Unfortunately, you don't save any money using a Hybrid at current, when you look at the overall costs.
First, the actual purchase cost of the Hybrid is greater than a comparable gas-based car. (See the cost of a Hybrid Civic vs. Regular Civic for example).
Second, the cost to insure a Hybrid car is significantly higher than a comparable gas-based car. (Insurance companies don't like new things, or hard to fix things, or imported things.)
Third, the cost to repair a Hyrbid car is significantly higher than a comparable gas-based car. The parts are more expensive, the labour is more expensive. Some mechanics won't touch (or don't know how to touch) a Hybrid, which puts it in the hands of the dealer's "mechanic" (and they're a bunch of cost effective, honest folk, aren't they?)
Fourth, there's the battery itself. Somewhere around the 4 year mark, the battery will need to be replaced, at a cost of roughly $4-8K US.
So yes, the Hybrid is much better on gas. But as an overall money saver, it isn't. And this is the main problem. If you want everyone to drive an alternate fuel car (Hybrid, hydrogen, electric)-- as they should be-- well, it has to be cost effective for Joe and Jane Average. Environmental impact will be attractive to a lot of folks, some who can even afford the higher costs of the Hybrid-- but for most, they can't justify or affrod spending $10K extra. If some smart auto manufacture manages to roll out an effective and affordable line of AF cars (ie: A car that costs $10K to buy, can be maintained by the average mechanic, and won't cost a week's salary per month to insure), they'll sell like hotcakes and kill off the petrolium based cars.
Right. That's how at least one of the professors got killed, by him shooting through the door. Better chance than sitting and waiting, sure, but so much less effective than if he'd had the means to effectively defend himself.
The man you're referrign to, Prof. Lebrescu, died protecting his students. He didn't stand in front of the door so they could sit around and be safe. He blockaded the door with his body so they could all escape through a second exit.
What we need to do is publish the executives and lawyers personal information along with SSNs and credit card numbers publicly, after all, it's the truth and therefore free speech!
Good idea, but your ambitions fall short of the mark:
We should be publishing the content of every single Verison R&D server, database, desktop, etc. Trade secrets? Nope, free speech. New products with a "we must be first to market to make this work?" Nope, free speech. Patented, propritary product designs? Nope, free speech.
That is true. What about some sort of "verify this ad" button or feature. Let the end user report a potential "no no" ad for verification. It would cover everything from malware to WoW gold-farm ads.
It's still an "after the fact" solution, but short of forcing people to make immutable ads...
Of course, given the mindstaggerly awsome amounts of bandwidth Google weilds, doing daily or weekly spot checks on new ads wouldn't be that straining. I mean, it's not like EVERY single ad needs checking. Customers who are in good standing (have been clean for a few months, for example-- or those who are, like, Disney and Coke-- known entities) don't need policing.
Why doesn't Google just test every new ad that is submitted to them? It wouldn't be all that hard. All they need are a few machines running XP and an unpatched copy of IE. Make an image of a working machine as a backup. Then, when a new Ad Sense ad is submitted, one of those machine visits the website. If it gets hit with malware, the ad is rejected, and the machine is re-imaged from the backup.
The philosophy is simple: Anyone who would take advantage of any sort of exploit to install software on an end user's machine is not peddling a legitimate product.
Of course, a semi-clever malware site admin can write a script that would deliver different content to a Google machine. But I am sure Google has enough disposable IPs and proxies that that won't be a problem. And even if it is, I'm sure they can just Google for a good IP spoofer. (Goofer?)
It's a trivial matter with an easily implemented solution.
What about games where losing in the short term is a perfectly viable strategy towards winning in the long term. Think about chess. That's what pawns are for.
Though I am reminded of Overpower (the card game). The object was, over the course of "rounds" of battle, to venture and win 7 missions. A viable strategy near the end game was when you only had one character left alive, to venture the rest of your missions, land one large attack on your opponent, then accept your opponents next attack of lesser value. Your character would die, and the round would end. Your successful attacks would be greater than your opponents sucessful attacks, and you win the game.
..five thousand people who can't succeed without a ragged scar on their forehead... you're also going to have five thousand people... swaggering around drunk on sun
Speaking of walking about the world, will you be introducing any interesting locations? How about Mordheim? The infinite city would make for a nice massive location, with lots of room for small-group quests.
And then, in fifteen minutes, when the Bad Guy doesn't call in, the guys with his family assume that HF has managed to take the bad guy out, and kills the family.
Granted-- but HF had already known that no matter what he did, his family was going to die. The hostages were the bad guy's only bargining chips. Killing them is less than ideal, since that means the whole plan's gone to pot. If they don't hear from their leader, they'll get nervous, but sit tight. Long enough, at least, for HF to get home, kill the power, and drop a septic tank on them or something.
That's why it bugged me so much. He had the ball in his court AND home-turf advantage AND the element of surprise AND the odds were better for his family to fight than to comply.
You're missing the point. The characters in that movie were so petrified that there's no way they would attempt to flee that scene. Besides, the car was parked beside a house and she would have to put it in reverse, back up, turn, then go. Which is the kind of maneuverability skills a mother of two scared to death just doesn't have in a movie. A single woman chased by a dozen criminals, however, would.
Petrified with fear? The same group who had the piece of mind to safely and quietly manuver escape in the first place? If they had just bonked one guy on the head with a potted plant then bolted, fine. But they had a well formulated and calculated plan. They weren't petrified.
And seriously, they should have helped the gene pool and left the kid for dead anyways. "Hey, I'm deathly allergic to peanuts, and I know it. Here's a bad guy whose broken into my house, beat up my mother, and threatened to kill me. But hey, if he SAYS the cookies have no peanuts in them, who is he to lie?"
I'll tell you the exact moment of unreality that made me lose instant interest in Firewall. Putting aside everything mentioned, for me it was right near the beginning, when the Bad Guy slips into HF's car and says "Drive, I have your family".
The movie could have ended nicely right there, because what SHOULD have happened was that since HF had his seatbelt on, and Bad Guy didn't... well, rev it up to 65 then slam on the breaks. See you on the pavement!
And to make matters worse, the movie reoffends an hour later. The wife and kids finally escape, get in the family car, and start to drive away-- but stop because there's someone standing in front of the car with a gun. How about duck and floor it. Even if the underpaid minion decided to hold the line for the half a second he had left to live, I seriously doubt he could hit a moving target safely tucked away behind an engine block.
My gf is a high school teacher. Last year, she was roped into teaching "Introduction to Technology" course. Basically: what is a mouse? What is email? What are documents?
Being technically apt, I helped her mark most of the assignments for that course. After the first round of marking, I had an inkling that a group of her students were cheating by handing in duplicated spreadsheets.
Her: How can you tell?
Me: Well, for starters, they have the exact same data.
Her: They did do web searches, so they could have found the same site.
Me: Okay, but look at this. (alt-tabs between the 'sheets). They have the same formatting, font and cell size.
Her: It is the default font...
Me: True, but the formatting isn't. But check this out. You know how when you scroll down, then exit the spreadsheet, it "remembers" where you were when you re-open it?
Her: Yes?
Me: Check this out. (scrolls up to "title" line). See the student name?
Her: Yes. It's Bob.
Me: Right. Because this is Bob's spreadsheet. Now (alt-tab to Mary's, scrolls up) check out the title bar.
Her:.... Bob.
Me: (repeats for three others)
And laziness is very easily spotted. I was able to see the simliar formatting and data. Anyone with a little bit of tech knowledge could spot it. But forgetting to remove the first student's name after the copy-and-paste...
The point is, students who cheat are lazy. And lazy cheating is sloppy cheating. And sloppy cheating is easy to spot. The amount of effort one has to put into cheating "undetectably" would be equal to, if not much greater, than just doing it honestly.
The parent is joking-- but that's not a bad idea. I mean, how many of us learned to use computers by slogging through the command lines of our C64/Apple IIe/XT-PCs?
The RIAA seems to be able to ask for some pretty outrageous things in their discovery requests, including seizing equipment, hard drives, etc. Can I do the same to them? Can I request the discovery of all evidence they will use in the case, including the seizing of all computers and servers used in their investigation, so I can have them expertly examined and prevent tampering?
Correct. By the same logic, humans have been "using" nano technology forever, since mitochondrial structures take advantage of nano-geometry. So do T-cells. For that matter, humans have been using "genetic engineering" for millenia too!
Whew, I didn't realize were so intrinsically advanced!
Forget that. Plants have us beat, hand's down. They've been cloning themselves for hundreds of millions of years. We have to stop them. Won't someone think of the seeds?
Perhaps a solution is making the captcha time-intensive? If it takes an additional 30 seconds of 45 seconds, it might cut down on the number of captchas a person could solve in an hour.
Take this a step further. Once you discover who the spammers are who are paying for this service, add a huge delay to all pageloads for them. It will drastically reduce the number of solves/hour-- which will drastically increase the cost per hour to hire one of these services.
Once the spammer gets a $5000 bill when they were expecting a $5 bill, the services will go out of buisness.
And as an added bonus, the services, which are surely being run by some ne'er-do-wells, might beat and flay a couple spammers for not paying their bills. So we price the captcha-beaters out of buissness and the spammers that survive will think twice about using the next great workaround. We win!
I'm an ICT teacher, and recently went to a conference where there was a presentation about so-called Digital Natives (today's kids) and Digital Immigrants (adults).
Apparently, the fundamental difference between us old-fart teachers (I'm 25, by the way) and today's kids is that they have grown up surrounded by technology to such an extent that their methods of working and interacting with others are totally different to ours.
Yeah, my girlfriend was at that same conference. She's an over-25 teacher. She spent the entire presentation on her laptop, updating her course website, checkig her email, chatting with me and playing NeoPets.
I think she completely tuned out sometime around when the presenter started going on and on about how kids today have physically completely different brains, and such other pseudo-scientific bunk.
As a future educator myself, I don't lend much credence to "radical, world changing education theories" that are based solely on a polarizing dividing line between teachers and "kids today".
Slashdot Mirror
im in ur boardroom, readin ur pwrpointz
First, the actual purchase cost of the Hybrid is greater than a comparable gas-based car. (See the cost of a Hybrid Civic vs. Regular Civic for example).
Second, the cost to insure a Hybrid car is significantly higher than a comparable gas-based car. (Insurance companies don't like new things, or hard to fix things, or imported things.)
Third, the cost to repair a Hyrbid car is significantly higher than a comparable gas-based car. The parts are more expensive, the labour is more expensive. Some mechanics won't touch (or don't know how to touch) a Hybrid, which puts it in the hands of the dealer's "mechanic" (and they're a bunch of cost effective, honest folk, aren't they?)
Fourth, there's the battery itself. Somewhere around the 4 year mark, the battery will need to be replaced, at a cost of roughly $4-8K US.
So yes, the Hybrid is much better on gas. But as an overall money saver, it isn't. And this is the main problem. If you want everyone to drive an alternate fuel car (Hybrid, hydrogen, electric)-- as they should be-- well, it has to be cost effective for Joe and Jane Average. Environmental impact will be attractive to a lot of folks, some who can even afford the higher costs of the Hybrid-- but for most, they can't justify or affrod spending $10K extra. If some smart auto manufacture manages to roll out an effective and affordable line of AF cars (ie: A car that costs $10K to buy, can be maintained by the average mechanic, and won't cost a week's salary per month to insure), they'll sell like hotcakes and kill off the petrolium based cars.
The man you're referrign to, Prof. Lebrescu, died protecting his students. He didn't stand in front of the door so they could sit around and be safe. He blockaded the door with his body so they could all escape through a second exit.
Globe and Mail article
Hiding my passwords in first post yt66axe
Good idea, but your ambitions fall short of the mark:
We should be publishing the content of every single Verison R&D server, database, desktop, etc. Trade secrets? Nope, free speech. New products with a "we must be first to market to make this work?" Nope, free speech. Patented, propritary product designs? Nope, free speech.
Well, there's your problem right there.
If it hasn't happened already, all what someone needs to do is get their competitor onto the front page during a critical service.
It's still an "after the fact" solution, but short of forcing people to make immutable ads...
Of course, given the mindstaggerly awsome amounts of bandwidth Google weilds, doing daily or weekly spot checks on new ads wouldn't be that straining. I mean, it's not like EVERY single ad needs checking. Customers who are in good standing (have been clean for a few months, for example-- or those who are, like, Disney and Coke-- known entities) don't need policing.
The philosophy is simple: Anyone who would take advantage of any sort of exploit to install software on an end user's machine is not peddling a legitimate product.
Of course, a semi-clever malware site admin can write a script that would deliver different content to a Google machine. But I am sure Google has enough disposable IPs and proxies that that won't be a problem. And even if it is, I'm sure they can just Google for a good IP spoofer. (Goofer?)
It's a trivial matter with an easily implemented solution.
What about games where losing in the short term is a perfectly viable strategy towards winning in the long term. Think about chess. That's what pawns are for. Though I am reminded of Overpower (the card game). The object was, over the course of "rounds" of battle, to venture and win 7 missions. A viable strategy near the end game was when you only had one character left alive, to venture the rest of your missions, land one large attack on your opponent, then accept your opponents next attack of lesser value. Your character would die, and the round would end. Your successful attacks would be greater than your opponents sucessful attacks, and you win the game.
Reminds me of this.
And this
=)
Speaking of walking about the world, will you be introducing any interesting locations? How about Mordheim? The infinite city would make for a nice massive location, with lots of room for small-group quests.
Granted-- but HF had already known that no matter what he did, his family was going to die. The hostages were the bad guy's only bargining chips. Killing them is less than ideal, since that means the whole plan's gone to pot. If they don't hear from their leader, they'll get nervous, but sit tight. Long enough, at least, for HF to get home, kill the power, and drop a septic tank on them or something.
That's why it bugged me so much. He had the ball in his court AND home-turf advantage AND the element of surprise AND the odds were better for his family to fight than to comply.
Petrified with fear? The same group who had the piece of mind to safely and quietly manuver escape in the first place? If they had just bonked one guy on the head with a potted plant then bolted, fine. But they had a well formulated and calculated plan. They weren't petrified.
And seriously, they should have helped the gene pool and left the kid for dead anyways. "Hey, I'm deathly allergic to peanuts, and I know it. Here's a bad guy whose broken into my house, beat up my mother, and threatened to kill me. But hey, if he SAYS the cookies have no peanuts in them, who is he to lie?"
The movie could have ended nicely right there, because what SHOULD have happened was that since HF had his seatbelt on, and Bad Guy didn't... well, rev it up to 65 then slam on the breaks. See you on the pavement!
And to make matters worse, the movie reoffends an hour later. The wife and kids finally escape, get in the family car, and start to drive away-- but stop because there's someone standing in front of the car with a gun. How about duck and floor it. Even if the underpaid minion decided to hold the line for the half a second he had left to live, I seriously doubt he could hit a moving target safely tucked away behind an engine block.
Stupid movie.
"You... Yes, you behind the bike shed... stand still laddy!"
Being technically apt, I helped her mark most of the assignments for that course. After the first round of marking, I had an inkling that a group of her students were cheating by handing in duplicated spreadsheets.
Her: How can you tell? .... Bob.
Me: Well, for starters, they have the exact same data.
Her: They did do web searches, so they could have found the same site.
Me: Okay, but look at this. (alt-tabs between the 'sheets). They have the same formatting, font and cell size.
Her: It is the default font...
Me: True, but the formatting isn't. But check this out. You know how when you scroll down, then exit the spreadsheet, it "remembers" where you were when you re-open it?
Her: Yes?
Me: Check this out. (scrolls up to "title" line). See the student name?
Her: Yes. It's Bob.
Me: Right. Because this is Bob's spreadsheet. Now (alt-tab to Mary's, scrolls up) check out the title bar.
Her:
Me: (repeats for three others)
And laziness is very easily spotted. I was able to see the simliar formatting and data. Anyone with a little bit of tech knowledge could spot it. But forgetting to remove the first student's name after the copy-and-paste...
The point is, students who cheat are lazy. And lazy cheating is sloppy cheating. And sloppy cheating is easy to spot. The amount of effort one has to put into cheating "undetectably" would be equal to, if not much greater, than just doing it honestly.
The parent is joking-- but that's not a bad idea. I mean, how many of us learned to use computers by slogging through the command lines of our C64/Apple IIe/XT-PCs?
Killing people in general is not right, but if you do it in a humane way, like shoot them through the head with a .454 casul?
Yes, but then the spammhaus people will just chose to ignore the "judgement" =)
The RIAA seems to be able to ask for some pretty outrageous things in their discovery requests, including seizing equipment, hard drives, etc. Can I do the same to them? Can I request the discovery of all evidence they will use in the case, including the seizing of all computers and servers used in their investigation, so I can have them expertly examined and prevent tampering?
Whew, I didn't realize were so intrinsically advanced!
Forget that. Plants have us beat, hand's down. They've been cloning themselves for hundreds of millions of years. We have to stop them. Won't someone think of the seeds?
Take this a step further. Once you discover who the spammers are who are paying for this service, add a huge delay to all pageloads for them. It will drastically reduce the number of solves/hour-- which will drastically increase the cost per hour to hire one of these services.
Once the spammer gets a $5000 bill when they were expecting a $5 bill, the services will go out of buisness.
And as an added bonus, the services, which are surely being run by some ne'er-do-wells, might beat and flay a couple spammers for not paying their bills. So we price the captcha-beaters out of buissness and the spammers that survive will think twice about using the next great workaround. We win!
Maybe they'll put the lyrics to the theme song back in.
Apparently, the fundamental difference between us old-fart teachers (I'm 25, by the way) and today's kids is that they have grown up surrounded by technology to such an extent that their methods of working and interacting with others are totally different to ours.
Yeah, my girlfriend was at that same conference. She's an over-25 teacher. She spent the entire presentation on her laptop, updating her course website, checkig her email, chatting with me and playing NeoPets.
I think she completely tuned out sometime around when the presenter started going on and on about how kids today have physically completely different brains, and such other pseudo-scientific bunk.
As a future educator myself, I don't lend much credence to "radical, world changing education theories" that are based solely on a polarizing dividing line between teachers and "kids today".