It's not very surprising that Chicago School economists would push back hard on this idea. Chicago school ideas are arguably significantly responsible for helping to create the problem. Economists aren't a monolithic group and analyses of these trends vary depending on the economist you read.
Right. That's not going to be hard. He's being charged with cyberstalking, but just for factual reference, this is from the DOJ:
"Evidence received pursuant to a search warrant showed Rivello’s Twitter account contained direct messages from Rivello’s account to other Twitter users concerning the victim. Among those direct messages included statements by Rivello, including “I hope this sends him into a seizure,” “Spammed this at [victim] let’s see if he dies,” and “I know he has epilepsy.” Additional evidence received pursuant to a search warrant showed Rivello’s iCloud account contained a screenshot of a Wikipedia page for the victim, which had been altered to show a fake obituary with the date of death listed as Dec. 16, 2016. Rivello’s iCloud account also contained screen shots from epilepsy.com with a list of commonly reported epilepsy seizure triggers and from dallasobserver.com discussing the victim’s report to the Dallas Police Department and his attempt to identify the Twitter user."
So yeah. When you've got someone stating "I hope this gives him a seizure," "Let's see if he dies," altering his Wikipedia page to show a death date and obit, and looking up information on the kinds of seizures that cause death, you haven't exactly established a strong defense for how this should be treated anything less than extremely seriously. This isn't a prank. It was a deliberate attempt to injure or kill someone.
Do you know how many epileptics die as a result of seizures every year in the US alone? Roughly 50,000. Provoking a seizure in an epileptic is not a fucking joke.
Our study abroad administrator didn't understand how email worked, didn't know how email *lists* worked, and didn't know you could suppress the email field via BCC.
She hand-typed the email address of every single student into a standard CC email field at a time when we only had something like 300KB of space for our *entire* email. The header alone was larger than that, given that we had over 2000 students. And *that* was before the "Reply-Alls" started rolling in. You could still send mail with your email storage full, it just wouldn't save the outgoing message, so the entire server filled up in minutes. Response time went through the floor. It took IT all afternoon to sort the whole thing out.
Experience isn't physical, yet it's something you can buy. When you purchase a game, beat it, and then return it after spending dozens or hundreds of hours playing the title, you've enriched yourself with that experience -- an experience you wouldn't have had otherwise.
You may not be returning something physical, but our concept of property isn't solely tied to physicality. That's why intellectual property is a thing. Now, I suppose if you're fundamentally against the existence of IP you can argue that theft doesn't exist -- but I find this a limited definition that doesn't really match reality. If playing a prerecorded song for hundreds of people at an event can count as infringement (and it does) despite the fact that nothing physical has been stolen or removed, then clearly property has more than a physical component.
But I can't take any "conservative" website seriously when these people -- who used to champion ideas like small government and personal freedom -- are lining up to vilify the man who did more to tell us about how the US government and its partners spy on their own citizens than anyone else ever has.
I can understand people who argue that Snowden should be tried in a court of law and punished for his actions. I may not *agree* with them, but I can at least understand it. But the idea that we should ignore the entire question of government overreach? I don't think that's something that ought to be swept aside -- and once upon a time, 20-30 years ago, I would've expected the GOP to be loud critics of this kind of surveillance.
"Maybe according to the Newspeak Wordsbook of the SJW, but not according to a real dictionary"
Let's test that theory.
Dictionary.com says that gender is: "either the male or female division of a species, especially as differentiated by social and cultural roles and behavior" while sex is: "either the male or female division of a species, especially as differentiated with reference to the reproductive functions."
Let's try the Oxford English dictionary.
Gender: "The state of being male or female as expressed by social or cultural distinctions and differences, rather than biological ones; the collective attributes or traits associated with a particular sex, or determined as a result of one's sex. Also: a (male or female) group characterized in this way."
Sex: Either of the two main categories (male and female) into which humans and many other living things are divided on the basis of their reproductive functions.
All emphasis my own.
So, no. You're just wrong about this, and if you're going to pedantically claim that the dictionary supports you, you ought to be arsed to check your dictionary first. The dictionary supports the modern distinction of gender and sex.
You can fab some *extremely* simple boards and designs this way, yes. You're not going to build anything approaching the computing power of the last 15-20 years on that kind of equipment.
You'll never get there because you need 99.9999999% purity and precisely balanced climate controls to do cutting-edge semiconductor fabbing. Government regulation has nothing to do with it. You can't build semiconductors of modern quality or capability in a bedroom, any more than Chinese peasants could build backyard steel furnaces during the Great Leap Forward.
Wikipedia's core staff is overwhelmingly male (87%) and mostly white. There is no indication that "social justice" played a role in either the creation of the current system nor the difficulty the site has had in attracting greater participation from members of other races and the opposite sex.
"The "social justice" movement is all about exerting control over what others think, believe and express. This is done by any means necessary, including hypocrisy and censorship."
This is a meaningless attack when evaluated in the context of any other social movement or ideological argument. All ideologies seek, by their nature, to exert control over what others think, feel, and express. If you believe that the First Amendment should have absolutely no restrictions and you loudly advocate for this position and push for laws that would enforce it, you are attempting to create a rigid ideological framework that refuses to consider any challenge to the idea of free speech.
I profoundly disagree with your evaluation of so-called "social justice," as well as your characterization of it as a monolithic and uniform bloc. My problems with your argument, however, aren't rooted in my personal opinion.
"These are the people who will manipulate Wikipedia articles to match the narrative that they want to dictate. "
There've been multiple high-profile articles this year about how Wikipedia is actually prone to manipulation by PR firms and self-interested parties. Drug companies that write glowing entries about new medications. Celebrities and others who hire PR firms to write Wikipedia pages for them. Special interests and organizations that pay those same PR firms to edit entries to confirm points of view.
"These are the people who will suppress any sort of original thought. "
The reason Wikipedia bans personal research and "original thought" is because an encyclopedia is not supposed to be "The Collected Thoughts of Todd." The purpose of an encyclopedia is to present factual, well-researched, documented information. That simple-sounding goal is incredibly difficult in and of itself, before we leap into the quicksand of evaluating the personal opinions of any given person.
"These are the sorts of people who will mislabel their opponents as "racists" or "sexists" or "intolerant" or "bullies", even when that's clearly not the case."
Ironically, it has been Wikipedia itself that's been attacked for standing *by* such opinions in recent years. The debate has been over the degree to which this is true, and what should be done about.
Your point is vague enough to be meaningless. I have no doubt that some people have been erroneously labeled as racist, sexist, and bullies. I have seen no evidence that this is unique or particular to Wikipedia, and no evidence that Wikipedians are more or less prone to this type of behavior than any other organization or group of people working together on the Internet.
You throw a lot of invective, but you offer precious little research to back it up as it pertains to Wikipedia. It therefore seems appropriate to end this with a [Citation Needed.]
This won't happen until electric cars with Model S-like capabilities cost $20,000 - $35,000. The Volt and its various competitors don't really count as Model S equivalents, and few would compare them directly. While it's true that you can save a huge amount on gas compared to electricity if you drive a great deal, that's money people are used to budgeting per month and it's not typically enough to compare to the up-front price of the car.
Now, if Elon and Co intended to deliver a Model S at even $35,000 in the next year or two, than I might agree with this claim. Until that happens, I don't see electric cars cresting some enormous tipping point.
"The point is that we don't want anyone to _have_ to use DRM. Making it available is one more step in that direction.
DRM is not a capability in the traditional sense. It's not a way for your software to do something. It's a way to prevent the user from using the software as they please, as directed by the content provider. That's a restriction, not a capability."
I would also prefer not to have to use DRM. Unfortunately, DRM exists and prevents me from watching the content I want to watch. Therefore, I will use DRM. Why? Because I'd rather pay $8 for an honest license than pirate for the rest of my life. Because streaming to multiple devices is simpler than managing a central file repository of content.
I'm glad Firefox w/o DRM exists. I'm glad other browser forks exist. I choose to use the version with this capability embedded because it *serves my needs.* If you want to take that away from me, then you aren't promoting any kind of live-and-let-live philosophy -- you've flipped over into a position every bit as tyrannical as the one the copyright industry holds. You want me to abandon content consumption for principle. You would sooner there was no legal content than allow legal consumption w/ DRM attached.
You're absolutely allowed to feel and think and advocate for such positions, but you don't get to tell everybody who thinks differently that they don't count.
Part of the reason we do the vaccines this way is because we now know more about the immune system and how effective the shots are / how long they last. Part of the reason we do the vaccines this way is because the less-toxic versions that have been developed since the 1960s are also less effective and must be administered more often. Part of the reason we do the vaccines this way is because its the best way to give immunity for life. After six, you shouldn't need a booster for polio, measles, varicella, or several others.
One of the fallacies of modern cloud and backup providers is that they actually provide a backup service. Most, including popular services like Backblaze, Mozy, Carbonite, etc contain prominent statements in their contracts that absolve them of any liability in the event of data loss. Your recoverable value in the event they lose your data is limited to either 12 months of service or is explicitly defined as nothing.
Now plenty of people pay for service with these companies, so I'm not claiming they don't make some effort to provide a genuine backup, but we're *starting* from a position where they explicitly have no liability as defined in the ToS. Now, add in the idea of storing critical or merely important files on someone else's hard drive. What happens if the drive you're storing on is a 5400 RPM Quantum Fireball from circa 1999? When that drive fails, what happens to you?
It's the same lack of guarantee with a *further* risk factor. No thanks.
Read the original comment, please: ""We have not, even one time, seen a case where climate change has caused long term economic damage. At the very worst bad weather has caused localized destruction that is, in every single case, completely recovered within a decade. "
Not "CO2-related climate change," or "Man-made climate change." Just climate change. And furthermore, a follow-up accusation that the worst-case scenario is "bad weather causing localized destruction... completely recovered within a decade."
No. That's not true. And *that's* what I refuted, with a handful from dozens of examples.
We could argue whether the drought that killed 10 million Benghalis counts as bad weather or climate change, but it certainly caused a catastrophic scenario that did NOT recover within 10 years. My larger point is that bad weather and climate change can have long-lasting effects and have done so for all of recorded history. The Irish Potato Famine may not be directly linked (I likely shouldn't have included it), but millions of Irish immigrated to America as a result. We have an entire population of people today who would not be here if not for a famine and subsequent upheaval.
Saying things "recovered within a decade" obscures the very real damage and millions of lives lost that many of these events caused.
"We have not, even one time, seen a case where climate change has caused long term economic damage. At the very worst bad weather has caused localized destruction that is, in every single case, completely recovered within a decade. "
You're hilariously wrong on this point. I'll grant you that it may depend on your scope and scale, but I trust you're aware that the Middle East used to be referred to as the "Fertile Crescent." What happened? Climate changed. It's theorized that the Mongols were able to cross the Asian steppes in the first place because significant rainfall patterns over several years greened the countryside enough to support a large foraging army as it traveled. And history is full -- literally *full* of examples of kingdoms toppled, countries overthrown, and civil unrest and destruction as a result of climate changes.
1770 Benghal: Famine kills 10 million people. Cause? Drought. One third of the population dead. Recovered in ten years? Not bloody likely.
1630-1631: Famine kills two million in China. Repeated drought-related disasters feed unrest and lead to the collapse of the entire Ming Dynasty in 1644.
1844-1849: Great Irish Potato Famine. Kills over one milion Irish, leads to the emigration of 1.5-2 million more. Irish demographics permanently shifted as a result, Irish populations seeded in other countries including a significant population in America.
1972-1973: Famine in Ethiopia kills 60,000 people, leads to the downfall of King Haile Selassie. Clearly this is a non-issue today, because Ethiopia is now a lush land of plenty and abundance.
1816-1817: Year Without A Summer: Has a huge number of impacts on innovation and culture, as well as killing several hundreds thousand more people worldwide. Wikipedia has the full list of interesting details:
So, no, you're just wrong about this. Multi-year weather patterns and long-term climate shifts have killed tens of millions of people throughout history. Famine and drought have toppled nations, destroyed city-states, and crushed empires. In some cases, the economic impacts of these events continue to reverberate in modern history.
Tesla *is* a fringe brand right now. So is Mercedes. So is BMW. So are Porsche and Lamborghini and a host of other high-end luxury car manufacturers. Tesla, like these other companies, builds a product that many would like to own and fairly few can afford.
It seems like what Lutz is saying is "If Tesla wants to meaningfully impact the way the average American gets from Point A to Point B, it needs to build a car that the average American can afford." I don't think there's anything untrue about that statement. I love the Model S and I'd love to *own* a Model S, but there's no foreseeable point in my life when I'll be rich enough to drop $80K on a car. That's why I'm hoping Tesla's midrange offering is a great vehicle with sensible compromises to bring the price down.
According to records, Nokia did about $4B in business in India in 2010 and 2011, but saw 2012 revenue fall about 23%. Still, that's a fairly large chunk of change. If their business from 2006 - 2010 was strong as well, I guess it's possible that the company owes about $3.4B in tax over that time period.
Thing is, they'd have had to be basically paying no tax at all to rack up that kind of bill. And since we can assume Nokia isn't stupid, it seems a lot more like a shakedown.
There is no perfect solution here. I'm not saying companies should erect wind turbines in the middle of nesting areas, but the truth is, there is no risk-free, cost-free, environmental-damage-free answer to the problem of power production. Coal mining is wretched for the environment and coal miners have a nasty habit of dying of black lung. Nuclear power has risks (and I'm a nuclear proponent). The long-term cleanup and environmental repair is very costly if something goes wrong. Solar power is expensive. Wind turbines kill birds.
At a certain point, the question is "What's an acceptable loss ratio?"
The blog post states: "You might object to these numbers because the usage of the drives is different. The enterprise drives are used heavily. The consumer drives are in continual use storing users’ updated files and they are up and running all the time, but the usage is lighter. "
That invalidates the conclusion they're drawing. You can't put two different types of drives under different workloads and then conclude they fail at the same rate. The fact that other studies have reached similar conclusions (Google published one a few years back) is irrelevant when it comes to evaluating whether or not *this* study has measured what it seeks to measure.
Consumer drives and enterprise drives may fail at equal rates, but using different workloads doesn't help us reach that conclusion.
Bitcoin mining on anything but ASICs is no longer profitable. Even on an R9 290X with an 80+ Platinum PSU, you're making maybe $1 - $2 a day. And the vast majority of people don't have anything like that equipment. CPU mining is so slow, you'll never complete any work before the block is finished. GPU mining is still fast enough to get some work done, provided you own an AMD GPU.
But Nvidia GPUs don't mine BTC for beans and most mining kernels will crash an NV card or lead to rampant slowdowns and random lockups. Even an AMD card needs a low priority miner to escape the kind of UI chokeup that immediately alerts someone to a problem in the system. This might have made sense in 2010, when CPUs could still mine, but these days the return on investment is going to be terrible -- and the performance hit is big enough that people *will* notice.
Multiple reviewers, including myself, took note of problems with OCZ hardware when we covered the company. Tech Reports review of the vector 150 explicitly called out these problems,.
Ars covers a different spread of topics then it used to when I wrote there, that's true. But it's still an excellent site. The coverage mix has shifted, the quality of that mixture (in my personal opinion), has not.
Your tone implies you think differently, which is fine. It's still on my personal short list.
Full disclosure up front: I currently write for ExtremeTech and Hot Hardware. In the past I've written for Ars Technica (2007 - 2009) and briefly Tech Report (2H 2005). Before that, I wrote for a now-defunct site going back to 2001.
Obviously I could be biased and plug the sites I write for. I write for them for a reason, after all. But since no one is going to buy me telling you to read my own work, here's where I go, personally:
For in-depth, excellent analysis (in alphabetical order)
Anandtech (Anandtech.com) Ars Technica (Arstechnica.com) Tech Report (techreport.com)
For ultra low-level analysis: Real World Tech (www.realworldtech.com) Agner Fog's CPU blog (www.agner.org) Lost Circuits (www.lostcircuits.com)
All three of these resources update only occasionally. But the information is second to none.
For spot-checking or specific issues:
TechSpot.com does great CPU/GPU scaling articles. LaptopMag or NotebookCheck are great for their particular areas. CPU-World has good general database information, VR-Zone often has interesting scoops, as does wccftech -- if you're willing to filter out a lot of rumor / speculation from the latter. Tom's Hardware has useful dynamic databases for product performance. So does Anandtech.
Don't be afraid to read a review on a site you haven't heard of, or with a layout from 1999. While established names and high-quality writers tend to go together, they are neither exclusively matched nor guaranteed. A good reviewer will document issues, give a thorough discussion of the topic, and won't come off sounding like a marketing employee.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not very surprising that Chicago School economists would push back hard on this idea. Chicago school ideas are arguably significantly responsible for helping to create the problem. Economists aren't a monolithic group and analyses of these trends vary depending on the economist you read.
Right. That's not going to be hard. He's being charged with cyberstalking, but just for factual reference, this is from the DOJ:
"Evidence received pursuant to a search warrant showed Rivello’s Twitter account contained direct messages from Rivello’s account to other Twitter users concerning the victim. Among those direct messages included statements by Rivello, including “I hope this sends him into a seizure,” “Spammed this at [victim] let’s see if he dies,” and “I know he has epilepsy.” Additional evidence received pursuant to a search warrant showed Rivello’s iCloud account contained a screenshot of a Wikipedia page for the victim, which had been altered to show a fake obituary with the date of death listed as Dec. 16, 2016. Rivello’s iCloud account also contained screen shots from epilepsy.com with a list of commonly reported epilepsy seizure triggers and from dallasobserver.com discussing the victim’s report to the Dallas Police Department and his attempt to identify the Twitter user."
So yeah. When you've got someone stating "I hope this gives him a seizure," "Let's see if he dies," altering his Wikipedia page to show a death date and obit, and looking up information on the kinds of seizures that cause death, you haven't exactly established a strong defense for how this should be treated anything less than extremely seriously. This isn't a prank. It was a deliberate attempt to injure or kill someone.
Do you know how many epileptics die as a result of seizures every year in the US alone? Roughly 50,000. Provoking a seizure in an epileptic is not a fucking joke.
Our study abroad administrator didn't understand how email worked, didn't know how email *lists* worked, and didn't know you could suppress the email field via BCC.
She hand-typed the email address of every single student into a standard CC email field at a time when we only had something like 300KB of space for our *entire* email. The header alone was larger than that, given that we had over 2000 students. And *that* was before the "Reply-Alls" started rolling in. You could still send mail with your email storage full, it just wouldn't save the outgoing message, so the entire server filled up in minutes. Response time went through the floor. It took IT all afternoon to sort the whole thing out.
And then, two days later, she did it again.
Experience isn't physical, yet it's something you can buy. When you purchase a game, beat it, and then return it after spending dozens or hundreds of hours playing the title, you've enriched yourself with that experience -- an experience you wouldn't have had otherwise.
You may not be returning something physical, but our concept of property isn't solely tied to physicality. That's why intellectual property is a thing. Now, I suppose if you're fundamentally against the existence of IP you can argue that theft doesn't exist -- but I find this a limited definition that doesn't really match reality. If playing a prerecorded song for hundreds of people at an event can count as infringement (and it does) despite the fact that nothing physical has been stolen or removed, then clearly property has more than a physical component.
But I can't take any "conservative" website seriously when these people -- who used to champion ideas like small government and personal freedom -- are lining up to vilify the man who did more to tell us about how the US government and its partners spy on their own citizens than anyone else ever has.
I can understand people who argue that Snowden should be tried in a court of law and punished for his actions. I may not *agree* with them, but I can at least understand it. But the idea that we should ignore the entire question of government overreach? I don't think that's something that ought to be swept aside -- and once upon a time, 20-30 years ago, I would've expected the GOP to be loud critics of this kind of surveillance.
How times change.
You mean "misandry?"
http://www.dictionary.com/brow...
http://www.oxforddictionaries....
There are definitions for misandry in both the sources I referred to.
"Maybe according to the Newspeak Wordsbook of the SJW, but not according to a real dictionary"
Let's test that theory.
Dictionary.com says that gender is: "either the male or female division of a species, especially as differentiated by social and cultural roles and behavior" while sex is: "either the male or female division of a species, especially as differentiated with reference to the reproductive functions."
Let's try the Oxford English dictionary.
Gender: "The state of being male or female as expressed by social or cultural distinctions and differences, rather than biological ones; the collective attributes or traits associated with a particular sex, or determined as a result of one's sex. Also: a (male or female) group characterized in this way."
Sex: Either of the two main categories (male and female) into which humans and many other living things are divided on the basis of their reproductive functions.
All emphasis my own.
So, no. You're just wrong about this, and if you're going to pedantically claim that the dictionary supports you, you ought to be arsed to check your dictionary first. The dictionary supports the modern distinction of gender and sex.
You can fab some *extremely* simple boards and designs this way, yes. You're not going to build anything approaching the computing power of the last 15-20 years on that kind of equipment.
You'll never get there because you need 99.9999999% purity and precisely balanced climate controls to do cutting-edge semiconductor fabbing. Government regulation has nothing to do with it. You can't build semiconductors of modern quality or capability in a bedroom, any more than Chinese peasants could build backyard steel furnaces during the Great Leap Forward.
Wikipedia's core staff is overwhelmingly male (87%) and mostly white. There is no indication that "social justice" played a role in either the creation of the current system nor the difficulty the site has had in attracting greater participation from members of other races and the opposite sex.
"The "social justice" movement is all about exerting control over what others think, believe and express. This is done by any means necessary, including hypocrisy and censorship."
This is a meaningless attack when evaluated in the context of any other social movement or ideological argument. All ideologies seek, by their nature, to exert control over what others think, feel, and express. If you believe that the First Amendment should have absolutely no restrictions and you loudly advocate for this position and push for laws that would enforce it, you are attempting to create a rigid ideological framework that refuses to consider any challenge to the idea of free speech.
I profoundly disagree with your evaluation of so-called "social justice," as well as your characterization of it as a monolithic and uniform bloc. My problems with your argument, however, aren't rooted in my personal opinion.
"These are the people who will manipulate Wikipedia articles to match the narrative that they want to dictate. "
There've been multiple high-profile articles this year about how Wikipedia is actually prone to manipulation by PR firms and self-interested parties. Drug companies that write glowing entries about new medications. Celebrities and others who hire PR firms to write Wikipedia pages for them. Special interests and organizations that pay those same PR firms to edit entries to confirm points of view.
"These are the people who will suppress any sort of original thought. "
The reason Wikipedia bans personal research and "original thought" is because an encyclopedia is not supposed to be "The Collected Thoughts of Todd." The purpose of an encyclopedia is to present factual, well-researched, documented information. That simple-sounding goal is incredibly difficult in and of itself, before we leap into the quicksand of evaluating the personal opinions of any given person.
"These are the sorts of people who will mislabel their opponents as "racists" or "sexists" or "intolerant" or "bullies", even when that's clearly not the case."
Ironically, it has been Wikipedia itself that's been attacked for standing *by* such opinions in recent years. The debate has been over the degree to which this is true, and what should be done about.
Your point is vague enough to be meaningless. I have no doubt that some people have been erroneously labeled as racist, sexist, and bullies. I have seen no evidence that this is unique or particular to Wikipedia, and no evidence that Wikipedians are more or less prone to this type of behavior than any other organization or group of people working together on the Internet.
You throw a lot of invective, but you offer precious little research to back it up as it pertains to Wikipedia. It therefore seems appropriate to end this with a [Citation Needed.]
Fee was $5 in 1966.
It's still $5.
This won't happen until electric cars with Model S-like capabilities cost $20,000 - $35,000. The Volt and its various competitors don't really count as Model S equivalents, and few would compare them directly. While it's true that you can save a huge amount on gas compared to electricity if you drive a great deal, that's money people are used to budgeting per month and it's not typically enough to compare to the up-front price of the car.
Now, if Elon and Co intended to deliver a Model S at even $35,000 in the next year or two, than I might agree with this claim. Until that happens, I don't see electric cars cresting some enormous tipping point.
"The point is that we don't want anyone to _have_ to use DRM. Making it available is one more step in that direction.
DRM is not a capability in the traditional sense. It's not a way for your software to do something. It's a way to prevent the user from using the software as they please, as directed by the content provider. That's a restriction, not a capability."
I would also prefer not to have to use DRM. Unfortunately, DRM exists and prevents me from watching the content I want to watch. Therefore, I will use DRM. Why? Because I'd rather pay $8 for an honest license than pirate for the rest of my life. Because streaming to multiple devices is simpler than managing a central file repository of content.
I'm glad Firefox w/o DRM exists. I'm glad other browser forks exist. I choose to use the version with this capability embedded because it *serves my needs.* If you want to take that away from me, then you aren't promoting any kind of live-and-let-live philosophy -- you've flipped over into a position every bit as tyrannical as the one the copyright industry holds. You want me to abandon content consumption for principle. You would sooner there was no legal content than allow legal consumption w/ DRM attached.
You're absolutely allowed to feel and think and advocate for such positions, but you don't get to tell everybody who thinks differently that they don't count.
You don't get 72 vaccines.
You get 49 doses of 14 vaccines by 6 and 69 doses by 18 if you follow the recommended schedule.
http://www.nvic.org/CMSTemplat...
Part of the reason we do the vaccines this way is because we now know more about the immune system and how effective the shots are / how long they last.
Part of the reason we do the vaccines this way is because the less-toxic versions that have been developed since the 1960s are also less effective and must be administered more often.
Part of the reason we do the vaccines this way is because its the best way to give immunity for life. After six, you shouldn't need a booster for polio, measles, varicella, or several others.
Either way, nobody gets 72 vaccinations.
One of the fallacies of modern cloud and backup providers is that they actually provide a backup service. Most, including popular services like Backblaze, Mozy, Carbonite, etc contain prominent statements in their contracts that absolve them of any liability in the event of data loss. Your recoverable value in the event they lose your data is limited to either 12 months of service or is explicitly defined as nothing.
Now plenty of people pay for service with these companies, so I'm not claiming they don't make some effort to provide a genuine backup, but we're *starting* from a position where they explicitly have no liability as defined in the ToS. Now, add in the idea of storing critical or merely important files on someone else's hard drive. What happens if the drive you're storing on is a 5400 RPM Quantum Fireball from circa 1999? When that drive fails, what happens to you?
It's the same lack of guarantee with a *further* risk factor. No thanks.
Read the original comment, please: ""We have not, even one time, seen a case where climate change has caused long term economic damage. At the very worst bad weather has caused localized destruction that is, in every single case, completely recovered within a decade. "
Not "CO2-related climate change," or "Man-made climate change." Just climate change. And furthermore, a follow-up accusation that the worst-case scenario is "bad weather causing localized destruction... completely recovered within a decade."
No. That's not true. And *that's* what I refuted, with a handful from dozens of examples.
We could argue whether the drought that killed 10 million Benghalis counts as bad weather or climate change, but it certainly caused a catastrophic scenario that did NOT recover within 10 years. My larger point is that bad weather and climate change can have long-lasting effects and have done so for all of recorded history. The Irish Potato Famine may not be directly linked (I likely shouldn't have included it), but millions of Irish immigrated to America as a result. We have an entire population of people today who would not be here if not for a famine and subsequent upheaval.
Saying things "recovered within a decade" obscures the very real damage and millions of lives lost that many of these events caused.
"We have not, even one time, seen a case where climate change has caused long term economic damage. At the very worst bad weather has caused localized destruction that is, in every single case, completely recovered within a decade. "
You're hilariously wrong on this point. I'll grant you that it may depend on your scope and scale, but I trust you're aware that the Middle East used to be referred to as the "Fertile Crescent." What happened? Climate changed. It's theorized that the Mongols were able to cross the Asian steppes in the first place because significant rainfall patterns over several years greened the countryside enough to support a large foraging army as it traveled. And history is full -- literally *full* of examples of kingdoms toppled, countries overthrown, and civil unrest and destruction as a result of climate changes.
1770 Benghal: Famine kills 10 million people. Cause? Drought. One third of the population dead. Recovered in ten years? Not bloody likely.
1630-1631: Famine kills two million in China. Repeated drought-related disasters feed unrest and lead to the collapse of the entire Ming Dynasty in 1644.
1844-1849: Great Irish Potato Famine. Kills over one milion Irish, leads to the emigration of 1.5-2 million more. Irish demographics permanently shifted as a result, Irish populations seeded in other countries including a significant population in America.
1972-1973: Famine in Ethiopia kills 60,000 people, leads to the downfall of King Haile Selassie. Clearly this is a non-issue today, because Ethiopia is now a lush land of plenty and abundance.
1816-1817: Year Without A Summer: Has a huge number of impacts on innovation and culture, as well as killing several hundreds thousand more people worldwide. Wikipedia has the full list of interesting details:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y...
So, no, you're just wrong about this. Multi-year weather patterns and long-term climate shifts have killed tens of millions of people throughout history. Famine and drought have toppled nations, destroyed city-states, and crushed empires. In some cases, the economic impacts of these events continue to reverberate in modern history.
Tesla *is* a fringe brand right now. So is Mercedes. So is BMW. So are Porsche and Lamborghini and a host of other high-end luxury car manufacturers. Tesla, like these other companies, builds a product that many would like to own and fairly few can afford.
It seems like what Lutz is saying is "If Tesla wants to meaningfully impact the way the average American gets from Point A to Point B, it needs to build a car that the average American can afford." I don't think there's anything untrue about that statement. I love the Model S and I'd love to *own* a Model S, but there's no foreseeable point in my life when I'll be rich enough to drop $80K on a car. That's why I'm hoping Tesla's midrange offering is a great vehicle with sensible compromises to bring the price down.
According to records, Nokia did about $4B in business in India in 2010 and 2011, but saw 2012 revenue fall about 23%. Still, that's a fairly large chunk of change. If their business from 2006 - 2010 was strong as well, I guess it's possible that the company owes about $3.4B in tax over that time period.
Thing is, they'd have had to be basically paying no tax at all to rack up that kind of bill. And since we can assume Nokia isn't stupid, it seems a lot more like a shakedown.
There is no perfect solution here. I'm not saying companies should erect wind turbines in the middle of nesting areas, but the truth is, there is no risk-free, cost-free, environmental-damage-free answer to the problem of power production. Coal mining is wretched for the environment and coal miners have a nasty habit of dying of black lung. Nuclear power has risks (and I'm a nuclear proponent). The long-term cleanup and environmental repair is very costly if something goes wrong. Solar power is expensive. Wind turbines kill birds.
At a certain point, the question is "What's an acceptable loss ratio?"
The blog post states: "You might object to these numbers because the usage of the drives is different. The enterprise drives are used heavily. The consumer drives are in continual use storing users’ updated files and they are up and running all the time, but the usage is lighter. "
That invalidates the conclusion they're drawing. You can't put two different types of drives under different workloads and then conclude they fail at the same rate. The fact that other studies have reached similar conclusions (Google published one a few years back) is irrelevant when it comes to evaluating whether or not *this* study has measured what it seeks to measure.
Consumer drives and enterprise drives may fail at equal rates, but using different workloads doesn't help us reach that conclusion.
Bitcoin mining on anything but ASICs is no longer profitable. Even on an R9 290X with an 80+ Platinum PSU, you're making maybe $1 - $2 a day. And the vast majority of people don't have anything like that equipment. CPU mining is so slow, you'll never complete any work before the block is finished. GPU mining is still fast enough to get some work done, provided you own an AMD GPU.
But Nvidia GPUs don't mine BTC for beans and most mining kernels will crash an NV card or lead to rampant slowdowns and random lockups. Even an AMD card needs a low priority miner to escape the kind of UI chokeup that immediately alerts someone to a problem in the system. This might have made sense in 2010, when CPUs could still mine, but these days the return on investment is going to be terrible -- and the performance hit is big enough that people *will* notice.
Multiple reviewers, including myself, took note of problems with OCZ hardware when we covered the company. Tech Reports review of the vector 150 explicitly called out these problems,.
Ars covers a different spread of topics then it used to when I wrote there, that's true. But it's still an excellent site. The coverage mix has shifted, the quality of that mixture (in my personal opinion), has not.
Your tone implies you think differently, which is fine. It's still on my personal short list.
Full disclosure up front: I currently write for ExtremeTech and Hot Hardware. In the past I've written for Ars Technica (2007 - 2009) and briefly Tech Report (2H 2005). Before that, I wrote for a now-defunct site going back to 2001.
Obviously I could be biased and plug the sites I write for. I write for them for a reason, after all. But since no one is going to buy me telling you to read my own work, here's where I go, personally:
For in-depth, excellent analysis (in alphabetical order)
Anandtech (Anandtech.com)
Ars Technica (Arstechnica.com)
Tech Report (techreport.com)
For ultra low-level analysis:
Real World Tech (www.realworldtech.com)
Agner Fog's CPU blog (www.agner.org)
Lost Circuits (www.lostcircuits.com)
All three of these resources update only occasionally. But the information is second to none.
For spot-checking or specific issues:
TechSpot.com does great CPU/GPU scaling articles. LaptopMag or NotebookCheck are great for their particular areas. CPU-World has good general database information, VR-Zone often has interesting scoops, as does wccftech -- if you're willing to filter out a lot of rumor / speculation from the latter. Tom's Hardware has useful dynamic databases for product performance. So does Anandtech.
Don't be afraid to read a review on a site you haven't heard of, or with a layout from 1999. While established names and high-quality writers tend to go together, they are neither exclusively matched nor guaranteed. A good reviewer will document issues, give a thorough discussion of the topic, and won't come off sounding like a marketing employee.