Actually he's pretty indicative of the average Porsche driver.
No, I'd say the average (male) Porsche driver knows the 6 is flat, but the average cretin spouting about Porsches as if they owned one tend to only remember 20% of the article they read about them.
At $2.1m they don't call it smuggling, they call it negotiating - do you want me to buy this car in WI? well, if so, I only want to pay $10K in taxes, otherwise I'll buy it in Oregon....
Hawking himself has addressed this: It takes him so much time just to get dressed, or go to the bathroom, that this overcomes any time not "wasted" on sports.
Totally agree on the time factor, and he must have some unique and complex skill sets developed to get around his disabilities, but I still feel that his "black hole processing center" had extra room to expand as compared to someone who knows how to drive the streets of London, navigate complex social situations "in real time", and do so many of the highly complex things that "normal" people take for granted.
Clearly you need to impair yourself physically to allow your brain to develop. See, blindness develops your ears, deafnes develops your eyes, and physical disability develops your brain.
Training to develop under-used muscles/skills is what I hope you meant. Disability by itself doesn't provide any such strengths.
No, but, the human condition seems to provide us with incredible potential in a diverse set of skills, but only enough capacity to develop a subset of that potential - if you become handicapped in one area, and you don't get despondent / depressed / suicidal, your drive to excel gets channeled into other areas, developing them beyond normal levels, and the fact that you are handicapped seems to "free up additional capacity" for the non-handicapped skills.
Not just good hearing for the blind, also savant skills, etc. TMI experiments seem to promise the ability to induce temporary handicaps that temporarily enable some savant skills - very very sketchy at present, but that's what the experimenters want to see, and they have some data to back up their dreams already.
Hawking himself may be an example of this - no ability to waste time on sports, etc., but plenty of time to think about theoretical physics, and potentially lots of spare brain capacity that would otherwise have been learning how to hit a ball with a stick, etc.
I think you are missing his point... what I hear is that the "external store" is an essentially new phenomenon on earth that has been exponentially growing for the last few hundred years, and that we, as a species, are evolving through development of the external store rather than changing our DNA.
Interestingly enough, within the next 25 year generation, that external store will likely become powerful enough to enable us to rewrite our DNA in meaningful ways, potentially bypassing millions of years of Darwinian evolution... unless SkyNet takes over.
This would be the key to any secure system. It is also possible to run Vista securely, but nobody does because that would require "training" the users more than we are used to. Linux is more secure by default, Linux users are more accustomed to running in a secured environment, etc.
Is the Linux security model "better" than the Vista one? I think that's a 99% subjective question. Subjectively, I find it easier to run Linux securely than Vista, and more importantly, it is easier to do things securely in Linux than to do them insecurely, in most instances. In Vista the opposite is often true - far easier to run in Administrator mode than to hassle with reconfiguring something to work properly in a secure way.
But, if you have a competent administrator and well trained users (both as common as Blue Moons on Thursdays), then Vista can be run just as securely as Linux, but then, well trained Linux user/administrators are also quite rare, in the real world.
The "real world" cost I find most annoying in dealing with software licenses is the human bandwidth cost of dealing with software licenses. The fact that an expense is involved launches all sorts of machinery within the company, requiring input from accounting, legal, management, etc. to determine which is the best choice, are we wasting money here, etc. Compound this with vendor's menu of selections that have to be considered, explaining the menu options to each concerned player, etc. etc. Then, if it is a renewable license, there's the annual annoyance of paying for the update, do we still need it? do we have to do accounting to the licensor? sales calls from the vendor, etc. When it's free, it's free - use it, or not. Simple decision, tons of hours saved simply because money is not involved.
There are other factors involved in deciding which software is "best" for a particular need, but if a "free" software will do the job adequately, it is saving several man days per year to use a "free" software as compared to having to turn the crank on the money machine.
Another side of this is Amazon's perspective, if they lose 1 or 2, or even 10% of their "affiliates", it will affect their bottom line far less than the increased hassle of implementing state specific taxes. All this is really doing is taking away affiliate income from those states that chose to implement silly tax laws like this.
Florida does similar stuff to people who have any physical representative in the state, but I guess they haven't tried to reach for Internet based tax dollars, yet.
There is still a difference between attending a meeting where everyone wears sheets on their heads and saying the 'N' word and attending a MLK rally and shouting it on a bull-horn. Even if someone at the sheet-head meeting videotapes you and replays it at the MLK rally with your name as a caption, the impact is different, especially if you have not given permission for the re-broadcast - which is where copyright was attempted to be inserted in this issue.
Unfortunately, copyright is a simple concept that is simply broken, it needs to be more complex to attain the goals it was set out to accomplish hundreds of years ago. Mostly, society needs to get over the idea that anyone can write a novel like Stephen King and have $1 per copy made deposited into their bank account until they die - it doesn't happen like that today, never did, and never will, but that's the concept that people are holding dearly to.
The Chinese government is a new kind of oppression that has survived many attempts to move in the opposite direction.
I'd say that the Chinese government is the product of the oldest, longest running civilized society on the face of the planet - they've taken oppression from an art to a science, they may not have it completely down yet, but they're much further along than the "Wild West" upstarts in America.
The whole problem is the forum in which the rant was "posted." Letters to the editor reach a particular segment of society, far different from the segment that typically kvetches on MySpace, seeing those opinions in black and white on their breakfast table apparently moved some codgers to action, yeah they're misguided idiots, but this isn't the first or last time a crusade has been/will be launched over ridiculous inflation of casual statements.
I don't believe it was a lapse on the part of the former principal, I believe it was a flagrant action with malicious intent. If she had decent representation before her first lawsuit, it might have gone differently for her:
As several lawyers said to me while I was asking them questions for this story, the girl would probably have a better claim for "intentional infliction of emotional distress" and for "false light publicity"
If the current administration wanted change it would change.
Easy to say from the armchair - in reality the "most powerful man in the world" is anything but. Every move gains or loses political capital, make too many losing moves and you essentially become powerless. It's a little early in the term for this administration to sink itself on principles.
Just relating life experiences with house contractors - great warranties up front turn into acrimonious battles about the sub-sub-sub contractors screwing up the rest of the house during installation, doing shoddy workmanship that will reveal itself in 6 to 60 months, etc. etc. And, while the absolute best of these people might come back 4 years later and "make it right, free of charge", the vast majority won't return your calls after the final payment check clears the bank.
So, if you're interested in doing the panel installation yourself, that 25 year warranty from Sanyo might mean something - although most such warranties require installation by a certified professional (see above.)
Do the panels last 25 years? Probably. Do they maintain 80% of their original output power? In an ideal installation, with no excessive corrosion due to: bird poo, leaf litter, salt spray, blowing dust, acid rain, or pretty much anything else from the real world - 25 years is a long time - and even if the panels are still working, odds are something in the installation, such as a rotting roof due to water penetration at the panel mount points, will fail in that time, leading to significantly more cost in maintenance than is projected by the article.
I'd love to have these panels myself, but I'm consuming $0.11/kwh coal produced electricity, and I have mature (100+ year old) trees in my yard that would cut 20-30% of my collection day. I'd love it if my entire town would cough up the cash to buy these panels and cut our coal burning pollution by 50% or more, but for me to spend a significant part of my 401(k) on something that won't even return bank interest in savings, and will require significant future labor to maintain... it just doesn't make sense here.
Read your warranty papers carefully, make sure they're backed by the manufacturer and not the installer... oh, by the way, installation/removal costs are a significant portion of the total system costs, and I can't imagine Sanyo, BP, or Sharp backing SunnyJim-Bob's installation crew.
I'm referring to the plethora of "flash in the pan" solar companies that sprouted from nowhere when oil passed $100/bbl. Maybe they'll be around 100 years from now, but in general, collecting on long term warranties is not the 100% assurance that some people in their early 20's seem to think it is.
Most manufacturers guarantee that their panels will give at least 90% of peak power at ten years, and 80% of power at 25 years. Yes, he's saving money.
These same manufacturers have guarantees that they will be in business in 25 years?
Yeah, there's zero maintenance on solar panels, they never blow off, or break, or lose efficiency over time. And as for future value, that $38K system will hopefully be able to be purchased for far less 10 years in the future, so it's inherent value also drops as technology improves.
Having said all that, I'd like to have a system on my house, too... not sure if I'd rather have a Tesla Roadster, though, roughly twice the price and it does a bit more for you than save money on the electric bill.
Which, no doubt, was the purpose of the study, to get at some root causes that might be effectively addressed, increasing condom use...
Whatever is happening now re: condom promotion could clearly be more effective. $400K probably paid for two guys to design and execute a survey over the course of a couple of years, plus overhead (grant accounting, departmental cuts, etc. etc.)
... yeah, not a viable strategy for an individual. It might be effective in an epidemic model, where lowering the transmission rate even slightly can change the graph topology, which is what the research is toward.
In short: possibly effective at treating entire populations which don't understand/accomodate safe sex; absolutely bollocks at helping an individual in a developed country.
Hey, this is starting to sound like those arguments for vaccination...
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Actually he's pretty indicative of the average Porsche driver.
No, I'd say the average (male) Porsche driver knows the 6 is flat, but the average cretin spouting about Porsches as if they owned one tend to only remember 20% of the article they read about them.
At $2.1m they don't call it smuggling, they call it negotiating - do you want me to buy this car in WI? well, if so, I only want to pay $10K in taxes, otherwise I'll buy it in Oregon....
Hawking himself has addressed this: It takes him so much time just to get dressed, or go to the bathroom, that this overcomes any time not "wasted" on sports.
Totally agree on the time factor, and he must have some unique and complex skill sets developed to get around his disabilities, but I still feel that his "black hole processing center" had extra room to expand as compared to someone who knows how to drive the streets of London, navigate complex social situations "in real time", and do so many of the highly complex things that "normal" people take for granted.
Clearly you need to impair yourself physically to allow your brain to develop. See, blindness develops your ears, deafnes develops your eyes, and physical disability develops your brain.
Training to develop under-used muscles/skills is what I hope you meant. Disability by itself doesn't provide any such strengths.
No, but, the human condition seems to provide us with incredible potential in a diverse set of skills, but only enough capacity to develop a subset of that potential - if you become handicapped in one area, and you don't get despondent / depressed / suicidal, your drive to excel gets channeled into other areas, developing them beyond normal levels, and the fact that you are handicapped seems to "free up additional capacity" for the non-handicapped skills.
Not just good hearing for the blind, also savant skills, etc. TMI experiments seem to promise the ability to induce temporary handicaps that temporarily enable some savant skills - very very sketchy at present, but that's what the experimenters want to see, and they have some data to back up their dreams already.
Hawking himself may be an example of this - no ability to waste time on sports, etc., but plenty of time to think about theoretical physics, and potentially lots of spare brain capacity that would otherwise have been learning how to hit a ball with a stick, etc.
I think you are missing his point... what I hear is that the "external store" is an essentially new phenomenon on earth that has been exponentially growing for the last few hundred years, and that we, as a species, are evolving through development of the external store rather than changing our DNA.
Interestingly enough, within the next 25 year generation, that external store will likely become powerful enough to enable us to rewrite our DNA in meaningful ways, potentially bypassing millions of years of Darwinian evolution... unless SkyNet takes over.
that is run by a competent administrator
This would be the key to any secure system. It is also possible to run Vista securely, but nobody does because that would require "training" the users more than we are used to. Linux is more secure by default, Linux users are more accustomed to running in a secured environment, etc.
Is the Linux security model "better" than the Vista one? I think that's a 99% subjective question. Subjectively, I find it easier to run Linux securely than Vista, and more importantly, it is easier to do things securely in Linux than to do them insecurely, in most instances. In Vista the opposite is often true - far easier to run in Administrator mode than to hassle with reconfiguring something to work properly in a secure way.
But, if you have a competent administrator and well trained users (both as common as Blue Moons on Thursdays), then Vista can be run just as securely as Linux, but then, well trained Linux user/administrators are also quite rare, in the real world.
The "real world" cost I find most annoying in dealing with software licenses is the human bandwidth cost of dealing with software licenses. The fact that an expense is involved launches all sorts of machinery within the company, requiring input from accounting, legal, management, etc. to determine which is the best choice, are we wasting money here, etc. Compound this with vendor's menu of selections that have to be considered, explaining the menu options to each concerned player, etc. etc. Then, if it is a renewable license, there's the annual annoyance of paying for the update, do we still need it? do we have to do accounting to the licensor? sales calls from the vendor, etc. When it's free, it's free - use it, or not. Simple decision, tons of hours saved simply because money is not involved.
There are other factors involved in deciding which software is "best" for a particular need, but if a "free" software will do the job adequately, it is saving several man days per year to use a "free" software as compared to having to turn the crank on the money machine.
Another side of this is Amazon's perspective, if they lose 1 or 2, or even 10% of their "affiliates", it will affect their bottom line far less than the increased hassle of implementing state specific taxes. All this is really doing is taking away affiliate income from those states that chose to implement silly tax laws like this.
Florida does similar stuff to people who have any physical representative in the state, but I guess they haven't tried to reach for Internet based tax dollars, yet.
There is still a difference between attending a meeting where everyone wears sheets on their heads and saying the 'N' word and attending a MLK rally and shouting it on a bull-horn. Even if someone at the sheet-head meeting videotapes you and replays it at the MLK rally with your name as a caption, the impact is different, especially if you have not given permission for the re-broadcast - which is where copyright was attempted to be inserted in this issue.
Unfortunately, copyright is a simple concept that is simply broken, it needs to be more complex to attain the goals it was set out to accomplish hundreds of years ago. Mostly, society needs to get over the idea that anyone can write a novel like Stephen King and have $1 per copy made deposited into their bank account until they die - it doesn't happen like that today, never did, and never will, but that's the concept that people are holding dearly to.
But it's a tortured CAR analogy, so that makes it o.k. - right?
Ever do straight data entry typing? It has lots of guises, most of them resembling Dante's 4th and 5th levels...
Only on /. would a story about gold farming lead directly to conclusions of imminent cultural revolt and overthrow of authority.
The Chinese government is a new kind of oppression that has survived many attempts to move in the opposite direction.
I'd say that the Chinese government is the product of the oldest, longest running civilized society on the face of the planet - they've taken oppression from an art to a science, they may not have it completely down yet, but they're much further along than the "Wild West" upstarts in America.
Good going, Roger Campbell of Coalinga High. Now everyone knows you stalk teenage girls.
Sadly, that does not make him rare within his profession.
The whole problem is the forum in which the rant was "posted." Letters to the editor reach a particular segment of society, far different from the segment that typically kvetches on MySpace, seeing those opinions in black and white on their breakfast table apparently moved some codgers to action, yeah they're misguided idiots, but this isn't the first or last time a crusade has been/will be launched over ridiculous inflation of casual statements.
As several lawyers said to me while I was asking them questions for this story, the girl would probably have a better claim for "intentional infliction of emotional distress" and for "false light publicity"
If the current administration wanted change it would change.
Easy to say from the armchair - in reality the "most powerful man in the world" is anything but. Every move gains or loses political capital, make too many losing moves and you essentially become powerless. It's a little early in the term for this administration to sink itself on principles.
Just relating life experiences with house contractors - great warranties up front turn into acrimonious battles about the sub-sub-sub contractors screwing up the rest of the house during installation, doing shoddy workmanship that will reveal itself in 6 to 60 months, etc. etc. And, while the absolute best of these people might come back 4 years later and "make it right, free of charge", the vast majority won't return your calls after the final payment check clears the bank.
So, if you're interested in doing the panel installation yourself, that 25 year warranty from Sanyo might mean something - although most such warranties require installation by a certified professional (see above.)
Do the panels last 25 years? Probably. Do they maintain 80% of their original output power? In an ideal installation, with no excessive corrosion due to: bird poo, leaf litter, salt spray, blowing dust, acid rain, or pretty much anything else from the real world - 25 years is a long time - and even if the panels are still working, odds are something in the installation, such as a rotting roof due to water penetration at the panel mount points, will fail in that time, leading to significantly more cost in maintenance than is projected by the article.
I'd love to have these panels myself, but I'm consuming $0.11/kwh coal produced electricity, and I have mature (100+ year old) trees in my yard that would cut 20-30% of my collection day. I'd love it if my entire town would cough up the cash to buy these panels and cut our coal burning pollution by 50% or more, but for me to spend a significant part of my 401(k) on something that won't even return bank interest in savings, and will require significant future labor to maintain... it just doesn't make sense here.
Read your warranty papers carefully, make sure they're backed by the manufacturer and not the installer... oh, by the way, installation/removal costs are a significant portion of the total system costs, and I can't imagine Sanyo, BP, or Sharp backing SunnyJim-Bob's installation crew.
I'm referring to the plethora of "flash in the pan" solar companies that sprouted from nowhere when oil passed $100/bbl. Maybe they'll be around 100 years from now, but in general, collecting on long term warranties is not the 100% assurance that some people in their early 20's seem to think it is.
When the cold fusion fairy finally appears, cost per kwh should take a remarkable turn....
Most manufacturers guarantee that their panels will give at least 90% of peak power at ten years, and 80% of power at 25 years. Yes, he's saving money.
These same manufacturers have guarantees that they will be in business in 25 years?
Yeah, there's zero maintenance on solar panels, they never blow off, or break, or lose efficiency over time. And as for future value, that $38K system will hopefully be able to be purchased for far less 10 years in the future, so it's inherent value also drops as technology improves.
Having said all that, I'd like to have a system on my house, too... not sure if I'd rather have a Tesla Roadster, though, roughly twice the price and it does a bit more for you than save money on the electric bill.
Or, 400k could be used to increase condom use
Which, no doubt, was the purpose of the study, to get at some root causes that might be effectively addressed, increasing condom use...
Whatever is happening now re: condom promotion could clearly be more effective. $400K probably paid for two guys to design and execute a survey over the course of a couple of years, plus overhead (grant accounting, departmental cuts, etc. etc.)
... yeah, not a viable strategy for an individual. It might be effective in an epidemic model, where lowering the transmission rate even slightly can change the graph topology, which is what the research is toward.
In short: possibly effective at treating entire populations which don't understand/accomodate safe sex; absolutely bollocks at helping an individual in a developed country.
Hey, this is starting to sound like those arguments for vaccination...