Rather than all of us benfitting from space research I predict that any and all discoveries will be kept to the wealthy playboys themselves leaving the rest of us out in the cold.
Steve: "Hey Bob, what was the salt content of the water that you found buried a few feet below the Martian surface?"
Bob: "Let me see your 1040... You only made $143,000 last year. I'm not telling you anything."
Given that Libya chairs the UN human rights committee, and Iraq is scheduled to chair the disarmament committee later this year, is Elbonia going to chair the space debris committee?
Is it based on your IP, or is it based on your computer's regional settings? I work for a company where we test hardware on various non-English versions of Windows, and one of my standard tests to make sure that the regions are set up correctly is to load google.com in IE -- if it redirects to the appropriate country's web page, then the regional settings must be set correctly.
It boils down to this: Activists said misleading (but not legally false) things about Nike. Nike responded to those unkind statements with "misleading" (but not legally false) statements. Nike is in trouble for "misleading" commercial speech.
"Commercial speech" is...what, exactly? Speech designed to tell you how to spend your money. Perhaps the activists' speech is also therefore commercial speech. If it's truly misleading, then the activists in question should be held accountable for it.
In reality what I really want IS just a glorified VCR. I don't want to have to pay monthly fees for their service.
You can buy, at Circuit City, right now (at least as of yesterday in Boise, Idaho) a ReplayTV 5040 for $200 after rebates. Once you get it home, you pay a one-time fee of $250, and you have a lifetime subscription. That means no service fee, ever.
I don't want to record every instance of "Whose Line..." available - I really only want the one that's on once a week at a particular time.
To do that, you'd just tell it to record the "Who's line..." that's on every Thursday on channel 9 at 8:30pm. OTOH, what do you care if it records stuff you don't ultimately watch? I watch maybe 10% of the Star Treks that I record.
I don't want TiVo (or ReplayTV, or whoever) to tell my machine to occasionally record things I haven't asked for, whether its because of their attempts at marketing or a lame attempt at "profiling" my viewing habits.
ReplayTV never records anything except what you tell it to. You can be specific -- "Channel 287 from 3:30pm until 5:00pm on Thursday, January 2, 2003" -- or vague -- "Star Trek, whenever and wherever it's on". However, no program appears on your hard drive unless you do something that causes it to record.
I don't want these companies using my viewing habits for their gain, even if its anonymous and aggregate.
Don't know what to tell you on that one. I'm pretty concerned about privacy, but I just can't get excited about them using my anonymous, aggregate data. Besides, admit it: we all got a good laugh at the beginning of the year when TiVo told us that the most rewatched part of the Super Bowl was not the final dramatic game-winning kick, but the Brittney Spears commercial.
But the PVR manufacturers seem hell-bent on only letting you use their device if you pay their monthly fee for their "service".
If you really don't want their service, your other option is a PVR made by RCA. The channel guide is genuinely free, and it even has a built-in DVD player. The channel guide also only goes three days out and doesn't work with satellite dishes. But, you get what you pay for.
I've been a Replay owner for two years now, and I still think that it's one of the best consumer electronics devices I've ever owned. I would give up color and my remote contrtol before I gave up my Replay. I would rather watch my Replay on a 19" black-and-white TV, walking over to change the channel, than watch live HDTV.
Until the beginning of this year, I was working for a large corporation near Portland, Oregon. When they started downsizing, they offered me a generous severance package to leave. I took it and moved to Boise, Idaho, where I'm originally from.
I used the package to buy a house, and started living off of my savings while looking for a job. It took me about three months to find one. I've moved from being a software engineer at $62k per year to being a hardware tester at $15 per hour. But I absolutely don't regret it. I'm very happy here and don't miss Portland at all.
Though my pay has dropped from >5k / month to 2.5k / month, my actual take-home has only dropped to about 60% of what it was because I'm in a lower tax bracket. Further, my mortgage is now $500 / month less than it was, from $1110 to $609.
Start looking in all of the places you'd like to move to. If you've never been there, take some time off and go there, or talk to someone who has. There are relatively few jobs away from the coast, but they are out here. Check the local newspapers, and see what you can find. Find out who the big employers are in the towns you're interested in, and start trying to contact people within them.
Finally, if you're unhappy, move. You only live once.
A DVD is 120mm in diameter and 1.2mm thick. That puts its volume at 1.2 * 60^2 * pi, or 13572 mm^3. That means that a DVD's volume is about 1/74000 of a cubic meter.
Assume that every American buys 10 disposable DVDs per year. That's 3 billion of these things that wind up in the landfill, for a total of around 41000 cubic meters.
Switching to American measurements, these would fit into a one-acre, 30 foot deep hole. There are plenty of places in the Nevada Desert where you could dig such a thing.
Or, think of it another way: If you threw away disks like this every time you rented a movie, by what percentage would it increase *your* personal trash output? For me it would be well under 1%.
On the other hand, assume that each DVD rental results in one extra mile of driving to return it. (Yes, I know you could walk, but the places I usually rent from are 4 and 9 miles away.) That results in an extra 3 billion miles of driving, or at least 100 million gallons of gasoline burned. Given that 1 gallon of gasoline results in 20 pounds of pollution (mostly CO2 and H2O), that's 1 million tons of pollution.
So: One acre hole in Nevada, or 1 million tons of pollution. Your choice.
Kramnik and Kasparov are the best chess players that nature can produce. Meanwhile, humans have built Fritz and Deep Blue. We aren't in the process of losing to machines. We're in the process of beating nature.
A 1-kilogram chunk of Nickel 63 will give off about 25 Watts of pure beta radiation -- assuming that you configure it in such a way that the beta particles aren't reabsorbed by neigboring nickel atoms. Even assuming 100% efficiency, a battery capable of powering your laptop would weigh at least a few kilograms.
Where is the incentive for Energizer or Duracel to make their batteries 10x more efficient?
Easy: They could charge up to 10x as much for them. Which would you rather buy: 4 AA batteries for $3 that will power your digital camera for an hour, or 4 AA batteries for $25 that will power your camera for 10 hours?
As long as they didn't cost 10x as much to produce, the battery manufacturers would come out ahead. Especially if one of them was able to patent it and lock the other out of the battery macket for 17 years.
I live in Boise, Idaho, and there's a Clean Flicks near my grocery store. I walked in a couple of weeks ago to see what the hubbub was about.
At first glance, it looks like a regular (albeit small) video store. They stock mostly VHS. Most (but not all) of them are edited, and clearly say so on the outside of the box. This business does not pass off their movies as being the original. Their edit method is to take the original tape, physically remove the offending section of tape, and splice it back together.
They also stocked a number of DVDs. Those were done a bit more interestingly. They had the original DVD case. Riveted to the DVD case was the original DVD. There was a sticker on it saying that it had been rendered unwatchable, it was only there as proof of purchase, and any attempt to remove it would result in a $30 charge against your account. Where you would normally find the DVD was a DVD-R disk, presumably with a digitally edited version of the movie on it. On the disk was a standard CD Label with info such as the movie run time and the like.
While I like my movies with all the sex and violence, I can understand that some people do not. These people are not on a mission to clean up all of Hollywood. They admit that some movies can't be "cleaned up" without destroying them. But, if they want to try, as long as they're not being deceptive, or engaging in copyright violation, I have trouble caring.
Better: Try Orbiter, an awesome space sim that lets you both launch and land the space shuttle, fly super-advanced spacecraft, dock at the ISS, or at a big wheel orbiting the moon, or fly to all the other planets in the solar system. Learn orbital mechanics before you try it though, or you won't be able to go anywhere.
The only thing that I can see as negative about this is that driving to work you will see all of these shiny vertical lines above the landscape heading out into the sky...
Nah... The only place you could put one of these would be at the equator, and the tower would be thin enough as to be invisible from more than a mile or two away. Once you get two or three up, and find that you still don't have enough capacity, it probably becomes cheaper to strengthen existing elevators rather than building new ones.
Arthur C. Clarke said that we'd build a space elevator about 50 years after everyone stopped laughing. With stories like this, I think it's safe to say that we've stopped laughing.
In his book "Hidden Order: The Economics of Everyday Life", David D. Friedman says that there is another reason for the growth in engagement rings over the past century. In a nutshell:
Premarital sex was not invented in the 1960s, and has in fact been around ever since just before the first marriage. Of course, back in the good old days, a good girl would never have sex before wedlock. However, some were willing to bend the rules once they were engaged. So, men quickly discovered that you could ask a woman to marry you, have sex with her, and then break off the engagement.
Up until 1935, this was considered an actionable tort in 47 of the 48 states. A woman who was deceived in this way could sue for the value of her lost virginity and subsequent difficulty in acquiring a husband. State legislatures passed laws against these suits in the 1930s and 1940s.
So, after this ability was removed, women needed a new way to ensure that a man proposing marriage really meant it. It became social custom that a man asking for marriage would post a performance bond equivalent to about twice his monthly salary. This bond would be forfeitable upon his breaking off of the engagement, but returnable if she broke off the engagement. This 'bond' was implemented as a diamond ring, because it was an easy way to, er, 'crystalize' two months of his salary in an easy-to-handle package.
In essence, the engagement ring is a private reimplementation of a canceled government policy.
So if I'm bored some day I go pick up some hydrogen peroxide, mix it with kerosene, and make some sort of remote detonation device and head over to the other side of the beach?
Well, maybe. The "Hydrogen Peroxide" you can buy at the drug store is 97% water and 3% H2O2.
But, let's say that you can find someone to sell you some High Test Peroxide (usually around 85%, but sometimes up to 97% H2O2). They're going to be incredibly unstable once you mix them -- a standard rule of H2O2 safety is to not put it in any container that's ever had hydrocarbons in it.
Hydrogen Peroxide + Kerosene, or possibly something else. A pure H2O2 engine has as its exhaust a 50/50 mixture of water and O2. Because of all that really hot O2, you can put just about anything combustible in the chamber and it will burn.
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You'll love Orbiter. It's even free!
Steve: "Hey Bob, what was the salt content of the water that you found buried a few feet below the Martian surface?"
Bob: "Let me see your 1040... You only made $143,000 last year. I'm not telling you anything."
This is what happens if economists get too much power.
Do you blame your scale when it tells you that you're getting fat?
Given that Libya chairs the UN human rights committee, and Iraq is scheduled to chair the disarmament committee later this year, is Elbonia going to chair the space debris committee?
Remember, you can't buy out someone who isn't for sale.
Armadillo's "How to invest in Armadillo Aerospace" page.
Is it based on your IP, or is it based on your computer's regional settings? I work for a company where we test hardware on various non-English versions of Windows, and one of my standard tests to make sure that the regions are set up correctly is to load google.com in IE -- if it redirects to the appropriate country's web page, then the regional settings must be set correctly.
It boils down to this: Activists said misleading (but not legally false) things about Nike. Nike responded to those unkind statements with "misleading" (but not legally false) statements. Nike is in trouble for "misleading" commercial speech.
"Commercial speech" is...what, exactly? Speech designed to tell you how to spend your money. Perhaps the activists' speech is also therefore commercial speech. If it's truly misleading, then the activists in question should be held accountable for it.
WTF is wrong with letting the user hit the back button?
Until the beginning of this year, I was working for a large corporation near Portland, Oregon. When they started downsizing, they offered me a generous severance package to leave. I took it and moved to Boise, Idaho, where I'm originally from.
I used the package to buy a house, and started living off of my savings while looking for a job. It took me about three months to find one. I've moved from being a software engineer at $62k per year to being a hardware tester at $15 per hour. But I absolutely don't regret it. I'm very happy here and don't miss Portland at all.
Though my pay has dropped from >5k / month to 2.5k / month, my actual take-home has only dropped to about 60% of what it was because I'm in a lower tax bracket. Further, my mortgage is now $500 / month less than it was, from $1110 to $609.
Start looking in all of the places you'd like to move to. If you've never been there, take some time off and go there, or talk to someone who has. There are relatively few jobs away from the coast, but they are out here. Check the local newspapers, and see what you can find. Find out who the big employers are in the towns you're interested in, and start trying to contact people within them.
Finally, if you're unhappy, move. You only live once.
Maybe you should talk to the people at Real Doll. (Not safe for work...) Their basic female models go for about $6000.
Don't those crazy foreigners know that it's almost WINTER?
Let's see...
A DVD is 120mm in diameter and 1.2mm thick. That puts its volume at 1.2 * 60^2 * pi, or 13572 mm^3. That means that a DVD's volume is about 1/74000 of a cubic meter.
Assume that every American buys 10 disposable DVDs per year. That's 3 billion of these things that wind up in the landfill, for a total of around 41000 cubic meters.
Switching to American measurements, these would fit into a one-acre, 30 foot deep hole. There are plenty of places in the Nevada Desert where you could dig such a thing.
Or, think of it another way: If you threw away disks like this every time you rented a movie, by what percentage would it increase *your* personal trash output? For me it would be well under 1%.
On the other hand, assume that each DVD rental results in one extra mile of driving to return it. (Yes, I know you could walk, but the places I usually rent from are 4 and 9 miles away.) That results in an extra 3 billion miles of driving, or at least 100 million gallons of gasoline burned. Given that 1 gallon of gasoline results in 20 pounds of pollution (mostly CO2 and H2O), that's 1 million tons of pollution.
So: One acre hole in Nevada, or 1 million tons of pollution. Your choice.
...It's Man vs. Nature.
Kramnik and Kasparov are the best chess players that nature can produce. Meanwhile, humans have built Fritz and Deep Blue. We aren't in the process of losing to machines. We're in the process of beating nature.
A 1-kilogram chunk of Nickel 63 will give off about 25 Watts of pure beta radiation -- assuming that you configure it in such a way that the beta particles aren't reabsorbed by neigboring nickel atoms. Even assuming 100% efficiency, a battery capable of powering your laptop would weigh at least a few kilograms.
Easy: They could charge up to 10x as much for them. Which would you rather buy: 4 AA batteries for $3 that will power your digital camera for an hour, or 4 AA batteries for $25 that will power your camera for 10 hours?
As long as they didn't cost 10x as much to produce, the battery manufacturers would come out ahead. Especially if one of them was able to patent it and lock the other out of the battery macket for 17 years.
I live in Boise, Idaho, and there's a Clean Flicks near my grocery store. I walked in a couple of weeks ago to see what the hubbub was about.
At first glance, it looks like a regular (albeit small) video store. They stock mostly VHS. Most (but not all) of them are edited, and clearly say so on the outside of the box. This business does not pass off their movies as being the original. Their edit method is to take the original tape, physically remove the offending section of tape, and splice it back together.
They also stocked a number of DVDs. Those were done a bit more interestingly. They had the original DVD case. Riveted to the DVD case was the original DVD. There was a sticker on it saying that it had been rendered unwatchable, it was only there as proof of purchase, and any attempt to remove it would result in a $30 charge against your account. Where you would normally find the DVD was a DVD-R disk, presumably with a digitally edited version of the movie on it. On the disk was a standard CD Label with info such as the movie run time and the like.
While I like my movies with all the sex and violence, I can understand that some people do not. These people are not on a mission to clean up all of Hollywood. They admit that some movies can't be "cleaned up" without destroying them. But, if they want to try, as long as they're not being deceptive, or engaging in copyright violation, I have trouble caring.
Better: Try Orbiter, an awesome space sim that lets you both launch and land the space shuttle, fly super-advanced spacecraft, dock at the ISS, or at a big wheel orbiting the moon, or fly to all the other planets in the solar system. Learn orbital mechanics before you try it though, or you won't be able to go anywhere.
Nah... The only place you could put one of these would be at the equator, and the tower would be thin enough as to be invisible from more than a mile or two away. Once you get two or three up, and find that you still don't have enough capacity, it probably becomes cheaper to strengthen existing elevators rather than building new ones.
Arthur C. Clarke said that we'd build a space elevator about 50 years after everyone stopped laughing. With stories like this, I think it's safe to say that we've stopped laughing.
Premarital sex was not invented in the 1960s, and has in fact been around ever since just before the first marriage. Of course, back in the good old days, a good girl would never have sex before wedlock. However, some were willing to bend the rules once they were engaged. So, men quickly discovered that you could ask a woman to marry you, have sex with her, and then break off the engagement.
Up until 1935, this was considered an actionable tort in 47 of the 48 states. A woman who was deceived in this way could sue for the value of her lost virginity and subsequent difficulty in acquiring a husband. State legislatures passed laws against these suits in the 1930s and 1940s.
So, after this ability was removed, women needed a new way to ensure that a man proposing marriage really meant it. It became social custom that a man asking for marriage would post a performance bond equivalent to about twice his monthly salary. This bond would be forfeitable upon his breaking off of the engagement, but returnable if she broke off the engagement. This 'bond' was implemented as a diamond ring, because it was an easy way to, er, 'crystalize' two months of his salary in an easy-to-handle package.
In essence, the engagement ring is a private reimplementation of a canceled government policy.
Well, maybe. The "Hydrogen Peroxide" you can buy at the drug store is 97% water and 3% H2O2.
But, let's say that you can find someone to sell you some High Test Peroxide (usually around 85%, but sometimes up to 97% H2O2). They're going to be incredibly unstable once you mix them -- a standard rule of H2O2 safety is to not put it in any container that's ever had hydrocarbons in it.
Hydrogen Peroxide + Kerosene, or possibly something else. A pure H2O2 engine has as its exhaust a 50/50 mixture of water and O2. Because of all that really hot O2, you can put just about anything combustible in the chamber and it will burn.
Dude, I'd much rather have cheap space access than yet another FPS.