For some parts of California, this is true. In Santa Cruz, they have a big problem because they let the students at UCSC vote in city elections. Those students are overwhelmingly liberal, anti-business, don't understand that you need a tax base to fund your socialist utopia, and most importantly, won't be around for more than 4 years to endure the inevitable results of their short-sighted belief systems. So the huge shopping mall project tries to locate in Santa Cruz, they get firmly rejected, they locate next door in Capitola, and a few years later the city of Santa Cruz is begging the City of Capitola for a cut of sales taxes from the mall on the weak argument that customers are driving through Santa Cruz in order to get to the mall in Capitola to shop... no, I'm not making this shit up!
"Painful place to build things". Silicon Valley is a very expensive, over-regulated place to do business. The only advantage it holds for current business is the critical mass of engineers that make it easy to cannibalize talent from other companies. Electric vehicle companies would likely adopt a model similar to Apple, wherein design work is done in-house in the Silicon Valley, but manufacturing is done in Taiwan or China. Also, the high efficiency vehicles of the future won't be 4-wheel cars; the safety standards for motorcycles are far less restrictive than those for automobiles, and any 3-wheel vehicle can be classified as a motorcycle. There are also several full electric motorcycles coming out now (e.g. Zero Motors).
The "It takes $1 billion and 5 years to launch a new vehicle" is simply bullshit. It make take that long if you do it the way Detroit does it, but history has shown that Detroit is doing it wrong! Modern businesses are no longer the huge vertically integrated monopolies of the early industrial age; it is now possible to buy everything from out of house. "Wrong kind of engineers" is also bullshit -- create a demand for automotive engineers and Stanford and Berkly will train them! Granted, there is a 4-year lag, but the reason there is a Silicon Valley in the first place is because the world-class universities in the area created a pool of world-class engineers. Again, having engineers that are trained to do things "the GM way" is a disadvantage, not an advantage.
For $8000 you can dig a well and install a pump that can supply the water for 250 people. Not in a boat, you can't. Nor can you in islands like the Bahamas where there is no salt-free groundwater to pump out. Personally, I think the real market for this is sailing yachts, not disaster relief, but that's just me. As far as the filters, you have a series of filters of decreasing mesh size. The bigger screen filters catch the bigger impurities and are easily cleaned by reversing the flow through them. But I'd be interested in seeing what the total cost of operation for this thing is in the real world too.
No surprise that somebody who believes in virgin birth and a water-walking zombie riddle-speaking prophet God has difficulty distinguishing between reality and fiction. The real question is, does technology make it difficult for atheists to distinguish between reality and fiction?
Fact: Natalie Portman is not grits, she is in fact frequently covered with something that looks a lot like hot grits, at least in the fantasies of many slashdot readers.
Conclusion: Slashdot readers really need to get out more often.
Now if they can just teach it to distinguish between "The Onion" and "Fox News", they may have something. Seriously, with 99% of the 'net being comprised of complete bullshit, I'm willing to bet this software gets a lot of funny ideas!
The blatantly stupid people who authorized this got off scott free... with no consequences for their actions, what makes you so sure they won't do something even more stupid in the future? Remember -- you can't fix stupid.
I called the ombudsman in our state capitol to ask where I could get a paper copy of the state statutes I am supposed to know and abide by every day, or face arrest. They couldn't tell me. Giving people access to the laws would interfere with law enforcement's ability to just make shit up as an excuse to pull people over. Fortunately, most statutes are now on the computer, but that doesn't guarantee the text is accurate. Incidentally, I beat a ticket for "exceeding the speed limit in a rural area" on appeal because the arresting officer could not produce any evidence to show where the "rural area" began or ended, but he was absolutely certain the half mile of freeway that went through a corner of his town must be a rural area.
Unless you can prove intent to look at nekkid pictures of teens, you can't get a sex crime conviction. As with most cases involving school authorities, the "too stupid to know better" defense prevails. Seriously, most of these people know little more than the kids they are entrusted to teach, and some of them know less.
The fact that we need specialized professions to be able to properly navigate the legal system is, well, downright stupid.
The fact that you need to pay lawyers to navigate the legal system designed by lawyers is pretty clever, actually. Now if I could only figure out how to charge users big fees to navigate the software I write, I'd be making as much as lawyers do!
What about the lawyers? Doesn't this run afoul of the wiretap statutes? Don't I have a reasonable expectation of privacy when discussing business while in a stadium with 10.000 other people? And does this new development dispel the trustworthiness of the old adage, "In space, no one can hear you masturbate!"?
I'll say it once again: there are two fundamental problems that public schools have but private schools don't: 1) It is far too difficult to get rid of disruptive students who rob other students of opportunity to learn, and 2) It is far too difficult to get rid of ineffective teachers.
On the other hand, when confronting the unknown dangers of space, it is really nice to have spare parts so readily available... although convincing your twin to give up those spare parts is another matter.
What bothers me about it is: doesn't the choice of which one is accelerating and which one isn't depend entirely upon your frame of reference? Neither one of them is standing still!
Slashdot Mirror
For some parts of California, this is true. In Santa Cruz, they have a big problem because they let the students at UCSC vote in city elections. Those students are overwhelmingly liberal, anti-business, don't understand that you need a tax base to fund your socialist utopia, and most importantly, won't be around for more than 4 years to endure the inevitable results of their short-sighted belief systems. So the huge shopping mall project tries to locate in Santa Cruz, they get firmly rejected, they locate next door in Capitola, and a few years later the city of Santa Cruz is begging the City of Capitola for a cut of sales taxes from the mall on the weak argument that customers are driving through Santa Cruz in order to get to the mall in Capitola to shop... no, I'm not making this shit up!
"Painful place to build things". Silicon Valley is a very expensive, over-regulated place to do business. The only advantage it holds for current business is the critical mass of engineers that make it easy to cannibalize talent from other companies. Electric vehicle companies would likely adopt a model similar to Apple, wherein design work is done in-house in the Silicon Valley, but manufacturing is done in Taiwan or China. Also, the high efficiency vehicles of the future won't be 4-wheel cars; the safety standards for motorcycles are far less restrictive than those for automobiles, and any 3-wheel vehicle can be classified as a motorcycle. There are also several full electric motorcycles coming out now (e.g. Zero Motors).
The "It takes $1 billion and 5 years to launch a new vehicle" is simply bullshit. It make take that long if you do it the way Detroit does it, but history has shown that Detroit is doing it wrong! Modern businesses are no longer the huge vertically integrated monopolies of the early industrial age; it is now possible to buy everything from out of house. "Wrong kind of engineers" is also bullshit -- create a demand for automotive engineers and Stanford and Berkly will train them! Granted, there is a 4-year lag, but the reason there is a Silicon Valley in the first place is because the world-class universities in the area created a pool of world-class engineers. Again, having engineers that are trained to do things "the GM way" is a disadvantage, not an advantage.
For $8000 you can dig a well and install a pump that can supply the water for 250 people. Not in a boat, you can't. Nor can you in islands like the Bahamas where there is no salt-free groundwater to pump out. Personally, I think the real market for this is sailing yachts, not disaster relief, but that's just me. As far as the filters, you have a series of filters of decreasing mesh size. The bigger screen filters catch the bigger impurities and are easily cleaned by reversing the flow through them. But I'd be interested in seeing what the total cost of operation for this thing is in the real world too.
That's an awful lot of money to spend just to fix the iPhone 4 antenna problem... I wonder who well this fix works?
No, possession is not enough to convict. Arrest and jail, yes, Convict, no.
Hey, you no playa the game, you no maka the rules!
No surprise that somebody who believes in virgin birth and a water-walking zombie riddle-speaking prophet God has difficulty distinguishing between reality and fiction. The real question is, does technology make it difficult for atheists to distinguish between reality and fiction?
Fact: Natalie Portman is not grits, she is in fact frequently covered with something that looks a lot like hot grits, at least in the fantasies of many slashdot readers.
Conclusion: Slashdot readers really need to get out more often.
Now if they can just teach it to distinguish between "The Onion" and "Fox News", they may have something. Seriously, with 99% of the 'net being comprised of complete bullshit, I'm willing to bet this software gets a lot of funny ideas!
If the computer is reading and learning from everything on the net, I'm sure it's going to turn into quite a serious perv!
The blatantly stupid people who authorized this got off scott free... with no consequences for their actions, what makes you so sure they won't do something even more stupid in the future? Remember -- you can't fix stupid.
I called the ombudsman in our state capitol to ask where I could get a paper copy of the state statutes I am supposed to know and abide by every day, or face arrest. They couldn't tell me. Giving people access to the laws would interfere with law enforcement's ability to just make shit up as an excuse to pull people over. Fortunately, most statutes are now on the computer, but that doesn't guarantee the text is accurate. Incidentally, I beat a ticket for "exceeding the speed limit in a rural area" on appeal because the arresting officer could not produce any evidence to show where the "rural area" began or ended, but he was absolutely certain the half mile of freeway that went through a corner of his town must be a rural area.
Unless you can prove intent to look at nekkid pictures of teens, you can't get a sex crime conviction. As with most cases involving school authorities, the "too stupid to know better" defense prevails. Seriously, most of these people know little more than the kids they are entrusted to teach, and some of them know less.
The fact that we need specialized professions to be able to properly navigate the legal system is, well, downright stupid.
The fact that you need to pay lawyers to navigate the legal system designed by lawyers is pretty clever, actually. Now if I could only figure out how to charge users big fees to navigate the software I write, I'd be making as much as lawyers do!
Those "more technical" users' bittorent feeds were using up all the bandwidth anyway, and slowing down my porn downloads!
What about the lawyers? Doesn't this run afoul of the wiretap statutes? Don't I have a reasonable expectation of privacy when discussing business while in a stadium with 10.000 other people? And does this new development dispel the trustworthiness of the old adage, "In space, no one can hear you masturbate!"?
Bill Gates was quoted as saying "640 microphones should be enough for anyone!"
I'll say it once again: there are two fundamental problems that public schools have but private schools don't: 1) It is far too difficult to get rid of disruptive students who rob other students of opportunity to learn, and 2) It is far too difficult to get rid of ineffective teachers.
On the other hand, when confronting the unknown dangers of space, it is really nice to have spare parts so readily available... although convincing your twin to give up those spare parts is another matter.
What bothers me about it is: doesn't the choice of which one is accelerating and which one isn't depend entirely upon your frame of reference? Neither one of them is standing still!
Um, I think I'll wait for female identical twins to hook up in space before I get really interested in watching...
I think that something is called "drugs".
There are two things I expect from a good movie, which to date Hollywood has done a great job providing: tits.
Minor details like plot, story, consistency, etc. are of comparatively little importance as long as a movie has tits!
I don't see what your problem is. My wife keeps telling me size doesn't matter.
When do they go for the record for most squashed pennies on the track?