This calling people Hitler, a Nazi, or even just a racist means, nothing any more since being abused. But then saying this means I'm a racist. By reading this now you are a racist. Everyone is a racist. Trump is Hitler. Pence is Hitler. They nominated Hitler to SCOTUS. So many Hitlers, so little time, there's no way to point them all out.
Give it a rest. The words mean nothing now and when a true Hitler comes along then you are just a boy who cried wolf.
If you read the article (I know, this is Slashdot) then you'd know that this species of mosquito is invasive. It's native to Africa and wiping them out in Australia would bring the native ecosystem back. This isn't extinction, the species still exists in Africa.
Indeed. Many people keep driving their old cars until the wheel bearings seize, or the transmission stops shifting, or it puts a rod through the block.
A car that breaks down to the point of not being worth the repair is having to call for a tow to a scrapyard and taking a walk/bus/cab/whatever home. There's enough metal and parts in the car to pay for the tow, and often enough left over for the first payment on a replacement car. You mention a bearing seizure as a possible mode of failure on a car. Do you know what a seized bearing looks like on a windmill? There's videos of them that are not too hard to find. You do not want to run a windmill to failure if you can help it.
The problem with windmills is that, unlike the car, people might not be able to find enough spare parts and scrap metal in the old windmill to pay for it's disposal.
I think that was the point.......
I'm not sure you got the point. I'm not sure I got it either.
Sure, but they can be repaired. They can be repaired only so many times though because the metal fatigue in the tower and other parts set a limit on the profitability of repairs over replacement.
Does it cost too much to clean the blades periodically and filth accumulation on the blades makes them less efficient?
All those bird guts do accumulate to a point. The rain washes a lot of it off. If it gets thick enough it cracks in the sun and wind and falls off. That's not the real problem though, the blades are under considerable stress in the wind and bird impacts stress it more. The stress deforms the blades and weakens them. So while the power output of the windmill is quite constant over the life of the windmill there will be a point that the windmill will have to be shut down for reasons of safety.
A windmill run beyond it's safe operational life can suffer a blade failure, meaning bits of metal and composites come flying off the blade. The windmill is now off balance and the bearings are stressed to failure. No working bearings means that metal is grinding against metal and considerable amounts of heat and metal particles are produced. This fine dust of metal and the oil in the bearings will eventually ignite under the heat. This windmill, potentially still turning in the wind, is now burning. If it's hot enough then it can ignite the aluminum and magnesium parts in the nacelle. Now there's burning metal getting flung about in the wind, causing a fire hazard all around. This heat from the fire, if not extinguished quickly, will weaken the steel tower. The tower will fall, the fire will eventually burn out, and now you have a mess of half burned composites, melted aluminum and copper splashed all over the steel and concrete base, and if you are lucky no one died from flying debris or a grass fire.
Will a windmill generate less power over time? Yes, and they will stop doing so in a very sudden and spectacular fashion.
All nuclear power plant projects are required to have a fund to decommission the plant. No funds to decommission means no license to build the plant.
One reason the utilities run these nuclear power plants for so long is because each plant is potentially billions of dollars in sunk costs, after running for 40 years it's been paid for. Another reason is that each reactor produces somewhere around one gigawatt of electricity, 24 hours per day, 7 days per week, with short shutdowns every few months (maybe years) for inspections, refuel, and repairs. Shutting a nuclear reactor down and not having another to replace it means they have to keep running it or they run short on electricity generating capacity by one gigawatt.
In the USA there are about 100 nuclear reactors producing power. Nuclear energy produces about 20% of the electricity we use. Losing a single reactor might not be a big deal because that's only 0.2% of the nation's electrical generation capacity. But what happens if we shut down 10 reactors? That's 2%. Perhaps not a big problem but it's starting to get in the territory of a concern.
You think that can be replaced by wind power? Wind takes 10 times the concrete and steel per generating capacity over nuclear. Does that sound like too much to you? Consider that for every tower sticking up in the air there is a very large block of reinforced concrete buried in the ground to hold it up against the wind. Also consider that those big concrete domes you see over a nuclear reactor is mostly hollow.
If the problem of getting rid of those old nuclear power plants concerns you then there's a really easy way to speed up the process of shutting them down. All the government would have to do is allow for replacement reactors at those sites.
We now know how to build reactors that can burn the spent fuel from those old reactors. These fuel rods still have plenty of fuel in them, it's only that the old light water designs we've been using are not efficient enough to use up what is left. Have the replacement reactors be heavy water designs, molten salt designs, or whatever else we have now, and they can dispose of the spent fuel on site by burning it more completely. We'd be getting energy without having to make any new fuel.
What I expect in the comments on this story: 1. Lots of Trump bashing. 2. Much speculation on some university, hospital, insurance company, or alternative federal agency taking the database over. 3. Someone linking to an article on someone taking over the database from HHS so it stays online.
It makes you look not only like an idiot, but a racist sexist idiot.
You forgot to also mention that I'm antisemitic and homophobic.
Your citations have a lot of speculation but little data. Very weak tea. If that's the best you got then I'm done here. I should have known to disengage the first time you called me a dumbfuck. Here's a hint, you will be more persuasive if you don't insult the people you want to bring to your side.
And white guys aren't asians. Why are you lumping them together?
Because the article is lumping Black and Latin together. If someone isn't Black or Latin then that means, with some exceptions in the USA, one is White or Asian. This also works out because Whites and Asians have an average IQ that's close to, and perhaps slightly above, 100. If you want to split some hairs here and claim that there's more than just those four groups then that's fine, but generally and for the purposes of this discussion there's the group that are dominate in STEM, Asian and White, and those that these people want to get more of in STEM, Black and Latin. Depending on how thin you want to split those hairs you can define native Americans as distinct from Latin but in this case I don't much care either way.
YES, that part IS disproportionate. And the causes appear to be, at least in part, sociological in nature.
Prove it. I'm not trying to convince you of anything since I believe it to be futile. If you want to convince me then bring some data. Otherwise we can simply agree to disagree.
And part of it, as I'm sure you'd like to harp on, seems to be biological in nature.
Yes, it's biological in many ways. I've listened to Dr. Jordan Peterson talk and he lays out quite convincingly that there are two aspects to employability. One is intelligence, and many people simply stop with that. To get a job doing something the person must be able to comprehend the task at hand. When there is competition for that job the person must not only be able to do the job but do it better than the other person. The other aspect is personality. The personality must also fit the job. Personality is also genetic. I don't know enough about the relationship between genetics and personality just yet to comment on if this has some correlation to race so I tend to leave that one alone.
It's also our biological nature to screw each other's brains out during puberty and make babies, but we overcome that. Mostly. Sometimes nature is horribly outdated.
Nature isn't outdated. At least I don't think so. Our nature is fine tuned to survival, with enough variation to allow adaptability and evolution to account for variation in the environment. Maybe instead of fighting our nature, and losing, we can use our natural tendencies to the advantage of the individual and society.
Anyway, I'm generally not a fan of racist or sexist policies, but supporting girls in tech is good because it gets more people into tech and we need more people in tech.
Supporting girls in STEM to the exclusion of boys is sexist. Supporting Black and Latin people to the exclusion of White and Asian is racist.
That's where the jobs are. There's plenty of work to do. I also support programs that get boys interested in tech.
Yes, that's where the jobs are. How about instead of worrying about what race and gender the people in these occupations are we simply allow people to choose freely which jobs they want? Seems to me that there's fewer women in STEM because they don't much like it and would rather be school teachers, surgeons/nurses/therapists/other medical, clerical, and so on. That doesn't mean women can't do engineering, or that they'd be bad at it, only that on the average you'll get more men in STEM than women. My sister is an engineer. Sounds like she's good at it too. I'd hate to think someone would want to push her to be a schoolteacher. Just flip that around, if a girl doesn't want to grow up to be an engineer then don't push her into it.
In nations where there's low amount of sexual barriers when it comes to choice of careers paths, there is still unbalance in different fields. People have their own preferences and there's a trend with men and women going different ways. That's fine. Let people choose which way
Well, I was assuming the parent was joking, that it could be software all the way down, which isn't obviously possible.
Yes, I realized that was quite probable after I submitted my post.
In practice though the complexity of SDN switching is well beyond the point of diminishing returns for almost everywhere to bother with.
Agreed, I imagine there is a market for software defined switching but it is quite small because the costs outweigh the benefits for most cases. I can also imagine much of that market exists in places where much of the network is virtual, like the VM clusters I mentioned in my previous post. It may be possible that software defined switches could gain more of the market. I'm thinking that not only would cost be a consideration but also security. I don't know much about how software defined switching would work but I'm quite certain the more general purpose the hardware the less secure it will be.
I heard the same thing about John Deere growing up. That John Deere was just green paint and a lot of snobbery.
Here's what I learned, farmers and ranchers are businessmen. They need to get work done like every other business. Downtime costs money. John Deere tractors still break down, get stuck in the mud, wear out, etc. It's that the competition do this more often. There's still some snobbery and such in there, John Deere tractors can have leather seats and built in refrigerator. They spend the money on the "green paint" because it gives them more return on their investment.
Is Cisco just a name? Maybe that's true now but they can only get to be "a name" by proving to be better over time. No one Is GMC just a name? Is Apple? Businessmen buy this stuff because it makes them money. If Cisco stops making people money, or rather they can make more money with someone else, then Cisco will disappear. Same goes for Apple, John Deere, and GMC.
Software defined networking is great when dealing with networks at a high enough level. People have been making routers from commodity hardware for a very long time. Obviously people have produced special purpose hardware for routing as this means they can optimize the hardware for the task and can do so cheaper than someone grabbing a PC, filling it with interface cards, and loading some software onto it.
Switching is different than routing, it's done on a different level. The hardware needed is more complex, and therefore more expensive, than what is found in commodity computers. Go and try to find a software defined switch. I tried, and they don't exist. The closest you will find is a switch defined as a virtual machine. Load up something like VMWare ESXi and you'll find a way to create a software switch, but it can only switch packets among the virtual machines on that system.
People have made limited software switches with server style Ethernet cards (which grant greater access to the packet content than a desktop Ethernet controller) and the right kind of software but they are expensive and slow. They are really only useful for things like testing, training, or demonstrations.
This is a big deal because this means Amazon is getting in the hardware business in a way that is quite rare. Amazon is a large enough company that they may actually be able to follow through.
That is a short summary , with caveat, but the bottom line is , if there was no law against grinding live puppy into paste , and it would bring money, a corporation WOULD do it.
For a corporation to make money grinding puppies into paste means people are buying puppy paste. That means people find grinding puppies into paste as something of value. It doesn't have to be all people, just enough people that puppy paste sells well enough for someone to profit from selling it. If you find grinding puppies into paste disgusting then don't buy it. If it disgusts you enough then I expect that you'd expend your own time and money to convince others to stop buying puppy paste. I'm guessing that someone might find something that they could sell as an alternative, something that may not be cheaper but cheap enough that those that don't want to see puppies turned into paste would buy the alternative. If enough people do this then enough buyers of puppy paste go get the alternative that the puppy paste people go out of business for not having enough customers.
There's more than one way to get rid of the puppy grinders. Government bans only work if there is some public support for it. I'll give the failure of bans on alcohol and marijuana as examples. To really get rid of this behavior you despise means giving people a cheaper alternative. As an example of this I give kerosene as an alternative to whale oil. If you want people to stop burning kerosene then give them electric lights.
A government is not beholden to a limited "private club" third party to get "profit". It is beholden to the whole of the public.
The government is beholden to the majority vote. They don't have to keep all the people happy all of the time, or some of the people all of the time, or all of the people some of the time. They have to keep some of the people happy some of the time. In a constitutional representative republic like the USA the government is bound (at least theoretically) by the confines of the constitution. It's quite possible that a constitution prevents the government from enacting or enforcing a law against grinding live puppies into paste.
How would we stop people from grinding puppies into paste if the government can't ban it? Maybe encourage people to adopt puppies. This can be problematic because now there is a profit motive in producing more puppies. Perhaps encouraging people to enact birth control on the dog owners so they produce less puppies, starve the puppy grinders of supply and they go out of business.
Most corporation do not care if a few kids get mangled in the machinery (or at least used to) or do not care if kids get an education, this is why we have labor laws , education laws and no child work allowed.
We have laws against child labor because we now have enough wealth that we can afford to not send children off to work.
Do you really think parents enjoyed sending their children to work? To a place where the machinery could tear them apart? Perhaps you could find cases of corporations kidnapping children, or "adopting" orphans, and forcing them to work but for the most part this was done with the knowledge and agreement of the parents. Why would parents do this? Because the children need to eat. If they can make a few nickels per day to buy some potatoes then they can eat. If they don't make that money then they don't eat, and they die of starvation. The choice was the chance the child died in an industrial accident or the assurance they died from starvation.
These parents need options to feed their children besides sending them to work in a factory so they can eat. We do this, at least in part, with public schools and subsidized school lunches. It's now more beneficial for the parents to send their children to a school instead of sending them to a factory.
This is nonsense. Giving petroleum a tax advantage over wind and solar will not be encourage investment in wind and solar.
You are correct, this is insufficient to create investment in wind and solar. What wind and solar needs to succeed is for them to create value. Creating value is different than creating money. The government creates money, but it only has value because people can generally get something of value with money through trade. Money is a commodity, and like any commodity it's value is reduced as it becomes more plentiful. The government can withdraw value from the private sector through taxes. The government can then divert this value to other segments of the private sector through subsidies.
When the government taxes coal and oil and then subsidizes wind and solar this doesn't necessarily create value. It might make the wind and solar people wealthier but unless there was some value created from the wind and solar power they get wealthier only because the government diverted it to them.
Government can create money also by just printing it. This is effectively a tax on every dollar in circulation. This tax on every dollar is not immediate because it takes time for the market to adjust to the reduced scarcity of the dollar. If the government just prints money and gives that to the wind and solar people then they still just taxed everyone and diverted value to the solar and wind people.
The only real way to create long lasting investment of value in wind and solar is for wind and solar to create some real value for the investors. This cannot be created by government fiat because the government does not write the laws of physics and the economy. People will invest in wind and solar if they see a return on their investment.
I believe that wind does in fact create value, I've seen the numbers and if wind was set loose on the free market then I would expect it to grow on it's own. Subsidies hold wind back because there is a cost in getting the subsidies, this is through lawyers, accountants, and paper pushers that file the paperwork with the government. Those that would like to invest in wind are competing with the people that have invested in wind and government subsidy. Remove the subsidy and the best wind technology wins, not the windmill makers with the best lawyers, lobbyists, and accountants that do a better job of gobbling up subsidy.
I've seen the numbers on solar and I believe that solar power rarely creates value. It might create value in certain places of the world but generally I believe it is a bad idea. Government subsidy hides the bad investment with government money. If you want solar to create real value then remove the subsidy. With subsidies you have lobbyists and lawyers looking for the most government money. Without subsidy you have scientists and engineers looking for the most sun.
People can in fact pull value from the blue sky. They do this with smart investment in wind and solar power.
I didn't say corporations are people, you did. You said the private sector would toss a baby off a bridge for a dollar.
I said people act on the behalf of corporations. A corporation itself does nothing. What is a corporation? It's a legal construct. It's nothing but words on paper and an idea in people's heads. A corporation cannot act. The people in the corporation act. For a corporation to do some evil act, like toss a baby off a bridge, means someone acting on behalf of the corporation tossed that baby off the bridge.
Perhaps there might be a series of events, where no one person in the corporation tossed the baby off the bridge. Maybe it's a series of acts from multiple actors in the corporation that by themselves would be seemingly innocent but when combined result in the baby being tossed from the bridge. That does not make the corporation evil, just blind and mindless.
What you seem to fail to comprehend is that corporations are, in the end, groups of people acting in concert just like a government. What is the term we use to describe the creation of a government? Incorporation. What is the term we use to describe the creation of a corporation? That's right, incorporation. A government is a corporation, a legal construct that is just words on paper and ideas in people's heads. I'm just trying to understand how you believe that a government corporate investment is inherently any better or worse than a private corporate investment. It's still people acting on the behalf of a legal construct. The actions of both are determined by the people within them. Their actions may be virtuous because the people are virtuous, or because the blind and mindless machine just happened to do something virtuous by chance like a blind squirrel can find a nut.
Anyway, it's not about "angelic" or "demonic", although your desire to frame economies in biblical terms makes me wonder if you're some kind of crazy.
The terms are not "biblical", they are English. Using the term does not mean I'm religious. It does not prove whether I'm crazy or not either.
And there is not a single country that has succeeded by leaving their economy in the hands of the private sector. Ever. Not one. As in it has never happened in the history of the world.
Of course not, because a government that is completely separated from the economy is no government at all.
So seriously, until you have some proof that it works besides a dog-eared copy of Ayn Rand you've been carrying around since junior year of high school, kindly take your mythical free market and go fuck yourself.
Interesting. You want proof from me to defend my theory but provide no proof to defend your own. Go fuck yourself.
Absolutely not. The coal companies will get the same thing Trump has given everyone to whom he's made a promise: Jack and shit, and maybe not in that order. He only pays his bill when it's hush money to a porn star, and even then under protest.
Trump promised to move the Israel embassy to Jerusalem, he kept that. He promised to lower taxes, seems like he kept that promise. He promised to get out of the Iran nuclear deal, that happened. Trump didn't do these things on his own, of course. Maybe these things would have happened anyway because a government is big and in many ways blind and mindless. Maybe Trump is just a blind squirrel that happened to find a nut.
If governments want to be serious, they should remove subsidies for fossil fuels.
No, if governments were serious about getting off fossil fuels then they'd remove all taxes from them.
Imagine I believe a horse will lose in a horse race, let's call this horse "Coal". Imagine I believe another horse will win, let's call this horse "Wind". If I thought Coal was going to lose this horse race then I'm not going to put myself in a place where I'd benefit off it winning in the race, or even placing (first three) in the race. If I thought Wind was going to win then I want to be in a place of gaining benefit from it winning or placing in the race.
Analogies are never perfect and this breaks down quickly since people that bet on horse races don't often invest in their care and feeding before the race. If I want government interested in the success of something then I want the government to see benefit in it's success. How would a government see benefits from the success of something? By increasing tax revenue if it succeeds.
Ireland selling off fossil fuel investments means they lose interest (and that word has a double meaning here) in the success of fossil fuels. Subsidies on coal though means the government loses money. If those subsidies on coal are tied to the productivity of coal then coal "winning" costs them more money and takes away from their ability to spend that money elsewhere. There's two ways for the government to do away with this expense. One is do away with the subsidies, and that means without taxes or subsidies the government is now further separated from any interest in coal. Another way to lower spending on coal is enacting regulations and laws discouraging coal use.
The government won't be ever completely disinterested in the success or failure of coal, or any other sector of the economy, because the government likes to see people working. Working people pay taxes, and generally tend to stay out of trouble. Coal miners that are out of work will now have time to protest in front of political offices and get themselves covered on the evening news.
Here's the crazy thing though, there's always an element in the government that loves to buy votes with other people's money. We see a lot of government money dumped into things like corn and schools. People like to see their children educated, especially if they don't have to pay for it. So politicians will promise more money for schools, that way they get votes. People working in corn fields like to know they will have jobs, and so they will vote for politicians that will spend tax dollars on buying corn. Once the corn is harvested the government loses interest in it being sold for ethanol, because the more ethanol burned the more the government has to spend on subsidies. Or rather the more is lost in revenue from higher taxed gasoline.
How do we get the government interested in the success of wind power? By having the government make money on windmills. How can the government make money on windmills? By taxing every kilowatt-hour they produce. The government might try to see greater success from wind power by other mean than subsidies, such as placing regulations beneficial to putting windmills in the most productive places. I recall politicians blocking windmills where they or their contributors might actually see them. Of course they'd do this. Windmills not only cost the government money from energy production subsidies but now they actually have to see them from their backyard. Make it so these places get revenue from the windmills and I believe they might find it not so unappealing to see them spin.
I'll believe the government is serious about getting off fossil fuels when I see them taxing wind and solar, and removing taxes from gasoline and diesel fuel.
In Windows-land, you can buy an Acer E5-576-392H for $380 which has 7 ports: 4x USB (mix of types), 1x VGA, 1x HDMI, and an RJ-45. And the obligatory audio jack, so I guess 8 total. It even includes a DVD drive.
Let's see, 1/3 the processors, 1/3 the RAM, 1/3 the screen resolution, for 1/3 the price. Oh, and twice the weight. TAKE MY MONEY!!
You can still buy motherboards with serial ports or PS/2 jacks.
Why? So I can plug in my CueCat?
The Windows side of the market actually has variety of products and meets consumer demand. It's not a problem.
I'm boggled on why Acer isn't getting more mention on Slashdot then. No... wait... I changed my mind. I'm not boggled at all.
Except for Apple. Apple has a problem where they want to make their products a work of art rather than tools. That's fine for consumer hardware to a point, but it really falls apart with the trash can Mac Pro.
Absolutely, because I wasn't getting anything done until my CueCat was plugged in.
That's great for Germany. I hear that Germany is just looking for more natural gas and oil. I'm sure that Germany will be quite happy to buy up these investments. It's summer now but winter will come again. Without more Russian natural gas it's going to be a lot of cold nights in Brrrrr-lin.
The problem with leaving investing in the hands of the private sector is that the private sector would gladly throw a baby off a bridge for a dollar.
Interesting. What makes the people in government so angelic and the people in private employ so demonic? They are both people, no?
I hear about racist cops that will shoot a black man for driving in the wrong part of town. Cops are government employees, no? Is shooting innocent black men the right thing for the government to do? Or, am I mistaken on the reports of cops being racist and shooting innocent black men?
People in the Army are government employees. They go where the commander in chief tells them to, and get funds to do so only with the permission of Congress. If Congress doesn't like what the Army is doing then they can withhold funds. With "angelic" representatives in Congress funding the Army, and an "angelic" public employee like the President in charge, the Army must be full of angelic people. Angelic people don't abuse innocent brown people in far off places. Therefore what I see in the news is a lie.
I hear that POTUS just appointed a coal advocate to head the EPA. I'm guessing that coal mines will get government subsidies now. That's a good thing, no? Because government investment is a good thing. Private investment is bad, public investment is good. The US government is investing in coal, therefore coal is good.
Um... okay. Was that necessary? A simple, "I believe you were mistaken" would have sufficed.
My $2,000 Blue & White G3 from May 1999 came with a DVD/CD reader only, and that was an extra hundred bucks over the basic CD drive. I had to spend an extra $250 for a firewire CD burner.
My mistake. I must have missed that. I remember having a debate with my siblings on buying an iMac for Mom. I wanted her to have the iMac with Firewire, a VGA port, and CD-RW, while my siblings thought the cheaper one without VGA or Firewire and only CD-ROM was enough. We were both kind of right. She never had a desire to burn a CD but when the screen went on the blink (bad capacitors were common among all computer makers of the time) there was no way to salvage the machine by hooking up a different display, and without Firewire I couldn't put the machine in target disk mode to copy the files off.
It did have a built-in Zip drive though. What a joke!
Maybe the joke was on me. I found Zip drives quite useful and popular among my co-workers, friends, and family, at the time. That popularity died quickly with the "click of death" in later models.
BONUS ROUND: The built-in hard disk controller would cause data corruption if anything bigger than a 6GB drive was plugged into it. I had to spend another $100 for a hard disk controller with Mac firmware that wouldn't fuck everything up, when similar parts were about $15 for PC's.
I'm not sure how to respond to that.
I did some research on this to refresh my memory and this was a problem on many systems of the era because the IDE/ATA protocol of the time did not support "big" drives. Well, there was a spec for ATA-2 that supported drives larger than 128GB in 1996 but it took a few years for it to be adopted widely. This was not unique to Apple, or to the G3 towers. What you are complaining about is analogous to buying a DVD player with an HDMI1.2 port and then complaining that it didn't support Blu-ray and 4K/HDMI2.0 displays when they came on the market.
I never bought another Apple ever again, and their hardware has only become more abusive since.
Bullshit! Um... I mean I believe you are mistaken.
Nothing Apple made was more abusive to the user than the Performa series of computers. The candy colored computers were quite the improvement over the previous models. The loss of SCSI ports kind of sucked since I had a considerable investment in SCSI devices. Losing ADB meant all kinds of expensive keyboards and Wacom tablets used at work became worthless overnight. Unpacking those G3 systems at work also meant I could retire some Performa systems that gave me headaches everyday. I vaguely recall running into drive size issues at the time but I got around it on the Performas and beige G3 desktops since they had SCSI controllers on the motherboard and I shuffled drives around to put the "big" ATA drives in the G4 systems and salvaged enough "big" SCSI drives from retired Macs to keep everyone happy.
This shuffling things about required some explaining at one point because I retired a Performa instead of an older PowerMac. I had to explain to my boss that the Performa had bad RAM soldered to the motherboard and could not be repaired, that's why it kept crashing. What pieces of shit. That retirement allowed me to salvage it's good RAM on DIMMs, and other parts, then install them in other computers to extend their life a bit. More G3 and less Performa made me and the people I supported much happier.
Keyboard aside - if they'd kept a couple "legacy" ports in addition to adding the new USB-C / Thunderbolt 3 ports, it wouldn't have been quite so maddening. It's not like they don't have room... several other manufacturers have managed to do it on equally-thin machines.
Interesting. I'm listening...
I realize Ethernet is a goner just due to size considerations (and my 2015 MBP doesn't have one anyway)
Not only size but also WiFi is quite common, USB to Ethernet adapters are cheap, and other attempts to shrink Ethernet to smaller jacks never caught on, probably because of the earlier two point menttioned.
- but they certainly could've included at least one USB-A port,
With quality USB-A to USB-C adapters going for $6 on Amazon I'm not going to throw a fit over this. Cheap USB 2 only adapters sell for a buck or two when bought in packs. If the size of the $6 adapter is too big there's very small USB 3.1 adapters for $10.
an SD card port,
I could see that but I have a SD slot on my older MacBook and I think I used it once. I'll admit I may be an outlier so I'll give you this one.
perhaps a Thunderbolt 2 port...
Mini-DisplayPort needs to die in a fire.
I wouldn't be so harsh on mini-DP if they hadn't made the Thunderbolt and mini-DP cables different and incompatible. It took me forever to figure out what the deal was. I finally figured out that mini-DP cables were straight-through and TB1/TB2 cables were crossover. This was confusing and needlessly so. To the few people that really need TB1/TB2 they can buy the $50 adapter. Because DP and TB compatibility was broken from the start someone that wants an adapter for USB3 to mini-DP will need a different $50 adapter. I cannot recall ever seeing a display with a mini-DisplayPort input that didn't have an Apple logo on it so I doubt there's a lot of demand out there. A more likely solution for people is instead of the $50 adapter is getting a $15 USB-C to DisplayPort cable.
Keeping the mini-DP/TB2 port will just extend the confusion for another generation. Let it die.
USB-C fixed this DisplayPort/ThunderBolt cable madness from the mini-DP port. USB-C introduced it's own kind of cable madness but at least we can walk away from the mistakes in mini-DP.
That said, I'm perfectly happy with my "new" (refurb) 2015 MBP.
That was a nice design. I'd likely still be happy with mine if I hadn't broken it.
well they'd go well with having a not shit keyboard and ports that most people still use.
People have been predicting Apple would go out of business since 1984. They've survived this long and with much bigger mistakes, they'll be fine.
I remember when apple dropped the floppy drive way back when. Everyone I knew who had a mac bought an external floppy drive because apple mindlessly dropped it before there was actually a replacement.
There was a replacement, CD-RW. A CD-RW drive was standard equipment on all Apple computers of the era except the lowest end iMac desktops. Also at the time I remember floppy disks being notoriously unreliable and too small to store the growing size of files. A floppy drive was fine for text, simple HTML, and such but worthless for people that were wanting to play MP3 files, move PDFs, and so on. At the time there was a lot of competition for floppy replacements and choosing anything as a replacement at the time would most likely result in failure. It was perhaps quite wise to leave the choice to the user to buy as a peripheral.
What competed with floppy? There's the CD-RW I mentioned, it stored a lot but was slow and awkward at first, and still kind of expensive. Zip drives were doing well, at 100MB each, fast, and (IIRC) about $10 per disc. There was the "floptical", a magnetic/optical hybrid that was backward compatible with floppies in that it could read and write floppies in the same drive. There was the MO drive, or magneto-optical, which as I recall worked similarly to the floptical but confusingly came in multiple incompatible sizes/formats. PD, phase-writer dual, which was similar to and somewhat backward compatible with CD-ROM. There was the big brother to Zip, Jazz, a drive that had 1GB, and later on 2GB, cartridges. There was the Mini-disc, which started as a purely audio storage media but moved into data storage. I'm sure I'm missing a few.
Two things were clear at the time, the floppy was essentially already dead as a usable storage media, and what would ultimately replace it was unclear.
Most people I knew got Zip drives. The place I worked at the time used MO. What signaled the end of the floppy to me was coming to work and finding a CD-R in my mailbox with a note that I was to do something with the file on the disc. I don't remember what I was to do with the file only that I was confused to put the CD-R in my computer and find only a single 2MB file. I went to the author of the note to ask if there was supposed to be more than a single 2MB file on a disc that could store 700MB. He told me he tried putting it on a floppy but it wouldn't fit. He thought he might put it on a MO disc but he knew my computer didn't have a MO drive. All else failing he burned it to a CD-R (which were still kind of expensive at the time) for me to work on because he knew all the computers in the department had a CD-ROM drive.
I mentioned CD-RW as the replacement for floppy because hindsight is 20/20. At the time the choices weren't so clear.
Of course they're going to be predominantly white. We're 62% of the nation.
Whites and Asians make up about 66% of the general population. Whites and Asians make up about 77% of those in computer science. Males make up 48% of the general population, and 79% in computer science. That's a predominance that is disproportionate.
The next biggest group is "latinos" at 17% (why don't we call them native (central) americans?
Probably because they come from places that speak Latin based languages like Spanish and Portuguese. Hispanic is also used to describe these populations because nearly all of them are descendants of people from "Hispana", an alternative name for the Iberian Peninsula. There might still be some people in Central America that are pure blood natives but those are very rare after settlers from predominately Spain and Portugal interbreeding with the native populations for about 500 years.
IQ averages aside, there's no way you're getting around that mass of people.
You've convinced me. I'm convinced you need to read some books on grammar, geography, and algebra.
As for the ports, the nice thing about USB-C standardization is that we no longer need to guess which port anyone will need, only the general largest number of simultaneous accesses they'll want.
I'll agree with one caveat, video.
USB-C supports at least three different video alternate modes natively, MHL, HDMI, and DisplayPort. Then there are adapters and docks that think it's a great idea to dispose of the native video protocol that might be on the USB-C port and provide a USB video adapter chip instead. So someone can have a laptop with a perfectly functional and quite elaborate video chip to drive a display but unless they take great attention on their purchases they might get crappy video because the chip in the adapter sucks, or find no video because the drivers suck.
The people in the USB group should have, for their benefit and ours, stuck with one video standard or none at all. With one USB-C video standard we'd have less of this confusion, either the port supports video natively or it doesn't. With no USB-C video standard we'd know that a USB-C to video cable or dock had a chip in it and we'd need supported drivers and that the video would be limited to the chip in the adapter.
Very few people have ever plugged more than 2-3 things into their laptop at the same time, especially in the WiFi era; many have never attached anything but power.
I find myself using the two USB-C ports on my laptop mostly for power and a mouse. Once in a while I'll have to swap one of those out for a while to plug in a flash drive or something. Sometimes I find a USB hub so I can plug in multiple things at a time, like when my wireless scanner acts up and I'd rather just plug it in than try to find out what's up with it. I thought about investing in a dock of some kind but I've got by without so far. I've been using various dongles for so long I don't even think of it anymore. I just leave the dongles on the cables and shove them in my bag when I pack up the computer, the dongles are just part of the cable to me. I've worn out or broken some USB-A cables and adapters and I'll just replace them with their USB-C equivalents so I don't need the dongles any more.
I hate USB-A and I'd like to be done with it. I have a greater hate for micro-B ports. Both of them are difficult to tell which way is up and if I hadn't invested so much money in devices and cables with those connections then I'd just toss them in the trash to get USB-C replacements.
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Ok Hitler.
If everyone is Hitler then no one is.
This calling people Hitler, a Nazi, or even just a racist means, nothing any more since being abused. But then saying this means I'm a racist. By reading this now you are a racist. Everyone is a racist. Trump is Hitler. Pence is Hitler. They nominated Hitler to SCOTUS. So many Hitlers, so little time, there's no way to point them all out.
Give it a rest. The words mean nothing now and when a true Hitler comes along then you are just a boy who cried wolf.
If you read the article (I know, this is Slashdot) then you'd know that this species of mosquito is invasive. It's native to Africa and wiping them out in Australia would bring the native ecosystem back. This isn't extinction, the species still exists in Africa.
We'll make it work out in the end. The gorillas will just freeze to death when winter comes.
Indeed. Many people keep driving their old cars until the wheel bearings seize, or the transmission stops shifting, or it puts a rod through the block.
A car that breaks down to the point of not being worth the repair is having to call for a tow to a scrapyard and taking a walk/bus/cab/whatever home. There's enough metal and parts in the car to pay for the tow, and often enough left over for the first payment on a replacement car. You mention a bearing seizure as a possible mode of failure on a car. Do you know what a seized bearing looks like on a windmill? There's videos of them that are not too hard to find. You do not want to run a windmill to failure if you can help it.
The problem with windmills is that, unlike the car, people might not be able to find enough spare parts and scrap metal in the old windmill to pay for it's disposal.
I think that was the point.......
I'm not sure you got the point. I'm not sure I got it either.
It would take decommissioning 4,000 wind turbines to equal $1 billion.
And it takes somewhere around 4000 wind turbines to replace the power output of a nuclear power plant like San Onofre. So, what's the problem again?
Does wire and steel age in a large generator?
Yes, metal fatigue is a real thing.
Do the bearings give out?
Sure, but they can be repaired. They can be repaired only so many times though because the metal fatigue in the tower and other parts set a limit on the profitability of repairs over replacement.
Does it cost too much to clean the blades periodically and filth accumulation on the blades makes them less efficient?
All those bird guts do accumulate to a point. The rain washes a lot of it off. If it gets thick enough it cracks in the sun and wind and falls off. That's not the real problem though, the blades are under considerable stress in the wind and bird impacts stress it more. The stress deforms the blades and weakens them. So while the power output of the windmill is quite constant over the life of the windmill there will be a point that the windmill will have to be shut down for reasons of safety.
A windmill run beyond it's safe operational life can suffer a blade failure, meaning bits of metal and composites come flying off the blade. The windmill is now off balance and the bearings are stressed to failure. No working bearings means that metal is grinding against metal and considerable amounts of heat and metal particles are produced. This fine dust of metal and the oil in the bearings will eventually ignite under the heat. This windmill, potentially still turning in the wind, is now burning. If it's hot enough then it can ignite the aluminum and magnesium parts in the nacelle. Now there's burning metal getting flung about in the wind, causing a fire hazard all around. This heat from the fire, if not extinguished quickly, will weaken the steel tower. The tower will fall, the fire will eventually burn out, and now you have a mess of half burned composites, melted aluminum and copper splashed all over the steel and concrete base, and if you are lucky no one died from flying debris or a grass fire.
Will a windmill generate less power over time? Yes, and they will stop doing so in a very sudden and spectacular fashion.
All nuclear power plant projects are required to have a fund to decommission the plant. No funds to decommission means no license to build the plant.
One reason the utilities run these nuclear power plants for so long is because each plant is potentially billions of dollars in sunk costs, after running for 40 years it's been paid for. Another reason is that each reactor produces somewhere around one gigawatt of electricity, 24 hours per day, 7 days per week, with short shutdowns every few months (maybe years) for inspections, refuel, and repairs. Shutting a nuclear reactor down and not having another to replace it means they have to keep running it or they run short on electricity generating capacity by one gigawatt.
In the USA there are about 100 nuclear reactors producing power. Nuclear energy produces about 20% of the electricity we use. Losing a single reactor might not be a big deal because that's only 0.2% of the nation's electrical generation capacity. But what happens if we shut down 10 reactors? That's 2%. Perhaps not a big problem but it's starting to get in the territory of a concern.
You think that can be replaced by wind power? Wind takes 10 times the concrete and steel per generating capacity over nuclear. Does that sound like too much to you? Consider that for every tower sticking up in the air there is a very large block of reinforced concrete buried in the ground to hold it up against the wind. Also consider that those big concrete domes you see over a nuclear reactor is mostly hollow.
If the problem of getting rid of those old nuclear power plants concerns you then there's a really easy way to speed up the process of shutting them down. All the government would have to do is allow for replacement reactors at those sites.
We now know how to build reactors that can burn the spent fuel from those old reactors. These fuel rods still have plenty of fuel in them, it's only that the old light water designs we've been using are not efficient enough to use up what is left. Have the replacement reactors be heavy water designs, molten salt designs, or whatever else we have now, and they can dispose of the spent fuel on site by burning it more completely. We'd be getting energy without having to make any new fuel.
What I expect in the comments on this story:
1. Lots of Trump bashing.
2. Much speculation on some university, hospital, insurance company, or alternative federal agency taking the database over.
3. Someone linking to an article on someone taking over the database from HHS so it stays online.
It makes you look not only like an idiot, but a racist sexist idiot.
You forgot to also mention that I'm antisemitic and homophobic.
Your citations have a lot of speculation but little data. Very weak tea. If that's the best you got then I'm done here. I should have known to disengage the first time you called me a dumbfuck. Here's a hint, you will be more persuasive if you don't insult the people you want to bring to your side.
And white guys aren't asians. Why are you lumping them together?
Because the article is lumping Black and Latin together. If someone isn't Black or Latin then that means, with some exceptions in the USA, one is White or Asian. This also works out because Whites and Asians have an average IQ that's close to, and perhaps slightly above, 100. If you want to split some hairs here and claim that there's more than just those four groups then that's fine, but generally and for the purposes of this discussion there's the group that are dominate in STEM, Asian and White, and those that these people want to get more of in STEM, Black and Latin. Depending on how thin you want to split those hairs you can define native Americans as distinct from Latin but in this case I don't much care either way.
YES, that part IS disproportionate. And the causes appear to be, at least in part, sociological in nature.
Prove it. I'm not trying to convince you of anything since I believe it to be futile. If you want to convince me then bring some data. Otherwise we can simply agree to disagree.
And part of it, as I'm sure you'd like to harp on, seems to be biological in nature.
Yes, it's biological in many ways. I've listened to Dr. Jordan Peterson talk and he lays out quite convincingly that there are two aspects to employability. One is intelligence, and many people simply stop with that. To get a job doing something the person must be able to comprehend the task at hand. When there is competition for that job the person must not only be able to do the job but do it better than the other person. The other aspect is personality. The personality must also fit the job. Personality is also genetic. I don't know enough about the relationship between genetics and personality just yet to comment on if this has some correlation to race so I tend to leave that one alone.
It's also our biological nature to screw each other's brains out during puberty and make babies, but we overcome that. Mostly. Sometimes nature is horribly outdated.
Nature isn't outdated. At least I don't think so. Our nature is fine tuned to survival, with enough variation to allow adaptability and evolution to account for variation in the environment. Maybe instead of fighting our nature, and losing, we can use our natural tendencies to the advantage of the individual and society.
Anyway, I'm generally not a fan of racist or sexist policies, but supporting girls in tech is good because it gets more people into tech and we need more people in tech.
Supporting girls in STEM to the exclusion of boys is sexist. Supporting Black and Latin people to the exclusion of White and Asian is racist.
That's where the jobs are. There's plenty of work to do. I also support programs that get boys interested in tech.
Yes, that's where the jobs are. How about instead of worrying about what race and gender the people in these occupations are we simply allow people to choose freely which jobs they want? Seems to me that there's fewer women in STEM because they don't much like it and would rather be school teachers, surgeons/nurses/therapists/other medical, clerical, and so on. That doesn't mean women can't do engineering, or that they'd be bad at it, only that on the average you'll get more men in STEM than women. My sister is an engineer. Sounds like she's good at it too. I'd hate to think someone would want to push her to be a schoolteacher. Just flip that around, if a girl doesn't want to grow up to be an engineer then don't push her into it.
In nations where there's low amount of sexual barriers when it comes to choice of careers paths, there is still unbalance in different fields. People have their own preferences and there's a trend with men and women going different ways. That's fine. Let people choose which way
Well, I was assuming the parent was joking, that it could be software all the way down, which isn't obviously possible.
Yes, I realized that was quite probable after I submitted my post.
In practice though the complexity of SDN switching is well beyond the point of diminishing returns for almost everywhere to bother with.
Agreed, I imagine there is a market for software defined switching but it is quite small because the costs outweigh the benefits for most cases. I can also imagine much of that market exists in places where much of the network is virtual, like the VM clusters I mentioned in my previous post. It may be possible that software defined switches could gain more of the market. I'm thinking that not only would cost be a consideration but also security. I don't know much about how software defined switching would work but I'm quite certain the more general purpose the hardware the less secure it will be.
I heard the same thing about John Deere growing up. That John Deere was just green paint and a lot of snobbery.
Here's what I learned, farmers and ranchers are businessmen. They need to get work done like every other business. Downtime costs money. John Deere tractors still break down, get stuck in the mud, wear out, etc. It's that the competition do this more often. There's still some snobbery and such in there, John Deere tractors can have leather seats and built in refrigerator. They spend the money on the "green paint" because it gives them more return on their investment.
Is Cisco just a name? Maybe that's true now but they can only get to be "a name" by proving to be better over time. No one Is GMC just a name? Is Apple? Businessmen buy this stuff because it makes them money. If Cisco stops making people money, or rather they can make more money with someone else, then Cisco will disappear. Same goes for Apple, John Deere, and GMC.
Software defined networking is great when dealing with networks at a high enough level. People have been making routers from commodity hardware for a very long time. Obviously people have produced special purpose hardware for routing as this means they can optimize the hardware for the task and can do so cheaper than someone grabbing a PC, filling it with interface cards, and loading some software onto it.
Switching is different than routing, it's done on a different level. The hardware needed is more complex, and therefore more expensive, than what is found in commodity computers. Go and try to find a software defined switch. I tried, and they don't exist. The closest you will find is a switch defined as a virtual machine. Load up something like VMWare ESXi and you'll find a way to create a software switch, but it can only switch packets among the virtual machines on that system.
People have made limited software switches with server style Ethernet cards (which grant greater access to the packet content than a desktop Ethernet controller) and the right kind of software but they are expensive and slow. They are really only useful for things like testing, training, or demonstrations.
This is a big deal because this means Amazon is getting in the hardware business in a way that is quite rare. Amazon is a large enough company that they may actually be able to follow through.
That is a short summary , with caveat, but the bottom line is , if there was no law against grinding live puppy into paste , and it would bring money, a corporation WOULD do it.
For a corporation to make money grinding puppies into paste means people are buying puppy paste. That means people find grinding puppies into paste as something of value. It doesn't have to be all people, just enough people that puppy paste sells well enough for someone to profit from selling it. If you find grinding puppies into paste disgusting then don't buy it. If it disgusts you enough then I expect that you'd expend your own time and money to convince others to stop buying puppy paste. I'm guessing that someone might find something that they could sell as an alternative, something that may not be cheaper but cheap enough that those that don't want to see puppies turned into paste would buy the alternative. If enough people do this then enough buyers of puppy paste go get the alternative that the puppy paste people go out of business for not having enough customers.
There's more than one way to get rid of the puppy grinders. Government bans only work if there is some public support for it. I'll give the failure of bans on alcohol and marijuana as examples. To really get rid of this behavior you despise means giving people a cheaper alternative. As an example of this I give kerosene as an alternative to whale oil. If you want people to stop burning kerosene then give them electric lights.
A government is not beholden to a limited "private club" third party to get "profit". It is beholden to the whole of the public.
The government is beholden to the majority vote. They don't have to keep all the people happy all of the time, or some of the people all of the time, or all of the people some of the time. They have to keep some of the people happy some of the time. In a constitutional representative republic like the USA the government is bound (at least theoretically) by the confines of the constitution. It's quite possible that a constitution prevents the government from enacting or enforcing a law against grinding live puppies into paste.
How would we stop people from grinding puppies into paste if the government can't ban it? Maybe encourage people to adopt puppies. This can be problematic because now there is a profit motive in producing more puppies. Perhaps encouraging people to enact birth control on the dog owners so they produce less puppies, starve the puppy grinders of supply and they go out of business.
Most corporation do not care if a few kids get mangled in the machinery (or at least used to) or do not care if kids get an education, this is why we have labor laws , education laws and no child work allowed.
We have laws against child labor because we now have enough wealth that we can afford to not send children off to work.
Do you really think parents enjoyed sending their children to work? To a place where the machinery could tear them apart? Perhaps you could find cases of corporations kidnapping children, or "adopting" orphans, and forcing them to work but for the most part this was done with the knowledge and agreement of the parents. Why would parents do this? Because the children need to eat. If they can make a few nickels per day to buy some potatoes then they can eat. If they don't make that money then they don't eat, and they die of starvation. The choice was the chance the child died in an industrial accident or the assurance they died from starvation.
These parents need options to feed their children besides sending them to work in a factory so they can eat. We do this, at least in part, with public schools and subsidized school lunches. It's now more beneficial for the parents to send their children to a school instead of sending them to a factory.
This is nonsense. Giving petroleum a tax advantage over wind and solar will not be encourage investment in wind and solar.
You are correct, this is insufficient to create investment in wind and solar. What wind and solar needs to succeed is for them to create value. Creating value is different than creating money. The government creates money, but it only has value because people can generally get something of value with money through trade. Money is a commodity, and like any commodity it's value is reduced as it becomes more plentiful. The government can withdraw value from the private sector through taxes. The government can then divert this value to other segments of the private sector through subsidies.
When the government taxes coal and oil and then subsidizes wind and solar this doesn't necessarily create value. It might make the wind and solar people wealthier but unless there was some value created from the wind and solar power they get wealthier only because the government diverted it to them.
Government can create money also by just printing it. This is effectively a tax on every dollar in circulation. This tax on every dollar is not immediate because it takes time for the market to adjust to the reduced scarcity of the dollar. If the government just prints money and gives that to the wind and solar people then they still just taxed everyone and diverted value to the solar and wind people.
The only real way to create long lasting investment of value in wind and solar is for wind and solar to create some real value for the investors. This cannot be created by government fiat because the government does not write the laws of physics and the economy. People will invest in wind and solar if they see a return on their investment.
I believe that wind does in fact create value, I've seen the numbers and if wind was set loose on the free market then I would expect it to grow on it's own. Subsidies hold wind back because there is a cost in getting the subsidies, this is through lawyers, accountants, and paper pushers that file the paperwork with the government. Those that would like to invest in wind are competing with the people that have invested in wind and government subsidy. Remove the subsidy and the best wind technology wins, not the windmill makers with the best lawyers, lobbyists, and accountants that do a better job of gobbling up subsidy.
I've seen the numbers on solar and I believe that solar power rarely creates value. It might create value in certain places of the world but generally I believe it is a bad idea. Government subsidy hides the bad investment with government money. If you want solar to create real value then remove the subsidy. With subsidies you have lobbyists and lawyers looking for the most government money. Without subsidy you have scientists and engineers looking for the most sun.
People can in fact pull value from the blue sky. They do this with smart investment in wind and solar power.
No. Corporations are not people.
I didn't say corporations are people, you did. You said the private sector would toss a baby off a bridge for a dollar.
I said people act on the behalf of corporations. A corporation itself does nothing. What is a corporation? It's a legal construct. It's nothing but words on paper and an idea in people's heads. A corporation cannot act. The people in the corporation act. For a corporation to do some evil act, like toss a baby off a bridge, means someone acting on behalf of the corporation tossed that baby off the bridge.
Perhaps there might be a series of events, where no one person in the corporation tossed the baby off the bridge. Maybe it's a series of acts from multiple actors in the corporation that by themselves would be seemingly innocent but when combined result in the baby being tossed from the bridge. That does not make the corporation evil, just blind and mindless.
What you seem to fail to comprehend is that corporations are, in the end, groups of people acting in concert just like a government. What is the term we use to describe the creation of a government? Incorporation. What is the term we use to describe the creation of a corporation? That's right, incorporation. A government is a corporation, a legal construct that is just words on paper and ideas in people's heads. I'm just trying to understand how you believe that a government corporate investment is inherently any better or worse than a private corporate investment. It's still people acting on the behalf of a legal construct. The actions of both are determined by the people within them. Their actions may be virtuous because the people are virtuous, or because the blind and mindless machine just happened to do something virtuous by chance like a blind squirrel can find a nut.
Anyway, it's not about "angelic" or "demonic", although your desire to frame economies in biblical terms makes me wonder if you're some kind of crazy.
The terms are not "biblical", they are English. Using the term does not mean I'm religious. It does not prove whether I'm crazy or not either.
And there is not a single country that has succeeded by leaving their economy in the hands of the private sector. Ever. Not one. As in it has never happened in the history of the world.
Of course not, because a government that is completely separated from the economy is no government at all.
So seriously, until you have some proof that it works besides a dog-eared copy of Ayn Rand you've been carrying around since junior year of high school, kindly take your mythical free market and go fuck yourself.
Interesting. You want proof from me to defend my theory but provide no proof to defend your own. Go fuck yourself.
Absolutely not. The coal companies will get the same thing Trump has given everyone to whom he's made a promise: Jack and shit, and maybe not in that order. He only pays his bill when it's hush money to a porn star, and even then under protest.
Trump promised to move the Israel embassy to Jerusalem, he kept that. He promised to lower taxes, seems like he kept that promise. He promised to get out of the Iran nuclear deal, that happened. Trump didn't do these things on his own, of course. Maybe these things would have happened anyway because a government is big and in many ways blind and mindless. Maybe Trump is just a blind squirrel that happened to find a nut.
If governments want to be serious, they should remove subsidies for fossil fuels.
No, if governments were serious about getting off fossil fuels then they'd remove all taxes from them.
Imagine I believe a horse will lose in a horse race, let's call this horse "Coal". Imagine I believe another horse will win, let's call this horse "Wind". If I thought Coal was going to lose this horse race then I'm not going to put myself in a place where I'd benefit off it winning in the race, or even placing (first three) in the race. If I thought Wind was going to win then I want to be in a place of gaining benefit from it winning or placing in the race.
Analogies are never perfect and this breaks down quickly since people that bet on horse races don't often invest in their care and feeding before the race. If I want government interested in the success of something then I want the government to see benefit in it's success. How would a government see benefits from the success of something? By increasing tax revenue if it succeeds.
Ireland selling off fossil fuel investments means they lose interest (and that word has a double meaning here) in the success of fossil fuels. Subsidies on coal though means the government loses money. If those subsidies on coal are tied to the productivity of coal then coal "winning" costs them more money and takes away from their ability to spend that money elsewhere. There's two ways for the government to do away with this expense. One is do away with the subsidies, and that means without taxes or subsidies the government is now further separated from any interest in coal. Another way to lower spending on coal is enacting regulations and laws discouraging coal use.
The government won't be ever completely disinterested in the success or failure of coal, or any other sector of the economy, because the government likes to see people working. Working people pay taxes, and generally tend to stay out of trouble. Coal miners that are out of work will now have time to protest in front of political offices and get themselves covered on the evening news.
Here's the crazy thing though, there's always an element in the government that loves to buy votes with other people's money. We see a lot of government money dumped into things like corn and schools. People like to see their children educated, especially if they don't have to pay for it. So politicians will promise more money for schools, that way they get votes. People working in corn fields like to know they will have jobs, and so they will vote for politicians that will spend tax dollars on buying corn. Once the corn is harvested the government loses interest in it being sold for ethanol, because the more ethanol burned the more the government has to spend on subsidies. Or rather the more is lost in revenue from higher taxed gasoline.
How do we get the government interested in the success of wind power? By having the government make money on windmills. How can the government make money on windmills? By taxing every kilowatt-hour they produce. The government might try to see greater success from wind power by other mean than subsidies, such as placing regulations beneficial to putting windmills in the most productive places. I recall politicians blocking windmills where they or their contributors might actually see them. Of course they'd do this. Windmills not only cost the government money from energy production subsidies but now they actually have to see them from their backyard. Make it so these places get revenue from the windmills and I believe they might find it not so unappealing to see them spin.
I'll believe the government is serious about getting off fossil fuels when I see them taxing wind and solar, and removing taxes from gasoline and diesel fuel.
In Windows-land, you can buy an Acer E5-576-392H for $380 which has 7 ports: 4x USB (mix of types), 1x VGA, 1x HDMI, and an RJ-45. And the obligatory audio jack, so I guess 8 total. It even includes a DVD drive.
Let's see, 1/3 the processors, 1/3 the RAM, 1/3 the screen resolution, for 1/3 the price. Oh, and twice the weight. TAKE MY MONEY!!
You can still buy motherboards with serial ports or PS/2 jacks.
Why? So I can plug in my CueCat?
The Windows side of the market actually has variety of products and meets consumer demand. It's not a problem.
I'm boggled on why Acer isn't getting more mention on Slashdot then. No... wait... I changed my mind. I'm not boggled at all.
Except for Apple. Apple has a problem where they want to make their products a work of art rather than tools. That's fine for consumer hardware to a point, but it really falls apart with the trash can Mac Pro.
Absolutely, because I wasn't getting anything done until my CueCat was plugged in.
Are you for real?
That's great for Germany. I hear that Germany is just looking for more natural gas and oil. I'm sure that Germany will be quite happy to buy up these investments. It's summer now but winter will come again. Without more Russian natural gas it's going to be a lot of cold nights in Brrrrr-lin.
The problem with leaving investing in the hands of the private sector is that the private sector would gladly throw a baby off a bridge for a dollar.
Interesting. What makes the people in government so angelic and the people in private employ so demonic? They are both people, no?
I hear about racist cops that will shoot a black man for driving in the wrong part of town. Cops are government employees, no? Is shooting innocent black men the right thing for the government to do? Or, am I mistaken on the reports of cops being racist and shooting innocent black men?
People in the Army are government employees. They go where the commander in chief tells them to, and get funds to do so only with the permission of Congress. If Congress doesn't like what the Army is doing then they can withhold funds. With "angelic" representatives in Congress funding the Army, and an "angelic" public employee like the President in charge, the Army must be full of angelic people. Angelic people don't abuse innocent brown people in far off places. Therefore what I see in the news is a lie.
I hear that POTUS just appointed a coal advocate to head the EPA. I'm guessing that coal mines will get government subsidies now. That's a good thing, no? Because government investment is a good thing. Private investment is bad, public investment is good. The US government is investing in coal, therefore coal is good.
In other words, you are an idiot.
Bullshit.
Um... okay. Was that necessary? A simple, "I believe you were mistaken" would have sufficed.
My $2,000 Blue & White G3 from May 1999 came with a DVD/CD reader only, and that was an extra hundred bucks over the basic CD drive. I had to spend an extra $250 for a firewire CD burner.
My mistake. I must have missed that. I remember having a debate with my siblings on buying an iMac for Mom. I wanted her to have the iMac with Firewire, a VGA port, and CD-RW, while my siblings thought the cheaper one without VGA or Firewire and only CD-ROM was enough. We were both kind of right. She never had a desire to burn a CD but when the screen went on the blink (bad capacitors were common among all computer makers of the time) there was no way to salvage the machine by hooking up a different display, and without Firewire I couldn't put the machine in target disk mode to copy the files off.
It did have a built-in Zip drive though. What a joke!
Maybe the joke was on me. I found Zip drives quite useful and popular among my co-workers, friends, and family, at the time. That popularity died quickly with the "click of death" in later models.
BONUS ROUND: The built-in hard disk controller would cause data corruption if anything bigger than a 6GB drive was plugged into it. I had to spend another $100 for a hard disk controller with Mac firmware that wouldn't fuck everything up, when similar parts were about $15 for PC's.
I'm not sure how to respond to that.
I did some research on this to refresh my memory and this was a problem on many systems of the era because the IDE/ATA protocol of the time did not support "big" drives. Well, there was a spec for ATA-2 that supported drives larger than 128GB in 1996 but it took a few years for it to be adopted widely. This was not unique to Apple, or to the G3 towers. What you are complaining about is analogous to buying a DVD player with an HDMI1.2 port and then complaining that it didn't support Blu-ray and 4K/HDMI2.0 displays when they came on the market.
I never bought another Apple ever again, and their hardware has only become more abusive since.
Bullshit! Um... I mean I believe you are mistaken.
Nothing Apple made was more abusive to the user than the Performa series of computers. The candy colored computers were quite the improvement over the previous models. The loss of SCSI ports kind of sucked since I had a considerable investment in SCSI devices. Losing ADB meant all kinds of expensive keyboards and Wacom tablets used at work became worthless overnight. Unpacking those G3 systems at work also meant I could retire some Performa systems that gave me headaches everyday. I vaguely recall running into drive size issues at the time but I got around it on the Performas and beige G3 desktops since they had SCSI controllers on the motherboard and I shuffled drives around to put the "big" ATA drives in the G4 systems and salvaged enough "big" SCSI drives from retired Macs to keep everyone happy.
This shuffling things about required some explaining at one point because I retired a Performa instead of an older PowerMac. I had to explain to my boss that the Performa had bad RAM soldered to the motherboard and could not be repaired, that's why it kept crashing. What pieces of shit. That retirement allowed me to salvage it's good RAM on DIMMs, and other parts, then install them in other computers to extend their life a bit. More G3 and less Performa made me and the people I supported much happier.
Keyboard aside - if they'd kept a couple "legacy" ports in addition to adding the new USB-C / Thunderbolt 3 ports, it wouldn't have been quite so maddening. It's not like they don't have room... several other manufacturers have managed to do it on equally-thin machines.
Interesting. I'm listening...
I realize Ethernet is a goner just due to size considerations (and my 2015 MBP doesn't have one anyway)
Not only size but also WiFi is quite common, USB to Ethernet adapters are cheap, and other attempts to shrink Ethernet to smaller jacks never caught on, probably because of the earlier two point menttioned.
- but they certainly could've included at least one USB-A port,
With quality USB-A to USB-C adapters going for $6 on Amazon I'm not going to throw a fit over this. Cheap USB 2 only adapters sell for a buck or two when bought in packs. If the size of the $6 adapter is too big there's very small USB 3.1 adapters for $10.
an SD card port,
I could see that but I have a SD slot on my older MacBook and I think I used it once. I'll admit I may be an outlier so I'll give you this one.
perhaps a Thunderbolt 2 port...
Mini-DisplayPort needs to die in a fire.
I wouldn't be so harsh on mini-DP if they hadn't made the Thunderbolt and mini-DP cables different and incompatible. It took me forever to figure out what the deal was. I finally figured out that mini-DP cables were straight-through and TB1/TB2 cables were crossover. This was confusing and needlessly so. To the few people that really need TB1/TB2 they can buy the $50 adapter. Because DP and TB compatibility was broken from the start someone that wants an adapter for USB3 to mini-DP will need a different $50 adapter. I cannot recall ever seeing a display with a mini-DisplayPort input that didn't have an Apple logo on it so I doubt there's a lot of demand out there. A more likely solution for people is instead of the $50 adapter is getting a $15 USB-C to DisplayPort cable.
Keeping the mini-DP/TB2 port will just extend the confusion for another generation. Let it die.
USB-C fixed this DisplayPort/ThunderBolt cable madness from the mini-DP port. USB-C introduced it's own kind of cable madness but at least we can walk away from the mistakes in mini-DP.
That said, I'm perfectly happy with my "new" (refurb) 2015 MBP.
That was a nice design. I'd likely still be happy with mine if I hadn't broken it.
well they'd go well with having a not shit keyboard and ports that most people still use.
People have been predicting Apple would go out of business since 1984. They've survived this long and with much bigger mistakes, they'll be fine.
I remember when apple dropped the floppy drive way back when. Everyone I knew who had a mac bought an external floppy drive because apple mindlessly dropped it before there was actually a replacement.
There was a replacement, CD-RW. A CD-RW drive was standard equipment on all Apple computers of the era except the lowest end iMac desktops. Also at the time I remember floppy disks being notoriously unreliable and too small to store the growing size of files. A floppy drive was fine for text, simple HTML, and such but worthless for people that were wanting to play MP3 files, move PDFs, and so on. At the time there was a lot of competition for floppy replacements and choosing anything as a replacement at the time would most likely result in failure. It was perhaps quite wise to leave the choice to the user to buy as a peripheral.
What competed with floppy? There's the CD-RW I mentioned, it stored a lot but was slow and awkward at first, and still kind of expensive. Zip drives were doing well, at 100MB each, fast, and (IIRC) about $10 per disc. There was the "floptical", a magnetic/optical hybrid that was backward compatible with floppies in that it could read and write floppies in the same drive. There was the MO drive, or magneto-optical, which as I recall worked similarly to the floptical but confusingly came in multiple incompatible sizes/formats. PD, phase-writer dual, which was similar to and somewhat backward compatible with CD-ROM. There was the big brother to Zip, Jazz, a drive that had 1GB, and later on 2GB, cartridges. There was the Mini-disc, which started as a purely audio storage media but moved into data storage. I'm sure I'm missing a few.
Two things were clear at the time, the floppy was essentially already dead as a usable storage media, and what would ultimately replace it was unclear.
Most people I knew got Zip drives. The place I worked at the time used MO. What signaled the end of the floppy to me was coming to work and finding a CD-R in my mailbox with a note that I was to do something with the file on the disc. I don't remember what I was to do with the file only that I was confused to put the CD-R in my computer and find only a single 2MB file. I went to the author of the note to ask if there was supposed to be more than a single 2MB file on a disc that could store 700MB. He told me he tried putting it on a floppy but it wouldn't fit. He thought he might put it on a MO disc but he knew my computer didn't have a MO drive. All else failing he burned it to a CD-R (which were still kind of expensive at the time) for me to work on because he knew all the computers in the department had a CD-ROM drive.
I mentioned CD-RW as the replacement for floppy because hindsight is 20/20. At the time the choices weren't so clear.
Of course they're going to be predominantly white. We're 62% of the nation.
Whites and Asians make up about 66% of the general population. Whites and Asians make up about 77% of those in computer science. Males make up 48% of the general population, and 79% in computer science. That's a predominance that is disproportionate.
The next biggest group is "latinos" at 17% (why don't we call them native (central) americans?
Probably because they come from places that speak Latin based languages like Spanish and Portuguese. Hispanic is also used to describe these populations because nearly all of them are descendants of people from "Hispana", an alternative name for the Iberian Peninsula. There might still be some people in Central America that are pure blood natives but those are very rare after settlers from predominately Spain and Portugal interbreeding with the native populations for about 500 years.
IQ averages aside, there's no way you're getting around that mass of people.
You've convinced me. I'm convinced you need to read some books on grammar, geography, and algebra.
Well said.
Thank you.
As for the ports, the nice thing about USB-C standardization is that we no longer need to guess which port anyone will need, only the general largest number of simultaneous accesses they'll want.
I'll agree with one caveat, video.
USB-C supports at least three different video alternate modes natively, MHL, HDMI, and DisplayPort. Then there are adapters and docks that think it's a great idea to dispose of the native video protocol that might be on the USB-C port and provide a USB video adapter chip instead. So someone can have a laptop with a perfectly functional and quite elaborate video chip to drive a display but unless they take great attention on their purchases they might get crappy video because the chip in the adapter sucks, or find no video because the drivers suck.
The people in the USB group should have, for their benefit and ours, stuck with one video standard or none at all. With one USB-C video standard we'd have less of this confusion, either the port supports video natively or it doesn't. With no USB-C video standard we'd know that a USB-C to video cable or dock had a chip in it and we'd need supported drivers and that the video would be limited to the chip in the adapter.
Very few people have ever plugged more than 2-3 things into their laptop at the same time, especially in the WiFi era; many have never attached anything but power.
I find myself using the two USB-C ports on my laptop mostly for power and a mouse. Once in a while I'll have to swap one of those out for a while to plug in a flash drive or something. Sometimes I find a USB hub so I can plug in multiple things at a time, like when my wireless scanner acts up and I'd rather just plug it in than try to find out what's up with it. I thought about investing in a dock of some kind but I've got by without so far. I've been using various dongles for so long I don't even think of it anymore. I just leave the dongles on the cables and shove them in my bag when I pack up the computer, the dongles are just part of the cable to me. I've worn out or broken some USB-A cables and adapters and I'll just replace them with their USB-C equivalents so I don't need the dongles any more.
I hate USB-A and I'd like to be done with it. I have a greater hate for micro-B ports. Both of them are difficult to tell which way is up and if I hadn't invested so much money in devices and cables with those connections then I'd just toss them in the trash to get USB-C replacements.