The article you quoted is full of inaccuracies. For one thing, "Tiririca" does not mean "Grumpy", that would be "Zangado" in Portuguese. "Tiririca"is the name of a common garden weed in Brazil.
More importantly, the judge mentioned there did not rule that Tiririca is able to read and write, he ruled that the candidate was not guilty of perjury just because he did not fill out himself the document stating that he's able to read and write.
Perhaps the Washington Post reporters aren't that much literate either...
I don't now about US Army's external sub-contractors illegally arresting, detaining and torturing half of the Swedish population.
No need for the US Army to do that. The Swedish legal system is already doing it. From what I've read about the Swedish definitions of "rape", the male half of the Swedish population is surely being actively prosecuted by now.
if she regrets it in the morning she can then claim it was rape, on the grounds that you had sex while her judgement was too impaired by the alcohol to consent.
OTOH, she cannot tell the judge she was too drunk to know what she was doing if she picks the car keys and drives it.
WTF? Drinking is supposed to require judgement for one act and not for another? If she's afraid of rape, then she should have a non-drinking designated chaperone with her, who will take her home when she's too drunk to use her judgement.
Multiply it by thousands and those capacitors and resistors begin to add up, multiply it by millions and the printed circuit real estate plus solder needed for the passive components start having a price impact. Flashing and testing a PIC takes less time than inserting, clipping leads, and soldering a couple of components.
Anyhow, when was the last time you needed just a half-second delay and nothing else from a circuit? With a PIC, the connections are the limit. From six pins in an 8-pin DIP to 40+ or more from the bigger packages, you cover a vast range of applications.
The only thing I really don't like about current PICs is the programming. I dream of an age, hopefully not too far away, when there will exist 8 pin PICs that cost less than a dollar running Linux and programmed in Python.
I suggested they add a 555 timer circuit. They looked at me like I had two heads. Their solution was to throw a microcontroller into the product. Come on, guys! It can be done with a 555, a cap, and two resistors. It's crash-proof, too. Whatever happened to K.I.S.S?
A PIC like the 12F675 has eight pins, like the 555, and needs no external components at all. What can be simpler than that?
After I got a 100-pack of 12F675s at a special discount price I decided never to use a 555 again.
So why am I surrounded by people taking flash pictures of the sky whenever I go to a fireworks show?
Because they have crappy point-and-shoot cameras that trigger the flash automatically whenever the light that reaches the lens falls below a certain level.
Do you seriously believe that unregulated markets are immune to manipulation? My god, man! What's the free market price on a bushel of corn in Mogadishu this time of year?
I didn't say an unregulated market can't be manipulated. I said that rules that aren't made can't be broken. If there are no rules, the buyers make their own rules.
You can bet no one is selling corn at the Mogadishu market where the Bacillus Thuringiensis level is above the norm.
The deregulation allowed Enron to manipulate power supplies and prices
Excuse me, but that's REgulation, not DEregulation. True deregulation wouldn't allow anyone to manipulate power supplies and prices, that would have been left to the market.
Cheating is intrinsic to regulation, the only scenario with no cheating is the one where there are no rules.
What the leftist politicians do not understand is that regulation NEVER works to protect the common people. Big corporations have big teams of lawyers working full time to find gaps in the regulation. They do not need to break the rules, just to bend them, to make a profit.
You and me, the common people, we have neither the time nor the expertise to do that detailed analysis work, we are unable to bend the regulations as much.
That's why you and everybody else is able to afford to have a telephone. You would be surprised to find how much it costs to have available at all times the maximum capacity you bought.
When the statistics of the system change, you need new formulas to calculate both the needed capacity and the prices the service will cost. This will happen with the power utilities when electric cars become popular, just as it happened with the phone service when people started buying their first 2400bps modems a quarter of a century ago to access CompuServe.
As I did the math once on a 12 volt transformer. a 1000 watt 12 volt transformer only draws 100 watts at 120 volts
Congratulations to you, sir, you have invented perpetual motion!
Rig a 12V 1000W motor running a 120V 1000W generator, use 100W of those 120V to power your 12V transformer and you have 900W left over, totally free...
"Before this week's power outages, California Governor Gray Davis's efforts to secure adequate supplies of electricity appeared to have stabilized the situation, at least until summer. The state is paying $45 million a day to subsidize energy purchases by the state's two major utility companiesSouthern California Edison and Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E). Recently the governor announced that some long-term contracts have been negotiated in the $70-80 per megawatt range."
The state spending $45 million a day hardly seems like DEregulation to me.
What they call "deregulation" of the power industry in California was actually a change in regulations, not the elimination of regulations. For instance, Wikipedia says:
"The California energy market allowed for energy companies to charge higher prices for electricity produced out-of-state"
"the Death Star group of scams played on the market rules which required the state to pay "congestion fees" to alleviate congestion on major power lines"
"in 2000, wholesale prices were deregulated, but retail prices were regulated for the incumbents as part of a deal with the regulator, allowing the incumbent utilities to recover the cost of assets that would be stranded as a result of greater competition, based on the expectation that "frozen" rates would remain higher than wholesale prices".
"By keeping the consumer price of electricity artificially low, the California government discouraged citizens from practicing conservation. In February 2001, California governor Gray Davis stated, "Believe me, if I wanted to raise rates I could have solved this problem in 20 minutes."
That's over-regulation, not deregulation. Deregulation would be letting anyone produce, transmit, and sell electricity at any price the consumers would pay.
Who profits from such a rumor? My bet would be on some consumer products retailer who is worried that too many people in Kuwait are buying DSLR cameras instead of the cameras he has in stock.
Kuwaitis are rich enough to buy more sophisticated products than they really need and Kuwait is a small country where rumors spread fast, so this could be some kind of marketing effort.
I suspect it would still be cheaper to design the satellites for a shorter life span and keep launching them into different orbits.
The cost of launching a satellite is in the tens of millions of dollars range.
Satellites are made to have longer and longer lifespans as technology evolves, because the higher cost of a more sophisticated satellite is easily compensated by needing less of those costly launch missions.
Slashdot Mirror
To say the sky got 'starrier' would imply that more stars are there than before...
No, it means there are more stars than we knew about before.
congressmen can't read, duh.
this one can: brazilian clown
In this case at least, the jury is still out.
The article you quoted is full of inaccuracies. For one thing, "Tiririca" does not mean "Grumpy", that would be "Zangado" in Portuguese. "Tiririca"is the name of a common garden weed in Brazil.
More importantly, the judge mentioned there did not rule that Tiririca is able to read and write, he ruled that the candidate was not guilty of perjury just because he did not fill out himself the document stating that he's able to read and write.
Perhaps the Washington Post reporters aren't that much literate either...
Hedley Lamarr: Qualifications?
Applicant: Fraud, murder, arson, and fraud.
Hedley Lamarr: You said fraud twice.
Applicant: I like fraud.
I don't now about US Army's external sub-contractors illegally arresting, detaining and torturing half of the Swedish population.
No need for the US Army to do that. The Swedish legal system is already doing it. From what I've read about the Swedish definitions of "rape", the male half of the Swedish population is surely being actively prosecuted by now.
he's Australian, at least according to both CNN and Wikipedia.
Not the subject of this story.
Accused of rape in a friendly foreign country, more likely.
He's Swedish. He doesn't need to travel anywhere to be accused of rape.
if she regrets it in the morning she can then claim it was rape, on the grounds that you had sex while her judgement was too impaired by the alcohol to consent.
OTOH, she cannot tell the judge she was too drunk to know what she was doing if she picks the car keys and drives it.
WTF? Drinking is supposed to require judgement for one act and not for another? If she's afraid of rape, then she should have a non-drinking designated chaperone with her, who will take her home when she's too drunk to use her judgement.
Well, Ray Kurzweil seems to me about as effective at predicting the future of technology as Oracle is effective at managing data bases.
This analogy is pretty good, but it's not exactly what some people might imagine.
for all I know SAP could totally be in the right.
But I still love seeing them in pain.. after all the pain they've caused everyone else.
A legal battle between SAP and Oracle sounds like a (forgive me, Godwin) war between Nazi Germany and Stalinist Soviet Union.
Whoever loses, they deserved it, and I hope no one wins.
If antibacterial soaps contain alcohol, then why don't they smell like alcohol?
Subject: No shit !
Content: nuff said
Moderation: (Score:2, Informative)
Would some of the moderators, please, inform me which information is that post bringing to me?
Multiply it by thousands and those capacitors and resistors begin to add up, multiply it by millions and the printed circuit real estate plus solder needed for the passive components start having a price impact. Flashing and testing a PIC takes less time than inserting, clipping leads, and soldering a couple of components.
Anyhow, when was the last time you needed just a half-second delay and nothing else from a circuit? With a PIC, the connections are the limit. From six pins in an 8-pin DIP to 40+ or more from the bigger packages, you cover a vast range of applications.
The only thing I really don't like about current PICs is the programming. I dream of an age, hopefully not too far away, when there will exist 8 pin PICs that cost less than a dollar running Linux and programmed in Python.
I suggested they add a 555 timer circuit. They looked at me like I had two heads. Their solution was to throw a microcontroller into the product. Come on, guys! It can be done with a 555, a cap, and two resistors. It's crash-proof, too. Whatever happened to K.I.S.S?
A PIC like the 12F675 has eight pins, like the 555, and needs no external components at all. What can be simpler than that?
After I got a 100-pack of 12F675s at a special discount price I decided never to use a 555 again.
So why am I surrounded by people taking flash pictures of the sky whenever I go to a fireworks show?
Because they have crappy point-and-shoot cameras that trigger the flash automatically whenever the light that reaches the lens falls below a certain level.
Food, water, a cave, high-speed internet, and hookers.
Do you seriously believe that unregulated markets are immune to manipulation? My god, man! What's the free market price on a bushel of corn in Mogadishu this time of year?
I didn't say an unregulated market can't be manipulated. I said that rules that aren't made can't be broken. If there are no rules, the buyers make their own rules.
You can bet no one is selling corn at the Mogadishu market where the Bacillus Thuringiensis level is above the norm.
The deregulation allowed Enron to manipulate power supplies and prices
Excuse me, but that's REgulation, not DEregulation. True deregulation wouldn't allow anyone to manipulate power supplies and prices, that would have been left to the market.
Cheating is intrinsic to regulation, the only scenario with no cheating is the one where there are no rules.
What the leftist politicians do not understand is that regulation NEVER works to protect the common people. Big corporations have big teams of lawyers working full time to find gaps in the regulation. They do not need to break the rules, just to bend them, to make a profit.
You and me, the common people, we have neither the time nor the expertise to do that detailed analysis work, we are unable to bend the regulations as much.
So they oversell electric capacity just like they oversell bandwidth?
Yes. Someone long ago found that it's not really necessary to have capacity to handle all possible requests at once, because not everybody uses the system at once.
That's why you and everybody else is able to afford to have a telephone. You would be surprised to find how much it costs to have available at all times the maximum capacity you bought.
When the statistics of the system change, you need new formulas to calculate both the needed capacity and the prices the service will cost. This will happen with the power utilities when electric cars become popular, just as it happened with the phone service when people started buying their first 2400bps modems a quarter of a century ago to access CompuServe.
Your argument fails at one epic point: we have been getting our electric power from centralized stations for over a hundred years.
the Obama administration says will put 'countless' lives at risk
Who would have guessed the US military has aleph-one people working for it?
often designed to handle 12,000 watts? Hogwash. That's 50 amp service (in North America, where homes are almost always supplied at 240VAC)
You should add a sqrt(3) there, because it's a three-phase system.
12000W / (240V * sqrt(3)) = 28.8A
As I did the math once on a 12 volt transformer. a 1000 watt 12 volt transformer only draws 100 watts at 120 volts
Congratulations to you, sir, you have invented perpetual motion!
Rig a 12V 1000W motor running a 120V 1000W generator, use 100W of those 120V to power your 12V transformer and you have 900W left over, totally free...
From the article you linked:
"Before this week's power outages, California Governor Gray Davis's efforts to secure adequate supplies of electricity appeared to have stabilized the situation, at least until summer. The state is paying $45 million a day to subsidize energy purchases by the state's two major utility companiesSouthern California Edison and Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E).
Recently the governor announced that some long-term contracts have been negotiated in the $70-80 per megawatt range."
The state spending $45 million a day hardly seems like DEregulation to me.
What they call "deregulation" of the power industry in California was actually a change in regulations, not the elimination of regulations. For instance, Wikipedia says:
"The California energy market allowed for energy companies to charge higher prices for electricity produced out-of-state"
"the Death Star group of scams played on the market rules which required the state to pay "congestion fees" to alleviate congestion on major power lines"
"in 2000, wholesale prices were deregulated, but retail prices were regulated for the incumbents as part of a deal with the regulator, allowing the incumbent utilities to recover the cost of assets that would be stranded as a result of greater competition, based on the expectation that "frozen" rates would remain higher than wholesale prices".
"By keeping the consumer price of electricity artificially low, the California government discouraged citizens from practicing conservation. In February 2001, California governor Gray Davis stated, "Believe me, if I wanted to raise rates I could have solved this problem in 20 minutes."
That's over-regulation, not deregulation. Deregulation would be letting anyone produce, transmit, and sell electricity at any price the consumers would pay.
If there's a rumor, it has started somewhere.
Who profits from such a rumor? My bet would be on some consumer products retailer who is worried that too many people in Kuwait are buying DSLR cameras instead of the cameras he has in stock.
Kuwaitis are rich enough to buy more sophisticated products than they really need and Kuwait is a small country where rumors spread fast, so this could be some kind of marketing effort.
I suspect it would still be cheaper to design the satellites for a shorter life span and keep launching them into different orbits.
The cost of launching a satellite is in the tens of millions of dollars range.
Satellites are made to have longer and longer lifespans as technology evolves, because the higher cost of a more sophisticated satellite is easily compensated by needing less of those costly launch missions.