Actually, we prefer to pay with little pieces of green paper. It's much more secure than the plastic stuff, chip, pin, or whatnot...
We used to use money that had actual value, but that perfectly logical practice was deemed barbaric by our betters in the last century.
As Scott McNealy famously said (and was pilloried for here on Slashdot, IIRC), "You've got no privacy anyway - get over it."
Turns out UPS (but not FedEx) will deliver anywhere with an address - even a vacant lot. A buddy of mine had his card used to buy thousands of dollars worth of TVs and other home entertainment electronics that were delivered to a vacant lot in Round Rock. The bad guys just waited for the truck to leave, then swooped in and loaded up. Far as I know, they were never caught. (To be fair, this was a few years ago, one would hope UPS has changed their policy on this....)
That's just another one of those old canards...
Oh, that sounds really f-ing convenient...
That's because electronic evidence *isn't*.
You're assuming people even *can* look at their statements in something like an real-time fashion.
A great many of us (even here at
BTW, I was comparing notes with a good friend of mine the other day - he's one of the world's leading experts on software engineering (his seminal paper is cited more than any other), and he's even tostricter on this stuff than I am - and for *all* the right reasons.
I thought it was interesting that the article mentioned that Dyson has never released a robot vacuum, but then failed to note that the company did *announce* a robot vacuum back around 2001, and finally (quietly) decided to cancel it in 2005. That vacuum was called the DC06 - a summary of the letter "announcing" its cancellation can be found here: http://www.robotreviews.com/ch...
Those who say this is an easy problem have clearly never really looked at what it takes to solve it. I have - my original background is robotics, and I worked on (and we abandoned as infeasible) a robotic floor cleaner design back in the late 1980s. Time and tech advances haven't helped much - Like most problems in robotics and AI, the real issues are stubbornly immune to increases in compute power or software technology. In addition, "simply" designing and building reliable robotics hardware is insanely difficult to do well. The very best (and thus very expensive) robots we can build are still finicky, fiddly, and incredibly fragile things that require staggering amounts of maintenance (both preventive and corrective). My friend Dewayne Perry, one of the world's leading experts on software engineering, is right when he says that Artificial Intelligence needs quantum improvements to reach even the level of natural stupidity...
FWIW, I've never seen a robot that doesn't suck, except for the robot "vacuum cleaners" out there.... Nothing makes you appreciate the Intelligent Design of living systems like trying to build a robot that actually really works and is truly adaptive to real world environments!
I remember reading that is all benefits were removed from oil than the price of gas would be between 12-15 dollars a gallon!
And that, children, is why you don't believe everything you read, especially from those on the Internet that don't bother to sanity check their figures.
Let's do some grade school math: The US EIA says we used 134 Billion gallons of gasoline in 2011. Assuming a $3/gal current cost of gas and subtracting that from your ridiculous $12-15/gal figure, that means the federal government was subsidizing the oil industry by between 1.2 and 1.6 TRILLION DOLLARS, or roughly HALF of all federal receipts.
I find that very difficult to believe!
Oh really? Then why aren't American companies over there owning, running, and profiting from all that oil? I'd bet there's not enough oil under the whole place for the next 100 years to break even on the Iraq war. Sorry, but the US oil industry really didn't gain much, if anything from the Iraq war. It may shake your world, but there may have been other considerations...
I remember reading that is all benefits were removed from oil than the price of gas would be between 12-15 dollars a gallon!
And that, children, is why you shouldn't believe everything you read, especially if it's hearsay from an uninformed source on the Internet...
That figure's complete BS - it has to be. Even if you counted all of the oil industry's tax deductions that are analogous to those in other industries as subsidies, (they're not), there's not nearly enough subsidy there to raise the price of gas anywhere near that much - that doesn't even pass a first-order common-sense test...
Do the grade school math: 134,000,000,000 (1.34e9) gallons of gasoline were used in the US in 2011, according to the EIA. Assuming current prices of $3/gal to make the math easier, that means you're claiming the "subsidies" amount to between $9 and $12/gal, for a total of $1.2-1.6 TRILLION. I find that very difficult to believe, since that's roughly HALF of the entire revenue of the federal government...
Lots of people tried to do thin-film/amorphous solar panels. All the others had the sense to make them flat to maximize the sun exposure rather than coat the entire inside surface of a tube, only half (at best) of which was going to catch sunlight anyway. Solyndra's engineering and design wasn't flat - but it was just flat awful.
Seriously, it's hard to imagine a stupider idea to throw over half a billion dollars at than Solyndra (maybe feeding plants Brawndo?) - this was corruption and unsavory dealing at its worst. Solyndra was doomed by a stupid concept, as anyone with any technical ability at all knew from the beginning.
Every rooftop that doesn't have solar panels is a target for panels
No, that's just wrong - your roof has to face within about 20 degrees of due south if those panels are ever to produce enough power to recover their cost. (Actually, about 15-20 degrees West of South is ideal from an economic point of view, since power is worth more in the late afternoon.)
Also, if your roof has any shade (trees, chimneys, etc.) then you can lose a large portion of your generating capacity. Microinverters help, since they keep the losses to only the shaded panels, but they are really only cost effective for homes and fairly small commercial rooftops, today.
Germany is hardly what anyone would call a bastion of sunshine, but they seem to be making quite a go of solar.
And a large part of that is their ability to lavishly fund subsidies because we provide a fair portion of their defense - and pay them for our bases there to do it...
Not that I'm advocating subsidies, I'm not, but it's fair to point out that European socialist welfare/subsidy states could not exist if it were not for the US subsidizing the costs of their defense. Not that I advocate that, either...
Whether or not SolarCity is getting direct subsidies (and I find it difficult to believe that they're not), they are most certainly getting the indirect benefits of those subsidies (tradeable renewable energy credits (RECs), etc.), since that's what's driving almost all solar projects today (which is why most are in New Jersey (nice, sunny place, that) and California - that's where the subsidies are biggest and still flowing. (Look at all the solar activity in Colorado that dried up overnight when the state killed the subsidy program...)
and how in about '66 or '67 Texaco payed less in Federal Income Tax than just one of the cleaning ladies at its New York headquarters
Corporations NEVER, EVER pay taxes. Sure, they may write a check to the government (although they owe it to their investors and customers to make sure that check is as small as possible) , but that cost is then necessarily passed on to their customers in the form of higher prices, and thus eventually to consumers. One of the biggest lies anywhere is the notion that you can tax corporations (evil, noble, or otherwise) at all. In reality, every corporate tax is paid for by all of us. There really is no such thing as a tax on corporations, just indirect and wildly inefficient tax collection mechanisms.
Always draw your curves, then plot your reading.
