Please excuse the reply to myself, but I'd like to point out that I'm not trying to single out China here, the above statements apply to USA, UK, Canada, or government that a trusted Root CA company resides within.
Eg: The US Government could compel (and also gag-order) Thawte into creating fake certs for Google.com (or any other domain), and in Google's case, you wouldn't even find out you've been pwned by checking the cert...
Honestly, HTTPS / SSL is The Ultimate Theater of Security.
Not to mention that of course, governments in any country where GOOG/MSFT/AAPL/YHOO do business (pretty much all of them) do not ever need to bother with MITM attacks. All of these companies provide convenient access for national "law enforcement" agencies to all of their customers' data on request (maybe after a quick subpoena)...
The real reason people don't want dollar coins is because the coins do not fit with how people use cash. They're too big and too heavy to just carry around. They don't organized well in a pocket, wallet, or purse. They just don't work.
So then you must prefer bills for all coin denominations. Quarter dollar bills, 10 cent bills, 5 cent bills, 1 cent bills. Right?
This is what they do in China, for instance... And let me tell you, it is a royal pain in the neck. Having a bunch of tiny 1-jiao (penny) and 5-jiao (7 cents) notes in my pocket makes it awfully hard to give the proper amount; not to mention the confusion between 5-jiao notes (worth 7 cents) and 5-yuan notes (70 cents).
"Believe it or not, Windows does support focus-follows-mouse, though there is no GUI configuration exposing it. Instead you must edit a registry key and then log out and back in for the change to become effective. You can use regedit to edit the key.
On Windows NT, set the following registry key to have a value of 1:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Mouse\Active Windows Tracking
On NT it has some bugs: some apps auto-raise on focus, and alt-tab doesn't move the mouse.
On Windows 2000, XP, or 2003, you need to change a binary-valued registry key:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\UserPreferencesMask
This is a little-endian bitmask. For focus-follows-mouse, add the flag 0x1. For example, my XP SP2 laptop originally had a value of 9E 3E 05 80, which is 0x80053E9E. To activate focus-follows-mouse I changed to 0x80053E9F, or 9F 3E 05 80 in regedit.
According to http://www.winguides.com/registry/display.php/18/ you can also achieve raise-on-focus by adding the flag 0x40. I haven't tested that as I don't like raise-on-focus."
As for virtual desktops, I'm using a decent open-source third-party add-on called Z-Systems Vista/XP Virtual Desktop Manager...
Please, someone create a TV show based on the Song of Songs of the Bible to fuck with those people.
What to do, what to do. It's the Bible and yet, it's porn!
They would mess it up, badly. Given that the English puritans intentionally mistranslated the reference to cunnilingus in 7:2, and the American puritans mistranslated it again in the NIV, you shouldn't get your hopes up. They might just make some sort of wishy-washy show saying it is an analogy for the love of God for Israel...
(Well maybe if the Germans did it... Luther at least dared to get that translation right.)
Royal Warrants are only awarded to tradesmen. The professions, employment agencies, party planners, the media, government departments, and "places of refreshment or entertainment" (such as pubs and theatres) do not qualify.
I doubt Facebook qualifies as a tradesman. Facebook instead seems to qualify on several of the excluded categories like party planners and "places of entertainment". If you got the Queen an iPhone that might qualify though.
Looking it up on the list, you would be late: she apparently already gets her iPhones from Carphone Warehouse...
No, this is a lie. Unemployment was never under 4% under GWB, Jan of '01 it was at 4.2% and got progressively worse, until '06-'07, when it improved some before entering into the current slide. It was never under 4% under GWB
You may be right. But this graph does show it dropping below 4% early in Bush's term. I got my source. If yours is better we'll take it.
Enthusiasm in your beliefs is no substitute for factual inaccuracy. Like GP said, unemployment under Dubya was never under 4%, while under Clinton it decreased from 7.3 to 3.9.
Your belief that the recent global recession was caused by the 2007 shift of a few congressional seats in the US (as opposed to - say - being the inevitable consequence of a massive irresponsible lending boom fueled by half a decade of easy credit) is equally deluded. Show your work, show the acts of congress in 2007 that have led to the housing and construction crash (that started in 2006)...
there are 20 million people here during the workday, it's a pretty good sample of the US. i know more people with android phones than iphones, but overall i see a lot more iphones in the street here
Yes, and overall, 80% of all cars in the US are probably yellow Crown Vics - I see a lot more of them on the street in NYC than any other car;-)
Unexpected comparison of trained coders / developers, many with certifications and degrees, to untrained sub-GED Taco Bell employee... well... frankly, knuckle-draggers.
>
Oh my, aren't we thin-skinned today?
I think you missed the point. The equivalent of the "blank-slate" Taco Bell employee is the blank-slate computer that only executes instructions given to it. The persons who get compared to good developers are the Taco Bell recipe writers, who managed to deliver instructions that yield quick, cheap, consistent and idiot-proof solutions. Many coders with degrees can't say as much.
BTW there are also a lot of people on "the left" who were pro-war.
Go back and look at the Congressional Authorization for War in 2001.
The Democrat representatives voted near-unanimously to go to war.
No they didn't. Half of the Dems voted against it, in both houses of Congress. Pretty much all Republicans voted for it. (Senator Chafee opposed it, but he is about as much of a Republican as Obama...)
And of course it is much harder to justify withdrawing your troops who are trying to clean up the mess they made, than not having them invade in the first place...
Name-calling? You called a fellow poster's statement (well-founded in my opinion) bullshit, thus I felt free to voice my opinion about your statement.
Well... To raise the level of discourse: I am still trying to convey that no matter how much oil there might be in shales and sands, it cannot be extracted at the same rock-bottom prices as it can be in Texas or, say, , Iraq. So that argument only starts to matter if the marginal barrel of supply is no longer the super cheap pumped oil but the $100 deep-sea platform oil or tar sand oil.
And yes, from a purely economic standpoint, "reducing dependence on the middle east" is irrelevant insofar that "Middle East" is a red herring aimed at US Republican audiences -- rather, you want to reduce your dependence on oil because it is a limited resource with an extremely steeply rising supply curve (i.e.: even if there is quite a lot of it left, it will get super-expensive to extract rather quickly), and thus prone to extreme price fluctuations that will periodically crash your economy if you rely on it too much.
Also, the actual number of dead civilians is 100k I believe, not half a million. Note also that this number includes all civilians who died as a consequence of the war regardless of who directly killed them. All these 100k civilians were not shot/bombed by US troops, they may have been killed by Talibans. I'm not sure if this number includes people who died as an indirect consequence of the war, for example people who died of illness/hunger because the war may have made medication/food unavailable. If not, then the total number of civilian war casualties is higher and may in fact reach half a million.
The Wiki has a good summary: There are 100k direct violent deaths from the war that were reported in the press; the indirect deaths (from hunger/illness/war-induced anarchy) are 150k, 600k or 1,000k depending on the survey.
And it is entirely fair to pin the deaths on the US government. You are begging the question - you assume that the invasion had to take place at all. (And even apart from that, Cheney and the Pentagon promised it would be a cakewalk and that the 'liberated' Iraqis would greet them with flowers...)
Dependence on Mideast oil? That's bullshit. The majority of U.S. comes from Canada, Mexico and Nigeria. It could stop importing oil from the Mideast tomorrow if it really wanted to, but doesn't probably for political reasons.
The one full of... ignorance... is you. The market for oil is integrated worldwide. Supertanker transport is virtually free. Which means that every barrel sold anywhere affects the market on the other side of the world.
As a thought experiment: Imagine the Arab world goes into a huff and decides to stop exporting oil. Europe and Asia therefore have to turn to the next-closest source, Nigeria/Mexico/Venezuela. Since many more people are now bidding for the Nigerian oil, they can afford to put prices up. Since the oil market is so efficient (remember, transport is cheap), prices go up massively even in Podunk, Alaska and Armpit, Texas. The American economy crashes without ever having imported a drop of oil from the Middle East. QED.
If anyone were serious about economy they'd be buying cars with small displacements and ideally running on diesel
You can't have both. Diesel engines below roughly 1.8l tend to be very inefficient. 2.0l - 2.2l seems a sweet spot.
That might be true - and a supertanker's diesel engine is even more efficent. But since there is a difference between absolute amounts of consumption and efficiency, you wouldn't put one in your car...
In a normal car, 1.2l to 1.6l is entirely sufficient, and gives you 70-120 hp with high torque at 60 mpg or more. Look up the Volkswagen BlueMotion series of TDI engines, for instance...
Worldwide, I'd bet that the majority of pizzas sold are of the fast-food variety. I'd also bet that most people who buy pizza for the convenience don't really care whether the dough is hand-made or pre-formed. They just want comfort food with minimum effort.
I do care and do know the difference. Presumably many people prefer proper thin-crust pizza, otherwise said pizza chains would have made inroads in places other than the US and the UK. And even though I probably eat more frozen pizza than restaurant pizza, if I actually do pay to eat out at a restaurant, I prefer to get a proper pizza...
I also think that your generalizations about Europe probably don't hold water. Europe is a big place. What is true for your corner of continent is not necessarily true in another place.
I have been to dozens of European countries, and haven't seen pizza fast food chains in small towns anywhere but the UK.
Also, don't you think that arguing about this is sort of pointless?
You must either live in a very unusual place, or you're kidding yourself.
My condolences if you only have deep-dish "pizza" places around...
I never said "only," I just mentioned the majority. Most pizza places are fast-food joints like Dominoes. Therefore, the average pizza sold is not lovingly hand-made.
I live in Europe, maybe that's the reason - there only a few Domino/Papa John/Pizza Hut outlets in major cities; most pizzerias are actually still run by Italian pizza bakers here... (Well, or the Eastern Europeans who apprenticed with said Italian bakers.)
Point is, maybe like.00001% of street signs need replacing in any normal year.
Yet now they want to replace ALL 250,000 of them over 8 years, and that does not include the of 8000 replacements done for theft reasons EACH year. So it works out to something like 39 times the normal replacement rate.
Personally, it seems unlikely to me that there are ONLY 250,000 street signs in NYC.
Point is, maybe like.00001% of street signs need replacing in any normal year.
You imbecile (pls look up that word...). Are you suggesting that street signs only need replacing every million years? Please (1) switch brain on, (2) think.
With that said, where America is lacking is that we are not looking at Cargo and doing it across all of North America. Basically, we should be putting a high speed rail on the common cargo routes, rather than common human routes.
Can't do it, signalling and track loads on cargo lines are not useful for high-speed trains. To get anything near "high speed" you need separate lins.
Cargo in general is dying in the US. Since delivery over the last mile generally requires a semi-trailer to haul the container, it's typically cheaper in the long run to build a new container port than it is to trans-ship through trains. Then you ship the containers to the port and truck them the last 400 km or so. This doesn't work for mid-west areas, but the amount of cargo flowing there is limited to the point that it's not a serious consideration.
The same is not true in Canada where the coastal loading areas are seriously limited, basically to Halifax, Vancouver and a few ports on the St. Lawrence while the main industrial areas are all inland 1000's of km away. As a result the railways up here are making money hand over fist, and they're slowly but surely buying up the US companies. Soo Line cars are very common in Oshawa.
Really? This Economist article makes it sound like what's happening is just the opposite of what you said:
"Rail’s share of the freight market, measured in ton-miles, has risen steadily to 43%—about the highest in any rich country. [...T]he fastest-growing part of rail freight has been “intermodal” traffic: containers or truck trailers loaded on to flat railcars. The number of such shipments rose from 3m in 1980 to 12.3m in 2006"
90% is fairly typical as far as I can tell. That's what it was for Machinarium as well. From what I can tell a piracy rate of only 80% is quite good.
Your definition of "good" might not be universal.
I could argue like this:
1. Pretty much none of the pirates would have bought the game anyway; thus the game studio and the distributor have lost little to nothing due to the piracy. (Notice: Games with effective DRM don't really outsell games without it.)
2. Increased take-up creates positive word-of-mouth and generates more sales. Thus higher piracy rates (for a given level of current sales) should translate into increased future sales.
I was thinking the same, but some calculations and googling turns up the fact that 20 MT is about 2e17 joules, which is reportedly what you get from a Mag 8 or 9 earthquake.
Although I don't think a circular splash of an object falling in the water organizes the subsurface motion in the way a tsunami-producing earthquake or landslide does.
So I wouldn't say there's no chance of a tsunami, but I won't say there's going to be a big one.
So you won't say anything at all then?:-P
To elaborate on your point: It would be a pretty puny tsunami (equal to a Richter 8.0 sea quake). For comparison: the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami came from a 9.3 sea quake, equivalent to 1340 megatons of TNT - 50 to 100 times more than this potential one...
And a proper extinction event like the 10km Yucatan asteroid that hit at the K-T boundary is about a million times more energetic.
Word is that it sucks bad [German]... (Ships without the promised Android compatibility layer, without hardware video acceleration enabled, without Flash...) Pity, it's a nice concept...
"Well, it has been 24 years since the last time a software problem required an on-orbit fix during a mission."
So a MTBF of 24 years?
"But perhaps the most meaningful statistic is that a software error has never endangered the crew, shuttle or a mission's success."
100% uptime, essentially? Assuming no computer problems on the last flight, they might actually achieve 100% uptime?
To pick some nits, I don't think they should be able to brag about decades of uptime/MTBF if those computers are only every switched on for a mission at most 18 days at a time - even Windows ME might manage that... (Though 100+ missions without critical computer errors is still a nice number.)
However numerous studies have shown that the US system is considerably less efficient than what you'd no doubt refer to as "cawmyerniss" systems like in the UK or France when it comes to quality versus cost.
Cite, please. For one thing, why is the US policy the only non-national one you consider relevant, and for another, by what metrics is it considerably less efficient than the UK's NHS?
Have a look at any statistic that compares national health systems. The US is unique in that it spends massively more than any country per capita on healthcare, and still doesn't get any better outcomes than other wealthy countries who spend half as much. That is usually referred to as "inefficiency". (Fun fact: The US government spends more per capita on healthcare than the entire NHS, and that's without the entire private health insurance industry and personal co-payments...)
And other non-nationalized systems might be relevant (Singapore has an efficient, working one), but the transition to a system such as those is hard to impossible.
Slashdot Mirror
Please excuse the reply to myself, but I'd like to point out that I'm not trying to single out China here, the above statements apply to USA, UK, Canada, or government that a trusted Root CA company resides within.
Eg: The US Government could compel (and also gag-order) Thawte into creating fake certs for Google.com (or any other domain), and in Google's case, you wouldn't even find out you've been pwned by checking the cert...
Honestly, HTTPS / SSL is The Ultimate Theater of Security.
Not to mention that of course, governments in any country where GOOG/MSFT/AAPL/YHOO do business (pretty much all of them) do not ever need to bother with MITM attacks. All of these companies provide convenient access for national "law enforcement" agencies to all of their customers' data on request (maybe after a quick subpoena)...
So then you must prefer bills for all coin denominations. Quarter dollar bills, 10 cent bills, 5 cent bills, 1 cent bills. Right?
This is what they do in China, for instance... And let me tell you, it is a royal pain in the neck. Having a bunch of tiny 1-jiao (penny) and 5-jiao (7 cents) notes in my pocket makes it awfully hard to give the proper amount; not to mention the confusion between 5-jiao notes (worth 7 cents) and 5-yuan notes (70 cents).
I'm still waiting for ...focus follows mouse...
A second of googling turned up this:
"Believe it or not, Windows does support focus-follows-mouse, though there is no GUI configuration exposing it. Instead you must edit a registry key and then log out and back in for the change to become effective. You can use regedit to edit the key. On Windows NT, set the following registry key to have a value of 1: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Mouse\Active Windows Tracking On NT it has some bugs: some apps auto-raise on focus, and alt-tab doesn't move the mouse. On Windows 2000, XP, or 2003, you need to change a binary-valued registry key: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\UserPreferencesMask This is a little-endian bitmask. For focus-follows-mouse, add the flag 0x1. For example, my XP SP2 laptop originally had a value of 9E 3E 05 80, which is 0x80053E9E. To activate focus-follows-mouse I changed to 0x80053E9F, or 9F 3E 05 80 in regedit. According to http://www.winguides.com/registry/display.php/18/ you can also achieve raise-on-focus by adding the flag 0x40. I haven't tested that as I don't like raise-on-focus."
As for virtual desktops, I'm using a decent open-source third-party add-on called Z-Systems Vista/XP Virtual Desktop Manager...
Please, someone create a TV show based on the Song of Songs of the Bible to fuck with those people.
What to do, what to do. It's the Bible and yet, it's porn!
They would mess it up, badly. Given that the English puritans intentionally mistranslated the reference to cunnilingus in 7:2, and the American puritans mistranslated it again in the NIV, you shouldn't get your hopes up. They might just make some sort of wishy-washy show saying it is an analogy for the love of God for Israel...
(Well maybe if the Germans did it... Luther at least dared to get that translation right.)
Royal Warrants are only awarded to tradesmen. The professions, employment agencies, party planners, the media, government departments, and "places of refreshment or entertainment" (such as pubs and theatres) do not qualify.
I doubt Facebook qualifies as a tradesman. Facebook instead seems to qualify on several of the excluded categories like party planners and "places of entertainment". If you got the Queen an iPhone that might qualify though.
Looking it up on the list, you would be late: she apparently already gets her iPhones from Carphone Warehouse...
No, this is a lie. Unemployment was never under 4% under GWB, Jan of '01 it was at 4.2% and got progressively worse, until '06-'07, when it improved some before entering into the current slide. It was never under 4% under GWB
You may be right. But this graph does show it dropping below 4% early in Bush's term. I got my source. If yours is better we'll take it.
Enthusiasm in your beliefs is no substitute for factual inaccuracy. Like GP said, unemployment under Dubya was never under 4%, while under Clinton it decreased from 7.3 to 3.9.
Your belief that the recent global recession was caused by the 2007 shift of a few congressional seats in the US (as opposed to - say - being the inevitable consequence of a massive irresponsible lending boom fueled by half a decade of easy credit) is equally deluded. Show your work, show the acts of congress in 2007 that have led to the housing and construction crash (that started in 2006)...
GP does have the upper hand, I am sorry to say.
there are 20 million people here during the workday, it's a pretty good sample of the US. i know more people with android phones than iphones, but overall i see a lot more iphones in the street here
Yes, and overall, 80% of all cars in the US are probably yellow Crown Vics - I see a lot more of them on the street in NYC than any other car ;-)
Unexpected comparison of trained coders / developers, many with certifications and degrees, to untrained sub-GED Taco Bell employee... well... frankly, knuckle-draggers.
>
Oh my, aren't we thin-skinned today?
I think you missed the point. The equivalent of the "blank-slate" Taco Bell employee is the blank-slate computer that only executes instructions given to it. The persons who get compared to good developers are the Taco Bell recipe writers, who managed to deliver instructions that yield quick, cheap, consistent and idiot-proof solutions. Many coders with degrees can't say as much.
BTW there are also a lot of people on "the left" who were pro-war. Go back and look at the Congressional Authorization for War in 2001. The Democrat representatives voted near-unanimously to go to war.
No they didn't. Half of the Dems voted against it, in both houses of Congress. Pretty much all Republicans voted for it. (Senator Chafee opposed it, but he is about as much of a Republican as Obama...)
And of course it is much harder to justify withdrawing your troops who are trying to clean up the mess they made, than not having them invade in the first place...
Well... To raise the level of discourse: I am still trying to convey that no matter how much oil there might be in shales and sands, it cannot be extracted at the same rock-bottom prices as it can be in Texas or, say, , Iraq. So that argument only starts to matter if the marginal barrel of supply is no longer the super cheap pumped oil but the $100 deep-sea platform oil or tar sand oil.
And yes, from a purely economic standpoint, "reducing dependence on the middle east" is irrelevant insofar that "Middle East" is a red herring aimed at US Republican audiences -- rather, you want to reduce your dependence on oil because it is a limited resource with an extremely steeply rising supply curve (i.e.: even if there is quite a lot of it left, it will get super-expensive to extract rather quickly), and thus prone to extreme price fluctuations that will periodically crash your economy if you rely on it too much.
Also, the actual number of dead civilians is 100k I believe, not half a million. Note also that this number includes all civilians who died as a consequence of the war regardless of who directly killed them. All these 100k civilians were not shot/bombed by US troops, they may have been killed by Talibans. I'm not sure if this number includes people who died as an indirect consequence of the war, for example people who died of illness/hunger because the war may have made medication/food unavailable. If not, then the total number of civilian war casualties is higher and may in fact reach half a million.
The Wiki has a good summary: There are 100k direct violent deaths from the war that were reported in the press; the indirect deaths (from hunger/illness/war-induced anarchy) are 150k, 600k or 1,000k depending on the survey.
And it is entirely fair to pin the deaths on the US government. You are begging the question - you assume that the invasion had to take place at all. (And even apart from that, Cheney and the Pentagon promised it would be a cakewalk and that the 'liberated' Iraqis would greet them with flowers...)
Dependence on Mideast oil? That's bullshit. The majority of U.S. comes from Canada, Mexico and Nigeria. It could stop importing oil from the Mideast tomorrow if it really wanted to, but doesn't probably for political reasons.
http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/oil_gas/petroleum/data_publications/company_level_imports/current/import.html
The one full of ... ignorance ... is you. The market for oil is integrated worldwide. Supertanker transport is virtually free. Which means that every barrel sold anywhere affects the market on the other side of the world.
As a thought experiment: Imagine the Arab world goes into a huff and decides to stop exporting oil. Europe and Asia therefore have to turn to the next-closest source, Nigeria/Mexico/Venezuela. Since many more people are now bidding for the Nigerian oil, they can afford to put prices up. Since the oil market is so efficient (remember, transport is cheap), prices go up massively even in Podunk, Alaska and Armpit, Texas. The American economy crashes without ever having imported a drop of oil from the Middle East. QED.
http://www.solarviews.com/raw/earth/america.jpg
If anyone were serious about economy they'd be buying cars with small displacements and ideally running on diesel
You can't have both. Diesel engines below roughly 1.8l tend to be very inefficient. 2.0l - 2.2l seems a sweet spot.
That might be true - and a supertanker's diesel engine is even more efficent. But since there is a difference between absolute amounts of consumption and efficiency, you wouldn't put one in your car...
In a normal car, 1.2l to 1.6l is entirely sufficient, and gives you 70-120 hp with high torque at 60 mpg or more. Look up the Volkswagen BlueMotion series of TDI engines, for instance...
This place used to be fun, back when the internet was hard to use.
It's the 6252nd of September -- one would've thought you'd get used to it by now...
I live in Europe, maybe that's the reason - there only a few Domino/Papa John/Pizza Hut outlets in major cities;
Whatever.
You're just citing exceptions that prove the rule.
Erm... You know that exceptions don't prove rules, do you?
Worldwide, I'd bet that the majority of pizzas sold are of the fast-food variety. I'd also bet that most people who buy pizza for the convenience don't really care whether the dough is hand-made or pre-formed. They just want comfort food with minimum effort.
I do care and do know the difference. Presumably many people prefer proper thin-crust pizza, otherwise said pizza chains would have made inroads in places other than the US and the UK. And even though I probably eat more frozen pizza than restaurant pizza, if I actually do pay to eat out at a restaurant, I prefer to get a proper pizza...
I also think that your generalizations about Europe probably don't hold water. Europe is a big place. What is true for your corner of continent is not necessarily true in another place.
I have been to dozens of European countries, and haven't seen pizza fast food chains in small towns anywhere but the UK.
Also, don't you think that arguing about this is sort of pointless?
They pretty much all do in my town.
You must either live in a very unusual place, or you're kidding yourself.
My condolences if you only have deep-dish "pizza" places around...
I never said "only," I just mentioned the majority. Most pizza places are fast-food joints like Dominoes. Therefore, the average pizza sold is not lovingly hand-made.
I live in Europe, maybe that's the reason - there only a few Domino/Papa John/Pizza Hut outlets in major cities; most pizzerias are actually still run by Italian pizza bakers here... (Well, or the Eastern Europeans who apprenticed with said Italian bakers.)
Do you really believe that the vast majority of pizza places "flip, toss and stretch" their dough?
They pretty much all do in my town. My condolences if you only have deep-dish "pizza" places around...
Well that was a nice focused rant now wasn't it.
Point is, maybe like .00001% of street signs need replacing in any normal year.
Yet now they want to replace ALL 250,000 of them over 8 years, and that does not include the of 8000 replacements done for theft reasons EACH year. So it works out to something like 39 times the normal replacement rate.
Personally, it seems unlikely to me that there are ONLY 250,000 street signs in NYC.
Point is, maybe like .00001% of street signs need replacing in any normal year.
You imbecile (pls look up that word...). Are you suggesting that street signs only need replacing every million years? Please (1) switch brain on, (2) think.
With that said, where America is lacking is that we are not looking at Cargo and doing it across all of North America. Basically, we should be putting a high speed rail on the common cargo routes, rather than common human routes.
Can't do it, signalling and track loads on cargo lines are not useful for high-speed trains. To get anything near "high speed" you need separate lins.
Cargo in general is dying in the US. Since delivery over the last mile generally requires a semi-trailer to haul the container, it's typically cheaper in the long run to build a new container port than it is to trans-ship through trains. Then you ship the containers to the port and truck them the last 400 km or so. This doesn't work for mid-west areas, but the amount of cargo flowing there is limited to the point that it's not a serious consideration.
The same is not true in Canada where the coastal loading areas are seriously limited, basically to Halifax, Vancouver and a few ports on the St. Lawrence while the main industrial areas are all inland 1000's of km away. As a result the railways up here are making money hand over fist, and they're slowly but surely buying up the US companies. Soo Line cars are very common in Oshawa.
Really? This Economist article makes it sound like what's happening is just the opposite of what you said:
"Rail’s share of the freight market, measured in ton-miles, has risen steadily to 43%—about the highest in any rich country. [...T]he fastest-growing part of rail freight has been “intermodal” traffic: containers or truck trailers loaded on to flat railcars. The number of such shipments rose from 3m in 1980 to 12.3m in 2006"
90% is fairly typical as far as I can tell. That's what it was for Machinarium as well. From what I can tell a piracy rate of only 80% is quite good.
Your definition of "good" might not be universal.
I could argue like this:
1. Pretty much none of the pirates would have bought the game anyway; thus the game studio and the distributor have lost little to nothing due to the piracy. (Notice: Games with effective DRM don't really outsell games without it.)
2. Increased take-up creates positive word-of-mouth and generates more sales. Thus higher piracy rates (for a given level of current sales) should translate into increased future sales.
I was thinking the same, but some calculations and googling turns up the fact that 20 MT is about 2e17 joules, which is reportedly what you get from a Mag 8 or 9 earthquake.
Although I don't think a circular splash of an object falling in the water organizes the subsurface motion in the way a tsunami-producing earthquake or landslide does.
So I wouldn't say there's no chance of a tsunami, but I won't say there's going to be a big one.
So you won't say anything at all then? :-P
To elaborate on your point: It would be a pretty puny tsunami (equal to a Richter 8.0 sea quake). For comparison: the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami came from a 9.3 sea quake, equivalent to 1340 megatons of TNT - 50 to 100 times more than this potential one...
And a proper extinction event like the 10km Yucatan asteroid that hit at the K-T boundary is about a million times more energetic.
or just get a wetab http://wetab.mobi/en
Word is that it sucks bad [German]... (Ships without the promised Android compatibility layer, without hardware video acceleration enabled, without Flash...) Pity, it's a nice concept...
I wonder how many "nines" reliability there is on a shuttle computer.
The reliability is high enough that it has little meaning.
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/flyout/flyfeature_shuttlecomputers.html
"Well, it has been 24 years since the last time a software problem required an on-orbit fix during a mission."
So a MTBF of 24 years?
"But perhaps the most meaningful statistic is that a software error has never endangered the crew, shuttle or a mission's success."
100% uptime, essentially? Assuming no computer problems on the last flight, they might actually achieve 100% uptime?
To pick some nits, I don't think they should be able to brag about decades of uptime/MTBF if those computers are only every switched on for a mission at most 18 days at a time - even Windows ME might manage that... (Though 100+ missions without critical computer errors is still a nice number.)
However numerous studies have shown that the US system is considerably less efficient than what you'd no doubt refer to as "cawmyerniss" systems like in the UK or France when it comes to quality versus cost.
Cite, please. For one thing, why is the US policy the only non-national one you consider relevant, and for another, by what metrics is it considerably less efficient than the UK's NHS?
Have a look at any statistic that compares national health systems. The US is unique in that it spends massively more than any country per capita on healthcare, and still doesn't get any better outcomes than other wealthy countries who spend half as much. That is usually referred to as "inefficiency". (Fun fact: The US government spends more per capita on healthcare than the entire NHS, and that's without the entire private health insurance industry and personal co-payments...)
And other non-nationalized systems might be relevant (Singapore has an efficient, working one), but the transition to a system such as those is hard to impossible.