I feel for you - I feel the same way when the tires refuse to spin when I am stuck in the snow.
However, I am not certain that your (or my) feeling is actually "correct" in this situation. Assuming that the computer system is actually working to prevent the wheels from slipping - I suspect that we are getting significantly more acceleration from the non-slipping (and non-screeching) tires than we would if they were spinning.
My memory from way back when was that rubber-road static was about double rubber-road kinetic but I cannot find actual numbers for kinetic friction coefficients:
If one wheel is starting to slip, but the other isn't I don't know if your total acceleration is better than with both not slipping but at a lower rate. I suspect however that having unequal accelerating forces between the two drive wheels causes very difficult handling.
Around here, we could save tons of lives by having better ROADs. Most roads here have no space berm off to the side (just trees), tons of random curves, hills, blind spots, etc. They'd save tons of lives (at huge cost, no doubt) if they straightened and flattened the roads and made them a little wider.
I understand that in BC (west coast of Canada) their socialized car insurance company which has a monopoly on car insurance uses some of their "profits" to improve roads. According to their propaganda, "A 2009 independent evaluation concluded that for every dollar invested, ICBC and customers see a return five to 12 times the investment. That is, for every dollar invested, ICBC and customers save $5.60 over two years and $12.80 over five years in reduced crash costs."
As the single source for car insurance, it makes economic sense to fund this type of program, which would be much harder to structure if there were multiple competing insurance providers.
Extending your logic, the tax bill on an 80,000 lb 18-wheeler that hauls food to your local grocery would be 2.56 million times the taxes paid on a 2,000 lb car.
So, the question is how much are you willing to pay for strawberries?
But the thing is, we are already paying that price when we build and repair the road - the question is how do we divide up that bill? Currently we pay most of that bill based on gas tax, but we could collect the same amount of money based on some "damage to the road" tax. Strawberries could become more expensive, but other things would become cheaper.
If we did it this way, we would probably see a bunch more stuff delivered by rail, and lots more smaller delivery vehicles. I don't know what the cost of the driver is as a total fraction of deliver costs, but maybe it would be cheaper to have 20 drivers in 20 small vans rather than one large semi-trailer with one driver - certainly that would be easier on the roads. And it would help with providing jobs. Of course it would use more gasoline, and thus probably have a bigger CO2 emission, but maybe decreased road repairs would make up for that? Would the decreased road repair work give us a bunch of road crews out of work I wonder?
Even worse than the lack of evidence of the underlying uniqueness of the fingerprints themselves, I have heard that there are very few studies determining the reliability of fingerprint analysis - even if they are unique, if the technician makes errors you can get false positives.
The kind of paranoid society where, if it turns out that the volunteer football couch turns out to be a sex offender (guilty of anything from rape to urinating in public or mooning a copper), the ravenous horde known as parents will sue the club.
Probably there would not be a lawsuit unless the coach (ha - you said couch!) ends up being accused of something, and in that case it wouldn't be too surprising that people would be looking for someone to blame (beyond of course just the perp). It is hard for humans to accept that sometimes bad things happen and that trying to guard against every possible bad outcome is counterproductive.
But you cannot help enough people with this type of "I'll look into it" type of assistance to stop them all from leaving. If the process is unsatisfying, people will not contribute as much. If they feel their contributions are not valued, wikipedia is in trouble.
As a small business owner, there is nothing more that I want to do than to drive my server down to the local mall when I'm having a problem. (Hint: Successful small businesses generally don't use Apple products).
I am not sure how much "generally" means, but I do a fair bit of support for successful small business people using Apple products, and turn away a whole bunch of potential work from successful small business people using Windows systems ('cause I do not want to work on Windows systems). In my experience, those with both types of systems encounter more troubles that are harder to address on the Windows side of things.
In any case, I see little evidence that using Apple products is a barrier to being successful, and for most of my clients moving away from Windows products tends to be good business decision.
People rent out their homes all over the world, all the time, and have been doing so since forever. Heck, there is an entire class of people (academics on sabbatical) that do so on a reoccurring basis. (See http://sabbaticalhomes.com/ and http://academichomes.com/ for websites set up to assist in this type of thing - I doubt either of them is raising a billion in funding however).
References and a bit of biographical history probably go a long way to preventing huge problems, but proper insurance would also seem to be appropriate.
With all that said, if someone was actively trying to be an evil bastard, they could probably fake stuff to get past all that background checking.
For the most part however, the number of total fuckups like this are pretty small compared to the number of rentals that go off with no or only minor difficulties. The value to the renter and the rentee in most cases is pretty high so I doubt very much that this story is in any way going to limit the future marketplace.
NEWSFLASH: People are stupid, irrational, and prone to violence. Film at 11.
What's the solution? Segregate the classes? Maybe we can have a caste system, like India.
No, I don't have any great solution to propose, but telling those less well off something like "hey, this slop is better than the stuff they get in that other country over there" doesn't seem like it is likely to have much success.
So if it 90k jobs are created installing solar panels wouldn't it be better if 100 million jobs were created by having people on exercise bikes with generators?
Actually, it might not be a completely insane idea depending on your point of view. If we get to the point where efficiency gains have created enough wealth for everyone to live well off of, we still need to figure out some way of distributing that wealth. We could tax the crap out of the wealthy and just give the money to the poor and unemployed, or we create "make-work" jobs and distribute the money that way.
Personally, I am more in favour of some gradual legislated decrease in the work week (its been at 40 hours since forever and we've had efficiency increases by factors of ten since then) or the work year (more vacation time is always popular). In a hundred years we should have 99% employment with a five hour work-week.
You are wrong. People in the US who don't work at all and live entirely off of handouts live better than 99% of the people that have ever lived on this planet.
That may have some basis it truth, but it ignores the psychological effect that people tend to compare themselves not with 99% of humanity, but with the people right next to them. If a large fraction of a country's population thinks it is being given the shaft, social unrest can become a real problem.
To be fair, Canadian elections tend to have a much simpler ballot, with just one set of choices for the local Member of Parliament. In the US one is often voting for members of the House, the Senate, the Governor, the President, various judges, local sheriffs, possible referendums, and all sorts of other crazy things. Making those things easy to fill out and easy to count is not always simple.
All electronic do-dads are essentially 100% efficient - as heaters. Other than some sound energy and a bit of electrical energy being carried away by the network connection, conservation of energy tells you that essentially all of the electric energy used by the device ends up as heat energy (where else could it go?). In terms of computational use of that energy, I think people talk about energy use per unit of computation - however it makes no sense to talk about such efficiency in percentages since there is no easily defined "100%" to be a goal.
I think the Thunderbold display will work fine with a DisplayPort computer, but only as a display - you won't get to use the ehternet/USB/Firewire connections on the back of the display.
If you do not have a DisplayPort output, I don't know if anyone makes a DVI-to-DisplayPort (more accurately mini-DisplayPort) adapter.
Well, depending on your summer temperatures, it might make you more comfortable and at minimal costs if you change the colour when you need to change the roofing material anyway.
Second, I believe he may have been talking about the opportunity cost, not the cost of credit. If he spends $300 to paint his roof white, but he could have invested that $300 in a fund that earns 5% interest, then his true cost is more than $300, even if he pays cash.
You also need to factor in the tax savings. He needs to pay income tax on that 5% interest income, while the savings in cooling costs are essential tax-free - thus effectively reducing that 5% income by whatever his tax bracket it. vlm above says he figures it is about a four year payback, which is roughly equivalent to a 25% rate of return. It is not very easy to find such low risk investments paying 25%.
It would seem like there would be an opportunity for someone to start an investment fund where they collect a bunch of money from investors, paint a bunch of roofs for people, and then collect something like half of the money saved on cooling from the roofowners to pay off the investors' investments and profits. Heck, I think there are a few utilities doing that sort of thing with energy efficiency retrofit loans - the payments come out of the energy savings.
Apple's hard-linked Time Machine directories may be a case of the same thing. Since the directories are only created by the TM software itself, and the OSX file system doesn't permit hard-linked directories (for non-superusers?), there's no danger of loops appearing in the TM's directory tree. They may have just relaxed the restriction in this case, since the result will usually be a significant saving of disk space.
Not only disk space savings, but also huge amounts of time savings - starting at the top of the structure, as soon as an unmodified directory is encountered, you make a hard link and move on. If little has changed, there is not much file reading or writing.
Slashdot Mirror
Or you could put it into the trash can - aren't they found in places with dense crowds?
I feel for you - I feel the same way when the tires refuse to spin when I am stuck in the snow.
However, I am not certain that your (or my) feeling is actually "correct" in this situation. Assuming that the computer system is actually working to prevent the wheels from slipping - I suspect that we are getting significantly more acceleration from the non-slipping (and non-screeching) tires than we would if they were spinning.
My memory from way back when was that rubber-road static was about double rubber-road kinetic but I cannot find actual numbers for kinetic friction coefficients:
http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/friction-coefficients-d_778.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friction#Static_friction
If one wheel is starting to slip, but the other isn't I don't know if your total acceleration is better than with both not slipping but at a lower rate. I suspect however that having unequal accelerating forces between the two drive wheels causes very difficult handling.
Around here, we could save tons of lives by having better ROADs. Most roads here have no space berm off to the side (just trees), tons of random curves, hills, blind spots, etc. They'd save tons of lives (at huge cost, no doubt) if they straightened and flattened the roads and made them a little wider.
I understand that in BC (west coast of Canada) their socialized car insurance company which has a monopoly on car insurance uses some of their "profits" to improve roads. According to their propaganda, "A 2009 independent evaluation concluded that for every dollar invested, ICBC and customers see a return five to 12 times the investment. That is, for every dollar invested, ICBC and customers save $5.60 over two years and $12.80 over five years in reduced crash costs."
http://www.icbc.com/news/2011mar22-11
http://www.icbc.com/road-safety/safer-roads/invest-roads
As the single source for car insurance, it makes economic sense to fund this type of program, which would be much harder to structure if there were multiple competing insurance providers.
Extending your logic, the tax bill on an 80,000 lb 18-wheeler that hauls food to your local grocery would be 2.56 million times the taxes paid on a 2,000 lb car.
So, the question is how much are you willing to pay for strawberries?
But the thing is, we are already paying that price when we build and repair the road - the question is how do we divide up that bill? Currently we pay most of that bill based on gas tax, but we could collect the same amount of money based on some "damage to the road" tax. Strawberries could become more expensive, but other things would become cheaper.
If we did it this way, we would probably see a bunch more stuff delivered by rail, and lots more smaller delivery vehicles. I don't know what the cost of the driver is as a total fraction of deliver costs, but maybe it would be cheaper to have 20 drivers in 20 small vans rather than one large semi-trailer with one driver - certainly that would be easier on the roads. And it would help with providing jobs. Of course it would use more gasoline, and thus probably have a bigger CO2 emission, but maybe decreased road repairs would make up for that? Would the decreased road repair work give us a bunch of road crews out of work I wonder?
A taller vehicle is also inherently less stable and more prone to rollovers.
Even worse than the lack of evidence of the underlying uniqueness of the fingerprints themselves, I have heard that there are very few studies determining the reliability of fingerprint analysis - even if they are unique, if the technician makes errors you can get false positives.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fingerprint#Validity_of_fingerprinting_for_identification
The kind of paranoid society where, if it turns out that the volunteer football couch turns out to be a sex offender (guilty of anything from rape to urinating in public or mooning a copper), the ravenous horde known as parents will sue the club.
Probably there would not be a lawsuit unless the coach (ha - you said couch!) ends up being accused of something, and in that case it wouldn't be too surprising that people would be looking for someone to blame (beyond of course just the perp). It is hard for humans to accept that sometimes bad things happen and that trying to guard against every possible bad outcome is counterproductive.
But you cannot help enough people with this type of "I'll look into it" type of assistance to stop them all from leaving. If the process is unsatisfying, people will not contribute as much. If they feel their contributions are not valued, wikipedia is in trouble.
As a small business owner, there is nothing more that I want to do than to drive my server down to the local mall when I'm having a problem. (Hint: Successful small businesses generally don't use Apple products).
I am not sure how much "generally" means, but I do a fair bit of support for successful small business people using Apple products, and turn away a whole bunch of potential work from successful small business people using Windows systems ('cause I do not want to work on Windows systems). In my experience, those with both types of systems encounter more troubles that are harder to address on the Windows side of things.
In any case, I see little evidence that using Apple products is a barrier to being successful, and for most of my clients moving away from Windows products tends to be good business decision.
I eventually got an invite that worked. I could try sending you one if you gave me your email address.
If you want an invite, I'll gladly send you one - what's your email address?
I have seen a few writeups of people using their Prius as a whole-house UPS: http://www.priups.com/ http://hiwaay.net/~bzwilson/prius/priups.html
People rent out their homes all over the world, all the time, and have been doing so since forever. Heck, there is an entire class of people (academics on sabbatical) that do so on a reoccurring basis. (See http://sabbaticalhomes.com/ and http://academichomes.com/ for websites set up to assist in this type of thing - I doubt either of them is raising a billion in funding however).
References and a bit of biographical history probably go a long way to preventing huge problems, but proper insurance would also seem to be appropriate.
With all that said, if someone was actively trying to be an evil bastard, they could probably fake stuff to get past all that background checking.
For the most part however, the number of total fuckups like this are pretty small compared to the number of rentals that go off with no or only minor difficulties. The value to the renter and the rentee in most cases is pretty high so I doubt very much that this story is in any way going to limit the future marketplace.
NEWSFLASH: People are stupid, irrational, and prone to violence. Film at 11.
What's the solution? Segregate the classes? Maybe we can have a caste system, like India.
No, I don't have any great solution to propose, but telling those less well off something like "hey, this slop is better than the stuff they get in that other country over there" doesn't seem like it is likely to have much success.
So if it 90k jobs are created installing solar panels wouldn't it be better if 100 million jobs were created by having people on exercise bikes with generators?
Actually, it might not be a completely insane idea depending on your point of view. If we get to the point where efficiency gains have created enough wealth for everyone to live well off of, we still need to figure out some way of distributing that wealth. We could tax the crap out of the wealthy and just give the money to the poor and unemployed, or we create "make-work" jobs and distribute the money that way.
Personally, I am more in favour of some gradual legislated decrease in the work week (its been at 40 hours since forever and we've had efficiency increases by factors of ten since then) or the work year (more vacation time is always popular). In a hundred years we should have 99% employment with a five hour work-week.
You are wrong. People in the US who don't work at all and live entirely off of handouts live better than 99% of the people that have ever lived on this planet.
That may have some basis it truth, but it ignores the psychological effect that people tend to compare themselves not with 99% of humanity, but with the people right next to them. If a large fraction of a country's population thinks it is being given the shaft, social unrest can become a real problem.
Sure, just put me in charge of everything. First we switch to metric, then outlaw everything but Robertson screwdrivers.....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_screw_drives
To be fair, Canadian elections tend to have a much simpler ballot, with just one set of choices for the local Member of Parliament. In the US one is often voting for members of the House, the Senate, the Governor, the President, various judges, local sheriffs, possible referendums, and all sorts of other crazy things. Making those things easy to fill out and easy to count is not always simple.
All electronic do-dads are essentially 100% efficient - as heaters. Other than some sound energy and a bit of electrical energy being carried away by the network connection, conservation of energy tells you that essentially all of the electric energy used by the device ends up as heat energy (where else could it go?). In terms of computational use of that energy, I think people talk about energy use per unit of computation - however it makes no sense to talk about such efficiency in percentages since there is no easily defined "100%" to be a goal.
I was going to say that - only I couldn't come up with something as biting.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/11/07/23/1320207/Why-Waste-Servers-Heat
To give them credit, it has been three whole days....
I think the Thunderbold display will work fine with a DisplayPort computer, but only as a display - you won't get to use the ehternet/USB/Firewire connections on the back of the display.
If you do not have a DisplayPort output, I don't know if anyone makes a DVI-to-DisplayPort (more accurately mini-DisplayPort) adapter.
Well, depending on your summer temperatures, it might make you more comfortable and at minimal costs if you change the colour when you need to change the roofing material anyway.
Second, I believe he may have been talking about the opportunity cost, not the cost of credit. If he spends $300 to paint his roof white, but he could have invested that $300 in a fund that earns 5% interest, then his true cost is more than $300, even if he pays cash.
You also need to factor in the tax savings. He needs to pay income tax on that 5% interest income, while the savings in cooling costs are essential tax-free - thus effectively reducing that 5% income by whatever his tax bracket it. vlm above says he figures it is about a four year payback, which is roughly equivalent to a 25% rate of return. It is not very easy to find such low risk investments paying 25%.
It would seem like there would be an opportunity for someone to start an investment fund where they collect a bunch of money from investors, paint a bunch of roofs for people, and then collect something like half of the money saved on cooling from the roofowners to pay off the investors' investments and profits. Heck, I think there are a few utilities doing that sort of thing with energy efficiency retrofit loans - the payments come out of the energy savings.
I did not know that - thanks for the info.
Apple's hard-linked Time Machine directories may be a case of the same thing. Since the directories are only created by the TM software itself, and the OSX file system doesn't permit hard-linked directories (for non-superusers?), there's no danger of loops appearing in the TM's directory tree. They may have just relaxed the restriction in this case, since the result will usually be a significant saving of disk space.
Not only disk space savings, but also huge amounts of time savings - starting at the top of the structure, as soon as an unmodified directory is encountered, you make a hard link and move on. If little has changed, there is not much file reading or writing.
Don't all POSIX compliant OS support hard linking?
I don't think you can regularly hard link directories. See this for example: http://linuxgazette.net/93/tag/2.html