You really missed one of the big points. All the engineering and complexity that goes into making a gas/electric hybrid only brings them up to efficiency levels that diesels were at to begin with.
In my opinion, Biodiesel fueled cars are a far better solution than gas/electric hybrids.
This should be blindingly obvious, but I'm always amazed at the number of people who make this exact mistake. Top two rules:
1. Do NOT Piss off the Judge.
2. Do not piss off your defense attorney.
If you cause #1, you will cause #2, and you will be well and truly fucked.
Oh yeah, #3 Do NOT testify in your own defense (And even worse, Do NOT insist against the best advise of your lawyer that you be allowed to). It doesn't matter how well you think you'll do, or how innocent you think your ass is. It is almost always (i.e. 99% of the time) a horrible idea.
All that and you still missed the point. Should you have learned not to listen to "experts" or learned to be skeptical about where your information comes from, maybe to ask questions like "What motivations does this person have to lie to me, and thus how might they be likely to distort the truth?" Such skepticism is often useful in all aspects of life, but is especially so regarding economic issues, by which I mean, If someone is trying to sell you margarine, that in and of itself is sufficient reason to be skeptical of their statements and to do independent research yourself.
Because Lucas was involved. He had intelligent people willing to tell him to keep his hands off of SW and ESB. The skill of the directors of those films (who are not george lucas) shines through. Lucas is a lousy director, a hack writer, but a very successful businessman.
Call me crazy, but I regard for-profit organization initially not with hatred, but suspicion and skepticism. Here we have Canonical, they support Ubuntu, which I and many other people enjoy and like. Shouldn't that be worth some moral credit? Have they done something horrible and evil that outweighs the good of supporting Ubuntu?
Don't get me wrong, I hate Microsoft, but I hate them for REASONS. Namely, they're products aren't very good and are often very bad, they're a convicted monopolist, and they engage in a wide variety of Anti-competitive business practices. Not just "because," but because of reasons that I can articulate in a reasoned argument.
Um, no. The correct interpretation is that Software is like a Book. You read the book, use it for research, loan it to your friends, sell the physical copy that you purchased, set it on fire, cut it up and rearrange the pieces, and a number of other actions. What you are arguing is that a EULA is a valid license because using software is copying and distributing. This is false.
The rights that I describe above are the rights that you have automatically, EULA's try to remove them. The GPL, on the other hand, gives you the right to copy and distribute software, as long as you meet certain conditions (mostly related to providing the source). These are rights above and beyond what you have.
The GPL is not a EULA, it is a legitimate contract. EULAs on the other hand, are bad faith contracts intended to trick people into giving up rights that they have anyway. They are thus generally void on their face.
See, that's why I think claiming ultralight computers contributing to obesity is so absurd. The people who are actually in shape, and carry their shit around by foot or bike, are some of the people most likely to be interested in having a Eee PC always with them, carried in a messenger bag or pannier. The guy driving the H2 hummer chewing down on deep fried lard is going to be more interested in the "Quad Core SLI RAID 19" 'Notebook'" So he can play teh haloz with his frat buddies.
No, you don't have a regular laptop. At 2lbs, the Eee 700 or 900 is about 2/3 the weight of a Thinkpad X61, about 1/2 the bulk, and about 1/2 the price as well. An X61 is a very small notebook by most peoples standards to begin with. It's already half the weight of the "average" ~5lb notebook, and much smaller than 6-8lb desktop replacement monstrosities. The Eee wins, even at the ~$500 I expect the US release to be priced at, by being a notebook you can literally carry in your (man)purse. Like a lightweight messenger bag.
And, with XP being taken out back and shot in favor of the new baby, why didn't they try to come up with a scaled-down version of Vista that would run on the hardware? Surely they'd want to disprove the claims that Vista was a hardware pig any chance they got. Because they Realized they can't, the fact that Vista IS a bloated hog coming back to bite them in the ass.
Regarding CE: Microsoft seems positively schizophrenic when it comes to positioning CE in any market...it's theoretically their "embedded OS" but out SAN uses "XP Embedded" as its controlling software, and apparently CE is relegated to basic phone use, down from the PDAs and smaller pseudo-PCs of the late 90s, early '00s (much like the Eee machine, come to think of it...) Those smaller psuedo-PCs, like the NEC Mobile Pro line, which were very similar to the Eee sucked because they were: A. Expensive, usually $800+, and B. Could not run standard full desktop apps. The Eee can, which is part of the reason for its success. It can do everything a Thinkpad X61 can do, just more slowly, but at about 1/3 the price, and almost 1/2 the size and weight. The "1/3 the price" is important, because it has made people much more likely to actually buy the machine.
Firstly, I've read that chapter in "The Blind Watchmaker" very recently, and as I said before, you're quoting the statements out of context. It's preceded by 10 pages of discussion on what he is intending the word "miraculous" to mean, which you are omitting.
Secondly, when you talk about "miraculous events which cannot occur if there wasn't someone/thing causing that event," well, name one. The trouble with "miracles" in the sense you mean is that there is no situation in which sufficient evidence exists that the event occurred rather than the claim being merely a mistake or an outright falsehood.
Third, it's all very well to ascribe properties to some kind of ideological construct. "God is a being with no beginning and no end." OK. Invisible Unicorns are Pink.
Demonstrate, in a logically consistent way, how "God is a being with no beginning and no end." has any more relevance as a statement that describes the state of the world than "Invisible Unicorns are Pink." or, for that matter, "Elvis Lives."
Merely because you can define some object doesn't mean it exists. I can declare that there exists on a Cartesian plane a square with 6 sides. That doesn't make it true. I can claim that there exists a chest in my closet filled with solid gold bars, wave a wand over the door and chant "So mote it be!" That doesn't make it true either. Similarly, you can chant over and over that there exists a "God" who is "a being with no beginning and no end" but that doesn't make it true.
You are engaging in "truthiness" of the most ridiculous sort. You want "god" to be real, so you assert it over and over, but that has no effect on whether "god" describes any phenomena that exists in the Universe.
You didn't understand. His explanation is very clear. He acknowledges that squid and ducks and dandelions and bats and humans are exceptional objects, and thus require more explanation than physics (at the moment) is capable of providing. This is why we have a field of study called Biology. That's what that whole discussion that you selectively quote is about. Admittedly he's using a term that is too easily misunderstood, miraculous. He is using it to mean events that in retrospect are extremely unlikely, but points out that all outcomes are equally miraculous in this sense.
You, on the other hand, are using "miraculous" to mean an event that violates the laws of physics.
It's all very well to say "I define God to be an entity with no origin," but that doesn't explain it does it? This is all too similar to Descartes "proof" of God's existence. Just because you can formulate a description of something doesn't mean it exists.
I disagree strongly. Windows XP Luna and Vista Whateverthefuckitscalled are by far the worst offenders in this regard. What's wrong with XFCE after a little tweaking to personal preference? Xubuntu and Zenwalk are both pretty tasteful out of the box. OS X really isn't bad either, Panther and Tiger (and leopard after the latest patches) are solid, and have high contrast UI elements. It's convenient.
Speaking of which has anybody noticed all the websites going to a light gray text on white background? Even the BBC gone to this, its horrible, and nearly unreadable.
My objection is this, what exactly do you expect your gun to do for you when a swat team randomly kicks down your door? Assuming that you actually use it, and AREN'T summarily killed, the Police and DA are going to push for the death penalty because "you're a cop killer." It doesn't matter that the police were violating the law. You're fucked.
It's not fair. I agree 100%. But I said earlier that there seems little interest in doing anything about it, and that's the problem. The way things are set up, guns are more of liability to victims of violence than they are a protection. Guns may make you feel better, but they don't do anything to really help the reality that you can be vanished to Guantanamo Bay (Or who knows where else) at any time.
Far too many Cops in the USA have a very Cowboy attitude. And even more unfortunately, it seems the people in the USA have very little interest in doing anything about it. There is exactly zero chance of any kind of disciplinary action being taken against officers for dangerously aggressive behavior, up until the point that they shoot an innocent person. Even then, in my experience of cases I know about in detail, it is very, very iffy. If the victim is black, there's no hope at all, unless it is caught on tape. Hispanic victims are about the same. The only things I know that tend to get a reaction are if the victim is rich and white, OR if the cop blows up and shoots a brother officer in anger (which happens more often than ANYBODY realizes. Why? It often doesn't get prosecuted and is hushed up by the local media). That's about the only thing I know that will actually get a cop fired PDQ.
There are WAY too many dangerously unhinged individuals with the attitude of "I AM THE LAW!" running around in uniform.
Heinlein did. If you read "For Us, The Living" written in 1938 or so, all the female characters in the book have careers, including a medical doctor (treating a man no less, if you're familiar at all with medical attitudes in the 1930's it should be clear just how progressive that is). It also includes far more permissive sexuality than we have now, and also birth control is at least implied.
I'm not saying he was a saint, but Heinlein was pretty consistent at asserting the intellectual equality of women in his writing.
Bush's posturing on a manned mission to Mars pisses me off. And it pisses me off even more when people claim they think he's sincere. By my estimation there is no way in hell we will manage to be first to return to the Moon, and an approximately equal chance of making it to Mars.
I've got a hell of lot more faith in China, or even a reformed USSR's ability to reach either goal first, and that depresses me immensely. The USA just ain't what it used to be.
No monopolist is ever going to support a product from a direct competitor. Plenty of other companies do so. Toshiba, Sony, Panasonic, and Samsung all directly compete in many of their core markets. Yet they also often adopt and support technologies developed by one another. The difference? None of them are monopolies and accustomed to monopolistic control in a market.
This excuse is such horseshit. Why? Because even in the areas of the United states that do have population densities similar to (or even higher than) Europe or Asia, the public transport is still abysmal compared to Japan Rail or the London Underground. It's even horseshit compared to the historical fact of America's old Rail system (circa say, 1950) which provided far better and cheaper long distance transport than is available today. Public transportation isn't just about getting you to the supermarket, it is also about getting you from LA to New York City or Chicago with a minimum of trouble and aggravation. And by almost any metric you choose, its more of a pain in the ass to do today than it was in the middle of the last century.
Hah! Wanna see a real shit storm go down? Suggest the possibility that automobiles are not God's Gift to the American people. The merest hint that people ought to think about Public Transportation and the benefits that a robust transportation infrastructure could provide, and you'll hit 0 faster than you can say "RDF." You'll also get a ton of posts about how Public transport sucks from people that have never been to Europe, or Asia, and who's only experience with Public Transportation is "That one time I had to ride the bus when my car was in the shop." Which totally ignores that, Duh, Public transportation in the USA does suck, because everyone is expected to drive a car.
Sorry, but while the case law may be clear on the issues, that is irrelevant. The judgements are bad law, in the same style as the doctrine of "Separate but Equal."
Sorry, but technology has developed, and as a result, some things are less valuable than they used to be. Shockingly, the buggy whip makers want to maintain the value of their product, but that's just not in society's best interest.
Also, Privity doesn't matter. For a number of reasons. Arguably, these are contracts made in bad faith on the part of the sellers. Hell, the provisions often made for denial of liability by sellers make them so on their face. Whether the legal system chooses to acknowledge this or not, it certainly provides the moral backing for Civil Disobedience. Other grounds include the highly questionable benefit of these corporations at serving society's interest in the promotion of art.
In my opinion, the convenience isn't worth it. At all. Mostly because people are not merely a threat to themselves while behind the wheel, they are a threat to pedestrians, cyclists, and children. I'd also argue that "Car Culture" contributes to our sedentary life style (which isn't good for long term health, remember? It causes hypertension, increases risk of heart attack, stroke, and generally lowers quality of life)
Cars suck. Big Time. In fact, pretty much everything that is wrong with America today, I can probably figure out a way to implicate America's love affair with the automobile as a major contributing factor. Dependence on Foreign Oil? Check. Consumer Debt Culture? A yep. Urban Sprawl? Check! Fast-Food as encouraged by the drive through window (further increasing the size of our fat asses)? Check! I can keep going all night folks.
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In my opinion, Biodiesel fueled cars are a far better solution than gas/electric hybrids.
1. Do NOT Piss off the Judge.
2. Do not piss off your defense attorney.
If you cause #1, you will cause #2, and you will be well and truly fucked.
Oh yeah, #3 Do NOT testify in your own defense (And even worse, Do NOT insist against the best advise of your lawyer that you be allowed to). It doesn't matter how well you think you'll do, or how innocent you think your ass is. It is almost always (i.e. 99% of the time) a horrible idea.
All that and you still missed the point. Should you have learned not to listen to "experts" or learned to be skeptical about where your information comes from, maybe to ask questions like "What motivations does this person have to lie to me, and thus how might they be likely to distort the truth?" Such skepticism is often useful in all aspects of life, but is especially so regarding economic issues, by which I mean, If someone is trying to sell you margarine, that in and of itself is sufficient reason to be skeptical of their statements and to do independent research yourself.
Because Lucas was involved. He had intelligent people willing to tell him to keep his hands off of SW and ESB. The skill of the directors of those films (who are not george lucas) shines through. Lucas is a lousy director, a hack writer, but a very successful businessman.
Also because R2D2 is a perv. Clearly. Which makes him awesome.
Call me crazy, but I regard for-profit organization initially not with hatred, but suspicion and skepticism. Here we have Canonical, they support Ubuntu, which I and many other people enjoy and like. Shouldn't that be worth some moral credit? Have they done something horrible and evil that outweighs the good of supporting Ubuntu?
Don't get me wrong, I hate Microsoft, but I hate them for REASONS. Namely, they're products aren't very good and are often very bad, they're a convicted monopolist, and they engage in a wide variety of Anti-competitive business practices. Not just "because," but because of reasons that I can articulate in a reasoned argument.
Why should I hate Canonical?
Not that I'm suggesting anyone should. Just y'know, it'd be a lot more expedient than a petition.
The rights that I describe above are the rights that you have automatically, EULA's try to remove them. The GPL, on the other hand, gives you the right to copy and distribute software, as long as you meet certain conditions (mostly related to providing the source). These are rights above and beyond what you have.
The GPL is not a EULA, it is a legitimate contract. EULAs on the other hand, are bad faith contracts intended to trick people into giving up rights that they have anyway. They are thus generally void on their face.
See, that's why I think claiming ultralight computers contributing to obesity is so absurd. The people who are actually in shape, and carry their shit around by foot or bike, are some of the people most likely to be interested in having a Eee PC always with them, carried in a messenger bag or pannier. The guy driving the H2 hummer chewing down on deep fried lard is going to be more interested in the "Quad Core SLI RAID 19" 'Notebook'" So he can play teh haloz with his frat buddies.
I suppose Ultralight backpackers thru-hike the Appalachian trial using ultra light camping gear because they're too obese and out of shape?
No, you don't have a regular laptop. At 2lbs, the Eee 700 or 900 is about 2/3 the weight of a Thinkpad X61, about 1/2 the bulk, and about 1/2 the price as well. An X61 is a very small notebook by most peoples standards to begin with. It's already half the weight of the "average" ~5lb notebook, and much smaller than 6-8lb desktop replacement monstrosities. The Eee wins, even at the ~$500 I expect the US release to be priced at, by being a notebook you can literally carry in your (man)purse. Like a lightweight messenger bag.
Secondly, when you talk about "miraculous events which cannot occur if there wasn't someone/thing causing that event," well, name one. The trouble with "miracles" in the sense you mean is that there is no situation in which sufficient evidence exists that the event occurred rather than the claim being merely a mistake or an outright falsehood.
Third, it's all very well to ascribe properties to some kind of ideological construct. "God is a being with no beginning and no end." OK. Invisible Unicorns are Pink.
Demonstrate, in a logically consistent way, how "God is a being with no beginning and no end." has any more relevance as a statement that describes the state of the world than "Invisible Unicorns are Pink." or, for that matter, "Elvis Lives."
Merely because you can define some object doesn't mean it exists. I can declare that there exists on a Cartesian plane a square with 6 sides. That doesn't make it true. I can claim that there exists a chest in my closet filled with solid gold bars, wave a wand over the door and chant "So mote it be!" That doesn't make it true either. Similarly, you can chant over and over that there exists a "God" who is "a being with no beginning and no end" but that doesn't make it true.
You are engaging in "truthiness" of the most ridiculous sort. You want "god" to be real, so you assert it over and over, but that has no effect on whether "god" describes any phenomena that exists in the Universe.
You, on the other hand, are using "miraculous" to mean an event that violates the laws of physics.
It's all very well to say "I define God to be an entity with no origin," but that doesn't explain it does it? This is all too similar to Descartes "proof" of God's existence. Just because you can formulate a description of something doesn't mean it exists.
Speaking of which has anybody noticed all the websites going to a light gray text on white background? Even the BBC gone to this, its horrible, and nearly unreadable.
I've never seen anyone seriously argue that the woman depicted in the Mona Lisa (if it is actually a woman, there is considerable debate on that point) is attractive. Which has very little to do with how significant a painting is judged to be. If it did, Alberto Vargas would be listed as one of the greatest masters of western art. http://fineart.elib.com/fineart.php?prev=Ethnicity/Peruvian-American&dir=Site_index%2FPeruvian-American%2FVargas
It's not fair. I agree 100%. But I said earlier that there seems little interest in doing anything about it, and that's the problem. The way things are set up, guns are more of liability to victims of violence than they are a protection. Guns may make you feel better, but they don't do anything to really help the reality that you can be vanished to Guantanamo Bay (Or who knows where else) at any time.
There are WAY too many dangerously unhinged individuals with the attitude of "I AM THE LAW!" running around in uniform.
I'm not saying he was a saint, but Heinlein was pretty consistent at asserting the intellectual equality of women in his writing.
I've got a hell of lot more faith in China, or even a reformed USSR's ability to reach either goal first, and that depresses me immensely. The USA just ain't what it used to be.
No monopolist is ever going to support a product from a direct competitor. Plenty of other companies do so. Toshiba, Sony, Panasonic, and Samsung all directly compete in many of their core markets. Yet they also often adopt and support technologies developed by one another. The difference? None of them are monopolies and accustomed to monopolistic control in a market.
This excuse is such horseshit. Why? Because even in the areas of the United states that do have population densities similar to (or even higher than) Europe or Asia, the public transport is still abysmal compared to Japan Rail or the London Underground. It's even horseshit compared to the historical fact of America's old Rail system (circa say, 1950) which provided far better and cheaper long distance transport than is available today. Public transportation isn't just about getting you to the supermarket, it is also about getting you from LA to New York City or Chicago with a minimum of trouble and aggravation. And by almost any metric you choose, its more of a pain in the ass to do today than it was in the middle of the last century.
Hah! Wanna see a real shit storm go down? Suggest the possibility that automobiles are not God's Gift to the American people. The merest hint that people ought to think about Public Transportation and the benefits that a robust transportation infrastructure could provide, and you'll hit 0 faster than you can say "RDF." You'll also get a ton of posts about how Public transport sucks from people that have never been to Europe, or Asia, and who's only experience with Public Transportation is "That one time I had to ride the bus when my car was in the shop." Which totally ignores that, Duh, Public transportation in the USA does suck, because everyone is expected to drive a car.
Sorry, but technology has developed, and as a result, some things are less valuable than they used to be. Shockingly, the buggy whip makers want to maintain the value of their product, but that's just not in society's best interest.
Also, Privity doesn't matter. For a number of reasons. Arguably, these are contracts made in bad faith on the part of the sellers. Hell, the provisions often made for denial of liability by sellers make them so on their face. Whether the legal system chooses to acknowledge this or not, it certainly provides the moral backing for Civil Disobedience. Other grounds include the highly questionable benefit of these corporations at serving society's interest in the promotion of art.
Cars suck. Big Time. In fact, pretty much everything that is wrong with America today, I can probably figure out a way to implicate America's love affair with the automobile as a major contributing factor. Dependence on Foreign Oil? Check. Consumer Debt Culture? A yep. Urban Sprawl? Check! Fast-Food as encouraged by the drive through window (further increasing the size of our fat asses)? Check! I can keep going all night folks.