It would be nice if you were to explain what you mean by this.
Are you saying that Europeans pay US sales tax when they buy
items online at a US company and have them shipped to Europe?
I would be very surprised if this were the case. I live in
the US, and if I order from a web site in some other state,
I don't pay any sales tax, because the order is coming from
out of state. It's thus interstate commerce, and I believe
that states do not have the legal authority to tax that.
In the US, sales tax is not figured into the price and is
added as a separate line item, whereas in some (most?)
places in Europe, it is included in the price. Is it possible
that this difference in customs is leading you to believe
you are paying US sales tax when you are actually not?
Re:Why rush to get there last?
on
Interstellar Ark
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Why not wait a while? In the past 100 years, there have been more technological breakthroughs than it pretty much all of human history before that. Isn't it likely that in the next 100 years we'll find a way to get us that far in a lot less than 700 years? I mean, even if we knocked it down to only 100 years, we'd have people there 500 years faster. Hell, they'd probably be stopping off at the "ark" to pick people up and take them the rest of the way.
This reminds me of a scenario someone once brought up at a party
(actually, a wedding reception -- there were a lot of geeks there...).
It goes like this:
Imagine that you have a really big computation task to perform, and
you have a budget of $10,000 to buy the equipment to do the computation.
You do some calculations and discover that if you went out and bought
the equipment and started it right now, it would take 5 years for your
computation to complete. But let's assume that Moore's Law (and/or
the popular bastardization thereof) operates very predictably so
that at any point in time, the computers you can buy at that time are
exactly twice as fast as what was available 18 months before for
the same price.
So, what is the optimal thing to do? Buy your computers now, or
procrastinate and buy them later? It turns out, if you buy the
computers now, your computation will run for 5 years and thus
complete in 5 years. But if you wait 18 months and then spend
the same $10,000, you will get computers that are twice is fast.
Then you will start the computation in 1.5 years and it will
run for 2.5 years, finishing after 4 years, which is a year
earlier than if you start right away.
So in that case, the optimal strategy is clearly to procrastinate.
You may be right that procrastination would be the optimal strategy
for the space ark problem as well.
Re:7 centuries isn't feasible for humans
on
Interstellar Ark
·
· Score: 1
How many human societies have survived 7 centuries unchanged?
Heck, just look at how much language has changed in the last century...
Or imagine trying to talk to someone from the 1300s...
That's easily solved. You just make a strict set of rules that
preserves our culture and language as it is now, and then you implant all the
people with a device called an "instrument of obedience". Also,
you build the ship so that it looks like a planet from the inside,
with sky and stars and everything, and people
can't tell the difference, except maybe some old guy who climbs
to the top of a mountain and then starts muttering things like
"the world is hollow, and I have touched the sky" for the rest
of his life. Come to think of it, maybe it's better not to
include any mountains.
About the only thing impressive about 1 million neurons is that it is
slightly more than the square root of the number of neurons in
the human brain.
Wake me up after the exponential growth has been going on a little
while longer and they have made up the 6 orders of magnitude they
need to make it worth of the term "brain".
Not being one myself, I consider a religion Christian if it's based on Jesus. If that particular religion adds a bunch of crazy nonsense to the Jesus worshiping, it doesn't make its followers non-Christians, it just makes them Christians who also believe a bunch of crazy nonsense.
What if it's fairly easy to objectively show that some key
parts of the
"crazy nonsense" they've added is in direct conflict with the
words of Jesus? Then can you really say the religion is "based on
Jesus"?
For the record, the particular words of Jesus I'm talking about
relate to marriage after death. The LDS ("Mormon") church is
very clear that they think marriage continues after death. In
fact, it's a key part of their religion. It's not an
exaggeration to call it a cornerstone of Mormonism.
(I have personally spoken to a man who converted to Mormonism
specifically because it included this belief.)
Jesus seems very clear on the subject as well, and it's also
hard to mistake his intent since three gospel writers give almost the
exact same version of this story:
Matthew,
Mark, and
Luke.
The only problem here is that Jesus and the Mormons have the
exact opposite position of each other. Mormons say marriage
is eternal; Jesus says it isn't.
Now, I'm sure this has come up before, and I'm sure the Mormons
have a way of explaining it, but I have a feeling it'll be
one of those "it depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is"
kinds of explanations.
If you accept Jesus as your savior, you are a Christian.
Anything else is fluff.
What if someone completely denies the existence of any supernatural
element whatsoever, but they happen to really
love Jesus Christ's teachings in all (other) areas, and they
devote their life to studying them, following them, and educating
others about them? Are they a Christian then? They're a
"follower of Christ", right? So why not?
Basically, how broad do you want to get with your definition?
If you're on Solaris 8 (SunOS 5.8 or Solaris 2.5.8) or 9 (SunOS 5.9, or Solaris 2.5.9), you appear to be safe.
You'll be really safe on "Solaris 2.5.8" and "Solaris 2.5.9"
since neither of those versions exist.
It's all well and good to refuse to go along with Sun's
marketing department and drop the "2." at the beginning,
but 2.5.8 and 2.5.9 are not the right version strings.
This is because the first eight versions of Solaris
2.x were:
2.0
2.1
2.2
2.3
2.4
2.5
2.5.1
2.6
Sun then applied the "drop the leading '2.'" rule, and the
next versions were these:
7
8
9
10
So, if you like to re-add the "2." after the marketing folks
took it away, the right way to do it would be to call
call SunOS 5.9 by the name "Solaris 2.9" and SunOS 5.10
by the name "Solaris 2.10".
Incidentally, 2.5.1 was available in three flavors: SPARC, x86,
and PowerPC.:-)
1. Install Windows XP (or whatever M$ product), get infected by a virus
2. Your computer attacks some critical US target, and the US military bombs you and your computer out of existence
3. Profit!!! [*]
I'm baffled whenever I see this old 'Mormons aren't Christian' chestnut brought up.
Mormons believe in and worship Jesus Christ as the Savior of all mankind, as the Son of God and as the only perfect man who ever lived.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but while Mormonism gives Jesus Christ an
important place, Mormon doctrine denies trinitarianism. Also, once
again, correct me if I'm wrong, but Mormon doctrine also includes
the idea that a human being from Earth can one day, after the
resurrection, become a God
who is a God in the same sense that God the Father is.
If that is the case, then it is incompatible with the fundamental
understanding of God held by other groups calling themselves
Christians. (To put it in geeky terms, to "regular" Christians,
God is a global variable, or a singleton; to Mormons, God is a
variable with local scope, and there are different Gods depending
on which function you're in.)
If those two things are true, they represent radical departures
from what any "regular" Christian group would call
orthodox theology.
The claim that Mormonism rejects other groups is false.
You have, perhaps, misunderstood what I am trying to say on
this point. Mormons respect and work with other groups, and
that is good and laudable. However, I was saying that Mormon
doctrine rejects the beliefs of other Christian groups, not the
people who are members of the groups. Is
this not what the Great Apostasy is about? Isn't the Mormon
claim that, prior to Joseph Smith, all Christian groups had
gone so far astray into wrong beliefs that they had lost the true
essence of Christian belief? (Or what else does
Doctrines and
Covenants 1:30 mean when it says that the church founded by
Joseph Smith is "the only true and living church upon the face of the whole earth"?) It is in that sense that I am
saying that Mormonism rejects other groups that call themselves
Christians.
On the other hand, most other Christian groups differ on several
points, but if you ask (say) a Presbyterian if a Catholic has
the basics right, they will say, "Sure, we disagree on the Pope
thing, but that is absolutely not a core issue." As I understand
it, the Mormon viewpoint is that Protestant, Catholic, and
Eastern Orthodox doctrine is not basically correct.
And really, what is Dell supposed to say to claims of "you've burned my house down?"
How about, "We take our responsibilities seriously and will be
more than glad to compensate you if we are truly at fault, but
we will require some proof that this was really due to a defect
in our product."? And when provided with solid proof, they
should say, "Please supply us with documentation of your
house's value, and tell us where we should send the check."
Actually, you don't need anything quite as elaborate as what this article seems to describe. All you need is the ability for power companies to charge rates that vary in realtime based on supply/demand, and to allow customer to elect to use these rates instead of averaged-out ones.
Very insightful comment. You should be modded up to +6 for that.
It is, probably, the most general solution to this sort of problem,
and if the scheme were implemented, it would motivate customers
to develop load-smoothing systems on their own.
By the way, the City of Austin already has a system somewhat
like this. In this part of the country, peak demand for
elecricity comes on really hot days in the summer. The
city-owned electric utility, Austin Energy, doesn't vary
the rates, but
they do have a program by which they will give you a free
programmable digital thermostat which can be centrally
controlled by the power company.
When the thermostat is installed, they then have the right
to cut the duty cycle of your A/C unit to something like 50%
or 66% during peak demand; a properly-sized A/C unit will be
at or near 100% duty cycle during peak times. They promise
this happens only
a few days each year. This clips off peaks in demand
and saves them huge amounts of money they would otherwise
have to invest in generation capacity. Also, if this
thermostat replaces an old non-programmable one, the
customer may program it to have a higher set point
during peak times (which is when it saves them the
most money to do so, because the duty cycle is higher
when it's hotter outside), thus further reducing peak usage.
This is not exactly the same as changing the rates, but
what it amounts to is that, for the price of a programmable
digital thermostat (the program is voluntary), the electric
company is buying the right of first refusal on sales of
electricity to you. So it's still sort of market-driven.
Private parties can do as they please. You have *NO* constitutional right to say what you want on their services.
Thanks for saying this. I remember years ago when The
Last Temptation of Christ was in theaters, it was
controversial where I lived (Dallas, TX), and theaters
were picketed. Some chose not to show it, and others
cried "censorship!" when this happened.
Looking back on it, it was probably pointless and stupid
to picket the theaters, and I think it was wrong for anyone
to demand that theaters not show the movie, but it was not
censorship. Freedom of speech means that the government
cannot restrict you from saying what you wish. It does
not mean that anyone else is somehow obligated to help
you say it. If they were, that would be a restriction
on their freedom. The people who owned the theaters
had the right to make a business decision not to show the
movie if they thought that would win them brownie points
with the protesters. And that's as it should be. The
alternative would be to live in a country where some
government authority could force a movie theater to show
movies it didn't want to show, which would be asinine.
At first I thought Nick Gisburne might be this guy. Fortunately, that video is still up. Hillarious and oh so telling.
That video is about Mormons, not Christians. It's true that
Mormons claim to be Christians, but that claim is very
controversial and is not accepted by most of mainstream
Christianity. There are literally thousands of different
Christian groups, and to some extent they all reject some
of the beliefs of others, but most groups accept that most
of the others are in fact Christians. The hit rate with
Mormonism, however, is very low, in both directions. That
is, most Christian groups do not accept Mormonism as a
form of Christianity, and Mormonism rejects most other
groups as well.
Of course, the question of who gets to define the term
"Christian" is a complex one, but if you let the majority
of people who apply it to themselves also be the ones who
define it, then it probably doesn't include Mormonism.
Also, one other telling difference is that most Christian
groups use only the Bible as their sacred text. Mormonism
also has the Book of Mormon, which (as I understand it) takes
precedence in case the two disagree. The only other major
difference between sacred texts within Christianity is
over the exact canonization of the books within the Bible.
Catholics have a few more than Protestants, and there are
a few other differences here and there. But this is a
comparatively minor difference: all books that Protestants
and Catholics disagree on are from the same historical time
period, and the disagreement is really more about authenticity
and authorship than anything. If you categorize groups based
on what their sacred text is, Mormonism has about as much
similarity to Christianity as Islam has.
And most people don't really have the electrical knowledge to differentiate between an IED-type device and a harmless prank just by looking at the PCB.
I don't care if most people do or do not know how to differentiate.
The statement by the attorney general was that "professionals"
responded to it, and they were the ones who thought it had a
"very sinister appearance". Professionals responding to a 911
call about a bomb threat should be able to tell the
difference between bombs and non-bombs, by looking at circuit
boards and other means. It's their job. If
they can't do it, they are incompetent, and the real problem here
is that a major American city has hired incompetent people who
have a meager ability to tell a threat from a non-threat.
And that brings up another problem: if they are making
errors that are false positives, how do we know they're
not also making errors that are false negatives?
If they are distinguishing
between bombs and non-bombs based on how sloppy or neat the
wiring is, then all terrorists have to do to disguise bombs
is make them have nice, neat packaging like consumer electronics
items have. If the sloppy wires' hanging out was what raised
the alarm in the minds of the "professionals", it seems quite
possible that something that looked very neat and clean and
like it was mass-produced would not raise any alarm, even if
it were a bomb.
I'm not saying Cartoon Network is completely without fault,
but the government has a responsibility to be knowledgeable
enough to tell the difference between threats and non-threats
without making too many mistakes in either direction. Electronics
are quite common in today's society, in case you hadn't noticed,
and so the government has a responsibility to know something
about them. Based on this situation, it would appear they
don't know much about them.
I think this quote, by the Attorney General of the State of Massachusetts,
Martha Coakley, sums up the overreaction and the unwillingness to look at the situation rationally:
"For those who responded to it, professionals, it had a very sinister appearance," Coakley said. "It had a battery behind it and wires."
My feeling is this: if I lived in the state, I'd damn well make
sure I stayed away from Radio Shack, because I'm likely to get
caught in the crossfire when someone buys a few electronics
components and the SWAT team comes in to take out the "terrorist"
with a storm of bullets.
Have these people never, ever seen a homemade electronics project
before!? For God's sake, MIT
is located in their state!
We've become so enamored with religion and terrorism that we can't make jokes about anything having to do with either.
Which reminds me of a quote from comedian Lewis Black on the
subject of humor, terrorism, and religion:
One of the scariest things to me about that war
was the fact that it was not an easy war for people
to take either side on. And the fact of the matter
was that this country, as it does every time it
comes down to war, completely loses its sense of
humor. And when we do that, we become dangerously
close to what we hate about our enemies. The
terrorist is a person without humor at all, and we
began to act like this. And neither side...
neither side knew exactly what they were talking about.
Or is there some reason you would present to support the idea that the infiltration of one religion is of more concern than of another?
Sure, if one of the two religions being discussed is Scientology,
then the Scientology one is of more concern. Of course, I say
this because I believe that, as a whole, the Church of Scientology
is being disingenuous in calling itself a church. It is not
automatically true that an organization is a church (or a religion,
whatever) just because it itself claims to be one.
It's an evocative way of saying "right now, Mac is better than what we're offering."
It's an attention-getting way of phrasing things.
Sort of like that scene in Men in Black where
Will Smith has figured out a critically important
piece of information, and he keeps trying to tell
everyone but nobody will listen,
so eventually he just loudly yells out, "YO, OLD GUYS!".
In case you're wondering, I don't really have anything
to contribute. I just really like that scene.
the 33rd most popular petition is for Tony Blair to stand on his head and juggle ice-cream.
Two things:
That's truly hilarious (in a British sort of a way).
If Blair has any brains or political savvy at all, he'll
one-up the person
who started that petition by waiting until the momentum
and press coverage behind it peaks, then announcing that,
because he is absolutely
committed to being responsive to citizens' needs,
he'd be glad to stand on his head and juggle
ice cream. And then, of course, he'll actually do it,
with skill and aplomb.
A little bit of a tangent, but I gotta ask: am I the only
one who thinks of the TV show Malcolm in the Middle
when I see Slashdot stories tagged as "maybe, yes, no"?
I always find myself singing "Can you repeeeeat the
queeeestion?" when I see stores like this one.
And yes, this will probably be totally irrelevant to
readers in the UK, who likely don't see episodes of
that show (although I could be wrong).
First of all, parents already have
the authority to do this. Simply tell your child that they
are forbidden from having a myspace account unless you also
have access to it. If they refuse, ground them. If they
still refuse, wipe their hard drive, take their computer,
sell it on eBay, put the money in their college fund, and
print them a little certificate congratulating them for
having chosen to invest in their own future.
Second, you'll note that this is not exactly enforceable.
They can always sneak around and create an account
behind your back somehow. They might do it at a friend's
house, or an internet cafe, or even at school if the
school is really dumb enough to give them unsupervised
Internet access (and they probably are). That leads to
a big problem: you can't access
what you don't know exists. And here's the key thing:
that's going to be the case whether the state forbids it
or the parents forbid it. The law doesn't solve this
problem. Furthermore, for the law to even pretend to
solve this problem, it would have to say, "children must
inform their parents of all online accounts they create"
rather than "parents must be able to get access to their
children's accounts".
Furthermore, I think you can break parents down into two
categories: those who will bother, and those who won't.
The parents in the first category have probably already
got the discipline thing down well enough that they can
keep their kids from doing harmful things, like eating
nothing but Fruit Loops for every meal, blowing off their
homework, and talking to unknown persons on the Internet.
The parents in the second category are not likely to check
what's going on on their child's myspace account even if
there were a law that granted them access.
Discharging a capacitor, requires energy. In every capacitor there is an electric field and changing this field from its full value to zero will lead to motion in the dielectrics over which the field passes.Actually if you do it too fast, your capacitor will certainly explode.
I can see that, but I do have a question: why is it harder
to discharge the capacitor quickly than it is to charge it
quickly? It's already known these capacitors can (or are
claimed to be able to) charge that quickly, which is still
a huge amount of energy being transferred in a short period
of time, so if they can pull off doing it in one direction,
why not in the other? Or is there something especially hard
about discharging that doesn't apply to charging?
Also, if it's really difficult to discharge a big (i.e. high
capacitance) capacitor
really quickly, how come this
guy doesn't seem to have problems doing it using capacitors
from these guys?
Put treadmills in the doorways of all the McDonalds. The treadmill won't shut off until you've burned up all the calories you just ate.
Ooh, let's do the math. This should be simultaneously
fun and frightening.
According to Calorie King, if you plug in my stats (height, weight,
age, etc.), and you do a 3 mile/hour rate on the treadmill, which is just in the middle range of speeds, you burn 277 Cal per hour on the treadmill.
Now, according to McDonald's, a Big Mac is 540 Cal, a large order of fries (fat people always upgrade the combo
to large fry and drink) is 570 Cal, and a large (32 fl.oz.) Coke Classic is 310 Cal.
That's 540 + 570 + 310 Cal, which is 1420 Cal. 1420 Cal / 277 Cal/hour is 5.1 hours.
McDonald's is going to need a room full of treadmills so their
customers aren't hogging (ha! pun intended) them all.
And even if they did, we don't have the 10,000amp service at my house necessary to actually charge them at speed.
Having a special hookup from the electric company is not
the only possible way to charge one of these quickly at
home. This electrical engineering problem can be solved
with a technique that software guys have been using for
quite some time: double buffering. Simply buy another
bank of ultracapacitors with a slightly higher capacity
(to account for losses), and slowly charge that up overnight,
or all day, or whatever. Then, when you want to charge your
car, grab some really damn thick cables, hook your car's
ultracapacitor up to the one you've been charging at home
all night, and FWOOOM 1.2 megawatts of power flows
from ultracapacitor A to ultracapacitor B for a few minutes.
Alternatively, if the things are small enough, just
physically swap out one for the other.
Slashdot Mirror
It would be nice if you were to explain what you mean by this. Are you saying that Europeans pay US sales tax when they buy items online at a US company and have them shipped to Europe?
I would be very surprised if this were the case. I live in the US, and if I order from a web site in some other state, I don't pay any sales tax, because the order is coming from out of state. It's thus interstate commerce, and I believe that states do not have the legal authority to tax that.
In the US, sales tax is not figured into the price and is added as a separate line item, whereas in some (most?) places in Europe, it is included in the price. Is it possible that this difference in customs is leading you to believe you are paying US sales tax when you are actually not?
This reminds me of a scenario someone once brought up at a party (actually, a wedding reception -- there were a lot of geeks there...). It goes like this:
Imagine that you have a really big computation task to perform, and you have a budget of $10,000 to buy the equipment to do the computation. You do some calculations and discover that if you went out and bought the equipment and started it right now, it would take 5 years for your computation to complete. But let's assume that Moore's Law (and/or the popular bastardization thereof) operates very predictably so that at any point in time, the computers you can buy at that time are exactly twice as fast as what was available 18 months before for the same price.
So, what is the optimal thing to do? Buy your computers now, or procrastinate and buy them later? It turns out, if you buy the computers now, your computation will run for 5 years and thus complete in 5 years. But if you wait 18 months and then spend the same $10,000, you will get computers that are twice is fast. Then you will start the computation in 1.5 years and it will run for 2.5 years, finishing after 4 years, which is a year earlier than if you start right away.
So in that case, the optimal strategy is clearly to procrastinate. You may be right that procrastination would be the optimal strategy for the space ark problem as well.
That's easily solved. You just make a strict set of rules that preserves our culture and language as it is now, and then you implant all the people with a device called an "instrument of obedience". Also, you build the ship so that it looks like a planet from the inside, with sky and stars and everything, and people can't tell the difference, except maybe some old guy who climbs to the top of a mountain and then starts muttering things like "the world is hollow, and I have touched the sky" for the rest of his life. Come to think of it, maybe it's better not to include any mountains.
Oh, that debriefing. I was mixed up for a minute and thought you meant this one.
About the only thing impressive about 1 million neurons is that it is slightly more than the square root of the number of neurons in the human brain.
Wake me up after the exponential growth has been going on a little while longer and they have made up the 6 orders of magnitude they need to make it worth of the term "brain".
What if it's fairly easy to objectively show that some key parts of the "crazy nonsense" they've added is in direct conflict with the words of Jesus? Then can you really say the religion is "based on Jesus"?
For the record, the particular words of Jesus I'm talking about relate to marriage after death. The LDS ("Mormon") church is very clear that they think marriage continues after death. In fact, it's a key part of their religion. It's not an exaggeration to call it a cornerstone of Mormonism. (I have personally spoken to a man who converted to Mormonism specifically because it included this belief.) Jesus seems very clear on the subject as well, and it's also hard to mistake his intent since three gospel writers give almost the exact same version of this story: Matthew, Mark, and Luke. The only problem here is that Jesus and the Mormons have the exact opposite position of each other. Mormons say marriage is eternal; Jesus says it isn't.
Now, I'm sure this has come up before, and I'm sure the Mormons have a way of explaining it, but I have a feeling it'll be one of those "it depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is" kinds of explanations.
What if someone completely denies the existence of any supernatural element whatsoever, but they happen to really love Jesus Christ's teachings in all (other) areas, and they devote their life to studying them, following them, and educating others about them? Are they a Christian then? They're a "follower of Christ", right? So why not?
Basically, how broad do you want to get with your definition?
You'll be really safe on "Solaris 2.5.8" and "Solaris 2.5.9" since neither of those versions exist.
It's all well and good to refuse to go along with Sun's marketing department and drop the "2." at the beginning, but 2.5.8 and 2.5.9 are not the right version strings. This is because the first eight versions of Solaris 2.x were:
Sun then applied the "drop the leading '2.'" rule, and the next versions were these:
So, if you like to re-add the "2." after the marketing folks took it away, the right way to do it would be to call call SunOS 5.9 by the name "Solaris 2.9" and SunOS 5.10 by the name "Solaris 2.10".
Incidentally, 2.5.1 was available in three flavors: SPARC, x86, and PowerPC. :-)
1. Install Windows XP (or whatever M$ product), get infected by a virus
2. Your computer attacks some critical US target, and the US military bombs you and your computer out of existence
3. Profit!!! [*]
([*] from life insurance)
Correct me if I'm wrong, but while Mormonism gives Jesus Christ an important place, Mormon doctrine denies trinitarianism. Also, once again, correct me if I'm wrong, but Mormon doctrine also includes the idea that a human being from Earth can one day, after the resurrection, become a God who is a God in the same sense that God the Father is. If that is the case, then it is incompatible with the fundamental understanding of God held by other groups calling themselves Christians. (To put it in geeky terms, to "regular" Christians, God is a global variable, or a singleton; to Mormons, God is a variable with local scope, and there are different Gods depending on which function you're in.)
If those two things are true, they represent radical departures from what any "regular" Christian group would call orthodox theology.
You have, perhaps, misunderstood what I am trying to say on this point. Mormons respect and work with other groups, and that is good and laudable. However, I was saying that Mormon doctrine rejects the beliefs of other Christian groups, not the people who are members of the groups. Is this not what the Great Apostasy is about? Isn't the Mormon claim that, prior to Joseph Smith, all Christian groups had gone so far astray into wrong beliefs that they had lost the true essence of Christian belief? (Or what else does Doctrines and Covenants 1:30 mean when it says that the church founded by Joseph Smith is "the only true and living church upon the face of the whole earth"?) It is in that sense that I am saying that Mormonism rejects other groups that call themselves Christians.
On the other hand, most other Christian groups differ on several points, but if you ask (say) a Presbyterian if a Catholic has the basics right, they will say, "Sure, we disagree on the Pope thing, but that is absolutely not a core issue." As I understand it, the Mormon viewpoint is that Protestant, Catholic, and Eastern Orthodox doctrine is not basically correct.
How about, "We take our responsibilities seriously and will be more than glad to compensate you if we are truly at fault, but we will require some proof that this was really due to a defect in our product."? And when provided with solid proof, they should say, "Please supply us with documentation of your house's value, and tell us where we should send the check."
Very insightful comment. You should be modded up to +6 for that. It is, probably, the most general solution to this sort of problem, and if the scheme were implemented, it would motivate customers to develop load-smoothing systems on their own.
By the way, the City of Austin already has a system somewhat like this. In this part of the country, peak demand for elecricity comes on really hot days in the summer. The city-owned electric utility, Austin Energy, doesn't vary the rates, but they do have a program by which they will give you a free programmable digital thermostat which can be centrally controlled by the power company. When the thermostat is installed, they then have the right to cut the duty cycle of your A/C unit to something like 50% or 66% during peak demand; a properly-sized A/C unit will be at or near 100% duty cycle during peak times. They promise this happens only a few days each year. This clips off peaks in demand and saves them huge amounts of money they would otherwise have to invest in generation capacity. Also, if this thermostat replaces an old non-programmable one, the customer may program it to have a higher set point during peak times (which is when it saves them the most money to do so, because the duty cycle is higher when it's hotter outside), thus further reducing peak usage.
This is not exactly the same as changing the rates, but what it amounts to is that, for the price of a programmable digital thermostat (the program is voluntary), the electric company is buying the right of first refusal on sales of electricity to you. So it's still sort of market-driven.
Thanks for saying this. I remember years ago when The Last Temptation of Christ was in theaters, it was controversial where I lived (Dallas, TX), and theaters were picketed. Some chose not to show it, and others cried "censorship!" when this happened.
Looking back on it, it was probably pointless and stupid to picket the theaters, and I think it was wrong for anyone to demand that theaters not show the movie, but it was not censorship. Freedom of speech means that the government cannot restrict you from saying what you wish. It does not mean that anyone else is somehow obligated to help you say it. If they were, that would be a restriction on their freedom. The people who owned the theaters had the right to make a business decision not to show the movie if they thought that would win them brownie points with the protesters. And that's as it should be. The alternative would be to live in a country where some government authority could force a movie theater to show movies it didn't want to show, which would be asinine.
That video is about Mormons, not Christians. It's true that Mormons claim to be Christians, but that claim is very controversial and is not accepted by most of mainstream Christianity. There are literally thousands of different Christian groups, and to some extent they all reject some of the beliefs of others, but most groups accept that most of the others are in fact Christians. The hit rate with Mormonism, however, is very low, in both directions. That is, most Christian groups do not accept Mormonism as a form of Christianity, and Mormonism rejects most other groups as well.
Of course, the question of who gets to define the term "Christian" is a complex one, but if you let the majority of people who apply it to themselves also be the ones who define it, then it probably doesn't include Mormonism.
Also, one other telling difference is that most Christian groups use only the Bible as their sacred text. Mormonism also has the Book of Mormon, which (as I understand it) takes precedence in case the two disagree. The only other major difference between sacred texts within Christianity is over the exact canonization of the books within the Bible. Catholics have a few more than Protestants, and there are a few other differences here and there. But this is a comparatively minor difference: all books that Protestants and Catholics disagree on are from the same historical time period, and the disagreement is really more about authenticity and authorship than anything. If you categorize groups based on what their sacred text is, Mormonism has about as much similarity to Christianity as Islam has.
I don't care if most people do or do not know how to differentiate. The statement by the attorney general was that "professionals" responded to it, and they were the ones who thought it had a "very sinister appearance". Professionals responding to a 911 call about a bomb threat should be able to tell the difference between bombs and non-bombs, by looking at circuit boards and other means. It's their job. If they can't do it, they are incompetent, and the real problem here is that a major American city has hired incompetent people who have a meager ability to tell a threat from a non-threat.
And that brings up another problem: if they are making errors that are false positives, how do we know they're not also making errors that are false negatives? If they are distinguishing between bombs and non-bombs based on how sloppy or neat the wiring is, then all terrorists have to do to disguise bombs is make them have nice, neat packaging like consumer electronics items have. If the sloppy wires' hanging out was what raised the alarm in the minds of the "professionals", it seems quite possible that something that looked very neat and clean and like it was mass-produced would not raise any alarm, even if it were a bomb.
I'm not saying Cartoon Network is completely without fault, but the government has a responsibility to be knowledgeable enough to tell the difference between threats and non-threats without making too many mistakes in either direction. Electronics are quite common in today's society, in case you hadn't noticed, and so the government has a responsibility to know something about them. Based on this situation, it would appear they don't know much about them.
I think this quote, by the Attorney General of the State of Massachusetts, Martha Coakley, sums up the overreaction and the unwillingness to look at the situation rationally:
(My source for that quote is a Boston Globe article.)
Oooooooh! Batteries and wires!! Run away!
My feeling is this: if I lived in the state, I'd damn well make sure I stayed away from Radio Shack, because I'm likely to get caught in the crossfire when someone buys a few electronics components and the SWAT team comes in to take out the "terrorist" with a storm of bullets. Have these people never, ever seen a homemade electronics project before!? For God's sake, MIT is located in their state!
Which reminds me of a quote from comedian Lewis Black on the subject of humor, terrorism, and religion:
Sure, if one of the two religions being discussed is Scientology, then the Scientology one is of more concern. Of course, I say this because I believe that, as a whole, the Church of Scientology is being disingenuous in calling itself a church. It is not automatically true that an organization is a church (or a religion, whatever) just because it itself claims to be one.
It's an attention-getting way of phrasing things. Sort of like that scene in Men in Black where Will Smith has figured out a critically important piece of information, and he keeps trying to tell everyone but nobody will listen, so eventually he just loudly yells out, "YO, OLD GUYS!".
In case you're wondering, I don't really have anything to contribute. I just really like that scene.
Two things:
A little bit of a tangent, but I gotta ask: am I the only one who thinks of the TV show Malcolm in the Middle when I see Slashdot stories tagged as "maybe, yes, no"? I always find myself singing "Can you repeeeeat the queeeestion?" when I see stores like this one.
And yes, this will probably be totally irrelevant to readers in the UK, who likely don't see episodes of that show (although I could be wrong).
Two things about this:
First of all, parents already have the authority to do this. Simply tell your child that they are forbidden from having a myspace account unless you also have access to it. If they refuse, ground them. If they still refuse, wipe their hard drive, take their computer, sell it on eBay, put the money in their college fund, and print them a little certificate congratulating them for having chosen to invest in their own future.
Second, you'll note that this is not exactly enforceable. They can always sneak around and create an account behind your back somehow. They might do it at a friend's house, or an internet cafe, or even at school if the school is really dumb enough to give them unsupervised Internet access (and they probably are). That leads to a big problem: you can't access what you don't know exists. And here's the key thing: that's going to be the case whether the state forbids it or the parents forbid it. The law doesn't solve this problem. Furthermore, for the law to even pretend to solve this problem, it would have to say, "children must inform their parents of all online accounts they create" rather than "parents must be able to get access to their children's accounts".
Furthermore, I think you can break parents down into two categories: those who will bother, and those who won't. The parents in the first category have probably already got the discipline thing down well enough that they can keep their kids from doing harmful things, like eating nothing but Fruit Loops for every meal, blowing off their homework, and talking to unknown persons on the Internet. The parents in the second category are not likely to check what's going on on their child's myspace account even if there were a law that granted them access.
I can see that, but I do have a question: why is it harder to discharge the capacitor quickly than it is to charge it quickly? It's already known these capacitors can (or are claimed to be able to) charge that quickly, which is still a huge amount of energy being transferred in a short period of time, so if they can pull off doing it in one direction, why not in the other? Or is there something especially hard about discharging that doesn't apply to charging?
Also, if it's really difficult to discharge a big (i.e. high capacitance) capacitor really quickly, how come this guy doesn't seem to have problems doing it using capacitors from these guys?
Ooh, let's do the math. This should be simultaneously fun and frightening.
According to Calorie King, if you plug in my stats (height, weight, age, etc.), and you do a 3 mile/hour rate on the treadmill, which is just in the middle range of speeds, you burn 277 Cal per hour on the treadmill.
Now, according to McDonald's, a Big Mac is 540 Cal, a large order of fries (fat people always upgrade the combo to large fry and drink) is 570 Cal, and a large (32 fl.oz.) Coke Classic is 310 Cal.
That's 540 + 570 + 310 Cal, which is 1420 Cal.
1420 Cal / 277 Cal/hour is 5.1 hours.
McDonald's is going to need a room full of treadmills so their customers aren't hogging (ha! pun intended) them all.
Having a special hookup from the electric company is not the only possible way to charge one of these quickly at home. This electrical engineering problem can be solved with a technique that software guys have been using for quite some time: double buffering. Simply buy another bank of ultracapacitors with a slightly higher capacity (to account for losses), and slowly charge that up overnight, or all day, or whatever. Then, when you want to charge your car, grab some really damn thick cables, hook your car's ultracapacitor up to the one you've been charging at home all night, and FWOOOM 1.2 megawatts of power flows from ultracapacitor A to ultracapacitor B for a few minutes.
Alternatively, if the things are small enough, just physically swap out one for the other.