That was my first thought (the weak dollar part, not the conspiracy theory part), but it fails to explain why US tourism has continued to rise in the 2008-2011 period, despite the dollar rebounding during those years. Your chart stops at the start of 2008, which was about as low the dollar got. It hit bottom a few months later, in April of 2008, at around 72 points. Since then, it has bounced back and is hovering around 80 points. Here's my source.
You don't appoint the former CEO of a national beef conglomerate to be head of PETA. You don't appoint a former devil worshipper as pope. You don't appoint a former member of the pirate party as an executive of the RIAA.
Allow me to play Devil's Advocate here... Why shouldn't you hire such people? People can change, and such people often have insights that lifetime partisans lack. For example, an ex-satanist who finds religion might make a good pope, in that he'd have an intimate understanding of what could drive people to devil worship and what could bring them back. The RIAA would likely benefit from having a former pirate party member at its helm, because that person would understand piracy in a way the organization currently doesn't and could drive sane policy changes.
What you're promoting seems to be ideological purity at the cost of maybe not expanding or improving policy. It's an innately defensive posture, used by people who are playing to not lose rather than to win. Maybe such a posture is better in this case, but I wouldn't say that that's always the case.
That's an interesting question. I did some digging, and came up with two things. The first is a new-found respect for the US government's data organization, which for all its flaws is way more accessible than Britain's or France's. The second is a document out of Germany that mercifully covers tourism across the EU, so I didn't have to dig up any more sources.
You can read it for yourself (there's some interesting stats on who goes where and how much they spend), but the upshot is the global average growth is around 4%, and the EU is a bit below average at 3.4%, whereas the US is quite a bit above average (around 8%), as shown by the numbers from my prior post. Interestingly, the Middle East is seeing the most growth of anywhere in the world, at a whopping 14% pace. You'd think people would be avoiding the region given the instability, but apparently that's not the case.
Wow, US tourism is absolutely booming! That's an increase of at least 4% (average of 8%) every year for nearly a decade! That greatly exceeds the world's average birth rate, especially when you consider that the birth rate is lower in places where most tourists come from. In light of these numbers, perhaps you'd like to reconsider your position?
It's redundant in that practically every story has at least one post saying how it's a nonstory. The guy claiming this one to be a nonstory is particularly off base in that the story involves Lord of the Rings, intellectual property law, and beer... the only way it could be more relevant to Slashdot's collective interests is if the ghost of Steve Jobs was found drinking there with Linus Torvalds.
Pro-lifers consider abortions to be "immoral and unjust". Indeed, from their point of view, abortions are equivalent to the murder of over a million infants every year, which (if they were right) I'm sure you would agree is much worse than a billion dollar fine for downloading an MP3. So by your logic, they are completely justified in treating abortion doctors and clinics as "valid targets".
If you think only people you agree with deserve the protection of law, then you are far worse than any of the villains you rail against.
Not quite. The slug is a unit of mass, but so is the pound...sometimes. We have the pound-mass and the pound-force, with the latter being described as the weight of an object with a mass of one pound-mass under standard Earth gravity. The slug is then defined based on the pound-force as an amount of mass that accelerates at 1 ft/s^2 when exposed to one pound-force of force.
If you're thinking that having two nearly identically named units to describe two closely linked parameters is just asking for someone to mix them up, the congratulations -- you've found one of the many flaws of the Imperial measurement system.
What you said: "And the warmists, who every time a cyclone hits, come out crying that it wouldn't have happened, if only you'd let them tax you more for your sinful energy consumption."
What your articles say:
A major climate study in 2010 based on the results of a range of computer models concluded there was likely to be a substantial increase in the number of storms in the severe category range of 3 to 5, with 5 being the maximum.
Overall, storms would be between 2 and 11 percent more intense by 2100 and rainfall would increase about 20 percent near the centre, it predicted.
The study also found that, with the exception of the Atlantic, there might be a drop in the number of storms in the Pacific and around Australia, but the storms that did form would tend to be more dangerous.
Can you really not see the difference? On the denier side, you have people who are literally saying "It's cold outside, therefore global warming is false." On the other side, you have people running simulations and making falsifiable predictions. But rather than actually discuss the science, you come back at them by putting words in their mouths, saying things like "sinful energy consumption".
Scientists aren't saying every cyclone is proof of global warming. They aren't saying that your energy consumption is "sinful". Those are lies that you are telling, in an attempt to make them look bad.
And yet last year saw some of the coldest temperatures we've had in a very long time. But I didn't see people screaming OMG GLOBAL FREEZING!!1!!1! back then.
That's because the people who understand global warming are smart enough to know that a single season doesn't mean anything on its own. It's the deniers who, every goddamned winter, come out of the woodwork with their childlike taunts: "If the Earth's getting warmer, then why is it currently cold outside!?"
Isn't it funny that this winter they all seem to understand that one point doesn't make a line? Sadly, I'm sure that by next year they will have forgotten all about this, and will point to the first snowflake as proof that the Earth is unchanged.
Disgusting. What was done to the Native Americans was terrible, but nothing like the Holocaust.
The vast majority of the deaths among Native Americans came from the various diseases brought over from Europe. Smallpox, measles, mumps, tuberculosis, malaria, typhus, cholera... Europeans had collected an impressive amount of plagues over the centuries, and introduced them all at once to an unprepared populace. That alone is estimated to have killed around 80% of the Native American population.
Many more Native Americans (particularly of the midwestern plains tribes) died to starvation, as the new settlers over-hunted the buffalo herds and left the natives without a reliable source of food. The early Americans in that case showed a callous disregard for the natives' well-being, but it was not a genocide.
Some genocides did take place. The well-known Trail of Tears killed around four thousand people through forced march. A less well-known, but much larger genocide also took place in the western states in the twenty years following the California gold rush, resulting in the deaths of around one hundred thousand people.
But to compare to the Holocaust? Eleven million people killed with machine-like efficiency? Fully 90% of the Jewish population of Germany and Poland? A similar percentage of Native Americans died, but the vast majority of those deaths were to sickness, not murder. The two cases are nothing alike, and it is absolutely disgusting that you would try to equate them.
I didn't say that COBs replaced BGAs. But they are being used, and I know my company is selling a lot of parts as COBs in applications other than the cheap crap you mention. Not for the central stuff with high pin counts, but peripheral stuff like radios and sram and touch controllers, with pin counts in the 20 - 40 range. Not as sexy as the latest CPU or FPGA, but still something that a hobbyist might want to tinker with.
SOPs are still common, but I suspect that that's because designers are more comfortable with them, since they're easier to debug. I don't know how long that state of affairs will last. It's easy enough to just put test points on your board, and if a particular chip is acting funky, send it back to the supplier and let them deal with it. No point in screwing around with lifting pins - it's a rather painful exercise with the fine pitch used in SOPs anyway. And I'm pretty sure you're wrong about SOPs being cheaper. You save a lot of money by eliminating the assembly/test/finish steps, and shorten your lead time to boot.
But as SMD rework stations became accessible, companies started using BGAs. And as a few hobbyists learned how to replace BGAs (with great difficulty), companies started using COBs. As far as I know, no one's even considering manual rework of those.
Hobbyists are going to lose this race. Perhaps they already have. It's unfortunate, but really it was always sort of inevitable.
Why shouldn't online purchases be taxable? Slashdotters always complain when people demand different laws for things "on the internet". Why is this an exception?
We need to fund the government somehow. Having a mile-wide loophole for purchases made on the information super-highway is archaic and counterproductive. I'd prefer no sales tax at all, since it's a regressive tax, but if we're going to have one, it should be applied everywhere.
When you highlight a passage, you have the option to share it. When you're reading, you'll see highlights that other people shared as dotted line underlines, along with a number indicating how many people shared that bit. You can turn off the display of shared highlights in the menu. Anyone who owns a Kindle would know that, so I suspect you're lying when you insinuate that you're a Kindle owner. Most likely a shill/fanboi for some other company.
Wrong. The conservative majority on the Supreme Court made it legal last year, if memory serves.
It will remain legal until we get an uninterrupted string of Democratic presidents for long enough that one of the current five Republican "justices" dies off.
This isn't some big election with millions of votes getting counted. This is 23 people in a room, 12 on one side, 11 on the other, and the eleven declaring themselves the victors while the twelve just shrug and accept it. Do the people on this committee care so little for democracy that they just blithely accept it when their opponents' imaginary friends cast ballots?
Is your theory that LightSquared donated roughly equal amounts of money to both parties, with the GOP actually receiving slightly more, as a way of currying favor with Obama? That they went to Obama and said, "Here's $100k. We gave even more to the men who have sworn to destroy you at any cost. Now do us a favor!"
Can't you see how illogical that is? Here's my theory: LightSquared is run by morons. They were morons to think that this plan would work in the first place, and that same stupidity drove them to engage in cargo cult bribery -- throw money at every party and hope to get favors in return. It didn't work, so like all mental children, they threw a tantrum, threatening to sue the FCC back in late 2011. At no point did they receive any real benefit from their attempts to bribe both parties. The Republicans are only "investigating" because they'd do anything to make the Democrats look bad. These are the people who shut down Acorn based on "evidence" from clearly doctored videos.
In fairness, many of those people were being honest. A good friend of mine had her home wrecked by Hurricane Gustav. It blew off the roof off the house, allowing rain to come in and flood the interior, destroying basically everything she owned. If it hadn't been for the wind removing the roof, there wouldn't have been any flooding, so I think it's quite reasonable to classify it as wind damage.
Admittedly, not every homeowner could claim this. In Katrina especially, due to the failing levies, there were lots of houses that were legitimately flooded (i.e. the water levels rose above the ground floor of the house). But there were also lots of houses that were outside the actual flood zones, but which suffered enormous water damage because they no longer had a roof.
Got a source to back that up? I can't find any sources to support your claim, even on the most conservatives sites.
Wikipedia seems to agree with me:
The Federal Election Commission has no record of Phil Falcone, a registered Republican, nor LightSquared Chairman and CEO Sanjiv Ahuja of having ever contributed to President Obama’s political campaigns.[39] However, since 2007, Philip Falcone has donated $50,500 to the Democratic Senatorial campaign Committee (and $85,500 to Republicans). Both Falcone's wife and LightSquared CEO Ahuja donated $30,400 to the DSCC (Ahuja gave the same amount to Republicans).
So tell me, where did you get this stuff about "several hundred thousand dollars in other donations"?
LightSquared made a $30,400 donation to the Democrats in Sept, 2010. One month later, in October, they made an identical $30,400 donation to the Republicans.
And yet strangely, people like SuperKendall only ever seem to mention the donation to the Democrats. I wonder why that is?
By the way, why do you feel that the FCC shouldn't have even let them test out their idea? Sure, it was probably doomed to failure, but I don't see the harm in letting them test it out with their own money.
Slashdot Mirror
That was my first thought (the weak dollar part, not the conspiracy theory part), but it fails to explain why US tourism has continued to rise in the 2008-2011 period, despite the dollar rebounding during those years. Your chart stops at the start of 2008, which was about as low the dollar got. It hit bottom a few months later, in April of 2008, at around 72 points. Since then, it has bounced back and is hovering around 80 points. Here's my source.
You don't appoint the former CEO of a national beef conglomerate to be head of PETA.
You don't appoint a former devil worshipper as pope. You don't appoint a former member of the pirate party as an executive of the RIAA.
Allow me to play Devil's Advocate here... Why shouldn't you hire such people? People can change, and such people often have insights that lifetime partisans lack. For example, an ex-satanist who finds religion might make a good pope, in that he'd have an intimate understanding of what could drive people to devil worship and what could bring them back. The RIAA would likely benefit from having a former pirate party member at its helm, because that person would understand piracy in a way the organization currently doesn't and could drive sane policy changes.
What you're promoting seems to be ideological purity at the cost of maybe not expanding or improving policy. It's an innately defensive posture, used by people who are playing to not lose rather than to win. Maybe such a posture is better in this case, but I wouldn't say that that's always the case.
That's an interesting question. I did some digging, and came up with two things. The first is a new-found respect for the US government's data organization, which for all its flaws is way more accessible than Britain's or France's. The second is a document out of Germany that mercifully covers tourism across the EU, so I didn't have to dig up any more sources.
You can read it for yourself (there's some interesting stats on who goes where and how much they spend), but the upshot is the global average growth is around 4%, and the EU is a bit below average at 3.4%, whereas the US is quite a bit above average (around 8%), as shown by the numbers from my prior post. Interestingly, the Middle East is seeing the most growth of anywhere in the world, at a whopping 14% pace. You'd think people would be avoiding the region given the instability, but apparently that's not the case.
How does the USA like it's foreign tourist trade now that it's dropped off a cliff?
I'd like to fact check that statement. It's a shame that the government doesn't keep track of those numbers. Oh wait... they totally do!
Let's see:
year - millions of visitors - change from previous year
2000 - 44.6 - n/a
2001 - 39.2 - -12%
2002 - 35.9 - -8%
2003 - 34.5 - -4%
Steep drop in the years following 9/11, but wait, what's this?
2004 - 38.2 - +11%
2005 - 41.1 - +8%
2006 - 43.5 - +6%
2007 - 48.4 - +11%
2008 - 50.5 - +4%
2009 - 54.9 - +9%
2010 - 59.7 - +9%
2011 - 62.3 - +4%
Wow, US tourism is absolutely booming! That's an increase of at least 4% (average of 8%) every year for nearly a decade! That greatly exceeds the world's average birth rate, especially when you consider that the birth rate is lower in places where most tourists come from. In light of these numbers, perhaps you'd like to reconsider your position?
It's redundant in that practically every story has at least one post saying how it's a nonstory. The guy claiming this one to be a nonstory is particularly off base in that the story involves Lord of the Rings, intellectual property law, and beer... the only way it could be more relevant to Slashdot's collective interests is if the ghost of Steve Jobs was found drinking there with Linus Torvalds.
Wait, what's the difference between b & f?
It's the typical Slashdot delay. I'm sure the original story will pop up in a week or two, followed by a couple dupes.
Pro-lifers consider abortions to be "immoral and unjust". Indeed, from their point of view, abortions are equivalent to the murder of over a million infants every year, which (if they were right) I'm sure you would agree is much worse than a billion dollar fine for downloading an MP3. So by your logic, they are completely justified in treating abortion doctors and clinics as "valid targets".
If you think only people you agree with deserve the protection of law, then you are far worse than any of the villains you rail against.
Not quite. The slug is a unit of mass, but so is the pound ...sometimes. We have the pound-mass and the pound-force, with the latter being described as the weight of an object with a mass of one pound-mass under standard Earth gravity. The slug is then defined based on the pound-force as an amount of mass that accelerates at 1 ft/s^2 when exposed to one pound-force of force.
If you're thinking that having two nearly identically named units to describe two closely linked parameters is just asking for someone to mix them up, the congratulations -- you've found one of the many flaws of the Imperial measurement system.
What you said:
"And the warmists, who every time a cyclone hits, come out crying that it wouldn't have happened, if only you'd let them tax you more for your sinful energy consumption."
What your articles say:
A major climate study in 2010 based on the results of a range of computer models concluded there was likely to be a substantial increase in the number of storms in the severe category range of 3 to 5, with 5 being the maximum.
Overall, storms would be between 2 and 11 percent more intense by 2100 and rainfall would increase about 20 percent near the centre, it predicted.
The study also found that, with the exception of the Atlantic, there might be a drop in the number of storms in the Pacific and around Australia, but the storms that did form would tend to be more dangerous.
Can you really not see the difference? On the denier side, you have people who are literally saying "It's cold outside, therefore global warming is false." On the other side, you have people running simulations and making falsifiable predictions. But rather than actually discuss the science, you come back at them by putting words in their mouths, saying things like "sinful energy consumption".
Scientists aren't saying every cyclone is proof of global warming. They aren't saying that your energy consumption is "sinful". Those are lies that you are telling, in an attempt to make them look bad.
Google image search: "global warming cartoon"
1
2
3
4
5
And yet last year saw some of the coldest temperatures we've had in a very long time. But I didn't see people screaming OMG GLOBAL FREEZING!!1!!1! back then.
That's because the people who understand global warming are smart enough to know that a single season doesn't mean anything on its own. It's the deniers who, every goddamned winter, come out of the woodwork with their childlike taunts: "If the Earth's getting warmer, then why is it currently cold outside!?"
Isn't it funny that this winter they all seem to understand that one point doesn't make a line? Sadly, I'm sure that by next year they will have forgotten all about this, and will point to the first snowflake as proof that the Earth is unchanged.
Disgusting. What was done to the Native Americans was terrible, but nothing like the Holocaust.
The vast majority of the deaths among Native Americans came from the various diseases brought over from Europe. Smallpox, measles, mumps, tuberculosis, malaria, typhus, cholera... Europeans had collected an impressive amount of plagues over the centuries, and introduced them all at once to an unprepared populace. That alone is estimated to have killed around 80% of the Native American population.
Many more Native Americans (particularly of the midwestern plains tribes) died to starvation, as the new settlers over-hunted the buffalo herds and left the natives without a reliable source of food. The early Americans in that case showed a callous disregard for the natives' well-being, but it was not a genocide.
Some genocides did take place. The well-known Trail of Tears killed around four thousand people through forced march. A less well-known, but much larger genocide also took place in the western states in the twenty years following the California gold rush, resulting in the deaths of around one hundred thousand people.
But to compare to the Holocaust? Eleven million people killed with machine-like efficiency? Fully 90% of the Jewish population of Germany and Poland? A similar percentage of Native Americans died, but the vast majority of those deaths were to sickness, not murder. The two cases are nothing alike, and it is absolutely disgusting that you would try to equate them.
I didn't say that COBs replaced BGAs. But they are being used, and I know my company is selling a lot of parts as COBs in applications other than the cheap crap you mention. Not for the central stuff with high pin counts, but peripheral stuff like radios and sram and touch controllers, with pin counts in the 20 - 40 range. Not as sexy as the latest CPU or FPGA, but still something that a hobbyist might want to tinker with.
SOPs are still common, but I suspect that that's because designers are more comfortable with them, since they're easier to debug. I don't know how long that state of affairs will last. It's easy enough to just put test points on your board, and if a particular chip is acting funky, send it back to the supplier and let them deal with it. No point in screwing around with lifting pins - it's a rather painful exercise with the fine pitch used in SOPs anyway. And I'm pretty sure you're wrong about SOPs being cheaper. You save a lot of money by eliminating the assembly/test/finish steps, and shorten your lead time to boot.
But as SMD rework stations became accessible, companies started using BGAs. And as a few hobbyists learned how to replace BGAs (with great difficulty), companies started using COBs. As far as I know, no one's even considering manual rework of those.
Hobbyists are going to lose this race. Perhaps they already have. It's unfortunate, but really it was always sort of inevitable.
Since you obviously read Slashdot, I'd say you see at least a couple every day. They're just disguised as stories.
Why shouldn't online purchases be taxable? Slashdotters always complain when people demand different laws for things "on the internet". Why is this an exception?
We need to fund the government somehow. Having a mile-wide loophole for purchases made on the information super-highway is archaic and counterproductive. I'd prefer no sales tax at all, since it's a regressive tax, but if we're going to have one, it should be applied everywhere.
When you highlight a passage, you have the option to share it. When you're reading, you'll see highlights that other people shared as dotted line underlines, along with a number indicating how many people shared that bit. You can turn off the display of shared highlights in the menu. Anyone who owns a Kindle would know that, so I suspect you're lying when you insinuate that you're a Kindle owner. Most likely a shill/fanboi for some other company.
Wrong. The conservative majority on the Supreme Court made it legal last year, if memory serves.
It will remain legal until we get an uninterrupted string of Democratic presidents for long enough that one of the current five Republican "justices" dies off.
The voltage would probably be the most fun part of it, given that "the pattern sizes can be tuned from millimeter to sub-micrometer."
This isn't some big election with millions of votes getting counted. This is 23 people in a room, 12 on one side, 11 on the other, and the eleven declaring themselves the victors while the twelve just shrug and accept it. Do the people on this committee care so little for democracy that they just blithely accept it when their opponents' imaginary friends cast ballots?
Is your theory that LightSquared donated roughly equal amounts of money to both parties, with the GOP actually receiving slightly more, as a way of currying favor with Obama? That they went to Obama and said, "Here's $100k. We gave even more to the men who have sworn to destroy you at any cost. Now do us a favor!"
Can't you see how illogical that is? Here's my theory: LightSquared is run by morons. They were morons to think that this plan would work in the first place, and that same stupidity drove them to engage in cargo cult bribery -- throw money at every party and hope to get favors in return. It didn't work, so like all mental children, they threw a tantrum, threatening to sue the FCC back in late 2011. At no point did they receive any real benefit from their attempts to bribe both parties. The Republicans are only "investigating" because they'd do anything to make the Democrats look bad. These are the people who shut down Acorn based on "evidence" from clearly doctored videos.
In fairness, many of those people were being honest. A good friend of mine had her home wrecked by Hurricane Gustav. It blew off the roof off the house, allowing rain to come in and flood the interior, destroying basically everything she owned. If it hadn't been for the wind removing the roof, there wouldn't have been any flooding, so I think it's quite reasonable to classify it as wind damage.
Admittedly, not every homeowner could claim this. In Katrina especially, due to the failing levies, there were lots of houses that were legitimately flooded (i.e. the water levels rose above the ground floor of the house). But there were also lots of houses that were outside the actual flood zones, but which suffered enormous water damage because they no longer had a roof.
Got a source to back that up? I can't find any sources to support your claim, even on the most conservatives sites.
Wikipedia seems to agree with me:
The Federal Election Commission has no record of Phil Falcone, a registered Republican, nor LightSquared Chairman and CEO Sanjiv Ahuja of having ever contributed to President Obama’s political campaigns.[39] However, since 2007, Philip Falcone has donated $50,500 to the Democratic Senatorial campaign Committee (and $85,500 to Republicans). Both Falcone's wife and LightSquared CEO Ahuja donated $30,400 to the DSCC (Ahuja gave the same amount to Republicans).
So tell me, where did you get this stuff about "several hundred thousand dollars in other donations"?
LightSquared made a $30,400 donation to the Democrats in Sept, 2010. One month later, in October, they made an identical $30,400 donation to the Republicans.
And yet strangely, people like SuperKendall only ever seem to mention the donation to the Democrats. I wonder why that is?
By the way, why do you feel that the FCC shouldn't have even let them test out their idea? Sure, it was probably doomed to failure, but I don't see the harm in letting them test it out with their own money.