From TFA: "1,082,370 U.S. citizens employed in the life sciences, such as biology and genetics, as well as physical and social sciences. Of these, approximately 31,000"
Wow, those are some massive cuts. An entire whopping 3% of the people may lose their jobs!
People just don't get it. The US government does not need to cut its budget by 3%. It needs to cut its budget by 50% or more. Many programs and federal departments need eliminated entirely. It's not even about the $16 Trillion debt. If the government ran honest accounts, it's about the $200 Trillion debt.
Don't worry, citizens of America. That's only some $650,000 per person that the government has borrowed on behalf of each and every one of you. No problem, right?
This is time for a small, custom-written bit of software. Put together a rough list of your requirements, ask around for recommendations, and contact a couple of programming houses. Heck, contact a local university and talk to them about student projects - sometimes that's not a bad way to go for a small application.
Your requirements are unusual, and aren't going to be covered well by off-the-shelf software. Professional quality custom programming will cost thousands of dollars. So what? How much is this going to boost your efficiency? Reduce stupid errors? Likely the long-term savings in salaries and customer goodwill will more than pay for the project.
My best guess, after seeing the replies above, is that the site is trying to show me localized results. I am not in the US; if the site is primarily US-oriented, perhaps that is an explanation.
To answer one poster's question above, here's what I see on the home page:
Target - save Thanksgiving (207k sigs) Nominate Malala for the Nobel Peace Prize (144k sigs) NCAA: Name...trophy after...Pat Summitt (1800 sigs) Celina High School... (14k sigs) FEMA's first responders...benefits (114k sigs) UNC Board of Governors... (147k sigs)
What an absolutely strange site. The site claims more than 100,000,000 signatures. So I figure I'll see what kinds of petitions attract this kind of attention. Select "browse petitions", then select "popular", finally select "all time".
- Top of the list: "Pay UN Interns a Fair Wage" with 2439 signatures.
- Second in the list: "Remove 2014 Ice Hockey...from Belarus" with 1334 signatures.
- Not far down the list, number 6 has only 33 signatures.
Haven't we already been here? When multi-core processors first became widely available, I recall a study that showed that anything over 8 cores was counterproductive. First, very few people have enough background stuff running to need more processing power than that. Second, coordinating multi-tasking on multiple cores requires a lot of complex work by the operating system, unless you just dedicate one to each process (not to each thread - that opens up problems with cache and data consistency). The benchmarks on desktop computers showed that adding more than 8 cores to a general purpose system actually slowed the system down due to added OS overhead.
About the only way this many cores can be useful is for graphics processing (or, in TFA, video processing): many simple cores work in parallel for the same process, on different parts of the same data. This, of course, is what graphics chips already do for a living.
People complain that for-profit medicine is to blame. This is true, in the sense, that the ground is responsible for hurting you when you trip over your untied shoelaces. I.e., it's true, but it's not the cause.
People with full insurance pay nothing or next to nothing for medical treatment. They do not care how much it costs. Insurance offers such idiotic plans, at least where I live, because the government regulators require them to.
Insurance ought to protect you from catastrophic expenses, not from reasonable expenses that lots of people have. Consider this: Supposed you had to pay all of your health-care expenses up to (say) 5% of your annual income, and 10% of subsequent expenses up to 10% of your annual income. What would the effect be?
1. You would care what ordinary things like hearing aids cost. You would shop around. The companies offering the products would now have to compete for your business. Prices would fall, and fall dramatically.
2. Your insurance costs would sink dramatically. First, because the insurance would rarely have to pay anything. Second, because the free market would be driving medical prices into the basement. For the average person, the saving in insurance costs would more than offset the out-of-pocket medical expenditures.
Government over-regulation is the reason for the current ridiculous prices - and also for the ridiculous bureaucracy in all aspects of medical care. Let the free market actually function in the health-care market, and see what happens.
A last note: it is important that everyone be subject to the rules above. No zero-copays for anyone, no free emergency room visit just because you are on welfare. You have an income, you need treatment, you pay something towards it. This would remove the ridiculous situation of people abusing emergency rooms because it's a way to get free treatment for ordinary things.
Well, yes, but consensus nonetheless. The point is: As currently run, only one viewpoint is allowed or accepted. On controversial topics, this is simply not useful. In fact, it winds up being propoganda.
For anyone who doesn't believe this, take the article on "global warming" as an example. There is a substantial group of people who believe that anthropogenic warming is exaggerated. Even given the warming, there is substantial dispute on the effect: for example, whether or not it will affect sea level. These are areas of genuine dispute. Science is supposed to be about using theories to make predictions, verifying the predictions provides evidence for the theory. Competing theories are supposed to be welcomed, and allowed to rise and fall on the merits of their predictive ability. Yet nowhere in the article is there any indication that alternative vewpoints to the IPCC reports even exist.
"... getting editors access to higher-quality scholarship (in private databases like JSTOR), admission to military-history conferences..."
Um, no. The problem with this idea is that the editors - as well intentioned as they may be - are generally not scholars of particular fields. They will never really be in a position to judge these things. Worse, on historical events such as wars, the editors have a well-deserved reputation of resisting any interpretations other than those that are well-established and well-accepted. They generally do not allow controversial alternative views to be mentioned, however well-founded, because Wikipedia is about consensus.
If they really want to make the transition to academic-quality content, they need to find away to get experts in the various fields to contribute, and to not only allow but encourage the presentation of more than one viewpoint - while somehow still filtering out the crackpots. This will be a very difficult thing to achieve, will require a very different way of working. I frankly do not believe that Wikipedia is capable of this kind of transition, though I would love to be proven wrong.
Quick summary: Comparing Mann to Sandusky and accusing him of sexually abusing his data is hyperbole, i.e., an expression of opinion not meant to be taken literally. To be guilty of libel, you have to present something false, that is meant to be taken as a fact. Other accusations in Mann's suit are similar - all are protected expressions of opinion, not libel. Worse, his suit appears to be meant primarily as a way of shutting down continued discussion of this time, which means that he is likely to be nailed with a SLAPP suit.
What's the definition of "impaired"? I have always had a terrible memory. In college, I would study the material when it was taught. When the tests came around, I had to basically re-learn the material from scratch. And re-learn it again for the final exam. While I was a top student, I looked on with amazement when other students could retain stuff after learning it the first time. Is a lousy memory an impairment? I don't know, but I would certainly have been ecstatic to be able to swallow a safe, non-addictive pill and get a decent memory.
Let's set any PC idiocy aside. If one can avoid addiction and side-effects, there is absolutely nothing wrong with enhancing people's cognitive abilities. Why should there be?
"international collaboration to address "freedom of expression" which clearly disregards public order"
I agree absolutely. Let's set the standard: public disorder - destroying property, killing people - is a crime. Freedom of expression is not. Pretending that freedom of expression forced someone to violence is a transparent and pathetic excuse.
According to TFA, Saudia Arabia is still blaming the video clip for the violence. It is now well-established that the violence was pre-planned; the date of September 11th was picked carefully. The video clip was merely a transparent excuse, and the upload may, in fact, have been coordinated to coincide with the violence. Saudia Arabia is trying to use the situation to impose their fundamentalist values on the rest of the world. No thanks.
So, yes, let's set a standard: Free speech is too important to compromise.
If you have a couple of identical phrases, that's no big deal. When you have pages and pages of such phrases, it indicates a problem. Identical phrases happen by coincidence, but it is surprisingly rare.
I check my students' work regularly for plagiarism. If you use a bit of sense, and pick out a phrase that contains specifics but is not standard (i.e, not "the fourth amendment"), you almost *never* find an exact match.
Here's a negative example: take the first sentence of the previous paragraph: "I check my students' work regularly for plagiarism". Google currently returns zero exact matches for this phrase, even though it doesn't seem like anything particularly special.
Here's a positive example (sorry, it's in German): "ein Speichermedium, das wie eine herkömmliche magnetische Festplatte". This phrase appeared in a homework assignment last year, and returns zillions of Google hits. Examining the hits, and it turns out that they are all copied from the Wikipedia article describing SSDs. This isn't yet proof of plagiarism, but when I find 10 or 15 paragraphs have been copied into the homework, well, the situation becomes clear.
That seems odd, especially from younger engineers. In Germany, co-workers in a business situation go by "du" and first-names very quickly; certainly as soon as they are working on a project together. This is even true for geezers like me (far side of 50). It's just not completely automatic, like in English.
In English *everybody* is on a first-name basis, which is extreme in the other direction. When you first meet someone, why should you immediately pretend to be friends? Especially if one of you is in a position of authority over the other? Unless you are in a tiny company where you are in daily contact, addressing the CEO of your company as Mr./Ms. Smith seems like simple politeness. Calling everyone by their first-name is pretending to a familiarity that just doesn't exist.
The fun begins in German-speaking countries where companies use lots of English internally. Find a situation where the English-language culture requires first names, but the German-language culture requires last names, put in a mix of people speaking a mix of languages, and watch our heads explode.
Much as I dislike adding fees to inhibit the free market, the whole HFT world desperately needs them. Placing any bid or making any transaction should cost some small-but-tangible amount of money.
Even better, if more complex: add a fee based on how long a particular security is held. Less than a second, the fee is 1000% of the transaction value, more than a year, no fee at all, and scale for all values in the middle. HFT is legalized theft, and needs to be penalized out of existence.
The US Savings bonds remain the safest bonds in the world. They're also the only bonds worth buying. * * * There's still plenty of funds available to service the debt.
First, while there are too few of them, there are a number of countries in the world without debt problems. The US is one of the countries that is worst off, especially if you add in all of the unfunded pension liabilities (which the government generally avoids). Any country colored green, yellow or even orange in that map has its debt under control. Cross-reference for a trustworthy government, and you still have quite a selection of countries whose bonds are a much better choice than US Savings Bonds.
The only source of "funds" to pay off this massive debt are called "printing presses". While printing more money is, in fact, probably what will eventually happen, this will destroy private saving, cause massive inflation, and completely undermine the position of the dollar in the international markets.
tldr; The US is not the whole world. Have a look around, much of the rest of the world is doing a lot better than the US nowadays...
Typical, stupid patent that just happens to seem cool because it's about space.
Patents are supposed to provide a competitive advantage. Has Boeing marketed this? No. Do they have any intention of marketing it? Highly unlikely. The patent office ought to reject the application with prejudice, and charge Boeing extra for a frivolous application.
Not to mention the obvious practical problem: If there is enough gas that stay in place long enough to decay orbits, the gas itself becomes another kind of "space junk"
Microsoft doing something right, standing up to government and industry. The cognitive dissonance makes my brain hurt...
That the FTC sees "harm to consumers" just shows that the FTC is a revolving door for industry lobbyists. I mean, it's like putting every new number on the "do not call" list, and requiring consumers to opt-in to intrusive advertising. How horrible that would be!/sarcasm
Planetary emergency? Total planetary ice is up (the arctic compensated in Antarctica). Ill effects from melting arctic ice: none. The only emergency was Hansen not having enough publicity...
There's a reason these companies came to the government: they could not get private sector financing. Why not? Most likely, because they have no convincing business case. However, they have good contacts in the government, so they get to waste your tax dollars.
- "The Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that the DOE loan guarantee program was riddled with program inefficiencies"
- "the absence of government intervention the private sector builds the infrastructure to assess risk, the federal government has neither the expertise nor the incentive..."
- "...once the government subsidizes a portion of the market, the object of the subsidy becomes a safe asset. Safety in the market, however, often means low return on investments, which is likely to turn venture capitalists away. As a result, capital investments will likely dry out and innovation rates will go down"
- "loan guarantee programs are unable to save failing industries or to create millions of jobs, because—he explained—the original lack of access to credit markets is caused by serious industrial problems, not vice versa. If an applicant’s business plan cannot be made to show a profit under reasonable economic assumptions, private lenders are unlikely to issue a loan. And they would be right not to."
- "the systematic economic harm done by rewarding companies that forgo value creation in favor of pursuing financial benefit through the political system creates long term consequences for our economy and our country"
The fact that the government is wasting less money on this cronyism than it is wasting on useless wars is irrelevant. It is still waste, and it is still our money they are wasting.
...pretty little things, the turbines at Windside. Do you notice how they provide all sorts of figures, except the generating capacity? There's a reason for having long honking blades - you gather power from a larger area. These generators aren't much wider than the post they sit on, and they aren't going to generate much power at all. The best you can get are these quotes:
"The core of our business is based on small turbines charging battery banks that power small DC systems"
And this incredibly misleading quote: "The biggest Windside wind turbine is currently WS-12. It is 6 meter high and its diameter is 2 meters. WS-12 produces annually approx. 8600 kWh at the average wind speed of 5 m/s". Note: kilowatt-hours, with no time period stated. They probably mean per year. So we may well be talking about a 1kw generator. Again, they most carefully do not say.
DNA screening only looks at a few characteristics. Take two random people, and there is about a 1-in-7000 chance that their DNA profiles will match. If you take the DNA profiles of 8000 people, it is quite likely that one of them will match the criminals profile. Meanwhile, the criminal will almost certainly find some way to avoid giving a sample. So you get to put some innocent person through hell, and for what?
The video isn't terrible sharp, but googling for better pictures, the new connector looks very much like micro-USB. Might it be that Apple is doing the right thing here?
Slashdot Mirror
From TFA: "1,082,370 U.S. citizens employed in the life sciences, such as biology and genetics, as well as physical and social sciences. Of these, approximately 31,000"
Wow, those are some massive cuts. An entire whopping 3% of the people may lose their jobs!
People just don't get it. The US government does not need to cut its budget by 3%. It needs to cut its budget by 50% or more. Many programs and federal departments need eliminated entirely. It's not even about the $16 Trillion debt. If the government ran honest accounts, it's about the $200 Trillion debt.
Don't worry, citizens of America. That's only some $650,000 per person that the government has borrowed on behalf of each and every one of you. No problem, right?
This is time for a small, custom-written bit of software. Put together a rough list of your requirements, ask around for recommendations, and contact a couple of programming houses. Heck, contact a local university and talk to them about student projects - sometimes that's not a bad way to go for a small application.
Your requirements are unusual, and aren't going to be covered well by off-the-shelf software. Professional quality custom programming will cost thousands of dollars. So what? How much is this going to boost your efficiency? Reduce stupid errors? Likely the long-term savings in salaries and customer goodwill will more than pay for the project.
My best guess, after seeing the replies above, is that the site is trying to show me localized results. I am not in the US; if the site is primarily US-oriented, perhaps that is an explanation.
To answer one poster's question above, here's what I see on the home page:
Target - save Thanksgiving (207k sigs)
Nominate Malala for the Nobel Peace Prize (144k sigs)
NCAA: Name...trophy after...Pat Summitt (1800 sigs)
Celina High School... (14k sigs)
FEMA's first responders...benefits (114k sigs)
UNC Board of Governors... (147k sigs)
What an absolutely strange site. The site claims more than 100,000,000 signatures. So I figure I'll see what kinds of petitions attract this kind of attention. Select "browse petitions", then select "popular", finally select "all time".
- Top of the list: "Pay UN Interns a Fair Wage" with 2439 signatures.
- Second in the list: "Remove 2014 Ice Hockey...from Belarus" with 1334 signatures.
- Not far down the list, number 6 has only 33 signatures.
Something, somewhere does not compute...
Haven't we already been here? When multi-core processors first became widely available, I recall a study that showed that anything over 8 cores was counterproductive. First, very few people have enough background stuff running to need more processing power than that. Second, coordinating multi-tasking on multiple cores requires a lot of complex work by the operating system, unless you just dedicate one to each process (not to each thread - that opens up problems with cache and data consistency). The benchmarks on desktop computers showed that adding more than 8 cores to a general purpose system actually slowed the system down due to added OS overhead.
About the only way this many cores can be useful is for graphics processing (or, in TFA, video processing): many simple cores work in parallel for the same process, on different parts of the same data. This, of course, is what graphics chips already do for a living.
People complain that for-profit medicine is to blame. This is true, in the sense, that the ground is responsible for hurting you when you trip over your untied shoelaces. I.e., it's true, but it's not the cause.
People with full insurance pay nothing or next to nothing for medical treatment. They do not care how much it costs. Insurance offers such idiotic plans, at least where I live, because the government regulators require them to.
Insurance ought to protect you from catastrophic expenses, not from reasonable expenses that lots of people have. Consider this: Supposed you had to pay all of your health-care expenses up to (say) 5% of your annual income, and 10% of subsequent expenses up to 10% of your annual income. What would the effect be?
1. You would care what ordinary things like hearing aids cost. You would shop around. The companies offering the products would now have to compete for your business. Prices would fall, and fall dramatically.
2. Your insurance costs would sink dramatically. First, because the insurance would rarely have to pay anything. Second, because the free market would be driving medical prices into the basement. For the average person, the saving in insurance costs would more than offset the out-of-pocket medical expenditures.
Government over-regulation is the reason for the current ridiculous prices - and also for the ridiculous bureaucracy in all aspects of medical care. Let the free market actually function in the health-care market, and see what happens.
A last note: it is important that everyone be subject to the rules above. No zero-copays for anyone, no free emergency room visit just because you are on welfare. You have an income, you need treatment, you pay something towards it. This would remove the ridiculous situation of people abusing emergency rooms because it's a way to get free treatment for ordinary things.
Well, yes, but consensus nonetheless. The point is: As currently run, only one viewpoint is allowed or accepted. On controversial topics, this is simply not useful. In fact, it winds up being propoganda.
For anyone who doesn't believe this, take the article on "global warming" as an example. There is a substantial group of people who believe that anthropogenic warming is exaggerated. Even given the warming, there is substantial dispute on the effect: for example, whether or not it will affect sea level. These are areas of genuine dispute. Science is supposed to be about using theories to make predictions, verifying the predictions provides evidence for the theory. Competing theories are supposed to be welcomed, and allowed to rise and fall on the merits of their predictive ability. Yet nowhere in the article is there any indication that alternative vewpoints to the IPCC reports even exist.
"... getting editors access to higher-quality scholarship (in private databases like JSTOR), admission to military-history conferences..."
Um, no. The problem with this idea is that the editors - as well intentioned as they may be - are generally not scholars of particular fields. They will never really be in a position to judge these things. Worse, on historical events such as wars, the editors have a well-deserved reputation of resisting any interpretations other than those that are well-established and well-accepted. They generally do not allow controversial alternative views to be mentioned, however well-founded, because Wikipedia is about consensus.
If they really want to make the transition to academic-quality content, they need to find away to get experts in the various fields to contribute, and to not only allow but encourage the presentation of more than one viewpoint - while somehow still filtering out the crackpots. This will be a very difficult thing to achieve, will require a very different way of working. I frankly do not believe that Wikipedia is capable of this kind of transition, though I would love to be proven wrong.
I realize I'm late to the party, but this still may be useful. A respected legal blogger explains why Michael Mann's lawsuit is hopeless.
Quick summary: Comparing Mann to Sandusky and accusing him of sexually abusing his data is hyperbole, i.e., an expression of opinion not meant to be taken literally. To be guilty of libel, you have to present something false, that is meant to be taken as a fact. Other accusations in Mann's suit are similar - all are protected expressions of opinion, not libel. Worse, his suit appears to be meant primarily as a way of shutting down continued discussion of this time, which means that he is likely to be nailed with a SLAPP suit.
What's the definition of "impaired"? I have always had a terrible memory. In college, I would study the material when it was taught. When the tests came around, I had to basically re-learn the material from scratch. And re-learn it again for the final exam. While I was a top student, I looked on with amazement when other students could retain stuff after learning it the first time. Is a lousy memory an impairment? I don't know, but I would certainly have been ecstatic to be able to swallow a safe, non-addictive pill and get a decent memory.
Let's set any PC idiocy aside. If one can avoid addiction and side-effects, there is absolutely nothing wrong with enhancing people's cognitive abilities. Why should there be?
...just like other .gov websites
What is the definition of reality? If you are simulated, you are still a "real" simulation.
There is no spoon...
"international collaboration to address "freedom of expression" which clearly disregards public order"
I agree absolutely. Let's set the standard: public disorder - destroying property, killing people - is a crime. Freedom of expression is not. Pretending that freedom of expression forced someone to violence is a transparent and pathetic excuse.
According to TFA, Saudia Arabia is still blaming the video clip for the violence. It is now well-established that the violence was pre-planned; the date of September 11th was picked carefully. The video clip was merely a transparent excuse, and the upload may, in fact, have been coordinated to coincide with the violence. Saudia Arabia is trying to use the situation to impose their fundamentalist values on the rest of the world. No thanks.
So, yes, let's set a standard: Free speech is too important to compromise.
If you have a couple of identical phrases, that's no big deal. When you have pages and pages of such phrases, it indicates a problem. Identical phrases happen by coincidence, but it is surprisingly rare.
I check my students' work regularly for plagiarism. If you use a bit of sense, and pick out a phrase that contains specifics but is not standard (i.e, not "the fourth amendment"), you almost *never* find an exact match.
Here's a negative example: take the first sentence of the previous paragraph: "I check my students' work regularly for plagiarism". Google currently returns zero exact matches for this phrase, even though it doesn't seem like anything particularly special.
Here's a positive example (sorry, it's in German): "ein Speichermedium, das wie eine herkömmliche magnetische Festplatte". This phrase appeared in a homework assignment last year, and returns zillions of Google hits. Examining the hits, and it turns out that they are all copied from the Wikipedia article describing SSDs. This isn't yet proof of plagiarism, but when I find 10 or 15 paragraphs have been copied into the homework, well, the situation becomes clear.
That seems odd, especially from younger engineers. In Germany, co-workers in a business situation go by "du" and first-names very quickly; certainly as soon as they are working on a project together. This is even true for geezers like me (far side of 50). It's just not completely automatic, like in English.
In English *everybody* is on a first-name basis, which is extreme in the other direction. When you first meet someone, why should you immediately pretend to be friends? Especially if one of you is in a position of authority over the other? Unless you are in a tiny company where you are in daily contact, addressing the CEO of your company as Mr./Ms. Smith seems like simple politeness. Calling everyone by their first-name is pretending to a familiarity that just doesn't exist.
The fun begins in German-speaking countries where companies use lots of English internally. Find a situation where the English-language culture requires first names, but the German-language culture requires last names, put in a mix of people speaking a mix of languages, and watch our heads explode.
Much as I dislike adding fees to inhibit the free market, the whole HFT world desperately needs them. Placing any bid or making any transaction should cost some small-but-tangible amount of money.
Even better, if more complex: add a fee based on how long a particular security is held. Less than a second, the fee is 1000% of the transaction value, more than a year, no fee at all, and scale for all values in the middle. HFT is legalized theft, and needs to be penalized out of existence.
The US Savings bonds remain the safest bonds in the world. They're also the only bonds worth buying. * * * There's still plenty of funds available to service the debt.
First, while there are too few of them, there are a number of countries in the world without debt problems. The US is one of the countries that is worst off, especially if you add in all of the unfunded pension liabilities (which the government generally avoids). Any country colored green, yellow or even orange in that map has its debt under control. Cross-reference for a trustworthy government, and you still have quite a selection of countries whose bonds are a much better choice than US Savings Bonds.
The only source of "funds" to pay off this massive debt are called "printing presses". While printing more money is, in fact, probably what will eventually happen, this will destroy private saving, cause massive inflation, and completely undermine the position of the dollar in the international markets.
tldr; The US is not the whole world. Have a look around, much of the rest of the world is doing a lot better than the US nowadays...
Typical, stupid patent that just happens to seem cool because it's about space.
Patents are supposed to provide a competitive advantage. Has Boeing marketed this? No. Do they have any intention of marketing it? Highly unlikely. The patent office ought to reject the application with prejudice, and charge Boeing extra for a frivolous application.
Not to mention the obvious practical problem: If there is enough gas that stay in place long enough to decay orbits, the gas itself becomes another kind of "space junk"
Microsoft doing something right, standing up to government and industry. The cognitive dissonance makes my brain hurt...
That the FTC sees "harm to consumers" just shows that the FTC is a revolving door for industry lobbyists. I mean, it's like putting every new number on the "do not call" list, and requiring consumers to opt-in to intrusive advertising. How horrible that would be! /sarcasm
Can anyone find a link to the study, rather than just the chart being tossed around? In particular, I wonder about countries not shown...
Planetary emergency? Total planetary ice is up (the arctic compensated in Antarctica). Ill effects from melting arctic ice: none. The only emergency was Hansen not having enough publicity...
There's a reason these companies came to the government: they could not get private sector financing. Why not? Most likely, because they have no convincing business case. However, they have good contacts in the government, so they get to waste your tax dollars.
Note these tidbits from a report written for the House Oversight Committee:
- "The Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that the DOE loan guarantee program was riddled with program inefficiencies"
- "the absence of government intervention the private sector builds the infrastructure to assess risk, the federal government has neither the expertise nor the incentive..."
- "...once the government subsidizes a portion of the market, the object of the subsidy becomes a
safe asset. Safety in the market, however, often means low return on investments, which is likely to turn venture
capitalists away. As a result, capital investments will likely dry out and innovation rates will go down"
- "loan guarantee programs are unable to save failing industries or to create millions of jobs,
because—he explained—the original lack of access to credit markets is caused by serious industrial problems, not
vice versa. If an applicant’s business plan cannot be made to show a profit under reasonable economic assumptions, private lenders are unlikely to issue a loan. And they would be right not to."
- "the systematic economic harm done by rewarding companies that forgo value creation in favor of pursuing
financial benefit through the political system creates long term consequences for our economy and our country"
The fact that the government is wasting less money on this cronyism than it is wasting on useless wars is irrelevant. It is still waste, and it is still our money they are wasting.
...pretty little things, the turbines at Windside. Do you notice how they provide all sorts of figures, except the generating capacity? There's a reason for having long honking blades - you gather power from a larger area. These generators aren't much wider than the post they sit on, and they aren't going to generate much power at all. The best you can get are these quotes:
"The core of our business is based on small turbines charging battery banks that power small DC systems"
And this incredibly misleading quote: "The biggest Windside wind turbine is currently WS-12. It is 6 meter high and its diameter is 2 meters. WS-12 produces annually approx. 8600 kWh at the average wind speed of 5 m/s". Note: kilowatt-hours, with no time period stated. They probably mean per year. So we may well be talking about a 1kw generator. Again, they most carefully do not say.
DNA screening only looks at a few characteristics. Take two random people, and there is about a 1-in-7000 chance that their DNA profiles will match. If you take the DNA profiles of 8000 people, it is quite likely that one of them will match the criminals profile. Meanwhile, the criminal will almost certainly find some way to avoid giving a sample. So you get to put some innocent person through hell, and for what?
The video isn't terrible sharp, but googling for better pictures, the new connector looks very much like micro-USB. Might it be that Apple is doing the right thing here?