Older LED traffic signal conversions probably replaced the old incandescent bulbs and color filters with LED panels made of LEDs using the appropriate color. They also in some cases may have used separate AC to DC converters located either in the control box for the traffic signal which would have been on the ground near the signal. Potentially this also meant rewiring all of the lights on each pole and replacing more equipment when required. On the other hand, an AC-DC converter could have been in each panel, which would require less retrofitting. Recently though, with the wide availability of 1W, 3W, and 5W high power white LEDs, it makes more sense (and easier) to use an LED fixture that is directly compatible with the old incandescent light socket.
The railroad industry, for instance, has begun using high power white LEDs for many of the various signals near tracks. A high power white LED, properly ventilated, can be lit for 10 years continuously and still retain 70% of its brightness. In both car and rail signaling applications not many lights are powered on continuously 24/7/365 and spend some time turned off this does of course increase the lifespan of the fixture. Still though, the parts of the power conversion for the fixture may fail sooner.
The traffic lights using the green LEDs you mention will become less intense as time passes. For me at least, in Minnesota, comparing from memory the LED traffic lights converted roughly five years ago or more do not seem as intensely bright as they once were. Some of this might be attributable to learning not to stare at such a light at night.
Actually, the clock radios that flicker do so because the ground* pins on the LEDs in the display are wired together in two separate networks that share input pins. Consequently, each input pin controls two different display segments. Each common ground pin alternates between a low voltage and and high voltage. When one ground pin is high the other is low and vice versa. Each segment wired to a given pin lights up when the voltage on the ground pins change, assuming there is voltage on the input pin. In this way the controller chip for the can address every segment on the display alternately with a lower pin count, saving money. Since putting a PWM on the clock controller chip or including a crystal oscillator would both be pricey, the frequency of the AC is used instead, hence the flicker. Low cost AC powered digital clocks still use the 60Hz or 50Hz from the wall as a frequency source.
If the flicker is a problem for you, there are clocks with a "reverse" LCD display and an LED backlight which can be designed to produce less flickering. Clocks like this should mention this kind of arrangement and end up looking similar to clocks with an LED display. Expect to pay more though.
* Yes, I know cathode or anode is a more appropriate term, but I can never keep the two straight. Also, many types of LED displays have common anodes and others have common cathodes, and in many cases have the same package and pin structure and are functionally the same.
If you like the methods of one big download with Guild Wars, adding the switch " -image" to the end of the string pointing to gw.exe in the shortcut will download the current versions of every area including the core PvE areas, the expansion PvE areas, and all of the PvP areas. Expect to download several gigabytes of files, which end up in one big file, bad for FAT32 user potentially.
On the other hand there is the DSP core in Creative X-Fi cards (not that anyone should own one). Modern TV tuner cards have MPEG-2 encoding units, these must be worth something. Higher end, professional video hardware like HD video capture cares and real-time video effects rendering cards often have Xilinx FPGA, most of which probably have a built in POWER CPU core. In this case, the CPU and the programmability of the FPGA are useful. Actually useful SATA RAID cards that support RAID 5 and RAID 6, like the 3ware 9000 series have POWER CPU cores as well. All of the hard drives in each of the three model lines of the Samsung F1 series have two ARM coprocessors. The Samsung F1 series is the newest set of hard drives from Samsung. As long as you get away from the bottom of the line crap from Intel there is almost always at least some spare power out there. In many cases though, it is used productively already.
Let's turn this question around: If adaptation of technology is such a beneficial trait, why don't we see more examples in nature? There are a few examples, but technology use is pretty sparse among the genomes of this planet. I'm talking here about active employment of tools and the like -- the bird building the nest, not the maple seed that's evolved to fly like a helicopter. But then, the bird doesn't experiment with new ways to build a nest (I don't think).
Ultimately I largely agree with your assessment that science has improved our lot in life. But I still think it's a little too much to say science has always helped. More like, it's an incredibly great good, but it's not 100% good.
Then again, I guess I don't think anything is 100% good. There's always the Law of Unintended Consequences.
Yeah, welcome to the world of moderation where everything, including scientific discoveries, are never always good and never always evil. How they are used is what is more important. Nuclear weapons are a pretty good way to ruin someone's day. On the other hand, one of the derivatives of nuclear weapons is nuclear power. Nuclear power has several benefits, but also has many down sides as well. If as a global society we were to have an informed discussion on the benefits and problems related to nuclear power, and then if we made a decision on how best to go forward with nuclear power, we might have an acceptable outcome. Hopefully, the conclusion made would be something better than many other decisions we have made. Like the decisions made in private, based on junk science or the ranting and ravings of fanatics. As usual though, there is not an infinite amount of time to make reasoned decisions. However, even in the timespan of a couple years a sensible decision can be made. Of course with anything new, unexpected complications encountered on the way are to be expected. Testing and adding robustness to a potential design can help a great deal too.
Funny, the fillings I had last year were still amalgam fillings, and when I had to have some work done on the same fillings back in September the dentist used amalgam again to fill in the work he had done. I also was advised and I also signed a consent form before I received a flu vaccine shot back in October that the vaccine contained thimerosal. I am fairly certain that this was the same vaccine given to children needing resistance to the flu. In any case, these days, many of the wild caught ocean fish, certain tuna species fall under this category, have significant amounts of mercury. Don't even get me started on the natural background levels of asbestos in the air. The asbestos is mainly liberated from the erosion of naturally exposed deposits.
Sure, any amount of asbestos, mercury, or radiation is dangerous, but determining what an acceptable level above background has been difficult. It is even more difficult when there are weirdos are out there actively interfering. So think about acceptable levels of risk the next time you go for a drive in you car.
I take it that the only mail "packets" you receive and send during the months of May, June, July, August, and August are electronic and have transfer delays not usually experienced by those living in the lower 48?
Also, I have a get "rich" moderately slowly scheme for you. Any rocks in Antarctica you might find embedded in the snow are almost certainly meteorites. If there is snow all around you, other than space where else could it be from? As long as any potential meteorites you find are not near other large bodies of earth-derived rock poking up nearby. For instance, rocks found next to the exposed rock from a mountain are probably no good. A large number of people with wildly variable levels of intelligence would probably pay good money for them, upon your return to warmer climes. If your job is looking for meteorites currently, you are probably having no fun in any case.
A year ago, I started taking the anti-epileptic medication, Topamax, and I started to suffer from psychosis shortly there after. I am better now though, now that I no longer take Topamax. Psychosis is a rare, but potential, side effect of Topamax, and there may be genetic factors that influence the occurrence of this particular serious side effect. A casual term that a layperson might use to describe me is that I was psychotic, but saying that I was suffering from psychosis is probably a better description I think anyways. It has something to do with not labeling an individual as a condition, but instead saying they have the condition.
In any case, Mr. Savain I have seen other post on your blog and even your separate website, and basically I think that the conclusions that you have made are entirely illogical and without merit. The reasoning you must have performed for your work was seriously delusional. I am certain that I could not have managed that quality of delusional thinking, when I was ill a year ago.
In any case, I would urge you to drop by the nearest ER immediately and ask to have a professional perform a mental evaluation on you. It is generally just a few questions and the results may be enormously helpful. Note, I am not any sort of health practitioner.
Also could a slashdot admin make an appropriate sig for the "Louis Savain" with the above link to Quackwatch and lock it such that he cannot change it. I'm tired of this idiot's posts getting modded up by confused mods impressed by the technical and pseudo-technical terms which get arranged into gibberish on the page he links to, which is invariably one of his blog postings or his website.
Well, those goof balls over at Acard has just released a two new models of RAM drives similar to the i-RAM Box. The Acard drives use DDR2 memory and the maximum DIMM size is 4GB, the manufacturer mentions ECC compatibility, but I am unsure if ECC is used if available. Like the Gigabyte i-RAM, the Acard drives have a rechargeable lithium back-up battery, however unlike the i-RAM the Acard drives are capable of backing their contents onto a properly sized Compact-Flash card in the event of power loss. An external AC to DC power adaptor that plugs into the drive is also available separately. I think the adaptor is for preserving the memory in case of short down time from shutting off the computer or for sending a computer into suspend. The higher end model from Acard ANS-9010 and has 8 DIMM slots, 64GB is the total supported, and it also has 2 SATA 3.0 ports, each SATA port only has access to one set of the 4 DIMM slots, one should use RAID 0 to get the full capacity as one drive. Expect to pay $400 for the ANS-9010 with battery, but with no RAM or backup CF card. The lower end model, the ANS-9010B, has six DIMM slots and only 1 SATA 3.0 port, the maximum RAM is 48GB. Still, expect to pay a bit for the ANS-9010B, like $250 and with no RAM or backup CF card. Performance wise, the Acard Drives are decent and faster than the i-RAM, the results from SiSoftware Sandra benchmarks seem to indicate that the ANS-9010B is somewhere around 25% faster than the i-RAM. The SiSoftware Sandra benchmarks on Acard's website are deceptive because the drives used in each comparison graph changes. In any case, Acard seems to be aiming these drives more at the low end server market as opposed to "enthusiasts".
If censoring certain speech would make society more "stable", "sociable", and "low stress", would you accept that?
If the speech blocked and prosecuted was speech that openly gave plans and detailed instructions seriously advocating the commission of serious crimes, like a violent revolution, then I have absolutely no problem with that. I think that one would have to be a pretty serious whack job to think otherwise.
What about a police state of sorts?
A police state would most likely one of the intermediate states from the fall of a democracy due to a violent revolution. The police state would come after the certain collapse of any partial or full implementation of some sort of libertarian state. Many of the ideas and theories espoused by libertarianism and the Austrian School of Economics have been shown to be unsupported by scientifically useful evidence and by scientific experiments. For instance, ask the former employees of Lehman Brothers or AIG about what they think about the existance of self-organizational actions of essentially unregulated markets. I think you can guess the response.
Yeah, but the winner of the first season of "Survivor", Richard Hatch, has managed to perform several examples of epic fail related to math, among other types of fail. For instance, he could not determine the result for 11*11 and choose an incorrect result on the Australian version of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" This was the fourth question posed to him, so he walked away with nothing. Perhaps more damaging was that Hatch did not report his cash prize for winning "Survivor" to the IRS. Eventually the IRS noticed a problem in Hatch's returns, as one should always expect from the IRS and should surprise no one. In general, reporting discrepancies that are of a reasonable size will be investigated, especially those related to larger sized amounts, like Hatch did. As Hatch went through the legal system, he had several more instances of fail. These fail were mostly of the legal variety, IIRC he did manage have a lawyer and was unable to use frivolous tax avoidance arguments. Due to Hatch taking this approach, his lawyer avoided sanctions, like disbarment, and Hatch, avoided fines of up to $5000 for each instance, which can and are assessed regularly in Tax Court. In any case, the threat of disbarment, means that wacky discredited legal theories will not be used by defense lawyers who want to continue on their current career path. In any case, Hatch ended up with a sentence of 4 years, 3 months, and will not spend his time in a maximum security facility. Hatch has a release date of October 2009. However, something that may negate any benefits of a lower security level is that Hatch is now idiling his time away at a prison, in an armpit of a state, West Virginia.
The original intent of the second amendment is of little consequence with respect to authorizing armed uprisings. One might look to the Civil War the results of which one should easily be able to conclude that violent action against the government or its agents, revolution or otherwise, is never justifiable under ANY circumstances under the Constitution.
What about metric time? I actually have a (non-serious) system for it, I am also sure that there are several serious methods too. First off, separate units for a full day and another for total number of years would be needed. Seconds would be preserved under this system, and would continue to be used for elapsed time. The time during the day would also be measured as elapsed time and be measured in parts of a day. Consequently, one day unit would be the base unit. When refering to a specific time during the day a figure in milidays would be used. This would not be totally unusual as currently there are 1440 seconds in a day and 1000 milidays in a day, additional precision is easily added if needed under this system. This system could be adapted for other locations, like Mars where the length of the martian day is not reasonably close to 24 hours, making a new unit of course. This would not be too bad as one would just have to check the units used and convert as needed. Similar to the day, the year would also have additional precision added to it, so an acceptable value of the year would be 2009.3294. The year would be the measurement of time over the course of days, months, and years, in the strange case this system would actually be used. I realize that this system would almost certainly require the use of conversion software and thus hardware of some type, among other related issues. While 9-5 workers may have trouble, those with variable schedules might not know the difference.
2 would have been appropriately followed by the Unicode character U+2030, in Windows, ALT+0137 also works, (lousy slashcode unicode removal). This would indicate it was 2 per mille which is equivalent to 0.2% or 0.2 percent, but what do I know?
I've always wanted to reply to a post that the editors at slashdot will remove following a soon to be received C&D letter from Apple. AFAIK Apple considers posting how to decode the structure of their serial numbers to violate one of their trade secrets and have managed to bully many sites into removing the same kind of information as posted by the parent. This info has been floating around for at least ten years and almost certainly more. Every computer or device manufactured by Apple with a serial number has used this sequence of characters since at least the early 1980's. On hardware manufactured for or by Apple before 2000 and probably currently too, Apple has a serial number label put on nearly every replaceable component that makes up a computer. This includes things like keyboards, mice, motherboards, motherboard add-in OEM PCI cards, essential proprietary motherboard modules, and hard drives from Western Digital or name-brand optical drives.
Of course putting carbon nanotubes under a tensile load of roughly 5% of their maximum rated tensile strength have the unfortunate property of undergoing plastic deformation and lengthening, which is a sort of permanent thing.
Why do you need to read the article when there are so many/. readers who would fly off the handle and post something ignorant and stupid like "OMFG censorship, Google is worse than Hitler!" For the record I see idiotic activity from both sides during moral panics like this newest British moral panic WRT knives, I especially include those who scream loudest, who in this discussion are the ones screaming about the "evil" censorship from Google at the top of their lungs.
I take issue with your statement that raising tax rates on the rich negatively affects the economy. Do you have any relevant, modern, post 1970 examples of your claim? I would note that in the 1980's and 1990's, in Minnesota, that higher and a more fair tax rates, when the tax rates are measured as a percentage of income, coincided with a much better than average economy for the state. In the last decade, lower taxes in the state have coincided with below average economic performance as compared with the rest of the nation.
Slashdot Mirror
I once considered attempting to park in an occupied part of a parking lot. I decided not to as my car (and my body too) cannot flow like a T-1000.
Older LED traffic signal conversions probably replaced the old incandescent bulbs and color filters with LED panels made of LEDs using the appropriate color. They also in some cases may have used separate AC to DC converters located either in the control box for the traffic signal which would have been on the ground near the signal. Potentially this also meant rewiring all of the lights on each pole and replacing more equipment when required. On the other hand, an AC-DC converter could have been in each panel, which would require less retrofitting. Recently though, with the wide availability of 1W, 3W, and 5W high power white LEDs, it makes more sense (and easier) to use an LED fixture that is directly compatible with the old incandescent light socket.
The railroad industry, for instance, has begun using high power white LEDs for many of the various signals near tracks. A high power white LED, properly ventilated, can be lit for 10 years continuously and still retain 70% of its brightness. In both car and rail signaling applications not many lights are powered on continuously 24/7/365 and spend some time turned off this does of course increase the lifespan of the fixture. Still though, the parts of the power conversion for the fixture may fail sooner.
The traffic lights using the green LEDs you mention will become less intense as time passes. For me at least, in Minnesota, comparing from memory the LED traffic lights converted roughly five years ago or more do not seem as intensely bright as they once were. Some of this might be attributable to learning not to stare at such a light at night.
Actually, the clock radios that flicker do so because the ground* pins on the LEDs in the display are wired together in two separate networks that share input pins. Consequently, each input pin controls two different display segments. Each common ground pin alternates between a low voltage and and high voltage. When one ground pin is high the other is low and vice versa. Each segment wired to a given pin lights up when the voltage on the ground pins change, assuming there is voltage on the input pin. In this way the controller chip for the can address every segment on the display alternately with a lower pin count, saving money. Since putting a PWM on the clock controller chip or including a crystal oscillator would both be pricey, the frequency of the AC is used instead, hence the flicker. Low cost AC powered digital clocks still use the 60Hz or 50Hz from the wall as a frequency source.
If the flicker is a problem for you, there are clocks with a "reverse" LCD display and an LED backlight which can be designed to produce less flickering. Clocks like this should mention this kind of arrangement and end up looking similar to clocks with an LED display. Expect to pay more though.
* Yes, I know cathode or anode is a more appropriate term, but I can never keep the two straight. Also, many types of LED displays have common anodes and others have common cathodes, and in many cases have the same package and pin structure and are functionally the same.
If you like the methods of one big download with Guild Wars, adding the switch " -image" to the end of the string pointing to gw.exe in the shortcut will download the current versions of every area including the core PvE areas, the expansion PvE areas, and all of the PvP areas. Expect to download several gigabytes of files, which end up in one big file, bad for FAT32 user potentially.
On the other hand there is the DSP core in Creative X-Fi cards (not that anyone should own one). Modern TV tuner cards have MPEG-2 encoding units, these must be worth something. Higher end, professional video hardware like HD video capture cares and real-time video effects rendering cards often have Xilinx FPGA, most of which probably have a built in POWER CPU core. In this case, the CPU and the programmability of the FPGA are useful. Actually useful SATA RAID cards that support RAID 5 and RAID 6, like the 3ware 9000 series have POWER CPU cores as well. All of the hard drives in each of the three model lines of the Samsung F1 series have two ARM coprocessors. The Samsung F1 series is the newest set of hard drives from Samsung. As long as you get away from the bottom of the line crap from Intel there is almost always at least some spare power out there. In many cases though, it is used productively already.
Let's turn this question around: If adaptation of technology is such a beneficial trait, why don't we see more examples in nature? There are a few examples, but technology use is pretty sparse among the genomes of this planet. I'm talking here about active employment of tools and the like -- the bird building the nest, not the maple seed that's evolved to fly like a helicopter. But then, the bird doesn't experiment with new ways to build a nest (I don't think).
Ultimately I largely agree with your assessment that science has improved our lot in life. But I still think it's a little too much to say science has always helped. More like, it's an incredibly great good, but it's not 100% good.
Then again, I guess I don't think anything is 100% good. There's always the Law of Unintended Consequences.
Yeah, welcome to the world of moderation where everything, including scientific discoveries, are never always good and never always evil. How they are used is what is more important. Nuclear weapons are a pretty good way to ruin someone's day. On the other hand, one of the derivatives of nuclear weapons is nuclear power. Nuclear power has several benefits, but also has many down sides as well. If as a global society we were to have an informed discussion on the benefits and problems related to nuclear power, and then if we made a decision on how best to go forward with nuclear power, we might have an acceptable outcome. Hopefully, the conclusion made would be something better than many other decisions we have made. Like the decisions made in private, based on junk science or the ranting and ravings of fanatics. As usual though, there is not an infinite amount of time to make reasoned decisions. However, even in the timespan of a couple years a sensible decision can be made. Of course with anything new, unexpected complications encountered on the way are to be expected. Testing and adding robustness to a potential design can help a great deal too.
Funny, the fillings I had last year were still amalgam fillings, and when I had to have some work done on the same fillings back in September the dentist used amalgam again to fill in the work he had done. I also was advised and I also signed a consent form before I received a flu vaccine shot back in October that the vaccine contained thimerosal. I am fairly certain that this was the same vaccine given to children needing resistance to the flu. In any case, these days, many of the wild caught ocean fish, certain tuna species fall under this category, have significant amounts of mercury. Don't even get me started on the natural background levels of asbestos in the air. The asbestos is mainly liberated from the erosion of naturally exposed deposits.
Sure, any amount of asbestos, mercury, or radiation is dangerous, but determining what an acceptable level above background has been difficult. It is even more difficult when there are weirdos are out there actively interfering. So think about acceptable levels of risk the next time you go for a drive in you car.
I take it that the only mail "packets" you receive and send during the months of May, June, July, August, and August are electronic and have transfer delays not usually experienced by those living in the lower 48?
Also, I have a get "rich" moderately slowly scheme for you. Any rocks in Antarctica you might find embedded in the snow are almost certainly meteorites. If there is snow all around you, other than space where else could it be from? As long as any potential meteorites you find are not near other large bodies of earth-derived rock poking up nearby. For instance, rocks found next to the exposed rock from a mountain are probably no good. A large number of people with wildly variable levels of intelligence would probably pay good money for them, upon your return to warmer climes. If your job is looking for meteorites currently, you are probably having no fun in any case.
Meh, get either of these two keyboards and you will be able to type every letter with only your left hand.
http://www.matias.ca/halfkeyboard/index.php?refID=7
See title.
A year ago, I started taking the anti-epileptic medication, Topamax, and I started to suffer from psychosis shortly there after. I am better now though, now that I no longer take Topamax. Psychosis is a rare, but potential, side effect of Topamax, and there may be genetic factors that influence the occurrence of this particular serious side effect. A casual term that a layperson might use to describe me is that I was psychotic, but saying that I was suffering from psychosis is probably a better description I think anyways. It has something to do with not labeling an individual as a condition, but instead saying they have the condition.
In any case, Mr. Savain I have seen other post on your blog and even your separate website, and basically I think that the conclusions that you have made are entirely illogical and without merit. The reasoning you must have performed for your work was seriously delusional. I am certain that I could not have managed that quality of delusional thinking, when I was ill a year ago.
In any case, I would urge you to drop by the nearest ER immediately and ask to have a professional perform a mental evaluation on you. It is generally just a few questions and the results may be enormously helpful. Note, I am not any sort of health practitioner.
In any case, for other readers, a fairly valid comparison to the validity all of Mr. Savain's irrational ideas can be found in the "Alternative Engineering" story here:
http://www.quackwatch.com/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/alteng.html
Also could a slashdot admin make an appropriate sig for the "Louis Savain" with the above link to Quackwatch and lock it such that he cannot change it. I'm tired of this idiot's posts getting modded up by confused mods impressed by the technical and pseudo-technical terms which get arranged into gibberish on the page he links to, which is invariably one of his blog postings or his website.
Well, those goof balls over at Acard has just released a two new models of RAM drives similar to the i-RAM Box. The Acard drives use DDR2 memory and the maximum DIMM size is 4GB, the manufacturer mentions ECC compatibility, but I am unsure if ECC is used if available. Like the Gigabyte i-RAM, the Acard drives have a rechargeable lithium back-up battery, however unlike the i-RAM the Acard drives are capable of backing their contents onto a properly sized Compact-Flash card in the event of power loss. An external AC to DC power adaptor that plugs into the drive is also available separately. I think the adaptor is for preserving the memory in case of short down time from shutting off the computer or for sending a computer into suspend. The higher end model from Acard ANS-9010 and has 8 DIMM slots, 64GB is the total supported, and it also has 2 SATA 3.0 ports, each SATA port only has access to one set of the 4 DIMM slots, one should use RAID 0 to get the full capacity as one drive. Expect to pay $400 for the ANS-9010 with battery, but with no RAM or backup CF card. The lower end model, the ANS-9010B, has six DIMM slots and only 1 SATA 3.0 port, the maximum RAM is 48GB. Still, expect to pay a bit for the ANS-9010B, like $250 and with no RAM or backup CF card. Performance wise, the Acard Drives are decent and faster than the i-RAM, the results from SiSoftware Sandra benchmarks seem to indicate that the ANS-9010B is somewhere around 25% faster than the i-RAM. The SiSoftware Sandra benchmarks on Acard's website are deceptive because the drives used in each comparison graph changes. In any case, Acard seems to be aiming these drives more at the low end server market as opposed to "enthusiasts".
Acard's page on their RAM drives:
http://www.acard.com.tw/english/fb0101.jsp?type1_idno=13&type2_idno=67
Acard's ANS-9010 benchmark page:
http://www.acard.com.tw/english/newstabpop.jsp?idno=87
Acard's ANS-9010B benchmark page:
http://www.acard.com.tw/english/newstabpop.jsp?idno=86
I really hope that in "Open Transport Tycoon Deluxe", the "Open Transport" referenced has nothing to do with the buying and selling bits of this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Transport
Yeah, I thought I had forgotten about that "Open Transport", thanks for the horrible flashback you goddamn bastard. ;)
One might also like their servers powered down when the active low signals NED and NEF fall to 0V from 20V on this device: http://www.maxwell.com/pdf/me/product_datasheets/ned/HSN3000_Rev3.pdf
Powering up the server can be done once NED rises back to 20V.
If the speech blocked and prosecuted was speech that openly gave plans and detailed instructions seriously advocating the commission of serious crimes, like a violent revolution, then I have absolutely no problem with that. I think that one would have to be a pretty serious whack job to think otherwise.
A police state would most likely one of the intermediate states from the fall of a democracy due to a violent revolution. The police state would come after the certain collapse of any partial or full implementation of some sort of libertarian state. Many of the ideas and theories espoused by libertarianism and the Austrian School of Economics have been shown to be unsupported by scientifically useful evidence and by scientific experiments. For instance, ask the former employees of Lehman Brothers or AIG about what they think about the existance of self-organizational actions of essentially unregulated markets. I think you can guess the response.
Yeah, but the winner of the first season of "Survivor", Richard Hatch, has managed to perform several examples of epic fail related to math, among other types of fail. For instance, he could not determine the result for 11*11 and choose an incorrect result on the Australian version of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" This was the fourth question posed to him, so he walked away with nothing. Perhaps more damaging was that Hatch did not report his cash prize for winning "Survivor" to the IRS. Eventually the IRS noticed a problem in Hatch's returns, as one should always expect from the IRS and should surprise no one. In general, reporting discrepancies that are of a reasonable size will be investigated, especially those related to larger sized amounts, like Hatch did. As Hatch went through the legal system, he had several more instances of fail. These fail were mostly of the legal variety, IIRC he did manage have a lawyer and was unable to use frivolous tax avoidance arguments. Due to Hatch taking this approach, his lawyer avoided sanctions, like disbarment, and Hatch, avoided fines of up to $5000 for each instance, which can and are assessed regularly in Tax Court. In any case, the threat of disbarment, means that wacky discredited legal theories will not be used by defense lawyers who want to continue on their current career path. In any case, Hatch ended up with a sentence of 4 years, 3 months, and will not spend his time in a maximum security facility. Hatch has a release date of October 2009. However, something that may negate any benefits of a lower security level is that Hatch is now idiling his time away at a prison, in an armpit of a state, West Virginia.
The original intent of the second amendment is of little consequence with respect to authorizing armed uprisings. One might look to the Civil War the results of which one should easily be able to conclude that violent action against the government or its agents, revolution or otherwise, is never justifiable under ANY circumstances under the Constitution.
What about metric time? I actually have a (non-serious) system for it, I am also sure that there are several serious methods too. First off, separate units for a full day and another for total number of years would be needed. Seconds would be preserved under this system, and would continue to be used for elapsed time. The time during the day would also be measured as elapsed time and be measured in parts of a day. Consequently, one day unit would be the base unit. When refering to a specific time during the day a figure in milidays would be used. This would not be totally unusual as currently there are 1440 seconds in a day and 1000 milidays in a day, additional precision is easily added if needed under this system. This system could be adapted for other locations, like Mars where the length of the martian day is not reasonably close to 24 hours, making a new unit of course. This would not be too bad as one would just have to check the units used and convert as needed. Similar to the day, the year would also have additional precision added to it, so an acceptable value of the year would be 2009.3294. The year would be the measurement of time over the course of days, months, and years, in the strange case this system would actually be used. I realize that this system would almost certainly require the use of conversion software and thus hardware of some type, among other related issues. While 9-5 workers may have trouble, those with variable schedules might not know the difference.
2 would have been appropriately followed by the Unicode character U+2030, in Windows, ALT+0137 also works, (lousy slashcode unicode removal). This would indicate it was 2 per mille which is equivalent to 0.2% or 0.2 percent, but what do I know?
I've always wanted to reply to a post that the editors at slashdot will remove following a soon to be received C&D letter from Apple. AFAIK Apple considers posting how to decode the structure of their serial numbers to violate one of their trade secrets and have managed to bully many sites into removing the same kind of information as posted by the parent. This info has been floating around for at least ten years and almost certainly more. Every computer or device manufactured by Apple with a serial number has used this sequence of characters since at least the early 1980's. On hardware manufactured for or by Apple before 2000 and probably currently too, Apple has a serial number label put on nearly every replaceable component that makes up a computer. This includes things like keyboards, mice, motherboards, motherboard add-in OEM PCI cards, essential proprietary motherboard modules, and hard drives from Western Digital or name-brand optical drives.
Meh, this hack is probably even worse, both for its general stupidity as an idea and its felonious misuse of metric prefixes:
http://desktop.google.com/plugins/i/metricclock_2853.html?hl=en
Of course putting carbon nanotubes under a tensile load of roughly 5% of their maximum rated tensile strength have the unfortunate property of undergoing plastic deformation and lengthening, which is a sort of permanent thing.
Why do you need to read the article when there are so many /. readers who would fly off the handle and post something ignorant and stupid like "OMFG censorship, Google is worse than Hitler!" For the record I see idiotic activity from both sides during moral panics like this newest British moral panic WRT knives, I especially include those who scream loudest, who in this discussion are the ones screaming about the "evil" censorship from Google at the top of their lungs.
I am not in favor of letting Texas secede. I would rather see Texas ejected from the union.
I take issue with your statement that raising tax rates on the rich negatively affects the economy. Do you have any relevant, modern, post 1970 examples of your claim? I would note that in the 1980's and 1990's, in Minnesota, that higher and a more fair tax rates, when the tax rates are measured as a percentage of income, coincided with a much better than average economy for the state. In the last decade, lower taxes in the state have coincided with below average economic performance as compared with the rest of the nation.
Here is my source:
http://minnesotabudgetbites.org/2008/05/21/minnesotas-tax-rankings-hover-around-average/
http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/hep-th/pdf/0110/0110253v2.pdf