Let's see if I got this right, Russia develops a new rifle design; then it orders a whole bunch of countries to build factories to manufacture said rifle; 30 years or so later it is no longer in a position to control what those countries do; it grants itself a patent on said rifle design and demands that those countries pay it for the right to manufacture it.
The "ill-founded interpretation of redshift" has been demonstrated by experimentation. That is scientists have taken objects emitting light and accelerated them away from a recording source and discovered that the frequency of the light recorded changes in proportion to the acceleration. Whether this observation extends to interstellar distances or not is a matter of assumption. However, if we do not assume that the rules of physics are essentially constant (with the understanding that the rules of physics state that under certain conditions they change) we have no way to make any prediction about what the Universe outside of our solar system is like (and very limited ability to make predictions off of the planet Earth). The current understanding of redshift is based on the theories of physics until someone comes up with a theory that explains both the experimentally demonstrated red shift and the supposed anomalies(I say supposed because I don't feel like taking the time to examine the credibility of your sources, they may be perfectly legitimate, but I don't know that) you are referencing cosmologists will continue to work with current theory. They may be wrong, but you can't come up with a cosmological theory based on those observations without of theory of physics that explains that behavior.
So you are saying that an Alaskan's vote would count for more being 1 of 300 million than it does being one of 700,000? 25% of Alaskans is fewer than the number of absentee ballots they didn't count in California in 2000. In 2000, California stopped counting absentee ballots when the number of remaining absentee ballots was less than the difference between the number of votes that Al Gore had and the number of votes that George W. Bush had. (All states follow a similar practice, I just remember this because the number of absentee ballots not counted in California significantly exceeded the number of total votes that Gore was supposed to have over Bush). Whatever state you live in your vote means more as one of that number than it would as one of the total population. There was a great article that showed that an individual vote makes a greater difference with 50 state races than it would in one national poll
http://www.avagara.com/e_c/reference/00012001.htm
You are overlooking something here, the electoral college is not composed of votes, it is composed of delegates. Each state gets a certain number of delegates. How those delegates are chosen is left up to the various state legislatures. The Constitution doesn't even call for a vote by the people for the President. That was the intention of the Founding Fathers. That states would determine who they wanted to vote for the President for them. Under the Constitution, the delegates are not bound to vote for the candidate they ran as supporting. The states select delegates to the electoral college, who then gather and select the next President.
The difference between the Hurricane relief that Florida and Louisiana got has to do with what the state and local governments did with the money. Have you seen the kinds of dollar figures the federal government has spent in Louisiana? Were you aware that the governor of Louisiana blocked/redirected some of the rebuilding funds intended for New Orleans because the mayor of New Orleans supported her opponent in the last election?
Actually that is not true. The votes in the swing states are divided approaching evenly between parties. That means the candidates have to work hard for any undecided's. In the non-swing states, the votes count just as much, sometimes more, but everyone knows who the overwhelming majority are going to vote for. If we got rid of the electoral college, only the votes of people in high population states would count. If it is simple majority of votes, who gives a s$$t about Alaska voters, there are probably more undecided's in Chicago than all the voters in Alaska (and certainly more in the greater metropolitan Chicago area).
The biggest problem with our Presidential elections is that all the media really pays attention to is the "horse race", who's ahead in the polls, who's gaining ground who's losing ground. The news media don't really tell you about a candidates stand on an issue unless it is one they care about, and even then they distort the position. Sometimes they distort to make a candidates position seem closer to the ideal, sometimes further away. I remember one election (state or local), candidate A thought the priorities should be: Item 1, Item 2, Item 3, Item 4, Item 5; candidate B thought the priorities should be: Item 1, Item 2, Item 3, Item 5, Item 4. The local press all reported "Candidate A is opposed to Item 5, Candidate B favors it".
Oh goody, I look forward to the day that my local municipality, my local county, and my state all tax my internet service...Oh yeah that is on top of the federal tax. Let's not forget, if I use the Internet to communicate with you, your local municipality, county and state are going to try and tax me too. Unless there is some law limiting what government body can tax who, every government body is going to try and tax every person who uses internet service through their jurisdiction. I know it is ridiculous, you know it is ridiculous, but when did that ever stop a politician from taxing something.
The article is about two separate but related things. One is the bill to force all businesses to collect sales tax on goods being shipped to a state that has sales tax. The other is the moratorium on taxes on the Internet that is due to expire shortly. When the moratorium was passed, several localities(state, city, county, etc) were considering taxing email messages. Other localities were considering how they were going to tax internet use. That is why the mention of email tax, it was being considered before. Possibly that is not the tax that would be implemented, but you can bet that if the moratorium is allowed to expire there will be all kinds of taxes on Internet services.
An important difference between the RE flippers being discussed and domain name squatters is that RE investors (of any kind) have large ongoing expenses for as long as they own a piece of property (real estate taxes, if nothing else). Domain name squatters are usually actually generating revenue on the domains they own (ad income). That being said, I don't know any way to change things to stop them that wouldn't make something else much worse(ungainly restrictions on registering a domain name as one example of some "solutions" to this problem).
All the early adopters I know are Democrats. I can think of several theories that explain this correlation. However, I don't think there is any relationship between early adoption and party affiliation.
If ethanol was cheaper, it would have been used before. The mandate to use ethanol increases the cost of a gallon of gas. That is why they didn't use it before. Also, simple logic says if it takes more energy to make ethanol than we get out of it, and the overwhelming majority of that energy comes from petroleum, it can't be cheaper. As far as domestic production of fuel, there are large deposits of oil shale and tar sands in North America (not quite sure of the distribution between Canada and the U.S.), but the break even point for production of oil out of these sources is approximately $70 a barrel. Until fuel prices can be relied on to stay at above $70 a barrel for the indefinite future, these sources will not be developed. There were a number of fuel options explored in the late '70s that were never developed because oil prices dropped in the '80s. The thing is that most of these were developed to the point of knowing how to exploit these resources, it just cost too much. Now that fuel prices seem to have stabilized at over $60 a barrel, we should start to see some development of these resources. Unfortunately, it will take about five years to build the plants to deliver them and they are going to cost about $70 to $100 a barrel to produce (not all of them produce something in barrels, but the energy equivalent to a barrel of oil costs somewhere in that price range).
In the past, whenever these resources neared marketability the OPEC countries increased production and reduced the price per barrel enough to make these alternatives non-viable. It doesn't look like they will be able to do that this time.
That is exactly it. This is an attempt to protect the extra charge on internet radio by saying "see terrestrial radio pays the same fees and doesn't have a problem making money". They won't mention that terrestrial radio is all big companies that they can cut deals with to offset the additional expense. If this is the strategy and the radio companies know the plan, the radio companies won't complain.
Actually, I have thought it through. You obviously assume that slavery is inherently evil. I can design a theoretical economic system in which slavery would be a net good (Unfortunately, just like Communism, it requires overlooking certain characteristics of human nature and thus would not actually work out that way in the real world). The problem is that this forum only allows for short summaries of ideas and concepts that require extensive discussion to fully work out. And actually, the basis of all freedom is the Rule of Law.
If you want really long term archiving, stone is the way to go. Of course, the data transfer rate is really, really slow. I'm sure someone could come up with a way to automate the process, but I suspect that the data transfer rate would still be pretty slow. Takes a lot of space to store the media as well. But, for all intents and purposes your data will be there forever (at least if you protect it from the wind and running water).
On the other hand, you could probably print to vellum with existing technology.
A debit card is either an ATM card that requires a PIN or it is a VISA or Mastercard (usually VISA). In case you haven't noticed, VISA and Mastercard are credit card companies. If you have the first kind and there is a fraudulent transaction, how did they get your PIN? If it is the second kind, VISA (and probably Mastercard) has said that they apply the same rules to it that they do to credit cards. That being said, I only have an ATM style debit card (around here, ATM cards were called debit cards from the beginning, and the others were called check cards), because I think the risk associated with the check card is still to high.
However, the merchant can make failure to have the card signed a reason to refuse to process the transaction. Technically, a Visa or Mastercard (and probably Discover and Amex as well) are not valid unless signed by the card holder, unless they have changed that in the last 4 years (I got out of retail a little less than 4 years ago and had reviewed Visa and Mastercard signature policies shortly before that).
Starr was not Paula Jones' lawyer. Bill Clinton lied under oath in the lawsuit that Paula Jones had filed against him. That was the lie under oath that led to his impeachment.
That's right Ptolemy was such a religious man. There has been a change in the approach to science, but you really don't understand the history of science if you think that mankind thinks differently today then he did in the past. The consensus that the Earth was the center of the Universe was philosophically based, not religiously. There was a "natural philosophy" community, it was Galileo's opponents in this community that led to his getting in trouble for his theories.
And as to that you can go more recently, in the 50's and 60's (even into the early '70') the scientific "consensus" was that the Big Bang theory was nonsense. There was even talk that it was just "creationism" in another guise.
Yeah that's right scientific consensus is always right. Just ask Galileo, or Copernicus. And your comment about all scientists who are Global Warming skeptics being on Exxon's payroll is exactly why people like me think that "Global Warming" is something to be skeptical about. If the only response to those who disagree is to accuse them of acting in bad faith, it makes me suspect that the Global Warming proponents can't answer their arguments.
"The science on climate change has ever-so-slowly morphed from the "global cooling" theories of the 1970's to the much more accurate computer models of today." Yeah, that's right they changed because the science changed. They changed because the temperatures stopped falling. In the 1970's the recorded temperatures had been falling since the end of WWII. In the late 70's or early 80's that stopped and temperatures started to rise. Did this lead the alarmists who had been yelling that Man was bringing on a new Ice Age to re-evaluate their assumptions? No, they just changed from predicting an Ice Age to predicting disastrous increases in temperature and that as a result we needed the government to take over everything. The same prescription to solve a different problem. When I see that Al Gore (the prophet of Global Warming) using more electricity in a month in one of his multiple houses than the average American uses in a year, I become somewhat skeptical about whether he really believes what he is preaching. In addition, many of the other proponents of Global Warming exhibit similar inconsistency. if the spokespeople for Global Warming aren't concerned enough about it to sacrifice why should I be?
"These departments are supposed to act as neutral parties to the government and their actions should not be influenced by political considerations."
What rock have you been living under, these departments have been influenced by political considerations since the founding of the country.
So? My point is that as far as I can tell, the President didn't commit any crimes. There are much more important things going on than the President firing people because he didn't like the way they were doing their job.
Except that the American public doesn't "want to know". The majority of Americans aren't paying attention, that is why stories like the base of this aren't in the American media, because not enough people are paying attention.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's see if I got this right, Russia develops a new rifle design; then it orders a whole bunch of countries to build factories to manufacture said rifle; 30 years or so later it is no longer in a position to control what those countries do; it grants itself a patent on said rifle design and demands that those countries pay it for the right to manufacture it.
The "ill-founded interpretation of redshift" has been demonstrated by experimentation. That is scientists have taken objects emitting light and accelerated them away from a recording source and discovered that the frequency of the light recorded changes in proportion to the acceleration. Whether this observation extends to interstellar distances or not is a matter of assumption. However, if we do not assume that the rules of physics are essentially constant (with the understanding that the rules of physics state that under certain conditions they change) we have no way to make any prediction about what the Universe outside of our solar system is like (and very limited ability to make predictions off of the planet Earth). The current understanding of redshift is based on the theories of physics until someone comes up with a theory that explains both the experimentally demonstrated red shift and the supposed anomalies(I say supposed because I don't feel like taking the time to examine the credibility of your sources, they may be perfectly legitimate, but I don't know that) you are referencing cosmologists will continue to work with current theory. They may be wrong, but you can't come up with a cosmological theory based on those observations without of theory of physics that explains that behavior.
So you are saying that an Alaskan's vote would count for more being 1 of 300 million than it does being one of 700,000? 25% of Alaskans is fewer than the number of absentee ballots they didn't count in California in 2000. In 2000, California stopped counting absentee ballots when the number of remaining absentee ballots was less than the difference between the number of votes that Al Gore had and the number of votes that George W. Bush had. (All states follow a similar practice, I just remember this because the number of absentee ballots not counted in California significantly exceeded the number of total votes that Gore was supposed to have over Bush). Whatever state you live in your vote means more as one of that number than it would as one of the total population. There was a great article that showed that an individual vote makes a greater difference with 50 state races than it would in one national poll http://www.avagara.com/e_c/reference/00012001.htm
You are overlooking something here, the electoral college is not composed of votes, it is composed of delegates. Each state gets a certain number of delegates. How those delegates are chosen is left up to the various state legislatures. The Constitution doesn't even call for a vote by the people for the President. That was the intention of the Founding Fathers. That states would determine who they wanted to vote for the President for them. Under the Constitution, the delegates are not bound to vote for the candidate they ran as supporting. The states select delegates to the electoral college, who then gather and select the next President.
The difference between the Hurricane relief that Florida and Louisiana got has to do with what the state and local governments did with the money. Have you seen the kinds of dollar figures the federal government has spent in Louisiana? Were you aware that the governor of Louisiana blocked/redirected some of the rebuilding funds intended for New Orleans because the mayor of New Orleans supported her opponent in the last election?
Actually that is not true. The votes in the swing states are divided approaching evenly between parties. That means the candidates have to work hard for any undecided's. In the non-swing states, the votes count just as much, sometimes more, but everyone knows who the overwhelming majority are going to vote for. If we got rid of the electoral college, only the votes of people in high population states would count. If it is simple majority of votes, who gives a s$$t about Alaska voters, there are probably more undecided's in Chicago than all the voters in Alaska (and certainly more in the greater metropolitan Chicago area). The biggest problem with our Presidential elections is that all the media really pays attention to is the "horse race", who's ahead in the polls, who's gaining ground who's losing ground. The news media don't really tell you about a candidates stand on an issue unless it is one they care about, and even then they distort the position. Sometimes they distort to make a candidates position seem closer to the ideal, sometimes further away. I remember one election (state or local), candidate A thought the priorities should be: Item 1, Item 2, Item 3, Item 4, Item 5; candidate B thought the priorities should be: Item 1, Item 2, Item 3, Item 5, Item 4. The local press all reported "Candidate A is opposed to Item 5, Candidate B favors it".
Oh goody, I look forward to the day that my local municipality, my local county, and my state all tax my internet service...Oh yeah that is on top of the federal tax. Let's not forget, if I use the Internet to communicate with you, your local municipality, county and state are going to try and tax me too. Unless there is some law limiting what government body can tax who, every government body is going to try and tax every person who uses internet service through their jurisdiction. I know it is ridiculous, you know it is ridiculous, but when did that ever stop a politician from taxing something.
The article is about two separate but related things. One is the bill to force all businesses to collect sales tax on goods being shipped to a state that has sales tax. The other is the moratorium on taxes on the Internet that is due to expire shortly. When the moratorium was passed, several localities(state, city, county, etc) were considering taxing email messages. Other localities were considering how they were going to tax internet use. That is why the mention of email tax, it was being considered before. Possibly that is not the tax that would be implemented, but you can bet that if the moratorium is allowed to expire there will be all kinds of taxes on Internet services.
An important difference between the RE flippers being discussed and domain name squatters is that RE investors (of any kind) have large ongoing expenses for as long as they own a piece of property (real estate taxes, if nothing else). Domain name squatters are usually actually generating revenue on the domains they own (ad income). That being said, I don't know any way to change things to stop them that wouldn't make something else much worse(ungainly restrictions on registering a domain name as one example of some "solutions" to this problem).
All the early adopters I know are Democrats. I can think of several theories that explain this correlation. However, I don't think there is any relationship between early adoption and party affiliation.
If ethanol was cheaper, it would have been used before. The mandate to use ethanol increases the cost of a gallon of gas. That is why they didn't use it before. Also, simple logic says if it takes more energy to make ethanol than we get out of it, and the overwhelming majority of that energy comes from petroleum, it can't be cheaper. As far as domestic production of fuel, there are large deposits of oil shale and tar sands in North America (not quite sure of the distribution between Canada and the U.S.), but the break even point for production of oil out of these sources is approximately $70 a barrel. Until fuel prices can be relied on to stay at above $70 a barrel for the indefinite future, these sources will not be developed. There were a number of fuel options explored in the late '70s that were never developed because oil prices dropped in the '80s. The thing is that most of these were developed to the point of knowing how to exploit these resources, it just cost too much. Now that fuel prices seem to have stabilized at over $60 a barrel, we should start to see some development of these resources. Unfortunately, it will take about five years to build the plants to deliver them and they are going to cost about $70 to $100 a barrel to produce (not all of them produce something in barrels, but the energy equivalent to a barrel of oil costs somewhere in that price range). In the past, whenever these resources neared marketability the OPEC countries increased production and reduced the price per barrel enough to make these alternatives non-viable. It doesn't look like they will be able to do that this time.
That is exactly it. This is an attempt to protect the extra charge on internet radio by saying "see terrestrial radio pays the same fees and doesn't have a problem making money". They won't mention that terrestrial radio is all big companies that they can cut deals with to offset the additional expense. If this is the strategy and the radio companies know the plan, the radio companies won't complain.
Actually, I have thought it through. You obviously assume that slavery is inherently evil. I can design a theoretical economic system in which slavery would be a net good (Unfortunately, just like Communism, it requires overlooking certain characteristics of human nature and thus would not actually work out that way in the real world). The problem is that this forum only allows for short summaries of ideas and concepts that require extensive discussion to fully work out. And actually, the basis of all freedom is the Rule of Law.
Actually the most basic property right is the right to own yourself. All other rights grow out of this.
If you want really long term archiving, stone is the way to go. Of course, the data transfer rate is really, really slow. I'm sure someone could come up with a way to automate the process, but I suspect that the data transfer rate would still be pretty slow. Takes a lot of space to store the media as well. But, for all intents and purposes your data will be there forever (at least if you protect it from the wind and running water). On the other hand, you could probably print to vellum with existing technology.
A debit card is either an ATM card that requires a PIN or it is a VISA or Mastercard (usually VISA). In case you haven't noticed, VISA and Mastercard are credit card companies. If you have the first kind and there is a fraudulent transaction, how did they get your PIN? If it is the second kind, VISA (and probably Mastercard) has said that they apply the same rules to it that they do to credit cards. That being said, I only have an ATM style debit card (around here, ATM cards were called debit cards from the beginning, and the others were called check cards), because I think the risk associated with the check card is still to high.
However, the merchant can make failure to have the card signed a reason to refuse to process the transaction. Technically, a Visa or Mastercard (and probably Discover and Amex as well) are not valid unless signed by the card holder, unless they have changed that in the last 4 years (I got out of retail a little less than 4 years ago and had reviewed Visa and Mastercard signature policies shortly before that).
Well, I wear gloves in the winter sometimes, so my thumbnails aren't always nude...
Starr was not Paula Jones' lawyer. Bill Clinton lied under oath in the lawsuit that Paula Jones had filed against him. That was the lie under oath that led to his impeachment.
That's right Ptolemy was such a religious man. There has been a change in the approach to science, but you really don't understand the history of science if you think that mankind thinks differently today then he did in the past. The consensus that the Earth was the center of the Universe was philosophically based, not religiously. There was a "natural philosophy" community, it was Galileo's opponents in this community that led to his getting in trouble for his theories. And as to that you can go more recently, in the 50's and 60's (even into the early '70') the scientific "consensus" was that the Big Bang theory was nonsense. There was even talk that it was just "creationism" in another guise.
Yeah that's right scientific consensus is always right. Just ask Galileo, or Copernicus. And your comment about all scientists who are Global Warming skeptics being on Exxon's payroll is exactly why people like me think that "Global Warming" is something to be skeptical about. If the only response to those who disagree is to accuse them of acting in bad faith, it makes me suspect that the Global Warming proponents can't answer their arguments.
"The science on climate change has ever-so-slowly morphed from the "global cooling" theories of the 1970's to the much more accurate computer models of today."
Yeah, that's right they changed because the science changed. They changed because the temperatures stopped falling. In the 1970's the recorded temperatures had been falling since the end of WWII. In the late 70's or early 80's that stopped and temperatures started to rise. Did this lead the alarmists who had been yelling that Man was bringing on a new Ice Age to re-evaluate their assumptions? No, they just changed from predicting an Ice Age to predicting disastrous increases in temperature and that as a result we needed the government to take over everything. The same prescription to solve a different problem.
When I see that Al Gore (the prophet of Global Warming) using more electricity in a month in one of his multiple houses than the average American uses in a year, I become somewhat skeptical about whether he really believes what he is preaching. In addition, many of the other proponents of Global Warming exhibit similar inconsistency. if the spokespeople for Global Warming aren't concerned enough about it to sacrifice why should I be?
"These departments are supposed to act as neutral parties to the government and their actions should not be influenced by political considerations." What rock have you been living under, these departments have been influenced by political considerations since the founding of the country.
So? My point is that as far as I can tell, the President didn't commit any crimes. There are much more important things going on than the President firing people because he didn't like the way they were doing their job.
Except that the American public doesn't "want to know". The majority of Americans aren't paying attention, that is why stories like the base of this aren't in the American media, because not enough people are paying attention.