100% huh? I guess we're back to 1870 when no one has heard of a scrubber.
I have read credible reports that the mercury in a CFL is less than mercury vented from a coal plant powering a incandescent bulb, it is important to realize that most of the mercury in the coal is captured and properly disposed of, not vented to the atmosphere.
Interesting aside, a leading contributor to atmospheric mercury emissions is crematoriums (who typically don't have scrubbers) cremating people with mercury containing amalgam fillings.
How many times do I have to tell you? Turn right in 500 feet!
I had a TomTom in my rental care ~ a month ago, and the cheery voice started to grate on me. I thought it would be amusing if there had been a bitch setting (not that your wife is a bitch, in fact, I quite enjoy her company;P). I think having the GPS make a snarky comment about my lack of sense of direction (and lack of ability to follow directions...) might actually help me chuckle and keep my blood pressure down, as opposed to, "Recalculating route. In 19.1 miles make the next legal U-Turn."
Bush could have moved off the optimum point on the Laffer curve and still have increasing tax revenue, if (a) the population grew, or (b) the economy grew. Since both a and b are true, I'm not sold that cutting taxes was a good move.
Well it's been a while since I looked into it, but my guess is that during normal operation most (~80%) of the heat actually gets dumped to the turbines. After all, power plants are in the business of converting heat to electricity, and that doesn't happen in cooling stacks.
That said, I have no doubt that a modern(ish) (built c. 1970) nuclear power plant could handle a turbine seizure, and dump all that heat to cooling towers or somewhere.
Because the turbines is where your secondary coolant loop dumps most of its heat. If your heat sink stops functioning, your primary coolant heats up. If your power plant was designed by some guy in Russia in 1952, and you had bypassed the rudimentary safety interlocks, despite the Cyrillic script clearly telling you never to push this button, this could potentially cause a meltdown.
You might have a point if there were any games in the present of near future that approached photorealism. As it is the backside of the avatar consists of what? 15 polygons?
And no, I never did get turned on by Lara Croft (in the video games that is, Angelina Jolie is a different matter)
What I find disturbing is people who find there to be, first, a difference between the pixlated backsides, and second feel affected enough by staring at the pixelated bottom of an animated avatar to need to rationalize or justify their choice of an animated character.
All niche channels wouldn't cease to exist. Many of them are really cheap (since they don't include multi-million-dollar CG effects or famous "movie stars" etc
Many of them are really cheap today because partly because of low production values, and partly because they're subsidized by bundles. Also I didn't say they'd all cease to exist, I said they'd cease to exist or become prohibitively expensive. Maybe prohibitively was a bit of hyperbole, but I have no doubt that they'd increase in price. In fairness, I suppose there is a third possibility, production values could fall through the floor, access to neat things, could dry up, and they could hire all the least talented TV personalities as hosts.
There are two major flaws in your statement. The small guys will cease to exist part, and the reason to why we don't have a la carte today.
The small guys will cease to exist
And there are proofs today. There are two types of "niche" channels: * Those that are "free" in a sense that the commercial pays for all of them. Would they cease to exist? Nope. They already have their income. * Those that cost money (but May include commercial as well). One example is HBO. Will they cease to exist? Well, sir, if you take the time to look outside the window, and perhaps even outside the country of yours (terrifying thought), _I_ would pay for HBO if it could be broadcasted to me (over the internet or any other simple fashion), to the country I live in (not the US, believe it or not).
Again, cease to exist is only one of the possible ways of dealing with increased cost in a low demand market place. However, the "free" channels aren't really free. They have two income streams, first, as you say, ads, second, your cable provider pays for the right to show them to you. They in turn pass this cost on to you.
Also, if you think HBO is a little guy, perhaps you ought to, "take the time to look outside the window." HBO is a giant, which is why they can get away with their pricing scheme. Also, you can't just buy HBO, you buy a bundle of ~5 HBO channels, for about $25/mo. I'd like to have HBO, but I don't, because I find it too expensive. If the Discovery bundle were similarly priced, I'd drop that as well, even though I really like watching the Discovery family of networks.
Are they charging me for things I don't watch? Yes. But they're also charging my neighbor for things he doesn't watch, but I do. This way, the cost of things I watch is spread over the population. Without bundling, the the cost of the Discovery channel for instance, would be spread over a smaller population, so we'd all have to pay more than what is currently included in our cable bill. I don't understand how you don't see that.
Your flawed dog/car/bike/beer analogies break down, because the dog/car/bike/beer and their associated costs aren't shared among everyone.
See, that's why ala carte is stupid, while those channels might be popular with slashdot, they are massively unpopular with the public at large. What this means is that they will be expensive. Right now the reason there are some geek friendly channels on cable is because they are subsidized by the popular stuff. If ala carte pricing ever happens, the only affordable channels will be the popular ones, and all the niche channels will cease to exist, or be prohibitively expensive.
Look people, ala carte might sound good, until you realize that in order to remain revenue neutral the people who watch the popular channels will pay less, and those who watch the more obscure stuff will pay more. And who are we kidding the cable companies aren't going to roll out a new pricing scheme that is revenue neutral, so in reality only those who choose the only the most popular networks will pay the same (and get less), and anyone who wants anything out of the ordinary (read: slashdot) will pay more.
Well, I'm disappointed, I thought someone had seen the light.
Message to content producers: I know that you make money from me watching ads, and I'm ok with that. If you want me to see ads, all you have to do is put the content up for free, in a high quality (read not streaming) format, as soon as it airs. Leave the commercials in. If I can download a mpeg from your site (or better yet, with your bit torrent client,) I'll go there rather than searching the piratebay for the same content with commercials removed.
It's your job to convince your clients (the advertisers) that having your show sit on my computer with ads intact is almost as good as broadcasting commercials over the air. I probably won't sit through them, but I don't do that on the couch either.
One more time, it doesn't matter how many copies I make, or how many friends I give them too, so long as the ads are there. You should know this, it's how they pay your salary. Gaging interest and/or viewership isn't as hard as you make it out to be, make your bit torrent client report back when a download finishes, I won't mind, and the few slashdotters that do are trivial compared to the people that don't know.
That my be true for gen chem 1, but once you're taking courses like Advanced Thermodynamics of Rarefied Systems do you really think that there must be some people who are smart enough to have done the pre-reqs, but aren't smart enough to pass?
That meshes with my experience, and if you hadn't said it, I would have.
Look for most teachers (even in college) fitting the grades to a normal curve is too much work, and they'll lobby against it as stifling their teaching method, and probably for a good reason. In my experience, I always learned less in a class where I have to study the grading system than one where I had to study the material.
Grading on a normal distribution is dumb when (a) you have a class that attracts a smarter than average student (selection bias) (b) when you have a class that is taken by both students majoring in the topic and students from other disciplines (multiple populations) and (c) when the class isn't very large (insufficient samples).
Additionally, even if you have a class where none of these are issues, e.g. psych 101 at a large university, and the grades naturally fall into something resembling a normal distribution, the instructor will still have to arbitrarily reset the standard deviation - which isn't good practice no matter how you look at it.
Not quite, you can refuse to sell anything to anyone, provided that your reason for refusing to sell isn't discriminatory.
The definition doesn't revolve around the product, but rather around protected classes. You can refuse sale to someone on the grounds that they're annoying, but not on grounds that they're senior citizens. It gets sticky when you find senior citizens proportionally more annoying than a random sample of the general public.
I got my BS in mechanical engineering in 2004, and while a lot of people had laptops, if you weren't interacting with the other students, I can tell you that if you weren't learning as efficiently as those who were.
While I could go home, load up matlab, and solve most of the problems myself, I found that it took considerably more time than if I headed to the computer lab found someone else working on the assignment, and worked on it with them. This wasn't because we split up the work, it was because everybody learned faster when bouncing ideas off each other. While I know that there were a few people who did well (and a lot who did poorly) doing all the work themselves, nothing beats 10 people around a study hall trying to hash out the subtleties of a thermodynamics problem. One person eventually says, "Ooh - I get it thats an adiabatic process" he shows the rest of the room, everyone gains some understanding and works the problem.
I'm with you on everything - especially the blackboard part. As much as I sympathize regarding workload and power point, I always learned better when the teacher was writing during the lecture. This is especially true in chemistry. Not even animated power points quite capture the instructive power of erasing and re-drawing chemical bonds. I feel similarly about math and engineering courses, the teacher deriving expressions by hand is much more informative than watching line after line of a solved problem show up on the projector screen.
So, how does one know that what shows up on the receipt and what is actually counted are the same thing?
You keep talking about knowing if a vote was lost or extra votes were injected, but that isn't the only issue, you also have to know that the votes that are casted are counted correctly and not flipped.
Is there protection against this in the finer details of the cryptography (sorry, I'm not very familiar with cryptography) and if so, how do you prevent the receipt generated from displaying a hash that doesn't match the human readable screen? After all, I can complain that my vote got flipped, but by design, I can't prove that it was my vote, so I can't prove that I know what the vote should be.
No it is not. Health insurance is voluntary, if I choose not to be covered and pay out of my pocket, I can keep that money. I do not have that option with taxes.
And that is the giant gaping hole in both your idea, and the current health care system.
Today, people do opt out, mostly because they're to poor, too young, or too old to be able to afford employer provided health care, or they don't work and can't afford fronting the whole premium cost themselves.
However, when these people get sick or have an accident they don't suck it up, and they can't afford the cost out of pocket (if they could they'd have health insurance instead). Doctors and hospitals are compelled to help these people when something really bad happens, which invariably happens sooner than for those with health care due to the complete lack of preventative care.
So until opting out isn't an option, any health care system will experience the same failings as our current one.
I like to posit that Keanu Reeves is a fantastic actor, provided his character has no idea whats going on around him, see Bill and Ted, the original Matrix, and A Scanner Darkly, (possibly also the Lake House, but I'm not about to subject myself to that to find out.)
The second Keanu Reeves' character is has a flash of insight, he is completely unbelievable - see, Dracula, Chain Reaction, Matrix 2 and 3, and Constantine.
Movies like Speed, and The Devils Advocate are a mixed bag, the scenes where Keanu is confused are good, the scenes where his character displays some sort of talent are bad.
That's all well and good, but the fact remains that ancient people as a rule wrote or told stories about the gods, rather than about logical positivism.
Sure this probably helped to prop up the social order, but I still think it's safe to say that religion came first, and atheism followed. There may have been atheists from day 2 of human society, but the atheists have always been preceded, and outnumbered by the theists.
Slashdot Mirror
100% huh? I guess we're back to 1870 when no one has heard of a scrubber.
I have read credible reports that the mercury in a CFL is less than mercury vented from a coal plant powering a incandescent bulb, it is important to realize that most of the mercury in the coal is captured and properly disposed of, not vented to the atmosphere.
Interesting aside, a leading contributor to atmospheric mercury emissions is crematoriums (who typically don't have scrubbers) cremating people with mercury containing amalgam fillings.
I had a TomTom in my rental care ~ a month ago, and the cheery voice started to grate on me. I thought it would be amusing if there had been a bitch setting (not that your wife is a bitch, in fact, I quite enjoy her company
Bush could have moved off the optimum point on the Laffer curve and still have increasing tax revenue, if (a) the population grew, or (b) the economy grew. Since both a and b are true, I'm not sold that cutting taxes was a good move.
Well it's been a while since I looked into it, but my guess is that during normal operation most (~80%) of the heat actually gets dumped to the turbines. After all, power plants are in the business of converting heat to electricity, and that doesn't happen in cooling stacks.
That said, I have no doubt that a modern(ish) (built c. 1970) nuclear power plant could handle a turbine seizure, and dump all that heat to cooling towers or somewhere.
Because the turbines is where your secondary coolant loop dumps most of its heat. If your heat sink stops functioning, your primary coolant heats up. If your power plant was designed by some guy in Russia in 1952, and you had bypassed the rudimentary safety interlocks, despite the Cyrillic script clearly telling you never to push this button, this could potentially cause a meltdown.
You might have a point if there were any games in the present of near future that approached photorealism. As it is the backside of the avatar consists of what? 15 polygons?
And no, I never did get turned on by Lara Croft (in the video games that is, Angelina Jolie is a different matter)
What I find disturbing is people who find there to be, first, a difference between the pixlated backsides, and second feel affected enough by staring at the pixelated bottom of an animated avatar to need to rationalize or justify their choice of an animated character.
Again, cease to exist is only one of the possible ways of dealing with increased cost in a low demand market place. However, the "free" channels aren't really free. They have two income streams, first, as you say, ads, second, your cable provider pays for the right to show them to you. They in turn pass this cost on to you.
Also, if you think HBO is a little guy, perhaps you ought to, "take the time to look outside the window." HBO is a giant, which is why they can get away with their pricing scheme. Also, you can't just buy HBO, you buy a bundle of ~5 HBO channels, for about $25/mo. I'd like to have HBO, but I don't, because I find it too expensive. If the Discovery bundle were similarly priced, I'd drop that as well, even though I really like watching the Discovery family of networks.
Are they charging me for things I don't watch? Yes. But they're also charging my neighbor for things he doesn't watch, but I do. This way, the cost of things I watch is spread over the population. Without bundling, the the cost of the Discovery channel for instance, would be spread over a smaller population, so we'd all have to pay more than what is currently included in our cable bill. I don't understand how you don't see that.
Your flawed dog/car/bike/beer analogies break down, because the dog/car/bike/beer and their associated costs aren't shared among everyone.
See, that's why ala carte is stupid, while those channels might be popular with slashdot, they are massively unpopular with the public at large. What this means is that they will be expensive. Right now the reason there are some geek friendly channels on cable is because they are subsidized by the popular stuff. If ala carte pricing ever happens, the only affordable channels will be the popular ones, and all the niche channels will cease to exist, or be prohibitively expensive.
Look people, ala carte might sound good, until you realize that in order to remain revenue neutral the people who watch the popular channels will pay less, and those who watch the more obscure stuff will pay more. And who are we kidding the cable companies aren't going to roll out a new pricing scheme that is revenue neutral, so in reality only those who choose the only the most popular networks will pay the same (and get less), and anyone who wants anything out of the ordinary (read: slashdot) will pay more.
Well, I'm disappointed, I thought someone had seen the light.
Message to content producers: I know that you make money from me watching ads, and I'm ok with that. If you want me to see ads, all you have to do is put the content up for free, in a high quality (read not streaming) format, as soon as it airs. Leave the commercials in. If I can download a mpeg from your site (or better yet, with your bit torrent client,) I'll go there rather than searching the piratebay for the same content with commercials removed.
It's your job to convince your clients (the advertisers) that having your show sit on my computer with ads intact is almost as good as broadcasting commercials over the air. I probably won't sit through them, but I don't do that on the couch either.
One more time, it doesn't matter how many copies I make, or how many friends I give them too, so long as the ads are there. You should know this, it's how they pay your salary. Gaging interest and/or viewership isn't as hard as you make it out to be, make your bit torrent client report back when a download finishes, I won't mind, and the few slashdotters that do are trivial compared to the people that don't know.
Which might be more accurate
How-To
That my be true for gen chem 1, but once you're taking courses like Advanced Thermodynamics of Rarefied Systems do you really think that there must be some people who are smart enough to have done the pre-reqs, but aren't smart enough to pass?
That meshes with my experience, and if you hadn't said it, I would have.
Look for most teachers (even in college) fitting the grades to a normal curve is too much work, and they'll lobby against it as stifling their teaching method, and probably for a good reason. In my experience, I always learned less in a class where I have to study the grading system than one where I had to study the material.
Grading on a normal distribution is dumb when (a) you have a class that attracts a smarter than average student (selection bias) (b) when you have a class that is taken by both students majoring in the topic and students from other disciplines (multiple populations) and (c) when the class isn't very large (insufficient samples).
Additionally, even if you have a class where none of these are issues, e.g. psych 101 at a large university, and the grades naturally fall into something resembling a normal distribution, the instructor will still have to arbitrarily reset the standard deviation - which isn't good practice no matter how you look at it.
Not quite, you can refuse to sell anything to anyone, provided that your reason for refusing to sell isn't discriminatory.
The definition doesn't revolve around the product, but rather around protected classes. You can refuse sale to someone on the grounds that they're annoying, but not on grounds that they're senior citizens. It gets sticky when you find senior citizens proportionally more annoying than a random sample of the general public.
pfft, that's why we have a robot service robot.
I got my BS in mechanical engineering in 2004, and while a lot of people had laptops, if you weren't interacting with the other students, I can tell you that if you weren't learning as efficiently as those who were.
While I could go home, load up matlab, and solve most of the problems myself, I found that it took considerably more time than if I headed to the computer lab found someone else working on the assignment, and worked on it with them. This wasn't because we split up the work, it was because everybody learned faster when bouncing ideas off each other. While I know that there were a few people who did well (and a lot who did poorly) doing all the work themselves, nothing beats 10 people around a study hall trying to hash out the subtleties of a thermodynamics problem. One person eventually says, "Ooh - I get it thats an adiabatic process" he shows the rest of the room, everyone gains some understanding and works the problem.
I'm with you on everything - especially the blackboard part. As much as I sympathize regarding workload and power point, I always learned better when the teacher was writing during the lecture. This is especially true in chemistry. Not even animated power points quite capture the instructive power of erasing and re-drawing chemical bonds. I feel similarly about math and engineering courses, the teacher deriving expressions by hand is much more informative than watching line after line of a solved problem show up on the projector screen.
Why do you need mirrors?
Regardless of whether the beam hits something you've still got photons with momentum leaving the ship, which generates thrust.
It's sort of like asking whether radiation leave the sun if no one is around to feel it.
What kind of geek builds and designs the world's fastest electric motorcycle, and doesn't even try to ride it?
So, how does one know that what shows up on the receipt and what is actually counted are the same thing?
You keep talking about knowing if a vote was lost or extra votes were injected, but that isn't the only issue, you also have to know that the votes that are casted are counted correctly and not flipped.
Is there protection against this in the finer details of the cryptography (sorry, I'm not very familiar with cryptography) and if so, how do you prevent the receipt generated from displaying a hash that doesn't match the human readable screen? After all, I can complain that my vote got flipped, but by design, I can't prove that it was my vote, so I can't prove that I know what the vote should be.
Yeah we'd never be able to get that much water to the desert
Today, people do opt out, mostly because they're to poor, too young, or too old to be able to afford employer provided health care, or they don't work and can't afford fronting the whole premium cost themselves.
However, when these people get sick or have an accident they don't suck it up, and they can't afford the cost out of pocket (if they could they'd have health insurance instead). Doctors and hospitals are compelled to help these people when something really bad happens, which invariably happens sooner than for those with health care due to the complete lack of preventative care.
So until opting out isn't an option, any health care system will experience the same failings as our current one.
I like to posit that Keanu Reeves is a fantastic actor, provided his character has no idea whats going on around him, see Bill and Ted, the original Matrix, and A Scanner Darkly, (possibly also the Lake House, but I'm not about to subject myself to that to find out.)
The second Keanu Reeves' character is has a flash of insight, he is completely unbelievable - see, Dracula, Chain Reaction, Matrix 2 and 3, and Constantine.
Movies like Speed, and The Devils Advocate are a mixed bag, the scenes where Keanu is confused are good, the scenes where his character displays some sort of talent are bad.
That's all well and good, but the fact remains that ancient people as a rule wrote or told stories about the gods, rather than about logical positivism.
Sure this probably helped to prop up the social order, but I still think it's safe to say that religion came first, and atheism followed. There may have been atheists from day 2 of human society, but the atheists have always been preceded, and outnumbered by the theists.