You know, I get associated with right-winged conservatives all the time (probably for good reason), but I found this article stupid, and just another effort to blame the Obama Administration for something else.
Do you have any idea how many wind turbines there are in California alone? Add to that all the wind turbines in Texas, plus all those strung out over the other 37 states that have wind power, and the fact that ONLY 85 eagles have been killed by them over 15 years is a pretty darn low number. I was expecting to read something like 100 per year. (Okay, granted, Texas isn't really the home of bald eagles)
I get it, I am a patriot, and the hearing that any eagle are killed doesn't sit too well with me. But seriously, 85 over 15 years?
How about an article saying how many animals are ALIVE from us going to windpower and reducing the amount of pollutant in the enviornment?
The Obama Administration issuing permits to wind power companies protecting them from prosecution because a bird is stupid enough to fly into a turbine sounds like a logical move to me.
Now if we were talking hundred or more birds killed a year in the same area, the argument could be made to disassemble some turbines in a given area. But these incidents sound pretty remote. The Altaria Wind Farm in California has 490 turbines. (source http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_the_United_States ). I am too lazy to go and look at how many turbines there are total near eagle nesting area, but once again, the numbers reported are really low. (The article does state though that not all deaths are reported, so I can accept that hese numbers may be higher).
Now if the poster can think of a way to get clean energy without any side effects, please tell us, and we will consider you for a Nobel Prize.
You may have to help him go through the initial setup, but the GUI is pretty self-explanitory. Its pretty minamalist, easy access to what is needed, etc.
If you want a bigger tablet, though, you may be stuck going with an iPad. But if you want to save a couple hundred bucks and stick with Android, go Kindle Fire.
And don't wine about it not having full Google Apps or access to the play store or anything. You said you wanted something simple. This is simple.
We got one for my dad a couple of years ago who is in his 60s, and he loves it.
I think the officer will have a hard time proving this in court, though. Unless someone who works for the school or the district made a complaint, it would be hard to prove that 1) that he did not have permission from someone or 2) the school even saw it as theft. This is like someone saying that you stole wifi from an open wireless router.
In many states you can legally shoot someone if they are on your property (wouldn't at all be surprised if Georgia is one of those states). I know its illegal to carry firearms onto school grounds in many states, but the man could have been perfectly justified if he came back to his car, saw someone strange sitting in it, and opened fire.
Also, if the officer cannot prove the theft charge, he can be charged with either illegal searches or breaking and entering. If any judge is in his right mind, the man will get off, and the officer will be disciplined.
I think the parent was tongue-in-cheek. That said, if they won't let you run wires, wifi may be your only solution.
Actually, this may be more than the company wants to spend, but talk the guy in charge of the building into installing raised floors. Run your cabling underneath. Then you don't have to worry about pretty trays or cabling.
With these channels moving around, it is also feasable that the broadcasting power is not as high, to keep from bleeding over onto channels aired from other areas. This was especially true before the transition, when you had both analogue and digital channels. After the switch over, only a couple of channels do I get stronger signals on - some are still giving me less than 60% of the signal (although most are now at 98% or better). What is sad is I live less than 15 miles from "broadcast hill" with a clear line-of-sight. I can see the antennas from my balcony. You would think that all I would have to do is point my antenna at the towers and I would have perfect signal.
Before the transition, a lot of my local stations were actually broadcasting the digital signal from their backup transmitters at the station, not from the transmitter on "broadcast hill". I know this because I called up the engineers of a couple of stations as I was having issues receiving their signal. So, they were broadcasting from a different location, at a lower power, on a different frequency, with a smaller tower, plus, before the transition, they might take the signal down completely for a while to do maintanance.
Before, DFW had 6 channels in the VHF range, now there are only 2 (BTW, I have no clue what that KSFW is, I don't get it, I have one channel "2.1" and it is Daystar).
What was worse is, after the transition, a couple of channels moved again to their new broadcast home, meaning that you had to rescan.
So you really cannot say that digital transmisison is worse than analogue, because there are many other variables that are in place.
I will say, however, that if you are living in the US and haven't rescanned in a couple of years, try that, and see if it helps. But as the parent said, you may have to end up putting up multiple antennas and repositioning them. It is not because digital doesn't go as far, it is because different frequencies and broadcast powers are being used now. About the only thing you can really do is to call up the station engineer at the station and ask if they have plans to increase their broadcast power.
In all seriouisness, I don't see how this relates to real-world data-gathering. Plugging data into an algorithim that you gathered on movie night while beer-drinking and smoking crack with your fraternity brothers is very different than gathering real data in real labs. It sounds like some students were just trying to justify a school project that let them have a zombie-movie marathon. I mean, if, as they say, the same model can be used to chart flu outbreaks, then why didn't they chart a flu outbreak? There is no rhyme or reason to Zombie movies, and most do not follow some established storyline or mythology. Trying to establish a pattern based on a bunch of disjointed movies may actually prove more difficult than using data for a real disease.
Sadly the main link is blocked for me, so I cannot see if there is any more information there. There may be more information there that clarifies what they are doing, but it all sounds rather pointless to me.
As much as I hate to side with Spamhaus, this actually sounds plausable. This isn't fining everyone with an insecure server, it is fining those who have recieved warnings already and have done nothing about it. Problem is, I don't see how that would really be enforcable. Wouldn't the government of each country in the world have to impose similar measures?
I think its a great idea, I just don't see how you could really enforce it.
that's an average of about 20kB per image. If we assume as near-worst-case an uncompressed 16-bit pixmap format, that means 100px x 100 px or so; realistically, most of them are probably jpegs
I am a HUGE fan of the Dell Latitude series. Extreamely easy to work on. I picked up a older refurbished d630 about 2 months ago - even though its an older model, came with dual-core 2.4GHz processor and 4 gig of ram for $239 at KMart. I picked up an external Blu-Ray drive for $30, and replaced the network card with a 802.11 N for $10. These things are STUPIDLY SIMPLE to take apart. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTPebVcfKRs
As these are business class notebooks, they are pretty durable as well.
At least for the d630, you can replace the six-cell battery with a 9 cell and extend the operating time to over 4 hours (the operating time seems to be cut in half by the 802.11N WiFi card, but there is a physical switch to easily toggle the WiFi on and off).
Why did I pick up a 630? Because I had one of these for work for two years when I worked in desktop support (I'm now in networking) and LOVED the thing. Still do. This model came out around 2007ish, and still outperforms my consumer-grade Compaq that I picked up in 2009. Why don't I still have the Compaq? Trying to take it apart to fix the motherboard resulted in me tearing up two ribbon cables, cracking the case, and the LCD pannel cable breaking, After that, I decided to go back to Dell Latitude series. They are hands-down the most tinkerer-friendly laptops you can find. I've replaced nics, drive, ram, keyboards, LCDs motherboards and processors on these things back in my desktop support days. I've worked on Compaqs, HPs, Apples, Gateway, eMachines, Acers and Sonys, and none are as easy to work with as the Dell.
No, Dell is not paying me to say this.:-) I think some of their business desktop models are crap. But IMHO nothing beats the Latitude line in terms of user servicability!
I moved out of a small town about two years ago. Had all utilities switched over to their name - usually involving both of us going to the utility office together, because it really did not make sense to have a disconnect and a reconnect scheduled - most services told us they could disconnect immediately but not reconnect for a week or two - however, they were all willing to just let me pay out my bill, and transfer the service over to the new owner. In other words, they closed my account, opened my account, noted on my account the service was already disconnected and noted on the new account that no connection was needed. Worked great..... EXCEPT....
for the water department. A few months after I moved out, I was talking to the new owner and asking how things were going. Things were fine except that they had the water turned off for some strange reason. Called the water department up, and everything was current they couldn't figure out why they had disconnected their service, and sent someone out to turn it back on. This seemed to happen about once a month for about 3-4 months.
A year later, I start getting calls and nasty letters for unpaid services at that address for the exact same time period, a bill that was now several hundred dollars because there was "tampering" charges now on the bill for the unauthorized reconnection of services. Luckily, the people who called were very polite, and said they were notifying the city that I was contesting the charge. Unfortunately, this did not take me out of their robo-call database or their robo-mail database. Sent a letter in writing to both them and the city demanding proof that I was the person the person who occupied the address at the time, and sent a cease and dissest all communications unless they had proof of said occupancy. They continued to call and send out letters, so I filed an FTC complaint. Calls and letters stopped within a few days.
Seriously, why do people get so upset about what happens in Texas? Each state has their own government, their own rules, their own boards. So what if Texas takes evolution out of textbooks. That is what Texas has decided to do. The only people who have a right to be upset about it are Texans. It has zero effect on the rest of the country.
A publisher says they will only publish whatever Texas chooses. Fine, then another state simply chooses textbooks from another publisher. Who cares? If Texas decides to do this, it is only hurting / helping Texans.
A bit more on topic, I truthfully don't think either evolution or creationism needs to be taught - at least, not in the way they are being taught now. Like my issue with evolution is people who say "evolution happens, therefore everything has evolved from something else, there is no other explanaiton, and if you believe otherwise, you are an idiot". Instead, change it to "evolution happens, lets look at the way some animal species have adapted over the past few hundred years".
As far as Creationism, that gets even crazier. Are we young-earth believers, old-earth believers, day/age believers, progressive creationism believers, etc.
Truthfully, a public school shouldn't be teaching either. Any type of Creationism theory promotes religion, which is a violation of the seperation of church and state - but anything that speaks against religion is also a violation of seperation of church and state.
Evolution, big bang theory and all that in and of itself is not a bad thing, the issue is with how it is presented. Present evidence that it is a theory and let kids make up their own minds, rather than shove it down their throats that it is the only explanation for things. Shoot, that might lead to independant thinking that leads to someone actually coming up with a theory that makes even more sense, has harder facts, and would totally blow the entire world away.
All of that said, who cares. The blurb itself says that it is 6 board members out of 28 - that is not even a quarter of the members. This argument has been tossed around for years. With less than a quarter of the board members pushing this, I don't see it happening.
Are you aware that most human accountants use... tax software?
Truthfully, unless you go to a person who specializes in taxes, and has done so for years, I find that the online tax software is more efficiant than the human accountants. Many places, such as H&R Block, that sets up tax advisors in Walmart and places like that, hire out-of-work people, send them to school for a couple of weeks, hire them for about 3-4 months and pay them around $10 an hour. I know people who have done it. Many can hardly balance their check books, and they just run your numbers through the tax software.
As far as the parent poster's $3400 deduction - the standardized deduction is higher than that, and pretty much everyone qualifies for that.
As far as the original poster - I've been using online tax software for years. Really haven't thought anything about it. If you are refering to to security, I don't know if its really any more or less secure than any other option. As far as reliability - I have had a friend who was an accountant look over what the online service did from time to time, and she said it was fine.
The online services seem to work fine if you qualify for the easy form. If you have tons of deductions and stuff like that you need to put in, such as taking care of disabled people, owning your own business, or something like that, you may want to go with a human accountant who does this type of stuff for a living (rather than a seasonal worker) who knows all the tax codes and all the deductions and stuff you can make.
Yeah, I know that this is what the first paragraph in the article says, but I have to wonder why KXAS even wrote that. The rest of the article specifically says the Fort Worth Police had no involvement - it was ran by the federal government, and they hired a few off-duty police officers - and that the Fort Worth Police was conducting an internal investigation about it.
This is again about the Federal Government overstepping their authority, and the federal government closing down a city road without consulting local law enforcement is horrible. The cities should really sue the federal government over this.
Moreso, Beach Street is an extreamely busy street, expecially now with all the construction in the area. The video says this is on the border of Fort Worth and Haltom City, and the video seems to confirm that area. This is a very busy area - I am usually over here a few times a month. The federal government closing off this area is inexcusable. I am sure that if someone had of called the FWPD about this when it was happening, the NHTSA contractors would have been arrested, and the off-duty officers placed on administrative leave - Fort Worth doesn't put up with that kind of crap.
The problem with Solar is that you really cannot do anything else with the land, and if you place them on top of buildings, you are lucky if you can generate enough power for the building underneath it. Solar pannels need to be much more effective before its a viable source of energy to replace something like nuclear. The largest array in the world covers 2400 acres and will generate only 397 MW of power. This may sound like its more efficiant than the wind farms I listed, but as wind turbines sit a considerable height above the ground, you just need the ground area for the stem (whatever its called) and can use the surrounding land for other uses.
You would need to set aside 7500 acres of land to generate the same power as ONE of the OLD reactors and about 12000 acres of land to generate as much electricity as the new reactors would produce. You would need 35,100 acres of solar panels in Arizona to generate the same amount of electricity that all four reactors (the two old and the two proposed new ones) at Comanche Peak could produce. While the US has plenty of land, this is a poor ratio of a footprint compared with other electric choices, especially for the power-hungry metropolitain areas.
This was my thought. I have been building PCs for 20 years (using for longer, mind you), and have used just about every single CONSUMER brand I can think of. TFA says 80% last longer than 4 years? I say 80% last LESS than 4 years. 100% of my drives fail within 5 years.
They did say that they were using consumer drives with 12-36 month warrenty.
3-5 years for me is average lifespan of a drive, with speeds start degrading after about 2.5 years, and 3-4 years start being when I have issues retrieving data. Worst drives were Connor (who is no longer around) followed by Maxtor (they fail if you look at them wrong - first time you go to move your PC or external drive my Maxtors lock up and will never spin up again). Hitachi's are kind of hit and miss - although they seem to have gotten much better in the past 10 years. Western Digital seems to be hands down the best drives that I have used, Toshiba being second and Seagate being third.
No, I totally call BS on the 4 year thing, unless their definition of failure is different than mine. Once a drive starts developing bad or dirty sectors, its time to replace it before you really do start suffering from Data loss.
And of course, make sure to have backups of unreplacable stuff (digital photos, documents, etc. I could care less about stuff that is easily replacable, like MP3s and games and movies).
The site is pretty, easy to use, and I got the information I needed in about 5 seconds of entering the site, and was redirected to the providers site, as it should be. HealthCare.gov made took me about 30 seconds just now to get to a portion of the site that then required me to make a username to continue (I don't remember seeing that two weeks ago).
Point is, as this site is keeping people on their site for much less time than the government site is, you could assume that it uses significantly less resources per person. If you scalled this site onto the governement's datacenter, it might actually work and fix the issue, even with hundreds of thousands hitting it.
In any case, I don't care. My health insurance is paid for by my employer, and I toss in a few bucks a month on top of it. If I were a contractor, though, I would be pissed at what these plans actually cost.
Yeah, I did not cover copyright infringement until third year of college in my Business Law class.
I also do not see this curriculum taking off in any state other than California. Seriously, could you imagine the State of Texas adopting this curriculum? "Let's drop a few math classes over the next few weeks so we can discuss copyright infringement. The MPAA / RIAA is your friends, kids, and if you give them your lunch money they won't beat you up! What do you mean you don't know your multiplication table yet? Do that at home, we are studying the more important issue of copyright infringement" Yep, not going to fly.
The question comes to how much land you want to use to generate power. It should be pointed out, though, that the land that windfarms are on can also be used for agricultual purposes,
So if you are talking cost wise, wind and gas is more efficient, but if you want to generate a ton of power in a relatively small footprint, nuclear is the way to go.
Luckily, the one thing we have here in Texas is tons of land. The wind farms are said by many to be eyesores. I kind of like them, because they are kind of unique, but I certainly wouldn't want to see the whole state littered with windfarms to generate power. Nuclear is the way of the future, but it looks like the way of the present is going to be wind and gas. That's fine for now, but with the growth of the cities in Texas, do you really want to set aside another 500,000 acres of land for wind when two new reactors, on land already being used for a nuclear power plant, can generate roughly the same amount of power?
Slashdot Mirror
Your links are not to Kindle Fires.
I was talking about something with an easy interface. I know there are Android tablets bigger than 13 inches. Those were not what I was endorsing.
You know, I get associated with right-winged conservatives all the time (probably for good reason), but I found this article stupid, and just another effort to blame the Obama Administration for something else.
Do you have any idea how many wind turbines there are in California alone? Add to that all the wind turbines in Texas, plus all those strung out over the other 37 states that have wind power, and the fact that ONLY 85 eagles have been killed by them over 15 years is a pretty darn low number. I was expecting to read something like 100 per year. (Okay, granted, Texas isn't really the home of bald eagles)
I get it, I am a patriot, and the hearing that any eagle are killed doesn't sit too well with me. But seriously, 85 over 15 years?
How about an article saying how many animals are ALIVE from us going to windpower and reducing the amount of pollutant in the enviornment?
The Obama Administration issuing permits to wind power companies protecting them from prosecution because a bird is stupid enough to fly into a turbine sounds like a logical move to me.
Now if we were talking hundred or more birds killed a year in the same area, the argument could be made to disassemble some turbines in a given area. But these incidents sound pretty remote. The Altaria Wind Farm in California has 490 turbines. (source http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_the_United_States ). I am too lazy to go and look at how many turbines there are total near eagle nesting area, but once again, the numbers reported are really low. (The article does state though that not all deaths are reported, so I can accept that hese numbers may be higher).
Now if the poster can think of a way to get clean energy without any side effects, please tell us, and we will consider you for a Nobel Prize.
You may have to help him go through the initial setup, but the GUI is pretty self-explanitory. Its pretty minamalist, easy access to what is needed, etc.
If you want a bigger tablet, though, you may be stuck going with an iPad. But if you want to save a couple hundred bucks and stick with Android, go Kindle Fire.
And don't wine about it not having full Google Apps or access to the play store or anything. You said you wanted something simple. This is simple.
We got one for my dad a couple of years ago who is in his 60s, and he loves it.
I think the officer will have a hard time proving this in court, though. Unless someone who works for the school or the district made a complaint, it would be hard to prove that 1) that he did not have permission from someone or 2) the school even saw it as theft. This is like someone saying that you stole wifi from an open wireless router.
In many states you can legally shoot someone if they are on your property (wouldn't at all be surprised if Georgia is one of those states). I know its illegal to carry firearms onto school grounds in many states, but the man could have been perfectly justified if he came back to his car, saw someone strange sitting in it, and opened fire.
Also, if the officer cannot prove the theft charge, he can be charged with either illegal searches or breaking and entering. If any judge is in his right mind, the man will get off, and the officer will be disciplined.
*Pretty cabling. :-) The idea of raised floors is that you can still run cabling. I should learn to proofread before hitting submit.
I think the parent was tongue-in-cheek. That said, if they won't let you run wires, wifi may be your only solution.
Actually, this may be more than the company wants to spend, but talk the guy in charge of the building into installing raised floors. Run your cabling underneath. Then you don't have to worry about pretty trays or cabling.
With these channels moving around, it is also feasable that the broadcasting power is not as high, to keep from bleeding over onto channels aired from other areas. This was especially true before the transition, when you had both analogue and digital channels. After the switch over, only a couple of channels do I get stronger signals on - some are still giving me less than 60% of the signal (although most are now at 98% or better). What is sad is I live less than 15 miles from "broadcast hill" with a clear line-of-sight. I can see the antennas from my balcony. You would think that all I would have to do is point my antenna at the towers and I would have perfect signal.
Before the transition, a lot of my local stations were actually broadcasting the digital signal from their backup transmitters at the station, not from the transmitter on "broadcast hill". I know this because I called up the engineers of a couple of stations as I was having issues receiving their signal. So, they were broadcasting from a different location, at a lower power, on a different frequency, with a smaller tower, plus, before the transition, they might take the signal down completely for a while to do maintanance.
An example of channels moving is shown at this chart:
http://www.rabbitears.info/market.php?request=print_market&mktid=5
Before, DFW had 6 channels in the VHF range, now there are only 2 (BTW, I have no clue what that KSFW is, I don't get it, I have one channel "2.1" and it is Daystar).
What was worse is, after the transition, a couple of channels moved again to their new broadcast home, meaning that you had to rescan.
So you really cannot say that digital transmisison is worse than analogue, because there are many other variables that are in place.
I will say, however, that if you are living in the US and haven't rescanned in a couple of years, try that, and see if it helps. But as the parent said, you may have to end up putting up multiple antennas and repositioning them. It is not because digital doesn't go as far, it is because different frequencies and broadcast powers are being used now. About the only thing you can really do is to call up the station engineer at the station and ask if they have plans to increase their broadcast power.
Mod parent up
April 1st was 8 months ago.
In all seriouisness, I don't see how this relates to real-world data-gathering. Plugging data into an algorithim that you gathered on movie night while beer-drinking and smoking crack with your fraternity brothers is very different than gathering real data in real labs. It sounds like some students were just trying to justify a school project that let them have a zombie-movie marathon. I mean, if, as they say, the same model can be used to chart flu outbreaks, then why didn't they chart a flu outbreak? There is no rhyme or reason to Zombie movies, and most do not follow some established storyline or mythology. Trying to establish a pattern based on a bunch of disjointed movies may actually prove more difficult than using data for a real disease.
Sadly the main link is blocked for me, so I cannot see if there is any more information there. There may be more information there that clarifies what they are doing, but it all sounds rather pointless to me.
Yes, because we must teach Ruby before we teach kids how to read and write.
"Now kids, this is how you declair a variable in Ruby"
"Mr Z, can I go color now?"
The Article Title is so stupid, and the summery is even worse, that I have no desire to even look at the article.
As much as I hate to side with Spamhaus, this actually sounds plausable. This isn't fining everyone with an insecure server, it is fining those who have recieved warnings already and have done nothing about it. Problem is, I don't see how that would really be enforcable. Wouldn't the government of each country in the world have to impose similar measures?
I think its a great idea, I just don't see how you could really enforce it.
that's an average of about 20kB per image. If we assume as near-worst-case an uncompressed 16-bit pixmap format, that means 100px x 100 px or so; realistically, most of them are probably jpegs
Exactly my point. :-)
yeah, 3.7 million images under 100gb? Do I even want to look at these? I can't imagine how compressed and low res those would have to be.
I am a HUGE fan of the Dell Latitude series. Extreamely easy to work on. I picked up a older refurbished d630 about 2 months ago - even though its an older model, came with dual-core 2.4GHz processor and 4 gig of ram for $239 at KMart. I picked up an external Blu-Ray drive for $30, and replaced the network card with a 802.11 N for $10. These things are STUPIDLY SIMPLE to take apart.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTPebVcfKRs
The newer Latitudes are just as easy to take apart and work on:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0NCPkxSMYA
As these are business class notebooks, they are pretty durable as well.
At least for the d630, you can replace the six-cell battery with a 9 cell and extend the operating time to over 4 hours (the operating time seems to be cut in half by the 802.11N WiFi card, but there is a physical switch to easily toggle the WiFi on and off).
Why did I pick up a 630? Because I had one of these for work for two years when I worked in desktop support (I'm now in networking) and LOVED the thing. Still do. This model came out around 2007ish, and still outperforms my consumer-grade Compaq that I picked up in 2009. Why don't I still have the Compaq? Trying to take it apart to fix the motherboard resulted in me tearing up two ribbon cables, cracking the case, and the LCD pannel cable breaking, After that, I decided to go back to Dell Latitude series. They are hands-down the most tinkerer-friendly laptops you can find. I've replaced nics, drive, ram, keyboards, LCDs motherboards and processors on these things back in my desktop support days. I've worked on Compaqs, HPs, Apples, Gateway, eMachines, Acers and Sonys, and none are as easy to work with as the Dell.
No, Dell is not paying me to say this. :-) I think some of their business desktop models are crap. But IMHO nothing beats the Latitude line in terms of user servicability!
I moved out of a small town about two years ago. Had all utilities switched over to their name - usually involving both of us going to the utility office together, because it really did not make sense to have a disconnect and a reconnect scheduled - most services told us they could disconnect immediately but not reconnect for a week or two - however, they were all willing to just let me pay out my bill, and transfer the service over to the new owner. In other words, they closed my account, opened my account, noted on my account the service was already disconnected and noted on the new account that no connection was needed. Worked great..... EXCEPT....
for the water department. A few months after I moved out, I was talking to the new owner and asking how things were going. Things were fine except that they had the water turned off for some strange reason. Called the water department up, and everything was current they couldn't figure out why they had disconnected their service, and sent someone out to turn it back on. This seemed to happen about once a month for about 3-4 months.
A year later, I start getting calls and nasty letters for unpaid services at that address for the exact same time period, a bill that was now several hundred dollars because there was "tampering" charges now on the bill for the unauthorized reconnection of services. Luckily, the people who called were very polite, and said they were notifying the city that I was contesting the charge. Unfortunately, this did not take me out of their robo-call database or their robo-mail database. Sent a letter in writing to both them and the city demanding proof that I was the person the person who occupied the address at the time, and sent a cease and dissest all communications unless they had proof of said occupancy. They continued to call and send out letters, so I filed an FTC complaint. Calls and letters stopped within a few days.
Seriously, why do people get so upset about what happens in Texas? Each state has their own government, their own rules, their own boards. So what if Texas takes evolution out of textbooks. That is what Texas has decided to do. The only people who have a right to be upset about it are Texans. It has zero effect on the rest of the country.
A publisher says they will only publish whatever Texas chooses. Fine, then another state simply chooses textbooks from another publisher. Who cares? If Texas decides to do this, it is only hurting / helping Texans.
A bit more on topic, I truthfully don't think either evolution or creationism needs to be taught - at least, not in the way they are being taught now. Like my issue with evolution is people who say "evolution happens, therefore everything has evolved from something else, there is no other explanaiton, and if you believe otherwise, you are an idiot". Instead, change it to "evolution happens, lets look at the way some animal species have adapted over the past few hundred years".
As far as Creationism, that gets even crazier. Are we young-earth believers, old-earth believers, day/age believers, progressive creationism believers, etc.
Truthfully, a public school shouldn't be teaching either. Any type of Creationism theory promotes religion, which is a violation of the seperation of church and state - but anything that speaks against religion is also a violation of seperation of church and state.
Evolution, big bang theory and all that in and of itself is not a bad thing, the issue is with how it is presented. Present evidence that it is a theory and let kids make up their own minds, rather than shove it down their throats that it is the only explanation for things. Shoot, that might lead to independant thinking that leads to someone actually coming up with a theory that makes even more sense, has harder facts, and would totally blow the entire world away.
All of that said, who cares. The blurb itself says that it is 6 board members out of 28 - that is not even a quarter of the members. This argument has been tossed around for years. With less than a quarter of the board members pushing this, I don't see it happening.
Are you aware that most human accountants use ... tax software?
Truthfully, unless you go to a person who specializes in taxes, and has done so for years, I find that the online tax software is more efficiant than the human accountants. Many places, such as H&R Block, that sets up tax advisors in Walmart and places like that, hire out-of-work people, send them to school for a couple of weeks, hire them for about 3-4 months and pay them around $10 an hour. I know people who have done it. Many can hardly balance their check books, and they just run your numbers through the tax software.
As far as the parent poster's $3400 deduction - the standardized deduction is higher than that, and pretty much everyone qualifies for that.
As far as the original poster - I've been using online tax software for years. Really haven't thought anything about it. If you are refering to to security, I don't know if its really any more or less secure than any other option. As far as reliability - I have had a friend who was an accountant look over what the online service did from time to time, and she said it was fine.
The online services seem to work fine if you qualify for the easy form. If you have tons of deductions and stuff like that you need to put in, such as taking care of disabled people, owning your own business, or something like that, you may want to go with a human accountant who does this type of stuff for a living (rather than a seasonal worker) who knows all the tax codes and all the deductions and stuff you can make.
Yeah, I know that this is what the first paragraph in the article says, but I have to wonder why KXAS even wrote that. The rest of the article specifically says the Fort Worth Police had no involvement - it was ran by the federal government, and they hired a few off-duty police officers - and that the Fort Worth Police was conducting an internal investigation about it.
This is again about the Federal Government overstepping their authority, and the federal government closing down a city road without consulting local law enforcement is horrible. The cities should really sue the federal government over this.
Moreso, Beach Street is an extreamely busy street, expecially now with all the construction in the area. The video says this is on the border of Fort Worth and Haltom City, and the video seems to confirm that area. This is a very busy area - I am usually over here a few times a month. The federal government closing off this area is inexcusable. I am sure that if someone had of called the FWPD about this when it was happening, the NHTSA contractors would have been arrested, and the off-duty officers placed on administrative leave - Fort Worth doesn't put up with that kind of crap.
So let's fund SETI to research and develop a subspace radio array. The payoff from that would be substantial! :-)
The problem with Solar is that you really cannot do anything else with the land, and if you place them on top of buildings, you are lucky if you can generate enough power for the building underneath it. Solar pannels need to be much more effective before its a viable source of energy to replace something like nuclear. The largest array in the world covers 2400 acres and will generate only 397 MW of power. This may sound like its more efficiant than the wind farms I listed, but as wind turbines sit a considerable height above the ground, you just need the ground area for the stem (whatever its called) and can use the surrounding land for other uses.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agua_Caliente_Solar_Project
You would need to set aside 7500 acres of land to generate the same power as ONE of the OLD reactors and about 12000 acres of land to generate as much electricity as the new reactors would produce. You would need 35,100 acres of solar panels in Arizona to generate the same amount of electricity that all four reactors (the two old and the two proposed new ones) at Comanche Peak could produce. While the US has plenty of land, this is a poor ratio of a footprint compared with other electric choices, especially for the power-hungry metropolitain areas.
This was my thought. I have been building PCs for 20 years (using for longer, mind you), and have used just about every single CONSUMER brand I can think of. TFA says 80% last longer than 4 years? I say 80% last LESS than 4 years. 100% of my drives fail within 5 years.
They did say that they were using consumer drives with 12-36 month warrenty.
3-5 years for me is average lifespan of a drive, with speeds start degrading after about 2.5 years, and 3-4 years start being when I have issues retrieving data. Worst drives were Connor (who is no longer around) followed by Maxtor (they fail if you look at them wrong - first time you go to move your PC or external drive my Maxtors lock up and will never spin up again). Hitachi's are kind of hit and miss - although they seem to have gotten much better in the past 10 years. Western Digital seems to be hands down the best drives that I have used, Toshiba being second and Seagate being third.
No, I totally call BS on the 4 year thing, unless their definition of failure is different than mine. Once a drive starts developing bad or dirty sectors, its time to replace it before you really do start suffering from Data loss.
And of course, make sure to have backups of unreplacable stuff (digital photos, documents, etc. I could care less about stuff that is easily replacable, like MP3s and games and movies).
The site is pretty, easy to use, and I got the information I needed in about 5 seconds of entering the site, and was redirected to the providers site, as it should be. HealthCare.gov made took me about 30 seconds just now to get to a portion of the site that then required me to make a username to continue (I don't remember seeing that two weeks ago).
Point is, as this site is keeping people on their site for much less time than the government site is, you could assume that it uses significantly less resources per person. If you scalled this site onto the governement's datacenter, it might actually work and fix the issue, even with hundreds of thousands hitting it.
In any case, I don't care. My health insurance is paid for by my employer, and I toss in a few bucks a month on top of it. If I were a contractor, though, I would be pissed at what these plans actually cost.
Yeah, I did not cover copyright infringement until third year of college in my Business Law class.
I also do not see this curriculum taking off in any state other than California. Seriously, could you imagine the State of Texas adopting this curriculum? "Let's drop a few math classes over the next few weeks so we can discuss copyright infringement. The MPAA / RIAA is your friends, kids, and if you give them your lunch money they won't beat you up! What do you mean you don't know your multiplication table yet? Do that at home, we are studying the more important issue of copyright infringement" Yep, not going to fly.
Yes, but were you using a 4G network?
Wind power in Texas does generate quite a bit of electricity - 12,212 MW to be exact.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_Texas
It looks like the Roscoe Wind Farm is the largest generating 781MW over 100,000 acres of land, several times the size of Manhatten
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roscoe_Wind_Farm
Likewise, Comanche Peak generates around 2,100 MW of electricity between its current two reactors.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comanche_Peak_Nuclear_Power_Plant
The question comes to how much land you want to use to generate power. It should be pointed out, though, that the land that windfarms are on can also be used for agricultual purposes,
So if you are talking cost wise, wind and gas is more efficient, but if you want to generate a ton of power in a relatively small footprint, nuclear is the way to go.
Luckily, the one thing we have here in Texas is tons of land. The wind farms are said by many to be eyesores. I kind of like them, because they are kind of unique, but I certainly wouldn't want to see the whole state littered with windfarms to generate power. Nuclear is the way of the future, but it looks like the way of the present is going to be wind and gas. That's fine for now, but with the growth of the cities in Texas, do you really want to set aside another 500,000 acres of land for wind when two new reactors, on land already being used for a nuclear power plant, can generate roughly the same amount of power?