Curious how a question of costs is somehow "offtopic"...

Guess I must've struck a few nerves.

Please explain how ~30-80 cents/gallon** taxation becomes "subsidized".

**depending on state and local excise taxation.

Okay, stop tape.

Unless you can point to or create an objective set of criteria for those "negative externalities" and do so in a way that sets an objective price point for them? It's a nice way of saying that pollution sucks, but way too subjective to actually use fairly. I guarantee that if ever put into statute, it would fast become a club with which to punish political enemies and convenient scapegoats.

Besides, who decides what is "energy intensive"? I'm pretty sure the old folks who rely on motorized gear just to stay out of a nursing home, or a crippled kid who relies on power-hungry medical equipment just to stay alive would object to your assessment, no?

I know what the panels will cost (specious sourcing for that cost aside).

What I want to know is how much it's going to cost the rest of us.

How the hell much is this going to cost?

Note that cost has many dimensions here:
* taxes
* personal cost of having to replace bits and bobs to meet these efficiency standards
* increases in the power bill

etc...

It's nice to promise something, but has anyone run the numbers on cost to individuals and to the economy at large?

Ha ha ha ha ha ha, did you just compare damage to a 'bridge inside borders' to a bridge over the ocean?

- correct.

Large container freighters can be loaded in a port, unloaded in a port half world away in 10 days. Then the existing train / truck network can pick up the containers and move them further.

The only bottleneck there is a port and ports are much easier and faster to build than additional bridges to increase throughput.

- ha, talk about silly.

A burning bridge stops all cargo from being moved, while a burning ship only stops that ship. Shipping docks are a scalable solution, while a bridge is a fixed throughput solution that cannot be scaled without building a second bridge.

Container ships can be easily redirected where they are needed at the time when they are needed, while a bridge cannot be moved where it is needed.

Also obviously you haven't seen Russian infrastructure, which is nonexistent in that part of the world and beside that there is no American/Canadian infrastructure to use a bridge like that either.

At the end if this project goes ahead it will never be for any economic reasons, only for political ones, so at the end there will be a gigantic price tag on this bridge to nowhere.

Actually, everyone should take a chill. All the charges should be dropped and these people should just work it out. The neighborly thing to do would have been to tell the neighbor not to fly over his property before shooting it out of the sky or anything like that. I think some partial compensation would be appropriate as a civil matter negotiated between the neighbors or in civil small claims court. The only reason that this is being given any attention is because "drone" has become the catch all word for a bunch of techno paranoia.

You are clearly not taking into account the upfront capital costs and bridge maintenance and repairs and changing political situations. Do that, amortise all those costs (real ones, not fake and improbably low ones) and try to answer the same question. A damaged boat doesn't prevent other boats from moving in the ocean and a boat can be used for other purposes if the political climate shuts down one route.

What are you going to move over that bridge that cannot be moved cheaper by a boat and faster by a plane?

Put a train on that maybe? What happens when a multi megaton train filled with oil (what else)? Goes off the rail there? There has to be an economic reason for anything like this, not a political one, because if it is all politics, it will be the most epic bridge to nowhere.

Come up with an economically sound reason first, before coming up with a solution like that.

Isn't the whole point that WE are effectively that program.

We are getting closer and closer to being able to write something more intelligent than ourselves, make sure it's working properly, and then letting it loose.

The concern is that this might only happen once...

for you technologically superior folk..

"Can I completely gut Windows 10 so that it basically just functions like Windows 7 with DX12?"

I own one Windows box. with Windows 7 Professional 64 bit running on it. It is used for exactly 3 things.. Playing Minecraft, and playing various Steam games. Also occasionally downloading mods for those various games from one or two very specific trusted websites.

I have an older box running Arch for everything *else* I want to do, because I'm not stupid enough to trust Microsoft with anything that might potentially have importance.

In the past, before I took the leap into Linux, Whenever I would set up a Windows box, I'd always pop into services.msc and disable a crapload of services.. usually using Blackviper's service guides.. And IE would only get used once to download a real browser, which I would then kit out with adblock and noscript plugins before doing anything else.

And this generally seemed to work pretty well. Even with no always-on antivirus, no security updates (I'd disable Windows Update completely), shut down windows managed firewalls and not replace them... all the things you're generally "not supposed to do".. I'd very rarely run into any kind of problem. (The exceptions being when I'd do something deliberately stupid and risky, fully knowing I shouldn't.. just because my brain went dead for a brief time.)

I found once you gut most of Windows, the security risks drop dramatically. More than enough for me to find tolerable for a dedicated game machine, anyway..

With Windows 10 being the obvious transition to "Software as a Service so we can just keep billing you for renting our product".. (which is where I forsee this going, ultimately..) is it still "old Windows" enough that it can be properly gutted?

I have no use for a sexualized version of Clippy... I have no use for "Edge". I have no use for really any "feature" of Windows 10 besides DX12. And I have a lot of reluctance about some of the features, even when it's only on a machine I use to play some games. So, to free up system resources.. I'd like to rip all that stuff out.. or at least permanently disable it.

Anybody tried playing around with that sort of approach to see if it is still doable? Like disabling Windows Update entirely?

:LISP can build, index, update and use GIANT HOSTS FILES

You lose! Grovel like a worm before the Queen of Programming Languages(TM)!!

Running it on the machine I'm using to post. Our group got the enterprise iso's and cdkey on the 29th. I did a custom install and said no to all of the bullshit options. So far I'm not seeing any ads.

Because your average user isn't a /. Reader or l33t hax0r... The idea of having settings and data synced across multiple PCs appeals to enough people to warrant it being in the box.

As they say in Russian (a rough translation): saving those, who are drowning is up to those who are drowning. They also say: while you can hope that a god will help you, you should help yourself.

Basically there are enough people on the African continent to make it possible for those very people to figure out how to solve their own problems. I don't see African solutions to problems in Indonesia related to Avian Flu as an example.