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And when an ambulance chaser uses a loophole contained in the plain-English document that didn't exist in the very specific legal language document...

At no point did I suggest changing the meaning of the document - merely its presentation.

Just for grins, let's take this a step farther. How far down the scale of least common denominator do you have to go? Not everyone in the U.S. graduated from high school...

If you're trying to communicate with someone and seek their acceptance, you need to speak their language - one way or another.

Of course, if you merely wish to demonstrate a pretence at seeking their acceptance then this should be disregarded as within that scenario, recipients of the document are able to meaningfully consent to terms they cannot understand.

You may argue that it makes more sense for 99.6% of people to take the service of a lawyer so-as to read a document addressed to them than for the author to ensure that an understandable equivalent document is prepared although I suspect high levels of disagreement.

Oh boy, $130million to create new energy solutions. That about what the computer systems in an SR-71 Blackbird costs. Guess the DoD will have to go without until next year's budget. Seriously though this is pathetic. $130million isn't shit. It's a laughable sum for any kind of major research project, let alone what is arguably the most important human challenge being faced today. Even $130bn would be too little spent in my opinion.

Yep. About as much as it costs to run a Nimitz class aircraft carrier for half a year. A truly outstanding commitment to energy research.

I am dissapoint.

gimp2 (gmp) pronunciation Slang. n. A limp or a limping gait. A person who limps. intr.v., gimped, gimping, gimps. To walk with a limp. http://www.answers.com/topic/gimp

There is no other country in the planet, INCLUDING the countries which actually ARE the producers of sugar, having problems with sugar.

Its an american problem. And this much stampede is done about it, and someone finally comes up saying some BASE element that is fundamental to life, is toxic ...

the UNIVERSAL energy source that ALL CELLS (including bacteria) on ANY living organism on this planet uses, is ATP.

and, ATP is generated through respiratory process from GLUCOSE (hello sugar) and oxygen.

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_produces_ATP_energy_for_a_cell

and we have someone coming up saying that the BASE mechanism for all life on this planet, is toxic.

when we check it out, it comes up as an idiot that is in an AMERICAN that is trying to fight obesity.

no sugar isnt toxic. its the american mindset that is toxic - overdo ANYthing, and it becomes harmful to health, including oxygen. there are no other countries on the planet having problem with sugar, but americans.

thats your problem. but appallingly, someone makes a science out of america's own excesses. appalling.

I'm catholic you insensitive clod! Clearly the bible was written in Latin by God!

I can't tell if this is a joke or serious. If serious, it is seriously ignorant.

The original books of the Old Testament were written in either Hebrew or Aramaic. The original books of the New Testament were written in Koine (common) Greek. The Bible was not translated into Latin until the 4th Century AD:

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_are_the_original_languages_the_Bible_was_written_in

I think the duration and capacity just depend on the size. This wikipedia page has a picture of a 2 GWh storage unit. Apparently homes average about 50 KW/h per day. If my math is right that's 10,000 homes for 4 days. Granted, that's just home electricity - not cars, not heating, not industry. I'd imagine an electric-powered steel mill would run down one of those very quickly.

The resistance of the "two circuits" is not doubling, it is halving! Hence the remaining bulb draws twice the current. Or other way around, its not really a resistance problem only.

Resistance doesn't work that way. If you have two 1k resistors and wire them in parallel, the circuit has about 500 ohms resistance. If you take one of them away, the circuit goes back to having 1k resistance. Taking away one side of a parallel set of resistors always results in an increase in the circuit's resistance, not a decrease.

If you have 2 bulbs in parallel they cause a voltage drop,

Voltage drop occurs across resistance. The two bulbs thus cause a voltage drop on the other side of the bulbs as a result of their resistance, not on the source side. Nothing happens when one bulb in a parallel circuit blows.

Now if you have a significant inline resistance in the wire between the battery and the bulbs, that's a different story, but unless you're dealing with LEDs (which should always have a separate resistor per LED), if you have high resistance between the battery and your bulbs, it means that your wires are way too small, and you have much bigger problems than a bulb burning out.

However in such situations the reactor *and* the main generator has to be shut down. So I can not see from where you want to get the power.

Again, you're making the assumption that those must be shut down completely. As I understand it, the only reason that the main turbine gets shut down is because it would experience an overspeed turbine trip anyway due to the lack of external load. However, that turbine shutdown could be avoided by adding a flow bypass and, optionally, a dummy load to drain additional power. Emphasis should be on doing most of the work with a flow bypass because a dummy load in the MW range is probably infeasible. :-)

The lowest power output of the reactor would still be ten times the amount you need for the pumps.

That should be solvable by either more precisely bypassing the flow around the turbine or by using a larger dummy load (or both). Alternatively, a secondary turbine could be added as you suggest. The only reason I suggested the main turbine is that a secondary turbine, unless run and tested regularly, could fail when you need it just as the diesel generators did.

Either way, the point was that under most auto-scram conditions, it seems like it would usually be safer if the reactors did a partial scram into a low-power, low-reactivity interim state in which they can still produce a small amount of emergency pump power on their own in one way or another. Then, the reactor engineers could take a look at each reactor, see which ones appear to be operating safely, and fully scram the others while continuing to use the semi-working reactors for pump power.

Here's a small list to start with of treaties which weren't honored: http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_many_treaties_did_the_US_break_with_native_Americans To the other part of your post, being an American who has been living outside the US for over a decade, it's very interesting seeing the world perspective versus the US perspective in things like the news. As a little homework assignment for all Americans, watch the news over the next few days. After watching, try to find similar stories from other countries and see how they report it. It wouldn't be difficult to find a real list but, hell, it's been a long day and I'm tired.

All this jabbering and no one thinks of MUDs? We're still here, we've got a wide range of quality. And that range sometimes extends to the best scifi and fantasy you've ever read.

http://www.answers.com/topic/multi-user-dungeon <- For the ignorant.

Badanedwa (No account. Hope someone sees this as AC. PS, speaking of art I worked on a big ASCII-art logo that says "MUDS" but the lameness filter won't allow it.)

1. Lake Kariba (180 km3 or 43 cu mi; Zimbabwe, Zambia)

2. Bratsk Reservoir (169 km3 or 41 cu mi; Russia)

3. Lake Nasser (157 km3 or 38 cu mi; Egypt, Sudan)

4. Lake Volta (148 km3 or 36 cu mi; Ghana)

5. Manicouagan Reservoir (142 km3 or 34 cu mi; Canada)

6. Lake Guri (135 km3 or 32 cu mi; Venezuela)

7. Williston Lake (74 km3 or 18 cu mi; Canada)

8. Krasnoyarsk Reservoir (73 km3 or 18 cu mi; Russia)

9. Zeya Reservoir (68 km3 or 16 cu mi; Russia) Read more: http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_the_largest_man_made_lake_in_the_world#ixzz1GnVTwRD4

What is justice? What is right or is corrected. Eliminate many of the laws on the books. For instance victimless crime laws. The War on Drugs? A big waste of tyme, money, and resources. Laws against prostitution? Where are the victims? Laws against fornication? Against sodomy? Against oral sex? Where are the victims? Getting rid of these laws will dramatically reduce the need for a justice system. Laws and law enforcement should be working on the harm personal acts afflict on the unwilling. Should there be a Law? is an excellent flowchart depicting the flow of reason that should occur in deciding what laws there will be.

I'd rather have power wielded by a democratic government - which I can influence - than corporations (which I can't).

I will handle this in two different ways. The first one being who gives corporations their power? Government does. If corporations have too much power it's because government gave them that power. Thirty years after Thomas Jefferson drafted the "Declaration of Independence" he wrote this warning:
“I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country."
However there was a reason the first corporate charters were granted, yes they are granted by government. The first businesses to be granted a charter was the British East India Company in 1600 and the Dutch East India Company in 1602. Both were shipping companies, as hinted by their names, but shipping was a risky business. If either cargo, crew, or passengers were lost the ship's owners were liable. If pirates captured the ship killing people, or just stole the cargo, the owners had to pay for their loss. The same with sinkings such as caused by hurricanes. So if I as a small investor wanted to and had the money to invest in a ship, if that ship was lost I would be financially liable. Not only would I lose the money I invested but I could lose my home and everything I owned. So the British and Dutch crowns decided to grant some businesses a corporate charter giving investors limited liability. With these charters I could invest money in a ship and if the ship was lost all I'd lose was the money I invested. This allows society and many people to benefit, international trade is a common or public good.

I could go on but you should now have a clear idea why corporations exist. Now onto the second way. So you trust government more than businesses? Has any business, or group of businesses, killed as many people as governments have? The greatest number of deaths all at once I know of was Union Carbide's Bhopal Disaster in India. The estimate with the highest number of deaths from it is 15,000, with an estimate of less than 600,000 injured.

Now how many people have governments killed or violated the rights of? NAZI Germany, over 600,000. Stalin's Russia, 20,000,000. Mao's China, 50,000,000. The US isn't guilt free either. The US, and state governments, have killed people and violated many more people's rights. Those in US prisons for non-violent drug offenses, and the US has the world's largest prison population? Their rights are violated on a daily basis. Throughout it's history the US massacred American Indian tribes. Up through the 1970s the US government's Indian Health Service had doctors sterilize Native American Women, forcefully and

What is justice? What is right or is corrected. Eliminate many of the laws on the books. For instance victimless crime laws. The War on Drugs? A big waste of tyme, money, and resources. Laws against prostitution? Where are the victims? Laws against fornication? Against sodomy? Against oral sex? Where are the victims? Getting rid of these laws will dramatically reduce the need for a justice system. Laws and law enforcement should be working on the harm personal acts afflict on the unwilling. Should there be a Law? is an excellent flowchart depicting the flow of reason that should occur in deciding what laws there will be.

I'd rather have power wielded by a democratic government - which I can influence - than corporations (which I can't).

I will handle this in two different ways. The first one being who gives corporations their power? Government does. If corporations have too much power it's because government gave them that power. Thirty years after Thomas Jefferson drafted the "Declaration of Independence" he wrote this warning:
“I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country."
However there was a reason the first corporate charters were granted, yes they are granted by government. The first businesses to be granted a charter was the British East India Company in 1600 and the Dutch East India Company in 1602. Both were shipping companies, as hinted by their names, but shipping was a risky business. If either cargo, crew, or passengers were lost the ship's owners were liable. If pirates captured the ship killing people, or just stole the cargo, the owners had to pay for their loss. The same with sinkings such as caused by hurricanes. So if I as a small investor wanted to and had the money to invest in a ship, if that ship was lost I would be financially liable. Not only would I lose the money I invested but I could lose my home and everything I owned. So the British and Dutch crowns decided to grant some businesses a corporate charter giving investors limited liability. With these charters I could invest money in a ship and if the ship was lost all I'd lose was the money I invested. This allows society and many people to benefit, international trade is a common or public good.

I could go on but you should now have a clear idea why corporations exist. Now onto the second way. So you trust government more than businesses? Has any business, or group of businesses, killed as many people as governments have? The greatest number of deaths all at once I know of was Union Carbide's Bhopal Disaster in India. The estimate with the highest number of deaths from it is 15,000, with an estimate of less than 600,000 injured.

Now how many people have governments killed or violated the rights of? NAZI Germany, over 600,000. Stalin's Russia, 20,000,000. Mao's China, 50,000,000. The US isn't guilt free either. The US, and state governments, have killed people and violated many more people's rights. Those in US prisons for non-violent drug offenses, and the US has the world's largest prison population? Their rights are violated on a daily basis. Throughout it's history the US massacred American Indian tribes. Up through the 1970s the US government's Indian Health Service had doctors sterilize Native American Women, forcefully and

Um, yes actually, the USA developed Darpanet (the first internet) in response to the USSR in order to build a robust communications network.

Oh, and there's this new-fangled thing called "Google" you can use to look up the origins like this: http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_some_information_about_the_invention_of_the_internet

and this: http://www.velocityguide.com/internet-history/origin-of-the-internet.html

or perhaps a little slideshow might be simpler for you:
http://www.slideshare.net/macloo/invention-of-the-internet

Oh yes, and TCP/IP? See this guy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vint_Cerf
and this guy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Kahn.
FYI, neither is Swiss.

You think yourself "harsh" but what you come across as is adolescent and what rural Americans would term "pig-ignorant."

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_much_money_does_a_lawyer_earn

Everyone trots on Mao, Pol Pot and Joseph Stalin as extreme examples of "atheists" who demonstrated the cruelty of "atheism". The problem, of course, is that none of them were actually atheist....

I believe in one thing only, the power of the human will. -Joseph Stalin

League of The Militant Godless -- Operating in the Soviet Union during Stalin's rule (with official permission and support)

The Black Book of Communism - Crimes, Terror, Repression --100 million deaths

How large a garden do you need to offset driving 100 miles a day?

That's easy enough to work out. Let's assume that your hypothetical 100 miles-per-day commute was done in a car that gets 25mpg. You'd use up 4 gallons of gasoline for your drive. Each gallon of gasoline roughly works out to 20 lbs of CO2.

Okay, so now you're working about 260 days a year, and this means you would need 20*260 ==> 5200 lbs of related lumber.

Going by how much an average tree absorbs (1100kg, or 2425lbs), your hypothetical driver would need to plant 2-3 trees a year.

Not everybody drives 100 miles a day, so not everybody would need all 3 trees to offset their driving.

If we'd have a "day of copyright rage", getting millions of civil-disobedience copyright-breakers in public squares, with (logically) police trying to break them up, we'd get real policy debate.

Fucking right. A mass protest in this circumstance is to have a letter signed by people across the country which states that on such-and-such a day everyone will pirate some specific piece of media. I would suggest the oldest movie available that is still under copyright. My source at the venerable and precise Answers.com suggests (URL below):

"Anything from a movie prior to 1923 or prior to 1964 and not properly renewed is in the public domain and can be used freely, without copyright restriction. Most other movies are still under copyright protection & you will have to seek permission from the rights holder."

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_are_the_copyright_laws_regarding_old_movie_stills_and_photographs

So something from 1924? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1924_in_film#Films_released_in_1924

Hundreds, or even thousands, of voluntarily identified individuals signing on to something like that would be a remarkable statement. To risk freedom in its name demonstrates our right to a return to democracy. Fricken Egypt showed us how it's done. Don't get me wrong, I don't want everything I own confiscated, but picket lines don't get press - especially when they're in cages. (Which is a rant for another time... free speech zones make me murderously angry - (that's hyperbole, DHS...(yeah, I'm a little paranoid))).

Corporations don't pay taxes, their customers do. And with corporate tax rates at 0%, consumers end up spending much less for the things they need and businesses find it easier to expand and hire more employees.

If corporations pay no income tax but people do corporations get a free ride. Sole Proprietorships and Partnerships also hire employees yet their owners still have to pay income tax. Not only do owners have to pay tax they are also financially liable, for instance in case of an accident, whereas stock holders are not. The first corporations granted charters were given charters just because of this. The British East India Company was granted a charter in 1600 and the Dutch East India Company was granted a charter in 1602. Both were shipping companies running ships between Europe and India/South Asia and shipping was a risky business. Ships owners were financially liable for losses. If a ship sank, ran aground, was attacked by pirates or otherwise lost cargo, passengers, or workers the owner had to settle. That meant the owner could lose everything they owned. So corporations were granted charters and limited liability. The most a stockholder could ever lose is the amount they paid for the stocks. Proposals like yours and corporate libertarians would give corporations an unfair advantage over other forms of businesses.

Much better would be to abolish personal income tax. And yes that would help corporations too, part of any business's tax burden is payroll taxes, abolish personal income tax and you also abolish payroll tax. Of course I hear the howling from corporatists, socialists, big government types, and others who support high taxes.

Falcon

Corporations don't pay taxes, their customers do. And with corporate tax rates at 0%, consumers end up spending much less for the things they need and businesses find it easier to expand and hire more employees.

If corporations pay no income tax but people do corporations get a free ride. Sole Proprietorships and Partnerships also hire employees yet their owners still have to pay income tax. Not only do owners have to pay tax they are also financially liable, for instance in case of an accident, whereas stock holders are not. The first corporations granted charters were given charters just because of this. The British East India Company was granted a charter in 1600 and the Dutch East India Company was granted a charter in 1602. Both were shipping companies running ships between Europe and India/South Asia and shipping was a risky business. Ships owners were financially liable for losses. If a ship sank, ran aground, was attacked by pirates or otherwise lost cargo, passengers, or workers the owner had to settle. That meant the owner could lose everything they owned. So corporations were granted charters and limited liability. The most a stockholder could ever lose is the amount they paid for the stocks. Proposals like yours and corporate libertarians would give corporations an unfair advantage over other forms of businesses.

Much better would be to abolish personal income tax. And yes that would help corporations too, part of any business's tax burden is payroll taxes, abolish personal income tax and you also abolish payroll tax. Of course I hear the howling from corporatists, socialists, big government types, and others who support high taxes.

Falcon

Ignoring ad hominum attacks and thermal energy tangent, it appears your arguments are (1) work on everything blind to its contribution to the whole and (2) work on vehicle engines because they have a shorter product lifespan when compared to coal plants.

(1) Focus on every single piece and you end up with no focus at all. The question is, where would you have the greatest IMPACT. The solar panel company I work for is now building solar cells that are just a penny or two above the $0.10 per kilo-watt-hour of grid parity. Give us a few years and I think we'll be cheaper than coal. Kill coal and start building solar and wind farms! Coal and petroleum are currently equivalent in their CO2 emissions Source and we can get that power through alternative methods for less than the cost of replacing all of our cars with only slightly better mileage, which would have the greater impact?

(2) Using $250m cars on the road with an estimated average $30k/vehicle retail cost ( Source ), here are approximately $7.5 trillion (that's with a T) worth of cars on the road today. There are approximately 600 ( Source ) coal plants in the US. To improve the mileage of cars, you essentially have to replace them entirely. Cost: $7.5 trillion. Spending that money on coal plants instead would provide $12.5 BILLION on EACH of the 600 coal plants. Considering that a coal plant costs less than $1b ( Source ) to build, I am sure we can find significantly better uses for that extra $11.5b per plant.

Some additional arguments
(1) Where do you suppose the power charging your Chevy Volt is coming from? Chase people from gas and you end up with a coal-powered car.

(2) The largest 15 ocean-going ocean tankers emit as much of some types of air pollution as every single car on earth. (!!!!) Source. I can't seem to find how much CO2 they emit... How many tankers do you think we have circling the globe?

In conclusion, I stand by my position: For CO2 emissions reduction purposes only, our dollars would be better spent on improved power generation... and to beat the CO2 drum is rhetoric designed to whip up the uninformed... or to advance someone's agenda...

If we assume a very efficient mouse consumption and digestion (E=mc^2) and take 30g as a typical mouse mass then you get about 2.696x10^15 Joules per mouse. After that first mouse, I bet the table could be quite the aggressive mouse hunter.

Hotz's [is this writing correct? :D] first hacking attempts were done on Linux, on a fat PS3, and required Linux (and a hardware glitch IIRC) to work. So Other OS was removed from the fat PS3 in response to his (failed) attempts.

That is correct - see "http://www.answers.com/topic/george-hotz#Hacking_the_PlayStation_3".
Fact of the matter is - the Sony haters on here do not like to listen to or consider any inconvenient fact which might demonstrate that their irrational Sony hatred does not have much basis in historical fact.

...but it's more like "tar calling granite black."

What is the color of granite?

Wow.
You are doing a lot of driving. 350 miles per week * 52 is 18000 miles per year and 50 miles / day.
OTH, the average American drives 33 miles a day, which is 231 miles / week and 12000 / year.
ANd with 231 miles each week, I would think that charging nightly in your garage, or even every other day would be just peachy for most ppl. With charging nightly for most ppl, then 100 miles would serve as a GREAT 2'nd car for the average family.

http://www.answers.com/topic/pedantic disagrees with you. Being pedantic doesn't require that details be small, it refers to (usually overly strict) adherence to formal rules.

Someone publishing a crack for the PS3 was absolutely forseeable once Sony got rid of OtherOS. It might have been a mod chip or plug-in hack rather than just software, but someone was going to find a way to crack the security to put back what Sony took away.

VERY CONVENIENT how everyone forgets that Geohotz's first hack (which abused the OtherOS feature to perform its exploit) WAS THE REASON that Sony took OtherOS away in the first place - http://www.answers.com/topic/george-hotz#Hacking_the_PlayStation_3

Specifically the lines "On January 26, 2010, Hotz released the exploit to the public. It requires the OtherOS function of the machine, and consists of a Linux kernel module and gaining control of the machine's hypervisor via bus glitching.[22] Hotz wrote that "Sony may have difficulty patching the exploit". On March 28, 2010, Sony has responded by announcing to release a PlayStation 3 firmware update that removes the OtherOS feature"

Very convenient for people who just want to lambast Sony and glorify Geohotz, REGARDLESS OF THE ACTUAL EVENT CHRONOLOGY.

...features Sony removed from the PS3...

..Because of Geohotz's initial exploit which USED the OtherOS feature to achieve its ends. So such an argument that he was trying to restore the OtherOS wouldn't really work, as HE was the reason Sony initially removed it from the Fat PS3s in the first place (and OtherOS was NEVER an advertised feature in the Slim PS3s).

And most USAians are not Catholics

The beliefs of most US Christians don't treat Catholics differently. Sure there's a number of evangelicals that thinks the Pope is the Antichrist and Catholics are going to Hell, but they're a very small minority (plus that kind tends to think even closely related evangelicals are going to Hell too).

And that brings us to Bill Gates. I gather he's not Christian. That puts him in a much smaller group than Catholics.

As I understand it, OtherOS had already been disabled in slim PS3s (though the firmware still contained the code), and that's what Geohot was attempting to reenable. Sony's reaction was to remove OtherOS from existing fat PS3s. I may be remembering it wrong, though. In other words, Sony decided to remove OtherOS from slim PS3 models (that is, they shipped without the option), despite the fact that the hardware can handle it without issues, a decision which certainly appears arbitrary. It looks to me like they no longer wanted to sell consoles with OtherOS enabled, and they took the first opportunity they could to disable it in the older PS3s as well (perhaps so they wouldn't have to maintain multiple sets of firmware). I would suggest that Geohot's difficult-to-execute hack was simply a convenient scapegoat for a decision Sony had already wanted to make (for whatever reason).

You are wrong - Hotz stated that he had begun working on hacking the PS3 in Summer of 2009 - search for "begun the hack last summer", before the Slims had been introduced.

Further, and most important, Hotz was NOT trying to re-enable the OtherOS. His hack used the THEN-EXISTING OtherOS feature - see here. That potential danger was what Sony was trying to stem when they finally removed OtherOS from the Fat models. Thus the OtherOS removal was a RESPONSE to Hotz's original hack which ABUSED the OtherOS feature to achieve it's ends.

All *fail0verflow* did was try to get the functionality back, and Sony named them in the motion as well, so we're sort of stuck defending both them and Geohot since Sony named them together. (I do agree that the relative size of each party has nothing to do with who is right and who is wrong.)

That may or may not be true - I'm a cynical guy, 36 years of life tends to do that to you :) . My personal opinion is that the OtherOS thing became a convenient excuse for fail0verflow. However, if that was the only thing that happened, then I don't think Sony would have reacted to this extent. What they did was make public the know-how to hack the PS3, something which could maybe pose a risk to Sony from professional pirates, but was still not easily actionable for most people. So that was not too outrageous. But then Geohot, possibly eager to stake some sort of claim for himself since his earlier exploit had been mostly neutralized and his thunder stolen by fail0verflow, used this discovery to find out the PS3 root key - something that would make piracy EXTREMELY CONVENIENT, not just for pirates, but even for slightly technical-minded individuals - and then performed the godawful act of posting this to the World Wide Web.

I think Sony are certainly right in trying to protect their investment and means of making money (I think any of us would, too, if we were placed in a similarly impossible situation. I don't think any of the people defending the hackers would be as understanding if it was their means of earning that was jeopardized by this action). One potential misstep Sony may have made is in suing fail0verflow, as in my opinion, all they announced was the know-how to give you the means to expend effort yourself and hack into the PS3, hardly lawsuit material imo. But what Geohot did was inescapably wrong. He is not a kid anymore, he knows the potentially destructive effects such an open hack can have on a business.

rorty may be cockney for that definition, but rort is definitively aussie for scam. They're homographs.

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_do_you_spell_raughty

Horsepower is overrated.

V8 in a 20 yr old sports car had about 200hp and modern four cylinder engines achieve 200hp that while still getting 31mpg

do you know he's currently on the ny times best seller list?

http://www.nytimes.com/best-sellers-books/overview.html

how'd he do that? he wrote a book, said "wait 100 years before publishing", and they did, and here he is, selling a new book, in 2011

quite an impressive man

and did you know about twain and halley's comet?

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_the_connection_between_Mark_twain_and_Halley's_comet

It is believed that Mark Twain (aka Samuel Clemens) was born the same month as the passing of Halley's comet in November 1835. Halley's Comet passed on November 10th 1835 and Twain was born November 30th 1835. Twain vowed he would "go out"with the passing of the comet, as it passes in 75 year cycles. Halley's comet passed again April 20th 1910, Twain passed April 21st 1910.

mark twain: space alien who travels via halley's comet

The difference is, the words "checkers" and "chess" do not have any other meanings in the English language besides the games, so there is no ambiguity.

Oh? Really

Both words have more than one meaning in English. You should stop making random assertions like that.

Fix your signature:

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Is_the_saying_'all_intents_and_purposes'_or_'all_intense_purposes'

For him, it's free beer that counts.

I think beer is something Putin drinks when he wants to sober up after a vodka bender.

Putin doesn't drink alcohol at all.

...a 'medieval-looking rescue ax' being available on the flight deck...

Ironically, it's actually a really, really, really, old guitar, used to calm passengers with folk songs, or club anyone that gets out of hand.

Listening to folks like the commenters here, it is clearly impossible for BofA to do this - everyone who owns a home has been impacted by Countrywide. If their home wasn't financed through Countrywide their neighbor's was and the drop in value of their neighbor's home tanked their home's value.

Roughly, according to National Association of Realtors, there are about 80 million single-family homes in the US today. The average value of all of these homes was around $170,000 and is now more like $100,000. Just having BofA pay every homeowner in the US $70,000 - all 80 million of them - would be 5.6 trillion dollars. If you blame banks for this mess, that is about what it would take. They don't have it.

One flaw with this is the banks may have participated, but the real problem is the bond rating agencies like Moody's. They are the ones that rated bonds backing subprime mortgages as AAA investment-grade bonds. Those bonds were then invested in by pension funds, municipalities and school districts. We haven't seen all of these bonds default yet, but they are going to - because the underlying mortgages are valueless and the rating agencies knew it. That pretty much means a lot of bankrupt pension funds, municipalities and school districts. Anyone that invested in AAA bonds exclusively is likely to get hit with this.

We haven't even seen the beginning of the collapse yet, but it is coming.

Simple, clear laws are best. Ones that lawyers can't understand because they are too straight forward.

There are 2 things I think it must protect, and should be enforceable.

1) an ISP cannot determine where a customer can and where a customer cannot go on the internet - i.e. all IPs are accessible at all times
2) an ISP cannot charge a customer extra to visit any particular end-point (IP) - including ports.

Whatever legislation that the FCC is proposing *may* cover these 2 things. If so, great. If not, shame!

I can imagine no rules about:
* volume of data - charging me more for high volume, I can understand that. False advertising falls under other laws, along with contract law. If I agree that anything over 50 GB produces an extra charge, and that is what I agreed to, and therefore I expect a charge. However, that means a measurement should also be presented/available at all times if I'm interested... proof and track-ability is essential then.
* bandwidth guarantees - paying for ensuring that I have minimum bandwidth, I can understand paying extra too. Again false advertising falls under other laws.
* connections that occur in other countries are not guaranteed. i.e. if China blocks you from accessing their end-points from the US, tough luck. Your ISP is not involved.

false advertising law explained

We don't need crazy laws that a child cannot understand.

I seriously don't understand why these concepts are so difficult to accept de facto. It has essentially been this way for a long time. Forcing it to not change would be relieving. I would imagine that the ISPs would be able to use legislation like this to play nice with each other too. i.e. "you can't, ISP A block ISP B because you will be causing a violation of law X"

Costco also manufactures a lot of the stuff it sells. Everything that is "Kirkland Select" brand is made by them.

Does Costco make stuff itself, or does it contract with others to make the stuff? I bet Costco does not own one factory. Sam's has other companies make it's Member's Mark products, for instance Wrangler makes Member Mark jeans and Duracell makes their batteries. In reply to the question Who makes the kirkland signature private label? Answers.com says "There is no one company. Several companies ranging from Starbucks to Diamond pet food make products that are sold under the Kirkland Signature brand."

Falcon

only applies to goods made in the US.

So nothing then? Why pick a Swiss watch? Why not go with something like a Nike football. Good ole' American Nike making American football, right? Wrong. I bet all the clothes on me right now came from Vietnam or Cambodia or Thailand or some other Asian fabric powerhouse. Donating them to a Goodwill store to be resold would be ... illegal?

Furthermore the article notes CostCo but what about Wal-Mart and Target. They resell these same articles of clothing as a middleman. Do they have some special contract protecting them from the largest copyright lawsuit to ever hit the retail industry?

This is so bizarre and just another indication of how copyright is seriously broken. If I understand the article, it's just because there's an Omega emblem on the watch? So since CostCo now owns that watch, they can chip the logo off and sell it for whatever price they want? This makes about as much logical sense as smearing my face with my own feces before a job interview.

Is there any lawyer out there with some background in this that might tell me what implications this holds for something like clothing being sold at Wal-Mart on the cheap? Or does it need to have an MSRP on it? How does this apply to software developed here but pressed overseas? So many questions I could dream up to ask about this new court decision.

Next up on Brainiac:

Silicone breast, will they float or will they sink?

And are they really the best thing to grab hold of in case of office flood thanks to global warming?

Well, for the record, silicone is typically slightly denser than water so that'd make for a less-than-excellent flotation device.

And, as a strange aside, newly-filled saline implants sometimes have a bit of air in them, and they can audibly slosh, which is a bit weird.

There's a huge difference between a democracy and a republic!

One is representative, the other is not. No troll there, just a correction of the misinformation in the original post.

And yes, the US Constitution protects against the tyranny of the majority, as I said. Here are some links so that you can familiarize yourself:

Where is majority rule and minority rights incorporated into the US constitution?
Minority Rights
How does the US constitution protect minority from majority?

No, this is completely wrong. If you copy the characters- i.e. Pacman, then it IS copyright infringement, that is Namco's IP.

No. Characters are not covered by copyright, but the media about them.

In theory, you could write your own fanfiction of "Harry Potter" and publish it as long as you don't use any source material of the original books and not violate copyright.

You can be sure as heck to be violating a trademark though.

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Can_you_get_a_copyright_on_a_character

So they offered approximately what we pay one football team each year? Whoop. De. Do.

I mean, really, how many pro football teams are there? We offer them a fraction of one popular form of entertainment's salaries? Not even counting all the extra people involved who get payed and other money spent.


http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_the_average_salary_of_an_NFL_football_player

I wonder if there is some subtle psychological reasoning behind painting the NASA X-34 white and the military X-37B a shining Darth Vader helmet black....

At first I thought, "oh, to make it harder to see with a telescope," but then I RTFA and noticed that amateur astronomers have been tracking the thing in orbit, so I guess the paint job is just to make it look cool. Really, though, if I were in charge of a super secret space plane, I'd want it to look cool, too.

Black surfaces radiate more heat than other surfaces so it is better for a heat shield to be black.

You don't even have to stop buying crap. We just need to buying/selling crap at what it really costs to ship it. My sister got some wooden blocks for her 1 year old to play with, they were made in France.

Painted blocks could be made anywhere, they don't have to be shipped across the world, packaged in America and sold here.

Aside from the pollutants, container ships burn 217 tons of fuel per day (source http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_much_fuel_does_a_container_ship_burn). Lets assume that this could be converted to run in cars or whatever other things we care about. Then you have to ask how much oil are we wasting to ship wooden blocks around the world?

The same should be asked about cruise ships where a weeks trip is cheap, the food is free and it all seems like a good deal. Except what damage is it doing?

The reason I don't agree it's fraud is because it was done in the open.

Sir, social security is unconstitutional and by that measure there was no 'openness' about it. It was and still is against the law (the constitution? Remember that? The supreme law of the land?)When FDR first tried to pass the new deal the supreme court decided it was unconstitutional. Only after FDR filled the supreme court with his cronies did it pass.

On February 5, 1937, he sent a special message to Congress proposing legislation granting the President new powers to add additional judges to all federal courts whenever there were sitting judges age 70 or older who refused to retire. The practical effect of this proposal was that the President would get to appoint six new Justices to the Supreme Court (and 44 judges to lower federal courts), thus instantly tipping the political balance on the Court dramatically in his favor.

[Emphasis added]

So only through the use of unconstitutional laws does social security exist in the first place. So no, we did not “vote” to have it, the government broke the law to implement it, and since then the government has ripped off the fund for tens of trillions of dollars. That's more than twice as many miles to Alpha Centari, the nearest star! or roughly 4x times GDP. So we didn't "vote" this program in, it was rammed illegally down the throats of the people just like the latest unconstitutional health care legislation. You see, according to the constitution (still the supreme law of the land) the government cannot force you to buy something and they cannot place a tax on your wages, only after the 16th amendment did income tax become constitutional, but I fail to see the amendment that legalized social security and its other unfunded cousins, and that is exactly why the constitutionality of the program is questioned.

The SS benefit will not go to zero unless there is no next generation of workers. If that ever happened, a 401k balance wouldn't help you either.

Umm, do you not know what a 401K plan is? It is an individual account that has nothing to do with anyone except for the single employee paying into the account. Your employer matches the contribution and it is tax free. There is no need for a "next generation of workers" to allow you to collect from your 401K. That you think that 401K relies on the “next generation of workers” really tells me a lot about your knowledge of this subject. Can you at least admit your wrong on this one?

So maybe we will end up letting inflation do the job for us, due to lack of political will.

So the increasingly efficient social security will need to devalue the dollar to make ends meet? You say time and again it's not the fault of social security but the politicians who get elected. Guess what? THEY ARE RUNNING IT! And that is part of social security. It really sounds like the argument "communism is great, it just has never been implemented correctly". We are talking about the actual social security system, the way it is implemented now, not the idealized social security system that does not exist, but the one that has trillions of dollars in debt.

As for the postal service, I thought we were talking about efficiency, not you

I think such flights are more common than you're allowing for. Consider a rather busy route: downtown New York City to downtown Washington DC. The in-air time is about 1 hour 12 minutes. You're supposed to get to the airport 60-90 minutes ahead of time for a domestic flight. Nowadays, airport security can take awhile, and can be quite variable, so one needs to get there somewhat early. Driving to the airport from downtown NYC takes about 40 minutes (say to JFK), but traffic can also be variable. So let's say a cautious traveler leaves home 130 minutes prior to the flight. Flights are not allowed to depart prior to their scheduled time, but sometimes have delays. So this means flights, on average, have a delay. Let's call that another 20 minutes. On the other end, one has to collect luggage (another 20 minute wait). Taxi downtown takes about 15 minutes.

Total time: 40 min. drive + 90 min. security/waiting + 20 min. typical delay + 72 min. in air + 10 min. for runway taxiing (on both ends) + 20 min. wait for luggage + 15 min. taxi = 4 hours and 27 minutes.

Driving the same distance (from downtown to downtown) takes 4 hours and 23 minutes if you don't hit traffic. Of course this route typically does have traffic, so you're looking at a drive of at least 5 hours and possibly more. Let's say it's 5.5 hours, on average.

Still, those are remarkably close. A traveler has to decide between a ~4.5 hour flight or a 5.5 hour drive. Even though the drive takes a hour longer, some people might consider that worthwhile for avoiding airport security and other hassles, and being more in control (able to stop and eat whenever they want).

Flying is liberating because it is so fast and allows us to access areas we wouldn't otherwise travel to. But it is also used for quick commutes between not-too-distant cities (think of the number of businesspeople who travel between nearby big cities frequently). Flying is often used to satisfy this need. But as flying becomes more onerous (security lines taking longer, the general annoyance/hassle becoming larger), more and more travelers on these edge cases (where the difference between driving and flying is 0-2 hours) will decide to drive.

Fine if the TSA wants ground transportation security jobs... let'em put search/patdown officers 24/7/365 at every bus stop, car rental lot, garage and available yard for parking outside private building complexes so "everyone is safe." Anything else would be a half-assed effort at their current ridiculous goals.

But, wait... nothing will scale that large in any world economy. The TSA is affording employee wages for only 15 thousand airports in the USA, which is fine seeing how it's a fraction of a percent out of our 150M employed/unemployed workforce count (see Economy \ Labor force section of the CIA factbook.)

NOBODY can provide enough 1:1 patdown manpower for the country's more than 60 million registered vehicles. If the government and TSA drafted that required minimum 40% of our available workforce just for searches and patdowns, we'd have 0 manpower for convenience stores supplying our daily food, and secretaries. And enough people would stop making lucrative private business cash that the political support would have to stop such a thing.

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Is_the_saying_'all_intents_and_purposes'_or_'all_intense_purposes'