That's funny, because I interpreted that some of those SlashDot submitters were giving such inappropriate questions that it wouldn't be something you can talk about publicly because they were rather vulgar in their bashing of Microsoft.
Back when I heard they (Infogrammes ne Atari) were the publisher for NWN, I bought a mess of their stock back in 2002 when it was about $5.50 a share...
Ok, so the whole article seemed to pivot around the notion that the biggest problem Microsoft has is that consumers are not upgrading their software fast enough to improve current market returns. Yes, "Many organisations are still using Office '97 - an 8 year old release - and see no compelling reason to upgrade."
Organizations are using Microsoft products, and are not switching (to other Microsoft products). Sounds like a net zero change in market share to me.
Yes, Linux is expected to close in on Windows in a couple of years. From a 90% dominance today, to a projected 58% dominence. Oh yeah, only if you count dominance on PDAs. You see, Microsoft has 48.1% of the PDA market in Q3 2004, with Palm at #2 at 29.8%, and is expected to decline.
In the browser usage stats, Microsoft is dropping, with a 64.9% share, compared to up and coming FireFox at 20%. The problem is, FireFox looks like it hasnt gained any share since it peaked in Nov 2004. That's the best I could find for FireFox, since other studies put Microsoft's Internet Explorer at around 92.9 % dominance worldwide. Its very hard to get any two companies to agree on stats, because they're both approaching the question with different agendas.
But desktops, well, the statistics for Microsoft and Linux are all over the place. Last spring, Microsoft had 93% of the worldwide desktop market in their corner, but was still fighting (in Jan 2004) the business side to upgrade to the latest and greatest MS products. Microsoft really starts to cry in the server market, where IBM via Linux are barrelling through to win. Except Microsoft still has 59% of the server market, 3:1 today and 2:1 on projected Linux share. This was one of the few business statistic sites that actually had hard numbers, and even there, desktop stats appear pretty stale.
In conclusion, from browsing through Google, people have been making these same claims on market share dominance since 2001, "Linux is the up and comer, watch out!" and noone seems to ever back up their sides with hard numbers... nothing that actually shows a survey on how Windows:Linux ratios that actually shows Linux having a chance... every year, "we're coming to get you, this year is our year!" Maybe its because for all the talk, Linux really is a niche market after all...
Not in the sense of VBScript or similar Windows issues. Applescripts don't run automatically, you can't email them to somebody and have it delete their home directory without their participation, or put it on a web page and use an IE exploit to get root-level access to the system.
Yet. How long will it be before there's a <SCRIPT LANGUAGE="AppleScript"> addition to the next version of IE for Macs? Welcome to the world of Windows issues. The only reason it hasn't been done yet is that the language hasn't generated enough followers for it to be worth someone's while to abuse it.
In 2002, a comprehensive study on web browsing clients (which reports browser OS in the HTTP request) stated "Windows now controls 97.46 percent of the global desktop OS market, compared to just 1.43 percent for Apple Macintosh and 0.26 percent for Linux".
Of course, this is before WindowsXP and MacOSX, but I doubt that much has changed. Its funny that for all the preaching I hear on SlashDot, it's incredibly difficult to actually get hard numbers on how much market share there actually is for Linux... I personally gave up on it back at Slackware7 due to hardware incompatabilities, and haven't looked back. If I was going to jump from WinXP now, it would be to OSX, not Linux... but thats a story for another day.
Wait a second. You don't actually think that the employer is paying this money, are you? Just because your paycheck at the end of the year says $50,000 doesn't mean that that's your actual worth to the company... There are things like medical costs and social security taxes that are hidden from you.
If you were paid $55,000 a year, and told that you are responsible for 100% of your social security of $10,000, then how is this different from you getting paid $50,000 a year, with you paying $5,000 and your employer paying $5,000 ?
That money is coming from somewhere, and it certainly isn't from the generocity of your employer... its coming out of lower gross wages for the employees. Some say that's what's so insideous about the federal tax withholding plans, if the common person had to pay the full amount out of their own income at the end of the year, there would be a lot more unhappy citizens demanding lower taxes once they get that $10,000 bill in the mail.
Time to put aside your obvious bias, and actually apply some business thought to this. It's not about taking money and giving it to businesses, the end goal is a run-around the federal government, another step in getting the government out of our wages, and to stop telling people that they have to give all this money into an account with poor performance. That's why half the congress is so pissed, because its going to take a huge chunk of spending capital out of the budgets, and force them to stop making so many promises with other people's money. It's a win-win, it gets the younger people more secure in higher interest accounts, returns his political party to its roots of reducing government, and defeats the opposition party on the grounds of giving more economic freedom to the masses, in a way that's more fair than anything the government could provide.
This is what No Child Left Behind was implemented to remove! If you bothered to read the principles of the law, and actually understood the dire state of the education system before N.C.L.B. was put into place, then you'd have a completely different outlook. During the 90s, the educational system in this country took a huge hit, and the quality of civics, history, geography, and anything in social studies was pushed to the side, in the efforts of pushing a "kinder, gentler" educational system where noone failed, the teacher and the students could be open and friends, where the teacher didn't actually have to teach if the student couldn't fail.
It took 10 years of yelling about the decline of the US's education system, and this administration finally did something about it, and who balks? The teachers of course, since they're taken to task for putting out bad "products" for an awfully high cost. We've tried throwing money at it, and every year it gets worse. Well, its time to stop, time to remove the underperforming teachers, and bang some knowledge back into the student's heads.
Hell, everyone should go nuts on this... you are using genetics to create a sub-human hybrid, for what purpose? Has no one read The Time Machine and the lessons of the Morlocks? Or A Brave New World, where a genetic sub-race of humans is created to be pure workers? No no, we're "just" going to do it to study disease.. but you know that every discovery is constantly yearning for applications.
Everyone reads The Uplift War and says "oh boy, we can use the good parts of being human to improve our friends the animals", but you know that it is human nature to domesticate animals, and make them workers... what better to create an animal with human dexterity without the burden of intelligence, without the moral dillema of the "handicapped"... such a worker would toil in a sweatshop with singlemindedness, as oxen would plow a field. Well, scientific culture and its wild abandon of any moral forethought has led to this, so I guess its time to reap what we sowed...
Last I checked, it was still ok to harvest adult stem cells for research.
Oh, and even if you could harvest any embryonic stem cell in the world, you would still have the "transplantation" immune response problems that you see with those contaminated cells; after all, you are taking the DNA of a human (we can argue if that human was ever "alive" later) and implanting it into another "live" human, you better be sure that your significant proteins match.
Well, that depends. Since the failure of '03 was caused by negligence in tree trimming maintainence, coupled with software failures caused by deadlocks in the communications modules (that were supposed to alarm that the aforementioned lines had tripped), I'd say yes, a lot has been done to prevent a blackout like the one that occurred.
Just because you are not aware of it does not mean that nothing is going on. You could have checked out the FERC publications, or read up on new Siemens EMS architectures, or the new national RTO reporting standards on vegetation management, but you didn't.
The system is not antiquated, as you so broadly painted it. It's like saying that the interstate highway system is antiquated since it was designed in 1953, when both systems have ongoing maintenence that are constantly replacing parts and upgrading with new materials.
Look Infogra.. *cough*, Atari is having enough problems with their finances as it is. This mildly annoys me, since I happen to have some of their stock in my portfolio (still waiting for it to break even).
They have to postpone a shareholder meeting because they can't get a quorum to vote on their bonds that are due this upcoming July, and now they want to give money away just to float another company? Yeesh! so much for a recovery...
The anthrosophical answer is that, if it were any other way, then we wouldn't be here to observe it.
If the cosmological constants weren't just right, our universe wouldn't have coalesced out of matter as it did. If the planet didn't have just the right orbit and axis, things would have been too chaotic for life to appear. If we hadn't evolved the way we did, we wouldn't be sentient enough to look back and be amazed by how it all came about.
Now, we can all argue at the end of the day whether all that happened by accident (by randomness), or if there's something behind the scenes guiding it all (design), but it's still something neat to philosophize about.
Since the submission is a little short on pictures, google was nice enough to point me at the writer's description, which is complete with pictures. I was curious how in-depth the book actually goes...
Basically, he explains how to work with base electronic equipment, basic parts (resistors, capacitors, potentiometers), and how to tie them together with infrared reflectors into an feedback system to direct steering (something my college offers a course to introduce control systems). It appears that it ends with a little writeup on some robotics clubs.
All in all, its basic mechanical/electrical engineering work, basically a bottom-up design for creating an autonomous object. Good project for starters, written in a way that most of us can whip up at home (its made out of legos after all). For those that are interested in more, look up "behavior-based robots" in your favorite search engine.
Well lets see. We're talking about the time it takes for "the planet to spin", which we currently clock as about 1 day for the same equatorial point to make one complete rotation about the axis of the earth. Due to a change in the earth's angular velocity, it now takes 3x10e-6 seconds less time to make one rotation. The best explanation I have seen for this is that a piece of the earth's crust has broken away and slipped more towards the center of the earth; like the ice skater pulling in her arms, the rotational speed increases.
Lucky for us, the US Navy is already on the job tracking the tilt of the earth & speeds of rotation. What's also interesting is that the rotational speed is not constant, and has been slowing for almost a century...
I had always heard that it operated more or less like what happens when you told phone callers to take you off their contact lists. In effect, you are removed from that company's list (for future contact), but are then added to a second list of validated names. The second list is then sold to other companies for fun and profit.
First, you're using 1998 numbers, which doesn't account for the natural gas generator production boom of 2001 & 2002. Energy Generated by Fuel Type for 2003 is about 69%, so 71% capacity sounds right. 2004s numbers should be out spring 2005.
Non-utility is the nomenclature for small units that are not owned by the vertically-integrated-monopoly utility companies (where "small" is on the order of less than 50 MW). NUGs could be anything from trash & landfill gas (sometimes called biomass), to wood (factory waste), to your local community's hydroelectric station. However, the vast majority of the NUGs run on traditional market fuels (oil/natural gas), so it is safe to add about 4/5ths of that 11.2% to the fossil fuel total.
Having now read the article in question, 25% of the articles listed both human activity and paleological activity as possible causes... It is still surprising to me that only 1 in 4 bothered to include alternative polution sources...
That's funny, because I look at this as news that the mass media is pretending that it is proven science... Read the details, 100% of the articles did not mention that global warming could be produced from valid geological / astrophysical events... temporary increase in the sun's energy output, recent random volcanic activity, you know, the kind of alternative sources that can easily be found in a google search...
I am not saying that human industrial pollution is not a contributor towards global warming, I just find it interesting that so many people think that it is the only contributor...
There are two obstacles I see with porting this game to console: (1) action activation is macro based and (2) the chat engine is free text.
The game engine interface is a function driven API where actions are tied to screen buttons -- there's a complex scripting interface under the buttons and frames (such as inventory, character sheet, etc) that can be bound to keystrokes, or tapped from a button on the interface. The default interface has 12 user buttons on the screen + 8 character related buttons + 5 inventory buttons for bags. The 8 character buttons each lead to other frames with buttons that can be dragged to the original 12.
One of the first User Interface modfications recognized that 12 customizable buttons werent enough given that you can receive hundreds of powers, and added 4 more 12 button-bars to the screen... But for just the original 12, I think you could do it.... Last I checked, the standard playstation 2 controller has 15 buttons (12 normally used) + 2 sticks. You might be able to get by if you used some of the buttons in combos (hold two buttons to act like Alt-#) but forget about custom combos that make classes like Warrior easier to play.
As far as chatting with other players goes, maybe you can just ignore everyone else anyone says, but I can't see this going forward without some way for the player to communicate... sure there's a menu driven emote system, but it's nowhere near compehensive enough, and it takes a while to hunt and peck for your response. Maybe an on-screen keyboard for you to pick letters with the joystick one at a time, but that just sounds painful.
Unless you got some sort of weird mod, in my opinion there just aren't enough ways to quickly control your character with a console interface...
Last time I checked, there is already a college student tracking system in place, run by the federal government, and one that you voluntary subscribed to... I'm talking about FAFSA, the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, not to mention FSA, the Federal Student Aid repayment portal. Because to get a loan and repay it, you give your name, your SSN, your address, etc...
From congress's documents on the web, in 2004 there are an estimated 15.9 million students in the US, of which 6.6 million students receive some sort of federal aid, at roughly $52 billion. I wouldn't be surprised if they had many millions more names on file, for those that applied but were denied funding....
I imagine someone in government now wants to tie individual student performance back to monies received -- you could then mine the data for attempts to defraud the government, or those that are doing their students a disservice by routinely pushing out lower quality education. The first step is to get a handle on just how bad the problem is.
In order to acheive the embryo in the first place, you take a mature female's egg and allow it to be fertiziled by male's sperm. At that point you then dissect the blastocyst (destroying it), and those cells are the "embryonic stem cells" as they have yet to differentiate.
So, there definitely is sperm involved, and if at any point the blastocyst is implanted into a human female's uterus, it will attach and draw nutrients, continue to grow, and eventually produce a baby. Religious people infer that since the blastocyst is viable from conception forward, then the destruction of the human life at any point is morally concerning, doubly so since its being done to get its cells for experimentation. After all, science has been conceiving babies in a petri dish for almost 30 years, and like you said, the only difference is that we allow them to mature.
The federal ban is basically federal government research dollars shouldn't go towards research into the non-approved stem cell lines. The National Science Foundation has a chart that shows how much federal money is spent in the US by year, compared with a study by AAAS on R&D funding by state. 2002 totals come in at $84.9 billion by federal and $88.3 billion by states, in 2002 dollars. So, money could very well come from the state levels of governments, where the states that approve of the process can push their own money towards their goals... One could argue that that is the preferred path, to reduce the dependence on federal government, but I digress.
The core issue for most people is "should the government fund projects that I am morally opposed to?" It's a tricky argument, one used for and against the National Endowment of the Arts for years... Whether its Maplethorpe (S&M photos), Ofili's Madonna (elephant dung on the Virgin Mary), or any other controvercial art, these are just personal expressions of speech... while it may offend, noone is harmed at the end of the day.
But when it comes to embryonic research, there are people that believe that the fetus is viable from the moment of conception, and that the process of extracting the cells is in effect "killing" a potential human. For them, it ranks as an abortion. Whether or not you believe that a life is being taken, many religious people do, and thus they want the practice to stop.
I would also counter that we are arguing two slightly different points. We both agree that there are two tracks that are available for research, embryonic stem cells and adult stem cells. Your argument appears to be that the government should not abandon the embryonic path simply because a minority are opposed to it on (their) ethical grounds, that there are many sick people who can benefit from the results of this research. My argument is that the government should be pushing its resources towards adult stem cell research, given that both technologies are on equal footing with this one being free of any stigma, and at the end of the day they are benefitting just as many people.
Personally, I'm about 50% against / 50% for embryonic stem cell research, but 100% towards adult stem cell research. I'm discouraged (yet not surprised) that there are just as many discoveries being made every day in adult stem cells (with more successes), yet the uninformed public only hears that embryonic stem cells are the only method.
I agree that the government should stop legislating moral statements, but then the constitutionalist in me also thinks that the government has no business putting any limits on first amdendment activity anywhere... This does not mean Freedom From Religion, that means Freedom Of Religion (like it reads), that the government needs to stop telling people that they cannot bring their symbols into schools and work, that the schools need to teach an objectively balanced education (as opposed to atheist) when it comes to religion. But that's an issue for another day.
That's funny, because every scientifically minded religious person such as myself always points out that it is only the "embryonic" stem cells that have the moral qualms surrounding them. It has been known for some time that (1) stem cells can be cultured from adult hosts through hormonal treatments, (2) they have none of the rejection issues that embryonic stem cells do (recall, you will be implanting cells from another individual with different genetic makeup; your body will reject the new cells just like any other organ donation) and (3) you avoid all of the discussion over whether you are destroying a life or not.
In my experience, it is that secular mass media often assumes that the religious want to ban all stem cells, because they fail to differentiate between cellular sources.
Simple google search shows the "major" media outlets routinely leave off the word embryonic when discussing the topic. Drawing a distinction between the two would better inform the public.
Catholic news letters define the difference, and promote more research into adult stem cells as the intelligent alternative.
Slashdot Mirror
That's funny, because I interpreted that some of those SlashDot submitters were giving such inappropriate questions that it wouldn't be something you can talk about publicly because they were rather vulgar in their bashing of Microsoft.
Back when I heard they (Infogrammes ne Atari) were the publisher for NWN, I bought a mess of their stock back in 2002 when it was about $5.50 a share...
Unfortunately, it hasnt seen those days since...
Ok, so the whole article seemed to pivot around the notion that the biggest problem Microsoft has is that consumers are not upgrading their software fast enough to improve current market returns. Yes, "Many organisations are still using Office '97 - an 8 year old release - and see no compelling reason to upgrade."
Organizations are using Microsoft products, and are not switching (to other Microsoft products). Sounds like a net zero change in market share to me.
Yes, Linux is expected to close in on Windows in a couple of years. From a 90% dominance today, to a projected 58% dominence. Oh yeah, only if you count dominance on PDAs. You see, Microsoft has 48.1% of the PDA market in Q3 2004, with Palm at #2 at 29.8%, and is expected to decline.
In the browser usage stats, Microsoft is dropping, with a 64.9% share, compared to up and coming FireFox at 20%. The problem is, FireFox looks like it hasnt gained any share since it peaked in Nov 2004. That's the best I could find for FireFox, since other studies put Microsoft's Internet Explorer at around 92.9 % dominance worldwide. Its very hard to get any two companies to agree on stats, because they're both approaching the question with different agendas.
But desktops, well, the statistics for Microsoft and Linux are all over the place. Last spring, Microsoft had 93% of the worldwide desktop market in their corner, but was still fighting (in Jan 2004) the business side to upgrade to the latest and greatest MS products. Microsoft really starts to cry in the server market, where IBM via Linux are barrelling through to win. Except Microsoft still has 59% of the server market, 3:1 today and 2:1 on projected Linux share. This was one of the few business statistic sites that actually had hard numbers, and even there, desktop stats appear pretty stale.
In conclusion, from browsing through Google, people have been making these same claims on market share dominance since 2001, "Linux is the up and comer, watch out!" and noone seems to ever back up their sides with hard numbers... nothing that actually shows a survey on how Windows:Linux ratios that actually shows Linux having a chance... every year, "we're coming to get you, this year is our year!" Maybe its because for all the talk, Linux really is a niche market after all...
Not in the sense of VBScript or similar Windows issues. Applescripts don't run automatically, you can't email them to somebody and have it delete their home directory without their participation, or put it on a web page and use an IE exploit to get root-level access to the system.
Yet. How long will it be before there's a <SCRIPT LANGUAGE="AppleScript"> addition to the next version of IE for Macs? Welcome to the world of Windows issues. The only reason it hasn't been done yet is that the language hasn't generated enough followers for it to be worth someone's while to abuse it.
In 2002, a comprehensive study on web browsing clients (which reports browser OS in the HTTP request) stated "Windows now controls 97.46 percent of the global desktop OS market, compared to just 1.43 percent for Apple Macintosh and 0.26 percent for Linux".
Of course, this is before WindowsXP and MacOSX, but I doubt that much has changed. Its funny that for all the preaching I hear on SlashDot, it's incredibly difficult to actually get hard numbers on how much market share there actually is for Linux... I personally gave up on it back at Slackware7 due to hardware incompatabilities, and haven't looked back. If I was going to jump from WinXP now, it would be to OSX, not Linux... but thats a story for another day.
Wait a second. You don't actually think that the employer is paying this money, are you? Just because your paycheck at the end of the year says $50,000 doesn't mean that that's your actual worth to the company... There are things like medical costs and social security taxes that are hidden from you.
If you were paid $55,000 a year, and told that you are responsible for 100% of your social security of $10,000, then how is this different from you getting paid $50,000 a year, with you paying $5,000 and your employer paying $5,000 ?
That money is coming from somewhere, and it certainly isn't from the generocity of your employer... its coming out of lower gross wages for the employees. Some say that's what's so insideous about the federal tax withholding plans, if the common person had to pay the full amount out of their own income at the end of the year, there would be a lot more unhappy citizens demanding lower taxes once they get that $10,000 bill in the mail.
Time to put aside your obvious bias, and actually apply some business thought to this. It's not about taking money and giving it to businesses, the end goal is a run-around the federal government, another step in getting the government out of our wages, and to stop telling people that they have to give all this money into an account with poor performance. That's why half the congress is so pissed, because its going to take a huge chunk of spending capital out of the budgets, and force them to stop making so many promises with other people's money. It's a win-win, it gets the younger people more secure in higher interest accounts, returns his political party to its roots of reducing government, and defeats the opposition party on the grounds of giving more economic freedom to the masses, in a way that's more fair than anything the government could provide.
This is what No Child Left Behind was implemented to remove! If you bothered to read the principles of the law, and actually understood the dire state of the education system before N.C.L.B. was put into place, then you'd have a completely different outlook. During the 90s, the educational system in this country took a huge hit, and the quality of civics, history, geography, and anything in social studies was pushed to the side, in the efforts of pushing a "kinder, gentler" educational system where noone failed, the teacher and the students could be open and friends, where the teacher didn't actually have to teach if the student couldn't fail.
It took 10 years of yelling about the decline of the US's education system, and this administration finally did something about it, and who balks? The teachers of course, since they're taken to task for putting out bad "products" for an awfully high cost. We've tried throwing money at it, and every year it gets worse. Well, its time to stop, time to remove the underperforming teachers, and bang some knowledge back into the student's heads.
Hell, everyone should go nuts on this... you are using genetics to create a sub-human hybrid, for what purpose? Has no one read The Time Machine and the lessons of the Morlocks? Or A Brave New World, where a genetic sub-race of humans is created to be pure workers? No no, we're "just" going to do it to study disease.. but you know that every discovery is constantly yearning for applications.
Everyone reads The Uplift War and says "oh boy, we can use the good parts of being human to improve our friends the animals", but you know that it is human nature to domesticate animals, and make them workers... what better to create an animal with human dexterity without the burden of intelligence, without the moral dillema of the "handicapped"... such a worker would toil in a sweatshop with singlemindedness, as oxen would plow a field. Well, scientific culture and its wild abandon of any moral forethought has led to this, so I guess its time to reap what we sowed...
Last I checked, it was still ok to harvest adult stem cells for research.
Oh, and even if you could harvest any embryonic stem cell in the world, you would still have the "transplantation" immune response problems that you see with those contaminated cells; after all, you are taking the DNA of a human (we can argue if that human was ever "alive" later) and implanting it into another "live" human, you better be sure that your significant proteins match.
Well, that depends. Since the failure of '03 was caused by negligence in tree trimming maintainence, coupled with software failures caused by deadlocks in the communications modules (that were supposed to alarm that the aforementioned lines had tripped), I'd say yes, a lot has been done to prevent a blackout like the one that occurred.
Just because you are not aware of it does not mean that nothing is going on. You could have checked out the FERC publications, or read up on new Siemens EMS architectures, or the new national RTO reporting standards on vegetation management, but you didn't.
The system is not antiquated, as you so broadly painted it. It's like saying that the interstate highway system is antiquated since it was designed in 1953, when both systems have ongoing maintenence that are constantly replacing parts and upgrading with new materials.
Look Infogra.. *cough*, Atari is having enough problems with their finances as it is. This mildly annoys me, since I happen to have some of their stock in my portfolio (still waiting for it to break even).
They have to postpone a shareholder meeting because they can't get a quorum to vote on their bonds that are due this upcoming July, and now they want to give money away just to float another company? Yeesh! so much for a recovery...
The anthrosophical answer is that, if it were any other way, then we wouldn't be here to observe it.
If the cosmological constants weren't just right, our universe wouldn't have coalesced out of matter as it did. If the planet didn't have just the right orbit and axis, things would have been too chaotic for life to appear. If we hadn't evolved the way we did, we wouldn't be sentient enough to look back and be amazed by how it all came about.
Now, we can all argue at the end of the day whether all that happened by accident (by randomness), or if there's something behind the scenes guiding it all (design), but it's still something neat to philosophize about.
Since the submission is a little short on pictures, google was nice enough to point me at the writer's description, which is complete with pictures. I was curious how in-depth the book actually goes...
Basically, he explains how to work with base electronic equipment, basic parts (resistors, capacitors, potentiometers), and how to tie them together with infrared reflectors into an feedback system to direct steering (something my college offers a course to introduce control systems). It appears that it ends with a little writeup on some robotics clubs.
All in all, its basic mechanical/electrical engineering work, basically a bottom-up design for creating an autonomous object. Good project for starters, written in a way that most of us can whip up at home (its made out of legos after all). For those that are interested in more, look up "behavior-based robots" in your favorite search engine.
Heh, I know that, you know that, but apparently that doomsday site doesn't know that. It's funny what Google picks up sometimes.
Well lets see. We're talking about the time it takes for "the planet to spin", which we currently clock as about 1 day for the same equatorial point to make one complete rotation about the axis of the earth. Due to a change in the earth's angular velocity, it now takes 3x10e-6 seconds less time to make one rotation. The best explanation I have seen for this is that a piece of the earth's crust has broken away and slipped more towards the center of the earth; like the ice skater pulling in her arms, the rotational speed increases.
Lucky for us, the US Navy is already on the job tracking the tilt of the earth & speeds of rotation. What's also interesting is that the rotational speed is not constant, and has been slowing for almost a century...
I had always heard that it operated more or less like what happens when you told phone callers to take you off their contact lists. In effect, you are removed from that company's list (for future contact), but are then added to a second list of validated names. The second list is then sold to other companies for fun and profit.
First, you're using 1998 numbers, which doesn't account for the natural gas generator production boom of 2001 & 2002. Energy Generated by Fuel Type for 2003 is about 69%, so 71% capacity sounds right. 2004s numbers should be out spring 2005.
Non-utility is the nomenclature for small units that are not owned by the vertically-integrated-monopoly utility companies (where "small" is on the order of less than 50 MW). NUGs could be anything from trash & landfill gas (sometimes called biomass), to wood (factory waste), to your local community's hydroelectric station. However, the vast majority of the NUGs run on traditional market fuels (oil/natural gas), so it is safe to add about 4/5ths of that 11.2% to the fossil fuel total.
Having now read the article in question, 25% of the articles listed both human activity and paleological activity as possible causes... It is still surprising to me that only 1 in 4 bothered to include alternative polution sources...
That's funny, because I look at this as news that the mass media is pretending that it is proven science... Read the details, 100% of the articles did not mention that global warming could be produced from valid geological / astrophysical events... temporary increase in the sun's energy output, recent random volcanic activity, you know, the kind of alternative sources that can easily be found in a google search...
I am not saying that human industrial pollution is not a contributor towards global warming, I just find it interesting that so many people think that it is the only contributor...
There are two obstacles I see with porting this game to console: (1) action activation is macro based and (2) the chat engine is free text.
The game engine interface is a function driven API where actions are tied to screen buttons -- there's a complex scripting interface under the buttons and frames (such as inventory, character sheet, etc) that can be bound to keystrokes, or tapped from a button on the interface. The default interface has 12 user buttons on the screen + 8 character related buttons + 5 inventory buttons for bags. The 8 character buttons each lead to other frames with buttons that can be dragged to the original 12.
One of the first User Interface modfications recognized that 12 customizable buttons werent enough given that you can receive hundreds of powers, and added 4 more 12 button-bars to the screen... But for just the original 12, I think you could do it.... Last I checked, the standard playstation 2 controller has 15 buttons (12 normally used) + 2 sticks. You might be able to get by if you used some of the buttons in combos (hold two buttons to act like Alt-#) but forget about custom combos that make classes like Warrior easier to play.
As far as chatting with other players goes, maybe you can just ignore everyone else anyone says, but I can't see this going forward without some way for the player to communicate... sure there's a menu driven emote system, but it's nowhere near compehensive enough, and it takes a while to hunt and peck for your response. Maybe an on-screen keyboard for you to pick letters with the joystick one at a time, but that just sounds painful.
Unless you got some sort of weird mod, in my opinion there just aren't enough ways to quickly control your character with a console interface...
Last time I checked, there is already a college student tracking system in place, run by the federal government, and one that you voluntary subscribed to... I'm talking about FAFSA, the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, not to mention FSA, the Federal Student Aid repayment portal. Because to get a loan and repay it, you give your name, your SSN, your address, etc...
From congress's documents on the web, in 2004 there are an estimated 15.9 million students in the US, of which 6.6 million students receive some sort of federal aid, at roughly $52 billion. I wouldn't be surprised if they had many millions more names on file, for those that applied but were denied funding....
I imagine someone in government now wants to tie individual student performance back to monies received -- you could then mine the data for attempts to defraud the government, or those that are doing their students a disservice by routinely pushing out lower quality education. The first step is to get a handle on just how bad the problem is.
In order to acheive the embryo in the first place, you take a mature female's egg and allow it to be fertiziled by male's sperm. At that point you then dissect the blastocyst (destroying it), and those cells are the "embryonic stem cells" as they have yet to differentiate.
So, there definitely is sperm involved, and if at any point the blastocyst is implanted into a human female's uterus, it will attach and draw nutrients, continue to grow, and eventually produce a baby. Religious people infer that since the blastocyst is viable from conception forward, then the destruction of the human life at any point is morally concerning, doubly so since its being done to get its cells for experimentation. After all, science has been conceiving babies in a petri dish for almost 30 years, and like you said, the only difference is that we allow them to mature.
The federal ban is basically federal government research dollars shouldn't go towards research into the non-approved stem cell lines. The National Science Foundation has a chart that shows how much federal money is spent in the US by year, compared with a study by AAAS on R&D funding by state. 2002 totals come in at $84.9 billion by federal and $88.3 billion by states, in 2002 dollars. So, money could very well come from the state levels of governments, where the states that approve of the process can push their own money towards their goals... One could argue that that is the preferred path, to reduce the dependence on federal government, but I digress.
... while it may offend, noone is harmed at the end of the day.
The core issue for most people is "should the government fund projects that I am morally opposed to?" It's a tricky argument, one used for and against the National Endowment of the Arts for years... Whether its Maplethorpe (S&M photos), Ofili's Madonna (elephant dung on the Virgin Mary), or any other controvercial art, these are just personal expressions of speech
But when it comes to embryonic research, there are people that believe that the fetus is viable from the moment of conception, and that the process of extracting the cells is in effect "killing" a potential human. For them, it ranks as an abortion. Whether or not you believe that a life is being taken, many religious people do, and thus they want the practice to stop.
I would also counter that we are arguing two slightly different points. We both agree that there are two tracks that are available for research, embryonic stem cells and adult stem cells. Your argument appears to be that the government should not abandon the embryonic path simply because a minority are opposed to it on (their) ethical grounds, that there are many sick people who can benefit from the results of this research. My argument is that the government should be pushing its resources towards adult stem cell research, given that both technologies are on equal footing with this one being free of any stigma, and at the end of the day they are benefitting just as many people.
Personally, I'm about 50% against / 50% for embryonic stem cell research, but 100% towards adult stem cell research. I'm discouraged (yet not surprised) that there are just as many discoveries being made every day in adult stem cells (with more successes), yet the uninformed public only hears that embryonic stem cells are the only method.
I agree that the government should stop legislating moral statements, but then the constitutionalist in me also thinks that the government has no business putting any limits on first amdendment activity anywhere... This does not mean Freedom From Religion, that means Freedom Of Religion (like it reads), that the government needs to stop telling people that they cannot bring their symbols into schools and work, that the schools need to teach an objectively balanced education (as opposed to atheist) when it comes to religion. But that's an issue for another day.
In my experience, it is that secular mass media often assumes that the religious want to ban all stem cells, because they fail to differentiate between cellular sources.
Simple google search shows the "major" media outlets routinely leave off the word embryonic when discussing the topic. Drawing a distinction between the two would better inform the public.
Catholic news letters define the difference, and promote more research into adult stem cells as the intelligent alternative.
North America Population Density, 1995