For tomorrow's fares, Boston to NYC is $64 one way by Train, $123 by Air (cheapest American Airlines), both for Tomorrow at 9AM. So, Train still wins.
And if you need a subsidy example, it's called the SouthEastern Pennsylvania Transit Authority (SEPTA). They're really happy, because they've managed to reduce their 2004 operating deficit "from $54 million to a still-formidable $26 million" (link) (last year's budget was $875 million + a $55 million deficit).
Who pays for all of this? We do... One way or another, the entire nation is paying for this inefficient mess. From this article, the counties pay for 8%, states at 38%. Another report states that even though federal subsidies have dropped in the last 5 years, money is still indirectly funnelled from Federal to State to SEPTA ($800 mil given to PA from the fed last year, $40 mil is directly accountable to going to SEPTA), not counting the $2 billion that the Federal gov has already invested in rail & car refurbishments. Oh, and they've only been sucking our money since 1963... not quite 60 years, but pigging out the same.
Now, imagine if we privatized the deal, and actually forced them to make money on their own? Because by Bus (the 3rd method of mass transit, privatized), I can go from Boston to NY City tomorrow at 9AM for $30. At 215 miles at 20 mpg & $1.75/gal for gas, its $18 by car, the ultimate privatized driving method, and I guess thats why people like to drive themselves.
The Washington Post makes up stories with left-wing sping, the Washington Times makes up stories with left-wing sping. Its up to the consumer to buy the version that they feel best represents the truth.
I get the impression that at one time, the human civilization was a lot more advanced. After years of fighting, the humans have been beaten back, and are culturally afraid of using certain kinds of technology. Secondly, the Galactica was about to be turned into a museum piece, so they may have removed some of the more useful scanning instruments prior to going on display. Perhaps that is why they did not find the cylon device... though I do not believe they said it actually transmits... it could just be a passive recorder that transmits in short bursts.
But would a cylon homing beacon be of any use? Once they've jumped to a new star system, any radio transmission would be relegated to travelling at light speeds, so it would be years before any sensor would pick up the origin of the beacon (assuming that Galacica has now jumped to unexplored space, and its doubtful such a small device could produce just a high intensity signal).
I'm a little torn on the "Cyclons talking" thing. What if, like human religions, they *can't* transfer from body to body, but they are told by their clerics they do? The "common" cylon is being misled by their religion to do bad things; makes them more human, doesn't it? Yet, Six is able to communicate with the main AI's just before the bombing, so they obviously have radios within them...
My friend and I were chatting about this.... and I believe you've hit on part of it. My opinion: I think the Cylons have "implemented" a religion for themselves... and not just an unprovable belief system like the humans have, but one that *works*. They may have some sort of an "overmind" (Six communicates with the AI just before the battle) as a God figure. Their ability to transport their conciousness is reincarnation with certainty; because of this, they believe they have souls, because only a soul can exist after the death of the body (or chassis if you prefer).
Also, Adama has the quote that "humans built the robots"... but think about today's high-tech design & fabrication... we rarely design by hand anymore, we use a computer to do our calculations for us: to draw our VLSI circuits, to solve our calculus problems, to do the computationally hard work for us. I think the Cylons look at this and say "the humans didn't make us, they made machines, and the machines made us".
Now, with any religion, you have wars of conversion.... look at the middle ages, with the wars between Christians and the Muslims. They follow the wisdom of their god to smite the unbelievers... and humans being flesh can never participate. The robots became self-aware, the humans tried to wipe them out, and now the robots have declared jihad on what remains of the human colonies.
How about because Diebold-the-ATM-manufacturer doesn't actually make the voting machines? The voting machine division is a recent aquisition of another company that had previously designed & manufactured the machines; Diebold saw a hot market after the 2000 election and purchased it. It would be like saying "why does Time-Warner provide such crappy internet service when they make such great movies?"
Why is it that the first thing I thought of was nation-wide audio surveilance network? Maybe that's because I was paging through a copy of Futureland... It starts small, but once you have a noise recording network, maybe you can record the audio amplitude spike of a gunshot, and dispatch police to the "crime" . Right now, it's only "10 to 15 computers... are at work", but once the infrastructure is in place, who's to say they can't re-purpose the system in the future? Right now, its just average amplitude, but crank up the sampling rate, and its a NSA wet dream...
There are painters that produce images and impressions, and then there are painters that slap paint on an interior wall of someone's house. One is considered skilled, the other is not. (You're really flattering yourself if you think that every programmer's job is a "work of art")
Isn't that really the issue between "good" programmers, and those who's tasks can be outsourced?
Re:Processing power will determine usefullness
on
The Robots are Coming
·
· Score: 1
Or maybe, the North American worker already doesn't have a chance. If you wait until all the human manufacturing labor is outsourced to other countries (which is happening fast), you can appeal to the local nationalism to build factories and robots in the country, in the name of "bringing back Made in the USA".
You could build a factory of robots anywhere in the world, so why are they built in some nations and not others? Regulations, and tax structures... two items that are seriously broken in the USA. When the tax structure is made more fair for corporations & high tech salaries, we can expect jobs to come back.
I caught the various news reports on CNBC on friday evening... apparently NASDAQ is only allowed to halt a stock when they are under investigation for regulation violations. When NASDAQ froze it, they also asked the west coast & overseas markets to halt trading on the ticker, but there was no precedent for this; NASDAQ just broke procedure. The interviewees seemed really pissed.
From the article, it appears that the software that communicated market orders went into a loop, and submitted a loop of Sell orders on this one stock. If it were just little old me selling stocks I don't own, it's called a Short, and I'd be liable for buying back any shares I don't own. If its really a computer error, then its up to the market providers to cancel the orders.
At some point, the SEC needs to find out who was liable this this little adventure. Why does NASDAQ allow companies to submit raw sell commands w/out proofing them for validity? And what about this software company? If it were me playing with Ameritrade, and their software repeats my order 100 times, shouldn't the software company be liable for all of the (unsolicited) trades? If these trades should have been cancelled, why did some markets resume trading before they validated the orders? I wouldn't be surprised if there's another round of market rules that fall out of this, because obviously there's a big loophole here.
When you claim that "overpopulation" is a problem, is the problem to you that there are too many people on the planet, or is the problem to you that there are too many of certain kinds of people?
When I was in grad school, I was offered half-tuition to teach part time and finish in 1 year, as opposed to going to school for 2+ years and teach full-time. Additionally, projects to design curriculum are usually reserved for graduate students. I'm meerly interpolating the data I have before me, since I could only find links to undergrad tuition $s. From what I recall, undergrad and grad tuitions are priced about the same, the only difference being that undergraduates are expected to get more government financial aid.
That said, I fully agree with you that this should have been the teaching project that students dream about, an effort to create a long-lasting addition to their college, while teaching them & their classmates about programming, communications & education. MIT dropped the ball on this one.. but I don't mind, since I didn't go to MIT. We always thought they were a little uppity, and not that good at hockey.
Cost for one year of MIT undergraduate tuition in 2002-2003: $28,230.00 Cost for one year of MIT undergraduate tuition in 2003-2004: $29,400.00
School runs from Sept 3 to May 21, so estimate at 39 weeks. Next, assume the student is working for 1/2 tuition credit (which a lot of colleges like to do for part time work), at ~ $14,500. Since they're working part time and going to school, lets be generous and say they work three days a week: 24 hours. You've just forked out $15.50/hour for one "cheap labor" marginally-skilled student.
Now, compare that to what you can get for outsourcing it to anyone else... I'm not surprised they did; because of their rising tuition costs, they've priced out their own students.
I'm not a geologist either, but here's how I understand it.
Start with the question "what is oil & coal?" Oil is a liquid slew of organic hydrocarbon chains, coal is organic hydrocarbons that haven't had high enough pressure to liquify, and shale is oil bubbles trapped in mineralized rocks.
Then ask, "how do I get the hydrocarbons?" You can start with dead plant/animal matter who used to live on the surface, then compress it at high temperatures and pressures. The pressure breaks apart the cellular structures into base strands that we can later burn as fuel. There's a company that's proven they can liquify turkey guts and convert it into low grade fuel; there was a Slashdot article on it a while back.
Now, an alternate theory has developed from recent discoveries of life on the sea floor. Organic life can exist in oxygen starved, high pressure environment around lava vents; also, bacterium have been found that can survive at much higher temperatures (hundreds of degrees F) than previously thought.
Combine the two, and you say "what if bacterium can survive in the earth's crust close to the mantle for heat"? This organic matter would live in a high pressure environment, and when they die, their cells could also be liquified into oil. In Sweden, they have been extracting oil for a decade from depths that should pre-date the appearance of plant life in the area... Search on Thomas Gold for his theories on oil formation on this method.
Re:Food fights are forbidden
on
Eating in Space
·
· Score: 3, Funny
"In space nobody will hear you scream" for ice cream!
Wrong, the vast majority is attributable to smaller engines with largely unregulated emissions.
Emissions from coal-fired power plants & automobiles are tightly controlled through scrubbers, catalytic converters, etc that don't exist in smaller engine designs... your average weed-wacker, lawn-mower, leaf-blower, chain-saws etc are all guilty.
Heh, you should see what happens when you put aluminum cans in a high power magnetic induction device... Whew, found some images at TeslaMania for before and after...
When I was in school, the prof brought one of these into lab one day, and he was using it to railgun things across the room... They kept it locked up because some years before a student thought it would be funny to wrap a banana in foil and stick it into the machine, and it worked... picture a in your head a fine mist of burnt banana covering a good portion of a large freshman electronics lab, and that's close to the result. This site explains why with pictures.
Slashdot Mirror
Congratulations, you just invented EEPROMs.
If Disney had its way, at the end of every DVD, the Player would connect to the internet and dump you in a gift shop.
I was expecting this anonymous coward to be saying "In pre-soviet russia...."
In Pre-Soviet Russia, YOU fly Planes!
... if only to take out the other projects on its way up... Blam, Blam!
For tomorrow's fares, Boston to NYC is $64 one way by Train, $123 by Air (cheapest American Airlines), both for Tomorrow at 9AM. So, Train still wins.
And if you need a subsidy example, it's called the SouthEastern Pennsylvania Transit Authority (SEPTA). They're really happy, because they've managed to reduce their 2004 operating deficit "from $54 million to a still-formidable $26 million" (link) (last year's budget was $875 million + a $55 million deficit).
Who pays for all of this? We do... One way or another, the entire nation is paying for this inefficient mess. From this article, the counties pay for 8%, states at 38%. Another report states that even though federal subsidies have dropped in the last 5 years, money is still indirectly funnelled from Federal to State to SEPTA ($800 mil given to PA from the fed last year, $40 mil is directly accountable to going to SEPTA), not counting the $2 billion that the Federal gov has already invested in rail & car refurbishments. Oh, and they've only been sucking our money since 1963... not quite 60 years, but pigging out the same.
Now, imagine if we privatized the deal, and actually forced them to make money on their own? Because by Bus (the 3rd method of mass transit, privatized), I can go from Boston to NY City tomorrow at 9AM for $30. At 215 miles at 20 mpg & $1.75/gal for gas, its $18 by car, the ultimate privatized driving method, and I guess thats why people like to drive themselves.
That doesn't make the post any less true.
The Washington Post makes up stories with left-wing sping, the Washington Times makes up stories with left-wing sping. Its up to the consumer to buy the version that they feel best represents the truth.
No, Reactionary is one tick stronger on the scale
Political Leaning - "Left" to "Right"
Revolutionary - Liberal - Status Quo - Conservative - Reactionary
Government Intervention - "Weak" to "Strong"
Anarchist - Libertarian - Status Quo - Authoritarian
I get the impression that at one time, the human civilization was a lot more advanced. After years of fighting, the humans have been beaten back, and are culturally afraid of using certain kinds of technology. Secondly, the Galactica was about to be turned into a museum piece, so they may have removed some of the more useful scanning instruments prior to going on display. Perhaps that is why they did not find the cylon device... though I do not believe they said it actually transmits... it could just be a passive recorder that transmits in short bursts.
But would a cylon homing beacon be of any use? Once they've jumped to a new star system, any radio transmission would be relegated to travelling at light speeds, so it would be years before any sensor would pick up the origin of the beacon (assuming that Galacica has now jumped to unexplored space, and its doubtful such a small device could produce just a high intensity signal).
I'm a little torn on the "Cyclons talking" thing. What if, like human religions, they *can't* transfer from body to body, but they are told by their clerics they do? The "common" cylon is being misled by their religion to do bad things; makes them more human, doesn't it? Yet, Six is able to communicate with the main AI's just before the bombing, so they obviously have radios within them...
Steve Martin might have something to say about that...
My friend and I were chatting about this.... and I believe you've hit on part of it. My opinion: I think the Cylons have "implemented" a religion for themselves... and not just an unprovable belief system like the humans have, but one that *works*. They may have some sort of an "overmind" (Six communicates with the AI just before the battle) as a God figure. Their ability to transport their conciousness is reincarnation with certainty; because of this, they believe they have souls, because only a soul can exist after the death of the body (or chassis if you prefer).
Also, Adama has the quote that "humans built the robots"... but think about today's high-tech design & fabrication... we rarely design by hand anymore, we use a computer to do our calculations for us: to draw our VLSI circuits, to solve our calculus problems, to do the computationally hard work for us. I think the Cylons look at this and say "the humans didn't make us, they made machines, and the machines made us".
Now, with any religion, you have wars of conversion.... look at the middle ages, with the wars between Christians and the Muslims. They follow the wisdom of their god to smite the unbelievers... and humans being flesh can never participate. The robots became self-aware, the humans tried to wipe them out, and now the robots have declared jihad on what remains of the human colonies.
How about because Diebold-the-ATM-manufacturer doesn't actually make the voting machines? The voting machine division is a recent aquisition of another company that had previously designed & manufactured the machines; Diebold saw a hot market after the 2000 election and purchased it. It would be like saying "why does Time-Warner provide such crappy internet service when they make such great movies?"
Why is it that the first thing I thought of was nation-wide audio surveilance network? Maybe that's because I was paging through a copy of Futureland... It starts small, but once you have a noise recording network, maybe you can record the audio amplitude spike of a gunshot, and dispatch police to the "crime" . Right now, it's only "10 to 15 computers ... are at work", but once the infrastructure is in place, who's to say they can't re-purpose the system in the future? Right now, its just average amplitude, but crank up the sampling rate, and its a NSA wet dream...
There are painters that produce images and impressions, and then there are painters that slap paint on an interior wall of someone's house. One is considered skilled, the other is not. (You're really flattering yourself if you think that every programmer's job is a "work of art")
Isn't that really the issue between "good" programmers, and those who's tasks can be outsourced?
Or maybe, the North American worker already doesn't have a chance. If you wait until all the human manufacturing labor is outsourced to other countries (which is happening fast), you can appeal to the local nationalism to build factories and robots in the country, in the name of "bringing back Made in the USA".
You could build a factory of robots anywhere in the world, so why are they built in some nations and not others? Regulations, and tax structures... two items that are seriously broken in the USA. When the tax structure is made more fair for corporations & high tech salaries, we can expect jobs to come back.
Longhorn.
I caught the various news reports on CNBC on friday evening... apparently NASDAQ is only allowed to halt a stock when they are under investigation for regulation violations. When NASDAQ froze it, they also asked the west coast & overseas markets to halt trading on the ticker, but there was no precedent for this; NASDAQ just broke procedure. The interviewees seemed really pissed.
From the article, it appears that the software that communicated market orders went into a loop, and submitted a loop of Sell orders on this one stock. If it were just little old me selling stocks I don't own, it's called a Short, and I'd be liable for buying back any shares I don't own. If its really a computer error, then its up to the market providers to cancel the orders.
At some point, the SEC needs to find out who was liable this this little adventure. Why does NASDAQ allow companies to submit raw sell commands w/out proofing them for validity? And what about this software company? If it were me playing with Ameritrade, and their software repeats my order 100 times, shouldn't the software company be liable for all of the (unsolicited) trades? If these trades should have been cancelled, why did some markets resume trading before they validated the orders? I wouldn't be surprised if there's another round of market rules that fall out of this, because obviously there's a big loophole here.
When you claim that "overpopulation" is a problem, is the problem to you that there are too many people on the planet, or is the problem to you that there are too many of certain kinds of people?
When I was in grad school, I was offered half-tuition to teach part time and finish in 1 year, as opposed to going to school for 2+ years and teach full-time. Additionally, projects to design curriculum are usually reserved for graduate students. I'm meerly interpolating the data I have before me, since I could only find links to undergrad tuition $s. From what I recall, undergrad and grad tuitions are priced about the same, the only difference being that undergraduates are expected to get more government financial aid.
That said, I fully agree with you that this should have been the teaching project that students dream about, an effort to create a long-lasting addition to their college, while teaching them & their classmates about programming, communications & education. MIT dropped the ball on this one.. but I don't mind, since I didn't go to MIT. We always thought they were a little uppity, and not that good at hockey.
Cost for one year of MIT undergraduate tuition in 2002-2003: $28,230.00
Cost for one year of MIT undergraduate tuition in 2003-2004: $29,400.00
School runs from Sept 3 to May 21, so estimate at 39 weeks. Next, assume the student is working for 1/2 tuition credit (which a lot of colleges like to do for part time work), at ~ $14,500. Since they're working part time and going to school, lets be generous and say they work three days a week: 24 hours. You've just forked out $15.50/hour for one "cheap labor" marginally-skilled student.
Now, compare that to what you can get for outsourcing it to anyone else... I'm not surprised they did; because of their rising tuition costs, they've priced out their own students.
It is so ready to be a Sci-Fi Channel mini-series... They can put it on right after Tremors!
*shiver*
I'm not a geologist either, but here's how I understand it.
Start with the question "what is oil & coal?" Oil is a liquid slew of organic hydrocarbon chains, coal is organic hydrocarbons that haven't had high enough pressure to liquify, and shale is oil bubbles trapped in mineralized rocks.
Then ask, "how do I get the hydrocarbons?" You can start with dead plant/animal matter who used to live on the surface, then compress it at high temperatures and pressures. The pressure breaks apart the cellular structures into base strands that we can later burn as fuel. There's a company that's proven they can liquify turkey guts and convert it into low grade fuel; there was a Slashdot article on it a while back.
Now, an alternate theory has developed from recent discoveries of life on the sea floor. Organic life can exist in oxygen starved, high pressure environment around lava vents; also, bacterium have been found that can survive at much higher temperatures (hundreds of degrees F) than previously thought.
Combine the two, and you say "what if bacterium can survive in the earth's crust close to the mantle for heat"? This organic matter would live in a high pressure environment, and when they die, their cells could also be liquified into oil. In Sweden, they have been extracting oil for a decade from depths that should pre-date the appearance of plant life in the area... Search on Thomas Gold for his theories on oil formation on this method.
"In space nobody will hear you scream" for ice cream!
Wrong, the vast majority is attributable to smaller engines with largely unregulated emissions.
Emissions from coal-fired power plants & automobiles are tightly controlled through scrubbers, catalytic converters, etc that don't exist in smaller engine designs... your average weed-wacker, lawn-mower, leaf-blower, chain-saws etc are all guilty.
For those that don't get the reference, it's from the Japanese anime/game series .hack
Heh, you should see what happens when you put aluminum cans in a high power magnetic induction device... Whew, found some images at TeslaMania for before and after...
When I was in school, the prof brought one of these into lab one day, and he was using it to railgun things across the room... They kept it locked up because some years before a student thought it would be funny to wrap a banana in foil and stick it into the machine, and it worked... picture a in your head a fine mist of burnt banana covering a good portion of a large freshman electronics lab, and that's close to the result. This site explains why with pictures.