Okay, you're probably not reading this two days later. But he bought books on criminal investigative techniques. I'd assume that he wanted to cover his trail, and that it was indeed premeditated.
Digital fortress caused me physical pain, especially the bit where they spent three pages figuring out that the prime difference between 235 and 238 was fucking 3. The other ones are okay reads if you don't sleep well on planes.
I may be totally misinterpreting the numbers in the article, but these are the specific passages I'm going by:
Eleven concentrating solar plants are operational in the United States, and 20 are in various stages of planning or permitting, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association.
and
In the meantime, bureau officials emphasized, they will continue processing the more than 130 applications received before May 29, measuring each oneâ(TM)s environmental impact.
It sounds to me like application backlog outnumbers the approved projects by more than 4 to 1, which I'm guessing means that the backlog will last them more than the two year moratorium they have on new apps and hence won't slow the rate of approvals or industry growth at all, while giving them time to create a better standard process for approvals. Additionally, remember this particular piece of the bureaucracy is only concerned with projects on federal land, so any on private land can continue totally unconcerned.
I would love to see it done faster, but I just don't see this as a big deal.
As a side note, they gutted the hybrid vehicle program in 2000? Do you mean the end of tax breaks for hybrids?
What would help would be stratifying the kids by ability level as soon as it becomes apparent, and giving up on the bullshit idea that everyone is equal and should be taught equally. The smart kids will by and large push each other, if they're provided with challenges and surrounded with people who are capable of competing with them. Some students who are way ahead of the curve disrupt the "average" students anyway because they're bored.
The non-PC addition to this says you stop going to extreme expense to educate kids with Downs and other serious mental deficiencies who are never going to get very much value out of their education.
Windmills don't prevent most alternative use of the land, because they're not very close together and the footprint of the pole itself is obviously pretty small. The ones in the plains they typically farm under. The ones in the mountains may kill some birds but don't bother other flora and fauna.
That's not what they mean at all. What they mean is:
We have a giant paperwork backlog and we're totally swamped. We're going to streamline the process. Don't give us anything new until we're done with that. In the meantime, we wouldn't have gotten to your new applications anyway.
As it stands now, even with a small (token, really) "wellness"
initiative at my workplace, last year only 4% of people on the policy
used 90% of the insurance payouts. Stop and think about that for a
minute - If we made that 4% pay their fair share, my insurance would cost
only 10% of what it currently does. And you want to suggest that I
have no right to complain???
To be fair, the entire premise of insurance is spreading unbearable costs among larger numbers of people. Without more (probably confidential) details, I don't know if those 4% using 90% of the payout are all people with self-induced medical conditions or whether one of them is Lance Armstrong with bad-luck aggressive testicular cancer in his 20's. There are probably also a few obese people who used very little of the plan money last year, just by good luck. It would improve your premiums if people were held accountable in a reasonable manner for their risky behaviors, but it likely won't decrease your premium by 90%.
I have to laugh. My dad has a book on souping up your car from ~1965 that I read once for kicks. He answers the question "Why would anyone soup up their car?" by saying something along the lines of "You just won't understand until you've felt the thrill of going 0-60 in 9 seconds!" You'd have trouble selling a minivan much slower than that today.
The Honda Fit has 106HP (and still get to 60 in the aforementioned 9 seconds with a manual). It could probably get by with 70. Of course, the '09 will be a bit heavier with 112HP, and the upward creep begins...
Honestly, I've never been in the market for an automatic because I have a better idea of what gear I'll want to be in in five seconds than it does, so late 80's - early 90's model year automatics are the last ones I have much experience with.
I still have a hard time believing that people get better mileage with an auto, besides maybe teenagers and other assorted gearheads. Not everyone with a manual shifts at 5000 RPM and I'll bet that most people with automatics are just as lousy of drivers as people driving stick, insofar as unnecessary acceleration and braking is concerned.
As long as it doesn't end up upside down. According to this mid-sized and large cars and minivans are safer than SUVs. I don't know whether that says more about the vehicles or the sort of people who drive Camrys, though.
For the average drive (and even the average driver who thinks they aren't) an auto will provide as good - likely better - fuel economy as a manual. That depends on the automatic transmission. There's a fair amount of power loss through the torque converter. Some newer transmissions lock the torque converter in the highway cruising gear, and cars equipped with one of these should match the mileage of a manual on the highway, but the combination of power loss in lower gears and added weight to accelerate really hurts an automatic's mileage in city driving.
Additionally, if you're looking to maximize efficiency, you'll get equivalent performance out of a smaller, lighter engine coupled to a manual transmission, though I don't know of any car companies offering that as an option in the US.
Which raises the question: If you grew up being told you were subhuman, having to accept being spit on, and under constant fear of lynching if you hit on a white woman because you were just some stupid nigger (or maybe they'd just beat you for fun), would you ever make statements that sound bigoted in 30 second CNN sound-byte form? I know I would. It would take a strong, patient person not to.
Not all of them. I had a better GPA as an engineering major in college than I did in my mediocre public high school just because I couldn't get myself to care enough about half the subjects to do the busywork homework or memorize quiz answers. This carried through to college - my in major GPA was better than my out of major GPA by about.3. Part of this is because my writing tends to be choppy and dull, but part of it is because I just had trouble maintaining focus in some 'required electives' and my grades correlated much more closely with my interest in classes than their objective difficulty.
Now I'm starting to wish I had tried to be a bit more well rounded for both personal and social reasons, but I doubt I'm the only person on Slashdot who had more success in Engineering than they would have in English Lit.
Oh, I'd have a sports car in a minute if I still lived somewhere with some nicely banked, curving two-lane blacktops... but on four lane highways between red lights and strip malls, the car becomes just a tool, and one that gets to 60 in 10 or 12 seconds is sufficient.
Any reason why air resistance wouldn't be related to square of speed? Not saying that it isn't, but the generic wind speed / pressure equation I'm familiar with has a 2nd power term, and I'd always assumed that to be the same for cars.
0-60 in 12 seconds was commonplace 15 years ago and comparable to the original 1950's Chevy Corvette. This fascination with overpowered cars seems relatively new. I think it's because people don't want to bother getting off their cell phone and looking over their shoulders to merge. Of course, that's why the fleet average fuel economy is in the low 20's. I can't make myself feel that sorry for people bitching about gas prices when they're voluntarily getting 15mpg driving some giant SUV with a V-8 and an automatic transmission and flooring it to red lights in traffic. (like the cayenne, perhaps;)
Either way, it won't get you killed on the highway if you plan a little in advance when driving. I commute in New Jersey, with probably the highest per-capita rate of incompetent asshole drivers, in a car that probably wouldn't break 10 seconds 0-60 even if the clutch weren't half shot, and I rarely have any problems that better acceleration would fix.
Probably two to three times that fast for a typical cargo ship.
The SS United States was the fastest, or one of the fastest, non-nuclear ships and could sustain 35 knots on fossil fuels but is currently gathering rust in South Philly.
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Okay, you're probably not reading this two days later. But he bought books on criminal investigative techniques. I'd assume that he wanted to cover his trail, and that it was indeed premeditated.
It can go right ahead and do that. I'd love to be around to watch.
Digital fortress caused me physical pain, especially the bit where they spent three pages figuring out that the prime difference between 235 and 238 was fucking 3. The other ones are okay reads if you don't sleep well on planes.
and
It sounds to me like application backlog outnumbers the approved projects by more than 4 to 1, which I'm guessing means that the backlog will last them more than the two year moratorium they have on new apps and hence won't slow the rate of approvals or industry growth at all, while giving them time to create a better standard process for approvals. Additionally, remember this particular piece of the bureaucracy is only concerned with projects on federal land, so any on private land can continue totally unconcerned.
I would love to see it done faster, but I just don't see this as a big deal.
As a side note, they gutted the hybrid vehicle program in 2000? Do you mean the end of tax breaks for hybrids?
True, but they're not putting up windmills in Manhattan or skyscrapers in North Dakota.
What would help would be stratifying the kids by ability level as soon as it becomes apparent, and giving up on the bullshit idea that everyone is equal and should be taught equally. The smart kids will by and large push each other, if they're provided with challenges and surrounded with people who are capable of competing with them. Some students who are way ahead of the curve disrupt the "average" students anyway because they're bored.
The non-PC addition to this says you stop going to extreme expense to educate kids with Downs and other serious mental deficiencies who are never going to get very much value out of their education.
Windmills don't prevent most alternative use of the land, because they're not very close together and the footprint of the pole itself is obviously pretty small. The ones in the plains they typically farm under. The ones in the mountains may kill some birds but don't bother other flora and fauna.
What, praytell, do you harvest when you clearcut desert?
That's not what they mean at all. What they mean is:
We have a giant paperwork backlog and we're totally swamped. We're going to streamline the process. Don't give us anything new until we're done with that. In the meantime, we wouldn't have gotten to your new applications anyway.
To be fair, the entire premise of insurance is spreading unbearable costs among larger numbers of people. Without more (probably confidential) details, I don't know if those 4% using 90% of the payout are all people with self-induced medical conditions or whether one of them is Lance Armstrong with bad-luck aggressive testicular cancer in his 20's. There are probably also a few obese people who used very little of the plan money last year, just by good luck. It would improve your premiums if people were held accountable in a reasonable manner for their risky behaviors, but it likely won't decrease your premium by 90%.
The hell it doesn't. It's probably 20% more expensive than Wegmans, and Wegmans isn't exactly cheap.
I have to laugh. My dad has a book on souping up your car from ~1965 that I read once for kicks. He answers the question "Why would anyone soup up their car?" by saying something along the lines of "You just won't understand until you've felt the thrill of going 0-60 in 9 seconds!" You'd have trouble selling a minivan much slower than that today.
The Honda Fit has 106HP (and still get to 60 in the aforementioned 9 seconds with a manual). It could probably get by with 70. Of course, the '09 will be a bit heavier with 112HP, and the upward creep begins...
Honestly, I've never been in the market for an automatic because I have a better idea of what gear I'll want to be in in five seconds than it does, so late 80's - early 90's model year automatics are the last ones I have much experience with.
I still have a hard time believing that people get better mileage with an auto, besides maybe teenagers and other assorted gearheads. Not everyone with a manual shifts at 5000 RPM and I'll bet that most people with automatics are just as lousy of drivers as people driving stick, insofar as unnecessary acceleration and braking is concerned.
He could be one of the suicidal fixie guys.
As long as it doesn't end up upside down. According to this mid-sized and large cars and minivans are safer than SUVs. I don't know whether that says more about the vehicles or the sort of people who drive Camrys, though.
Additionally, if you're looking to maximize efficiency, you'll get equivalent performance out of a smaller, lighter engine coupled to a manual transmission, though I don't know of any car companies offering that as an option in the US.
Whatever that Indonesian shit-coffee is that's supposed to be the best coffee going. I think it's pretty expensive, though.
Which raises the question: If you grew up being told you were subhuman, having to accept being spit on, and under constant fear of lynching if you hit on a white woman because you were just some stupid nigger (or maybe they'd just beat you for fun), would you ever make statements that sound bigoted in 30 second CNN sound-byte form? I know I would. It would take a strong, patient person not to.
Not all of them. I had a better GPA as an engineering major in college than I did in my mediocre public high school just because I couldn't get myself to care enough about half the subjects to do the busywork homework or memorize quiz answers. This carried through to college - my in major GPA was better than my out of major GPA by about .3. Part of this is because my writing tends to be choppy and dull, but part of it is because I just had trouble maintaining focus in some 'required electives' and my grades correlated much more closely with my interest in classes than their objective difficulty.
Now I'm starting to wish I had tried to be a bit more well rounded for both personal and social reasons, but I doubt I'm the only person on Slashdot who had more success in Engineering than they would have in English Lit.
Oh, I'd have a sports car in a minute if I still lived somewhere with some nicely banked, curving two-lane blacktops... but on four lane highways between red lights and strip malls, the car becomes just a tool, and one that gets to 60 in 10 or 12 seconds is sufficient.
Any reason why air resistance wouldn't be related to square of speed? Not saying that it isn't, but the generic wind speed / pressure equation I'm familiar with has a 2nd power term, and I'd always assumed that to be the same for cars.
0-60 in 12 seconds was commonplace 15 years ago and comparable to the original 1950's Chevy Corvette. This fascination with overpowered cars seems relatively new. I think it's because people don't want to bother getting off their cell phone and looking over their shoulders to merge. Of course, that's why the fleet average fuel economy is in the low 20's. I can't make myself feel that sorry for people bitching about gas prices when they're voluntarily getting 15mpg driving some giant SUV with a V-8 and an automatic transmission and flooring it to red lights in traffic. (like the cayenne, perhaps ;)
Either way, it won't get you killed on the highway if you plan a little in advance when driving. I commute in New Jersey, with probably the highest per-capita rate of incompetent asshole drivers, in a car that probably wouldn't break 10 seconds 0-60 even if the clutch weren't half shot, and I rarely have any problems that better acceleration would fix.
"Funny" mods don't get karma. But... I guess someone had to do it.
Or reading Slashdot.
Probably two to three times that fast for a typical cargo ship.
The SS United States was the fastest, or one of the fastest, non-nuclear ships and could sustain 35 knots on fossil fuels but is currently gathering rust in South Philly.