Seriously this. Weights and Measures are the ones who keep honest people honest, by auditing and randomly testing anything that relies on metering. They are one making sure out of town people are not being cheated at the gas pump. If Comcast wants to measure and meter data usage, then they should be compelled to install a tested and sealed device that spits out the data usage to customer on premise.
What you speak of when it comes to siding with the consumers and breaking bundling is great in theory, but this is an example of prisoners dilemma. Any one cable company knows they can't take on Disney/Turner/etc in forcing unbundling because Disney can just smile, drop ESPN, and watch the cable/satTV customers go racing to one of the satellite TV providers or back to cable, and leaving the cable/satTV company screwed. Disney is the worst of the bundlers because they have ESPN, so they force all the other shit down the cable/sat companies throats.
Until the FCC rules such bundling to be illegal, the content companies can continue to play the various cable companies and sat TV companies against each other. This is the main idea behind the various mergers in providers, to reduce the number of entities that can played against each other. In terms of customer choice, it is awful, and is bullshit. But from a content negotiation point of view, the bigger you are, the bigger the club you can wield, and the content providers are effectively a cartel, so the transport providers are bulking up as well.
For this reason, Netflix and other streamers, once they overtake cable/satTV in terms of viewers, will get the harsh end of this same stick. Mind you, they know this, hence both Netflix and Amazon are becoming content creators themselves, to avoid the same fate of being held over the barrel. Disney could easily play Netflix against Amazon, and force bundling on both of them.
Someone apparently hasn't bothered to read Dune yet. Or take a civics course.
Could we theoretically get off fossil fuels? Yes. Could we do it overnight? No. The spice must flow. To unilaterally end the usage of fossil fuels in transportation would be to "End all commerce among the Great Houses". There simply is no replacement for fossil fuels when it comes to transportation. Especially once you consider the infrastructure.
This doesn't even begin to cover the power of fossil fuels, specifically oil, when it comes to medical technology. Did this kid get a vaccine? If so, he has benefitted from fossil fuels. Has he ever been to a hospital or a doctors office and been examined or received a physical? Again, fossil fuels made this possible to do. Before plastic, many many many kinds of procedures were simply not possible to do safely. Lost large amounts of blood? Die well, either from the blood loss or from playing Russian roullette with a blood transfusion (did these even exist prior to refrigeration and plastics?).
We may reach a day where we do not rely on fossil fuels for transportation. I very much hope so. But Rome was not built in a day, and neither will this effort to reduce fossil fuel usage. Fossil fuels have built over the last 2 centuries, they won't be undone in 1 decade.
Because they just got laid off? What people are trying to get across is that if you layoff 50% of your workforce, and reduce your price by 50%, you are creating a net loss, because the remaining 50% pay 50% less, and the other 50% you laid off pay NOTHING, because they now have 0 income, so the cost reduction does not benefit them what so ever. So yeah, you get some extra profit from reducing your cost by half, and yoru price by something less then half, but then you lose a ton in the volume side, when people stop buying your stuff entirely, being unable to afford it. This is most reflected in the F2P games, where it is EXPECTED that 60% or so of the playerbase will pay nothing, the 10% at the top will provide 50% of the revenue.
Fundamentally, with technology, we keep raising the bar on what is required to even participate in the market. There was a time a child could work and get a wage of some kind, and required almost no training. Now, many jobs require a ton of training and learning on the go just to become productive. All the main professions (Engineering, Law, Medicine, Accounting) take anywhere from 5-10 years to get fully up to speed to be productive. Trade based stuff takes almost as long, just getting the experience. Programming is nearly as bad, just masked by the fact that you can start it relatively early, but doing actual good software design is like a trade, it takes experience and some people have a talent for it.
Forget trusting the government to not abuse it, they won't be able to secure it. Once a random hacker grabs the keys, open season on all of banking.
Factions and their real world representations
on
The Politics of Star Trek
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I always felt Star Trek politics were pretty cut and dried, as each race either directly represented a specific country or ideology
Federation: Western world, especially the US, given the diversity of participants.
Romulan Empire: Soviet Union, semi paranoid society, fairly closed, state security is fairly powerful and ever present (Tal Shiar = KGB). Mix of military power and secrecy to further their agenda (The plot line of supplying weapons to the Duras is straight out of the Soviet playbook of arming allies with Soviet weapons, AK-47's being the most common).
Cardassian Empire: East Germany. Odo is quoted as saying "Not even the Tal Shiar can match the Obsidian Order" in the episode The Wire. Poor, even more paranoid, uses miltary expansion to acquire resources. Obsidian Order = Stasi
Ferengi = Captialism/Wall St. where everything has a price.
Tholians = Japanese. Exotic technology, very advanced, but xenophobic to the extreme.
Borg = China. More intent on taking then innovating, seen as homogeneous mob. Suppresses dissent for the collective/society good.
Dominion = Middle East. Average religious fanatic = Jem Hadar (believe in a god and is willing to die for them). Vorta = Mullahs (use the belief of the founders to enforce their will). Founders = Typical Middle East dictator/monarchy, who use religion purely as an excuse to maintain control, and don't care what so ever about their people and throw them away with little regard.
Bajorans = Israel. Home occupied, people murdered, scattered to the wind. Rebuilds.
Klingon Empire = Probably West Germany, due to overarching militarism, and pride. As seen in TNG, battleground for the ideologies of Romulans and the Federation, similar to the ideological battles in Germany, symbolized by the Berlin Wall. But really any place where there was combat over the ideolgies could represent here (Vietnam, Korea)
So the Fifth Element was a prophecy? I always wondered why we didn't do that more. As you say, let us skip the pretense of comfort and cram as many people aboard. Most people would prefer to skip the flight experience I imagine.
I would have to disagree. The Soviets were the Romulans. Large military power, relies on stealth and maneuvering to achieve foreign policy objectives (supplying the Duras sisters to undermine the Klingon Empire). Paranoid population where the intelligence service was also the secret police (Tal Shiar = KGB).
The Cardassians were the East Germans. Odo remarks that the Obsidian Order was even more ruthless and feared then the Tal Shiar, just as the Stasi were considered more dangerous/ruthless then the KGB. Also, like East Germany, the State was everything and the country was resource poor and relied on conquest/military rule to keep things together.
If he was assassinated in Russia, the Russians would probably have a word or two. Not to mention that it would open Pandora's box, because then they would have the moral justification to start killing any dissidents in the US (and the Chinese would do the same), basically declaring a free for all on political enemies world wide.
Actually, the main crop that is quite profitable but requires vast amounts of water is not rice, but nuts, specifically Almonds. Rice isn't a problem because the delta around the Sacramento river normally floods, so it doesn't take a ton of effort to rice farm up there. The issue is irrigating both snowmelt and river water to the central valley to grow almonds and other crops.
The grandparent was more alluding to the fact that by him taking the class possibly meant someone else couldn't. In many cases, classes are bound by how many students can take them. Especially in lower division/intro courses that people from many majors have to take (Calculus, Basic Science, etc.). So he "stole" an A or even a grade period if he was forced to take the class instead of letting him skip out of it and let another person take the class instead of him.
I don't know how much the parent knows, but it is known that various elements, either added or part of a nuclear reaction will "poison" it and absorb neutrons, limiting or completing killing the chain reaction. So I imagine if you contaminate the fissile material with such elements, it will make a chain reaction/detonation not possible. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_poison/
Pretty much this. I tend to get the news either by visiting the various news sites, local and national, or just using Google News. Along with Slashdot, Ars, and a few others, that pretty much covers everything.
Anecdotally, I never watch TV and I'm 27, part of a fairly large generation/cohort that has shown to be very unlikely to adopt TV. Ran into a classmate from high school and the story was the same, she doesn't even OWN a TV, let alone TV service. Like me she gets everything online.
On the non anecdotal, it is telling when they are routinely, for the last 4 years running that I know of, the winners or runner up to the most hated companies in the US, with their customer service rated below everyone in their industries (Both TV and Internet Service), and are rated below even banks. I think that really is amazing and has to be sinking in, that people rate their ISP and TV service below those who arguably have committed massive criminal behavior and can strip people of their homes. Mind you, in this day and age, being stripped of Internet Service, while no where near as bad as losing ones shelter, is a pretty crippling blow to economic and educational opportunity and in some cases, denies you even basic functioning life since some government functions are moving to be purely online. Even in the case where it is not, the sheer difference in what you have to devote time to without an internet connection represents a massive drawback (Imagine having to personally drive or transport to pay all bills, as well call business to ascertain information, as well as conduct any government business of any kind, such as taxes or drivers license).
To expand upon this. Oil made plastic possible, and with it, saving lives. Before plastic, we did not have a sanitary way to store or transport many chemicals and substances, among them, blood. With the advent of plastics, safe blood transfusions became possible, along with other transfusions. Burning the oil in a gas tank is a terrible waste, it is better used for the medical applications. So much of what you see and take for granted in a modern hospital is plastic and thus based on oil (Plastic Syringes, IV drips, Latex gloves, bags to hold transfusions, plastic tubes, the list goes on and on.)
Sadly no, thanks to AT&T, class actions against service providers are dead, since it is now legal to sign it away and agree to binding arbitration, which favors the corporation 90% of the time.
Umm... you CAN mod SC2 games, the editor ships with the game. To make a "Maphack" mod in the SC2 editor is literally 2-3 lines of code. So if you want to make a mod that does maphack, go right ahead, takes 0 effort and time. And can be applied to any melee map.
The mod in this case is designed purely to cheat in ranked ladder games, nothing more.
The range means you can fire it from beyond the horizon, so radar can never spot the firing. The speed means you have no way in hell of dodging it or shooting it down. And the kinetic energy of it means no armor will block it, short of armoring the ship to the point it can't move.
Just take aim at the power plant or armory of the other ship and you get a guaranteed kill. I think the key advantage is the inability to be dodged or shot down like a shell, but the range of a missile. Also, I imagine detecting a missile launch is easier then detecting a railgun firing.
You do realize, by the way Korean conglomerates are structured, that it is completely impossible for anyone to buy Samsung? You would have to buy out the entire Samsung Chaebol, which includes a large bank, large ship building company, large insurance company, and the electronics company, which combined represents like 1/5th of Korean GDP
In that case, Amazon simply declares itself to be "in" a state with 0% sales taxes and everyone avoids sales tax, thus reducing every state sales taxes to basically 0%?
The problem is that everything after Half Life 2 Episode 2 is not a Valve game, they were indie games that pitched their idea and got funding from Valve. So that puts the last actual in house developed game by Valve around 2005.
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously this. Weights and Measures are the ones who keep honest people honest, by auditing and randomly testing anything that relies on metering. They are one making sure out of town people are not being cheated at the gas pump. If Comcast wants to measure and meter data usage, then they should be compelled to install a tested and sealed device that spits out the data usage to customer on premise.
What you speak of when it comes to siding with the consumers and breaking bundling is great in theory, but this is an example of prisoners dilemma. Any one cable company knows they can't take on Disney/Turner/etc in forcing unbundling because Disney can just smile, drop ESPN, and watch the cable/satTV customers go racing to one of the satellite TV providers or back to cable, and leaving the cable/satTV company screwed. Disney is the worst of the bundlers because they have ESPN, so they force all the other shit down the cable/sat companies throats.
Until the FCC rules such bundling to be illegal, the content companies can continue to play the various cable companies and sat TV companies against each other. This is the main idea behind the various mergers in providers, to reduce the number of entities that can played against each other. In terms of customer choice, it is awful, and is bullshit. But from a content negotiation point of view, the bigger you are, the bigger the club you can wield, and the content providers are effectively a cartel, so the transport providers are bulking up as well.
For this reason, Netflix and other streamers, once they overtake cable/satTV in terms of viewers, will get the harsh end of this same stick. Mind you, they know this, hence both Netflix and Amazon are becoming content creators themselves, to avoid the same fate of being held over the barrel. Disney could easily play Netflix against Amazon, and force bundling on both of them.
Someone apparently hasn't bothered to read Dune yet. Or take a civics course.
Could we theoretically get off fossil fuels? Yes. Could we do it overnight? No. The spice must flow. To unilaterally end the usage of fossil fuels in transportation would be to "End all commerce among the Great Houses". There simply is no replacement for fossil fuels when it comes to transportation. Especially once you consider the infrastructure.
This doesn't even begin to cover the power of fossil fuels, specifically oil, when it comes to medical technology. Did this kid get a vaccine? If so, he has benefitted from fossil fuels. Has he ever been to a hospital or a doctors office and been examined or received a physical? Again, fossil fuels made this possible to do. Before plastic, many many many kinds of procedures were simply not possible to do safely. Lost large amounts of blood? Die well, either from the blood loss or from playing Russian roullette with a blood transfusion (did these even exist prior to refrigeration and plastics?).
We may reach a day where we do not rely on fossil fuels for transportation. I very much hope so. But Rome was not built in a day, and neither will this effort to reduce fossil fuel usage. Fossil fuels have built over the last 2 centuries, they won't be undone in 1 decade.
Because they just got laid off? What people are trying to get across is that if you layoff 50% of your workforce, and reduce your price by 50%, you are creating a net loss, because the remaining 50% pay 50% less, and the other 50% you laid off pay NOTHING, because they now have 0 income, so the cost reduction does not benefit them what so ever. So yeah, you get some extra profit from reducing your cost by half, and yoru price by something less then half, but then you lose a ton in the volume side, when people stop buying your stuff entirely, being unable to afford it. This is most reflected in the F2P games, where it is EXPECTED that 60% or so of the playerbase will pay nothing, the 10% at the top will provide 50% of the revenue.
Fundamentally, with technology, we keep raising the bar on what is required to even participate in the market. There was a time a child could work and get a wage of some kind, and required almost no training. Now, many jobs require a ton of training and learning on the go just to become productive. All the main professions (Engineering, Law, Medicine, Accounting) take anywhere from 5-10 years to get fully up to speed to be productive. Trade based stuff takes almost as long, just getting the experience. Programming is nearly as bad, just masked by the fact that you can start it relatively early, but doing actual good software design is like a trade, it takes experience and some people have a talent for it.
If the can afford them, which, after being laid off, they can't. Doesn't matter how cheap something is, if my discretionary income is 0.
Forget trusting the government to not abuse it, they won't be able to secure it. Once a random hacker grabs the keys, open season on all of banking.
I always felt Star Trek politics were pretty cut and dried, as each race either directly represented a specific country or ideology Federation: Western world, especially the US, given the diversity of participants. Romulan Empire: Soviet Union, semi paranoid society, fairly closed, state security is fairly powerful and ever present (Tal Shiar = KGB). Mix of military power and secrecy to further their agenda (The plot line of supplying weapons to the Duras is straight out of the Soviet playbook of arming allies with Soviet weapons, AK-47's being the most common). Cardassian Empire: East Germany. Odo is quoted as saying "Not even the Tal Shiar can match the Obsidian Order" in the episode The Wire. Poor, even more paranoid, uses miltary expansion to acquire resources. Obsidian Order = Stasi Ferengi = Captialism/Wall St. where everything has a price. Tholians = Japanese. Exotic technology, very advanced, but xenophobic to the extreme. Borg = China. More intent on taking then innovating, seen as homogeneous mob. Suppresses dissent for the collective/society good. Dominion = Middle East. Average religious fanatic = Jem Hadar (believe in a god and is willing to die for them). Vorta = Mullahs (use the belief of the founders to enforce their will). Founders = Typical Middle East dictator/monarchy, who use religion purely as an excuse to maintain control, and don't care what so ever about their people and throw them away with little regard. Bajorans = Israel. Home occupied, people murdered, scattered to the wind. Rebuilds. Klingon Empire = Probably West Germany, due to overarching militarism, and pride. As seen in TNG, battleground for the ideologies of Romulans and the Federation, similar to the ideological battles in Germany, symbolized by the Berlin Wall. But really any place where there was combat over the ideolgies could represent here (Vietnam, Korea)
So the Fifth Element was a prophecy? I always wondered why we didn't do that more. As you say, let us skip the pretense of comfort and cram as many people aboard. Most people would prefer to skip the flight experience I imagine.
I would have to disagree. The Soviets were the Romulans. Large military power, relies on stealth and maneuvering to achieve foreign policy objectives (supplying the Duras sisters to undermine the Klingon Empire). Paranoid population where the intelligence service was also the secret police (Tal Shiar = KGB). The Cardassians were the East Germans. Odo remarks that the Obsidian Order was even more ruthless and feared then the Tal Shiar, just as the Stasi were considered more dangerous/ruthless then the KGB. Also, like East Germany, the State was everything and the country was resource poor and relied on conquest/military rule to keep things together.
If he was assassinated in Russia, the Russians would probably have a word or two. Not to mention that it would open Pandora's box, because then they would have the moral justification to start killing any dissidents in the US (and the Chinese would do the same), basically declaring a free for all on political enemies world wide.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contempt_of_Congress/ says otherwise. Although this is the US version, I can only imagine Australia (and most legislative bodies) have similar powers.
Actually, the main crop that is quite profitable but requires vast amounts of water is not rice, but nuts, specifically Almonds. Rice isn't a problem because the delta around the Sacramento river normally floods, so it doesn't take a ton of effort to rice farm up there. The issue is irrigating both snowmelt and river water to the central valley to grow almonds and other crops.
The grandparent was more alluding to the fact that by him taking the class possibly meant someone else couldn't. In many cases, classes are bound by how many students can take them. Especially in lower division/intro courses that people from many majors have to take (Calculus, Basic Science, etc.). So he "stole" an A or even a grade period if he was forced to take the class instead of letting him skip out of it and let another person take the class instead of him.
I don't know how much the parent knows, but it is known that various elements, either added or part of a nuclear reaction will "poison" it and absorb neutrons, limiting or completing killing the chain reaction. So I imagine if you contaminate the fissile material with such elements, it will make a chain reaction/detonation not possible.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_poison/
Seriously. Does no one read Mythical Man Month anymore? This stuff has been done to death for ages now...
Pretty much this. I tend to get the news either by visiting the various news sites, local and national, or just using Google News. Along with Slashdot, Ars, and a few others, that pretty much covers everything.
Anecdotally, I never watch TV and I'm 27, part of a fairly large generation/cohort that has shown to be very unlikely to adopt TV. Ran into a classmate from high school and the story was the same, she doesn't even OWN a TV, let alone TV service. Like me she gets everything online. On the non anecdotal, it is telling when they are routinely, for the last 4 years running that I know of, the winners or runner up to the most hated companies in the US, with their customer service rated below everyone in their industries (Both TV and Internet Service), and are rated below even banks. I think that really is amazing and has to be sinking in, that people rate their ISP and TV service below those who arguably have committed massive criminal behavior and can strip people of their homes. Mind you, in this day and age, being stripped of Internet Service, while no where near as bad as losing ones shelter, is a pretty crippling blow to economic and educational opportunity and in some cases, denies you even basic functioning life since some government functions are moving to be purely online. Even in the case where it is not, the sheer difference in what you have to devote time to without an internet connection represents a massive drawback (Imagine having to personally drive or transport to pay all bills, as well call business to ascertain information, as well as conduct any government business of any kind, such as taxes or drivers license).
To expand upon this. Oil made plastic possible, and with it, saving lives. Before plastic, we did not have a sanitary way to store or transport many chemicals and substances, among them, blood. With the advent of plastics, safe blood transfusions became possible, along with other transfusions. Burning the oil in a gas tank is a terrible waste, it is better used for the medical applications. So much of what you see and take for granted in a modern hospital is plastic and thus based on oil (Plastic Syringes, IV drips, Latex gloves, bags to hold transfusions, plastic tubes, the list goes on and on.)
Sadly no, thanks to AT&T, class actions against service providers are dead, since it is now legal to sign it away and agree to binding arbitration, which favors the corporation 90% of the time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AT%26T_Mobility_v._Concepcion/
And what do you say when the wealthy becomes the government and impose the uniformity anyhow? Welcome to feudalism.
Umm... you CAN mod SC2 games, the editor ships with the game. To make a "Maphack" mod in the SC2 editor is literally 2-3 lines of code. So if you want to make a mod that does maphack, go right ahead, takes 0 effort and time. And can be applied to any melee map. The mod in this case is designed purely to cheat in ranked ladder games, nothing more.
The range means you can fire it from beyond the horizon, so radar can never spot the firing. The speed means you have no way in hell of dodging it or shooting it down. And the kinetic energy of it means no armor will block it, short of armoring the ship to the point it can't move. Just take aim at the power plant or armory of the other ship and you get a guaranteed kill. I think the key advantage is the inability to be dodged or shot down like a shell, but the range of a missile. Also, I imagine detecting a missile launch is easier then detecting a railgun firing.
You do realize, by the way Korean conglomerates are structured, that it is completely impossible for anyone to buy Samsung? You would have to buy out the entire Samsung Chaebol, which includes a large bank, large ship building company, large insurance company, and the electronics company, which combined represents like 1/5th of Korean GDP
In that case, Amazon simply declares itself to be "in" a state with 0% sales taxes and everyone avoids sales tax, thus reducing every state sales taxes to basically 0%?
The problem is that everything after Half Life 2 Episode 2 is not a Valve game, they were indie games that pitched their idea and got funding from Valve. So that puts the last actual in house developed game by Valve around 2005.