Sure, if you want to pick the one source which shows different figures, go for it.
Unfortunately, even your own source shows that efficiency has increased overall, while the efficiency of imported vehicles has decreased. Let's compare the most "efficient" year (1987), to the most current year (2004):
Passenger cars went from 28.5 to 29.3 Domestic vehicles went from 27 to 29.3 Imports went from 31.2 to 29.3 Light trucks went from 21.7 to 21.5
Since they seem to be using weighted averages, the reason that the overall figure decreased by almost 2 mpg is because more people started buying light trucks. However, the actual fuel efficiency has clearly increased over time, as even your own source shows.
The dumbest idea in the movie Total Recall was that there would be any need for human miners on Mars in the first place.
Yeah, the giant alien-built pyramid which magically gave mars an atmosphere... that was WAY more realistic!
The plausibility of the scenario you complain about hinges entirely on the cost of transport at the time that the colonies were established. Given that middle-class people in the Total Recall Universe can apparently afford vacation travel to Mars, I'd say the idea of human miners is completely realistic. With the availability of such cheap travel, and the abundance of poverty on Earth, it makes perfect sense to ship off your poor and your criminals to slave away in martian mines, instead of sending billion-dollar machines.
There's a difference between clicking a link on Facebook (which a person was logged into anyway) and going out of your way to visit a petition site.
Not really, no. It's not important though - I was just pointing out how ridiculously low a number you were crowing about. Maybe if you were trying to petition the mayor of Tuktoyaktuk to cancel the annual Caribou Rodeo, 10,000 signatures would get results. When you're petitioning the Federal Government to scrap a major part of the bureaucracy, all it'll get you is a lot of poorly concealed laughter.
Maybe this has something to do with just how unpopular the CRTC is among Canadians, with an online petition that has over 10,000 signatures [dissolvethecrtc.ca].
Dude. The "Help nominate William Shatner for Governor General of Canada" Facebook group has over 40,000 votes. I'm not a big fan of the CRTC either, but let's keep things in perspective here....
And for a nice example of an anti-religious bigot leading a nasty crusade to discredit a theory that was later vindicated, please see Jesuit physicist George LeMaitre's "primordial atom theory" which is known to this day by Fred Hoyle's derisive epithet, "the big bang theory".
You should provide more detail if you expect me to see anything. Otherwise you may as well write "as an example of quantum mechanics, see rocks".
Most of the developed world has a negative population growth. Even the US - with one of the highest birth rates amongst the industrialized nations - has a birth rate just below the replacement rate.
- Use high-speed rail for long distance... Switch unequivocally to nuclear power
Sounds good to me.
Build cheap electrical cars
$40,000+ USD isn't cheap, by any means. Even Tesla motors was planning on putting out a similarly priced vehicle, and I'd put good money on their vehicles being much safer than anything coming out of China. Or you can buy the Chevy Volt - a more practical vehicle - for almost $10,000 less.
Funny. "Western elites" seem to know what is needed to be done but it looks like in Asia, they prefer to do than to talk.
Yeah, how dare you white folks try to make suggestions! Just sit in the corner and shut the fuck up! Only other cultures are allowed to come up with ideas!
Yes, there are lots of people who still can read Arabic, but not the general population, I cannot read notes behind photos of my grandparents, I cannot read registration papers of our ancestral family home... It was a political decision back then, justified by the ease of learning Latin alphabet, but more harm done than benefits.
Nonsense. If you really care about those things, you can hire a translator fairly cheaply to translate them for you. The fact that you haven't bothered means that those things have no real value to you. Losing information which you have some vague attachment to is a small price to pay for progress.
Well if it comes down to one of the two, you're better off going with the internet. What you think of as religion is 2,000 year old bullshit that some iron-age twits made up to explain the world around them. The internet is, likewise, full of bullshit, but at least it's made up by modern era people who have the benefit of a couple thousand years of scientific discovery.
Your appeal to authority fallacy notwithstanding, it's worth pointing out that many people who believe in UFO's, bigfoot, and the JFK and 9/11 conspiracy theories also have PHD's etc. Having a piece of paper from a fancy school doesn't mean you're not an idiot, it just means you can focus on a task and have a higher IQ than a chimp.
On the other hand, success in the scientific fields can be directly correlated with religiosity - those who do the best work and contribute the most to our understanding of the universe are FAR less likely to be religious than their more mediocre counterparts.
They might also have been smart enough to have figured out that traveling such distances to so little end was a ridiculous waste of resources, and instead put their brilliance and limited resources into making their original planet more survivable and durable.
After which they got smoked by a massive meteor. Which explains why we're not at least getting some signals from them.
Judging by the fact that you're posting unrelated articles, I'm going to assume that the answer - in your case - is "yes". I'm still waiting for the original guy to respond, though.
Yes, the entire planet is part of an evil plot to replace hemp with nylon. Countries which can't even agree on the color of the sky have all magically agreed to artificially make hemp obsolete.
The guy they "overthrew" was a dictator, too - he just wasn't our dictator. Look into how he was "democratically elected" - you'll be surprised what you find. And that's without bothering to get into just how much of a role the US played. There's plenty of reason to believe that the guy would have been unseated without the help of America.
That's true for the moment - ZFS is the only reason I use OpenSolaris - but it won't last for long. As soon as the BTRFS folks develop a RAIDZ equivalent, I plan on switching back to linux.
Also, as has already been pointed out, ZFS is available on BSD. With OpenSolaris development effectively stopped I've seriously considered switching, but figured I might as well wait a while and see where BTRFS is in a year or so. However, if I needed to build a new ZFS based file server today, I'd definitely go with BSD.
You also seem to imply that the US space program went along flawlessly from the very beginning in the 50s.
No, I just don't seem to remember it killing hundreds of civilians.
My snarky comment was more to point out that hatred for another country
That would be a fair point, if his comment had actually been based on xenophobic hatred of China. It wasn't. Chinese products generally are of inferior quality, just like Japanese products used to be utter crap when we first started buying stuff from them. You don't get to prop up an inferior product by claiming that those who dislike it are all racist assholes who just hate the Chinese.
The quality of the o-rings wasn't the issue - choosing to launch when they knew the weather was unsuitable is what caused the explosion. On the other hand, China has had some FAR worse disasters while developing their own space program, and those failures were entirely due to poor design/manufacture.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, if you want to pick the one source which shows different figures, go for it.
Unfortunately, even your own source shows that efficiency has increased overall, while the efficiency of imported vehicles has decreased. Let's compare the most "efficient" year (1987), to the most current year (2004):
Passenger cars went from 28.5 to 29.3
Domestic vehicles went from 27 to 29.3
Imports went from 31.2 to 29.3
Light trucks went from 21.7 to 21.5
Since they seem to be using weighted averages, the reason that the overall figure decreased by almost 2 mpg is because more people started buying light trucks. However, the actual fuel efficiency has clearly increased over time, as even your own source shows.
I reiterate: Oh, the Horror!
If people could compare their car's economy to vehicles from the 80's, they would plainly see just how inefficient their vehicles are.
Yeah, right. Oh, the Horror!
Really? I actually stuffed 2 single kayaks inside my prius.
Yes, but gluing the fragments back together once you got to the river must have been a real pain in the ass.
The dumbest idea in the movie Total Recall was that there would be any need for human miners on Mars in the first place.
Yeah, the giant alien-built pyramid which magically gave mars an atmosphere ... that was WAY more realistic!
The plausibility of the scenario you complain about hinges entirely on the cost of transport at the time that the colonies were established. Given that middle-class people in the Total Recall Universe can apparently afford vacation travel to Mars, I'd say the idea of human miners is completely realistic. With the availability of such cheap travel, and the abundance of poverty on Earth, it makes perfect sense to ship off your poor and your criminals to slave away in martian mines, instead of sending billion-dollar machines.
There's a difference between clicking a link on Facebook (which a person was logged into anyway) and going out of your way to visit a petition site.
Not really, no. It's not important though - I was just pointing out how ridiculously low a number you were crowing about. Maybe if you were trying to petition the mayor of Tuktoyaktuk to cancel the annual Caribou Rodeo, 10,000 signatures would get results. When you're petitioning the Federal Government to scrap a major part of the bureaucracy, all it'll get you is a lot of poorly concealed laughter.
Maybe this has something to do with just how unpopular the CRTC is among Canadians, with an online petition that has over 10,000 signatures [dissolvethecrtc.ca].
Dude. The "Help nominate William Shatner for Governor General of Canada" Facebook group has over 40,000 votes. I'm not a big fan of the CRTC either, but let's keep things in perspective here ....
Citation, please?
One example:
http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/news/file002.html
And for a nice example of an anti-religious bigot leading a nasty crusade to discredit a theory that was later vindicated, please see Jesuit physicist George LeMaitre's "primordial atom theory" which is known to this day by Fred Hoyle's derisive epithet, "the big bang theory".
You should provide more detail if you expect me to see anything. Otherwise you may as well write "as an example of quantum mechanics, see rocks".
- Stop having more than one kid
Most of the developed world has a negative population growth. Even the US - with one of the highest birth rates amongst the industrialized nations - has a birth rate just below the replacement rate.
- Use high-speed rail for long distance ... Switch unequivocally to nuclear power
Sounds good to me.
Build cheap electrical cars
$40,000+ USD isn't cheap, by any means. Even Tesla motors was planning on putting out a similarly priced vehicle, and I'd put good money on their vehicles being much safer than anything coming out of China. Or you can buy the Chevy Volt - a more practical vehicle - for almost $10,000 less.
Funny. "Western elites" seem to know what is needed to be done but it looks like in Asia, they prefer to do than to talk.
Yep. Aren't brutal dictatorships just wonderful?
Yeah, how dare you white folks try to make suggestions! Just sit in the corner and shut the fuck up! Only other cultures are allowed to come up with ideas!
Yes, there are lots of people who still can read Arabic, but not the general population, I cannot read notes behind photos of my grandparents, I cannot read registration papers of our ancestral family home... It was a political decision back then, justified by the ease of learning Latin alphabet, but more harm done than benefits.
Nonsense. If you really care about those things, you can hire a translator fairly cheaply to translate them for you. The fact that you haven't bothered means that those things have no real value to you. Losing information which you have some vague attachment to is a small price to pay for progress.
Well if it comes down to one of the two, you're better off going with the internet. What you think of as religion is 2,000 year old bullshit that some iron-age twits made up to explain the world around them. The internet is, likewise, full of bullshit, but at least it's made up by modern era people who have the benefit of a couple thousand years of scientific discovery.
Yeah, but what's that got to do with the price of eggs?
Actually a lot of those people are often stereotyped as atheists who are wondering trying to find some greater force in the world.
And rightly so.
Any comment which includes the phrase "Einstein was quite clearly a believer in God" is clearly a troll.
Your appeal to authority fallacy notwithstanding, it's worth pointing out that many people who believe in UFO's, bigfoot, and the JFK and 9/11 conspiracy theories also have PHD's etc. Having a piece of paper from a fancy school doesn't mean you're not an idiot, it just means you can focus on a task and have a higher IQ than a chimp.
On the other hand, success in the scientific fields can be directly correlated with religiosity - those who do the best work and contribute the most to our understanding of the universe are FAR less likely to be religious than their more mediocre counterparts.
Amen
They might also have been smart enough to have figured out that traveling such distances to so little end was a ridiculous waste of resources, and instead put their brilliance and limited resources into making their original planet more survivable and durable.
After which they got smoked by a massive meteor. Which explains why we're not at least getting some signals from them.
That's "science" fiction, not science.
Judging by the fact that you're posting unrelated articles, I'm going to assume that the answer - in your case - is "yes". I'm still waiting for the original guy to respond, though.
The roadside assistance kit contains Twinkies, a large bottle of Mountain Dew, and some aluminum foil.
Yes, the entire planet is part of an evil plot to replace hemp with nylon. Countries which can't even agree on the color of the sky have all magically agreed to artificially make hemp obsolete.
No, seriously .... are you retarded?
The guy they "overthrew" was a dictator, too - he just wasn't our dictator. Look into how he was "democratically elected" - you'll be surprised what you find. And that's without bothering to get into just how much of a role the US played. There's plenty of reason to believe that the guy would have been unseated without the help of America.
That's true for the moment - ZFS is the only reason I use OpenSolaris - but it won't last for long. As soon as the BTRFS folks develop a RAIDZ equivalent, I plan on switching back to linux.
Also, as has already been pointed out, ZFS is available on BSD. With OpenSolaris development effectively stopped I've seriously considered switching, but figured I might as well wait a while and see where BTRFS is in a year or so. However, if I needed to build a new ZFS based file server today, I'd definitely go with BSD.
You also seem to imply that the US space program went along flawlessly from the very beginning in the 50s.
No, I just don't seem to remember it killing hundreds of civilians.
My snarky comment was more to point out that hatred for another country
That would be a fair point, if his comment had actually been based on xenophobic hatred of China. It wasn't. Chinese products generally are of inferior quality, just like Japanese products used to be utter crap when we first started buying stuff from them. You don't get to prop up an inferior product by claiming that those who dislike it are all racist assholes who just hate the Chinese.
The quality of the o-rings wasn't the issue - choosing to launch when they knew the weather was unsuitable is what caused the explosion. On the other hand, China has had some FAR worse disasters while developing their own space program, and those failures were entirely due to poor design/manufacture.