Fuel is only a small part of the cost of operating a fission power plant. It non-trivial, but it's a lower percentage than for simpler / lower-energy-fuel power plants such as coal or natural gas.
With that said, I agree that we should be expanding on fission power. Not at the expense of renewables - those are still well below where they could be - but at the expense of things like coal (which is currently needed to provide a lot of the base load that nuclear plants could handle so well and easily). However, given the current cleanup costs, etc. a single commercial-scale fission power plant costs more than $17e9 to build, and I'm not even sure if that counts its (decades of) fuel.
They're also self-replacing. MREs don't fill (or recycle) themselves. If it was possible to reach a point where food could be grown sustainably for even a few people, that would be a huge boon toward more permanent research outposts (think Antarctic research stations or the ISS, not Luna City or a Mars colony). For that matter, that would be the first step toward making a viable colony too... you may not be able to make one completely self-sufficient out of current tech, but you should try to get closer than needing to send up *everything* that gets consumed!
I've played Eve for over seven years, and aside from one scam when I was just starting out (and which cost me a pretty trivial amount of my total wallet, as I was pretty suspicious of it) and one unfortunate incident where a moderately valuable ship of mine got stolen by a (very rapidly former) corpmate, I've had no trouble of the sort you describe. I've lived in everything from highsec to wormholes. I've run missions, belts, complexes, roaming gangs, and fleet combats, operated as scout, FC, bait, and logistics (unarmed repair ship). I've lost ships supporting allies in combat, but never because those allies turned on me. I've been in several corps and even more alliances. I've flown with real-life friends and with people who live halfway around the world from me. I've given loans and had them paid back, and taken loans out myself. I've lived in a communist system where all our loot went to the corp in exchange for free ships and modules at need.
I've been doing this since 2006, and I'm in no way a good judge of character. I just try to fly smart, and look for situations where self-interest keeps people together. It works.
The best way to get into Eve is to join a friend who already plays, who can show you the ropes and maybe give you an influx of starting cash (5M is nothing to a player who has been in the game for a year - a single gun on one whip may cost more than that - but it'll outfit a newbie for basically their whole trial without needing to grind). Ideally, that friend would also have a corp which is welcoming of newbies, so once you're past the basics of the game and have, for example, basic tackler skills (this takes maybe three days of training), you can join in the roaming gangs (or mining fleets, or whatever you want to do).
Another advantage of that friend who knows the game already is they'll be able to help you figure out just what it is that you want to do. There are a lot of ways to play the game, and it helps to have a goal already when you're going in. There's no classes - any character *can* learn to do anything - but it takes time; the game is over ten years old and as far as I know, it's still impossible for one character to have learned all the skill paths to maximum. There's just too many of them.
Is it actually going anywhere? Last time I tried EL (some years ago), it had no meaningful story or gameplay hooks. Just another cookie-cutter fantasy MMO, without even the polish or breadth of other such games. The graphics were awful too, which didn't bug me much but certainly weren't a reason to play.
You're doing it wrong. It's an MMO. If you aren't making it on your own, *JOIN* one of those corporations (or get a bunch of people together and create your own).
Or go solo. It's entirely possible. It's risky and requires a lot of skill, and you'll get blown up a lot at first... but if you're actually good (and combat is Eve is much more skill-based than a casual observer might think) you can easily find, and win, small fights all day long. Yeah, you'll need a good ship (which means money and training time), but the risks are also lower when you're starting out. Be a pirate. Be a mercenary. Take over a wormhole.
You make the rules, man. That's the essence of the game. It's like libertarian paradise. Would I want to live there for real? Hell no! But it's a fun thing, to go out and fight, solo or with a small gang or with a massive battle fleet.
Because you can navigate the command prompt and write batch scripts, are familiar with driver configuration concepts (still relevant today if you're developing them, admittedly pretty useless just as a user of PnP hardware), know what Windows binaries look like inside (assuming you used the debug program available at the time), understand hierarchical file systems and the Windows registry, are familiar with Windows shortcuts files, are familiar with Windows' built-in programs (really, many of them haven't changed that much since 98), probably have pretty good keyboarding skills (that was one of the main things I learned in elementary school computer classes, and I'm probably within five years of your age), and plenty of other things, both vendor-specific and not? Computer skills don't just evaporate with each new OS release, or even switching between completely different systems (although it sometimes feels that way when I use a Mac, and yes, I use both Linux and FreeBSD...)
If it was compiling down to.NET, there would probably be some completely optional extensions to make use of the.NET framework (mostly, adding interoperability with other.NET languages). As is, I don't even know about that. I have no particular use for Node.JS myself, but I do like having more languages and frameworks supported in VS.
Worth noting: "federal contractors" working on behalf of the NHTSA are not cops. I'm not saying that shooting them would have been a god use of one's time, but this *is* Texas. I'm a bit surprised if none of them were at least threatened with a gun if the "100 percent voluntary" part is as BS as people are claiming.
I actually consider YAST2 (the "s" stands for "Setup", by the way, though it does much more than OS installation and package management) one of the key reasons to use [open]Suse. All-in-one-place administration of the system, available through several different UIs (QT/KDE3, QT/KDE4, GTK, ncurses, and probably more), is nice. It provides pretty extensive help information explaining each of the options even in the "Advanced" panels. It lets you view the config files it's changing right in the tool, including editing them yourself (in case you can't find the option you're looking for in the UI). It tells you what it's doing at every step (writing this file, running that tool, disabling or enabling interfaces, loading or unloading drivers, etc.).
It's actually helped me become better at *nix administration in general, because it gives me the ability to see what's possible (not literally every option, but far more than the typical ~20% that is all that 80% of users ever need), and to see what changes it makes to the system when I select those options (so I can duplicate them myself, including on other distros or even on non-Linux POSIX systems in many cases). The preponderance of UIs (more accurately, of UI toolkits; the actual UI always looks about the same) means that even if the X server won't start, or I'm SSHed into the box and don't want to deal with X forwarding, or I'm on the machine of somebody who uses GNOME (I prefer KDE), I can sudo yast2 and get a familiar set of tools. It's a truly handy utility.
And, as the AC parent indicates, it is of course optional and open-source. If you don't like it, don't use it. If you think there's a problem, file a bug report, or patch it yourself, maybe submit your patch if you want to. But believe me, it beats all the other distros' admin tools (at least, among the many versions of 8 or so reasonably popular distros that I've tried, including quite a few versions of Ubuntu) hands down.
Still my preferred Linux distro for desktop productivity (where the important points are A) easy to tell it what I want it to do, and B) it does it well, without needing a lot of hand-holding but also without needing me to fix anything afterward). Backtrack (I suppose I should really upgrade to Kali now...) and FreeBSD in VMs, for work and play respectively.
Surface Pro 2 hits all your criteria, including the last, except for the battery life. Add in the Power Cover (not yet out, but coming "soon" according to the rumor mill) instead of the normal keyboard covers (it's a type cover - the kind with the real keyboard - plus auxiliary battery) and maybe that meets your needs?
Civ 5 actually has an explicitly touch-oriented UI option which is enabled for Windows 8 (optionally; I still use the default controls). Many turn-based strategy games could be played very readily on a touch device, though, even without tweaks to the UI/controls.
Windows Store != Windows Phone Store. Windows Store is less likely to contain things like banking apps or Pandora, because with a full desktop browser (including Flash) in every machine capable of using the Windows Store, there's a lot less need for it.
Windows Phone's store has Pandora (and a ton of other music services), apps for nearly all significant banks by now (although it took them a while; six months ago there were some very notable omissions), and tons of other such stuff. It's not up to Google Play or iOS App Store counts yet, of course, but well past where those stores were when they were considered "successful" and it was said that "there's an app for that".
Either the Flash or Java browser plugins have more exploits discovered each year than Silverlight has in its entire existence... and unlike this one (which was patched over half a year ago), many of those get exploited in the wild as 0-days. Microsoft's security stance is (within the last seven years or so) far, far better than that of either Adobe or Oracle (Sun wasn't much better, at least with browser plugins).
Netflix does, in fact, have a lot of really bright people (don't work there myself, but I know some folks who do). I suspect the only person in this discussion who "[doesn't know] what they were doing" is you.
Good, informative post. I've been doing this for years on all my boxes with IE installed, but most people don't even know it's possible. Note that since IE9, you can also disable/enable ActiveX in general on a per-site basis. Tools -> Safety -> ActiveX filtering to disable it by default. It'll put a little blue icon in end of the address bar when it blocks something; you can click the icon to turn off the filtering for that site only. Less obtrusive than the "do you want to enable <SPECIFIC_ACTIVEX_CONTROL>?" (usually Flash) prompt too, which won't show up until you enable ActiveX for the site.
Come on, if the question got to +4, the answer is worth a few mod points too...
The chain of trust for Windows updates is among the strongest protections the OS has. Certificate pinning for the update servers (can't spoof them even with a compromised CA signing your SSL cert), signed update packages (again, must be signed by Microsoft rather than some third-party trust authority), and signed binaries. In order to compromise the update installer, you would need to have already compromised the OS so thoroughly that there's no point pushing a malicious update. The odds of an actual security exploit using the update system are miniscule.
Now, with that said, it's a good idea to review the updates manually for other reasons. Some of those other reasons are even security-related, albeit indirectly (updating clients or servers or infrastructure that is important for security could have a detrimental impact on system security if, for example, you've heavily modified the default security configuration). If you don't trust the updates themselves (for example, because they might push DRM) then that's another reason to check them manually. Worrying about the update process, though... well, that's not likely a worthwhile concern. If it gets compromised, there are already other, bigger problems.
Wow buddy, you have some serious perception problems!
When Paypal was started, it was far from useless. There simply wasn't anything even roughly equivalent to what it offered, and it got huge quickly. I don't like the company and I don't use the service because of their current policies, but guess what? All of those policies are from the time after Musk left...
Explain to me exactly how providing commercial services to government agencies that would otherwise cost taxpayers vastly more money is "sucking off the government space programme teat", if you'd be so kind. I mean, who else was he supposed to sell launches to? Who else was the government supposed to turn to for resupplying the space station and launching or repairing satellites? Besides, not all the launches have even been on government contracts.
This article is, all by itself, pretty conclusive evidence that Teslas can be substantially superior on merit - no seriously, look at the numbers on car fires overall, and especially on the numbers where car fires injured (much less killed) anybody, and then look at *other* accident types such as rollovers and such - and the entrenched interests in the marketplace will try to shut them down anyhow. I suppose, given the warped view of reality you've showed so far, it wouldn't be surprising if you're a Free Market True Believer, though... but if you were, explain to me how anything they are doing is "end-to-end lock-in bullshit" anyhow, please. You don't have to sell through the company directly - you could buy from them and re-sell if you want to, hell, used ones go for more than new sometimes - but just because Tesla themselves will sell you a car directly, *that* is "end-to-end lock-in bullshit"?
No, it merely suffers from neglect and negligence. Saying it gets treated as a second-class citizen wouldn't be string enough. Showstopper bugs and terrible configuration choices in release builds. If I want an Ubuntu-like KDE distro I might try Mepis again, it was good once (and the last version I used was Ubuntu-based), but I have no plans to try Kubuntu again. Colossal waste of time.
Well, WP market share *is* up compared to where it was even a year ago, when Nokia was already churning out WP handsets, and much of that gain is on Nokia's strength. Not that this means it's a success, but it is squarely in third place and clawing at 10% market share in some key markets.
While a decent Java editor (and pluggable or switchable build system, so I can produce.NET or JRE or Dalvik binaries) I can certainly see that being nice. With that said, VS does support a number of non-MS languages; aside from the web stuff like HTML/CSS/JS, there's also IronPython and IronRuby, which were started externally but are now pretty official under MS.
Slashdot Mirror
I am very, very sorry to report that your link appears to be broken. Was hoping for suitably entertaining image.
Fuel is only a small part of the cost of operating a fission power plant. It non-trivial, but it's a lower percentage than for simpler / lower-energy-fuel power plants such as coal or natural gas.
With that said, I agree that we should be expanding on fission power. Not at the expense of renewables - those are still well below where they could be - but at the expense of things like coal (which is currently needed to provide a lot of the base load that nuclear plants could handle so well and easily). However, given the current cleanup costs, etc. a single commercial-scale fission power plant costs more than $17e9 to build, and I'm not even sure if that counts its (decades of) fuel.
They're also self-replacing. MREs don't fill (or recycle) themselves. If it was possible to reach a point where food could be grown sustainably for even a few people, that would be a huge boon toward more permanent research outposts (think Antarctic research stations or the ISS, not Luna City or a Mars colony). For that matter, that would be the first step toward making a viable colony too... you may not be able to make one completely self-sufficient out of current tech, but you should try to get closer than needing to send up *everything* that gets consumed!
Indeed, and then wash my hands in the sink, and maybe stop at the drinking fountain. Hey, look at me stealing water! That costs money, you know!
I've played Eve for over seven years, and aside from one scam when I was just starting out (and which cost me a pretty trivial amount of my total wallet, as I was pretty suspicious of it) and one unfortunate incident where a moderately valuable ship of mine got stolen by a (very rapidly former) corpmate, I've had no trouble of the sort you describe. I've lived in everything from highsec to wormholes. I've run missions, belts, complexes, roaming gangs, and fleet combats, operated as scout, FC, bait, and logistics (unarmed repair ship). I've lost ships supporting allies in combat, but never because those allies turned on me. I've been in several corps and even more alliances. I've flown with real-life friends and with people who live halfway around the world from me. I've given loans and had them paid back, and taken loans out myself. I've lived in a communist system where all our loot went to the corp in exchange for free ships and modules at need.
I've been doing this since 2006, and I'm in no way a good judge of character. I just try to fly smart, and look for situations where self-interest keeps people together. It works.
The best way to get into Eve is to join a friend who already plays, who can show you the ropes and maybe give you an influx of starting cash (5M is nothing to a player who has been in the game for a year - a single gun on one whip may cost more than that - but it'll outfit a newbie for basically their whole trial without needing to grind). Ideally, that friend would also have a corp which is welcoming of newbies, so once you're past the basics of the game and have, for example, basic tackler skills (this takes maybe three days of training), you can join in the roaming gangs (or mining fleets, or whatever you want to do).
Another advantage of that friend who knows the game already is they'll be able to help you figure out just what it is that you want to do. There are a lot of ways to play the game, and it helps to have a goal already when you're going in. There's no classes - any character *can* learn to do anything - but it takes time; the game is over ten years old and as far as I know, it's still impossible for one character to have learned all the skill paths to maximum. There's just too many of them.
Is it actually going anywhere? Last time I tried EL (some years ago), it had no meaningful story or gameplay hooks. Just another cookie-cutter fantasy MMO, without even the polish or breadth of other such games. The graphics were awful too, which didn't bug me much but certainly weren't a reason to play.
You're doing it wrong. It's an MMO. If you aren't making it on your own, *JOIN* one of those corporations (or get a bunch of people together and create your own).
Or go solo. It's entirely possible. It's risky and requires a lot of skill, and you'll get blown up a lot at first... but if you're actually good (and combat is Eve is much more skill-based than a casual observer might think) you can easily find, and win, small fights all day long. Yeah, you'll need a good ship (which means money and training time), but the risks are also lower when you're starting out. Be a pirate. Be a mercenary. Take over a wormhole.
You make the rules, man. That's the essence of the game. It's like libertarian paradise. Would I want to live there for real? Hell no! But it's a fun thing, to go out and fight, solo or with a small gang or with a massive battle fleet.
Because you can navigate the command prompt and write batch scripts, are familiar with driver configuration concepts (still relevant today if you're developing them, admittedly pretty useless just as a user of PnP hardware), know what Windows binaries look like inside (assuming you used the debug program available at the time), understand hierarchical file systems and the Windows registry, are familiar with Windows shortcuts files, are familiar with Windows' built-in programs (really, many of them haven't changed that much since 98), probably have pretty good keyboarding skills (that was one of the main things I learned in elementary school computer classes, and I'm probably within five years of your age), and plenty of other things, both vendor-specific and not? Computer skills don't just evaporate with each new OS release, or even switching between completely different systems (although it sometimes feels that way when I use a Mac, and yes, I use both Linux and FreeBSD...)
If it was compiling down to .NET, there would probably be some completely optional extensions to make use of the .NET framework (mostly, adding interoperability with other .NET languages). As is, I don't even know about that. I have no particular use for Node.JS myself, but I do like having more languages and frameworks supported in VS.
Worth noting: "federal contractors" working on behalf of the NHTSA are not cops. I'm not saying that shooting them would have been a god use of one's time, but this *is* Texas. I'm a bit surprised if none of them were at least threatened with a gun if the "100 percent voluntary" part is as BS as people are claiming.
I actually consider YAST2 (the "s" stands for "Setup", by the way, though it does much more than OS installation and package management) one of the key reasons to use [open]Suse. All-in-one-place administration of the system, available through several different UIs (QT/KDE3, QT/KDE4, GTK, ncurses, and probably more), is nice. It provides pretty extensive help information explaining each of the options even in the "Advanced" panels. It lets you view the config files it's changing right in the tool, including editing them yourself (in case you can't find the option you're looking for in the UI). It tells you what it's doing at every step (writing this file, running that tool, disabling or enabling interfaces, loading or unloading drivers, etc.).
It's actually helped me become better at *nix administration in general, because it gives me the ability to see what's possible (not literally every option, but far more than the typical ~20% that is all that 80% of users ever need), and to see what changes it makes to the system when I select those options (so I can duplicate them myself, including on other distros or even on non-Linux POSIX systems in many cases). The preponderance of UIs (more accurately, of UI toolkits; the actual UI always looks about the same) means that even if the X server won't start, or I'm SSHed into the box and don't want to deal with X forwarding, or I'm on the machine of somebody who uses GNOME (I prefer KDE), I can sudo yast2 and get a familiar set of tools. It's a truly handy utility.
And, as the AC parent indicates, it is of course optional and open-source. If you don't like it, don't use it. If you think there's a problem, file a bug report, or patch it yourself, maybe submit your patch if you want to. But believe me, it beats all the other distros' admin tools (at least, among the many versions of 8 or so reasonably popular distros that I've tried, including quite a few versions of Ubuntu) hands down.
Still my preferred Linux distro for desktop productivity (where the important points are A) easy to tell it what I want it to do, and B) it does it well, without needing a lot of hand-holding but also without needing me to fix anything afterward). Backtrack (I suppose I should really upgrade to Kali now...) and FreeBSD in VMs, for work and play respectively.
Surface Pro 2 hits all your criteria, including the last, except for the battery life. Add in the Power Cover (not yet out, but coming "soon" according to the rumor mill) instead of the normal keyboard covers (it's a type cover - the kind with the real keyboard - plus auxiliary battery) and maybe that meets your needs?
Men per hour is the standard rating system for your mom, I believe...
</joke>
Civ 5 actually has an explicitly touch-oriented UI option which is enabled for Windows 8 (optionally; I still use the default controls). Many turn-based strategy games could be played very readily on a touch device, though, even without tweaks to the UI/controls.
Windows Store != Windows Phone Store. Windows Store is less likely to contain things like banking apps or Pandora, because with a full desktop browser (including Flash) in every machine capable of using the Windows Store, there's a lot less need for it.
Windows Phone's store has Pandora (and a ton of other music services), apps for nearly all significant banks by now (although it took them a while; six months ago there were some very notable omissions), and tons of other such stuff. It's not up to Google Play or iOS App Store counts yet, of course, but well past where those stores were when they were considered "successful" and it was said that "there's an app for that".
Either the Flash or Java browser plugins have more exploits discovered each year than Silverlight has in its entire existence... and unlike this one (which was patched over half a year ago), many of those get exploited in the wild as 0-days. Microsoft's security stance is (within the last seven years or so) far, far better than that of either Adobe or Oracle (Sun wasn't much better, at least with browser plugins).
Netflix does, in fact, have a lot of really bright people (don't work there myself, but I know some folks who do). I suspect the only person in this discussion who "[doesn't know] what they were doing" is you.
Good, informative post. I've been doing this for years on all my boxes with IE installed, but most people don't even know it's possible.
Note that since IE9, you can also disable/enable ActiveX in general on a per-site basis. Tools -> Safety -> ActiveX filtering to disable it by default. It'll put a little blue icon in end of the address bar when it blocks something; you can click the icon to turn off the filtering for that site only. Less obtrusive than the "do you want to enable <SPECIFIC_ACTIVEX_CONTROL>?" (usually Flash) prompt too, which won't show up until you enable ActiveX for the site.
Come on, if the question got to +4, the answer is worth a few mod points too...
The chain of trust for Windows updates is among the strongest protections the OS has. Certificate pinning for the update servers (can't spoof them even with a compromised CA signing your SSL cert), signed update packages (again, must be signed by Microsoft rather than some third-party trust authority), and signed binaries. In order to compromise the update installer, you would need to have already compromised the OS so thoroughly that there's no point pushing a malicious update. The odds of an actual security exploit using the update system are miniscule.
Now, with that said, it's a good idea to review the updates manually for other reasons. Some of those other reasons are even security-related, albeit indirectly (updating clients or servers or infrastructure that is important for security could have a detrimental impact on system security if, for example, you've heavily modified the default security configuration). If you don't trust the updates themselves (for example, because they might push DRM) then that's another reason to check them manually. Worrying about the update process, though... well, that's not likely a worthwhile concern. If it gets compromised, there are already other, bigger problems.
Wow buddy, you have some serious perception problems!
When Paypal was started, it was far from useless. There simply wasn't anything even roughly equivalent to what it offered, and it got huge quickly. I don't like the company and I don't use the service because of their current policies, but guess what? All of those policies are from the time after Musk left...
Explain to me exactly how providing commercial services to government agencies that would otherwise cost taxpayers vastly more money is "sucking off the government space programme teat", if you'd be so kind. I mean, who else was he supposed to sell launches to? Who else was the government supposed to turn to for resupplying the space station and launching or repairing satellites? Besides, not all the launches have even been on government contracts.
This article is, all by itself, pretty conclusive evidence that Teslas can be substantially superior on merit - no seriously, look at the numbers on car fires overall, and especially on the numbers where car fires injured (much less killed) anybody, and then look at *other* accident types such as rollovers and such - and the entrenched interests in the marketplace will try to shut them down anyhow. I suppose, given the warped view of reality you've showed so far, it wouldn't be surprising if you're a Free Market True Believer, though... but if you were, explain to me how anything they are doing is "end-to-end lock-in bullshit" anyhow, please. You don't have to sell through the company directly - you could buy from them and re-sell if you want to, hell, used ones go for more than new sometimes - but just because Tesla themselves will sell you a car directly, *that* is "end-to-end lock-in bullshit"?
Does the cognitive dissonance hurt?
No, it merely suffers from neglect and negligence. Saying it gets treated as a second-class citizen wouldn't be string enough. Showstopper bugs and terrible configuration choices in release builds. If I want an Ubuntu-like KDE distro I might try Mepis again, it was good once (and the last version I used was Ubuntu-based), but I have no plans to try Kubuntu again. Colossal waste of time.
Well, WP market share *is* up compared to where it was even a year ago, when Nokia was already churning out WP handsets, and much of that gain is on Nokia's strength. Not that this means it's a success, but it is squarely in third place and clawing at 10% market share in some key markets.
While a decent Java editor (and pluggable or switchable build system, so I can produce .NET or JRE or Dalvik binaries) I can certainly see that being nice. With that said, VS does support a number of non-MS languages; aside from the web stuff like HTML/CSS/JS, there's also IronPython and IronRuby, which were started externally but are now pretty official under MS.
Well fine, research them both. I don't care which wins, as long as we get *something*!