Comment Re: Inconvenient truth? (Score 1) 521
You do know that you can point out problems and still support something, right?
Any chance to pin that on the content mafia or patent trolls? C'mon, at least ONCE such a story has to hit someone we can uniformly hate and not be controversial.
So long as you don't blame it on Tesla, Bitcoin, or Starts with a Bang, everyone here will cool with it.
Actually for reading books knowing where you are does help line up the story. (beginning middle or end)
However for story's that bounce back and forth with exposition that is less helpful sometimes.
Complexity. the "vertical" transport system only goes to given floors in a given building. The roads go everywhere. I can drive from NYC to Los Angeles... and anywhere in between.
But I only need to go between points A and B, and don't much care about hypothetical point C (since I can always rent transport there, if needs be).
I agree completely. When I first started using an dreaded (an old LG keyboard phone with a JavaME spun reader I had hacked on to it) I found reading a bit of a chore. It took me a few days to get really comfortable with the seemingly small and yet ultimately pricing differences. Now I regularly read books on my smartphone and tablet without a hitch, and have noticed no recall problems.
Yeah, I just can't see the OS being too large of a financial drain. You can get a pro version of Windows for $90 bulk. So let's say you have 10,000 employees and you're spending $1m on licenses. You have to remember that you only upgrade OSes probably once every 4-5 years at best. So that's $200k per year. So for the price of Windows licensing you could only really hire one IT person to manage your Linux Distro. For $200k per year though you might be able to push some municipal management software far enough to get a few other cities contributing. As it improves then you would have more and more people working.
The problem with this theory of even just biting off chunks is that now you're a software company and a city. You have to find and hire and manage teams of people. There will also be tons of moochers. At some point if a bunch of cities are pooling their resources to build an application... how is that different from paying a company for a license? And then you're REALLY locked into a vendor if you spend $10m over 10 years on an in house product that isn't as good as someone else's new shiny thing.
The argument to develop in-house software always comes up at every company when they are looking at a large software licensing purchase order. But unless you need something very specific that off-the-shelf software just doesn't do--it rarely is worth the investment to rebuild it.
In order to transition an economy or government to true socialism,
Finland has been social democrat since the World War II. It's only in the recent years American-style capitalism has become fashionable. I'm sure it's a pure coincidence that our economy switched to an apparently permanent tailspin at the same time.
Gaze upon our debt-free university-level education and despair. Or grow balls and demand it from your own government. Either way, I'm gainfully employed and paying taxes because and only because my government gave me an education offer I could had refused, but didn't see any rational reason to.
How is this blow against Uber?
Uber is illegal in Finland as taxis here need a license to operate and they have service obligation.
Why would anyone use a taxi to get around Helsinki? It's the one city even I just leave my car parked at the outskirt (Mellunmäki metro station 24h free parking with enough space to make sure some is always available - take note everyone, that's what it takes to get people to abandon cars) and switch to mass transit.
Nuclear power requires uninterrupted police powers for tens of thousands of years to control nuclear waste.
Anything that stays active for ten thousand years is either not dangerous or fuel. The exact same power that damages your tissues will just as happily turn a steam turbine for you.
No it sounds more like an Uber App but instead of being locked into one transportation vendor they allow you to price compare and shop between multiple competing transportation solutions whether that's municipal bus, car2go, zip car and uber in one hub.
"The city wants to build a framework for an open market where companies can operate and offer their services in different combinations. The City doesn't want to decree what services are offered, but help to facilitate the establishment of an ecosystem that enables private companies to produce a variety of them," Heikkilà says. "There would be several commercial [transport] operators offering these services, in the same way as in telecommunications today. The customers could choose the operator and the service package they want."
Given our track record with Juniper, "drop everything and patch now" is a foolhardy approach, especially with something as important as a border router or firewall. I wouldn't apply any of their patches without seeing a long track record of safety. With heartbleed there was an unknown level of risk that they would be attacked; with any given Juniper patch there is a known risk the network would just go down.
Of course, given the choice, I wouldn't select a Juniper device to route packets to a doghouse, and would never place one as a mission critical node on any network. Then again, that's not my choice to make, just one we have to live with.
Lots of things kill birds, and actually wind turbines are pretty low on the scale. Even nuclear plants kill more by some estimates:
Yes, obviously it takes a retarded bird to be hit by an easily visible object moving at a perfectly regular path. That doesn't stop people from protesting wind power on behalf of birds, though. And the thing is, they aren't necessarily wrong: while it takes spectacular bad luck for a bird to die from an encounter with a windmill, it also takes a ridiculous amounts of windmills to replace a single nuclear plant.
Of course, there's always the possibility of not having a single large turbine, but a tower full of small turbines. That would not only make them bird-safe, but also allow them to run right up to and including hurricane winds, unlike a single large one (due to stress to bearings because windspeed varies across the area).
Thanks California. Human impact of using coal fired plants? Nope, think of the children has been replaced by "think of the birds".
It's not California. It's everywhere. Anything whatsoever has some impact, thus enviromental groups oppose it. Even damn wind turbines have been opposed on the grounds that they might chop up birds.
None of which means we shouldn't think about how this effect could be mitigated or prevented (maybe use optic fibers rather than open space to transport and concentrate light? Put a glass roof on the whole thing?) but no matter what, there's going to be some negative ones.
The soviet government was unable to keep the lie going. The USA government does not have that problem: They are funded by biased taxation and trade agreements, a monopoly on many forms of intellectual property, a monopoly on 'world police' duties, and sale of most of the international currency. When all that fails, they simply invent 1/3rd of their federal revenue from thin air.
The US government is hardly synonymous with capitalism. Whether that's a good or bad thing I won't get into, but it's entirely possible that US might survive the fall of capitalism and recover. However, should this not be the case, it doesn't matter how much money it can print for itself. Money only has value within a functioning economic system; all the money in the world can't buy anything is no one is selling.
All the people provide is disposable labour and babies for future labour markets.
And they're starting to admit that, too. Once you consciously admit that the promises offered by some Power that Be are lies, it no longer has any power to compel your loyalty. It might try coercion, but as the Soviet coup demonstrated, that's a desperate gambit that has low chances of working, even if the people who make up the army still stay under its spell.
In short, capitalism is going to fall for failing the same test it judges people by: can you deliver? And it could had avoided its fate by showing mercy for those who can't. There is irony in that. But the stupid thing is that it already got a stay of execution back when communism first arose by becoming lighter and softer with unemployment benefits and keynesian stimulus economics, and is really only dying due to abandoning those - and could still repent a second time, it's just bloody unlikely to.
So you think that money is the root of all evil. Have you ever asked what is the root of money? -- Ayn Rand
