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Were the bankers white men, or Jewish men? Oh I see, it's in vogue to shit on white men, but you wouldn't have the courage to point out the disproportionate number of Jews involved in the bailouts on both the government side and the banker side.

Personally I don't think there is any Jew banker conspiracy or anything like that, I just like calling out fucking morons who blame everything on white men like cowards because it fits the current zeitgeist. People like you would have been cracking a whip in the old south, and marching jews into gas chambers in nazi Germany.

Actually I think most people conflate White with Jewish. It's an ethnicity and religion, not a race. Being Jewish doesn't even require specific parentage anymore.

Would you seriously try to argue that Jerry Seinfeld isn't white? Or better yet, Jon Stewart? this guy isn't white? Really?

Are you forced to talk about something you don't have knowledge about? Intakes are aerodynamically wrong?

Like this:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0d/DARPA_USAirForce_HaveBlue.png

Or this?
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a1/F-117_Nighthawk_Front.jpg

Are you forced to talk about something you don't have knowledge about? Intakes are aerodynamically wrong?

Like this:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0d/DARPA_USAirForce_HaveBlue.png

Or this?
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a1/F-117_Nighthawk_Front.jpg

I never said anything about 100 years, and the whole point of the thread (which you clearly didn't follow) is tax rates with social services (ie. SS in the 30's, Medicare in the 60's, etc). Thus 1913-1915 is totally irrelevant (well, as is the rest of your post, but for different reasons). I just picked 60 years, sure (sort of as an average to the biggest social programs) but as you point out, 80 years would have made an even *stronger* point, thanks.

And you also missed my statement "not in terms of effective tax paid" - even in the 80's the effective tax rate paid in the upper brackets was higher, because there are so many more people in the upper brackets taking advantage of loopholes and the current *15%* capital gains rate (vs the previous lowest rate os 20% in the 80's). In fact for many wealthy people cap gains and dividends are their major source of income.

Also, the top tax rate for last year was 35%, not 37.5%. But I'll give you a pass on that since I doubt you were anywhere near it.

And if this weren't enough to make your post look bad, the effective top *corporate* tax rate is also at a modern low (here's a simple chart so you don't have to try to do math)

So my point is the same - originally taxes were at a level to pay for social services. Unrealistic tax cuts are as much responsible for the current debt as excessive spending.

Anyway, if you want to keep ranting have some balls and don't be an anonymous troll, at least. But you have to try harder than that either way.

Israel has to "deal" with gunpowder rockets that even the IDF admits are a psychological, not military weapon. You're more likely to die in an accident with a passenger bus in Israel than die from a quassam rocket.

So I assume when Apple releases its newest product you will dig out a toilet seat iBook and throw it into the fire? If not then what's your point?

I don't know about 1990, but we definitely had some pretty nasty air pollution about 40-60 years ago. When I was < 10 and growing up in Ohio circa 1980, I remember that air pollution was pretty much everywhere, even in smaller cities, like the Warren-Youngstown-Sharon area roughly halfway between Cleveland and Pittsburgh. My first "omg" memory of Florida was looking up during recess one day about a month after we moved there, and freaking out because I could see the full moon in broad daylight. That was something you never, EVER saw in Ohio. Or at least something *I* had no memory of ever seeing.

Hell, I spent July 5, 1994 in New York, and remember BARELY being able to see the Twin Towers from Midtown. The whole city smelled like a burning log in a fireplace. Likewise, I spent a week in Los Angeles sometime in August 1996, and remember driving into L.A. on LaCienega drive... I made it over the mountain, and saw the famous vista with LA (well, OK, I guess it was actually Beverly Hills) spread out in front of me... except you couldn't actually see anything except faint rooftops a mile or two away, and a sea of opaque smog. In LA's defense, though, its smog didn't really have any particular odor. It was opaque to a degree I'd never seen in my life, but other than obscuring most of the views, it didn't really bother me.

Anyway, onto the pics:

Pittsburgh, 1948... during the DAY: http://bike-pgh.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/smog1.jpg

Cleveland, 1973: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/83/CLEVELAND_SKYLINE_IN_THE_SMOG_OF_JULY_20%2C_1973%2C_DAY_OF_POLLUTION_ALERT_-_NARA_-_550190.jpg

New York, 1972: http://earth911.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Smog-1970s.jpg

Los Angeles, 1948: http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/jamesfallows/los-angeles-smog_53499058.jpg

Manhattan, 1966: http://www.flickr.com/photos/wavz13/4083896787/

You might have missed the fact that half of Turkey is in Asia (the other half in Europe).

I find your notion of a "half" rather curious.

You can find a more up to date graph in Wikipedia.

To me it seems like all basic PV technologies (excluding multi-junction cells, concentrated solar, and the like) are converging in performance. The question is how cheap they will be and how much manufacturing scale is possible. 20% efficiency is actually quite a lot.

I think they do replicate DBs to Florida (the former main data center), because they wrote it's a hot failover. The other data centers are just caches, because that's most of the requests.

Virginia has had 90% of all requests anyway already, they are serving bits.wikimedia.org (JS, CSS, ...), upload.wikimedia.org (images and media) and I guess also Squid+Varnish. The "only" thing missing is the actual mediawiki software, databases and things like memcached. Here's the checklist

I think they do replicate DBs to Florida (the former main data center), because they wrote it's a hot failover. The other data centers are just caches, because that's most of the requests.

Virginia has had 90% of all requests anyway already, they are serving bits.wikimedia.org (JS, CSS, ...), upload.wikimedia.org (images and media) and I guess also Squid+Varnish. The "only" thing missing is the actual mediawiki software, databases and things like memcached. Here's the checklist

NASA images are generally public domain; that's why there's a huge pile of them on Wikipedia, among other places. There are a few exceptions for stuff created by third-party contractors, though; depending on the terms of the contract, the copyrights might be owned by the contractor. The NASA logo itself is also not in the public domain, so you can't sell knockoff NASA tshirts.

From the FAQ:

Is it true that Wikivoyage's content came from Wikitravel?
It's true, more or less: when the English language Wikivoyage was founded in 2012, we brought over the travel guides from Wikitravel. (This is both legal and moral thanks to the free licence both sites share!) In fact, Wikivoyage was founded by a very large contingent of editors and administrators from Wikitravel—the very people who originally wrote much of the content we imported.

If you're interested in the gory details of why we forked the project, we have a page that provides a recap. But we are our own project now, and we're moving forward with great new content. As time goes on, our content will resemble Wikitravel's less and less—hopefully, by being more up-to-date, better organized, and more integrated with the other wikis of the Wikimedia Foundation.

There are very good reasons for the fork (IMHO), more here:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikivoyage/Migration/FAQ

Actually, this apparently comes from Dell's acquisition of Wyse. That is, these guys: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/72/WyseTerminal100.jpg/220px-WyseTerminal100.jpg -- the people who *did* do this decades ago. So, I guess, fair enough.

Wikipedia employs abusive paranoid admins who obviously don't take their medications. Just look at the Wikimedia global account log to see some of the loony behavior from admins who stay up for 12 hours straight. Wikimedia should be held with the same scrutiny as gun and video game manufacturers before we have another Aaron Schwartz or Sandy Hook on our hands. See also the Gibraltarpedia scandal which violates their own conflict of interest guidelines and is ran by the banned user Gibraltarian.

Note that Wikipedia's implementation is broken when private RFC1918 addresses are used inside the NAT, which is the case here. They have a proposal to combine the public and private IPs to form an unique identifier.

A far bigger problem is that a lot of internet services these days use IP-based blocks as the final "brute force" version of "you are abusing the service, go away". It would really suck to be under an ISP that shows every customer coming from a single IP.

That's what X-Forwarded-For: and agreements with ISPs are for. See, for example, Wikimedia's implementation of X-Forwarded-For:.

My money will go to the manufacturers who will provide "old school" displays.

Here's your VT100 sir.

Bah! A waste of good glass. What you want is one of these:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0a/What-is-teletype.jpg

State of the art in 1957.

Uh, no. Strength of character. Asshole. When you're dead, you're gone. No more life, no more things you love. At least with life you have a *chance* at redemption.

Yeah, look at this guy. Another weak-willed loser who didn't have the balls to tough it out.

Those numbers are a bit out of date. The current Wikipedia page has an updated bar graph; in the most recent quarter listed (Jul-Sept 2012), the iPhone sold 26.9 million units.

If we're to assume that Nokia's goal is to sell a dominant phone platform, rather than a very niche product, these reported sales figures are underwhelming.

If you're training to use a gun in self-defense, what exactly do you think you should be shooting at?

Prawns

Case in point:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ac/Glock_26.JPG

^ Plastic. Feels plastic. Not a cheap piece of shit.

I personally think less of you because you use proprietary software.

Here you go: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8b/Schimpanse_zoo-leipig.jpg

His name is Bobo. He likes candlelit dinners and cuddling.

The same phenomena is why earth-bound telescopes [of similar size] don't hold a candle to space telescopes such as the Hubble

Fixed that for you.

In the wavelengths that can be observed through the atmosphere, the Keck Observatory is going to blow Hubble away for several reasons:

* Each of the Keck telescopes has a 10 meter mirror - Hubble has a 2.4 meter mirror. That gives Keck a massive 16 times advantage in collecting area (76 m^2 vs 4.5 m^2).
* The Keck telescopes can be linked together via interferometry, giving it a virtual 85 meter mirror (sort of - interferometry is a bit strange).
* Keck can be easily updated and improved, the Hubble cannot.

However, Hubble has advantages over Keck and every other earth bound telescope - no atmosphere to contend with.

Our atmosphere may be turbulent, but that's not the main problem with it (it's pretty much solvable via adaptable mirrors) is its opacity or rather lack thereof.

Our atmosphere has very limited opacity to certain EM wavelengths (primarily radio and visible light), so if you want to observe stuff outside of that opacity range, you have to go outside the atmosphere.

This picture is rather self explanatory.

Now - even if we somehow managed to put a Keck sized observatory into space, it'd still be beat out by Earth bound telescopes, simply due to ease of size construction, deployment, maintenance and interferometry.

That probably won't change until we're able to put decent sized telescopes into the Earth-Moon and later Earth-Sun L4 and L5 points, allowing for a massive 665,000 km and 255,000,000 km respectively virtual mirror for those. If we go out to the Sun-Neptune L4 and L5, we're looking at a 7.8 billion km virtual mirror.

I think.

According to wikipedia, a furlong is the height of the creepy devil-faced ox

"Plus?"

I've also used terminals where the enter key was underneath the shift key. Ah, LOCIS, you were so much cooler than the other interface.

I have a pre-paid cellphone, the second cheapest DSL rate, bought my car with cash, do not do vacations more than 30 km away. Granted I pay more in water, electricity, and communications than my grandparents did. However things are a lot more skewed than some people think and the reason is not services. Its just that the price of a house is whatever the market is willing to bear and with loans, which weren't easy to come by back then, people can bear a lot more. See the Melbourne house price chart I posted in the other thread.

Another chart this time house prices vs income in Melbourne Australia 1965-2010.

In Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy, the northern ocean is filled with fresh water from the molten polar ice cap, while the rivers take up salt from the rocks they flow over, so there are salty rivers flowing into a fresh water ocean. I'm not sure how realistic that is, but it doesn't seem completely illogical.

As artist impressions go, I prefer this one, by Daein Ballard over the one in the article.

The real bidi smokes much better. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/dd/A_pack_of_Bidi.jpg

I worked in a small computer store in the mid '90s and we had lots of people come in and ask to see "MPCs." Of course we couldn't show them any, because we weren't building half-assed PCs in huge volumes. Back then, most of them just wanted to run 7th Guest or Encarta and what we built would run the hell outta either of them. ;) The logo looked like this - http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/29/Mpclogo.png - and it was slathered all over crap Packard Bell et al computers - the people who were building half-assed PCs in huge volumes. ;)

The failure with MPC was that multimedia titles got better faster than was anticipated, and your c1994 MPC computer was positively worthless for running 1996 multimedia titles. We had many customers buy software only to come back with puzzled faces when their MPC choked. They weren't happy when we told them their 486SX wasn't going to run anything on the shelves well.

Computers move too fast for a standard like this to exist. By the time all parties involved ratify some MPC-HD standard it will be barely sufficient to run current titles and worthless for whatever comes out tomorrow.

People who genuinely care about PC gaming are already doing just fine digesting new model numbers and looking up benchmarks and making good choices. Everyone else is just buying an Xbox or an iPad anyway. The last thing PCs need is another industry working group taking their cut of the pie with a stupid certification slash choke point.

That said, if anyone was going to do something like this, it should be Microsoft. Selling OEMs an "xbox certified" sticker to plop next to the "Designed for Windows" logo would probably money in the bank for them. Perhaps I shouldn't have said that.

Wikipedia has a picture of it: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/4b/Ouya_Console.png

Speaking of which, have you seen the new BSOD?

WTF, Ballmer?

That was British farming practise - keep the weapon like this picture when outside but not actually firing:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a4/ShotgunAction.JPG

Even then people would still die in cleaning accidents in the same way that they would walking into spinning airplane propellors

We've owned it since we stuck our flag in it. If you don't think that's legally binding, talk to Christopher Columbus about it.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/95/Columbus_Taking_Possession.jpg

Hmm, I think the Soviet Union first got their insignia on the moon with Luna 2 in 1959.

What now?

We've owned it since we stuck our flag in it. If you don't think that's legally binding, talk to Christopher Columbus about it. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/95/Columbus_Taking_Possession.jpg

The cities are crowded but there is still a lot of open land in between. There are still small towns and villages all over the place. Look at a population map of the place up close.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/69/Japan_Population_density_map.svg

http://www.firstpr.com.au/jncrisis/Japan-population-density-833x846.png

If you want to go by statistics

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/4f/Homicide_offending_by_race.jpg

The solution is to ban black people. Or men

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._incarceration_rates_1925_onwards.png

After all the Blacks and Men are banned in the U.S. It will be a right cheery place, what, no. Maybe just quoting statistics without how and why those numbers exist is mostly useless.

Only in theory :)

About as close as you'll get is a dipole but then you still end up with more of a doughnut.

Just about any antenna can be modeled as a dipole. For example, an AM broadcast antenna (AKA a vertical) is just a dipole where the tower is one side and the earth is the other. Actually on an AM tower there is a lot of copper strap laid out radially underground from the base of the tower and the whole tower is electrically insulated from the ground. Same thing with a mobile antenna on a car, the stick is one side and the car body the other.

Only in theory :)

About as close as you'll get is a dipole but then you still end up with more of a doughnut.

Just about any antenna can be modeled as a dipole. For example, an AM broadcast antenna (AKA a vertical) is just a dipole where the tower is one side and the earth is the other. Actually on an AM tower there is a lot of copper strap laid out radially underground from the base of the tower and the whole tower is electrically insulated from the ground. Same thing with a mobile antenna on a car, the stick is one side and the car body the other.

The high-end Tandberg telepresence endpoint is the T3. Picture below from 2008.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cc/Tandberg_Image_Gallery_-_telepresence-t3-side-view-hires.jpg

They sell the whole room, and I believe it is indeed in that price range, if not more.
I won't go into too much detail, but know that Tandberg had made some interesting innovations to make both its software and hardware quite better than the competition; supporting higher resolutions, at higher framerates, with better encoder/decoder quality, better interoperability, and better data loss tolerance. Tandberg contributes (contributed?) to the new h265 video standards, and worked on next-gen endpoints with Tilera many-core processors. They were, however, quite more expensive that the alternatives, in particular their rival Polycom (no one considered Cisco as a viable telepresence solution at the time).

Thanks for the reference but that is still horribly old solar cell technology. I was actually looking at the Suniva Optimus 315w stuff at the time which uses a monocrystalline structure rather than polycrystalline for better efficiency. But as you can see, 17% efficiency like the module you linked is absolutely horrible compared to the tech that is out there. Most of it is really only available in highly commercial multi-array installations well outside the price range of the average consumer. I'm just saying I see a new /. article about once every 4 months lauding the newest solar cell technology that is going to change the world on its face and none of it is trickling down.

You didn't scroll far enough down: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Woman_masturbating_with_improvised_vibrator.jpg (NSFW, obviously)

History is written by victors because victors' propaganda manages to ultimately dilute the way majority of people later perceive things. Murder of 6 million is more "evil" than intentionally starving 58.73 millions to death, according to you for example. You are *very* sure of that. While I was looking at this photo : http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d8/India-famine-family-crop-420.jpg

Look at those living skeletons. Do you think that breastfeeding baby was getting any actual food? To me that photo, except for skin-color and clothes could be one of the holocaust victims. To me they are BOTH a horrible testament of man's cruelty to others. And yet the propaganda works well enough on you, that when *you* look at this picture, you think "oh but they are not holocaust victims... so if this woman's baby died due to British destroying food crops, that is a much, much lesser evil thing than a *Jew* mother losing her baby due to starvation in a concentration camp. Yessir!".

Victors NEED to justify their all their acts. even the downright evil ones. So they become "necessary evil". Or "the final results justified it". Or "the other side was pure evil and ate live babies". The goal is not to make everyone forget, but to make everyone stop caring. You remember the 20 million because ultimately Stalin and his philosophy did not win obviously, as these things go. Mao and his philosophy won, and the 20-30 millions of deaths his policies caused have been forgiven too. China tries its best to censor the Nanking massacre and the public eventually stops caring. Even though you are aware of it, you hardly spare a thought to the genocide of native Red Indians for example, do you ? I noticed that that was not the first thing you said you remembered. Telling, isn't it? And that is what I am objecting to. The American seem to have this need to paint themselves as savior of the world and to belittle every other tragedy in the world, in comparison to the ones where they got involved. And that is how THAT propaganda has been working. Your second line just proved my point.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ef/World's_First_Five_Spaceplanes.PNG

This picture gives a good scale view.

The Shuttle Orbiter is much much bigger than the X37.

isn't the Arctic like, mostly ocean??

I would say so.

How about Windows 95 with Microsoft Bob?

I think that's a violation of the Geneva Convention.

Yeah and the Windows Search Puppy is not safe either in China when it ends up on the menu (thanks to Clippy).

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/28/Radiometer_9965_Nevit.gif

I'm not so sure. Many minor assemblies such as Brembo brake callipers are common across many vehicles. Also, many manufacturers share common chassis designs with a cosmetically different body.

Take a look at these three:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3c/VW_Sharan.jpg
http://www.albacars.com/image/seat_alhambra.jpg
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b3/Ford_Galaxy_-_first_generation.jpg

Same chassis, three different makers.

However, I do dislike the car analogy. Invariably the iProduct is compared to a high-end sports car and the droid to a common runaround, when in fact they are more like the people carriers above; same purpose, different badge.

I'm not so sure. Many minor assemblies such as Brembo brake callipers are common across many vehicles. Also, many manufacturers share common chassis designs with a cosmetically different body.

Take a look at these three:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3c/VW_Sharan.jpg
http://www.albacars.com/image/seat_alhambra.jpg
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b3/Ford_Galaxy_-_first_generation.jpg

Same chassis, three different makers.

However, I do dislike the car analogy. Invariably the iProduct is compared to a high-end sports car and the droid to a common runaround, when in fact they are more like the people carriers above; same purpose, different badge.