is more challenging in some places than it was 30 years ago, and less in others, like steel mill towns for example.
I think the primary effect is one of broader knowledge. 30 years ago, if you had some 1 in 100,000 disease, doctors would scratch their heads and tell you to take two aspirin and call them in the morning. If it wasn't better, they'd likely shrug, refer you to their favorite associate specialist, and he'd diagnose you with whatever he could treat and see if that helped. Now, you can join a support group with thousands of people suffering from the same condition and compare notes - patterns that went unrecognized are discovered and valid courses of treatment are established - my personal recent favorite is wheat-gluten intolerance, which went from complete crack-pottery association about 7 years ago to mostly accepted as fact today (in some cases, at least.)
There will always be psycho-somatic conditions (and, for what it's worth, the placebo effect is real in its own right), hopefully with enough knowledge sharing, most of the people who think they are suffering from an imagined condition can be helped to identify what's really going on and get more effective relief.
I don't know how much you make, but for a very large portion of the population, they already spend well more than 10% of their annual income on transportation.
I make a good salary, but mostly my % cost of transportation is low because I drive an old car and maintain it, no payments, insurance costs more than maintenance. Having kept this car for 21 years, I don't factor in cost of replacement...
Life is short, and the modern "ideal" of working 8 hours + 1 for lunch + 1 to 2 more spent in a daily commute, doesn't leave nearly enough "me" time in the equation, by my reckoning, anyway.
If there was a straight "autodrive" replacement vehicle available today (same cost to own and operate, same flexibility of scheduling, etc. as my current car), I would take the autodrive option in a second. At the point that it starts costing more than 10% of my annual income to own and operate, I think it's a clear pass. At least zipping around populated areas in a multi-ton death machine gives a twice daily sense of power and control, something that is clearly lacking in activities like waiting at a bus stop, in the rain.
I've gotten.really good at not accelerating when i see a red and reaching the light just as it turns green. It's fun to zip past everybody who previously raced to the red.
I did this to a Ferrari once (I was in a 10 year old Honda Civic), blew by him at 55+ when he was just getting rolling. Seconds later, he blew by me at 55+55.... good fun.
Re: steering lockup, yes, true, though it shouldn't take long for anyone to learn that, and if you're a hard-core hyper-miler, you can install a kill-button on the dash that leaves the steering unlocked (though power steering will still loose boost...) Even with an easy-kill button (or, even some of the automatic systems that have been deployed by various manufacturers), I still maintain that the drops of fuel saved (idle vs off) are not worth the distraction. If it was a big (measurable?) savings, the major manufacturers would have implemented it across the board to help them meet CAFE standards 20 years ago.
Coasting when possible and using the brakes as little as possible do help, as does capping speed at 55mph (or even 45mph) before air resistance becomes significant.
I too speak from a position of Minecraft ignorance (I 'think' I logged on once, long ago, when the first Minecraft story piqued my interest, that first hand experience left me mostly unpiqueable for Minecraft since then).
Anyway, I -believe- the fuss is mostly because Minecraft Classic is a "free" to play game in which creations are "free" for others to copy - so it's kind of a "best of" meld of Free Software, Legos, and Second Life.
Personally, it looks like a ginormous time-sink to me.
------
It's a scary day when ginormous doesn't trigger the spell-checker.
when you're perfectly synchronized with the traffic lights at 30 mph, you are also at 60 and 120 :)
Not really, but I do know for a fact (having learned while working in the FDOT district 6 planning office, and personally experienced first hand many times) that the lights on US1 in South Dade county (Miami) are synchronized well above the speed limit in the direction of rush hour traffic flow. Speed limit is mostly 45, but if you can manage to keep moving at an average speed of 55-60 (sometimes 65), you can get green lights all the way from Homestead into Downtown. Having lived there for nearly 20 years, I never saw speed enforcement, or traffic rule enforcement of any kind, for that matter, on that part of US1 during rush hours.
Disclaimer: I moved away from Miami in 2003 - what goes on there now may be different, but probably not.
They had stripe following demo vehicles in the 1950s. Look far enough into the future, and the "cheapest" cars will be the ones that drive themselves - drivers will pay a premium for manual control. Actually, I think right now we are all paying the premium for manual control, already the "system" (counting roads, signals, vehicles, garages, etc.) would be cheaper overall if every vehicle were automatically driven. Today's tech can handle 100% automated vehicle traffic, what it can't handle is mixing automatic with the manual drivers and holding the manufacturers automatic drivers to a higher standard of liability than the manual drivers.
Not saying I am in favor of an automatic vehicle system, just because something is cheaper or more efficient does not mean it is "better."
The city of Gainesville, Florida, has installed a dozen or so roundabouts... drivers here have no clue what to do with them, 50% approach them according to roundabout rules, the other 50% approach them as if they are some kind of four way stop - you would think that this would improve over time, but over the last 5 years, it has not.
The installation pattern here seems to have nothing to do with improvement of traffic flow, here it seems more geared toward creating a speed reducing obstacle in an otherwise perfectly straight road with a posted speed of 30 or 35mph.
(with the shift stick in neutral, so the car doesn't brake on the engine)
On a modern car this is bad for fuel consumption - in neutral, the engine is burning fuel to idle, but under engine-braking conditions the ECU cuts the fuel entirely. So if you used the brakes (wasting kinetic energy as heat) and then put the car in neutral to avoid slowing down further, you wasted a load of fuel. Better to just let the engine brake the whole way.
True, but missing a sense of scale. The "load of fuel" used to idle an engine (at high vacuum) during the few seconds that you could engine brake before coming to a stop is rather small compared to the "load of fuel" that would be required to bring yourself back up to speed.
If you want to be a hyper-miler, then kill the engine altogether anytime you are not using it for acceleration or cruise - I wouldn't advise this for most people, it's more important to focus on the traffic situation around you than conserving a half a gram of gasoline - if you add up all those tiny drops of fuel saved over 30 years, they probably won't pay for a single collision repair.