And once upon a time there was much less land above water. Specifically this was back when the Earth had a far warmer climate and no permanent ice caps. For that matter, Mars, Earth, and Venus all have wildly different topographies, chemical compositions, rotational rates, and natural satellites. I'd imagine that we'd really have to fuck the Earth up hardcore to make it entirely uninhabitable and worthless and to force us to consider colonizing Mars or Venus.
Mars has been geologically dead for billions of years and the oldest terrain on Venus is less than a billion years old. This is important because the Earth has had four billion years of continuous volcanism, physical weathering, and chemical weathering to concentrate useful elements. This is less so the case on Mars and Venus, which are certainly far more homogeneous in their distribution of elements than the Earth. This would present a problem for one attempting to obtain something critical but not too rare like titanium, useful as paint and in its metallic form. Who wants to build and maintain machines that would need to excavate and process cubic miles of rock for a small quantity of titanium? It gets worse when one considers that iridium is orders of magnitude more rare than titanium. So no prospecting on Mars, yet or maybe ever.
Don't go looking to far into the future, global warming is here, and is already lowering your quality of life. The technology to significantly reduce carbon dioxide emissions is also here already and is not something that needs to be developed yet. You may have to be willing to buy the car that handles 95% of your car related needs that uses a quarter the gas as one that fills all your needs. For the other 5%, renting a vehicle may help.
If I understand you correctly, you seem to be saying that contracts should always be enforceable as long as both sides agree. Which is a bit stupid, contracts can be misleading and/or unconscionable. Fortunately, contracts are regulated by the government and are invalidated by the court system.
For instance, a contract with Verizon that includes a clause written in microprint unreadable to the naked eye as part of an innocent looking dividing line that allows Verizon to flay off your skin while you are conscious at any time at their option would be both misleading and unconscionable. In this case, the clause with the microprint is present is readable with the proper equipment, and you did agree with the language, so that would be an entirely enforceable contract, right?
The argument that the government is bought off with lobbyists is not an argument for stronger corporations. It's an argument for stronger government.
Alternatively, you could be advocating a weaker corporation, one with fewer rights and more obligations. This does not immediately lead to stronger government, just a government stronger than corporations.
I'd be happy with either, the government is (ideally) responsible to and must answer to its citizens on election day. A corporation only (theoretically) answers to its shareholders based on the amount of shares each shareholder owns. Guess which is most likely to be more responsive to reasonable complaints? I'd say the government.
Note: I do not support more regulations for the sake of more regulations, and a reasonable complaint is not a complaint about the existence of income taxes or any spurious complaints on health care reform.
Of course this is meaningless if global warming changes weather patterns and causes droughts on a scale similar to the Dust Bowl in the 1930's or worse. Did I also mention that for unclear reasons the Central US during the 20th century had an unusually low number of Dust Bowl scale droughts as compared to previous centuries? Heck, the drought during the 1930's was short when compared to droughts during previous centuries.
In any case, I am not aware of any successful historical violent insurrection that afterward didn't end up with immediate results that were suboptimal. The Continental Congress formed after the American Revolutionary War was weak and nearly useless. It was also on its way to collapse and leading towards a civil war. Fortunately, the current Constitution was written with an effective central government. The results in this case are the exception rather than the rule. The French Revolution, the Khmer Rouge, and the actual American Civil War are more likely results from a violent insurrection. Theoretical NRA members trying a rebellion today would be more delusional than the southerners who attempted to secede. At least the Confederacy had a decent supply of small arms and some heavy weapons. The Confederacy had little industrial capacity, unlike the Union which had a massive amount and with the effective Union blockade able to prevent imports to the Confederacy, the Civil War's outcome was assured before it began.
By contrast, a poorly regulated militia today would have all sorts of different weapons with no common parts making logistics a nightmare. They would have no meaning no aircraft, no tanks, and no armored off-road vehicles. Worse, they would have no way to produce or obtain more equipment. After a winter or two in the freezing cold and after losing all engagements, I would imagine a warm bed in prison might not sound so bad.
Try an estimate that projects cost out a reasonable timeframe, like 10 years. Attempting to project a cost beyond that date really isn't important. No points for wild extrapolations 60 years into the future.
Also, what date were those projections made? Bonus: were the dollars you mention adjusted for inflation so that both figures had dollars that could buy the same goods or at the same price? Or, are we talking about $12 billion in 1933 dollars, which were worth far more than $12 billion in 1990? Also, results from an estimation done at least thirty years ago for a date twenty years in the past are meaningless in a discussion on a recent estimation. No, it is unreasonable to determine the credibility or lack there of in a current estimation based on a report done at least thirty years ago.
Also, Social Security and Medicare are funded for at least the next 20 years. Beyond that time raising the payroll tax by 3% to 4% and increasing the income exemption or benefit cuts like means testing can ensure their survival into the next century.
I would expect health care reform will cost in the trillions, but in 2040 dollars which will have undergone inflation at a similar rate of inflation analogous to the way current dollars have changed in value due to inflation since 1980.
What you are talking about magnitude of the figure which is not relevant to the situation because it lacks contexts and cannot be compared with other figures from different years. I am talking about something meaningful: constant dollar figures which have context and can be compared to one another reasonably. Percent of GDP is another good figure to use as well.
Actually the pinkie finger is very important, it is prehensile and thus can move away from the ring finger, which makes it extremely useful for grasping objects. IIRC, this is also a trait unique to humans.
That is the CBO report for the health care reform bill, I see no $1 trillion figure contained in said report. Back up you claim with a link directly from the CBO or retract your claim.
95% (literally) of the asbestos ever used is of a type known as crysotile. Crysotile fibers are hollow and fibers shorter than 1.5 inches are quickly physically broken up in the lungs by the immune system and excreted. Fibers longer than 1.5 inches can get stuck in the bronchii and are carcinogenic. However, no processed crysotile with fibers that long are sold anymore. Only smaller fiber sizes are sold currently. On the other hand, the other types of asbestos are amphiboles and have a totally different fiber structure that is solid and that has ends that will flake off into microscopic pieces are are carcinogenic. It may be good to mention at this point that natural asbestos deposits are common and asbestos fibers of both types are probably something you inhale on a regular basis. On the other hand, if you live in the US and have vermiculite insulation in your home, and depending on the age tremolite asbestos, an amphibole, may be present. Surprisingly, asbestos is not like a toxic or radioactive substance and is safer if left alone, assuming it is in an enclosed space, like an attic, that is left undisturbed. Note, this changes is vermiculite insulation end up in your living room. When and if asbestos needs to be removed, hire trained professionals with the proper equipment.
Also, fiberglass insulation isn't necessarily any better for your lungs than asbestos.
The coverage provisions will have a net cost of $624 billion for the ten years from 2010 to 2019, and a gross cost of $875 billion over the same ten years, the $624 billion number is what is actually relevant. However, with new taxes and other cost savings the bill would implement, the total effect of the bill on the budget deficit would be to lower the deficit by saving $118 billion over ten years. On the other hand the CBO estimate in 2003 for the bill that established Medicare Part D stated the new (at the time) benefits would have outlays (costs) of $460.7 billion from 2004 to 2013. That is here:
Medicare does not negotiate payment rates, it mandates payment rates. Larger states with more House members and those with senators that have been or were in Congress longer have much higher reimbursement rates than other states. It gets pretty bad in states with high amounts of reimbursement per patient, specifically Texas and the Deep South, the performance of this expensive medical care as measured by the mortality rate of Medicare patients is awful. These high costs are due in large part to the excessive reimbursement rates of these areas and the Health Care Bill is supposed to remedy this imbalance, which should be a huge chunk of savings.
Yeah, the maps are from 2005 and 2006, but Katrina and the other hurricanes probably had few effects in terms of mortality rates in northern Alabama, Oklahoma, and central Louisiana.
Well there is noneconomic compensation as well. Ego inflation anyone?
Also not all politicians or even a majority, but instead a small minority are actually corrupt. You are free to think that all politicians or just those you disagree with are corrupt and rage indiscriminately about it. However, at that point you are just looking for rage porn and engaging in mental masturbation.
Oddly enough I had nothing but trouble with the Toshiba stack. I have an older Microsoft keyboard that uses Bluetooth 1.1 along with a high powered Class 1 Bluetooth 2.0 adapter from Cambridge Silicon Radio and it dropped keystrokes like crazy and the connection would frequently break and need to be reconnected manual with the Toshiba stack. The keyboard seems to work fine with the Bluetooth stack in Windows XP, but the stack in XP is limited, but actually works as intended. This computer does have an Intel ICH7 southbridge, which has trouble connecting to USB bluetooth adapters behind a USB hub, however, my BT adapter is connected directly to the computer and is not behind a USB hub.
And then there is the FCC, which last year made states and municipalities approve new antenna installations within 90 days assuming the plans follow the laws and regulations already in place by the federal government. Some cases applications for antenna installation had been delayed as long as nine years by municipalities. Sometimes, it was paranoia about health effects, sometimes idiotic concerns about the antenna's effect on the aesthetics of the area, and obviously some good old fashioned blocking of competition by established players.
Keep in mind that only if a nuclear weapon is detonated in the stratosphere, the EMP effects become important, but this means that no damage will be caused on the ground by that nuclear weapon. A nuclear weapon detonated on the ground or close to ground level will have EMP effect in a small area, but the effects of the blast wave, radiation, and heat from the explosion will likely destroy or collapse any unhardened structures and their contents. Any survivors would be badly injured and in an area that was still radioactive and more concerned about leaving the area and receiving medical care. Those survivors with the highest radiation exposure levels would be dead in a few days anyway. With this in mind, the EMP effects are of negligible concern in ground level detonations.
Oddly enough, it is actually significantly more difficult to get decent signal quality out of HDMI as than analog VGA or DisplayPort. I suppose it would be bad to mention that the only major difference between HDMI and VGA is that in HDMI the three color signals are encoded in a crappy digital encoding along with an additional clock signal in the previously mentioned encoding scheme. Note that clock signal in HDMI is not used for the vertical and horizontal sync pulses, those work the same as they do in VGA. I would think that if this goes through, Silicon Image and friends will have questions to answer from the US FTC, the EC, and maybe even the Japanese JFTC. It isn't like a market structured like this can last very long without governmental inquiry or a situation where the entire set of 40-bit encryption keys used in HDMI are uncovered after being brute forced in a trivially easy fashion.
Then again, it isn't even like HDMI does any good for that matter, the issues with the wide open hole of BD-J authentication and encryption make recording a file from even a decrypted HDMI output port pointlessly difficult.
What about those of us who are tall simply due to genetics? The seats in airplanes don't fit very well when one is 6'7" (2m). Of course, one could say this shouldn't matter, excessive height is not a choice and obesity is often not a choice or a failure of will, and thus both should be considered disabilities. In the US and under the Americans with Disabilities Act, accommodations MUST be offered at no additional charge for those with disabilities at public facilities. Allowing an airline to charge someone extra because the airline has arranged their seats so that 15% of the population cannot not fit into a seat is something that is the airline's problem, not the passengers. This may explain why individuals who cannot fit in one seat on Delta flights are now able to receive an additional seat at no cost.
I'd also add that depending on the task, the cheap solution would be slower if the task had serial parts that could not be separated into threads. For instance if a task takes 1,000 cycles and all of the instructions must be done in a precise order, a quad-core processor running at 2.0 GHz would be slower and be of lower utility than a single core 4.0 GHz processor, assuming all other things are equal. The quad-core ends up working at half the speed of the single core and the quad-core also has the penalty of three idle cores draining electricity.
I would also imagine that these newer POWER7 processors carry over the decimal floating point units present in the POWER6. Yes, floating point units that operate in base-10 as opposed to base-2. Not necessarily of much value for scientific purposes, but great for preserving accuracy in financial calculations. One gets to avoid the base-10 to base-2 conversion and the conversion back that can severely hurt accuracy with only a binary floating point unit. One also gets a nice speed up by doing decimal math in hardware as opposed to the other option of software decimal math.
Assembly is useful for creating self-modifying code, which finds at least some use in emulation. However, that still doesn't make x86 assembler and self-modifying code anything other than abominations. Writing code in assembly when the same code in C would be at least 90% as fast should qualify one for immediate execution by firing squad.
Yes, there may be an idea or two that are currently considered "crackpot" that will eventually become mainstream, however, there are a a million other ideas that will never leave the "crackpot" category. The small number of ideas that end up making this transition still requires evidence to make that move. In the case of global warming, one or two isolated mistakes or revisions out of a million pieces of supporting evidence does not invalidate global warming and certainly does not indicate that either nothing is happening or that the world is cooling.
Umm, I'm a bit confused on the local benefits to being a tax haven for both tax cheats and "legitimate" uses, perhaps you could help me. Even though cash might flow into a location that might act as a tax haven assuming it has a currency with a history of stability, which Iceland's currency does not currently, please explain why it follows that being a tax haven is a good thing. Tax cheats and tax avoiders really only want to put there money where their home country will not tax it, they really don't care if the bank is in the South Pacific, North Atlantic, or Central Asia, they also don't care about the local economy. Also, wouldn't it seem likely that the tax haven that attempts to tax any of that money will find the money in those accounts moved to another country, its always a race to the bottom when it comes to being a tax haven. I'm also going to guess that the terms "Chicago School" and "Milton Friedman" could be used a curse words these days in Iceland. Iceland got in its current mess by diligently following practices described by the both the Chicago School and Milton Friedman, these practices ended up putting Iceland in its current predicament, trying the same techniques again because they weren't done "properly" strikes me as a bad idea, an economic policy should have some amount of robustness built into its system. The type of "economics" espoused by the Chicago School seems to result in an unstable, fragile system in practice, even though the doctrine may state otherwise. Then again, it would be hard to get tax cheats and tax avoiders to put money into banks in a country that dealt recently with a collapse of its banking sector due to mismanagement.
By the way, does anyone know if there was a plan to build an aluminum smelter in Iceland, if it ever ended up being built, and if the smelter is currently in production if it was built? Oddly enough, even a single reasonably sized aluminum smelter using the geothermal power available in Iceland would be much more profitable, directly employ far more people, and would produce far more economic activity locally in Iceland than a rinky-dink data center on an old NATO base.
This is probably not the time to mention it, but be aware of the total mess that consists of the x86 ISA with its various extensions. It doesn't help that Intel has tried intentionally to make the x86 ISA more difficult to use and worse (SSE2, SSE3, and SSSE3) or even through its own incompetence or stubbornness when Intel made the crappy 80387 FPU. Using a stack based design poorly suited for an FPU used in the 387 doesn't say much for Intel's architectural design prowess.
What, besides shutting down leaky old nuclear plants, could be done to better control release of tritium into the environment?"
I'd say that one thing that could be done would be to prohibit above ground nuclear tests, of course that has been done already. Aerial nuclear tests produced and spread far more Tritium than any tiny amounts of Tritium released by nuclear reactors that end up diluted over a large area. Any radioactivity from these cases ends up being far below background levels when spread out.
Brain drain sucks even worse for the people who live in the country the person receiving a PhD emigrated from. For instance, there are more doctors in the born in Ethiopia living in just the Washington, DC area than there are doctors in the entire country of Ethiopia. How does a country recover from such a tremendous brain drain and address major social ills like rampant poverty, famine, and endemic corruption when the very people who might be best able to assist with their own experience and knowledge do not return to their native country because there is nothing to return to and no reasonable job prospects? Why must the US retain as many of their foreign born individuals who received their PhD in the US, when under the right conditions these PhD holders could help their own country far more than any kind of work they do in the US? I'm not suggesting we force these people to return or even expect them to return, especially when there is nothing to return to. But then again I see nothing wrong with ti US offering grants and other forms of aid to underdeveloped countries so that they can improve their situation with respect to development and improve the local economy. This would come with the explicit expectation that these governments spend the money wisely, and steps are taken so that as little money as possible is wasted by corruption.
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And once upon a time there was much less land above water. Specifically this was back when the Earth had a far warmer climate and no permanent ice caps. For that matter, Mars, Earth, and Venus all have wildly different topographies, chemical compositions, rotational rates, and natural satellites. I'd imagine that we'd really have to fuck the Earth up hardcore to make it entirely uninhabitable and worthless and to force us to consider colonizing Mars or Venus.
Mars has been geologically dead for billions of years and the oldest terrain on Venus is less than a billion years old. This is important because the Earth has had four billion years of continuous volcanism, physical weathering, and chemical weathering to concentrate useful elements. This is less so the case on Mars and Venus, which are certainly far more homogeneous in their distribution of elements than the Earth. This would present a problem for one attempting to obtain something critical but not too rare like titanium, useful as paint and in its metallic form. Who wants to build and maintain machines that would need to excavate and process cubic miles of rock for a small quantity of titanium? It gets worse when one considers that iridium is orders of magnitude more rare than titanium. So no prospecting on Mars, yet or maybe ever.
Don't go looking to far into the future, global warming is here, and is already lowering your quality of life. The technology to significantly reduce carbon dioxide emissions is also here already and is not something that needs to be developed yet. You may have to be willing to buy the car that handles 95% of your car related needs that uses a quarter the gas as one that fills all your needs. For the other 5%, renting a vehicle may help.
If I understand you correctly, you seem to be saying that contracts should always be enforceable as long as both sides agree. Which is a bit stupid, contracts can be misleading and/or unconscionable. Fortunately, contracts are regulated by the government and are invalidated by the court system.
For instance, a contract with Verizon that includes a clause written in microprint unreadable to the naked eye as part of an innocent looking dividing line that allows Verizon to flay off your skin while you are conscious at any time at their option would be both misleading and unconscionable. In this case, the clause with the microprint is present is readable with the proper equipment, and you did agree with the language, so that would be an entirely enforceable contract, right?
The argument that the government is bought off with lobbyists is not an argument for stronger corporations. It's an argument for stronger government.
Alternatively, you could be advocating a weaker corporation, one with fewer rights and more obligations. This does not immediately lead to stronger government, just a government stronger than corporations.
I'd be happy with either, the government is (ideally) responsible to and must answer to its citizens on election day. A corporation only (theoretically) answers to its shareholders based on the amount of shares each shareholder owns. Guess which is most likely to be more responsive to reasonable complaints? I'd say the government.
Note: I do not support more regulations for the sake of more regulations, and a reasonable complaint is not a complaint about the existence of income taxes or any spurious complaints on health care reform.
Of course this is meaningless if global warming changes weather patterns and causes droughts on a scale similar to the Dust Bowl in the 1930's or worse. Did I also mention that for unclear reasons the Central US during the 20th century had an unusually low number of Dust Bowl scale droughts as compared to previous centuries? Heck, the drought during the 1930's was short when compared to droughts during previous centuries.
In any case, I am not aware of any successful historical violent insurrection that afterward didn't end up with immediate results that were suboptimal. The Continental Congress formed after the American Revolutionary War was weak and nearly useless. It was also on its way to collapse and leading towards a civil war. Fortunately, the current Constitution was written with an effective central government. The results in this case are the exception rather than the rule. The French Revolution, the Khmer Rouge, and the actual American Civil War are more likely results from a violent insurrection. Theoretical NRA members trying a rebellion today would be more delusional than the southerners who attempted to secede. At least the Confederacy had a decent supply of small arms and some heavy weapons. The Confederacy had little industrial capacity, unlike the Union which had a massive amount and with the effective Union blockade able to prevent imports to the Confederacy, the Civil War's outcome was assured before it began.
By contrast, a poorly regulated militia today would have all sorts of different weapons with no common parts making logistics a nightmare. They would have no meaning no aircraft, no tanks, and no armored off-road vehicles. Worse, they would have no way to produce or obtain more equipment. After a winter or two in the freezing cold and after losing all engagements, I would imagine a warm bed in prison might not sound so bad.
LINK!
Try an estimate that projects cost out a reasonable timeframe, like 10 years. Attempting to project a cost beyond that date really isn't important. No points for wild extrapolations 60 years into the future.
Also, what date were those projections made? Bonus: were the dollars you mention adjusted for inflation so that both figures had dollars that could buy the same goods or at the same price? Or, are we talking about $12 billion in 1933 dollars, which were worth far more than $12 billion in 1990? Also, results from an estimation done at least thirty years ago for a date twenty years in the past are meaningless in a discussion on a recent estimation. No, it is unreasonable to determine the credibility or lack there of in a current estimation based on a report done at least thirty years ago.
Also, Social Security and Medicare are funded for at least the next 20 years. Beyond that time raising the payroll tax by 3% to 4% and increasing the income exemption or benefit cuts like means testing can ensure their survival into the next century.
I would expect health care reform will cost in the trillions, but in 2040 dollars which will have undergone inflation at a similar rate of inflation analogous to the way current dollars have changed in value due to inflation since 1980.
What you are talking about magnitude of the figure which is not relevant to the situation because it lacks contexts and cannot be compared with other figures from different years. I am talking about something meaningful: constant dollar figures which have context and can be compared to one another reasonably. Percent of GDP is another good figure to use as well.
Actually the pinkie finger is very important, it is prehensile and thus can move away from the ring finger, which makes it extremely useful for grasping objects. IIRC, this is also a trait unique to humans.
That is the CBO report for the health care reform bill, I see no $1 trillion figure contained in said report. Back up you claim with a link directly from the CBO or retract your claim.
Try asbestos insulation.
Head, desk. Desk, head. HEADDESK!
95% (literally) of the asbestos ever used is of a type known as crysotile. Crysotile fibers are hollow and fibers shorter than 1.5 inches are quickly physically broken up in the lungs by the immune system and excreted. Fibers longer than 1.5 inches can get stuck in the bronchii and are carcinogenic. However, no processed crysotile with fibers that long are sold anymore. Only smaller fiber sizes are sold currently. On the other hand, the other types of asbestos are amphiboles and have a totally different fiber structure that is solid and that has ends that will flake off into microscopic pieces are are carcinogenic. It may be good to mention at this point that natural asbestos deposits are common and asbestos fibers of both types are probably something you inhale on a regular basis. On the other hand, if you live in the US and have vermiculite insulation in your home, and depending on the age tremolite asbestos, an amphibole, may be present. Surprisingly, asbestos is not like a toxic or radioactive substance and is safer if left alone, assuming it is in an enclosed space, like an attic, that is left undisturbed. Note, this changes is vermiculite insulation end up in your living room. When and if asbestos needs to be removed, hire trained professionals with the proper equipment.
Also, fiberglass insulation isn't necessarily any better for your lungs than asbestos.
[citation needed]
This would be the CBO's forecast:
http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/113xx/doc11307/Reid_Letter_HR3590.pdf
The coverage provisions will have a net cost of $624 billion for the ten years from 2010 to 2019, and a gross cost of $875 billion over the same ten years, the $624 billion number is what is actually relevant. However, with new taxes and other cost savings the bill would implement, the total effect of the bill on the budget deficit would be to lower the deficit by saving $118 billion over ten years. On the other hand the CBO estimate in 2003 for the bill that established Medicare Part D stated the new (at the time) benefits would have outlays (costs) of $460.7 billion from 2004 to 2013. That is here:
http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/44xx/doc4468/hr1s1.pdf
Medicare does not negotiate payment rates, it mandates payment rates. Larger states with more House members and those with senators that have been or were in Congress longer have much higher reimbursement rates than other states. It gets pretty bad in states with high amounts of reimbursement per patient, specifically Texas and the Deep South, the performance of this expensive medical care as measured by the mortality rate of Medicare patients is awful. These high costs are due in large part to the excessive reimbursement rates of these areas and the Health Care Bill is supposed to remedy this imbalance, which should be a huge chunk of savings.
http://www.raconline.org/maps/#medicare
Yeah, the maps are from 2005 and 2006, but Katrina and the other hurricanes probably had few effects in terms of mortality rates in northern Alabama, Oklahoma, and central Louisiana.
Well there is noneconomic compensation as well. Ego inflation anyone?
Also not all politicians or even a majority, but instead a small minority are actually corrupt. You are free to think that all politicians or just those you disagree with are corrupt and rage indiscriminately about it. However, at that point you are just looking for rage porn and engaging in mental masturbation.
Oddly enough I had nothing but trouble with the Toshiba stack. I have an older Microsoft keyboard that uses Bluetooth 1.1 along with a high powered Class 1 Bluetooth 2.0 adapter from Cambridge Silicon Radio and it dropped keystrokes like crazy and the connection would frequently break and need to be reconnected manual with the Toshiba stack. The keyboard seems to work fine with the Bluetooth stack in Windows XP, but the stack in XP is limited, but actually works as intended. This computer does have an Intel ICH7 southbridge, which has trouble connecting to USB bluetooth adapters behind a USB hub, however, my BT adapter is connected directly to the computer and is not behind a USB hub.
And then there is the FCC, which last year made states and municipalities approve new antenna installations within 90 days assuming the plans follow the laws and regulations already in place by the federal government. Some cases applications for antenna installation had been delayed as long as nine years by municipalities. Sometimes, it was paranoia about health effects, sometimes idiotic concerns about the antenna's effect on the aesthetics of the area, and obviously some good old fashioned blocking of competition by established players.
Keep in mind that only if a nuclear weapon is detonated in the stratosphere, the EMP effects become important, but this means that no damage will be caused on the ground by that nuclear weapon. A nuclear weapon detonated on the ground or close to ground level will have EMP effect in a small area, but the effects of the blast wave, radiation, and heat from the explosion will likely destroy or collapse any unhardened structures and their contents. Any survivors would be badly injured and in an area that was still radioactive and more concerned about leaving the area and receiving medical care. Those survivors with the highest radiation exposure levels would be dead in a few days anyway. With this in mind, the EMP effects are of negligible concern in ground level detonations.
What we have is a perfect recipe for greed!
We are already far into this situation, the corporation to blame is Silicon Image: http://www.edn.com/blog/400000040/post/1850046185.html
Oddly enough, it is actually significantly more difficult to get decent signal quality out of HDMI as than analog VGA or DisplayPort. I suppose it would be bad to mention that the only major difference between HDMI and VGA is that in HDMI the three color signals are encoded in a crappy digital encoding along with an additional clock signal in the previously mentioned encoding scheme. Note that clock signal in HDMI is not used for the vertical and horizontal sync pulses, those work the same as they do in VGA. I would think that if this goes through, Silicon Image and friends will have questions to answer from the US FTC, the EC, and maybe even the Japanese JFTC. It isn't like a market structured like this can last very long without governmental inquiry or a situation where the entire set of 40-bit encryption keys used in HDMI are uncovered after being brute forced in a trivially easy fashion.
Then again, it isn't even like HDMI does any good for that matter, the issues with the wide open hole of BD-J authentication and encryption make recording a file from even a decrypted HDMI output port pointlessly difficult.
What about those of us who are tall simply due to genetics? The seats in airplanes don't fit very well when one is 6'7" (2m). Of course, one could say this shouldn't matter, excessive height is not a choice and obesity is often not a choice or a failure of will, and thus both should be considered disabilities. In the US and under the Americans with Disabilities Act, accommodations MUST be offered at no additional charge for those with disabilities at public facilities. Allowing an airline to charge someone extra because the airline has arranged their seats so that 15% of the population cannot not fit into a seat is something that is the airline's problem, not the passengers. This may explain why individuals who cannot fit in one seat on Delta flights are now able to receive an additional seat at no cost.
I'd also add that depending on the task, the cheap solution would be slower if the task had serial parts that could not be separated into threads. For instance if a task takes 1,000 cycles and all of the instructions must be done in a precise order, a quad-core processor running at 2.0 GHz would be slower and be of lower utility than a single core 4.0 GHz processor, assuming all other things are equal. The quad-core ends up working at half the speed of the single core and the quad-core also has the penalty of three idle cores draining electricity.
I would also imagine that these newer POWER7 processors carry over the decimal floating point units present in the POWER6. Yes, floating point units that operate in base-10 as opposed to base-2. Not necessarily of much value for scientific purposes, but great for preserving accuracy in financial calculations. One gets to avoid the base-10 to base-2 conversion and the conversion back that can severely hurt accuracy with only a binary floating point unit. One also gets a nice speed up by doing decimal math in hardware as opposed to the other option of software decimal math.
Assembly is useful for creating self-modifying code, which finds at least some use in emulation. However, that still doesn't make x86 assembler and self-modifying code anything other than abominations. Writing code in assembly when the same code in C would be at least 90% as fast should qualify one for immediate execution by firing squad.
Yes, there may be an idea or two that are currently considered "crackpot" that will eventually become mainstream, however, there are a a million other ideas that will never leave the "crackpot" category. The small number of ideas that end up making this transition still requires evidence to make that move. In the case of global warming, one or two isolated mistakes or revisions out of a million pieces of supporting evidence does not invalidate global warming and certainly does not indicate that either nothing is happening or that the world is cooling.
Umm, I'm a bit confused on the local benefits to being a tax haven for both tax cheats and "legitimate" uses, perhaps you could help me. Even though cash might flow into a location that might act as a tax haven assuming it has a currency with a history of stability, which Iceland's currency does not currently, please explain why it follows that being a tax haven is a good thing. Tax cheats and tax avoiders really only want to put there money where their home country will not tax it, they really don't care if the bank is in the South Pacific, North Atlantic, or Central Asia, they also don't care about the local economy. Also, wouldn't it seem likely that the tax haven that attempts to tax any of that money will find the money in those accounts moved to another country, its always a race to the bottom when it comes to being a tax haven. I'm also going to guess that the terms "Chicago School" and "Milton Friedman" could be used a curse words these days in Iceland. Iceland got in its current mess by diligently following practices described by the both the Chicago School and Milton Friedman, these practices ended up putting Iceland in its current predicament, trying the same techniques again because they weren't done "properly" strikes me as a bad idea, an economic policy should have some amount of robustness built into its system. The type of "economics" espoused by the Chicago School seems to result in an unstable, fragile system in practice, even though the doctrine may state otherwise. Then again, it would be hard to get tax cheats and tax avoiders to put money into banks in a country that dealt recently with a collapse of its banking sector due to mismanagement.
By the way, does anyone know if there was a plan to build an aluminum smelter in Iceland, if it ever ended up being built, and if the smelter is currently in production if it was built? Oddly enough, even a single reasonably sized aluminum smelter using the geothermal power available in Iceland would be much more profitable, directly employ far more people, and would produce far more economic activity locally in Iceland than a rinky-dink data center on an old NATO base.
This is probably not the time to mention it, but be aware of the total mess that consists of the x86 ISA with its various extensions. It doesn't help that Intel has tried intentionally to make the x86 ISA more difficult to use and worse (SSE2, SSE3, and SSSE3) or even through its own incompetence or stubbornness when Intel made the crappy 80387 FPU. Using a stack based design poorly suited for an FPU used in the 387 doesn't say much for Intel's architectural design prowess.
What, besides shutting down leaky old nuclear plants, could be done to better control release of tritium into the environment?"
I'd say that one thing that could be done would be to prohibit above ground nuclear tests, of course that has been done already. Aerial nuclear tests produced and spread far more Tritium than any tiny amounts of Tritium released by nuclear reactors that end up diluted over a large area. Any radioactivity from these cases ends up being far below background levels when spread out.
Brain drain sucks even worse for the people who live in the country the person receiving a PhD emigrated from. For instance, there are more doctors in the born in Ethiopia living in just the Washington, DC area than there are doctors in the entire country of Ethiopia. How does a country recover from such a tremendous brain drain and address major social ills like rampant poverty, famine, and endemic corruption when the very people who might be best able to assist with their own experience and knowledge do not return to their native country because there is nothing to return to and no reasonable job prospects? Why must the US retain as many of their foreign born individuals who received their PhD in the US, when under the right conditions these PhD holders could help their own country far more than any kind of work they do in the US? I'm not suggesting we force these people to return or even expect them to return, especially when there is nothing to return to. But then again I see nothing wrong with ti US offering grants and other forms of aid to underdeveloped countries so that they can improve their situation with respect to development and improve the local economy. This would come with the explicit expectation that these governments spend the money wisely, and steps are taken so that as little money as possible is wasted by corruption.