It is likely because a degree is essentially an IQ test.
I'm going by memory here so if someone has better numbers then I welcome corrections. The average IQ of a high school graduate is about 105, slightly above average. The average IQ of a college graduate is about 110. The average IQ of someone with a graduate degree is about 120. The 50/50 point of graduating high school is an IQ of around 80 or 85 as I recall. I can assume that if someone has a college degree then there's a high probability of a person of above average IQ.
I saw an interview with Dr. Jordan Petersen, a psychologist and professor who has gained some popularity recently, where he mentioned another aspect of employment, attitude. Even highly intelligent people can be unemployable if they lack the right attitude. People with an IQ well below average can be good workers if they are motivated and friendly. A college degree shows people have a certain kind of behavior and attitude highly consistent with being able to hold a job. The unmotivated will drop out of college or fail. Those with behavioral issues will also have trouble completing college even with good grades as anti-social behaviors will likely reveal themselves and get them arrested or kicked out of the school.
I've heard of issues of public high schools outside the USA falling into the same bad habits as public high schools in the USA. These habits resulting in people that would normally not be able to graduate in the past being graduated only so the system would be rid of them. They "did their time" and so are released to the public. This means a lot of people with a supposed high school education being functionally illiterate. This may be because they are on the low end of the IQ, or due to being anti-social. How we got to this point would require a lengthy analysis of public education.
With high schools failing to provide an education suitable for an adult to be employed then it falls on colleges to provide this education and employment filter.
The proposal was for subsidized loans. Not a completely free lunch but the government is still paying something.
These interest free loans, guaranteed by the government, has still had effects. It's created an unnatural inflation on the price of an education. We're seeing more bullshit degrees. We're seeing more people go to college that quite likely should not be there. Not everyone needs to go to college. If these loans were not insured by the government then the schools might not be accepting so many marginal students.
Why should i believe anything you wrote when the sites you cite are not believeable?
My head hurts just reading that. That logic just does not compute.
I at least cited something. If you want to claim that they are not believable then would not the natural response be to provide a believable source?
I argue the point of nuclear being lower carbon that solar because the goal, or so I thought, is to reduce carbon output. If that's the goal then why deny access to the lowest carbon energy source we have? If you want to argue that the difference between the two is irrelevant because a future world of electric planes, trains, and automobiles will mean both have a zero carbon footprint then I'll go with that. If you want to claim that solar power has a lower carbon footprint than nuclear then at least show evidence to support it.
If we can agree that the carbon footprint of both is irrelevant then we are still left with nuclear being more reliable, lower cost, and safer. I gave evidence of nuclear power safety. I gave evidence of it being lower cost. If you want to claim that solar is more reliable than nuclear then you've just plain lost me. Solar cannot be more reliable than nuclear because of this thing called "night". If you want to bring in storage solutions like batteries and pumped hydro, or a "super smart grid", then I can bring in those same technologies to argue that nuclear power can load follow, provide power through emergency shutdowns, and provide all the power we'd need absent other energy sources. Oh, and do all of these things without increasing costs. Solar power isn't just expensive because the collectors are made of space age materials, it's expensive because it's unreliable. If we add the storage and "smarts" to make solar reliable then that adds to the costs.
Granted we need some of the ideas above implemented too for it to work, but the idea that you're going to go into permanent debt and be ruined for life, all because you tried to better yourself and get a decent job, is re-pungent and shouldn't be tolerated in a country that fancies itself the "#1 country in the world."
What should be repugnant in the "#1 country in the world" is having a population so poor and dependent on the government that they cannot even afford to pay to educate themselves and their children. A free people should mean being free from being forced, by government fiat or desperation, to go to the government for education. I think this government education is rotting the brains of our nation. The government doesn't much care if people are educated in their schools.
I was in a college history class and part of it covered World War 2. The professor one week in lecture talked about how the Nazi government was teaching children about how the mentally challenged were a drain on society. An example was given on a math problem given to children on how many able bodied workers it would take to support those unable to work. The next week we had a lecture about the post war period and the UK had lots of children that didn't have fathers to care for them. The government set up public schools to educate these children. The professor seemed to this that this was great, children getting free school was good.
I asked the professor what I thought was a pretty basic question. I asked that if the Nazis were using public schools to indoctrinate children then what kept the UK government from doing the same? He thought about the question for a second, waved his hand at me like he didn't have time for that now, and moved on with the prepared lecture. Think about that. This was a professor that was teaching this same lesson for years and I had to be the first one of likely thousands of his students to ask that question. In the space of a week I got two conflicting messages, public school "bad" and public school "good", and nothing to tell me when either one is true.
Here's the lesson I took from that, public school is "bad". If this professor lacked the ability to tell me why UK public school was good then public school must always be bad. I wonder if this professor was taught in public schools.
There's a few other questions that were asked of this professor that he could not answer, which I thought were pretty basic. Students asked for translations on some French and German seen in images he presented in class. It seems odd that this professor, someone I assume had to take a foreign language like I did in college, could not be bothered to find translations for a few words on images he brought to class. I'd think someone that taught the history of France and Germany, and claimed to have lived in Germany as a child, would perhaps know some of the language from where he lived and the neighboring country. I had to go search the internet after class to find out that the name of a French store "Le Bon Marche" translated, basically, to "Best Buy".
I didn't care too much though. I wasn't paying for this class, the government was. Which just another example of how government funded education fails. I saw the problem and I was not bothered by it enough to complain at the time. That's because I was not paying for it.
Stop expecting that the "market will fix everything".
I don't expect the market will fix everything. I also don't expect the government to fix everything either.
The government is good at simple solutions to obvious problems. If the problem is getting goods and people from one end of the nation/state/county to the other then the government knows how to solve that. This means roads, bridges, rails, seaports, and airports. They'll blaze that trail but the government is bad at the more complex problems like operating an airline, a passenger rail system, or ships, that's best left for th
Nuclear isn't cheaper than wind and solar in South Australia, not by a wide margin.
That's because nuclear power costs in Australia is effectively infinite. There is no nuclear power in Australia. How can you even make such a statement with a straight face? I can look at the data and I see this, wind and solar takes ten times as much steel and concrete over nuclear for the same power capacity.
Where's the steel and concrete in wind power? That might not be completely obvious as the tower is a visible steel structure but the concrete anchor below the ground isn't obvious unless you've had some engineering experience.
What of the steel and concrete in solar? Rooftop solar might get away without much steel and concrete but that's the most labor intensive way to do solar. Most solar is out in the desert with collectors on steel posts stuck in concrete anchors, like the windmills.
If we compare nuclear to wind and solar, where we make an honest assessment of materials and labor compared to the power generation capacity and actual energy produced, then nuclear is lower in costs. This is especially true when adding in the costs of batteries to make up for when the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow.
Looking at those links, and not clicking them, they don't really appear as "citations" to me. They appear to be positions.
Then give your own citations (or positions) or shut up.
Instead of clicking your "citations," I looked at the meta-data to see what you're shilling as "citations."
So you are literally judging a book by it's cover.
You went through the effort to read what people said about the data presented rather than actually reading the data yourself and making your own decision? That's messed up. Do you take any position on anything before reading Mother Jones so you know what you should think? Can you decide what to have for breakfast without first reading a public opinion poll on the topic?
I don't know what the solution is. One reasonable proposal is to require taxpayer subsidized student loans to be combined with an internship or apprenticeship to match up students with employers and ensure they are learning something useful.
Here's another proposal. Let's have the students either have to pay for their own educations, like in working through college, or have to apply for a loan through a private bank. If you pay for your own education up front then no one cares if you study transgender dance theory because that's your money. If someone has to go to a bank and they see an application for a loan to major in transgender dance theory then chances are the bank will refuse the loan. If someone shows up with an even slightly higher than average SAT or ACT score, good grades in high school, and wants to go to college to be a registered nurse then that person is quite likely to get a loan.
Government subsidy just artificially raised the prices and reduces choices. I remember this with the switch to digital television. The government said they'd pay UP TO $50 for a device that received digital TV and had a few other requirements. Guess what happened? Every device was priced at exactly $50. I wanted a device that did something the government would not subsidize so I had little for choices. I could choose the crippled government subsidized solution or a very expensive feature filled device for many times more money. There wasn't a $100 middle of the road digital TV converter device, only the $50 crippled devices or $300 whiz bang devices.
Why is it that an engineering degree costs as much as a degree in transgender dance theory? Because the student doesn't pay for it, the government does. If the student had to pay for it then perhaps the student might give more thought in the value of the degree. If a private bank had to put a risk factor on each degree on every student loan they they'd be handing out loans for things like engineering, nursing, law, business, and so forth but not transgender dance theory. They'd also set standards on who got the loan. The government really only cares if a person has been accepted to a college, not if the degree has any value or the school is any good. Mostly they do this just so they know who gets the check and for how much.
A private bank would also put a market based check on the amount of the loan. They might give a $15,000 loan for studying dance. For someone that wants to be a surgeon, and they have demonstrated ability, the bank is quite likely to give a $250,000 loan. Oh, and the dance school loan would probably have a 15% interest rate and the medical school loan a 5% interest rate.
Oh, and the bank might also get in the business of finding people work if it meant getting paid back on the loan. What incentive does the government have in finding people work? I mean they don't want people destitute but really all they want is people that won't cause trouble. The government doesn't much care if they get you a job, put you in prison, or get you on welfare. It's not their money so some government bureaucrat will "find you a job" just so they can be rid of you and move on. They won't care if you like the job, if it matches your degree, or even if the job pays better than minimum wage. It's not their money.
The paper I cited was a compilation of multiple studies, they collected no data themselves they just put a bunch of independent studies together in one place. If you have a better source then please provide it, I'm curious where you get your ideas.
You seem to do that over and over again, make claims with nothing to back it up. That "anti everything else" site shows where they get their data, you did not, why should I believe anything you wrote?
Rooftop solar could power the planet, at a lower cost than nuclear.
Citation needed. How does that work in northern latitudes? Even where I live in the Midwest we're getting barely 9.5 hours between sunrise and sunset, not actual usable daylight on a stationary solar panel, and days are getting shorter.
Nuclear is cheaper only when the government gives the land for free and waives liability.
Solar gets subsidies too. Let's do away with all these energy subsidies and see who wins out. Even Japan is building new nuclear now. Do you want to tell them how much nuclear energy costs? I'm pretty sure they are fully aware of the costs.
Maybe because it was pointed out that a couple hundred million in extra costs from regulation (higher seawall and better backup cooling power) could have saved Japan a couple hundred billion in cleanup costs?
Or, maybe, if regulations had not prevented the building of new nuclear power all those reactors at Fukushima could have been replaced with new ones. The reactors that failed were as old as the one at Chernobyl. Chernobyl and Fukushima were second generation designs, what is likely to be the last of the Gen II reactors to go online was the one the just went online at Watts Bar. Watts Bar had that reactor construction suspended for about 40 years before being completed, it was outdated before it was even switched on.
Japan could have saved billions in cleanup costs by replacing their old reactors with new ones. Even though the wave overcame the seawall the reactor itself was undamaged by the event. What destroyed the reactor was the decay heat from the fuel not being removed by the pumps. Gen III reactors are designed to survive these events even with loss of power for cooling.
Because the cost can never be justified. Didn't seem to pick up on that one.
Then why is Japan restarting half of it's fleet of nuclear reactors and starting construction on new ones? The costs can be justified because Japan just made the justification. Before the Fukushima meltdown Japan had about 25% of their electricity from nuclear fission, the plan is to have it at 30% by 2030. All it took was electricity prices rising by 20% to 30% and trillions of dollars spent every year on importing coal and oil.
Nuclear fission is the safest energy source we have available today. It's also cheaper than solar, hydro, and offshore wind. https://www.instituteforenergy...
If there is an energy scam out there then it's solar. Onshore wind and hydro aren't too bad but they are limited in utility by geography, nuclear energy is not. About the rest of your claims, I think you have your aluminum foil helmet on too tight.
For some reason I got to talking with some of my co-workers on the nuclear emergency evacuation plans that get printed in phone books and such. We live near an operating nuclear power plant so I guess plans like this are legally required or something. The area around the reactor was separated into evacuation zones, each zone is supposed to head out away from the power plant to a specified neighboring city.
One of my co-workers mentioned that where we worked was in one zone and where his children went to school was in a different zone. He said they can take their plan and shove it, he's got his own plan. I suspect that he's not unique. If someone were to actually order an evacuation then we'd have chaos as everyone does their own thing. I suspect that the police and National Guard would be called out to maintain some semblance of order but that's just wishful thinking.
We've had evacuations because of floods before and I saw some of the mayhem from a fairly local, and visible, threat. You take an invisible and widespread threat (and quite likely theoretical threat) like a radiation release then all plans will go out the window. You'll have panicked parents punching out police officers at roadblocks so they can get to their children before the school buses them off to somewhere a county away from where the parents are supposed be. That's assuming the police even show up.
But we can't have nuclear power because we have what has been proven to be a non-issue while we keep burning coal, which also creates a much more certain (and again still theoretical) threat to the safety of children.
Oh, and the lack of new nuclear power means we keep operating current nuclear power plants decades beyond their designed lifespan. Fukushima Daiichi would likely have been shutdown 20 years ago if Japan had not stopped building new nuclear power plants.
So, we can do an orderly shutdown of these old nuclear power reactors or wait until we have to do a very disorderly shutdown. We'll have people claim we can replace these nuclear power reactors with wind and solar but how much will that cost? Wind might look cheap until we figure out that all installed capacity is not equal. A nuclear power plant can have a capacity factor of 90% and wind a capacity factor of 30%. You shutdown a one gigawatt nuclear power plant then you'll need three gigawatts of wind capacity and a Tesla PowerWall big enough to run a small city for hours. Money costs lives too, raising energy prices means less money for food, medical care, and so on.
We've known that nuclear power is exceedingly safe. This study of current practice proves that nuclear is even safer than shown before. Maybe there was a good reason to stop building as many nuclear power plants as we did in the 1970s and 1980s. Not building new nuclear power reactors now is just making things worse.
Big battery packs like this will not be enough to solve the problems with wind and solar.
Critics of solar and wind energy claim that unlike coal or nuclear, it's often not dependable -- sometimes, obviously, the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine. Lithium battery backup systems from companies like Tesla can charge up when such power plants are productive, however, and then provide backup energy when they're not.
Critics of coal and nuclear will point out that they cannot load follow. With a big battery pack like this to follow the peaks and valleys of power demands any energy source looks good. Nuclear produces less CO2 than solar, and about the same as wind, per energy produced. Nuclear is safer than any other energy source we have today. Nuclear power is cheaper than solar, cheaper than hydro, and cheaper than offshore wind.
This is a backup system for onshore wind so it's making something as cheap as nuclear, and with as low of CO2 output as nuclear, as reliable as nuclear. But then if you have to add the cost of a 50 million dollar battery pack to make wind as reliable as nuclear then is wind really as cheap as nuclear any more? What of the CO2 output of building a 50 million dollar battery pack?
We'll likely need battery packs like this Tesla project regardless of the energy source we choose to replace coal and natural gas. I suspect that if we replace coal and natural gas with nuclear these battery packs would not have to be as large as if used with wind and solar.
People can claim that new battery technologies will help make wind and solar more reliable but that applies to any energy source. If wind and solar want to be the means by which we save the world from global warming then they still have to compete with nuclear power. Nuclear power has a 50 year history of safe and reliable power without batteries from Tesla, and the addition of batteries from Tesla can make them even cheaper, safer, and more reliable.
Wind is a great energy source, let's keep doing that. Solar works too but it's ability to compete is quite limited geographically. Can't we have more nuclear too? We used to be able to build a dozen nuclear power plants every year in the USA, I think we can and should do that again. We should keep building a dozen new nuclear power plants every year until something better comes along. If we want to just keep up with the rate of expected shut downs of coal and nuclear then we'd have to build a dozen new nuclear power plants per year for a long time, and not even add new electrical capacity. If we expect to grow in electrical generation capacity then we'd need more than one new gigawatt nuclear power plant every month in the USA. 12 gigawatt power plants is just breaking even with those being shut down, we'll need the wind and solar capacity for growth on top of that.
I'll believe that people are taking the saving of the coral reefs seriously when we get over this unfounded fear of nuclear power. If we fear nuclear power more than global warming then we have some seriously messed up priorities.
Can we solve this problem of CO2 production without nuclear power? Perhaps. What we know for sure is that we can solve this problem faster with nuclear power than without. Nuclear power is safe, inexpensive, and has the lowest CO2 output than any other energy source we have available to us today. If the governments of the world don't allow the building of more nuclear power plants then they are, IMHO, denying the threats that global warming pose. I'd think it is possible to erect windmills as well as nuclear power reactors, doing one doesn't mean we cannot do the other.
As of today, right now, nothing is a better solution to reducing our CO2 output than nuclear power. That might change in the future but right now, today, solar, wind, or whatever else someone might pose as a solution is inferior to nuclear power. By not allowing the building of nuclear power reactors, today, they are making the problem worse.
If the governments of the world are not issuing licenses for new nuclear power reactors then I can only assume they are not convinced of the threats the global warming poses to the coral reefs of the world, or they are completely ignorant of how nuclear power works and how it competes with other energy sources. Is there a third option?
Maybe this isn't ignorance but incompetence, that's the third option. Maybe they know about global warming and nuclear power but they lack the competence to issue licenses. Which is it? Incompetence or ignorance? Perhaps it doesn't matter which, we need to replace them with people that are knowledgeable and competent enough to issue new nuclear reactor licenses.
Lobbying is really just another term for paid bribes.
So, let me get this straight. The only reason the city of Munich would switch back to Microsoft is because someone got bribed. Does that mean someone was bribed to switch to Linux in the first place?
Not all lobbying is bribery, sometimes lobbying is from honest concerned citizens. If all the bad decisions a government makes were from being bribed then all the good decisions were also from bribery.
If all lobbying is bribery then who paid for the lobbying to make drunk driving illegal? I'm not saying I support drunk driving only that there were already laws on maintaining control of your vehicle, obeying signage, speed limits, and so forth. Did we really need these drunk driving laws? If so, then who was doing the bribery? If people wanted to see these laws repealed on drivers being required (or rather forced under severe penalties) to submit to blood alcohol testing on Fourth Amendment grounds then are we to just assume that they are in fact being paid off by "big alcohol"? If "big alcohol" is spending money on rolling back Fourth Amendment violations should we rally against this because... reasons? Do we have to assume bad intentions every time a law gets proposed? Is there such a thing as a good law then?
Did we really need to pay off government officials to make murder illegal?
I don't like government bribery either but if we want to stop it then we need to be certain the bribery exists or we'll be accused of crying wolf eventually. Just like when claiming every problem minorities face is because of racism. Racism is bad, I will not claim otherwise, but if claims of racism are taken too far then claims of such lose any meaning.
Maybe you are a racist for claiming all lobbying is just legalized bribery.
Not that long ago I saw right here on Slashdot that we had (A) identified a gene for a kind of cancer that was very difficult to treat and (B) this gene was largely unique to people of African ancestry. So, because we have a high rate of people that die of cancer of African ancestry therefore racism. But we were just told this tendency was genetic! A + B = racism, that's the only way to add that up apparently.
When I go to most any store to buy electronic the people at the cash register will ask for a ZIP code. I asked one day why they did this, it was so they could plan for more stores. I hated being asked for my address before, as that meant I'd get more crap in the mail from the stores. This practice is rare now, but they still ask for your ZIP code.
When more minorities buy stuff from Apple, and give their ZIP code, then we'll see more stores in those neighborhoods.
I remember seeing some comedy skit where Blacks were portrayed as paranoid about being tracked by the government. Is there some truth to this? I didn't get the joke. If this is true, and many minorities are reluctant to give their ZIP code then the people that plan where stores go don't know that people willing to buy their stuff are traveling so far to buy. Maybe this has something to do with the culture that comes with the race. Paranoid parents raise paranoid children.
Another thing I see are neighborhoods that protest when someone wants to open a store there. Walmart is a popular target. Walmart, or whomever, wants to open a store because they think people will shop there. People in the neighborhood protest because they this this store will bring the "wrong" kind of people to the neighborhood, or there's some racist undertone to the store. (Selling chicken in a Black neighborhood? Are you racist?)
Here's the deal, not everything is about race. If all people see is racism then I think they protest too much.
Did they have a USB logo? Or, did they just have the USB shaped connector?
It's possible that some of those early connectors somehow was able to slip by with getting the logo on the connector and still not meet spec but that's growing pains that most anything new goes through.
I bought one of those cables without a USB logo on it. It was from a respectable cable maker but they made it clear that it was not a USB cable. I missed that detail when I bought it though. I was kind of bummed that it could only pass power but not data, at first anyway. Now I kind of like the idea of a quality "USB-C like" power cable rated for 60 watts that cannot pass data, it protects my devices from having someone try to hack in on a suspicious power port.
So we have to interpret tiny embossed markings in order to tell them apart? I don't think you understand what "looks pretty much the same" means.
I do understand what that means, and this is not a new problem. We've had this problem for a long time and the solution has existed for a long time. We label our cables. If you cannot be bothered to look for the label then that's your problem.
We've been re-using connectors for a long time now. I gave the 25 pin connector example already. There's also the DE-9 connector, that could be used for a number of serial or video connections. The RJ-45 can be Ethernet, serial, telephone, and more. There's those mini-DIN cables with there various number of pins that require a close look on how many pins it's got and what kind of device it uses. This is not a new problem.
It might be new to people used to laptops from just a few months ago, where every device type had a unique connector, video had one shape, USB had another, power a different shape, and ThunderBolt a different one yet. Now that they all use the same connector people are going to have to take a closer look at the cable, or take care to buy quality cables for everything so it doesn't matter which one they pick up from their bag.
Only those cables rated for >3A are electronically identified.
My mistake. This just means that a device assumes a low ampere cable unless told otherwise.
So cheap USB-C cables can still burn up if they can not handle 3A of current.
Right, that's what I said. If you get cables with the USB logo on it then it's been tested for the current carrying capacity. Lacking that logo it can burn up on you.
With a 3A current, most standard cables will have to dissipate 2W per meter of cable. Not that bad but if people go cheap and use 28AWG power conductors, like with some current USB cables, the resulting 4W load could cause things to start smoking.
Right, so don't buy cheap cables. Which was my point.
Are you saying that even cables with the USB logo will burn up? I'll find that hard to believe. Even if the spec was somehow lacking and would allow for such cables to get the logo I'm pretty sure that name brand cable makers would then exceed the spec and/or the spec would be revised so melting cables would be rare on the market pretty quickly.
You ever stop to think maybe you're just weird? Tons of people eat frosted flakes without getting obsessed.
Don't take my little story too seriously. I exaggerated some for effect but Frosted Flakes are damned addicting. It is still something of a craving, that's true, but I can control myself. I rarely eat it any more, I pretty much lost any desire to just gobble it up. It's something of a comfort food now, something to eat when I've had a bad day or something.
It's not the USB C connector, Macs with the older MagSafe one have the same problem. It's a design decision.
What same problem? Being unable to maintain a charge with the included charger under load? I did not know that was an issue. I'm not saying it didn't happen, only that I have not heard of it elsewhere and I have not experienced it myself. I have two MagSafe laptops, one ten years old and the other five. Both stay charged from 85 watt chargers. This tells me that the laptops and chargers were designed with matching power draw to power supplied.
The issue is that they want to sell a small, under-powered charger. It has to be thin and light weight, rather than appropriately spec'ed. If they really wanted to they could sell a more powerful charger and just use two USB C ports to supply 200W.
I recall from previous uses of two USB cables to draw sufficient power for a device that the USB Implementer Forum frowned on this practice. I know it's been done, that's without doubt. Calling this good practice does seem suspect. I'd think offering a single charging connection to meet all power demands would not only be logical but also not appear as a hack to get around a poor design decision. The Surface family of devices also use the SurfaceConnect port, does that provide more than 100 watts? I've been looking and I can find very little that is definitive on this port.
This also means that if^H^H when your battery is dead in a couple of years your Surface won't work properly any more.
Because a genetically modified plant is still made of the same stuff as any other plant. The proportions of these chemicals in these plants might be different but the fundamental chemistry is unchanged. If the proportions of the chemicals is different then the cause of any health issue is in the chemicals, not the genetics.
You've made a compelling argument for why GMOs should not be protected by intellectual property laws.
How you made the leap from what I wrote to anything concerning the validity of intellectual property laws is baffling.
If we're going to get rid of laws restricting the growing of plants then let's do something about opium and marijuana. We got a good start on marijuana already, we just need to push that a bit further.
Starting at $2,499 ($1,499 for the 13.5-inch model), the 15-inch Surface Book 2 is $100 more than a comparable MacBook Pro and is at the very high end of the laptop market.
I thought only Apple sold overpriced laptops? Turns out if you want the power that used to be only available in a desktop and in the form factor of a portable device then you have to pay for it. The article even ends with a comment that the choice between Apple and Microsoft is mostly over OS preference not price/performance.
It seems part of the problem here is the choice of USB-C for charging. That connector is limited to 100 watts. If they want to make a laptop that sucks down more than 100 watts under heavy load then they should have used a different connector for charging.
They mention the lack of ThunderBolt on the Surface Book 2, this reminds me of the previous rantings on Slashdot of being unable to tell a USB cable from a ThunderBolt cable. I looked into this and found this complaint is just ignorance. The people that hold the rights to the USB icon will only allow it's use on cables that meet the USB spec, if you don't see that symbol on the cable then the cable might not be able to pass a USB signal. Same for ThunderBolt, if it has the ThunderBolt symbol then it's rated for ThunderBolt. There's even symbols for the different speed ratings of cables, so complaining of a USB cable not being "super speed" is just not checking the markings. Complaining about being unable to tell a USB cable from a ThunderBolt cable is no different than complaining about being unable to tell cables apart with the old 25 pin connectors. You can tell the serial cables from the parallel cables from the SCSI cables by looking for the cable markings. If your cable doesn't have markings then you are not only an idiot but you are a cheap idiot for buying cheap cables and then complaining you can't tell them apart.
When it comes to the different power ratings of USB-C cables and power supplies I'm not sure I see a problem here either. I'm pretty sure all the power supplies will have markings indicating their maximum wattage ratings. Unlike trying to use a 10 amp 120 volt extension cord to plug in a coffeepot it's not possible to melt the USB-C cable for exceeding the power rating of a cable. The cable will have a chip telling the power supply what it's current carrying capacity is, not have the wires for high current, or simply not have any power wires at all. If you are melting USB-C cables then you have a serious failure, either in the hardware or in mental capacity for thinking you can use a no name unmarked cable to charge a 100 watt computer.
If people complain about a computer that came with a 100 watt power supply and that power supply can't keep the computer charged then who's the bigger idiot? The people that designed the computer this way or the people that bought it? The $2500 price tag just adds to the idiocy.
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It is likely because a degree is essentially an IQ test.
I'm going by memory here so if someone has better numbers then I welcome corrections. The average IQ of a high school graduate is about 105, slightly above average. The average IQ of a college graduate is about 110. The average IQ of someone with a graduate degree is about 120. The 50/50 point of graduating high school is an IQ of around 80 or 85 as I recall. I can assume that if someone has a college degree then there's a high probability of a person of above average IQ.
I saw an interview with Dr. Jordan Petersen, a psychologist and professor who has gained some popularity recently, where he mentioned another aspect of employment, attitude. Even highly intelligent people can be unemployable if they lack the right attitude. People with an IQ well below average can be good workers if they are motivated and friendly. A college degree shows people have a certain kind of behavior and attitude highly consistent with being able to hold a job. The unmotivated will drop out of college or fail. Those with behavioral issues will also have trouble completing college even with good grades as anti-social behaviors will likely reveal themselves and get them arrested or kicked out of the school.
I've heard of issues of public high schools outside the USA falling into the same bad habits as public high schools in the USA. These habits resulting in people that would normally not be able to graduate in the past being graduated only so the system would be rid of them. They "did their time" and so are released to the public. This means a lot of people with a supposed high school education being functionally illiterate. This may be because they are on the low end of the IQ, or due to being anti-social. How we got to this point would require a lengthy analysis of public education.
With high schools failing to provide an education suitable for an adult to be employed then it falls on colleges to provide this education and employment filter.
The proposal was for subsidized loans. Not a completely free lunch but the government is still paying something.
These interest free loans, guaranteed by the government, has still had effects. It's created an unnatural inflation on the price of an education. We're seeing more bullshit degrees. We're seeing more people go to college that quite likely should not be there. Not everyone needs to go to college. If these loans were not insured by the government then the schools might not be accepting so many marginal students.
Why should i believe anything you wrote when the sites you cite are not believeable?
My head hurts just reading that. That logic just does not compute.
I at least cited something. If you want to claim that they are not believable then would not the natural response be to provide a believable source?
I argue the point of nuclear being lower carbon that solar because the goal, or so I thought, is to reduce carbon output. If that's the goal then why deny access to the lowest carbon energy source we have? If you want to argue that the difference between the two is irrelevant because a future world of electric planes, trains, and automobiles will mean both have a zero carbon footprint then I'll go with that. If you want to claim that solar power has a lower carbon footprint than nuclear then at least show evidence to support it.
If we can agree that the carbon footprint of both is irrelevant then we are still left with nuclear being more reliable, lower cost, and safer. I gave evidence of nuclear power safety. I gave evidence of it being lower cost. If you want to claim that solar is more reliable than nuclear then you've just plain lost me. Solar cannot be more reliable than nuclear because of this thing called "night". If you want to bring in storage solutions like batteries and pumped hydro, or a "super smart grid", then I can bring in those same technologies to argue that nuclear power can load follow, provide power through emergency shutdowns, and provide all the power we'd need absent other energy sources. Oh, and do all of these things without increasing costs. Solar power isn't just expensive because the collectors are made of space age materials, it's expensive because it's unreliable. If we add the storage and "smarts" to make solar reliable then that adds to the costs.
Granted we need some of the ideas above implemented too for it to work, but the idea that you're going to go into permanent debt and be ruined for life, all because you tried to better yourself and get a decent job, is re-pungent and shouldn't be tolerated in a country that fancies itself the "#1 country in the world."
What should be repugnant in the "#1 country in the world" is having a population so poor and dependent on the government that they cannot even afford to pay to educate themselves and their children. A free people should mean being free from being forced, by government fiat or desperation, to go to the government for education. I think this government education is rotting the brains of our nation. The government doesn't much care if people are educated in their schools.
I was in a college history class and part of it covered World War 2. The professor one week in lecture talked about how the Nazi government was teaching children about how the mentally challenged were a drain on society. An example was given on a math problem given to children on how many able bodied workers it would take to support those unable to work. The next week we had a lecture about the post war period and the UK had lots of children that didn't have fathers to care for them. The government set up public schools to educate these children. The professor seemed to this that this was great, children getting free school was good.
I asked the professor what I thought was a pretty basic question. I asked that if the Nazis were using public schools to indoctrinate children then what kept the UK government from doing the same? He thought about the question for a second, waved his hand at me like he didn't have time for that now, and moved on with the prepared lecture. Think about that. This was a professor that was teaching this same lesson for years and I had to be the first one of likely thousands of his students to ask that question. In the space of a week I got two conflicting messages, public school "bad" and public school "good", and nothing to tell me when either one is true.
Here's the lesson I took from that, public school is "bad". If this professor lacked the ability to tell me why UK public school was good then public school must always be bad. I wonder if this professor was taught in public schools.
There's a few other questions that were asked of this professor that he could not answer, which I thought were pretty basic. Students asked for translations on some French and German seen in images he presented in class. It seems odd that this professor, someone I assume had to take a foreign language like I did in college, could not be bothered to find translations for a few words on images he brought to class. I'd think someone that taught the history of France and Germany, and claimed to have lived in Germany as a child, would perhaps know some of the language from where he lived and the neighboring country. I had to go search the internet after class to find out that the name of a French store "Le Bon Marche" translated, basically, to "Best Buy".
I didn't care too much though. I wasn't paying for this class, the government was. Which just another example of how government funded education fails. I saw the problem and I was not bothered by it enough to complain at the time. That's because I was not paying for it.
Stop expecting that the "market will fix everything".
I don't expect the market will fix everything. I also don't expect the government to fix everything either.
The government is good at simple solutions to obvious problems. If the problem is getting goods and people from one end of the nation/state/county to the other then the government knows how to solve that. This means roads, bridges, rails, seaports, and airports. They'll blaze that trail but the government is bad at the more complex problems like operating an airline, a passenger rail system, or ships, that's best left for th
Motorhome/rocket-launcher?
That's something I expect from North Korea or a 1980s Bill Murray movie. Sometimes I get the two confused.
Nuclear isn't cheaper than wind and solar in South Australia, not by a wide margin.
That's because nuclear power costs in Australia is effectively infinite. There is no nuclear power in Australia. How can you even make such a statement with a straight face? I can look at the data and I see this, wind and solar takes ten times as much steel and concrete over nuclear for the same power capacity.
Where's the steel and concrete in wind power? That might not be completely obvious as the tower is a visible steel structure but the concrete anchor below the ground isn't obvious unless you've had some engineering experience.
What of the steel and concrete in solar? Rooftop solar might get away without much steel and concrete but that's the most labor intensive way to do solar. Most solar is out in the desert with collectors on steel posts stuck in concrete anchors, like the windmills.
If we compare nuclear to wind and solar, where we make an honest assessment of materials and labor compared to the power generation capacity and actual energy produced, then nuclear is lower in costs. This is especially true when adding in the costs of batteries to make up for when the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow.
Looking at those links, and not clicking them, they don't really appear as "citations" to me. They appear to be positions.
Then give your own citations (or positions) or shut up.
Instead of clicking your "citations," I looked at the meta-data to see what you're shilling as "citations."
So you are literally judging a book by it's cover.
You went through the effort to read what people said about the data presented rather than actually reading the data yourself and making your own decision? That's messed up. Do you take any position on anything before reading Mother Jones so you know what you should think? Can you decide what to have for breakfast without first reading a public opinion poll on the topic?
I don't know what the solution is. One reasonable proposal is to require taxpayer subsidized student loans to be combined with an internship or apprenticeship to match up students with employers and ensure they are learning something useful.
Here's another proposal. Let's have the students either have to pay for their own educations, like in working through college, or have to apply for a loan through a private bank. If you pay for your own education up front then no one cares if you study transgender dance theory because that's your money. If someone has to go to a bank and they see an application for a loan to major in transgender dance theory then chances are the bank will refuse the loan. If someone shows up with an even slightly higher than average SAT or ACT score, good grades in high school, and wants to go to college to be a registered nurse then that person is quite likely to get a loan.
Government subsidy just artificially raised the prices and reduces choices. I remember this with the switch to digital television. The government said they'd pay UP TO $50 for a device that received digital TV and had a few other requirements. Guess what happened? Every device was priced at exactly $50. I wanted a device that did something the government would not subsidize so I had little for choices. I could choose the crippled government subsidized solution or a very expensive feature filled device for many times more money. There wasn't a $100 middle of the road digital TV converter device, only the $50 crippled devices or $300 whiz bang devices.
Why is it that an engineering degree costs as much as a degree in transgender dance theory? Because the student doesn't pay for it, the government does. If the student had to pay for it then perhaps the student might give more thought in the value of the degree. If a private bank had to put a risk factor on each degree on every student loan they they'd be handing out loans for things like engineering, nursing, law, business, and so forth but not transgender dance theory. They'd also set standards on who got the loan. The government really only cares if a person has been accepted to a college, not if the degree has any value or the school is any good. Mostly they do this just so they know who gets the check and for how much.
A private bank would also put a market based check on the amount of the loan. They might give a $15,000 loan for studying dance. For someone that wants to be a surgeon, and they have demonstrated ability, the bank is quite likely to give a $250,000 loan. Oh, and the dance school loan would probably have a 15% interest rate and the medical school loan a 5% interest rate.
Oh, and the bank might also get in the business of finding people work if it meant getting paid back on the loan. What incentive does the government have in finding people work? I mean they don't want people destitute but really all they want is people that won't cause trouble. The government doesn't much care if they get you a job, put you in prison, or get you on welfare. It's not their money so some government bureaucrat will "find you a job" just so they can be rid of you and move on. They won't care if you like the job, if it matches your degree, or even if the job pays better than minimum wage. It's not their money.
The paper I cited was a compilation of multiple studies, they collected no data themselves they just put a bunch of independent studies together in one place. If you have a better source then please provide it, I'm curious where you get your ideas.
You seem to do that over and over again, make claims with nothing to back it up. That "anti everything else" site shows where they get their data, you did not, why should I believe anything you wrote?
Rooftop solar could power the planet, at a lower cost than nuclear.
Citation needed. How does that work in northern latitudes? Even where I live in the Midwest we're getting barely 9.5 hours between sunrise and sunset, not actual usable daylight on a stationary solar panel, and days are getting shorter.
Nuclear is cheaper only when the government gives the land for free and waives liability.
Solar gets subsidies too. Let's do away with all these energy subsidies and see who wins out. Even Japan is building new nuclear now. Do you want to tell them how much nuclear energy costs? I'm pretty sure they are fully aware of the costs.
Maybe because it was pointed out that a couple hundred million in extra costs from regulation (higher seawall and better backup cooling power) could have saved Japan a couple hundred billion in cleanup costs?
Or, maybe, if regulations had not prevented the building of new nuclear power all those reactors at Fukushima could have been replaced with new ones. The reactors that failed were as old as the one at Chernobyl. Chernobyl and Fukushima were second generation designs, what is likely to be the last of the Gen II reactors to go online was the one the just went online at Watts Bar. Watts Bar had that reactor construction suspended for about 40 years before being completed, it was outdated before it was even switched on.
Japan could have saved billions in cleanup costs by replacing their old reactors with new ones. Even though the wave overcame the seawall the reactor itself was undamaged by the event. What destroyed the reactor was the decay heat from the fuel not being removed by the pumps. Gen III reactors are designed to survive these events even with loss of power for cooling.
Because the cost can never be justified. Didn't seem to pick up on that one.
Then why is Japan restarting half of it's fleet of nuclear reactors and starting construction on new ones? The costs can be justified because Japan just made the justification. Before the Fukushima meltdown Japan had about 25% of their electricity from nuclear fission, the plan is to have it at 30% by 2030. All it took was electricity prices rising by 20% to 30% and trillions of dollars spent every year on importing coal and oil.
fission is not only a pointlessly dangerous scam, it's an entirely unnecessary one.
Citation needed. Here's mine that says you're full of shit.
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/...
Nuclear fission is the safest energy source we have available today. It's also cheaper than solar, hydro, and offshore wind.
https://www.instituteforenergy...
Nuclear also has a lower carbon footprint than solar.
http://www.world-nuclear.org/u...
If there is an energy scam out there then it's solar. Onshore wind and hydro aren't too bad but they are limited in utility by geography, nuclear energy is not. About the rest of your claims, I think you have your aluminum foil helmet on too tight.
For some reason I got to talking with some of my co-workers on the nuclear emergency evacuation plans that get printed in phone books and such. We live near an operating nuclear power plant so I guess plans like this are legally required or something. The area around the reactor was separated into evacuation zones, each zone is supposed to head out away from the power plant to a specified neighboring city.
One of my co-workers mentioned that where we worked was in one zone and where his children went to school was in a different zone. He said they can take their plan and shove it, he's got his own plan. I suspect that he's not unique. If someone were to actually order an evacuation then we'd have chaos as everyone does their own thing. I suspect that the police and National Guard would be called out to maintain some semblance of order but that's just wishful thinking.
We've had evacuations because of floods before and I saw some of the mayhem from a fairly local, and visible, threat. You take an invisible and widespread threat (and quite likely theoretical threat) like a radiation release then all plans will go out the window. You'll have panicked parents punching out police officers at roadblocks so they can get to their children before the school buses them off to somewhere a county away from where the parents are supposed be. That's assuming the police even show up.
But we can't have nuclear power because we have what has been proven to be a non-issue while we keep burning coal, which also creates a much more certain (and again still theoretical) threat to the safety of children.
Oh, and the lack of new nuclear power means we keep operating current nuclear power plants decades beyond their designed lifespan. Fukushima Daiichi would likely have been shutdown 20 years ago if Japan had not stopped building new nuclear power plants.
So, we can do an orderly shutdown of these old nuclear power reactors or wait until we have to do a very disorderly shutdown. We'll have people claim we can replace these nuclear power reactors with wind and solar but how much will that cost? Wind might look cheap until we figure out that all installed capacity is not equal. A nuclear power plant can have a capacity factor of 90% and wind a capacity factor of 30%. You shutdown a one gigawatt nuclear power plant then you'll need three gigawatts of wind capacity and a Tesla PowerWall big enough to run a small city for hours. Money costs lives too, raising energy prices means less money for food, medical care, and so on.
We've known that nuclear power is exceedingly safe. This study of current practice proves that nuclear is even safer than shown before. Maybe there was a good reason to stop building as many nuclear power plants as we did in the 1970s and 1980s. Not building new nuclear power reactors now is just making things worse.
Big battery packs like this will not be enough to solve the problems with wind and solar.
Critics of solar and wind energy claim that unlike coal or nuclear, it's often not dependable -- sometimes, obviously, the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine. Lithium battery backup systems from companies like Tesla can charge up when such power plants are productive, however, and then provide backup energy when they're not.
Critics of coal and nuclear will point out that they cannot load follow. With a big battery pack like this to follow the peaks and valleys of power demands any energy source looks good. Nuclear produces less CO2 than solar, and about the same as wind, per energy produced. Nuclear is safer than any other energy source we have today. Nuclear power is cheaper than solar, cheaper than hydro, and cheaper than offshore wind.
This is a backup system for onshore wind so it's making something as cheap as nuclear, and with as low of CO2 output as nuclear, as reliable as nuclear. But then if you have to add the cost of a 50 million dollar battery pack to make wind as reliable as nuclear then is wind really as cheap as nuclear any more? What of the CO2 output of building a 50 million dollar battery pack?
We'll likely need battery packs like this Tesla project regardless of the energy source we choose to replace coal and natural gas. I suspect that if we replace coal and natural gas with nuclear these battery packs would not have to be as large as if used with wind and solar.
People can claim that new battery technologies will help make wind and solar more reliable but that applies to any energy source. If wind and solar want to be the means by which we save the world from global warming then they still have to compete with nuclear power. Nuclear power has a 50 year history of safe and reliable power without batteries from Tesla, and the addition of batteries from Tesla can make them even cheaper, safer, and more reliable.
Wind is a great energy source, let's keep doing that. Solar works too but it's ability to compete is quite limited geographically. Can't we have more nuclear too? We used to be able to build a dozen nuclear power plants every year in the USA, I think we can and should do that again. We should keep building a dozen new nuclear power plants every year until something better comes along. If we want to just keep up with the rate of expected shut downs of coal and nuclear then we'd have to build a dozen new nuclear power plants per year for a long time, and not even add new electrical capacity. If we expect to grow in electrical generation capacity then we'd need more than one new gigawatt nuclear power plant every month in the USA. 12 gigawatt power plants is just breaking even with those being shut down, we'll need the wind and solar capacity for growth on top of that.
Oh, and we'll need some big battery packs too.
I'll believe that people are taking the saving of the coral reefs seriously when we get over this unfounded fear of nuclear power. If we fear nuclear power more than global warming then we have some seriously messed up priorities.
Can we solve this problem of CO2 production without nuclear power? Perhaps. What we know for sure is that we can solve this problem faster with nuclear power than without. Nuclear power is safe, inexpensive, and has the lowest CO2 output than any other energy source we have available to us today. If the governments of the world don't allow the building of more nuclear power plants then they are, IMHO, denying the threats that global warming pose. I'd think it is possible to erect windmills as well as nuclear power reactors, doing one doesn't mean we cannot do the other.
As of today, right now, nothing is a better solution to reducing our CO2 output than nuclear power. That might change in the future but right now, today, solar, wind, or whatever else someone might pose as a solution is inferior to nuclear power. By not allowing the building of nuclear power reactors, today, they are making the problem worse.
If the governments of the world are not issuing licenses for new nuclear power reactors then I can only assume they are not convinced of the threats the global warming poses to the coral reefs of the world, or they are completely ignorant of how nuclear power works and how it competes with other energy sources. Is there a third option?
Maybe this isn't ignorance but incompetence, that's the third option. Maybe they know about global warming and nuclear power but they lack the competence to issue licenses. Which is it? Incompetence or ignorance? Perhaps it doesn't matter which, we need to replace them with people that are knowledgeable and competent enough to issue new nuclear reactor licenses.
James Damore? Is that you?
Lobbying is really just another term for paid bribes.
So, let me get this straight. The only reason the city of Munich would switch back to Microsoft is because someone got bribed. Does that mean someone was bribed to switch to Linux in the first place?
Not all lobbying is bribery, sometimes lobbying is from honest concerned citizens. If all the bad decisions a government makes were from being bribed then all the good decisions were also from bribery.
If all lobbying is bribery then who paid for the lobbying to make drunk driving illegal? I'm not saying I support drunk driving only that there were already laws on maintaining control of your vehicle, obeying signage, speed limits, and so forth. Did we really need these drunk driving laws? If so, then who was doing the bribery? If people wanted to see these laws repealed on drivers being required (or rather forced under severe penalties) to submit to blood alcohol testing on Fourth Amendment grounds then are we to just assume that they are in fact being paid off by "big alcohol"? If "big alcohol" is spending money on rolling back Fourth Amendment violations should we rally against this because... reasons? Do we have to assume bad intentions every time a law gets proposed? Is there such a thing as a good law then?
Did we really need to pay off government officials to make murder illegal?
I don't like government bribery either but if we want to stop it then we need to be certain the bribery exists or we'll be accused of crying wolf eventually. Just like when claiming every problem minorities face is because of racism. Racism is bad, I will not claim otherwise, but if claims of racism are taken too far then claims of such lose any meaning.
Maybe you are a racist for claiming all lobbying is just legalized bribery.
Not that long ago I saw right here on Slashdot that we had (A) identified a gene for a kind of cancer that was very difficult to treat and (B) this gene was largely unique to people of African ancestry. So, because we have a high rate of people that die of cancer of African ancestry therefore racism. But we were just told this tendency was genetic! A + B = racism, that's the only way to add that up apparently.
When I go to most any store to buy electronic the people at the cash register will ask for a ZIP code. I asked one day why they did this, it was so they could plan for more stores. I hated being asked for my address before, as that meant I'd get more crap in the mail from the stores. This practice is rare now, but they still ask for your ZIP code.
When more minorities buy stuff from Apple, and give their ZIP code, then we'll see more stores in those neighborhoods.
I remember seeing some comedy skit where Blacks were portrayed as paranoid about being tracked by the government. Is there some truth to this? I didn't get the joke. If this is true, and many minorities are reluctant to give their ZIP code then the people that plan where stores go don't know that people willing to buy their stuff are traveling so far to buy. Maybe this has something to do with the culture that comes with the race. Paranoid parents raise paranoid children.
Another thing I see are neighborhoods that protest when someone wants to open a store there. Walmart is a popular target. Walmart, or whomever, wants to open a store because they think people will shop there. People in the neighborhood protest because they this this store will bring the "wrong" kind of people to the neighborhood, or there's some racist undertone to the store. (Selling chicken in a Black neighborhood? Are you racist?)
Here's the deal, not everything is about race. If all people see is racism then I think they protest too much.
Did they have a USB logo? Or, did they just have the USB shaped connector?
It's possible that some of those early connectors somehow was able to slip by with getting the logo on the connector and still not meet spec but that's growing pains that most anything new goes through.
I bought one of those cables without a USB logo on it. It was from a respectable cable maker but they made it clear that it was not a USB cable. I missed that detail when I bought it though. I was kind of bummed that it could only pass power but not data, at first anyway. Now I kind of like the idea of a quality "USB-C like" power cable rated for 60 watts that cannot pass data, it protects my devices from having someone try to hack in on a suspicious power port.
So we have to interpret tiny embossed markings in order to tell them apart? I don't think you understand what "looks pretty much the same" means.
I do understand what that means, and this is not a new problem. We've had this problem for a long time and the solution has existed for a long time. We label our cables. If you cannot be bothered to look for the label then that's your problem.
We've been re-using connectors for a long time now. I gave the 25 pin connector example already. There's also the DE-9 connector, that could be used for a number of serial or video connections. The RJ-45 can be Ethernet, serial, telephone, and more. There's those mini-DIN cables with there various number of pins that require a close look on how many pins it's got and what kind of device it uses. This is not a new problem.
It might be new to people used to laptops from just a few months ago, where every device type had a unique connector, video had one shape, USB had another, power a different shape, and ThunderBolt a different one yet. Now that they all use the same connector people are going to have to take a closer look at the cable, or take care to buy quality cables for everything so it doesn't matter which one they pick up from their bag.
Personally I find USB-C a net gain.
Only those cables rated for >3A are electronically identified.
My mistake. This just means that a device assumes a low ampere cable unless told otherwise.
So cheap USB-C cables can still burn up if they can not handle 3A of current.
Right, that's what I said. If you get cables with the USB logo on it then it's been tested for the current carrying capacity. Lacking that logo it can burn up on you.
With a 3A current, most standard cables will have to dissipate 2W per meter of cable. Not that bad but if people go cheap and use 28AWG power conductors, like with some current USB cables, the resulting 4W load could cause things to start smoking.
Right, so don't buy cheap cables. Which was my point.
Are you saying that even cables with the USB logo will burn up? I'll find that hard to believe. Even if the spec was somehow lacking and would allow for such cables to get the logo I'm pretty sure that name brand cable makers would then exceed the spec and/or the spec would be revised so melting cables would be rare on the market pretty quickly.
You ever stop to think maybe you're just weird? Tons of people eat frosted flakes without getting obsessed.
Don't take my little story too seriously. I exaggerated some for effect but Frosted Flakes are damned addicting. It is still something of a craving, that's true, but I can control myself. I rarely eat it any more, I pretty much lost any desire to just gobble it up. It's something of a comfort food now, something to eat when I've had a bad day or something.
It's not the USB C connector, Macs with the older MagSafe one have the same problem. It's a design decision.
What same problem? Being unable to maintain a charge with the included charger under load? I did not know that was an issue. I'm not saying it didn't happen, only that I have not heard of it elsewhere and I have not experienced it myself. I have two MagSafe laptops, one ten years old and the other five. Both stay charged from 85 watt chargers. This tells me that the laptops and chargers were designed with matching power draw to power supplied.
The issue is that they want to sell a small, under-powered charger. It has to be thin and light weight, rather than appropriately spec'ed. If they really wanted to they could sell a more powerful charger and just use two USB C ports to supply 200W.
I recall from previous uses of two USB cables to draw sufficient power for a device that the USB Implementer Forum frowned on this practice. I know it's been done, that's without doubt. Calling this good practice does seem suspect. I'd think offering a single charging connection to meet all power demands would not only be logical but also not appear as a hack to get around a poor design decision. The Surface family of devices also use the SurfaceConnect port, does that provide more than 100 watts? I've been looking and I can find very little that is definitive on this port.
This also means that if^H^H when your battery is dead in a couple of years your Surface won't work properly any more.
That's far from unique to Microsoft.
Because a genetically modified plant is still made of the same stuff as any other plant. The proportions of these chemicals in these plants might be different but the fundamental chemistry is unchanged. If the proportions of the chemicals is different then the cause of any health issue is in the chemicals, not the genetics.
You've made a compelling argument for why GMOs should not be protected by intellectual property laws.
How you made the leap from what I wrote to anything concerning the validity of intellectual property laws is baffling.
If we're going to get rid of laws restricting the growing of plants then let's do something about opium and marijuana. We got a good start on marijuana already, we just need to push that a bit further.
You are what you eat.
Moo.
Starting at $2,499 ($1,499 for the 13.5-inch model), the 15-inch Surface Book 2 is $100 more than a comparable MacBook Pro and is at the very high end of the laptop market.
I thought only Apple sold overpriced laptops? Turns out if you want the power that used to be only available in a desktop and in the form factor of a portable device then you have to pay for it. The article even ends with a comment that the choice between Apple and Microsoft is mostly over OS preference not price/performance.
It seems part of the problem here is the choice of USB-C for charging. That connector is limited to 100 watts. If they want to make a laptop that sucks down more than 100 watts under heavy load then they should have used a different connector for charging.
They mention the lack of ThunderBolt on the Surface Book 2, this reminds me of the previous rantings on Slashdot of being unable to tell a USB cable from a ThunderBolt cable. I looked into this and found this complaint is just ignorance. The people that hold the rights to the USB icon will only allow it's use on cables that meet the USB spec, if you don't see that symbol on the cable then the cable might not be able to pass a USB signal. Same for ThunderBolt, if it has the ThunderBolt symbol then it's rated for ThunderBolt. There's even symbols for the different speed ratings of cables, so complaining of a USB cable not being "super speed" is just not checking the markings. Complaining about being unable to tell a USB cable from a ThunderBolt cable is no different than complaining about being unable to tell cables apart with the old 25 pin connectors. You can tell the serial cables from the parallel cables from the SCSI cables by looking for the cable markings. If your cable doesn't have markings then you are not only an idiot but you are a cheap idiot for buying cheap cables and then complaining you can't tell them apart.
When it comes to the different power ratings of USB-C cables and power supplies I'm not sure I see a problem here either. I'm pretty sure all the power supplies will have markings indicating their maximum wattage ratings. Unlike trying to use a 10 amp 120 volt extension cord to plug in a coffeepot it's not possible to melt the USB-C cable for exceeding the power rating of a cable. The cable will have a chip telling the power supply what it's current carrying capacity is, not have the wires for high current, or simply not have any power wires at all. If you are melting USB-C cables then you have a serious failure, either in the hardware or in mental capacity for thinking you can use a no name unmarked cable to charge a 100 watt computer.
If people complain about a computer that came with a 100 watt power supply and that power supply can't keep the computer charged then who's the bigger idiot? The people that designed the computer this way or the people that bought it? The $2500 price tag just adds to the idiocy.