I am curious - did you move some from other less hospitable part of the planet or did someone else make the "smart choice" for you?
I am not as surprised as you that more people don't move to "better places", since climate is but one factor that is important to human decisions, and there are a WHOLE BUNCH of factors that are essentially randomly decided that get "baked into" the desirability of a location. "Hey what a pretty spot for a hunting campsite, I like the way that tree gives good shade next to the fork in the stream"...."Yes this city sucks and the other place over there would be better in every way, except that all the infrastructure is here, all the capital is here, all the jobs are here, all the customers are here, all the sexy people are here, and over there are only a few people saying how great it is."
I happen to live in what is objectively described as fairly inhospitable, but we decided to move here based on work and economic grounds. We have convinced ourselves that skiing is "fun" and freezing part of the year while melting part of the year is a good trade off.
I suppose the argument could be made that if we only lived in those parts of the world where clothing is optional the year around, and the food is easy to come by, then as a species we might still be in the "hunter-gather" stage, with the "couch-potato" stage not even on the horizon. If we want to be able to post on Slashdot, maybe some of us NEEDED to live in shitty climates. Maybe our great-grandchildren in the post-scarcity world beyond the singularity will all live in pastoral bliss, but if seven to ten billion of us all move to the Bahamas it might get a bit crowded.
Your temperature units are so shitty that you have to cut them in half for a thermostat. Your mass unit is so terrible that you had to multiply it by a thousand to be useful.
Ouch! What a burn! I am sure the rest of the world looks upon the non-metric system with envy.
[Yes, I'm being deliberately obtuse, as I know that for some reason/s large numbers of humans insist on living outside the comfortably habitable range of climate suited for humans, but I still do not know why they choose this].
Did you actually choose to live where you are, or was that choice made by someone else when you were a wee tot or before you were born? If so, did they make the choice based primarily on climate?
You may be correct that the climate you are living in is the objective optimal one, the fact that it is not currently completely buried in new immigrants seems to indicate that people generally do not decide where to live based on this type of thing.
There are economic reasons why people live in places with non-ideal climates - the "natural resources" are spread around, and historically it was hard to live far from where those things were. Once you have built the population centers it is hard to move them to "better" places even if the climate would be nicer.
I look forward to telemarketers calling me. Sometimes the bots can get past the robocall part and get a real human on the phone. My record is 12 minutes.
"Myself, I was upfront that it wasn't a real stone. I told her that I was investing the money in having a unique design created. She was much happier."
Good move.
I managed to sidestep the issue entirely - she went out and found a ring and asked me. The surprise was fun, but I cannot imagine how a "traditional" woman can think that trying to encourage (or worse "manipulate") a fellow into a proposal is an any way a healthy start to a life-long partnership. If you want to get married - ask them! Why there are rigid gender roles in this sort of thing is beyond me.
Anyhow, she reports that jewelers have difficulty in wrapping their mind around a female purchasing an engagement ring for a male, and that most "male" rings are butt ugly.
"Snowflake generation gets their Hitler education from fellow Progressives or from outlets like CNN. In summary, each Republican presidential candidate is literally Hitler."
"De beers have been ruthless in monopolizing the market and creating the perception of value to a woman."
At least half, if not more, of the perception creation has been directed to men too. There is a tremendous amount of work put in to making men think that this type of expensive adornment is vitally important. Of course, you and I are not effected by this, but those "others" are...
I've settled on sets of passwords with patterns based on the name of the sites, different patterns for different levels of security (so about three or so possible patterns). I then can have pretty complex passwords with special characters and mixed case, but the passwords are just different enough between sites to foil re-use of the password in a breach.
That seems pretty good, but maybe the people who write password cracking software use the collected breach data as the starting point for their brute forcing of other websites. If so, then perhaps the patterns that you are using might not give as much protection as you might think. Even unique email addresses/logins for each website might not give much protection if the pattern for creating them is not to hard to discern.
All of this is doubly true if you are being specifically targeted.
Of course being specifically targeted makes it hard to securely use random strings stored in a password manager too.
Balancing reasonable security against reasonable convenience is reasonably challenging.
Canada uses ("used" really, as most volume stuff is metric since at least the 80s) the "Imperial gallon" which is a touch more than 1.20 times the size of a US gallon (the US is about 83% of the Imperial).
I recall the advertised MPG ratings "back in the day" being a source of confusion depending if one was watching a US TV channel or a Canadian one.
It doesn't change the fact that DNA testing is still multiple orders or magnitude more accurate than any other tools to solve crimes and it's not used as the only piece of evidence in a case. On the whole DNA keeps considerably more innocent people out of prison than it puts them in prison.
Sure, but calling for better use of tools, and better understanding of statistics is important. If your tool has a false positive rate of "one-in-a-million", and you test the entire population, you are going to find at least 7600 suspects out of a world population of 7.6 billion. The odds of any one of those being "the one" are pretty small. Restricting your pool of people to test to those mostly likely to be the criminal (ie those in the appropriate location at the appropriate time) decreases the number of people falsely accused.
This is the good side of DNA databases. This data can also be abused. It's an awesome power and power is very corrupting. This needs serious regulation...ironclad. But of course that wont happen.
Yeah, the bad side is that people making judgements using DNA as evidence are bad at at stats. DNA evidence only "works" due to limited number of suspects. When you're comparing DNA to the entire population you're going to get quite a thousand false positives. When you have 10 suspects and one of them as a "match" (and I use that term loosely) then you can be pretty sure he's the one.
When you compare against a database of 300m, you're going to get tens of thousands matching close enough.
Very good point, but perhaps this can be addressed by comparing more DNA markers? If you get pulled in due to this type of data, it certainly seems worth your while getting an independent lab test as part of your defense.
Of course if the crime scene sample got contaminated during the first tests due to bad evidence handling process ("Was I supposed to clean the test tube before or after testing the suspect's sample?") you are screwed.
Human energy "production" figures have nothing to do with the balance between the heat/energy flow into the earth from the sun vs the rate of heat flow out of the earth radiated into space.
Solar radiation heats the earth exactly the same amount if it hits a solar panel as if it hits the ground (at least over the time scale that it takes the the electrical energy to eventually do some work). Energy/heat produced by coal/oil/nuke is so tiny compared to the solar radiation, it can be ignored. Wind and hydro generation are just secondary effects of solar heating of the planet and atmosphere, and they are also tiny compared to the solar radiation.
For the earth/sun system, very roughly speaking, the visible sunlight passes through the atmosphere relatively untouched and is absorbed by the planet, while the radiated infra-red light given off by the planet is partially blocked by the "greenhouse gasses".
If you increase the insulation of a system (more CO2), the rate of heat flow out of the system decreases, which causes the temperature to increase. (a thicker blanket reduces the heat-flow out of the bed, so you body warms it up to a higher temperature). As the temperature increases, the rate of heat flow out of the system increases, in spite of the increased insulation. Eventually, the temperature increases enough so that the rate of heat flow out of the system exactly matched the energy flowing into the system. Then you have the new higher equilibrium temperature.
This is similar to having a tall dam on a river, with a small hole in the bottom of the dam. If the flow rate out of the hole is equal to the river flow rate above the dam, the height of the water behind the dam stays constant. If you make the hole smaller (more insulation), the height of the water behind the dam will get bigger (higher temperature). As the height of water gets bigger, the water pressure down at the bottom will increase, and the flow rate out of the hole will increase. Eventually the flow rate out of the hole will equal the flow rate of the river, and the water behind the dam will be at a new higher constant. (Unless the dam is too low and the water flows over the top, or the dam is too weak for the higher pressure and falls apart. No analogy is perfect.)
I think the funds are not salary, but rather research funding. It gets used to pay for equipment, hire staff, and do academic stuff. Similar "Canada Research Chairs" have been given out over the past few years - maybe even decades.
There were less opportunities for women or minorities.
All in all, while there have been many changes in society that might not seem positive, there have also been many that have been clearly positive. On balance, I think I am better off now compared to then, and not just because I am older and richer.
Yeah. It is absurd for most individuals to have that kind of decision-making power; that's why most individuals do not ever get anything near that amount. Some individuals, though, are worthy of it, and the whole point of the Free Market is to do things like find such people.
Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahah, oh you are so funny.
If you really think that the billionaires of the world have magically be selected by "the Free Market" as being "worthy" of this type of decision-making power, you are not really living in the same world as the rest of us.
Sure, I can believe that they might be, on average, a bit smarter or more competent than "the rest of us", but the biggest difference is one of good fortune. Being in the right place at the right time with the right skills could in theory be something that a brilliant person could plan, but for the most part the differences between those with "regular" success and those with "amazing" success are purely luck.
So far, such "right answer" seems to be the Standard Model, a theory which is typically regarded as “the pinnacle of science” or even “the theory of almost everything.” The Standard Model poses that the whole physical world is reduced to exactly 61 different kind of zero-sized point-particles, entities that somehow interact through four non-contact interactions, forces that are simultaneously also zero-sized point-particles. In addition, each of these 61 different kinds of extensionless entities may demonstrate the incomprehensible wave-particle paradox (as Feynman reminded us, "Nobody understands quantum mechanics"). All this activity happens, it is claimed, in 4D "curved" spacetime. In addition, absolutely all that was created from nothing sometime ago, starting from an "initial singularity" of "infinite density".
Just a quick reminder of the so-called right answer.
Yeah, the "Standard Model" is intellectually unsatisfying, and the philosophical implications of physical interpretations of the math of Quantum Mechanics seem bizarre in the extreme.
But that shit has given and continues to give extremely precise predictions that match experimental measurements to levels that beggar the imagination. If this is "wrong", it is really hard to imagine what "right" could possibly be.
I'm having trouble figuring out how to comment without manually copying part of my username into the body of my post. Can anyone help me figure out how to not do that? Everyone else has this figured out but me.
I highly doubt a pair of consumer-grade AMD RX580s gaming cards would last mining ETH for over 3 years.
There is that.
I was just looking at a client's office where a system doing file backup duties is located in a space that is heated by electricity. For the most part, the system is idle as the scheduled backup tasks are not running constantly and don't actually use a lot of computing power. We have considered setting up something like mining software or Folding@home to do something useful with some of the energy being used to heat the space. Not running the software in the summer would be a good idea. One should be able to run such software in a way that doesn't dramatically decrease the useful lifespan of the hardware.
Whattomine.com says your profit is 2.66 bucks a day using 2x 580 cards with 60 MH/s mining speed. You would recover your investment after... 1354 days of NON STOP mining, provided the cards hold for that long, which I highly, highly doubt.
This solution is one of the most retarded I've heard of.
If you are already heating with electricity, your "cost of electricity" is effective $0.00/kwh rather than $0.10/kwh since you are paying for the energy whether you run this rig or not.
Yes, Hillary won the popular vote, but from just two districts in LA and one in NYC. Had polls weighted a person's per-capita electoral value, Trump was obviously winning in a landslide.
What does that mean "but from just two districts in LA and one in NYC"? Clinton won the popular vote by about 2.9 million votes, sure. I am willing to entertain that there are two districts in LA and one in NYC that had an imbalance of 2.9 million votes in Clinton's favor - but so what? To deny that Clinton won the popular vote nation-wide because one or a few regions had particular voting patterns is similar to questioning the validity of Trump's electoral college win by saying something like "Yes, Donald won the electoral college, but from just one state (Texas)."
Nobody who has any knowledge of the electoral voting system thought that the popular vote total has any direct bearing on the winner of the election. However, national popular vote polls do give useful input to models of how individual states' electoral college seats are likely to be assigned. As fivethirtyeight.com pointed out - there was a lot of spotty journalism out there in regards to recognizing the complexity of the electoral college and how to interpret polls.
That's some interesting revisionist history you have there. I remember the polls putting Clinton as winning by a wide margin. Could you remind me who won?
A fun little article if you think I'm wrong, feel free to post your evidence to counter mine if you'd like.
The link you posted ( https://www.npr.org/2016/11/14... ) does not seem to match your statement. In fact point #1 is basically what I was saying. It states as point #1 that the polls (at least the Real Clear Politics' final polling average) in 2016 were closer to the vote results than they were in 2012, when they were off by about 3.2%, well within the stated uncertainty ranges. The polls were indicating nothing like a "landslide", and just like "Brexit", a single "polling error" away from deciding between choice "A" or choice "B".
Then, after basically saying, "the polls were within their measurement capabilities", the author of the article goes on to look at reasons why the polls might have been wrong. But they were not "wrong"! They were correct within the published accuracy of their measurement! Might there be ways to increase their accuracy? Sure, but it is impossible to eliminate all uncertainties, even if you somehow were able to actually poll every voter in the country and get their true feelings about how they would vote - some of them will change their minds, and some of them will die before the polls even open. The polls were "better" in 2016 than 2012. Hopefully they will be better still in 2018.
In any case, maybe I just wasn't reading widely enough before the elections and maybe there was a widespread narrative that Clinton was winning by a wide margin - I was mostly looking at poll aggregators. So maybe I had less of a feeling that the last few months before the election had Clinton with an insurmountable lead. I went into election night thinking that Trump had about a 20% chance of winning, as reflected by the polling and various models derived from that. It made the morning news that he had won a surprise, but not something amazingly unexpected. I think the betting markets had similar odds.
Here is a postmortem from late January, with slightly better data than the mid-November NPR article linked above:
"Another myth is that Trump’s victory represented some sort of catastrophic failure for the polls. Trump outperformed his national polls by only 1 to 2 percentage points in losing the popular vote to Clinton, making them slightly closer to the mark than they were in 2012. Meanwhile, he beat his polls by only 2 to 3 percentage points in the average swing state.3 Certainly, there were individual pollsters that had some explaining to do, especially in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, where Trump beat his polls by a larger amount. But the result was not some sort of massive outlier; on the contrary, the polls were pretty much as accurate as they’d been, on average, since 1968."
You did learn that polls aren't to be believed after the 2016 election, right? Especially when it's about an unpopular view within the media that people are worried about being stigmatized for.
The polls were pretty accurate in 2016. Much of the analysis and narrative around the polls turned out to be incorrect, but the polls themselves were not bad. There is little evidence that the polls had significant issues with people unwilling to state their true preferences.
Slashdot Mirror
I am curious - did you move some from other less hospitable part of the planet or did someone else make the "smart choice" for you?
I am not as surprised as you that more people don't move to "better places", since climate is but one factor that is important to human decisions, and there are a WHOLE BUNCH of factors that are essentially randomly decided that get "baked into" the desirability of a location. "Hey what a pretty spot for a hunting campsite, I like the way that tree gives good shade next to the fork in the stream"...."Yes this city sucks and the other place over there would be better in every way, except that all the infrastructure is here, all the capital is here, all the jobs are here, all the customers are here, all the sexy people are here, and over there are only a few people saying how great it is."
I happen to live in what is objectively described as fairly inhospitable, but we decided to move here based on work and economic grounds. We have convinced ourselves that skiing is "fun" and freezing part of the year while melting part of the year is a good trade off.
I suppose the argument could be made that if we only lived in those parts of the world where clothing is optional the year around, and the food is easy to come by, then as a species we might still be in the "hunter-gather" stage, with the "couch-potato" stage not even on the horizon. If we want to be able to post on Slashdot, maybe some of us NEEDED to live in shitty climates. Maybe our great-grandchildren in the post-scarcity world beyond the singularity will all live in pastoral bliss, but if seven to ten billion of us all move to the Bahamas it might get a bit crowded.
Your temperature units are so shitty that you have to cut them in half for a thermostat. Your mass unit is so terrible that you had to multiply it by a thousand to be useful.
Ouch! What a burn! I am sure the rest of the world looks upon the non-metric system with envy.
They don't use it because they hate our freedom.
Yeah... great advance I'm sure.
[Yes, I'm being deliberately obtuse, as I know that for some reason/s large numbers of humans insist on living outside the comfortably habitable range of climate suited for humans, but I still do not know why they choose this].
Did you actually choose to live where you are, or was that choice made by someone else when you were a wee tot or before you were born? If so, did they make the choice based primarily on climate?
You may be correct that the climate you are living in is the objective optimal one, the fact that it is not currently completely buried in new immigrants seems to indicate that people generally do not decide where to live based on this type of thing.
There are economic reasons why people live in places with non-ideal climates - the "natural resources" are spread around, and historically it was hard to live far from where those things were. Once you have built the population centers it is hard to move them to "better" places even if the climate would be nicer.
The AC must have mistyped - October 2007 according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
October 2007 according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Seems like a good system. I don't know if I would call it "easy" however.
A very nice service.
"Myself, I was upfront that it wasn't a real stone. I told her that I was investing the money in having a unique design created. She was much happier."
Good move.
I managed to sidestep the issue entirely - she went out and found a ring and asked me. The surprise was fun, but I cannot imagine how a "traditional" woman can think that trying to encourage (or worse "manipulate") a fellow into a proposal is an any way a healthy start to a life-long partnership. If you want to get married - ask them! Why there are rigid gender roles in this sort of thing is beyond me.
Anyhow, she reports that jewelers have difficulty in wrapping their mind around a female purchasing an engagement ring for a male, and that most "male" rings are butt ugly.
"Snowflake generation gets their Hitler education from fellow Progressives or from outlets like CNN. In summary, each Republican presidential candidate is literally Hitler."
Literally?
"De beers have been ruthless in monopolizing the market and creating the perception of value to a woman."
At least half, if not more, of the perception creation has been directed to men too. There is a tremendous amount of work put in to making men think that this type of expensive adornment is vitally important. Of course, you and I are not effected by this, but those "others" are...
I don't like password managers...
I've settled on sets of passwords with patterns based on the name of the sites, different patterns for different levels of security (so about three or so possible patterns). I then can have pretty complex passwords with special characters and mixed case, but the passwords are just different enough between sites to foil re-use of the password in a breach.
That seems pretty good, but maybe the people who write password cracking software use the collected breach data as the starting point for their brute forcing of other websites. If so, then perhaps the patterns that you are using might not give as much protection as you might think. Even unique email addresses/logins for each website might not give much protection if the pattern for creating them is not to hard to discern.
All of this is doubly true if you are being specifically targeted.
Of course being specifically targeted makes it hard to securely use random strings stored in a password manager too.
Balancing reasonable security against reasonable convenience is reasonably challenging.
WTF is a "Canadian Gallon"?
Canada uses ("used" really, as most volume stuff is metric since at least the 80s) the "Imperial gallon" which is a touch more than 1.20 times the size of a US gallon (the US is about 83% of the Imperial).
I recall the advertised MPG ratings "back in the day" being a source of confusion depending if one was watching a US TV channel or a Canadian one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The US gallon is defined as 231 cubic inches (8 US liquid pints) or about 3.785 L
The Imperial gallon defined as 4.54609 litres (8 imperial pints)
The pint is not a pound, the world around - unless "the world" is just the USA.
It doesn't change the fact that DNA testing is still multiple orders or magnitude more accurate than any other tools to solve crimes and it's not used as the only piece of evidence in a case. On the whole DNA keeps considerably more innocent people out of prison than it puts them in prison.
Sure, but calling for better use of tools, and better understanding of statistics is important. If your tool has a false positive rate of "one-in-a-million", and you test the entire population, you are going to find at least 7600 suspects out of a world population of 7.6 billion. The odds of any one of those being "the one" are pretty small. Restricting your pool of people to test to those mostly likely to be the criminal (ie those in the appropriate location at the appropriate time) decreases the number of people falsely accused.
This is the good side of DNA databases. This data can also be abused. It's an awesome power and power is very corrupting. This needs serious regulation...ironclad. But of course that wont happen.
Yeah, the bad side is that people making judgements using DNA as evidence are bad at at stats. DNA evidence only "works" due to limited number of suspects. When you're comparing DNA to the entire population you're going to get quite a thousand false positives. When you have 10 suspects and one of them as a "match" (and I use that term loosely) then you can be pretty sure he's the one.
When you compare against a database of 300m, you're going to get tens of thousands matching close enough.
Very good point, but perhaps this can be addressed by comparing more DNA markers? If you get pulled in due to this type of data, it certainly seems worth your while getting an independent lab test as part of your defense.
Of course if the crime scene sample got contaminated during the first tests due to bad evidence handling process ("Was I supposed to clean the test tube before or after testing the suspect's sample?") you are screwed.
Human energy "production" figures have nothing to do with the balance between the heat/energy flow into the earth from the sun vs the rate of heat flow out of the earth radiated into space.
Solar radiation heats the earth exactly the same amount if it hits a solar panel as if it hits the ground (at least over the time scale that it takes the the electrical energy to eventually do some work). Energy/heat produced by coal/oil/nuke is so tiny compared to the solar radiation, it can be ignored. Wind and hydro generation are just secondary effects of solar heating of the planet and atmosphere, and they are also tiny compared to the solar radiation.
For the earth/sun system, very roughly speaking, the visible sunlight passes through the atmosphere relatively untouched and is absorbed by the planet, while the radiated infra-red light given off by the planet is partially blocked by the "greenhouse gasses".
If you increase the insulation of a system (more CO2), the rate of heat flow out of the system decreases, which causes the temperature to increase. (a thicker blanket reduces the heat-flow out of the bed, so you body warms it up to a higher temperature). As the temperature increases, the rate of heat flow out of the system increases, in spite of the increased insulation. Eventually, the temperature increases enough so that the rate of heat flow out of the system exactly matched the energy flowing into the system. Then you have the new higher equilibrium temperature.
This is similar to having a tall dam on a river, with a small hole in the bottom of the dam. If the flow rate out of the hole is equal to the river flow rate above the dam, the height of the water behind the dam stays constant. If you make the hole smaller (more insulation), the height of the water behind the dam will get bigger (higher temperature). As the height of water gets bigger, the water pressure down at the bottom will increase, and the flow rate out of the hole will increase. Eventually the flow rate out of the hole will equal the flow rate of the river, and the water behind the dam will be at a new higher constant. (Unless the dam is too low and the water flows over the top, or the dam is too weak for the higher pressure and falls apart. No analogy is perfect.)
I think the funds are not salary, but rather research funding. It gets used to pay for equipment, hire staff, and do academic stuff. Similar "Canada Research Chairs" have been given out over the past few years - maybe even decades.
Oh, the CRC system has been in place since 2000 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Everything was better back then.
That has been true since Aristotle.
Or not. I think we have a tendency to look at the past through rose-colored glasses.
Domestic violence was higher, but we didn't talk about it.
Drunk driving was higher, but we didn't talk about it.
There were fewer school shootings, but far from zero: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
There were less opportunities for women or minorities.
All in all, while there have been many changes in society that might not seem positive, there have also been many that have been clearly positive. On balance, I think I am better off now compared to then, and not just because I am older and richer.
Yeah. It is absurd for most individuals to have that kind of decision-making power; that's why most individuals do not ever get anything near that amount. Some individuals, though, are worthy of it, and the whole point of the Free Market is to do things like find such people.
Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahah, oh you are so funny.
If you really think that the billionaires of the world have magically be selected by "the Free Market" as being "worthy" of this type of decision-making power, you are not really living in the same world as the rest of us.
Sure, I can believe that they might be, on average, a bit smarter or more competent than "the rest of us", but the biggest difference is one of good fortune. Being in the right place at the right time with the right skills could in theory be something that a brilliant person could plan, but for the most part the differences between those with "regular" success and those with "amazing" success are purely luck.
"Outliers" by Gladwell does a pretty good job of examining some of these issues.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
So far, such "right answer" seems to be the Standard Model, a theory which is typically regarded as “the pinnacle of science” or even “the theory of almost everything.” The Standard Model poses that the whole physical world is reduced to exactly 61 different kind of zero-sized point-particles, entities that somehow interact through four non-contact interactions, forces that are simultaneously also zero-sized point-particles. In addition, each of these 61 different kinds of extensionless entities may demonstrate the incomprehensible wave-particle paradox (as Feynman reminded us, "Nobody understands quantum mechanics"). All this activity happens, it is claimed, in 4D "curved" spacetime. In addition, absolutely all that was created from nothing sometime ago, starting from an "initial singularity" of "infinite density".
Just a quick reminder of the so-called right answer.
Yeah, the "Standard Model" is intellectually unsatisfying, and the philosophical implications of physical interpretations of the math of Quantum Mechanics seem bizarre in the extreme.
But that shit has given and continues to give extremely precise predictions that match experimental measurements to levels that beggar the imagination. If this is "wrong", it is really hard to imagine what "right" could possibly be.
I'm having trouble figuring out how to comment without manually copying part of my username into the body of my post. Can anyone help me figure out how to not do that? Everyone else has this figured out but me.
Terje
Log in first?
I highly doubt a pair of consumer-grade AMD RX580s gaming cards would last mining ETH for over 3 years.
There is that.
I was just looking at a client's office where a system doing file backup duties is located in a space that is heated by electricity. For the most part, the system is idle as the scheduled backup tasks are not running constantly and don't actually use a lot of computing power. We have considered setting up something like mining software or Folding@home to do something useful with some of the energy being used to heat the space. Not running the software in the summer would be a good idea. One should be able to run such software in a way that doesn't dramatically decrease the useful lifespan of the hardware.
Whattomine.com says your profit is 2.66 bucks a day using 2x 580 cards with 60 MH/s mining speed. You would recover your investment after... 1354 days of NON STOP mining, provided the cards hold for that long, which I highly, highly doubt.
http://whattomine.com/coins?ut...
This solution is one of the most retarded I've heard of.
If you are already heating with electricity, your "cost of electricity" is effective $0.00/kwh rather than $0.10/kwh since you are paying for the energy whether you run this rig or not.
Using ht
Yes, Hillary won the popular vote, but from just two districts in LA and one in NYC. Had polls weighted a person's per-capita electoral value, Trump was obviously winning in a landslide.
What does that mean "but from just two districts in LA and one in NYC"? Clinton won the popular vote by about 2.9 million votes, sure. I am willing to entertain that there are two districts in LA and one in NYC that had an imbalance of 2.9 million votes in Clinton's favor - but so what? To deny that Clinton won the popular vote nation-wide because one or a few regions had particular voting patterns is similar to questioning the validity of Trump's electoral college win by saying something like "Yes, Donald won the electoral college, but from just one state (Texas)."
Nobody who has any knowledge of the electoral voting system thought that the popular vote total has any direct bearing on the winner of the election. However, national popular vote polls do give useful input to models of how individual states' electoral college seats are likely to be assigned. As fivethirtyeight.com pointed out - there was a lot of spotty journalism out there in regards to recognizing the complexity of the electoral college and how to interpret polls.
http://fivethirtyeight.com/fea...
That's some interesting revisionist history you have there. I remember the polls putting Clinton as winning by a wide margin. Could you remind me who won?
A fun little article if you think I'm wrong, feel free to post your evidence to counter mine if you'd like.
The link you posted ( https://www.npr.org/2016/11/14... ) does not seem to match your statement. In fact point #1 is basically what I was saying. It states as point #1 that the polls (at least the Real Clear Politics' final polling average) in 2016 were closer to the vote results than they were in 2012, when they were off by about 3.2%, well within the stated uncertainty ranges. The polls were indicating nothing like a "landslide", and just like "Brexit", a single "polling error" away from deciding between choice "A" or choice "B".
Then, after basically saying, "the polls were within their measurement capabilities", the author of the article goes on to look at reasons why the polls might have been wrong. But they were not "wrong"! They were correct within the published accuracy of their measurement! Might there be ways to increase their accuracy? Sure, but it is impossible to eliminate all uncertainties, even if you somehow were able to actually poll every voter in the country and get their true feelings about how they would vote - some of them will change their minds, and some of them will die before the polls even open. The polls were "better" in 2016 than 2012. Hopefully they will be better still in 2018.
In any case, maybe I just wasn't reading widely enough before the elections and maybe there was a widespread narrative that Clinton was winning by a wide margin - I was mostly looking at poll aggregators. So maybe I had less of a feeling that the last few months before the election had Clinton with an insurmountable lead. I went into election night thinking that Trump had about a 20% chance of winning, as reflected by the polling and various models derived from that. It made the morning news that he had won a surprise, but not something amazingly unexpected. I think the betting markets had similar odds.
Here is a postmortem from late January, with slightly better data than the mid-November NPR article linked above:
http://fivethirtyeight.com/fea...
"Another myth is that Trump’s victory represented some sort of catastrophic failure for the polls. Trump outperformed his national polls by only 1 to 2 percentage points in losing the popular vote to Clinton, making them slightly closer to the mark than they were in 2012. Meanwhile, he beat his polls by only 2 to 3 percentage points in the average swing state.3 Certainly, there were individual pollsters that had some explaining to do, especially in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, where Trump beat his polls by a larger amount. But the result was not some sort of massive outlier; on the contrary, the polls were pretty much as accurate as they’d been, on average, since 1968."
You did learn that polls aren't to be believed after the 2016 election, right? Especially when it's about an unpopular view within the media that people are worried about being stigmatized for.
The polls were pretty accurate in 2016. Much of the analysis and narrative around the polls turned out to be incorrect, but the polls themselves were not bad. There is little evidence that the polls had significant issues with people unwilling to state their true preferences.