For the same reason having a dumb computer try to enforce red lights and speed limits is not a good thing. It will interpret my driving based on the limited set of parameters it was programmed with, instead of based on what's really going on.
If they want to send an actual human to ride with me and evaluate my driving, I'd be fine with that.
I don't know about the rest of you but I have to buy a new tube every time I have a new CPU, the old tube always disappears.
Well, that's what happens when you buy DRM'd thermal paste. There's no guarantee it will be available the next time you need it. I'm sure since these sheets are from Sony, they'll have similar problems... Heck, they'll probably remove themselves from between the CPU and heatsink if they can't phone home when you power up the computer.
Most of us women in IT go to some lengths to avoid disclosing it in casual gatherings. It's often the "great reveal" in a relationship... Most men are intimidated by smart women, and so most women who are smart try to conceal it.
Wait, what? So you're going out of your way to attract/keep men too insecure to handle who you really are, and drive away the ones can?
If you have smart appliances that can read these messages, they can make their own decisions. You might configure your clothes dryer to run only when electricity is cheaper then $0.50/kWh, for example, meaning it would shut itself off during the really expensive peaks. Or you might configure your water heater to hold 140 degrees at $0.35/kWh rates, but 110 degrees at rates above that. This would give you the ability to make your own choices about placing peak demands on the power grid. You would think about if you really need 50 gallons of 140 degree hot water at 5:00 in the afternoon if it's going to cost you $7.00 extra per day.
The one I'm waiting for is being able to tell an electric car to charge overnight at $0.10/kWh, and discharge into the grid at $0.20/kWh on-peak when I get home from work. If you apply the "what if everyone did that?" test to that, it would really kill the usage peaks the power companies have to deal with now.
Yep, it's the insurance. This is what my mom was told when she was shopping for one:
Basically, the companies that make the hearing aids agree to give the insurance companies some percentage discount, so they inflate the "list" price to insane levels, in order to give a decent discount. My mom was told that the "list" price for her hearing aid was $12,000, but that the "discounted" insurance price was only $8,000. However, if she didn't have insurance, they would charge her $3,000 out of pocket. I'm sure the company was still making money at the $3k price point, so the rest is just a scam to bilk the insurance companies.
I often visit lake Lewisville, and the top end of the lake (the old Lake Dallas) was impounded about 100 years ago now. The trees are STILL THERE. They rot down to the water level, then stay there as nearly invisible hazards to boaters...
The thing is, steam rolling is either impossible (they're a nuclear power), or wasteful and stupid.
Let's use Iraq as an example. We pretty much wanted to take out ONE guy and his cronies, but we demolished an entire country and spent gobs of money to do it. Get your evidence (important!), your op together, figure out where he is, declare war, and GO GET HIM. Actually going in and dragging him back to face a trial would be best (you did get evidence, right?), but a bomb through the window would work in a pinch. Then send in a diplomat and sue for peace and offer them a clean slate relations-wise. Obviously it wouldn't be quite that simple, but I'm fairly confident our armed forces could pull that off. Yes, there's a good chance he'd be replaced by someone similar, but you're not going to have to demonstrate that capability much more than once, because everyone will know that you'll come for them the second they make any sort of credible threat towards you. Plus, the civilians are a lot less likely to hate our guts afterwards.
The whole grade-level system needs to be thrown out. A better system would be to have a year-round trimester, with courses designed to cover material quickly and be taken twice by most people. The quick studies will be out in one term, and some people might stay for three. You advance in each subject independent of the others (except where dependencies are involved, like physics needing calculus), and when your current instructor thinks you're ready for the next step.
If you add in the ability for students who learn in one term to bank some of that extra time as time off, you also add a very strong incentive to study.
Right now there are so many ads that it seems like we get only fifteen minutes of actual programming in a half-hour show.
It's even worse than that... Go watch some TV shows on Netflix or something where the ads are already cut out. They spend so much time rehashing what happened before the advertising interruption, that there's probably only 10 minutes of real content.
Contrast that with a 1-hour program from a decent network (PBS or BBC) that's actually 1 hour of content.
Until we see new power plants being built I am not so sure we will have a large scale transition to electrically powered vehicles. Various parts of our electrical grid are already pretty stressed out and seeing periodic brown outs and black outs. This could put a damper on large scale adoption of electric vehicles.
Except that most people will be charging their vehicles overnight off-peak. The only real problem would be in the already-peak evening hours when everyone gets home and plugs their cars in on top of that.
However... If electric cars were really widespread enough to cause a problem, there would also be enough of them to help do some load-levelling on the grid, if you have the infrastructure. If I only normally drive my car 10 miles to work and back, I could tell it to maintain 25% charge, and make the rest available for off-peak charging and load levelling. Maybe even make some money charging at home overnight, and discharging on-peak during the day in the parking garage at work.
Re:Hate to put a damper on the celebration
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Diablo III Released
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But should we really be celebrating one of the first major single-player games to *require* that you have an internet connection to even play in solo mode? You can still pop in your ancient copies of earlier Diablos and play. Will the same be true 10 or 15 years from now when the Diablo 3 servers no longer work, or if you should lose your internet connection for some reason (or if Blizzard ever goes belly-up)?
A shame... I played the heck out of Diablo I and II, but I completely stopped even bothering to follow the development of DIII when heard about the single-player internet requirement.
This isn't really about copyright infringement at all. It's about an industry that is rapidly becoming obsolete, and the greedy fat cats trying to keep it going to keep getting fatter off it.
I'm also willing to bet that the textbook cartel has had their sharks circling this company for a while looking for any standing whatsoever to sue over. This is probably just the first vaguely plausible thing they've come up with.
Actually, what we need here is a "smart grid" for wireless data. The plans would be straight metered access, but the actual price per unit of data would be set dynamically by the cell based on current load. The cell would keep the phones informed about the current rate, and each app on the phone that uses data could be configured for a certain limit price where if the current price is above the limit it would not connect on its own, and ask for confirmation if you try to use it manually.
Only problem with that is there's no incentive for the companies to upgrade capacity...
We know many drivers are idiots (I wonder sometimes if there's an idiot out there with my name on him). So providing technology which could marginally reduce their lethality in spite of themselves, would help the others who share the environment with them and their multi-ton rolling missiles.
Throwing more technology at the problem is a terrible way to deal with the problem of stupid drivers. If someone has proven themselves to be a dangerous driver, the correct course of action is to get them off of the public roads.
How does that work with winter, mud and all the other junk that will cover the camera? Do I get a ticket if it's obscured?
I've driven a Prius with a backup camera for three years now. The view is generally good in all conditions. The only real problem is when it rains heavily, you can get a single raindrop hanging from the lens (the lens is tiny) and blocking much of the view.
But then, the rear-view mirror still works.
And if it's raining that heavily, it's quite unlikely that there will be anyone hanging around out behind the car...
Here in the UK, drivers are taught to reverse from the road into a driveway (or from a major road into a minor one when manoeuvring) and then drive out forwards. This means you're going the more dangerous way around (backwards) into the quieter area rather than the busier one, you have a better view of the busier area to choose when to complete your move, and usually you can concentrate on looking one way into a driveway/road you're reversing into instead of both.
Definitely this. Other benefits: - You have to drive past the space to back in, which lets you eyeball it first - It's actually *easier* to back into a space in tight quarters, due to the fact that your manoeuvring wheels are out in the open instead of confined.
Can you imagine if you went to rent a car that advertised unlimited mileage that had the same contractual caveats that unlimited data plans have. Your conversation with the agent might go something like this.
"Yes you do get unlimited mileage but if you drive too much then the car will slow down and only go 5 MPH." "Well how much is too much?" "There is no set amount, it varies by how much other people are driving. It is only the top 5%" "Then how am I supposed to know if I am driving to much?" "Well there is really know way to know, just try to drive as little as possible and you should be fine."
I don't think anyone would stand for that kind of car rental contract.
Well... that IS in fact what happens when everyone is driving too much... The rental agency is happy to rent you a Corvette for lots of money that can do almost 200MPH, in spite of the fact that most roads are "throttled" to 30-70MPH. And if there are too many people driving, you might only get 5MPH.
I sometimes have insomnia in the middle of the night, after awaking from a few hours' rest. At first I was angry that I needed to get up soon and couldn't sleep, but then I started taking it in stride. If I cannot feel sleepy within 15 minutes or so of laying back down, I get up and read or work on a project or something for an hour or two until the sleepiness comes back, or simply nap after work the next day.
Since doing that I feel more relaxed and natural. I am not sure if its biological or simply a state of mind, but I often find it is better not to force sleep if I am not ready for it, it just frustrates me and wastes time. Unfortunately, the way society is set up does not make it easy to run counter to that schedule of course, but I try.
I think attitude has something to do with it. If you wake up, and are annoyed by it, that in itself can keep you awake. When my cat or fiancee wakes me up by walking on me, snoring, or whatever, my response is usually "whatever, back to sleep," and I'm asleep again in seconds. My fiancee tends to get annoyed when that happens, and has a hard time getting back to sleep (which compounds the problem).
My first thought when I read that was that if China starts selling the stuff at insanely low prices (at a subsidized loss) to beat out domestic competition, why don't we just start buying it up and stockpiling it.
That would give us a buffer if they decide to cut us off, and we wouldn't need to buy from them for a while if they raise the prices, which might cause them to keep underselling themselves.
Eh? We have geologists guarded by Marines working to survey Afghanistan because of all the rare-earth stuff there, and get mines up and running to kickstart their economy.
By then there may be a number of cheaper options to visit space though, Virgin Galactic is making a go at it.
I dont believe they will ever be cheaper. Also, they're not even reaching low earth orbit yet (at the moment they're scraping 110km or something).
Space elevators on the other hand will go up to geostationary at least (as the summary says: 36000km), and they're far more efficient, I suspect (rocket motor spewing stuff all over the place versus electrical lift running up a tether).
I'm not so sure that the space elevator will be all that cheaper, either (for passengers). Assuming this is built, and the "cab" is counterweighted with another cab, you still only have one trip per week. If this is cheaper than rockets, then every company and government is going to want to use it to get their satellites and other "stuff" into orbit, which will probably pay a lot better for the company running it than passenger service would. The price will get inflated past what most people can pay, just like current space tourism.
I do this, and take the opportunity to tell the TSA guy that he really ought to do some Google searches for "terahertz radiation" if he's going to be exposed to it all day. So far all the guys I've said that too seemed interested, perhaps more so because I was actually friendly and not calling them sexual predators like most people seem to. If they won't stand next to those machines, those machines can't be there.
Go one step further and suggest that there might be a big pay day if it turns out they were exposed to something dangerous. Nothing like a little greed to get thing moving...
This is a non-violence approach as best as Ghandi himself would have come up with. If the everyone opted for a pat down, then there would be massive queues as the TSA sods could not keep up with the folks in line, that gives them bad press - which is the last thing they want coming up to an election.
A possibly more effective solution: Refuse to fly. Take a bus, take a train, drive, or forgo travel, but don't pay into the system by buying a plane ticket.
So instead of buying a ticket and at least getting something for my money, I'm forced to pay into the system via tax dollars when the airlines get bailed out?
Slashdot Mirror
For the same reason having a dumb computer try to enforce red lights and speed limits is not a good thing. It will interpret my driving based on the limited set of parameters it was programmed with, instead of based on what's really going on.
If they want to send an actual human to ride with me and evaluate my driving, I'd be fine with that.
Aww, that's cute. Too bad it's also bullshit.
Men don't overhear an off-color joke being told to another man and subject the whole office to PC-training.
Hmm, last place I was at, some idiot boss told an off-color (i.e. racist) joke that another man took offense to. Lawsuit. Settled for around $2M.
Ah... and there's the real motivation. He probably didn't care, but realized he could milk it for a big payday.
I don't know about the rest of you but I have to buy a new tube every time I have a new CPU, the old tube always disappears.
Well, that's what happens when you buy DRM'd thermal paste. There's no guarantee it will be available the next time you need it. I'm sure since these sheets are from Sony, they'll have similar problems... Heck, they'll probably remove themselves from between the CPU and heatsink if they can't phone home when you power up the computer.
Most of us women in IT go to some lengths to avoid disclosing it in casual gatherings. It's often the "great reveal" in a relationship... Most men are intimidated by smart women, and so most women who are smart try to conceal it.
Wait, what? So you're going out of your way to attract/keep men too insecure to handle who you really are, and drive away the ones can?
If you have smart appliances that can read these messages, they can make their own decisions. You might configure your clothes dryer to run only when electricity is cheaper then $0.50/kWh, for example, meaning it would shut itself off during the really expensive peaks. Or you might configure your water heater to hold 140 degrees at $0.35/kWh rates, but 110 degrees at rates above that. This would give you the ability to make your own choices about placing peak demands on the power grid. You would think about if you really need 50 gallons of 140 degree hot water at 5:00 in the afternoon if it's going to cost you $7.00 extra per day.
The one I'm waiting for is being able to tell an electric car to charge overnight at $0.10/kWh, and discharge into the grid at $0.20/kWh on-peak when I get home from work. If you apply the "what if everyone did that?" test to that, it would really kill the usage peaks the power companies have to deal with now.
Yep, it's the insurance. This is what my mom was told when she was shopping for one:
Basically, the companies that make the hearing aids agree to give the insurance companies some percentage discount, so they inflate the "list" price to insane levels, in order to give a decent discount. My mom was told that the "list" price for her hearing aid was $12,000, but that the "discounted" insurance price was only $8,000. However, if she didn't have insurance, they would charge her $3,000 out of pocket. I'm sure the company was still making money at the $3k price point, so the rest is just a scam to bilk the insurance companies.
Sink, yes... not so sure about rot.
I often visit lake Lewisville, and the top end of the lake (the old Lake Dallas) was impounded about 100 years ago now. The trees are STILL THERE. They rot down to the water level, then stay there as nearly invisible hazards to boaters...
And the Japanese tea has this cool glow-in-the-dark ambiance...
It wakes you up and keeps you glowing all day!
The thing is, steam rolling is either impossible (they're a nuclear power), or wasteful and stupid.
Let's use Iraq as an example. We pretty much wanted to take out ONE guy and his cronies, but we demolished an entire country and spent gobs of money to do it. Get your evidence (important!), your op together, figure out where he is, declare war, and GO GET HIM. Actually going in and dragging him back to face a trial would be best (you did get evidence, right?), but a bomb through the window would work in a pinch. Then send in a diplomat and sue for peace and offer them a clean slate relations-wise. Obviously it wouldn't be quite that simple, but I'm fairly confident our armed forces could pull that off. Yes, there's a good chance he'd be replaced by someone similar, but you're not going to have to demonstrate that capability much more than once, because everyone will know that you'll come for them the second they make any sort of credible threat towards you. Plus, the civilians are a lot less likely to hate our guts afterwards.
This...
The whole grade-level system needs to be thrown out. A better system would be to have a year-round trimester, with courses designed to cover material quickly and be taken twice by most people. The quick studies will be out in one term, and some people might stay for three. You advance in each subject independent of the others (except where dependencies are involved, like physics needing calculus), and when your current instructor thinks you're ready for the next step.
If you add in the ability for students who learn in one term to bank some of that extra time as time off, you also add a very strong incentive to study.
Right now there are so many ads that it seems like we get only fifteen minutes of actual programming in a half-hour show.
It's even worse than that... Go watch some TV shows on Netflix or something where the ads are already cut out. They spend so much time rehashing what happened before the advertising interruption, that there's probably only 10 minutes of real content.
Contrast that with a 1-hour program from a decent network (PBS or BBC) that's actually 1 hour of content.
Until we see new power plants being built I am not so sure we will have a large scale transition to electrically powered vehicles. Various parts of our electrical grid are already pretty stressed out and seeing periodic brown outs and black outs. This could put a damper on large scale adoption of electric vehicles.
Except that most people will be charging their vehicles overnight off-peak. The only real problem would be in the already-peak evening hours when everyone gets home and plugs their cars in on top of that.
However... If electric cars were really widespread enough to cause a problem, there would also be enough of them to help do some load-levelling on the grid, if you have the infrastructure. If I only normally drive my car 10 miles to work and back, I could tell it to maintain 25% charge, and make the rest available for off-peak charging and load levelling. Maybe even make some money charging at home overnight, and discharging on-peak during the day in the parking garage at work.
But should we really be celebrating one of the first major single-player games to *require* that you have an internet connection to even play in solo mode? You can still pop in your ancient copies of earlier Diablos and play. Will the same be true 10 or 15 years from now when the Diablo 3 servers no longer work, or if you should lose your internet connection for some reason (or if Blizzard ever goes belly-up)?
A shame... I played the heck out of Diablo I and II, but I completely stopped even bothering to follow the development of DIII when heard about the single-player internet requirement.
This isn't really about copyright infringement at all. It's about an industry that is rapidly becoming obsolete, and the greedy fat cats trying to keep it going to keep getting fatter off it.
I'm also willing to bet that the textbook cartel has had their sharks circling this company for a while looking for any standing whatsoever to sue over. This is probably just the first vaguely plausible thing they've come up with.
Actually, what we need here is a "smart grid" for wireless data. The plans would be straight metered access, but the actual price per unit of data would be set dynamically by the cell based on current load. The cell would keep the phones informed about the current rate, and each app on the phone that uses data could be configured for a certain limit price where if the current price is above the limit it would not connect on its own, and ask for confirmation if you try to use it manually.
Only problem with that is there's no incentive for the companies to upgrade capacity...
We know many drivers are idiots (I wonder sometimes if there's an idiot out there with my name on him). So providing technology which could marginally reduce their lethality in spite of themselves, would help the others who share the environment with them and their multi-ton rolling missiles.
Throwing more technology at the problem is a terrible way to deal with the problem of stupid drivers. If someone has proven themselves to be a dangerous driver, the correct course of action is to get them off of the public roads.
I've driven a Prius with a backup camera for three years now. The view is generally good in all conditions. The only real problem is when it rains heavily, you can get a single raindrop hanging from the lens (the lens is tiny) and blocking much of the view.
But then, the rear-view mirror still works.
And if it's raining that heavily, it's quite unlikely that there will be anyone hanging around out behind the car...
Here in the UK, drivers are taught to reverse from the road into a driveway (or from a major road into a minor one when manoeuvring) and then drive out forwards. This means you're going the more dangerous way around (backwards) into the quieter area rather than the busier one, you have a better view of the busier area to choose when to complete your move, and usually you can concentrate on looking one way into a driveway/road you're reversing into instead of both.
Definitely this. Other benefits:
- You have to drive past the space to back in, which lets you eyeball it first
- It's actually *easier* to back into a space in tight quarters, due to the fact that your manoeuvring wheels are out in the open instead of confined.
Can you imagine if you went to rent a car that advertised unlimited mileage that had the same contractual caveats that unlimited data plans have. Your conversation with the agent might go something like this.
"Yes you do get unlimited mileage but if you drive too much then the car will slow down and only go 5 MPH."
"Well how much is too much?"
"There is no set amount, it varies by how much other people are driving. It is only the top 5%"
"Then how am I supposed to know if I am driving to much?"
"Well there is really know way to know, just try to drive as little as possible and you should be fine."
I don't think anyone would stand for that kind of car rental contract.
Well... that IS in fact what happens when everyone is driving too much... The rental agency is happy to rent you a Corvette for lots of money that can do almost 200MPH, in spite of the fact that most roads are "throttled" to 30-70MPH. And if there are too many people driving, you might only get 5MPH.
I sometimes have insomnia in the middle of the night, after awaking from a few hours' rest. At first I was angry that I needed to get up soon and couldn't sleep, but then I started taking it in stride. If I cannot feel sleepy within 15 minutes or so of laying back down, I get up and read or work on a project or something for an hour or two until the sleepiness comes back, or simply nap after work the next day.
Since doing that I feel more relaxed and natural. I am not sure if its biological or simply a state of mind, but I often find it is better not to force sleep if I am not ready for it, it just frustrates me and wastes time. Unfortunately, the way society is set up does not make it easy to run counter to that schedule of course, but I try.
I think attitude has something to do with it. If you wake up, and are annoyed by it, that in itself can keep you awake.
When my cat or fiancee wakes me up by walking on me, snoring, or whatever, my response is usually "whatever, back to sleep," and I'm asleep again in seconds. My fiancee tends to get annoyed when that happens, and has a hard time getting back to sleep (which compounds the problem).
My first thought when I read that was that if China starts selling the stuff at insanely low prices (at a subsidized loss) to beat out domestic competition, why don't we just start buying it up and stockpiling it.
That would give us a buffer if they decide to cut us off, and we wouldn't need to buy from them for a while if they raise the prices, which might cause them to keep underselling themselves.
Eh? We have geologists guarded by Marines working to survey Afghanistan because of all the rare-earth stuff there, and get mines up and running to kickstart their economy.
I'm sure we can handle Nebraska.
By then there may be a number of cheaper options to visit space though, Virgin Galactic is making a go at it.
I dont believe they will ever be cheaper. Also, they're not even reaching low earth orbit yet (at the moment they're scraping 110km or something).
Space elevators on the other hand will go up to geostationary at least (as the summary says: 36000km), and they're far more efficient, I suspect (rocket motor spewing stuff all over the place versus electrical lift running up a tether).
I'm not so sure that the space elevator will be all that cheaper, either (for passengers). Assuming this is built, and the "cab" is counterweighted with another cab, you still only have one trip per week. If this is cheaper than rockets, then every company and government is going to want to use it to get their satellites and other "stuff" into orbit, which will probably pay a lot better for the company running it than passenger service would. The price will get inflated past what most people can pay, just like current space tourism.
I do this, and take the opportunity to tell the TSA guy that he really ought to do some Google searches for "terahertz radiation" if he's going to be exposed to it all day. So far all the guys I've said that too seemed interested, perhaps more so because I was actually friendly and not calling them sexual predators like most people seem to. If they won't stand next to those machines, those machines can't be there.
Go one step further and suggest that there might be a big pay day if it turns out they were exposed to something dangerous. Nothing like a little greed to get thing moving...
This is a non-violence approach as best as Ghandi himself would have come up with. If the everyone opted for a pat down, then there would be massive queues as the TSA sods could not keep up with the folks in line, that gives them bad press - which is the last thing they want coming up to an election.
A possibly more effective solution: Refuse to fly. Take a bus, take a train, drive, or forgo travel, but don't pay into the system by buying a plane ticket.
So instead of buying a ticket and at least getting something for my money, I'm forced to pay into the system via tax dollars when the airlines get bailed out?