I refer you to a United States Office of Trade Representative on the trade balance for Korea in 2000, outlining what tariffs are in effect for Korea. Some examples: - "In 2000, Korea was the United Statesâ(TM) sixth largest export market. In 2000, two-way merchandise trade between the United States and Korea reached record levels, totaling $68.2 billion, compared with $54.3 billion for 1999." - 8% tariff on US automobile imports into Korea - 317% import tariff on US potato products
From the ZDNet article, "Semiconductors are South Korea's biggest export and generated $16.6 bn in overseas sales in 2002. DRAM exports represent 35 percent of total semiconductor exports."
From a CIA report, South Korea's total exports for 2002 was $159.2 billion.
This implies that ~10% of the Korean economy is in semiconductor sales alone. Recall that recently South Korea is warming up to North Korea, and if we add that Pres. Bush has already put North Korea on notice regarding their weapon exports, we should not be surpised that the government would penalize the friend of your enemy.
My personal beliefs are that that tariffs are bad on both imports and exports, but after reading the report on how much Korea taxes US exports, I don't pity them.
Interestingly enough, "In spring 2000, Korea was elevated to the Special 301 "priority watch list" as a result of continuing concerns regarding inadequate IPR enforcement, lack of protection for clinical drug test data, lack of full retroactive protection for pre-existing copyrighted works and pharmaceutical patents, problematic amendments to Koreaâ(TM)s Copyright Act and Computer Program Protection Act, lack of coordination between Korean health and IPR authorities on drug product approvals for marketing, and continued counterfeiting of consumer products."
Jeez, I don't know... how on earth did the auto industry recover when all of the workers were replaced by robot welding machines?
Oh, that's right. They did just fine -- because now we have a market for assembly robot designers, robot repairmen, plant designers (industrial engineers). More car production means more car lots, more salesmen jobs, more delivery jobs to move the products. Then you have more demand for skilled workers, scientists to make faster hydraulics, better chips & CPUs.
One door closes, another one opens.
Google spake thusly, Robots!, a fairly well researched opinion piece on why robotic industry is good for everyone.
Exactly. When dealing in bulk power, the most critical item are these "ramp rates". The order from slowest to fastest is pretty much Nuclear, Fossil (natural gas, oil & coal), Combustion Turbine (natural gas & oil), Wind, then Hydroelectric.
As such, the Nuclears will run at peak capacity 24-7, Fossils have a daytime-high/nighttime-minimum cycle (unless you leave the TV on, people tend to need power at night when they sleep), and the rest take up the slack. As mentioned, the ramping rate for Nuclear & Fossil is measured in hours.
Combusion Turbines are like taking a Jet engine, strapping it to the ground, then firing it off. They are expensive, but very fast, and can reach their full outputs in ~10 minutes.
Hydroelectric is as easy as opening the floodgate at the reservoir, you can get full response in seconds. However, there are additional planning restrictions limiting when they can run (you wouldn't want to empty the reservoir, for example). Some operate in pump mode, they let the water flow down during the day and generate when the rates are expensive, then pump the water back uphill at night, buying back the energy when it is cheap.
Wind plants are by nature unpredictable. You know the average wind at a location, but it is still "up in the air" if its going to be windy enough at 2:30 this afternoon to produce the 2 MW of electricity you have a contract to sell. As far as I know, they have brakes if they need to slow down, but if the wind is too slow, there's nothing you can do to force more energy out of the machine. That is why there is still some financial risk in running wind power; if you can't produce what you promised, you buy it off the spot market at the higher rates.
So, some forms of renewables are unpreditable in their outputs, which can cause frequency disturbances on the bulk grid. To counter that, bulk power operators have a system called "regulation", which are a small fleet of fast ramp-rate units that move opposite of the error signal. If unit A is running short, then B outputs a little higher to meet the deficiency. And it all averages out, as long as the regulating units are fast, the world sees very little frequency deviations at their outlets.
You can run renewable sources all the time, and we do (some run of river plants run 24-7, as does the windfarms at Somerset PA) as long as you have faster units operating on "regulation" to smooth out the changes. Recent changes regarding windfarms have allowed them to participate in capacity markets, by bidding in the "average" output of their plants as their capability. Finally, what is really going to help renewables enter the market is the rise in natural gas prices in the next few years... As the operating costs rise, businesses will always look towards the cheaper alternatives, and what's cheaper than a unit that has self-delivering fuel?
The pricing system you want is called Locational Marginal Price, as opposed to flat zonal pricing. The calculations involve both the marginal cost of generation, and the effects of transporting the energy (congestion). The mid-Atlantic region helped pioneer its use on the east coast, and the pricing method has since been sucessfully implemented in NY and New England. In a year or two, it will be the standard pricing model in all of the Northeast and Mid-West.
Ironically, the areas of the country that are fighting against it are the same areas that have traditionally under-invested in their power grid. Massachusetts, Connecticut, Delaware, southern Virginia and California have very poor transmission systems (note NIMBY is very strong) and as such, they have not built the infrastructure to support the demand growth in their areas. Rather than deal with the transmission problems, these states are now attempting to roll-back deregulation (and go back to zonal pricing) so that everyone can share the higher prices instead of just the communities that refused to upgrade.
One thing I've noticed from the business shows is that the recent dropping of the interest rates have had a completely unexpected effect compared to historical rate drops.
The idea is that dropping the interest rates makes stocks more desireable, as opposed to bonds. As the rate drops, bonds become less valuable, and fund managers are inclined to move money from the bond markets into the stock markets. Right now, bonds will get you 3%, whereas the stock market may have a 5% short-term gain. Alternately, lowering the rates will lower your monthly loan payments, which leaves more spare money to spend in other sectors of the economy.
But there were problems with these assumptions. First, too many people have a short-term investment mentality (those who only got into the market in '98), and seeing a 3 year drop in average prices does make reinvesting in the stock market undesireable. Then they looked at bonds, and figured that the rates were to poor of an investment which is the point). Then, a low interest rate makes your savings account interest pitiful (what, 0.5%?) which discourages savings, encouraging spending. Last, I would add a cultural change -- the current old population is obsessed with "image" and status symbols. What bigger generational symbol is there than a bigger house?
A lower rate for the same value loan makes a lower monthly payment, but that's half of what people were thinking... Because the same formulas give a different result -- a lower rate for a larger value loan makes the same monthly payment.
Personally, I believe that many people were comfortable with their monthly payments (the 90's made people too comfortable with carrying debt), and instead of buying the same value house and having cash left over (to invest in the economy), they instead bought a more expensive house (which at the lower interest rate equalled the payment they were making before). For evidence, look at the mid-atlantic USA -- housing prices have really jumped in the last year and a half, matching the drops in the prime rate.
So, I think that is why the housing market is booming, yet the other sectors of the economy are slower in recovering. People tied their money up in monthly payments for more expensive houses rather than spending it in the local economies.
Google has some hints, but I found this response to the Senate on CC's own site... I believe this is the quoted statistic, effective June 2002.
"First, while some contend that the radio industry has become too concentrated among a few large companies, in reality radio is significantly less concentrated than most other information and entertainment industries in terms of total industry revenues. For example, the 10 largest owners of movie studios account for 99 percent of industry revenues, and in cable TV systems 89 percent of the revenues are controlled by the top 10 companies. The top 10 firms account for 55 percent of revenues in the TV station sector and 48 percent in the newspaper business. And, just the top five record distributors account for 84 percent of album sales.
By contrast, the top 10 radio station owners account for 44 percent of industry revenues. Even Clear Channel, the largest owner of radio stations in the country, owns only 11 percent of the stations. So, the notion of a few large corporations controlling the majority of the radio industry is not only incorrect, but is actually less of a factor in radio than in most other media and entertainment industries."
Discovery had this great show on the Hindenburg.... apparently, they used aluminum powder in their paint... heck, this site says it better:
"Careful investigation of the Hindenburg disaster verified the opinion of the engineers on the Hindenburg and proved that it was the flammable aluminum powder filled paint varnish that coated the infamous airship, not the hydrogen that started the fateful fire.
The Hindenburg repeated the famous experiment of Ben Franklin regarding collection of electric charge on an object in the sky. Ben Franklin flew a kite in a storm to learn about lightening. The captain of the Hindenburg provided the 800' long, 236 ton, aluminum-powder varnish covered airship as a much larger electric charge collector. As the Hindenburg was grounded by dropping landing lines, the experiment was complete and electrical discharge in the Hindenburg's skin started the fire. The Hindenburg would have burned and crashed if it had been filled with helium or simply held in the air by some other force.
As eyewitnesses noted, the hydrogen fire started considerably after the Hindenburg's surface skin started to burn and was over in less than one minute. The diesel fuel and other heavier-than-air components of the Hindenburg continued to burn many hours on the ground."
We already do. The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) is a federal government owned utility company, in 7 states in the central USA.
Plus there are countless DOE, Army Engineer, and other public works projects scattered about. Municipal trash-to-steam plants, public-works hydroelectrics (Canada loves this), all sorts of neat power producing methods that help local governments offset their costs, and lowers our taxes.
Apparently 95% of the slashdot community consists of either clueless newbie programmers, or people with huge chips on their shoulders outside of the United States....
The internet was developed by the United States using US capital, both intellectual and financial. It was a military project, then academic, then commercial, so IP address space was doled out in that order, to.mil and.gov, then to.edu, then to.coms.orgs and.nets. And THEN they went international. So it should be no surprise to everyone that a majority of the address space is reserved for the United States governments and academia (it is already mentioned that MIT holds a class A node).
I'm sick and tired of people calling for such-and-such to be "fair", where their definition of "fair" involves taking something (that cost a lot of investment) from the creators and giving it out (for free) to their friends and nations. There's nothing fair about this, because there doesn't have to be! Its a freakin internet address, made to fit an international scheme that was designed after the fact... There was no design at the beginning that Country A would get everything with 0x01... Besides, anyone with skills understands there are ways to work with the system, as also mentioned above: NAT, firewalling, subnetting...
Is it "fair" that cell phone are being designed to consume addresses to do messaging, or is that a design flaw? IMO, it's the Latter; do the same thing with DHCP and recycled addresses like any ISP. Is the US greedy, or a big corporate conspiracy to keep the asian markets out of the internet? How about it's really a case where the other players entered the game twenty years behind the times, and that's all that was left. Build your own addressing, implement it, and enough with the complaining about how the USA chooses to do its business!
The Rotten Tomato movie write-up gives a few insights as to costs, as well as a number of other bits of trivia...
"The filmmaker, Kevin Smith, worked at the Quick Stop in Leonardo, New Jersey during production. The film was shot there, and at the RST Video next door. Smith was only allowed to shoot at night, when the store was closed--hence the closed shutters, which are explained away in the script.
The budget for the film is reported to have been $27,575 by Smith's ViewAskew Productions. Smith financed the film with credit cards, his Quick Stop earnings, family assistance, and by selling his comic book collection. When the film was a success, he bought back the comics (and bought himself a comics shop). The soundtrack rights cost more than the production costs."
I guess you can really tell the workers are on vacation for the holiday, because the only ones left to post on Slashdot are the goof-offs.
There are computer networks that run behind the scenes that maintain every utility that runs our lives, whether it be remotely-controllable circuit breakers on the bulk power grid, hydroelectric dam controls for power & water, the multiplexors that run the telephone systems, etc. It's cheaper to put a machine out in the field and run network cable to it, than to have a live person out at the station pushing the same buttons, so more and more infrastructure is getting networked, telemetered, and controllable...
Companies are increasingly relying on VPN and similar systems to allow workers to tunnel through the internet to connect to their business machines. Well all trust RSA encoding, but crack the operating system and you can use the tunnelling to get into a lot of restricted (price sensitive) data. Or maybe the company has a nifty database back-end to their site, and some buffer overruns gets you into schemas that weren't supposed to be exposed... Or it could be passwords on a stolen laptop. For whatever reasons, sites get hacked.
Right now, what do companies do? If they even notice the cyber attack, they fill out some NIPC forms, and the issue vanishes into the beaurocracy. Not exactly the best measure, because the NIPC doesn't have the authority like the FBI to investigate events... or read the NIPC homepage, even they admit that there were 4 government programs that were combined, each in some way did little pieces of the puzzle but noone had the big picture of the events.
My opinion? Appointing a Cyber-Security chief is a good thing, as long as there are additional steps taken to reduce the bloat of governement, by combining the other departments into one sector that can actually be effective in investigation. You have to not only create the position, but you have to give it the proper resources (like contacts at the FBI & NSA) who can properly identify crackers going after government resources, and hunt them down. Adding another level of red tape isn't going to accomplish much, but any step in the direction of securing national & private sector secrets is a good thing.
So let me get this straight. You're going to take one of the most polluting combustion engines, and convert it into a 24-hour operating generator. Lawnmowers don't have anywhere near the filters that larger engines do and no catalytic converters to reduce emissions.
"In the Swedish testing, the researchers used regular unleaded fuel in a typical four-stroke, four horsepower lawn mower engine and found, after one hour, that the PAH emissions are similar to a modern gasoline-powered car driving approximately 150 kilometers (93 miles). A typical push-type lawn mower is run for an average of 25 hours per year, according to the Outdoor Power Equipment Institute."
So, running a lawnmower engine for 1 day is equivalent to the pollution put out by your average car in 2200 miles, about 2 months worth of standard driving.
CDs & DVDs are a thin layer of reflective material (which is the data) coated with a protective clear layer (which is why you can "scratch" a CD and still listen to it).
From your article, it implies that the protective outer layer is now chemically treated to go "opaque" within 48 hours (from red to black) after being exposed to air, which would make it literally "impenetrable to the laser".
The reflective layer underneath would still be readable (and still decypherable), if you could figure out how to remove the outer coatings... This would be interesting, if you could develop a chemical bath to reverse the oxidation process. Just soak it until it turns clear again, and re-use -- not ditigally "hackable", but chemically.
There is a big difference between 50 GWHrs and 50 GW. Watts is an instantaneous power measurement, I current at V voltage. Watt-hours is a quantifiable amount of charge, a constant stream of particles over a timer period.
50 GigaWatts is approximately the generation output of every commercial generator in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland and Delaware combined, a value that is routinely hit during the hottest days of every summer since 2000 (the capacity's higher, but I'm estimating some loss for outages).
Now, if we could just convince the residents to let us borrow their power plants for a day or two... then we've got the power.
Delivery of all that energy is a different matter.
This is the song from the Simpsons, 3F16 - 17th March 1996, from the episode The Day the Violence Died, when Crusty the clown was forced to remove the Itchy & Scratchy cartoon from his show. The "kid" voice was done by the same lady who does the voice as Millhouse.
For those that haven't played, this was the biggest flaw in the entire game -- micromanagement of resource delivery.
Yes, you drop a guy on a field, and he becomes a little farmer to carry the food back to the store. And you drop a peon on a tree, and he becomes a little logger to carry wood back to the store. (And if you drop a little guy next to a little gal, they become lovers, and hump till they die, but that's besides the point)
And when people are hungry, do they go to the store and eat the food? Yes, unless they happen to be doing other jobs -- the most important of which was dancing around your temple to generate the mana that you use to do all your god-like stuff. Without mana, you can't water your fields to grow more food, or throw fireballs to burn the food store of your enemies.
You see, once they became a worshiper, they have this little OTHER food storage next to their alter that they go and eat from. Oh, and the two food stores aren't linked, you have to stop what you're doing, drag the food out of the main storage, and drop it by the temple. Plus every new alter you build (you can have up to 6 if I recall) has its own food store, so you're refilling 6 separate groups of peons. And if you don't drop food on it like every 90 seconds, they don't eat and die. All the while, you hear soft little pleadings out of your speakers "We need food!" Eventually you hear this soft "Deaaaath" south, followed by "We need more worshipers"...
All the micromanagement in the game could have been solved by creating a Teamster peon who's job is to carry resource between all your buildings. Carry the food to the temple, carry the wood to the workshop, carry the wood to the damaged buildings (yes, villagers won't repair their own houses unless there is wood placed on the house first). You would think that having ultimate godly powers would mean you don't have to do grocery runs for your peons anymore.
The National Interagency Fire Center statistics show that the average # of acres destroyed by forest fires have decreased by a factor of 10 over the last century...
So I'd say yes, before humans started fighting forest fires, nature was doing quite badly.
So you know, the original income tax was first instituted to help fund the civil war, at 1/2% tax. It was later repealed, as it was found unconstitutional in the courts for the government to tax income.
But congress tried again in 1913, and was a 1% tax on the top 1% wage earners (in 1913, those that earned $3k to $20k per year).
Fast forward to today, and take a look at how far we've let the government tax our earnings... today, the top 1% wage earners pay 38.6% of their salary in taxes, accounting for ~ 29% of the total (top 5% wage earners paid 50% of all taxes in 1999)
Now we have people saying, "I don't mind paying $0.01 for my emails"... What restraint has the government ever shown that next year it'll be $0.02, then $0.05 (who'll miss a nickle?), a dime... And where the hell will all this money go? into improving the internet infrastructure? Nooo, that's a private business. The money and accountability will disappear, probably into Medicare, Social Security, and all the other social programs that government isn't supposed to be in.
Government control is not a road we want to walk down folks. Yes, control of communications through taxation. I can't understand why the crowd complains when little things are being taken away, and the same people just turn around and hand the big ones over willingly.
In the cutting and pasting, the submitter clipped an important word from the opening paragraph...
"The former privacy officer of Internet advertising giant DoubleClick will be the Department of Homeland Security's first privacy czar, Bush administration officials said. "
Yes, she once worked for DoubleClick, but she only started AFTER the FTC sited them for privacy abuses. So she went in, cleaned them up, settled their lawsuits, and moved on. She now works for the Department of Commerce.
So, she ran the privacy clean-up for DoubleClick, and now she's picked to do the same thing, monitoring privacy for the government's latest fad, Homeland Security. Is this a problem? Or is it only a problem because she was picked by a conservative?
Slashdot Mirror
- "In 2000, Korea was the United Statesâ(TM) sixth largest export market. In 2000, two-way merchandise trade between the United States and Korea reached record levels, totaling $68.2 billion, compared with $54.3 billion for 1999."
- 8% tariff on US automobile imports into Korea
- 317% import tariff on US potato products
From the ZDNet article, "Semiconductors are South Korea's biggest export and generated $16.6 bn in overseas sales in 2002. DRAM exports represent 35 percent of total semiconductor exports."
From a CIA report, South Korea's total exports for 2002 was $159.2 billion.
This implies that ~10% of the Korean economy is in semiconductor sales alone. Recall that recently South Korea is warming up to North Korea, and if we add that Pres. Bush has already put North Korea on notice regarding their weapon exports, we should not be surpised that the government would penalize the friend of your enemy.
My personal beliefs are that that tariffs are bad on both imports and exports, but after reading the report on how much Korea taxes US exports, I don't pity them.
Interestingly enough, "In spring 2000, Korea was elevated to the Special 301 "priority watch list" as a result of continuing concerns regarding inadequate IPR enforcement, lack of protection for clinical drug test data, lack of full retroactive protection for pre-existing copyrighted works and pharmaceutical patents, problematic amendments to Koreaâ(TM)s Copyright Act and Computer Program Protection Act, lack of coordination between Korean health and IPR authorities on drug product approvals for marketing, and continued counterfeiting of consumer products."
Jeez, I don't know... how on earth did the auto industry recover when all of the workers were replaced by robot welding machines?
Oh, that's right. They did just fine -- because now we have a market for assembly robot designers, robot repairmen, plant designers (industrial engineers). More car production means more car lots, more salesmen jobs, more delivery jobs to move the products. Then you have more demand for skilled workers, scientists to make faster hydraulics, better chips & CPUs.
One door closes, another one opens.
Google spake thusly, Robots!, a fairly well researched opinion piece on why robotic industry is good for everyone.
Exactly. When dealing in bulk power, the most critical item are these "ramp rates". The order from slowest to fastest is pretty much Nuclear, Fossil (natural gas, oil & coal), Combustion Turbine (natural gas & oil), Wind, then Hydroelectric.
As such, the Nuclears will run at peak capacity 24-7, Fossils have a daytime-high/nighttime-minimum cycle (unless you leave the TV on, people tend to need power at night when they sleep), and the rest take up the slack. As mentioned, the ramping rate for Nuclear & Fossil is measured in hours.
Combusion Turbines are like taking a Jet engine, strapping it to the ground, then firing it off. They are expensive, but very fast, and can reach their full outputs in ~10 minutes.
Hydroelectric is as easy as opening the floodgate at the reservoir, you can get full response in seconds. However, there are additional planning restrictions limiting when they can run (you wouldn't want to empty the reservoir, for example). Some operate in pump mode, they let the water flow down during the day and generate when the rates are expensive, then pump the water back uphill at night, buying back the energy when it is cheap.
Wind plants are by nature unpredictable. You know the average wind at a location, but it is still "up in the air" if its going to be windy enough at 2:30 this afternoon to produce the 2 MW of electricity you have a contract to sell. As far as I know, they have brakes if they need to slow down, but if the wind is too slow, there's nothing you can do to force more energy out of the machine. That is why there is still some financial risk in running wind power; if you can't produce what you promised, you buy it off the spot market at the higher rates.
So, some forms of renewables are unpreditable in their outputs, which can cause frequency disturbances on the bulk grid. To counter that, bulk power operators have a system called "regulation", which are a small fleet of fast ramp-rate units that move opposite of the error signal. If unit A is running short, then B outputs a little higher to meet the deficiency. And it all averages out, as long as the regulating units are fast, the world sees very little frequency deviations at their outlets.
You can run renewable sources all the time, and we do (some run of river plants run 24-7, as does the windfarms at Somerset PA) as long as you have faster units operating on "regulation" to smooth out the changes. Recent changes regarding windfarms have allowed them to participate in capacity markets, by bidding in the "average" output of their plants as their capability. Finally, what is really going to help renewables enter the market is the rise in natural gas prices in the next few years... As the operating costs rise, businesses will always look towards the cheaper alternatives, and what's cheaper than a unit that has self-delivering fuel?
The pricing system you want is called Locational Marginal Price, as opposed to flat zonal pricing. The calculations involve both the marginal cost of generation, and the effects of transporting the energy (congestion). The mid-Atlantic region helped pioneer its use on the east coast, and the pricing method has since been sucessfully implemented in NY and New England. In a year or two, it will be the standard pricing model in all of the Northeast and Mid-West.
Ironically, the areas of the country that are fighting against it are the same areas that have traditionally under-invested in their power grid. Massachusetts, Connecticut, Delaware, southern Virginia and California have very poor transmission systems (note NIMBY is very strong) and as such, they have not built the infrastructure to support the demand growth in their areas. Rather than deal with the transmission problems, these states are now attempting to roll-back deregulation (and go back to zonal pricing) so that everyone can share the higher prices instead of just the communities that refused to upgrade.
One thing I've noticed from the business shows is that the recent dropping of the interest rates have had a completely unexpected effect compared to historical rate drops.
The idea is that dropping the interest rates makes stocks more desireable, as opposed to bonds. As the rate drops, bonds become less valuable, and fund managers are inclined to move money from the bond markets into the stock markets. Right now, bonds will get you 3%, whereas the stock market may have a 5% short-term gain. Alternately, lowering the rates will lower your monthly loan payments, which leaves more spare money to spend in other sectors of the economy.
But there were problems with these assumptions. First, too many people have a short-term investment mentality (those who only got into the market in '98), and seeing a 3 year drop in average prices does make reinvesting in the stock market undesireable. Then they looked at bonds, and figured that the rates were to poor of an investment which is the point). Then, a low interest rate makes your savings account interest pitiful (what, 0.5%?) which discourages savings, encouraging spending. Last, I would add a cultural change -- the current old population is obsessed with "image" and status symbols. What bigger generational symbol is there than a bigger house?
A lower rate for the same value loan makes a lower monthly payment, but that's half of what people were thinking... Because the same formulas give a different result -- a lower rate for a larger value loan makes the same monthly payment.
Personally, I believe that many people were comfortable with their monthly payments (the 90's made people too comfortable with carrying debt), and instead of buying the same value house and having cash left over (to invest in the economy), they instead bought a more expensive house (which at the lower interest rate equalled the payment they were making before). For evidence, look at the mid-atlantic USA -- housing prices have really jumped in the last year and a half, matching the drops in the prime rate.
So, I think that is why the housing market is booming, yet the other sectors of the economy are slower in recovering. People tied their money up in monthly payments for more expensive houses rather than spending it in the local economies.
But if noone buys the first-run product, then how will the company earn enough money to produce a second-run product?
Google has some hints, but I found this response to the Senate on CC's own site... I believe this is the quoted statistic, effective June 2002.
"First, while some contend that the radio industry has become too concentrated among a few large companies, in reality radio is significantly less concentrated than most other information and entertainment industries in terms of total industry revenues. For example, the 10 largest owners of movie studios account for 99 percent of industry revenues, and in cable TV systems 89 percent of the revenues are controlled by the top 10 companies. The top 10 firms account for 55 percent of revenues in the TV station sector and 48 percent in the newspaper business. And, just the top five record distributors account for 84 percent of album sales.
By contrast, the top 10 radio station owners account for 44 percent of industry revenues. Even Clear Channel, the largest owner of radio stations in the country, owns only 11 percent of the stations. So, the notion of a few large corporations controlling the majority of the radio industry is not only incorrect, but is actually less of a factor in radio than in most other media and entertainment industries."
Because *BSD is dead?
Discovery had this great show on the Hindenburg.... apparently, they used aluminum powder in their paint... heck, this site says it better:
"Careful investigation of the Hindenburg disaster verified the opinion of the engineers on the Hindenburg and proved that it was the flammable aluminum powder filled paint varnish that coated the infamous airship, not the hydrogen that started the fateful fire.
The Hindenburg repeated the famous experiment of Ben Franklin regarding collection of electric charge on an object in the sky. Ben Franklin flew a kite in a storm to learn about lightening. The captain of the Hindenburg provided the 800' long, 236 ton, aluminum-powder varnish covered airship as a much larger electric charge collector. As the Hindenburg was grounded by dropping landing lines, the experiment was complete and electrical discharge in the Hindenburg's skin started the fire. The Hindenburg would have burned and crashed if it had been filled with helium or simply held in the air by some other force.
As eyewitnesses noted, the hydrogen fire started considerably after the Hindenburg's surface skin started to burn and was over in less than one minute. The diesel fuel and other heavier-than-air components of the Hindenburg continued to burn many hours on the ground."
We already do. The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) is a federal government owned utility company, in 7 states in the central USA.
Plus there are countless DOE, Army Engineer, and other public works projects scattered about. Municipal trash-to-steam plants, public-works hydroelectrics (Canada loves this), all sorts of neat power producing methods that help local governments offset their costs, and lowers our taxes.
Apparently 95% of the slashdot community consists of either clueless newbie programmers, or people with huge chips on their shoulders outside of the United States....
.mil and .gov, then to .edu, then to .coms .orgs and .nets. And THEN they went international. So it should be no surprise to everyone that a majority of the address space is reserved for the United States governments and academia (it is already mentioned that MIT holds a class A node).
The internet was developed by the United States using US capital, both intellectual and financial. It was a military project, then academic, then commercial, so IP address space was doled out in that order, to
I'm sick and tired of people calling for such-and-such to be "fair", where their definition of "fair" involves taking something (that cost a lot of investment) from the creators and giving it out (for free) to their friends and nations. There's nothing fair about this, because there doesn't have to be! Its a freakin internet address, made to fit an international scheme that was designed after the fact... There was no design at the beginning that Country A would get everything with 0x01... Besides, anyone with skills understands there are ways to work with the system, as also mentioned above: NAT, firewalling, subnetting...
Is it "fair" that cell phone are being designed to consume addresses to do messaging, or is that a design flaw? IMO, it's the Latter; do the same thing with DHCP and recycled addresses like any ISP. Is the US greedy, or a big corporate conspiracy to keep the asian markets out of the internet? How about it's really a case where the other players entered the game twenty years behind the times, and that's all that was left. Build your own addressing, implement it, and enough with the complaining about how the USA chooses to do its business!
Heh, you forgot that bit about lost revenues...
($13 / month) x (1 year playing period) = $156 per player.
Total Player population = 1000ish per server x 10 servers = 10,000 players
Assuming 10% quit over the incident, that's 10k x 10% x $156 = $156,000.00
That sounds like a good punishment.
The Rotten Tomato movie write-up gives a few insights as to costs, as well as a number of other bits of trivia...
"The filmmaker, Kevin Smith, worked at the Quick Stop in Leonardo, New Jersey during production. The film was shot there, and at the RST Video next door. Smith was only allowed to shoot at night, when the store was closed--hence the closed shutters, which are explained away in the script.
The budget for the film is reported to have been $27,575 by Smith's ViewAskew Productions. Smith financed the film with credit cards, his Quick Stop earnings, family assistance, and by selling his comic book collection. When the film was a success, he bought back the comics (and bought himself a comics shop). The soundtrack rights cost more than the production costs."
idspispopd -- named for that 'smash' hit Smashing Pumpkins Into Small Piles of Putrid Debris, demo here
I guess you can really tell the workers are on vacation for the holiday, because the only ones left to post on Slashdot are the goof-offs.
There are computer networks that run behind the scenes that maintain every utility that runs our lives, whether it be remotely-controllable circuit breakers on the bulk power grid, hydroelectric dam controls for power & water, the multiplexors that run the telephone systems, etc. It's cheaper to put a machine out in the field and run network cable to it, than to have a live person out at the station pushing the same buttons, so more and more infrastructure is getting networked, telemetered, and controllable...
Companies are increasingly relying on VPN and similar systems to allow workers to tunnel through the internet to connect to their business machines. Well all trust RSA encoding, but crack the operating system and you can use the tunnelling to get into a lot of restricted (price sensitive) data. Or maybe the company has a nifty database back-end to their site, and some buffer overruns gets you into schemas that weren't supposed to be exposed... Or it could be passwords on a stolen laptop. For whatever reasons, sites get hacked.
Right now, what do companies do? If they even notice the cyber attack, they fill out some NIPC forms, and the issue vanishes into the beaurocracy. Not exactly the best measure, because the NIPC doesn't have the authority like the FBI to investigate events... or read the NIPC homepage, even they admit that there were 4 government programs that were combined, each in some way did little pieces of the puzzle but noone had the big picture of the events.
My opinion? Appointing a Cyber-Security chief is a good thing, as long as there are additional steps taken to reduce the bloat of governement, by combining the other departments into one sector that can actually be effective in investigation. You have to not only create the position, but you have to give it the proper resources (like contacts at the FBI & NSA) who can properly identify crackers going after government resources, and hunt them down. Adding another level of red tape isn't going to accomplish much, but any step in the direction of securing national & private sector secrets is a good thing.
So let me get this straight. You're going to take one of the most polluting combustion engines, and convert it into a 24-hour operating generator. Lawnmowers don't have anywhere near the filters that larger engines do and no catalytic converters to reduce emissions.
"In the Swedish testing, the researchers used regular unleaded fuel in a typical four-stroke, four horsepower lawn mower engine and found, after one hour, that the PAH emissions are similar to a modern gasoline-powered car driving approximately 150 kilometers (93 miles). A typical push-type lawn mower is run for an average of 25 hours per year, according to the Outdoor Power Equipment Institute."
So, running a lawnmower engine for 1 day is equivalent to the pollution put out by your average car in 2200 miles, about 2 months worth of standard driving.
CDs & DVDs are a thin layer of reflective material (which is the data) coated with a protective clear layer (which is why you can "scratch" a CD and still listen to it).
From your article, it implies that the protective outer layer is now chemically treated to go "opaque" within 48 hours (from red to black) after being exposed to air, which would make it literally "impenetrable to the laser".
The reflective layer underneath would still be readable (and still decypherable), if you could figure out how to remove the outer coatings... This would be interesting, if you could develop a chemical bath to reverse the oxidation process. Just soak it until it turns clear again, and re-use -- not ditigally "hackable", but chemically.
In the words of Dennis Leary, "We only want to save the cute animals, don't we?"
There is a big difference between 50 GWHrs and 50 GW. Watts is an instantaneous power measurement, I current at V voltage. Watt-hours is a quantifiable amount of charge, a constant stream of particles over a timer period.
50 GigaWatts is approximately the generation output of every commercial generator in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland and Delaware combined, a value that is routinely hit during the hottest days of every summer since 2000 (the capacity's higher, but I'm estimating some loss for outages).
Now, if we could just convince the residents to let us borrow their power plants for a day or two... then we've got the power.
Delivery of all that energy is a different matter.
This is the song from the Simpsons, 3F16 - 17th March 1996, from the episode The Day the Violence Died, when Crusty the clown was forced to remove the Itchy & Scratchy cartoon from his show. The "kid" voice was done by the same lady who does the voice as Millhouse.
For those that haven't played, this was the biggest flaw in the entire game -- micromanagement of resource delivery.
Yes, you drop a guy on a field, and he becomes a little farmer to carry the food back to the store. And you drop a peon on a tree, and he becomes a little logger to carry wood back to the store. (And if you drop a little guy next to a little gal, they become lovers, and hump till they die, but that's besides the point)
And when people are hungry, do they go to the store and eat the food? Yes, unless they happen to be doing other jobs -- the most important of which was dancing around your temple to generate the mana that you use to do all your god-like stuff. Without mana, you can't water your fields to grow more food, or throw fireballs to burn the food store of your enemies.
You see, once they became a worshiper, they have this little OTHER food storage next to their alter that they go and eat from. Oh, and the two food stores aren't linked, you have to stop what you're doing, drag the food out of the main storage, and drop it by the temple. Plus every new alter you build (you can have up to 6 if I recall) has its own food store, so you're refilling 6 separate groups of peons. And if you don't drop food on it like every 90 seconds, they don't eat and die. All the while, you hear soft little pleadings out of your speakers "We need food!" Eventually you hear this soft "Deaaaath" south, followed by "We need more worshipers"...
All the micromanagement in the game could have been solved by creating a Teamster peon who's job is to carry resource between all your buildings. Carry the food to the temple, carry the wood to the workshop, carry the wood to the damaged buildings (yes, villagers won't repair their own houses unless there is wood placed on the house first). You would think that having ultimate godly powers would mean you don't have to do grocery runs for your peons anymore.
And don't even get me started on the pet....
The National Interagency Fire Center statistics show that the average # of acres destroyed by forest fires have decreased by a factor of 10 over the last century...
So I'd say yes, before humans started fighting forest fires, nature was doing quite badly.
So you know, the original income tax was first instituted to help fund the civil war, at 1/2% tax. It was later repealed, as it was found unconstitutional in the courts for the government to tax income.
But congress tried again in 1913, and was a 1% tax on the top 1% wage earners (in 1913, those that earned $3k to $20k per year).
Fast forward to today, and take a look at how far we've let the government tax our earnings... today, the top 1% wage earners pay 38.6% of their salary in taxes, accounting for ~ 29% of the total (top 5% wage earners paid 50% of all taxes in 1999)
Now we have people saying, "I don't mind paying $0.01 for my emails"... What restraint has the government ever shown that next year it'll be $0.02, then $0.05 (who'll miss a nickle?), a dime... And where the hell will all this money go? into improving the internet infrastructure? Nooo, that's a private business. The money and accountability will disappear, probably into Medicare, Social Security, and all the other social programs that government isn't supposed to be in.
Government control is not a road we want to walk down folks. Yes, control of communications through taxation. I can't understand why the crowd complains when little things are being taken away, and the same people just turn around and hand the big ones over willingly.
In the cutting and pasting, the submitter clipped an important word from the opening paragraph...
"The former privacy officer of Internet advertising giant DoubleClick will be the Department of Homeland Security's first privacy czar, Bush administration officials said. "
Yes, she once worked for DoubleClick, but she only started AFTER the FTC sited them for privacy abuses. So she went in, cleaned them up, settled their lawsuits, and moved on. She now works for the Department of Commerce.
So, she ran the privacy clean-up for DoubleClick, and now she's picked to do the same thing, monitoring privacy for the government's latest fad, Homeland Security. Is this a problem? Or is it only a problem because she was picked by a conservative?
... or CNN...